Writing. Still.

 

As of last night, I have been writing for 15 minutes or more in one format or another almost every day since January 2. Blog posts, some poetry (still sticking to pantoums as I reintroduce myself to poetry), a large ongoing work (35,000+ words) which is most likely a memoir of my childhood.

The more I write, the more I want to write. I don't mean "want to write about;" I mean "want to write." 

The physical act of writing is a powerful act. It is magic. In several places in my commonplace books, I have captured quotes of writers of different eras, different genres, who all comment on writing being an act of the hands and not the brain. Keyboard or pen on paper: make the words come. I write longhand before turning to a keyboard: my pen, my hand learn the words.

Warren recently made a similar observation as he prepares for a major timpani performance in May. He noted that he is very familiar with the written part, looking at the score, but that his hands have not learned it yet.

These last few weeks have been, as I have noted more than once, a time of mixed emotions and mixed feelings and mixed actions. The medical path ahead is still murky; Dante in his dark forest had nothing on me. But with help from Warren, my PCP, and my friend David, I have reached some clarity about what I am thinking. What help did they give me? Listening closely, listening carefully, and affirming my wonderings.

And there are other arenas - money (always money), travel, community - that I am talking and writing through as I move forward. 

On that note, here is a recent pantoum: 

I am taking stock: 
Counting out the pennies,
Counting out the seeds.
Where are we now? 

Counting out the pennies, 

I try to scan the future,

Where are we now?

The bar code is invalid.

I try to scan the future;

The past is no help.

The bar code is invalid.

Only the present works.

The past is no help.

I am taking stock

And only the present works,

Counting out the seeds.

*****

As you can tell, gardening is never far away. 

Having Our Day

 

Henry David Thoreau

Spring is coming on, for the most part earlier than usual. It is startling to see daffodils not just sending up shoots, but in full bloom. Having just finished reading The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle, I look down at them and wonder what kind of world my grandchildren will live in and what nature - anywhere - will look like. Bill McKibben's The End of Nature came out 44 years ago and we are still pretending everything is fine.

From The Great Displacement (which was just published; god, I love our library system), I turned to Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson by Jeffrey S. Cramer. Earlier this year I tried diligently to read Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert Richardson, and was taken with the subject, but the tiny type (9 or maybe 10 point) did me in. Richardson was known for the format of his major biographies: 100 chapters, all relatively short (5 pages was a long one), but I could not get through the typeset. All the same, I was fascinated with what I read, and expostulated to Warren and others that I could not believe that NO ONE in my early years (high school) ever exposed me to Emerson.

One cannot read or write about Emerson without reading or writing about Thoreau. And vice versa. I am far more familiar with Thoreau than Emerson. Emerson used to be a standard feature in traditional high school literature curriculum but he had all but disappeared from it by 1970. 

Thoreau was never in the high school curriculum, but many youth, and I was one of them, found our way to him all the same.

I was in high school when I first discovered his "different drummer" quote, and being deeply taken with a drummer who truly listened to and followed his own internal beat, I embraced those words. I wrote that quote in LARGE letters with a permanent marker on the back of the large scrapbook in which I was assembling my photographs. I had that scrapbook for years, carrying it across the country and back more than once. 

Note: That different drummer and I took over three decades to finally get on the same beat, so to speak, but here we are. And yes, Warren still follows the beat of that different drummer.

In read Jeffrey Cramer's author bio on the dust jacket, I caught a reference to his being a historical consultant on a short film, Walden, which was produced in 2017 for the 200th anniversary of Thoreau's birth. So while I ate lunch that day, I tracked the film down on Vimeo. 

I watched it.

I watched it with Warren.

I will watch it again.

There were moments in that film when I could murmur along to the quotes, all from Walden, and come darn close to getting them right. The film reminded me of why I was so taken with Thoreau the first time I read that book.

E. B. White revered Thoreau and Walden, and referenced both more than once in his essays and other writings. He called May 6, the day Thoreau died, "the saddest day of the year," and meant it. White admired Thoreau's vision of the meaning of human existence. (Andy White, like my husband, also moved to the beat of a different drummer.) I

Several years ago, I gave my most recently owned copy of Walden to my stepson David after he expressed an interest in reading it. I don't know if he ever did read it or even if he still has the book.

That is not important because immediately after finishing the movie, I went online to ThriftBooks and found a paperback edition from the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walden (1845). I ordered it on the spot. (Realize I rarely buy books anymore.) John Updike wrote the introduction to this edition. I have always admired Updike's writings on literature, so that was just an additional bonus. 

I can't wait for it to arrive.

What Thoreau always reminded me (and I have drifted far from remembering the lesson more times than I wish to acknowledge) was to pay attention to the natural world. Don't get so caught up in the hustle of modern society (for him, the Industrial Revolution) that you lose sight of what really counts.

