Channie Greenberg, Granny Does It, vol. II:
A Rhetoric of Identity
excerpt
Granny Does It, vol. II: A Rhetoric of Identity Publisher:Seashell Books Retailer:Amazon Date: August 30, 2022 Length: 276 pages ISBN: 979-8848392135 |
My Imaginary Friends’ Impact on My Writing
By midlife, most gals have earned the right to run with wolves. Some women, however, prefer the company of smaller, odd baddies.
My primary associates are my invisible hedgehogs. There are enough members in my prickle to fill an entire hibernaculum. When my furze pigs are awake, they enjoy eating marshmallow fluff and shooting miniature meatballs, via slingshots, from my living room ceiling.
To boot, my wee goons love to slide down my stairwell’s banister, but only when wearing mismatched socks (that’s their “fashion statement.”) As well, my mini monsters delight in chewing select bits from my family’s leftovers and in otherwise providing my teenagers with excuses for new jumbles. Besides, my pokey critters kiss up to my husband; they encourage him to engage in extra bouts of “glorious” code generation rather than take out the garbage
Granted, my most precious, pretend friends have neither names nor numbers as they are accustomed to large and frequent litters and to parachuting off my family’s rooftop porch in the company of motorcycle-riding lizards (that latter activity repeatedly reduces their ranks.)
All in all, without those barbed muses, my writing would be stuck in frumpy mode. My essays would sound like a rhetoric professor’s mumble, not like the madness of a mom grasping midlife by frying bananas with scallions or by pushing the resistance level on her elliptical bike. To wit, it’s my household’s jaggy urchins that are answerable for all manner of my shrubbery-sourced scamps. Plus, I associate with the woodland ones populating my stories and with the sundry, intergalactic ones peering out from my pages when not tipping over my potted plants. Viz., my incorporeal, spiny terrors substantiate my belief that no writer ought to be without wonderful, make-believe friends or without a constitution strong enough to endure their frequent, domestic disasters.
In addition to my imperceptible hedgy-boars, occasionally, my older son’s fictitious Komodo dragons keep me company. Whereas those deadly brutes belong to him, they remain with me when he’s at school. More exactly, those powerful monitors curl up around my feet and elsewise function to trip me up, literally. At least, their lethal saliva, like them, is of the fanciful sort.
In spite of my fairly peaceable coexistence with those toxic fiends, one among them is devious; he’s gotten habituated to ordering pizzas because he likes eating delivery persons. That lizard contends that hunting for random fauna is taxing and that chowing on the folks who come to our door better suits him. In view of his propensity to be ruinous, I’ve not argued with him.
What’s more, per that particular reptile. who’s “all about convenience,” there are, to date, no tales. Vladimir’s a savage who’s not only possessed of a voracious appetite and an indeterminate disposition, but also of discerning editing qualities. So, rather than attempt to sate another of his unquenchable traits, I’ve sufficed with writing stories about his distant relatives, i.e., about a pod of chimerea.
Those fire-breathing rascals have filled many absurd pages of derring-do. One such rapscallion even befriended a human girl until he was forced away from that girl’s domicile for eating that girl’s neighbors (story arcs have to end, eventually.)
As per the random, extra-terrestrial beasts that circulate through our home, few of them have ever captivated me or my kin. Most often, they float hither and yon seeking out the mold that clings to our toilets, uncovering the smelliest of our laundry hampers and devouring our spider webs (at least, if my children’s anecdotes are to be believed.) I do know that one glittery species of pests liked pilfering my daughters’ costume jewelry until they got repeatedly bopped on their heads (my girls used their smartphones.) Thereafter, those aliens stopped reaching gelatinous paws into my teens’ jewelry boxes.
Whereas I have some clue about the haunts of my hedgies, about the activities of my son’s Komodo dragons, and about the undertakings of my chimerea, and whereas I ignore most of my family’s interstellar visitors, I remain mystified by the goings-on of my children’s phantom kangaroos. One of my scions claimed to have detected those mischief-makers literally hanging with an unseeable possum on our family’s drying rack. Since I’ve yet to witness such marsupial madness, I appreciated all reports of those sightings. Nonetheless, until such time as I actual see those critters, I reserve the right to doubt their existence.
All things considered, although I write entire books about relatively staid subjects like parenting, religion, and nationalism, I also fabricate assemblages concerned chiefly with ungainly creatures that go thud in the dark or that make messes during diurnal hours. If not for their motley appendages reaching toward my keyboard to “help” me write, I’d fashion fewer fantasies.
Copyright © 2021 by Channie Greenberg
