How that One Random Shoe Ended Up in the Road

For the last few months I've been going to Art Club, an informal gathering of artists that my friend MAK started. Now, Art Club isn't exactly what it sounds like. We look at art and talk about it; or we have a discussion question like, "What does it mean to be an artist?" We had never made art—until this past Wednesday.

Since no one had volunteered to facilitate our discussion for this week, MAK decided that it would be fun to do a little free writing with jazz music playing in the background. I've always been terrible at free writing. Maybe because my perfectionist side has trouble relaxing and letting the thoughts flow. My inner editor gets overly focused on the details of sentence structure, diction, and punctuation, which makes free writing more like torture than riding a roller coaster.

But on Wednesday night at Art Club, I let my thoughts carry me away. The result? I wrote fiction for the first time in about two years! It was exhilarating. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to make up stories.

Just for fun, here is one of the fictional scenes I wrote this week. The only edits I made were to add paragraphs. Enjoy! 

"How that One Random Shoe Ended Up in the Road" 

Even when you think your day cannot get any more awful, it will. Trust me. I've been there.

My boyfriend dumped me that morning. I spilled red Kool-aid all over my new white shorts. And then, as I was crossing the street to get in my car, I stepped in a pothole, with a car coming down the road toward me, and I couldn't get my foot back out. It wasn't a particularly large pothole, but it was large enough that my foot (and I have big feet) could go in it. Why my foot wouldn't come out, I have no freaking idea, but that car wasn't slowing down and I was like, "Holy crap, I'm going to die."

So I bent over, untied my shoe, and booked it across the street without it. And what do you know, that damn car hit the pothole and my shoe sailed through the air at least 25 yards and landed in somebody's driveway. He was just backing out and squashed my tennis shoe flat as a pancake. 

I swear this all happened in the space of 75 seconds.

Seeds of Sound In Silence Grow

“I love this song.” It’s a phrase that is much more likely to come out of some of my best friends’ mouths than out of my own. You can ask them. I’ve never really been one to fall in love with a song, to hanker after music, to desire it. And I don’t usually go out of my way to listen to music, because, in general, I prefer silence.

But music, I’m beginning to slowly discover, can make the times of silence in my life more fruitful. Or at least music makes the silence more reflective than routine. It’s like the difference between digging a hole in the ground for the sheer entertainment of seeing how deep you can get and digging a hole for the purpose of planting a seed in it.

Music in the in-between-times can help the silence to have a purpose. Music plants seeds.

So silence and sound work together, and sometimes it is good to soak myself in sounds in order that my silence will benefit from it.

I know this because the lyrics of Josh Garrels’ song “At The Table”—which I have been listening to and learning to play on guitar—have been stirring around in my brain for the past week.

I went the ways of wayward winds

In a world of trouble and sin

A story of prodigality, reconciliation, and conversion, the lyrics cry out to me as a sinner. There is always a place for me at the table of my Mother, the Church.

For each of us, there is a place. We are welcomed in the arms of our loving mother; our Father comes running to meet us. The prodigal son is welcomed to the banquet of the Eucharist.

Quotation from "At The Table," by Josh Garrels