CONNECTIONS

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

I’ve been researching and it involves me living in my car. Not totally, but this is exactly what I’ve done from 8 to 5 for several days. It’s an interesting turn of events for someone like me who isn’t into “roughing it.” I did find you can camp out in your car in a small town college parking area and no one particularly cares – even if you fall asleep mid-afternoon. It isn’t even an oddity as I wasn’t the only tired person on these sunny spring days.

This particular college requires no parking permit and though I imagine there is some sort of campus security, I have yet run into anyone questioning my being there or even policing the area. My mind wanders to crimes that could be happening on the grounds or inside the buildings, none which are more than two stories. I sit safe and relatively secure in my locked sedan.

I have seen inquiring looks from professor types coming and going, but the students don’t seem to notice me. Maybe I’ve developed that cloak of invisibility I so covet from the Harry Potter series. Maybe I am like other adults and fade into the landscape of those young enough to be my children.

I have brought snacks and a lunch with required amounts of beverages and sticking mainly with bottled water, fruit that isn’t sticky and sandwiches. I have a cell phone, a book, a magazine and a thick spiral notebook and too many pens.

This environment has proved perfect for many things I can’t do at home. There are no real distractions. A minimal sound of wind rustles leaves on the trees and hedges. Students come and go in waves and then disappear into their vehicles and out of my realm within minutes. As they exit the classroom buildings, almost all of them have a cell phone attached to an ear. They are chatting with someone, yet are oblivious to those around them, who in turn are also oblivious of their fellow students. Everyone is connected, yet detached.

I lean my seat all the way back and stare through the windshield at three flags swaying in the breeze. Old Glory, the state flag, and the college flag flutter independent from the others, yet are connected by their placement five feet from each other and centered on the main instructional center building. Like the students on their phones, each is important in its own right atop their respective flag poles. Connected and separated. I keep remembering the line from HBO’s Temple Grandin where the title character says those with autism are “different, but not less.”

I watch the groundskeeper carefully pushes a fertilizer spreader across the plush lawn. A few sprigs of dandelions mar the grass from being a perfect specimen. The bright yellow of the blooms of the flowering weed and the grass are connected, but separate from each other. Each has a separate identity. The groundskeeper will soon eliminate the weed from the yard. But one weed is another person’s flower.

Sometimes, I feel like short story writers are dandelions in the midst of a well-manicured lawn of the novelist and the literary world. Our glory is short-lived because we are weeded out as more and more magazines cut fiction from their lineups. Yet, we’re bright attention-getters who are plucked up in handfuls by young-at-heart folks who still dance barefoot on grass just because it feels good. We may not have secure spots in bookstores, libraries, or newsstands, but we have won many readers over to thinking our short stories are worthy of their time.

Sitting in a car in a college parking lot in the middle of a spring day, I munch on an apple and wonder what it would be like if I had to live in my car and steal apples from someone’s backyard during the correct season just to have something to eat. Isn’t that crime?

A short story writer has her moments of grandeur, too. Times when we see our story in print or hear someone saying, “I remember that story. It was fabulous!” It’s times like these we feel like a dandelion bursting onto the scene with a brightness no one can ignore.

I am alone in a crowded parking lot. I open my magazine and read the short mystery that transports me to another place and time. The characters and I are connected and it is not until I am finished reading, do I understand how the moment of that connected between the writer, his characters and the reader has melded us together if only briefly. Independence is good, but making the right connections is even better.