You've Got Mail

Martin sits across from me, writing the second bit for our new novel.  I started last night, e-mailed it to him, and he's pounding away at his keyboard now.  It's so much fun.  I can't tell you what it's about.  Sorry.  You'll have to wait until we're done. . .six months or a year from now.  Or maybe never.  You can never tell with a novel. 

It's lovely to exchange e-mail with a man I've lived with for almost fourteen years.  We started our courtship way back in college--courtship!  Such a formal word!--but it was sort of formal, at least the letter-writing part was.  E-mail was brand new; you had to type in all the commands and it was sluggish.  But we thought it was wonderful.  We had an entire e-mail relationship that we never, ever talked about when we met, which was often.  We went to the same college, shared a class, and ate many of our meals together. 

And secretly, we wrote e-mails to each other.  I still remember the feel of the computer lab chair as I pulled it up under the computer, quickly surveying the other people in the lab (it would be rather awkward to be in the same lab as Martin while I was writing him!) and then fell to work.  YOU'VE GOT MAIL.  Yeah, baby.

I just had an insight--this early part of our relationship may explain our obsession with the movie, You've Got Mail.  I'm a bit embarrassed to admit how many times Martin and I have watched it.  We've moved quite a few times since we married each other, and somewhere along the line, it became traditional to cue up the movie as a sort of reward after we'd unpacked and hung pictures on the walls.  Now we've been settled a month and we still haven't watched it.

Why?

I've made some lame excuses--a few pictures still need to be hung and I haven't gone through a few bags of clothes up in our closets--but I think the real reason is, I'm just restless.  I can't seem to convince my mind and soul to relax.  I feel driven to accomplish a hundred things, to finish a dozen stories and stack apples in the dehydrator and write another picture-book text and weed through my clothes and polish a book and find a new doctor and dentist and write letters and volunteer at the girls' school and write two new novels. . . .for the first time in my life (and I've moved over a dozen times), I'm having trouble lowering my pulse and truly settling.

Perhaps it's because our lives this summer were a series of transitions, and before that a sudden decision to move, and before that a sudden ending of seven hapy years in Pennsylvania, an ending that was not of our choosing.  Perhaps it's because next year is still unsettled.  (What will we be doing?  Will we be able to stay here?  Will we have to uproot the kids again?)

Whatever is keeping me from this illusive undercurrent of peace, I find I must discipline myself to trust daily that our own story is still being told.  We haven't been dropped in the middle of a chapter; the threads of our lives will continue to be woven.  It's a little disconcerting--all right, a lot disconcerting, to have realized last spring that my story--that is, my plot--is not being told entirely by me or even the people around me.   How the plot of my story changes me--that's a journey I am always responsible for.  I can't help but ask for a gentle journey for a while, for the kids, for Martin, and for me.  Let us be, sustain us, ease us into more goodness.  Everyone wants that.

In the meanwhile, life is good.  The weather holds sunny and warm.  Today Martin and I spread a picnic blanket at a park and while Bea played, we watched the sun skipping across the bay in a thousand points of light.  We felt a bit unsettled, and fortunate, and nervous about the future, and happy.  And I guess that tension makes a good story.  It makes good letters, too.  I'm looking across the table, now, trying to read Martin's face.  What will the next chapter hold?  I'll wait, check my mail, and maybe I'll have a message.