On Noticing
At the end of a school year, as spring melds into summer, I sit with my family in a small Italian restaurant. There is the smell of marinara sauce and baked cheese and the flap of the double doors to the kitchen as they swing open and closed as the servers shuttle through. After a few minutes I tell my children to close their eyes, “What do you remember about the room?” I ask. They scrunch their eyes and grin and recall the colored glass vases arranged along a top shelf on the far wall, the wooden arch over the doorway, and the array of bottles over the bar. I find myself glancing around to the room to check their descriptions, amazed at the level of detail they can recall. “Writing is about noticing,” I tell them. “It is about capturing the details from the world around you.”
It’s one of the things I love about writing, the way it forces me into the present. Because I must notice the details, remember the way things look and feel and sound. Because the moments happen all around me every day and later, with the cursor blinking black on the white page, I will try to set the images to words. It never comes easy, and every sentence feels clunky and unwieldy. Sometimes I spend half an hour changing one word only to change it back again later. I labor over sentences that, once they are published, I will want to change: “The baby’s body was shiny, his breath quiet, his chest feathering up and down” or “This time there was only the shiver of air as the breaths dragged through his bronchioles.” But the process makes me want to try again, to notice more and write a sentence that truly captures a moment.
Especially now, a year into the pandemic, I struggle with the seeming monotony of the days. Drive to work and back home. Do it again the next day and the next. And yet, monotony is only an illusion. There are stories all around me, the bulk of them massed beneath the surface like tree roots—a father who crouches in the hallway after his wife’s c-section, pale and shaking, as the images from Iraq surge over him, triggered by the smell of surgical cautery. Or a comment a young father makes about his leaky trailer home as we are preparing his baby girl for discharge. And sometimes it is as simple as asking someone where they are from. I recently talked to a mother who had just moved 8,000 miles from Micronesia to North Carolina for better schooling for her children. “My island has world class scuba diving,” she told me, and I felt myself traveling back twenty years to diving off the coast of Fiji during my honeymoon.
Writing for me is about uncoupling from the heuristics our brains have fashioned to help us navigate our surroundings. These shortcuts serve to ease the burden of living in a complex world. They let me drive home without realizing how I got there, read a cliché without thinking. I can sleepwalk through daily moments if I’m not careful. I wonder, when I examined the baby, did I really see the baby? The miniscule pearly white papules on the cheeks, the crease at the folds of the nose, the feel of her fingers wrapping around my index finger as I held the stethoscope to her chest.
A friend from our provider writing group shared a poem he wrote about waking his daughter up one morning and her joy in seeing the “watery frost” on the window. In another poem he describes a hawk skimming the tree line at a gas station off the highway. I wonder how many times I miss these kinds of moments, rushing to get ready for work, to make coffee and start the day. My friend’s poetry reminds me to pay attention, to see the details, to remember. Not just to catalogue them for a sentence one day, but to change the way I see the world.