Small Moments of Great Reward

A Certain Self Possession

2012-01-21T10:11:00.000-05:00

On the topic of writing and not being able to write, Ernest Hemingway wrote, "Write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."

Or something like that. I can't place my hands on my copy of A Moveable Feast, which to this day remains a favorite of mine. Never mind the tawdry internecine battles over its posthumous publication, it should be read if only for Hemingway's description of hunger and of the sausage he ate in the brasserie after unexpectedly receiving money for selling a story.

One true sentence.

**The sunrise Thursday morning was gloriously brilliant.

**At night, I fall asleep with the radiant heat of a corn bag paving the way.

**Last night, I talked with one of the most charmingly self-possessed young women I have ever met.

That last one I can go with.

We had a (vastly) younger couple over last night. By young, I mean in my son Ben's age range: mid-20s. I have known Doug since high school, as he and Ben were friends and teammates. Danielle is his fiancee; I had heard about her from Doug, but not yet met her.

The stop at our house was supposed to be the briefest of way stations for Doug and Danielle's evening. He was stopping by to meet and talk with Warren about the Symphony; she, an aspiring rare book appraiser, was coming by to look at a book in Warren's library. (It wasn't rare; no Antiques Roadshow moment here, folks.)

In arranging the evening, Doug and I had estimated perhaps a half hour. They were off to dinner and a night of board games with friends afterwards, so I made no plans for drinks, for appetizers, for anything.

Well, it didn't turn out that way. The conversation started quickly and took on a life of its own, as good conversations will. The Civil War, children's literature, the Symphony, downtown Cincinnati, Japan, Frank Lloyd Wright, music, vellum, Christmas trees, the First Folio, Archimedes, and the Gutenberg Bible, to name a few, were all part of the evening. It was as wide ranging a conversation as we have had with any of our closest friends.

It was only with reluctance (and guilt that we had gone on so long and I hadn't set out any food) that I finally felt compelled to say, "We've kept you from your friends and your plans!" Shortly after that, Doug and Danielle drove off in the light snow, while Warren and I turned to making our now very late supper.

This morning I woke with the evening still on my mind. It has been a long time (and not something we often do as a couple) since we had spent an evening talking with such young adults in such a free floating way. I found myself hoping they did not leave last night saying, "Thank God, I thought we were never going to get away from there."

And Danielle made an impression on me. She is bright and witty and down to earth all at the same time, with a good, hearty laugh, a combination I like in anyone, but especially in young women. And she was stylish and put together in a graceful, subtle way that I have never achieved, and certainly could not have even begun to attempt when I was her age.

I commented on that last fact this morning.

"Well, she probably puts a little more time into it than you do, " Warren mused.

Well, yes. Isn't that the whole point of looking put together: putting a little more time into it? And haven't I gotten to the point where I can pick and choose where to put the time I have? My point was more that some women, of any age, possess that innate sense of being put together and I do not.

But that's not what this post is about. It's not about my lack of style, or what I was or wasn't at age 27 or am or am not at age 55. And that's not what last night was about. Last night was about the talk and the topics. Last night was about shouts of laughter and murmurs of agreement. Last night was about exploring architecture and music and medieval manuscripts. And last night was about one of most charmingly self-possessed young women I have ever met.

One true sentence.

Wonder Bread

2012-01-14T21:12:00.000-05:00

It is the simplest of processes.

Stir yeast and water together, add some flour. Stir some more to wake the gluten. Add some salt, add some more flour. Knead vigorously.

Let it rise.

I am at the "let it rise" stage right now. We are - well, we will be when Elizabeth gets back here and kicks it into gear - eating a Pakistani inspired meal tonight. (For the new year, Elizabeth and Warren have started cooking ethnic meals on the Saturdays she is here. Tonight is Pakistani.)

I offered to make naan , a Middle East/subcontinent flatbread. I have never made naan before, but the recipe (courtesy of Dorie Greenspan and Julia Child) is so basic that I am trusting it to turn out.

By any measure, I have had a good day. Other than meeting a friend for coffee this morning, I have been home all day, tending to small things. I have sent or answered a few emails; I've read some of John Cheever's short stories. I've tied up some loose ends too small to be projects but too big to ignore.

And now I am waiting out the rising, experiencing yet again the wonder of bread. It never fails to catch me by surprise.

While I stirred the yeast/water/flour slurry today, I found myself thinking of how many centuries we - women, humans - have been making bread. How many generations of us have kneaded it, watched it rise, baked it (over a fire, in an oven, in the big city, in the desert) and then broken it?

When I lose myself in baking, the cares of my world drop away. Baking is a tonic for me, and baking bread is the strongest tonic of them all. Bread has its own rhythm, its own schedule, its own ways - you come to bread and enter its universe when you bake.

Out of flour, salt, water, and yeast, this miracle.

Wonder bread.

Postscript: Because of the unpredictability of the American teenager, the day grew later and the dough rose higher without Elizabeth reappearing. Finally, Warren and I looked at each other, scrapped the Pakistani meal, and headed to the grocery for the staples we needed. Once back home, I announced I was making the naan all the same, and I proceeded to shape and bake while Warren prepared a pasta dish. Elizabeth burst through the door as the first of it was going into the oven. Some twenty minutes later, we sat down to a meal of pasta, grilled vegetables, and the naan. The naan was an unqualified success. Not quite what any of us had in mind when the day started, but wonderful all the same.

Of Dragons' Tails and Corn Bags

2012-01-07T16:23:00.001-05:00

We saw in the New Year in the best way possible: sitting outside around a fire with our close friends Margo and Gerald. By the time 2011 was down to its last hour, the night sky had cleared and the stars had grown bright. Gerald came back from taking the dog in and announced that the Big Dipper was prominent in the northeast; I joined him in the yard and picked out Orion in the south.

When the New Year came, we all kissed our spouses. There were fireworks on the horizon in several directions. Warren and Gerald poked the fire until we could safely leave it to burn out. We said our goodnights, exchanged hugs and best wishes, and then my dear husband and I drove home in 2012, smelling of wood smoke and friendship.

The next day, I read a line in an old New Yorker that the "happiest civilizations had existed in the age of Homer, when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths." Certainly it seemed that way the night before as we watched the stars wheel by.

I have been reading the Byron Blakely biography of the writer, John Cheever. It is not the first biography of Cheever I have ever read, but it is the best. It presents an intricately detailed and ultimately sympathetic portrait of Cheever, who was a very complex individual on his best days. That alone is an achievement. But what Blakely does particularly well is make the reader see the beauty and structure of Cheever's prose. It is akin to Blakely placing a hummingbird in your hands for the briefest of seconds and then telling you to release it to the garden.

One such hummingbird is this excerpt from Cheever's essay, "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear." Cheever is describing the ascent and descent of an imaginary popular writer and criticizes the final works thusly:

You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women. He had damaged, you might say, the ear's innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves.

I have read those two sentences over and over for the last few days. I read them and smell the ocean. I read them and recall the smoke of New Year's Eve. I read them and hear the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves.

I have written very little in the last few months. Chalk it up to any number of reasons: the press of life, family issues, Warren's and my schedules, niggling little medical problems that have put me in medical offices, the needs and demands of others, a lingering and persistent depression threaded through the holiday season. I pick up a pen to write, then set it aside. My inner ear is not damaged, but I am not listening well. I am mistaking the rumble of the weekly garbage truck for the heavy noise of the dragon's tail.

As I often do when in this place, I am scaling back everywhere I can, cutting the daily demands down to the smallest size possible. I am focusing on the small moments: writing letters to close friends, cooking savory meals, paying attention to the intense blue of the daytime sky when I am outside. My smallest moment occurs each evening when I warm a corn bag in the microwave and then read with it on my lap. (Corn bags, for the uninitiated, are large pieces of terry cloth (bigger than a washcloth, smaller than a dishtowel) sewed first to make a sack, partially filled with dried field corn, and then sewn shut.) A warmed corn bag has the weight of a fat puppy and the smell of a corncrib on a hot day. It radiates heat and comfort far beyond the physical. When bedtime draws close, we warm up several such bags and throw them under the bedclothes to take off the chill. I often drift off to sleep with the smell of harvest time lacing the air.

2012 holds great promise, I hope and believe. For now, though, it is just beyond the tip of my pen. For now I can only trust that I am building up a store of ideas and impressions and sentences. Somewhere there is sea water. Somewhere there is the sound of the heavy dragon's tail moving over dead leaves. Somewhere I will return to writing.

Counting Down

2011-12-29T14:26:00.000-05:00

The ending days of this waning year have been piling up, one on top of the other. We are down to the dregs of 2011, and I for one am ready to put the year to rest. This has been an exhausting year at any level. Margo and I were discussing the year over coffee just yesterday, exclaiming at the fact that so much happened worldwide that has already faded from her and my daily consciousness: the Japanese tsunami, the Joplin tornado, the Arab spring. I wondered aloud whether they had faded because of the nature of news (in that we are always moving on to the "next" story), or whether they had faded because, on mental overload constantly, I let more and more slip through my fingers.

Back in the old days, when I first started practicing law in a small firm here in town, the last two weeks of the year were always a hectic time. Clients always rushed to get done in the last two weeks of the year what they should have done earlier, very often related to gift or charitable giving for tax purposes. Files would pile up precariously on the conference room table; staff members would be rushing to get copies made or documents corrected; lunches were discouraged. But in the midst of the rush and chaos, there was always that exquisite moment when the senior attorney would announce, "that's all we can do this year. We'll start again after New Year's. Close the doors."

I want to say that in my personal life. "That's all I can do for this year. Close the doors."

I worked this morning until early afternoon. Out of hours for the week, I then walked home. I am done at the office for the rest of this year, a luxurious sounding phrase if there ever was one. I just mailed off the Christmas boxes to Ben and Alise and Sam. I have nothing on my schedule, nothing of my calendar, nothing calling my name until 2012.

Close the doors.

****
Two updates from 2011 blogs. (1) I have not yet found my grandmother's popcorn ball recipe. I didn't even make popcorn balls this year - not because of the loss, but because of time and being too rushed on too many fronts. (2) Back in August, I predicted that our local legal clinic would see over 250 clients for the first time in its eight years of existence. Indeed, the Andrews House/Delaware County Bar Interfaith Legal Clinic saw and provided services to 254 clients (including a Wills Clinic that served 16) in 2011. By comparison, we served 206 in 2010. That's a 23% increase in one year. While deeply sorry to see that record set in terms of the community difficulties, I am proud to be associated with the many volunteers who make the Clinic happen month after month.

The Recipe

2011-12-10T13:23:00.000-05:00

"I can't find the popcorn ball recipe."

Warren looked at me as we ate breakfast this morning. "I'm sure it's here."

You would think so. But no, I have searched through the recipe folder and checked a few other spots where I thought it might be, and come up empty-handed.

The recipe, which was the one my beloved Grandma Skatzes used every Christmas for years and years, was printed on a 4x6 index card. I have carried that card around with me for some 25 years. Across the top, I had printed "Skatzes Popcorn Balls."

And it is not here. It is not in the folder where I tuck recipes, it is not stuck in a cookbook, it is not on a counter in the kitchen.

It is gone.

After Warren left for the holiday concert rehearsal, I came back home and googled "popcorn ball recipes." No, I don't want one with marshmallows in it. No, I don't use molasses. This was a water, sugar, and corn syrup concoction. After several minutes, I zeroed in on a few recipes that sound darn close. Until and unless the recipe card shows up, these will do.

The new recipes will do because when it comes right down to it, the magic of my grandmother's popcorn balls was not in the eating, although they were pretty darn good. The magic was in the smiles on the faces of family members when it was popcorn ball time and they stopped in at Grandma's to pick up their sack of goodness. The magic was in the love Grandma put into every batch she made. The magic was in being allowed to spend the day by her side, burning our fingers from time to time, listening to her stories.

The magic is in the memories.

One Berry, Two Berry, Read Me a Newbery

2011-11-21T06:00:00.002-05:00

Part 2 of 2

Okay, so much for my theories about the Newbery Medal. Here's why I really wrote this column: I want to talk about my experiences reading the Newbery Medal books and what I thought of the titles.

The Books That Have Failed My Test of Time

The Story of Mankind, Hendrik Willem van Loon, 1922. This was the first Newbery Medal book. Even if you can overlook its blatantly white, Euro-centric point of view, it is a tedious read at best. My heart aches for every boy or girl who found this under a Christmas tree that year.

Smoky, the Cowhorse, Will James, 1927. Imagine Black Beauty told not from the viewpoint of the horse, which is the magic of Black Beauty, but from the third person narrative. Now transpose Black Beauty to the American west, throw in some Mexican desperados and some manly rodeos, and for good measure write the entire book in a folksy, "cowboy" dialect. I made it to the end of this novel, but I got awfully tired of hearing about Smoky's "hankerin'" for grass, or oats, or rest, about how every horse in the book was "a-poundin'" when it ran, and how his "mammy's" ears twitched at the least sound.

Gay Neck, The Story of a Pigeon, Dhan Ghopal Mukerji, 1928. Words fail me. The book is indeed the story of a pigeon, named "Gay Neck" because of the bright feather band around his neck. Narrated largely by a young man (the author in fictional voice) and set primarily in India, the book's style is not merely stilted; it is painfully twisted and hard to read. The chapters from the pigeon's viewpoint are equally laborious to wade through. Mukerji lived most of his short life in exile for advocating for a free India. This is clearly a book written by someone who knows he will never see his homeland again. The most moving part of the book is the author's heartfelt and now heartbreaking description of the sanctity and symbolism of Mount Everest, concluding with the firm assertion that Everest would never be trod upon by man. Mukerji killed himself in 1936, mercifully never seeing the successful ascent of Everest in 1953.

Daniel Boone, James Daughtery, 1940. This book lost me when I realized one of its themes was "the only good Injun is a dead Injun." Indians are vastly underrepresented in the Newbery list, but this was the worst depiction of all. I contrasted it with Waterless Mountain (1932, set in Navajo Nation in the late teens or early 1920s), which made a largely successful attempt at portraying a young Navajo boy navigating the modern world while remaining true to his spiritual value. Consider also Caddie Woodlawn (1936), The Matchlock Gun (1942), and Rifles for Watie (1957), all of which have Indians making cameo or supporting appearances. While the Indians portrayed in The Matchlock Gun are clearly the enemy, they are the enemy because they have sided with the French in the French and Indian War and are attacking the family in the story, and not because they are "bad" Indians. I cannot get past the clear bigotry in the work about Boone.

Strawberry Girl, Lois Lenski, 1946. What can I say about this book? Lenski has drawn a curious and harsh picture of life in rural Florida in the early part of the twentieth century, using years of research to frame the story of Birdie Boyer and her family's struggles as they establish a strawberry farm. Contrasted sharply against the Boyers are Shoestring Slater and his family, graphically representing the "poor white trash" of the day. I never found sympathy for Birdie, her family, the Slaters, or anyone else in the community. The edition of the book I read contained a forward explaining Lenski's research techniques and her desire to write an entire series of regional stories representing modern children in America. Lenski won great praise for her many contributions to American children's literature, but this is not a book I would eagerly recommend.

Shiloh, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, 1992. I know, I know. I am the only person who doesn't like this book. It is a coming of age story, it features a boy and a dog (a surefire winning combination), it is full of pathos (the dog is brutalized) and triumph (the boy rescues the dog honorably), and it fits the "Appalachian Poor" niche. I found the characters unrealistic, with the bad guy drawn so stereotypically narrow that the only way I made it through this book was reassuring myself it was short and I was almost done. I have not read either Honor Book for that year, but this is one where I am thinking "Really? This was the selection? Really?"

A book which I am reluctant to consign to this list but must talk about is Rifles for Watie, the 1957 winner by Harold Keith. Set during the Civil War in the states and territories west of the Mississippi, this book is exemplary for several reasons, not the least of which is its fairly searing depiction of the realities of war (death, hunger, privation). It stands apart because an underlying story is a love story between Jeff, a young Union soldier, and Lucy, a young woman whose family supports the Southern cause. Romances come and go in any literary genre, but this one is unique because Lucy is the youngest daughter of a Cherokee family living in Talequah, today's capitol of the Cherokee nation. She gets to deliver the clearest explanation of why her family(and indeed many Cherokees) supports the Confederacy when she gives Jeff a strongly worded history lesson about Andrew Jackson and his violation of Indian treaties that resulted in the destruction of the Cherokee's community in the east. Lucy does not say the word "genocide," but in her description of the numbers who died on the trail, it is the unspoken word that hangs in the air.

So why am I struggling with this choice? Because despite his clear-eyed recounting of Cherokee history, the author cannot resist having his characters draws distinctions between the "preferred" Indians (those who conduct their lives like whites) and the "frontier" Indians who have backslid into "shiftless" ways, abandoning the white culture and businesses for subsistence farming and hunting. The frontier Indians even discard the white man's clothing, and while Harold Keith does not describe their undesirable dress, I strongly suspect the women would be wearing the tear dress that is now the national dress of the Cherokee nation.

There is another reason too that I hold back on Rifles for Watie. Someday, I may have a grandchild whose family heritage is an elaborately stitched quilt of many backgrounds, including the strong dose of Ojibwa (Chippewa) he or she will inherit from my daughter-in-law Alise. I wouldn't want to have to begin to explain to my grandchild the inherent bigotry behind the depictions of the good (white) Indians and the lazy (native) Indians. I couldn't do it.

Sigh.

Now, for the feel good part. These are the books that rose to the top of the list.

April's Cream of the Crop Newbery Medal Winners

The Book That Changed the Face of the Newbery Winners: Thimble Summer, Elizabeth Enright, 1939. Prior to this, the medal books were primarily either about children living in other eras (Caddie Woodlawn, Roller Skates), or other countries (Dobry, Yung Fu of the Upper Yangtze) or were the retelling of folk tales from various parts of the world. Thimble Summer was set in 1930s America, with the Great Depression as a backdrop. Real time, real children. The first of several Newbery Medal Books set in the Great Depression, it is the only one written, published, and honored during that era.

Biggest Surprise Ending: Miss Hickory, Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, 1947. Early on, the Newbery Medal went to Hitty, Her First Hundred Years (Rachel Field, 1930). Hitty is a wooden doll who pens her memoirs from her now secure home in an antique shop. When I began Miss Hickory, I wondered whether I was in for another Hitty. Ha, was I surprised! Miss Hickory is a narrow minded, selfish, and self-centered sentient twig being who comes to not one but two unusual endings. Her first is when her head (which is a hickory nut) is eaten by Squirrel, who is starving at the end of a long winter. No, she does not redeem herself by sacrificing her head; he pulls it off her body and eats it. Miss Hickory's stream of consciousness reflection on her life and all of her shortcomings as her head is consumed is riveting. The second ending is when her beheaded twig body (which continues to walk and move, thus causing Squirrel to swear off his dissolute ways in a most convincing AA manner) is compelled to climb an apple tree, feeling tugged upward by the rising sap of the spring, and then plant herself neck first into small opening in the tree, where Miss Hickory's body takes hold and becomes a scion (look it up as a grafting term). Miss Hickory is one of the least pleasant title characters in the Newbery Medal books and one that is memorable in large part because of her shortcomings.

Most Beautifully Written: Hands down, I, Juan de Pareja, Elizabeth Borton de Trevino, 1966. There are lots of beautifully written Newbery Medal books, but this one leaps out. First runner up: Shadow of a Bull, Maia Wojciechowska, 1965.

Best Coming of Age: Up a Road Slowly, Irene Hunt, 1967. I've written about this book before. First runner up: Shadow of a Bull, Maia Wojciechowska, 1965.

Best Biography: Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, Jean Lee Latham, 1956. The Newbery Medal has been awarded five times for biography; this one was fascinating, lively, and left me with an appreciation of a significant American I had never heard of before.

The Book I Started Out Disliking and Ended Up Loving: The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley, 1985.I labored through this book until midpoint, at which time I suddenly found myself caught up in the mystical fantasy world that McKinley created.

The Only Book That Made Me Laugh Out Loud: A Year Down Yonder, Richard Peck, 2001. I defy you to read the snake scene without rolling on the floor. Just to check my reaction, the other day at the library, I pulled this book off the shelf and reread that chapter. Same reaction.

Best Poetry: A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers, Kathy Willard, 1982. As with biographies, poetry books occasionally garner a Newbery. These poems are inspired by William Blake; you don't have to be familiar with his works to enjoy this fantastical exploration of an inn maintained by William Blake and full of wonders. The illustrations are the icing on the cake. I want to stay at William Blake's inn!

Book Destined to Become a Percussion Performance: Joyful Noise, Paul Fleischman, 1989. This is another poetry collection, made to be read aloud. Each poem is told by a different insect. I read the first two, then went to find Warren, exclaiming, "This has to be set to percussion and performed sometime!"

Best Book About Accepting Death: Missing May, Cynthia Rylant, 1993. Just read it.

Realize, too, that there are several Newbery Medal books that I have read dozens of time, did not reread this fall, and would immediately put on my All Time Gold Star Favorites list. They include: Caddie Woodlawn, Carol Ryrie Brink, 1936; From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E. L. Konigsburg, 1968; A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle, 1963; Sarah, Plain and Tall, Patricia McLachlan, 1986; The View From Saturday, E. L. Konigsburg, 1997; Dear Mr. Henshaw, Beverly Cleary, 1984; Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse, 1998. I cannot say enough about these books. But when all is said and done, there is one book that stands alone as the best of the best. Out of the 90 books, and I can get away with this because I have read all 90, one is the very best Newbery Medal book of all. It is well written, the story is clever beyond description (I didn't figure the ending out until almost the very end, at which point I said aloud, "WOW!"), and, perhaps best of all, it is a beautiful tribute to A Wrinkle in Time, which itself won the Newbery.

Best Newberry Medal Book of Them All: When You Reach Me, Patricia Stead, 2010. Beautiful, stunning, and heartbreaking. Tears came to my eyes when I realized whose face was drawn on the underside of the mailbox. Even several weeks later, I am still analyzing the book and ready to reread it. Well done, Patricia Stead!

KJ Dell'Antonia recently summed up the importance of reading (she was writing about reading real books and not electronic ones): A book - a real book - is one choice, taken from a pile, opened and entered as its own singular, separate world.

I couldn't agree more. Reading the Newbery Medal books was a deliberate choice that I would make over again in a heartbeat. 90 singular, separate worlds, and I got to be in them all.

********

Special thanks are due: to Cindy, who knows why I started this quest, to Margo, who never failed to listen as I ranted or raved about the books, and who read When You Reach Me immediately on my recommendation so we could talk about it, to Katrina, whose response to my reading the Newbery Medal books was to cull her own children's bookshelves and start reading the ones readily at hand, and to my longtime reading buddy Scott, who is always up for a book discussion and because of whom I will always think of the 1944 Newbery Medal book as Johnny Deformed.

One Berry, Two Berry, Read Me a Newbery

2011-11-20T08:47:00.001-05:00

Part 1 of 2

Back in September, for a lot of reasons I won't go into right now, I decided to read the Newbery Medal winners, or at least all of the Newbery Medal winners that I had not read recently (as in the last decade).

The Newbery Medal is given annually by the American Library Association to the "most distinctive contribution to American children's literature" for the prior year. One has been given every year since 1922. (The Newbery Committee also names "Newbery Honor Books" for the outstanding runners up for the year. No, I have not read all the honor books.)

Of the 90 Newbery books out there, I had previously read about 18-20 of them. That left all the rest.

I did not read them in any order, including chronologically. Our local library owns all but a scant handful of them, and houses many of them at the main branch here in Delaware. My selection method consisted of taking a printout of the list (found here) to the library, stand in the children's section (where most are typically found) and pluck a random bouquet. When the load grew heavy in my arms, I had enough. "Enough" usually meant that 15 books came home at one shot.

Over the 5 or 6 weeks it took me to read the Newbery Medal books, I heard some interesting comments from adults about my quest. One, a former school librarian, said he thought the list was put out by adults for adults, and that is why children don't read Newbery Medal books.(This theory has a number of vocal adherents, incidentally.) Another, a retired teacher, said he had rarely used Newbery books in his classrooms because the writing styles were too dated and the students wouldn't understand them (he taught primarily 5th and 6th grades). Another said she thought the Newbery had covered enough niches (homelessness, mental illness, drug abuse) and it was time to stop using "does this fill a niche?" as one of the selection criteria. A constant comment I heard was "but the process is so subjective."

Interesting theories all, and I now have my own thoughts on these points, as well as my own theory about the Newbery Medal books.

Is the Medal Book a book chosen by adults for adults? Other than a few winners in the earliest years, I would say they are not picked with adult readers in mind. I think we read the books differently as we get older, but I think almost all of them stand the test of time and interest to a young reader. (I'll write tomorrow about the ones that I think "fail" as selections.) In fact, my overwhelming response to many of them was to smack my forehead and say "dang, why didn't I ever put this book in my children's hands?" (Sorry, Ben and Sam, that we missed Lloyd Alexander, among others.) Watching my own children devour many of the Newbery Medal books of their generation (my copy of Holes came from Sam's insistence that we buy it) tells me a lot about the appeal of the books to children. I think we as adults either fail to put the books in children's hands or so sermonize about their value that reading a Newbery Medal book is seen as torture.

Are the styles of the older books dated? There are one or two books that I say time has not been kind to when it comes to style. I found myself reading all of them with a critical ear and eye for the style as well as the content. My test was whether I felt I could read the book out loud to a child. The vast majority passed. In fact, the very book that the retired teacher and I discussed (Rifles for Watie, 1958) is one that I would say still holds up when it comes to style, although I have other concerns about it. I don't think children are put off by style as much as adults are; we adults think something is tedious, and so we expect children to think so too. I think a child who is grabbed by a book will plow through it regardless of the style in which it is written provided the characters populating the story are engaging.

