My father believed in routine. Every day, the same schedule. Every week, the same menu. Every weekend, the same social hours with the same people. Routine, my father said, is the secret to success. Sometimes, when I look at my watch, I think of what he’d be doing if he were still alive. It’s 6:30 AM, I think, he’d be horseback riding right now. It’s 9:00 AM, he’d be listening to classical music and working on blueprints in his architectural office. It’s 5:00 PM, he’d be pouring his first cocktail. It’s 8:30, he’d be reading a mystery before going to bed.
When I told him I wanted to be a writer, he said I just needed to be disciplined; success would follow. But I needed more than that. I needed to learn how to bypass his voice—he was a mean critic who had no faith in my talent—or his own, for that matter. Whatever I wrote, he let me know I had failed him, or worse, embarrassed him. “What will people think?” he’d ask.
After he retired, he decided to fulfill his dream of becoming a sculptor. He bought a chunk of soapstone and planned to shape into a piece of modern art. “How hard can it be?” he said, exuding confidence. It was a lovely, soft gray stone. The man who sold it to him promised it would be easy to sculpt into whatever vision my father had. For days, weeks, months, my father visited the stone every afternoon from 1:00-3:00 PM, but he never touched it. Instead, he took long naps. My mother began to tease him. She named the stone, your father’s pebble. One day my father asked for the soapstone to be taken away so he wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. The other day, on a walk, I found my father’s pebble in a brush pile on the family farm—a gravestone for my father’s dreams.
My father’s relationship with his pebble reminds me of all the talented writers and artists I know who don’t practice their craft anymore. Several of the students I thought were the most likely to succeed in my MFA program, who drew the loudest applause at readings, have never published. Others published stunning first books and then stopped. Where did they go? On that note, I was delighted to discover recently that the amazing Shivani Mehta, whose first book, Useful Information for the Soon-to-be-Beheaded, I so admired, has a second book coming out from Press 53.
My father’s pebble also reminds me of W.S. Merwin’s wonderful prose poem, “Tergvinder’s Stone” and of Vasko Popa’s poems, translated by Charles Simic, about the little box. In both cases, objects serve as metaphors for our relationships with others and our art. In the case of W.S. Merwin’s poem, a man brings a boulder into his living room and begins to bond with it, much to his wife’s chagrin. In Popa’s poem, a little box contains/becomes everything and nothing at once.
The Little Box
The little box gets her first teeth
And her first length
Little width little emptiness
And all the rest she has
The little box continues growing
The cupboard that she was inside
Is now inside her
And she grows bigger bigger bigger
Now the room is inside her
And the house and the city and the earth
And the world she was in before
The little box remembers her childhood
And by a great great longing
She becomes a little box again
Now in the little box
You have the whole world in miniature
You can easily put in a pocket
Easily steal it easily lose it
Take care of the little box
(from The Horse Has Six Legs, an Anthology of Serbian Poetry, Edited and Translated by Charles Simic)
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