November 4, 2010
Thursday

For about thirty years now I have started my day with C&C — Coffee and Contemplation. It wasn’t always that way. In college, I used to get up, stumble around, get dressed, and stop at the dining hall for a sweet roll before sliding into class just as the professor was beginning. When I had the apartment my senior year, I had what passed for coffee (Maxim freeze-dried crystals) and instant oatmeal, a breakfast I’d learned to eat at the Leader Nursing Home in Camp Hill the summer of 1968. After all the residents had been served, we nurses’ aides could sit in the lounge and have some of the gruel ourselves. During the depth of my depression in the early 1970s, I would arrive at school at 7:30 after what seems now like one continuous rolling motion that began sometimes as late as 7:10.

By 1980 I was acting like more of a grownup. By the time Lynn was born in 1985 I had developed the habit of having two cups of drip-brewed coffee with two tablespoons of half-and-half in each, which I drank in silence while I prayed for a bit and then read or wrote in my journal or, sometimes, just looked out the window. This time became very important to me. Lynn learned to creep into the kitchen, peer into my mug, judge the level of the brew and, if it were at just about half, whisper, “Is that your second cup?” If she got a grunted no she would tiptoe back out and wait until I had the focus and the mindset to attend to her.

I had left the classroom by the time she was in high school. I still got up when she did, about 6:15, but I learned to defer my coffee until after she had left for school, because the energy she poured into the house, while full of joy, was too distracting for my C&C.

Maintaining my regimen when I am Gallivanting can be a challenge. I carry my own 4-cup Mr. Coffee and a can of Melitta coffee when I stay in hotels, and I check beforehand that there is a refrigerator in the room or genuine half-and-half, not the abomination known as powdered non-dairy coffee lightener, available at the hotel breakfast bar.

Here at the Vermont Studio Center I have developed a regimen not unlike that which I maintained at Jentel in Wyoming. My residence has a small communal kitchen with a refrigerator, but my room is not conducive to the Contemplation part  of the C&C. There’s no desk or dining table. I have to have a desk or a table.

So I get up, make the coffee, wash and get dressed. Then I pack my journal and whatever book I’m reading, pour the coffee, and walk a few feet to the Mason House. (My residence is in the converted garage behind Mason.) There, I set myself up in the conference room, seen at left in a picture taken near dawn this morning.

As you can see, it is a book-lined room, hundreds and hundreds of volumes. There are more hundreds in the floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases in the adjoining room. Collections like this, assembled without the aid of a professional librarian and used by many people who pass through on short visits, can become quite haphazard.

This summer, someone began to organize and categorize them, and a resident artist made some hand-lettered signs identifying the shelves that held Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Journals. Behind me where I stood to take this picture is a broad three-shelf counter height bookcase labeled “VSC Authors.” Gazing at all those books, at all the books in the next room, I wondered how many had actually been read since they’d been placed there.

I looked on those shelves today for something by Antonya Nelson, who will be here in about a week. The Ns were on the second shelf, too low for me to see easily with the way my progressive bifocal lenses are cut. When I reached in to try to pull one out to see where in the alphabet I was, a book fell down behind the bookcase.

The bookcase was too heavy for me to move. I crouched and tried to fish around behind the books for it, but my knees can’t tolerate too much crouching and kneeling.

Someone’s book is behind those shelves, a book that may indeed have been begun or furthered during a stay at the Vermont Studio Center. It is lost now to visiting residents who dream of having their own book earn a place there.

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