February | 2013 | pull up a chair

February 22, 2013

this nook i’ve come to call home

dispatch from 02139 (in which, after 192 days, it makes me wince to think of leaving….)

really, i think, i’m part squirrel. or maybe fat-cheeked chipmunk. certainly from the mammalian order Rodentia. i know, i know. it’s not a pretty picture. those furry little critters that make so many yelp. leap high on stools. lurch for brooms.

but really.

i do exhibit many squirrel-like tendencies. i burrow. i conform whole-bodily to my confines. i’ve been known to overstuff my pantry with twos and threes of things i love — just in case! a squirrel does too. only they call it hoarding. stocking up for winter. i call it making sure i don’t have to dash to the grocery in the wee wee hours, when suddenly an urge for popcorn strikes (see! yet another link between me and the bushy-tailed kernel-loving kind!).

mostly, though, it’s about the burrowing. about boring in, carving tunnels in my cove. making cozy. is not the squirrel the queen of cozy comfy? heck, if you can make the insides of an old oak’s trunk the very place where you can’t wait to scurry at the end of a long day hauling acorns, you are one fine cozy-maker.

and so it is, here in the aerie. where 192 days into this experiment in third-floor living, i can barely consider packing up and leaving without scrunching up my countenance.

i’ve come to love this little place. love the pit-a-pat of soles against the shining planks of maple. love the sunshine streaming in by day, and the moonlight every cloudless night. love the sounds of the city down below, tucked away, not far from harvard square, where just now cardinal and blue jay are out the window carrying on a discourse above the din of all the thinkers strolling by.

i am particularly fond of this little breakfast nook, all bench and cushions, with steam heat pouring up from down below my bum. how fine a configuration is that? to have your undersides steamed like chinese buns?

i sit here by the hour, especially at the dawn. my earthen mug filled high. the morning birds flitting in for a nibble at the feeder. this morning it is particularly quiet. and quiet is a sound i love more than most. so hushed i hear the water drip-drip-dripping from the sink. every once in a while, the gurgle from the french-roast trough. the hum from the fridge.

i leap out of bed before the clock chimes “time to wake,” just so i can steal a few extra minutes — all alone, in cloak of morning light, before the rush begins.

and i can’t help but marvel at the human capacity for burrowing down to joy. for shirking off the parts that make us squirm. for honing in on finding where our hum comes. where comfort rises up, wraps round us, holds us tight.

we are a species — we and our bushy-tailed brethren, yes — who can’t help but toil toward equilibrium. and, hardly content to idle in the neutral zone, we burrow deeper still, down to where the glories bubble up. we find our hum, indeed.

all this from a girl who, just a year ago, was dizzy at the thought of leaving a place that had carved her in the palm of its hand. all this from a girl who 192 mornings ago was clicking snapshots of the old house she was leaving behind, as if she’d not breathe again till she returned. and here i am, humming. knowing my well-worn footpaths in the maple planks. having carved a whole new routine. morning coffee, followed by reading, followed by catching glimpse of sunrise, followed by clomp-clomp-clomp along the cobbled sidewalks, drawing me into lecture halls and classrooms where i nearly purr with pure contentment.

we adapt.

we find joy.

it’s what, as a species, we are wired to do.

i write this because i never cease to be amazed. at this capacity for comfort. at making home wherever we are plopped.

i write this because a friend i love — nay, adore — stands at the brink of just such a translocation. and she is trembling. wondering what she’s doing to her family, up and hauling them across the country, to a faraway place that right now feels oh-so foreign.

i write this because i was that trembling soul. but a wee small voice inside propelled me. whispered louder than all the others: don’t be afraid. just go!

and so, for all these days and weeks and months, we’ve been living the experiment. (and here’s the part where the hallelujahs come, rise up and bring on tears…) i’ve watched my boy become best friends with a kid who can’t afford the hot cocoa in the cafeteria. i’ve heard stories that might make your hairs stand on end. but he takes them in stride because he loves the kid who tells the stories, true stories from a life that’s short on lucky breaks. and i can’t help but know that to have your eyes wide-opened when you’re 11, when you’re smack dab in middle school, is to keep those eyes forever scanning the landscape in whole new ways.

