Denying self-denial

A description of a writer, a few weeks ago, has stuck. The author—was he a novelist, or a poet?—went through his self-denial phase as a truck driver, before he turned to writing, which he does now every night for hours on end, in a little cabin behind his home.

I scoured Google looking for this piece about him, like finding it would unlock some door. Do all writers go through a phase of denying the kind of rising, surging desire I have almost daily, to express myself through the written word?

If so, it’s a strange comfort to me. Why, in my own life, do I deny great, teaming pleasures? Not because I fear rejection as a writer anymore than the next person. Because the impulses to create are checked early on. I simply switch them off, or deny them through any number of rationalizations (a favorite: people need me).

(Of course, then these impulses pile up behind the locked door, like so many poor souls trying to escape annihilation by fire, and I get very depressed, but that’s an old story. )


Someone has likened this self-denial to a kind of anorexia; it’s like cutting yourself off from the stuff you love. I can understand the connection, since I’m a food addict. Self-denial kinda runs in my family, and I fear I've passed on this trait to my children, the way it was passed to me.

What is the price of unlocking this heavy old door, and keeping it ajar? I think, looking back, it's a dread that I will be punished, or, in some primeval way, that something--or someone--critical to my survival will be overlooked.

What’s the reward? Playing in the wash of waves at the shoreline, where the sea ebbs and flows, mixing up sticks and rocks and mud and acorns, to make a homemade stew while playing house, racing around the block on my two-wheeler, making piles of paper airplanes, telling untold stories in Rwanda, writing a short story about a young girl whose mother abandons her to a great-aunt and uncle,or a poem about hearing that your first teenage boyfriend died at age 63.

Following pathways

What would life be like without surprise? Encountering something new, moving toward it, then allowing yourself to be swallowed by the encounter, is this not what creativity, and adaptation is all about?
This was my take-away from a bike trip yesterday to a Central Michigan county, with Rob, and here’s what happened. We had tried to mount enthusiasm for a long, rural bike ride starting from Jackson, a medium sized town just West from Ann Arbor, but it was difficult.
Jackson: Jackson State Prison. Jackson: Republicans. Jackson: where small minds are made smaller. We even tried to circumvent the actual town by starting our ride about 3 miles out, and parking in the empty lot of a Greek Orthodox Church, to unload our bikes and so begin a 25 mile loop taking us back toward Ann Arbor, and past some pretty lakes.
My front tire was soft; we didn’t have a pump along. Oh well, I thought, if it goes flat, THAT will be our adventure.
We rode on miles of rural/residential road, past schools, washed out country stories, the occasional mega-home with an algaed pond, a trailer park, small ranches built on 4-5 acres, homes where pick-up trucks, sheds, dogs, and riding mowers were de riguer. It was pleasant, the occasional hill was a riding challenge, and the weather was knock-dead gorgeous. There were enough turns to make navigating a necessity.
A man in a pickup truck pulled astride us to request that we be on the lookout for a lost Yorkshire terrier. Passing an old frame house, we were blasted by rock music, and for a brief instant I fantasized the place as a summer hideaway for Eminem (not).
Another mile, and we encountered a very old farm house, next to a field being plowed by a very old man on a tractor. We waved; he waved back. The house with its old, covered swimming pool and ancient basketball hoop suggested a family had been raised here, in the 50’s. It was sad somehow, this enduring image of a rural family whose children may have run off for Las Vegas, or Orlando. The lack of a flowers garden seemed to signal the loss of the man’s wife too.
As we turned north, there were fewer houses, and more trees, signaling the lake district ahead. I felt lulled into a kind of vague longing for summer icons: a lake, ice cream, picnic tables, a resting spot.
And then we happened upon an odd, weather-beaten sign. Then another one: ‘Parking ahead for viewing area.’ Viewing what? A tree in the shape of Mary Magdelene? A hill-top vista long ago overrun by trees and houses? I braced for the honky-tonk that the Midwest is famous for: “THE WORLD’S LARGEST CROSS.” Or “YOU HAVE NOW CROSSED THE 49TH PARALLEL.”
Sure enough, on our right appeared a dirt parking lot. We steered toward it, my soft front tire sinking into construction sand, and gravel. A bright blue sedan was parked, the only car. There was a wide grass path directly to the left and we eased down it, toward some odd, open space.
What we encountered still boggles my mind, 24 hours later. An enormous bird sanctuary is nestled among 900 acres of forest, marshland, and open prairie. Each year hundreds, sometimes thousands of sand crane stop here. We heard a few in the distance. The sky was flooded with birds flying in and out of hundreds of well-placed bird houses. Purple lupine dotted the landscape. Viewing benches were everywhere, and trails upon trails. And this: no one save ourselves and the owner of the bright blue car, who stood stark still gazing at a tree wherein presumably was a rare bird.
We rode our bikes on the trails, past a lake, into another open area, through some forest, and looped back to our beginnings. Apparently the area is home to many rare birds, including a bald eagle. We were agape in wonderment, to discover such a place, hidden from the road, maintained by the Audubon Society, donated by a man who lost his only daughter, in 1935.
Follow an uncharted pathway, and this is what can happen.

