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Writing The Mee Street Chronicles has been something like making scrambled eggs. I had to break the eggs into the bowl (remember people, places and things), beat the eggs up with milk and seasoning (put the memories in story telling form), then dump the whole thing in a skillet (get the stories organized and edited to publish in a book). I didn’t know how the whole concoction would turn out. Would my storytelling turn out to be a brown-edged, overcooked mess? (My eggs often are.) A runny, undercooked goo? (I have trouble trying to scramble “soft” rather than “hard.”) Or would it be a fluffy, tasty treat? I didn’t know, couldn’t know unless I tried. Unless I took the risk. Made the jump. Broke the eggs and scrambled them.
I grew up a dreamer, and I had imagined, back when I was a kid, that my life would go like the ending of a fairy tale: That I’d live “happily ever after.” That it would all be so perfect. No need to break eggs. No need to take risks. The future was, I thought, an unclouded, golden horizon waiting to serve me up all my dreams. But it didn’t go that way. Nobody’s life does.
I found out that life mostly serves you up raw eggs, and it’s up to you to choose how you’ll eat them. Raw or cooked. If you go with raw, you just suck it up and slurp it down, I suppose. If you go with cooked, though, you can choose an omelet, poached, sunny side up, over easy, or scrambled. You make the choices. And what you choose becomes the story of what you’ve done (or are doing) with your life. I didn’t know, when I was growing up, that I really could choose. I didn’t know that my choices didn’t have to match up with what you deemed as acceptable and desirable. I didn’t know that I didn’t have to fall in line and choose what you wanted me to choose. So I spent a lot of time people-pleasing rather than living my life.
I do wish I hadn’t done that. But…. no sense in crying over spilt milk or mistakes long ago made. No sense in it because that very spilt milk—those mistakes and my people-pleasing choices—that’s what I put into my scrambled eggs to make my stories. Actually, its seasoning made the stories in Mee Street tastier, I think. Gave them an extra kick.
You tell me what you think. Go to www.amazon.com and order The Mee Street Chronicles: Straight Up Stories of a Black Woman’s Life; after you read the stories, log on to Amazon and write a Customer Review if you’ve a mind to.
2 comments:
"Adventures of a Maverick Author 3:Scramble Eggs" has th be the most inspirational piece of writing that I enjoy from Frankie Lennon. I admire how she realtes the process of scrambling eggs to her process of publishing a book. The detials in the steps that she describes makes her writing easier to understand and enjoy. When Lennon mentions that life "serves you up raw eggs" and how it is our chioce to make something out of it, I relate my life to this passage because I feel that God has blessed me with special talents and it it my choice to repay him by fulfilling all that i can fulfill in my lifetime.
When Lennon says, “ I found out that life mostly serves you up raw eggs, and it’s up to you to choose how you’ll eat them,” inspires me because I remember going through those situations. When I was in middle school I took the “raw” path and affected me in so many ways. I lost the respect of my family and was going in the wrong path at school. I soon realized that this path was getting me nowhere. Whatever happened to those dreams I had as a child of becoming a successful doctor? Eventually I got my head straight and when I entered high school it all started to come step by step to succeeding my goals. But then again I soon comprehended that all the work I was doing was not for me but to show everyone that doubted me wrong. Like Lennon says, “So I spent a lot of time people-pleasing rather that living my life”. And that’s a quote that relates to me.
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