My house has officially succumbed to books. Bowed its head, elbowed out its own frame, said yes. Yes, Beth, you can have the newest pubbed books by David Levithan (
Every Day) and Eliot Schrefer (
Endangered) co-mingling with the galleys for
This Close (short stories by your dear friend Jessica Francis Kane), and alongside these please add a dollop of Mary McCarthy's
The Stones of Florence, a book on the history of eggs, three maps of Florence (one laminated), one old diary, several Florence guides, many tomes on domes, not to mention weather forecasts, three unread
New Yorkers (unread, save for the back pages), and while all of that is going on, please add more to your iPad Kindle because having not yet read your e-versions of
Code Name Verity (Elizabeth E. Wein),
Salvage the Bones, and
The Marriage Artist is no shame at all. Also, while you are at it, imagine A.S. King's
Ask the Passengers (not yet released) sitting near. Just do it, Kephart. Do it.
So what did I do, in the midst of this? I took a walk with my best friend from college days, Ellen. We headed out to Valley Forge National Park, where my mother is buried and where Ellen and I often meet to talk life, not books. It was a ripe September day, crisp as a green apple.
I want it all, always.
I manage it poorly, more times than not.
Today, no books again. Instead, a trip to the city, to see my glorious, happy, smart, successful son. No prize greater than his glorifying smile.
Every now and then, someone will say,
Oh, it must be great to have a writing talent. I think so, too. It must be great: To write like a dream, and to write with ease.
That, however, is not my life. Today, for example, I cranked open an old book in progress. There are lines in it that I'd love to blame on someone else.
Unfortunately, I wrote them.
No doubt this will make me unpopular. Certainly I've been unpopular before.
But.
I'm hearing a lot these days about folks out of work and about the impact of such losses on family, on love. I'm feeling the quiet out there and also the quiet within, where work at my own marketing communications firm has slowed considerably and projects that were once sure things have been thrown off of their tracks. I get worry. I get wondering what tomorrow will bring. I get sitting down at 4 AM with the finances and the taxes and the bills and jiggering things around to make the many pieces fit. Simpler meals, more carefully made. Shoes worn until the soles are left behind on the pave. A house that feels emptier as less comes in—but also roomier, perhaps, also more accommodating.
But what I don't get (and here's where you start to hate me) is the level of animosity I'm finding, in some places, toward those who have lost their jobs. Spouses furious with spouses. Disappointments stomped out in public. Quotes like this one, found today in a Newsweek story titled, "Men Will Be Men:" When money goes, love flies out the window. Spoken by an interviewed man clearly living a whole lot of char and hurt.
Does it have to be this way? Must love be contingent on funds? Can't love also be the time that is spent just being together, finding a way? We're not going to get these days back. Not ever. Can we really put love on hold until the coins start clattering in?
I take my camera most everywhere; it is my habit. I take it because the weight of it around my neck reminds me to see—to decide against deciding that my world is overly familiar, already known. I look for cracks and fissures, for the new or the newly announced. I look for the water to run a different color in the stream, or for the sun to strike the pond at winter with deafening, delirious force. If I can’t see, then I don’t know, and if I don’t know, I’m not writing, and while some may question the value of the written word, I shall make this claim for stories: They spook and spur us. They recall for us. They suggest the tremble of the whole so that we may believe in the lives we’re living.
Live your life, some say. Don’t write it. But I don’t know how to do one without the other. I don’t know how to feel alive unless I’m writing.
I am held into place by the world in which I live. My continuity is my neighborhood, the streets I walk, the stretch of fabled road between my own house and my parents’. I am tethered here by the slow simmer of a passion that began in 1973, when I moved with my family to a house on a bend. When I began to walk and drive, with them, the roads that would always mark me as a writer. I’ve written memoir. I’ve written poetry. I’ve written fable. I’ve written short stories. I’ve written novels. I’ve written history. Everything I’ve languaged is touched by the trees that leafed and the trees that were felled, by the bales of hay and the frozen pond, by the flower that wouldn’t bloom and the garden that did, by the fox that arrives and the deer that departs, by the crow that threatens and the hawk that stays, by the ribbon of asphalt that carries me home.
— from "Writing my Life," Tredyffrin Public Library Grand Opening, Tuesday, February 10, 7:30 PM
The first essay my student, K., ever wrote for me was about this abandoned greenhouse, which K. had found, he said, in a park, and photographed at sunset, just before autumn became winter and K. himself was forced inside. It was this essay that announced K.'s huge, if voluble talent and made me want to discover if his words had been fanciful or accurate, fiction or truth.
Yesterday, all these months later, I set out with my camera, and there this broke-down creature was, shattered and exquisite as K. had promised, cordoned off but accessible to the eyes and, therefore, to the imagination, and suggesting torrents, seasons, sprung seeds, escape. Accuracy, in this case, could only be pinned to fancy. Both things necessary to broker the truth.
Sounds absol-U-tely perfect!!
(Last minute packing. Yes. Know that trick.)
xox
pm
Sounds like a great day.