It was last May. I was on my way back from a pop culture conference in Calgary. Prior to and throughout that trip, I had been casting around for some kind of writing target. I’ve written before about how, when I first undertook writing for its own sake, I found I had nothing to write about except my big stupid feelings, either my sorrow over the death of my cat Peanut or my shame and rage about failing on the academic job market. And whatever I produced on either of those topics was usually all choked up, either with sentimental garbage about how one special cat taught me how to love or a bunch of melodramatic whining about how stupid I’d been. I needed to open things up, I needed to think about something else. I read books about the writing life. I read Stephen King’s On Writing and Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I felt better. I could look around me and see things to write. I could look up and feel inspired by airport architecture. But I lacked direction. Nothing was adding up.
At the pop culture conference in Calgary, I went to a panel about graffiti. I can’t remember much about any of the projects presented, but I do remember being struck, hard, by the idea that people often use graffiti as a way to inhabit a space, if only for the time it takes to tag a stop sign. It made me think about what can happen when we’re mindful about being where we are (with or without spray paint.)
It’s funny, because I have no interest in graffiti-ing anything, and though I’ll occasionally stop and take notice of a particularly vivid or weird piece of graffiti, more often than not it just joins the mass of visual city noise. But this panel on graffiti helped me to articulate something that I’d only been intuiting since I started casting around for a writing target: as I walk across the Smoot Bridge, or past the S-Curved steps on my way to Davis, or along the Mystic to the library, as I look up and across the many rooftops that jump out in sharp relief against the bright blue sky, I dig into where I am and I find sources for things I might say. Where I live can be a writing target…but how to begin?
Instagram. Really. Graffiti led me to Instagram, a platform I had avoided and scoffed at ever since I learned of its existence. Just eat your food, people! Come on! But, sitting in that Sheraton conference room, taking in the array of graffiti images captured in cities, small towns, and on railway cars, I realized that with Instagram I could capture images of my own. I could accumulate a stylized portfolio of visuals that hit me somehow, and then maybe I could figure out how to write about them. I could even use the captions to take notes for later.
The colors and layers of this Meow Mile pic really grabbed me, and it turned out to be a useful way to introduce the characters in my life: Tim, Iris, Lateegra, and the idea of Peanut (whose love taught me how to….yuck, you get it.) My Meow Mile was my first post, written before I really knew what this blog was going to be. What it lacks in coherence I think it makes up for in cuteness…a cheap trick, to be sure.
The point of all this: In a nutshell, winter kills the muse. My Instagram has been running on fumes for months. We’ve got a few pictures of the inside of my house, or a selfie of me in a unicorn horn (because, one must!) but otherwise, just nothing. Nothing I see makes me want to write. And the longer I go without writing, the harder it is to write. In desperation, I went back and read my earlier posts — cringed a bit, copy-edited some — and generally embarked upon a labyrinthine meta adventure, thinking about thinking about writing this blog.
They are no longer shoulder height, and in many places the city has come and carried them away, but most sidewalks in Medford are still narrowed by massive snow embankments. Now that March is here, the temperatures rise and fall so that the snow melts and unmelts over and over. The topmost layer of these embankments has accumulated a month of filth, so that the lacy crystalline fingers that have formed through repeated melting and unmelting glisten brown, blackish, and gray.
Oh, and of course, yellow.
Occasionally, we get to sidestep other gifts left behind by neighborhood dogs and their weary walkers. The embankments have stolen the strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk — the canine’s usual rest area. Apparently the humans tasked with ushering our neighborhood dogs out to go on the snow-choked sidewalk can’t handle their usual bend-and-scoop. They are undone by the miserable, ever-present walls of refrozen snow and filth.
Yes, this is disgusting. This is what walking in Medford has become. (But poor Medford. It isn’t just Medford. It’s the entire greater Boston area. Dis-Gusting.)
I love to walk in and around Medford. I walk as much as I possibly can, especially since the buses are as choked with irritable commuters as the sidewalks are choked with filthy snow. I am always wearing my bean boots these days. I’ve had to plan my work apparel around them. This resulted in the unintentional February uniform of bean boots, slim-cut corduroys, button-downs under sweaters, and a maybe a blazer to dress it up a bit. I have four pairs of corduroys, each in a different playful color, but if I never see my corduroys again, it will be too soon.
