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Category: joy of writing

October 4, 2012

donald hall’s farm

dispatch from 02139, en route to 03287 (in which a flock of fellows and co-vivantes board buses and roll along route 4 into new hampshire, for an audience with a high priest of american poetry)…

back in the faraway house that hums without me now, back in the heat of summer, when the fog was lifting on this year of thinking sumptuously, when i first got a peek at the calendar of what the days and weeks and months would bring, my eye was drawn sharply and swiftly to a little rectangle tucked at the top of the month of october.

it read: field trip to new hampshire farm of poet donald hall.

be still, my hurried heart.

i promise you i am not indulging in the great irish art of embellishment when i tell you i nearly slumped from my chair. i slapped the pine ledge of my writing desk, slapped hard, flat palm against the knotty plank of old french pine. i gasped. i am certain, if memory serves me, i felt a quiver in my arms.

one doesn’t stumble across an invitation to might-as-well-be mecca, the holy place and farmstead of an american poet laureate, just any old friday.

like so many things in my life, i’d come late to donald hall.

but when i did — stumbling across him in an essay in the new yorker last january, one titled, “out the window,” one you can find here — i sat transfixed by the power of his words.

hall, now 84, was named u.s. poet laureate in 2006, the 14th such poet potentate of the library of congress.

billy collins, himself the poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, once wrote that hall “has long been placed in the frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet.”

he has written some 22 books of poetry, at least four biographies, 11 children’s books (most notably, “ox-cart man”), six memoirs, three plays, and more. but it wasn’t till page 40 of the january 23, 2012, new yorker, that i sat up and took hard notice.

he wrote there, straight through to the bottom of page 43, about aging, about growing old in a particular place, his family’s 150-year-old  new hampshire farm, a place he’d long ago committed to memory. knew by heart, by season, by length of light and shadow. knew by fluttering of birds and drifting of snow on the old barn roof.

he wrote words that rocket-launched into my heart, ricocheted around in there, and left me gasping, quite frankly, for air.

take a listen (i’ll offer snippets, a swatch from here and there, all from that one glorious four-page essay)…

“twenty years later,” hall writes on page 41, “my circles narrow. each season, my balance gets worse, and sometimes i fall…my fingers are clumsy and slow with buttons…

“new poems no longer come to me, with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. i feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven (when his wife, the poet jane kenyon, died) or fifty-two (the age of his father when he died). when i lament and darken over my diminishments, i accomplish nothing. it’s better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. it is a pleasure to write about what i do.

“generation after generation, my family’s old people sat at this window to watch the year. there are beds in this house where babies were born, where the same babies died eighty years later….

“after a life of loving the old, by natural law i turned old myself. decades followed each other….however alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. it is alien, and old people are a separate form of life…if we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.”

i could go on. but, you, please, read for yourself.

check out books from your library. i did. some 17 in all. only just the other day, i checked out two more. and bought one, “life work,” a slender volume i’ll tuck inside my backpack, pull out if i get brave, hand to mr. hall, and ask, shyly, if he’d put pen to a page that is his, but lives on my shelves now.

and since i promised you, long ago, that we would share the glories of this year, i wanted you to have a head start. to spend a swatch of time whirling and swirling inside the poetry of donald hall, while i poke around the clapboard farmhouse, with the narrow porch where the birdfeeder hangs. where, if i’m lucky, i’ll press my nose to the window, deep and wide, where he looks out, keeps watch, as autumn turns to winter, turns to spring, and back to summer.

i’ll drink in the gnarly branches of the maple and the oak, and the “bluing air of afternoon.”  i’ll tiptoe into the cow barn, built in 1865, and scan the hayfields that are the crossbeams and the vaults of a lifetime of pure poetry, born and raised and resurrected in a little town nestled in the mid-hills of new hampshire.

i’ll stand deeply still. inhale and pray. words of thanks, first, for this rare gift. and begging words just after, that whatever’s in the air, the earth, the floorboards, seeps into me, and teaches me to see, out the window, in the ways that mr. hall so clearly sees.

