On a Tuesday in September

Far as I’m concerned, America is home to Muslim, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Confucianist, atheist, agnostic, short, tall, thin, fat, brown, black, white, red, gay, straight, transgender, bi-sexual, the uncoordinated and the athletic, the fashion-challenged and the super model, nature-lovers, city-dwellers, southerners and northerners, those who hug the coasts and those who love the plains and prairies and deserts, the tired, the hungry and the poor, the wealthy and the middle-class, the employed and unemployed, the homeowner, the renter, the homeless, the student and the teacher, the uneducated and the self-taught, the Mexican, the Arab, those with documentation and without, the male and the female, the young and old, the Springsteen fans, the hip-hop fans, the classical music lovers, the jazz aficionados, those who drive SUVs and motorcycles and foreign imports, the pick-up driver and the Prius owner and the walker, the couch potatoes and the health nuts, the vegetarians and carnivores, dog people and cat people, those who prefer Pepsi and those who prefer Coke, the potheads and the addicts, the alcoholics and gamblers and risk-takers of all stripes, the cautious and the timid, the bold and the beautiful, the agoraphobe and the horder and the aesthete, the poets and the artists and the scientists and the mathematicians and the secretaries and the chimney sweeps and the construction workers and the lawyers and those with children and those without, those who love the real Jersey shore and those who are left-handed and the right-brained, the Democrats and Republicans, the insomniacs and those-who-have-yet-to-awaken. Come on, people. Walk the walk. Get out and vote. Say hello. Open the door. Grow up.

The Beauty of the Bowed Head

My cat, Fargo, has a ritual that charms me. Every morning she will jump onto my desk chair and then onto my desk. She positions herself next to the lamp and waits for me to come upstairs from the kitchen, where I’ve fetched my tea. I check email and read the Times online while having breakfast, all of which I must accomplish one-handed (alternating between mouse, teacup, keyboard, cereal spoon), because my other arm is claimed by the cat. She curls herself into its curve and tucks her head into my elbow, where she purrs for 30 minutes or so before leaving me to the rest of my morning.

Sometimes she’ll sit and face me before heading off to her other endeavors. This is my cue to stop staring at the computer screen and pay attention to Fargo. I’ll put down my cup and place both hands on her sides, scratching or petting behind her ears. “You’re the best cat in the world,” I’ll whisper, finding the sweet spot on her neck. “The best cat in the galaxy,” I’ll say, as she leans into my hand. We’re usually just an inch apart, eye to eye, and her fur has been warmed by the lamp and my arm. It’s just about perfect happiness, but it gets better. On certain mornings, if I’m really lucky, she’ll bow her head in the midst of this ritual. She'll sit directly in front of me, still and silent on the desk, head bowed as if waiting to be knighted. I'll lean in and bow my head, too, so that my forehead is touching the crown of her head. Then we just stay like that, Fargo turning up the purr, me wishing I could purr, until the world shifts and the moment ends.

Maybe it’s a remnant of a mildly Catholic childhood, but there’s something about that posture -- shoulders still, breath steady, head bowed -- that I adore. It’s the posture of prayer, of deep thought, the posture of sorrow and of nodding off to sleep. When one is writing, the head is bowed – and here I realize I must clarify, because it is true only when writing with a pen and not when composing on a keyboard and screen. It is that position – pen or pencil in hand, head bowed, concentration utter – that combines all of the above. We are praying, we are thinking, we are in some reverent half-sleep half-dream half-wide-oh-so-wide-awake state. We are writing, and sometimes, if we’re really lucky, it feels like we are touching, in both solitude and total communion, the perfect reader, the perfect other.

July, Rain

When it rains all day I feel like my senses need to be reset. Usually when I’m working at my desk, the window to my left is wide open and I hear, dozens of times an hour, the wings of hummingbirds coming to sip from the feeder. If the day’s breezy, leaves from the maple and locust and cherry trees rustle, and in the background I’ll note the irregular punctuation of bird song and an occasional car. Most of that is blocked out with steady rain. All I’ve heard for the last few hours is rain hitting various surfaces – the sturdy leaves of the hosta below my window; the stones of the rockwalls in the yard; the wooden slats of the deck; the rooftop shingles. Every once in a while I catch the buzz of the hummers’ wings… but most of the customary sounds are gone, replaced by thousands of drops meeting dozens of obstacles. The raindrops that hit grass in the yard or the fresh dirt of the new flower garden are soundless from indoors. But they make everything shine. As the leaves and flowers become saturated, their colors appear more vibrant.

