A Walker in the Suburbs

This blog grew from a habit of daily writing, a habit that began when I was in high school and a student teacher made us keep a journal. This would be a commonplace book of sorts, the teacher said. We could use it to reflect on the books we were reading, the lives we were living. Decades later I’m still on assignment, still scribbling to make sense of things.

One thing I hadn’t done much is to read the journals I’ve written. Except for the odd case when I needed to check a date or a fact, I’ve tucked each book away as soon as I finished it and moved on to the next one.

Until recently, that is. For some reason I’ve gotten interested in what I wrote last year or the year before. These are not exactly page-turners — I know how they end! — but I’m finding it a useful way to herd stray thoughts and gain perspective.

So even though it’s the ultimate meta exercise — not only do I analyze my life while I’m living it but then I read the analysis! — I’m pressing on. It’s a meta me!

I learned last night of the passing of Brian Doyle, a writer I admired for years, who I read too little of, who leaves behind a body of work that nourishes us all.

Doyle was the editor of Portland Magazine, the alumni magazine of the University of Portland. But that was just his day job. He also wrote novels (Mink River), short stories, prayers (how many writers pen prayers these days?) and essays (which is how I know him best). Doyle’s essays sing and probe and exalt. They make moments matter.

Accessible, joyful, torrential — those are words that describe Doyle’s prose. His sentences, by his own admission, begin on Tuesday and end on Saturday. He’s one of those writers who, when I read him, loosens up something in my own tightly coiled style.

Consider the conclusion to Joyas Voladoras, an essay I discovered in an anthology, wrote about and used to teach the form, an essay that’s yet to leave me with dry eyes. Read this and think a kind thought for its author, dead at age 60 but living on through his words:

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

I’ve been thinking about the line between poetry and prose, whether it’s wiggly or straight, dotted or plain. And I’ve decided it is, if anything, the faintest outline of a path, a deer trail in the woods, a bend in the rushes.

The words make a difference, of course, and the care with which they’re placed on the page. There are line starts and breaks, and the music of the cadence — these can separate the two.

But mostly there is one bucket of beauty we dip into and drink from.

Will it nourish us, frustrate us, lead us to lines wiggly or straight? That seems beyond the point when we’re possessed. The point is to translate the beauty as best we can.