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Letter from Joyce Archives
July 15, 2000
Dear Friends,
I
happened to be in New York City last fall on the day of the New York Marathon.
I had just celebrated my 46th birthday, and was taking stock of my life
(as I tend to, not only on my birthday, but on virtually every other day
of the year too). The sight of all those euphoric-looking runners, with
their great calf muscles, got me thinking that I'd like to become a runner
too. So, early in the new year I started a very modest course of training.
No plan of running any marathons. I just wanted to see what I could do.
And in the beginning the answer was, not much. One mile felt like a lot.
I called up my friend Brooke, a personal trainer, and asked if she'd help me. So we began to work on improving my endurance. Not all at once, but very gradually, I was up to a couple of miles, and then three. To my surprise (because initially, running was something I saw myself suffering through, for the desired result of toning up my 46 year old body) I actually started enjoying the running. Brooke suggested we run together in the annual Bay to Breakers race, held in San Francisco every May. 12K felt like a long way for me, but we had a few months to prepare, so I said yes.
[ Above: Charlie and Audrey after Charlie's high school graduation ceremonies. ]
Now we were running in earnest -- four, sometimes five miles, along a beautiful trail here in Marin County, to the beach and back. We were both at crossroads moments in our lives: Brooke -- just turned thirty -- preparing for her wedding to her fiance, Ken, also a good friend. Me, on the home stretch of my life with my children at home, looking to June when my son Charlie would graduate from high school and head off into the world -- with his brother Willy close behind him. After 23 years of living with kids at home, I was nearing the moment when I would find myself witho nobody left to take care of but my own self. (And our dog, Opie, of course). The feeling that brought was the oddest combination of fear and elation.
So, running felt good. Sort of. Somewhere along the line, I also started experiencing some knee pain that concerned Brooke, but by this time I was way too attached to my dream of running in that race to give up.
Around the time I started running, I had also started taking swing dancing classes here in my town. (More of this life-change stuff. I figured I'd spent enough years loving to dance, but not dancing, on the theory that I'd wait until my partner showed up. This January I decided to stop waiting around for some dream partner and just dance.)
Ed (the birthday boy), Joyce & Gilda
The way it worked in this dance class was that you rotated through the partners--no more than a few minutes at a time with any one. Early on, I recognized that there was one man in the group I would always look forward to dancing with. You can tell a surprising amount about a person, dancing with him, and I felt very comfortable with this one. But I was only there to dance, and he seemed equally focused on the dancing. So for a month or two, that's how it was.
Then a scheduling commitment (doctors' appointments for one of my sons) got in the way of my class, and I had to give up the dancing for a while. When I was able to return to class, I signed up for a private lesson to get caught up. My teacher suggested we bring in this one partner who had evidently been asking about me. That was in April. We've been together since then.
Turned out he was a runner, so I started running with him too, though Brooke remained my most steady running partner. Over the miles we covered, we'd talk about our lives, at the two very different stages we found ourselves in: Brooke, on the verge of her marriage to Ken, in the unscathed, endlessly hopeful way a young person embarks on marriage, and me, a middle-aged long-divorced dancer with bad knees and a long and complicated history, wondering if I could ever, any more, put my life together with anybody else's.
On the dance floor, Dennis and I were working out some pretty snazzy moves. I bought real dancing shoes, and we went out to the Mark Hopkins Hotel one night to show off what we could do. (Which turned out to be a lot less than we'd thought). The dancing no longer seemed as significant, though, as life off the dance floor.
Meanwhile,
my son Charlie had been waiting for news from colleges. In mid April the
letters arrived, with acceptances from most places, and a difficult decision
to make between Berkeley (which would have kept him out here) and NYU. I
knew NYU was the place for him, though, and in the end that's where he settled
on going. Willy got into a program he'd applied for, to spend a semester
in New York City too, this fall, for the first half of his senior year.
So....the empty nest loomed. I figured I could handle it though. I was a
runner now. A dancer. No longer rotating partners.
Only problem was, my knee kept getting worse. The weekend of the big race, I called Brooke to deliver the news that I couldn't do it. I spent that weekend camping on the beach in Carmel with Dennis. We ran a couple of miles the morning of the race, but I had to quit.
Finally, there was nothing for it but to see a doctor, who gave me the bad news. An MRI revealed cartilage damage from an old skating injury more than a dozen years ago. I needed surgery.
(Incidentally, I don't blame running or dancing for this, though it was certainly the running that revealed the problem. My knee had in fact been shakey for years, but I chose to ignore it. Had I not started running, the arthritis that had also begun would surely have gotten much worse. I see it as a good thing, actually, that the problem was so clearly revealed to me.)
