A Rolling Stop

My most memorable ticket was for a rolling stop at a posted intersection. "Hey, you're my daughter's pediatric nurse!"  Officer Mills announced, wagging his pen in my face.    

"Um... yes... she's a cutie." I flashed on all the sharp objects I'd poked his beloved with through the years.

He handed me a ticket. "Just a warning. This time."

I stuffed it between the pages of a yellow legal pad I kept in my car and forgot all about it for forty years.

A yellow pad was my constant companion because I was writing a book. Scribbling it out in the lunchroom, bleachers, dentist office. Divorced with a young child and twelve-hour workdays, I wrote during spare moments. It was my secret love affair. My son's bedtime stories were snippets written throughout the day. The dictionary and thesaurus were my best buds. Cut and paste involved scissors and tape. Research meant phone calls, library visits, interviews. I used an old, hand-me-down Underwood typewriter for the final draft, I still have it. I adored the ratcheting sound of the roller and the ding of the return bell and hated smudgy carbon paper and white-out and centering and columns. Word processors are from the hand of God and they're going straight to heaven. I'm sure of it.

After studying the rules, I approached publishing houses with exuberant confidence. Only original pages were accepted because photocopies weren't as good back then.  It took three months for a rejected manuscript to come back, often with coffee rings and dog ears. I was told this meant they'd made it to meetings before hitting the sludge pile. Those pages couldn't be sent out again, so my trusty Underwood clanked into the night. The cost of paper and postage was piling up alongside rejection slips and I wasn't having fun anymore. I decided to stop trying to become a published author. 

But it was a rolling stop. You know how it is, writers write, right?

Through the years, I wrote for anyone who asked, the school and church and newspaper and weddings and funerals—on a computer now, though a yellow legal pad could still evoke raw lust. I checked out local writer's clubs but found I'd rather hack my arm off than read in front of a group. Three years ago, I discovered Write-On followed by Wattpad and a hole in my life was filled by extraordinarily gracious writers. 

Recently, I was cleaning out a storage bin and found a yellow legal pad full of story ideas with a forty-year-old traffic ticket stuck in the middle. The excitement of those pre-rejection slip days returned with the intensity of first love. Right then, I resolved to finish writing another book-length manuscript just for the joy of it. I can do that because I belong to a community that welcomes all skill levels and criticism is always constructive and rejection doesn't exist.