Nancy Peacock's Blog, page 6

Work

I think there are three ways of earning money in this world. One is to rent out your body (labor), another is to rent out the space between your ears (desk jobs mostly), and the third is to have money to spend on something that earns more money (investment). I have no experience with the third, only the first two.

I work as a teacher now. I rent out the space between my ears, but I’ve had lots of jobs working as a laborer. Whereas the hazards of working as a laborer were sore muscles and not feeling intelligent or being seen as intelligent, the hazards now are that my brain gets a bit overcrowded sometimes. It gets overcrowded because I use it, not just for my income producing work, but also for my writing. Writing, for me, requires a sort of emptiness. It requires space for feeling out a story, for the subconscious to mull, for the muse, and this is made harder by the fact that the space between my ears is not always my own.

I have a lot of narratives running through my head. My students’ novels in progress and memoirs in progress, short stories, essays – all kinds of stories that don’t actually belong to me, but to which I apply what I know about writing. I try to help with craft, but I also bring to the narratives my intuition.

This morning I lay in bed and counted up the number of jobs I’ve had. Including babysitting when a teenager and a paper route when even younger, I’ve worked over 25 jobs. There were times that I hated the work I was doing, times when I was sure that I was better than this, whatever this was: scrubbing toilets, serving food, dipping ice cream, milking cows, delivering bread. Whatever it was, I felt certain that I was above it. Only I wasn’t, and I’m not now. The thing is, I wasn’t just judging myself at the time, I was also judging the work. I judged the work to be not good enough for me. I was sure I was too smart for slinging hash, or banging nails, or chasing other people’s pubic hairs down drains. I was just wrong, dead wrong. No one is too smart for anything.

I say this because I think it’s important to respect all work. I didn’t respect the work I was doing when I was doing it. Even as it benefited me, I did not recognize that. When I cleaned houses for a living I did not realize that my work supported me in more ways than one. In fact, except for the fact that I had to do some pretty back-breaking labor, it was luxurious. I had every day alone. The stories and novels I worked on during that time had all of my attention because the work that I did required so little from the space between my ears.

I also see how much the work I did simply to pay the bills has given me a rich trunk-full of experiences to draw from while writing. The experiences I racked up from my 25-plus jobs are experiences now in a database to draw from when writing fiction. I know first hand the feel of washing a cow’s udders as the mud and shit flake away under my fingers. I know what it is to stand behind a cash register eight hours a day and feel the ache in my feet. I know what it is to be a waitress, a bartender, a baker, a maid, an exercise instructor, a carpenter, a paper deliverer, even an assistant drum-maker. I’m profoundly grateful now for all these experiences. I’m so glad I wasn’t “too smart” for these jobs. They’ve made me a a better person, a more thoughtful person, and possibly a better writer too.

 

The Coyote

In the town I live in there is a river. I often walk it in the mornings, and sit on a rock beside a beaver pond. The bank on the other side has a very steep grade leading up a small mountain. Between the two shores, and downstream a little is an island that blocks my view of a part of the opposite bank. Yesterday I saw a reflection of something moving along the shore across the river, the part of the opposite shore that I could not see for the island. A deer, I thought. All I could see was a reflection of legs. Then the animal moved and stopped and I saw a little more of its legs. And then it moved again, and stopped and I saw its entire reflection. It was a coyote.

It must have sensed me, because it would take a few steps and then stop and sniff the air. I sat very still and watched its rippling upside-down reflection in the water as it stepped and stopped, stepped and stopped. Finally the coyote itself came into view, still stopping and starting, and then ambling up the steep hill, coming in and going out of view as it slipped in and out of vegetation.

This is like writing. This is how a story is revealed to its author. First a movement. Then a hint of a little more. A reflection at first. Rippling and upside down. And then a wild animal, shy and uncertain about its ability to trust you.

Trust is key. In watching wildlife it means to let the wild thing be, to stay still and not interfere. Storytelling also requires stillness, listening, and allowing the story to be what it wants to be, to let it reveal itself to you, to trust that you are an author who can be trusted, who will not impose her will on the story, but will listen for what the story wants to be. A story is always a wild thing. You can set a trap for it, and capture it wounded and suffering. Or you can show up respectfully, and let it reveal itself to you.

