Category Archives: Rebecca’s Hobbies

Sunday Scribblings #111 Soar/Sore

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I lift him above my head: his mouth opens wide in a baby-grin and he laughs loudly, soaring above me, arms outstretched. I smile too, my heart memorizing the sound, the sight, and the feeling of chubby childhood joy.

***

I turn away: in my mind I still see the tears on his pumpkin-covered face and in my ears I still hear his constant scream of baby indignation. I sigh and grab a towel to wipe away the blood on my finger, wishing someone would kiss my sore better.

This is motherhood: a daily dichotomy.

[Fiction] Friday: Retold Fairy Tale

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How the Dog Got his Bark

(With apologies to Rudyard Kipling)

Long ago, when the world first began, dogs were quiet animals. They did what they were told, particularly when it came to fetching things, and lived a quiet life, usually.

One particular dog, named Terry, liked to jump on people to get their attention. He lived with a man named Joe. Joe did not like to be jumped on. Every time Terry jumped up to get Joe’s attention, Joe hit him with a stick.

This was not very nice. Terry did not like to be hit with a stick. But he still wanted to get Joe’s attention sometimes.

One night, Joe was asleep and Terry was resting at the foot of Joe’s bed. He wasn’t quiet tired yet, so he just rested. Then he heard something approaching. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew it wasn’t good. He stood up on his four legs. Joe kept sleeping. Then Terry realized that it was a big bear. The animal was coming toward Joe in his bed. Terry realized that Joe was not going to wake up before the bear attacked him.

Terry knew he would be hit by the stick if he jumped on Joe. But he wanted to protect Joe. He jumped up on Joe. Joe, as was his instinct, grabbed the stick, which was under his pillow. But Joe missed Terry. Terry, in his excitement, swallowed the stick. Joe was still kind of asleep. Terry didnâ’t like the feeling of the stick in his throat so he tried to cough it out. It wouldn’t budge. But instead of silence, a sound came out:

“Rroof! Rroof!”

Joe jumped up. The combination of the noise from Terry and Joe’s movement caused the bear to flee. And both Terry and Joe were safe.

From then on, whenever Terry wanted to get Joe’s attention, he would simply”Rroof”, and Joe would respond. Joe liked that much better.

And that is how the dog got his bark.

[Note: Technically, I don’t think I quite followed the prompt, as it was supposed to be a “modern” take on a fairy tale. Instead, I did my own take on Kipling’s “Just So Stories” idea. It’s the first thing that came to mind.]

When Did You Know You Were a Writer?

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I scrawled in five-year-old writing on the cover (The Three Little Pigs) and on the last page (THE END). For the other pages, my mother was my scribe. She wrote my words on ruler-straight lines underneath my crayon illustrations. Then, I took a stapler and bound my first book together. My first experiment with the written word — my written word — was thus published for all to see. Although I simply retold a story, for the first time I had expressed my own creativity through the written word.

Then, in first grade, my teacher gave me lined pages. I wrote my stories carefully on the lines. These stories were no longer simple retellings, but my own creations. The class published them at the elementary school publishing center: plastic comb bindings.

At home in the afternoons, my classmate, neighbor, and friend became my co-writer and illustrator. We sat, side-by-side, at a plastic blue Smurf table. Together, we wrote and illustrated stories set in all times and settings—from orphans in our day to dinosaurs that traveled through space and time. I wrote words. She drew pictures. She wrote words. I drew pictures. We stapled the pages together.

As I moved through school, our Smurf table publishing world came to an end, and the elementary school publishing center was no longer a monthly destination. But my interest in the written word remained at my core. Anytime anything even remotely interesting happened in my family, I produced another issue of the Family Tribune and delivered it to every member of my family and to my grandparents who were far way. I wrote a play and my friends and I acted in it. I wrote stories and half of a novel. Then, come high school and college, I wrote term paper after term paper.

Now I write for myself, I write for my family, and I share my words online. I suppose writing on a webpage is much like stapling my books: it’s not professional, and few will read my words. But the words are mine. As I improve my ability to write, I will better find my voice for expressing my own experiences — whether those experiences focus on travel adventures, nonfiction research, or the creative explorations of my imagination.

