WALKING ON THIN ICE

From a letter to a friend:

I love my conversations with Steve. Because I’ve been recording them lately, I notice what seems to facilitate talk.

For one thing, Steve loves being recorded. When I take my notebook out, I think it stimulates his wit.

And it seems that our most enjoyable conversations have been on walks. By getting out and about we are reminded of things. If we just sit at home we tend to read or write; we don’t talk as much. Also we can’t talk well at restaurants or cafes - too much bustle, noise from other people.

When we first started our relationship and there were still things we didn’t know about each other, we’d sit on the couch and smoke and look at his art. And Steve would tell me a story about his past. This is how the memoir project got started.

Every once and a while he has a new recollection, but I think I got most of the major stuff out.

So now our conversations seem to be a stew of talk about the environment and politics, history and what we’ve read about. We also talk a lot about the writing process, about creation. We try to figure out what we’re doing right and wrong in writing.

We talk about our goals a lot as well. Steve says he can never be satisfied, that as soon as he gets one thing he pushes himself for the next. But I’m feeling tremendously at peace. I do feel that I should be writing a lot. This free time goads me on because of the opportunity it presents.

And I do think that we are out on a financial limb. We want to figure out a way to live that makes us happy but that also allows us to have an income.

In a year Steve will be eligible for social security, and we have money for living from the sale of his condo. I’m ready to work to supplement our lives when this runs out, but Steve would like us to try to make it as writers.

I don’t see that poetry will provide an income - it’s more like breathing. But I think if we get ourselves together we might be able to produce a commercially viable prose book. We could support ourselves through writing as well as be true to ourselves.

I’m a bit of a fatalist as well, though. I think we’re starting some severe environmental and political times, and I don’t know if the human race is gonna make it. So all this planning could be moot. Still, I think that if I just discard any planning because of fear of the future, it’s like an excuse to not achieve, to not try and be the best I can be.