January 21, 2008
Monday

Be Happy is “a little book to help you live a happy life.” In simple line drawings and short exhortations, it encourages the reader to put into practice those actions we all know contribute to our well-being but which we sometimes neglect. A friend gave me a copy at Christmas, and I remarked that it contained every single principle that I try to live by, from the ones I’m really good at (“Read books,” “Be open to new ideas,” “Believe in something bigger than yourself”) to the ones I need more practice in (“Finish what you started,” “Exercise,” “Value who you are right now”). I will look at it every single day, I said. And I have.

Here’s what caught my attention this morning:

It reminded me of the summer of 1959. I was twelve years old and afraid of going off the high dive at Penbrook Pool. I’d had two summers of swimming lessons, earning a “Crane Wader” patch. I hadn’t mastered diving, but I had fun in the water and could jump off the low board (about three feet above the surface) with no fear. The high board was twelve feet up, and  even though jumping off that would entail the exact same actions under the exact same safety conditions as jumping off the low board, the idea of doing it terrified me. I would sit on the grass watching others, from the athletic teenagers and young adults who executed elaborate dives with twists and rotations to the less artistic swimmers, mostly preteen boys, who just liked jumping in and making a big splash.

I couldn’t climb up on the board and peer into the water, as the woman in the illustration is doing, and I certainly couldn’t wear a life ring.  There was always a line at the board, and once I went up there, I couldn’t change my mind, turn around, and back down the ladder, asking those waiting to let me by. The only way out was through.

I can’t say now why jumping off the high board was important to me. I only know that I thought about it all summer, and finally, on Labor Day, the last day the pool would be open that season, as my parents were gathering up our gear and reminding us that we were leaving in ten minutes, I climbed the steps, walked out on the board, and went in. And here I am, almost fifty years later, alive to tell the tale.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the difficult time that was my first workshop at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. My manuscript had been severely criticized for its flaws, although I did note that it wasn’t the criticism that hurt me, it was the way in which it was delivered. The criticisms were sound, helpful even, and the suggestions for improvement, had I followed them, might have helped me to have a finished manuscript now for a story I truly loved. Instead, “when I got home it took me six weeks to even take my writing materials out of my car, and I never went back to that manuscript.”

I have to send a manuscript for workshop by the group I’ve been meeting with monthly for a year. Since The Cold That Loves Me took up residence in my body almost two weeks ago I haven’t been able to work. Oh, I had plans — more work on the incomplete story I showed them in December, the fruit of my time in Wyoming, development of the scenes for my other novel that I’d sketched out but not put into text yet.  But I haven’t had the concentration to address fiction, and as of this morning (already late on our agreed-upon submission deadline) I hadn’t sent anything.

The box where I keep my nineteenth century materials (the research, the notes, some comments by the tutor I worked with in 2001, but not the comments from my fellow readers in 2003 and certainly nothing in Lynn Freed’s hand) is in a downstairs closet. The computer files are on my old computer. I didn’t even transfer them when I got my new laptop in June. It is work I have not looked at in almost five years.

I let Lynn Freed steal from me a project I was very invested in. Yes, it has its flaws, but I’m a better writer now and I know that story has value. Why not show it to people I trust, ask them just how bad it is, start all over again? What am I afraid of?

I pulled out the old computer, booted it up, found the files, and transferred them. I reconstructed the manuscript, added an explanation of where this came from and what I want my friends to tell me (just how sucky is this?), and sent it.

I think I jumped off that high dive in Penbrook only once. The next year we went to a different pool, one where my father was the manager. It didn’t have a high dive. I didn’t go out there much anyway. By my teen years I was too sophisticated, or too self-conscious, to splash around in the water.  Instead, when I did go to the pool, I sat on the grass and read novels. But I never forgot the sense of accomplishment in facing my fear of the high board.

I might not go back to my nineteenth century manuscript. But Lynn Freed doesn’t own it anymore. I do.

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margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)