Wednesday, March 25, 2015

I'm Ready for My Gravy, Mr. DeMille.

This morning three of the girls woke early to make biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Then they came back to the dorm to get dressed and ready for the day. A few minutes later, one of the other girls came in and said the gravy was gone. The boys had eaten it.

This is not a discussion of gender. No one assigned those girls the task to cook breakfast. And no one intended to serve the boys first. The girls asked if they could make biscuits and gravy, because they wanted to eat it.

I was still sitting in my bed when this unfolded. When I walked out, the boys were sitting around the table, full plates in front of them, enjoying their breakfast. The girls stomped around a bit. A couple of other kids, who also missed the gravy part of the program, dug out the cheerios. One of the dads offered up fresh bagels he had picked up earlier this morning (don't ask me when; I was not awake yet). But I don't think anything helped the girls feel better. And the boys, if they felt bad, did not show it on their faces.

What I noticed was that we adults wanted to fix it, make it right, restore the balance. I heard someone say to one of the kids who had missed out, "Don't worry. Once we are up on that roof, you'll be glad you didn't eat a heavy breakfast." Our leader, who has been on many, many of these trips with kids, mentioned that she would be having a conversation about it later on. As for me, well, once I saw the boys had finished, I suggested they go in and load everything breakfast dishes. I like to even the scales.

After they left, I set to work cleaning the rest of the mess: pans from cooking sausage and making the gravy, bowls in which they had mixed the white sauce, baking sheets, mixing spoons, and a greasy stovetop. There was a bowl full of extra biscuits, thirteen of them, which are now stuffed with ham and cheese and egg and wrapped in foil in the fridge. While I put them together, I contemplated when to serve them, and how to divy them up fairly.

I think at the heart of this is a conversation about work, and about being rewarded. Those girls got up early, cooked breakfast and went off to get ready for work, thinking that they would be sitting down to a tasty, decadent breakfast. And those boys did nothing to earn the right to eat their fill. And I can relate. Yesterday, one of the kids whom I have know for many years, asked me about my book, and when I told her, she said, how long have you been working on that?

5 years.

I am ready for my biscuits and gravy.

I tell myself these words, that I once taped these words from the Tal Te Ching to the wall inside the closet of a house I have long since left behind:

Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.

 

 

Monday, March 23, 2015

Losing Things

The work crew set off about 8:30am. I stayed behind to write. It was hard to do that, let myself and 21 other people think that writing my stories is as important as putting a roof on a house for a grandmother and her two grandchildren, who have been living with blue tarps over their heads for over two years.

I took my walk and ate lunch in the memorial garden. I began recopying the final revision of collection. By 2:30 in the afternoon I had completed the first of eleven stories. I took a break and carried my handwritten copy of Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Kindness" out to the parking lot and copied the first stanza in big yellow chalk letters onto the concrete. I want it to be the first thing the work crew sees when they return this afternoon.

Later, after a dinner of spaghetti casserole, prepared at home by my sister-in-law and carried here in a cooler in the back of our vans to Louisiana, I will ask anyone who is interested to spend a few minutes listing out things they have lost. Some of those things will not surprise me, but I am certain that I many things on their lists will. If they let me, I will list some of those things here for you.

I have put aside Tolstoy for the week, to copy my own work, to work with teenagers who are learning how to use power tools instead of laying on a beach, with parents who took their vacation time to work on someone else's house. We are fathers and mothers and and grandparents and sons and daughters. We are plasterers and teachers and students and writers.

And we have all lost things. Precious things, things we thought we could never live without.

my hair

my grandpa

shoes

my dog

my dad

my flip-flops in a lake

motivation for school

Monica

every pen I've ever used in school

my uterus

Shakespeare, my cat

my learner's permit

my best friend Pat to cancer

my right breast

my keys in a Steak and Shake, found three hours later

foods that I used to love when I was younger but now they kill my stomach

tv remote

my homework

two husbands

Aunt Sandy, I loved her

my mom, 10-20-2-12

a stuffed animal from when I was a kid

I once lost my brother but then we found him.

my lucky socks

 

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Surfing in Paris

With the revision of my short story collection (mostly) complete, I am preparing for a writing residency. I leave tomorrow morning at 6:30am. This is not like most writing residencies, where one runs away from home and all its responsiblities in order to focus on one's writing. I am going on a work trip to Slidell, Louisiana with a group of people who will be rebuilding a home damaged by Hurrican Katrina. While the others mud, drywall and paint, I will be writing alonside them. In the evening, I will offer writing opportunities to anyone who is interested.

It has been a busy week in my family. 13 boarded a plane to China this morning. She raised money for her ticket in less than six months. Honestly, I don't know how she did it. But I do: she baked bread; she dog-sat; she sold carwash coupons; she saved her Birthday and Christmas money. She has been packing and unpacking all week, making certain that she had all the necessities, including the right shoes to match the clothes she packed, and a package of Oreos. She loaded her backpack with books. I gave her a journal to record her thoughts.

At the airport, no one cried. Not even me. It could be because she is the last of seven. I have witnessed many departures and returns. It could be because she is an experienced traveler, traveling with her school group to San Francisco last year. This kid has been leaving me since the day she exited the womb.

It could be because I am not a sentimental person, or that I am tired and ready for a break.

By the time we were pulling out of the parking garage, I was making a mental list of what I needed to pack for my writing residency. I can't help but wonder if this makes me a bad mother. Shouldn't I be worrying about my daughter?

