I lay on the sofa, feet up, reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. It’s a how-to book on writing, as if someone can write a how-to book on writing, which one can’t, and the author says as much. Lamott is an entertaining writer: witty, light-footed, a little crass, honest. I’ve read this book before and enjoyed it; I’m pleased to be reading it again– the lightest, easiest reading I’ve done for class Ever.
I’m reminded, of course, of Annie Dillard’s comment on teaching someone to write, her quiet assent to the fact that it can’t be done: “The page, the page, the page will teach you how to write.”
So I was reading Lamott and Bill was making dinner, and I was exhausted after hours in Perkins Library, climbing stairs to the history floor and then down to the social sciences floor (there are, in fact, three social science floors), and then down even farther, around several turns, to the microfilms room, a windowless, receding space, wherein I discovered that neither of the articles I need are available to me.
I came home laden with books, some of impressive thickness, who made their weight insistently apparent as I carried them in my arms through Duke Gardens. They sit in the pile where I left them, on the living room floor at the foot of the armchair.
I am fighting something, I’m sure. I have a quiet ache at the back of my neck and also at my knees; something feels inflamed at the back of my throat. Bill brought me a glass of wine, and it warmed me. I listened to him cooking in the kitchen; I love the smell of olive oil warming with onions.
But I’m aching with something else too– the weight of all the Things I have to do, and the pile of books there on the floor is but One of them. There is Other Writing as well, some that will be read aloud and some that will be read silently and some that will be delivered by me before a potentially large group of people. And None of it is something that I don’t want to do, but All of it comes due in October, and all of it in the next two and a half weeks. And somehow deadlines, even deadlines of things one wants to do, can become heavy– heavier, even, than the stack of books that I carried through the gardens this late afternoon. Heavy not as much for the arms as for the shoulders, or the back, the mind and, even, the soul.
So I lay on the sofa and read, and tried to remove all of this weight to the sofa cushions, who couldn’t be nearly as bothered by it as I.
And then they came in, My Three, dressed, for the time-being, as pirates. Everett was the captain (“Captain Jack,” he informed me) wearing the tri-cornered hat replete with skull and cross-bones. He had a belt, too, and a long sword, and a gun, for good measure. William was similarly armed, and had tied something woven and jaunty around his head. Emma Grace wore a red vest over her pajamas and a white bandana. She had a gun too, or something, and they were all having a wonderful time.
Bill took their picture, and I would post it here, except that now I have a new computer on which we have not yet installed the capacity to do such things. But let me tell you that the children posed nicely, engaged in battle, weapons aloft, faces full of avarice and rage, as pirate faces ought to be.
There are lots of how-to books on parenting, but no one can tell you how to do it, really. What works for one person Absolutely Won’t Do for another, and there is nothing like having multiple children to make this fact readily apparent. The child, yes? The child, the child will teach you how to parent.
I would like to say that their very presence in my living room, so imaginatively attired, was enough to lift all of the weight from my shoulders, my back, even the books over there by the chair. I would like to say that.
But I will say instead that there is something tragic at work in the mere dailyness of our lives. There is something deceptive about the mundane regularity of our days. There is something that can make us tired in the face of the magnificent, something that can cause us to overlook or take for granted the sweet wonder of one’s children dressed as pirates, playing together in the living room on a rainy Friday night.
The fact is that I have known many an October to come and go, and this one will likely do the same, enfolding and carrying away in its days all the deadlines and projects and worries that plague me now. As my grandmother used to say, “It came to pass; it didn’t come to stay.”
But there is the fact, too, that Time is not an element in which I find comfort. I can’t get my bearings, can’t really understand how to spend it, don’t really know how to manage. So these days of parenting can seem long, but the years fly by. And the burden of a silly little research paper that will Scarcely Matter At All in two months time rears its head daily: a monstrosity.
What perspective can we hope to have? Moses said it: “For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.”
And then he says– and here, my friends, is Hope– “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90
Amen.
