The Essay I Can’t Write

Chinese Proverb: I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I write and I understand.
 

It’s been a tumultuous few days. Such a variety of events have occurred that I find it difficult to focus. I want to organize the details, make them merge into something cohesive and clear, but instead they play in my mind like some discordant orchestra whose sounds refuse to blend.
 
It began on Easter Sunday with a call from my sister, her tearful words filling my ears, “Baby Noah is dead!” His drug-abusing mother, the daughter of my sister’s partner, had left him alone in the bathtub. One day after his first birthday. This mother and her live-in boyfriend had met in rehab and had begun co-habiting and making babies even before they’d put their own fractured lives back into order. Now they face arrest and two other children have been removed from their custody. And yet they seem unwilling to accept responsibility for what they’ve done, even as their lawyer builds their defense against a system that should rightly punish them for this crime of negligence and narcissism but perhaps never will.
 
These unspeakable things happen, but how can I write of them? I don’t know how to begin.
 
On Wednesday those awful tornadoes set upon Mississippi, Georgia and Tennessee and swept a 200 mile long swath across my own home state of Alabama, making history while killing 340 people and leaving hundreds of others missing amidst the overwhelming destruction. 
 
I want to write about this somehow, to make the pain and loss more bearable, but where are the words?
 
The following day a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses came knocking on our door and wound up engaged with my partner in a lengthy discussion about God and how, if He does exist and is the good and loving God he is purported to be, He can allow such tragedies to happen. But this pair, sweet old ladies dressed in straw hats and bright ankle length skirts and with speech heavily laced with Caribbean accents, would not have their faiths shaken. 
 
Which started me thinking about people who believe passionately in a deity whose existence has never been proven. While at the same time demanding proof of the citizenship of a man who stands before them, the president of their country, having already provided such proof. People who believe conspiracy theories and lies – none of which is based on solid or tangible evidence. Yet who in this case, having been stirred to a frenzy by an egotistical bone-head, demand proof.
 
Because on top of everything else, the media had spent days lavishing Donald Trump with undue attention, allowing him to show himself the fool we already knew he was. The one good thing, if there can be a good thing, about the tornadoes is that they took the media’s attention away from that despicable man, his self-adoration and his lies.
 
I want to write of this, to use the page as my soap box, asking people to look into their hearts and think before they believe the bile one man spews. But I cannot. There would be no point.
 
On Friday we viewed the CNN coverage of Britain’s dramatic royal wedding. Juxtaposed in sharp contrast to the images of destruction in the American south, it seemed almost surreal and, in many ways, shamefully decadent.
 
It would be nice to write about how so many people still cherish the magic of a fairy tale wedding. But I can’t. My heart is too burdened by the shameful inequalities of life on this planet. 
 
Saturday and Sunday I watched as neighbors came and went from the house across the street where a gigantic yard sale was being held. Adult children selling the collections of their parents’ 65 years of living there. It’s a small cottage, gray with white trim, black shutters, a magnificent stone chimney, a split-rail fence. But it has been sold and will be demolished to make way for something big, modern and pretentious. This is the trend all over our little town. Our neighborhood was once nothing but beach cottages and summer homes, rich with personality and history. Young home buyers have no respect for this. What they want instead is to flaunt their wealth, and they do, even as the unique history of our town disappears in the dust. There are 3 cottages left on our street. One of them is ours. We’d like to put money into some renovations, but we know it will be money lost – when we are gone, this too will be a tear-down. 
 
I want to write about this trend they call progress. But how can I when I am at a loss to explain it, even to myself?
 
Sunday night Osama bin Laden was overtaken by a team of brave American soldiers who swept into his secret compound and shot him dead. As soon as the news was out, celebrations began all over the world. I can’t explain why, but I don’t feel like celebrating. It does not seem right to me to celebrate the death of another human, even one as patently evil and deserving of a horrible death as this man. Though I am as happy as anyone that he is finally gone. What I hope is that al Qaida – the malignancy that remains although the tumor has been removed – will see now how outnumbered and hated they are and will just slink into a corner somewhere to die a natural death. But already the world gears up instead for the retaliation that is sure to follow their leader’s assassination. Because these people believe in revenge with as much passion as they believe that killing innocents will guarantee them reward in the hereafter.
 
I want to write this essay. But first I want to understand these things. Why it is OK to dance at the death of a monster. Or why we allow the dismantling of history for the sake of tawdry improvement. Why we live amidst such shameful extremes of poverty and wealth. Why there are egos so huge their owners fail to realize the fools they make of themselves with their own hubris. Why people’s belief that there is a God who loves them will not be shattered. And how people can risk the lives of their children to indulge their own pleasures.

To write about these things, I need to understand them. Otherwise, I don’t know where to begin.

Mind Matters

It was only after my mother died that I became fully aware of how little I actually knew about her. She shared so little of herself with any of us. But one thing I always knew, on some level anyway, was how terrified she was of developing Alzheimer’s, as her mother did, and her grandmother before that. In fact, no one even knows how far back into our family it goes, this insidious and dreadful disease.

