In my writing class we are focusing on dramatizing things. Writing in scene, darlings, which is not a bad thing to practice. I was thinking I should try to write my blog in scene, to dramatize my blog. But before I do that I want to just mention that men love to write about their erections. And truthfully this is more interesting than some of the other things they write about. Maybe men should write more about erections. Maybe they should write only about their erections. For a hundred years. Then they should be allowed to write about flowers, and then farm animals, and then cowboys, and then erections again, in a kind of cycle. The female cycle? Sexual awakening at the hands of an older man, flowers, swimming in the ocean, Italian food.

Dramatizing. I can tell you that two weeks ago, at the end of class, snow started coming down quite heavily. The class is on the second floor of a building that looks down a hill to the Hudson River—you can see the river through the window, but not either shore. The building belongs to the Junior League and the rooms are very neat and nicely appointed, if old and ugly and containing a thousand chairs. Still, the bathroom has a filled tissue dispenser, air freshener, and handsoap set out on the counter, and a full roll of paper towels for drying your hands. The oven in the little kitchen is from fifty years ago, but all of its timers and settings seem to work and it gleams. I wander around on breaks and, since I don’t smoke, look at these things. Anyway we had a break and came back to work. There were five of us, including the teacher. The snow was coming down, but I didn’t think much of it, except that I was pleased to see it, since the winter has been so bare and snowless, so unwintry. At this point in time every time it snows or rains or doesn’t snow or rain—yes, that is every day—I worry about the future of our planet. I read the paper and compare the highs and lows for the week with the historic highs and lows and, like a bad bowler, which I am, standing at the top of the lane making waving motions with her hands so the ball won’t fall into the gutter, which it does, I try to wish the highs and lows into the normal range. I don’t want to hear again that we’ve had the hottest year on record, I just don’t want to hear it.

Dramatizing. My phone started ringing. I ignored the first call and it went to voice mail. Then it rang again and I picked up and it turned out that Henry had to be picked up early because after school activities were being canceled, so I had to call Jennifer to make sure she knew this, but I couldn’t reach her, so I called David and left a message with his secretary, which meant that he was going to call me back, which he did, so I spent the next fifteen minutes on the phone in the Junior League kitchen, making sure that someone would pick Henry up. Then, because we live in a town filled with assholes who don’t adhere to the pick-up traffic rules at the school, Jennifer, in the car with Johnny, couldn’t get up to where Henry was waiting and one of the aides took him into the office and called me again, to say that no one had gotten him and someone really should. So I had to call Jennifer again and say, Henry is now in the office for you to pick up. Now the snow was falling harder, if you went to the window, as I did in the kitchen, and looked out, you could see that my car was covered with snow and you might remember, as I did, that you had left the scraper in the other car, and think, Why don’t I just have two scrapers, like normal people? I returned to class. The teacher gave us an assignment to write in class but I hated the assignment and couldn’t do it. It involved describing the room we were in, underwriting and overwriting it, and I couldn’t write a thing, I refused to write it, since I didn’t care about it at all. I was worried about my son, who was, I knew, being taken care of, but who, with his brother, was going to want to eat when I got home, which was fine except I didn’t have any food in the house to feed him. I also hate writing extended description.

You can’t rush dramatization, so don’t try. I asked the teacher if she lived in town, because I wanted to find out if she knew where I could buy groceries, but she didn’t live in town, and I thus unwittingly led the class into an intrusive discussion of her living arrangements and what health coverage she had. I felt bad about this. The other female student told me about some grocery stores she passed, but she came from another direction and I didn’t want to go that way. When class ended, I walked carefully to the car through the slippery white lot. The car on, the heaters burning, I started wiping the snow off with my gloved hand, which became icy cold. The snow was falling still, and I felt the pressure. I had to get to the store. I had to get home.

I was a stranger to the grocery store. I wanted to speed through the aisles, but they were crowded with people and empty of things I wanted to buy. From behind the deli counter floated a nauseating smell I couldn’t pinpoint. I still ordered deli meat from the pimply youth behind the counter. As if he doesn’t have enough problems without being identified, for ease of memory, as the pimply youth. With the little deli hat on. The fruit was rotten, or underripe. The cocktail franks weren’t Hebrew National, and my children wouldn’t eat them. I don’t, actually, know what I bought to make dinner that night. All I know is that I brought four bags of it out to the car. It was covered with snow again. On the way home I thought mostly about something I read that our teacher wrote. A scene she wrote about a man who is gardening outside his house when a car pulls up. I wanted to know what I should take from it, and what I should leave.

Sometimes I think about someone I’ll call Sammy, who sent in on average one poem every day to the magazine where I worked as the literary assistant. This was a long time ago, darlings. Long, long time ago. Before the war. Well, after one war, but before the next one. Before cell phones. One of my jobs at the magazine was to go through the poetry submissions, to reject the bad ones, and to send the good ones on to the poetry editor. The poetry editor looked over the names I sent her, and made sure I wasn't rejecting people she knew.

I was good at rejecting poems, in the sense that I could easily tell which poems were decent, and which were not. I was bad at rejecting poems, in the sense that I used the worst faded, smudged, off-center, copy of a copy of a copy of a form rejection letter and never wrote anything personal on it. I was a soul-crusher. On top of that, Sammy sent in a poem or two every day, and when I started, I thought I had to respond to each of these poems. I sent him how many of those form letters in the first few months I was there? Soul-crushing, multiplied.

Finally, I got a letter from Sammy that wasn’t a poem, or not just a poem. I’m sure there was a poem in there, but there was also a letter, asking me to stop sending rejection letters. He just wanted to send his poems out, he said. I respected his wish, in the sense that I stopped sending him the horrible form rejection letters. I didn’t respect his wish, in the sense that I never after that opened his letters, and put them directly in the trash. I can’t say I’m sorry, either, because his poems were so bad.

We were in Brussels, and I was at the pâtisserie. I was in the apartment, with our new babysitter, watching the BBC. I was walking to buy something, something else, and our downstairs neighbor pulled her car across the street in front of me, to see if I was okay. At that point in time David and I shared a cell phone, we knew where the other was, we didn’t worry about each other, or had only just started to worry about each other a few months earlier, when I was pregnant. I remember at the end of the pregnancy I used to root through my purse to check the cell phone to see if I had missed a call, before realizing, again, that no one would be calling me, I would be calling them.

I want to go back further, more, to see how it was then, when everything was wonderful except for loneliness and, in the winter, dodgy heat. When I went to the salle de kinésthérapie and took my turn on the massage bed and watched the snow fall outside. When the man from the next building over stopped us on the street to explain that he and his wife practiced naturisme, and he hoped we wouldn’t mind. When the car was towed, and we found it.

It was as real as anything else. I can see that now. I wonder if the point of thinking and writing about past things is that by doing this you make them real, and by making them real you promise that someday this will all seem real, as well.