A month of gifts, day 20: The (Lost) Gift of Creativity

Somehow, I lost one of these gifts, the one I need to tell stories. The one that lures me to the laptop day after day. “Here,” it whispers, “I have something to show you. Sit down and pay attention.”

Somehow, that went away. Looking back, I’m not sure if it happened all at once, like ripping off a Band-aid, or if it trickled away, sand slipping from an hourglass with a hole in the bottom. Sometimes I see glints of it, the way you can catch glimpses of minnows at the bottom of the creek when the sun comes from behind a cloud and strikes the water at the right angle. A flip—a poem—a scene—and it’s gone again.

The sane, responsible, grown-up part of me tries to remind the rest of me that this happens from time to time. I really admire the people who sit down and grind it out day after day, and I know that when I show up, good things can happen. Until they don’t. This is how adults make art, I tell that small, scared child that lives somewhere in me. You calm down and put in the time. Or you do things that refill the well. You don’t whine and stomp around.

Except sometimes, whining and stomping is a lot more emotionally satisfying. It’s the illusion of power, when actual creative power seems to have fled. And I suspect I’m not the only writer who’s heard that sneering voice at the back of my mind at those moments: “Who were you trying to fool? 

You put on a good show for a while, but now it’s over. Whatever magic you once had is gone.”

The thing no one tells anyone when they start out on this road is how scary it can be sometimes. There’s this idea that if you follow the path, the way will open up. The Way. Will open up. I mean, it’s part of the hero’s journey, right? The brambles and pits can’t go on forever.

Or can they?

I don’t know the answer, though it’s a question I’ve been wrestling with for more than a year now. The habit of hope—and I’m not sure right now if it’s a good habit or a bad one—is hard to break. Dent it, sure. Scratch it up, absolutely. But it still hangs around, its hand out, ready to pull me back whenever I’m ready to walk. Hope says to wait a little longer. Maybe take a step back, a deep breath, and accept that plan A isn’t going to work, and plan B was a bust, but plan C will show up in a minute.

And when plan C arrives, it says, “I had this thought. A question, really, about this guy. And this girl. Do you want to hear it?”

Yes. Yes, I do.

Although this does remind me of how Dorothy Parker said that if you know a young person who wants to become a writer, the second best thing you can do for them is to buy them a good thesaurus. And the first best thing is to shoot them now, while they're still happy.

A month of gifts, day 19: The Gift of Home

Last night we had the first snowfall of the season. Not much to speak of—only a couple of inches—but it never really feels like Christmas until there’s at least a dusting on the ground.

I never expected to feel at home in western New York. If anything, I always imagined going back to Maine at some point, but fate and a sucky economy have worked against that. Yet at some point when I wasn’t really thinking about it, Buffalo and its environs began to feel like the place I belong. 

Some of it is a matter of knowing people, both friends and nodding acquaintances. It’s the clerk at the post office remembering where I send packages, and the barista at the coffee shop knowing my favorite drink when I show up to hang out with a friend. It’s knowing their names and stories in turn.

Finding a home in Buffalo means cheering for sports teams that never quite seem to win in the crunch. It means Broadway shows at Shea’s, and taking all your friends and relatives to Niagara Falls at least once. It means learning to like beef on weck rolls with horseradish sauce. It means feeling passionate about 19^th century architecture and taking pride in the history of the area. It’s sponge candy and fresh apple cider and picking your own berries on a hot summer’s day.

Home means the rhythm of the seasons and having a favorite spot to watch them change. It means having strong opinions about the new sign at the five and dime store (yes, we actually have one of those in my little town, and it’s terrific. The store, I mean. Though I like the fiberglass statue of Ed Vidler on the roof as well). 

Vidler's 5 and 10

It means checking the obituaries and the police blotter and the wedding announcements to look for any familiar names. It means knowing which neighbors don’t believe in the leash laws, and which ones want me to stop by and say hello when I’m out for a walk.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I live in some kind of bucolic time warp. There are thefts and drug problems, bitterness between neighbors, poverty, all the sorrows that accumulate when people live together. But all things considered, it’s a beautiful place full of people who are mostly a pretty decent bunch. In the stormy times, their best qualities shine through. Folks seem at their kindest when we’ve been buried under a few feet of snow.

