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Pop!

It’s one-thirty Wednesday afternoon, and I’m standing in a sunny classroom blowing up an imaginary bubble. I make my fingers into a tube, hold them to my mouth, and blow.

I’m with nine teenagers and about fifteen pre-schoolers, participating in Project Serve, an afternoon of service learning at my school. The teenagers have been studying early childhood music education, and today they are putting that training to work for the first time. I don’t have a job here; the “big buddies” are in charge.

Once my bubble is all blown up, I make exaggerated spritzing motions with my finger and squeaky noises with my imaginary squeegee, cleaning my bubble so I can look around and see all my friends in their bubbles. When we’re all enclosed in our own protective spaces, we’re ready to sing and move around the room without crashing in to one another. A big buddy I’ll call Vee leads us in a song in Spanish about a statue garden (at least that’s what I think it’s about; I’m only one week in to Spanish class). When she says, “Asi!” we all stop and make crazy statue poses inside our bubbles.

I have an unusual job. My morning began at the Lucky 66 bowIing alley with seventy ninth-graders. The freshmen are bowling because the tenth and eleventh graders are taking the PSAT, and the seniors are sprawled across the building we call the schoolhouse, working on college applications. The original plan was to take the ninth graders to the corn maze, but we’re in a drought, so the corn never grew high enough to cut a maze into the stalks. I hope the short corn doesn’t mean the cranes won’t winter in this field, but that’s a thought for another essay.

The class of 2017 fills the first twenty-two lanes. Twenty-three and twenty-four next to us are empty (this bowling alley owner knows what he’s doing), and the rest of the lanes are occupied by a women’s senior citizen league. It’s nice, I think throughout the morning, this spectrum we make from one end of the building to the other: exuberant youth yields to blank space, which matures into rich old age. The students notice the women, too, but not the symbolism.  “Those old ladies know how to bowl!” one of them tells me on the way back to the bus.

Bowling always takes me back to Pittsburgh.  My friends and I spent lots of weekends and summer days bowling at the alley across the street from the Howard Johnson’s on the way down the hill toward Kaufman’s. There’s a Galleria there now, but if you live in Pittsburgh, you know that I’d never say I bowled at the lanes near the Galleria; they will always be the lanes up the street from where Kaufman’s used to be.

As far as I know, this firm adherence to yesterday’s landscape is strictly a Pittsburgh phenomenon. If I were to tell you how to get to my high school (which doesn’t exist anymore), I would tell you to turn left where the Heigh-Ho used to be. The Heigh-Ho burned down long before I ever went to high school, but if you want to know where to turn, you need to know that the Italian restaurant whose name no one knows is the Italian restaurant that’s where the Heigh-Ho used to be.

If we weren’t bowling across the street from the HoJo, chances are we were bowling at Caste Village, down the hill from where Aunt Ann and Uncle Don used to live, where you could still roll duckpins in the late seventies.

There’s one another anomaly about getting from one place to another in Pittsburgh that has shaped me in ways I haven’t fully explored yet. The first time my husband came home with me, we decided to make a quick trip to the mall. At the end of my parents’ driveway, Fred said, “Which way should I go?”

I told him the truth, which was, “It doesn’t matter.” He looked at me a little funny, but turned left. At the bottom of the hill, he asked again, “Which way should I go?” And I told him again, “It doesn’t matter.” It’s hard to understand these sort of directions if you grew up in a city on a grid, but most of the time if you want to get anywhere in Pittsburgh, you have to go over a hill or through a hill or around a hill, and it doesn’t much matter how you do it. Somehow you get where you are going.

After bowling two games, the freshman class, the other chaperones, and I head back to school. I stop in the schoolhouse to visit the seniors, and a student I’ve taught for the past two years asks me to read her college application essay.

Do you know how, after someone you love dies, you walk around for a little while without any skin? You feel everything; there’s a tender rawness in the air that tugs your heart outside your body and pins it, flapping, to your sweater.

My student doesn’t quite say those words in her essay, but she tells how she lost a woman who was a second mother to her when she was ten years old. She writes about how frightening it was to let people get close to her, how hard it was to learn to be vulnerable again, and how she finally grew into the strong and independent young woman I know.

She wants feedback on her writing. She wants to talk about how to make her essay more powerful and whether she needs all those commas in the second paragraph. She doesn’t want to talk about the old gash in her heart, or about the crack just now opening in response in mine, so I find myself saying the things I should say, like “Can you write about a specific time when you let someone in?” and “Do you remember a specific moment when you learned you could solve problems on your own?”

Her eyes grow soft while we talk, and I am having trouble keeping mine from doing the same, and this is what it means to teach high school. Students with their invisible stories ask teachers, who keep their own stories tucked in, about sentence structure, specific details, and semicolons, while what we’re all trying to say to each other is “I get scared, too,” and “yes, love will tear you apart.” We keep going up and over and around hills, and somehow we get where we’re going.

I say a few last words about her essay and it’s time to head to U8 to meet my service learning group. Over the course of one afternoon, I watch nine students transform into teachers. They start with their “Hello” song according to plan, and the first group of preschoolers is easy; they wave, they sing “Hi,” they pat their heads and stomp their feet. Everything the “big buddies” do works.

The second group is hard; some “little buddies” just aren’t going to sing or clap or pose like statues today. I watch the teenagers realize they need to improvise; they change their plan, they grab the interest they do see and run with it, reacting to the smiles and needs on the tiny faces before them.

The final group of little buddies is tiny and enthusiastic, and none of the big buddies wants to let them go home. We all wave and say goodbye and watch them walk across campus toward their bus. I imagine the bowling alley arcing back beyond the freshmen; I see these little bodies pushing round balls down smooth, bumpered alleys.

When the tiny ones are gone and the big buddies are putting the room back together, the energy is palpable. They talk about the kid in the yellow shirt who loved the bass, the goofy kid in the puffy jacket who made them laugh, the little girl who wouldn’t do anything but put her head on the floor. I recognize their euphoria, the adrenaline rush, the exhausted high a good teaching day leaves after the last student takes her story home.

All afternoon while I’ve been clapping and stomping and singing songs about shoes, I’ve been fighting back tears. Actually, not just tears. Do other people have these perfectly happy moments, when you become so overcome that you know that if you don’t keep everything in, what is going to come out of you is not a tear or two but a full-fledged, inconveniently timed sob?  I think this might be what James Wright is talking about in “A Blessing” when he says

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

After the little buddies clean their bubbles, a big buddy asks, “What should we do with our bubbles now?” One little boy raises his hand so hard he levitates. “Pop the bubble,” he yells. Another little boy’s whole body smiles as he takes up the refrain, “Pop the bubble! Pop the bubble!”

The blossoming teacher before me promises them they can pop their bubbles at the end of class, so it’s really important to keep their bubbles safe and whole until then. It’s an inspired improvisation, and sure enough, at the end of class, she remembers her promise.

