Month: February 2014

• On Not Writing

After having spent last Thursday morning writing a blog post about my relationship with my late father, that evening I found myself unable to sleep. I felt stirred up, sure, about exposing my own messy emotional issues, but the bigger problem was that I couldn’t turn off the writers’ voices in my brain.

Hassling my mind’s librarian, I was rifling my long-term memories, flipping through my dad’s record collection for Christmas Eve with Burl Ives and Songs of the Lincoln Brigade. Then I was annotating the selections: My dad was a Jew and a sincere Cold Warrior who had worked for the NSA, but still he had a penchant for lefty anthems and Christmas songs.

As the night stretched on, my inner narrator launched an adverb attack. Instead of just rolling over in bed, I was rolling over uneasily. A spot on my lower back was persistently itching and I vainly attempted to quiet my thoughts.

That’s when I turned (desperately) to one of the happy places inside me, a fortified mental city-state dedicated to a single, shining principle: the right not to write. Of course, Not Writing comes easily to a lot of people, especially to writers, for whom it can be a dangerous activity. In fact “Not Panicking about Not Writing” may be the better name for an undertaking that has proved life-affirming for me.

restlessly

One thing I have never lacked in life is encouragement for my writing. As an ill-tempered, noncomformist child, I refused to brush my hair or to stop wearing my favorite torn clothes, and so I struggled in my peer relationships. One icy afternoon, when other kids were laughing at me because my loose green pants kept sliding down, I defiantly pulled them off, slipping out of one boot at a time, and slung them over my shoulder.

Armed with too much vocabulary for my own good, I once asked a classmate why he insisted on calling me by my last name instead of my first. Naturally, he gave the only answer possible from an 8-year-old boy thus confronted: “Shefler blew a fart and the world blew apart!” Still, I got a lot of respect for my (very) short stories about Martians, flying horses, and haunted houses, and to my literary accomplishments I pinned my shaky self-esteem.

What’s more, my family’s support for my writing career has never quivered, much less wavered. My father, a freelance writer himself, used his wardrobe-sized copying machine to generate Martian and flying horse booklets. My stepfather (also a professional writer) found time to advise me of drafts of all my high school papers. He never hesitated to point out my excesses in adjectives or to let me know, ever so tactfully, when a piece wasn’t “up to the usual” eloquence or liveliness. As for my mom, she gently reminds me to write the way some mothers remind their children to eat vegetables or wash behind the ears.

During my twenties, when I worked as a writer for Pitt Magazine, a university publication with uncommonly high literary standards, I spent most of my time in one of three modes: writing (for as much as 14 hours a day), weeping about writing, and shredding up little pieces of paper while waiting for ideas to come to me. In my late 30s, when I was working on the thesis for my MA in education, I had a big revival of weeping about writing and also managed to get some writing done.

In between, though, and off and on during the years since then, I have passed many glorious Not Writing days. Before I could even grasp the concept of Not Writing, I had to quit my job cold turkey and fly myself thousands of miles from my home computer. On a self-structured backpacker’s sabbatical in Europe, I experience the Not-Writing tingle at curious moments: riding a bus back to my hostel after my second full day at the British Museum, my mind glittering with images, gold-leaf falcons painted on mummy cases, Assyrian bas-relief fish freely leaping the curves of their carved-stone rivers.

Ecstatic was how I felt, in part because no was one asking me to organize these pictures into words. I did pen some letters home, but that didn’t stop me from savoring hours and days of non-typing, non-composing, non-reflection–or more accurately the surrender of the effort to capture and serve up reflections that darted through my mental stream.

Now, in my late 40s, I am hoping that writing can coexist with not writing, as one of the perquisites of the change of life that leaves us not just maturing but also aging. Maturity can give us the wisdom to breathe deeply instead of shredding paper. If we’re lucky, aging can teach us the courage to embrace our multi-facets, writing and not writing, striving and savoring, working and living, moment to moment, day to day.

• Persistence

Once or twice a month, I dream my dad is still alive, though in the waking world we’re almost ten years out from his passing. True, I dream-remember, he was gone for a little while, but it was some kind of misunderstanding or temporary condition, and now he’s back among us, sharing a restaurant meal or needing a ride somewhere.

