The Landlord of Good Intentions

On Keeping a Notebook...

Classes started last week, which means my sabbatical is over, sniff, but that’s okay. I’ve had my sabbatical like Carrie Watts/Geraldine Page/Cicely Tyson says in The Trip to Bountiful - “I’ve had my trip.”

I’ve been working on three books. It’s going well for the most part. I try to touch all three a little each day - the children’s novel, the adult novel, and the memoir. And I take long walks at night when it cools down a little. Will I be able to keep this up as the semester heats up? As of this date, I am determined to do so somehow though I struggle with structure on all three.

In my new children’s novel, there is a character called “The Landlord of Good Intentions.” I will get to him in a minute, but he was born out of keeping notes.

A student wrote today asking me to clarify an assignment “On Keeping A Notebook.” I had them read Joan Didion’s “On Keeping A Notebook” for our graduate nonfiction workshop. For some, this is still their first creative writing workshop coming from other majors, fields, and lives.

Read this essay and write a response by starting your own notebook in the style of Joan Didion or your own style. Have fun! Play! This should be no longer than three or four paragraphs. By play, I mean look at Joan Didion's style of keeping notes and commenting on those notes. Or you can show us your style of note-keeping/taking. How do you remember the details? Joan Didion wrote it down and sometimes didn't remember why and knew she probably got it wrong, but she still took notes. We all approach it differently. 

https://fs.blog/keeping-a-notebook/Links to an external site.

Here is an example of an old notebook of mine from my first day in Alabama at the DMV. You could write about your first day somewhere new and what it was like.

How does one upend a life?

On August 13, 2009, the first day in my new city, I spent six hours at the DMV in Birmingham, Alabama to get a tag for my new car for my new life. I wrote down snatches of dialogue in the only book I had with me “The Contemporary American Short Story” to pick out some short stories I might teach for the fiction workshop. Down the road, a rented two-bedroom apartment waited for me with sheets, an air mattress, lawn furniture, and an electric tea kettle.

The facts were these: I was in Birmingham for a job. My family was in Los Angeles. I was on the verge of panic, so I took notes to stay in the moment.

Notes at the Birmingham DMV.

DMV temporarily moved to the Courthouse.

Snaking lines everywhere…

Today is my sister’s birthday. She is forty-one. Is she having a good birthday? I’m forty-seven. Old. Too old to start over. What are my kids doing? I miss the kids. Two in college, a freshman and a senior, I’m not exactly leaving them, but what about Norah? She’s only ten. This was a terrible idea. I can get the tag and drive back to California, tell the English Department I'm sorry. Will Flannery behave himself at UCSB after the shenanigans of the spring? Will Lucy like Sarah Lawrence? I should be taking her to college. This is too hard.

I want life to freeze time in LA until I get back. I’ll be back by Christmas, but it’s only August. Snap out of it. It’s a good job, a tenure track job teaching creative writing. 

Why do so many men named Barry live in the South?

A cacophony of doors, bells, elevators, babies crying.

The line isn’t moving.

Cellphones, chips, Sierra Mist, more children, linoleum, and warnings of “Please don’t block the door. Thank you.”

A man with a burned face talks to the crowd control man.

An old man sings, “You’re just too good to be true.”

A woman with a star sticker says, “If you’re in line, you’ll get what you came for. We got folks working until 8:00 pm since all the satellite offices are closed.”

The Vespa line spills out into the street. Do a lot of people drive Vespas in Birmingham?

The tired lady sighs, “I’ve got to get back to work. I've got to get back to work.”

The crowd control person says, “Everybody listen up - move ten steps back. No credit or debit cards. Cash or check only. You need two forms of ID and proof of address. Power bill is fine.”

Someone says to me, “I wish I’d brought me a book. Is it good?”

I was about to start teaching at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, not Alabama in Tuscaloosa, the mothership of the UA system, but UAB, where the medical school was. UAB or the “University that ate Birmingham” since now medicine was the city’s business, not steel. Who knew Birmingham used to be the Pittsburgh of the South? I knew nothing about this place other than it earned the nickname Bombingham in the ‘60s, Dad used to coach football teams at the Iron Bowl Stadium, and he wanted me to play golf on the women's golf team at the University of Alabama since the University of Tennessee didn’t have a women’s golf team at the time.

Dad also wanted me to be a sportswriter and got me an internship with the Lady Vols when I was in college, working in sports information for the Lady Vols and helping out during games by taking stats on games or ordering pizza for the team. It was a disaster because I got so nervous trying to do it right, and it was beyond irritating to Debbie, the Sports Information Director.

On one of my last days of employment, she yelled, “You’re in the supply room waiting for pizza! That’s it. Can you handle it?”

On a family trip a month before to Birmingham, we’d found a place for me to live and bought a used car at CarMax on a scorching day and left it parked in my mother-in-law’s driveway in Nashville, Tennessee. One month later, I flew to Nashville from California and drove to Birmingham straight to the DMV. The time was up to get the tag, but I was determined to hang onto my California driver’s license.

