Second Sight (II)

I.

Once upon a time, I lived in a boxy, badly-built house with a person with whom I had considerable disagreement over what are surely a relationship’s most important parameters.  Should a person wed?  Should a person buy a house, hold down a job with more than the minimum responsibilities attached to it, make sure one had health insurance? Should a person have children?  He felt that the answer to any and all of these questions was a resounding no way; I  — under my breath, behind his back, in my dreams — thought certainly yes.

Anyone with half a brain could see just how short-lived a union like that was going to be.

But because the two of us were clearly lacking in the brains department, for a while we lived together in a boxy, badly-built house in an area of Austin that has since gentrified itself out of existence, next door to a person whose house was equally as boxy and as badly-built, though he owned his, and we just rented ours.

This neighbor had certain traits Austin tended to favor back in those days:  he had a job he’d held for years and what he considered a comfortable living arrangement.  He’d long ago answered in the negative every single question the two of us were struggling over.  He had no savings, no significant other, no children.  He was in his forties or fifties — because we were twenty years younger than he was, we found it difficult to tell the difference.  He had put together for himself a life that was completely serviceable and streamlined, a life that contained no fat. His furniture was crap, his house was dirty — but he was free, or at least believed himself to be so, which might be the same thing in the end.

He also happened to be, he told me the first time he knocked on our front door, extremely good at finding things, and he’d just that day found an earring he thought I might like to have.  He offered it up to me, in the middle of the palm of a hand held flat.

I was not about to wear an earring my next door neighbor had found somewhere, no matter how beautiful it might be, but I’d grown up around people who found — or longed to find — things.  At age 5 my brother found a 50 dollar bill in a grocery store.  For many years my father was very good at finding college class rings.  And at that particular point in my life, I already happened to be working for someone who claimed to be very good at finding things, someone who considered himself extraordinarily lucky and would in fact in a few years go on to win the lottery — twice.

All of which might explain why I would follow that neighbor into his dim, dusty living room to see the collection of things he’d found.

Earrings, bracelets, necklaces, old coins, new coins.  Passports.  Keys.  Expensive pens.  Wallets. Dollar bills.  I’d never seen such riches.  You found all this? I asked. Just lying on the ground?

It’s all in how you look at things, he told me.  You have to see everything in front of you a certain way.

The only way I could imagine this strategy working was if you spent your life doing nothing but looking down at your feet.

II.

Years after the boxy, badly-built house, at a point when I’d had just enough career successes that I would be able to keep alit the tiny flame of career for another ten years,  for six months I lived at the end of a oiled caliche road. Beyond two gates I had to climb out of my car to unlock and then lock again.

Every time I left the property or came back to it, the heavy links of chain that secured those gates left on my hands the mineral smell of metal and flecks of rust, and after a while, it just got to be too much trouble  — to go anywhere I didn’t have to.  Besides, after such a build-up — out of the car, drive through gate, back in the car; repeat — what could the white-painted house that sat at the end of the road and the acreage that surrounded it possibly be, but some sort of precious treasure, hidden away, locked up for safekeeping?  It was like something from a fairy story!

While I was in the white-painted house at the end of the caliche road, I was working on a book, in what had to be the most conducive surroundings for book-writing ever, but even in such places one can’t write 24/7, so every day at about four in the afternoon, I knocked off work, turning off my computer and setting off to walk the 200 some-odd acres of cedar scrub and limestone that stretched beyond the house’s front door like a sea.

Sometimes, I walked along the creek that wound through the property downstream, along a flood plain of smoothed rocks above its banks that seemed to be the easiest course:  past hillocks of juniper grass, skirting the thickest fretwork of the cedar’s painful branches.  I went where the land told me to go, because for the first time in my life it seemed best to have no direction of my own, no agenda.

Other times, I followed the game trails that stitched the property together, and one afternoon, when the fall light contained the pale thin yellow wash of beaten egg and wind blew the long grasses between the cedars sideways and silver, I stooped to examine something the ivory color of old bone that lay in the middle of the  path deer had worn along the backbone of the hill.

