The Journal Keeper Page 4

  Later, sitting in Dorothy Jones’s kitchen, I was aware of how the air in her house has the thick flavor of dust, sunlight, old books, fried chicken, and furniture polish. It is a human, comforting smell. Clutter is a part of it. A sense of belonging is another. It is such a gift to coincide with where you live. Ashland has become that place for me.

  Yesterday’s gifts: a Stanley Kunitz poem (“The Layers”), a brilliant day, and my mother’s continuing presence and example. She is so gentle, without the need to proselytize. I see myself as insistent and demanding, pushing my opinions on others. It would be better if I didn’t have any opinions at all, since it’s so difficult for me to hold them quietly.

  Some of the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions…. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day ... we become seekers.

  —Peter Matthiessen

  Sometimes the only way I can write, when I have nothing to say myself, is to copy something significant from another writer.

  As of this moment I am bill-free and paid up. It is, however, the beginning of a new month of bills to come. Without the income from a monthly column (my contract with House Beautiful magazine has just ended), I am vulnerable. Well, so be it. I must make an act of faith and go ahead with the new asphalt driveway.

  This may be as good a place as any to say a few words about my attitude toward money, a topic that surfaces frequently in my journal, usually when I’m about to run out of it. As a freelance writer it helps to be independently wealthy, married to someone who has a regular job, or—failing that—have a regular job yourself. None of this has ever been true of me, at least for very long, and when I was getting divorced my lawyer kept asking me about assets I surely must have forgotten when I was making up the list. “No,” I said, gesturing to my blue-jean skirt and thrift-shop sweater, “what you see is what you get.” My lawyer, who was sitting beneath a plaque that read ASSUME NOTHING, smiled. “In my experience, women who look like you are often worth millions.” But the facts are that while I have lived around wealthy people all my life, my own family consistently bought high and sold low until we had nothing but a bunch of scuffed-up antiques and some scrapbooks full of photographs of houses that were no longer ours.

  On the subject of money, here’s what I have going against me: an inability to sustain my interest in it for very long, a deep-seated belief that there is nothing I can do to better my economic position, and a relationship with my bank account that is akin to the relationship I have with my refrigerator. I rarely know what is in either one.

  Here is what I have going for me: a belief that if I am doing my part to use my talents and lead a meaningful life the universe will play ball with me, and if it doesn’t it’s not my fault; a mother who once said, “If you take a step toward life, life will support you,” which I have found to be true; and the ability to take a piece of chalk and draw a smaller circle around my feet when the old larger circle falls apart. I trace this last back to a sentimental childhood book The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. The Pepper family was poor but merry, and if the lights got turned out they rejoiced in finding a candle to hold while they stood around the piano and sang songs in the dark.

  More than once I have awoken from a fitful night with my hand clutching the windowsill above my bed. But this is simply my subconscious asserting its right to be heard, at least when I’m asleep. Awake, I have what my friend Ellen Papoulakos says is a teenager’s view of money, that is, there is bound to be more on the way from somewhere. And I have something else: a keen awareness of death, which tends to put everything short of death in perspective.

  An example: once I was sitting in my kitchen reading the newspaper. Suddenly, all three of the wooden shelves I had recently installed to hold my china and glassware crashed to the floor by my chair. (Screwing in brackets is not one of my strong points.) What did I do? I gazed down at the shards of crockery and glass on the floor—and turned to the editorial page.

  Normally, I am not aware of the important role I play in my mother’s life, but yesterday when she told me of her anxiety attack, which came upon her suddenly, I realized it. Before she went to sleep I gave her a back rub, massaged her face, and tucked the blankets around her (“It makes me feel safe,” she said) before she went to sleep.

  Thinking about Mother, I compare her to the late stage of a dandelion. All the earlier, fleshy brilliance is gone. Now she is a fluffy globe of light, holding herself erect as ever but ready, with one puff, to fly away, be gone.

  Most of what goes through my head I don’t record. It would be impossible. But some things want to become words, like the maple leaves in the jug on the kitchen windowsill. Every time I go to the sink they fill up my eye. In countless little moments I think of death, of its approach, not just to me but the yellow pepper on the sill, smooth as wax a week ago, now beginning to wrinkle.

  Suppose I had nothing external with which to define myself. Take away my children, even my ex-husband, then remove my friends and family, then my books—those small but solid tokens of creativity and achievement, the basis of a reputation. Upon what, with whom, would I base my worth? How would I keep from feeling lost or meaningless? The answer, I know, lies within myself, the being or person who waits—passively or actively—at the center.

  In the greater quiet of my life, I am able to listen to myself more easily. It is a new sensation, or realization, to know that I have what I call a Resident Adviser. Only now, after so many years, do I realize how incomplete, how painfully absent from myself I was when I was getting divorced, falling in and out of love, living in so much daily pain and longing.

  This morning, lying in bed, I felt surrounded by an enemy I could not vanquish. Depression fell. Then a thought. Be unattached from your feelings. Welcome them and try to learn what they have to impart.

