Writing Club Week 36

Irishgirl

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Writing Club Week 36

« on: November 11, 2009, 01:52:28 pm »

Writing Club Week 36
The rules are the same - ten minutes, no stopping, no editing, just write what comes to mind.

As usual the first one to respond to this week's thread sets the topic.

Join in, write, have fun Smiley


« Last Edit: November 28, 2009, 11:50:37 am by Irishgirl »	Logged

boodog

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #1 on: November 11, 2009, 07:40:25 pm »

.I wrote shoes, then tried to delete it because I was not where I thought I was. I guess you can't delete a comment- so I left a dot, that looked stupid, so I am back with shoes?


« Last Edit: November 11, 2009, 08:12:38 pm by boodog »	Logged

Sitka Larry

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #2 on: November 11, 2009, 07:45:42 pm »

hmmm, how to interpret boodog's suggestion?

Dot?

Period?

Point?

Punctuation?

How about 'The missing sentence.'???


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boodog

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #3 on: November 11, 2009, 07:50:31 pm »

sorry Larry- you found me out before I could 'fix' my mistake. How about SHOES? Or the missing sentence?


« Last Edit: November 11, 2009, 08:13:06 pm by boodog »	Logged

daMamma

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #4 on: November 11, 2009, 10:18:14 pm »

How about Missing Shoes? sort of a combination of both Shoes & The Missing Sentence.


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Irishgirl

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #5 on: November 12, 2009, 12:40:03 am »

Quote from: boodog on November 11, 2009, 07:40:25 pm

.I wrote shoes, then tried to delete it because I was not where I thought I was. I guess you can't delete a comment- so I left a dot, that looked stupid, so I am back with shoes?

Ok, I think we will go with missing shoes! Wink


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InterestedPerson

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #6 on: November 12, 2009, 10:40:42 am »

This is not so much a writing exercise, but the recollection of a life-long principle that
surfaced yesterday at work.
Setting : an acute care hospital with serious budget issues, trying to compete with an even larger
hospital system with almost unlimited resources, and the apparent intent to wipe all other
systems off the map..the dophin vs. the orca.

Episode: a young case manager filling in for the day decides to 'call the bluff' of a patient who
wasn't willing to go home, although medically stable. Ensuing confrontation uses 3-4 hours of
the case managers' time, and 2 hours of her supervisor's time.
End result: patient stays an extra day, $800 wasted dollars, plus staff labor time, other work
left undone; patient and husband feel aggreived, etc. etc.

Took this witness a day to remember what was so wrong with this picture:
goes back to 1966 my first jog at at girls detention center in the South Bronx...orientation with the director.
He told the story of the defiant little girl who refused to go to the in-facility school, and the way that the heirarchy of staff got worked up the ladder to him.
He finally posed the question: "
WHY don't you want to go to school?"
Little girl: "Someone stole my shoes. My shoes are missing."


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jammer5

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #7 on: November 13, 2009, 01:49:46 am »

I run barefoot. I hate shoes. They make my feet feel like they're in prison. I like the feel of grass between my toes; warm sand crunching under my feet; even having to dodge the occasional animal remnants at times. I was doing just that two months ago, running my daily five miles. It was around six am, sun starting to peek over the housing complex, and the air crisp and clean. I heard a siren in the background, getting closer with each passing step.

A police car, with lights and sounds disturbing the quiet morning, stopped next to me. Two police exited the vehicle, pointed their guns at me and demanded I stop. Confused, I stopped, raised my hands, and asked what was going on. The policeman, who had exited on the passenger side, told me to shut up, lie on the ground on my stomach, and put my hands behind me. I did as he asked.

After being taken downtown and processed, I was finally told I was a suspect in a string of robberies in the area, my running made someone suspicious, and that person called the police. Hence, my being arrested and jailed.

