Never in a Hurry

When my eye picked out a town named Nye on the map near Pendleton

It worked out. We stopped at every playground between San Antonio and Portland. (The best one, for anyone following our circuitous route, is at Baker, Oregon—an old-fashioned paradise of high slides and well-oiled merry-go-rounds.) We ate Japanese food in Santa Fe. We unrolled our moldy-smelling tent on a spot of ground in Utah and by morning were encircled by clamoring chipmunks, who had found a wealthy source of cracker crumbs. They were calling for more.

It probably wouldn’t have made any difference had I told her that I happened to like the name, or that sometimes it’s a pleasure to become someone else midstream in your life. Had the name in question been Smithers or Lumpkin, I might have passed. But this little syllable, this glittering eye, held mine. I could almost have made it up.

So, you’ve compromised yourself to marriage? I supposed you’d let a man publish your work?”—seemed nullified, erased. I’d walked out of that place, throat burning.

The experience I’d had at a Women’s Writing Weekend in Austin where a visiting poet singled me out with displeasure—“What are these three names of yours?

Later I would remember how the picnic table in our backyard spilled a rich offering of pies and green beans and potato salads, how the talk seemed infinite in its variety, how the laughter—“What a wacky idea, Babe!”—some Nye slapping me on the back with sudden gusto—rolled and rolled.

How could you tell someone you loved them too much? It sounded ridiculous, like you just didn’t want to get a job.

Never in a Hurry

Essays on People and Places