A Pen in Hand

Eager for Monday morning, the reverse of what most people might feel, eager for getting back to that thing I was saying last week about this time. I’m two-thirds of the way through an essay/chapter called “The Way to Hold a Pen.” There’s more to it than one might think -- and not necessarily what it seems.

Went outside early this a.m. to fetch the newspaper to begin the day . . . The air was pink – that’s the only way to describe it – the air was pink – so I came back in the house and got on my shoes and coat – and I took a walk down to the pond where I go – it’s a little neighborhood Walden pond save for the occasional airplane overhead and the din of distant traffic through a barrier of trees – but then again, Walden was besieged by a train nearby, not so secluded as we’ve been led to believe – and so I walked around the pond at 7 a.m., before anyone in the house knew I was missing.  I saw a tree with a dozen or so worn out leaves, one leaf tottering at the end of each bare branch. It looked so comical to me at that time of the day in the pink air – like an old man with a few short hairs left atop his pink head.

But now I’m back and I’ve done my journal warm-up writing – so much longer than I thought it would be – and not about anything I thought it would be – but there was an idea for another thing I might use later – nothing is ever lost in writing. I’ve learned that. I might ramble and ramble about narcissus bulbs for example, and the need to get them buried in gravel today so they’ll bloom by Christmas, but at the end of all that rambling I see a thing I can use for my book – if not now, then certainly later . . . and so the walk and the ramble become worthwhile.

This is where I took a break from this blog to run back down to the pond, in a light rain, to grab a picture of the tottering leaves before they succumb – already less than I saw in the pink air of the morning.  The pack of men with their noisy leaf blowers . . . what did they think of the woman running with her camera and pen in hand? 

Now I finish the thing I was saying last week about how to hold a pen -- and I’ll file away my fresh idea for another day . . .

The Season Upon Me

This Monday  has the feeling of "bothersomeness."  I want to write a new chapter/essay today, want to write my journal pages, want to publish a blog -- but it all comes as a bother between ordering Christmas and birthday presents while researching the star-ratings of other items . . . making a Thanksgiving grocery list . . . watching disappointed birds peck around at nearly empty feeders . . . noting wet leaves layering themselves like beds of mica. All these lists I write. I come back to the table of my atelier to really write, assuring myself of two safe hours, but my mind won't buy the promise.

So I do what I've learned to do when I can't sit down long enough to write so much as a poem much less an essay/chapter -- I grind wheat berries into flour . . . which will make the bread . . . which will enable the crumb . . . which will become the dressing . . . that stuffs the bird . . . that feeds the family.  So much work going from hard wheat berry to moist stuffing -- and not because it's so much tastier or superior or even thriftier than a boxed mix of dried bread crumbs and herbs -- but because I am doomed to suffer small amazements such as the transformation of hard winter wheat into nourishing bread.  I think about writing while I work . . . about how to transform harsh experience into words that might someday feed.

I always wax poetic when I run my open palm through a bin of amber wheat berries – individual kernels so hard and unyielding on their own – yet fluid and fragrant in the collective sense.  I wish I knew the name of my farmer who grew this hard winter wheat for me, someone in Montana . . . my poem would be complete.

Yes, I'd rather be writing.  But the collective anticipation of the season has got me in its gulf -- me, one leaf in the sweep of a season -- tossed and turned upside down, inside out, to where the thing I want to do is a big bother . . . and so I do the thing that enables me to think about it.

This Little Monument

I have never found a decent pen to work with – like the blacksmith having no good hammer – like the cobbler having no good stool or leather. Just this morning I tossed three pens with a dart-throwing motion into the trash can, my frustration finally taking action. I am so tired of this quest for a good pen.  So I'm using a pencil I rediscovered in my drawer, the Palomino 2B, supposedly the next best thing to the now collectible but defunct Blackwing 602 which Steinbeck had sense enough to choose after a two-month pencil search before beginning his East of Eden. Once Steinbeck determined the Blackwing was worthy of his project (though they were the most expensive pencil at the time, 50 cents each), he ordered four dozen of those graphite tools per month – worth a medium sized fortune today when considering that each pencil might go for $35-$50 on eBay.

