Notes on Finishing
After five years of research and three years of writing [interrupted by the birth of my daughter and the death of my father and the ceaseless forward movement of life and work], the Imagining Toronto book is done. All that remains is a little more haggling over the text. And the typesetting, a mysterious process I imagine to be conducted by elves who run rows of type back and forth between ink-stained cases and a manual press. Or maybe that was the dream I had after visiting Mackenzie House.
For nearly a week in the evenings I have wandered through the house looking for something to read. Something that will not require keeping a package of post-it notes handy to mark passages for later reference. Something that will not arouse an urge to add another section to the book, already a bit of a door-stopper. Last night I picked up Janet Lunn's Double Spell, a children's story set in the Beach area of Toronto. A book I had read and loved as a child, but that never made its way into the book. Feeling guilty about this, I set Double Spell aside and instead giggled over Russell Ash and Brian Lake's Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities until I fell asleep.
And this morning. Cool, sunny, September. My husband travels out for a day of teaching; my daughter sleeps in her bed; the cats are fed. And I feel at loose ends. I ache, a little, to turn to other projects I have held in abeyance. But they must wait a little longer. And for the moment I sit here in a kind of suspended animation. The moment of creation; the bullet between the gun and its target; an embryo (also a kind of bullet) floating somewhere in the fallopian tubes. What does a suicide think in the moments after her feet leave the surface of the bridge? Newton must have something to say about this inertia, the moment between an action and its consequence.
Life goes on. Tomorrow I will vacuum, scrub the bathroom, redesign my faculty website, play with our daughter, bike somewhere with my husband, and feel the season turn around us. Undoubtedly I will write: the compulsion is far too deeply ingrained to have any thought of stopping now.
But there is peace here. Trains rumble through the Junction; a blue jay screams in the cedars. My daughter stirs. Hello, she says. Hello, my little girl.
