Walk with me, reader. I have become a walker, much to my surprise. I don't walk to reduce my carbon footprint (a lovely side-effect nonetheless), lose weight (still waiting for that to happen) or accomplish tasks. I walk to amble, meander, and meet the occasional toddler who just learned to walk themselves, yesterday.
I'll tell you straight up that I am not smoking, so there may be some irritability, some snappishness. Truly, I'm not. Any moody storms will be quick and sure to pass, not to worry, because I am the beneficiary of an efficient nicotine delivery system. It is located on my left arm in the form of a patch. How is that going, you want to know? In time. In time, I'll tell you.
It's not that I want to make you wait (I'm not one of those who delights in some perverse way at holding out, not me at all) rather, I want to protect and nurture this new feeling of drawing in, holding close, not choosing or deciding on an outcome before the scene has even had a chance to play itself out.
So we'll walk and admire the canvas of greens put before us in spring, sniff earth smells, and hurl a stick to water for a while to watch the young dog's muscle and joy when she dives in after it. My whole life I have walked only to get from point A to point B. Same with the telephone. Hello? What time are we meeting? See you then, I have to go now.
I have lived, on reflection, to get from point A to point B. How very American. How un-Zen. Such a lot I have missed focused straight ahead, straining to influence, impress, solicit imprimatur. Although there is something seductive about the scoffer-type, the one who says, to hell with that and you, this is my house and you are a guest, I don't want to exchange my type of chip for that type of chip.
You know I harbor a secret desire to write, string just the right word here with that one there and build a story that opens the curtain for a glimpse of the mystery. One that explains, inadequately and perhaps just for a moment, the ambiguity of love. I do write, you say? Well, yes. I do write, it's why you know anything at all about me, isn't it reader?
But I tell no stories, I weave no threads of truth into a canvas that, unfurled, narrates a picture map of life. I pick book after book off my shelves that do just that thing, I read fiction with highlighter in hand, notebook at my side, to re-read, re-write, marvel at word pairings, word symmetry, word progression.
I get that same feeling sometimes reading the non-fiction in the New York Times or the New Yorker, but it's not non-fiction I yearn to put on paper. Some local writers summon me too: Trevor Bartlett can turn a revealing phrase, Gina Carbone can make me sit through a movie (trust me, that's a big one) and Heather Mackenzie makes me wonder every week why she never tackles the question of sexually transmitted disease.
Dan Brown? Not so much. I'm envious of his bankroll, and the themes in his blockbuster are good on the face of it, but the transparent formula seems simply a mass-market version of my fifth grade discovery of Sidney Sheldon.
Lean in, I don't want to say this next too loudly, for fear of scaring off my continued attempts at writing. I think (I hope) there is a story in me. I handle my well-worn copies of "Art and Fear" (Bayles and Orland), "If You Want to Write" (Ueland) and "Sifting through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way" (Bukowski) and hope and wonder and write and wait.
I walk. Idleness, say all good writers who write about the craft, is the essential beginning. That toddler? The one who learned to walk yesterday? We offered her a flower from the garden, we labeled them, yellow, red, soft, tall, short. Each word a new universe.
Take my hand now, on our walk. Just for a minute, help me down this incline. I won't hold on too long, or too intensely. My hand I can pull back, my heart, I cannot.
Walk your fingers to the keyboard and e-mail suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.
