Pencil, chair, courage
and two eggs, please.
Yesterday I found myself reading “Two Eggs, Please.” to three rapt children at the Montclair Flea. Not random children, children of my friends, but I wasn’t expecting a gaggle, I’d only made plans with one, the others we’d just run into.
The best part of reading to children is when they start to shout things, relating to the characters and the action, in this case, what diners they’ve been to, with a counter and swiveling stools — Holstein’s! Bobs! — and how THEY like their eggs, if they even like eggs?
I love how big the coffee cups are in this book. They are the same size regardless of the animal. The mouse sips from a cup that’s bigger than he is.
*
Earlier in the week, on the F train from Penn Station to DUMBO, a dance troupe came through the car, the same guys I wrote about two weeks ago: “Fill the cap fill the cap fill the cap.”
A woman dug in her purse. She didn’t have bills but she fished out coins. “Anything but killing and robbing,” she said, as she put the money in the dancers’ hands. They bumped fists. There might have been an Amen.
Tears in my eyes, then. For most of my life: a commonplace thing, rare in the last couple of years. At the last funeral I went to, I apologized to friends who were crying. “I can’t cry,” I said. “It’s the meds I’m on.”
Now, in the train, I thought: maybe the meds aren’t working anymore. Or maybe they are working extra well.
Randomly every few weeks I remember that my friend Hobbs was killed right before her fortieth birthday — it was her funeral where I could not cry — and that she is survived by the draft of the book she was writing for many years.
And that slams things back into perspective for me. I take the pencil out of my hair, return butt to chair, banish despair to a corner of my mind, and keep going, on my own book.
Behind the Pen
Unnameable Books: 615 Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn
Wednesday, September 17 @ 7 PM
I’ll be reading from my story, JUNCO & WOLF, which will appear in the winter issue of A Public Space. This story is inspired by my year studying in Moscow. No one dies in this story.
The other Public Space fellows will read, and then we’ll have a conversation about craft, language, translation, folklore, and literature that inspires our writing.
Details here. Come!
Divinity School goes out every Sunday at sunset • if you’re always looking, after some time you’ll have seen
