Write Around the Block

I traveled to Jamaica over Christmas break to investigate a guesthouse as the potential venue for a warm-in-winter writing workshop.  I expected the location of Treasure Beach to be picturesque, and Calabash House to be the same.  I did not, however, expect to fall in love with the place.

We landed in Montego Bay several hours late because of air travel delays, and the rental car dealer warned, “I do not advise you to make the journey to Treasure Beach at night.  It is dark, very dark, and winding.”  We booked a hotel with a surprisingly good restaurant and bar, ate curry, drank rum punch, and motored to the south of the island in the morning.

Waiting turned out to be wise: the drive, even in daylight, was treacherous, but the scenery exquisite.  Photo ops rewarded hairpin turns and stomach-lurching ledges.  When we arrived at Calabash House, our cook, the lovely Suzette, and her assistant Euonie, fixed us sandwiches, even though lunch had not been part of our two-meal-a-day agreement.  Elizabeth Seltzer, the owner and host, made sure we were taken care of, though by no means pestered or hovered over.

The town of Treasure Beach has much to be enjoyed and explored:  a reggae club, a stylish spa, shops (including Elizabeth’s wonderful on-site Mermaid Art Gallery) and restaurants.  It is not a shopping mecca, mind you, but it has commerce and nightlife.  Our first evening there we walked down the road to the club, South Jammin’, and bounced to a band featuring drummer Joe Isaacs, who played with the legendary Jackie Mittoo way back at the dawn of reggae.  On New Year’s Eve, a concert at Jack Sprat’s required the mediation of traffic police.  Glowing miniature hot air balloons, close to a hundred of them, were released gracefully into the sky to usher in 2010.

The grounds of Calabash House are not grand, but are sweet and impeccable, groomed daily by staff member, Michael.  Anyone lucky enough to stay there walks the twenty or so steps to the shore amid a delightful array of butterflies and flowers.  I did not have sphygmomanometer handy, but would bet my blood pressure lowered by significant degrees each time I took the garden path.  There’s a hammock to inhabit at the beach’s edge, in case a body becomes too relaxed.

And then there’s the water.  Our group had at least three reluctant ocean swimmers who were nonetheless coerced by the bathing pleasures of Treasure Beach.  The sea is calm and clear, varying shades of blue-green, and a temperature neither too warm nor too cold.  Jusssst right.  It refreshes you from the 80-85 degree heat; I swam and was renewed by my dips into the ocean a minimum of 2 hours a day.

The rooms at Calabash House are large and artful, graced by themed wall mosaics created by the owner herself.  I wanted to lurk through the house and photograph each one, but refrained.  At some point I realized the journey to Treasure Beach was about being there, not simply photographing it, and subsequently decided this was a wonderful place to conduct a writing workshop, a place to be.

Anyone interested?  We would build into the workshop package 7 nights of lodging, van transportation to and from the airport so you wouldn’t have to make that wild drive, 12-14 meals, a nightly literary salon for those who are so inclined, and a boat excursion up the Black River and to the Pelican Bar. (The bar is pictured in the photo on our blogspot, and is only boat accessible.)

We are thinking about Presidents Week 2011, Feb. 19-26, or an earlier week in January.  If you relish the thought of a writing retreat in the warm embrace of the Caribbean, let’s talk.

Winter solstice. Tomorrow we in the northern hemisphere will experience our shortest day, or longest night. Yesterday, last night, into early this morning, a record-breaking snow storm ripped up the east coast and dropped nearly two feet of snow on Philadelphia, grounding planes, chasing last minute Christmas shoppers indoors. The city was hushed. Walkers took to streets where few cars rolled. My husband’s planned trek to Cape Cod– a “guys weekend” with a close friend– was canceled. My courtyard neighbors, all of whom have plans to scatter for the holiday, postponed their travels for a day or two. Today as the skies cleared and the sun sparkled the snow banks, all of us came out in mismatched layers, boots, mittens–warm and dry trumps fashion on a day like today–and we chatted as we shoveled, catching up with each other’s lives in small flakes of conversation, stopping, each of us, frequently, to marvel at the beauty of trees or to grin at the sight of children sledding down usually busy Third Street.

