Here. Even here. Maybe especially here.

Husband had a bad health blip recently and as he was being admitted to the hospital, I asked myself for a favor.

“Lynn, buddy old pal, can we not abandon creativity because of this hospital stay? Pretty please?”

You see, I’d really been on a roll, creatively, at home, and I didn’t want to lose momentum.

Don’t get me wrong, I was a good support to my husband. I fetched things he needed and listened in on medical conversations, so we’d have two memories to draw from instead of one. I texted everyone with updates—a crucial job when your spouse is stuck in a hospital bed.

But I wanted to be intentional about keeping my creative antennae raised.

So how did it go? (Husband’s home now, thankfully, blessedly.)

Well, it was interesting. During this experiment I was able to commit a few acts of creativity, including:

CHARACTER STUDY

I watched the nurses carefully, looking for aspects of characterization that I might use for my fiction writing.

One scene stands out.

A pump wasn’t working—hadn’t worked for hours—and the CNA (certified nursing assistant, if that’s a new term to you) and RN (registered nurse) assigned to our room were just not getting it fixed.

The RN whispered to the CNA who made a call and soon a different CNA popped into Room 3224. She was short with strong arms, and had a badgerlike intensity about her.

Everyone stepped back while the newcomer worked. She muscled the pump into compliance, confidently and firmly, in a matter of minutes. Here, I decided, is a mechanic of medical appliances, on call from her regular duties to help her colleagues.

Thank God for mechanics.

BEEP…BEEP…BEEP

In the past (yeah, too much time in the past year and a half spent in hospital rooms, with three different family members) I have been really annoyed and disturbed by all the beeping. Alarms everywhere! Announcing everything from empty IV bags to low oxygen levels to things even the nurses can’t quite identify.

This time I tried on a few occasions to listen differently. It didn’t work every time, but when I focused on the beeps and played with the idea of them as sounds and rhythms and not as annoyances, it was kind of fun.

A beep coming from the room next door syncopated with one in our room for a while—felt kind of reggae-ish. Throw in the whoosh from an oxygen tank and soon my foot was tapping along.

CREATIVE GRATITUDE

I was grateful for all the usual reasons: thankful for insurance, access to medical staff (artists in their own right), for friends and family.

But I also found myself being grateful for the simple ability to text.

People used to have to rely on phone calls—remembering who to call and then keeping track of who had been updated.

During this hospital stay I had about 7 text threads going. (I hate to lump everyone together and end up annoying people with all the notifications.) With this texting system I could always check and see who had been updated, and when—very handy when stress has tangled your brain.

Best of all, the love coming through the replies to my texts was palpable. I felt connected and supported by this invisible clan, and I think they could sense how much they matter to us as I filled them in on my husband's progress.

EXPERIMENT CONCLUDED

So, yeah, an intentional lean toward creativity worked for me, and helped pass the time until the doctor said the magic words, “We can go ahead and release you this afternoon.”

Creativity. Here in the hospital, even here. Maybe especially here.

Because creativity is healing. Creativity is life.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write is an effort toward wholeness. —Madeleine L'Engle

Whale Watching

I lived in Los Angeles for three years back in the 1980s.

Fish out of water is an understatement. It might tell you something about how much I missed Wyoming when I tell you that I got all teary one time when I saw a Christmas card portraying a snow-covered pine tree.

I missed pine trees. I missed snow. I missed home.

But there were some really good things about LA also—like whale watching.

When you go on a whale watching tour you climb on a boat with a lot of people. You jockey for position to claim a good viewing spot. Then you hang on while the boat churns out to sea. The leaders of the tour have ideas on where the whales are and they also have rules on how close they can get, but all that is invisible to the folks on the tour.

As soon as the captain powers down the engine, everybody starts looking around.

Then you wait.

And wait.

The boat lurches side to side. You sip on your water bottle and wait. You scan the ocean, training your binoculars on the wavy horizon until your arms are shaking from the effort, so you lower them, and wait.

You think maybe you should have gone to Disneyland instead.

While you’re waiting, you notice the salt on your lips and lick them repeatedly. You gaze into the water and wonder what fishy things are lurking down there. You listen to the calls of the sea gulls as they crisscross the boat’s wake.

You check the horizon again. Nothing.

