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Birth Stories

Birth Stories

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Ever since becoming a grandmother I’ve meant to find the journals where I described the births of each of my daughters. I was put off by the digging it would take me to find them.

But yesterday I had a few moments, so I looked in the most logical first place — a drawer in a dressing table where I keep some of my old (now well-filled) blank books. And there, right on top, was the journal describing Celia’s arrival — what I’d done that day (Christmas shop) and how it felt (scary!) to look up at the hospital sign from a distance, counting contractions while sitting in a rush-hour traffic jam.

Beneath that journal was the one with the pages for Claire’s arrival. The heat of those summer days came alive again for me, as did the rosebud mouth and cute little nose of my second-born. 

And finally, there was the journal that described Suzanne’s birth. I labored longer with my first, of course, and the nurses were marvelous, especially one whose name had escaped me — until yesterday. 

It’s not as if I’d forgotten the moments when each of these precious babes was put into my arms, and many of the details were there, too. But to relive the excitement in my own voice brought me back to those days in a way no photograph could — and made me glad that even in that early, new mother exhaustion, I chose writing over napping, that I picked up my pen, grabbed my blank books and wrote the birth stories.

Mind and Body

Mind and Body

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Over the weekend I read an essay about the power of literary analysis in the college classroom — and, because of the unique times in which we live — also not in the college classroom.  Apart from the many excellent points made about education in the humanities — the lessons of the great books have never mattered more, the ability to think and analyze is prized in the workplace — the author, Carlo Rotella, made one that brought a crucial point to mind. 

While teaching via Zoom, Rotella said, he realized how much he uses visual cues in his class, figuring out who he should call on, who’s getting a concept and who is not. I ran this through my own, English-major memory, and sure enough, the same seems true from the student’s point of view. 

What I remember most about college literature classes is not just the ideas that seemed to be exploding in my brain as we discussed The Magic Mountain or The Brothers Karamazov, but the visual impressions my teachers left as well. 

I recall in particular my favorite college professor, Dr. Ferguson, who would curl himself around the podium when he lectured, one knee on the desk, one foot on the floor, while stork-like, he led us through the great books. It’s not that I don’t recall the ideas themselves — I think about them all the time — but until I read this essay I wasn’t aware of how closely they are linked to the physical peculiarities of the professors who introduced them to me. 

This essay triggered a dialogue in my brain, a conversation between the author and me, and the part that I supplied surprised me — as it should, when the “conversations” are deep and good. 

The Big Send

The Big Send

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In an hour or two, I’ll drive to the Oak Hill post office to mail 100 letters, part of the Vote Forward campaign which today will send 15,000,000 (that’s 15 million!) letters to voters in swing states. The organizers are calling it the Big Send.

It’s a way to canvas for votes during a pandemic and it’s business for the beleaguered U.S. Postal Service. Plus … and this is my favorite part … it’s a vote of confidence for the old school approach: pen and paper, envelopes and stamps, snail mail. It’s harkening back to an epistolary mode of communication that’s so old it’s new again.

I’m glad I could find time recently to pen a few lines to voters who are registered but seldom go to the polls, explaining why I vote and encouraging them to do the same. It’s not exactly knocking on doors, but it’s a small movement in that direction. 

Paper and Pen

Paper and Pen

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The witch hazel is blazing bright yellow in the backyard, but at least so far, I’m working inside. I will work in chill but not damp chill (which we have today) — plus there is the sensitivity of the wonderful machine on which I type these words. One drop of moisture in the wrong place spells doom. Which has me thinking about the portability and beauty of paper and pen. 

I could no more do my work solely with those two items than I could with a stylus and clay tablet. But it’s worth mentioning how much freer one can feel with tools that weather the elements with fortitude and good cheer. 

The fickleness of the modern computer is one of those things that makes me feel I’m living my life atop a stormy sea of unknowingness. It’s a fair-weather implement that helps me when there’s power, but doesn’t when there’s not. I don’t really, truly understand how computers work, only that — somehow, miraculously — they do.

And of course, there’s the fact that this blog wouldn’t exist if I communicated  only with paper and pen. And there you have it: the modern dilemma in a nutshell … or at least one of its nutshells.

(Above: the little black book where I write when I’m not typing.)

A Post at Sundown

A Post at Sundown

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It’s past six on a Sunday evening, late enough that if I hadn’t written a blog post I would just skip it for the day. But not this Sunday — or any of the 51 others we’ve had this year.

