The Lesson
May. 9th, 2009 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonNot many people realize that it was my Mother who gave me my first lesson in what it took to become a writer. The most important lesson of all really. The lesson of endurance. It was during one of those suffocatingly hot summer nights back in Brooklyn. Our little apartment had no A/C and an open window and a box fan was as good as it got for us. I would lay on the floor trying to sleep, it being for some reason, slightly cooler than my bed. From this vantage point I could see through the cracked door of my room, past the hallway, and straight into the little dining area that connected to the kitchen. My mom would be sitting there over her typewriter at the kitchen table. I would hear her make the keys sing in this pounding, clattering symphony that you can never quite get out of the modern keyboards. She was writing a book, a novel really, about, well, that's her business and her story and certainly not my place to mention here. But the image of her sitting there in the sweltering humidity of a New York July with the cigarette smoke coiling in the yellow light and the roaches crawling up the walls behind her all seemed to her a distant distraction at best. I would watch her quietly hunched over that typewriter... sometimes cradling her temple in thought, sometimes an inspired curl of a smile, sometimes you could see the frustration wrestle with her will. The cigarettes endlessly lit up, inhaled, jabbed out and replaced.
She was some fifteen years younger than I am today.
At this time in my life I thought I would grow up to be an artist. I didn't understand the effort I saw her give the novel, because drawing and doodling for me came easily. I just picked up a pen and an hour later would have a poorly rendered superhero fight. I thought all art was easy, so long as you had the gift or the talent.
I had no idea really what she went through until some thirty years later when I would try to write my own novel.
Until now, I don't think I've ever mentioned that all those nights over the last year and a half... nights of inspired freefalling into the word, nights of crying when the blank page stood defiantly before me... daring, just daring me to sully its purity with my crap.
On the nights when it got bad and my Muse and my Daemon and what little talent I had had abandoned me... I would remember mom at the typewriter and force something to come out of these clumsy fingers of mine.
Art is work. Hard work. She taught me that and being an especially willful and slow child, it took me some three decades to figure out the lesson I spied from her all those years back.
Still it was a lesson that did not come too late in life.
So thanks Mom. I know the move has been tough and me and dad aren't making it any easier. But for what it's worth... you more than any other author... published or not, dead or not, famous or not... taught me to hunker down and do the work.
I love you and Happy Mothers Day.
She was some fifteen years younger than I am today.
At this time in my life I thought I would grow up to be an artist. I didn't understand the effort I saw her give the novel, because drawing and doodling for me came easily. I just picked up a pen and an hour later would have a poorly rendered superhero fight. I thought all art was easy, so long as you had the gift or the talent.
I had no idea really what she went through until some thirty years later when I would try to write my own novel.
Until now, I don't think I've ever mentioned that all those nights over the last year and a half... nights of inspired freefalling into the word, nights of crying when the blank page stood defiantly before me... daring, just daring me to sully its purity with my crap.
On the nights when it got bad and my Muse and my Daemon and what little talent I had had abandoned me... I would remember mom at the typewriter and force something to come out of these clumsy fingers of mine.
Art is work. Hard work. She taught me that and being an especially willful and slow child, it took me some three decades to figure out the lesson I spied from her all those years back.
Still it was a lesson that did not come too late in life.
So thanks Mom. I know the move has been tough and me and dad aren't making it any easier. But for what it's worth... you more than any other author... published or not, dead or not, famous or not... taught me to hunker down and do the work.
I love you and Happy Mothers Day.