M.E. Breen

A friend just wrote me in full meltdown mode because she’s been working the 4:00pm to 2:00am hospital shift for two weeks straight. Of all the daily rituals such a schedule might disturb — sleep and regular meals among them — the one she’s most upset about is missing her running group.

She recently moved to a new town for this job (apparently the hospital is unswayed by her sweet, lost, newbie air and wants her in charge of everything, all the time), and the running group has become her way of being among people without having to act like she’s trying to be among people. We’ve all moved to a new place and at least thought about meeting people at the local pub or coffee shop, but what are you doing there but lurking and drinking and passively hoping someone interesting will approach, and aware the whole time that if someone does approach it will be creepy, so what do you even want, poor thing, shaking with caffeine and desperate to pee but afraid of leaving your laptop with one of these strangers? No, it’s much better to join a running group. First of all, you’re running! Zoom! (For my friend, it really is zoom! For me, more like, zuh, zuh, zuh, oom? But this is not about my fitness.) Anyway, you’re running, your feet are moving, you’re going places, and whether these other people in shorts are going anywhere is up to them. It’s the opposite of waiting for something to happen to you.

And here I think I arrive at my point. For most of my life I’ve been convinced that the only things really worth much were the things other people, or collections of people, as in institutions, conferred on you. You worked, and waited, and looked serene, and felt virtuous, if a little anxious, and eventually someone came by with a wreath and put it on your head. Status wreath! To pursue something in an active way, to appear to want it, was totally embarrassing. This isn’t to say I didn’t believe you should be ambitious, but I did think ambition was something you dealt with on your own, quietly, as you would a love of cookies.

Ok, I want this thing, and I may even get if for myself, because it’s really not so bad, but it’s nothing to shout about, either, and maybe I’ll even eat the cookie out of the little opaque paper bag, so maybe it looks like an oatcake.

All this, of course, suggests a pathetic, if generic, preoccupation with what other people observe about us. Do I really think someone is looking at my bag from the coffee shop and caring what’s in it? You – oat eater! Capital! Well played! I guess I do imagine people care, except that imagines a whole Being John Malkovich scenario, with frown-faced, knitting-navel-to-spine-excellent-posture-having, cookie-deploring ME everywhere.

But I digress! What I’ve discovered is how liberating and terrifying it is to realize that no one cares about what happens with your cookie or your career or your dog or that gray hair sticking straight up from the middle of your part as much as you do, which mean, yes, you have to pick up the phone. You have to find out what’s up, and suggest things, and offer to do things, and be an instigator, not just a responder, however lovely and nuanced and carefully calibrated your response, however perfectly you got it. Because you also have to go get it. Baby, you have to set the world on fire. Baby, you have to go running.

I’m reading from Darkwood and talking about villains at The Reading Bug, a new independent children’s bookstore in San Carlos, CA this Sunday 9/27 at 3:00. Come on over!

Here are the details: http://www.thereadingbug.com/event/create-villain-author-me-breen

Why didn’t anyone tell me how good this book is? People did tell me, teachers and mothers and that sort of people. One teacher in particular may have mentioned it. She was teaching a class on Victorian heroines in which I was a student. Mind you, this isn’t a post about how I never did any work in college. It’s possible I did all my work in college, excepting any assignments in subjects biological, chemical, mathematical, or musically educational (History of Jazz? Withdraw).

I read Middlemarch. I even liked it, judging by all the little stars and things I marked in the margins. But I wasn’t ready for it, or I would have remembered it. I was ready for The Mill on the Floss. The heroine is named Maggie, for one thing. Totally approachable!  I read the last 100 pages on the floor of my mom’s living room during winter break. It must have been Christmas day or Christmas Eve because we had a fire and one side of my face turned flaming pink.

But Middlemarch. At nineteen, I couldn’t have known what to make of this:

“Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labours; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause.”

But I did put a star next to it. Now it seems to me impossible that my rambunctious, wildly hopeful self could get a bead on the deeper fixity of self-delusion, but maybe I’m wrong. My mother asserts you can’t understand Proust until you turn sixty, but I only read Proust in French class, which narrowed my chances of understanding it to nil. That’s what’s interesting about keeping old school books around. They can make you look pretentious and sentimental and kind of lame, sure, but they also work as a record of a very private self, the reader self, marking off moments of discovery and revelation.

