Raking Sand

Over a few months my sophomore year of college, I spent a good amount of time in the office of a dean who was trying to kick me out. I remember almost nothing of this person or our conversations. My grades were fine, was the problem. My attendance: almost none. I had been reported to the University because I often did not leave my dorm room except for long walks in the middle of the night and my roommate was concerned. None of this is relevant besides to say I was not in a great spot. I was able to stay. I began to see a therapist who it is not overstating to say saved my life.

This dean, though, I have very little recollection of her. I might have spent months going to her office; it might have been days or weeks. I couldn’t tell you what she looked like, what she said to me in those meetings. I can see with near perfect clarity the distance between where my feet sat as we talked and the bottom of her desk. She had a large and lovely office. In retrospect, I should have paid closer attention. The other person who played a pretty major role in my not being in the state I was in then, was a Woolf professor who was a contingent hire—I would three times over the next ten years write letters arguing for her to get tenure but she would be denied—and her office was down a long hall and so cramped and small that I had to keep my feet tucked under my chair so as not to kick her or disrupt one of the stacks of books she had on the floor as we talked.

This dean’s office had great big windows, a couch along one wall, two large chairs in front of her desk and a small table between them. I can see the face of that Woolf professor perfectly. No doubt in part because she always had to sit so close to me when we met.

Anyway: on the table between the two chairs in front of that dean’s desk was a long flat object, three-ish inches deep, roughly a foot long, 6 inches across. Inside this container was sand, a small rake, two pleasingly cold smooth rocks.

I fidgeted a lot then. I am still restless almost all the time. When I came for our first meeting, this woman was not in her office and when her secretary first led me in, I lifted this container of sand and placed it on my lap. I struggled then with calibration and compulsions—I wanted, suddenly, to have that slab of sand on my lap; more than that, it felt possible it would help steady me as I talked, and so I picked it up. The slab was made of hard stone, cool to the touch, and though it was winter in New England, all the buildings were always overheated, and it felt good to feel the cold on my palms and fingers, through my jeans, as I sat.

The sand had a small rake laid out over it and I picked the rake up and ran it slowly through the sand. I held one of the rocks and then the other one. When the dean came in, I freaked out and began to set the thing down, but she let me keep it on my lap. The whole time we talked, I raked. Slow, methodical. Ritual, repetition—they are two of my favorite things on earth. The sand was such, the rake was such, that very little changed each time you raked except it looked slightly smoother; you could see the marks each time you raked, and the allocation of sand became more even. But it was enough sand that it never looked completely even. After a while, you raked because raking felt good.

Often, then, I did not show up for things I had agreed to. That dean was the person who found my therapist. She was the person who could have decided that the University send me home and I would have never met that Woolf professor, added an English major, on and on. I would likely have not gone back the next few times the University said I had to to that Dean’s office, except I had loved so much running that rake through sand that I did.

I have not written to you here because I have been raking. Because I have been, in a time of near constant world horrors, been so grateful, relieved, to get up early every morning, and slowly and methodically re-allocate endless bits of sand.

I went on a long drive with a friend last week and we somehow happened upon talk of college. I mentioned this stretch of time but didn’t talk about the dean or raking sand, except we were driving to Maine to write together for a few days, and, once we got there, once I got to working every morning, I began to think all the time about that cold stone on my lap. I haven’t wanted to write because when I’m deep in something I like not thinking too much about whether or not it will become something, I like the ritual, the repetition, I like the weight of it in my brain and body, computer often on my lap.

That same time in college, I wrote a friend and told her I’d decided I wanted to be a writer, Oh, Lynny, she said to me, your grammar is a mess. We did not go to a particularly good high school and I had never learned grammar. Nearly every book I’d read so far that I loved I’d happened upon randomly and on my own. But inside language, inside sentences was often the only place that I felt safe, alive, like sense might one day come. I bought a book and taught myself grammar. I went back into sentences but slightly more equipped. I still get nervous often, am embarrassed and ashamed, that I never learned it well or good enough.

Last night, at dinner, our younger kid asked me what the difference was between “good job” and “well done.” I told them “good job” was about the product, “well done” was about the quality of the work you did, the process. Well done is more important for me, I said. But even that feels like a stretch. What felt so thrilling to me, remembering that sand rake was that “well” wasn’t possible. It was just cold heavy stone on lap and hand tight on the rake’s medal handle, down and through and back then up then down and through and back.

For a long time, I think, that’s all writing should feel like, that its immense, extraordinary pleasure is in simple repetition; practice because nothing “good” ever came without an endless going back and through—head down, attention sharply, carefully attuned—and back and through and try again.