Recently, a man named Sean wrote to me that because of my age, I couldn’t possibly be able to relate to most readers. That I should stick to such subjects as where to get the best mojito in town. That I should read more Raymond Carver. That I have not experienced enough pain in my youth to produce art.
He knew neither my pains, nor my age, but I started to think about both. And mojitos.
I can’t remember having a good mojito in Denver, but in New Orleans, I lived down the street from a bar where low-lying beds of mint grew like weeds. Sometimes I went there just to watch old men and young groups of women swirl the tattered leaves through rum with long red straws.
On my way back from having a drink, I’d stop to swap gossip with my neighbor Sophie, an elderly woman who rarely left the swing on her porch, just pushed back and forth, back and forth, even while her yellow shutters fought with the wind. I told her about mojitos — she’d never had one — and brought her handfuls of mint to chew on hot days.
Four generations lived in Sophie’s butter-colored cottage. Under the scalloped pediment, we talked of baking, bruises, having babies. She never mentioned being old. With her, I never felt too young.
I knew she was sick; she knew I was sad. We didn’t bother each other with the details during our short conversations. Our words did not need our pasts for justification. Something was wrong with her great-great- granddaughter, but I never asked what. There was screaming and chasing late at night between the magnolia trees in their yard, but in the morning, there was always a hopeful Sophie leaning toward my house from her swing.
I brought her cool leaves and she brought me a constant, ageless sort of kindness. Sophie’s house was spilling over with pain and age, but she never made any person feel that he deserved to be listened to less.
Now my pain is not remembering everything. I don’t remember the last thing I said to Sophie before she died. I remember the poster on her porch that all the neighbors signed. Kids from the tenement and old men from the million-dollar mansions, the man with the mutt and the girl with the drug problem all signed the poster-board taped to her pale front door.
Sometimes, when I try to remember a place through the pain of leaving, I feel like I have stirred a drink for too long, and my favorite parts, like leaves, have dissolved into little triangles, muddled down by the selectivity of memory and the newness that covers what once was.
Like art or stories or memories (all interchangeable in some way), pain cannot be qualified. There are toothaches and betrayals, lost loves and left-behind homes, shame and skinned knees. Acne, arthritis and adultery all hurt.
My mom worked in the oncology ward at Children’s Hospital for six years, and when she asked 5-year-olds what their biggest worry was as they lay dying in some small white room, almost all of them said, “I’m worried about what my parents will do after I die.”
For me, art can mean a child’s sentence that seems to shake your ribs. Pain can be a pin-prick or it can be so huge it feels like you have a truck stuck in your torso. Raymond Carver writes that “there isn’t enough of anything as long as we live, but at intervals, a sweetness appears, that when given a chance, prevails.”
I find prevailing sweetness in the young and the old and in a well-made mojito.
To Sean, I would say that art and pain are possible from the time a child knows her own name. Wisdom comes with age, yes, but if good writing only began in the last years of life, think of all the words we would lose.
Megan Nix () of Denver is an editor at DiningOut Magazine and can be reached at thenixionary@gmail.com.
