At sleepovers, I deconstructed entire linen closets. I would sneak into the hallway, a child prowler working by nightlight, and seek out the towels, fabric-softener-fresh mounds of richly hued terrycloth, thick and plentiful. At home our towels were hodgepodge and pale, thin and stained. Inexpertly folded. We put them in haphazard stacks, shoved them in the bathroom cabinet or never even bothered to put them away, passed the spinach souffle over them at the dinner table. I observed the technique of those in the folding-know, took the stacks apart, unfolded and folded until it became second nature. The trick was to fold the towels evenly in thirds lengthwise, then fold the result in half and in half again. It was the kind of skill one learned at a mother’s side, like ironing or playing poker or throwing chaotic birthday parties.

Because folding is the metaphor, see? For domestic knowledge and stability. For normalcy. When you don't feel normal and want to fit in, you observe and try to copy. Everything is a clue to the right way to behave. Nobody needs to know that you are an impostor.

Last night my small book group met to discuss Michael Ondaatje's novel Divisadero. It's a flawed book, or at the very least a book that requires both careful reading and a lack of attachment to resolution. I was the only one who really enjoyed it. Yes, the characters are damaged and abandoned, solitary types with hidden motivations. But they are my people, sketched out in Ondaatje's poetic language. I can't be the only one who knows how to fill in the blanks.

What I can't get from careful observation, from cracking open other peoples' linen closets, I get from books. Stories show me the possibilities in life. Sometimes I know the characters, fellow strangers in a strange land. There is solace in the world of quiet ones, solitary bookish people trapped in the amber of personality and circumstance. Freedom is possible. Maybe it is as simple as self-acceptance and if there is hope for them, there is hope for me. Or maybe there is no hope and I should just get on with it.

“All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refused to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.” -- Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 136.

Without stories, I would be a series of events waiting for an author, searching for a unifying theme. Without memory, the raw material of story, I am nothing. But a strange thing can happen when we start to tell our stories, to mix memory with narrative: the stories can change. We can change. Our past can drop away, defanged.

I am here to gather the pieces and make them into something new, a narrative, a mutable monologue: this is who I am. If I'm lucky what I write will spark something in you.

Maybe it's time for another story.

Image: Me, Wilmington, DE, circa 1976?
More on the villanelle.

Tags: Michael Ondaatje, towel folding, Divisadero (Novel), imposters, fitting in, autodidacticism

I should be sleeping, but I just finished Jeannette Wall's memoir, The Glass Castle and my brain is buzzing. She lays the story of her crazy upbringing out so cleanly, without judgment.

After reading some interviews, it appears as if she truly has no prejudice, despite suffering from neglect at the hands of very mixed-up parents.

I don't think I'll ever be at the place of complete acceptance, a place where I am ok with some of my past, since I feel a little warped by it, but I'm also not a published author. Forgiveness I can see. Acceptance, well, I've already have accepted some things -- without my unique mother I wouldn't be who I am, Kevin gets some credit there, too, and my dad contributed some fine DNA -- but I didn't need to be left to bleed, either. That's where forgiveness fits in. At some point.

So -- more memoirs to read, more research to be done. And I'll keep on working on my story, but out of sight. I don't think it's helping me to put it out here and, to be honest, it makes me anxious about the whole thing. Kind of like serving a partially cooked dinner to a room full of guests (you imaginary ones count, too). It's just not ready yet.

But I'll leave the vestiges up.

Off to bed.

Tags: memoir

Is this a lucky day?

Another long no napper today. My ole nubbin brain keeps on shrinking, with very little to show for it. I did learn that toddlers (at least my toddler) enjoy raking clean cat litter and can turn almost anything into a digger -- even themselves with the proper equipment (dust pan and litter scoop).

I'd like to transcend the day now, please.

I've been reading Beautiful Children , a first novel by Charles Bock. Some of it is very well done. The portrayal of how a marriage can slowly fall apart captures a sense of sadness and inevitability when people no longer communicate, can't bridge the distance they've built between themselves, but still care about each other. What happens to the couple when their only child goes missing is also poignantly written. Many of the characters are real and believable. It's a long and ambitious book with various interweaving story lines. I can feel the struggles he had writing it -- ten years and at least four rewrites -- and it is on the bombastic side, well maybe some lower form of bombasticity, since his language is simple for the most part. Just over the top. Maybe he should have stayed with the couple and their struggle, but I'm not sure that would have been as interesting for Bock or his readers.

Tags: fiction, reading