emlocke

Category: Writing

  • Dear Dixie

    1468800_843481833585_1243191480_nOne year since you, Dix. Dixie Chick of Shadowland White. Dixalicious. Chunk with the Junk in Her Trunk. My Snuggleupagus.

    I still miss you every every every day, especially when I’m walking home after work. I used to get home and launch into a frustrated rant about work or slow walkers or silent filibusters. You’d sit at my feet, shifting back and forth, if necessary, as I paced, twitching the very tip of your tail hopefully, like you always did. When you got impatient, you’d put your paw up on my knee, like, “excuse me, down here, hi, hi, hello!” I’d finally get the message, and I’d kneel down to greet you and instantly forget all my troubles.

    When I scratched your ears, rubbed your belly, or snuggled your scruff, your comfort and happiness comforted me and made me happy. I believe you knew that, and that you felt the same way.

    I loved knowing—usually—what you needed from me, and that I could provide it. And you could always give back what I needed most from you. Could you read my mind and know what I was feeling? I’m not entirely sure about that. I think it just worked out that what was best for you was best for me; that’s enough for me to know that our bond was special—honest, generous, affectionate, and loyal.IMG_4797

    I’ve faced some tough times in the last year. When I’m sad, sick, or tired, I miss you terribly. When I can’t sleep or concentrate, I remember your thunderous snoring and the insistent, reassuring press of your forehead, chin, or rump against me. When I feel weak or hopeless, I remember your steady gait and your patient gaze. But I also miss you when I’m happiest, because feeling safe, peaceful, or loved always reminds me of you.

    A few fantastic things have come my way this year, too—four of them are other Shadowland labs, including your granddaughter, Birdie Balderdash!

    Ida Run-A-Muck & Birdie “The Bird” Balderdash of Shadowland, November 2015

    Your wonderful pawrents Karen and Craig have sent Birdie, along with young ladies named Ida, Sally, and Shirley, to visit me, and Mom and Dad, for sleepover weekends when we’ve needed some labrador love in the house.

    12742131_10100210970829665_4083055946047667566_nSisters (yes, littermates!) Sally and Shirley of Shadowland, February 2016

    Shadowland is in very good paws with those girls! We feel so lucky to be part of the extended Shadowland family, thanks to you. Karen and Craig adored you; I’m so grateful that they shared you with me.

    Right after you died, I worried a lot about where you might be and if you were okay there. It tore up my heart to think about you being somewhere unfamiliar, not sure what to do, lonely, waiting for me, and wondering why I didn’t come. On bad days, I felt so guilty, angry, helpless, and sad that I looked forward to the “good” days when just the sadness, on its own, felt tolerable. A year later, I think I’ve finally come to believe that wherever you are, you’re safe and content, and comfortable enough to roll belly-up when you’re dreaming. Now, I’m just hoping I get to be with you again someday, there, wherever there is. I know you’ll wait for me.

    IMG_5083

    It’s been a very warm March week, the kind of days you would have liked to spending lying on the deck, baking in the sun. Even before it registered that this anniversary was approaching so quickly, I’d found myself thinking about how much you loved to do that and wishing you were here to enjoy this weather. Making you happy was not only a delight, but a point of pride! I hadn’t grasped that facet of love so thoroughly until I loved you; you probably understood it all along.

    IMG_4728

    So, wherever you are, know that I’m thinking about you, which is kind of like petting you with my mind. Thank you for being my best friend. I promise that I’m okay and I’m ready to love another dog full-time, just as soon as I’m allowed to bring one home! I’m so proud of you for overcoming your fear of cutlery and for becoming the Dog of the House after Maggie was gone. You did a great job looking after Mom and Dad. Please say ‘hi’ to Maggie for me. You’re a good, good girl. I love you, Dix.

    Always,

    Your Girl, Emily

  • I’m crying small, sticky tears as I write

    Introduction to Creative Writing met at one o’clock on Wednesdays.  I took a violet spiral-bound notebook to class.  On a lavender post-it that I stuck to the inside of the back cover, I wrote:

    “. . . Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”—D. Foster Wallace

    The only work that I have ever read by David Foster Wallace is the commencement speech in which he said those words.  The line was preceded by the following:

    “As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head . . .”

    That’s what depression is like.  A constant, hypnotic monologue damning each pleasure, every hope, any purpose and all courage.  It corrodes human resolve.  It bleeds out energy.  It’s paralyzing.  It will confine you to the inside of your own head and the only way out is to take back control over how and what you think. 

