Still Amazed

Pausing for a Trundle

 

We went for an afternoon walk on Christmas day in the backcountry of the ranch, and the world was green and shining. We ascended steep dirt roads, climbed up to the place where rainwater pools in a sandstone basin, strolled down through grassy fields. Pi exuberantly bounded off into the distance with his usual canine exuberance, frolicking, and we too felt exhilarated, in a more subdued human way. There were five of us, and we walked in different combinations, picking up bits of conversation and letting them drift off, sometimes a trio, sometimes two friends, and once I was solo, having found myself far enough ahead that I stood and waited for the others, listening to the quiet, which was somehow both vast and companionable.

I eventually turned back to find that my friends had gathered for a rock-roll.  One of the lads (because it is, after all, a guy kind of thing) had dislodged a hefty sandstone rock from the edge of a grassy slope and was about to let it go for a long roll down into the open field below.  We watched, riveted, as it traveled on and on, sometimes bouncing, then resuming speed, rolling further, giving another little jump, sending off a few broken fragments of itself, and finally spinning to a stop far below.  We laughed, then immediately looked around for other prospects.

This was not the first time I had encountered this particular pastime. Monte and I were “serious” bike riders for many years, riding off-road with friends in the days when mountain bikes were still a novelty and the great outdoors seemed like our secret playground. I witnessed many episodes of rock rolling back then, during which otherwise grown-up men would make it their mission to set a rock rolling down a long steep slope. The object was distance, I think, how far would it travel. But there were other rewards, too: the fragrance of the chaparral as the rock crashed through brush and over grass, the unexpected quirks and comical bounces in its journey. It's hard to explain why this is so appealing.

A couple of years ago we were reminiscing about this activity with a friend of ours who is (among other things) a well-known mountain climber.  “Rock rolling?” he said, with some surprise. “We call it trundling. I thought it was something only climbers did.” He proceeded to share some trundling tales of his own and we bikers and climbers found we weren't so different.

Rock rolling is an activity that cuts across all arbitrary boundaries. It really doesn’t matter what you originally set out to do; it is a fun diversion that occurs when the opportunity presents itself. Maybe it's like surfing in that way: Conditions have to be just so, and you have to be lucky enough to find yourself there. But maybe back in prehistoric times, when folks had a more direct daily relationship with their terrain and all the elements, guys would wander from their caves to the local gorge and gather for a good shove and guffaw. I happen to know, in fact, that geologists and surveyors were rolling rocks in our local mountains more than a century ago. The following documentation was taken directly from Up and Down California 1860-1864, The Journal of William H. Brewer. The day was April 23, 1861, the location,an encampment at San Luis Obispo. Here’s what Brewer wrote:

“ Each mountain ascent has something peculiarly its own to distinguish it from the others. The feature of that day’s trip was the unpoetic one of rolling rocks down the slope. Nature seemed to have made it for that – a smooth, grassy slope, with few obstructions on it, and plenty of rocks at the right place near the top. We could start them, they would go about six hundred to nine hundred feet at an angle of 45 or 50 degrees, then roll down a slope of 25 to 30 degrees, going a mile from their starting place and falling probably nearly 2,000 feet. Their velocity was incredible. As they would roll, large angular fragments bounding in immense leaps through the air, they would whistle like cannon balls. We could hear them whistle half a mile! Their leaps would surpass belief. After rolling many, I went down to the foot of the first slope to see them come by – Guirado starting them. Some came within thirty feet of me; their whistling exceeded my belief. They would leap through the air on meeting slight obstructions – pieces flying off would fly a hundred feet in the air, whistling like bullets. One stone of over a hundred pounds leaped close to me. I measured the leap; it was 60 feet! Another, much larger, perhaps 400 pounds, came thundering down, struck a flat stone bedded flat in the soil, which it crushed into a thousand pieces, then bounded 100 feet, and then took its straight course down the slope.”

