The Snowbird Writing League
I’ll admit to it, we were snowbirds through and through, we were among those tens of thousands that migrated each November to the warmth of Texas – Corpus by the Gulf, or Berne in the Hill Country or in our case McAllen – leaving the chill of Canada or Wyoming or Kansas to the residents who have no choice but to stay there working diligently in order to pay into my Social Security.
An RV would have been a reach for us, plus I would take no pleasure in hauling a car behind us all the way down to the campground.
In addition to that, at age 76, in a vehicle that size, I would be required to hand some of the driving chores over to Mattie, and as she drives with a lot of personality, I preferred to stick with our truck and trailer.
I have tried to tell her all these fifty years that driving is a neutral activity at best, neither a contest of wills nor the first skirmishes of a border war, "to no avail' is I think the correct phrase to cover this.
I say “leaving the chill” of the Midwest but this Mattie, my wife, has to the alarm of all around her taken up authorship, and would feel obliged to juice it up a bit, something like “fleeing the howling bitterness of the plains,” so I feel I should shoehorn that in on her behalf. I am still getting used to my duties as an author’s spouse.
My mother and aunt, and I would imagine yours as well, would call Mattie a spitfire or firecracker or some other term that had the elements of ignition, explosion, and combustibility wrapped up all at once in the meaning somehow, which as you will have guessed by now, is appropriate.
It makes me wonder, this spitfiredness, if authorship is quite the hobby that the woman should take up in her mid-70s.
I have seen stray pages of this manuscript she has been pecking away at over the summer, and have heard other passages read out loud, and have had questions put to me in the manner of “if you were going to do away with an evil character, would it be better to employ a makeshift guillotine or a safe falling from an upstairs window?” as she was asking now as we drove towards Texas.
Marriage to a woman like Mattie brings with it what you might call a Worry Gauge similar to the Engine Temperature Gauge on the old automobile dashboards, and these comments combined have moved the needle up to at least orange, and who’s to say, perhaps even tiptoeing into red.
There at Camp Sundowner there are a number of organized events for us snowbirds, I am talking the like of canasta tournaments, square dancing competitions, various traveling musical groups, arts and crafts classes, and -- here is the crux of the matter if that is the right word, crux I mean -- a writing class, taught by a professor from the local junior college, who all in all must have wondered what he had gotten himself into.
You see, we travel the 800 miles to McAllen to hang out with the people we might just as easily see every day, my various sisters and sisters-in-law, the neighbors on both sides of us, and three members from Mattie’s bridge circle.
There is a certain amount of residual spitfiredness among the women of this crew as well, though theirs is of a less potent brand, a lower proof you might say.
They, all the members of the writing class, all female, all upwards in years, had left Texas for home early last spring with an assignment to come back in the winter with a good start on their own novel or play or short story or poetry.
If that doesn’t make the Worry Gauge creep up.
The ease with which the instructor assigned this and the warmth of his encouragement to not shirk if that is the word from delving deep into their souls and to just go ahead and wrestle with the thorniest of life’s questions, made me wonder if he intended from the get-go not to be there when they came back or alternatively was perhaps laying a trap for a romantic rival or professional contender who was taking over the class in the next season.
They were encouraged, these spitfiery writing women, to draw freely upon their own histories, but as most anything that resembled history among any of these individuals would almost necessarily include reference to some or all of the others, the thought of the outcomes of these first readings down in Texas made strong men shudder.
There may have been dark forces at work as well, I’m back to this writing instructor, who may have some similarity to a person who sees a kerosene spill in the middle of nowhere and just then remembers that he has a book of matches in his pocket. Original Sin is an outdated notion that we have left behind except when we see it in action and I am also told that Poe developed an entire theory around the topic of The Imp of the Perverse.
This may be overreach. It may have simply been a writing assignment.
But you see how the prospect of these first readings has cast me into a gloomy and Old Testament state of mind.
“Which do you think, Hank, which death has the most poetic justice involved?”
This, as we high-end plot consultants like to say, is a loaded question and fills me with the aforementioned alarm.
I have begun to infer that Mattie is writing a novel that is a thinly veiled summary of the years of her life and her various fiery interactions with the rest of the human race, of which, you might expect, there are a lot.
A family/neighborhood/church/school saga of the multi-generational/ancient blood feud/these-wrongs-shall-be-righted type, is what I’m getting more and more a picture of.
I have the sense that Mattie has long expected nature or life or the normal course of events to dish out the punishments that she thinks is deserved to this or that individual, perhaps even other members of this writing club, and it’s not happening quick enough for her, so she is taking things into her own hands fictionally.
I have wondered what my responsibility is to the world, or to the campground, or to the writing group, in this regard.
Word has leaked out along what you might call unofficial sources, or a sort of Underground Railroad along the street whereby information is furtively passed along over the back yard fences or perhaps a muttered word here and there at neighborhood barbecues, that the group has each been hard at work on their projects.
Jeremy Laughlin looked positively stricken as he described some of the poetry that Betty was writing, who had taken her instructions to heart and was writing deep from her very heart, her very warm heart, love poetry that “would make a sailor blush,” according to Jeremy, all addressed to a man of his height, career, hair coloring and weight named “Laramie Jauphlin.”
Fran English for her part was writing a novel that threatened to “blow the lid off” various injustices, personality conflicts, and still-unresolved issues surrounding accusations and counter-accusations among the work force at the Sledge County Agricultural Extension Office out there on 92nd St. during a time in the early 1980s, which was enough to have me and Fred English exchanging worried and meaningful glances, as half the women in that writing club had worked out there just at that time.
I could not see a good end to all this authorship, and I notched down the speed a bit, delaying at least by a few minutes our arrival at the camp and the inevitable renewal of the writing class.
I looked at myself in the mirror as I often did when we were out in restaurants and church socials, and saw what I usually saw, a thin man in his mid-70’s shaking his head and holding a hand up and out wide-fingered, as though trying to tamp down an explosive force he knows is coming.
"Or how about poison?" Mattie asked in the tone of a screenwriter revolving any number of options in her head to knock off the bad guy. "Or maybe a hurricane blows up and sends a stake right through that bad woman's heart. Right through it!" she finished with relish, which is something you’d rather see on a hot dog, I’m talking about this relish, than in conversation about lightly fictionalized characters who get there comeuppance.
Too much plot is not good for a man. Sometimes the reader simply wants long stretches of nothing happening, nothing happening at all, without having to brace himself for what is around the next corner, be that a plot twist, or even perhaps the wrong end of a farm implement.
More than once I have thought of looking up the root of Matilda, Mattie’s given name, but as I am sure there is a strong element of spitfiredness in the original, I really don’t see the need. A minor Greek goddess of combustion perhaps, or a household pagan deity of workaday vengeance.
