Writing

Amy Tan inspires me.

Michelle McNamara inspires me.

I can no longer write with a pen. My hand is unsteady. This makes the writing illegible at times. I used to enjoy feeling the pen glide along the paper…. But no more. Sometimes writing and signing checks is difficult.

But I struggle with what to make public. What to not write except in my mind. But I forget. When I write, I can relive as I reread the past. It comes back to life. But somethings are best left unwritten, I think.  Like, should I do an essay on “Me and My Men” and describe the romantic encounters of my life? I don’t think so…. And then other times, I think…… why not?  Should I write a treatise on “My Friends and Acquaintances”, and record the details of what others feed me, in terms of social interaction that I seek or experience?

I don’t think one person can provide a soul with all the human contact that it needs. We get little pieces for each relationship. Slivers from chance encounters. Sometimes chance encounters offer opportunity to resume a multi-life entanglement.

Like my 19-year-old self, at West Chester State College, a sophomore transfer and commuter student… with two hours to kill between classes…. Wandering in to the “commuter cafeteria” for coffee and a smoke.  Round tables, each seating 8 to 10, fill the large room…. Probably about 30 or 40 of them.  I find a table with Viet Nam vets, and Barbara and I take a seat.  Why? I don’t recall. Maybe she or I know one or more of the guys from a class in common? Actually, I think John and Skip were in my World Geography class….. maybe that was the link.  But I didn’t write it down at the time, so I really don’t recall what prompted the meeting.  Barbara was a 30-something year old, plum and matronly “alternative student” …. Was that what they called older women returning to college after having a family? But I didn’t write it down at the time, so I don’t recall the phrase used to pigeonhole Barbara and her kind.  She had a husband and two almost middle school aged sons. She was a primary school education major. That’s where I got to know something about John Lewis. He told me about this first encounter….. he told me years later that he looked at me, listened to me, and said to himself, “This one is different.”  His lives and mine are deeply entangled.

I recently watched “I’ll be gone in the dark”, a documentary about the Golden State Killer, based on Michelle McNamara’s blogs and ramblings.  When she died in 2016 from an accidental overdose, taken in attempt to tame her demons and relieve her insomnia, her friends dissected her electronic and paper notes that were her writings.  What the found is very similar to my stash of musings.  Outlines for unwritten books. Individual chapters, separate stories and disjointed streams of consciousness.  Yes, I think I have the basis for many books already written.  It just requires discipline and focus to pull them together.