Creative Gestation

Sometimes I feel like a coffee percolator.

In a coffee percolator, all the ingredients are put into the pot at the same time, but they have to bubble around there together for a while before they’re ready to come out as something recognisable and flavourful.

Sometimes a story has to bubble around inside me for a long time before it’s ready to come out as a story. I know that all of the ingredients are there, but if I try to pour it before it’s ready, all I get are coffee grounds and weakly flavoured water.

I think this is what Marguerite Yourcenar was referring to when she said, "There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty." The book she was referring to was her greatest novel, "Memoirs of Hadrian". (Joan Acocella’s excellent review in the New Yorker 80th Anniversary Issue)

John McPhee described it poetically in a speech made at a banquet held in his honour:

"As the stream of ideas goes by, one of them will be stopped because it connects with something from what is now rapidly becoming the deep past."

My past is only 34 years deep, but the percolator is bubbling.

What Has Changed?

A week ago last Friday, at around 3:45 in the afternoon, two high school baseball players I know (let’s call them Joe and Tom) were caught trying to buy alcohol at a liquor store a few blocks from the school. One of them purportedly had a fake ID.

That night, another player from the same team (I’ll call him Bill) was caught drinking alcohol in a stall in the boys’ bathroom at the school dance.

All three are in the 11th grade — juniors.

The boy who was caught drinking was suspended from school for three days and must sit out an automatic two-week suspension from organized school sports. His coach requires that he come to every practice and sit in the dugout during games in jeans and a team shirt as an example to others. The other two received no punishment from the school but were suspended for a game by the coach.

The weekend that it happened, Bill was alone at home; his parents were away as they are most weekends.

This weekend, Easter weekend and the start of spring break, Joe is in San Diego partying with friends. He was supposed to leave on Friday — school got out at 1 p.m. — and was mad when he found out that he had to wait another day because his team was playing a make-up of a rained out game at 3:30 Friday afternoon, and he had to be in the dugout, even though he wasn’t in the starting line-up.

None of the three received parental punishment.

In the mid-1990s, Felipe Lopez was dubbed by scouts the best high school basketball player in the country, and he had three crates of solicitation letters from college coaches to prove it.

In ‘Shoot the Moon’, a profile of Lopez, Susan Orlean describes the discipline he received for an infraction of his father’s rules.

"Once, Felipe’s father forbade him to go to a tournament because he had neglected to wash the dishes. This made Felipe cry, but in hindsight he is philosophical about it. ‘He was right,’ he says. ‘I didn’t do my dishes.’ "

Felipe didn’t do the dishes. Joe and Tom and Bill, who are all under the age of eighteen, were all caught with alcohol. The difference in the infractions and the difference in the consequences stuns and confuses me.