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Rilke Meets the Little Red Hen

First, someone had to run down to the basement and get the big, blue-speckled pot from the shelf under the stairs. This person was the Little Red Hen, whose job was simply to say “I will!” any time my father said, “Who will help me get the pot from the basement?” or “Who will get the flour from the pantry?” or “Who will grease the loaf pans?”

The Little Red Hen, if you remember the children’s story, grew her own wheat and baked her own bread while the lamb and the pig and the cat sat around saying “Not I!” every time the hen asked who would help. It was a true story. We had a cat then, and I can’t remember even one time when Fluffy helped bake the bread.

After you got the pot from the basement, you had to get the black scale with the big round dial from the hearth in the family room. You probably had to move a bowl of walnuts out of the way. Then, my father would weigh the big blue pot, set the scale to the new zero, and start pouring clouds of flour. My father made so much bread at one time that it was easier to weigh the ingredients than measure them. In retrospect, it might just be that he thought it would be more fun. He was an engineer.

Let’s leave my father in the kitchen baking bread circa 1970 for a minute.

On New Year’s morning this year, Fred went to the grocery store, and when he came back I was sitting with my laptop at the kitchen table. I had pumpkin bread in the oven and I was writing about this line from Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend”:

“I have my dead and I have let them go and was amazed to see them so contented, so at home in being dead, so cheerful, so unlike their reputation.”

I’ve always loved that sentence. I was working on this essay and thinking about just how many dead I have. I was making a list, tearing up a little, and when I told Fred what I was working on, he said, “That’s life.”

I knew what he meant. Growing up in a huge Roman Catholic family, if you learn anything (well, anything other than that you shouldn’t have sex) it’s that people die all the time. Out of the blue, a relative I barely knew would die, and normal life would stop to dance around the ritual. My mother would send flowers. We would put on school clothes and go to the funeral home. At some point, we would end up at an aunt’s house eating ham and potato salad that a neighbor had brought by. If we stayed at the funeral home until it was closing, we would kneel in the hall while one of the men led the rosary. (I liked this part. The ritual reciting of the words made me feel ancient and alive.)

Today, though, the Little Red Hen isn’t reciting Our Fathers and Hail Marys in strings of sorrowful mysteries. Today she’s standing ready to say, “I will!” while her father checks the notes in the 1946 Woman’s Home Companion Cook Book. On page 116 in the recipe for WHITE BREAD: Straight-Dough Method, where the cookbook says “6 cups of all-purpose sifted flour,” my mother has penciled in, “5# 10oz flour” and then, maybe as the family grew, “7# 6 oz,” and finally, “8 ½+ # in mixing pot” (which I’m assuming is the blue speckled pot, since I’m the last kid and the recipe stopped growing). Where the Woman’s Home Companion says “milk, scalded, 2 cups” my mother has penciled in “8.” 2 ½ teaspoons of salt has been replaced with “10” and later simplified to “1/4 cup.” My father baked a lot of bread.

Back in my kitchen in 2015, I am taking pumpkin bread out of the oven and thinking about another line from Rilke. I read “Archaic Torso of Apollo” when I was nineteen, not long after I had left Pennsylvania for the first time. I’ve never understood the poem. The speaker is looking at a headless statue of Apollo that bursts with life. After a series of striking descriptions, Rilke says this: “for here there is no place/that does not see you. You must change your/ life.”

What the hell, Rilke? The urgency of the lines, which Mark Doty describes perfectly as “winging out of nowhere,” hit me hard at nineteen and has never left.

Meanwhile, back on Marvle Valley Drive, yeast are swimming to life in a pot of warm sugar water. I’m swimming, too, across ideas, and decades, and time zones. I can’t make this essay stay put. I’m more than seven hundred words in and I still haven’t mentioned that Friday afternoon in November. I was driving a bus full of kids back to Albuquerque from Santa Fe. I was driving straight into the sun, which was leaning hard into the horizon.

I was disoriented. You think of driving from Santa Fe to Albuquerque as heading south. What was the sun doing directly in front of me rather than off to my right? (Off to my right, by the way, I was looking through one of those school bus doors that folds opens with a metal rod. Just being on a school bus makes me think of book bags, and knee socks, and rolling down Irishtown Road to drop off some boy the driver called Buddy right in front of his house. It was kindergarten in Pittsburgh. It was raining.)

I was trying to figure out how I was driving due west on I-25 South when a sentence “winged out of nowhere” into my head. “Things are changing in me, and I do not know where or to what end.” (What the hell, Rilke?) The sentence followed me home. It climbed into bed with me. It stuck around through the holidays.

I would have happily traded it for the Little Red Hen’s eager “I will!” when it was time to knead the dough. She loved that moment when the dough would start to breathe back against her hands; when she’d realize that this pile of flour and salt and water was alive.

It would be dark by the time my father’s bread finally came out of the oven. We cut it hot and slathered melting butter on slice after slice after slice. We were all there then: Pat, Judy, Paul, Meg, Clare, and me, crowded around the kitchen table in our pajamas, breaking bread.

To paraphrase the title of an Ann Patchett book, this is the story of a happy childhood. I am the youngest of six kids. Eight if you count the two babies who didn’t live, one on either side of me. Most of my siblings are alive. Some of them, I think, read these essays. A few years ago, my Uncle Larry, the youngest of my father’s siblings, sent me a Christmas card. “We’re the cabooses,” he said. I love that image: the littlest sibling chugging along behind the big kids, trying to catch up, trying not to get left behind as they round that bend off in the distance before I get there.

In Albuquerque Fred is putting the groceries away and I tell him I have finally figured out how to write an essay about something other than dying. “But those are your best ones,” he says.

So one more thing. I am thinking about Ann Patchett because not that long ago one of my friends sent me an email about her book, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Elizabeth said, “It’s a collection of short stories, basically about becoming/being a writer, and it makes me think of you. Her voice reminds me of your writing, and I love her writing.”

She lent me the book, and I loved it, and I loved that she said it reminded her of me, and then, about a month later, she died. It wasn’t a surprise; she had been outliving pancreatic cancer with matter-of-fact grace and gusto for two years. Lately when we were playing music together in her home, she would say things like, “You should play this at my memorial.” This weekend, we will.

Then about a week ago, my friend Jacqui from first grade sent me an email asking me if I had read Ann Patchett’s This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. “Her voice is so much like yours… that I thought I was proofing a book for you the whole time that I read it,” she said.

Sometimes everything feels like a sign.

January has come and gone. That sentence from the bus is still following me around. I keep meaning to write a letter to Ann Patchett. Those of us who are still here are off on yet another wild loop around the sun.

I want to say that it’s good to be here, and that maybe it’s ok to move on. Something, I don’t know what, is going to happen next. And even though my friend Deena thinks I might have a clue “what this messy life means,” that’s pretty much everything I know.

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Crossing the Bridge

I don’t love Ernest Hemingway. I need to start with that. But in his Nobel prize speech, Ernest Hemingway said, “if he is a good enough writer,” (it was always a he), “he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”

For at least twenty-six years of my life, I had no idea what he meant. Hold that thought for a minute.

A small stretch of Montaño Road between Coors and Carlisle runs like a furrow through the middle of my life. I could say it runs like Marvle Valley Drive, or Clifton, or Irishtown Road, because it runs like those streets I spent my first twenty years walking and sled-riding and learning to drive on. Going east Montaño opens into mountain. Driving back home mesa dissolves in sky.

For a number of years now, it has seemed that if I am going anywhere, I am driving across the river on that stretch of Montaño. Thursday nights and Sunday mornings, I head across the bridge to St. Michael and All Angels. Saturday mornings, I turn right on Carlisle for violin lessons with my granddaughter. Sunday afternoons, I turn right on Fourth Street to play mandolin with Ken, Elizabeth, Katie, and Steve. I’ve ridden across this bridge on my bike and run across it training for a half marathon. One sad morning in 2011, I walked to the middle of the bridge with a group of teenagers and dropped flowers in the river. Monday afternoons after that sad morning, I drove across the bridge to a warm office just east of Carlisle to try to regain my footing in the world.