But maybe a disclaimer is in order before I go further. When I decided to write this blog post, I googled “trundling” as a matter of curiosity, and guess what? It is, like so many fun things, potentially dangerous, and in many places illegal. Often cited is the tragic story of a hiker in a national park who was killed by an unexpected granite boulder landing on his head. Hello? In this case, the rock roller had set a rather large and heavy rock in motion through an area that was poorly visible to him and where people and animals were likely to be. So don’t do this. Okay? Don’t hurl a bottle into a crowd, either, or drive a truck 90 miles an hour through a schoolyard filled with children playing. Common sense is a good thing.  It keeps us alive and we like it.

Back to us, where we linger at the hillside on a luminous day at the ranch, as gleeful as ten-year-olds. I decide to give trundling a try myself, my chosen rock relatively compact but with good heft. Conditions are perfect, view clear and open, and it looks like it will be a steady downhill tumble onto a wide grassy field below. I drop the rock. It’s a giddy release, a sense of setting something in motion that takes on a life of its own, a little like parenting but without the emotional investment. I watch my rock speed ahead, then meander a bit, pick up a spurt of velocity, spray a few sandstone pebbles into the air, and finally roll to a stop in the distance. The day is bright, we’re being silly, and it’s fun.  

Christmas Eve With Monte

 It’s a bright and beautiful Christmas Eve and I have nothing at all to complain about, but I’ve been feeling sorry for myself. Missing my daughter, that’s the main problem. We just saw her a couple of weeks ago in New York, but now she is back in England, and it is our second Christmas without her, and it just doesn’t feel right. We talked on the telephone, me standing in a sunlit room looking out onto green hills, she in a white winter faraway, and I whined a bit and told her it didn’t feel like Christmas without her. I’ve been resenting all this distance lately, and not keeping that resentment to myself. I guess my sense of having been abandoned is exacerbated by the season, but I have to admit I am the sort of person who pretty much says out loud whatever I am feeling. Finally Monte pointed out that I was beginning to sound like a bitter old woman. Ouch.  

But he was right, as usual. I need to consider the possibility that telling someone how sad you are without them may actually dampen their spirits a bit, and does not necessarily inspire them to return to you any sooner. Despite its being an age-old technique in my own family, guilt is not an effective motivator in the long run. I need, in short, to bite my tongue, be grateful for all I have, and enjoy our quiet little version of Christmas.

As I type this, I can see Monte outside on the deck repairing the window screens. This is his idea of relaxing. He takes on a project, some sort of puttering or fixing that has needed doing, and it is often something that’s been in the back of his mind for awhile, and now he has the time for it, and he’s happy.  He has also set me up with a brand new laptop, put air in my bike tires, and been my constant and indulgent companion, but when I’m whining about our daughter-less house, it sounds like I don’t appreciate him. That’s another thing he pointed out to me today. But oh, I do appreciate him, and maybe I need to say that out loud, since I leave so little else unspoken. This post, in fact, is dedicated to Monte, without whom I really would be a bitter old woman.

Monte, you see, is not just my husband; he’s like my life coach. He’s probably got a thousand IQ points on me and a sort of grounding in reality that I have always lacked, and he helps keep me centered and functional. Let’s just consider the last couple of hours – shall we? Here are a few Christmas Eve sound bites from Monte:

“Stop complaining. Look at everything that is good in your life, and be grateful.” We already discussed these.

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Related to the above.

“Try a light touch, not a tap.” This has to do with the touch pad on my new computer, but it somehow seems applicable to other situations.

“Don’t be braking all the time. Go with it. Let it run.” This is something he shouted out to me as we descended a hill on our bicycles this morning. He has been telling me this for years, which gives you some idea of the kind of cyclist I am.  Again, it seems applicable to a lot of situations. File with “Don’t fight forces; use them,” which is another suggestion he frequently offers.

“It’s nice to be nostalgic, but it’s far more interesting to pay attention to what young people are doing now. Take the music, for example. A lot of it is better than what we were listening to.” This gives you some idea how Monte avoids becoming an obsolete old fart. At the same time, he is very big on mentoring, and passing the torch, and gracefully getting out of the way for the new to have their turn.

“There are only two means of achieving change: one is violent revolution and the other is tedious, painful compromise. That’s what’s happening now with health care reform; you’re watching the sausage being made.” Now we’re getting into politics, policy, and democratic governance, which is Monte’s bread and butter.

