The Journal Keeper

by Phyllis Theroux

  Yesterday I tried to do one thing, begin an essay “On Single-mindedness.” I created a page of notes and then the phone rang. It was my younger son, telling me that he had just run into his old childhood friend Max on a street corner in New York. Their first reaction was to think how happy their mothers would be that they were together. The second phone call was from Max’s mother. There went the day.

  The power of Bones of the Master grows within me. “Don’t think,” Tsung Tsai tells Crane. “Thinking weakens.” I am becoming aware of this truth. Thinking can tyrannize, introduce willfulness and fear.

  I feel at the age of sixty-one that I should be a sage, not a novice. It is embarrassing to be so shallow. Yet it is also important to be aware of how raw and unlettered I really am and to be eager to learn something new.

  This morning I awoke determined to reinvigorate my life by disciplining myself so that the Goddess of Comfort is put in her proper place. Up at seven, make the bed, prune my life so that the strength flows into fewer branches.

  Yesterday Mother turned eighty-three. Knowing how nervous she is about her birthday—the result of a childhood wound when her parents forgot to celebrate it one year—I said, “Let’s just let the day unfold.” She loved that. “Yes!” she exclaimed. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a birthday where people dropped in, not even knowing it was my birthday,” “Sort of like a drive-by birthday,” I suggested. “That’s right,” she said.

  The day proceeded like the slow unwrapping of a gift. In the morning, our next-door neighbor, Mel Titus, came over with her two boys and sat on the porch for several hours, drinking tea and telling us about her past. It was a quiet, happy start. Then, after lunch, Katherine Tinker arrived with a present of some superior scotch and stayed to talk about her husband, who has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I told her my belief that most of us learn what we have to learn before we finish our lives. “Do you think so?” she asked. “I’m not so sure.”

  I decided to go upstairs and finish up Mother’s birthday quilt on the sewing machine. Midafternoon, my cousin Angel drove down from Maryland as a surprise. I began cooking the birthday dinner around four. Guests began to arrive around six-thirty. They brought food, jars of flowers, and their talents: a song sung by the Reihl family, accompanied by their father on the guitar. After dinner, twelve-year-old Cody Artiglia brought out his collection of artifacts from Arizona, where his family had vacationed that June. They included owl throw-up and dinosaur poop. The day ended with sparklers and Roman candles on the lawn. We sat in a fairy circle of logs on the grass and watched little boys twirling sparklers in the warm sulfur-scented air.

  Lately, I have been falling into the ways of my mother, sitting long and happily on the back porch, doing nothing except acting as if I, too, were eighty-three. We are now so well attuned to each other that our tastes and impulses are uncannily alike. I will think about what I’d like to cook for dinner only to be interrupted by my mother, who says, “I think I’ll just have a baked potato,” mirroring my own thoughts.

  This morning, very early, I took a canoe ride on the nearby South Anna River with my neighbor, Ned Dillon, who has lived here all his life. The air was scented with mud and honeysuckle. As we eased down the river, we saw beaver slides, tangles of tree roots like piles of rope, and bright islands of river grass that we paddled around into deeper water. Ned is as easy as the South Anna to be with. He has known everyone in Ashland since childhood. The conversation turned to one of his childhood friends in town who reminds me of a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel—tall, patrician, and slightly removed from most other people. Ned knew what I meant. “He got that way when he went to college,” he said.

  This is the height and heat of summer. Everything pants for water—dogs, hydrangeas, boys wanting to dive into a lake and feel the cold second skin coat their dusty bodies. Each day dissolves like a lozenge upon the tongue. I can barely recall it except to describe the flavor, and even that is ephemeral: phone calls, glasses of ice tea.

  Today I came downstairs at five-thirty and lit a stick of incense and a candle to focus the nose and eye. But my attention continually drifted. Finally, I turned on the light, took up my journal, and began to write, to give my mind a line of print to follow. It is discouraging to think of all these years that I have driven my mind to skin and bones, like an exhausted but dutiful horse, and now, when I try to dismount and tether it, it won’t stop moving.

