Do You Want Until a Song is Over?

On my way to the gym yesterday morning I was listening to the XM 70’s station and it played song after song that I remembered and could sing along with. Just as I was pulling up to the intersection where I turn off the Carpenter’s Top of the World came on. Like most pop tunes from that era, it is of rather short duration but it wasn’t quite finished as I pulled into the parking lot and into a spot, so I sat in my vehicle, head bopping and singing along until the song was through before getting out. And I wondered, how many people sit and listen through to the end of the song before exiting their vehicles? I know it probably depends on the day and whether or not a person is crunched for time, but since I am chronically not on time anyway and have really no earth shattering obligations beyond my husband and our family, I usually sit and wait for the song to end.

It was a good song too. Happy and upbeat. Anyone who might have been watching me could have well wondered what I had in my tea at breakfast. (A bit of honey and vanilla rice milk, actually) Although Rob would be horrified, the lyrics suited the two of us in a way, and it felt good to be able to identify with them.

I remember once back when I was teaching middle school we had a student teacher, I think, who would often sit in her car for a while after she arrived in the morning. When someone finally asked her what she was doing, she replied that she was singing along with a song that hadn’t quite finished and that sometimes she would even “play” the drum part on the steering wheel and even if she was running late, she always waited for the song to end. At the time I thought, how totally cool to be so young and to have such good priorities. For a while after I made it a point to sit and listen to songs I liked. But then, life got busy and sad and I stopped. I had forgotten about her until today. I am going to try not to forget again.

Writing: The Problem with Digging Deep

Eric Clapton’s autobiography recently came out and it’s been praised widely for, among other things, its frankness. Mr. Clapton’s colorful past manages to be honest without injecting drama that isn’t there. But the chapter dealing with the death of his four year old son has a different tone than the rest of the book. There is a distance to the narrative that alarmed his publishers to the point that they asked him to consider rewriting it. He declined and explained that his child’s tragic accident was not something he could write any other way. That time and those circumstances were not places he could go emotionally anymore. He could talk about them. Sing the song he wrote for his boy. But to write the event from the perspective of the grieving father wasn’t possible. He just couldn’t do it.

In writing my novel I have discovered that while I can fictionalize much of the events surrounding my first husband’s illness and death and that I can write about the year that followed in a fashion, I can’t dive in to those emotions anymore. I am too far removed and just don’t want to. I wondered for a while if this was the denial I have been accused of in the past and decided it wasn’t. I am normal and what I am experiencing is normal. Grief doesn’t go anywhere really but you do reach a point where it is someplace you don’t go much, if at all. And that’s more than okay. It’s a good thing.

So, I am mining my past and my pain for the time being as I go back over the latter half of last year and when the book is finished, I won’t be revisiting that in my fiction again. I have other projects. Two of which I have already started actually. Still, “going there” as Gary Paulson would say, isn’t entirely without its redeeming factors because I think I am writing a pretty darn good book.

Towels

If you’d been peeking into my backyard the other night about 10PM you would have been treated to the sight of my husband not once but twice running out to retrieve and put away tools he’d been using on the roof reno earlier that evening. The treat part, well maybe just for me, was that he was in his towel. Actually, towels could almost be considered part of his wardrobe. I laughed when I realized he’d been out like that. He didn’t see anything wrong in it. It was dark after all, and it isn’t as if our neighbors have much of a view of our backyard. Out where we live most yards and houses are sheltered by trees and shrubs, not to mention the garages and privacy fences and RV’s that are typical of the back yard parking areas that connect to the alley. I think the real reason that I laugh is that it’s interesting that I should have found and married a man who is more casual than I am about running about in towels or less. My habits stem from years on my own, but his I chalk up to his exotic Canadian roots. Canadians drop drawers for outdoor tinkling without much thought really, so it stands to reason that running about in towels isn’t any big deal to them.

