New Ways, Old Ways
A kind, well-meaning person asked me the other day if I was writing anything new.
Am I ever.
My desktop computer died last month. A vestige of the Stone Age (2013), it had grown ever slower until I found myself reading the news on my phone as I waited for Word to save. The fix prescribed by the computer shop (new external drive), failed. So I ordered a new desktop, which, in the post-Covid backlog, will arrive next month.
I now find myself in a struggle against ergonomics. I usually write in the morning at my desk with a dropped keyboard and a footrest (a copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette 75th Anniversary Edition.)
My laptop doesn’t cripple me if I use it standing at the kitchen counter, but I can’t seem to compose when I’m standing. Is there some creative alchemy to a relaxed posture, or am I just lazy? I don’t know. I only know that I’m now writing in a whole new way: with a pen and paper.
It’s been excruciating, to say the least.
The first couple of days I could barely stand the glacial pace I had to maintain to write legibly. It was like being behind myself in a traffic jam. But as I transcribed the first drafts to the laptop later while standing (apparently my brain doesn’t consider that writing), I found myself revising, which is something I wouldn’t normally do until well into my second draft.
It will be months before this thing I’m working on will declare itself as living or dead. Meantime, I’m reminded that this is how I used to write: Drafting college papers by hand before queueing up to type them up at the computer lab. Scrawling airmail letters to my childhood friend who got a job teaching English in Japan. Scribbling faxes in Spanglish to my Peruvian fisherman boyfriend in the South Pacific (Luis, you were a nice guy but a lousy pen pal).
More old ways abound.
This week, I was invited to speak to a book club, which involved eating dinner inside someone else’s home and meeting new people while seeing the lower half of their faces. What a pleasure that was. On my way home from that lovely dinner, I saw things I’ve missed this year: Gangs of kids riding bikes with no adults in sight. Two neighbors chatting on the sidewalk. The local restaurant workers softball league cheering in the dusk as someone made it home.
These simple, normal engagements feel painfully precious now and not just because they disappeared suddenly and returned slowly. There’s also the new, growingly dire backdrop in which they take place.
Last week the Pacific Northwest saw record high temperatures—up to 118 down the road from me. This in a region that used to joke about our rainy June-uarys. Our governor declared a state of emergency as 10,000 acres kicked off our wildfire season. Oregon dropped its mask mandate, but instead of causing celebration, it lingers as an issue that divides people.
I’ve been prone to nostalgia since I was old enough to form memories.
However, I’m not so deluded as to think things we’ll return the way things used to be (whatever that means). I was thinking about this as I read Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline, in which she writes, “But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.”
I’m grateful for book clubs, kids on bikes, softball games, and some neighborhood normalcy. I’m grateful for the partly cloudy sky this morning, for the hilarity of my chickens, and the diligence of the bees. And as always, I’m grateful for writing, which makes me slow down. It’s a reminder, a remembrance, a meditation. This day happened, with all its beautiful imperfections. I was here, I saw it, and I tried to do my part. In old ways, in new ways and ways yet to come.