On those Monday afternoons, the bridge was full of breakthroughs. I’d be on my way home from my appointment; crossing the bridge, something would snap into place. I’d find clarity around a question, or a decision, or just a new ability to make sense of what I was feeling. It’s as though these roads we live on wear grooves in us, instead of the other way around.

Somewhere in those years, I decided I needed to write now. I was teaching teenagers, not fighting bulls or going on African safaris, but I was facing, for the first time, eternity, or the lack of it, every day.

In November, when the light grows shy, the cranes come. They stand in the fields on the north side of the road by Los Poblanos. Thanksgiving morning, four of them rise out of the cornfield just beyond the bike path and pedal into the air. I am on my way to meet my friend Martha for a hike. I am listening to Lori True singing “Go Now in Peace.” My heart is going all squinchy, as though those cranes are tugging at it and pulling me up into the air with them.

Thanksgiving morning is warm. When I meet Martha and her pug Saki at Elena Gallegos, I get Rusty on his leash, tug my sweatshirt off over my head in the sun, and head into Pino Canyon. The first part of the trail is relatively flat and exposed, and Rusty and Saki set a good pace. Soon we’re moving deeper into trees and climbing.

Part of my plan for this hike is for Martha to help me fix my life. “I’m not writing,” I had told her earlier in the week. “I’m spending every second working. I have to figure out how to change things.”

Martha is looking for change, too. A health scare in the middle of the night has left her with a sense of urgency. “I’m not waiting,” she told me. “If there is something to do, I need to do it now.” Our plan is to walk up the mountain and figure everything out.

About a mile or so in, a massive bolder flanks the trail. Sun-warmed and statuesque, it’s the sort of rock Tolkien could have turned into a hotel for hobbits. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we walked around the back and found a tiny door. Martha pauses by the rock as she always does, pats it, and says hello. We give the dogs some water and keep climbing.

In a little while, we reach the point on the trail where it feels as though the mountain has rotated; suddenly the highest ridge we can see is to the north rather than the east. I always find this spot disorienting. I’m looking out through the trees to the model train city far below when Martha tells me I should write about friendship. It’s unique, she says. It’s free of the obligations and expectations we get tangled in with every other kind of relationship. It’s profound, she says. Metaphysical. Holy.

I started writing today thinking I might have something to say about gratitude. I wanted to say that at this time of year, the leaves still hanging on the white plum in my front yard are the same color as the cranberries boiling on the stove. In late afternoon, the sun comes rushing through the window and transforms my office into a chapel.

A few weeks ago I thought I was writing a different essay. I was trying to figure out if I live in a body or as a body. Which part is me? Today, hiking up a mountain with a friend, it doesn’t feel like the right question. Something has been changing in me. It’s as though my edges are dissolving: the boulder, the cranes stepping into air, the light in my plum tree, the spots of snow by the side of the trail, lately it’s been feeling like all one thing. There’s not so much here and not here, less wondering about what’s me and what’s not-me.

In I and Thou, one of those books I read in college that bobs up into my consciousness now and then, Martin Buber says, The primary word I-Thou can be spoken only with the whole being. Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me. I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou: All real living is meeting.

So I am thinking about friendship, and the holy way in which we are connected to our friends, and the fact that all real living is meeting. Martha is laughing and remembering another hike where I fell dramatically into cactus when I remember that matter is neither created nor destroyed in this universe. I must have learned that phrase in ninth grade physical science, along with Bernoulli’s Law, “the faster a fluid moves the lesser is its pressure.” I remember those words devoid of any scientific understanding; I just like the way they sound.

Recently, though, I started wondering what it means that matter is neither created nor destroyed. I googled E=mc2 and read about the law of the conservation of mass-energy. I looked at pictures of people on space ships bouncing light off of mirrors and read that mass and energy are different forms of the same thing. I read about Einstein and Newton and Lavoisier and clicked through a web site that claims the First Law of Thermodynamics proves the existence of God. I read Martin Buber, who describes God as “the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.”

I don’t understand any of it. It’s Thanksgiving morning and Martha and I have climbed as high as we can for today so we turn around. I’m heading down a mountain with my dear friend, and Rusty is in a hurry. I’m trying not to fall as his energy tugs on my matter and light splashes down on us through branches and leaves. Martha keeps her camera close in case I cartwheel into another cactus.

There were a lot of years when I never thought about dying or loss or even really let myself fully feel the loss of people I loved. And then there were years when loss shook me like an earthquake, and I had to relearn to trust the ground to hold. For a while now, I think I’ve been in this other space: I get it. I face eternity or the lack of it every day. I know loss throws you to the ground like lightning, and at some point, I decided to love anyway.

That’s an empowering choice, maybe even a brave and ordinary one, but it didn’t take away the fear. I hate flying. I won’t ride roller coasters. Sometimes I can’t shake a huge sadness at the thought that someday everything will go on without me. It seems too much, really, to ask of a species: to hold in our minds at one time the knowledge that life is meaningful and that life ends.

Martha and I stop again by the boulder that either rose up or crashed down to this spot millions or billions of years ago. I’m thinking that matter and energy are just different forms of the same thing, and that they are neither created nor destroyed in this universe. Everything, it occurs to me, is transformation.

Maybe all I’m trying to say is that lately I don’t feel quite so temporary. Thanksgiving morning I walked up a mountain and I walked down a mountain and I drove across a bridge. I talked to a friend and I said hello to a boulder. Light kept hurrying to the earth. I am guessing the sun will come up again in the morning and streak gray and blue across this desert sky. Crows and geese and cranes will settle on the pond and the river will keep sidling south. Martin Buber says, “The present is not fugitive and transient, but continually present and enduring.”

Some mornings, I believe.

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Friday Afternoon at the Shredder

It’s Friday afternoon at 3:15 and I’m shredding troubles. All day I’ve started my classes by asking my students to write down anything that’s bothering them and seal it in an envelope. No one will read what you write, I promise. After a few minutes, they put their names on their envelopes and sign across the seal.  Then I ask them to trust me to hold them for a little while. It’s the first day of class. Every one of them hands me an envelope, and I stash them out of sight.

Summer is officially over. For a week, every conversation I have includes the words, “How was your summer?” and almost everyone answers with some form of “It was great, how about yours?”  We talk as though each of us existed in our own private Junes and Julys. I had my summer; you had yours. Now that school is back in session we reunite the space-time continuum and walk together through the same days.

Why do we think we can own the summer? In my summer it was hot, and the rain finally fell. I woke each morning without an alarm to a cacophony of birds perched on my deck and the steady breathing of Fred and Rusty, my two external heartbeats. I played piano and violin, cleaned my house, read, worked out, and went for long bike rides. You could draw a circle around my neighborhood with a radius of twenty miles and plot my summer inside it with room to spare. It was that kind of slow, simple summer.

We put our house up for sale in May, so it was also a summer of savoring. I spent many mornings running rags over bookshelves, scrubbing sinks, mopping tile. I rubbed lemon oil into cabinets, cleaned dust and dead bugs out of light fixtures, and planted a new pot of flowers by the front door. It’s funny how easy it is to fall in love with your house again when you are trying to sell it. If I ever write that book of poems, I’m going to call it: I Love It Here: Poems about Letting Go. It was a good summer.

In late July as summer ambled on, the ensemble I sing with sang a funny little song as the congregation processed out of the sanctuary. It’s number 714 in the Gather Hymnal, for any Catholics or Episcopalians who might be reading. It’s called “God Whose Purpose is to Kindle.”

Like many hymns and anthems, including “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore You” and “Rise, O Voices of Rhodesia” (who knew?), number 714 is set to the final movement of Beethoven’s ninth, the choral symphony. In the fourth movement, the chorus sings the words from Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 poem, Ode to Joy.

You know the music. I encountered it for the first time when I was eight or nine as “Bells are Ringing” in John W. Schaum’s Piano Course A—The Red Book. “Bells are ringing, hearts are singing, hymns of love and life worthwhile. All mankind with one great mind unites in free and joyful style.” If you are really interested, you can watch some little kid named Daniel practice it on YouTube. “Bells are Ringing” was by far my favorite piece in The Red Book. I would bang out those joyful chords every time I sat down to play. (As an aside, I don’t begrudge “Bells Are Ringing” its space in my memory, but do I really need to have the full text of “If a Woodchuck Could Chuck Wood” and “Motorcycle Cop’s on Guard” claiming neurons? Shouldn’t there be a backspace key?)

