Threads

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects."
-Herman Melville

I have previously noted my thoughts on a story by the American writer O. Henry and how I personally believed his characters ought to have behaved differently in a certain situation.
That said, I do respect O. Henry and admire his work. In October of 2005 I had the privilege of attending a free, three-week writing class hosted by a locally published author. Seven of us sat in O. Henry's dining room in Austin and accepted advice on writing while gazing in awe at our surroundings.
I took the class primarily in order to be part of such an event. I wondered at the fact of my being in the home of a long-gone influential writer of short stories.
I learned many a thing while I was there, the most lasting of which was this:
everything is connected and inspiration for writing can come from the most benign source.
Our host performed a magician's party trick of sorts: one unrelated word, one far-flung thing hurled into the circle, and we were asked to declare the first image that sprang to mind.
Stockings, she said to us.
Around went the word, circumnavigating the room, taking on unforeseen meaning, increasing in scope and placing itself into the midst of unexplored ideas.

Parties.
Ladies.
Dancing.
Wartime.
Ladders.
Car engines.

That last was mine. I had just that morning been discussing with my mother the best way to stall the tragic and ominous death rattle of my cherished car whom I had affectionately named Mrs. Doyle.
Mater, with an endless supply of magic tricks all her own, suggested that the trouble might be a loose engine belt, and to wrap a stocking around it temporarily.
All present in O. Henry's house examined the results of the exercise and were astonished that so much imaginative wealth had come from one lone word. No doubt kernels of entire stories began to develop in that afternoon in my classmates' minds and in my own.
Stockings to car engines. Every thing in this world to another, linked and entwined with invisible threads.