Shifting Viewpoints for a Shifting Mind

I’ve officially wrapped up the first year of my writing program. One year down. Two to go. Hopefully all my newfound knowledge is transferring to my stories. Because I’ve been telling the tale of an older woman with Alzheimer’s from her point of view (which is slightly unreliable, with a few drifts in and out of reality, if you catch my drift), I had to hone the skill of telling her tale using multiple viewpoints.

Reading a story written from multiple viewpoints is a little like a parent having one child tattle on another, only to find out with a little investigation the tattletale masterfully fabricated a story, misusing or under-using details to his or her advantage. When we hear a different side to a story, the details fill in and the characters round out and become more understandable, more heart-wrenching, deplorable, lovable, whatever.

Using differing voices throughout a book beautifully mimics real life where we learn a little about others from their self-revelation, a lot through how others view them, and even more through their actions.  Oftentimes, seeing someone through the eyes of a person who loves them makes us stop and take a second look at someone we might otherwise dislike as we become willing to give an unpleasant person a chance, looking a little more closely for that redeemable quality that maybe only the mother sees. Someone loves them.

And don’t we often hear the phrase, usually regarding someone who’s committed an unthinkable crime: “He’s the kind of person only a mother could love.” Why is it the mother loves him? Is it because she’s seen him in a multitude of circumstances? She’s seen his motivations, vulnerabilities, fears, unselfish moments, loving moments and every experience that formed him into the person he has become. Most importantly, she once saw her child through eyes that hoped he or she would choose a different path. She never stopped loving him when the results of his choices brought on destruction; she clings to the last vestiges of her dream because at his core, she knows who her child could’ve been.

To be honest, we all have moments of being a beast to one person and an angel to the next. We are tyrants at home while being respectable at work. No one really sees us accurately without viewing us from a full range of human interactions and perspectives and through the eyes of multiple people – not just our own warped and one-sided, deluded impression of ourselves.

Just an aside here, if in the world of books we demand three-dimensional people that readers will love and accept as genuine and authentic characters, why is it in life we often settle for making others one-dimensional? Because of my recent studies, I’ve found myself imagining how someone would describe themself or their viewpoint without anyone else furnishing the details for them. It’s amazing what we might hear when we let characters (and people) speak for themselves rather than putting dialogue on their lips and intentions in their hearts.

And so my year ends. I’ve dragged my character, Eva, into the empty house of her dead friend where she believes she can live without anyone finding her. She’s stumbled into the house of an unknown neighbor to make tea for her son who lives overseas until the owner kindly comes to check on what she’s doing. Through most of her missteps, Eva believes she’s just fine. And isn’t that like the rest of us? We’re a little blind to those parts of us that live in shadows, desperately needing the light of some kind and truthful words to let us out.

How Old Am I?

“How old am I?” I asked my husband several months back. He shot me a concerned look, thinking I was having an “Eva moment” as we call forgetful times in our house named after the character in my novel with Alzheimer’s. Eva moments include times when I leave my purse in Starbucks and someone chases me out onto the sidewalk to return it. Or when I think I think I left my glasses at a restaurant, return to claim them only to come back to work with someone else’s glasses and have my co-workers screech, “Those aren’t even yours!”                                 

 Or when I can’t remember my age.   
 

 “We’re the same age, remember?” Bill responds to my question.
 

“Okay. And how old is that?” He recites my birth year, encouraging me do the math. I’m sure he’s thinking using math skills keep the mind working longer.
 

As dull as my memory has become these days, the real cause of my inability to remember my age is that I spend so much time trying on my new and approaching birthday – the one that I’m dreading a year in advance. I live in the future so much that I disorient myself.  

 We’re told to live in the present - it’s best to live in the present - but obviously I struggle to accomplish this goal. I like to think of living in different realms as exercising my aging mental skills. Besides, if we were meant to live only in the present, our memory would be unnecessary. By its very nature, memory allows us to keep the past with us while simultaneously living in the present.  

Memory has been on my brain recently for many reasons: I’m seeing mine reflect its age, and I’ve spent this year reading and writing fiction about memory. I’ve looked at the gift and genius of memory and marveled, wondering how our lives would look without it. What if someone we loved died and we had no ability to remember them anymore? What if we moved to another part of the country but forgot the people and the place we left behind?
 

