The Journal Keeper

by Phyllis Theroux

  The only reason to write this down is to see more clearly what lies at the bottom of these reactions. My worry, while she was here, was that she would sense my negativity—the ultimate in inhospitable behavior is to invite someone in and then make her feel uncomfortable.

  If I were to die tomorrow, how many messes would I have left behind me that I had run out of time to clean up? More importantly, what kind of shape would I myself be in? What small hardened little heart or large filled-with-love heart would they find?

  Last night I lay in bed and felt lost and I cried out silently for help. It is an instinct I had almost lost. There is, instead, a kind of stolid state that resembles sleep. I would rather feel pain.

  One of the strongest illusions in life is that another person’s love will liberate us. The illusion is hard to let go of, even when one lover after another has disappeared, because while they are present they do set us temporarily “free.” We do feel as if we are more talented and lovable, and then they turn away and stop loving us, and we realize how much our balloon depended upon their hot air.

  Going into Mother’s room to get the Walkman, I see her sitting in her chair, a gray shawl wrapped around her shoulders, her eyes closed in the semidark room. Once again, she has triumphed over the flu and is back in good health. The upright and attentive posture, the waiting, willing pose, sums up someone who loves the truth more than she loves her own will.

  I am astray in the world of words and communication. All day yesterday I played at the edge of the ocean—e-mail, letters, phone calls—without ever getting my feet wet. And all because I fear being pulled out to sea without being able to swim.

  Yesterday I went through some notes I took of my four-year stint as a writing teacher in an inner-city elementary school in Washington, D.C. Instantly, I am back in the chaos that I was never able to dispel when I was there. Part of it was the school system, which was a disaster, and part of it was me. I lay awake last night thinking about what could possibly be made out of it. My notes are as full of holes as the school, and yet I began to remember specific incidents, like opening up a bank account for a fifth grade student who was trying to save money by sweeping up in a barber shop on Fourteenth Street and how, when the bank checked on my credit, they almost refused to let me co-sign. I return to the feeling that I don’t have to admire myself to write about that experience. I just have to be honest without being a victim, since nobody wants or needs a book written by a self-loather.

  A gift to myself: Stephen King’s book (On Writing: A Memoir). He is a hilarious, truthful person, and his book is easy reading. His advice: If you aren’t spending about six hours a day, every day, reading and writing, the “guy with the cigar and the bag of magic” won’t help you out.

  Then I came across this, by the English writer Alan Bennett:

  People like me because I’m no threat. They think I’m nice. No writer is nice. It’s a misconception…. [One is] never wholly dismayed ... even by tragedy. The awful thing about writing is the eagerness with which you seize on things like that.

  It is interesting that Bennett said he doesn’t record his feelings in his journal—“They make you wince when you read them”—except perhaps to say “very low” or something similar. “I always wish I had told more lies,” he says, “I would write a lot better if I were able to invent myself more than I do. So little happens to me.”

  All of yesterday was spent cleaning the house. This morning, sitting in my polished lair with Mother’s amaryllis dominating the windowsill, I feel polished, too. My contemplation table by the chair has been cleaned out, with the bulk of my books reshelved and only the best (Emerson’s essays and Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life) allowed to remain.

  The things I learn are so simple. If you want to love someone better, make room for it—by doing something loving. Yesterday I painted a small wooden recipe box and filled it full of some of my favorite quotations and gave it to my friend Pat for her birthday. By the time I had finished it, my love for her had grown.

  I am in great health, not a single ache or pain, with a clear mind and a calm spirit. Yet I know that the years ahead will demand everything I’ve got, which may not be enough. When young, we run off an excess of power. As we get older the energy we need and the energy we have equals out. Then it doesn’t. We must slow down and finally stop. Journey over.

  I am not yet elderly but my life could end now and my death would not be called untimely. After a brief period of mourning, my survivors would go on grinding coffee, scanning the headlines, and rejoicing in their own robust, bone-singing good health, as I do now.

