While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.
******
“There was a full moon outside my window, icy white in a blue sky, and the Cubs were playing Cincinnati.”
——Marilynne Robinson
—--Gilead
I’m ten years old, dozing in the bow of Dad’s yellow cabin cruiser, while he lazes on the deck. We’ve been fishing, just the two of us. Vin Scully calls a Dodgers game on the radio. Mosquitoes buzz. Fireflies flicker. As the smells of pipe tobacco and fish confuse the summer air, the river rocks me to sleep.

With a pen awkwardly gripped in my non-dominant hand, I time-travel back to 1960. I don’t want to go.

The hyypnotherapist instructed me to communicate with my child self. I’m on a quest for lost memories of Professor Agnes Jackson, my college mentor, but those memories lie hidden on the far side of childhood terrors. The therapist assigned me writing prompts, for my dominant hand. Told me to switch hands to respond.

Confronted by the rage she’d splattered all over a previous incarnation of our journaling experiment, I do not want to talk to the little girl.

She gives me a headache, and by headache I mean one single vice grip of the skull that lasts for all the weeks I try but fail to avoid her. There she is in the mirror, clad in Mickey Mouse pajamas all day long. Or tee shirt and flouncy orange skirt, a replica of the skirt I wore to shreds when I was four. She co-opts my diet: gobbling ice cream, hot dogs, and QuikTrip fruit cups that are nothing more than the canned fruit cocktail of my kid-hood.

As instructed, I write the prompt with my right hand: What do you want me to know?

Initially, My left-handed penmanship is illegible. I’m mystified how the skill level improves dramatically after half a dozen lines. As the pen travels down the sheet of copy paper on my desk, the handwriting becomes exactly mine from fourth grade, 1960, when I learned cursive. I’m mystified that my left hand, which produced only a scrawl at the top of the page, by the bottom is writing complete sentences. There is communication here, that I don’t quite belive in. So I continue pushing the pen laboriously across and down the page. I tire easily from the effort and the too tight grip of my arthritic hand. I want to stop. Should we stop, I ask my ten-year-old self. “Not yet,” she answers. And then “Maybe.”

The time machine pauses. I wait.

I watch my hand cross the page. The effort is labored, but steady. Halfway through her final lines, I know what she’s about to say. Because my mind outpaces my hand, the sentences appear on the screen of my brain before they appear on the page. I misinterpret the lag as free will. I foolishly think I control the process. I consider stopping. Just stop your hand. It’s easy. The writing stops, by the will of who knows what.

I lay the pen down. Analysis drains away. Anxious energy settles with a soft shhh. The final enigmatic words on the page comfort me as I’ve never been comforted, as the little girl has never been comforted.

“It’s a game,” she says in my fourth grade cursive. “Don’t worry. You can’t lose. Not this time around.”

Later, after I’ve regained elder consciousness, doubts will reclaim their territory. Will this exercise lead me to the memories I seek? I will wonder how a child can sound like a wise elder. I will wonder which of us is the elder, which the child. I will wonder whether time travel has taken me to the past or whisked me into the future, when I’m as wise as a child.

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.
******

"I distrust happy people."
———Chloe Chun Seim
——--Churn

My therapist asked, “Are you under any stress?”

“Heck, no. Everything’s wonder––. Wait. Yes.” I slumped into the couch. “A friend bought ten copies of my book. Another bought five. They’re writing reviews that are really moving. It’s stressing me out. It’s confusing. Sometimes I go blank.”

“Positive affect disorder,” he said.

Or was it positive affect deregulation? Or dehydration? Or deceleration?

“Negative comes in at a different voltage than positive. You’re wired for negative. Too much good short-circuits the system.”

I perked up. My brain loved to learn new things about itself. Cause and effect lined up. Tissues buried deep within my body relaxed. Electrical currents switched pathways. Rewiring had already begun.

Still, it could take a while for the electricians who manage my gray matter to complete the upgrade. Here’s a warning: On occasion you might rush toward me with open arms, face backlit with positive affect. You might smile at me and exclaim, “What a magnificent achievement.” (And I certainly hope that comes to pass.) If such a scenario plays out, please don’t be alarmed if my eyes glaze over. Or speech slurs. Or my dreadlocks whip around my head like live wires. I’m just short-circuiting.

Watch out for sparks, and back away until the power is restored.