Imagination Gone Wild

"Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun." --George Scialabba

I came home one day this week from a morning jaunt (thinly disguised as exercise :-) to an innocent question from hubby: "How was your walk?"

Well, I had rehearsed what I was going to say most of the way home. This is how it went:

"Oh, nothing unusual. Except...well, I saw a cowboy, got accosted by a bandit, was quizzed by a tax collector, and had a four-legged senior citizen teach me a life lesson."

What's that all about, you say? Did my imagination get the best of me?

Or did I run with my imagination?

Imagination: n. "the action of imagining; power of forming pictures in the mind of things not present to the senses...the ability to create new things or ideas or to combine old ones in new forms...a creation of the mind; mental image; fancy.

This is what really happened. At a point, I heard a noise behind me. I turned to see a guy riding a black horse and leading a spotted gray one across the road. Now once upon a time my neighborhood consisted of a few little farmhouses dotted randomly about, but no more. Most have been replaced by newer homes. So where did these horses come from? Where is the barn? Where was the rider going? He was not wearing a cowboy hat.

The bandit? Bandit--the name of a white yappy dog--ran toward me just after the horses passed from view. I swear this noisy thing was going to nip at my ankles. The owner, an older guy who had great difficulty walking, came out and tried to round Bandit up, all the while assuring me his dog would not bite. Yeah, right--did he get Bandit's word on that?

A friend drove up shortly afterwards, slowed down and kept pace with me for a little while. "Say," he said as he kept an eye on his rear-view mirror for any cars that might be coming, "you know your taxes are going to go up." He had noticed we recently had a new patio put in at the back of the house. "You think so?" I responded, and waved as he went on down the road. Not really a tax collector, but curious all the same.

And the four-legged senior citizen? I greeted Cindy who was walking her slow, meandering lab, Cameo. "At least she's still moving," Cindy said of her 17-year old dog. "Ha," I replied. "I think there's a lesson in there somewhere for us, too!"

Don't know if I'll try to weave a story from any of these elements or not--but it was fun to craft a draft in my head and test it out on hubby.

It's sort of like something Thomas Edison said: "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."

Or Dr. Seuss--"Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!"

Where did your "thinks" take you this week? Any plans to stir the imagination in a new and fun way in the days ahead?

*photo: sxc.hu/

Idea Shopping

"The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea." --Thomas Mann

Where do you go for your ideas?

I found that I've been inspired by objects, places, and people--particularly those that have played a role in history, as obscure as the historical details might be. My inspirational sources include...

A hollow sycamore tree.

A stone barn, built during the Civil War.

(This is for you, Jess, because of your comment in my last post! Notice the "1861" mounted on the front.)

My grandmother, who was a child at the turn of the 20th century.

Some say they get ideas from photos, some from music, art, people-watching, snatches of conversation, or simply by taking a walk. Some journal, some freewrite. I find stories in history. Where do you shop for your ideas?

"Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different." --Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Story Sparks

Clover is in full bloom. We saw great spreads of it along the highway on a recent trip up I-71 to Columbus. There's also a patch along the road where I walk.

Clover makes me think of dotted swiss. Do you remember material by that name? It's a rather old-fashioned organdy fabric that's dotted with flocks of threads. And the thought of it brings back memories of childhood: the dark-haired doll dressed in a pale green dotted swiss dress, kitchen curtains in lavender, my grandmother's fancy white apron.

Follow the memories back to Mom at her sewing machine, and Grandma fashioning home-made dolls and stuffed fabric frogs. Oh, that takes me back to stories of Grandma as a child just after the turn of the 20th century and her tales of floods, flu epidemics, and such everyday childhood escapades as singing out doodlebugs and locking old Granny Manny in the privy.

Just the other day, on our trip to visit my parents, an amazing tidbit--one I'd never heard before--came to light when my dad (now in his late 80s) mentioned that his great-grandmother was a cook on a canal boat. The canals were a series of waterways wide enough for boats. The Ohio-Erie Canal linked New York to the Ohio River, and was used from the 1830s to the 1850s to transport goods and produce to market, before the advent of the railroad. The boats were pulled by mules that trudged alongside on the banks.

Though I've always been interested in history, especially local, I never was much interested in the canals--until it became personal. Now I think: "There must be a story here!"

Story. A family of six living in a hollow sycamore tree in 1800? There must be a story there (the book I'm finishing up on now). A barn with the number 1861 welded in wagon wheel rims and mounted above the large door? There must be a story here (book 2). A young girl (later to become my grandmother) rescued out a second floor window into a johnny boat to escape the flooded house? There must be a story here (book 3). And now who was this woman who cooked on the canal boats? Is there a story here?

Stories are everywhere. May we turn our ears to them, pluck them out of the air, get them down on paper, write them the best we can. And hopefully stir, inspire, entertain, uplift, (fill in the blank with your vision) our readers as we go.

Sycamore trees, barns, doodlebugs and dotted swiss are some of the things that have sparked my ideas. What has sparked yours?