According to the tiny print at the bottom of the page in my hymnal, a man named David Elton Trueblood wrote the lyrics for this rendition. If Wikipedia is to be trusted (note to any students reading this essay: it’s not. I use it here because this isn’t a research paper on David Elton Trueblood. The quality of evidence needed varies with your purpose.), David Elton Trueblood (1900-1994) was a highly accomplished scholar, theologian, and academic who “wrote 33 books” and founded the Earlham School of Religion at Earlham College. He was an active Quaker.

Writing Quaker reminds me of an essay I meant to write this summer about the day with three Qs. One July afternoon as I was walking the dog, two quail and a small squirrel danced down the street before us. The quail would glance back at the squirrel and strut forward a few steps, and then the squirrel would sit up like a prairie dog, sniff, and follow them. Rusty did that tilted head thing at me, and I shrugged back to say I didn’t get it either, and we followed a few feet behind them for a hundred yards or so. We finally crossed the street only when we realized they weren’t planning either to scurry away from us or show us how to play the game. It was a good summer.

The reason #714 made me curious about Dr. Trueblood is that the lyrics he wrote for this universal anthem of joy chastise us for being joyful. He wants God to “overcome our sinful calmness” and forgive us for “our tranquility.” I thought if I learned about him I could figure out whether he was being deliberately ironic or simply should have stuck to his day job and left lyric writing to someone less heavily committed to rhyme.

Another way to say that is that I was taking it personally.

The Ode to Joy Beethoven made famous was German poet Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 poem. The singers open with these words, “Oh friends, not these tones. Let us raise our voices in more pleasing and more joyful sounds!” I love that plea.  At another point in the poem Schiller writes, “All the world’s creatures draw joy from nature’s breast.”  In the final, ringing lines, the chorus, looking for “the Creator,” sings “He must dwell beyond the stars.” It’s a powerful, hope-filled claim.

David Elton Trueblood replaced Schiller’s triumphal ending with these words: “Save us now from satisfaction when we privately are free, yet are undisturbed in spirit by our neighbor’s misery.” The last booming words we sing out (joyfully?) as the congregation files out of church and into another week in a weary world are “our neighbor’s misery.” What?

And then the song followed me home.

The last thing I did before leaving home for church the Sunday after we sang #714 was to read an article in the newspaper about a woman who was stoned to death in Syria.  She was silent, the article said, as men pelted her with stones until she died.

Oh friends, not these sounds.

It was a gruesome summer. The article I read just before I left home for church on Sunday said they put the woman in Syria in “a small hole.” That detail.

On another day, in a spot that falls inside that circle summer drew around my house, three teenagers, boys the same ages as the ones I teach, beat and killed two homeless men while they were sleeping.

Can you see why I wanted to know if David Elton Trueblood was being deliberately ironic? “How can you say it was a good summer?” he’s asking me. How can anyone sing about anything? It was a gruesome summer.

During the bloody summer of ’14, I imagine some disinterested biographer writing someday, while pain erupted across the planet and the very limits of civilization were being tested, she brimmed with inexplicable joy. She pulled the summer over her head like a down comforter on a cold night and snuggled in. She remembered the days when she could barely stand upright against the world, when sadness made her dizzy, but these weren’t those days. Ladle it out, her heart said of this welling joy, there’s plenty more.

And then, as the days kept passing while I tried to figure out what I was trying to say in this essay, Robin Williams died. I’m breaking a sweat doing Muay Thai kicks when his name catches my eye in a headline flashing across my iPad. A few minutes later my husband comes in to tell me the details, and it’s too much. Robin Williams. Syria. Gaza. Ukraine. Ferguson. Beheading. Another beheading. Oh, friends, not these words.

And somehow there it all is at the end of the summer. I’ve been trying to finish this essay for a month. Early every morning I tweak a few words, move a paragraph or two around, and then I hear the neighbor’s garage door open and realize I can see the branches of the white plum outside the window.  It’s time to stop writing and get ready for work. I still don’t know what it is I am trying to say to David Elton Trueblood about joy and misery.

Because the thing is, if I am going to be honest, I know there is a place deep in the pit of my stomach where I could go if I let go my grip on joy and not be certain of returning. You might call it “a small hole.” Because the thing is, while I am delighting in yet another beautiful, ordinary sunrise, someone is doing despicable things to someone else in my back yard or on the other side of the world. And it matters immensely if I know the person who is in pain, and it doesn’t matter at all if I know that person, and both of those things are true. Someday, I am sure, physicists or theologians will discover that we do not stop at the edges of our own bodies.

If David Elton Trueblood were standing before me, chastising me for joy in the face of my neighbor’s misery, I would say to him, “Oh friend, not these words.” We have to strike a deal, I think, with our neighbor’s misery. We have to figure out how to be with it without being swallowed by it. Somebody, I think, has to hang onto joy. Misery is not allowed to win.

At the end of class I ask my students if they want their envelopes back. They look at me like I’m crazy and shake their heads.  One boy says, a little incredulously, “It worked! I didn’t think about my problems at all.”

This is what I know how to do. It’s the end of the first week of a new school year. I feed the shredder these small envelopes full of pain and watch while it turns them into confetti. That feels like it should be a metaphor for something.

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Bad Whale Jokes

Recently, a good friend who for years was the only person who knew my English-teacher-dirty-little-secret remarked that reading Moby Dick is my white whale.

I’ll have to take her word for it.

There. I’ve said it. I’ve probably taken at least eight college courses that included the words “American” and “Literature” in some combination in their titles (add in a time period, or a gender indicator, or another identity marker and they can add up quickly). I probably took a class called “American Literature” in high school, too, judging by the fact that I wrote an essay on John Steinbeck. Somehow, though, I’ve never read Moby Dick.

I do not mean to imply that none of those classes had Moby Dick on the syllabus. I’m pretty sure at least two of them did. I can’t even remember why I didn’t read it—I’m a homework-doer; my parents had to buy me phonics workbooks when I was four so I could do homework before I ever even went to school. I wish I could claim some life calamity tore me away while the boat crashed and rocked on the sea (I’m assuming at some point the boat crashes and rocks on the sea—doesn’t it?) but if that happened, those calamities have been lost in some great ocean of memory; you might say they’ve drifted out to sea without me.

With the exception of Robin Hood and A Brief History of Time, I’ve finished every other book I’ve ever started. I can’t bear not to know how a story ends, even when the story is a sentence long. When my husband picks up the remote a few seconds too early while we’re watching Jeopardy, I lose it. But what happened when he traveled with his wife to London and a cabby told him he looked like—WHO?? Who did the cabby tell him he looked like?  I won’t remember in five minutes, but I can’t bear not to know right now.

It isn’t that I haven’t tried to read Moby Dick. I have wandered the streets of that little town on six or seven different occasions. I’ve stopped at The Spouter Inn, and I’ve spent the night in that crowded hammock with Ishmael and Queequeg a whole bunch of times. My problem, I think, begins in Chapter Two. Ishmael reaches New Bedford on Saturday night and is “disappointed upon learning that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.” That long weekend at The Spouter Inn (the Hotel California?) does me in every time. I just can never quite make it to the sea (Chapter 21—Going Aboard, I’m guessing?), which, from what I hear, is where the action is.

And lest you think I’ve got an old Eagles song running through my head, I should let you know that Chapter One actually has me singing Jimmy Buffett.  (The voice in my sister’s car calls him Jimmy Buf-fay, as in all you can eat seafood at Long John Silver’s on Saturday night. It’s funny every time. A few summers ago we drove from her home near Huntington, West Virginia, to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, telling the car to “Play Jimmy Buffett” every hour or so just to hear the car say “Ok, I’ll play Jimmy Buf-fay,” followed by, “Playing, Jimmy Buf-fay.” Trust me—it was funny every time. Even on the drive back.)