In a tawny-colored flannel shirt he stands there, and I take in the broadness of his gently rounded shoulders and the robustness of his rib-cage, which give him a powerful presence, despite his age-diminished height. He’s right in front of me, and I fall for this illusion every single time. Even when my sleep-self puzzles, “Didn’t I used to have a dream like this?” or when I sleep-solve a real-world math problem–“He must be 94 by now”–I just go on and sleep-marvel at the unlikeliness of it all.

Even in my waking life, it occasionally takes me some effort to distinguish between what I dreamed and what has actually happened. I flutter my eyes open in the morning still trying to figure out how to coax that elephant into the ballroom for my wedding. I console myself at the disappointing realization that I do not write for a travel magazine edited by Stephen Colbert. Most importantly, I need to savvy up to the fact that I paid the mortgage this month or informed my husband about a change in our schedule only in my dreams.

That’s the middle-aged brain for you–my middle-aged brain, at least. Typically, we associate the blurring of mental states, between the conscious and unconscious mind, between reality and imaginations, with early childhood or extreme old age. Granny Weatherall reunites with her long-dead daughter Hapsy; young Max sails away to the kingdom where the wild things are. Folks in mid-adulthood who wander in and out of fantasy get diagnosed and treated, or else dismissed as charming but inadequate “Walter Mitty” types.

Mature adults (according to Erik Erikson’s psychosocial theories) are supposed to focus on generativity, on establishing ourselves in society and providing for the next generation. Practical, persistent, goal-driven, yes! Blurry is the last thing that we’re supposed to be. So when I stumble on my quirks and confusions, I find myself asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and wondering if others in their 40s and 50s feel the same way, too.

Contrary to the age-related expectation that my efforts should be outwardly focused, I’m in my own head a lot of the time. Having unhinged myself from the 9 to 5 work world, I’m always reshuffling my daily routines, teaching short-term classes, driving all over the place to meet my tutoring clients. People try for regular meeting times, but not a week goes by without a sorry-it’s-so-last-minute change. Having no children and no single boss I’m accountable to means that I have very few inflexible demands on me. It’s a luxury, but it’s disorienting. (Yes, I hear all you working parents playing the world’s tiniest violin for me.) Sometimes I have all day to myself. Other times I’m so busy at odd hours and locations that I spend the breaks napping in my car by the side of the road. Sometimes, the instability of my work life and the eidetic dreams I’ve been having feel like they’re a part of the same wild ride.

And yet the dreams about my father are all about generativity, his and mine alike, all about how the muddles of the past can contribute to our finding a meaningful place in the world. During his lifetime, my relationship with my father was fraught with difficulties related to his catastrophic mental illness, a recurring depression that in its worst form caused him to hallucinate and at its mildest left him so anxious about making decisions that he agonized over simple tasks like getting out of a parking space. When he was sick, I was stricken. When he was on an upswing, I struggled to establish personal boundaries in the face of his theatrical exuberance. In his 60s and 70s, he liked to date women in their early twenties, phone me with half-serious, half-facetious business proposals, pick fights with me by telling me he was worried I would turn out like my mother, copy edit my already-published articles, pull out a plastic whistle in a restaurant and act like he was about to trill for the waitress.

There were easy times with him, a few, not enough, but still: sitting on the steps of the Berkeley Rose Garden watching the sunset, looking up etymologies in his Oxford English dictionary, getting trounced by him at Trivial Pursuit just for the stories he could tell about World War II battles, Negro League baseball players, and folk music from the Great Depression. When I am teaching English as a second language, I often remember him laying out for me, with his gold Cross pen on a restaurant’s paper placemat, George Bernard Shaw’s satirical claim that “ghoti” spelled “fish” (gh as in cough, o as in women, and ti as in nation)

And to tell the truth, the best time for me with him is now, when I have had almost a decade to heal from the emotional extremes that he inspired–the panic, shame, and grief. Only now am I getting around processing the positive aspects of our relationship and the tendencies he provided: an awareness of patterns in nature, a passion for stories, and an unconditional love for the wayward English language. Every time I help a student correct a double negative, grasp the difference between that and which, or save their hardest-hitting idea for the punchline, I am laying out the best of him for the benefit of a new generation, reveling in the entirely real persistence of his legacy.

