Three Things: At the Diner Edition
The neon signs, the all-night hours, the bottomless cups of coffee, the pie (oh, the pie!): what’s not to love about a classic American diner? I once wrote a story which largely took place in just such a diner, about a wickedly dry-humored elderly woman named Ellis. I never quite finished it, but every few years I revisit Ellis and her diner and tweak a scene or dust off the dialogue. Someday, perhaps, I’ll finish the story, but in the meantime, Ellis waits (not so patiently), drinking cup after cup of mediocre coffee.
For this week’s Three Things, I searched Flickr high and low for interesting diner patrons. Let’s write a diner scene, shall we?
P.S. Speaking of writing revisions, you’re going to submit your work-in-progress to this month’s Open Mic, right? Submissions are being accepted today and tomorrow only, and go live for feedback on Wednesday!
Adam Bronkhorst, American Diner, 2009. Via flickr.
Brad Kayal, South St. Diner, 2008. Via flickr.
dakota.morrison, 263/365, 2009. Via flickr.
And here’s a bonus for you dear Twin Cities natives:
QuoinMonkey, Neon Sun Rises Over Mickey’s Diner, 2009. Via flickr.
On my wordy reference shelf sits The Extended Words: An Imaginary Dictionary, by Sid Gershgoren (Red Wing, MN: Red Dragonfly Press, 2009). It’s full of, yes, imaginary words and their imaginary definitions, complete with imaginary examples of use. Such as:
CHUNG /chung’/ Expletive. A signal for finality of one kind or another. “[…] I remember clearly that, at the end of a stretched-out good hour of probing questions and answers (and the answers were not only on my father’s side, for I had good ones, too, and wide open they were), he simply said ‘chung‘ and shut off the light, and I lay in the dark with my thoughts and his hovering around me.” How and When to End It, a Manual of Style. Dorothy B. Truce and Gordon Starker Limits. 1931.
It’s a delightfully strange book, which is to say, right up my alley. But although “chung” is wonderful, the word that inspired today’s Three Things is another:
LUWILLAWAY /lōō-wil’-a-wā/ n. The drift of clouds on summer afternoons and the resulting state of languorous identification produced by lying on one’s back and looking up at them for hours. “He had shorn the sheep of their wool that morning and had finally, after much persuasion within himself, gone out to the long, rolling hills beyond the lake to lie in the grasses waving in the slight and delicate breezes and follow the strong luwillaway beyond himself, drifting bodiless over the immense, image-expanding earth.” Sleeve. Mary Adams Waysit. 1996.
Let’s write something that somehow includes luwillaway, shall we? Here are three properly dreamy cloudscapes to get you started.
Sharon Heiz, Vintage Clouds2, July 9, 2009. Via flickr.
rachelf13, clouds, January 25, 2009. Via flickr.
Jacob Gube, Cloud Texture 04, August 8, 2009. Via flickr.
Last night I paged through The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), as I am wont to do every now and then, and landed on “Lost Things”:
They are lost, but also not lost but somewhere in the world. Most of them are small, though two are larger, one a coat and one a dog. Of the small things, one is a valuable ring, one a valuable button. They are lost from me and where I am, but they are also not gone. They are somewhere else, and they are there to someone else, it may be. But if not there to someone else, the ring is, still, not lost to itself, but there, only not where I am, and the button, too, there, still, only not where I am.
It got me thinking about (can you guess?) lost objects, and the stories around them — how they are lost, how they are found, what happens in between. The recent lost-and-found roll of film in Brooklyn comes to mind (the story’s conclusion here), but not all stories are quite so far-reaching, or so neatly tied up.
So what did I do next? I headed over to Flickr to search for three lost things in want of a story. I found a shoe, a teddy, and a pair of keys. Just for you.
by Jenny Murray via flickr
by mulberry leaves via flickr
by Jacob Shere via flickr