You probably know the part I’m talking about. Ishmael says, “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; [some other stuff about wanting to knock people’s hats off]…then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”  We’ve heard this before—he’s looking for some changes in attitude, changes in latitude.  Right? Am I getting this yet?

It’s not that I don’t know anything about Moby Dick. For the record, I remember taking a test on which I had a choice of essay questions between Moby Dick and some other book that I had duly read and annotated, and I chose to answer the question on Moby Dick.  I got an A on that test. I can’t explain that A, any more than I can explain the fact that I often get the chemistry questions on Jeopardy right.

I’m sure a lot of people go through life without ever reading Moby Dick, and I have nothing but respect for them. It’s just that when people learn you’re an English teacher, they make certain assumptions. My insecurity about this whale of a hole in my education grew a few years ago when I started teaching a class called “American Lit.” You can see how that could make for rough sailing.

Mostly, my strategy has been to avoid discussing Melville (“I’m not a big fan,” does a nice job of suggesting you knew the work at one point and dismissed it, without actually making that false claim). When avoidance has failed, I’ve simply changed the subject. There are plenty of other writers about whom I can talk with some semblance of intelligence. It’s pretty easy with a little practice to turn a conversation from whale hunting to big game hunting or bull fighting. See how I did that? A nice bit of showing off with the correct choice of an object pronoun followed by a quick feint toward Hemingway, and no one suspects that the English teacher with whom they are in conversation is a fraud. (I threw that whom in for good measure.)

The whale almost pulled me under recently when an ambitious student got excited about comparing Moby Dick to Star Trek. I leaned on my more socially respectable ignorance of the TV show (or was it a movie?) to justify my inability to be of much help to him. It bothered me, though, in a grain of sand irritating an oyster sort of way.

A few months ago at a graduation party, my insecurity erupted like seawater from a blowhole. I was engaged in conversation with the head of my school (my boss’s boss, if you want to get technical) our college counselor, my husband, and her husband, who, for some inexplicable reason began explaining why Moby Dick is THE AMERICAN NOVEL. I don’t believe in writing in all caps like that, but it seems the simplest way to express the weight of those words bearing down on me.

I had several choices. I could stay quiet (a challenge if you know me, but I can do it when I dig my oars deep); I could jump up in mid-sentence and ask if anyone wanted me to see if they had cut the cake yet (foiled by the graduate appearing just then—what were the chances?—and asking that very question); or I could come clean. My secret about the whale was throbbing in me like that heart Poe stashed beneath the floorboards, and as Melville says, “Yes, these eyes are windows.” I was sure they knew my secret and had staged this whole conversation, maybe even this graduation and this party, to draw a confession from my tell-tale heart. I took a deep breath and grabbed the whale by its horns, or flukes, or barnacles, or whatever protrudes from that great white preponderance of flesh and metaphor. (Isn’t there some chapter where I’ll learn what protrudes from that great white preponderance along with everything else I ever wanted to know about whale anatomy?)

“I’ve never read it,” I told them, firing my puny harpoon.

I’d like to say a hush fell over the whole party as my students and colleagues lost all respect for me, but I had to speak. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” as they say. (Not Melville?) I’ve spent too many years sailing away from this damn whale with the same zeal that I’ve heard what’s his name sails toward it.

What actually happened was that the college counselor’s husband said something about how the book is about the relentless, disastrous pursuit of something meaningless.  That’s why, he said, the book is THE AMERICAN NOVEL.

“Oh,” I thought. Maybe I should read it. We left the party not long after, but the conversation has dogged me all summer.

Having confessed once publicly, I now find myself confessing all over. I’m like the convert or the new non-smoker who can’t stop telling people things they really don’t want to hear. “Hi, I’m Heather. I’ve never read Moby Dick.” It’s like I won’t be free of this albatross around my neck until I tell my story to some stranger.  (A wedding guest, say. I read that one.)

Recently one of my confessors sent me a cartoon. The drawing is of a woman (who looks a little like me if you lose the sensible shoes) lying on her psychiatrist’s couch. “I’m a liar and a fake,” she says. “Moby Dick for Dummies is as far as I got.”

It’s tempting.

When I was in seventh or eighth grade, we drove from Pittsburgh to Duck, North Carolina, to spend a week with relatives in a rented house on the sea. Those were the days when cars still broke down, and early on, ours filled with fog. When the car was fixed, the sky filled with fog, and it was hard to know just where we were or where we were going. Later there was a storm and a wrong turn or two, and some tense moments as the drive we’d woken before dawn to get an early start on stretched deep into the night.

But we got there. Duck in the late seventies was a quiet peninsula with few roads and beach houses tucked in among dunes and sea oats. What I mean by that is that you can drive up and down the same dark roads for a long time without finding Finisterre, the romantically named house for which we were looking. The other thing I mean by that is that it was dark, and the realty office wouldn’t be open until morning.

I can’t remember how long we wandered lost, searching for the end of the earth, but at some point, for some reason, (perhaps because one or the other of my parents was feeling like knocking someone’s hat off) we stopped the car, got out, and walked onto the beach. It was, as one great American writer I’ve heard about put it, “a very dark and dismal night.”

The reason I remember this moment so vividly isn’t because I saw the ocean, but because I couldn’t see it. The stars were black and the ocean was invisible. We could hear it and smell it and sense it, but all we could see of the huge dark water was a tiny string of foam snaking up the beach.

Melville describes how I felt at that moment (and how I often feel) when he says, “..the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open…”

What a line!

I’m on page 53. I’ll let you know if I make it out to sea.

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“Who made the grasshopper?”

I have graded my last papers, taken the posters off my walls, sorted my old files, and gone to bed the past few nights without setting my alarm. If that doesn’t clinch it, I just woke up on the couch from a nap, I’m writing a new blog post at last, and I’m quoting Mary Oliver in the title. It’s summer!

I ended this school year in love with my students, in love with my profession, and thinking about some of the things I learned in high school. When I was a junior at Bethel Park Senior High, I served as the school district’s first (non-voting) “Student on the School Board.” It was something like 1981, and the district had decided to implement “activity fees” for extracurricular activities. All of them—think National Honor Society, Concert Choir, Key Club–no one was exempt, and I was outraged. I led the student revolt against the fees, which culminated in presenting a sixteen-page report at a public board meeting.

It was big news. We filmed a “speak-out” message with the local public television station, and one Saturday morning my mother handed me the phone (you know, those ones that were attached to the wall in the kitchen with a long curly cord) so I could talk to a reporter from the Associated Press.

Heady times. Seventeen is a good age to have a cause, to fight for something with utter certainty that you are right. The board presentation went great.

My political education began the next day.

Every single board member made a point of taking me aside to tell me that they agreed with me. They had been convinced, they said, that the strong extracurricular activities in the district were a selling point for people looking for a new home. They agreed that imposing a fee on a poor student to enable that student to sing in a choir was antithetical to the values of public education. They agreed that the fees collected would be big enough to prohibit a student from participating but too small to make any noticeable impact on anyone’s property taxes. They agreed, in short, that the argument was strong and had convinced them that the fees were not going to do anyone any good.

Then came the punch line, or maybe I should say the punch. Every single board member voted to impose the fees. Every one of them explained, as though it were the most rational position in the world, that they didn’t have a choice. The elderly voters in the district wouldn’t be happy/vote for them again if they didn’t pretend to help them by imposing the fees.

My adult, teacher self wants to say to those people, be careful what you teach a teenager.  The cynicism was too much for me.  I didn’t vote for years.

But wallowing in ancient outrage is not where I planned to go with this essay. I meant to write about grasshoppers. They came out of the earth by the millions a few weeks ago.

As my dog and I walk down the street, they fly up from our feet like little dust clouds (remember Pigpen?).  They part for us, wafting up and settling five or ten feet up the road. It’s as though someone is bedecking our path as we walk. (And yes, I really mean bedecking–it’s just that sort of old-fashioned, ceremonial connotation that I need here.) The grasshoppers are turning our ordinary walks around the neighborhood into processions. We are attended in our walks by leaping clouds of glory.

