Life is a collection of dots/Connecting them makes sense

Life is a collection of dots...

Abigail Thomas, the American memoirist, says not to worry about chronology when we are trying to capture our life’s stories. Just get the dots down, she says. Worry about connecting them later. I find this freeing.

In a recent writing class, the prompt was the image of an old-fashioned pencil sharpener — the kind that was affixed to the wall of my primary school classroom. I mulled on it a while, thinking about pencils and sharpening them, a most satisfying action. Then, after a conversation with a writing friend who said the image reminded her of ‘back to school’ times, I realized I had two dots stored in my memory bank that I could work with: Miss McCormack, my Grade One teacher in Montreal; and Frau Doktor Friedrich, my home room teacher at my middle-grade school in Germany.

I started with those two dots, inserted a third ‘teacher’ dot in between them, and then noodled on how to extend the piece beyond those three dots into something I would share at our Sunday afternoon session. 

Oh, I thought, why don’t I play with the idea of ‘sharp’ and see where the dots would take me. The piece is below; it was satisfying (after decades of holding the memories in my mind) to get the dots of Miss McCormack and Frau Doktor Friedrich onto the page, and then to weave in the third of Mrs Ramsay, and then to take those dots for a walk and discover the path they were making.

This is how writing goes. Until we put the first, maybe tentative, words onto the page, we rarely know with any degree of certainty where we’ll end up, what story will show up on the page. Maybe another day, another story would emerge from these same dots. For now, today, this is the story I am telling.

Playing with sharp

Grade One, Montreal.
Miss McCormack and her red suit
She was so tall, sharp looking, lovely.
I loved her

Grade Two, still Montreal
Mrs Ramsay — not tall
Rounder, softer.
She gave me the role of the Shoemaker’s Wife in the class play —
my first taste of acting.
I love her for that

Middle school, age ten, now in Germany.
Frau Doktor Friedrich — my homeroom teacher,
tall, lean, sharp features, grey hair.
Black wardrobe, always,
mourning her mother
but loving, I believe, her colleague
name unremembered, maybe never known by me.
She, equally tall as Frau Doktor Friedrich,
their love — I think it was that —
my first memory of two women
together, loving

The other day
a clattering sound
loud in the early morning quiet
came, it seemed, from the basement.
My hearing acute, sharp always,
especially so this early dark morning
only I am up
the house asleep.
This clattering sound loud, discordant, odd
I go downstairs to investigate but see nothing untoward
until, a few days later, I look again more closely
and see the plastic dinosaur given by a friend with a good sense of humour
— that Dino is toppled from its perch on a picture frame’s edge, the finger-puppet nuns askew.
A scene of carnage, a mess
caused I knew, in sharp recognition, by exactly what —
a mouse, more than one mouse
the evidence points to that…
Damn

...

Sharp claws
Sharp teeth
Sharp mind
Sharp notes
Sharp points, pencils, creases
Sharp dresser
Sharp turn ahead — if only we always saw them in advance
Sharp shooter

So much sharpness in this world

Some sharp is heard, felt, sensed —
the edge of fear, pain, anger.
Some sharp draws blood —
the prick of a knife, a nail, an ice pick

Every sharp is clear to those with ear and eye and heart
To hear, to see, to feel

We are all both sharp and soft
A mix of choices, always,
of options, maybe

Sharp can cut
Softness occlude

Sometimes sharp is right
Other times softness

The trick in life:
Know which to be, when, with whom
And maybe most of all,
Why

...connecting the dots can tell our story one way; connect the dots differently and, maybe, a different story will emerge...

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation. 

Dots top: Photo by Sung Jin Cho on Unsplash
Dots bottom: Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash