Jodi Hills

So this is who I am – a writer that paints, a painter that writes…

Category Archives: joan didion


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Someone was.

I was thirty-something when my bike was stolen. I ran up to my apartment for just a few minutes. Left the garage door open. How quickly things slip away. When I returned, it was gone. I called the police to report it. I remember thinking how casually he walked, this police officer, to my garage door. Like he saw it every day. Well… He asked for the brand and style of bike. I asked if they ever found them. “No,” he said. And then he proceeded to talk about how the drainage system in our garages wasn’t correct. So that was it? My beautiful bike was gone and we were talking drainage. He put the report in his pocket and left.

I stood alone in front of my open, improperly drained garage, and thought about my first bike. My beautiful banana seat bike that I pedaled into the ground. That I abandoned in ditches on VanDyke road. In the Olson’s Supermarket parking lot while I ran in to cool off in the refrigerated section. In the front lawn of the public library while I read for hours. On the beaches of Lake Latoka while I splashed until summer’s end. I stood in the gaping mouth of my open garage, missing much more than my bike, wanting so desperately to feel surprised. Wanting to be that banana seat bike riding girl, that girl who trusted everything and everyone.

I wrote about it — that beautiful feeling of trust — in my book, Leap of Faith:

“It was the greatest. All my friends loved it. (my banana seat bike)
But Ididn’t even need a lock for it. Nobody ever stole
bikes from the beach. It was kind of like our sacred
ground. . . and we knew that in order to get to our
sacred ground, you had to have a bike, and to take
that away from someone, to take away their chance
to fly on the way to that glorious one of 10,000
lakes, well that would just be a terrible crime, so
we didn’t do it. I don’t think I realized how beautiful life without
mistrust really was. . .How could I know?
You can’t. . .until it is taken away —
and only in those rare moments,
when you let yourself remember innocence,
can you feel the slip of beauty.”

I reread that passage often, and I think, as Joan Didion wrote in her book, Slouching towards Bethlehem, “Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.”

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Mon préféré

We got a new refrigerator yesterday. I don’t think I’m overstating it when I say that it’s the most beautiful fridge in the world. My very favorite. It is shiny and clean, and it works! Sure, it doesn’t have all the “bells and whistles” – to be honest, I’m not even certain what that would include. But I’m in love with it. The rack that holds the water bottles – how could anything be so magnificent? It’s ours. And it’s my favorite.

I hold that feeling as I climb the stairs to begin my daily routine. The first of which is to practice my French. I have found a new website that offers up random questions that you can discuss. Today’s question was “Who is your favorite author, and why?” In my office, I am surrounded by books. I love to read. I love writers. I love words. To Kill a Mockingbird sits right behind my head. It is glorious. I remember the first time I read it, and the last (which won’t be the last). Ernest Hemingway rests beneath it, reminding me “there would always be the spring.” There is Elizabeth Strout who so elegantly takes me back to Maine. Joan Didion who inspires me daily. George Saunders. Joyce Carol Oates. Virginia Woolf who challenged me. And John Kennedy Toole who made me laugh out loud by myself. I won’t go through every book and author — there are just too many. And I love them all. But the question lingers, and I think about each word of it. It isn’t who wrote your favorite book. The question is, who is your favorite author. To which I answer, it’s me. Hold on, hold on, hold on… not so fast to judge me… let me explain.

I am not the best writer. I look up to all the authors that I have mentioned and more! So many more. I envy the perfect words they choose – in the perfect order. They are magnificent. And I haven’t sold the most books. I won’t be on everyone’s best seller list. Most people won’t even know my name. No, I am not the best writer. But I will tell you this. Writing has always been my comfort, my joy. I have told you from the age of five, I began writing and drawing. No matter what I was feeling, I would go into my room and put it down on paper. Words have always saved me — from the darkest of times, and they have rejoiced with me in the brightest. They have held me. They have lifted me. And so I write. Every day. And I love it. So, yes, I am my favorite author. I would hope the same for all, with everything!!

I have to believe I am living with the best husband. That I have the best mother. That I am living my best life. (And I have the best refrigerator). Otherwise, what am I in this for??

I want you to be in love with your life. As I have said before, Do something you love. Be someone you love.

Good morning, my friends. Welcome to the day — it just might be my (your) favorite!

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Slouching towards Bethlehem.

We lost a good writer this week — Joan Didion. But I take comfort in the fact that we didn’t lose the words. They will be here, as long as we need them. She wrote with such a clarity, even in times of complete distress. She wrote of the hippies, and drug culture in California. She wrote of losing her husband. Her daughter. She says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.”

One of my favorite titles was her book, “Slouching towards Bethlehem.” She took this title from the poet Yeats — “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Didion stands in the same position as Yeats’s narrator, describing a social disaster of her time, feeling the center starting to give out.

The “rough beasts” seem to surround us still, and always. But sometimes it feels they are doing a lot more than slouching. So I look to my center. To hold me. And I find it in the words. The words in poems. In books. In songs. The words that gather in my heart and spill to the page each day. I find it in the ones I love. Standing tall. Standing beside. Ever upward. Whenever I need them.

This is my core. My center. I believe it will hold. I tell myself today’s story. And I live.

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