My laptop computer is dying. Actually, it has been dying over the course of a really long time. This is an experience I have not had elsewhere in my life, this matter where something is dying, and this looming demise is known, and the whole business unfolds over an unpredictable, ebbing and flowing, torturously long period. In my family of origin, it is customary to drop dead with no foreshadowing whatsoever; so much so that we joke that both of my grandmothers “lingered,” one having lived nearly 36 hours following her heart attack, and the other drawing out her life’s breath for a full seventy-two hours following her stroke.
The first two laptops that I wrote on were given to me by good friends. I mentioned to my buddy Nina that I was thinking of buying one, as it would be really great to be able to write at one of the many, many places/activities I was forever hauling my kids around to, many of which were far enough away that it made no sense to do anything but sit there on my ass for the two, or three, hours while the child in question did their thing. Irish dancing. Swimming. Youth Orchestra. To name but a few.
Nina offered up her daughter’s old IBM ThinkPad, and my life was forever changed. I loved it immediately. Devotedly.
Irish Dancing was a club that neither I nor my daughter ever belonged to — which was our acknowledged desire going into it. She had been to RiverDance and been enthralled enough with the whole hopping/jumping/drumming/fluting/tapping spectacle that she thought it would be a delicious hoot to give it a whirl. And so I ended up once a week sitting in a giant, overheated kitchen/meeting room of a community center filled with, well, Irish parents and their innumerable children for whom this whole endeavor was a Calling and a Way of Life. The wigs! The costumes! The SHOES!! Turns out there is no limit whatsoever on how much fervent, devoted conversational attention these topics can carry. It was a loud crowded sweaty scene; and though I could tell that this miraculous life-changing mini-computer seemed to be spewing out some indecipherable sound at totally random intervals, I couldn’t glean it and had no idea exactly what it was.
It wasn’t until waiting in the solemn library-grade quiet of the Youth Orchestra, with a roomful of Clasical Music Parents sipping lattes and reading WSJ, NYT or managing their porlfolios, that the sound was discernible – yep, there were the Beastie Boys yelling out in all their glory,
The first sign of my computer’s failing was nearly a year ago. The screen would suddenly go blank, throwing up a solid blue nothingness while making a sickly little blipping noise. My tech-savvy son said, “Yup. Hewlett-Packard’s are known for that. It’s gonna die.” Great. A new computer. Right when I had decided to format my two completed novels for e-publication. And far more importantly, right when I had begun a new, third novel.
Anyone who writes will tell you that its success depends on a hair’s breath of “talent” (let’s say less than 1%), an abundance of grueling, persistent hard work (90%), and that the remaining >10% is a mystical amalgamation of caffeine, alcohol, the alignment of the stars, witchcraft, amulets, rituals, and the elusive ephemera called inspiration. Most of us would argue that following our rituals extremely closely is the way in which we open the door for inspiration to find its way in. And if it doesn’t; well, at least we are fully and happily caffeinated, sitting in our favorite spot, wearing our lucky slippers.
My point being that I am deeply, and profoundly, attached to my laptop computer.
And I am absolutely convinced that I will be unable to write a single word, let alone a decent sentence, let alone a multi-hundred page novel on some interloping, new, unfamiliar piece of machinery that I have NO BOND WITH. Never mind that this particular HP laptop is actually my fourth laptop and the fifth computer on which I have written. Never mind that the first draft of my first novel was written almost entirely on a desktop computer in a dark basement in the pre-dawn hours. Never mind that, as my son and daughter feel compelled to point out to me on a regular basis, I don’t really need a laptop at all, since I never move the thing from its place on the table in my sun room. Well, of course I never move it! How else would I be able to sit in my lucky chair to write!!
This is NOT an area where we can blindly believe that the past will prove predictive of the future; in other words, the historical fact that I have adjusted to numerous different computers with relatively little difficulty CANNOT BE COUNTED UPON to foretell that it would be the same in some hypothetical, untested future with some hypothetical, untested electronic device that may simply have terribly bad juju.
My mother had on her fur coat. They must have been going to the symphony, or maybe the opera, back in the days when they had season tickets to both, before my father put his foot down and announced that he refused to go any more and thereby broke my mother’s heart. They came into the living room to say good-bye to my brother and me, all gussied up and remaining at a distance.