Of course, life in our family hardly remained at a standstill, while I waited for my knee to get better. In May Charlie headed off to the desert for five days -- three of them solo -- on what was called a Vision Quest -- a deeply important experience for him. Willy got his driver's license -- a long-awaited event around here, since Charlie lost his in December. Audrey -- out of school for the year, working in Boston -- announced she was returning to college at Santa Cruz in the fall.
I
travelled to San Diego and Los Angeles to teach some writing classes.
Audrey came home in June to see her brother graduate. He delivered a wonderful
speech that day. The next morning I took off on a two week trip to Barcelona
and Amsterdam to promote new foreign translations of my book, At Home
in the World, in those countries. For years I've made trips like this
solo. This time, Dennis came with me.
[Old friend Judy Blume & Joyce, Key West]
Home again, I underwent arthroscopic knee surgery June 28 -- after performing the wedding ceremony of Ken and Brooke in Sonoma, two days earlier. Preparing what I wanted to say for that wedding, I thought a lot about love, and commitment, and distance running, and partner dancing, feeling (despite recent setbacks) more hopeful about my capacities for those things than I have in a long while.
Two days after the surgery, on crutches, I put Willy on a plane for Spain, where he will spend the summer living with a family in the city of Salamanca and studying Spanish. Next week, my son Charlie takes off on an adventure of his own, flying to join a friend who lives in Jakarta and heading off from there for a month of exploring Indonesia. To pay for his ticket, he rolled up all the quarters, nickels and dimes he's been saving in a huge bottle since he was nine years old. Audrey has got herself a job as a counselor at an arts camp in Connecticut, where she and one other young woman look after twenty eight thirteen year old girls. My heart swells with pride knowing there couldn't be a better person for that job.
My knee immobilizer came off yesterday, but I have a long way yet to go. When I stood up from the table, my leg buckled and gave way. My running muscles are gone.
When
I think of how I was dancing, just two months ago -- and my dreams of the
12K race, and climbing Half Dome in Yosemite this summer -- I could cry.
In a funny way, though, this injury of mine has taught me some patience.
All my life I've been rushing places. I move very slowly at the moment.
I will rebuild my atrophied muscles and -- though I may not be a long distance
runner -- I intend to run again. Meanwhile, this appears to be a time for
a certain stillness.
There you have it. I'm going to disappear again for a while. Working on my new book, at long last. (Something I do best when my children are gone from home.) You may not hear from me again for a while. But sooner or later you will.
Meanwhile, I want to let you know about a couple of places I'll be speaking and teaching. In May I had to cancel a class I was scheduled to teach in New York City, with the Learning Annex. (And I want to apologize to any of you who might have been planning to attend.) That one's been rescheduled for the evening of September 7 in Manhattan. Check with The Learning Annex there for details. Looks like I'll be in (one of my favorite towns) St. Pete Florida in November too, for the St. Petersburg Times Reading Festival. Details to come.
The event I'm particularly
looking forward to is the second annual Walloon
Writers' Retreat at the glorious Michigania camp on Walloon Lake in
Northern Michigan, run by my good friend John Lamb and his organization,
Springfed Arts. (One of the many great things about John's retreats: He
sees to it that the food is healthy, and delicious. They also serve great
coffee. And John -- a rock and roll musician and songwriter based in Detroit
-- is sure to perform.) 
I taught at Walloon last fall, along with a wonderful faculty of poets, fiction writers and essayists, including my friends the filmmaker and writer Michael Moore (who 'll be back again this year) and Rosemary Daniell. This year's retreat will feature my dear friend, Jacqueline Mitchard, author of the novel Deep End of the Ocean, among many other works. It runs from Sept 28 to Oct 1 (which means that there's at least a chance I'll make it into Lake Walloon for a swim.) Naturally, I'd love to see you there.
As always, I want to remind you that this space is maintained and overseen by our wonderful web-mistress, Myrna Uhlig, who also handles orders of books, tapes and CD's through the Joyce Maynard Catalogue. If you haven't registered your name here, I hope you'll take a moment to do so. Myrna will send you my terrific poppy seed recipe for your trouble.
If you've got a story to tell, or a concern on your mind, I want to encourage you to make use of the discussion forum. I may not be online for a few weeks, as I have been in the past, to respond personally, but many other thoughtful and caring readers will be. This space is meant to give you the opportunity that has meant so much to me over the years, to share my stories.
Your turn. Go for it.
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