[friends they are jewels]

Sometimes writing evades me, while other times I’m the one doing the avoiding. When I get teasing glimpses into the thrill of finding the right words, I promise myself I’ll write as soon as I can sit down with my laptop or pen. But wait – here I am, computer-sitting, and still struggling to articulate buzzing ideas. It’s times like these I wish I could just translate thoughts (via osmosis? telepathy?) instantly onto a page and into nice collection descriptive nouns and adjectives. Though I guess if I were translating my thoughts now the page would just be a nice collection of ramblings. Man.

What stories would I tell if I could? I know what I want to write. I want to talk about the people I laugh with day-to-day, but that’s more fitting for a book and not a blog post, considering the depth and breadth of their spirits and humor and personalities. I wish I could capture them, the moments when we’re together and they are at their absolute best.

I guess I’ve been thinking about this – my friends and their stories – because it’s summer and our little May Term family has been spending nights on the beach, in the car, and walking around Boston, telling a lot of our own stories. We trade memories, giving one and taking another and happily ending up with two. The stories we’ve been telling are about high school and past summers, about first jobs and first dances and what July was like in Maine, in California, in Pennsylvania. We’ve realized we all listened to the same bands in junior high. They’ve told stories about roof hopping along apartment buildings and pipe smoking in the mountains and summer parades and living by the lake, about working in the back of a bakery and working at a funnel cake stand. They tell their own stories so well. It makes me wish I could talk about them, capture them in writing, so much more authentically. Since we’ve been trading our individual memories – the ones we lived before meeting each other – I want to tell the ones we are living now, together. Because they are good ones, and these friends are worth writing about.

I think you can get better at storytelling, just like anything else. Even if it’s a while before I can tell these stories the way I want them told, I’m okay with that. And beyond happy to say that I’m certainly not lacking any extraordinary friends for subjects. The quote below, by Ira Glass of NPR, touches on this topic. Here’s to hoping Mr. Glass is right.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this…It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”