Welcome to Leslie’s Corner, a quiet place of musings and meanderings. Check in from time to time, for short essays, poems, maybe a short story, the occasional photo, and updates on the novel.

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Ms. Keig is a retired public defender who began writing plays and poems during the pandemic. Her play The Weaver and the Fool was chosen for the Exit Theatre’s Short Play Festival of 2024. She is working on her first novel, Route 6 Baby.
Ms. Keig is a retired public defender who began writing plays and poems during the pandemic. Her play “The Weaver and the Fool” was chosen for the Exit Theatre’s Short Play Festival of 2024. She is working on her first novel, “Route 6 Baby.”

  • Procrastivity

    Yeah, “procrastivity.” That clichéd idea that writers will do any little task to get out of having to write. Need your house cleaned? Call up your local miserable author suffering from writer’s block. Your house has never seen such a cleaning.

    Me? I have the opposite problem. What I hate is cleaning the house. I will do anything to get out of it. Write or clean? It’s no contest for me, I’ll choose writing every time.

    It’s not that I prefer a filthy house. On the contrary. I like having a clean house. That’s not the issue. The issue is the act of cleaning.

    As I always say, a person with a clean house has run out of yarn to knit and books to read.

    Well, here’s the thing. I’ve got company coming. Family-company. And, honestly, my beautiful niece and her wonderful family actually don’t care if I have a clean house. But that’s not good enough. See, it’s my upbringing. It’s what my mother drilled into me, from my earliest memories. It’s ok if things aren’t perfectly spic and span for yourself, but when you have people coming over, you clean the house. It’s polite. It makes your home more comfortable for your guests. It’s rude to not clean for them.

    As many of you reading this know, I am in the throws of writing a novel. My first. I have given myself a daily word count goal, weekdays only, weekends off, to get my first draft done before my husband and I go off on our drive-by Christmas. Which is another story which I won’t get into here. But let me just say, when Christmas comes, and it will come early this year, my first draft has to be done and off to my writing coach. Otherwise, it might languish until…Superbowl Sunday?

    But I’ve got company coming. So I have to clean the house. I can’t write. I have to clean.

    Which pissed me off.

    You can just imagine. I’m angrily sweeping the front porch. I’m angrily scrubbing the electric stove top. I’m angrily mopping the floors.

    And suddenly, inspiration came to me. A fight between two of my characters. And let me tell you, the fight was so clear, I could almost hear it out loud. I kept playing it over and over in my head, cringing at every spiteful comeback, wilting with every anguished tear, as I’m throwing that last used cleaning rag into the washing machine.

    The house is clean enough. Got out the laptop, and cranked out over two thousand words in no time. Who says those trivial daily chores are wasted time? Today’s cleaning conjured forth my muse.

    Maybe she likes a clean house, too.

  • Travel Advice for Knitters

    Shockingly, metal knitting needles are not prohibited by TSA.  I look at my ominous blood red sharp instruments, used for magically turning yarn into blankets, and I think to myself, if I were czar of the skies, I certainly wouldn’t allow them.

    But, allowed there are.  Nonetheless, be mindful of your fellow passengers, especially if you are among the huddled masses squeezed into economy.  Do not.  I repeat. Do not bring your straight needles.  Your elbows or sticks will be poking your companion travelers.  That will make them hate you.

    Best bet for airplane knitting:  circular bamboo.  And while I know you’re two thirds of the way through knitting that Christmas lap blanket, and I know you’re thinking about how that time of enforced sitting on the plane is the perfect opportunity for finishing it, you want to travel light.  Therefore, leave the Afghan blankets and Irish sweaters at home.  Instead, focus on fingerless gloves, socks, or lacy narrow scarves.

    OK, ok, full disclosure.  I myself, at this very moment, am breaking the small project rule, even now as I am sitting on this airplane.  Why?  Because… this time of enforced sitting on the plane is the perfect opportunity… and all that.  Dang.  And why do we avoid bringing oversized projects?  Obvious.  They take up too much precious space in your tiny carryon bag that also holds your snacks, your paperback, and your laptop.  And honestly, who has room to knit an eight by five throw in the three-square feet of personal space you’re allocated on this flying aluminum can in the sky?

    Everyone wants to see what you’re working on, and will invariably ask if you’re crocheting.  Be gracious.  That peculiar lady who swoons over your lace trimmed bookmark might just be the same person you’ll run into, in the next day or so, on that crowded shopping boulevard at your foreign destination.  She’ll give you great insider advice, or at the very least, a smile and a friendly wave.