And that —that was the first arrowhead I ever found.  And as I stood there fingering the dips in flint mottled like old china,  I realized that —it’s true — once you know what to look for, you know what to look for, and you’ll never mistake an arrowhead for something else.

III.

These days, I live nowhere near light of such a rare vintage, or such wildness.  When I step outside my front door in the mornings, the sound of Interstate 20 is borne toward me, rising and falling, as ever-present as those long-ago cedar, but creating a very different sort of sea.

Some mornings, the police helicopter beats beats beats the bush of our quadrant of southeast Atlanta, some afternoons — particularly on sunny Saturdays — so many walkers pushing baby carriages or being pulled along by dogs amble along the sidewalks that you might mistake these blocks for Mayberry, instead.

There are a few of us, though, for whom walking is more than just a fair-weather avocation.  The sikh who walks quickly, a white blur moving quickly through the neighborhood before daylight.  Curtis the toothless addict, who was the first person to welcome us into the neighborhood ten years ago, with a knock on our door at 11 p.m. and a garbled request for money.  The woman who walks, rain or shine — for hours — pushing a triple stroller freighted with swaddled sleeping infants.

Fixtures of the neighborhood all, and all, I suspect, pegged as just a trifle loony.  And I, I am afraid, am one of them.  But oh— if you want to know a place, really know it, maybe you have to walk it.

John Graves, a Texas writer who writes of land and our connection to it as well as just about any writer I can think of, in one of his books said something that’s stuck with me for years, something that might apply just as strongly to urban Atlanta as it did to the Texas he was writing about —

when you’re somewhere you don’t especially want to be and don’t belong, you tend to wall yourself off from sentience like a hibernating bear, whereas in surroundings that you care for and have chosen, you use eyes, ears, nose, tastebuds, and whatever other aids you can muster for reception.  You notice.  And, noticing, you live.

When I moved to Atlanta, I didn’t care for it, particularly, and the fact that I was living here seemed less a choice than it did a cruel fate. But when you walk around a neighborhood for ten years you begin to notice things, and sharpened observation of a thing might be that small first step —toward love for it.

There are hawks that ride the thermals above the interstate here; who troll convenience store parking lots for pigeons.  There are hickory nuts, and figs, and dandelion greens — such plenty!  There are ukelelehs with missing strings, left at the curb outside the church that ministers to the mentally ill, and punched metal tokens uncovered in the parking strips in front of Edwardian bungalows, and the whisper of instruction barely readable beneath their grime when you wipe it away with a thumb:  Good For One Fare. There are art-deco vanities missing only a single shingle of veneer and wheat-sheaf pennies, dated 1951.

The subway token I gave to Elder Girleen, who tucked it away in her box of treasure.  The wheat sheaf penny I handed to Younger Girleen, who accompanied me on the walk I was taking when I found it.

You’re a good finder, Mama, she told me as she studied it.

It meant more than most of the accolades I’ve gotten in my life, that momentary praise.

Second Sight (I)

We’re actually beginning to settle into a bit of a fall routine here, which, among many many other things, includes passing a cold around the house like a hot potato.

It’s not swine flu.  Honest.

On Saturday, the Husband, who as of this month has been married to me for 14 years and now knows me almost better than I do myself, swung by the library and stocked up on a stack of books for all the readers in the family, both great and small, in case anybody needed to take to their beds and nurse their colds.

The stack contained a baker’s dozen of coffee table books for me of the genre that can only honestly be called “house porn.” And though looking at such might be cruel and unusual punishment for some, for me it was exactly what the doctor ordered, and I spent a happy couple of hours on Sunday paging through glossy photographs of living rooms containing only an ornate mantelpiece and an Eames chair.

Like most aficionados of such things, I have very particular predilections.  I like the furniture I’m looking at to be mid-century modern, the rooms that furniture sits in to be completely absolutely clutterfree  — the better for me to concentrate on the aesthetics of the shadow cast by the orchid sitting in the handcrafted vase on the kitchen counter.

