sundays

on yearning to feel like a writer when maybe i’m not one

January's last bit of daylight crumbles like leftover cake in my clumsy fingers. The stone Mary that’s usually watching over me on my walk home has her eyes wide shut today. Looks like she’s got the hint. Inside her Roman building she promises salvation. A Roman of another kind once told me he liked churches in the mornings, while they’re still empty. Not so much once its Sunday crowd filed back in. I nod to let him know I agree. To let Mary know today isn't her or my day. Tomorrow doesn’t look good either.

I walk to the Greek bakery instead. For baklava that will never be as good as my mothers. The olives and the feta and the newspaper in an alphabet I can’t read remind me of a home I’ve never seen so I’ll buy them for a taste of nostalgia that can’t exist. Nostalgia - its delicate, but potent. Teddy told Don that in Greek nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.

That’s what my Sundays are like now. Nostalgia and low-fat Greek salads to silence the bluebird in my heart that won’t stop singing for a warmer island. I reach for my new summer dress, I hold its poem of cloth and colors and watch it move gracefully. It doesn’t yet realize its career has been interrupted the day I brought it home. Its destiny is to hang like a corpse with the others. It will never see Santorini. I should be writing. I am playing dress-up instead.

For some writers, Sunday nights are for the manuscripts that would land them book deals and an interview in The Paris Review. I wish to god I could be one of them, but I long ago understood I haven’t got the nerve.

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I return to one particular Anthony Bourdain clip. A two minute snippet of a 2011 q&a in front of a Florida State University creative writing class. His signature gold hoop earring is the only sign of the Anthony Bourdain we’re familiar with- the “cool guy” Hell’s Kitchen native, the acerbic Vassar dropout who transformed himself into an Emmy award winning television personality. On this day, and finally, he is just Tony the writer.

Bourdain, invited to share insight on his writing process, appears flattered, a little embarrassed even, to be taken seriously enough to speak to a group of writing students. “Who would want to read about the squalid life of a not particularly good cook?” he asked the room. Turns out more than a few did.

In the last three seconds of the clip, Bourdain smiles at the sole cameraman that tagged along. With eyes a little warmer, a little more genuinely excited than usual, he delivers his closing line. “I’m leaving here feeling like a writer, finally.”

I haven’t found that feeling yet.

Kerouac argued there is a crucial difference between talent and genius. “Genius derived from the Latin word gignere (to beget) and a genius is simply a person who originates something never known before…Nobody but Whitman could have written Leaves of Grass; Whitman was born to write Leaves of Grass and Melville was born to write Moby-Dick.” Is talent, then, just a skilled interpreter? An imitator?

Genius gives birth and talent delivers and here I am, diligently delivering to you all. But I can’t help but feel all of my so-called talent comes from a place that merely got good at adopting others and calling it my own. Oscar Wilde quipped that “nothing that is worth knowing can be taught,” yet greats like Susan Sontag credit their genius to their osmotic relationship with reading so I have to believe the answer lies somewhere in between.

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I don’t know how many stories I have left in me. Every time I finish one up, I am flooded with panic that the words have finally run out.

I step outside.

When you’re a writer at heart and not just by trade, the world will prompt you. I’ll wait for the next story to come to me.

The story is in the waitress at the diner. In the neighbor walking his three-legged dog. In the first memory you thought you’d long ago suppressed. In the Greek newspaper you can’t read (yet).

Maybe this story sounds a little like one Plath or Dickens or King or Wordsworth already wrote. I’m still looking for my own Bourdain moment. So I’m going to write it anyway.

But our little Lilly wrote her first book almost by accident; that book was only a euphemism for trying to grow, yet it insisted to her that she was a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she wanted to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly, because writing can do that. It just burned her up; she wasn't big enough to take the self-abuse of it, to take the constant chipping away—of herself. - The Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving