There really is something to this “in the zone” thing. I’m telling you. Once I get down to business I get completely lost inside the words and I know how trite this sounds, but … it’s like someone else is writing the story and I’m just reading along, correcting the spelling. I wonder if there’s other times in my life when that has happened. I know there’s been times when I’ve been performing and if you’d asked me afterwards how it felt, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. It’s not out-of-body as much as totally in-body.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get as far today as I would have liked, but when I finally did get into myself, I just sort of sat by and watched things appear. It was … exhilarating. When I finally slowed down, I went into editing mode and just sort of plowed through a couple of chapters, changing things like “my mom” to “Mom” and fixing sentences to meet the format.
I know this sounds precious, but I have to tell you … everyone should be so lucky.
Today I filled in some missing meaning gaps in a chapter I started more than a year ago about diving into a wading pool. I really didn’t know why I’d done it, at the time, but through writing the scene, I honestly think I was doing it just to get attention. God, what an ass!
I spent the morning reading a pamphlet that was published by the Soroptimist Club of Anaconda in salute to Anaconda’s first 100 years called Anaconda, Montana’s Copper City, by Matt J Kelly. A true native son, Mr. Kelly had collected a boatload of information on the beginnings of Anaconda, including many of the facts and figures about the smelter that other researchers would have overlooked.
I took a couple of important things away from the reading. First off, the town was much more sophisticated than I have ever given it credit for. (For this I feel ashamed, in fact.) Also, and this is an important thing to remember I think, there’s more than a couple tales of hard-working folks helping each other through tough times. Mr. Kelly’s description of the depression, for example, shows a town supporting each other, starting a community garden, making sure the hungry were fed. Or the time when the alderman, clearly understanding they weren’t going to stop bootlegging, decided to regulate the speakeasies and charge a nuisance fine … collecting some $650 to add to the city coffers before the mayor called them in and put an end to the regulation program.
I’m sure that other places in the west have similar stories, probably just as colorful, I’d wager. But the fact that I grew up with such history leaking through the bricks of the very buildings is … astonishing. Hopefully, by shining a light into the corners of my own weird little existence there, I’ll be able to find that history and sophistication seeping through the decisions I made, and the reasons I made them. Sometimes, I just have to pinch myself.