Aborted Beginnings
Friday, March 6th, 2009
The following is an introduction I wrote for a story submitted last week to Present Magazine. These opening paragraphs were trimmed by the editors, and rightfully so. I’d indulged a little too much in my subject matter and what I had hoped was an accurate portrayal of the setting. I’ll post the piece as soon as it is published online. For now, though, you’ll have to take my word for it that this piece was originally about homelessness, in one capacity. What I’d done was render this neighborhood, where the article source lived, and contrast it to the worlds of the homeless she’d encounter. I wasn’t confident it worked. I’ve written about sunsets before and it gets more and more difficult to use different words in describing them, but it’s a good exercise for the mind and the page – to look out on the same scene and try to find something different in it. I think that some married people who are able to live that way successfully are able to do it. They look at their spouses and find something new in them. I am not in love with sunsets, but I am in love with words, and sometimes they drive me almost to the brink, as would any passionate relationship (I think this is the second post in a row where I’ve refereed to writing as a lover. Read into that what you like.) Here’s the abandoned intro.:
Pared into a crescent shape, the moon above resembled a thin sliver set in the dawn by a hand that had mistakenly carved too much. Arched as it was, high, in a blue band, the shape hung above the stove pipes on the house tops blowing warm air into the February cold.
The air was busy with train whistles and the first whishes from vehicles fleeing the working homes for work in the city. Once the initial traffic is gone from the new neighborhoods and onto the rural roads, the streets sometimes become the property of door to door sellers who find that most people work in ordinary careers or don’t answer their door for strangers. The intruders dressed nicely and holding leather cases filled with products can be more dangerous than the hooded kind with crow bars.
Living is balanced in these neighborhoods on a solitude that does not exist, a right to privacy that everyone believes they have. But the schedules the neighbors keep inadvertently reveals something about them. What drives them is the love and the need to provide, a home most importantly, vacations, sometimes certain extravagancies depending on the holiday and birthday schedule. And the determination finds them everyday, whether it’s artificial, ground out from coffee beans and boiling water, or a place in their heart, they never quit most of them, no matter how fragile the day begins.