I look up from the keyboard after that last line and see that I have to adjust my perception. The clouds have grown so gray that any brightening highlights on the ground are diminished. It looks more like 8 in the evening than 10 in the morning. The world is dark and wet and cold, and although it puts a literal damper on any outdoor activities for us humans, the steady rhythm of rain is a joy.

Vast Embrace

i. Bird nests in the brambles cup chalices of snow. A scrap of blue scarf caught. (The tenderness of the scrap.)

ii. When I was a kid, I thought it would be fun to walk the plank of a pirate ship. I could swim. Danger was a foreign concept. Figured I’d bob in the water until the ship was out of sight, then head for shore. I’d show those pirates.

iii. Letter from my brother, age 10: Dear Donna, How are you? I’m doing very good. It’s only 11 days till you get here, and I’m still counting. Ever since Momy said I could type on your old typewriter I have been on a craze for typing. The office had a new typewriter. IT was great typing on it. It could type any way you wanted, because you can change this little ball-like object with different types of lettering. When I first started yesterday I was using one finger, and now I almost now the key-board by hart, and am using two hands, pinkies and all….. PLEASE WRITE (type) back soon. (if possible in my name) LOVE ROBERT

iv. Envelope saved from my brother, age 23. Scrawled on the outside, to the postman: PLEASE DO NOT BEND THESE BEAUTIFUL PHOTOS OF OUR NEW SON. HE WAS BORN ON NOV 9^TH. WE LOVE HIM A LOT!!

v. My brother is deployed to Iraq. We write messages in ink on the insides of orange rinds, leave them in each other’s pockets. When I find one in the future it reads: I will always meet you someplace else.

vi. “What are the two most important parts of an essay?” I ask. In unison, the class responds: “Openings and conclusions.” “Is it okay to bend the truth, twist the truth, leave out details or add details to the truth?” I ask. They fidget.

vii. His boy is 16. He thumb-texts. On my answering machine, saved messages cover his whole life. Hear his voice crack. Hear his voice change. I made the team, he says. Would you read this poem I wrote, he says. Call me back, he says.

viii. Nabokov, in the story with the funeral: “And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this:

ix.

x. (The tenderness of the scrap.)

Valentine's Day

The icicles outside the front door are dripping. Where the drops land in the snow it looks like constellations, shallow indentations that seem significant, like if I recognized the language I could understand the meaning.

Next door, the little neighbor boy is shoveling snow onto his dog. The orange plastic shovel is bigger than the boy, and he finds it unwieldy because of its size but also because he is bundled in a fat jacket and snow pants. He and the dog are playing a game, and the game is called Joy. He scrapes up some light snow, tries to lift the shovel over his head – he’s only about 3 years old – and dumps the snow onto the dog’s ears or back or tail. The dog yips and leaps and the boy laughs. And then they do it again.

Outside in the yard, fallen branches poke up out of the snow. They look like skinny arms reaching toward the sky. It’s as though a contingent of stick figures was buried in the drifts, and the rescue party has yet to locate them.

I’m reading a book about writing memoir, and the famous author says “Voice is everything.” Another well-known writer says “Point of view is everything.” Sometimes I hear myself telling my students "Theme is everything." Really, I think nothing is everything.

But many things are enough.

