Snow Cat

Mocha here.

Still trying to get over cold stuff on the ground last Monday. I'd never seen such stuff. It looked like it would be fun to play with, but it was cold and hurt my cute paws. I wanted to go out. I begged and begged until my mom let me out. She warned me I wouldn't stay long. I went to the end of the deck. What's that? Paw prints leading away? Wonder if my friend Spats came over. I wonder if he's still out there. Maybe we can play?

No? I think Spats ran off before I came out. Oh wait, there's a squirrel over there. I want to chase it. No, I don't. I'll get my paws wetter. But I want to chase the squirrel. Oh what to do? What to do? Do I get brave and dance across the snow? Do I sit where it's dry and watch the birds and squirrels have fun? Do I just say "meh" and ignore the snow?

Nope. I'm going back inside. This cold white stuff just isn't for me.

Where Were You...?

This sounds like the start of a parlor game. Where were you on such and such a date? It is kind of a parlor game but with a more serious intent. This game falls into two distinct parts: personal and global memories.

Personal memories are the seminal events in the life of a family. You never have to ask a mother where she was when her children were born. She was kinda there, kinda involved with the delivery. Dads of previous generations, not so involved. Births, deaths and weddings fill up books and calendars, but not too many in a family can really say where they were when they heard about the birth or death of a relative. It's just the way it is. We note the date, send cards and gifts. And we are pretty much done.

Global memories are different. Depending on the generation, people remember when events of global or national importance happened. The Greatest Generation can tell you to the second what they were doing on Sunday, December 7, 1942. They can tell you what they did immediately afterwards, because many of the men and boys enlisted the next Monday.

Adults of the next generation know what they were doing on November 22, 1963. Even more than sixty years later, I still remember what I was doing and how I felt when I heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. This couldn't happen. No one in the modern era imagined that one man could throw the nation into a tailspin, out of which the citizens found a new patriotism, a new willingness to work together for a common good.

Neil Armstrong walking on the moon and the Challenger explosion frame the space age. One good, one terrible. Both led to national pride, renewed patriotism. The moon walk may have resulted in working together for the common good. Not so the Challenger tragedy. After the grief healed, we as a nation went back to our old ways.

Fast forward to the current generation. Will its seminal moment be 9/11? Not everyone can recall the year this happened, but the date is part of the national psyche, our national vocabulary. We drew together as a nation and as a member of the world community. Flags blossomed from porches for a while. Heads of state in Europe said we were all Americans. It took 19 men and three airplanes to reawaken our national pride and willingness to work together.

So will this be the seminal event for the current generation? I hope not, because after that tragedy the nation plunged into financial darkness, divisiveness in government and in our neighborhoods, suspicion of anyone whose beliefs are different or who look different "from me" and a renewed demand that we be a nation governed by values. Like gun owning. Like telling women what to do with their reproductive tracts. Like telling the poor they really don't count. Like telling the rich that they do.

Is this the memory we want our children to take away? I sure as hell hope not.

Writing Stuff That Looks Like Other Stuff

Over the weekend, I went to the Roanoke Regional Writers Conference for the fourth time. It was the best conference yet. The speakers were focused and professional; the panels were alternatively funny and thought-provoking.

On Saturday, I went to a class called “Creating Fraudulent Artifacts: How to Construct Stories that Masquerade as Other Forms of Writing,” taught by Matt Vollmer, assistant professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech. The title is a mouthful. I almost skipped it. I am so glad I didn’t.

Have you ever seen a piece of paper lying on the ground and wondered what it was? Did you pick it up? If you did, what did you learn about the person who dropped the paper? Even if it's a receipt for gas, you can learn a lot about the driver depending on how much gas he put in his car.

Matt challenges his students to write short stories that pretend to be something other than a short story. What, you say. So, go think about what your grocery list says about you. Can you create a story out of that list? What do you buy? How many people are in your household? What are your favorite brands? It’s more than a brain-teaser. It’s a different way of looking at the world.

Matt said his technique is fun, subversive and liberating. It breaks up writer’s block, requires the reader to become a participant in the story, encourages experimentation and gives the writer a way to turn the ordinary into art.

I got to thinking about this. What do the emails in my span folder say about me? Can I write a “dear john” letter to a politician? Can I look at something as common as a dinner receipt and create a vignette for a novel?

To quote a losing politician from 2008, “you betcha.”

Losing Control of the Keyboard

Hi. My name is Mocha Java, Mom and Dad’s new kitty. I came to my new forever home in mid July and am trying to learn to type. It’s not that easy when you have five toes with claws. I kepp hitting the rongg keys.

Did you see my spots? The vet says I’m a patches tabby, but I'm a fawn-colored Ocecat. That’s a cross between a tabby and an ocelot. Mom says I can be anything I want as long as I’m her kitty.

I thought I’d take over today, because Mom is recovering from a death threat one of her FB “fiends” sent her after her last post. That is not a typo. I meant fiends, not friends. The man wrote her a private message through FB, whatever that is, and called her a Satanist. He said if he didn’t kill her, he hoped someone else would.*

I read the post. I didn’t understood much of it since it wasn’t about mousies or chipmunks or head noogies. Why people would want to hurt my Mom just because of something she wrote?

Mom laughed about the threat, before she unfriended the fiend. She’s going to take a few days off from her blog, since she doesn’t want to upset too many more people.

She was silly and left the computer on last nite. It’s not eazy standing on a ball on my back leggs. I don’t know what else to write. Maybe I’ll crawl into my hooch and sleep. Or, stick my head out and keep an eye on Mom. I need to proteck her.

I hope you like my first post. I want to be a better riter, so I’ll try and come back.

* Mocha writes the truth about the death threat. I didn’t take it seriously, because my proselytizing post led to several amazing conversations – and one idiot who ruined my week.,/p>