Nap Time

My prose is tired. I can feel it wilting and wanting to pull the covers up over its head to take a long nap. Where previously the words would crackle like logs in a fireplace in winter, now they feel end-of-summer moldy and lazy. Sometimes they feel like someone forgot to put them back in the cooler after lunch. Half-eaten chunks of writing are lying around attracting ants. Everything is old, weary. Last night, I dreamt I was in a play, a sort of fairy tale, where all the actors were charged with coming up with their own costumes. On the day of the performance, the other artists arrived in silken capes, glittery crowns and feather boas. I was wearing gray corduroy pants and a gray cardigan that belonged to my mother in the fifties. It was a PG version of that old standard nocturnal fantasy of showing up naked at a school assembly. When I woke up, I wanted to beat myself up about my lack of glitter, but I also wanted to heave a theatrical sigh of relief that I was telling the truth about the grayness. Not the gray on my head mind you, but the loss of the depth of flavor as the chefs on TV say, of the color that I sometimes can squeeze out of language. It was a come-as-you-are morning and gray was who I was. 

Photo by Abbie Bernet on Unsplash

 It could be that my prose needs more than a nap. We are getting old, me and my sweet syllables, and we don’t always rise to the occasion. In the spirit of self-care, I’ve decided for the next few months  — until after Yom Kippur — to accommodate myself and step back from the weekly demand to produce lively, engaging essays whether I feel like it or not. I will instead send out pieces that must be written on subjects that are banging on the door of my consciousness like people who won’t leave me alone,  who insist on having the last word. Those pieces, I will write. On August 25th, Toronto writer Paula Halpin will share her lovely essay Time and Tide and on September 29th, Berkshire poet and visual artist Rosemary Starace and I will continue our provocative exploration of How Art Heals: Remembering Wholeness. Otherwise, I will meet each Wednesday morning in the spirit of inquiry and curiosity. Is there something that needs to be said? Or should I just go back to sleep?

Here’s what happened this week. On Saturday, we drove to Rochester, Minnesota to attend a 90th birthday party for the mother of my niece’s husband, Anthony. The guest of honor, Lola, entering her tenth decade, is a Black woman from Mississippi who gave birth to eleven children and brought them north in the Great Migration, settling first in Chicago and then in Rochester. Ten of them are still living and they were all at the party in a woodsy park along with many of their kids and grandkids. The soundtrack was deep Motown, my music.  Anthony’s oldest sister confessed that, despite various husbands and boyfriends, she had been in love with Smokey Robinson all along. I asked Anthony if his mother danced when she was younger. He said, not really. I guessed that she came of age before rock and roll and suggested she may have listened to Frank Sinatra on the radio in the forties like my sister, her contemporary. Anthony was incredulous. Frank Sinatra, he screamed! There was no Frank Sinatra. There was no radio. There was blues and there was gospel, live music played in the shanties and sung in the churches. “My people were sharecroppers,” he said. “My mother cleaned houses for white folks. Like in that movie, The Help?” he asked thinking I needed context. I did not need context. I did not need to go to the movies to know about white women watching while their husbands’ shirts were ironed by black women. “My mother had women come down from Harlem to clean our apartment on the Upper West Side,” I said in return, feeling contempt for the movie version of my own childhood. And it was okay because Anthony and I love each other and we are family.

A story about race and class and laundry unfolded. And art demonstrated its capacity to heal. It tells you the truth, what you need to know. It elbows its way up out of the murk and into awareness so that you can’t nod out on it. It forces you to wake up and share the discovery of grief and illumination. This was the first story that needed to be told.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In August, just in time for the end of summer, Toronto writer Paula Halpin will return with her evocative essay, Time and Tide. All subscribers are now welcome to read and comment on Many Voices posts.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.