Now You Say It

You’re asking if there is something I should have said that would have changed my life?That’s certainly easy to answer: yes. 

I should have said yes. Literally. Yes and let’s go! Vamos!

No, not like that, not so exaggerated. I just see saying yes as a way to deal with an opportunity.

A lot of people say they should have said no and if they had, they wouldn’t have gotten into trouble. There were times I should have said no, too, but what really matters as I think back over the years is the number of doors remained unopened, uNOpened.

I believe that by choosing ‘yes’ as my answer, I have nicely forced you into asking me how many yeses went unsaid. Were they associated with a single person or circumstance? Or were there many silenced yeses in my past? You must be a little curious.

Certainly you are interested in the answer, so I will do my best to provide what you’re looking for. It may take a moment or two, but I hope I won’t try your patience inordinately. Some stories do not follow a straight path. I will say that you will hear some normal things, but others - not so much.

Like so many people, I should have said yes to more dreams and crazy ideas, like setting up a mesón and running it. It would be a kind of second home and there would be regulars who stopped in, like in Europe, more for conversation and companionship than food or a beverage . I always enjoyed places like that when I traveled overseas. The intimate space was so comforting.

The kitchen with the house around it was the image my mother repeated often if anybody asked her what her dream house would be. She would have been appalled if she had ever known her dream of putting the kitchen in the center of a house somehow delivered to me a dream of running an eatery with rustic dark wood tables, a space for a guitar player, and good mesón (pub) food. Feed people, show them you enjoy seeing them. 

Mom, bless her heart, would have been appalled because she was a teetotaler and mesón sounded like wine and bar to her. Still, my dream definitely came from her and it was one I perhaps should have followed. I didn’t, but still think it was a good idea. Maybe I would have named the place Si! Yes!

Feeding people at this point in my life is still a real pleasure, nevertheless. As I try to make do with the little counter space I actually do have, it’s clear that this kitchen is not a pleasure to work in. I would love to cook for more people, serve them a drink. It is already cramped in here, so no use dreaming any more about the kitchen in the center of the house, Mom. Neither you nor I got our wish. I mean, I’d be lucky to be able to fit a 3’ x 3’ mini-island in this kitchen.

A second choice might have been a career as a food photographer, but I backed down there as well. Don’t ask me why, because it’s much more worthwhile and intriguing than fashion photography, but after tossing the idea around for a while, I said no. I love the still life as an art form, so it should have seemed like a good fit as a career for me. It’s another yes that remained unspoken. Why was I always walking away from things I craved?

Why was one syllable so hard to say?

The unchosen career path is certainly a common example of hindsight, of a yes we don’t dare to utter. At the risk of sounding even more clichéd, there is another case of my needing to say yes and failing to do so. What I did was typical of my time and even now plagues society.

That is:

I was unable to say yes - to accept - who and what I was instead of being ashamed of myself. That yes would have meant: Do not accept the numerous forms of media - tv, magazines, comics, movies - that teach girls what they should be like. What they should look like. Clothing. Makeup. Spectacular eyes and perfect-fitting, perfectly-matched clothes. This brainwashing is why some trends today and why the body harems of the K family depress me.  

Fake fake fake. Influencers? Narcissists. None of what I’m saying here is original. 

Like many girls my age, I did not find a way to say yes to myself, to refuse the influencers’ images. That meant I was saying yes to hair and clothing styles that cost money, created competition, had me thinking of myself as an object or lure. It was a horrible thing to do, that not saying yes to myself just as I was. 

I did not have blue eyes or blond hair that flipped up perfectly on both sides even in the rain. I wore glasses. I could only get one new item of clothing a month, when my mother got paid. The outfit was an important part of going to a Friday night home basketball game. I didn’t have a great singing voice. 

I had nothing of what society told me I should have.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I am pretty much average in every physical way. That should have been sufficient; other things were more important.)

Here is another yes I regret never having said:

I should have said yes to the reality of the limited finances of my parents. Instead, I complained or hid. I should have loved living in a house that was like a novel, that had many stories under its roof. Stories to match the lives that had begun and ended in it. So much inequality, illness, affection clinging to crumbling plaster showing through old wallpaper.

