Tag: Literature

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Advice for Seniors

Note from the seniors reading "We [heart] you Ms. O'Shea"

“Do you have any advice for us?”

It’s a few days before the last day of classes and the seniors don’t want to spend any more time analyzing the Federal Reserve’s response to the financial crisis.

Who can blame them? My mind is on the future these days, too.

“Write an advice post on your blog,” they say. Then, they get back to work preparing for their debate on the Federal Reserve.

So, if they can power through their senioritis,  I guess I’ll get to work, too. Senior women in B-Block Economics, this one’s for you.

Note to everyone else: one of the perks dangers of teaching is that it’s easy to convince yourself that you are as wise as the students think you are. Let’s agree to pretend that’s true for a few more minutes while I get my hubris on and offer them some advice.

1. Everyone is insecure.

I spent a good deal of college feeling like I wasn’t quite “enough.” I was a great student and I made good and lasting friends, but I always felt a little bit like a misfit.

At my twenty-year college reunion I found myself in conversation with some of those people I’d been intimidated by. They were talking about all the things and people they had been intimidated by. Come again? One of them even mentioned my brains. Huh. 

(Bonus advice: go to reunions. They are funny and they give you an excuse to think about your life. Also, there’s a good chance that the crush who ignored you senior year will have lost his hair. That will feel better than it should.)

2. If you have a terrible job, juggle glasses.

My freshman year I worked in the dining hall. If your dining hall has a conveyor belt, imagine riding on your tray all the way through the little opening in the wall where it disappears. I worked on the other side of that wall.

Worse than that, I worked on the other side of that wall during dinner on Fridays when students were starting to let off steam for the weekend. Young people do terrible, disgusting things to mashed potatoes and patty melts after a few beers.

My job was to scrape the mashed potato castles and ground beef sculptures off those trays. Pete’s job was to take the glasses off the trays, dump out the mashed potatoes and fruit punch, and load the glasses in huge plastic racks.

Pete would grab a glass from a tray, toss it into the air, and catch it behind his back. Then he’d grab another, until he was juggling six at one time while trays kept rushing by. I never saw Pete break a glass.

I was homesick that semester in the dining hall. Pete made me feel like I could be happy.

(Bonus advice: don’t put mashed potatoes in your fruit punch in the dining hall. Extra bonus advice: don’t actually ride your tray on the conveyor belt. That would be weird. Extra super bonus advice: don’t keep that dining hall job for too long, Pete or no Pete. Dorm mail carrier–that was a good job.)

3. Try not to hurt people more than you have to.

You are going to have to hurt people sometimes. Maybe you will tell your freshman roommate that you want to live with someone else next year. Perhaps you will disappoint your parents when you realize the needs of your heart don’t align with the needs of their expectations. Someday you might stop loving someone who still loves you.

Life is complicated and sometimes it’s really hard to figure out how to be good. Don’t waste your karma hurting people when you don’t have to.

(Bonus advice: when you do hurt someone, don’t fake apologize. People hate that shit. Bonus apology to non-teenagers: Sorry about the profanity. Teenagers like that shit. Bonus homework assignment for Econ B: Debate the following proposition: O’Shea just fake apologized. Be prepared to argue either side.)

4. Don’t use the ice bucket in hotel rooms.

Old people soak their teeth in them. Don’t ask me how I know that.

(Bonus advice: If you have a long drive to college, you can always count on O’Reilly Auto Parts.)

5. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

I’m just kidding. That’s terrible advice. (Trust me–I’m your Econ teacher.)

Did we remember to make you read Hamlet? Laertes, son of Polonius, is heading off to college. Polonius, perhaps fearing that he has forgotten to raise his son, starts spewing random advice. You can watch Bill Murray in this scene if you follow the link. Go ahead, click on it. I’ll wait.

I always thought Polonius was being sort of silly and arrogant in that scene. Then I started writing a blog post full of advice.

(Bonus advice: Make a budget. Live below your means. Be frugal when you have to be and generous always. Extra bonus advice: That thing Polonius said about friendship (did you watch the clip like I asked you to?): “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel”–that was good advice. Do that.)

6. You don’t get extra credit for being strong.

Be as mature as you can pull off. Try to be decent. Be kind. But strong? Sometimes strong is stupid. Let people help you.

(Bonus advice pop quiz: Fill in the blank with appropriate bonus advice: ___________________________________________________________)

7. Like what you like, not what you think you are supposed to like.

I like Dancing with the Stars. I can tell you the complete plot of a Brady Bunch episode in thirty seconds or less. I’m a halfway decent Texas Hold’em player (I’m not kidding–I won a tournament in Laughlin one time).

People with MBAs and PhDs in English aren’t supposed to like these things. Sue me. I’m happy.

(Bonus advice: Love who you love, not who you think you are supposed to love. You should probably make sure that point ends up in your notes. In the scene before Polonius gives Laertes advice, Laertes gives Ophelia advice. In a nutshell, he says: don’t love that Hamlet guy you love. Things go badly from there. Bonus writing advice: don’t bury your most important point in the parentheses after number 7.)

8. No one is just one thing.

You’ll have to figure out what to do with this advice on your own. Someday you will need it, and I promise that it’s true.

9. See that face in the mirror?

Like that face. Say nice things to it. Treat it as well as you treat your good friends. I think I was in my forties before I figured this out. Skip those twenty years of wishing your face looked like somebody else’s face. There’s absolutely no upside there. Use that extra time to read Hamlet.

You are going to wake up with yourself every single morning of your life. You’ll probably wake up with other people sometimes, too, and that can be nice. But you are the one who will stick around. Make sure that person is someone you enjoy hanging around with.

10. You don’t need my advice.

I was halfway through writing this post on your last day of class. You started giving advice to the juniors. You told them to stand up for themselves and trust their own choices. Then you advised them not to stress out comparing themselves to their friends. Finally, you reminded them that they can get a good college education anywhere–that what you put into it is more important than where you go.

I just sat back and smiled. Class of 2018, relax. You’ve got this.

If you’ve got advice for the class of 2018, feel free to add it in the comments, and don’t hesitate to share this post with your friends.

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Rilke Meets the Little Red Hen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes everything feels like a sign.

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

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

**************************************************

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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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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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