On a recent lazy Sunday, I did a writing exercise with my friend, writer Ingrid M Calderon-Collins. We got on Facetime, and found our prompts by flipping through a book and landing randomly on a line or two. Then we each wrote for exactly an hour, and checked in when it was up.
I used the exercise to jump start an essay I have been wanting to write about my favorite dead writer crush, Emily Hahn. She wrote for the New Yorker for over seventy years, published fifty-two books and lived and traveled all over the world, finding herself in the middle of many historical flashpoints.I became enamored as a history student at CSUN when we read an article she wrote for a class examining Shanghai in the early 20th century. I decided to do my Masters Thesis on her, but alas, never finished. However, I still have binders full of research I did at the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington. I spent a week living the span of her life through glorious primary sources. It was an electrifying experience. My research will not go to waste. I will get Emily on the page! This writing exercise is me dipping my toes in and making a start.
For the exercise, I used one of Emily Hahn’s books. My prompt came from pg 123 of No Hurry to Get Home, her memoir. Here is the line I landed on:
“What happened next was a click in my mind, and then it was as if a window blew open, letting anger flow in. I knew all about that anger, though I hadn’t felt it for a long time.”
This line jogged a memory about a part of my trip where I came face to face with patriarchy. And the anger male entitlement always stirs in me. Here is what I wrote:
It was summer and the campus and area surrounding was a ghost town. I spent a week in slightly unsettling yet blissful isolation. The hotel I stayed at, The Biddle, was nestled in the historical Indiana Memorial Union, a building that during the academic year was no doubt a social hub. This week I had it almost entirely to myself. In the quiet mornings I lingered in bed, made coffee in my room, and looked through my notes at a leisurely pace. Around 10am I would make my way out into the thick humid air and walk the deserted sidewalk that led to the Lilly. In such a serene setting, it was hard to visualize the experience this would have been during the school year, trying to make way through a bustling freeway of students heading to class. The only people I encountered for most of the week were the groundskeepers mowing the lawns or doing general maintenance.
I would spend eight hours or so in the archives looking through business correspondence, love letters, diary pages, photos, notebooks, documents and scraps of paper peppered with Emily Hahn’s doodles, ideas and to-do lists. Being there, being able to run my fingers over her actual handwriting, feeling the raised letters on papers that came from her typewriter , it felt so intimate and immediate. And oddly, stepping back into time like this grounded me in the moment, I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I felt it, I was in it.
At the end of each day I would pack up, make note of where I left off and walk the campus a bit. Many of the businesses surrounding the University were on summer hours, and closed earlier than they do during the school year, so I enjoyed my dinner around the time most long term retirees do. At 5pm, I would head off to a sandwich shop called Dagwood’s. Every day I’d walk in and get a mumbled greeting from the bored teenager that worked there. I’d feel their apathetic eyes watching, waiting for me to look at the menu and act like I wasn’t going to order the same sandwich I had been ordering, a very memorable roast beef sub. I’d take it to go, but before going back to the hotel room to eat, I’d walk up and down the streets peeping into sleepy bars, restaurants and coffee places now collecting mostly dusty locals in their seats.
By the end of the week, I was nearing the end of Emily’s life. I felt loss and grief. This woman who I had become so invested in, inspired by, fell in love with–I had lived alongside her through a life path of papers and artifacts. Starting with her youthful adventures traveling the unfinished roadways of the United States in a model T car, going through the span of her time living in Shanghai, Africa, England and India, all the way to when she was ninety and still actively writing for the New Yorker. The last thing I read was a piece she wrote when she was in her nineties. It was about the fear of falling she felt each time she got in and out of taxis in New York. How she hated having to give so much thought to such a simple thing. But she knew if she were to injure herself, it could mean the end of her independence, her freedom. It was jarring to read fear and vulnerability in her work. She was feeling her mortality, and I felt it too for the first time all week. I sat in the middle of the empty research library struggling to keep tears from landing on the archival materials.
On the last day, as I was packing, I heard people outside my hotel room for the first time all week. There were doors being unlocked by key cards and muffled voices coming through walls and floors. As I rolled my luggage out my room a few kids in boy scout uniforms ran by me swatting each other like kittens as they tore down the hall. At the elevator a grown man in an adult sized boy scout shirt and shorts stood waiting for the elevator and looking at the campus map. When the elevator door opened he walked in without even looking up. He jabbed at the lobby floor button with his stubby finger, and moved to the center of the elevator, his shoulders held wide, head down, dinner bun knees turned slightly towards each other as if his patellas were having polite conversation. I imagined they were gossiping about how ridiculous the dirty off brand sneakers into which his small feet were stuffed looked with the uniform. I paused and stepped into one of the corner spaces he had so graciously left for me. The door slid shut and as we went down, I tried to sneak a peek at the badges that donned this man’s shirt. I wondered, did he himself iron them on? What did that scene look like? Did he do it one morning before going to his job or was it a choice he made for an evening activity? What did he do to earn these badges? Build a fire? Walk an old lady across a street? Is there a badge for creeping people the fuck out in that uniform? There should be.
When we got to the lobby floor I was thrown into an ocean of boy scouts in uniform. The serene lobby I breezed through all week long to make my way to Emily, was now desecrated by a sea of tow headed creatures and their balding older counterparts wearing an overabundance of regalia, all walking around the hotel with unfettered purpose. Others were standing in circles of luggage bumpy with rods and ropes, pocket knives and bungee cords, slingshots and arrows and random shaft shaped items I am sure they used to dig and poke and uproot mother nature in some way. They were checking in, looking at maps, doing head counts and noting things on clipboards. Gap-toothed boys fidgeting and running around, their trajectories hampered only by the adult men and their greedy postures, as they stood puffed out, feet planted, shifting their weight back and forth from one pasty leg to the other. Proud grown men in neckerchiefs and goofy hats, taking over the hotel, their stances and strides telling everyone that they own it. All of it. And all I could think looking around at a lobby full of adult males in Boy Scout shorts, was how on earth is it possible men still have such a stranglehold on power?
So evocative my gut lurched with that ole' familiar dread and revulsion... a multitude of well-turned phrases here that I will muse on for days -
Intolerance hits you right in the face in this Musing.