All life is math, really

 

I admire commitment.

I’ve always suspected I haven’t got what it takes, and the dozen unfinished posts in my blog folder are pretty strong evidence that follow-through and staying power are not my strong suits. There are people out there in the World Wide Wilderness who are so absolutely reliable about writing that I wonder if they ever do anything else. And if the signal of their latest post pricks my mild resentment – that grubby cohort of envy – it’s only because it means I’ll have to use some of my writing time to read and comment. 

Writing a recent draft on the magical aspects of analogies, I couldn’t decide where it was going. I like things to be joined up and for essays to circle back and complement themselves, which might be the only lesson from high school that has stuck, apart from remembering how to solve a quadratic equation. (I’m not saying that to show off but to salvage my own self-respect. ‘You don’t have a math brain’ remains one of the most egregious insults I can imagine. Despite thinking, back then, that learning how to manipulate X and Y was a waste of time, I did have reason in 1987 to formulate my very own equation in order to solve a word puzzle in the International Herald Tribune. That gave me pause, and in the years since I have reconsidered my short-sightedness about mathematics).

The analogy I had fixed on was particularly apt to my situation and I was able to explore and develop it for some nine hundred words before reaching a dead end, where the grit of true commitment abandoned me, again. I didn’t really want to give it up, but neither could I find the motivation or the energy to do all the thinking that was needed for the whole thing to make sense, to give it some meat. To maybe even be the catalyst for some reader’s Aha Moment.

But I made myself go back to it day after day, or, more precisely, morning after morning. Afternoons and writing are mutually incompatible, I have found, and there are better places to nap than on my computer. The weeks sped by while the essay inched along, on average, by twenty new words a day, nullified by the thirty or so old ones that were rearranged, reconsidered and often rejected. This process – if it can even be called something so constructive – is somewhat discouraging, although I recently discovered that, for Kurt Vonnegut, writing makes him feel ‘like a legless, armless man with a crayon in his mouth’. I felt better knowing he and I shared some common ground. 

I had been writing about a real-life adventure on a river which involved being swept along by the current while, by contrast, others in my group diligently practiced manoeuvres with the aim of becoming better practitioners of their sport. Gradually, I began to realize that my little treatise on the analogy of life as a river and me as a kayak was linked to an existential question.

I wanted to take the literal meaning and figurative sense of ‘going with the flow’ and develop that theme, with some background music appropriate to my (mild) anguish over my difficulty to be self-directed. You know what I mean, don’t you? After the rush and tumble of white water rafting, haven’t you ever found yourself drifting in a limpid pool of placidity, unable to do much more than raise your head now and then to sip your lemonade?

Having moved from analogy to metaphor, and never sure where the line is between the two anyway, I think it’s better to speak plainly.

Mid-life. Retirement. Le troisième age. You’d done your growing up, helped the kids to do theirs, maybe gone back to fine-tune your own again, and now you realize that many of the imperatives of your life-thus-far have up and left. And if, belatedly, you recognize that all that time you spent looking after others was pretty gratifying (even though at the time you might have resented not having any time to yourself and might even have suspected that your very self would be permanently subsumed by the general stuff of life), you also have great hope about the potential that lies in these calmer waters.

It might even have been an exciting thought. At last there would be great chunks of time to devote to what had heretofore been only dreams. Things you had only thought about while swimming laps and waiting at long red lights. Something you might have confessed to a friend, self-consciously , over a coffee at Starbucks. I’d like to write. Um, yeah, I have an idea for a book. Rolling your eyes, before she could do it for you.

At first it seemed do-able. You might even have got to the point where you described yourself as a writer, because in the void left by the departure of children and the close of a career, you did more writing than anything else. And that’s what makes a writer, isn’t it? The act of writing. It might even have felt like a reasonable truth after a few repetitions. The novelty of it carried you along for a good while, and when your interest began to falter, you gave yourself the first of a series of pep talks.

When you found out that you could commune with others like yourself, you learned that self-doubt is pretty much a given in this solitary, reflective occupation. And that it’s often hard to feel like you’ve accomplished anything at all, even when forty thousand words have somehow managed to accumulate in a folder optimistically – euphemistically, even – entitled ‘The Novel’.