Of perhaps his lack of modesty is a male thing? In the locker room at the gym the other morning I was drawn into a conversation on nudity etiquette. It began with a woman fresh from the shower and trying to pull on her panties before dropping her towel, which is something I do to if there are a lot of other women around and the quarters are tight. When I have elbow room and there women are familiar to me, I just drop the towel and dress. Though I have to admit I sometimes do this just to make people uncomfortable when I get the feeling they disapprove of my changing out in the open as opposed to gathering up all my things and heading to the draped cubicles. The conversation covered a range of topics within the larger context, but we reached the unanimous conclusion that age and experience and above all comfortable confidence in your body that the aforementioned bring to many women eventually are the chief reasons that we eventually drop the modest act and just get dressed.

I have told Rob that if we ever get to the timeshare in St. Martin, I want to try the nude side of the beach. Not that I have anything spectacular to share with the world. It’s not about the world. It’s about being comfortable and confident in me. That is something I see in Rob that I find incredibly attractive, and I think his influence has helped further my own ease with myself. So, I guess it’s not really about towels or “neckidness”, is it.

Meanderings of Writer's Block

One of my favorite authors is a man named Gary Paulson. If you are a middle school teacher, you probably are quite familiar with his work. He is a phenomenal talent who writes accessible fiction that promotes thinking without being preachy. I was thinking about him the other day when I read yet another newspaper article about how brave the author of the Harry Potter series was to “out” one of her main characters. I was and still am unimpressed by her after the fact revelation. Had she written the character as a man who happened to be gay in addition to being the head master of a school for wizards that would have been worthy of praise. As it was, she opted for the cheap politically correct option of telling her readers she imagined that the character was gay as she wrote about him......not being gay. Not that it matters. Orientation is not the sole defining characteristic of any person and that should have been the point. It reminded me of Paulson because in his novel The Car, one of the man characters is a gay man. As readers we learn about this through yet another main character as he reveals the fact in passing during a conversation. Paulson never mentions the fact again in the course of the novel because it’s not relevant to the story, but he mentions it upfront and not as an aside in an interview later on. So why do I bring up Paulson at all? Was it to discuss the Rowlings revelation? No, actually I wanted to talk about his theory on writing. I may have mentioned it at some point in my blogging but it bears repeating. He feels that writers have to be willing to “go there” in other words, dig deep into the rubble pile that is the sum of all our bad experiences in life and be willing to put ourselves back in those circumstances and draw on the rawness to fuel artistic endeavors. And no, it’s not much more fun that it sounds. I know because I have been reading back through the first six months of my blogging from July through December of 2006. Not fun times. Although not as dark as times that preceded it in 2005 or 2004 or even earlier. When I truly think about, life has been a struggle since early spring of 2002. That’s when Will first began to be obviously not right in so many ways. That’s a long time to struggle. And sometimes I would like to forget about those times completely. Why not? There is no reason to go back there and agonize, second guess or berate myself. Except that those times made me who I am in the same way that my father’s alcoholism shaped me or my long, lonely single years laid the foundation I built upon when Will was sick and it was just me and Katy, just as examples. How do you integrate and use those lessons, for lack of a better word, and forget the circumstances at the same time. In retrospect, I am a lucky person because I know there are people who lives have been beset with far more tragedy than my own and for whom there never seems to be much, if any respite. Though most of these people are strong, resourceful and able to hang onto those wonders and joys of life that see them through and give them hope; no one is able to hold up the world day in and day out when it seems intent on rolling off their shoulders or becomes to heavy a burden alone. Those times when I felt that life was little more than an endless battle against the bad things; I hung onto the fact that I would be happy again. Even when I wasn’t sure if that was really true, I clung to it stubbornly and it saw me through to where I am now. Today I was reading one of the many widow blogs I peruse. It’s author, Alicia, called to mind the endurance that is necessary to sustain oneself when the forces beyond our control have us tightly boxed and seemingly in their grip. Her poem reminded me of the power within us all to dig within ourselves and express our need for strength and empathy and a glimpse of that elusive and lit tunnel exit sign.