A Walker in the Suburbs

Astute readers of these posts will notice that they’re as often about books and writing as they are about walking. No walking today; I’m not feeling well enough to get out of bed. So into the bed come books, journal, newspaper, laptop and notes for the article I have to write whether I’m sick or not.

Writing in bed makes me remember something I’d heard about Winston Churchill, that he spent most of his mornings in bed, reading all the daily newspapers, dictating to his secretary, writing. I also learned from a book called The Writer’s Desk that Edith Wharton, Colette, Proust, James Joyce and Walker Percy all wrote in bed. I have to laugh about Walker Percy. For a while it seemed that every novel my book group chose had been blurbed by Walker Percy. Perhaps Percy did his blurbing in bed, too.

I just finished reading Antonia Fraser’s memoir of her life with Harold Pinter, Must You Go? I marvel at the honesty and the tenderness of Antonia’s portrayal of her husband — and also at how they seemed to know everyone in the literary and political establishments. It reminds me of something I know but seldom think about: how small the world is at the top.

But my favorite line has nothing to do with literary lions or radical politics. It is instead this almost off-the-cuff observation Antonia made April 4, 1979: “My idea of happiness is to be alone in a room in a house full of people.”

I’ve never heard it put quite that way, but I understand and agree. We must be alone in order to create; we must be with loved ones in order to live.

Today I travel around the Beltway to a little building in Bethesda called the Writer’s Center. I have led essay and non-fiction writing workshops there for almost 10 years, and every time I do I know I’ll be inspired. I will meet lawyers and accountants, caterers and dry cleaners — people from all walks of life with one thing in common — they all have stories to tell.

Sometimes we laugh together; sometimes we cry. But always we learn something about ourselves as writers and as human beings.

Writing is best done alone and in silence, so when writers gather to share their work there is an extra measure of relief and pleasure at being together. It is good to know there are kindred spirits walking this long road.

I’ve been meaning for several weeks to write about a book called Hard Scrabble. It’s by John Graves, a Texas man — and (I was almost afraid to look because he was born in 1920) still a living one, a fact which buoys me, to know that someone like him (he calls himself an “Old Fart,” “OF” or “Head Varmint”) is still with us.

I’d had this book on my “to read” list for months and had hunted for it without success in the several libraries I haunt. Finding no free copies anywhere I was actually driven to purchase it. I’m happy to report that the book was worth every penny I paid for it — and then some.

Hard Scrabble is the name of Graves’ farm, a place that he owns not because he holds the title to it but because he “owns it in his head” — meaning that he’s lived on and worked it for many decades. His writing style is what I would call crunchy — not in the hippie granola sense of that word but meaning that it is full of texture. His surprising word choices and unusual rhythms and phrasing come not from sitting at a desk and looking out a window but from tending bees and building stone houses and finding lost goats. His writing is specific, as all good writing is, but his details are not just observed, they are lived.

And so, when you’re reading Hard Scrabble and you’re clinging to each phrase because there are only a few pages left and you don’t want the book to end, you come across words like these:

” [W]hen past forty — in a period when by rights a man ought to be using what knowledge he has already acquired… did I start consolidating a store of rare knowledge with making a show in carpentry, with fences and humus and stumps and bugs, with the smell of rain on dung and drouthy soil, with how goats bleat when frightened … with fields that are green and why and what flowers the bees work in August in the third smallest county in Texas.”

And then a couple pages later, this:

“It strikes me as more than a possibility that archaism, in times one disagrees with, may touch closer to lasting truth than do the times themselves — that, for instance, the timbre and meaning of various goat-bleats may be at least as much worth learning as the music and mores of the newest wave of youths to arrive at awareness of the eternal steaming turmoil of the human crotch. Therefore, having at least the illusion of choice, one chooses for the moment at any rate isolation and an older way of life.”

It is difficult in the suburbs to choose “isolation and an older way of life.” But reading Hard Scrabble gives me hope that there is truth and beauty in the honest observation of the place one finds one’s self.

I left this morning early on a round of errands: library, post office, gas station, pharmacy, two grocery stores. By 10:15 I am home again, ready to write, edit and read. I wonder if I can summon the mood for creative work. It is true that a day’s first steps can set its tone, and I began this day in efficiency mode.

But I have stumbled upon a cure — poetry podcasts. As I listen to the words read aloud, their cadences chase away the day’s earlier rhythms, fill me instead with iambs and trochees, with the human voice in search of magic.