and now, as promised, a few assigned readings:

let’s start with ox cart man, a book that might be tucked on every child’s library shelf.

or this, short one, “the things”

The Things

by Donald Hall

When I walk in my house I see pictures,
bought long ago, framed and hanging
—de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore—
that I’ve cherished and stared at for years,
yet my eyes keep returning to the masters
of the trivial—a white stone perfectly round,
tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell,
a broken great-grandmother’s rocker,
a dead dog’s toy—valueless, unforgettable
detritus that my children will throw away
as I did my mother’s souvenirs of trips
with my dead father, Kodaks of kittens,
and bundles of cards from her mother Kate.

and lastly, though, please don’t stop here…

a poetry corner, where you can curl up, on this fine october day, and drink in the sounds of donald hall in his many forms. please do click on “letter with no address,” written to jane kenyon, his wife who died of leukemia in 1995. you will hear your heart crack.

i promise to post dispatch, post field trip, once we’re back from eagle pond farm, up new hampshire way. if you could visit any poet in the world, who might it be, and why? and feel free to leave a line of poetry here as proof. 

p.s. i realize that if you don’t have a subscription to the new yorker the link above won’t get you directly into the essay, but rather to a bit about the essay. i wish i could get around that, but i can’t. your library will have a back issue of the new yorker, i do believe. if you’re stuck, i will xerox and snail mail. you can send me your address via email. 

13 Comments
April 20, 2012

hole in my heart

soon, but not too soon, i will take down the welcome sign. i will tuck away all the index cards, our bridge back at the beginning, the guideposts that brought us together, each one a noun in english and german.

soon, but not too soon, i will figure out what to do with the big box of froot loops that now sits in the pantry. and the doritos beside it. the little boy who discovered both of those adventures in american eating, he is gone now.

i just took him to the train. i just cried a stream of tears that would not stop. i just walked back in to the emptiest house. a house that echoes with too much quiet now.

i can’t hear the scritch-scratch of his pencil, as he sat at the table each morning, writing his book, illustrating it. i can’t see the way his cheeks turn to pink when he laughs at me and my clumsy pronunciations. i can’t see his deep blue eyes, eyes like the sky on an april morning. i can’t see his smile, the wordless language that pulled us together. paper cards irrelevant, after all.

it had only been 10 days. but i found out, once again, you can fall in love in an instant.

especially when it’s a child who is in your care, tucked under your wing. especially when you discover, uncannily, the child is very much like you when you were a child.

my little friend from munster in germany carries with him wherever he goes stapled and folded pieces of plain white paper, his “books,” each one exquisitely hand-printed, and illustrated, the first letter of each chapter a postage-stamp-sized work of pencil-drawn art.

he has 20 books in all, so far, at home on his bedroom shelf, and it’s his daily practice to unfold his blue canvas pencil case and put no. 2 lead — in black or in colors — to paper.

“my dream,” he told me in his beautiful little-boy english, “is to be a writer.”

and so, every morning, for the past nine mornings, he and i would sit in bliss-soaked silence at the kitchen table, both of us writing for however many minutes the morning allowed. we carved out sacred time for a dream that both of us share, even though decades and miles and culture and gender might have made us, by ordinary measure, so far apart.

last night, when we took our sweet friend to the pancake house at the top of his must-do list, we asked him what he loved most about his visit to chicago. “your family,” he said, the words tumbling right out, without even a flash of a pause. “and the willis tower,” he said, second. “and the pancake house,” he said, wrapping up the short list.

he is too young, too pure, to have slanted those answers for the sake of diplomacy. i knew when he said it that the words sprang from his heart. and that’s why tears sprang in my eyes. because those words were a peek into his heart, into a heart that is rare, a heart that i came to treasure.

in 10 short days.

it started out, this adventure in trans-atlantic connection, as simply a chance to welcome a kid from far away. we had no clue who might come to our house. all we knew was that he would be german, and that we had an empty bed and a bathroom just for him.