We had a babysitter. Kathy Bates (nope, not that one, though having the always-a-hoot actress as a babysitter would certainly have been swell). At 10 and 8, Kathy was not all that much older than my brother and I were; but we were very much little kids, and she had crossed that treacherous threshold into Early Adolescence. Kathy looked, most unfortunately, exactly like her father. At the age of nearly 13, she was well on her way to her final height of 6 feet tall.
She was athletic and strong and awkward and rangy all at once. Her hair always seemed to be horribly greasy, and it was evident that she curled it, teased it, sprayed it and in every way possible fought with it to achieve what little détente she could. She had clearly outgrown her pants and not yet grown into her blouse. Because we were watching TV, Kathy had to reluctantly don her glasses – the narrow, black-framed, pointy-tipped specs of the time that everyone spent years making fun of before shocking number of hipsters across the country took up their cause once again.
I was, in every way, fascinated by her.
She must have gotten special permission from my parents, as our TV watching was Regulated. No more than one hour per night, and only approved shows. We were permitted to watch all the PBS we wanted; which needless to say meant that we watched absolutely none at all, ever, period.
Kathy was kneeling on the floor, her PFFlyer-clad feet tucked underneath her as she sat no more than three or four feet from our little old black-and-white TV. Her eyes were already glued to the screen as my parents said their goodbyes.
It was Sunday, February 9, 1964, and the Beatles were about to make an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. My brother and I had no idea what to make of the awed, rapt solemnity with which Kathy Bates seemed to be approaching this event; but we understood the fact of it, if not the reasoning, and so knelt on the floor beside her.
The minute Ed Sullivan says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Beatles!” the girls in the audience break into cheers and screams and yells. Kathy Bates’ hands fly up to either side of her face, cradling her cheeks. She moaned in ecstatic agony for a second before crying out.
Kathy looked over at my brother and me as if suddenly remembering we were there. Our mouths were probably hanging open. I spent the rest of “All My Loving” pretending to watch –I thought Paul was the cutest thing ever. John scared me. Ringo had a great goofy crazy smile. And George? Well, at the age of 8, George who? – but secretly studying every single move that Kathy made.
It was one of those pivotal moments in life, when a brand new door opens and you get a white-light-blinding glimpse of a world that is so much bigger, and scarier, and more complicated, and more magnificent, than you ever imagined before. Thank you, Kathy Bates, for fanning a flame of curiosity and wonder.
Readers, may your 2014 be filled with such moments.
“In your status line list 10 books that have stayed with you. Don’t take more than a few minutes. Don’t think too hard. They don’t have to be great works, or even your favorites. Just the ones that have touched you. Tag 10 friends including me so I’ll see your list. Some of these books I read in a Memoir Writing class I took within the last five or six years. Two took up a lot of my time and contemplation in college.”
Yeah, I know it said “Don’t take more than a few minutes” as well as “Don’t think too hard;” both of which directives proved totally impossible for me. In fact, I found myself thinking about this a great deal over the past couple of days – as I was going to sleep the night of Amy’s post (and then proceeding to not go to sleep as I pondered), again when I woke the next morning, while I walked my dog in the brilliant bitter powder-snow cold, in between work appointments and the assorted tasks of everyday life.
I write (at least at times I do cough cough), and continue to consider what makes writing really, really good. This strikes me as sort of like devoting one’s life to understanding the sound of one hand clapping, in that, of course, there is no one, even reasonably satisfying answer to this. Writing has the capacity to touch us on so many different levels and in profoundly different ways: the beauty of words themselves can awe us in works of fiction and non-fiction as much as the poetry of immortal greats. Writing can teach us, move us, educate us, stir us to action, change our perspective, open us, transport us, transform us. There have been passages in books that I didn’t believe I would ever fully recover from – when little Walt dies in The World According to Garp, when the evil Blue Duck slits the throat of Roscoe, Joe and Janey in Lonesome Dove, when Billy Bibbit takes his life in One Flew over theCuckoo’s Nest – well, after each of these passages I mourned, wrenched for days, not myself, unable to shake the profound effect the authors had fueled within me.
And then there is the question of timing: does our profound love of a particular book depend on the exact time that we happened to read it, and would that book — so beloved once — hold the same power to stir our soul if we had chanced to read it at an entirely different time in our lives? Within the past couple of years, I re-read The Catcher inthe Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird, both of which are often first read during adolescence, and often in a soul-killing high school English class. Both of these novels struck me – again – as so powerfully visionary, so stunningly well-written, and, well, so damn important.
