These Precious Days: Essays

by Ann Patchett

Were I to die, I’d be taking the entire world of my novel with me—no significant loss to literature, sure, but the thought of losing all the souls inside me was unbearable.

My professional life has continued to be marked by this on-again, off-again relationship, and, weird as it is, the problem isn’t unique to me. Before she boards a plane, one friend sends me instructions as to where in her house she’s hidden a thumb drive with the files for her uncompleted novel; another friend asks me if I could just finish her book for her if she dies. “I left a Post-it on my computer,” she tells me, “saying you’ll write the end.”

That was how I found my loophole: death has no interest in essays.

Time works tirelessly to erase facts—this country works tirelessly—but facts have a way of popping up, their buoyant truth shining all the more brightly with time. Maybe that was why death wasn’t interested in essays; essays don’t die. I decided to go all in.

True

Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have.

Beneath the glow of the little white lights draped over the ceiling’s crossbeams, my stepfather’s love for my mother and my father’s hatred of her looked remarkably similar.

Then I asked Mike, who would have found a way to get me the North Star had I wanted it.

“We were all standing there waiting on the photographer,” my father told me later on the phone. “And Mike said, ‘You know what she’s doing, don’t you? She’s going to wait until the three of us are dead and then she’s going to write about us. This is the picture that will run with the piece.’ ” My father said the idea hadn’t occurred to him, and it wouldn’t have occurred to Darrell, but as soon as Mike said it, they knew he was right. He was right. That was exactly what I meant to do. That is exactly what I’m doing now.

This is nice, but not the "waiting-for-them-to-die" part.

He spent his last two years living with his older daughter, Tina, who gave him all the love and attention he had denied her as a child.

what I would write after

Everything isn't writing material, is it? What about living in the moment? I feel you have no regard for life.

somehow convincing us that the couch was where she’d wanted to sleep all along.

“Someday you’ll get divorced,” he told me when I was in high school. “You’ll have a couple of kids to support. You’re not going to be able to do that writing.” I couldn’t be so selfish, he was saying. I had to think about what was best for those kids.

I’m older now than my father was then, and I think about these conversations differently in the aftermath of time. Maybe he was trying to save me from suffering. He remembered his father walking through Los Angeles all day looking for work with a sandwich in his pocket, a wife and seven children back on Council Street. He remembered moving home after the navy, working in a liquor store, sleeping on the porch again. Wouldn’t he try to spare me that?

But I was a writer and nothing else, and to miss seeing me as such was to miss me altogether. I wrote and read and read and wrote.

Contrary to popular belief, love does not need understanding to thrive.

I want to disagree with this, but then I would be lying to myself.

Our very happiest times were spent on the two linen sofas that faced each other in the Rossmoyne house, drinking gin and tonics and reading Yeats aloud, passing the leather-bound volume back and forth. “Who will go drive with Fergus now, / And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade, / And dance upon the level shore?” “This one,” he would say, and read me “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Then he would hand me back the book and I would say, “This one.”

Every time he sent me down the alley to retrieve the scattered balls I thought, I’ll show you. I will not hit or play or join or score but I will write and I will show you. It turns out that having a hard wall to hit your tennis balls against is what gives them bounce. Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert. It made me fierce. Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval. I wish I could bottle that freedom now and give it to every young writer I meet, with an extra bottle for the women. I would give them the ability both to love and not to care.

I was twenty-seven when my mother married for the third time. The very idea of it exhausted me.

my father wanting me to be more like him, my stepfather wanting to be more like me.

I cannot imagine Darrell being interested in how much money I made or where I went or whom I knew, and yet I always believed he cared about my happiness.

But coming in as the third father at a point in my life when I most decidedly did not need a third father, he gave me a wonderful gift: he didn’t see me as my work, nor did he see me as an extension of my mother. He let me be just one more person around a crowded table, a valued addition.

It can be hard to remember what someone once meant to you in the wake of so much suffering.

