Ellie in NYC

I have met and held and hung with an astounding number of four month olds this month and I think four months old is then new forty.  Four month olds are really really into three things: gripping, trying, and being upright. I love how they hold on. I love how already, at this earliest of ages, they want to do what you do—drive, write poetry, wash dishes. I love how they want to stand even though they can’t stand. They can’t even lean. But they do not define themselves, at all, by all what can’t be done. They don’t even know what can’t be done is!! Their freedom is a very dogged one, not at all loose. They remind me a lot of my eighty year old daddy, who looks at me in a similar way: yes, what do you got, what do you know, bring it on, all of it.

I wish, at midlife, when I’m not always as into things as I was (relationship, career, the garden, abdominal strength), when I feel a kind of fading away of all the beautiful wonderful wants—a combination in this of loss and grace—to be more like the baby and the elder, with that fearless face, give it to me, all of it, I’m ready, I’m next.

I met with my client Irene yesterday. She’s an amazing woman—a dentist, who retired early her to write her memoir. She’s been bitten, hard, by life and she’s got this amazingly hilarious and super-smart sharp insight into her life. We were meeting because Irene hasn’t been working on the book. She hasn’t been working for a year. She paid for appointments, didn’t show up. She went to Turkey, Russia, and started a foundation for children whose lives were affected by the Gulf spill. All good stuff. But was she avoiding writing her book, throwing herself into the world?

I had a whole little lecture planned out for Irene, a series of statements of the obvious: you have to set aside time. The book has to be like you left the water running upstairs, always on your mind. Always something you’re going back to. You have to hold the whole thing in your head. Write first thing in the morning. Things come so easily to you, because you are smart and good, really good, like most dentists, at being a student. But you aren’t giving this writing project the time you must give it.

But when Irene, in her red silk dress, waltzed into my office (she always brings me flowers) and flounced down on my little sofa, she said, “I’m reading Chapter after Chapter. I feel like you wrote it to me! I’m ready now. I’m going to write each morning. Stop making excuses. Stop avoiding. I’m lazy. No more. I’m going to write for thirty days, every day. I will do this if I tell you. I do not break a promise.”

My mouth fell open. For a few minutes, as she chattered brightly about how helpful my book was, I wondered. Do I tell her? I did write the book to her. Literally. When I wrote Chapter, I had expanded my private client business, and I’d just started working with Irene. I wrote many of the chapters by writing letters to Irene. I confessed. I’m not sure Irene believed me. She didn’t say anything. At this point, she thrust her new pages into my hands. “Am I on the right track?”

*

Just last week, I called, mid-morning, my friend S., whose initials spell SOS, which is very helpful since she is a rabbi and very helpful if anyone is in over her head. I didn’t know how to revise my new manuscript. I wanted it to be perfect. I liked it how it was. What to do? I complained in this vein for one hour (one hour!) S said this: read Chapter after Chapter.

Which I have not done.

We are all so scared of what we know. We all think the answer is someone out there, somewhere out there, in a lover, in a book. We spend all this time talking about writing, worrying about writing, learning about writing, whining about writing, writing, as I am doing now, about writing!

You know the answer, I said to Irene. You know the answer, Irene was saying to me, and SOS was saying to me.  You already know. Writing is confirmation.

So go. Be the word.