Let’s be honest; if the title of this blog post doesn’t compel you to read it, nothing will… .
Life and Death on the Living Room Rug
He should never have strayed.
Away from the herd, he was
vulnerable; young, naïve to the ways
of the enemy.
Stumbling clumsily
across carpet braids, searching for food
on this ancient Asian plain, he had no idea
what lay in wait.
From behind thick trunks of coffee
table forest,
two plastic Velociraptors attack
hapless Hadrosaur;
one bites at his back, the other
uses sickle-claws
to tear his sides.
Unexpected to all,
the Tyrant King arrives
(perched atop Grave Digger, appropriately),
spies the bloodless carnage,
disperses speedy thieves
with a toddler-sized roar,
and enjoys a duck-billed dinosaur dinner
before bedtime.
I wrote this little slice o’ life as a tribute to the imagination of my 7-year-old son – a budding truck-driving, superhero paleontology artist- and also as a way to practice some internal rhyme. Hope you liked it! For more poetry, be sure to visit Penny Parker Klostermann for today’s complete Poetry Friday roundup!
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I was sifting through a number of my older children’s poems the other day, and I re-discovered this little thing. It’s a short poem I wrote at least 6 years ago, that I never did anything with – possibly because I only wrote it for my kids (it’s based on a saying I used to tell them when they’d get hurt), but more likely because it’s probably not up to ‘publishable’-level quality.
Oh, well. I have so many projects I’m trying to find time to work on these days, I’m sure this poem will never be revised – so I figured I’d share it with you! Even though I wrote it before I found my children’s poetry voice, I still kind of like it…hope you do, too:
A Father’s Advice
One day, you just might hurt yourself;
you may fall down and skin your knee
or bump your head, or need some help.
Well, please take this advice from me:
The first thing you should always do
is try your best to grin a grin;
‘cause if you find you’re still alive,
it’s not as bad
as it could’ve been.
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My son is one of those folks whose birthday comes shortly after Christmas, so it takes some effort on his mom’s and my part to make sure he doesn’t get short-changed. (You know, the “Well, you just got a bunch of stuff for Christmas, so here are some new socks” kind of thing) So in addition to a few more cool toys and a nice cake, I wrote him a little something.
Hopefully he’ll appreciate it once he’s old enough to be able to appreciate it! Hard to believe he’s already 7 – so that day is probably rapidly approaching.
My neighbor to the north, Donna Smith at Mainely Write, is hosting Poetry Friday today, while we all dig out from a big pile of snow that got dumped on us yesterday and overnight. So please stop by and say hi, and check out all the poetry links and fun!
And please have a very safe, healthy, and success-filled New Year!
Did you like this post? Find something interesting elsewhere in this blog? I really won’t mind at all if you feel compelled to share it with your friends and followers!
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I want to take a moment and thank my two young children for whatever success I may have down the road with my writing career.
Granted, whatever success I may enjoy would probably have come sooner had I not had to keep stopping to tell the 6-year-old to stop running through the house half-naked while playing with the TV remote…and it might have come sooner still had I not had to tell the 3-year-old 67 times to stop pulling her clean clothes out of the dresser and throwing them all over her room and just take a nap, for the love of Pete.
But still, I would have no success at all without those two little devils angels because they – and their older siblings – are the reasons I write for children in the first place. Being a stay-at-home dad, I may barely have a career as it is…but I’d have no career whatsoever without them.
And no one to go sledding with, either.
“You got yourself down there, you can get yourself back up!”
So today, I just wanted to give thanks for the inspiration, love, and exhaustion that my kids provide me. For the past several months, I’ve had a difficult time getting any significant writing done; the 3-year-old is rarely taking naps now, so my work time is severely diminished, and now that she has been waking up at 2 or 3am every other night, I’m only getting 4-5 hours of sleep at night if I’m lucky.
But today, for some reason, went differently.
I don’t know if it was the fact we had our first real snowfall of the season (the 3-year-old spent a good hour outside with me in the morning before I’d even had breakfast), but for some reason she was exceedingly helpful today. And as it turned out, today was THE day I needed her to help me out.
Somehow, I managed to get some commercial television voicework recorded and sent off to an agency in Baltimore with whom I work on a regular basis…I wrote two versions of a poem for an upcoming anthology due out in the next few years…made final revisions to the text of my upcoming debut picture book, Flashlight Night (Boyd’s Mills Press, Fall 2017)…began work on another new poem for another project…AND managed to shovel the property, twice!
Oh, and I wrote a blog post. 😉
And once the 6-year-old came home from school, I was even able to clip enough evergreens from around the property to fill our house’s four large window boxes, and start getting more greens together for our wreaths.
Granted, I got almost no housework done – hey, something’s gotta give, right? – but days like this are few and far-between lately, so I needed to try to make the most of it.
And if I know my 3-year-old daughter, I’ll be spending most of tomorrow doing laundry, dishes, and vacuuming. And picking up clean clothes off the floor. After all, I can’t expect her to give me two of these kinds of days in a row.