“Some good is better than no good. Politics is the art of the possible.” Related to the above, but speaking of other issues.

“Idealism without leverage is meaningless.” We were talking about how quickly even the Left has turned on President Obama because of his pragmatism. Monte respects the fact that Obama sees complexity and seeks compromise, that his idealism is tempered by real world facts.

“The two great enemies of democracy are extremism and apathy.” Related to the above.

“People need to learn their own lessons in their own way. Including our daughter.”  But it’s nice to have someone smart around to help.

“We can just stay home and listen to Handel’s Messiah. You know that always works.” He said this because I was longing for the real spirit of Christmas and thinking about driving into the Valley to go to church with my friend later tonight.

Now the sky is glowing as dusk draws near, and Monte just went to get our mail, and the house is suddenly so quiet it is ringing. I’m listening to it now: It’s a thin ringing, a glassy sound, the electronic hum of a light fixture perhaps, and barely discernible, but to me it is the sparkling tintinnabulation of tiny bells beneath the everyday. There is another layer to the world. And it’s Christmas Eve. I am nothing but blessed. And I’m alone only briefly.

Now...I'm making pizza and listening to Handel's Messiah. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Christmas Corsage

 

 Back in the days of my Brooklyn childhood, women often wore Christmas corsages pinned to their coats during the holiday season. These might consist of a cluster of ribbon and sprig of pine, with a fake poinsettia, plastic candy cane, or some other seasonal artifact at the center, and lots of glitter and sparkle. I remember admiring the choices in a store window one gray December day, just as I would admire, come February, the beautiful heart-shaped boxes of Valentine’s Day chocolate on display, burgundy velvet or adorned with red roses. I just had a weakness for this stuff. I was a skinny, scrappy girl with bruises on her knees, but I had decidedly frilly and fem sensibilities. I imagined it would be a great pleasure to sport a Christmas corsage on the lapel of my winter coat, and now I lingered at the storefront peering through the glass, wondering which one I would choose if I had the means for such a luxury. My mother was with me, but this was only a looking game, and I never would have asked or expected her to buy one. I haven’t the foggiest notion what such a corsage would have cost back then, in the 1950s, but even if they were only a dollar, that would have been too extravagant.

Then the proprietor of the shop stepped out onto the street with two corsages in his hand. I cannot recall his face, only his kindly demeanor. He was an older man, balding perhaps. He handed me a corsage and said, “Little girls should have corsages for the holiday.” Then, turning to give one to my mother, he said, “And pretty ladies too.” He wished us a good day and a Merry Christmas, gave a courtly sort of bow, and retreated back into the shop. I spent the rest of the day feeling giddy, staring down at my corsage, touching its ribbons and tiny plastic charms, believing that I was now part of the festive pageantry and procession of Christmas in the city.

And I never forgot that man’s gesture. I never knew his name, barely even managed to sputter out a thank you, but more than fifty years later, I am thinking of him. He achieved a kind of immortality that day, and whoever he was, he is famous to me. He helped the child that was me to perceive the world as a place that could be gentle and unexpectedly indulgent, and I have tried many times to do the same for others. It's easy to feel depressed and overwhelmed when considering the state of the world, but maybe the idea is to think a little smaller sometimes. I like the credo expressed by Naomi Shihab Nye's in her poem Famous, which concludes with these words:  

I want to be famous to shuffling men

who smile while crossing streets,

sticky children in grocery lines,

famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,

but because it never forgot what it could do.

So here's to small kindnesses and frivolous gallantries, to smiles returned or offered first, to ephemeral and essential ice cream kinds of giving. 

Last week the Geminid meteor showers were at their peak. There was not much moon, the night was clear, and a spellbinding show was predicted. In the old days, I might have bundled up and camped out on the deck, but this time I just forced myself awake and lay down on the living room floor for a few minutes, looking up and out the window to the sky, not a very committed stargazer. But even from my awkward vantage point on the floor, I actually caught a couple of meteors. (“Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket…”) I tucked these into my heart and went back to bed.

