Prompt #37
A Year in the Life
Hello my Monday-ers.
Happy late-August!
I don’t know about you, but I’m losing track of what prompts we’ve already done around here! Today, I started to write a prompt using “list” stories, and then I thought, wait, haven’t we done list stories already? Well, I don’t know because I didn’t go back and check. Instead, I decided to simply give you a different prompt altogether.
The thing is, it really wouldn’t have mattered if I’d repeated a prompt. All prompts are merely here to prompt you. How amazing a prompt can be! Only the moment before you read one, you literally have no idea what the prompt is going to do to your brain and where your thoughts will then lead you. We have so many houses, streets, cities, countries, continents, planets, universes, galaxies living inside of us! We are so lucky!
And so much is forgotten until we are prompted in one way or another.
For instance:
The other night, I went to a Dodgers game with my daughter. The Dodgers were playing my true home team—the Seattle Mariners. Though it’s been a looong time since I lived in the Pacific Northwest, the Mariners will always be my baseball team. Not long after the game ended (the Dodgers won), the Mariners let their manager go. In his place, they hired Dan Wilson, the Mariners’ former catcher during the glory years—meaning the years I went to a zillion games with my young kids. I’M GETTING TO THE POINT.
Well, the next morning I woke up to a text from my daughter that said, “So fun! Your crush!” And suddenly I remembered that I used to have a (pretend) crush on Dan Wilson way back in those glory years, while my very young-at-the-time daughter had a very real crush on third baseman Edgar Martinez. And then I remembered the sign she used to hold up back then, year after year, starting when she was about 7 years old—it said, “Marry Me, Edgar!” on it. She held it up whenever Edgar came to the plate and everyone who saw the sign smiled at her. So cute! And then I remembered the one year she brought that sign to the game, held it up for a moment, and then—suddenly—put it back down. My girl—not so little anymore—had all at once realized she’d outgrown her little girl sign. (Sorry, Edgar.)
So, all of that had been sitting in my head unused for a long, long time, until it was prompted forward by the baseball game the other night. Life! You never know what you will remember!
Which brings me to this week’s stories, all of which concern the memories of a certain year.
The first story (which is also a poem) is called “A Second Time,” and was written by the poet James Galvin. Take a look HERE.
The second story, by Kathryn Phelan, was actually inspired (prompted!) by Galvin’s. Called “Homecoming,” it appears in The Master’s Review and can be found HERE.
And here’s one more story. While the last two stories used “It was the year of…” as a jumping off point, this one uses a slightly different phrase (“It was a year of…”). Written by Kelli Short Borges, this story (from Fictive Dream), called “It Was a Year,” can be read online HERE.
TODAY’S PROMPT
You already know where this is headed, don’t you?
Write your own story about a particular year.
Use either “It was a year of…” or “It was the year of…” as the jump-start into your story.
Alternatively, come up with your own phrase, such as “The year we all…” Or, “The following year…” Or any phrase about a year that works for you.
If you want, feel free to use the literary device called “anaphora,” repeating the phrase several times throughout your story.
Alternate prompt: Write about a secret.
As always, post up to 400 words in the comments. If your piece is longer than 400 words, simply post the first 400 and summarize the rest! Thank you!
NOTE: I scheduled this post to be sent out this morning (August 26). I am out of town and may not be able to post responses to your lovely responses until Tuesday.
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It was the year I left. My city, my state, my childhood. I had finally earned and saved enough money from painting houses that I could afford to cross the country in the old mustang I bought, that looked cool but was so undependable I had to park it facing downhill every night, in case I had to jump start it the next morning by rolling it and popping the clutch. Sometimes by running along side to get it rolling then jumping in to the drivers seat before it got away from me. Very dramatic and sort of par for the course in an 18 year old's life of dramas large, small and imagined. But it worked. The plan that is. I made it to California, to the other ocean. I parked there at the beach, listening to Bruce Springsteen wail his heart out on the car stereo I had rigged up with my high school buddy, which was something we all cared a lot about during those years. I was free. Free to be lonely as hell while I lived on a couch in somebody's shitty apartment, waiting for my life to start and listening to a new band called Dire Straits (how fitting.) I waited for the rest of my life to start at Berkeley. It was the year the mayor of San Francisco was murdered for being gay and the cult members of Jonestown drank the kool aid, giving the world a new catch phrase for buying into dumb shit. It was the year I left that couch and moved up to living in my own makeshift bedroom, created by hanging blankets in a dining room, in a house packed with other students. Less lonely but still out of place. It was my first year at a the university that lured me across the country and that I am heading over to teach at three days from now. It was the year I found my place in the world, even though it took me many more years, decades really, to know this