Joan Didion Was in My Head Twenty Years Before I Was Born

I'm a furniture magpie, my interior design a funky (read: semi-coherent) collection of items from the glory days of heavy item pick up, cast offs from neighbors and customers, the odd piece from Goodwill or Salvation Army.  But bookshelves...these are the salvager's holy grail, because no one gets rid of a good bookshelf. 

As a result, I have but one, filled to the gills and surrounded by stacks of more recent acquisitions to the library pressing against it like supplicants at a temple.  And I've read every one of those buggers, most of them more than once, so finding something to read on the porch on a sunny afternoon is an exercise in excavation and empty vows to actually pay money and find a home for them all.

Last week I dug especially deep and came up with Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a collection of Joan Didion's essays  from the '60s.  I remember finding them interesting the first time through, which is baffling because this time I'm finding them absolutely glorious: sharply observational, subtle in their judgments, poignant, vivid and outrageously, wrenchingly human.

My favorite, by far, is the piece "On Keeping a Notebook," in which Didion meditates on the orphaned, enigmatic aphorisms that dot her notebook.  They aren't notes of the journalistic variety, just a series of seemingly random observations, a recipe, the kind of random facts that one finds fascinating, if frivolous.  She searches her memory, recalls the moments that generated each tidbit and wonders where the impulse to capture these snippets come from.

The conclusions she draws are, like so many things she writes, both elegantly intimate and universal. No, she acknowleges, these aren't factual accounts meant to capture an important moment, they're deeply subjective observations meant to capture the writer herself at that larger moment in time. "Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point." [italics hers]

She compares the keeping of a notebook like this to that very different creature the journal.  She eschews the journal as a deadly dull exercise in recording the banal details of day to day life and posits that most of it will be as lifeless for the writer as for any third party witness.  The notebook, by comparison, is driven by flights of fancy and captures in living, broad strokes the thinking that defines who the writer was as they were committing that thought to paper.

I would have been satisfied with just that, but the larger point of it all is why, outside of sentimentality and nostalgia, it's a worthwhile endeavor to reinsert yourself into a stream of consciousness you've since abandoned:

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to
be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise
us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted
them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."

Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes!  It's one thing to live your life and learn from your experiences, but a lesson learned once is a fragile thing.  As anyone who's instituted any kind of resolution in their life can attest, it's easy to set your resolve but even easier to lose track of the reasoning behind it. How many people have sworn off "that type" at the end of a miserable relationship, or quit drinking forever as they drag themselves through a hungover Monday?  Those are some relatively petty examples, but the principle holds for any lessons learned in the course of personal evolution.

The arguments of this essay are compelling, but what I love almost equally is Didion's ability to speak very frankly about her personal stake in them with a frankness that is both shocking and extremely subtle.  She fesses up to insecurities and failings in a matter of fact way that feels a little like bravado.  She's self-deprecating with a disarming dash of humor.  In short, she comes across as a person who's comfortable in her own skin, a condition as magical as it rare. (Don't even get me started on "On Self-Respect")

Seriously, this essay, and most everything else she's written is a gift. Get reading.

For about ten years, my mother was a carpenter, swinging a hammer like a champ building houses in New Hampshire and Maine.  They didn't go in for anything fancy like naming the company, but some hilarious plumber or electrician christened them Honey and Dear Construction and they penciled the name on their tools for a lark.

When it was school vacation I tagged along, busying myself with such quixotic pastimes as string-and-safety pin drop line fishing, dowsing (why did I know about dowsing when I was 6??), and building eensy weensy stone walls from wayward wads of mortar and chips of slate.  If I was really lucky and no one was around, she'd let me snap the chalk line, which was inexplicably magical to me, and even let me hang a shingle or two.  I liked the construction sites and I took for granted the freedom and family time that their self-employment provided.

Memory is very a strange animal, and independent sources confirm that mine is particularly arbitrary and specific, and I have a very vivid memory of my mom's job search when she left building.  She applied haphazardly to whatever jobs seemed even marginally interesting, including a print shop.  But when the shop called her for an interview, she declined.  "One of the questions on the application was, 'What did you enjoy most about your last job?' and I realized it was being outside, being my own boss, working on my own...pretty much the opposite of the position they're hiring for," she told me.

Since I quit college, I've worked two jobs, both of them more or less by chance and both of them satisfying, unlikely, and slightly embarrassing relative to expectations (mine and others') of my potential.

I took a job as a line cook at a popular diner ("no experience preferred," ooh, that's me!) and was promoted to baker when the previous one quit in a fit of pique and I confirmed that I had, in fact baked cakes with my mom as a kid.  I had total control over the menu and worked whatever hours I deemed necessary at whatever time I felt the urge.

The next one was the one I work now at a ferry company where I made a meteoric rise from souvenir girl to ticket seller to full-time union employee, supervisor, and office mommy.  I like the work.  I schedule crews, I drive a forklift (which will never stop seeming weird), I council, coddle and occasionally chastise the peevish, petty, often rageful masses that are islanders, captains and coworkers.

Lately, though, I've developed a restlessness that I haven't felt in a long time, a deep and abiding desire to shake things up, attended as usual by its doppelganger, fear of the unknown.  In my twenties I made some big decisions on the back of this desire, always managing to whip up a perfectly reasonable rationale for moves that were bold at face value but hollow at their heart.  So this time around I've taken a quick inventory of things that I like about my job (strangers! I love talking to strangers!, variety of tasks, the combination of hands on labor and tedious administrative tasks. I love tedious administrative tasks, so zen!) and dislike (the nightmare of hierarchy, unreliable coworkers, representing backwards policies, lack of nuance) and realized that it's time to stop fiddling around betraying my ambition.

I have, over the years had about a million ideas for businesses I'd like to start, but every time I let comfort trump my modest dreams.  Today I started a fact-finding mission to see if it's feasible to actually carry one out.  On the one hand I feel inclined to tell everyone I know about it, just to put some pressure on me to follow through, but on the other, I'm feeling hopeful and slightly superstitious, so for now I'll keep the details under my hat.

For now it'll have to suffice to say that I'm ready to risk comfort for the greater reward of satisfaction.