  Why isn’t it enough simply to enjoy a thing without wanting to describe it, pull the thread of sensibility through it, like a needle poking through a bead, to make it mine?

  Looking back over the entries of the past few months, I see the idea of attention, pure attention, emerging in different forms and guises. Slowing down long enough to pay full attention requires an empty mind. We must clear the decks and be doing nothing else. This is what goes counter to the culture, which tries to distract and divide our attention so that it never rests on any one thing for any length of time.

  A final thought: there are so many souls who could help me if only I remembered to invoke their help. Jesus; Baba Whatsisname; my old high school principal and mentor, Sister Maurice; the entire community of saints. They are all there and I believe available. Add to them the saints still on earth, Tsung Tsai, for example, and I am surrounded by my superiors.

  Yesterday I entered a new phase, hopefully with grace. I was asked by my friend Mel if I could babysit eight-year-old Jesse while she went to a school meeting. A part of me resisted the offer. It implied that I was too old to have anything else to do. I could sense a little hesitation on Mel’s part, as if she worried I would take her request amiss. But after thinking it over for a few moments I decided to be thrilled—and that made all the difference. And I did indeed have a great time, making Jesse popcorn, looking at the iguana in his aquarium, and reading him stories from his book of samurai tales. (He kept correcting my pronunciation until I said samurai the right way.)

  In 1988, after living in Washington, D.C., for twenty-four years, I left town—reluctantly. Washington was where I had come as a new bride, had raised my children, created a much-loved community of friends, established myself as a writer, and gone through a divorce—more or less in that order. My roots were deep, but the desire to own my own home (which I had to sell in 1984) was deeper. Between 1984–88, I rented, while real estate prices continued to climb higher and higher. Sick of throwing monthly rent checks over my shoulder, I began to think about moving. North was more expensive than south.

  One day, a realtor friend told me about a house for sale outside of Richmond, Virginia. The next weekend, I drove down to take a look. Ashland was a sleepy little town with big trees and no stoplights. I remember seeing a John Deere tractor dealership and an advertisement for a Jell-O wrestling contest on the main street. Ahead of me, as I bumped across the railroad tracks, was a pickup truck with a Confederate flag on its back window. Turning down a shady side street, I pulled up in front of a two-story brick house with no landscaping. It looked solid but unloved. There were bookshelves and a fireplace in the living room, the closet doors opened without falling off their hinges, and the light was good. I could live here, I thought. Some of the biggest decisions take the least amount of time. Thirty minutes later, I made an offer. Over the years, I found professional and personal reasons to return to Washington frequently. But every time I did, I bumped into the same truth: I had closed a chapter in my life and could not easily add on new pages.

  You have to stay in your old neighborhood in order to maintain the right to drop in on people. Here in Washington I realized there weren’t that many people I could—or wanted to—see. Judy O’Hara wasn’t home, Donna and Rita are both gone (dead), and Faith is too nervous to drop in on unannounced. I went to the nearby Starbucks, which used to be the dry cleaners. At 8:30 A.M. it was full of strapping well-dressed men with soft hair and hard bodies. They ordered their skim decaf cappuccinos and exuded intelligence and worldliness. I wanted to know them all,
be part of all their worlds—an impossibility that throws me back upon the truth that the only person I have the absolute right (and obligation) to know is myself.

  Later, I visited my old cooperative garden in Rock Creek Park, which has become a citadel of netted enclosures. “It’s the deer,” explained one gardener, a bright-eyed woman in her early fifties who is a nurse at NIH. She was married to two different Frenchmen, living in France for twenty years before divorcing the last one and coming home “to get some benefits. My life is nowhere near as dramatic as it was, but I’ve made a good life for myself here. It’s simple, except when I complicate it.” From a bag she took some cotton seeds she was planning to plant and showed them to me. “I’m going to grow my own underwear,” she joked.

