Striking Chords

Having a baby is moving to a foreign land. Old customs and language no longer apply. Time moves differently, or, there is no time, but some new mysterious substance you travel through tentatively, ecstatically. You experience daily the small and large before unknown. So, this, too, is possible, you think. And you marvel: other people have known this all along.

In that way, it stirs around the thick mental soup, dislodges ideas once stuck to the sides. Like staring down into a new river in a new city in a new country, travel in baby land can make the mind feel fertile, though enfogged, thoughts fresh. Simple things, like deciphering a bus system, like soothing your baby to sleep, are emboldening, the satisfactions seeming not quite commensurate with the deeds.

At The New Yorker Festival a few years back, I heard Deborah Treisman interview Alice Munro, who said that when her children were small she couldn't write for all the reasons one can't write with small children, but that while they were napping she would pour herself a cup of coffee, and sit at her kitchen table and think about writing, and that this time of thinking about writing was not only necessary, but in some way useful, a kind of storing up, hoarding, priming, whatever the metaphor—good. I like this image of the consummate storyteller, hands wrapped around mug for warmth, very still, brewing. She also said that when she started publishing the local paper ran a story headlined: "Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories." I appreciate the feat of this now. What I might have read as patronizing a few years ago, I now find truly headline-worthy.

All this to say, I have ideas, but not the whatever it is necessary to turn the embryo of an idea into a fully formed story, a "new mother" or "grandmother" into a human being with life experiences, hair color, and furniture. For now, I can only sit at the table with the mug and mull.

But I know the writer in me is still there, and am reassured when I find her, each time I come across some moment or event in the world that resonates in a certain deep, spinal way. I think all writers have this striking of chords, this internal thrumming, that alerts them to the presence of something that might work in their work. Something true which belongs in their fiction. (One can see that this cliche, to strike a chord, started life so happily, so rightly, capturing precisely that strange physical moment of recognition. I feel sad for its demise, as I do whenever I see "a shock of white hair," which is incredibly often, in places that really ought to know better, but still, one sees how good it once was at describing just that.)

I felt the thrum a month or so ago when I read an article in The New York Times Magazine about two high school boys who have won a prestigious science prize for creating software that can recognize emotion, can tell when you are angry, or sad, or excited. The boys are best friends as well as collaborators, superstars as well as nerds, and throughout the time they were building this digital-sadness-meter, the father of one of the boys has been gravely ill.

I can imagine so many wonderful and devastating versions of this story. A Karen Russell story. A Rivka Galchen story. A Nellie Hermann story. And somewhere out there in the great beyond, maybe even a story of my own.

Nouns

Living with a 16-month old, I've been thinking a lot about language and its acquisition. It all begins with nouns, whether the starting point be Mama or Dada, cat or tree, airplane or book.

My son, before he started speaking, developed a commanding point. My husband determined there were in fact two different types of pointing at work. The first: Request for Transportation (bring me there at once!). And the second: Request for Identification (what is that called?). Now he knows verbs, too, but who needs them? He can string together beads of nouns into what my husband refers to as the inverse of circumlocution. He goes straight to the nugget of things. When I asked him one morning if he'd heard the thunder during the night, he replied, "Bang, Bang, Outside." (He loves onomatopoeia.) When he wants to be taken to the playground he says, "Swings, Whee! Outside." (According to my Merriam Webster's Dictionary, the word "whee" is classified as an "Interjection.")

As my mother pointed out, nouns are also the first parts of speech to go, as marbles age and memories fade. "Thing" becomes a great crutch for aging brains: "I need to go to thing," "Please pass me thing." Nouns: first in, first out.

There is something poignant, and downright biblical here. The significance of naming. A creative urge, to name the world. How powerful one feels, learning everyday new names for new things. You can see my son has a sense of himself as a conqueror as he wraps his mouth around a new word, a new thing known. And how terrifying, the reciprocal daily loss of objects, the sudden foreignness in the familiar, as the nouns start to recede.

