A Blog Falls to Pieces

The theme of pieces keeps cropping up in my life. The number of cliches involving pieces can be strung together to describe this current status. Falling to pieces, picking up the pieces. Saying piece of cake is somewhat akin to smashing frosting in my face. Nothing is coming easy these days.

Sometimes, I look for pieces of sentiments to begin my writing time if words don’t come quickly to me. Yet when there is an emotion to convey, a message to send out in the bottle, and there is no starter piece, nothing to light the fires, what then is there?

My writing lately has been in pieces. Snatches of real-time, coupled with a crippling state over what? The world? This speck of a life? Have both shattered to pieces and we are tasked once more with picking them up? Something is paralyzing me, and I keep thinking if only I had the right piece. There’s a stuckness, as if there is no piece, nothing to break off, nothing left to give.

My blog fell too, today, broken into pieces. Maybe for the best. So, here are a few pieces for me to gather later.

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The genesis of Something Italian: A personal history of flight, food, and family included tome of poetry, memoir, recipes, photos, letters, and snippets of memory. Pieces. All pieces. Little puzzle ones, sometimes with torn or frayed edges and tops, very few corners or edges to give the work some sort of definition. A boundary. Pieces of me that needed capturing. Pieces of me that got away.

For over five years, I brought them together in various shapes and forms, sometimes pieces were tossed out, or snipped off to fit snugly somewhere they didn’t actually belong.

Sally Field, in her memoir, In Pieces, she writes “In pieces I had come into the world, and in pieces I would live my life.” However, our modern world does not adjust well to pieces. We are asked to smooth out the edges on a worldview that is interrupted, mangled, rumpled. One not contiguous at all. But we live our moments in pieces.

My parents lived their lives in pieces, in going through the day-to-day drudgery, filling pieces of their day. Minutes, hours. My mother lived piece by piece in the kitchen, through sections of dough or chunks of lamb or slices of peaches referenced in her recipes.

I think of all the lives I loved this year, my body catching up to time zones I can hardly recall visiting, the flinging of myself outside of myself. To find pieces of myself. Waiting for a growth that may or may not happen. The odd thing is we think it all has to have meaning, a threaded together one. The irony is that in the end, they are all simply standalone pieces. As is what we leave behind.

Inspirationist, Yung Pueblo, says, December is a time for reflecting and reorganizing. “Honestly assess what worked well, what didn’t. Start letting go of whatever was weighing you down. Figure out what projects need more of your energy. Stay real about who you want to spend time with.” Not necessarily is it a time to rest, which I have been prone to do over the past week for reasons having to do with internal conflicts over holiday expectations, a lack of focus for my writing, awaiting on editors and assignments, and a general brain freeze due to the early wind chill last week.

Rest, no. Wait, maybe.

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Advent calendars used to arrive in the mail, presumably from the same source as the church calendars, or my mother carried them home from the Hallmark store or ported them back to us from the mall, a discovered Cadbury Advent calendar, adding chocolate to this terrifying mix of waiting. What was Advent anyhow? The root word is from Medieval Latin adventitious, meaning "coming from abroad, extraneous," a corruption of Latin adventicius "foreign, strange, accidental." Advent was also known as the Lent of St. Martin, encouraging people to fast, which we were subject to early on in our Christmas careers. The only thing we didn’t keep our hands off were the German inspired nativity Advent calendars with pull-tabs to tell time in our little lives. Until the felt Christmas trees with Hershey’s kisses tied to them appeared.

One might note that the word advent also comes from Latin root advenīre. The word "advent" means "the arrival of a notable person or thing.” For Christians, the arrival of Christ is symbolic of the meaning of Advent. The Latin root of the word "adventure" is also advenīre, which means "to arrive at, reach, arise, develop".

So, this time is an adventure, something we don’t always consider.

We’re told to stop, to rest, that the darkness means a ceasing. But December is an adventure. Something to arrive at. A testament to the perpetual nature that we show up in our lives, despite the darkness or whatever has laid us down immutable, immobile. An adventure to go inside. To shatter the pieces, find them, put them together, and when necessary, break them apart once more.

We’re told of these pieces, to see them as puzzle pieces that do not exist without the whole. Yet each of those pieces have their own existence, no need to fit into the larger puzzle. These pieces are ornaments on a tree, hung together like popcorn and cranberries on only a string. Or like the silly list of the 12 Days of Christmas, what would three French hens have to do with drummers drumming anyhow? And yet there is an entire cottage industry built of these pieces.

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Every December, as Yung Pueblo might recommend of all dutiful writers, I pick through the pieces of my writing. What work moves forward, what gets left behind? Three half-baked novels, one about a little boy and his mom playing baseball, one about a daughter whose mother, with dementia, only remembers Sinatra songs, and a final one, about a washerwoman who fought for ownership of a historic building with a checkered past. I pick through short stories about a tsunami, a meatball shop. So much left unfinished to finish a part of me.

All of them have built up my writing muscle but left me feeling loaded down, weak with words that will never bolster a sentence in my body of work. Opinion pieces about how our city didn’t need another event venue (everything is a venue these days), why women shouldn’t vote for Trump (they did), positions I knew were in the minority, attempted to find a framework for them, and recognized they had no edges as they became pieces lost and trampled on the floor.

Did I, or did I not have something to say about each of those, I wondered then. And now.

“Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging,” so writes Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Interpreter of Maladies, and In Other Words. As I struggle, perhaps it’s simply that different pieces of ourselves—like language, or home—belong to different puzzles, to different Advent calendars, some waiting on Jesus, others on chocolate. They are part of different ways of living as a writer and person, piece by piece. Some don’t belong at all, which is where most of my writing lives—inside.

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• While there’s plenty for me to share, I’m thinking about the final event on my calendar this year. An appearance at a senior living community. Have any of you watched A Man on the Inside, the Netflix show about an older widower who takes on the role of P/I at a senior living center? If ever we were to understand how many disparate pieces of lives can be contained under one roof, each their own standalone plot, this is it.

• One recent column with Edible Ohio Valley is on line, and I think you’ll gain some wisdom from it. And the print issue of Edible out on newstands contains The Rise of Baking Powder. Just in time to wow your holidays guests with your baking and your knowledge.

  May the remainder of this season bring you the Mirth of Mischief, the name of the children’s book which inspired the Twelve Days of Christmas. The phrase is intended to mean joy without harm.