Reading an essay at Starbucks with Hadley and Harper

It is a blustery afternoon; the kind of day in November where you know winter’s coming.  It’s on it’s way and the brilliant leaves scream it against the bright blue sky.

The three of us, me, Hadley, and Harper, have a bit of cabin fever.  Jesse’s out of town and we are getting on each other’s nerves but we’re all too young and the house is too small for us to go our separate ways for a bit so I say, “Starbucks break.”  They like this and throw on coats and shoes and I grab my keys.

“Can we sit?” Harper asks, meaning, can we sit at a table when we get our drinks.  I say sure and Hadley says, “I’ll go get some work.”  Harper follows.  Hadley brings back a Puzzle Buzz and Harper has her High Five magazine.  I decide that if they’re bringing something to look at, then I will too.   I throw Jeanne Murray Walker’s essay, “Alice Munro: A Quiet Grace,” in my bag with my pens and notebook.  I read it weeks ago and loved it and am studying it now to figure out why.  I understand it’s a “memoir essay,” and I told my advisor that I want to write a memoir essay for my critical paper.  “Or,” I tell her because I’m afraid she’ll hate that idea, “I could write something on my study of braided essays.  I like those, too.”

“I like the first idea,” she tells me. “It feels more alive.”

So I take JMW’s essay with me to Starbucks to try and figure out what it is she does so I can do it, too.

JMW discusses Munro’s writing while weaving in bits of her life into the essay, particularly, trying to write when she has a young daughter.  This is what I wrote down on a post-it note at Starbucks.  It took me about ten minutes to write it because I was helping Harper put her straw in her chocolate milk. She opens up the straw but neglects to open it up all the way thus losing the straw in the milk carton.  So I help her.  I also remind her to open the flaps on either side of the carton so the milk won’t erupt before she can take a sip.   Losing the straw and milk eruptions set Harper off.

I notice that Ms Murray Walker takes almost four paragraphs to let us know she’s going to discuss Alice Munro.  First, she tells us about picking up her pencil to write in the fourth bedroom of her Chicago townhome when she hears her daughter stirring in the bedroom.  She tells us that she knows it’s not the kind of stirring that might mean her daughter is still asleep; it’s the sort that means her daughter is ready to be picked up, changed, and taken care of.  “I could distinguish, even from another room, a dozen different ways she turned over.”  She wonders now, what it was she thought was so important that she was going to write about. “I couldn’t, honestly, think of anyone who would want to read what I was about to write.”

I don’t think she wrote that day. She took her daughter to the park, instead.

I tried to sort this out while Hadley told me that the pen she choose to work on puzzles with didn’t work.  I took out my pencil pouch and opened it for her so she could pick another pen.  I look at Harper working on her High Five magazine. She’s circling all the objects in the picture that begin with “B.”  Her eyelashes are so long, I think.

“Are fruit snacks healthy?” she asks. “Anyway, fruit is healthy so fruit snacks should be healthy.”  She isn’t looking for confirmation.  She’s found the answer and continues to look for B words.

I note that Ms Murray Walker understands the body of Munro’s work and is able to explain themes, characters, etc., but also explain how it resonated with her.  I decide this is my favorite type of critique; the sort that lets the reader know a story did something to her.  I wonder in the margins of this essay, whether I should choose one author’s body of work, or several when I attempt to do what Ms Murray Walker did.  I begin to make a list of Creative Nonfiction writers whose work has influenced me when Hadley asks me which state is most likely to have an orange tree in it: Illinois, Nevada, or Florida.

“Florida,” I tell her, and she grins because I got it right.

“You want to know how I know?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Because I have a friend who grew up in Florida and she had a orange tree in her backyard.  She told me she used to wake up and pick oranges to make orange juice everyday.  Have you ever had fresh squeezed orange juice?”

Hadley says no and I tell her that it’s the best kind of juice there is.

I’m not exactly sure, but it seems that part of what makes Munro’s writing wonderful is that she takes note of the sort of people who are “small.”  Not the BIG IMPORTANT PEOPLE, but those on the margins.  And it was that noticing that Ms Murray Walker appreciated in Munro’s stories. It’s not that we can’t try and “Do Something Important,” she writes, but, “One has to peel potatoes and take care of children. One has to get joy out those things. One has to enter this kind of detailed life of service in a spirit of service of love and forgiveness. This is a great paradox. I saw it as a threat to my future plans. It threatened everything I was working for.”

Somehow, Harper sprays chocolate milk all over herself.  It’s on her face, up her nose, on her shirt, dripping off her hands.  She begins to cry.  I’m not sure how this happened because I was reading how the concept of living what seems like a small life threatening everything JMW was working for.  My heart was racing a little bit.  I was thinking, again, for the zillionoth time, that I should’ve done this graduate school thing before the kids.

I wipe Harper up and she seems OK.  More annoyed and stewing then anything else.  She asks me for a coin to scratch off a mystery card in her magazine.  She can’t scratch it off entirely and this makes her upset.  “I did it fully when I was two!  These stickers are RUDE!”  She takes the magazine and stomps over to the garbage with it.  “Wait,” she screams across the cafe, “Mama, is this recyclable?”

“Yup!”  Hadley screams back. “You can recycle it!”

Other people are looking at us and I wonder what I’ve done wrong that Harper gets so mad. Is it because I refuse to read parenting books? That I hated breastfeeding and stopped early? Is it because I have a temper? Harper stomps back to our table.  “I’m bored.”

I’m so annoyed.

We pack up and get ready to go home.  The wind pushes the leaves around the sidewalk and Harper and Hadley squeal and dance, jumping out of their way.  It’s a game and I let them play it for awhile before we get in the car.  Their cheeks are rosy and they’re laughing as they buckle themselves into their carseats.

When we pull up to our spot, Harper says, “We park our car underneath the best tree in the world, Mama.”

“I agree,” I tell her.

“It’s a ballerina tree in the spring and in the fall it’s a like a red firecracker.”

We get out of the car and the game with the leaves continues. I walk behind them and think about ballerina and firecracker trees and wonder if Harper will want to write someday.