What You Do When Everything Is Fine

I have wondered more than once whether, if a bank teller drew on my hands with one of those counterfeit bill detector markers and forced them under the light for examination, I’d have tells like those of a fake twenty.

The word fraud crosses my mind sometimes as I work stage right and stage left in the classroom talking big about reading and how the best way to become a good writer is to read lots and often.

It crosses my mind as students will ask, as they often do, whether I’ve read fill in the blank off the bestseller list, and I say something about not preferring contemporary lit or something about having been too busy with student essays. A good mood will get you a “That sounds great! I’ll put it on my list for between semesters,” and that may, now that I think about it, register as the emptiest promise I make, very nearly a borderline lie. I just don’t have the heart to break yours.

I cannot tell you the jaws I’ve dropped because I haven’t read any Stephanie Meyer, have gotten only halfway through the first book in The Hunger Games series, and finished exactly one Nicholas Sparks book before throwing it as hard as I could across the room. It was The Notebook, and I’m still not sorry.

I manage still, believe it or not, to classify myself as a literate person despite this. I have read books before. Yes, complete books, start to finish. I have marked them up. I have passed them along. I have bought multiple copies because I wasn’t sure (multiple times) whether I still had my own. To illustrate, note that I can locate four copies of Eat, Pray, Love by moving my head left to right without even trying hard to spot them, and Liz Gilbert, although she is grand, is not counted among my favorites. Let’s just say I felt convicted while watching Mel Gibson’s character in Conspiracy Theory as he compulsively bought copies of The Catcher in the Rye although he’d never read it. 

What gets me is when people ask what I’m reading these days. I want to make something up. I do. I want to say I’ve just read Salman Rushdie’s latest and tell them an anecdote from a Sherman Alexie book. I want to go all gaga about Anne Lamott’s newest one, which I know I’ll love if I ever have a moment to myself. I want more on my tongue and my mind than article snippets about the demise of public schools and higher ed and Julianna Baggott’s brilliant Facebook status updates I peruse while rocking the smallest lovenugget in the house—or maybe her and her brother at the same time if he’s jealous or recovering from a tantrum.

People see me in Barnes and Noble wearing a baby, carrying another nearly upside down under my armpit, juggling a stack of books, and calling the first child to come along with her own tallish stack. They probably think I read. I’m sure the family friend who brings our Amazon Prime packages with super-rushed delivery because I need those unread books now believes I read, too, and read fast because she’ll be back tomorrow as well. My homeschooling friends I bump into at the public library during weekday story hours probably think I read. I’m in all the right places that one should be if one were to read someday.

Babywearer Jr.

Even online I look like a reader. Every social media photograph has a mess of books behind a baby. These pictures aren’t strategically taken; it’s just that the books are everywhere, much like the laundry, so it is rather impossible to take a baby picture without White Noise, White Teeth, or White Oleander in the background. I’ve given up trying to be private about what we’re reading (or planning on reading) nearly as much as I’ve given up trying to hide my son’s Toy Story underwear.

I want to tell them that this literature professor is reading. The truth is I’m not—not entire books, not in long sittings, not for pleasure. And what does that even mean to someone in my season of life? Reading for pleasure. As opposed to what? Reading for torture? Reading for edification? Reading, to me, means your eyes are awake enough to be open and your situation is relaxed enough where your eyes aren’t already committed to watching someone jump off a couch arm or scale a stove. 

Reading means you must be holding a book, which means you haven’t lost complete feeling in the arm that’s holding the baby you cannot put down because she has a runny nose and can’t breathe while lying horizontally. Reading means there must be clean forks in the drawer and cups in the cabinet. It means the dog isn’t whining to be let out or let in. It means you’re not hungry, you’re not cold, and you don’t have to pee or work or yell at someone to do either of these things.

You cannot read for pleasure when the act itself is pleasure. To correct the redundancy, I would say it’s just reading, but I cannot leave that alone on the page. Nothing is just reading, and if it is, you’re doing it wrong.

After a full day in the kitchen trying to bake, puree, and freeze some semblance of stay-at-home motherhood while I am not Dr. Price for a few more days until the semester starts, I crawled under the covers, ignoring the piles of work on the floor, a veritable obstacle course of envelopes, grade sheets, receipts, binders, and oversized books that don’t fit onto shelves. I broke the spine of Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and read fifty pages, my eyes not yet burning from the day, the kitchen cleaned and hallway cleared of Lego traps, tiny plastic horses, and things with wheels, and all the Price babies in bed. And words of comfort I’ve offered to students over the past eleven years circled back around and came to me this time.

