The Corner Table

Today this blog is being brought to you by the good people at the Scarsdale Borders Books and Music, located on White Plains Road in the Vernon Hills Shopping Center.

Technically I am working from home, but since the cable is out, and I have no phone line, I came on over here for the WiFi and the coffee.

This Borders holds a special place in my heart, as this is the place I spent a significant amount of time back in the spring of '05. Saying that being here saved my life might be a bit of an overstatement, but perhaps it isn't. That year, on March 1st, was the day I decided to end a relationship that I thought was going to be my saving grace - it was supposed to change my life, get me out of a New York that was haunted by the ghosts of smoke and ash and low-flying planes. He was supposed to be my rescuer, my knight, my sweet prince. But in real life he was sad and struggling, and the sadder he became and the more he struggled, the more he seemed to feel that it was my fault; that my success was somehow to blame for his failures.

And so it ended. I knew it was for the best, especially when friends and family members, one by one, came forward to spew the simmering invective about the Former Loved One; seeing how much angst and anger and anxiety they had held back taught me a lot about the lengths that friends will go to in order to keep from hurting your feelings.

But the transitional period didn't end with a breakup. Nope. Ten days later my father was gone, in a strange flash of blood to the brain, like the final bright blink of a lightbulb. One last light, one luminous blinding eyeful - then nothing.

After shivah I went back to work. A week later, I was told that while I had been out, the foundation realized that it didn't really need a communications director anymore. They handed me a three month severance package and wished me good luck.

It was that point at which I wondered what exactly the point was in waking up the next morning.

But there was a point; a light; a reason: the one thing my father had never let me forget was that I was a writer. That like him, I loved nothing more than a good story. When he was a homicide detective, it was as if he loved justice most, but in close second was his desire to put the right end to a story that a murder or a rape or an injustice had begun. I had been hit with three acts of injustice, right in a row - it was as if he was telling me that I needed to find the right ending.

And that was how I found the corner table - the one here, at Borders, where I arrived every morning between nine and ten, ordered my toasted bagel and a large Coke (oh, G-d how I miss Coke), and sat down at my borrowed laptop to write. In the space of ten weeks, I completed the first draft of The Bookseller's Sonnets, my beloved little book about murder and justice, rape and identity, history and eyewitness: with my story I tried to put to right all of the things that had happened to me. It wasn't justice, certainly, but it was something.

I sat at the table every day and gazed out the window at the little garden terrace. There were days that friends came over and bought me coffee and rice krispies treats; I loved that they knew where to find me. There were days I sat alone and wrote chapter after chapter, days that I sat and wondered if I would ever find another job, if I would ever find love again, and I wrote nothing at all. Some days I just sat and cried about my dad. Other days I was able to recreate the scene of his death in the hospital for one of my characters in a way that I could never do now because it is too sacred and scary to think about.

Three years later and the corner table is gone. It's been replaced by a couple of leather chairs, a small table to hold lattes and magazines. But that little corner is still sacred to me. It is still the birthplace of hope, of creativity, of my healing. It is the place that helped me create the perfect ending, and at the same time, a new beginning.