and, now, the adventure behind us, we’ve all discovered, all over again, the miracle of falling in love. we’ve all remembered that love is something that happens without expectation. it’s pure surprise. it’s physical. it’s falling, like body through air. it’s not being able to stop. not planning the fall, not mapping the trajectory.

you just feel your heart opening wide, and kaboom, there you are, with all sorts of sparks and electrical currents surging through that place in your chest — if that’s where it dwells, really. if that’s where the love is tucked away, lined on the shelves, perhaps, wrapped inside itty-bitty boxes, each with a sumptuous bow, each ready to spring open, once the magic is airborne, is launched, once it does its unlocking, and the undiluted love escapes, twirls and whirls all through you, making your head spin, making you melt deep inside.

it’s not common, not something that happens, say, just because you like to laugh with the fellow ringing up your groceries. or because the lady down the block is pleasant when she walks by with her dog on a leash, when she looks up and waves.

love, it seems, is more demanding than that. it requires a plunge, diving deep beneath the surface. it requires exposure, peeling back the tough outer skin, revealing the place deep inside where the pulsing comes, where the dreams flow. where we say who we are, where we listen, where we discover a charm or a trinket, miracle or marvel, that schwoops us — both of our hearts — into a vacuum-sealed lock. one where age or country of origin dissolve into bits, don’t matter. we are merely two living, breathing, dreaming souls who discover that we understand each other in ways we never would have imagined.

and so it was, so it is, with my little friend and i.

and i’d never expected it.

and now, now that there’s no one to gobble the froot loops by the bowlful, now that my little one (the one still asleep in the bed at the top of the stairs) is left to plow through the snack-sized bags of doritos all by himself, i find i’m in need of a needle and thread here.

there is a hole in my heart this morning, one that already misses my sweet little friend at the kitchen table. misses the way he politely announced each night,  at minutes to nine, “i am tired, may i go to bed now?”  and awoke with a smile, and tousled blond hair, then climbed down the stairs awaiting his bowl and his spoon and his froot loops.

i’ve no one to sit with at the kitchen table. no one to write alongside. but now, in that hole in my heart, i’ve a treasure to tuck deep inside: i know there’s a beautiful boy, with writerly dreams, and pencils and papers. and wherever we go, whatever the day, no matter the thousands of miles away, he and i discovered together one of life’s unshakable secrets.

love doesn’t tell you it’s coming, doesn’t announce its destination. it merely up and entwines you, and forever thereafter, it is the thread that keeps you so deeply, unstoppably stitched at the hearts.

so that’s my fumbled attempt at mapping out love and the way it grabs us. how would you describe the fine art of falling in love, and when in your life has it happened?

the picture above is my little friend’s breakfast place, as it awaited him this morning, with a love note penned and perched in his bowl. “thank you for your words,” he said, after reading the love note, before pouring two last mounds of american froot loops.

32 Comments
December 10, 2010

ho-ho-holiday nods

most every friday, i carve out an hour. or maybe more than one.

it’s the hour when i pull up a chair, and sit for a moment. wait for the bubbling up to begin. it’s when i sift through the landscape of the week, see where my heart trips up. where it wants to play a frame over and over again. it’s the hour when i capture some scene of my children’s lives, as that life rolls on. it’s where i stop and pause and stare at some God-given miracle, the flight of a bird, the droop of a bloom. it’s where i wonder out loud.

and so it comes today. at the far side of the day, instead of the start. a field trip pulled me away. and the bus broke down on the long ride home. but, on fridays, i never feel settled till i’ve pulled up a chair.

so here i am, just me and my words and my bubbling-up heart.

it’s quiet here, the way i like it best of all, the way that lets me breathe. deep in, and deep out.

the clock ticks. the tea kettle is almost to whistling. the back yard, where all my flocks come, where they chitter and squawk, it’s silver-blue light out there. the sun has slipped from the afternoon sky. there’s barely the barest tinge of pink-fingered sky off to the west.

oh, there’s the kettle.

and there goes the last of the light. all i see now is black against gray. the limbs of the trees stretched like veins against sky.

