WRITER’S BLOCK

By Pamela Acuña-Capiz
(Published in Celebrity World and Women's Journal in the 90s)

AFTER THREE HOURS AND A HALF, the keyboard in front of me remained untouched.  Two empty Benson & Hedges packs lay on the basement floor, alongside an empty waste bin and an almost-empty coffeepot.

There are days when my fingers would never seem to stop pounding on the keys and I could come up with two or three short stories a week.  And a poem or two perhaps.  But blast those days when my creative juices would fail to flow and all I could do is stare at the blank monitor.

Must be one of the latter days again, I thought, pouring the last of the black liquid onto my mug.  It would have meant nothing to me if writing weren’t my chief source of green bucks.  Problem is, it is.

One and a half years ago, I left my job as a copy editor for the town paper to go back to my first love – creative writing.  I had hoped to work on my first novel but for the meantime, I concentrated on short fiction and poetry writing.  My works have appeared in a number of magazines but there isn’t much money in it, a fact I already knew a long time ago.  You don’t have to remind me now – my wife always does.

“You didn’t have to leave The Herald,” she would insist.

Deciding that today is a bad day to pick my brains, I put the mug on the desktop and turned off the computer.  As if on cue, my wife appeared.

“How’s the Great American Short Story coming along?” she inquired with a smile.

When I shrugged, she looked surprised.

“Nothing yet?  Maybe it’s because you’ve been cooped up in this tiny hole of yours for so long.  How about looking around for a change?  Wouldn’t hurt, you know.  There may be something good out there,” she suggested, bending to pick up the empty pot and mug.  
Before closing the door, she looked back and said, “There’s so much to write about, Ted.  You, of all people, should know that.”

I rose and stood beside the open window to look across the backyard.  As I did so, a soft breeze tousled my hair.

My two sons – Jan, five and Jules, 7 – were kneeling beside their bikes.  Both were clad in sweat-stained t-shirts.  Jan was saying something to his brother with a worried look on his face.  Jules was nodding and shaking his head, perhaps reassuring Jan that yes, he can fix it and no, Dad won’t get mad.

An hour or so later, their mom would be hollering at them to start working on their homework.

Jill is a good-sized woman with dark features, straight brown hair, and a ready laugh.  We met while we were at Connecticut College; she, studying elementary education and I, literature.  We got married after graduation and rented a two-room house in Guilford.

She taught at a nearby elementary school while I wrote for the Village Green Gazette.  When Jill’s mother died, we moved here at Haddam Neck where the old woman left her a property.

We all adored the house.  Actually, it used to be an inn built in 1813 right on the east bank of the Connecticut River.  It sure was – and still is – a lovely place to live in.  It has three floors and a basement where I put up my office plus two upstairs porches.  And each of the kids has his and her own room.  The property also included 645 feet of river frontage and a cleared beach area.

The boys loved the wildlife around.  An occasional deer or two would run about playfully.  My youngest daughter Anais had chosen a perfect spot on the porch that looks over the river where she could sit during springtime and wait for the shad.  I think what I like most was the sound of the ice breaking up in the spring like an express train.

I remember Neil, one of my photographer-friends.  He would always stall his trip and stay at Haddam Neck.  He wanted to “buy” Anais’ “perfect spot” but the little girl politely refused, of course.

Neil’s favorite view of the house was the one from Rock Landing Road which ends at the old river steamboat landing.  He even took several shots of that view in different seasons which all appeared in a New England magazine.  He said he would come back every year.  He did last year – with a wife in tow.

I climbed the stairs out of the basement and stood on the front porch.  The maple and elm trees on the yard have become bare skeletons in pools of fallen leaves.  My children refer to the maple as their “special tree”.  They claim it is always the very last in “our state” to lose its leaves.

“It even glows in the morning fog, Dad,” they would chorus.

Jill said a furniture-maker from North Carolina dropped in one time and offered her mother a huge sum for the four large black walnut trees on the property but she refused to sell them.

“They’re for my grandchildren,” the old woman declared.

I found Anais sitting under one of the trees, holding a big dry maple leaf.  A brilliant shaft of light filtering through the tree made the leaf luminous.  I silently watched and smiled as my daughter opened her mouth in awe.

When she saw me looking at her, she grinned broadly and waved the leaf at me.  Then as she heard her mother call, she brushed her bottom seat and scurried toward the house.

A steamer that runs from New York to Hartford passed by and as the mate recognized me, he saluted.  Jill once told me he was a lonely man.  His wife ran off with another man while he was aboard the ship going to New York one day.  And he never got off the steamer ever since.  I teased Jill afterwards for being a gossip.

I returned the salute and waited until the steamer became just a black speck.

A soft rose and mauve color was blooming in the west, as the October sun was about to disappear below the horizon.

Inside the house, I could hear the kids moving hurriedly and laughing at the same time as their one-fourth French mom was shouting that dinner was ready.  I turned to go inside.

I wished I had left the computer running.  Jill was right.  There really was so much to write about. #