Category: writing

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What to Do With These Tickets?

What should I do with these:

when I don’t keep one of these anymore?


I used to be such a faithful journal writer. Now, I blog. I still keep a journal of sorts — I write down snippets and ideas of things I want to blog about. But when I look back at these entries, they don’t tell a story. I have to read my blog to get the whole story, which requires a computer and internet access.

As I was flipping through my journals tonight, I found not only tickets to plays and movies, but cards from bouquets of flowers I received from Ed, little notes from a friend, and special emails I printed to stick into the pages of my journal. I love those little artifacts, these little scraps of memories.

See the pinkish ticket in the journal above? I wrote in that journal that I had gone to see my mom sing in the chorus of a local production of Don Giovanni. I had completely forgotten she was in that opera. I remember going with Mom to auditions to give her support, attending the concerts she sang in, and listening to her sing in church. I can remember exactly how she sounded when she sang a solo at the late service every year on Christmas Eve. But I had forgotten about Don Giovanni.

I think these tickets are a sign…a sign that I need to continue my last journal where I left off, to write down with pen and paper little events like these. Little events that may not seem that important right now, but might mean the world to me in years to come. Little events, like hearing my mom sing ten years ago, in a little opera house in the Midwest.

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Resistance

Last night I put a carton of ice cream on the counter to soften. I ruined our ice cream scoop when trying to scoop ice cream that was as hard as a rock. It bent in my hand as the ice cream resisted being scooped. It was stubborn, that ice cream.

I resist. I resist simple changes, such as bill paying online. I know how easy it is; I paid my brother’s bills online for him when he was in the hospital after a serious accident. Yet still I resist, writing checks and mailing them in every month. There’s something I enjoy about sitting down with my checkbook. I learned how to write checks a long time ago, in Consumer Education during high school.

Lily resists. I put broccoli on her plate, and she tells me “Broccoli is gross!” She used to eat broccoli all the time, but now she’s four. If I say nothing; do nothing, at the end of dinner, the broccoli has been eaten; perhaps by ignoring her there is nothing to resist. She becomes soft like ice cream.

Emmy resists. She can have the wettest, poopiest diaper, and yet she doesn’t want to stop what she is doing to have it changed. She will wake up in the morning, not even be doing anything yet, and still she resists. I need to distract her, make the diaper change fun before she stops crying and wriggling away from me.

Ed resists. He admits he dislikes change. He still prefers the Lutheran Hymnal as opposed to the Lutheran Book of Worship. Our church switched hymnals in 1980. Yes, Ed resists change.

What do you resist?