This is what we do when everything is fine.

I’ve said that line to students going through divorces, hospitalizations, miscarriages, deaths in the family, job losses and changes—the things that wear us into different people, that make us want to mess with time, to speed it up or slow it down, and make us want to mess with space, to get more of it or less of it—to be at any other pace or place than that which we are.

This is what we do when everything is fine.

I say this to illuminate the comparative lightness of academics when looked at alongside the stuff of life. They hear me preaching, preaching, preaching about syntax and style. They hear plagiarism warnings that conjure eschatological imagery. It matters, but it doesn’t matter. “There is no such thing as an English emergency,” I tell them. 

This is what we do when everything is fine.

I spent the better part of thirty years reading what others gave to me, bought for me, or assigned to me. I recall a small window in my late teens where I camped out on bookstore floors and stayed out late in coffee shops reading everything in sight. I recall switching books with my best friend Kim, having marked up key passages we loved with circles and stars everywhere, playing poems on repeat in the car from Fort Walton Beach to Pensacola to memorize tracks on audiobooks. I remember moments of resurgence between semesters in grad school #1 and grad school #2 after my daughter had entered school where reading happened.

Good reading like that doesn’t happen often anymore. I used to have a series of lengthy, monogamous and semi-monogamous relationships with authors. Whitman was mine all of from 1996-1998. I rebounded with Bukowski all of 1999, then Anne Sexton moved in and brought all her friends. They camped out until…hmm. Okay, so maybe they’re still here, hiding in the walls and under the floorboards. 

Now my desk, bedside table, and the backseat of my car are overflowing with student work and lit anthologies. I pick up the same toys twelve times a day, probably more, and put them with the Where's Waldo? and I Spy books we use as a hard surface for coloring and Play-Doh molds. I reach blindly into backseats to toss my son a book from the floorboard because he sees my older daughter reading. Half the time, I don't know what I've thrown him. It's entirely possible that he's held David Sedaris, The Vagina Monologues, or a Chuck Palahniuk. I'm not even supposed to text and drive; how on earth can I be responsible for monitoring a miniature book club in the backseat during the ballet carpool? 

And a breath here.

As I ended the day with a book in my hands and quiet in the space between me and midnight, the most beautiful thought occurred to hint that I might be emerging from the dark tunnel to at least a sliver of light on the other side.

How am I doing this? How is it possible that I am in a room alone, holding my own book in my hands, with no one sitting on either of my legs? I am reading this sentence, and I can hear myself in my own head. 

There is only one way I could be doing this. I know exactly what this means.

Everything is fine.  

The Cost of Being Bookish

According to the Facebook fish flow, I am supposed to write an assigned number of true things about myself and be thankful for a unique thing each day of the month. 

Me: Daina, how many? 

Daina: How many what? Kids? How many animals? 

Me: Just a number.

Daina: Okay, fifty chickens.

Me: What? That's too many.

Daina: All right. Five chickens. 

So, five is my number, but I don't follow arbitrary instructions well, so here are five lies instead. 

1. I am originally from Kansas, which explains my penchant for red shoes, root cellars, and twirly things. 

2. I collect antique German thermometers, but always tell people they're French because I don't want to sound cocky. 

3. I am certified as a baton instructor, the kind that sparkle, not the kind British bobbies beat you with for sport.

4. When too much recyclable Tupperware collects in my cabinets, I melt it all down and make yard flamingos to decorate my eggplant garden.

5. Every time I've broken into someone's home and found their bed unmade, I've made the bed with hospital corners and left two Andes mints on the left pillow. 

Okay, here's one true thing:

1. The thanks I'll dole out this year won't fit on Facebook. It's too heavy, too deep, too wide. I'm writing thirty letters--private ones that strangers will carry from town to town and hand-deliver to mailboxes, where they'll settle and wait for fingers braced only for bills and eyes that will open, electric, at the sight of handwriting--a sign of life in an otherwise dead and ordinary pile of paper automatons. 

Okay, another true thing:

2. If I were to say what I'm busy being thankful for, I would, as you might imagine, breathe the word books. Those letters would fall right out of my mouth, as if readied from my birth, the B stepped up to the ledge of my lip first, followed by the O's linked arm in arm, inseparable. The K would follow, hooked to the swoosh of the S, and my mouth would close, as if putting two palms forward to shove off a you're welcome I didn't believe I deserved. 

