Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Dictionary of a Dream

There is a pale light leaking through the curtains—legs of the leftover sunset dripping down the walls. I am at my usual post, one foot in front of the standing fan. Thank you God for reliable electricity in this place. Tin roofs, furrowed at the edges, slide into one another gently outside. Fat-fingered palm trees exhale happily in silhouette. My bare feet hang off the foot of the bed, a foot or two above a concrete floor.

Nothing in Africa holds its breath at night. I adore the carefully fringed houses of my neighborhood in Colorado - the sound of new spring winds from the high country and cars crunching through freshly plowed snow. But there is something tight around the throat when night falls, when everyone waves and goes into their big houses and no sound seems to make it out of there. In winter, even the trees stop their blustering and all heartbeats go underground. But here…here everything has a voice, especially after dark. Doors are open without screens, cooking smells carry, lush trees and gardens squirrel with activity. If it isn’t the dogs woowoowoo-ing each other or the rooster crowing well before dawn just to get a headstart, then it’s the crashing rain on the tin roof, preceded by unseparated rolls of thunder for hours. And if you manage to sleep past dawn, then the mothers and small children of the entire continent will do you the honor - cheerfully muckity mucking to each other, singing low and lovely as they hand wash their laundry and squawking to their children about this or that in between beautiful breaths of the morning. The early evenings are the quietest when everyone sweats out a day's worth of hot sun on their backs and enjoys the breeze frothing up from the sea.
This evening is such an evening. Just like the last and most likely just like the next. The American in me sometimes gets so bored I could read a physics textbook in one night. But then again, that is the same me that runs around in high boots trying to please everyone at once and holding my breath the whole time while doing it. I like that about myself – always burning up like hot oil over this thing or that which I'm hoping will lead to something meaningful. Crunching whatever sanity I have left between my teeth just trying to be something I can be proud of. Chasing everyone else's tail in the search of what I can work to the ground until it taps and feel like I made people's lives better. Something I deem worthy of remembering. But frankly, I’m surprised I’m not downright purple after 27 years of it. And like I said. Nothing holds its breath at night in Africa.

Tonight I am thinking about writing while I’m doing it. Trying not to delete some things that look imperfect to me and just feeling it flow out of me like hot boiling water through a metal strainer. Sometimes when I finish a book I feel jealous. Isn’t that funny? Every time I read a good line, part of me gobbles it up and wants to shake the author's hand—and the other thinks, damn, it should have been mine. Reading the author's biography is the hardest part. Especially if she was some hidden gem, some accountant or librarian that suddenly produced this golden egg with a Penguin Publisher stamp on it and now the world wants to know every little thought she ever had, everything she ever wrote and every fleeting feeling that passed over the pages of her life. I'm sure it sounds silly, ironic and rather obstinate to you to hear this. Those closest to me tell me I'd have a better chance of someday writing something worthwhile if I'd just get off my fanny (or get on it, in this case) and write more often. Of course they are 100% right. No one to blame except, well, you know who. Funny how cheeky one little dream can be.

See, I've been wanting to be a writer since I was five. You think I'm kidding. But I wanted to be a writer and an illustrator. The library at my public elementary school bought a little miniature book binding machine. And I was in the library pretty much anytime I could be. It was half to hide from the little boy I'd had a one-day handhold with who thereafter stalked me like an alcoholic ex-husband just out of prison (seriously, that guy was scary, even at the age of eight) and half because I was the smallest, shyest girl in school. Sounds like the perfect introvert turned dazzling young writer story, doesn’t it? Don’t get too comfortable. As I said, this machine – you could write and illustrate your own little story on printer paper and choose the patent leather color of your book's binding. Then after a few days, the library would hand you your very own book. And your name stenciled into the fake leather on the front cover, sunk into it like this product was yours forever. Wow, this was neat. I mentioned earlier that I grew up in an affluent, middle class town. Read therein that while inner city kids were on the subway selling candy to buy a three ring binder, I was fancying around pumping out my own little bound books faster than I could write them. I'd of course been encouraged to write since the day I was born, every story and picture I produced was treated like it was the Iliad of the 1990s. Not exactly the rags to riches story that gives many writers that knuckle-biting hunger, destined to be laid bare on finger-tingling pages within the kind of masterpieces we can only salivate over. This I know. But I remember those productions with more pride than I do any of my more recent professional achievements. Receiving every last one of them hot off the press was like getting married every month of the year. Nobody but me ever read them. But all of my little heart was in ‘em. And I guess in life, that’s all that really matters. That and how many hearts you have at your disposal for throwing into things like that.

Through high school and middle school I took my writing underground, lined up in secret stacks of bad poetry in my room. I liked keeping it away from the world because it knew me well by then. Knew me just how I wanted to be known. And it made me feel bigger, stronger than myself. Kept me from disintegrating into doubt or worst yet, complete silence. It had the worst job of all - being the keeper of the ugliest of secret feelings, none of which I knew how to label yet.

