Creative Inkwell, is a new site dedicated to “making your blog great” and was created by Sean Platt and David Wright. It’s currently hosting a creative writing contest.

 

I thought participating would be fun, plus a great chance to help Sean and David launch their new business endeavor. When you have time, spend a few minutes from your busy day there, and read some great new fiction that’s been submitted from other talented and diverse bloggers from very different genres. While you’re there, make sure you check out the new services that Sean and David are offering other bloggers to make their websites noticed and top-notch.

So, in the spirit of Travelin’ Local, here’s my entry:

Christmas Morning and a Camera

How could she have known that simply crossing the street would mean so much?

With her children grown and beginning their adult lives at college or with new careers, Christmas become just another symbol and routine: a time off from work. Her ennui did not engulf and enmesh her into anything worse than what happens to most—an acceptance of the way things are, not what they could be.

She wasn’t depressed for sure, because long ago she knew that she was a survivor and a warrior. Life had taken on more of the pitter-patter of which many get used to, or make believe they do—full time job, a card carrying member of the rat race.

So for her, as this Christmas portended another year almost gone, a footnote in history, however, new potentialities were approaching from around the bend.

You see, her gift this year was a new camera. She was always interested in the arts, especially photography and writing, but she had foregone her career in lieu of her former husband’s, as did many women who thought that was the right thing to do. A person’s right to happiness, she later recognized was an elusive goal. But one she was determined to achieve, though, without sacrificing her moral underpinnings.

At night, she frequently loved to look at the city’s panoramic and pulsating neon lights. To her they were an art-form of translucent beauty, a swirling of momentary magic to be captured through pictures as their affects are dreams, reflections, transfixions between the day and night, between original and man-made, and the creativity of commercial use for personal art.

She has a firecracker personality, disarming to many, but treasured by those who really know her. Time waits for no one to be sure. She always knew the phrase and its implications but this day was different because she was about to cross the Rubicon she always dreamt of and knew that she was capable of. How could she have known that simply crossing the street would mean so much?

With her camera hanging around her neck, and her bag full of camera paraphernalia, she was ready.

As she crossed the street, she looked at a scene that had presented itself many times to her, the Pacific Ocean beach’s of Southern California. As usual, it was brisk and fog-laden.

But not as usual, she knew things this time were indeed different. Armed with her new weapon, she knew right there, right then at that moment that her new camera would spring life back into her morning and her life. It didn’t matter what the weather was, or how many people were out and about.

Of course, most people were home, enjoying opening presents, eating Christmas cookies, watching the parades and Bowl games.

She looked out over the beach, held the camera to her eye, and starting taking pictures. One, then another, then another, time was irrelevant. Her art was.

Looking right, left, up, and down, she took picture after picture, trying to visualize each shot in her mind before she’d shoot. Like a director concocting a scene, or a writer visualizing his plot, her mind enjoyed the new found joy of being able to compose mis-en-scene and capture the moment.

The moment is that characteristically misunderstood things that most people take for granted and now, with her new Nikon, she was able to find tremendous satisfaction in having the capacity to steal those things and seal their fate onto the palette of her memory using the photograph as a means to suspend time and beauty forever.

Unsure of all of her camera settings, for this first photo shoot, she kept her camera on “auto.” After all, the brave new world she had entered even though now fully digitized, was also the same form and reference point that the greats worked with—hand on camera, eye to the mood and environment, and senses all tuned in and on by the light, many much more famous than she’ll ever be turned photography and photographs into a cultural phenomenon, a denouement of the senses, a moment of time never to be repeated but captured onto the silver gelatin. So she’d figure out, over time, all of those “whatcha ma call its” and “thing a majigs.”

It suddenly dawned on her that she had started seeing common everyday things in a new way. The portrait of an Artist was now her new calling card as she now knew and understood that by crossing the street she had changed her life forever.

Her personality and love of people, art, writing, and technology would allow here to pursue her life-long dreams of becoming a photojournalist and the vista of her dreams were multi-colored, multifaceted and didn’t have an ending or any restrictions that she could see.

The clearer she was going to be about her destination, the easier it was going to communicate why others should pay attention.

How could she have known that simply crossing the street would mean so much?

She couldn’t have, but by and because of that fact the rest of the world was soon to find out, her personal zeitgeist of what her interpretations of her environment is.

Today was the First Day of the Beginning of the Rest of Her Life

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