my night’s work will be filled with elf sorts of tasks. i’ve holiday bread, 10 loaves, to deliver. each one tied with a cord, pulled on a sled perhaps. depends when the snow comes.

i’ve decided this year that i am making all of december a month for quietly giving. none of this mad-dash rush at the end. i’ve made the stretch from the first through till christmas a time to turn to those who’ve made a difference, to say, with a loaf, or a word, thank you for all you bring to me on the unlikeliest of days.

thank you to the neighbor who left a basket of tomatoes at my back stoop.

thank you to the one who lets my boy play in her basement for hours on end.

thank you mister bus driver, for marking each ride with a wave and a smile. for giving me reason, each blessed morning we manage to get there, for walking home with my own smile inside.

thank you to the soulful women who type beside me, tuesday through thursday. thank you for giving me reason to want to come to work.

thank you to the principal who made sure my little one was safe at heart during his days in the woods (and typed out a furtive email to let me know that he was).

thank you, deeply and truly, to each of you who come here during the days of the year when, somehow, you carve out the minutes it takes to come and see what’s out on the table. maybe you nibble, maybe you pass. but back and again, you come and you come.

nearly four years it’s been (12.12.06, the very first entry). and here we are on the brink of that marker, and too, the brink of the eve when a boy who’s grown up here will find out the news about college.

it’s a big december, as always.

bigger than most because of the latter.

how did we get here, so many are asking? how did we get to this place where our just-born children were finding out about college–where they would go, where they would dream, where they’d spread wings and fly from our nest?

it’s a good time for quiet, this brink of so much. so quiet i’ve stitched. in a card typed and cut and pasted and stamped. in bread studded with almond paste and golden raisins and cranberries too. wrapped in bakery paper, the white waxy kind.

it’s a quiet i’ve carved in tiptoeing down the stairs early and all alone. it’s a quiet i find in feeding my birds.

it’s a quiet inside that comes when you learn, at last, to whisper, this is enough. this says it all.

and so you pull a sled through the ridges of snow. you knock at a door, and hand over bread and a card and a merry, merry that says in so many ways: thank you for making my days as rich as they are.

merry merry to each and every one of you. those who still come here, and those who’ve not been in a very long while. i never forget a one of you.

may your december days be blessed through and through.

what’s on your thank you list this december?

1 Comment
May 13, 2008

lucy’s story: what you didn’t yet read

there is more. there is always, always more.

sometimes, when i am writing a story for the newspaper, it actually hurts to leave out whole chunks of what i’ve gathered. a hundred thousand times i’ve cut and cried, leaning mightily on the words of one mr. hemingway: “a story’s only as good as what you leave on the cutting room floor.” it’s a line we whisper to ourselves as we wave goodbye to bits and threads we love, but cannot use. only so much you can squeeze onto those blank white pages, before they wrap the next day’s fish. or, in the case of my mother, line her birdcage.

lucy’s story, the one i told on mother’s day, is one of those ones that would have left me aching, feeling unfinished, if not for this holy sacred place where there is always room to finish every story.

my job, as storyteller, is to propel the reader through the piece, to condense, refine, suggest, spell out, depending on the day and space.

my preference, as storyteller, is to meander. to take my time, peek in corners, poke beneath the covers. listen. really, really closely. let whole thoughts unspool, and not just cut and grab.

i understand, of course, that readers mostly want to get to the point, and then move on to tidy up the kitchen table, get the kiddies out the door, pick up the dry cleaning. be done with it.

but this place here, this table with so many chairs, is wholly discretionary. you take it, or you leave it. this is whipped cream and maraschino cherries. you don’t have to pick just one, eenie-meenie-minie-moe.

so curl up, rest your chin on your palms, and your elbows on the table’s edge.

there is more to tell you about blessed lucy, and her mama rosa, the two i introduced you to just yesterday, or if you picked up a chicago tribune, you might have met them back on mother’s day.

for you just joining us, lucy graduated saturday with a degree in bioengineering from the university of illinois at chicago. she’s been in a wheelchair since she was 9. she found out when she was four that she had a rare degenerative disease, spinal muscular atrophy, which has left her arms and legs rag-doll limp, unable even to turn the pages in a heavy book, sometimes too tired to lift a peanut-butter sandwich to her lips.