 

 

The Mother Ship of Writing

On Saturday I taught my once-a-month, free-to-all Prompt Writing class. One of the prompts was “What I need for my writing.” I don’t usually give a writing prompt about writing, but when I do it’s almost always profound. I find that people touch on a core issue with their writing life. They see something they did not see before, something that on some level they’ve known is keeping them from the work, but that they have not yet articulated. As writers, we love to put it down on paper. For me, writing it down is how I work it out. This is the value of journaling and doing timed writings, the value of writing that is just for self.

Whenever I do an exercise on writing I too discover something I need to know about my own work, and whatever might be standing in the way of it. Here is an excerpt from my piece. It has given me a new perspective, a twist that allows me to think of serving the writing rather than the writing serving me.

“I need a willingness to stand naked in the unknown. Inspiration? Do I need it? It helps, but I don’t have time to wait for it. I squeeze the writing in. I write here and there, and lately I’ve been having a hard time because of the squeezing. The hereness and thereness of it fractures my concentration, and this fractures the narrative I am trying to create. I feel lost, disconnected, like that guy in 2001 Space Odyssey who got cut loose from the mother ship and floated off in his big white suit. It must have been beautiful to just float in space, until his body started dying.

And that is it. Writing is the mother ship, and I must stay connected to it. But how? What do I need? I think the only way to know the answer to that question is to ask another. What does writing need from me?

It needs me to show up consistently instead of randomly

It needs me to explore, not just a novel, which is a huge commitment, but also short stories, poems, essays. It needs me to play.

It needs me to have confidence that the exploration and play are important.

It needs me to read and enjoy reading.

It needs me to take walks and enjoy nature.

It needs me to stay healthy.

It needs me to find stillness and not fill my schedule with rush, rush, rush.

This is how I will stay connected to the mother ship. This is the only way. This is how the cord will not get severed.”

Gratitude for Karen McElmurray

Dear Karen,

Here is what I have to thank you for: Embarking on this journey with me, a journey of over two years in which we have been writing letters back and forth on the writing life, and more. Bringing your voice here. Sharing your stories. Your ruminations. Your thoughts. Your life.

One can never ask for more than a friend sharing her life.

I believe we’ve touched some deep places with these letters, and within ourselves. I am not sorry for the journey, or to be washed ashore at this point to inhabit our own islands for awhile, as you put it so beautifully. I too am ready for my own silence, for the rain pattering on leaves, for the quiet waves along the beach.

My hope in our journey together with this blog is that we did not add to the noise of the world, but to its understanding.

May God Bless You.

Love, Nancy

 

 

 

An imaginary island where the words hear only their own voices for awhile

Dear Nancy:

Sometime this week while I was staying in the cottage on the farm up Gettysburg way, I dreamed deep and hard.  I was in a car with a several students.  One new one, a young man who is serious about his words, who writes about sailing and Newport and the sea.   One  former student, a woman who can be hard-edged and hilarious and full of heart. We were all driving across a bridge in search of chocolate.  Suddenly the bridge burst into flames and we backed up seeking our way.  How about that other bridge, I said, and we all looked in the distance at the other bridge, the only way off the island.  And there we all were, stuck, stranded, having to stay put, chocolateless.

I don’t know what to make of this letter right now, except that my heart wants an island, a piece of land, a farm, a pasture, a road, a tiny square of red earth that no one  knows about.  I am deeply tired.  I want a big, fat, anonymous retreat.  I don’t even want any letters to reach me in this private place.

Letters.  You and I have been exchanging them for over two years now.  The letters have been rich, kind, passionate, writerly, disconnected, connected.  They have been about the heart, the public, the private.  I have valued them so much, and I am excited that this bounty of exchanges will, for me, be evolving into a collection of short essays that I will dive into revising.  The land between.  But for now I am exhausted, letter-wise.    The palms of my hands and my fingertips feel no words to send you.  I want to harbor my essay-words for awhile, hold them close, love on them like little creatures that have not yet figured out how to walk.