    “You’re that knitting lady!” she’ll say.  “Look Gladys, it’s that knitting lady I was telling you about, and she was knitting from memory!”

    I’m not making this up.  This has happened to me.  More than once.

    And speaking of foreign destinations, if you should happen to wander into a yarn store, you do realize that you will find it impossible to leave it without purchasing something.

    It’s Ok.  It’s a souvenir.  Just make sure there’s room in your carryon.

    Because you know you’ll need a project for the plane ride home.

    Happy Knitting and Happy Travels!

  • Revenge

    Today while I was out and about, I started feeling a little peckish.  It was lunch-ish time, but I had a day full of errands ahead of me to get done, and didn’t want to sit too long for lunch.  I didn’t want to eat in my car either, though.  As I was considering my options, I saw a Burger King up ahead, and thought, well, I haven’t had fast food for a while, maybe I will try that.

    When I walked in after parking the car, I saw that there were a number of young people hanging about the front counter.  I asked if anyone was in line?  No, they were all waiting for their orders to be ready.  OK, I said, and stepped up to the counter.

    No one came to wait on me, for at least five minutes.  Finally, a young lady with green tinted hair and several face piercings came to the counter.  “Can I help you?”

    “Yes, thank you.  I would like a Whopper meal with cheese, no pick…”

    “No, you have to use the kiosk,” she said tapping on the big screen to my left.

    “What?”

    “Yeah.  I don’t take orders.”

    Well.  I just turned on my heels and walked out.  You see, the last time I was confronted with a self-serve ordering gismo, at a McDonalds, it got my order wrong, and also I missed out on the dollar menu options.  User error in both cases, I’m sure, but I don’t want to be responsible for punching in my own order.  I want human back and forth communication when I order a meal.

    Call me old, but I feel that part of the eating out experience, even if just at a fast food joint, is human interaction.

    When I got back into the car, I pulled out my phone and tried getting onto the BK website to lodge my complaint.  I wanted to let them know that I had just walked out of one of their establishments because they had installed a self-serve kiosk which I wasn’t interested in learning how to use.  The automatic response I received from the customer service bot was that without a receipt, it would not accept my complaint.

    I didn’t have a receipt, of course, because I had walked out without ordering.

    OK, fine.  Drove a bit farther along, came to a Carl’s Jr.  Where a very nice young man took my order, allowed me to change it after he’d already entered it in (“hold the pickles on that last order!” he yelled back), and actually brought my food out to me where I was sitting.  I’m guessing he only took that last action because the place was empty.  I imagine normally I’d have come back up to the counter to retrieve it.

    What a nice young man.

    And it occurred to me, one way to get my revenge on BK for treating me like a faceless customer whose absence they won’t even miss would be to include this episode in my novel.  One of my main characters, Nisi, a seventy-year-old woman traveling across the country in 2023, would be as unhappy as I was to be required to use a self-serve kiosk to get her food.

    But then I thought maybe it’d be a too mean thing to do to my character.

    So, I’m getting my revenge this way instead.  I’m sharing that episode with you all, on this blog.

    Take that, Burger King.

    (Sigh.  They’ll still never know).

  • Earthquakes

    I am born and raised in California.  It is therefore a given that earthquakes have always been part of my reality. I can’t say exactly when I learned about plate tectonics, but I can say that I learned about earthquakes at a young age.

    All through grammar school, we practiced our “duck and cover.”  Not for the threat of nuclear attack.  It wasn’t the fifties.  No, our duck and covers were all about earthquakes.  Those safety drills permanently implanted into my brain that at the slightest tremor, you duck under the nearest sturdy table, and if there wasn’t one, you braced yourself in a door jam.  Frankly, as a kid I really couldn’t fathom a door jam being much help in an earthquake.  I’ve always been shorter than average and that supporting beam seemed an awfully long way away from my head to do me much good. 

    As a college student, I lived in a small version of the International House.  Most of the residents, unlike me, were foreign graduate students on Fulbright scholarships.  Those of us who were undergraduates and whose ethnicity was white American, we got in by being a member of the Episcopal Church.  It was a two-story Victorian style creaky old place, with several shared kitchens and co-ed bathrooms.  Anyway, it so happened that I was on the second floor in 1984 when the earthquake that brought down my parents’ brick chimney hit.  I was sixty miles away from the epicenter, but I could sure feel it in that wobbly building.  Down I went under the kitchen table.  No one joined me.  They just stared.  I guess none of the other students had had the same rigorous earthquake conditioning that I had gone through as a child.

