Excerpt from, "How To Ruin a Pearl"--- a Novel

In the late summer of 1971 I was about to enter fourth grade. I was eight years old that day. The sky was a clear blue, the summer air was calm, we were in a high, with a slight breeze that blew west to east.

My mother stood before me and held in her hand, a book. Mom stood 5’5” or so, hips, and shoulders with curves that killed. Back then she had recognized something about me that I was uncertain of. She held out a book, it was five inches in height by seven inches in width approximately. The book was pink with gold lettering in script, written on an angle. The word said, “Autographs” .

As she handed me the pink, hard, yet cushioned covered book to me; a second later she asked, “May I have it back?”

I wondered why, yet I slowly handed it back to her. After she received the book back from me, she then looked me in the eye and asked, “Is it okay that I write something in it for you?”

I responded, “Yes Mom.”

https://www.amazon.com/Jody-Lynn-Reicher/e/B00R3VUZ18/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_10?qid=1418802234&sr=1-10

Comments

It Follows Me...

One may wonder what would inspire someone to work hard labor voluntarily. For me it’s the love of many things. It’s the passion that won’t be broken. Because there are so many aspects to such service for me, that it may seem beyond comprehension. I’d compare it to my youthful desire to enter the military as a young child. Then for a multitude of reasons only to follow through thirteen years later at age eighteen entering the Marines. There were things that followed me throughout my life. Sometimes they were questions of how I ever gave up my over decade’s life dream to become a New Jersey State Trooper. My childhood desire to never wed—to never have any serious relationships with another human being. I desired only service in military and law enforcement nearly my whole childhood. Too the extent that even one of my Marine Corps superiors expressed to me last July, “I never thought you’d ever get married. It just wasn’t who you were. You were always a loner.” I replied, “Yeah. I know.

Sledging the Hammer

"You could have a steam trainIf you'd just lay down your tracks..."---Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' lyrics. This is not the tune that lay in my mind this morning as I reminisced about yesterday's volunteers to help on trail crew. However, as I looked up the proper definition of sledging that song popped up. I say sledging, which is my own take on swinging a hammer that we call a "Double Jack". The Single Jack is six pounds. I know that because our regular crew of five including me and one staff supervisor are handling Harriman State Park Trails, and have to carry about four of those, two shaping hammers, along with a hoist, belay bag with heavy equipment, first aid kit, double Jack, three 18lb rock bars, a lopper, three buckets, three eye to eyes, two burlap straps, two green wrapping straps, two pick Mattox, a roe hoe or two, a bar for either the two ton or one ton hoist, the feathers with pegs for splitting rocks that we drill... s

Death in the Distant Future...

Death in the Distant Future… Or at least that is what its supposed to be. We don’t suppose people should die at a certain age. We will witness suffering; but we know it gets better. So, we’ve been told. Or so, we have hope that it will. There are instances of mass tragedy. Sometimes we call that war—maybe insanity—perhaps terrorism… We have names for it, that type of death. Then there are the terminals. Things we think we can control—once we know the enemy within. Or things we follow, pray for, aim for. We hold hands for it. Or we choose to suffer with the suffering because it matters. And it doesn’t matter how it matters. Then there is some form of Universal Order. A tainted weird line of fate. Perhaps mathematically calculated in everyone’s existence. No matter how great, how menial a life on earth may appear there’s a geometric wave—a pattern. We can involve other mathematical ideologies—Fibonacci, perhaps. And each of our lives are formulas. Formulas appearing misundersto

Writing Reality

Search This Blog