Some Days I Make Soup: A Writer in Progress

Lesson One about being a writer is that you should be able to admit in public over coffee that you’re writing a book.

The funny thing is I can’t say it above a whisper or while looking anyone in the eye. It’s as if the volume and eye contact is a verbal contract that I’ll finish it someday. Someone, eventually, would know that it happened and then, it would be in print forever, as if to suggest I’d be eternally bound to those opinions and that I’d have to defend them in even more public spaces in front of family and childhood friends who will always believe they knew you best and lament that you’ve “changed.”

The second funny thing is that I whisper confessions of writing among friends, too. This morning over coffee I admitted that I’m working on, not one, but two books and that one of them <gasp> is a book of poems.

And why is this so hard to say? Why is it that the thing that every kid brags about and posts on refrigerator doors is something that grown, passable adults somehow must attribute to French blood or mental illness? It’s all fine and dandy to have it done and published, but to be working on a book? It somehow feels sadder than it should.

So I give myself a hard time. I’m used to having writing in progress, but I’ve suddenly come down with a bad case of being a writer in progress.

I think of awfully vain questions some days like when I will need a dot com and how many books it will take until I matter. When my mind wanders in these ridiculous ways, I bring everything to a grinding halt and thrust myself back into an actual moment with actual people.

I find someone small to celebrate.

I find someone who needs loving on.

I make soup.

On days when we’re still in our pajamas until noon, my three-year-old son invariably asks if we can make soup. So, we do. And I savor the details.

I start with swirls of olive oil to shine and pop in the silvered pot bottom. I dice onions that haven’t sprouted anything yet (the others, I count as freestyle gardening; I leave them boasting in the windowsill). We sweep them in to the pot to shine until they look like wet glass.

I mash garlic like potatoes and toss them in for a short chat with the shallots, and I splash chicken bouillon in for nothing more than the sound of the sizzle.

I add money-carrots, we call them. I cut them in coins and, because of this, we must wish on them as they fall into the pretend broth fountain. Celery follows and swims around like small green rafts for shredded chicken moving like minnows closely behind.

We hold hands over the can opener to turn and count and turn and count until the top opens, leaving us with a rinsing job that is best likened to dismantling a bomb. And the defused can of beans goes in with three hard shakes best done by my son, followed by more shakes of dried herbs as though he is overfeeding fish without the risk of anything but glory.

It simmers while we tell stories.

He asks between stories a string of questions and answers as the world’s smallest sous chef: “Is it hot? No, it’s not hot. Is it warm? It’s not warm. It’s perfect? It’s perfect.”

Yes, it’s perfect.

April 2: William Carlos Williams

The Good Doctor

for William Carlos Williams

“You now officially have more information about me

than any other person on the planet,” I said,

handing over five small-print pages

where I checked family history

boxes beside disorders and cancers,

X-ing them hard,

layering death-black ink like superstitions

while tallying loves and losses,

counting on confessions to keep me safe.

In the waiting room, my mind wanders

as I wonder whether a sinning priest

can confess to himself.

Here, I think of you, William Carlos Williams,

the good doctor,

a wound in one hand,

a salve in the other,

never waiting in this room

to hear the sound of your own name.

You, the diagnostician,

must have known always what you had,

but in this waiting room

a woman who cannot heal herself

cries.

I finger-trace cures into idle hands,

stand by for white-coat wonders.

I want to write her well like you,

to save all the plums for her,

push her in red wheelbarrows home

where she can dance naked in front of a mirror,

afraid only of waking the baby,

her sweet Kathleen.

I am no cure.

I can only put her in a poem.

Hand-me-downs: Those Words We Grow Into

Words have always been important to me because they are how we tell our stories. It is through the telling and hearing of stories that we communicate with one another and connect in such a way that we know we are not alone. 

Some of us are born with stories falling out of our mouths and dripping off of our fingers. I remember as far back as second grade, writing a story about three rebellious rabbits (Hopsy, Flopsy, and something else that rhymed) who had run away from home and taken to a life of drugs on the streets. The DARE program had clearly made a profound impact on me and driven me at the age of seven so much so that I wrote a seven-page story (front and back, no skipped lines). Side note: You have to specify "front and back" when you're seven. You have to. 

Diary after diary, journal after journal, words continued to be important to me. I sloughed them off between classes in markered, bubble-lettered, origami-folded notes with arrows labelled "Pull here" and  warning signs reading, "Don't open until lunch." They wore off through the day and regenerated with every conversation and observation and interaction, wending their ways into letters and poems and stories. 

