Too Many Colors

For so many years I wrote poetry because there wasn't time for the short stories or essays or character descriptions I had in mind. I would be driving from here to there in a series of things to do. I would catch a dialogue or an irony or a gesture -- and an idea would cross paths with me almost as though someone had yelled, hey!, before throwing a ball in my lap. I'd catch it that way. But then -- my mind, having caught it, would be spinning with what had to be done; and there was always so much noise around me, and so many things to do once I got home, and so much needed out of me -- and the best I could do was to jot down the phrase I heard or a few words to describe the idea or the irony. After a day or so -- still no quiet time to make it into a short story -- I'd say, Well, I'll just turn it into a poem. It was the best I could do.

I went to Tangier Island yesterday. This is a working island, not a resort island. It is the soft shell crab capital of the entire world, a one- by three-mile strip of land, 18 miles out from shore in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, accessible only by ferry boat. The 458 residents are watermen and watermen's wives and watermen's children. I went there because I've always heard that the islanders have retained their Elizabethan dialect -- and I wanted to hear it. Also, the world was too much with me, as the saying goes.

There are three primary family names on the island as evidenced by a walk through the cemeteries -- Crockett, Parks, and Pruitt. They say many older residents have never been off the island. The old men line up like birds on a wire at the only fueling station on the island, this one at the marina since there are no cars on the island. I walked not-so-inconspicuously back and forth in order to catch what they were saying. It's not even an English accent, more ancient and Scottish. One old man said something about another man, "Hez gote no doge, gote no wefe . . . " I couldn't decipher what was becoming of the man now that he's got no dog, got no wife, but it seemed sad. I sensed that I was looking at the strange combination of 17th century America and circa 1952.

So far no developer has touched the island other than a local man who offers this seasonal once-a-day, 90-minute ferry boat ride to another world so that mainlanders can stay in Hilda Crockett's bed and breakfast and eat her lunch or dinner of crab cakes, clam fritters, Virginia ham, corn pudding, pickled beets, and so on and so forth.

I stood in the small history museum put together with backdrops of newspaper clippings and maps; with frames holding local artwork and watermen's poems -- and I looked at a disturbing map which illustrates that, in the past 150 years, Tangier Island has lost 2/3 of itself to the waters around it -- swallowed up at the rate of 9 square acres per year. I made my own grim calculations -- taking the 750 or so square acres that remain of the island, dividing that by 9 -- and I figure that in 50 years or so the island will be no more than a strip of land on which to stand and watch the tide from either one's front or back sides.

One of the Crockett clan, a middle-aged man with a guitar cradled in his arms, said, "I tried to live on the mainland once a long time ago, but there were too many . . . colors." He hestitated for a while, as everyone does on the island, and then added, "too many sounds, strange faces . . . cars."

The senior graduating class this year will total five, about average for any given year. For the first time in the island's 400-year history, however, all five seniors will leave the island for college -- and none plans to become watermen like their fathers.

I rode back to the mainland, seated at the stern all by myself for the first 30 minutes or so, holding that old familiar feeling of a story in my catch and not enough time to write it. An older man came to sit down on the bench beside me -- and the two of us sat looking out to the faded island for the remaining hour of our trip  -- and we never said a word.  I'll call this "On the Stern":

Dazzled by pin pricks of light --

    this sun off the sea.

As though astounding me,

-- its diamond sweep, dust

    particles settling

    at peaks.

Watching Over Me

I came across the word atelier while looking for another word in the dictionary. I liked atelier so much that I have been repeating it to myself all morning -- at'l - ya. The ya is a long a sound, and it is stressed, so it comes out like yeah! At'l - yeah! At'l - yeah!

It means an artist's workshop or any kind of studio that is meant for design or artistry. My kitchen is my atelier. I sit here at the kitchen table where breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner are cycled endlessly; where bills are paid; where much bread has been let to rise; where arguments have never been resolved. But in its off-hours, this kitchen nook becomes my atelier. I think of one of my favorite children's books, In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak. Everything becomes wonderfully animated and alive in the night kitchen (as long as we think no one is watching).

