On Waiting

First, I acknowledge my colleague Harold Schweizer, the title of whose recent book I have brazenly stolen for this post--thanks, Harold!

I am waiting. I am waiting for lots of things. Beginning and end of life things, like the births of assorted babies I will soon know and the death of my beloved father-in-law, who is dying so well I keep suggesting he should quick run some seminars for other old folks on the art of dying. I am waiting for some interesting work responsibilities to begin and for some less interesting ones to end. I am waiting for my sabbatical and the move to Barcelona that will come with it. I am waiting to read A Wind in the Door with my oldest son and The Chamber of Secrets with my younger kids. I am waiting for the picture book snow storm that this cold winter has not yet brought us, and I am also waiting for it to be warmer and to be able to walk out of the house without layering and layering first. I am waiting for the Lost premiere and the Oscars and the Percy Jackson movie.

Most of all, in this moment, I am waiting to hear from the agent who is currently reading the first 50 pages of This Powerful Rhyme. This particular agent has every reason to be unusually busy right now, and she has no obligation to respond to me quickly. However, a flurry of e-mails a couple of weeks ago led me to hope for a quick response. I think that no news is just no news, neither good nor bad, but it's hard not to devote lots of mental energy to imagining her response to my book. While I wait, I imagine enthusiasm and criticisms, contracts and rejections, friendships and starting over. Waiting is not passive or empty but one of the most active imaginative acts we experience.

In my fiction and my scholarly writing, I return again and again to the matter of time and the relationship between the present and the past. Waiting is a psychological limbo that inhabits the space between present and future. The knowledge that something will come or might come and the feeling of that something's absence. This is complex and fascinating: how can we feel the absence of something we've not yet had? Anticipation is the imagining of the presence of something in our lives. Sometimes we anticipate (read: dread) something we don't want in our lives, and sometimes we anticipate things we do want. In both cases, we wait for a future we imagine, and we work around the perceived absence of the fiction of what the future will hold.