A Walker in the Suburbs

Thinking of yesterday’s title, “First Walk,” and of the difficulty of pinning down the precise rush of feeling from Sunday’s stroll.

What helped was scribbling a few phrases in my journal as soon as I came in. Those crabbed words led me back to the feelings of that walk. They were the rushed but essential first draft.

It’s the perennial problem, letting the words flow enough in the beginning to get you (more or less) where you want to go. Care too little about the final destination and you’ll muddle yourself from the start. Care too much and you won’t be able to put one syllable in front of the other.

Word processing has made the first draft a rare document indeed. How difficult it is to push forward without using the delete key; to hold in mind the perfect image while valuing the imperfect one that materializes in its place.

In so many ways, a first draft is more precious than the final draft it makes possible: rare, ephemeral, a product of struggle, a product of doubt.

I write a blog post almost every day, and I write plenty on the job. Subtract time for things like eating and sleeping and commuting, for buying groceries and cleaning the kitchen, for pulling weeds and returning books to the library.

And then take away the time for exercise, for running and walking, for bouncing on the trampoline, for tapping on Wednesday nights, for taking torturous classes on my lunch hour. All of this necessary for the health of the mind as well as the body.

And then there are the hours spent with friends and family, precious time in person or on the phone or the computer, keeping up with the people I love. And time to entertain, to meet friends for lunch or dinner. The wine of life!

All of which is to say how hard I struggle to find the time to do what I really must be doing — which is writing the other stuff, essays, perhaps even another book someday.

Every week I vow to make more time. Most weeks I come up short. But this week I’ve made it happen. I’m exhausted — and behind in other ways. But I carved out the hours.

Which is why this blog post consists of one long, sustained (but silent) cheer! Why silent? I don’t want to raise too much racket, you know. That might jinx it!

The office is closed, magazine proofs stuffed in my bag. For now it’s just me and the laptop and the words that won’t come. It’s so easy to sidle over to the kitchen for another cup of tea. Or watch the birds fight over suet. Just now a pair of young bluejays sparring in the air.

But the empty page won’t go away, so I come back, pull the words from wherever it is they like to hide. They are fickle and stubborn. They won’t be willed into existence.

The thing is, sometimes they hang out with the birds or the cup of tea. That’s where they hide when they should be on the page.

Nothing to do but find them and bring them home.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. The company of writers is unlike the company of other folks.

Others may take issue with this, of course, may say it’s the company of actors or stamp-collectors or plumbers that does it for them. And they would be right. It’s the company of those with whom you feel an affinity. Or, to put it another way, writers are my people!

Take last night’s bunch. We talked of safety in university laboratories, the manufacturing of steel, a murder in Centropolis, Kansas, in 1905. One of us read poetry aloud, from a memoir penned in verse. Another passed around a coffee table book on the Chesapeake that was back in print after 20 years. Still another talked about her plan to bring computers to African kids.

I don’t mean to brag here, but writers have many interests. They ask good questions. They are curious. They are also endangered, now that book publishing is in free fall and newspapers and magazines are fading away. So we also traded frustrations, gripes, gallows humor.  But somehow the upshot of it all was overwhelmingly positive.

It was a cold, blustery night. I had worked 12 hours. I should have been exhausted.

I wasn’t.