Ms. Parker has often joked that in the game of our friendship, when points are scored for visits to the other’s home, I have thus far beaten her by a score of 5-0. Not one to be shutout, though, last month, Ms. Parker made the score 5-1 when she led off the third inning of our lives with a solo blast to left-center. For my baseball-challenged readers (read: reader) out there, that means she hit a homerun; and for those of you who are figuratively challenged by metaphors (or is that metaphorically-challenged, figuratively speaking?), that means she visited me in Vermont. Inspired by my close proximity to Ben and Jerry’s (or was it the other way around?), Ms. Parker and her cousin, Cousin J, drove up north to the land of cheese, maple syrup, gay marriages, and me (listed, of course, not necessarily in order of preference).
After a day spent sampling Vermont’s finest, the three of us settled into an American Flatbread restaurant booth where Sarah the L joined us, marking the first time those two Round Table friends had ever met. We ordered salads, a few drinks, and four different types of flatbreads split between two pies from our waitress who happened to be a friend of Sarah the L and proved as much with a hug. At some point during our meal, The Heinous Shrew walked by our booth on her way to crash her friend’s date. Later that night, Ms. Parker commented on how small our small city was and that she would hate to live in such a place where encounters like these were the norm. I think she’d probably go so far as to suggest that this is the same personality trait that makes her, in her opinion, a person whom the homeless find “unapproachable,” which, incidentally, recent trends would seem to suggest is a trait I don’t possess (but that’s a comment on my city’s homeless situation, which is best set aside for another blogging day).
Ms. Parker’s remark made me question my own reality: do I enjoy a city small enough that the aforementioned random encounters occur on an almost daily basis? Or would I rather live in a town with so many bars that hardly anyone knows my name? What’s my perfect balance of community and privacy? This is a question I’ve pondered on many occasions and quite often in the three weeks since I started this blog entry. And until four days ago, I didn’t have an answer. You see, I never know when I’m going to find the inspiration to write a blog entry, and when I finally start one, I never know how it’s going to end. My creative process resembles that of a junior high school metal shop class: countless bold ideas, quite a few stops and starts, and a finished project that never resembles the original plans. (That I’m even capable of producing a complete and coherent sentence is a sort of miracle in and of itself.)
Typically, most of my blog entries begin on my walk to work, an 8-minute jaunt filled with sounds of school children (if I’m on time), school bells (if I’m not), construction workers beginning their day spent fixing up a recently burned house, cars accelerating a little too fast for a side street, and the city busses idling as they wait for their respective passengers. Like that metal shop class, this walk doesn’t exactly overflow with inspiration. Thankfully, it’s what I learned in elementary school (how to be creative) and college (how to tell a story) that lets me utilize this time. And so, I spend my time daydreaming about my life, finding patterns and themes within that life, figuring out if they’re interesting to me, and then slowly attempting to make them sound interesting to you. Sometimes I end up with a finely crafted metal basketball hoop, and sometimes I end up with a pointless piece of scrap metal with no ending in sight. Whatever I end up with, though, you can rest assured it wasn’t what I originally planned to make.
My continuing struggle with the writing process was on my mind recently when I heard the claim that writers are a great source of wisdom because they spend their lives observing human nature in an attempt to accurately reproduce it on the page. The theory is that anyone who studies humans to the point when they know exactly what a fictional character would do in a hypothetical situation must understand nonfictional people in realistic settings. I hardly ever feel bold enough to offer a dissenting view in someone else’s house (especially this particular house), so I chose to keep my opinion to myself and instead share it here: I don’t agree.
I think writers only know what their characters would do in a situation simply because said characters reside in the imaginations of said writers. Claiming that an understanding of their character implies an understanding of society is not unlike claiming to know what another person is craving for lunch simply because you’re craving corned beef. And besides, to believe that this is proof that writers know the answers to most of life’s questions is to ignore how imperfect the lives of these writers are. We can’t answer most of our own questions, so how could we possibly answer yours?
In an effort to have some of my questions answered, and for reasons maybe Ms. Parker, Sarah the L, and Robin Williams would understand, last Sunday afternoon I found myself sitting next to Mary (nicknamed for various reasons) in a church she and her friends had started a few years ago. This is where I heard the theory about writers having answers, and this is where I met an assortment of characters whose (nick)names will have to wait for another day. And through these characters, I Ultimately found myself sitting side-by-side Mary in a Wednesday night discussion group, in front of a coffee table on which the homeowner had placed a coffee mug that had printed on it the name of Papa Benchly’s church. After quick Sherlock-Holmes-like detective work, I discovered that my father was a mentor to the homeowner. A small town, indeed.
The group’s discussion centered on the question, “What is church?” and at one point, a debate broke out regarding how many people were needed for a church to exist. Some claimed you needed a community to help your faith grow; I posited that only one person was needed “to go to church.” Mary’s view was that a person can only evolve (spiritually or otherwise) so much through the lessons he/she learns from personal mistakes; that to evolve to his/her full potential, a person needs to learn from others as well. I won’t say that I changed my opinion, but I will confess that Mary and the others convinced me that it does, in fact, take a village to evolve.
And that’s when I realized how much I loved feeling part of a community and the random encounters that accompany such a relationship. I don’t think I ever feel as alive as I do when one of my trees falls in the forest and my friends are around to hear it. Through these moments, I find joy, the answers to my questions, the inspiration to write, and sometimes even the perfect ending for my blog.
Benchly'sword 