Spin

Three crows wick powder from the throat of a fat maple. January ground looks like a Rorschach, swatches of earth against swatches of snow. We had a bit of a thaw, a week or so with flurries and squalls but not much accumulation. It’s rare to see the ground at this time of year, but the occasional patch of green makes me happy. The green feels like a promise, an implied guarantee that winter will, eventually, end. It’s a reminder that’s welcome on a day like this when, despite the sunshine and the glimpses of hard ground, the temperature stalls below zero. I write wearing gloves and a scarf, a bulky jacket. We keep the wood stove stocked, burn level set at ROAR; periodically throughout the morning it’s necessary to go stand right next to it in order to warm up. For backup I’ve got a little space heater in my study that sits at ankle level. My feet are encased in boots made of sheepskin and suede but the heat wafts up and keeps my legs warm. It’s a lazy day in the heart of winter, and I can’t help but think of the beautiful title of the last novel I read: Let the Great World Spin. I sit and stare out the window, watch the crows and the shivering trees. Wood pops and shifts in the stove. My cat curls a paw over her eyes, a casual defense against the confrontation of sunlight. I drink it in, thirsty for light at this time of year. Even in the middle of the night, I stand and watch the wolf moon as it glazes the sky, feel the glow on my skin, watch shadows drift across the kitchen floor.

Let the great world spin… It’s cold out there, but time and again we find our way to warmth.

December 29, 2009

Tomorrow is my blog’s first birthday, and I’m giving myself a moment’s credit for sticking to it. When I made that initial entry I wasn’t sure if a writing project called a blog was something I could sustain interest in. It seemed so anonymous, so lonely, so potentially unrewarding. Would anybody read it? Would anyone respond? Was that even the point? I had no idea, really, what I wanted out of the endeavor beyond feeling a need to get some work out into the world that might otherwise live out its days in the solitude of my word-processing program.

A year later, I’m still not sure who reads the posts or when or where, but occasionally someone responds. These responses are often from former or current students and they always, always make me happy. Responses, including those from strangers, seem like authentic moments of connection – someone visited the site, read what I wrote, and took a few minutes to comment. It’s a simple gesture, but tonight, at 2 a.m. on a cold, snowy, fairly bleak night in Oswego, New York, I feel it as profound. Thank you to every person who has written a comment on the blog or via Facebook, that weird and wonderful forum for fleeting contact.

It’s been a difficult year for many of my students, some of my family, and a few of my dear friends – many have struggled on the employment front, some have lost family members, suffered serious illness, contended with other private hardship. Each has taught me something about courage and resilience and faith. When I lived in Arizona, I’d often be awake at this hour, and I’d stand in my doorway and look out at the stars and the desert and wish to be back home, in the east, where it seemed like the lives of my friends were unfolding smoothly and joyfully and without me. It seemed like the loneliest time and place in the world… Now, when I’m awake and looking out at a different but equally beautiful landscape, I think of my friends asleep in the southwest, and recognize that I will always feel some degree of wanderlust and regret, some degree of what if and if only. It is my nature – perhaps a common nature – to want something other than what I have. But tonight I acknowledge and feel grateful to my bones for precisely that – for what I have.

We had an unseasonably warm day this week – it almost hit 40 – and the morning brought waves of increasing fog. My camera was jammed and I lamented that something so beautiful would go undocumented. Out of desperation I smacked the camera on the heel of my hand and it suddenly clicked into action. When I went outside to catch the light, the thinnest and most invisible sheen of ice covered every surface and I slipped on literally my first step. My right hand slammed against a wooden post, giving rise to an immediate welt. My left leg crashed into a step – a second bruise. My spine, already in less-than-perfect shape, felt like it torqued, twisted from left to right and from top to bottom. It was, in other words, not a graceful slip and I stood silently in place, trying to catch my breath, hoping I hadn’t broken my hand, hoping I hadn’t further aggravated my back, glad I hadn’t dropped the camera. I walked slowly to a level spot in the yard and began to take some shots. The effort rewarded me with some spooky and evocative photographs and, admittedly, a very sore back.

I’m posting one of the shots, above, because 2009 has been a year that will be remembered for its hardships, but hopefully, too, for its art.

Looking forward to more light, more beauty. Looking forward to peace and safety, especially for my brother and the other men and women who are, have been, or will be serving in the military, taking part in a war that we often seem happy to forget. Looking forward to healthy recoveries for my friends and family, and hoping that everyone who wants a job finds one. Looking forward to more art of every kind, including the beautiful and heartfelt poems & essays offered up by my students, the funny and creative notes on Facebook, the occasional cherished handwritten letter that arrives in the mail. Every word matters.

Peace in 2010, my friends. Thank you for visiting.