Still Amazed

Write or Wrong, Here I Am

 

The problem with blogging – or writing in general - is that the less you do of it the harder it is to get back into it. That isn’t for lack of material. It’s because so much has cumulatively happened and so many thoughts have raced, uncaught, across your mind that just knowing how to begin becomes overwhelming. My oft-quoted hero, William Stafford, is helpful to me here. He said, “I don’t experience those times when I don’t have anything to write because I write whatever it is that occurs to me. Some writers experience difficulty that may be because their standards are too high. They feel they can’t write well enough. But I write anyway. I think that activity is important.” I appreciate the reminder, Bill, and I am going to resume the activity more consistently, even if it means lowering my standards. Rather than fret about subject matter or skill, and rather than brood about all the things I would have wanted to mention but which have since fled from memory, I am going to dive right in here and write. 

I get discouraged about this blog sometimes. I know I have a faithful group of discerning readers, but I am aware that they are relatively small in number; this is not one of those blogs that generate thousands of daily hits, garner strings of comments, get linked and circulated throughout the blogosphere. It's not hip, newsy, or even particularly entertaining most of the time. Do I care? Not really. Well, sometimes maybe a little, but only when I compare myself to others. I don't even know why: I’m not writing this blog for attention or publicity, and I assure you I have nothing at all to sell. My little book of essays  – anyone remember that? – is gone, all 200 of them sold or given away, and I’m done with that. The book I wrote for teachers, which was published by a prestigious academic press five years ago, sold about 9 copies last year, and I know that’s not a very good number, although I still believe it is a very good book. So I am not exactly a "successful" author, and I guess now and then I have to remind myself why I write, or simply observe how blank and flat and un-alive I feel when I am not writing. As has lately been the case…

I need to write because…writing helps me sort out the things that happen (or don’t happen); because it allows me to articulate my pain or my joy; because it gives me a way to communicate something of myself to others, even if they are few, who care to read the words; and because it enables me to eke out more from the experience of being here. Well-meaning friends often ask me, “What are you working on now?” fully expecting that I have a book or at least a substantial article in progress. If I do not, which is certainly the case right now, and may forevermore be the case for all I know, I feel as though I have no credibility as a writer, and I am embarrassed to say, “Only the occasional blog post.”  Or emails to friends. Or journal entries and notes to myself. I just happen to enjoy and understand experience more fully if I am concurrently documenting it in some way; this seems counter-intuitive to enlightenment, but so be it. 

In any case, I think it’s time for me to stop being apologetic and embarrassed about it, and just continue to do it, and with less restraint, less searching for justification, less yearning for external validation. My friend Jacquie Phelan  recently sent me this quote from the brilliant Kay Ryan, current Poet Laureate of the U.S, and it is going to be my new mantra: “You really shouldn’t be living for a reaction all the time.”

Right on, Kay Ryan. Good advice for me. And I think it is equally important to stop comparing myself to others. I tend to choose geniuses and inevitably walk away immobilized by the awareness of my own mediocrity. But please allow me to quote one more literary giant, Orhan Pamuk, because this is a sentiment I share:  “I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.”  

It’s as simple as that. I am happier when I am writing, and if that writing takes the form of a scribble of words that amount to naught, or a small blog post that might connect to a few hearts or heads out there, well, then, no need to apologize anymore. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because my dear friend Vickie Gill and I are planning a class we will be co-teaching this summer. It’s called “The Teacher As A Writer and the Teaching of Writing” and we were brainstorming about what we hoped the teachers who enroll in this class would take away from it. One of the most important things, we decided, would be that they would understand the importance, or even the necessity, of writing in their own lives. Certainly the course, as is the South Coast Writing Project with which we are affiliated, is predicated on the premise that you cannot effectively teach writing if you never write. But for so many people, writing is painfully difficult and as appealing as medicine. I am hoping to help others see that writing in a personal way can be healing, surprising, satisfying. But I’d be a hypocrite if I tried to teach this class when I consistently devalue my own writing. 

I need to go outside right now. But I’m coming back. And that’s a dangerous thing to declare out in the open. 

Saturday's Poem: Little Rooms

 

This one is by William Stafford, the friend I never met, whose quiet words have been a tonic and comfort for many years. I have written about him in previous posts and will no doubt refer to him again and again. To be honest, I could turn this Saturday routine into a platform for him alone; I would still have hundreds of beautiful choices -- and you, dear readers, would never be disappointed. 

