Feathers, Paint

When you have a baby, you spend your days trying to figure out what makes it sleep or not sleep, and when you near 60, you are the baby, and you eventually admit to yourself chasing sleep is like chasing feathers. The more energy you put into trying to catch those fluffy white feathers, the more they skitter away from the breeze you’re kicking up.

My first day of class happened this past week – I am teaching long-form mainstream science writing to a group of wonderful students – and among the pearls that fell from my mouth on Day 1 was the observation that if you can’t sleep, you might as well write, because in that liminal space, in the quiet of the night, your brain will often not worry so much about the conventions and will find bright verbs and multi-faceted nouns you wouldn’t otherwise think to grab.

They wrote this down. So why don’t I spend those waking hours writing, as I used to? I think it is in part because I used to need a nap every day, in the days when I didn’t know I was profoundly deficient in B-12, and so I just got up and worked knowing I’d need a  nap no matter what I tried.

But these days I wake and convince myself that if I don’t go back to sleep, if I get up to write, I’ll need a nap, and that will mess up the whole day. And feathers fall from the ceiling, and I do another New York Times crossword puzzle, and I think about what I would write if it were a good idea to get up and write, and I think about whether to repaint the yellow bathroom and, in the case of last night, subscribe to House Beautiful because I’ve looked at everything there is to look at in Elle Décor. (Handmade Spanish tile and Californian velvet are how I avoid The News, which is just a full-on bird strike to somnolence these days.)

But maybe I ought to get up and write and stop acting as if I have aged out of writing and become instead only an editor and a teacher of writing. Talking to my students about prose, it was a bit as if I ran into my old muse in the place we used to go when we were together. As if we had sat down to have a drink and reminisce and ask each other why it is we fell apart.

I know it is partly the business of spending a chunk of every night reading to my mother as her vision goes. We have lately fallen back into James Herriot, to his well-told tales of tickling sows’ uteri to get them to let down the milk, or putting a good dog to sleep for an incurable and tortuous skin condition, of dealing with farmers who persevered long after it made any sense to keep a small holding. And there is a way in which reading these stories of the 1930s and ‘40s makes me feel as if all the things that need to be told have been told, even as they dislodge stories from my mother of things she never thought to mention before. The things my father said when she was at the grocery store "too long." What kind of cheese the liberators brought to prevent famine after the war. Why she gave up on doctors.

I made my mother two gluten-free almond-orange cakes and a batch of coconut macaroons and shipped them overnight when her vision got worse a week or so ago, and she opened the package and called to ask if I thought she was starving. “You’ll be here in 10 days,” she said, crunching on a macaroon and moaning with delight, and it was true. And of course when I made them, I couldn’t even taste the batter or the results because of my ridiculous diet, and she knew that. But it feels like the little bit I can do.

I think sometimes when I am awake for two hours, knowing I should get up and write, that I will look back from my deathbed or just my octogenarian blindness and realize I spent all of those hours playing the Spelling Bee or Strands, or looking at the pretty pictures of an apartment in Milan where the owner has mixed sixteenth century statuary with a modern couch in the shape of a half moon. Is that when I’ll decide it’s no fair, death, and I’ll try to fight for a few more days, when I could have been having them now?

I do take a stupid delight spending my days editing things not that many people will read (there is the pleasure of helping a good reporter), and I most certainly feel a rush being back in the classroom helping young writers find their voices.

Does the world need another book? It often feels enough to bake the cakes and divide them up for the freezer, to show a molecular engineering major how to take a passive sentence and electrify it, to bring a thousand words of truth not with my byline but with my assistance in the revisions and the fact-checking. Is it a problem to spend quite so much time considering whether to paint the yellow bathroom a lighter shade? I could get up and paint.