10 Things: Witch

It’s Writer Wednesday (#WW) over in Twitterdom, so let’s do 10 Things to get our writer cells working. I say a thing. You say 10 Things that pop into your head or out the end of your pen. Ready? Set?

WITCH

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These are my 10 Things. Your mileage may vary.

1. Wicked Witch. For L. Frank Baum, she was a cackling, green-skinned thing, out for vengeance for her sister against Dorothy and for power against the Wizard of Oz. Gregory Maguire complicates her, building a biology and psychology for her in which wickedness is only one interpretation. Rhetorical and political only.

2. Amy is the name of the witch that haunts my stories, but I don’t really know who she is or what makes her unique. Should I make her a knitter? Or perhaps more like Nancy Drew, sleuthing and meddling?

3. Witchy Woman. Is that The Eagles? What is that song even about? Does the point of view LIKE her witchiness? Fear it? Hang on, I have to go listen. 

4. Hermione Granger. My favorite witch. Bookish, awkward, brilliant. The most loyal friend. And aside from one jealous meltdown, she does not crumble from her responsibilities even when upset. 

5. Which witch? A grammatical conundrum. A question in which we wonder what the correct use of the word is in a particular written context.

6. Witchy Poo. She was a costumed cartoon of a witch who looked just like the cartoon Helga. Orange hair, striped socks and vultures. Oh, and warts. What did she even want from Pufenstuf? I don’t know, except that he was afraid of her and I want some socks like hers. 

7. Bewitched. The domestic witch who used her powers not for the improvement of society but for domestic bliss, against the wishes of her wilder and more sexual mother. Conservative shift? Then her daughter is wilder as well?

8. Sabrina the teenage witch. Which I never watched. Not once. But somehow my brain knows the actress’s name is Melissa Joan Hart. Why do I know that?

9. Willow. Nerdy to evil. Hetero to lesbian. Shy to invidious. My other favorite witch. Both she and Hermione relied heavily on books for their power and craft.

10. A Discovery of Witches was the last witch book I read.

And now, you see, I’ve come to the end of my 10 Things and only talked about pop culture witches. What about historical witches? Religious witches? Multi-cultural witches?  

10 Things: Mac

A stuffy head and creaky fingers are making my words flow like molasses today. What I need is a little writing EXERCISE. Join me? Let’s do 10 Things. I say a thing and you share the first 10 Things you think of when you think of that thing. It’s easy. Find my things after a polite pixel partition. Anyone can play!

10 Things: MAC.

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My MAC things? Certainly.

1. Hi. I’m a Mac and I’m a PC. Actually I’m a Mac. Or rather, THIS is a Mac.

2. Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. Big Mac. Why do they call it that?

3. Mac. A nickname for my step-father. A frequent nickname for people with a “Mc” or “Mac” surname or more generally for anyone of Irish or Scottish descent.

4. A generic epithet, like ‘buddy.’ Hey mac, can you spare a dime?

5. Mac, a Scottish Terrier from a Disney movie. Which one though? Lady and the Tramp? Can anyone confirm or deny this correlation?

6. Mac… Mack… macintosh rain coat. Splish splash.

7. Mac. Macadam. McAdam, the person credited with the use of macadame, a type of paving that I associate with black top parking lots. I learned this word from Janet Evanovich. True story.

8. macmacmaccamcamcam A backwards camera? Yes, reaching now. Can. I. Pull. Out. Ten???

9. Mac. Macademia nuts! From Hawaii. My grandma Flora brought these to me sometimes when she came to visit. I thought she had such weird snacks. I realize now that she was excited to share exotic foods with me. 

10. macmacmacmac HEYYY Macarena! Sonar X6 can dance the Macarena (though he knows it as the calendar song from school. Try it. Sing the months of the year—in English or Spanish—to the Macrena tune. I’ll wait.). But he doens’t know how to Hustle. A parenting lapse. I’ll fix that this weekend. 

10 Things: Mailbox Cushion

I noticed it the other day. Other family members insist that it’s been there for a few weeks. I struggled to come up with a reasonable explanation. What does it MEAN?! And then I pulled out a pen and made up a list of 10 Things that could explain this scenario. But that’s not enough. I want to hear your 10 Things too. So get your writing tools, number 1 through 10, and when you see the photo, write down the first 10 Things you think of to explain why, WHY?! there is a plush, velvety, red cushion tied to the top of this mailbox with a blue cord.

Ready? My 10 Things will follow below. Click to embiggen the photo if you like.

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The mailbox of one of my neighbors

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My 10 Things: 

1. The cushion adds directional stability to keep the mailbox from falling off its post.

2. The cushion protects the sensitive mailbox from falling branches or acorns.

3. The cushion provides a place for the mail carrier to lean out of his truck to rest his head.

4. Once a week the neighborhood cats gather around the mailbox with the king or queen cat perched on the cushion throne.

5. The red cushion with blue straps is an alternative to tree streamers for demonstrating school pride. Go blue red!

6. The cushion is a teleporter. The mail carrier places packages upon the cushion and they are instantly zapped into the house. (This one courtesy of Sonar X11)

7. The cushion is the signal for a secret underground network, or perhaps the sign of the meeting place of a secret organization. (If cushion is red we meet at the library. If cushion is blue we meet at the Dairy Queen.)

