The Journal Keeper

by Phyllis Theroux

  He recalled a comment from Mrs. Newton Priddy, who would call in her orders. “Get me some of that number twenty-five flour, but don’t sell me no bag the damn cat sat on.”

  Tommy Willis was one of the first people I got to know when I moved to Ashland. In his sixties, with wavy silver-gray hair (more on that in a minute) and a dry sense of humor, he is usually cleaning out the onion bin or stocking canned goods and is ready to talk—which is one of my requirements for friendship—when I come into the store. Over the years, Tommy has told me about his men’s singing group (which goes on fun road trips), his antique car collection, and how his wife, a retired hairdresser, sets his hair with marcel clips every morning after breakfast and puts him under a hair dryer while he reads the newspaper. I love to think about that.

  Several years ago, Tommy invited me to an ice cream social at his church, which was just winding up its annual revival week. I had never been to an ice cream social or a revival, and the idea of going to the Hopeful Baptist Church with Tommy’s family seemed like a unique out-of-time way to spend the afternoon. The following Sunday I found myself sitting in a small country church, full of men in double-breasted suits and women with bertha collars, singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” As the late afternoon sun filled the church up with honey-colored light, I felt as if I were in a National Geographic article about the American heartland.

  Then came the ice cream social in the basement. Tommy stood with me in line and whispered, “See that lady up ahead, with her husband?” I followed his gaze to a gray-haired woman with glasses, wearing a pleated skirt and a sweater set. She looked like all the other parishioners at Hopeful Baptist—old-fashioned and decent, with kitchen drawers full of neatly folded Clorox-scented dish towels. Her husband, dropping scoops of ice cream on her plate, wore a Mr. Rogers zip-up cardigan sweater over his shirt and tie.

  “What about them?”

  “She found him on line,” he whispered. “In Florida.”

  “You’re kidding! You mean they’re newlyweds?”

  Tommy nodded. “But you can bet she had him checked out six ways to Sunday before she got involved.”

  I would have reason to think back to this conversation later on.

  Up early, my one cup of coffee already consumed. My thoughts race ahead of the light. Today is the day Molly negotiates a deal with Scribner’s. Nan will, I think, bid on my book. Molly will, I know, represent me well. And it remains for me to reinforce the themes that want strengthening. I see it as a joy and am so relieved that Nan does not want a wholesale revision, which I could not do. I am already planning to turn the garage into a guest cottage to bring in extra income.

  Around noon, Molly called me to say she had talked to Nan. “You can buy one cashmere sweater,” she said. Then, without further ado, she dropped the news: seventy-five thousand dollars! In my wildest fantasies I had not allowed myself to think of an amount this high. Mother broke into tears when I told her. After living so close to the bone, with so little margin for error, it seems like a staggering amount of money.

  I am reminded of the time I stood behind Nora Ephron in the elevator of her apartment building in New York, watching her rip open her mail and pull out checks as casually as little Valentines, barely reading the amounts. Money seems to be pouring in again, but the instinct to save is neither strong nor weak. On some level, money itself just doesn’t catch my attention, except when the lights go out.

  I find it interesting that I know Mother so well I can predict what she is going to want almost every minute of the day: the cup of coffee, the cigarette, the glass of port by the fire. She is, on the one hand, so materially bound, on the other, so spiritually free.

  A long satisfying conversation with Eliza. There is no one I would rather have as a daughter—and she made me laugh when she said she had been headed toward another mother but hung a right at the last moment and wound up with me. [My two oldest children are adopted.]

  I am so moved by David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, who inspires one to be virtuous and openhearted, without guile or malice. McCullough quotes a letter from Adams to a grandchild:

  Do justly love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough…. So questions and so answers your affectionate grandfather.

  And another:

  He who loves the Workman and his work and does what he can to preserve and improve it, shall be accepted of Him.