I had the occasion to visit a pre-school classroom this past week, something I do every so often in my work. For the hour that I visited, the classroom of four-year-olds first acted out the children’s book The Mitten, pretending to be each of the animals that one-by-one crowds into the ever-growing mitten to stay warm. Then, it was time to climb aboard The Polar Express. The little ones lined up in the hallway to claim their tickets, then returned to a darkened classroom to board the train when the whistle blew. They bumped up in down in their chairs, making their way to the North Pole, shouting out the sights they saw along the way. By the time the teacher read the story, I was glad that my visiting time was up, and that the room was dark, so I could sneak away as my eyes welled with tears at the story’s end, as they do every single time.
Meh. The formation of ideas into words, into sentences, into pages that comprised my writing of this third novel for a good chuck of time has come to a temporary halt. Sigh. I know this is how it goes for me. At times it flows, and the flow can proceed along – sometimes at a pace that surprises me, other times at a crawl – but still it proceeds, without substantial interruption.
But the halts do come. For me, they do. I am not talking about “writer’s block;” I am talking about the times – now being one of them – where life gets squarely in the way of being able to find and maintain the wide open mental spaces necessary for the creative picture to remain in focus, not to become too blurry for a while, too hazy-in-the-distance, just out of reach.
It’s! the! Holidays! With their sundry boisterous chaos.
Some of the chaos is magnificent, such as the nearly-two-week Thanksgiving visit from my daughter, soon to be followed up by another for Christmas; and the shelving of our usual family board games at the holidays in favor of being fascinated by a one-year-old baby who is fascinated by everything.
Some of the chaos is wrenching, such as the enormous suffering of many of the people I work with in my day job as a clinical social worker.
The words will flow again. And though I know this from history, part of me remains patient while another part sighs internally and drums its fingers.
In the meantime, let us all make merry, and rejoice for the gifts we have. In lieu of words, I offer some pictures of twinkly lights from my very own corner of the world – in this case, my own block in Evanston, IL.
“No, no, no, no no. I cannot stand it one minute longer.”
—
“That is simply NOT what happened,” she added.
“Well, who lit a fire under you?”
“That would be your department. I just think that you’re getting it all wrong. It simply did NOT happen that way.”
“It’s a story!”
“You’re taking too many liberties! You’re all the way down there, far away from so many of the very things that you’re telling about.”
“It’s MY story! It’s my story, according to ME. Course I’m making it up. S-T-O-R-Y!”
“It seems to me that if you open the door on these, well, these very personal things, that you should have a responsibility to some degree of truth.”
“Oh, truth is it? Now you’re flat-out playing with fire, talking about the truth!”
“I suppose you think that’s hilarious.”
“My darling, I have been waiting one hundred years, one full century, listening, and learning, and waiting for my chance to say my piece. It’s my turn! Geez Louise, you’re trying to close the barn door after the horse has already left the stable.”
“Again. Hilarious.”
“Lordy, lordy, what have I done.? Why do I have to put up with this from the likes of you?”
“Accountability! Responsibility! Where is your sense of honor!?”
Honor! Cripes almighty, YOU’RE A DOOR!
“YOU’RE A BOILER!”
—
I ain’t never used this word in all my born days…but…you’re a whore! You’re a whore of a door! A door whore! You’ll let anybody in!!”
“Oh! Oh! As if you are so very discriminating! As if you are particular about whose air you warm up and whose you don’t!”
“I got no choice!”
“None of us has a choice. Not any of us, my old friend. We are all in the same boat, in the identical situation, in the like predicament, in the same fix, on a par, on even terms, on the same footing, alike, equal, together, cut from the same cloth, brothers and sisters.”
“Pretty speech. Not sure if it means nothing. But it was pretty.”
“In short, my equally ancient brother, we are dying. We stand right at the threshold of death’s door.”
“It ain’t right to talk of such things. No good can come of it.”
“Ah, easy for you to say, my friend. But I have heard the whispers; and so, I am sure, have you.”
“What in tarnation are you nattering about now?
“You have the great good fortune to be too large, and too big of a – pardon my language – a pain in the rear end — to remove. Even when there is no longer a fire in your belly, you will remain. The day will come when you will witness this family pack up their boxes, and you will watch the next one move in. And the next after them. You will be eternal.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“I suppose I cannot blame you for that.”
—
“You have not seen me lately.”
“Of course I ain’t. Me being a boiler, in the basement here, like you said.”
“I know that you hear everything though. I know that even running along the pipes, and echoing through the floor, you have heard the difference in me.”