A long time ago, when I was in India, you had to go through this enormous process to even send a letter.  You had to wait in one vast line to have your letter dolloped with wax on its seal.  You had to wait in another long line to have the wax stamped.  You had to wait in another line to hand the letter to someone who, you hoped, would send the letter to someone else who might mail it. Sometimes you’d get so tired, you’d just forget the who thing and walk off and not  send anything.   I spent some months in India, sometimes without anyone knowing where I was.  This was hard on my friends and family.  I disappeared.

Yet, as a poem says somewhere, there is much to be gained in the art of disappearing.  I need to go letterless for awhile.  I want to burn the bridges on either side of me and wander the island, even without chocolate.

I hope we find our way back writing these letters about our lives as writers at a future point.  I would like that.

With love,

Karen

 

After plenty

Dear Nancy:

As you know from all the beautiful notes and photos and songs and many kind wishes on this Facebook wall, yesterday was my birthday.

Birth Day.

That day has always been a haunted one for me. One of my farthest back memories of Birthday is being nine years old. It was Saturday, and my father was out in the garage and my mother was out there, too, and they were quarreling, as they often did, about how unclean the world was. All those leaves in the yard as the trees let go into fall and look at the mess our feet made, tracking in dirt and debris. And the furnace that needed cleaning before winter set in and air from the vent blew dust all over the world that was our house. The phone calls my mother was getting from someone who hung up, time after time, and just who was that, anyway, she wanted to know as they stood out there and fought. But me, I was inside that day, wishing. I wished for a big, fat birthday cake. I wished for candles and presents with blue bows and glitter. I wished we were all happier, but we were not, and so September 12th became in my memory a day that celebrated sadness rather than joy.

Birth Day.

Many years later, of course, birthdays became another kind of commemoration of melancholy. When I was fifteen I birthed a boy and gave him up. Re-lin-quished.   The word was like icing I kept in my mouth until it melted little by little, tasting of loss.

It is only now, mornings like this one, the day after a day of plenty—gracious birthday words from loved ones and strangers alike—that I am able, at last, to celebrate the fact that Birth comes in waves.

I walked my three miles with my dog this morning. Leaves are beginning to cascade. I love that word for their falling. A woman walked on a rise in the distance, her baby in her arms and her two dogs running behind her. They were gathering the last tomatoes from their garden before autumn sets in. My husband was sleeping late, the house all cool with the windows open to the air after the rain. As I walked I fell to thinking about his sister, who has experienced the great loss of her own husband of forty years, had her own birthday this week. She went out to a celebratory dinner last night. She will come with us to the sea at Thanksgiving. Loss. Joy. Loss.

In your last letter on here you talked about not believing that we can produce words on command. No new book in eighteen months, as a publisher might like, right in line after the last one? No failure, that.   Birth comes in waves and words are like birth, too. They are born, enter the world, find their lives. We wait as new ones are born inside us, tell us their story, find their way to the page. We wait as sometimes words don’t come at all, as silence gathers inside us and we are still, somber, mourning, respectful of the fallow time.

Happy Birth Day, Nancy Peacock, even though it’s not your birthday. I wish you a day of quiet, of stories told, remembered, said, unsaid.

Love,

Karen

 

 

Failure

Dear Abby and Karen,

Today for some reason, I am thinking about failure. The failure of a book to sell well. The failure of a book to be published. The failure to complete a book. The failure to even write at all. Perhaps I am thinking about this because last night in one of my classes we wrote on Failing at Something.

I had plenty to choose from. A marriage. Jobs. School. All of the above regarding books and writing. But what I wrote about was the possibility that I hadn’t failed.

Take the marriage. It ended after eight years. My biggest failure there might be not ending it sooner, for it was meant to end. On the other hand the fact that it was meant to end does not necessarily mean that it never should have been in the first place. I was eighteen when I said I do, and had it said to me. Neither of us knew a damn thing, and we both had a lot of growing to do. But while we certainly had our big fights, and disappointed each other, and drove each other crazy, at the same time we were safe. A kind of safe anyway. A dangerous safe as we each grew in the ways we needed to grow. Is there really any other kind?

All during that marriage, hard as it was, I was collecting stories, and I was becoming me, and I was learning all that I could given the fear I carried in my gut like something planted there. I learned to drive. I learned to stoke a wood stove and bank a fire. I learned how to garden, laugh, cry, make love, not make love, pay bills, endure. I learned my way out of the woods I walked in behind our house, and eventually I learned my way out of the marriage too. That marriage was a resounding success.