that sweet boy will not go back to our leafy little village taking it for granted, taking anything for granted (so help me, Lord on high). he will not forget his friend who has to step over the drug-dealing in the staircase. or the other stories i can’t tell here. he will remember how much he loved the street ball in the gym. how the big towering kids loved the scrappy little white boy, my boy. and how he woke up and realized he was truly color blind. and more than comfortable in a united nations classroom.

i write this because i live and breathe contentment these days. pure joy is an hourly intoxicant.

and i wouldn’t have gotten here if i’d let the demons hold me down.

i promise you, my friend, you will purr again. your babies will stretch and pull and some nights, at bedtime, break down in floods of tears. but the morning will come when you are all gathered round the breakfast table, and laughter will rise up. and you’ll all feel oh so deeply home. and you’ll look around at all the wonders that have come your way, and you won’t want to imagine what it would have been like to not know such particular life-defining joys.

i promise you, my friend. we’ve all got a dose of squirrel somewhere down inside.

what are the little joys that make for comfort zones in your long day?

6 Comments

February 15, 2013

turning the page on my little muse

dispatch from 02139 (in which my stretching-by-the-hour muse proclaims independence and right of first refusal…)

it was just a few weeks ago, one night after dinner, when my little fellow was nonchalantly clearing the table, and plopped his plate precipitously over the edge of the counter, threatening to wobble and crash to the depths of the dishwasher down below.

yes, half the plate was securely on the countertop. ah, but the other half, suspended on air and air alone.

seizing this moment of gravity instruction, i chimed: “sweetie, don’t leave the plate there. it could fall.”

to which my young isaac newton circled back, eyed the non-wobbling plate, and crisply replied: “well, it didn’t.”

“but it could,” i tried again, intent on cementing this lesson.

wherein the young thinker, once again, became the teacher.

said he, looking me straight in the eyeballs: “you don’t want to live your life in what-ifs!”

and then he scurried on. and i was left, alone in the kitchen, his words reverberating. making the walls shake. waking up sound-asleep brain cells.

“you don’t want to live your life in what-ifs.”

who is this 11-year-old buddha? is it not true that the heavens send us our teachers in soccer pants and sauce-stained T-shirts?

so struck was i by this kitchen-sink wisdom that i lurched to grab my trusty camera, to record the not-so-tipsy plate, just as he’d left it. so that, as i’ve so often done in the last six of his 11 years, i might etch the lesson here, on the pages of the chair.

but i was caught, mid-click.

he knew what i was up to. and there arose a gentle protest. a declaration of independence.

“mom, you can’t write about me without checking with me first.”

point taken.

so i didn’t write that week about the lesson of not living your life in what-ifs.

though it was a lesson that shot me through and through. because, yes, how often have i not crossed a threshold after ticking up the hundred ways that something might go wrong. because fear undercuts, boxes in, circumscribes, so very many blue highways in the landscape of our lives.

his claim to right of first refusal became an oft-returned-to point of discussion over days that followed. he’d deemed that if he could be first-reader, it might or might not pass the test. i might or might not get to click the “publish” button.

all wholly on the mark. all wholly admirable. and defensible.

and a policy to which i now subscribe.

and, yes, in that moment, i heard the crinkling of yet another page in my life as it turned, as i lifted up the fragile corner, arced it across time and space, and pressed it back, onto the growing stack of past.

my little muse had, for all these years, been the heartbeat of so many meanders here at the table. there was monster fighter, the one about how he armed himself for perilous nights in those fitful shadowed hours not long before he was swallowed up by first grade. there was the a-ha moment where the little black squiggles on the page suddenly, out of the blue, and after much trying, erupted into words, the likes of which he swallowed whole, in starter sentences and paragraphs. there was, most recently, stitching the homesick blanket, in which he wanted more than anything a plane ticket home. and the meander, in particular, that made him stand up and say, excuse me, i have a right to tell my own story of my own life.