(Not that I’m looking forward to the next round of lake effect madness. Well, okay, maybe a little. When the whole family is home safe, and we’ve gathered together to read or watch a movie, while the snow piles up between us and the rest of the world, and the kitchen smells like tomato soup, hot chocolate, and grilled cheese sandwiches . . . That’s home.)

A month of gifts, day 18: The Gift of Travel

The thing is, once you've traveled beyond your own comfortable corner of the world, you will never be the same again. And that's a good thing. 

(The pictures are from my trip to what was then the Soviet Union. It was 1987, I was about to start my senior year in high school, and I got to see some really amazing things.)

 (Summer palace of the Persian Empire, near Baku, Azerbaijan)

 (Tower and wall, in the old city of Tallinn, Estonia)

 (Courtyard)

 (Soviet sailors in Leningrad)

 (Memorial and cemetery for the Siege of Leningrad during WWII)

(Tallinn cathedral)

(The Tsar Cannon in the Kremlin, Moscow)

(Cathedral, Moscow Kremlin)

(View from the palace, Tsarskoe Selo)

(Children at a summer camp near Sochi)

A month of gifts, day 17: The Gift of Love

If I look kind of cranky in that picture, it's because I've had a difficult day. Well, year. Well, actually, it's been a difficult decade. I'm working through it, but some days are better than others.

I'm regaining my will to live somewhat, because the Spousal Unit brought home doughnuts from Paula's Doughnuts tonight. If you're local, you know what that means. If not, you need to come visit and we'll eat doughnuts and hunt fossils and go to Niagara Falls . . . It'll be fun.

So I'm eating my key lime doughnut and thinking about love. Sometimes, in the midst of disaster or despair, it can be hard to remember how I got to this place, or why I made the trip. Physical pain, depression, those things can grind you down until life becomes a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other slog. It's been getting better, but today . . . Well, you know on the news when the neighbor says, "She always seemed like such a nice person, and then she just SNAPPED"? Today was the day I finally lost patience with the staff at my doctor's office after 15 years of dismissiveness and stonewalling. Not my finest hour.

So when the spouse called to say he was on his way home early, I was thrilled, even before he said he was bringing doughnuts. I told him I was having a bad day, and he said, "I can get dinner, too."

I love that man. He even listened to me vent my spleen and empathized and agreed that the staff at our doctor's office are unnecessarily obnoxious. That gift of understanding, of time, was just what I needed. That, and a key lime doughnut.

To me, one of the best things about the gift-giving part of the holidays is the chance to enjoy those moments when someone opens a present and tells you, “Oh, it’s perfect.” Or for that matter, opening something and seeing a surprise that resonates with you on a level that tells you the gift-giver understands you more deeply than you realized. It’s then that you see the gift is not so much in the package, but in the love that wraps it.

Like that cool coat I'm wearing in the picture at the top. I saw it in a store when we were on a road trip in Rochester and did a little oooing and ahing over it. Buying it was pretty much out of the question, though . . . and then I opened a box on Christmas morning and found the coat I thought I'd never get to wear. My sweet spouse drove all the way back to Rochester on the sly to surprise me with it. Every time I wear that coat, every time I think about opening that box, I can't help but smile. After all, it is an Awesome Pirate Coat--but it's also a reminder that I married a guy who'll go out of his way to remember the things I like. Putting it on is like armor against life's little wounds. 

A month of gifts, day 16: The Gift of the Ocean

(The view from Windswept Point, South Harpswell, Maine.)

My friend Lynn and I bonded over living in the Buffalo area after growing up in Maine. “I miss the ocean,” Lynn told me, and I nodded agreement. “When I moved here, someone said, ‘Just go to Lake Erie. It’s the same.’ So I did. And I just stood on the shore and cried.”

I knew what she meant. Oh, the Great Lakes are nice, even impressive at times. But, no, they aren’t ‘the same’ as the sea. The ocean feels and tastes and sounds different. Tides measure out the days, storms cast up treasure, seals and lobster buoys bob off the rocks.

I think everyone has a certain kind of wildness they’re drawn to, and while I love the forests of my childhood home, and I’ve learned to love mountains and deserts and the sere high plains in my life’s journey, there’s something about the sea that always calls to me. I come from sea people, and I feel the tide the way I can feel the pulse of my own blood in my neck.

