CREEK ROAD GANG
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Thoughts from the Editor:
January 2011
copyright 2011
When I was a little girl, it seemed to me that New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day were absolutely no fun at all.
In my family, the New Year meant we’d have to take down our Christmas tree – no fun there. And soon our school vacation would be over, which meant we wouldn’t be coasting on our new sleds or skating on our new ice skates as often.
Instead of all the great Christmas carols we’d been singing every night, there was only one song for New Year, which sounded sad. Not only that, it asked a dumb question: Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should you forget about all your friends and never think of them at all? Of course not! What a stupid idea! And what did it have to do with a new year anyway?
Maybe grown-ups enjoyed New Year’s a little. They could stay up late, wear funny hats and blow horns, but I had go to bed at my usual bedtime. My mother would drink her annual glass of wine mixed with ginger ale, but it smelled weird to me, and I certainly didn’t want any. We’d have a Sunday dinner on New Year’s Day, even if it wasn’t a Sunday, but we had Sunday dinners all the time. That was nothing special.
The one traditional activity for the day was to think up New Year Resolutions. A holiday dedicated to figuring out what I’d done wrong for a year so I could make promises to behave better? What kind of holiday was that?
Boring and stupid, that’s what kind.
In high school, the scene changed a little. I spent New Year’s Eve at my best friend’s house. Her father made a fire in their fireplace, opened a bottle of champagne, and allowed us girls to try it. How daring! How exciting! How grown-up! How disappointed I was at the taste of champagne!
Another year, at the same friend’s house, two boys unexpectedly showed up. How wonderful! What hints of romance to come in the new year! What a surprise that they wanted to watch static patterns on the television so we could all see if we saw any funny patterns, like a clown riding a unicycle, for instance. (They could, we couldn’t.)
Then there was college, and the year a group of us went to Times Square to watch the ball drop. At last, potential for an exciting New Year’s Eve! The glamour of it! The storefront with naked women magazines in one front window, naked men magazines in the other. The sounds of people trying to coax jazz out of the long, skinny neon-colored plastic horns sold on the street corners! The crowds of people, all waiting for midnight! The huge lines at Nedick’s. The crowd fight, with one side of the crowd pushing, and the others pushing back, and suddenly we were being carried along without any sense of our feet moving! The immense sense of relief when we left for home!
In my single days, there were parties, sometimes with the perfect dress, sometimes not, sometimes alone and wondering if romance was in the air (not my air); sometimes with someone who seemed right, but more likely had spent his adolescence looking for clowns on unicycles in television static.
New Year’s is better now. We generally stay home, drink eggnog, have friends and family over for dinner.
Comfy.
Cozy.
Boring?
This year I decided to shake things up a little, so I got the family a surprise for Christmas, and we enjoyed it on New Year’s Day.
A night out on the town? Dinner? Play, concert, movie? Maybe something daring – a get-away? A cruise, perhaps?
Not me, no.
I bought us a game.
I’ve got to admit that for years, we had a family game night every week, complete with root beer and popcorn. When the kids were younger, we had an amazing assortment of games. Sesame St. dominoes gave way to Ancient Egypt-themed cards. We played standards like Candy Land, Chess, Battleship, Risk, Clue, Monopoly (which I never wanted to play because I always lost) and Scrabble (which no one else wanted to play because I always won). We had more offbeat choices like Tic Tac Twice, MacGregor, and By Jove, an all-time favorite. It was all great fun, until the kids got old enough to find it juvenile. But I was betting this year that they’re old enough now that maybe it could be fun.
The new game is Scribblish!, described on the box as: The hilarious scribbling game of “How did THIS become THAT?”
It’s a game in which players alternate between making drawings to illustrate a sentence someone else has given, and making sense of other’s drawings by writing a sentence. The sequence is followed so that players do four drawings and four sentences per round, to surprising results. We puzzled, wrote, schemed, drew, and laughed. The rubber band man of drawing one may become an attendee of Captain Hook’s birthday party by the last drawing. What starts out as a dinosaur under a bed might become in the end a blind whale. Vehicles in quicksand are transformed, quite by accident, mind you, into flying bowling balls carrying beer.
Guess what! New Year was fun this year.
That sense of play – I certainly need it. I suspect we all do.
Whether it’s Scribblish, charades, sports, art, music, sewing, baking, carving or carpentry, we all have some things that are done for the love of it, the fun, the novelty, the excitement. Although they can be deadly serious about them, writers play with words. But the word play will be livelier if writers play in other senses too – if they reawaken creativity in other respects as well as with words. Play isn’t a waste of time. Instead, it highlights the gifts of time. Heck, it’s even given me an appreciation of New Year’s Day, something that’s been a long time coming.
With this issue, we bring you Janice Ewing's review of a fascinating book, My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor.
Poets including Kristin Strid, Joe Quinton and Richard Moyer bring a new selection of poetry with themes from New Year’s Eve parties (R.M.) to sledding (K.S.) to the solstice (J.Q.) Prose offerings include Jackie Kearins' story og groundhog "Punxsutawney Phil" and his strange influence on winter weather. Matt Jodziewicz’s tale, “That’s My Story, and I’m Sticking to It,” is a 60s odyssey from draft notice through boot camp. In “Writing My Body for You,” Len Gottesman talks about life experiences, writing, and the meaning of those writings. And I’ve contributed “Maggie and Me,” a piece about an unhappy child playing with a beloved doll.