Someday, my words will be bound between covers.

Amateur that I am, I know that I am a writer: I have always been a writer.

Quote: Keeping a Journal

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One of the most helpful tools a writer has is his journals. Whenever someone asks how to become an author, I suggest keeping a journal. A journal is not a diary, where you record the weather and the engagements of the day. A journal is a notebook in which one can, hopefully be ontological. [A journal is] a place where you can unload, dump, let go. A journal is also a place in which joy gets recorded, because joy is too bright a flame in me not to burn if it doesn’t get expressed in words.

Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet, page 197

Sunday Scribblings #110 Telephone

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My unpacked bags were under the kitchen table. It was Saturday morning, and I perched on the edge of a kitchen chair, drinking a glass of water and telling my mother about my amazing week at the religious retreat. Then the telephone rang.

The excitement of my week of teenage socialization hadn’t worn off on the one-hour drive home. I wanted to tell her everything: she could not get off the phone soon enough.

I don’t recall how she told me. I just remember the feeling of euphoria ebbing out of me, like the sands in an hourglass.

Quote: Writing Practices

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I like the name writing practices better than Creative Writing. Nobody can teach creative writing: run like made from anybody who thinks he can. But one can teach practices, like finger exercises on the piano; one can share the tools of the trade, and what one has gleaned from the great writers: it is the great writers themselves who do the teaching, rather than the leader of a seminar. It doesn’t take long for the gifted student to realize that there are certain things the great writers always do, and certain things they never do; it is from these that we learn.

Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet, page 60-61

May Day Mayday

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May Day, definition: May 1 celebrated as a springtime festival

I am feeling kind of down these days. Everyone is writing on their blogs about the beautiful flowers they are enjoying, about the lovely weather they are hoping for, about SPRING. My days are getting progressively colder and the leaves are mostly finished changing colors and dropping. I was having a hard time getting out the house before it got cold: now I can see I’m just going to spend the next few months indoors. It takes twice as long to get Paul ready to go out because I have to bundle him up. I think we’ll stay indoors.

This morning, I realized it was May Day. I have always had a special place in my heart for May Day. One year, when I was a depressed, lonely, loner teenager, a friend of mine left me a bouquet of roses on May Day. “Happy May Day!” the note said. She left them anonymously, but I knew who it was. I haven’t talked to her for years, but I’ll always remember the service she did for me back on that spring day when I felt so awkward and alone. It was a reminder that in the “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer” (Camus); I just needed to stop thinking about myself and serve, as she did.

It’s just so sad that this year’s May Day is rainy, overcast, cold, and only getting colder. I must remember that summer will eventually come again.

I miss spring! (I guess it serves me right for bragging about good produce in November!)

Mayday, definition: an international radio-telephone signal word used as a distress call

I’m trying to find my ancestors. I researched James and Margaret and found their supposed marriage date in an index of marriages. The UK likes to horde the originals and won’t let anyone (even LDS volunteers) digitize or scan them for microfilm. So, for £13 I ordered the marriage certificate. (Yes, Mom, I know you claim Grandma already had one, but when I visited, we searched her apartment and couldn’t find it.)

For some reason, I thought that the marriage certificate would tell me everything. I guess I imagined a large packet or box delivered to my door with birth information and parental details, complete with an explanation of the mystery of where, when, and why Margaret disappeared fifteen years later.

Here’s what I got: a barely legible official copy of the certificate on file in a slim, small, half-sheet-of-paper-sized envelope.

The certificate tells me their names and professions, their ages, etc. Most of the information we already knew.

But here are my questions:

  • If I didn’t know which James Simon/Simons/Simmons was my ancestor, how could I be sure this was their marriage certificate?
  • How can I figure out where they were born? Tradition holds James Simmons as Irish, but we don’t know where he came from or when he came to England.
  • How do I find where, when, and to whom James Delany/Simons was born? Because he was aged four at the 1871 census, he couldn’t possibly have been born to James and Margaret unless he was born out of wedlock.
  • Could James Delany/Simmons have been born out of wedlock in the 1860s? Wouldn’t that have been pretty scandalous for this Catholic family? Can I assume he was born to people who were married?

