GILDED MEMORIES
I want to write again. It eats at me, has been eating at me for more than a decade.
As each of those years passed, I reminded myself that I’d spent many others without putting pen to paper or digits to keyboard. Those days, the urge ate at me insatiably as well, but something always came along to shake me out of it.
I guess I relied on that happening again, until I realized at 78.5 years old I’d best just get on with it.
So, I fooled with a sequel to the novel I wrote in 2014 (Don’t Ya Know) with a WIP called “Healing Properties”. It is the continuing saga of a fictional island off Long Island’s East End. However, the mojo required has failed me, repeatedly, even while I hear my late friend Martha urging me on. (Damnit, Martha. I know. I know.).
I’ve also played with creating a story about my maternal grandparents and their roots in Ireland. I’ve scrapped it. The scenes I write don’t read ‘real’ to me.
I dabbled with a full-length piece about the oldest, or at least most interesting, book club in Atlanta and loved every minute of its researchm and writing. It’s a good, solid feature. I was pleased, but not further inspired.
I would venture to write about the impending death of American democracy, however the Heathers, Robin, and Mary Geddy are acing the topic; Ann Lamott covers the fear and faith angle; and, I’m trying my damndest to engender only kindness in my 80s.
Once upon a time, I wrote weekly features for an old LI newspaper while living on a small Island lush with natural beauty, surrounded by a bay, and ripe with wonderful characters.
I haven’t lived there for more than three decades, and though I’ve lived long enough to know there are intriguing people and places everywhere, it’s so much harder to see them in the tech corridors and townhomes where I live now (in a city the NYT has named #1 this year for jobs and homes).
My character studies assume no one in this town is like Lottie, our feisty 100 year old Island neighbor who told stories on everyone in residence or Mal, the philosophical seafarer and one time town supervisor who bellowed his truths to all who’d listen or Jimmy, who can still filet a fish faster than most humans while cackling away at some great story about his SC youth.
Currently, all the quirky humans I know are my dearest friends. NDA’s exist, legally binding though implicit.
There was a time when my ‘new’ town hadn’t been discovered globally and companions to my characters of yore lived here. I was writing about other places then, and I missed the opportunity to feature the former cotton farmers, or the oldest of the Old Soldiers who still marked 1865, or the Methodist quilters who made blankets to comfort any bereaved family in their little town - population 3,000 in the 1980s and 68,000 today. Now, houses with many garages, multiple stories, and enormous windows have replaced modest, mid-Century ranches that dwelled on large tracts of land. Their owners have moved on.
As for our former home, these days I see it as a visitor and note a similar facelift has surgically altered the landscape. It’s true that mansions have looked out at the Long Island Sound for decades. They appeared to respect the sole source aquifer beneath the loamy land. Likewise, generations of bay families had lived harmoniously in cottages along the shores. They fished the waters to make a living. A few of them still do, and I respect the hell out of how difficult it must be. The same for the old family merchants and ancestral residents, the ones who fight to retain what was, but isn’t so much any more. Because the cottages have given way to the colossal second homes of new Island wayfarers - to private planes and personal beaches. They are people living on the land, not with it.
The new structures - there and here - dwarf the characters dwelling within them. The owners aren’t outside caring for their tomato plants, waving to their neighbors, or crossing the street to chat.
Oh, I know there are exceptions, and thank the good Lord there are many. My own husband, a front yard gardener, knows all our neighbors by name. That is not me. I’m more of a waver than a chatter, but I understand one simple fact - humans crave interaction. The popularity of Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden supports the theory. In it reside characters galore. Fictional ones, but symbols of the intimacy we’ve lost somewhere along the way and want to read about in record numbers.
And all the while here I am, listening for my voice after so long and wondering what it has to say. It’s me, waving to my reading neighbors while we stop to chat about that pesky American dream becoming gilded again, and I position myself in a boat battling the current where I find myself, like Gatsby, being “borne ceaselessly into the past” and thinking it’s a far more comfortable place to be.
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Fiction: Don’t Ya Know
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dont-ya-know-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1122048551
Memoirs: Manhasset Stories I & II
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1112360942
