Role Reversal

Silver-green feathers of foxtails nodding lazily through rusted wire fences

The orange-gold chalice of a single poppy in a sea of tender grass

Meandering sidewalks, charcoal-gray ribbons of asphalt fractured by weedy cracks

Palm trees and fir trees and the spreading oak

Sleepy, small-town quiet kissed by spring and haunted by the bittersweet ghosts of Cinderella dreams

The world of my childhood seen from beneath the peach-colored brim of a canvass sun hat.

A traveler, I raced away at the speed of light, only to return to find time standing still and

Nothing much changed … except me.

Dimensions overlap, deeply familiar then with alien now.  You can never go home once you’ve left.

Not really.  Not all the way.

Role reversal.  Until today, I was the one who left—left over and over as she stood outside the door,

Waving and smiling.  It’s all right.  I’ll be fine.  Call me when you get home.

This gray morning she left me.  Standing where she stood those many times, I tried to return the favor

As quiet men closed the doors behind her, and the plain white van pulled slowly away.

It’s all right, I told her. I’ll be fine.  Call me when you get home.

When Worlds Collide

I’m a novelist, a teller of tales.  And an infrequent poet.  While waiting for my career to blossom, I keep bread on the table by writing true stories about real people.  Not my first love, but I don’t mind, partly because people are so darned interesting—especially the ones who don’t think they are—and partly because I never met a person who wouldn’t make a great secondary character.

Sixty percent of my life is lived inside my head.  Probably more.  You’ve heard the phrase a world of ideas?  That describes a writer’s brain.  Imagine a cosmos chockablock with characters and snatches of dialogue and plot lines aborning, and you have the general idea.

How do you come up with all those story ideas?

How do you not?

How do you see a woman running for a bus and not start to spin tales about the whys and wherefores and the dramatic turn her life might take if she misses that bus on that one never-to-be-repeated day?  How do you look at a live oak, uppermost branches gray in the predawn, lower leaves splashed yellow by a streetlight, and not wonder, “How would I describe that so someone could see it, really see it, through my words?”

That’s the world I live in.  I’m comfortable in that world.  Maybe not mistress of all I survey, because characters tend to develop minds of their own, and plot lines kink in the strangest ways and places, but I have a semblance control.  A say in the matter, at least.

The other 40% of my life?   The part lived outside my head?  A crapshoot.  Hardly any say-so, and I never know what the day might bring.  Most the time, it brings same-old-same-old, once in a while a providential break, occasionally a rubber-meets-road rendezvous.

The puddle-jumper to Houston was late.  An hour and a half late.  I can’t explain why I got mad about the delay … it’s not like I was looking forward to the trip.  The reason for my perverse peevishness didn’t get any clearer with altitude, but I did eventually figure out my main problem.

Before I boarded that plane, I could keep the fact that she’s dying at a distance.  Author it out:  finesse the adjectives, massage the reality to almost bearable.  But now US Airways was ferrying me toward the undeniable fact of the matter.  The planes kept flying west, one leg after another, always west, until finally, they spat me out into the last jetway and flew off again, leaving me with cold feet and nowhere to run.  Leaving me to face her last days without my thesaurus to soften the blow.

So I sit beside her bed and wait with her.  I hold her hand and rarely speak, except maybe to reminisce, when she’s able, or to tell her again that I love her.  And sometimes I pray.

But the work goes on even so.  My mind runs ahead of the reality it can’t quite face, sketching her portrait, assembling all the words I’ll use to tell you about her when she’s gone.  How she was small and funny and stubborn, and how my barracks-mates used to wait for the letters she wrote, wait with the kind of anticipation usually reserved for the next Harry Potter novel.  Yes, Mom’s letters were that good.

She would laugh if you called her a writer, but her laughter wouldn’t make the compliment any less true.

For that and a thousand other reasons, I’ll miss you, Mom.

And did I remember to say, “I love you?”

What a Difference a Year (or Two) Makes

When it takes you two years to write a book (in your “spare” time), and when you’re my age, it’s easy to forget.  I mean, think about it:  The beginning of your book is obscured in the mists of yesteryear.  You haven’t looked at it … well, since the beginning.  By the time you get to The End and start editing your heart out, you suddenly realize you had forgotten all about the cleft in Jack’s chin.  Not to mention Biker Dog’s Fu-Manchu.  Go figure.