A multi-year spelling bee winner in elementary school and yearbook editor in middle school, I learned quickly that it was easy to impress people with your words. They would reward you for it, even label you with new words like "smart." They would put you in a category like "honors." They would keep you around but at a distance--close enough to check their homework, far enough so that some labels like "nerd" and "geek" didn't wear off you and onto them.

I'd grow, as most do, to wear those last words proudly. 

By high school I had learned that words could get you into trouble. These are the stories I don't write for free. 

Like words, names have power. I do not think they wield the power to determine who we become, but they certainly generate others' expectations of us. Impressions attach themselves to names so that, once we've met one by a name, we judge all others by that standard. We expect all Jennies, all Beckys, all Deborahs to be the same just like so many people have met black Deidres and then look at me, disappointed, when I walk in a room white, like I will never not do. 

My name actually means "sorrowful wanderer," and I am. Some days.

I have three children, ages twelve, two years, and two months. When I named each, I named them with great hope and anticipation for the adults they would become. Each of them corresponds with a avian reference (I'm pre-Portlandia), and all of them are literary. 

Daina stands for song. It is the name of traditional music or poetry from Latvia. She is my songbird. Her name's spelling has ties to dainty, and her middle name is Alivia-Lee. When I think of it all together, it occurs to me as dainty, alive, and free. It always has. 

Atticus is my son, named after the noblest character in all of literature, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. I love how this character represents the ones who speak for those who cannot, despite the cost. Atticus is a high bar for anyone to reach, so we gave him Holden as a middle-name backup from Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. 

Evangeline Ever is our newest. Her name means "bringer of good news always." Our third bird, she's the dove and olive branch, the promise of good things to come. 

When I gave my children names, I paired a word with their life and what I'd hoped it would be and who I believed they could become. I gave them names with high bars and big shoes.

These are the stories I'm telling about them before they happen, written with hope onto their birth certificates, above closet doors, in lunch boxes, and on the tags of winter coats.

I etched each letter with love, thought of every serif curve, planned how I would pen it on presents and at the bottom of Christmas cards. I played the mean girl while pregnant and imagined how it would be botched by too-tired teachers who would, after mutilating every syllable, shoo my child's corrective words away with a dismissive Frenchman's wave. I weighed the cost of the time and energy I'd spend spelling out "Daina" and explaining that it's like "Diana" but inverted. I'd forecast the pained face I'd fight each time someone cited Atticus as a character from "that really good movie," never knowing who Harper Lee was or what that book did. I knew the ways everyone would try to shorten Evangeline ("Have you thought about Angie? What about Angel? Maybe Evie?") to make it easier when I know good and well that easy is the last thing most people need.

What they need are words big enough to grow into and strong enough to pass down when they're through.

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys

My husband and I have a few people in the world we absolutely and collectively adore. One of our friend's fathers is such a person. He says things like "He's driving like a cowboy!" which is to say that that the person has a complete and utter disregard for the law and which, naturally, we've adopted into our family-friendly traffic cursings.

I've adored the phrase and its nuances so much that it has become part of my grading vernacular: "He's writing like a cowboy!" 

I don't say this, of course, but I think it with an echoing contempt for what appears to be that complete and utter disregard for the law and an outright refusal to "share the road."

I don't say this, of course, not aloud, because it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between someone who hasn't tried and someone who doesn't know, and I would never want to accuse someone of the former when the latter is true. It would be simpler if these beginners could hang a sign on the back of their paper, like we see affixed on so many Civic bumpers, alerting us of learners' status. Warning, they'd say, Student Writer. Proceed with caution (and a healthy slathering of traveling mercies).

I don't say this, of course, never aloud, because I am busy worrying about how many times they must have seen the words don't, can't, or won't in books and believed the apostrophes to be merely decorative. The gasp echoes again when I see a lonely lowercase I (see, I can't even reproduce it here it's so terrifying) and stop to think of how many first-person books they mustn't have read along the long path to believing that (deep breath) "i" ever appears on its own in nature.

I don't say this, of course, when I see I seen without room for the Holy Spirit and a helping verb left between them. 

And this isn't the only thing I don't say. 

I don't tell them I can spot a reader from across a room, or worse, that I can spot a non-reader from across a parking lot. 

I try to keep quiet that, because I've read so much and so long, I can spot an accidentally italicized period after a book title in a works cited entry. They don't need to know that my eyes have traced and memorized half the fonts in Word so that I can't not see a header in Calibri 11 when it's supposed to be Times New Roman 12. I don't tell them I can spell words I can't pronounce because I've seen more words in print than I've ever heard spoken. 

Instead, I tell them that to be better writers, they must be better readers. What I mean to say, though, is that they must have been better readers, and what I need to give I cannot: a time machine, a lap, a love, and a library card.