Take also the jobs I’ve held. There have been probably fifty to one hundred of them. It could be said that I failed at those jobs, but I never really intended to succeed, not in the way one thinks of succeeding at a job. Those jobs were place-holders, something I did while writing. They’re called day-jobs in the art world, although some of mine were at night. Most of them never meant anything more to me than a paycheck. I collected those paychecks and I used the money I earned to shelter and feed myself, to clothe myself, to keep warm or cool, to flush my waste, to stay in touch with people and to move myself from one place to another. Those jobs weren’t failures. They too were resounding successes.

But then there are the books. There is one in particular that I am thinking of. It never got published and it never will. I don’t actually like it very much. Even though I worked on it for two years, I don’t have much of a relationship to it. I don’t have a relationship to the characters. It’s a failure, except that it taught me to trust myself.

When I wrote it I had decided that my usual slow way of writing needed to change, that I’d never have a “career” unless I learned to write faster, so I did what I’d always heard I should do when writing a first draft. Instead of pushing the work through the sieve a little every day, as I had always done before, I barreled through without looking. I had heard, often enough to believe it may have some merit, that one should throw everything you can think of into that first draft, and if you want to you can take it out later.

I admit I had fun writing that book, but I never came to a deep understanding of the story. In the end I felt like I had a knotted wad of necklaces and chains. I couldn’t tell where one began and another ended. Was this a plot point, or a theme, or important, or not? I tried to untangle it, and I suppose I wrote something passable, though I’m actually glad it never got accepted for publication. The biggest problem with this process was that it wasn’t mine, and it didn’t produce something I could relate to or feel strongly about or have a relationship with. It turns out I wasn’t doing it wrong after all; I was just doing it slowly. I already knew that, of course. Plenty of people told me so.

Too slow. You should be writing a new novel every eighteen months, I was told. I tried. I really did, but I failed. I failed at what was wrong for me. It takes time to write deeply. I can’t change that. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a law of nature.

Much love – Nancy

On Magical Places

Dear Nancy,

Well, my first letter was lost somewhere on the beach at Head of the Meadow where we were yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Further back than that I can’t remember. It’s all a lovely blur of sand and sky and the blue ocean sprinkled with kids in bright bathing suits. I don’t eavesdrop on the beach. It’s all about the sound of waves. Until now, this summer has sped by leaving no mark, no impression. What’s up with that? Is it age, or had it fast-forwarded for everyone? Here, though, the days are endless, as they are supposed to be. The past ten days have been one long smooth moment, kind of like a sandbar. Maybe time passes more slowly by the sea. There is always a prop plane lazing somewhere above, a sound of nature by now. The kids are always in the water. The sun moves slowly. We are never, ever ready to leave the beach until suddenly, we are.

Chuck has rented this house on the Cape. Most of my family is here, and it is heaven. His lovely daughter Hannah will come late tonight, and Catherine’s boys will be all over her, at nine, they love a beautiful girl. Justine, my son Ralph’s daughter, is reading, or rather, failing to read, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, a book I’ve never read and she can’t stand. Summer reading. I remember loving doing summer reading although I can’t recall a single assigned book. All I know about Mary Shelley, or all I think I know, is that she was crazy in love with Lord Byron (“mad, bad, and dangerous to know”) but now I can’t remember any of his poetry, only that he was handsome, had a club foot, and died swimming the Hellespont. Tim recommends that once she’s finished the book she should watch Young Frankenstein, and then we try to remember what else she wrote, and somehow, after a bit, we find ourselves on Dover Beach, each one of us recalling a number of favorite lines. It takes me 24 hours to recall “swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight” which impresses the hell out of Chuck, who has remarked from time to time that maybe he shouldn’t have gone to college either, maybe he’d remember more.