Rusty didn’t like them at first. He’d swat at them with his paws as they leaped too close to his head or snap at them like travelling snacks, but he’s used to them now. He accepts their homage, confident that he deserves it, trotting smartly, head up and gait stately.

Curiously, unlike the tent-worm summers of my childhood, or the more recent Albuquerque moth infestations, or the Mormon crickets on a fire-closed highway between Reno and Jackpot (where we stopped for hours and watched the blacktop crawl), I like this plague.

A news site out of Philadelphia writes, “People in Albuquerque are on edge as millions of grasshoppers invade the city.” Really? People in Philadelphia are talking about our grasshoppers? List me as one ‘Querque who is not on edge.

I have to say I saw them coming, although I didn’t know the earth well enough to know what I was seeing. A week before the grasshoppers swarmed, I told my husband the sycamore in the backyard was dying. There was a sparseness in the leaves; the yard was a little more sun dappled than seemed right for late spring.

Extra birds were also swooping and diving and chattering around us. We see lots of doves and robins and sparrows and finches, but big birds with yellow bellies were flying back and forth from rooftop to rooftop, something small and deep orange flashed and settled in my neighbor’s mulberry, and big black speckled birds and swallows were arguing and dipping low over the empty house on the corner. All sorts of bird sounds I couldn’t identify were singing me awake each morning.

And now, all the neighborhood birds, hungry these many drought years, are growing fat on grasshoppers. Mary Oliver asks who made them and has a beautiful line about their jaws, and ee cummings wrote a grasshopper poem, too, but it’s too hard to reproduce it here. Keats in his poem “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” gets it right when he says, “he takes the lead in summer luxury,– he has never done with his delights”–

Rusty and I are laughing in that grasshopper delight when we turn into the driveway and see something I’ve never seen before. A robin is picking a fight with a bunny under the piñon tree. The robin flies at the rabbit’s head and startles the rabbit, who hops back and freezes, hops and freezes. I don’t know if I am watching animals at play in the world or if the robin is hoping to eat this bunny.

So here’s where it turns out I’m going with this. Rusty and I stop in the driveway and watch for a few minutes. When the robin notices us, she gets wary, hops back a few steps, and freezes. The rabbit ignores us; she’s holding still, pretending to be invisible. After a few minutes, Rusty gets restless and makes a move toward the front door. The robin flies back about ten yards to perch on a low wall, and the bunny, sensing her chance, takes off across the street.

I can’t help thinking about what we saw. Was that rabbit really prey to a rogue robin, or are these just two creatures who share my front yard and don’t always get along? Is there a nest of baby rabbits under the sage bush and a nest of baby robins up in the white plum? Maybe nothing at all momentous was happening under my piñon.

I can’t shake the feeling, though, that Rusty and I helped shape the world. What if our most casual and unintentional actions helped save a little fuzzy life? Or maybe I’m wrong to be rooting for the rabbit; what if the rabbit were the aggressor? What if our simple action of walking up the driveway determined whose babies lived and whose didn’t that morning?

And here’s my point, at last. There are people in the world who have just that sort of power, people who could make intentional decisions that might just keep someone else’s children alive, who keep finding excuses not to make those decisions.

I’m grateful to Richard Martinez, whose son was killed in the most recent shooting and stabbing rampage, for saying he doesn’t want sympathy from politicians. “I don’t give a shit that you feel sorry for me,” he’s widely reported as saying. “Get to work and do something.”

“Don’t you dare,” is what I want to say to all those school board politicians in the House and Senate who agree that gun laws should be strengthened but rationalize inaction out of fear of political repercussions. Don’t you dare pretend you don’t have a choice, as you cede your actual power to the NRA’s threatened power. Don’t you dare tell a grieving parent that you know they are right but you can’t vote their way.

In Pittsburgh school kids paint little fishes by street sewers to remind people that their actions have consequences. Little kids know you still own the garbage that ends up downstream.

Keats says, “The Poetry of earth is never dead,” and Mary Oliver says “I don’t know exactly what prayer is,” and Richard Martinez says, “I don’t give a shit that you feel sorry for me.”

It’s summer, and the world is frothy with grasshoppers. Robins and rabbits are fighting in my front yard. The earth keeps swelling with grief and glory.

Let’s all be careful what we teach the teenagers.

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Driving

I suppose my oldest brother has said wise things before, but if he has, I wasn’t listening. Last week when he picked me up at the airport in Charleston, West Virginia, he said two things that struck me at the time as being worthy of remembering.

I can’t remember the first one. The second one was, “You can’t drive someone else’s car.”

Often when my husband and I are going somewhere we have the following conversation.

Heather: That car in front of us has his brake lights on.

Fred: He shouldn’t. The light is green.

Heather: Nevertheless, it will hurt if we drive into him.

Fred: I don’t know why he has his brakes on.

Heather: It doesn’t seem important to me that you know why he has his brakes on. What seems important to me is that you put your brakes on so we don’t crash into him.

Now, a critical reader might note that the fact that I have time to use the word “nevertheless” indicates that the danger I’m imagining is less than imminent. I suspect that’s what Fred would tell you. My ability to imagine danger is both a genetic and cultivated gift, but you’ll have to read some older posts if that’s what you are interested in. Today I’m thinking about driving.

When we were little, my friend Joanne would feel carsick every time my dad drove us somewhere. I always felt safe in the backseat of the Pontiac, but my dad did have a habit of accelerating toward stop signs and then stopping quickly. An engineer, he taught me that you have more traction if you accelerate through the curves, so we’d do that, too. Joanne and I would sway into each other in the backseat as we veered off Clifton onto Dashwood. And then there was that other spot on Dashwood, if you came down the hill from Irishtown, where your stomach would do that jumpy roller coaster thing if you could convince the driver to take the bump without slowing down. I loved being a passenger.

Today as my brother and I take the curves easily and drive across the bridge into southern Ohio, I’m mostly managing not to help him drive. We are on our way to visit our sister and our mother.

When I was learning to drive, my father offered me the choice of learning with him and fighting a lot, or letting my sister teach me. I opted for my sister. She stayed calm even when I drove the car into her boyfriend’s house in Gibsonia. I passed on this calm approach to my step-daughter when she picked me over her father to teach her. She still laughs about me saying things like, “You might want to accelerate now that you are in the middle of the intersection so that truck doesn’t barrel into us.” When I wanted to learn how to drive a stick shift, my husband left town and one of my best friends bunny hopped around parking lots all over Albuquerque with me. I never really thought about driving being this thing passed on between women before, but I like that thought.

My mother never learned to drive. The story I heard is that my dad tried to teach her once and it didn’t go well, so she never tried again. As she got older and the world changed around her, we would often encourage her to learn. I remember once she told me that she couldn’t drive because she could never live with herself if she ran over a child. (See “both genetic and cultivated” above.)

I hardly ever visit my mother. For the past few years she has lived in a nursing home in Kentucky, many years into a lonely ride with Alzheimer’s. The people there are kind to her, my sister visits her all the time, and her roommate, who is also losing track of her memories, expresses herself solely via compliments. “Those are some nice shoes you’re wearing,” she says, as soon as she comes in the room. I can barely say thanks before she says, “That sure is a nice purse.” She has enormous clear blue eyes, and I’m not sure how this game goes.

“You have beautiful eyes,” I compliment her back, and we go several rounds before my sister laughs. “You can’t win,” she says. Eventually my mother’s roommate sits on her bed, tells me to take her shoes off, and falls asleep. I hope that if I lose my mind before my body wears out, my dementia manifests itself in such a gentle way.

It has been years since my mother has spoken at all, or recognized any of us in any conventional way. One time when she was still speaking a little, she recognized me as my sister Meg, who died in 1990. My mother’s eyes are all that speak now, which is either heartwarming or heartbreaking, depending on whether she is happy (my last visit) or suffering (this one). A recent stroke has taken away her ability to walk, so she sits upright in a wheel chair now, held in that position by what looks like one of the aprons she wore in lighter years.

After a few days with my sister I flew off the mountain in Charleston and headed out the next morning to the Taos Shortz Film Festival with a bunch of teenagers. My friend had one carful of kids and I followed her around through the week in my Subaru. The teens in my car laughed as my friend buzzed through yellow lights, leaving us behind to find our way without her. “You can’t drive someone else’s car,” I told them.

