Today I am hobbling around on a dislocated toe– an old “football injury” from my crazy college days– that I reinjured yesterday and still have not been able to repair. Also it’s raining in that cold and dreary way, all the more dismal because yesterday by contrast it was high summer. I paid bills and went to the bank and the grocery store. Indeed, all the hallmarks of a rather drudgery-filled ordinary day, tinged with wincing toe pain and horizontal precip. And yet– today is a wonderful special day. A calendar-marking day. April 7, 2005: I got an office.
You will understand the significance of this… it’s a giant leap towards writing again.
It’s funny because I had no idea that I really WANTED an office outside of the house. It wasn’t a thought I had formed. Then about a month ago Ben and I were out to breakfast with our friends Pippa and Steve, who just moved into our neighborhood with their stunning little 18-month-old Nola Rose. Between the serious blueberry-for-strawberry negotiations of the toddlers at the table, Steve mentioned in an off-handed way that he has this office, in a building very near to us both, maybe five blocks away, that has lovely views and is only $90 a month. As this shocking news sunk in, I began to feel like a– not a drowning person, which is too extreme– but a person who has been swimming a long, long time, and suddenly a boat pulls up. And it has happy people and cocktails and a stack of warm fluffy towels. I wanted to get into that boat very badly.
It took a few weeks for various reasons, but last week, despite being rather exhausted from my surgery, I set up a time to go and see this office and check the whole situation out. It was just as I expected– sort of dingy little place, with a window and desk. But workable and indeed with a lovely view. The building is a former bank and has some of that old grandeur– marble floors and hallways. But it’s been several decades since its heyday and not well-cared-for since. We decided to go in an entourage down to the building managers and have them show me what was actually for rent at the moment. To my surprise, the lady walked me into the most lovely office in the world!! Much more beautiful than I had ever imagined. Two huge windows looking out over the skyline and the lake beyond (on the 8th floor, with nothing tall anywhere nearby). A room-width window seat. Cupboards, cabinets, everything you could want and much more. Dazzling! I had specifically mentioned that my price range was $90. She didn’t know the exact price. She said that her boss would call me back next week, which was this week.
As it turned out, though, the room of glory was in fact $185. Pippa pointed out that it’s dead space to them, seeing as no one wants it, and whatever offer I made would be more than what they are getting for it now. So I told the building guy that I couldn’t go over $110 or $120, and hoped he would let me have the space for that much, seeing as I’m a bird in hand. I said I would pay a chunk up front, etc., to try to sweeten the deal. Negotiations were on-going yesterday, and today I went over to look at his counter-offer. A lesser office a few doors down from it that he would give me for $120.
Okay, it’s not as nice. It’s a little glum. It’s longer and skinnier than the room of glory, more tunnel-like. It only has one window instead of two and no window seat. It has a depressing old desk in it and a crusty radiator. I walked back and forth between the two of them probably about 50 times, thinking about the $60 between them. Thinking about what I really need, and how distorted my mind has become with greed already– not only did I suddenly need an office, any office, now it had to be an extra nice one??? (This would be hard to explain to Ben.) Thinking about budgetary constraints that are so ever-present, and the borderline pointlessness of paying good money to potentially sit there and day dream. I can’t guarantee that I will write anything, and certainly not something that actually earns money back. I’m trading out Pilates classes to pay for it, which is how I pitched the plan to Ben, pretty much an even exchange. But the $180 one would put the plan into the red and we’d have to find that extra money someplace and — yada, yada, yada.
I decided finally that the lesser of the two, had I seen it first, is really what I had pictured. And that with a coat of paint and a little rug shampoo (which the guy says he’ll attend to soon), it really will be just fine. The view is the same, the big bridge over to downtown, far away buildings, a little of the lake and lots of sky. I think the actual square feet is the same– and I put this here to send my friends in NYC into agony– it’s about 250 square feet. And the point of course is not so much the space itself, its comfort, but the solitude, the quiet, the time. It’s a sanctuary. It can be spartan.
So in a couple weeks I’ll set up one of our many elderly iMacs over there, hook up a printer, and go there, whenever I have childcare and time, and see what happens. Maybe I’ll just READ books for a while, sentence after sentence, page after page, without interruptions. I’ll go to a junk store and buy an old easy chair. Maybe I’ll practice my flute, or do some drawing or something else entirely. I’m not going to sit myself down in front of a blank screen, type “CHAPTER ONE,” and throw myself into acute writer’s block for the next six months. I’m just going to go there, and then go there, and then go there again. Basically I’m creating a space in my life into which writing can enter if it wants to.
More on this as it develops.