I have decided to approach Christmas the same way. I won’t get into a big frenzy about it, but I think I need to at least force myself awake and pay attention to whatever good is still going on. Even a flash or occasional glimmer will be welcome. 

And I will try to pin a metaphorical Christmas corsage on a bleak lapel here and there. 

Rain Walk

 

Today was our first rain walk of the season. The hard steady rain of yesterday had abated and instead we had what weathermen would call “showers, heavy at times” with windows of sunlight between and concurrently. 

 My very first thought, of course, was that we must go outside and look for rainbows. Jeanne and Pi joined us and we strolled down the muddy road towards the beach. Sometimes the sea was a gash of shimmering silver, the sky shifting tones of gray-white light.  

But then the sun would appear, shining through the droplets of rain, and all the trees were strewn with diamonds and every blade of new grass sparkled, and big white clouds sat squat upon the hilltops.  

Now and then we encountered neighbors and friends for a sundry assortment of roadside conversations about whether the grass will sprout, when the rain would stop, and if the green will stay. We talked about new fences and fat dogs, needing a shale base and competing for Ruffino, painful changes and reassuring cycles. 

Monte and I hadn’t worn our rubber boots, so Jeanne had the important job of stomping out a channel to divert the water that was pooling in one place. Pi, meanwhile, was sniffing out some hidden critter in the grass. His concentration was impressive.

 We were walking towards the sun and towards the sea, but we were bound to see a rainbow; not a one of us doubted that we would. And when a sudden shower swept through with a swoosh and sound like tambourines, we turned to look through its crystal-beaded curtain. And there it was: a gauzy rainbow arched in bright bands that echoed the curve of the hill and seemed to end at our house. 

No pot of gold awaited us back home, but there was good music. And lunch.

Breathing

 

My friend and I met for coffee on Sunday morning in a crowded shop in the West Village. Soundtrack: Nick Drake, the clatter of dishes, the din of conversation. My friend had endured a great loss in this year, but she spoke about it calmly. “I was with her at the moment she died,” she told me. “I had placed my hand upon her mouth to see if she was breathing, and I literally felt her last breath. It was just a puff, right into my palm. Just a little puff of air.”

We stepped outside and were startled by the cold. It seemed that winter had suddenly arrived, and the only way to walk was to hurry along, and so my friend and I went our separate ways. I buttoned the top buttons of my coat, wrapped my scarf more tightly around my neck, and  saw my own frosty breath in front of me as I headed back towards the apartment where Monte and I were staying. 

There were Christmas trees for sale on the corner. I closed my eyes and inhaled their evergreen fragrance, imagining snowy mountains, sleigh rides and carolers, midnights clear. I had been kvetching all week about the intrusion of pseudo-Christmas everywhere, the insincere strains of Yuletide muzak, the relentless push to spend money. But the smell of Christmas trees revived something pure and hopeful in me; it felt good to pause among them. I breathed deeply, and I sighed.

The day before, Monte and I had disembarked from a subway train and bypassed a crowded escalator, choosing to climb a mountain of stairs up to the street. There were stairs, then more stairs, and we strode up briskly, flight after flight, a bit of the old competitiveness kicking in, an exhausting acceleration to the top.  My heart was pounding by the time I reached the sidewalk, and I gulped the cold air, and felt pleased with myself for no reason.

We had come to New York to see our daughter, and that would be our Christmas. I had been worried about it, though: How are they affording this? What are her plans and her purpose? Where will she be staying? Only days before her scheduled departure, I’d seen tweets from her and her boyfriend, asking whether anyone had a place in New York where they could crash. I was appalled; I offered unwelcome advice; I lay awake in the night fretting. But someone did have a place for them –– a rather nice place, as it turns out, and the plans unfolded as they went along, and it all seemed satisfactory. I had forgotten an important fact: the young live in another world. They have their own language, their own code, their own methodologies. They breathe a different air. 

And that daughter? She looked beautiful and happy. Step back, let go, exhale, said the universe.

 

Glimpses of Magic

 

"To inhabit was the most natural joy when I was still living inside; all was garden and I had not lost the way in."  Helene Cixous

This afternoon I witnessed the precise moment of enchantment when the rain became snow. I had taken shelter in the doorway of a city shop, and I was watching the sky as droplets thickened and whitened and turned to feathered flakes, and it was magic.