With every love, there is a loss, or at least a sacrifice. We push some parts of life away to pull some others closer. Every day we choose something, and in that choice, we don't choose something else. We can't choose everything. We just choose some things instead of others. We can choose those other things, but not at the same time as the first things. 

Books are one of those sacrifices for me. They are on what I call "life layaway" indefinitely at this point. Students, friends, and colleagues constantly recommend books. I nod. I say I'll put them on the list. I take them. I stack them up, one alongside another, alongside another. I want to reward them with orange Tic Tacs like I give my son when he's waiting patiently in the carline at the bank. I'm busy living the things I might put into books one day. 

My well-intentioned life has become a bit of a joke around my house. I work hard to keep the jealousy at bay when I read about friends who have already finished their Christmas shopping (although I'll admit to being a bit of a pre-Thanksgiving Christmas crab) and others who make everything from scratch--especially those who post public reprimands to those of us who don't. I have a host of friends who sew clothes, paint Mason jars, give people "just because" gifts, take their kids to Disney four times a year and make scavenger hunt riddles for weeks beforehand, which they send to school in homemade bento boxes with "I love you" origami in the shape of owls and Hello Kitty.

I can Pinterest with the best of them, but it's a digital fantasyland more than a real, live plan that will ever get executed. More and more of my friends have begun designing these elaborate wreaths to decorate their doors for each season, birthday, and holiday of the year. As with most mom projects, I can make it about halfway, so I made a wreath that reflects it--my too busy life, full of books and words and paper and children and praying and diaper rash cream and formula and algebra and nail polish remover and tangles and library visits and coffee creamers and frozen P.F. Chang dinners and writing and reading and grading and telling and washing, folding, sterilizing, stain-treating, drying and toothbrushing and refilling and buying and returning and committee meetings and dressing and changing and closing my eyes and pretending to sleep from two until about four. 

Choices were made. Other choices weren't. This is how it goes.

Advice comes my way often. I listen but seldom take it. I lean in. I nod. But I know they don't really know, and so I hum in my head--any ditty will do.

I'm many things to many people. Many days I feel like the circus performer with the sticks and the plates spinning overhead, only in my case there are a couple dozen plates, and every one of them is over another person's head. I'm more of the facilitator, your happy host.

Some people know the cost of being bookish--and not just bookish in the sense that there's a love of literature (although that's addiction enough sometimes)--but bookish in terms of immersion and devotion, of being a writer or being an academic, the compulsion to spend so much of oneself on what seems to be an individual, maybe even selfish, pursuit.

Because that's just the thing--it's anything but an individual pursuit. Engaging through the written word and poring over language is a key way that we connect with others and begin to comprehend the connections between others. It just looks lonely for a while, like the contents of a cocoon. Then, at once, the fuzzy worm blossoms, then flies.

The cost of being bookish ends up being the inability to communicate with those who don't ever climb into cocoons, those who don't understand that, for literati, the release comes only from periods of temporary retreat.

Harper Lee's Jem Finch comes to mind when he says, "Turtles don't feel, stupid" and Dill replies, "Were you ever a turtle, huh?"

But every once in a while there's a kindred one that comes, like a friend who picks books off your shelves as though your home were a library--and keeps them because it's like an insurance policy on your friendship--or the husband who goes to bed before you because, when the sentences are perfect, you'll come to bed and wake him up to tell him how well the story turned out.

Or it's the mother-in-law who already keeps your children on Mondays so that you can do the thing you were born to do for a few hours and then, because you've spent the best of yourself doing it, makes the family dinner and even sends home poundcake with you because, sometimes, mamas need some sugar, too.

Open Mouths and Open Mics

All that business about April being the cruelest month is true. (Eliot was right. Go figure.) I will add, however, that October and November can be incredibly hard on writers, too. Fall brings promises I cannot keep: a poem a day in October and a whole novel in November (visit NaNoWriMo.org for information about other crazies like me). If my day-to-day world didn't look like it does, I might manage meeting an occasional high bar. Under the year's circumstances, however, it looks like any influx of writing or reading is cause to celebrate.

I'm reminded this month of my brother and how I must have been an absolutely horrible big sister. I don't recall ever losing a board game to him. It wasn't because I was better at the games than he was. It was simply because I could read, and that made him believe I was telling the truth when I'd consult the instructions and "read" a new part we'd overlooked the first time, always an addendum to shift the game in my favor. Again, I was a horrible big sister. 

Elements of this sisterdom, no doubt, influence each semester's syllabus redux, as I find it impossible to believe every grade issued is fair (whether high enough or low enough) and end up trying to rethink my methods so that students get exactly the grades they deserve, nothing more, nothing less. 