We watched one hundred eleven movies in four days. One afternoon, almost all of the movies were either about people in varying stages of living with Alzheimer’s or about children who were being horribly mistreated by the adults in their lives.

At some point that afternoon, crying in a dark theater, I realized just how little love it takes to barrel through pain. I also realized how true my brother’s words are. You can’t drive someone else’s car; you have to love the world as it is.

No one expected my mother to live long after my father died; it was hard to imagine either of them without the other. I like to think it’s possible that my dad has been trying to get my mother to join him for a while. She never moved quickly. Anytime we left the house she went through a series of steps that strike me now as more incantatory than practical. She would check the stove, then the locks on the front windows, then turn on the radio. She’d get halfway to the car only to run back to turn on a few upstairs lights so it looked like we were home, after which she’d have to check the locks again.  Sometimes we’d drive around the block to make sure we hadn’t left a window open. That was the ritual to leave the house for an hour or two. I can only imagine how many things will have to be in order before she leaves for the last time. “Let me just make sure I turned the stove off,” I can hear her saying, as she runs back into the house to check one last thing.

I want to imagine my father growing impatient. He is waiting in the driveway with the engine running, calling, in a sing-song, never actually irritated voice, “Cathy, we’re going to be late.” One of these days she’ll come skipping down the front steps at last and get in the car.  If she wants to check one more thing he’ll convince her that everything is taken care of.  He’ll turn on the radio and pull out of the driveway. If an old song comes on, he’ll turn to her and say, “Do you remember this one?”

She won’t, and he’ll explain where they were when they heard it for the first time. Time and love will grow wide around them. I’ll be standing in the front yard waving until I can’t see them any longer, but they won’t look back. My dad will accelerate into the curve, and they will drive off into the unknown world together.

 

 

 

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Unlocking the Doors

Every morning when I get to my school, the first thing I do is to unlock two doors.  The first opens into my classroom from inside the building we call the schoolhouse. The second door leads out of my classroom from a wall of windows onto a grassy quad. Most days while I teach, the quad is filled with kids playing Frisbee and waving lacrosse sticks while teachers’ dogs run after them.

I used to unlock only the inside door. Kids could leave my classroom through the outside door, but somebody had to let them in if they wanted to come in from outside. I didn’t have any real reason for this routine; it was just a habit I’d fallen into. I started unlocking the outside door every morning about a year ago after we had “active shooter training.”

I don’t remember everything that I’m supposed to do if one of those lacrosse sticks were to turn into a gun one day. I do remember that I am supposed to keep my door locked if one my students has gotten trapped outside and wants to come in. I’m supposed to assume at that moment that the outside child is a threat and cast my flimsy protective spell over the children already in my care. I do not remember how I am supposed to live with a decision like that for the rest of my life.

The other thing I remember from active shooter training is that it won’t happen to me. That’s the first and last thing they tell you. Statistically, it will never happen to you.

I didn’t get the “It won’t happen to me” gene. I got the ability to imagine the worst thing that could happen in any situation and the desire to write, which means I live by indulging my imagination. Sitting in a baseball stadium? I’m hoping the upper deck won’t fall on me. Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge? I’m hoping the earthquake holds off till I get to the other side. Riding the tram up the Sandias? I’m hoping no small planes buzz through the cables today. Wading in placid waters off Cocoa Beach? I’m scanning the horizon for a tsunami and keeping an eye on the spot, twenty yards out, where frenzied fish are jumping in the air.

I didn’t get like this all by myself. When I lived on Lake Michigan for a few years after college, my mother sent me a Reader’s Digest article about a rare amoeba that lives in the Great Lakes and might already have swum into my ear and lodged in my brain. When I learned to drive, she advised me to look under the car before I got in, just in case someone was lying under it waiting to grab my ankles. I excel at spotting danger where it isn’t lurking.

Not long ago, I walked into my classroom to find Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” written on my whiteboard. Yeats says: “Things fall apart; The centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

I had a few moments of not knowing what to do. Should I be worried? Is this a warning? Is this one of those signs that everyone can tell is a sign once something bad has happened?

Yeats says: “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

To teach in a high school is to walk a fine line between over and under-reacting.

Joy and pain hold hands in school; they walk around as raw and intense as the week’s newest couple. Just last week in a fifteen-minute span I learned that kids were picking on a child I care about and then watched about ten big basketball boys surround my colleague in a goofy affectionate birthday hug. They carried flowers and had even dressed alike for the occasion.

On any given day in a school, life is beautiful. On any given day in a school, life is hard.

Of course, there’s nothing strange about finding odd things written on my whiteboard. Usually I’ll find a hastily drawn portrait, or a TARDIS[1], or maybe a few random words, like “I wish I knew the answer!” Last week, next to two cartoon figures, someone had drawn what I thought was an ice cream sundae. Friday afternoon, talking to a student after school, she pointed out my error. “Why would there be flies buzzing around an ice cream sundae?” She asked.

Oh.

Remember how it felt when you first learned how to pump your legs on a swing? That’s the feeling I’m craving when I get home from school and hear there was another school shooting, this time in Roswell. I am writing angry letters to the editor in my head and I know that the most important thing I can do is not hear the rest of the story. I put my sneakers on and head out for a run.

The trail is loud. Usually when I’m here this open space is largely deserted. Today, three middle school boys are playing with a toddler’s plastic ride-in car. The car is complaining loudly about carrying such big kids, whose heads and arms are sticking out the sides, and the boys are screaming and laughing. They’ve got the crows worked up, so all around me the air is exploding in caws and guffaws.

It’s not fair how the world tricks you into joy while you know how badly other people are suffering. A mile in, and I’m already feeling good. I’m running a diagonal into the sun, scooping the eastern edge of the flood plain, inhaling sky. Down below me on the bike trail, kids are swooshing down the hill on skateboards and scooters. A small moon rides just over my left shoulder, and all of Albuquerque stretches below me. Straight ahead, the sun at eye level, I am blind.

I’m trying a new breathing pattern. An article in Runner’s World says that if I inhale for three paces and exhale for two, I’ll minimize the impact of landing and run injury free for years. It’s too soon to tell if I’m running more safely, but focusing on my breathing feels good.

Isn’t it funny how the rhythm of the lungs is expand/contract, expand/contract? We breathe air in, we blow it out, over and over again, so automatically we hardly think about this quotidian proof that we’re still alive. According to Walker Meade in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, we take almost eight and a half million breaths in a year. I remember watching my father-in-law breathe after he had his stroke, how the air moved in and out for hours, how the spaces between each breath grew longer through the night.

I’ve rounded the curve, so I can see again. Isn’t it funny how the rhythm of the heart is also expand/contract, expand/contract, expand/contract? Blood rushes in to heal or hurt or fill us, and then we push it away and rest a while. I’m thinking about all of this as my footsteps rise and fall in the soft dirt. I don’t like to run on arroyos after dark, and the sun is falling into the west mesa.  I’m breathing hard. I’m chasing the light home.

The morning that Yeats appeared on my board, I shook off the questions in my head. I decided that I would be adding to the things that are wrong in the world if I found a poem and labeled it threat instead of gift. I did what I think most English teachers would do. I worked it into my lesson plan.

I didn’t want to write about Roswell. I didn’t want to write about that other school shooting that happened right after Roswell, or about that shooting in a mall near DC. I already wrote about school shootings once before, and there is something obscene in writing about them again.

Right now it’s six a.m., and I’ve been unable to finish this essay for too many days. I’m going to head into school and unlock two doors. It’s not defiance, exactly. I’m making deposits in a bank; I’m accumulating proof that the world makes sense against that day, which I’m doing my best to believe will never come, when nothing makes sense. I’ll spend the day loving and teaching every sweet face that walks through those unlocked doors.

With any luck, we’ll all put another good day in the bank.

[1] Reader alert: One of the many things I’ve learned as a high school teacher is that if I have no idea what students are talking about, they are probably talking about Dr. Who. That logic will work for you, too, if you are wondering what a TARDIS is.

