21
I have said, written, that I was 19, 20. This is a lie. That critical difference -- the teen at the end -- is me trying to say how young I was, to garner sympathy. What a shrewd lie: it matters to the ear, to the mind of the reader.
I was still a boy at 21.
I lay this lie aside.
When I was 21 my first wife Mirren came to me, unexpected. She came to drop off our our daughter, and said:
"I can't do this. I am going crazy."
And she couldn't, and she was, and she did.
two
I have said she was one, or 9 months old. See above. Another shrewd lie. She was still in diapers.
The truth suffices.
I lay this lie aside.
Our daughter was not yet two. She came with two bags: one of tiny clothes, nuks, ba-bas and dollies; the other of cloth diapers. We were 60s hippies. It had to be cloth.
I took care of Molly every other weekend, before this, so I had some provisional things. But I had to scramble to find a real crib, a dresser with a proper changing surface.
My wife checked herself into a facility that night. She would do this again and again for twenty years. I have written about her, her extremity. She went up and down, spent a lot of time in facilities.
Once, months later, she came to us, to me and our daughter, and was psychotic. Pinpoint pupils. Odd affect. I told her she couldn't take Molly for the day. I told her she couldn't come in. I remember watching her thru the window that afternoon after she left, sitting in her car, for over an hour, motionless.
She told me later she was happy I had done this. That she had her dead cop father's .38 and a rifle as well, in her car.
She ended her life. She had the tenacity to wait until her beloved daughter was at least an adult. Her self destruction was epic, but her willpower, to wait so long, for love's sake, was greater than her illness. She was a great painter and a writer. Her journals became incomprehensible over the years. She loved our daughter every minute, every minute she was herself, and had a good heart. Modern medication would have saved her.
give to me
I have always omitted her tragedy, the great love and deep sadness behind her hold on these. I have been bitter; I needed those things, my baby's familiar things. To leave off her humanity, the tragedy of a mad daughter and a lost grandchild, is a terrible lie.
I lay this lie aside.
My wife's mother, convinced it would all be temporary, did not give to me my daughter's things, her furniture and toys and clothes.
She could not let go of them, and they remained in her home, a set piece, a tableau. For decades.
My studio apartment was two rooms. Our beds filled the main room; the kitchenette was along one wall. The small space in front of the sink was our living room. The bathroom was behind the only door.
three beers
I have always said this was one beer. An inane lie. As if someone would think I drank a lot of beer. I didn't, really. A six pack a month maybe. But it sounded nobler to me, to say one. "Poor guy, couldn't even keep his one beer."
I lay this lie aside.
After my baby was with me for two days I poured out the three beers in the fridge and never brought home another for seven years. (Until I was in Brooklyn, with Deborah, who would become my 2nd and still beloved wife. She made me a regular guy again. I never regained my ability to drink beer, not like before. It's a good thing.)
I had grueling days. Here's one, about two weeks into full-time fatherhood: up before dawn, a hike (no car) to the pre-school where I was cook. Sweet little Molly, perched on the stool in the kitchen, the teachers not in yet, while I baked the daily bread.
walked to classes
I always said i ran to classes. I did sometimes; I was a runner then. Usually i walked. I kept my bike at the pre-school for a while, but had to sell it, needed the cash. A dumb lie, to make my life seem more frenetic, a small thing to help justify my decision to quit college. That's coming up.
I lay this lie aside.
I had to make breakfast and serve it, clean up, make lunch, clean up, then walked to classes. After classes I walked, on some days ran, back to the school to pick her up before nursery school closed. A fun daddy dinner, some play time -- we had no TV -- and always I read a book, kissed her forehead. Then, quietly, while she slept, worked on my foam core construction for senior sculpture class. Some down time. Sleep. Up at two AM to help her go potty. Hit or miss it was at this point -- toilet training in progress. I could not return to sleep. My hands itched from the diaper cream and talc. My exhaustion granulated me.
prop me up
I sometimes mention this. I never add that I considered, that whole first six months or so, who I could take her to. Who could relieve me. Who could take her from me. If I had had family nearby I do not know how this would have turned out. None of them were a better choice than me, but I chewed it over. A lot.
A lie, to leave this out.
I lay this lie aside.
This was the night I crept outside, found a place by the window, in the dark, near the window where I could hear her if she called for me. I did not know exactly what I was going to do next. I pushed my face into the deep grass and moaned -- I had no family within 800 miles, to help me, to prop me up. I wept -- I could not abandon her, but I wanted to, oh God forgive me I wanted to.
So then I howled. I bayed. Afraid to wake the neighbors, my face pressed so hard into the earth, with each rasping intake I inhaled dirt, and dead debris. After I reached that skin-of-pins place, the skeletal feeling of empty, and couldn't keep crying, I went back inside. I sat on the edge of my mattress, waited for 5 AM to come, rocking myself. Staring at my white foam-core building, a cell in fact, adorned with asymmetric add-ons and plexi inserts.
In that hour my marrow filled with steel. In that hour my limbs shook, my muscles changed, as boyish, awkward excess was replaced with a man's taut reserve. This event perplexes me still. Believers have ready explanations; I don't. What changed in me was organic, but I think it was because I had an example: my Nana raised my mother alone, during the Depression. Her grace, her humble work, her commitment to self-learning, was steady; for my mother, for her grandchildren, for me.
