Last year I had two goals for myself: losing weight (winning the contest, really) and reading 19 books. I did both - I overachieved on the reading and wasn't quite as successful as I would have liked with the other (but I still won). So when this new year started I was trying to figure out how many books I could reasonably read and how much weight I could reasonably lose. And then I remembered something - I wanted to be a writer, once. I should concentrate on writing this year.
A couple of years ago I decided science was something I just did because I was good at it - but if I could have any career it would be that of an author. But, even after that epiphany, I just continued my status quo because I knew it would take me too long to be good at writing for a living. I am impatient and practical.
Rewind two decades plus - I was about 12. Growing up my family was very close friends with Mary Higgins Clark and her family. I used to swim in her above ground pool and fetch pennies off the bottom where you could feel the bumpy blemishes of the ground it sat on. She lived in a pretty average house on a pretty average street in New Jersey. We lived a few blocks away.
One night at a cocktail party at Mary's house I told her that I liked to write stories. I used to write all the time. And I mean all the time. I wrote stories and poems and filled fractions of different journals galore (never once filled one up all the way, though). She bent down and whispered in my ear, "Never show them to anyone!" The grin on her face made me feel like she had just told me the greatest secret in the whole world and we were the only ones who knew it. And my response was, "I know!"
Sometime in college I remembered that moment and couldn't reconcile why she said that and why I agreed with her. And even a couple of years ago I was trying to decipher that moment again. How could I so completely understand what she meant when I was 12 but not now? Then last week happened.
I was reading an article about JD Salinger after he passed away (I will always and forever link him in my mind to an old school friend,
Col, because she was the first person I knew who read Franny & Zooey and Catcher in the Rye and told me how it was a banned book. I even remember looking at Catcher in the Hillsdale library thinking I was going to get in trouble or something). At some point in history he said, "Publishing is a terrible invasion of privacy...I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure."
I had forgotten what I liked about writing - reading and re-reading what I wrote and the feeling I got from it: not having to grow up. Each piece takes me back to the moment in time when it came together and I smile. I didn't need anyone else to read those stories to get out of them what I needed. And Mary knew that a 12 year-old wasn't writing for an audience and apparently 12 year-old me knew that, too.
So I finally understand what Mary meant that night - probably my only clear memory of her: standing in the hallway with the parkay floor on my way to the den with a drink for my Dad, thinking my parents were so cool to let me come to the party because I was the youngest kid there.
Would I ever show those stories from my youth to anyone? Probably not. I would be embarrassed but mostly because no one else would get the inside jokes. Those are just for me and they still make me smile.
So the reality is that I don't want to be a publishing author (blogs don't count - these are just opinions and certainly no one is paying to read them). It's not something I want as a career. I just want those moments back where I can make myself stuck in time.
