Dream small

Elena and elephant ears. Hasselblad photo by Jorge.

I have stopped writing, I keep telling people. I haven’t written anything in eight months. I say this more in stupor than in resentment or anger or worry. I say this with the sort of numbness that has defined so much of this pandemic experience: a numbness under which hums terror and boredom, dread and hope. I started writing again this week. I suppose by “writing” I mean “working on a project,” which might be part of the problem right there. Now, when I write, I can’t just write. I can’t just sit down and let loose with whatever nebulous ideas are floating around my head. I have a whole assembly line of Publication-Related Thoughts and I cannot seem to find the lever to turn them off: Who will read this? Is there an audience for this? What is the audience? Am I the audience? I then let a sundry assortment of publishing’s current or recent rock stars gallop through my mind whispering not a good idea that’ll never work and then I give up and resort to grading student essays.

Anne Lamott says that publication is something one has to recover from. I never would have understood that in grad school, but I understand it much too acutely now. It is hard to tune out all the desire for acclaim, success, metrics, recognition, progress, and simply grind out the work. Everything about the process is apocryphal and uncertain except the act of showing up and getting it done.

So I started writing again this week, a pandemic diary. Much like when my daughter was a newborn, I can think of nothing else but what is right in front of me. I’m so overwhelmed by the now and its demands and uncertainties and limits that all I can do is note what happened that day: in a spirit-cleansing attempt, Jorge chanted spells in Spanish and burnt sage over one of our Ikea candles and the whole house immediately reeked of weed. I opened all the windows and it still reeked of weed and Jorge reassured me no one can smell anything through masks but I had my mask round my neck and now it reeks of weed. Elena has become obsessed with a statue of a goblin woman down the street, in the yard of a young family Jorge and I have shy crushes on. They are pretty and they painted their front door a bold but elegant turquoise and they have a little free library full of mystery books and a hand-painted Black Lives Matter sign. And now they have the goblin lady, who is about my height, hunched over, her face a heap of gray folds, her nose hooked, her mouth toothless, cloaked in a long black robe. She holds an empty metal bowl that, when touched, makes her come to life with gleaming red eyes and a cackle. The first time Elena touched the bowl and the goblin woman moved Elena screamed a bloodcurdling scream and hurtled into my arms so fast I fell backward. Now, in the bizarre way of kids, who love to be scared just to a point of near-delirium, she demands we go back every day and sneak up to the woman. Strangely, the woman doesn’t always come to life; sometimes she stays silent, and sometimes there’s a 1-2 minute delay and all of a sudden she shudders and her eyes beam crimson and Elena convulses with terrified delight. The goblin lady is the main neighborhood attraction and always draws at least 2-3 kids on bikes and a few passerby, creating a little eddy of fascination on that dead-end street.

These are the things I’ve been writing. I have my doubts about them. I have my doubts about glory. But I am seeing again, thank God. I am jotting things down for the purpose of actually writing them later, I am seeing how the tiny threads of the everyday weave together into a tentative meaning. That’ll have to be enough for now.

We in the U.S. in particular are raised on the ethos of Dream Big. Someday, we intone breathily, you can be President. We idolize entrepreneurs and inventors with big ideas who’ve gone on to build massive corporations or movements. We love the story of the breakthrough moment, the sex appeal of the elevator pitch. The Big Idea. The Dream. But there is also a quiet, powerful ethos to smallness. Especially in this era of climate change, there are renewed calls to think and dream and act locally. To shop small. To live small.

Right now, most of us have no choice: the scope and possibilities of our lives have been dramatically reduced. Maybe to a city or town, maybe even just to a few blocks. A park. A pod. I resist this smallness because I want A Clear Solution, A Big Dream, An Answer To All This Uncertainty! But instead what I have are the notes I take in my notebook: Eula Biss on the gift economy, on how one correction to capitalism isn’t changing ownership from the few to the many but using the surplus (and o, o, what a surplus with the billionaires this year alone earning billions more!) as a gift. She talks about how Toni Morrison would always pass along part of whatever she earned to other black writers, and how those writers would return the gift in whatever way they could, in kind or with care or meals. I think of how so often it is those who have had very little who appreciate the value of the gift, and how the gift is not to be hoarded but to be passed along.

I note how I keep trying to come up with activities to educate and entertain Elena and she says, “Mom, I just want to sit on the trampoline and make wishes.” “Wishes” are two leaves sewn together by poking a hole in one with the stem of the other. She came up with this concept casually on her own and is having none of my Organized Learning Time. So we sit and make hundreds of wishes and when I ask why or what the idea is she gives me a withering look and says, “Mom, just sew.”

So I do. I sit and sew wishes all afternoon on what is likely the last warm day of the year. I think small. I am small. I try to inhabit this smallness with grace. And when the smallness feels oppressive, I note that too. There is power in not being dwarfed always by an obsession with big, better, breakthrough. I fold socks and listen to Time (The Revelator). I run through the cemetery and the shining full skirt of red leaves around the maple breaks my heart, how this tree glowing and glorious with scarlet fire just a week ago has given it all up so easily, just let it go, nearly naked now, but newly lit from below.

Recommendations:

THIS:

"The nuclear family can be a beautiful thing until it breaks. And it breaks for many private reasons. But it also breaks if the world sits too hard on it.

When I carried my two kids in my body, I expected my cervix would one day open, but I never expected the social netting of childcare and public school to split open, too. We have fallen through it, all of us, landing isolated on our own sandy islands."

Started the new Elena Ferrante and am loving it. This is the movie you need right now!

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Sarah Menkedick · 5522 Phillips Ave · Pittsburgh, PA 15217-1907 · USA