Friday, April 3, 2009

WEEKEND REFLECTIONS # 2: a writing exercise

The purpose of “weekend reflections” is to develop writing skills, increase vocabulary, and---yes—have some fun! So I hope every weekend to list ten words to be used for posts (which will be linked to from here) for the following week.[Except this time, the next one will be in THREE WEEKS]
Rules:
1. Use all 10 words in a short vignette (or if you’re in a hurry, 5 words in two or 3three sentences). You can use derivatives (incline/inclined/inclination) of words, at least occaisionally.
2. Since many of the readers of this blog are religious, please keep your subject matter pretty “pareve” (clean), but no missionizing as we have all sorts of people here…..
3. If you want, you can add in a bit of explanation, reflection, at the end.
4. Link to here through the Mr. Linkey widget at the bottom of my page. Post the URL of the specific post.

THIS WEEK”S 10 words are:
Sparkle – spice – consider(ed) – feisty – tune – howl – fell – “hip-hop” - peculiar - incline (or inclination)

MY PIECE
The kitchen sparkled, but that’s not the way Lisa felt about it. Passover was coming in two days, and she had considered the ridding of all signs of chometz (leaven) from her kitchen as both a privledge, and a sacred duty. Today she was busy arranging her Passover dishes in the closet, putting spices and other foodstuffs on the shelves. But what about the chometz within? What about all those evil things within her soul? Last night’s events gave her no peace. She was inclined to brush it off, to blame Charlie, but she could not; the hurt was too great.
It had been eleven PM, and she had been tired. The cleaning had exhausted her, and the hour was late. She had heard his “hip-hop” music blaring from his radio even before the seventeen year-old entered. The feisty, raucous “tune”, however, couldn’t block the inner voice that howled at her brain: “You are a failure. How could you have a son like this?” She looked at his peculiar hairdo, and her spirits plummeted. She felt that she was stuck in her own terrible “Egypt”, and her son was definitely a “slave” to his non-religious friends. Leaving “Eygpt”, experiencing the exhilaration of freedom from her personal nightmare was apparently not to be. He was falling and cascading downwards, away from his family, his traditions, from all that mattered, as far as she could tell.

COMMENTS: I am glad I don’t have to finish the scenario I started here.
1. I could play it out easily with her losing her temper, and him running out. The next day she would regret it, but the damage would be done. Needless to say, I don’t like that ending.
2. A fairy tale ending of her handling things right would be nice, but doesn’t fit her early morning self-recriminations. And it would not be too realistic.
3. Instead I suggest that she somehow got engaged in a discussion with him, and although she handled it pretty well, she is still full of self-doubts in the morning, for not handling it even better. (And she will need to learn to quiet that voice, to learn to “let go” and not try and control….. but that is a journey of self-discovery that takes time….)

Next “weekend reflections” will be (hopefully) in THREE weeks, and the TEN WORDS are: Spill – chuckle – window – nuisance – insert – flamboyant – discussion – solitary – burnish - fester

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