TheBanyanTree: A Yearning

[Maria Gibson]

I had a writing assignment this week.  I have a confession to make and 
the one to which I will confess suggested I write it all down, just get 
it all out and then I wouldn't have to give it air time.  Yikes.  So I 
did and now I wait for the time that I will have to sit and watch my 
reader read as I impatiently wait; waiting writer watching reading 
reader.  Yowsa.  I don't know how others feel about watching someone 
read what you wrote but for me it is a little like waiting to have my 
fingernails ripped out as the torturer is fitting me for a fingernail 
ripping device, getting the perfect fit for the maximum pain all the 
while I just sit there.  Being fitted.  Again, Yowsa.  Being that my 
primary experiences of being a writer are all wrapped up in this 
Internet medium, I almost never know who reads what I wrote or who may 
have or not have liked it.  Used to be, we knew it  _more_ than we know 
it now but, still, it has always allowed me the luxury of anonymity 
which isn't so unlike that of a published paper work, is it?  Anyway, 
just my perspective.  Suffice to say, I don't usually like to watch the 
reading.

Well, as I sit here waiting for the time I will be fitted, it isn't 
today but in a  few weeks and the offending confession is resting in 
printed form in my purse, I wondered why I haven't gotten much Tree 
mail.  Ah, yes, seems I have also sent several emails to which I have 
received no reply, not that I expect immediate replies or even any 
replies as I myself can be so haphazard with the email, but it is 
unusual to have not gotten *any* after sending a few out.  Hm, maybe my 
email isn't working properly.  Randy recently transferred my email to a 
different program for blahblahblah reasons too boring to go into and 
nothing has been the same since.  Which is a lot of my problem with 
change in the first place, it just never turns out the same.  So, I 
commence to looking for the Tree website but of course I don't remember 
my password or how to get there, no different than any other time I try 
to go, usually for the same reason, to check and see if I'm missing 
email.  Now, feeling truly paranoid (which doesn't mean no one isn't out 
to get me) I try it the old fashioned way, which for me is to ride the 
coat tails of someone's old email.  But, alas, my deleted emails are not 
going to the trash folder.  I recently trashed several month's worth of 
email to include many hateful spams which *INFUR*iate me to no end!!! by 
their mere existence and whose presence I am trying to avoid while not 
changing anything.  Yeah, it ain't working and I may have to change even 
more of my precious habits and comfort zones just to get rid of these, 
these, these....PIGEONS of the Internet.  But, I digress, perhaps the 
only thing that may never change.

In the effort of checking all my folders for these deleted emails which 
may contain a link (and thinking the folders are not all there and 
neither is all the mail that was in the ones I still have and generally, 
again, being very distrustful of this whole change thing) I came across 
a gold mine.

I have a folder named "Spoon" which contains seventy-seven posts from 
11/96 to 06/01.  Wow.  Pieces of history to include stuff folks sent in 
from Terry after he died and something via Wes from thefatguy at juno.  
There are names in there I don't recognize anymore and some that make my 
heart hurt to think of what has changed and gone on.  I have my very own 
YB folder, of course, and there are a few others whose stuff I kept with 
their name on the folder.  The thing that is crazy to me is the 
haphazard stuff in there.  Some of it is a response or two I received 
but, it seems, none of the ones I would really like to see again.  I 
have always felt it a little egotistical to save the kudos, so mostly 
don't, and now I wish I had; not for what they said but for who said 
it.  And, I'm sure this has happened to a few others, I have gotten 
responses that were miles and miles better than what I even *wrote* in 
the first place, for crying out loud.  This almost feels like finding a 
box of your stuff after a flood or from the back of the only closet that 
didn't burn after a house fire.  The stuff saved is so random and not at 
all what I would have chosen to save if I had only known it would be the 
only box to survive.  I'd have taken much more care with my time capsule 
if only I'd known I was putting one together and getting ready to bury it.

And yet.  How precious actually, are these random items.  How 
desperately they speak to me and beg my forgiveness in their 
unspecialness.  How they, like a hateful child no one wants to be 
around, yearn to be loved for who they are not what they remind me that 
they are not.  Like all of those ordinary days of our lives that we 
can't remember, although they must have happened to bring us from there 
to here, they have the unlikely fate to show up in my twilight zone 
remembering, unannounced and becoming unwelcome not in their entirety 
but in their lack of luster.  They are at once revered and then 
reviled.  OH!  Look what I have, this is great!!  Wait...how come it 
isn't this and that and the other?  Crazy bi-yatch, they moan to one 
another, never happy with what she finds, always wishing it was 
something else.  Huh.  We'll show her, we'll be ORDinary and the slice 
of life kinda crap rather than unearthed diamonds already polished and 
cut.  She'll have to get in the dirt and scrap and remember that she 
came from having nothing to having something and then having the nerve 
not to appreciate it.  That will teach her to forget how much time she 
put into searching for something in the first place. 

**snort**

Set back in my place by several folders of ordinary things that are 
extraordinary in their survival if not in their content.  How many 
wondrous works of true literary art have I callously deleted?  There 
have been writers here, and now some not while some still are, who are 
immeasurably talented.  Some of what I remember aren't the exact words 
but the feelings evoked by what I read long ago and those will linger on 
and on in a folder in my heart forever, no deletion key available.  So, 
I must be content with what I feel and what I remember if not what I can 
find and take hold of.  I must look at the content of the ordinary and 
love it from dawn to dusk, for every second in between, from here to 
there and back again for its mere existence.  I must cling not only to 
those things which still have surface on which to cling but to those 
which art but a  memory providing me a comforting tether.  Perhaps not a 
tangible rope but a stronger one more capable of withstanding a rotting 
container for a time capsule or a computer crash taking away everything 
at once. 

My written confession has evoked in me so much and, yes, a yearning.  A 
yearning for days gone by, deletion strokes unhit and sins not yet 
committed.  I yearn to find something special everywhere I look and, 
even more, to realize what is special in everything I find.

I hope I am forgiven.  I hope to forgive myself.

I hope I get some email soon.


Maria