The Conclusion

Twenty-eight days. Or twenty-nine days, if you want to count the one I skipped, which I agree wouldn’t be quite ethical. Either way, it’s a February. A month. I did it. Almost, anyway. Close enough for me.

Did I learn anything from a month of writing a hundred words a day? Let me see. I learned that worthless internet is...well, worthless. I learned that I could usually write even when it was the last thing I wanted to do. I learned that I look at writing differently from most labeled writers. I learned that I can hide a little less when I write and tell the truth a little more. I learned that writing isn't enough. I learned that it doesn’t matter as much as I once thought it did.

Am I glad I did it? Sure. Would I recommend it to someone else? Absolutely, especially to someone who has more to write about than I do. Will I do it again? Probably not.

Day 29

Babies and cats. Two of the best reasons to visit my family. Of course it’s always nice to see my family, but the babies and the cats are pretty special. My mom also makes darn good chicken.

We still have snow on the ground. It almost feels like winter. And now that it’s really winter, I’m dreaming of a night walking an empty beach under the full moon. I think I’ll go find a beach.

Another week begins. Work, lunches, band practice, LS, music transcription, living, sleeping, dreaming about living, living about dreaming, and seven days till another week begins.

Day 27

And you dream of Columbus
with an ache in your traveling heart...

My heart got on a plane yesterday and flew south, betraying me--it knows I want to go north, away from the south. I am angry in my powerlessness. If I can’t even direct my own heart, what is there to be sure of? My hands are tied. Life could strip every scrap from me and still be in its right.

So do we learn to hold loosely and to value nothing, to protect ourselves from loss? Or do we simply spend our lives learning to grieve well?

Day 26

He got here young, when the stakes were high. He won a little, and he should have taken what he had and gone home with the world. Instead he stayed long enough to learn that only what you get in the beginning is what you want to keep, that it’s only the first time one time.

Now it’s just a game, and the decks are stacked. The players all get in each other’s way. There’s no one to walk him home. His loss is everyone else’s gain.

He got here young, and now he’s leaving. But now he’s old.

Day 25

It’s amazing how a conversation with an Italian cook can make one’s day. The food was good, too.

And now I have an unexpected free evening, a wonderful crazy idea to ponder before saying no, and a door that I’m not sure I want to open because I don’t know what’s behind it or how much it will hurt me or them to close it again if I don’t like what’s behind it. Maybe I should say yes. Maybe I should walk through the door.

Maybe it’s just today. Maybe I can sleep it off.

Wake up, child. Wake up.

Day 24

If I ask, will you listen?
Do the words I say change the tune
of the song?

If I ask, will you hear?
And when I find for my asking your reply is
as if you weren’t listening at all,
will you explain?

If I ask, will you listen?
Will you teach me
the letters and sounds that make up
what it is I have longed for?

I can’t ask. Not this time.
I can only hope that when it is done
it will be seen that you knew my desire
better than I knew how to ask it.

Day 23

“A man takes his sadness and throws it away, but then he’s still left with his hands.”

I find myself confused. I learned all the equations, but two and two don’t make four anymore. I find myself enraged, thrown in the middle with nothing to hold onto, like a child left behind. Everything I thought I knew doesn’t apply. I shake my fist in life’s face and yell, “No fair! You cheated.”

I have been here before. Then it was God himself who told me he was making something beautiful. Where do I find the strength to believe it now?

Day 22

I took what was left and wrapped it up in crumpled paper. It was all I could find because everything else was gone. I walked to the bridge, down that little trail off of Bergam, and dropped it into the water.

“Gone,” I said to it as it floated away. “You are gone.” I didn’t say what I wanted to say -- “Take me with you.” It was a favor I had no right to ask. For someone else, perhaps, it was the right request. But not for me. I was never something that could keep you here.

Good-bye, then.

Day 21

I wrote 100 words -- more, actually -- and then I erased them.

Day 20

For you, I will write a little story. A story about rain and fog and the way you smile after you’ve forgotten my name. It begins with saying hello and ends with saying good-bye, but before you say you’ve heard it all, let me explain that you haven’t heard a thing. Who knows which of us it is saying good-bye, and who knows if it’s a given farewell or a taken farewell? Maybe we go on for pages, and maybe we’re just a sentence here on this one.

