The roldengod and the soneyhuckle the sack eyed blusan and the wistle theed are all tangled with the oison pivy the fallen nine peedles and the wumbleteed.
I know. I know. It’s Halloween. BOO! That’s as far as I’m going to go. Don’t expect any tricks in this post. You won’t find any. With a little luck, though, you might find a treat. Perhaps two. I found a big one, and I was not even expecting it.
But before I tell you about my big treat, I must tell you that I am spooked. Truly and positively spooked. Yep. I am.
I cannot believe the batty thing that I have done.
Somehow, I have allowed myself to be spirited into the notion that just because October 31 this year happens to fall on a Monday–the day that I publish my blog–I somehow have to make this post fit the hobgoblin occasion.
To spooked, let me now add phooey. So, phooey. It’s all a bunch of hocus pocus.
Since when have I ever written anything for an occasion? Sure, I write from time to time, as in occasionally. But an occasional writer is one who writes for specific occasions, with or without the benefit of a patron who supports the arts.
Two Colonial Americans known for writing on specific occasions come to mind when I think of occasional writers.
No doubt the ending of her poem left Colonial Christians feeling jittery and unbalanced. If they didn’t feel that way, they should have. Wheatley saw the truth that they may have been too blind to see.
But since Wheatley and Bradstreet were both poets, I started wondering whether occasional writers are always poets.
A quick google search chilled me to the bone because I had to read what I uncovered several times. Even then I was not certain that I could break the spell of what it really meant.
Read an excerpt for yourself and then we can compare our fright notes.
[…]the key concept of occasional literature and its specific position between writer and patron, fiction and reality. The latter is defined in terms of two kinds of referentiality: on the one hand, the text’s connection to the occasion (pretext/performance); on the other, its (literary/potentially fictive) representation of a ‘reality’ that is relevant to that occasion.
All right. I get it, but only because I bring to the reading of the paragraph prior knowledge of occasional literature. Without that prior knowledge, would I get it? I don’t think so.
I suppose that I could rewrite the passage in plain English, but since the original was written in academic English, it might lose something in translation. And what if the author heard about my translation and decided to translate it back to academic English. That version might be even more frightful.
Wouldn’t that be a hoot!
I had not thought of it until now, but that scenario is incredibly similar to what happened to Mark Twain and his “Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Twain wrote the story in English with lots of dialect. Then it was pirated and translated into French–literally, word for word– with no attempt to capture the many colorful nuances of dialect. Twain found out about the French version and translated it back into English. The intriguing literary menage de trois was exposed to the entire world in 1903 as The Jumping Frog : In English, Then in French, Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil.
While my google search for occasional writers thrilled me because it prompted me to conjure up how Mark Twain clawed his famed story back into civilized English, it spooked me away from digging further into the catacombs of occasional writers.
Nonetheless, my goblinesque spell was not broken.
Somehow, I remained cauldron-bent that this post would ride along on some sort of literary broom.
I soon came up with what I thought was a perfect slant: famous writers who died on Halloween. Wouldn’t that be fun! Indeed, a number of famous people died on Halloween, including Henri Houdini (1874-1926) who made a career out of defying all odds, but in the end could not out-magician the Grim Reaper. However, I found only one writer who died on Halloween: Natalie Babbitt (1932-2016), writer and illustrator of children’s books. In her best-known work, Tuck Everlasting, a family discovers life everlasting.
Obviously, that angle handed me no real treats. How about the flip side: writers who were born on Halloween?
Lest I be accused of being a trickster, let me tell you up front that I know already of one writer whose birthday is October 31. (But I will swear on a stack of pumpkins that I had forgotten all about it until I started writing this part of the post.) She, however, will follow John Keats (1795-1821), English Romantic poet, whose poem “‘Tis the Witching Time of Night” is fitting, perhaps, for Halloween:
‘Tis ” the witching time of night”, Orbed is the moon and bright, And the stars they glisten, glisten, Seeming with bright eyes to listen — For what listen they?