Mr. Stafford's voice is humble, almost self-effacing at times; he was a gentle sort of mystic, a fervent pacifist, and a friend of the earth. His messages are as intimate as whispers, and he has a way of counseling your heart and recharging your spirit, but at the same time he somehow possesses a solitary, stand-alone countenance. He is a man who needed to step outside sometimes, into rooms "apart from the others", to look at the moon or a mountain, contemplate the creek or some small wild creature, and listen to the wind or to the silence when it ceased. 

Does it sound as though I knew him? I guess I feel as though I did -- as though I do -- at least in the way that counts. In his poetry, he captured the important things he noticed, and the moments he experienced, and he passed these along to his readers in a way that feels quite personal. Time, he says, was a gift going by, and he bequeaths it here to us. He refers to his life as "this brief spell of nothing that was mine" but he lets us understand that it is also everything.

LITTLE ROOMS    by William Stafford

I rock high in the oak - secure, big branches -

at home while darkness comes. It gets lonely up here

as lights needle forth below, through airy space.

Tinkling dishwashing noises drift up, and a faint

smooth gush of air through leaves, cool evening

moving out over the earth. Our town leans farther

away, and I ride through the arch toward midnight,

holding on, listening, hearing deep roots grow.

There are rooms in a life, apart from the others, rich

with whatever happens, a glimpse of moon, a breeze.

You who come years from now to this brief spell 

of nothing that was mine: the open, slow passing

of time was a gift going by. I have put my hand out

on the mane of the wind, like this, to give it to you.

The Things We Fear

My head is still filled with a dream I had last night in which I encountered a pair of lions in Sacate Canyon. Mountain lions do indeed live around here, though I have yet to glimpse one. I used to worry about the possibility of encountering one while riding my bike or walking alone in the backcountry, but after more than twenty years it’s never happened, and I don’t give it as much thought anymore.

In my dream, however, the lions I saw were not locals but African lions, including one large and sinewy animal with a full mane who looked like Aslan but without the kindly vibe. He was accompanied by an equally powerful looking lioness, and what these two were doing loitering near the creek was a mystery to me, but I froze in fear and tried not to disturb them.

You know how dreams include all these bizarre and disparate elements that don’t make any sense?  Well, somehow these two lions morphed into humans, but that did not even slightly mitigate my sense of vulnerability. I crouched in the brush, close to the ground, and as the two lion-humans foraged around, one of them, now a burly bearded fellow in a red jacket, unknowingly placed his paw-foot on my back, and I felt its claws digging into me but I tried to remain still despite my pain and terror.

And the funny thing was that I was both brave and afraid all in the same moment, both panicky and clear-headed. And when the lion people noticed me, I rose and stood as tall as I could and backed away slowly, then claimed the familiar path through the canyon leading back to my house. The dream proceeded in its crazy-quilt way and by morning I could not remember the specific developments that followed, only a sense of having survived.

So if the dream is a metaphor, I suppose it is about the things I fear, the inevitability of confronting them, and the way fear and bravery must, and do, coexist in each of us. I don’t know if it is because of the personal season of life I am in or the history that we are living -- and it’s probably both -- but everything seems intense lately, scary and challenging, fast-paced and unsettling. The economic and political landscapes are undergoing cataclysmic change. It seems our very culture is transforming itself, and frankly, some of this is good and over-due. (But it is easy to see how fear can manifest itself in hate; any Sarah Palin rally will do the trick). All in all, we are living in astonishing times, but we get to decide how we will face them. 

And I am grateful to be among those bearing witness, to be present and a part of it somehow.

Which reminds me of  a lyric from Joanna Newsom’s song about Bridges and Balloons: “O my love, it was a funny little thing, to be the ones to’ve seen.”  Nothing too grandiose there, just funny and little, such human and personal terms.  As one who has seen and is seeing, funny and little is how I often feel. 

The other day my dear friend Vickie said, “I’ve been concerned about you. How are you doing?”  It surprised me how much I bridled against being a source of concern, and I tried to find the right words for how I felt, words that would be both honest and reassuring. 

