Story Starters

It's hard for me to judge if my elementary school was really as great as I remember it being. Was Little House in the Big Woods as perfect as I remember it seeming? Was age 8 as good as it feels in the fuzzy room of memory?

But The Common School was undoubtedly great and one of the great things our teachers did was to give us time every week to write stories in our speckled black and white composition books. Just to sit quietly and make things up. I wrote pages and pages of plotless adventure stories (Paris, Or, The Dark Alley, stood out, with its two titles, as particularly sophisticated; a plotless adventure story may sound like a contradiction in terms, but I found a way).

If we were stuck, we could consult a notecard box of Story Starters. Printed in type on each notecard was a first line, or partial line of a story, a line to launch the imagination, to set us fifth graders on our literary ways.

I had a baby recently (though not so recently; the excuse of worthless milk brain may be wearing thin) and it often feels as though all that's left in my writing mind is a notecard box of Story Starters. I have ideas, occasionally they even strike me as good, but I don't have the time or the wherewithal to do anything with them. They sit there, disused, like the heart-shaped cookie cutters in my kitchen drawer. Another time, maybe, I think. Or, maybe better, another person.

That is the purpose of this slog (I'm sure my blogging efforts will never be anything other than slow): to set down an idea that might be worth something to someone some day. Even today.

Many of the ideas I have, admittedly, have something to do with babies. So here goes. First. May it set you on your way.

When my son was very tiny, he smelled of strawberry jam. The top of his head exuded it, like a scone. Nothing was sweeter, or more delicious. If he remained in my arms, or my husband's, this is what he smelled like—his smell, unadulterated strawberry jam. But I noticed at a certain point that when other people held him, he would absorb their smells—a shampoo or perfume or laundry detergent. His little fuzzy pate would somehow hold onto that smell, or the smell would cling to him, like the smokey tank top you bring home from the bar. He would smell like my mother on days my mother visited. He would smell like my mother-in-law long after she'd gone home.

This got me to imagining a young mother with a new baby who begins to suspect her husband of infidelity when every Thursday afternoon the baby returns home from a walk with her father smelling of a particular cloying perfume. The perfume I was imagining is Poison. A young mother I babysat for not long after I left The Common School and life became more complicated smelled of this perfume, and somehow this sense memory dislodged itself when I began to imagine writing this story, were I a slightly different person with much clearer thinking and a good dose of more time.