Fair Trade

I used to spend an exorbitant amount of time writing in diners and coffee shops. This was back before motherhood, before I kept jobs longer than the average three-month stretch. This was before barn chores and a mortgage and before I went grocery shopping weekly at the same grocery store and even went so far as to write lists so as not to forget basic household favorites. This was before the household.

At that time, the bottomless cup of coffee still existed. Maybe it was because the kind of places I frequented didn't sell organic, fair-trade coffees. Maybe it was because my favorite place was a silver diner called Palooka Joe's and it's patrons were mostly the down and outs in the dowtown area. I would sit at the bar sometimes learning sign language from Michael, my favorite down and out. He had big aluminum baskets on both ends of his bicycle, worked odd jobs for money and had no sense of hearing. For a long time, our exchanges consisted of words cluttered on paper placemats but I had had a deaf boyfriend in high school and so had learned the ESL alphabet. It was slow communication but I had time and was open and he was homeless and weathered. He loved the opportunity to sit with a young pretty girl and I.... I just needed substance. I was desperately searching for anything other than the hum-drum, mundane reality of middle class white America and all that came with that.

In the closet in the guest room of our 150 year old, crooked farmhouse is a black and purple bag, stuffed to the top with fat, little CVS spiral-bound notebooks. None of them are dated, there are likely more than a dozen, and in order to put them in any kind of sequence I would have to sit down and force myself to read through them. Force myself back into that time in my life. I always tell myself that someday I will put myself to the task. But it's been more than a decade since those fat, little spiral bound notebooks and more than a decade of healing old wounds. My new journals are formatted differently. I've begun to think in full sentences, starting combing my hair, stopped taking so many drugs and gave birth to new muse.

But I do miss my homeless friends. I miss Benjamin, who, instead of introducing himself right off, walked up to my table at a little downtown deli and asked me if I was writing love letters in those notebooks. I told him that I didn't write love letters and conceded that I was writing poetry (something I rarely admitted at that time in my life). He took a deep breath, grinned, and proceeded to recite the Raven line by line. A few minutes into his performance, he held up one finger, turned around and ordered a cup of coffee and came back to my table and asked if he might join me. The friendship was sealed already but he gave me more of the Raven, his life story and there would be days to come where we would meet up on the square and I would play harmonica while he would play a borrowed guitar. Oftentimes, the other old buddies would be nearby playing cards or checkers on the stone benches.

Back then, I was dodging the ghosts of a love gone bad and a given up pregnancy. I was medicating myself with lots of weed, a little speed, alot of booze and music and sex and dancing. I've always thought of those years as the golden years, as the Great Distraction. I was dancing out there on the very thin limbs of my own branches. Dreaming of houses with no windows, no roofs, and many rooms. Dreaming of little girls that might have been my own. I was writing the story of my life in scattered sentences over drip coffee, good company and fried eggs. And late at night, after the bands had packed up, I'd walk barefoot into the dark alleys to find my old buddies on some abandoned porch and they'd scold me for wearing no shoes as I'd sit there on the broken step pulling a sliver of glass out of the heel of my foot. I'd loan them smokes. They'd loan me their stories. It seemed a very fair trade.

I'm sitting here now in a coffee shop in a prime tourist New England town, a couple of blocks from where I work. In the place of a fat, little notebook or a placemat, I have my old, slow laptop. I've graduated from see-through coffee to a chai latte and I'm not stoned. There are no homeless people reciting poetry to me, this is not a silver diner and I am no longer in an old blue-collar mining town. Just some nice tables and chairs and the constant drone of the espresso machine.

My fingers move much faster on a keyboard than they do with a pen and paper and I think now in full sentences. My attempts at making sense of my life come easier and my ghosts are so much more transparent. I shake their hands now, pull up a chair and offer to buy them all a cup of coffee.

finding time for words

The hardest part about writing is actually doing the writing. My first typewriter was an old Royal that belonged to my great uncle. When I was twelve, I received my first electric typewriter for Christmas. In seventh grade, I scored a D in reading class because I spent the duration of the class writing my first book in two spiral bound notebooks instead of tending to the lesson plans. I spent my late teens and early twenties traveling in a large crowd of friends but often times could be found sitting in a corner with my journals writing down my thoughts or the witty quotes of those around me. When my daughter was born I would write during our long nursing marathons or while she napped. Now, I find myself trying to balance old receipts on the base of the steering wheel while trying to just get down that one good thought that I don't dare forget. Those old scraps become a kind of buffet of good ideas that inadvertantly get lukewarm, cold and eventually taken out to the dumpster. On my desk in the "guest room" is a big stack of unlined paper sitting under my glass paperweight ~ a magikal gift from Ella ~ and when it was placed there, I entertained all kinds of plans to wake up early and spend at least twenty minutes every morning getting those first thoughts down.

Mornings are awfully hectic in my house.

Evenings awfully sleepy.

I've only started calling on the advice of other established writers. Stephen King's book On Writing has been an enormous inspiration. Also, Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird ~ Instructions on Writing and Life. The biggest peice of advice they offer is to just do it. To sit down and do the work. To write. To summon up the disicpline and make it happen.

My passion for it is there and I keep thinking that, one of these days, I'll start the work. I'll establish that sense of discipline. Right now, it's still a little like exercise or giving up coffee. I start off strong, stay with it for a wee bit and then it all falls to shit. It's half fear of diving in and half the distraction of life.

I remember back when I lived in the ghetto of my hometown. I shared a tall, brick Sesame Street duplex with six to ten, always changing, room-mates. I painted my bedroom walls a great shade of purple and hung red, flowered curtains and kept my Royal typewriter on the desk by the dirty window. A bottle of orange rind whiskey in the drawer to my left. The words came pouring out in swirls of sticky breath and tobacco smoke, inspired by the ever changing backdrop to my life. The people, the travels, the drugs. Poverty, even if self iduced and three quarters chosen, seemed to offer up a fair amount of muse. But my writing then wasn't born of discipline. It spilled from passion and time and youth. Throw a farm, a child, a mortgage and a partner into the mix and the passion gets muffled, the time gets swallowed and the youth turns into best intentions.

I tell myself that I'll start taking classes on creative writing. That the structure of that environment will back me into the corner of getting words down on paper while also providing the feedback and networking. I tell myself that once I learn more literary tricks, I'll find the time and motivation. Once I learn how to organize my ideas, set up the story, develop characters, write memoirs, learn more forms for poetry............

But I'm here now, sitting, still, with romantic notions of a cluttered desktop, hot mug of tea and a rising sun while the child still sleeps. Sitting with notions of page after page of decade old ideas taking shape, waiting for the dialogue with the aftermath.

Wish me luck.