Reading and reality

I'm reading two quite disparate books at the moment. One is Dante's Purgatory (so much lighter, tone-wise, than the Inferno, which I suppose should be expected, really. I like the symmetry, too, of his having cast off a belt in hell and being gird again at the foot of the seven-storey mountain with another belt, this time of humility. I'm making all sorts of fun notes as I read. An English major is always an English major. :) But I digress...), and the other is "Career of Evil," the third in the Cormoran Strike series written by J.K. Rowling under her nom de plume, Robert Galbraith. It was a Christmas gift from my brother Daniel.


As I was reading along last night, Strike, the one of the two main characters, has to follow a lead to Scotland. He takes a train to Edinburgh and then a car borrowed off a friend to Melrose, which is an hourish south. Strike arrives and "deposited the Mini in a car park beside (Melrose) abbey, with its dark red arches against a pale blue sky."


I parked our rental car in that same lot during the trip Mom and I took to Scotland in June, 2014, and the abbey ruins are, indeed, stark and bold against the sky.

The beautiful ruins of Melrose Abbey

Walking through the Wynd, Melrose.

In the book, Strike sets off in search of a house which is addressed on the Wynd. He wanders up the high street "to the central square, where a unicorn-topped pillar stood." When he misses it, he doubles back on the High Street and found the "narrow entrance in the walls to his right, only large enough for a pedestrian, which led to a dim inner courtyard. ... (the) home had a blue front door and was reached by a short flight of steps."

And I knew exactly where he was, because the Wynd is a small alley that cuts through from Bucchleuch Street, where our B&B was, to Melrose's High Street. And in the middle there really is a small courtyard, with a shop, and a museum and that house -- which when I was there, had pots of red flowers on the steps -- that are only accessible from that courtyard.

Toward the end of the chapter, Strike also walks "to Millers of Melrose, a family butcher he had noticed on his troll around the town" where he buys some meat pies for his return journey.


I even have a picture of Millers' butcher shop. Why would I take a picture of a butcher shop, you ask? Well, as my mom and I were walking off our dinner the night we got to Melrose(amazing food at the King's Arms, and banoffee pie for dessert that I still want to try and recreate sometime), we went to the center of town, home of that unicorn-topper pillar, and then wandered a bit before turning in for the night. Close to the center of town was one butcher's shop which bore a rather hoity-toity sign that declared it was owned by "Martin Baird: High Class Family Butcher." It was only when we reached the bottom of the same street that we spotted Miller's. Mom and I were a little tired, still, and in a goofy mood, because I said something about it clearly being the low-class butcher of Melrose, and we both just dissolved in giggles. Maybe you had to be there to find it funny...

Snobby butcher

Millers: butcher to the people.

Anyway, maybe it's because I haven't traveled terribly extensively, but there is still a strange thrill for me reading about places I've now been. It happened after Rome as well, a sense of wonder and of somehow being in on something, in the know because you're not just imagining it, but have seen it and experienced it for yourself. And even, as in this case, when the book is fiction, you know the author (Rowling, although of course she's Scottish herself, so it makes sense) has been there, too. It's a tenuous connection, really, but I also know what it's like to see or experience something, even something tiny, and then include it in something you're writing. It just makes writing, and reading, all the more real.

Thoughts on being single

So I'm on day six of my 40-day writing commitment and I'm doing quite well. I've managed to write every day so far, even if only for a little while. Three cheers for dedication! Now if only I can get back into that exercise routine...

Fitness aside, I've spent a little time reviewing some things I've written in the past. One, a piece of fiction I started last year, I've decided to put more effort into and see if anything comes of it. I also found the below, some compiled reflections on faith and being single that, at the time, I titled Vignettes (probably because it doesn't have a solid conclusion).

I wrote them in March of 2008 (and very proud of my quote usage I was, too, although I was probably reading too much chick-lit at the time), and was clearly intending to do something with it, although I can't recall what. References I make to "not too long ago," are now three years in the past. It made me laugh, though, as I reread. I liked it when I wrote it and I still like it now. I probably didn't post it to this blog (which has been around quite a while now, even if I've only been more consistent posting to it recently) because I wasn't brave enough, and (gasp!) someone might actually read it. Maybe it's a symptom of being a few years older, but I care less about what people think, in terms of my writing, than I once did. I also received some positive reinforcement about it from a friend, who thought it was worthwhile to put out there as well.

