Publication day

The other night, I spoke to a group of women in Lexington, Massachusetts.  It was rainy and cold, the kind of night when anyone would be excused for staying home, putting the tea kettle on, going to bed early with a book.  But the room filled, my nerves quieted, and this group of mothers found plenty to say to one another.

As always, the best part of the evening was not the formal “talk” I’d labored over for a week, but the questions that came at the end, the freewheeling conversation between women whose life stories are woven through with familiar themes–friendship, loss, change, growth.

This morning I opened my e-mail to find a note from one of them, saying, “I wanted to ask you a question last night.  If it’s too personal, not to worry, you don’t have to answer.  I was just wondering how your friend from the book is doing, eQuanimiti?  She sounds like such a wonderful person, hope she is still on the mend.”

It is a question I am only too happy to answer.  Two years ago today, eQuanimiti was bedridden, wracked by pain, her face ravaged by shingles that had spread into her eyes, down her neck, over her scalp.  Her business had been shuttered for months, there was no money for doctor bills, and, day after day after day, no improvement in her condition, which seemed to go from serious to more serious yet.

eQuanimiti and I share an October 3 Libra birthday, a discovery we made early in our friendship, convincing us that our paths had surely been destined to cross.  Perhaps she admired my steady, ordinary, married life with children as a road not taken.  Certainly I was inspired by her creativity and flamboyance; the flow of paintings and projects that emerged from her studio; the window dresser’s eye that made every surface in her eccentric little boutique beckon the eye; her willingness to sit down for a heart-to-heart chat with every customer who crossed her welcoming threshold.  We were not every-day-on-the-phone friends, or even once-a-month-for-dinner friends.  But there was a bond there from the start, a joyful, mutual appreciation for one another’s very different journeys, a deep pleasure on both sides in our occasional conversations. We could catch up fast, in shorthand it seemed, and get right down to the meat of things.

For a while, it seemed that eQuanimiti might lose her eyesight, might not ever recover, might sustain permanent nerve damage from the exceedingly severe case of shingles that kept her housebound for many months, in a dark, airless room.  Even the slightest breath of air across her open lesions caused excruciating pain; the smallest bit of light was unbearable to her infected eyes.

What I remember thinking back then, as I brought food to her door or slipped cards into the mail, was that there seemed to be no way out for her.  There came a point where I couldn’t imagine a life for her beyond the one she had right then–suffering, isolated, compromised.  eQuanimiti, on the other hand, worked every single day to find the meaning in her illness, to plumb her dark night of the soul for every lesson it had to teach her.  Hard as her days and nights were, she never lost faith in the belief that they served some deeper purpose, and that part of her job was to stay open to whatever her long illness had to teach her.

As summer came, as her strength returned and her sores healed and her eyes regained sight, eQuanimiti began to write.  The stories that poured from her hand onto the page had been taking shape in her mind for months, during the long quiet hours in a dark room, but of course the seeds of this work had been planted many years ago, and had lain dormant all this time, while her life was taken up with other things.

Finally, it was time to write them.

Today, it is time for the world to hear them. In a few minutes, I will jump in the shower, then, in honor of eQuanimiti’s flair, I’ll put on a pouffy polka dot skirt and a cardigan sweater and a pair of big earrings, and head off to hear my friend read the short story she has just had published in a literary magazine.  It’s her first pub party, but I’m sure it won’t be her last.  She has a novel ready to go, a collection of stories completed, a fierce and exuberant commitment to the work she now knows she came here to do.

As she said to me a couple of weeks ago, over tea, “Being sick gave me a couple of gifts in the end, including the realization, when I finally did get well, that I didn’t have any more time for dilly-dallying.  Life isn’t going to last for ever. So I figured I’d better get bustling along.”  I better get bustling along myself–her literary debut is in an hour, and I don’t want to miss it.