the rest of the story.

Mark is Boris Pleshenko, the Siberian FigureBlader. Blake, High Top, and I, Low Top, are gearing up for the World's Greatest Three-on-Three Basketball Championship. Discovering that Boris is actually Slipper, our third man who ran away to Siberia when he missed the game-winning shot in the Show Down at Cape Town in 2004. That's the rest of the story.

mark as 'johnny riptide' at windy gap.

That's right, we did program. Along with Blake Hill, the mastermind, also pictured. I don't have my costumes on... be thankful.

reconnecting.

This week I'm down in Fort Myers hanging out with my parents and brother for a week of reading books, laying by the pool in the intermittent clouds and sunshine, drinking Mirassou Pinot Noir, celebrating my dad's birthday and helping my mom weed the garden. It's deleriously relaxing and my body is reverting to my 8th grade self that wants to sleep all the time. Usually when I'm down in Florida I want to crawl into my hermit crab shell and not talk to anyone outside of the Ficker 5. However, this evening I have had the delightful pleasure of talking to a few great friends... including, but not limited to

Amanda Fair, previously Miller, who was married in early February of this year. I will always call her "Miller," though it kind of no longer applies, but also will always apply. Brickies, you know. Anyway, a great forty-five minutes of a few hearty laughs, catching up, and making dreamy plans for the future. A sweet conversation to fill me up for weeks to come with the presence of great memories and warmth from the days we lived together in the Brick House on High Street. What is it about a good friend and her voice that changes a moment from regular to sparkling?

Sam Boro, an old friend from high school, who is teaching Social Studies to inner city kids in Baltimore. Though his job is literally sapping the life out of him, he sounds like his old self. High school seems so far away from me, though it isn't. But when he said, "Hello?" this afternoon, I just laughed! Remembering his voice in countless wonderful moments from when I was fifteen to eighteen.

Kevin, in an e-mail. Told me he was writing, sipping coffee, which reminded me of the days he worked as a baristo (?) in this little coffee shop on Benfield Road in Severna Park. Told me about living in Boston with his beautiful Susan and thinking of moving to the UK.

Sam and Kevin pictured below...

And then Kaili, sweet sweet bestie, who makes me know I'm home every time I read or hear a word out of her mouth or mind. She made me get on video chat in Gmail, something I've steered clear of for fear of not knowing how to use it, until now. And we sat, she in her cubicle three hours behind me, and I on my mom's sofa under the oil painting of the egret. She showed me the nick nacks on her desk because, "I feel like I should show you things in my life." Including a doll with a unibrow, flowers made of paper and a pair of scissors with a plastic blue handle. She's coming to visit in June, with Ben, and we made plans for Mark and Ben to be friends. Fingers crossed.

It's 6:30 now and I'm listening to Explosions in the Sky off and on with some Patty Griffin and the breeze is coming in through the great sliding doors that wrap around the back of the house like invisible fences, listening to the palm trees bend back and forth feeling like today I am happy.

annie dillard and 'the writing life.'

Writing is a funny thing, like an addiction the way it haunts you until you have your fix. Sometimes when an idea flies into my brain I can't stop thinking on and around and through it until I quit the thing I am doing, sit down, and write it out. Sometimes it has to be typed. Sometimes I have to turn several pages back in my writing notebook to be sure the page is completely white and free of text, and write it there. I have to use a Pentel R.S.V.P. fine point black ink pen...I will run around the house scouring for one until I find it. And it's a race, you know, to get the thought down on paper or Dora (the name of my Macbook) before it flies right on out my ear. I literally forsee the winged thought on its way out. All the while the muse, strangely a diminutive Scottish man with reddish sideburns, sits up on the edge of the laptop, kicking his little shoed feet and smiling. Sometimes his smile is reassuring and comforting. Other times he mocks me. In my head, in my world unspoken imagination, this all seems quite normal. But when I think about it, really, it seems lunatic.


Annie Dillard wrote this brilliant book called "The Writing Life" wherein she discusses this state of being--the mental and actual lifestyle of the writer and the way writers think and operate. She talked about how she would lock herself away in a cold cabin overlooking the ocean to write, how she would subsist on Coca Cola and chocolate and how when she wrote in a small room in the library she would close the blinds so she wouldn't be tempted to distractions of the outside world. She says, among so many other things, "the fanaticism of my twenties shocks me now. As I feared it would."


I have a friend who always asks me how my writing is going and I appreciate her for this because she forces me to believe and own the fact that I write. I am a writer. We were discussing Annie Dillard's philosophies and how I could never do what she does--commit myself to isolation for the sake of writing. Because I view her from an apprentice standpoint this made me feel hopeless at first, as if I don't sell my soul to the muse I won't be opening myself up for true success and brilliance. Allison talked me down, assured me that people with very busy and integrated lives cannot become an island.


That being stated, if I could meet Annie Dillard I would thank her for writing her book because of the great comfort, wisdom and humor ("why people want to become writers I will never know"...AMEN SISTER. Pure torture 85% of the time but the 15% of near heavenliness...maybe that's why). I would tell her that every time I read a paragraph in her book it gave me fuel to gun across another two-hundred miles of story.


Toward the end of the book she tells of how Michelangelo, at his death, left a note to his apprentice that simply said, "Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw Antonio and do not waste time." And this has made all the difference to me... Write, Ginny, write, Ginny, write and do not waste time.