Author: Nancy

Work in Progress

There was a time in my life when I loved to write. There was a time when I believed I was a good writer. Years intervened. I became a teacher, where I learned to strip the task of writing of any creativity or joy. I wrote formulas for paragraphs so that student essays could tick boxes on standardized test rubrics. And they did. My students did well on their tests. But as I taught students to produce writing that was mechanical and artless, my writing became mechanical and artless. (Maybe you knew that already, because you are reading my writing.)

I started this blog as a way to revive the part of me that loved to write. Challenging myself to write privately had failed; the resolution alone was toothless. Exposing my writing to the world, even when I don’t promote it, gives the promise some bite. So, here we are.

All of my posts will forever be a work in progress, which means I may revise and edit them over time. Weeks, months, or years after publication, I may reconsider a phrase. I might tighten an argument or polish a piece of prose. I might change my mind.

I wish I’d taught my students to take risks, to write embarrassing metaphors now and revise them later, to freely publish works in progress.

A Very Clean Dime

“A very clean dime.” He punctuates each word as he examines his find, then turns it over once and places it in his pocket. We’ve been walking in silence for a few minutes.

I’m fond of silence. Katie from Mississippi says she likes me because I don’t talk too much. It’s because I’m a Yankee, she says.

I’m a bad first date because in those moments of silence that other people scramble to fill, I recede into my mind and feel none of the discomfort, leaving all the burden of the scrambling on my date.

With my father, the silence fills the space around us like breath in a balloon, straining against the walls until one of us takes a pin and POP

“A very clean dime.”

Riverwalk

The smokestack of the old brewery rises above the river, red letters on white paint. Behind it a drift of purple clouds swim on the sherbert colored sky. I sit with the sun setting to my right and the twilight rising to my left. The air is still, but cooling off as the day wanes, and I can feel the chill between the slats of the bench as I lean back and on my bare shoulders. The air is fresh and clear.

There’s a small rapid about 20 meters up the river to my right, and the babbling of the water over the rocks is almost loud enough to cover the baseline of the music playing a hundred meters or so down the river, where a fit young man with a bun of mousy brown hair is running an outdoor fitness class on the public riverside tennis court. There’s a frog nearby, and the irregularity of his croak against the constancy of the bass is tugging at me. I keep trying to sync them in my mind, but the frog is not playing for me.

An egret stands across the river, wading in the bank. The bright white of his feathers and graceful curve of his neck make him the star. The cormorants are pretty, but they blend into the marshy grass around the river. Downstream, a few mallards make their way toward the egret and me. They are pretty too, some with bright blue and green heads, but we had ducks in Central Park. I never saw an egret in New York, and they seem like a magical upgrade from the geese. The egret spreads his impossibly wide wings and flies to the opposite bank, just feet from me. Two sets of rings, one emerging from where the egret took off and one from where he alighted ripple toward the center of the stream, merge, and still themselves.

A jogger passes by, his footsteps heavy and his breath strained. He is leaning forward and clearly pushing through discomfort. As he approaches I see the sweat that’s accumulated around the collar of his blue shirt, and as he passes I see the wetness of his back. He’s got a belly and some extra weight on his face and legs. People who see him in the grocery store or on his way to work probably don’t think much, but think running is a special kind of misery, so I am impressed.