ANYWAY STORIES: DEATH GRIP
By Greg Moody
I’ve been accused, over the years, of holding my writing implements in a death grip.
Mrs. Sheldon, fifth grade penmanship teacher, leaps to faded Eastman Color Life in my mind, taking her irradiated-milk-fortified charges through the peaks and valleys of Palmer Method cursive, wielding her Eberhard-Faber wooden ruler with quick dispatch, catching my knuckles a sharp report, while the patented brass edge cuts a delightful groove in the soft-flesh valley between.
“Loosen your grip,” she’d wheeze, the need for a fresh Winston calling her home.
I’d drop the instrument, shake my hand, then go immediately back to the grip, as if said Bic or Dixon Ticonderoga #2 would suddenly grow legs, straight out of a Chuck Jones fever dream, and make for the open window and the farm fields beyond.
As I consider this deficiency in my psychological makeup today, I have to wonder why I’ve always done that, held so maniacally to the pencil that it squeaked and raced in my writing as if I was desperately trying to get the words out before the fully formed idea fell out of my focus-of-a-squirrel brain and skittered off to …
… too late.
Anyway.
By now, if this was a normal day, I’d usually be off on a new topic, a new train of thought, over there on Track 42, but I’ve magically, and, quite unexpectedly, caught the wave again, fully prepared to ride this puppy out. Shall we?
Now, what were we talking about?
Ah, yes. Death Grip.
I’m thinking that’s a solid title for something, maybe the story of a writer who holds his pen too tightly for his teacher’s liking and rushes desperately to get his words down before another wondrous idea once more slips down the rabbit hole to be lost forever, or, at least until 2:37 am, when it leaps back happily into his head, causing a frenzied moment of note taking before our hero slides back into the ether, waking up, still chuckling, only to read the the scrawl that seems to say, “Rototiller — funny word?”
I still hold my pen too tight. I still write too quickly, skittering over the page, the word and the thought at hand. I get moving at such a frantic pace that my handwriting looks like a variation on Mandarin pictographs as performed by Charles-the-Carnival-Chicken.
(Two shows nightly. Matinee on Wednesday.)
In a way, that’s good, because my family will never be able to decipher my daily journals and discover what I truly think of them, though, on a sad note, my daily pearls of I-just-woke-up-and-haven’t-had-coffee-yet wisdom and phyllo-deep thoughts will thus be lost to those future generations who will spend their lives wondering how those living through Trump-o-Mania burned their creative fire while under the influence of massive doses of Ativan.
Anyway.
My penmanship never progressed past basic scribble, especially after Wilma Wilson introduced me to the joys of the Royal Corona keyboard, on which we were trained to move at a quick metronome beat.
“Go, go, go — hundred words a minute!”
Leading, of course, to the realization that we were nothing more than typewriter galley slaves and Miss Wilson wanted to water ski.
Ideas took a back seat to flying over the keys, racing to get the sliver of a thought down before it once more skittered down the garbage chute, lost forever.
Ah, me.
And so, in a endlessly continuing effort to get inspiration to the page in a legible form, I buy new pens, bold gel balls sliding ungracefully over the wide-ruled page, more pencils than could ever be chewed to a pulp in a lifetime, and keyboards, ones that clack like an old Olivetti, ones that promise ergonomically functional comfort, others that fit in an under seat bag, all TSA compliant, attached to big screen and small, I-Pads, Surface tablets, off-brand, on-brand, whatever bits and pieces might catch the wave and propel one moment of inspiration to the top of crest, driving it toward a satisfying conclusion upon the safety of the beach, all at the speed of my thought.
Once again, it doesn’t work.
Thousands of dollars in this-time-for-sure computer equipment and writing programs that fail to unlock the mind, free the soul or catch the wave.
Where is the magic machine for which I have searched all these many years?
It continues to elude.
I shuffle to the couch on wonky knees and an arthritic ankle that sings like Ethel Merman playing to the back of the St. James, sit down and pick up a battered Moleskine notebook and a two-inch-stub of ancient pencil, eraser gone and incisor-pock-marked from the graphite tip to the top edge of the Ferrule, and write in a never to be deciphered form of Sanskrit:
“Rototiller — funny word?”
It may be square one, again, but I, truly, am home.
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