Uncle Richmond in his element.
Jerry has had an exacerbation/ exasperation of COPD, two trips to Urgent Care. This will not go away, but will get better in between attacks, one hopes. I have moved my almost 100-year-old uncle into the assisted living area of the place where we live. Will he live long enough to benefit from the effort? I’m tired. My step-daughter who has stage four cancer has had the flu. An old friend from Delaware just died. Her sobbing husband described her death to us on the phone. What else? Well, the country is in grave, perhaps mortal, danger. I feel so much sadness and impending doom, sometimes lately I wake at 3 and can’t go back to sleep. And I’m a good sleeper.
Is this your condition, too? Where to focus? How to smell a few roses, or in our case, tramp across the lovely snow, when Rome is burning. If the body retracts in fear, nothing becomes possible. I envy the neighbor who makes quilts. Whatever feelings she’s having can be stitched up.
The big picture is too much. If you’re writing, you need to pick something out. You need to think of your audience. This is not a monologue; it’s a dialogue between you and your invisible friend who will become impatient with your list of woes. Who wouldn’t? A list of your woes is entirely narcissistic. What about your friend?
If I’m choosing, I look for the story with the most possible depth, one I can feel tendrils that reach into many other parts of my life, and probably yours. If I want to tell a story, there’s that. If I feel one part of the story drawing inward and radiating outward into something inexplicable about the story, there goes a poem, starting up.
Richmond and the fake orchid. The picture over his head is of a flotilla of kayaks in Sutton’s bay, an effort to set a world’s record. The picture was given to me by the daughter of our neighbor, who had just died. I tell you this because a visitor said she thought it was a flotilla of garbage.
For example, moving my uncle here. I bought him a fake orchid for his room. While we were talking, he reached over and lightly touched the petals of the orchid, too see if it was real. I felt in that touch his astonishment that this life now had things in it like this, the wonderment of his new place, his sudden new life after so many years on the lake, paddling, sailing, building boats. Suddenly, life has thrust this unreal orchid into this unreal life. Life expands and contracts, and here he is, where he never dreamed of being. Someone comes and helps him pick out clothes, someone takes him to dinner. It’s all a surprise.
You can see where the poem would go, although one hopes at last it will also be a surprise. You can see where the essay will go, although until it’s written you can’t know where it’s going or what it may mean. All you know at the beginning is that the story itself fascinates you, how you found yourself compelled to do the considerable work of getting him moved from the place where your own father, his brother lived for five years and died. What is the difference in the brothers that made you want to save this one from a lonely life in a memory care unit? Neither of the brothers had memory loss, but a placement had to be made, fast, and that spot was available. My father, though, being autistic, was content with his books, his little poetry reading once a week during the afternoon tea. His brother, being much more sociable, was fading away there. A story of rescue? Whose? Mine? The person my father could have been?
There are so many tendrils and details that I could write a story, a novel, an essay. Each one would give me a chance to explore. It feels like any direction I might go would open up an avenue that didn’t exist until I opened it. Or, call it string theory, maybe. It feels as if every direction I begin with my words starts carving a path through the wilderness.
That’s the reward of this work. Everything is vines, tendrils, massive trees, streams, until I carve some sort of path through. Through to where? To the clearing where the sun breaks through? Nothing is solved, nothing is locked into a meaning, but somehow the experience, the trip, has been stitched into this life, which amazingly now knows how to hold it properly.
The P.S. . . .
Once again a reminder that my chapbook, Doctor of the World (Finishing Line Press Chapbook Contest Winner) will be available in late March. Here’s the link to order it now.
ORDER BOOK here.