I sit on a sturdy chair made by Gustave and Leopold Stickley in 1910. It was bought at an estate sale belonging to the former curator of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It had the aroma of pipe smoke when it arrived here. The wood of the wide arms is worn many shades lighter than the rest of the chair, especially the left arm -- as though this curator had placed one great hand to rest on the left side while his right hand went about the business of alternately smoking and resting (or maybe writing and resting). I believe he had great thoughts about art while sitting at home in this chair -- what to procure, what not to procure . . .

The table where I write was bought at a flea market when my children were all babies and it was finally decided that we needed someplace to set them all down for a family meal. I was told it was made from the siding of an old barn in North Carolina. It is put together with the original square nails and wooden pegs. I can only imagine what these old planks saw and heard before they became a docile kitchen table.

I look up to see my mother's unfinished oil painting of a pumpkin and apples and Indian corn from the fruit cellar of my childhood home. I had followed my mother down to the basement that day when I was a few years old. She retrieved a few things from the fruit cellar and the freezer -- her plans for dinner, most likely -- and placed them on the steps. She turned and saw a few things in the corner on the cold basement floor. She arranged them and rearranged them, tipping her head, standing back, that sort of thing. Then she got out her easel and paints and went to work. I remember being very cold. She never put her name to it because it was never finished -- or maybe she didn't like it. She gave it to me one day many years later when I was walking around the house procuring items for my first apartment. I've always wondered whether I was the reason she never finished it.

A generation hence, I've brought this painting down from the attic to grace my atelier. I'll use it as my reminder to drop everything when the vision takes me -- to capture it -- even if I never put my name to it (for whatever reason).

What's it About?

September 18, 2009: No -- I say this in response to myself from yesterday -- I think the blog is a good thing to play around with. It gives me a place to figure out the rest of the story -- as when Steinbeck wrote a daily letter to his publisher before beginning the real writing for East of Eden. I have that book of letters -- Journal of a Novel -- and I read it right along with the novel several years ago. His own two boys had a big influence on the writing -- who knew?

For some reason I thought this morning about a book I read in college -- Chauncey? -- about a mentally retarded gardener who seemed to say all the right things, unbeknownst to himself of course, and was therefore greatly admired by others and even made upwardly mobile in the social world. He kept being misinterpreted and lauded at each new level -- a pre-Forrest Gump kind of book. My English professor wanted us students to discuss the great and hidden meanings.

I was far too shy to say anything, much less something, about what I really thought. I had grown up with real-life Paul, my older brother whom no one ever mistook for clever or wise. There is no mentally compromised person who does not show some physical hint to give his self away before anyone has a chance to misinterpret what comes out of his mouth. I was an angry student sitting there the day of that discussion. I knew what it was like -- there is no glamour, no upward mobility, no wise words or magic. If I'd been a different sort of angry young student, I might have screamed, "You Fools! It's not like that at all! Chauncey is make believe -- book glamour! Book glamour!"

As it was, I sat there in my damaged, quiet soul, comfirmed to solitude and hiding. I listened to Fools talk about the wisdom of fools -- and I don't say that disparagingly. No one would believe what it was like to watch your own brother be taken for exactly what he was -- and worse.

My mother always insisted, "These people (like Paul) have a lot to teach the rest of us." I think she spent most of her life trying to figure out what that was.

Becoming a Bowl

September 15, 2009: Wiled away a day of writing by playing around with my great idea for this blog and its profile -- then took a hack at the chapter/essay, "Becoming a Bowl," which is not on my approved list of write-abouts this week (it should go somewhere in the middle) -- then experimented with listing books on Goodreads, and that is the one thing I succeeded at doing, and so I listed about 20 or more books with personal reviews and ratings.

"Becoming a Bowl" is one of my favorite chapters/essays -- though I haven't done it justice today -- but at least I've got something to work with when I officially get there.
I think of something Stravinsky said regarding the creative process: "I know exactly what I want to do . . . and then I do something else."