    My next big earthquake memory is from the 1989 Bay Bridge World Series earthquake, more formally known as the Loma Prieta.  Oakland A’s at San Francisco Giants.  The quake hit just as I was pulling into a parking space in front of my sister’s townhouse apartment.  I had left work early in order to be there in time for the first pitch.  I had just turned off the engine when it hit, and I mistook the shaking and the noise for the car backfiring.  Took a moment to realize the enormity of what happened, up to and including major destruction to the Bay Bridge itself.

    It is because of that earthquake that I became acquainted with the “Mandela Effect.”  The Mandela Effect, if you have not heard of it, is this strange but surprisingly common phenomenon, in which a whole group of people share a false memory. For me, the false memory was that the earthquake interrupted the very first game of the series, and I would have taken an oath swearing to the truth of the matter.   I nearly got into an argument over that very fact with one of my colleagues, just about twenty years later.  He said it was because of the earthquake that the Giants lost the series in four straight, because the A’s ace pitcher could have a second start after the long rest.  The A’s had already won the first two games, and now their ace could have another start.  This was an older colleague whom I respected, so I wasn’t going to get into an argument with him.  However, I knew in my heart of hearts he was wrong.  I let it slide.  

    And then I checked on the Google machine.  He was right.  The Giants had already lost two games by then.  And not only that, I wasn’t the only person on the planet who believed differently.  It is a common misconception that the earthquake cancelled game one, not game three, of the Bay Bridge World Series.

    All that shaking can rattle the brain, I guess.

    As an aside, it’s too bad the Mandela Effect refers to mass mistaken memory.  I would have wished the Mandela Effect instead referred to the earthshaking force of peaceful resistance against an authoritarian regime.

    Just sayin’.

  • Funeral Etiquette

                  This morning, I am getting dressed for a funeral service at a Catholic Church.  Joe, the deceased, was a good man I worked with in a public defender’s office for many years.  We both retired a few years ago, but he was also a neighbor, and we would run into each other from time to time.  He was a great story teller.  He used to tell our clients, “you have to learn to tell stories before you start telling lies.”

                  Yes, defendants lie, even to their own lawyers.

                  You are here reading this on my “author’s website/blog”, so you must know I am in the throws of writing my first novel, “Route 6 Baby.” The story takes place over two timelines, 1953 and 2023, traveling east to west following US 6.  US 6 is not Route 66, let’s just get that confusion out of the way at the git go.  Route 66 travels from Chicago to LA; US 6 travels from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Bishop, CA, on the east side of the Sierras, although at one time it continued all the way to Long Beach.

                  What I only just learned, from reading my colleague’s obituary, is that as a young person, his family moved from Massachusetts to Southern California, in 1952.  1952!!!! His family very likely travelled along US 6 for at least part if not all of that journey.  What a resource he would have been!  If I had only known.

                  But today’s Musing and Meandering is titled Funeral Etiquette, not Regrets about the Dead.

                  I was trying to decide what to wear this morning.  I’m not part of the family, not in mourning, so all black is not suitable, although somber is the right tone. I am reminded of struggling with what to wear to my own father’s funeral service. My mother had passed years earlier.  When my father died, I was still working, and as a trial lawyer, what I wore daily almost without fail was a black suit.  I owned seven of them.  I did not want to wear a black suit to my Dad’s funeral because the occasion called for something more significant than my daily working attire.

                  The night before his service, mom came to me in a dream.  Mom was a very proper Episcopalian lady who knew how to write a proper thank you note, how to set a table for a formal occasion, and what to wear to a funeral.  In my dream, she told me my deep purple silk pants and blouse would be just fine.

                  Thank you, mom.

                  She never met Joe, so she can’t really help me today.  Joe and I did work together, so maybe a black suit would be OK.  But I have chosen instead black jeans (this is Humboldt County, after all, and I won’t be the only person wearing jeans) with a navy blue and black blouse.

                  Then there’s the question of Communion.  I was taught growing up that Episcopalians can invite Catholics to the Communion Table during mass, but not vice versa.  My best friend is Catholic, and, terrible thought, but if she were to pass before I do, I would not hesitate to take communion at her service.  In fact, I would insist.

                  But, again, I’m not part of Joe’s family.  I will participate in the service, as a friend and colleague, but no more, and will stay seated in the pew until the service is over.

                  The real question is….how do I get hold of Joe’s stories about moving across the country in 1952.

                  Etiquette can’t help me there. For that, it’s too late.

