My Morning Page

For forty years I wrote for food while thinking, When I get to seventy, I'll write for love. 

My role model was Norman Maclean, author of my favorite work of non-religious* nonfiction, Young Men and Fire. Maclean was a revered teacher at U Chicago who wrote only academic papers and books until the age of seventy. Then, thinking he was about nothing more than putting down a few stories for his children, he wrote the luminous A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories and the posthumously published YM&F.

Now that I'm seventy, like Norman Maclean, though still eight years short of the age at which Grandma Moses began painting for serious, I have told myself until very recently that I'm too tired and that writing is too hard. 

In the last month or so, though, I find that I have more energy. It's partly the Noom diet, with which I lost 15 percent of my body weight since midsummer; and it's partly the Noom exercise program, which invites me to perform things like burpees, something I haven't even said since I stopped playing schoolboy lacrosse fifty-three years ago. Today, I have more energy, and I surprised myself by actually springing up yesterday at the words “Let us pray.” 

That’s not the only reason I am writing my first post in nearly five years, however. The trigger was a text from my friend Todd at three in the morning Friday. It read: 

My main main man who may be up this early, I am here with Jane and I want to access your blog entries from our trip desperately to read and reminisce, could you grant me access

I was up, as usual, at three in the morning, and Todd and Jane were too because they were on the “overnight” at Pat House, a L’Arche home in Haverhill, Massachusetts. The exchange that followed led to my reopening this blog to public view. 

Todd and Jane were, as you'll read under the L'ARCHE entries at left and right, the two L'Arche assistants with whom I took a cross-country trip five years ago, in company of core members Woody, Doris, and John. This trip was the culmination of my two years “in Community,” as L’Archers say, and one of the peaks on my life map.

It was deeply gratifying to realize before dawn on Friday that by chronicling our days on the road in the L’Archmobile (my 2016 Toyota Sienna minivan), I had performed a small, very small, service for two friends to whom I am devoted. 

It is with that smallness in mind—and heaven protect me not with delusions of grandeur—that I take up keyboard and courage, proposing now to write a bit every day. I will take inspiration from a dear writer friend of mine who every day upon waking sits down to her “morning pages.”

Lord, give me the courage and the discernment to write briefly each day my own morning pages—

—from experience

—without politics or ideology

—without mentioning family members by name

—with faith

—with hope

—with sobriety   

I’ll conclude this morning page with the famous words of my beautiful grandchild (they know who they are), “Amen, alleluia, boat!”

*NOTE: Actually, YM&F is quite religious, though I suspect Maclean, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was unchurched in adulthood if not outright atheist.