8. Enclosed within the cushion is surveillance equipment that monitors traffic speeds or tries to catch kids who get stoned in the arroyo across the street.

9. This cushion is part of a new trend in front yard decor. Soon all the mailboxes will have plush adornments.

10. This is a showcase cushion. Periodically the homeowner displays his prize __________ to passersby.

Don’t forget to put your speculation, wild or otherwise, into the comments for all of us to enjoy. 

Etude: Accident, First grade fear

Another expansion of an entry in last Wednesday’s episode of 10 Things: 

In the first grade, I changed schools part way through the year. I was small and quiet normally, and on the first day in my new school, I was terrified of everything and everyone. The classroom was bigger, the desks were different and bigger, the other students seemed bigger than my former classmates. My new teacher seemed nice enough (she did, after all, have a Dorothy Hamill haircut like mine), but she had giant owl-eyed glasses.

The boy who sat in front of me that day was named Marc Soto.  On that day, Marc Soto seemed a little bit mean, or at least brashly confident — and why not, *he* wasn’t the new kid. He knew where the pencil sharpener was and how to get to the bathroom.

In my old classroom, if we needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of class, we knew to look for the pass — a big block of wood with “Mrs. Jaramillo’s bathroom pass” painted on it in red fingernail polish. If the pass was in the chalk tray, we could take it, walk two doors down the hall from our classroom, do our business, and come right back. In this new classroom, I didn’t see a big block of wood with “Miss Jackson’s bathroom pass” painted on it in any color of nail polish, or anything at all resembling a bathroom pass. So when I needed to pee, I had no idea what to do. Was there some sort of hand-raising protocol? Was the pass hidden somewhere and I had to find it?

I suppose I must have pondered the possibilities — all except for the obvious, ASK the teacher — for some time. For so long in fact that not only could I not pay any attention at all to what Miss Jackson (who was later confirmed to be very nice and who changed to Mrs. Reynolds the next summer, prompting me to wonder if she was actually the same person and if she’d remember *my* name if hers had changed) was saying, but also could not hold it anymore. So I peed quietly, hoping no one would hear it, thinking that if I peed just a little, maybe no one would notice and maybe I’d be able to hold it long enough to figure out where the pass might be (not to mention where the actual bathroom might be).

Unfortunately once I started peeing, quiet or not, I could not stop.

In spite of sitting as still as a statue, the pee didn’t stay in the chair with me. It spilled out onto the floor in a silent puddle that spread out around me. And of course Marc Soto was the first person to notice. He half stood in his chair and pointed and said something very loud to draw the attention of Miss Jackson.

I don’t remember what happened next, but I know that I survived. I also know that Marc Soto also sat in front of me in second grade and sometimes I thought he was mean and sometimes I thought he was not mean, and once he confused me a lot because he and his family didn’t celebrate birthdays. Mostly I thought that Marc Soto was ok because he ran faster than most of the kids, and, though he once called me four-eyes, he didn’t seem to care that he’d once caught me peeing in the first grade.

Etude: Accident, Truck vs. Truck

Building on Wednesday’s episode of 10 Things, a ramble about an accident.

In tenth grade I had my first and only car accident. I had been a licensed driver for less than a year. I was driving a fourteen-year-old, faded green, 1977 Chevy pickup truck with an on-the-column shift. At five feet tall (if I’m generous) and with the bench seat slid all the way forward, and if I scooted right up against the steering wheel, I could just about mash to the floor the giant pedals of the brake, clutch, and accelerator. With both a license and a vehicle, I had the righteous privilege of offering people rides home from school sometimes. In later years, I might view this as a curse. On that day, I was dropping off two friends before heading home myself.

Our high school had a population just under two-thousand students. Only a small fraction of those rode the bus, and I’d bet almost none of them walked or rode bikes because the school was nowhere near anything at the time. Everyone else got picked up, drove themselves, or bummed rides from people like me. At the end of the school day, two parking lots full of teenage drivers and a pickup lane of buses and parents spilled out onto a winding, descending, narrow, two-lane road that terminated at a busy T-intersection at the bottom of the hill below the school. In the thick of the exodus, getting out of a parking lot onto that road was usually an adventure.

My friends and I were giddy, practically punch drunk from who knows what, likely singing at the top of our lungs as we left school. We survived the merge onto the road and were sitting through a second round at the red light when another truck slammed into us from behind.

I was six or eight cars back from the intersection, and the light had turned from red to green. I had taken my right foot from the brake and pulled the gear shift back and up into first. The tires were loose, but we hadn’t started to roll. My foot hadn’t made it to the accelerator. We hadn’t yet fastened our seat belts.

The singing stopped. The impact threw us forward. All of our books and purses flew into the dashboard and spilled onto the floor. The chassis of the truck was knocked forward so that it didn’t sit right on the axles afterwards.

The guy driving the new red pick-up wasn’t a teenager as you might expect. He was delivering parts for a local auto shop, driving his shiny, manual-transmission truck with one arm in a cast. He had smashed into us going at least thirty-fives miles per hour and had never once applied the brakes.

We lied about the seat belts, puzzling everyone who expected us to have bruises from the shoulder straps. We were ok. Sore necks. Sore backs. A few days of headache. That green pick-up I was driving was a beast, and I credit it with protecting us from more serious harm.