The trial went fairly quickly, with the prosecution telling the jury I was seen in the area of basically all the burglaries. My attorney countered the shoe prints taken at the scenes of the burglaries was a size twelve in all cases. My shoe size, when I had to wear them, was a size ten, and when arrested, I was bare foot. The judge looked at the prosecuting attorney and said, "Looks like we got a case of missing size and shoes here. I also guess the sentence will have to go missing as well. Case dismissed."

Had the police done a thorough job a searching the area, they'd have found a pair of size twelve shoes in a dumpster no more than two blocks from where I was arrested. Did you know you can pick up shoes really cheap at any salvation army store?


« Last Edit: November 13, 2009, 10:08:17 am by jammer5 »	Logged

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daMamma

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #8 on: November 13, 2009, 09:59:51 am »

The case of the wandering shoes.

It seemed that one pair or another of my shoes, always the expensive ones no less, would disappear of their own volition on a fairly regular basis. Always they would eventually turn up, though never back among the other in their neat row at the back of the closet.

I would eventually find the missing shoe or shoes under a piece of furniture or in a corner. Sometimes muddy as if they'd walked through the bog, sometimes sandy from a beach, occasionally half chewed by some unknown dog.

No one would ever admit to knowledge of my shoes' wanderings, and more than once there were the looks of 'poor dear, she's lost her mind', as everyone knows shoes do not take walks all by themselves.

It has been a few decades since that time of the Wanderings of the Shoes. My baby sis, who is now safely 2400 miles away found the nerves to confess that she was the one that would help my shoes escape to adventures unknown.

LOL


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Jaime from Wasilla

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #9 on: November 13, 2009, 11:26:08 am »

I was recently on a mission to abolish clutter in my home, and one of the consequences was a shocking pile of foot wear in the middle of my living room. You must understand, I live alone, and I am not a fashion whore, yet somehow, one would think - looking at the pile - that I was striving to be an Alaskan male equivalent of Imelda Marcos.

I started the daunting task of sorting and matching pieces, and making three smaller piles, one for the trash, one to donate, and the "keepers". As I dug through this record of my ambulatory past, I was struck by nostalgia. I had a pile of nearly thirty years of footwear, some of it showing the signs of hard use, and others never worn. There were fond memories tied to certain beloved ragged companions. Other items brought pain and disgust just looking at them.

It was easy to discard the broken flip flops and smelly sneakers. Some muddy workboots and leaky Extra Tough cannery boots were let go with gratitude for their service. More nostalgic highlights included a pair of Capezio Jazz shoes from my youth as a semi-professional dancer, and a pair of custom made, soft black leather Russian Dance boots that cost $300 new over 25 years ago. The cowboy boots were an embarrassing remnant of the early 1980's. I regretted never replacing the Birkenstock sandals. I was appalled to have over a dozen pairs of trashed deck slippers - none wearable. I got rid of many old shoes that are now rotting in the landfill. A large box with a couple dozen pairs of shoes and boots never worn went to the thrift store where someone can finally make use of them.

I'm still left with more shoes than I actually wear. I have one set of flip flops, one pair of sneakers, one pair of deck slippers, the old Russian boots, hip waders, chest waders, arctic booots, mudboots, steel-toed work boots, oxfords, loafers, and Crocs. I have a pair of figure skates that crept into the pile because I don't know where else to put them. Mercifully, the cross country and down hill ski boots disappeared in last year's purge. It took hours to sort through the pile, as much to process the memories and the emotions as to handle the actual material. For a house with no closets I wonder how all this stuff accumulated? I don't feel like a hoarder. I don't have any cats. If I include my fuzzy slippers, I have 14 pairs of footwear and no closets. Where am I gonna put them? And I really want that new pair of mud shoes from Army Surplus store.


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Sitka Larry

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #10 on: November 13, 2009, 01:12:10 pm »

Missing

I was first brought into it by the missing shoes.

Mrs. Pauline Llewellyn called on the 3rd of November. I was given the assignment by my Boss, and the owner of Swift Investigative Services, Tom Fielding. It seemed rather mundane at first report, a pair of missing shoes is not that uncommon, after all, but of course it quickly became obvious that this was not a matter of missing footwear. The shoes in question were two antique silver plates that had once sat on the bottom of two rods, as part of the assembly of an old large format camera.

