Losing the Doublewide

Well, first it had to be written right?

Well, first it had to be written right? Or on its way at least. And so it was. I had spent my first year of retirement in ridiculous decadence; doing ALL the NY Times puzzles in the morning, reading anything I wanted for however long I wanted, watching Netflix, even bad Netlix, sometimes even in the middle of the day! My parents were not religious people, but TV during the day? That was a sin.

So. Doublewide. After a year of this lolling about, as well as forays into volunteering and crafting and such, I turned to my writing again. After all, I had always wanted to be a writer, right?

I started up again by writing essays which artfully described life in a pandemic. Who wasn’t?

Needing a better escape from reality, I started this book about my favorite place: Northern Michigan. But I wanted it to be about someone living there, not a summer tourist like me. Also, my mom was in assisted living, had been there forever it seemed, as her brain had quit many years before her body would. So she had had many caregivers by this time. Most of them had been wonderful, some of them too good to be called mere mortals. The love, the patience, the humor. It was beyond my capability, that’s for sure, and she was my MOM.

And so Candy was born, a caregiver at a Nursing Home up North, hard working and underpaid. But she had a badass dream of better. And when I let her, she took the reins. She dreamed herself into existence. And I became her stenographer. The novel was just writing itself and the plot was unfurling and Janelle was being born and Clint was hanging in the wings like a delicious smell waiting to feed the romance hunger and it was all just….

Great.

I think I was about 90 pages in (that would be about 30,000 words) when I got a message that my Google storage was full and would I like to pay 1.99 a month for a bajillion more bytes?

I would NOT. I was indignant for some inexplicable reason. Google was free right? Docs? Mail? Drive? Maps? They weren’t going to get my buck 99 a month, No sirree.

So I went about deleting the many, many huge heavy files from my previous life as a union leader and teacher. I mean those School Board Meeting books with the budgets in them? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages. How many bytes? Who knew? But click gone, click gone, click gone. I was giddy.

I thought, it’s just like cleaning house, taking out the trash, emptying the basement. Virtuous.

And then I deleted The Doublewide.

Or what was of it so far, but which I was pretty stoked about. It was accidental of course. And when I realized it, it was two weeks later (not the most disciplined writer), and I became frantic. I found a phone number for Google (believe it) and I called and a lovely man who clearly lived far far away told me it would come back to me. If I was the owner and I had deleted it the Google Cloud would shower it back down upon on me. He would make sure of it. He took down the name of the file, asked me about its size and dates and said, keep checking your Drive. It will be there. It would be returned to me. I experienced a storm of relief. My book wasn’t lost, and so, neither was I.

Over the next week or so, I got back the unit plans and the agendas and the Board minutes and all the bullshit that no longer mattered in my life.

But no Doublewide.

Even though I am not a particularly religious person, I did end up ascribing its loss to a sentient universe which was signaling to me that it wasn’t very good anyway.

Bad book.

Bad idea.

It would’ve ended badly.

Who did I think I was anyway?

However, without the novel I found I was becoming bereft, an old fashioned word that I found myself living inside of. I missed my peeps and their world which had begun to bloom on the page/screen, and a main character who had a life that needed living, a future that needed to be written?

I liked Candy Schein.

I loved the setting

I loved walking the beach and going to work with her.

I had begun to make a world under her direction and then boom, it was gone.

It felt like a nuclear apocalypse.

I spent about a month kvetching about it to friends and feeling lost again and got back to figuring out what the rest of my life was going to look like now that I was no longer an aspiring writer.

And then one morning, I went down early to the lake to walk the dog.

And there was a woman. On a bench. In scrubs. With a take out cup of coffee.

And I checked my phone. It was just before 7AM. I imagined her shift might begin in a half hour or so at one of the Assisted Living Homes in the neighborhood.

Her scrubs were teal. She was wearing white Crocs. Her coffee was from Dunkin’Donuts. She looked, maybe Afro-Caribbean. She had locks that were colored red and green.

She seemed serene, sipping her coffee and looking out at the sparkling, vast lake that Candy loved and walked alongside whenever she felt blue or dejected.

A friend had said, a couple weeks before, that I could write it again. The Doublewide. It was all there, it was just a matter of excavation and retrieval.

But if I began again, it would mean I was committing to it. That I cared enough about it to do the grunt work as it were. None of this flighty sit down and say what tales shall we spin today as the words fly off my fingertips. I had to track her down and bring her back home.

I began a Google doc (yes I bought the storage) where I listed the chapters and what I remembered them being about. Then that Doc spiraled off into the future of the novel, what would happen next, how Granddah would become senile and Graham would come home and on and on. But I wasn’t writing. I had just been, in the inimitable words of some of my favorite people in the world, simply dicking around.

And, then that morning at the beach, taking sidelong glances at that beautiful, serene, hardworking woman, I surrendered. Because there was Candy, or one of her avatars at least, on a Chicago park bench getting ready for her shift, soaking in enough sun and lake to sustain her through a smelly, difficult shift with ancient sad people whose families had left them in her care.

And I began again.