I have been thinking this week of hibernation, of all the ways that these days of shortened light and increased cold signal me as a mammal that it’s time to rest, restore and listen to the stillness. Last Thursday, the sidewalks still bone dry, my yoga teacher told the class that the winter solstice is a good time to get quiet. Only when we get quiet, she reminded us, will we find solutions to problems, will our creativity be able to bubble to our surfaces. She was talking, as a yogi, about finding my “true self,” but I thought immediately of my writing process, about how when I am too busily engaged in my “mental manager,” I rarely get a creative piece going, but sometimes, often, on a quiet walk or when I’m soaking in a hot tub, an idea, a line, maybe just an image or a word or two, will float into my head. “Let go of the question,” the yogis say, “and the answer will follow.”

When my children were little, I let go control and learned humility. It didn’t happen all at once; the idea wasn’t native to me or consistent with my upbringing at all. But bit by bit, I began, at least occasionally, to operate according to the dictates of what I referred to as my “snow day theory of life.” To wit: The day you plan to get done all those errands you’ve been avoiding, or want to edit that story or need to return a dozen phone calls, it snows, schools are closed, kids are home, bored and needy, and your plans are shot to hell. Slow down. Give up on snapping through the to do list. It was my “turn lemons into lemonade” moment the first time I thought “I’m not just ripping my hair out one strand at a time. I’m becoming flexible.” The snow day theory blanketed all sorts of frustrations– sick days, flat tires, phone lines down.

I woke yesterday and found both cats stretched out at the foot of the bed, sleeping the sleep of the redeemed. No cat nap edginess; I stomped around and they did not move. I hovered over each of them to assure myself their breath was still making their bellies– ever so gently– rise and fall. Usually they are rammy first thing in the morning, in search of food and attention, still wired from their nocturnal house explorations. Outside, the snow fell in fat, steady flakes and the wind blew drifts sideways. Whatever we had planned, we were going to have to unplan. “What the hell,” I thought, “mammals that we are, we should all be out cold,” and I crawled back in beside them and, in the stillness, my mind happily wandered.

I work at a school where Santa arrives in a helicopter on the soccer field at this time of year.  The children shriek and wave, Santa and Mrs. Claus throw broken candy canes, and the hullabaloo is more confounding than exhilarating.

But I’m not going to write another piece on being miffed about the commercialism and pageantry of Christmas.  I want to recognize what one of my young students said this week, which just might get me through the season.

During an assignment that had not much to do with the holidays but was about community, I asked a group of bright second graders to describe a place in their neighborhood that is very important to them.  Most of their answers zeroed in on favorite restaurants, parks where sports were played, and the school itself.  The last child to volunteer said that his family was the most important place in the community.  The rest of us paused, blinked, and tried to digest his answer.

“Without my family,” the boy said, undeterred by our silence, “I would wander around the streets with no place to go.  I wouldn’t even have a name.”

The teacher in me had to breathe and reconsider my urge to say, “But a family is not a place.”  And I am so glad I had the presence of mind to keep my mouth shut and think for a moment.

Because family is a place.  It is where we go to be completely known, in all our goodness and failing.  It is the comfort zone in which to erupt with laughter, or weep because there’s nothing else that can be done.  It is where we break down, and where we find the strength and shelter to put ourselves together again.  A family may not be one of origin:  it is often what we build through years of friendship and association.  But it is always where we go to be ourselves.

The child pictured above is not the boy whose remark made my classroom pause this week.  This child is my brother.  He’s a middle-aged man now, experiencing a rough patch, and I hope he knows that he is a place to me, a reason why I belong, and proof we are not nameless.  Look closely at the picture and you’ll see in him the bewilderment Christmas produces in both of us.  It must be a family trait.

May you all be in the place you call family this holiday season.

When I was fifteen, I was a child in a woman’s body.

This thought scrolls through my brain, a truth that seems suddenly terrible since I heard the news about a gang rape in Richmond, California, my home state. The rape occurred over a span of two and a half hours, on a high school campus at night after a homecoming game, with bystanders clutching their cell phones, texting friends to come watch the show.

