January Blues

Hooray! It’s raining in Houston! I’ve got Lena Horne up singing “Stormy Weather” and am giving serious thought to hitting the couch with a book from my reading stack. But, oh dear, that’s where I run into trouble. I’m in deep book trouble.

It goes back to the holidays when my visiting daughter suggested she help me with my resolutions. I needed help and jumped at the chance. Of course, me being me, several of the resolutions involved books and reading.

“I want to read more.”

Katy looked amazed. “You already read more than anyone I know.”

“I don’t care. I want to read more.” She shrugged and wrote it down.

“And,” I went on,” I want to go to an independent bookstore at least once a month. I’m so lucky to have three nearby.” She wrote it down.

She also wrote down my next resolution that I simply had to stop buying so many books. I must discipline myself to buy only what I was going to read. I have stacks of books I haven’t read; I’ll go through them. No more buying on speculation. Now, usually pacific Katy became a bit edgy. She pointed out that I had just resolved to visit bookstores. Was there a smidgen of conflict there?

What do you think?

Resolution One--read more

Shift to New Year’s Day. Facebook informed me that Brazos Bookstore was open all afternoon. Not far away, it’s one of the three. Abandoning the football-filled living room, I headed out. When I got to Brazos, I was the only customer. I had a good chat with the manager. I congratulated him on introducing new evening hours and promised to come back some evening. Then I browsed through the books and magazines and especially the blank journals. I have a big thing about blank journals. It seemed like a shame to leave empty-handed and so I grabbed a copy of Salvage the Bones. I love owning National Book Award winners. I knew I’d given it to my daughter-in-law for Christmas, and she’d promised to lend it to me. Still. . .

Resolution 2--Visit an independent bookstore. I was at Brazos on January 1, 2012

Just think. The first day of the year and I’d met a resolution. Visit an independent book store! Good girl!

I was back on Thursday night; after all, I’d promised. Plus, I’d been thinking about those journals. One of the elegant Moleskines was a book journal. What a great idea. I could track what I read –and what I buy. The manager welcomed me. While he was ringing up the journal he told me

Paradise. Inside the Brazos Bookstore.

about the store book club. Gosh! December’s selection The Worst Hard Time looked fascinating. After all, my current writing project is about Texas and the New Deal and this book is about Dust Bowl survivors, and it won a National Book Award. It was the third entry in my new journal.

So the month has gone. I’ve tried. I can’t say that I’ve been good. I read the review in the New York Times of Death Comes to Pemberly, P.D. James extension of Pride and Prejudice. The order was in at Amazon before I realized it. Then I thought I’d better revisit the original book, so I got it for my iPhone, but it was free, or almost.  I enrolled in a poetry class and realized I couldn’t get along without Billy Collin’s new book. But I’m trying.

I’m deleting my e-mails from Amazon. I open the journal to the wish list section when I read book reviews—latest entry The Flight of Gemma Hardy, an extension of Jane Eyre. No buying until I’ve finished Pemberly. Did you hear me, Self?

Starting the wish list.

Last Friday a friend gave a party for the launching of a mutual friend’s book. What’s a friend to do? So many friends bought Robert Leleux’s new book that Brazos ran out before I could buy one. I might have taken that as my good luck, but as I said, “What’s a friend to do?” You can read my review of Robert’s excellent memoir of his and his grandmother’s journey through Alzheimer’s, The Living End: A Memoir of Forgetting and Forgiving, at http://amzn.to/zFgglD .

Now there’s one more resolution that’s giving me a problem: I must follow the “one in—one out” rule. Come on! More about that another time.

Writing On Alone

Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning...

The last day of 2011 began with waves of Chinook winds roaring past my house. The cadence of these downslope winds is distinct: first a long whooshing sound as the wave of moving air approaches, growing louder and cresting in a percussive “thud!” as the leading edge hits the house, followed by a cacophony of ringing, crashing, banging, rattling and creaking, all of which diminish as the wave of air passes. Then a lull before the next chinook wave approaches.

At first the slapping waves of wind were disconcerting. I lay in bed, listening to the stream of noise and mentally reviewed the yard, garden, and courtyards. Was everything secure out there? Were my porch chairs blowing about, my raised-bed row covers coming undone?

As day came and the wind continued, I started my morning routine: turn on the gas fireplace, pad to the kitchen and measure out the organic dried fruits and grains to soak for my breakfast bowl of hot cereal, return to the bedroom to greet the day with yoga; wash, dress and eat breakfast.

By the time I got to the stretch-out-sideways-on-the-loveseat-and-soak-up-the-morning-sun part of my morning, laptop on a pillow in my lap, the chinook winds had become simply a part of the rhythm of this particular day. Not my choice, but life.

Which is, come to think of it, a good way to describe how 2011 felt: not my choice of events, just life.

It was a heck of a ride, beginning with my mom entering hospice care in January and her death at home on February 3rd, followed quickly by Richard’s brain-swelling crises and two brain surgeries in one month, and then what seemed like a promising recovery until the tumor came roaring back to destroy his right brain, leading to his death from brain cancer–also at home in hospice care–on November 27th.

A year that has been disturbing, disorienting, difficult–so much so that at points I wondered how I’d find the strength to go on, much less to do so with any measure of grace. A year that has also brought soaring moments of joy, and a lot of quiet contentment. Looking back, it’s the latter I remember most.

Still smiling on that last trip...

Times like when Richard and I were on our “Big Trip” in September–our last trip, we knew. We had stopped at Devil’s Punchbowl, a little wayside on the Oregon Coast we’ve visited before to watch the waves pound the rocky shoreline, exploding in white fountains of spray.

This time, we got out stiffly and stretched. I grabbed my camera and headed for the cliff edge. Richard followed slowly, and when I turned, he had stopped, smiling.

“Listen,” he said. I did, and heard the bass “thump!” as a wave crashed into the hollows in the cliff, shaking the ground. A song sparrow warbled a few notes. The sun canted toward the horizon.

We grinned at each other, loving every bit of that moment.

Sun sets over the Pacific Ocean, Oregon Coast

So yes, 2011 was disturbing, disorienting, difficult in ways I couldn’t have imagined. But like anything that weaves itself into our daily existence, the tough parts have simply become part of life. Not my choice, but life all the same. A life whose rhythm I am getting used to, just as I got accustomed to the thrashing waves of wind rolling down our valley on that last morning of the year.

If this year-almost-past has taught me nothing else, it’s that those waves won’t sink me. They may crash over me, but those moments of joy–the thump of the surf, the song sparrow’s sweet notes, the slanting sunlight–will buoy me, and on I’ll go.

Fuchsias bloom on a foggy dawn at Lucia Lodge, Big Sur Coast

Alone now, but not lonely. I have the whole of the living world for company–wind, song sparrows, sunsets, and all–and I intend to enjoy the miracle we call life thoroughly, just as I did when my love and I shared the rhythm of these days.

And I have writing to help me sift through the changes in words, pouring out my life onto the page and then reading it over to see what stands out, what patterns and trends and narrative arcs, to get a sense of what it all means.

What will you write about this year?