 In Anthony Doerr’s collection of short stories, The Memory Wall, he examines the value and role of memory, looking at memories belonging to individual people, but also collective memories of entire cultures, some that simply go away. Communities are moved, some to make way for progress, some to make room for someone else, governments fail, etc. But Doerr also depicts the ability of memory to torment us when we grieve the past through our memories, grieve memories we’ll never make, (Infertile couples grieve never making memories with a child. The parents at Newtown grieve future memories stolen from them.), or we grieve the disintegrating nature of our memory which reminds us (ironically) that our time to make new memories is limited.
 

 But I do remember this: some forgetting is good. Unless something stirs them up, I have laid to rest many moments I never care to relive. Some memories should be blocked out permanently. But if I so choose, I have memory files to open that will bring my dear but broken father back to life and remember driving beside him in the car as we quietly daydreamed together, the road ahead a seemingly endless journey on a sunny New England day. I remember moments with a house full of my loud sons, everyone talking at once, laughing uproariously over some of their antics. Or I can conjure up a nostalgic time period like college and revisit dear friends there. Then when I’m ready, I close up those files and save them for another day, fully living in the present, as long as I can recall where I put my purse, glasses, and my husband’s cell phone number in case I need him to come pick me up when I’m lost.

 

  

   

Brick by Brick

Nothing satisfies more than finishing a day of writing at the computer and finding a strong body of work appear on the page. But in all honesty, many days are duds, leaving me disappointed in the small amount of work created. On the unproductive days, I always walk away from a seven, eight, nine-hour stint at the computer hearing the words “brick by brick” pass through my mind.

A building is built brick by brick, a skyscraper one cement piece at a time, a city one block at a time. Relationships are built one shared experience at a time. Lifetimes are just moments strung together until decades pass, then your younger and healthier years, then your kids’ younger years pass. And stories are built when a few words strung together form a sentence that build a paragraph that in time form a chapter until you suddenly find you’ve written 300 pages – brick by brick. Those words often keep me from giving up and labeling the unproductive days as a waste.

Before I worked full-time, I had the luxury of wide-open space to write and the dud days didn’t seem as threatening. Now that I write while juggling a full-time job, an unproductive writing day can be a serious setback considering the limited time available to produce material (usually just Saturdays for creative stuff).  But I’ve had the welcome experience of realizing that my brief moments of writing can actually be as productive as those longer periods. Some days, only a few bricks are laid. But the next time I return to that piece of work, I find a surprising foundation formed by those mere words, and often the foundation whispered to its friends to join and cling to the other bricks, together throwing up an entire structure.

Thankfully the mind continues to write after turning off the computer. Brick by brick, details of a story piece together, come to mind after i cross from work mode into domestic life. Brick by brick, pieces fall into place as I talk with friends, overhear grocery store conversations, sit at stoplights thinking, or walk around my neighborhood. Answers to a writing problem appear. A scene materializes. Dialogue writes itself.

Over Christmas I was wrestling with a scene involving my main character who has early Alzheimer’s disease. My son and daughter-in-law were visiting and played a song for me called “An Old Shoebox Filled with Ghosts.” Suddenly I envisioned a scene where my character goes on a snooping expedition in someone else’s house and finds an old shoe box filled with details that fill in missing places in her past. The scene kindly arrived after my writing time had ended for the day and my brain fell into relaxation mode, almost a “receiving” mode. Even the undisciplined moments can be productive moments.

In nine weeks I’ll finish the first year of my MFA program. On a weekly basis I don’t feel I’m accomplishing a great amount of work. But looking back, I’ve written or rewritten roughly 150 pages. Many passages and additions to my novel appeared over these past months despite a busy work schedule and other demands on my time. Ideas grew and informed each other. Characters turned into real people with real wants, foibles and loves. And one truth has been confirmed: as long as I show up faithfully and put words on paper - small or large amounts of words  -  a novel, short story, or anything can appear - brick by brick.

Family Visits in the Techno Age

 

We've gathered for our annual Christmas get-together, and technology is the new guest. We’ve debated whether we should have “no-technology” moments during our family visit as we became aware that at times all 7 people staying at our house have our noses stuck in 7 different pieces of technology – laptops, iPads, or smartphones. The twins send music back and forth to each other while sitting on opposite couches. Bill reads something to everyone from his smartphone, and everyone enjoys a running commentary with family members far and near on Facebook.