 

My grandmother died curled into a fetal position in a nursing home where she had lingered for more than ten years. But long before she’d reached that stage she’d already forgotten who my mother was. Her only daughter. My mother never let on how much this hurt her. But it hurt me. Not just for my mother, but for myself as well. Most painful was the day my grandmother, though still living alone and managing her life, approached me at a family gathering and asked, as one might ask someone newly introduced, “Now, what did you say your name was again?” This was how the disease started with my grandmother, turning her loved ones into strangers.

 

So when my mother’s symptoms began, her denial was understandable. It’s not like cancer, which eats away at some organ but with luck can be caught and slowed if not eliminated altogether. Alzheimer’s spells certain doom. Drugs, what few there are, don’t stop it. And in many cases don’t even slow it noticeably. The tragic outcome is always there, staring you down, looming larger and larger until you lose your senses right along with your mind. Your life does a 180, and you go backwards, returning to the state of helplessness in which you began. It was this sad irony my mother wanted to avoid, and which I, too, had hoped might skip right over her somehow.

 

So sometime in her second life - that is, the life-after-children life – she developed an addiction to crossword puzzles. “Brain exercises,” she called them. Whenever she visited me over the years, in all the various places I lived, I was trained, like a loyal pet, to leave the house early in search of a paper stand. So that we could begin each day as she always did when she was home - with Katie Couric and the puzzles. I don’t think she was capable of doing it any other way. As some people drink coffee to jump-start themselves, my mother worked a crossword. 

 

She always made a show of reading the other sections first, often out loud - which was more than a little annoying - but I knew it was only a half-interested effort at best to keep up with the day’s events. As the years progressed, the time span between the front page headlines and the methodical folding down of the sought-after section – in half, then half again, pencil in hand - got shorter and shorter. Until eventually it seemed as if that one page, the puzzle page, was the only reason for a paper at all. 

 

Carl, her companion of thirty plus years, whom she refused to ever marry or even live with, was hooked too. The link between them and their crosswords was so interwoven that even on the nights when they each slept at their own homes, one would always call the other early the following day with a question like, “34 down…what’d you put there?”

 

My mother’s memory had always been unfaltering. And indisputable. Or at least, if she was wrong, no one dared suggest it without facts to back themselves up. She remembered things in surprising detail – the name of a restaurant we’d gone to years earlier, or a street we’d lived on a lifetime ago, places and events no one else could recall. My grandfather was one of ten children – my mother had stories to tell about all of them, in detail. So when these memories began escaping her, it was easy to see how it terrified her. The look in her eye of abject fear. And it was easy to understand her denial. But when she began to confuse memories of my father, whom she divorced in the sixties, with Carl, who was with her until he died in 2005, there was no way for me to remain in denial right along with her.

 

I had tried for years already to get her to do other “brain exercises.” Learn a new language, take a course in something, anything. I even tried convincing her to buy a computer. She refused. “What do I need that for?” she’d ask, even as my sisters and I presented her with answers ad infinitum. She’d get angry at us if we persisted. It did no good to tell her how it might help keep her memory sharp. By then it had become a touchy subject, almost taboo. So we tried to show her other reasons, the joy of surfing the net, the convenience of email. To no avail. As afraid as she was of Alzheimer’s, I think she was even more afraid of failure. The challenge of learning to use a computer was more than she was willing to try. And she as much as said so.

 

Then the day came when I learned the level to which her dementia had finally advanced. I had found a stack of unfinished crosswords. Dozens of them, going back weeks. All in a neat pile, almost hidden, under the coffee table in her living room. Her habit had always been to save a puzzle if she’d been unable to complete it, going back to it again and again until it was finally done. Sometimes it would take her a few days, but she was determined, and nearly always successful. “Did it!” she’d exclaim as soon as she’d filled in the last word, her understated way of waxing triumphant. So she had been saving all of these for the same reason, apparently with the same determination. I selected one from the stack, thinking to fill some idle time by completing it. But many of the answers she’d filled in were completely inappropriate, utterly wrong. I was afraid to look further into the collection. I couldn’t bear to see any more evidence of what I already knew. 

 

Four months later, two days before her 84^th birthday, my mother died. It’s sad and frightening to think about how unsuccessful her paltry efforts to beat her destiny were. But I can think of one small way in which she won. She still knew the names of all her children. In that, at least, there is victory. “Did it!” I can hear her saying.

Easy Writing

Bought this new pen yesterday. Spent a long time selecting it.  At Staples – I stood there for maybe thirty minutes examining them all; so many to choose from. Ended up with this new style, called a Dr. Grip. Fat at the grip, so my arthritic fingers don’t cramp up and whine just when I’m on a creative roll. 

I took a writing workshop a few weeks ago, the gist of which was to help me be more disciplined, to help me make my writing a lifestyle habit rather than drudgery. And the instructor suggested, among a lot of other helpful things, that everyone, or at least those like me who write in longhand first, get an “easy writing pen.” 