He wrote this to his editor while on chapter four of East of Eden: “I just looked up and saw how different my handwriting is from day to day. I think I am writing much faster today than I did yesterday. That gives a sharpness to the letter. And also I have found a new kind of pencil – the best I have ever had. Of course it costs three times as much too but it is black and soft but doesn’t break off. I think I will always use these. They are called Blackwings and they really glide over the paper. And brother, they have some gliding to do before I am finished. Now to the work.”

They say this Palomino 2B (or the HB, but not the B, H, or 2H) is the next best thing to the Blackwing 602 which went out of production in 1998 when the eraser crimping machine broke. It’s not as waxy across the page, I've noticed; I have to sharpen it after every paragraph, and the smell is not so transporting -- even though they say it's made of California cedar – but it’s smooth, soft and dark, and better than all the pens I’ve tried. I'm ordering one dozen Palomino 2B pencils today -- about a dollar each including the postage -- and I'll write with pencils from now on.  

I’ve got a few Blackwings I’ve procured for myself or received as gifts over the years -- and I've always used them because I believe a collectible is not worth anything if you can't enjoy it -- so I’ve got several that are half-used or reduced to stubbles.  But – I enjoyed them. It's truly the best pencil ever made, smelling of strong cedar and long ago times when freshly caught salmon was smoked on freshly felled wood and leaves. I can hear drum beats when I use the Blackwing 602 . . .

I leave these stubbles to lie around my house where I might see them or pick them up for use as accent writing – that is, underlining or making brackets and stars in books I’m reading along the way.  Sometimes I just sniff them. And I always remember that I enjoyed these pencils – much as an old man might look at portraits of women he has known, or maybe at cigar boxes he has been left to ponder – or as an old woman might look at the tins of fine tea she has sipped of a Sunday afternoon . . .

I remember when cleaning out the kitchen cupboards of my mother’s house soon after she had died, and I saw a little monument of tea saucers which she had hidden all the way in the back corner of an uppermost shelf – they were wrapped in a bit of yellowed tissue paper, probably from a gift she'd received nearly 40 years before – and I unwrapped that little monument of saucers, shuffled through them with two hands and carefully spread them out like a game of solitaire upon the kitchen countertop in front of me – and I saw the designs of each, like seeing photos of deceased relatives, their familiar features and would-be smiles coming to life within memory – and I looked up to see if there were any cups to match – and there weren’t – and that is when all became clear to me, that my mother had used her fine English bone china teacups in the same way I used my Blackwing 602’s – to enjoy them. They were the only nice things she ever had, gifts from my father for each of the 39 wedding anniversaries they had together before he died.

These stacked saucers are like the stubbles of my Blackwing pencils – a testament to what she enjoyed – because in the enjoyment of things we love, we use them up – or break a few.

A Tote of Sticks

The first draft of anything I do is the one that has the Life in it – and then I start making it grammatically correct and taking out the dashes and the dots which I love so much – taking out the made-up words that say it better anyway – putting in commas so my imaginary critics have nothing to say – I’m the worst critic anyway, a trained editor of Life and licensed English teacher – and I feel by the tension in my neck that the Life is being drained out of me – blocked off – as though periods were sutures and semicolons were clamps, commas were scalpels and parenthesis were boxes where little bits of Life get held in check.

And then I have a headache and I want to throw it all away – the thing that made perfect sense when it first was born, first drafted – because I don’t want it boxed up like pictures cropped and trimmed and clarified to take out all the rubble of sticks in the background. Real Life is a run on sentence like a ghost that flows through walls, would never stop at lights or signs. Like ganglion, I get twisted in knots and confusion once the editor/teacher in me sets to the task – the nerves in my back can attest . . .

I took a walk yesterday after feeling this ganglion in my being, walked through a forested pathway that leads down to a lake where I take a few laps to see the herons and – this time of year, the geese should be arriving from Canada any day now, always a week or two before Thanksgiving – and on the forested path I saw an old lady’s purplish blue and whitish legs moving through some leaves and I ran over to see that a frail old lady had fallen. She was fine, I deduced after a few words, but she couldn’t get up – so I reached under her arms like I’d seen them do for my mother at the nursing home, and lifted her to her feet. She smelled like a dirty old stovepipe and stale crackers. “I’m steady now,” she said, and I let her stand on her own. “You sure are strong,” she said. The conversation went on for about 10 minutes – “I should be in a hospital, shouldn’t be living alone any more” – and she pointed out her house to me, a view of the lake I thought, and I learned all about her son who she said did the best he could for her -- those leaves in the yard really bothered her -- and that she couldn’t see to push the buttons on the phone to call anyone to clear them . . . so many details of her life . . .

