MY FIRST LOVE

This is my first blogfest. I'd like to thank Alex J. Cavanaugh for the opportunity.

There are four areas specified by this blogfest: books, movies, music, and people. Since I'm new at this, I'm only going to choose one.

I intended to choose a lover/boyfriend/unrequited love but, in thinking back, I remembered my very first love of all. Memories popped out at me with images so clear and striking and heart stopping, I felt as if I were there.

The years melted away in a heartbeat and I was five years old again waiting for the front door to open. Like a wriggly puppy unable to physically contain my joy, I would run to him the moment he stepped inside the house and be swept up in his big, powerful hands, tossed into the air to my exhilarated squeals, heart pounding wildly. He'd catch me like a football, hands around my belly, then fly me through the front room, Peter Pan style.

"There's my girl," he'd say as he carried me into the kitchen where mom burned dinner in her 1950s apron and gingham house dress. They would hug and kiss with me squeezed between them floating in the cocoon of love they wove around me. Safe in my cozy little world.

Yeah, it may be cliche, but my first love was my daddy.

That safe little world is gone now. I'm sixty, just got laid off and feeling deeply alone and vulnerable in the harsh reality of a hostile world. My father is almost ninety now, stooped and frail with cloudy eyes, a failing heart and a mind that struggles to be some small part of what it once was, but sometimes I still see him through the eyes of that little girl--tall and handsome and strong and with love shining bright in his blue, blue eyes.

He was my first hero. He flew me to bed so I could feel like TinkerBell. He read me stories of wonder as I fell asleep. When I wanted to touch the stars, he stood me on his steady shoulders to help me get closer and told me to reach. And when I asked questions he not only answered them but set up demonstrations and drew diagrams. He was never too tired or impatient to listen. He's the man I've compared all others to in my life.

He's my dad and he was my first true love. I am and will forever be his little girl.

Love ya, dad.

Not My Hand

I looked down at my hand today and I saw it. Really saw it. It's not the hand I remember having. Suddenly there are lines and wrinkles and freckles. They can't be age spots; they have to be freckles. It isn't my hand but I did recognize it; it is my mother's hand.

The shock spiraled me into a memory from my twenties. In a creative writing class I took in college, the instructor was encouraging us to write and never stop. He told a story about an elderly women who took his night class and how frustrated he was with her because she had waited too late to start writing. He encouraged her to quit because developing talent as a writer takes time she didn't have and memory skills she had already lost.

I remember thinking that would never be me.

And now here I am getting old and feeling it's too late to be a writer.

When I took that class, I thought the instructor was an idiot. Words and ideas gushed from me at that age and I couldn't imagine ever losing that. Now, I think he might have been right. Writing is hard work now. Words and ideas merely trickle.

Is there a point in life when you are just too old to write? Or, like everything else with age, it just gets harder to do, but not impossible?