My first story idea was a half-joke, a half-parody. The parody would be both of itself, and of other stories with extreme points-of-view (an accordion, a horse, a five-year-old). The thought: to tell a story from the point of view of, say, a 14-month-old, using only nouns. I'm quite sure noun-only stories have been told before. And I'm quite sure the results were comedic, and perhaps tedious.

But the idea that perhaps has more meat on its bones is about a grandparent and grandchild. I was imagining a grandmother and her grandson, as one of the greatest pleasures of the last year-plus of my life has been witnessing the love affair between my mother and my son. My son, Felix, calls his grandmother "Nonna," and when he wants to refer to the two of them together, as a duo, which is often, he calls out joyfully, "NonnaFee!" much like celebrity magazines refer to "Bennifer" or "TomCat."

But the grandmother I imagined is not my mother, and the grandson is not my son.

I imagined the grandmother living alone, down the street from her daughter and young grandson, in a small town, maybe in upstate New York. Somewhere pretty, and somewhat depressed. This description might apply to the women in the story, too. The men are missing, or fleeting. The grandmother babysits often, to help her daughter out, and because she likes it. But it is as her grandson begins to speak, to point commandingly at objects and demand to be told what they are, that this grandmother realizes her memory is slipping away. It seems to be slipping faster and faster, as quickly as her grandson gains a word, she loses one. And she does not want to tell her daughter, because she fears she will no longer be allowed to babysit, a noun-less idiot, she will be deemed untrustworthy, a baby herself, who must be watched and cared for, though without all the optimism and boundless potential of infancy.

Story Starters

It's hard for me to judge if my elementary school was really as great as I remember it being. Was Little House in the Big Woods as perfect as I remember it seeming? Was age 8 as good as it feels in the fuzzy room of memory?

But The Common School was undoubtedly great and one of the great things our teachers did was to give us time every week to write stories in our speckled black and white composition books. Just to sit quietly and make things up. I wrote pages and pages of plotless adventure stories (Paris, Or, The Dark Alley, stood out, with its two titles, as particularly sophisticated; a plotless adventure story may sound like a contradiction in terms, but I found a way).

If we were stuck, we could consult a notecard box of Story Starters. Printed in type on each notecard was a first line, or partial line of a story, a line to launch the imagination, to set us fifth graders on our literary ways.

I had a baby recently (though not so recently; the excuse of worthless milk brain may be wearing thin) and it often feels as though all that's left in my writing mind is a notecard box of Story Starters. I have ideas, occasionally they even strike me as good, but I don't have the time or the wherewithal to do anything with them. They sit there, disused, like the heart-shaped cookie cutters in my kitchen drawer. Another time, maybe, I think. Or, maybe better, another person.

That is the purpose of this slog (I'm sure my blogging efforts will never be anything other than slow): to set down an idea that might be worth something to someone some day. Even today.

Many of the ideas I have, admittedly, have something to do with babies. So here goes. First. May it set you on your way.

When my son was very tiny, he smelled of strawberry jam. The top of his head exuded it, like a scone. Nothing was sweeter, or more delicious. If he remained in my arms, or my husband's, this is what he smelled like—his smell, unadulterated strawberry jam. But I noticed at a certain point that when other people held him, he would absorb their smells—a shampoo or perfume or laundry detergent. His little fuzzy pate would somehow hold onto that smell, or the smell would cling to him, like the smokey tank top you bring home from the bar. He would smell like my mother on days my mother visited. He would smell like my mother-in-law long after she'd gone home.

This got me to imagining a young mother with a new baby who begins to suspect her husband of infidelity when every Thursday afternoon the baby returns home from a walk with her father smelling of a particular cloying perfume. The perfume I was imagining is Poison. A young mother I babysat for not long after I left The Common School and life became more complicated smelled of this perfume, and somehow this sense memory dislodged itself when I began to imagine writing this story, were I a slightly different person with much clearer thinking and a good dose of more time.