J. Michael Dew

Observing how the English ivy wound its way around a small tree trunk, I asked my daughter why the English ivy simply didn't shoot straight up.  Why did it take a circuitous route?  It needs something to cling to, she said.  I thought this was rather insightful, coming from a twelve-year-old girl.  Instead of growing directly toward the sun, the English ivy tacked left then right until it had secured its position on the trunk.  It held fast.  It wasn't going to budge.  This is why we fail, I thought.  Oftentimes we never get directly to our goal but, instead, try, fail, experiment, try again until we inch forward.  In doing so, we establish security.  We are firm where we are.  Those who attain their goals too easily, however, are bound to fall away.  They are not wound tightly around the trunk.  They can  simply be peeled away. It is an interesting way to look at our failures, at any rate.  Perhaps we are just ...

We thought it was a coyote, but it wasn't.  It was a car.  The damage was too much.  Pablo had to be put to sleep. I don't know why I was surprised by the reaction.  We all wept.  I knew that was coming.  But in the next few days, there were angry outbursts.  Anger.  We were all so mad that our sweet little gray kitty was struck, forcing us to make a horrible decision. He's under the rose bush now.  I mowed the lawn today and clenched my jaw as I passed his grave.

The sky looks more blue when you are wearing sunglasses.  I wonder if there is a metaphor in this.  Is a thing more beautiful when it is view through a dark prism?  Is there joy only because there is pain?  Do the two work in some mysterious symbiosis?  Is this life?  Is it about learning to find the good despite the bad?

Jordan B. Peterson argues that we must always tell the truth or at least not lie.  What does this suggest about the way in which Western society has evolved?  Are we a culture built on falsehoods?  Have we become a people too afraid to call it how it is?  It does not take long to see in the cacophony of arguments inundating the air waves, social media, and the like that people are usually dancing around the issue, whatever that may be.  A direct observation would be refreshing.  A refusal to submit to rules of conversation dictated by ideologues would be helpful.  Our voices should not be mere echoes of what somebody else says.  We should think on our own and say what we mean, not in coded language but in clear, honest language.

Perhaps the ability to write fiction is the ability to make something of wounds, either yours or somebody else's.  I'm thinking now of the boy who, years ago, worked in the same field as a group of other individuals.  They were haying, and they were bonding in the way that coworkers do who ache and sweat under the same sun.  When lunch time came around, everybody but the boy was invited to go up to the house.  The boy was only twelve.  While the rest ate together, the boy ate his sandwich by himself on a stump next to the field. That event remained with him throughout his life.  It haunted him -- gave him feelings that he struggles with to this day. Perhaps it is a writer's duty to try to make sense of instances like this,  Perhaps all it takes is to write them down.  We take a wound, and we make it communal.  Maybe this is where the healing begins.

"I am so lonely, but I know there is a plan.  There must be.  I can muscle through my life until the next move is clear.  I miss you all so much.  I am alone for most of the time.  It's just me and the cats and dogs.  Nobody comes up.  Nobody stops by.  It's not like it used to be -- so full of life.  Perhaps I'll move down there with you.  But not now.  There is a plan, and I must follow it.  I must follow it even though it's too quiet around here."

As I was walking my three daughters to school, we all looked up and noticed that the sky was pink.  My oldest said that this meant rain.  My middle child agreed.  My youngest had a different opinion: "Maybe it will rain pink lemonade."  "Yes," I said.  "Wouldn't that be grand."

In Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, there is a scene that has stuck with me since I first came across it.   Frankl describes the horrid conditions of Auschwitz -- how the sky was gray, the tattered uniforms were gray, the snow was gray -- but off in the distance in a house on the side of a hill, someone turned on a light.  This one light broke through the grayness of his existence, and defying all that he was up against, gave him hope.

The world prompts us to get to know one another as members of a group, but I prefer to get to know someone on an individual basis.  We are so much more than whatever defines a group.  We are more nuanced than that, and it is in the nuance where true cordiality is found.

