So much for the sacrosanct

Last night I went home determined to work on my memoir instead of going to Harold Night. Until last night I had only missed one Harold Night since September--and that was to see an important novelist read.

I was dead tired when I got home but I decided I'd better write something or I would have wasted the entire day (I am doing something amazingly tedious at work these days--a special project). I took a nap and when I awoke it was 7 p.m.--if I went back to Manhattan now I could see Harold Night, and guarantee that I had not wasted the evening.

I did not go out. I fed Jenny. I cooked up a nice little dinner. I put my dinner dishes in the sink and sat in my chair--it's a beach chair--and opened a plastic tub of fresh papaya chunks for dessert. It was 8 p.m. If I went back to Manhattan now I could see the second show of Harold Night. Jenny leapt onto my lap and curled up and started purring. We had spent a lot of time together over the holidays, but as far as I am concerned Jenny can stay on my lap as long as she wants. She purred away and we listened to the radio and I decided I had eaten enough papaya. Then I could feel her fur heating up and she went to eat more dinner--she usually eats in courses.

I washed the dishes--which is also Jenny's cue to ask to be brushed. I feed her twice a day and brush her afterward because she always asks. Getting brushed after breakfast and dinner is her favorite thing in the whole world. I wonder if anything about this resembles the way Herman Melville wrote. I'm guessing not.

Then I brushed my teeth, figuring I would write and go straight to bed, meaning that as I fell asleep I would think of the next thing to write. When I sat in my beach chair again, Jenny jumped on my lap again--actually it was pretty much a repeat of what we'd done about 20 minutes before. Sometimes Jenny stares at me and meows for no reason; so, I pick he up and tell her I have not forgotten her. I think she was glad this night. Her fur got hot again and she leapt off me. Finally I booted up my computer and got to work. It was nearly 9 p.m.

By 9:46 I realized I had been writing solidly--which I didn't expect, because I had spent most of the evening fighting off fatigue and suspecting that I was finding ways to avoid writing. I wasn't sure I could keep going for 14 more minutes. Well, I did, and it was more solid writing. At 10 p.m. I stopped because I still had more to say (Hemingway's technique for making sure he could get started the next day). In that hour I had written a little over three pages. That doesn't sound very productive (20 minutes per page), especially considering my ratio of deleting half my first draft in my second draft. But this is a memoir, and I was remembering details from my childhood that I wasn't sure were there to be excavated, and my articulation of them on the page was strong. They were three good pages. I don't think I'm a person in real life, only on the page.