Crunch: The Family Stranger
Writing Exercise #12
My brain is a little fried these days, so I’m going to use one of MY OWN PROMPTS! Imagine that! Does that make me conceited or efficient? You tell me!
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Enjoy!
Crunch: Write about an old bridge
I don’t know what it is about the photograph that spoke to me. It spoke to me before I ever knew who it was.
“It’s your great-grandfather,” my dad had said. It was in a collection of my grandfather’s possessions, a box of precious knick-knacks, odds-and-ends which grandfather had kept all his life. There was a photo album which no one had ever seen before. There were classic pictures of grandfather as a young man, sure—but what surprised everyone was five pictures of great-grandfather, hidden at the back of the album.
It’s a little bit of family history that we never really explored. Grandfather didn’t talk about his father very much, and anyway I had my hands full with my cousins and aunts and uncles and the immediate family. There was a distance to these distant relations.
But when I saw that photo—great grandfather, the mystery man, the man whom none of us knew—I saw we all had the same nose. We had the same open-mouthed laugh. We had the same crinkle in our eyes when we smiled. His silent moment captured two lifetimes ago spoke to me loudly.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“It looks like the Manhattan Bridge,” father replied.
“Can we go here?”
“That’s a long way away, son.” He said.
My mind tumbled. The thought of standing in the spot where my great-grandfather stood, of laughing the way my great-grandfather laughed, of capturing the moment the same way.
“I want to go.”
(250 words )
Talk to me!
Your feedback helps to improve my writing. I would really appreciate a comment on your thoughts on this writing exercise. Consider telling me your thoughts about:
Do you have any photographs of past relations?
Are you into genealogy?
What city has the best bridges?
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy! Come back next week for another writing exercise!
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Thank you and God bless!
We’ve got a lot of magical old covered bridges in Oregon. My wife took me to one from her youth. It still stands in a lush, green, dale near a place called ‘Five Rivers.’ There’s an old abandoned schoolhouse nearby, her Dad was a preacher and used to preach there after the school closed down. The forest is slowly reclaiming the spot.
The BEST bridge is the Mackinac Bridge. It connects the upper penisula to the lower penisula. It is five miles long. It goes up high so ships and barges can pass underneath. Because it is so high it gets very windy sometimes. When that happens they escort five vehiles at a time across. If it is real foggy or rainy and visilibity is compromised they close the bridge. When that happens you have to go down to Chicago and up through Wisconsin to get to the other side. Mike Rowe did an episode of Dirty Jobs about how they maintain the bridge. It takes a whole year to clean it and look for things that need to be repaired. It is beautiful at night because they light it up. It is even more beautiful at night when it is lit and the Northern lights are appearing. They used to close the bridge on Labor Day and allow everyone to participate in the Labor Day Bridge walk. Now I think they close one side for about three hours to allow people to walk one wayvand then thry provide buses to return you to the side you started from.