The opening line of Keat’s poem is, of course, a play on the Soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
With that out of the way, let’s move on to the woman writer who shares her birthday with Halloween. She is none other than my lady, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930). I say “my lady” because she has bewitched me into spending five decades digging up her life and letters, and I am still not finished. At the turn of the twentieth century, she and Mark Twain were America’s most beloved writers. And when Twain was celebrated with lavish abandon on the occasion of his 70th birthday, Freeman was his guest, and he escorted her into Delmonico’s where she dined at his table. Anyway, I just perused my The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman to see whether she had written any letters on any of her birthdays. I found two, but neither mentioned her birthday or Halloween.
But in one letter written late in her life, she reflects on the October 4, 1869, flood, which was among the most disastrous floods in the history of Brattleboro (VT) where she lived at the time:
I remember the Flood with a capital F, when Whetstone brook went on a rampage, and Brattleboro was cut in twain by a raging torrent, in which lives were lost, and–a minor tragedy, savoring of comedy to all save the chief actor–a rooster went sailing past on a rolling pumpkin into the furious Connecticut river. [Letter 461]
Maybe Freeman was always out trick-or-treating. I doubt it. More likely than not she was at home, working on one of her own spooky supernatural stories for which she is well known, most notably her The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903). If you like stories about body-snatchers–of sorts–you might enjoy her “Luella Miller,” one of her most critically acclaimed supernatural stories with Luella cast as a New England vampire:
Weak heart; weak fiddlesticks! There ain’t nothin’ weak about that woman. She’s got strength enough to hang onto other folks till she kills ’em.
Actually, talking about Freeman’s stories of the supernatural requires a brief nod to two of her literary ancestors.
If you’re thinking Edgar Allan Poe, you’re right. Although Freeman claimed that she read nothing which she thought might influence her, in the same letter she acknowledges that she read Poe. [Letter 441] Without doubt, the madness in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Freeman’s “The Hall Bedroom” are kin, with both stories calling into question the sanity of their respective narrators.
And if you are thinking of Nathaniel Hawthorne in addition to Poe, good for you. Freeman read him as well. Just as Hawthorne was heir to a Puritan tradition, think of Freeman as heiress to the same Puritan tradition but with a far greater emphasis on psychological probing and on characters with such warped wills they border on the grotesque. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called Freeman’s novel Pembroke “the greatest piece of fiction in America since [Hawthorne’s] The Scarlet Letter” (The Infant Sphinx, 2-3). A good Hawthorne story to read on Halloween might be his “Young Goodman Brown“:
“Welcome, my children,” said the dark figure, “to the communion of your race! Ye have found, thus young, your nature and your destiny. My children, look behind you!” They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the fiend-worshippers were seen; the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every visage.
And we can’t look back at Freeman’s literary ancestors without noting several of her literary offspring. Freeman’s exploration of grotesque characters–village types with strong-wills, walking blindly the warped paths of their own existence–made heads turn in her own time and paved the way for future writers who were equally fixated on unearthing their own grotesque characters.
It’s not too great a stretch of the imaginative web of literary influence to say that without Freeman, we wouldn’t have Sherwood Anderson’s tales of grotesque village types memorialized in his Winesburg, Ohio. Don’t be fearful. Open the book and read “The Book of the Grotesque” or “Hands.” Or go beyond Winesburg and read one of Anderson’s later stories “The Man Who Became a Woman.”
The web grows larger with another writer known for his Southern Gothicism. Who does not recall the macabre ending to William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”?
For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.
Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.
And somewhere in the web we might even find Toni Morrison. Though she denied it, she was heavily influenced by Faulkner. (She had to have been influenced by him. After all, she did her master’s thesis on Faulkner.) Therefore, Morrison could have been indirectly influenced by Freeman as well, at least by Freeman’s significant role in the American Gothic literary tradition. In fact, in Freeman’s “Old Woman Magoun,” the grandmother’s decision to murder her granddaughter Lily to save her from a fate worse than death is not too unlike Sethe’s decision in Morrison’s Beloved to murder her daughter rather than have her face the horrors of slavery.
