People often ask me why I write. Okay, so they phrase it a little differently but the answer to “Why do you keep writing?” is the same as the answer to “Why do you write?” Right? The answer is another question: What else would I do? Why did Shirley Jackson, Will Cuppy, Erma Bombeck and Jean Kerr write? Why do millions of writers, like me, sit down at their keyboards and share their sometimes very personal life experiences with the world? Why don't we put our time to better use by finding a cure for migraines or a way to stop global warming or a little alarm that goes off if you have spinach in your teeth in public or something worthwhile like that?
Well, in my case, at least, there is one compelling reason for sharing my life experiences. I have so many of them, and they're so weird. I think I was about ten when I realized that I'm a magnet for strange people, odd coincidences, and bizarre events. If there's one loony in the bin, wherever I am, the loony will sit down beside me and start to tell me her life story.
What's more, I probably won't find that story terribly strange, because I've heard many similar stories before, at least once from a man who was wearing a plastic bowl for a hat and waiting next to me on a bus stop bench. If I remember correctly, he was also wearing roller blades and had a wooden cup on a string around his neck, but this was decades ago so I could be imagining the cup. It might have been a bowl. I do remember that he gave me a butterscotch toffee that was covered with lint from his pocket and I mimed putting it into my mouth so as not to hurt his feelings. Unfortunately, then I had to make sucking noises and poke my tongue up against my cheeks to make it look like I was eating it.
This week has been a veritable cornucopia of writing fodder. I suppose the strangest thing happened at my doctor's office where I went to get my infected ears looked at and ended up sharing a bathroom stall with 3-yr old twin boys. This wouldn't usually throw me, but I was supposed to be producing a urine sample at the time, which made it a little dicey.
They crawled under the door and into the stall while their mother was diapering their baby brother, who seemed to be having some sort of medical crisis which involved his diaper contents. At least, it smelled like that. Anyhow, Frick and Frack or Thing A and Thing B or whoever they were managed to escape their double stroller and popped up like little gophers right in front of my knees. Luckily, I had a long sweater on, so I just kind of pulled it over my lap and set the specimen cup on the toilet paper holder.
I smiled, and they smiled and one of them said, "We got lead poison."
"We might die." The other one said.
"Oh, dear," I said, "That's not good. But I don't think you'll die. I think you'll probably be fine."
"Nope," Boy in Green said, "Mom says we're in deep doo-doo."
"Evan!" A horrified voice yelled. "Devan! You get out of there and leave that lady alone. Let her pee in peace."
"She's not peeing," Evan or Devan said, "She's talkin' to us."
"Well, actually," I said, "I'd appreciate it if you guys could crawl back out. Can you do that?"
They wiggled backward, but somehow the stroller had gotten in the way, and that wasn't going to work. The stroller was also in the way of the door that opened outward, so I couldn't even open it to let them out. I was in the stall on the end, so they scooched down and into the next stall, and a loud voice said, "Hey! Get out of here!" and they fell back on my feet.
"There's a mean old lady in there," one of them said.
"And she doesn't like kids," the other one said.
The stroller moved, and a hand reached under the door into the stall and grabbed the nearest boy's pants cuff. His astonished expression was so comical that I started laughing and so did his twin, as the first boy was dragged out of the stall backward.
Unfortunately, just as he was about to go under the door, he put his head up and banged it. His loud yowl of pain set off his brother, who also started yowling and my already painful ears began to hurt even more from the din. I think it was the acoustics, but it was a bit like being between two cymbals with the orchestra playing the 1812 Overture. The woman in the stall next to me left, banging the stall door as she went and I opened the door so that the second twin's mother could reach in and grab him. The woman was evidently somewhat used to this kind of thing, because, by the time I finished doing what I had to do, the restroom was empty and very, very quiet.
For the rest of the day, I found myself wondering if they really do have lead poisoning, maybe from a recalled toy? Or maybe they ate paint chips on the windowsill of their decrepit apartment building that is all their mother can afford now that her husband is deployed or shacked up with a cocktail waitress. Or maybe they live in an old farmhouse with lead soldered pipes, and they'll just keep getting dumber and dumber and grow up to be the kind of people who forward emails about disappearing hitchhikers and spiders in bananas. Or run for office. Or maybe, twenty years from now, they'll be offering lint-covered Toffees to women who sit down next to them at bus stations.
Well anyway, this kind of weirdness is why I started writing way back in 1961. I started with little stories about horses and animals and fairy tale creatures, but only because that was what my teachers told me I should be writing. Then, a few years later, on our old black and white TV, I saw The Purple Avenger episode of Please Don't Eat the Daisies by Jean Kerr, a humor writer. (Dom Deluise was the Purple Avenger so I got to discover him too.) I read my way through her books within a week and moved on to Shirley Jackson and Erma Bombeck.
Some writers are remembered for their inspiring love stories i.e. Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago. Some, like Hemingway, for his style and some like Faulkner for his ability to evoke a place and a time and characters that people it so well that we feel as if we know them. Me? I suspect that I'll always be that woman who writes about the weird things that happen to her, which means I'll be writing for a long time.