Snippets in a Bowl of Marbles

I put together sixty-seven of my 100-word stories into a chapbook called Snippets.

A graphic artist whom I’ve known for close to fifty years created the cover and then carefully laid out the stories. This is harder than one might think because of how a chapbook is constructed. It takes skill. I know this because I tried laying it out and it made me crazy.

The idea of the chapbook was to print it and give it away. So, I ordered 100 copies and I’ve been giving them to people I like – friends, family, people in my writing groups. If recipients weren’t standing directly in front of me, I mailed them copies. I liked this. It felt like sending things for Christmas. Real things – not gift cards or presents in big fabric bags from Amazon.

I gave a copy to each of my children including the daughter who passed away in June. She remarked on one story having to do with Nicaragua, “Adoption,” page 32, asking if it was about when I came to Nicaragua to bring her back to America. It was. She didn’t say anything else about the story, whether she liked it or not, but I noticed that when the nurse asked her to pack up her less essential things prior to a move to ICU, she put Snippets in the grocery bag that also had a small plant I’d given her that had wilted, earrings and a beaded purse that a friend had brought (I could never figure out why) and several self-help books, I guess because visitors thought being quite ill in a hospital is a good time for reflection.

She kept other books. Oh well.

I could make something of that. In the giant bowl of marbles that is the aftermath of a child’s death, everything can have meaning. I think of that when I look at the small stack of chapbooks on my desk. How I gave one to my daughter and she gave it back. Maybe it was for safekeeping, she didn’t say.

There’s no way of knowing. There’s no need to know. I just stir up the marbles on move on.