A slave named Bob to have, hold & enjoy

When I'm really busy, I am known to punch family names into Ancestry.com in the oddest hours of the night or morning. It settles me down.

So one jittery night I type 'Edney,'a name from my mother's maternal line in Tennessee. No one knows much about the Edneys; we have relatives named Rainey and Dunnagan. The Edney's, and the Jones's have all but disappeared.

Several hours later, I come across a series of online conversations in a genealogy site, about the Edneys of North Carolina.

I leap into the conversation, which has been going on for about 7 years, and try to reach a couple of people, many of whom may be dead, because genealogy is an old person's hobby. For the record, I'm not old, but I'm obsessed with where I come from, like I'm the silky threads of a blown dandelion, trying to find my way back.

A 76 year-old man named Earl Peeler who lives in Tampa gets right back to me online. We exchange emails. We're like two knights in armour approaching each other on horseback, our lances drawn. Protecting a family line goes way back in evolution, and first we must establish our credentials.

I cite my direct descendants; he cites his. "I am Patricia of Samuel Edney, son Robert Edney and Ann Rensher." He comes right back: "And I am Earl of Asa Edney, son of Robert Edney and Ann Rensher."

Okay, that's over. So we're related. We are something like first cousins, ten times removed. That means our common ancestors were brothers, a long, long, long time ago. And their father was our direct descendant. This tight bond established, he agrees to send me pieces of the Edney genealogy, a 47 year-old project he says will 'probably get dumped in the trash when I'm gone.'

For the record, Robert Edney was born between 1690 and 1710 in England, and settled his family in Pasquotank, North Carolina, buying up land, and slaves.

These are my people. I know this from a two-page typed family history someone passed to me decades ago. Whoever it was found it in a family bible I think. And I have this bible. It's wrapped in blue-and-white-hopsacking material, in a white garbage bag, and lain in a plastic storage bin on the floor of a spare room closet.

It's three days later. I'm nearly finished with my ancestry orgy. What have I got to show for it?

1. Secure knowledge that I have the Edney family bible, written in by Newton Edney, Robert's grandson, born before the Revolutionary War, January 1, 1763 to be exactly. My Uncle Ammon got it for me, from my mother's first cousin, Christine.

2. Reasonable speculation that Newton had a mistress named Parmelia, possibly an African-American woman who bore two children with Newton, named Eliza and Mary. They are listed as Negro births by a man who had quite a few slaves (13). Why else are they listed in the family bible? And why else is Parmelia's marriage to William Bray recorded there? And why else is she listed in Newton's will?

3. Confirmation that my early Edney line is comprised of land-owners who had slaves at every generation up to the Civil War, including 'Bob' who shows up in a will, a piece of property for the bequeathee 'to have, hold and enjoy.'

4. Three locks of hair, carefully bound, one wrapped in a tiny piece of paper labeled 'Eccleses.'

5. Many pressed flowers.

6. A post card from my great great grandfather John Wesley Jones, to his son-in-law, John Dunnagan, asking to be picked up at a train station Christmas Eve in Bon Aqua, Tennessee.

7. Leaflets advertising the new town of Rochester, New York, and Denton County Texas, the new frontiers.

8. A pencil scratched will signed by W. Nelson, my great-grandmother Dolly's brother-in-law.

9. A love poem by Viola Dunnagan, saying 'i love you but thats no youse.'

Fixed points

Now that Spring is just ahead, I linger outside as the edges of day smudge from burnt scarlet to soft purple. I'm awaiting the nighttime sky. With a great, familiar intention, I look for the few childhood constellations I still know. More than once--I remember a dock New Hampshire, and an Hawaii hot tub-- I have laid back against my arms to bask in the vastness of the black universe.

As a young teenager, my private universe was often asunder. Parents fighting, boyfriends coming and going, brothers to help raise, living from my roots, lots of home chores, schoolwork and piano practice always beckoning. It was way too much for one girl.

But. Many summer nights, long after the family was sleep, I propped my chin on a pillow nested in an upstairs bedroom windowsill, and searched for the comfort of constellations. Majestic, confident Orion. The happy, cocky, Big and Little Dippers. The huddled pack of Seven Sisters. The stars, seemingly immovable, were my family, fixed points of reference in a turbulent time. Watching them, charting them, remembering them--them usually eased me to sleep

They still are. And now that I've traveled all around the earth, and searched for roots ancient and ancestral, the stars have new meanings. Imagine the first people on earth migrating out of Africa and looking up: they saw these very same powerful, bright dots that I see tonight. Imagine: in a few hours, my friends in the Philippines, or Rwanda, will see nearly the same star-studded sky.

Younger, blessed and cursed with the gift of imagination, I used to ask the stars how I would survive if my parents got divorced, if my boyfriend stopped liking me, or I couldn't ever find my lost library books.

I still wonder. Standing in the driveway, peering up through our front tree, I ask myself the big, impossible questions of midlife. What will growing old be like? What does it feel like to be without parents? Will I, or my husband, die first? Will I live to see grandchildren? What legacies will I leave behind?

The sky still answers. The stars will always be there, it says. Count on it. Many havee, before you.

This settles me, and sleep comes.