A dog-eared novel

Here's a short piece I wrote several years ago that I came across today:


She had obviously come to the mall for the same reason I had: to escape the 100° heat. My apartment had become an oven about noon and I had a stack of research articles that I could read just as easily in the frigid air of the Food Court as at home all asweat.

She clearly had no such agenda. She carried two big white plastic garbage bags drooping with the weight of her possessions, a man’s winter parka, a big paper bag rolled over at the top, and a cup from Taco Time out of which she sipped from time to time. I could see that she wore a couple of sweaters over her men’s slacks—all of the clothing old, all of it poorly fitting except for the sturdy black tennis shoes on her feet.

She sat first at a table one row over and five down near the Orange Julius stand but just as she was getting settled, a large handsome Hispanic family spread to part of her table. She was immediately distraught, her eyes shifting between the now shrunken elbowroom and her bags. Without a word or even a real look at them, she gathered everything up and moved to a larger table where she spread her possessions in three chairs and sat in the fourth, closer to me now but with her back towards me.

For the next two hours, while I read about botanical therapies for hypertension, underlining quotable passages, and I ate teriyaki chicken and drank iced tea, she sat, occasionally mumbling to herself, shifting in her seat, wiping her nose, moving the bags around.

I was hyper-conscious of her there, wanting to offer her something, anything. But I couldn’t figure how to do it in a casual way that wouldn’t painfully point out the differences in our lives. I wondered, as I always do when confronted by a homeless person, how I would be on the street. Could I spend two hours at the mall with nothing to do, not even a dog-eared novel to read? How would I live my life without my structures, my purposes, my community? She was my age—and I felt such sorrow and guilt.

She left as I debated this for the 6th or 7th time, and I felt ashamed. The next day I gave $10 to a one-legged man begging in the still 100° heat at a freeway exit. I didn’t care if it was a scam. It was something to do and it was nothing.

Ways to get started writing

As a writing coach and teacher, I’m always looking for good prompts and writing ideas that will serve me and my clients. I start my writing support groups with a 10-minute warm-up that’s often based on something that’s happened in my life or something I’ve overheard. The recent workshop I took with Kim Stafford afforded me many ideas. Here is some of what I heard and thought of during those two days. Write about:

Something you don’t know
A foray into the unknown
Spirits most restless and crude
Do what you’re doing
Clicking my ruby slippers
I don’t fish.
Pay attention with all you have.
Sleep sets in
Acceptance is as necessary as oxygen
And so it was
How true you are
Deep ocean loneliness
Occasionally, a storm
I want to be yours again
I owe you three poems
The next paradigm
The library of consolations
Too proud and defended
He strayed into coherence
A place in yourself that is tight, dark, forgotten

Kim also shared some of the advice that his father, poet William Stafford, shared with his students and with his son. I liked some of these a lot. They bear keeping in mind.

To get started, accept anything that occurs to you.
Write when it’s least possible to write
Do something every day to advance the human project.
Writing stimulates the fountain; it does not deplete the reservoir.

And perhaps most importantly, don’t compare yourself to your expectations.