Move along, nothing to see...

When the web-crawlers pull enough references to death out of your posts that you find your blog advertising tombstones and obituaries, it's time to give it a rest. I'm so sick of everything dying, my husband said angrily, on his way out the door to bury some stiff little varmint. I knew how he felt. Death can saturate your world, so much so that I'd begun to envision mortality, that old hustler, as a huge leaking teabag. And so I'll only note that my little cat died, but only after a ferocious struggle. I'll write her the eulogy she deserves another time. It needs to be a good one, and I'm not sure I'm up to it now.

This weekend I polished off one huge looming job I've been chiseling at, a bit at a time...getting my short stories in order. They cover a span of about ten years, and there are about fifty of them, some published, more of them not. Most of this chore involved weeding out duplicate copies, finding old drafts, then cataloging them neatly, and in the process rereading a lot. Psychologically it's an arduous and finicky task, because it involves the writer I am in my head vs. the writer on the page.

For a very long time I was the most reluctant of writers, only because writing was so painful for me. Every time I sat down to do it, I felt like a barely recovered burn victim, filled with dread and foreboding. When the story was done, I'd want to curl up like a mealie-bug, aching from a weird humiliation. Those emotions were bewildering, and oddly at war with the joy I would feel during the writing itself...this sense that I was square in the middle of a living mystery.

Once, I was on a panel of writers, all of us sitting in a row, stupid as bull's eye targets, taking questions from the audience. We were asked the usual stuff: where did we get our ideas, did our families ever get mad over stuff we wrote about them, how many hours did we write per day, yadda, yadda, until our talk deteriorated into something misty called the process. I said that I felt real writing, authentic, from-the-center, no-fooling writing had to do with spilling secrets. I didn't say much more because the idea had just occurred to me.

I don't know about the poor schmucks who paid money to hear us, but for me it was a very useful idea. I knew that the best of my stories were always accompanied by a puzzling boatload of shame. Then I remembered a truism that time and experience had taught me. The secrets we are likely to take to our graves are not of the fizzy technicolor variety...that something awful happened to us in the toolshed, that we once ran off with the yard guy, that we've embezzled quite a tidy little stash. The secrets that eat our lunch are generally so benign they can live within us for years, coring out our hearts, and darkening our lights.

I remember a man I taught with, getting so drunk at my apartment he felt he could finally unburden himself, and blurrily confessed that he'd flunked first grade. My great uncle nearly broke down when he told me how he'd knocked his brother's ice cream cone into the dirt. Those kinds of secrets are the ones I blurt out in my writing.
But it's a day's work getting to them. Something in me is likely to butt in and hurry me away...not from the lurid car crash, but from the day I broke my thermos walking home from school. Move along, nothing to see here... Except, that's where I need to stop and stare, because there's everything to see.

And so, in all my busy cataloging, I shouldn't have been surprised that I didn't remember writing many of my stories. I'm amazed I wrote them at all. Evidently my habit of writing obsessively pushed me into some half-conscious zone where I could get at this flotsam: the broken thermos, the ice cream melting in the dust, the weeping first-grader.

You know, the good stuff.