  Not long ago I came into the house at dusk. My mother was not there. It was an unsettling sensation. I felt like a six-year-old coming home from school, moving through cold motherless air that did not have an animating principle. Then, convinced that she was just out for a walk, I went upstairs and started to work. Soon, I heard noises in the kitchen, the sound of pots on the stove. I called her name, she answered, and I was as casual about it as if a stock I owned had momentarily dipped and then recovered.

  Yesterday, I worked four hours on my Christmas story. I find that reading some of Mary Oliver’s poetry enables me to write a few good lines from a place I hadn’t found before. Poetry excavates, blasts, cuts through the flab.

  Thinking ahead to my birthday tomorrow, I’m not sure any of my children will remember it. Then again, they weren’t there when I was born. The impression of my birth upon them is necessarily weaker than their births are on me.

  Last night with Dorothy Jones was so restoring. That bird-like, tall thing, bent over a plate she can’t see, but so bright and large-hearted. She and Mother are an equal match. Their relationship keeps them both alive.

  The best thing to come out of the Immaculate Degenerates was Dorothy Jones, who was totally blind, which didn’t keep her from being the hub of the entire Ashland community. I have never known anybody in their nineties who laughed so often, complained so little, and whose phone rang so continually. A retired classics professor, she never married and devoted the last years of her life to caring for her younger, mentally challenged sister, Geezie, in a huge ramshackle ship of a house that was managed by her housekeeper, Esther, who lived in daily terror that Dorothy was going to fire her. “I don’t do nothing to earn all this money,” she would say. For a while, Esther refused to cash her paychecks. Finally, Dorothy and my mother forced her to drive them to the bank so they could watch her deposit the paychecks in the bank.

  Dorothy and my mother quickly became best friends. “Imagine,” said my mother, “having a best friend at my age.” No two friends could have been more different than my mother, the high school dropout Buddhist transcendentalist who thought the past was something to get over, and Dorothy, who had a PhD, belonged to two Christian churches in town, and whose hobby was family histories. But beneath the surface, they had the same sense of the absurd and a deeply held belief in a life of service. When they took their daily walks with Dorothy’s toy poodle, Callie, at the local cemetery, Dorothy would entertain Mother with the stories behind the tombstones. Sometimes, when they passed a newly dug grave, my mother would nudge Dorothy in the ribs and say, “You’re next.”

  Their conversations were worth writing down, and sometimes I did.

  MOTHER (after going with Dorothy “to visit the ga-ga” at Crump Manor, one of the more perfect names for an old people’s home): It’s decided. We’ve got to get some DO NOT RESUSCITATE bracelets.

  DOROTHY (to me): She really got going after she visited Crump.

  MOTHER: There’s such pathos and history in every room. And you can hear a pin drop, which shows how drugged up they all are.

  DOROTHY: Well, we know they’re sedated.

  MOTHER: Isn’t it interesting, the word “sedate.” Just add a “d” and you’ve got “sedated.” Did you hear [changing the subject] about the new curbside mortuary viewings in Atlanta? You push a button, and a curtain pulls back so you can see the body and sign
the guest book.

  DOROTHY: How about the new drive-by sermons in Florida? You just put in a quarter and get the lowdown.

  And so on….

  As flat and far away from passionate living as I feel, it would still take me quite some time to list the gifts I have been given: my mother, my health, my ongoing financial luck, a cozy house, friends, and permeating all of the above, my children. And so much beauty, from the hills of California to the fog gathering in the fields near Villa Spannocchia in Tuscany.

  If I had a wish it would be to have chance and ability to love, not as I used to wish, for a man, although I wouldn’t turn a good one down.

  A thought comes to me—that what one professes to believe is not always what one actually thinks. Therein lies the disjointedness; energy and resolve drain through the crack between them.

  On a mundane level, I think I am capable of swimming half a mile with relative ease. But in the water I don’t do it because I feel myself to be weak in resolve. And what I feel is stronger than what I think.