her mama, rosa, has been the arms and legs that lucy cannot use. for six years. all through college.

she has opened doors, laid out books and papers, cut up lucy’s breakfast, lunch and dinner. at night, she rolls her, side-to-side, three times before the dawn.

i condensed all of this in the story. but what i didn’t get to spell out were some of the everyday obstacles that would have felled a lesser duo.

for instance, lucy and her mama–who is not fluent in english–rode the CTA’s blue line train every day to campus, a one-hour ride if all unfolded as it should have. but, often, it did not.

sometimes, the elevator in the train station near campus wouldn’t work, so lucy and her mama would have to re-board the next incoming train, take it on downtown, where they would transfer to another line, and take that train back out to campus, to a station that didn’t require an elevator.

or, sometimes, when it rained, lucy would worry that the rain would muck up the battery that operates her wheelchair, which would loosen the cable to her joystick, and she’d be stuck–with a 420-pound wheelchair that her mother couldn’t push if she wanted to.

just last week, riding in for her very last exam, a two-hour grueler in her hardest class, lucy spilled a bit of gatorade from the bottle she was sipping during the ride. the sticky liquid got into the battery of her wheelchair, and when they got to campus, to take the exam, the wheelchair wouldn’t work. they had to turn around, go home, get the back-up chair, and start the trip again.

“good thing i hadn’t gotten around to giving away the old chair,” she said matter-of-factly. good thing, too, she added, she’d originally set out for campus four hours before the exam.

earlier in the semester, the only elevator in the building where she took her hardest class was broken for a week. she had to miss a whole week’s lectures, relying on the notes that someone else took for her, never quite totally grasping every concept in a class called Pattern Recognition, which has something to do with understanding how an automated machine–say, an MRI–analyzes data to make a diagnosis.

for a woman who takes half an hour just to write one page of painstakingly-looped letters and words and sentences, she said there was nothing she could do but watch closely as her lab partners precisely measured out chemicals–in fractions of a milliliter, sometimes–with the glass pipettes that are so essential and so taken for granted in every science lab.

same thing, she said, when it came to intricate wiring that had to be tracked and secured for circuit panels in a bio-instrumentation lab. she watched, and absorbed without the tactile learning that comes from fingering each wire, screw and micro-tool.

but what sticks with me as much as the heartache over how hard her road was, and how she not once complained, is what lucy had to say about her unshakable faith, once lost, now found. and a friend whose light still illuminates her way.

“when i was little i was real religious,” said lucy, sitting in a study room in the engineering building at UIC last week. “when i stopped walking, i became an atheist at the age of nine.

“i was depressed from nine to 15. ‘why did i have to be born with a disability?’ i kept thinking.

“but then i thought about how would the world be different if everyone was perfect? would everybody be super vain? they would never think of helping anybody else. what if? when i finally accepted my disability, it felt like a lot of bricks had been lifted off me.”

lucy, who is 24 now, says she wouldn’t change one thing in her life. “i’m not blind, i can hear, i can speak, i can use my mind. i think i finally just got tired of being depressed. i thought, ‘i’m never gonna walk, why be sad about it?’ being sad about it, isn’t going to change it.”

it was a college religion class, one on catholicism, actually, that really opened her heart, she says. the class was assigned to read one of the writings of Pope John Paul II, who suffered from parkinson’s disease. the writing, an encyclical titled, “The Gospel of Life,” she says, revolutionized her thinking about her own disabilities.

“i used to feel like a disability was a punishment. after reading the pope, i realized it’s another beautiful form of life.”

reading the pope’s words, she said, “kind of helped me bring my faith back in God.”

her mother, rosa, never lost it. even though she says her deepest desire is to see lucy stand and walk.