Are there too many niche choices? Hmmn, tougher question. There have certainly been some choices that could be considered niche selections. I look at the changing nature of the list as a reflection of the changes we as a country have gone through as we moved through the 20th century and into the 21st. (Although, surprisingly, the Newbery tackled mental illness as early as 1960.) I think ethnic and racial niches or selections point this change out the best. It took a long time for novels with believable African-American characters to crack the list, with Sounder finally doing so in 1970. True, a biography entitled Amos Fortune, Free Man, made the charts in 1951, and the beautifully written I, Juan de Pareja, about the Moorish slave of the painter Velasquez, made it in 1966, but Sounder was the first in which an African-American family living in America was featured. After that barrier was broken, others books featuring African-American characters followed.

What is glaringly absent from the list are books about modern day Latino, Asian-American, or Native American youth. I can make a convincing argument that a good book will captivate a reader of any age or ethnic background, because I believe that to be true. But I also firmly believe that, especially when you are young, it helps to be able to read a book in which the main character reflects your life experiences as someone of a different color or family origin. Louisa May Alcott established this beyond refute when she published Little Women and it became a runaway best seller on the strength of it being the first children's novel written about believable girls growing up in Civil War America.

I have my own little theory about the Newbery Medal books and why the older ones are not read more widely. I believe it is because we read, teach, and share those books with which we are most familiar. A 5th grade teacher in his or her thirties may be most familiar with the Newbery Medal books of the 1990s, when he or she was in 4th through 6th grades. They may have never been exposed to the works from the 1960s and earlier, unless they were either avid readers or had the good fortune to have had a teacher who knew the older winners and did not hesitate to make recommendations or read them aloud to the class. Otherwise, there is book after book on the list from every decade that I think stands up to the honor of being selected.

And finally, are the Newbery Medal Book selections subjective? Absolutely. They often reflect the times and the makeup of the selection committee. And the selection committee is only human. Look at the fact that neither Stuart Little nor Charlotte's Web, both of which are established classic, ever won a Newbery Medal. This is largely due to the fact that for a long time Anne Carroll Moore held sway over the committee, even when she wasn't a member of it. Moore, who all but created the concept of children's librarians and children's sections of public libraries, is remembered by many not for her significant contributions but by her intense and profound dislike of White's children's literature. In the end, although she won the battle and kept E. B. White from collecting a Newbery for either, there is little question as to who won that war. The 1946 winner (the year that White would have won for Stuart Little)? Strawberry Girl, by Lois Lenski, a period piece that has not held up well. The 1953 winner (the year White would have won for Charlotte's Web) was Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark. The 1953 winner is an oddly mystical, haunting fantasy that blends the ancient Incan past with the modern world, but it's no Charlotte's Web. I would have awarded the medal to White each time.

Sometimes I have to remind myself (while I am carping about subjectivity) that the Newbery is not the Nobel, in that the Newbery Medal is given to the most distinctive contribution published the previous year and not to an author for his or her body or literature. (More head smacking moments: what do you mean Beverly Cleary never won a Newbery for any of her Beeezus and Ramona books?)

In the end, the Newbery Medal selection is subjective. And so am I, as you will see in my free ranging critique of the Newbery Medal Books in part 2 of this post.

We Are the 99%

2011-11-17T20:11:00.000-05:00

I recently held a mediation between two young parents. Although the mediation topic was parenting time, the two kept veering into arguments about money: jobs, housing, child support. I let it go on for a little while, then held up my hand to stop the rants. When they were both quiet, I made some observations.

"You [indicating one] are struggling to find work. You [looking at the other] just had to move home because you couldn't afford the rent when your roommate moved out. I'm not saying the financial issues aren't important, but we are here today to talk about your child. There's a recession going on. You could be the faces of it."

They are the 99%.

Earlier this week was our legal clinic. We sailed past our all time record of 214 clients (set last year) and finished November at 239, knowing we will top 250 this year. That statistic is both incredible (as a visible benchmark to the skills, passion, and dedication of our volunteers) and absolutely heartbreaking (as a visible benchmark of what the Great Recession has done to our community).

Our legal clinic clients are the 99%.

Earlier tonight I sat down and figured out where the next paycheck (which I get tomorrow) goes. I net $575 every two weeks. After the bills still owing this month, after my share of the groceries ($100 per month or $50 per check), I have $42 left. $42! I told Amy I am buying her an early Christmas present tomorrow. She desperately needs a humidifier for her bedroom because of her severe asthma. So unless I find a decent one at Goodwill, it will be a $30 basic one at Wal-Mart, so that leaves me…hmmn…$12 for two weeks. Now, I have $30 in my pocket (a rare occurrence made possible only because of a recent repayment of a gasoline loan), so I am, in fact, feeling plush with $42 at hand.

I am the 99%. And I am one of the blessedly lucky ones, given that I have food, shelter, medical insurance, and a safe community to live in, not to mention an amazingly wonderful husband who lives in similarly straitened conditions and makes the absolute best of it. We are both lucky, and we are both part of the 99%.

The phrase "we are the 99%" refers to the reality that 1% of our population controls almost a quarter of all of the income generated in this country. In short, they control this country. There's a whole lot of talk going on right now about the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is closely aligned with the "we are the 99%" discussion. For me, the issue is whether we continue to pretend everything is "all right" where so much wealth and power is amassed in the hands of so few people.

It's not all right. Hunger, homelessness, foreclosures, lack of medical care, poor public education systems, a crumbling infrastructure, falling behind technologically, and all the other rampant accoutrements of this imbalance are not acceptable. Not to me and not to lots of others. Even some of those who make up that 1% are starting to speak out about the dangers the wealth inequities pose to our nation.

And while I am still standing on my soapbox, let me add that I firmly believe the First Amendment is in danger of being bludgeoned as mayors move to stop the Occupy movement. The last time I checked, We the People, regardless of our socio-economic credentials, have the right to free speech and the right to assemble peacefully. Our press has the right to freedom as well, which means allowing them to cover the whole story on both sides, as opposed to cordoning them off during the police sweep of Zuccotti Park. I have no problem with arresting occupiers when they become violent. I have a huge problem with directing law enforcement to silence them and the press simultaneously because the protests are inconvenient or embarrassing.

At wearethe99percent.tumblr.com, people of all ages and all backgrounds tell their stories. I haven't put mine up, but every day I am more and more tempted. I admire these people. It takes courage to say in a very public forum "I am broke." Or "I am sick." Or "No matter how hard I work I am still behind." It takes courage to say "this is wrong."

There is huge power in storytelling and I suspect those who post their story or join a protest realize that truth more and more each day. As Barry Lopez said, "sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive." We need these stories to know we are not alone. We need these stories to stay alive.

As time and the economy wear on, I am increasingly radicalized, which is not my usual political mode. My usual political mode is sort of a middle of the road, let me concentrate on the local issues stance. I can no longer pretend the national issues have not warped our local issues out of kilter. There is no positive way to spin the Great Recession. Whether it is the school levy that failed in my stepdaughter's district or the recent attempt in Ohio to destroy police, firefighters, and teachers unions (beaten back at the polls overwhelmingly), or the clients waiting patiently at the legal clinic every month, my local community has been turned upside down.

2100 years ago, Hillel the Elder wrote "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself only, then what am I? And if not now, when?"

The time is now.

A Remarkable Teacher

2011-11-13T12:54:00.000-05:00

Note: Early last week, Jean Blakeslee died at the age of 85. Jean was an important person in our community and an important person in my life. I missed her memorial service because we were out of town, but this is what I imagine others besides me had to say about her.

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

Jean Blakeslee was my fifth grade teacher at Conger Elementary from 1966-1967 and was one of those benchmark teachers you look back at later and say "I am so lucky I had her." I believe it was her first year teaching at Conger and those of us in her class were amazed that our teacher was also the principal's wife. Somehow that seemed too fantastical to believe.

Fifth grade with Mrs. Blakeslee was a year of spelling bees (which she loved), of being read The Hobbit, which she also loved, and of science experiments sometimes gone fabulously awry (the praying mantis case that hatched in the dead of February, filling our classroom with hundreds of miniature mantises when we walked in that next morning, comes to mind). For our Halloween parade that year, Mrs. Blakeslee showed up as a witch with a tall pointy hat that added to her already impressive height. (Mr. Blakeslee showed up dressed as Mrs. Blakeslee, complete with hose, heels, and falsetto voice, stunning us all again.)

Our fifth grade classroom was full of singing. Mrs. Blakeslee had us sing a lot. Looking back, I suspect she used singing as a way to divert our energies and focus our attention. We sang lots of different songs, but the one we sang most enthusiastically was "Goober Peas," a Civil War song. How could a bunch of eleven year olds resist a chorus of "Peas! Peas! Peas! Peas! Eating goober peas! Goodness how delicious, eating goober peas!"?

Mrs. Blakeslee figured out very early on that I was a voracious reader, and often steered me to books that she thought would challenge me. I remember her putting Irene Hunt's Up A Road Slowly in my hands, saying "I think this would be a good book for you to read, April." She was right. She fed my desire to write as well as my love of reading, and many years later turned over to me a story I had penned as a sixth grader and mailed to her to show her I was still writing.

Mrs. Blakeslee let me know she believed in me, and her belief in me carried me into junior high school next year and beyond. You don't forget those kind of things about a teacher.

When I moved back to Delaware in 1990, our paths crossed at various places, including the soft-serve ice cream stand near her house. She was active with a passion in Delaware after retiring from teaching and sometimes we crossed paths at various community events. We always talked when we met and I always, always called her "Mrs. Blakeslee" until the day she looked at me and said, "I think we are both old enough now that you can call me Jean."

Jean Blakeslee was a remarkable woman and a great teacher. She left her imprint all over our community; I am blessed that she left it on me as well.

A Fork in the Road

2011-11-01T18:00:00.003-04:00

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Yogi Berra

The summer was a long road through concerts, through visits from Sam and trips with David, through Amy moving in. It wound through medical procedures sprinkled liberally on the older tier of the family. It rolled on through private times and public times.

The road rolled on into fall. The medical matters are winding down. Symphony seasons have opened, first in Mansfield and then here in Delaware. Indianapolis and the percussion convention are just ahead, as is New York again for the orchestra conference. Halloween is just past, more holidays are in the offing.

The road indeed goes ever on, but we have come to a fork.

Over the last several months, my mother has been changing, slowly but surely. Her once frequent phone calls have now all but stopped. After a lifetime of dominating any conversation, she more often than not is quiet. When she pulls up short too many times in a conversation, stymied as to what comes next, she covers with “I’m brain dead” and makes a joke. She asks the same question within a few minutes of first asking it. And when those rare phone calls do come and she repeats the same story for the second time within minutes of the first telling, I afterwards hang up the phone quietly and just stand for a minute, gazing out into the backyard.

Some of us – “us” being me, my sister-in-law, and two of my three brothers – started comparing notes many months ago. Because Mom had major surgery earlier this summer, none of us said much more or raised the issue with Dad while they were preoccupied.

But we were watching all the same.

Recently, my youngest brother Mark and I, after weeks of comparing notes and concerns and fears, agreed it was time to say something to dad. With the backing of our spouses, we came up with a plan to meet at mom and dad’s when Mark and I could both be there.

Mark arrived first to work on his car; he phoned me to let me know he was en route. I arrived a little later to look for canning jars stored overhead in the garage. Dad, already out in the garage talking to Mark as we hoped he would be, climbed up with me to help get the jars down the stairs. After we both were back down the stairs, I asked, as casually as my suddenly uncertain voice would allow, about mom’s upcoming visit with her family physician.

Mark shot me an appreciative look as dad answered. I then asked the hitherto unasked question.

“Dad, is mom all right?”

Mark stopped working. Dad looked at me. He hesitated in replying, and I took the pause to jump.

“I’m asking because we are noticing things.”

Dad cut right to the chase, which is his style. “You mean her memory? Yes, there are problems.”

The tension sagged out of the air. We all talked then, throwing our worries and notes one by one onto a growing stack. Dad listed the changes that he lives with now, both small and big changes of which we weren’t aware. She has stopped reading books, which saddened me. She still works crossword puzzles, but more and more she asks my dad for help on the clues. Dad, a notoriously poor speller, barked a short, rueful laugh at this turn of events.

The pile of worries and observations grew larger. It was painfully clear that mom is showing increasing signs of what the medical world calls “cognitive impairment.” It was painfully obvious that dad was relieved that he didn’t have to break the news to us.

Finally someone, Dad perhaps, said the word out loud.

Alzheimer’s.

Mom hates that word. Mom is terrified of that word. She much prefers “dementia,” which she thinks of as a different, less severe illness than Alzheimer’s.

Dementia, Alzheimer’s, senility.

The words all mean more or less the same thing: our family is at a fork in the road. And when you come to that particular fork, you take it. You have no choice. Mom has turned down a twisty fork that goes way over that way while the rest of us are still on the other path over here. We can still see each other and talk and laugh together, but looking up ahead, we know that at some point her path will diverge more steeply from ours and while we will always be able to see her on her path, she will no longer see us on ours.

In 1994, former President Ronald Reagan released a written statement that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He did so in the hope that others might be encouraged to seek early intervention and diagnosis, writing “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life.”

We are all journeying into the sunset of our lives. My dad does not pretend at 78 that his sunset is not most likely right around the corner. I know that my sunset will very likely come far earlier for me than if I had not been diagnosed with an incurable cancer.

And my mother? I fervently hope she is walking along, marveling at the brilliant golds and reds in the west, happily unaware of the gathering shadows of the oncoming night.

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

Postscript

I have had this piece written for several weeks, and delayed posting it until now. It has tugged at my conscience, it has pulled hard at my heart. My mother's cognitive impairment is a very difficult topic because it is so personal and so immediate. What finally made me decide to post it was my saying out loud, as I thought through the post for the nth time, "what is my motive?"

My motive? To know that I am not alone. To know that we are not alone.

I wrote this in mid-September and am posting it now in November. Some things are unchanged, especially mom’s continuing decline. What has changed is that we are now speaking aloud to each other about what is happening, at least to one another.

No one mentions it to mom. (For those of you who know my mother, I would ask that you not feel you need to break the news to her.) I don’t know which of us will undertake that task. Dad recently tried to and she became so distraught that he quickly backtracked and calmed her down.

It does not surprise me that he cannot bring himself to break her heart. My father has spent 59 years being protective of my mother. It seems that he is growing even more so as she slips away. He has spent his whole adult life calming her fears, giving her reassurance, being there for her.

It does not surprise me that he will go along with her on the road for as long as possible. He will make the path as smooth as possible; he will stoop to clear away any debris.

Dad will hold mom's hand for as long as he is able.

My dear friend Katrina wrote me a long letter about what we are facing, having gone through it herself in her family. It was thoughtful and heartfelt, so much so that I copied the lines and sent them on to Mark so he and his wife could read them. She closed her comments with this: Finally, enjoy your Mom as much as you can for as long as you can. There will be glimmers of gains and lots of puddles. Only God knows the timing and we all have to live with that.

Enjoy your Mom as much as you can for as long as you can.

We plan on it.

A Bridge of Contemplation

2011-10-14T09:42:00.000-04:00

Spiderwort in the front yard

"The short fall season, therefore, is a blend of both fatigue and melancholy, of final consolidation of the summer's gains and of preparation for the severity of approaching weather. It is a bridge of contemplation, of taking stock." Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord

I have carried that quote in my commonplace book since 1989. I know that only because I read The Broken Cord when it was first published. These days I try to remember to date my additions to my book, much like Ann Dillard's writing about wanting to plant a flag in time and say "now."

I stepped out on the deck early this morning, shortly after the day started to lighten. It had rained off and on throughout the night, so the air carried a pungent, wet tang of downed leaves and dead garden. I stood several minutes, watching the clouds scud to the east, hugging myself against the sharp breeze.

We are in our fall season. All over town, the trees are giving up their leaves in showers of red and yellow. Out front, the spiderwort is still blooming, grateful for the cooler, wet weather. It is a patch of purple-blue in an ever deepening puddle of leaves from the ornamental cherry.

Autumn is my favorite season, for the color, for the preparation for the oncoming winter, for the enticing blend of melancholy, fatigue, and contemplation. Yesterday I made a thick chili for our supper tonight. I awoke during the night to hear the rain brushing the windows and smell the chili threading its way through the house. When I came back inside this morning, its scent wrapped itself around me, replacing the raw smells from outside.

A walk to work these days is a walk with my nerves and senses scrubbed raw and laid open to the world. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote of what I am feeling. The poem is God's World, the form is a sonnet.

O WORLD, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag	5
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is	10
As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

Like Millay, my soul is all but out of me. And there are many burning leaves yet to fall.

Beyond the Harvest

2011-10-04T19:52:00.001-04:00

Sunday night, my mind was stuck on food. I was not hungry; supper was filling. But I thought of food all the same. I pulled a cookbook onto my lap and riffled through the pages.

I spent August, well into September in fact, canning and freezing food from our garden. I plugged the basement freezer back in (it was on summer break) and filled it with the sweet corn from Mrs. Hough, the beans from mom and dad, the apples from everywhere. Jars of green pepper relish and salsa filled the cabinet shelves. I pulled the onions: white, pearly globes; they are drying spread out on paper on the basement floor. Earlier in the summer, Kris had brought over bunches of garlic, now dried and stored in a mesh sack.

Food is plentiful and want is far from our door. All the same, my mind was stuck on food.

Sunday’s supper was excellent. We had bean soup that was a combination of the black bean soup from earlier in the week and some pinto bean soup from the freezer. I tossed in slivers of a red banana pepper I had just picked and one of our own onions, along with some of Kris’s garlic. There was a pan of fresh cornbread. As Warren and I ate, we marveled over the thick, savory concoction, spooning it up carefully to get every last bite. The smell of it hung into the air late into the evening.

I was not hungry Sunday night. All the same, I kept thinking of food. I kept looking at recipes.

Our garden has almost wound down for the year. There are still peppers. A few tomatoes still hang on the raggedy vines. They are all the more precious for being the last tomatoes. I will not taste their likes again until next July.

Our garden has been bountiful this season. But all the same, my mind was not quite at rest.

Sam recently emailed me from far away Oregon to ask me to send him certain recipes. He is working at a local farm market; his diet is changing. He wants to work on his baking, something we experimented with this summer. He is eager to see where his food interests take him. I miss Sam. I want him at our table. I want Ben and Alise there too. I am grateful for being able to eat with David and Elizabeth, not to mention Amy, but those opportunities are infrequent. I miss sitting at the table with all my children, all our children, down one side and up the other.

Earlier in the day Sunday, I talked by phone with a longtime friend who is struggling with depression. Sometimes I am frustrated with my words as I offer them up, well aware of their inadequacy in touching the very real pain my friend is experiencing. It is like ladling air into a soup bowl. I would rather bring my friend to our table and pass to him our food – the thick soup, the humble cornbread – as we all eat together. I would like to serve my friend a slice of homemade apple pie and tell him to savor it slowly. There is community in coming together to eat; there is healing in sharing a meal. I believe that a week of sharing food at our table would feed my friend both body and soul.

I was not hungry in body Sunday night, but I was hungry in spirit. I was feeling the empty seats at the table, the emptiness my friend is trying to fill. I wanted to feed that emptiness: for family, for my friend struggling with depression, for myself.

It has taken me a few days to think through my food thoughts, days in which I have been sometimes hungry for something that is not food. I am rereading (for the 5th? - the 6th? - time) The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God by Leslie Leyland Fields and find myself moved, not for the first time, by the lines within. Sometimes I think I am being called - quietly, deliberately - to something involving food.

I don't know what that means or may mean. I only know that I am listening.

Mending

2011-09-28T17:49:00.000-04:00

Mending is on my mind these days.

I am talking about mending in its simplest terms, which is “to make something broken, worn, torn, or otherwise damaged whole, sound, or usable by repairing.”

Mending used to be a kind of old-fashioned idea. Ma Ingalls mended. Marmee mended. Grandmothers mended. Tinkers mended. During World War II, the slogan “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without” became a watchword for making sure you didn’t waste valuable food and resources that were needed for the war effort. Mending was a way to support the troops. I still use a pot that was probably mended around that time; my grandfather reattached the handle with a big nut rather than throw it out.

But then we forgot about mending. We got accustomed to tossing the shirt or the pan when it was broken instead of trying to mend. Let’s face it: it was faster and more fun to buy a new one.

In these recession-battered times, however, mending has seen a revival as more and more of us try to get more and more use out of our belongings. The difficulty is remembering how to mend. Too many of us have lost the skill.

I thought of mending the other night as I sat and, well, mended. I had two umbrellas, each with a rib where the stitching had pulled, and a pair of pantyhose that I had poked a toe through. Ten minutes, a little thread, a little stitching, and the umbrellas were whole again and the hose wearable for several more weeks.

When I mend, I sit with a green sewing box that has always been in my life. It originally belonged to my mother. As a little girl, I thought it was the height of elegance, with its green quilted covering. Somewhere along the line, my mother bought a bigger and fancier sewing box, and I inherited the one from my childhood.

I never look at that sewing box without thinking of mending. And sometimes when I think of mending, I mean the simplest definition applied on a larger scale.

Tikkun olam is a Jewish concept of repairing the world to make it whole again. By practicing tikkun olam, we are mending the world. We are making whole something damaged.By practicing tikkun olam, we are also revealing godliness in the world. In Judaism, that is called Kiddush Hashem, or “sanctifying the Divine Name.”

The Gospels speak to this duty as well:

Here's another way to put it: You're here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We're going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don't think I'm going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I'm putting you on a light stand. Now that I've put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you'll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:14-16, The Message)

Richard Stearns, the author of The Hole in Our Gospel makes this point with stunning accuracy: we cannot sit "smugly in our comfortable bubbles and claim no responsibility for the disadvantaged in our world. God did not leave us that option... Faith and work must be put back together again. We must move beyond an anemic view of our faith as something only personal and private, with no public dimension, and instead see it as the source of power that can change the world. Faith is the fuel that powers the light that shines in the darkness."

As with our everyday mending skills, we are too often out of practice with mending the world. We shrink from the task. It is too overwhelming. We forget that we are not charged with righting every wrong.

But mending is a small step. Mending is taking something close at hand, be it a damaged umbrella or a damaged spirit, and repairing the tear. Mending is strengthening a loose button or a shaky friend. Sometimes we use a needle and thread to mend something. Sometimes we use duct tape. Sometimes we use our hearts.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, starts tonight at sunset. Tonight also marks the start of the High Holidays, the holiest days of the Jewish calendar. The High Holidays are a time of reflection and repentance.

And they are a time of mending the world, one small stitch at a time.

I'm linking up with Michelle over at Graceful today.

Banned Books

2011-09-21T18:28:00.000-04:00

Both my favorite and least favorite national “week” of the year is fast approaching. Banned Books Week begins Saturday, September 24 and ends Saturday, October 1. As I have in the past, I cheer and praise the American Library Association for promoting this event. As always, I regret that Banned Books Week exists.

The ALA is clear as to why we need a Banned Books Week. It “highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States. Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week.”

Isn’t that a great line? Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week.

Intellectual freedom. As far as I am concerned, that is right up there with freedom of religion, another right I tend to hold close to my heart.

As I have often noted, I love reading. As it was for Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird (a book frequently targeted for banning, incidentally), reading is like breathing for me. I love books. Like Thomas Jefferson, I cannot live without them.

This fall, I have made it a personal project to read every book awarded a Newbery Medal, the award given annually to the “most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.” The Newbery was first given in 1922, and there are 90 of them out there. As of this posting, I am a third of the way through the list. Even Newbery Medal books are the target of banning attempts, some of them decades after being published. The Witch of Blackbird Pond, the 1959 Newbery Medal book, was challenged as recently as 2002 on the grounds that it promotes witchcraft. (Ironically, two strong themes in the book are freedom of religion and the dangerous consequences of suppressing religious freedom. The “witch” is a Quaker living on the fringes of a Puritan colony.) In talking about a challenge to The Higher Power of Lucky, the 2007 Newbery Award book, because it contained the word “scrotum” one time in one sentence, a former chairwoman of the Newbery Award committee called out what we are really talking about: censorship. She criticized schools and libraries banning the book on the basis of one word one time, pointing out “that’s what censors do — they pick out words and don’t look at the total merit of the book.”

There are lots of books out there, ranging from superb to a wretched waste of paper. Some contain ideas and thoughts that I do not endorse or even find repugnant and offensive. But that doesn’t mean I want to ban those books. It just means I cut a wide swath around them when I come across them, or speak out against the ideas they contain.

Last year for Banned Books Week I wrote about a favorite scene in the movie "Field of Dreams." The scene takes place during a school board hearing when a parent is trying to get a book banned. Annie Kinsella opposes her and challenges the audience:

Now, who's for the Bill of Rights? Who thinks freedom is a pretty darn good thing? Come on! Let’s see those hands! Who thinks we have to stand up to the kind of censorship they had under Stalin? [Hands go up all over the auditorium.] All right! There you go! America, I love you. I’m proud of you!

I too am for the Bill of Rights. I too think that freedom is a pretty good thing. And in preparing to celebrate my rights and my freedom, I’m making sure I am surrounded by books for Banned Books Week.

I hope you are too.

Sharing the Sunrise

2011-09-19T17:08:00.001-04:00

Lately there have been many clouds on the horizon. I am not yet ready to write about the clouds, but I can remind myself to share the sunrise.

This is the day which the Lord has made;
Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Psalm 118:24 (New American Standard Bible)

Linking up with Michelle over at Graceful today.

One Decade

2011-09-11T00:01:00.004-04:00

Even if we are not all writing about it today, we are thinking about it. Even if we claim we are not thinking about it, we are.

Those of us who experienced September 11, 2001, carry a psychic wound deep inside us. We know where we were when we first heard, where we were when it sank in this was not an accident.

My law partner Scott came to the office some 20 minutes after I did that day and told me he'd have been there sooner but there'd been a plane crash at the World Trade Center. He happened to have a radio in his office and so found a news station. Minutes later he yelled in disbelief as the second plane hit. Then they were saying something about the Pentagon.

By then, I was in Scott's office. We looked at each other. The Pentagon? What the ...?

The first tower came down as Scott and I were driving to my house to get in front of a television set. We both started yelling in disbelief and shock as the radio blared the news. The second tower came down just as we turned on the television, and we yelled again.

