Today I stared at the green-green leaves of oak and pine and hickory and I gave the breeze a listen and felt the cool surprise of a gray and rainy North Carolina May day.
For a whole two minutes, I was not productive. I was not efficient. I was not worthy of the free enterprise system.
Before this moment, I indulged in a novel sequel that feels some moments like a breathtaking concept and yet not novel I can hurry myself to write.
And while it may be The One, just like every other novel has always been The One, I can’t rush into it. I can’t strive and strain and spill out words in a way that’s conscious of time ticking away. In a way that some who in Silicon Valley do now, managing five AI agents, or a multimillion-dollar business, or an online brand or whatever we say qualifies now as “killing it.”
Killing it, so that we can live better and maybe forever. I think that’s the idea?
So I wrote that page like it was like my last day on earth. Like all that mattered was the particular arrangements of a few paragraphs and that this particular ordering of things, of finding a flow, was the most sacred thing.
I was chasing the character voice and the feelings and the wants and needs and all the interior chaos of a brand-new person I’m birthing.
Not the completion of her, not the full life, but just the one day she walked into a bookstore for what she considered to be the worst high school reunion ever. Where she’d meet a former best friend who represented “killing it” and who left her–my character–wishing she were dead.
The first book, all about these two girls when they were in high school, is one I’m currently trying to sell. I’m calling it Here Comes the Dog Parade.
The second, one-third written, is one I’m calling Today’s Parade Is Cancelled, I’m starting over with a new chapter because that’s what you do with books that haunt you.
If all the angels and saints were to ask me at the pearly gates how I spent this Saturday in May, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, I would tell them
Well, I wrote a page of a piece I believe in
I hugged a cat and then another
I argued and made up with someone I love
There were these trees
And maybe they and the seraphim would say, “Well done, my good and faithful creature.
Welcome.
Welcome to a place where you can be.”
I wrote this in honor of Beth Barnwell, beloved wife of my dear teacher, Jack Barnwell.
At her memorial service, I heard stories of her courage and compassion. She and her mathematical brain broke boundaries for women; she earned a PhD in only 4 years while standing up to double standards regarding maternity and women’s work. She spread her love like the arms of those majestic trees on all her hikes. Her life was a great story, a novel in verse delighting grandchildren, daughter and son-in-law, her spouse, and her friends. Every stanza shimmered with kindness.
As her pastor said, Henry James’ wisdom here is a symbol of who Beth was
“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
Below is one of her favorite poems. Rest in peace, Beth.
i thank You God
— e.e. cummings
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
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