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Down the rabbit hole:
Third person,
first person,
and an essay.
Prompt- the plane touched down and every one began breathing normally. Everyone had felt the jolt when something was hit, some had heard a crump, a few claimed to have seen something careening past the windows.
This was a strange time to have something fall off the plane. Then Mary whispered to Joe. “A drone. I bet it was a drone.” That instantly made sense.
Joe cried loudly, as his ‘crowd service,’ “Hallelujah! We are here! Through the miracle of flight! Far above the common land!… How miraculous.” The other passengers did not mind him commandeering their common air space. It was something that had to be said, that re-famed what had just happened, that reminded them all to have gratitude. Mary squeezed Joe’s hand, and in a minute, the quiet grateful hubbub was broken by the comforting routine of the captain speaking about the weather and meters above sea level and “That was an unidentified flying object folks, and we will be taxing up to our gate now.”
In the rush of modern life, this was a chance for sober reflection. Joe whispered, ‘We need to pay off that mortgage… If anything happens I want you to have the house.” She squeezed his hand.
A little tube had been lifted into subzero thin atmosphere and had landed safely on earth. How marvellous. And someone had been negligent with a drone. How human. We can fly, but we can’t escape our common clay.
…
Prompt- Is that a finger?
My mother-in-law fancied herself as a mother to hit the sheets with. It was just a habit with her to act out “look at me” all the time. She was like a model who always knows where the camera is, and whether she is showing her good side.
So no, I wouldn’t employ her as one of my special agents. She was unhappy and told me so. “But you had Maude stake out the coffee shop, and you had Ethel walk her dogs back and forth in the park, and Agnes got to go up to the suspect and ask the time so she could see into his—
I interrupted, thinking this was the problem: M-in-law was all about me, me, me. How could I expect her to be observant?
She went into her habitual pose #3, saying, “I could get a suspect to never suspect me, I’d just say, “Hello big boy” and he’d forget about hiding anything.”
Believe me, when I thought about my m-i-l and sheets, I thought about lots of other guys, in wife beater shirts, like Loui and Gus and Spike.
I put my hand in my pocket, and she said, “Is that a finger?”
“Not so loud, doll, it’s my colt .38, and if you’d kindly step aside—”
But she had to interrupt, as it was all about her “—Are afraid to employ a dame who knows what she’s doing?” She stood so rigidly, and when I tried to step around her she stepped too.
So I yelled, “You stupid cow! And when she stepped to slap me I could fire past her. Pow!
…
prompt- “I remember, in no particular order”
I was watching The Wiggles yesterday. They were doing a skit-song about a monster in classroom with nice rhyming words. I remember when poetry all rhymed. What ever happened to us?
On the wall was a commonwealth flag, presumably Australia’s. Why is it that today’s children can say their city team is the best, but they can’t say their country, and flag, is the best? Are we afraid they will grow up to invade Germany and holocaust the Germans? Are we afraid they will build a fleet and imperialize the Japanese, or the South Koreans? I remember when we had no fear.
High on the wall was a big framed picture of the queen , as young as the student’s mothers. Our gracious, noble queen. I remember when you didn’t have to be in Brownies or Wolf Cubs in order to know the words to the song. I remember an adventure when Biggles was a prisoner in a tower and he passed a message to Ginger, without his captors knowing, by singing “God save”, with the lines, “I haven’t got a hope, unless you bring a rope.”
I suppose with our British heritage we would believe in assimilation, and maybe people don’t want us to believe, now, forgetting that assimilation meant that the first prime minister of Canada was NOT an Englishman, but a Scotsman. Easy to forget about assimilation, once achieved, or the struggles of G.I. Joe and Tommy, once achieved. We can tell our children “violence never solves anything” but then we have to quit telling them about how the borders of Poland kept changing with every battle, or how the Acadians become reconciled after the violent Yankee revolution.
I remember when every schoolboy knew Romans fought for free, with no conscription, and how the Carthaginians tried to hire all their armies. Only as an adult do I realize that the native Carthaginian troops were only in sufficient numbers to control all the others.
I remember when school desks were wooden, with an ink bottle hole, later a paste bottle hole, with a slot to hold your pencil from rolling down. People got too excited over the green composite desk tops—too modern for the paste hole, but too modern for the pencils too.
…
…
Sean Crawford
Under the big sky
2021
Note I: Speaking of gratitude and “Hallelujah,” I see that the infamous Professor Jordan Peterson, in an interview with Dennis Prager, believes in these concepts too (available on Youtube through better search engines everywhere)
Note II: While the above was for gratitude at the North American level, the detested man also expressed gratitude at the personal level, speaking in the subjunctive to express his lived reality:
“It would be lovely if I can live my life in a manner so that wherever I went in the world, perfect strangers would come up to me one after the other and tell me that they are suffering much less, that their families are in better shape and their lives are on course because they took to hearts something that I was communicating. That’s as good as it gets as far I can tell”.
