One element that journalism and nursing share is the fabulous potential of the right question, asked at an opportune time -- the one that elicits the confession or the quote on the one hand, and the realization that the patient is, say, in the early stages of Digoxin toxicity (visual changes!) on the other.
My friend, Sam, is a journalist, and is often tasked with getting information from people who don't spend their free time elucidating their feelings on all the things for their own entertainment. After reading yesterday's blog, in which I referenced how I stopped writing in an effort to do more "useful" and "service-oriented" things with my life -- or (in a witty and unfortunate turn of events) to go on lots of job interviews in which I try to convince people to let me do these useful things -- he asked: what do you want to write?
And I thought about it all day, in between my cartoonish efforts to shove my cartoon boulder, called toddler-in a-stroller-with-groceries, through the snow, and to coordinate the two job interviews I was offered, suddenly. (We've moved on from simply hurling my resume and "thoughtful cover letters" into an abyss, to making increasingly contrived excuses for That Guy who liked us so much but now just won't call, even though he said he would and I know his phone is working, I've called it and hung up already today, twice. Since lunch.)
Because I'm not really a writer, I don't know what these things are that I'd like to write -- essays or stories or poems or what. But I want to write about the following:
1. My grandfather -- the things he loved (drinking tea and wandering, clipping poems and stories from obscure publications for me, thick glossy magazines and cats and small children) and the things I loved about him: his voice, like socked feet on a carpet, padding from one word to the next; his capacity for paying attention long after everyone else had lost interest in tomorrow's quiz on state capitals and the seventeen pound cat that's not done being pet yet; and, then, for awhile, nothing at all.
I'd like to write how that happens -- that someone can sit so squarely in the center of your life and then mean nothing, the way a cramp eventually, disconcertingly, gives way to numbness; how it feels simultanously like loss and like every breath you could not take if he were here and can take now. How you remember someone correctly when the memories you have are also memories of a small, weak, pathetic manifestation of you, someone you wouldn't want your friends now to meet.
2. My kids. All the kids: the one who watched his cousin bleed out on the street in Cambodia and then shut down, terrifyingly and without a single word, during his high-stakes assessment. The one who threatened to kill himself, eight years old and apocalyptic over some after-school counselor's slight, and how small he looked strapped into the ambulance with his silent grandma poised ominously off to the side. The one who came out, gloriously and with a series of ill-conceived artistic images on his Facebook page -- since taken down -- but only after a protracted break-up with the Jehovah's witnesses who'd visited him regularly as a fifteen year old in South Boston, itself the result of an entire year spent analyzing Madonna's oeuvre in every single five-paragraph essay assigned.
3. Bodies. Not so much mine, which maybe isn't fair, and definitely keeps me from writing a lot of the time. That is, the fact that my real interest in women's bodies and the things language does to them stems from my own experiences, living in a body that, it would seem, somehow belongs to everyone -- this makes me reluctant to write, unsure if I'm the only one preoccupied with and resentful of questions like: should I feed it, and how much? Should it breastfeed, and for how long? If someone does this or this to it, and under these circumstances, was it raped?
What is my responsibility towards it -- this body that actually, it would seem, is not mine? If I "consent" to sex in an effort to avoid face-punching and get the hell out of this almost-stranger's car, did I protect myself, or fail to do so?
Because I think, anything you can do to avoid getting the shit beat out of you; why risk it? But being female, one also must understand, it would seem, that that's not fully your call -- you can't just go along with sex to avoid getting hurt, and then say you didn't want it.
Whereas, you know, if my body were a wallet, one could, conceivably, hand it over and then call the cops. A predicament, one about which I have a lot of writing I'd like to do.
I literally could do this for the rest of the day -- not because I'm an especially prolific person, but because this is my head, all the time: these thoughts and the other thoughts and not-yet thoughts, pacing, indistinct from one another, under the surface of all the shit that needs to get done and interests me some, but less. And also because collectively, our desire to be heard outweighs our desire to listen -- one is easy and the other takes a certain level of restraint, a kind of imagination that is less immediately gratifying than the kind involved in talking.
So there's no real way to end this besides: thanks for asking, Sam. Thanks for listening, reader.
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