Christine M. Rice
“Literature is nothing but carpentry… Both are very hard work. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood… I never have done any carpentry, but it’s the job I admire most.” —Gabriel Garcia Márquez
My dad had two workshops: one in the basement and a smaller one in the garage. Bright red vice grips and glue stood ready to mend broken broom handles or busted toys. Band saws, table saws, rip saws, crosscut saws, safety glasses, a broom and dustpan, chisels, sand paper, chalk lines, awls, wood glue were organized on his own custom-made shelves and tables made out of two-by-fours and plywood. It smelled of sawdust and glue and sweat. He built desks and chairs and trellises and even a greenhouse big enough to walk in where we started our vegetable garden seedlings.
Right now, I’m looking at his WWII army medals. They are framed and hang above my desk. At the top, there’s an Expert Infantryman pin. Below are his gold and black US Army and shoulder patches. Next his service badges: a Bronze Star, Good Conduct, American Campaign, European African Middle Eastern Campaign, World War II and Army of Occupation medals. His Army rank bars and cording are below those medals and a small gold plate that reads “T/5 Walter Maul HQ BTRY 559th AAA AW BN” anchors the entire thing.
I suspect that he built things to reshape the reality he had been handed. At 19, he and his battalion crossed the English Channel seventeen days after D-Day in June of 1944. In December of 1944, the 559th found themselves retreating from Germany’s massive counter-attack – the Battle of the Bulge — where over 19,000 Americans died, some 47,000 were wounded and 23,00 went missing. I didn’t know that then because he wouldn’t talk about it. But I know it now because I’ve spoken to his buddies in the 559th and read-up on the battle.
Márquez knows what he’s talking about when he says that reality is hard as wood. For four years, my dad’s reality consisted of battles and terror and death. I still have photos of concentration camp rooms with barely-clad bodies piled ten-feet-high in corners: the spoils of a newly occupied Germany.
When I was 19, my dad left my mom. He left my mom but he left our family, too. I didn’t know it then but I wouldn’t talk to him for over 20 years. I still can’t believe it. Twenty years. Two decades. Over 7000 days. Over 168,000 hours. Too many minutes. Countless moments. It’s a hard reality (not as hard as others’ realities, I know). I’m not proud of it.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is, hands-down, one of my favorite novels. I feel slightly overwhelmed when I consider the work Márquez put into its structure, language, imagery, metaphor, tone, handling of time, and the way he juggles parallel story lines. It’s interesting that he says, ‘With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood…” because Marquez cloaks a fictional Macondo in moments of dream-reality. And, although I remember the themes of war and conflict, I mostly remember how Márquez used those themes to influence his craft of character development, how he made the relationships between characters so real you could feel it, and how deeply they loved and hated. Have you ever tried doing that? If you have, you know it’s hard work. Hard as wood. Maybe harder.
Right now, I’m only four chapters into my novel-in-stories. I try not to think about how much hard work I have yet to do. It’s overwhelming but exciting and a great challenge. I’m grateful for it, though. I mean, what would I do if I wasn’t able to re-shape reality? If it came at me and I was just supposed to take it? That’s why we write and paint and stitch and draw and dance and make music and sing and do the millions of things humans do to mold reality into something we can, in the end, recognize as life.