So far, in addition to forgetting Jack’s manly cleft and the dog’s stache, I discovered I used the exact same name for two different characters, who appear a hundred pages and 3,000 miles apart.  (What is this fascination with the name Angie DiNapoli?)  My only consolation is the goof evidently registered in my dim subconscious, because the second Angie inexplicably became a Tina two pages after I introduced her.  Like I said, go figure.

Although I’ve been whining about how long it took me to write Mandy’s Eyes—and I still look forward to the day when my New York Times bestselling career takes off, allowing me to write novels full-time, possibly in my pj’s—I’m forced to admit at least one long-haul plus.  My main character has grown up over the past two years, maturing from a play-it-safe Pollyanna not unlike myself to the risk-taking, story hungry, borderline pushy police reporter she was meant to be.  Oh, she’s still a closet idealist, but Mandy has acquired a definite edge.  I like this woman … even if she does intimidate me.

Finally, while I’m admitting the bennies of marathon authorship, I might as well tell you those two years gave me time to brush up on my science.  This matters (at least to me—and hopefully, before long, to a legion of fans) because Mandy lives and works in the year 2095.  (I won’t go into my whole this isn’t science fiction but a novel that takes place in the future spiel right now.  I’ll save that for another post.)  The point is, technology will be a lot cooler in 2095, and I needed to get comfortable with imagining how cool.  Reading New Science, Discover, and Popular Science … just to name a few … helped.  It was also fun.  (Did I mention the fact that in addition to being a play-it-safe Pollyanna, I’m an inveterate geek?)

Bottom line, I’m editing out a lot of oh puleeeeze technology I wrote when I was trying too hard.

As I glance back over this post, a question occurs to me:  What makes you think anybody wants to read about this stuff?  I mean, just because I’m having fun …. 

But isn’t that the definition of a writer?  You labor under the delusion that not only do you have something interesting, new, witty, or important to say, but you actually believe other people want to read it.

Once again, go figure.

Smile, Slash, and Burn

There’s no greater joy in life than editing someone else’s work.

I read that somewhere once, and I have to admit, the red-pen high is hard to beat, especially when some unwary friend or colleague asks for it.  If there are sweeter words in the English language than, “Will you edit my letter/essay/paper?” I’d be hard pressed to come up with them.  Why the poor innocents don’t run screaming from the room when the shark-like grin stretches across my face and I start gleefully rubbing my hands together, I’ll never understand.  Maybe it’s only the masochists who ask?

But if editing someone else’s work can be a joy forever, it doesn’t come close to the satisfaction I get from editing my own.  That’s what I’m doing right now, as a matter of fact.  And I do mean right now. My ink-jet printer is chuffing out pages for the slaughter, even as we speak.  Having finished Mandy’s Eyes this past weekend, I’m now ready to slash and burn.  And I’ll do it with a smile.

We’re talking literary liposuction, people, sucking the fat out of every overblown paragraph.

I’ll hunt down every really, very, and just. Lop off adjectives like they were heads, and I was the Queen of Hearts with PMS.  Kick the passive voice clear into next week and cut redundancies off at the knees.

Not that editing is all take and no give.  I have a habit of skimping on the details, especially when it comes to background information or how somebody is dressed or how they got from point A to point B.  Did Mandy walk, amble, sprint, or wander … and what was she wearing when she did?  I’ve got to tell you, I  hate writing that stuff.  Dialogue?  I’m all over dialogue.  Unfortunately, dialogue does not a novel make.  (Or does it?  An interesting concept I’ll have to explore some other time.)

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, editing is fun.

The trick is knowing when to stop.  I’m fairly sure I could edit my stuff indefinitely, which would more or less turn writing into an exercise in futility.

But, as the Good Book says, “There’s a time for every purpose under heaven.”  And this is the time to slash and burn.

 

Finis. But How?

It feels so good to finish a book.  Writing in snatches in my “spare” time, I sometimes wonder if my books will ever get done.