Thoreau took to the woods because he "wished to live deliberately." He saw his retreat as an opportunity "to learn the essential facts of life" from the woods rather than, on his deathbed, "discover that [he] had not lived at all." He left the woods for a reason equally compelling: it seemed to him that he "had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one."

Thoreau died a few months before turning 45. Of death, Thoreau wrote, "Live your life, do your work, take your hat." (The conciseness of that summation makes me smile.) It was his mentor and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson (who lived another 20 years, almost reaching the age of 80), who captured the essence of the spread of life: "Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short. But when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day."

"We have had our day." 

Even without the cancer of 18+ years, let alone the new diagnosis, I have no illusions about my being in the autumn of my days. Like Thoreau, I have left lives - careers, communities, focuses - because I had others to live. And like Emerson, I can truly say I have had my day.

And am grateful for it. 

Two Views of the Same Night

Mr. Frumble of Busytown

Hemingway famously said that when you needed to start writing, "write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."

At 9:30 p.m. last night, here was my one true sentence: I am worn to the nub.

We are on overload on several fronts.

For me, it is the newest diagnosis. One of the hallmarks of having bone marrow - my hemoglobin, specifically - functioning subpar is to be exhausted.

Not tired. Exhausted.

But trying to spin it differently, I instead told myself last night that I had had a busy day (Justice Bus), a busy week (Concert Week).

That line of thinking reminded me of the Richard Scarry books about Busytown. Who was the pig character that never got things straight? Mr. Bumbles?

I had to Google it: Mr. Frumble.

And then I stopped writing, too tired to move the pen across the paper. 

That was my second one true sentence: I am too tired to write.

But there was more to last night than the exhaustion. 

Earlier that evening, we had dinner guests: this weekend's guest artist and his partner, who also performs. 

Leading up to dinner, I realized I had to come to grips with "enough."

Did I clean the house to a white glove inspection standard? No. I cleaned it to a level where I was comfortable having guests in our home. 

And that was enough.

And the meal? I made apple pie, of course. And a salad and a main dish. But instead of rushing to the store to add this or that special ingredient, I made do with what we had here in our freezer and pantry (sauteed zucchini/onions with pasta). The Parmesan cheese was just out of the shaker - nothing fancy there. I thawed and warmed an uncut loaf of bread I had picked up elsewhere instead of trying to find the time and energy to make a loaf from scratch. And I didn't worry about anything else other than having a good meal.

And that was enough.

What counted last night was the laughter and the talk (and the pie). Our guests, who are on a long recital tour, were grateful for a home-cooked meal. 

And pie. Peter ate three slices while we sat and talked the evening away.

And that was enough.

I wrote the first view of my evening last night after our guests left and Warren and I finished cleaning up the kitchen. I wrote the second part, well, took notes for the second part, after going upstairs to our bedroom. I made those notes feeling tired but grateful. Grateful for a wonderful evening of good conversation and good food and good pie.

And that, truly, was enough.

Past and Present

 

I was at a City Council meeting—our City Council—last night for the first time in years.

Years.

I went with Warren because Council was talking about a long-delayed reboot of its flag and banner policy. The Symphony has banners for Concert Week that have not been flown in months as the City has been slowly reviewing its policies in light of the Supreme Court ruling in Shurtleff v. Boston. (Note: Not much progress was made last night either.)

I had a small sense of Old Home Week when I walked into Council chambers. I used to serve on our Civil Service Commission, so there was a joke with our Police Chief (who'd been a captain back in those days) and I was able to congratulate our interim Fire Chief, someone I had gotten to know well from those years. (The firefighters union, to my delight, was ever-present at our meetings; our interim Chief was in that bunch back then.) The head of HR, also someone I had known forever, came in behind me, tapping me on the shoulder and leaning in to tell me she was glad to see me. And I sat right next to the young person who I will be voting for in the next Ward elections.

I do not know most of our Council members at all anymore, although I still know the City Manager and, of course, the City Planning Director. ("Of course" because I also sat on our Historic Preservation Commission for several years. Plus I was a zoning lawyer , so even thought the current planner and I did not overlap extensively in that era, I still worked with him and his department before I hung it up.)

I found myself thinking back, way way back, to myself as a college student, to the year I was in between schools, and all the hours I spent at council and school board meetings during that time.

When I withdrew from Chicago at the end of my freshman year, I retreated to Delaware,  moving in with my Aunt Ginger and my Grandma Skatzes. It was a long period of putting myself back together — in every way imaginable. I did not work those months. I volunteered at my high school, teaching classes with the greatest English teacher I ever had. And I started attending council and school board meetings.

