A GATHERING OF NO’S

by Melodie Johnson Howe

Overwhelmed with the demands of my everyday life, and a world I find more and more unnerving (there are no homosexuals in Iran), I decide to plant some snapdragons. While digging my spade into the ground, I become aware that I’m repeating the word “no” over and over. I fall silent. Stunned. Why “no”? Why not “yes”? It never occurred to me to be surprised that I was talking to myself. I’m a writer. Writers spend hours talking to themselves. My husband, not without irony, will even go so far as to apologize for interrupting me in one of my solo conversations.

Dr. Watson, our dog, sits happily next to me. So these no’s of mine must have been said softly and calmly. Otherwise he’d be running for his life. He bats his long flirty eyelashes at me. And I wonder why did this gathering of little stone-like negatives hurtle their way through my unconscious and out of my mouth?

I stand and stretch my back. The sky is heartbreakingly blue. A gentle breeze ruffles the dusty eucalyptus trees. The grass is so green it looks like it’s been enameled. But I’m uneasy. Why wasn’t I repeating yes, yes, yes? I was planting snapdragons for God’s sake. What could be a more optimistic gesture? Especially since I know there is a rabbit lurking in the agapanthus waiting for me to finish so he can eat the snapdragons. And then there is Dr. Watson who will run through the snapdragons trying to catch the rabbit, which he never does. Am I feeling ineffectual, hopeless? I sense some awful self-defining word has escaped my lips.

I leave the snapdragons half planted and go into the house. The TV is on. Fox News is chattering in my kitchen. I pour myself a cup of coffee. Two blondes, their hair as shiny as two gold Rolexes and their lips so glossy they look like they’ve been sprayed with Pledge, are bickering over the primary election that hasn’t taken place yet. The blonde Democrat is talking about change. Still. Inept in her response, the blonde Republican looks like she’s trying to restrain herself from reaching across the news desk and strangling her opponent. “No, no, no,” I hear myself say again.

I turn the channel to C-Span. They’re covering the National Book Festival. An older woman in her seventies is talking. She has an English accent and wears a blue chiffon scarf wrapped daringly around her neck. Her hair is thin but coiffed. Her face is untouched by a plastic surgeon’s scalpel. Her hand dramatically goes up to her hair now and then, quivers, then comes back down to rest on the podium. She is biographer and has written a novel about her own life. She is nervous and jumps from subject to subject without making any connections. Then she gathers her thoughts and tells wonderful stories. One is about Richard Rodgers who had someone call her to say if she wrote certain things about Rodgers he would have her bumped off. “Richard Rodgers, for God’s sake,” she screeches and laughs. “This is the man who wrote Some Enchanted Evening, Oh What a Beautiful Morning. Oklahoma. And he’s going to kill me?!” She didn’t listen to the thug. She said no and wrote what she knew she had to. She’s refreshing in her frailty, in her feistiness. She’s an author.

Another woman takes the stage. She’s younger with long dyed-black hair thick as chunks of velvet. Her skin is pale and her lips are a deep blood-red. My husband walks in and says, “My God, she looks like a member of Kiss.” Then he walks out. But I love how she looks. There is bravado in her appearance. She is an author. She has written about a woman, the owner of a zoo in Poland, during World War Two. The zoo was bombed and many of the animals died. When the Germans invaded, the woman began to hide Jews in the tunnels that led to the empty cages. She also hid them in her villa along with the remaining animals. Many of these people were artists. Even though the Germans tried, they could never find those she hid. They all survived the war, the animals and the artists, because this woman said no.

I go back outside. The spade is where I left it. The flowers are still waiting to be planted. The dog is lifting his leg on the grass. The rabbit is still waiting. The sky is still blue. I pick up my spade and plunge my snapdragons into the earth and consciously, loudly, say the word “no”. I say it to the banal and to the evil. I say it to reality. That’s what a writer must do in order to write … even a blog.