Every Morning

The Skier, the Buddha, and Papa

It’s now ingrained, a habit. Every morning I get up as soon as my tired bones let me rise from that soft warmth I occupy in bed beside my loving wife and I pad my way in stocking feet down the carpeted hallway of our house towards the kitchen. Once there, I draw cold water from our well (through the faucet kids: we’ve got power and running water out here in the sticks!), grind beans in the coffeemaker, push the “on” button, and wander off to my writing studio. An iMac waits for me in that little room surrounded by tongue and groove cedar and two walls of single-pane windows overlooking the tired hay field that surrounds our house and the lazy black flowage of the Cloquet River. Even the ceiling of my writing space is aromatic cedar, making my creative retreat essentially a cabin in the wilderness.

The computer slumbers overnight: I rarely turn it completely off. Hell, you never know what you might miss if the magic box is disconnected from the Internet! I tap my mouse and the screen lights up. I log onto Firefox, my browser of choice. I don’t like Safari. Maybe that makes me an Apple heretic. I really don’t care-I like Mozilla better. I check my email, my Facebook page, maybe Huffingtonpost.com and the Duluth News Tribune’s website. Ego usually compels me to Google myself. I know: how horrifically shallow of me. What can I say? Folks without egos don’t become trial lawyers or District Court Judges or bloggers or writers, at least, not in my experience. Then, when the electronic alarm on the coffeemaker sounds, I get up from my cushy office chair, walk back into the kitchen, open a cupboard and select just the right cup for my morning jolt of caffeine. Not just any cup, mind you. Writers, as you are likely beginning to fathom, are the personification of pattern. No, my morning coffee is usually (unless the dishes haven’t been done) poured into either my Sloppy Joe’s cup (pictured above along with a wooden skier by my artist friend Jan Flom and the little red Buddha my sister Annie says I need to rub every day) or one of two Barnes and Noble cups I own. The B&N mugs depict likenesses of Hemingway, Tolstoy, Hurston, and other famous writers. I got them long ago when the economy was better and the corporate bookstore gave out premiums to writers who did book signings in their stores. No more. Today a writer doing a B&N signing is lucky to get a paper cup of way-too-strong coffee as he or she sits in the middle of the sprawling bookstore signing books for strangers. These are the only cups from which I drink my pre-dawn writerly coffee: For it is in the morning, my friends, that I write. Every morning I am home and not ill, I write. It’s been my obsession now for over two decades. For me (and for other authors, essayists, and poets I’m sure) this daily routine is something akin to breathing air: If I was unable to do it, I would likely give up the ghost.

How did this all get started? My wife. She did this to me. Some of you know the story. Hell, like most stories remembered and told by old men, the tale’s been told so often that my children and my wife know the punchline as well, if not better, than I do. But if you haven’t heard it, here’s the Cliff Notes version:

In 1990 I was facing a back fusion and three months away from my work at the time as a trial lawyer (think John Grisham without the money and the accent). I’d been a voracious reader and a sometime writer of poetry and the odd essay or prose piece since I was old enough to hold a pen. My wife knew this about me, knew, it turns out, more about my creative DNA than I did. “You’re a type A personality,” she said as I was recovering in St. Luke’s after having my spine cut apart and reassembled, “why don’t you get a start on that Great American novel you’ve always wanted to write?” That was it. That was all it took: One person (albeit the person I most love in the world) urging me to pick up a pencil and follow my heart. And so it began.

In the early going, I wasn’t a solid, every-morning-writer. Our kids were young and there was a lot more going on in our lives so I wrote whenever I had a chance. Morning. During the day. At breaks on the job. Late at night. For a time, I was able to piece words together into sentences and sentences together into paragraphs and paragraphs together into chapters in this haphazard fashion. Novels were born. Short fiction was written. For eight years, I also wrote a “slice of rural life” column for a weekly newspaper. But gradually, as I began to find the rhythm in my craft, mornings became an obvious preference. Some folks who write are night owls: They scrawl long into the evening. Others, confronted by life’s realities, do as I did as a beginner: They write when they can. I found, over the years of following my muse, that mornings are for me. Mornings with my Papa Hemingway cup ( provided to me by my ever-encouraging eldest son and his wife) brimming with hot java feed my obsession and drive me to words.

The funny thing, throughout the now 21 years I’ve been at this crazy lunacy: publishing books on my own because no reputable press will have me; hawking my stories to strangers in places as far flung as Helsinki and Calgary; pecking away at keyboards of successively sophisticated computers; is that I’ve never, not once, been afflicted by the dreaded curse of the writer. Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately, depending upon your opinion of my work) I’ve never had writer’s block. Never. Oh, I’ve stepped away from my writing to regroup. I’ve fought off minor illnesses, fatigue, and depression. But the words have never slowed to the point where I could not, on a bright sunny morning like January 2nd, 2012 take my proper place at the keyboard and begin anew.

Peace.

Mark