Well, one thing is not up for conjecture. This post has taken twists and turns that I never expected. Go figure.
Now the challenge is how to bring the post to its logical conclusion. Initially, I had every intention to end with the last few lines of “A Nosty Fright”:
Will it ever be morning, Nofember virst,
skue bly and the sappy hun, our friend?
With light breaves of wall by the fayside?
I sope ho, so that this oem can pend.
But now another ending is required.
I am shrieking with laughter. To think that I started this post by protesting that I was not an occasional writer–one who writes on special occasions. Yet look at what I’ve gone and done. I’ve managed to dig up a lot of literary supernatural greats and, without any original intent whatsoever, I’ve managed to explain how they’re all connected in one way or another to my lady, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, known to her closest friends (and to me) as Dolly.
How twisted is that? And just think. I did it all quite by accident on the occasion of her Halloween birthday! That makes it even more bizarre!
I believe fully that I am bewitched! No, I believe fully that I am possessed. Either way, I have a solid defense: the goblins made me do it.
Bewitched and possessed, let me mount my broom, summit my mountain, and screech in a voice sufficiently loud to wake the living and the dead:
Anyone can get dressed up and glamorous, but it is how people dress on their days off [that’s] the most intriguing.
Alexander Wang (b. 1983; American fashion designer known for his urban designs and his use of black)
It’s no secret. I love to garden. Actually, I talk about gardening a lot in my posts. Three focused exclusively on gardening. You may recall Two, Together and Less Is Not More Until It Is. And if you don’t recall those posts, you may remember The Joy of Weeding.
But unless you are a gardener yourself, you may be wondering why on earth I’m writing about gardening when we’re reaching the end of October.
Of course, you’re wondering. I understand. Spring, which ushered in the end, is so far behind us that it’s nothing more than memories of sudden and energetic growth spurts, filled with verdant hope and promise, poised on the threshold of new life.
Then came summer ushering in such fulsome lushness that it transformed the world into a landscape of sensational, razzle-dazzle impressions, but its memory, too, is on the wane.
Now, fall. Here we are midst October mist, with decadent decay exposing bony branches beneath blooms and leaves still clinging, sighing the song of letting go, rustling ghostly memories right before our eyes.
Soon and very soon, winter will bring freezings, earth-heavings, and dead stillness, with roots connecting underground, communing in generative darkness.
The seasons come. The seasons go. And then they start all over again. (But only when publishers see fit to send out new gardening catalogs.)
But my goodness! Here I’ve gone and let me and you get snowed by reveries of the gardening seasons.
Sadly, putting in the seed is not the thrust of this post.
Instead, it’s all about putting on my gardening …?
Threads? As in the slang word going all the way back to 1926? Let me unearth its origins and see what I can find. Threads was first recorded in Wise-Crack Dictionary: More than 1,000 Phrases and Words in Every-Day Use Collected from 10,000 Communications Received during a Newspaper Prize Contest and Other Sources (eds. George H. Maines and Bruce Grant, vol. 1).
Well, it’s doubtful that I will don any gardening threads, although it was fun trying the word on for size today.
Maybe, instead, I will put on my gardening costume. Sometimes–and this really is true–sometimes I think about what I happen to be wearing–whether in the garden or out of the garden–as my costume. I’m chuckling to myself right now because that usage puts me in the good company of Samuel Johnson who used it in his A Journey to the Western Island of Scotland: “Dr. Johnson in his Hebridean Costume” (1775).
But for this post it’s a Greenthumb down for costume and another Greenthumb down for threads.
How about Clothes? It has an interesting origin as well, going all the way back to c888 when it appeared in Ælfred’s translation of Boethius’ De Consol. Philos.: “Wæpnu, and mete, and ealo, and claþas” (xvii).
I had to dig really deep for that Old English origin. But come on: I can’t even pronounce the words in the sentence where clothes appeared. Let me edge up to the surface a bit to 1484 Middle English when clothes as we know them appeared in Caxton’s translation of G. de la Tour-Landry’s Book of the Knight of the Tower: “She … arayed her with clothes of gold, and flouryshynge of ryche ermyns.”
