My Life: Leprechauns, Cats and a Dictator Writer

I’m going back to college for an English Degree, and this semester, I read a book called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.

The book says writers are dictators.

I shuffle mentally through my six published books and over a hundred blog posts and ask myself: “Am I a dictator?”

Covid19 means I forget to get a little treat to leave in my daughter’s leprechaun trap on St. Patrick’s Day. Then I forget to sneak in and spring the trap while she’s in deep sleep. By the time its morning I know she’ll never stay asleep through me going into her room. Instead, I tip-toe around the kitchen praying she won’t wake as early as she usually does. I fling cereal and my loose change over the table, make a trail to the fridge, and dye the milk green.

I write a note.

Her sneaky trap almost tricked the leprechaun, but he managed to escape and found his favorite marshmallow cereal. By the time she wakes up, I’m back in bed, pretending I never got out. She spends all morning finding things the leprechaun must have done (he gets blamed for everything, even stuff I didn’t stage). She makes a plan to trap him next year.

When I write another letter from the Easter Bunny and leave nibbled on carrots for her to find the Saturday before Easter, I realize I’m everything Díaz was saying.

It’s a crazy sort of power. I write and people believe me. Especially little humans. I spend hours on words. I move them and change them and hate them and love them. In the end, after I push publish, they aren’t even mine anymore. I only control the beginning.

Díaz creates a book were the good guys are reflections of the bad guys. A writer, trying to reveal all the darkness of a dictator, turns into a dictator of sorts himself. My super power is words and I use them like air.

What does that one comic book say? “With great power . . .”

I sit in a drive-through waiting for my turn to order and scroll, out of habit, to words of a social media feed. When it’s time to order, I’m looking at cat memes. Someone told me to. I just don’t remember who.