She came around the corner of the cave, and saw the old man dead on the ledge, sitting in the sunshine.
She was to keep an eye on him, bring him water if he needed it. Sometimes she’d watch him breath as he was dozing, up down, up down.
She’d been playing with pebbles in the dust like a younger child, marking out the patterns of the stars in the sky and a maze to the underworld.
To see the rest:
http://olentangyreview.com/fiction.html
Distance
My first husband, Robert Winson, used to say–it’s upsetting that a person has to be close to you to do you any good but can hurt you from farther off. I found this intriguing, and just believed it, but this windy spring I’m wondering exactly what it means.
It doesn’t seem to hold true for history. Yes, Nazis can hurt and terrify me still, even at this remove of time and space. But I have FDR to thank for the social security checks. What about lovely little parks dedicated to someone civic I’ve never heard of or met? This is good at a distance.
And so of course is writing–poems, novels, literature, great suspense fiction–you name it.
There is a corollary, though, about appreciation. Do I wake up every day glad I don’t still have vertigo? Yes, that appreciation holds at a distance. Be happy I have a house with a roof…hmmm, this seems vaguer. And yet, there is my garden. For about twenty-five years my yard was mediocre. Now, thanks to other peoples’ expertise, time, love, and money, it is beautiful. I didn’t hate it every day then. But I do love it every day now.
Maybe Robert was just an introvert–and a shy person at first. Maybe he needed intimacy to feel good but not to suffer the bad. I can’t ask him because he has been dead a long time. And although he is indeed at a distance, he can still do me both good and ill, at least in memory or in the energy the dead still have to visit us.
Clouds on gallery ceiling, Santa Fe Community College
I’m good at a variety of things. I often give excellent advice. I can teach anyone willing how to write a college essay or a villanelle. I can cook eggplant several ways.
But I’m not handy, crafty, or artistic. I know nothing about clay. Except that my package is called Big White, and is a rather grainy grade.
I am taking a clay class. I put my thumb into a ball–it feels oddly assertive, sensuous, unfamiliar.
My whole impulse is to add words, but I haven’t got an alphabet set yet.
SPLIT LIP
GOD’S PINCH
Death interests me. A lot. Or maybe not death– a state I suspect I’ll have no conscious experience of. But rather the human experience–fear, intimation, loss, and grief.
When I was 21, I almost died from what appears in retrospect to have been swine flu. Spent weeks in the ICU, months in the hospital, lost part of one lung, and was forever changed. Or maybe that story isn’t exactly true. Maybe I was already a rebel, a poet, a seeker. Maybe that experience only uncovered my basic nature. In any case, the realization of death propelled me forward into a life that worked for me.
My first husband Robert died when I was 41. That was twenty years of believing in death, even though that was also when I had my only child, a primary life affirming event. After Robert died, something shifted radically again and it was as if the life force became ascendent. I’ve tried to solve every Zen koan I ever met that would allow me to experience life and death as one non-warring state. Don’t ask how this is going.
So I keep wanting to read about death. Emily Rapp is a Santa Fe based writer whose new book, THE STILL POINT OF THE TURNING WORLD, is about her young son’s death from Tay-Sachs disease. It is a different–much better–book than I’d expected, based on my extensive reading of memoirs of extremis. For one thing, it isn’t a narrative of redemption. How could it be, as a child is dying. But despite the American preference for the storyline of “I once was lost but now am found” life–and death–don’t really work that way. Rapp writes: “After those first few weeks of blackness and bouncing back and forth in the void, I realized that I didn’t want to be coddled or protected from the wild unpredictability of my feelings….But digging into the experience of loss is not only deeply profound but artistically, at some points, absolutely electric.”
Writing helped Rapp. And this is a very good book. However, although I wrote book after book about Robert–for some reason the process didn’t offer much direct solace. The investigation certainly helped my writing, but it didn’t deeply cheer me. It was other people–from friends to strangers–that did that.
STILL POINT isn’t an elegy, a how to, or an ode to survival. Rather, it reminded me of C.S. Lewis’s A GRIEF OBSERVED…what happens when a fine writer is given a subject he or she never wanted, but must dive deeply into as well as transcend, often at the same time.
I love Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” As does all of humanity. It is the rock anthem par excellance–and of course the winning team’s.
But when it comes on the car radio and I weep a little and sing along I’m not thinking about winning. I’m thinking about failure. I’m thinking about all I’ve lost and all I’ve struggled with and how at 59 years old (next month!) I still have the ability to go on and rise to the occasion. When I was a young window and a single mom, it was my song. When I didn’t get what I wanted professionally or health-wise or financially–mine.
I know I’m not alone. There are millions like me driving around in old Toyotas singing along. Running between daycare and care taking. Trying to substitute a kind word for mere knee jerk rudeness. Not giving the finger to the car that cuts us off.
The B side of the hit (ah, I miss B sides) was “We Will Rock You.” One of my favorite memories is coming into my daughter’s pre-school to be greeted by a grubby chorus line of kids on the playground chanting “We will we will rock you.” Indeed the did.
And we’ll keep on fighting to the end.
When I was nine months pregnant, I decided to re-read Tanizaki’s masterpiece “The Makioka Sisters.” Written during the days before Japan’s fall in the Second World War, the novel harkens back to a quieter if modernizing time. And its major questions are the marriages of four sisters.
I realized years later that I was re-reading my favorite novel because unconsciously I was afraid I’d die–this was my last chance. Consciously, I feared I’d never read again. It was a blissful time in immersion in another world.
I didn’t die, but kept reading, and watching TV series too. Recently I saw all of the third season of “Downton Abbey.” Seen en masse, its roots are clear–some 19th century novel, a hearty dose of Nancy Mitford, a dollop of the soap opera from Dickens to now. Like “The Makioka Sisters” it is about a group of sisters–and who will marry, inherit, reproduce, die, etc. etc.
For some mysterious reason, I then felt compelled to re-watch the first two seasons. Maybe to keep certain now dead characters alive? Or just the pleasure of watching the plot for nuance, not just narrative.
I don’t re-read enough. I spent my childhood re-reading “Little Women” and “Lord of the Rings” to the point of memorization. As an adult, I wanted the new. But every so often–late pregnancy, spring break, an inner sea change–I want the flow of the expected, with the serendibity that can also bring.
I was fascinated to discover this textile art–it has so much narrative.
Check out the artist at http://www.heathergoodchild.com/
Right in the middle of the semester, I got hit with an idea for a novella. I saw the whole thing laid out clearly. Terrible timing though, as I’m really busy. But I started writing a bit anyway. Almost like taking dictation at first. But as I get deeper into the first draft, I have some questions.
Set-up—five very different women meet in a new mom’s group about 30 years ago. Flash forward to the present. One has a terminal disease, and has asked the others to assist in her suicide. The time line is twelve hours–the day they help her. Back stories are told as reminiscence/flashback.
Of the group, the ill woman is the one secretly liked the least by the group. She is elusive (or private). Not an engaged mom, and given to romantic entanglements. But beautiful, intelligent, and caring in her own way.
The question–do I give her a pov? At first I thought not–four characters is already a lot, and they have children, partners, exes. Then she wanted a chapter of her own–a kind of suicide note. Then I realized she might have left a will. Then a man who’d loved her wanted to speak.
What to do? I don’t want to have to re-read AS I LAY DYING. Ideas?
