Why is the Goldfish Floating?

On lost words and the girlhood desk

Jan 01, 2025

I’ve begun to drop words.

The filmstrip of my life had already begun to drop memories here and there, which my husband actually appreciates as he is able to recount the same stories with regularity and I am not annoyed. I shrug that I cannot pull up the name of some random road on the Pacific coast we were traveling on a Saturday afternoon whereby we stopped to eat fresh caught fish that had apparently spoiled. Granted, I remember the delirium and vomiting that I suffered, but the tale I tell is one sentence and not a saga full of colorful details like names of roads.

But the words I want and cannot evoke bother me.

Fortyish years ago, I was a prolific poet. The books I read, especially the classics assigned to me in literature classes, fed my hunger for new vocabulary, the kinds of words that rolled around and around in my mind. The agonies I felt in girlhood (the acne, the parents, the boys, the female bullies) pressed me to my notebooks, and I poured out my growing angst and heartbreaks onto college ruled paper, poem after poem after poem, developing some of them into songs, choruses and all. I’m certain that was a better choice than smoking Marlboro’s from the bedroom window, the only option before scrolling became a thing.

I do remember throwing away all of those notebooks on a random weekday, along with stacks and stacks of letters from friends, various boys, and my grandmother. I’m not sure if it was an angry purge or a courageous declutter, but my hands were full enough with a naughty cocker spaniel, a jealous Himalayan cat, and two small children. I didn’t need to nurse melancholy and ranking regret anymore, much less continue to inventory and heft sunken boxes every time I moved. I barely took the time to reread any of it before I pitched it overhead into the Dumpster, thinking now I am a mother, and must put away childish things.

The problem of course is that I took my innate love of words with me into motherhood and, given enough fodder through its labor and difficulties, it was either returning to smoking or to writing to relieve me of the tension. Naturally, I chose using words rather than nicotine, my body at that point a temple of the Holy Spirit and my home already well drenched in polyester-free clothing, wooden toys, and organic food for the children. So I freelanced here and there, started a blog, wrote a few books, found some new pen pals. I did this in snatches of time, between diaper changing and laundry sorting and onion chopping.

However, decades of snatching bits of time has wearied me, as well as putting aside “for later” words and phrases I would promise (this time, really and truly) to remember once I got the chance to scribble in a moment of quiet and contemplation.

So I began to forget them. Which, I suppose, once forgotten ought no longer to be meddlesome, but in truth those words even now tend to find some nook or cranny in my body and I know they are still there. Somewhere. Probably curled up in balls, trying not to dehydrate into knots of ignored and decaying inspirations. But, as neglected children, they do not come when I finally remember, finally find the time to call them.

In the afternoon, after cleaning up the lunch dishes, I pull my girlhood desk out from the boys’ room as they are far happier with erupted mountains of Lego atop Costco tables. Obviously, my disdain for plastic in childhood has abated, left behind with cloth diapers and Waldorf dolls.

The desk looks smaller than I remember, but as I sit there in my bedroom a calm pervades. One narrow center drawer, two deep drawers on either end, and a top that splits between the soft and hardwood, obviously originally intended for writing upon. The curved top edge gives me a slight lip to set my favorite writing tools: Sisson’s book of synonyms, Nicholson’s American-English Usage, The Oxford Book of English Verse. Old friends.

I add a small swing lamp to the wall. A tealight spinner to my left gives me a lovely starting routine and, when lost words refuse to come, a little fire to stare into and soothe my psyche. My thick Bible sits to the right, my comfort and teaching every early morning.

I don’t know if the words will come at all, ever. But they have a nesting place, if so.

A remembrance pricks me someplace between stirring the oatmeal and heading downstairs to switch the laundry around and for once I listen to it and swirl around to head another direction. I find the small filing cabinet and pull out the bottom drawer. Household manuals, client files, homeschooling papers, health records. And then, there in the furthest reaches, a fat file of “writing projects”.

Well.

I find notes from the books I’ve written, including ideas for online meetings and in-person retreats. Lists of podcast titles, four pages of them. A thick paper clip of papers with “Book 4” written on top, ten typed pages of chapters worth. Nine issues of mini magazines organized into themes and topics. A stack of poetry and essays I had written in the two years I spent with a local community of writers, structure for yet another book, a memoir that covers the first two decades of my life, and nine chapters into a fictional novel (a novel!) in which the characters instantly materialized into the room I was standing in.

Maybe I don’t have to find the words. Maybe they will find me.

The poem I leave for you here I wrote three decades ago. I don’t leave it as an important bit of prose or even as anything you might find remotely interesting. I leave it here rather as perhaps a crumb for you should you decide to pause and draw upon what you may have previously put aside (or taken to the landfill) whether writing, mechanical interest, handwork, craft or sport. May you find a feast of God’s pleasure in the coming year, and remembrance, too.

Granny

The screen door slammed, and

Granny tipped her bourbon

into the goldfish bowl

before the boy

rounded the corner, wailing,

arms flying, chubby face

spanking dirty and

laces undone.

The boy plopped his body

onto Granny’s aproned lap,

blubbering how not only did

Jimmy push him down,

Cooty Kate had kissed him,

other boys howled and sucked candy.

Granny inhaled and sighed,

“Jimmy’s mean but Kate

loves ya.