The Journal Keeper

by Phyllis Theroux

  Without a place to land, except a Starbucks, and having to drag a suitcase behind, one feels semihomeless. But what a rich human feast it is! My mind is restrung, my senses are more alert, and I think of Thomas Merton’s line about “everyone walking around shining like the sun.”

  The joy to me was being with my friends Robert Ellsberg and Molly Friedrich for a few uninterrupted hours, talking about books and ideas and people while never running out of enthusiasm. Both of them are so alive, with a kind of wholeness and humor that pours out of them.

  Molly’s house in Bedford Hills is perfect: a rambling yellow empire with places in and around it where children can develop, like negatives, in their own time. I loved the dog-wood at the top of the hill, the vistas of fields and trees, the way the house snakes around like a story, not revealing the whole at any one time. And no room is too big or too small for what it is.

  During lunch with my editor friend Joan Bingham, her remark about the value of writing fiction—“you get to know a lot of different kinds of people”—struck me with force. This might solve a certain lack of stimulation in Ashland.

  There are times when Ashland seems like a desert of inactivity and my life without purpose or importance. The phone does not ring with pressing developments, people wanting my company. Maybe it never did. I am aware that most of what I imagine to be missing is an illusion. Everyone’s life is full of potholes. Whoever I think of has to struggle to stay at the center of their own lives. When I think of the center of a wheel I wonder if dead center is, despite the turning outer rim, nearly still. That is the aim and object of meditation.

  Norma in good form today. At Cross Brothers, to pick up a cantaloupe for breakfast, I decided to give her a recent compliment.

  “Did you know that Pat Funk talked about you at the town council meeting last night?”

  “That’s what they say, that she mentioned my messages on the butter bean trays … but I tell people I haven’t been in the right frame of mind lately.”

  “Oh?”

  “There’s been so much going on.”

  “Really?”

  “My grandson tried to kill himself and my older daughter has cancer.”

  “What kind?”

  “Lymphoma … the same kind that killed my daddy.”

  “Is your grandson her son?”

  “No, he belongs to my son in Richmond. His wife just left him and she’s had him arrested.”

  On it goes.

  My backyard cottage is taking shape. Shingle men, window men, air-conditioning and heating men, plumbers, electricians. Trucks are continually pulling into the driveway. The buzz saw rings, the hammer pounds. It is very exciting.

  Every day I visit the cottage at least a dozen times to plan my plans, dream its future. My latest idea is to offer it as part of a package—a writer’s retreat and editing opportunity. When not being used by friends or family, a writer—I or another—can use it as a retreat.

  The bay window is in. It feels as if the eye of the cottage has finally been inserted. Now when I walk inside it has focus and a sense of identity it didn’t have before.

  I can tell Mother is a little worried about her mental capacities. Recently she confused sconce with scone and wasn’t sure which was which. Last night on the porch, talking with our friend Pat, she said, “Phyllie promised me she’d tell me when I should go mute.”

  There was never a time when I thought my mother had lost her mental acuity, although she used to joke about “brain cells flying out the window,” and there were times when I could see her struggling for a word that was eluding her. I simply pretended not to notice. Then, too, she had been mangling the language forever, and when she got a word wrong it was much funnier and more interesting.

  “That’s meat for the fodder,” she once declared. “Do you mean fodder for thought?” I asked. She blushed. “No, we’re going to mix a little meat in it.” Once, she said that something “shrieked her out,” which admittedly is an improvement. And upon returning from France, she reported that “stone argyles acted as rain gutters on the corners of the cathedrals.

  But my favorite word mix-up was the time she wrote a letter to my friend Elizabeth, who was going through a hard time, and counseled, “Just remember, no one is free from immunity.” If I knew how to needlepoint, that one would be on a cushion. “I don’t know,” said my mother, who knew she was wrong but still liked the way it sounded. “Every time I say it, it just flows.”

  Some thoughts on the troubled marriage of a friend: he is disdainful and cold, she is insecure and lacking in conversational rhythm when she is with him. There is a certain natural timing that is present when two people are at ease with each other. It is missing here. He begins to speak; she jumps in too fast.

  A new thought—that writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that can lower you below or hoist you above the surface of your life, enabling you to go deeper or higher than you would otherwise go. What excites me about this metaphor is that it makes writing much more of a lifesaving venture.

  IN ITALY AGAIN FOR MY FALL NIGHTWRITERS SEMINAR AT VILLA SPANNOCCHIA

  The yearly miracle has occurred again. I am once more sitting in the dark morning before a newly lit fire in the villa living room. Two days of travel have ended with me fumbling for matches in Spannocchia’s kitchen to make the first of a dozen cups of morning coffee. Now I open my journal and listen for my thoughts.

  Last night, sitting with friends at an outdoor restaurant in Siena, on the street where Saint Catherine walked to her house a few feet from our table, I looked at the darkened town across the way, with its layered, stacked houses cut with golden squares of light.