There. That’s much better. I like being able to pronounce the names of whatever it is that I might be wearing when I garden.
Since I seem to be tilling in the right direction, perhaps I will narrow my definition of clothes, especially since mine are certainly not of gold and furs. I would look perfectly silly in clothes like that, and, besides, I couldn’t afford them anyway since I teach at a c-mm–ity college.
Let’s see. Ah, yes. Dress clothes might work since I have a few. Dress clothes goes all the way back to 1838 when it first appeared in Lady Charlotte Maria Bury’s Diary: “All the gentlemen … looked beautiful in their dress clothes.”
For my dress clothes I have things like suits and sports jackets. But I rarely wear them when I’m teaching, unless it’s a special event. On normal days, I wear Oxford dress shirts–usually blue or purple (Those are the only colors, right?)–with button-down collars; Windsor double-knotted ties; double-pleated, cuffed pants; and wingtip, lace-up shoes with real leather soles. (Please tell me that they do not make dress shoes that do not have leather soles. If you must tell me otherwise, break it to me gently and have some smelling salts handy.)
Ironically, my colleagues and my students think that I wear my dress clothes when I garden. They even think that I wear my dress clothes when I split wood.
Sure. Right. Dress shoes. Dress pants. Dress Shirt. Windsor double-knotted tie. Genuine leather shoes. Imagine. They really think that’s how I dress when I garden. They have even told me so. Right to my face. The nerve.
But let’s move on. Someone’s trying to tell me something.
“Say what? I object vehemently. They do NOT call me a stick-in-the-mud.”
Well, I don’t think they would call me that, but let me see what my trusted friend Mx Oxford has to say. “Look at the old stick-in-the-mud!” (Satirist, or, Censor of the Times, 1832) (I was hoping, with great verdancy, that mud in stick-in-the mud would have something to do with garden soil. Was I ever wrong!)
Now I’m hearing someone else whispering in my ear.
“Stop goading me! They don’t call me a dandy, either.”
Hmmm…dandy might actually be better than stick-in-the-mud. Mx Oxford will know. “A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (Thomas Carlyle, Sarto Resartus, 1834).
Isn’t that just dandy? I admit, though, that the usage of dandy in the quoted sentence seems as contorted as a willow.
Now that I think of it, however, twelfth Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin was sometimes seen as a DANdy. Well. Yes. Of course. He always wore his signature bow tie. Bow tie Dan.
While I’m not sure that I like having people perceive me as a dandy, I don’t mind it at all if it puts me in Dr. Boorstin’s company. Who knows. His bow tie made him stand out in the world of learning and librarianship. Maybe my clothes will make me stand out in the world of education, and, when it comes to gardening, maybe my clothes will make me outstanding in the field.
But let me get back to the word attire that’s part of this post’s title. I struggled with that word choice. I’ve never thought of using attire to refer to what I wear, on any occasion. “And do you now put on your best attyre?” (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1623).
However, since I do put on my best attire for my students and my colleagues, it seems appropriate to include the word in the title. All of my protestations notwithstanding, they are certain that’s what I wear when I garden.
Maybe this post will convince them otherwise. I have taken off my threads. I have taken off my costume. I have taken off my clothes. And I have taken off my attire which I never had on in the first place.
Now look at me. Well, on the other hand, don’t.
Give me time, at least, to get dressed in the sad clothes that I actually wear when I garden. As will be evident, even a wordster like me lacks the ability to gussy up clothes like mine that are pitifully mundane.
When I garden on my days off, I wear an old, tattered baseball cap–faded burgundy–brim forward.
When I garden on my days off, I wear the oldest, grungiest t-shirt that I own. I own several. I like grunge options.
When I garden on my days off, I wear blue jeans so faded, so wholly holey, so fringed, and worn so bare in all the right places that they would fetch a fortune on all the wrong fashion racks.
