“Impress your personality on him: wear the same perfume every day.” That’s what a teen magazine recommended. I was in junior high school and totally obsessing about a boy. I’d try anything. So I wore the same perfume every day for a month. It didn’t work. Apparently, the boy had to know you existed before the allure of a repetitive fragrance could kick in, and I couldn’t get physically close enough for him to smell it. White Shoulders was heavy on the gardenia anyway. He probably saved himself from choking on a cloying perfume.

Things worsened in high school. When it came time for the Junior Prom, I asked a gay Jehovah’s Witness friend from ballet class to take me. We had fun, actually. He was a good dancer and I certainly didn’t worry about an assault on my virginity.

I wonder what other adolescent agonies I might recall if I’d kept a diary. I tried it for a few months, but I got bored recording things such as who I saw and what I ate for dinner. Hmmm. Perhaps I was just ahead of my time … I should have taken Polaroid photos and shared the banal events with people I didn’t know.

So, although I’ve written most of life, it’s been more along the lines of interviews, speeches, newspaper articles and radio editorials. I don’t journal, although I hear it provides fabulous insight into your life. It just doesn’t call to me. But then, I don’t like yoga, and 95% of the population believes it cures everything. Ha. Nothing cures being a chocoholic, but I might tuck a yoga mat under my arm if I could nibble on a box of See’s candy during the Downward-Facing Dog pose.

Now, after many years of “youth-ening” like Merlin, all I want to do is write. I’m ready. I’ve lived enough life to have something to say and not enough life left to say it all.

What drives people to write? I mean regularly write, and even more so, write something they’re willing to “put out there” for others to read? And why won’t people who have important thoughts to share dare to commit them to paper? Aye, matey, there’s the rub: “putting it out there” is like walking the plank naked. The writer who jumps is prone to drowning in a sea o’ criticism, and the ones who try to hang on without jumping get splinters in their butt. I don’t think I can expound any further than on that metaphor, but it’s a major reason why people don’t write.

And that’s a shame, because writing forces us to open up windows in our minds that have been sealed shut for years. When that happens, we let out the stale thoughts, use the ones that, like honey, don’t spoil, and allow fresh ones to enter. Let’s stop here. Take a moment and think about writing something, anything, today. Think of something that been gnawing at you or inspiring you and write a few lines about it, for the sheer enjoyment of seeing it in print.

We’ll come back to this subject … in the meantime, enjoy looking at a chair in our hotel room on a trip to Bartlesville, Oklahoma. I wrote in that chair. Heck, you could make up a whole story about a hotel room chair, if you wanted to.

“Rosebud” was just a sled, after all.