Memorial comes in many forms.
Today I’m remembering the Ott Shop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where I bought Steiff and Schuco bears as a child, and many other wonderful things. At some point when I was grown up, I found this photo in the box of YS News photos for sale, and bought it, and kept it. The little bears are still in my closet, in boxes.
Time to unpack.
Writing churns things up. That churning is one of the most fantastic things about writing, one of the things I love, but it’s not comfortable. Facing things, really looking at things, staring dumbly at things, that kind of minute and honest reflection, can be difficult and unpleasant. You can also find small treasures there. In working on an essay about stuff (literal stuff, the items that tumble from my closet, the towers of papers and important detritus spanning my surfaces) I realized I actually need to be writing about my phantom limb: my childhood house that’s no longer there. It was burned down in a fire training exercise. I’ve written about it in my novel, immortalized it here and there.
This time I decided to write a short story about the house, about a ghost in the house, about the fire…currently, the stuff of the story is a huge mess, but it’s been satisfying to make. Right now I’m just generating words, ideas, the raw junk that I will attempt to shape into a story. It’s all I want to do, but it’s so untidy, so simultaneously new and ancient. Like my surfaces, it’s cluttered, noisy.
And sometimes a spider skitters from underneath…
In 1974, I lived in Yellow Springs, Ohio, ten miles from Xenia. One of the worst tornadoes on record hit Xenia that spring. I remember only a few things about that day: hiding under a heavy blanket in my bathtub; a hail-ball the size of a softball (maybe smaller: I was a kid) that kept for a long time in my freezer; the way Xenia looked like a clearcut forest for years afterwards. Even as they recreated buildings, they couldn’t rebuilt trees.
I still live about ten miles from Xenia, a town that has traditionally been plagued by tornadoes. I’ve been processing my fear of tornadoes ever since 1974. They haunt my dreams and fiction. Last summer I wrote a poem (or something that might some day be a poem) about those springs of childhood, memories of many green skies. So, knowing there’d be “weather” tonight, upon hearing a continuous tornado warning siren, I interrupted bedtime reading to take my daughter, who hadn’t napped, down to the basement. I took the flashlight and phone, and my laptop, which is the only source of live information (live streaming TV station audio, as we don’t have cable) and explained calmly why we had to go down there, trying not to scare her. Within a few moments, she said, “I’m afraid!” She seemed to be trying on the costume of “afraid” more than feeling real fear. The storm passed (three-inch hail through Xenia, in fact) and we went back upstairs.
I imagine my fear of “weather” is something like what children of the Cold War grew up with: the duck and cover mentality. (You want to see something interesting, go here.) I need to work it out, find a way to let go of the freak-out while keeping myself and my family sanely safe. I don’t want to be alarmist about green skies. Just because I have a visceral memory of that time, I don’t want to pass it along to my daughter.
But how?
In the car this morning, listening to my daughter’s “mixed tape” (a CD, actually) that includes Jack Hardy’s song, “Blackberry Pie,” I got sad again about Jack’s passing. Since he died, I haven’t not been sad about it, but there are moments when there’s an upwelling I can’t ignore or fake my way out of. I told my daughter that it makes me happy and sad to hear Jack’s songs. After she informed me that I should not sing the song because, “I’m Jack Hardy and I get to decide who sings my songs,” we had an interesting conversation about how he wrote those songs, and how they are his, but he also gave them to us, so they are also ours. She agreed.
Here are the lyrics:
i stopped all day to pick wildflowers down by the banks where the blackberry grows all in the shadows of the late autumn hours all in the brambles and the late blooming rose i picked all of the white ones and picked all the blues for those are the ones that would go with her dress and i'll dance tonight, wear holes in my shoes 'til i am the one that she loves the best (chorus:) so dally down where the river runs where the forest bathes the senses clean dally down where the fiery sun and the rhythm moon makes a faery dream and you might think that my heart would lie that many a girl had caught my eye but my heart all along belongs to the girl who baked me a blackberry pie though i've stayed single all of these years 'tween the twisting rope and the wounding wind never staying long enough to see the spring where i had seen the harvest in and i don't give a tinker's damn for the road though many they say i'm bound to roam and i just might be the last one in though i will be coming home (repeat chorus) and many a glass i'll drink tonight where the wine-red hand is from work or fight there is no judge more fair than time for there is no one to change his mind each time i look in the parting glass those years that look both ways to know i'll sing the last song of my youth but i'll sing it again tomorrow (repeat chorus)
Today the line, “I’ll dance tonight, wear holes in my shoes/till I am the one that she loves the best,” made me think about writing. About what I’m willing to do, what I even want to do when I write. I am willing, I want to wear holes in my shoes so the thing (the novel, the essay, the story) is good, is good enough. To extend the metaphor, I was thinking an editor might be the “she” in that phrase, but more than that, the “she” is also me. So I’m the dancer, and I’m also the “she” who the dancer wants to impress, from whom the dancer want to earn love. Crazy geometry. An illustration of how Jack’s songs are about so many more things than what appears on the surface. And how they belong to him, but they also belong to us.
And the sadness comes from my pushing against this: I know that no one lives forever, but I always thought he would “sing it again tomorrow.”
“Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.” –Maria Montessori
In hopes of assessing how many one sentence paragraphs I had in my novel, I changed the magnification on my word processor window, which made the text appear much smaller than usual. This allowed me to see most of a page on one screen. As I scrolled through the pages, stopping whenever I saw a one sentence paragraph, I joined what I could with longer paragraphs, and omitted some. This was prompted by a piece of advice in Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer, namely not to overuse the one sentence paragraph. As I combed through the text, some unexpected things happened:
1) I realized that sometimes one sentence paragraphs are necessary, the best choice. I want to trust the reader, and not lean too heavily on the structural signal of a one sentence paragraph as alert: “Hey you reader! Look here! This line is so important I set it up on its own! Read carefully!” And yet sometimes a one sentence paragraph just feels right. (It was good to interrogate each occurence, however, to be sure.)
2) The decision about where to break paragraphs has its own intuition, and the writer should take time to quiet down enough and follow it.
3) I was doing a lot of changing and then changing back, doing and undoing. A lot of tinkering, but maybe the act of tinkering confirmed that I’d gotten some bits “right” before questioning, if such a thing as “right” is possible in a thing so subjective as fiction.
4) Another nuance I hadn’t considered, in defense of keeping some one sentence paragraphs in this novel: my protagonist is seven years old. The child’s close lens on her world and the visual smallness of a one sentence paragraph seem connected. I don’t think this is overly precious, in this case.
5) The exercise was a great lesson, and proved the point that Prose includes in her book. On p. 68-9, she quotes Rex Stout’s novel, Plot It Yourself, in which “Nero Wolfe is called upon to determine if three manuscripts that figure into a case involving accusations of plagiarism could have been written by the same person.”:
“A clever man might successfully disguise every element of his style but one–the paragraphing. Diction and syntax may be determined and controlled by rational processes in full consciousness, but paragraphing–the decision whether to take short hops or long ones, and whether to hop in the middle of a thought or action or finish it first–that comes from instinct, from the depths of personality. I will concede the possibility that the verbal similarities, and even the punctuation, could be coincidence, though it is highly improbable; but not the paragraphing. These three stories were paragraphed by the same person.”
So is the paragraph like a fingerprint, individual to each writer? Maybe.
Another thing happened as I worked through the manuscript, not related to paragraphs, but worth noting. As the text looked so much smaller to my writing eye, it performed a visual trick on me. I’ve done this bird’s-eye thing before, but this time I was pulled into some scenes despite (or maybe because of) how hard it was to read the words. The clusters of words formed different shapes in my brain, pulling me in. Like those little sugar Easter eggs that you peer into, I had to look closely and see the world that was hiding there. And thus I did a whole lot of unexpected line editing than I planned to do. Good.
As always, I hope it’s stronger for the toil.
A tiny, important thing is happening in my yard. The little white lilac is blooming.
Here’s the history of my beloved, best ever lilac tree. When I read that old post from 2006, I marvel at how long ago that was in personal years. Since then, I had a daughter, the country house is larger, now almost roomy, thanks to an addition. And the white lilac shoot has been moved to its second country house location (to make room for the addition).
A harsh winter, a rainy spring, and now there’s beautiful popcorn on the small tree. I breathe in its heady fullness. I look back and think of how I wanted to kick the ass of the people who cut it down. I think back to how I considered the word “evil” in the cutting down of that good grandmother lilac tree. (Now, rather than “evil,” I would call it “unskilled,” and the word would not be a euphemism.)
I savor these blooms. May the years provide many small but important moments to celebrate flexibility, evolution, and the tender cycle of life.
At the raptor center at Glen Helen, there’s a bald eagle named Solo. He’s over 30 years old, and lost his left wing after running into a power line. My daughter loves going to see all the raptors there, but she’s especially fond of Solo. The other day on our way down the bumpy lane, she said, “Solo is happy because he knows I’m coming to see him!”
When I saw the news about Osama Bin Laden yesterday, I was reminded again how much I’m a pacifist.
Some people believe that a human can be inherently evil. I believe that humans are born with curiosity and kindness, the natural state of a child. If, for whatever reason, those natural characteristics are neglected or broken, sometimes a person can gnarl as they grow, becoming one who does horrible (or “unskilled“) acts. Experiences mix with beliefs, among other essential ingredients, and shape a person.
I am not defending Osama Bin Laden. I am grateful that no one close to me died in the attacks on September 11, 2001. Perhaps if I had experienced that loss more closely, I would have felt some relief or closure at Bin Laden’s death. (I’m sure I would never have partied and chanted happily, however.) But when I saw the headline, “Bin Laden Is Dead, Obama Says”, the sick feeling that spread through my gut, the repulsion, the sadness, the pain, was over the fact that our government (“we the people”) had killed someone. I feel this way whenever I hear of a person who has received the death penalty being executed, no matter the crime.
I want us to be a better species. I want us to find ways other than war to get along together here. I believe we can each move toward peace, in small ways that might become huge: if we pay attention, and focus on other humans with kindness and open hearts. I admit to being an unapologetic original hippie-kid idealist optimist (OHIO for short)! But I have a poet’s sense that the intentional taking of a life disturbs nature in ways we can’t know. (This includes bugs and spiders, and I’m not yet reconciled on how to deal with them, so I continue to kill and maim. And I am pro-choice, so some will call me a hypocrite.)
At a gathering of women last night, we sang, “One by one everyone comes to remember we are healing the world one heart at a time…” Solo, American icon, left wing missing, right wing irrelevant, can’t fly, but would hunt and kill if he could. In order to eat, in order to survive. (How to heal a wounded bird? How to heal a wounded nation? Take care of him, and think about how we affect each other. How to heal a wounded world? One heart at a time?)
Does the killing of Bin Laden heal the pain we feel over the loss of those who died on September 11, 2001? His death is not about healing, it’s about vengeance, but I’d feel better if we were trying to do better in the world.
I bet Solo would, too.
Rebecca Kuder 