I gave up
I say sometimes I had one semester left. An artful compression; that is, a lie. It was a mess. Four different colleges, two restarts. At my first college I did OK. I was on the dean's list at the end of freshman yeah, but I always leave out that it was because I had to take frosh algebra twice, again in the spring. (But then I aced it.) By the end of my 2nd year (and a semester at a 2nd school) I had re-connected with Mirren -- I had fallen in love with her the first time at 14 -- and we married and moved west.
I returned to school, because sawing logs at minimum wage sucked. Left that school went to another University. I tell people it was because I was 60s guy, trying things out. Horseshit. I was ambivalent, and did not realize what I was doing.
It was with grief, but also a familiar relief, that I abandoned my degree so close to finishing. I did grieve, though, because this time it wasn't my choice. I just couldn't do it, and it made me realize, sort of, that this was a terrible loss for me.
I lay these lies aside.
I tried to finish college, but I didn't. I gave up. I was, approximately, a senior, finishing an art degree. But I could not sleep, I could not calm myself. A full load of classes, crammed into afternoons and Saturdays. Thirty hours of work, at minimum wage. My baby daughter. I finished my semester, took an incomplete in one course, and ended my formal education. I intended to return, soon, somehow. At 54, I now admit how unlikely this is. Don't tell me I can still go back; I know, I have looked into it, I know how I could make it work. Maybe.
But I have three daughters, two in high school. My wife's cancer ate up our equity, we lost our house, our savings. College, and weddings, perhaps, are around those bends, and I am broke. I do not know how I can do it. I know what they deserve, what they require. If they were not such good scholarship material I would have to admit: I have almost nothing for them. But I do not. I will not callout a lie here, but I am not honest.
If they get accepted by the schools their extraordinary achievements have earned for them, and the scholarships are insufficient, there is no earth forgiving enough to absorb my grief, my guilt, when I tell them: I cannot pay.
I leave this unsaid to them, and hope, absurdly. One, my middle child, a senior, has already been offered $16,000 by Philadelphia University. If FIT takes her, though, if the tuition and books get covered, how will she live? Manhattan is a hole in the pocket, every day.
I want my story to move you. This is no lie.
But I want to serve the human story, our shared narrative, and to do this I must confess my mess, my insipid untruths, my confusion, my common venality, my false starts.
glorified myself
I am cheap even in my self-revelation, vain in my confession: only now that I see how to do this, have made sufficient headway, learned it is OK, credible to teach myself, do I have the courage to admit my mis-steps. It is real enough: I have a bibliography for this, the books and wise teachers (Susan Wise Bauer, her real name) who have awakened in me a hunger to know, my now-relentless drive to recover what I lost, what I might never get, formally. I have read a lot -- a LOT lot -- but only recently have I learned to Read. Only recently have I developed a realistic plan for tackling the Ancient Greek language in earnest. All previous assertions were either premature, expansive or just plain delusional.
I lay these lies aside.
This entire piece is a false start. I set out to reveal my auto-didactism, why and how I began to teach my self. I saw it in this format, with the callouts that reveal the lies, the self-deception, the pretension.
I will do this. I will reveal how my study of Ancient Greek is pitifully inconsistent. How hard it has been to understand Spinoza, to get straight about ancient history. I have accomplished things, but on the way I have exaggerated and glorified myself.
But the moment I began to write it was Some Other Thing first. The tale of the boy.
I continue with this now.
prodigy
I was a prodigy in art, specifically drawing. For real. But though I have never claimed to be a prodigy in anything else, I have torqued, clipped, tainted, and twisted the details to let others conclude: a man who is now so facile with language, who reads so, um, prodigiously -- and I do, this is real: compulsively, endlessly, and with literary tastes of a high order -- well, he must have been a prodigy, yes? Well, bullshit.
I was a quick boy, a glib fabulist, dreamy-headed, and have always had an ability to synthesize information, to make intuitive connections that seem extraordinary. My youngest daughter has it too, even more than I did at her age. But I was no prodigy of the mind. Something short of it.
All else is a lie.
I lay these lies aside.
My relationship with formal education was always screwy. I was precocious but not altogether a prodigy. I got As, mostly, but was easily bored. I read several grades above my level; they were always fussing over me about this, finding me challenges, starting in the 3rd grade. Letting me check out high school books in the 5th grade. I was tracked for advanced classes.
My parents divorced when I was eleven. This was a good thing: my father was abusive and cruel, my mother addicted to pills and a narcissist. But it was 1967, that great and terrible year, and having no supervision meant drugs and runaway and digression.
And jail, at 14.
I quit high school. Moved into a commune, became an emancipated minor at 16. After jail my fellow teens seemed as remote as pod people to me. And the noble lie that was secondary education in America in those days -- pre-sensitivity, pre-feminism, pre-liberation, pre-Panther infiltration revelations, pre-Wounded Knee, pre Watergate, pre-1968 assassinations -- was stiflingly simple-minded. Pollyana-ish. No lie: I couldn't hack it.
I couldn't hack it
I could have. I was a quitter.
Also? I used to tell people I left home when I was 15. Jesus, I have been so full of shit. What is wrong with me?
I lay these lies aside.