    It scared me that the Creative Writing course was one of the things that triggered such despair.  The possibility that deliberate writing, and the introspection and vulnerability that accompanies it, might always be so damaging was depressing enough.  I didn’t want it to be that way.  I really wanted to believe that, armed with philosophies like Wallace’s, I could cope my way past all the classic hazards of sensitivity, perception, and creativity, and get better.

    To this day, I’ve never read a word by David Foster Wallace that wasn’t in his commencement speech.  At first, I abstained out of fear.  My depression was an imaginative and particularly superstitious monster.  I believed that reading Infinite Jest or Consider the Lobster would bring me closer to the author, but I also believed that if I got too close, I would break the spell.  I might threaten his control over his own thoughts.  And I might shatter any hopes I had for myself.

    I’ve still not become a reader of David Foster Wallace’s work, and now I only wish there were some validity to my irrational fear.

    The speech is archived at Marginalia.org.

    I still have the post-it.

  • Shooting up a love flare

    My mom has this thing that she says: “Love your guts.”

    It’s the verbal expression of those moments when emphatic love flares up so brightly that you want to force someone between your ribs and squeeze them into your chest cavity to get them just that much closer to your beating heart.

    It sounds a little gory, maybe even a little morbid.  But isn’t that just like love?

  • That’s not a complete sentence, but Thanks.

    “You’re a really great writer.”

    “It was just a two-sentence memo.”

    “I know.  Just saying.”

  • A mere fiction of the mind

    I just can’t picture three German brutes behind the robbery of four Masterworks from a museum in Zurich last week. I imagine that the crooks were three slender French mice, hardly taller than the paintings themselves, wearing black and white gondolier’s suits.

    They rode into the gallery on diminutive unicycles. Brie, the smallest, followed her brothers, Hamlin and Armand. Her wheel was rigged to a crank for her tail—she couldn’t quite reach the pedals with her feet.

    Armand and Hamlin hopped from their unicycles, which clattered together in a heap. “Everybody to the floor!” cried Armand, revealing a pistol made of black licorice. He pointed the confection across the small gallery. The museum patrons and staff dropped to the ground.

    Brie cranked herself to a stop and slipped to the floor. Ever so carefully, she tilted her unicycle against the piano in the center of the room. She patted the floral-print scarf tied round her sleek neck.

    Using his bristly tail, Hamlin bounced up on to the brocade seat of a chair in one corner. From the little pocket in his cropped trousers, Hamlin produced a French harp.

    “Armand; Brie! This one! And that one!” he cried, pointing at the paintings on either side of his post. He poised the harmonica beneath his wiry whiskers and began to hum out The Flight of the Bumblebee.

    It was Armand’s cue to dash forward and reach out for a Cézanne; Boy in a Red Vest. He bumbled backward under the weight of the frame and he spent a moment hopping this way and that and juggling the painting before he could collect himself. He turned to look at Brie.

    “Oh, all right,” she sighed. She wound up her tail, bounced herself upward, and plucked van Gogh’s Blossoming Chestnut Branches from its spot on the white wall of the gallery. Her picture was wider than her brother’s, but it was held in a more delicate frame. Still, it took all of her might for Brie to propel herself and the painting over to the glossy piano top, where descend on to her unicycle.

    Armand was already pedaling around the room, narrowly missing the limbs of the anxious museum patrons fastened to the floor. He gripped his portrait under one matchstick arm. “Hamlin, we’re off!”

    Hamlin hastened to conclude his recital and returned the harmonica to his pocket. He coiled up his hairless tail and heaved himself off the brocade chair, straight toward Count Lepic and his Daughters, a Degas portrait. In midair, Hamlin snatched the painting from the wall. He alighted to the floor as though bearing no enormous weight at all and scampered to his own unicycle.

    Brie, now, was also cycling around the room, following Armand with a bit of a wobble. Hamlin fell in behind her. “Around again! Once again!” he commanded gleefully. The horizontal stripes did a little something to disguise his flat-chestedness. Brie wondered if it had perhaps gone to his head.

    The trio began their final loop. Hamlin fished the harmonica from his pocket once more. He managed a grand finale of three thunderous notes with the instrument clamped between his jaws.

    Boswell, the oldest and the very largest mouse, was waiting outside with a getaway car and a thick slice of cheese. He tossed his snack aside and threw open the van doors when he saw Armand and Brie racing down the walk.

