“I am a writer if I never write another line, I am alive if
I never step out of this room again; Christ, oh, Christ, the problem is not to
stretch a feeling, it is to reduce a feeling, all feeling, all thought, all
ecstasy, tangled and tumbled in the empty crowded head of a writer, to one
clear sentence, one clear form, and still preserve the hugeness, the
hurt-fulness, the enormity, the unbearable all-at-once-ness, of being alive and
knowing it too…” from the essay A Life in
the Day of a Writer by Tess Slesinger. Published in the book Present Tense:The
Arts of Living . Copyright 1941.
Today my wife and I completed an arduous task—cleaning out a WWII army
surplus trunk that I inherited from my sister ten years ago who inherited it
from our mother some years before that. Mother was a hoarder of sorts. It was not the
kind of hoarding that would make it to Buried Alive, but it was hoarding. Besides textbooks from my father’s college days at Auburn, she kept his
notebooks, assignment books and correspondence.
In 2001 when my wife and my sister cleaned out our “home place” after
mother went to assisted living, they found a mountain of paper in drawers and
chests that featured her three children in church bulletins, school grade
books, the local paper, anything and everything
that printed our names and our accomplishments. Just like my wife and sister did
in 2001, most of the contents of the trunk went in the garbage, to save my son
from throwing them away after we’re gone. I did keep some of my dad’s composition books
that include his writing and his sketches. As I was throwing his engineering textbooks
one by one in the garbage, I decided to keep three books
that weren’t technical in nature. Turns
out, two of them were my mother’s books from
Judson College and not his. One of them is the book from which I quoted The Arts of Living. That book, as I mentioned,
was copyrighted in ’41. The cover includes the “All Rights Reserved” and language
and instructions to not reprint any part of it in any form. Don’t I remember something about after 50
years copyrighted material becomes a part of the public domain? Well, be that as it may, I’ll take my chances.
One of my readers complained that I haven’t been writing. Something happened either to my blog or to
Facebook, but according to the Blogspot analytics, my 200 or so readers has
shrunk to ten to twenty. I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. But a few days ago my counselor said, “David,
don’t you enjoy writing?” And I said, “Yes
I do.” “Then what difference does it
make who reads it? You benefit from it even if no one else ever sees it.” Good
point. So here my am (the way a certain three year old in our lives would say
it). Just as it was true for Slesinger, writing helps me to create “one clear
sentence, one clear form” from “the tangled and tumbled” thoughts in my head.
That three year old is named Cole. For all his life we’ve
called him “Baby Cole” and we still do.
Yesterday, as he and his family were leaving our house, he was playing on the driveway. He had his arms extended, swaying in and out,
flying like an airplane and making
airplane noises. His older sister said, “Cole,
what is that?” And he answered “Baby Cole.” His sister was thirteen years old
when her family took us in. Now she’s driving. It was a gut check to see that
child driving away with her siblings and no adults in the car. Her mom was in
another car. “As you age, you get older.”
I don’t know what’s going to become of me and my writing.
Well, I know what’s going to become of me, but hopefully that’s some years down
the road. But I try to live my life
every day. “A life in the day” as Slesinger wrote. Hopefully, at least some of my writing will
outlive me. If so, I will have achieved some level of immortality.
So here my am. Ready, willing and able to scratch up my
thoughts and feelings here. Tossing the contents of that trunk wasn't easy. I’ve gotten rid of its contents, now to get rid of
the trunk.
