So You Want to be a Writer?

It's that time of the year again. My royalty check from my days as a Hollywood screenwriter arrived. This time, we scored seventy-one cents.

Wow, seventy-one pennies. We'll have to be careful not to spend that all in one place!

You'll be glad to know I paid my fair share of taxes on these earnings: forty-six cents. That's 30 percent.

To be a journalist with a 40-year career in America means to be vectoring steeply toward poverty. Or, alternatively, it means a new chance to start over, etc. Today a sudden wind blew a tiny blossom from the plum tree in my backyard eastward to me, standing on my back deck (or decky, really, it's a tiny thing.)

I picked up the fragile mini-flower and though to myself, there on the decky, in a few months this tiny blossom would produce a large, ripened plum, soft and firm, begging to be sucked.

Or at least it would have had it not just been blown off the tree. Now, it is a piece of art, a tiny reminder that we all have a future --

-- until / unless we get blown away.

-30-