His face was alive with curiosity. Everyone who got on the bus was gone over with wide-open eyes. He was taking the world in as fast as it was presented to him. What a sharp contrast he was to the other passengers, most of them elderly, whose faces and eyes were closed down except for a narrow opening to let in enough light to see by. My mother maintained the alertness of that young boy to the end of her life. It is not age but awareness that makes the difference—and a lack of judgmentalness. I wonder, if I could see my own face, how open and nonjudgmental it would be.
We are home from the honeymoon. Being cast upon one’s own as we were for seven days rinsed my mind of some of the impurities of modern life that I had gotten too dependent upon—gossip magazines, nonstop NPR, the phone. For stimulation, there were books, conversation, and thinking. I found myself interested, as I had been as a child, in what I saw on the road—tangles of nasturtiums, squashed cherries, bay-grape leaves stiff as leather paddles on the grass. Sitting on the terrace overlooking the bay I meditated on the fact of our mutability, how almost every person in the restaurant will be wiped off the stage in fifty years or less. Yet we sit and butter our toast as if we are immortal.
This is the beginning of my new life.
This morning, as I poured hot water onto fresh coffee grounds, I thought of all the married couples who have come together for the same reasons: comfort, company, safety. How much are we motivated by the powerful desire to feel safe? And is feeling safe and unafraid the same thing?
A beautiful congratulatory note from my friend Kitty, enclosing a silver-framed shamrock and a quotation from G. K. Chesterton:
The power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged, God has kept that good wine until now. It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst.
She ended the note with, “So soar!”
Along with this came a note in the shape of a butterfly from Nancy Newhouse, saying how much she loved the wedding party. The backwash of that long moment continues to bring good things in on the tide.
Distressing news from Italy. My Siena friend Jennifer Storey has breast cancer that has spread to her lymph nodes. She is caught up in many different emotions, including intense fear. I cannot take pleasure in my own life, knowing what is happening to her.
I am holding the volume of Emerson’s essays that Jennifer took from me in Italy last year and made whole again, regluing the pages and strengthening the spine with a new red leather binding. Now it will last a long time. This is what friends do for each other. We strengthen each other’s spines.
The process of transferring and merging two separate lives into one, physically and emotionally, is a daily challenge. I wonder if I am not losing a certain jauntiness (my daughter Eliza’s favorite word to describe herself) that being independent creates. Now that my dependence, physically, upon him has grown, it seems to me that I am too watchful of Ragan’s moods, monitoring him.
Between then and now there has been another climate change—a contentment that is like an incoming tide, sliding up the sand, filling in the holes, leveling the surface. As best as I can surmise, it is a human exchange that did it, conversation on a higher level that calms my soul. Recently, Ragan said that he knows he can tell me anything that is in his heart. It takes so little now to reassure me that I am in the right place and relationship.
A metaphor catches my imagination, the idea that our bodies have “general contractors” who repair what is broken but usually on a longer lead time than we want. My ear, for instance, had fluid in it for the better part of a month. Finally, I made an appointment with the doctor, just before it cleared up on its own. My rib cage, bruised when I fell out of bed, healed on its own slow schedule, too. To extend the metaphor a bit more, if we take good care of our property, the general contractor can move more quickly, perform more efficiently.
Hurricane Katrina has wiped out the Gulf Coast areas of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. New Orleans is a city of the past. Whatever happens, it will be almost entirely new. The poor are the hardest hit, trapped in flooded houses, drowning in attics, bodies floating in the water. The reality of losing everything you have and not being able to return to where you lived—having the slate entirely erased—is not something I’m capable of really comprehending. In my world, there are so many avenues of escape.
I am beginning to really see why the first part of my life was so slow and creative. There was little except books and the radio, with an occasional Saturday afternoon movie into which I could escape. This left me uncomfortably in my own skin, with my imagination as the only escape route. Restlessness and the aching desire to experience new things were part of my daily life. The outer quiet was broken only by the sounds of footsteps, scraping chairs, the swish of water, and other mostly human-generated noises that were not distracting. The phone rarely, if ever, rang for me.
This morning, I watched a yellow leaf drift to the ground like a butterfly, twisting in the air as if it had wings, and I thought of Mother, who loved autumn with the air full of leaves whenever the wind blew. It excited her, the way the prospect of going someplace new—or dying—excited her. “The body has its fears,” she admitted. But she herself had none.
This morning Ragan read from Roger Housden’s essay on marriage. Love, Housden writes, is not pleasure but work, and since it is work that makes us happy, love is necessarily the hardest work of all.
Last night we had our first dinner on Duncan Street [my house, which was extensively remodeled after we got married]. Later, Ragan gazed into the living room, newly slipcovered and blooming with lighted lamps, and declared it welcoming. So the transition has begun.
NOTES FROM OUR TRIP TO MOLLY AND MARK’S HOUSE IN BEDFORD HILLS, NEW YORK
Molly’s largeness of spirit, coupled with an honest mind and compassionate eye for the foibles of those she loves, make her so lovable to me. I consider her an ace up my sleeve, someone who makes it easier for me to live my life knowing she is there.