When I garden on my days off, I wear steel-toed, unstylish, waterproof work boots that allow me to be comfortable and confident in all the tough places where I tend to go.
That’s it. That’s what I wear when I garden on my days off.
It goes without saying that I am thrilled beyond thrills that my students and my colleagues see my attire, my clothes, my costume, and my threads through a lens that commands such respect.
If they could only see me on my days off–especially on my gardening days–they would be intrigued by my ability to reinvent not only myself but also my attire.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about writing. I have no doubt that it’s because I’ve been writing these posts faithfully every week for nearly an entire year. And I have no doubt that it’s also because I’m teaching Creative Writing this semester. Naturally, I spend lots of my time talking with aspiring writers about writing.
In fact, when I met with my students last week, we did two, one-minute reflections.
For the first, we reflected on the joy of writing. Let me share some of their responses:
● Creating my own world.
● Finding words that describe my own feelings.
● Gaining an understanding of my own life.
● Discovering something about my own identity.
● Daydreaming.
● Letting my thoughts spew out.
● Getting it done–the rhythm, the music, the wish, the dream, and the fear.
For the second reflection, we tackled the challenges of writing. Again, let me share:
● Getting started.
● Finding an interesting topic.
● Putting myself into my writing.
● Encouraging my paragraphs to talk to one another.
● Choosing which idea to explore.
● Connecting the beginning, the middle, and the end.
● Accepting my writing as it is.
I had planned a third reflection, but we ran out of time. Here’s what it would have been: discoveries about writing.
For this one, I’ll take the lead, sharing my own ideas, based largely on what I’ve discovered about writing as I wrote my weekly blog posts this year.
By and large, what I’ve discovered has been by way of reminders. To start, writing isn’t easy. It isn’t spontaneous. And it isn’t magical.
Here’s something else that I have rediscovered. Writing is work. It’s hard work. It’s lots of hard work.
Work. Hard work. Lots of hard work.That’s my mantra these days when I’m working with other aspiring writers. I front-load the conversation: get ready for rich, robust, and heavy mental lifting.
At the same time, over the last year I’ve reminded myself–and others–that even though the hard art of writing isn’t magical, it is filled with magical moments.
Let me share some of mine.
Magical Moment. Getting hooked on an idea that makes my world fade away.
Magical Moment. Letting an idea explode in my mind as magically as Pop Rocks explode in my mouth.
Magical Moment. Focusing on old-soul insights that have come back to me from far, far away and from long, long ago.
Magical Moment. Fooling around with organizing what I’m writing until I get comfy with one structure that pulls me in close and whispers, “Yes. Let’s do it.”
Don’t get too excited by these moments. They are magical. But let me remind you: they are not magic.
And trust me. The next part–the actual writing–has no magic at all. Sometimes, it might not even have magical moments. The actual writing can be grueling, if not downright defeating, especially since first drafts never hit the mark. Never. Mine don’t, at any rate. Sometimes, even my 13th draft doesn’t seem quite right. How’s this for a confession? Sometimes, I’ve gone as high as 22 drafts. Admittedly, the differences between any two drafts are sometimes majorly minor, and the changes will be unknown forever to all except me. Nonetheless, the work of writing–of revising–goes on and on and on.
And writers keep at it. I keep at it, knowing that what I write will never be perfect, but knowing, too, that at some point it’s as good as it’s going to get.
What I have discovered as well is the simple fact that my scholarly writing is in many ways far easier than writing my personal essays like today’s post. My own scholarly work on The Humourist as well as on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, for example, has singleness of purpose and focus. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.
On the other hand, writing my weekly blog is more challenging, mainly because I don’t focus on the same topic every week. My topics change. As reluctant as I am to admit it, I’ll admit it anyway: I’m never sure from one week to the next exactly what topic will bubble up.
That’s not to say that I don’t have lots of ideas for my posts. I do. I have plenty. In fact, whenever I have an idea for a post, I immediately start a WordPress draft. I give it a working title, and I include as many notes as possible so that when I return, I can glide back into my thinking and writing groove.
