Writers Reluctance

I am reluctant to write a blog today.  Yesterday I got a belated "Christmas Letter" from a distant cousin.  We get one of these letters every year and it has become a running joke in our family. 

I am an admitted anecdote snob,  but this Christmas letter never fails to break new ground in grammatical incongruity depicting banal occurrences.  I know a Christmas letter is not supposed to be a script for the Hallmark Hall of Fame. It is supposed to be just a catch up, highlighting the activities of the kids I have never met and a summary of the family activities. This year it was the regaling escapades of stalking a cockroach found in the sink.  For those of you who didn't grow up in Texas, like me, a roach discovered in a Texas sink is the equivalent of discovering snow in Alaska. Perhaps, however, the events would not be so utterly devoid of interest if the writing was better. 

This cousin is a college graduate who is married to a college graduate and elementary teacher. However, in the two page, small type, single spaced recap of their year the letter changes voice, tense and person several times. If offered as an example of a letter from an "English as a second language" student, it would be encouraging.  This however is not the case. 

I know not every one's talent reside in the area of writing, but you would think that after all the years of constructing these Christmas letters my cousin would get better at the process. Nope. It continues to baffle me how the ink actually sticks to the paper with such a poor foundation.   

Which brings me to my reluctance to write this morning.  I am sure my cousin thinks the Christmas letter is a noble effort and is proud of the work.  Not unlike my blog here.  (Not so much the nobility nor the pride, but the work.) Perhaps my next blog will be about a cockroach I found in the sink this morning, and I will have "jumped the shark" without any awareness. I have a vision of Miss Gayland my Junior High School English teacher reading my blog and repeating, "That Boy never did learn a thing in my class, always playing with those puppets.... what a waste."

So if you are out there Miss Gayland, I'm still writing and still playing with dolls.  You taught me more than you know. Too bad you didn't have my cousin in class.

As you were,

Jay