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Fathers

Shortly after Fred finally convinced my father-in-law to drive one of those little motorized carts around the grocery store, they went shopping one Sunday morning. Peter liked to clip coupons and travel from store to store to get the best deals. A typical Sunday morning might include buying green grapes at Smiths, toilet paper at Albertsons, tomatoes at Walmart, and frozen fish sticks at Skaggs Alpha Beta (anyone else remember Skaggs?).

On this fine spring morning, Fred had wandered a few aisles ahead. I picture him checking the dates on loaves of bread while Peter rolls through the pasta aisle. (The first time I ever ate dinner at my then-future-in-laws’ house we had spaghetti and peas and pickles, but that’s probably a detail for a different story.)

The store was fairly quiet that morning, and Fred wasn’t paying much attention to anything as he checked the bread for the best dates. Suddenly, he heard a popping noise, like the sound a jar of pickles makes when you first twist the lid and break the seal. Then he heard a louder splat, and then another, and then the morning crescendoed into a crazy cacophony of popping, splatting, crashing, and breaking glass.

I imagine that Fred looked up from the bread at this point. He may have had time to think, “That sounds like an old man driving an electric cart into a pyramid of Ragu jars at the end of an aisle,” but I can’t be sure about that.

What I do know is that Peter’s khaki pants were splashed red to his knees when he wheeled around the corner. “I didn’t do it,” he said to Fred, and then,  “Let’s get out of here.”

I imagine the slow-motion getaway scene. Peter rolls through the checkout line with three boxes of American Beauty thin spaghetti, six cans of tuna, two coupons, and perhaps curiously to an observant checker, no spaghetti sauce.

Peter was a man who fed his neighbor’s dalmatian hot dogs over the wall; who stopped eating meat and wearing leather when he was six years old in 1923; and whose normal way of being with most people could best be described as irascible. He was also a man who loved talk radio, filled our closet with over one hundred juice jars full of water in preparation for Y2K, cooked steak and eggs for our dogs, and, in a mystery we still haven’t solved, decided not to wear underwear for the final few weeks of his life. Oh, and in what I like to think of as a testament to his good judgment, he liked me.

If you remember Statler and Waldorf, the two grumpy old hecklers in the balcony on the Muppet Show, you can get a rough sketch of Peter. For a similar rough sketch of my father, I’d point you toward Bob Newhart, when he was still a psychiatrist, not later when he bought the inn.

My father was more reserved than Peter, more inclined to walk around the house singing “Danny Boy” or “Bicycle Built for Two,” and more likely to laugh so hard he couldn’t breathe. It’s harder to find one story that lays him bare, that illuminates him the way the crashing Ragu bottles spotlight Peter.

A collage then.

Any one of hundreds of mornings: My father sits at the table eating breakfast. He is fully dressed. Something flashes in the trees. He sets down his teacup, puts the New York Times crossword puzzle aside (unless it’s Monday, because that one is too easy to bother doing), and grabs the bird book to identify a new red bird in the backyard.  Maybe it’s the pileated woodpecker at last!

I’m in high school: I drive my father to work on a summer morning if I want to use the car. As we walk through the Pennsylvania grass he points out how each drop of dew sifts sunlight into colors. Engineer father teaches indifferent daughter about prisms; poet daughter thinks about ways of seeing the world.

Baking bread: I don’t know if my father baked homemade bread once a month or once a year, but if Alzheimer’s takes everything else, I expect I will wander in search of the house on Marvle Valley filled with the yeasty smell of rising dough. He didn’t measure his ingredients with cup measures; he weighed out pounds of flour on an old kitchen scale that usually sat on the hearth in the family room under a big bowl of unshelled nuts. Late in the evening, as the loaves finally came out of the oven, we’d all sit around the kitchen table, melting hot butter onto slice after slice after slice of crusty white bread.

Liver cancer: When my father was battling the liver cancer that would eventually take his life, he was determined to keep laughing. He bought old radio shows on CDs, watched the Pink Panther, read and re-read The Importance of Being Earnest, and one day we went online together and ordered the giant book of New Yorker cartoons.

There’s a collage. I could look from any number of other angles and choose different moments, but if I’m honest, I’ve been stalling. There is a story that is tugging at me, a story that illuminates. Right before the meal my family referred to even as it happened as The Last Supper, we had a family meeting. My father was too ill to continue to care for himself and my mother; my mother had taken her first few steps on her long walk with Alzheimer’s; my siblings and I were spread across the country; and the house was too big. Decisions had to be made.

At one point in the conversation, my father broke down. I can’t pretend to understand everything he was feeling in that moment: gratitude and pride as his children rallied around, sadness at the thought of leaving, perhaps something like fear of the unknown.

But there was more, and I’m having trouble coming at it directly.

This might help. Today, my husband and I met with a financial advisor to talk about retirement planning. The first man we met greeted me as “Dr. O’Shea” and I introduced him to my husband, Fred Gordon. When the financial advisor introduced us, carefully and accurately to his colleague, an older man, the colleague shook my husband’s hand, called him Dr. O’Shea, smiled at me, and said “It’s nice to meet you, Miss.”

For all the years I can remember, a poem my mother had clipped out of a magazine hung on the refrigerator. “I don’t think my apron’s a red badge of shame” is the line I remember reading hundreds of times during what people might call my “formative years.” At the same time, I can remember my father telling me, in what must have been the early 1970s, that I could grow up to be an astronaut if that’s what I wanted to be.

Like many women my age, I grew up with one foot in a traditional world, where parents stayed married, women stayed home, and family roles were clear, and another foot in a changing world, that taught me to value independence and self-reliance and to be on guard against being cast into roles that would limit me.

The night of the last supper, I glimpsed my parents’ world for the first time, not from my usual standpoint as a woman who wanted and didn’t want to be like my mother, but from the eyes of my father. I saw the pain it caused him to have to stop protecting my mother before she stopped needing to be protected, to walk away from her out of this world instead of taking her with him. I saw that, as he contemplated his own death, the only thing he cared about was making sure my mother would have everything she needed.

I had a visceral sense that evening of having been not just loved, but carried, without ever knowing it, through the world on my father’s shoulders. I glimpsed for just a moment the way all those “family men” of my father’s generation subsumed themselves to the needs of their wives and children.

