Some of Each, in a Rain Storm

Throughout the long pour-down of yesterday's rain, I travel. First, in the dark of pre-dawn, I travel a dreamscape, write to page 246 of this new novel. It's a number bearing no actual significance, save that there, within page 245, are the seeds of the novel's ending, a turning toward, a knowing that, someday, I'll finish this—a fact I would not have bet on until yesterday's strum-beat of rain. Mid-morning Body Pump at the gym with friends is a journey away from me, my mind. Later, back at home, the windows streaking, the laundry room leaking, I slip inside the work of my Penn students, who have responded, with heartbreaking skill, to this call:

Choose an event from your own life about which you now have some distance, some accumulated wisdom. Tell the story of what happened. Enrich it with your understanding of what it meant then, of what it means now, of how time has shifted both the event and its meaning. Consider Ginzburg's dictate about poetic beauty, Dillard's consuming wish to notice everything, Hampl's suggestion that true memoir is written in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.

In the early afternoon, my husband and I eat under a canopy at a local dive, watch the canvas pucker beneath the force of rain. At the gym, beneath the pounding down of storm on rooftops, we practice our tango. Inside the ceaseless wash, we drive home, and again I read the work of my students, then read (for the fourth time) "Hotels Rwanda," authored by my friend Jay Kirk, a best travel essay originally appearing in GQ. Jay will join our class on Monday, talk about how narrative nonfiction gets done, about how one hunts for story, then finds its heart, then gives it shape and purpose. Jay will come, and because he knows and charms and bushwhacks and waits, we'll all be smarter for it.

Late afternoon, our son calls and we talk for a long time about the things he has learned, the conversations he has started, the words his teachers write across his papers. Night, the rain still falling, we watch the movie, "Seven Pounds." I cannot sleep afterward.

Today, this much-discussed ballroom dance showcase will take place. A tango. A Broadway quickstep jive. No matter what, then, that chapter will be written, complete. That is life, the sum total: the anticipation, the afterward.

I just wish I slept more.