    “Where is Hamlin?” he cried as he pushed their unicycles and their spoils into the truck.

    “Coming!” they heard Hamlin call. He had just emerged from the museum.

    “What happened to you?” asked Brie as she draped her scarf over her glistening head and knotted it under her chin.

    “I stopped for one more. Nabbed it with my tail.” Hamlin held up the Monet that had hung beside the gallery door, Poppies Near Vétheuil. Everybody paused to admire the impressionist landscape. Brie tilted her head to one side and squinted. Boswell stroked one of his whiskers.

    “Stop! Thief! Thieves!” The museum director and two respectably muscular security guards were charging down the front walk.

    “Eek!” shrieked Brie. She hopped into the passenger seat and popped on a pair of dark glasses. Boswell ran around to the driver’s seat. Hamlin and Armand hopped into the van and pulled the doors closed, taking good care not to slam their silken paws.

    “Just go!” urged Hamlin. Boswell put both of his little feet on the gas pedal.

    Together, they hummed The Flight of the Bumblebee as they drove the four paintings toward the city limits.

  • Just a smidge behind the Times OR On Peter and Jerry

    It was early October when I saw Peter and Jerry at the Second Stage Theater, and it closes tomorrow. But since the closing itself warranted mention in The New York Times weekend preview e-newsletter Urban Eye, it must not be too late to talk about it.

    In 1958, Edward Albee wrote one act about two characters and called it The Zoo Story. Peter is a meekly stuffy upper-crust textbook editor from the Upper East Side. Jerry is a gregariously unsettled urban meanderer. He dwells in one room in a pitiful boarding house on the other side of town.

    In 2004, Albee revisited Peter and Jerry. He put his characters, his script and his story into a time machine called Poetic License and went back to write a first scene. It serves as sort of an extended prologue to The Zoo Story. Peter and his wife tiptoe toward each other until they pounce violently on one horrific tidbit from Peter’s past, and then tiptoe away again. Peter retreats to the park to take a bit of buttoned-up refuge in his tightly-wound solitude. And there, he encounters Jerry, who unwinds the stagnant routine on which Peter depends.

    I’ve read far more plays than I’ve watched and I think that has lead me to look at theater productions through a watching-from-the-wings sort of lens. I struggle to divorce the delivered dialogue from lines that were first printed in a script. I associate the performance with the writing process before considering the on-stage delivery. Sometimes it’s a challenge just to watch actors act without thinking of them as third-party messengers passing along the playwright’s text.

    For this reason, Peter and Jerry was endlessly fascinating to me. There’s nothing I like better than a gimmick of artistic process.

    (more…)

  • Lately, I’ve been thinking about camp

    It was summer and,
    At seventeen,
    We bickered over who most deserved
    To operate the cotton candy machine at the camp carnival.

    After dark, we took shifts.
    One kept watch for flashlights coming down the hill.
    The rest slipped in and out of the water,
    Breaking the surface of the lake with wet skin,
    Breaking the silence with gasps of laughter and shushing.

    On brisker Berkshire nights,
    We congregated beneath the covered bridge
    To assemble bits of birch and hemlock.
    Sculpting flames like Bernini.
    Our fountain spout fire.

    Some of us smoked up.
    Some of us blew bubbles.
    All with equal authority over our inferno,
    The consensus always, “throw more on.”

    Before lights out,
    We tucked in,
    We dried homesick tears,
    We sang bedtime songs,
    We read insipid inspirational poetry,
    We pointed out constellations.

    After Taps,
    We stargazed two by two.
    With our eyes closed,
    Our mouths open,
    Our hands warm beneath fleece
    With someone else’s name sewn in the collar.
    That’s the buddy system.

    We stayed up too late.
    We smelled like lake water and burning leaves.
    We kept secrets and promises.
    We sang the same songs.

    But none of that mattered
    When it came to the cotton candy machine.

  • Ready or Not, I’m All Wound Up

    He is winding the watch of his wit;
    by and by it will strike.

    – William Shakespeare

    In 2004, I resolved to leave shorter messages in the voice mail boxes of my loved ones. What was meant to be a benevolent effort to stop wasting others’ cell phone minutes backfired before the ball dropped. For the next twelve months, my recordings rambled on, unchanged in length or senselessness, only augmented by this hurried salutation:

    “This message is really long, and you know, I resolved to leave shorter messages this year, so I’m going to hang up now, really, I’m hanging up, really…okay, bye!”