it is a struggle many writers meet head on. there are sharp lines in our lives we do not cross. whole continents of heartland we do not explore in print.

it’s why there’s fiction.

being married to a writer, i’ve long known our unspoken pact: i don’t write about his private life, our private life, because it’s his as much as mine. being the mother of a college kid, i’ve known too just how close i can inch toward that tender, fragile, firm, border crossing. i’ve written less and less about him as he’s grown, claimed his own life story.

but my little one, until just now, has been the one whose heart, whose words, whose wonders i couldn’t help but capture.

like a lepidopterist, i’ve flailed my net, and here and there, in daisy fields and shaded coves, in kindergarten classrooms, and on little league playlots, i’ve netted bright-winged moments that were my sweet boy growing up.

moments that otherwise would have escaped, fluttered off to clouds, or tucked away behind a tree limb.

been lost to time and memory.

i’ve long said that more than anything, pull up a chair has been my truest snapshot album. has lassoed in times new roman (the font in which i type) a mother’s deepest felt moments, the charms of six-year-old and seven-year-old lexicon and logic. has been slow-release, unfurling love song.

more than anything, it’s holding up a life — my life, our life — to the light. it’s catching the rainbow shards distilled in every shaft of sunbeam. it’s turning a moment round and round, re-discovering a miracle or magic not seen in first-run.

and along the way, truth be always told, i fell more in love with one particular little fellow than i ever knew i could. it’s not that i didn’t love him through and through and through in real time. it’s just that in putting him on paper, in digging deep to find the words, to record his whims and whirling marvels, i fell in love all over and over and over again. it’s the prestidigitation of the pen.

just this morning, as i petitioned this very musing, as i inquired as we trudged through snow banks and skidded over ice patch en route to where the school bus stops, he generously offered more than compromise: “oh, you can write about me, mom. just not my private life.”

so no more snaps of little boy legs peeking out from under the covers. no more monster fighter garb, bare naked chest and legs. no more stories from the shadows and the aching vessels of his heart. not without assent — of the committee of one. not unless he lifts the “no trespassing” sign.

my little muse is growing up. and he’s the author of his life.

to which the corollary is: the life that’s mine is the one of which i’m allowed to write. and that alone, i’ll mine.

unless permission’s granted.

for the writers and artists among you, do you too find places in your heart which you know not to trespass, at least not out loud and in public?

dashing to get to audio storytelling class. huge computer snafus this morning. will edit later. thanks, T, for letting me tell a story.

the sweet snap way above is my apple-cheeked boy, caught reading by the light of the double-d battery, long long ago. when he was five, and didn’t mind being the subject of a story.

7 Comments

February 8, 2013

nose pressed to the window pane

dispatch from 02139 (in which “epic” — yes, epic, say the headline writers — hurri-blizzard blows in off the atlantic, and the winds begin to whistle their warning cry…)

it is a posture that pulls us back to long-ago days, days when you woke up to the cackle of a radio telling you school was closed, when you heard your mama down in the kitchen, not rustling the brown bags of school lunches in the making but rather cranking up the griddle for stay-home vittles.

it’s the posture of nose pressed to the window pane. it’s the posture of waiting. heart pumping. peering into the far-away-but-coming-closer.

it’s the posture of knowing adventure’s tucked behind the not-so-distant cloud. it’s awaiting mama nature. mama nature who, in the end and after all, rules over all her globe and sky, and every once in a while, reminds us of our humble place on earth.

so it is that i sit here, with windows east and south, keeping watch. the sky’s gone sooty gray. all shadow’s slipped away. the bird-seed tube that dangles just beyond the sill is rocking back and forth, making me a wee bit seasick if i stare too long.