  A TRIP TO CHARLOTTESVILLE WITH MY FRIEND BILL MCPHERSON

  We walked around the University of Virginia quad designed by Jefferson. It is winter now, stacks of wood lie by each student’s door. The ivy on the serpentine brick walls is withering, the gardens, laid out in pie-shaped triangles, are bare. Something in me doesn’t like to take the time to describe what I’m looking at: the slender student bent over her book in Starbucks, the little snow-suited baby waiting patiently to be scooped up by its mother in the restaurant, the bundled-up Tibetans downtown sitting before their tables of trinkets and prayer flags. But another part of me wants to develop a more physically observing eye. This sabbatical from writing has given me the space and time to cultivate my eye for its own sake.

  Increasingly, I am coming to view the brain as a large, unevenly frozen pond. Some sections—like the part that holds childhood memories—are smooth and hard, with every mark of the ice skate clearly delineated. Other, more recent, sections are so crisscrossed and layered with impressions that no single mark is visible. Then there are the parts that are too mushy to hold anything at all. When you skate upon them, you fall through.

  There is something mysterious but obvious about the importance of staying put. The soul cannot do its work when we are in constant motion. It requires the knowledge that it won’t be asked to move too far from home. These past several weeks when I have been at rest within myself have been fruitful by being fallow. I can feel my imagination repairing itself, my powers of concentration returning.

  Still, at some unacknowledged level, I have lost faith. The passionate side of me has been submerged or doused, like a fire gone out. Yet I resist thinking this, wondering whether it is simply age. No, it is something else, more self-induced.

  Reading from Jacques Lusseyran’s book And There Was Light, I find this on page 11:

  As a young child I was not aware that I did not see well. I was not concerned about it, because I was happy to make friends with light as tho
ugh it were the essence of the whole world.

  Colors, shapes, even objects, the heaviest of them, all had the same vibration. And today, every time I assume the attitude of tender attention, I find the same vibration once again.

  It is the phrase tender attention that moves my imagination. What I continually fail to note in these pages, is the heartbreaking, light-filled brilliance of the world I swim through like an unappreciative fish every day. Let the record show that I am grateful.

  While still living in Washington, I started a story about a town that was halted in its tracks by a blizzard just before Christmas. It had a solid premise but after a few pages it lost its way, sounding like Betty MacDonald or Jean Kerr on a bad day. I had no experience writing fiction, but I liked the fragment well enough to take it with me when I moved to Ashland. Every so often I would get the story out of the drawer and try—without luck—to breathe life into it again. Then, just before this next entry, I imagined myself standing before the judgment seat of God and being asked, “Tell me, whatever happened to that idea I gave you back in 1986?” The fact that my mother would ask plaintively every so often if I was ever going to finish the story (read: “before I die”) was an added incentive. I did a quick calculation of my time, which was ample, and money, which would run out in about three months, and decided that I didn’t want to die without having given the story my best shot. “All right,” I said, “I’ll do it. But if it’s not any good don’t blame me.” To which God replied, in Milton’s voice, “Doth God exact day labor, light denied?” Actually, that’s not what God said, but if this were a work of fiction….

  I have set out before me a number of projects that I would like to work on: my Christmas story, a book about my mother, a history of the Dominican sisters, and—on another track—a nonprofit wing of Nightwriters that would be devoted to bringing black and white teachers together to focus on the racism that divides us.

  In my mind, this is the last day of the vacation that began when I returned from Italy. Tomorrow I return to my vocation, to myself. I know I will be tempted to fly in different directions—sending presents, making Christmas cards, folding laundry. Help me, God, to stare them down.

  Yesterday went well. I worked on the plot outline for the Christmas book. No real writing, but I spent several hours working steadily without wanting to be anywhere else. It was exciting. What is happening is that my imagination is engaged; scenes and ideas are filling in the spaces of the story in a satisfying way. I am still not sure of certain things, but I am living with the questions, turning them over in my mind.

  AT THE WHITE HOUSE, FOR A RECEPTION GIVEN BY HILLARY CLINTON, WHO SPONSORED THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC BOOK, SAVING AMERICA’S TREASURES, IN WHICH I HAD AN ESSAY

  The White House was thrilling. Ribboned swags of lacquered fruit and berries framed all the windows. In every corner was another brilliantly decorated tree or a choir singing carols. But the most moving sights were the portraits: Kennedy with his head bowed in thought, Lincoln sitting slightly forward in a chair, Truman staring straight into your eyes. And then the First Ladies portrait room, with Jacqueline Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, and Pat Nixon, her eyes almost unbearably full of pain.

  This morning, back in Ashland, I lifted up a narcissus bulb in a teacup on the kitchen windowsill and saw that there was a small bush of new roots on the bottom. Still no visible growth on top, but there is activity and preparation for growth going on. Sometimes, living in Ashland, I feel like a bulb in a teacup, living such a small life.

  The notion that we are victims of our own story, that we drag it like a chain mantle behind us, is worth thinking about. We could unclasp the mantle and step away from it if we knew how.

  A dream in which I could not get my mother to stop telling people what a slob I was, and in another segment I am being shown by someone else how I have spilled little drops of food on clothes I sent to the cleaners. I was embarrassed and, angry with my mother, I tried to get her attention by dumping a box of stuff on the floor. But nothing worked.