Soon enough the advent of sleety snow and chilly temperatures meant nothing more than being wet and cold and miserable, but there was that window of wonder while it lasted, and a little bit is clinging to me still.

Yesterday I revisited scenes from my childhood. First we went to Prospect Park, a place where my siblings and I spent many happy hours. It’s funny how familiar little details were: the hexagonal pavers of the pathways, the sturdy stone fountains, the bridge beneath which we always paused to sing and shout and hear our voices echo. 

 There was the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch at Grand Army Plaza –– Brooklyn’s own Arc de Triomphe -- and what we used to call The Pancake Building at 47 Plaza Street West -- Brooklyn’s own Flatiron Building -- designed by Sicilian architect Rosario Candela. There was the marble gazebo with its beautiful tiled ceiling, and within the park, green pastures and winding tree-lined paths. It was nice to see my daughter there in the place that was once so dear to me.

In the southeast corner of the Plaza is the Brooklyn Public Library, a building shaped like an open book, with sculpted gold figures on either side and these beautiful words above the entrance: Here are enshrined the longing of great hearts and noble things that tower above the tide, the magic word that winged wonder starts, the garnered wisdom that never dies. 

A block or so further, we passed the Botanical Garden, one of my favorite places anywhere, and then, the Brooklyn Museum, where my sister and I used to love looking at the rooms from different historical periods in which we would imagine ourselves living. (On this day we went to an exhibition called Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic Exhibit, 1955 to the Present, worth a ponder.)

We walked back to the apartment in Park Slope where Miranda was staying, past elegant old buildings, lamplight shining from windows, a glimpse of a woman reading in a room, a sense of something quietly wondrous in the gathering dusk. I was remembering my brother and sister, aching for days that had happened long ago but here...when all was garden, and I had not lost the way in.  But I loved coming back with Monte and Miranda. 

And I still recognize magic: it comes in flickers and cannot be paused; it is a sweetness that leads into longing, and there you are left… but a sweetness.  

 

New York, Entry

 

We take a red-eye flight from LAX and suddenly we're in New York, and I can't quite get my brain around it. A surprisingly pleasant taxi driver deposits us in front of the 7^th Avenue apartment building where an old friend of mine has said we could leave our bags until our own rental is available for check-in. I knew this friend back in the Syracuse days –– thirty years ago –– and have seldom seen her since. She’s at work now, and it’s touching to me how readily she has left us her key and entrusted us to enter her private space in her absence. There’s something humbling about having someone else’s key in hand. 

Ten flights above the busy street, her place is very still, except for a little dog who yelps until we crouch down to her level and reassure her. My friend is recently widowed, but there are two toothbrushes in the glass at the bathroom sink, and two robes on a hook, and everywhere the sense that both of them still live here, and it seems sad, but that’s only because I know the back-story.  My friend gets up at 5 each morning to swim at the Y a few blocks away, and her wet swimsuit and cap are hanging in the shower, and somehow that feels poignant to me also. There is an intimacy about being here, and the impulse to walk carefully and speak in whispers. Our plan is to leave our bags and be on our way, but I have that punchy, disoriented red eye feeling and decide to lean back on the couch for a few minutes and before you know it I am soundly asleep with a pair of cats who have leapt up to join me, while Monte sits in a chair reading and planning with his iPhone.  

 It’s nearly ten when we set out to take the subway to Brooklyn to meet up with Miranda. We stop for coffee and tea, and there's a bowl of bananas on the counter, but in a classic case of ‘yes, we have no bananas’, the counter guy says we cannot buy one, no how, no way; they are all he has and simply not for sale. We order the oatmeal, which sounds very good, but alas, there is no more. A bagel suffices. It's New York, after all. 

We enter the subway, where a series of hand-lettered signs announce that we are about to come upon a poet: N.Y. PUBLISHED POET SHARES HIS POEMS. YOUR CHANCE TO HEAR PUBLISHED POET READ HIS WORK. The poet, as it turns, out is a thin black man sitting on the ground with sheets of paper all around him, not an audience in sight. We, too, hurry by; chance missed. (And this Published Essay-Writer wishes she had at least left a dollar and a nod of respect.)