Flight 93 had already hit the ground.

Scott's friend, Bob, a New York firefighter, was already dead. His body would later be found in one of the tower stairwells. He died trying to save lives.

My boys were both in school that day. Ben, then a sophomore, spent the day in the same classroom as they suspended the schedule and kept everyone in front of televisions. Sam was at the 5th-6th middle school, and someone decided to keep the story from the students so as not to alarm them. Rumors leaked out all the same, and finally Sam and others learned the story from the gym teacher.

Sam was only 11.

Ben was only 15.

For the next 24 hours, everyone everywhere stayed in front of a television set. Even when I finally slept, I saw the towers peel down in my sleep. The next morning, I snapped the set back on and resumed watching.

Last Friday night I went online and looked at pictures and videos of that day. I was stunned at how much I had already forgotten in a decade.

Two memories I have carried close through this whole decade. The first is the members of Congress addressing the nation that evening from the steps of the Capitol, then singing "God Bless America." Raggedy at first, they finished strong. When I saw it ten years ago, I burst into tears. When I saw it again Friday night, I wept anew.

The other memory is that of Sam creeping into the television room early on the 12th while I watched international coverage. The story was delivered in French; the footage showed military boats racing across the water. Sam watched intently, then turned and asked "are they coming to bomb us too?" When I said no, that was a French story about the US military response, tears trickled down Sam's cheeks and I hugged him hard, my tears falling on his head.

My life has changed in innumerable ways, so very many of them for the better, since that terrible day. Our country has changed in innumerable ways, not all of them good, since that terrible day.

My boys are now grown, now 2500 miles away. If something of this magnitude happens again, I will send my swiftest prayers and hopes to their sides.

If something of this magnitude happens again, I will send my swiftest prayers and hopes to this country.

It has already been a decade.

It has already been a lifetime.

It has only been since yesterday.

The Guest at Our Tables

2011-09-06T19:12:00.001-04:00

"Hope is always a guest at our table."

That line is from Redwood and Wildfire, Andrea Hairston's fantasy novel set in Georgia and in Chicago in the early twentieth century. It was not my typical read; Sam is the one who put the book in my hands and suggested I would enjoy it. (I did, which is why I love it when my children (you too, Alise) give me book titles, as their interests range wider than what I typically read.) In the book, those words were in the mouth of Clarissa, an African American woman living in Chicago in the early 1900s, speaking of the long road for racial equality. She says them quietly to Redwood, her sister-in-law, who is discouraged by the never ending racial violence that has followed her from backwoods Georgia to Chicago. When Redwood says she has no hope of anything ever improving, Clarissa chides her gently, saying "hope is always a guest at our table."

Hope is always a guest at our table.

I love that line. I love it so much I wrote it out and put it up on our refrigerator. I love to think of Hope, who I picture as a calm, graceful woman, joining us at supper every night.

I think Hope has been gracing a lot of tables lately.

As Amy heads into her fourth week here, she is calmer and less volatile. By her own admission, she is eating and sleeping better. She is starting to look at the bookshelf and pull interesting titles off to look through, perhaps to read. Bit by bit, she is settling in, interacting more, coming and going with the calm assurance that when she returns, she is still welcome and there is a stable roof over her head.

Hope is always a guest at our table.

Next door, Pete and Nancy, retired and just turning 80, have taken in their two teenage grandchildren who were suddenly in desperate need of a stable home. Pete and I talked yesterday and he expressed the hope that he and Nancy would stay healthy until both children graduated from high school. Chuckling, he talked about the changes in their household: the new schedules, the increased grocery bill, the homework spread across the dining room table. Bit by bit, their grandchildren have started to adjust: settling in, getting involved in school, coming and going with the calm assurance that when they return, they are still welcome and there is a stable roof over their heads.

I bet Hope is always a guest at their table, too.

When the grandkids arrived, there were not enough bikes to go around. I offered Sam's old bike, which he has long outgrown, to the grandson, who has not yet hit his growth spurt and is at that in-between middle school size that some boys linger in for a long time. It fit him well. He sent me a thank you note: Thank you for the bike, I love it and always love riding it, I will always take care of it.

"I will always take care of it." I think Hope goes along for the ride when Pete and Nancy's grandson takes off to explore his new neighborhood.

The weather is changing, reminding us that autumn is almost upon us. I did a lot of household work this weekend, canning and freezing food for the winter yet to come. I baked a pie last night with apples from our local Farmers Market. The apples were described only as "the best bakers," so I am looking forward to the results since I didn't recognize the apple. The kitchen filled with the scent of apples and cinnamon; the sweet smells wrapped around us each time we walked into the house from the outside.

                            Eat honey, dear child - it's good for you -
                            and delicacies that melt in your mouth.
                            Likewise knowledge,
                            and wisdom for your soul -
                            Get that and your future's secured,
                            your hope is on solid rock.
                                                                Proverbs 24: 13-14 (The Message)

Both Amy and the children next door are gaining the knowledge - the security - that their homes are now stable. When you take that worry off of the table, then it is easier to think beyond the immediacy of "where am I sleeping (or eating, or doing homework) tonight?" Perhaps they can now start to plan for a better future. Perhaps now their hopes are on solid rock.

We will cut the pie tonight. It is a delicacy that will melt in our mouths. Hope will be right there with us when we take that first bite.

Hope is always a guest at our table.

Looking For Proof Rock

2011-08-30T19:00:00.002-04:00

This post started as an email to my friend Cindy in which I wrote: I wish I could get more charged up about things. Feeling like there is never time for "anything" that isn't mandatory. I don't mind most of the weekends going to work/chores, but all of them? And all the evenings? No time to dream, think, write, contemplate. Maybe I am too self-indulgent!

But now I am taking a few steps back from being so critical. Maybe I am not too self-indulgent. Maybe this persistent sense of being dissatisfied and disjointed is just my inner self trying hard to be heard.

I have gone through long periods of time in my life where I have not taken the time to listen to my inner self. While that is advice I freely give to others, it is advice I have difficulty following myself. The truth is I am more careful and caring of my friends than of myself.

When advising friends to listen to their inner selves, I often send them the following paragraph from the novella I Heard the Owl Call My Name, which is a favorite of mine:

All day long, on his way back to Kingcome, because he was alone and receptive, the little questions, the observations he had pushed deep within him, began to rise slowly towards the door of the conscious mind which was almost ready to open, to receive them, and give them words...In front of the vicarage he anchored the boat and waded ashore. He trudged up the black sands to the path and stopped. From the dark spruce he heard an owl call—once, and again—and the questions that had been rising all day long reached the door of his mind and opened it.

I love that image of the observations and questions rising towards the door of the conscious mind and then a seemingly simple act, the call of the owl, being the catalyst to allow them to reach the door and open it.

(What is it about the act of opening a door?)

I haven’t wandered off to a quiet spot (preferably one by water) to let the observations and questions rise within me. I haven’t given myself the time or space in which to do that. Despite that, and perhaps because I have been so persistent in not granting myself the luxury of taking care of myself, those thoughts are rising to the surface all the same.

So, what do I want?

Time.
Writing time: blog, letters.
Feel as if I am on top of things: the house, the garden, the bills, cooking, food storage (canning and freezing).
Rekindle the connections with Warren beyond the dailies. We seem to have less and less time to dream or share things beyond the immediate day-to-day stuff that is always demanding our attention.
Go away for a day or two. Not a vacation (yet), but a break. Water would be nice. Away would be nicer. Somewhere that is not Delaware.
Brownbag lunch with Warren at the springs on campus.
Be somewhere where I am not expected or required to be my Delaware self with all the responsibilities and weight of the schedule and commitments.
More sleep.
More connections (personal) with my friends: coffee, walks, something.
Regularly swim and walk again (exercise).
Walk regularly with Warren again (relationship).
Read more poetry.
Rediscover Prufrock.
Not be Prufrock.
Watch more movies (I don’t mean go out to the movies, I mean watch more movies).
Watch more sunsets.

Those were all items I jotted down quickly, without thinking too hard and without censoring myself. (I haven’t rewritten the list for publication either, as I prepare this post.) So many of them are small things. Doable things. And so many keep pointing back to time and personal connections (with friends, with Warren).

So why am I not listening to myself and doing some of these?

I don’t know. Maybe it goes to back to my feeling that if I do the things I want to do, I am being self-indulgent. I think women more than men (but not exclusively) tend not to place enough value our wants and our needs. It is always easier to take care of others first. Maybe I don’t want the internal critic pointing her finger at me, accusing me of being selfish and thinking only of myself.

Or maybe I am afraid the list will become one more demand on my time, one more set of responsibilities and commitments I have to keep.

For awhile, lots of people were doing lists of “50 things you want to do before you die.” Then everyone talked abut their “bucket list.” Same idea, new name. Folks would meet and say “so, what’s on your bucket list?” or “Yep, I put that on my bucket list.” Some of those bucket lists are pretty staggering.

I have a “50 things” list on my computer, one I put together many, many years ago. I have not looked at it for a long time; I know I wrote it pre-cancer. Post cancer, I’m not sure it matters as much. I really am that different. Things that once seemed important to me have slid way down in priority.

The list I scrawled out is not a bucket list or a 50 things list. It’s a little list. It’s a “maybe could I just live a little more deliberately and not feel so harried and out of touch with my life?” list.

Time will tell.

Postscript

As is so often the case when I am musing, Warren often brings me back to reality with one tug of the kite string. I shared the list with him last night and then commented this morning at breakfast that I was a little surprised that he didn’t say anything about it last night.

“I was thinking about it,” Warren replied. He then calmly ate his oatmeal while I explained the Prufrock entries on the list.

“Prufrock” is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, and is probably my all time favorite poem out of a long list of favorites. It was on my mind because Monday evening my friend Jacob and I had kept up a running repartee about Prufrock on Facebook after he had posted a video of Michael Gough reading it.

Warren, as we famously know, is not into poetry. I lost him somewhere in the breakfast discussion. He confirmed that later this morning when he wrote: As for Prufrock, I was thinking Proof Rock and wondering where it is.

Like I said, a good sharp tug on the kite string does wonders.

I have a list, a little list, in hand. I have Warren beside me.

Now if we can only find the time to go looking for Proof Rock.

One Really Special Moment

2011-08-27T18:40:00.002-04:00

Last night Warren and I attended a talent show, an annual fundraiser put on to support our local developmental disabilities board. We did not realize until the show started that, except for three "guest" acts, all of the other acts, whether solo or group, were performed by individuals who were developmentally disabled. That made for some unexpected moments of both poignancy and hilarity, depending on the act and the performer.

The show theme was a World War II style USO show. The acts were unabashedly and enthusiastically patriotic. The audience clapped and cheered loudly for every singer, dancer, and actor. More than once I found myself swallowing around a large lump in my throat one moment, and then cheering loudly the next.

As we drove home, Warren and I discussed our favorite moments and I recounted several. Then I said, "no, there was one really special moment."

Partway through the first half, the next act listed was "God Bless America," to be performed by Mickey McNamara. Mickey, an older man of indeterminate age, came awkwardly onto the stage, a small accordion hanging from its strap around his neck. He smiled nervously, pumped the bellows once, and then played, not "God Bless America," but "O Beautiful." Laboring over the notes, he made it to the end and grinned at the applause. The emcee thanked him and we all waited for Mickey to leave the stage. Instead, he leaned over and said something to the emcee, who announced Mickey was playing an encore. The audience quieted down.

Mickey studied his accordion. He tried one chord, then tried another. He made a false start and frowned. He tried a different chord and must have heard something he liked. Mickey then started playing his encore piece.

It was hard to recognize the music at first. The tune was broken, the rhythm was irregular. There were missed notes which Mickey went back and replayed. But all the same, a rustle started in the crowd and many of us started stirring in our seats.

A few of us stood up, then a few more stood. Soon the whole audience was on its feet, singing along to Mickey's tune.

He was playing "The Star Spangled Banner."

Mickey never looked up from his hard work. He concentrated fiercely on the chords and notes, drawing the bellows out and pressing them back in to make the breathy tones of the accordion. He had no idea we were all standing, singing along to his erratic beat.

When he finished and the accordion went silent, Mickey finally looked up to see us all standing and applauding. He smiled - a great, face-splitting smile - and then left the stage.

We all applauded hard as he walked away. We clapped for our country, for our national anthem, and for Mickey, who passionately and seriously, to his own rhythm and tune, gave us one really special moment in a night full of special moments.

Drifting Out of Summer

2011-08-24T18:00:00.002-04:00

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—

Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
End poem, Lewis Carroll

We are coming down to the end days of summer. Schools started back in session today here in our town. Warren and I caught a ballgame last night in Columbus (the Indians’ Triple A farm team) and it grew cool enough during the evening that I slipped on a cotton sweater. The rudbeckia bed is going to seed; each day there are fewer and fewer bees and more and more finches.

The nights are cooler, the mornings are sharper, the day temperatures are softer. There are fewer cicadas during the day and fewer katydids at night. The crickets, however, have taken their place in the chorus.

Drifting out of summer. Substitute “August” for July in Carroll’s poem and that would capture the feel of the days.

Canning and freezing operations have started up on the weekends in the kitchen. Last Sunday I canned seven pints of salsa and eleven pints of tomatoes. It’s not August until you spend the whole day standing in your kitchen cannery with steam everywhere. There are still many, many tomatoes in the garden; the peppers are also finally starting to turn.

The first high school football game is this Friday. We are just close enough to our local high school that you can hear the marching band, faintly, during practice. Come Friday night, the sky will be lit up to the west when they turn on the field lights.

Drifting out of summer.

On the home front, the summer has been squished and packed with many projects and events. Older family members have had medical issues needing attention; I’ve been accompanying my aunt Ginger to appointments. As she nears her 82nd birthday this fall, she looks more and more like her mother, my beloved Grandma Skatzes, so I am feeling perhaps even more strongly the already strong family bonds that connect us.

The “children” in the household have shifted all summer long. Sam headed back west earlier this month. He resumes school in September and just landed a job with a Portland area farm market. Sam has shown a lot of interest in local, sustainable food sources, so this may be an ideal fit for him. Elizabeth is back from her summer travels and work and will soon start the every other weekend routine with us as she heads into her final year of high school. We have even seen a fair amount of David, who went back to college this week.

And Amy moved in with us last week.

Amy had been living on the edge of homelessness for a long time. Her father finally ordered her out of his apartment and she moved into an overcrowded house where she was sharing a room with two others and where the owner of the house made it clear Amy was not welcome. I kept saying, “We have a room for you,” and she kept resisting, trying to make things work out where she was. Then Warren and I came home after work one day last week and he said “that’s Amy’s car.”

There she was, parked in front of our house, curled up on the front seat sobbing. She was the one who made the decision to leave, as opposed to being tossed out, but it was a hard decision all the same. All of her worldly goods (except those she had moved out previously and were stored elsewhere with safe families) were in the back seat of her car.

We carried her clothes and her boxes into the house. Amy was teary and upset for the first hour, but slowly calmed down and starting putting her new room to rights. The first thing she did was hang her dream catcher over her bed. I hope it catches all of her bad dreams. She had brought a few stuffed animals with her – small, well-worn, well-loved ones – and later I saw them on the neatly made bed, tucked in by the pillows. I think that broke my heart more than anything else: at that moment she was just a little girl with no roof over her head.

But she has one now, just in time for the change in seasons. And I am grateful beyond words that we have a roof that we could share with her.

Drifting out of summer. It’s been a bittersweet time. I miss my three Oregon children, happy as I am that they are all stable and happy out there. Shepherding family members through the medical world is a poignant reminder of how short the time is growing that we have with one another. Watching Amy calming down and putting her life back together is bittersweet. She has been drifting long enough and could use some change.

Drifting out of summer. May all of our boats come back into the harbor for the winter, snug against the storms.

Downsized? Only in Compassion

2011-08-19T16:15:00.001-04:00

During the monthly department meeting at work, someone spoke about the filing fee for opening a new case (custody or visitation, for example) and whether there should be indigent waivers for people who couldn't afford the fee, which is $100. That prompted someone else to say that if a person couldn't afford the fee, they shouldn't be asking for time with their children. This same individual went on to say, in a self-assured tone, "I mean, what's the problem? Any one of us could write a check for $100 right now."

I spoke up while those words were still hanging in the air. "I couldn't. And in this economy, there are a lot of people for whom $100 would be a stretch after paying bills and rent and gasoline."

Our department leader changed the topic quickly. Apparently, even though there was no heat in my words, we don't want the discussion to get personal. I didn't mind. I wasn't looking for a response, but it made me leave the office later that day wondering whatever happened to compassion.

A lot, apparently. In some corners, compassion has been downsized along with wages and benefits.

Lately the cable television show "Downsized" has been generating some comment in Blogville. Remember, we don't watch television in this household. We have no cable, and other than the new season of "This Old House" on PBS, it is unlikely we will turn on the television the rest of the year unless it is to watch a DVD or video. (Well, okay, we might watch some of the World Series. Just saying.) So any discussion about any television series, let alone a cable series, is usually not something I note. But after my good friend Sharon blogged about the show, and noted the opening episode was available online, I sat down and watched it.

What amazed me, now that I have seen the episode, is not the show itself. "Downsized" is "reality television," whatever that phrase has come to mean, and no matter how sanctimonious or critical we may be about "those people" and their choices, the true reality is that we the public enjoy being voyeurs in these peoples' lives and want to be titillated, offended, or appalled. The show hits its mark on that count.

No, what surprised me, and still does as I type this post, were some of the comments that Sharon's sympathy for the show's family (if not their economic choices) drew. She admitted that she had previously been harshly critical of them, but recent events in her own life had made her realize just how rapidly a family's financial stability can turn fragile these days. Sharon made a distinction between the individuals and their choices, and in doing so found a wellspring of compassion for the family.

It is too easy to throw rocks, and lots of them, at this family, but I found myself thinking that they're a lot like any of us. We all struggle with these issues - finances, family - in our own homes. We all make foolish choices from time to time. In all fairness, most of the comments on Sharon's post were sympathetic also. But some of them were harsh. Maybe this show irks us because it comes a little too close for comfort. And maybe because it's a little too close for comfort, it's easier to get shrill and dismissive about the individuals in the show rather than question why there is a market for watching a family's economic gaffes and blunders. As Sharon wisely noted: We are often quick to judge what other families do financially. Especially in front of cameras. But, we all make mistakes. Thankfully for my family, we aren't doing a reality TV show and airing them for all the world to see. I air all I want to air here on this blog!

We are often quick to judge. I'm not saying (and I doubt Sharon is too) that everyone, including the "Downsized" family, gets a permanent free pass on economic responsibility. But I do believe that times have been hard for too many for too long, no matter how wisely they budget their money or their lives. Can't pay a filing fee? Too bad, you might not get time with your children for a year or two. Made some foolish purchases and then your business tanked? Tough luck that you didn't see that coming.

To me, it's only a short step from that mindset to "Hungry? Homeless? You should have planned better."

I won't be watching "Downsized" because we don't watch television. Even if we did, I doubt I would watch it. But I really appreciate Sharon for sharing some sympathy for a family that, in the final analysis, looks more like most of us than we all want to acknowledge.

Roofs

2011-08-17T19:00:00.003-04:00

Just the other day, I wrote my friend Cindy that I really enjoy my job, but there are days I don’t want to go to work. At all. On those days, I think that if someone came running up to me, handed me a satchel of money, and ran off shouting “you don't ever have to work again and you will have no money or health insurance problems for the rest of your life!," I would turn right around and head back home.

Cindy emailed back: ‘Wouldn't that be nice!!!! I think a lot about the fact that we spend SO much of our time doing things we don't particularly like to put a roof over our heads and have no time to enjoy that "roof!" Does it really make sense?”

Cindy has made that roof comment before. Every time she does, I think she is onto something. There are days we all want to be under our own "roofs" (whatever and wherever they may be) doing what we want or need to be doing.

So here I am, Wednesday evening, thinking about our respective “roofs” and what it takes to be under them. Legal clinic was last night. Lots of clients, lots of hard times. Oatmeal cookies and fruit kuchen (thank you, Ashley, it was wonderful!) are not enough to keep the wolves away from these peoples’ doors (and roofs). We will see at least 250 clients this year, a record we don’t look forward to setting. If the economy turns steeply downward, we will see even more.

While I type this, I am making more oatmeal cookies (for another program I bake for). Bread (for us) is rising. I am trying to stare my checkbook into submission, looking at whether I can shave a little more off the stack of bills. Some of the “getting away” fund – the portion directly attributable to my rebates and mileage checks (as compared to loose change, which we both contribute) – “got away” into my checking account to pay bills, but I am resolved to replace that when I am able.

And I am STILL tired.

But my roof – literally and figuratively – is sturdily in place over my head, kept there by a wonderful husband, a solid marriage, a dependable job (which I really do enjoy), and blessings innumerable. Even if I don’t always recognize (or admit) it, the reality is I do have time to enjoy my roof, whether that means sharing breakfast with Warren, reading in the quiet of the evening, or daydreaming about strengthening the community through baking. That doesn’t mean I don’t want more time under my roof, no matter how I define “roof,” but I try to be mindful of just how much I already have in the face of so many who are faced with so much less.

In these uncertain times, many of us are struggling to keep the roofs of our lives from blowing away, trying to patch the holes in the roof before the drip becomes a deluge, trying to throw up a makeshift roof where one used to be before the storm breaks. My prayer for us all is simple.

May we all be under our own roofs, wherever and whatever they may be.

To the Peaky Mountain

2011-08-16T19:00:00.001-04:00

Zora Neale Hurston, Drumming

Monday was one of those days. You know, the never quite get it into gear, really tired, where did the weekend go?, somewhat numb kind of day that all of us stub our toes on every now and then. Well, Monday was that day for me. (Still is, even though it is no longer Monday.)

The weekend was way, way full. Warren had rehearsals and a concert in a city about an hour from here. The concert was an all Rodgers & Hammerstein evening. Now, I like R & H. I mean, really like them. Sigh. This was an inconsistent performance. Some of it was excellent (a couple of the soloists were superb), some of it was good, and some of it was, well, never mind. I will only say I have never heard "Oklahoma" sung at quite that tempo. You could not only spell "Oklahoma" but could probably embroider it to boot before the song finished. Between the rehearsals (Thursday and Friday) and the concert (Saturday), there were a lot of late, late nights.

As a result, I don’t really remember the weekend. Was there one? I know I got to Monday morning and said to Warren "I need a weekend now." Boy, do I ever.

Monday was made longer by my rising earlier than usual to take Aunt Ginger to the hospital for some pre-surgical testing. She sailed through without a hitch, looking unusually bright-eyed and perky (anxiety brings out her coloring). I hope I look half that good in five years when I turn 60, let alone if I ever reach almost 82.

So by the time I reached Monday night, I was beat. Exhausted. Worn out. I made oatmeal cookies for Tuesday’s legal clinic, I finished reading an excellent biography about Zora Neale Hurston (Wrapped in Rainbows by Valerie Boyd), I thought about but did not pick the tomatoes and beans. (It was evening. The mosquitoes were out. I hate mosquitoes.)

A day later, I am less physically tired, but my mood remains all over the floor. Limp. Worn out. I poke it around the edges. Sad? Depressed? Definitely on the numb side. I feel as if I have a lot on my mind, but nothing yet I can really catch up and deal with. (Or, perhaps more truthfully, nothing I am ready to catch up in my hands and deal with. Dealing with stuff is hard work.)

The biography I just finished started with a quote by Zora that I have long known: I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. What I didn’t know until I read this book is that there is more to the quote then that.

I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands. [From Dust Tracks on the Road, 1942.]

As I emailed Warren this morning, right now I seem to be in Sorrow's kitchen, licking out all the pots. I need to move myself forward to the rest of that quote. I want to be wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in hand, standing on the peaky mountain.

All the Angels

2011-08-08T19:36:00.000-04:00

He ordered his angels

to guard you wherever you go.

If you stumble, they'll catch you;

their job is to keep you from falling.

Psalm 91:11 (The Message)

Walking downtown in the humid, sultry air last week, I kept my eyes cast down. It was already hot. It was only 10:15 a.m. My mind was on the heat.

I don't do well in heat. I was definitely not in the moment.

When I walk along in that mood, I am absent. I miss the little threads that make up the tapestry of the world: a cardinal alighting on the tree branch, a spray of petunias blooming despite the heat. Small moments whisper by me and I don't even catch them.

All the same, I snapped out of my trance long enough to notice the battered concrete planter sitting cockeyed on the downtown sidewalk. It was full only of foxtail grasses and a weed or two. Clearly no one had tended it this summer. I couldn't even tell if it belonged to anyone.

Just a weedy, discarded, beat up and battered planter. But it had cherubs cast onto its surface.

A whole planter full of angels!

A lot of us could use a planter full of angels, never mind the weeds. I could use a planter full of angels.

In recent weeks, there has been a whole lot of taking care of others going on in our household. I am helping an elderly family member through some major medical appointments. Amy's already precarious living conditions imploded and there have been several crises. (We hope she will be joining our household soon.) Warren is shepherding Season 33 onto the main stage while tending to a myriad of other demands and needs, including two rehearsals and a concert this weekend with another group in a town an hour from here. Sam leaves this Wednesday morning and we are trying to cram in just a little more time together before I put him on an airplane back to Oregon. I have missed him deeply this past school year and will miss him again this coming one. I miss my older son, Ben, and my daughter-in-law, Alise, deeply; this weekend was their wedding anniversary. 2500 miles away, I am too far out of the fabric of all of their daily lives and am feeling that distance keenly.

I am feeling stretched thin. I am feeling worn down. The heat has finally broken, so I can't blame it today as I type, but it certainly has played a role.

I don't know. Like I said, I could use a bucketful of angels.

Composer Lukas Foss wrote a percussion concerto titled "All the Angels Have Big Feet." This line was taken from lines by Ezra Pound:

All the angels have big feet.

Hump, diddywim tum .... Hump, bump, stunt.

I'd never heard of Lukas Foss. My eye had caught the concerto title in an article Warren was reading and the image has stuck with me.

All the angels have big feet.

