Finding Words

Yesterday, I listened only to radio news because I couldn't bear to look.  I searched for words of comfort, in lyrics and song.  I scrolled through Facebook statuses and read all that people had to say and discovered I had nothing to say. I felt compelled to prepare my own statement.  My own ahem.   It seemed that everyone had one. And I'm a writer.  But silence. Stillness. That felt more appropriate to me.

On September 12, 2001, I sat at a long wood table in Goldwyn Smith Hall.  We were a group of sixteen creative writing students that later dwindled to ten.  Our first assignments were due.  My professor, Dan McCall, collected our words, piled them up in a neat, organized stack of typed pages.  He sat back, at the head of our table, and asked us who had written of the tragedy the day before.  No one raised a hand.

I remember, of all things about him, his voice.  It was ragged and unkempt, this thick, almost bearded-like garble and he spoke slowly, like guiding a cane forward.  He said that when he began teaching forty years ago every student in his class would have turned in a piece about the day that would come to be known as 9/11.  He said they would have stayed up all night, ripped it from the pages of their notebooks, still warm from the pen.  He said the stack before him would have been made of yellow legal pad paper and stained napkins, that the room we sat in would be a rupturing volcano, it is with that kind of urgency his students in the 60's would write.  Look at what happened yesterday, he said. And none of you have written a word.

On this kind of yesterday, I listened, as many did, to the President's speech.  Maybe it is telling, of our culture, of these times, that what struck us most was not the words he spoke but his long pause as he struggled to speak (5 seconds, the papers noted and reported.)   In that silence, we realized the weight of what had happened.

I woke this morning, with a stirring, to come to this space, to assign words to all I feel.  But in tragedies like these words still fail me.  I worry that, in truth, I have failed them.

Upside Down

Late last night on a G train, I looked up from my book and found this.

He looks how I feel.

When I Read A Book

While reading I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, I came across this sentence and I loved it, so I wanted to share it here:

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it -- or rather, it is like living it. 

I love this idea that reading is just as active as writing.  As living.

Fixing A Heart

I often feel helpless in medical situations.  With my father's health issues last week, there came the unexpected frustration that I have never been smart enough to understand the sciences.  

A cardiac surgeon with kind eyes and soft hands would leave the room and I'd say,  I should have been a surgeon.  

A nurse might explain the unreliability of EKGs and I'd lament that I should have been a nurse. 

After asking five hundred questions about the role of a cosmetologist in the hospital, I was about to speak up before my father chimed in and said, Let me guess, you want to be a cosmetologist in a hospital?   I nodded.

I think, no matter what field we study or what path we walk, we'd all like to be the kind of someone who can  fix a person's heart.  

Rethinking Urgent

After an emotional and scary week (my father had emergency surgery but all went well and he is in recovery) I came into the office to catch up.  Perhaps my head was elsewhere, still with my Dad in his hospital room where I will return soon, but I was focused enough to laugh loudly in the face of a red-bolded, exclamation-marked email labelled URGENT in the subject line.

I scrolled through the frenzy, then went through my files and sent the necessary information.  This urgently needed information.  After, I watched the silence and the long breath, a mad email chain officially over with no response, no thank you, just the taking and the running until the next inevitable whirling dervish spin.

This is something that's been on my mind for a while, but even more so after this week's life events: I've decided to rethink urgent.  The way I request urgency in others and how I respond to those who ask it of me.  

I think I need a new priority of urgent.  Attending a birthday party. That sounds pretty urgent. Seeing the baby. (As in: You gotta see the baby! Seinfeld, anyone?)  Catching the sunset before it drops from the sky.  A girl's weekend. Dinner, or a walk, or a phone-call with family and friends. 

So, rethinking urgent. Who's with me?

A Familiar Journey

The morning was damp, hazy. I rode my bicycle to work for the first time in weeks, took the familiar journey.  It went (it goes) like this:

My bike plunks off the curb.  I adjust to the concrete, to the wobble of my handlebars. I ride the wrong way, for just a brief moment, in that I know the way but traffic along this one small street runs opposite, so I tuck myself at the edge, aware that I'm where I shouldn't be.

The stoplight is never long but I watch the corner market.  I remember when it burned, the notes that were left on the windows, we miss you.  Now it's bright and open and I know the owner's smile because it sits beneath an unshaven gray shadow and it's kinder than most.

Clinton Street is wet and crowded but the crossing guard, our favorite, stands at the park, the one where we sat with Tyler's cousins and a little girl, lost in play, wandered towards us because she thought she was ours until she realized she wasn't and toddled away.  The crossing guard is little but sturdy and her glasses are fogged or maybe they're smudged and she doesn't mind it.  She shouts things we've come to expect, Come on bikers!  Hey baby doll!  Watch out for these maniacs!  She points at cars and shakes her head.  In the summer we miss her, and those weeks, this fall, when the road was closed, we wondered where she went.  Because her voice is my morning.  Her voice is the moment you think you are sitting alone and someone sits beside you.

I take the road up and around towards the Manhattan bridge.  I know the ground beneath me, the way it curls first, then slopes just enough for my tires to slow.  Soon, I mark the East river, it's middle.  This is where the road flattens, then slips away from itself, a downhill sled. This is where the air changes. The faint smell of fish.  Cooking oil climbs like a chimney swell from unknown stoves.  No one glances from the rushing carts and they take chances, like a gazelle's very first leap, across the painted lines of street.

I always want to stop here, on the path, where the old women in their winter bundle coats stand in Tai Chi formation across the damp grass.  I always think I will stop, someday, to take their photograph, to capture something I've otherwise been unable to keep.  Sometimes they are still and I think I'm caught in the hush of their whisper.

Sometimes they are dancing.

The Power of Story

Last week, I saw The Twenty-Seventh Man, a play by Nathan Englander.  I wanted to briefly mention it here because the ideas are big and they are relevant to those of us trying to create something with words.

The gist of the play here, (a true story) : In 1952 Stalin imprisoned and executed 26 Yiddish writers, an incident also known as the Night Of the Murdered Poets. Englander invents a 27th prisoner, a young, unpublished writer mistakenly taken into custody.

The play is about many things but, at the heart of it, it's about extinguishing the soul of a group of people, which, Englander suggests (and I would agree), is its stories.

I think, most of the time, we see this as a part of a time gone by or a foreign country tucked safely in the folds of newspapers.  But it happens here, too, through censorship, banned books, white-washed covers.

This play reminded me that it's important to tell any story and, if we can, to speak for groups of people who have been silenced.  Story is powerful. Don't let anyone tell you it's not. People will go to great lengths to capture and contain the spin of words, then eliminate them all together.