“No need to be concerned about me,” I said, “I’m just a little bit…baffled.” 

But funny and little is better yet.

Then again, funny and little doesn’t begin to get at the fact that I can also stand up to lions. And that the world still dazzles me every time I step outside. And that I am inspired by greatness even in its tiniest incarnations, and I've learned to live with loss and ambiguity, and people send me poems. 

And yes, I know very well the tremors of anxiety, but lately there’s been an old familiar flutter in my heart. I've been calling it hope. 

What you fear, said my hero William Stafford, will not go away:

It will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you.

That’s the world, and we all live there.

 

 

 

Changes

Yesterday there was a snakeskin on the ground, nearly transparent and slightly opalescent, in its own way beautiful and perfect. Hollow and seemingly brittle, it glistened faintly in the sunlight like a plastic necklace dropped and forgotten. Somehow its former inhabitant had slipped from its bounds, leaving it empty and intact, then slithered silently off into the next episode of its life.

And the much-maligned snake evokes very few associations that are positive, but I have to admit there was something enviable about the idea of shedding one’s skin and slinking away to a new incarnation and new possibilities.  I indulged the metaphor and applied it to many things: my life, the economy, the presidency. 

But the changes we face as a nation today are more than a superficial shedding of the outer layer. There is a sea change coming at us, whether we like it or not, and it will take great strength to guide it in ways that will ensure the viability of our future. We have heard the platitudes of denial, the regressive slogans, the cynical attempts to scare us, but we have learned that the best decisions are based on reason, not fear, and we are ready to move forward -- with Obama of course. 

The snake in the picture right now is a man named John Mc Cain, whose hunger for power trumps all else, whose misplaced priorities and recklessness of judgment were never more apparent than during the crisis days of the previous week, and whose bizarre choice of a running mate is insulting and disturbing to thinking people everywhere. At times during the debate Friday night I almost felt sorry for McCain, the kind of sorry you feel when someone is so removed from reality, wanting something so much but so desperately off key you feel a little sad for him. My sympathy dissolved, though, when I heard his message and watched his condescending attitude toward the brilliant man beside him, a man he seemed unable to look at and speak to directly, a man who tried to be respectful and even sought some common ground but always made the point. 

But I digress. I guess I am a little obsessed about this election.

And we may be at the end of something but we are at the cusp of something too. 

I remain hopeful.

-----

Paul Newman died. I don’t usually write about movie stars and celebrities, but wasn’t there something about him that was better than most? A couple of years ago my friend Kelley and I saw him and Joanne Woodward just a few rows away from us in the audience at a play in Manhattan. He looked thin and frail, but still handsome and dignified, and everyone knew darned well who he was, but there was an implicit understanding to give him and his wife their privacy and their space. After the play, people paused and let them pass and not a single person called their names or intruded in any way, and judging by the way he gazed straight ahead as he walked, I think he really appreciated it. He was obviously very loved and respected. Maybe it was partly because he had a sense of humor about himself. He didn’t let that movie star business go to his head but he generously used what benefits it yielded to do good things for the world.  So his passing makes me sad, even though I didn’t know him. Here’s to Paul Newman.

 -------

The following poem by William Stafford found its way to me on wings of its own and it somehow feels right to share it here.  It’s called Allegiances:

It is time for all the heroes to go home

if they have any, time for all of us common ones

to locate ourselves by the real things

we live by.

Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,

strange mountains and creatures have always lurked-

elves, goblins, trolls and spiders: - we

encounter them in dread and wonder,

But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,

found some limit by the waterfall,

a season changes, and we come back, changed

but safe, quiet, grateful.

Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills

while strange beliefs whine at the traveler's ears,

we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love

where we are, sturdy for common things.

 ---------

Here, in the backcountry, off the grid, nowhere in particular, the stars shone brightly in the night and now the morning fog is crawling up the canyon and to the east beyond the vaqueros the sky is beginning to blue.

I remain hopeful.

 

 

 

 

Writing Out the Bleaks

I am teaching a three-day workshop called teacher as writer. I have come over-prepared with a stack of hand-outs and  a head filled with tired old ideas and too many books of poetry. It is a class filled with women, younger than me, but not too young, women with teen-aged children and busy lives, women who do not share my self-indulgent compulsion to document everything but who are sitting here bravely writing. They are kind women; I do not feel judged. It is a gift to be here, really. I am a rusty door opening slowly.

