Connection
Sinkholes and Inkwells
Samantha Mozart is a beautiful writer. The voice, the powers of description and observation, the heart, it’s all there.
Sometimes with these weekly pieces I feel it useful to add context and lay some groundwork to best help the author shine. Other times I know that I simply need to get out of the way and use my few sentences here to merely convey the simple message of ‘you have to read this’.
Today is one of those latter, get-out-of-the-way occasions. So I’ll do just that and leave you to soak up this weeks artistry.
Enjoy.
TJB.
There’s a soundtrack to this, if you wish to listen.
Mozart: Sinfonia Concertante, II. Andante, Itzhak Perlman, violin; Pinchas Zuckerman, viola; Zubin Mehta conducting the Israel Philarmonic Orchestra.
The middle-of-the-night zoomies awakened me last night. Flumes of light from the Aquarius full moon cascaded through my window, flooded my counterpane and lit up my brain. The full moon played a harmonious trine with my Libra midheaven spotlighting my life mission, the messenger, the storyteller, the writer. Everything came perfectly clear: edit the three books of essays languishing in my computer, format them for e-book and print, and publish them. To balance my cloistered writing life with my social life, I will continue volunteering at our local, historic opera house. Interweaving these tasks will see my books to market and fill my hours over the coming months — September, October, November, and into winter. Simple.
Thus, at four a.m., streams of moonlight buoying me, I not pausing to reflect, overrode the diurnal flotsam and household urgencies clogging up my psychic plumbing. I slid one leg over the edge of the bed, about to abandon my nighttime lifeboat, and rush to my computer. I didn’t. The conflicting late-night resident bedside intruder in my story mugged me and secured the blankets around me. I fell back to sleep.
Two days before, I sat out on my porch mentally discussing with F. Scott Fitzgerald, my writing mentor, that I wished to spend my days, these last years of my life, writing, just writing, and deriving a supplemental income from that, my sole work, and how would I do that, when my next-door neighbor came around the corner of my house. “I’m glad I caught you outside,” she said. “You have a sinkhole. Come, look.”
My heart sank. I didn’t want to see. I furtively glanced around for a pile of sand where I could bury my head.
I got up and followed her along the side of my Victorian house, by the powder room near the back. There it was, right on the property line. It was pretty big, big enough to fit a round, cast iron Victorian grease trap into. I have one of those, too. It sits in another sinkhole a few feet away, but for years, disconnected from the rest of the plumbing.
Peering down into the sinkhole, I saw another $1,000 swirl down the drain and into my plumber’s pocket. The line comes from my powder room and laundry room housed on an enclosed, former side porch. Water was leaking from where the cast-iron sewer pipes connect. And that would explain where the water was coming from this past year, leaking into my formerly dry cellar.
Nine months before, I had another sinkhole, further along that same sewer line, closer to the street. Water was leaking down the foundation wall into my cellar. My plumber came and found a backup in the line and a split in the old pipes. He and his guys pushed through the blockage and replaced the pipes with new plastic ones. That work created a $1,000 bill. I am still struggling to pay that one off. That repair dried up the cellar in that spot. It dried up my bank account. Would that I could write short stories and sell them for handsome fees. But water was still coming in from somewhere else. The plumbers thought it was leaking in through the Bilco doors, but applying sealant didn’t fix that.
I have left a phone message for my plumber. Whether or not he will want to work with me given that I still owe him from the earlier sinkhole, I’ll see.
My plumber grew up in my house. When he comes into the house to repair the plumbing in one of the rooms, I just say, “You know where it is.” I tell him that I blame my plumbing problems on him, because when he was growing up here he probably was playing plumber and threw something down the toilet. I think that’s the case.
My having a job would pay the plumbing bills. Alas, I have a disconnect with the work force. Nobody wants to hire someone like me, one who is old enough to have been taught cursive writing in school. Recently and simultaneously, tariffs and taxes increased here in the United States and in our county and town.
I am priced out of life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald would no doubt tell me to rent, not own, go live in Paris or the south of France or someplace; then I wouldn’t have to deal with these issues. I’d just pick up the phone and call somebody.