I love your magical place, the circle in the meadow where you and your friends went to be together. I guess my magical place was the beach in Amagansett, which I think of now. Amagansett in the forties and fifties when nobody had heard of the tiny village, when Schellinger’s Well Drilling and Toppings, which was part grocery, part soda fountain, part magazines and newspapers, and the Two Sisters’ Tearoom were still fixtures of Main Street. We went every summer, no matter how far away we lived (Baltimore, New Orleans, St. Paul). It is still beautiful of course, almost too beautiful, because it now reeks of money. Well groomed everything. Back then it was really just the water, and our grandmother’s house on Indian Wells Highway. Ken Mulford ran the ABA, and he sold candy and sodas, but our lunches were the hard boiled eggs and chicken sandwiches (crusts cut off) that our grandmother made us. We walked to the beach, which glittered at the end of our road. Once, in a great hurricane whose name I forget, the water came as far as the Bluff Road. I still remember my grandmother’s phone number: Amagansett 7-3559.

There goes a helicopter, probably looking for sharks. There are few seals on this beach, and the water is dotted with swimmers.

People. Yeah, people. I love them. I love them on the beach especially. Nobody is staring at I Pods or cellphones, they are building castles and shivering in towels, rushing into the waves (which today, just before they break, are pale as peeled cucumbers). Chuck and I sit together, exchanging a word or two. When someone particularly overweight staggers past, I refrain from asking him if I’m that fat, for fear of his answer. We’ve been pals for 36 years. Good god. We both love the woods on the way to Head of the Meadow. The trees are small and twisted, gnarly, like gnomes. People camp there, but I’d be worried. There might be bears. “Bears?” Says Chuck. “There are no bears here. What would they do?”

Catherine’s cat had kittens the day before we arrived, and she brought the little family with her in a box. Catherine, the keeper of tiny things. One died the other morning, and there was sadness, but these things happen, and Catherine wrapped her in a washcloth and thought about where to bury her. Or him. Too young to tell, although its little eyes were already open.

Jennifer does all our cooking, every night another delicious supper for us grown-ups. She loves to cook, spends hours fixing dinner, and then we eat it all up in five minutes. The kids eat mac and cheese out of a box but seem to thrive. The twins (two sets of them) spend all day riding waves, fearless. Ralphie, who burns easily, wears a bright long-sleeved t-shirt in the water, you can always keep track of him. Putting on my own hideous bathing suit is the most strenuous thing I do all day except for getting out of the ocean or getting up from my beach chair.

Which reminds me that everything I promised myself I’d do like get a personal trainer (hahahahaha) is still undone. But the season of new pencil boxes and notebooks is right around the corner (January first is nonsense, the New Year starts in fall) and maybe I can do better when we get home.

There’s a little fall in the air.

 

Hope you are thriving and writing, thank god for these letters,

 

Abby

 

 

The Daily Swath

Dear Abigail,

Your letter reminded me of once sitting in a coffee shop with a baby in my lap. The baby was not mine (I have no babies). She was the daughter of my friend, who was at this time up at the cash register paying for our coffees. There was a table nearby of several old women (I hesitate to call them old because I am now old too – but at that time, they were old to me) who started cooing to Maren, the baby. One of them said, directly to Maren, in a gooey voice, “Say, I’m going to run away from here. I’m going to run away. No, you’re not. No, you’re not. I’m going to put the baby in formaldehyde. I’m going to put the baby in formaldehyde.”

This was something I have never forgotten, because…how could I? I remember asking myself at the time if I had heard what I just thought I’d heard. Then the woman repeated it, again in that gooey voice people use with babies, and naturally I started holding Maren just a little bit closer.

I was a little creeped out and I told my friend, Janet about this incident as we walked back to her house. Janet was much more good humored about it than I was feeling, but really, what could we do but laugh? What I’ve always wondered, though, is what possessed this woman to say such a thing, and naturally, having a novelist’s mind, I came up with this scenario. The woman grew up in a family whose members owned and worked in a funeral home and threatening to put a child in formaldehyde was par for the course. Just like saying, “Eat your peas. There are children starving in India.” And all those strange things grown-ups say that they never give a second thought to.

I never got around to writing a story set in a funeral home, and I never created the collection of stupid things people say to babies either, an idea sparked by this incident. But I love the story, and I’ve been saving it in my mind all these years, twenty-something, to use somewhere, maybe here, in this letter to you.