Rather than driving home each night, I've been staying in a motel, a vintage 1960s sort of dump right on the main drag. The word that comes to mind is seedy. A big-bellied man in a tee-shirt is standing on the balcony smoking cigarettes, television noises are emanating from various rooms, and three intrepid guests are bobbing around at dusk in a hot tub adjacent to the parking lot. Now and then a train rumbles by and the whole place seems to vibrate. 

On the first night I wake up feeling as though I am suffocating. I cannot open the window and I cannot get the air conditioning on. Finally at 1 a.m. I call the front desk and ask for advice. A young woman in a ponytail appears within moments, and together we unjam the window. She shows me the secret of the air conditioner too, but I prefer real air, the kind that enters directly through the screened window. 

"Then keep those curtains sealed shut," she warns me as she leaves. "This place is filled with oil workers."

I lie in bed thinking about oil workers and wondering if there is something especially dangerous about them. 

When I fall asleep, I dream that I have been stopped by a cop for driving too slowly. 

"You're overcompensating," he says. 

"I'm only being cautious," I tell him. "Since when is cautiousness a crime?"

Back at the workshop, the women are becoming familiar to me. The points of their pencils lead to children in Oklahoma, Red Sox games at Fenway Park, a mother's sewing room, a pale blue nightgown, the house in summer of someone dearly loved. There are births and anniversaries, partings and discoveries, commonalities and differences. We feel safe here. We share our stories and we share a Granny apple covered with caramel and pecan, and we share a bit of laughter, and occasionally some tears. A couple of the women have felt intimidated about writing and are surprised to discover how much they have to say, and how much it needed saying, and how real their voices are.

Later I walk around the downtown area and poke into the thrift shops half-heartedly, but it's not nearly as much fun as it was with my girlfriends last month. I pause to look at a classic old theater and take a picture of the vintage neon sign above the Star Lounge. "You should come back tonight and see it lit up," says a friendly patron on her way in.  A homeless man pushes along a cart piled high with stuff. A store called Wild Planet has its doors open and the fragrance of patchouli oil rushes at me like the ghost of 1969. I buy Thai food to-go and carry it back to the motel. I am starting to feel in my element.

Still, there is a certain desolation when I shut the door behind me. 

Oh yes, I know this feeling. The Bleaks. 

I've been here before. 

It helps that there's a wi-fi connection, which in my mind is no small miracle. Cornelia has sent me a message from Berlin where she, too, is staying in a dump, and it makes me feel we're sort of traveling together. Vickie checks in. Even Naomi reminds me that we are all part of a larger family, especially when washed up at The Bleaks, for at any given moment a lot of folks are there.

In the morning a thin slice of light cuts through the narrow space between those drapes I should have sealed more tightly shut, and a man and a woman are bickering right outside my window, and I consider the possibility of scrambled eggs and bacon at the restaurant on the other side of the parking lot, just to say I ate there. I find I'm in a Rumi frame of mind: There is a community of the spirit/join it and feel the delight of walking in the noisy street/and being the noise. 

I am feeling contentedly common and unsung. 

I am just the sort of person who would stay in this motel. 

Back at the workshop, we talk about teaching and exchange ideas and email addresses, but mostly we write, and we see how writing quenches rather than depletes us, and we hope to give this secret to our students. 

On the board I leave a parting message, a poem by William Stafford (yeah, him again) called When I Met My Muse. It  concludes: 

"I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand. 

And I'm thinking that when it comes to riding out The Bleaks, I'm a rodeo star. 

The Season of Lavender in the Year of the Lizard

This morning I went for a walk with my neighbor Jeanne and we inadvertently startled a doe and a small spotted fawn. The doe darted up a hill and quickly vanished and the fawn ran directly towards me in all its fear and vulnerability, looking so tiny and new I wondered if this might have been its first day in the world. Equally startled, I jumped aside, feeling clumsy and intrusive. I hope mother and baby were quickly reunited. 

Back at Jeanne’s house, we paused to pick berries, thrashing through the lavender that borders her garden. (A bear appeared behind her house recently, perhaps drawn to those berries, or maybe to test the not-quite-ready apricots.) Then I rode my bike home along the oak-lined road accompanied by intermittent birdsong. The scent of lavender still clung to my hands. 

