Category Archives: beginnings

Remembering Erich

My younger brother, my only sibling, died a little more than a year ago. This will be our second Christmas without him. My brother was a loner and unpredictable so Christmas without him, even when he was alive, was not rare, but this year feels different. When you love someone, even if you don’t always enjoy their company when they are around, knowing they are safe somewhere in the world is a comfort. My brother’s existence seemed less and less safe as the years went by, certainly in the last few years when he had physically moved a thousand miles away and was living in his van, but he kept in touch with my mother by phone, often daily. I didn’t always believe or trust in the news he shared with her about his life. My brother’s narratives often strayed from reality, and I never knew how much he believed of his own tales. Toward the end of his life I would have liked more than anything to know how much he believed himself of what he spun for the rest of us. But that was the one thing you could never really know with him.

My brother was an alcoholic.

He was the smartest person I ever knew, smart enough to observe and draw conclusions about life that most people happily miss. He was smart enough to see that his intelligence, his dyslexia, his six foot seven inch, one hundred ninety pound frame, his poet’s heart and painter’s eye made him an odd stranger in this world. We were eighteen months apart in age, and the children of addicts. That it was my job to pilot my little brother to safe waters seemed clear to me at an early age, but I lost that sense of mission when I started school. While school was a place of safety and belonging for me, it was only ever a danger to my brother. So it became every man for himself in my little family, and that single, unspoken truth wounded him immeasurably. It also, as wounds often do, defined him.

When you love an addict, you always imagine there is a way of helping just within reach, something that you, and maybe only you, can do, or say, or maybe a way of being that will change things. That somehow it lies within your power to make the light snap on. There isn’t of course, but the fact that you believe there is makes you and your addict perfectly suited to one another. My brother found and made his own family as an adult, cobbled together from childhood friends, and like-minded dreamers. He sometimes loved well, and was loved by others along the way, but his wound would not be healed. He died alone. A resilient few people tried hard to keep that from happening, but looking back, I think that is how he had planned it.

Christmas, however, offers an alternate ending to my brother’s story.

Christmas was not his holiday. Too much family. Too much forced cheeriness. Too many ways to disappoint and be disappointed. Christmas is about beginnings, about the hope that comes with beginnings. Christmas, as a holiday on its own, does not have much to recommend itself to broken people, people with wounds, people who have seen more endings than beginnings. But Christmas, as a holiday, doesn’t stand alone. It is encompassed within the story of a larger life, the life of a man who, like my brother was defined by his wounds, left alone by his friends, and homeless. Christmas, as a story, is circumscribed by the story of Good Friday and Easter. The baby grows. The man loves others more than himself. The world sees no use for him. He dies alone.

And then, in the most unimaginable twist, he conquers death, takes back his broken body and walks among us. Christmas introduces us to the One who can truly say, “No one dies alone.”

I think, in the days and hours after we left his side, the days and hours he lay in hospice dying, my brother had a divine appointment with a fellow wanderer. How he responded in those last moments is, for a time, a mystery, but because it is Christmas I can hope.

Goodbye Easy, Hello Happy

Recently a string of minor inconveniences has detoured me from getting any kind of daily exercise, and the combination of this with the holidays, a nasty recycled virus, and some extra responsibilities have left me feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and now, according to my all-wise therapist, depressed. I am Patient Zero for mental illness. I already have SAD, ADD, and chronic Just Let Me Take a Nap-itis. Now I’m depressed. Really? Just now? I thought I was born depressed.

In all seriousness, this happens to me every winter to one extent or another. This winter, though, I have gained weight. More than the usual oh-no-its-time-to-give-up-the-second-glass-of-wine weight. This is a sneaky, perfidious weight. My sluggish mind acknowledges that action must be taken, but it is cold outside, and I’ve been playing phone tag with the trainer at the gym to get a new workout planned, and my jeans HURT me. I should take them off. There’s not a lot one can do without wearing pants, except nap. I should nap.