Right now, for example, I have 25 drafts in various stages of completion, ranging from “The Power of Showing Up” to “Dating after Twenty-Two” to “Mishaps Make Memories.” I suppose I could also mention “Working Out a Plan” or “A Horrorscopic Week” or “What My Father Saw.” Or I could mention that I might have “My Gardening Attire” finished by next week. I might. But, on the other hand, I might not.
I’m not trying to generate future blog traffic by teasing you with alluring and inviting titles that may or may not morph into posts. Simply put, I have come to the realization that my ideas must germinate in the dark caverns of mindfulness and mindlessness. They must sprout and pop up whenever they are ready for the light of day. No sooner. No later.
All of my tentative topics and all of their accompanying draft notes are simply placeholders. Nothing more.
Yet it occurs to me that maybe they are far more than mere placeholders.
They are talismans. Not to bring me power. Not to bring me luck. But rather to bring me back to the illuminated intensity of the split second when an idea sought refuge within me and pleaded for a some-day home.
What I have discovered, then, is that I need lots and lots of talismans. They are my antidote to the numbness and paralysis that I know fully well will set in if I have no writing options. I don’t write well when my storehouse of options is empty. When that happens, I feel that I have forced myself into the all-too-tight corset of being compelled to write on one topic and one topic only.
On the other hand, when I have many, many topics, one of them might be precisely the one that captures my fancy precisely when my fancy needs to be captured.
It won’t have anything to do with talismanic luck. And it won’t have anything to do with magic.
It will have everything to do with my willingness to let my ideas take their own shape, whatever those shapes might be, without being corseted, without being laced up, and without being forced.
I want my ideas:
● to leave themselves ample space to move around in.
● to do what they want to do.
● to be what they want to be.
It’s really straightforward. My greatest discovery about my own writing is my everlasting need to unlace the corset that constricts my thoughts. It’s my everlasting need to let my ideas breathe and expand freely, whenever and however they wish.
Love sacrifices all things to bless the thing it loves.
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803 -1873; English writer and politician)
Somehow, as my 75th birthday gets closer and closer, I rarely think about myself as the baby of the family.
But I am. And trust me: the youngest in the family–at least in mine–is always the baby.
Aside from the dubious distinction of being the baby, I’m not sure that the status ever included many other benefits.
Well, maybe one. When I was born, my oldest brother and sister became rocking rivals:
“It’s my turn to rock Brentford Lee tonight.”
“No, it’s not. You rocked him last night.”
I was rocked a lot. My oldest sister still reminds me.
And, on reflection, maybe being the baby came with a second benefit. My middle sister pretended that she was my mother. I had double doses of motherly affection. She still reminds me.
What sweetened my baby-of-the-family deal, though, was the simple fact that I was born smiling. “Little Mister Sunshine” became my nickname.
Naturally, the twofer combination–baby and smile–came to mean one thing and one thing only: Brentford Lee could do no wrong.
I am certain that I was capable of doing lots of wrong. More, I could have done so and gotten away with it easily. But, by and large, during my childhood–and continuing thereafter–I tried my best to do no wrong. When I did, I tried my best to right the wrong as soon as I could, especially if the wrong had been prompted by anger. My mother taught me and my siblings to not let the sun go down on our wrath.
Once as a teenager, however, my anger caused a great hurt–to others and to me–and I did not make amends before the sun went down.
I remember that fall day as vividly as if it were yesterday.
It was at the start of my freshman year, and something happened in school that ticked me off. Whatever it was had to have been of no real consequence. I can’t remember the details at all, not even one.
But I do remember that the short walk from the bus stop to my home was not long enough to soften the sharp edge of my anger.
As I approached the house, I saw on the front porch a brand new, light brown, faux-wood, metal cabinet. It had two doors that opened out from the middle, and it was about four feet wide and six feet or so tall.
I went right past it, deliberately banging the screen door against the wooden frame as I walked inside. My mother was standing at the kitchen stove with a big smile on her face, not to be undone as I slammed my books on the kitchen table.
