As I’ve probably made more than clear through the years, I seek variety, changes in routine. They keep us out of ruts; they keep us young. Changes of scene, of workout and workload. Even changes in cuisine (though I’m not as good about that one).
Lately I’ve been juggling short-term to-dos (writing here, completing schoolwork) with longer-term writing projects.
I enjoy having both until deadlines loom. And then … the only change in routine I crave is to do nothing all day.
The musical “Chorus Line” contains a song with the lines, “Who am I anyway? Am I my resume?” I thought of those lines recently when I came across one of my first professional CVs, a document listing jobs I’ve long since forgotten — writing scripts for a public television station — and interests — music and reading — I’ve continued to enjoy but have long since ceased to record.
And then there were the personal details. I listed my birthday, marital status, even my height and weight. Were these required? I wasn’t seeking a position as an airline flight attendant but a high school English teacher!
A key phrase in these old resumes was “agreeable to relocation.” And looking at a list of the places I sent them — Wyoming, California, New Mexico — that could be assumed. What a quaint concept in these days of remote work.
And what a quaint document in general, this old resume, with the blotchy printing and the inclusion of my middle name “Leet,” which I’m proud to bear but haven’t used in decades.
Am I my resume? Not this one.
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On this first Monday in September I’m thinking of a day long ago when I had a deadline to meet at the same time as the neighbors next door were having a screened-in porch added to the back of their house. While I’m sure there was prep work, in memory it seems as if the thing went up in a day, a week at the very least.
While the hammers pounded, the nail guns added their one-two punch. There was shouting, laughter, the dull thud of two-by-fours being laid in place. Every so often I would lift my head from the keyboard to monitor the progress.
By dinnertime the porch was framed: an outside room, a place that hadn’t existed that morning. I glanced at my screen, at the words I’d cobbled together during the same nine or ten hours.
Surely we had all been building something that day, the workmen and I. Surely we had all been laboring. But at the end of the day they had something tangible to show for it … and, unless I printed a draft, I did not. Writing is a strange occupation. But I can’t imagine another one.
I want to stay with the filing topic today, because when I file, I read, and when I read, I remember.
The folders I’m going through are full of the notes and research I collected for the articles I wrote when I was a full-time freelancer. I toss most of the research and notes, but I keep the assignment letters, list of sources, and the piece itself. The “wheat” is small and the chaff is plentiful.
What emerges from this winnowing is not only a set of skinny file folders, but also the portrait of an age. It was a golden era for magazine writers: publications were plump, editors were many, business was brisk.
It’s a different world now, a leaner, meaner one. And while I try not to let it bother me, I miss that old world.
Yesterday was picture-perfect: clear skies, low humidity, a freshness in the air after Monday’s rain. It was one of those days I didn’t want to be inside.
And yet I’d come back from the lake determined to make decluttering a larger priority and tackle those file boxes in the basement. What to do? Haul them up to the deck, of course.
My back isn’t happy about it today, but that’s what I did. They shared the glass-topped table with the parakeets, who also didn’t want to be inside on such a glorious afternoon.
Papers were tossed, order was imposed and Vitamin D was absorbed. Who could ask for more?
By the time I got upstairs, all I could remember was that it was one of the best ideas I’d ever had. Down in the basement it had seemed revelatory, perfect for a blog post or even an essay. But by the time I’d climbed two flights of stairs to jot it down, it was gone, lost amidst the grocery lists and other to-dos in my mind.
Such is the fate of what seem my best ideas.
What to do? Ought I to wear a pen and notebook around my neck? Practice better memory hygiene? Learn the mnemonic devices of the ancients? All of the above?
Or, should I just let those brilliant ideas go, have faith that they’ll return again soon, perhaps when I least expect them. At which point I will realize that … they weren’t so brilliant after all.
It was almost 10 last night when the editor’s email arrived. I found it on my last check of the day. Could I read over my essay, which he had recently accepted and edited, and send him fixes as soon as possible?
Receiving a work-related email so late in the evening reminded me of the old days, when I’d get similar requests that didn’t feel as warm and fuzzy as last night’s did. Last night I felt plugged in and stimulated rather than tired and overworked.
And no wonder. This time, the words in question are ones I’ve written for myself, not for others. I write them to share, as I do the words in this blog, but they are not words for hire.
The difference gives me pause, and makes me grateful.
There’s a way I want to live now that is best described as seamless. Unlike the work-for-pay life, where my time was parceled into segments set by modern office practices (meetings, deadlines, more meetings), the seamless life goes something like this:
I write for a few hours, then break to play the piano or clean the bird’s cage, followed by a walk and then more writing because a walk almost always gives me an idea or two.
Which is not say there aren’t plenty of errands to run, laundry to do and other details of daily life. The seamless life is part reality, part aspiration.
One of my final projects for class last semester required making an object. It could be a collage or a photograph or a batch of banana bread, but it had to be something tangible that represented a lesson we had learned or a question we had asked. I crocheted the spider web you see above. Here, in part, is how I explained my choice:
Delicate yet strong, filmy yet adhesive, the filaments of a spider web are both a prism and a killing field. They bend light, make rainbows, reveal themselves from some angles and not others. Humans find them beautiful; insects find them deadly.
In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino chose the spider web to portray one of his most memorable metropolises: Octavia, a city stretched across a void, made of “ropes and chains and catwalks.” Its inhabitants “know the net will only last so long.” The spider web seemed an apt metaphor for this class; it represents all the impermanent structures we build to make meaning, knowing, even as we construct them, that they are doomed to fall.
I talked about how the class readings were “knotty but precious,” and how the entire project was “deconstructionist” in nature since I frequently found myself ripping out stitches. I ended by mentioning that the word “crochet” comes from the French croche, to hook. I interpreted this “hook” not as a spear but as a net, a way to catch an idea, examine it, then let it go — not pin it down. I’d like to do more of that.
In her new book Sanctuary, Emily Rapp Black explores the concept of resilience. As part of this task, she talks with the editor of a book called Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust.
Black learns that resilience is not an item on a to-do list. It is a part of us, as long as we have the agency to express it.
The children whose diaries are featured in this book found that agency through keeping their diaries. “The journal writers made it clear that writing was the path to maintaining any agency at all, which in this context was life,” Black writes. “To do creative work was to be — and feel — alive.”
The children who kept these diaries were exposed to unimaginable horrors. Yet they found the will to live through scribbling words on a page. I take great hope from that.
