Like Love, Sort Of

Over the past few years you have been faithfully reading the stories I have written. Thank you. I hope there have been some you liked. And, surely, there were others which left you flat, or worse.

But, that’s all to be expected. As, I’m sure, there were moviegoers who liked, maybe even raved about, the movie Ishtar. There you go. As with liking a movie or not, liking a story or not is really only a part of what stories are about. I did not like Ishtar when I saw it. I am pretty sure I walked out before it ended, but you know what? I still remember it. It has become a piece of me. I even enjoy the not-liking of it.

A story, or a poem, a photograph or a painting, a sculpture, or a film, as a medium through which a relationship is established. It is through that, that a connection is made. And the connection can be a deep one, with several working parts.

The connection between a writer, say, and the reader, is a relationship forged through the medium of the story.

And too, there is a connection, a relationship, made through the story, between the person whose story is being told and the writer who tells it.

Why am I telling you this? Because I believe that the reader is owed, from the writer, both truthfulness and faithfulness. Truthfulness to the subject, to the story, and to you, the reader. And at the same time, there is a bond of faithfulness between the writer and the mystifying muse: that person or that force that is the source of inspiration for the story.

Let me explain.

I often find myself waiting for a story to come. For the words to come. I feel dry. Barren. I feel at loose ends. I try thinking in the shower. Not thinking in the shower. Thinking of nothing, as if that were possible for me.

I am only now coming to appreciate that worrying about waiting for the words to come, is fruitless. Stories are not about the words. Don’t get me wrong. One right word in the right place can make or break a story. The right word refines, clarifies, intonates, and conveys, the story. Finding the right word is both arduous and essential. It may take draft after draft after draft to find the right one. But… that is the work part of story writing. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don’t.

I once wrote a story about an older man I’d known many years ago who lived across the street from us. He was a grocer and he mowed his lawn several times a week, like going to mass. In the spring, the heat of summer, and into the fall.

Late one afternoon, a year or so ago, I was in my own back yard mowing my lawn. The sun was lowering and the green of the grass could almost make one cry.  And, as I pushed the mower, that same man, Vito, who is long gone, was there with me, pushing his mower alongside me through the grass.

You may have read the story.

On that late-afternoon, when Vito came, I ran into the house and stood at my desk and typed the story he’d brought with him.

As I typed, I watched him roll the mower out of the garage and onto the lawn. I saw Angie waiting for him in the kitchen.

It was his story. The story he brought with him. I used his name because I felt it would disappear if I had called him Fred or something like that. His wife, Angie, too. I thought of her along with Vito. What she might be thinking. It was Vito whose voice I was translating, transposing, to the page. I was afraid that if I changed his name, I would be unfaithful and he would take his story away.

Sometimes, a name comes and brings a story with it. A person I may never have known but who, for a while, I come to know. Like the two men on a bench looking east out over Gloucester harbor during COVID, or Adelaide on the beach, or Sedge, Malachi and his mother, Sy Spiegelman, Camus, Sloane and Mona, or Meyer Rothstein and Moishe Feingold eating a Thanksgiving dinner together.

And then, sometimes, a story does leave. Picks up and goes. As if it had come looking for someone else.

Oftentimes, after a story has been told, it feels as if no story will ever come again. That I have told the last one. That there will be no more stories. That someone else will be the one to whom the stories will come.

Then I despair. My mood drops. I am sad. It affects my days. I feel lost.

I need them. I am sad to say that. To admit that. As if it is a shortcoming. A lack of faithfulness within me. That sounds so self-centered. It is, I know. Thinking like that. That makes me despair all the more.

The stories, their souls, come only when I don’t beg for them. Don’t try to conjure them.

They cannot be conjured. They won’t come. You can sit at your desk, me at my desk, and wait. You might as well take a walk. Make coffee. Call a friend. Speak with the cashier in the supermarket. Take a nap. Mow the lawn.

A story is like love. Love resists conjuring. Forcing. Love, I believe, comes when it comes. And when it does, it lives in you. And stories you connect with are like that. Like the people you love.

Like a train, when a story comes, you get on it and see where it goes or you don’t. It’s your train or it’s not. You have to be on the platform. You can’t make the train or a story come by wishing it into being. Like love, sort of. Or like waiting for the cat to come home. Cherish it when it does. And cherish the readers when they come, too.

Thanks to all.