Week One of Airstream Life and Enough

When I taught composition at San José State, near the end of my time there I had the students do The Winston Grammar Program, something I learned as an ESL teacher. I had somehow gotten through high school and college and graduate school without ever really knowing what a preposition was. Hell, I’m not even sure I was clear exactly what an adverb was. The Winston Grammar Program uses cards to teach you how to name and diagram all the parts of a sentence—something I fake learned how to do at Westwood High School in the 1980’s. (The method of studying called Pass the test but fail to learn anything.) If I couldn’t teach the students how to write an essay, as it was becoming increasingly clear many college-age students enrolled in Comp 101 had a Teflon coating that made the traditional essay slide off into the I don’t care about writing all that much bucket, at least I could give them the gift of knowing what kids used to master in sixth grade somewhere in America in the mid-1900s. This is a noun; this is a verb; this is a preposition; this is a prepositional phrase; this is a direct object; this is an indirect object. You get the picture. I told the students that now at family gatherings when a curmudgeonly grandmother asked what they were learning at school, they could have their grandmother write a sentence and diagram it right in front of her like a chef with a wildly sharp knife.

The other thing I did was to have them memorize the first paragraph of Walden. If they did not care enough about writing to carry their own words like treasures inside of their mind, at least they could carry someone else’s.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; not did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

I don’t remember if anyone managed to memorize the whole paragraph, but I do have a goose-bumpy recollection of hearing voice after voice repeat the first sentence. Can’t that be one of the magics of essays, using it as a stage where you can honor someone else’s words as much or more than your own?

Do you have to put an essay to paper to have it count as an essay? Can you live it, instead? That is one thing I am experimenting with these days, the committed emphasis on living over writing.

My favorite thing about the word essay is that it comes from the French word essayer which means to try or to attempt.

I’m trying to say something here.

Here is what I’m trying to say: this is my first week living in an Airstream trailer on an organic farm in California. Two weeks ago I was digging my car out of the snow in Maine. Now I’m digging dirt so I can plant five different kinds of salad greens. I’m trying to get my life down to the bare essentials so I have the brain space to feel what is important to me.

I have had a good life marked by curiosity, humor, intense reliance on metaphor, and hypervigilance, and anxiety. As so many people did, I created an identity based on fear. Don’t show them who you really are because then they will leave and you will be alone and you will die.

Maybe part of entering your sixties for some people, for me at least, is realizing that since death isn’t really all that far away anymore, who cares if everyone leaves? I feel an urgency to let my Self be in the world washed clean of fake politeness and ungrounded fears. I long for stillness and quiet. I want to be able to hear Her.

Culture wants me to listen to Culture. Culture wants me to listen to Botox and Nice Car and Picket Fence and Good Job and Husband and Target and Haircuts and Toned Body and Comparison and Fear and Self-Hatred and Progress and The News. Culture wants me to believe I live on The Titanic and that unless I do exactly what Culture tells me to do, Culture is going to steer me into an Iceberg because I’m not smart enough to steer my own self.

Culture has taught me to be afraid there is not enough.

And yet.

I have a storage unit with stuff in it that I can’t even list because I don’t remember what’s there aside from a computer and a pepper grinder and an office chair.

I have a belly. This is a way of saying I have extra fat I could live on for a while if push came to hunger.

I have an almost full tank of gas.

I have more people I call a friend than I can count on my fingers and toes.

I have lots of storage left in the cloud.

It’s reasonable to assume I have years left to live.

I have money in the bank.

My airways are clear and I get what feels like a good amount of air with each breath.

There’s an extra roll of toilet paper under the bathroom sink and an extra roll of paper towels under the kitchen sink.

I have an almost full bottle of laundry detergent.

My refrigerator is full of food. Literally. I could not fit your jar of homemade pickles in there unless it was a thumb-size jar full of pickle babies. Actually, if you have some of those you want to give me, I could just sit here and eat them, so, sure. Please. I’ll take them. I don’t have enough pickles.

Actually, I don’t have any.

What I do have is a plastic horse that is wedged in the branches of a tree that I see when I look up from my screen. That’s cool. I don’t think about wanting pickles when I wonder where that horse came from and if he likes flying like that, up in the tree, sideways, his mouth open, his ears pricked sideways as if someone, somewhere, is calling.