I’ve been giving some thought today to the word romantic. I use the word a lot, at least in my head, and am beginning to wonder when the idea of romance expanded to include so many things that have nothing to do with interpersonal love. For example, one might use the term ‘romantic’ to describe a moonlit walk on the beach. That’s a classic example, and it does, in fact, involve two people in love; unless you prefer to take romantic walks on the beach with, say, your dog...but that’s a completely different issue that I’d rather not think about. However, many other things can be considered romantic. Moving to Paris to live in a studio apartment and paint--doesn’t that sound romantic? Spending a year living in solitude in the wilderness, like Thoreau or Abbey, to write and reflect on the nature of life, well, that’s pretty darn romantic. In both of these instances, one is alone, yet the word romantic springs immediately to mind. The problem with this is that it is not the actual apartment in Paris that is romantic in and of itself. It is not the cabin on the lake or the trailer in the desert that is romantic. It is not the reality that is romantic--it is the idea of these things that is romantic.
I have come to romanticize an idea in my own life--the idea of a garden. Notice that I did not state that the garden itself is romantic. It is quite the opposite. In fact, in the creation of our first garden this spring, my husband and I fought over the silliest of things, simply out of frustration. But we were working towards some romanticized ideal. Surely once it was built and we were reaping the literal fruits of our labor, then there would be something magical, something primal, something romantic about sharing in the food we created. Having realized the creation of a garden was not at all romantic, we looked forward to the next step.
This morning and afternoon I spent cooking a meal made primarily with food grown in this very garden. I decided that it would be quite romantic to go out, pick the food, gather it in my skirt, and bring it inside to prepare. Quite to my dismay, I discovered there is very little magic in the de-stringing of string beans. On my list of Things that are Dull and Mundane, that chore is near the top of the list. Making fresh pesto from the stalks of basil that I chopped down--I’m going to have to label that tedious. And don’t even get me started on the corn. My husband went out and picked and gathered, only to pull back the stalks and silk to find the most snaggle-toothed corn we’ve ever seen. But we’re still serving it for dinner tonight. Maybe I’ll cut some fresh flowers and light some candles, and we can see if an accidental flaming hydrangea and a screeching smoke alarm are romantic.
All I wanted to do was relax, near water, on sand. The beach was too far away to qualify as relaxing--how relaxed can one really get after driving for three hours, knowing that the drive back will be just as long? But lakes--Pennsylvania has a lot of little lakes. (Though we are not as quaint as Vermont, which I recently learned has a website devoted to ‘swimming holes’. Seriously? Swimming holes? Who uses that term anymore?) So off we went, to visit a pseudo-local lake about 45 minutes north east.
I knew it was a bad idea before we left. In the summer, we typically don’t do anything or go anywhere on the weekends. Weekends in August are for those poor souls who have to work during the summer. From June until September, we do everything on weekdays between the hours of nine and four. But this summer, something unusual happened. It rained. For days and days on end, it rained. And there was one bright, glimmering, shining day in the middle of many days depicting lightening bearing clouds on The Weather Channel homepage--Saturday. So we went to the lake. It was a bad idea.
Please recall that relaxation was our goal. We were immediately met with traffic--first with the traffic out of town. There was a car show, and we smiled and laughed thinking we were leaving the crowds behind. Then we arrived at the lake--correction--we arrived in the town that is near the lake. And there was traffic.
An hour after leaving, we pulled into the parking lot of the promised lake. It was packed. There were mini vans as far as the eye could see. If I had not just sat in traffic for thirty minutes on both sides of a major mountain range, we would have turned around immediately.
But instead we got out and spread out our blankets. I changed into my bathing suit in a changing room that only I could possibly be ok with, having spent years using public port-o-potties at hippie music festivals, typically with a wicked hangover on a ninety degree day. My husband--who I love and am thankful is still married to me after many outings such as this--dutifully carried the low-sitting beach chairs into the water, so we could lounge, presumably in a relaxed fashion, with our feet in the lake and our asses dangling mere centimeters above the water. I grabbed my book, sat down, and prepared to relax.
That’s when I heard it. The screaming. It was terrible. It surrounded me from all sides. Literally--in every direction, there was screaming. The screaming of dozens of children. They yelled, they ran, they whooped, they generally were very, very loud, and very, very noticeable. They were everywhere at once. It was a giant, mewling mass of kids under the age of nine. Correction--it was a giant, mewling mass, and a smaller, calmer, more tired-looking mass of parents who could not have cared less. They simply arrived--much like we did, after sitting in the same traffic--laid out their blankets, as we did, and set their kids free. All of the children ran into the lake at random intervals. No child simply walks into a lake. And running into a body of water is very splashy business, and none of it was lost on me or my book, with which I was supposedly relaxing. Several kids boogie boarded into me, despite the clear lack of tide or waves that would justify a boogie board. Finally one admittedly very cute child inched closer and closer to me until he could finally reach out and grab my foot--his whole reason for inching--and I gasped and smiled at him, all the time wondering if his mother was watching. If she wasn’t, he could easily have drown in the seven inches of water; if she was, she should have stopped the inching before he got even remotely close to my-foot-grabbing-distance. Either way, she deserved to be slapped.
