Jill Malone

Do you know how certain books come to you precisely when they should? When you need them, or, at any rate, when you’re ready for them?

My parents now both attend the Auntie’s Bookstore Tuesday Morning Book Group that I used to lead, and this last month they read Carol Shields’ Unless. My mother gave me a copy, and said I’d love it. And she’s exactly right. I love it. I needed, at this exact moment in my life, such a novel.

I have found, working through this third manuscript, my protagonist a reflective teenager (I do think such an animal as a reflective teenager exists) an infinite, and surprising capacity to sympathize with parents. I understand now just how much of parenthood is failure. Despite all of our best intentions, we get it so wrong so often. Like any relationship in which we love with our arms thrown wide.

I’m two-thirds through Unless, and find Shields’ tone perfectly balanced, her characterizations beautifully rendered. I missed this: reading with so much attention.

I haven’t written a word in the third manuscript this entire month. Excuses: broken finger, new job, last month of summer for 4-year-old, blah fucking blah. Mostly I’m terrified to go back through it, to sit, staring at the white page, knowing I have no idea where I’m going.  Or worse, feeling that I have a clear idea where I’m going, but no comprehension about what it means.

Write through it.  I know I should.  I know.  Yet.  Just opening the document has become a hardship.

I may well be 30 pages from the end.  Possibly less.  Somehow I keep thinking of sunrises.  My first girlfriend and I counted them for a while. Sunrises while we were on the beach together, or on the phone, or on planes.  We started to lose track about the same time every thing else derailed.  For a while, counting felt like ownership, like possession. But it wasn’t any of those things.  It wasn’t even a loan.

It was a palette.  A way of seeing.

Most of my nightmares involve sharks and crocodiles.  I’m often required, in the dream, to cross a marshy body of water, or jump from lilypad to lilypad.  I am always young.  Usually it seems to be some sort of expedition, and I’m responsible for the safety of everyone around me.  It doesn’t go well.
 
When I was a kid, I had five seconds to get from the lightswitch to the bed.  Five safe seconds before the crocodiles would swarm.  It was always crocodiles.
 
For the last two nights, Gavin has woken at 2 a.m., frightened.  Last night he told me, “I’m afraid to close my eyes.  I don’t want to dream.”
 
When I asked him about his dreams this morning, he told me one had a dragon in it.  “Chasing me,” he said.  And the other was a good dream. 
 
We are at the mercy of so much when we are little.  For our meals, and our rides, and our entertainment, and our comfort.  I have been wondering about his dragon, and whether or not it would help to tell him a story of vanquishing knights.  Maybe it’s more effective to make the monsters silly.  To laugh at what we fear, to make it ridiculous.  A shark lurking under a lilypad.  Preposterous.  Absurd.  Hardly frightening at all.