Last week we went into the cupboard to pull out a sweater for my daughter.
[We house their clothes in the downstairs built-in cupboards because keeping my children in their room when they wake up, long enough to get them ACTUALLY DRESSED, is a fundamentally ridiculous proposition. Instead we go for the “catch-and-release” model, whereby one snags a naked child and puts something—anything—on it the first time it runs by, adding an item each successive time it runs by, and replacing items as they are continuously removed/summarily rejected. Mostly we are all in various stages and states of undress most of the time.]
Anyhow, we went into one of those clothing-roundabout cupboards to pull a sweater for my daughter and found that the red one, which was suddenly and inexplicably her favorite, had two large holes in it. Since it was made of cotton, not wool, I couldn’t blame our usual crop of moths, and had to admit that the mice have finally come in. They do this every year and I pretend it’s not happening every year.
I sighed and told her that a mouse had chewed some holes in the sweater and that it was not something mommy could fix with her knitting supplies. The damage was sufficient to effectively total the sweater.
To my surprise, she was immediately and deeply aggrieved. She cried, hard, for forty-five minutes. She wailed. “Why the mouse DO that, Mama?” she said over and over. It blew her mind that a creature would harm something she (apparently) loved. I explained about soft building materials, and that mice are wild animals and don’t know any better and don’t mean any harm, and are just trying to make nice places to live, like the rest of us.
I thought back to a recent time when she’d been very disappointed— when we’d made the trek down the hill to get cider doughnuts at the orchard stand and found the whole operation to be closed. She’d done something brilliant then— taken a napkin and drawn little doughnuts on it, complete with sugar and cinnamon powder dots. I don’t know why, but that small act of creative amendment broke my heart. She’d patched things up, as best she could.
So, regarding the red sweater, I finally asked the still-crying child if she’d like to paint the mice. Yes, she said, immediately, and we got the watercolors out. Big oval, little legs, and then— “THESE ARE THE HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE TEETH,” she said, and added notable protuberances from the nominal heads of her ovals. Somehow, this seemed to satisfy her, in combination with me painting the sweater, avec holes.
The recording, the making, the rendering… the act of witness, allowed her to move on, to continue living, where it had seemed impossible (in a world where mice eat red sweaters).
*
Last week, I sent nothing out to my subscribers for the first time in a year and a half. Every week for almost eighteen months, I have delivered something— something that mattered to me and that did some kind of work I needed to do. Last week I was unable.
There are times when things are too hard, when circumstance wins. I’ve been in recovery from an autoimmune attack since June, and it’s been a rough road for my whole family, which everyone expected. What I didn’t expect was the viciousness of the treatment itself: that withdrawal from massive doses of steroids is enough to put the world in smithereens.
The psychological suffering possible as a result of a body robbed of its regulatory capabilities (and let’s be honest, mine weren’t super awesome to begin with) is, frankly, astonishing. It leaves precious little room for short, funny essays to percolate, let’s just say (read: me, visibly shaking, sobbing on the bathroom floor because I can’t tell whether I deserve to take a shower or not. Folks, we’re not talking one or two wandering marbles here— it was ALL the marbles, STRAIGHT down the vent.)
I felt a sadness in not sending any transmission last week, even though I knew people would either not notice or not be bothered by the omission. Part of that sadness was knowing that my livelihood (“livelihood” as understood more as a combination of purpose, utility, pleasure, and joy than as a form of monetary earning capability) depends upon words— the making of word artifacts/sculptures/structures, and the sharing of them especially.
So: I offer last week’s struggle as artifact, as the process of witness, and a record, in a way, of any of us making our way through the materials we have—creating something in order to continue.
And, as much for myself as for anyone else, I also want to offer a way to patch some of the holes: some time in the new year, I’ll be offering a new feature here, a place for closeted scribblers and seasoned writers alike to show up and share their own particular assemblies of words, which I will meet exactly where they are (see how Busy and Important I Am and How Many Qualifications I Have Here).
Several folks on this list have approached me with various kinds of writing (casual musings, hard-earned poems, explorations and reflections that bounce off of what I’ve written that week, for example) and it thrills me to attend to these.
I want to offer invitations/motivations/prompts to those who’d like to show up and see what happens, and then offer what tends to be called “feedback,” but what I prefer to call “weather reports” or “descriptions of my experience.”
I envision a type of one-room schoolhouse, but without any expectations. Whatsoever. It could be called the Complete Deniability Literary Society, or Office Hours with the Feral Professor. Anyone who wanted the option to read and/or share in this venue would simply upgrade their subscription to Founding Member at any price above the yearly subscription that feels comfortable, thereby joining a new kind of community, a safe and encouraging place to create and see what happens. (This upgrade feature is not *yet* in place; I’m mentioning it now so that you can think on it, since I usually need a few thousand years to think about something I know I want to do before actually doing it.)
I know there are those of you on this subscription list who would share wonderful things made of words, and that I would take great pleasure and derive great purpose from interacting with them, no matter how humble or crystalline, no matter what genre, no matter how many of your marbles have gone down the vent. Which means others would, too. And as I’ve asked before, who are you to withhold your offerings from others?
There would be no obligation to share, only the continued invitation, and the insistence that what we create matters, perhaps more than we know. And perhaps we can all be a little less alone in this way. So do think on it, and I’ll be in touch with more information and rabble-rousing as we close in on the new year. I welcome comments and questions in response to this proposed community/activity, as I begin to wrap my head around how best to offer it, and how it might best serve us all.
These are my artifacts, my renderings, my offerings— these are the horrible, horrible teeth, and these are the doughnuts.
I did notice, and I'm sorry to hear it wasn't just a planned break. Would you like to draw a watercolor of your immune system? Haha. I mean, kind of. Why not, really?. I guess your writing is kind of your watercolor, or so it seems. The size of the teeth (aka overwhelming circumstances, misbehaving body, medical purgatory) has been seen.
Inspired by your daughter I am contemplating drawing the presumably outdoor mice who came indoors (well, into the cold garage) to deposit their chewings in the form of a nest on the intake manifold of my Subaru as I prepared for a long trip.
But then somehow I felt less aggrieved than your daughter. Perhaps feeling guilt for having once had to live-trap them & tag their soft velvety ears before letting them go again, perhaps because I have been very cold myself and sought most any form of warmth I could find (even on a warm engine), perhaps because of guilt over how we keep encroaching on their natural habitat, perhaps because I'm just older and have grown more tolerant of what life throws my way, perhaps because my skills of artistic expression are more rudimentary than your daughter's and any attempt at remediation through art would leave me more wounded than I began; any or all of these in accumulation have left me feeling not only accepting but perhaps even reassured that those of the horrible, horrible teeth have found their own special way too survive...at not too dear a cost to me.