"WHEN THE HURLYBURLY'S DONE"

A breath of air, a zephyr if you will, arose from the frozen tundra south of Hudson Bay and began a journey to the warmer climes. It picked up speed and strength as it passed over the flatlands of Ontario. With nothing in its path it crossed the Great Lakes, its front now expanded many miles wide. Its left flank slammed into Buffalo, its right took Watertown. The center swept through the Mohawk Valley to the east, crossing the Hudson just below Albany and finally meeting the first object in its path, a house that sits atop a hill.

By now blowing across the landscape in excess of forty miles-per-hour, it shook the windows and found its way under the doors, freezing the inhabitants to the bone.

“Who are you jiving, man, with this arty bull?”

“Get off my shoulder, whatever your name is, you so-called ‘writer’s conscience.’ Your Jiminy Cricket impersonation cuts no ice with me.”

“But read the claptrap you wrote, if you can, and if you are able you might be the only person in this world who can read it!”

“I am trying to write a piece for a contest. It must contain a single father or mother, a teenage boy or girl, a postman, a bouquet of red roses and a ghost. I am trying to set the scene. Imagine neither snow nor rain nor wind stopping the mailman from pulling up in her car and dropping off a bouquet of roses.”

“Well, right about now you better tell them something about me else the readers won’t know what the hell is going on, like in that one you entered the other day all in dialogue. You’ve been foisting some real junk off on your audience lately.”

The muse jumped down from my shoulder. She looked nothing like Jiminy Cricket at all, but rather was human and of middle age with curly black hair, penetrating brown eyes and dressed in jeans and a shirt. There was a certain beauty to her in spite of her height of three inches. She began to jump up and down on the letter 'P'.

PPPPPPPPPPP

“Now cut that out!”

“Just wanted to get your attention. You could have made me look more like Meg Ryan or someone even younger. Anyway, to get back to your story, why all this sturm und drang? You could have simply ordered a dozen roses for your friend Pam for Valentine Day. I could have put the idea in your ear and I could have been sort of the ghost.”

“Do you want to write this, is that it? Hmmm? What would that be, about two hundred words? Pam works all day. What was the delivery person to do with them? Leave them on her doorstep? And for all I know she might be allergic to roses. Or I might have embarrassed her.”

GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

“Keep that up and I’ll flick you away with my finger. And what about the mailman.”

“David, you have all the romantic instincts of a clam. You’re wearing the shirt she gave you for your birthday. The least you could do is send her flowers. The postman, and note they want him to be a postman, not a mailman, could bring a Valentine from her. Sometimes you are so dumb, David. Sometimes I want to ask Clio why was I assigned to be your muse?”

“Why don’t you sit on the number pad instead of the ‘page up’ key. I wanted to see where I was and I don’t want to hit you to do so.”

“Why don’t you just ask me?”

“You’d give me a smart-ass answer. Don’t bother to move; I know where I am now. Maybe I could have the mailman, or woman in my case, bring me a Valentine from an unknown admirer nearby.”

“You’re plagiarizing Thomas Hardy, David. Sometimes I don’t think you have an original bone in your body. Where did your daughter get her vision? Surely wasn’t from your genes! Listen to the beginning of One Rainy Saturday and then hear your bloated attempt at being a wordsmith.”

My muse opened the slim book written and copyrighted in 1988 when Lixie was in seventh grade. She began to read.

“My head is killing me! After all, hearing Professor Houck lecture for two semesters straight isn’t very fun. Thank God for spring break! My name’s Roberta but call me Bobby.”

“That girl could write rings around you and she was thirteen? She would never settle for ‘A breath of air, a zephyr if you will, arose from the frozen tundra’. And by the way, any wind coming from the north would hit the field next door first, and more particularly that rock outcropping in the middle of it. It's higher than your house.”

Her quote from my work was delivered in a very sarcastic tone that stung me, and she was right about the elevation.

“Muse, I wish you had a name.”

“I told you, guess it, and it’s not Rumplestiltskin.”

“Turn your head and look at the painting, Muse. That’s Lixie sailing away to another world. She’s been dead thirteen years this June, but I like to think her writing is being channeled through me. I didn’t write back then in 1988 and have only been prolific since I put that painting on the wall two years ago.”

The muse turned back to me and spoke in a more somber, commanding voice.

“I was her muse too. I knew you both! Believe me David, you are no Lixie.”

“Now who’s plagiarizing?” A feeling of remorse hit me, like I had said a bad word in mixed company. “I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry. It’s the pressure of work; it’s my busy time. Yesterday the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. How do you expect me to write in these circumstances?”

The muse sighed, “I expect you to write better than you do now, and with more clarity. The dialogue piece you entered assumed too much of your readers. Tell them who is speaking.”

She was impossible to argue with but I tried.

“The dialogue came straight from many talks I had with Lixie while taking her to Movies Unlimited where she would rent videotapes of heavy metal concerts.”

“You could have told your readers.”

This conversation was so wearying. I tried to end it by telling her how hard it is to be not only a single writer with a ghost of a wife and daughter roaming about, but also to work in this world.

“You know, nameless muse, every year I have to put aside writing to prepare tax returns. I spend my days with earphones on, talking to people all over the country, and this when I am not traveling to my other office two hundred miles away. The pressure builds as the deadline nears. Every year I think I won’t make it and I remember that poem:

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade”

“Too melodramatic, David, and of course, not original. I’m going to get out of here and go help my other pupil. By the way, the contest calls NOT for a single FATHER, but for a single MOTHER! Betcha didn’t think of that, but maybe I can help. My other pupil is my daughter, Alessandra. I think she is in the same class as your fellow Writer’s Circle member, The Narrator. He probably never noticed her because of her height, though she is over two inches now.”

“And you are not married?”

“Never was. I dallied too long one day with Alec D’Urbeville.”

“No wonder I borrow from others. How can I help it if my muse steals plot lines for her own life?”

The muse slid into the floppy drive and was gone. I was hungry for lunch; talking to her is so exhausting. I also wondered for the first time why Seeger used ‘barricade’. It did not sound like the correct word for trench warfare. My reverie was interrupted by the dog at the window, barking at the mail woman’s car out by the road. I grabbed the leash and off we went for a walk.

We went into the field next to ours. I let Farfel off her leash. She headed for the rock outcropping and began to circle it, sniffing enthusiastically. As I neared it I heard a voice cackling:

“By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.”

Through a crack in the rock I could see three women, circling a pot and dumping various oddments into it. They were dressed in greasy black shawls. The one talking was younger than the other two. She looked almost teenage. I wondered which of the older ones was the single mother. The oldest saw us. She pointed to me and told me I would become Thane of Cawdor and then King of Scotland, but that my reign would be barren of succession.

Farfel barked at her but she shouted the dog down and prophesied that Farfel would be lesser than me, but greater than me, not so happy but much happier. The youngest then spoke, pointing at Farfel, “Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.”

A strong gust of wind, straight from Hudson Bay, blew the apparitions away. We walked home, picking up the mail on the way. Most of it was junk mail for my late wife. I tried to take a nap. The dog jumped in bed next to me, but I could not sleep. As I lay there restless, the dog murmured, “Still it cried ‘Sleep no more’ to all the house: ‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more.”

She looked so smug and satisfied. I wondered how she was going to produce future kings. She had been fixed as a puppy. One Old English Sheepdog/Irish Setter was enough for the world. I got out of bed and went to my keyboard. I looked up at Lixie, sitting on her sailboat. She smiled and shook her head.

“Dad, are you ever going to write anything original?”

**********

The muse returns, and departs, in"WRITER'S BLOCK"