And while I'm sure that, having had three additional years of single life go by, I could add to the piece, what is here still stands on its own, I think. So, barring a few tweaks and an update or two, here 'tis:

“Someone will come along someday. I hear Florida is a good place to find wealthy widowers … Of course, I hear they go pretty quickly. Both to marriage and death. Better hurry!”

From “What a Girl Wants” by Kristin Billerbeck

You know, if only the man I wanted was a wealthy, or even remotely well-off, widower, I would have my pick. The roads, stores, restaurants at 4 p.m. and indeed the very ground in Southwest Florida are thick with them. As my cousin Carrie once said to me jokingly, “If you wanted a sugar-daddy, you’d be all set.”

           

But I don’t want a wealthy widower. With all due respect to the retirees, I would prefer to date a man who’s closer to my age range than to my grandfather’s. The only problem is, there don’t seem to be any unmarried ones here.

           

Not too long ago, my friend Lance suggested I join a grandmother’s group at my parish.

           

“Maybe they’d have some grandsons your age,” he said before his wife Nicole slapped him playfully.

           

Well, even if I was that desperate about being single at 30, I couldn’t join a grandmother’s – or any other woman’s group – down here if I wanted to. They all meet during the day, sometime between 10 and 2, when I’m at work. So much for ministering to young adults, huh?

           

As far as single’s groups at area parishes go, there are a couple. But I don’t qualify for any of them, seeing as I’m under 45 and all.

           

And as for the potential grandsons, I very much doubt that any of them live here. They’re probably in Boston, New York, Chicago or Saskatchewan.

           

One of my college roommates, now a youth minister, used to go to a number of conferences. She would always come back and say something like, “I met this great guy. He’d be so perfect for you! Only he lives in Arizona.”

           

I’d scoff at her and say “Well, what good does that do me here?” I used to think that God would plunk a man into my lap wherever I was and that would be that. Nothing like that has happened yet.

           

But God certainly works in interesting ways. My friend Amanda joined one of the Catholic dating Web sites. She started sending messages back and forth with a man who lived in Massachusetts who volunteered with FOCUS ministries. Before they even met officially, they were dating. She said everything was so easy…but she still had doubt. “God is crazy…but in a good way,” she’d tell me. After five and a half months, tons of phone calls, Internet chatting sessions and flying back and forth to see each other (not to mention the fact that it turned out he’d known a friend of hers at Steubenville), he proposed. A little more than a year after she’d been mourning the loss of a relationship with a man she thought was the love of her life, Amanda found the true one (2011 update: they’re now expecting their second child).

I think sometimes that, for those of us who are still single, we lack the faith to believe that God will do amazing things like that for us, or that we are somehow less deserving of love like that that seems to just appear out of thin air. But that’s not the case at all. I have to remind myself that God is working in me and molding me for that other person, and vice versa. My best (now very happily married) friend and I used to think that love would just come. We both thought that we’d go to college, meet the man of our dreams, graduate, land a fabulous job and live happily every after. Looking back now, I know that didn’t happen because I wasn’t ready. I still don’t know if I am, but I do know I’m closer. My faith tells me so.

           

“(He) was the constant ray of hope in my life. The Omnipresent Potential. A reason to buy new clothes. It was the hope I was addicted to.”

 From “What a Girl Wants” by Kristin Billerbeck

Hope is a heady thing. And it doesn’t take much to feed it. An e-mail. A sentence. A word of greeting spoken in passing. I will readily admit to having spent countless hours overanalyzing nearly everything a crush has said to me. Sometimes, I brought a friend along with me in these trips to happily-ever-after land. In fact, it was better that way, because you had someone to gush to. And if she happened to have a crush of her own to analyze it was even better. It was like crack.

