Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

What I’m (th)Inkingabout

It’s Tuesday — so here’s the prompt

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Your main character is asleep and though it is early, the sun is lightening the room enough to discern furnishings and objects about the place.  Have your main character begin his usual wake up routine.  When he gets up to sit on the side of the bed for the last residuals of sleep to pass, have him notice something in the room that is just not as it should be.  Maybe someone else’s shoes are next to the bureau or perhaps different jewelry is in the tray where cufflinks or earrings are normally left to be put away later or used again.  Maybe the bedding is not the same as it was the night before. Whatever it is that is different, have your character figure out why it is.

(To avoid the he/she, his/her, etc., inserts to avoid saying “they,” I put a male reference and for no other reason.  Replace it with a female reference if needed.)

Never thought I would own an RV

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So we decided to get a motor home, and my husband became married to a motor home online sales site.  He searched all the time, sometimes showing me the ones way beyond our price and others within range but not configured the way we wanted. We looked at a few and they were intriguing in unique ways.

The first was pretty good, but the owner had made no effort whatever to remove her stuff or clean up the RV.  Really, shouldn’t a person clean out the stove, vacuum a bit and air out the refrigerator when you know people are going to be snooping about?  You know, if you are going to sell a house, you should neaten things up a bit, maybe bake cookies so everything smells good.  We’re pretty good at looking beyond such stuff.  All the same, it was the disorganized one in my mind, besides being just too small for the price.  Had it been nice from moment one, I might have been won over despite the size.

A second looked better, larger and neat but too much looked nice but didn’t work. If we didn’t want to drive it any where, we were good.  The engine was spotty when it came to power, not all lights were working, inside and out, no refrigerator, etc.

We looked at a third because the price was good, but it looked like it was used by hunters without a care for cleanliness, not to mention quite a bit of the practical items missing or damaged. I began to think what we could afford was just not what we would want.  But the man kept looking.

He found another that looked pretty good in pictures and was said to be in pretty good working order.  So we knocked on the door clearly waking up the owner (even though we had made an appointment) who looked like he had partied all night.  He let us tour the RV, and I tried really hard to smell beyond the distinct odor of less than legal ingredients, look beyond the poor and abandoned attempt at refinishing the cabinets, the replacement couch (a metal frame with a lumpy mattress), no refrigerator, etc.  It was the largest we had looked at, and we wanted to give it a chance, so we talked about how we could renovate the inside figuring it would come to about $1,500. But did we really want a vehicle that might cause us to be marked by a drug dog at school because we spent too much time in our RV’s fumes? We started referring to it as the drug den RV in order to differentiate it from the others that were just not what we wanted.

So he found another weeks later and pretty much after we had both determined we were going to have to save another two grand to get something we would want to camp in.  I went along, prying at my not so open mind.  We arrived in a really nice neighborhood, upscale country.  Checked out the RV on a cold rainy night.  Nice colors (time-faded pink, almost tan — no stripes or gaudy colors), everything worked, all original except for a new refrigerator, fellow educators and the price was right for us.  So we own a motor home.  But my husband after all that looking at fixer uppers cannot leave well enough alone.  He’s busy making prettier what was already pretty.

Another Tuesday night writing prompt

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Everybody has one of those items in their house that they don’t know the purpose of. I once had a slender silver cylinder measuring thingy (received from my husband’s family and sold by him at a garage sale) that was also a music box (say 8 inches tall, base included, and 2 inches in diameter).  That is, if you turn the little crank on the round silver bottom, it would play a tinny jingle.  It had marks engraved down the side I believe for measuring portions of a cup.  But if one were to put flour or sugar in it, the powder or grains would filter down into the music box box below through the margins where the silver cylinder and silver base met.  It was definitely silver, tarnished and all.  So the question is what was it used to measure?

Your prompt in all of this is find your strange item and give it a history and a purpose.  Or it you don’t have such a thing, give mine a history and a purpose. And share it with me. I would love to know the possibilities behind it.

