from "The Riots"

Yesterday at my internship at the University of Georgia Press, I began proofreading a manuscript that I am really enjoying. The training I'm receiving at this internship is indispensable, no matter how the four long hours of copy comparison at a desk in a silent office may drag on. Who knew there were so many things that can go wrong on a page of a book? Widows and orphans and ladders and the like (oh, pardon my insider publishing jargon).

If this mode of work can be the tool by which I support a life of love and grace and learning and glorifying the L-RD, I think I'm alright with that. But I wanted to share an excerpt from this manuscript that I found particularly engaging. Here the narrator, a young woman who grew up in Oregon and is now living in New York, is silently addressing the proprietor of a downtown hardware store. She has just had her heart broken in a huge and awful and typical way, and she feels a paternally-imparted need to build something with her hands (her father was a carpenter). I love it for all of the parallelism it presents to me, and because when I lived in the East Village I felt that the man at the hardware store on First Avenue (where I bought screws to hang the frames I was buying at thrift stores and coolers to hold the beer for the beach) was someone who had answers.

"I want you to tell me something. I want you to explain how I might resolve my heart, or how to build a wooden box. Explain to me how I could be so blind, how I could let him twist me into this--for what? Yes, for what, exactly--and also how do I make sure the joints match up, and do you recommend glue or nails or both?"