Humainologie creative dialogue team practice with Zoom link and a first draft of my short story

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, ‘It might have been.’” ― Kurt Vonnegut (See also John Greenleaf Whittier, “Maud Muller”)

As I send you the very rough first draft of my short story written for tonight’s team practice and appended below, I would emphasize one of the concepts you learned from the book on creativity by John Cleese: It is the rewriting of the story that is essential. Don’t worry about the first draft not being a great story. Just jot something down on paper and off you go!

Here once again is the link from Shinobu, and I hope to see you tonight, Wednesday November 11, starting at 6:30 PM.

Topic: Humainologie creative dialogue team practice Time: Nov 11, 2020 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Dec 30, 2020, 8 occurrence(s) Nov 11, 2020 06:30 PM Nov 18, 2020 06:30 PM Nov 25, 2020 06:30 PM Dec 2, 2020 06:30 PM Dec 9, 2020 06:30 PM Dec 16, 2020 06:30 PM Dec 23, 2020 06:30 PM Dec 30, 2020 06:30 PM Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89466067851?pwd=TzY2T1ZrVWNjdGo5aWhMSFV1cTVBQT09

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Arthur

Dream Letter

Part I. September 28, 1918, Philadelphia

The parade had been the most exciting day of Robinson’s life. John Philip Sousa had led a marching band and Robinson had never seen so many people together in Philadelphia at one time. His father had said he hoped the war would end soon and they should all go to the parade to support the war effort.

That night, he dreamt he was alone in a room and it was dark. The window was open, and he felt cold and wanted to get up and close the window, but he couldn’t get up from his chair. His legs were very long – so long and thin that he would be very tall if he could only - but he could not stand up. Then he heard someone walking toward his room and his door opened and a woman – he did not recognize her – said that a letter had come for him. She reached toward him holding the letter. He wanted to ask her to close the window because he was cold. And then he woke up.

A week later his cousin Patrick died.

Part II. Twenty-five years later

He hadn’t noticed her right away. She had come to the table where a group of them were sitting and looked at him and said that he looked like a newcomer.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said, and they began to talk. Marie was her name, Marie Dominique.

It was several days later, when they met for a glass of wine somewhere – it was in town, not on the military base – that he noticed how beautiful she really was. It was a cheerful, lively beauty, in her wide blue eyes and her lips which seemed always about to break into a smile, and her abundant waves of blonde hair and the rhythm of her walk or even in how she would turn his way when she sat to one side of him and tilted back or forward, as if she were almost unconsciously creating new dance moves.

He was leaving in three days. They exchanged addresses and the letters started. Her letters were like a flower that arrived twice a month amid the drone and knock and staccato of life in Chengkung. At Christmas in 1944, she had written that she’d put up a Christmas tree and imagined what it would be like when children of her own – “our own,” she had written - would unwrap their presents under a bigger tree, and she hoped it would not be long.

Then that letter came. It was dated May 27, 1945. She had met someone. They were engaged. She had missed Robby so much and maybe that had made her vulnerable…. Robby put the letter away. After that, there were no more letters from her.

Part III. December 1998, Baltimore

“Oh, I have no complaints,” he said to Elaine. “Sure, being old is a pain in the ass if you think about it but Kathy and I had a good life. I miss her, but the boys are doing well.” He laughed “They’re still boys. That’s funny. When Eliot came in yesterday, a lady asked him if he were a resident here!”

Robinson walked carefully with his walker back to his room. Even now, he gave the impression of a man who had once been very tall indeed. His legs were still almost as long as they had been so many years ago.

Room 100. As he shuffled carefully into the room each day, it would pass through his mind that he might actually have to keep going not just to room 100 but to a hundred years of age. “Well, you live with it and you do the best you can,” he would say when people asked him how he was doing.

On the morning of Christmas eve, he was sitting at the breakfast table in the dining room. He had finished a pancake and a bowl of grapefruit and was about to pick up his coffee. He heard Elaine’s voice.

“Mr. O’Connor, there’s a letter for you,” she said. “It looks like it got lost in the mail.”

Elaine placed it carefully on the table to his right and then pulled up a chair to sit beside him.

Part of the post mark was difficult to read, but it had been mailed in 1946. Elaine carefully opened it and handed it to Robby. The date of the letter was October 17, 1946.

“Dearest Robby,” it began. “My heart is torn as I write you this letter….”

The handwriting had been instantly recognizable anyway. Robby looked at the signature. It was from Marie. The last line of the letter read, “Hoping to hear from you soon, All My Love.” As he read the letter, his mind slipped away from everything that was around him at that moment – Elaine, the coffee growing cold on the table beside the empty plate that still had some syrup from the pancake - into the state of a waking dream. He could almost feel Marie’s vitality, hear her laughter. The address she had printed carefully in the very center of the letter was in Chicago. He had never been to Chicago. Marie’s engagement had broken off. She wanted to see him as soon as possible.

That night, he dreamt that he was a child again, at that parade in Philadelphia. A little girl turned toward him excitedly and said, “Look Robby, it’s John Phillip Sousa!” The little girl looked so much like Marie! He woke up. He had placed the letter on the nightstand beside his bed and he reached over and picked it up and brought it to his chest.

In the days that followed, and there were many of them, Robby often thought about something he had heard long ago, that an ancient Chinese philosopher had written about a dream. The philosopher had dreamt he was a butterfly. He had been very happy as a butterfly and had no idea that he was a man dreaming that he was a butterfly. When he had wakened from that dream, the philosopher wrote that now, in his daily life, he could not be certain whether he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or whether he was a butterfly dreaming that he was a man.

Robby had known about this story for most of his life. And yet it was only after he received that letter from Marie and had that dream that he felt deep inside him what Chuang Tzu had actually experienced.