Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

In the Middle of Things: An Introduction or an Afterword

This book is a mess. Well, not this book, the one you are reading now, the finished product with its finished pages, its finished cover. A few weeks ago, I responded to the author's questionnaire, a marketing survey so extensive and detailed that you lose track of what you once thought you knew about your own book while writing catchy pitches for ad copy and sales meetings. I wrote addresses, too, of critics and reviewers who, by now, have or haven't written reviews about the book. Reviewers often don't even receive finished copies of the book, but bound galleys instead, which warn not to quote from this version because things are still uncorrected, unproofed, unfinished, and in flux. And Alison Lerner, in marketing, recently requested cover ideas she'd then forward to design and production and needed a new picture of me, as the one I had sent didn't have the digital oomph she needed for reproduction. My ideas for a cover were a collage of blimp and zeppelin photos or, maybe, a plate of one of the Gee's Bend quilts, long on tour but now making their way back home to Alabama. I don't know, now as I write this, what the cover actually is, nor any of the versions or mock-ups. You, the reader of this introduction, do know (in this other now, the now of your reading the finished book). And I don't know who they finally got to blurb the book, though I just sent a note of some names of people who might want to read these essays in typescript and e-mail a few sentences back to Athens. The flap copy needs to be written, telegraphic paragraphs the book reps can use to pitch to bookstore buyers sometime in the future. I haven't done it yet, but I will probably go up to Chicago in the fall to the Great Lakes Booksellers Association meeting and hang around the table manned by the Miller Brothers, the regional distributors for the press, promoting the finished product to the dwindling number of bookstore owners and managers in the hope that they will order a copy or two of the book that, right now as I write this, is in parts and pieces, unfinished and even unbegun, on disks and scrap paper in Athens, Tuscaloosa, and Fort Wayne. That all has yet to be done along with this introduction that is only as far along as this word I am typing right now. So the now of this book, the book that is (as I write this right now) a mess, is not the book of the now now, the moment now that you are reading this this.

But that's the way it always is. The process of book production is obscured, mystified, it seems, a lot by the complex nature of the actual making, but a little bit intentionally (on the part of authors, agents, and publishers) to give the work a sheen of magic, a gloss of spontaneity. You, reader, who admire books, share with the devotees of legislation and sausages the admonition that one shouldn't track the way laws, links, or books are being made. A book, especially, wants to appear parthenogenetic. And that's particularly funny as the publisher of this book is headquartered in a town named after the goddess who, as Zeus's afterthought, embodied forethought, fully armored and ready to rumble, sprang from some mythic migraine. We'd like to think a writer writes something someplace and the pages are sent off and after awhile a book springs forth, hot type and all, and appears on a shelf someplace. But buried there in the process is my early query letter to Nicole Mitchell, the press's director, and the negotiations with Andrew Berzanskis, the acquiring editor, who rounded up the anonymous readers-anonymous to me still-who wrote reports for the press's Board of Directors, who signed off on what was then a pile of loose paper with notations from Andrew that the title probably will be changed and the two brief essays will be scrapped and, oh yes, the introduction is to come, the author, in Alabama, having some difficulty writing it, not even sure the book needs an introduction and unsure what the introduction should say at this point. And the holidays are approaching, so that means that Andrew won't even have a contract until the first of the year and it, the contract, unwritten, will have to be vetted by my agent, Marian Young, who will attach her clause with her mailing address in New York, instructing that any money that the book produces will be sent first to her before it comes back to me, and she will make a good case that I receive more complimentary copies of the finished book when it is finished than the paltry number the boilerplate specifies. And I won't even go into the copyediting because I don't know at this point who will be editing this, though I hope it is Mindy Wilson, a freelance editor I worked with the last time and who was, ten years ago, my student at the University of Alabama. I directed her writing of her thesis, a book of stories, the first thesis I directed at Alabama. I went through the book peppering Mindy with questions as she now is (or soon will be) going through this book, tabbing her questions with bright-colored Post-it notes. But that is all in the future, though now, now that you are reading this, it is in the past.

So the book is a mess. And it is a book of smaller messes. I even subtitled the book "Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins," or at least it was subtitled this when I submitted the book. In the editing process since then, the subtitle might have been left out. That is to say the essays collected here were written at different times for different occasions and in forms that are episodic at best, anecdotal, associative, nonsequential, inconsequential, random. They don't shape up into much of a narrative pattern, I can see, with attention to beginnings, middles, and ends. To me, it seems like a lot of middles. That has always seemed like the problem for the memoir (and you can think of this book as a collection of little memoirs). How does one make sense of what's going on when it is still going on? Writing about life should be the providence of the eulogist, who gets the high ground of a coda, a cessation of event and the relative stability of the facts to inject some meaning, some sense, into the stuff that has been happening and now has happened. Memoirs are artificial eulogies often with the memoirist looking to draw parentheses around a portion of a messy, spontaneous, ongoing life (childhood, say, or that eventful summer or the year spent abroad). It's over, a curious phrase. Memoirists have to find an "over." It is funny then that this essay, the one I am writing now, is an introduction to a book of memoirs, but it is the last thing written. Maybe it should come as an afterword. Who knows? Maybe this is there at the end of the finished book already. But if this is at the end of the book you are reading, it is after the other essays and will be agreeing (or not) with the assessment of what this book means. If this introduction stays in the front of the book, that means that, even though it was written in hindsight, it is working (or not) as a kind of foreshadowing. Either way, it is trying to make a sense of what's going on, a parenthesis, as I said, attempting to bring some stability to the whole shifting mix of things, events, notions, stray thoughts, and odd facts. Maybe this introduction should be both published as a before and after. Though the words remain the same, the essay would change, be read differently on the occasion of the reading and on what comes after and before its reading and its rereading. Never stepping into the same river twice and all that.

