My Mom and Cormac McCarthy

When I was eighteen, I made a mistake. Well, I suppose I made a series of mistakes that lasted for about a decade, but that’s another story. The one I’m referring to here is going away to Virginia to college.

It’s hard to remember now my reasons for going. I think I had a vague notion that I needed to get away from home, and the school was four hours away. That, combined with the fact that their basketball team made a run in an NCAA tournament, led me to Virginia. In case you’re wondering, these are not great reasons to pick a school. But people need to make mistakes. It’s our failures, much more than our successes, that make us who we are.

One person knew going down there was a mistake. She knew the whole time, even if I didn’t. Mothers are like that. Still, despite her trepidations, she let me go. She drove me down and did her best not to cry when they left me there.

I won’t go into the details of what went wrong there. Instead, I’ll tell you about the one thing that went right.

I had a vague notion that I wanted to be a writer. My reasons for this are also muddy all these years later. I knew my mom loved to read. I thought it seemed to me to be a cool job (little did I know it primarily consisted of sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day). And I loved to tell stories.

Now, despite this idea of myself as a writer, I never wrote. Periodically I’d try. I’d pick up a pen or bang away on Word, but nothing came of it. Writing is about a willingness to fail. You need to write a hundred bad stories before you write a good one, and when I was young, I lacked the patience and fortitude to go through that failure.

But the idea that one day I’d be a writer persisted.

After a few weeks of being away at that school (mostly I smoked weed, tried to make friends, and stopped going to classes choosing instead to stream movies and TV through an early web version of Netflix), I went to the bookstore. A writer needs to read, I told myself. I’d find something there, and it would all fall into place.

And for once, it kind of worked.

I was looking through books, and there was one with a black cover that called to me. It was a book for adults. It was acclaimed. It was something. So, I bought it and brought it back to my dorm room, where I sat down at my tiny desk and read the whole thing in one sitting. I don’t know that I’ve ever done that since. It wasn’t a long book, and it moved quickly, but still, there’s a magic to reading a book like that. You never leave that world. You feel the entire story at once. It’s an intoxicating experience.

The book was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and I wanted to write this to commemorate McCarthy’s passing. I can’t say I’ve done any scholarly reading on his work, and I don’t know much about his biography. All I know is the way I felt reading his novels. In the following years, I devoured No Country for Old Men, his border trilogy, Suttree, and, of course, Blood Meridian. I loved everything I read of his. The energy, the settings, the way his words wrapped themselves around me.

But The Road will always be the one for me. I acknowledge that Blood Meridian is a better novel (whatever that means), but it doesn’t have the same hold on me. Because it was there, sitting in a room I didn’t want to be in at a college I’d already begun to detest, that I affirmed my desire to become a writer.

Now, did this mean I began writing? No, of course not. Did this mean I got my life on track? Not in the slightest. Things got much worse before they got better. But it’s a moment I’ll never forget, a transcendent experience where a book carved its way into me.

I’ve read The Road quite a few times since and often think of two lines from it. They’re connected and speak to me personally like a great novel can.

The first,

Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.

(Fire. He loves fire just as he loves grayness and violence.)

I think of this often with my writing and my life. I think of the times I was in the darkness and felt there was no light—the times I wanted to give up, pack it in, and call it a day. I don’t think I always knew the fire was in there, but it was. It must’ve been. And I’m lucky that now it burns so bright.

And the second,

You have to carry the fire."
I don't know how to."
Yes, you do."
Is the fire real? The fire?"
Yes it is."
Where is it? I don't know where it is."
Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”

I always think of my mother with this quote. The woman who dropped me off at school knowing it was a mistake. The woman who sent me letters of encouragement and told me she believed in me when I didn’t. The woman who never gave up on me. She saw a fire in me that I didn’t always know or believe was there. A fire that was dim and failing. And she flamed it.

And that’s the thing, sometimes you need someone else to take that fire up for you. You need someone to carry you through your difficult times and see you through to the warmth. Often that was my mother. Sometimes it was my father, siblings, cousins, or friends. Later it would be my partner.

And, for that one day in 2009, it was Cormac McCarthy. For that and all his other novels, I thank him.

And to my mother and all the others who helped me through the darkness, I love you all and wouldn’t be here without you.