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SLUG: PROMPT-0922    BY: BRUBAKER    DESK: HOME    PG: 1 OF 1 THE WEDNESDAY PROMPT One idea a week. Twenty minutes. No excuses. THIS WEEK — Wednesday, September 22, 1999 Write about a door in your family that nobody opened. A closet, a cellar, a cedar chest, a bedroom kept the way somebody left it. Real or made up, your choice. Tell us who didn't open it, and why, and what happened the day somebody finally did. Or didn't. Rules: 300 words or less. No ghosts. Everybody writes ghosts. Give me a person. HOW THIS WORKS Every Wednesday morning, by six o'clock Eastern (I'm up anyway), there's a new prompt on this page. You set a kitchen timer for twenty minutes and you write. You don't stop, you don't fix, you don't get up for coffee. When the timer goes off, you stop. Then, if you like, you e-mail what you've got to [email protected], and every week I put up a couple of them here, with your first name and your town if you say it's okay. I don't edit what you send. If I fix a typo, I tell you. I spent thirty-eight years fixing other people's typos for money and I'm trying to cut back. All the old prompts are in the morgue (that's newspaper talk for the archive; nobody died). If you want to know what I think about writing, which you didn't ask, it's in Brubaker's Twelve. FROM THE MAILBAG Last week's prompt (September 15) was: You find a grocery list in a shopping cart. It isn't yours. Write the list, then the person. I got forty-one of these. Forty-one! A lot of you wrote very sad lists. Here are two I liked. Marjorie, Tucson toilet paper (the soft kind, he's not here to complain) one pork chop one potato one of those little pies stamps dog food — NO, stop it She stood in the aisle with her pencil over the last line for a long time. Buster had been fourteen. You don't stop buying dog food because of a thing like that; you stop buying it because the bag in the garage is still half full and will be half full, now, until it's time to throw it out. She crossed it out hard. Then she went and bought two pork chops, because the man at the meat counter had known her husband, and she didn't want him to see the one. Hal (me), Ohio milk (blue cap) eggs bananas NOT GREEN birthday candles — how old is he, 7? 8?? card the cake mix Mom always got ask at the pharmacy counter about Dad's I found it in the cart with the bad wheel, the one that pulls left, the one that always seems to find me. The handwriting was a teenager's, all loops, and it had been folded and unfolded so many times it was soft. Somebody was doing a mother's shopping. Somebody's mother wasn't doing it this week, and maybe not next week either. I stood there in produce holding a stranger's worry like it was mine. Then I did something I've never done. I went and bought a box of birthday candles, the kind that relight when you blow them out, and I put them in the cart with the bad wheel, and I left it by the door where the kid would find it. It's a story. That didn't happen. I wish it had. ABOUT THE FELLOW WITH THE RED PENCIL Hal Brubaker. Thirty-eight years on the copy desk of a daily paper in southern Ohio that I won't name, because they still owe me a clock. I wrote headlines, cut stories to fit, and caught the mayor's name spelled three different ways in one article. I retired in 1997. My wife said I needed a hobby that didn't involve correcting the church bulletin. My granddaughter said, "Grandpa, make a Web page." So I did. That's her mailbox down there. She says it's cute. I say it's a mailbox. Send me your twenty minutes: [email protected] Readers since January 1998: Last updated Wednesday, September 22, 1999 Prompts and my own pieces © 1999 Hal Brubaker. Readers' pieces belong to the readers. -30-