“Ok,” she tells them, “it’s time! Let’s all pop our bubbles.” Tiny fingers make poking motions and popping noises and then it’s done.

We all step out of our protective coatings and take our stories out into the world.

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Gentle

On the floor of the room where I write, a little round rug, a souvenir from the trip to Las Vegas where we saw the Cirque du Soleil “Love” show, proclaims “ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE” in friendly capital letters. The rug was expensive as souvenirs go, but Fred and I both knew when we saw it that it belonged in our home.

Lately I’ve been caught up in the gentle things of the world. I proctor a study hall every other day at work. Ninth graders who are finding their way in the world of high school come for about forty-five minutes, take out their books, and, for the most part, study. We meet in a beautiful classroom; sunlight pours in from a wall of windows overlooking a grassy quad. It’s peaceful in study hall.

Sometimes when I’m working at home in my office, my dog comes in and stretches out on the love rug. When he does this while I’m practicing the violin, I know that what the rug says is true.

Last week in study hall, the students were playful. Ninth grade homework must have been light. They were playing on their phones, I was pretending not to notice, and Google was celebrating its 15th birthday with a piñata doodle. (If you know what I’m talking about, let me just say that I stopped at 48 candies. I was proud of my restraint.) One of the boys announced, in my favorite part of study hall that happens after the kids are free to go and four or five of them stay around and argue about math formulae, that he had just realized that “If Google played soccer, he’d be on my team.” This is what it means to be fifteen.

Sometimes after I play my violin for too long, when I’ve gotten obsessed by the challenge of shifting to play an A harmonic in tune, or when I’m trying to memorize Beethoven’s Minuet in G without sounding like the band in The Music Man, I lie on the rug and stretch. After freeing my neck and shoulders, I press up into downward dog. Sometimes, if Rusty has stuck around for the whole practice, he walks under my downward dog, stretches effortlessly into his own, folds his paws, and settles like a sausage in the space between my body and the love rug.

This past weekend, the Animal Injustice Prevention Society at my school held a dog-a-thon to raise money for Watermelon Ranch, a no-kill animal shelter. Kids in purple t-shirts filled a grassy field with plastic kiddy-pools full of soapy water. Happy dogs meandered among the pools after their baths, sniffing, licking, frolicking, loving strangers indiscriminately. It was Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grand Jatte come to life, tempered with Chicago’s Saturday in the Park, a song I danced to with an umbrella in Susan Pierson’s basement, when I was even younger than those kids in my study hall. I want to say to them now, “Listen, children, all is not lost, all is not lost, oh no, no…”

Sometimes in the room with the “All you need is love” rug I read the news on my iPad. This is where I am when I read the Pope’s interview in America and feel myself beginning to forgive the Catholic Church for not being a place I could stay. This is also where I read about the recent death of a dear friend’s wife, and where some mornings I read from “My Daily Spiritual Companion,” a little red journal my uncle Larry gave me last year after my Uncle Don died. Sometimes in this room I notice the night lifting, or the white plum casting shadow shapes, or something Rilke said, like “I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It’s still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.”

Last Sunday I could feel my body vibrate as I sang. I have been feeling my breath deepen as time expands out to the horizon and ebbs, leaving me, sometimes gentled, sometimes sad. I have been reading the letters my mother sent to her mother from Germany in the late fifties. In April, 1953, she writes that she lives near the site of the Battle of the Bulge and sees the soldiers clearing landmines. “Don’t worry,” she tells her mother, “they don’t let you go where they aren’t sure it’s safe.”

Do you know that if you Google “gentle poems,” thinking that this time you’ll reach beyond your bookshelves to ground your meandering thoughts, the first fifteen entries will be Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” even though you were determined, this one time, to write about something other than the fact that after we live, we die? Do you know that the next entry takes you to a link to The Guardian, and a story about Taliban poetry, where you will read, “Evening the twilight arrives slowly with its lap full of red flowers”?

It is still true that the world is hard. Tonight as I write, the government remains shut down. No one seems to know how to get from here to the day after tomorrow. Recently, though, when it seemed as though we were about to bomb Syria, it became possible to believe that all that needed to happen to prevent war was for the pope to lead a day of prayer and the American people to lose their taste for killing.

Some early mornings I sit on a zafu on my little blue “all you need is love” rug with the dog breathing beside me and I believe.

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Clicking In

A few weeks ago I bought clipless pedals for my bike. I had already bought shoes with a space on the bottom where a cleat can screw in, and that hollow spot kept calling me. So, back I went to the sports store to buy the pedals. Then off I went to borrow the right sized wrench from a friend who knows her way around a bike. Then off I went to the bike shop to get help loosening my old pedals, and finally, I cranked on the new pedals on Sunday afternoon. Then it started raining.

It rained Monday. Then it rained Tuesday. Then it rained Wednesday…Then it rained Friday. I live in a desert in drought, so this sort of week doesn’t happen here. I just kept looking at my bike shoes sitting patiently on the piano bench. They looked happy, eager. They looked ready for a ride.

The point of clipless pedals is to lock your feet to the bike, without using any straps or toe cages. When you want to free your foot, a quick twist of your ankle releases the cleat. My pedals are flat on one side, so I figured I could click one foot in while keeping the other free, thus easing in to this learning curve and reducing my chances of falling, which my friend had guaranteed would happen.

Saturday afternoon, while all the usual clouds convene to decide if they will rain on us today, I head out. I want to see what changes all this water has made in the world. I ride east where the bike trail skirts the Piedras Marcadas Dam, not quite a mile from my house.  My first near miss happens just before I get to the dam, before I’ve even gotten my courage up to click one foot in. A jogger stops me for information about where the trail goes, and as I stop to answer her, I push down on the pedal and hear my left foot click in. I panic and yank hard, skinning my knee on my handlebar, while talking casually to the runner. (If you are having trouble picturing the geometry of this moment, it’s not you. I’m certain I couldn’t recreate this move intentionally.) Her question answered, I ride on.

The dam flanks a flood control zone tucked between neighborhoods just west of Eagle Ranch, so if you don’t walk or ride your bike around here, you’ve probably never seen it. Most days, it’s a large dry bowl, a strangely lovely open space where clumps of trees grow bucolically and an abandoned shopping cart announces that someone calls this landscape home.

I’ve always laughed at the hopeful, stucco-colored pillar at the far end painted with the numbers one through twelve, every one of which has been visible every other time I’ve been here. Saturday afternoon when I ride by, though, water has covered one through five and is lapping at the six. Six feet of water has shortened the trees and turned this hollow basin into a lake. As if to emphasize this fact, a group of adventurers in a green rowboat is dipping their oars in last night’s rain.