Despite wardrobe weariness, despite filthy snow, despite the penguin’s gait I must adopt on stretches of sidewalk that have become solid ice, I walk. Every day I skip the bus and head from my place, past Tufts, up Winthrop, down Curtis, through Teele Square to the Davis T stop, and then off to work. On the weekends, I walk either from my house down to the Mystic River and the library near Medford Square, or around Tufts campus, over to Ball Square in Somerville, then down Willow to the bike path, through Davis Square and back.
Last April, on my usual walk to the T, I got the idea to start making notes and taking pictures on my walks to try to document what it’s like for me to inhabit my town this way. All year long, this is what I do. When the sky is blue and the sun is shining, the houses, trees, and flowers all electrify with color. The world jumps out at me. I remember well stopping on my way up the hill on Winthrop Street and just staring at the S-curved steps carved into the hillside that leads up to Carmichael Hall. I love those steps. Walking here is a comfort and an inspiration. But not so much among the dank glistening of sidewalk embankments.
Last Sunday when, for the fifth time in twenty minutes, I realized shovelers had skipped the corners and I was trapped in a snow maze that would likely circle ever inward upon itself, I realized that though I never quit walking, I’d been doing it out of defiance, no longer out of love. The only joy to be had in my walks these days comes from my sense of pride at not giving up. My eyes rarely unlock from the slippery sidewalk in front of me, but I’m no quitter. This is a thin kind of joy.
But today we lost an hour, the sky is blue, and the sun will be up until well after six. When spring finally comes, we’ll see a parade of perennials: crocuses, grape hyacinths, daffodils, tulips, irises, roses, lilacs, peonies, rhododendrons, hostas, hydrangeas, echinachea, black-eyed susans, and others whose names I’ve never learned, and some surprise guests, like the totally unexpected color explosion I stumbled upon in my neighborhood last September. Not five minutes before I’d been complaining that we’d run out of flowers for the flower parade. Then I almost ran into this bank of bright pink.
Moments after I cheerily posted My Snow Panic two weeks ago, I received an email I’d been kind of dreading.
Back in July, I submitted the third iteration of My Middlemarch Article to a third scholarly journal of Victorian literary and cultural studies. After seven months, I got my rejection.
Feelings were mixed: I was not surprised; I was tremendously disappointed; I understood where the reviewers were coming from; I was certain they hadn’t actually paid attention to what I was trying to do, which pissed me off…or they didn’t care…which in the end, is on me. Woe. Is. Me.
If I were submitting a different kind of writing to a different kind of journal — say, a short story to a literary journal — a reviewer’s inability to “get it” wouldn’t feel so bad. To a certain extent, it would still be “on me” if a reviewer didn’t get it, but the culture surrounding that kind of literary submission puts more responsibility on the reviewer. The piece just didn’t connect with that reader, but it might be just what the next editor is looking for. And guess what? In the world of literary journals, you can submit the same piece to multiple journals simultaneously. Not So in Scholarland.
Still, plenty of people who write scholarly articles adopt a similar view. They immediately send the manuscript off to the next journal on their list. I’ve heard beautiful stories. One place hated it, the next place accepted it with minor revisions. Dreams do come true!
Now, you know you can’t throw a dead skunk at the internet these days without hitting an article about the dying academic job market or the plight of the adjunct. Your dead skunk might even hit my rendition of “quit lit.” Less prolific are the articles about the sado-masochistic world of scholarly peer-review. Less prolific, but still plentiful. Here, in a piece for Vitae, Kirsten Bell pulls the curtain back on the world of scholarly journal publication. She also links to other articles she’s written in which she gently takes us all by the hand and shows us just how we’ve been effing everything up. (I kind of like her.) And in this piece for Slate, in her trademark over-the-top satirical style (which I love), Rebecca Schuman shows us just how messed up the peer-review process has become and proposes her modest, pragmatic solution.
