False Starts

I talked earlier about the artist who is trying to capture something in one corner of his canvas but keeps discovering that what he has painted is not what he had in mind. He keeps covering his work over with white paint each time that he discovers what it isn’t, and each time this brings him closer to discovering what it is. This has happened again and again for me in writing. I may think I know who a certain character is or how an essay should proceed, so I make a stab at following this ghostly blueprint in my head. Then it turns out that I’ve been wrong, wrong about the character. I had the sandwich board she was wearing confused with who she really is. So I white it out and try again.

I found out something important about false starts when I began accompanying some members of my church to a convalescent home once a month, where we were conducting a worship service. After that first dismal visit, I thought I knew who the residents were and what they were capable of, what they were all about. If I had started to write, I would have written about them with confidence, and I would have been all wrong.

I have been going there for four years now. I don’t ever really look forward to it, but I keep going back for reasons I do not quite understand. Perhaps I am subconsciously hoping it will help me get into the Junior League someday. Still, the moment I walk in and smell those old people again, and find them parked in the hallways like so many cars abandoned by the side of the road, I start begging God not to let me end up like this. But God is not a short-order cook, and these people were once my age. I bet they used to beg God not to let them end up as they have.

At first many of them look strangely alike, just as many people at the Special Olympics bear a familial resemblance to one another. Then you start to notice that some have lambskin chaps or blankets, some have manicures, some have the teeth they were born with, some have sores, some don’t, some were clearly beautiful in earlier days, some weren’t, some seem to know where they are, some remember lines from the Lord’s Prayer, some sleep, some try to sing along on the simple hymns and clap in rhythm. But even the ones who clap all clap differently. Some clap along frailly, almost in silence. One woman claps with great gusto, as if she’s at a polka. One old man claps once, as if to kill a fly. My favorite, a woman named Anne like me, is someone I’d first pegged as a muzzy, emaciated woman who smelled of urine and baby powder without a whole lot going on inside. She isn’t what I thought, though. I still don’t know who she is, but I do know now who she isn’t.

She can never remember my name, and when I tell her every month, she pantomimes smiting her own forehead. Then we both smile. I suspect she is pulling my leg. When we sing "Amen," she always sits with her hands in her lap, palms cupped together as if there might be a tiny bird inside. With each clap, she moves her hands a tiny bit apart, as if she really does want to clap along, but at the same time she doesn’t want to let the bird get out.

If I’d written about her and the other old people after the first few visits, the smells and confusion would have dominated my description. I would have recorded our odd conversations—one woman is convinced we went to school together; another once asked if Sam was a dog—and I would have tried to capture my sense of waste. Instead, I continued to go there, and I struggled to find meaning in their bleak existence. What finally helped was an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, who saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, whom God loves unconditionally anyway. My priest friend Margaret, who works with the aged and who shared this image with me, wanted me to see that even though these old people are no longer useful in any traditional meaning of the word, they are there to be loved unconditionally, like trees in the winter.

When you write about your characters, we want to know all about their leaves and colors and growth. But we also want to know who they are when stripped of the surface show. So if you want to get to know your characters, you have to hang out with them long enough to see beyond all the things they aren’t. You may try to get them to do something because it would be convenient plotwise, or you might want to pigeonhole them so you can maintain the illusion of control. But with luck their tendrils will sneak out the sides of the box you’ve put them in, and you will finally have to admit that who they are isn’t who you thought they were.

Dying people can teach us this most directly. Often the attributes that define them drop away—the hair, the shape, the skills, the cleverness. And then it turns out that the packaging is not who that person has really been all along. Without the package, another sort of beauty shines through. For instance, on a retail-therapy outing ten days before she died, my friend Pammy discovered that she could no longer write her name on checks, and she turned to me and said, "What is the point of being alive when you can’t even sign checks?" I could only shrug and shake my head. But it turned out that the essence of Pammy wasn’t about the things she could do with her hands. Who she was wasn’t about doing at all.

On the first anniversary of her death, I visited a memorial garden at the radiation clinic where she had been treated, and discovered that someone had planted a yew tree there in her honor. The yew was bigger than me and fuzzy, like an Edward Koren character. It looked like it might suddenly come over and hug me. Near the yew were tall flowering bushes—some kind of poppy, perhaps. But almost all of the petals had fallen off, so mostly I just saw a thousand tangled stems growing skyward. Then I realized that the stems were actually connected, and that they bore seeds that would flower again in the spring.

That’s how real life works, in our daily lives as well as in the convalescent home and even at the deathbed, and this is what good writing allows us to notice sometimes. You can see the underlying essence only when you strip away the busyness, and then some surprising connections appear.