The Joy of Revising

I began last week to reread and revise a manuscript I finished two years ago.  When I finished writing,   I was thoroughly exhausted.  Apparently, even before that I looked as done in as I fwas starting to feel, because one evening, after a class I was taking with him, my rabbi said, You know, you could finish your book and drop dead. The other day, I told him that he'd been more right than wrong about what that manuscript was taking out of me. He did not know, for example, that the only thing I did besides work on the manuscript was to take that class. Oh, I brushed my teeth every morning and showered every night--at least one of which I neglected when I was writing my first novel several decades ago.

So tired was I when I finished the book, that I put it away without making any changes or even reading it through. 

Last week, I decided it was time to print out the manuscript and see if time had lent me enough distance to decide if it was good and, if I thought it was, to revise it productively. Some years ago I heard my brother, who is also a writer, say that it was important, in revising a manuscript, not to "dis-improve" it. The word's not in my dictionaries, but it is a fine word. And in reworking any of my writing, I always keep it in mind, just behind the forefront. For it has to be there, or one may start to fiddle too much with what works. Mostly, to me, revising means cutting out the flab I notice, and moving some phrases around so the reader doesn't have to read sentences two or three times to understand them. Because reading a book shouldn't involve manual labor.

I've read and revised 129 pages so far. And the experience is giving me joy. I'd forgotten that part: how it feels to do the actual work of making something you wrote, better. Joy--one word I won't need to revise.

A Resolution

I need to make a resolution. Otherwise, I will continue to squander my days instead of spending them as carefully as I spend money.

I don't want to phrase my resolution so tightly that it chokes off other possibilities; but I don't want to make it so fluid that my work hours will drip away into a puddle at day's end.

So here it is: instead of looking for projects that pay--which feeds my lifelong fear of ending up in genuine squalor--I will spend some money on things I want and/or need  (or both) and spend my time revising my spiritual manuscript until I feel it's entirely free of self-indulgence and therefore ready to show to an agent. And then show it.

So help me, God.  Please?

Father Lloyd and Me

Yesterday, I had a morning appointment at Cornell-New York Hospital with my neurologist. He's an unusually pleasant man,  whose only fault in my eyes is that he's so laid-back that I sometimes fear he'll tip his chair  over backward.

Afterward, I met Father Lloyd for lunch. This is a ritual I observe whenever my hospital appointments are on a weekday. Seeing one another pleases us both. I think my visits please him because I remind him about his good will and patience toward me when, as a reluctant catechumen, I took the Paulist Center conversion class three times. I must have asked a thousand questions--only because I controlled my desire to ask more. The visits please me because, at ninety-two, he remains the most open "dinosaur" (his word, not mine). I enjoy his enormous pleasure in my ongoing love for the Church, and how he examines and re-examines the meaning for him of his own father's Jewishness. Most of all, though, what bonds us is how visceral our faith is in God.  The same. The One.

Louis Stein - An Anniversary

This year, I was lucky. Most years, the Jewish calendar, Jewish tradition, and my heart lead me to observe the anniversary of my father's death three times: on the date of his death according to the Jewish calendar; in synagogue on the Saturday preceding the jewish date or, if I cannot make that one, the Saturday after; and on the "American" date.  The fortunate part this year was that the date according to the Jewish calendar fell on a Saturday, the first two dates melded into one.

I lit a Yahrzeit candle on Friday evening, before lighting my Sabbath candles. It would burn throughout that night and into the following evening. I said a few words, aloud, addressed to my father rather than God, because there is no prayer to accompany the lighting of a yahrzeit candle. I find this absence of a "set' prayer very strange, for Judaism is dense with prayers for even the most commonplace of quotidian activities. On the other hand, I like the freedom to address my father rather than God at this singular candle-lighting.

At services the following morning, I was given an aliyah (called "up" to the Torah to say a blessing and stand beside the Torah reader as he chanted a portion of the day's reading). Somepeople say the prayer both before and after their part quickly. Some even mumble. I do not hurry through it. I say it slowly.  I try to share it. I feel the honor. But not my father.

Because, yesterday as every year, it's on the "American" date, that I "felt" it. "It" being my father's presence in my life--and his absence. The latter has been far longer than his presence. Louis Stein died when I was nine, and he was fifty-two. As years went by, missing him became more and more replaced by questions about him and the sort of man he was aside from being my tateh (father). In recent years, the questions have faded, though they remain unanswered. And, overlaying them, is a kind of acceptance. That Louis Stein was a complicated man, like most of us. And that, even if I am blessed to encounter him after I die, I will probably not tarnish that moment by confronting him with my questions. Chances are, I will love him then, unquestioningly, even as I did when we both were too young for him to die.

For isn't it possible that that's what heaven is, freedom at last from all our questions?