Nobody was punching a hole into my California license.

This was all temporary.

My husband and I were taking out Parent-Plus loans to get the older two through college, and this was a tenure track position, but it had been advertised as an associate professor when I interviewed at MLA but then changed to assistant professor for a lot less money. But it was still money. We’d been eeking by on Kiffen’s teaching salary and my children’s novels’ advances, but the education of our kids was going to crush us financially yet we had to get them through college. We rented in LA.

Five hours later at the DMV, the transaction was simple with two choices in tags – “American flag” or “Sweet Home Alabama.” I picked the latter, and nobody made me give up my California license. I paid in cash and a lady said, “Welcome to Birmingham” and handed me my tag and license plate.

***

I spared my students the rest, but here is a little more…

I found my way out of downtown to the apartment in Homewood beneath the statue of Vulcan, god of the forge, standing atop Red Mountain. The apartment manager/landlord resembled and spoke like a southern Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. Cicadas shrieked, the humidity a thick blanket of heat, the sky a peachy orange at dusk.

“All the way from California?” He asked. “Leaving your family? You gotta mama and daddy in California? And a husband? And children. Lordy. Well, my daddy died in June, broke my heart. Won’t never be over it. Family is everything. What’s your husband thinking of you coming all the way out here? Well, families gotta do what they gotta do. Isn’t that right? Here’s your key. Rent’s due first of the month”

The more he talked the more I thought my heart might fly out of my chest.

The night before in Nashville my mother-in-law had said, “I guess y’all know what you’re doing,” but her eyes said something else.

Dad had said over the phone, “Hell, give it a try, but you gotta stay relevant. Keep publishing. Go to some football games!”

I walked inside the new apartment on the second floor of a two-story building. It was cool and clean with hardwood floors; empty save the air mattress and lawn chairs. Months earlier, I looked at well-lit apartments online that were so inviting compared to our messy Silver Lake house with its beige carpeting, sagging couches, and dusty blinds. I kept thinking of Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own. After 21 years of raising kids, I had wanted a room of my own again, but I carried it too far.

Virginia Woolf hadn’t meant Alabama.

I called home, trying to stay upbeat. When Norah got on, I reminded her I had two bedrooms in Alabama.

She said, “I want to do fifth grade here. I’ll be at the same school with Daddy. I miss you, Mama, but it’s okay, and Flannery and Lucy are still here. We’ll visit soon. Are you homesick?”

“I’m fine, honey.” I hung up before I started crying. Everything was making me cry. An idea flashed. What if I quit before I even started? Danny, the poet, who had helped me get this job wouldn’t be too mad, right? He was going to bring his late Aunt Janet’s wingback chairs over in the morning, but I could cancel. I’d written a book about Harper Lee for teens and all the research had brought me to Alabama, but I was never meant to live here.  

I glanced out the window in the courtyard of red crape myrtles. A woman was smoking and talking on the phone, pacing. A heavyset man pedaled by on an adult tricycle with a canopy on top. What was I doing here?  It was all a huge and terrible mistake. I would write a letter to the English Department where I would apologize for wasting their time. Then I would deflate the air mattress, pack, and sneak out of town and get on I-20 west back home to California.

It was a relief to settle on that plan. I could breathe. I went out then to the Piggly Wiggly and got some wine, cheese, crackers, fruit, and coffee and brought it back to the apartment. I fell asleep late, but the next morning a soft rain was falling, and I thought – well, I should try it for a week. Then I can go home.

***

This all became part of a longer essay that is now part of my memoir that I'm working on - it's how taking notes can lead to something. That fall, almost every time I taught fiction in the creaky Humanities Building in a tiny classroom on Thursday nights, a cracking thunderstorm blew up. A student remarked on it too. “Ever notice how we have thunderstorms whenever this workshop meets?” It was wonderful to experience wild thunderstorms again, especially with students reading their stories aloud. It made for lovely sound effects, and I’d leave the heavy door cracked open to watch torrents of rain slash down.

That old Humanities Building (with the cornerstone dedicated to George Wallace) is now torn down to rubble. Here is a picture of Adena Dundas-Rivera and Sam Byker on a trip through Birmingham in my early days where I showed them the cornerstone. These kids, all grown up now, grew up with our kids.

And all those people I saw that first night at the new apartment - the apartment manager/landlord, the man on the adult tricycle, the pacing/smoking woman in the courtyard, and even Vulcan himself all became parts of characters in the new children’s novel, “Millie G and Vulcan.”

Kiffen named our landlord “The Landlord of Good Intentions” because he’d always wave from his big truck and call out, “I couldn’t pick up when y’all called me. I was at church. I’m gonna fix that door. I got good intentions! I got good intentions.”

Look at what Alexander Chee wrote today on his Substack about keeping notes:

Activity Report: Monsieur Three Stars, Others

I didn’t stage this picture - I walked into the room to discover it just like this today.

It looks like home to me.

I just miss our kids a lot, spread all over from Chicago to Los Angeles.

And so begins another school year.

Part II is coming up soon.

My California Driver's License - Letting Go…