In early 2008 I dreamt I met the writer, Richard Price. We sat at a bar holding heavy glasses of whiskey and ice. He looked directly into my eyes and told me about the slippery craft of writing. I listened.
***
I attended Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho, as a freshman in the fall of 1992 and winter of 1993. It was an academic year that began glorious and warm and then turned crisp and suddenly cold as hell. By the time Rexburg began to thaw in late spring, my freshman year was over.
The quiet campus lay on a gradual slope, wide open to the light of day. It was a school both quaint and self-assured. Before the snow and ice came, pretty girls ran the sidewalks on the quadrangle in new Asics shoes. They were God’s breed, all legs and pert ponytails swaying neatly back and forth.
I was six foot three; by spring I would be six foot four. I had no plan. I simply knew the world was already mine even though it really wasn’t.
I had always been a natural and omnivorous reader, but that year things changed. I wanted to earn the Queen’s English and then wholly command it. Language was, and remains for me, everything. I desired to wield a power with words so resplendent and pure it would give lift to my voice and ignite every curiosity, every wild and fraught dream and all of my earnest imagination. The classes I fulfilled did not hold my attention–I merely passed through them. What mattered were the hours I spent alone reading and searching in the McKay Library. I was insatiable, urgent.
One evening in late fall I walked through a heavy snow under the headphones of my yellow Sony Walkman. Lindsey Buckingham hissed Empire State into my ears. As I climbed the steps to the entrance of the David O. McKay Library I noticed a plain girl in a drab overcoat slip violently and fall hard onto her knees. Her collapse was terrible. I ended the slap-strut beat in my ears and entered into a sound of bitter stillness as I crested the top of the steps. Bright folders and books lay scattered on the partially exposed concrete. The girl winced. She was in terrible pain. Her physical distress was instantly made more acute by her obvious embarrassment at falling so awkwardly. She blanched as she looked up at me, but did her level best to laugh away her obvious discomfort even as she nobly attempted to rise to her feet, which she was unable to do. Her agony was too great and so she relented to it, shuddering as she surrendered a sob and then crumpled into a disheveled ball. Her emotion was unfettered even as I reached for her shoulders and gently pulled her up to a sitting position in the snow. I know I would have asked her if she was okay but I have no memory of my words. She said nothing at all, she was too overcome. I gathered her things and then promptly slipped and fell on my own ass. “SHIT!” I got up and dusted myself off and then regathered her things. I helped her to her feet. She walked away and I watched her go.
Wide latticed snowflakes fell in the still air. It was quiet. I was alone standing out in the open. Soft yellow light from large windows all around the campus entered and then faded into the off-white fray of raw dusk. I decided not to go inside the library. After a long minute or two, I turned and headed for my dorm.
***
–A girl edging toward 13 doesn’t expect much. She knows about Santa, but decides she’ll write to him anyway. It will be her last letter. Her only wish for Christmas is a soft bathrobe–any color will do, and, if possible, a matching towel to go with it.
–An aging father rises early in the morning to put on coffee and fry a thick beef patty. Under the light of the stovetop he neatly wraps a beautiful hamburger in wax paper and places it into a red IGLOO cooler. He fills a tall stainless steel thermos with decaffeinated coffee and cream and screws the silver cap tight. He then sets a tidy breakfast at the small kitchen table and crosses over into the room where his adult son sleeps.
The two men sit at the table and share a breakfast and talk of the day ahead. When it’s time, they rise together and walk out the door of the small apartment, down the stairwell and on out to the street beyond where the city bus will take the son to his retail job in the city.
“Sure am proud of you, my boy,” says the father.
“Love you, Dad. Can’t wait to eat my hamburger!” And then this sweet boy, as innocent as the day he was born, smiles as wide as the Wasatch Mountain range behind him and presses his thick glasses up the bridge of his nose with his thumb.
The two grown men embrace and then part. The son steps onto the bus with a firm grip on the handle of the red IGLOO cooler.
As the UTA bus fades into the distance, the father wonders what will become of his boy after he is no longer there to care for him. Who will make those hamburgers he likes so much for his work lunch?
–When I was twelve I attended a junior leadership training camp called Cedar Badge in the Grand Tetons. I learned a song there one night that I’ve been singing all my life since. I sang it to my daughter when she was little and I sing it to my young sons now. It’s about a man who takes on a farm; takes on life. The refrain of the song has become something of a poem to me the further I get along in my own life. The lines that count are these: When I first came to this wondrous land, I was not a wealthy man…but the land was sweet and good and I did what I should.
***
Writing is indeed a slippery craft. But not in the way I thought it meant when Richard Price came to me in a dream and we had a whiskey at some delightfully empty bar. It’s slippery because it requires eyesight and insight–an ability to see something when it may seem there is nothing at all to see. And not just see but to pay attention to what is right there in front of me, all around me. It’s vision and discernment all at once. The writing happens there. It’s not easy.
The best writing always and only just tells me enough. It’s as if the writer was thinking of me when she was writing. She did the hard work of setting the sight and sound, of offering a rhythm and nuance, but then she ends there and allows me to carry her story forward and make it my own. That’s the gift of language. It’s communal and everlasting and when it’s shared in the most human of ways it’s not slippery anymore, it’s substantial and right.
***
At night when I do the dishes I put a weary mind to all of my seeming failures in life, but as the dishes are rendered clean and orderly once again I tell myself, it’s okay to keep trying.
RCS
12 May, 2020