I am completely lost as to where to begin. I’ll head to the Family History Library next Wednesday when it’s open, but my experience is the librarians there are as clueless as I am.

PLEASE HELP if you have any experience with family history!

Note: Any Benac family members who’d like to save £13 can view and download a high-res jpg of this image here for your own family history files.

Ignored Characters

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As I mentioned, to my surprise, I loved rereading Little Women. I think I liked it more now than when I first read it as a teenager, simply because the goody-goody characters were refreshing to me after the novels and the nonfiction books I’ve been reading. I related to the girls.

Author Geraldine Brooks read Little Women the first time when she was ten. When her mother recommended it, she said to take it with a grain of salt: “Nobody in real life is such a goody-goody as that Marmee” (Afterword, page 354). With that concept was born Brooks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, March.

While March focuses a little bit on Marmee, the majority of this book is about Mr. March (called March), the father of the girls, who, in part one of Alcott’s novel, is away fighting in the Civil War. In this novel, we read his letters to Marmee, and then we read the truth of what is happening to him in the South. March writes ” promised her that I would write something every day: I never promised I would write the truth” (page 4).

In a fascinating contrast to the girls’ failures in Little Women, March’s failings are huge to him; he cannot solve them in a chapter or even by the end of the book. As Little Women delves into the little problems of teenage girls, March delves into the larger problems of an adult before and during the civil war: slavery, death, violence and war, betrayal, marital and extramarital relationships, and confusion about one’s role in the world and in a family. (Disappointingly, there is a far amount of sexuality in this book, so keep that in mind.) To me, it is an intriguing contrast to the goody-goody world of Little Women.

Geraldine Brooks has thoroughly researched both the civil war and the life of Louisa May Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott, for many of the philosophies and characteristics of Mr. March. Since Alcott herself based Little Women on her own experience, basing Mr. March on Alcott’s father seemed very appropriate. I love a well-researched novel, especially historical fiction, and this certainly was well-researched.

I also loved the concept of fleshing out a character that otherwise wasn’t noticed. I know I never gave a thought to Mr. March when I first read Little Women. Only on rereading Little Women now, knowing that I’d read March next, did I realize how little attention is given to him.

What behind-the-scenes fictional character would you like to know more about?

Note: I’d recommend reading Little Women (at least part one) before approaching March. They complement each other nicely.

Apostasy?

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We traveled to see the Twelve Apostles this weekend because we had a holiday. (We might not get Thanksgiving, but we do get ANZAC day in April!) Apparently, some of the Twelve Apostles have fallen away. I think that’s apostasy, isn’t it?

Here’s a picture of Mommy and Paul. You can see one of the “fallen Apostles” in the surf below. (Pardon my wind-blown hair. It was windy and I didn’t have a hair tie.)

I’ll try to get my pictures up by the end of the week, but we’ll see.

Why I Like Photoshop

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In August, I went to visit the Mornington Peninsula. I took pictures, and I didn’t feel very satisfied with any of them. The sun was too bright, and nothing did justice to the beauty of the scene.

Since then, my husband helped me install Photoshop CS2 on my computer, and we got more memory (the computer often froze if I tried to use Photoshop). This week, I revisited the Mornington Peninsula photos.

Before Photoshop

photoshopsample1[1]

After Photoshop

photoshopsample2[1]

Before Photoshop

photoshopsample3[1]

After Photoshop

photoshopsample4[1]

What did I do? I cropped out distractions, I straightened the horizon, I adjusted the exposure, and I removed the the smudges. I also ran a macro that found the edges and made them a little sharper.

It’s amazing to me what a little bit of tweaking can do to a photograph. They are the same shots, and I took them, but it looks so much nicer in the after-shot.

Because I like to review the photos I’ve taken, I’ve created a photography journal. I have the photos in the order that I’ve taken them — if you click on Archive, you can browse through them by year and month or by category. Currently, I have my Australia photographs posted. I’m going to add some of church history sites and France and Italy once I process them in Photoshop. I don’t have most of my others–Bolivia, Jerusalem, etc.–but when I eventually get back to the USA, I’ll scan them, revisit them in Photoshop, and post those as well.

I’m not sure the point of creating a site like this, other than I want to share my photographs with the world. Amateur that I am, I like them.