But the snow is still on the ground, so anything’s possible.
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Well, I hope you enjoyed that little excursion into the past with my Throwback Summer series…many of you commented that you couldn’t believe I was willing to share poetry I’d written in high school and college, and my response is, “Hey, we all had to start somewhere!”
Granted, “Ode to a Dishrag,” “Ode to Lint,” and “Ode to a Poem I’m Writing Only Because I Couldn’t Think of Anything Else to Write About” were never Pushcart contenders…but I wanted to show readers how far one can develop through hard work, practice, and sheer determination.
As I always say, #WriteLikeNoOneIsReading!
Today we get back to my present-day writing, and the following is one of those poems I wrote specifically to submit to a journal. I’ve previously shared my thoughts about the value of submission requests as inspiration to write, and this was one of those cases; the journal was looking for poems about ice cream, so I put this together.
It was just a few weeks later that I went to the journal’s website and all references to this particular issue were removed, and even the contact person’s name was nowhere to be found. Sigh. Oh, well…no reason to let the poem go unread, right?
Sunday afternoon, 1975
Ice cream, again. One of them said
something wrong, I think, something the other
didn’t like;
I don’t know what. I don’t know why
they’re even here in front of the grocery store
instead of at home – one of our homes –
but we’re here, and people
I don’t know are looking
and all I can do is fight
a shiver in my chest. I try not
to make them mad, but it always happens
around this time
every second weekend.
Without warning,
mom snatches my hand and turns, walking
so quickly I can barely keep up; I turn my head
to look behind
and see dad, standing on the pavement
watching, arms
by his sides, right hand
angled in a half-wave
as if to say
he’s sorry
it’s ice cream again.
Poetry Friday is being hosted by the one and only Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at The Poem Farm, so head on over for all of today’s poetry links, and learn more about a brand new book being published by the folks responsible for the Poetry Friday Anthology series, Pomelo Books!
Did you like this post? Find something interesting elsewhere in this blog? I really won’t mind at all if you feel compelled to share it with your friends and followers!
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Well, ok – I admit, that headline is a bit misleading. As someone who spent 25 years in radio and now writes for children, one could make a case that I never really left my childhood.
The only lunchbox I ever owned. Alas, it’s missing the special “silo”-themed Thermos! Ahhh, memories of lukewarm milk and room-temperature Beefaroni. It’s a miracle I lived through all the potential food poisoning.
However, as I mentioned this past Friday, I recently came upon a huge stash of papers and memorabilia from my school days, while cleaning out my parents’ house. Their attic has been a treasure trove of nostalgia, where I have discovered old school tests and projects, several of my old journals, and even my elementary school lunchbox!
The journals – portions of which I’ll be sharing throughout the summer – were only part of the story.
The folks saved darned near everything
If the strength of a mother and father’s pride in their only child can be measured in the number of school papers and knick knacks they save, my parents are superhuman. Among the additional artifacts unearthed:
Poems by Emily Dickenson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and others that I was required to memorize in high school.
A printout of my senior-year computer class project: a program I designed using BASIC (any geeks remember that??) to keep track of a basketball team’s stats. I actually went back to school the Monday AFTER I graduated to try to fix a bug in the program. I wasn’t going to get any extra credit for it, but it was one of those things that kept annoying me and I had to fix. Never did. >sigh<
The first typewriter I ever owned! Yes, we all have to start somewhere.
Copies of the high school newspaper, of which I was a staff member and editor-in-chief my senior year. (see below!)
A big, pink, construction-paper heart envelope filled with 2 or 3 years’ worth of elementary school Valentine’s Day cards. You know those cheap, dozen-for-a-dollar cards they sell every year? Mom kept them all.
My mug shows up twice on these front pages…score extra points if you can find me! (click to enlarge)
I still have wonderful memories of working on the student newspaper: spending days after school typing stories on the old word-processors; cutting and pasting the stories, artwork, and photos together; and being embarrassed during journalism class when our teacher, Mrs. Jencks, told everyone her two younger daughters liked visiting us after school because they thought I looked like Remington Steele.
Not sure why Pierce Brosnan gets to keep his hair these days and I don’t…but I suppose that’s just more proof that life really is not fair.
When I first joined the newspaper staff, I started out entering news stories on our clunky Apple II computers. (MS DOS, anyone?) I also created word puzzles, which I absolutely loved to do. During my senior year, I was not only editor, but also provided some of the cartoons. The school faced serious overcrowding issues; hence, the cover art on the left! (click to enlarge)
When you suddenly realize none of the kids you knew…are kids
A very sobering aspect of these discoveries is that I look at names and faces and need to come to grips with the fact that none of these children knew what was in store for them.
The kids whose names fill that Valentine heart, in particular – barely older than my 6-year-old son – give me pause to reflect on life, death, and fate. April, who went on to marry her childhood sweetheart. Karen, who became our senior class Salutatorian when I became Valedictorian. Chris, who committed suicide before he had a chance to graduate. Eric, who, a mere 2 months after high school graduation, died in a terrible car crash that should never have happened.