It’s likely that everyone but me has known this all along. The first time I saw Yellowstone, I stood in front of a boiling pond the color of sky and phlox and sun and leaves. Steam rose like spirits, and I was overwhelmed. So much beauty had been waiting in the world all this time, and I hadn’t known it was there.

That’s what I want to say about fathers this mid-June. It turns out my father and Peter did have a few things in common. They both carried those responsibilities so gracefully that it was easy not to notice they were doing it. They both also died way too soon.

Reading The Importance of Being Earnest, my father would laugh until he couldn’t breathe when Lady Bracknell declaimed,  “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

When Peter came in from grocery shopping that Sunday morning, I asked him what had happened to his pants.

“Nothing,” he said.

From far, far away, in a world beyond talk radio, I can hear my father laughing.

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Walnut

If you follow the Bosque Trail along the Rio Grande south past the Nature Center, you’ll eventually come to an intersection with a cute little mini-street sign. Here you will have to make a decision. You can continue south toward Tingley Beach all the way past Rio Bravo if you’re in the mood for an out and back ride. Or, if you are a teacher, and it’s June, and you want to satisfy your curiosity about whether this trail links with Unser, you can turn right, take the I-40 trail to the west, and see what happens.

I feel like a human roller coaster as soon as I make the turn. Here the trail, its own mini-road, rises parallel to the highway. An orange metal rail swoops playfully alongside all the way across the river. My new light bike says click click click click click as I pedal up the narrow track. It’s a smaller version of the sound the Thunderbolt makes at Kennywood Park as it begins its long ascent to the top of the first hill. The ground falls away as I look up and up and up toward the cliff on the other side of the river.

As I pump into the sky, I feel a little bit like ET pedaling into the clouds. First the bosque drops away beneath me, the Rio Grande reveals its muddy bottom, and then I soar over the top branches of cottonwoods on the west bank.  Finally, I chug alongside the cliff, rising to the top where I can almost look into the windows of that house with the big Christmas light display every December.

No one passes me on this roller coaster; I’m the only one with a ticket today.

Now might be a good time to mention that I don’t particularly care for roller coasters. I’m terrified of heights. I don’t see any good reason to be up in the air if I could be down on the ground.

Rather than getting more reasonable as I’ve gotten older, my fear has grown to encompass more things. I used to be afraid only when a situation was out of my control. I could climb a ladder, for instance, or traipse along a mountain ledge, or walk out and peer over the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge near Taos without any trouble.

It wasn’t until bridges started collapsing on CNN that it occurred to me to be afraid of bad engineering in every day structures. Now I don’t pull into a parking garage or drive through a tunnel without, at least for a moment, wondering if they will collapse. Likewise, I prefer upper decks of sports stadiums, assuming that it would be better to be on top than underneath if a structure came crashing to the ground.

Fortunately, these fears aren’t debilitating. For the most part, I park where I have to, drive across bridges, ride the tram when I have company in town, and live alongside these fears with little impact on my daily life.

Nevertheless, as I start up the I-40 trail, I feel the familiar wobbliness kick in.

In “The Neurobiology of Fear,” Laurel Duphiney Edmundson (whom I quote in part because I find her name delightful) notes that “the animal fear response,” which she describes as an “unspecific physiological response” is just the beginning of what happens when our bodies perceive danger. It precedes a “slower, more detailed psychological assessment of the situation, during which the individual [that would be me, on my bike on a bridge] becomes conscious of feeling afraid.”

Almost simultaneous with the wobbly feeling, I do exactly what science predicts. I think, “Huh, I am getting higher and higher above the river,” which is really cool, and “I’m terrified,” which I think I would like not to be.

For some reason, I find it comforting to know that something like my fear of heights exists in animals. Duphiney Edmundson explains that my physical response comes from “the walnut-sized structure in the forebrain called the amygdala.” I also find it comforting that she describes my amygdala as “walnut-sized,” rather than golf-ball or hailstone or brussels sprout-sized.

When I look down from that bridge, my amygdala gets busy. First, it “stimulates the hypothalamus to produce corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH).” This release “triggers the pituitary gland’s discharge of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which in turn stimulates the adrenal gland to secrete cortisol. Cortisol in the bloodstream causes an increase in glucose production, providing the necessary fuel for the brain and muscles to deal with stress.”

Cool, isn’t it?

Finally, “After passing through the amygdala, sensory information is sent on to the cortex” where “the frightening stimulus is examined in detail to determine whether or not a real threat exists.” I recognize this final stage. This is when I look down at the ground from the bridge and wonder if this web of concrete might actually fall into the river. My cortex being my cortex, not that of a more reasonable version of the species, gathers every image of a collapsing highway I’ve ever seen and decides that, yes, this bridge might fall down while I’m riding across it.

This morning (spoiler alert: the bridge still stands) I was reading an essay on a blog I follow, (zenhabits), in which Leo Babauta was explaining how to deal with a different anxiety. He advises, “Don’t fear it, don’t try to kill it. Instead, give it a hug. Embrace it. Accept it. Get used to it. You’re together for the long haul.”

He didn’t add, “Be grateful for it,” but he might have.  When I reach the top of the hill, I am exuberant. I am proud of my lumpy body for pedaling me up that trail. As I think about it further, though, it occurs to me that riding up that long hill was easy, and I mean easy in a way it had no business being for a minimally fit person who didn’t bring enough water twelve miles into a bike ride on a hot day with a headwind.

I realize now that it was my little walnut-sized amygdala, flooding my bloodstream with cortisol and increasing my glucose production, that propelled me up that hill. It was my fear that powered my legs and kept them pedaling. I hope I remember, the next time I feel that wobbly sensation or need to outrun a wooly mammoth, to be grateful.

I’ll have a chance soon. My friend Tammy suggested we bike up the bridge and then whoosh back down the next time we ride together.

You know, down, where you pick up speed and can see the ground rushing up at you the whole time. My cortex is already afraid.

I’ll let you know if the little walnut cracks.

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Read more about “The Neurobiology of Fear”  

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Summer

Every night before we go to bed, my husband tries to convince our dog to sleep in later the next morning. “Rusty,” he’ll say to the ninety pounds of fur that makes his bed beside ours, “Don’t wake us up until 7:30 tomorrow.” Rusty wags and nuzzles as if he agrees, curls himself up like a giant snail, and falls fast asleep. Most nights he doesn’t run to the window in the middle of the night to bark at Jax, the neighbor’s dog, but sometimes he does. Most nights, I sleep through it.