  After a weekend of gardening and cleaning out the garage, it now stands ready to be renovated. The pleasure I get back from this house on this piece of land is continual. There is a certain moment in the late afternoon when the sun slips out from behind a cloud, like a monstrance raised to catch the light—and light floods the air, intensifies and suffuses everything, and then quickly recedes. Every living thing thrums and glows, and the amazing fact is that no one sitting quietly on the porch chatting about whatever we are discussing ever pauses to remark on the beauty that surrounds us.

  Lately I have been sitting for a few minutes after my morning walk, on the bench at the edge of the park pond. At this time of year, with the trees in new bud, their leaves hang like small pale flags from the branches and a light mist of pollen covers the pond. A pair of mallards have taken up residence at the south end. Usually one is resting on the bank while the other swims. What particularly impresses me is the way one can interpret and then reinterpret the same scene.

  Last night, watching a beautifully done documentary on the mollusk, whose most brilliant relative is the chambered nautilus, I was struck by the truly magnificent, inspired nature of creation, the way the nautilus traps gas in its separate chambers so it can float. Then I get a tooth removed and am told that after the blood clot gives way to new nerves, the nerves will proceed to rebuild the bone. The cells know!

  A week from now I will be in California, waking up in Francesca’s guest room, listening to the Pacific Ocean a block away. This is an amazing fact that never gets less so. But more amazing is the realization that, no matter where I am, I have come together as a whole person in a way I never thought possible. Those years of longing for another have come to an end, or at least a surcease. That being said, I wonder how this will change when Mother moves on.

  An overcast, cool morning. Sitting by De Jarnette Pond. Both ducks were on the grass where they had been before, the male mallard on both feet, with his neck fully extended upward, the female with one leg tucked up and her neck sunk in an S upon her chest. I wondered what they had to protect them against predators, and then, of course, I remembered: wings. The equivalent in humans is the imagination.

  A silent flotilla of leaves, too light to sink, drifts slowly with the wind across the surface of the pond. On the ground, there are more of those little one-wing propeller-shaped seeds, so easy to ignore unless you’re looking—like the pair of gray upside-down squirrels clinging to the gray tree trunk. Nature usually clothes its creatures so modestly.

  Mother announced yesterday that her “French leg” (the one that was mangled by the Dalmatian dog that ran into her in Menton on the Riviera) was giving her the same pain walking that it did two years ago, before she began taking glucosamine and chondroitin. “Oh, well, the end of an era (i.e., walking),” she said. “It’s something to build on.” I know her well enough to know that not walking is a deeply disappointing thought, that she is, on one level, very upset. On another level, she isn’t.

  This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

  — George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

  It is a mild, faintly muggy morning. The air is just moist enough to carry the scent of flowers on it like a handkerchief. The magnolia will open soon. The pond at De Jarnette Park smells of new rainwater. And our newly ousted mayor of Ashland is spitting mad! We h
ave a brand-new town council that has never looked so diverse: two women, two black men, one white man.

  Most important occurrence of the day: Nan Graham’s note, which arrived on Saturday.

  Dear Phyllie,

  Thank you. It’s a thing of beauty…. Giovanni’s Light has gone into production and will be in the stores for Christmas.

  I called Molly and read her Nan’s note. After all the Sturm und Drang she generated during our editing, Nan’s sunny side is a relief.

  Having written a work of fiction, I am finding my consciousness greatly expanded, as if my “closet” now has a wardrobe full of clothes for all kinds of people, not just for me.

  Walking back from downtown yesterday, I took the top off a garbage can and tossed my newspaper into it. Suddenly a story began to take form in my mind. There was a discarded baby in the can and the casual act of discarding a newspaper saved the baby from dying of hypothermia. I played with that idea all the way home.

  Lunch with my friends Lee and Carol. The conversation turned to religion and what each of us believed. I found myself saying that I was much more conscious of light than darkness and I didn’t really hold out much hope for myself changing. Lee said that not believing in sin didn’t make sense and I agreed—but it was the guilt-inducing aspect of Christianity that felt so wrong.