I am not a creative person.  I am, rather, an observant person with a good memory.  I remember the rocking motion as we pulled into our rutted driveway.  I remember the smell of my granny's perfume.  I remember the woodshed, the Scout, the buzz of my grampa's chainsaw.  This is what goes into storytelling.  I must.  It is what I know.

Two quarters.  That's what it costs to buy a pop from a machine in Pennsylvania when I was growing up.  We coveted those two quarters, squirreled them away for when we might go to Quality or walk by the laundry mat.  Two quarters meant something.  Two quarters could get you a pop and fizz. This morning, my middle child woke up and reported on the tooth fairy.  "What am I going to do with five dollars?  It's just so little."

Just after my father had passed away, I took a walk to the small factory down the street from where I grew up to inquire about a job.  The building made noise and produced wood chips and saw dust, but what else, I couldn't say.  I figured I could sweep up those chips, that saw dust.  The big bearded man said I was too young, only ten, which is why I probably cried all the way home. I have since learned something from that event.  My life since that point has consisted of me doing my best to earn money no matter how menial the chore.  This attitude, this "I'll do it no matter how much you will pay me so long as it is something" way about doing business has, I have discovered, put me into a box of my own making.  There are successful people out there who do not undersell their skills.  They have a confidence about them that I, coming from a place of great need, have never had.  I think it is time to reexamine how I rate my skills and how I value my...

Peachy King seemed to know all the answers but mostly those regarding girls.  He was a Boy Scout like the rest of us, though with some rank, and he was the only one of us with facial hair: a slim, barely perceptible line of hair above his upper lip.  Peach fuzz.  Peachy.  The name went with the mature look.  After we had crawled into our tents for the night, Dale hollered out, "Peachy!"  "Yes," came the tired reply, and then Dale launched into a series of questions about the so-called fairer sex.  Peachy King answered each question succinctly and with a measure of "one who knows."  Of course, we all benefitted from the Q/A session.  We were Boy Scouts all trying to make rank.

Aunt Nellie and Uncle Gerald lived in an old house on the back of the hill.  Aunt Nellie had a hard time getting water to boil, though, because every time she left the kitchen, the pot would somehow fall to the floor, creating quite a mess.  After a while, Uncle Gerald had to tear out the water-damaged floorboards.  When he did so, he found a small bundle beneath the floor.  Inside was the skeletal remains of a newborn.  Apparently, the previous owner of the house had a daughter who got pregnant out of wedlock.  Her solution?  Boil the baby alive. Now we knew why Aunt Nellie could never get the water to boil.

I think it was John Updike who said that a person lives his life for thirty years and spends the rest of it trying to understand what happened.  At forty-three, I wonder if I have already turned that corner.  Have most of my mountains been scaled?  Am I now in the valley of self-reflection?

I think of my brother who, as a boy, was branded "special needs," and as a result, was put on a path that led to him being ostracized by many.  It amazes me how one decision, one twist in the road can alter a person's life.  Had he not been labeled as such, he might have ended up somewhere else.  We must all be aware of how we treat the littlest among us.

Gramma and Grampa has a plum tree out behind the house that I used to climb in the summers.  The plums were great treasures, and I have fond memories of eating them, resting there in the crook.  How often do I reach for those plums now in my nearly forty-fourth year of living on this earth.  Sometimes I reach for the bad fruit, but it never satisfies the same.

I am only interested in what is true and that we should not build narratives on what is false or what we want to be true.  I think this happens too often and that this is a cause for a lot of divisiveness.  In fact, I have to wonder if the purveyors of these untruths and conjectures have a vested interested in riling up the public.  I think so.  I think this is true.

I cut the holes myself, bought the rope, rigged the swing up good to the tree in front of the house.  The branch muscles the swing, and the girls gleefully swing to and fro beneath the Georgia sky.  Tomorrow, the tree will be cut down.  Where will my girls swing?  It saddens me that I do not have an answer.

Is the road sometimes long because it takes time to develop persistence, fortitude, and courage?