To tell you the truth, the difficulty of writing this introduction didn't delay it, Andrew. Nor did my ambivalent feelings about "introductions" being generated for these kinds of books. Truth is, life and time got in the way. I am in Fort Wayne again, where I was born and grew up, a place that I have written about and will continue to write about, I suppose, even though I haven't lived here in a quarter century, half my life. For a while I thought this introduction would make clear that the essays collected here, written over the last ten years, marked some kind of transition away from writing about Fort Wayne, about the Midwest. These essays were all written in the time I've lived in Alabama, and maybe there is something to be said of that. But right now, I am back up North tending my mother, who is in the hospital, uterine cancer, and in the long hours in waiting rooms and at my patient mother's bedside waiting, I have been piecing together this, this something. I guess now it is the introduction to the book, the book whose many parts are beginning to come together as a book down South in my other home.

My mother's surgery took place at Parkview Hospital a few days ago. Parkview was once on the edge of town, it even overlooked parkland that now is crowded with clinics and offices and assisted living facilities and parking structures. The hospital itself, at its inception a modest modernist box, has expanded, morphing with all the subsequent additions of the last half-century of medical science. There are wards for cancer, cardiac, and rehab, and the hotel-like annex for birthing that in the past was known as delivery. There is a hospice. Right outside my mother's window on the surgical recovery floor is the seemingly precariously perched landing pad on stilts flooded by light at night. The two evac helicopters are constantly taking off and landing, hovering nosily a few dozen yards away as the pilots change the pitch on the rotors to land or veer away. As my mother sleeps, I write postcards. I tell my correspondents that this hospital is the site of my earliest memory. My younger brother, Tim, was born here, and back then floors were quarantined to siblings, I guess, so I remember being in a little parking lot way below, hoisted on my father's shoulders, looking up to the fifth floor and a big plateglass window where my mother waved down to me. A couple years later when I was five I almost died here in the very same hospital, a tonsillectomy that had its complications, my mother then at my bedside hysterical as I hemorrhaged, outdoing Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment screaming for help at the nurses' station. Or so she tells me in her lucid moments between the pain and zonked-out state after she presses the button of the morphine pump. It isn't morphine, and I will have to find out the actual name of the drug. But my mother is having some trouble getting the knack of its delivery sequence, and there are signs that warn that only the patient can push the button, so all I can do is coach.

The doctors and nurses get the patients up and walking right away. The pressure of insurance oversight drives this, of course, but it reflects also the newer theories of healing to slough the heavy anesthesia, wake the body up, ward off ilea. So now I am walking with my mother, feeble, a few hours after surgery, down the corridor. First to the nurses' station, then a few hours later down to the conference room and back. The elevator lobby, the waiting lounge, then the next time the second nurses' station in the west wing, a little farther each time. We are aiming for the far end of the hallway and the big plate-glass picture-window wall shimmering there like a mirage. It looks out to the west at a sunset you can see framed there even at this distance.

Before my mother's surgery, she performed a novena at St. Jude's church and dedicated the prayers to St. Anthony. She hedged her bet, the two patron saints of lost causes, of miracles. We will be able to see the church where she prayed from that window, too, and Mom thinks that will be a good ending to that beginning, further motivation propelling these painful walks. And I think now that the window off in the distance might be the very same window I remember my mother, framed there almost fifty years ago, waving and waving down at me. Maybe it was the floor below or the one above but it was this side of the hospital, the end of another long walk. I imagine that when we get there, lugging the wheeled metal Christmas tree decked with the beeping IV pumps and tubes, the bags of saline, glucose, and dope, I'll mention this to my mother, this strange shift in time and place and point of view, how this shuffling dance we are doing couldn't have been scripted any better. The sunset, the saints, the son. How it all makes sense somehow. But that walk hasn't happened yet, or it hasn't happened yet right now, the moment I am writing this. Perhaps, as you read this, it has. Mom has had the staples removed, is resting comfortably at home, the cancer banished for the present. Christmas has come and New Year's, too. I have written this introduction and the press in Athens has chosen to keep it in the book. But right now (right now) both helicopters, both on some urgent missions of rescue or recovery, are floating in the air outside this hospital room window. One is taking off, one about to land, I am not sure which is which as they both slowly circle, carefully maneuvering through this specific time, this particular place, this exact concoction of memory.