I could use some angels with big feet right about now. I want some big footed angels stomping around, shaking the ground, shaking up things right now. I need some angels leaving big footprints as they tread firmly through my life right now.

All the angels have big feet.

Saturday a week ago Sam spent the afternoon with me baking. (Yeah, yeah, I know. It was hot. Even with the air on. And we had the kitchen heated up for baking?) He made two pies, one apple, one key lime meringue. I introduced Sam to yeast dough and he made a deep dish pizza that was just excellent. Tomorrow when he comes over we plan on making mozzarella cheese and pasta. In the evening, I hope the three of us go to a favorite ice cream stand, about 20 miles from here, and sit on the steps of the nearby church with our sodas and our sundaes. Maybe we'll talk. Maybe we'll just watch the village life all around us.

Any time I spend with Sam is a gift to me. We have seen him only in spurts as he visits with this friend and that friend. All these weeks, we have been ready with a meal and a bed as he has come and gone. I have mended his clothes, done some of his laundry, and given him rides. Tomorrow we will cook and share a meal and maybe an ice cream cone.

"Be not forgetful to entertain strangers,

for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."

Hebrews 13:2 (KJV)

Sam is no stranger, but his feet are good sized, in keeping with his 6'4" frame.

All the angels have big feet.

Books and Tomatoes

2011-08-04T10:58:00.000-04:00

I have the day off today; when your schedule is only 24 hours a week, it is easier to slide one in every now and then. It promises to be a humid but cooler day than we have had for some time. All the same, I walked to the library first thing this morning before it got any warmer.

Going to the library is like walking into a garden this time of year. My garden (overgrown, wild green mass that it is this summer) is just starting to get serious about churning out tomatoes. I go out to pick the three ripe ones I saw earlier, but in bending over to pluck them, I see another! And another! And oh, look, that one is ready to pick too! So I come in with the bowl, which was big enough for the three tomatoes I had in mind originally, overflowing and one more tomato in my hand for good measure.

There is always another ripe tomato.

The library for me is the same way. I always set out with the thought of getting just one or two books; often I have a call number or two scribbled on a piece of paper. But only one or two. After all, I have to lug them the seven blocks back home. The fewer books to tote, the happier my arms are.

It rarely works out that way. It didn't today either.

I had meant (really, truly) only to get one book that another blogger, Darla at Bay Side to Mountain Side, had recommended. The library had it in the stacks.

But to get to the stacks in our library, you have to walk right past the new books.

I never just walk past the new books section. I didn't today. And therein lay my downfall.

Like newly ripened tomatoes, new books winked at me. I picked them up, I squeezed them, I weighed them in my hand - not for the physical weight but the emotional. Is this something I want to read now? Can this wait?

A few went back on the shelf, maybe not quite ripe, maybe not what I was looking for. Several more went into my arms. The book I had originally set out for was added to the stack, as were two videos. When all was said and done, the tote bag was packed tightly, and I still had seven blocks between me and our front door.

I used to read and walk at the same time. I probably hold the local record, dating back to my youth, for simultaneous reading and walking the greatest distances. I don't do that these days, thanks to aging eyesight. So while I walked home, I instead thought about the books I was carrying and how soon I would be back here, cooling off with lemonade and cracking open the first one.

As I finish this post mid-morning, I hear the cicadas starting their daylong chatter. The sun is in and out of clouds, so the heat is milder. I have a fan blowing on me as I sit here typing. The books are one room away, scattered on the kitchen table. There is lemonade in the refrigerator and ripe tomatoes on the window sill.

Books, tomatoes, and a summer day. Heaven in my household.

Forgiveness

2011-07-25T20:44:00.002-04:00

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Matthew 6:12

Sometimes you hear a thread of a family story that is so contrary to your version of the story that it makes you reexamine and ponder what you know and what you do not know to be true.

That is what happened to me last Friday. My thoughts and heart have been knotted ever since as I sort through the tangled, loose, or just plain snarled threads of a family story that has had far-reaching consequences even to this day.

A long time ago, decades ago when I was a small child, my grandfather committed a great wrong against me, not just once, but numerous times over several years.

When he died in the spring of my fourth grade year, I was relieved. No more hiding, no more dodging, no more trying to be invisible.

My grandfather's death had an immediately freeing effect on me, but what I did not know in my ten year old naivety was that the emotional consequences of what had happened would imprint me forever. In part, it made me who and what I am today. Some of that has been to my benefit: what happened infused me with determination and resilience to survive what otherwise would have destroyed me. Some of that was to my detriment and it took a long time with a wonderful therapist to help reshape core coping mechanisms that had served the child well, but were disastrous for the adult.

But this post is not about what happened. This post is about the new line of the story that I heard for the first time last Friday and am weaving into the story I already know.

On Friday, I accompanied my aunt Ginger to the hospital while she underwent a medical procedure. While we waited in the prep area, she on the bed, I on the hard chair, we talked to pass the time and Ginger started sharing family stories.

I learned things about Grandma Skatzes (her mother) that I had not heard before: how she went to work in the kitchens of the women's dorm in this small town when my grandfather was ill and unable to work, how much she loved that job and how she hated to give it up when he was better and insisted she quit. I heard how during the Depression she was the one who went to the Relief Office to get food for the family, as my grandfather was too proud to ask for help despite the hunger at home.

And then Ginger told me a story I had not heard before, about my grandfather's final days. My grandfather had a heart attack and was hospitalized. Within a week or two, he would have a massive one that would kill him. That part of the story I knew. But what I didn't know is that for several days prior to his death, at my grandfather's request, a minister came daily to the hospital and met with him for lengthy talks.

Ginger, who knows my story, stopped in her narrative and said, "I wonder if he was feeling…guilty over…you know…and wanted to…well, maybe atone for what he did…well…you know…."

We changed the topic and the day went on. But I carried that new piece of information home with me and have turned it over innumerable times since then.

My grandfather met with a minister several times in the days leading up to his death.

I struggle with the notion of my grandfather seeking forgiveness in his dying days, if that is what he indeed did. I struggle with the image of my grandfather, facing death, finding solace with a minister.

I struggle big time with all this. Never mind that faith is meant to be a strength and comfort to people. Never mind that it is not my right to dictate how, when, or even whether a person repents of his wrongs. I struggle with the notion of my grandfather having that comfort at all.

It is hard to forgive.

One of the many, many reasons I veered away from church as a young adult was my childhood church's interpretation of the duty and obligation of Christians to "forgive those who trespass against us." That message was hardened into a kind of co-dependency diatribe by our elderly minister and at least one Sunday School teacher whose class I attended for one or two miserable years. If we were incapable of forgiving someone who had wronged us, then we were at fault, we were to blame, and we were the ones in dire need of forgiveness. Never mind what the wrong was. The burden was all on me, the victim, to rise magnanimously above the wrong and forgive the wrongdoer. Anything less than that and I was probably heading to hell in a personalized hand basket.

There was no discussion of the human and humane side of forgiveness: that forgiving lifts a burden from the victim's heart, that forgiveness allows the one who has been wronged to move on and put the wrong aside. If someone, anyone, had suggested that side to forgiveness, instead of threatening me with damnation if I could not grant absolute and total forgiveness, I might have listened.

But, as taught, this was a version of forgiveness that I could not swallow. It was not one I could find in the Bible. It was certainly not one I could live with as a tenet of faith. It left me outside in the cold, victimized in spirit, knowing in my heart there was no place for me inside that church. It is no coincidence that the religion that drew me in was Judaism, which places the emphasis on atonement by the person who has done the wrong, including, where possible, to the victim.

It is no wonder that I have been journeying spiritually for so long.

It was my wonderful therapist who finally explained forgiveness to me in a way I could understand and accept. He asked me how I felt about forgiveness, which caused me to nearly leap out of my seat. I explained the whole painful religious experience that left me feeling more victimized than before. He was quiet while I calmed down, and then he suggested equating forgiveness with forgiving a past due bill in a business. You stop sending the bill. You write it off. It doesn't undo what happened, it doesn't explain or excuse the act, but it allows you to put it away.

You just let it go.

I could accept that. I could mentally run the bill and stick it away in a folder marked "closed accounts." And that is what I did, until Ginger's story last Friday.

Now the bill is in my hand again.

In writing this post, I read various translations of the Lord's Prayer, particularly the verse having to do with forgiving "those who trespass against us." I did not find any version of the prayer, including the King James version, that used the "trespass" language. I did find multiple versions that spoke of forgiving debts and forgiving debtors, in line with what my therapist discussed.

I can approach forgiveness on those terms. It's a debt. Not all debts are honored. Not all debts are paid.

Not all debts are collectible.

Did my grandfather seek forgiveness in his final days? I don't know. I'll never know. Am I better able to forgive his wrongs, knowing he might have been remorseful, that he might have repented? I don't know. I do know this: what happened is a long, overdue bill and there is no need for me to continue to send it. It will never be paid, but I can let it go.

The account is closed.

One Dime, One Day

2011-07-20T18:50:00.001-04:00

I have been struggling with money issues as of late: some of them in my wallet, more of them in my head. Monday, I contacted our local hospital where I do all my oncology work (lab work and consultations) to find out why I was no longer receiving hospital bills. Our local hospital is part of a larger conglomerate and it turns out that somehow, somewhere, between April 2010 and October 2010, the system's computer resurrected my old mailing address (last used in October 2008) and was shipping everything to that address. That explains the recently received collection letter on a bill from October that I never received and never saw, and that explains why I only just learned the April totals.

The April total was higher than I anticipated. Had I known, I would have been paying on it but I didn't and I haven't been, so now I have a whopping bill to pare down. (Before you say "but April, surely you knew you had a bill, why weren't you more proactive?," let me add that I also have a pending application for financial assistance and I initially thought the bill was being held up while the assistance application was being reviewed.)

So by 5:00 Monday night, I was thoroughly demoralized. But then I rallied: I will pay it off bit by bit; yes, that means stretching some other things out a little further, but I can do it; it will be okay.

That was before I looked more closely at the account sheets and saw something on the master account called "bad debt balance," with a large sum after it. A large sum as in four figures. Where did that come from? When I applied for financial assistance last time, the counselor referred to some unpaid (and unmentioned ever) 2004 charges that should have been picked up by Medicaid or bundled into my bankruptcy in 2005. Could that be them? What charges are they? And why that amount?

I don't know about the figure; it apparently is written off but still pops up in internal documents (which is what I was looking at as we tried to figure out where my bills had gone). Regardless, it is so discouraging. As I told Warren when I related the day's discoveries, I pay and pay and pay, get close to finishing off a major bill of some sort and plan on adding that payment to another bill's payment (the snowball effect), and then learn I have new bills. Or older bills newly discovered. By the time I pay my share of the household costs and make payments on the bills (now including the new ones), there is little left to my paycheck.

It's hard. It's hard to be perpetually tight on funds. It's hard to realize that some necessities I have delayed spending money on are just that much more out of reach, even with being hyper frugal with my dollars. It's hard to not feel that even a small item once in a great while is an extravagance I should not indulge in.

But like so many times when I am feeling stressed or struggling to cope, all I really needed after Monday was a different perspective.

A change in attitude.

A reminder of just how much I am blessed.

What a difference a day can make.

The first reminder, small and sweet, happened when I dropped Warren off at work yesterday. After he got out of the car, he bent over and reached down to the curb. Had he dropped something?

Warren straightened back up and held up a slim dime. One thin, silvery dime. "It can go in the vacation fund!"

We both laughed. We are ten cents (ten cents!) closer to whatever we are doing next summer. And the dime knocked my perspective a little closer to center. It doesn't have to be all about the money. It so rarely is all about the money. So many times it is about other things: emotions, anxieties, stresses. But it is so much easier and convenient to blame it on money rather than deal with those messy, squishy topics.

The second reminder was neither short nor sweet. Last night at 10:20 the phone rang. In our household, phones ringing after 10:00 are usually not pleasant calls. This one held true to type.

Our "almost daughter" Amy was on the phone. She is at risk to lose her already insecure housing situation (she lives with her dad) due to family conflicts, she is at risk to lose her already insecure means of transportation due to family conflicts, she is underemployed and has not found additional work that would give her the financial ability to meet the risks, she is going hungry more times than she will admit, and she is so emotionally battered and worn down due to family conflicts that she is almost too numb to respond to the immediate crises. I tried making suggestions, until I finally realized I needed to shut up and listen because she was in no shape to hear the offers of help. Amy talked and cried, cried and talked.

Then she blurted out, crying even harder, "and we only have a half roll of toilet paper left and I don't get paid until Friday."

That I could respond to concretely and immediately. "Amy, come over here right now. We have toilet paper."

I went upstairs and gathered some rolls of toilet paper. I also raided the vacation fund box, which held a few dollar bills (along with Tuesday's dime and some other loose change), and Warren contributed a few more. The toilet paper went into a grocery bag, the dollar bills went into an envelope.

When Amy pulled up five minutes later, I met her on the lawn. I handed her the grocery bag and the envelope.

"This is a gift from us. It'll help you get closer to payday. And here's the toilet paper."

We hugged for a long moment. Amy is thin and shaking and sad. It breaks my heart to see her that way. She is so young to have so many sorrows and difficulties. I walked her back to the car, thanked her friend who brought her over, hugged her again.

"We love you. We are here for you. You can stay here while you figure things out."

After Amy left, I walked back into the house and plopped down beside Warren on the couch, drained. We talked a little about what had just happened, about what we can do for Amy. It was still on my mind as I fell asleep. This morning, Warren said "I think Amy was in my dreams last night."

Yeah, mine too.

Amy was the big jolt to my perspective, a real live reminder of just how much I have. I have what she is lacking presently, starting with toilet paper, food, and a secure place to live. Most important, I have a loving home to shelter me when times are tough.

I have a different attitude today. I still have a large pile of medical bills that I will need to pay down bit by bit. I still have some important purchases that I will need to defer yet a little longer. I still have an anemic checking account balance which will rally only briefly on payday for some time to come. We even have a little tiny vacation fund that might just maybe allow us to get away for a few days next summer.

And I still have a wonderfully loving household where Warren and I work together to make the most of what we have, dime by dime, day by day.

The Jonah in Me

2011-07-17T15:13:00.000-04:00

One day long ago, God's Word came to Jonah, Amittai's son: "Up on your feet and on your way to the big city of Nineveh! Preach to them. They're in a bad way and I can't ignore it any longer." But Jonah got up and went the other direction to Tarshish, running away from God. He went down to the port of Joppa and found a ship headed for Tarshish.

Jonah 1:1-3 (The Message)

Back in the beginning of the year, my friend Katrina sent me on a spiritual journey. At the time, I admitted that her expectations brought out the Jonah in me. Called to Nineveh, I wanted to go instead to Tarshish.

I'm in a Jonah kind of mood right now. (Or a Moses mood, who after offering up excuse after excuse to God as to why he, Moses, should not ask Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, finally blurted "Send somebody else!")

Ever since Katrina sent me off on my journey, I have come to view my beliefs and my spirituality in far more personal, real ways. So why am I kicking my heels right now?

Blame it on Michelle Derusha.

Michelle is the blogger at Graceful, a deftly and beautifully written blog about her life, her faith, and her own journeys. One of the journeys Michelle is on presently is a "shop-not" year.

Shop-not years always intrigue me and I read Michelle's explanation of why she had made that decision. She pointed to a book, The Hole In Our Gospel, by Richard Stearns. What Michelle wrote about that book was intriguing, intriguing enough to track down the book and start reading it last night.

Start reading it? Start absorbing it. Start inhaling it. Start immersing myself in it. It is a powerful book. It is a book that reaches right into my heart and pulls hard.

This is how hard that book has hit me: When I find a quote that moves me, I usually flag it until I can come back to it and copy it into my commonplace book. I am not yet finished with The Hole in Our Gospel and there are so many notes sticking out of it that it looks as if someone shoved a ream of construction paper into the pages.

The Hole in Our Gospel is a book that even when I manage to put it down and turn to the tasks at hand, I am still thinking about the book.

And this is where Jonah comes in. Sundays are my swimming day many weeks, this week being one of them. As I swam earlier today, counting laps, I found myself thinking of the book, and the book's message, and what that message could, might, maybe mean for me. I found myself praying as I counted laps: 3-4, 3-5, What are You asking of me, Lord?, 3-6, 4-1, What am I supposed to do?, 4-2, 4-3, Not now, please, Lord, not now.

As I type these words, it is midafternoon Sunday. Sam and a friend are in the next room, gaming. Warren is in his shop (the garage) cutting steel. Me? I'm wondering whether to go to Nineveh or Tarshish, and I haven't even finished the book yet.

In the end, Jonah goes to Nineveh and preaches repentance (so successfully that God spared the city, to Jonah's great anger and disgust). As for me, I suspect in the end I will trudge into my own version of Nineveh, where I will find…

Myself, talking about but not taking action, wondering about but not questing after a more meaningful expression of my faith. My Nineveh is not populated by evildoers so wicked the town is about to be destroyed, but just by me, who I hope is a fairly decent person. But as Stearns make clear in his book, the issue is not whether one is fairly decent or well meaning or a "good Christian." The issue is far greater than that: it is about living with integrity and compassion and justice for the poorest of the poor, the sickest of the sick, the hungriest of the hungry. It is about the meaning of life itself.

Sooner or later, I hope to end up in Nineveh.

Magical Music Moments

2011-07-15T10:39:00.002-04:00

I have been silent on my blog for several days. The start of July is always a swirl of setting stages and packing up percussion gear and attending holiday concerts. There is not much time to think, let alone collect my thoughts. Add to that the work schedule, some ongoing family matters with older family members, Sam being home (and in and out of the house), and Life in general, and it is no wonder that my pen (or keyboard) has been silent.

But in the last few days, I have experienced three magical music moments, reminding me of the power of music and family and community.

The first was a few nights ago, when Warren and I came home from our respective days at the office to find Sam and friends ensconced on the deck playing Magic and talking. Three of the four are musical, and there were guitars and one ukulele at hand. After the game concluded and the evening started coming on, the boys (the young men) reached for the instruments and started jamming. Old, new, folk, funk, improv: the notes spilled into the evening along with laughter and comments. One would start a line, look at another, and say "C sharp." A nod and other fingers would stat to build on the melody.

I joined them all on the deck at some point in the evening. (Warren was at his board meeting.) The jamming went on, sometimes with singing, sometimes just the sweet sounds. Sam grinned at me and kept playing. At one point, when the other two took a break, he started playing an old Grateful Dead standard and we sang along in duet. He told me afterwards that he "really really liked that you are just hanging out with us--that is so cool." As far as I am concerned, that was worth the whole visit right there.

After I shared the experience with my friend Margo, she commented "Last night on the deck sounds like one of those magical summer nights. Lucky you." Margo was right. Lucky me. It was magical and moments such as those have been all too rare with my mercurial son. I was grateful for every note that spilled into the air Monday night.

The second magical moment was Warren and I just went to Columbus to the Ohio Theatre to see two Buster Keaton silent films. I have commented before about watching silent films at the Ohio Theatre and last night again featured the amazing Clark Wilson on the Mighty Morton. Buster Keaton is a longtime favorite of mine, so I would have enjoyed the night no matter what. But Clark Wilson is truly stunning, and after playing the entire film (plus a Keaton short before the feature length one), the audience rose to its feet for a long, sustained, and deserved standing ovation. Warren and I drove home the "slow route," which means meandering north on High Street through the various Columbus neighborhoods, listening to the chatter and music spill out of the restaurants into the warm night. We were both quiet on the way back; I was stilled wrapped in the music of the evening.

The third, which happened just today and is still coming together as I type, reminded me (as if I needed it) that we are blessed to live in a town where the sense of community is powerful and that I am double blessed to witness it firsthand. And triply blessed to be married to Warren, who also has a strong sense of community both personally and as executive director of the Symphony.

My morning started with a Facebook message from my friend, Jessica, who put out a plea for help. A good friend of hers - a father, a grandfather, a husband - is dying of cancer. He is back home, spending his last days with his family and friends, living in the front room of the house where there is a large window to the world. Today is his wedding anniversary, the last he will celebrate with his wife. Other friends are bringing over an anniversary meal. Was there any chance that somehow Warren could pull together an ensemble to appear tonight and serenade the couple?

I shared the note with Warren before we even sat down for breakfast. By the time he left for his office, his thoughts were already running to possibilities. In less than an hour, he had one of the musicians, the amazing Pam Beery, say "I will try to do this." Pam is a gifted flutist who plays in a local duo, and she was already on the phone to her partner to make it happen.

When Warren told Jessica what was coming together, and heard her thanks, he said (and I only imagine the quiet, comforting tone he used) that the mission of the Symphony is to engage the community through music. That often means thinking outside the box and reaching people where they are, not sitting back and expecting them to come to you. Jessica put on Facebook minutes later that she has "has a new and greater appreciation for musicians today!"

Music is magic. It brings people together, it closes gaps, it strengthens and celebrates and comforts. Somewhere in Delaware tonight a man and his wife are sharing their last anniversary together, and there will be music spilling into the evening, blessing them as they listen.

Postscript

I had most of the story right. What I did not realize is that last night was not the couple's "real" anniversary, but a special anniversary planned (by friends) when during a recent medical crisis, the wife cried "I just want one more anniversary with him."

The incomparable Pam Beery, along with her equally talented music partner, Bob Claymier, made the special anniversary all the more special with their playing. Our friend Brandon (Jessica's husband) caught a little of their performance on tape.

Down the Rabbit Hole

2011-07-06T19:24:00.002-04:00

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?'

How old was I when I first read that line? Nine? Ten? Ten sticks in my mind as the right age.

I had discovered the small paperback on the bookshelf at my Aunt Jane's house. Aunt Jane, Uncle Frank, and their children lived in the house in the next yard over from the house next door when I was growing up. In the summer, it was as natural to be at Aunt Jane's, running after my older brother and cousins, as it was to be in our own backyard.

On hot days, we might retreat inside. My brother Dale would thunder upstairs with John and Robert to play with Matchbox cars on the bedroom floor. I was perfectly content lounging downstairs, reading stray comic books or the latest issue of Mad Magazine, and no doubt annoying my aunt Jane to no end with my presence. At times she would put me to work on simple chores; other times she would shoo me home when my stay went on too long.

Whenever I was in Aunt Jane's kitchen, I would scan the built-in bookshelf for things to read. 45 years later, I don't remember much about that shelf other than it had very few books of interest to a child, even one who read voraciously.

But the little dark blue paperback caught my eye. It was a small book, a child size book. I was younger when I first saw it. Although I was discouraged by the dense text, I liked to look at the detailed drawings every few pages: a rabbit in a waistcoat, a girl holding back a curtain to reveal a tiny door, the same girl pages later with an elongated neck.

The pictures fascinated me. Whenever I was at Aunt Jane's house and it got quiet and slow, I would pull down the little book and study the pictures over and over. Here were two identical, roly-poly little men; here were chess pieces with faces, clearly having a conversation.

What was this book?

The summer I was ten, I found out what the mysterious dark blue paperback was when I opened it and began to read it rather than just look at the pictures. Thus was I finally introduced to Alice.

I was hooked by the third sentence. Curiouser and curiouser, I plunged in headfirst and kept reading. The little blue paperback, which turned out to be an omnibus edition of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, came home with me, where it joined the pantheon of truly great books (meaning I read and reread them constantly) occupied at that time only by Little Women and the works of Marguerite Henry.

It has never left my "all time favorites" list.

I have lost count of how many times I have read the Alice books. When I was young, it was not unusual for me to finish and then begin them again immediately, much like the Torah reading cycle in synagogues. The little blue paperback came home with me, eventually traveling with me to college and beyond, crisscrossing the country as one of my most important books.

In fact, the little book survived for many, many years until my son Ben came along and read it to death. Already well worn and cracked at the spine, the book had no chance against his reading style, which seems to have consisted of massaging every last word off the page and into his very being. Ben was every bit as taken with Alice as I was and I later bought him a hardback copy because, as I wrote in the inscription, "everyone needs to know their way through Wonderland."

Everyone should know their way through Wonderland, but not everyone does. My dear Warren has never read the Alice books. Neither have his two children. I am not sure whether my brothers have read them. Sam has only read Through the Looking Glass.

I can't imagine life without Wonderland.

In recent months, I have read two novels based on the relationship between Alice Liddell and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and just finished two newer biographies about the unusual author of these fantastical works. The story of Lewis Carroll, fictionalized or not, is a tangled, confused tale.

I was trying to explain some of this to Warren the other night after he asked me about my reading. Lewis Carroll's life, as a real, historical happening, is murky. In the century plus since Carroll died, and the century and a half since Alice in Wonderland was first published, biographical portraits of him have run the gamut from gentle, quirky professor who loved children to emotionally disturbed misfit. After finishing Jenny Woolf's well-crafted biography, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, I suspect the truth contained threads of the entire continuum.

As Woolf adeptly points out, the original sources and record as to Carroll are slim at best. As an Oxford lecturer and deacon, Carroll led a circumscribed life in many ways. His family destroyed many of his personal records after his death. Other records have disappeared from view. Woolf, in fact, discovered Carroll's bank account record in 2005, untouched since 1900 when his estate was concluded, and was able to draw upon them in her research and writing. Modern Carroll biographers start from the thinnest of original sources, and that hampers us from our 21st century post in knowing the man behind the books.

Having read more about Lewis Carroll, I am torn whether to pursue him any further or just let him go. I am not sure in my mind whether I want to learn more about the author and his tangled life. The truth is we shall never know Lewis Carroll, we shall never know Charles Lutwidge Dodsgon. The trail was obscure from the outset, and huge portions of it have been obliterated. With each passing year, Carroll grows fainter and fainter like a fading photograph, smaller and smaller like Alice eating the mushroom.

In the end, I am not sure it matters whether I know Lewis Carroll. It is Wonderland that beckons to me still. Regardless of how I arrive there, down a rabbit hole or through a looking glass, I shall always return to Wonderland.

