The Birth of a Notion

As I was thinking of what to write, two thoughts for the title and the direction for the subject were battling in my mind. The first title I thought to name it was “The Birth of a Nation” and I planned to share stories surrounding the birth of my three children. The initial thought was spurred by my post of our visit to Niagara Falls and the trip home. My wife Cindy became nauseated as we drove home. Later as she tried to sleep, the images of electric poles sped past her like a picket fence and the nausea persisted. This was our introduction into pregnancy with our first daughter. After that, I developed a craving for greasy hamburgers at each of the following pregnancies. With the last craving of a hamburger for our third child, Cindy said, “No need for me to go to the doctor. I’m pregnant” and she was.

The second idea that fits the chosen title of this piece was to introduce how an idea, phrase, or incident can set off a spark of creativity which eventually becomes a story, a book, or a poem. Many times I copy down a single thought and it stays on the paper for quite awhile. It was something I wanted to keep, but the words to finish it wasn’t there yet, but it was the germ of a plot, a partial line of a poem, or sometimes it would find its way into a waste basket, rejected because I’d already written something similar or it wasn’t as good as my initial thought.

In my computer room, there are reams of paper with finished manuscripts, partially written stories, and finished poems or Haiku that haven’t been entered into the computer. The stacks pile up, because of laziness on my part. I see the task and because I never took typing, I avoid it. I am a two and at best a three fingered typist.

I did start to clean out some of the clutter surrounding me and I found a check as payment for a book I sold. It was tucked in a Christmas card. The postmark was from November 2016. My bank was kind enough to cash it. I do hope my cousin Barb won’t be too mad that I took so long to redeem it. As you can see, even check that hasn’t been cashed can be an interesting notion to write about.