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Craning My Neck

I recently changed my Facebook profile picture to a photo of my house on Christmas Eve, decked out in lights and luminaria. It’s a peaceful picture, but it already feels so last year. Soon I’ll take the tree down and head back to work for another semester. I was trying to imagine a new photo, and I thought I might take a picture of my piano with a novel (currently Everything is Illuminated—finally!), my laptop, my violin and mandolin, and my running shoes sitting on the bench. If I were just starting my blog today, I think, I might call it “Read-Write-Run-Play.” (Or maybe that’s in the small print after “Live”—it doesn’t quite capture Love and Leave. Or maybe it just means I have too many hobbies, or that I still haven’t learned to resist the lure of resolutions. I have long loved Rilke, but I would forget the line “You must change your life” if I could.)

Last night showing a few friends around my house I took them to the deck off the upstairs loft. From where I live on the west mesa, you can see most of Albuquerque stretching below; lights shimmer thickly north and south from downtown to Placitas, east all the way up to Tramway; the tram blinks a solitary light at the crest, and a dark trail runs horizontally through it all, imagining the bosque and the river trickling through the trees.

Vantage points matter. My husband and I have been spending the past few months standing on lots for the second time in our marriage. We are trying to downsize, and we are determined to land on a lot with a view. I don’t know why it matters what I can see from my home, but it does. A number of years ago forest fires across the West hid the city and the mountains from my view. For weeks, looking to the northeast, all I could see was gray. It didn’t matter that I knew that the mountains were there inside the smoke, that I could imagine their outline and the way the clouds move against them; I found it surprisingly hard to be happy. Where you stand changes what you see.

High up in the wall in my family room, three tall windows loom like living landscape paintings in Hogwarts. Some nights, if you look up at the right time, you’ll see a plane fly by. Other times, clouds drift from one window to the next. Sometimes, the moon fills a window like a familiar song or an old memory and grabs my breath as I’m doing the dishes.

IMG_2029About a week ago I woke up one morning needing to see cranes. I dragged my husband to the open space off Montano Road where I knew we’d find them. Late in the afternoon, I felt them tugging at me again. I pulled on my running shoes and headed back to Los Poblanos and spent about forty-five minutes running on dirt roads and ditch banks while cranes meandered through the fields around me. At one point, two cranes crossed the road no more than five feet in front of me. To my back stood the Sandias, framing the city. Straight ahead to the southwest waited the volcanos. And everywhere, like water, blue sky poured itself out and lapped around me.

I’m mapping my coordinates, I think, imagining what’s behind, taking in what’s ahead, aware of my breathing and my feet, each step pressing firmly into easy ground. Some magic days the planet presses back, and every step is easy. A plane flies silently overhead, chalking contrails in the sky.

There is something peaceful about watching cranes walk. Their knees bend backwards while their forelegs stretch forward—it’s as though every step is past, future, and present at the same time. N. Scott Momaday in The Way to Rainy Mountain describes tortoises as “going nowhere in the plenty of time.” I’d like to have written that line. Every spring the cranes fly away from Albuquerque, and late every fall as the light leans away, they come back.

I have no eyes for the small birds when the cranes come. I hear them whistling overhead and notice them thickening the telephone wires, but I don’t crane my head to study them; I don’t wonder what that flash of yellow moving in the cottonwood might be. Later when I look at the photos I took while I ran, I’ll see two cranes edging away from me, one leaning just slightly toward the other, and two girls on horseback in the background. I never knew the girls or the horses were there.

When I drive back over the bridge at dusk, all the water birds are gone from the river. The sky is just starting to turn that dusky mauve pink that will forever be the color of Albuquerque to me. A hot air balloon is deflating in a field to the south just by my school, where so far there isn’t a Walmart. The top is open, so I’m looking through the balloon where silhouettes of people seem stamped on the far side.

Mary Oliver, in Winter Hours, writes, “All narrative is metaphor.” A few weeks ago, my husband and I stood on a lot to judge the quality of the view. Before we could get back in the car, we had to spend ten minutes picking goatheads from our shoes and pant legs. We decided that wasn’t our lot.

The light was something like the light tonight, though, and for some reason I found myself thinking about my neighbor’s dog. One night last March our neighbors were out of town and their dog was alone. Late into the night he barked and howled and called. Finally, on a whim, my husband took our golden retriever Rusty next door, let him in the neighbor’s gate, and left him there to play. Surprised, distracted, no longer alone in the night, Jax stopped barking. Even after Fred brought our dog back home a half hour later, Jax stayed quiet. Now we do this regularly when the neighbors are away. Just that little bit of contact, someone to run with in the night, drives despair away; sleep comes.

It’s the beginning of the year again, and humans are still running laps on a spinning planet. I love that the cranes bend in both directions and hover in the present with each step, but tonight with no moon in the window, I’m thinking more about what happens when they fly. They rise above the world, changing their vantage point. They see the fields fall away, stretch their necks  into clear blue, and watch the world grow small below them. Huge delicate wings agitate the air.

Once in a while, I like to imagine, when the sky is pink and the earth is spinning slowly, they capture a sweet current, lean into it, and soar.

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Enough

I woke up this morning with a gospel song playing in my head. “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, oh Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer…”

I’ve been in a bad mood this week. My natural state is calibrated well toward the joy end of the dial; happiness usually comes easily. But something has been bothering me all week, some shadow standing between me and the sun, and I haven’t been able either to figure it out or to walk out of its shade.

Sometimes in the morning when I write, I find myself following random trails, bouncing from memory to story to inane prattle about my day. I might do that for a week or two, until one morning I wake up in a bad mood with a gospel song in my head and realize that for the past two weeks I’ve been writing about need.

November 10. I’m writing about how much work and how little time I have. Mid-thought I stop whining long enough to ask, what do I have enough of?

November 20. I’ve been thinking about something that happened at least ten years ago. I was in a public restroom in a mall in Lubbock when a woman in a wheelchair asked me if I could come into the handicapped stall with her to help her.

I had no idea what she needed or how to help, and some part of me that is too well trained in fear wondered for a moment if this were some new kind of scam, and if I were about to be mugged. Fortunately, more developed parts of my brain prevailed, and I smiled and said sure. I followed her in, did what she asked, and in a few minutes we were both washing our hands, exchanging pleasantries, and leaving each other’s lives forever.

It was an unexpected intimacy, and I thought about it for a long time. I wondered what sort of courage it takes to ask a stranger to help you use the bathroom in a shopping mall. I wondered what sort of grace had let me be chosen.

November 22. Thinking about the woman in Lubbock has me thinking about my mother-in-law. In 2007 when Ann was dying in our downstairs bedroom, I grew adept at helping with bathroom details. The hospice worker told me what to do and somehow my mother-in-law and I managed.

Late one morning the doorbell rang. It was Mary, the hospice social worker. I had just made a pot of coffee, so we all sat down at the kitchen table. Fred and Mary talked about how my mother-in-law was doing and what the doctor had said most recently and about the nurse who had been by earlier.

Then, this woman I had never met turned to me, looked into my eyes, right at the spot that was hurting, and said, “And how are you?”

We had moved my mother-in-law back into our house on the day we got home from my father’s funeral in Pittsburgh. We should have done it sooner; that day we drove straight from the airport to her house and brought her home with us. She had stopped bathing some time before, we learned, and for the first few weeks she wouldn’t move out of a chair in the living room. We had taken to opening windows in November and lighting scented candles before it finally occurred to us to call Hospice.

Hospice is an amazing thing. Strangers flooded our house, helped us manage things we couldn’t possibly manage: personal care assistants coaxed Ann into the shower, a doctor diagnosed her illness and dispensed medicine she didn’t want to take and oxygen she refused to use, nurses applied salves and showed me how to help her in the bathroom. There was even a social worker who stopped by from time to just to make sure we were all still keeping it together.

I hadn’t met Mary until that morning when we had coffee. I fled the house early each day, happy to escape to work, a place where everyone showered regularly and no one was dying. If you’d have asked me then, in those months right after my father died while my mother-in-law was dying, how I was doing, I would have told you I was fine.