Every morning since school ended and summer began, Rusty wakes up at 6:15. By 6:30, the dog can no longer contain himself. He bats at the bed, turns in circles, and, if we ignore him for more than a few moments, lies back down with a dramatic, drawn-out sigh, the sort of sound a child makes when he’s letting the air escape from a balloon as slowly as possible.

It is a sigh that says, “Hello, the birds have been singing for an hour already,” and “Seriously? You are going to sleep through all this daylight?” It is a sigh that never fails to make us laugh. It is a sigh that is heavy in its finality, yet is followed within seconds by a leap to his feet and a renewed round of pawing the bed. If we show signs of moving, he’ll stretch his long nose toward whosever pillow he’s closer to and stare lovingly into sleepy eyes.

It’s hard to resist such a persistent call to play. He sniffs me on my way into the bathroom, as if to make sure I haven’t changed too much overnight, and he turns in circles while he waits as patiently as he can (which isn’t very patiently) for me to do all the things humans have to do before they leave the house in the morning. It’s clear he thinks I’m overdoing it. Clothes? Shoes? Brushing your teeth? Aren’t you ready yet?

The biggest thing I’ve learned since having this dog who drags us out of the house at least four times a day for walks is that bunnies are terrible at hiding. We inadvertently terrorize them every morning as we bound by. The rabbits, and there are thousands of them in my neighborhood, come to a dead stop as we approach. Their stillness, they seem to believe, renders us blind.

Rusty has gotten pretty good at not lunging toward them each time, but still, I gather the slack of his leash into my fist as we pass, just a few feet away from a rabbit that is standing stock still in front of a bush he might more wisely have chosen to hide behind.

After we pass, we lumbering animals who could not possibly outrun those springs with fur, the bunnies bolt across the street. I can only surmise that evolution gave them such prolific reproductive systems to counteract their poor survival instincts.

One time on a walk like this one, Rusty found half a bunny under a bush and had it in his mouth before I knew what was happening. I couldn’t get him to drop it, so I ran the rest of the way home, one rabbit paw hanging out of each side of the dog’s mouth like a giant cartoon mustache. I stuck my head in the front door to get Fred’s attention, hoping he’d agree that extracting a dead rabbit from the dog’s jaws was more his job than mine. While I was distracted, Rusty happily ate his dead half rabbit for breakfast.

Another time, our neighbor’s little yappy dog got beat up by a rabbit in their back yard. Half of the dog’s jaw was chewed away and for weeks he wore a bandage that made him look like an old cartoon of a person with a toothache.

This is the moment in the essay where, when I show up faithfully to write each day, some muse floats into my fingers, and, wham! epiphany! explains to me why I’m writing about rabbits.

While we all wait for that to happen, I’ll tell you that after I walked and fed the dog this morning, I got on my bike and set out for a rambling ten-mile ride. The sky was blessedly overcast, the clouds heavy with ash rising from fires in the Jemez and Pecos mountains. Seeing me approach on wheels this time, not alongside a wild animal on a string, more bunnies demonstrate a new set of bad survival skills. They dash at me out of the ditch, and I find myself braking repeatedly to avoid hitting them, as if they were deer on Pennsylvania highways.

I had been thinking I’d write about abundance this morning, not a bunny, but it appears that today’s muse is a comedian. I’m grateful to my dog for wagging me out of bed before the light grows old each morning.

Do me a favor, don’t tell my husband.

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Marrow

I found the dead robin in the loft in front of the wine cellar a few weeks before my uncle died. I had come upstairs to get a sauvignon blanc, not to contemplate mortality, yet there she lay, still and harmless as a kicked-off shoe. She didn’t have a mark on her, which made me certain that my golden retriever not only hadn’t brought her in to the house, but didn’t even know she was here.

We make up myths to explain the inexplicable, so here’s mine: The bird walked in through the doggy door one quiet morning when no one was home. She might have been dizzy, having flown into a window. She might have seen the dog walk through the wall and been curious. She might have grown tired of a crow pestering her, or maybe she just wanted some shade.

Inside, she wandered around the house for a while, flapping up through open space, gaining altitude. There are thirty-two windows in my house. Seeing sky in so many places, she got confused. At last she decided the only way out was through the glass door at the eastern end of the loft. She soared into air gone strangely solid, staggered back a few feet, and died.

My husband wasn’t home when I found her, so I pulled a baby gate across the doorway to the loft to keep death in and the dog out, and went downstairs, wineless.

I am afraid of dead things.  More precisely, I’m afraid of dead things in my house. Outside, in the world, I’m curious about the oddly tilted neck of the goose in the ditch, the hollowed out beaver on the trail, the fossilized lizard in the fountain. But here, inside my house, I’m totally freaked out.

Most of the time this isn’t a problem, but late last summer, wild things kept coming inside. We have a doggy-door that’s covered by a simple flap of carpet. For fifteen years, other than the time the neighbor’s jack russell terrier sauntered in while we were eating spaghetti (sensing correctly that my father-in-law would share his supper) and the time a squirrel peeked in but ran when I yelled “no,” and the time the beagles threw a party for a big black cat, it has served as a surprisingly sufficient barrier to keep the outside world outside.

Last August when the first mouse came in, I saw him slant-wise. He was there and not there, felt more than seen. I was just about to remind my husband of that time in the old house when a giant centipede skittered across the tile when the mouse made a run for it.

Mouse removal isn’t the sort of thing either of us is good at. Over the next twenty minutes, we managed to chase him out from behind the love-seat, around the room, and into the piano, where none of our ill-chosen tools (broom, dustpan, salad tongs, pancake flipper) proved useful either for catching him or scaring him out of the house. Finally, he escaped into another room where we lost his trail.

The next day, I did what I always do when I’m confronted with wild things I don’t understand. I went to my school to ask a science teacher, and came home on a kill mission. It turns out someone has actually built a better mousetrap, so after almost losing a few fingers to an old wooden one, I went to Home Depot and bought six little white plastic traps. Lined up on the kitchen counter, my weapons looked more like a row of tiny toilets than an arsenal.

