This Is How It All Began

I stood in the cold light of Central Park, my head down, my breath curling back around my neck like a diaphanous scarf melting into the March morning. Motionless, hands buried deep in the pockets of someone else’s overcoat, I stared at a low post with an unassuming little marker, cast bronze, the size of a deck of playing cards, nestled among the leaves of ivy. A few minutes earlier, the sun not yet above the trees on the east side of the park, I had passed the model boat pond and found a little-used track, a ribbon of chocolate-colored earth, the grass worn from the scuffing of sparse winter foot traffic. The sleeve of my overcoat brushed the needles of a young spruce and a whiff of resin trailed me as I skirted the edge of a coniferous wood and headed north and west, up an incline and away from the joggers and the gentle surf of traffic on Fifth Avenue. I passed the enormous planar rocks that had been placed like houses in a composed landscape, and stopped at the crest of the low hill, where I now stood, staring at the marker, reading the few letters that marked my own grave: “In Gratitude for the Life of Patricia Ray Cross 1954 – 1975.” The year was 1986.

As I stood there, a covey of cedar waxwings swooped in, the tiny droplets of red and yellow at the ends of their pinfeathers flashing against the undergrowth. Without looking up, I put my hand to my face and rubbed a scar like a tiny sickle on my left cheekbone and as if launched out of the crescent of that scar my finger rounded the back of my ear to tuck in a loose strand of dirty hair.  A curious odor now came to me. Earthy and ill-defined, somewhat sweet. The smell conjured images and memories I had tried to keep at bay for too long, of lying in this very spot, among the same ivy, with my friend Buz on top of me. We were seventeen, then, and had driven to New York to support an anti-war rally on the Great Lawn of Central Park. We had idled here, weary from the twelve-hour drive we had made from High Point. I shook my head a little, felt my hair brush the hood of the sweatshirt hanging out of the collar of my coat, then I reached back and pulled the hood tight around my face to shut out the cold and to quiet my thoughts.

I lifted my foot and placed it against the face of the bronze marker. With a slight lunge I shoved my weight against the raised letters and the post sank back into the dark soil. I leaned down and pulled the thing back to standing, leaving a clean wedge of empty space behind it. Grabbing the post in both hands, I lifted it out of the ground, looked back over my shoulder, then squatted and examined the block of wood, turning it over in my hands looking for some secret instruction. Taking a well-worn Swiss Army knife out of my pocket, I unfolded the screwdriver and twisted out a brass screw near the bottom on the post. Inset and invisible, a panel fell into my hand, what appeared to be a post was actually a box, as I knew it would be. Laying it on the ground, its open mouth toward me, I withdrew a long copper box from inside the wooden one and looked at a remnant of my past, now covered with a variegated blue patina.

How had I come to this? I was thirty-two years old and living on the street – by my own choice. Sometimes, the magnitude of what I was planning got the better of me and I had to stop and restate the situation rationally to reassure myself that I was not crazy. I rubbed the plastic handle of the Swiss Army knife with my thumb, feeling the familiar dents and scratches, like a kind of Braille history, a record of incidents written in a script known only to me and decipherable only with the nerves on the end of my right thumb.

I wiped my nose on the frayed sleeve of my overcoat and used the knife to release a catch on the copper box that I myself, had filled. The inside was dry and held a canvas bag sewn shut and two palm-sized books. I closed my eyes briefly, then reached into the copper box and removed one book, black with a prominent red spine, and smacked it sharply against my palm to shake loose the fine ash. For now, this book was what I needed. I jammed it into the pocket of my overcoat, pushing my fingers along the seam to check for holes. The other book, smaller, with an elastic band around it, I lightly picked up, turned over in my hand and then replaced in the copper box. Glancing around again, I closed both boxes and banged the screw back into the punky wood with the butt of my knife. I shoved the post back into the ground, pressed the earth against it with my foot, and strode away.

This was in early 2000. I was in my mid-forties and had become burned out on making large-scaled sculptures. I was still employed nearly full-time at VCCA, the artists’ retreat at the foot of the Blue Ridge, I had three kids aged 5, 10, and 13 and I felt a need to shake up my life as an artist, refresh my vision, keep burnout at bay. On a whim I signed up to audit a fiction writing course at nearby Sweet Briar College taught by my friend John Gregory Brown. I imagined that this might give me some new insights into the creative process. George W. Bush had just been handed the Presidency in what felt like a partisan, bogus Supreme Court decision. I was appalled that the people of the United States could have elected a man who often spoke and acted like a buffoon and I felt the impotence of making obtuse visual statements when what seemed to be needed was something more polemical.

So I began writing. John gave us prompts for stories but walking near the Sweet Briar College boathouse one day, I came upon a little marker, about the size of a deck of playing cards: “In Gratitude for the Life of….. ” it was obviously a memorial for a Sweet Briar student that had died while still in college. That random incident changed the course of my life. The thought of that twenty-one year old woman set me on a course that gobbled up most of my creative energies and impulses for years. I swiftly moved from stories into a complex novel set in two time periods, on three continents; a novel that wanted to be both a re-telling of the Orpheus story, an exploration of the fugitive nature of memory, a meditation on how to live a meaningful life, and an assertion of the right of an oppressed people to rise up and remove a corrupt and immoral leader. Stupendously (root word stupid) ambitious. The lessons I had learned from making sculpture for two decades; that one must always curtail the ambitions around meaning; that there will always be a new artwork that can be used to explore the next idea; that it is not advisable to try to force all the ideas into one work; were all forgotten or ignored. I forged ahead. For six years. Finishing seven drafts, spending time at the Sewanee Writers Conference, sending the manuscript out to patient and generous friends and ultimately even to ten or twelve agents, some of some of whom had very nice (or at least kind) things to say.

Ultimately that manuscript collapsed under its own weight – or at least, it got put up on a high shelf. I did come away with some valuable insights, perhaps the most important of which is that nothing you do is wasted if you simply keep moving and working. Grow the flower or the vegetable and if you don’t use it and enjoy it that time, preserve it in a jar, or freeze it, or, if that is not possible, just compost it and the next time it will be a better flower, it will hold in its core the lost flower, the essence of the previous flower and it will be more beautiful and profound because of that previous life.

The central incident around which the novel turned was truly recounted just as it had happened to me and two of my friends, up to a point, but for now it will stay on its shelf.