Characters and Plots

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"How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct."
Benjamin Disraeli

"Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects."
Will Rogers

"When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others."
Anais Nin

Youth has a great narrative drive and plot: Get bigger, get freer; find out about life, others and self. Everything's exciting: the "best" or the "worst" EVER!

Adolescence is a love story, a comedy, a drama, a farce. A collage of fears, first times, and aspirations. All seem tailor-made for a story arc, for songs, or movies; not to mention fodder for gossip.

Girl chases guy, or the other way around.

The world must be saved! (Again).

Grownups just don't understand. We'll never be like them!

Then they kiss, and the credits roll.

All this, mind you, takes place in the first thirty or so years.

Then, offstage, distracted by work and by children

-by the negotiations and nuances of marriage -

we tread the mill Monday through Friday,

Fall to Summer vacation, year after year.

Till we look up to realize with surprise that we are not the young stars anymore.

But we're still years (God willing) from the end!

Though the best roles seem to be passing us by, to younger actors.

Our cozy character work fits us like a glove.

Besides: it pays the bills.

A fixation on beauty is common to the young, engendering an involuntary aversion to the blemishes and badges of age.

But fortunately (skeptics will call it self-serving) we see at last the deeper beauties of maturity. The light from within illuminates the merely physical with lovely survior-ness.

The plot lines of maturity are not necessarily dark, it just takes greater skills to write them. Maturity in a writer is not a bad thing. As illusion is stripped away, we find the truffles of satisfaction where we may. Unexpectedly we cherish the homely hearth that once seemed a prison.

A L O H A! Cloudia