Post #28 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing Prompt – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
By Promptly Portland
During the holiday season, a friend sent me an email. At first, I was inclined to do the quick scan-and-delete as it was one of those pass-along messages that circulate around the Internet forever. I’m sure that in the future, cyber-archeologists will be amazed at the repeated layers of email artifacts.
But, because I have a dog and the email was about an animal, I decided to see if the story was true. I went to the usual sources for checking authenticity (scopes.com factorfiction.com urbanlegends.about.com among others) and found that the message was true.
Although the email contained a somewhat changed version of the newspaper story, I’m going to include the message exactly as I received it. If you are interested, you can read the original San Francisco Chronicle article from December 14, 2005.
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The Whale…
If you read a recent front page story of the SF Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her mouth.
A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate) and radioed an environmental group for help.
Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her.
They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her.
When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles.
She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around – she was thanking them. Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives.
The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.
May you, and all those you love, be so fortunate to be surrounded by people who will help you get untangled from the things that are binding you.
And, may you always know the joy of giving and receiving gratitude.
I pass this message on to you in the same spirit…
Have a very Merry Christmas and a very Prosperous New Year !!!!
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OK. As writers, we can spot several problems with the story, such as the obvious four exclamation marks at the end. Also, a comparison with the original article shows that over time the story has evolved to make the whale more human and to give her an intent that certainly can’t be determined. As writers, we’re aware of the importance of point of view and realize we can’t know what another person was thinking and so we certainly can’t know what an animal was thinking. But allow yourself a bit of “willing suspension of disbelief” (a phrase coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, 1817) when reading this story.
Why? Because many of us have had humanlike experiences with our pets. Let me share a couple of stories Kendra Bonnett told me about her pets. Perhaps these stories will help spark your memories of pets you’ve had. When I shared with her the whale story, she responded, “If something makes me cry, Sabrina [her cat] immediately comes over to me and gets in my lap. Animals know. Alice [her dog] was so smart; she very quickly came to understand the boundaries of her yard in Greenwich and knew not to cross the force field of the electric fence. She had it all figured out in just a day or two. Anyway, whenever I’d get to close to the property boundary she’d bark at me to warn me. She didn’t want me to get zapped.”
500 Words (or More) Writing Prompt:
1. Let your experience with a loved pet be the source of your story. Write about a time when a pet helped untangle you, or comfort you, in a human way.
2. Don’t have a pet? Then write 500 words or more about a person who helped untangle you at a critical time in your life.
Until next time,
-Promptly Portland
memoir writing
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