So, I’m not alone in getting my guts wrenched by this process, nor am I alone in my understanding that I don’t have to let it wrench my guts. I can really just shoot this manuscript at the next scholarly journal of Victorian literary and cultural studies, provided I tweak some things to suit the new venue. And I’ve toyed with this option. But my reviewer called the coherence of my argument into serious question. Back to the drawing board, they said. Or strip it and sell it for parts.
I’m a planner. Even curled in the fetal position, I plan my next move. But things are different this time.
On the one hand, given that I’ve chosen a non-traditional sort-of academic path, I knew that I could just cut my losses and move on. I know about the “sunk-cost fallacy.” More misery doesn’t add value. I don’t need to publish like an assistant professor, because at this point it really doesn’t look like I’m gonna be one.
On the other hand, though I know that “publish or perish” doesn’t apply to me, I want to see My Middlemarch Article have some kind of life out there in the world, where people can read it. Truly, the only way to get your scholarship published is by not cutting losses and moving on. I’ve been working on Middlemarch for about a decade — from seminar paper, to conference presentations, to dissertation chapter, to first rejected article, to second rejected article, and now third rejected article. That’s a lot of time, and it feels like a lot of rejection, but compared to the wide field of scholarly publishing, it’s totally commonplace. We must take comfort in that, right? An article that is good can be rejected many, many times. And I’m no quitter.
As I sat there on my old IKEA loveseat, chromebook in my lap, reading and re-reading the reviewer’s report, crumpling and uncrumpling both facially and internally, I felt my personal sunk-costs. I’ve invested a lot of time and scholarly toil, but it’s more than that. Working on My Middlemarch Article, I’ve changed. I’ve gotten better. While Peanut the cat and I negotiated bites of tuna and nausea medication, I was also working hard on this article’s second iteration. As the new version came together, so much stronger than the first, I seemed to be coming together and getting stronger, too. I don’t know, the two things feel really knotted together. Even though they probably aren’t.
The journal I sent the second version to rejected it, but in the second paragraph of the letter they asked me to write a review essay about Victorian realism. I accepted, did the research, wrote it, and was told to expect it in the March issue. As I crumpled and uncrumpled on the loveseat the other day, I took a peak to see if it had come out yet. It had.
That helped. Then, the following Friday I got an email from a journal accepting a conference paper I’d given for publication. This one is on another gigantic George Eliot novel called Daniel Deronda. The ideas in this paper owe a lot to the work I’ve one on Middlemarch; it’s been in development for almost as long, too. The Deronda Paper will appear in this journal’s online, free, readable-by-anyone section in May. That makes two publications out of the ashes of My Middlemarch Article.
So, I’ve decided that I don’t have to decide what to do about My poor old rejected Middlemarch Article. I’ve decided that it can live in a drawer for a while. The article itself might not be out there in the world — it might never get out there in the world — but some of the stuff it helped create is out there now. For years, I’ve felt like some inmate of Tartarus, working and working to make something that seemed to crumble apart in my hands. But some things did actually come together. My stuff doesn’t look like I was told it ought to, but it is my stuff, and it isn’t too shabby.
It’s ok, I know it looked like you didn’t have any ideas that were going to cohere today, but you’ve got it now.
No, you’re right, I know, it totally isn’t your fault that you’ve been buried under a five-foot tall pile of snow. And right, the MBTA! The MBTA keeps shutting things down. And when it’s running, nobody wants to go anywhere because all buses and trains, when they turn up, are packed. And broken.
And, once you swallow your terror and get on board, there will be no sitting down. There will only be upright spooning with strangers, and then swaying together — human spoons, nested, swaying, pretending to be elsewhere. Thank god we’re all wearing big puffy coats to help us maintain the illusion of personal space.
Yesterday was nice, though, right? WBUR Meteorologist David Epstein said the weather wouldn’t get bad till late, so we could all keep our Valentine’s day plans. After gleefully trudging a mile and a half to Davis Square, grabbing, on impulse, 2 chocolate chip cookies for $2.49 at the Davis Au Bon Pain, you and Tim didn’t bat an eye at the mob of people waiting for the train. Delays due to a severe and mysterious medical emergency at the Park Street Station…Who Cares?! Love! Cookies! And the massive angry crowd of Valentines people was thinner at the back of the train! No stranger spooning! Score!