We emerge into the sunlight of Park Slope on a winter morning, red brick buildings with decorative cornices, stately old brownstones, hints of holiday here and there.  Miranda and Xander have also had the humbling experience of being handed a key; they are staying in the new and nearly empty apartment of a generous friend.  Two mattresses are lined up parallel on the floor, with two large suitcases nearby, open and spilling over; there are tweets being tweeted and blogs being blogged and cell phones ringing and plans in the air, and despite the echoing vacancy of the apartment it is filled with bustle and energy and optimism.  

 The kids accompany us back to Manhattan and we walk to the West Village to meet the woman with the key to the studio apartment Monte and I have rented. For this particular key, we hand over a big wad of cash, then check in and deem the apartment satisfactory. There's a curious assortment of kitchen things, a bleak attempt at decor, a view from the window of men in hard hats doing brick work from scaffolding attached to a building across an alley. But it has all the conveniences, home base for four nights. 

We decide to go exploring afterwards. The wind has kicked up, but it's surprisingly mild and pleasant outside. We walk over to the elevated High Line Park in the old the meatpacking district, climb the steps, and wander. Native grasses are growing between the old freight train tracks and through artfully slotted concrete slabs and sidewalks. There are overlooks onto former warehouses and industrial structures and modern glassy buildings that glow in the light of the rapidly setting sun and the city beginning its nightly twinkle. We descend onto cobblestone streets and pass shops lit up for Christmas; we walk through the Chelsea marketplace and enter the Wired store, oh brave new world, abuzz with glitzy goods and edgy-techy-digital electronic things, ultimately baffling.

In the evening, we meet up with Ben, the third member of the 20-something trio, and his parents, who have just flown in from London, and we sit at a long table in a noisy downtown restaurant, and we feel included and happy to be with our kids, and Ben’s mother says, “Aren’t we lucky to have this connection with their generation?” and we know we are obsolete, but for the moment, we feel pleased, we feel sated, we feel grateful. 

Keep an Eye Out for Green-Winged Redheads

 

Sue and James had come to visit for our day-after Thanksgiving celebration of thanks. The focus was on good friends, and beautiful surroundings, and all of us still hanging in there. Saturday morning was bright and windy and we decided to drive down to the beach at Bullito for a walk.

There were white wisps of cloud in a very blue sky, and the surf was big and wild. Here and there guys sat on the hoods of parked vehicles looking out to sea with that hypnotized gaze that they get, almost drooling. The wind rushed through the trees and scattered bits of leaves through the air like confetti.

“Interesting red parrot,” said James from the back seat.

“What exactly did YOU have with coffee this morning?” we said, along with other expressions of skepticism, sarcasm, and silliness.  

“Well, maybe it was my imagination,” said James, “but I’m pretty sure I saw a bright red parrot up in the tree back there.”

We decided to turn the car around and check it out, and I am so glad we did.

Because there he was, comfortably perched on the pinnacle branches of a tall eucalyptus tree, and as you can see, I made sure I did not leave the scene without photographic evidence. 

 I googled him later, of course. This is a green-winged macaw, and he is WAY out of his native habitat...which is mostly South America, where he and his relatives live in tropical jungles, savannas, and mangroves. They can fly at speeds up to 35 miles an hour; who'd have imagined?

Intelligent and feisty, macaws like this are prized as pets and can cost about $1500 in the store. They are not for the "casual owner", says one website; they require attention and interaction. Perhaps someone is searching for this one right now.

He might make it out here – there are fruits, and nuts, and potential shelter. But I don’t know; it’s far from tropical, and there are some pretty aggressive predators. I read that the macaw’s average life span is 60 years, but they have been known to live well past 80, and I hope this one gets to do that.

It's hard to explain how much tenderness he engendered in the course of our fleeting encounter –– his comical incongruity, his flashy colors and outrageous beauty, the absurdity and wonder of him.

He was gone two hours later when we went by again.

