Falling Through Space (27 page)

We went to bookstores and record stores. We went to an athletic shoe store and bought Nikes and rubbed elbows with people in town for the marathon. We walked in the park and saw the castle. We went to The Museum of Natural History and marveled at the dinosaurs and saw the free movie twice. We
worked
the city from eight in the morning until eight at night. There were many things we left undone. We didn't see the Statue of Liberty and I regret not taking Marshall to Yankee Stadium, where, he reminded me, Babe Ruth hit his hundredth home run. But that has always been the wonder of New York City. You can not exhaust its possibilities in a thousand visits. You always leave things half-finished and undone. There is a table in the Egyptian Galleries that contains a handkerchief that is the first clue that led to finding King Tut's tomb. A curator of the museum drew me a map to it so I could take Marshall and show him that and in the excitement of the morning I forgot to do it.

“Y
OUR CHILDREN
are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself,” wrote Kahlil Gibran. How he knew this is marvelous to me, since I have striven so long and hard to learn it. The rules I discovered while raising my own three sons are simple. You have to let them go. You have to let them ride off on their bikes when they are seven, and you have to stop giving them money and advice when they are 21. Of course, as long as you are giving them money you will think you have the right to give them advice. They will resent the advice. If you raised them, it won't be a thing they haven't thought of for themselves.

Nothing that you say now will help. They have to find their manhood. They have to forge their sword. Alone in the forest, like Siegfried, with only the broken pieces of his father's sword for material, they must forge the weapon they will use to kill the dragons of the world. It is very difficult to believe that they are capable of doing this. You must try to see the face of a grown man before you, not the face of the child you taught to tie his shoelaces.

I make it a point to live far away from both my parents and my children. If I lived near my parents I would be sucked into the morass of family problems which is the bread and water on which my parents thrive. They have partaken of this food for so long they think it's nectar. On the other hand, if I lived near my grandchildren I would become their slave. And I'm not slave material.

I believe that the greatest gift I can give my children is to have a life of my own that is not dependent on them. When they come to visit, they come of their own free will, not because they think I need them.

I try not to ask my children too many questions. Every question that a parent asks a child is a leading question. I try not to compare them to other people. And I am trying to learn not to be proud of them. The thing I am proud of today may be the thing they need to stop doing tomorrow in order to grow and change.

I am trying to learn to love them unconditionally, and this is where the money comes in. Giving money to a grown child is giving him power without responsibility. It will keep you from ever having a peer relationship with your child. A relationship where nobody gives advice or hovers or nags. In a peer relationship two people of equal worth and intelligence discuss the world
outside themselves
. They meet as equals and part without sorrow, trusting each other to return with good news. If I'm not paying for it, if it isn't going to cost me money, I can listen to their wildest plans with enthusiasm and respect.

Most of all I want to learn to trust in the future, which is always full of surprises. I am fiercely independent. So is my father. He is 85 years old, and last month, for the first time in our lives, I was able to do something for him that he couldn't do for himself. I went to visit my parents and found him trying to read a book with a plastic sheet of magnifying material he had ordered from a magazine. He is a constant reader. If he isn't working or plotting to control somebody's life, he is reading. In the last few years much of his reading has been about groups who are plotting to control the world. What he reads is not my business. His failing vision is another matter. He had just received word from a third doctor that it was impossible to operate and let more light into his eyes. So he was struggling away with the magnifying sheet and not complaining.

Luckily I had known a lawyer with a similar problem and had seen the marvelous magnifying instruments his wife had found for him.

I left the house on some flimsy excuse and spent the afternoon combing Jackson, Mississippi, for magnifying devices. Finally, in a mall, in a German instruments store, I found it. A raised, lighted rectangle that sat upon the page and made up for the light lost to the retina. I took it home and gave it to him. It was a great moment for me. The next month, in Paris, I found an even better device that fits into the palm of the hand and can be moved more easily across the page. I had it wrapped and shipped to him with a bottle of Guerlain's L'Heure Bleue for my mother.

There was a message on my answering machine from him when I came home last night. In his kind, cultured, vastly humorous, sweet Southern voice it said, “Sister, I was just calling to thank you for that nice, sophisticated reader you got, and I liked the perfume I was putting on myself too. Ten, four.”

A long time ago we had metaphors for all that I have said. Push them out of the nest. Cut the apron strings. These are vast metaphors. Even more important now that we live such long lives. Plenty of time to create real relationships with the ones we kicked out, or the ones we wish had kicked us out a whole lot sooner.