From each of the fathers I took the things I needed, and then I turned them into stories—

and I stood on his shoes so we could dance, my father singing and swaying us back and forth, Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you. Dear God, how I loved him. How he loved me! How proud he was of what I did, how grateful I was for his help.

I had never been so happy, because now I was a girl like Fern, and Mike had never been so happy, because he had never made anyone this happy before in all his life.

There had never been so many people in that house before, and the chaos and conversations turned into a kind of light,

Aspects of this story seem mildly shocking in retrospect—the haphazard aloneness of it all, the wrongheaded decision masquerading as moxie. But most stunning is the unquestioned belief that every single thing I cooked had to be made from scratch.

I did not glance at the instructions, I followed them, so that even now when someone claims they don’t know how to cook, I find myself snapping, “Do you know how to read?” Paying close attention to the text, and realizing that books can save you, those were the lessons I learned my freshman year of college when school was closed.

I wish I could remember whether we had the sense to be grateful then, for food, for the comfort of one another, for the luxury of our education. We were—we are—so insanely fortunate, and much too cool to bow our heads to anything, but in our hearts I hope we recognized the bounty that lay before us.

I was trying to distract myself, but the distraction left me feeling worse, the way a late night in a bar smoking Winstons and drinking gin leaves you feeling worse. The unspoken question of shopping is What do I need?, but I didn’t need anything. What I needed was less than what I had.

It doesn’t take so long for craving to subside. Once I got the hang of giving something up, it wasn’t much of a trick. The much harder part was living with the startling abundance that had been illuminated when I stopped trying to get more. Once I could see what I already had, and what actually mattered, I was left with a feeling that was somewhere between sickened and humbled. When did I amass so many things, and did someone else need them?

I was struck by how often the lessons we learn when we’re young, the things we could never imagine needing, make it possible to meet what life will ask of us later. “I’ve grown to be who I am,” Charlie said, “because of those life experiences each of us has.”

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

“All you have to do,” he tells me, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.” The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past.

We want to get close so we can convince ourselves that he is made of some rare and superior material that hasn’t been given to us, but it isn’t true. Calling him a saint is just a way of letting ourselves off the hook. After riding around with Charlie, I find it shocking to realize how simple it would be to see myself as a worthless servant, to find joy in the service of others, to open my heart and let it remain open to everyone, everyone, all the time. The trick is in the decision to wake up every morning and meet the world again with love.

I had miscalculated the tools of adulthood when I was young, or I had miscalculated the kind of adult I would be.

“Then why didn’t you call to say you’d landed?” “It was too late.” In the house, he went to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of orange juice. He was dead tired but not dead. “I didn’t want to wake you up.” He might as well have said, I thought you were sleeping because I have no idea who you are, or who any normal people are.

Eventually, Karl was going to die. Eventually, we were all going to die. I understood this, but I wanted him to give me the luxury of forgetting. I wanted not to have to contemplate his loss so vividly while he was still here.

He shook his head. “Too much money.” “I don’t care if we have to sell the house. I’m not going to enjoy having extra money if you’re killed in a cheap plane.”

What I understood was that there was no keeping anyone safe—one person remembers to tip the nose up for the landing while the other person forgets to latch the door—and, in the end, it probably won’t be the nose tip or the door. It will be something infinitely more mundane. It will be life and time, the things that come for us all. Which doesn’t mean I’ll be able to keep myself from saying, Careful, call me, come right back. I will always be reaching for his hand.

This is where the reader might be tempted to think that she was “the pretty one” and I was “the smart one,” but that would be a fairy tale. Tavia is scorching smart. People like to believe that women like Tavia will be punished eventually, that, having been given too much in the way of luster, they must lack the intelligence or depth that would bring them true happiness. We are all but promised that such women will make some horrible mistake early on, usually one involving a man who pays them too much attention, or they’ll take what the world offers them and burn up quickly. Beauty ensures there will be no close friendships to see them through. How could they have friends when other women are hobbled by jealousy, when men only want to sleep with them? Somehow Tavia failed to acknowledge any of this. She worked hard. She went about her life with what I can only describe as glee. As far as I could tell, everybody loved her.