An hour and a half into my ride, when I’ve looped most of the way back and I’m approaching our new lake from the south, I’m feeling cocky. I’ve had a few other near misses, like when I stopped at a light on Coors and clicked out with just my left foot, leaving my right connected to my bike. This worked fine until I leaned to the right to hit the crosswalk button, but another hard yank of an ankle kept me upright. I’ve got this, I’m telling myself as I slow down at the bottom of the hill to walk my bike through a turnstile.

Seeing all this water pooling in drought land has me thinking about abundance, about how things go empty and are refilled. Recently at a faculty meeting, I watched a Ted Talk. (Note to future anthropologists: This is what private school teachers do at faculty meetings in the early twenty-first century.) Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, was teaching the audience that everyone loves classical music.  Before playing a Chopin prelude, Zander asked us to think of someone we loved and had lost.

I didn’t do that. I was at work, in a room in which I’ve already spent too much time thinking about loss. I didn’t want to begin the new school year weeping with my colleagues. Been there, done that, would rather not this time.

I opted not to engage.

The school year has started out beautifully, though. I’ve felt confident, competent, and joyful. I’ve been getting enough sleep, finding time to write, playing my violin. That’s why I was so surprised last week at another faculty meeting when I found myself paralyzed in the face of a simple decision. Two meetings were happening simultaneously, and I couldn’t decide which one to attend. I asked clarifying questions about information I already knew; I expressed concern about the plan, and then I changed my mind after the meeting I had chosen started, left it abruptly, and spent fifteen minutes roaming around campus trying to find the other meeting, which, it turned out, was happening just across the hall from where I’d begun.

It took me another half of a meeting and a few more moments of panicky indecision to realize that something other than having to choose between two meetings was bothering me. It all came flooding back: the sadness, the fear, the knowledge that to love children is to skip along the edge of a beautiful chasm. Somehow I’d managed to get a good month into the school year without tripping into that old fear.

Saturday afternoon, though, I’m standing astride my bike at the bottom of a hill looking at a lake where a field used to be and thinking about the fact that cool water rains on us from a generous sky. I’m wondering if the drought is over. I’m thinking about everything I know about loss and abundance. My left foot is safely planted on the ground when I turn my head to the right to gaze at the mountains.

This is the moment, as I’m falling into the bushes by the side of the trail, when I remember that my right foot is still clicked in to my pedal. There’s nothing I can do. I ride gravity down to the ground.

On one of his first visits to Albuquerque, my father remarked that everything in the desert looks like it wants to hurt you. (At the time, he might have been picking a goathead from his golf shoe, but I can’t be certain.) Today, an innocuous looking bushy plant with leaves like razor blades slices into my calf to prove him right. As I free my foot and climb out of the weeds, long streaks of blood stream down my leg.  I don’t see the other thing in the desert that wants to hurt me, but I can tell you that it was hard and pointy, and it left a two-inch mark just southeast of my tailbone that looks like one of those pictures of deep space nebulae on NASA’s website.

Weeks before I bought my new pedals, I came home from work and dug through my sheet music.  I found my old book of Chopin preludes and sat down at the piano. Before I started playing, I thought about someone I had loved deeply and lost. I played that prelude over and over and over. I let it hurt me and soothe me; I let it empty me out. I let it refill me.

Saturday afternoon after I laughed and lumbered out of the bushes with my bike, I did what there was to do. I clicked in and pedaled home.

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Riding the Brakes

IMG_1313Remember how Wile E. Coyote keeps running straight ahead for a few feet after he’s left the cliff edge behind? That’s how I fell off a horse named Omega in 1994 and got this long scar that runs from my palm, halfway up my left forearm. I could clear the jump until the second that I realized I couldn’t clear the jump; that’s when Omega put his head down and I tumbled over it into the soft dirt of the arena.

That’s how I come down the big human roller coaster hill on the bike trail: certain I can’t do it. My friend Tammy flies ahead, working out her own downhill demons while I lag behind. The bumpy pavement surprises me. Going up, I moved slowly enough not to notice how rough it is. Coming down, though, it jars my head in my helmet, just the encouragement I need to tighten my hands and squeeze the brakes.

This fear of speed is nothing new. When I turned forty, I went skiing for only the second time in my life. My friend took off for the big-girl slopes while I signed up for a lesson. All around me, little kids in parkas bounced and hopped and swerved down the hill like an avalanche of gumballs.  I picked my way through them (by which I mean I went straight and hoped they wouldn’t knock me over), intent on mastering the snowplow.

Even as a kid, I picked the slow route. There were two ways to sled-ride from the top of Marvle Valley Drive to the bottom. The first was to sally through the yards, each one connected to the next by a small hill, a mostly flat front yard, and a driveway. (Some of those driveways, like ours, were red-dog in those days, so they slowed you down nicely!) The second way was to fly right down the steep road and hope there were no cars coming down Dashwood when you reached the bottom and careened across the street into the Buckley’s front yard. I don’t have to tell you which route I took, do I?

Earlier this summer I thought I could think my way out of some of my fears. Here’s one of the things I tried:

(A Partial List of) Things I’m Afraid Of:

Spiders in the shower
Moving (or playing music) fast
Touching dead things
Buildings/Bridges/tunnels collapsing
Car accidents
Heights
Talking politics with people I’m related to
Flying

Then I made this list.

(A Partial List of) Things I’m Not Afraid Of:

Public speaking
Taking up the violin in my forties
Leaving well-paying jobs that don’t feed my heart
Signing up for a triathlon when I’m out of shape
Getting my shoes dirty
Lizards
Talking politics with people I’m not related to

I thought maybe I could figure out why I’m not afraid of the things on the second list and apply that logic to talk myself out of being afraid of the things on the first.

Then I watched my grand-daughter ride the Cliff-Hanger at Uncle Cliff’s. The ride lifts you 120 feet into the air and then drops you straight down.  At nine, Aurora is terrified to speak to most people, but she’ll shinny straight to the top of the rope at the gym, and she loves thrill rides. Her tiny feet dangle over the edge and she smiles her own cryptic Mona Lisa smile as she ascends into the sky and plummets down.

Where does fear come from, anyway? How come I got heights, Aurora got speaking, and my husband got water?

Just before school started, I spent a day with teenagers at a ropes course deep in the Manzano Mountains. My group of about two-dozen ninth graders was standing at the base of a tall pole capped by a tiny platform. The two girls who had volunteered to go first were suited up in harnesses and helmets. The first girl climbed straight up the pole and maneuvered easily onto the platform, some thirty feet in the air. The second girl also flew to the top; then she struggled a bit to climb onto the platform with her friend.

As an onlooker, I stand below, halfway hoping they will chicken out before I have to watch them leap from the platform, aiming for the tiny trapeze dangling nearly out of reach in front of them.

