Nine years ago I left nursing school, in the throes of an anxiety attack brought on by (what I now understand to be) the dog-brained realization that my time with Jeff was limited, and that my energies (never prodigious) were now to be at the disposal of a different set of priorities.
Since then, we’ve been in a slow orbit around the black hole of Alzheimer’s. In 2012, Jeff crossed the event horizon. A definition of event horizon from Wiki: “In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer.” More accurately for me, it means a boundary beyond which the outside observer cannot affect events. It’s where the pull toward oblivion turns inexorable, (as if it ever wasn’t.)
In the true spirit of spacetime inscrutability, I have no idea how long the remainder of the spiral will take, in realtime, to swirl to the singularity. But the path is set, and my influence on Jeff’s breathing moments is small. What this means for me is that, while I haven’t quite shaken hands with What-now, What-now is standing on the nearing shore waving at me with the cocky assurance of inevitability.
So, I’m not a nurse. So, they’d have little use for me now on the USNS Comfort, sailing into Haiti and such, delivering medical expertise where it’s desperately needed. Truth is, (and I say this not in a self-disparaging way, but in a practical, realistic way,) I have no clear-cut skills or training that make me an easy fit for any obvious next step. The only thing I know how to do is observe something and write sentences about it. Hardly an obvious market niche.
The upshot is that What-now has seemed like a bit of a threatening presence. I never have an answer to the sort of questions that What-now poses. Even though there were 700 and a few kids in my high-school graduating class, each of the 700 of us had to, at some point or other, have at least one talk with Mr. Johnson, guidance counselor for the class of ’79. My chat with him went like this: Mr. J: So, what are your plans? Me: Um...I’m going to go to college. Mr. J: Why? It’s hard to reproduce the tone of that “Why.” It was delivered in a way that was meant to convey--Look kid...know why the hell you’re doing something before you do it. I muttered something vague about possible majors, and he let it drop. He had 700 other kids to say “Why?” to, after all.
Mr. Johnson? I still don’t know why. That’s just the pathetic way I am. I settled the issue for 25 years by the grace of two things: One--I knew I wanted to team up with Jeff. On that count I had no reservations. And two--My biological impetus to reproduce was strong enough to let it be the guide, for lack of any other overriding ambition. Once you have kids, there’s no room for “why.” “Why” becomes irrelevant. There’s just stuff you have to do, and your hobbies and interests become things you squeeze in around the edges. You never have to make a significant career out of them, so if they’re not particularly lucrative or impressive it’s no big deal.
Anyway, today I came up with my answer for What-now. It’s not an especially good answer, but it’s my answer. Within the parameters defined by the remaining stuff I MUST do, I’m going to have adventures and write about them. Pick somewhere to go, pick something to do, do it, write about it. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This is a form of making it up as you go along. This is how I wrote four books. I had no real sense of inspiration...no compelling topic for fiction. Simply the compulsion to try it. So, I pulled it, like teeth, out of my own head. Like squeezing toothpaste out of a near-empty tube. The product speaks for itself. Here’s what it says: "That’s a really stupid way to write fiction! No wonder we’re works of wondrous mediocrity!”
Oops. Yeah, well, that’s really still what I’m going to do if something doesn’t roll in out of the mist to fill in the blanks. It is entirely possible that it’s lame that I haven’t come up with a more compelling, meaningful, or at least useful idea than that. But...hang on, let me check my pockets (pat pat,)...let me hold up a blade of grass and gauge the direction of the wind. (___that’s the sound of no wind.) Nope. That’s all I’ve got. I’m going to go places, do stuff, and write about it. Why? Because I want to.
