Preparation

There's a great song Richard Shindell sings called "Waiting For The Storm", which contains the following lines:

I've opened all the windows wide

I've left the doors ajar

Everything that was inside

I've spread out in the yard

I've made my preparations

There's nothing more to do

But sit here in this rocking chair

Waiting for the storm

It's a solid song, and it's most definitely about someone waiting out a hurricane, or some similar natural disaster. This evening though, it carries overtones of a life lesson.

Tomorrow I am going to get up early, get in the car, and go to Ohio for the weekend. The purpose of this trip is to take the time to go through all of the things still left in my parents' house that I have yet to sort. These are all my things, which I left there when I moved to Chicago seven and a half year ago, and I have never gone back to retrieve. There is a filing cabinet full of things, a dresser, two bookshelves, a closet, several boxes in the attic, and a hodge-podge of other small things that are living in my room, awaiting the fate of the trash can, Goodwill, or coming to a new home. I too will have to spread things out in the yard, symbolically speaking, and wait for the emotional storm to come pass over them and see what remains.

It's the boxes in the attic that I'm the most conflicted about confronting. Some of the things up there, like the backdrop from a play I did at Girl Scout camp one summer, can be photographed and thrown away. Although these items are attached to memories, they aren't so strong that I need the actual items around anymore. Other items will need to be savored. I have a box, and by this I mean a box, not a shoe box, full of letters from my friends from junior high and high school, and even a few notes and letters from college. Many of these can be let go - I will keep the ones that are most special to me, but not everything. Then there are the more complex items, like my Senior Scrapbook. I spent hours assembling that thing, though I don't know why. I do like to look back at it from time to time, and the sensible thing to do would be to scan each page and then throw the book away once I have the images, but... all that time, and all that creative process seems to be a bit wasted if I do that.

Honestly though, those aren't the hardest items. They may be emotionally connected to the heaviest parts of my life, but there are ways to work with them to keep the memories and lose the clutter. The thing that's really getting me stuck is a blanket I owned when I was a little kid. It's an interactive blanket, featuring a farm scene, and there are pockets for putting these little stuffed ponies in. (That explanation in no way does it justice; I'm going to have to take a picture.) The trouble with this item isn't that I kept it, it's why I kept it. I saved it because it's something someone made for me, that I wanted and planned and hoped to some day pass along to my own children.

I will be thirty this summer. I know that women are having children later and later in life, but I have to be realistic. Between the demands of my job, my marriage, and my own desire for free time, I have to be honest with myself - it is highly unlikely that I am going to be having children of my own. I'm not even entirely sure that I want them. There is certainly a part of me that would welcome them, that has dreamed and hoped and planned all my life to have them, but there is another part of me that enjoys not having to worry about child care and what time I come home in the evening or about being responsible for anyone other than myself. And so... what do I do with that blanket? Or with the books that I kept with the sole purpose of passing them on to my own children? I'm really not sure. Maybe those things will have to stay in a box in the attic, because that's not a dream I'm ready to let go of, no matter what my more practical mind is telling me. I don't know that I won't have children, and I am someone who hangs on to possibilities, no matter how slim, so... someday I might have kids of my own. Therefore, I will keep these things. And if I don't use them, then I know that I will get to the point where I can let go of them. Some day. And then I can give them to someone else to love. Eventually.

...And A Player With A Handful Of Dice.

I have a very clear memory from when I was a child of sitting on my knees on a chair in the dining room watching my father play Dungeons & Dragon with some of his friends. As far as I was concerned, the best part of D&D was the dice. My father kept his in a Crown Royal bag. There were a few that I particularly loved - 4 d20's, one red, one blue, one green, and one golden-yellow - that were translucent when held up to the light. I used to call them "the gem dice". I used to kneel at the table and play with those dice while my dad ran his game. Sometimes I pretended I was a princess in my castle counting my treasure. Other times I imagined I was an architect, and I built myself impossible towers with as many dice as I could gather.

When I got older, I started developing an interest in creating a D&D world of my own. I was twelve when I started seriously drawing maps. My dad used to keep pads of graph paper, the green kind that engineers used to draw on before CADD, and I would steal them away along with his dice and his books so I could generate towns and dungeons of my own. I taught myself cartography and geography, the rules of weather systems and the logical placement of towns. The summer I turned 17 I got lucky enough to go to England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland for three weeks. We toured towns and castles, palaces and gardens, and I took notes, made sketches, and wrote stories. When I got back, I had so many ideas that I thought I might explode if I didn't find someone to share them with - it never occurred to me to see if my high school friends were interested in playing.

Thankfully, when I got to college there were a lot of people who were interested in table-top games. I even learned that I was "cool" because I played "old-school" 1st edition AD&D. I started acquiring books and dice of my own. By my junior year I was running two semi-regular games, and my senior year I continued one of them. I was also introduced to the world of White Wolf via LARPing. I never fell in love with LARPs - I adore the idea but am entirely too timid to pull off the reality - but Changeling: The Dreaming (Thank you, Phil!) is a story-world-concept I love.

After I started teaching I despaired of ever finding a group of people to game with again. None of my teacher-friends were interested. A few people said things like, "Oh yeah, I used to play that," and they'd laugh like it was a part of their life they were embarrassed to remember and wanted to forget. That made me terribly sad and extremely lonely. Then it occurred to me - why not ask the students? Most of them won't be interested, but the few who are might benefit. It got me started thinking about just how I'd manage to explain an AD&D game as a school-appropriate activity and what I would even call it.

Enter: The Storyteller's Society. A casual club where members work together to create characters and use role-play to interact with each other inside the construct of an imaginary environment, or in other words "Let's get together and make up stories!" And yes, I too keep my dice in a Crown Royal bag.