Blogging A-Z: C Is for Coldwater

            Jack was born in Coldwater, Kansas, a town of about 1,200 people in the south-central part of the state, a few months after Pearl Harbor. The town is in Comanche County, which borders Oklahoma. Jack’s parents, and 6-year-old brother and 8-year-old sister, lived in their own house on Jack’s grandfather’s ranch. His grandfather bought baby calves, fattened them up, and drove them north to sell.

            Coldwater was what is known as a “sunset” town, i.e., it had a sign at the town limit with

this message: “N*****, don’t let the sun set on your black head in Coldwater.” That sign still existed into the mid-1950s, when Jack came to visit his grandparents on “the farm.” Other towns in the county are Protection and Buttermilk. Coldwater now has a population a bit over 800, Protection about 500, and Buttermilk barely exists any more.

            Jack’s father, Lawrence, worked for his father, but their relationship was strained; one year, Lawrence failed to return home immediately after selling the cattle because he was drinking up much of the money. By 1944, he moved his family up to Wichita, where he’d started working at Boeing, which was churning out warplanes, and the family lived in a war-time housing community called Planeview.  

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April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.

Essay #8: Catching Up

            I had such hopes for this year. I’d write every week for Vanessa’s 52 Essays in 2017. I’d write every Tuesday for the Two Writing Teachers’ Slice of Life Tuesdays and daily for their March Slice of Life Daily Challenge. I’d write every day in April for the Blogging AtoZ Challenge.

            Well, I have no discipline. I got through Week 7 for the essays. I missed only four days in March (posting twice a few days when I missed the actual dailiness). I wrote 10 blog posts for the blogging challenge, but posted only seven. I have managed 20 of the Tuesday slices of life, which is half the number of weeks so far. So Slices of Life get most of my attention—or maybe just what I’m in the habit of doing; this is my third year on that project.

            But I’m going to try to get back into the essay challenge. Only 11 weeks left in the year, so unless I write four essays a week from now to the end of the year, I’ll never catch up. But writing is better than not writing. Writing always tells me what I think. I often don’t know otherwise, or don’t remember. If I don’t write it down, I can’t remember it.

            This has always been the case with my brain. Tell me something, and really, it does go in one ear and out the other. I might remember a conversation being interesting, or fascinating, or boring, or annoying, but the details of why are lost in fog. Unless I write them down.

            Many years ago I saw someone on a subway platform wearing a T-shirt that read: “Writing is thinking, not thinking written down.” I want that T-shirt.

            (Is this an essay? It is because I say it is.)#52essays2017