this is the perfect perch for storm patrol, peering out beyond the rooftops, through the limbs of trees. i see smoke tendrils twirling up from chimney pots. i’ll soon gasp as tree trunks practice yoga bends.

winds at 85 miles per hour, the weatherman predicts. snows falling at the rate of four inches per hour. tumbling till they pile to three-feet-and-counting.

but, deary me, whooshing air at 85 m.p.h. up against flakes that weigh in at nothingness, it’s the equation for drifts the likes of which i’ve never seen. sounds like being a speck of milk inside a whirring blender. when someone clicks “puree.”

no wonder the sky-readers turned to their thesaurus to pull out a label for this blizzard. at last — after much office to and fro, i imagine — they decided to dub it “epic,” so epic it is, and epic we shall see.

it seems fitting, so fitting, that in this year of living sumptuously we — our little triangle of cambridge explorers — should endure spells of sumptuous weather. why, in just six months, there’s been one hurricane, one earthquake, and now this epic blizzard. good thing i packed my yellow rubber knee-high galoshes. i’ll be out trekking before this day is done.

for it’s one thing to inhale a storm from behind the glass, and wholly another what-the-heck to plant yourself amid the whirls and whoops.

why, you didn’t think life at veritas university would slow for any old avalanche of snow, did you? mais non! classes are marching on, clear through the morning. and at high noon, we’re being called to what promises to be a spine-tingling talk with a mexican journalist who risks her life — and aims to protect her compatriot periodistas — telling the truth about the drug wars that have torn apart her homeland.

for marcela turati, who dodges death threats and machine gun bullets on a daily basis, i can dodge a few flying snowflakes. even if they whirl at never-before-observed velocities.

other than that one arctic exposition, we’re hunkered down for the duration. we’ve all the essentials: popcorn, apples, soup. extra blankets, just in case. a fat cat who loves to curl beside our undulations. we’ve neighbors down below and just across the way, should we need to draw in the wagons — or trade one last drop of milk for one slab of vienna pastry (the doctor down below happens to be a fiendish baker, and the buttery vapors that slink up through the floorboards are enough to have me drooling at his door).

fact is, if you’re going to call yourself a bostonian for the year, you’d better weather a tried-and-true nor’easter’. i’d hate to amble home a pretender, head bowed in shame for having shirked a little tussle with the snow clouds that whirl in off the atlantic.

so far, with 14 minutes till the bewitching hour, there’s not a flake in sight. i’ll sit here for a few more hours, tomes piled to my left, eyes trained on the graying skies, waiting, waiting.

alert to what the heavens offer up today. and tuned in to how the human spirit pitches and dives along with all the whirling, swirling, dumping.

it’s front row to one celestial theatre. and right now, the players must be in the wings, clearing throats, slipping on their costumes. any moment, the curtain’s due to rise…

do you love snow days? odd weather days? what is it about the chance to draw in, simmer kettles of soup, slither into our snuggliest sweaters? three stories off the ground, i feel as if i’m in a tree fort, with the best seat in the house. if it gets outlandishly exciting here, i’ll be back to record the weather dramas. for now, be safe, be warm, and thanks for pulling up a chair.

in the spirit of my beloved helen vendler poetry class, perhaps i ought to dig for a poem to mark this snowy occasion……any submissions out there?

during the night, under the street lamp out my office window….that little bump down there, that’s a car on its way to being buried…

and come morning, here’s what befell the back deck. those chairs are hard-edged, with sharp corners. until the snow, they had no undulations. now they do….

