Never Coming Back(42)

You might think that making your living writing three to five Words by Winter a day would be easy. You might think, How hard could it be for a word girl to churn out a few hundred words at a hundred bucks a hundred? You might think, Aren’t words what she does, who she is, what matters to her?

You would be right, and you would be wrong.

You would be right when it came to someone like John Stein, a self-published poet who paid me to write blurbs for the back of each of his books, five or six of them a year. All the titles were variations on Real Poems for Real People. The latest was More Real Poems About Real People with Real Problems. Words for John Stein were easy.



In his latest volume, the cannot-be-stopped poet John Stein explores territory familiar to all those over fifty or with a family history of colon cancer. “Up There” takes the reader to literally dark places, places most of us care not to venture. And yet by journey’s end, Stein’s devoted followers may find themselves even more grateful for their polyp-free status. Suitable for all adult readers, those who have had their first colonoscopy and those who are contemplating one. Real poems about real people with real problems indeed!





One hundred dollars, please.

But you would be wrong about other parts of it. That words were what mattered to me was true. That words were what I did was true. That words were easy was not.

What matters most is also what hurts most. If you were a person to whom words were living, breathing animals, animals that you loved and whose lives were in your keeping, then you couldn’t take them for granted or treat them flippantly. Instead, you bent your brain into pretzels of strain, trying to find just the right words. You stood up and paced around the room, opened the porch door and stepped out into the cold morning air, roamed your eyes around the stalwart trunks of the white pines as if they held answers.

Easy? No.

Words for me were best sought early in the morning or late at night. In the morning they were just-born babies new to the world, depthless eyes fastened on yours. As the hours floated past they lost that newness, that innocence. They turned guarded and wary. They put up walls. They stood at the parapets with buckets of burning oil, ready to vanquish those who would steal the kingdom. At night, though, they rose again from the weary remains of the day, cool, dark air beckoning them back to the bower. A tiny light began to glow in their bellies. Firefly words floated up and glimmered among the white pines. If you were lucky you could catch some of them, keep them for a while and then let them go.

There was wonderment out there in the Words by Winter world, and sorrow, and regret, so much regret. There was wishing and hoping and more wishing and more hoping. Craft a note from a gay son to his born-again parents who believe that homosexuals will burn in hell. Craft a note from a girl to her lifelong crush, asking him to prom in a way that he won’t be able to refuse. Craft a note from a middle-aged woman to her elderly stepmother, an apology for making her life hell when she was an adolescent. Craft a note like that, do it right, and do it in under a hundred words with a one-day turnaround.

See? Hard. So much harder than you’d think.

Speed and precision were essential. But the hardest part about words-making wasn’t the words themselves but the invisible scaffolding that lifted their black-and-white stick-figure-ness from the page and turned it into heart and soul. Dear Mister or Miss Winter, please help me. Dear Winter, I wonder if . . . Dear Words by Winter, I need your help.

The only way out was through, and what through meant was that you had to transfuse the words you wrote with your own heart and soul. As Jacob wrestled with the angel, as Teresa of Avila contemplated silence, as Jonathan Livingston Seagull tried and tried again to lift his heavy body from the earth, so I wrestled, and contemplated, and tried. And tried again.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the seventies book about the teleporting seagull? Did she really just stick a seagull in there with Saint Teresa and the angel-wrestling Jacob? Did I read that right?

Yes, yes and yes. I put him in there because of Tamar. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, you squawking heavy bird, my mother read you over and over and over again. There must have been something in you that had thus far escaped me. As words were my witness, I would seek it out.





* * *





Can’t we? No. Why not? No. Come on. No.

That was Sunshine and Brown, asking to go with me to the place where my mother lived now. They kept asking, and they wouldn’t stop, and after a while it was harder to say no than to give in, so we all drove down together. Brown held the book of the week, My Side of the Mountain. Sunshine had a notebook and pen.

“Tell us what we should know,” she said. “What to do, what not to do.”

“Don’t tell her she’s wrong,” I said.

“Like anyone would do that?” Brown said. “She wasn’t called The Fearsome for nothing.”

It was more than that, though. Different from arguing with an ordinary person about a point of fact, the way Sunshine and Brown and I might do when playing Jeopardy!

“It’s more like training yourself not to correct,” I said. “It’s figuring out how to listen. To whatever she’s saying, even if it doesn’t seem to make any sense.”

“Follow her,” Sunshine said, and I nodded. Yes. Follow your mother wheresoever she goeth.