Fred was on his way out of town, so after I smeared the traps with peanut butter and set them around the baseboards, he knocked on the neighbor’s door to arrange my disposal crew. Chuck, the neighbor, rolled his eyes. I know this because he rolled his eyes again when I rang his doorbell the next morning to ask him to throw my dead mouse away, and yet again when I recoiled as he tried to hand me the used mousetrap, sans mouse.

Two more mice came in alive and went out dead. While I grew efficient at trap placement, I never was able to throw the dead mouse away or to reuse a trap that had killed a mouse.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m afraid to touch these dead things. It isn’t about anything rational, and it’s not a superficial squeamishness. It’s deeper than that, more intractable; it’s monsters in the closet, trolls under the bridge. I know that if I hadn’t had a neighbor willing to throw the mouse away, I would have closed that bedroom door, sealed the opening beneath it with a towel, and left the carcass there until my husband got home. I am terrified to feel the weight of death in my hands.

Like so many other fears, naming it doesn’t make it go away. To understand isn’t necessarily to overcome. I keep tugging on the thread of this fear, trying to unravel the string back to a source. Today it leads me to a photo: a four-year old stands by a rosebush, reaching toward it. In one memory of this picture, an older brother is chasing me around the yard. In another, I’ve just put down the hose, which, I’m told, I would hold for hours, mesmerized by the flow of water.

Something about that little girl’s expression makes me think she was both living in that moment and already writing its story, that she was not just laughing at the water flowing from the hose, but capturing it, wondering about it, and preparing herself to report back to anyone who would listen that water comes out of a hose and turns into a rosebush.

Kafka explains this little girl to me when he says, “I have never understood how it is possible for almost everyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of undergoing them.” He might have substituted “joys” or “loves” for “sufferings” if he had lived a happier life. I don’t know when I first realized I had a job in the world, that it would be my place not just to be, but to observe and to tell, to “objectify [my] experience” even as I was busy living it, but when I look at that little girl, I think she knew.

It’s dangerous, though. What if there are things you are afraid to know, like the weight and warmth of a dead bird in your hand? What if you are unwilling to go near the things that disturb you, like small dead animals in your home? What if you are too small, and the world is too big, and you decide to keep your art at a distance? What if you keep objectifying without writing?

Since art is how you were built to live, you end up, without ever planning it, keeping your whole life at a distance. You develop a limp, one foot walking on the path leading you to write, to be who you are built to be, one stepping safely on the same path you think everyone else is on. Your massage therapist confirms it: one leg has grown shorter than the other, one hipbone tilts awry.

It turns out this is an essay about art. We make up myths to explain the inexplicable, to help us tell the truth about the world. I have been trying to explain to myself why for so many years I lived without being claimed by writing. That objectivity that I mastered young lets you zoom out, live at a distance, while writing, if you do it, pulls you back in to the marrow. Kafka called a “non-writing writer” a “monster courting insanity.” Perhaps he meant a woman who might just begin screaming if she has to touch a dead robin by the wine cellar.

I don’t know if I have figured anything out here, or if I have said anything that will help anyone else figure anything out. I’d like to think I have. I do know that when Fred got home, it took him about twenty seconds to don a work glove, pick up the dead robin, and toss her in the trash outside.

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Eden

Yesterday at a school in Oklahoma, teachers lay on top of their students to protect them as a tornado smashed through town. This is what teachers and parents do every day; they throw themselves between children and danger, hoping that such a frail shield will be enough. We keep getting reminded that all we have are these flimsy, breakable bodies, that sometimes all we can do is throw ourselves to the ground and hold on.

I was already thinking about loss. All week I’ve been trying to figure out the connection between loss and abundance. I’ve never agreed with people who say that loss exists to make us appreciate joy. Joy is its own tangible thing. You know this if you wake early; every single morning, one bird sings first. Being awake to hear that wild call into darkness, that summoning of light, isn’t the absence of anything.

The day Fred and I walked north and south as far as you could go on the beach at Laguna, clambering over rocks, skinning our knees, and peering into tide pools, wasn’t the absence of anything either. Joy didn’t come that day because no one we knew was dying. Joy came because an abundant world had cracked open, and we had shown up to see sculpin, sea anemones, and starfish washing in and out of the tide pools.

If loss isn’t a joy-deepener, what is it? The callous “suffering is God’s will” has always struck me as an oxymoron, and a particularly unkind one at that. I prefer to imagine a distraught God trying to talk a stubborn son out of crucifixion. I can picture a strong-willed young man-god explaining to his horrified father, “I know you didn’t mean for it to go this way, but, trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

I guess deep down, I don’t know what to make of Eden.

For almost a decade, I spent one week every year at a Zen Buddhist center in the Jemez with a bunch of teenagers. Buddhism taught me that my thoughts weren’t my self and that I could acknowledge anxiety and then let it go. It taught me to breathe, and to chant, and to be still and wait for understanding.

One of the four Noble Truths says that the origin of suffering is attachment. My understanding of Buddhism is whatever you call understanding before you can call it rudimentary, but this one always bothered me. How do you love and remain unattached? How can learning how not to hold on be a good thing?

For the record, I excel at holding on. My step kids laugh at the way I grip the strap above the passenger door when Fred is driving. I don’t lift my hands in the air on roller coasters (or at least I didn’t back when I used to ride them). I never let go of the handlebars, or even the steering wheel for that matter. In the picture from the Tower of Terror, one of those elevator-dropping rides that I got on accidently, you can barely see me; I’m tucked in behind Fred and holding on. Even when I’m riding the tram to the top of the Sandias, where my biggest fear is that the cable will snap and we’ll plummet to the canyon floor, I hold on to the pole in the middle of the cabin, as though somehow that grip could save me. I’ve got holding on down.

Non-attachment always sounded to me like not caring, like protecting yourself to avoid inevitable suffering. I know how to do that, and for me, learning to be alive in the world has meant un-learning that skill. I had to learn how to love enough to be destroyed by loss, and then, when loss almost destroyed me, I had to learn how to tread water beside it without letting it pull me under. I had to come to grips with the fact that the children I teach can die, and still throw myself on top of them as though every nascent promise will have a chance to blossom.  I have to throw seeds into clayey ground and trust that something beyond my meager gardening skill will help them grow.

