{"id":5636,"date":"2015-01-04T12:26:37","date_gmt":"2015-01-04T17:26:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=5636"},"modified":"2015-01-06T16:04:02","modified_gmt":"2015-01-06T21:04:02","slug":"where-to-start","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=5636","title":{"rendered":"Where to Start?"},"content":{"rendered":"

January 4, 2015<\/strong><\/span>
\n Epiphany<\/strong> Sunday<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Later, opening a little journal he kept sporadically \u00e2\u20ac\u201d whole months were missing \u00e2\u20ac\u201d where to start?<\/em><\/span>
\n \u00e2\u20ac\u201d David Guterson, b. 1956<\/span>
\n American fiction writer<\/span>
\n from “Tenant,” short story in New England Review<\/em>, Vol. 33, No. 3, 2012<\/span><\/p>\n

I opened my notebook, the J, this morning, to J44:11 (Volume 44 of the J, p. 11), and found that I had ended yesterday’s session with a comma. <\/span><\/p>\n

“8:20, 38\u00c2\u00ba, did I just leave off yesterday with a comma? Where was I going?” I wrote. “‘God is in the detours of our lives,’ says today’s meditation in The Upper Room<\/em>. Prayer focus: ‘the elderly.’ Easter is in 90 days. I do not know how to get back to where I once belonged. I do not know where that place is, nor what one does when one gets there.”<\/span><\/p>\n

My last post here, and for Holidailies, was Christmas Eve. I began a few more, but never worked up the strength, emotionally, to finish and post them. On Christmas Day, toward late afternoon, I drove for nearly two hours without leaving Dauphin County, past places that held some energy for me. I never got out of the car, just slowed down, if possible, and looked. These places included the house on Second Street where I was taken for pediatrician visits until about 1959, and the place where I went for piano lessons in those same years. I continued to go to physical therapy and saw improvement in my mechanical functioning, at least in my hips and legs. <\/span><\/p>\n

On December 30 I saw a cardiologist, who looked at the results of the stress test I’d undergone in June and recommended a heart catheterization. He also prescribed several medications to “protect” me until that procedure, scheduled for January 12. He didn’t say what, precisely, I was to be protected from. One of the medications lists as side effects “fatigue, depression, and strange dreams.” I already have those things, I thought. I don’t need to take a pill to invite them.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the 90th birthday celebration for Ron’s youngest uncle, I ate two very large slices of pizza but took a sensible pass on the chocolate cake. I woke this morning from a dream I’ve had before, both historically and recently, of walking down a labyrinthine hallway toward a desk on which are piles of papers which I have to review. <\/span><\/p>\n

Today is Epiphany Sunday, two days ahead of the traditional date of Epiphany. Tomorrow is “go back” day, and if I were still in the classroom, I’d be going back to school. I haven’t done any creative work since Thanksgiving, not really, although I have read a new poem every day. This morning I picked up, entirely at random, an issue of the\u00c2\u00a0New England Review<\/em> that I’ve had for at least two years. I read “Tenant,” a story by David Guterson. (You can read it yourself, here<\/span><\/a>.) For the first time in a month I fell into fiction, into reading it, into walking around in the life of someone who is just a slob like one of us, just a stranger on the bus tryin’ to make his way home.<\/span><\/p>\n

I keep the figures of the Magi from a handsome Lenox cr\u00c3\u00a8che on a table in the living room all the time, and a small charm depicting them on my writing table. They were advised in a dream to go home by another road. <\/span><\/p>\n

Where to start? Right where you are.<\/span><\/p>\n

 
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