June Notes

2011-06-29T16:53:00.001-04:00

June is drawing to an end. Let me make a few notes before it slips away entirely:

With the exception of a few hot days, June has been unusually and wonderfully mild this year. The day lingers in the low 80s, then drops into the 50s at night. That is about as close to ideal summer weather as it gets in central Ohio.
We have an abundance of fireflies. Perhaps it is the wet spring we had. Perhaps it is the cool weather. Whatever the reasons, the nightly displays in the backyard are staggering.
The rudbeckia at the end of the deck is starting to bud. Once the flowers open, our backyard becomes Bee Central to such an extent that you can sit on the deck and hear the hum.
My 2011 garden is going great guns, despite its pathetic start. It is as impressive as it is because of the kindness of my friends Kermit and Donna, who shared with open hands and hearts their starter plants. The tomatoes are flowering. The beans are up. We have been eating fresh zucchini for weeks. (Yes, I know, there's the weeding to do.)
Walking downtown yesterday, I passed a hopscotch pattern chalked on the sidewalk. No rock on it, or I might have been tempted to go a round or two.
The hopscotch game was in front of the house which has a rocking horse on the porch. The horse's body is white, its mane and tail are fuchsia and "real" (not molded), and it appears to have lavender eye shadow and gold glitter around its eyes. Trust me, we are not talking about a plain old circus pony. We are talking about a just-jumped-off-a-merry-go-round prancer. It's the rocking horse I would have wanted as a kid.
Last night, the Symphony rehearsed for its holiday concerts. I arrived after it was underway, walking through the campus after stopping first at the library. The windows to the performance hall were open and "Phantom of the Opera" spilled out into the warm summer evening. I stood outside for an extra long moment letting the music wash over me.

For the next few days, our lives will whirl around holiday concerts at three different locations: one tomorrow night in Mansfield, one Saturday in Put-In-Bay up on Lake Erie, and the final one the night of the Fourth here in Delaware. Late Sunday afternoon, in the midst of the hoopla, Sam arrives home for a summer stay. I have not seen him since I said goodbye in Montana last August and I am eager to see my boy once again.

Not all fireworks burst over our heads in the night sky. Some explode right in our hearts.

Bread Upon the Waters

2011-06-28T07:56:00.003-04:00

Cast your bread upon the waters,

For you will find it after many days.

Ecclesiastes 11:1; New King James Version

Grandma and Grandpa Nelson lived on a farm about 12 miles away when I was growing up. We spent many Sunday afternoons there having a traditional Sunday dinner. In the summers when I was very young, my older brother Dale and I would spend several days at the farm "on vacation." Looking back, I realize the vacations were more for the benefit of my parents, but I remember the excitement of going to the farm with my little overnight suitcase.

Farm vacations! That meant gathering eggs, playing in the barn and fields, helping slop the hogs, running up and down the lane, snapping and stringing beans, husking corn, picking tomatoes, and eating my grandma's delicious cooking (hands down, she was the best cook I knew growing up).

Usually at least once during our vacation, Dale and I would "go fishing." Even though a small creek (the "crick") ran through the fields, we did not fish there as the water was too shallow. Rather, we would trudge down the dusty lane to the main road (melodiously named "Hogback") and then walk a very short distance to where the creek ran under the road. The culvert had old concrete abutments on either side of the road, and the little bridge (as we called it) marked our fishing hole. From there, perhaps all of six or seven feet above the water, we would let down our lines in the vain hopes of catching a fish. In retrospect, it was something only young children would do, as only a child would believe in the impossibility of there being anything bigger than a minnow in the brackish, shallow water underneath the little bridge.

Our fishing lines were baling twine and safety pins. We occasionally made "poles" out of old sticks, but only to extend the reach of the baling twine, which had a maddening habit of floating on the water's surface. For bait, we used what was popularly called a "dough ball." Dough balls were wadded up pieces of bread, preferably the white, spongy stuff (and let's face it, we all ate the white spongy stuff back then), moistened with water until the bread could be kneaded and shaped around the open safety pin. Once we had the lines suitable baited, we would lower them over the side into the scummy, green water (no small feat given the nature of baling twine) and wait.

I don't remember how long the fishing expeditions lasted. 20 minutes? 30? Hogback was a quiet gravel road in those days, so two young children could sit along the roadside undisturbed for a whole morning. I doubt we lasted that long. The heat and the dust, let alone the boredom of no fish, probably drove us back down the lane to the cool dimness of the house before too much time elapsed.

In Ecclesiastes 11, we are admonished to cast our bread upon the waters and wait for the return. We cast our bread constantly on the waters in those days with little tangible return. We never caught a fish. In looking back, I wonder whether we even ever got a minnow nibble.

A number of translations and interpretations analyze Ecclesiastes 11 in trade and financial terms. The New International Bible is blunt:

Put your money into trade across the ocean.
After a while you will earn something from it.
Give shares of what you earn to a lot of people.
After all, you don't know what great trouble
might come on the land.

More than one writer has used that or a similar translation to say that Solomon (the presumed writer of Ecclesiastes) was giving us financial advice to invest broadly and diversify our holdings.

I'm not so convinced. Perhaps Solomon was thinking of economics. But he could have been thinking about fishing. My brother and I cast our bread upon the waters, watching our dough balls get stickier and slimier with each successive cast. As I noted, we never caught a fish, so our measurable returns were non-existent. But there were intangible returns beyond measure: water striders skating across the water, a tadpole or two, birds singing in the bushes. If we were really lucky, a dragonfly, all shimmer and elegance, would hover for a second or two before zipping away.

My grandparents sold the farm in 1970 and moved to a "modern" ranch style home on the outskirts of a small village. The old farmhouse is long gone; the lane is now an access road to houses built back on what used to be the farm. It has all changed.

But the memories remain. Without even being aware of it, as a child I invested broadly in storing up the sights, the sounds, the smells, the sensations, and the flavors of my days. Even though Grandma Nelson has been dead for almost 30 years and it has been even longer since I sat at a table full of her cooking, I can still remember what her fried chicken and her homemade sweet pickles tasted like. In writing this post, I can feel again the heavy dust of the lane between my toes as we walked, the curiously smooth feel of a tadpole in my hands, the sun beating down on my shoulders as I tried to straighten the prickly baling twine enough that it would reach the water.

We cast our bread upon the waters in those days, wildly and improbably, hoping for just one fish. Half a century later, my bread has come back to me.

Stuff

2011-06-26T10:35:00.003-04:00

My friend Cindy and I have been exchanging emails about her upcoming yard sale. Cindy, who lives alone (not counting the horses, dogs, cats, and other assorted animals) in a small space, is focused on purging her life of unwanted articles (and hopes to make some money while she's at it).

When her marriage ended a few years ago, Cindy moved from a larger house (and barn and outbuildings) to the place where she is at now. Many of her possessions got packed away and stored under tarps or in a shed. Cindy is ready to get rid of items she has held onto but not used or even seen for years.

Not surprisingly, our emails all come down to talking about "stuff." Because that's what a wholesale purge of unwanted items is really about: it's about getting rid of stuff. Cindy wrote:

Realized i have A LOT of crap to sell! And i haven't even started thru boxes yet!!! Found a NICE flat seat saddle in the mow i had forgot about. It cleaned up really nicely! Have a set of harness to clean yet...

Cindy's house is on a country lot next door to her parents' house. Her parents have lots of stuff. Her mom loves stuff so much that she started giving Cindy a hard time about the yard sale:

Mom is already giving me grief about some of the stuff i want to get rid of. DUH....can't imagine where i got my hoardingness!!!! You think i have a lot of crap??? You should see her basement. This is a full basement TOTALLY full top to bottom with crap! A lot is food and supply storage (which has come in very handy) but a lot is just STUFF!!! All nice but STUFF!!! And WHY an i even talking about someone else's crap!!!!

Cindy's complaint struck me as humorous:

HA! First thought, it's YOUR stuff. You can toss it if you want. Second thought--she could buy it from you and then put it in HER basement!!! HA! That'll solve the whole problem. I'm with you - it's all just STUFF. I am getting so tired of STUFF!

(And this whole discussion so reminds me of George Carlin's classic routine on stuff. A gentle reminder to sensitive readers: this is George Carlin.)

As Cindy dug deeper into her stored goods, her comments kept coming back to stuff:

Found major more Yard Sale stuff and still haven't opened the boxes! Shed is FULL of stuff that can go. IT will take some time to pull everything out and go thru. Haven't gotten into that shed in......months. Maybe even a year!

I know that feeling. I have moved twice in the last five years. Each time, I have ended up making large donations of stuff to our local Goodwill. One of my criteria was whether I had used the item in the last year. If the answer was no, into the pile it went.

Quite often, I look at what remains and feel the urge to get rid of more of it. I wrote Cindy that her emails make "me want to go home and get rid of stuff - of course, some of the stuff I would get rid of is not mine to discard, so just my stuff, I guess." As I look at what remains, I have a feeling the next major purge will be to a dumpster and not Goodwill.

Warren, who is a collector and keeper of many things, cringes when I refer to the trash dumpster. He knows I am talking about my elementary school grade cards, old papers, and thank you notes. He knows I am talking about the flotsam and jetsam that we all accumulate as we move through life - precious to the recipient (in this case, me) but fairly meaningless to the world at large. More than once, he has gently suggested that I consider my sons' feelings and whether they will someday want these things.

My response tends to be a little blunt. I am pretty sure Ben and Sam aren't going to want my miscellaneous stuff (but I will check with them just to be sure). Given that Warren will probably outlive me, he will be left with the stuff left after my sons take those items they want. Given his genetic predisposition not to be able to get rid of stuff, Warren will not part with my leftover stuff, so it will still be around when he dies. Frankly, as much as I love my stepchildren, I don't want them to be the ones to throw out my stuff.

Warren grew up in a family that did not put a high premium on shopping for or acquiring material goods, and I am grateful he inherited that tendency from his parents. Most of the stuff Warren owns now either is related to his profession (percussion equipment, music, and his machine shop, and therefore not stuff as far as I am concerned) or is items he inherited from his parents, much of which in turn was inherited from their parents.

All the same, it is a lot of stuff. Especially by my standards. While Warren knew before we became a couple that I didn't live a materialistic life, he recently said even he was surprised by how "sparse" my lifestyle and attitude towards materialism were. (I remember looking at him and saying "Sparse?" That was a new label even for me.)

My reaction to living with all of Warren's stuff is to cull my stuff even more. Don't get me wrong. I don't live in a bare building with only one pan to cook in and one chair on which to sit. I live in the modern world and have many of the accoutrements that we consider part of everyday life, including the computer on which to type these words and the internet access through which to post it. I like living in the twenty-first century! I just like living in it with less stuff cluttering my life. And much of what I want now to cast off is merely the accumulated detritus of my fifty-five years on this earth.

As Cindy nears her yard sale, she has grown reflective, as we often do when we sort through our stuff:

This Yard Sale is letting me see things that are going on with me i'm not sure i would have otherwise seen. SO many things i was keeping.....because i might need them someday. Someday is here, kinda sad in a way, and i DON'T and WILL NOT ever need them!! But also very freeing! Yes, that can go!!!! Storing that stuff is a huge pain, the emotional baggage is a huge pain too. The emotional is gone, good feeling!!!

I know that feeling. I wrote her back:

I like your observations about the yard sale showing you stuff about yourself you may not otherwise have seen. It is always really fascinating to "let go" of stuff - because you get a point in your life where you realize "you know, I'm never going to do that, or do that again, or learn that, or I'm not that person anymore, or I'm never going to be that person."

Getting rid of stuff is freeing. Letting go of tangible items - the mirror you never hung, the boots that never fit quite right - frees up your living space and allows you to see your environment in very different ways. Letting go of intangible items - the old relationship, the hobby that defined "you" thirty years ago but no longer interests you - frees up your emotional space and allows you to see yourself in very different ways. Letting go of the tangible evidence of the intangible - the thank you note from the class you student taught 23 years ago when you were working on the teaching certification that you then set aside - is the most freeing of all.

The novelist and poet Herman Hesse wrote "some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go." I need to let go of some stuff. I'm ready.

Springboarding into Books

2011-06-22T09:36:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading The Pilgrim's Progress, the 1678 work by John Bunyan. The book is a Christian allegory, probably the most famous in English literature. It has never been out of print since first being published.

Reading Bunyan was slow going. At first, I didn't understand why it was so slow. The narrative is not smooth; the transitions are awkward. As a result, about a third of the way through Part One I had to step outside (figuratively, not literally) and put the work in its historical context. That is when I realized that this is not a novel. While there is an ongoing debate in the academic world as to when the first English novel was published, many scholars agree that it is later than Bunyan. (Leading contenders, for all you geeks like me out there who just want to know, are Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Samuel Richardson's Pamela, both appearing in the 1700s.) So context number one was "this is not a novel, or certainly not a novel in the sense that we understand a novel to be." So I needed to stop expecting it to be a novel.

The second contextual issue for me as I waded through the dense writing was "how did anyone have the patience to read this?" I am used to faster paced reading (see context number one: this is not a novel). Then it hit me: it's the 1670s, April. (Sometimes, despite being a geek, I am slow on the uptake.) There were no telephones, no televisions, no internet. There were no magazines to speak of and newspapers were in their infancy. There were no trains, planes, or automobiles. If you were outside a major city, such as London, entertainment was limited and local. The literacy rate in England at the time was less than 50%, so even having a reader in the household was a major asset. So context number two was "Bunyan's readers didn't mind a long, densely written book because they weren't bombarded with a thousand other things all calling for their time or attention, and a book, any book, was a treat." A work like The Pilgrim's Progress could be read in the evening over the course of a long winter. Foolish me, trying to read it in quick doses while juggling the other demands and interruptions on my time, and then wondering why it was taking "so long."

The third contextual issue was putting Bunyan into the religious landscape of his time. Religious freedom and religious inquiry were current and vital topics in England in the 1600s. England was in the middle of the Restoration. The Stuart kings were Catholic; Parliament, on the heels of the Commonwealth, was holding the line at maintaining the supremacy of the Church of England. Any other religious expression, including the burgeoning number of Protestant reformers, was forbidden. Bunyan was jailed as "a non-conformist" minister more than once between 1658 and 1672; he may have written much of The Pilgrim's Progress while in jail. Even with limited knowledge of the religious issues, I could pick out characters who reflected the societal turmoil and Bunyan's views of that turmoil. So historical context number three was that this book was written during a time of great religious upheaval, in which Bunyan was deeply involved and for which he was jailed, and that the societal issues, as well as Bunyan's religious beliefs, are part of the narrative.

I'm not sure these three contextual realizations made reading Bunyan any easier or smoother, but they did allow me a framework in which to place myself as I worked my way through this work over three hundred years after it was written.

Next up is Vanity Fair, written 150 years later and taking its title and theme from a locale in The Pilgrim's Progress. From there, I will jump forward another almost half century and reread Little Women.

Why Little Women? Louisa May Alcott was intimately familiar with The Pilgrim's Progress and references to it are laced throughout her great work. Alcott was writing two centuries later, but she was clearly well-versed in the book and made ample use of Bunyan's work to advance her own story. I have a feeling that I may read and understand Little Women differently after having read Bunyan. While reading Bunyan, I had several moments of "ah, so that's what Alcott was talking about."

So many times one book is a springboard leading to another or to a whole line of books. I got interested in reading Bunyan from reading Payback - Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, a 2008 nonfiction work by Margaret Atwood. Reading backwards to 1678, I am now springing forward to the 1800s. From there, it is anyone's guess, including my own, which direction I will turn.

As I recently noted, for me reading is like floating down a river. Judging by the books on the table, I'm going to be in the water for some time to come.

Over the Rainbow

2011-06-19T19:34:00.003-04:00

Like so many others, I keep a mental list of my favorite movies. "Hoosiers" is on that list. So is "Singing in the Rain" and "The King's Speech." "Field of Dreams" is on that list too, as is "What Dreams May Come." But my all time, absolutely favorite movie - the one that I will watch at any opportunity - is "The Wizard of Oz."

Yep, 1939, Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Margaret Hamilton, the Munchkins, Oz, the flying monkeys, the whole nine yards. "The Wizard of Oz" is always number one on any list of mine. I probably have seen it at least once for every year of my life (55) and probably another dozen to two dozen times beyond that, so maybe I've seen it 75-80 times.

Friday night Warren and I went down to the Ohio Theatre for the start of the summer movie series and watched "The Wizard of Oz" on the big screen. (Be still my heart. While the movie suits me in any format, it really pops when seen on a big screen.)

We were running a bit late getting out of town. As we debated grabbing supper on the fly, I announced, as calmly as I could in light of the ticking clock, that I didn't want to be late for the movie as I had to (had to) see Dorothy sing "Over the Rainbow." If I missed that scene, which occurs very early in the movie, then we might as well bag the whole evening.

A short silence ensued while Warren pondered the enormity (or insanity) of what I had just said. After determining I was probably competent, he said "we'll make it work." And we did, ending up in our seats with ten or fifteen minutes to spare.

I wasn't disappointed. The movie is still magical. For the next two hours (with intermission), I was caught up in the story, enjoying the oh-so-familiar lines and scenes. I bounced in my seat when Glinda (My favorite! My favorite!) made her first appearance; I swallowed hard when Dorothy hugged the scarecrow and whispered "I think I'll miss you most of all." When the house thumped back down at the end of the movie and we were all back in Kansas, I sighed a little.

Emerging into the warm night in downtown Columbus, I felt a little disoriented. "I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." No, nor in Oz either.

If you asked me why I love "The Wizard of Oz" so much, I could probably spin off several reasons. I love the books, and while the movie is not faithful to the text (what do you mean, Louis Mayer, that Dorothy was just dreaming?), it's close enough that I am satisfied. Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, the lyricist and composer of the songs? Love them. I love watching Judy Garland sing their signature work, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" (although it is heartbreaking watching it from the vantage point of now knowing how Garland's life would turn out). I love seeing Frank Morgan (the wizard) pop up in various roles, five in all. I even love the flying monkeys and the Wicked Witch of the West, the two components of the film that frighten most children. (I was fine with them when I was little, but that tornado haunted my dreams well into my thirties. Watching the twister scene the other night on the big screen, I found myself still tensing up as it came closer and closer to the farmhouse.)

I love the actors, I love the costumes, I love the sets. I'd love to be Glinda, no matter which character the Facebook quiz said I was most like.

Let's face it: I love the film.

When I outfitted myself for my new job, I found a skirt at Goodwill that I call my Frida Kahlo/Wizard of Oz skirt. (Katrina, if you are reading this, you are probably rolling your eyes and wondering what on earth I look like.) The Oz reference came about because the skirt is so color splashed that it looks like what Dorothy must have seen when she first opened the door after the farmhouse landed in the Munchkin city.

And maybe that is what I love best about "The Wizard of Oz" - the wonder of Dorothy opening the door into Oz. There is something in that simple scene that has always resonated with me, no matter what my age. Friday night I could barely sit still, knowing that Dorothy was about to open the farmhouse door and step out into enchantment.

In the book, The Wizard Of Oz, Dorothy "gave a cry of amazement and looked about her, her eyes growing bigger and bigger at the wonderful sights she saw." In my very first blog post, I wrote about the magic of opening doors. This movie is where I first learned that to open the door is to set off on an adventure.

Big doors, little doors, real doors, dream doors: no matter what kind of door you may have, there is always that moment when your hand is on the knob and you are about to open it. May you always give cries of amazement at what is on the other side.

My Stones

2011-06-14T16:42:00.001-04:00

I don't often write about books, which is odd given that I read constantly, as in "all the time." I tend to see my reading as a broad river in which I am floating, enjoying the sunshine on the water and the sound of the ripples. Sometimes I am lazing around in the water, sometimes I am on an old inner tube letting the current tug me gently downstream, but I am always in the river when I read.

I love that river. I have floated on that river for a half century.

Sometimes, though, a book comes along that narrows the river channel, driving the water through a rock walled canyon. The water sweeps along and there is a rush of whitewater. During those times, I hold tight to the book, knowing I will emerge back into the sunlight and lazy current when I am done.

I just finished reading one such book, The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Subtitled A Biography of Cancer, the book is exactly that. Written for laypeople as well as for doctors, it takes the reader from the earliest indications of cancer in the human record up to 2010 and where we are now in the treatment of cancer.

Mukherjee makes clear, with no mincing of words, that we are nowhere near "conquering" cancer. The reality is humans will likely never "conquer" cancer in the sense of eradicating the disease. Certain types of cancer are now highly treatable and indeed curable. Cures for others are within reach. But cancer as such will always be with (and in) us. In speaking about the climbing cancer rates in certain cancers or in certain countries, the author notes that at the point that cancer is affecting one in three or one in two people, "the question then will not be if we will encounter the immortal illness in our lifetime, but when." (Author's emphasis.)

I finished the book last night after an intense several days of reading. When I set it down with a thud (the book is not small), Warren asked me if I were "okay."

How would I know, so soon? I was just climbing out of the water after a wild rush through the narrow channel. I needed to stand on the shore, towel off, get into some dry clothes.

This book resonated deeply with me, citizen of Cancerland that I am. (I was delighted to see Mukherjee use that term one time in the book.) But, as I noted, this is not a gentle read or a soft sell about cancer. Mukherjee reminded me bluntly on page 444 that not only do I live in Cancerland, but I will never leave it. Nothing "cures myeloma outright; myeloma is still a fatal disease."

This morning Warren called me after he left the house to mention a possible demolition in the downtown area. I emailed him in response: This is going to sound like a weird comment, but after reading the cancer book, I feel more detached. I hate to see the house come down. On the other hand, I'm in this "long view" frame of mind right now. I think the cancer book just reminded me of how much is guesswork with cancer and how much my still being alive is due to unusually good fortune. I am vastly blessed that my myeloma has stayed quiet for so long (unusually long, truth be known).

Warren replied in his usual thoughtful way: I know things are in the back of your mind. I try not to disturb them in you because they are yours. (What a gentle, loving husband I have.)

Mukherjee writes about the impact of his medical rotation in oncology on him and his colleagues: "our encounter with cancer has rounded us off; it has smoothed and polished us like river rocks." Like Mukherjee's experience in his oncology rotation, I too have been shaped by living with cancer.

In copying that quote into my commonplace book, I without thinking substituted "stones" for "rocks" before catching my mistake. Stones are smaller than rocks, smoother, rounder. They can be held in the hand. Since getting cancer, I have collected many stones along the way: stones of memories, stones of experiences, stones of feelings.

Those stones are mine.

When I read Warren's beautiful line, I saw myself at the river again, picking up small stones, each of them rounded by the cancer. They are my stones. Warren and others can look at them, hold them, marvel at them, but they remain my stones. Sooner or later, whoever is looking at them has to hand them back to me.

One of those stone is gratitude. Another is uncertainty. One is love. One of those stones is hope. Yet another is purpose. One, polished particularly smooth, is death.

Yes, death is one of my stones too.

Cancer has shaped and rounded who I am and what my life is. Reading The Emperor of All Maladies reminded me anew of what a gift I have been given. I am still here. This morning, as I walked Warren out to the car, I bent down to pluck a stray weed (one of many) from the front flower bed. My head was near a clump of spiderwort, which the honeybees have been plumbing for weeks now, and I heard the sharp buzz of one of them in the clump of flowers. I straightened up and looked until I spotted the bee furiously working over a stamen.

So full of life, so full of purpose.

I am still here. It is up to me to decide what to do with those stones every day of the rest of my life.

The Class of '74

2011-06-11T16:13:00.001-04:00

37 years ago, we all graduated from our local high school and then went our separate ways, many of us never to see one another again, or so we thought. Like so many other self-absorbed young people, we had just finished four years of high school together, but, in so many, many ways, apart.

We were jocks, geeks, pretty girls, majorettes. We were band kids, writers, loners, pariahs. We were thespians and debaters. We were bad kids, quiet kids, kids who blended into the wallpaper. We were girls who were fast and boys who were weird.

And we had nothing in common with each other, beyond the tight little circle of friends that each of us moved in. In fact, we had so little in common with one another that many of us went through four years in the same building, sometimes in the same classes or even the same homeroom, without saying a word to each other.

About each other, yes. But to each other? Absurd.

Until recently.

We have coalesced as a class, as friends, thanks to the wonder of Facebook and the persistence of one classmate in bringing us together. In addition to maintaining a class website, Bob (geek, loner) also maintains a Facebook page through which a number of us have met for the first time or reconnected again for the first time in many years.

Like many other high school groups, our class meets every five years for a formal reunion. But thanks to FB and Bob's nudges, our class meets more often at a local eatery for what someone (probably Bob again) dubbed a "mini reunion." There is a flow and ease to these events. They are little things. A few drinks, some eats, some talk, and everyone disperses.

Simple.

I made it to my first mini reunion last night along with Warren, who graduated two years ahead of me (and who so patiently sat through the evening). In addition to the locals (and we are many), Friday night's mini reunion featured out-of-staters Tonya (majorette) coming in from New Jersey (a not infrequent occurrence) and Kate (thespian, literary magazine, dancer) coming all the way from California back to Delaware, Ohio for the first time in a quarter century.

I was there for the first hour or so, listening to the talk, chiming in occasionally. What I mostly did was watch and marvel. Some of us were poring over old yearbooks. Others were catching up on "what have you done since" the last time they last saw one another. Kate opened her bag and pulled out "the German dolls," small, now well-worn figures she and her girlfriends had played with for countless hours in grade school. Judy (rebel) breathed out reverently, "I remember these."

The last classmate I talked to before leaving last night was Mark (jock), who was sitting on the other side of the table. I can guarantee that Mark and I (band kid, geek, writer) never exchanged one word in four years of high school. Mark surprised me by asking me how my health was and listened very carefully to my reply. He then told me his father died several years ago of multiple myeloma, which is the same cancer I have.

Little connections. Big connections.

Warren and I left early on, as we knew today held community work. The mini reunion went on long into the night, with some going home and others joining the mix as it rotated to different venues. Tonya and Kate were two of the last standing. I know that because I met them for coffee this morning before hugging them goodbye.

In 37 years, our class of 1974 has gone so many different ways. Some of us are teachers, some of us are small business owners, some of us work in government jobs. Some of us are retired already; some of us are hoping just to hang on in this shaky economy until we can retire. Some of us have had multiple careers. Some of us are parents, some of us are grandparents, and some of us are the happy owners of cats. Some of us have been married more than once, some of us are still with the one we said "I do" to many years ago, some of us never married at all.