Of course they don’t chicken out. As they begin their count to three (one-two-three-jump, is the sequence the course director has drilled them on), I can hear the extra air in the voice of the girl who is afraid. I want to beg them not to jump, but that’s not the point of this morning, so instead I hope their belayers know what they are doing, that they got enough sleep last night, that they didn’t fight with their wives this morning. I hope the ropes hold and that the kids have put their harnesses on right, and by the time I’ve gone through this litany of fears, before I even have time to get to the end of The Memorare, my go-to incantation when I’m afraid, these two beautiful children have leapt into the sky and are dangling high above the ground, swaying and laughing in the cool, piney air.

At this point, as the (attentive) belayers gently lower the (safely harnessed) girls to the ground, a line from Kurt Vonnegut starts following me around.

If you’ve never had a quote follow you around, it’s just as you’d imagine it. Really. A little thought bubble pokes its way out of your shoulder and hovers in the air just beyond your left ear, sometimes for weeks, until you finally take those words into your life and figure out why they are haunting you. This one says, Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

I realize I’m not going to be able to think my way out of my fears. When I first got married, I remember being a little bit afraid every time my husband left the house; for some reason, he seemed newly fragile. I wanted to follow him into the world each day and see him safely home. At some point, I forgot that fear is something that most people try to overcome; I set a generous place for it at the table. I was grateful to it for keeping my feet on solid ground. I was comfortable with the way it manifested in my stomach, in the shake in my voice, in a coldness in my hands. I even learned to feed it, imagining plane crashes, tunnels caving in, and other disasters on demand. I had decided, as I wrote in a poem, “to try like hell to stay alive.”

For a long time I wasn’t aware that I had donned a life-jacket, but even now it seems a not completely unreasonable reaction to the world.

The quote bubble hanging by my ear is getting annoying, so I finally pull Slaughterhouse Five off the shelf to refresh my memory. I’m not thrilled when I realize my quote is an epitaph Billy Pilgrim imagines for himself. In the book, it’s etched on a picture of a tombstone.

It’s not the quote I’d pick to sum up my life today, although I think it describes the world I spent a long time trying to live in.  It’s not too far off; I could live with, “It was beautiful and it hurt,” or “It was so beautiful that it hurt.” Or maybe if I’m writing my epitaph, I should keep the line I wrote one grade school Halloween: “Here lies Heather, under the weather.”

That still makes me smile.

There’s no rest when the first two girls are safe on the ground. The next pair is already clipped in to their harnesses and starting up the pole.

I’m thinking that maybe you have to let the world toss you around a little. I’m thinking that next time I ride down the bumpy bike trail, I might try to wait a few seconds before I start squeezing the brakes. I’m thinking about that moment just after you run over the edge of the cliff, before you realize you will have to fall. I’m thinking that that’s the space, out there for those few seconds in clear air where everything is beautiful, in which we live our lives.

Recently I got an email from an old friend who has been on her own journey out of loss into love. I’ve known Jacqui since the first day of first grade, and she has been telling me that we should go for a hot air balloon ride when we turn fifty.

I wouldn’t want her to read this essay and think I have decided I want to go for that ride. It’s fair to say, though, that lately I’ve been wondering what’s out there, just over the edge.

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Bad Theology?

A few days ago, I was eating a roasted vegetable, pesto, and melted cheese sandwich in the school cafeteria when I overhead just enough of a conversation between my colleagues to become intrigued. “What is the meaning of life?” the historian said. The biologist replied, “What is life?” and then they both laughed.

I’ve been thinking about that second question. I learned this summer that a host of microorganisms calls my body home. I guess I’ve heard that before; I suspect in some long ago science class I looked at  a drop of saliva under a microscope and saw tiny things scurrying around, but this summer when I read an article about the The National Institute of Health’s Human Microbiome Project, I was hooked. The NIH is working “to characterize the microbial communities found at several different sites on the human body, including nasal passages, oral cavities, skin, gastrointestinal tract, and urogenital tract, and to analyze the role of the microbes in human health and disease.” It’s the human genome project all over again, with a vastly expanded notion of “human.”

Some of the things I’ve read suggest we might have several pounds worth of these creatures eating lunch, going to work, sleeping, making love, and raising families, all snug inside the cozy planet previously known as “Me.”

Is it hubris to get excited about the idea that colonies of microorganisms call my body home?

I remember reading an article years ago about the giant sequoias in California. The author had climbed into the uppermost branches with a group of botanists and wrote about the entire ecosystem she encountered. If I’m remembering right, a distinct species of huckleberry flourishes in the canopy. I remember being amazed as I read that a mini-world hides above the world  we know. I imagined how it would feel to be a bush whose roots sway in the California breeze. I like to think that to a root-bound creature it might feel like being part cloud.

I can’t really explain why I find these stories of mini-ecosystems so fascinating. Somehow the idea that bushes grow in trees or that microorganisms in my body are working beyond reach of my consciousness to keep me alive is oddly comforting.

Let’s be clear: I’ve never liked the idea of things crawling on me. When I was eight or nine, I used to tag along with a girl named Betsy as she delivered newspapers on Sunday mornings. I remember standing in her driveway, stuffing ads into the paper, and loading them into a big canvas Pittsburgh Press bag. At one point, while the rest of the neighborhood slept, my legs grew itchy. I looked down and was horrified to see hundreds of tiny aphids crawling out of my sneakers and swarming my legs. I jerked, I danced, and I howled, loud, neighbor-waking howls, until we finally dragged a hose out of Betsy’s garage and flushed the bugs away.

That was the end of letting things crawl on me. So it surprised me when I read about these studies to map the human microbiota and thought, “Cool!” In the pictures, they look like jars of multi-colored gummy bears, or necklaces of green, fuzzy jade, or twisty colored pipe-cleaners. These creatures, I’m reading, are linked to our health in ways that scientists are just beginning to explore.

As a young girl raised Catholic, I had lots of exposure outside of science class to the idea that my body was home to something other than “me”; in addition to being the container for that mysterious thing called soul, my body, I was taught, was also the temple of the equally mysterious Holy Spirit.

Honestly, that vision matches my experience fairly well. I have often felt deeply connected to the world. I’ve lived through solitary times when I have known, with the part of knowing that doesn’t happen in my head, that I was not alone. In her poem, “Some Questions You Might Ask,” Mary Oliver writes, “Is the soul solid, like iron?” and “Who has it, and who doesn’t?” The poem packs fourteen questions into twenty-one lines, including my favorite, “Why should I have it, and not the camel?”

Can you see where I’m going with this? I have just enough knowledge of science to put it to work to do bad theology. I’m not (quite!) saying I have discovered the soul and it is a collection of multicolored eukaryotes, but did you know they have been around for over a billion years? Do you know that they live in you and on you and that you are not, it turns out, ever really alone? It’s not our imaginations: something always pulses in the night.

