My pal Robey reminded me yesterday that I have not, in fact, been blogging. This is true. I've been both out of town (once, miraculously and deliberately, without a laptop) and busy. Such is life. He was letting me know, he said, because "some of us have come to expect regular blog posts." The day before, driving down from Tacoma, I'd listened to a tape I'd bought of a panel from the 2001 Los Angeles Festival of Books, a panel of narrative nonfiction writers that included Lawrence Weschler and Nathaniel Philbrick, both of whose work I admire. The moderator, Patt Morrison, asked good questions, including one I don't remember, only Weschler's answer, about how a writer skeins together the strands that make the story, a rough paraphrasing of which went, all the world is chaos and always will be, and the writer corrals some of this chaos and presents it to the reader, who appreciates (or not) the construction of what is now a story. This is as I, too, understand it. The writer is presented infinite particles (and I mean this literally) which he catches with his net, and then organizes. All the panelists agreed, as do I, that it's never a matter of not having enough material (except when it is; except when you start looking into a story that turns out not to be one, but experience teaches you to do this less and less, and then never, though I will posit it's equally true that sometimes you need to take a fishing expedition), always a matter of too much: how do you decide, as did Edward Humes, the author of Baby ER, which compelling, anguished, miraculous threads to include?
I told Robey, he and the other handful of folks who check in on this blog appreciate, for whatever reasons, the way I organize stories, and that this is the highest appreciation I can ever want.
Several days ago, I was asked to part in an art project. All I needed to do was write the one, or at the most two, most important things to me. My answers: 1: The safety of my daughter. 2: To write one great book, and preferably more. I was in Tacoma for the book. Today, driving at six in the morning through Portland, I saw that I have thus far for this book maybe six weeny strands. I imagined them as nerves, running through an outline of a human body, everything else blank, and then saw that someday there will be six hundred -- one will have to stop researching at some point -- all firing against one another, and then there will be coalescing, and the geometry of it will reveal what does and does not stay in the book, and what should.
Yesterday, a friend who I have known since childhood, Maggie Levine, tagged me in several Facebook photos. She wrote they were from LA, 1988-89, though I know the one below is summer of 1990, the age of my child being extremely easy to tell at that point in her life.
This morning, I took this same child to get all four of her wisdom teeth pulled out. I was a little anxious, she'd be going under general anesthetic for the first time in her life. After she'd been in the treatment room for a few minutes, I asked the nurse at reception if she would put my mind at ease; that Tafv had never been put under, and there was that time in LA when she broke her finger and when the doctor had shot a pain killer into the joint, the whites of my seven-year-old's eyes had flushed lavender and she'd started to hyperventilate. That sometimes, Tafv gets anxious.
"And where do you think she got that?" asked the nurse, but she was smiling. The procedure went fine, and quickly. I was led back into a small dark room where Tafv was recovering under a blanket; dopey as hell, nodding in and out every two minutes. I sat there, stroking her head, her leg, watching her nod in and out and babble, and saw the moment contained in a bubble, one of the millions of our lives together. I thought, I wished I'd made more of these bubbles all along; that I could more easily grab these moments with my child. It's now, that she is nineteen, that I am trying to burn them into my brain. Lately, I have dreamt of her -- as an infant, and then just learning to walk, and then at two, and at three.
She's home right now, upstairs, asleep. Before she conked out, we fed her soup. Since she can't really feel anything yet, I gave her a bib, the first she's had since she was about the age of the above picture, and she let me capture it.