Summer chores: pleasure and pain

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a fraction of my paint can hoard

In his essay, “Good-Bye to Forty-Eighth Street,” E. B. White describes a move from the six-room Manhattan apartment he then shared with his wife. Even in 1957 people accumulated lots of stuff; it’s not just our epoch that is so acquisitive.  Contemplating my own home, which is fairly tidy, I feel about it the same way that White felt about his apartment:

A home is like a reservoir equipped with a check valve: the valve permits influx but prevents outflow. Acquisition goes on night and day — smooth, subtly, imperceptibly. I have no sharp taste for acquiring things, but it is not necessary to desire things in order to acquire them. Goods and chattels seek a man out; they find him even though his guard is up. […] This steady influx is not counterbalanced by any comparable outgo. Under ordinary circumstances, the only stuff that leaves a home is paper trash and garbage; everything else stays on and digs in.

In the passage above where I’ve used a “[…]” as a placeholder for many sentences I’ve omitted, White lists the various things that have made their way into his life without his beckoning or actively acquiring them: books, oddities, gifts, memo books, a chip of wood sent to him by a reader, and “indestructible keepsakes” left behind by someone who has died. Later in the essay he writes about the special problem of trophies. (Note: While my post is not at all about teaching, I think it could be a fruitful assignment in a creative writing class to have students make a long list of items that could fill that “[…]” spot. Perhaps an idea for a poem would emerge.)

White and his wife had only six rooms in this apartment. In our house, we have seven rooms, plus more closets, and an attic and basement. Ah, therein lies the problem. A former grad school professor of mine once said to me, as she and her husband packed up a house to move in with a daughter upon their retirement: “People should not be allowed to know that they have attics and basements.” Continue reading →

A complaint may simply be a boast in disguise

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Years ago, I was having dinner at Brasserie Jo with a friend, her husband, and her out-of-town colleague. The colleague, a professor from somewhere in the Midwest, asked me about our experience of the public schools in our town. I described the school system’s exceptional quality, and I paradoxically whined at length about the excessive homework, competition, and parental (over) involvement.

Listening to myself, I didn’t like what I was hearing. I broke off and said to him, “I’m so sorry. I have a lot to be happy about, and I’m only complaining.”

He replied, “You’re boasting. I hear you. That’s okay.”

His remark was illuminating to me, and I have thought about that often. Whenever I hear someone else complaining, or even myself, I wonder if it really is a boast in disguise. I wish I had the guts that he did, though, and could say to someone else what he, so cheerfully, said to me.

And now I have a complaint that’s really a boast. Read on.

For six months, our old Kenmore washing machine has been dying a slow death. Repaired many times over its 12 years of life, it finally started to rust out over the winter, and Jimmy and I propped up the crumpled base with wooden toy blocks. It kept going and washing until a couple of weeks ago, when water started to leak out the bottom, and we realized we could no longer put off the errand. So we went to the store and ordered a new washer and dryer.

The plumber came Friday morning to disconnect the two (we have a gas dryer, and a plumber is needed) before the arrival of the appliances, scheduled for Saturday. With the appliances pulled away from the basement wall, we could see that the drywall was damp and crumbling up about 24″ off the floor. It would have to be fixed before the plumber came back Monday morning to connect the new appliances. No time to call a handyman — we’d have to do it.

My handy brother-in-law Kenlie came by, demolished part of both the wall and the frame supporting it (sections of the sole plate were rotted too), and told us what to do.  That “us” became “me” — poor me, that’s my overt complaint — and I spent a few hours on Sunday repairing the wall when what I had really wanted to do was not much of anything.

Watch this slideshow, and you’ll see the process. I wish I had a “before” picture, but the moment the appliances were pulled away from the wall was so disgusting — dirty and wet plaster everywhere — that I didn’t think to photograph it. The show begins after I’ve put in the pieces to replace the rotted sole plate, which I painted red: paint to make them a bit moisture resistant and red because it’s what I had nearby.

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And what’s the underlying boast? This was my first experience with drywall and plaster, and it came out very nicely, neat and clean.

I’m wicked proud of myself. There, I said it.

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Thanks to Grace and Jimmy Guterman for the photography.

Mother and daughter, hat makers

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Today is Crazy Hat Day at the arts camp that Grace attends (and Lydia serves as counselor in training). Sure, a person could buy a hat, but the thrills of using a glue gun are too intense to resist. So Grace made a hat last night, after rummaging through the basement for both junk and glitter. By this morning, the glitter had set, and the hat could be touched. This is where I came in: I had to find and sew on, to a hat made of cardboard and foam rubber, ties that would hold it on her head. Ribbon or shoelaces wouldn’t work — something stretchy was needed. Fortunately, there are numerous uses for nylon stockings, beyond covering the legs, and they came in handy this time too. I took two black knee-highs and sewed them by hand to the foam underside of the brim. Voilá, a crazy hat that stays put.

Same route, different thoughts

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I took the same route back to my parked car today as I did last Monday afternoon: through the Common, down Charles Street, and across the Longfellow Bridge back to Kendall Square from Park Street.

