Writing class

Sixteen autumns ago, when my younger son Jack was a baby, I took a writing class in Harvard Square.  Wednesday morning was the high point of my week.  I would riffle through my closet, trying to pull together an outfit that wasn’t stained with spit up and that didn’t shout out “suburban housewife,” the babysitter would arrive, and I would jump into my car and head down Mass Ave., thrilled to have an excuse to buy a new notebook and a nice pen, to be out and about without an infant in a stroller or carried on my back, happy instead to be part of the hustle and bustle of undergraduates and academics in the Square.  I made a point of getting into town early on those fall mornings, so that I could linger over a pot of strong mint tea at Algiers, and put the finishing touches on my piece for the week.  Sometimes, I wrote the whole thing right there in the hour before class, notebook balanced on a teeny, tippy table in the window, scribbling down the events of the hours I had just lived through–waking up before dawn with a toddler in our bed, changing the baby, finding a private moment with my husband, greeting the day.

Our class, held in a dusty first-floor classroom at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, was led by a woman with a weirdly wonderful name:  Mopsy Strange Kennedy, herself something of an ageless, enigmatic Cambridge institution.  With her head of wild red hair, heavily lined eyes, tight boucle sweaters and mini-skirts, she was an unlikely muse.  And yet, she managed to set a tone each week that was some kind of magical amalgam of therapy session, cocktail party, and staged reading.  She gave us provocative assignments (“Write the biography of your hair”), which we were free to do or not, and loads of encouragement.  She found something to like in every piece, and, buoyed aloft by her enthusiasm, even the shyest among us found the courage to read our work aloud.  We were a varied lot of aspiring writers–retirees determined to get their memories down on paper, twenty-somethings in search of themselves, zesty post-menopausal women eager to write new life chapters, and me, a former book editor who had always believed that I was much better at improving a “real” writer’s work than trying to say something of my own.  What we shared was a passionate love of books and prose, and, inspired by Mopsy’s effusive praise, a willingness to be cheerleaders for one another’s humble efforts.

Week after week, for want of a more compelling subject,  I found myself writing about the life I was living in that moment–my first attempt to make jam, the last of the tomatoes in the garden and my bouquet of nasturtiums on the windowsill, my sons, myself.  “You have the perfect life,” a classmate said to me once, over coffee.  Her remark surprised me; perfect it most definitely was not.  And yet, by paying attention to the way things actually were, by caring enough about the ordinary details of my everyday life to write about them, I could see that I was imbuing that life with a kind of grace, or sanctity, that I had never quite appreciated before.  To me, the most compelling subject of all, it seemed, was the present moment.  Could I live it fully?  Could I capture it, perhaps hold onto it, by writing it down?

Yesterday, my mom and I paid a visit to Mopsy’s class.  My mother had found her own writing voice in that room, a few years after I left the class, and had made lasting friendships there at a time of great transition in her life.  “Go take Mopsy’s class,” I’d advised her, and so she did, and began to write about her marriage, her losses, her hopes for the future.  So it was quite a treat, all these years later, to return as honored visitors.  One of my mother’s old classmates (still a loyal attendee after thirteen years!) had invited us to come together, and the timing was perfect.  My mother has an essay she wrote in this month’s edition of The Sun magazine.  I had my new book to bring.  We could return in glory, two published writers.

This time, I left home at 7 am, and drove to Harvard Square from New Hampshire.  And all the way down the highway, I thought about how important that first class had been to me, at a time when I wondered if I had anything at all to say.  What I’d come to realize, sitting alone with my notebook in Algiers, or reading aloud to a group of kind-hearted souls, is that as long as we write what we love, it is worth doing, if only to honor that which is beautiful and precious and fleeting in our lives.  The file folder in my desk drawer from that autumn sixteen years ago holds brief word pictures of my life as it was then, a life that seems so long ago that I can only reach out and touch it by reading those words.  How grateful I am now that I paused then, in the heat of the moment, and wrote something down.