Tuesday prompt time

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This is more of a change in perspective than an actual topic prompt.  What I suggest you do is go sit someplace where you don’t usually go to write.  In my class, I have my students sit on the table or beneath it or face a corner.  How many teachers ask you to sit on their tables (none that I know of, unless you are in my classroom)?  Each of my students find something to write about because it is such an unexpected place to be.  But you could sit behind your couch, or underneath the porch swing or in a tree, behind the rose bush or under your bed. Sure some of you are saying, “Done that.”  So find your own out-of-the-norm place and see what comes to mind and out those fingers.  If you have trouble coming up with something, write about “going sideways.”

My father and I married people allergic to cats, but…

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we did have the good fortune of having cats in the family prior to those marriages.  So what made me think of this?  I saw a Siamese cat, a beautiful brown point, sitting on a porch as my husband and I were driving home today from the store.  And I just starting thinking about my dad’s Siamese cats, Ming and Ling. (There was also a parakeet whose name I cannot remember and a chihuahua named Pepe, but they have their own stories which I will leave for another time.)

They joined my dad’s family before I was born, but not too much before as we still had them when I was five, and they were pretty feisty then.  My father told me those cats were fearless and intelligent.  He said there was a full-size standard poodle who lived on the block, and it would walk past the house and menace Ming and Ling, even chase them if he thought he could get away with it.

Well, one day my dad was at home — must have been a weekend.  He noticed the two cats were hanging out in the front yard, but not just relaxing. One was in a small palm tree on the grassed area between the sidewalk and the road.  The other, we’ll say it was Ling, the male of the pair, was down below walking about the spiky trunk.  It was a fairly young palm tree, as I remember I used to hang my baby doll’s blanket like a hammock from the points of the sharp-edged trunk and place my doll inside for a nap while the slender swishing leaves dangled down about me, and that was after the cats had decided to live out on their own.

So he had noted their slightly odd behavior but had not thought much about it.  When he looked out front an hour later, they were still there, Ming mounted in the palm leaves above and Ling below tirelessly traipsing around the tree. My dad was about to turn back to whatever he was doing, when he saw the black poodle walking down the sidewalk.  He saw Ling still stepping around the tree casual as you please.  My father expected the cats to start spitting or run for the house.  But they did neither.  Ling sat down looking at the dog still a good fifty feet away.  That should have rang bells for the canine, but he planted himself firmly on four feet and then tore down the walk straight for Ling.  My dad regretted in that moment having had the cats declawed in front.  He’d wanted them to have some degree of protection, but he didn’t have much faith in the fact that they still had their rear claws.  Just as this poodle pounced on Ling, Ming leaped from her perch above on to his back, plunging all her rear claws into his back while wrapping her front legs around his neck and biting him wherever she could reach.  Ling in turn had twisted onto his own back, pressed his front paws into the ground beneath him and leveraged his rear legs up scratching at the dog’s face.  The battle lasted seconds before the dog took off making the usual frightened dog wails.  And the cats?  They just strolled back to the house.  My dad was certain it was a planned ambush.

This was my father’s story as all I remember of  Ming and Ling is that they left one day.  My father said they went off for adventures.  I recall walking around the house calling their names, hoping every day they would come back.  They returned once, weeks later, looking healthy and happy and then left again presumably off for further adventures.

I love it when a lesson comes together

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Today I was introducing the idea that interpreting poetry is heavily based in the personal experience and knowledge of the reader.  I wanted my students to have a strong grasp on perspective and how it influences how we look at things. So I found several Escher pictures online (http://mcescher.com/) and one by one (via the usual various cables, a computer, an overhead projector and a screen) presented them to my students.  We talked about each one and tried to switch back and forth to see the different images. 

I particularly like this lesson because the students get excited about seeing things in a different way.  Later when we start examining poetry and the students have different viewpoints on meaning and imagery, I can remind them of these Escher prints and how we each saw different images at first, but ultimately, they all drew together a similar idea about what was happening in the print.  They learned for this brief moment to appreciate the different viewpoints of each student and to realize those differences increase their understanding.

So today my students enjoyed a great lesson. It was one of those I wish my principal could have been present to see on those days when he is there to evaluate my teaching.  Aw well, there will be other great days when a lesson comes together and feels like I produced magic.