Work in Progress

It has been those long seven weeks since I could work at all on my novel in progress, this one for adults. I had left the book at a crucial place. I was afraid, frankly, that it would deny me access. Sometimes all you can write in a day is a scene. This one takes place in 1955, in a hospital for the mentally unwell. The photo above is the Alcatraz kitchen. It was the closest I could come to an institutional shot.

Down the long vat of the hall, the day is a scowl. The white sun through the streaked glass is a kind of unhappy. Beyond the windows the trees poke their naked branches into the underbelly of the sky. “Fresh air to do us good,” I tell Autumn, because she already knows, because I told her so through the hard itch of the dark night, that our goodness has earned us the outsides. “We’re privileged people now,” I said. I walk smooth and straight. I parade, no shenanigans, as if there is not, all around me, the bent smash of the Staters in their untied dress wraps and naked feet, their nowhere to go, their back and forthing. They walk and they sit, or they lump along the hall edge like rolled-up carpets, or they have been tied into the places they will remain all day, like dogs at the end of no leash. I walk like I walk, through the smoke and the stares, pushing my parcel, which is Autumn. “Wind is blowing,” I tell her. “Bushes are in rumble.”

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Think what you must, but the book that has been with me of late—the one I just finally finished reading an hour or so ago while I waited for the boys to rise—has been the Ken Kesey classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It was on the high school summer reading table at the local book store, and of course I'd seen the movie, but I should have long ago read the book.

I had anticipated the intensity of the story itself—the horrible inevitability that awaits Randle Patrick McMurphy, the red-headed asylum inmate with the white-whale shorts who does battle of every kind with Nurse Ratched. I fell in quickly with Chief, the faux-mute/deaf Indian who narrates the tale. What I didn't see coming was the sentence-by-sentence power of the writing itself, the ridiculously unriddled but original details that made this book not a fast read for me, but a slow one.

Here's what Kesey does with a man's hand, which is to say, with a man's character:

I remember real clear the way that hand looked: there was carbon under the fingernails where he'd worked once in a garage; there was an anchor tattooed back from the knuckles; there was a dirty Band-Aid on the middle knuckle, peeling up at the edge.... I remember the palm was smooth and hard as bone from hefting the wooden handles of axes and hoes, not the hand you'd think could deal cards. The palm was callused, and the calluses were cracked, and dirt was worked in the cracks. A road map of his travels up and down the West.

There's a whole life story in these hands—no need to back story McMurphy in any of the staid, familiar ways. He's all right there, in a peeling Band-Aid. So much to learn from that.

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Holding on to the Just Then

We climbed to the top of Russian Hill, and for a moment, everything was ours.

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The Gardens of Alcatraz, A Prisoner's Release

"The hillside provided a refuge from disturbances of the prison, the work a release, and it became an obsession. This one thing I would do well.... If we are all our own jailers, and prisoners of our traits, then I am grateful for my introduction to the spade and trowel, the seed and the spray can. They have given me a lasting interest in creativity."

Elliott Michener, Alcatraz prisoner and gardener, quoted in Gardens of Alcatraz.

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