  My Christmas story is stalled. Pray for inspiration ... stay seated.

  My old friend P called me from the hospital. A nurse dialed my number, held the phone to his ear. He is in a strait-jacket, which he has been in most of his life, but now he is in one literally. What a shock. How sad. His comment: “I thought it was something to help my back. It had a floral print. And I didn’t realize until I was in it what had happened.” He still retains his humor, but I sensed he was disoriented.

  A cold, clear light. The house is quiet. I am in my office, listening to the scratch of my pen and the tick of the clock. Everything I need, including my willingness to remain collected for as long as it takes, is here.

  I moved downstairs into the living room and picked up Emerson and his essay, “Spiritual Laws.”

  The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.

  Last night, the right word came from eight-year-old Alexander Lamm from San Francisco, who came with his parents for dinner. When I told them about the book I was trying to write, Alexander looked at me solemnly and dug into his eight years of experience to say, “A book has to pull you along. It has to be full of inspiration and make you want to do things you hadn’t thought of doing before.” What good simple advice!

  * * *

  One of the strongest illusions in life is that another person’s love will liberate us. The illusion is hard to let go of, even when one lover after another has disappeared, because while they are present they do set us temporarily “free.” We feel as if we are more talented and lovable, and then they turn away and stop loving us, and we realize how much our balloon depended upon their hot air.

  * * *

  2001

  When my mother first came to live with me, her eyes were still good enough for her to drive around town, play Scrabble after supper at the kitchen table, and use her Tarot cards as prompts during her morning meditation. But by the end of the first year she could do none of these things, and after giving it some thought she decided—quite uncharacteristically for someone so shy—to create a support group for other people who had macular degeneration. After numerous phone calls and referrals from Kathy Waldroup at Cross Brothers Market, a half-dozen elderly women and several men joined up. I dubbed the group the “Immaculate Degenerates” and the name stuck.

  Once a month “the Immaculates” met, usually around our dining room table. Various townspeople volunteered to entertain them. Deering Gaddy gave a lecture on the history of the motorcycle, complete with a video of our local delegate to the state legislature riding around on his Harley. Fan Etienne put on an interactive play. The local llama farm owner walked a few of her llamas down to be petted. And one morning, Lyde Longaker taught everyone how to hand-build clay bowls.

  “I think you’re finished,” dead-panned my mother to her friend Dorothy Jones, who wasn’t exactly throwing herself into the project. “In more ways than one,” she added.

  Some meetings—like the time they learned how to wrap colored string around a pair of chopsticks to make a “God’s eye”—were less successful than others. “What is it about making a God’s eye that makes me so furious?” Mother whispered. “I feel trapped in it.” But word quickly got around town that our dining room was a lively place to be on the first Wednesday of every month, and soon people who could see perfectly well began to show up. Then someone suggested that they meet twice a month. My mother put her foot down.

  “I just don’t want that much continuity,” she said. “I had continuity for forty years. Now I want incontinuity.” The once-a-month schedule stayed in place.

  Mother’s Immaculate Degenerates met yesterday. The subject was Japanese fishing balls. Susan Tucker had written and researched a paper on them for the Women’s Club and she had real fishing balls, some of which she bought on eBay to pass around. In the process we were transported around the world, hearing about a Hawaiia
n island of only pure Hawaiians who make necklaces of littoral, how the invention of mechanized winches scuttled the art of fishing-ball making, and how there is a current that begins in Japan and snakes across the Pacific Ocean, dumping fishing balls on the West Coast beaches of the United States. I was unexpectedly fascinated.

  Last night, sitting by the fire, I realized how carefully you have to tend it. No matter how dry the fuel or well-constructed the pyramid of logs and paper, one has to make continual small adjustments—moving the logs closer together or farther apart—to keep the fire going. This is true for relationships as well, although some relationships are easier to keep fired up than others and a few seem very difficult to get going at all.

  I have instituted a new custom, of lowering the lights as it gets later, so that by dusk we are sitting in a living room lit only by candles and firelight. It is a gentle, reflective way to finish the day, mimicking the setting of the sun outside.

  We ended in a dark living room listening to a meditation tape. My body twitched continually. But mother was as still as a tree. When the tape was over, she opened her eyes, gazed gently around the room, and said, “time for a glass of port and a cig.”

  I’m grateful for a string of reprieves—from financial worry (a tax rebate), health concerns (weight coming down), and family stress (my children all in good places). Now, dear Lord of Words, fill me with inspiration. My book remains unfinished.

  It was probably a mistake to read my work to a friend who did not much like it. This is not to blame my friend, who only did what I asked, which was to listen constructively. What I realize is how easy it is to be rigid or incapable of change. I get it into my head that a story should be one way or that I can’t alter it after something is already there. The fact is that I can alter what I want.

  A houseguest gone. It was a harmonious visit, but I find it unaccountably hard to like her and continue to wonder why. The closest I can get to it is that there is a kind of shifting, insubstantial quality about her. She does not stand behind what she says if any resistance is offered, which infuriates me.