The joy of finishing

Unable to get back to sleep after awaking at 3 with chest pain, which turns out to be heartburn from making a supper out of popcorn, I come down to make myself a cup of tea. The kitchen is a disaster. How can it be such a mess when I haven’t been cooking? Why is that chicken bone on the floor? Oh. The cat must have jumped up on the kitchen island where those bones have been idling since I made a fast sandwich out of leftover chicken for yesterday’s lunch.  And there are the remains of my breakfast, and dinner of the evening before, because, while I haven’t been cooking, I have been eating. Throwing things together and into my mouth.

The state of the kitchen island—dirty tea cups, the unsqueezed half of a lemon, the malaria tablets for my upcoming trip ($148 for 22 days!), the popcorn popper, the popcorn bag, the popcorn salt, olive oil, empty blood orangeade bottle (quite yummy—Meijer), that plate of chicken bones, and much, much more—is the cumulative result of not putting anything away or cleaning anything up—nothing—for two days. No wonder the cat took advantage of the chaos.

Two observations. Well, three.

1) One person can make a lot of mess.

2) The mess of a person alone is greater than the mess of two people because one person alone has no shame.

3) This is what happens when I’m finishing a project. My study is in a similar state. Papers everywhere. Scribbles everywhere on them. But I am done—DONE!—with the Congo story book.

For the last two days I have had tunnel vision, ignoring the chaos gathering around me, because I have seen the light at the end of that tunnel. I could feel, taste the project finally coming together. I had all the material. I was translating and editing the last stories but I still wasn’t sure how I would organize it. I’d been thinking for a long time there would be two parts—pre-independence and post-independence—but, although the events of 1960 and thereafter cut a decisive slice through the stories, people’s lives don’t divide themselves up that way. And then I was thinking three parts, and then suddenly knew how I would organize it, and there would be four parts.

With that, everything fell more or less into place. All I had to do was line up the stories in the right order—I spent the first tunnel-vision day doing this—and then go through and do a final proofing-tweaking-consistency edit of the whole collection. I got that done much faster than I thought, also in a single day. When 6 pm rolled around yesterday, time to go to yoga, I was only 20 pages from the finish line so I disobeyed my body’s commands and followed my heart, stayed home, and finished the 67,000-word manuscript.

Waking at 3 with chest pain, worrying that I had thrown a clot into my lungs from sitting too long at my desk—was the price. Really, it was heartburn.

I even came up with title candidates, a last step. Sometimes early titles help shape the material but sometimes they shape it too much. For this one, I wanted the stories to tell themselves before naming the book. I have to get the consensus of my co-editors—those who conceived and shepherded the project before I got my hands on it—but my favorite title candidate so far is The Jesus Tribe: Stories of Congo’s Mennonites, 1912–2012.