The Ludicrous Life of a Writer

So, Sunday morning, my husband came in to where I was reading the paper and picked up a different section and started reading alongside me. Co-reading of newspapers is something I highly recommend. You can learn twice as much stuff by listening to the other person's comments as you can when you are reading alone.

The first thing he mentioned was that a woman who had been doing a breast cancer walk had somehow ended up dangling from a bridge that had opened up. "Maybe breast cancer didn't seem like such a threat to her life anymore," I remarked.

He laughed, and then told me that it was Marie Osmond's birthday. "I came face to face with her once outside a restroom," I told him, "but she didn't recognize me."

This sent him into guffaws that lasted intermittently for a half hour.

I was pleased to have tickled his funny bone.

Until I found out why.

"It's just so ludicrous!" he snorted between gasps for air, a half-hour later.

Ludicrous.  Hmmphf!

Well, I'm a writer, and sometimes writers think--and do--funny things.

One night, I woke from an amazing dream that gave me a terrific idea for a blog.  The dream had unfolded in such a superb story-like manner that it would really be a shame to lose it when I fell back to sleep. I didn't trust myself to remember the dream in the morning, so I grabbed the paper nearest to me, which happened to be the newspaper section I had been working a Sudoku in when I fell asleep, and scribbled down the ideas in the margin.

A day or so later, I remembered that I had done this, and I looked for that newspaper.  It didn't take me long to realize that it had been taken out to the recycling bin. I recruited my husband to go out in the cold with me to dig into the four-and-a-half-foot rubber can to find the correct section.

"What are we looking for?" he asked.

"Handwriting in a margin--in the comic section.  It would be folded in quarters with the Sudoku showing."

Well, we pulled out and looked at every piece of newspaper in that can, and didn't find it.I looked a second time, just to be sure. Dismayed, I came back in and hunted through my nightstand again.

And, I found it.

A quarter-size section with handwriting scribbled in the margin next to the half-done Sudoku. Only problem was, the scribbling I'd done was just that--scribbing. I couldn't make anything out of it, and the dream and story and good idea were lost after all.