Month: October 2013

That’s why they pay us

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photoLast year I bought the materials needed to repair the concrete around our bulkhead that is crumbling in a few places. I suspect this is a back-door entrance for mice into our house. I then threw a blue tarp over the bulkhead, weighed it down with a few old bricks, and procrastinated the task for several months. Yesterday, I re-started.

This morning I went into the backyard to inspect if the first layer of Quikrete® had dried. I kneeled and touched it. My peripheral vision noticed the immobile, five-inch long slug, and I jumped up, disgusted. I stood back; I stared at and then photographed it. (Note: you can click on the image and see the full-sized beauty.)

I was both fascinated and repelled. I remembered some work I did the summer before college, when I took on lots of odd jobs to make money: child care, house painting, and landscaping. Neighbors hired me to clean out and mulch under their deck, which was built only about three feet off the ground, so I had to crawl on my hands and knees in that dark wet space for hours. Enough light seeped through the spaces between floorboards and lattice on the sides that I could spot broken cement blocks that had been discarded there, and I spread around huge double handfuls, one after another, of the spruce mulch. Occasionally under my dungareed knees I felt a pop. Only when I got out to the light did I see the mucus-y smear and realize how many slugs I was sharing the space with. I forced myself to finish the job, shuddering when I felt the pop and pressing on. I liked the smell of mulch — still do — and had my pride to consider.

This is what work is sometimes, isn’t it? We accept the big task with enthusiasm or at least willingness, and then the hours and days present us with the actual nature of the work: the dirt, bent back, slug slime, and belief that we were made for better things or at least great praise and compensation for our dedicated labor. All work has some of this, even art. I don’t love everything I do, and I don’t believe that old lie: Do what you love, the money will follow it. But I am satisfied when the mulch has been laid down and the broken bricks thrown out. I can at least say, “Someone had to do it, and that person was me.”

Writer’s 15-minute confession

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Sometimes I feel as though I am dying by not writing.

By “I,” I mean my creative self, not my physical body.

By “dying,” I mean losing force, vitality, hope.

By “writing,” I mean the right words on a matter of personal or artistic urgency.

I went to the bookshelf to find a poem to work on with my adult ESL student today. We are studying modifiers, and those grammar workbooks will kill your interest in words. They are so earnestly done. They seem to have nothing to do with any language that people actually speak or write.

Charles Simic, Philip Levine, Robert Frost. Mark Strand’s “I Was an Arctic Explorer” was on my mind, but I couldn’t put my hand on the book. Mary Oliver’s What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems will do.

“Black Snake,” first line:

The flat rock in the center of the garden heats up every morning in the sun.

Instantly, you are somewhere else. You see it in your mind as you’ve seen it before. You feel it; you are the rock.

This poem was in front of me like a piece of cake I could not eat. I know I am exaggerating. But I am close to the cake — so close I could put a fork into it, put the fork into my mouth — but I cannot. Not because I am unable, and not because I am afraid, but because I should be doing something else. I am preventing myself. I am in my own way.

And time will pass, life will happen, I will notice things like flat rocks, bare toes on concrete, and the uptwist of my daughter’s hair, and someone else will be writing about them.

I will be grading your paper, attending your meeting, revising a lecture, listening to your complaints, fielding a question, cooking a meal, signing a school form, getting some sleep.

This may not be factual. This though is what it is like for me to not write.

Lost and found writing

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garageI’ve been on Google Docs, which is now part of Google Drive, since the beta version became available. (Was that 2007?) I do most of my writing in that environment, whether collaborative and individual. I’ve lost track of what I’ve stored there.

Recently, I was searching for a document I knew was in there, and I came across one with an unfamiliar title, “toc: Jane’s World.” While I don’t recall the moment of this file’s creation, I recognized the contents immediately. It’s an annotated table of contents of a book of essays I imagined writing and publishing. There is a list of 11 titles with short descriptions of them after.

The table of contents was aspirational, I could see. The titles of essays were mere drafts; I’ve thought of better ones since. What really made me happy was to realize that 5 of the 11 essays were since completed and published, and one is well underway.

I worry a lot that, with time being fragmented by work and personal responsibilities and activities, no writing gets done. This lost and found table of contents makes me realize that writing is getting done.

Though many of my professional hours are spent as a teacher, I am still a writer. The list is akin to a letter written by the self years ago. I’m sending her a thank you note.