This is not the first time that a trip of mine has overlapped with my kids' departures. I think I prefer it that way. It is much easier to go away if I know they are off doing their own thing as well. It is a phenomenon I call Surfing in Paris, inspired by my first trip to Europe, when I was forty. While I was gone, my kids went to the beach with their dad. I was glad that they had something to keep them occupied. What I found was that while I was off struggling to relax away from home, my daughter (17) decided to take surfing lessons. I have spent hours talking this kid into diving off the dock into the lake, so know, without a doubt, she would not have done this if we were together. There was something about going our own ways that gave both of us courage to step out of our comfort zones, to try something new. And when I returned, she was proudly wearing the t-shirt that proved she had ridden a wave.

This time, my baby is the one traveling to another country. She might be anxious, maybe even scared. It seems like we are far away from each other. But that is just geography.

The End of the Affair

Note: I wrote this more than two weeks ago. I contemplated not publishing this one, but I decided it is relevant and needs to be read. I have not copied a single page of Anna Karenina. I have instead been completing the revision of my own manuscript.

 

One week ago, I finished copying Part Three of Anna Karenina, 353 pages by my bood, satisfied to end on the last line of the back of my own sheet of paper, a good sense of closure.

The next day, I woke up knowing that I was leaving Tolstoy behind for the weekend. My husband and I drove to Michigan. We went cross-country skiing, my first time, and played several games of cribbage, many of which I won. We ate bagels for breakfast, and on Sunday, after springing our clocks forward, stayed in bed reading until 10:30am.

Since coming home, I have had difficulty returning to the pages of Anna. I'm still working, a couple of pages a day, but the romance is gone. I have even contemplated giving up the project. Not because it is too hard, but because I realized the peace and calm of not having Tolstoy in my head. My mulling and contemplating of the story, and his life, and his family had bloomed far beyond the page.

I did not come to this realization on my own. My husband was the one who called me out. I was sitting in the kitchen one morning, hard at work copying pages, trying to get to page 400 by the end of the month, when Mark leaned back against the counter and looked at me.

"Our house doesn't seem like a very happy place lately."

I was shocked. I was feeling pretty good about things. The kids were doing well in school. 17 got a small part in the school play. 13 has saved the money to take a school trip over spring break. The house was clean, and things were pretty quiet in our life. I began to mutter about my own work, and that maybe it was him and not me or the rest of the family. Nothing was resolved.

But after he left for work, I began to think about what he saw when he walked in the door: me, head down, madly copying the work of another man.

Me talking about how I wanted to go to Russia, even as I was telling him we couldn't really take time to get away as a couple.

Me, me, me.

Except not me. My own writing never seemed to make it off the To-Do list. I began each day with Tolstoy and ended with the dinner dishes, falling into bed so exhausted that I couldn't even read a page before falling asleep. Mark would remove the book from my face and turn off the light. So I sent him an email and told him that I was sorry, that while my work was important to me, so was our marriage, that I was looking forward to a weekend away, to getting out of my head.

When we returned from Michigan, I moved Tolstoy to the end of my daily schedule. This has been one of my most productive weeks as a creative person. Not only have I waded through the revision of the last story in my collection, I have sewed several new pieces for the shop, cleaned out a couple of closets, knitted three new dishcloths (while watching The Voice) and finished reading two books.

So when Vronsky bumped into Anna's husband while sneaking into the Karenins' house for a rendezvous, I felt annoyed. Let's get on with it already. Let's wrap this up. Some people have lives to live.

 

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

You Are Not the Boss of Me

The romance is gone. I am no longer enamored with Leo's long, complicated sentences. My hand hurts, not my finger and thumb from gripping the pen, but alongside my palm and up through my pinkie, from being curled and cramped underneath as I slide across the page.

I don't want to copy anymore. I dread sitting down to it each day, and yet, I am still strangely compelled to do it. Some days, I get right to it, pages spread out across the kitchen table as early as 5:30am, the only light a lamp that hangs overhead, the sky outside still dark. Other days, I sit and watch old movies, like Inherit the Wind and The Harvey Girls, while I write on a TV tray set up in front of my seat on the couch.

After everyone leaves the house, I trick myself by turning the furnace down to 60 and set up a space heater at my feet, forcing myself to sit in the only warm spot in the house while I copy line after line. I feel a little like Bob Cratchett.

I carry pages with me to write while I wait in doctors' offices. I sit in the car and copy words while my daughter has her saxophone lesson. I even tore out several chapters to take with me on a recent trip to Dallas for a friend's book launch party.


Lately, I have taken to eating handfuls of chocolate chips each time I reach certain milemarkers: the end of a page, the end of a particularly long paragraph, or the end of one long boring conversation inside Levin's head. Last night at the store, I bought another bag, telling myself that I was going to bake chocolate chip cookies for the kids.

The bag is already half gone.

I want to quit. I am grouchy. My shoulder and back ache from stiffness when I get up. I silently cheer each time the chapter turns out to be only two pages. More often than not, the chapters are much longer, five, sometimes six pages. It has been at least fifty pages since I heard a peep out of Anna, or Kitty, or Darya. The only females I come across are the peasant wives, silently gathering up hay or serving tea. I don't care about new methods of agriculture. I don't neet to debate whether sour cream or fresh milk makes better butter.

Where is the passion? Where is the love? Where are the women?

But, I tell myself, I can't quit. I made a commitment, and I have to see it through. Sophie couldn't quit, so neither can I.