She’d apparently drunk a lot of alcohol, which was the go-ahead signal for a gathering of young men to beat and use her like a dehumanized doll for hours, and for the rest of the crowd to enjoy and promote it like live theatre. I suppose it was live theatre, but not the variety I envisioned for the world in which I hope to grow old.

When I was fifteen, it was 1968, and I was a child in a woman’s body. I know I was, and so were girls who were more sexually advanced. They were simply children in bodies more experienced than mine. We grew up in the days of sexual revolution; that’s what we called it when a girl could choose to have sex before marriage without being branded a harlot for possessing the same urges boys had. It was the first time in our country’s Puritanical history a young woman could do so and discuss it freely with her peers without being publicly derided if word leaked out. I remember having such discussions, the sheer heady rapture of them, even if I wasn’t sure I wanted to participate in the game. Having that choice was the purview of an individual female in my generation, and rape was something cavemen chose, in theory, at least. In practice? Rape did not disappear. Rape has never disappeared, despite our hard won steps toward enlightenment and equality.

There are cavemen still among us, but it’s difficult to fathom why or how. So much has transpired since the dawn of our kind: language, literature, art, music, science, medicine, hygiene, philosophy, psychology, civil rights and equal opportunity legislation. Why would young men act so flagrantly against the cultural and intellectual advances of our species? What would drive them to violate bodies that are the bearers of human life?

I asked the smartest man I know, respect and love, and he thinks the internet, its bottomless grab-bag of pornography, revitalized the myth my generation sought to eradicate, of women as objects for the taking, and sex as something procured. The net has supplied a lightning bolt for the prostrate monster of misogyny. It was almost on its way out, folks, but now, it’s alive! Alive with sadism, masochism, bondage, domination, rough sex, violent sex, snuff videos, bored and belligerent spouses looking for more excitement than marriage provides, singles staying that way because the fantasies are limitless, teenagers writhing in parochial school uniforms, and, lest we forget, bestiality is there, too. Those animals don’t have the brainpower we supposedly do, and I am loath to imagine them victimized, without having intelligible voices to raise against savages.

The victim of the crime in Richmond was fifteen years old, a child in a woman’s body. I wonder what she will say when she finds her voice, when she finally recovers—and I pray that she does—from the savagery visited upon her.

And what about those of us horrified at the image of young men huddled over cell phones, feverishly texting news and photographs of a gang rape in progress, and not one of them calling for help? What shall we say with our voices?

Photographs are my favorite prompts for writing students. Look closely, I always instruct. Consider not only the occasion for this photo, but the interaction of people, both the obvious subjects and those caught in the background. Look for those small details that hint at a time and a place. Speculate on their lives, their moods, their expectations.

When I came across two loose Halloween photos in a stack of old files the other day, I decided to practice what I preach. There I am as a witch, sitting with Paul and Michelle in their authentic garb from India. Paul wears a turban and Michelle looks impossibly young. The other photo is of Ray and Sondra, dressed in silk kimonos and playing one of my guessing games – also involving photos. Ray holds a lit cigarette in one hand and a lit candle in the other. Sondra holds pen and paper. Both of them smile for the camera.

This Halloween Party is at the Roundhouse, our very first house, and the exposed brick wall behind Ray and Sondra is the result of long, hard, hours of Tom’s labor. The Irish travel booklet in my lap has to be from 1970, and the slogan on my chest (“I’m Hecate, Fly Me”) mocks an airline’s ad slogan of the time. My costume consists of black leotard and tights, a hat made of black construction paper, and crepe paper streamers for my witchy hair. I have a lipsticked heart on my cheek, and I, too, hold a burning candle.

I could be satisfied with what little I see here, but because I wonder where my children are, and because I am a librarian at heart, I search for the album that once held these photos. This is what I discover: the party, for teachers from Tom’s school, was in October 1974. Our daughter has yet to be born. Our son is sleeping in his nursery. And this is what I know: in less than two years, that little country school will be tied up in a long string of misery that includes illness, divorce, widowhood, and murder.