We are so different, and yet we are so alike. All of us have a common thread that we didn't realize for the longest time. We share a common past that connects us in ways we would have laughed uproariously over 37 years ago.

When I look back on those long ago years, I sometimes flinch, I sometimes laugh, I sometimes shrug. My high school years were goofy, horrifying, wonderful, or just plain weird, depending on what hour or day or week you pick. And you know what? So was everyone else's.

I know. I heard it last night.

Pennies Under The Rug

2011-06-07T15:25:00.001-04:00

Last night I had a short, intense exchange with Sam on the issue of finances. Mine, not his. The dialogue was prompted by my asking him his financial status, as Sam's dad had just asked me to contribute more to Sam's monthly expenses. Sam immediately asked why we were even having that discussion without his involvement.

Good point, Sam. And thank you for making it.

Emails about money from my ex-spouse, no matter how well meant, always cause my stress level to jump way into the red. Because of the long and often difficult history between us, including major struggles on financial issues, I cannot read any inquiry from him as neutral. This one was no exception.

To reply to his email required much agonizing over words. As I labored through a draft, I cried out "I can hear Doug [my brilliant therapist of yore] talking to me!" Warren, who was providing moral support and a listening ear, asked me what Doug was saying.

"Stop thinking that telling your story means it is heard."

Doug was right. My long, labored explanation added nothing to the discussion and only made me feel worse. I trimmed my reply considerably, reined in my feelings, wrote that I was already doing all I could do, and would stretch more when I could. Then I hit "send."

But not before Sam and I had our quick exchange. And not before I assured Sam that he was not the source of financial stress in my life.

I grew up in a hardworking, blue collar family where my parents made it clear from grade school on that they would support and provide for my brothers and me until we graduated from high school. After that, we were on our own and either had to join the military, get a job, or go to college. If you chose college, good for you, but it was on your own dime. After my parents drove me to Chicago in the fall of 1974 and unloaded my suitcases, their obligation ended. It was my scholarships, my loans, and my meager savings that got me through that first year and the years to follow.

Having gone to college on the sink or swim financial plan, I have always felt strongly about helping my children through college. What I hadn't planned on was Life, in the form of a major illness and an extreme and permanent reduction in income, messing up my plans.

I struggled my way through the responses and the guilt last night. I did not want to turn my back on Sam, and while I "knew" I wasn't doing that, I didn't accept that I was not. I "know" I am doing what I can to help him achieve his education. Is it all I want or hoped it would be? No. But I have to accept that my means are far more limited than in "the old days" and I am doing what I can. I can only shave pennies so thin, no matter what my desires for my children. And at this point, all my pennies are pretty thinly shaved. (Confession: I did just start a "getting away" account, but with my opening deposit being a whopping $96.33 and a third of that being spare change and another half being rebates and coupon savings, I don't think I am being selfish at the expense of a college education.)

For me, the big issue is changing my mindset that spending money equals love and that the only way I can prove myself as a good and loving parent is to overextend myself financially. As I told Warren, I could move this amount from here to there (because I also pay some other bills for Sam), but I was really just playing a shell game. Spread the dollars as I might over my budget, there are still only a given number of dollars. Like resolving to buy the gift I can afford versus the splashier, pricier gift I can't, I have to work through my feelings and accept that it is okay to say "I can't do that amount, but I can do this amount."

I have to accept that about myself: that I am doing all I can. I have to give myself permission that "all I can" is a loving response.

My friend Arlene recently shared her memory of her mother helping her with her college education: How well I remember my mother's jar of dimes. I still have tears when I think of the morning she rolled back the worn rug and removed enough nickels, dimes, and pennies to pay my first quarter tuition at OSU.

It is a beautiful story and one I thought about last night as I struggled with my desire and my inability to provide everything I would like for my children.

Sam will be home in four weeks for a visit and a brief respite from school. He'll have a chance to talk; I'll have a chance to listen. We are both looking forward to cooking together and recently talked about some of the dishes we want to try. And perhaps we'll have a chance to roll back the rug and find treasures underneath.

Loose Change

2011-06-03T14:16:00.000-04:00

Back in April, while I was posting poetry, my friend Sharon over at Musings From a Midlife Mom was posting about her continued odyssey through her year of spending less and living more. Pounded by several Life events - a broken water heater, a family emergency - she noted ruefully how the month so far had been a lot about "spending more" because she had to, and added that she needed to also plan on and budget some "living more" items into her life. Sharon then noted that her personal "living more" list required some major funding to come true.

Sharon hit on something critical: it is important to take into account your wants as well as your needs as you thread your way through life. We sometimes forget that, either thinking we may only consider our needs or else only taking into account our wants. Either path will ultimately prove discouraging at best and disastrous at worst.

I liked how Sharon identified items that represented "living more" for her and recognized they all have a price tag. I suggested in a comment that she think about opening (with a very modest deposit) a "living more" bank account that the odd change and odd savings go into so she could see progress, even a little, toward her dreams. I wrote "if you can save one auto trip a week maybe there is $5 saved in gas and you throw $5 or close to it in a jar."

I have always found it impossible to read Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and not be moved by the story of the Nolan family saving pennies in a homemade bank nailed to the floor of the closet. The goal was five cents a day. "It seems a little. But where is it to come from? We haven't enough now and with another mouth to feed…" It is the grandmother who gives advice on how to scrimp even harder to come up with the precious pennies. I had the Nolans in mind when I suggested throwing the extra savings into the jar that would eventually be deposited into the "living more" account.

Sharon is still working on solving her money issues by taking a long, hard look at her family budget and aligning the needs and wants into the budget. Like all of us, she struggles with the needs versus the wants, the goals (saving, budgeting) versus the reality (what stopped working now?).

This was a very stressful spring for us due to external factors over which we had had very little control. Our peaceful home life was very hard hit and is still recovering, some major issues in our larger families have cropped up that we have to deal with, our finances were thrown into total chaos by outside events, and at many points both Warren and I felt beleaguered, to put it mildly. It is a blessing our relationship is so strong, because I am not sure a shaky one could have survived. At one low point, when I got done ranting to the point of tears about some of those external factors, I announced loudly "And you know what? Next year we are going on vacation for a week and GETTING AWAY from all of this!"

Saying those words was like letting the genie out of the bottle. The moment I spoke them aloud, they started taking on form and shape.

I want to go to the ocean. I love the ocean. I miss the ocean. I want to go east and eat blue crab and other seafood wonderfulness. I want to sit on an almost empty beach (we're not talking Virginia Beach here) somewhere and stare out to sea. I want to walk along the shoreline holding hands with Warren. And I want to watch and listen to the waves rolling in until I feel whole again.

(Note: I wrote a draft of this post in late April. Since then I have added an alternative destination: north to a lakefront cottage with a screen door and maybe, maybe the Northern lights. We'll see what next year brings.)

Sharon has blogged before about putting spare five-dollar bills in a special drawer, jar, or box, and watching how fast they build up. I do the same thing with loose change and one dollar bills, spare five-dollar bills being a rare commodity around here. Don't laugh: loose change is what helped us get to Montana last summer. Well, the only way to accomplish GETTING AWAY on our modest incomes is to follow my advice to Sharon: open a "living more" bank account and throw all the loose change and extra dollars into it. Which is exactly what I did earlier today. True to my advice, I opened it with a very modest deposit, but open it I did. Into it will go all the loose change, coupon savings (I don't use coupons very much but when I do, I will write a check to the "living more" account for that amount), rebates, and other odd amounts that come my way for the next year. If I write a check for $43.57 for the electric, I will enter it as $44.00 in the checkbook and count the extra 43¢ towards the account, moving it over each month as I balance my account. Loose change, it all adds up.

Thank you, Sharon, for inspiring me! I can hear the surf (or the slap of the screen door) already.

Small Blessings

2011-05-30T06:39:00.003-04:00

As the Lord was passing by, a fierce wind tore mountains and shattered rocks ahead of the Lord. But the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind came an earthquake. But the Lord wasn’t in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was a fire. But the Lord wasn’t in the fire.And after the fire there was a quiet, whispering voice.
I Kings 19: 11-12 (GOD'S WORD Translation)

Sunday midday was hot and bright. I had two errands to run, one to a friend's house to pick up pepper and tomato plants for our garden (my seedlings having bombed gloriously), and one to the grocery to pick up a few items.

I stayed at my friend's house longer than I had intended, standing and talking in her backyard. She is going through a difficult time in her life, and I listened as she talked. We stood there for a long time, as friends do, sharing our thoughts, sharing our hearts. When I left, a flat full of plants in my trunk, we hugged. Arguably I "did her a favor" by listening as she threaded her way through the maze of her thoughts. But I was the one who felt blessed by the encounter: blessed by the friendship, blessed by her trust in me that allowed her to give voice to her thoughts.

My grocery stop was fast; I had a half dozen items for a family supper last night and a family cookout later today. After I had checked out and started towards the door, I saw coming toward me an employee I have seen several times. He is a developmentally disabled man of indeterminate age who works there as a bagger. He and I have talked on occasion: odd, disjointed talks given his limitations. Now he was walking slowly past the checkout lanes, swinging his head from side to side as he asked "Arnold? Arnold?"

"Arnold?" he asked, peering closely at me through his thick glasses. Then he looked at my tee shirt and read, slowly and carefully, "Celebration of Life." (The shirt is from the Cleveland Clinic Transplant Clinic.)

He extended his hand to me to shake, saying "Celebration. Every day of my life is a blessing. What did you do to get that shirt?"

I told him I had cancer, that I had had a lot of special medical treatment, and that I was celebrating because I still alive. His eyes widened when I said "medical treatment," and he nodded gravely before moving past me.

His words stuck with me as I loaded my groceries in the car. His simple statement, that every day of his life was a blessing, resonated with me. A few minutes later, I headed for home, my car full of plants, groceries, and blessings.

"The best things come in small packages" is an old saying that we don't hear too often in this era of "bigger is better." I think it must be the same way with blessings. Sometimes we get confused, thinking the bigger the blessing, the better the blessing. But God doesn't always do the Big Event. Oh, sure, there are the spectaculars: the burning bush, the parting of the seas, the walls of Jericho. But after the dust and the noise and the clamor settle, it is the quiet, whispering voice.

It is the smallest of voices. It is the smallest of packages.

Time and time again, it is the small blessings that register deeply. It is the hug of a friend, the handshake of a bagger, the family around around the table that leave their imprints upon my heart.

A Steadfast Spirit

2011-05-25T10:44:00.000-04:00

May is almost over and I have barely seen or experienced any of it. It took forever to get over the virus that hit earlier in the month. There have been house chores galore (the vast bulk of them handled wonderfully by Warren) as we get ready for company. There has been a lot of rain and my garden bed is ankle deep in lush grasses and weeds, while my puny seedlings sit on the sidelines, waiting to be planted.

It's not been a satisfying month for me. Too much of it has been spent coughing. And the rest has just been a plain, old nose to the grindstone kind of month. I told Warren we have not taken any time just to do something fun. I didn't mean go on vacation or have a Big Night Out. I just meant something simple—a walk, an ice cream cone—that wasn't tied to a chore or a job or an obligation or a meeting. He nodded. We then both turned back to our respective tasks to get more chores done.

I have spent more time than usual this month thinking about dying. No, this is not an announcement. My health is good. My cancer is stable. But I have of late been more contemplative about the reality of living with cancer, the impact it has had—for better and for worse—on my life, and the inevitable return of it somewhere in the future. Those thoughts tend to curve towards death much like a winding road whose end is over the hill still but not so distant as to fade into the far horizon. I shared some of these thoughts with Warren recently, adding that I thought death will be interesting. I am pretty sure that last comment caused Warren to take a deep breath before replying quietly "I know you have been thinking about it."

In the midst of muddling through May, I stumbled across a book, Acedia and Me, by Kathleen Norris, that has caught fierce hold of me. I am reading it slowly. (I tend to read swiftly, so the fact that I am taking this work slowly says something.) Norris writes about the concept of acedia, which can mean spiritual slothfulness, but which also signifies a greater spiritual malady of just not caring. In her book, she explores acedia in the context of her own spirituality, her work as a poet, her marriage, and the death of her husband.

For Norris, acedia is the inability to care about anything important, whether it is one's relationship with God, one's relationship with a spouse, or one's relationship to the community and society as a whole. Acedia is not depression (although they are related), but rather an intellectual and personal disconnect from caring and from being committed to anything. It is the response of "whatever."

Norris looks often to a line from Psalm 51: "Put a steadfast spirit within me." She has spent much time in Benedictine convents and monasteries and draws upon those spiritual communities. She often turns to early Christian writers, especially those from the fourth centuries, for solutions to being overextended and over stimulated to the point that she is numb.

Her reflections speak to me as I try to scale back on the external chatter—the visual and audio clutter—that filters into my life every day. It makes sense to me to continue to shut down my home computer early and often, although I still haven't weaned myself of it over both days of the weekend. (Question to self: why do I need to be on a computer on Saturday?) We don't go out to eat or run to the mall just for "something to do." We don't watch television. (Warren does listen to a lot of Cincinnati Reds baseball on the radio, which is a minor issue not because I am opposed to radio or baseball, but because I am not a Reds fan.)

But it is still hard. I live in the world, not in a bubble, and recognizing and taking part in the world is a much a rebuke of acedia as prayer.

Norris also writes about turning down the internal static as well. Turning to her fourth century guides, she counsels: "Perform the humblest of tasks with full attention and no fussing over the whys and wherefores; remember that you are susceptible, at the beginning of any new venture, to being distracted from your purpose by such things as a headache, an intense ill will towards another, a neurotic and potent self-doubt." She reminds us that those early writers were living and struggling in the desert, trying to make it bloom. She goes on to discuss using the repetitive, plain rhythms of life—baking, walking, pulling weeds, doing dishes every night with her husband—to ground herself in her beliefs.

I nod as I read her words. Potent self-doubt is always trying to plant itself in my mind. Combined with the headache, the nagging cough, it is too easy to sigh and say "whatever" when asked to care, when asked to contribute, when asked to pray. By focusing on those humblest of tasks, balking perhaps but doing the steps nonetheless, I am able to give today—this moment, this life—its due time and attention. By grounding myself in today, I can move further down the road towards that unseen but certain destination.

I spent a chunk of the winter exploring issues of faith at the behest of my friend Katrina. In the end, her firm nudge propelled me back into the ocean of belief again, having lingered for the longest time on the shore. With the thoughtful words of Kathleen Norris, I am able to lean back against the stern of my boat and gaze up at the Milky Way.

For most of human history, we have navigated the seas by the stars. Put a steadfast spirit within me, Lord, that my hand stays steady on the tiller as I sail along under the endless heavens.

A Silence Explained

2011-05-20T18:47:00.004-04:00

Katrina is concerned that my lack of blogging this month is an indication of how rough things are in my life, “rough” covering a wide range.

I say my lack of blogging is an indication of how badly my schedule has gotten out of hand. I often (too often) have a full plate. As of late, we are not talking “full.” Instead, we are talking “spilled over onto the table and about to run on the floor.”

I just want a new plate. But there aren’t any left. Getting up from the table is not an option. And unlike everyone at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, I can’t move over one setting.

Finances are on my plate. So are family concerns that have been causing my youngest brother and me to huddle on the phone. So is a respiratory infection that has left me exhausted. (Good thing it was a little one or I’d really be in over my head.) The little itty bitty seedlings that are supposed to be our garden this summer are on the plate, although not as big a serving as they before last night, when our good friend Kermit brought over some of his “extras,” big strapping plants that put mine to shame. (Thank you, Kermit!)

I was recently looking at photos of a church mission trip. I envied the one of the mission team, looking so happy and hearty, all of them older than me by several years judging from the photos. There they all were, smiling broadly, going off to repair walls and plumb houses and build foundations.

I know; it’s a photo. It may have been hot and humid the whole time. Someone may have daily pounded their thumb instead of a nail. Someone else may have been muttering “I can’t stand this, why did I ever sign up for this?” The whole trip may have been dogged by bad luck and bad humor. But I’m telling you: they looked good.

Looking at those pictures made me tired. (Truth is, I am tired even when I haven’t been sick, courtesy of the myeloma. Throw the respiratory thing in and I am wiped out.) If I were on a mission trip, I would probably have to find a shady spot and stretch out for a nap. The roof would not get fixed because I’d be working on it in twenty minute intervals with a rest in between.

I know this for a fact because Warren has been painting the hallway and I have been watching him, all the time feeling guilty because I am too tired to help. (Warren’s reply is “it’s nice if you just keep me company and talk to me while I am work,” which is Reason #9588573857 on a long list of why he is such a wonderful husband: he doesn’t mind doing the work alone when I am in a limp dish rag mode.)

We are headed into the weekend and the “to do” list is long. There are the usual suspects: laundry, shopping, cooking. There’s the hallway, there’s the garden. Company is coming midweek and there are two bedrooms to make ready, a not inconsequential task. Warren is on a stepladder in the hallway as I finish this.

The plate is spilling over.

I’ll wipe it up later. This post wore me out. I’m going to go take a nap.

Filled With Hope

2011-05-06T14:18:00.002-04:00

As he has for the last three years, Warren again played timpani for the Easter services at Maple Grove Methodist Church. I have written about Maple Grove before, most recently when their minister, Bill Croy, retired.

There was an interim minister in the pulpit. The new minister will be installed in July. Bill Croy was there for Easter, now zipping around on an electric cart or using walking sticks when he left his cart. From across the room, I thought there were new shadows in his face that weren't there in the past, but his smile still throws light on all within its reach.

There was an opening prayer in the service that read in part as follows: May we remember in the darkest hours of our lives, He lived through the darkest hours of His life and then was alive again. That is Your gift to us, Eternal Life with Christ.

I found myself punctuating the sentence differently: May we remember in the darkest hours of our lives, He lived through the darkest hours of His life and then was alive again. That is Your gift to us.

Not to take away from the magnitude of eternal life, but to me the fact that Jesus lived "through the darkest hours of His life and then was alive again" is the resonating message.

There are so many of us living through our personal darkest hours—illness, death, tornadoes, job loss, floods, homelessness, hunger, deep family strife. We live through our darkest hours and emerge, sometimes battered, sometimes broken, but alive. Alive.

We have our own small resurrections on a sometimes weekly or daily basis—not aping Jesus, but following in his example.

For me, that is the wonder and the gift of belief. The gift is that we can and do stumble through our own darkest hours, not sure when the light will break or even if it will break, and then find we are alive again.

The interim pastor preached a sermon on the resurrection, concluding it with this thought: "If Christ is risen, then the empty tomb is filled with hope."

Indeed it is.

**********

When You Live in Poverty: May 2011 Version

2011-05-04T14:07:00.004-04:00

Growing up, I listened to my grandmother Skatzes talk about her Depression experiences as a wife and mother of a large family. She talked about how everyone was in the same boat and how they all worked together to make it through tough times. Folks did favors for one another: "I'll give you the shirt my boy outgrew if you give me the shoes that your little girl can't fit into anymore." The town doctors went on treating the sick and delivering babies, telling families to pay as they could. "I know you're good for it." Grandma never glorified the Great Depression as a time of universal goodwill nor did she minimize the deprivation. Her stories demonstrated though that most went on with their daily lives, helping one another as best they could.

Those stories fascinated me. Several years ago, while having lunch with my friend Roger, we speculated about what historical era we would love to visit and experience firsthand. Roger picked the early years of the 1900s because of the new inventions: automobiles, airplanes, movies. He wanted to be in the midst of that exciting change. I picked the 1930s, the Great Depression, so I could witness those small episodes of daily life that Grandma had related.

A good moral to that casual lunch discussion is "be careful what you wish for." I don't have to go back in time to witness what my Grandma Skatzes lived through; I get to witness it in the here and now.

When you live in poverty, you bank heavily in relationships, because it is relationships that help you navigate the rocky shoals of your everyday life. As the Great Recession grinds on and more and more of us move downward on the economic scale, I see this played out daily.

Midway through April I was privileged to again attend a session of Grace Medical Clinic, again accompanying our Amy. This time I paid close attention to the workings of the waiting room while the Clinic volunteers performed their amazing ministry.

Amy got there early this time, to be higher on the waiting list. By the time I arrived from work, Amy had already met and talked with some of the other early arrivals. Cheryl, perhaps my age, had already taken Amy under her wing. As she scratched the poison ivy that had brought her to Grace, Cheryl talked to Amy about getting a practical nursing certificate through the local career center, about the portability of health care skills, and about how to get information about the programs and find out about financial aid. Amy listened intently. A little later, when Cheryl learned that Amy's dad had a CDL, she proffered a contact for a possible trucking job. "Tell him to call Tom and make sure you tell him to mention my name," she said, writing down the phone number.

All around the room, others were also sharing job leads, tips on how to get by, information on other community resources. Amy only had $1.00 to get her to Friday's payday and groceries, so I gave her the loose dollars in my wallet. By the time we left Grace, her dad had called and offered to take her out to KFC. Amy would eat that evening.

Watching and listening to the exchange of support and advice hit me more than usual because earlier that same day I had shared tea and talk with a longtime friend who is struggling hard right now. This is someone who, along with her husband, had attained recognizable benchmarks of success—college educations, home ownership, secure jobs—and then watched everything get swept away by illness, job loss, long term unemployment, and foreclosure. A year ago, they moved back here, her hometown, to be closer to an aging parent and try to make a stand against the economic devastation that had roared through their lives. She has a fulltime minimum wage job, her husband has a part-time minimum wage job. These are the only jobs they have been able to find in over two years. She has been off work for several weeks due to injury, so their financial resources, already tight, have been stretched past breaking. As we talked, my friend revealed that they had applied for food stamps, and that they had no way to pay their rent in May. She said, ruefully, "I never wanted to come back here with my tail tucked between my legs." We talked about and shared what social workers call "linkages." I gave her names to call, agencies and programs to check out, even a job lead. I shared with her some of our own struggles in recent months. The reality is, I told her, but for the fact that our home is mortgage free, we would have been at risk for homelessness this winter due to no fault of our own. Fortunately, because we don't have rent or a mortgage to pay, we not only kept our housing but also kept the lights on and put food on the table as well. No monthly housing expense is a blessing my friend and millions of others like her do not have.

When she left, we hugged long and hard.

This is what poverty in 2011 is about. It is about the high school friend in her 50s who lies awake at night wondering how long she and her husband will have a roof over their heads. It is about Amy eating only one or two meals a day because that's all she can afford some weeks. It is about the 15 patients at Grace that night, young and old, at least one of them very ill, waiting patiently because this was the only way they could get medical attention. It is about doing what you can, penny by penny, to try to meet your most basic needs.

And it's about relationships.

One of the many benefits of my new job is that I have office colleagues I see and interact with daily. We all have different backgrounds, different politics, different areas of expertise, different life stories. But the one thing we seem to have in common is a recognition of the vast reach of the Great Recession and how deeply it has hurt our community. None of us feels it is over yet. The poor are not nameless to us, because they are now not only our clients, but also our neighbors, our friends, our family, and, sometimes, even ourselves.

What April Held

2011-05-01T08:28:00.006-04:00

"Now you know why we celebrate May Day!"

"Too bad National Poetry month isn't in February."

"Another one."

Those were all comments Warren made to me, albeit with a lot of love and affection, last Sunday when we talked about my month-long Poetry Challenge. We were both laughing hard as he tried to top each quip with an even funnier one.

Let's be honest: by Warren's own admission, he usually doesn't "get" poetry. Despite his living his whole adult life in a world of rhythm, he and poetry do not connect. Most days Warren would read my post and look at me blankly, searching for something - anything - he could say. (That stupefaction is the source of Warren's third quote above, explaining what he thought each day as he clicked on my blog.) The one poem I was sure he would like, Reading Lessons, he gave lackluster praise, telling me the last word in the poem ("gone"), was incorrect. "Absorbed is more accurate," said my residential rail buff. It probably is to all the train folks out there, but to me the correct term was "gone," as in "never coming back." A poem I thought he would pass by without comment, Easter, he liked. "It tells a story," he said.

Go figure.

The good news is that I knew going into the challenge that Warren did not particularly enjoy poetry. So I never took his lack of enthusiasm personally, and gave up early on trying to explain any of the poems. By midweek of the final week, I gave up even asking what he thought of each one, as his silence told me volumes.

In fairness to Warren, I had mixed feelings myself about the challenge. Poetry is not my strong suit and I was constantly uneasy at "putting it out there" for that reason, let alone my other personal ones. The challenge for me was posting my work and letting it stand. A wonderful (and much welcome) ending note to the month came last night when my friend (and regular reader) Ashley told me that she had enjoyed my April poetry challenge. Thank you, Ashley!

All the same, here it is May 1 and to Warren's vast relief, I am getting back to small moments and great rewards, starting with today's post.

As of tomorrow, I will be starting my eighth week of my new job as a part-time staff mediator at our county Juvenile Court. I love my job. It fits me wonderfully. I am still getting used to the schedule, which I primarily "control" but which fluctuates a lot from week to week. The fluctuation will continue until the end of the school year, when truancy mediations halt. Being on a schedule of 24 hours a week, even one with a lot of stretch to it, has taught me quickly to be more conscientious of my time and my "to do" lists, household, professional, or otherwise.

It would appear that spring has finally arrived, although for much of April it arrived in its typical Ohio fashion: 2 steps forward, 1 sideways, 4 backwards, then another forward. Repeat. April was cold and wet, cold but not wet, wet but not cold, and rarely sunny. For lots of reasons, none of them good, I didn't get seeds started until April 17. By my records, that is late for me. As of today, the tomatoes have sprouted. The peppers are just starting to pop through the dirt. Given how cold it has been, it will be late May or even June before I will be able to plant them outside, so I am crossing my fingers that it will all work out and that we will have tomatoes before the first frost. (On the other hand, I may cheat and buy commercial plants. We'll see.)