More elements of this sisterdom have also translated into my being exceedingly kind with my own deadlines and writing goals. Although NaNoWriMo has been a complete bust for me this year (only 4k so far), I have, in the process of procrastinating on this novel, ended up writing the starts of proposals for several CFPs, a few thank you cards to check off the never-ending list of people who feed and water me daily, a grocery list (which is hugely unlike me), and several buried emails and comments on late papers. Most days I'm lucky if I can get to a Facebook post--and even then, they're usually the post equivalents of found poems, just words I hear in my house with my quarter-dozen children and Wayne Szalinski husband. Yes, that's a hula hoop behind him. 

So, I keep moving the mark. Mothers, certainly, and writerly mothers, especially, must move that mark sometimes to keep from giving up entirely. Far more important than perfection is persistence. 

My twelve year old and I have recently parted reading ways. She has fallen in love with Dr. Who, Jericho, Heroes, and Supernatural; her shelves are filled with John Green, Veronica Roth, Rick Riordan, Christopher Paolini, and Suzanne Collins. I can't keep up and, in some ways, don't want to. She has reading worlds that are worlds apart from my own, worlds of apocalypses and made-up creatures, worlds of unlikely flirtations I don't need anymore. 

I still crave the conversation, though. I still look for silent spaces so that I can peek into her world for a little while. Even if my own familiar narratives are not the same as her own, the love of a story translates, and I recognize the glow that happens upon her face when she emerges from the first chapter of a new book and has fallen in love, again. 

Until we meet back up on other aisles, I stay busy fueling her addiction by bringing home extra books, ordering surprise Amazon deliveries on Fridays, and taking the long way home from ballet to make impromptu stops at the bookstore when the babies are at home. When I see articles online, like one a friend posted about the Native American response to the celebration of Thanksgiving, I toss Daina an iPad and ask her opinion. Every day she is alive, she opens her eyes wider than she did the day before. But I want her to open her mouth, too--not only to relate, but to connect, to communicate, to do something with what she sees and what she knows. 

Tonight we went to an open mic night. I served as a judge, and she came to watch. Several of the pieces performed were poems, and so that gave us a chance to talk literature after the event. I asked her about the performance where the poet used two voices, yelling at himself to create tension through the dialogue. She said, "It was good but kind of scary. I told him I liked his hat last time I met him." She moved right into telling me about an interaction with another writer in the crowd: "She asked me for a tampon one time, which means she must have been desperate. And it made me think she wasn't afraid of anything." 

I would have said something, but she kept talking: "That poem about the brother who died? That was a good poem, but I wouldn't like it as much if it weren't true. Do you think it was true? I'll have to ask her sometime." And then she said she wished another poet had been there, the one who writes about packing up things in her mother's house. "She's one of my favorites, and her daughter's really nice," she said. 

When I asked who her favorite tonight was, and her answer was "the flute player" who filled the gap when we were tallying up scores during intermission, I laughed and immediately realized that she gets it in ways I don't. Far too often I worry about what she's getting or not getting from the world. Is she reading the right things? Is she being challenged? Is she gleaning goodness from the people who surround us? When I told her the flute player wasn't in the competition, she told me it didn't matter: "I've never seen anyone play a flute that close to me before. It was great." 

And so art finds her--music, beauty, books, the whole shebang. The conversations about hats and tampons and daughters are all creating the poem that she's becoming. 

Life is happening whether I'm there during intermission or not. 

The Care and Keeping of Books

Daina, age 10, reading to Atticus at 3 months old.

If there were a priest of all things literary, I would owe him a couple confessions.

I read and finished exactly one Nicholas Sparks book before throwing it across the room as hard as I could. It was The Notebook, a movie I’d loved and cried over. I’d braced my mind to be blown because the books are always better than the movies. While it’s possible my bar was set too high, it’s also entirely possible that he wasn’t even trying. I think I said that aloud when I got about halfway through the book, “You’re not even trying, are you?” It was just domino line up after domino line up—a suspense machine. We all have our readerly biases, and my criteria for a good read occurs on the sentence level. Ideally, I want to be falling over myself with jealousy for the perfect order and selection of words. Anyone can follow the recipe for apple pie, but if you haven’t picked the right apples, there is really no reason to bother with the pie. Nicholas Sparks is fantastic at following pie recipes, but he’ll put any apple in them, worms and all.

