Getting My Land Legs

photo by Federico Erra.

My creative funny bone has not been smacked in quite some time. How do I get back to that place inside my head, how do I find that playground of my youth? My lack of inspiration is evident even in the storyline of my dreams. Now, when I feel bored, I reach for the cheap escape of “Desperate Housewives”, or catch “Sherlock Holmes” at the discount theater, or I play hours of solitaire on my iPhone. I search for high-priced gadgets to distract me, while what my soul really requires is something as simple as pen and paper. We compromise: an hour on my laptop for a little stream-of-consciousness. The lowest priced effort for the would-be writer.

Out of the morning mist emerges a tea house, about a hundred yards from the docks. Inside gather Harajuku girls, professors, grandmothers. Drifters slink to the shadows of the back room, sipping their oolongs and nibbling dried scones like the rats down at the pier.

In the front room by the portrait window, huddled in overstuffed chairs with their feet propped on footstools, the silver-hairs click their knitting needles and unravel infinite balls of yarn. I sneak down the back hallway towards the store room, riddled with crates of tea. There’s a cracked cellar door leading to the basement, where century old wine casks lay broken amid the cobwebs and dirt floor, the stains of their contents still discernable on floor, or is that blood? In the center sits a small round table with the melted stub of a candle where the tea shop owner escapes from the bustle of the shop to read through his wife’s diary.

I leave through the coal chute and head further inland. Dogs bark all over town, lunging into the dark but snapping back in mid-leap as they reach the end of their leashes. Dark clouds roll in, electricity in the air, green skies ready to hatch. Children on their bikes pedal hard for the hill from which to watch the storm pass. One giant lightning rod, that hill. They don’t know the danger in which they put themselves. Twelve years ago Sally was struck and lived, followed by her prolonged hospital stay with her fried nerves, muscle twitches, blackouts. People plied her for visions embellished on her through the lightning bolt. She waited for supersensory abilities, but no such magic came. She told them that the rare honor of being struck by lightning and living was like a steel rod being pounded from the crown of her skull through her spine and out through her heel bone, and that was all, yet people still asked her if she could pass on a message to their dead mothers, what day of the year they should plan for their wedding to ensure a lasting marriage, or where they could find their car keys. In frustration she started to make up answers. She was right almost every time.