I both love people and loathe them. I truly enjoy the absolute quirky weirdness that is the human race. Like you, I can sit in a coffee shop for hours and listen in on the conversations around me, and record it word for word. I can laugh at what I overhear in bathroom stalls (one young woman saying to another, as I peed, that she needed to see her plastic surgeon because she had scarring from a spider bite), or when you ask a stranger for directions (“Where you from? Oh, Chapel Hill. That’s where folks around here go to get their hearts transplanted.”). I love the human language, and the illogical usage, and the zaniness of it all. And like you, I seriously need some time away from these same people who delight me so much. From all people really.

Writing fiction to me is a sort of study of the human condition, and the human condition is many, many things. It’s pretty awful sometimes, yet even in the midst of that awfulness someone can say something funny. There is nothing like gallows humor to lighten things up. I tend to like gallows humor. I laughed my way through a book one friend cried her way through. I saw how tragic these events were in the story. I hadn’t missed that. What amazed me was how my friend had missed how funny and absurd they were too. I’m sure they weren’t at the time that they were going on (it was memoir), but in the retelling the author had not missed that point, and I loved him for it.

Life is funny. And tragic. People are funny and tragic and mean and kind, and I both love them and need to recover from them. Right now, I’m in my studio, alone. Quiet. I have a book to read. Tomorrow I’m going to return to writing a novel I started and had to temporarily abandon. Once in that process, I won’t be alone at all. I’ll be with my characters. I love them, and yet can even tire of their company. Especially if I am working too hard. It’s that doing nothing that I crave.

When I was in high school, and doing poorly grade-wise, the powers-that-were decided that role call would only occur in homeroom, and not in any other classes. This meant, for a great many of us, that all we needed to do to be counted as present for the day was attend homeroom. Then we could, and did, hitchhike out of there. I have often wondered how the powers-that-were arrived at this arrangement, and I believe that it served the purpose they intended. The school emptied of the students that really didn’t want to be there, and this way the teachers didn’t have to deal with us.

It was early 1970s, a crazy time. Some students came to class tripping. Many smoked dope behind the football stadium and tennis courts. There was a field of wheat back there, and someone had trampled a path through it, and created a circle where we could sit and not be seen. It was a magical place, and I went there often. Whatever I missed in my education because of my lax attitude toward school, I made up for with that daily swath of free time. I got in the habit of carrying a notebook around with me, and sitting in a coffee shop (back then it was called Dunkin’ Doughnuts) and eavesdropping and writing. I can’t say that I regret all that. I can say that I miss that luxury of uninterrupted time, and that I miss it badly. It seems to me that my whole life has been spent trying to recreate that daily swath.

Keep calm and carry on,  Nancy

Eavesdropping and Solitude

Dear Nancy,

Just now I’m sitting at an iron table outside a coffee place in Jamaica Plain. I had looked forward to a cigarette with my coffee, but there’s a big NO SMOKING sign and I obey. I’m wide awake. If I were home in Woodstock, I’d be inside my pleasant house doing nothing at all. Possibly napping with dogs. Re-reading Tom Hennen’s Darkness Sticks to Everything. Even on pretty summer afternoons, I only leave the house if I’m out of something necessary, like coffee or smokes. I could blame this on the heat or the damned gnats, but that’s a cop-out. I’m lazy.

This week I’m visiting my daughter Jennifer and her twins, whose 10th birthday is tomorrow. Jen is at her therapist, I’m waiting for her to come pick me up. It’s ten-thirty. Five minutes ago there was in line behind me an old man carrying a plastic bag full of cans and bottles. “Can I buy you a coffee?” I asked, and “Sure,” he said. Such a nice ordinary exchange.

At my back all kinds of noisy traffic—trucks, street cleaners, motorcycles, a train. The exhaust makes me homesick for New York City, where I no longer live. One table away two kids are eating breakfast with a woman I think must be their grandmother. In ten minutes, nobody has exchanged a single word, they are all absorbed by whatever is on their various I- Phones or Pods. On the drive up I heard somebody on NPR say that the stuff on these devices was far more exciting than real life, and what is the future of this generation going to be, reality will never measure up, and oh dear, oh dear. I am remembering the old story of somebody bending over a carriage and exclaiming on the beauty of the baby within and the mother saying, as she took out her wallet full of photos, “But wait till you see her pictures!” and I wonder was this the forerunner of today’s obsession with something other than living flesh and blood??