For years I’ve thought looking at books like this —not that I think much about this bad habit, it being a particularly mindless pleasure — made me hungry to possess a house that looked like the ones being depicted in the photographs, which tended to dilute the pleasure  with a touch of anxiety. If only, I would think, if only.

But this weekend I realized that the hunger books like this instill in me isn’t actually to have a different life, but to be able to see the life that I already have differently.

I actually already have what I long for:  it’s just that I often tend to focus on what’s outside the frame, instead.  The children’s dirty clothes flung on the floor instead of the perfect wedge of cloudless blue-glazed sky in the window just above it.

Coffee Break

There’s a very good piece  about children’s (picture) books in this week’s New Yorker that dissects some of the ways they “record shifts in domestic life.”

From a social-commentary standpoint, this is fascinating to think about.  As the review points out,

Newspaper-burrowing fathers have been replaced by eager, if bumbling, diaper-changers.  Similarly, the stern disciplinarians of the past … have largely vanished.  The parents in today’s stories suffer the same diminution in authority felt by the parents reading them aloud (an hour past bedtime).

And I can’t think of a more spot-on observation than the review’s description of “a Manhattan playground”:

A toddler whirling into a rage is quietly instructed, “Use your words.” A preschooler who clocks his classmate is offered the vaguely Zen incantation “Hands are not for hitting….”

Ah, yes.  Here in Atlanta, we are equally guilty, guilty guilty.

It happened before I really even noticed, but at seven-and-a-half Elder Girleen has already left those picture book days behind — chapter books are where it’s at.  She reads voraciously.  Her life depends on it.  And it’s an honor — to be able to live vicariously through her,  to be able to experience again that magic of discovery of the written word.

She’s devouring plenty of contemporary books, but she’s dipping into old faves as well.  One of her godmothers already passed on her complete collection of Nancy Drews.  The other gifted her A Wrinkle in Time.  And I, thinking ahead to the holidays, ordered a set of books that I read over and over and over again when I was a little older than Elder Girleen, and still think about occassionally as an adult.  The first of them arrived yesterday; after reading the above-mentioned New Yorker article, I decided to “vet” Uncle Robert’s Secret before tucking it away until Christmas.

These books, half a dozen mysteries that were published in the 60s and 70s as a boxed set, were by a Georgia writer  and (I believe) Atlanta Constitution journalist named Wylly Folk St. John.   Maybe I loved them most for their locales, because they were nothing if not regional.  The dilapidated victorian houses of Atlanta’s West End during urban renewal, a grimy-around-the-edges Savannah(?) or Tybee Island (?).  Pirate treasure.  The lost Confederate gold.  Man, I loved these books.

And the thing I was struck by most, revisiting the first of these as an adult?

What on earth is Elder Girleen going to make of the freedom these nine, eleven and thirteen-year-old protagonists have?  They tell the aunts who are watching them they’re downstairs watching television  — but really they’re heading out to roam the woods, hang with neighbors (who smoke and drink and engage in all kinds of nefarious activities).  They’re rowing boats across lakes; investigating strange lights that glimmer in creepy family graveyards.

The books I loved because they reflected (at least partially) the world I lived in might as well be about the 1870s of Little House on the Prairie for her — an irretrievable, expansive past when children could run wild.

Weather Report, October 15

Rain, still.  The cell phone tower on the other side of I-20 is swathed in clouds.  Along my morning walk, cardinals eddy upwards, tiny sparks of color amidst the gray.

The guy who scavenges cans on recycling day is dressed in gray; trudges through the drizzle head down, hooded like the Grim Reaper.

Weather Report, October 5

It’s a rainy day down here in Georgia, and the neighbor said to be a dealer just walked down the street with a proudly unfurled red and white umbrella clutched in one hand.

