Pirates on Her Majesty's Ship

Magic, patience, love

Dear friends

I’ve been offline lately. I’m always a little offline when my kids are around a bunch, and when my partner is not teaching and is around to cook and co-parent, my stress levels come down and we watch TV and I sleep a lot. When my stress is up, my creativity goes up, making me more wired but also more “productive.” I’m trying to wrestle a longer piece of fiction this summer. Sometimes I like the chatter online and sometimes I need to be more still, to hear the stories trying to tell themselves to me.

I’ve been incorporating child-approved activities into the days (tie-dye, lake swimming, family picnics), occasionally escaping for exercise or meditation while Tim takes over my Monopoly piece and wants to gouge his eyes out wondering how he got suckered into this (this being a game he loathes, not family life although I won’t speak for him, maybe he’s planning a solo trip to Bermuda this very minute).

We went east to the Atlantic Ocean with cousins and parents and siblings and in-laws, a hundred stuffies between us. Once there I asked myself the essential question everyone must ask at one point or another:

Am I too old for the banana boat?

I was swimming one day, bobbing in the ocean while that fleshly yellow phallus careened through the waves. Instead of ignoring it like I always do, I thought: Did the window of opportunity to ride a banana boat close when I wasn’t looking? I didn’t ride one when I was younger and may have actually wanted to. Should I do it before my bones osteoporize before our very eyes? Then I thought, even if I my body says I can, does my spirit actually want that? Did it ever?? Does one REALLY want to drag their sweet body onto that obscenely bright thing tearing through the ocean, to ride gloriously with the pelicans and the sea spray and the wind? (Sidebar I found a flying banana boat while looking for a picture of the regular one. LOL, no words.)

oh no

There is only one way to answer these questions, really, by doing proper scientific research for you, dear readers, alas that is not what happened. A character in fiction should get on that thing, but this little lady said, Nah.

At the time I felt peace about it. Writing this to you now, I’m like: damn, it would have been a better story if you had gotten on that thing! Sorry I have neither tales nor pictures of such a deed.

H.M.S. IMAGINATION

the very definition of smug gloating, after a round of putt putt they didn’t even win

One night while putting both kids to sleep in the same bed, I was invited to read between them for a few minutes. I am reading a book by Ian Leslie, whose intellect and humor I enjoy, about how conflict makes groups of humans smarter. (It’s a real performance piece to read about disagreement while vacationing with family, lol.) Sometime after we had all been silently reading, my youngest lowered their book and gazed at me with the most hilarious grin. “I didn’t know you were here!” they said and we started laughing. Our arms and legs had been touching for about ten minutes but they were so engrossed in their Boxcar Children Volume Whatever that they didn’t even notice I was there.

Another night, my daughter and I visited the wall that I discovered last year with which I’ve grown even more obsessed. I had already pilgrimaged to it the day before, when I was alone after a run. At that time I had studied it and thought, “If I don’t make something like this by the end of my life, I truly will have blown it,” a nod to my joke (non-joke) that I want to be buried in Alan Alda’s winter outfit in The Four Seasons, kitted out head-to-toe in creamy hand-knits. The night my daughter and I poured over the wall together, all my jokes fell away. I was merely entranced by its charms. Two palmetto trees flanked it wrapped in blue lights, a detail I had forgotten until I saw it again.

do you have a Love Is Patient football in your life?

As we poked through the pirates and ships, the dog ceramics and brass animals floating in cement, I said, “I mean, how do you plan something like this? It’s just so amazing. You have to be a genius to make something like this.” My daughter disagreed. “You don’t have to be a genius,” she said. “You just have to have fun making it. You just have to play.” It was one of those moments I love, where I get a big life lesson in eight seconds from a child. I thought about the usefulness of this advice for novel writing. As I am elbow/neurosis deep in trying to finish a draft of a manuscript, the usefulness of this advice - just let yourself play - is so good.

Later she said: Some people think they know more than kids, but there are things we know that are the real thing. I’m paraphrasing a bit but couldn’t agree more. It’s why I spend so much time with my kids (in addition to wanting to, you know, do my job as a stable presence in their days?). My mom worked with children professionally and imparted the knowledge throughout her career that kids contain a brilliance that can’t be beat for entertainment. Their light can be blindingly fun. In my own life, I think of it almost like stand-under-a-waterfall-and-let-the-fresh-water-pummel-you kind of fun. Why would you pass that up? Last night while running through a sprinkler, one of my kids uttered the words: “Let’s just say, I have to have fun.” I smiled, recognizing the truth and poetry of that statement. The moon wrapped us in soft glory as fireflies winked in the background.

little fang

Thanks for taking time to travel with my thoughts and pictures today. I hope you are taking care this week. In the US we are celebrating days of independence. What are you working out from under and how are you reaching for greater support? Are there any secrets to sinking in deeper, rather than too-heatedly fighting off everything and everyone? I’ve been reading Bono’s memoir which is titled Surrender. It is shaggy in a delightful way, full of poetry and, yes, troubling ego. I appreciate how he takes the air out of himself in lots of ways and casually examines some of his worst habits. Still, books by famous people are difficult to trust. I feel his creative process which I appreciate and respect. And/but books are but one piece of a longer story. The best reflect that huge wholeness. And they’re very hard to pull off.

wanted: magic. also Bono’s wife Ali’s memoir

Big love to all of you! Thanks for playing today.

Xoxo

I almost forgot to tell you, Tim’s book The Machine We Trust won the Midwest Book Award for short fiction! I’m SO happy for him. I’m also weirdly proud, as if because I lived alongside these stories as he wrote or edited many of them, I have watched them grow into adulthood. Which I have, in a certain way? Maybe I feel this because I can track phases of our life in their becoming. I’m also just plainly, proprietorially, moved. Like: “Duh! These are beautiful stories.”

Here’s Bono on working with Brian Eno:

“Your thoughts, they decide who you are” - Brian Eno. I don’t even know if I believe this totally as a human and especially as someone with the body to which I’m very tied. BUT, in terms of your ideas determining much of the quality your life, I agree. And I deeply believe in taking “the minutiae of our own lives seriously.”

Something about this page in Surrender stood out to me, even though I, of course, don’t track my origins as an artist to three other men or a castle in Ireland or Brian Eno. Or to Daniel Lanois, for that matter! Who gets called Danny in this book. It’s always thrilling when people call artists by their real names. When Joy Williams referred to Richard Ford as “Dick” one day in class, I nearly fell out of my overly comfortable chair.

Which is all to say, Congratulations, Tim! You are a beautiful keeper of words and worlds. And congrats to all the makers for believing in the dream. It is reaching for us, waiting for us to reach for it, too.

Xoxo