But one use of technology silenced my call for no-techno moments. While sitting around the fire with the fam, we asked my mother-in-law to tell us about how they celebrated Christmas in her home during her growing up years in St. Peters, Nova Scotia. She told us about going out to the back field to chop down a Christmas tree with her father and how she received nothing more than apples and oranges in her stocking.  Their gifts included simple items, like socks and underwear. Her family never owned a car. She walked to school and to the store, while her dad walked to the post office where he worked, making just $2,000 a year. And she never felt poor.

To highlight the moment, one son pulled up decades-old photos of her family he had uploaded onto his computer from old slides. Another son went on to Google maps and found her childhood home.   With the street view, he was able to show my mother-in-law her old house, complete with changes made by the new owners who turned it into apartments. Another son pulled up a picture of one of her family members taken in the 50’s that he used as a CD cover for his band because he liked the vintage look. While I write this post, they are looking up the MacKillop tartan, celebrating their Scottish heritage. In a minute I’ll post this on Facebook and my sons will notice. They might “like” it or not, but either way, we’ll have a continuing conversation. A different kind of conversation, but we are talking nevertheless. And the times they are a changin’.

A Peaceful Hush

In my growing up years, we children often fell asleep to the sounds of parental battles downstairs, someone screeching tires out of the driveway in a fit of rage, glasses crashing against walls and voices shouting to be heard.

But at Christmas time, the most amazing thing would happen. For some reason, my parents called a truce, allowing a peaceful hush to descend on our home. I’m not sure why the holy hush when we weren’t terribly religious, but nevertheless some sort of reverence inspired by the season calmed spirits. We had happy family moments, sitting around the fireplace in pajamas by the dim light of our Christmas tree decorated with strings of popcorn and cranberries, laughing and conversing, eating pinwheel cookies, drinking eggnog. We would discuss the little fat man who miraculously managed to bring toys to every child in the world in one night, unaware that his behavior rang of omnipresence, showing that even folks unable to grasp the real meaning of Christmas bumped up against its truth.

If only we could’ve really loved each other year round the way we loved each other during Christmas.  I think my parents would’ve chosen to live everyday in that calm but didn’t know how to bottle the peace and use it another day. Unfortunately the truce broke soon after the holiday, and our family eventually shattered.

While raising my sons, a holy hush descended on our home too, but unlike my family of origin, we understood the meaning of the celebration that caused people all over the world, the broken and battered world, to hope and believe in reconciliation with God. We celebrated with many of the same traditions as my parents, but with a sense of significance. 

In this Christmas season, I think of how all the world glimmers and burns bright with lights for a God so many don’t even believe in, many chuckling at the ridiculousness of the faith story, even considering it offensive. To some, it’s a fairytale that weak folks believe, this idea that a powerful creator entered into his creation in the form of a helpless baby, born to an unwed teenage mother in a building shared with farm animals. He could’ve lived in a palace and commanded armies to protect him and demand obedience. Instead he lived simply and humbly, cared for the marginalized, and submitted to a horrendous death.

The nineteenth century author George MacDonald talks about basing his life on this seemingly far-fetched storyline in his book Thomas Wingfold:  "Even if there be no hereafter, I would live my time believing in a grand thing that ought to be true if it is not...Let me hold by the better than the actual, and fall into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and John and Paul and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their deaths make even the nothingness into which they have passed like the garden of the Lord."

May a holy hush descend on us all this Christmas as we celebrate this story. God knows we need it.   

 

Love in the Latter Years

 My husband and I leave pre-dawn for a 3-hour journey to visit one of our sons. Road trips and travel invite thoughts to wander and memories to stir, forming narrative and reflection that instruct. We fill up with coffee before merging onto a nearly deserted highway, music serenading us from the CD player, the top down on the convertible as Indiana farmland zooms past, the backseat empty of car seats or wrestling boys. Those days are behind us now. Thirty years into this marital journey, we’re back where we started, just the two of us; but the two of us are very different people now. Life and love and have transformed us both.   

We ride mostly in silence, indicative of the comfort we feel with each other after all these years. Eva Cassidy serenades with a jazzy version of “I love you, I love you, I love you, like never before.” Bill gives my hand a squeeze. I notice the lines engraved on his face and think of the Psalmist's words, “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places.” The smile and laugh lines etched deeply around his eyes tell of his life’s pleasant places. Despite ups and downs in our relationship and life’s challenges, he has traveled this road with levity, and it shows.