  It struck me how most of our conversation was conducted through stories. Gina told about the abduction of Saint Catherine’s head by the Sienese, who demanded that the pope return her to Siena after her death in Rome; the pope had refused, so they snuck into the church where she was buried, lopped off the best part of her, plus a few fingers, and put them in glass cases that are still on display in the duomo here. Jennifer relayed her story of escaping from an alcoholic husband in Central America with her children, using forged documents, including a laundry ticket with some postage stamps as the final paper she offered to the border patrol soldier (“He read it upside down for several minutes and then waved us through”). She then told of a mutual friend’s newly discovered talent for automatic writing (she sits down at her computer and her hands move without her bidding). I made them laugh with tales of different times I had pretended to be someone else—once an emergency room nurse, once a pediatrician—in order to help people who couldn’t help themselves. All these stories were woven together into a disposable shawl that covered us just for that evening and then was discarded. We do this every time we meet.

  Today, one of my students said that she had stopped being polite because it wasted her time, to which another student asked, “And that works for you?” “Yes,” she replied, after which the questioner fell silent. Falling silent should be cultivated, the way the woods fall silent in the snow. Messages you can’t send any other way can be heard.

  This is our third day together, and there is a sense of settling in that is making it easier for everyone to work. It is a very high-energy, motivated group. Katie and Kirstin are writing books. Christine is newly committed to a full-time writing life. Susan is a quiet deep-feeling person. Keke is awash in her own tumultuous life, leaking tears as she laughs over the details. Janet is charming and intense, Sharon blunt beyond the need for it but lovable nonetheless. Andy is overcome with joy, just at being here. Deb, the youngest, is innocently open to everything. Ruta is probably the most naturally talented and Judy the most hard-working and earnest.

  Walking down the road from Cateni Restaurant at the top of the hill town of Orgia, I looked up into the sky. The air was full of dampness, chestnut smoke, and stars, with the soft verges of grass along the road smelling of nipitella mint and rain.
What I need is some poetry to let me rub the moments between my fingers and release the scent.

  Today I looked at one of my students who is giving me pangs of irritation and thought of a more compassionate way to view her—as someone usually so trapped in one small part of herself that it is difficult to experience the rest of her.

  Our last day at Spannocchia. The small band that is left, only six, is softening fast now that the tougher, more judgmental members of the seminar are gone.

  I wonder why I feel a magnetic attraction for this place when I am not exactly productive when here. The illusion, that I will be moving energetically from one brilliant place and conversation to another, is never matched by the reality of much sitting, eating, and feeling faintly bored. But at the same time I am watered, like a dry creek bed, with such beauty at every turn.

  This morning, throwing open my shutters, the gold light on the wisteria, the pale sky mottled with pink clouds, the line of cypress trees along the terrace filled my eye. Now I am in a bar in Rosia, listening to the chatter of Italians having their morning cappuccinos. My heart simply loves this part of the world.

  Home. Gazing at a small candle in a glass holder hanging from a chain—one of my purchases in San Gimignano that I knew would go in my writer’s cottage behind the house. The pleasure I am taking from this work-in-progress, imagining the finished product, thinking of how it will be used and by whom, is continual. Watching carpenters put up solid beams of new wood, watching electricians fill the eaves with new wiring and pipes, all of it carefully done by craftsmen who know how to measure, plumb, and flesh out a line, is quietly thrilling.

  Last night we had a wonderful warm dinner at the Lemons’ house. Yet all of Virginia is in the grip of a grim lottery where almost every day someone is being picked off by a sniper. Last Saturday night, Ashland was the target. David Willis from Cross Brothers carried the victim to the hospital, but it could just as easily have been David; who was in the vicinity of the shooting only five minutes before it happened. Schools have been closed and parents are terrified to let their children play outside. Malls are empty. Nobody wants to risk being the next target, although the targets are so random—someone getting off a bus, a woman on a park bench, a child walking to school. It is impossible to know where to position oneself and the only real solution is to continue as if nothing significant could happen—the way we live, as if death were not the ultimate end for us all.

  In his book The Saints’ Guide to Happiness, Robert Ellsberg’s reminiscence of his dying friend Chuck Matthei moves me:

  To me [said Matthei, the last time Robert saw him] it is the recognition that we are never without a meaningful choice. This is a culture that nearly drowns people with meaningless consumer choices, yet leaves most of them feeling that they are powerless in the most important affairs of life—but that’s not true…. This is the decision I have to make every morning: I can rise and think about what has been done to me, what I have lost … or I can rise and say to myself, “Here I am. Let’s get moving!”

  A conversation with my sister, Cynthia, who has been visiting:

  CYNTHIA: I like that magazine called More.

  ME: I’d like a magazine called Old. Then I could go into a store and ask, “Have you got any Old magazines?” Or maybe there could be three different magazines called Old, Older, and Oldest.

  MOM: Or Finished.

  ME: Except who would buy it? Dead people don’t read.

  MOM: (changing the subject) I’m still aghast at someone having quadruple bypass surgery at eighty-seven. It shows what a tremendous fear of death we have.

