Here is a vignette that I wrote quite awhile ago while I was working on an idea for a book. I got sidetracked, but I come back to this vignette on occasion, polishing it a bit here and there, wondering what I can do to finish it and what I can do to make it work in my book. And, I wonder, what can I do to give myself the discipline to write the book I set out to write?
They were old people, people who had experienced the spectacular joys of love and friendship and passion. And they had suffered through incomprehensible pain; the struggles and heartache of friends dying, loving relationships gone irretrievably sour, lost jobs, repossessed homes, and thousands of other less dramatic though crushingly painful events that helped shape them and mold their lives. Their faces bore the marks of these occasions. Years of weather and love, laughter, anger, fear, and loss had once carved deep ridges into their old faces, the creases of life in the faces of men and women in their sixties and early seventies. But these people were beyond that...they were in their late seventies and early eighties, some even older. The passage of so much more time had softened those ridges into worn canyons, wrinkles that no longer suggested specific, traumatic events in their lives but, instead, revealed years and years of life, wearing relentlessly on what had once been supple skin.
While I stood watching them, I wondered who among them had been passionate lovers and fierce fighters. I wondered what issues had prompted them to stand their ground on matters of principle. What fundamental values had driven them to be bold, in their prime, and what ideas defined them as people? I wondered what had happened to the burning embers of passion that had driven their desires in years long past.
© 2004 Musings from Myopia Blogger
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