 One of my favorite Bill stories took place when our sons were young and we struggled to support them on his single salary while I stayed home. He drove a car with an exhaust system that blew inside our vehicle rather than outside, arriving home in the evening smelling like carbon monoxide. A long-awaited raise and promotion at work allowed us to purchase a newer car with exhaust blowing in the right direction. One of his coworkers ribbed him about his new and spiffy Ford Taurus station wagon saying, “Now that you’re making the big bucks, Bill, you had to go buy a new car?” First of all, the bucks weren’t all that big. Second of all, I would’ve sassed the man over his sarcastic comment. But my husband handled him with customary humor by saying, “You know Steve, making the big bucks hasn’t changed me a bit. Why, I was just saying to my house boy, Hop Sing, this morning….”

Bill has handled me with the same good-natured personality. During rough spots in our marriage, he always brought winsomeness to our struggles. During years when we both failed to constructively express and communicate our disappointments and frustrations to each other (he became withdrawn and I became mouthy), he learned over time to model to me the art of telling the truth in love. Coming from a broken, unhealthy famiIy, I needed someone to try a different tactic to build a marriage with me; my husband succeeded.

Bill never compounded my past hurts by revisiting and mimicking them. Despite meltdowns on my part, my husband refused to stop loving me. He never attempted to control me with verbal tirades. He never put me in my place, gave up, listed my faults though many, lashed out, said an unkind word, or left. His very calming presence formed the perfect recipe for healing a troubled past. His behavior spoke to the steady and loving gift he has been in my life.

Today he never pats himself on the back for his altruistic behavior. I’ve calmed and healed, and he’s learned to express himself - some might say a little too much. He doesn’t take credit for his contribution to our marriage although that contribution is massive. He pretends (almost) that he never noticed I was a challenge. And that is love. 

Serenaded, comforted and healed, we continue on down the road, a shared loved-one ahead waiting for us.  Bill’s smile lines appear as he squints against the morning light that showers over us in the early hours of dawn.

 

Why am I Talking?

I heard an Anne Lamott interview recently where the well-known author shared her thoughts about the role of being a mother-in-law. My ears perked up as I’ve now been a mother-in-law for two years and hope to always have a respectful, loving relationship with my daughter-in-law and any future daughter-in-laws.

In her characteristic humor, Lamott says that when she is speaking with her children and their spouses, she recites the acronym WAIT to herself, which stands for Why Am I Talking? At one point in the relationship she realized they didn’t want her advice, critiques, or thoughts on how to do certain things.

I need to zip my lip at times, too, not just with my daughter-in-law but with grown sons as well. I need to WAIT until I’m asked before I offer a mouthful. All those times I find myself commenting on job applications, travels, financial choices, etc. I now hear myself asking Why am I Talking? My job at this point is to be a cheerleader on the sidelines, a listening ear, an encourager, and an advisor when asked.

In my writing life, there are times I need to learn to zip my lip, too. Writing often informs life and life informs writing, and WAIT applies here as well. I have a commentary problem when I write. Surely there’s a 12-step program for those of us who divulge too much.  I place my characters in a situation, give them some actions and behavior, cause other characters to react or not react to their behavior, and then I make the mistake too often of commenting on everyone’s behaviors. Readers can see for themselves what just happened and its affects. They might draw a different conclusion then my intended one, but all the better. So Why Am I Talking? I need to be on a "commentary diet" instead.

I find author Elizabeth Strout to be a master at the understated. Here’s a mother-in-law example from her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Olive Kitteridge. How would you describe this character from this brief interaction with her soon-to-be daughter-in-law?

“Do you mind if I call you mom?” asked the girl, stepping back but holding Olive by her elbows. “I’m so dying to call you Mom.”

 “Call me anything you want,” Olive replied. “I guess I’ll call you Ann.”

 A lack of commentary, in other words silence, often speaks loudly in literature and loudly in life as well. Have you ever been falsely accused? Lied about? Met a person who describes themselves one way and lives another? A lack of commentary comes in handy in these situations, as well as when you’ve lost your opportunity to defend yourself, argue your point, convince someone of your goodness or respectability. In other words, if we can’t use words to explain who we are, who are we? Sometimes it’s frightening to be known only by what we do or don’t do.

I’ll withhold any further commentary.