outtake

We tell them to kill their children. it's a  phrase i have always hated. The whole idea of comparing book writing to giving birth--oh i get it... the seed planting, the incubation process, gestation, all that. But having children is so much braver. Just knowing or that they can love you breathlessly, keep you captivated, carry you into generations and reproduce a better (or worse you) or they can be lost or hurt or turn on you, it's all such a crapshoot. The input and the output sometimes have no correspondence.

On the other hand, what we write, from one draft to the next, is all dependent on what we choose. Selection is everything and when it falls together or is cobbled together, or even constructed, we have something that we wanted, begged for and worked on. I know, lots of heavy breathing, pushing, and praying, but my darlings, it's a book not a baby.

But back to killing the children idea--this refers to being in love with one's writing and then realize the parts we have been so enamored with are ornament and not substance. Yes, I said to one writer over and over, just get on the damned bus. The backstory with ghosts and dreams, lovely out of body travel, full of meaning, but not really, because there was no body, no thing--at that point. As soon as she got on the bus (her character is on a bus, by the way), we had a character and a journey. Ahhhhh.

I turn the knife on myself in this current rewrite of the memoir the water cycle -- I have snatched the narration from the adult and have given it to the child. So the reflective moments, the searing truths of identity and dispossession--out, gone. Who really cares, get that little girl spinning in the yard--get on the bus. 

So for this blog, i am stashing a couple of those paragraphs that weighed down my narrative for yes, a couple of years. I letting them leave home now (okay back off the metaphor). Fact is, not ditching them...i'm not that out of love. Instead, depositing it here: 

Countries don’t have memories. Countries don’t count names or keep lists. Countries aren’t contrary about how they are remembered. They don’t sit in solace, coffee cold, hands in lap wondering. Their feet don’t itch to move on; in fact, they settle well, plant deep and hard, float on oceans, shrug their hardy mountains, give and take with the celestial and environmental changes. Countries are menaced but not menacing—they suffer their droughts and hungers, they crack from pressure, fissure and drown with a steady and less abstract loneliness. Their vulnerability gives them nothing but heartache.

And the heartache is passed on to those who love them and write their histories on their hands. Grandmother wiping her classes, Uncle turning the pages of the prayer book, thumbs, pinkies, and brittle nails. They stare at the lines mapping the palms, the chronologies crisscrossing from finger to thumb, wrist to knuckle—roadways to and from home. Leaving home etches the longitude and latitude more deeply, again year by year, until life is a thicket of longing. That they hold calmly. This is how I would find my father, in the quiet times, examining the cup of his large hands. Not holding them at a distance checking the long healthy nails, or the exquisiteness of their shape.

 My father’s hands never roughened, not even after years of gardening and shoving boxes around the store, ripping open merchandise packaging barehanded. His had the elegance of a concert pianist. They had his life etched in them. The more years he was in this country and not at home, the more they became a book he read and re-read. I had no country of origin that gathered in my palms like leaves cracking along their veins—not like my father.

Born in a dark corner of Pennsylvania, I lived in the ether of my father’s dreams and memories--they hovered clouds in our house, never letting me see the sky where I was. So the place I walked, the street from home to school, the earth I sifted during planting and picking, the vapors leaving my mouth in the cold, didn’t recognize me. No one did.

 But this is not a story about invisibility, the way society misses a body in the crowd, a black spot in their eyes. And it’s not a story about silence or the unheard child even though sometimes I was, as many children are. This is a story of empty hands—mine haunt me, without the imprint of country or commitment, without loyalty or longing