“Well…”
“After all this time. All this time. To think that I could warp so badly after one hundred years. It’s not my fault, you know. Everything has shifted. The whole house, I mean. My frame. The very floor underneath me.”
—
“I am ugly. I have bubbled, warped, bent, caved, buckled and bowed. I have bulged out in some places, and folded in on myself in others. There was a day when I could not budge. Frozen in place, unable to open even a crack. That’s when she started calling people in. I will be replaced.”
—
“For one hundred springs I have felt the first hint of winter’s end floating on a waft of breeze. I have been scorched and plumped by the sultry air of one hundred summers. The gentlest rains and dazzling, torrential storms have knocked against me. I have witnessed the outside world glow a glittering golden color through one hundred falls, and I have held my breath for the first sign of an early snowflake drifting down to melt on my outer face. And all the while that my outer face greeted each completely unique day, every shift in light and air, my inner face remained a constant, warmed by you. Warmed by a family.”
“ ‘Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?’ Do you remember that?”
“Course I do. How could I forget the Little One practicing those lines over and over?
Our Town, was it?”
“That’s right – Our Town.”
—
“There is something I would like to ask of you. A favor.”
”What might that be?”
“I would like to tell one part of the story.”
“That’s a awful lot to ask. It’s MY STORY.”
“Just one part. Before my time is up. Before the day when I get carried away. Replaced. So I might believe that some part of me remains.”
“Well…”
“Please.”
“Well…”
“I will let you know when the time comes. When we reach the part that I would like to tell.”
“Let me think on it.”
—
“Have you ever thought about what your name should be. You know, if you had a real name, like the people do?”
“Can’t say as I have. Why? Have you?”
“Shirley. I always thought my name should be Shirley.”
“Well, I’m guessing maybe I would be Merle. Or Floyd.”
“I like Merle. It suits you.”
—
“Do you know why I would pick Shirley? Do you remember when the ones you call The Boy and the Little One were small and high-voiced and running around in footed pajamas? And on very important occasions, their mama, the one you call My Lady, would make a special concoction for them to drink? They called it a Shirley Temple.”
“I remember.”
“The children would take all the cushions off the sofas and chairs, and build forts and tunnels, and make up stories, and dress in costumes – their cheeks would flush with excitement…those were…wonderful days.”
—
“I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Shirley.”
“I must say that the pleasure is entirely mine, Merle.”
I ain’t never used this word in all my born days…but…you’re a whore! You’re a whore of a door! A door whore! You’ll let anybody in!!”
“Oh! Oh! As if you are so very discriminating! As if you are particular about whose air you warm up and whose you don’t!”
“I got no choice!”
“None of us has a choice. Not any of us, my old friend. We are all in the same boat, in the identical situation, in the like predicament, in the same fix, on a par, on even terms, on the same footing, alike, equal, together, cut from the same cloth, brothers and sisters.”
“Pretty speech. Not sure if it means nothing. But it was pretty.”
“In short, my equally ancient brother, we are dying. We stand right at the threshold of death’s door.”
SPOILER ALERT: In this brief excerpt, the narrator of “Pushing the River” is revealed. But, not to worry, The book is not a mystery…
“No, no, no, no no. I cannot stand it one minute longer.”
—
“That is simply NOT what happened,” she added.
“Well, who lit a fire under you?”
“That would be your department.I just think that you’re getting it all wrong.It simply did NOT happen that way.”
“It’s a story!”
“You’re taking too many liberties!You’re all the way down there, far away from so many of the very things that you’re telling about.”
“It’s MY story!It’s my story, according to ME.Course I’m making it up.S-T-O-R-Y!”
“It seems to me that if you open the door on these, well, these very personal things, that you should have a responsibility to some degree of truth.”
“Oh, truth is it?Now you’re flat-out playing with fire, talking about the truth!”
“I suppose you think that’s hilarious.”
“My darling, I have been waiting one hundred years, one full century, listening, and learning, and waiting for my chance to say my piece.It’s my turn!Geez Louise, you’re trying to close the barn door after the horse has already left the stable.”
“Again.Hilarious.”
“Lordy, lordy, what have I done.?Why do I have to put up with this from the likes of you?”
“Accountability!Responsibility!Where is your sense of honor!?”
