Celestial Chicken Blog

When I was a teenager, my mother started telling me stories about her father, my grandfather. He died in a horrible truck crash when I was just an infant, so I have no memories of him. My grandfather was a bit of a character. Actually, he was more than a bit. Frank was a charmer and a con man. He spent time in the 40’s in prison for conning the wrong person. This was not too long after he married my grandmother. Of course, her whole family tried to talk her out of marrying him, but she loved him and that was that. He had lots of ambition but not much education. He’d spent time as a junk man, as a hobo traveling on the trains, as a cowboy. He could play guitar like nobody’s business and my mother still has that guitar, complete with the hand-carved bone cameo a fellow hobo made for my grandpa. Yes, he was a character. While Frank was in prison, his attitude got him into a lot of trouble. He was always up to something, trying to con someone or take advantage of a situation. That’s the way he was, and he often found himself locked into solitary confinement for many days at a time. In those days, prisons weren’t very humane, and solitary confinement was a pretty awful thing. He would be put into a room that was virtually soundproof and completely dark. In such situations, there is no sense of time passing, no understanding of night or day, and everything is skewed. Frank quickly learned that if he did not do something with his mind, solitary confinement would literally drive him insane. It came to him one day when he lay in the darkness, his ears straining to hear any noise, his eyes bulging to see even the tiniest bit of light, and what reached his ears was a clicking sound. It was very faint, but it was there. Sometimes it clicked fast, sometimes it clicked more slowly, and sometimes there would be huge pauses between clicks. His mind imagined all sorts of things, mostly insects, and as the hours “clicked” by he became more and more concerned. Was the clicking dangerous? Why was it moving faster sometimes, and pausing other times? As his mind worked to figure this out, he noted a pattern, and suddenly realized that he was the source of the clicking. Specifically, the faint clicking he was hearing was the sound of his own eyelids as he blinked. How completely unnerving, and ridiculous, this was. His own mind was working against him, creating his own insanity. Frank was a clever man, and a smart man. He knew that if he could keep his brain occupied, he could stave off the insanity that usually afflicted those who spent a lot of time in solitary confinement. So he wrote stories in his head. He made up characters and situations and developed plots and wrote them all in his head, story after story, until he was released. When sent back to solitary, he would write more stories. I always say I write to get the stories out of my head. They swirl around up in there until I get them out onto paper (or computer screen). Sometimes the stories in my head are what keeps me sane, as well. As I lay in deep insomnia at 3 a.m. on a weeknight, knowing I have to get up in a few hours and go to work, the stories in my head give my brain something to do, and I don’t feel so hopeless about the insomnia. I think about my granfather when I do this. I undetstand why he did it, and how, and the benefit it had for him. I just am able to take it one step further and put many of these stories onto paper. If Frank had had such resources, he might have been a writer, too.