“you know why i think God is very good,” rosa asks. “lucy cannot walk; my other daughter can. what i can’t see in one, i see in the other.” it is the same, she says, with her two sons, one of whom is in a wheelchair (and a freshman at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign), and one of whom is not.

this, from a mother who must speak up for her daughter in the cafeteria line, because lucy’s disease won’t allow her to speak much louder than an amplified whisper. she can’t bark out a request for the baked ziti that is her very favorite lunch.

the one thing that lucy still misses, she says, is her privacy.

“before i’d hide notes all over my room. after i stopped walking, i couldn’t keep anything hidden. everybody always had to know everything.”

lucy says she learned patience from her best friend, giovanna, whom she met when she was eight, and who died when she was 13, from SMA, the same disease that lucy has.

“she taught me to have patience. i didn’t want people to help me, i wanted to do everything for myself. when i first met her i could walk. to all of a sudden be in a wheelchair…”

it was practically unbearable, lucy says. giovanna, she adds, “taught me determination.”

giovanna was full of grace, as lucy tells it. and giovanna, i think, bequeathed her grace to lucy.

and that is most of what i wanted to tell you about two fine souls who rolled into my life last week, and now will never leave.

one of them, a woman who finds justice in the divine equation that has two of her four children in wheelchairs, motoring around college campuses, refusing to rein in their dreams, now inspiring far beyond the boundaries of their colleges.

the other, a woman who sees the wisdom–and the beauty–in a world where our imperfections compel us to reach beyond our limits, to be each others’ arms and legs and hopes and dreams.

those are the lessons i learned at work this week.

it is no wonder why i call this storytelling business not just a job but a holy sacred calling. how blessed i am.

how blessed, lucy and rosa trevino, not trapped at all by a life in a 420-pound chair on wheels. but rather, teaching as they roll, inspiring as we lope behind, trying to catch their holy shining wisdom.

bless you if you stayed to read this story. it was long, i know. but it feels so deeply essential. your thoughts….

the photo above is one i took at lucy’s graduation. months ago, she ordered that certificate of gratitude for her mother, just for graduation day. because the print is small, i’ll spell it out: “thank you for all your love and support. i would not be where i am today if it wasn’t for you. i feel so grateful to have you in my life. today is my day, but i dedicate it to you.”
and then she signed it, lucy trevino. it took minutes to push the pen through those 11 proud but simple letters.
the lilac chiffon you see behind the certificate, and the sturdy hands, those belong to rosa, who was beaming all day saturday, mexican mother’s day.

1 Comment
May 9, 2008

no reason ’cept she’s beautiful…

no reason cept she's beautiful

i guess maybe you’ll think you need to call the doctor. dial up some prescription for that poor lady who cannot haul herself in from out beneath the smelly bush.

oh, my, the neighbors soon will whisper. why, i saw her there, just the other night, they’ll say. all curled up and sleeping. didn’t seem to mind the rain. she lay there, drip, drip, drip. till morning. when she stirred, and stretched and, dang, she took another picture, that lady did. seems she’s up and lost her mind over that there vi-bur-num.

fear not, friends. it’s just that, well, i couldn’t very well tuck that lovely rain-laced beauty queen away in some old box with mothballs to keep it from crumbling. i had to lay it out, so you could see. sort of like when folks invite you in for coffee, then make sure to leave all the baby books right there on the cushions of the couch, and you can’t help but flip the pages and coo the mandatory ooohs, and ahhhs.

the other thing is simply this: it’s the very end of a long, long week, and looking at that picture (although here it looks a little fuzzy, which it did not before it landed here. oh, well…) is sort of like putting on your old holey jammies, the ones you would not wear out the house. the ones you would race to change, even before the fire fighters got there, if you’d had to call and beg their services.

it’s just a friday night, is all, and rather than curling up with ice cream and a trashy novel, i thought, oh, heck, why not wander over to the table. put out some new fresh flowers. pretty things up for the weekend.

this is, of course, that day we mamas wait for, yessirree. that day when we do the shopping, make the quiche, invite the friends, and call it mother’s day brunch. oh, wait. it’s not like that at your house? hmm. well, it is at mine.

mostly, i’m unwinding from a week that stretched my heart from here to there, and back again. my computer went kerpluey. which was not so very fun. no, not at all.

