The Over Achiever

Every now and then I play around with the short-short story. It amuses me to see how much 'story' one can tell with so few words. Here is today's effort.(100 words)

The Over Achiever

©  Hazel Campbell 2015

 

Nobody likes my mother. She is an overachiever and batters everybody with this. "I" is the centre of all her universes. Anything you can do she has done better. Hell! I don’t like her.

   I am a good cook. She has fed presidents.

   I applied for training to go to the moon. She is the moon.

   I killed my husband. She murdered three of hers.

   They allowed me to witness her getting the fatal  needle for her crimes. She was the first woman in my country to be thus executed. 

   I wonder what she will overachieve wherever it is she has gone.

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Good old Anancy story days and nights

Thinking about the far away days when there was no television, and home entertainment was only radio or storytelling for the children in the yard at nights, if you were lucky to have parents or any adults who had not yet divorced themselves from their rural connections and had a fount of these stories to share.

     The stories were very scary and to hear the adults tell it, even more so in the rural setting where the only light was from the moon as they gathered in front of someone's house to hear about the hauntings of duppies or the antics of Anancy. Many are the stories about not being able to walk home in the country darkness, especially if alone.

But, what I have come to realize is that the greater part of the experience was the sense of community; the coming together, the feeling of camaraderie as people laughed together or commented on aspects of the story or added their own witty comments. It was also a learning experience for the children as the adults commented on the wisdom or error of the ways of the characters in the stories.

Domestic entertainment today is fast becoming an individual event, between the I -phones and I -pads and I -tablets and I - laptops . . . you name it, everything is now I. Even the gathering of the family  in the living room to watch television together is fast becoming a thing of the past as each person does his/her  own thing on some electronic devise. Such a loss.

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Happy Teachers' Day - All

I wonder if teachers today still exert as much influence over the lives of their students as they did in my day?
 In my day, teachers were demi-gods. Very few of us would dare to defy a teacher, as any complaint from a teacher got severe repercussions from home. A teacher could shame a child into compliance by a word or two in the classroom.
  It is still true, of course, that teachers have their students welfare at heart, for a student who turns out well is a credit to him/herself and the school.
  Of course, there were awful teachers. They are people too. Like many of you, I met some bad ones as well as some outstanding ones. For most of my early school life I went to a sort of little private school (couldn't be called a prep). It was very small with only one teacher taking us through. Miss Shirley taught me for most of my early life. She made me believe that I could achieve things I never could have dreamed of. Knowing the limitations of my home, she prepared me to get a scholarship to Merl Grove High, which set the pattern for my later life.
  The first day, at registration at Merl Grove, Miss Miriam Speid, the very scary headmistress, told me, "You are born in July, you will have to work hard for everything you get in life" Subconsciously, this remained the mantra for my life. She also told me that as a scholarship child I would have to participate in everything the school did. All extracurricular activities - choir, drama, speech festivals, dance – I balked only at sports. I couldn't run to save my life and hated netball etc.
  But the emphasis on the arts was good for me. I loved school and all the things I got to do. In high school I met some of the teachers who would influence the way my life has gone. For one thing, the only career I saw for myself was teaching. And the exposure to creative activities pushed my own creativity. In the lower forms, as in many girls' schools, we developed 'crushes' on some of the teachers. Some didn't deserve our adoration as we found out when we grew more critical. Some did.
  The major influence on my desire to become a writer was Alma Mock Yen (nee Hylton).I had always loved reading, but she made reading more than merely pleasure. Her literature classes were inspiring. Somehow she made the words lift off the page and invade my soul.  She made Shakespeare come alive as if we were right there in the plays with his characters. Right there at my desk, I flitted about with Ariel and sang:

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:

In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat’s back I do fly

After summer merrily.   

Merrily, merrily shall I live now

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

 Even in the lower forms she forced us to be critical of what we read. We couldn't get away with merely saying the we 'liked' a piece of writing. We had to say why, out loud, in front of the class. This forced us to really think about what we were reading. These many years later, I still remember some of her classes. I recall how impressed I was when she insisted that we write simply – not using big words just for the sake of using them. The best writers who made themselves understood by all used simple language, impressively. She cited Winston Churchill (and told us to go read his speeches) who inspired a nation with words which everyone could understand and readily repeat.
  I was in pain when I went on to university and had to adopt jargon, pertinent to the subject area, and complicated (pompous) ways of expressing our thoughts in order to 'impress' the lecturers (or so we thought). (I wonder where a certain Bajan lecturer is now?)  It was joy when I could ditch all that and write in a more comfortable style.
 Today, I thank all the teachers I met. Those who had both negative and positive influences on my life. In my old age, I know that things go the way they were meant to. We are free to use our experiences as learning tools for later life. I can read and write and understand life, a little better, because of all my teachers.

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Mothers' Day

She who mothered me - her husband's outside child
and yes, she was a mother hen

A very long time ago, when I was at CPTC, I spearheaded a video program of readings to celebrate Mother's Day. At the time we were locked into JBC and they had to approve the program before airing it. The program had several writers reading both poetry and prose. I remember items by Kamau Brathwaite and Velma Pollard. And M'bala, (early days for him), accompanied by his drum, did a thought provoking piece about an old woman sitting at the street corner, abandoned, was somebody's mother, too.

One of the JBC officials who had to vet the program took umbrage at this. Mothers' Day, she said is about celebrating mothers and nice things about mothers. So they didn’t carry that segment.

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For the brief period that I attended what was then called elementary school, in Kingston, the easiest way to get into a fight was to "tell somebody about their mother" (say something bad about a student's mother), even if that mother was obviously ill-treating that child).

There is something sacred about that person who carried you for nine months into life and cared for you through the stages when you couldn't take care of yourself.

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Actually, there are all kinds of mothers in this world – mothers are people too and feel all the emotions that people do – not only love but the burdens, the stress, the anger, depression, and they sometimes snap, sometimes they can't carry on, sometimes they do bad things to their children. Enter the mother who didn’t give birth, but takes in a child and does all the caring a real mother could give - sometimes more.

So, mothering is about more than merely giving birth. After all, when 'THEY' finally produce a new life outside of a parent human being, somebody is going to have to take on the role of mothering or 'humans' will be even more neurotic than they are now.

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