Archives for December 22, 2004

“Let your characters talk a little longer about a little less.”

True Boardman (quoted in Leonard Maltin, The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio’s Golden Age)

A friend writes:

How is it to be home? What do your days consist of? Tell me tell me.

My days are for the most part happily uneventful. I always sleep late. I usually take my mother out to lunch (nowhere fancy–there aren’t any fancy places to take her in Smalltown!), after which we run whatever errands may need running. I brought home a couple of unfinished pieces that require my attention, but I haven’t yet started working on them. My brother and his family, who live three blocks away, frequently poke their heads in after dinner; otherwise, my mother and I do the dishes, watch a little TV or a movie, and chat contentedly about old times, local gossip, and whatever I may have been up to since my last visit home. She goes to bed around ten-thirty, after which I surf the Web, answer the day’s e-mail, blog a bit, and read myself to sleep. I packed four new books, David Thomson’s The Whole Equation, Ada Louise Huxtable’s brief life of Frank Lloyd Wright, the new Willem de Kooning biography, and the galleys of Doug Ramsey’s biography of Paul Desmond–more than I needed, but I’ve always been overambitious when it comes to holiday reading.

That’s normally about the size of it, but yesterday was different. We’d been talking about driving to Cape Girardeau to polish off our Christmas shopping, and when the weatherman told us on Monday that it was going to snow on Wednesday, we figured we’d better stop procrastinating and get the rest of it done while we still could. It happened that my mother’s boss was buying lunch in Cape on Tuesday for all the girls in the office (my septuagenarian mother, who continues to work in the mornings, finds it highly gratifying to be thought of as “one of the girls”), so I joined the party, and after lunch we got in my rental car and whizzed around town, keeping an eye on the cloud-filled sky in between stops. Once we’d worked our way to the bottom of the checklist, we turned around and headed for home. I popped a Louis Armstrong album into the CD player and told stories about Louis’ New Orleans childhood as we listened to “Blues in the Night” and “Just One of Those Things” and watched the clouds grow thicker.

Back in Smalltown, we picked up some just-in-case groceries, filled a prescription, bought one last present at Wal-Mart, and rented four videos that I thought my mother might enjoy seeing, The Secret Lives of Dentists, Napoleon Dynamite, Open Range (she likes Westerns), and Stuck on You. We got home just in time to catch the five o’clock weather on TV. It started raining around ten, right on time, and I went to bed with the benign glow of achievement that comes from knowing that you’re as ready as you can possibly be for a two-day blow.

I woke before sunrise, looked out my bedroom window, and saw at least two inches of snow glittering beneath the streetlights of Hickory Drive. Content at last, I got back in bed and returned to my mundane dreams.

– To pick up on the theme of an earlier posting, my newest friend is in the same key as I am–or, to use a metaphor drawn from a different realm, we’re on the same page, and we realized it almost as soon as we met. A person who knows us both well told me that she thought we were “long-lost siblings, separated at birth and finally together again.” Such intense and immediate rapport is a gift akin to grace, and thus never to be taken lightly, not least because it is so rare.

Only yesterday, she ended an e-mail to me with the following sentence: “Hoping your dreams entertain–let me know if any good ones grant you the luck of remembering.” As I read it, I asked myself, What part of my destiny is to be made manifest by my having found a friend capable of saying such a thing to me within days of our first meeting?

– Being a writer is a strange business: you have an experience, and right in the middle of it words start taking shape in your head. The trick, I suppose, is not to let the words get between you and the experience. I’m usually pretty good about that, but I can recall more than one occasion in my life when I found myself thinking coolly detached thoughts in the least likely and least appropriate of circumstances, from intimate moments to deathbed scenes. I can’t think of many traits that are less attractive, since the point of life is to live it while it’s happening, but the writer in me is always on duty, and though he frequently nods off at his post, it doesn’t take much to wake him up.

– I don’t often surprise Our Girl in Chicago, but I brought the trick off the other day when I mentioned in passing that I’d never in my life asked a woman out simply because I thought she was cute. Our Girl was astonished to hear this, and told me so.