A Novel Idea

I could be packing up my car instead of posting this right now – lighting out for a little island in big Rainy Lake – if I hadn’t had to bow out of the week-long adventure a few months ago.  There was my niece’s wedding coming this week and my dog’s failing health to think of, but this morning all I can think of is Ober’s island.

Only days ago, Margo emailed to say she and her buddy Jack were just back from another visit.  We met on this magical outcropping a half-mile from the Canadian border a couple of summers ago, she and I, and Jack (pictured above), all sleeping under the same roof in one of a batch of dwellings with ladders-for-stairs and hidden alcoves and secret doors and the ghosts of those who first visited in the first part of the last century. That’s Margo, in the doorway of a sky-high room where she found me chillin’ and invited me to come out to play.

I’m talking Pippi Longstocking-worthy play, the kind that is usually only the province of childhood.  Unselfconscious play for sure – everybody in unspoken agreement about practicing the willing suspension of disbelief, as when Jack, a loquacious pooch, mesmerized listeners with one of his stories or when the small band of us, in such high spirits that alcoholic ones weren’t needed, found ourselves under a full moon, banging drums and ringing bells, hooting and laughing, in a ragtag procession to one end of the island.

Yes, child’s play, both spontaneous and absorbing.  Whenever and wherever the spirit moved her, one of the cohabiting creatives took to making mandalas from bits and pieces of the natural surround.  Each one — appearing in this glade, beside that hint of a trail, even atop an overturned wheelbarrow — surprised the rest of us on our rambles. (At Margo’s urging, I threw together a mandala in yet another unlikely spot, the top of Margo’s head, a surprise gift for the mandalas’ creator.)

I’m certain that if I were scribbling and roaming and playing there as I have over a long string of summers, I’d soon forget all about last week’s submissions, in the same way that at the age of eight, I forgot I’d submitted a poem to Katy Keene Comics, until payment in paper dolls arrived in the mail.  Surprised by joy!

I’ve just read Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog and reread Jacqueline Woodson’s Locomotion—two books about boys who resist the siren song of poetry but ultimately experience its therapeutic power in the writing of it.  One goes:

Sometimes

when you are trying

not to think about something

it keeps popping back

into your head

you can’t help it

you think about it

and

think about it

and think about it

until your brain

feels like

a squashed pea.

A squashed pea… well, not exactly, but, despite my best intentions, I’ve been dogged by stray thoughts regarding the whereabouts of my queries and copies of the manuscript.  Is it still in an agency mail room? In an editor’s satchel?  I’m hoping that after the wedding, a family pilgrimage up north to the headwaters of the Mississippi for a week will do the trick because if there’s anything that can free a brain from feeling like a squashed pea… it’s magical thinking.  It’s inspired fun.  It’s kid-style, full-tilt, forget-about-all-else play.  And once we return,  I’m all for being surprised, once again, by joy.

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This entry was posted on July 11, 2010 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.