Writing happens in the early morning, before the dog walk and the coffee. Before the Facebook catch up and the Likes and Follows check-in on Instagram. It's the first foray of my brain into consciousness after a much-needed rest in the passive realm where dreams and problem solving evolve unhindered by the too-well-informed editor of intentional thought.
I'm there now. It's morning. I took a break to make coffee because it's Saturday. Saturday means more time writing. The luxury of a coffee break and more writing. I'm at the part where I'm drawing houses for money 28 years ago and I thought I'd pause and post here, on my trusty old blog. The thoughts swarming around this history are too vivid and tenacious to ignore as I am present today in that place: the Montclair suburban sprawl, where it all happened.
Today I am writing about the houses. The ones I drew, purchased by the privileged few, but my perspective has shifted with nearly thirty years of experience. My daughter Joy and fiancé Colin have just purchased such a home. A would-be mansion, for a cheap price in dilapidated condition, and they are in the throws of restoring, renovating and remodeling it. It will be amazing. But they are not stock brokers or lawyers. They have bought into the long game, embracing debt for the future, so their children's children can struggle less, thanks to their hard work. Colin is a master craftsman and will create most of the interior details by hand. In my imagination of homeowners thirty years ago, as we were losing our home, there was no such self-dedication and commitment. Every buyer was privileged. Every homeowner was at ease. How wrong I was.
When you write your story, however, you write it true for that moment, and in that moment my lens was set, though partially in error, on the striking contrast of ease to struggle, privilege to poverty.From memory I sketched, on a flight the other day, the architectural detail you see here. I will always remember it: an Arabic-style leaded glass window on a Tudor revival house, hidden by a huge spruce tree, or maybe it was a cedar. I could see it from my point of view in the car with my three smallest children, as I sketched the house. I loved it, so I moved the tree in my drawing. Perhaps I loved that window more because it was hidden, like an afterthought. I fought for it. I fought for the architect, for the craftsmen shaping the wood and the hours of leaded glass work, insisting that it be shown, though only an inch or so in my drawing. My customer loved the license I took, and loved the drawing.
I was drawing those architectural masterpieces in Montclair, New Jersey as we were being evicted from our tiny home in Bloomfield. Now I am here again, and I look back with tender gratitude.
This morning I'm working on my book, a book I plan for thousands to read to see how anything is possible. This morning I am in a house owned by my youngest daughter and her husband. I am looking at an email with the architectural plans for the renovation of a home owned by my second youngest daughter and her husband. And this morning I own two homes myself in South Carolina. The one I live in, and the one my stepmother, Tani, lives in.
I am writing the story of my impossible journey while envisioning that journey's future state as a promise to struggling young people that the reality you're in is worth living through. I was baffled by the existence of these architectural gems in a world where I could not feed my family. I drew houses as we were losing ours and I drew them with joy and with love, being present, appreciating everything. By a lucky genetic neurological defect, or crazy childhood conditioning, my natural state seems to somehow always be one of joy and gratitude. I hope, with all of my being, that whatever that is, it's contagious.