And that's the way it is sometimes.

Jeanne wrote about our canyon in an email recently: The other day I needed to explain to someone where I lived. All I could really say was that I lived a good safe distance beyond the end of the road. How could I begin to describe what this canyon really is?  Or how the fence line along the ocean disappears into the dusk at twilight, headlands blurring softly into the distance as I make my way home from town in the evening?

Beyond the threshold of fog and dusk, there is this universe. It is impossible to ignore the strangeness and beauty of the natural world here -- its weirdnesses and wonders assert themselves daily. Just yesterday I watched as a redtail hawk danced with the wind, a family of wild pigs traversed the hill from Coyote Canyon, and a lizard with streaks of iridescent blue on its underbelly scampered up the window screen, its miniature hands looking eerily humanoid. 

On the beach a small sea lion pup lay dead on the sand -- I counted twenty-seven turkey vultures gnawing at the carcass or hovering nearby. A string of pelicans soared above and dolphins dipped and spun in the shine of the sea, and once again I was overcome by a sense of amazement and humility.

No doubt sharing life with a dog taught me to pay closer attention, too. I am sure I listen a little lower to the ground now, aware of another stratum of existence, of squirrels and quail and insects buzzing, the constant drone of industrious life in the orchard, the wildness at the edge of things, that bold coyote strutting close to the house, the cattle converging by the hammock near the creek, the clamor of invisible beings passing through the brush. These are the wavelengths Terra tuned into, and I cannot begin to understand them, but they seem valid and worthy and infinitely complex. I approach life more respectfully now.

I am the visitor, after all.

Meanwhile the century plant -- which I have since learned is actually a type of yucca, sometimes called Our Lord's Candle, which makes a lot of sense -- continues its ascent after thirty dormant years, rising now above the roofline and dropping yellow blossoms. Supposedly it blooms only once and that once is happening now. There is something epic and miraculous about it. 

So I live in a state of astonishment, a little bit crazy no doubt, and becoming somewhat feral, but comforted and not alone.  

William Stafford (of course) said it far better than I ever could:

Now I know why people worship, carry around

magic emblems, wake up talking dreams

they teach to their children: the world speaks.

The world speaks everything to us.

It is our only friend. 

--------------

Maybe this whole post is just a thank you song. 

I don’t know why I was so lucky to have landed here, but I am grateful I am grateful I am grateful.

I Think We Should Keep Some of This

There is a man I never met who often brings me comfort in these anxious times. He is someone who awoke at 3 a.m. every morning for fifty years to write in his journal, creating 22,000 poems in the course of his lifetime and publishing 65 volumes of poetry and prose. He was a conscientious objector who worked in civilian public service camps during World War II. He later taught at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, traveling extensively to read his poems and teach his craft to others. His name was William Stafford.

I once mentioned to the writer Gretel Ehrlich that I had a special affection for William Stafford and over time had come to think of him as my friend. It turned out that she had actually known him, and that many years ago they had led some sort of writing and poetry sessions together in towns and classrooms in the remote rural West. She recalled that they were scheduled one evening to convene a group at the library in a particularly lonely outpost someplace, and not a soul showed up. “What do we do now?” she asked. “We write,” replied Stafford. And they sat at a table and wrote.

I love that story, and I hope I’m remembering it accurately, but it seems consistent with the man I imagine Stafford to have been. James Dickey, who perhaps met him also, described his natural mode of speech as ‘a gentle, mystical, half-mocking and highly personal daydreaming about the western United States’. Somehow that resonates with me, and the landscape is familiar.

"Is This Feeling About the West Real?" Stafford asks in the title of one of his poems, and then answers:

"All their lives out here some people know
they live in a hemisphere beyond what Columbus discovered.
These people look out and wonder: Is it magic? Is it
the oceans of the Pacific? You can't
walk through it without wrapping a new
piece of time around you, a readiness for a meadowlark,
that brinkmanship a dawn can carry for lucky people
all through the day.

But if you don't get it, this bonus, you can
go home full of denial, and live out your years.
Great waves can pass unnoticed outside your door;
stars can pound silently on the roof: your teakettle
and cosy life inside can deny everything outside-
whole mountain ranges, history, the holocaust,
sainthood, Crazy Horse.