In spite of the falling snow, icy temperatures, wind, slush, and sidewalks-turned-giant snow caverns, you still got to the Russell House Tavern in Harvard Square for the raw bar, lobster sliders, and a lovely glass of bubbly. And then pen shopping at Bob Slate Stationers, followed by comics at The Million Year Picnic and a new pair of whale socks at Newbury Comics (which sells more socks now than it does comics…or music, but no matter. One must find one’s cool-ass socks somewhere.)
Over night, though. Wow. Here’s the neighborhood:
The beautiful, frozen MysticTim wanted to see the beautiful, frozen Mystic, so we walked over there. It usually takes us about five minutes to get to this bridge. This time, maybe twenty minutes? Twenty five?I could not see over the bridge’s snowbank to see the beautiful, frozen Mystic. But that’s ok!I can barely see over the top of this snow cavern, but that’s ok!My home is totally buried in snow, but that’s ok!And around the home, we have beautiful, terrifying Ice Dams that could fall and kill us, but that’s ok!Because under what other circumstances can I get away with rocking these cool-ass socks?
Yes, those socks are cool-ass, indeed. And it’s ok that the only thing you really have to blog about is the same thing that everyone in eastern Mass, parts of Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine has been talking about for the past month? I mean, it is a crazy huge amount of snow. Seriously.
I am sitting on the floor in my kitchen, leaning on one forearm with the other outstretched, trying to coax my cat Peanut to eat bits of tunafish from my finger tips.
We just got home from one of his chemo treatments about an hour ago. The vet tech told me that if he won’t eat within a couple of hours, then I have to call. If he won’t eat, he’ll have to go back. He hates leaving the house. Leaving the house is, for him, the worst part of having cancer.
There was a time when Peanut would walk right into his carrier, but since the vet appointments have grown closer together and more invasive we have to force him. I have mastered this by now, but the first time he fought me turned into a half an hour of struggling. It was summer in our third-floor apartment. I was sweating and growing sweatier as I chased him, grabbed him, tried and failed to get him in the carrier. Peanut is a huge orange tomcat, like Maurice the Cat or Garfield, and I am not skilled in cat-grappling. Every time I tried to thrust him in he’d somehow manage to straight-arm the entryway and knock the carrier back. After perhaps ten attempts, including a couple in which I stood the carrier on end and tried to lower him in, I gave up.
Shit.
Then I remembered that I am stronger than him. I just had to anchor the damned thing so he couldn’t push it away.
I grabbed him, forced him in, and then paced the apartment. I was out of breath, kind of weeping, soaked with sweat, and coated in cat hair. It was in my eyes, up my nose, and in my mouth. I removed as much as I could, and took Peanut to the damned vet.
In May, after Peanut’s regular checkup, there were concerns about his liver. Friday before Memorial Day, we took him in for an ultrasound. The anesthesia from that procedure almost killed him. A vet hospital in Woburn saved his life, and after the holiday weekend, both our vet and the hospital told us that Peanut had lymphoma.
I was not the primary cat parent. That was Tim. He took care of all the near-death drama while I waited at home. But cat oncology appointments can only be made on weekdays during regular work hours. Because it was summer, and as an adjunct academic I was “off work,” that left me to do the primary cat parenting. (In truth, I was unemployed in the summer, or rather ungainfully self-employed. I was embroiled in the process of patching significant research holes in my recently-rejected article on intimacy in Middlemarch — a novel that is very well covered by scholars already — and along with that imbroglio, I was fiercely battling the return of my depression.)
Though Tim found Peanut as a kitten in Evanston, Illinois five years before I’d met them, and though Peanut was there for Tim through years of upheaval, and though Tim took care of Peanut day after day while I explored the various depths of my woe and self-involvement, it was I who went with Peanut to find out how much time he had left, and how he was supposed to spend it.
Peanut’s lymphoma is particularly aggressive, the cat oncologist told me. His life expectancy is very short, with or without chemotherapy. I listened as well as I could, trying to make sense of our three complex treatment options so that I could confer with Tim over the phone.
