I woke up thinking about two women who were very dear to me – both of whom have been dead for some years now.   I decided I would Nora Ephron them with my morning coffee.   The first, Beverly Jensen, came up immediately.   She has a novel coming out in June, based on many short stories she wrote while her children were growing up,  all of them stuffed into a cramped apartment in Chelsea, which they somehow made work.   I went to her website and listened to two short audio clips of her reading from her book, titled posthumously by her husband, “The Sisters From Hardscrabble Bay.”     I had listened to them before, I realized, but it was lovely to hear her voice first thing in the morning,  clipping along in a slightly inflected Maine accent.  She reminded me that anything is possible.

I then NE’d my sister, Nancy Blair.   I was just curious to see if this middle-class suburban housewife who died 9 years ago would have any hits.   She had been an artist after all – someone who sold her paintings at local art shows in malls near Chicago.  She actually got commissions to do paintings for wealthy North Shore women and made a few hundred on each one.   I have a couple of her paintings, mostly flowers.    I find it comforting to have something created by her near me.  My husband sneers at her work, and though I would never say this to him, I know what he means.  They’re not great art.  They’re not particularly stamped with originality.  But they do come from her gut, her soul, her heart, and I am grateful to have them.   Contrariwise, I do not treasure my husband’s sculptures, dotted around the apartment, though they are quite good, if likewise, lacking in originality.    They tend to dominate, to insist on their presence in the rooms.    I look at them and I am so very bored with them, mainly because I find him often staring admiringly at them while he slightly adjusts the angle of view.   I also get frustrated because they were all done more than 25 years ago, and he’s done nothing new in the intervening years.    I mean, come on.  Get on with it.

Then I realize that I’ve put up (partly in egoic self-defense) old posters of me from my acting days.  They’re not prominently displayed in the living room; they’re in the hall and the bedroom.  But they’re there.   Has this become a pissing contest in the Carroll household?  I think so.   We’re each marking our territory; staking our claim to fame- or at least to a moment or two of creativity that is uniquely ours.    I didn’t put mine up, by the way, for years, until I guess I needed to take a whiz.  That is, I needed something of my own in my own house.

And then there’s the passing it on thought.   Beverly wrote not for publication but out of a great need to be creative because that too made her somebody who was worthy of recognition, even if it was her own self esteem.   It’s difficult to be a creative person (Beverly had been an actor) and raise two children on a teacher’s salary in New York City.   It’s difficult to have received attention and then to have it taken away by poopy diapers and throwup and worry.    This was her way of saying “I’m still here.”   I guess we all need to keep saying to someone  that we’re still here.  If we are artists, we do it through our art.   Writers write.  And me?

I yearn.   I’ve spent the last 11 years on an intellectual pursuit.   Luckily I was brought into the Writing Project fold right away and was encouraged to be creative in the classroom.   This school of teaching fit perfectly with my post-actor self.     It’s not working anymore; I don’t know why.     Is it that I’m teaching only online?   Do I need to be in the physical classroom again?   It IS a challenge to be creative in the midst of teaching online.   So much of the creativity is born during the design of the class, in choosing the content and deciding how best to display it.   Once you’ve got a good working online course up and running for a few semesters,  I think it can become not unlike the several profs I’ve had who worked from yellowed and stained 3 by 5 index cards that they brought out for whatever course it was they were doing yet again.    They were NOT reinventing the wheel each semester, just as I see that I am not doing much of that either in my online venues.   I do try to shake things up by using different texts and trying out new sorts of writing assignments.   But I don’t see the students eyes light up because I’ve said something clever or useful in class.   I don’t see the students’ boredom which would lead to my increased determination to hook them in. I don’t see them.  I only hear them through their writing ( or not).     They have to provide an “aha” moment to me in writing, and how many of them are skilled enough writers to do that?  Not many.   So I don’t get to see those lovely moments.  I think I miss that.   I’m doing a lot of yearning these days.  I feel emptied out, flat.   Is this a piece of the puzzle I’m trying to put together of my missing emotional life?