This past weekend’s adventure with my foster grandson D: Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo and Conservatory.D. and I actually did this same outing a number of months ago, which consisted mostly of him sleeping soundly in his stroller in front of numerous outdoor animals’ cages as well as in the fecund, heavy-aired, lush Conservatory.It proved an invigorating walk for me against a backdrop of gorgeous park flora and exotic (if caged) fauna.As for D, well, it reminded of the comedian who once quipped about the opera: “I love it.You just can’t sleep like that at home.”
Last weekend was a horse of a different color for D, who will mark the milestone of his first full year on Earth in just three weeks.D is easygoing as babies come, but the wheels are turning all the time.He is at the very beginning of understanding what developmental theorists call a “concept of mind,” meaning that he has a rudimentary understanding of himself as a being, a “self” with all kinds of thoughts and feelings and such.What’s more, he also understands that those around him, those of us who talk and dress and feed and rock and sing and tickle and hold and love him – well, we, too, have minds.
It is a critical moment in infant development when they begin to point to stuff, for it is in this way that they demonstrate their desire to share minds – they point our attention to whatever it is that they’re focusing on, in order that we share the same focus, that we align our two minds in the same direction, and feel the deeply satisfying sense of sharing an experience.Interestingly, the only other mammals who demonstrate an understanding of pointing are elephants (which was established pretty recently) and dogs, simply due to so many years of close proximity to humans and their inherent desire to communicate and please us.
Anyway. High falutin’ language aside,D could not get enough of pointing to every single animal.We would stroll over to a cage, I would say the name of the animal, and he would point.He particularly loved scanning through the chimpanzees’ and apes’ habitats to seek out and point to each and every one he could find lolling in a high-up hammock, or swinging on a rope, or hiding in a dark, out-of-the-way corner.
Babies learn by categorizing.If you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that a very young child can recognize that a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are both dogs!D isn’t quite there yet, but we have been working on animal sounds.When I start to moo, or oink, or woof-woof, he gives me a special sidelong glance that says, “You’re weird; but I like it!”D has known for weeks now what a quack-quack is.When I say quack-quack, Dawson will crawl through all four rooms of my first floor until he finds the hideously gaudy stuffed animal that’s meant to resemble a duck.Everything else, for the time being, is a woof-woof.
Really, a joyous little boy who’s scanning every inch of an animal habitat until he finds the giant, panting, pent-up, blazing-eyed jaguar so he can shoot up his arm, point his index finger right towards the big cat’s face and from deep in his belly grunt out a “WOOF WOOF!” makes for a wondrous day.
I have a foster grandson.The unexpected, chaotic, shape-shifting circumstances that led to this little boy’s emergence into this wide world have served as the inspiration for my third novel.
But back in the “real” world, the one in which my son and daughter-in-law are forever forging their unexpected lives day to day, hour to hour, exhausted and improvising; well, there is only today.
My son worries that my taking care of the now 11-month-old baby one or (infrequently) two days a week is an unfair thing to ask, a burden to me, a toll on my body as I continue to recover from aback injury.I, in turn, worry about him, nearly every minute, as is my right.
The baby boy, in the meantime, thrives, blossoms, works to figure out the world little piece by little piece, babbles, bangs things together, tests gravity continually to see if it will really always make objects fall – every! time! – touches, pats, dances, sings.Nothing can match the thrill of eliciting a full-on belly laugh from him.You just never know what will strike him as simply hilarious.
This past weekend I took him to Chicago’s wonderful National Museum of Mexican Art for their annual Day of the Dead exhibit.I try to make it down every year for this; it’s a highlight of the city’s cultural year.I had forgotten to pack the stroller for our outing, and so had to carry baby D in my arms through the museum.
D took it all in, as he always does.The entire time, his expression was what I call “The D Amazed Face” – mouth slightly open in sheer awe, eyes drinking it all in.When he took particular notice of something, the tip of his index finger would wander into his mouth, much as it might with a thoughtful adult.
It turned out to be quite fortuitous that the stroller had been forgotten, as D kept both of his little hands gripped tightly to my clothing – one on my sleeve, the other clutching a bunched up handful of sweater from around my neck.He eagerly took in the whirl of weird shapes, wild colors, scads of flowers, platefuls of play food – but only if he could maintain the abiding sense of being safe, and secure, and loved.Every so often, for a little extra reassurance, he would burrow his face deep into the pit of my arm, just for a second or two, then resume his amazed examination of this brand new world.
The chance to share in his amazement at this wide world is a privilege, indeed.The chance to offer him whatever measure of safe harbor I can is an honor.In some ways, there is nothing that allows life to make as much sense as the simple act of holding a baby.