           

More often than not, my crushes didn’t live in the same city as I did. There was the brother of a friend I met on a retreat. A crush who finally asked me to dinner the night before he moved across the country for work but then maintained a nearly three-year correspondence with me. Another who was the classmate of a former roommate at a different university (you follow?). I lived for their e-mails, imagining they were the modern version of love letters. The distance made it even easier to imagine different meanings to the words they wrote to me.

Even Charles Dickens commented on this once. I came a cross a quote in "Nicholas Nickleby" that reminded me so much of this. For some reason, it surprised me to no end that Charles Dickens would know what I felt 150-odd years later.

"Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to thegrowth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries. 'Out of sight, out of mind,' is well enough as a proverb applicable to cases of friendship, though absence is not always necessary to hollowness of heart, even between friends, and truth and honesty, like precious stones, are perhaps most easily imitated at a distance, when the counterfeits often pass for real. Love, however, is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination, which has a long memory, and will thrive for a considerable time on very slight and sparing food. Thus it is, that it often attains its most luxuriant growth in separation and under circumstances of utmost difficulty."      

Dickens had a sense for human nature. And that doesn’t change much.

           

And it seems like most of these relationships that experienced “luxuriant growth” were the ones that didn’t have a concrete ending. There was still some kind of a connection, or no closure. For myself, and for some friends, those are those are ones you carry with you. The ones that make you think, “what if?” For far too long.

           

A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to be able to attend the first night of a two-night presentation by Christopher West (who I was able to meet with briefly—I had him sign a book for me). He spent that evening addressing the women in the audience. Being a reporter, I of course took copious notes, and I’m glad I did, since I’ve gone back to read them several times. One of the things he said that stuck with me (and there were many) was that when we as women look to men to satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts, we commit idolatry. I’d never thought about it that way before, and thinking about all the time I spent worrying/wishing/wasting time thinking about and overanalyzing the relationships that almost were, well, that’s what I was doing. West said man can only be “a faint glimmer” of what Jesus can do for us. God will woo you if you let Him.

“The date was nothing like I expected it to be. Not that I knew what to expect. But I did have the odd imaginary scenario in my head, ranging from dreadful (he doesn’t turn up; it turns out he’s a Nazi) to fantastic (we end up … on a speedboat on the Thames and he asks me to marry him) …”

From “Can You Keep a Secret” by Sophie Kinsella

Not too long ago, I agreed to meet with a man I’d been exchanging e-mails with on a Catholic dating site. He was going to be visiting the area to meet with his spiritual director (so I figured he couldn’t be an ax-murderer, right?) and wanted to meet for coffee. After finding out his last name (so I’d know what name my friends should give the cops in case I turned up missing), and talking on the phone, I said agreed. It had been years since I’d had anything remotely resembling a date, but I offered it up to God and His will, figuring He’d cover me.

And in one way, it was a successful date. No, he didn’t sweep me off my feet and propose we jet to Scotland for a lavish wedding in a castle, and there wasn’t even a love connection, but I was confident and myself. In fact, I was so confident, I think I made this man nervous. He was having a hard time coming up with things to ask me about. And although the conversation was ok when it got going, there wasn’t a love connection. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

The imagination weaves other storylines, too. In lieu of an actual date, the mind creates idiotic scenarios that could rival some of the best of Hollywood’s “meet cute” plot lines. It’s usually completely unrealistic, ridiculously detailed and takes place in a locale that the other person would either a) never show up in, or b) a place you tend to frequent, making option A all the more likely. Something like this:

“‘I meant to call you,’ he would say, as I swooned glamorously over his arm, defying gravity in the best of all possible ways. ‘But I was [hit by a cab; gored by a wild bull; in hospital with cholera]. Come to dinner with me and I’ll make it up to you.’”

From “The Deception of the Emerald Ring” by Lauren Willig

Imagine if the brain power we women wasted coming up with these scenarios was used for good, or even constructive prayer time, rather than silliness? What couldn’t we do?

“Truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. I don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my whole life, who says I know, me too. I want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?”