In college, it didn’t take me long to put the ingredients of the old dream back together into life again. I went at it hard again, bolstered by academic encouragement and post-pubescent confidence. I majored in writing in college and even though the critique workshops were like fingernails in my eyes, doing it was the only thing I could do every single day and feel all filled up. Never got sick of it. Not sure if I got any better at it. But that’s the nature of the beast. When it came time to graduate, I applied to every prestigious writing grad school program I could. Which of course is only a handful. I handcrafted, edited and reedited the short story for the applications. It was about a wild-hearted Latina and a stiff-lipped white southerner. Id never been to Louisiana. But I described it anyway as I imagined it. I saw pieces of my self in that story like I was looking back at my life in the sideview mirror. At all these new and interesting angles. I loved the characters, I loved the setting, I wanted to KNOW them. It was my best and I hoped that was enough. Colombia and NYU, of course, didn’t think so. So when a local company in my hometown offered their writing intern/restaurant hostess a job in marketing, I traded the dirty kitchen flats for high heels and hit the office, without thinking about it too much. Given the choice between making a decent salary to write press releases and going to graduate school in my hometown, the only place that had accepted me, I guess I chose what seemed most reasonable. They always said in my writing workshops, “write what you know”. At the time, I suppose I figured I didn’t yet know enough.  And who knew, I loved business too.  I liked business the way I like really honest and frank people – sometimes their blunt, objective observations can sting a little and won’t ever make them good at politics , but at least you always know exactly what they are thinking. The dream changed then – opened bigger at its edges to be just four words. Write for a reason. Make it matter. Book, blog, or newsletter…whatever.

Five years later. I am in Africa, sitting like a human crescent moon on the bed. My face is arching toward the fan with the heat of the laptop making my belly sweat. After a big move to New York City to carve out a new life, it seemed I had changed so much that writing was the only thing I still had in common with my old self. The monologue running in my head non stop just the way I’d write it down, with unacceptably long fragment sentences and far too many adjectives. So when my brother got sick and we all played the role of crisis negotiator for the 12 months that death held him hostage, it came out like a broken sewage pipe. The writing was a way to pass that terrible time, to feel the feelings from outside myself, a reprieve but also an ode to the experience in hopes of never becoming a eulogy. I thought for a while that this would be the story it was my earthly job to tell. This would be the turn the words had been waiting to take. But when he thank heaven recovered and escaped certain death with his life - by the skin of western medicine’s teeth I might add - it became clear that it was a story that belonged only to him. Not only that, but I wasn’t sure that I could hem in the feelings satisfactorily in a controlled environment of 200 pages, or handle the subject safely from the distance of a writer’s stethoscope. Cancer had changed him and it had changed us too. It wasn’t so easy as I had hoped to turn that into something we could all sign our names to and blow off like an eyelash from a fingertip.

I left my job in the silver tower over Ground Zero and started again. Yes one more time, this time with a backpack in Africa. I came here to volunteer, learn and crack open my heart wide, but most of all I came to write. People kept telling me it would be the inspiration for that book that was coming to me. This, they said and I told myself, was surely a story I could tell safely and passionately. Bringing global paradox to light and singing in a million unheard voices. Excavating everything in need of empathy and forcing it under the nose of the unconscious world.

There are nearly two weeks left in my trip to Africa. In an effort not to bore you, I wont list the things I learned, only highlight a few of the biggest ones in passing. Life is much smaller and shorter than any of us ever thought. Nobody gets out alive and so going out laughing instead of going out crying is a more enjoyable approach. Doing something that you love alongside someone that you love is an even bigger gift than living a long life. Home is where your heart is, which is not always where you are. True friends are everywhere. Life dreams are like teenagers - they only turn out alright if you let them grow and change their clothes a million times until you hardly recognize them. But you knew all this already.

I may not have helped the human race all that much - and whose to say it needed help, let alone mine. But I sure have come to respect it more. Respect in a love/hate kind of way. Which is the true nature of respect, I guess. If you’ve never seen a little something to hate in someone that you love, then you don’t love them all that well. After all these months, I’m sad to admit, there is no book, not even a short story. I don’t want to write a book about Africa. Africa doesn’t need me to write their stories - it is a job that I am highly unqualified for, from my small seat in the global amphitheatre. I respect the people I have met enough to realize I don’t really know them, their country and their lives - not to the level that they do. And the ultimate disrespect to anything or anyone is thinking you know what you can’t possibly. But sometimes, deeply sincere respect is good enough. And what’s more - I don’t even know if a book is what I will write at all. Its not the book binding or the cover art that I’m writing for.

So I will return these months later with pen in hand and ready to walk back into the life I was born into. With all its warts and childish misconceptions, I still love my country in that love/hate kind of way. Even watching it do what it always does, swipe at the world with a big clumsy paw like the biggest kid in the sandbox. This is who we are and we are always changing. I too am changed. A little younger, a little older. A little happier despite myself to walk into the arms of my friends and family. To take a seat back in my very small section of the global audience, from which perch everything on the universal stage of life will look just a little different to me from now on. That’s enough for me. Book or no book.

And as for what to write or do next - I’ll just have to wait and see what change tomorrow has in store for me. But this time, I won’t hold my breath while waiting for it to sweep me up in its current. As if in response to these words as I write them, the massive theatre of the African sky yolks up with night clouds and starts an overture of lighting flashes. A new storm is coming - coming for me.

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