At 17 I rushed to get a GED and returned to the mainstream. Being a dropout sucked. I worked as a drug counselor, at a house for runaways -- ironic, that. But a factory future loomed, and my friends were all well-to-do, and heading for college, and so I got away with it: I dropped out, then re-joined my class. Ha.
I was just beginning to glimpse how fractured I was, how many missing parts, how different my pre-divorce childhood had been.
Well, we've covered the college stuff already. Let's get back to revelation.
food stamps
I tell almost no one about this. The omission is dreadful. WIC kept my daughter in milk and cereal, kept us both eating healthy. I had no money. Getting food stamps meant some cash was free. I could get her new shoes, fabric to make her dolls and skirts. And I will admit it: to go dancing a few times a year. Social services for children is a Great and Good part of America, of western civilization, and by denying I got it I dis-serve the hard-working men and (mostly) women who get this aid, the tireless protectors of these programs, and the sound reasoning of the state ensuring milk and cereal for poor children. I have paid lots of taxes since then. My lies of omission and misplaced shame?
I lay these lies aside.
To survive as a single parent making no real money I got WIC and food stamps. My caseworker was a peerless human being, always supportive, always listening and nurturing. I bemoaned my fate, shamelessly. She was so compassionate. I used her like a sponge.
At our last appointment, before I fled further west, she told me of her husband and son. Her husband had a rare degenerative disease that showed up just a few years before. Genetic. He required full-time nursing care, and the county worker's insurance covered day nurses only. So at night she was up, seeing to him.
Her son, in his teens, was tested. He had it as well.
revealed
This is me being a weasel. I have been a recovering sad sack for 33 years. I do not know how much pain my inattention kept me from responding to, all told. I simply do not know if it was possible to see her pain, back then. I am alive to even the worst people I meet now, to their suffering. Especially the worst.
But I have pretended to not see or feel pain too many times to count.
I lay these lies aside.
Not one iota of this pain was ever revealed to me in over a year of monthly appointments. She was alive to my personal anguish, utterly, giving me all I asked for. Indulging me. I sat there and listened to her tell her story. Short sentences. Eloquent. I suffered a peculiar shame, and it courses through me ever since.
Taut muscle is not enough, I learned. A special sinew, a stoic reserve, and this only comes when we give ourselves completely to another's pain, and lay aside our own, for their sake. Compassion is what this was, what compassion really was. My self-sacrifice for my child felt cheap that day.
homeless
24 hours in a shelter, then four weeks in a motel, a crappy place co-opted by the state for such as I. Working six days a week, putting my daughter in childcare, got me up and out, as it were. To a basement apartment. But I fooled myself a few years ago: I got the courage to admit I had been homeless. So I think it OK to let people fill in the blanks and assume this meant weeks in the shelters, and a more movie-of-the-week up-from-the-bottom experience than it was. it was awful. The low moment of my life.
But many had it worse.
I lay this lie aside.
Then I left town. I was homeless for a while. It was brief. Over the next two years I worked hard, and lucked into an entry level position at an ad agency. I got trained. It was the foundation for my, ahem, award-winning design career in New York City.
And it was in New York City that I came face-to-face with real scholarship. Real learning. Brilliance. Prodigies, the real thing. And it was...a relief.
Well, after some humiliating encounters, wherein I was schooled but good. THEN it was a relief.
But it was, it really was. I was in the most exciting city in the world, and anything was possible. And I began to burn.
Homer. Sputtering at first, but steady enough. Tacitus. Livy. Xenephon. I saw what was possible. V.S.Naipaul. Harold Bloom. H.L.Mencken. What I had missed. Patricia Highsmith. Thomas Wolfe. Eudora Welty. And I saw where it would take me, if I did the work. Umberto Eco. Joan Didion. Elmore Leonard. Don DeLillo. James Ellroy. Flannery O'Conner. Cicero.
Spinoza.
OS.
Redaction (1350-1400 ME): (redigere: to lead back)
1. To put into suitable literary form, revise, edit.
2. To draw up or frame (a statement, proclamation)
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Comments
Thank you for this.
consonantsandvowels: yeah, that's it. And affirming our truth is not the same as telling the truth, reliably. I find there is no such thing. we all seem to be endlessly capable of slipping.
wakingupslowly: and your avatar name suits this, eh? Thank you and also for the PM.
Lea: why do I always feel good when you read my posts? thank you. In my last piece I found myself taking umbrage with a commenter for being full of it. Then I woke up as to why he was annoying. Because so am I. And Susan Wise Bauer's book, "The Well-Educated Mind" has been a revelation. She establishes with crisp precision that anyone can educate themselves.
OK, Right. But I found her book after reading her magnum opus, "The History of the Ancient World", what I believe to be the slyest, most learned, best well-written and brilliant one-volume history ever penned. So her assertion that we can do this, we can get this, carries special weight.
Thank you.
C.K.: "the quick decisions..." precisely. Too quick to catch, and then we hear ourselves imperfectly, but grandly, tragically. So it adheres to our story. Thank you.
we are storytellers. Stories are patterns. Our ancestors who did not notice the patterns in the savannah were eaten; the ones who could tell themselves a story, what things represented, what comes next? not eaten so much.