I almost ran into Scott here in Delaware a couple of times. But, mind you, I’m old but not that old.
One hundred years ago, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald leased Ellerslie, the white three-story 1842 Greek Revival cupolaed mansion with the pillared portico on the Delaware River in Edgemoor, near Wilmington, Delaware. This was just around the corner from where I once lived. The feudal atmosphere when I lived there and before, 100 years ago in Wilmington under the du Ponts, thought Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s Scribner’s editor, would provide the tranquility Scott needed to finish his fourth novel which would become Tender Is the Night.
Zelda called Wilmington the black hole of Calcutta, a sinkhole of sorts. At Ellerslie, the Fitzgerald idyl fizzled, sinking into the Fitzgerald discontent.
The invitations went out and the crazy weekends began. Fridays the French chauffeur drove to the Wilmington train station to meet the guests, among them Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Thornton Wilder, Ford Madox Ford, Edmund Wilson, Charles MacArthur and polo star Tommy Hitchcock, and drove them back on Sunday. In between were dinner dances, polo matches staged with plow horses and croquet mallets, and late-night bedside visits by the resident ghost. If things got dull, they caroused the town: Fitzgerald’s former Princeton College roommate, Judge John Biggs, received the middle of the night phone calls to get them out of jail.
Zelda wanted to build a surprise dollhouse for Scottie, their daughter. Scott and his little girl waited in their car on a quiet red-brick street corner while Zelda disappeared with some papers through a door lettered “Cabinet Maker.”
It was a fine November day. The last golden leaves clung to the trees, sprinkling little shadows here and there on the sidewalk.
While they waited, Scott wove a tale of fairy intrigue for his daughter. “And what, Daddy? What?” demanded the little girl, caught up in the magic. The man continued the story. He wanted to be in his little girl’s fairy world with her. The man could remember that world but he knew he would never again see it or touch it for himself. “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s” was published in The Century Magazine, December 1928.
I have connected with that world. I have been on that street many times, on that corner, on a fine November day. And those red-brick rowhomes still look the same, even after 100 years. Well, except for the air conditioners in the windows. I have looked for that fairy world, tried to imagine it, looked around for Scott. If I could just see or touch him for myself. But, Scott’s not there. The magical moment is gone. I connect there only with his ghost. I could vaguely remember Ellerslie from when I was a little girl. So, years later I drove to where I knew Ellerslie was. There they were, the broad lawns. And the old trees. But, Ellerslie, that white, pillared porticoed mansion, Ellerslie was gone. I learned I had missed it by a couple of years. Riddled with termites, it had been torn down.
Now, more than a half century later, here I sit at my computer in my Victorian house with the sinkhole in my yard. I await not a plumber, not even Godot, only Fitzgerald’s spirit.
Scott filled me with the magic of the Roaring Twenties: he introduced me to Hemingway and the rest, to James Joyce, whom he worshipped, to Paris and to Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, her company of authors. I have always wanted to be a part of such a company of writers, artists and thinkers. And, then, Scott Fitzgerald, still my mentor after all these years, appeared just when I was thinking he quit. So we beat on, boats across the century to the green light at the end of the dock of the Soaring Twenties Social Club where I have fallen into a pool of creative, sensitive individuals who think like I do, with whom I feel a strong connection.
I raise a toast. I’m a wine person, myself, but I’ll hoist a martini, because I really like olives.
~Samantha
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Samantha’s meditative episode reads with great effectiveness as does her description of that sink hole and the party palace up the Delaware River. Thank you for sharing this clever connection.
What a gorgeous, layered reflection. Thank you for sharing it. I love the way the mundane, like sinkholes and plumbing woes and bills, blends with the magical - the moonlit revelations, the literary ghosts, the call to write. Your story really captures that overlap where the ordinary and the enchanted meet, and how both can shape a life. The Fitzgerald thread feels like both a blessing and a burden: the glamour of his era standing right alongside your own day-to-day struggles.
I hope you do publish those essays. I’d love to read them. And I totally get raising a glass to the writers and dreamers who came before us. Here’s to editing, storytelling, old houses, and the green light. I hope your words make their way out of the computer and into the world.