None of those are the stories I want to write, so here is what I will tell you about the folks in the two photos. We have lived reasonably happy lives. We have all stayed married and raised our children. Paul and Michelle are grandparents. Sondra is now blonde, and Ray quit smoking ages ago. We remain fast friends, and our times together are filled with laughter, not remorse. Despite all we have learned of life in the last thirty-five years, we live with the same hopeful yearning once so evident on our sweet, young faces. Our story continues, and that is a prompt in itself.

Late in my fifties, I have become a groupie. The past two Tuesdays, I went to see Springsteen at the Spectrum, a Philadelphia venue Bruce has played 51 times, each time to a sold out crowd. The arena will be demolished at the end of the month. As a farewell to the old place, Springsteen and the E Street Band performed in their entirety three of his earliest albums on four different concert nights. Though Springsteen was the cover boy of AARP Magazine, having turned 60 this past September, his fans span generations. The twenty-somethings in front of us,far younger than the album, Born to Run,knew every word of every song. Philadelphia, the city of Rocky and cheese steaks only a cast iron stomach could digest, the city whose sports teams, until last year, were perennial also rans,loves Springsteen. We love the way he comes on stage energetic and doesn’t stop moving or engaging us for close to four hours. No curtain warmers. No intermissions. A working man. You take your seat and he takes the stage. In a few minutes you and everyone else is out of your seat. Whatever sorrow you brought into the Spectrum, is ushered out the door. Even when he’s singing what the critics the next morning will dub his “downer” songs, you are feeling whole and lifted.

The first Tuesday was planned months ago by my friend, Jeanne, the Springsteen addict who turned me on to his concerts, and we brought our husbands. As we four walked out of the arena, singing and giggling in the colder than usual night, Jeanne told me she had heard there were still a few seats left for the last of the four concerts, a week away. “Want to try to get a couple?” She had a rough weekend of family crisis coming up; I’ve been in a blue funk. “It would be totally crazy,” I answered. We decided “totally crazy” was just what we needed.

Jeanne’s crisis weekend was harder than she anticipated. I was more blah. The seats we assumed would be terrible (”behind the stage” we were told, but really they were to the side, right where you could see every sweat bead and smile and crease mark in Bruce’s jeans) were great. The audience bonded even before the band took the stage that second Tuesday. The night before, our Phillies (World Champions the year before but still the Rodney Dangerfield of sports teams, assumed to be a fluke winner) had hung in and come from behind to win a pennant-run up game against the Dodgers with 2 outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. If you made that game up for a poem or story, you would be told it needed to be made more subtle to be believable. We were in the Spectrum, everyone talking Phillies, when a security detail was spotted accompanying a VIP to his seat near us: Joe Torre, manager of our rival Dodgers. Instantly the crowd began to chant “Beat L.A.” Torre was good natured about it all, understood that when fans are passionate, sports teams and performers are lucky, because passion is communicable. Torre waved and signed autographs on Phillies ticket stubs and then Bruce and the band came out and kept us all moving (”Born in the USA” that night)and for four hours we were all one. The next night our Phillies won another game, clinched their division title and secured a return trip to the World Series this year. Last year, their win came after a dry spell of nearly three decades. I thought fans would be blase this year, having come to see ourselves finally as winners, but we in Philadelphia are again delirious. Phillies red is on everyone. Total strangers chat in store lines about the moves of each player.

But this isn’t a story about sports. This could be about writing. After decades of success, Springsteen’s entitled the album and concert tour of his sixtieth year, “Working on a Dream.” He’s still working, though he can’t need the money and would pack audiences into his concerts if he gave them half as much. He’s still dreaming. For nearly four hours last Tuesday, he had thousands of people dreaming with him. Thousands of fists in the air, thousands of voices belting “tramps like us, baby we were born to run.” I thought about the Phillies and those come from behind two runs. I thought about the friend beside me who had traveled and worked to help family members navigate the shoals of crisis though she wanted to hide from the pain. I thought about the story I’ve been stalled on for weeks and how I had been avoiding writing and feeling miserable, and I resolved to start back to it the next morning. It felt good to get back to work. Baby, we were born with passion; we were born to hang in.

