From the Midwest to the Northwest

So, I’ve decided to take a number of ideas swirling around in my tiny little brain and use them to write something new to me (relatively). I’ve a writer, yes, but I’ve never really embraced fiction fully. I never could set up place and time in a way I found to be authentic or original. Lately, though, I’ve finally admitted what others probably realized long ago: nothing is original, everything is derivative, and why not just have fun incorporating all the disparate elements that make you you into a story? So, against what may in fact be my better judgment, I’m working on a novel.

But, to do so, I’m going to have to get past the phrase working on a novel. It reads as so cloying. So pretentious. So willfully unemployed. I don’t want to turn into one of THOSE PEOPLE. I won’t let it become the lone topic at parties, or the thing people always ask me about because it seems to be never finished (a la Paul Giamatti’s Miles Raymond in Sideways). It just is an undiscovered country to me; I’ve only written short stories closely based on circumstances I’ve lived. Humorous (or -less) character studies about people I grew up around. I tell self-deprecating stories about my own mistakes, not those of invented characters.

So, we’ll see how this goes. My goal is to write 300 words every day specifically on this project. I write 300 words everyday anyway; might as well make them part of a greater whole. This would mean I’d finish in a bit less than a year. If I’m happy with it, I’ll send it around. If not, hey, at least I tried. I guess I just need to check this one off my list of things to do before I die.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well. I’m not one of those people who thinks that. Anything you do is worth doing. Thinking of tasks, and life, this way changes perspective. Breathing. Making breakfast. Tweaking the brakes on your bike. All these small things make up the whole, and all these small things remind you that you live. Of your humanness. That we are creatures.

If you stare at hexagonal floor tiles long enough they start to look like pixels. The day I realized this was the day I began working to willfully distance myself from the technology on which we all depend. There was also the mountain goat. The mountain goat, wary and chewing on grasses, doesn’t have a computer. It just knows the glaciers have retreated and that summers are getting warmer, but it doesn’t really worry about it. It adapts; follows the alpine meadow as it moves further up the mountain. Seeks out colder water and fresher air. The mountain goat doesn’t have an email address. It’s a creature, just like me.

I have to remind myself of that, of that creatureness, when I start to get wrapped up in the human world. Some might call it nihilism. I just think it’s realistic. When all is said and done, popular culture and the contemporary way we’ve structured society is pretty silly. It would be hilarious if we weren’t so brutal; so damaging. It’d be funnier if we were fruit flies instead of big, smart apes bumbling through the forest knocking down trees. But saying that doesn’t give apes enough credit. They, too, just adapt. Move further up the mountain. Find new things to eat. I don’t think they obsess about celebrities. But, then again, it’s not like we listen to them. There could, after all, be a Brangelina ape couple.

Too many people write about the majesty of apes.

When I was 8 years old, my mother and I visited my childhood best friend and her mom and sister. They’d moved to a small city north of us. A small city with a zoo. I remember touching the broad backs of tortoises and riding on an escalator somewhere. But mostly I remember the baboons, agitated, throwing poop at us. I remember screaming and laughing at the same time and running from the poop. Long hairy arms flinging it through the bars. I didn’t blame them. I just wanted to get away from the yellow fluorescent lights, the flying poop and the baboons’ big pink posteriors.

We all have those memories of our own individual histories that favor who we are today. The baboon poop story isn’t usually one of mine. Instead, I remember listening to Sepultura while sitting in a beat-up Oldsmobile parked near a dam at the end of a winding dirt road. To me, this experiences best defines what it was like growing up in a tiny cow town in rural northwestern Wisconsin. Escapism. Nature. Music. It fits the mythos I’ve created for myself as an adult – whether or not it’d seem true to others who remember me then doesn’t matter. What matters is telling this story at parties.

Others probably remember me as a nerd: a girl who liked school, got good grades, had a steady boyfriend. A girl who did what she was supposed to do. I was all those things, but I was also the things I favor in my memory. As well as cripplingly depressed, uncertain and really, really bored. But what teenager isn’t? No matter where you come from, you are all those things. The older I get the more convinced I am of our human similarity. Our creatureness doesn’t set us apart. We all go through that pupa stage.

I wonder sometimes if it’s modernity that lengthens the duration of that stage. I felt like a pupa until I was at least 27. Though I’ve been ostensibly on my own since I was 18 (college financed on my own, own apartment at 19, many jobs to make ends meet), attaining stability was challenging. It didn’t follow a white-picket-fence trajectory (my fence is untreated cedar). Or maybe it’s that some people take longer to believe in adulthood. It wasn’t until I found gray hairs at my temples that I realized it was true; that I was knew I was no longer invincible.

Anecdotes tell part of the story of a person’s life, but not always the most important parts. Grandpa communicated by telling stories, and you knew when something important – something glaring, perhaps, or something inappropriate for ears younger than 18 – was missing because his eyes would twinkle. There was always that twinkle there. Sometimes that twinkle told you more. Sometimes we’d twinkle back and a whole other conversation was going on in the corners of eyes.

He wasn’t that big of a man (and by that I mean in height – we all know how he loved his potatoes), but he had a huge heart. Because of his upbringing in a big family in the neighborhoods of north Minneapolis, he was infinitely accepting, and he passed this ahead-of-his-time open-mindedness on to his children and grandchildren. He never assumed anything and always gave people the benefit of the doubt. He aimed to like everyone equally.

He was deliberately and purposely unpretentious. Once, when I was in junior high, I said, “That’s not my intention,” and he, eyes twinkling, countered with, “And you don’t want to do it, either.” He challenged each of us, whenever we acted like smarty-pants, to think about how we really didn’t know anything at all; that we really weren’t important. Yet, when we performed in plays or played sports, he was the first to give us hugs and tell us good job. He wanted us to be smart and accomplish the things we aimed to do, but not buy into our own hype or ego. I don’t know anyone in the family who hasn’t taken that lesson to heart. We all want to do the best we can, but none of us think we’re amazing special snowflakes. At least not intentionally.

I will miss the dismissive “aaaaeeeeh” grumble Grandpa made after a political conversation on Christmas Eve turned sour and he grew annoyed with Tim-John-Joel-Jeff-Greg and went outside to smoke a cigar instead of talking to his asshole sons.

I will miss how he would correct every detail of a story Grandma was telling, thereby increasing the time it took to tell it by 50 percent (at least) and sidetracking it into innumerable smaller stories about people the listener didn’t even know.

I will miss the riling and joshing about whatever the topic might be. Grandpa was a terrific teaser when he liked you. But if he didn’t like you, he kept his mouth shut.

I will miss hearing tales of his youth and the naughty stuff he did. No wonder he was so forgiving of the grandkids; we never collected residual gasoline in a can and lit a street on fire.

I will miss how he had a special nickname for so many of his grandchildren that no one else ever used. Jenny Poo, Con-Man, etc.

But most of all, I will miss his laugh and his smile. Both were incredibly contagious; filled with levity and forgiveness. He was the kind of person you can’t forget: kind, generous and never believing he was all that special. Well, Grandpa, you were. And tonight I bet we’ll be smoking cigars for you. We promise to always tell your stories, even if some portions are embellished or left out, with a twinkle in our eyes.