I conclude with James’ sage advice, applicable for a lifetime: “Keep an eye out for green-winged red- heads, wherever you go.”

 

Wally? Wally Wrote Poems?

 I talked about Wallace Stevens in the blog before last, and I’m finally getting back to him now – can’t leave someone so important dangling like that! I was drawn to Stevens’ poems even when I first read them back in high school, and revisiting his work all these many years later has been a wonderful journey through a lush and opulent landscape, even if I don’t always “get” them at the level of sophistication of the guy who wrote that article in the New York Review of Books.

But I have received some advice from another fine poet, Dan Gerber, who wrote this to me in an email: “Don't worry about ‘understanding’ Stevens.  Just let yourself be grasped by his work. [As in the words of Rilke:] ‘And so we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.’”

Dan suggested that I start with Peter Quince at the Clavier, and so I did: Music is feeling then, not sound.

As in the music that is poetry, I suppose. Feeling, then, not literal meaning only –– although the words of the poems sure do make some mellifluous sound, and they do carry significance and specificity; do they not? In any case, who would not be grasped by the compelling lure of lines like these:

In the green water, clear and warm,

Susanna lay,

She searched

The touch of springs,

And found

Concealed imaginings.

She sighed,

For so much melody.

 

Upon the bank, she stood

In the cool

Of spent emotions,

She felt, among the leaves,

The dew

Of old devotions.

 

The dew of old devotions. Ah yes, I know it well.

And how about Sunday Morning, where:

Complacencies of the peignoir and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

 

I guess I don’t have to fully understand it to experience its deliciousness, but it is clearly about a woman spending Sunday not in church, but in the secular and physical world, a woman who finds comfort in the sun and “pungent fruit and bright, green wings”, and cherishes the balm and beauty of earth. And why not? Are these not things to be cherished like "the thought of heaven"? 

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measures destined for her soul.

 

Such gorgeous lines, such sensory delight. And if the guy had written this one poem only (which in its entirety consists of eight sumptuous stanzas), it would have been enough, but he was prolific -- and yet quite busy in other realms too. A graduate of Harvard followed by New York Law School, he practiced general law for a few years and then began an illustrious career with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, becoming the firm’s vice-president in 1934, all the while creating poetry. I picture him retiring to his study late in the day to write poems in a notebook at a great mahogany desk, pausing now and then to contemplate a still life painting on the wall or the way the light of late afternoon spills into the room. From all accounts, his marriage was a lonely one, and although he enjoyed his sojourns to Key West, the Harvard-Yale football games, and a friendly rapport with his colleagues, he wasn’t exactly sharing poetry with his buddies at cocktail parties.

In fact, Dan Gerber told me a story told to him by a former professor and old friend of his named Clyde who had actually attended Wallace Stevens’ funeral. Apparently, when Clyde mentioned Stevens' poetry at the funeral, Stevens’ colleagues expressed surprise and bewilderment. “Wally?” one of them exclaimed. “Wally wrote poems?”

It’s an anecdote that is stunning in its implications about how little we can know about someone we see every day. Or in what it says of the vast complexity of the human spirit and its ability to compartmentalize.  Or maybe it’s just revealing of Wallace Stevens, for whom poetry, or any work of art, existed in itself and for itself, a moment stopped and rescued from all the chaos, a leap from the mundane and sordid into the realm of imagination or a savoring of that green corn gleaming. Perhaps in his view no further justification, discussion, or accolades were needed.

Even with provocative titles such as The Motive for Metaphor or The Idea of Order at Key West, which suggest all sorts of philosophical and intellectual explorations, or tangible visuals such as Two Figures in Dense Violet Light and Sea Surface Full of Clouds, the subject of the poem, according to Stevens, is..ta-da!...poetry. And I think I'd rather read the poems than read about them, but I like this wrap-up quote from Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) a poet from my own little hometown of Brooklyn, New York. He wrote: “Confronted by the need of conclusion or summary, one is impressed by how much more there is always to say about Stevens. No matter what aspect one begins, one has a sense of inexhaustible richness of significance and connection.”

As for me, to quote Wally once more:

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes.