  I wonder whether one day my children will feel the same pull backward that I am feeling now. Does there come a time in most people’s lives when the urge to explore gives way to the lure to return to the first places in our lives? And is this a temptation or a legitimate impulse?

  The bench I’m sitting on is, I’m told, a memorial to a child who died. There is no plaque but it is a sturdy, comfortable bench, just right for sitting and thinking about the perishability of life. Mr. Olson, the garden’s overseer, is gone, except in the memory of a few other gardeners. Mr. Khoury, who used to come here with his wife toward the end of his life, is gone, too.

  The garden was the highlight of my visit to Washington. Twenty years ago, struggling with wounded children, a perilous financial picture, and men who didn’t fit the bill, I recouped a sense of peace and good fortune when I was digging in my ten-by-twenty-foot plot here. To be surrounded by towering trees in a city felt luxurious and lucky. Standing in the garden, surrounded by sunflowers, dahlias, cucumbers, and squash plants, softened me, filled me with a sense of plenty. That feeling has not changed.

  When my children were young, I supplemented my income with writing seminars (called Nightwriters) around my dining room table. Later, I taught in a back room in the nearby Politics & Prose bookstore. And eventually, when my children had flown the coop, I flew, too—teaching wherever I found the right combination of shabby-chic accommodations, delicious food, and a beautiful location. In July of 2000, I conducted my first (and so far only) Nightwriters seminar in Scotland, on the Isle of Mull.

  I have just returned from three weeks on the Isle of Mull. The exhaustion I feel is from having to be so alert and so unproductive at the same time. When one is in receiver mode, always absorbing something new or beautiful, trying to understand or fit in, it is not possible to be in a transmitting mode as well. But to live for three weeks on an island where the sea, the sky, and the mountains are in front of you at all times clears the imagination like a windshield that has been wiped free of grime. I am not alone in this feeling. People remark upon the distilled quality of the light on Mull, how their eyes seem to sharpen and improve the longer they are there.

  It is the smallness and inaccessibility of Mull that gives the island life its grace and necessary slowness. Single-lane roads force a courtesy upon drivers, who must pull over to let an oncoming driver pass. The water creates a barrier between ourselves and instant gratification. You want film developed? It must go by ferry to Oban on the mainland and come back again a week later. There is no cable for television reception. Instead, you look out the window for entertainment.

  Yesterday, while waiting in my friend Magi’s hospital suite for her neck operation to be over, I read through Jacques Lusseyran’s And There Was Light. There was much to think about.

  Lusseyran was totally blind, but able to “see” in a way that enabled him to be an invaluable member of the French Youth Resistance. (His capacity to “read” a prospective new member’s voice, to know whether he or she was genuine or a spy, was near-perfect.) Then, when he was fifteen he temporarily lost his capacity to perceive what he could not see. But a voice inside told him that, “I had fallen into a trap, had forgotten the true world: the world within, which is the source of all the others. I must remember that this world, instead of disappearing, would grow with the years, but only on one condition: that I believe in it unshakably.”

  Yesterday, playing tennis, I realized that many of my problems stem from not remaining in my body, but rather “leaking” into the past or future. Being on a tennis court in Ashland reminds me of being on a tennis court in California, so my imagination carries me there, which makes it hard for me to connect with the ball in Virginia. But if I consciously pull myself back to the center of my self, I create a field of gravity and my powers are somewhat restored.

  My friend Magi talks about her work as a professional mediator and how one must be 100 percent present and listening. She said this would be a good exercise for me, that sometimes I am not present or if I am she’s always conscious that I may leave in an instant. Other people have told me the same thing, that sometimes I take little out-of-body trips while they’re talking to me. Not good.

  I miss my children, each for reasons the other two cannot supply, which is as it should be. This stage of parenthood is impossible to imagine until you’re in it.

