The Journal Keeper

by Phyllis Theroux

  Mother remarked that Dorothy might not last too much longer. She had said to Mother, “What will I do without H?” as she calls him. “Well, perhaps you will decide you don’t want to live without him and that will be that. You can relax.” Mom hasn’t actually said this to her but thinks she will.

  At Hunter’s funeral, fully one half of the church was reserved for his family. They came walking down the aisle, at least fifty sons, daughters, grandchildren, and cousins, tears streaming down their cheeks. It is a Jones characteristic that everyone knows about: they cry easily. The rest of the church was crammed with friends who cared deeply, fiercely, about Hunter. He had put so many of them on their feet, helped them out, encouraged them.

  I thought sadly of another Ashlander who had died a few days earlier under far different circumstances. A former mayor, overwhelmed by chronic depression, had left notes for his family, driven out of town, and hanged himself from a tree near the railroad tracks. He, too, had his admirers, of whom I was one.

  A visit last night from the Nickersons from Maine. Fran is a woman of such enthusiasm and affection; Guy, at seventynine, a man you want in your life, quietly replacing the molding on a window, fixing the lock on a door. Fran, in particular, has never been happier, in love with learning, with Senior College, her poets, and art history. “I had to miss the Enlightenment to come here,” she said, “and Elizabeth Bishop, about whom I know nothing. But I’ll get back in time for Langston Hughes and T. S. Eliot.”

  We sat in the living room, and I read them Thurber’s “Greatest Man in the World.” Then Guy read Thurber’s “The Bear Who Could Take It or Leave It Alone.”

  I relished the preterrorist feeling of comfort the Nick-ersons created: the quiet talk about Maine writers, Guy replacing my rain gutters, and how they feel insulated in Maine from what is going on elsewhere.

  Holding a mug of warm coffee to my chest, which is covered in a clean Egyptian flannel nightgown, I wonder if I could even have a thought without these supports? My body’s every signal—warm me, cool me, rest me, feed me—is my command.

  Weaker signals—exercise me, floss me, hydrate me—involve a higher degree of discipline and formal thinking. The slave doesn’t move so quickly to answer these requests, perhaps because he senses that they are not a priority. He can let them slide without losing his job.

  Report from the West: my brother John—who moved to Sequim, Washington this year—pulled an eighteen-pound silver salmon from the river behind his new house. After all the struggles he has gone through in his life, there is something shining and triumphant about that.

  Mom is getting funnier. She joked yesterday about going to the cemetery with Dorothy (“We go there because no one talks back”) to walk Dorothy’s dog, Callie. “The big shots get the big tombstones, just like in life,” she said.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she continued, “that I don’t want you to bury my ashes anywhere. It’s ridiculous to think about going all the way up to Angel’s farm and then you have to stop off at McDonald’s for lunch and you have to leave me in the car or bring me inside in a box. No, just forget about the ashes.”

  A message from the ground was delivered yesterday morning as I took my walk along the wooded path that borders the Randolph-Macon College playing fields. While thinking that I had probably played my last game of tennis and would have to fall back upon walking as my principal form of exercise, my left foot caught upon something in the path and I went abruptly down for the count. Picking myself up, I retraced my steps to see what it was that had caught my foot and found a thick loop of a tree root, too tough to pull up, hidden beneath the leaves.

  Today, with the public interest in my mind and a hacksaw in my hand, I went back to saw the root off so others won’t be hurt. But the primary thought that came to me is that there is no real certainty that the next moment will be available to us. A tree root could permanently alter one’s future. A plane could fly into a skyscraper, anthrax be inhaled from an envelope.

  The terrorists have sobered and scared everyone. But all the talk is about how to defend ourselves or kill the perpetrators and none about how to create a society that renders terrorism moot.

  An exchange with my new friend, the writer George Crane, who said that writing was his practice, his meditation, the means by which he felt whole and grounded. “It’s your way in,” I commented. “Yes,” he said, “it’s my way in.” So it is for me.

  Last night I did not sleep—acid reflux, even with an expensive $4 pill, which conspired to make me very anxious about my financial future. Here we are, going into a terrible decline with fewer and fewer jobs, I am without any reliable source of income, with new expensive bills for medical problems, and I am on the verge of going into debt. To avoid this I will liquidate my stock portfolio if I can and try to remain outside the equity line. But I do not see any give anywhere.

  Rarely do I consult my soul without a prop, like this pen and journal, which simultaneously obscures and preserves what emanates from within. Throughout the day, I am almost always accompanied by another voice—from a radio, magazine, phone, or newspaper.

  When the desire is strong enough, talent shows up, like a day laborer, to help you achieve your goal.

  This is the line I labored over most of the morning, and it felt deeply satisfying to see it on the page. It is the answer to the question, How do you acquire a belief in oneself, how do you overcome powerlessness of any kind?

  Writing is a bit like swimming in the ocean. You have to get beyond the wave line into the depths. But the fear of not getting back to shore, of drifting out to sea, can make the swimmer/writer panic.

