Evolution

This blog started out as a collection of cab stories. I'd read Hack and said to myself, I've got so many more stories, and better stories.............

I told myself that when I started actually writing the book, I'd go back through the posts, and one by one take them down, as they went into the pages of the book. Otherwise, I wasn't going to go back and read my own writing. Lately, I did a little reading of my own writing, and it's evolved. I now see why people don't write in certain ways. You don't say, "Ah, yeah................ Ah, am, er.... and so forth", before you begin to speak like you would if you were actually speaking. Readers won't tolerate it. They just put the book down, or click into the next website, or what ever they do. When I started this blog, I put that stuff in on purpose because it's how I'd actually tell the story if you were in my cab listening. I, the reader would put the book down too.

Perhaps my writing has improved.

There are a few reasons for reading those old posts. How many of you keep a diary? Do you ever read that diary? How much value is there in reading your own diary?

I came across a letter that I'd written to my daughter. I've written dozens of letters to my daughter, and only ever mailed 2 perhaps. Last time I saw her, she was 5. All the stuff I'd write to her is on real paper, so to get it here I'd have to transcribe it. Last time I talked to her, she told me I'd have to do some really off the wall things if I ever wanted to talk to her again. Some time later, my mother told me she'd had second thoughts, but what she'd said to me was sufficiently off the wall that I said to myself, I should be afraid of somebody with that much hate in them.

How did I come to be talking to her? I had hunted her up on the internet, I sent an email to someone who was probably her. Bingo, it was her. I'd sent an email to one, Lisa Sherrill Schumaker of the Tuscon, Arizona area, employee of the State of Arizona. Over the years, she'd kept in contact with grandma, and my sister, but not me. I was this monster or something, and everyone was to hide her from me. Something she probably never realized was how off the wall my relationship with my mother was. Her total image of me was the one painted by my mother, her mother, and her mother's family. Great portrait.

Back in the early '70's her mother figured out that it was much more profitable to not have a husband. She had a live in boyfriend who paid 1/2 her rent, and a female room mate who paid 1/2 the rent on the house, and she went to my mother and grand parents frequently with her hand out asking for more money to tide her over until next months child support check came. I'm sure she never hit on her own family. In spite of the fact that her father was a salaried consultant to a major automaker, and a tenured professor at the University of Michigan, and a staff officer in the US Air Force, he never had any money. Just like her. She asked my dad once, and he asked what she was willing to give him for it. For ever more, she'd claim that my dad had propositioned her.

So do you ever read your own diary? Huh?