Waiting for the Lights to Come Back On

January, messy and scattered, is mercifully over.   Last Thursday, I went to a doctor’s appointment in Harrisonburg.  I drive more than a hundred miles, in all seasons, over good roads, across the Blue Ridge Mountains, and into the Shenandoah Valley. 

I was glad to break away from my desk, put distance between me and the current project that glared at me every time I stepped in my office.   The landscape was as dreary as my mood, brown grass, bare trees, gray barns, lumps of black cattle.    

Usually I play the local country music station until it fizzles out and then let my own thoughts ping-pong.  But this time I slipped in Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde CD and listened to songs jazzy and sad by turns, with cryptic lyrics I never tried to interpret when I was thirteen and still don’t, just enjoyed the way he leans words together.

I rolled along the chemical-scoured highway, past frozen creeks and ponds still frosted with snow, tucked inside my truck-bubble, recalling every bright tap of tambourine, every calliope slide of harmonica. 

The music tricked my mind, the way the sun shining through branches tricked my side-vision.  Flick, flick, flick.  Fence-picket glimpses of my young self scribbling maudlin poetry alternated with quick snaps of my present self, grim-lipped over my inner struggle.

All month I’d produced pitches, pieces of proposals, prologues, outlines, and plots, but when I went to the page, the words iced up and sank to the bottom.  It’s like living in a house with one small lamp.  I keep waiting for somebody to cut all the lights back on.

In 20-20 hindsight, I reviewed my thirty-two-year career, wishing I could go back to 1985 or 1998 or 2009, years when things went well.  I remembered being fifteen and wanting to be a children’s book writer so bad, it hurt to breathe.  What had changed?

Hands gripping the wheel, I asked myself two questions:

One:  What did you love then?

Two:  What do you still love?

Answers to the questions flew into my head.  No surprise, the lists were the same.  Go back to what you love.  Is it really that simple?

The farther I drove from home, the closer I drove to home, or so it felt.  I often experience that odd dichotomy between Fredericksburg and the Valley.  Just I am between places, I am between projects, waiting for the one that will let me settle in for a long stay.

A friend e-mailed me this quote from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years–

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it.  And so each venture

Is a new beginning . . .

Home is where one starts from.  As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated . . .

As I headed into the mountains, Eliot’s lines mingled with Dylan’s.  I woke up and noticed things—sky thrown over winter scenery like a deep blue tarp.  Patches of snow lingering in the shade like fallen clouds.  Red-tailed hawks straight as plumb bobs on phone wires.  The world wasn’t as dull or colorless as I thought.

A turkey buzzard angled overhead.  When he flapped his wings for balance, I knew I could make a wish.  But I’d have to be fast—the wish has to be stated before the buzzard regains his easy glide.  I had time for one word:  Light!  

 I could have said Money! or Contract! or Award!  But no.  I want the lights back on.  There’s still one small lamp glowing, though. 

For now, I guess it’s enough to see by.