(this is annie)

It's funny: I started telling stories before I could write them down. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, and she'd take down the tales I dictated. (Sample title: Paddington Bear Goes to the Mailbox.) In grade school, Jim and Mike and I were an accelerated-reading trio that we called The Rainbows. We wrote Choose Your Own Adventure-type stories in BASIC, and I still remember the password to get into the most adventurous levels. (Blueflashfalcon10mx.) Later, there was WSBS, the "radio show" we hosted over the school's PA system. (The poor nuns.) After a stint as the editor of The Good News Bears, I went on to high school to eventually run The Critic, and after that I edited The Michigan Independent. Post-college, I have always made my living from words.

Other talents elude me. I can't draw; my recent attempt at sketching a dog resembled lumpy oatmeal more than any sort of mammal. I cannot sing very well. Dorky dancer. Asthmatic, clumsy, bad at sports.

So that leaves writing, one of the roughest interests a person can develop. I never trust people who say it's easy to write. Maybe it is for them, but they should just shut their traps, because for the rest of us, it's work. Often-thankless work that compels an otherwise well-balanced person to tinker with a paragraph for hours or ponder the placement of a single comma, all for the chance that there's a tiny seed of something great growing in the copious amounts of crap you've produced. And the better writer you become, the more you can spot what isn't quite right. (For instance, the first paragraph has far too many parentheses, and now I've added one more. Agh!)

I've always liked this take on writing from Truman Capote:

When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.

I don't think I have some sort of magical talent or anything like that, just an attraction to words and a need to share them. Still, I put on my red writing cap and crack that whip. Sometimes that pushes me toward improvement, and I'll get into this rare and amazing mode where everything flows as it should. Other times, the whip is cruelly critical, and it makes me think I'm a bigger hack than Nicholas Sparks. Then I get upset because Nicholas Sparks' books are the Precious Moments figurines of literature, and yet he finishes his schmaltz, so why don't I write some schmaltz of my own? See? Whipped. But I can't not write. Frankly, I don't know what else to do.

All of this is an lengthy prelude to what I wanted to say in the first place, which is this: I like taking photographs! I enjoy snapping scenes all around town, stealing shots of strangers, and trying to get the cats to stand still for a portrait of Minou as a feline Henry Kissinger lookalike. (Glasses, jowls.)

Unlike writing, taking pictures is easy for me. This is because I have no idea what I'm doing, and I don't measure myself by the end result. There are no high expectations, no need to get a perfect shot, no aspirations to do much more than capture a scene. I might look at a photo and think, "Oh, look how well it turned out!" instead of looking for something to improve. In other words, it's fun.

Lately I've found another reason to keep the camera battery charged. Since my father died, an increasing number of my pictures look like his paintings. The bright colors, the empty space, clean lines — they're all him. I laughed while writing this because I just looked up at a painting he did of an awkward girl next to a cruiser bike; this morning, I snapped exactly that scene while waiting for the bus. I don't go looking for this overlap; it just happens every so often. Every time it does, it's like he's here for a moment, looking at the world with me.

Labels: dad