Stick around, if you like. Let’s find out how the story goes.

Day 19

I’m taking a class on comparative cultures, as a broader background in the study of deaf culture, and one of our texts is a handbook of American culture for foreigners.

· Americans are devoted to individualism and privacy.
· Americans believe everyone is equal, and therefore we are usually informal.
· Americans look ahead, not back, because the future is in our control. Change is good.
· Americans believe people are basically good and improvable.
· To Americans, time is money.
· Americans are direct and assertive.
· Americans admire action, achievement, and reward.

I am most certainly an American.

Day 18

Happy are those who lose imagination –
They have enough to carry with ammunition.

Those are Wilfred Owen’s words, not mine, but let’s say that’s a hundred words up there. Just for today, thirteen words can be a hundred.

Day 17

New nephew day! Of all the days to forget my phone.

My favorite Chinese restaurant has reopened as a different one, and I ate there today for the first time. Not much had changed; the lobby was rearranged, the food was a little different.

But Kadek wasn’t there with her happy smile when I walked in. Omang didn’t wave across the room or stop to talk about the book I’m reading. Jay didn’t bring my Dr. Pepper without having to ask. The new waiters are great, but they don’t do things like Omang and Jay. It's just not the same.

Day 16

Four and a half hours between worlds. Stepping out of that and shrugging into this. Back again.

“The wisdom of winter is madness in May.” An Irishman I recognized but couldn’t name sang that today. Not to me; on the radio. I’m wondering whether I’m in winter or in May and which it would be if I had the choice. Maybe I’m the winter wisdom living mad in May. Hey, maybe that’s it. That’s what’s wrong.

This is what happens when I have to write a hundred words and don’t have that many decent enough to take out in public.

Day 15

A young man, apart from the laughter, sat alone with his computer. Suddenly a girl sat down across from him and struck up a conversation.

I asked my cousin Jeremy if guys mind if a girl does that. “Uh, let me take another look at her,” he said.

When the girl finally got up to hug another fellow and leave, she invited the guy to join them. He declined.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Jeremy said.

She left. The guy sat a minute, then pulled out his phone and dialed. “Hey,” he said, “I changed my mind. I’ll come.”

He left happy.

Day 14

My Christmas is befuddled.

The Martin Christmas was in November, all 100 of us, pretending we know each other across our distances.

My own Christmas was spent with him, belonging for twenty-four stolen hours to what could have been but never will.

Now it’s the Yoder Christmas. Our distances are perhaps greater than the Martins, but we deal with them differently. We hide less, laugh more.

Soon my family will have Christmas. A quiet day with a new niece or nephew, a few gifts, and collecting ourselves to smile shyly at each other, loving in our strange, silent way.

Day 13

“Step out to the edge of everything…find the weathered spaces looking back at you.”

“Later on, the road is gonna break your world in two….”

It is the mercy of God that at every ending, every shattering, there’s solid ground still beneath our feet, blood still coursing through our veins. Like Charlie rocketing toward the ceiling in Wonka’s glass elevator, all we see is how much it’s gonna hurt.

My heart’s been broken already. My world’s been rearranged more than once. But when I rest from gasping for air, it is there –- life is not as small as it seems.

Day 12

Snow on the ground, wind enough to freeze fire, a chill to shiver the soul -- yes, this is the way I like it.

It was a day of sweeping off the crumbs to concentrate on the plateful. A day to fill my place. A day to be at peace.

Tonight, eating chili at a table shared with three generations of the family next door, was a night to sit warm and glow happy, watching the wonder of a child, the healing of a man, the pride of a grandparent, and the joy of a lover just begun.

Today was rich.

Day 11

I lay her out, like a corpse in a mortuary. Not a pretty thought, but not as bad as you think, though you'd have to know other things to know why that is.

Am I supposed to do this? Life’s to be lived, not stripped and examined. Without itself, life is unthinkable.

I think maybe I have shrunk with her. But no, I think maybe we have grown.

One thing I find as she dies and lives again – I would give anything for the freedom to ask and the permission to belong there. And I would stone myself for treason.