A month ago, if you’d asked me what I remember about reading Middlemarch, I would have said something about how horrified I was at the prospect of someone young marrying someone old and ghoulish and skinny-legged. I wouldn’t have claimed to remember much about the plot, but I would have been confident about who I was and what my concerns were when I read it.  I would have been confident in the recollection of my own plot, and I would have been wrong. Because all the things I put stars and dashes and question marks beside then are the things I’m most interested in now. I’m the same. I was young, I’m older, but my sense of humor hasn’t changed, my anxieties haven’t changed, my rabid desire for annotation hasn’t changed. It’s so weird. I’m so invested in the idea of progress. I feel like I’ve been through so much and am so different than I was at Dorothea’s age. But I loved this book at nineteen, and then I forgot it.

I’m teaching a two-weekend writing workshop through Stanford at the end of the month. It’s not a class on the fine art of pet-blogging, I swear, so sign up today!

Here’s where you sign up:

http://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/courses/course.php?cid=20091_WSP%20121

And here’s the description:

Writing Novels for Children and Young Adults: Creating Character

As readers of literature for middle-grade children and young adults, we all have favorite heroes and villains, whether the drama between them unfolds in Narnia or on the dodgeball court. But what makes a hero heroic or a villain villainous? What details of dress, speech, and gesture let the reader know this is a person to trust or mistrust? And how does an adult reader’s perception of character differ from a child’s?

http://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/courses/writersstudio.php

My cat burned off his whiskers yesterday. Some are completely gone, some are still long, but most got curly and short with the heat, so he has a frizz of white question marks where his eyebrows and whiskers and chin hairs used to be. He looks like a cartoon cat, after the cartoon mouse tricked him into sticking his paw into an electrical socket. This cat is a 10 year-old marmalade tabby, a big cat, the kind who would have made a ferocious Tom, only his head never grew to proper bullish size and, when he was tiny and his sister was somewhat less tiny and I wasn’t thinking about the long term psychological effects, I named him Didi.

Didi’s accident involved an attempt to Cross the Stove.  On the other side of the stove is a window, and outside the window is a vine, and in the vine nests a fruit rat. Nested, actually. For two days. A year ago. But it might come back. My other cat has no problem jumping to the edge of the sink and reaching the window that way, but Didi has this great down-hanging stomach that throws him off balance. I have seen the stomach swing to one side and drag him from the top of the fridge or the bookcase to the floor, like a man in cement shoes dropping to the bottom of a lake.

And that’s what this is meant to be about. Not a stove, but a lake. Over the weekend, I made my own wild attempt. There was something I wanted, something that would make my life better, but getting the thing I wanted involved terror and risk.

C. invited me to spend labor day with her in her family’s cabin on a lake. You can only reach the cabin by boat or by foot. I packed my swimsuit. I packed my long undies and my headlamp. I packed five different kinds of face cream. I was ready. And then I got sick. Really sick, like the swine flu, except not the swine flu, but still: really sick.

C. went on hikes and cooked beautiful dinners and made me a thousand cups of tea and slept under the stars and wrote in her journal while the sun rose over the water. I marinated in germs inside my sleeping bag. C. and I have known each other since we were eight. We are like a pair of feet in old shoes together. But still, being sick is embarrassing. Self-pity is embarrassing, and having your nose peel and crack and your left eye leak fluid for three days straight is embarrassing, too.

On the second day we decided I might actually turn to liquid if I stayed in that sleeping bag any longer. So, wobbling, with C. behind ready to catch me, we went on a hike. By hike, I mean walk, and by walk, I mean three steps, sit on a rock, three steps, sit on a rock. But we got up to this sunny ridge and lay on the flat-topped boulders and tanned our shins and laughed and my eye leaked. On the way down, I took off my sweatshirt, and then the sweatshirt I was wearing under the sweatshirt. I was hot. Sweating, even. And there was that lake.

This lake is something you want to drink and be swallowed by at the same time. The water is clear, clearer than water in a glass or a bath or a pool. On the shore are broad sloping rocks that slope you right into the water, as deep as you want to go. And there are high round-shouldered rocks over dark pools for when you want to jump, and battered wooden docks for when you want to jump, but not so high. On this particular weekend, the wind was up. There were whitecaps on the water. And the water was cold, cold enough that when you put your hand in to test it you were ready to take it out again right away. I said, I’m going swimming. C. said, I think you should.

I jumped off the dock. I gasped and flopped like a fish in fast-forward evolution onto the shore where C. was waiting with my towel. I was proud. I wheezed. But then, standing there, a dripping, prickly-skinned, bright pink mammal, I wanted to do it again. So I did, and this time I really swam, all the way out to a rock island and back through the chop, and C.’s neighbors cheered and gave me a thumbs up and offered me a beer, and said, Aren’t you sick? And the next day I did it again, and I was still sick, but I was better.