It was the novel I always wanted to write. Wait, make that four novels, not just one. I always thought I could write four novels, just like I wanted four children. (That didn’t happen. All I had were four miscarriages, but that has nothing to do with saying yes or no to anything. It’s just part of the novel.)

The house had all the space in the world for words. They were everywhere, too - in the attic, the basement, hallways, all the closets, even in worn pockets and old shoeboxes. The words moved, were alive; so was the house and its living dead. Because nobody who ever lived there could ever leave it. It was my own national archive, an architectural phenomenon, a museum.

It would have been so good to know that back then, when I was saying no to the walls and splintery floors, because now it lives in me and I have to live with that.

I definitely should have said yes to the house, should have embraced it, read it better, listened harder. After all, it taught me so much despite my inattention. 

However, we parted ways. It was my decision. This is not the time to talk about that.

Another big yes I never said was to living in another place, even having to give up career. Yes to (almost) starting over. I should not have doubted for an instant, but I did. Just one instant too long.

Saying no was a bad decision. The worst no ever. And I didn’t even realize it. Tunnel vision made me do it. A no that should have been a resounding yes. Maybe others have faced the issue of leaving a life behind to take on another…

I don’t want to talk about that anymore. There is just one more example of how a simple yes might have changed my life. A yes that I never even knew was mine to make. It is really the only one on this list that might not be commonplace the way the previous ones have been…

Let’s face it. The most important thing I ought to have said, the thing that would have changed my life completely: I should have said yes to books. This might require a little explanation.

By saying yes to books I mean that I wish to live in them, through them, with them and them alone. Already I prefer to purchase books about libraries, librarians, translators, and bookstore owners. Sometimes I am able to locate a book about an editor or a literary critic, a biographer, careers like those. Books about books, metaliterature, old manuscripts from the Bodleian and El Escorial Libraries, folders of unpublished plays on parchment. Heavenly. 

Spend entire days or weeks or longer in marathon readings like the one of Moby Dick on the anniversary of the novel’s publication. Take a semester-long course in the history of paper. Also take a course in book restoration. Do a tour of the world’s most famous libraries. Join six new reading groups at the local library. The list of thoroughly enjoyable bookish occupations is endless. They all interest me. I haven’t found a good source yet for the history of ink, but assume it will appear. If not, I could do the research and publish a book on the topic. That would be just as good.

In a previous life I may have been Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or one of numerous other nuns who took refuge in convents but were really taking refuge in books. They read, studied, wrote. I should have done that, gone into a convent, but there were other options, or so I thought. Maybe there still are…

I could write books. I’ve worked as editor for a few, too. I can produce books as art pieces, what they call artist’s books. That was an immediate love when I discovered the art form at a book arts bazaar south of here.

Or I’m sure I could be a volunteer librarian. I know all the librarians in town by name, and think they’d be amenable to my working for free a few hours a week. Oh to be surrounded by books all day! I could maybe bring in a sleeping bag and curl up in somebody’s office. Hope I don’t snore loudly enough to wake any books up. (That is a really lame joke, isn’t it?)

All right, it’s time to wrap things up. This hasn’t been much more than me complaining, like everybody else, that I didn’t say something I should. Well now I am saying yes, at least to books. If you need me, go to your nearby library or bookstore. I won’t be hard to locate. 

The title of the book you say? There’s just a working title right now, but it might be something like:

“I plan to die with a book in my hands, and it definitely will not be electronic” 

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Special Collections Librarian. Note.

Manuscript is first draft of memoir by novelist Emily Olivia Fern. Apparently she became discouraged with the assembly process and discontinued the memoir. She may have been concerned that in some areas it sounded trite, needed some attention to style, but in other areas her attempts at humor might not have come across well. Ultimately the author cannot be located and the question is whether she is determined to devote what is left of her life to the pursuit of all things ‘book’ - or if she has (heaven forbid!) eaten her own words and has become a book.

Which would eliminate the possibility of editing a posthumous memoir. Books don’t die.

This Library has received the manuscript in donation from the author’s family. We thank them for their generosity, even if we don’t know what might be lurking among the pages.

We can talk about that some other time, yes?