I mean, there’s always the excitement of starting a new book, but somewhere around the middle the exercise segues from exciting new adventure to just plain work.  I sink up to my knees in chapter 20 or 30 or maybe even 40, and find myself slogging instead of sprinting.  Eventually, the end is in sight … a pinpoint of light at the end of an extremely long tunnel … and frustration mounts.  If only I had a month, two weeks even, when I could write full-time, full-steam-ahead.  Start in the morning, when I’m fresh.  (Yes, I’m one of those.)  I’m pretty sure I could leap tall buildings with a single bound, if I could write like that.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

God has a plan, right?  Writing full-time isn’t in the cards right now.  So, I write when I can and remind myself to be thankful for the privilege, the sheer gift of writing.  (Yes, it is a gift.  Even when I’m bogged and slogging.  At least, I think it is.)

Still, sometimes I whine.  I throw private tantrums.  Both unattractive, especially at my age.  (Artistic temperament?  Probably doesn’t hold water, but I’ll take what I can get.)  And I wonder if it’s worth it.

Then it happens, like tonight.  I write the last word, enclose the last period in quotation marks, sit back, and stare at my monitor in bemused surprise.  I’m done.  How did that happen?  I could have sworn I didn’t have the time, strength, or self-discipline to do it.

But it happened anyway … the book got written.

God has a plan, right?

Seeing

I wonder how much we really see?  Did I see you today?  Not you in relation to me, with me center stage and you playing the chorus, but you as the one-of-a-kind miracle you are?  Did I see you?

I remember boys in bright orange t-shirts–kinetic, jostling and laughing outside the museum.  Someone said they were cub scouts.  If I close my eyes now, I can almost see them hopping the curb or balancing on one foot or making faces at themselves in the high, dark-glass windows–an expectant gaggle in high gear, loosely shepherded by adults dressed in the same day-glow orange.  A short, paunchy man in a shapeless white t-shirt appeared from … somewhere.  To be honest, I didn’t notice him at all until the boys had gathered around him in a suddenly quiet huddle enchanted by, of all things, his short monologue about the many uses for the rosemary that grew next to the pale stone wall.

But did I really see them?  Any of them?  Is even one boy imprinted on my memory?

I do remember the girl.  Shoulder-length blond hair, heavy and straight.  Ivory skin and rosy cheeks, like that woman in the portrait by Henri, Cori.  I remember the girl spoke to us.  Something about the medical exhibit I think–wickedly curved hooks and blades, leeches in formaldehyde.  I remember her smile–friendly and open, inviting me to share the moment–but I can’t recall what she said.  So did I really see her?  Or did I only look at her?

Buechner said the artist/novelist/poet puts a frame around a given moment, asks us to pay attention–to the round-cheeked boy scout in the carrot-colored shirt; the man who hitches up his navy-blue trouser leg to squat down by the rosemary; the girl with the young face and share-a-moment smile.  But how can we frame them, if we never really see them?

We miss so much, always looking but never really seeing.  Did I see you today?

Sleeper, Awake

It turned cold here yesterday.  The wind blew in with teeth bared, howling down the walkway between buildings as my friend and I hurried toward our meeting inside.  Hunched forward slightly, chins tucked, hugging ourselves against the wind’s chill, clammy bite, we comforted ourselves with the usual chatter.

“You know what I’m going to do when I get home?”  I asked her, shivering lightly.  “I’m going to climb into my softest, baggiest sweats.  Put on my fuzzy pink slippers and wrap up in my electric lap blanket to read a good book.”  The anticipation alone was enough to take the edge off.

It was only later–only after anticipation had become warm, comfy  reality–that I thought of the others.  You know who I’m talking about?

Imagine that same wind wailing into the mouth of an alley, chasing dirty scraps of paper along the cold, puddled concrete.  Picture the light at the mouth of the alley breaking up into murky shadows, gradually fading to black as distance from the street increases.  It’s dark, and it stinks–wet asphalt, drenched cardboard, soggy garbage, urine … an unwashed body, the smell of human misery.

They live in American alleys and refugee camps in the Sudan, these huddlers-against-the windy cold.  They shiver in primitive prisons and crude huts and in the filthy gutters lining streets where poverty is as deep and dark as the Black Hole of Calcutta.  With no warmth to look forward to at the end of their day, they fold in on themselves, wrap themselves in their bony arms, and hang on with chattering teeth.

They haunt me like so many ghosts today.  I’m ashamed I didn’t feel them here before.  Maybe I was asleep–safe in that distant, dreamlike, intellectual awareness that, yes, there are poor people in this world; and yes, we should do our bit to help them.  Waking up is a prickly, painful process; it breaks the heart.

