Friday 11/15/24
We'll start tomorrow morning with a prose off. To paraphrase a country and western song, who will the next exposed fool be?
I've been working hard today on There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. Masterpiece to end all masterpieces. I'm not going to do a prose off with this bit here, because I don't want the godawful slop of the people of this system near this precious work right now.
How beautiful is this fiction? This is what these system people don't want you to see because it is so much better than anything anyone among them can do. I hope you remember the things these people do when you see something like this. I hope you think about Carolyn Kuebler and Daniel Zalewski and Michael Ray saying that guy just isn't any good at writing. The place of hate and discrimination you'd have to be coming from to say that when there's nothing you believe less.
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I think these trips for my mother represented what a sled did to Charles Foster Kane. But instead of Rosebud, there was aunt Dot. It was like my mom had a guardian angel and a secret best friend who loved her and provided her with that benign form of spoiling that all children need and deserve, as though my mother was the child aunt Dot never had. And maybe she was part of aunt Dot’s formidable purpose, too, and Dot was actually an amazing person all along. It’s just that with some people, they store that amazingness in different layers, and aunt Dot kept hers buried further down than most.
Aunt Dot, interceder and protector. Provider of necessary joy and hope-blooming respite that would color the rest of my mother’s life. Who knew.
Without aunt Dot, I think I would have been without my mother. I’d have had a mother. Everyone has a mother. But that’s not always the same as having your mother. When the doctors told mine that she would never have a real child of her own, my mother corrected them by saying that yes, she would, and she’d love that child as much as a child could be loved.
How do those who love the best learn how to do it? We act like everything just happens, don’t we? Nothing just happens. The night sky doesn’t just happen. Nor a cloud. A baby’s smile. Never mind love and the decision to love, with creatures as meek as humans may well be, so often overwhelmed, beleaguered, scared. Love isn’t slipping on a banana peel and there you are.
The people who love the best find much within themselves, for they have much within themselves. But they don’t often know it without someone on the outside who helps them learn to look. That was aunt Dot. For my mother. And because my mother has helped me learn to look, for me, too. It’s extremely hard to give that which you don’t know you have. But when you know what you do? There are no limits, regardless of our own failings. If we’re talking love, that is. Which is why love is love, the same as the night’s sky has its reasons for being the night’s sky, the cloud the cloud, and the baby’s smile the baby’s smile.
You know how I say sometimes I read things back that I've written and I just laugh? That's why.
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