• Today is pretty [???]

I’m not the first one to cry foul about the Honda ad that plays over and over on Hulu. Dressed in a lavender shirt, sporting a black vest and fedora, faded jeans, and cowboy boots, a blues singer (Ty Taylor of Vintage Trouble) leans against a splintery porch column and croons, “Today…”

A guitar strums rhythmically as the scene quick-cuts: a newscaster’s head talking, some static, a bronze sign that says “Bankruptcy,” heavy machinery pushing around a mountain of trash. For a fraction of a second, we flash back to our singer, his face (but not his chin and neck) awash in weird light that bleaches his deep brown skin to the same pale purple as his shirt. All of our woes summed up in eight beats: “Today bum bum the world is pretty sad.”

Immediate contradiction follows. Some fancy finger-work on the guitar, and a shiny black car rolls out of the sunrise and down a desert road. Suddenly we’re in the passenger seat, looking up as if from a child’s height at a twenty-something brunette who assures us serenely–maybe even a little smugly–that there are “great things too.” Then a series of quirky but fresh-faced young people, in the middle of doing quirky fun things: wearing superhero costumes, cleaning up a beach, leaning out of a car window streaming a beard long and thick enough to be a sea otter. Today, today, today, is actually, actually, actually (all together now) pretty great!

We’re landing on Mars! Driving fast cars! Even Dr. Seuss would be proud.

The first thing that rankled people about this ad was that its original version featured footage of people protesting outside a Detroit courthouse in defense of their pensions. Aaron Foley, for instance, writing in the blog Detroit Jalopnik pointed out the ugliness of the ad’s implications: it’s OK if old folks eat cat food, as long as the young and strong drive happy. And who needs Detroit as long as we have the import market and the open road?

Eventually Honda cut the protest footage, but the whole thing still makes me want to take a shower in the hopes of washing all the quirky fun out of my life–except that this would be self-indulgent, too, given the drought. Not that I’m against self-indulgence! Not that this blog post isn’t fueled by a giant latte and funded by a tutoring business that involves a lot of driving and leaves significant carbon footprint. For me personally, sitting across a cafe table from the loving, brilliant man that I married, enjoying access to the internet, not to mention a clean water supply and better than adequate food, today offers zero margin for complaint. Nevertheless I am afflicted, because other people are afflicted.

I fiercely believe in self-care, in the human need for optimism and celebration. Maybe that’s why this ad gets under my skin: it exploits human tendencies that resonate in me. We really do need to avoid burying ourselves under bad news. About issues like police brutality, school funding cuts, and unfair labor practices I get so worked up that I enforce a 9 pm ban on conversations with even a whiff of politics. What’s wrong with Honda spreading a little cheer? The problem is that this ad encourages us to shelter in our feel-good zone, to “give back” by spending a day at the beach, and to express our freedom through grooming and wardrobe choices. Forget that freedom of speech and the right to privacy are genuinely threatened. Forget the cycles of poverty, repression, and lack of education. Focus on volunteer work you can complete holding a clipboard on a sunny afternoon. Go home feeling all rosy and fulfilled.

Again, I’ve got nothing against rosy. There’s nothing wrong with clean beaches. Nothing wrong with feeling satisfied, or even joyous, after a good day’s work. All the same, in our thoughts and especially in our actions, we the privileged (and anyone who can view that ad is to some degree privileged) need to open ourselves to fear, grief, anger, disgust. There’s a good reason why young adult fiction these days teems with dystopian societies marked by a wealthy and powerful elite lording it over impoverished masses. In our hearts, we know that we are be heading in that direction. The rich have been getting richer and the poor getting poorer for longer than our teenagers have been alive. It is critical to our society and to our planet that we show our young people something else.

We need to live by the principles that justice and equality are both possible and necessary. Even if we don’t believe it, we need to behave as though we do. That’s our only occasion for optimism–in fact, our only excuse for breathing. It’s a belief that calls for the full range of human emotions, today and every day.