In the past week, I reunited with two old and dear friends. One was a friend from high school, the other a roommate from college; one I hadn’t seen for over 30 years, the other for almost 40.

We all grew up in safe suburban neighborhoods and modest but lovely homes. Our parents drove us to music and art and dance lessons. We did not color our hair, except for an occasional lemon juice rinse, nor did we wear excessive makeup. We were raised to be “nice girls,” which meant the opposite of trampy. You know, those girls with ratted hair and raccoon eyeliner and skirts up to there. The girls who smoked in the school bathroom, snapped chewing gum, and went with boys who drove vans and station wagons that had curtains around the back windows.

Decades ago, I was jealous of one of these dear friends I recently met with because she had huge green eyes and attended every Beatles concert held at the Hollywood Bowl, and of the other because she was lithe and had a cute little candy apple red Fiat.

We went out into the world expecting it to treat us with the deference and care that our parents, in all good faith, led us to believe was our lot. We opened ourselves to love like corsage flowers.

Decades later, there are six divorces between us. We held on in our marriages until we saw we would die, either literally or metaphorically, if we stayed. We were lied to, bullied and betrayed in ways we could never have predicted back when we felt a young man breathing in our scent as though it were a blessing. Back when we believed it possible for him always to be charmed by the way we wobbled in high heels, or misplaced our keys, or smiled when we were actually upset.

There are daughters, sons, stepdaughters and stepsons, and we wish them well as they go out into the world. But we can’t protect them from the disappointments and cruelties of love any more than our parents could protect us, once we left their homes in search of our own.

I look at my friends in their fifties, and I want to weep because I still see the girls they were, the litheness heavier, the large eyes droopier. But beauty was never fully present till now—before it was merely freshness mistaken for beauty. We are beautiful today because we have been shattered, and we’ve repaired ourselves, like those other girls emerging from the curtained station wagons, smoothing their disheveled hair, opening their compacts to survey the damage.

Who knew there were varieties of azaleas that bloom twice each year? I grew up thinking of azaleas as a spring blossom, reliable sign of May in central New Jersey. Pink, white, salmon, purple: their hues varied but never their timing. The azaleas in my front yard, the shrubs dotting the university campus that was my personal park across the street, these flowered each year right around my early May birthday. They bloomed the same weeks as the magnolias–a whole grove of them a few blocks from home. I inherited boxes of photos snapped by my father each spring, my sisters and I dressed in party wear, faces forward, pink and white magnolia petals a curtain behind us. How many Mother’s Day albums did these fill?

And here I sit: October in Philadelphia, white flowers feathering an azalea bush next to my bench. My daughter was a Philadelphia October baby, born into a season of gold maple leaves and red apples, crimson asters and bold orange mums. Last Sunday she turned thirty and I spiraled into a wash of memory; I have been pondering the texture of time. Some months and even years of her life have been viscous, slow moving, even gloppy or sticky at times. Now it seems whole decades have flowed rapidly around bends I never saw from the banks on which I stood as a new mother.

Thirty years ago minus a week or two, my mother wheeled her first grandchild, me walking beside the two women I’d become sandwiched between. We strolled around my block in sharp fall light, through crunching oak leaf piles, each of us lost in reverie. Suddenly, she looked at me, confused, startled. “I was just trying to figure out who you are,” she said. “I just realized I’ve been thinking the baby is you.” She giggled sheepishly when she added, “I just realized I’m not thirty years old any more.” I retorted with something sarcastic, something that indicated that I thought maybe she should look in the mirror once in a while, as if her dislocation had anything to do with her salt and pepper hair and a few deeply etched laugh lines around her mouth. Someone once said we are all, always, every age we’ve ever been. I wish I could remember who said it.