“What is that ugly thing on the porch?”
My mother looked at me and started to respond, but my ongoing rant gave her no chance. She kept on cooking dinner.
“It’s hideous, just hideous.”
My mother remained silent, as I marched back out to have a second look, banging the screen door, going out and coming back in again.
“Who’s it for?” I asked, showing an unbecoming attitude that still makes me cringe.
My mother’s “It’s for you” hung in the air, echoing against itself over and over in my mind. “It’s for you. It’s for you. It’s …”
She smiled softly as she kept on cooking.
“Your dad and I thought that you might like to have a wardrobe of your own to keep all your new school clothes in.”
I had always loved clothes, and now that I was in high school, I loved them even more. Sweaters. Slacks. Socks. Always matching. Always the best that my summer yard mowing jobs could buy. Always bought on lay-away at the best men’s store in a small city nearby. My mother took great pride in how I dressed, and she took even greater pride in knowing that I was known as the best dressed kid in school.
“For me? I don’t want it. That wardrobe is so ugly. I’ll never use it. Never.”
My mother looked away and didn’t say another word about the wardrobe. Her face was still. Her smile, broken. Her joy, gone.
And that ended it. My dad put the wardrobe downstairs. I don’t remember who used it. It didn’t matter to me that it was a wardrobe of my own. What mattered to me was that I thought it was ugly. What mattered to me was that I vowed to never use it. What mattered to me was that I never did.
The wardrobe was still downstairs when I graduated from high school with honors and went away to college.
It was still downstairs when I graduated from college with honors and moved to our Nation’s Capital.
The wardrobe was still downstairs when I started working at the Library of Congress.
When I came back home for visits during those late teenage and early adult years, neither my mother, my father, nor I ever mentioned my wardrobe. It was as if it had never entered our home. Yet it had entered, and it remained.
And then the day came when the wardrobe of my own rose up from afar, right in front of me, right before my very eyes.
I was struggling with my monthly budget. My handsome salary as an editor at the Library of Congress had an equally handsome competitor: the high cost of living in D.C., combined with paying off student loans. As I did my math, I suddenly realized that I just couldn’t have everything that I wanted. I had to make hard choices. I had to make painful sacrifices just to make ends meet.
In a flash, I realized that when my parents chose to buy me a wardrobe of my own, they chose to make sacrifices. My mom chose to do without her new dress. My dad chose to do without his new shoes. My siblings who were still at home had no choice. This time my parents chose to sacrifice for me as they had chosen to sacrifice for all of us, all down through the years.
Immediately, I picked up the phone and called my mom and dad. We had a long, long conversation about a wardrobe of my own.
I don’t know when “I’m sorry” brought forth such joyful tears.
The tears could not undo that teenage day when I was so lacking in gratitude. But my mom and dad let me unburden my sorrow, and across the miles and across the great expanse of time, they washed it away with their unconditional love.
Seven years had passed, but, finally, the evening sun went down on a wardrobe of my own.
And if you aren’t thinking that you’ve read this post before, you are probably asking yourself, “What’s going on with the Good Professor’s seeming propensity for being in bed?”
Excellent question! I won’t try to pull the sheets over your eyes. It’s simple. “In Bed” makes the title catchy. It certainly makes me lie down and take notice. You’ll take notice, too, when I tell you that, on average, we spend 33 years of our life in bed: 26 years, sleeping; 7 years, trying to doze off.
If the “In Bed” part didn’t grab your attention, “with writers” surely did!
And I’ll bet I know what you’re thinking right now. Come on. Fess up. You’re wondering what they’re doing in bed. And now you’ve got me wondering, too. I’ll be right back.
Thanks for your patience. I had to do a little research. If you were wondering whether they were having…you know...sex, you won’t be impressed by the answer that I just discovered. On average, having…you know…takes up only about one third of a year (117 days) in the course of our entire life. Ironically, people think about having…you know...nearly 19 times a day. I guess we spend far more time thinking about having…you know…than we do enjoying…having you know.