Option number one: chemo at the veterinary hospital every single week for the rest of Peanut’s life. Option number two: chemo at the veterinary hospital every three weeks, plus meds, for the rest of Peanut’s life. Option number three: no chemo, some meds, and occasional checkups at the vet hospital for the rest of Peanut’s life. Testing on dogs has indicated that option number one prolongs life longer than option number two, and option number two longer than option number three. But no matter what we do, this cancer is going to kill Peanut in nine months or less.
We chose the second option because the third didn’t seem enough like trying.
The name of the game is Quality of Life. As we side-stepped the omnipresent anxiety, pain, and nausea of weekly car rides to invasive chemo, our task was to maintain Peanut’s quality of life through a combination of vet visits, feeding, medication, and observation. And most of the time, it was just me. He needs his medication about an hour after we get home from the vet, and he needs to take it with food. But the vet, the car ride, and the medicine make him too stressed and nauseous to eat. And a cat’s failure to eat can become life-threatening very quickly. Hence, if Peanut doesn’t eat within a couple of hours, back to the vet he must go.
So Peanut and I enter into a precarious dance. We come home. He is very stressed, so I let him calm down. He hides under the bed. I learn to gently call his name to coax him out of hiding. I learn that tuna is his comfort food.
Down here on the kitchen floor, I have bits of tuna on every finger. There are bits of tuna scattered on the floor between us.
“Please, Peanut. Eat some tuna.”
He sniffs it. He licks a few bits from my fingers. I pull the dish forward and he sniffs it. He recoils a little, nauseous. Then he inches his nose toward the bowl again. He licks a bit of tuna juice. He has a bite. Another. He’s eating.
At last, I wipe away the tears and snot that have been running down my face and I collapse onto the floor. He’s eating. He will not have to go back to the vet today. Lying snotty and sobbing on the kitchen floor, I know I have become a cat person.
Back in 2006, right after Tim and I got married, we realized that Peanut had put on quite a bit of weight. In the nine-month period before our wedding, Tim and Peanut had been living with roommates, one of whom was another cat. Peanut tried to befriend this cat, but she demurred. So, he availed himself of her ready supply of food. He was in danger of cat-adult-onset diabetes, so we put him on a diet.
For six years, we measured out his food, he lost a couple pounds, and begged to be fed all the time. He liked to nibble on my bare legs and scratch at my dissertation desk while I tried, often in vain, to wrestle the Diaries of Virginia Woolf to the ground.
Yeah, I screamed at him a few times. A few times a day.
I remember quipping to my friends at a party, “I’m pretty much over Peanut.” I should have said, “I’m pretty much over Virginia Woolf,” because it wasn’t Peanut who was killing me, it was her. But he was easier to blame. As I cared for him throughout summer 2013, I apologized a lot.
Over time we decided to stop the chemo treatments. All they did was make him nauseous. He started eating more, and we rejoiced.
As I patched my research holes on intimacy in Middlemarch, the ever-shrinking Peanut curled up in my lap to keep warm, even in the summer heat. As summer turned to autumn, he ate less and less.
The week before Thanksgiving, we had to let him go. Carrying Peanut, I approached the vet hospital receptionist and said, “I have come to euthanize my cat.”
January 2014
There’s been no cat here for me to care for or talk to. One day, I caught myself petting my own pony-tail. A few days later, I decided to name it Harrison. I miss the Harrison phase. Anything I did, I announced to Tim that Harrison and I were doing it. While we enjoyed this source of hilarity, we also knew it was time to find our new cats. At the Gifford House Cat Shelter, Iris and Lateegra were quartered in the basement–Iris lived in the shower stall and Lateegra lived about ten feet away, in one of those cages we all call “crates.”
I am a cat person and a primary cat parent. I clean the litter box. (Well, we take turns.) Here is what I know about quality of life:
Sitting in the sun means the cat is happy. Sitting in the window means the cat is happy. And if you’re working at your dissertation desk, or your adjunct-academic desk, or your freelance-math-book-editor desk, hacking through the current learning curve, and you look down and find a cat sitting on the rug next to you, all four feet curled underneath, kind of resembling a loaf of bread, it means this:
“I kind of like you.”