  In my writing, I am fearful of risk or change, not because I wouldn’t if I could, but because I don’t think I can. Here, what I think prevails. Do I have anything to say? In a conversation with my mother, she asked if I knew many wise people. I got to thinking that we all have wisdom, and it is a matter of knowing how to get access to it that makes the difference between us. In speaking with one friend, I am soulful and insightful. With another I can barely complete a sentence. Something in them either produces something in me or doesn’t.

  Last night I gave myself a birthday dinner and asked people to bring something to share that inspires them. The inspiration-sharing got off to a wonderful start with five-year-old Meade Reihl’s drawing, then her seven-year-old brother Alec’s story about the trash can snowmen, Magi’s favorite book of plants from the southeastern United States, Jeff Reihl’s song about “No Time,” Cody Artiglia’s card, Jesse Artiglia’s light-up pen, Pat’s poem on “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye, and finally Mel Titus’s anecdote about the snow. Yesterday, her eight-year-old son looked up into the sky full of flakes and said, “This is the best day of my life.” She said I had that spirit, too. When the cake came and Meade, Jesse, and Cody helped me blow out the candles, I wished for a bigger heart. Second wish: that more people sign up for my seminar in Scotland.

  A new thought is like a new footprint in the snow. This is the yield from a morning walk through a snow-filled town.

  I am reading The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. It was the only book he ever wrote, and he died shortly after it was published.

  Death, oh yes, it existed of course, but it was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was inner ignorance of this supreme consolation that makes the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit.

  It is a beautiful book that consoles the heart and revives the imagination.

  While walking around the neighborhood this morning, I passed a house under construction and wondered why humans build such right-angle habitats. Is it because of our skeletal structure, the linear way our minds function? Snails live on a curve, oysters, too. Everything in nature lives in the round except for us. The more I look at our houses, the odder they seem to me.

  Yesterday I talked to a wonderful local photographer, Doug Buerlin, about creating a photo essay exhibit called Our Town. He would take the pictures and I would write the commentary. Mother wasn’t sure it would be a good idea. “It will get people’s noses out of joint if they’re not included and their noses are out of joint anyway.” I found it lovably unsaintly of her when, later on, she wondered if she had done enough to warrant being included. “I founded the Immaculate Degenerates,” she said tentatively.

  A manuscript to edit came yesterday, with a check for $500: $250 more came from a magazine for an essay. A writing class starting that will bring $400 a month more. This is serious financial stability. If I activated my Social Security of $820 a month I’d feel quite secure.

  In the early eighties I worked as a contract writer at the Washington Post for several years. The financial stability of a monthly check was wonderful (even though I forgot to put anything aside for taxes—another story), but I didn’t feel too inspired sitting at a desk with nothing to look at out the window but another building full of people sitting at their desks across the street. I was also under the impression that working at the Post would be like going back to college, with lots of time in the snack bar swapping jokes with my new friends. But everybody kept their heads down and didn’t even look up when I walked by. (“That’s because everybody’s waiting to see if you last long enough to be nice to,” said my friend Rudy Maxa, the paper’s gossip columnist.) Still, I needed the job because my ex-husband was threatening to sue me for custody of the children and it was important to look respectable. Dick Harwood, the Post’s deputy managing editor, helped me get hired.

  My old friend and defender at the Washington Post, Dick Har-wood, is dead. There was a white-hot anger in him that frightened most people, an intensity that was not softened by any of the usual gifts of courtesy or self-deprecation. But he was very honest, and when I asked him about his life he told me a stunning story: his father had been a roustabout in the Wild Bill Hickok Show, he’d seen his mother kill herself and he’d witnessed the death of his sister. Then an orphan, his stingy uncle had taken him in and presented him at the end of his stay with a bill for every nickel he had spent on him. He did not have any self-pity, but I will always remember his voice when he told me about how, at his mother’s funeral, “Everyone patted me on the head and said how sad it was but not one of them asked to take me home—not one!”