But photographs are distillations of life, and whatever is going on in those devices keeps happening faster and faster. Nothing distilled. Like those strobe lights in discos, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Nobody seems to know how to do nothing anymore, and it is so important to be able to keep still, to enjoy one’s own company. Doing nothing makes room for who-knows-what to come along through an open window, maybe, or out of a clear blue sky. I can’t go any further with this, but at least it’s almost a thought. Already I’ve had more thoughts in twenty minutes than a year at home.

It is important to have a pen you love, and an expensive notebook.

I have both. I like to defile my expensive notebook with grocery lists so it doesn’t intimidate me. Lego. Cat anythings. Birthday cake candles. They will be ten years old. How can this be?

I think life is endlessly interesting if you pay attention. Sitting at home what absorbs me? My dogs. The leaves, summer outside, green overtaking green. But being elsewhere, sitting here in a city not my own, looking at unfamiliar people, it’s a mystery how I fill my days at home so comfortably. What is wrong with me? How can I do so much nothing??

I need new experiences! at 73, I’ve got to get out more, vary my days.

Ah, a quite fat young woman with a quite fat young man sits down a few tables away. They are talking, God bless them, and the fragment I catch is her saying “with mashed potatoes on top.”

I am loving this.

Somebody just sat down at the table next to mine. “That’s a beautiful bracelet,” she says, followed by “Are you a writer? You look so creative.” (I’m just writing in my notebook.) “Yes,” I say.

“Do you have a card?” she wants to know now. She is leaning toward me. Do writers have cards? Good god. “No,” I say, “Sorry.” She is sweet and young and a little speedy and she tells me she lives with five writers but she herself is studying marketing. I have never understood what marketing is, but decide not to ask. We exchange names, shake hands, and I go back to my notebook.

Do I look approachable? Mary Cantwell once wrote “My face looks stony in repose,” and so does mine. Unless I keep a pleasant expression handy I look angry and scary. My children have pointed this out to me, with photographs to prove it. Maybe my face was not in repose just now. For a week last winter I stopped putting on lipstick and blush and went naked faced into the world. I forget why, but there was a reason. Maybe I had decided to accept the universe. The funny part was that my untouched face felt like a disguise. I would walk into Bread Alone as if incognito, and although I thought hard about this for a while, obsessed by the irony, it remained a puzzle. Why should what I really look like be a disguise?

Last night, sleeping on Jen’s extremely comfortable sofa, I had a great dream. Everyone was in love with this bad boy, who was also a little sad. He never went out with a woman longer than a few intense days, but he was very sexy. A dowdy woman in my dream exclaimed, “I’m even in love with his shadow!”

Never have I remembered dialogue from a dream, in fact I rarely remember a dream, but I loved what she said, or what I said in my dream, or however that all works. If I were younger, I suppose I’d examine “shadow” more carefully, thinking of the various layers of meaning, but at 73, I prefer the literal. “I’m even in love with his shadow!” Perfect. I also love how a dream lingers on for a day or two. That one made me feel young again, which is preferable to actually being young.

I read Plato’s Republic in the back of a Morris Minor while my parents drove around England. Even though I understood not a single word, it made me feel grown up. Speaking of shadows.

I know what I love about being home. Solitude. My own thoughts or lack thereof, no interruptions. My bad dogs. But I hope I can muster the energy it takes to leave a comfortable place, to risk stimulation, although why stimulation is a risk, I don’t know.

Here comes my daughter, her happy face flushed. We are going to shop for the kids, whom I adore. Sorry this letter is so short, and so short on anything but random notes and contradictions, but that’s all I’ve got these days. Any help would be welcome.

Best regards,

Abigail

 

Our guest blogger: Abigail Thomas is the author of the memoirs, A Three Dog Life, What Comes Next and How to Like It, and Safekeeping as well as two collections of short stories, Herb’s Pajamas and Getting Over Tom. She is also the author of Two Pages, a collection of two page writing prompts, and the AARP publication, Thinking About Memoir. We invite you visit her website www.abigailthomas.net