This time, I took my own photo.

on Longfellow Bridge, nearing Cambridge, today at 4:45pm

I met no strangers on the bridge, but I did walk by many of them. One smiled.

On my walk, I thought for almost the whole time about the power of the words, “I’m sorry.” My shift on the GLAD Legal InfoLine was busy today. Lots of calls. So many of the calls I get have to do with gay marriage or immigration issues. Once in a while there is one that has to do with crime, and the caller as victim of one. Today there were two.

To one fellow, after he had told me a long yet coherent story about being beaten, I said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you. It sounds very upsetting.” Until that moment, his voice had been measured and regular, sort of like the tone of voice a friend would use as you sat together at a coffee shop and discussed an incident that had happened to a third friend.

His voice broke. “It was.” That was all he said. I could hear the loosening inside him. I felt loosened myself, not crying but as though I could.

I got practical again and made some suggestions. He rallied. I’d like to think we both felt as though we were moving forward in solving a problem and that it seemed, for the moment, better.

Writer’s Dozen: William Zinsser and Voice

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This is the second in a series of posts, called “A Writer’s Dozen,” on texts that have been important to me as a writer.

In learning to write, there is always some unlearning to do. As writers, we build up our vocabularies and strategies in ways useful to us, but sometimes we get locked into those ways, and our writing becomes disembodied, unnatural, overwrought, show off-y. For writing to be good and worth reading, it has to fit the rhetorical situation and have a voice – a real one that could only come from that writer.

For me, the best definition and treatment of “voice,” as it applies to writing, comes from William Zinsser in his On Writing Well (1976): it is your “commodity as a writer” and conveys your “attitude toward language.” As writer, it is uniquely you.

Last week, some colleagues and I were reading stacks of essays by first-year students, as part of a writing assessment project at another local university. We read in mostly silence, but on our lunch and coffee breaks we would discuss features of student work that we liked or didn’t like. This is the writing teacher’s version of water-cooler gossip.

Uniformly we were irked by students using 50-cent words when plainer ones would do. For example, instead of using “posit” as a verb, which we saw used repeatedly in one essay, we prefer “state” or “argue” when quoting from an article or book or “say” when quoting from an interview.

The fancy word choices enraged one or two of my colleagues. I like a more straightforward style myself, but I understand why students write in what they believe to be a more formal register: to sound smart and to reach the teacher. (For a nice discussion of register, try this: link.)

Entering the academy and the conventions of academic writing is “like learning a new language,” I suggested to my colleagues. “It’s awkward at first, and it takes some mastery of the language before you use it naturally.” Before you get to the point of sounding like a native, there’s a lot of stilted use that doesn’t sound quite right to experienced ears.

I mostly practiced creative writing when I was in high school, and I was considered to be a fluent writer. When I got to college, however, and turned in my first academic paper – over which I had toiled devotedly and seriously – and got an F for a grade, with the comment, “This is not an analytical essay,” I realized I was unprepared for this new country called College and its strange customs. It was a new start and a tough one. Continue reading →

Walking and talking

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On the short train ride today between the Kendall Square and Park Street stations, so many conversations about our intentions — to be or make something, go somewhere, decide, give up, let go — were on my mind. As I walked up the stairs from the lower platform to the main one, and then up into the mid-day sun, I arrived at this:

Let’s no longer talk of the things we want to do. Let’s do them.

A four-piece brass band was playing at the mouth of Winter Street. The guys were older and paunched, all wearing yellow vests, and they enthusiastically tootled “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid. It was wonderfully done. I looked, but there was no cup on the sidewalk collecting change. One song, and they left.

If you want to make music, make it.

art over Winter Street

On Mondays, I usually go to the Starbucks on Winter and get a cup of coffee and the fruit-and-cheese bistro box for lunch before heading up to GLAD. Walking there, I saw a man with a beautiful, muscled body walking up the middle of the street from downtown. Otherwise bare, he wore only tan shorts and flip flops, and as we neared each other I could see that his face had been burned and later treated with skin grafts — it was like melted wax, smoothed and cooled, but the eyes dark and liquid and still piercingly human.

Perhaps this is what you do when your face, your badge, is odd: you flaunt the body. Continue reading →

Happiness is a moment, not a life

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Last Saturday morning, walking to the last sessions of the IWAC Conference in Savannah, I saw this graffiti on a building behind my hotel at the corner of Turner Boulevard and Fahm Street.

The graffiti says, “Happiness is a drug I can’t afford.” (Click and see.) Who spray painted this, I wondered? Is this a shout? And if frustration gave birth to this remark, did the spray painter not feel any thrill in the act of expressing it?

I’ll bet he did have at least a few minutes of absorption that are equated with happiness.

I don’t like that question, “Are you happy?” because happiness is a quality that is on the move constantly. It’s like hunger or the satisfaction of hunger: depending on the moment, I could answer in different ways. If I say NO the person asking may assume a generalized unhappiness on my part when, really, happiness is specific and ephemeral. This is okay.