  Later, while talking with Mother and a neighbor, Sandy, I asked Mother who she thought God was. She answered that God was light. “And what do you do with it?” Sandy asked. “Nothing,” said Mother. “I just allow it to bring me and my surroundings into greater harmony.”

  Searching for a way to say a few words about my mother’s spiritual beliefs, I opened up a journal I kept specifically to record some of our conversations. Tucked in front was a letter she had written to me in her seventies, when she was in France.

  Am sitting outside reading Emerson. I am completely, finally, enthralled with his writing. Where have I been?

  Let me try to answer that.

  In her midfifties, when she was still married to my father, my mother met Dr. Lawrence McCafferty, a spiritual teacher of metaphysics who had a profound impact upon the rest of her life. Lawrence, as his disciples called him, opened the door to a world that, intuitively, my mother already knew existed. He taught her how to experience it—through a series of public discourses, private sessions, use of Tarot cards, and most especially meditation. He died in 1979, about ten years after she met him, and long before she came to live with me, but many of his talks had been recorded. At my house, my mother had an entire library of his tapes beneath her bed.

  Every morning, while I sat in the living room reading, writing, and free-form floating around in my mind, my mother was in her room, listening to a tape, meditating, or doing her yoga exercises—usually in that order. The rest of the day was spent waiting to see what it might bring forth—a walk, a visit from a friend followed by a phone call from one of her children, or a trip to the library for another Maeve Binchy novel on tape (she was addicted to them). But running quietly beneath the surface of her life, what she was really doing was waiting, as patiently as she could, for her own death.

  “When you leave this plane,” she once said, “the postmortem life isn’t that different because you bring your consciousness with you. In fact, that’s all you bring. Most people don’t know that.”

  One night, when her eyes were still good enough to play cards, I decided to give her a small tutorial on the computer. Sitting her down in front of the keyboard, I showed her how she could play Solitaire on the screen.

  She wasn’t impressed. “I like to hold the cards in my hand,” she protested.

  I decided to introduce her to Google. “You can look up anything,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, just give me something to search for.”

  “Could you look up the Akashic Records?”

  “The what?” I had never heard of them. But after I typed it into the search box, up came the Wikipedia definition: “Sanskrit for a compendium of mystical knowledge encoded in a non-physical plane of existence.”

  When my mother was a little girl, she used to spend long lonely hours staring into the pond behind her house, wishing she had the courage to dive in and join the Water Babies who swam around the bottom. That same innocence and inclination of heart stayed with her to the end. She believed in Everything and the Akashic Records is where Everything can be found.

  I wonder how much of the clear-mindedness, peace, and comfort I feel now is related to the absence of daily worry and responsibility for my children. The fear that laced my life, needing to know they were alive and well, was constant. Waking up from a nap always meant asking myself, “Where are they?” Now, however, I do not want to push myself into any new zones of discomfort or pain of that kind.

  Yesterday, standing in a supermarket line, I read aloud a Mary Oliver poem to Mother and realized what a sharp knife to the soul she is. Instantly, I moved to a richer, deeper place in my consciousness. But generally I have noticed that I am very easily distracted when I am reading. My capacity to be at one with the words I am trying to digest is weak. Remembering what I have read is harder.

  Almost everything I do is done in a preoccupied state, and only writing, which requires attention to the pen, the paper, and the line of thought across the page, has the capacity to focus my attention. If I could really see how this habit of mind hinders me, I wouldn’t have so many exploding eggs in the pot on the stove.

  The mind, I am convinced, is its own apothecary, dumping chemicals into our bloodstream that go to the brain and influence the thoughts we have and the impressions we receive. And the mind knows what to avoid that might bring us pain.

  Last night, for example, I placed my new digital camera on my desk and posed in front of it. I could not affect a single flattering pose. The face I possess was just not the face I thought was mine and I am amazed at the disparity. Later, when I stood in front of a mirror and stared quietly at my reflection, I was brought up-to-date again. This is not a face that would turn anyone’s head. I could not even find clues of distinctiveness or elegance. It was simply a lump, intelligent but not beautiful.