And so it goes. I just want things to be easy.

I was talking to a friend recently who was returning to the grind of medical school after a month off. He was remarking on how easily he had adapted to doing absolutely nothing, and how that scared him because he had some relatives who’d ballooned to four hundred pounds and had not left their house, had not left their sofa, in a decade. “It runs in my family!” he said, looking mildly horrified.

I don’t have to shake the family tree too hard to find my own versions of what I might become if I let things slide, but this only occasionally prevents me from practicing a slew of bad habits. This winter it’s getting harder and harder to find external motivations for doing what my internal motivators have decided to nap through. What if my internal motivators don’t wake up? What if they just go on a long, long holiday and leave no forwarding address? I can see the handwriting on the wall, folks. Inside me there is a fat, alcoholic, hoarding, crazy cat lady living on the public dole and the only thing I have to do to let her emerge is nothing at all.

I don’t want to have to exercise to be thin and fit. I don’t want to have to get up early to get anything done in a day. I don’t want to have to wrestle out all the terrible paragraphs onto a page before one beautiful sentence emerges. I don’t want to have to fight with an acquaintance to have her become a friend. I don’t want to have to embrace a lot of ugly truths about myself before I find the grace to extend forgiveness to someone else, and yet I’m greedy. I want to be, and have all these things.

I just need to say no to the Easy Button.

My therapist says to start with one thing at a time. Get back to exercising every day. I’ve promised him I will, so now I have to do it or lie to him next time. I hate the cold. I’ll blow my knee or shoulder out if I start a new workout without the trainer. The fat lady in me wants to take a nap immediately. But the greedy lady in me wins. I put on three complete layers of clothing and waddle out into the arctic freeze to do three miles.

It is positively blissful.

The Things We Buried (apologies to Tim O’Brien)

One of my resolutions this year, and sooner rather than later, is to find my desk. My desk hasn’t gone anywhere, but in the past couple of years with the publication of my novel, Alabaster Houses, and all the subsequent non-writing activities required to publicize it, I have gotten surprisingly little work done on my current novel, and absolutely none of it at my desk. At the same time, our empty nest has undergone a population explosion. Lots of returning, reproducing, and relocating has been going on here. As more and more of our household items have had to be moved, sifted through, re-designated, or given away with each new arrival and departure, the loft that was once my office has become a purgatory for displaced belongings.

Recently I’m feeling the yearn for routine again, coffee in the same place at the same time, the slow slog, the tedious work of writing a novel. It’s time to sit my ass down on a hard plank of a chair, plunk out black letters onto a white page for several hours at a time and intermittently stare into space. That sort of work can only get done at my desk. Time to find it.

At first my desk remained visible. Shipments of books arrived and were placed on top of piles of research and binders with early drafts and more book shipments and boxes of promotional materials. I spent some time traveling, and my desk became a dumping station, shrouded under piles of paper and books and boxes that may or may not have contained things I should or should not have been paying attention to. Then it became the mere backdrop to the pile of things I was storing in front of it. Later, that portion of the room where my desk had first been accessible, then merely visible, then vaguely locatable became the forgotten area behind the space that I could no longer get to where I had stored some things that I no longer remembered if I did or did not need, because they were barricaded by the stack of things that I definitely needed but had no current room for anywhere else in our house.

So what do I find on the way to finding my desk? Lots of outgrown baby equipment. Since the publication of my novel, my grandson has fast forwarded from a preemie to an infant to a toddler. He has shed just about as much molded plastic, rubber, and enamel coated metal as he’s shed skin cells. We have baby-sized containerization technology that swings, rocks, bounces, rolls, sings, whirls, blinks, whizzes and sighs.

I find old, unopened bills. The thing about bills is, you never get sent just one. Fail to pay it, and new ones arrive punctually every month. I open this one and find a twenty month old invoice for something I must have eventually paid, since I’m not in jail, but who can remember these things?

