More Like Me
Monday, April 13th, 2009
The items began collecting in 1994 when I decided to keep my first letter and some photographs from a girl I’d met one summer, which was also her name. The shoe box is filled with envelopes and corresponding letters written in girls’ handwriting, ticket stubs from concerts and baseball games, birthday cards signed by people I remember and some I don’t, and paper scraps with a young man’s wisdom written on them. The young man thought they were worth holding onto.
I found the shoebox a few nights ago while looking for a book. My college books are laying in old banana boxes that I taken from a grocery store in the days before leaving my apartment. Vonnegut, Steinbeck, Mark Harris, books on poiltical thought and grammar. I moved them all into my mother’s guest bedroom closet after I graduated from college and abandoned my apartment to look for another. My diploma was in there for a time and an award I’d won for writing.
I sat on the bed and looked through it. I found some folded up articles I’d written as editor of the campus newspaper and stuffed in the box. I unfolded them and I was struck by how beautifully written they were and how much more the voice sounded like me than I do now. And I realized that I’ve spent my life to this point trying to capture the fun and the perspective that I had then, which came from the people I knew and the hope I had for us all.
Summer lived in Bellevue, Neb. I’d asked her out clumsily one afternoon at a food court in the shopping mall. “Will you go out with me?” were the first words I spoke to her and the approach failed miserably. Instead of rejecting me, she was instantly gentle and kind, as though she’d rehearsed the moment and after I came to know her, I was sure it had happened to her before. I knew nothing about her except what I could see, but I recogized right away the rarity – that someone so gorgeous could also be the better person for it, not lesser. She was probably the most perfect person I’d seen to that point. Beauty had become her strength though it sometimes made other people stupid. Her hair was honey-blonde and she had the high cheek bones that agents equate to models and I noticed the contours despite them never being an inventory item for me. For me, it was the eyes, green and sharp, and they showed her wisdom. We exchanged letters for a time until I got lost in my studies and the more immediate women on campus presented themselves.
I remembered all this in seeing her handwriting again. I didn’t need the photographs to bring back what I knew. And I didn’t need the writing examples to know how I once wrote, and how I should now.
My searching through the closet came after I shared a piece I wrote for work with a publishing colleague, Jenni. I like to have someone review my work before it gets posted because I usually try to write in a way unlike anyone else, but that doesn’t mean that I what I write makes any sense. She sent me a reply e-mail that said: “I like when you write this way.”
I knew what she meant. I’d actually made sense. I hadn’t meandered through paragraphs and paragraphs of detail to tell a story. Detail has always been important to me. And on this blog in particular, my reliance on gets somewhat exaggerated. I will write descriptions about the room I am in for no larger purpse than to be writing. I adopt windows and write about what’s happening outside. I like to watch the neighborhood kids play and bend the rules in side-yard football matches or -oil-stained driveway pick up basketball games. Somehow those games matter more than all the rest.
But I’ve gone through some changes. I’ve grown as a person in the last few weeks and, while I was afraid that this new outlook on life would affect my writing negatively, it’s actually turned to my advantage. I am writing more like I did when I first discovered this craft, that I loved it, and I am writing more and more often.
The way I’ve been writing was extremely complex. It would have taken me years to finish a novel that way, with all the description. But now my taste in what I read has also changed. I am reading lighter material. The thick writers have moved back to the library and nearer the far end of my bookshelf that takes a little more effort to reach through the rows of button-ups and sport coats to take them down.
So, I am writing “this way” again. As Jenni noted in the piece I sent her. Writing is about putting thoughts down thoughtfully, in the way I see what’s important in the world. Writing can be about much more than beautiful women, but it can be about much less, too.
