Author’s note: This is from a series based on my journal. Unconventional and idiosyncratic punctuation and formatting are intentional.
This afternoon Meg posted a prompt to write a story in the style of a postcard where the writer has something important to tell the recipient. She included a link to a story called Advice from My Dead Grandmother by Kathryn Kulpa. The writer basically tells the recipient to get involved in the world instead of spending all her time on her phone taking pictures of it. The story ends with the writer telling the recipient that her dog doesn’t want her to take a picture of her with a stick in her mouth. She wants her to throw the stick. In the comments to the post Kulpa said she wrote the story on top of Mount Greylock in Massachusetts. Kulpa’s profile on Substack lists several publications in which her writing has appeared. She is also an editor at Cleaver. I subscribed. It’s not so much that I liked the few posts I read. I did. It’s also that Kulpa posts mostly flash and just about once a month or less.
On my way to Dairy Queen I passed two middle-aged women each with a baby stroller stuffed with stuff covered with plastic sheeting all held together with rope and bungee cords. They sat talking on a bench by a bus stop. The sheeting bulged and shined in the slanting afternoon light. At Dairy Queen Jasmine and Trinity were working. The ice cream machine was not. Jasmine had a tech there fixing it but she thought it would take a while. No lie, she said. I got a Dilly bar instead. At a table by the front door I read Davis’ Can’t and Won’t. I was recently denied a writing prize because, the title story begins,
they said, I was lazy. What they meant by lazy was that I used too many contractions: for instance, I would not write out in full the words cannot and will not, but instead contracted them to can’t and won’t.
On my way home I passed the baby stroller women again. They were about half a mile further toward Dairy Queen, pushing their strollers up a small incline where the road rises. At home I read about a woman who went on a trek in Tibet after her sister died and her husband asked for a divorce. She worked on feeling grateful and forgiving herself. It took her three days and she needed oxygen just once.
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