“The camera is a family heirloom,” Mrs. Llewellyn fretted when we conversed over the phone. The police had been contacted, and they had done an investigation. As soon as I'd hung up from talking to her, I called the officer whose name she'd been given. I got far luckier than my usual, he actually answered my call.

“Detective Broome,” he answered. He sounded harassed. Every policeman I'd ever had dealings with sounded either bored or harassed, as if there was no middle ground.

“Detective, good morning,” I began. “My name is Charlie Stevens. I'm an investigator for Swift Investigative Services. I was given your name by Mrs. Pauline Llewellyn.”

“Ah, the missing camera bits.”

“Exactly,” I was surprised at his volunteering this, as usually the police were less than cooperative with folks in my line of work. “She's hired us to investigate, and I thought you might have information that would be helpful.”

“Wish I did,” he said, still far to agreeably. “We've got no suspects, as Mrs. Llewellyn lives alone, there was no sign of a break in, and there were many far more valuable items in the home that would have been far more profitable for a burglar, and far easier to make off with.”

“These shoes weren't some sort of snatch and grab then?” I asked, my curiosity roused. This was far more information than I'd gotten so far from the dithering Mrs. Llewellyn.

“Not in the least. The two shoes are only some three or four inches long and an inch wide. They were fastened to the camera frame with three screws each, and those screws were themselves covered in several layers of old laquer finish. The camera itself is huge and roughly made. Heavy as hell and built like it was meant to withstand just about anything. This is no fine work of art Mr. Stevens, regardless of its heirloom status.”

“So stealing the camera in its entirety would have been quite a chore, and even so it took some doing to get the screws out,” I observed aloud, though more to myself than to the detective.

“Very much so,” he agreed again. “As for the rest of it, it seemed pretty bare bones. An old single sheet of paper with typed instructions for fastening, removing and processing the camera's photographic plates was the only other thing we found. Pretty mundane to be honest. We brought the sheet in and had the lab boys give it a going over, but they got nothing,not even fingerprints, which doesn't surprise me. The whole thing is probably a hundred years old at least.”

“Well, that's not much at all is it,” I muttered.

“Nope,” the detective agreed. “We'd suspect some sort of insurance angle, but it doesn't seem that there was any on the camera, so we can't even suspect an inside job.”

“Well, there's not much else I can go on, can I come have a look at the paper?”

“Sure, come on down. I've got it in the file here on my desk. Just ask for Detective Broome.”

I talked to Mrs. Llewellyn again before I left the office, but she wasn't terribly helpful. The camera had been her father's. Something he'd brought with him from Germany when her parents had fled near the end of the war, and which she'd then brought with her from England when she'd married the late Mr. Llewellyn, at her father's insistence. Her late husband had liked the antique finish and the patina of the aged metal bindings, and so had found a place to display it in his study. There it had sat all this time, unmolested.

I found Detective Broome with no difficulty, and he pulled the file to the center of his desk and opened it. The worn and faded sheet of paper that sat atop the stack of police paperwork within looked ancient indeed. The paper was a good stock, I thought, heavy, with a good bit of linen content. Nothing like modern papers. It had been made long enough ago that it didn't suffer to much from high acid content like a lot of modern paper did, so it had held up well.

“Seems pretty straightforward,” I said after reading the faded text. The instructions had been typed, but were minimal and terse, filling only half the sheet. The top line carried only the name and address of a photo shop.

   Hauenstein Fotografie
   212 Landauer
   D. Kunst, Prop.

That was the only part of the whole thing that came close to making sense. The entire thing was in German! “You read German?” I asked Detective Broome.

“No, do you think a hundred year old set of camera instructions will reveal a clue?” he laughed. I laughed with him, as I shared his skepticism.