That’s because about this time in 2019, I realized that if I wrote a post every day, I might hit the 3,000-mark at about the same time as this blog’s 10-year anniversary in February. I figured that if I could write five or six posts a week I could probably write seven. And so I did.

I didn’t quite make 3,000 posts by the 10-year mark, though I was close. But as it turns out, I’ve kept up the daily blog-writing routine for more than 365 days now. Come October 1,  I’ll start giving myself an occasional pass on a Saturday or Sunday.

It’s all rather silly, I know — a resolution I didn’t have to make for a blog I don’t have to write. But that’s the fun of it.

Simplicity

Simplicity

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I learned from the Writer’s Almanac  that today is the birthday of the poet Mary Oliver, who lived from 1935 to 2019. I discovered her only years before her passing, reading her prose before her poetry. But it poetry that she was known for and poetry that won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. 

Today’s entry includes a few words from Oliver about what she needed, which wasn’t much:

“I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else. There were times over the years when life was not easy, but when you can work a few hours a day and you’ve got a good book to read and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you’re okay.”

I will hold onto that simplicity today. 

Why We Write

Why We Write

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There are certainly mornings when I wonder what I’m doing here. Why share these observations with the blogosphere when I could just as soon express them to family or friends or jot them down in my journal?

I know the answer to that question, but I’ve seldom seen it explained as well as Susan Orlean does in her 2018 nonfiction bestseller The Library Book. 

Admitting that before the idea for The Library Book struck her she had sworn off writing books — “working on them felt like a slow-motion wrestling match,” she wrote — she goes on to talk about why the idea pulled her in. The book, which recounts the Los Angeles Public Library’s great fire of 1986 and the beauty and fragility of libraries in general, grew from the love of books Orlean developed as a child and the memory of afternoon excursions to the Bertram Woods Branch of the Shaker Heights (Ohio) Public Library system with her mother. Her mother, much older now and in the throes of dementia, wasn’t remembering those library visits anymore. That left Orlean to remember for both of them.

“I knew I was writing this because I was trying hard to preserve those afternoons. I convinced myself that committing them to a page meant the memory was saved, somehow, from the corrosive effect of time.

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. …

“But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and you can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are part of a larger story that has shape and purpose — a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future.”

Poems through the Pandemic

Poems through the Pandemic

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In this morning’s newspaper I read about a Covid-19 newsletter in Portsmouth, Maine, which carries, amidst the grim statistics and prognoses … a poem. Once a week every Sunday Portsmouth residents can find something else to focus on besides numbers and test results.

The poems are supplied by Portsmouth’s poet laureate, the 12th to serve in the role and one of several in the state of Maine. Here’s one she wrote after she learned of the passing of a fellow poet:

Today I find the mask useful

along with sunglasses

to hide my tear streaked face,

not wanting to scare the barista

who has enough to deal with

behind his own mask. 

In general, writers weigh in later, sometimes years after a historical event.  Poetry is different, I think, and in this case it’s helpful that poets are commenting in real time. 

Beyond the Beach

Beyond the Beach

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When you’re at the beach it’s easy to be seduced by it, to think there is nothing else to see or do. But  there are other pleasures. The pool, for instance. I’ve spent many hours lazing by it, reading or writing, and many hours in it, as my body cools and my fingers shrivel.

And there is walking around the little village center here, where you can people-watch, pick up a salad for dinner and buy a souvenir or two.

Finally, there’s the mental vibe of the beach, which expands beyond the sand and surf into the light and the wind — into the words I write, the thoughts I think and the dreams I dream.

I guess that’s why I keep coming back.

Anniversary of a Classic

Anniversary of a Classic

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Catching up on email, I learned from the Writer’s Almanac that To Kill a Mockingbird was published 60 years ago yesterday — and that it was not an easy book to write (if any book is). 

Apparently, Harper Lee was so frustrated by her work-in-progress that in 1957 she threw the manuscript out the window. Luckily, she retrieved it and went on to finish the book, which has sold 30 million copies, been translated into 40 languages and won the Pulitzer Prize.


Lee admitted that she didn’t know what to expect when the book was published, and hoped that if it was panned, it would be a “quick and merciful death” at the hands of the critics. She later admitted that she found the success almost as frightening as the “quick and merciful death” would have been.  And in fact, Lee never wrote the next book.

If communication is the point, how our work is perceived by others, then perhaps Lee said everything she needed to say in that classic and her silence was justified. But if the point of writing is the doing of it … then Lee was robbed.