if you don’t ask the right question/every answer seems wrong.—ani difranco
The best meal I’ve ever eaten was served to me in a gently lit basement restaurant, in a room that achieved a crowded elegance that was both comforting and uplifting. It made me feel both fancy and relaxed, something not easy to achieve. It was romantic in the way that
Lady and The Tramp’s back alley pasta dinner was romantic. I think there may even have been straw-bottomed bottles of Chianti hanging from the low ceiling near the fireplace. Our menu was more complicated and the wine list more extravagant than Tramp and Lady’s, but the lighting and the mood were exactly the same. If our lips had met in the middle of a shared spaghetti strand, the other couples in the restaurant would only have smiled pleasantly and listened for the violins that should rightly have followed.
I had come to the restaurant with my girlfriend at the time, because it was her favorite place, and she wanted to share it with me. We had sublet our San Francisco apartment and were spending the summer together, living with her sister’s family on a beautiful cove in her hometown on Cape Cod. She was painting houses and I was writing and recuperating from the two years of constant illness I’d endured in San Francisco. I remember this meal because everything about it was so absolutely perfect. The company was right, the setting was divine, and the swordfish I ordered was absolutely sublime. My salivary glands still gush and I drift off into a reverie whenever I think of it.
I savored every bite of that meal, moaning softly when the sumptuous flavor was too much to bear in silence. I felt spoiled—but like I deserved it, which was a wonderful sensation--and stimulated. Like really great sex, I didn’t want it to end. That swordfish in its special lemony sauce served over pasta was so delicious it made my whole life seem satisfying and worthwhile. What’s amazing to me is that even after seven years, when I want to feel that feeling again, I can reach back to the memory of that meal, and feel for as long as I can hold it in my mind, I am thoroughly protected, indulged, adored, and satisfied. It’s not just the taste of the fish that made that meal so great, it was everything. And when I re-visit it, I am given everything again.
As a child, I had a few special places where I’d go to feel peaceful and be alone. My favorite was a giant field of lupine where hundreds, maybe thousands, of lavender-, pink-, and white-blossomed plants stood three feet high and smelled of peppery goodness. The field was at the end of a long dirt road on private property at the tip of a grassy point that reaches out into the Orland River. It was a long bike ride for a seven-year-old from where I lived—a couple of miles, mostly unpaved—but it was just a few hundred feet from my best friend’s house, and she had free reign over it, so I felt it belonged to me, too. Sometimes, I would lie to my father, tell him I was going to my friend’s, but sneak off to the field instead.
I would go there alone as often as I could in summer. I would drop my bike at the edge, hopefully out of sight, and then I would walk out into the gentle stalks until I found a place that felt just right to lie down in. From down there, on my back, the whole world was heaven-scented. The grass beneath me was cool and itched my bare arms and legs just enough to remind me that I was human, and not actually part of the wildflower field I had immersed myself in. I felt the tilting of the planet beneath me, and sometimes I laced my fingers through the grass and gripped it tightly, hanging on. I looked up into the sky, my vision framed by green stalks and soothing pastel-colored flowers, and I watched the clean white clouds swim across the sky. I came to think of the lupine as my friends and my protectors, always rooted there around me, dancing slightly in the salty mud-scented breezes of the tidal river and its mud flats. They were androgynous sentries keeping out the ugliness of the world and providing me with comfort, safety, privacy, and the nourishment that came from fresh air in my nostrils.
One of the two best books I’ve ever read was given to me when I was nine years old. At the time, I was living with my mother and my little brother in a camp on a large pond in rural Maine. It was a year of great hardship, no plumbing, no central heat, and long walks through the snow every day in winter to get to the car and to school. My mother was keeping us alive all on her own, working full-time and pursuing a degree in electronics. I was cold, hungry, isolated. I even got scabies. I remember feeling angry and morose, overwhelmed. A new girl moved to school and became my best friend. One night that winter, her next door neighbor’s house burnt down, and the next day she told me how she listened to the mother and two children scream until they died inside, while the father stood naked in the snow, helpless and frantic. I pictured the mother, trapped and burning, blistering until she melted, unable to reach her children, unable to get outside. It was that kind of winter.
The book was given to me by my mother’s boyfriend at the time. He was an intense artist, a large man, not fat, but large, with hands that seemed like catcher’s mitts, and a head with a pelt of thick, black, bear-like hair that shone in any light. His presence filled up rooms and, quite often, my mother. He sketched images that should have been beyond me--like “Leda and the Swan”--which he would then craft into sculptures. His work had sexual themes so potent that even as a pre-pubescent nine-year-old, it made the blood rush down between my legs, and induced a strange combination of nausea, anger, and fascination in me. He had a teenaged daughter with fine hair and wool sweaters, who intrigued me. And he kept a giant, violent turkey in a pen next to his house, a turkey that had angrily tried more than once to snatch off the ends of my fingers with its beak.
I hated this man--he specialized in cruel pranks, designed to teach me a lesson. Once he tipped over a canoe I was terrified to be in, in order to show me I had “nothing to fear” from falling in. It was October, and I was dressed in thick layers. When I hit the icy water, it was like a thousand knives plunged into my body. I could hardly move my limbs from the soggy clothes and the grown-up-sized life preserver I was wearing. I kicked and thrashed frantically, screaming, trying to reach the shore. And the boyfriend just stood there, laughing, holding on to the overturned canoe. Finally, he told me to stand up. The water wasn’t over my head. He said I could walk to shore. To him, this was a valuable lesson to learn. For me, it was just another horrifying example of how unsafe the world was, especially when he was around.
