Aspiration

Noun:  Goal; desire; something one wishes to achieve.

e.g. Marco, whose lifelong aspiration was to be the number one seat violinist in the orchestra, was left thinking only about sabotage when it was announced the young prodigy would be assuming the premiere position.

Bella the Beagle, aka “The Ancient One”, who entered our lives in 1996 at six months of age, died a few hours before self’s plane arrived from the Philippines, in the afternoon of Monday, Oct. 14. The Man found her when he got home from work, a little before five.  She was still warm.  It seemed she had died peacefully, lying in the warm sun on the deck.

Oh, woe!

Self was quite overcome to think she had missed seeing Bella alive, by just a few hours.

Self’s other beagle, Gracie, died in April 2011, so Bella had two more happy years with us.  When Gracie was alive, she was completely cowed and submissive.  When Gracie passed away, she began to get a little assertiveness back (We adopted Gracie when Bella was about four years old, and Gracie was far more rambunctious, and completely stole the show).

The Ancient One Peruses the Backyard.  Self predicted 2011 would be her last Christmas. As it turned out, self was too much of a pessimist.

Bella the Beagle:  Sept. 30, 1995 to Oct. 14, 2013

Self’s eyes are pretty swollen right now.  It was an exhausting trip. Started 3:50 pm in Bacolod, included a five-hour layover in Manila which stretched to 8 hours, and then a 12-hour flight.  She got in at 11 p.m.  The Man has to wake up at 5 a.m. to get to work.

But when she was reading her e-mail, she saw a letter from Waccamaw accepting her story “Bridging.”  This was a story she wrote while in Hawthornden, June 2012.  Towards the end of the month, she and the other writers decided to have an informal reading of works-in-progress.  The story self read was “Bridging.”  It was only about 8 pages at the time; in August, when she last worked on it and sent it out, it had grown to 17 pages.

Totaling the time it took from the story’s inception to its final version, June 2012 to October 2013, it took only about 16 months.  She’s had stories that she works on for six, seven years before they get picked up.  Such a one was “Silence,” which was published long ago in The Threepenny Review, and was shortlisted for the O. Henry Literature Prize.

“Bridging” will appear in Waccamaw‘s forthcoming issue (going live October 31).

It’s only her 3rd acceptance of 2013.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.