    In 2006, I resolved to listen to the stereo in my car at a lower volume. With the windows closed, I kept the dial at 22 or below. With the windows open, I could pump it up to 26. My success with this resolution depended on the digital volume meter holding me accountable to the neon blue numbers on the display. Maybe if I had someone to hold up a stop-watch every time I left a message on the phone, I would have had a fighting chance with my failed resolution of 2004.

    Maybe it was just silly to resolve to squelch one of my most primal urges. How can I fight the need to ramble?

    Which brings me, through the essential blogging device fondly known as the segue, to my 2007 resolution. How can I fight my primal need to write? I’ve been waiting too long for wit to strike.

    A few months ago, someone told me, “I don’t think I’ll ever be happy unless I’m writing.” It made such certain sense to my head that he could have been reading my mind, but my heart felt pierced, as if it were suffering a slow, persistent loss. I should have started writing something at that precise moment. Instead, I started thinking about writing – the act, the product – and happiness – the state of being, the noun. It complicated what should have been effortless. Writing is a primal aspect of who I am. How can I fight it?

    My New Year’s Resolution for the rapidly approaching 2007 is to start blogging again, and to start writing again. But not right this moment. I have a party to attend. So I’m going to go now, really, I’m going, really…okay, okay, goodbye.

  • Wine and Manifesto

    On Friday, I decided that I wouldn’t consider myself officially unemployed until Monday.  Practically everyone is unemployed over the weekend.  That was my reasoning.  That’s how I found myself eating dry ramen on the couch at 12:34 on Monday morning while I stare at the cover letters and thank you notes that I started to compose last week.

    But I think I produced my best work during the Summer Publishing Institute’s closing luncheon on Friday.  After three glasses of Chilean chardonnay, I started pulling old receipts out of my wallet and scribbling thoughts down on the back.  When I woke up from my wine-induced nap hours later, I pulled them out of my bag and read my personal manifesto, loosely based on whatever inspiring words our program director was rambling off at the time, for what might as well have been the first time.  It’s pretty moving, or at least, the room seemed to be while I was writing.

    I seem to appreciate myself quite a bit after a little wine.  I must have used the word ‘brave’ at least five times.  I may tend to repeat myself, but my punctuation is on point.  At times, the following is pretty sassy.  On the other hand, it’s certainly not untrue.

    Emily,

    You have made passages that you have chosen on your own.  You have made your own brave choices.  You have made your own brave leaps and you are courageous enough to make more.

    Love, Emily

    1. Transition: you are in a transition during which you will learn, and decide and change.  You are transitioning, but you will always be you.

    2. Change:  You have made changes.  You have made changes that no one else has understood or believed in and you made them anyway because you decided – you chose – what was best for you and you went after it, caught it, and it was brave.  You could have stayed put, but you took action.  You learned to stop settling and start reaching, start demanding, start insisting that you knew – and you do know – what is right for you.  You are a strong, creative and capable woman and you can achieve whatever you choose to chase.

    Look at yourself.  The people you allow to see you love, trust and admire what they see.  It is normal to doubt yourself.  It is healthy to temper that doubt with faith and confidence, because that is what people will see in you – yes, you – when you enter a room, complete a project, or walk out with everyone checking out your adorable ass.

    Why don’t you believe in your own staggering presence…well, I guess I can’t say that I don’t understand that because I am you; I have lived through everything with you that has left you that way.  I hope that now, you – and I – will be able to look at the future and what we mean in the world ahead of us.  We are capable, beautiful, smart, and brave.

    Some years ago, you worked at a dance store where you got the job because your Girl Scout leader owned the place.  But one evening, your mom came to pick you up and while you clocked out, she told the manager who she was and the manager said, “Oh, Emily, of course!  She’s going to take on the world.”  Dance accessories, Emily, you could change the world with dance accessories.

    You can change the world with words or passion or hard work, or with love.  You love hard.

    I’m trying to choose a favorite part.  It’s either the line about my adorable ass or the part where I realize that I’m writing to myself and using first-person plural pronouns.

  • Oscar Night Insight

    Jon Stewart and I wonder why nobody gets excited at the podium when they win an Academy Award. I think the winners are suffering from the same syndrome in their acceptance speeches that I am fighting about writing personal statements for post-grad programs. They’re using their time at the podium to deliver a profoundly moving statement with rehearsed eloquence, forgoing the genuine elation about winning the big award!

    So I’ve figured out how to direct the celebs into a more exciting Oscar night performance. I guess there’s nothing left to do but tackle those personal statements.