sharpened pencils and clean underwear

in which we once again find ourselves in the unfamiliar . . .

you’d think by now i would have sharpened all my pencils, pulled clean underwear from the drawer, and stacked it all on a chair by the side of my bed.

it’s what we do when headed off to a new school. or so i learned along the way, back in the school-starting days. we sharpen pencils.

(“what’s a pencil?” i can hear today’s kidlets crying, the ones who tote their “pads” in their backpacks. . . . can you even imagine what they must think when you try to explain what a pencil sharpener is? “see this hole? you stick the stub of your pencil in there, and this crank, you turn it…”)

in the early, early hours of this week (and i mean well before the sun rose), i up and moved the chair. from wordpress, where it’s been nestled for the past fourteen years (before that, it was apple’s ancient iWeb where the chair was birthed in 2006, the pre-dawn of the blogging age), to over here, substack, where it seems the big kids play. or at least it looks that way. they do some writing in these parts. crank up the podcasts. schedule live chats (a phenomenon i’ve yet to witness, and don’t look for me to turn into a blathering pest). over here, they seem to partake of a host of of-the-moment, writerly, voice-of-the-people tricks. (stack and restack. subscribe and recommend, all verbs of this particular vernacular.)

all week i’ve been taunted by whiffs of junior high. i feel a bit like i’m back there. as if this uncharted writerly terrain is the latest iteration of that quizzical, self-questioning space and i’m a tad overwhelmed, roaming halls i don’t recognize, trying to find my way. what if doors to classrooms are locked? what if i knock over a desk on my way to my seat? what if i can’t find my locker? what if i miss my old school?

i remember well the lurch in my belly that was a part of so many septembers: when the year was new, the halls unfamiliar, and the oncoming crowds so daunting.

i am averse to unfamiliar. it gives me the jitters. not once but twice in my life—in both kindergarten and first grade—i got so sick to my stomach in the first week of school i landed smack dab in the hospital. dehydrated. i’d bottomed the barrel. both times. oh lordy. i was just a wee little kid, and the degree of scared must have been daunting. (makes me wish i could leap back in time and wrap my arms round that sweet precious child, the one who was so, so afraid. the one who was me.)

truth is, i’m feeling a wee bit quaky inside over here where the big kids—the real writers—romp. (never mind the mechanics; the futzing around behind the curtain that has all but driven me batty.) but fear not: we—all of us chairs, the old ones, the new ones, the occasionals, and the regulars—are all just going to settle in, as we’ve been doing here for the last 1,283 chair-pulling times. and we shall carry on our very chair ways: we shall be kind; we shall be curious; we will hold each other up when we wobble, and dry each other’s tears on the days when they run down our cheeks.

doing hard things is the thing i’ve been thinking about. how we do them, again and again and again. or else. (a particular quirk of mine seems to be that the more daunted i am, the more likely i am to dive in, determined and hellbent on surviving. it’s a trait i attribute to my ancient celtic roots, a people who wouldn’t be toppled no matter how rugged the landscape. though too, too often i forget to remember how many times those roots have saved me.)

i’ve been thinking of how we are so much fiercer, more stubborn, more resilient than we sometimes let on—even to ourselves. maybe especially to ourselves. we forget to notice that we’re mightier than we imagine.

sometimes we need to remember.

i remember how, not long after i found out about the nettlesome thing down in my lung, a friend who i came to love mightily, a friend who found herself on the very same road with a cancer deep in her lung, sent me a photo of a little girl standing in the doorway, with a woman i imagine to have been her mama, leaning in close, whispering something. the words at the bottom of the frame were these: “beautiful girl . . . you can do hard things.”

i remember i wept like a baby. no one had ever told me that.

it’s a thought worth clinging to.

some of us have had to learn that, well, the hard way. not because someone told us. but because we just plain up and did it. without really realizing most of the time. but then, one day when we were once again staring some hard thing in the face, maybe we stepped off to the side and took a long look back, and realized, by golly, we did do hard things: we buried someones we loved. we lay on the gurney. we did precisely as we were told—or else. we took a deep breath and pushed through the doorway. took a seat at the desk they said would be ours.

we did the hard thing.

and we didn’t crumble, not once. we might have wobbled. we might have needed to reach for a hand. but here we are, all these hard things later, and we are still standing.

do me a favor today: tell someone you know that they can do hard things, the hardest of things. tell them you know, cuz you’ve seen ’em. and then maybe look in the mirror and say it again.

the someone you see might need to hear it.

what’s one hard thing you’ve done lately?

a little bit more….(while i learn how to futz with buttons here, pretend this is one of those dividing lines letting you know this is a bit of afterthought. an extra dollop, perhaps….)

more and more of late, commonplacing is one of my greatest delights here at the chair and far, far beyond. to “commonplace” is a verb drawn from the ages-old literary device the commonplace book, a compendium of snippets and bits of esoterica and wonder that traces its roots all the way to pliny the great roman naturalist. and makes stops along the way at the writing desks of mark twain, and those rival transcendentalists thoreau and emerson. (i’ve called the commonplace book “mosquito netting for the mind” for it keeps wily little thoughts from wriggling away, provides a station in which to stake them. as indelibly as our devices will allow. (which oomphs the case for pen and paper commonplace….)

in this week’s commonplace, i have gathered a bevy. but the one worthy of a substack debut would be this marvel from e.b. white’s “This is New York.” elwyn brooks —e.b. to most of us—was something of “an inveterate non-traveler” and hated to leave his beloved maine, but in the sweltering summer of 1948, he was commissioned by holiday magazine to write a so-called travel piece of his home away from home, his “urban residence.” holed up in that epicenter of mid-century manhattan literati, the algonquin hotel, white’s essay “captures a disappearing old New York of speakeasies and diners, the demolished ‘El’ tracks, the neighbourhood ice-coal-and-wood cellars, and the thousands of neighbourhoods – often a handful of blocks, smaller than a rural village – that made up the patchwork of New York City.” and it stands as one of the best of his best, though i’d knock just about anything off the shelf that is not charlotte and her web or “death of a pig.”

i‘ll go quiet and let you inhale the whole of it….

and i’ll see you again next week. same place; same time. as ever. some things just cannot change…fridays are indelible here at the chair.

even when we move places.

among the zillion glitches this week, i noticed that none of our heavenly comments/conversations in the wake of a chair post have migrated over. but the site and all its archives—complete with comments—still exist over at https://bampullupachair.wordpress.com/

till next week. love, bam