But as Spinoza says -- God i have become a Spinoza bore, the worst kind of bore, since most people find Spinoza incomprehensibly boring -- our comatus, our ME-ness, means we preen, we make ourselves the hero or villain of our stories, and usually it is not quite either.
lunchlady: thank you
And sometimes the most simple is the most profound, as is consonantsandvowels's observation.
I was going to try to get some work done tonight, but I'm now exhausted. I doubt if I'll sleep well, but I need the rest.
This one strikes hard Greg.
JustJuli: the first time I wrote that I wanted to write it again. I wanted to earn the right to say it. You describe it well.
Of course, such self-satisfaction is just more self-gratification, more pretension, more...oh geez. It's hopeless. We are apes who fall in love with our hoots. sigh.
Thanks.
Reading the parallel text was made more complicated by the fact that I could not get the giant and his bridges out of my mind while read it.
Love to you and your beautiful family~
bbd: I have never gotten a comment like yours. You stir a little anguish -- I sometimes feel someone stole my life; who? where is it? why can't I go back?
But I feel the depth of your feeling, and feel pleased. If I cannot have this, or that, or the other thing, i can bygod write and try not to flinch.
I think some day we will be better, we humans. In this post I speak to, write for, that future; to those lucky ones, who accept themselves with grace: We really are this way. We have always been this way.
In one hundred years we will be unread stones, so what else should we do but reveal our trembling selves?
1_Irritated_Mother: love back to you. Thank you.
....next please: You are welcome, and thanks.
A Phoenix risen from the ashes...
So go the stories of our lives, but here, you are brave enough to illuminate the darkest recesses of you heart to us...
A humble, yet tremendous gift. Thank you.
I hold you in the highest esteem for your gifts, for your life, for your rigorous and inventive art
Steven Axelrod: I needed this. You make me laugh. Thanks. Notice I never once promised to be perfect.
Gary Justis: I am convinced we are convinced of our own shaded truths. It is very hard to be an adult, to be honorable, but even harder to go beyond this, to govern ourselves and how we represent.
I reserve the write "true enough" writing. Some truths are better said, even truer when we distort.
But I recently -- my last post, in a comment to an irksome fellow -- disgusted myself a bit; pompously, sanctimoniously, suggesting he might "come clean". Ha!
WalkAwayHappy: This is an exceptionally warm and kind comment. Thank you.
I think your shortcomings are mostly in your own eyes. I also think that you are forgiven.
I see such wonderful experimentation here on OS. Mine, here, seems tepid by comparison. I think OS, OS formally, that is, just doesn't know what to do with the energetic writerly innovation that occurs here.
Writing does it, but is not easy. And by defnition it is a species of false. Because it is words, flying off of me, to be sure, but once released, in what sense is it the real me? We must get comfortable with shrugging off the strictures of our Identity. More Spinoza I'm afraid. Sheesh.
My sense is that this will allow you to more easily look your fellow OSers in the eye. I may be mixing my own stuff up here; so, please excuse if I have.
Well done.
Gabby: i like to format. i earn my money formatting (we just launched this project for Yale! http://climate.research.yale.edu/), but leave off doing it, usually, here on OS. This one, it came to me as a way to footnote "in the flow". And I wanted to write it on th one hand, but debunk i, too, without busting the flow.
As to it being something beyond this: I expected far less from this post. Saturday night, and this is some material I have been working in various ways on other posts. But I have drafts of this material -- about 40,000 words so far -- that are good in parts, are intended to be a memoirish novel -- but I have not found my Voice with it yet. It surges, then diverts. Thank you.
And you've given me more than a couple things to go look up.
To mention just the first, you were very young -- 19 or 21? I suppose by revealing the lie simply shows that you felt very young and wanted people to know how you felt.
They just sharpen the point a bit, and not even that much -- to me. But the point to you? I suppose that they were important because we want to believe that we had to do what we chose to do. But, that is pretty human.
grif: I truly am. my eyes are burning, my heart is full form this remarkable response. It is weirdly like the first post i made on OS in several ways: the feeling i got when people loved it, when it became an EP. And strangely, it was about the night my first wife left with our child, so it resonates on other levels. Life is strange and wonderful.
Robin: thank you
barking: i had to do this. I was a bit of a pompous ass in my last post. commenting to someone. some part of me said, to me, "o yeah?"
Julie: I guess I did something here. I must remember this, the feeling, the need I felt to just say shit, not prance and finesse it. I am more and more struck by the absurdity of my untruths. By everyone's.
skeltenwmn: here is to us, to he ones who stood up and did right and persevered. We aren't rich, society shrugs, but our children will do wonderful things, because we endured
I am afraid to leave, to miss anyone. I am exhausted; we have 28 people -- family -- coming tomorrow and i must put in 8 hr work day before they arrive at 2 pm.
if any one else comments, trust I will respond in the morning. love to all. this has been...ahh. love to all.
Perhaps you need a "brother" willing to purloin your manuscript while you sleep, and show it to an agent or an editor so that the ball can get to rolling. Everything you've written that I've seen here is breathtaking in a way that few pieces of writing I've seen anywhere, ever, have been. You're an artist, sir. I'd say you were an artist of the first order, were I qualified to make that determination. But if you have 40,000 words of the kind of writing you're showing us here, you shouldn't be worrying about a voice. Your voice comes through powerfully and distinctively. Let a good editor look at it.
Your work has healing power. You should share it with a wider audience.
