The Best of Pickering

Composing a Life

Composing a Life last month i received a letter that began, “Are you the Samuel Pickering that went to Sewanee twenty years ago?” I did not know how to answer the letter. A boy with my name once attended college at Sewanee, and although I knew him fairly well and think I liked him, that boy had long since disappeared. Some good things happened to him at college, and I have often considered writing about them. The trouble is that I am not sure if the things I remember actually happened. Did that boy actually carry a hammer into Professor Martin’s class one day, and when an old roommate Jimmy asked why he had it, did that boy really say, “For nailing hands to desks.” And did he tell Jimmy to ›atten his hand out on the desk if he did not believe him—whereupon, trusting a friend, Jimmy did so. Shortly afterwards when Professor Martin asked Jimmy why he had screamed, did Jimmy answer, “Pickering hit me with a hammer”? And did that boy stand up and say, “I cannot tell a lie; I hit him with my little hammer.” No, no—the person who I have become certainly didn’t do that. This person lives in a world without Jimmys, hammers, screams, and exclamation points. For ‹fteen years I have taught writing. For ten of these years writing has taught me, and I have labored not so much to compose sentences as to compose my life. Hours at the desk and countless erasures have brought success. I haven’t committed a comma blunder in almost ‹ve years, certainly not since I married Vicki. Happily I have forgotten what participles and gerunds are, but then I have forgotten most things: books, loves, and most of my identities. At my dining room table, dangling modi‹ers are not mentioned, and I ignore all question marks as my days are composed, not of lurid prose and purple moments, but of calm of mind and forthright, workaday sentences. Rarely do I use a complex sentence, and even more rarely do I live with complexity. In a simple style I write about simple people, people born before the ‹rst in‹nitive was split and the wrath of grammarians fell upon mankind. Occasionally I write about a small town in Virginia
223 where I spent summers as a boy. In the center of the town was the railway station. Clustered about it were the bank and post of‹ce, Ankenbauer ’s Café and Horace Vickery’s store. Mr. Vickery was a big man; alongside him, his wife, whom he called “Little Bitty Bird,” seemed no larger than a sparrow. Mrs. Vickery spent her days in the domestic nest over the store where she delighted in rearranging furniture. One night Mr. Vickery returned home late from a meeting of the Masons; and if the truth be known, he came home a tri›e “happy.” Not wanting to wake Mrs. Vickery, he did not turn on the bedroom light. He undressed in the dark and after hanging his clothes up, silently slipped into his pajamas then leaned over to get into bed. Alas, the bed was not where he remembered it; Mrs. Vickery had spent the evening moving furniture, and as Mr. Vickery reached to pull back the covers, he fell to the ›oor in a great heap. “Oh, Little Bitty Bird,” he sang out once he got his breath, “what have you done?” By rearranging her few possessions Mrs. Vickery was able to create new worlds for herself. Distant places did not appeal to her, and when her husband took the day train to Richmond, seventeen miles away, she stayed home, content to shift a chair or dresser. As I think about Mrs. Vickery now, her life seems almost ideal. In my seven years in eastern Connecticut, I have lived simply, rarely traveling to Hartford thirty miles away. Years ago simplicity held little attraction for me, and I traveled far a‹eld seeking the confusion of mixed metaphors and long, runon sentences. Dashes marked my days, and I dreamed of breaking through the tried and the safe into the unknown. Once in Baku on the Caspian Sea, Soviet police dogged my footsteps, and I retreated into the twisting byways of the old town where I would suddenly disappear and then just as suddenly reappear, much to my pleasure and, as I thought, to the amazement of the police. When I began to write, I...