I find lists made to myself for things I was supposed to do that might or might not have gotten done. I find books I meant to read but haven’t, articles I meant to read but haven’t, clothes, whole wardrobes in varying sizes and conditions, folded, bagged and ready to pass on. I find boxes of beads, threads, craft books, my Bedazzler with scraps of studded, beaded, and dazzled fabrics waiting to take shape. I find a stack of picture frames in advancing stages of disrepair. I find an endless supply of things I always need but can never find- pens, pencils, notepaper, binders, folders, paper clips, packs of light bulbs, two cans of Endust, several random, unmated book ends, a box full of colored coat hangers. I spy an art easel slumped in the corner, crates full of old textbooks, school handouts, and lesson plans.

I find a cat. To be honest, I recognize this cat; it belongs to us, but who knows how long it has been hiding in this particular box waiting for me to shift the lid a little. It springs out with a screech from the middle of a pile.

I find a crate full of old Marine Corps cammies and dress shirts. A box of model cars, a plastic crate labeled “Vital- Do Not Throw Out!!!” full of my married daughter’s old bank statements, college tuition statements, employment pay stubs and high school theater Playbills. A box of old cds, letters from various girls, foreign coins, ticket stubs, photographs, a belt buckle, a broken watch band, an incredibly expensive school ring still in the box, some individual, unmatched socks and one old pair of graying briefs.

These are the vestiges of the life that has been waged around this space, the peripheral and sloughed off artifacts of heroic efforts, daily grinds, unexpected upheavals, well deserved advances, and the simple but unstoppable passage of time. My loft office, perhaps because of its availability or disuse, perhaps because of its proximity to the entrances and exits in our home, has become a repository of clutter, but clutter that, on closer inspection, as all clutter inevitably does, tells a story.

I am struck by how easily our lives have continued and prospered without any of these things, stored, lost, or forgotten as they have been over the years. Money has been spent replacing some of these things. I am chastened by that. But most of what lies here signifies the passage of a stage of life, a time when my children were younger, more vulnerable, when I had more time to pursue artistic hobbies, a time when I labored at something other than my writing, a time when I labored at my writing, and now, a time when the success of my labors has moved me on once again.

I wonder if people who are relentlessly orderly, compulsively organized, have opportunities to take stock of their lives in such massive, physical chunks. Although the accumulation of disorder on such a large scale leaves me longing for some personal improvement, this is the way my life is lived- in a rhythm of ebbs and surges, and I find value in both seasons.

I also find my desk. A new season about to begin.

The Power and Perils of the Blank Page

A writer with whom I’m acquainted,
Once stared at a blank page and fainted.
For the thoughts in her heart
Were too big from the start
and to put them in words left them tainted.

To an optimist, a blank page is the beginning of something; to a pessimist it may evoke dread. To a writer with an idea, a blank page is a promise to keep. It signals the point in creation when everything is possible, when aspirations are poised on the verge of actuality, and intention has not yet been weighed down by the gravity of the work that lies ahead. But a blank page is only valuable for its potential, for the invitation it extends to the writer. Left alone, it is never more than itself. Unused, a blank page is a travesty, a blight.

Today is January 1, the blank page on which the year 2013 will be written. I have aspirations in my heart for the coming year, and I know before putting a single stroke on the page of today that as the year unfolds, some of my aspirations will change, some will fall by the wayside, some will be grieved and new ones will be celebrated. That is the way of creation. The minute I transform the blank page of this day into a work in progress, I will be faced with regrets; that is inevitable. I will get it wrong. I will need do-overs. But if I become afraid of the process, if I become captive to the beauty of the blank page and forget why it lies before me I will have wasted myself.

My hope for all of us this year is that we recognize the blank pages that lie before us, and that whatever our medium, we transform those pages one day at a time into lives well lived. They may not achieve the aspirations we had for them, but neither will we be found guilty of squandering them.

Happy New Year.