It took an Episcopal priest to help me understand this idea of loving without attachment. When the Rector of my church announced his upcoming retirement, I, along with an entire congregation, had several months to come to grips with the impending loss of a wise, compassionate, beloved teacher. Over those months, in sermons each week, he and the other clergy talked about love and grace and leaving.

At first I wanted them to stop. I didn’t want to live in the loss any sooner than I had to. But as they all kept talking, every week, in beautifully crafted sermon after sermon, I felt something in my grip unclenching.

Last Sunday after the final service, I went to a ballet recital. I watched as one of my students led a group of three year olds on stage. A minute or so into the dance, one little tutu’d girl stopped. She didn’t get confused or distracted or scared; today just wasn’t her dancing day. She folded her arms across her white leotard, dug in her white-tighted heels, stuck out her tiny lip, and pouted. Tiny tutu collisions followed as the other girls, their routine disrupted, lost their way on the big stage. My student danced on beautifully, her face relaxed and smiling, her dancing free and joyful.

When I first heard about our Rector’s retirement, I was that little girl in the tutu with my arms crossed. When the time came for our last service together, I was my student, able to keep dancing through a world that wasn’t organized around me.

One summer before I realized I like the idea of gardening more than I like gardening, I planted tomatoes, peppers, basil, thyme, and parsley in some clayey soil that gets too much sun next to a brick wall that radiates heat and cooks the plants all day. (My sister once added sage and rosemary to this mix and called it her Simon and Garfunkel garden.)

The parsley loved it. I put in two plants that year, and they grew bushy and tall, and I ate fresh parsley all summer. I remember those plants vividly because a parsley caterpillar spent July living on one of them. If you haven’t seen a parsley caterpillar, it looks more like something that came out of Pixar than out of creation. My grandson wore a Bee Transformer costume on his fourth birthday, and the parsley caterpillar looked a little bit like that. 1284088532SZTrNi-1

I spend just enough time paying attention to the world that it’s still easy to surprise me. The parsley caterpillar, striped in neon green and black, dotted with bright yellowy-orange spots, would lift his head and wiggle his two bright green horns when I came into the garden to water.  (Ok, I suspect I’m personifying, or at least canine-ifying here, but all I can do is tell you how the world feels to me.) I learned to water gently, so as not to wash him off his stem. Each day I’d peer at the parsley until I spotted him, say good morning, and update him on the dismal state of the other plants in the garden.

The first morning, certain I was experiencing something new on the planet, I did some research and learned that my little (ordinary) worm would grow up to be a black swallowtail. I wondered what he knew about who he was becoming. He didn’t seem concerned. He lazed on the parsley all summer. Back when we shared our house with three aging beagles, my sister described them as “decorations that follow you around.” That’s sort of how I felt about the caterpillar; he was a really cool animated plant decoration.

If you’re a real gardener, you already know how this story ends. One morning I showed up with the hose at my scrawny garden, and the parsley and the parsley caterpillar were gone. Every single leaf had been chewed to the stalk. It hadn’t occurred to me that one day he would leave and take the parsley with him, but it made sense. He’d had to find a new spot to spin himself into his shroud while he transformed. I looked around the garden, but I never found the chrysalis.

Mostly I don’t understand loss. I don’t understand how each loss holds every other loss. I don’t understand how we keep managing to live our way out of it. I don’t understand why sometimes these frail bodies are enough to hold back pain, and sometimes they buckle. For a while I wondered if abundance were about the present, the potential each moment has for bursting into beauty, and loss were about the past and future, and our fear of losing every impermanent thing. That doesn’t really explain it, though. Loss is every bit as present and tangible as joy.

Because my parsley caterpillar went away to cocoon, I missed the moment when the black swallowtail emerged into a new world. I didn’t see him light on the trumpet vine and wait quietly for his wings to dry. I don’t know if he burst out blinking into the sun, or unfolded himself easily into early evening.

1351460677oDGetxMostly I don’t understand loss. All I know is that that summer, the back yard was full of black swallowtails. I loved to watch how gently they brushed the planet. I can see them now as I watch my student dancing; they skip and flutter, they light for a moment on a branch that doesn’t bend, they swoop and hover. All they are is wing and wonder; nothing about them is built for holding on.

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Rhythm

I woke up this morning imagining my basil plant’s to-do list:

Six fifteen:  Slowly stretch toward the window as the first sun comes in (bow pose in basil-yoga).

Seven ten:  Breakfast; suck water from soil into stems.

Seven fifty: Disperse water throughout leaves.

Eight thirty to six pm:  Begin replacing two leaves snipped last night for a stir-fry. Goal: three centimeters of new growth today.

Periodically throughout day: Sift scent into the room as leaves are riffled. Goal: minimum of eight wafts.

I grew up in the “time management” school of living; I took my first time-management class in my early twenties. There I learned to keep one (and only one) calendar, to sort my to-do list into A B and C priorities, to transfer those to-do list items into time-slots on my calendar, and to update my list at the end of each day. I even learned to cross off items if I’d carried them forward for five days without completing them (they’ll show up as A-items if they ever become important) and to schedule unscheduled time for emergencies into each day. I liked it when people said things like “If you need to get something done, ask a busy person,” and then asked me.

Recently I was imagining the week I’d mapped out in my head, every hour carefully accounted for, my stress mounting as I portioned too many tasks into those scarce slots. I was sure I had already said no to everything I could say no to. Everything left, work, writing, exercise, laundry, playing piano, playing violin, and so on, was an A. The challenge, I thought, was one of mapping. I simply had to arrange my life into a schedule, a definitive route through time, and then exert discipline to follow the map. I wanted a routine.

Someone (the internet would like it to be the Buddha but can’t commit) once said, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” That’s what happened when a good friend interrupted my stress-fest to ask, “What if you thought in terms of rhythm instead of routine?”

Oh. I’ve always liked the word circadian. Now that I’m thinking about rhythm I realize that built in to my biology is a rhythm that takes its cues from the world. I pretend I’m “managing my time,” but without any awareness on my part, my body has been responding to the waxing and waning of light for forty-nine years. Rhythm was here before my to-do list. Rhythm preceded my calendar. I didn’t have to learn how to live my days according to a rhythm, I just had to stop trying not to.

