themillions.com
August 17, 2012
Because summer in Beirut was so brutally hot and because the
grandparents missed their granddaughter and because the dream was still
alive and I had signed up this winter for a low-residency creative
writing MFA program in Tampa, which required me to travel from Lebanon
to the Florida campus for 10 days in June, I began to sketch out an
entire summer in America, anchored by that MFA residency and then two
weeks at a writing conference four hours north of New York City.
Key to the plan was leaving my daughter in Illinois, where — with my
dad’s recent death — my mom had recently bought a house on six
acres, near my wife’s parents, Steve and Claudia, who lived in the same
small town. All three were retired, and could do pretty much anything
they wanted. But the world was a big place, and sometimes you stayed
where you felt most at home.
Children can be an anchor. During the two weeks I was at the writing
conference, where was my wife? Mostly in Yemen, where she met a boy
who said he cowered in the rocks one night after what was an apparent
American airstrike, waiting for daylight to try to find his father and
brother. When the sun came out, he found them, scattered in pieces, a
red sludge.
Once upon a time, she and I lived in Turkey and Iraq. And before
that, it was Saudi Arabia, where our little girl was born. Before all
that, it was a big job in New York, which I left to walk along the
ocean. Why did I do that? I’m still trying to figure it out.
I can be a private person. Shy. It was a strange experience to hear the long-time director of the writing conference, Bob Boyers,
stand in front of a room and talk about having lunch with the same guy
four times a week, for 26 years. I’m not sure I’ve had lunch with the
same guy four times, like, ever.
Ever since it was up to me, I suppose, I’ve been on the move. Early
on, it was hitchhiking across the West, fishing in Alaska, a
summer doing construction in Hawaii. I made it to all 50
states, thinking that mattered. Then I took a newspaper internship in
Cambodia, where I met my wife. Eventually, we made it in New York, but
then I decided to take that walk. Then Kelly said, OK, it’s my turn. So we moved to the Middle East.
So now it’s a life in Lebanon, and the decision to leave, and then
the decision to attend this conference, where everyone hopes someday to
succeed, whatever that might mean, but for now we sleep in the dorms.
There’s the green poster on the door, about sexual assault, the number
to call, how you shouldn’t wash your privates. The handicapped bathroom,
with its flickering light and half-empty bottle of male body-wash. The
thin carpet and the poster about studying abroad and the faded photo of
an RA, whose favorite color is blue. Favorite hobby: watching movies.
In the dining hall, it was all you can eat — and I couldn’t stop,
could you? We were all getting older, larger, with sophisticated
appetites, as if we were almost a different species than the
highschoolers on campus for their own summer improvement programs —
dancers, jazz trumpeters, math nerds — all of the kids chirping at some
higher register, like a dog whistle or a swarm of swallows, this mad
rush at lunch for the french fries, a silver tray of meat, no idea of
the complications that lay ahead. I’d owned leather jackets heavier than
some of them, yet that gave no obvious advantage. Some day, some of
them might be 33 years old, sitting at a desk, trying to write.
It wasn’t easy. I wanted to finish a book. Be a good dad. Get an MFA.
Be a good husband. I’d lined up a teaching job at a university in
Beirut. Got an essay in a publication that might impress you. Called my
mom as much as I could. I couldn’t call my dad, he was dead. When do you
know if it’s actually starting to add up, when you can say, OK, yes,
this is real, it’s actually happening.
Among members of the Skidmore faculty, the answers seemed different. For novelist Allan Gurganus, there was a hotel room in Iowa City, and John Cheever was pouring scotch. For Elizabeth Benedict,
there was a sublet in Washington DC, and she left the oven door open,
trying the keep the place warm, and when the editor visited he was
appalled. Poet Campbell McGrath and his wife moved to Miami Beach, and yet the Genius Grant people managed to find them anyway.
There’s only so much time, and it’s a big world. Wherever we are, we
work at it, making decisions, and then one day — and we may not even
know when it comes — the scales begin to tip and the waiting turns into
the having done it already.
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