My dad’s family settled in Maine a few hundred years ago. There used to be a Bibber Island in Casco Bay—it’s known as Little Whaleboat now, and you can see it if you stand at the end of the point where my grandmother’s house stands. Shale breaks apart like the leaves of a giant book, slabs taller than me falling every year to the storms. Seaweed squelches underfoot, and barnacles will cut your feet and knees as you clamber along the low cliffs. Little green crabs, quahog clams with their royal purple lips, gulls shrilling overhead, slow starfish and darting seals. I even love that rich, rank low-tide smell.

(The house at Harpswell.)

That’s the sea I grew up with, cold and stern like a Pilgrim preacher on the northern Atlantic coast. And when I grew older and moved west, I learned to love the Pacific, too. There’s Point Reyes State Shore just north of San Francisco, and Coos Bay on the Oregon coast, where the rocky cliffs are gentled by a warmer sun and soft sand. My sister tells me I bring good weather luck with me when I visit, because it’s always sunny and warm enough to visit the beach. (Apparently it’s not always cheery and bright in Oregon?)

When I was a little girl, I would give offerings to the sea. In my mind, she was a powerful woman, capable of great rages and yet full of playfulness. I felt her presence, her majesty, and I would toss the best seashells and stones I found back into the water as a gift. Maybe, in that little act of worship, I linked myself to something larger than I knew, something impossible to ever escape.

(Some of the treasures I picked up while beachcombing in Bandon.)

Not that I want to escape, unless you mean a little vacation spot by the sea.

I'm not here today, I'm over THERE

Halfway through December, and today I'm guest-blogging at Jay Wilburn's place for the Giftmas Tour. Please stop by and check it out!

Here's the yellow brick road to Jay's blog

A month of gifts, day 14: The Gift of History

Saturday night before the hockey game, the Spousal Unit and I went out for dinner and talked about life and stuff, as you do when you’ve got almost a quarter-century of shared history. In fact, history was one of the things we discussed. Specifically, the way some people seem to have a very selective understanding of the past, a sort of idealized vision of a world that never really existed.

(A page from the Book of Kells.)

Earlier this month I talked about my affection for science and technology, and how much I adore living in the future as we do. But I’m also glad to live in a time with so much easily accessible knowledge about the past . . . and it’s kind of sad when people don’t take advantage of that opportunity.

There are people with idealized perceptions of the past—fueled in large part, I think, by the relentless negativity of the 24-hour news cycle—as a place without random violence or scary people who are different, or whatever. If it wasn’t such a menace to the stability of our society, it would be hilarious. 

Grab a book about the Thirty Years’ War. (Go ahead; I’ll wait.) Or about one of the many, many horrible pandemics that routinely destroyed huge chunks of the population all over the world. Or a book about slavery, or the Armenian genocide during World War I, or the Holocaust during World War II, or Stalin’s terror . . .

I trust I’ve made my point. Bad things happen in every time. There was no lovely golden age where children didn’t come to grief, and regardless of what the talking heads on CNN or Fox News would have you believe in their relentless quest for higher ratings, kids are much safer, much more likely to live to a ripe old age today than at any other time in history. I would no more willingly raise my kids a hundred and fifty years ago than I would drive them around without their seatbelts on.

I’ll admit, too, that I used to keep my blinders on as much as possible, in that comfortable zone of heroes and villains. My fall from grace started in college, with a history professor who specialized in research on the late medieval/Renaissance period in central Europe. His work fascinated me—rather than an illusionary time of wholesome nuclear families, their lives were just as messy and fraught as any modern community. We just didn’t know about it before, because no one had bothered to look.

Since then, I’ve delved into the founding of the good ol’ US of A—which is even more remarkable once you understand all the negotiations that made it possible, all the squabbling and searching. One of my favorite biographies is David McCullough’s John Adams, in large part because he presents Adams as a complete person, a prickly genius who struggled with ego and faith and service. His accomplishments and his humanity are all the more remarkable when his fallibility becomes clear. And I think one of the dangers of idealizing the heroes of the past (however awesome they are) is that we can fail to understand our own capacity for courage and goodness.

(A portrait of John Adams.)

I’m not sure I believe that forgetting history means we’re doomed to repeat it. But I do think we can’t move forward until we have an honest understanding of the past rather than a naïve wish for a storybook time rather than grappling with reality. And remember, those who forget history are doomed to get a verbal smackdown from someone who’s done the homework.

(Danse Macabre--Even kings must bow to the greater powers.)