A few months ago a preschool music teacher came to my school to show teenagers how to help little kids access music. We played clapping games, made noises that sounded like rain and thunder, and chanted rhymes while waving our arms, touching our heads, and hopping on the beat. We turned our bodies into rhythm instruments and talked about the innate nature of rhythm. I started noticing the pulse of my breathing when I sang or ran, the beat of my steps and the swing of my arms as I walked across campus or around my kitchen.

When I started paying attention to the rhythm of my days instead of hunting for the perfect routine, I freed myself from those slots. I realized I didn’t have to schedule “play violin for an hour” to actually play the violin.  Once the slots weren’t full of things I had to do, I was free to do what I most wanted or needed to do in every moment. All of the other moments, and the anxiety embedded in them, receded before the power of the present. All of a sudden, every day was vacation.

Lately, two women I like and admire have been commenting on my seeming ability to “have a life” in addition to “having a job.” They say this, I think, because I started a blog, because I play mandolin with friends on Sunday afternoons, perhaps because I seem (at least sometimes!) to get enough sleep. Almost every morning, I get up at five and write.  Sometimes when I get home from work, I play the violin for two hours. Sometimes I play the piano. Sometimes I get obsessed over whether anyone is commenting on my blog and check it a hundred times before dinner. Sometimes I cook, or grade papers, or play the slipper game with the dog.

I don’t write many things down any more. I still have a to-do list, but there isn’t much on it. Really, if it were something I “have” to do, why on earth would I forget to do it? I’m learning to trust that the important things will rise to the surface, shine, and catch my attention if I just show up to see them. I still find myself setting goals or trying to make long-term plans, but I’m learning to notice those moments and resist them, to get up and go for a run when I feel the urge to sit down and map out an exercise routine.

I like being a time-management heretic, living into rhythm instead of following a routine. A few nights ago I found myself outside in the mountains under the stars with a group of teenagers. We were marveling at how many stars we could see once we’d cleared the clutter of city lights. Claire, a bagpiper, was leading us in a march under the stars. Earlier she’d asked what sort of a walk we wanted. She’d been debating a six-eight or a four-four cadence, explaining how our steps would inevitably echo the rhythm of her piping. As she piped into the darkness, our steps responded, the stars held their patterns, curious animals wondered at this new noise in the world, and I felt as simple as that little pot of basil on my kitchen table.

Here’s what I’ve learned since I stopped trying to manage time. Routine starts in scarcity, with a finite number of hours in a day. Rhythm dances in abundance. There aren’t any slots when you are living in the river. The current (call it life, call it light, call it God) tugs at you, the sun snags a path, and you follow it like a sunflower across long afternoons. Basil plants push out new leaves because that is what basil plants do.  Your body already knows how to delight in the world. Time takes deep breaths and grows wide downstream.

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Impediment

I still remember the sound of the rope slapping the flagpole outside Mrs. Majewski’s classroom at St. Louise. All spring, while we diagrammed sentences, practiced spelling bee words, and solved for x, it clanged stability, longing, and the lengthening lure of the sun.

Seventh grade was the year the flagpole was closest to my classroom and the year the orthodontist cemented a bar between my top teeth and gave me a speech impediment. Each evening my father had to insert a tiny key into the metal bar that spanned the roof of my mouth and crank it open half a turn. The goal was to make extra room for my teeth by widening my jaw. (I remember a lot of joking about the irony: I wasn’t exactly a kid who needed a bigger mouth.) My father and I both dreaded this ritual; it hurt me to have my mouth cranked open, and it hurt my father to reach his hand into my mouth and cause pain.

I remember sitting in class that year, not raising my hand because I hated the way my voice sounded. You can’t pronounce words right when your tongue can’t hit the roof of your mouth. Words were my thing; I didn’t understand this new fear of speaking.

I’ve wandered into this memory unexpectedly this morning, and now I’m picking at it, trying to figure out why it’s here.  Lately I’ve been talking to teenagers about what it means to have a voice. I love talking to them; they reach deep when they aren’t pretending. Those who have found their voices claim them passionately; those who are still looking bare their yearning so intimately that sometimes I have to catch my breath and look away. Can a government have a right to privacy? Is Wiki-Leaks going to save our democracy or doom it? What sorts of things silence a person? Can an individual person change the world or does change come from a group? Why would anyone be that mean? These are the sorts of questions they lob like innocent bombs around the room, and the answers matter. “How do you live in the world?” is an urgent question when you are seventeen.

Yesterday when the students’ conversation ebbed, we read the first chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.  She writes of her childhood silences, “It was when I found out I had to talk that school became a misery, that the silence became a misery. I did not speak and felt bad each time that I did not speak.” She remembers her “broken voice skittering out into the open” when she had to “perform.”

I thought again of the bar that used to keep my tongue from reaching the roof of my mouth. One day after school that year, some of the boys in my class were dropping pens onto pictures of tanks. They were making the noises some boys make when they bomb things, a dramatic descending whistle followed by a long, sputtering, guttural explosion when the pen hits the tank on the floor.

At one point, John started telling a story about “this crazy guy” who lived next door to him. The man had been torturing a cat in his yard. John went into graphic detail, but I won’t. Suffice it to say it was horrific, and the other boys laughed.

I don’t remember that many specific moments from seventh grade. I remember the position of the classroom in the building (upstairs, on the McMurray Road side), and the direction our desks faced (toward the office and the church, away from the library), and writing an essay on autism that my older brother showed to one of his friends. I’m not even sure I’ve gotten the teacher’s name right, but I remember exactly what the boy said his neighbor did to the cat.

As I walk deeper into this memory, trying to figure out why it stayed intact, I feel the present, with all its confidence and bravado, falling off the horizon behind me. I see my hair grow longer. I’m wearing knee socks. My tongue twists around uncomfortable metal in my mouth. I walk up the stairs from the playground, turn left past the principal’s office, and take a quick right into the classroom. I see where I’m sitting in the fourth row of desks toward the windows, three chairs from the back of the room. I see the moment I’m avoiding slide into focus.

The boy who is speaking aligns his aim, lobs his weapon out of the launcher on his desk, and whistles as it arcs beautifully and falls toward its target on the floor. The listening boys are laughing. From this distance I can see that I am measuring my reaction against their potential judgment of it in real time. Seventh grade: calibrating, revising, reacting.

