Lingering Place
Went for a walk on the strand in our old neighborhood on Lake Erie. The water was out and childhood memories came flooding.
Writing: Driving home to Cincinnati I decided to try and capture the story – the feeling of what it was like to walk on the bottom of the lake. I rambled into my phone. A week or so later, I transcribed it onto paper and learned a valuable, if surprising thing: it’s not the process for me. I am securely a pantser – even trying to capture something without typing or writing, blocks my mind. I love the idea of clearly outlining something. But since I sat down and outlined Electric Possum, it’s been talking less to me. The urgency to get the images is gone and the images just sit there, they don’t grow or pulse anymore. They’ve been poorly captured or summed up and they sit pouting at the top of the stairs refusing to come down. I do know that in structural revisions, the outline helps me. The thing that is missing, that loses consistency can then be tended to (if it hasn’t already made it’s voice known) but summaries feel like I’m finished. Like it’s done. Good to know. I’ll keep experimenting with it.
Reading: 75 books this year so far. I’m slowing down because I’m in danger of rushing these lovely books just to meet a number. I don’t want to read 25 books in December. I want to enjoy some more stories. So, I’m slowing down on that to make sure. 75 is a great number anyway. This year I was an “avid reader.” I have dozens of books in the que. They keep coming from Thriftbooks or Barnes and Noble or local used book stores. I keep watching videos about top books. It’s become a lovely addiction. The dopamine hit from holding a new hardcover thrills just thinking about it. I think I bought 200 books these past 3 months alone. When I found myself reading every last story and poem in The Paris Review just so that I could count it as a book – well. It’s a solid publication – some 245 pages of dense short stories and poems. Excellent stuff – but all at once?
I’m craving the “weekly readers” we used to get in grade-school. Is that what they were called? Scholastic book club? A paper order sheet with pictures and descriptions of children’s books. We could put in an order and it would take forever to come. You’d given the form and your dollars and pennies for the books you ordered. Just when you’d forgotten to be excited anymore, or suspected the teacher of embezzling the money (I was a Watergate kid – so ---) they’d arrive and the box got opened right there in your classroom. It was better than Christmas and renewed your faith in humanity all at once.
None of my family read solid books anymore – Kindles and tablets. My nieces can go old school so that’s comforting. Many new books now have a rough coat on them to give some tactile sense I guess. Or they have raised letters. I guess they’ve figured out that the people who still buy books have some need for the feel of them in their hands. The same folks who love sensory pleasures, thus the candle-tea-cozy blanket combination. Funny that it’s tea and not liquor.
My most perfect reading experience was in an old beach house a friend of mine was renting. The rambling blue clapboard house sat in sea grass at the edge of the Rohobeth boardwalk. Up in one of the private rooms, the over-painted window sill was cracked to admit sea smells and sounds. On my stomach on the iron bed, facing out toward a long stretch of sand and ocean, I read The Old Man and the Sea from cover to cover. Half way through, my host brought me gin, whiskey? Don’t remember, but it was strong. He set it on the floor and backed out of the room. I sipped that while Hemmingway’s world of the open sea washed over me. After the last page, I had to come slowly back to the beach house, the real ocean still pulling at my ears. It’s one of those experiences that makes you walk slowly, languorously afterward. I relished it all the way down the stairway from the second floor to find people dressed in strange modern clothes and voices.
That’s what I’m working to keep— that feeling— no sense of accomplishment in numbers, or reputation, just lingering place and experience.