She had a big tote full of sticks and she went about the task of picking up more sticks and putting them in the tote as we talked . . . so finally I told her I’d be walking around the lake and I’d be coming back this way if she needed me to pick her up again – we laughed – or anything at all, I said. I looked back up the pathway after a dozen or two steps to see her hitting one stick with a bigger stick to make it go into her tote full of sticks. I went around the lake just once and came back – but she had gone.

I dreamed about her all night . . . the son too . . . so many thoughts about life as it gets old and can’t see enough to push the buttons on the phone . . . starts collecting sticks in a bag . . . just feeling and sensing, as I lay in bed this morning, that ganglion of chopped up nerves in my neck and back like the old lady’s tote of tangled sticks.

Speaking of Silence, Just Once

Just this week I’ve read two articles about silence, the need for it, – one in Newsweek magazine, the other an editorial in the local newspaper – and I’ve come across at least one newly released book, A Book of Silence, by Sara Maitland. And when I say this week, I mean the last three days.

All of this would and should make me feel very relieved because it’s the thing I’ve been odd enough to advocate for as long as I can remember – the thing I’ve unsuccessfully fought for since early marriage and family life; the thing I’ve known well by wanting it so desperately; the thing I’ve finally taken action to have and to hold for myself if not for those around me.  Silence.

I’ve always rejected the ever present cell phone, the stereophonic TV and music in the house, the earphones to pipe music or anything else into the eardrums while walking, etc. I’m very aware and unusually angry that one cannot pump gas, eat an expensive meal, grocery shop, get one’s hair cut, or wait for novocaine to kick in without the onslaught of piped in music or advertisements. But no one hears me! When my son was unusually stressed and overwhelmed during his first year of college, my plea and only advice to him was, just leave the cell phone for an hour, go take a walk in a quiet place, just one hour! I knew this from experience.

Now that people are talking about silence, writing books about it, publicly advocating it – uh-oh, I say to myself – it won’t be long before it becomes another national obsession – and every national obsession eventually becomes law.

I imagine there will be silence zones just as there are no smoking zones now. Silence will be enforced because, let's say, a study was done at a major university proving that it is good for us. Many people of the current generation, who cannot leave their cell phones or iPods at home for one hour, will receive grants and earn their PhDs by conducting such studies about silence and writing grand dissertations. We will all start talking about it – silence. How good it is for us. The media will report it ad nauseum.

Very soon an industry of silence will rise up – you will join a place called Savoring Silence Hostel (SSH) in which you pay to sit or lie down in a dark quiet room for an hour or more. Or perhaps you will pay to take a walk in a quiet forest. Noise cancelling earphones will be the craze for holiday shopping. People will compete to be cool in this way. An industry that offered us cleaned water, cleaned air, and supplementary nutritious foods (because we no longer have those things which humans took for granted until 50 years ago) – well, they will see a market for silence too.

Eventually the CDC will declare that we must have silence for good health. Some roguish Senator will make her mark in history by advocating these so-called silent zones. Laws will be passed. Signs will be made – I imagine a large ear in a red circle with a wide diagonal line marked through it. That means, Don't Listen. Or maybe three successive right-parenthesis-looking curves to indicate sound waves -- that means, No Sound Waves Allowed.  Eventually it must be enforced, and that means police officers . . . time in jail . . .

When I was a young mother and inundated by sound, I would often imagine time in jail – provided I had my own cell or solitary confinement. I used to think: ah, silence . . . my food prepared . . . no vacuum cleaner . . . no TV or radio . . . time to read and write . . . lights out early . . . a full hour designated for fresh air and exercise. Anything less would be considered cruel and unusual punishment, right?

I won't join the bandwagon that talks about silence.  I won't even say -- Just do it!