Loose Leaf Notes

DID YOU HEAR THAT SOUND? I JUST FELL OFF MY CHAIR!!! That’s what I said to my friend, Patry, after reading an email she sent to me with a subject line that announced: Strangest Coincidence Ever.

 
I had stumbled upon Patry’s blog nearly three years before, intrigued by that fact that she was a waitress who wrote poetry. Later, we began to correspond via blog comments, and I learned that she grew up in the same Massachusetts town my grandmother was from, that we both had family members who worked in the Brockton shoe factories, and that she lived on Cape Cod, very near to where I grew up.

 
But it turned out that our link was even closer than that.

 
The whole time we were clicking on each other’s blogs and reading about our mutual adventures, we couldn’t have guessed what Patry’s email revealed. She had discovered that her first cousin’s daughter had lived in Floyd for many years and that she was married to my first husband after he and I divorced! Patry hadn’t known when she read about my son Dylan’s marriage in summer of 2006, or when she read about Josh building a wood fired kiln that my sons, Dylan and Josh, are the older brothers of her second cousin’s son.

 
She jokingly called me “cuz” after that.

 
After the release of her debut novel, Liar’s Diary, and the book tour that followed, Patry’s blog posts became infrequent. In August she mentioned working on a new novel, so I assumed that she was busy with that. In September her posts stopped altogether. It wasn’t until late November, after a three month silence, that a new entry appeared. THIS TIME I SUNK IN MY CHAIR.

 
Reading that Patry had cancer, felt like I was reading a scene from one of her novels. It should have been a character she created that had cancer, but it was her. It was real.

 
The day after Christmas, writing from the hospital, she described the scene from her window as “a kind of moving picture–one I could see, but could not enter. I looked on it–and on my own recent active, happy life–with nostalgia and awe.”

 
A good painting has the ability to pull me in, to create a route for me to enter into it. Writing can to the same thing. If it’s good, I’m able to transport myself, to see the written scene and feel as if I’m there.

 
It probably helped that the Boston skyline is etched in my own memory and that I know what the Charles River looks like. But mostly it was Patry’s writing that transported me back to Boston. I could see the people she described on the street below her hospital window trudging with Christmas packages in snow, coming in out of the Starbucks for the love of hot coffee. I even walked the hospital corridors and imagined myself with a tin of Christmas cookies on my way to visit Patry. I had already been introduced to her roommate through Patry’s writing and felt like I knew her. I might as well say hello, I thought.

 
She ended her post about the view from her hospital window like this: Outside, the snow continued to fall, and people continued to travel through the moving picture in the street, eager to get where they were going. My friend and I, temporarily stopped by pain and indignity and tedium, were them. And they, whether they knew it or not, were us.

And that’s what writing at its best does. It connects us to each other. I can see Patry’s world through the window she creates with her words. And as I read, her words move me, dissolving the separation of time and space between us, at least for a few seconds.

 
Please feel free to visit Patry’s blog, say hello, and wish her well. The last I heard her prognosis was good.