We both turned a year older earlier in April. Normally, that sentence would carry a lot more joy and enthusiasm, but other events intervened.

I had an oncology visit in mid-April, the first I had seen Tim since last fall. The good news? I now have insurance through my new job. The bad news? I won't have any insurance coverage for my cancer (as a pre-existing condition) until March 6, 2012, thanks to living in a country that values large corporate interests over small human ones. The great news? My cancer is still slumbering. (Huge exhale as I let out the breath I had been holding.) I don't see Tim until next October, and by then it's only four and a half more months until my treatment is covered. So long as my bone marrow behaves itself for ten months and six days more, I will be fine.

The Symphony dominated the whole month, after pretty much chewing up all of March. It rolled over my birthday; it consumed Warren's entirely (he was at a board meeting until 10:00 p.m. the night of his birthday). The March concerts (which were stunning) and the April concert (which was last night and was tumultuous) being only five weeks apart this year would have been enough activity. It wasn't. Challenges on the Symphony front and the resulting extreme stress and additional work those struggles placed on Warren bled into our home. Bled into our home? Steamrolled through the front door and out the back. We as a we are okay, but our peace of mind, our personal time, and our home life were just about destroyed by mid-month. More positive events (thank you, Dick) have occurred as of late, but our household is still licking its wounds. I finally realized, as the homefront tension flared up again last Friday morning, that all I can do is try to be a better listener as Warren and the Board move forward. I support Warren and his work one thousand percent. I believe deeply in the Symphony. Great things (should) lie ahead. But I cannot pretend that the last two months have not been painful. Even as I read back over this paragraph, I sigh. I am drained.

It is those moments - those bleak or painful ones - when I try to let go of the inner turmoil and focus on something small and immediate. The small is important to me. Often when I am deepest in a hurtful situation, seething with resentment or anger or pettiness, it is the littlest things, the smallest moments, that allow to drop my indignation or misery and catch my breath.

Like this moment: I came out of a truancy mediation at one of our elementary schools two weeks ago and looked around. The school is nestled into one of our older neighborhoods. Like everywhere else, we are hit hard here by the recession. It was a rainy day and the houses were looking particularly bedraggled and down at the heels, as houses often do in the rain. But I felt my heart uplifted all the same. It is Home, it is where I Belong doing Work I Believe In. All I could say was "thank you, thank you, thank you" for the chance to serve my community quietly, in little ways.

Or this moment: Walking to Friday's rehearsal, trying to sort out my feelings, I passed a swath of violets in a lawn, their blooms making a deep purple pool in the grass.

Or this one: Jaime conducting the Beethoven at a rehearsal, his heart soaring to the music.

Or this one: Before Friday night's dress rehearsal, while I was still nursing many grievances, I looked across the lobby of the hall to see Warren sitting quietly on the steps, his head down, studying music. He looked unhappy; he looked absolutely alone. I knew he was confused and hurt by my mood. I got up, walked over, sat down behind him, and leaned up against him, wrapping my arms around him and just cherishing the warmth of my husband. "I love you. I'm sorry," I whispered. He leaned back into my embrace. "I love you too."

And so I begin May on quiet moments: the rainy day row of houses that inexplicably lifted my spirits, a puddle of violets, the rapture of music, the warmth of my marriage. My gratitude for my life.

Happy May Day.

Closing Out April: What Stuck With Me

2011-04-30T06:00:00.000-04:00

It is the last day of National Poetry Month, so today is the last day (for awhile at least) I inflict my poetry on my readers. It is only fitting that the last poem of the month ties back to a much earlier work that I ran early in the month.

When I posted Kentucky Funeral and said I wanted to rewrite parts of it, Blogville friendTerri asked what lines I would have rewritten. I replied in part: I'd rework…the description of the pallbearers (both how they were dressed and where they came from - they were people who lived up & down the holler, not exactly a "neighborhood," but clearly a community) …The pallbearers made such an impression on me that...Oh heck, I may just have come up with one of this month's poems!

In responding to a question about what I would change, I realized that what I wanted to do was not rewrite the original poem, but write a different poem about the memory.

**********

What Stuck With Me

Thirty five years later, they stick in my memory,
Those men from the surrounding hills and hollers,
Waiting in groups of five and six
Spaced all up the hillside
To relay the coffin to the mountaintop cemetery
Where no hearse could go.

No one group could begin to haul
A coffin that far -
        200 yards?
        300 yards?
        More?
Up an incline where the only path
Had been worn slick from the rain
And the family trips up to dig the grave by hand.

They were dressed for the weather and the task at hand:
        Hunting clothes
        Coveralls
        Work boots.
Silently, they unloaded the casket
And carried it up the hill to the top
With a terrible and swift choreography
Before melting away to leave the family to its mourning.

This was paying their respects.
This was seeing that one of their own was laid to rest
         in the good dirt of home.
This was dealing with death head on and straight up.

That's what has stuck with me all these years
     -    More than the view from the mountaintop
     -    More than the family talk that day
     -    More than the terrapin in Atheen's hands.

Just those men, silently carrying out the last rites.

To an Unknown Concertgoer

2011-04-29T06:00:00.004-04:00

Today's poem is also based on a true event. At the March 2010 concert, someone in the audience was so struck by the soloist's performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto in D Minor that he called out the moment she lifted her bow off the strings. Clearly the concertgoer was deeply moved by the performance he had just witnessed. A few weeks later, in rehashing the concert with another attendee, I mentioned that moment in reference to the virtuosity of the performer. The woman with whom I was talking pursed her mouth sharply and made the comment captured in the poem.

Over a year later, I still find myself reliving that moment. The air was still vibrating and someone in the audience could no longer hold in his emotion over what he had just experienced. I'm glad he couldn't.

*********

To the Unknown Concertgoer

There are those who attend to concerts with precision:
Never clapping out of turn or being the first to rise in appreciation.
And, heavens, no shouting "Bravo!"

He was not one of them.

When the last note of the violin concerto was played, he cried out
The moment the soloist lifted her bow in completion
And there was that half beat of silence
Before the conductor lowered his baton.

We could all hear his call, like a mourning dove up in the dome of the hall,
An aching, yearning "ahhh" that he had to release.
It hung in the air just before the wave of applause broke.

A patron pulled her mouth tight recounting the moment.
"Well, clearly that was not someone
Who has been to concerts frequently enough
To know how to behave."

I wish I had been that listener in the audience
Crying out in appreciation
Crying out at music so moving that it would break the heart to keep silent.

I wish I had been the one to not behave so beautifully.

Wrapping Up Monologues: Mabel's Story

2011-04-28T06:00:00.004-04:00

The great English poet Robert Browning wrote many monologues, among them My Last Duchess, the one most likely to be encountered in high school. Browning was a prodigious and exuberant writer and I have often read him just to be uplifted.

He also rhymed his monologues, which even now remains a feat beyond my capability.

This last monologue is actually based on a real person, my paternal grandmother. My grandmother was an unimaginative, hardworking farmwife who came from Kentucky in the depths of the Great Depression with her husband and her little son, my dad. (I do not know whether my aunt Gail had been born yet.)

I know very little about my grandmother's early years, other than she loved school so much that she repeated eighth grade three times just to stay in school. This was back in a time in rural Kentucky when a high school education required having the money to board the student "in town."

Life was not easy for my grandmother after she married. Money was tight. My grandfather, although a strong worker, drank. My grandmother always had many health problems, all of them exacerbated and accelerated by her refusal to take care of her health. I remember her as a no-nonsense, unaffectionate woman who was always working at something: canning, quilting, cooking, gardening, gathering eggs, cleaning the house.

In the photo, my grandmother is the woman smack in the middle of the photo, her arms on the shoulders of her parents in front.

********

Maggie Mabel

I loved school -
     the chalky smell of it
     the flag hanging in the corner
     the neatness of Teacher's desk.
Loved it all so much I wanted to go on with my learning,
but there wasn't enough money to board me in town
what with all the youngsters still at home and Ma's weak heart.
They let me repeat eighth grade twice more as a kind of teacher's
helper, but then everyone said "That's enough,"
and Pa was doing poorly too.

What do you do when you are 17 and live back up a holler
with younger sisters all prettier than you?
They got the curly hair; they got the smiles that lit up their faces.
Me? I was built square and solid, close to the ground, my hair thin and frizzy.
Even when I was happy, I viewed the world
with a grim look of no expectations.
So when that tall, rangy boy came courting me, I didn't say no,
no matter what I thought.

We started out like so many others with a lick and a promise of
better things to come.
Jim'd drive if there was gas or else ride the mule
to where he was cutting wood for the day.
I stayed home, cooking and cleaning.
I tended the garden,
put up canned goods, quilted every scrap I could find, gathered eggs,
and scratched out our daily bread from that shallow, rocky soil.

When the Depression came, we didn't so much as feel it, times already being
bad in the hills. Then it got worse.
We eked out a life until our boy turned three,
then Jim came home and said we were headed to Ohio,
where the farming was better and
he could surely find work.

And that was that.

While he tuned and patched our old Ford, I sorted
and packed the household goods,
my face already hardened to the future.

Olives

2011-04-27T06:00:00.002-04:00

This monologue is based in small part on half-remembered phrases and lines from a poem that was destroyed in the Great Shredding. I had drafted a poem about a family feast in an olive orchard. When Bobby showed up in my head a few weeks ago to tell me his story, that scene slipped itself into this poem.

*********

The Sweet Memory of Olive Oil

We went over there just that one time -
my old man taking Mama
back to the village she'd come from in '45
after the war ended.

I was just a little boy, an Americano
in my striped tee-shirt and
Red Ball Jets.
I was tired from a too long plane flight,
thirsty and fretful from a long hot dusty road.

Soon, Bobby, soothed my mother.
Presto, Roberto, presto.

Then we were there.
The farmhouse perched
on the edge of the village
and all these people - zias and zios -
all come to see their Maria home.

I remember best the feast -
what else could you call it?
To my five year old eyes, the table went on forever,
famiglia on both sides.
Nonna sat at the head of the table,
her white braids a crown on her head.
The sun, dappled through the grape leaves, the dry baked earth air,
The whole thing set to a hum of bees.

I can still taste the sharp bite of the salt-cured olives,
the sweet sop of olive oil on the pane.
Stories and laughter passing back and forth across the white tablecloths,
platters passing up and down the long stretch of table.
The drone of the bees back and forth in the air,
the pasta surely made in heaven.

The day rolled over to night and I fell asleep,
carried away by the very stars themselves.

We never went back.
Mama lost touch with her sisters after Nonna died
and I don't know the name of the village,
let alone the way to it.

I wake sometimes and
sit up in bed,
the smell of baking earth caking my nostrils,
the hum of bees loud in my ears.
I call out for Mama, call out for mia nonna.
I call for my famiglia gathered again under that grape arbor
before remembering that was 60 years ago
and I'm old enough to be a nonno myself.

Next to me, my wife stirs.

"Go back to sleep," I tell her, patting her shoulder.
"It was only a dream."

Beach Monologue

2011-04-26T06:00:00.002-04:00

At many points, most of them low, in my younger life, I fantasized pulling up every stake I had and setting out to somewhere else. Somewhere else was where I didn't know anyone and didn't have any connections. Invariably, my dreams would take me to some nameless small town tacked to the New England seacoast. I would get a job at a local restaurant (never mind that I at that age was an apathetic waitress at best), rent a sparely furnished room in someone's house, and live my life.

In my fantasies, my new life was always idyllic.

This monologue is the flip side: a "what if?" written for that tempestuous young woman of yore.

********

On the Beach

So it has come to this: a sparse, bare cottage -
Oh, let's be truthful, a shack really -
that rents cheap in this little beach town gritty with sand and hard times.

I piece together a living: 20 hours at the library,
10 hours at the grocery, odd jobs here and there.
It keeps the lights on, but it's
nothing to write home about, if there was anyone left to write home to.

I eat simply and sparingly, out of concern for both my
health and my pocketbook.
In the summer, I grow a few tomatoes
off the back deck and feel rich beyond compare.

Most of my needs can be met at the Salvation Army store next town over.
I don't know about my wants anymore.

I have to think a few minutes to come up with how long I've been here,
almost but not quite having to count on my fingers.
I was young, of course - who isn't, setting off on a quest? -
and I knew - knew deep in my bones - that I was the one with
the golden touch, the quicksilver pen.
Five months, ten months, and I would have a fat manuscript of poems
that would out-Frost Robert Frost.
So I chose this little town, well off the tourist track,
and settled down to write.

I would write the best stuff of my life up here,
fueled by the eternal promise of the ocean.

Ten months stretched into twenty, and then twenty more.
After sixty months, I stopped counting.

The little jobs I took for "color," for "authentic voice,"
became the daily routine
until I grew tired of collecting rejection slips and food stamps,
and looked for work that would at least allow me to eat.

It's been almost thirty-five years since I shuffled off the coil of my hometown
told mom I'd make it, she'd see
turned down the hesitant proposal from the old boyfriend
and drove north just like Stuart Little.
A lot of tides have come and gone. I look in the mirror
and see my mother's lined face staring back out at me,
see the silver laced through my hair.

I still walk the beach, picking up driftwood
and other wave-borne oddments for my room,
not even bothering to scan the horizon for my ship that never came in.

Looking Back

2011-04-25T06:00:00.005-04:00

Starting today, I will be posting four monologues by characters who have shown up in my head to talk about their lives. These monologues, like most of my other poetry, are triggered by images or phrases that I see or hear.

Today's monologue was triggered by an article about the "new" small farmers and the social, physical, economical, and practical hurdles they face. I'm a huge proponent of supporting and bringing food production back to a local level: this is not a commentary scorning that movement. But the article reminded me of earlier "back to the land" movements and those who eventually gave up on those earnest plans. This is about the small picture of relentless hard work and great sacrifice to follow a dream, and what is left if the dream dissolves.

*********

Looking Back

Looking back, we were all so earnest,
gathering for our monthly potlucks
of rice and beans and lumpy breads.

Squatting in the cold March mud
to thumb in the broccoli, our breath
small clouds hanging in the damp, chill air.

And the knitting! My god, the knitting!
We did it endlessly, when we weren't
spinning the wool, or the honey. Sweaters
and shawls and gloves and hats: small wonder
we didn't clothe the sheep themselves in wool wraps.

The chickens, the pigs.
The chickweed, the pigweed.
Hauling the slops to the pigs, the pigs
to the butcher, the pork chops to the freezer.
It never stopped.

What was it then, that changed? What was it that made us say
"that's enough," and scrub our hands raw at the sink
until every trace of soil was gone from under our nails?

It wasn't the goodness of the first tomato of summer
or the soft down of the chicks
that did us in. Heaven knows those were gifts,
plain and simple.
It was something more basic.
One mud-tracked rug too many,
one more torn fingernail,
all five grain casseroles and no desserts at the potluck.

Something as little as that.

We sold off
the chickens, the tiller. Gave up the lease and
moved back to the rhythm and hum of the city.
Never looked back, never kept track of the cost,
plus or minus. What good would have come of that?
Nothing but heartache and some tallies on a sheet of paper.

No, better to leave that door closed: the knitting unfinished,
the herbs gone wild,
the heart gone to seed.

Childhood Moments: Easter

2011-04-24T06:00:00.005-04:00

When my sons were little, we sometimes went to an upscale Easter brunch. At one such brunch, an adult wearing a large bunny outfit was greeting small children. This was during the years when Sam was terrified of anyone, especially an adult, wearing a costume. The Easter Bunny was over to one side, with a ring of children around him, so Sam was comfortable with proceeding to our table. Midway through the meal, the Easter Bunny started circulating the room. At some point, he came up directly behind Sam, who was intent on eating, and placed a large paw on Sam’s head. Sam froze, the color draining from his face. Ben, in an act of big brother protectiveness, hissed “Sam! Don't. Look. Behind. You.” The adults waved the Bunny off, the moment passed without further incident, and that morning remains a favorite memory of mine.

Other memories are not so pleasant. One such moment occurred with Ben and Easter when he was in first grade. Religion, like so many other topics, was one more landmine in the household. As a result, the boys grew up with no religion or discussions of faith and spirituality. Easter, even in its most commercial and non-religious form, somehow also ended up on the non-observed list.

Just days ago I posted a sonnet about how life is only a one-take proposition. All the same, what parent out there hasn’t replayed events from their children’s childhood and winced? The moment captured below, in contrast to the day of the giant Bunny, is one that eighteen years later I still wish I could take back and make right. (And for those who wonder when they get to the end, yes, Sam got one too.)

**********

Easter

Your 1st grade classmates were talking
About chocolate bunnies
And Peeps
And hunting for colored eggs.

Peter Cottontail was hopping into every one of their homes.

You came home, all of seven, and asked
Tentatively
If we celebrated Easter.

“No,” said your dad, “we don’t believe in Easter.”

You hung your head to hide
The disappointment
But I heard you whisper,
“I believe in Easter.”

You never mentioned Easter again.
You never asked to dye an egg.
You never asked for a chocolate bunny.
When Peeps came home from the grocery,
You ate them without comment.

Easter was never on your calendar.

Over the years, I would hear your small
“I believe in Easter”
And yearn to give it back to you.

This year, I packed a box
With chocolate eggs and a surprise or two
And shipped them out to you,
A long overdue visit from the Easter Bunny.

Reading Lessons

2011-04-23T06:00:00.004-04:00

I'm in the homestretch of my April poetry challenge! The remaining eight poems are all of recent vintage, most of them written this month.

As I wrote recently, the poetry challenge has been hard for me. I've had more than one anxiety attack over the foolhardiness of this venture. Even now, the jury - my own internal handpicked jury - is still out as to whether this was a good thing for me to do.

On the other hand, focusing only on poetry for a month has made me aware of other things. For one, I have missed blogging about life, whether mine or the community's. So much - the small moments, the small observations - has slipped through my fingers. I am more attentive when I am blogging. Another realization I have had is how little poetry there has been in my life in recent years. I don't mean writing poetry. I knew that was gone. No, I am talking about pulling a book of poems off the shelf and losing (or finding) myself in it for an afternoon. Living with my own poetry this month has made me acutely aware of that gap and I am resolved to slip poetry back into my life.

Something else has occurred to me: I don't write poetry about cancer or about living with cancer. I am hardly silent about cancer - a quick skim of the blog labels to the right tells you I write regularly about the disease that took up permanent residency in my body six and a half years ago. But with the exception of one haiku I dashed off this month in response to the Haiku-ca-choo! challenge to write a riddle, there is nothing in cancer or my life with it that would move me to poetry.

[Oh, I know, you are all wondering about my haiku. Remember, we were supposed to write a riddle.

Little turncoat! What
made you switch your allegiance?
Power? You rogue you.

The first two guesses were Arlen Specter and Joe Liberman, both of which were perfectly appropriate depending on your politics, and both of which just cracked me up. My answer, not nearly as good, was my bone marrow.]

So what am I inspired to write about? Small moments that catch my attention, little happenings that make me take a second or third look, phrases or pictures that make me imagine the life experiences of others. Like my blogging, my poetry also tends towards the little picture and the things I can touch (literally or figuratively).

The poem for today came about during a recent walk when I had to wait at the railroad tracks. It is a good read-aloud poem to catch the rhythm of a freight train clacking by.

********

Photo from Eddie's Rail Fan Page

Reading Lessons

When I was a little girl, I loved to read off the names
Painted on the boxcars and gondolas and hoppers,
A roll call of America:
B & O, Pennsylvania, New York Central
Wabash, Santa Fe, Burlington
Rock Island, Grand Trunk, L & N
Denver Rio Grande & Western
Cotton Belt, Lehigh Valley, Soo Line
Reading, Frisco, Union Pacific
Erie Lackawanna
Seaboard Coastline.

My brother and I would hang over the front seat of the car,
racing to be the first to call out the line.
Frisco!
Wabash!
Chessie!
Rock Island!

Sometimes I would just chant them under my breath
To the rhythm of the train:
Er-ie Lack-a-wan-na
Er-ie Lack-a-wan-na
Cotton Belt, Cotton Belt
Er-ie Lack-a-wan-na.
Er-ie Lack-a-wan-na
Cotton Belt, Cotton Belt

Today while I was walking, the crossing guard blinked and
Clanged down.
I heard the locomotive's sharp call
And saw it coming down the tracks.

I stood back and watched the freight train roll through,
Car after car:
New cars, sleek cars,
Glossy black coal cars
Filled and heading north,
Rumbling through and then gone.
CSX every last one.

All work, no play.
(Rock Island, Burlington)
All business, no romance.
(New York Central, Soo Line)
No America to roll off your tongue.
(Denver Rio Grande & Western, Seaboard Coastline)

Nothing to read there.

Cotton Belt, Cotton Belt
Erie Lackawanna
Erie Lackawanna
Cotton Belt, Cotton Belt

Gone.

Villanelles, Part Two

2011-04-22T06:00:00.003-04:00

Right on the heels of my first villanelle, I followed with this one. Read with the other, it makes for a nice set of bookends in a greeting card kind of way. I blame it on the rhymes.

I do love the word "villanelle" though. It is a beautiful word to roll off the tongue, and I regret I cannot bring the beauty to the form that the name implies.

********

Daybreak

Sun is rising strong and bright.
Shadows all are set to flee.
Extinguish candles at the light.

Birds raise their voices in delight,
Calling out in vocal spree,
"Sun is rising strong and bright!"

Scour away the tips of night,
Set the sleeping hours free!
Extinguish candles at the light.

Day grows stronger, dark's in flight,
Paths are lit for all to see.
Sun is rising strong and bright.

Gray haze fades without a fight,
Nowhere left for it to be.
Extinguish candles at the light.

Morning breaks, sun gains height,
Golden rays wash over me.
Sun is rising strong and bright.
Extinguish candles at the light.

Villanelles

2011-04-21T06:00:00.001-04:00

Villanelles are an odd, tight, technical form that originated during the Renaissance as freeform drinking songs. Somewhere along the line, supposedly in nineteenth century France, villanelles became highly structured and assumed the form they retain today: five tercets (stanzas of three lines) followed by a quatrain (stanza with four lines), with two repeating lines (refrains) and two repeating rhymes (a or b). The repeating lines are the first and third line of the first tercet. The ending quatrain also picks up those repetitious (and rhyming) lines. (Confused yet? So am I. I only write these with a penciled schematic in the margin.)

For someone like me who struggles with rhymed verse, villanelles are hell. Some poets - Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath - handled this form brilliantly. Me? I feel like I am writing script for greeting cards when I work on one.

Below is my first attempt (ever) at a villanelle, written in March of this year.

********

End of Day

Daylight fades across the way.
Shadows grow, colors end.
Candles lit at end of day.

Children coming in from play,
Parting from the many friends,
Daylight fades across the way.

Supper: hunger's now at bay.
Mother with the socks to mend,
Candles lit at end of day.

Bath time now, boat display!
Homework done with, time to spend.
Daylight fades across the way.

Day is over, time to pray,
Cares and worries now to tend.
Candles lit at end of day.

Sleeping household, let it stay
Quiet while the nighttime wends.
Daylight fades across the way.
Candles lit at end of day.

Sending Out the Sonnets: Sonnet #3

2011-04-20T06:00:00.002-04:00

Of all my lumpy little sonnets, this one is my favorite. I like the images, I like the theme. I wrote this one evening when I was replaying moments from my children's childhoods, and wishing either I could take some of them back or else revisit and savor them all over again. (On Easter, I will be posting a poem on the very theme of wanting to redo a moment from the past.)

********

Documentary

You don't get a do-over. No god runs
the film backwards, letting you say "Stop it
there." No replays allowed, no edits done,
no rewriting the lines to better fit.
The film only rolls forward, one large reel
spooling endlessly until it runs out.
Only one take in which to catch the feel
of baby's cheek, the sound of children's shouts.
One shot only per scene! Small wonder you
walk around the remainder of your days
wondering, hoping for a sign or two
that you get one more role in which to play.

The true treasures of each minute hold tight
to give comfort against the coming night.

Sending Out the Sonnets: Sonnet #2

2011-04-19T06:00:00.003-04:00

When I posted this sonnet with my Facebook poetry group, one friend commented Possible alternate title: "Starting a business." I reread it with that title in mind and realized he was right.

This is probably the most lighthearted sonnet of the few I have written. That's not saying much.

********

Lesson

Consider this: that for every step
You do not take, having looked way too long
At chasms you otherwise would have leapt,
There may yet be time to undo the wrong
Of too much carefulness, too little glee -
To take the chances held out before you
And leap, shouting your fears, your joys! To be
Soaring, tumbling, flailing away as new
Landscapes hurtle past. The joy of being
Mid-air, mid-jump as it were. The old cares
Cast aside to take on this quest, freeing
Your heart from the box before it grows spare.

And when you land, breathe deep before you rise
To view strange vistas with unsullied eyes.

Sending Out the Sonnets: Sonnet #1

2011-04-18T06:00:00.005-04:00

I was fortunate in high school to have had some excellent, rigorous literature teachers. (I am also old enough by many decades that literature curricula were still thick, meaty entrees rather than the flighty appetizers that they are all too often now.)

We read a lot of poetry back in those days. If you were in an overview course, you would read English poetry from Chaucer to Eliot and beyond. Sonnets, whether by Shakespeare or Browning (Elizabeth, not Robert) made up a large part of the sampler. If you had Mrs. Hearn, as I did for several classes, both reading and writing sonnets were part of the coursework. So despite the rhyme requirements, I have always had a high comfort level with sonnets. Earlier this year, as I took the training wheels off in my Facebook poetry group, I tried my hand at sonnets. I will be posting the results over the next three days.

Sonnets tend to bring out the somber side of me and this one and the third of the three are no exceptions. I haven't figured out why. Perhaps I am so intent on the rhyme and meter that I can't lighten up the topic.

For those of you who were not fortunate enough to have Kay Hearn, Arlene Gregory, Steve Tobias, or Roberta Rollins for literature, the opening line is from the sonnet by the same name by John Keats. Keats was not being prophetic; he probably already knew he had contracted tuberculosis and that early death was the only outcome.