I had met a newly elected council member on Election Night that fall, and he encouraged me to see what city government was all about. As I was thinking of staying in Delaware, I started thinking maybe I should get a better idea of how the school board operated as well.

It ended up being a fascinating time – I made friends I still have, I felt at home at council meetings (never school board, interestingly enough), and I began to learn how this city functioned. I knew the insider jokes and side comments at Council. I change my career goal to law school, realizing that, if I was going to stay in Delaware, as I was strongly thinking I would, I wanted to make a difference and have a say in how the community operated. I started to have plans to run for Council at the next election cycle.

That was in late 1975, early 1976. By that summer, I was back in Chicago, eventually on my way to living out west for several years. I did not return to Delaware permanently until the fall of 1990.

I did become a lawyer. And when I moved back, I ended up practicing in the office of that Council member. I had met so many years earlier.

I never ran for City Council. That was not a goal by 1990 and thereafter. I almost ran for school board, but had a conflict, so did not. My service on the two city commissions was enough.

I did not sit there last night full of  nostalgia or wondering "What if...?" Maybe I had a sense of relief that I had not ventured into politics. But maybe not even that. Maybe just a sense of being there, listening to Warren make his public comments, and then heading home.

And that was more than enough. 

By Special Request: Another Pantoum

My blogger friend Kim commented on yesterday's post and suggested I needed to write an ode to twist ties. I do not often write a poem on request, but this one, dear Kim, is for you.

Stopping For Bread Ties On A Winter Evening (With apologies to Robert Frost)

Whose bread twist ties these are I think I know - 

Oh, who am I kidding?

I stuffed them in there long ago

Clearly anticipating a twist tie shortage.

Oh, who am I kidding?

Our household is two, not 22.

Clearly anticipating a twist tie shortage,

I saved every single one.

Our household is two, not 22.

A loaf of bread lasts for weeks.

I saved every single one –

Well, not the paper-wrapped ones.

A loaf of bread lasts for week.

But still I continued to amass those ties - 

Well, not the paper-wrapped ones.

They never last.

But still I continued to amass those ties.

They were becoming unruly.

They never last.

They were not true to me.

They were becoming unruly.

I had to clear them out.

They were not true to me.

I closed my eyes and let them go.

I had to clear them out –

I will be telling this ages and ages hence

I closed my eyes and let them go.

Forty ties stuffed in a drawer.

I will be telling this ages and ages hence -

Whose bread twist ties these are I think I know - 

Forty ties stuffed in a drawer.

I stuffed them in there long ago.

Tiptoeing Back Into Poetry: Pantoums

A pantoum is a highly structured poem. They are a Malay form of poetry and historically have been rhymed. As I noted many times before, I don't work well with rhymes. Luckily, a pantoum may also be unrhymed and mine tend to be. I last posted (and wrote) pantoums back in 2011. 

It is always written in quatrains (stanzas of four lines each). The second and fourth lines of each quatrain become the first and third line of the next quatrain until the final quatrain, which is so neatly linked back to the first and third lines of the first quatrain that you feel as if you have just tied up a package.

I receive the daily "Poem-a-Day" email from the Academy of American Poets. One recently featured a pantoum. Oh my gosh. Back in 2011, when I was writing more extensively, I wrote several pantoums. I had forgotten all about that form and their precise structure.

Maybe, I thought, that was a good place to start writing poetry again.

It's been a while. A long while. 

Pre-Covid, I belonged to a poetry group, started by myself and someone else who was a close friend. Over the months and years, we added to the group. He invited someone; I invited someone. Then a newer member would say, "Hey, we should invite so-and-so to this group."

And so we did.

At its height, we probably had 10 to 12 regular members, with out-of-town guests sometimes joining us. We would gather monthly, often but not always at my house. Someone would usually bring wine, some of us would bring snacks, and we would share our own poems or read a poem that we had come across and felt like reading. (Billy Collins was often read at our gatherings.)

No surprise, the pandemic slam the door shut. There were no gatherings, no anything, while we all hunkered down and regrouped in our personal and professional lives.

Then one member suggested, maybe just to me, but maybe in a group email, what if we Zoomed? So we tried that.

It kinda sorta worked. But there were barriers, including most (all?) of us spending so much time in Zoom because of our jobs that one more Zoom meeting was just one too many. More than once, when I sent out the Zoom link, I will get a quick email: "Sorry, but I won't make it. I am on overload."

I should've pulled the plug earlier. (I am saying "I" because I was the one who set up the meetings.) But it turns out in the end that I didn't have to. On what became the very last meeting ever, sometime in early 2021, the club died a very swift death after two members behaved badly (one by email, one at the meeting) on the day of the last meeting. 

And that was that. 

