themes

Themes are on my mind right now.  

If you know me at all, you know that I would love to get paid to write books.  I’d like to make a living at it, actually.  I say that with the scary sense that there are actually a few people out there that read these little ramblings, and that there must be more than a few critics out there. Actually, my guess is that everyone is a critic in their own way.  So when I say that I want to write for a living, I feel as if I owe you an explanation.  

I don’t think that it’s very wise for people to go around saying that they want to be writers.  I know a few that do, and it always seems that I am in the company of great arrogance instead of great genius.  The fact is that we need to go into these things with fear and with trembling. I have to be anchored enough to reality to know that I am not Hemmingway.  I’m not even close, actually.  My friend Emily asked me the other day: “Haven’t you already written a book, Tatum?”  You’ve got to be kidding.  “If I had written and published and sold a book,” I told her, “then you certainly would know about it.  You would have an autographed copy and I would spend all of our time together encouraging you to buy it in triplicate.”  I haven’t.  I’m a little frightened.  I’m frightened because Frederick Buechner is correct when he says “to write is to open a vein on the page.”  If I write for you, and if it’s going to be worth anything at all to anyone, then I’m going to have to bleed for you.  That’s a messy endeavor.  A commitment, I would dare say.  So, yes, I would love to write a book.  But I’m scared as hell. That’s the truth.  

Now back to themes.  

I’m thinking about themes because every moment is key, right?  Themes, plots, and story lines are constantly running through the deep undercurrents of our lives. The day to day of our breathing air and brushing our teeth and going to the market and taking out the trash and making love to our spouses and going to dinner with a friend is all shaped by a theme.  We are living out fairly tales and tragedies and comedies constantly in our lives. If anyone is ever going to write anything, they are going to have to connect this flesh and blood thing, this living organism, to themes.  That’s a narrative that you want to read. 

I went over and visited with my grandmother yesterday.  Bless her heart.  Nana is a beauty and a fashionista at 74 years old.  She was as much a mother to me as my own mom was.  We sat and talked for hours about the past.  We talked about the people that have come and gone in our lives.  She told me about her birth father.  He was an alcoholic whom she constantly referred to as “not worth killing.”  Her mother died when she was two.  She was an orphan taken in by aunts and uncles.  And she was loved.  She was taught to love everyone, even her father.  And when he finally passed away she grieved and wept fiercely because she had learned to love fiercely.  And he wasn’t even “worth killing.”  How much more has she loved me?  I can’t think of the words to spill on this paper.  Her themes are a tragedy turned fairy tale.  Her story is a comedy starring a young woman who got married at 16. Not because she had to, but because she was in love. Its a comedy and a fairly tale of a marriage that lasted four decades and was only separated by death.  Its a dark comedy filled with joy and triumph and children and grandchildren.  It’s also filled with betrayal, pain, addictions, neglect.  But there is a fairy tale coming.  

In her story I find themes of hope.  Of love. Of faith. I see the early winter of her story come meshed with the early spring of my life. The arrival of me into this world.  Nana and I talked for hours about how we felt and what was said and what was heard as my grandfather died.  I was ten and Papaw was the only father I had ever known.  I remember knowing for a good month that he was going to die.  I was young, but I understood.  Its amazing though, because grief did not set in until the moment that he was gone.  From that moment on I sobbed for days and days.  How do you put that emotion, that phenomenon, on a piece of paper?  It wasn’t until yesterday, talking to my grandmother, that I realized that the great tragedy in my life was not the absence of my birth father. It was losing my grandfather.  That’s wear things turned ugly.  

I come into all of this knowing that I believe, well, I hope in the idea of a fairy tale.  I hope that at the end of all of this, the ending will be a happy one.  That we will all breathe a deep sigh of relief, wipe the tears from our eyes, and we’ll smile the bright morning smiles of peace that come from the redemption of the tragedies that have cursed our stories.  I hope that from all of our wilderness wanderings that we find ourselves in the fabled and promised land.  We’ll come in stumbling and famished and half-blind, but we will arrive there.  That’s what I hope for.  

Because our lives are just stories. True to every last one of us.  What we are doing now by walking and talking and working and playing is dancing a pen across a page.  Every story has to resolve.  It has to have themes.  It has to end.  The question is: what are the themes that make this story worth reading?  What ending are we hoping for? What leaps of faith and courage will I take to make this story a happy ending?  Can I create my own fairy tale?  Has the story been written already?  These are the questions that are in my mind today as I sketch out ideas for the books that are lining the Barnes and Noble of my dreams. Make sure to pick one up for you and everyone at your family reunion.  

Nods to Beuchner and Miller for the never ending influence on everything that I write, including this.