and, then, i stumbled upon a story so sweet and so delicious, i am still trying to get the drippy stains off of my chest. actually, they might be dried-up tears, because i’m not like those hard-boiled, tough-skinned news chicks on tv. oh no. i don’t pretend that it’s just a story, and i am there to scribble notes.

nope.

i fall hard sometimes. really really hard.

thing is, i realized this week that, for me, writing stories is the most fervent prayer i pray. it is wholly sacred, i tell you, to sit and listen as some fine someone unfurls her story. and i, collecting words like rosary beads, just snatch and string each one. bead after bead, story after story. until the tale is told.

when i’m in the gather mode, scooping up so many beads, i do ask a million questions. once, someone laughed and called me a human vacuum cleaner. hmm.

well, i do tend to ask for a few thousand teeny-tiny details. and, then, because i can’t help myself, i whip up my newsgirl lasso and swing it first in little circles once or twice, then i cast it out, wide and sweeping. often, this is where the things that someones say humble me to tears. if you listen long enough, you can’t help but hear some mighty wisdom.

other times i tiptoe on the ledge, inching close as i can inch to just short of that place where the teller of the story, would say, oh no. that i cannot, will not, tell.

when it’s over, when the last story is spilled, and folks are starting to yawn, i gather all my beads, sweep them up and stuff them in my satchel.

then, back home, i sit down before the magic keys and close my eyes, and pray to God to be that holy pencil, i so often refer to.

what i pray for, is that the pulsing beauty of the everyday psalm–as the brilliant chicago photographer, john white, once referred to the capturing of the uncommonly common street story–oozes through the words that just come spilling out, and fill the page.

then i send it off and wait. i have this little picture in my head. i imagine some sort of gold dust, from the spirit of the story’s essence, rubbing off, onto the fingers and the heart of every someone who takes the time to sit and pick up that day’s news, and, then, just happens to bumble on the one i stitched my heart in, and reads along, to the very end.

i imagine, this mother’s day especially, a whole city glowing gold, as, one-by-one, a story’s read and passed along. i imagine a whole city shining.

or at least that’s what i pray. and why i think the work i do each day is really nothing more than the finest prayer i ever learned to pray.

and that’s what i’m thinking about this lovely evening. lying here, beneath that raindrop-christened bush, where all is beautiful these smelly days and nights.

oh, and besides, the nice computer man told me to fool around here and see if he’d chased out all the critters that were gunking up the gears. so let me just push this one little button here, and see….

promise, soon as i can i will share with you the story that has me at once so giddy, and so very tired, this late late friday night.

it’s sunday now. the computer went kerpluey again. but i think we’ve now done the proper voodoo. at least i hope so. tomorrow morn, when all is quiet, and i am fully breathing once again, i will post the lucy story, and share with you the lovely bits that had to fall to the cutting room floor. ol’ dear mr. hemingway once said, a story is only as good as what’s left on the cutting room floor. and that fine maxim has been the novacaine to get me through plenty a painful cutting session. ouch. it always hurts. but this here blog, i now realize is a fine remedy, a way to still get to tell some of the pieces of the story that i think you’ll love. lucy trevino and her mama, rosa, are my heroes of this day. a more amazing love story i’ve not heard in a long long while….check out the tribune’s website today, or come back tomorrow, and i’ll have the story here….

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April 2, 2008

the other blog in this ol’ house

maybe it’s because we shared a glass. maybe it has something to do with sleeping on the same sheets for the past 18 months. (oh, i mean i changed the sheets and all, but even when i did our arms and legs were still stretched out on common threads). egad, we might have even touched. our toes, i mean our toes.

what’s happened, though, is most peculiar. i once resided with a fellow who harumphed at the notion of a blog. i still recall him–quite vividly, in fact–with his gray hooded sweatshirt pulled up and past his ears, sitting at the banged-up kitchen table one dreary weekday morn, spooning little Os into his mouth, while i pranced by with camera.