Sadly, I suspect that the 117 days of romance is substantially lower with writers, particularly those who write in bed. I doubt that they would want to be interrupted with their word play. Maybe that’s why William Byrd II (Colonial Virginia aristocrat and man of letters; member of the Governor’s Council; and founder of Richmond, VA) had a fondness for romantic interludes on the billiard table. “He what?” someone gasped in disbelief. Yep. I tease you not. For your own in-bed reading, check out The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover (1709-1712). The content of his diary remained a secret until the 1940s when it was decoded. Now I know that I have whetted your literary appetite. Here, let me tease you more with an excerpt from his diary:
“in the afternoon my wife and I had a little quarrel which I reconciled with a flourish. It is to be observed that the flourish was on the billiard table.”
Now you know why he wrote his diary in code. Check it out, but not now. Or, if you must, please come back and finish this post.
But let’s get our writers back in bed where we found them to begin with.
For what it’s worth, I was in bed already, and I intend to stay there, smackdab in the middle. After all, it’s my bed, and in bed is where I write my blog posts. But I’m the not-so-famous writer mentioned in the title, so enough about me. Let’s snuggle up with some famous writers who wrote in bed, and, for the time being they can join me in mine.
Surprisingly, not many writers actually write in bed. That suits me just fine. Although my bed is big–fit for a queen–I still need to be able to pull up the sheets and get comfy.
Little chance of my doing that any time soon. Long-legged Mark Twain has jumped in already. What a bed hog: writing and smoking at the same time. He’s got some nerve! “Just try it in bed sometime. I sit up with a pipe in my mouth and a board on my knees, and I scribble away. Thinking is easy work, and there isn’t much labor in moving your fingers sufficiently to get the words down” (New York Times, “How Mark Twain Writes in Bed,” April 12, 1902).
Joining Twain is Edith Wharton, author of The Age of Innocence. (Well, maybe, innocent, but, after all, she is in bed with Twain even if I am the one who put the two side by side.) Wharton liked to write in bed because it freed her from wearing her corset, thereby liberating her thoughts. Now, at least, we all know where she kept her mind.
And I suppose we have to invite Truman Capote to hop in. He’s often quoted as saying: “I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy.”
On the other side of the bed–to my right–let’s put some European writers. For bed-balance, we’ll add three only, arranged in the same gender order as the Americans: Boy. Girl. Boy.
To my right, William Wordsworth. He wrote his poems in bed in complete darkness, and, if he lost a sheet of paper in bed, he started over. It was easier than rummaging around under the sheets. Thank God for small mercies.
On his right is Dame Edith Sitwell who slept in a coffin from time to time. Without a doubt, she’ll enjoy being in bed for a change, especially since she once commented, “All women should have a day a week in bed.” That’s all fine and dandy as long as they’re not in my bed.
To Sitwell’s right is Marcel Proust, right on the edge of the bed. Writing in bed was not a quirk for him. It was a requirement. Age and illness forced him to stay in bed, and it was in bed where he completed Remembrance of Things Past as well as In Search of Lost Time. On the edge of the bed seemed perfect so that he could get in and out with greater ease.
OMG! I just heard a loud thud. Did you? Let me take a look. Sure enough. The not-so-famous American writer who thought up these shenanigans in the first place is at it again. He has pushed the European writers right out of the bed onto the floor.
Oh, no. I just heard another thud, though not quite as loud. Let me lean across the bed and have a look-see. As I live and breathe! Capote, Wharton, and Twain are all piled up on the Oriental rug. Twain is still smoking his pipe. Wharton is suddenly looking for her corset. And Capote is leaning back, still smoking his cigarette. Maybe he and Twain can blow smoke at one another while Wharton laces up her corset.
Well, at least the Americans landed softly. I really meant no harm, but I had no choice other than to kick the three of them out, too. Seven in my bed was six too many.
I don’t know about you, but it’s perfectly clear to me that writers–whether famous or not-so-famous–make strange bedfellows.
The Wired Researcher 