3Doors from Serendip

Yesterday, I had dinner with two friends.  Instead of the planned frittata which morphed into an omelet, we wound up with angel hair pasta, blue potatoes, greens & cookies.  Only the potatoes, for me, struck out.  Cozied by wine, I asked to read an excerpt of my novel-in-progress.  Unfair question.  I read what I haven’t ever read aloud, and the words felt odd, too slow on my tongue at times.  After thinking I was near completion, I scrapped two-thirds of the manuscript and began again.  I am using quotations from Virginia Woolf to help me, she who wrote one of the most devastating lines in literature: Mr. Ramsey, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsey having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.

Can one write after this?  Once in the first class I taught professionally, and miserably, a young boy came up to me after Winter Break and said, Thank You, for Virginia Woolf.  This is why I teach.

My tenure such as it is at Naropa ends this Spring.  I don’t know what lies ahead.  Some people are more graceful with their exits, saving their goodbyes until the end.  But as Joan Didion taught, you need to go to the beginning to arrive at the end.

In 2004, I packed my car with a friend, and we drove from Sag Harbor to Boulder.  I thought I was striking out, leaving teaching behind, starting anew.  Of course I wasn’t, because I found adjunct work almost immediately.  A friend said, becoming an adjunct isn’t pretty, and it wasn’t.  I flew out to Cambridge for a low-res; to San Francisco for a once a month job; and Naropa welcomed me with open arms, or a deep bow.  I taught Art of the Essay, a course I will end with this Spring, in addition to another on Creative Writing:An Introduction.

Seven years, if I do the math, fly by.  Sometimes I still count on my fingers each fall to make sure. I did take a year off in the middle, but what will it be like without the structure of teaching?  On my year off, I fell fiercely into yoga practice.

I have decided, as I did as soon as I returned to campus after my year off, I would devote myself to three things: my classes;yoga;and my book.  Before my year off, I’d dine constantly with friends.  After, hardly ever, even as I became more interested in all things food.  So, yesterday, dinner with friends, and it felt like coming home to myself.

The other home, this place I’ve made my home, is where if I spill coffee on my laptop, I can get into the car and drive to the Apple Store in minutes and get help.  That’s what I did five days ago, with success.  Can home be defined by ease of living?  A place were one is secure, at ease, ready to face an embarrassment of riches and hard times?

The photograph above is accompanied by poems on doors at http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/mcbride/Doors.html

and this:

…I never thought how all the while
what I needed was so simply
this:
a door, to the outside
that opens
a door, to the inside
that shuts.

from Becky Birtha
“Doors”
The Forbidden Poems

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“O Paris, I am so lonely in you!” wrote my friend Megan when we were both in college. I love her poetry, getting to the heart of the matter all at once, as once when she wrote, “I’m poeted out.” I have been blogged out but Megan urges me to write.

I read recently that to indulge in daydreams is to emerge sadder into reality. Dreaming it will snow might make you disappointed when you discover the overcast , dry reality. And Walter Mitty must have been unhappy, can anyone remember? The Buddhists would say that living in the present is the key to happiness, but the writer in us might differ. Writers always look back, look ahead, and dream. It is almost like a drug-induced state, nostalgia, or strong imagination. We can remember sensations, colors, conversations. Lovers do this; it is how they maintain their nuclear world.

Elegy–what a beautiful word–in a country churchyard , when Thomas Gray speaks of who have passed, when remembrance is found in a tea-soaked biscuit, when even summer past is praised. Memoir, when I look back so you can see.

What do I remember in my loneliness, when I strip from it romanticism? The wants, I suppose, the I-do-not-haves. That is when I forget to take down a book, wrap myself in an afghan, and read with a cup of tea nearby. If it is winter, and the afternoon sun streams in, I fall asleep. But if it is summer, loneliness is warded off outside with a magazine, or in the labor of gardening.

Is it loneliness that makes us rely so much on email and Facebook instead of conversations? No news there, but still there we are, logging on. Where did I read about a computer program called Freedom that will not let you go on the net for a predetermined set of time? An article on Nora Ephron in The Times.

photo by roman from dreamtime.com

After all that, I’m Facebook enabled again. A glitch, a malfunction, a something. Photos from my multi-talented friend, Diane Cooper, entitled November’s Child.