A Table Set For Many

Good Morning, Nancy:

The rooms are clear and bright here this morning—I’m still at Hollins for about another month, and am witnessing the most glorious of springs from the table that is my desk in this house.  There are pear trees.  Cherry.  Redbud. There are violets. Daffodils. Forsythia.  Blossoms abound.  And in this week, grief has abounded too.  I dreamed a long river with tables of ice and woke with my husband’s voice, telling me a dear friend of his had chosen to leave this world.  I’ve been deep inside myself these last days, and have found myself thinking of homes and so many tables in my life.  Places I have eaten, sat, shared, written even.

When I was little, my mother and father and I would drive to Dwale to my granny and pa’s house.  In my memory, that table was always laden.   There were pies with meringue brown from the oven.  Mustardy potato salad.  Light bread stacked on little plates or cornbread and buttermilk.  Fried bologna with the edges cut so it wouldn’t curl up.   And in between the plates of food to make your mouth water, the tubs and jars of this and that.  Margarine.  Salad dressing.  Ruby beets sweet and spicy with a fork to spear them.  Much later, when I’d grown and moved and moved, I found myself in Virginia, a graduate student and a girlfriend to a boy who came from an old Southern family.  I’d literally never sat at a table with so many knives and forks and salad plates and wine glasses.  We ate shad roe and Charlotte Russe and drank wine out of one glass and water out of another.  There were salad plates and dessert plates and I was out of my element with what to reach for, when.

I’ve known even less how to behave at the table in other places over the years.  At a bounteous meal in France once, with calves tongue on a platter in a table’s center and bread to melt in my mouth and wine from grapes I’d cut myself, I knew scarcely a dozen words of French and was mostly afraid to ask for anything, to speak up as the others laughed and celebrated.  In India, I did not know the etiquette of eating my meals with my fingers, nor did I understand the significance of plates of yak butter and the neat mounds of henna we were offered as we sat crossed legged while a temple was blessed in Muktinath in the north of Nepal.  Country upon country and tables both familiar and unfamiliar, both comforting and new, all of them part of me as I grew and entered the world.

These last years as I have become more deeply a writer, the tables for the feast of words that is part of my life have been many.   I have taught at a variety of writing programs. I have written and published books.  I’ve sat at tables for signings.   I’ve been in rooms full of tables of books and magazines at giant writing conferences.  I’ve brought three books to the table of the writing world so far, and have just this week come to the last seven pages of the fifth draft of book four.  I’ve even tabled plans for a book or two along the way, and this very day I’ve sat at a table by this window  at a sunroom I’ve made my office these last months at the college where I am a writer in residence.  This week of both the beauty of spring and the loss of a friend, I have thought a lot about ambition and this writing life I have chosen.  That table most of all.  How to behave there?

A writer friend wrote me some months back with a question.  When will I be invited to sit at the table?  What did she mean by this? She was frustrated with where she is in her writing life—its publishing, the time she has to write, the name she wants for herself as a writer.  She meant, if I am interpreting the metaphor correctly, the table of success.  What do we reach for? The Big People’s table of the writing life?  The table that says we have “made it” as writers.  The table belonging to those who have achieved this thing, this measure of success, this measure of ownership of…and there my words fail me.  What makes us a success?  What do we own? What gives us an identity?  The number of books?  The number of events or readings or conferences or festivals or gigs or even the likes on a Facebook status, all the successes, small or large that define our lives in the external, professional sense.  If I do not sit at such a table, the table of success, will I lose my identity as a writer?  What do I lose and what do I gain if I let go of my seat at one table of identity and seek the most important sustenance of all, that most important meal you describe it so well: “…the energy between me and the universe of story.”

I am trying hard, these last two years, to learn how to behave honorably at the table of language.  To let myself eat and drink from the deepest place inside me, the table of heart and purpose.  To reach inside myself for stillness, a clean wide place of understanding, a quiet room, a white blank page that is my own soul’s purpose.  Soul.  Yes, even that over-used word.  That table of the self.  I want to feast on silence, sunlight, starlight, the moon shining down on words I make with my own two hands.  To reinvent the language I have known, make it new, reclaim it, make even the metaphor of drinking the moon new.  To devour that energy you describe that flows back and forth between me and the energy of story.  To drink deep of the elixir of making words and, at the same time, to speak honestly and clearly.

I think of myself, that girl who trekked mountains.  I think of being in Nepal, hungry and tired and a hundred miles from any place I knew even slightly.  My meal, a can of tuna I’d hauled with me all those miles of trekking, my table that rock beside a dirt path, and right then a beggar came by.  A sadhu.  A holy man.  He held out his hands, wanting, and I wondered what I would do if I gave him what I had to eat.  Would I be hungry?  What would I do if I were?  I handed him the can though I did not know where or how my next meal would be and then I walked on.  This morning as I remember that moment, I think of the words of the poet, Adrienne Rich.   We must use what we have to invent what we desire.  That is the table where I want to sit, where I want to linger.  And, more than that, I imagine a table where I invite others to sit, to share—both their successes and their struggles, their vulnerabilities and their strengths.

You, my friend, are my guest at my table, always.

Yours with so much love,

 

Karen