  Yesterday I paid bills, taking the last bits of money from my business account that can be called mine and paying the mortgage through December. Then the other, smaller bills were addressed. I feel oddly as if I am closer to nature now, like a plant dependent on roots and rainfall, and there is no sense in becoming anxious. Still, if I did not have any recourse—a mother with some ability to help, the future of my teaching, Social Security coming in March—I might not be quite so sanguine.

  Finding inspiration where and when I can—this time in the bathtub—from Gary Zukav in O: The Oprah Magazine. He writes that we must be conscious of our intentions because who we are and the life we lead is directed and shaped by them.

  How hard it is to catch the drift of one’s own thoughts or life. But Emerson is always an anchor. His words are clean and clear, giving me hope.

  Love and you shall be loved.

  A great man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep.

  I have been thinking that I have failed the test of love; I do not have anyone whom I really love on a daily basis. But then I remember my mother and adjust my grade from a D to a B minus, even though it is I who feels loved by her.

  Mother is beginning to see spirits. “I’m not seeing at all well, but I’m seeing inner things, and then there’s all this purple.” She described it as a kind of radiant saturation or aura that surrounds what she sees.

  “Over the last year I’ve been having figures coming into my meditation. They are souls who want you to help them. You bless them and say, ‘I’m not the one.’”

  Yesterday she saw me coming into the house, and five feet behind me was a blonde-haired woman in a quilted down coat. “She would have come right in if I hadn’t told her to leave.” My sister, Cynthia, who is visiting from California, and I both thought of the same person. “I wonder if it was Barbara [my best friend in college, who died when she was fifty-one],” I said. Mother immediately felt this was right. “If I thought that it was Barbara, I wouldn’t have told her to go away.”

  At the cemetery yesterday, she saw two ghost children coming running toward her. They were about twenty yards away, a twelve-year-old girl and a younger brother, holding hands, and then a woman. “I shined them off,” she said, in all seriousness. “It was just too much, with Callie running all over the place and Dorothy
bumping into tombstones, and then Cynthia slipped on her crutches, almost falling into a new grave.”

  For someone whose entire life revolved around the spiritual world, Mother was surprisingly unmoved by the spirits themselves. They weren’t her responsibility and she considered them a supernatural nuisance, gray ghosts who cluttered up the supermarket aisles and made it difficult for her to find the produce section without staring at the floor for guidance. But most of the time she lived with them the way other people live with floaters in their peripheral vision—without complaint or comment.

  I woke up with financial worries on my mind, not so oppressive as to cripple me but just there, like a reality I must deal with as best I can.

  What is the difference between hope and dependence? The first is grounded in the belief in certain truths that will support you if followed. The other relies upon someone or something else to open the door one stands before.

  Yesterday, Cynthia and I went to a reception at artist Nancy Witt’s house. My feelings were hurt rather effectively by a man who was attracted to Cynthia and made it clear to me that he thought I was old and unattractive. “God’s joy moves from box to box,” said Rumi. So does God’s pain.

  It is always harder, I think, to have something and then lose it. Fame, privilege, wealth, physical beauty, love. Yet when you look at these words on a written line, they are not assets that the people I admire or try to emulate possess except secondarily.

  Winter is coming. The few brightly colored leaves remaining on the trees are more noticeable because of the spaces created by the leaves lying on the ground. Winter subtracts and creates beauty that is just as compelling as spring, which adds it back.

  Yesterday I worked on my book (which finally has a proper name, Giovanni’s Light), but I did not move forward. Rather, I fiddled with what I’d already written and didn’t break new ground. It is an old impulse, rooted in the desire to create a perfect piece of something before moving on—as if the light of what I have created will show me where to go next.

  It has been a rough few days, assailed by both financial and creative worries. This week I must liquidate some assets to pay my bills. I am approaching the bottom of the bucket financially.

  Now I have an entire outline, chapter by chapter, of Giovanni’s Light. It gives me a box in which to put the contents. Afterward, I celebrated by running out to Campbell’s Ceramics and buying some clay, firing cones, and other equipment.

  Some years ago, I bought a block of clay at a garage sale and discovered the joy of kneading a jug or face or small earthen figure into existence with my fingers. Like making quilts, another hobby I pursue with joyous inexactitude, playing with clay satisfies a need to feel the material world between my hands after so many hours in the abstract world of words.

  Reading Emerson, I came across a page I’d folded over and wondered what was on it that I had wanted to remember. I found it two-thirds of the way down: “People wish to be settled; only insofar as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” Farther up, another thought catches my eye—on aging.

  But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration ... and talk down to the young. Let them become organs of the Holy Ghost, let them be lovers, let them behold truth, and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, and they are perfumed again with hope and power. This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed, the coming only is sacred.

  Rollo May writes [in The Courage to Create] of Prometheus’s liver, how it restored itself at the beginning of each new day.

  All artists have at some time had the experience at the end of the day of feeling tired, spent, and so certain they can never express their vision…. But during the night their liver grows back again. They arise full of energy and go back with renewed hope to their task, again to strive in the smithy of their soul.”