She had managed to peel off other people’s expectations in order to see what a life that was entirely her own would look like. It looked like the natural world.

I read an article recently about how friendships can die over time. We shouldn’t feel bad about it, the article said. People change after all, grow in different directions: nothing lasts forever. It’s true, of course, that we have changed, but Tavia and I are in this life together. We found each other as little girls, and through everything, we’ve held on. Some years all we’ve managed to do is exchange birthday cards, while other years we’ve talked on the phone every week, usually when she’s driving to work. In the best years we see each other all the time. It really doesn’t matter. Ours is a friendship full of elasticity and trust. For fifty years we’ve adjusted our bond to fit the times. Fifty years! Somewhere buried inside us are the selves who left school early to go back to my mother’s and listen to Keith Jarrett records.

And maybe that’s true, except that of all the myriad and conflicting words I could use to describe Tavia, lucky isn’t one of them. At every turn, happiness was her decision. She started working after school at fourteen, finishing her homework while the rest of us were in bed asleep. She has spent her life saddled with Type 1 diabetes and has dealt with all the attending health problems. Not only did she take care of herself, she took care of everyone else. She didn’t complain. But it was more than that—no matter the hand she was dealt, it always looked like she was winning. Even in hard times, she made her life look effortless, glamorous. Born on New Year’s Eve, she seemed to exist in a perpetual fizz of golden champagne bubbles. That was her choice. Working at the nature preserve, she puts on a little lip gloss before firing up the chain saw.

“The next time you see Tavia . . . ,” is what I imagined him saying to me. “I know,” I tell him. “I know. She saved you. You’re grateful. Get in line.”

“Don’t you wrestle with this?” she asked me. I told her I did not. “But you must have, at some point.” When I was a child, my bed was covered in stuffed animals. I slept with my head propped up on the edge of a giant green frog. My sister wanted only baby dolls, the more realistic the better—dolls whose hinged eyelids came down like shutters when you leaned them back. She practiced changing their empty diapers. She swaddled them and carried them in her arms. Even the memory of those dolls makes me shiver. “All my life people have been telling me I must want a baby, or that I’m going to want a baby later on,” I said. “It’s like someone telling me the car keys are in the drawer in the kitchen. ‘Go get the car keys out of the drawer.’ So I go and I open the drawer and the car keys aren’t in there. In fact, nothing’s in there. The drawer is empty. I go back and tell them, the keys aren’t in the drawer, and this person says to me, ‘No, they are, you just need to try harder. Go back and look again.’ It doesn’t make any sense, but I do it. I go back and look, and the drawer is still empty. People are always telling me I’m wrong. Total strangers have told me that I’m wrong, that I need to go back and check one more time, but there’s never anything in the drawer, and there’s never going to be anything in the drawer.” My friend thinks about this for a while, and then she nods. “That must be really nice to know,” she said. And I tell her yes, it’s wonderful.

“Imagine how selfish a person would have to be to not have a child,” she said to me.

Wow. Proud of yourself? Asshole.

We had the time to imagine and dissect every conceivable scenario for our future, but I couldn’t quite envision what she was suggesting: a man who wanted children; a man who wanted to have those children with me; a man who wanted those children with me so much that he would claim half the work, half the love and responsibility, and I would be able to believe that he was telling me the truth, and that the truth wouldn’t change a few months in. He would be a wonderful father. He would make sure I still had the time and space to be a writer. I shook my head. I had never met such a man, nor did I believe in his existence.

How I came not to care about other people’s opinions is something of a mystery even to me. I was born with a compass. It was the luck of my draw. This compass has been incalculably beneficial for writing—for everything, really—and for that reason I take very good care of it. How do you take care of your internal compass? You don’t listen to anyone who tells you to do something as consequential as having a child. Think about that one for a second.

“I could never do that to someone I loved,” I said. “Do what?” “Childhood.” “Oh, that,” she said, nodding. “I get that.” Kate didn’t have children either.