Which makes me happy.
— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
Peanut in our Somerville apartment, on my dissertation desk.
Though I will be exercising more, this is the only serious resolution I have:
Write every single day, before everything else.
So far, it has been a challenge. First of all, the phone beckons. I’d gotten into the habit of checking my calendar, to-do list, and email on my phone almost the instant I got out of bed. This would, inevitably, turn into checking facebook and twitter. I’d stand there in the middle of the kitchen in the dark, swaying zombie-like, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. In truth, this morning ritual never takes very much time, but I think it may have a deadening effect on my mood and creativity.
So, no more phone until after I write. I also used to give up about thirty minutes a day to reading while I drink my coffee. It was quite glorious, to be honest, but then I found that I wasn’t writing nearly as much as I wanted to be. So, now I’ll be writing before everything else…buuut in order for my brain to function I do have to include some caveats: eat breakfast and have coffee on hand. There must always, always be coffee.
“11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all of these come afterwards.”
I don’t remember where I saw this, and that’s because I saw it during one of my morning zombie scrolls. But it resonated — “Erh?!” — and I put the phone down.
A lot of Henry Miller’s commandments don’t make sense for me at the moment. In addition to music, friends, and cinema, I also have this day-job thingy. And his first rule doesn’t work right now either: “1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.” I think that’s a great idea, honestly, but my “one thing” is currently made up of the chaos of a million things. So, I prefer Ann Lamott’s theory of index cards and short assignments, in which a writer collects insights and images as she moves through the world and then dedicates herself to writing at least 350 words a day, keeping an eye out for the moment things start to cohere. When that happens, I will gladly work on one thing at a time. And this post just clocked in at 403 words.
Tim’s bicycle has a broken axle. He bought it when he was 23, when he was living in New Brunswick, New Jersey back in the spring of 2000. The bicycle before that was purchased the previous summer, in Delaware. It traveled with him–first to Richmond, Virginia, where he stayed for one month in late summer ’99, then to New Brunswick, where he stayed a bit longer, for basically the whole ’99-2000 school year. Somewhere in there, Tim left that bicycle under a tree in the side yard of the blue split-level colonial where he lived with five other twenty-somethings. The bike got stolen. He replaced it with a black Jamis, which he has ridden ever since — until the day he crossed the railroad tracks near Kendall Square in Cambridge and busted the axle.
Though Tim is a freelance editor today, he used to be a math teacher, and before that he worked raising money for environmental causes. After graduating from college, Tim took a job as canvas director for the Fund for Public Interest Research. He would travel from town to town setting up canvas offices and deploying teams of college students to knock on doors, raising money for things like Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and Human Rights Campaign. He worked for the Massachusetts bottle bill his first summer (a new version of which just failed…again). He had a big win the year his bike was stolen: he helped protect about 90 million acres of national forests from the logging industry.
Tim is tall and thin with light, wavy brown hair, big blue eyes, and a smile that digs deep into both cheeks. Though he looked younger than most of the college students on his team, for as long as he was in town he was an effective manager, running things with an air of good humored sincerity.
His work involved a lot of hustle and bustle, but he also spent a lot of time alone. When the kids were canvasing, Tim would canvas too, walking miles all alone, knocking on doors, sometimes getting donations, sometimes not. On these jobs, there was plenty of time to think — he would, for example, theorize the correlation between the outward appearance of a house, the likelihood of donation, and if they gave, how much. He once told me about how on his rare nights off in West Hartford, he’d stop at a nearby used bookstore, buy a paperback and read the whole thing in a night. This reminded me of the time he fell asleep under a tree near Spy Pond (Arlington, MA) while reading Kafka’s short stories. A solitary but contented man.
On our second date, in the spring of 2005, I saw him crumple his water bottle up into a little ball and stick it in his pocket to recycle at home. I thought that was so weird, I fell in love a little. I soon learned, Tim does not just throw things away. His bike is a prime example. A couple of years ago, when we brought our bikes in for their annual April checkup, Tim and the bike guy shared a little moment, laughing at how long the old Jamis had been hanging on. A few years before that, Tim noticed with chagrin that someone had stolen his bike seat and replaced it with a lesser model. This seat tips up and down and is generally a pain in the ass. I have suggested that he go buy himself a proper seat at least once a year for the last eight years. “Eh…it’s fine,” he says. “Now it’s rusted in place!”