More, sweetheart. You have captured us, you have engaged us.
Bravo.
It makes me want to crawl into a corner and spend copious amounts of time introverting on the paths I've chosen in life.
Thanks are grossly insufficient for me to express my gratitude to You for this explosive piece.
r
thanks, oh so much, as usual. rated.
One more thing - thank you for mentioning food stamps. Thank you for shedding that light. People need food. Children need food. Without proper nutrition, children cannot grow and develop as they should. Receiving food stamps not only helps supply some of the food people and children need, it also frees up a little bit of money, if there is any extra money, to live on. Money that can be used for rent, for gas, for heat, for diapers, for insulin, for a night out with some friends.
People need to eat.
Thank you.
And not hearing others' pain, inflating my own, tho human and inevitable in the young of our species, persisted in me too long. Still lingers. Work on this has resulted the biggest transformation in my life
ClarkKL: fascinating about Giacometti. Poor sap. OCD, or something. I wish it were so simple about my writing. I tend to the inventive, the florid. I can write a mean show not tell, but struggle to do so about my own life. And that's the book worth reading, wherein I lay it down, lay it out, and use observation to deliver the emotional power. At least I THINK so.
But your support of my effort is touching and meaningful to me. Thank you, Clark.
Ginny: ooh, "want more". That stands out on a page of remarkable comments. thank you.
wendyo: thank you.
M B: thanks, and I am glad the callouts worked, seemed a bit precious to me just before I hit publish.
Jill: thanks
Gail: I wonder where Ruth is, after all these years? thank you
Lonnie: Thank you.
markinjapan: this is an extraordinary comment. I am moved and grateful. thank you.
IslandView: this gets to the essential part: what seems small to another makes us cringe, looms large. Or else we just dont see what others can't stop noticing. thanks.
waking: yes, glad you emphasize this. It is hard to stand up for empowering, assisting. And to admit we availed ourselves. I was a strapping young man, making this especially problematic. But it boiled down to dollars, to my child's health. I was working long hours to NOT make ends meet. I made crafts and art and peddled them.
When do we do it, speak up? Even among liberals the "taint" is there, among our peers.
And I think workfare improved welfare. Conservative complaints are not all without merit.
But help to feed our children is normalized in European countries. I was on my way, no slacker, and there should be no shame, for me or in others eyes, for needing this critical infrastructure for a decent society
Dorinda: I love when you read my wok. Your perspective is meaningful to me many on many levels. Thank you, friend.
rated
You are so good, Greg. If you were writing lies, your writing would not have stood up like it does.
Rated
junk1: it is in the minutiae that lies serve us. serve me. These aren't just literary lies, understand: I have woven them into the telling of my story at times, one on one. Shame on me for that. I give myself more latitude now and in the future for "re-telling". But this exercise did feel as others say, liberating.
And this morning I could do a redaction redux. For instance, calling my mother a narcissist is shorthand for a lifetime of complex events and feelings. If explicated, scrupulously, would any one conclude it was the one word description that works? I don't know either
In October our unscrupulous landlord gave us 30 days to move, pleading catastrophe in Fla. We scrambled. I was readying the launch of the biggest project of my Proj Manager career -- Yale! Climate Institute -- and we had an awful time finding ANY house to rent in the off -season. He capped his 30 days with an anti-semitic tirade against me -- calling my daughters filthy Jew whores -- and the revelation that this was all his option, a choice, not a personal catastrophe. And has not returned our colossal deposit.
OK.
We found a good place. I worked for 82 days straight, and for lack of $ pulled double duty with 14-18 hour days and pickup truck trips. I then had a nervous breakdown. Not a euphemism. I am now on Prozac and Xanax.
And have learned that I am somewhat bipolar. Faced at last that my daughter got troublesome chemistry from her mother AND from me. This was hardest of all for me.
I also changed my life, my business. Redefined my terms with clients. Stopped trying to soldier on, push thru no matter what. To ask for help. And my precious friends and family came thru for me.
I have permanent shaking in my right hand. At night it gets bad, my thoughts race, I repeat words obsessively and make odd motions. New tics. My wife calms me. We play Pente. We joke. I lie and vibrate and clutch myself until the Ambien takes me under.
No shit. Admitting all this means I will never be on the short list for Vice-President. Look what they did to Eagleton.
But thru it all I made the right choices. We launched Yale and my business is doing better. Surprise: my clients understood.
My family made me take a day off every week. So Saturday mornings i go into town, alone. I eat the breakfast special at the Main Street Bistro and write. I visit our two books stores. I write the titles of the books I wish I could buy; this manages my bibliophilia. Every 3rd week I give myself a 7 dollar used book budget. I spend the afternoon in the library, writing.
Then I go home and do chores.
Yesterday, at the Bistro, I wrote this. It poured out, close to the final form. The photo is of the table before me, my notes, their good strong coffee. It was a Must-Write, and was triggered by this:
A babe in mother's arms, a year-old at most, made a delighted 2-note sound, repeated it. A 2-year old nearby, charmed, echoed the sound each time, but used words: "How go?" It was a bird call and response, from un-verbal joy, to new mind, attaching meaning to the music of it. I cannot trace the exact path between this aural experience, how it flooded me with the need to correct my pettiness mentioned in my comments above.
