Ever have one of those days or worse, a sleepless night, that the mind feels like it is on a merry-go-round and all these little things keep popping up, not really related to one another but the mind is jumping from one thing to another?
Well, I have them quite often. Both the sleepless nights and day time. I tell myself that it is my over imagination at work. I have always had a big imagination and maybe that is why I'm a writer today. It is my outlet for my imaginary thoughts, my alter ego or whatever.
I reflect back on my childhood, growing up with primarily my younger brother as my playmate since we lived on a street that there just weren't any children other than us. I was thinking about him the other day and the things we used to do to entertain ourselves.
For one thing there was a huge tree in our front yard and the roots were above ground and stretched out like the tentacles of an Octopus in all different directions. We would play under that tree for hours. My brother would be on one side playing with his cars and trucks, while I'd be on the other side with all my doll furniture and dolls. The roots were great room dividers so I could really play house there.
There were times when my brother would play house with me or I would play cars with him. We each had our own little worlds but occasionally we would play together. And if we weren't doing that, as we got older and were allowed to go to the afternoon matinee at the theater in our little town, we would come home, find a nice branch that would make a good horse and we would play cowboy and indian and re-enact the movie we had just seen. Those stick horses and his toy guns, if he would share with me, when he didn't I had to find a stick I could use as my "rifle."
We also had one other thing that occupied us. My dad had a 1936 Pontiac that he drove everyday, this was in the early 50's, and he also ran a gas station. He was going to do some minor repairs as the car had been acting up but just hadn't got to it and it was parked across the street from the station. One day when my brother was staying with my dad at the station, he got the idea that he could fix the car. He found a hammer and somehow managed to open the hood and looking at it, decided those things with wires were the culprit and began to use the hammer to start beating on the spark plugs.
One of the young men who worked with my dad noticed and told him, "What is Bobby doing?" My dad went to see and by then, he had managed to beat on every plug and had broken them all off. My dad was a patient man and asked him what he was doing. My brother who was probably 7 or 8 at the time and really old enough to know better but thought he could help told my dad, "I'm fixing the car." My dad told him he needed to give him the hammer and that he had broken it more. My brother felt bad and after a talking too by my dad, he knew he had done wrong and was really sorry.
But the car could not be fixed. They tried all they could to remove the plugs but to no avail so it was pulled down and parked in the side yard east of our house. Well, that old car became our new adventure. We got permission to play in it and we travelled around the world. We went to New York, California, London and Paris. Not sure how we figured to get across the ocean but we went there anyway. Sometimes he would be my chauffeur and I'd be a movie star or a famous person. Other times I would drive and he would be a famous person.
We had most of one summer which that old car took us around the world and we saw sights that we'd only seen in the movies or magazines or books or even knew about but it was as real to us as it could be. But we had fun and our imaginations were going full blast.
Even on a lazy day, we would lie down in the grass and look up at the clouds in the sky and we saw animals, faces, buildings. Those clouds told us stories and we wondered where they were going and where they had come from, if anyone was on them.
Of course we did go visit friends occasionally or might have someone come to our house and then we would play the outdoor games of the time. Hide and Seek, Cowboys and Indians, Tag, Red Light Green Light and then as night time came, it was time to catch the lightning bugs as we called them. My mom or dad would find us a jar and make holes in the lid as we collected as many as we could catch and then would set the jar up where we could watch the show going on inside.
I think back and wonder if a part of our imagination came before we had TV and only had a radio with our favorite shows, The Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, Gangbusters, Roy Rogers and so many others. We had to listen and use our imagination to know what was going on and I think it only expanded the imaginations we had.
As a writer, I still like to "tell" a story and I know that has to come from my mother and grandmother. My grandmother was a story teller as my mother grew up and my mother told us stories. She could sit and tell a story as if she had read it somewhere but it came from her imagination. Whether there is a special trait for those of us with extraordinary imaginations or if it is something we honed out of necessity, but either way, it has given me the opportunity to use my imagination in my writing.
So there are nights when I go to bed, only to have thoughts racing through my head as the plot comes for a new story. Sometimes during the day time, I have a thought and these thoughts stay with me until I sit down and start writing. Even then, they nag at me until I finish it and then allow me to have some peace until they are ready to start up again.
But I love it. I love the idea of thinking about a story, telling that story and most of all seeing it unfold in front of me, not knowing what will happen next and then when it comes to the end, the feeling of sorrow as I have to say good bye to those new friends I have met during my story. It is an emotional roller coaster at times as I just want to keep going but my imagination tells me it is time to end it and so I wait until the next time the thoughts start up.
So some of what I do are reflections of my past, but not all. I might see something that triggers those thoughts and soon the muse is pecking at the brain, 'write, write, write'. I can see some little thing in each of my stories that reminds me of something from my childhood or growing up years and sometimes it is somethng in my adult life or that of my own children. It may not be about them or me, but maybe just one little piece of that relection is interjected into the story and becomes a part of the magical world of words on paper and for my thoughts to be forever remembered.
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