From “The Giant’s House” by Elizabeth McCracken

I have a desire to be wooed. Most women do. I’ve tried pursuing before, which is what the world tells us we should do, but that didn’t work. It didn’t feel altogether natural, either. And sure, there’s a definite allure to the whole love at first sight thing. But being friends first takes time. It takes patience, which a lot of us pray for, but don’t have. We can’t wait on our own. We need God’s help.

The writer once I was

I used to write all the time. I have folders upon backpacks filled with scribblings. Poems, random musings, journals, fun quotes I found and saved in the hopes of topping chapters with one day, the unfinished Elizabethan love story (72 pages worth!) I started when I was 13. :) I wrote my first story when I was five, and as the years went on, I was almost ridiculously prolific. I was a sucker for lengthy, sometimes almost Dickensian descriptions, historical accuracy and multi-syllabic words. And letters, oh the letters I used to write to my cousins, the occasional overseas pen pal, my best friend from kindergarten (we wrote each other letters beginning in third grade and didn't talk on the phone until high school. We kept on writing in to college, and didn't see each other physically until I was in her wedding in 1999). I've kept most of the letters I've received, and wonder often about the fate of mine.

In the last several years I've started short stories (and actually finished a couple), two novels (one made it to 30-some odd pages, the other about 15...so far) and only a handful of letters (most, in fact, were only cards). Last year a good friend from high school and I decided we would write letters to each other (she now lives in Texas). We wrote each other exactly one letter a piece and then I, well, I kept meaning to write, and then months went by and I haven't written her a letter since.

And I was a dedicated, one might say obsessively Victorian-like journal keeper. They're all mismatched, my journals, some large, some small, one a book of bound graphing paper, filled to the margins. Some of my entries are about serious things like family events or school. Mostly they're silly musings about boys who I spent entirely too much time worrying about and obsessing over. In recent years, there have been more writings about faith and my walk with and toward God. But the last time I did any serious journaling was in Rome and immediately after I returned. A year and a half ago.

And of course the ironic thing is that I write every day. I'm lucky in that I make my living writing. It's what I got that creative writing degree to be able to do. But I feel like many of my stories for the paper are mundane and lacking in creativity, boxed in by inch counts, dumbed down and shortened for people who don't have long enough attention spans to read to the end.

Maybe that's my fault. But sometimes I wonder if my creativity has vanished or simply gone on an extended hiatus. I have ideas occasionally, but I'm lucky if I get beyond writing them down. They come at the most inopportune times, while I'm in the shower or getting ready to go somewhere. The majority of the time, the last thing I want to do when I get home from writing at work all day is sit and write some more. Writing used to be a joy for me, a necessary outlet almost as integral as breathing. Now, mostly, it feels like a chore. I at least tried to keep my hand in at one point. Three or four years ago I used to play a game with my editor: I would try and use big words in stories and see how many she'd let me keep, or how many actually made it into the paper the next day. Once I managed to squeeze in triumvirate, and was most proud of using prestidigitation several years ago. Now we have this new rule that no story can exceed 20 inches (roughly 500 words), and I wonder how much further we can be curbed and still be able to tell a decent story.

My editor now jokes with me occasionally that I'm really sitting at my desk writing my 15th novel (the number keeps growing) and that I'll complete it by lunchtime. If only. It was never my dream to write the Great American Novel, not really, but to have one well-written one that I'm proud of published? Now that I dream of.

And I know this post smacks somewhat of bitterness and regret, but I don't want that, ultimately. God gave me a gift in my writing ability, and I don't want to waste it. Sitting here typing, I realized I can do something about that. While I think Lent would be the ideal time to rededicate myself to writing creatively or introspectively every day, I need to get back in the habit, and I shouldn't have to wait until next spring. I should be able to discipline myself to do that, writing a little (not on the computer, but by hand), whether it's journaling or something creative, be it ever so meager an effort, for the next 40 days. I'll start today...well, as it's after 1 in the morning, later today, although this post should count, right?

I pray for the intercession of St. Francis de Sales and St. Maximillian Kolbe, patrons of writers and journalists, for their help in sticking to my resolution. Counting it out, 40 days from today is August 14th. I can do that.

I just realized August 14th is St. Maximillian Kolbe's feast day. I sit here amazed.