Of stories, and how we prefer them

You can’t tell by looking at the sky today, but a little over a week ago, Atlanta was practically afloat, and during one of last week’s downpours, the Girleens and I found ourselves stranded for a few hours at our neighborhood library — where I found myself reading a lot of book jacket copy while I stood in the stacks keeping an eye on them as they read Judy Moody books to each other.

Granted, the whole topic I’m about to embark on is truly shallow, particularly if mentioned in the same breath as flooding that actually caused a great deal of damage (there’s a terribly misbegotten pun in there somewhere, if you can untangle it) but it takes a foot of water lapping at the curbcuts to keep a mom still for longer than a few minutes these days (there’s laundry to fold!  there’s math homework to do!)

And here’s my question, the one that seemed particularly burning by the time I’d worked my way to the end of the fiction stacks:

When on earth did every single novel out there start having to include a mystery within it?

Oh, I’m not talking about the actual mystery genre, which has always been with us, and always will —  there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

I’m no snob.   (Well, that might be debatable; maybe I am…). I like a good who-done-it as much as the next escapist.  Sometimes you just plain need those page-turners, those propulsive narratives that pull you through a book.

My issue du jour might be more with the recent elevation of such narratives  to every single end cap of a book store’s fiction shelves — when, o when, did a Mystery (capitalization intentional) become  such an absolute prerequisite plot twist for … what used to be called literary … fiction?

The jacket copy of almost every single contemporary novel I picked up contained a reference to”searing,” “heartbreaking” mysteries and “devastating” and  ”explosive” secrets.  I’m not just talking the ever-popular “child in peril” subgenre of domestic fiction — you know the kind of book I mean, it’s got a sky blue cover that contains a photograph of a single child’s sneaker left forlorn on the pavement.

I’m talking debut novels by the Bright Young Things of American Letters.  I’m talking basically every novel written these days by someone between 25 and 60.

Is this even worth mentioning?  Probably not, but I was struck by this current tic most in books about what used to be called, somewhat derisively “the domestic” arena (not necessarily only those written by women).  If “family” was mentioned in the first paragraph of a book’s jacket copy, you can bet, dollars-to-doughnuts, that a searing mystery or harrowing secret reared its head in the second — usually one that included a snatched or vanished child or a more historical mystery that took place when the novel’s protagonist was a child and witnessed a murder or was somehow close to a snatched or vanished child.

What to make of this?

There’s a dissertation in there somewhere.  Maybe this need for every single narrative we read to contain a mystery (the comforting assumption being that by the end of these books these mysteries will be at least somewhat … solved)  addresses social anxiety, a need for a “quick fix”  and a culture of fear (or the unspoken desire to “disappear” children?)  Maybe it speaks to the notion that in our reading, as we’re told we have in so much else,  we’ve gotten lazy — if the plot doesn’t propel us through it, we can’t be bothered.

Maybe it’s that (and personally, I think this is a biggie) we live in times that value solid functional frameworks above all else.  What used to pull readers through novels considered literary? The way they were written.  Style.  And character development. Somewhere along the way, these things became window dressing — great if they’re there, but the main thing is plot, plot that moves along at a merry clip.

But the thing that’s most interesting about this phenomenon, at least from the point of view of a blog about writing and motherhood, is the possibility that , just as a “working” parent has more legitimacy in many circles than those who “stay at home,” writing that locates itself within that “domestic arena” is still not considered interesting (or valuable, or readable) unless it borrows from more popular genres.

Enter the deus ex machina of the Searing Mystery!

It’s an amusing party trick — trying insert one into the literary novels of previous decades and see what you come up with.  For Whom the Bell Tolls.   Mrs. Dalloway.  Middlemarch.

Sorry about such a long post, but you get the idea.