Listen - something else hovers out here, not
color, not outlines or depth when air
relieves distance by hazing far mountains,
but some total feeling or other world
almost coming forward, like when a bell sounds
and then leaves a whole countryside waiting."

It wasn't my intention to type out that entire poem, but it's awfully hard to chop these up and amputate choice bits for display. I'll try to be more restrained for the remainder of this post lest it turn into a miniature William Stafford anthology. In any case, I did not discover Stafford until I myself lived Out West, and I have come to associate him with this geography in the same way I connect Wallace Stegner to it.

And yet Stafford speaks clearly in any context. He is an observant and understanding soul who quietly tells me what I didn't even know I needed to hear.

When I am afraid, he is honest with me:

"What you fear will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That's the world, and we all live there."

But he reminds me to hold on to truth and navigate with integrity:

"There is a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change."

and

"Nothing you can do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread."

Like me, he lives with his share of old grief; it bows in its corner and hides in the dark, but it’s there. And yet he knows, too that despite the hollow of pain:

"Things That Hurt Me -
Turn into pearls.
First my tongue turns them over and over.
They have an edge that lacerates
and then brings out a coating.
They begin to shine."

If I'm discouraged over rejection and disapproval, my friend gives me a nudge and a wink and asks:

"When they criticize you how do you
hold your wings? I hold mine out
and down, descend a little, then more.
Cool air comes. Nobody cares how low
I descend, and the way my eyes close
makes me disappear. They have their sky again."

And when I struggle with insomnia in the hour of the wolf, he reminds me:

"Even in the cave of the night when you
wake and are free and lonely,
neglected by others, discarded, loved only
by what doesn’t matter – even in that
big room no one can see,
you push with your eyes till forever
comes in its twisted figure eight
and lies down in your head."

He has high expectations of me:

"How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe."

And he urges me to get up and pay attention:

"Don’t just stay tangled up in your life.
Out there in some river or cave where you
could have been, some absolute lonely
dawn may arrive and begin the story
that means what everything is about.

...don’t just look, either:
let your whole self drift like a breath and learn
its way down through the trees…"

------

I realize I am at risk of going overboard here. I love too many of these poems. Allow me just a few more excerpts, please, and if you want to wade in further on your own, I suggest you start with the slender volume called Even In Quiet Places.

Okay. But before I go -- do you know how an unexpected kindness, even a smile from a stranger, can save you sometimes? In "Grace Abounds" Stafford speaks of this, and of the redemptive powers of the natural world, be it molecules of air or the branch of a tree. In the final verse, he writes:

"I’m saved in this big world by unforeseen
friends, or times when only a glance
from a passenger beside me, or just the tired
branch of a willow inclining toward earth,
may teach me how to join earth and sky."

His words rinse and renew and remind me what matters, how every morning dawns with new possibility and every evening brings "an arch and promise renewed. Nobody has to notice..."

For those who do notice, wonders abound.

Listen:

"Water likes to sing. If you leave it alone,
even in quiet places, it'll talk a little
to itself about old days it has known
and the songs it composed."

It's such a beautiful thought. For Stafford, every look at the world -- and every attentive listening -- could be a kind of salvation. Everything is waiting for our breathing respect. In his understated way, he muses, "I think we should keep some of this, in case God comes back to see what we did with it."

And in this time of global crisis, that feels more urgent than ever.

Now the stars are pounding silently on my roof and the creek is singing its way through the canyon and the ink still speaks from the pages of books and somewhere in the deep is a light like faith.

"From far a light, maybe a hill ranch
remote and unvisited, beams on the horizon
when we pass; then it is gone.
For the rest of our lives that far place
waits; it’s an increment, one more
hollow that slips by out there, almost
a gift, an acquaintance taken away.

Still, beyond all ranches the deep
night waits, breathing when we breathe,
always ready to offer new light,
over and over, so long as we search
for something so faint most people
won’t know, even when it is found."