Their recently adopted four-year-old son, Nando, is a small, observant elf, black-eyed and endearing. Their seven-year-old adopted daughter, P-Quy, confided to her mother that everyone loves him “because he’s so cute—and he is, Mom.” Being in Molly and Mark’s house is like floating down the river in an inner tube. Hot water, thick towels, down pillows, and fat shrimp with cocktail sauce. Conversation flies around like a birdie in a badminton game. I’m beginning to realize that perhaps I am as important to Molly as she is to me.
Here in Ashland, the sounds of hammers and trains. Fall leaves sift through the air. I am content to make this home. Ragan is a good husband. We fit amazingly well, almost because of the differences.
This morning, searching for an inspired bit of material to launch these pages, I opened Henry Miller’s On Writing. There it was:
The creative individual (in wrestling with his medium) is supposed to experience a joy which balances, if it does not outweigh, the pain and anguish which accompany the struggle to express himself. He lives his work, we say. But this unique kind of life varies extremely with the individual. It is only in the measure that he is aware of more life, the life abundant, that he may be said to live in his work. If there is no realization, there is no purpose or advantage in substituting the imaginative life for the purely adventurous one of reality. Everyone who lifts himself above the activities of the daily round does so not only in the hope of enlarging his field of experience, or even of enriching it, but of quickening it.
That, in Miller’s beautifully strung-together words, is what we’re after—the joy of quickening the dead, of bringing something inert to life. Once you have experienced it, you want it again.
Packed and ready for Italy. A part of me is already there, with my broken Italian, making my way around Rosia, admiring the cyclamen along the banks that flank the winding road to Orgia.
It always amazes me how one decision can trigg
er so many others. My going to Italy caused Ragan’s daughter, Meg, to decide to come, too. She will meet her best friend in Paris. We are always paving the way for each other, although it takes a long time in one’s development to grasp the truth that being responsible for your own life is so much more exhilarating than waiting for someone else to pave the way, make it right.
The flight across the Atlantic was fairly bumpy. The plane creaked like an old ship. Outside, the sky was jammed with stars, clear and fixed against the wild fishtailing of our airplane.
A missed plane connection due to slow customs. I am stuck at Gatwick for the night. Sleepless at 2 A.M. I finished Kurt Vonnegut’s book, A Man Without a Country. I don’t think there is one word of it that I disagree with, and much of it is so sublime I want to snatch it up and engrave it on everyone’s mind.
Vonnegut’s thoughts on the power of the imagination (he can look at a face and see stories; others only see a face) makes me realize—again!—how easily it can fall into disuse. The streets are full of people who don’t use their imaginations for anything more than to imagine dinner, or how a new sweater could change their mood. I speak firsthand.
I wonder if the process of aging doesn’t bring as its chief gift the capacity to separate our intellect from our feelings. A sixteen-year-old can know one thing but be emotionally incapable of acting upon it. At sixteen, the emotional needs must come first if the heart is to survive. Perhaps this is true at every age, but at sixty-six, I am no longer hungry in that old starving way. Even if all my sources of comfort were to vanish, I would know how to create new ones. A sixteen-year-old doesn’t know this about herself. A thirty-two-year-old has trouble knowing it, too. Instinctively, we hang on to what we’ve got for fear that there won’t be any more. Who or what teaches us this? To be alive and standing should be enough to prove that life will support us when we move toward it. But there is always the fear that the safety net will have a hole in it, that we will slip through and be lost.
AT SPANNOCCHIA
Another wonderful group, six women and one man. This morning, Julie’s notes about her family’s dinners were the most powerful. While everyone else is out walking, she has gone back to her room to write, as have I. But about what? The silence, broken only by a pair of flies and my pen on paper, has not spoken to me yet. But I am comfortable with emptiness. There is something very healing about this small austere room, this wooden desk and chair, white walls, and terracotta floor. It is all I need or want at this moment, except for a quickening of the creative impulse.
Today I spent several hours, with one nap in the middle, writing. All I can say about it is that I kneaded the material, remembered the rules, eliminated, put back in, rewrote, and rewrote again. The spark did not appear, but just knowing that I was at work provided its own flame of a sort.
Later, I took a walk down the road, where at several spots I searched for chestnuts. On the way down the hill, I found a pocketful. Coming home, looking in the same spots, I found more. The eye is not as careful as we think. It takes many passes over the same material to see it all. True for both chestnuts and writing.
A seamless week: beautiful weather, flowing creativity, and an easy blending of personalities. Each person, including our one nonwriter, Tim, has had something very important to add to the group, which genuinely admires one another. I am perhaps most gratified by Julie’s presence. She has really surprised herself and me by her writing, her conversational abilities, and the way she seems to love being here.
This is our last writing day. Everyone has found at least one assignment in which they have been able to “reach water.” Writers come to Spannocchia to remember something deep inside themselves, to try—with help from the teacher and the group—to find that piece of gold or beauty that flicks by them like a darting fish.
