Henrietta Hay's Column

Ideas are a little like butterflies, beautiful and delicate and very hard to catch. You think you have grabbed one, and it flies away never to reappear. Since ideas are to columnists as blueprints are to engineers that can be a pretty serious problem for me. People often ask, "Where do you get your ideas?" Well, they tend to come at odd times and in all sorts of places. You have to catch them when they flit by or you may lose them.

I often have wonderful ones in the shower, but by the time I am dry I have completely lost that great flash of inspiration. I wish someone would invent a waterproof chalkboard. It's very hard to write under water. On the other hand, I met a mathematician once who claimed that he did most of his creative work in the bathtub. Apparently he had a better one than I have.

Some wonderful ideas occur in the dead of night. Or I think they do. Waking up in the night with a brilliant thought would be fine if I could be sure the next morning what it was. Now and then a perfect sentence will come into my head while I am driving through the intersection of 7th and Patterson, it is not too practical to write it down on the spot so it is often lost.

I get lots of free ideas from people who tell me all sorts of things I should write about. Sometimes the suggestions are useful and sometimes they're not, but I'm always glad to get them. You never know when they'll come in handy.

It is not, however, quite as simple as it looks to take a single idea and expand it to three pages. Despite what you may think, newspapers and magazines are full of ideas. I enjoy other people's columns, including those I don't agree with, and there are very few subjects that one or another of the writers doesn't discuss eventually. Political writers range from the far left to the far right - and I do mean far. In this election year the most scathing column I have seen yet, however, had nothing to do with the next president. Bob Ewegan wrote one protesting in inelegant but graphic language, the killing of bears in the spring and the amendment involving it.

And sometimes the personal ones get very personal. Erma Bombeck went public about her mastectomy because she felt it would help other women. She chose to laugh, since that was better than crying.

Perhaps the most interesting idea I have had recently was given to me by my expert on teenage affairs who came up with this pearl of wisdom. He suggested that I just put something down and write about it. He apparently has great confidence in me. I would like to discuss that concept of creative writing with his English teacher, but he was a lot closer to the truth than he knew. Another idea of his might germinate some day.

He asked whether there is something I have always wanted to do that I have not done yet. As of now, I can't come up with anything, so apparently I have either been awfully lucky in my lifetime or awfully boring. Of course, I might lose my mind and consider skydiving. On TV the other day I saw an 80-year-old woman jump out of a plane and land with her hairdo intact, so you never know. But that idea is a little far out even for me.

The experts tell us that everything we have ever seen or heard or thought is stored in the computer we call the brain. That is a frightening thought as we struggle to remember something important and find a blank. It would be nice if there were more access points with a few reserved for fleeting ideas. With those fragile ideas, it's wise to get them anchored somewhere as quickly as possible. Otherwise as William McFee commented, "In the matter of ideas, he who meditates is lost."