Sunlight on the Side of a House

We are in Boston to visit our daughter who is off and running and radiant in her leaving. She’ll be studying and traveling in Europe for the summer and then returning to Boston in the fall for her final semester. She tries to be patient with me, but I can tell that I am already skirting the boundaries of irrelevance. Now and then I say something Mom-like, and I catch that flicker of embarrassment, almost a wince, or occasionally an affectionate look of amused indulgence. I am a relic, formerly useful and still sort of quaint but essentially outmoded, like a hat pin or a typewriter. “Miranda…,” I begin, and maybe there’s something needy in my voice, because she immediately asks, “Is this going to be one of those weird reassurance things?” Yeah, I guess it was.

We are walking through the North End, Boston’s Little Italy, where she will be living come September. It’s a great neighborhood of narrow streets, old brick buildings, Italian restaurants and pastry shops. There’s a Knights of Columbus Hall down the block from her apartment, a bakery that’s always open, and a pizzeria on the corner with a vintage neon sign. Paul Revere and Ben Franklin just strolled by, drawing not a second glance, and an elderly Italian lady wends her way slowly down the street pushing a little shopping cart filled with groceries. Colorful packets of seeds are on display outside the hardware store, saints and angels are keeping vigil in the alleyways, and it is snowing white blossoms. “Buy the skinny ones,” a woman is saying, referring to egg plants, “they have fewer seeds.”

It all comes down to letting go, but at least I am releasing her into enviable circumstances and a life of possibilities. The hard part is heading home and reshaping the life that is my own -- the roles that defined me have vanished, the body that contains me has frayed, and frankly I’m a little confused. I realize I am a cliché, and I am sick of all the hype lately about aging Baby Boomers, but there it is. This is the time of life when one is young enough to feel capable but old enough to perceive limitations, the time to acknowledge that there might be some truth to those rumors of mortality and to make the remainder of the journey count. I want to savor the precious ordinary, but I still have a craving to explore some new frontiers before it’s over, and I can’t shake the belief that the measure of a life ultimately translates into the good it brings to others, but I don’t know what form that should take. And now I'm seeing off a daughter who feels confident enough to say good-bye jauntily and head out toward her own horizons. I guess I need to somehow do the same.

Monte and I are staying on the South end of town in a brownstone bed and breakfast run by the gregarious duo of Al and Dominic. In the morning we have breakfast with a group of Germans here for the Bio-Tech convention. One of the Germans, whose name is Iggy, is explaining why Wal-Mart failed in Germany. Al is at the grill tending to the French toast and Dominic sits down with us. He brings up politics, and at some point expresses a leaning toward Hilary, wondering how I feel about the subject. “Anyone is better than the nightmare we have now,” I mutter unhelpfully. “I wish it WAS a nightmare,” says Al at the grill, “’cause then we could just wake up.” Dieter asks if we are going to the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, a welcome change of subject and a very good idea.

“All I ever wanted to do,” said Edward Hopper, “was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” And did he ever. The exhibit is extraordinary, from etchings to watercolors to the oils we tend to think of. It is an almost hypnotic experience. We look through windows into the rooms of strangers, all of whom seem to be living parallel but unconnected lives. We contemplate white wooden houses, stolid brick buildings and shops long gone, a brightly lit drug store with its glass jars and Ex-Lax sign, the light and shadow of a New York theater. I stare for long minutes at the iconic Nighthawks, where the four sleepless souls in an eerily lit all-night diner seem forever lost in their own thoughts. We peer like voyeurs into hotel rooms and living rooms where the floors are green and the silence is palpable. There is such a sense of isolation and loneliness that the final painting seems inevitable: Sun in an Empty Room.

I’m in an Edward Hopper frame of mind when we leave the museum, but I’d forgotten how astonishing forsythias are. “We're back!” they shout, never shy about stealing the show. It is springtime after all, and springtime in the Northeast is something else again. Only those who have lived in winter’s clutch for six long months can fully appreciate the euphoria of the first warm days, when suddenly the very earth seems to breathe. We wander through the Boston Common and Public Garden, where people are out strolling or lying contentedly on the grass with their faces to the sun. Couples snuggle on park benches, kids practice softball, and families celebrate weddings and graduations, taking pictures of each other by the tulip beds. New parents of every ethnicity hold their babies with the same look of fullness and joy, and someone is incongruously playing bagpipes in the distance. The Charles River sparkles in sunlight and the trees are crowned by the lacy yellow-green of early foliage or delicately blossomed in white and pink.

William Stafford always said it best:

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?