It would be no surprise to me if Nicholas Sparks loved George Bernard Shaw, playwright of Major Barbara, my most hated book of all time. This leads to my second confession: In my younger, edgier years, I finished Major Barbara and promptly tore out every page, singly crumpled up each one, and threw it into the trash can. It was just terrible. Wish it on no one.

These confessions are my full disclosure in the off chance that any of you knows the stories already and wants to call shenanigans on my argument about the care and keeping of books. These were two extreme examples of my violence against the written word, and for these instances, however deserved, I am sorry.

Here are ten book rules we follow in the Price house. For my autumnal assignment today, Daina selected “skeletons.” Because she said the word, and whenever Daina says anything, books come to mind, my thoughts went straight to spines and the eternal question of “To break or not break?” Here are our thoughts on the subject of spines and a few other things.

PRICE BOOK RULES

10. JACKETS

Books wear their jackets. Period.

9. e-BOOKS

No e-book purchases to fill in the gaps in hardback collections.  

8. MOVIE COVERS

            Never buy a book with a picture on the cover from the movie adaptation.

7. ANNOTATIONS

Always write in books. Use a fine-tipped ballpoint pen, never a pencil which will fade or a fountain or felt pen that will bleed.

6. THE FOOT RULE

New books must be stored at least one foot off the ground out of Oscar’s “welcome” range. Oscar was our dog who used to christen everything new in our house. Oscar moved to Michigan, but we still kept the rule.

5. HOARDING
            We’ve found book hoarding to be overlooked by most psychologists as a 
            socially acceptable habit of the literati. And thank God.

4. PINTEREST

No Pinterest crafts that desecrate books for the sake of a half-wit fad may be done in the house. I consider an occasional project with pages of an old, non-literary book acceptable (fanned pages turned into hanging decorations or a L-shaped bracket drilled into an old, non-literary book to create floating bookshelves for less), but my husband cringes at these ideas. They’re quasi-sacred here. We’re like a book sanctuary.

3. DOG-EARS

We don’t dog-ear pages. Anything can be a bookmark, so it’s not possible to be without one. My favorite are Taco Bell receipts, but I’ve used gum wrappers and napkins before. Daina dog-ears books on occasion but believes that it’s only acceptable to do so for a two-day period. I asked her what happens after the two-day period, and her response was that “The Lord of Books will come and eat you.”

2. SPINES

This is the most impassioned debate in our house. I break in a book by breaking the spine, but this makes my husband and daughter cringe. If I really want to cuddle up with it and get close and personal, I bend it right in two so that I can wrap the front around the back and focus on just one page at a time. Based on this sole act, Daina calls me a “book murderer”—the scariest thing of all.  

But here is our most important rule.

1. IF IT’S THERE, IT’S THERE TO SHARE.

The Price Lending Library is open always. See a book? Take a book. 
We can always buy more. And we will. 

Three Three-sentence Conversations (October 4-6)

My daughter wanted to see three fall subjects this time around: wolves, costumes, and leaves. She actually listed a fourth—pie—but I told her we’d already covered pie. She loves a good pie poem. And, yes, I’ve written others before.

one: WOLVES and the Dinner Date Cut Short

“I don’t believe in wolves,” he said.

“Werewolves, you mean?” she said.

“What’s the difference?” he said.

two: COSTUMES and Sounds of Words

“You have to say it PE-can!” June said. Hand held out to the side her brother wasn’t on, fist clenched, she was done bargaining. “Say it right or starve, Andy. I ain’t messin’ around.”

three: LEAVES and Pages that Fall

            “What is it about fall that makes you get all nerdy about this reading stuff?”

“Something about the connection between leaves and pages, I think. They both turn, you know.”

She says tomorrow's topic is skeletons. Until then...

"Pumpkins and Patches" (October 3)

When Daina texted me my autumnal poem topic for the day, I was reminded about how twelve year olds live unimpressed. 

I hope you enjoy this poem. It caught me by surprise on my first reading. It could be a little moving if you're feeling it. And here I was, thinking you might get a light, rhyming pumpkin poem out of me. It turns out pumpkins are deep. Who knew? 

Pumpkins and Patches 

Each October

middle schools hang in hallways

the false symmetry and even complexions

of orange orbs presented as pumpkins.

Topped with a stump of a stem,

a natural lattice for its pigtail vine,

a 45-degree angled leaf leans toward heaven,

its teleological nod.

Not one knows every pumpkin

has its ugly side

where it sat without sun

so that the rest of it

could grow.

Pumpkins aren’t so far from people.

Some of us sit among the pigs.

We wear patched pants,

our ugly sides to the earth.