“No, but it interesting to get such a glimpse into those days, eh?” I asked. “This had to have been done on some old manual typewriter. One of those big, black bulky monsters.”

“Right, no editing allowed, no correcting your mistakes... must've been painstaking to use with any efficiency,” Broome mused.

“Yeah, typists back then must have really earned their money.”

“That's for sure,” he agreed. “This was a neat enough job. I wonder if the shop owner typed it himself? I have this image of some gray-haired Herr Kunst, wearing wire-rimmed glasses sitting at a desk laboriously typing this, one careful keystroke at a time.”

“More likely Fraulein Kunst,” I offered. “Though there is one little mistake.”

“Mistake? Where,” he asked.

"There at the bottom of the second paragraph,” I pointed. “There's a period beneath the last line, about halfway across the page.”

“So there is,” Detective Broome had bent down to look more closely. “You have good eyes. So we have a missing sentence then?

“Or just a typo, a key struck accidentally, more likely,” I said, but even as I said it, something seemed wrong. “except...”

“What?” Broome asked.

“Well, remember, this was an old manual typewriter. The typist, whoever it was would have to have advanced the carriage to that specific spot to put a period there. It's not like he could have clicked that spot with his mouse by accident remember.”

“You're right,” he mused, adding a low 'hmmm' to the end that wasn't addressed to me and probably not something he was even aware of doing. He opened the right hand drawer of his desk and took out a magnifying glass. The rectangular kind people used to enlarge text for reading when there eyes are going bad, not the old Sherlock Holmes detective kind. “My god, look at this!”

I bent over the glass, but it was difficult to see anything with both of us bent over with it. I took the glass from Broome's hand and bent over the page. Odd, the little dot wasn't an impression on the page as the text above was. Instead, it dimpled out from the page considerably, and it was very solidy black, much blacker than the fading ink above it. “What the hell?” I muttered aloud. The detective wasn't waiting for me, however; he was on the phone already.

“Howie, this is Broome, I think I've got something for you,”

A few minutes later, a pair of nebbishes in lab coats came scurrying in, examined the aged piece of paper for a moment and then scurried out again, carrying the paper carefully like it was a scrap of cloth from the manger in Bethlehem. Detective Broome sent me packing then, though he promised to keep me updated on what they found. He did too, eventually. Mrs. Llewellyn paid the fee Swift Investigations had demanded, and offered me a nice bonus. I accepted, but asked for an explanation. I got it, during an interview with her and Detective Broome.

“The dot was a kind of microfilm,” the detective told me to open things. I'd suspected as much, and had gone online and learned that microfilm was a fairly old technology, dating clear back to 1839 and a British optician named John Dancer. “It was small, but it didn't need to be large, it contained only a single sentence.”

“The missing sentence,” I said almost gasping at the irony. “What did it say?”

“Disassemble this camera and weight the parts.” Mrs. Llewellyn answered with a shudder.

“Which we did,” Broome said. “Or rather the lab boys did. They decided that the camera's walls were too heavy, so they investigated further. Those thick rough walls were not such crude construction as we thought.”

“What?” I asked, lost.

“Photographic plates,” Mrs. Llewellyn sobbed. I was puzzled by her tears. What memories had these plates carried to cause her tears? “Pictures my father had been ordered to take. Pictures for those.... butchers!” she spat.

“Butchers?” I asked, still lost.

“They were taken at one of the concentration camps,” Broome added in a sad voice. “You don't want to see them. The quality was poor after all this time, but still...”

“Did you?” I asked, shuddering.

“I did, and will regret it the rest of my life.”

“I see,” I said after a moment's reflection. No, I would not be asking to see the images. I wondered then, and said my thoughts aloud. “The missing shoes then?”

“I had promised my father, when he asked me to take the camera,” She began. “He made me swear to always keep it with me and to never sell it or give it away, to always keep it in the family.”

“And you honored your father's word,” Detective Broome reassured her.

