TURKEY DELIGHT
Twas nearly Thanksgiving and all through the house,
not a creature was stirring 'cept maybe a mouse,
The fridge held a turkey long since safely dead,
and visions of cranberries danced in my head.
Then I glanced out the window and what did I see?
A full-feathered turkey looking straight back at me!
The turkey was perched aloft on our car,
I suppose it had flown there from somewhere afar.
It returned to its preening with no further thought;
And I yelled for a camera to snap a great shot.
My mate came a running with shutter all set.
He set about snapping, each shot the best yet.
The turkey's head rose and down she did squat,
A gift she then left us, and not in a pot.
Ere long her four flock mates ambled onto the scene,
And the turkey decided to return to the green.
Her huge feathered wings spread open quite wide
to assist her ungainly hop down to the side.
Then off the flock waddled, deep into the woods
In search of delectable dinnertime goods.
I'll never forget this most wonderous sight
of the bird on our car I call Turkey Delight.
When I downloaded this recent picture from my husband's camera, it cried out for a story, and that story took on a life of its own, emerging in a totally unexpected way. I just relaxed and let it have its way with me. Who knows? Maybe Sarabelle was working her magic. Sometimes it's good to cut loose and play with our stories. I've always said I was born without the poetry gene. I haven't changed that opinion, but it's fun to dabble in different writing forms now and then.
Write now: think of a fun or wondrous event and try a new way of expressing it. Poetry. Song. Crayola. Write with your non-dominant hand. Use colored markers. You may be amazed at the creativity boost you get.
In the last post I wrote about the “Great Pelican Rescue Adventure” and the advantages of sharing stories like that in an e-mail or other written form to get them recorded while the detail is fresh in your memory and passion still high.
Using e-mail to record stories is especially effective, because you'll probably write in your most natural voice that way, and you can immediately share your work with family and friends. I strongly suggest you save the story in some other format rather than leaving it solely as an e-mail. E-mail is probably the most fragile or volatile form of digital information storage I know of. I've lost large chunks of e-mail at various times, but never lost a word processing file. Some of the e-mails have been lost when changing from one e-mail management form to other. Through the years I've used Industry Net, Juno, AOL, Adelphia, Comcast, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and a few others. It's not easy, and sometimes impossible, to go back and find old e-mails, especially with the online varieties.
If you write in an e-mail program, copy the story text and paste it into a Word document for long-term storage. Eventually you may want to remove the formatting that e-mail programs often add. I sometimes stumble into story writing mode without intending to, but if I plan to write a story as part of an email, I'll start in OpenOffice (my preferred free, open source, Microsoft Alternative), then paste the story into the e-mail.
Once you have your story saved, you can let it sit for days or ages to mellow before you do anything else with it, if indeed you ever do. Eventually you may think of other ways to use the material in other stories. For example, I may use my pelican story as an element in a larger account of contact with wild life in general. I may link it to memories of the chickens we raised when I was very young, and duck and geese that hunting neighbors used to share. I could use it in an essay about the perils mankind poses to wild critters, or I could go off on a tangent about the spiritual nature of encounters with wild animals. Most likely it will simply fit into a comprehensive account of the Everglades Elderhostel we were attending when this adventure took place.
As you can see, the opportunities for expanding stories and putting bits and pieces of them to other uses are limited only by your imagination. You can string stories together like beads on a necklace, nest them, or segue one into another. For more information about these various methods of combining stories, see an earlier post, “Like Beads on a Necklace.” You'll also find a more complete explanation in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing.
Write now: think of a lively story or story idea of your own. Make a list of all the various associations you can think of that relate to that story. Select at least two others and incorporate them, together with your original story idea, into a more comprehensive account.
Have you ever had something happen that is so exciting you can't help telling everyone you see about it? These are events that deserve to be memorialized in story form. You may eventually want to embellish the written account with metaphor, dialog or other literary devices, but the most compelling account may be the one you spontaneously dash off at the first opportunity, without any editing. In fact, an e-mail account can serve nicely, at least as a first draft, to the memorialize such an event.
Last week I had such an experience during an Elderhostel about and in the Everglades, and this is the account I sent:
I'm so excited — we helped rescue a pelican that had a large fishing plug stuck in the tendon along the front of its upper right wing. We were walking along the boat slips behind the hotel, and a fellow was casting bait in the water. A pelican was lurking around, eyeing the bait. As we took pictures, we noticed something in its wing that we thought was a wildlife marker. The fisherman explained that it was a plug, and that he was trying to catch the pelican so he could get the plug out. Unfortunately grabbing it with bare hands hadn't worked, so he was switching to a hook baited with eight ounces of raw fish. Of course we hung around to watch, along with another couple from our group.
The pelican swooped down and bit at the bait he was teasing it with, but the hook didn't stick. Just then a ten-foot alligator glided over under the water. The second time the pelican swooped for the bait, the alligator leapt out of the water, with jaws wide open. The pelican took off, evading the alligator's snapping jaw by a couple of feet. That gator had its whole head out of the water — about three feet.
The gator disappeared, and the fisherman kept toying around with his bait (a large hunk of fish, not at all subtle). Finally the pelican got brave and swooped back in. This time it worked. He was hooked. The fisherman reeled him in like a huge fish, reaching down to grab him by the head to pull him up out of the water. The pelican was scared silly and flapping all over. The fisherman held the beak shut and covered the pelican's eyes. That's when we sprang into action. We each held a wing tight while the fisherman tried to work the hooks loose. Two large hooks were caught in the front area of the upper wing. They were really stuck. He couldn't get the job done with one hand, so another Elderhosteler held the beak and eyes so the fisherman could finish the job. He said he's worked on bird rescue for a long time, even handling bald eagles. If he didn't get the plug out, it would get infected and the bird would die. He finally did work it out.
Then he took the bird again. He folded the head in close to the body and held the wings tight, then tossed it into the air toward the water. The bird took off, but didn't go further than the dock about fifty feet away. It was joined there by another pelican that seemed to be its mate. They stood there longer than we did, basking in the sun. I'm sure that bird was happy to have that nasty thing out of its wing.
What excitement! Seeing that gator jump for the pelican, and then getting to actually hold a wild pelican. Nobody ever gets to do that!
I may eventually rewrite this story, incorporate it in a larger account of the trip or some other piece, or expand on it in a personal essay, but if that never happens, at least I have this much. I'll write more about this in my next post.
Write now: about some exciting event that recently happened to you. It doesn't have to be high adventure involving wildlife or wild life. It may be as quiet as seeing the first daffodil pushing its head above the frozen ground, bringing hope and joy after a difficult and depressing winter. The important thing is that it had meaning to you, and was something you felt like telling people about.
Write on,
Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal
