Rebeccalou: This Writer’s Life

“I don’t know how to start.” That’s Tess talking, slumped on a stool at the kitchen counter. She’s doodling in the corner of a blank piece of paper, stuck on a writing assignment. Those green eyes are willing me to say something, anything, to get the ball rolling. I ask about the topic. I ask for her ideas. I empathize. 

“It’s the same for me.” She is not consoled. A writer whose name I can’t remember comes to mind: sit for a morning and if nothing comes, slash your wrists and get it over with. I do not share this with Tess.

The other day, in an attempt to jump-start a new piece, I go to the bookshelf in search of Anna Quindlen. In the mid-late 80’s, Quindlen wrote a weekly column in The New York Times called Life in the 30’s, hailed for its wit, honesty and insight. She and I and another several million women who came of age in the sixties believed we could have it all: love, family, rewarding career. Anna brought us tales from the trenches, poking fun, engaging her brain and her heart around the possibilities and the pitfalls. She bravely revealed insecurities and prejudices, the issues she wrestled with, what made her happy and the things that hurt. She felt like a friend. Some weeks she was me, another eldest child, in her words “a leader, a doer, a convincing veneer of personality and confidence atop a bottomless pit of insecurity and need,” and other times an icon I bowed to. She had her finger on the pulse of a generation of overachievers, pen at hand. She held up the mirror and there we were, en masse, wagging our tails, begging for more. 

I met Anna exactly once, in the fall of 1988. She was on tour for Living Out Loud, the published collection of her Life in the 30’s columns. I was home as a full-time mom after years of business lunches and expensive clothes, moving through my day in a tee-shirt and a pair of Levi’s. Ali was a year old. We had a diagnosis but really knew nothing about how this neurological impairment called cerebral palsy would play out over time. Our baby was alert and engaging, smiled often, obviously understood what we said to her, but wasn’t rolling over, wasn’t sitting without support, wasn’t making the kind of sounds that turn into words. I turned to writing. The notebooks were a place to put what I couldn’t say out loud. To the world, to Ali, to my family and all but my closest friends, I maintained the convincing veneer we firstborns master in childhood, the one Anna had nailed on the head.

I ran several miles a week, wrote while Ali napped, tried not to be afraid. 

The midwestern roots and natural instincts of a woman accustomed to success kicked in. If we worked hard, if I took her to experts in Chicago, Milwaukee and San Francisco, if I repeated the exercises at home and fed her healthy foods and played Louise Hay tapes in the background, my baby would literally crawl out of this place of fisted hands and floppy torso and be on her way. I visualized the two of us returning in a year to the white-coated specialists who had delivered the diagnosis. I wanted more than anything to prove them wrong. My money was on the long shot: heaps of intervention and piles of love would somehow re-route the pathways in Ali’s brain. I didn’t want a special needs child. I wanted a ballerina, an athlete, a little girl who played the piano. I wanted a star, which is what I have, but in the beginning I was looking for the usual suspects in all the wrong places. 

So on a warmish October afternoon I go to hear Anna Quindlen, one of my heros. She talks and reads for thirty minutes and then the women-only crowd forms a line for book signing. Anna sits at a blond library table in front of a stack of fiction, brown hair to her shoulders, belly extended, well into her pregnancy with their third child, a girl they would name Maria. 

As the line snakes among the racks, I think about what to say to this woman whose work I adore, idolize and try to emulate. I want to sound less like a fan and more like a kindred spirit. I know, she’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist syndicated in newspapers throughout the country and I’m filling journals I share with no one, but still, you never know. 

And then the woman ahead of me steps aside and I’m standing at the table, eager as a five-year-old on her first day of school, a little anxious, very curious. The writer says hi and reaches for the book I’m holding. She’s gracious but I’d bet a hundred dollars she’d rather be home with her feet up and her boys in bed. She sets my book on the table, opens the inside cover, asks my name. This is happening all too quickly. I want coffee, a glass of wine, time to chat. I want to connect.

“I’d love to be a writer.” There, I’ve said it out loud.

She lets out a soft groan and raises her eyebrows. “You might want to think twice about that.” Sarcasm with a smile or an Irish Catholic’s confession? Her eyes look tired. “If I knew how to do anything else, I would.” A shallow sigh, followed by the tiniest chuckle. She’s dead serious. 

Anna writes quickly, gives me the book and smiles again. Time’s up. I thank her and step into the sunshine. I don’t look until I’m sitting in the car.

For Rebecca — Enjoy!    Anna Quindlen

Change the name, and the inscription was most likely what she wrote in the books of the other fifty women in line that day. No Good luck, no Go for it. Nothing so corny as Follow your dream (thank god). A simple Enjoy. And I do. Every time I pick up anything she’s written. Quindlen, the queen of making it look easy. 

But we all know better, including a 13-year-old with a homework assignment.

“So Becky, do you, like, think this is okay?” Tess hands me two pages filled with thick scratches, squiggles in the margins, rows of small cursive followed by large loopy letters—telltale signs of struggle. “I’m not sure about the ending,” she adds.

I read the piece out loud beginning with the hardest line of all, that precious first sentence, and work my way to the second hardest, the last.

“How does it sound to you?” I ask.

“I think it needs some work but could we, like, have a snack first?”