One night in Pittsburgh I thought it was horses. I was staying with my parents in my childhood home and sleeping fitfully. The window by my bed was wide open, and late in the night I heard a horse whinnying deep in the woods. Longing spread through the trees as the animal called out, waited, called into the silence again. Finally, after what felt like hours, an answer came, and the two voices nickered back and forth. I fell asleep to their singing, bathed in wonder, gifted by this mysterious conversation.

Back home in Albuquerque, knowing there couldn’t be horses in those woods, I described the sound on an internet birding site. Within minutes, I received a link to a sound file identifying my midnight horses as screech owls. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “Mated pairs may sing to each other antiphonally, both day and night.”

I want to say, I have heard the screech owls singing, each to each. In Eliot’s poem, after the mermaids sing each to each, “human voices wake us and we drown.” We all know that’s how the story always ends. A while ago, though, when I was still trying to decide if I should keep my guard up or settle in and trust the world, a priest stumped me by asking, “What is death, anyway?”

So here’s the thing I keep Googling. I want to know what happens to all those microorganisms when I die. Am I like those conifers in forest fires who open their pods and fling their seeds madly to the forest floor, shouting “Life Life Life!” into the flames? Do the bacteria in my digestive tract have a chance to flee their dying planet and strike out for a brave new world? Or do these same microbes who have devoted their lives to mine help me, one last time, to shed skin and bone and ease into element?

I like that idea. I’m trying to say that I’d be ok if it turned out that the secret to eternal life, to God, is symbiosis. I like to think that that huckleberry bush doesn’t know her roots never touch the ground, doesn’t know that the whole thing she calls the world is cradled in a net of branches, doesn’t know that she, too, is part huckleberry, part prokaryote, part bacteria, part fuzzy jade and twirly pipe-cleaner, part every other thing that teems and swims and breathes in this abundant world.

Just now, my ten year-old granddaughter asked me what I was writing about. I tried to explain without going in to too much detail that we have these tiny things living in us, and that I think it’s really cool. She got quiet for a minute, then stuck her tongue out. “Ew,” she said.

That’s another way of looking at it.

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Glee

Lately I haven’t been able to focus. I get up in the morning, and instead of sitting down to write, or going for a bike ride, or working on lesson plans, I’m picking up a book and putting it down, pulling Nick Hornby off my shelves only to set him aside for Jane Smiley, sitting down at the piano for ten minutes, picking up my mandolin, sorting laundry. I’m like the birds in the backyard before rain, flitting from branch to branch, not staying anywhere long enough to sing.

School is starting soon. I can feel it gathering around me, that sense that I’ll be sitting at a lit desk in the evening as the dark comes early and the crickets start to hum. The end of summer, the doors opening to new things, the gentling of shorter days—that whole soup of nostalgia and anticipation and nervous energy that I remember feeling almost every September since 1968—it’s starting to simmer again.

Yesterday I bought a nine-pack of fine-tipped Sharpies in black, blue, green, red, purple, and orange, and a fourteen-pack of Pilot G2 blue click gel pens. There are many reasons why I’m a teacher. Not the least important of them is that it gives me an excuse to shop for loose-leaf paper and new pens when summer starts to grow shabby around the edges.

School is starting soon. A few nights ago I was watching a Glee re-run (go ahead, judge me and get it over with!) when the cast spontaneously broke into a fully orchestrated rendition of Shout in the hallway by their lockers. Suddenly I am standing under orange and black crepe paper streamers in the cafeteria at Bethel Park Senior High circa 1980 at an all-night dance-a-thon. My friends and I are getting a little bit softer now, and a little bit louder now, and I’m learning how very much I enjoy being the one holding the microphone.

From the very first episode, I tried not to watch Glee. Something about it reminded me of eating deep-fried twinkies or bacon sandwiches on glazed doughnuts: it seemed like something that people who take themselves seriously as adults just shouldn’t do. But even as the scripts deteriorated last season and most of the teenagers I know stopped watching, I kept on.

I couldn’t help it. I like seeing those fake kids figure out their lives in Show Choir. I like watching their angsty teacher and quirky counselor wince and love them through a series of ridiculous mistakes. I even usually like the big, corny song and dance numbers when pianists, drummers, dancers, and bass players magically appear in the middle of chemistry class. And I might as well admit this, too: on more than one occasion my husband has looked at me in amazement in the middle of the show and asked, “Are you really crying?”

School is starting soon. I have a new backpack, and new intentions to ride my bike at least twice a week, and a new software program for writing lesson plans, and class lists full of names of eager students, some of whom have probably spent the past few weeks as I have, losing their purchase on summer, scrabbling to catch hold of a new year’s routine.

I once raised my hand to answer a question and told my teacher confidently that fall symbolizes new beginnings. She corrected me, explaining that fall is the symbol of ripening and harvest, the time when summer’s growth comes to fruition, the period before the open-armed earth rests after gifting its bounty. Spring, not fall, she explained, is the season of new beginnings.

But of course, it wasn’t. Spring was when fifth grade ended and you knew you would never sit in that same classroom in the middle of the upstairs hall again. Spring was when you erased all the pencil marks in your books and said goodbye and signed your friends’ autograph books. Fall, on the other hand, was when you got new shoes and new folders and cut brown paper book covers out of grocery bags to cover your new books. Fall was when you were one grade older and moved to a new teacher one classroom closer to the end of the hall.

Maybe I like Glee because I can watch students grapple with mistakes without having to try to think of anything wise to say. Or maybe it’s like the space shuttle simulator I rode at Kennedy Space Center this summer: I could pretend to be brave enough to be exploded into outer space without putting myself in any danger at all.

That last thought probably explains the surprising depth of my sadness when Cory Monteith, the 31-year-old who played Finn on Glee, died in real life on July 13. Last spring I met a teacher who said, “I’ve lost twenty-six kids in twenty-five years” and went on with the conversation. I wanted to get to know him. I wanted to learn what faith or fury feeds him and lets him keep loving these fragile miracles.

What I’m saying is that you have to be a little bit brave to be a teacher. You have to love your students as though you can protect them from themselves and the world, even after they teach you that you can’t.

School is starting soon and I’m growing restless. The real life death of a man who played a student on Glee reminds me that even in make-believe school, there’s no simulator. Loving kids is dangerous work. It’s also hilarious and joyous and infuriating and enriching and draining. It makes you feel wise and mature and solid and grown up. It makes you feel unworthy and immature and too flimsy to support the weight of so much earnest becoming. It’s beautiful and terrifying and real.

It’s almost fall. Everything is beginning again. I can’t wait to get started.

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Little Dog

IMG_1836This morning as I write, a little barrel-shaped white dog is sitting on my desk. Her tail is curled across the edge of my laptop, and she is calmly surveying the scene behind me. In other words, she’s got my back.

Officially, her name is Snow White, which is the same name that her predecessor (a little white cat) had, but we call her Little Dog, because she’s about a tenth of the size of Rusty, who we call Big Dog when Little Dog comes to stay. We’re dog-sitting.