For the most part, I stopped writing poetry at that point. I had not been writing regularly and that last meeting killed my interest. Oh, there were some scraps and half-bitten lines here and there, but not even much of that. I did not work at it or set aside time for it.

Two things happened.

Earlier this month, I opened my poetry file folder – not the one on the computer, but the massive paper one I keep in my desk drawer. [Know that I have hoarding tendencies. My poetry file made the bread twist ties stash and the plastic straws stash look like nothing. Don't ask. I cleared those out weeks ago.] I took out a handful of poems and read them in the silence of my study with an audience of one – me.

OK there was a lot of ehhhhhh there. But a few caught my attention.

Maybe? Maybe there is something here? 

The second, of course,  is the spark that pantoum email sent through me. 

Maybe I could try to edge my way back into writing poetry more regularly through pantoums? Maybe I just try it.

As I just noted in my last post, I have been writing a minimum of 15 minutes per day. Every day. Almost all of that writing is what may yet turn into a memoir. No, I am not ready to reveal anything about that but what about poetry too? What if I wrote for 15 minutes on the one project and then also allowed myself time to write poetry whenever it nudged me?

What if indeed? 

Here is a very recent and rough example from our trip to and from Mayo. I experimented with the traditional pantoum form in the very last quatrain, changing the wording of the very last line to create a different outcome. 

While driving, I saw

Two sunbows

On the wisps of a cloud.

The sun in a haze.

Two sunbows - 

The sheerest of colors.

The sun in a haze - 

My eyes glanced at the shimmer.

The sheerest of colors:

No wonder they fade in a blink.

My eyes glanced at the shimmer,

But I had to watch the road.

No wonder they fade in a blink.

How could they not?

But I had to watch the road

Instead of the sunbows.

How could they not?

While driving, I saw -

Instead of the sunbows -

Only the wisps of a cloud.

I am feeling my way back into writing. Let's see what comes of this. 

Recombobulating

Yes, this is a real sign at the Milwaukee Airport.

Thea Milwaukee Airport has a large terminal sign pointing passengers to the "Recombobulation Area."

I totally get that.

I am recombobulating. And my recent trip to the Emerald City (Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN) added to that feeling.

As I discuss my post-2022 life changes with friends, I continue to realize that I am still working to find the rhythms of the day and the week. I find myself struggling with writing. 

Seriously. 

I do not struggle with writing at least 15 minutes a day. That has become a valued routine. With the exception of this past Wednesday, which was a hard travel day back home (I can't write in a moving car), I have written for at least 15 minutes every day since January 2.

So where do I struggle? In recognizing writing as a valid use of my time. I am still struggling with honoring myself and my need and desire to write.

This is my own internal challenge. Warren is tremendously supportive and encouraging. My friends are supportive. My son Ben is pleased. And while I have not shared my writing regimen with Ramona, I know exactly what she would say if I did. "So what took you so long to finally write, Grandma?" And then roll her eyes for good measure.

One writer I follow, Kaki Okumura, recently wrote about how Japanese culture focuses on imperfection, citing kintsugi, the art of repairing broken ceramic pieces with gold, which both beautifies and emphasizes the cracks. Look at our lives through the lens of continuous progress, she wrote: anything we accomplish is progress.

Maybe I need to look at my writing as repairing the cracks with gold, and give myself the grace to do so.

While Warren and I drove the miles from home to Mayo (about 660 miles), we used some of that time to talk about personal matters that don't always get discussed in the rush of any given week. One topic, no surprise, was time. Even without a progressive, incurable cancer, I would be shortsighted to pretend that at almost 67, I have decades of life left. With an incurable, progressive cancer, and having far outstripped even the most generous post-diagnosis life expectancy, any time I have is pure gravy. (Thank you, Raymond Carver.)

I started this particular post in Rochester, on Monday evening after we arrived. In longhand, in my writing notebook. By midday Wednesday, we started our drive back home with some very positive results on the one hand (the myeloma continuing to be incredibly stable; my oncologist called it "surprisingly stable"), and a new (additional) diagnosis on the other (in the "we need to keep an eye on this" stage).

OTOH, OTOH indeed!

So now as I sit at home finishing this post tonight, I circle back to the writing struggle as I consider this new factor. After spending yesterday recuperating (this was a rocket trip of less than 72 hours from walking out the front door to walking back in, at 12:30 a.m. to boot), I got nine hours of sleep last night and could view my life with far more balance. (Truth be told, I felt a lot like George Bailey after realizing he had a wonderful life after all.) 

When my older brother died in 2015, I was one of his eulogists. I speculated in my talk about what lasting advice he would want us to take from his life. After making a couple of proposals, I said, "Life goes on."

And it does.

Raymond Carver was right: this is pure gravy.