Loose Leaf Notes

Having The Sun magazine around is like having a bottle of wine in the fridge. If it’s there, I’m easily tempted to drink it, even before noon, and even though I know it will make me feel fuzzy.

I don’t keep The Sun around because reading it makes me want to write. I don’t have time to write, at least not like that, because I’m too busy writing what I’m already writing. But someone left a copy on the kitchen table and now I’ll never get the kitchen cleaned, and the question of ‘what am I doing with my life?’ will inevitably come up.

I’d love to be published in The Sun but have never been interested in submitting to the Readers Write section. Somehow I maintain an awkward balance between snobbery and an inferiority complex, thinking I’m above writing for Readers Write (which are more like letters to the editor) while also realizing that if reading The Sun doesn’t make me want to write, it makes me want to give up writing, because I don’t think I’ll ever be that good.

I also have poverty consciousness. When I was younger and my sons were little, I loved Mothering magazine but couldn’t afford the subscription.  So I wrote and submitted something that was accepted, got paid and earned a free subscription. Now I seem to think that’s the only way I deserve a magazine subscription.

So I crack the thing open and am soon absorbed in a story about a man who is taking care of his elderly mother, a mother he has unfinished business with. He fights with his brother and freely admits his own shortcomings. It’s raw and revealing and all day I think about it and wonder if it’s true. Even though I know that fiction, like a myth, is a lie that tells the truth, I don’t want to get sucked into someone’s made-up for shock value story. Sometimes I think fiction is too much like lying, a way to keep us from telling our own shockingly true stories.

Now I’m really in the thick of it and already at the computer researching the Ancient Chinese poets, mentioned in an interview, who balanced their lives of political service (trying to make the world better) with a reclusive life, one in which they could meditate, garden, make art, take walks, contemplate mountain landscapes and drink wine with friends.

Everything seems relevant, some like therapy, and I haven’t even gotten to the poetry.

You might say The Sun shines so brightly that I feel blinded after reading for half an hour. I muster my will to put out its light, like a candle, not by blowing on it, but by snuffing out its air, which means burying it in a bookcase for a future day that won’t likely come.

Maybe someday when I’m stranded on island, I’ll indulge in a subscription of The Sun. I’ll read them cover to cover and then wallpaper my hut with the pages. I’ll write my own stories on coconuts and send them floating out to sea.

____Read Happy Birthday Sy Safransky HERE.