Mud & Pearls

The best story I read as a kid was and remains unpublished. The total number of people who have read the manuscript is probably five, my nuclear family. It was written by my mother, it was called Mud & Pearls, and when I finished the last page, I cried to the point of hyperventilating. I could not believe something so beautiful had been created within the walls of my house. To sum it up – the story was about a young girl stuck for three months on an oceanographic ship and therefore missing her middle school play back on land; she would have been Dorothy.

Mud & Pearls taught me three things that basically charted/wrecked the rest of my life: 1) the stories are writable; 2) some of the best art never makes it above water; and 3) perhaps most detrimentally, it cemented my already desperate love of theatre.

Though my mother has published a slew of I Can Reads and picture books, she never published that story. She will not publish it. It will die in a cardboard box in our basement in Ohio. I can tell you it involved an oceanographer, redeemable father, who came to understand, over the course of his research trip, that his daughter’s misery was in great part due to his disinterest and negligence, and so yes he does attend her production of The Wizard of Oz, staged in the galley with the industrious help of the ship’s Cook.

Other works shocked and awed me too, not just the ones made in-house. Sarah, Plain and Tall said that sometimes life is as beautiful as the colors of the sea. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, confirmed that, ayup, you can wake up one day with your monstrosity on full display, and then an apple is lodged in your back and rots there, and then you die; life is 100% terrifying, and no, an explanation will not be provided. The most meta of all the awes was encountering The Outsiders. My god. The story is the essay is the story is the essay. Ponyboy was writing this all along. Wait. What?! My god.

Reading taught me to believe in the idea of living a life, even if narrative has little relation to actual life as we actually live it. Characters taught me facets of companionship beyond the anxious realms of human interaction. Books (published & unpublished) taught me that stories are writable, if you dare, if you are lucky enough to have any goddamn talent for it, if you are brave enough to write under water, possibly forever, possibly without your stories ever once reaching above the surface and into the light.