But I think that’s what they need–more than our money, they need our hearts.  They need us achingly, acutely aware that they are us.  They’re not there, they’re here, inside us, always inside us, brothers and sisters under the skin, fellow time travelers.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  Love your neighbor, because he is yourself, not in some half-baked New-Age way, but metaphysically, truly, in every way that counts.  What hurts them hurts me.  It doesn’t get more real than that.

So, I sit here–warm, rust-colored electric lap blanket across my knees, laptop under my fingertips, chant playing on Pandora–aching for them and, thus, for myself; astounded that I should be given so much, when so many have nothing at all; humbled by the Providence that placed me, of all people, in a warm home with every creature comfort.  And I wonder how to move in the light of this awareness, in the face of need and misery so great, they all but bring me to my knees.

Jesus said we would always have the poor with us.  With us.  With me.  They’re with me now, and I’ve never been as sure of anything in my life as I am about the fact that, by the grace of God, I’ll know exactly what to do for them, now that I love them.  Lovers always know.

Dear Fred

It was only a passing thought:  Maybe I should write a letter to Frederick Buechner (it’s pronounced BEEKner, by the way) with a CC to Annie Dillard. A couple of things stopped me.

First of all, Fred is in his 80s.  I decided anybody who writes the way he does for as long as he has deserved to be spared what would undoubtedly be a sycophantically self-conscious stutterfest on gifts differing as they relate to writing.  Besides, I had just finished reading his poems in The Yellow Leaves.  The man is certifiably brilliant.  Who am I to tell him anything at all about writing?  He’d probably fall out of his chair laughing and, God forbid, break a hip.

As for Annie ….  Well, that woman just plain scares me to death!  Whenever I imagine her, she’s got gunslinger’s eyes.  Her writing is somewhere between a stained-glass sunrise and a punch in the gut … either way, it leaves me winded.  Then there’s her website.  She says, in effect, that she’s very sorry, and yes, she really does care, but she just doesn’t have time to read, let alone answer, all the mail she gets from aspiring authors.  Not that I would ever have the nerve to write her, but it’s nice to have an excuse not to.

But the erstwhile letter won’t be denied, so I’m posting it here.

* * *

Dear Fred,

I’m sure you get your share of fan letters, but I figured one more couldn’t hurt, even if you are kind of worn out by opening all the mail.  I’ll bet you’ve read the same compliments over and over again, too.  I don’t know you, of course, but I picture you bemused by the hubbub.  Maybe you just want to be left alone?  Well, I don’t mean to bother you, and I may not be saying anything new, but I feel it’s only fair to tell you your books have enriched my life and helped me see God and my fellow man in a new light.  Your writing is a joy and a wonder.  That’s the good news, from both our perspectives, I reckon.

The bad news–at least from my perspective–is your writing and your remarks on writing made me think about my own writing, and boy did that open a can of worms!  (Not that it’s all your fault.  I read Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, too.  Of course, most of the blame lay with me and my newly discovered inferiority complex.)  Why?  Well, I knew I could never write like you and she do, like you both say good writers do.  I’m just not put together that way.  I felt pretty awful about that for a while, even mooned around and moped some.  Didn’t write a word, wasn’t sure I ever would again.

I guess that’s why the Lord stepped in the way He did.  Nobody gives a pep talk like Him!

Basically, He had to remind me not everyone is created or destined to pen (or type) Pulitzer Prize-winning novels or thought-provoking, ageless essays that turn people inside out and leave them a little more awake and aware than they were when they opened the book to page one.  Maybe the only thing we’re wired to write is a cracking good yarn.  The catch?  If yarn-writing is our vocation and our art, we have to take it as seriously–as sweat, blood, and tears seriously–as Shakespeare took writing The Tempest.

Besides, people like a good yarn, and maybe they need them, too, what with things being the way they are in the world today.  Everybody needs a chance to kick back and relax now and then.

But the really great thing I realized, the mystery, the big joke is, even a light-weight yarn can be a means to an end and more than the sum of its parts.  Something to do with the topsy-turvy wisdom of God and the kick He gets out of using the foolish things of the world to confound the wise and a sack lunch to feed the multitude.  You know, I believe I’m learning to be good with that.