  Dick’s funeral at the Navy Chapel in Washington was full of a lifetime of friends and colleagues who came to say good-bye. They were Washington’s powerful word and idea people. The familiar faces of Ben Bradlee, Kay Graham, and Walter Pincus were easily picked out. But it was young Helen Harwood, whose face was such a mobile version of her father’s, who moved me most. The passion that characterized her father ran freely across her features. Looking at her, I missed him.

  Ben’s eulogy included the scene of Dick cradling Bobby Kennedy’s head on the floor of the LA hotel kitchen after he was assassinated, having to leave him to find a phone to call Ben at the Post, then dictating a story “that was poetry,” Ben said. There was a stiff and graceful flag ceremony, with gloved hands combing the air, palm out, as the flag was turned into a tricornered packet for Bea, Dick’s widow. The marine commander, a chest full of decorative ribbons against dark navy cloth, bending down to deliver his condolences, listening to the pipers play “Amazing Grace.”

  A funeral is like a train station waiting room. We’re all going to board the train someday. Only the schedules vary. In the meantime, we catch up with each other, and assess how we’re preparing for the trip. I returned home full of energy and affection.

  Mother, sitting by the fire, said, “While there is breath in me, I’ll want to stay, as long as there is something more for me to learn, as long as I’ve got my marbles. If I’m unconscious I don’t want a lot of chemicals in me keeping me around for years. That’s not right for the body. If I was an Eskimo they’d put me on an ice floe.”

  My friend Sarah called this morning with two compliments. I didn’t know I needed them, but if she had announced she had two hundred, I would have sat as quiet as a mouse while she reeled them all off. The ego is such a hungry creature. I don’t now remember what the compliments were, but after they were delivered she recounted a story about her new boyfriend saying to her, “I like your little scalloped scissors.” “I can’t believe I made out with a man who knows what scalloped scissors are,” she exclaimed.

  I notice, after going through the diagnostic phase of getting my blood analyzed, teeth examined, and chest X-rayed, that I fall off in interest, and have difficulty taking the next step; filling the prescriptions, taking the thyroid, following the docto
r’s orders to lose weight. It is as if the diagnosis is enough.

  It seems as if my entire life now is revolving around the maintenance of it: teeth, stomach, car, garden, house refinance, piano keys. On the other hand, there is a much greater sense of order that is very comforting, even addicting.

  Today is Easter Sunday. On Saturday night, Rose’s Department Store was full of people buying plastic toys, gigantic bunny-filled baskets, and cheap fancy dresses for their children to go to church in, but at least there is a slim thread connecting them to the story behind it: “Jesus lives.” When I think how quickly we disappear from the face of the Earth when we die, the power of Jesus’ life becomes clearer at the checkout counter.

  My friend Katy’s teenage daughter came for a few minutes to receive her bat mitzvah present from me. A large temple ceremony where the whole community turns out to support one thirteen-year-old girl, at her most awkward, insecure age is a very wise thing. It not only gives her a loving push to the next level but it creates an opportunity for adults—who might otherwise ignore or take a child too lightly—to focus upon her.

  This morning I woke up thinking that I may, in some way, be experiencing my mother’s life. I feel blind. I cannot seem to see my next creative move. Once again, I read Stephen King’s writing memoir: Tell the truth, he says. I should try it, really try it. I will write a sentence and then ask, “Is that really true?” or “Can I make it more true?”

  Mother has some kind of flu bug. She has no symptoms other than a feeling of shakiness and a need for water. I must keep closer to her than usual. Her psychological health, her spirits, need my presence. She needs real care—warm the water, butter the toast—nothing huge, but continual. Her eyes make everything so problematic—the cords of her earphones get tangled, she can’t figure out which tape is which. When she went into her closet to get a thermometer, her bathrobe caught on the door and she fell. I am rolling up rugs to create a smoother surface.