SOLTuesday: Dreaming and Writing

I am part of a reading series called Big Words. (The audience at one gathering votes for the “big word” or phrase that will be the prompt for the next gathering.) This month’s Big Word is “Five More Minutes.”

            I thought I had an idea, and a week before the reading (which is tonight), I started writing. But it just wasn’t coming out right. One of those ideas that sounds good in theory, but maybe I just don’t have the skill to make it be what I wanted it to be. What to do?

            A couple of nights later I was having a hard time sleeping: lying awake, dozing for a while, snapping awake again. In one of those snap phases, I had the image of a young man named Charles Fletcher, who lives in the 1950s in one of those classic red-brick apartment buildings in Queens, New York, and has a mild crush on an older woman who lives in his building, who has three children. Hmmm, what could I do with that?

            The next day, I had a few hours between meeting friends. So I took my laptop to a nearby library, sat down, and wrote a story. Sent it to my writers’ group, who gave me excellent feedback (way too much setup; doesn’t really end), and yesterday did a revise.

            No time to send it back for more feedback. I will just take it out and run it past the audience tonight. I hope they like it.

            Should I post the final version here?

Big Words: Backsliding

(I want to acknowledge Tanya Shirley, a Jamaican poet, whose “A Chant Against Fear” inspired part of this.)

            Backsliding – should I be afraid of it or look forward to it? Mainstream culture says backsliding is bad. We must always be moving forward. Like sharks, if we don’t keep moving (forward, of course), we die. If we take one step forward and two steps back, that’s a tragedy.             What if there’s a time for backsliding.

            Jack died. Did I tell you that? I’m supposed to be moving forward, finding closure, healing. But I’m not backsliding into grief. Grief is beside the point.

            We met when we were 21, married at 22. We were children. I know, some of you may be 21 or 22 and think you’re adults. We thought we were adults, thought we knew who we were and what we were doing.

            We were lucky, together for the next 52 years. At the beginning, I was a shy, reserved person afraid to speak up because I knew no one would listen to me. I’ve becomw confident, outspoken, standing up in front of classes, sometimes crowds, like this, becoming a boss, hiring and firing, traveling to many countries with strange languages. Women’s liberation had a lot to do with this transformation, but Jack supported it, too. Without him, I’m afraid I’m backsliding to that earlier me.

            When we met, I was on my own and supporting myself, but I was still unformed, malleable. Going from family to roommates, I’d only ever lived alone for two weeks of my life. The first time I was completely on my own, in my own place, I sat on my sofa/bed and cried, for half an hour. I retreated home, to my parents. Then I was afraid, of the silence (no radio), no one to talk to (on the pay phone out in the hall).

Fear of loneliness.

Fear of not knowing who I was.

            A few months after Jack died, fear came roaring back. Now I was home, and my fears were different:

Fear of losing the person I’d become via loving Jack and he loving me.

Fear of being old as a single person, as a single woman, as a woman who’s 75.

Fear of forgetting Jack if I’m successful in learning to live without him.

Fear of the open-endedness of freedom, with no one to share it with.

Fear that having a daily plan will constrain me, but

Fear that having no plan will leave me unmoored.

Fear of dying.

Fear of being a person who is afraid of dying.

            The fear ebbs, but never disappears. I remember what the great Negro Leagues xpitcher Satchel Paige said, “Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you.”  But if I look back, if I backslide into that fear, perhaps I’ll learn something I need to know.

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I read this at the July 24 Big Words series, which had the theme word "Backslide."

Slice of Life, #17

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            Last night I went to the Big Words reading series. Founded by Stacey Kahn and Jess Martinez exactly three years ago, Big Words meets approximately once a month with readers writing to a theme chosen by the audience at the previous Big Words reading. Last night’s theme was All or Nothing.

            I was one of the readers (see Slice 11). When I started going to Big Words, it met in the back of CultureFix, a bar on the far Lower East Side, a long walk from any subway stops. Last summer it moved to Brooklyn, to a large upstairs event space at another bar, 61 Local, at 61 Bergen Street (this one has a kitchen, and a good one). I’d been to a couple of Big Words there and thought I knew the way. So I didn’t make a Google map. My mistake.

            Took the subway to the Barclay Center, but when I looked at the neighborhood map in the station, I couldn’t find Boerum Place, the street I usually walked down. But there was Bergen Street just a couple of blocks away, so that’s where I headed. But when I got to Bergen Street, the house numbers showed how far off I was. The first one I saw was 413. Oh, dear. And Brooklyn blocks are long. It took me 25 minutes to get to 61 Local -- but at least there was no wind, like Monday, it wasn’t very cold, and I could use the exercise. When my friend Stacie arrived, she explained that I should have gotten off at Borough Hall – oh, it was that B on the map that had thrown me off.

            My reading went well, there were many laughs, and I enjoyed my five minutes in the metaphorical spotlight (no mike either). Looking forward to the next Big Words, whose theme is Stories from Abroad.