Not anything I’d ever thought of before. But then I realized that, yeah, some pens you have to really prod. Some are not very dependable, and take a lot of persuasion, or don’t write at all, so that you have to go digging around for another one.  Which is when that capricious flow of creativity just dries right up. 

But I like my pens to be more than just reliable. I like my pens to be pretty and to make a statement. To say something about me, like that I’m not all business, because I have this little flaky right-brain thing going on sometimes too. And that I’m not cheap, though I am frugal; and that I have a sense of style, but not a loud one. 

I want my pen to be colorful. But a classy color, not flashy, like orange, or intimidating, like blue. Classy, like this new one. Pink. Pink and silver. Yes. 

I want my pen to put me in the mood to pick it up. I want a pen I can clasp without effort as it slides across the page. And I want the words and sentences and language to ooze out of it like syrup, clinging to the paper and making perfect, indelible sense. A pen that writes from the very first letter without cajoling; no frantic scribbling to get it going; no pressure; no sputtered ink that lies in ugly, disconcerting gobs on the page. Just the silken flow of flawless prose, spurred by gravity and my pen, held taut yet relaxed in an indefatigable downward dog.  

My ideal pen will be sound and relentless in its tasks, an effective and very fine writer. 

My pen will be a model of efficiency and glamour.  Because when the job is done, and it is good, it is the pen that must be ready then to step forward and takes its bows.

Right?

Waiting for Godot, et al....

I’ve always felt undereducated. But never more than since moving to New York six years ago. It seems everyone I meet here has a degree or two. Not that I ask them, because I don’t - I don’t want the question turned back on me, because it always embarrasses me to have to explain that I’ve never even been to college.
When I was seventeen and fresh out of high school I left home to move into a dormitory at a hospital-based School of Nursing blocks away from the University of Alabama. This program, once I graduated and then passed eight grueling hours of State Board exams, would render me a Registered Nurse. But not a degreed nurse.
I am one of those dinosaurs known as a “diploma” graduate. A term lay people are not even familiar with. What it means is that even though University professors came to our school to teach our courses – English, Math, Sociology, Psychology and all the requisite sciences – and even though we attended classes and worked in the clinical arena 5 days a week for 11 months each year for those three years (not an easy program, either – only half the number that I started with made it to graduation), what we left with was not a degree of any sort.  But, that was in 1968. And in 1968, diploma graduates were the rule, not the exception.
In the seventies diploma schools began being phased out.  Aspiring nursing students then began choosing between a two year Associate’s Degree or a four year Bachelor’s Degree. One could even begin one’s career with the AD, and then later add the courses needed to complete the BS. My having graduated with only a diploma and no college credits to my name meant that a degree of any kind would require me to start as a freshman again and run the whole race.
What I always said was that if I ever did return to school, it would not be to study nursing, though it would certainly have helped advance my nursing career. What I wanted instead was to study literature and the craft of writing. As a working wife and mother, and then a single parent, it always seemed the impossible dream.
My daughter, whom I coaxed and pushed through nine fragmented years of secondary education, and who managed, finally, to walk away with a BFA, feels only half the pride I think she should for that accomplishment. If only she knew how I envy her.
As I examine my life these days, it seems to be curiously bookended, on the one side by my daughter and her somewhat nonchalant attitude about her education, but on the other by my maternal grandfather. In my first and most indelible memory of that quiet, gentle man, he is seated, thin, frail and balding, in a wicker rocker on his and my grandmother’s porch, engrossed in a Reader’s Digest.
It’s not what he was reading that fascinates my fractured memory so much as the fact that he was reading. I had no idea, as I stood watching his yellowed fingertip follow the words across the page that day, that he’d had to quit school when he was only eight to help support his ten brothers and sisters, and had taught himself everything he’d learned thereafter, including how to read.
Being  jealous of the higher education everyone I know seems to have acquired should not inspire me as much as my grandfather’s determination to learn despite having had his right to even the most basic education stolen from him.  But it does.
I hang around a lot of wannabe writers like myself. I am always envious when they make references to some literary detail that I’m not familiar with, even though, on my own, I’ve read and studied whatever college lit I could get my hands on over the years.
When I read the bios of accomplished (that is, published) writers, I always make note of their academic careers. It seems they all have degrees, in English, or Fine Arts, or something equally esoteric. It seems many, if not most of them are also teaching the same subjects. What, I then wonder, am I doing trying to get my foot in that door? I am not educated. I have no right.
Yet I’ve yearned to acquire that right for years. So what am I waiting for, you want to know. Well, besides what is most daunting -the cost - the whole college admission process completely intimidates me. I had to be tutored just to pass high-school algebra – how can I possibly pass a college entrance exam forty-something years after that embarrassing fact?  But just to hold a degree in my hand some day, well, I think it would feel pretty amazing. And would make my grandfather proud.
Maybe it’s time to just do this thing.