From the Gods

The muse has not visited in a while, so writing anything -- much less a blog post -- has been arduous. But this morning I received a sign that it was time to get back to work.

I live in Rogers Park, the northern-most neighborhood along the lakefront of Chicago. It's a neighborhood that has risen and fallen dramatically with the economic tides, and as such one of the last lakefront neighborhoods to experience the real estate renaissance. This means that businesses have not opened as quickly as one might like. Still, on the corner there is a precious little coffee shop, Charmer's, that I've adopted as my home away from home. When I was unemployed, much of my days were spent there swilling Diet Coke and pounding out short stories. I became one of the characters I had known when I'd run my own cafe. And over those months I grew to know most of the staff and some of the patrons. One of the patrons is Meredith, a wiry woman in her sixties who looks as if she's subsisted on nicotine and coffee since the Reagan administration. She's the wife of a retired English professor and aggressively gets to know anyone she's seen in the cafe more than once. We've discussed literature and politics and neighborhood gossip.

This morning as I was collecting my morning donuts for my train ride to work, she took notice of the book I was carrying. I'm reading McClellan's What Happened and she momentarily thought it was a novel she didn't recognize. We chatted for a moment and then she held up an anthology of works that had been published in The Paris Review. It was published on its fiftieth anniversary.

"Have you read anything in The Paris Review?

"Not in a few years," I said. The truth is that I've purchased a couple of copies, but that nothing I've ever read in them moved me to loyalty.

"Would you like this?"

The book was obviously unread. I flipped through the introduction from George Plimpton and the original foreword by William Styron. The language is both spare and luxurious. On the train, as I read those two brief pieces, I ached and felt ashamed at the length of time I've been away from my writing, focusing on my photography. Out of the blue, from an unexpected source, the inspiration returned.

I'm back.