Creative writing

Years ago before Grandfather passed away the family would eat traditional Thanksgiving dinner with an enormous turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, store-bought stuffing, cranberry sauce out of a can. The white meat of the turkey was dry, and the children drank milk to wash it down, whereas the adults drank wine. Given the amount of drink needed to wash down the turkey, adults should have eaten dark meat. In addition to the white meat, there was angelfood cake for dessert.

Grandfather presided at the head of the table. He had no trouble saying grace, which was the same every year. Saying grace was not like making conversation.

Making conversation was difficult. Grandmother would remember an escapade from after the second world war when they lived in Europe. They had been stationed in Germany, near Stuttgart. But Grandmother remembered visits to France. Grandfather would join in the reminiscence, but he never managed more than a few sentences of story. His storytelling always seemed to go off the rails from the very start, like a bowling ball rolling only a few feet down the lane before falling in the gutter.

Now I sympathize. It's as though the story dries up before it even starts flowing.

What difference does it make? No ability to tell a story, no capacity to imagine on my own. That is, I can follow someone else's story, just not create my own. I cannot even imagine a blue circle or a yellow square.

Most people who want to tell stories probably have active imaginations of their own. They probably have original ideas to share, and those ideas want out. That's not my case. No doubt, it hardly matters. If I make a habit of learning to tell stories, then eventually I'll be able to imagine my life being different, even it if remains unoriginal. Things cannot get better without getting different.

Damon Knight wrote a book called Creating Short Fiction. He also wrote novels and short stories. My mother had me read a book by John Gardiner called On Becoming a Novelist. That is too advanced for me, yet. So I start with the first exercise in Knight's book, an exercise in seeing. I'm supposed to look at a living thing until I notice something about it that I've never noticed before, and then write a paragraph about that.

Looking at the backs of my hands, I notice that of the fingers, only the ring finger has hairs growing on the back of the second joint. There are just a few.
Without my glasses I can barely see them. With my glasses, I count seven hairs on the left hand ring finger, maybe eight or nine on the right hand.

That's a slow start.

Looking further down the back of my hands, I see that the vein layout, although nearly symmetrical, is not fully so. On the left hand, there's only one little vein directly behind the middle finger. On the right hand, there are two, both larger than the single vein on the left hand. I am what you would call right-handed. Perhaps that makes a difference.
Furthermore, my right pinky finger is several millimeters shorter than my left pinky. It might have something to do with the way I sucked the ring and pinky fingers of my right hand as a child. I twirled my hair at the same time with the left hand fingers. Similar to thumb sucking in normal children.

Maybe next time I should look at one of the cats instead.