But, this past August, the axle broke. The Jamis is currently unrideable. Fortunately, Hubway exists, and it is right in line with Tim’s sensibilities. It’s a bike-sharing program with bike stations all over the greater Boston area. There are annual and monthly memberships, or you can get a 24 or 72 hour pass — you swipe your credit card at the Hubway kiosk and you can ride as many times as you want within the time-frame you select. You just can’t go over 30 minutes a ride.
The day before I wrote Smoot Bridge, I got the urge to ride my bike over there. I used to ride across the bridge every day, but it had been years and I wanted to recapture the feeling. For a tense moment, we thought I would have to do this alone…the Jamis’s axle is broken, after all. But then we remembered Hubway. Tim decided to do the 24 hour pass. If he could switch bikes in under 30 minutes, he could get away with paying only $6. Challenge accepted.
We walked from our house to the Tufts Hubway station and grabbed the first bike. Being the first one, this transaction took the longest. We rode from Tufts, down to Mass Ave, and through Harvard Square. We heard the noontime bells ringing, and Tim realized he only had 7 minutes to return his first bicycle. I was totally oblivious to this. He charged up Mount Auburn and Mass Ave, on the lookout for any sign of Hubway. He found a station at the Central Square Post Office, with only a couple minutes to spare.
He had a little trouble with this one, because the original 30 minutes wasn’t up yet. For a second, he thought he’d misread the website and he’d be stuck bikeless in Central Square. Once the 30th minute arrived, he tried again and was immediately given his next bike. He figures either the time was an issue, or the kiosk needs a couple of minutes to recognize that the bike is back. (here’s a word from Hubway about what happened.)
We kept riding down Mass Ave, across the Smoot Bridge, where I stopped to take some pictures for the blog. Tim didn’t say anything, but he knew the pictures were going to make it difficult to get to another Hubway station in time. He thought he could make it once we got going across the bridge, but, as he rode out to the patch of Esplanade across from the Lagoon, he realized that I had disappeared.
In fact, I had stopped as soon as I got down to the Esplanade from the bridge. The sailboats were looking perfect and I wanted a picture. I tried to call after him, but he was way out of earshot. Once we met back up, everything was swell until, on the foot bridge at Mass General, Tim realized he had 2 minutes to find a Hubway station. I was in mid-sentence when he realized this. “Time’s almost up! Gotta go! Gotta go!”
Tim’s Hubway Adventure was truly excellent. He may try it again some time, but he wishes we had a station closer to our house. We both feel lucky to live somewhere with a service like this, but we both love our own bikes. I asked him what he wanted to to do about his, fully expecting that at long last he would agree to replace it with a new bike. I don’t know what I was thinking. The Jamis isn’t going anywhere.
–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
Hubway Adventure Route!Tim on a bike path in Wales, holding bikes that look exactly like ours…yet which are not.
The 94 bus route to Medford Square is more circuitous than I had originally thought.
“If I want to go straight to the library from Davis, what’s the best way to go?”
“Well, the 94 goes right by there.”
Indeed, but had I gotten off at my house and walked, I would have been there and home already. I’d only ever gone to the library on a whim, never on a mission. Stephen King’s On Writing had come in and they were holding it for me. I had to get to the library. As soon as possible.
Not a direct route.
Now, Stephen King’s On Writing was certainly old news to most by this point in time. It was March 2014. On Writing was published in 2000, not long after King was struck from behind by a light blue Dodge mini van on one of his many walks along Route 5 up near Bangor, Maine. By the time I got around to caring (and I mean, seriously caring…a lot) about On Writing, King had considered and decided against retirement, and published something like sixteen more novels.