(See, there I am, back with that play stuff again.)
Wishing you a joyful, playful winter!
In my family, the New Year meant we’d have to take down our Christmas tree – no fun there. And soon our school vacation would be over, which meant we wouldn’t be coasting on our new sleds or skating on our new ice skates as often.
Instead of all the great Christmas carols we’d been singing every night, there was only one song for New Year, which sounded sad. Not only that, it asked a dumb question: Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should you forget about all your friends and never think of them at all? Of course not! What a stupid idea! And what did it have to do with a new year anyway?
Maybe grown-ups enjoyed New Year’s a little. They could stay up late, wear funny hats and blow horns, but I had go to bed at my usual bedtime. My mother would drink her annual glass of wine mixed with ginger ale, but it smelled weird to me, and I certainly didn’t want any. We’d have a Sunday dinner on New Year’s Day, even if it wasn’t a Sunday, but we had Sunday dinners all the time. That was nothing special.
The one traditional activity for the day was to think up New Year Resolutions. A holiday dedicated to figuring out what I’d done wrong for a year so I could make promises to behave better? What kind of holiday was that?
Boring and stupid, that’s what kind.
In high school, the scene changed a little. I spent New Year’s Eve at my best friend’s house. Her father made a fire in their fireplace, opened a bottle of champagne, and allowed us girls to try it. How daring! How exciting! How grown-up! How disappointed I was at the taste of champagne!
Another year, at the same friend’s house, two boys unexpectedly showed up. How wonderful! What hints of romance to come in the new year! What a surprise that they wanted to watch static patterns on the television so we could all see if we saw any funny patterns, like a clown riding a unicycle, for instance. (They could, we couldn’t.)
Then there was college, and the year a group of us went to Times Square to watch the ball drop. At last, potential for an exciting New Year’s Eve! The glamour of it! The storefront with naked women magazines in one front window, naked men magazines in the other. The sounds of people trying to coax jazz out of the long, skinny neon-colored plastic horns sold on the street corners! The crowds of people, all waiting for midnight! The huge lines at Nedick’s. The crowd fight, with one side of the crowd pushing, and the others pushing back, and suddenly we were being carried along without any sense of our feet moving! The immense sense of relief when we left for home!
In my single days, there were parties, sometimes with the perfect dress, sometimes not, sometimes alone and wondering if romance was in the air (not my air); sometimes with someone who seemed right, but more likely had spent his adolescence looking for clowns on unicycles in television static.
New Year’s is better now. We generally stay home, drink eggnog, have friends and family over for dinner.
Comfy.
Cozy.
Boring?
This year I decided to shake things up a little, so I got the family a surprise for Christmas, and we enjoyed it on New Year’s Day.
A night out on the town? Dinner? Play, concert, movie? Maybe something daring – a get-away? A cruise, perhaps?
Not me, no.
I bought us a game.
I’ve got to admit that for years, we had a family game night every week, complete with root beer and popcorn. When the kids were younger, we had an amazing assortment of games. Sesame St. dominoes gave way to Ancient Egypt-themed cards. We played standards like Candy Land, Chess, Battleship, Risk, Clue, Monopoly (which I never wanted to play because I always lost) and Scrabble (which no one else wanted to play because I always won). We had more offbeat choices like Tic Tac Twice, MacGregor, and By Jove, an all-time favorite. It was all great fun, until the kids got old enough to find it juvenile. But I was betting this year that they’re old enough now that maybe it could be fun.
The new game is Scribblish!, described on the box as: The hilarious scribbling game of “How did THIS become THAT?”
It’s a game in which players alternate between making drawings to illustrate a sentence someone else has given, and making sense of other’s drawings by writing a sentence. The sequence is followed so that players do four drawings and four sentences per round, to surprising results. We puzzled, wrote, schemed, drew, and laughed. The rubber band man of drawing one may become an attendee of Captain Hook’s birthday party by the last drawing. What starts out as a dinosaur under a bed might become in the end a blind whale. Vehicles in quicksand are transformed, quite by accident, mind you, into flying bowling balls carrying beer.
Guess what! New Year was fun this year.
That sense of play – I certainly need it. I suspect we all do.
Whether it’s Scribblish, charades, sports, art, music, sewing, baking, carving or carpentry, we all have some things that are done for the love of it, the fun, the novelty, the excitement. Although they can be deadly serious about them, writers play with words. But the word play will be livelier if writers play in other senses too – if they reawaken creativity in other respects as well as with words. Play isn’t a waste of time. Instead, it highlights the gifts of time. Heck, it’s even given me an appreciation of New Year’s Day, something that’s been a long time coming.
With this issue, we bring you Janice Ewing's review of a fascinating book, My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor.
Poets including Kristin Strid, Joe Quinton and Richard Moyer bring a new selection of poetry with themes from New Year’s Eve parties (R.M.) to sledding (K.S.) to the solstice (J.Q.) Prose offerings include Jackie Kearins' story og groundhog "Punxsutawney Phil" and his strange influence on winter weather. Matt Jodziewicz’s tale, “That’s My Story, and I’m Sticking to It,” is a 60s odyssey from draft notice through boot camp. In “Writing My Body for You,” Len Gottesman talks about life experiences, writing, and the meaning of those writings. And I’ve contributed “Maggie and Me,” a piece about an unhappy child playing with a beloved doll.
(See, there I am, back with that play stuff again.)
Wishing you a joyful, playful winter!
~ Kate Lydon
