A writer is always on the search. Even as everyone else is busy, moving on, moving forward, a writer is thinking back, tracking time, making decisions, clarifying things, critiquing ideas, analyzing questions that everyone else has neglected to answer. A writer is never done with the job, never done with a sentence, never done with a story. Things happen as you watch; you watch as they happen. When you are sitting at a café, people watching, strangers are unfolding their lives before you. The woman who orders a hot chai has a much different story than the young girl who orders an iced vanilla latte. The man who stirs his sugar sees things that the two women waiting for their orders don’t.
Stories are happening as the day unfolds. The man who rings up my groceries at the check out asks how I am. I say I’m fine and ask him the same. He says, “fine for a Monday.” He can mean many things by this. He may be saying that for a dull Monday afternoon where nothing is expected to happen, he is doing well. Or he may mean that he is not doing great, but it’s only the beginning of the week and he is just fine for now. But what is he hoping for? How does he hope to complete his day? What do we all hope for, at the end of the day, to have felt fine, or to have gone further?
I watch as Baba dips his sweet cracker into his hot tea. I watch as the crumples sink under the liquid and reach the bottom of the glass. He brings his glass close to his mouth, takes a sip, puts the glass down, and dips another cracker. Has he had a fine day? I wonder. Will he feel fine tomorrow when he wakes up at dawn to get dressed for work? Or when he returns home, checks the mailbox and walks in to his house?
What is fine? How do you define this simple, yet vague word? How is it that we say it everyday and every time without knowing its many meanings? How is it that we say it no matter how we feel?
This is what a writer does. A writer asks and wonders and tries and attempts. And still finds it close to impossible to really answer or resolve. I still don’t know what fine means, or what I mean when I say I’m fine. I don’t know what makes Baba’s day just fine, or what makes the man at the store say he is doing fine for a Monday. But I am always going to wonder and ask because that’s what a writer does.