Steel or Twine

Some days, the things that hold you together - your work, your family, your writing, your health - are solid guy-wires (pun intended), steel cables anchored in concrete, supports that you know you can rely on through good times and bad.

Then there are the other days. Maybe it starts as string of little things – you go to the grocery store for cream because your dog woke you up at two thirty in the morning with an urgent desire to go out, so now you need the cream for coffee to wake you up, and then later, for a white Russian when you can't sleep, and as you're about to enter the store the fire alarms go off and they clear all the patrons before you can buy anything.

Or maybe the string is not so little. You're still struggling with nerve pain from the case of shingles you had back in January. Nobody wants to publish your old stories, and your writing group tells you the latest one has a point of view that's all over the map. Your dog has thyroid cancer. Everything you think you need to do costs money.

Your wife has breast cancer.

So you start feeling that your supports look more like this.

Twine happens.

But after a while you think about things, you talk it over with your wife, and you realize that the cables are all intact – they might be stretching a bit in the storm, you can even hear the steel humming in the wind, but the coiled, tempered metal is strong, the bases heavy and solid.

You have health insurance, from a job where you can sometimes work from home, and a patient, understanding boss. You haven't even touched that emergency fund in the bank. Your dog is under the care of the city's best canine cancer specialists, and most important, your wife's cancer is Stage Zero, which means it was caught so early that some medical authorities don't consider it to be 'worthy' of being called cancer at all.

So you buy a large coffee at Dunkin' Donuts, and contemplate having a glass of wine with dinner. And there's time tonight to rewrite that new story and fix the wandering point of view, and you send those other stories out to a set of different journals.

Steel, not Twine.

Thanks for Reading,

Stephen