Trusting in the possibilities

The possibilities are endless.

I look around my room and part of me is overwhelmed. How does it always get this messy? I’m like a kid who doesn’t know to put away his toys, leaving a pile of stuff everywhere I turn.

It’s like that when I sit down to write some mornings. What could I possibly write? It’s not: “I got nothing.” No, it’s: “So many choices!” How do you pick just one toy?

What wonder have I assembled within a couple of steps and an easy reach. Here are books collecting the first 50 editions of Fantastic Four, the first 40 editions of Spider-Man, similar collections of Batman and Captain Marvel and Zot. Not far away are A Treasury of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poetry, all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter stories — right here at my elbow is the Emily Dickinson paperback I pulled off the shelf a couple of weeks ago, and Carole King is singing “Smackwater Jack” from the turntable.

Is there a more perfect album of songs than Tapestry? OK, Blue and Judee Sill are also within reach, so I can think of plenty of contenders just in my own collection. But still … “When my soul was in the lost and found, you came along to claim it …”

The robin eggs under our back deck have hatched, and mama is tending what were little fluffballs not long ago but this morning look, amazingly, like little robins.

And what a few weeks ago was a white landscape is now awash with green. It has always been my favorite color, green, speaking as it does of life and warmth and growth.

Sometimes I sit in my chair, pen posed expectantly over the page, and my fingers just hover. It’s not that I don’t know what to write. It’s that the possibilities are endless.

At those moments I have a choice to be frustrated, or I can remember the story of a friend who needed to start work on a promotional video for his nonprofit, but so many things called for his attention, he didn’t know where to begin.

“Just get started,” smiled the renowned actor who had agreed to appear in his video. “The rest will take care of itself.”

And so I send my fingers across the page — or the keyboard as I’m doing now — and see what happens. It’s not magic, it’s just trusting in the possibilities.

I suppose I should pick up some of this mess. What would company think? If I keel over unexpectedly today, how rude of me to leave this for someone else to pick up. It’s like wearing dirty underwear to the emergency room.

Even more important, though, there may be something miraculous waiting to be rediscovered. How cool is that?

ish

Ish? Ah, the fudge is on.

You were all set to commit to a path and you ished it.

“The project will be done by 4-ish.”

“I will reach that goal by July-ish.”

“Our love will last forever-ish.”

Ish! A plague on your ish.

You can do this. Not do it-ish. You can do this.

Coffee’s ready.

Teaser Trailer #1

The young woman who was destined to save the worlds grinned and held her finger over the ignition switch.

“Ready, Blaine?”

“Ready as I’m ever going to be,” drawled Blaine, who was a vampire. “Punch it!”

“OK, here goes. I hope Mom knew what she was doing when she built this thing,” she said, holding on to the wing-shaped steering wheel and flipping the switch.

“Wait,” said Blaine. “What? What does that mean, ‘I hope Mom knew what she was doing’?”

Everything began to vibrate.

“Next stop, Venus!” the girl cried.

“Are you sure about this, Jeep?” the vampire said.

“Of course not!” she shouted over the rumbling. “Who’s ever sure about anything new? That’s why you do it!”

Something pinged against a window.

“And then there’s the little matter of those people shooting at us!” Jeep shouted. “Ready or not, here we go!”

And she punched it.

The machine burst through the garage door, and she aimed for the field. Light pressure on the accelerator sent them careening forward, accelerating from zero to highway speed almost instantly. Alarmed men and women in suits and sunglasses dove out of the way, some of them firing weapons.

“Yikes! This thing goes a lot faster than I expected,” she said. They quickly reached the edge of the clearing, and she pointed the machine down the length of the grassy field.

“STOP, JEEP! YOU DON’T KNOW HOW IT WORKS!” came an amplified voice from behind.

“She’s got that right,” she told Blaine, “but I don’t like the idea of being shot or arrested or something.”

“But it’s set for Venus!” Blaine said, his calm voice perhaps a little higher-pitched than usual. “Shouldn’t we aim for somewhere a little closer?”

“No time!” Jeep said. “I can probably adjust the direction once we’re airborne.” And as if to punctuate her words, several more pings pinged against the windows. “Gotta go!” she said and punched hard on the accelerator. “I hope we can clear the trees or this is a short trip.”

Not only did the vehicle clear the trees, but it shot almost vertically into the sky, zipped through the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and exosphere and left Earth’s gravitational pull in the time it took her to say “this is a short trip.”

“Good newt!” Blaine shrieked. “Are you kidding me?”

(It occurs to me that perhaps we should explain a little bit about who Jeep and Blaine are, how they happened to be flying to Venus in a machine Jeep’s mother built, and why those people were shooting. Once upon a — Oh, dear, It’ll have to wait. Something’s happening.)

“Is that what I think it is?” Jeep shouted.

“If you think it’s Venus, I have to say I think you’re right,” Blaine shrieked.

“We’ve only been flying about three minutes,” she said. “How is that possible?”

“I have no idea,” Blaine said, “but that’s a planet, and it’s not Earth, and we aimed for Venus, so do the math.”

She pulled back on the throttle-thing, and the rumbling drew back to a more manageable and somewhat pleasant vibration. The huge green orb ahead grew at a more reasonable pace, and they began to believe they would have a chance to land there rather than splat against it.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Jeep said.

“You don’t need my permission to think so,” Blaine sniffed.

warrior giel © Rudall30 | dreamstime.com

“Say, on the dark side of the planet,” Jeep said. “Are those lights? like the lights of cities?”

Blaine peered into the darkness.

“They’re lights,” he acknowledged. “I’d have to be closer to know if they’re cities.”

“But they could be.”

“Have you ever been to Venus? Neither have I,” he sniffed. “I don’t have a clue what causes light during the night on Venus.”

“But they look like the light of Earth cities.”

“As you like to say, my dear: Duh.”

“That’s all I’m saying!” Jeep said.

“So: Venus inhabited?” Blaine raised his pointed eyebrows.

“Not in any universe I ever knew about!” she cried. It’s amazing how true that particular statement turned out to be.

“So: Shall we land on the day side or the night side?” Blaine asked. “I vote day.”

“Makes sense. How do you suppose you land this thing?”

“Oh, dear. You made taking off look so easy, I just thought you knew how to land.”

Jeep peered at the controls.

“If this thing flies like an airplane, I may have a fighting chance of getting us down,” she said. “Assuming a real airplane reacts like a video-game airplane.”

“Oh, my,” Blaine sighed. “How did we get into this?”