T
HIS IS
Pedro Calderon de la Barca's description of a bluebird. I read this one morning in a doctor's office and have thought of it daily ever since. Every time I see a bird or a branch of leaves or a flower I think of it.

This is the job of writing, to carve indelible metaphors into the mind of a reader. Can't you see, the writer must tell the reader. It is all one thing. Look outside yourself and see that we are all fashioned of the same forms, the seven basic forms of crystals. Look outside yourself. Look at me.

If that is the task, how can the writer achieve it? I think it is like building a wall. Let us suppose that the beginning writer is a man living alone on a piece of land. He wants to build a wall to keep other people from coming onto his land, but he has no tools or knowledge. All he knows is that he wishes to construct a barrier. He collects what he finds lying around, leaves and fallen branches. He stacks these things up. The first wind blows them away.

He finds stones and begins to make piles of them but they are heavy and cumbersome and in short supply, so he soon gives that up. Then he travels to the next piece of land and finds a man who is making bricks out of clay and stacking them up. Our man likes that idea. He goes home and makes a wall of clay bricks, but the spring rains melt the bricks and the wall tumbles.

He meets a third man who is making bricks and letting them dry in the sun before he stacks them up. Our man is very excited by this idea. He goes home and works twice as hard as before. He doesn't care how hard it is to do; now he will make a wall that will hold.

As he works day after day and week after week fashioning the bricks and setting them out in the sun to dry, he begins to imagine a wall so beautiful that other men will come to see it and marvel at its beauty. He begins to make each brick exactly the same size, with sides carefully trimmed. He notices the clay from the banks of his creek makes more beautifully colored bricks than the clay near his campfire. He begins to make long trips to bring back this thicker, redder clay. Now he doesn't like the dun colored bricks he made to begin with. He discards them. He is excited. He has lost his sense of time. He barely remembers to eat. He is going to make the most beautiful wall in the kingdom, the longest and the tallest and the most beautiful. Every day he gets up and works on the wall. He is a happy man. He has forgotten why he is building a wall. He has forgotten that he thought there was something that needed walling in or walling out. He is an artist with a plan and materials and skills. He has become a builder.

My life as a writer has been like that man making that wall. I have forgotten what I wanted from this work. I have never liked celebrity or having people ask me questions. Aside from being paid so I can go on writing there is nothing the outside world gives me in exchange for my writing that is of value to me. I do not take pleasure in other people's praise and I don't believe their criticism.

I love to make up characters and make things happen to them and then make them strong enough to survive their problems and go on to happy times. “Happy trails to you,” I say to my characters at the end of my stories. I nearly always let my characters have happy endings because I wish that for myself and for my readers. I don't want to send my readers to bed with sad or malignant endings.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca lived in Spain in tragic times. His father was a tyrant and the only woman he ever loved died in childbirth. She died giving birth to Caleron's illegitimate child. Because of these things Calderon was forced to have a tragic view of life. He was concerned with guilt. He believed that a man can be responsible through his own wrongdoing for the wrongdoing of another. That the greatest sinner is also the most sinned against. These are deeply tragic beliefs, and yet the poetry with which Calderon expressed these beliefs was so beautiful that it has lasted all these years.

Like a flower of feathers or a winged branch. That is what we want to write. But first we must learn to make a wall. We must find what materials are available to us and we must learn to shape them and we must forget what we were doing it for. If you get lonely, and it is lonely work, invoke the spirits of past artists to stand by you and teach you by their examples. Today, for me, it is Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca, poet and playwright, born January 17, 1600, Madrid, Spain, died, May 25, 1681, Madrid.

S
HE LIVED IN
A small wooden house on the main street of Courtland, Alabama, and the walls of her house were lined with books. In many ways I suppose she was the town librarian since people came there to read and borrow books and sit on the porch and talk about books. Everything was censored in the 1940s so little children could sit on the swings and listen to anything that was being said. They could also read anything on the walls and not be in danger of having their minds corrupted. When I was alone with her in that house our program was set. We spent the hot afternoons on beds reading books and eating pound cake and drinking tea. The phone never rang that time of day and no one came to visit. Even the animals and birds were quiet, waiting for evening. If it was summer, the magnolia trees would be so full of blooms they perfumed the town. Magnolia, honeysuckle, and jasmine mixed with dust from the roads and the DDT we sprayed on the cotton to keep the bugs from eating the bolls.