But it flushed thru me, launched by young human music and meaning. I shielded my eyes as I wrote, to hide the plop of tears from the cheery breakfast crowd.
What is this, this mindfulness, this attention to others, this love that suffuses us? Why does writing it out lift us so?
See now: this is why these responses mean so much to me, for this piece, for this explication of my rottenness. For the love and support you give me, for what is my one true art and salvation: sacred, holy writing, here on the cleared ground, this well-lit space, this community of trembling souls, this OS.
//
__thanks cartouche, for the PM that opened this up.
Thank you again.
As I’ve seen the word used only in academic references to famous people, I’ve always considered the word to be a euphemism employed to avoid slighting the venerable. I know I certainly would not slight, while sane, unless inadvertently, the likes of DaVinci, Newton, Franklin, Lincoln, Burns, Einstein, Twain or Correll, especially considering that anyone worth his or her dehydrated minerals does not stop learning once the sheepskin, should there be one, finally slaps the hand - whether through brilliant scholarship or diligent plodding via the flunk-out-crawl-back-repeat-twice-more method employed by some of us who can barely remember the courses he took or how those quasi-cloistered years might have aided him beyond the ivied walls except having shown him how to look things up, how to think and how to swallow a glass of beer quicker than you can pour one onto the ground.
Even then I never learned what boola boola means.
This was beautiful.
cartouche: sweetie.
the squirrel: you are a polished writer, of tightly crafted, seemingly offhand, wry, hilarious humans in the food and beverage biz. I know from this. I have relatives at great hotels and restaurants. make it Junipero, extra dry. Thanks
Kind of: your PM blew me away. love to you. Thank you.
Procopius: Thank you
Stelaa: those callouts an do simple, nice things. I appreciate the "melodramatic or sentimental" distinction. thank you.
Chuck: soul-shaken; that is a powerful comment. Thank you.
Verbal: Yo! thank you.
bbd: if I learn a lesson form this it is: write what must be written. thank you, bbd, again
ClarkK: you prove you respond at a feeling level to what I do here. But auto-didact is a loaded term,and that's OK. I love the way language is loaded. all good.
I got something good: without a degree, my education feels unfinished, and it is. Mine, yours. I get something, feeling it so acutely: I get to keep at it.
And boola boola, lessee: the implicative perfect of rah! rah! I think. Derives from the Latvian.
Thank you, fine fellow.
ttfn: thank you
Sandra: wonderful. you read this. "pretend to ignore" -- yep. thank you.
xenonlit: too good? rats. at last, someone wih the guts to tell me the truth. thanks.
sweetfeet: thank you. (groovy avatar name, yours.)
But, on balance, I think that you are too hard on yourself. You have labeled your prior words "lies" and technically they are. I guess only you knows whether they were lies at the time they were written, or whether, upon rereading them, you decided they were.
But at most they were embellishments, perhaps little falsehoods that you needed while creating a story that allowed you to come to grips with the turbulence of that difficult time in your life. But the essentials of the narrative are not changed by changing those words.
I know that this comment runs counter to the flow here, but I wonder if, five years down the road, you might not read this again and decide that there are more "lies" to confess, more exaggerations, or less emphasis on things that you will then see formative of the person you were and the person you have become. You may come to feel that the entire narrative is skewed this way or that and omitted key elements, either consciously or not.
Memory is a funny thing. No memory is pure. None is precise. To think that we can ever reconstruct the actual event let alone insure the accuracy of our memories or our critical look at our memories is to delude ourselves into thinking that our minds are far less complex than they are.
But meanwhile remember that anyone who reads either biographies or autobiographies surely knows that they are not totally accurate portrayals of the person or the events. Some embellish on purpose, as perhaps you did when you first posted this, I don't know, but others will do it unconsciously. All, however, do it. Some do it to serve the narrative, some to serve themselves.
In the end any narrative can encompass only a tiny slice of the life we lived, a few minutes of the hours, the days of our lives. In the decision to put on paper those minutes we have, consciously or not, chosen not to put on paper all those countless other hours and days we lived.
Whether or not this need for revising the previously produced narrative of this part of your life will yield a felt sense of closure is something only you can decide.
Ultimately what counts with me is the man we now see before us, a good man, a good father, an honest man who has integrity and who cares about others, who, incidentally, writes very well. That is the man I already know and care about.
God bless (something I mean sincerely)
Monte
cadence, i like that. Thank you.
Susanne: yes, we give ourselves a pass. s'alright. mostly. but as writers we must turn the forearm, test the joint, imagine the arterial flow. yes? and cruel we are.
thank you.
Monte: you honor me with this close read and thoughtful comment. I recognize and respond to the intention. But my nobility here is small n, and flawed, and that's OK. I am both honest, expressing the deeper thing, and shrugging off the easy lie. but I am still being shrewd.
Being less invested in my identity lately, this is not quite as painful or brave, as it seems perhaps. Then again, it only took 40 years or so to get past the hard part.
I find forgiveness to be too ready a term, there's the whiff of something under the sanctity that's promised. It's always a mess, and requires upkeep. I can live with that. Thank you for the grace of your words.
Astonished again, and that's no lie.
