Issue 3:1 | Non-Fiction | Jeanne Bryner

Moments of Grace: My Writing Life

Jeanne Bryner

 

 

We all know the story of the Titanic because it was a luxury liner, filled with affluent people and hailed as ‘the ship that couldn’t sink.’ It is a tragic tale. It is a big story that overshadows many little ones. The day this famous ship went down, the world over, other people were starving and struggling, kicking and calling out from troubled waters. They waited for a boat brave enough to come close. They wanted to live. Who will paint the faces of these people and tell how cold the water was? Who will whisper what they dreamed for their lives? Who will sift the ashes, find the cause of the fire, and then, name the thing by its politics?

 

To create art, I believe we must witness and facilitate the voices of those who are marginalized. When I’m working on a new piece of writing, I ask myself “why is this important and who gets to be remembered?” And always, I think of Audre Lorde saying, “What will you do with the power that you have to change the things you say you believe in?” I can think of no finer mantra. I live in a country where we publish books on duct tape and out houses. I have used both frequently, but I find it more than a little disturbing to realize this is what a reader hungers. If her belly is that empty, feed her your granny’s biscuits spread with blackberry jam or tell her how your Aunt Odessa brought her black husband to the family reunion wearing a low cut polka dot dress and red shoes. In other words, don’t be afraid to tell the story of your people and your one precious life. Writing is the cheapest form of expression. We need only paper and pencil to honor and celebrate our lives.

 

Dear reader, please let me share a story, maybe two. It’s autumn in Michigan and this, a dirt road where a wooden lean-to stands near a cornfield. I’m buying a bouquet of carnations and mums from a woman dressed in scars. In her pink tank top, jeans and bandana, she bends and picks, fixes and wraps stems and blossoms. Country music plays in the background and she hums. If I focus on the crooked puckered mask, which is her face, and the angry branches which are her arms—you might miss the sweet way she asks me, “Well, where are you from and who are the flowers for?” I might forget to mention how her red-brown hair tendriled near her neck and a quiet chain hung there leading to its cross, I suppose to remind us of a higher power.

 

Without thinking, she handed my toddler daughter a cherry dum-dum sucker. Did I say her eyes were the exact blues of my daughter’s? And when she gave me two quarters in change I felt her wedding band and all around it the place fire had danced across her flesh. In that moment, I learned a form of Braille and was blinded by its heat. All the years past those flames and her mother maybe taping school pictures around her hospital bed to show the nurses how she looked smooth and pretty before, to help the surgeons better reconstruct her features; hit me like a fierce wind. What happened to me that day is what I call a moment of grace. The juxtaposition of those flawless blossoms in a woman’s lobster-boiled hands, the web spaces all wrong, the fingernails gnarled or absent. The way money and suckers moved across the saggy plywood counter and a plain gold cross twinkled in the mid day sun.

 

I might report on another day when I was at a Denny’s restaurant, eating alone (in town for a conference). My registration packet held the good news that one of my stories and one of my poems had made the top ten—being considered for awards. I immediately started to bargain with God. “I don’t want both awards.” I told Him. “One will be fine. The story, please—and if it’s not too much trouble, could the poem be second?” Shameful. I realize this now, but I’m human, and remember, I was alone. That’s probably why I went ahead and ordered a Rueben sandwich knowing it would give me gas later on.

 

I sat at the counter; the way people do who don’t have a partner. There was the usual clanking of coffee cups and steam rising and music of voices weaving around me—perched there on my red vinyl stool where I had just promised God not to ask for anything special until 1999 if he’d just take care of the short story contest. Also, I told him I’d just go ahead and be den mother for one more year.

 

A shadow passed over my right shoulder when I was on the second bite of my dill pickle. It caused me to look in the mirror—you know, those shiny mirrors at bars and restaurants—the ones that let us see our God-awful chewing and getting-drunk stares. A balding grandfather stood, warm in his mustard-colored cardigan, wrestling his topcoat. I studied him as I chewed my pickle, watched as he helped his stooped wife rise.

 

Independence was an island she had known and loved and left, because eventually, time holds its gun to our head and we are forced to leave the country of wellness. Her snowy perm hugged a small creased face as she waited, leaning cobbled hands on her cane’s blackness. Now, the wife was his doll and the gentle husband dressed her. It wasn’t just the slow way he lifted first her right arm, and then, her left to find each sleeve’s silk tunnel. One by one, he pressed four buttons through wooly holes. A priceless marionette, she smiled, then sighed over all the fuss. He fiddled the lime green scarf he’d slipped from her sleeve moments ago. Like a magician, the husband pulled it through his hands, made it into a triangle, and laid it on her head. Was it a veil or a prayer cloth? I can not say, but if fell over her soft curls, touched the frame of her thick glasses, and he tied it, not once, but twice. Just when I thought the show was over; one more scene took place. His tremulous right hand smoothed her hair behind the scarf on the left side of her face. Words fail me when I try to recite the poetry of such a tender gesture. That day in that lime green scarf with that man, she was ready for any gust December could muster.

 

By half inches, they sputtered and halted as he guided her, at last, to the exit. All of it went into my journal. A story problem to be figured out later. We were tangled in it—the web of our lives, the sacred space where we bump into each other for sixty-odd years or six minutes and we overlap—a woman chewing her dill pickle while bargaining with God and this dear couple nearing the final lap of their journey. It was how we must finally pull apart—me, swallowing hard as I watched them shuffle out the door.

 

Here was the sailboat starting to sink, endless lashing of terrible silent waves, and a captain’s bravery after years of rough seas. If we don’t waste our days glued to a screen, we have these encounters with the natural world and our brothers and our sisters every day. My challenge is to find a way to harvest moments of grace and build a story or poem around them, for I believe rain and sunsets and people are trying to teach us how we can live our lives better. The heart has many doors and writers two or three keys. A writer takes us by the hand to see the windows of a madhouse, a mansion, or a mud hut. If she is good, she will let her readers fall in love, if she is really good, she will let them fall in mud. Maybe it’s all the same. In the mouths of her characters, she bends and twists the rules of language. She lets her people wrestle questions that may not have an answer. Entire families appear on her page dressed in the holy shoes of beauty, carrying a gunnysack of truth.