Inspired by the spoken words, I listen and I write. A day of doing may yet turn out to be a day of being.

I almost didn’t go, had too many papers on my desk to feel right about leaving them behind, but my friend Michele Wolf was reading from her new book Immersion so I walked 20 minutes to a building made of words, took a seat and let the images flow into my brain.

It was a good decision. The verse filled me full as any food. They were love poems — love for children, for parents, for spouse — and they trembled and soared; they skittered to the edge of the abyss, stood still and stared it down.

On the way home, my path was filled with light. All the buildings had softened edges.

Last weekend I decided to do something special for my blog on its first anniversary, a little facelift, so to speak. Blogspot has new templates so I experimented with some of those on Saturday. I fiddled with background pictures, fonts and shadows; with line rules of varying widths and thicknesses; with navigation bars in everything from chartreuse to puce. Then I became impatient, pushed some buttons I shouldn’t have — and in an instant the old familiar design was gone.

I will admit that a tiny moment of panic ensued. I didn’t want my blog to have an ugly green bar across the top. I wanted those clean spare lines, the thin rules around the title, the subtlety, the white space. I wanted my old blog back.

It took the better part of two hours to return to the “classic” template (Blogspot doesn’t make it easy for you), and once I did I had to re-install all the little extras I’d had there before — using HTML code no less. But I made most of the changes. So the blog that looks almost the same as it used to is actually not the same at all. It is new born.

And I add to the list of benefits A Walker in the Suburbs has brought me yet one more: to be less timid of technology. I’m still a Luddite, just not as much of one.

It was Super Bowl Sunday 2010, which means very little to me but which anchors this blog’s beginnings in my memory. We were going out later to watch the game, something we usually don’t do but which good friends and neighbors had invited us for earlier in the weekend. Outside was two feet of snow; inside, the smell of yeast. I’d been baking rolls, big yeasty rolls, and we were taking them to our neighbors. There would be no work or school the next day; in fact, there would be no work or school the rest of the week. But I didn’t know that then.

What I did know was that I’d wanted to start a blog and now I was doing it. Tom helped me with the technology part and the words flowed onto the screen. (For the first post, click here: http://walkerinthesuburbs.blogspot.com/2010/02/walker-begins.html.)

Had I known then that a year later I would have 315 posts under my belt I would have been surprised and pleased. Not so much by the daily writing — that was already a habit — but by the fact that I could eke out something I felt comfortable sharing with others. And also by the photography part — snapping pictures for the blog has been a fringe benefit I didn’t foresee.

What gladdens me the most is how the blog has rejuvenated my writing life. In the last few years many essay markets have dried up, and freelance writing, while never an easy path, has become a darned near impossible one. As any suburban walker knows, when one road is blocked you must find another. This blog has helped me find my voice again.

As A Walker ambles forward I want to notice more, question myself less and never be afraid to explore the winding, circuitous path — the detour. Because often it’s the road I should have taken all along. Thanks for visiting this blog. Happy Reading!

“Our literature is filled with young people like myself who came from the provinces to the Big Cave [New York City], seeking involvement in what one always thought from the outside was a world of incomparable wonder, hoping for some vague kind of literary ‘fulfillment,'” writes Willie Morris in his memoir North Toward Home.

I’ve meant to read this book for years, and now that I’ve almost finished it, I’m itching to read his sequel, New York Days. Morris grew up in Yazoo City, Mississippi, and his description of driving home from Texas through Natchez, Port Gibson and Vicksburg is some of the loveliest writing I’ve ever read about returning to one’s hometown:

“I had the most overwhelming sense of coming home, to some place that belonged to me; I was not merely stunned by its beauty, for this was not new to me; I was surprised to feel so settled inside, as if nothing, no matter how cruel or despairing, could destroy my belonging. It was the last time I felt so strongly about a place.”

Morris became the editor of Harper’s magazine, its youngest ever, and set about chronicling a tumultuous time (the 1960s) in its pages. He edited and befriended many writers, wrote numerous books, was writer-in-residence at Ole Miss and died of a heart attack at age 64 in 1999.

As someone who also came to New York City in my youth, I find the words Morris wrote about the big city absolutely on the mark: “Coming to New York for the first time, the sensitive outlander might soon find himself in a subtle interior struggle with himself, over the most fundamental sense and meaning of his own origins. It was this struggle, if fully comprehended, which finally could give New York its own peculiar and wonderful value as a place, for it tested who you are, in the deepest and most contorted way.”