Acceptance

or we'll take Aqaba from the desert.

I have so much work on my plate this weekend but all I want to do is watch Elton John at the Hollywood Bowl and then watch all of Get Back again and then Lawrence of Arabia. I want to sit at the edge of a sofa curled into myself and say the words at the same time and cry hot tears that embarrass me but I can’t help. I won’t know why I’m crying. Why do I hear John Lennon’s voice and immediately get so choked up I can’t, I can’t, I can’t sing along another word? (No one minds this. I didn’t arrive on the planet with the gift of a singing voice.) Does it have to do with my father, who died when I was ten but would have been 108 this week were he still among us? No doubt there’s a connection. One of the things I know about my father is that he was a musician, apparently a prodigy with perfect pitch who along with his identical twin brother gave concerts all over the world. Quite an act, they were handsome guys, both violinists who became doctors. My father wanted to continue to be a musician but the story is that his mother insisted the boys become doctors like her father, grandfather, great-grandfather and all the way back to Hippocrates.

I have carried around stories about my father and his background all my life but haven’t ever delved into the facts. I’ve always wanted to go to South Dakota where he grew up and learn more about his grandfather who became a member of the Yankton Sioux after he doctored them for decades. I picture him like Father LaTour in Death Comes for the Archbishop, which I would argue is a top contender for the title of the great American novel (fight me!) though I don’t think that’s even a thing anymore. There doesn’t seem to be an America that could choose one novel to represent it. It’s a great book, in any case, and reading it connects me with a past as much imagined as my father’s life is for me.

Which somehow leads me to my topic for the week—acceptance. This semester I am having my grad students keep a writing notebook to which is added a new category every week. One is to write a brief plan—a few words suffice—before the day’s writing. I used up that advice on my writing yesterday before my writing session. Try birth scene again, I wrote. I had an idea in bed the night before that would take the scene a step closer to bringing it alive. I have rewritten it probably ten times so far, inching toward what I know it needs to be. I have come to accept this, and in accepting how slowly the final answer comes to me, I have found I have also come to accept most everything else, too. Aging may play a role in acceptance—what can you do?—but this humbling practice of going back and back and back to the page, coaxing it like a frightened dog to move forward step by step, is a choice, the consequences of which have been big and edifying.

If I know what the scene needs to be why can’t I go right to that place? I don’t know. If I did I’d reveal the method, spare all other writers a lot of work, and confine the word “draft” to windows and chimneys. Instead, I’ve come to accept the gradual progress, and that was at the center of my thoughts for this Thanksgiving week. Acceptance alongside gratitude. I have been told that I’m never going to get over my father’s death. It carved deep valleys into my neural pathways that are there for good. That’s fine. I’ve managed. Writing has helped. Writing a novel kicks your ass like nothing else. For years you might be stumbling in the dark, you might doubt yourself in ways other areas of life don’t come near. That’s okay. Other goodnesses are accruing. It is, I have found, a pure balance on the scales of equanimity that self-acceptance is mirrored by acceptance of others. This goes deeper than knowledge of projections and so on. It’s about love. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” In case you don’t recognize that guiding wisdom, it belongs to the entity we call Shakespeare. It’s a good line, and a great reality check.

I suppose when I am hard at work, and juggling the needs of others, even as the subconscious is tugging my sleeve and asking me to remember I once had a father and ate cake with him on his birthday, that I am drawn to watch the Beatles or Elton or Lawrence of Arabia so I can for a few hours enter a space where I would change nothing. No revising necessary. I am flooded with past feelings about people and happenings I wish had turned out differently but that are, by nature of being in the past, perfected: love lost, ghosts, relationships that foundered on non-acceptance, events where I had no choice, missings. I let go and cry. But then I find a deep joy in living inside the genius of others for an afternoon. I feel restored, rinsed, and ready for another kick my ass writing session. Add details to the dolphin scene.

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