And then this woman I didn’t know asked me over a casual cup of coffee if I was ok, and I didn’t tell her I was fine, and it felt good, weeping at my kitchen table, to say “I’m not ok,” and to let this stranger help.

November 28. I’m thinking about how long it has been since I’ve posted an essay on my blog and having a quiet Thanksgiving. Family comes Friday evening, so we’re saving the big meal for Saturday.  I made a pot roast today, and I’ll be baking pies tomorrow when everyone else is eating leftovers. I have to say I’m sort of enjoying the extra days of anticipation.

My dad used to tell this story about having enough. One time, he said, he was complaining to his brother. “There’s never any extra,” he told my uncle. “Just when you get the dryer paid off the dishwasher goes on the fritz. When the dishwasher is paid off, the car needs work. There’s always just exactly enough.” My dad would pause here before relating my uncle’s response.  Apparently Uncle Larry looked at my dad for a minute, considering his words. “That’s neat,” he said.

November days are getting shorter, but these aren’t dark days. I still haven’t really figured out why I was in such a bad mood this week, or why this gospel song keeps dogging me.  Walking the dog late in the afternoon I’m thinking about apple pie and my Aunt Ann’s cranberry orange relish; I’m thinking about need and about abundance. I’m thinking about how maybe all of us are broken and glued back together, and about the odd beauty in all those cracks and jagged edges.

As the dog and I turn the corner, the sun darkens.  Two crows are chasing each other across the sky. They swoop and dive and jabber, their bodies turning the sun on and off as they fly in and out of its path.  I look up and watch them dance. I don’t notice that I’m humming, or that my shoulders are softening, or that the glue in my cracks is growing firm again, but the dog does, and he’s not about to stand around and watch while a couple of crows have all the fun.  He’s all wag and bustle; he pants and prances; his whole body is shouting JoyJoyJoy or maybe it’s NeedNeedNeed–it’s all the same big blur of fur, and it’s tugging on the leash right now, pulling hard for home.

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Thief

Last Thursday, after living the first six years of his life as a largely law-abiding citizen, (I’m not counting the time he ate our rug or mistook my slippers for his; those early crimes were committed before he reached the age of reason), Rusty tossed respectability to the curb like an over chewed bone and embarked on a life of crime.

I’ve never seen him happier.

The incident took place on a drizzly afternoon. We were enjoying our usual walk when I stopped to talk for a moment with a friendly older man washing his car. He must have felt the need to explain to anyone who walked by why he was hosing down his Honda on one of Albuquerque’s rare rainy days, so he shrugged, grinned, and said, “I’m from Portland,” which I took to mean “I know this looks like rain to you, but trust me, it isn’t raining.”

The piece de resistance was an ordinary green tennis ball. Rusty has had lots of them over the years. They sit ignored in the corner in his toy basket until his friend Circuit comes over and carries all the toys outside. Rusty never takes the toys outside, because he doesn’t believe he can fit through his doggy door with anything in his mouth.  He thinks Circuit is pretty cool for having this supernatural ability.

Anyway, Rusty has never cared much about any toy. He’ll play ball with you, if by playing ball you mean Rusty gets the ball, trots around a little, and waits for you to come try to take it from him. He’s never really understood the point of the traditional fetch game; it makes much more sense to him for the human to do the running.

I laughed with the car washing man and Rusty seemed to be in a hurry for once to get going, so we continued up the hill. I kept asking him what the big rush was, if he had big plans for the evening, but he was holding his head kind of funny and not answering me.

I’m not naïve to the fact that my dog can be sneaky. Rusty wasn’t even a year old the first time he faked having a goat head in his paw. We go on a lot of walks and we live in New Mexico, so we encounter a lot of goat heads.  (And if you are not from New Mexico, and you are actually imagining the head of a goat stuck in my golden retriever’s paw, just go with that. It couldn’t be any more painful than what I actually mean.) We have a system, Rusty and I.  He comes to a dead stop, lifts the affected paw as though he’s on point, and I, loyal servant and companion, kneel and remove the diabolical sticker.

Only this one time, there wasn’t a sticker. He just wanted some extra time to sniff out the new dog on the other side of the fence. I’m not making this up. After I fruitlessly searched his paw for a few minutes, he admitted he was faking it. He took his paw back and pointed with his head to the fence, where the now thoroughly sniffed dog was rustling around. “Sorry, I just really wanted to sniff him,” he told me, as clearly as if he had used words. Then he swung his head forward, saying, “We can go now,” so we did. I remember wondering at the time what else my dog was pulling over on me.

As he pulled me up the hill on the day he became a thief, he wouldn’t look at me. He cocked his head to the right when we reached the top to tell me which way he wanted to turn, and that’s when I saw the green felt gleaming between his teeth.

He ignored my half-hearted “drop it,” and kept going, for the first time ever sniffing absolutely nothing for an entire block. Every now and then he’d look over his shoulder at me, as if to be sure I understood that something important was happening. As soon as we got home, he ran into the house, down the hall, through the kitchen, and out his dog door into the backyard, never even slowing down to see if he could still fit.

I think he was showing his new ball his kingdom. He strutted around for a few minutes, and then came back in, ball in mouth, and lay down with it safely tucked between his paws. A little while later, he took a nap with his new ball all nuzzled up beside his nose.

If my life were a sitcom, this would be the part where the responsible parent takes the tearful child back to the candy store, makes him confess his crime, return the half-eaten candy bar, and trade the fleeting pleasure of chocolaty nougat for the presumably more lasting sense of righteousness that comes from having done the right thing.

I can’t do it. My dog is blissfully happy. I couldn’t make this elated dog give this ball back to its rightful owner if she were four years old, wearing pigtails and overalls, and standing in front of me crying.

Saturday afternoon I’m working on this essay and trying to figure out exactly what my thieving dog is teaching me about my commitment to joy and my lack of commitment to property rights when the doorbell rings. The man standing there when Rusty and I open the door is wearing Dockers and a tweed jacket, and he has some of the saddest, kindest eyes I’ve ever seen.

Those eyes, the ninety pounds of fur leaning against my leg, and the knowledge that my husband is upstairs in his office have lowered my usual “strange man at the door” defenses, so I’m actually listening when he says, “Have you ever wondered what happens after we die?”

Before I can say, “You mean, other than every day?” he hands me a pamphlet, says “There is some very comforting information in there,” tells me to have a good day, and walks off down the driveway.

These aren’t my mother’s Jehovah’s Witnesses. Growing up we lived a few blocks away from the Bethel Park Congregation on Irishtown Road, so it was pretty common for an eager believer to ring the doorbell on a summer afternoon and launch into an explanation of how we could be saved. Those Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t hand you a pamphlet and tell you to have a good day. They wanted to convince you, and they had all the time in the world for you to come around.

One day, my mother, devout Catholic, decided she was going to make her case, too. She started explaining Catholicism to the Jehovah’s Witness, and the two went at it for a long time on the front porch.

Because it’s Saturday, I actually read the man’s pamphlet, and it’s full of Old and New Testament quotations about life after death. I’m disappointed that the argument is as circular as it is, so I find myself thinking about the marketing team who came up with the plan to focus on eternity in this year’s doorbell ringing campaign rather than contemplating life and death with capital letters.

It’s the beginning of November, so Sunday morning the banco at my church is covered in photos of the dead and we’re lighting candles. For some reason, ever since I realized I was ok with my dog being a thief since it made him so happy, I’ve had the old liberation theology phrase, “a preferential option for the poor,” in my head. It always strikes me to think how at odds that theology is with today’s politicians who claim to be on God’s side yet work to demonize the poor. “Poor in spirit” is ok; poor in body and material goods is lazy.

Not knowing who Rusty stole this particular tennis ball from, I’m not sure if my dog is Robin Hood or JP Morgan, but it turns out I’m just rooting for joy. I’m thinking that this whole life/death thing might be a spectrum, not an on/off switch, and joy is what pushes at the far right boundary.

It’s been a week now, and Rusty’s new tennis ball is still his most important possession. He brings it to me when I get home from work, and I chase him around for a little while, and then we both flop down to rest, tongues hanging out, feeling like it’s good to be alive.

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