I started reading King in 1992, when I was 13 — Carrie, of course — then powered through Christine, It, The Shining, The Dark Half, ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, Firestarter, and finally stopped with Needful Things somewhere around 1999. I rekindled things for a minute with The Stand in 2003; I enjoyed it, but King and I had basically gone our separate ways in the late 90s. I can’t remember why, exactly. In 2002, a classmate brought in an excerpt from the “Toolbox” section of On Writing to share with our freshman comp. teaching practicum at Kent State University. This may have prompted me to take a look at The Stand, but on the whole I was focused on books by people named Faulkner, Woolf, Eliot, and I stayed that way until somewhere around March 2014. Except it was around then that I realized I had this Ph.D. in literature and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d just read a book. And it was killing me.
Back in the wintertime, I started taking some creative writing classes as a means to shake off the tortured scholarly prose and get back to where I once belonged. To my dismay, the only things I had to write about were my daily waves of post-Ph.D. bitterness and how I felt about my recently deceased cat. These feelings were intense, and my aphasia on any other topic only made things worse. I felt like an exposed nerve. My writing teacher liked to quip, “There are only so many human emotions,” to help us build confidence in our writing. I created my own version of this: “There are only so many human emotions. And I am having all of them. Right now.” It wasn’t until I finally took a walk one Saturday morning over to the Library that I started to settle down.
The writing teacher asked us to make resolutions about the progress we’d make in the next 30 days. Other people planned their memoir projects. I vowed to start reading again. Just reading. At home, I surveyed my walls of books. Here are the Victorian and modernist novels I’ve started but never finished. Here are the graphic novels I’ve never even opened. Here are shelves upon shelves of literary criticism and theory I’ve been trying to shove whole into my head. I have so many books. I couldn’t read any of them. That Saturday, I walked down Winthrop Street, darted across the roundabout at High Street, and made my way to the Summer Reading section of the Medford Public Library.
the Library in early November
It’s a mid-century municipal building. It reminds me very much of the public library next to my old middle school in Austintown, Ohio, where as a little kid I would check out bags full of books, and as a big kid I would sheepishly explore the “Young Adult” spinner rack. (Back in the early 1990s, “Young Adult” didn’t mean wizards and sparkling vampires; it meant over-the-pants makeout sessions and teen angst!) The Medford Public Library is not fancy. It is not the flagship branch of the Minuteman Library Network. But they have shelves upon shelves of fiction and nonfiction. You can sit down and read the paper at old, expansive tables. You can peruse a dozen spinner racks of ancient paperbacks. And if they don’t have something (and let’s face it, while they have a lot, they don’t have it all) you can order it from the Minuteman Network. It’s a twenty-minute walk from my house, and I love it.
On that first visit in February, I felt I had forgotten how to use a public library (though now I realize that the point is that you can use it however you want.) I walked all around the place before I settled on Summer Reading. I wanted to read something completely different from what I had been reading. Nothing too fancy, but still something solid and good. Good librarians spent time and thought compiling this collection for the local school kids, and I threw myself upon their goodness and expertise. I picked up and put down several different books before deciding on Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding. I went home and gobbled those up in a matter of days. Then, I read seven books in a month. I’m still going strong.
Sometime in late February or early March, I sat down at one of the old PCs the library has for looking up books in the catalog. I wanted to know what they had on writing. In particular, I wanted On Writing. I can’t tell you why, but the book had acquired an aura…I felt it held important secrets or something. I don’t know, I just really wanted to read it. No dice, though. Not today. Medford doesn’t carry it. Denied instant gratification, I put my order in. A few days later, I got the email while I was at work. My mission: reach the Library before closing time! To the 94 bus!
Well, we know how that went, but I did get there before closing time. Book in hand and safely across High Street, I began reading immediately. I read King’s three forewords (yes, there are three forewords) as I took the footbridge over the Mystic from Shipyard Way to Route 16. As I walked down South Street toward Winthrop, I read King’s earliest memory of being stung in the ear by a wasp while he was playing “strong man” in his Aunt and Uncle’s garage. So many of his novels start with similar moments of childhood vulnerability. This one isn’t a scary story, but his voice is the same to me, so familiar. The voice of my old friend who regularly scared me so bad that I had to hide his books under my bed for days at a time.
Inhabit Your Town 