  This morning I woke up wishing that Christmas could be just another day, that I didn’t have to think about any part of it. When I went to Cross Brothers for ice cream, Norma was dressed in a red outfit with a ceramic Santa head on her sweater. “Dressed for Christmas,” I said. “I’m trying,” she said. I knew that if I scratched the surface I’d hear all about her money problems. This is the spirit or lack of it that my story [Giovanni’s Light] deals with.

  I must confess a shameful weakness, a failure to be consistently generous. After a brief period of time, I’m finished. I don’t want to return to the bedside, the yard, or wherever it is that help is needed. I wonder if I fear becoming indispensable, that my first steps toward helping someone will trap me, make it difficult to leave. I wonder also if it is only if I hollow myself out in some way that involves prayer, even fasting, something I have never done in all my years on earth, that genuine generosity can emerge.

  I am so disappointed in myself. All these weeks of steadily losing weight are about to be undone. Is the reason for losing my way the belief that I cannot really do it? Well, I will not be a coward. I will confess, at least to myself, that I have fallen down, and I will get up again and continue with a hopeful heart. There are times when you must treat yourself like a child, with tenderness and belief and encouragement.

  A moment of quasi-enlightenment when I realized that I have been spending a lot of time in the past and it has had a demoralizing effect.

  Recently I have been watching a lot of television and seeing many people I knew when I lived in Washington and worked for the Post and was on the Newshour. It made me aware of who I used to be, the friends and contacts I used to have. Then I thought how my phone used to ring a lot more, and how I used to be a lot busier. Revisiting my past had a paralyzing and narrowing effect on me. My capacity to be fully aware and connected to life as it is—instead of how it was—was diminished. Then, for a few liberating seconds, I got out from under the past and was free of it. Living in the past is the temptation and burden of aging.

  I am also aware of a large inventory of experiences, of having been immersed in such beauty for all of my life. But even this can be a hindrance that creates a painful nostalgia for days gone by. The present becomes an empty antechamber where one sits thinking about what is on the other side of a locked door. It is also a temptation to view the present mournfully and worry that what we have will be taken away—as indeed it will.

  For a moment I closed my eyes and imagined how it would be to let go of writing, to lose my grip on the chain of words that leads me through the darkness. Am I not a prisoner of words, dependent upon them in a way that tethers me to my own intellect? To always be looking down at a line of print instead of up at the world in front of me seems escapist. But I would no more remove myself from the page than I would take a rattle from a baby’s hand. The ability to make my own noise is what makes me feel alive.

  I broke down last night by the fire and told Mom I was really depressed. Almost too much to go into it. But I did, and she was so encouraging and convinced that all will be well. I read some excerpts from this journal to her. It seems to be the place I am writing best these days.

  I am acutely aware that I am about to impoverish myself, to dig all the way into my meager stock portfolio, liquidate it, and pay bills that must be paid. Then comes my equity line, where I go back into debt, and then I am flat broke and gone. If I can get a few more students for my Ashland seminar, keep bringing in some mentoring fees, be very careful with my expenses, and perhaps count on Mother for $300 a month, we’ll be okay.

  Fear makes us take time-consuming detours around the thing we are afraid of. It is possible to live one’s entire life this way, not going toward what we desire, avoiding what we cannot find the courage to confront. Every new apprehension is a new link in the chain of fears.

  From a Merchant-Ivory screenplay I found in my office:

  Her books about America no longer sell, and she is broke. This breaking up of a well-formed personality is what she is enduring now.

  Ex
actly how I feel! Finding it in print cheered me up.

  It is true that you become what you love. I love ideas, words, people, and food. So I am an intellectual with lots of friends who is twenty pounds overweight. If I were to love exercise, thrift, and truth I would be better off.

  Watching Robin MacNeil on the Newshour last night as I rested on some folded laundry on my lap, I felt so helpless. What am I doing? I joked to my mother. I write the same chapter all day, don’t go outside the house, and fold laundry. What I am missing is the feeling of being connected to the larger world. But this is something that can happen without physical movement. And I thought to myself that I should take the opportunity to connect with my interior world more deeply, even though it can feel murky and ill-defined.

  How is it that I can go so long without being loved in a concrete physical way? [This is Catholic-girl speak for sex.] And have I lost the instinct for loving another in the same way? Writing it down makes me realize that it is a pretty insubstantial question/complaint. I am loved as much as I am able to receive it. That is the truth of it. And I do not feel that my capacity to receive love is very large. Again, it goes back to making room, allowing for it. What is present that should be removed in order to make it possible, self-loathing?

  I am beginning, by small degrees, to realize how one might eventually become enlightened—not as the result of “heavy lifting” but by quietly reflecting, or coming upon an idea so integral that one is subtly, permanently, changed by it.

  Another idea came to me last night as I was gathering my clothes and reading matter from the bathroom floor. My messy, demanding ego resists order, but my soul requires it. To quietly pick up after oneself is a soul-ordering activity that I have resisted most of my life. I’m not sure why. Being orderly is not that difficult. In fact, it is a very easy thing to do—if the ego can be trained to know its place.