  Mom’s eighty-fifth birthday. My present to her is to be at her disposal for the entire day. She is such a continual gift, when I imagine her gone I cannot quite see myself here. Yet she has brought such peace to my life that I cannot imagine that peace leaving when she dies.

  It was a day of family phone calls, flowers, a drop-in from Mel and the boys, crab cakes with Pat, and small acts of love from me—a new cotton blanket for her bed, another book tape (Les Miserables)—and then it was over.

  After dinner on a dark porch, we talked quietly about her last “seven-year cycle” and how joyful and complete it had been. Two estranged children speaking to her again, the blessings that came after the deterioration of her eyes—“and living with you,” she said, “is one of them.” If she completes another cycle she will be ninety-two, which seems unlikely. But I hope she will be here long enough for me to finish the book about her.

  Summer has come and the heat has released the perfume from the earth. As I ride my bicycle through the street, my nose is filled with the scent of the flowers and grasses that are at the height of their lushness. All the magnolias are in bloom. I dip my nose into the cup of their petals and can’t believe my luck. De Jarnette Pond, swirling with arabesques of algae, is new every morning.

  Mother didn’t feel well yesterday. I stayed close and made an effort to do things for her—vacuuming her room, arranging her books, etcetera. Late last night I massaged her back and feet, trying to run strength into her body through my hands. This morning she pronounced herself cured, saying that my hands had healed her. I do think about what life will be like when she is gone, but it seems impractical to advance the plot. Right now is where I am.

  Sometimes it is so quiet here in Ashland that I wonder how we don’t die of it. There is nothing to remind you from the outside that you are here. I und
erstand why it is so hard to get people to visit. They know what they will find, a quietness so deep and steady it creates a kind of nervousness. I visualize Eudora Welty in Jackson, Mississippi, the lace curtains in her living room catching the lemon-colored light every afternoon, even the dust undisturbed on the floor. One must have a very active imagination to withstand it.

  It occurs to me that I am going backward, into the same but different state of life I chafed to leave when I was young. Too quiet, too spare, too beyond my ability to make exciting. Yet my childhood was the real time of richness from which I continue to draw my creativity. So here I am again, a child of quiet.

  A conversation with the wife of a former college president. She said that her husband had gone into a deep depression just before he retired and that five years later he was not yet out of it. “He’s busy,” she said, “but that’s all it is.” There is a growing segment of the population that is silently suffering from lack of meaning. The little sand castles of accomplishment begin to crumble before their eyes, and the question of what life is for, returns to be answered.

  Last night at the library I saw a neighbor whom I hadn’t seen for over a year. The miracle was remembering his name. With so much forgetting that is going on, it’s thrilling to do a little remembering. The mind is like a library full of overloaded shelves. As you age, the shelves collapse and one is forced to throw things into a pile that hides what lies in it. This is the best metaphor I can think of.

  From Henry Miller on Writing:

  What happened to me in writing … was tantamount to revelation. It was revealed to me that I could say what I wanted to say—if I thought of nothing else, if I concentrated upon that exclusively—and if I were willing to bear the consequences which a pure act always involves.

  Yesterday, I spent the afternoon on the James River with my friends the Roepers. The James revealed no secrets, but the deep quiet pools and little rushing waterfalls, safe enough for children, were beautiful and green. A blue heron unfolded its wings and flapped across the water. A large crowd of geese slid like a moving carpet above the bow of our boat, and nets of mosquitoes, almost invisible, hovered just over the water, moving as one. Sitting in the boat, tightly cinched into a life vest and helmet, with clunky tennis shoes and wet clothing, I felt as ungainly as a wet sandbag. Trying to climb rocks near the shore in rubber sneakers was impossible. Twice I slipped back into the water when my shoes lost their grip.