Category: Creative Writing

Monday morning coffee shop observations

A morning of people watching in a coffee shop …..

A cool fall morning in Seattle is like no other place.  Go into a coffee shop, have a cappuccino and watch as the city awakens. People watching can be a most interesting hobby.

There is the homeless person who buys a mocha latte in the coffee shop so (s)he can sit quietly in the corner and sleep in relative safety.  Across the room the unemployed, well-suited, well-soled job seeker, with his nervous cup of java, reviews yet one more time his resume and the job description. Will this be his lucky cup of joe and his lucky day?

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Song of the ironwood tree

In going back through old documents, I am finding things I wrote quite a long time ago. This is one retrospective I wrote as a catharsis nearly 30 years ago:

Funny what will imprint on the mind when the waves of life come crashing in on your shore. 

Ironwood tree
An ironwood tree – By Ethel Aardvark – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4989854

 

“A young woman stands under an ironwood tree on a remote Pacific island and the sound of the wind through the ironwood is neither melodious nor discordant.  It is the sound of her precarious hold on her marriage flushing down the toilet.

What makes a person so intent on controlling both the horizontal and the vertical that she will put herself in such a position?  Her husband was to go and visit with his lover to tell her he is going to try (once more) to make his marriage work.  His wife, the young woman, stands under the ironwood tree feeling alienated and out-of-control as she watches him clasp the “other woman” into his body to say good bye.”  

“CUT”!

That scene just isn’t working. 

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