Stories always stay

dispatch 15

Hi friends,

Somehow I let it slide that last month, (on the 14th!) was my six-month anniversary with this newsletter. While six months may not seem like a long time, I can’t tell you how much this little experiment of writing for myself has impacted my life. I appreciate this space, and all of you, so much. You’ve kept me writing and creating consistently in a meaningful way that I really enjoy.

When I was little my mom enabled my love of half birthdays by making me half cupcakes (regular cupcakes, each half iced differently), singing me half of the birthday song, and generally not getting in the way of my joy. I will take any chance to celebrate a half birthday, and snoozeletter’s is no exception, so I’ll be running discounted subscriptions through the month of February. You can sign up at the button below.

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Our heroes on an adventure. Image by Jules Feiffer, via this site.

Stories always stay

When I was small my mother would read to me every night before bed. It was a secret time between us, a moment of magic. An escape into the pages of a book, a portal to other worlds.  A half-hour adventure just for us. She invited me into this thing that she loved, the act of reading, and it became a lifelong passion, the longest of my life.

We read a lot of things. The entire Little House on the Prairie series, The Boxcar Children series, Bridge to Terabithia. My mother refused to touch my Babysitter’s Club books, absolutely forbade me from picking up anything by R.L. Stine. She preferred her idea of the classics. I read with other people, too. With my mother’s friend, Phan, who I remember best as a competitive fencer. Of all of the adults who orbited my early life as an only child, I liked reading with her best. During the long summer afternoons when she would sometimes babysit me, we would read together, separately and in silence. There is gentle companionship in comfortable silence. 

Sometimes we’d admit defeat, our heads spinning from too many pages turned, and internal adventures endeavoured. When that happened, we’d head to the heavy, humid air of the front yard where she’d teach me the basics of swordwork. I became a tiny knight, stick clutched in my hand, lunging across the lawn into an adventure of my own. Both of us were fierce, small things united in a fight against an invisible enemy. Phan is an adult that stays in my memory because she played like children play, wholeheartedly. We recognized each other that way, and so the memory of her has not faded in the way that other adults have. She was not too busy or disillusioned to build new worlds with me. She did not treat me like a child, and I can still feel the warm light of her respect and how it made me feel.

I don’t remember how old I was when she left, just that she did. And on the last day, before she moved away, she pressed a small bag into my hands. The Phantom Tollbooth, in paperback. Its blue cover was immediately comforting. It’s still comforting to me, though I’ve owned countless versions since. I didn’t understand that Phan was leaving yet and her leaving gave the gift a bittersweet edge in the remembering. It’s still there, an extra hook into the fabric of my memory, beloved person tied to a beloved book. There are so many people and things that we lose along the way. But stories always stay. She taught me that.

When I look at it now, I think she knew I was lonely. Only children often are, though I think that’s why our imaginations grow so vast in the space that’s left. And in those pages of one boy’s escape into the adventures and friendships of his imagination, I saw that I never needed to be alone again. Reading and learning as escape are something I immediately understood. There have been books that have mattered to me since, but none have had the staying power of Tollbooth. I have read it every year since I opened that gateway paperback, weaving it into school assignments and work assignments, my recovery, my life. 

There is something special about sharing a book you love with another person. Like giving them a tiny gift of yourself and asking them to be careful with it. It’s the same with music, sometimes film. A small confession of the precious. A hope that you are not wrong, that in this giving your love will grow and not be tarnished, judged, or ridiculed. That it won’t be taken for granted.

There is nothing like the heartbreak of the giving not being received in the way you had hoped. There is never a sharper blade than the dismissal of something you love by someone you could love. I’m paraphrasing, but I always remember reading a quote by Jean-Luc Godard about how lovers who do not like the same films will inevitably divorce. There is only so much love and care you can pour into any kind of relationship if that fundamental understanding isn’t there. To love the same things, the same words, the same poem, to cry at the same song is a special kind of intimacy, a special kind of understanding. 

There is vulnerability there, in the giving. In the taking, too. I have hated things that those I love have loved and it has hurt me deeply to find those points of difference. I think that is sometimes called codependency but I think it has something to do with wanting to be seen. To be understood, and to understand. The books and the movies and the songs are stand-ins for parts of who we are or who we want to be. Who we think we are. 

The things that we collect over a lifetime shape us in ways we cannot describe or even begin to untangle. For me it was books, and really this book is the start of it all. The story of a boy who escapes into his imagination and finds that there is always something to learn. Always some courage to test. New friends to cherish. 

Assorted, rad things: 

• Remembered Rapture: the writer at work by bell hooks: I learned about this book through an issue of Mason Currey’s newsletter recently and immediately reserved it at the library. I LOVE to read writing about the act of writing almost more than I like to read anything else. It’s no surprise that this is beautifully written and intense, but what I love about it most is the genuine joy hooks so clearly felt when writing. I often lose the joy thread of creativity but this brought me back.

• Don’t Look Up: (Netflix) This movie made me feel BLEAK. I laughed and also felt incredibly uncomfortable the entire time. A lot has been said about the portrayal of a Trumpian president and a clickbait-seeking, indifferent media, but I also thought the really cloying portrayal of meaningless liberal gesturing was spot on. Mainstream politics will never solve anything.

• The Lost Daughter: (Netflix) A lot of folks didn’t like this movie, and to be fair if it has Olivia Coleman in it, I would watch several hours of paint drying. But I actually really liked it? A story of a deeply understandable but also deeply unlikeable academic and mother who is alone on a holiday somewhere in Greece and her entwinings with a rich family from Queens. It was beautifully shot, well-acted, and the male characters are treated carelessly as plot points, in a way that I hope was an intentional reflection of how non-male characters are so often treated. Coleman’s low boil of fury and her need to make aesthetic order of that which won’t be ordered was gorgeous and haunting.

thank you, thank you, thank you for being here,

lisa

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