*****

A few weeks ago, I was eating breakfast when I heard a persistent squeaky chirp outside. I listened for a little while, not sure whether it was a bird or something that needed tightening on the porch swing.

When I finally got up to look, I saw a robin hopping around, picking up juniper berries and rose hips from the rocks. The bird would pick up a berry, knock it on the ground a few times, and then hop over to the little spot of shade by the wall. There, the source of the squeaky chirp would open his mouth wide and wait for the big bird to drop the food in.

The funny thing was that the little bird with the wide mouth was almost as big as the big bird. Its breast was more speckley than red, and it was easy to imagine him as a chubby little kid. I am not an expert on how to raise a robin, so I laughed when I found myself thinking, “Isn’t that bird big enough to get his own food?”

I watched them eat breakfast until Big Dog lumbered out his dog-door and scared them away.

*****

In July in Albuquerque the sky does somersaults. If you turn in a slow circle on a wild day you’ll see clear blue over the mesa, towering white cumulous over the south valley, dark gray storm clouds teasing the mountain, rain falling in Placitas, and way off in the distance, virga, that broken promise of rain that evaporates before it hits the ground.

The other night driving to a baseball game, I saw a fully formed sculpture in the sky. I looked up, and it was as though I were standing in a museum. Back-lit against the horizon laughed a white marble cherub, rivaling any you might see in a Renaissance collection. A few nights later, driving west just before sunset across the Montano Bridge, it happened again. This time I saw the carved bust of a beautiful woman.

I’ve been searching for links online that might give a sense of what I saw. This National Gallery of Art image of the work of  Tullio Lombardo comes closest.

My mother delighted in ordinary things, so it wasn’t unusual for us to look for faces and shapes in the clouds. “Look at the sailboat!” she might exclaim as walked onto the front porch, or “Ooh, do you see that old woman?”

These sculptures, though, are different. I wasn’t looking for anything when they appeared; I just glanced up and there they were, solid and luminous in the summer sky.

*****

Last week, we traveled to Cocoa Beach, Florida, to visit one of my dearest friends. While there, I spent two mornings standing in the Banana River, really a salt lagoon, staring at manatees. At least a dozen of these giant sea creatures swam all around me, sometimes mere inches away, for hours. One came right up to me, flipped onto his back, and lay there gently flapping his flippers. Another, whose back was more barnacled than the others, kept swimming by my knees underwater, but wouldn’t surface until he was about ten feet away. Often I didn’t even see him coming; I’d suddenly sense movement in the water, look down, and he’d be there. Another swam up with her baby and nudged him up for air by my knees; I had the distinct sense that she was showing him off.

The next morning when I went back, the manatees were back, too, and we did the whole thing again.

*****

The longer I’ve lived in the desert, the more each trip to the ocean has come to feel like a sacrament. I’m gripped by the urge to see and to name every feature of this watery creation. On our first day, we saw laughing gulls, royal terns, skimmers, American oystercatchers, a white ibis, lots of pelicans, and a strange new bird that looked like what you might get if you crossed a vulture with a flamingo.

From a distance, wood storks are tall and elegant. White wings the birds fold around themselves like robes hunch solemnly atop long, dark legs, giving them the gravitas of old-time dons. This scholarly air is enhanced by their bald, reptilian heads.

My husband and friend head into the restaurant while I stay behind, taking pictures and talking to the birds. Eventually I turn away and join people I love in the known world for happy hour at Fish Lips.

*****

As I’ve been writing, Little Dog has relocated to my lap, so now I’m typing tilted to the right, with my left elbow up in the air and resting on her head.  At the beach, we watched a crow take funny, lurching side-steps into the water, as though he were climbing over things we couldn’t see; that’s how I’m moving now, as I shift and reposition myself around the thick skein of fur trying to get comfortable in my lap.

*****

Reading other people’s writing, I’ve always believed that using asterisks between paragraphs to separate ideas was a cop-out; a shortcut writers use instead of finding and making evident the connections between one idea and another.

Playing with this technique myself, I suspect I’m  right.

*****

When I went to the post office to stop our mail before the trip, the woman in front of me was buying stamps. The postal worker fanned her choices on the counter. “Are those Forever stamps?” she asked. He answered yes each time she picked up a different booklet and repeated the same question.

Finally, he said, “Lady, they’re all Forever stamps now.”

“Oh,” she responded. “And how long are they good for?”

He paused a moment, while she fingered the stamps and the question grew heavy around us.

“As long as forever is,” he told her. “Just as long as it lasts.”

 *****

Last night lightening ricocheted around the sky for hours, and thunder chased Little Dog far under the bed. I stayed up watching the sky explode until I couldn’t stay awake any longer. This morning dawned soft, and blue, and humid.

I’m trying to say that I love it here.

I’m trying to say that some days creation flops into view like a fish leaping in the Banana River and laughs at us for trying so hard to understand.

I’m trying to say that some days it is exactly enough to open my eyes in a wet world, to breathe salt air, to bask in a planet at play.

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Wobble Board

Have you ever stood on a wobble board? Mine is a sixteen-inch wooden disk, mounted on top of a hard plastic dome (imagine a circle of wood glued to half a baseball, with the round part of the baseball touching the ground). After I tore ligaments in my ankle for the second time a number of years ago, my doctor suggested I use a wobble board to try to prevent future injuries.

The point is to rock back and forth on the board in every possible direction without letting its edges touch the ground.  Theoretically, I’m not just strengthening lots of little muscles in my ankles and calves by wobbling around, but I’m also improving my proprioception, my body’s ability to sense where it is in space.

It’s comforting to think that my muscles know where my elbows are in relation to my earlobes and how to keep me upright if my left foot lands halfway on the curb and halfway on the road. I like that my body is working to keep me balanced without any conscious intervention on my part.

Not that long ago, I went through a period when I felt every day as though I were standing on that board. Accosted by a loss that knocked me off balance, I couldn’t figure out how to make the earth stand still beneath my feet. It was as though aftershocks from an earthquake were rattling the ground every day, reminding me that destruction was immanent.

Friends, well-meaning strangers, and grief counselors all recommended I “talk to someone.” For weeks I carried scraps of paper with names and phone numbers in my pocket. I was terrified that I’d call the wrong person; how do you choose among strangers which one to invite into your vulnerability? It wasn’t until I finally decided to talk to a trusted priest and even he handed me a scrap of paper with a phone number on it that I finally decided I wasn’t going to be able to find solid ground on my own.

A few months after I started “talking to someone,” I had a dream. In the dream, my husband and I were lying on our stomachs on a raft. We were somewhere beautiful, maybe off Hawaii or Monterey, in the middle of the ocean. The raft was also somehow a spacious field of grass, rocking gently on the waves. For some reason Wyeth’s painting “Christina’s World” always comes to mind when I think of this dream, although looking at the painting now, seeing the way the woman in the grass looks (purposefully?) toward the house in the distance, I can’t really explain why.

