There’s something freeing about not working with an editor. There’s also something horrible about not working with an editor.
First off, I’ve had the benefit of working with excellent editors throughout my whole writing career: in fact, I married one. Excellent isn’t even the best word: often, they’ve been downright stupendous, saving me from all manner of stupid mistakes. So, I miss them when I’m working in this space. If anyone ever tells you their work doesn’t need editing, they’re wrong.
But sometimes, editors — however good they are — arrive at the scene of the crime too early. They come to your desk, occasionally before you’ve even had a chance to put your fingers on the keys, and ask what you’re working on.
You tell them, and because you respect them, you value their reactions.
“Why,” you might say, “I’m thinking about writing a whole column about finding a fork.” Imagine the look on their faces. It can put you right off whatever you were planning to do.
(This, by the way, is a column about finding a fork. There is no editor here right now to dissuade me.)
Years ago, my wife Leslie and I had taken the kids to a stone beach in Witless Bay, Newfoundland, and we were scouring the beach for treasure. (There is always beach treasure, if you set your standards for acceptable treasure at the right level.) The beach at Witless Bay is a barrisway beach, built up out of mostly grey stones of all sizes, ground into round shapes by the regular wave action, a massive drift of piled stones holding back a freshwater pond behind it.
We were exploring the landwash, looking for everything from oddly-shaped driftwood to things we could toss in the ocean to serve as targets for rock-throwing.
The landwash, by the way, is exactly what it sounds like: the edge of land that’s regularly washed by the sea. There’s lots in the landwash, plenty of it unsettling. Kelp and other seaweed, single shoes or the soles of shoes, the broken-up wooden boards of what had once been boats, plastic bottles, rope and twine, and even occasional mystery burlap sacks, tied tight, that you feel you probably shouldn’t investigate.
And, in this particular instance, a fork.
I think Leslie found it. (I tend to absorb all experiences as if they were my own, even when they aren’t, so if I say I think Leslie found it, she most likely did.)
But it wasn’t just any fork.
It was the exact same pattern as every other piece of flatware that was at home in our kitchen drawer — and to top it off, it had the first letter of my last name in delightful script on the handle.
Some things just jar your universe. For me, it’s when things that seem to occur like simple chance are actually so complicated that they set your teeth on edge. Coincidence stops being coincidence where there are just too many moving parts that seem to be lining up in casual but perfect order.
Sometimes, it’s like receiving a deliberate message that, while you’re happily trundling along convinced you’re in full control of your life, there’s actually someone or something else pulling the strings, and perhaps deliberately toying with you in the process to make a point.
You know the feeling. The one that make you look over your shoulder when you’re walking down an absolutely empty, misty late night street — yet at the same time, even before you look, you’re resigned to the idea that someone might be right there.
Who lost the fork? How did it get in the ocean — happenstance, deliberate design or tragedy? How, out of anyone, were we the ones who ended up finding it?
Was it a warning, or a coincidence? What does an ocean-delivered, personalized fork even mean?
Hard to know.
But it was absolutely a once in a lifetime find.
The ghost fork came home with us. Permanently.
And it creeped me out entirely. Opening the cutlery drawer and having it pop up on top of the pile of other, more innocent forks was like drawing a Tarot card from the deck that, when you turn it over, makes the fortuneteller visibly recoil.
I would slip it carefully to the bottom of the pile, and hope the dishwasher would run and the fork-pile would fill before I tripped over it again. It became both a running joke, and to me, nothing like a joke at all.
I’ll admit, now that years have passed, I’ve made my peace with the ghost fork. If it has a curse, it’s certainly taking its time delivering. I’ll even use it to eat dinner now, though I look at the capital W every single time and remember precisely where it came from.
Lots goes on in and under an ocean. It isn’t always reasonable.
And it most definitely isn’t always pleasant.
Oh, and I don’t just remember where the fork came from.
Almost every time, I remember something else, as well.
Unbidden, the words of poet e.e. cummings’ offering “maggie and milly and molly and may” comes too mind, which ends with these lines:
“for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
It’s always ourselves that we find in the sea.”
It’s a little too sharply apt, that little line.
Back to the bottom of the fork pile for you, ghost fork.
A fork in the road
I understand that sentiment for sure.
Love this piece. The interface of two worlds, beaches are magical. There is endless wonder in walking a beach, looking down, picking up & pocketing or dropping back down. So much so that you might forget to look up & around, where there is other wonder.