  A Sunday morning. One candle burns rather noisily in the glass container that hangs from my new Italian “iron tree,” and I am thinking that I have neglected the beauty that has been presented to me. When I could be writing about these things, I am browsing in dime stores, noticing and recording what isn’t important.

  Last night, the Moreland clan [whose father, Earl Moreland, lived the last part of his life here] descended on the house in a noisy, vivacious, piano-playing gang and instantly filled it with bright intelligence. Even Mother, who never contemplated a party she couldn’t do without, was charmed to be there. Hearing the Moreland grandchildren banging on the piano while adults collared each other in conversation, with the smell of candles and coffee filling the air, I was back at my aunt and uncle’s house in San Francisco, feeling the same kind of excited contentment that I felt then.

  THINKING OF MOM

  Think how it would feel, if I had an idea and because I was blind I could not pursue it. And, being old, I could not remember all the details. And being dependent upon someone else to stop and take the time to help me, I had to show great patience so that person would not become irritated with me.

  I am beginning to look upon those who irritate me—the egoists, the overly emphatic, the nonstop talkers who press me against the wall—with more compassion. It is still a temptation to strike out and say something mean but true that will rip away their facades. But increasingly I am more inclined to look upon them as pilgrims who have gotten lost or forgotten where they are going, if they ever knew.

  This thought was dislodged by a comment from Czeslaw Milosz:

  William Blake was inclined to see human sins as phases through which humans pass and not as something substantial.

  —Milosz, The Book of Luminous Things

  It is time to rise and take some exercise. I wonder if I would do this more eagerly if I viewed my body as a friend who depended upon me, the way my mother does for her well-being.

  A long talk with a distant friend fills you up like a meal full of comfort food. A hole is filled. This was how Franny Farr’s call to me felt. My emotional stomach received solid nourishment, delighted by every morsel about her life and the lives around her.

  The other morning I shook an inchworm from my hair. It must have dropped off the dogwood tree when I stood beneath it snapping off a branch to decorate a room.

  Back home, sitting at the breakfast table with the Sunday New York Times, I heard a little noise—the inchworm dropping onto the paper. It immediately headed for the paper’s edge, bunching itself up like the eye of a hook and eye, sliding forward, bunching its little gray body up again. That something no larger than a tiny piece of string could be so purposeful and well-made caught my imagination and eye for the next fifteen minutes, which seems like a long time to give to a creature that small.

  What interested me most was how the inchworm reacted to a new void. When it reached the edge of a section, say the Sports section, it paused thoughtfully, arched all but the anchoring end of its body off the page like a periscope, and looked around—or so I assume. It was too small to tell if it had eyes or perhaps tiny filaments, like hairs on a squirrel’s tail, that “perceived” the situation. The inchworm would remain in this arched antigravity position for what seemed too long for such a minute organism to sustain. And then, carefully, it would lower its torso down, down, until it made contact with a new, lower surface. Then it would continue toward yet another challenge.

  The Sunday Times, even when spread around, is like Mount Everest to an inchworm and eventually I got tired of watching it make its way from one part of the paper to the next. Putting my hand in its way, I let the inchworm crawl onto my finger and carried it outside, where I deposited it on the bush by the back door.

  Numerous questions remain unanswered, like what and when does it eat? Average life span? But what interests me most is what is going on in that small intelligence as it poses, erect and thoughtful, for such a long time over the emptiness. Is it trying to decide whether the space is too wide and dangerous to challenge? And why does it never head for middle ground? Safety doesn’t seem to play a big part in the inchworm’s calculations. Not once did it strike out for the centerfold. This inchworm consistently headed for a fall.

  Reading the first few pages of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird reminds me of how deeply imaginative a book can be. I want to write one li
ke it. Her instinct for knowing what she can leave out may not be teachable, but the beginning of her book is a place to start.

  This time of year is so spicy, with the earth not yet frozen and the leaves just beginning to fall. Rain soaks the ground, sending up smells of mold and mulch; the fires in people’s houses mix with the cold air. Everything is coming to a head, with berries bright as blood in the magnolia cones, pumpkins in the field waiting to be carved up or to rot. I am enlarged, excited by it—if I don’t think about the feudal state our country is becoming, in the hands of a president who dozed his way through good schools.

  It is consoling to think, if I am not always looking for God, that God is nevertheless looking for me. It is my suspicion, so deep that I forget its existence, that I am as profound as I am willing to be, that only a small revolution or turn toward the light would make all the difference.

  A dream in which I am talking on the phone with Christian while I wait to get into a limousine. I hang up and get into the car with all the family—Mom, Dad, Cynthia, all the aunts and uncles, plus Grandmother. We are taking Grandmother to a rest home. I sit next to her. She is quite calm and peaceful, with a smiling face. I take her hand and start to tell her how much she has meant to me and I begin to cry. Then the dream ends.

  It is interesting that the importance of family in my value system has not created the family I wanted, that I used to love being in the midst of as a child. Yet perhaps the quiet and freedom I have and cherish is what I need, and that is what I have found.