R
Bonnie: thanks, i figure. unless this points out how pedantic I can be. in which case I completely own that, too! ;)
LuluandPheobe: thank you. we only seem to be very different. it's how those phony psychics get away with their BS: they know us to be all about love, happiness, money, and missing our dead.
scupper: thank you
jimmy: so lad you read his. and you get it to a T, as u always do: "It wasn't even important." and "Why did I?" thank you, my friend.
Owl! the unwinding: i like that. Yep, every one of us. As writers we get to do the True Enough, and what a good and useful option. thank you
WomanBlogging: Thank you for this kind comment.
stoneman: thank you. I like your avatar name.
Buffy: I am too old to keep that grin on my face, that mournful pose, that "open look", as I insert and append little inane embellishments. I will probably keep doing it at times, then wonder again "Why?" Human beings are ridiculous. thank you.
Lisa:thank you
__
approaching 70 comments! i think that's a first; i rarely break 30. c'mon. somebody say something, criticize my shoes, berate me for a missing semicolon or too many sentence fragments. I need that pointless milestone of 70, so I can hoot to the wind about it. It will make my wife so happy! ( i am shameless. this is dumb. yet i do not delete this. sheessh.)
and then I wake up to my first EP in a long long while! happy happy joy joy. I will try not to think about it. Or try to figure out what made it so. I will just write.
Lies or distortions are more informative than truth. For the sake of argument, I am assuming that there there is something approximating both truth and lies.
and as to the higher order of truth about whether there is Truth? uh-oh. here we go. hmm. let's just say it is a useful phrase, that Truth is true enough. A trope for us dopes, Truth is.
At least isn't a complete illusion, like free will. Or our "soul". (ducking brickbats now?)
You should not feel guilt. As a daughter whose parents could not afford to pay for college, it's okay. Your girls can do it on their own. They need your love and support. They don't need your money. They will make it on their own.
Deborah: and it never ends, eh? thank you.
you write, "Taut muscle is not enough, I learned. A special sinew, a stoic reserve, and this only comes when we give ourselves completely to another's pain, and lay aside our own, for their sake. Compassion is what this was, what compassion really was. "
So beautiful. Though I don't agree with this statement that follows,
"My self-sacrifice for my child felt cheap that day."
Your self-sacrifice (and anyone else's) for your child is far from cheap. It's what the best part of our society is built on. But thank-you for making me think about this difficulty of how do we overlook the pain of others when we are so wrapped (as we sometimes can be) in troubles of our own.
Extraordinary writing and you are an extraordinary human being.
Anyways, this story is a story of resiliance, knowledge, strength, and compassion. I loved this post. It's brave. You're brave to write this.
You have a lot to tell. This is only the beginning. Your words will touch others and change lives. I believe that. So...don't be afraid. Tell your story.
Take all the praise fro mother comment writers and add my name to them.
This may sound silly, but if your daughters do get accepted into a college youc an't afford to pay for, maybe you could blog about it and all of your fans on OS (me included) could send some money. If enough of us pitch in, we could make a big difference. You'd be doing us a favor, because it feels good to help people.
Anyway, please let other people help you if it comes to that.
Your daughters are breathtakingly lucky to have you for a Dad.
God Bless You.
we lie to the most
oneself
When one lives
in a Kafka/Bukowski
kind of reality
sometimes afraid
to get too close
to the flame
sometime willing to embrace
who knows
what will come forth
Nevertheless
if one must write
that is the price we pay
Forgive my shorthand writing in the post: it did, tho, my self-pity diminished that day, and in a way that helped me. and I inow you get it with what you focus on, the real point: we overlook others out of a feeling that there isn't enough space, that our own suffering is too large, and we begrudge because so few others pay us in kind.
Gwen: back! I am moved by what you say. It is part of why we write, some of us: to enlarge our story into a proper space, to diminish our own pain, to see if truth betters the world. Thank you.
big fat trauma queen: (great avatar name!) Thank you. Oh man, tho. NOT what this was about -- but I recognize the urgent need to express some larger-than-worrds feeling to another's problems. I wish sometimes I could travel in a humble vw bus, giving out $1000 tips to weary waitresses, bequeathing computers to poor school in the cities I pass thru, funding education for single parents. An oddly selfish fantasy, because it is really help the long-gone me, in a way. But so cool to do! It is an exceptional and generous comment you make. My children will make it. Somehow. We are not from the slums of Rio or Darfur or Chechnya or the Congo; I keep this in mind, and remain grateful.
Kim: thanks
Naive but Learning: Thank you
scanner! thank for this kind comment.
plantlover: a poem. thank you. "who knows what will come forth" -- finding out is the special thrill of writing, eh?
I'm trying to find a way to describe my own response to it, as if I owe a debt to you for moving me so powerfully.
Bellwether Vance wrote "My favorite line: My exhaustion granulated me. That's organic weariness. That's a picture." YES.
JustJuli wrote 'I love the incantation of "I lay this lie aside." ' YES.
Cartouche wrote "This. Is. Magnificent. Utterly magnificent. I am in awe of your talent(s)." YES.
Wakingupslowly wrote "I am deeply, deeply moved." YES.
I feel disturbed.
something is coming to life here. I might just have the format for the 40,000 words or so I have. The currently disjointed, sprawling material. hmm.
ah. the comment I was waiting for, with some trepidation.
I think so. You are generous to me. love you sweetie.
...
Everyone go read her posts!
