Susan Wittig Albert - Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place

TOGETHER, ALONE

SOUTHWESTERN WRITERS COLLECTION SERIES

The Wittliff Collections at Texas State UniversitySan Marcos

Steven L. Davis, Editor

A MEMOIR OF MARRIAGE AND PLACE

Susan Wittig Albert

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

Austin

The Southwestern Writers Collection Series originates from the Wittliff Collections, a repository of literature, film, music, and southwestern and Mexican photography established at Texas State UniversitySan Marcos.

Copyright 2009 by Susan Wittig Albert

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 2009

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The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Albert, Susan Wittig.

Together, alone : a memoir of marriage and place / Susan Wittig Albert. 1st ed.

p. cm. (Southwestern writers collection series)

ISBN 978-0-292-71970-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Albert, Susan Wittig. 2. Authors, American20th centuryBiography. 3. Married womenUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

PS3551.L2637Z46 2009

813.54dc22

[B]

2009010632

ISBN 978-0-292-79258-6 (E-book)

For Bill Albert,

who makes all journeys possible;

for Bob Goodfellow, always a friend;

and for Father Francis Kelly Nemeck,

a guide along the way.

Loyalty to place arises... from our need to be at home on the earth. We marry ourselves to the creation by knowing and cherishing a particular place, just as we join ourselves to the human family by marrying a particular man or woman.

SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS, STAYING PUT: MAKING A HOME IN A RESTLESS WORLD

What marriage offersand what fidelity is meant to protectis the possibility that what we have chosen and what we desire are the same.

WENDELL BERRY, THE UNSETTLING OF AMERICA

PROLOGUE

Documenting a Life

that leads us through timeforward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing.... As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover.

EUDORA WELTY, ONE WRITERS BEGINNINGS

THIS MEMOIR LOOKS BACK over twenty-some years of life experience. It encompasses times of joyous discovery and hopeful anticipation, times of loss and sadness and anger. But memory is a shape-shifter and a deceiver, capable of altering our view of all past realities into a cleverly crafted perception that fits with our present view of self-in-world. Memory conceals, invents, flatters. Memory makes mythology. You cant trust memory to tell the truth. I cant, anyway.

What made this memoir possible was not memory, that notoriously unreliable beast, but my habit of keeping a daily journal, or at least a daily diary, when there wasnt time for serious, introspective writing. Ive held on to these notebooks and computer files, resisting the occasional temptation, in a fit of housekeeping tidiness, to chuck the whole lot of them into the rubbish. Theres certainly a lot of trash in those pageswhines, complaints, angry rants, mindless raves, the effluvium of life caught on the fly. But theres good stuff there, too. People and events Ive forgotten, feelings Ive hidden, patterns I couldnt see then but that would emerge with time, details that slipped through the cracks of the floor of my mind and into the cellar where unremembered things lie, dark, dust-covered, silent.

The journal has been my traveling companion as Ive backtracked along the trail of the last couple of decades. Because its there to read and refer to, Ive had to deal only with the distortions of the present point of view (that is, the present of the journal, in whatever year it was written), rather than the inevitable distortions Id see if I looked into the past through the unreliable mirrors of memory. I cant lay claim to absolute truth, of course, any more than you can, when you tell your own story. But I will lay claim to the relative truths of my perceptions, while I candidly admit to their selectivity, slanting, inexactness, and incompleteness.

Ive journaled since I was in graduate school at Berkeley in the late 1960s. Oh, those years, chaotic, cataclysmic, incoherenta single mother with three young kids, Peace Park up the hill, Haight-Ashbury across the Bay, a dissertation in the typewriter. These were the years of the Flower Children and antiwar protests and Kent State, and all that tumultuous energy lives still in my journal. Sometimes I wrote regularly, sometimes intermittently, but more regularly and more obsessively as the years went along. Each year, on my birthday, I made it a practice to reread and annotate what I wrote during the previous year; every few years, Id pick a period to revisit and spend a day or so rereading several years worth of journals. I have never failed to be astonished, or enlightened, or amused, or perturbed, or embarrassed. And I have never failed to learn something new about myself, something I didnt already know, or something I knew once and had forgotten.

As I wrote this memoir, I read through a cache of sixteen thick handwritten notebooks and more than five hundred single-spaced pages of computer printout, covering the years between 1985 and 2006. Ive included some of the entries in this memoirnot because they are especially well written or describe some momentous event, but because they are typical in their every-daily-ness. And because they help to frame my story in the context of what really happened.

The journal has lived through several incarnations, from notebook to computer and now (at least in part) to cyberspace. I first kept my blog, Lifescapes, on my Web site, then moved to first one blog host and then another, looking for the right home. Im now settled at www.susanalbert.typepad.com/lifescapes. There, youll meet my public self, the self I like to present to the world. For the private self, youd have to dig into the notebooks I still keep.

Together, these public and private explorations are as reliable a record of my past lives and invented selves as I am ever likely to have.

TOGETHER, ALONE

CHAPTER ONE

Meadow Knoll

Getting Here, Alone Together

Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free.

Tis a gift to come down where you want to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right

Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

SIMPLE GIFTS, TRADITIONAL SHAKER HYMN

JOURNAL ENTRIES

July 7, 1986 . Austin, Bills house. Early morning sunshine, and already hot, in the 80s. The grapes are ripe. I take a large basket outside and in twenty-five minutes have picked six pounds of ripe grapes, juicy, sweet-tart, purple. The vines are so heavy they have broken some of the lathes of the trellis. The mockingbird scolds me as I pickthese are his grapesand dive-bombs the cats. They are watching me from the porch, pleased to have my company. Inside, in the kitchen, its still cool. I wash and pick the grapes over, delighting in their roundness, their silvery sheen, and now they are cooking into juice.

February 27, 1987 . Back from our long trip through the Northwest. Im glad not to be on the road (living 24-7 in Grace has its stresses), and Im grateful to have a nice house to come home to, even if it is piled high with stuff at the moment. But its hard to come home to the city, and Austin is a very large city. How had I forgotten that? Back in the land of Yuppies and IBM execs, I feel utterly alien. I hate the traffic, the blaring billboards, the careless ugliness of the landscape, the politics, and the Texas mega-hype that infects everything. I need a quieter landscape where things dont shout so.