I write in the morning, the still dark mornings of autumn, before the time change, when it seems that is the middle of the night and I should be sleeping, but words begin.
At Mass yesterday (does this make it prayer?) I was musing about my writing lately, about how it felt, often, like a pile of words, a too-heavy pile of words added to words. I thought about poetry, about how it gives the reader not an answer, and not even a question, but an unknowing that calls for time, time to slow down, and perhaps even stop, to listen, like when you thought you heard something and stopped
what you were doing; then when you have stopped you’re not sure that you heard anything after all, but you are, after all, stopped.I thought, this morning, that I would entertain the play on words that is in the title – wait instead of weight. But then something stopped me. Am I waiting for words, or are they waiting for me?
I built a china cabinet for Kathy a few years ago, to hold the dishes and cups and glasses that she had squirreled all around the big old farmhouse we inhabited at Manresa. Now they are in one place where they can be clearly seen, the so-thin teacups from the so-thin blue-haired and white-haired ladies who lived in our upper flat and down the block, the Depression Glass plates from my Godfather, the fish plate that our daughter brought back from Hawaii when she was still in High School, and on and on.
Today Kathy will have a guest, a friend she has met who lives further up the peninsula. They will have a walk, and perhaps come back for a cup of tea together. Kathy will open the china cabinet and they will talk of cups, and people who they came from, and it will be a warm conversation and the words will come, pouring out of those cups that seemed empty but were full of words, waiting for people to find them.
I delight in a fantasy, that my writing would be this vessel that someone would reach for, that like those old cups would have virtually no weight, and that when they touched it, their own words would come, the ones that were waiting for them all along.
Look around. What are the words that surround you, the mouthing of memory that is the essence of old things? What are the words that wait for you?
The girls love Nana's teacups --and to them each cup represent something I didn't understand, "special time." The girls collection of cups is small and each cup a gift from grey haired ladies (who got those cups from white haired ladies) and the girls know what those cups represent: slow time, story time, sit back talk and listen time.
ReplyDeleteWhen one of the too thin saucers broke, Sonja cried, we decided to fix it carefully with super glue, a reminder not to use the cups every day --just for "special time" when we slow down and remember to listen to what the teacups have to say...