It was at this point I realized something--it must be really hard to be a teacher. I love my job--I really, truly do. I don’t even especially love it in the summertime--I’d much rather be in my own classroom in November, working, than on a lake-beach in the middle of August. The reason for this is very simple--in my classroom, no one grabs my foot. No one boogie-boards into me, and no one, I repeat no one, screams.
Thirty-seven more days until school starts. I cannot wait.
I can’t stop thinking about her. Well--I suppose I should say ‘them’, as it technically was a rather large family. However, it was the mother that most interested me. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Today I had lunch at the TGI Fridays at the intersection of Cedar Crest and Hamilton Boulevards. It is important to note that it was lunch--around 12:30, in fact--and also important to note that it was a Wednesday. The woman came in first, with her four sons, all between the ages of maybe seven years and eighteen months. They were all wearing those short sleeve button down checked shirts that remind me of church for some reason, and all had very nice little crew cut hairdos. The mother wore a long white lace dress--rather, a long white lace maternity dress, as she was very clearly quite pregnant with child number five. This already made me sympathetic towards her, and I still sincerely hope that whoever she was, she gives birth sometime very soon to a baby girl.
Shortly after the father arrived, and they all sat down to eat. The children were very well behaved, and I didn’t really notice the table any more at all for quite some time. There were snippets of conversation that drifted over. The father telling the one child to STOP SCREAMING (I failed to point out the irony of this to him), and another rather loud ‘do you want to ruin mommy and daddy’s special day?’ interrogation of the same child. This confirmed my suspicions that it was, in fact, a special day. My friend leaned over to me and whispered “did they just get married”--to which I replied “I don’t think so” and in my head “I certainly hope not”. The woman was, however, wearing the afore mentioned long white dress, complete with a tastefully small diamond cross pendant (which I judgmentally assumed had quite a bit to do with her urge to ‘go forth, be fruitful and multiply’) and she had clearly had her hair done in a very middle school dance fashion. I wondered whether she did it herself very well or had it done professionally very poorly.
The father ordered them both a glass of white zinfandel. Yes, I said both, and she sipped hers slowly enough to make me think that it was a special treat, and that likely her unborn child would be just fine. If she’d been swilling from a flask stashed under her maternity dress, that would have been a problem, but this clearly was part of the ‘special day’.
The cause for the specialness finally became clear when the father produced a card, which he proceeded to read out loud (I’m going to have to be honest here, at this point I was watching them like they were a reality television show). It was their anniversary.
I thought back to my last anniversary dinner only a few weeks ago, at Emeril’s in Las Vegas. I wore a red dress my mother had bought for me because we saw it in a store window and it was on sale. Before dinner we went to see a Cirque du Soleil performance. At the restaurant, we ordered the tasting menu complete with wine pairing. It was fantastic. An annoying woman took our picture and tried to sell us an entire album of them for an insane amount of money (we bought one picture for twenty bucks). I had the best swordfish I’ve ever had. I had the only swordfish I’ve ever had. The banana cream pie was, as promised, exquisite--though I did think that the waiter was a bit pretentious and did not feel that the word ‘exquisite’ should be applied to something as mundane as banana cream pie. But it was quite good.
This woman, in comparison, had to find a way to make her very pregnant self beautiful--and she was very pretty--while, I’m assuming, taking care of the four children she’d already borne. She did her hair--or had it done, damn I wish I knew which one--steamed her dress, hooked her necklace, and got ready to go out for a romantic lunch date with her husband and four children to TGI Fridays at the intersection of Cedar Crest and Hamilton Boulevards. At noon. On a Wednesday. In a long white dress with a diamond cross pendant. And as a very special treat, she allowed herself one glass--of white zinfandel.
Out of all of those thing, I think it is her choice of wine that makes me the most sad of all.
I’m coming back next year. What a beautiful place. It makes me happy that places like this exist. Last week, during the retreat week, there were not only writers, but astronomers and storytellers and potters. I wonder what those evening porch conversations were like.
Everyone is exceptionally nice. I give the name tags some of the credit. It is nice for someone to be able to say ‘Good morning, Tracy’, and respond ‘Good morning, Bill!’ having never met that person before that very moment.
It is raining today, and I’m again grateful that this is a place with indoor plumbing. It is odd, the progression of places like this I’ve explored—from jam band festivals to pagan gatherings to writing retreats—I could use these as measurements, like pencil lines on a pantry door, to chart my progress as a person.
I wonder where I’ll go next.
And come to think of it, you could also chart that progression by quantifying the idea of indoor plumbing. I guess by the time most people make it to the ‘writing conference’ phase of their life, they don’t want to schlep out in the rain to pee in the middle of the night—but they don’t mind doing so to get to the dining hall (provided there will be hot coffee as a reward for the effort.)
