What Watching Some Guy Drop a Football Taught Me About My Writing

Today I went to visit my grandmother who is in a nursing home. At 94, she's been diagnosed with dementia and usually can't remember my name, where she is or what she's doing there. "Do you work here now?" she kept asking me. She also kissed my cellphone screen when I showed her pictures of my niece and nephew.

She was sitting in a lounge with several other elderly women, all in wheelchairs--the staff like to keep the residents in the lounge, for company, and so they don't fall while alone in their rooms. "I'm being punished," my grandmother whispered to me. Several times, I asked her why, what happened, did she think she did something wrong, did someone hurt her? As it goes these days, she couldn't explain, offer details, or remember what had happened earlier in the day. The Bills were on TV, the women mostly dozed like cats in the sun; it was a lovely day, weather-wise. When a wide receiver caught a pass and broke for some yardage, I got excited. Go, I thought, after a penalty sent them halfway to the goal, first down. The receiver was intercepted in the end zone. "I'm being punished," my grandmother told me again. "Because you're watching the Bills?" I asked.

The announcer explained that the Bills receiver just didn't fight hard enough for the ball while it was in the air; the defender wanted it more. I thought about this after taking my grandmother downstairs to watch a man with a guitar perform songs I haven't heard since third grade, when we sang them in chorus. Oh Susanna, Love and Marriage, The Yellow Rose of Texas. Any Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas. I ran "because I could not stop for death/it kindly stopped for me/ the carriage held but just ourselves/and immortality" through my head as my grandmother nodded off, holding my hand, and I thought about that receiver and the trouble I've been having with my writing lately.

Conclusion: I need to fight harder for my stories. I need to want them to work more than I don't want to try and try and try and try and still not be there. I need to give everything I have to pull the truth and the arc and the right moments out of the air so they work. Because life is both too short and too long all at the same time.