There was no purpose in my feeling in the dream. Years ago after breaking my wrist I woke from surgery to a stranger wrapping me in hot blankets. That was how I felt in the dream: enveloped, tended to, almost surreally peaceful. I found myself craving that feeling long after I was awake. I can close my eyes even now and almost feel it.

At some point in the dream, though, the waves picked up. The raft started rocking aggressively. As the waves grew menacing, I became terrified, certain that the next one would capsize us and pull us under. I dug my hands into the grass as the dream that had begun as a beautiful respite became, literally, a nightmare.

Just as I was trying to scream myself awake, a voice in the dream said, “It’s not a raft; it’s an island.”  I don’t know whose voice this was, but it spoke matter-of-factly into my fear. It repeated those words, “It’s not a raft; it’s an island.”

Somehow, saying it made it true. I looked around, and I could feel the column of earth under my feet, reaching all the way down to the ocean floor. We continued to dip and lunge in the waves, but we weren’t going anywhere. We were on solid ground. I could relax back into the movement.

When I told the woman I had finally chosen to “talk to,” about this dream, she smiled. She said something like, “That’s such a powerful message from your psyche, telling you that you are going to be ok.”

The thing is that I believed her. The ground didn’t firm up instantly, but “It’s not a raft, it’s an island” became available to me as a mantra, as a little stone I can worry in my pocket whenever the earth starts pitching beneath my feet.

I remember one time flying over the Southwest and being terrified for a moment at how tiny all the cities are, how desolate the spaces that sprawl between. “We’re so alone!” I remember thinking, feeling a wave of compassion for all of us, tiny people scattered like old seed on dry land.

If you zoom out even further, beyond the airplane, who is to say what’s raft and what’s island? What is there, really, that’s tethered all the way down?

In his poem, “The Abduction,” Stanley Kunitz writes,

Our lives are spinning out
from world to world;
the shapes of things
are shifting in the wind.
What do we know
beyond the rapture and the dread?

There was a time when lines like those could paralyze me, when all I wanted was to make the world stand still. I thought I needed the “shapes of things” to stop “shifting in the wind.” I wanted to be able to say with certainty, “The world is this way; therefore, it isn’t this other way.”

For some reason walking the dog with Fred in the rain tonight, I’m thinking about this dread and rapture. It’s a gentle rain by the time we head into it, but just half an hour ago, it was wild; lightening arced into the ground and wind twisted the sycamore in the back yard sideways.

The streets are wet and I walk balancing on the curb, still working on my proprioception, still trying to figure out how my body is positioned in space, still learning to keep my balance in a whirling world that holds both love that rocks you gently on the waves and loss that tries to drown you.

The trick I’ve learned on the wobble board is this: If you don’t want to fall off, you have to go with it as it flings you face-forward; you can’t panic as your body falls backward or dips to the left or right. You can’t fight the motion.

You have to let go. You have to trust that somehow, in some way you don’t have to understand, the center will hold.

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View Christina’s World

Read The Abduction

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In Vino Veritas?

When I was in sixth grade, I wrote an essay about an old family story and was asked to read it over the P.A. system. I don’t remember all of the details, but the important part of the story happens when Gracie and Vader (some degree of great-grandparents) hear a knock on their door late one night when they are in bed.

The knock is followed by their daughter’s voice, saying, “Mom, Dad, I’ve come to say good-bye.” She was living far away at the time and couldn’t possibly be there, but they both heard her.

It wasn’t until sometime the next day that they heard a different knock on the door and learned from the police that their daughter had died the night before. They knew then that she had indeed “come to say goodbye.”

I’ve been trying to figure out what it means to know something. My husband will confirm that I’ve never met a button I didn’t push. “What’s this do?” I’ll say, already pushing the button, whether it’s on the dashboard, or the furnace, or his new camera. It’s not enough for me to hear his answer, “it adjusts the zoom,” or “it lights the pilot”—I have to see what that means by trying it out for myself. Once I’ve poked, prodded, and explored, I can relax, confident that I know exactly what that button does.

I found some tangible evidence of things I know while I was looking for a copy of that old essay. I pulled a folder labeled “St. Louise” out of a milk crate in my closet and was astounded to see all the things I know.

Apparently, I have hand-written, illustrated, and gotten good grades on lab reports on such diverse topics as Basic Principles in Electricity; Micro-Organisms (this one includes a drawing of the life cycle of a mold); Chemical, Physical, and Nuclear Change; and lots of reports on phylums, including Chordata, Arthropoda, Echinodermata (those cool spiny-skinned animals), and Molluska.

I have also written broadly  (and in cursive) about diverse topics in the social sciences, including Racial Relations in the North and South During the Gilded Age (which I covered thoroughly in 2 pages), Steamships (which includes a drawing of The Clermont), The US Indian Policy, Eli Whitney, Lillian A. Wald, and The Development of Air Power during World War One.

I also found a scrapbook from the 1976 Presidential campaign that includes my in-depth analysis of the choice between tickets: “Pineapple or peanuts?” Wait for it.

Sadly, I have no memory of knowing anything about any of these things.

Do you know that moment when you are watching Jeopardy! when you find yourself saying words like spirilla or manganese phosphate or cheliped with utter confidence and wondering how you know these things? I learned today that the answer to that question is  “What is seventh grade science?”

So. Here’s another thing I know.

A few years ago my niece was considerate enough to get married at a winery in the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. Glenora Wine Cellars has an inn, a restaurant, and down the hill toward Seneca Lake, a cottage. My sister rented the cottage, and I stayed there with her and her husband; my nephew, his wife, and their baby; and Sarah, until her wedding night. The two families slept in bedrooms upstairs while Sarah and I shared a closed-in porch on the back of the house.

On Sarah’s wedding night, I had the porch to myself.  Sometime around two or three in the morning, I woke up and heard people talking in the front room. My porch was separated from the main house by a sliding glass door that we’d been leaving open. On the other side of the glass door was a small dining room, and directly in front of that was the family room.

The soft voices made me think the baby had woken everyone up, and now that he seemed to have fallen back to sleep, the parents and grandparents were relaxing together before heading back to bed.

I had to go to the bathroom, but I was afraid I’d wake the baby if I went into the front room and joined the conversation, so I tried to stay invisible as I slipped through the open door. I could see shapes in the dark room that matched my assumption of what was going on, and I could hear them all talking softly. As I came out of the bathroom, I saw and heard them again. It was a sweet moment, and I fell peacefully back to sleep.

Sometime in the middle of the next day I turned casually to my nephew’s wife and said, “So, you guys must have had a rough night.”

“What do you mean?” she asked me, genuinely confused.

“Mason had you up for a while, didn’t he?”