My mother has been gone almost 12 years now. When she died, my baby sister planted a magnolia tree in her own yard up in Massachusetts. Each year, for a decade, my sister called or wrote saying “Mom’s magnolia blossomed for her birthday again!” We decided the flowers, appearing on a spring bloomer in mid-September in New England, had to be some sort of benevolent sign. My mother’s grandchildren ranged in age from eight to eighteen the year their grandmother died. This year the youngest is almost twenty. From Massachusetts, my sister writes me that a horticulturist friend has clued her in: it seems there is a species of magnolia that blooms twice a year. Who knew? I need to tell her about my azaleas. We will laugh at our naivete. We will laugh sheepishly, and then secretely long for our former ignorance. We will long for a time when the off-season appearance of a few fragrant petals could feel like a miracle.

The authors, too many to possibly see, represented every genre. We overheard snippets from Judy Blume, Lois Lowry, Walter Mosley, and Nicholas Sparks as we wove among the book-reading masses. We were charmed by Jeannette Walls’ claim that she wrote her book imagining how a rich kid would someday read it and understand her life. We were inspired by Julia Alvarez’s fight to keep a Virginia school from banning her book and moved by Azar Nafisi’s passion for becoming an American citizen. But being writers, and therefore observers of life, we were often distracted by the antics of those around us.

Having dodged elbows and umbrellas to make it to the first row of SRO at the John Irving presentation, we found ourselves directly behind two women breastfeeding their tiny infants. Given that Irving was discussing fatherhood, perhaps it was appropriate, but the people coughing down our necks only made me think of one thing: swine flu. Why would any mother bring a new baby into such a crowd? She was desperate to hear good writing? Or she was desperate to get out of the house?

We found seats before Marilynne Robinson began to read, but it was hard to concentrate when the couple in front of us was entwined into a single, two headed creature. His head nestled against her neck, her mouth scoured his face, and they whispered incessantly. By the time Tim O’Brien began to read, I figured they would slink away. But no, suddenly they raised their heads, rapt, as O’Brien read his essay. The girl wept at every word, and the boyfriend offered comfort by kissing her shoulder.

“He was the man who read with me. I didn’t know he was famous.” That was some child in Washington, D.C. I was on Cape Cod the week Ted Kennedy died, was glued to every bit of the coverage. The Cape Cod Times was filled with stories of Kennedy’s life in Hyannis. “He waited for his turn in line.” The man at the bakery. “He helped us when we were at risk of losing our house to the bank.” A couple nearing retirement. “He remembered to call my family every September 11, ever since my boy died in the towers.” A Massachusetts constituent. “He was father to 11 extra kids after our father and Uncle John died.” One of the late Robert Kennedy’s sons.

I was glued to the news coverage of Kennedy’s funeral– newspapers, television, radio. A child of the Sixties, I bathed in nostalgia. Outside, Hurricane Danny whipped the National Seashore lands the Kennedy family had fought to preserve. Two days before the senator was eulogized and buried, the sun had shone on Cape Cod, and people– natives, wash ashores and first time visitors– had lined the roadways, stood on the bridge to the mainland with placards. They waited for hours to see the entourage carrying his casket, his family, for a few seconds. They stood in the sun with children on their shoulders, with elderly and disabled relatives in wheelchairs, thousands of “regular people” wanting to bid a last farewell to a man from a family that the press dubbed “American royalty.” At night, the senator laid in-state in the Kennedy Library in Boston, I followed his journey off Cape to pick my husband, Steve, up at the airport. Along all roads, construction signs were lit and read “From the People of Massachusetts: Thanks, Ted.”

I arrived at the airport red-eyed and full of Kennedy stories to share, but when my husband jumped in the car, the first thing he told me was that he’d started the morning comforting our neighbor, Sue. Sue was pretty distraught, had to put her beloved cat, Sammy, down the night before. When Steve got to work, he stopped in the coffee shop next door to his office for his morning coffee, and saw his usual waitress weeping over the dog she’d lost the day before. “It was a day for comforting people, I guess,” he said.

“He accomplished so much in his lifetime,” my husband says as he reads the litany of legislation for which Ted Kennedy is given credit. “I’ll never do what he did in his lifetime.” I thought about all those kids who will remember the old guy who came to their school and read with them when no press corps was taking notes, the Ted Kennedy I’ve been mourning. I thought of those bereaved pet owners comforted by my busy lawyer husband who has always meant to change the world. “Sure you will,” I say.