Living Life in Draft

My wife is a blog hog—and a prolific one at that. On more than one occassion in the past few weeks, I've thought of posting to this blog about some topic only to find that she has beat me to it. The way our Christmas bear tradition was hatched in our poverty. My near-death experience with a pack of feral teenagers. The snowball luminaries I learned to make in Finland.

It's that last one that really takes the cake. I knew I would have to be quick to the computer if I was going to write about it before Thelma did. But how quick? Impossibly so. Before I had my gloves of and had dusted the snow off my sandals, Thelma had beat me to the punch.

Perhaps I'll start writing about what I'm going to do.

I'm convinced that Thelma lives her life in draft. Somewhere in her mind she is always writing. She captures life in written form and then it's just a matter of finding time to get it down on paper. Dumbledore had a pensieve in the Harry Potter stories. Thelma has a blog.

The wonderful thing about living life in draft is that it gives you an opportunity to make final edits before fully committing it to paper or post or even memory.

Take December 2002, for example. I live in the moment. It was a time of cold, miserable nights in a drafty old house with a newborn baby. For Thelma, though, it was "a Christmas of precious little sleep and precious time gazing into my newborn Mark’s eyes by the light of the Christmas tree." That's the beauty of living life in draft. My memories are rigid and brittle. Thelma's are fluid and flowing.

Every now and again I still get hung up on the facts of a situation when I listen to Thelma tell a story or read over her shoulder as she writes an email to family or friends. Every now and again I protest and insist, "That's not how it was!" But, it's only every now and again. Life is much better by the time Thelma is done with it.