More of the Laundry of Life

Call it coincidence, but the New York Times is beginning to seem like it might have an axe to grind (I’m sure to many people, particular the politically conservative, it seems like the NYT has MANY axes grindin’ away, and this would be one of its most inconsequential).  First there was Tim Kreider’s blog post (mentioned here), where, as he ruminated on what he called “The Referendum” he observed that

Judging from the unanimity with which parents preface any gripe about children with the disclaimer, “Although I would never wish I hadn’t had them and I can’t imagine life without them,” I can’t help but wonder whether they don’t have to repress precisely these thoughts on a daily basis.

Then there was Maureen Dowd’s latest column, which poses questions about the relative happiness (or unhappiness) of women, in which she reports:

“Across the happiness data, the one thing in life that will make you less happy is having children,” said Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at Wharton who co-wrote a paper called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” “It’s true whether you’re wealthy or poor, if you have kids late or kids early. Yet I know very few people who would tell me they wish they hadn’t had kids or who would tell me they feel their kids were the destroyer of their happiness.”

You could extrapolate plenty of different things from this, depending on where you stand (the childless might feel confirmed in their childlessness, parents might find themselves thinking to themselves about the virtues of their state), but what I choose to take away from the discussion is this:

Happiness is infinite and mutable.

I know this sounds particularly saccharin, a little new-agey to boot.  But.

Once, I derived a considerable amount of happiness from spending my Sundays lolling in bed, coffee close at hand, reading the New York Times cover to cover.

It was lovely.

If I still used yardsticks such as that to measure happiness, yeah, I guess you might have to say … we’ve got a problem here.

But maybe a better way to look at it would be:  in our younger days, happiness was singular, self-absorbed.  What else could it be?  Who else did we have, but ourselves?

Once, I loved (among other things) laziness, naps, the luxury of hours in which I had to do little but think whatever I wanted to.  Twenty years ago, on the eve of Hurricane Hugo, I sat on the back stoop of a shoddy rental on Avenue A in Austin and watched the way the trees were being flayed by the wind, the darkening sky.  Bob Dylan was on the turntable in the house, behind me.  Yellow light fell through the screen door.  I had a cigarette in one hand. I ate when I wanted, slept when I wanted, and the only thing that demanded anything from me was a job I didn’t even have much invested in.  I was… completely… absolutely… happy.

Now I think about that place, that time, that feeling,  nostalgically, the way you think about the house where you grew up.

I don’t have the happiness of living in that feeling anymore; but there are others.

I could give you clues about the latest developments in our adventures in parasites by posing the (not- quite) rhetorical question — who picks the nits off Mom?

I’ve got this to contend with:  

(that’s unfolded but clean laundry, there about three more loads to go).

Somehow, it’s up to me to figure out how to use straightened coathangers to make Pippie Longstocking’s braids stick out (this year’s Halloween costume).

I already know that this afternoon’s homework assignment will mean blood and tears.

None of these things, taken individually, make me happy.  But am I happier than I was before I ever dreamed they’d be part of my life, when all I had to do was think about what caused me happiness or unhappiness?

You bet.

Coffee Break

The NYTimes Happy Days: The Pursuit of What Matters in Troubled Times blog always makes interesting reading; the most recent post, by Tim Kreider, contains this funny gem of a paragraph (among others):

Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.

It Starts Like This…

…an email that arrives in your inbox from your child’s elementary school titled “Significant Lice Infestation.”

Where it ends, I can’t tell you yet, but I can already weigh in about nit combs, Rid vs Nix shampoo, the uses of vinegar, olive oil and mayonaise, the perpetual sound of laundry sloshing in the washer, and shallow, disrupted sleep during which you dream, over and over and over again, that you are combing through your child’s hair for nits.

Years ago, when I heard New York friends discussing the merits of hiring Dominican or Hasidic nitpickers, I scoffed.

No more.

Way back when, when the Husband and I gazed lovingly  each other’s eyes and said, o yes!  a family!  I had no idea.

Words of Wisdom

So this is how a four-year-old fights back when being teased by a more verbally-agile seven-year-old:

“I don’t love you.

I don’t even like you.

I think you’re poop.”

Pure poetry.  Just think how good that would sound set to music.