Suddenly, though, the story changes. I realize I know the man John is talking about, and that he could draw a line that reached right from that cat torturer to me. Worse, I know that John knows, and I am terrified that he is about to draw that line.

It must have been tempting. It would have transformed his story into a weapon. It might even have been the reason he began telling the story in the first place. “Isn’t he the guy who…?” was the question I dreaded to hear whistling toward me.

The way I remember this story now may not be the way it happened; it could be that John drew that line, and I lied. It could be that I was wrong: maybe he didn’t know the line existed, and I didn’t have to be afraid. But the way I remember it now, he looked at the girl with the long hair and knee socks, and he knew she was afraid, and she knew he knew, and he didn’t draw that line. The way I remember it now, a little girl was given a gift from a boy who was bombing a sheet of loose-leaf paper with a pen that was about to explode.

I let the horizon roll itself up like a yoga mat behind me and leave that little girl back in Pennsylvania to fend for herself. I look around the classroom I’m in today and wonder if they still crank kids’ mouths open with little keys. I’m thinking about all the voices speaking this morning, and the voices not speaking, and I’m wondering about all of our heavy words and silences. I’m wondering if there is a student in the room who is terrified that her secret will be said.

They must make either ropes or flagpoles out of something different now, because, although I’ve listened for it on windy days, I’ve never heard this flagpole slap that same hopeful, melancholy sound. When my palatal expander was removed, I lost my speech impediment. I resumed raising my hand to answer questions and read out loud. But there were still things I didn’t say.

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Revelation

Am I really the only one who never realized that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and the ABCs are the same song?

I learned this riveting bit of trivia from Hakim Bellamy, Albuquerque’s first Poet Laureate, at a workshop in January. It was a throwaway line, something like, “You know, the same way Twinkle Twinkle…” He wasn’t expecting to reveal truth with that aside, but for me, it eclipsed everything else he had to say.

It’s not like I haven’t thought about these songs since I was five. Twinkle is contemporary music for me. If that idea seems hard to imagine, you probably never had a child who played a string instrument. My granddaughter decided she wanted to play the violin when she saw Celtic Woman on TV. In retrospect, she was still in her princess phase, so maybe she just wanted to wear the sparkly dress, but we’re enthusiastic grandparents, so off we went to violin lessons.

The Suzuki method leaves nothing to chance. There are games for learning to hold the bow, games for naming the parts of the violin, games for getting to violin lessons on time. (Ok, I made that last one up, but there ought to be.)

The first thing that happens when your granddaughter takes up violin is that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star becomes the music of your life. She’ll play the twinkle theme in quarter notes (the way you are used to hearing it), and then she’ll play it in triplets (think twin-twin-twin-kle-kle-kle), which she will understand as “lavender octopus.” She’ll play Twinkle to the rhythm of “fuzzy yellow caterpillar” and to “I practice each morning.” Just last week she started playing it to “I’m [pause] a monkey.” My point is that she will spend some part of each day for the next two or three years (and counting) playing the song I didn’t know was the ABC song.

The second thing that happens when your granddaughter takes up the violin is that you realize she’s having a lot of fun, and you’re just watching. Hence the third thing: you buy a violin and start playing Twinkle Twinkle every day yourself.

I have to admit that I thought it looked easy. I’ve played the piano on and off for a long time—how hard could it be to learn an instrument when you only have to read one clef?

It turns out, there are at least three reasons it’s harder to learn to play violin than piano.

1. The notes on a piano know who they are. If you put your finger on middle C, the 24th white key from the far left of the keyboard, the tone you hear will be, with a high degree of statistical certainty, middle C.

Not so on the violin. You will put your finger in the same unmarked location where you are certain you put it yesterday to play a D, and you are likely to play a D flat (who plays a D flat on purpose?), or a D#, or if you haven’t been practicing enough, you might actually play a C or an E.

2. Learning to play piano, you might have to practice scales in contrary motion (one hand singing do re mi fa…the other do ti la so…), but both hands are doing roughly the same thing in different directions. You do not have to finger a scale in your left hand while your right hand makes unnatural stroking motions with a stick.

3. You do not have to hoist a piano onto your shoulder and hold it in precisely the right place with your chin to play it.

Finally, if my husband or my dog were writing this list and loved me less than they do, they might add that it never actually causes your family physical pain when you practice piano.

So.  All that is to say that I’m quite familiar with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star; it’s not an abandoned relic of my childhood.

Which brings me to the ABCs. With five older siblings, I’m sure I knew the alphabet well before first grade, but circa 1970, I (and the forty-four other students who would line up in front of and behind me through eighth grade) marched around Sr. Esther’s room, carrying canes with letters on them. Along the way, we jumped in tires and probably even clapped out beats as we sang the alphabet song. I loved those canes.

I remember 1970 as the year we colored everything yellow and circled words that rhymed. At some point, we also learned to say the alphabet backwards, presumably to make looking up words in the dictionary easier. (I can’t say this skill has ever helped me figure out if equanimity comes before or after erotic on the fly, but it does make it easy to impress teenagers on the first day of class. As does writing your name forwards and backwards at the same time with a marker in each hand, which is really no different than playing a scale in contrary motion, but I digress.)

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve had a love affair with the alphabet since I was a little kid. I used to say periwinkle was my favorite color, just because I liked how it sounded. And when I checked the dictionary just now to make sure periwinkle really is just a fancy way to say purple, I learned it is also a sea snail, which is every bit as much fun to say.

So at some point when I was three or four or five, I learned the song that taught me to cast my wonder onto the stars, and I learned the song that gave me twenty-six tools I could use to explore that wonder.

“How I wonder what you are” still pulls me onto the back deck with my sleeping bag each November to watch the Leonids. “How I wonder what you are” still calls me to my keyboard to explore that mystery, the way Rilke does when he explains life in eleven syllables: “it is alternately stone in you and star.”

When Hakim Bellamy said casually, “You know, the way Twinkle Twinkle and the ABCs are the same song,” what I heard was, “in the beginning was the word,” or, in the words of my old teacher, John Dunne, “if it all means the same thing, it means God.”