Hey, the real writers room is here. right here. Do we not bleed?
Because the truth, ah the truth might just paralyze us.
But in the end, the truth will win out. We all have our truths, and our lies told to camouflage those truths. Sooner or later, we have to at least come clean to ourselves.
I know some of what you went through, Greg. I am glad to see you are standing tall now, realizing that there is no shame in your admissions just as there is really no shame in your omissions either.
Sometimes we tell the story; then again, sometimes the story tells us.
Rated.
R
This was not only incredibly brave but transformatively inspirational.
Donna: Thank you for this kind comment.
markTheCanuck: succinct summary. I am the outcome of all of it, the mess, the slippery details adjustment, the hard work, the bad knock, the gifts that are three daughters.
I might have ended up a placid lumberjack. happy enough, disconnected from others, wistful about what might have been, if not for my children.
I'd rather be me, most days. thanks.
That would be you that keeps pulling me back in. I am so timid when it comes to this sort of revelation. It is powerful and even redemptive (I am one of the "believers"...so I can use that word in ALL it's myriad meanings).
I sometimes feel sad to be one of the fawning crowd in awe of your talent, your gift. That's me...being truthful...I remember discovering you here for the first time. And if you want to know the truth, I'd stack you up against your favorite authors any day.
I am one of the crowd, but I want you to be a secret treasure and have a thin red line to the truth you write. It always feels so much a mix of "ardent" and "austere". And always, my mind catches fire here.
Much love.
yekdeli: What an extraordinary comment.
I want little from life: To write. And I'd like a swimming pool.
But I have no interest in giant houses or Atlantic City or bling bling. An old truck and my wife's cooking and free time to see local theatre and I'm good.
The obstacle to my happiness is I would need financial security, which means the ability to do right by my kids college etc. Alas, this means I must do a lot of other things before I can write.
But if only I could get there, and just write, and have a modest success, within your thin red line, and it radiated to and reverberated back from yekdeli and cartouche and Verbal and Gary and MaryT and Sandra and jimmymac and Owl and Con and Lea and Chicago and 1_irritated and a few thousand talented thoughtful enterprising writers? bliss
thank you, dear yek.
"to tell the truth, or something to that effect."
I like the 2nd one: that he meant its hard to tell the truth AND something to the effect of truth. Pertinent to this post and all the cross-comments, and a pithy compressioin of the whole thing
Con: re-read Boswell? i stand in awe. I have always loved the idea of reading Boswell.
"ingenious and brutal" -- this is one of those tricky, even physically impossible things. Like "screaming sullenly".
thanks
sophieh: wow. Several people have said this, that they read this twice. I am encouraged, to say the least.
I tried reading OS on my iphone once. the hair on my eyebrows collapsed from all the squinting, and I now must do a brow comb-over-and-up before going out in public.
Thank you.
That's all.
"So then I howled. I bayed. Afraid to wake the neighbors, my face pressed so hard into the earth, with each rasping intake I inhaled dirt, and dead debris. After I reached that skin-of-pins place, the skeletal feeling of empty, and couldn't keep crying, I went back inside. I sat on the edge of my mattress, waited for 5 AM to come, rocking myself. Staring at my white foam-core building, a cell in fact, adorned with asymmetric add-ons and plexi inserts. "
Lisa: I love that you love that part. And you move me with the living words idea. This moment lives in me. thank you.
with respect,
I found myself chuckling about some of the things you present here as “lies”, considering the connotation that comes with the word; connotations that seem so severe compared to what you present.
You present an image of your “fractured” state, which I have to say mirrors my own in many ways. One especially significant way relates to your relationship with “formal education”. But it is interesting how later in life we can begin to piece together some of the fractured segments and recognize a sense of solidarity of which the fractures are merely a part.
You write, “I am alive to even the worst people I meet now, to their suffering. Especially the worst.”
That is something I am working on, but with which I often still find difficulty. I often wonder why finding consistency in this is difficult.
Lastly, this is the kind of post that I often have difficulty reading through, but not so with yours. Your writing is compelling and always draws me in.
Rick: Yeah. I know it seems that way, the scale of the lies.. the response to this have been unending revelation to me.
"the fractures are merely a part" -- i like that.
I was tested last year, with that landlord, i found that all the lip service, the stutter starts, the grinding away at being compassionate? had finally found roots. And thus at the same time discovered why Buddhist say we must be grateful to those who wrong us.
I struggle to read the long posts, too. I'm glad so many found a path thru it. Thank you for the close read.
Plus, I'm primarily a stay @ home mom to 2-yr-old and respect single parents to my core. I have my 5-yr-old to help out, and a super supportive hubby and family. I am embarrassed to tell you how overwhelmed I still get. So to read about the years spent alone with your child... I am in awe. You humbled yourself throughout the post, but all I see is a super man.
This must have been a heck of an experience for you. Powerful stuff. A real head-on, no bullshit look. Kudos and then some, Greg.
Of course, I'm trying to figure out you could get that double-columned format but that's just me.
Thank you.
(do view source. It's a div tag with float:right, basically. Add margins so the words don't collide)
Your brilliance leaves me speechless and smiling.
Thank you for reminding me of what compassion is, and of the gateway to it that attention. A reminder I need, often. Thank you for so much, for helping to open my heart not just with what you share through your writing, but through how you are.