Notes from Maine - 2021/08/08

Sometimes I write an email to myself. When I do, the subject is “writing idea,” which tells Gmail to tuck the idea away into a special folder. If I’m looking for something to ponder, I’ll open up that folder and start hunting around. A lot of times, I’ve already written a whole book about the idea. That just happened to me recently. The folder currently has 566 entries. I think it might contain every decent idea I’ve had so far.

One of the oldest emails just says, “Fireworks out the window.”

My sister used to live in a little 2nd floor apartment. One July, she told me that I could watch the fireworks through her kitchen window. I saw the red glow of maybe three fireworks. The whole thing was a giant, disappointing fabrication that I should have seen coming. People in DC and Northern Virginia are always telling you that you can see the fireworks from where they live or work. When I was a teenager, my father took me down to his office one time because he said we could go on the roof of his building and watch the fireworks. We went. There was a building in the way.

The next email in the folder says, “Bug in ear.”

A bunch of years ago, I was woken up around midnight because there was a buzzing in my ear. The next thing I knew, I was jumping up and down in the bathroom as the bug dug deeper and deeper into my ear canal. I tried drops, but that just made it dig harder. It was amazing how I could feel its little legs trying to make a home in my eardrum. I jumped in the car and drove to the nearest hospital where they clearly thought I was a drug addict or maybe mentally ill. I paced in front of the triage nurse, refusing to sit down because every time I sat down the bug burrowed. She was starting to lose her patience and I think I came close to being admitted to the psychiatric ward. 

Finally, a doctor poured something in my ear to loosen the wax and the bug stopped. I think it died fairly instantly. I fell asleep a few seconds later. It was about three in the morning at this point. They woke me up fifteen minutes later to flush my ear and they screamed in surprise when a bug came out.

The doctor said, “I bet you thought you were going crazy with that thing in there.”

I said, “No, I knew there was a bug in my ear. It never occurred to me that I was crazy.”

Another entry in my folder says, "Man self-sufficient at home. Maine winter. Loses power doesn't know about apocalypse until later.” I turned that idea into a book called Extinct. I loved writing that book. It all came from that idea that a person could be in the midst of the end of the world and have no idea.

Another one just says, “Concessions.” I meant to look that up and find out why it means both “a place to buy popcorn,” and “things you would give up during bargaining.” It seems odd that the word could have diverged into two different directions like that. I have the same issue with “Sanctioned.” It’s either authorization, or you’ve been punished. 

I get hung up on these strange corners of English sometimes. I spend an hour trying to figure out why a door can be “open” or “closed.” One state is the present tense of the verb and the other is past. It seems like we should say the door is opened. Maybe that’s the way it was once, but it was shortened? 

One of my favorite early entries in my email folder is, “Don’t forget your shells.”

I was at the beach with my sister and nephew. They were playing in the water and I was sitting on a towel while the family next to us was packing up. All day, the youngest daughter had collected these terrible shells that were the ugliest, broken shells on the beach. She clearly treasured them, but in the chaos of packing up, she had forgotten all about them.

Before they walked away, the little girl glanced over at me and I said, “Don’t forget your shells!”

Her mom looked at me like I was the most evil person in the world. They told the daughter that they could leave the shells and get new ones next time they visited, but the little girl began to throw a tantrum. They had to put down all their bags and collect up the shells to take them back to the car. The process was made longer because every few seconds the parents felt the need to stop what they were doing and shoot me a dirty look. 

I smiled back each time. 

There are 566 of those little emails in my folder. Almost all of them bring me back to a specific thought or memory. This next one was from a dream. I don’t remember why I thought it was worth saving: “I'm from the land of bowl haircuts, swayback horses, and mountains on the horizon that I've never seen in person.”