In books about writing, books about how to write – I’m not entirely certain about this, but I seem to recall that within this genre – we readers are presented with the occasional friendly challenge, a little tip, a shoe horn to forcefully ease us from the state of reading into the state of writing. The authors (or editors, perhaps even the book designers) set these prods off from the main text – rich with anecdote that either does or does not resonate with the reader – by means of a subhead: Try This. Try This, even though you’re not like me and your troubles aren’t like mine. Just TRY trying it, but then don’t give up if it doesn’t work.
For me, writing is itself a ‘try this’ proposition. Try this: try writing and observe whether I then come into existence as a steady place with a shape. Sometimes it works. The tide of everything I have to do and attend to recedes, leaving a clear, lightly reflective expanse. Writing is a lever by which I hope to shift myself, when I can. We have these levers, all of us – means by which we adjust our state of being. Writing is one lever, having a job working with children is another. Writing leaves an enduring residue and I enjoy the concrete yet dispersive nature of words. Working with children is an unpredictable lever, sometimes leading straight into distress, sometimes leading, by winding paths, out again.
If he were able to understand the previous two paragraphs, I think Ryan would relate to the notion of ‘Try This’ and of levers. Ryan tries many, many things to ease his sense of non-existence. Ryan’s sadness and loss of shape is brought on by missing Mommy, and by the crash following the rush following the breakfast of one large donut with pink frosting and sprinkles eaten dazedly in a cab on the way to school and then in the stroller unfolded from the cab – the cab, donut, and stroller all helping to mark the intersection of Ryan’s resistance to waking/dressing/walking/leaving and his mother’s urgent need to get to work on time.
We can start with purple masking tape from the floor of the block area. It was placed there by a grown-up and represents (or ought to) roadways in a city. The tape when freshly laid could easily have been removed. Once burnished under the wheels of about two dozen toy vehicles it sticks unpredictably (here it holds fast, there it is loose.) The cars/trucks/planes are all back in the supply closet now, in the bin to which they are relegated once teachers have gotten good and sick of the repetitive play they engender. The tape, scuffed but tenacious, has been on the floor for weeks. No one pays attention to this tape except Ryan, one day, after clean up time, when everyone else was gathering for meeting. Ryan appeared on the rug with this foot-and-a-half of tape wrapped loosely around his neck, the two ends twisted and sticking as though they were sealing a bag of bananas. Not tight, not constricting air flow in and out of Ryan, just there, a statement. Maybe if he wears a collar of purple tape he will have magic and lose his feeling of squeeze and missing and wanting. I look at the collar and do nothing at first. I say nothing.
Ryan’s speech is a little unclear. His thought processes are subtle, glancing, tangential, reticulated. He lacks vocabulary but gains it easily. His mind is made for memory, but memory requires the support of words if it is to be retrieved and shared. One day I saw what seemed to be a lightening bug, clinging low on a brick wall of the play deck. “Oh, look!” I said, “A fire fly, a lightning bug! Hey!” I called as the lovely small figure trundled down the gap between the wall and the rubber safety decking. “Hey!” Two days later, Ryan furrowed his slow velvet brow, pointed to the last place we’d seen the insect and said, “You saw a lightening bug there. It put its wings out.” I hadn’t noticed, but Ryan had, the firefly’s elytra and flight wings. “That is intimacy,” I thought to myself, “recalling the memory of something sweet and fleetingly shared.” I hadn’t remembered that Ryan had been there. I would not have been able to make this offering of closeness to him.
Ryan’s family suffered an enormous loss, a loss that impended, extending slowly through time, then occurred, and continues to hold sway. He is empty in places, deeply sad. He tries many methods to contend with this feeling at school. At home he tries some of the same methods. As if he were a scientist trying interventions in different settings. What is the control, though?
Were Ryan to write a book about surviving loss with the aid only of a modest vocabulary, and the ability to make drawings of head/eye/leg figures, it might include the following “Try This” suggestions.
1. Peel about 18 inches of purple masking tape from the block area floor. Do this while no one is paying particular attention, just take a break, kneel on one knee, the other pointing to the ceiling as the foot steadies you. Pinch the tape, peel it up and wrap it around your neck. Then wait for a teacher to notice. When a teacher notices and says and does nothing, approach her and ask her to remove the noose. This will work, kind of, even if you don’t know the word knee, or pinch, or noose.
2. Take off one shoe and then the other shoe. Take off your small Converse sneakers with the soft laces. The shoes that collapse and recede when grown-ups try to insert your foot into them. Don’t help the grown up! Just let your foot be solid, small, sloping and warm in its sock. Unless you took off your socks, too. But that’s not my style. I like to keep my socks on and just take off my shoes and just pull the laces out of the eyelets and chew on the tip of the laces. Should this be another item on the list? Try chewing on your shoe laces?
3. Chew on your shoe laces, just pull the laces out of the eyelets and stretch one end up and pull it taught and gnaw on it gently – don’t mess it up! You still want – you want someone to restore your shoes completely and exactly so don’t chew the casing off the tip of the lace. How do they weave these limp laces, what kind of thread, so loosely woven, so inert and yielding?
4. Cry when a grown up demands that you stop chewing on your shoe laces.
5. Fall over to the side, with your back to the grown-up and get scooped up onto a lap. Lay your head against the breast of the grown-up (for this to work you must be scooped up by a woman grown-up, that’s not too hard to maneuver.) Snuffle and rest your forehead, which is maple sugar and like a lamb, against this yielding breast which stands in, of course, for all breasts.
6. Go on hoping that you get what you need, a breast or maybe, better yet, some words to work the fragile levers of your heart. Fleeting. Fugitive. Lightning bug. Firefly.