  • Jigsaw Puzzles

                  Those of us who enjoy putting together a jigsaw puzzle understand that there are rules.  The catch is that not all families follow the same set of rules.  Fortunately, both my husband and I were raised properly, making us compatible puzzle companions.  We believe fundamentally:

    1. It’s cheating to look at the picture.  It must be hidden away until the puzzle is completed.
    2. Best practice is to sort out edge pieces first.  It is not a rule that the edge has to be completed before putting together the interior, but the edge should be well along.

    Beyond those two fundamental rules, it turns out that our inherited jigsaw traditions are not the same.  We moved in together carrying different family jigsaw baggage.

    In my family, it was Christmas tradition to have a card table out with a brand new 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle on it, fresh out of the box.  Anyone who came to the house was invited to sit down at the table to put in a piece or two, or twenty.   I have more than a few Christmas photographs of my big brother staring down at an incomplete puzzle.  As for me, as the youngest of my cousins and siblings, I seldom got to fit a puzzle piece in.  Everyone around me was both faster and more patient.

                  When the puzzle was completed, it was immediately re-boxed and donated to the Goodwill.  One and done.  It was Mom’s opinion that it was important that people with less money than we had still got the opportunity to work on a beautiful, complete puzzle.

                  Imagine my surprise then, when David and I first started dating, and he pulls out old family jigsaw puzzles.  And I mean old.  Some dating back to the thirties, some a bit more recent, like, um, maybe the seventies?

                  These jigsaw puzzles have faded, are missing pieces, are housed in falling apart boxes, and range in size from 250 pieces up to 1000.  Some were literally cut using a jigsaw, and the pieces don’t actually lock together.  They sort of get pushed together.

                  The boxes containing these puzzles are held together with yellowing tape.  Carefully written on the inside box cover of every puzzle is a running history of the dates the puzzle was completed, including a notation of how many pieces were missing at that time.

                  Mom and David, March 3, 1962, 2 pieces missing.

                  Mom and David, July 17, 1973, 3 pieces missing.

                  David treasures these old puzzles.  But he never got excited about buying new puzzles.

                  Well, I grew up with one and done.  I wanted to start doing new puzzles.

                  My first strategy was to buy puzzles in places we visited.  If we got a puzzle of the tapestries in Paris, well, that’s a souvenir, right?  And then, maybe a puzzle about a road trip we had taken, like route 66.  Or a collection of National Parks.

                  And then…along came Covid.

                  Suddenly, it was all about doing jigsaw puzzles.  Instead of posting photos on Facebook about our travels, I was posting photos of us doing jigsaw puzzles at home.  Or of the kitties destroying a puzzle we had just completed.  Or of all our jigsaw puzzles in a heap on the floor after another earthquake.

                  Facebook is a powerful thing.  Use with caution.

                  What happened is that everyone started gifting us jigsaw puzzles.

                  Therefore, the next strategy had to respond to the growing pile of jigsaw puzzles we found ourselves accumulating.

                  What we started doing is giving away puzzles at the location pictured on the cover.

                  To be honest, the first time we gave away a puzzle on location was probably a good fifteen years ahead of Covid, when I attended a work seminar close to Pyramid Lake in Nevada, and David came along for the ride.  How it is that we happened to have a puzzle of Pyramid Lake, I can’t tell you.  But it was David’s idea to deliver it to the Pyramid Lake Museum and Visitor’s Center.  Which we did.  The lady at the counter seemed surprised and confused, but eventually accepted the offer graciously.

                  Our puzzle give-away activity sped up post-Covid, however.  We’ve gifted puzzles on location in Lassen National Park, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Anza Borrego State Park, Death Valley National Park, Arches National Park, and Carmel Mission.  We’ve stopped donating them at the visitor center, though.  Instead, we think it’s much more fun to gift a puzzle directly to a startled tourist.

                  But we won’t give away David’s old family puzzles.  We even still do them from time to time.  On the inside box covers you’ll now find my name listed on the historical ledgers.

                  I have started creating “replacement” pieces out of cardboard for some of those old puzzles.  I was afraid David would be upset, but on the contrary, he was very happy to see the old puzzles “complete” again.  The replacement pieces stick out awkwardly, in my opinion, but David is happy with them.

                  My family baggage is that Christmas means a new jigsaw puzzle.  David’s family baggage is that old jigsaw puzzles mean family history.  For us both, a jigsaw puzzle means family love.

                  There’s a Christmas story that I’ve always hated: the Gift of the Magi by O. Henry, in which the husband and wife, who are very poor, each try to buy the other a surprise Christmas present.  She cuts off her hair to buy a chain for his pocket watch, and he pawns his pocket watch to buy special combs for her hair.  Each one sacrifices something very dear to the other in order to buy a complement to that special thing.  It’s an absolutely devastating story, and I really don’t understand the point of it.  Is the point that it sucks to be poor in a commercial, materialistic, and capitalist society, especially at Christmas?  Well, yeah duh it sucks, and that’s not very deep.

                  I’ve always wanted to write an alternative Gift of the Magi, one in which sacrifices bring joy to the other person, not sorrow.

                  I haven’t yet come up with a substitute Christmas Story.  We do love giving away jigsaw puzzles when traveling, though.  Maybe there’s a Christmas story in there somewhere.

  • Laundry

    A week or so ago, my husband David received a call from one of his oldest friends.  They became friends over forty years ago, but they’ve been estranged for the last three.  No calls, no letters, no contact.  Their last exchange was a “Dear John” letter response to a postcard David had written to his friend. David was told to never contact him again. Which David respected, for the last three years.

    All was immediately forgiven.  From the side of the conversation I could hear, there was laughing and a lot of catching up.

    The conversation was long.  Which somewhat interrupted my own plans for that morning.

    To sneak in a load of laundry behind my husband’s back.

    Laundry has become an irritant for me.  It’s a very easy task.  We’ve had a washer and dryer in every home we’ve lived in together for the last 25 years.  And my memory is that when we first moved in together, he’d do his laundry and I would do mine.

    But since I’ve retired, it seems we are experiencing laundry creep.  He will ask me when am I doing a laundry, so that can we do our laundry together.

    Let me tell you.  There is no such thing as doing laundry together.  It’s a one-person job.  Doing laundry “together” means I do the laundry.

    My husband and I travel.  A lot.  In fact, the postcard that led to the estrangement was sent from one of our overseas trips.  My routine, in preparation for a trip, is to wait until the day before we leave to do a thorough laundry.  That way I have my pick of what to pack, and the sheets and towels are ready for our return.  Well David has decided he wants to be a part of that laundry, too. 

    And, it has expanded from there.

    “When are you doing a laundry next?  I’m starting to run out of socks.”

    “When did it become my job to do your laundry?  You know how to do laundry.  You used to do it all the time.”

    I am ashamed to say, it has gotten to the point where I am sneaking around doing laundry when he’s not home, so that I don’t have to do his, too.

    One time, when David took me down to Southern California to meet his mother, he brought a load of dirty laundry with him.  I couldn’t believe it.  I would no more have brought a load of laundry to my mother’s house than fly to the moon.  Doing your own laundry was part of being a responsible adult.  I was so shocked that I actually spoke to his mother about it.   “You don’t have to do David’s laundry for him.  We’ve got our own washer and dryer.”  You want to know how she responded?  She said, “It’s a little thing.  Anything I can do for him, I’m happy to do.”

    OK.  I’m happy to make my husband a cocktail.  For me, that’s a fun thing, and I do that for us just about every evening.  But doing laundry?

    Before my husband and I moved in together, I lived across the street from a wash and fold.  You drop off your bags of laundry, and two days later it’s returned to you in blue paper packages tied up with string.  Really.  I’m not making this up.  It was Sound of Music across the street from my apartment, and clean folded laundry was one of my favorite things.

    But of course, I gave that up once we moved in together and had our own washer and dryer.  It was a luxury of singlehood that disappeared with adulthood.

    Adulthood.  David and I just feel differently about the laundry.  For me, it means responsibility.  For him, well, maybe it’s part of his love language.  Unconditional love means you’ll do my laundry.  Like mom used to do.   Or, maybe unconditional love means “we” can do our laundry “together.”  I just don’t buy it.  For me, laundry is a chore, just as easily done alone.

    When David got off the phone with his old friend, he was happy like a child.  He had reconciled with his lost friend.  A friend who frankly had said some astonishingly cruel things to him.  Things so cruel, I myself had to wonder if I had been in his place, could I be so forgiving.  But David’s joy was boundless.  As if he’d been living with a dark cloud that had miraculously disappeared.

    Last night, David put his own laundry in the washing machine, asked me what the setting should be, then added the soap.  Me, I waited until this morning when he was gone to sneak in my own load.

    He’s learned to do laundry. Maybe I can learn to do forgiveness.

  • Hello Friends!

    Welcome to Leslie’s Corner, a quiet place of musings and meanderings. Check in from time to time, for short essays, poems, maybe a short story, the occasional photo, and updates on the novel.