Home. How comforting it is to be back in one’s own picture. No longer do you have to search for the right preposition or coin. Travel is grueling because you have to keep moving. But it’s a necessary act, like changing, because otherwise you lose the capacity to adjust to new challenges. Now, at five-thirty in the morning, with Ragan and Bear still sleeping, I am back in my wing chair, listening to the language of my old house as its pipes ping and creak in the winter cold.
Signs of aging. Yesterday Dr. Everhart examined my eyes and found the very early signs of dry (the better kind to have) macular degeneration. I am aware of how much time and material is involved in maintaining myself—the medications for reflux, thyroid, cholesterol, and now macular degeneration, the exercise to keep strong, the right food to keep healthy. So much more is involved than twenty-years-ago, in what I now call my wash-and-wear days.
So few new thoughts, and the ones I have fly out of my head before I can get them pinned down on paper. If I were Emerson, every specific thought would turn into a general aphorism. Instead, the aphorisms go unsaid, uncoined. With metaphors I have an easier time.
Three years ago, Mom died in this house. I have just put the last remnants of her existence into a cardboard box upstairs: her special stones, a pearl shell, some other odds and ends. A husband is quietly washing dishes in the sink. I am in a new life, one in which I am so much more protected than I was before. This is a blessing I never expected to receive.
Yesterday we had our first real moving day, as boxes of books were temporarily taken out of the garage and furniture from Ragan’s house was brought in. When we are done furnishing this “kingdom” I fear feeling burdened, the custodian of a life filled with scrapbooks and shoes, sofas and casserole dishes, two floors of towels, sheets, soap, hand cream, clothes, books, and curtains. In a world where there is so much poverty, we are pashas, who only have to snap our fingers for another possession to materialize.
Last night I told Ragan that he was giving me the chance to experience the difference between intense and lasting love. Given the choice, I would chose long-lasting. Perhaps in time there will be both, but a high flame takes more watching than I am prepared to do.
CHRISTMAS MORNING
R asleep on the sofa in front of the fire, Bear dozing by his side, sweet potatoes and apple pie on the stove. And where am I? My mind is off in Siena, wondering what Jennifer Storey is having for breakfast; then Carmel, where Francesca is probably just waking up. Then suddenly, I think, Stop all this astral travel. Be present while you’re peeling the yams. Notice how the flesh turns from pale yellow to mango, how the coloration of the skin has the faint look of veins. Life is more intense when one is all here to live it.
A line from a luminous Indian movie, Water, in which one of the characters says of Mahatma Gandhi, “Gandhi is a man who listens to his conscience.” Immediately I thought, Do I? What huge changes would have to come about if I did?
Later, helping my friend Elizabeth write a commencement speech, I stumbled across a thought in my mind: Use your life to illuminate something larger. That’s it. That’s what we’re all called to do.
If You Want to Keep a Journal
One of the reasons why people resist keeping a journal is because they assume it will quickly become a garbage can for all of the spoiled plans, bad news, and other dark developments in their life. The journal I keep is the spiritual equivalent of a personal light box or cheering section, which I create as I go along. This isn’t to say that the pages are without pain or perplexity. The dilemmas in my life were one of the main reasons I began to keep a journal in the first place. But I use it as a tool for solving or understanding them. Whatever insights or glimpses of the truth I glean when sitting quietly in my wing chair—thinking, reading, or simply gazing out the window at a neighbor walking her dog—is what I write down.
There are other, less self-involved motives for keeping a journal. Knowing I have a place to save small pieces of beauty keeps me on the lookout for them, even in a checkout line in Safeway or on the other side of a grimy train window in the rain. These are my butterflies, halted midflight on the page. Then, there is the “journal as ragbag” use, where I store stor
ies, anecdotes, or phrases that please my mind and ear. When my children were small, they would often say something so heartbreakingly astute or funny that I rushed to preserve it— sometimes for tomorrow’s essay, which used to drive my children crazy. “Nobody else I know has this problem,” wailed Eliza, after she found herself trapped in a carful of other Brownies listening to her mother read an essay on the radio—about embarrassing her children!
Should you censor what you say? I think that goes without saying, unless your intention is to finger the person you think wants to murder you or get back at someone who has hurt your feelings, assuming they read what you write. Children of any age should be protected. Messages from the grave can too easily be misconstrued or considered the final verdict on their worth, when all you’re doing is blowing off steam.
The type of journal you use is important. My advice is not to get anything too fancy. The cover might intimidate you, the paper may seem too expensive to ruin with your humble observations. For the past twenty years I have used the same five-by-seven-inch black cardboard journals with red binding that come from the Pearl River Market in Greenwich Village, New York. They are cheap and durable and fit easily into my purse when traveling. To date I have filled up at least three dozen, all neatly labeled with a pair of dates on their spines. It is the only organized thing about me.
Keeping a journal for posterity should be a minor, even inconsequential reason. The one place you want to be unselfconscious is on the pages of your private diary. That being said, there is a public dimension to writing—even if it is a laundry list—and I am not a fan of those who urge you to dump whatever comes to mind upon the page. No, no, no. Your journal should be a wise friend who helps you create your own enlightenment. Choose what you think has some merit or lasting value, so that when you reread your journal in years to come it continues to nourish you.
The Journal Keeper Page 21