That’s where the existentialism comes in. (I admit that my grasp on what ‘existentialism’ really means is tenuous, and that this disclaimer may be  redundant for those of you who do understand it).

Eventually the leap is made between ‘what have I accomplished?’ to ‘why am I doing this?’ And as you know, that’s sometimes a ‘what’s the purpose of life?’ question in disguise. And what a humdinger of a contemplation that is! I don’t know the answer and am sure that, even if I devoted my remaining years to serious study of the issue, I would never arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. The relatively little time I’ve already spent thinking about it has only convinced me that whatever rationale I could come up with would only be valid for me, and wouldn’t be provable, in any case.

You don’t have to be a writer to get into this morass. You could be doing something far more helpful, making your corner of the world a better place, for instance, and be faced with the same conundrum. You might spend your days mentoring wayward youth, keeping the wolves from other people’s doors and knitting teddy bears for African children and still be unsure that a backward look would leave you satisfied with your contribution.

But of all the things it is possible spend time on, writing seems particularly useless. Self-indulgent. Pretentious. An activity without any particular benefit to anyone, save a momentary pleasure if the result is well-crafted or illuminating or funny. And I’m not even talking about pleasure for others – let the writer among you who has never re-read her own emails just to snuggle up with her own cleverness raise her hand!

And while we’re at it, how about all those ideas you’ve talked yourself out of writing about because they weren’t fresh or original or interesting to anybody but you? And how far down that road did you go? Did you get to the point where you questioned the worth of all but the most luminous or learned writings? Were you ready to write off – pardon me – your blog, blogs in general, writer’s workshops, creative writing classes, writing just for fun (my favourite contradiction in terms) , and especially writing for profit?

Not having the requisite mental firecrackers to consider how all of this ties in with the raison d’être of the human race, I took a philosophical shortcut. Never mind if I don’t have a calling, a higher purpose or even a really good reason to get out of bed in the morning. Never mind if my most useful moments on earth have been spent in the service of small children, or that I can’t envisage ever being or doing anything that will change the world. Never mind that when my kids’ memories fade to black, all trace of me will disappear.

Some might build bridges, solve unsolvable puzzles, find a cure for apathy, and for their contributions they’ll be rightfully lauded. Some might go to sleep most nights knowing that they have helped someone feel good, made a life better, or at least be relatively sure that they’ve done their best at doing what they do.

But for me, the trick is to think that, despite not believing I’ve been put here for any particular purpose, I am free to create one. To commit to doing what I do, no matter how often I suspect the futility of it. To pack up the doubt and the cynicism and the unanswerable questions about the meaning of life and just get on with it.

 

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On crabapple jelly and memories

 

Under the arch of red-gold leaves, the old metal gate is still the same, flaking paint and all. When I push it open, the hinges squeak just like they always did. I almost laugh out loud. It’s been twenty-three years since my last visit to this house and I didn’t expect this trigger of memory. The broad steps up to the front door are cracked but still solid, and the house number - one-three-oh - is still etched across the glass globe of the overhead light. In a corner of the generous porch, a wicker rocker faces to the south-west, my grandmother’s habitual placement. I marvel that despite the evidence of extensive renovations to the second storey, the place seems unchanged.

The sound of the doorbell sets off wild barking inside the house, and a moment later two wet black noses nudge the curtains aside. An attractive woman in her forties opens the door, her guarded expression relaxing into a smile when I explain why I’m here. She tells me to go around the side and that she’ll meet me in the back yard.

The side gate is the one I remember, too, although it’s been moved a few feet towards the front of the house. In the back yard, a flagstone patio has been added around the base of the crab tree and a low fence separates the lawn from the vegetable garden, but otherwise, little has changed.

