writing

The Adult Contingent

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The summer I was 19, I worked in a nursing home in Brattleboro, swing shift from 3 to 11pm, arriving at the hot and busy part of the day and leaving in the generally cool and always quiet night. Being 19 and filled with endless energy, I often worked a double shift, and left at 7 am when just about everyone else in Brattleboro was heading to work.

A few young residents lived in that nursing home – a woman crippled with arthritis, a young man irreparably injured by a drunk driver – but the older residents were there either because they had dementia or suffered an illness, or were simply old and had nowhere else to go.

One evening, my favorite little old woman rang her bell. I remember she had a small bedside lamp and a handmade quilt. When I appeared, she was polite, but she said clearly, Honey, I want a grownup.

I hurried to get the charge nurse, even though it was my job and maybe I should have stayed. I was very young, and the woman was very old – a territory wholly unfamiliar to me.

Early last Sunday, in the last push of moving, I desperately wanted the adults to arrive. I love kids and teenagers dearly, but there’s a time for adults, too. The adults arrived in force, moved us and stayed, and put our house together again, too. They ferried us down the mountain and over the river and up a hill, and took the younger daughter swimming, too.

Eternal thanks.

A camellia
dropped down into
still waters
Of a deep dark well

– Buson

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Classic Reprint

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

 

By chance, I’ve discovered a reprint of The Farm in the Green Mountains by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, published originally in 1968, about a German family who sought succor in my state during the terrible years of World War II. Herdan-Zuckmayer’s writing flows clear as water, pragmatic and thoughtful. How I wished she lived down my road today, and I might ask her to take a walk.

Among the states they (Vermonters) are a relatively poor state, but they are not afraid of their poverty; they don’t love wealth, they have little to gain and not much to lose. This modesty and moderation give them an independence from uncertain times and arm them with pride and fearlessness.

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Soil Writing Exercise

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In a writing workshop I attended years ago, a professor grilled another student about a field she had recently driven by. What emotion did the field evoke in you? Older than me and not a close friend, the student was a woman I admired. A single mother, she was simultaneously brassy, insecure, funny.

The professor kept asking questions: Any moon or starlight? Rock piles? Did a river or trees border any edge?

The woman paused and finally said one word: sad. The emptiness of the harrowed up field evoked a sense of waste. The conversation might have ended there, but the professor pushed a little further, probing, and the woman said she thought the sorrowful emptiness was just one long snapshot of the field’s story.

That evening, we were not in our usual seminar room, clumped awkwardly instead in a half circle of chairs with writing desks attached. The overhead fluorescent lights made the windowless room uglier than it needed to be.

Every now and then, I find myself wondering what happened to this woman, and which way her story bent.

In the end you should probably know your characters as well as you know yourself. Not only what they had for breakfast this morning, but what they wanted to have for breakfast.

– Colum McCann

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The Ole Golly Space

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was about seven or so, my older sister read me Harriet the Spy, a book she liked so much she wanted to share with me, who couldn’t yet read that length of novel.

Early in the book, we hit a plot point of great excitement, when Harriet takes the journey to visit Ole Golly’s mother – her nanny’s mother. Oddly enough, I can still remember the rented townhouse living room where we read, with the glass doors leading out to a balcony suspended over a scrubby backyard.

It’s the ‘Ole Golly’ space I find in reading – and in my own life – forty years later. Open up that door. Introduce me to someone who will make think differently about this life. Clearly, I am no longer seven, my sister and I gnawing on the ends of our braids, but don’t we live the same things in our lives, over and over, and yet all the time changing?

Well, you must realize, Harriet, knowing everything won’t do you a bit of good unless you use it to put beauty in this world. True or false?

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Hardwick, Vermont

Robert Pirsig

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Robert Pirsig, dead at 88, I hear this morning, driving along a rutted back road.

I pilfered Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from my dad’s bookshelf when I was a teenager, intrigued by its title, lured by the lush fatness of reading material. Not that many years later, my dad showed me an article (in the Times Book Review section, maybe?) Pirsig had written about his son’s murder.

What I’ll always remember about that book is the high school teacher who told me the book saved his life. What higher complement to give a writer? And yet every time I think of Pirsig, I think of that essay, too…..

Sometimes I like to think about truth in the image of an old and wrathful Buddhist master who grabs us, shakes us, and shouts, ‘Drop it now!’ Truth can be wrathful.

– Anam Thubten, No Self, No Problem: Awakening to Our True Nature

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Murky Matters of the Heart

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m in the firewood chore time, a task I’m embracing with gusto. Wood stacks satisfyingly, drying for toasty winter evenings sprawled before the hearth, with tea and books and board games. The chore is pretty much zero-loss; if the piles fall down, I’ll restack, a redoing with little loss but of time – perhaps even a gain in the muscle category.

Not so, in other aspects of human life. Last night,  I lay awake late, sucking lemons and reading Jung Yun’s Shelter, a novel about specific family actions with that extremely gray subtext of what I can only call ‘matters of the human heart’ – the moral (or immoral) meanings of our actions, the elements of our lives that mean the very most to us. The novel reminds me of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a family saga about human choice: the uniquely human element that often seems so baffling. What the heck must I do now?

Hence, the pleasure of stacking wood on a balmy August day, with the bittersweet scent of freshly-drawn sap, the dryness of dust on split logs, and the tidy wisdom of ordering a piece of my land for the colder days to come.

Of all the people in the world, he (Kyung) never expected Reverend Sung to be a source of comfort, the first real sense of comfort he’s felt in so long. He’s thrown by it, stunned silent by the possibility that he isn’t so underserving of kindness as he believes himself to be. Kyung sits down and takes the reverend’s hand, squeezing it to convey the volume of things he can’t, and the reverend, in another act of kindness, simply stands there and lets him, saying nothing in return.

Jung Yun, Shelter

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Woodbury, Vermont