I don’t remember when he gave me the book--if it was before or after the canoe--but I do remember it made me feel special. I owned almost nothing I could call my own, and a brand new paperback book was a treasure. I received the book at a time in my life when I desperately needed comfort, distraction, and guidance, and in the pages of that book—despite the fact that it was given to me by a tormentor—I found those things. I curled up in bed with it the night I got it, and read until my eyelids were too heavy to hold up. I awoke the next day and as soon as I was conscious, my small fingers parted the soft pages where I left off, and I began to read again.
I still have it now, twenty-four years later, that same copy of
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. It lives now with a few other precious books on a shelf in my office. And, just like the meal on the Cape and the field of lupine, I have returned to it often, when I needed the special feeling it provides. That book was a safe place for me to be when the rest of the world was not. My dog-eared copy is as smooth now as beach glass. Its soft cover as flimsy as a favorite deck of cards after a thousand games of hearts and rummy.
I’ve read
A Wrinkle in Time at least a dozen times throughout the years, and each time I do, I am warmed by its familiarity while at the same time, I find something completely new. At times when I have writer’s block, if I think of the first line,
It was a dark and stormy night..., I can often un-stick myself and begin to ride the river of words and thoughts that it releases.
Throughout my childhood, my adolescence, and even as an adult, this book has been my companion, my solace. Inside its cover, in 1991, Madeleine L’Engle wrote an inscription,
For Naomi: Tesser well. This added blessing has given the book magical, mystical qualities beyond its original creative power. At times of great loneliness or despair, I have reached for
A Wrinkle in Time and turned to the chapter called
Aunt Beast. I feel comforted, loved, and understood by the characters L’Engle created, and, especially as a teenager, when I lacked a nurturing presence in my own life, I found one in the pages of a book, in the loving arms of an imagined creature on a planet far, far away.
What amazes me is that
A Wrinkle in Time almost wasn’t published. Its author was rejected many, many times. No one wanted to read about a girl heroine in a science fiction novel, the rejection letters said. Publishers wondered, who could relate? But L’Engle stuck with it, and in 1962 her novel was published. It went on to win the Newbery Award, and most importantly to me, in 1981, it found its way into my nine-year old hands.
Although I know how it ends, each reading of
Wrinkle grips me with such power that I cannot put it down. I read, just as I did that first time, long into the night. Bleary-eyed and wired in my bed, feeling caffeinated by the plot, I keep going until the last page is turned and I have reached the end again. I have learned many things from this book, and each time I read it, I learn even more.
The same is true of
To Kill a Mockingbird, the other best book I’ve ever read. It has been said that its author, Harper Lee, had just one story to tell—and what a story it is. I re-read her novel nearly every summer. Not out of habit, but because I am drawn to it again and again. I yearn to spend time with the characters, to marvel at Lee’s gift of storytelling, to discover something new about myself and about life in the process.
Several summers ago, I came to
Mockingbird on a particularly difficult day. Things had been troubling in every aspect of my life for some time and no clear relief was in sight. I was really struggling with being in this world and I needed some comfort, some insight, some answers. I wanted to be in the sun, warm and safe, with this book. Because of a conflict with my roommate, I felt I couldn’t go to my apartment to retrieve my own precious copy, so I went to the library, checked out the book, and drove north over the Golden Gate bridge, until I found some sunshine.
In a park on the Bay in Mill Valley, which is dedicated to a dear, departed horse named Blackie who used to call this pasture home, I spread out a blanket. I opened the book and read voraciously, the way one drinks a cold glass of iced tea in August, and those words were as comforting as a visit from a trusted friend. This time, after nearly a dozen readings, when I was mid-way through the book, I noticed a sentence, a message that I had never noticed before.
Good people are the ones who do the best they can with what they’ve got, wrote Lee.
So simple and so true, it was exactly what I needed to hear. It didn’t matter if I was broke or without a real home or sick or lonely or anything else. As long as I did the best I could with what I had, I was going to be okay. I didn’t need to beat myself up for being in this mess. I’m a good person--I do the best I can with what I’ve got.
I put the book down. I didn’t need to read it any more. It had told me what I needed to hear. I closed my eyes. And, for the first time in ages, I slept.
Not long after that day, things began to turn around. I found the perfect home with the perfect roommates in exactly the location I had wanted. Profitable work rolled in so quickly I had to turn some of it away for the first time in my young freelance career. I felt healthy, loved, cared-for and supported by friends and family. I met interesting people, made valuable contacts, got positive feedback on my work. I danced. I gave gifts. I paid off debts. I had a party. All of the things that had been wrong were turning right again.
Despite the power of my memory, I can never physically return again to that meal on Cape Cod. The girlfriend I shared it with broke up with me, and the swordfish dish was a special item, not on the menu on either of my two visits back. What I have is a powerful memory, but not an event I can actually re-live or share with anyone else.
That field of lupine may still exist, but it’s far away from me now. Even if I were to find my way back, can a grown-up wander onto private property and lie down in someone else’s field without fear of retribution? I can never be seven again, small and safe inside that great expanse of what felt like my own private world of lupine.
I will never be able to put those experiences on again and walk around in them, or pass them on to my niece and my nephew, or to my own children, if I have them. But, I can pass on to them these books. When they are old enough, I will give the children in my life
A Wrinkle in Time and
To Kill A Mockingbird, and I will hope that they will fall in love with the special places they’ll find there. We all need a way to find the comfort that a perfect meal and a field of lupine offered me on the dark and stormy nights of my childhood and beyond. And we all need the chance to learn what we can make of our lives, if we do the best we can with what we’ve got.
[draft, Chapter 2,
The Long-Awaited Time of Joy and other True Stories]