 

The Lost Art of Finding Happiness

I wasn't done with Wallace Stevens, and I'll get back to him, but right now I am sitting in a coffee place in Orange County, and I'm using this blog to get myself centered. (The act of writing seems to help.) Those of you who know me, either in real life or through the blog, are aware that when I come down here it's primarily to look in on my elderly mother, so it's not what I would categorize as fun, but I step out of my element and deal with it because it's the right thing to do, whether I like it or not.

Sometimes it has its rewards. My mother may be wacky, and the past we share is a painful one, but I feel very welcome and appreciated when I show up at her room. She knows who I am, introduces me to everyone (again and again), and is incredibly grateful just to go for a drive and an ice cream. Lately she has even been wearing her hearing aid and claiming that her hearing has been miraculously restored, which I suppose is true. 

That was the good news. The bad news is that she lost her lower dentures. Again. 

(How do you lose your teeth? That's what I want to know.) 

Her roommate, Ann, said they have looked in all the socks. (The socks?)

"We looked everywhere," Ann explains. "She thought she stuck them in her pocket, but she was wearing her green pants, and they don't have a pocket. We looked in her socks, where she sometimes sticks things. We looked in the drawers. They were wrapped in tissue; they might have been thrown away. She was afraid to tell you."

Well, she didn't need to tell me. It isn't that hard to notice. But maybe she vaguely remembers that we just replaced them a few months ago and shouldn't have to go through this again. The part she doesn't realize is that it cost $800 to do so, and that was her emergency cushion money. 

I promptly called the dentist and asked if she could have them replicated at a discount price. No dice.

"It's okay," says my mother. "I have pretty hard gums."

"She can eat mashed potatoes," says Ann. "She's not gonna starve. The food's lousy here anyway." 

Meanwhile, my mother is fretting because she had a plastic box of pens and pencils that seems to have disappeared. She is convinced that someone stole them until I open the drawer of her nightstand and, lo and behold, there they are. She's delighted.

This in turn gives me hope that the dentures may yet turn up.

"Oh, yes," says my mother. "I lost them right here in this room. Not outside. They're in here somewhere."

So we'll give that little issue a bit more time. 

We're headed out for ice cream, no teeth necessary. On the way out, we notice that the door to Emma's room is open, and we pause to say hello. Doris, one of the other residents, is visiting, sitting on the bed. She is sick, and clearly depressed, as evidenced by a doleful, dyspeptic expression and the omission of her usual wig, and Emma, who looks about 70 but is 93 years old, is trying to make cheery conversation from an adjacent rocking chair. I've heard that Emma used to write poetry, and I ask her about this. She immediately recites from memory a poem about the hands of the clock and our numbered days. It's quite good. 

"You're like a genius," declares Doris, brightening a bit. "Such intelligence. Who was your father? You got that brainy DNA from someone."

Encouraged by our appreciative response, Emma grabs onto her cane, hoists herself up, and goes over to the dresser, where she pulls out a stack of typed pages and a small photo album. Her most famous poem was written in 1969, and it's about the astronauts landing on the moon. I read it out loud.

"I sent that poem to the President," Emma tells us proudly, "and he sent me a certificate. And I sent it to all three astronauts, too, and each one of them wrote back. That poem made the rounds." 

It's interesting how some people draw in others and become a kind of hearth. Emma is one of those. She lights up the place, even at 93. For a moment I almost feel like I'm back in college sitting with a couple of girlfriends in a dorm room. It turns out Emma was a dancer in her youth, and the album I am holding is filled with pictures of her in her various dancing costumes, from a leggy pose with top hat and cane, to a Carmen Miranda type of get-up complete with fruit on her head. My mother is fascinated. "You were in a chorus line?" she asks, impressed.

"Yes I was," says Emma. "I did all of that and strip dancing too."

 "You were a stripper?" says Doris, with a mixture of awe and disapproval, mostly awe.  

"I was," says Emma. "Oh, I loved to dance! And I loved to write poems. But I've had a couple of strokes and can't do either one now. I don't know why God has seen fit to keep me around this long. I don't know why I'm still here."

"Because you make us happy," Doris responds, and I have to agree that she does. 

Now it's time for ice cream.