The world is large, the world is small

She's turning two soon, and we're all making plans to fly down to Dallas for her birthday party at the end of May. Life goes on, even with the world aflame. I just love the picture, our little one caught mid conversation, her face full of all the hope and expectation of goodness one little face can hold. I had to post this evidence that we have so many reasons to never give up. For me, this little girl is one.

Cory Booker, whoa. He talked for twenty-five hours in the Senate yesterday, starting the evening before, and unlike past filibusters, in which Congresspeople disrupted Senate business by reading from phone books or other inane texts, Cory had his staff put together a manifesto of all the ways in which the current administration is destroying the pillars of our society, with examples from real people who are being hurt by these dangerous, wrongheaded, and mean-spirited policies, and for anyone saying his stand was a waste of time, I disagree. He did something. He made us look. He made us think and feel. He gave us the facts. He demonstrated passion and love for our country and hope for our collective ability to rescue the future. And now it's our turn to make good trouble, in whatever large or small ways we can. I really like what, Amanda, one of our friends here, said in comments a few posts back. She said one act of resistance we can take in this very moment is to not allow ourselves to be incapacitated by fear. We can choose rather to be hopeful, to look for the places where possibility and opportunity live.

I've been something of a hermit lately, just in my house, writing, conducting phone interviews with my subject and people in her life, then writing some more. One supporting player in her story, who I interviewed last week and again yesterday, should be a book herself. She has a fascinating life, starting with the hardest childhood you can imagine, growing up Mormon in Utah, running away again and again, until she finally managed to make her escape, and build a life for herself, and find the thing that gave her a sense of purpose. "I had no self esteem before," she told me, "but once I put on that hat, that was when I became a real person." 

I can't get into specifics of course, but this woman is in her eighties now, and talking to her about her own life, and how it intersected with my subject's at a certain pivotal moment, reminded me of why I love what I do, even when it feels hard. People just making sense of their lives, doing their level best at every turn, are just so awe inspiring. I understand now why I used to walk down the streets of this city, or sit in sidewalk cafes and never tire of watching people and imagining their backstories. It's because when you peel back the layers of a person's life, there is always a hero's journey to be found—or a villain's, I guess, as we certainly know. But I'm in the business of learning about the heroes, so lucky, lucky me.

I do wish I were more brave myself. Someone reached out to me yesterday to ask that I lead a public conversation with an editor who has written a book about Toni Morrison, for an arts event at one of those very cool literary gathering places in Brooklyn. She had read the tribute I wrote when Toni died, about my having been her college intern at Random House one summer. What an honor to be asked to do this thing, but the God's honest truth is I would rather stab my eyes out than sit on that stage for two hours. Thank the fates the event happens to be when I will be out of town, as I know for a fact that I do not want to do it, no matter how much I should make myself do it. I immediately started to hyperventilate just reading the email. I gave the programming person the name of another person who I know will do a wonderful job, and I am self-flagellating a bit this morning for being like this, but I also feel a great measure of relief, too, that I won't have to live in dread for two months because that event is in my future. Why am I like this???

Any way, back to work. I made something of a breakthrough two Saturdays ago. I just stopped writing and made chapter summaries for the rest of the book, and now I feel less adrift, no longer making it up as I go. I feel anchored. I have a map now. I can take tangents and veer off the path if I choose to, but I have a reference to come back to, and a way forward. The writing has been going more smoothly since. Yesterday, I even had a 3000-word day, which has not happened since I began this book. Might the process be gaining momentum at last? I'm 38K words in and by contract I have to get to 75K. I'm more than halfway there, and now I can see that I will probably go past that word count. I'm hoping I've finally unlocked the puzzle of this book. Each project has its own challenges to be solved.

I also have choir today. We're singing an 11-minute medley from Phantom of the Opera as part of the repertoire this term. I can tell that our conductor absolutely hates that she has been asked to teach us this campy show music, but I love it. That said, we definitely haven't mastered the score quite yet ...