  When I think about why people have children, I realize how little it should have to do with the future. If, before any children are conceived, we knew that our reward for raising them would be perhaps several phone calls a month, a very occasional visit, and the sense of having once been important in their lives, we might not do it. But if we realize that the rewards are given during the raising, we will calculate the cost differently. My children have taught me more than I have taught them, given me more joy than I have given them, and their not being present or even much aware of me now does not alter this.

  IN NEW YORK CITY

  I met George Crane, author of Bones of the Master, today. He was easy to talk to, a real writer. “I don’t know what I would do,” he said, “if I wasn’t writing poetry.” He works a full writer’s day, about four hours, and moves houses often. He has only lived in Accord (New York) for about a year. He has warm brown eyes and masses of silver hair. We talked a lot about Tsung Tsai, how he is an authentic mystic. George has seen him perform some amazing feats. It was good to be with him. Things I rarely confess about what I truly feel about myself, such as my fear of being hard-hearted, came pouring out.

  Waiting in Penn Station for the train back to Virginia, I watched a young girl, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, who was also waiting. There was an expectant, self-contained happiness about her that had everything to do with what she was thinking about—perhaps a boyfriend who was going to meet her at the other end. Her thoughts competed with her eyes, which gazed out at the flow of travelers, but she was only mildly, idly interested, following someone for just a few yards before returning to the more brightly lit interior of her own mind. She was so fresh and innocent, like a soap scrubbed schoolgirl, clutching her plum-colored garment bag, which matched her plum-colored luggage.

  Mentally, I took a ball of string and wound it around everybody there, from the little boy playing cards on his suitcase, to the couple kissing in the corner, to the rabbi leaning against the wall reading. By the end I had created a cat’s cradle of connections between everybody in Penn Station. When one person moved, everybody else moved, too, in a kind of string dance. I think, on another level, that is really what happens. We influence each other, but so subtly that we cannot trace it back.

  Now back in Ashland, I am exactly where I would want to be if I weren’t already here. Last night, reading Wendell Berry’s poems, I could feel an old theme—the inseparability and connectedness of everything—reemerge. Everything—from the books to the sofa to the game of Chinese checkers on the table—is intimately related, like my past, which echoes in my head as I walk down old streets and remember being young with a mop of curly hair, in a blue coat, searching through the racks for my future and a dress to wear in it.

  Reading a great poet acts like a rope that pulls me out of the weed-choked creek into the broader river. Suddenly I feel cold water around me. I
am in the depths again.

  This morning the porch door was locked, meaning that Mother had not risen during the night. I always wonder, when these small routines aren’t followed, whether she has died. But when I walked into the room she was only sleeping.

  Last night, aware that Mom’s eyes were depriving her of too much joy, I went into her room and told her I knew this. She conceded that it wasn’t easy and asked if I would read her one of the scraps of paper that she keeps in a wallet by her bed. I pulled one out. On it she had written, “What your intentions are create your reality.” We talked about that for a while. It is not so easily understood as it sounds.

  Reading Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child is difficult. There is a strident, insistent quality to it. But her question is valid: Why is it that otherwise bright and sensitive children are emotionally blank about important things, like the birth of a rival younger sibling? I don’t remember my younger brother John’s birth but I was angry at him—for reasons that remain beyond my comprehension—for my entire childhood.

  Home, after a third trip to Italy and a Nightwriters seminar. It was a rich time with a rewarding group of writers, although not without “moments.” Women are complicated and—when we get what we need, primarily love and confirmation—fantastically supportive. But when we don’t get it, sparks fly. I had to confront one student who was being difficult, and I began by saying something I wasn’t sure was true—that I loved her. Instantly, when I heard my own words, I realized it was true. By drawing a finger in the sand, I had created both the channel and the love that flowed down it. You attract the love you describe.

  Mother’s first words as I walked in the door were about the leaves falling. “It’s all about detachment,” she said. “I can actually hear it when I sit on the porch and listen to them fall.”