“No, he slept great,” she said. She looked at me a little funny when I said, “Seriously?” and reassured me that she and her husband and baby had had a deliciously full night of sleep.

A little later I tried to get a different answer from my sister. “Were you guys up with Mason last night?” I asked Judy, thinking that maybe the thoughtful grandparents had heard the baby crying and decided to let the tired parents sleep.

Again, “No, we slept all night.”

Imagine that you know that you ate a bowl of shredded wheat with blueberries this morning for breakfast. You know it the same way you know everything: you touched it, you saw it, you pushed its buttons. Then imagine that people you love and trust insist that there is no such thing as shredded wheat.  That’s how I felt all day as we hiked the waterfall in Watkins Glen. I kept reliving those nighttime moments, trying to find a way to believe they hadn’t happened.

As we climbed toward the top of the waterfall, I found myself wondering about the Underground Railroad. Now, I am not a person who goes through life spontaneously thinking about historic events. At no other time in my forty-nine years has the Underground Railroad popped into my head as I hiked along a waterfall. But there it was; as the afternoon passed, I became convinced that the family I had seen, heard, and felt emanating peace and love from that room had something to do with the Underground Railroad.

For the record, I know that I sound like a crazy person here. My husband’s cousin used to take pictures in graveyards, and she and my father-in-law would circle the spirits they saw in them, and I thought they were crazy.

By the time we got back to the cottage, I was hungry to press every button I could to learn about  the Finger Lakes’  involvement with the Underground Railroad. I was heading toward the porch to get my iPad when I noticed a book on the bookshelf. I don’t remember the exact title, but I think it was Emerson Klee’s Underground Railroad Tales: With Routes through the Finger Lakes Region. Remember that “They’re here!” moment from Poltergeist?

Here’s what I know for sure: There were people in that room that night. They were at peace, resting, lulling a baby to sleep. My family swears it wasn’t them. The Amazon blurb for Klee’s book notes the existence of “eight routes and 41 stations in the Finger Lakes Region.”

Here’s what my rational brain, and I expect your rational brain, thinks: It wasn’t just a wedding; it was a wedding at a winery. Of course, I had been drinking wine. I must have been dreaming. I must have seen the book on the bookshelves earlier in the week, and it filed in dutifully when my mind was looking for answers.

That’s a perfectly plausible, perfectly rational explanation. It’s not the one I believe, but it’s possible.

Later that summer, still pushing buttons to learn about my ghosts, I did some research. I found this book on Amazon: Ghosts of Genesee Country: From Captain Kidd to the Underground Railroad. The author, Ralph Esposito, leaves it to his readers to decide whether or not they believe his stories, but adds, “As for me, my money is on the ghosts.”  If I’m crazy, at least I’ve got company.

I have tangible proof that I knew a lot about the phylum Echinodermata when I was thirteen, but I didn’t know I knew those things until this afternoon. The list of things I don’t know grows exponentially as I get older. I’m not even sure this whole idea of knowing holds up very well. Emily Dickinson says “Wonder—is not precisely Knowing and not precisely Knowing not.”

I don’t precisely know if there is such a thing as a ghost, or a god, or what exactly happens to that thing we were in the second (or the century) after we take our very last breath. My great (or great-great) grandparents knew their daughter had visited them as she was dying. I know there were people in that room in Dundee.

When Hamlet has to explain his dead father’s appearance to his best friend, he says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

My husband, though, is more comfortable with the idea of me drinking too much wine than of me seeing ghosts. He points me instead to a quote often misattributed to Shakespeare that says, “The wine-cup is the little silver well, Where truth, if truth there be, doth dwell.”

I know what I think happened that night. You’ll have to decide for yourself.

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Government Cheese

Remember the part of the story where Jesus says, “Take the seven loaves of bread and those few small fish, and once you have completed all the drug-testing and sorted out the people who could be working and aren’t, feed the people”?

I did not like those big wheels of cheese that for a short time took up space in my mother’s refrigerator. Nor did I like grocery shopping with my older sister, carefully scanning the cereal aisle for Kix and other foods that were on the list of things she was allowed to buy. I was actually nervous as we went through the checkout line, and I admit it, embarrassed. I wanted to tell the checker, “It’s not for me; I don’t live like this.”

The cheese came to my sister through the WIC program, and I’m guessing her refrigerator was either too small or not working at the time, and that’s why my mother was keeping it for her. My sister’s life was harder than mine. She had insulin-dependent juvenile diabetes, the hereditary kind, not the sort you can make go away by improving your diet. She gave herself shots daily and had to check her blood sugar frequently. She didn’t go to college. She had emotional problems that were built into her struggle with diabetes. She never learned to drive.

She also had an adorable son and was married to a good man who loved her. He had a mental illness that sometimes caused him to detach from reality. Their health challenges made it hard for them to get and keep jobs, but for a while at least, she worked in the laundry-mat up the street. For a good stretch, he ran his own business, painting houses. They made a living. They lived. Their son was beautiful and laughed often. She was a good mother.

After an explosion blew up their trailer, the husband’s hands were injured. His car was gone. It became hard to work, then hard to feel good about yourself. There were long trips to Texas to find jobs. I don’t remember exactly when this was, but I expect that this same time is when the government cheese moved in.

I have been remembering these things lately because the tone people use when they talk about the farm bill is making me sad, and I had to look backward to figure out why. I have also been worrying about all the kids who are growing up thinking that paying taxes is some sort of punishment imposed on good rich people to support lazy poor people.

I don’t remember everything about grade school, but I do remember learning that paying taxes was part of the privilege of living in a bountiful country. I remember specifically discussing whether an elderly couple with no children should have to pay taxes that supported the school system. The answer, given by my fifth grade teacher, Sr. Janine, was “Of course they should.” That nice old couple were going to share in the benefits as those educated children grew up and became firemen and doctors and lawyers. That’s what it meant to live as part of a thriving community.

I can imagine people thinking as they read this, “Yeah, but that’s because you grew up in the seventies, before the government started taxing everyone so heavily.” Maybe that’s it. In 1976, earnings in the top tax bracket were taxed at 70%. Today that number is 39.6%.

I was about to say that I’m not writing today in support of any particular plan or policy, but that’s not really honest. I’m writing to say I’m glad the farm bill didn’t pass. I’m writing to say those posts I see on Facebook about the poor downtrodden taxpayers make me sad. And I’m writing to say that it makes me angry that people co-opt Christianity as a plan for achieving worldly success.

My mother once told me I have the wrong opinion about everything. This was after the time when she had started watching Bill O’Reilly three times a day and before the time when the doctor suggested to my father that that habit might not be helping her.

So, if I have the wrong opinion about the farm bill, at least it’s the opinion that puts a big wheel of government cheese in the refrigerator of some potentially hungry kids. I’m willing to risk being wrong about the rest of it.

 

 

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