You watch a couple who are standing a few feet away and notice how the young woman is trying to keep her hair tidy in the wind by patting at it. She keeps swiping her finger under her eyes as if she’s afraid her mascara is running, which it is.

First date, you decide.

Somebody points and yells, “Spout!”

You turn in that direction just as a fountain of water spatters the surface of the sea. Then the maw of a blue whale rises up out of the liquid floor, followed by the massive barnacled slide of a whale body. Then the tail, etched with white scars, flips way up into the air and back down, slamming the surface.

A curtain of water splashes the crowd on the boat. Everybody laughs and applauds (as if the whale were performing a stunt). You giggle with your friends as you wipe the salty water from your face. You show off your photos and look at theirs.

Then you wait, again. And wait. On a two-hour tour, that might be all the whale you see. Sometimes no whale appears at all.

Waiting for the creative muse to show, I’ve decided, is a lot like a whale watching tour.

The ratio of waiting time to the arrival of creative insight is a lot to a little. Sometimes nothing worth anything arrives. Delete, delete.

But still, you’ve got to get on that boat. You’ve got to stay alert.

You’ve got to go out to sea if you want to see a whale, and you’ve got to show up to the page if you want to write.

Food, Glorious Food

I remember a time, shortly before we got married, when Mike and I were eating lunch and he asked, “What should we have for dinner?”

I told my sister about it.

“Oh, he’s gonna fit in with our family just fine,” she said.

Food is a big part of my life. That’s why I am confused when writers neglect to mention all the muffin crumbs, lemon slices, and long, cheesy strands of life in their stories.

I concur with the Italian writer, Aldo Buzzi, who wrote, “The writer who never talks about eating, about appetite, hunger, food, about cooks and meals, arouses my suspicion as though some vital element were missing in him.”

I will make this assertion: leaving out the purchasing, preparation, and consumption of food in your essays, stories, and poems is a lost opportunity.

A LOST OPPORTUNITY FOR…

Waxing philosophic:

“One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.”

Luciano Pavarotti

Paying homage:

“When God sets the table for dinner, I would bet my grandma’s rolls are right next to the butter.”

Susan Mark

Expressing disdain:

“Cucumber should be well sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out.”

Samuel Johnson

Inserting humor:

“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”

Calvin Trillin

Portraying attitude:

“Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.”

Sophia Loren

Describing the sublime:

“Strawberries are the angels of the earth, innocent and sweet with green leafy wings reaching heavenward.”

Terri Guillemets

Delivering a good insult:

“Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.”

Henry James

Bringing characters to life:

(Excerpt from a letter included in my as-yet-unpublished novel):

I hope to bring back a new recipe from my sojourn in Kengetty, but I’m not sure I can recreate it exactly. Mrs. Yandle, the sibilant proprietress of the Gwesty, has a style to her baking that I guarantee I can’t replicate.

Making bakestones, for example. It starts with a pronouncement, to nobody in particular: “Oi! I’d best get to my bakestones, or it’ll be dimmit before we know it!” Followed by a march to the cupboard, a clattering as she pulls bowls, boxes, and implements out and bangs them down on the sideboard.

At which point she suddenly turns into a monk at prayer as she crumbles lard, butter, and flour together in a bowl, then adds in honey, currants, cinnamon, and nutmeg. She cracks an egg on top as a benediction. When the dough has been mixed to her satisfaction, Mrs. Yandle goes into a kind of fit state, giving it fond slaps and yelling (I kid you not) “Take that, you fop doodle!”

For me, food is also a portal to memory.

What is evoked as I remember my father serving my sisters and me a dish he called “goop” (creamed tuna on toast) after my mother’s departure when I was eight years old? It was about the only dish he knew how to cook, having learned it in the military.

Goop filled the hole in my stomach, but I missed Mom’s tacos, and the way she pressed all the grease out of the hamburger for me, because I was a finicky eater, and couldn’t stand any kind of fat.

And in remembering my father’s dish I am whisked back in time, and feel again the hole in my insides that no amount of food could fill.

There’s much, much more to food than just the ingredients, the cooking, the eating, isn’t there?

So, all I’m saying today is don’t forget the food.

Let your characters argue over pasta.

Resurrect the way your grandfather chewed his pot roast.

Bring into your poem the taste of a single blackberry, just plucked from the bush in the shadow of the Tetons as you keep an eye out for bears.