Notes On Another New Life #20

Over My Shoulder

Laurie Stone and Richard Toon in 2011.

I'm thinking about two periods in my life where I felt flattened to the mat. One is getting fired from the Village Voice in 1999, a little bit before a wave of firings would change the lives of many other writers at the paper. I'm also thinking about moving to Arizona to live with Richard, starting in 2007. No matter who I talked to and how much effort I made to work with other writers there, I was invited to participate in the literary world—I mean give a reading in a series or attend a literary festival—exactly never.

I’m dying to describe these people to you. I want to tell you their names and the way they spoke to me. I can see their faces. One looks like a pit bull. Another is so proud of her punk cool I doubt her piercings are even real. If I laid these fish on the deck and slit them down the middle, it would be for me, not you. It would be for you, too, but consider I’m hating them enough for both of us.

When a thing is happening that takes the stuffing out of me, that pokes me in the shoulder and says, You know what? You're nothing. You never were and you never will be. When a thing like that is going on, I can’t feel it the way I am feeling it now. I can measure the toll on me of excluding episodes—the slinking off and feeling of pushing boulders up mountains. I can wonder about such times in the lives of other people because I'm in the exact opposite relationship to the world.

In a week I’ll be 78. This number has little meaning to me except there’s a lot of high moments and low moments to look back on, and what I can tell you is I have changed temperamentally hardly at all. A friend was recently contemplating turning 60 in another year. That number has an aura around it for her. I think it did for me, too. It’s the shadow of you’re not going anywhere exciting again or to places where you’re wanted.

I didn’t pull myself out of anything. Life went this way and not that way. On my sixtieth birthday, honestly truly on my sixtieth birthday a bolt of lightening tapped my shoulder and said, You see that guy over there named Richard? He’s walking in the same garden of forking paths you’re walking in. Why don’t you link arms. I didn’t change, but my life changed, and the same way a punch can take the air out of you a kiss can rush the air back in.   

I started a writing practice with Richard. We write together almost every day, and it’s made me a better writer. There’s more stuff in my days to write about. I feel more love inside me that moves outward. This is human. This is not me, per se, but it’s not always available to people. Feeling anchored has made me more adventurous. Two years ago, I started a Substack publication and began writing this column, and what I can tell you is the sense of support and community you gain from a setting like this is in my case the same thing as creativity.

Laurie and Richard last spring.

I may not be a better writer than ever (although I think I am), but I feel better than ever. The better than ever feeling puts in relief the times it wasn’t like this. So much in life depends on your collision with luck, and then it’s how you take this luck to the casino and bet your life on it.

I don’t forgive the pit bull or the anxious punk. Forgiveness is over rated. Also, it feels presumptuous. Who am I to forgive anyone? What am I, Jesus? It also feels goyish. (See previous sentence.) I’m attracted to the concept of "reconciliation," as in "truth and reconciliation," practiced in South Africa after apartheid. Reconciliation with everyone but the pit bull and the punk.  

Today, from my seat on time’s coach bus, I’m also sending support to all other female humans. Women in my generation felt the bony hand of the biological time clock moving up and down our spines. I remember thinking, If you don't have a child, you will be outside the great chain of a full life. It was bullshit, but it was powerful.

I didn't want a child. Honestly, not really, and not in the way other women did want a child or several. I didn't want to look like a loser or a freak. It was more fear of missing out than anything else.

I didn't have a child. It took a generation of women like me. We're not a gigantic number, but there are a ton more of us than there were when I was young. It took a generation of women like me to tell you who are younger you will not be sorry if you don't have a child. You won't be a freak or feel like a freak—a freak in a poor-me sense. Do what you want. Don't listen to anyone else's sense of what will make you a full human being or a person who will come to regret listening to their feelings.

Most of the time I don’t think I’ve learned anything worth sharing and looking back on, but I’m wrong. This is worth sharing, and I hope it helps you, dearest sisters.

Richard Toon

It’s interesting being finished with nothing. I have enjoyed looking at Richard since we met. Maybe it's the shape of his nose. He doesn't know when I'm looking at him. He's pretty much the only thing in the house that moves. He says when he sees himself in the mirror, he expects his hair to be brown. When I place my nose against his nose, he thinks I'm imitating what I did with my dog, and he's right. Even when we know what’s going to happen, there is still suspense because we don’t know what’s going to happen.

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Read the whole ‘Notes On Another New LIfe’ series. Laurie Stone writes Everything is Personal, which LitHub recently named one of the seven best literary publications on Substack.

Order Laurie Stone’s latest book, Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was long-listed for a PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award. Use code LAURIE for free shipping.