Tomorrow I’ll have coffee.
And I’ll sit on a bench in the morning, a green one, and wait for the pigeons to come.
Because they come every morning.
The coffee will be black with sugar, lots of sugar.
Sugar to keep me up, in the park, as the pigeons keep me waiting.
I won’t feed them but I’ll watch, as they feast and feed me.
Can’t wait.
At least from early adulthood if not before, Barack Obama was clearly driven to write; to trace that continuing compulsion, from the days when he penned fiction and then memoir to his present speechcraft, is to recognize that writing is anything but a small part of Obama’s life. It’s basic to who he is.
“I think he sees the world through a writer’s eye,” says senior White House adviser and former Chicago journalist David Axelrod. “I’ve always appreciated about him his ability to participate in a scene and also reflect on it. I mean, I remember when we were meeting clandestinely with the guys who were vetting the vice presidential candidates. There was this courtly southern gentleman who was doing the vetting. The president said to me, ‘This whole scene’s right out of a Grisham novel.’ [GQ]
I said, “I want to write a novel. But I don’t know what to write.” Mom told me try to put myself in it and maybe that’d make it easier. I told her she didn’t know what she was talking about. This isn’t Adaptation. “It’s not that easy,” I said. I screamed it, actually. I exclaimed it. It’s…not that easy. She says it is. I disagree. We disagree over and over before dropping the matter altogether.
We’re in the kitchen discussing the matter. The kitchen is in Philly. I’m trying to write a novel, but I have no idea. I have no ideas. Plural. No idea that’s original. My mom tells me stop. Think. Sit. Just stop. I tell her it’s not that easy. It’s…not that easy. We disagree over and over before dropping the matter altogether. We drop so many matters. Altogether.
We sit at the table and brainstorm.
Mom asks, “What do you want to write about?” I’m 19. She says, “Kayla, what do you want to write about?”
“I don’t know mom, that’s the problem!” She doesn’t understand. She’ll never understand. “I want to write about me… But not with me in it.”
She sighs. She laughs. “You want to write about you.”
“Not about me, but someone like me. I mean, something someone like me would read.”
I pause. I stare, suck teeth. “You get it?”
“Write about you.”
It’s not that easy.
“In the middle of all this gossip and speculation that permeates peoples’ lives, I still think they know the difference between real news and bullshit. And they’re glad that someone cares enough to get things on the record and print the truth.” -Russell Crowe’s character in State of Play
