Why Writing?

It was a joke, right?  Someone near me jested, “You should right a blog.” Ha Ha Ha, we laughed and laughed.  This was the response to yet another funny, if not slightly animated story I told.

I love to tell stories, to embellish, to act out particularly poignant scenes for emphasis, like the time my eight year old daughter claimed a deer was a coyote, but mostly to make others laugh. Deep, hearty, belly laughs, the kind that reverberate through walls and roofs, the kind of infectious laughter, which ripples through a collective body of people until everyone is laughing and no one remembers why.

I thought of myself as a sort of blue-collar comedian, not a writer, pshh. It was spontaneous and unrehearsed, my stories relatable, of family life, stupid things married people do, the occasional backwoods country story about things that only happen in the country, like when the cattle get out of the pasture and run down the road so the sheriff has to follow them in his car until the cowboys come to call the cows home, to explain why I was late for work (again).

Sprinkled in with some mild and well-timed self-deprecation, I could insert humor and well placed-wit almost anywhere.  It brings me joy to be able to make people laugh. Sometimes I dreamt about becoming a comedian, about telling my stories. But the idea would fade as quickly as a clean house before company.  It was an idea, but, eh… it never took hold.

But, to write a blog?  What on EARTH would I possibly write about? What did I have to say that anybody would read? Let alone have some lasting immortalizing impact. Suddenly, I had nothing to say. NOTHING. Could I make people laugh through my writing? Could I? Oh, this idea, this thought, this seed, this is the one that began to root and grow and bloom.

“You should WRITE!”  The words forceful, as if the person speaking them, spun me by the shoulders and shook me violently, at least that’s what I felt. “JUST WRITE,” they said.

About what?  I whined.  And I whined and whined.  And then, I wrote.  I wrote about family life, and stupid shit married people do, and silly things kids say and backwoods country life.

And low and behold the seed planted, its roots digging deep into the earth, nurtured and fed, soon would see sunlight. And I wrote some more.

Poems to start, and things that popped into my head at random times, I began to grab hold of those floating phrases, “Lucy ran her fingers through the silky corn colored hair above her eyes…” Just a thought, a phrase, a moment, and the idea took shape and I let the stories tell themselves.

They are not ANYTHING like what I expected. The stories alive in themselves and of themselves and I am nothing more than a vessel through which the story is told. I don’t worry about an audience. I don’t consider who will read it, who will LIKE it, well I do, but I write as if I don’t.

I still want to make people laugh. Deep belly laughs and tears and choking asthma attacks. That’s the best.

“Just begin, and in the end it will not look like what it was intended to be.”

As far as the blog, I never did start it. But I surely did start writing and oh what a thing that is