[FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

[Steve Smith]

Nick -


> Oh, thank you steve.  I was afraid it might be a bad dream.
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> Sometimes I think your mom knew my mom. 
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> I like how you write, Steve.  I wish I could find you a good agent.
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thanks for the kind words.  it definitely felt like a bad dream to a 10
year old!

A good agent/editor would be key if I had any such aspirations.   I am
definitely an ama-tuer and would probably fail miserably if I tried to
write for any more specific purpose than you find here.   My technical
proposals and the like may be a testimony to how much better I write
when I have only my own self-imposed goals and constraints! 

Mary is a published poet and when she moved here 3 years ago had the
body of a memoir which she completed and I became her first reader... 
she writes well...  but even after hiring a "coach" does not have a
submittable manuscript.  She acknowledges that she may have written her
memoir more as therapy than as something worthy of sharing widely.  

My mother was raised by older parents... her father's first wife died in
the 1918 influenza and she had 5 older siblings (3 of them half's), her
mother was abandoned with two young boys by her own first husband who
was never seen again.    Her mother died when she was about 21... and
while they lived rural (Kentucky subsistence farmers), her city-aunt,
married to an MD took my mom in during her elementary school years (age
6-12, depth of the Depression). They offered her the kind of
poverty-of-spirit that only the most strict (if of modest financial
means) Scottish Methodists could conjure (budgeting one square of toilet
paper per event when she was allowed a full-page from Sears&Roebuck at
home?).  Her aunt (and the MD husband) were also older...  having just
shipped their own young-adults out of the house when they moved her
in.    So my mom may well have been raised by parents who were your
grandparents age.   My mother is turning 91 next week.  She is in an
assisted living in Tucson which manages COVID well but not perfectly...
she voted for Trump, twice... her TV is stuck on Fox News... she used to
be very progressive (by my expectations/standards), all I can think is
that she (and my dad who passed nearly 10 years ago now) simply "got
old" and let fear take over from compassion.   I am thankful she made me
read/write (and 'rithmatic and geography) above and beyond what the
public schools offered...  she was also a self-taught landscape
painter... I found her *first* oil painting when we cleaned out the
house after my father's death... it was (literally) a paint-by-number (
I can still smell the linseed-oil as the paint dried/cured over weeks
before she moved on to acrylics).   She eventually found watercolors and
a hand/eye/voice in that medium that transcended the
literal/representational style her paint-by-number beginnings gave her.

- Steve

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