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John Keats by William Hilton, National Portrait Gallery, London

Sonnet One

"When I have fears that I may cease to be…"
Who knows, when they are young, reading those lines
What awaits? Time is endless, a great, free
Banquet spread out at which one is to dine,
Never dreaming in savoring the feast
That the wine may grow flat, the bread turn sour,
That there may not be enough for the least
Hunger to be filled for a day, an hour.
Who knows, sitting there, the bill will come due
And one's pockets may be empty as air?
No, best to eat happily, without clues,
Enjoy the meal, savor all that is fair.

Life will intrude soon enough: sorrow, grief,
Hardship, reminding us our time is brief.

Parodies

2011-04-17T06:00:00.001-04:00

I have always enjoyed parodies of poems, especially when the parody is not aimed directly at the poet being aped but instead makes use of a well-known poem to poke fun at someone or something else, including the author of the parody. One of my all-time favorites is "Ancient Music," by Ezra Pound, in which he comments scathingly on winter by turning inside out the Middle English round "Sumer is icumen in."

Two years ago, I posted a parody of one of my favorite poems, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," by Wallace Stevens. My work was the result of a frustrating battle with an overstuffed closet in our garage. Two years later, it still makes me laugh.

This year's piece came about as a result of realizing one day this winter just how disheveled our home was. I had come from a car that was muddy and dirty from too slushy, wet days. The front hallway was dirty with melting puddles and the tracks leading from them. Neither of us had swept the kitchen floor or even wiped off the table that day. As for vacuuming the carpet or clearing the coffee tables, that thought was beyond our scope. For a brief moment I was overwhelmed, and then I remembered Carl Sandburg's poem, "The Grass."

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Dirt

Rugs, floors, towels, windshields.
Leave them alone and let me work.
I am the dirt; I cover all.

The windowsills, curtains, baseboards,
The mat at the front door;
Don't do anything and let me work.
That Sandburg guy aiming for immortality?
I covered him too.

I am the dirt.
Let me work.

A Plethora of Pantoums: French Lullabies

2011-04-16T06:00:00.001-04:00

The pantoum below was written based upon hearing my sister-in-law singing French lullabies in the early morning as she went about some kitchen tasks. For the record, she was not weeping, but having just said goodbye to both of my sons, I easily imagined a scene where a mother would combine gentle weeping and soft singing as she thought back over the early years of childhood.

*********

French Lullabies

The French lullabies that now are not needed?
They hang in the air yet.
She gently weeps as she puts things to right
in the kitchen.

They hang in the air yet,
Clinging to the curtains.
In the kitchen,
Little tears

Clinging to the curtains.
The French lullabies,
Little tears,
You could brush away unnoticed if anyone came in.

The French lullabies
She used to sing to him,
You could brush away unnoticed if anyone came in.
In the quiet morning, her clear notes rise up the stairs.

She used to sing to him.
The baby is gone.
In the quiet morning, her clear notes rise up the stairs.
The little boy is gone.

The baby is gone.
He does not need crooned to now.
The little boy is gone.
She croons the French lullabies.

He does not need crooned to now.
As she wipes the kitchen counter,
She croons the French lullabies
Gently weeping.

As she wipes the kitchen counter
She gently weeps as she puts things to rights,
Gently weeping
The French lullabies that now are not needed.

A Plethora of Pantoums: Midway Mark

2011-04-15T06:00:00.002-04:00

As of today, I am halfway through posting a poem of my own each day in honor of National Poetry Month. And I have to confess: it is hard. Harder than I anticipated when I took on this challenge.

It is hard putting poetry - my poetry, for God's sake! - out in the public sphere. I have had more than one bout with anxiety since starting this month. The Internal Critic has been a daily companion, particularly loud when the anxiety hits, but certainly audible most other times as well. The comments range from a snippy "this isn't real haiku, you know" to a hissed "what do you think you are doing?"

We all carry around Internal Critics. They are the ones who nibble away at our self esteem, take bites out of our confidence. Sometimes they are guests artists making a cameo appearance: the Hard-To-Please Parent, the Undermining Best Friend, the Callous Commentator. Sometimes we know the voice and the face because it is our own.

As I continue to post pantoums, one in particular seems appropriate at this halfway point given my anxiety. This was written in response to a writing prompt on Quote Snack. For those of you who are not familiar with writing prompts, they are simple to do. The writer is given a phrase or a line and a set period of time in which to write, without stopping, anything that comes to mind in response. E.A., the blogger at Quote Snack, sets her writing prompts up to last five minutes, reminding you at the end to "Get up and wiggle. Move. Laugh. Growl. Pat self on back."

The phrase in a recent Quote Snack prompt was "with the Past's blood-rusted key." After writing my response, I thought it had the bones for a pantoum, so I pretty much just cut and tweaked my response to fit the pantoum framework. The original pantoum was considerably longer; the one below is the revised version.

As much fun as I have with them, pantoums are a little freaky, especially if you are struggling with an anxiety attack. At those times, they remind me of the chain emails you used to see directing you to pick numbers, think of colors, write down three names, and then learn what your answers revealed. Those emails usually had the warning "DON'T SCROLL DOWN! YOU WILL BE AMAZED!" Because pantoums turn back in upon themselves - completing the circle, as it were - it sometimes throws me how neatly the first and fourth lines fit into and lock up the ending, even though I know they are supposed to do exactly that. This is one of those times.

This pantoum speaks to the anxiety this month's poetry challenge poses for me. As my brilliant therapist of years past would remind me, I don't have to unlock the door and let those anxieties enter. As the poem reveals and as even he would have acknowledged, it is not easy to discard the key. The trick is learning to carry it, but not use it.

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with the Past's blood-rusted key

The key is rusty.
The key is rusted red, ferrous red, iron red.
It is the key to my past.
I hold it in my hand.

The key is rusted red, ferrous red, iron red.
I study the key carefully.
I hold it in my hand.
I cannot clench my fist around it.

I study the key carefully,
I lay the key down on the counter.
I cannot clench my fist around it.
I try to remember where the key fits.

I lay the key down on the counter.
What memory does it unlock?
I try to remember where the key fits.
My god, my head throbs, trying to remember.

What memory does it unlock?
Is it from years and years past?
My god, my head throbs, trying to remember.
Are we talking one decade or five?

Is it from years and years past?
What if I just walked away?
Are we talking one decade or five?
What if I just left the key and never came back for it?

What if I just walked away?
No one else can use it.
What if I just left the key and never came back for it?
They would just toss it.

No one else can use it.
It would follow me noiselessly through the air if I left without it.
They would just toss it.
I hesitate, my hand on the door knob.

It would follow me noiselessly through the air if I left without it.
The key is now curiously warm.
I hesitate, my hand on the door knob.
I sigh. I walk back.

The key is now curiously warm.
I pick up the key and pocket it.
I sigh. I walk back.
I walk out the door, locking it with a fresh key.

I pick up the key and pocket it.
It is the key to my past.
I walk out the door, locking it with a fresh key.
The key is rusty.

A Plethora of Pantoums: Reverie

2011-04-14T06:00:00.001-04:00

The cold rehearsal mentioned yesterday lead to a cold dress rehearsal and a brown bag supper in a cold upper hallway two nights later. After we ate, Warren prepared for concert by reviewing his music, while I shivered, watched the snow fall, and thought of summer.

*********

Reverie

There shall come again bright sun,
The heat of the day rising up.
But tonight it is cold.
We have weathered so much already.

The heat of the day rising up
From the garden hazy with promise.
We have weathered so much already.
The sharp tang of summer is far away.

From the garden hazy with promise
The mysterious smell of growing rises up.
The sharp taste of summer is far away.
My tongue has forgotten its flavor.

The mysterious smell of growing rises up.
My hands search the vines.
My tongue has forgotten its flavor.
Where is that season in this long cold?

My hands search the vines.
(But tonight it is cold.)
Where is that season in this long cold?
There shall come again bright sun.

A Plethora of Pantoums

2011-04-13T06:00:00.001-04:00

Several weeks into Haiku-ca-choo!, our intrepid leader Kate formed a second Facebook group, Poetry Prom. The thought behind this group was to stretch our poetic wings and experiment with various formal poetic structures.

Initially, much like with the Haiku-ca-choo! group, Kate would set out an assignment, albeit by poetic form rather than by theme. Those of us who were game would then work with the assigned form and post our results on the group page.

The very first assignment was pantoums, a form I was unfamiliar with then. Pantoums are a Malay form of poetry and historically have been rhymed. As I noted just two days ago, I don't work well with rhymes. Luckily, a pantoum may also be unrhymed and, as you will see, all of mine are.

A pantoum is a highly structured poem. It is always written in quatrains (stanzas of four lines each). The second and fourth lines of each quatrain become the first and third line of the next quatrain until the final quatrain, which is so neatly tied back to the first and third lines of the first quatrain that you feel as if you are darning a sock.

I wrote a whole rash of pantoums and am planning on posting five of them this month. For me, they are little puzzles of words and pictures that, as the poet, I have to interlock in the course of the poem.

More than the other poetic forms, my pantoums often start with a distinct image that I have seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted. My first pantoum, set out below, was roughed out during a rehearsal I attended with Warren. The concert focused on Russian composers, and the exotic melodic lines worked their way into the poem, contrasting sharply with the cold theatre hall in which I sat.

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Notes on a Rehearsal

There should be half-shuttered rooms,
Dust motes in strong sunlight,
Scents of cinnamon, almond,
The faint ting of finger cymbals.

Dust motes in strong sunlight?
It is still winter here, with raggedy sunshine.
The faint ting of finger cymbals
Lost in the rush of wind.

It is still winter here, with raggedy sunshine,
No place for oriental fantasias.
Lost in the rush of wind,
The Old Quarter fades away.

No place for oriental fantasias,
Scents of cinnamon, almond;
The Old Quarter fades away.
There should be half-shuttered rooms.

Happy Birthday, Beverly Cleary!

2011-04-12T06:00:00.004-04:00

Childhood Memory #7: The Library

Walking to the books -
How many miles did I log
going back and forth?

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One of Louis Darling's wonderful drawings; this one from Beezus and Ramona

I thought I was done posting haiku during this poetry challenge, but then I discovered that author Beverly Cleary is 95 today!

As a child, I lived a little less than half a mile from the library, which was then at the north edge of downtown, right next to the courthouse. The library loomed large in my childhood: it was my safe haven, it was my gateway to the world, it was one of a very few places where I felt cherished, safe, and totally free to be myself. I was a weekly visitor at any time of the year. During the summer, it was not unusual for me to make three or four trips a week to the library, sometimes two in the same day, usually on foot.

I may have been nine when I first discovered Beverly Cleary. Whether I found her on my own or whether Mrs. Judd, the archetypal librarian of my childhood, steered me Cleary's way, I cannot recall, but I do remember the first Cleary book I ever read. It was Ellen Tebbits, the story of a third grader who found her best friend in a janitorial closet where they were both hiding while they changed in and out of their dance clothes. (Read the book if you want to know why Ellen and Austine, her friend, were hiding.)

One book by Cleary and I was hooked. Otis Spofford (the wonderful bullfight chapter!), Beezus and Ramona (the applesauce!), and all the rest then available soon followed. Cleary's early works were illustrated by Louis Darling, whose detailed pen and ink drawings fascinated me almost as much as Cleary's words did.

I missed out (the first time) on the rash of Ramona books Cleary wrote in the late 70s and early 80s. As luck would have it, after we moved back to Delaware, the girl next door one day brought over a sack of books she had "outgrown" and thought my boys might like to read. I was thrilled beyond words to find the bag was full of Beverly Cleary novels (including my beloved Ellen Tebbits), and thus I had the glorious opportunity to catch up on many of Cleary's later works that I had missed the first time around. I still have the twelve volumes we got that day and still dip into them frequently. I can never thank Bethany, then the girl next door and now a cherished friend, enough for that grocery sack of wonder.

In the 1990s, Cleary wrote two autobiographies, A Girl From Yamhill and On My Own Two Feet. These portray her childhood and adulthood up through the publication of Henry Huggins, her first book. Cleary wrote with clarity and honesty about her struggles to get an education and lead her own life despite constrained finances and the constant disapproval and opposition of her mother, themes which resonated deeply with me. They are as easy to read as her novels and I have returned to them more than once as well.

There is a wonderful line in the movie Hook (a favorite of mine), in which Captain Hook (the Captain Hook of Peter Pan fame) proclaims "What would the world be without Captain Hook?"

What would be it be indeed? That line rings true for all of the great characters of children's literature. What would the world be without Jo, Stuart, Charlotte, Laura, Harry, Dorothy, Jane, Pauline, Petrova, and Posie, Alice, Meg and Charles Wallace, Sara, Sam, Milo and Tock, Stanley, and Caddie? (Can you name the characters and the books?)

What would the world be without Beezus and Ramona?

Happy birthday, Beverly Cleary!

Another Sonnet? So Soon?

2011-04-11T06:00:00.002-04:00

Sonnets are not an easy poetry form for me to work with, because they require both rhyme and meter (rhythm). Rhyming is hard work for me. I was raised on heavily rhymed poetry, starting with nursery rhymes and proceeding to Eugene Fields and Robert Louis Stevenson. I was in junior high before I discovered that not all poetry had to rhyme. I was further stunned to learn, contrary to what I had been taught, that free verse (which is what teachers used to call all unrhymed poetry) was not an elaborate ruse visited upon us by "modern" (i.e., early 20th century) poets but had a proud heritage in this country courtesy of Walt Whitman.

As a result of these discoveries, I stopped writing rhymed poetry for a long time, freeing my pen from the tyranny of a rhyme scheme. After I stopped writing any poetry except the very occasional extremely light verse, I wrote only rhymed poetry. Go figure.

I am still uneasy with rhymed poetry (as you will see later this month) and often feel like a second-rate greeting card writer when I tackle it. Of all the rhymed forms, I struggle the least with sonnets. Sonnets are limited in length (only fourteen lines) and depend as heavily on the meter as they do the rhyme scheme. There are many classic sonnet forms, each with its own rhyme patterns. For the record, the sonnet below (as well as the one a few days ago and the ones to come) is written in the Shakespearian or English style. (As longtime readers know, I love Shakespeare. Besides being a whale of a playwright, Shakespeare was also no slouch as a poet, leaving us over 150 sonnets alone.) In a Shakespearian sonnet, the rhyme scheme is ababcdcdefefgg. When it comes to sonnets, I am still working on what is known as the volta (or "turn"), which marks a change in subject matter mid-sonnet (from small picture to large picture, for example).

Today's sonnet is a taste of what is to come not this week but the one after this one. After today, I am heading to the land of pantoums, a curious structure that Kate of Haiku-ca-choo! introduced me to some weeks ago.

So why a sonnet today? Because today is Warren's 57th birthday and this piece, which I penned a few weeks back, was written very much with us in mind.

Happy Birthday, my dear Warren!

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Sonnet for Warren

Who knows what might have come of this had we
but set aside all caution, prudence - thrown
our fates to the wind, and let fortune be
our guide in years to come. Later, windblown,
we might then assess the damage done, or,
instead, count the stored memories we'd set
aside to stoke our hearts at cold times. For
lack of something - courage, perhaps - we bet
instead on other paths, other routes to
what we thought the future should have held, not
realizing what it would take to true
up the lines Fate had drawn but we'd not sought.
These later years seem doubly sweet to taste
for rescuing hearts, souls, and lives from waste.

Four Days of Haiku: Tandem Poems

2011-04-10T06:00:00.000-04:00

Writing in two Facebook poetry groups has been a heartening experience for me. It helps me to have feedback and commentary as I write. "Putting it out there" in a supportive group was a huge part of my making the decision to challenge myself to post a poem a day for National Poetry month.

Besides, it is fun. A lot of what goes on, especially in the Haiku-ca-choo! group, is silliness. Silliness spawns more silliness, and before long the haiku go spinning out of control. Sometimes one of us posts a piece that sets off a whole series of comments or responsive poems.

Recently, a chance meeting with a classmate (and fellow Haiku-ca-choo!-er) led to the following poems, a variation on tandem poems. The haiku are by me, the limerick is by Paul Monks, who I had earlier seen racing down the street on a bicycle. After our brief meeting, I called back, walking away, "I better see something in Haiku-ca-choo! about this!"

My haiku went up first.

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Street Scenes: Two Views

        I
First warm day: Paul on
his bike, whizzing down the street,
grinning like a kid.

       II
Monks barreling down
the street, scattering those in
his path. "Hey, April!"

Same Street Scene
                   By Paul Monks

There is a lady we all like,
who takes what to me is a hike.
From work she does walk
and will stop to talk.
April could go faster by bike.
(warm weather haiku, non-fiction)

Reply to Monks

If I biked, so much
would be lost: snowdrops, bird songs,
chatting with old friends.

Four Days of Haiku: Childhood Memories

2011-04-09T06:00:00.008-04:00

One of the most popular assignments for our Haiku-ca-choo! group was "favorite childhood memories." It was this assignment that caused me to toss off piece after piece without pausing.

When I realized what I had just done, I had the same shaky exhilaration that any kid who has ever mastered riding a bike feels that first successful solo trip. There I was, halfway down the alley thinking someone was still running alongside me keeping me upright, before I realized I was doing it all by myself. I was so pleased that over the next few days I went on writing ("Look, Ma, no hands!") and ended up with 28 childhood notes.

Below are eight haiku from that fateful assignment.

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The blue print dress

Childhood Memory #1: School Days

Warm spring sunshine day-

Teaching how to be a horse

to Jill. "Neigh like this."

Childhood Memory #2: Street Play

Throw the rock like that,

flicking it to 5 and then

hopscotching past it.

Childhood Memory #5: Barbie

(or "Thanks a lot, Tonya, for Reminding Me!")

Days playing Barbie

with Kim. Just what was Barbie

up to exactly?

Childhood Memory #9: Perspective

The Flax Street hill was

huge, gigantic-too much to

climb. When did it shrink?

Childhood Memory #14: Play

The Alamo set

in the sandbox. We had the

Americans win.

Childhood Memory #16: Summertime Two

Hide-and-seek in the

dark, fireflies showing us the

way to a good spot.

Childhood Memory #20: Car Trips

Riding backwards in

the Plymouth wagon, one of

us always threw up.

Childhood Memory #23: School Clothes

Mom made my dresses

first, second grade. What became

of the blue print one?

Four Days of Haiku: Assignments

2011-04-08T06:00:00.005-04:00

In our Haiku-ca-choo! group, someone, often Kate, suggests a theme for the week. In early February, the theme was "favorite foods." I was in the early stages of a spiritual journey and deeply interested in the connection between food, belief, and community. While everyone else answered the assignment in the spirit it was meant ("chocolate!"), I penned the haiku below with a small comment appended.

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Breaking bread with friends.
Communion, community
at the table now.

Haiku comment: it's not about the food.

With Katrina this past February before breaking bread together.
With Katrina, it is never just about the food.

Four Days of Haiku: Learning to Speak

2011-04-07T06:00:00.009-04:00

As I wrote yesterday, my road back to poetry was broken and crooked beyond crooked. So what changed? What got me not only writing poetry again but even willing to post it?

It was my long ago high school classmates, now good friends thanks to Facebook, that provided the final nudge. One of our number, Kate, starting posting a daily haiku about her Bay Area commute. Others of us starting chiming in with little pieces of our own, and soon we had spun off a separate Facebook group, Haiku-ca-choo!, launched in January of this year.

Haiku was an easy way to ease back into poetry. Haiku is often described as a seventeen syllable Japanese poetry form, often written in three lines with a 5-7-5 syllabic pattern. In reality, haiku has far more complexity and variation to it in its traditional Japanese form. But for someone coming back to poetry after a long layoff, Americanized haiku was perfect. It was short, it was simple, and all I had to do to write it was count syllables on my fingers.

Below in one of the earliest works I posted in Haiku-ca-choo!

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Red cherries, white snow.

Ornamentals, yes, but birds

don't turn up their beaks.

Hidden Sonnet

2011-04-06T06:00:00.004-04:00

As I have recounted elsewhere, I stopped writing poetry for over a decade because of a traumatic event during a deeply troubled prior marriage. For the longest time, I didn't even try to write poetry, other than occasional light verse (doggerel, really), because it was simply too overwhelming emotionally.

Truth be known, for the longest time, I did no writing other than personal letters and those documents necessary in my law practice. For someone who had once written "take away my pen and you render me mute," this was a very bleak time in my life. It was not until I left the marriage and had a long course of therapy that I started to feel I could again take pleasure in writing.

My confidence in my prose writing came back first. In 2002, I began writing a monthly newspaper article about downtown commercial architecture. To my surprise, the articles gained a following and eventually netted me and my editor two state awards.

As much as I loved writing about architecture, it wasn't poetry. I steadfastly avoided poetry. Poetry still hurt too much. Poetry was still way too scary. Over the next several years, I would only attempt two poems, making sure to bury them deep in a computer file so no one would ever know they existed.

Starting this blog in March, 2009, brought me a long way down the path towards poetry. Writing publicly, receiving feedback, making new friends in Blogville who responded positively to my writing - all of these things reassured me that maybe, just maybe, I did have something to say. And if I did have something to say, then maybe I could write poetry again.

I tested the poetic waters a few times in my blog, quietly and without much ado. It didn't hurt, but it didn't yet feel comfortable. To borrow a line from my friend EA, "that stubbornly insecure heart of mine" wasn't ready to acknowledge that I was allowed to write poetry again.

But even if my heart wasn't ready to acknowledge that poetry was permissible, my pen was. Last Saturday night, looking through my writing notebook, I came across what clearly was a roughed out sonnet. By its location in the book as well as its topic, I knew it dated back to this past August. I had forgotten all about it. Sunday morning, I copied it out and cleaned it up, correcting the meter and the rhyme scheme.

I'll discuss sonnet structure later this month. Enjoy this one today.

**********

It Would Have Been Enough

It would have been enough to see your smile
If you had come upon me suddenly
And watched me cut the peppers for awhile,
Bagging them for later suppers to be.
Standing in the doorway, you with ease could
Have viewed the sorting through the greens and reds,
Seen the line of concentration that would
Weave its way from my hands to my forehead.
I would have gone on chopping, unaware
Of your gaze until you moved in the door
And caught my attention away to stare
Briefly at you until I turned once more
To peppers. But no, there you were outside,
Tending other tasks, love's look set aside.

Juvenilia IV: Let Her Speak

2011-04-05T06:00:00.001-04:00

In Bring Me A Unicorn, the first of five volumes of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's letters and diaries, the author spoke about the embarrassment of rereading, let alone publishing, writings from her teen and college years. In explaining why she chose to do so, Anna noted that she "had a certain respect for the early efforts of this struggling adolescent, who now seems so many lives removed from the self of today. I can laugh at her and am often embarrassed by her, but I do not want to betray her. Let her speak for herself."

I feel the same way about this last poem from my early years. As I typed it out for this post, I saw lines and phrases I wanted so much to rewrite. I corrected a few spelling errors, but otherwise chose to let the poem stand on its own awkward legs.

This was written after going with my parents to a family funeral down in the Kentucky hills. Over 35 years later, my cousin Atheen still mentions this piece and how he "never was in a poem in [his] life except for that one." Atheen wasn't much for poetry by his own admission, but he reckoned he liked this one.

**********

Kentucky Funeral

Atheen, my cousin,
    his face unlined yet worn for all his thirty-five years in the hills,
stood in the door of his cabin - shack - home
and waved us goodbye
    before returning to the mourners inside.

These past two days he had made
    twenty or more trips up the side of the Nelson hill,
digging the grave out for great Uncle Bill in the cold March air,
    using blasting caps when the thin soil gave out
    and only bedrock was left.
As family trickled in from all parts of the country,
    the men folk all made the trek up
    and pitched in to help bury their dead.

After the funeral, sparse and commercial,
    and the twisted drive from Greenup to our land,
contingents of neighborhood men waited upside the hill -
spaced at neat intervals to relay the coffin up the slick mud path.
    Me and Burl raced up after
    being two of the first people to the top
following the valley pallbearers, coveralled and hunting clothed.
Waiting for the rest to join us
(the minister and fat little funeral director
puffing and picking their ways up more slowly),
I examined my ancestors' final plots, Iven and Minnie,
    my Nelson great grandparents.
They say this little hilltop graveyard was one of two,
    my more ancient forbearers being one hill over.
    Burl pointed out towards another rise
where we'd someday make a similar climb to lower my
other clan great grandmother, wrinkled and bent,
into the selfsame wooden vault and hear,
    as they were now doing with Bill,
the mud and rocks thud back down upon her.

Atheen joined us briefly,
    grinning like a small boy,
and held up some old terrapin that had braved the cold and rush of humans,
only to be captured by this Kentucky hills man.

Juvenilia III: College Poems

2011-04-04T06:00:00.001-04:00

More of my early poetry that escaped the Great Shredding is contained in a small notebook of poems I gave my mother for Christmas, 1975. Both my mother and her mother, my beloved Grandma Skatzes, wrote poetry, so I put together a small selection of poems by each of us for my mom's present that year.

I wrote in the introduction: Three generations of women and all of them found it necessary at some time to pick up a pen and make sense of their world through the written word. No one of them writes with the same style as the other two, but the similarities, the same blood in each of them, are evident. For this reason, the authors are listed as Skatzes, Skatzes Nelson, and finally Nelson, to show the progression through the decades. Maybe someday it will be extended to a fourth generation.

I am including two poems, one today and one tomorrow, from Three Generations: An Anthology.

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Wonder Bread

During the season, they were pushing football,
    Each loaf of bread concealing a cardboard faced player:
    Cockcroft and Gries.
Smiling patiently, we extracted them and set them aside for youngest sibling.

But now, Christmas and all its tinsel brings a change.
No more hulking heroes these
But instead a game,
    Wondrous and childish:
    Mazes and secret circles to erase for answers.

Michel sees this newest toy and,
    Forgetful of his sixteen years,
Picks it up in eagerness. Catching my eye,
He lays it down with a self-conscious shrug.
"Hunh" says he.

Each of us, from our lordly adult heights,
Keeps a watch over the cards,
Waiting for the other to turn so we can race ourselves
    To the magic and secret circles of childhood.