It Is What It Is

You know, when I decided to take a writing break for the month of December, I fully expected to start the new year by sliding effortlessly back into the writing groove. As you might have noted, this hasn’t happened . . . yet.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it. And one of the things that keeps running through my mind is an incident I witnessed early one morning in Niagara Falls.

The hubby and I went to Niagara to ring in the New Year. I get up much earlier than him, so I would get up and walk to the Tim Hortons about a third of the way down Clifton Hill (the main drag) and have breakfast there before going on a long walk.

Anyway, Tims didn’t open until 7:30 and I got there early, so I stood around with a couple other people, waiting. Off to the side, on the fringes, so to speak, was an old guy with a shopping cart filled with junk. It was pretty obvious he was homeless. He wasn’t bothering anyone, just hanging around waiting for Tims to open like the rest of us.

The woman behind me in the loose line rummaged around in her purse and pulled out a twenty dollar bill, and gave it to the homeless guy. But that’s only part of what made this incident memorable.

By this time there were half a dozen of us lined up. Tims opened and we went inside and placed our orders. I sat down with my breakfast and my Kindle, and I noticed the homeless guy come in. And I also noticed the way the staff were reluctant to serve him. He sat at the table closest to the door and wasn’t bothering anyone, but one Tims worker in particular seemed to give him a hard time. She told him, “I told you before, you can’t be in here.” Which I thought was really weird considering he was a paying customer. Eventually, she called a security guard to roust him out of there.

Now here’s where my writer’s brain kicked in. While I’m sure there was a reasonable explanation for this – maybe they’ve had trouble with him before – I couldn’t help making up my own explanation.

Like, maybe he was the woman’s estranged father who’d fallen on hard times. He’d turned over a new leaf and was trying to get his life back on track. But because of past bad blood between them, she was unwilling to forgive and forget. But he was persistent to the point where she got a restraining order against him, which he was ignoring in his desperation to make amends.

Okay, maybe that was a bit of a stretch, but you can see how a writer’s mind can make a whole story out of a random encounter.

All this is to stay, the writing fire is still burning in me, I just need to fan the flames a little. I might not be ready to dive back into writing yet, but I’m getting closer.

Meanwhile, it is what it is ‘till it’s not then it ain’t.