This month in The Sun, the painter Ran Ortner describes the feeling of being engaged in his work:

In my reading I’ve come across this again and again: that a person is most powerful when in a state of inner peace. The outside world recedes when I’m engaged in my work. I fall under the illusion that what I’m doing is all-important… I’ll take a break, and when I come back and look at the work, I’ll think, Damn, there’s magic there… That’s what makes art great — it’s a souvenir from these frontiers.

To me, a sort of cool-temperatured soul, that inner peace is happiness.

It doesn’t only come with art-making. If it did, I would experience it as infrequently as I make art. So much of my time seems spent in getting work done or giving comfort or making/maintaining a home.

Some of that inner peace comes actually from those activities, even mowing the lawn or sweeping the sidewalk. And I feel satisfied with the souvenir from the frontier of the backyard. Just this morning, Friday at 6:50am, I sat on the steps in the back, watched the birds peck at the damp dirt under the green grass, looked around at my neighbors’ yards, heard the garbage truck on a distant street, and felt happy with the place I’ve made over many moments of absorption. This includes my recent wrestling with two overgrown rhododendron. Happy is a lightness of being — that may be the best way to describe it. (Thanks to Kundera for the phrase.) It comes and it goes and it comes again.

Continue reading →

Writer’s Dozen: Natalie Goldberg and Bones

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Goldberg, pen, and cake

Permission, sincere belief, and urgency: those are what Natalie Goldberg gives to readers of Writing Down the Bones (Shambhala Publications, Boston: 1986). This post is the first of Writer’s Dozen, a series on 13 texts that have meant a lot to me as a writer.

When I first encountered this book, in the graduate-level Teaching Writing course at Simmons College in the spring of 2003, I wondered why Professor Lowry Pei had assigned it. I cringed reading the first chapter, “Beginner’s Mind, Pen and Paper,” and Goldberg’s hokey advice on choosing a “fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand” and purchasing “a cheap spiral notebook” over a “fancy” one so that “you feel that you can fill it quickly and afford another.”

Let’s get to the point, I thought. The pen-and-paper suggestion seemed to be a detour and right at the beginning of the book when I was eager to get started. Clearly, this was for adults, and did they really need guidance in finding these most basic tools? If they do, they’re not going to get too far as writers. The snob in me was having her say in my internal dialogue.

Other chapters describe the timed “egoless” freewrite, writing as daily practice, distance of time, and some more fruitful topics. My position on Goldberg’s method started to soften, though, only when I read her command that we shouldn’t “identify too strongly with [our] work.” Words, when writing them, are “a great moment going through” the writer. Not being a Buddhist, as she is, I didn’t quite understand what she was getting at, but I found it a relief to think that I could write deeply and then move on to deeply writing something else, having left the old thing behind, done.

My initial resistance to Writing Down the Bones and the spiritual dimension to Goldberg’s approach had to do with my age (38), agnosticism, and experience writing and getting writing (for work and school) done. I didn’t think I necessarily needed anyone to tell me to write, write lots, write regularly. At first, I wondered if this book was intended purely for the beginner or the unsure, which I believed myself to be not at all.

But I quickly liked and was intrigued by the ideas of this writing professor, Lowry Pei, who has since become mentor, colleague, and friend, and I thought I’d go along with it and see how Goldberg fit into Pei’s approach. I was still keeping my emotional distance from Bones, not sure it applied to me. Continue reading →

Writer’s Dozen: a new series

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For several months, I’ve been keeping a list of texts that have meant a lot to me as a writer. Some are as long as a book and are explicitly about writing, in particular about practice, process, and style.  A few of my picks are essay length, and a few are about visual art, e.g., photography and ceramics, yet the authors articulate principles that, in my view, apply to writing.

This list of 13 of my fundamental texts will turn into a new series, Writer’s Dozen, starting with my next post. I am inspired in part by an essay I read recently, by Tom Bissell, called “Writing about Writing about Writing,” in which he takes stock of some staples in the how-to-write section of his local bookstore. It’s a balanced analysis; he finds reasons to both mock and praise the books he features. On my list and his only two overlap: ones by Annie Lamott and Natalie Goldberg. Bissell admits to varying personal interest in the other books he critiques, which include Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (his one writer’s-life-changing text), Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, and Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life.

I highly recommend Bissell’s essay. He has a tougher sensibility than I, but the heart of his argument is consistent with my motivation for choosing 13 personally influential texts and commenting on them in my upcoming series. About books about writing in general, Bissell asserts:

Most writers have thoughts about writing as an act, as a way of understanding oneself, or as a way of being, and they are often interesting. I have any number of thoughts about writing, all of which I find incomparably fascinating… A how-to-write book saved my life, then, but it did so existentially, not instructively. Many of the best books about writing are only incidentally about writing. Instead, they are about how to live.

Indeed, my favorite books about writing or art are, in their way, about how to live.

First up: Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, a book that initially disturbed me and then later settled down and found its place in my habits.

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Image, “Pencil Art,” by Nalini Prasana on Flickr via a creative commons license.