On a warm and sunny Saturday morning in early February, two friends and I load the back end of the car with snowshoes, poles, boots and backpacks and head south on C-470, veering right at the sign for Fairplay, winding our way through canyons of red rock and pine until the urban sprawl filling the rearview mirror disappears completely. The radio is off. Bright sun beats through the glass. The creeks are open and running hard. The gray and brown earth of winter lies exposed during these weeks of mild weather. We wind our way through the foothills, slowing down for Conifer, Bailey and Grant, then climb the last four miles to Kenosha Pass. At the summit the Colorado Trail crosses the highway, with arrows pointing in both directions. The trailhead to our right is filled with two rows of vehicles. We turn left onto gravel. The car scrapes across a twenty-foot patch of snow. We avoid the ruts for another hundred yards and pull into the parking lot, the fourth car to arrive.

The air is colder at 10,000 feet. We add more layers, strap on foot gear and head up through a stand of aspen on a snow-packed trail imprinted with the soles of boots and the wide, oversized mark of a snowshoe. Parallel tracks left by a cross-country skier run alongside the trail a short distance before veering off into the meadow. I unwrap the chain at the gate and swing it open just far enough to allow passage into the forest. 

At the first clearing, Kathy interrupts Patricia’s story of how she came to own the hat she’s wearing, and we all stop. Off to the right are thousands of aspen in the meadow below us, tall and silver-gray in their nakedness, intermingled with ponderosa pine. Across the distant highway, hills sit like children at the knees of the massive peaks, snow-covered and majestic, tall enough to reach into the swirl of white cloud brushed through winter’s sky. At the curve of the highway, the hills give way to the expansive South Park valley, and miles beyond, at the southern edge of our view, the Collegiate Peaks rise to the heavens, promising adventure from afar, triggering memories of summer climbs, nights in a tent at tree line, my first pelting by corn snow on the summit of Mount Harvard seventeen years ago, its landscape barren as the moon. 

I love to hike. I love that my feet are on the ground. I have no desire to float through air or explore the deep waters of an ocean but I will climb anything the body will tolerate. I respond to the palpable thinness of air at altitude, the crisp bite on the face, the effort in the muscles of thigh and calf, the fifty-something whine in my left knee. I find it impossible to remain stuck in the angst and nagging turmoil of ego when I look at the world from the side or the top of a mountain, caught in the quirky blend of humility and empowerment, our insignificance twinned with all that’s possible. Without fail, the big picture reveals itself in direct proportion to the diminishment of self. Despite the thinner air, I breathe more fully.

We continue up-trail. The body grows warm with exertion. Without leaves to interrupt their fall, the sun’s rays stroke our heads, shoulders and chests before reflecting off the snow on the forest floor. We stop for water in a small clearing. I plant poles in the shallow snowbank at the side of the trail, remove my pack, unclip the snowshoes and take off the outer layer. I stuff the clothes into the pack, eat a handful of almonds, drink more water and step back into the snowshoes. Before grabbing the poles, I unzip the fleece at my neck, feel the sweat on my skin, followed by a clammy chill when a breeze kicks up.

Another hour passes on the trail. We stop for lunch at a spot overlooking South Park. A fallen aspen provides the perfect bench. We unload our gear and spread the contents of our packs at our feet: wedges of cheese, leftover chicken cutlets, one peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a container of olives, slices of pear, a banana, a bag of raw almonds. Kathy opens the Beaulieu Vineyard Merlot and fills three cups. The sun, full-out when we sat, is soon covered by a band of clouds. Hats and gloves go back on. We take turns snapping photos of the other two, all sunglasses and smiles. We consume every morsel, washing down the home-baked chocolate chip cookie with a final sip of wine before strapping on the gear and starting back down.

The descent offers another perspective on the same view. The clouds move on, exposing afternoon sunlight against bold peaks that sparkle in their whiteness. I spot the basket that had disengaged from my pole on the way up, abandoned atop a small patch of crusted snow. We talk of families and books, a meditation service, husbands and parents, the writing process, a website for a client, what it feels like to return to square one in this economy, in our fifties. 

I bring up the Pema Chodron series I’m listening to, a collection of teachings called Noble Heart. The three of us have stopped for water. I unscrew the blue cap on the Nalgene bottle, stare at the forest around us and think about the big sky concept of equanimity. The word is a favorite of mine, although descriptive of a state I don’t come close to touching on home turf. But up here, away from the distractions and messiness of daily life, equanimity seems almost plausible; maybe it is possible to move beyond the dualistic principles of pleasure and pain, good and bad, praise and blame, into the vast mind that embraces all of it. Like the arrows at the top of the pass, equanimity points to the great way, to the open mind-open heart goodness of our true nature.

My friends and I look at strong, healthy trees, at fallen dead trees, young saplings, trees still upright but showing signs of disease, others hearty and straight in their stretch toward sunlight. Broken branches poke out of the snow. Exposed clumps of black, gnarly roots resemble prehistoric art forms. Slender stalks not three feet tall appear alongside trees with trunks thick as the muscled thigh of a seasoned climber. Nothing moves. There are no leaves to flitter in the breeze, no animals afoot. Decay sits alongside healthy, tall alongside tiny, old next to young, without judgment, without labels, equanimous in their beauty.

We pass through the gate and head to the parking lot, savoring the last leg of the hike in silence. The drone of cars on the highway drowns out the crunch of boots and snowshoes on packed snow. The mind fills with plans for the evening, weekend commitments, the full, busy nature of life. We load gear and backpacks into the trunk, shedding hats, gloves and jackets, and head back to the city. 

The next afternoon, on our way out of the restaurant, a friend touches my arm. “When are we going to see some more writing? Anything in the works?”

I nod my head. Soon. I’m thinking you’ll see something soon.