In my mind, I have written at least ten blog posts these past few weeks. Unfortunately, none of them ended up on the "page." I imagined posts about: homemade gifts, like the shoes that Leo made for Sophie, which hurt her feet and which she wore anyway; about the movies I have seen, The Theory of Everything and The Imagination Game, in which unusual men succeed at impossible tasks with the help of women who love them; about a Romanian bartender, Radovan, whom I befriended in a hotel bar in London, whom I gifted with my new copy of Best American Short Stories, after he told me about his love of Pushkin; about daydreaming, from my bed after my husband has gotten up and the sky is still dark and I am awake but letting my mind wander, and where I thought up the endless ideas for this blog.
Sadly, those ideas stayed in my subconscious. I don't know if they will make it out alive. And I don't know if other artists feel this way, that they will never get to every idea that comes to them. I know that as a mother, I have a long list of things I never finished, or even started, like the flannel pajamas I had hoped to make for each of the kids when they came home for Christmas this year.
My family has trickled back to their jobs and schools, pajama-less, I sit in a quiet house, wondering what to do first. There are Christmas decorations to put away. There is cleaning to be done. (Did I mention that we had the electrical wiring in our house replaced and are now faced with repairing the road map of holes in the walls and ceilings, not to mention the layer of plaster dust inside drawers and every corner of the house?) I also need to begin revising one last story in my collection and continue submitting the completed stories to journals and magazines. And I plan to begin the draft of my new collection this month. One might wonder if there is any part of my life in which I am caught up.
I am happy to tell you that there is one. I spent the last three days of 2014 copying from Anna Karenina, hoping to reach page 200 before the end of the year. On December 28, I found myself twenty-two pages short of that goal. If I were to accomplish the task, that meant roughly seven pages per day. One a good day, I have copied five.
Sunday, I rearranged the living room.
Monday morning, I sat down at the massive wooden desk in the living room, a desk left behind by the former owners, a desk which typically only gets used to serve appetizers at the holidays, and set to work. The first day, I copied nine pages. I accomplished little else that day.
Tuesday morning, I woke at 6am with Anna Karenina on my mind. By 7am, I was seated at the desk, pen in hand. I managed another eight pages, putting me three pages short of my goal.
Wednesday morning, New Year's Eve, I woke with the knowledge that I would make my goal. I should tell you that New Year's Eve is also my birthday, a day which I have rarely enjoyed. I think this has a bit to do with sharing my birthday not just with a holiday, but with a mostly adult holiday, which means that family and friends often have other plans. The day has come to have more to do with regret of all those things I have failed to acomplish, with yet another year behind me, a bitter distillation of year end disappointments.
This birthday, my forty-eighth, I woke with a sense of optimism. I was going to make it. And, if my calculations were correct, I could complete the project within a year. And so, with no plans other than to sit at a desk and copy out the remaining five pages of Anna Karenina (if you have been counting, that actually puts me at page 202, but I had to write to the end of a chapter), my birthday unfolded in a beautiful organic way. My husband presented me with a birthday breakfast of one egg, over easy, on top of his homemade ham hash. My daughter and I snuck out for a secret cupcake and a trip to a hip downtown toystore where I bought a kit to make a pinhole camera (stay-tuned for results of that project). I was presented with brand new potholders and dishtowels, a gift which I am embarassed to say made me squeal, and if you knew me, you would understand why. I once lied to my children, telling them the dishwasher was broken, so we could wash dishes together at the sink.
As to Anna Karenina, so much happened in those twenty-four pages. Levin discovers that Kitty did not marry Vronsky. Anna tells Vronksy she is pregnant with his baby. And most disturbing, Vronsky rides in the race that kills his horse. When I wrote that last scene, I pushed the chair back from the desk and stood up. My hands flew to my mouth. My daughter, 17, who had walked in to tell me happy birthday looked at me and asked, what's wrong, mom? All I had to say was, the horse died, and she was standing in front of me, hugging me. I was crying. She was stroking my head, saying, I know, I remember that part, it was so sad.
I can only imagine what the rest of this year has in store for me.
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