Aside from this morning, the weather has been beautiful, and even now it looks like the clouds are beginning to clear over the mountains. We’re on top of a mountain, actually, but because of this, the views of the mountains surround us on all sides. I see the whole picture now—before it was just snippets of photographs on the internet—there’s the sign that I saw in one picture, there’s the great view from another, that flower bed looks startlingly familiar. I want to take my own pictures but know it has already been done.
There are some things I’ve realized that I’ve learned here already—and I have only been here for two days…two days, is that possible? Yes, not even two days—it is not even noon.
Things I’ve Learned Here In Two Days
(Not Taught in Class):
1. Having a southern accent does not mean you are stupid. I suppose I should have realized this before, or at least recognized it as an extremely broad generalization—at best—or an ignorant stereotype—at worst. But it took me 29 years and almost 700 miles to be able to write that with any confidence. Sad.
2. Not many people think they are good writers. Even the faculty, professors and published authors that they are, stand up and say things like ‘I suspect this (poem) may suck’—and they’re not being modest. They don’t NEED to be modest. It is more than clear by the way that we all sit there and ‘deeerrrr….’ sitting next to them at dinner, or the way we suck up, sitting next to them on the patio, that WE don’t think they suck. We think they are celebrities. And in their own way, to the right people, they are. What a wonderful world—where not one person has talked about Michael Jackson or John and Kate or any other male/female name-mush-type person one single time, but many are excited about the memoir class that starts in 40 minutes and/or just asked Anne Hood to sign a copy of her book.
3. It would be easier to quit drinking than to quit the internet. To be fair, by ‘the internet’, I mean ‘the ability to communicate with friends and loved ones’. I had decided that I’d not try to call anyone, and that’s an easy decision because, well, I’d have to drive down the mountain to get a signal. But to cut myself off from email—that was another thing all together, and something that I was not able to successfully achieve. I’ve been online maybe five times since I’ve been here, but really, even that should be considered an accomplishment (akin to a three pack a day smoker cutting down to a pack and a half…it is still not good, but it is BETTER!)
4. If I want to write well, I need to read something other than young adult fiction. No one told me this—which is why it is on a list subtitled ‘not learned in class’—but I’ve come to this conclusion all by myself (yay me!) I learned to write by reading, and if I’m going to become a better writer, I have to become a ‘better’ reader—and to me, that means reading more widely (wider? More wide? See what I mean?) That means leaving the comfort of young adult fantasy and coming of age novels (though I have been meaning to get to work on my own young adult fantasy-coming-of-age novel…) and exploring the world of grown-up literature. Wish me luck on that one, especially come September.
5. If dessert is put in front of me, I will eat it. It does not matter what it is. Note to self: try to avoid places where dessert is put in front of me. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They might have to roll me down the mountain. And I’m not talking about ‘in neutral’.
6. Writing often feels like gambling. You’ll sit there, pulling the handle or dealing the cards over and over, and nothing happens—you get a shitty hand or the 7s don’t line up or the house hits 21. But then sometimes—very rarely—the machine goes off and the fake change sound starts playing, and it dings and blinks and the little red numbers go up and up and up and you smile and think ‘god I love this’! But that is very, very rare. And you always lose more than you win.
7. Writers have kids. They just do. Because, you see, writers are people, and people have kids. And they still write. And they still go to conferences. And they still get published. And everything is ok.
8. Despite this, I still don’t know how I feel about right now. Or should I say Right Now. That feels more accurate. It definitely needs capital letters.
9. I might not actually be a writer. I just gave up on the ‘fiction’ I was trying to write—because it is not, in fact, fiction. I am incapable of writing fiction. Hello my name is Tracy and I can only write memoir or poorly-masked memoir dressed in fiction’s clothing, and by ‘dressed in fiction’s clothing’ I mean ‘changing the names of people and places’.
10. This computer is set to not auto-format lists, which is bothering me. Because after I type line ten, what do you think I’m going to type, stupid computer?
11. I don’t know where people’s stories come from. I must make a mental note to ask that at some point this week.
12. I’m really good at making lists. This list, for example. I’ve written it in maybe 15 minutes. I have two paragraphs of ‘fiction’ in another document (see number nine), cursor blinking at me, dialogue un-startable—and that took me an hour.
13. Writers drink. A lot. Early in the day. And late into the night. People have bars here—full bars—that are set up on the counters of their rooms. It actually makes the random sink/counter/mirror thing that’s actually in the bedroom—not the bathroom—of each room make sense. They just need a few stools and maybe a florescent light or two.
So you see, I’ve really learned a lot at Wildacres. But, to be fair, I also got ‘ordained’ as a ‘second level reiki practitioner’ at one of my pagan gatherings. And neither Word nor Pages recognizes ‘reiki’ as a word.
