To Learn How To Write

The little ditty below is something I typed out just a bit ago.  I have always been sort of interested in writing, but have very little follow-through on many aspirations.  Mostly, I just use one aspiration to procrastinate on another.  I welcome your comments.

                They say that to learn how to write, one should write.  To put words on paper, to form thoughts, to put words together in strings, to practice.  Yes, to practice.  That is what one is doing when one is writing.  It is merely practice for the dream of writing which probably will never come true. 

                The man sat staring blankly at his computer screen, the black cursor blinking rhythmically.  As much as he wanted to write, he could not think of a single coherent thought to type onto the document.  For fifteen minutes he watched the cursor slowly blinking.  He thought that perhaps the speed of blinking increased, and then he thought that perhaps it decreased.  At the end of the fifteen minutes, he closed his computer, collected it and his drink, and he left.

                Through the thick lenses of her tortoise-shell glasses, a woman surreptitiously watched the man leave the coffee shop.  She peered over the top of her New York Times, having not read a single word of it.  In fact, she could not read.  She had never learned, although many had tried to teach her.  Instead, she watched people.  She wore formal suits like the brown skirt suit she now sported with practical one-inch heels on her pumps.  The pumps clicked when she walked across the floor, which reminded her of elementary school teachers who wore shoes that clicked.  After the man left, the woman picked up her newspaper, tucked it under her arm, and she left.

                The clicking of teachers’ shoes drew the boy’s attention away from the toys that he was playing with in the corner.  He glanced up at the woman in the brown suit as she left, noticing her pretty blue-green glasses, then he went back to his toys.  The train needed a caboose.  The boy started to look for a red caboose.  That was his favorite color.  He was wearing a red shirt today that his mother had chosen for him and red socks that he had chosen himself. 

                When the store closed, the man was at home sleeping, and the woman was on an airplane which was about to crash.  The store owner knew neither fact, but he glanced through the coffee shop that he had opened three years earlier.  He checked for remaining customers, but he did not notice the boy in the red shirt who had fallen asleep under a brown leather chair in the corner with the toys. 

The boy did not notice that there were no other people in the store until much later, when he awoke and realized he was hungry.  Being the resourceful youth that he was, the six-year-old stood up and stretched, put his shoes back on like his mother had always told him to do, and wandered out of his corner in search of dinner.

                “Hello?” the boy called.  When no one answered, he walked himself to the other side of the brightly lit pastry counter, the side on which only adults were allowed.  He stood on the very tips of his shoes, which he noticed with pride still lit up even though they were more than a year old and much too small, and he reached very carefully into the case to pull out one blueberry muffin.  The boy wondered if he would be taken to jail for stealing a muffin, but he remembered that the store owner had looked kind.  He probably wouldn’t arrest him.

                Meanwhile, far away over the mountains, a small airplane fell quickly to the ground.  A large fire ensued, lighting a blaze in the forest which took many weeks to extinguish.  The year had been dry, and the autumn winds sent flames and leaves, twigs and smoke, swirling in all directions.  One person died in the initial plane crash, the newspapers reported, a woman who had left behind a son.

                The child had been found the next day, abandoned in a downtown coffee shop.   Many years later, he sat in front of a computer, remembering that someone had once told him that to learn how to write, one must write.  One must put words on paper, form strings of words into sentences and thoughts.  He watched the cursor blinking slowly, wondering if the speed of the blinking was increasing, or perhaps it was decreasing.