As a Writer, You Can Never Collect Too Many Endings

For my neighbor Linda back in Lincoln, Nebraska, it was chickens—fridge magnets, figurines, calendars, coffee mugs, decorative plates. To sit in her kitchen, some sunlit morning, was to be surrounded by feathers and beaks in all manner of design. She just loved them. She couldn’t say why. For someone else, it might be bumper stickers. You slap one down, then another, then pretty soon the entire back of your car has been plastered over with slogans and jokes, the oldest of which start to fade and peel off.

I’ve never been an obsessive collector of objects—I don’t like clutter. I collect endings to essays I want to write.

The ones I like give me something to write toward, a sense of purpose. Just about anything will do, but I am particularly drawn to reversals of fortune, epiphanies, ironies, rhyming action, concrete images coded symbolic.

A few years ago, at dusk, I saw an owl swoop into a low branch and start poking its beak into a catbird’s nest. The catbirds inside made a terrible hissing-screeching-gargling sound—like a baby that’s been scalded—and after a moment the owl, for whatever reason, decided it was too much and flew off. After the danger passed, dusk shifted to dark. The night deepened. It struck me that the owl could come back at any moment, and that the catbirds, whose cheery songs I loved and had been listening to all afternoon, lived under perpetual threat. While I didn’t know what story from my life the moment might make a good ending for, I knew it was an ending because in the quiet of its resolution it kept gathering significance. It was factual and also metaphorical. I’ve been those screeching catbirds. I’ve been that owl.

In my twenties, smarting from a bad break up, I once thought I saw my ex at a bookstore, but it was clearly someone else. I drifted out to my car and started driving and ended up rolling by the landmarks of our relationship, streets we’d walked down, cafes where we’d sat talking for hours over coffee. I drove past the house she’d grown up in, out in the country, just to see if it looked the way I remembered. It was a summer day. Sheep grazed in a pasture. The wind knocked around Queen Anne’s lace. At the house, in a sunhat and gloves, her mother knelt in the garden tending flowers. She looked up as I drove by.

Maybe she saw me, maybe not.

I gunned it and kept going, following dusty county roads until the radio crackled and nothing looked familiar anymore. By the side of a cornfield, I pulled over and sat for a minute with the windows rolled down, the field radiating its summer-green heat. Then out of the radio’s crackling static—way down at the low end of the dial—came a wash of live music. It took me a second to understand: it was some kind of talent show, broadcast from a nearby county fair. A young girl shakily sang “The Rose” by Bette Midler.

The collision of my heartbreak and the rippling corn and the hay dust and horseshit-scented sweetness of a county fair broke something in me. Life was more sorrowful and beautiful than I’d ever imagined. And even though I’d only just begun my writing career at that point, I remember thinking: This is an ending.

To imagine the moment that way redeemed it. Pain wasn’t only something I experienced—it was something I could use.

Practically speaking, I might as easily have thought: This is a beginning. Or simply: Remember this feeling. But endings hold more of an allure for me. A beginning is a leap, a plunge, and I recognize that for some people nothing is more thrilling than blazing off into the unknown. I prefer pausing to look back. I’m less interested in setting out than I am in having arrived. The journeys I take are return trips into memory in search of origin and meaning. Where and when did this story begin? How did I end up here feeling like this? And why? Whether sudden or drawn out, endings bring a paradoxical quality of awareness, a feeling as though nothing will ever be the same, and also as though this is how the world has always been but I’d forgotten. Every ending, in its way, is a homecoming.

I have more potential endings stored up than I can ever hope to use. Like my neighbor Linda with her chickens, I just love them. And like those chickens—if I’m being honest—my collection is more decorative than functional. Over the years, I have used precious few of my hoarded memories for anything I’ve written. Even in times I set out to end on a very specific moment, the writing inevitably takes me elsewhere.

Often what I think is an ending is instead the continuation of another dynamic, a ripple from a larger splash. Sometimes different endings rub against each other like cricket wings, a discordant harmony.

As kids, my brother and I used to toss crickets into our dad’s farm pond. We’d find them by turning over stones and rotten logs. The crickets’ hollow bodies floated, and even though they’d never swum before they knew how to kick their legs and make for dry land. The kicking inevitably drew bluegill, dark ovals hovering in the water below. Sensing their presence, the crickets panicked and kicked harder. One bluegill rose and snapped the surface, followed by another, and another. Bit by bit, they ripped the crickets to pieces and devoured the carcasses in the depths.

One day while we tossed crickets into the pond, our friend Danny came by with a fishing rod slung over his shoulder. He was on his way to the creek in the woods. A man named Rick accompanied him. Rick was in his thirties, worked third-shift at Alcoa, drove a white Trans-Am. He lived cattycorner from the elementary school and played pickup basketball at the playground every afternoon and evening.

On hot days, we wandered over to drink from the garden hose in his yard. We did not know—or at least I didn’t know—that he preyed on young boys, often those without fathers, befriending them, taking them on overnight fishing trips, where he sexually assaulted them. The day he and Danny came by on the way to the creek, he was just Rick to me, and Danny—whose home life was rough—was Danny. I turned over an old log and snagged a cricket and tossed it into the water. We all stood there a moment, watching, and I remember Rick smiling. I remember how happy it made me to make him smile.

For years, I held the moment as an ending. I wanted to write about my hometown, and about Danny, who one night in high school, after a falling out, tried to run my brother and me off the road on the way home from a football game. I wanted to write about vulnerability, violence, guilt. I wanted to get inside a bluegill’s hunger.

It never came together.

Then one fall decades later, walking out to my car after work, I heard a cricket chirping in the berm in the parking lot. It was late October and the crickets wouldn’t be chirping much longer. I stopped to listen, loving the sound.

The cricket would never know what it meant to me, how it held pieces of my childhood, whole summers, in its stiff wings. Danny and Rick and that day at the pond were there. All the goodness I remembered, too. Nights fishing with my dad while fireflies sparked over the water. The tender warmth of a first kiss in a neighbor girl’s backyard. Cricket-song was the sound of life, an otherness, sweet and raw and indifferent. And even though life could be cruel and terrible—and enduringly so—I loved it all the same.

I turn 50 in a few months, an age teeming with endings. I have a teenage son who will soon start driving. I have an elderly father who has been in and out of the hospital, fighting rectal cancer. I have a wife, a dog, a mortgage, credit card debt, a car payment, a job as a writing teacher made ever more complicated by the ubiquity of AI. What does it all mean? The only way I know to approach such a question is to ask: What has it meant up until now? To write an ending is to inhabit that question, to choose with intention the contours and nuances of a response.

I don’t collect endings, however, to have the final say about my life. In fact, I write against certainty. The more options I have at my disposal for ending an essay, the freer I am to change my mind about its meaning. Nor am I simply putting my pain to use, as I thought when I was starting out. I write to savor my pain, to transgress and transform it.

As with many long-time collectors, my obsession with endings has shifted over the years from the thing itself—from the thrill of discovery and possession—to  the more workaday pleasures of the search. More and more, I see myself as a kind of rockhound cruising the beach after the tide has washed out. I’m not looking for anything in particular, a shape I like, a color, a certain sparkle and shine. I can’t bring home all the endings I’d like to, not even all the ones I find uncommonly beautiful. But I pick them up just the same. I brush the sand away and run a finger over their edges. Their heft is a comfort to me, even as they fall from my hand.