“I did, but my husband and I had no children, and I am too old to bear one now anyway,” she said through her tears. “I would not be able to keep it in the family. I had no one to pass it on to, but..”

She sobbed for a moment, pausing in her narrative. Detective Broome patted her on the shoulder and she looked up at him and smiled bravely. He was an older gentleman himself. I wondered if he was married, as the widow Llewellyn seemed responsive to his succor.

“My father made me promise never to give up the camera, and never to reveal its details. I always suspected there was some secret and after my husband died, it began to weigh on me. It needed to be looked into, but I had promised never to speak of it to anyone outside the family.”

“So you stole the shoes!” I said, surprised.

“I did,” she cried. “It was the only way.”

“And when you thought the police were getting nowhere, you contacted my agency,” I nodded. It was beginning to make sense now. All of it.

So the missing shoes lead to the missing sentence,” Detective Broome said. “And once you found that, you lead me to the period.”

“And that little dot let us all to the truth,” Mrs. Llewellyn said with a little more bravery than before.

“A story comes out of it then, in the end. Far after it should have, perhaps, but a story that needed telling, a confession by a witness long gone to a crime long remembered.”

“Exactly,” they both whispered together.


« Last Edit: November 13, 2009, 01:43:50 pm by Sitka Larry »	Logged

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #11 on: November 13, 2009, 03:44:12 pm »

Larry.


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daMamma

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #12 on: November 13, 2009, 04:45:51 pm »

Wow Sitka Larry, that is one heck of a story.

I'm thinking Larry wins! What say ye?


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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #13 on: November 13, 2009, 05:15:31 pm »

I think they are all great stories- I totally identify with Jaime and damamma, and I hope jammer5's is fiction, Interestedperson, aawww! and Larry incorporated my . into his story!
1 Thumb Up!


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daMamma

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #14 on: November 13, 2009, 05:19:29 pm »

I agree, all are great stories. I love reading them each week and sometimes it is really hard to pick a favorite. The writing seems to have evolved greatly over the many weeks.

Rarely do I write something, always I enjoy the reading.


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Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -- Voltaire

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #15 on: November 13, 2009, 05:30:25 pm »

Quote from: daMamma on November 13, 2009, 05:19:29 pm

this has become one of my favorite sections in the forum- reindeer


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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #16 on: November 13, 2009, 05:49:05 pm »

Awesome, Larry. And it comes to pass I was absolved from stealing both the shoes and the camera. The shoes were too small anyway. LOL


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Sitka Larry

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #17 on: November 13, 2009, 05:50:07 pm »

Quote from: boodog on November 13, 2009, 05:30:25 pm

Quote from: daMamma on November 13, 2009, 05:19:29 pm

this has become one of my favorite sections in the forum- reindeer

I'm sure I speak for all of us who do write, we appreciate your appreciation! Group Hug


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Jaime from Wasilla

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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #18 on: November 13, 2009, 06:10:38 pm »

Some weeks are more fun to write than others. This week was difficult, because I couldn't get a story I read long ago out of my head. It was a teaching story, and I can't remember if it comes from the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" or "The Way of the Peaceful Warrior" or some other book like those. It was a story about a shoe repair shop, where the author brought a beloved pair of boots to get re-soled, over and over through the years. Finally, the boots were too worn to repair, but the repair shop owner packaged them up in a box with some fresh homemade cookies, and a small note that read "Anything worth not doing is worth not doing well."

I was deeply moved by that idea, and have tried to live the principle embodied in that story. It was hard to shake when contemplating a missing shoe, or missing a shoe, which could be two different things. Longing for my favorite shoes is not the same as hopping around on one foot looking for where my dog put the other shoe, or waiting for a shoe to drop....


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Re: Writing Club Week 36

« Reply #19 on: November 13, 2009, 08:22:45 pm »

I, as well, appreciate everyone who stops by and reads our stories. I hope more join in, as just the thought of creating something out of an idea is so good for the mind. So come on and join in and a big Welcome

to those that do, and to those that just like to read Grin


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