Back when I was first learning to sing to the stars and to love the world with letters, I had to leave for the bus stop when the trolley came for the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Today, I have to stop writing and get ready for work when I hear my neighbor’s garage door open.

Before I turn off my desk lamp, a little pool of light illuminates my hands, spidering over my laptop. The backs are flat and my fingers curl gently toward the keys. If I were to put pennies on them while I type, an old piano trick for practicing scales, they wouldn’t fall off. If the moonlight caught me just then and you looked in the door, you wouldn’t be able to tell if I were playing at a Bach Invention or playing at salvation.

Click here to read Rilke’s poem Evening  

  Click here to get to know Hakim Bellamy

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Spring

Riding my bike home from work yesterday into a thirty mile per hour headwind (with gusts to 44, according to the National Weather Service), I realized that no combination of my fitness level and my bike’s gears were going to get me all the way up the hill between Coors Boulevard and home. I also realized that you don’t really need spring in Albuquerque. Winter here is not an endurance test. The sky stays clear blue, cranes fly in to fill the fields, and snow doesn’t stay long enough to slush into puddles. Even the lessening light feels more like a respite than a reason for despair.

That wasn’t true growing up in Pittsburgh. I was reminded of this fact recently when my sister came to visit. (Note to regular readers: you can relax; Judy and I are both happy to report that there’s no surprise ending here!) On a rare, overcast New Mexico day, Judy looked at the sky and said something like, “Oh, good, the sun’s out.”

I had forgotten that for the first twenty years of my life, a day where the sky stays a light milky gray could have felt sunny. In Pittsburgh, once winter comes and the days go short, the sky steels itself, untinted by any hint of blue. Ash Wednesday there was redundant. By February, anyone who didn’t know that they were dust and that to dust they would return just wasn’t paying attention.

On one of those short days, long before we were using words like dementia, I was standing with my mother in the kitchen of the house she’d lived in since 1967. We were looking out the window at the woods beyond the back yard. The trees with their empty branches scrawled on dull sky looked like charcoal sketches on a dingy tea towel.

“They’re all dead now,” she surprised me by saying. “They aren’t going to bloom this year.”

My mother doesn’t easily change her mind, so after a few minor protests I didn’t really argue on the trees’ behalf. The words felt sad, and portentous, and I was glad when a blue jay landed on the birdfeeder and brought some color back into the afternoon.

It’s easy to feel like the trees will never bloom again in March in Pittsburgh.

I remember those childhood winters as a series of annual illnesses. All the color fell from the trees, long nights usurped the light, and cold mornings woke you in silence.  My friends and I stopped collecting bright leaves and ironing them into wax paper placemats, stopped playing kickball and flashlight tag, and started moving quickly from house to car to school bus, bundled tightly against the earth’s cold breathing. Every single year, the whole world grew quiet and died.

Sometime in late March or April, just when you were sure it was going to be winter forever this time, you’d come home from school, drop your book bag in the hall, and see a vase on the kitchen table full of pussy willow branches your mother had cut in the backyard. They were as gray as the sky, but a light-fuzzy-dawn-gray that hinted at life. The next morning waking up, you’d hear finches singing in the locust outside your bedroom window. You’d still scuff through slush on your way to the bus stop, but you could feel it coming now.

And here’s the thing. Every single year, no matter how long or bleak the winter had been, it came. The dogwood bloomed, forsythia lit up the driveway, azaleas flanked the front porch, and walnuts ripened in bright green hulls. Even the tadpoles could be counted on to swim around in creeks and jelly jars, as long as there was someone in the neighborhood young enough to remember to catch them.

In his sumptuous poem, “A Color of the Sky,” Tony Hoagland writes, “Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,” which is precisely how I felt when I got off my bike at last yesterday afternoon. “Windy today” in Albuquerque means fifty mile an hour gusts and dust suspended like fish food in the air. It means trees so flustered they throw pollen at you, and air so brown you can’t see the mountains at the edge of town. In Albuquerque, the earth in spring tells a different story than the one I learned as a child, and even living here almost twenty-five years, I’m still not sure what to make of it.

As I write tonight, I’m in out of the wind. My throat is raw, my eyes are itching, and I’m still feeling “less than brilliant.” I really don’t know much about the world, but growing up in Pittsburgh taught me this one important thing: Spring comes.

Every single year, the earth makes a promise and keeps it.

My mother was wrong about the trees that year. I’m here like Thomas to tell you: I slid my hand into the wound in the earth’s side, and I saw the woods go green.

(Click here to read “A Color of the World” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171303)

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Guns

Yesterday’s Senate action to make sure we don’t expand background checks on gun sales reminded me that maintaining the (deeply flawed) status quo is grueling work. I thought I’d take it upon myself to help our hardworking Senators by drafting a form letter they can use in the future. 

Dear Grieving Parents of [insert child’s name],

The United States Senate wants you to know that we will stand beside you in this time of deep sadness. We will light candles, send cards and teddy bears, and go to our churches and pray. We will also watch a great deal more twenty-four news than usual. Some of us may even commit selfless acts of genuine kindness on TV.

However, we think it is important to let you know what we will not do. (You might want to share this information with your surviving children so that they can better understand the illusive nature of their safety.)

1. We will not pass any laws that criminals are going to break, because that would just be stupid.

2. We will not pass any laws until we are sure that they will be 100% effective at ending all crime. Incremental steps that don’t instantly solve the entire problem are also stupid.

3. We will not give up or in any way limit our right to own military assault weapons, because military assault weapons don’t kill people, people kill people.

4. We will not give up our right to shoot dozens of rounds of bullets with a single pull of the trigger. If you were a hunter, you would understand. Game animals travel in herds.

5. We will not take any action to try to keep guns away from criminals and the mentally ill, because they will just get them anyway (see #1 above).

6. We will not place any limits on who can buy a gun, sell a gun, or shoot a gun. Any step in that direction makes it more likely that the government, which is secretly planning to invade your home, will write your name down and come take your guns.  Just like they took your car and your cat and your dog when you registered them.

In short, we will not take any difficult action to enhance your child’s chances of survival. We have decided that the murder of children (and adults, for that matter), while highly unfortunate, is a cost we are willing to bear.

We hope you understand how deeply saddened we are by your loss.  The teddy bears and balloons should be arriving shortly.

Sincerely,

Your U.S. Senate

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