What we did before

OK, brain, I turned off the screens and I’m going to write with pen and paper today. So here we go and … write!

What do you mean, you got nothing? You’re always racing around from topic to topic, you must have something for me — a conversation on the observation deck of a space station? the story of a little boy and girl collecting memories in the forest? a scary night when a little boy is sure he heard a monster crashing around in the backyard?

Nothing? Fine. The dog wants to take a walk anyway. Maybe Later.

LATER: My screen-free day has not been a total success, but I probably have only done half of the screen time I usually do. Not horrible for Day One, but not great either.

What did we do before screens? Maybe we sat out on the back porch in the sunshine, listened to the bird song and passing traffic, and appreciated the warmth and the deepening shades of green on the ground and the buds in the trees.

Maybe we looked over the yard and began drafting plans in our head for the coming spring and summer. We saw a few places where fresh paint could do some good, we thought about edges that needed sharpening and new tools to be purchased and old tools to be refurbished. Maybe we just marveled at how blue the sky is and how grateful we are to still be alive after all we’ve lived, and maybe we missed those we lost and we felt love for those we still have. Maybe we smiled at the young dog and fretted for the old dog, and we did all those things without reaching into our pockets for the miracle device we euphemistically still call a phone.

Maybe we regretted never learning the names of the myriad bird species that flit about wondering if we and the dogs would leave soon so they can come back to the feeder. Maybe we hoped some would realize we are harmless and dare to sweep in for some seed despite our presence.

I remember a time when we were not distracted by that little pocket device. What distracted me then? I know I still went days without writing or picking up the guitar.

What makes me write these thoughts as if I have lost another day? Just by writing these 500 words, I have won another decent blog post to transcribe for Friday. (I hear an unfamiliar bird call that sounds like a rusty gate swinging. And now, for a brief moment, a brave bird does swoop in for a nibble!)

The dogs want to come in, but I am enjoying the sun. I’ll go back in the house reluctantly, but at least I have my daily quota of filled journal pages, and I haven’t picked up my “phone” during this visit out back. But now a red-winged blackbird is shouting, “Go back inside so we can eat!” OK, girls, let’s go inside.

Analog dreams

My eyes are blurry from staring at screens big and small all day. I think I need a little analog time.

For a few days I think I’m going to log on just long enough to do my daily posting and refrain from staying online half the day, which seems to be my habit lately. No games, no surfing, maybe not even TV.

I’m feeling a need for a digital cleanse — a time when the vast majority of my reading and writing are on paper, to reset my brain back to more or less normal.

What will I return from that wilderness with? I can only find out by doing.

Call this a poem if you dare

Dance, words, dance! Pick a melody and a rhythm and fly across the page like a seagull so high all we register is the squawk and the rattle of the redwing’s challenge here below — Mine! Mine! All I survey belongs to me, it is mine and no other, and I share it with you from the goodness of my very special heart.

Fly, words, fly! All of space and time belong to you; even when the words aren’t sufficient to speak the beauty, there are words to describe when words fail, those awestruck moments when there’s nothing to say except there’s nothing to say.

A picture may show more than a thousand words can say, but the words can say what the picture cannot, the picture only shows what is, the words show what it feels like. The words say why they feel like dancing and flying.

I am frozen in time like that moment a half-century ago when I taught myself how to play someone else’s song and I made the music that came out of the radio using my own fingers — I am frozen in time like that moment I held a girl’s hand for the first time — I am frozen in time like that moment my lips touched another pair of lips and I knew why they say it’s electric because I felt the shock of recognition — another human touching me touching you and we are together literally and figuratively we fit together like we were designed to do this.

I am frozen in time, only my fingers moving slowly across the page scrawling words that are between my ears (some of them, anyway, the ones I remember long enough to write them down) and shouting across time to a moment when someone sees the words and hears my voice inside their head except it’s my words and their voice or their imperfect recollection of the timber of my voice approximating.

I am frozen in time and maybe in years to come I will remember the evergreen behind the naked branches behind the vehicles that passed on the highway behind the old highway behind the rocking chair on the porch on the other side of the window next to the stairs to the basement behind the bookcase with the dinosaur Mary gave me across the room behind the open door to the room where I am sitting frozen in time.

It is twelve minutes past three on Tuesday, April 14,2026, and I have frozen the moment here on this page to be transmitted across space and time to another soul in another moment somewhere else. Hello! And now it’s two minutes later, no, three, because that’s how long it took me to write this paragraph by hand.

Such a slow dance, now 20 minutes and more since I started scrawling, and yet the words hurry by as the reader reads. And how many images and sounds and aromas have I experienced that scrambled past so quickly I could never write them all down even if I remembered them all? So much to see and to say, and the words are inadequate, yet somehow suggest there was so much more in the moment. And that, I suppose, is for you to unravel.