12 Comments

February 1, 2013

the humility of knowledge

dispatch from 02139 (in which we recognize our humble stature before the gates of true knowledge…)

class is back in session. and that means my shoulder is sagging from the weight of books. my right hand aches from scribbling, fast as i can. and my whole body is inclined to bow down before the gates of knowledge, and confess how empty a vessel i truly am.

i’d intended to go easy this semester, spend whole days holed up inside this book-lined aerie. cut down on the classes to which i zipped across the leafy harvard yard.

but then the course catalog rolled out. and so too an inkling that this was but a last-chance vault to a long life spent with nose in books.

so why not, i reasoned to my reasonable self, take the hardest, highest bounce off that bouncy leaping board?

why not give it one with-gusto whirl, you and this heady voyage, the one where you get to slither into cushioned seats (for seats are cushioned, oh-so-cushioned, here in harvard halls), yank hard on the itty-bitty writing perch, and open wide for all the learning swirling through the chambers?

convinced, i signed up.

my class list stretched and stretched — and stretched. somehow, i got to seven. and all the books to boot. (which is why my credit-card patrol called this week to see if someone had gotten loose and run amok with my account at the coop, that magnificent university book store where great minds — the professors’ — have curated stacks of books, and even browsing through a class not yours imparts a heady lesson in what tomes are deemed worthy of study.)

and here’s the thing: all week the image that’s floated in my mind is one of standing at the precipice of, say, the grand canyon, tiptoeing out to the edge, where you can see how far and wide that great gulf stretches, yet you can’t begin to make out the nooks and crannies, can’t see beyond the etched granite walls, into coves, up sheer cliffs. and you can’t help but feel so small, so incidental beside such grandeur. such majesty.

and so it is with the magnificent humankind creation, knowledge.

the closer you tiptoe into it, the grander all the vastness appears. the higher, the deeper, the more intricately chiseled.

and that’s where i perch. i am at the brink of something so immense it will take all my life to begin to grasp the flimsiest grasp. so immense it makes me wish for two or three lifetimes to wrap my feeble fist around a simple starter’s course.

i sit in african-american history, jaw-dropped, wondering how i got to my own mid-century and knew so very little. i need to speed-read, speed-think, speed-swallow to catch up on all that i don’t know.

i move to poetry, with helen vendler, that great mother northstar of all that is poetic in america, and i get dizzy. she recites line after line, from poet after poet. she makes it all make sense, makes it feel like for the first time in our lives we’re netting moonbeams and twinkling stars. and then i zip home, and plunk oh-so-slowly over the tomes that will last me a lifetime. i flip from poem to dictionary. i scribble words — and lines — that send me to jupiter and mars.

i even got ultra-brave and signed up for “postwar american and british fiction” with james wood, whom some have called “the greatest living literary critic,” and gosh-darn if i’m not going to feel adrift, but i’ll not stand ashore for fear of owning up to my sorry unschooled self.

what point in learning if not to start from scratch, or close to scratch, and swallow, chew, inhale, imbibe with gusto?

i’ve just been struck, at every turn this week, with how it is that as you step into the canyon, you begin to truly grasp its immensity, and your own itty-bitty dismissible stature. and isn’t it paradoxical — blessedly, beautifully paradoxical — how the deeper you thrust yourself into learning, the humbler you become?

you know so little, there is so infinitely much to learn.

it makes me sad for all the hubris in this country. all the clutter on the airwaves, and cyber-waves, of folks who’re sure they know everything because they read one blip as they went to click their email. lord help us, all.

a good dose of humility might be a fine prescription for the rampant cultural ails. all the know-it-alls might do well to ask, “just how much do i really know? and might i learn a wee bit more?”

but mostly it comes back to the simple posture of laying down our sorry selves at the time-worn feet of Infinite Wisdom. of assuming the age-old pose of acknowledging that we’re but empty vessels, and we are begging to be filled.

vowing: we’ll do the work, the fine act of turning pages, scanning wisdom, and breathing in the accumulated knowledge of all those who’ve trekked this way, and picked up a thing or three along the way.

we’ll dedicate our days to the holy work of trying to grow in knowledge, yes, and wisdom, absolutely.

do you often feel small, oh so small, in the face of all there is for us to understand, to come to know? and do you make lifework of learning? if so, what’s one book we should all add to our reading list?

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Month: February, 2013