For weeks I’ve been thinking about this. I planned to first check if the tree was still there; if not, that would be the end of it. There was no one around when I parked in the alley behind the house and I hoped that the neighbours, if they were even alert enough to notice me, wouldn’t find a middle-aged woman suspicious. I peered over the back fence; even standing on tiptoe I could barely see into the yard, and I couldn’t see the tree. Maybe it had been unappreciated, cut down to make way for a deck, or had simply died. How old would it have been when I was a kid? It was certainly mature even then, half a century ago.

I moved a little further along, and there it was, partly obscured by the garage. It was smaller than I remembered, its spindly branches outstretched in a brave display of dying foliage, and strung with Christmas light-sized apples. It seemed that I wasn’t too late in the season, as I had feared.

Now I stand under it, telling Melanie about the tree, how it’s a particularly good variety – a Dolga crab – rich in pectin, whose bold red fruit makes gorgeous jelly. The tree had been seriously pruned the previous fall, she explains, and is the reason for the scanty crop. She hands me a step-stool and tells me to pick as much as I can reach.

My grandmother was of a frugal, productive generation of women, canning vegetables, baking bread, pickling and preserving, and always making jelly from the crabapple tree. Nothing was wasted, certainly not the pulp that remained after the last slow drops had fallen from the cheesecloth bag. Apple sauce – apple butter, as she called it – was the delicious by-product, but the deep claret jelly was a thing of beauty and my favourite spread for toast. Don’t squeeze the bag, Grandma warned, or the jelly won’t be clear.

Every fall my mother and I filled two or three large buckets of apples from the tree. It was tedious work, although perversely, I was put out by the greater claim my aunt’s large family laid to the tree. But the rules were clear: no taking more than your share, and no picking all the low-hanging fruit, either.

After my grandmother’s death and the sale of the house I lost my supply of crabapples, although I had rarely taken advantage of it. I didn’t inherit my mother and grandmother’s homely habits, and the few times I had made jelly, I ignored my grandmother’s instructions and hurried things along, forcing the juice through the bag. The result was tasty enough but the colour was opaque and lifeless. Years later I lucked into a regular, if small supply through a piano student whose mother sent along a jar of crab-apple jelly every Christmas. I shared the chocolates I got from other students, but the jelly was hidden at the back of the fridge; my children had no idea what they were missing.

I pick everything I can but it’s not a lot – maybe enough for one small jar. Melanie invites me to come back next fall when, she hopes, the tree’s usual fecundity will return. We talk about the house and she wants to know what might be behind a boarded-up section of the basement wall. Skeletons, I’m tempted to say, but it might have been a root cellar. I tell her how much the house sold for after my grandmother’s death and her eyes widen; the neighbourhood has become trendy and upscale, and the house turned over for ten times more than that twenty years later. She is kind enough to listen to my reminiscences and I promise to ask my aunt about the root cellar.

It’s not often that you can go back again to find things almost exactly as you remember them. Every subsequent owner of the house has respected its Arts and Crafts style and resisted the urge to make it over. The place is so familiar that I imagine I can see my grandfather sitting in his favourite spot by the fence, hands on his knees, his leathered face turned to the sun. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see his chair still there, painted the same robin’s-egg blue as the ’36 Packard he used to drive. To my uncles’ dismay, he refused to sell the car to either of them, selling it for a song, they suspected, to a collector who’d been after it for years.

I take a picture of the front gate as I leave. Somebody set fire to the vine on the archway once; it might have been Granddad, it may or may not have been an accident. I don’t remember, although I do recall Grandma being pretty mad about it. I’ll ask my aunt to fill me on that, too. What will be lost when I no longer have her memories to mine for family history!

I make a stop to buy cheesecloth and spend an hour in a coffee shop writing about my morning; the car is redolent of warm fruit as I drive home. Tomorrow’s breakfast will be tinged with nostalgia - maybe I’ll even commune with my mother and her mother over toast spread with wobbly red jelly. 

 

 

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Note: Four days later I finally got around to cooking my little stash of apples. Not paying enough attention to the recipe, I added sugar at the first stage – too soon! The cooked pulp began to jell even before I could get it in the bag, which had to be squeezed to convince the sluggish juice to drip. Oh dear. But with eyes closed, it didn’t matter, the taste was exactly right.  

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