Thanking Thoreau

When my children were small, during their two nap times (sometimes longer), when I “should” have been making beds or doing laundry or washing the dishes, I’d sit in my favorite maple rocker, still wearing my bathrobe, sipping a lukewarm cup of morning tea, and read. Not everyday, just when I needed to lose myself, to remove myself from the endless demands and expectations of daily married life. And sometimes my husband would find me this way and comment, “Still in your bathrobe. What did you do all day?”

Back then I had no words to explain how important it was for me to experience a life different from the one we both were leading, to escape just for a few hours. The kids were happy and safe. No one got hurt while I traveled to a different place and time. But the laundry did pile up sometimes. And the dishes were still in the sink. I didn’t care. Why did he?

After our separation and eventual divorce, I returned to college to complete the journey I had begun before husband and children. It was in an American literature class that I found the answer to my husband’s question. In his Walden, Henry David Thoreau gave voice to what I had known was so important to my existence—a “broad margin.”

I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning… I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery…in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around…until by the sun falling in at my west window…I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life.

I believe we all have the need to remove ourselves from everyday “have-to’s” and allow ourselves to sit and read all day or enjoy our gardens without pulling a weed or just be still without guilt. It took Thoreau to help me understand that sometimes doing nothing is everything.

What's in a Name?

True Confession:  It was back in the days before MTV, before every inch of celebrity life was examined ad nauseum.  He was coming to Saratoga, and I had front row seats.  Now, before I confess, you have to remember I grew up in front of the television, my generation the first to do so.  Good guys wore white, brunettes were evil, and Native Americans were still Indians with last names like Silverheels.  So given a name like Lightfoot, you know what I was expecting. A tall, dark, mysterious Tonto. Only someone who looked like that could have such a voice.  

There I sat, front row center on that warm August night, best friend on one side, husband on the other, eyes focused straight ahead, waiting for Sings With Magic Throat to take the stage.  When a short, fair skinned blond walked out from stage left, guitar in hand, I assumed he was a roadie setting up. He leaned the guitar into a stand, adjusted the microphone, but never left the stage, the way roadies do.  Two musicians joined him, both carrying guitars. Then the lights dimmed. The curly blond "roadie" lifted the guitar from the stand and began strumming. With the first notes of If You Could Read My Mind I learned an important lesson.  I never judged anyone by his or her name again. 

Hemingway's Husband

Imagine. If Hemingway had had a husband, we'd never have had The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms or The Old Man and the Sea. Wives of writers, famous or not, run interference for their mates. Allow their partners the time to do what they have to do--write. They don't interrupt several times a day just to give their spouse a smooch. They don't carry in the cat "just to visit" or bring in the mail or share an interesting text they just received or an article in the paper they just read or a question on Jeopardy they thought was worthy of distracting the writer from writing. Women get it. No sane wife would ever interrupt her writer husband with anything less than "The house is on fire!" And it damned well better be.

So why then does a husband feel it's perfectly acceptable to interrupt his writer wife's creative process? What drives this behavior? Attention. The husband wants to be acknowledged. "Look at me. I'm here!" No kidding. A quick kiss on the cheek and all your concentration, all your searching for the exact descriptive word, gone. That dialogue you've been looping in your head all morning, lost, because the cat "wanted to say Hello." And your male protagonist, who must survive to make your story work, suddenly gets murdered because you had to kill somebody and this way you won't go to prison.

Fortunately, Hemingway had no husband, no gender-privileged companion to barge in just at the moment the writer hit on the perfect title for his latest work. Otherwise, we'd be reading The Single Old Man and the Sea, and the focus of Death in the Afternoon would not be bullfighting.