High school. Before class began, our modern dance teacher put Blood, Sweat, and Tears on a turntable in the gym. Their song pulled me to my feet. Freed from the self-consciousness that usually plagued me, I swirled and swayed á la Martha Graham––a spinning wheel that had to go ’round.

Single years. On the dance floor, Stevie Wonder blasting “Living for the City,” men mistook my undulation for invitation. Slid their hands downward from my waist. I pushed them back up. They shoved their groins against my belly whenever Barry White moaned. I spun away, learned the rhythms of predator and prey.

Married. On television, The Temptations played in the background of a romcom. My husband creaked up from his La-Z-Boy, pulled me in to sway cheek to cheek as he crooned in my ear. “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day.” His palm pressed the words into my back, and his raised arm coaxed me to spin.

A miracle, the dance. I’m led wherever I need to go.

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

*****
“The anger unjelled and flooded through her.”
———Toni Morrison
———Song of Solomon

At Chicago’s American Writers Museum, among the 100 author bookmarks offered to us word-loving souvenir hunters, only three black writers were represented, none of whom was Toni Morrison.

I interrupted my morning writing routine when a pop-up ad drew my attention away from Dictionary.com.
Hemingwrite.

Clever name. What’s that about? A click opened an article describing an invention for writers that was being funded on Kickstarter. A word-processor without an internet browser, it looked like a flattened-out typewriter with a postcard-sized screen. What a godsend for people like me, easily seduced by online curiosities, tempted to peek at Facebook or open one more email. This might work. Just sit and type while it backs up my work to the cloud, and that’s good, because … well let’s see how much it costs.

The cursor blinked over the link to the Kickstarter campaign. I studied the donation levels, weighed my options, read the backstory of the invention.

I was well into stalking the people who’d already donated, when a cartoon lightning bolt zapped my head.
My eyeballs sproinged from their sockets.

A singed dreadlock plopped onto the keyboard.

Sigh.

Here I sit, consumed by a website about a device designed to prevent me from being consumed by websites.

Once again stuck on its treadmill, my frantic mind races toward solutions to problems it’s busy creating.
It’s not my job to find a solution to the problem of my distraction. My job is to notice I’m distracted and then observe how that feels. Nothing more.

Life works out. It always has. The details are above my pay grade.