I am sitting at my granddaughter’s desk in Redon, France while she is away on summer vacation. The desk and the room are surprisingly ordered for a young teenager. There is a poster of an all-girl band, trading cards with photos of determined and sweaty footfall players with stats I don’t understand.
The cubby-holes of her desk are filled with the accoutrements of a young life. It reminds me of how a Corgi car or a memento someone had brought back for me from one of their trips or a broken camera became precious to me. There are a couple of Harry Potter wands, a glittery sticker of a spider, a miniature water color, a yellow candle with the image of a mosquito fleeing with a suitcase in hand. There are a lifetime’s supply of colored pens and pencils — if they don’t dry out — as well as a stash of rubber bands that should likewise last several decades but won’t. There is a mechanical clock with a missing battery, a beautiful gilded mirror on its side, a little photo book I published and gave her last time she came to visit, a walkie-talkie, a unicorn sculpture, scotch tape (always handy), a calendar with the last day of school written in celebratory letters and the arrival of some cousins duly noted part way through the summer holidays. In short, a little life beginning to fuse itself with the greater world that surrounds it.
My childhood bedroom was paneled in knotty pine and adjacent to my little sister’s. Our rooms were part of an ill-conceived addition to the old house when the very Catholic family that resided there before us needed extra rooms to house the latest of their ten children. Even as a child I knew our rooms were an after-thought, much as we were.
There were many other spaces that I loved in that house: the three-sided peninsula counter of white Formica that served as our daily dining table, the morning room with its view to the terrace, the woodshop in the basement where my father made furniture. But my very favorite spaces were those of contemplation: the solarium with its white wainscotting and muntins separating the panes of glass that reached to the ceiling and my father’s study with it collection of leather bound anatomy books that were several hundred years old and art books that were of more recent publication.
Even then, I sought solitude. Or maybe it was there in the big house that I developed my enduring taste for silence, my desire to be surrounded and embraced but also left to myself.
I spent long hours alone with my thoughts in adolescence. I was often alone but never lonely. I was forever reading or learning something new or concocting something. I liked hearing people moving through the house — a door opening and closing, a car driving up the driveway, the squeak of the refrigerator door opening — but I did not want to be interrupted.
A lot like today. I like being together, in silence.
Sitting at this child’s desk, remembering my own childhood, feeling the brisk morning air of Bretagne before the warmth of the day begins brings back memories of cool mornings in the Oakland Hills in a house also surrounded by trees, sensing a crystalline potential in the day before me.
These days, the ecstasy I feel is slightly more muted. I am not jaded just more experienced. Perceiving great potential and achieving it are not the same thing, I now know. Contemplation is seductive but it is also an exquisite trap. It cannot replace the real work.
For me, writing is where contemplation and action collide. Writing transforms thought into something tangible and lasting.
The aspirations of a dreamy California childhood found their true home in the geography of writing, that fair land where all the dreamers gather to celebrate this brief and precious gift called life.
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