So, Fred, as it turns out, I have to thank you twice.  Once for your books, each one a feast in itself, and once for the way you got me thinking and, yes, even doubting myself as a writer.  I think I’m on solid ground now … or next door to it, anyway.  Yes, I think I’ve finally gotten the message (so hopefully, I can stop blogging it out with myself):  I’m okay, you’re okay.  Actually, I’m okay, you’re amazing.  But I’m okay with being okay, because there’s a lot more to this deal than just me and my sack lunch.

Thanks again, and have a terrific day.

Gifts Differing

For a while today I felt a bit like the beautiful woman who wants to be admired for her mind.

I’ve been reading about writing again … real writing.  Serious writing.  Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Buechner.  Writing that defies time and tide; digs down into the bedrock of the human condition and takes a good, hard look at who we are, who we aren’t, who we should be.  I read about how good writers, serious writers put a lot of themselves in their work–as in, “opening a vein,” spilling their hearts’ blood.  And as I read I started to feel like a pygmy among giants, a gnat among eagles, a dirt clod among mount–

Well, you get the idea.  Shakespeare I ain’t.

It made me feel sort of sad and shallow, like I was lacking somehow.  I wondered if maybe I was a bit of a cheat.  If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times:  The greatest gift we have to give is the gift of ourselves.  So how much of myself do I put into my books?  Do I keep my distance or do I give until it hurts–my joys and heartaches, my passion, my doubts and fears?  Well, I couldn’t really say.  And if I’m going to be brutally honest, I’ll have to admit I couldn’t even say for sure I would have the guts to open that vein … on purpose, I mean.

I pondered it all for a while, trying to come to grips with my place in the literary scheme of things.  I am, after all, 99.999% sure I’ll never write anything remotely equivalent to The Tempest or The Brothers Karamazov or Huckleberry Finn. You never know, but odds are against it.  So where did that leave me?  Somewhere between hack and dilettante?  Purveyor of pulp fiction?  (Assuming I get even that far.)  Could I even call myself a writer without blushing?

The conclusion I eventually came to was this:  God never says, “Oops!”

I write according to the gift I’ve been given, giving myself to the extent and in the ways I’m able.  I’m no Dostoevsky, but then, he was no Kathy.   I don’t mean that in a comparative sense–as far as I know, delusions of grandeur aren’t among my many faults–only pointing out that we each have our place in the grand plan.  You know, like Esther coming to the kingdom for such a time as this.  I’m here, writing what I’m writing the way I’m writing it, for God knows what reason.  And that’s reason enough for me.

Balancing Act

Delicate balances aren’t exactly my forte.  My personal style tends more toward Martin Luther’s metaphor:  A drunkard who falls off the right side of the horse, staggers to his feet, and tries again to mount, only to overshoot the mark and topple off the horse’s left side.  Still, even I know delicate balances are usually important … although sometimes I’m not real clear on how to go about maintaining them.

Take writing, for example.

When I start a book or a poem, or even this blog, for that matter, I write both for myself and for you.  If I wrote only for you, I doubt I could come up with a single sentence–I would be too busy trying to figure out what I thought you wanted to hear, too afraid of boring or offending you to type a word.  If I only wrote for me … well, that’s just too ugly-arrogant to contemplate.

Writing–at least, writing as I know it–is an inside job.  The story takes shape within me, and I have to write it out as faithfully as I can, regardless of who might or might not read it.  At that point, it’s the story and me, mano y mano, and I’m absorbed in it … or by it, not sure which.  I’m grinding out sentences, often word by word.  I’m caught in the gears.  Furthermore, writing is solitary.  It’s emotionally and intellectually dense.  The process as I know it doesn’t leave a lot of room for anyone else, and my gaze is turned inward toward the story unfolding in my mind.

And yet ….

The story that took shape in me isn’t really for me … not for me alone, anyway.  There’s a greater purpose–has to be, if the process is going to be anything more than a narcissistic exercise.  The story’s genesis lies in an idea, a point, a message.  If it doesn’t speak to a need in at least one person’s life, why bother?

The balance between the inward focus of the writing process and the gaze that goes beyond myself is one I constantly struggle to maintain.  I need grace to carry it off.  Without grace, I take a header off the horse, to one side or the other.  Either I lose the point and get clever for my own sake, or I freeze up and find myself unable to spit out the message at all.

Thinking it all over, I come to the conclusion that once again, writing strikes me as a microcosm of life.  The delicate balance between the inward gaze and the eye that sees beyond ourselves is one we all struggle to maintain.  I guess we all need grace.