Against the Wind

September 14, 2009: I think of the song lyrics, "What to leave in, what to leave out . . ." I look back at the first two of those 21 notebooks I wrote over 18 months and I see that it is all relevant -- but can't possibly all be included. I had planned to find the material for about three chapters/essays as my planned work assignment for the week, but instead found about eight or nine -- not all big and great, but important nevertheless.

I keep saying (to the wind, I guess) that I don't want this to be about me -- but I know that I was searching for my own route in life all the while I was making those 500-mile trips to visit my mother in the nursing home. Those monthly trips were as much about my transition as about hers. And so, while dawdling with that thought. . .

I came upon an online reflection by Sue Monk Kidd in which she talks about the transition from writing non-fiction to fiction: " . . . my dream was to write fiction, but I was diverted from that almost before I started." Her firsts two books were narratives of her spiritual experience.

"I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them," she writes. Blown away by these unplanned books (but not fighting them), she was somewhat surprised to find herself writing The Secret Life of Bees -- a very successful fiction.

Outliers

September 11, 2009: The big guy at 7 a.m. yoga class today just so happened to mention a book he was reading, "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell. He (the big guy) reported that anything can be mastered in 10,000 hours -- and he plans to do such a thing with yoga.

"Basically ten years," he said to me. I did a quick calculation and replied, "Basically three hours a day?" He nodded in approval.

I recognize that thing called "synchronicity" or "divine guidance" when I see it. Usually it arrives off the wall and out of context, yet is completely apropos. It turns to me. It has that bottomless look of wisdom in one eye, and it often nods. It is short and to the point -- and then it's gone.

I came home and requested the book from the library. The bugaboos must have heard me, for it seems the AC is not working today. One or two of them must have fiddled with its workings while I was at yoga class.

Bugaboos

September 10, 2009: It's important to have a routine for writing. I already knew that from reading what writers say about writing these past decades. Early morning seems to "get the worm" -- though I could never have that time when the children were young no matter how early I got up. I've given much thought to women writers over the years -- Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Isak Dinesen, May Sarton, MFK Fisher, many more -- childless and often spouseless too.

My committment is three to four hours a day -- all I can really manage. This morning I woke up to the sound of the radio announcer stating a famous quote which I'll have to paraphrase from my reverie: When you make a solid commitment and goal, the rest will follow . . .
And so I got out of bed to discover there was no hot water -- which necessitated a phone call, which invited a plumber, which interfered with my writing commitment.

Now I add my own quote: When you make a commitment or goal, the bugaboos will strive to stop you. For every action forward, there is an equal and opposing reaction. Recognizing this principle, I followed through on my commitment once the plumber left at 10:30 a.m.

Now What?

September 9, 2009: But is it really about her? I'm not sure what it's about. I'm surprised to find more of me than I had hoped. I consider leaving this out (me), but I know it's best not to second guess the writing process. The best I can do now is to show up for work at this kitchen table, pick up the pen, and stay out of the way -- as any good parent watching her child learn a new skill while wielding dangerous gadgets might do. It's best not to edit, fix up, or prettify too much right now. It's easier to take out later than to fill in pieces I have regretfully hacked away. I have this messy feeling inside about the two chapters/essays I have typed this morning.

One of my biggest character flaws for writing is that I am not comfortable with chaos. I get very edgy and don't trust a mess. I'm always trying to fine tune the details before the large picture has had time to settle. This is something I have to challenge: Be comfortable with chaos.

The Beginning

September 8, 2009: A propitious day to begin my book since this is the one-year anniversary of my mother's passing. I woke up early this morning thinking of her, knowing she wishes me well in this pursuit. I remember one Sunday afternoon a few months before she died -- I was sitting in her room at the nursing home while she dozed, writing about . . . various things . . . and she awoke suddenly, looked at me, and said, "Writing a book about ME?" I said, "Yes," because that was the easiest answer to give. She smiled, nodded her head, and went back to sleep. I think she smiles and nods to me this morning . . .