Waiting for Cocktail Hour

I have been trying to finish writing before cocktail hour. This fulfills an obligation, like making my bed when I get up and not letting it lay there, a snarled, disheveled mess. And it also lessens the odds of yet another maudlin writing tour of some relative’s death or a break-up from decades ago.

This is hard, though, because a lot of my writing career, such as it is, has been commissioned under the influence. So much so there was usually a ‘writing drink’ prior to the cocktail hour drink, the drinking of which then became celebratory since getting to drink #2 meant that my blog post for the day had been sent off to my vast audience.

A writing teacher once said to me, and I have repeated this to myself hundreds of times, that the most important thing about writing is to have something to say.

So what I have this to say today, sitting here on the shores of Lake Superior, without a drink but with two dogs who lay down on the weather beaten planks of our porch to sun themselves and then get up minutes later to rearrange their limbs, giving off the message that they have yet to find what they are looking for, everything is very still here.

The sky and the grass and the lake are as still as a painting. Motionless. It is perfect but short-lived for now, as I’ve said this, the wind is picking up and I can see the fine breeze skimming on top of the water and the thin reeds of beach grass waving just slightly.

Never mind.