New York Writing Class

Tuesday I started a six week online writing class. It is through Gotham Writers Workshop http://www.writingclasses.com/ in New York. How I love being connected to that city!


There are about twenty other people in the class from all over the U.S. and even France and Japan.


I am going to take you on this journey with me...I will share with you my weekly assignments, what I turn in and the comments the teacher gives back to me and as my assignments are not due until Tuesday I would love feedback from you to help make the pieces the best they can be!... so here we go...


This weeks assignment...

Think of a specific moment when you were at a crossroads, major or minor. For example: screwing up the courage to ask someone on a date, deciding if you should fight back at someone who affronted you, unpacking in your first college dorm room, standing on the altar about to be married. Zero in on that specific moment. Remember all that you can about that moment, perhaps even jotting things down. What did you see, hear, smell, touch, or taste? What were you thinking or feeling? Now try to write about this moment, bringing it to life on the page. (Use the details you remembered.) You may allude to things before and after, but stay mostly focused on that exact moment in time. Keep it short, preferably under 500 words.

My piece:

I tenderly settle myself on the bed and sit snuggly next to his legs. I finger the smooth translucent top of his purpled right hand, gently tracing the broken blood vessels. I pause over the ridges that line his trimmed nails. The pads of his fingertips are hollow, empty of fat and scarred with blue needle punctures. His exposed skin, seeped in jaundice yellow, shows no sign of the deep tan worn by this traveling salesman or of the welding sparks that once singed his young arm.

I cup his limp hand in mine and watch his chest labor up and down with soft broken breathing. His lips, slightly parted, are stretched tight, flaked from dehydration; his eyelids are peacefully closed, fringed with sparse white lashes. The thick creases of his forehead curve downward, connecting to the wrinkled tributaries of his eyebrows, his ears, his cheeks and slack neck. Years of loss, joy, anger, wit and love flow placidly to a place of final surrender.

Resting my head on his stomach I set my right hand on his heart --- his injured heart, his borrowed valve, his man-made helper. The organ weakly whispers of his faults and his triumphs --- carrying the pain of losing his mother at 19, arguments with his children, failing his career, toting oxygen in a can while waiting for his one of his 21 grandchildren to visit. This soft muscle clings to the day he met my mother, fathering his first child, making the sale, cheering the football team, building wheel chair ramps and hearing me sing.

My palm feels a slow beating through his hospital gown and thin cotton blanket. I want to grab hard…yank him out of his yielding and pull him toward me, like a spoiled child not wanting to share, begging for more time. I am not ready for just memories of my father, pages of a photo album or a little smile of remembrance while eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich. I need his calm blue eyes looking at me with pride, I need him to help me piece my life back together, to help me raise my son, to let me really love him.

My mother sits beside the bed in front of me. My eldest brother and two sisters stand to the right. Tears, prayers and talk of “going home” push through the stagnant air. My mouth murmurs words of togetherness, knowing how he dreads traveling alone. I lie still with him. His breathing calmly stops. The cries around me become louder, more intense and urgent. Yet mine is a quiet, tearful waiting, unaware of when his last beat will resonate, anticipating the moment of losing his rhythm. Time slows, I strain, memorizing the timbre of his heart, I listen…the absence is the finality…I wait…just to make sure.