I think about Chris and Eric, and I so desperately wish I could somehow go back in time and wrap my arms around them, these little 7-year-old boys, and protect them the same way I would protect my own little dude.
Hold them. Shield them.
Warn them.
But they grew up, as we all do, and made choices they should not have made…and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that.
So I’ll continue sifting through my memories, sharing them here, and hopefully creating new ones, as long as God or Fate allow me to do so. And as I watch my son tap excitedly on my old typewriter, making up stories in much the same way I did – albeit with a dry, 40-year-old ribbon – I pray that he, and all my children, and everyone’s children, may live to see their dreams come true.
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Well, now…that’s a cheery title for a blog post, isn’t it?
True, it’s not as exciting and peppy and others I’ve shared, but the good news for you is, this will be shorter than usual!
My little crazy-haired girl loves her brother’s Legos, trucks, and dinosaurs!
I have been trying and trying for months now to come to terms with a new lack of time available to work – either for my voiceover business or my writing – and having finally come to the conclusion of what I need to do, I’m finding it extremely difficult to put that conclusion into practice.
You see, my 2-year-old daughter has decided naps are no longer her ‘thing’…and it’s killing me that I have now lost 2 hours each afternoon in which I used to devote time to recording, writing or marketing myself. The only time I now have for my work is at night, once my daughter and 6-year-old son are asleep. And that doesn’t leave a lot of time for much of anything else.
The stress has been getting the better of me, I hate to say. I work late now, but still wake up at 5:30am when my wife gets up for work, at which time our son usually wakes up, as well. Consequently, I’m exhausted more and have less patience with the kids – and then add in the fact I have to drive nearly an hour away once or twice every week to help my parents who are in their 80’s and having a hard time getting around – and my time is no longer my own.
I’m racing here, racing there, forcing my son to hurry up and eat his breakfast and get dressed for school, then hurry my daughter so we can leave to run errands, then try to get her to be quiet for a little while in the afternoon so I can at least check emails, then hurry up and make dinner and hurry up and get them to bed so I can hurry up and try to write…it’s absolutely exhausting.
And not just for me; I’m sure it’s exhausting for the kids, as well.
Selfishness is hard to fight
I have to admit, I have selfish reasons for wanting to work: two-and-a-half years ago, I left full-time employment to develop my voiceover business, and had a hard time building it up because, as a stay-at-home dad, so much of my time was spent raising my son.
Fortunately, I was able to write quite a bit at night, and my children’s writing career took off even stronger than my voiceover business; I started selling poems as a contributor to a number of different books, and even signed my very first contract for a full-length picture book just last year.
So things were really growing for me, and I wanted to maintain that momentum. I wanted to be writing more, submitting more manuscripts to publishers, and hopefully sign another contract. But now, with almost no time left to myself, I feel I’ve hit a wall.
I squeeze my recording sessions in where I can and squeeze in my writing where I can, but feeling that heavy sense of urgency when trying to write poetry (or anything, really) is counter-productive. How does one “hurry up” and write anything that’s worth reading??
My conclusion
So, as I mentioned earlier in this post, I’ve come to a conclusion that I’m having a difficult time putting into practice. And that is…
To put it in God’s hands.
You see, what we expect of ourselves is not always what God expects of us. What we expect of others is not always what God expects, either. In fact, as my wife and I were reminded this past Sunday at church, even Jesus was not the king that people were expecting at the time.
So I’m trying to remind myself that my daughter’s and son’s well-being are the most important things I should be concentrating on right now. I’ll continue to work on my voice career as time allows, and will write as time allows, but if I can’t capitalize on my publishing “momentum,” so be it. Perhaps I can capitalize on it next year.
Or perhaps I’ll manage to sell one of the 5 or 6 manuscripts I’m currently submitting.
Regardless, I need to change my way of thinking, and it’s not easy. Not easy, at all. I’d like to be a successful voice actor, a successful children’s writer, and a successful father/husband. But if it’s not possible to be all three, I know which one I need to pick.
I need to make an effort to be the person my kids, my wife, and God need me to be…not the person I want to be.
But come to think of it, that’s not entirely correct.
The person I should want to be…is the person my kids, my wife, and God need me to be. And if I can strive for that goal, all other goals can be secondary.
With that frame of mind, there’s no disappointment.
Did you like this post? Find something interesting elsewhere in this blog? I really won’t mind at all if you feel compelled to share it with your friends and followers!
To keep abreast of all my posts, please consider subscribing via the links up there on the right! (I usually only post twice a week – on Tues. and Fri. – so you won’t be inundated with emails every day)
budding truck-driving, superhero paleontology artist- and also as a way to practice some internal rhyme. Hope you liked it! For more poetry, be sure to visit Penny Parker Klostermann for today’s complete Poetry Friday roundup!
did anything with – possibly because I only wrote it for my kids (it’s based on a saying I used to tell them when they’d get hurt), but more likely because it’s probably not up to ‘publishable’-level quality.
Well, I hope you enjoyed that little excursion into the past with my 
