Jane Pauley - Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue

Contents

To Ann,
who was always there
Garry,
who always will be
and
Rickie, Ross, and Tom,
my inspiration

PREFACE

Truth arrives in microscopic increments, and when enough has accumulated, in a moment of recognition, you just know. You know because the truth fits.

I was the only member of my family to lack the gene for numbers, but I do need things to add up. Approaching midlife, I became aware of a darkening feelingwas it something heavy on my heart or was something missing? Grateful as I am for the opportunities Ive had, and especially for the people who came into my life as a result, I couldnt ignore that feeling. I had the impulse to begin a conversation with myself, through writing, as if to see whether my fingers could get to the bottom of it.

It was a Saturday morning eight or ten years ago when I began following this impulse to find the answers to unformed questions. Skywriting is what I call my personal process of discovery, because it seemed that I plied blue skyso much of the work went on unconsciously. I imagined the boys in the back room toiling while I slept, because often I knew things in the morning that I hadnt known the night before. Writers sometimes say they write to see what their fingers know; my fingers seemed to have their own agenda.

It was a fascinating exercise, but in time I started to wonder what the point waswas I headed somewhere or just doomed to wander? Frustrated, I described my writing process as wandering purposelessly.

When I encountered that phrase years later in an inverted formpurposeful wanderingI recognized its significance immediately. It turned wandering purposelessly on its head.

Purposeful wandering is to be actively available to moments of recognitionthe portals to insight. Words in frequent rotation in our heads, such as purposeless, arent circling in and out of our consciousness for no reason, nor are fragments of songs, or the snapshot images from long ago, burned into an otherwise faulty memory. They are expressions of unconscious meaning, and I think of them as moments of pre-recognition.

For instance, why did the discovery of a red swizzle stick in my fathers suitcase give me a bad feeling as a little girl, and why was the memory engraved on my brain? It had significance just beyond the reach of my understanding. Nothing stronger than ginger ale was ever served in our house; I liked mine in a martini glass. Nobody but me ever reached for that set of martini glasses in the top cupboard. A swizzle stick with a martini-glass decoration on the top didnt belong in Daddys suitcase; it didnt fit us. This was a moment of pre-recognition. Many years later, recognition arrived amidst a bundle of evidence my sister, Ann, and I could not ignoreit fit the truth.

When I was still little, a doctor told my mother that Jane is a nervous child, and shell have to be careful her whole life. I was sitting on the examination table, listening. I didnt ask why or howmuch less, would a career in television be okay? I dont know what symptoms provoked the visit or what the doctor meant by nervous, but Im pretty sure there was a correlation between those childhood nerves and an EKG tape forty years later that inspired my doctor to say, I dont see this much tension in twenty women! She didnt get it. I didnt, either. I was happily married, with three lovely kids, dogs, a successful careera perfect picture. What was wrong with it?

The mental landscape of my life when I set out on this Skywriting mission most resembled an early map of the New World, with great expanses of terra incognita. There were childhood memories as vivid as a clump of tar stuck to my Red Ball Jets in the summer after the road was paved. My bedroom was intact, down to what I called the polio shirts in the chester drawers. The Beatles arrival in 1964 was crystal-clear, but the previous year, when my mother had cancer, was missing. There was a pattern in my family of missing years and missing persons. I needed to get to the bottom of it.

There were no pictures of my paternal grandparents in our house. I didnt know what my fathers mother looked like, though I was named for her: Margaret Pauley. How could I be such a strenuously committed realist (I even prefer to read nonfiction) despite such a tentative grasp on reality? A moment of recognition arrives when a conviction (Im a realist) meets a contradiction (I didnt even know what my grandmother looked like). A little girl might develop an attachment to whats real because of all she doesnt know, not despite it. Skywriting has become an accumulation of moments of clarity in which I finally saw what had been in plain sight all along.

Just look on the bright side strikes me as an essentially pessimistic point of view. I cant deny the research that says optimists live longer, but I think they lack the faith to take life whole, and it comes no other way. I like to think that Skywriting is about looking toward the bright side, knowing the journey there will not be a straight line but rather a spiraling path that moves forward in a pattern of turning backpurposeful wandering. Heres where the realist in me is revealed for an optimist, because I believed in my future enough to risk finding that my idea of my past had been something of a fantasy. As long as it was my only story, I had no choice but to stick to it. I was changed the moment I recognized that the absence of a story doesnt mean there is no story.

Three years ago, I suffered the first significant illness of my life; I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It was medically induced by treatment for something that sounds utterly innocuoushives.

The cause of the hives was, and is still, a mystery; I suspect it wasnt one factor but a whole gang of them. Menopause looms large at my age, but so does being a mother with children growing up, being a daughter without parents. I hear a biological clock ticking againhow should I spend the rest of my life? Id like not to spend it with more tension than twenty women. I read recently that many people dont know which elements of their lives cause stress and which they actually enjoy. My illness compelled me to pay attention to what my body was trying to tell me.

Have you noticed that the happy endings in fairy tales were predicated on unhappy beginnings? In no version of the story does Cinderella have a happy childhood, or a life of placid conventionality as I had, in the well-chosen words of a young writer named Frank Rich. In 1977, when I was twenty-six, he interviewed me in my office at the Today show and my parents at home in Indianapolis. He found my office devoid of personality, and our home did nothing to alter the impression. He was not being unkind. He spoke for both of us when he wrote, I dont get it. He could not figure out how someone so unaggressive, more like Dinah Shore than Lesley Stahl, as he put it, could get to the top of a competitive profession so young and so fast. I agreed; it seemed like I had won it in a contest. I knew I had not reached the pinnacle by pluck, and I didnt really believe in luck. I am such a hard-core realist that even my daydreams have to be plausible! It was my life that stretched credulity.

For thirty-two years, a career on television has been as inseparable from me as my shadow. It has been an uneasy coexistence. Id almost given up trying to explain my mixed feelings for a career that by any objective consideration was fabulous. My psyche didnt relate to objective consideration and persisted in sending messagesincluding depression and probably hivesthat corrective measures should be taken. I get it now.