Making Time Disappear

Eight weeks out from teaching my last class, I am trying to make time disappear. This is a good thing.

This morning, I ground up coffee beans in the old manual coffee grinder I found in my grandmother's stuff. It was made in Germany. It could have been my great-grandmother's, come to think of it.

This summer is all about task, not time. I write without a clock. Time does not circumscribe task.

The coffee tastes better.

Inexplicable Sorrow, Unexpected Pleasures

I didn’t put in a garden this year. “Garden” is probably a misnomer, as mine is limited to whatever I can fit on the fire escape. One year it was heirloom tomatoes and basil, and the tomatoes were so delicious I tried it again the following year. The squirrels found the tomatoes to be irresistible and peed in the basil. The next year I put in pots of petunias and did so every year until now.

Petunias grow well on my fire escape, which faces south and gets sun for the better part of the day. The brick walls hold onto heat and it’s not unusual for a petunia or two to bloom in December or until the first measurable snowfall.

I had a thesis to finish this May and some traveling to do in the latter weeks of the month. Memorial Day was cool and un-summerlike. My cat took a turn for the worse. Each day I thought about going to the garden store for soil and some flats of flowers and didn’t.

My cat Beachamp died last week. He’d been on medication for a chronic condition for more than a year and the prognosis wasn’t good. He’d had a happy life and I wanted his death to be a reflection of that life, of his stoicism and his dignity. He was a comfort and a joy.

A door shuts, another opens. Last week I was vacuuming in my office, the fire escape room, when I noticed a single petunia poking up and out of what I had mistaken for weeds. After days of rain, the sun came out and the flower opened, the first of many blooming from seedlings. All of them are white, except for the pink one you see in the picture above.

I want to think that’s Beauchamp: Still flowering. Still here.

In Praise of Snail Mail

Through twenty-three years and five moves across two states, I’ve kept a manila file folder containing the first acceptance letter I ever received. The letter is typed on cream-colored stationery, glossy and substantial, and is embossed with the letterhead of the magazine that accepted that long-ago first story. Looking at it now, I still remember the sense of hope I felt standing there in the dusty foyer of the rowhouse apartment where I lived in Philadelphia. I remember thinking the envelope was too fat to be a letter of acceptance, but too slim to be the story I’d sent them, only to be returned to me now with regrets.

The other day I uploaded five poems into an online submission manager and hit “Submit.” Seconds later I received a form e-mail from the journal thanking me for my submission. It cost me nothing but a moment of my time and spared me a slog to the post office on a crummy day, the way I’d done so long ago in Philadelphia. I remember how I’d hiked that short story down to the post office not far from City Hall and kissed the clasp envelope before handing it to the amused clerk. I was a graduate student at the time, living on student loans and a part-time job as a proofreader; the money that I spent on postage to send that story and others out into the world would have been considerable—part of the dues I thought I needed to pay become a writer.

Recently, a friend shared a story on his blog about a journal that accepted four of his poems nearly two years ago, only to send him an e-mail months later rejecting those same four poems. After many back and forth e-mails, the editor (the same one who’d accepted the poems) attributed the rejection to “budget cuts.” And so my friend did what most poets do when they receive rejection: Moved on and resubmitted those poems to other magazines. Several of the poems were subsequently accepted, suggesting a happily-ever-after ending –-until recently, when he received a print copy of the journal that had rejected him containing (you guessed it) the four poems the magazine had declined.

As writers we’re well advised not to take rejection personally, to treat it not as an event—as Carolyn See writes—but as a process. To be sure, e-mailed rejections can be easily dismissed as blips, the briefest of interruptions on an otherwise okay day. But acceptance – whether the first or the hundred and first – should be an event, a worthy-of-fireworks ceremony marking the final mile in a creative journey that started with a handful of words whispering this way.  And a letter dropped through a mail slot or tucked into a box next to the front door affirms this in a way that an e-mail is simply unable to.

The day I received that first letter of acceptance I called all of my friends. I toasted myself with a bottle of beer and when I finally fell asleep, the letter was next to me on the pillow.

It smelled like hope. It still does. 

An Ode to East Avenue Wegmans

An Ode to East Avenue Wegmans

Really, can you grieve a building? Can you miss a building the way you would a dead parent or a beloved pet? Can you grieve a building that was in no way distinguished architecturally or historical or remarkable, a building that was in fact nothing more than a pile of nondescript beige bricks? A building with dingy linoleum floors, narrow aisles and a vegetable section that was all but impossible to negotiate on Sunday morning.

The answer to each question is yes, yes, yes and yes.

This morning at 7 a.m., to the delight of a thousand people—a couple dozen of those who’d been waiting in line for twenty-four hours—the new East Avenue Wegmans opened. It’s not the old building, to be sure, whose old footprint is now forever underneath the lot I parked in this morning. It’s big and clean and I wager to say that no one will go missing in the vast room of veggies and fruits. But underneath the shine is the same old East Avenue Wegmans—the familiar faces of employees who, for nearly twenty-two years, have seemed like friends.

So much of my history here in Rochester is tied to that store. Wegmans is where I went the Tuesday afternoon in 1999 when my mother died, to buy cat food and litter before leaving for the week. When the clerk at the checkout counter asked me if I’d found everything I was looking for, I told her my mother died. She was the first person I’d spoken to and my voice sounded dusty and unused. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and leaned around the counter to give me a hug.

On September 11, 2001, when I couldn’t bear to see another replay of those planes crashing into the World Trade Center, I turned off my television and drove to Wegmans. The aisles were full of people who walked as if they were fragile, breakable, and yet it was as quiet as a church. I suspected they, like me, didn’t need much in the way of groceries, only to understand that the world would somehow go on.

When my Wegmans closed in late February, I missed it terribly. I deliberately avoided driving by that area. I didn’t want to see the line of bulldozers, the shattered glass and the eventual pile of bricks of the old store. It was late winter, and everything is harder here in late winter.

Just before seven this morning, minutes before the new store was about to open its doors, a longtime employee—apron in hand—waved as she walked past the line. There were shouts of “Karen! There’s Karen! Yay, Karen!” and several people applauded as if the sidewalk were suddenly a red carpet.

You just had to be there.

April 15, 2013

Last night, driving toward home on the street where I live, I saw my cat sitting in the window. His name is Beauchamp and he waits for me. Anyone who thinks cats are aloof or lacking in affection doesn't know cats, doesn't know my cat. He waits for me and when he sees my car, hears my key in the door downstairs, he jumps down onto the love seat so he can act like he's been there all along. Act like a cat, in other words. Aloof.

I woke up at 4:30 yesterday morning, courtesy of a bird singing in a tree near the same window. I tried sleeping again. I told the bird to shut up, and the bird went on singing, the coloratura of birds. I cursed the bird and got up to face the day. 

How many of the dead or injured heard birdsong when they woke up yesterday in Boston. Did they curse the bird or sing along with him? Who was waiting by a window for them to get home--a wife, a son, a cat? 

The bird was there again this morning. In his tree, singing, hours before the sun would come up.