“i will not be blogged,” he bellowed. and i of course demurred. i’ve only once or twice trespassed across that line–and that was to make nice. and he, of course, responded with a mighty grin.

but now, it seems the anti-blogger has come around, crossed over to the dark side. why, even as i type, he is on a train tap-tapping at his keys.

stranger than fiction, truer than truth, we are now a two-blog household.

he of course is blogging boldly, about that thing he loves, the size and shapes of towers, and how we build our cities. i too write of that i love, the little things that unfold around us, our hearts, our souls, our wings, our stumbles.

seems he’s taken rather quickly to this whole new world of laying it on the line (he seems to lay it nearly every hour, on the hour). and seems the world is taking rather quickly, too, to every word he writes.

there is irony aplenty here, so much in fact, i need to scrape it off the walls. but i’ll leave all of that to your imagination.

i’ll offer these few points:

you’ll get a chuckle, yes indeed, at the fact that weeks ago he was moaning–over mashed potatoes, if i recall–that there might come a day when he’d get merely 10,000 to 20,000 hits.

i choked, i really did, nearly spit my spuds across the table. thought of all the mornings i arose before the rooster even crowed. i realized, i did, that in 18 months of all this finger exercise i’d only just barely scraped the 20,000 mark (and half of those i fear, were me simply clicking past the chair, on the way to other places).

in fact, just the other day, his first official day, he clocked a stunning 6,000-something clicks. i did a little checking, flipped through the pages of my calendar, where i confess i scribble all my clicks on the days that i hit “publish.” took me, for example, from aug. 24 to dec. 10–a full 14 weeks, or 76 meanders–to get that many clicks. and his were on the single day he launched, for cryin’ out loud.

oh, not that i’m comparing. not that i’m feeling one bit, um, overshadowed.

just that well, after all of this, i am now the other blog in this ol’ house.

mostly, i sit in pure amazement at the power of the internet, when it knows where to find you. i scratch my head, trying to figure out just why it is you and me might be the only ones who visit here today.

just a week or so ago, i was getting up at my most delicious hour–that would be five bells from the noisy clock downstairs–and the stretched-out someone right beside me, groggily inquired as i rose, “getting up to blog?”

“no, merely writing in obscurity,” i shot back, quite proud of my early morning sense of humor.

it’s not every woman who can a.) take the dismal comparison, and b.) find something still to laugh about.

so there you have it.

fact is, i more than many on the planet understand the yins and yangs of feeding this here blogging beast. i know what it is to worry all the time, to wake up in a sweat, to wonder who might think that you’re a fool, and, worst of worst, what in the world will you do if, at any hour, the computer won’t turn on.

fact is, as always, he is doing a mighty job. i would not be lying if i said that long ago i fell in love, in part, with just how much he cares, and how triumphantly he makes it matter.

i worry of course that once again he works too hard. and frets too much.

of course, i understand the bumps and bruises, and the exhaustion to the point of flopping to the floor.

what i don’t get is how in the world can it be a bad day when you only get 10,000 hits?

dearly beloved loyal readers, bless you–all three of you–who continue to come back for more. ‘twas too tempting a morsel to pass up this chance to poke a little tease at me and my beloved blogger. here’s hoping it is tossed and caught in the same shared jovial spirit. truth is, in these fretful newsprint times, i stand up and applaud anything that draws a reader. and so i wish the hooded one smooth soaring to the highest heights. i’ll be here, holdin’ down the fort. a job i attempt to manage…..
p.s. the photo up above is the smiling picture of the author of the skyline, the latest blog wholly endorsed by the chicago tribune. they ran a lovely post about it earlier this week. seems they recognize a good thing when it’s in their grasp.

1 Comment
March 30, 2007

the essential shelf

once upon a time, it seemed the end of the week might be a fine time to pull up a chair and ponder the almighty word. relax. get comfy. kick off your workday shoes, plunk your naked toes on table’s edge.

consider the word.

in any form. alone. strung together into something akin to thinking aloud. broken, roughly, into stanza. pressed between the covers of a blessed book. a book you’d grab first thing, should you ever need to dial 9-1-1.

by now, whether you are a regular or a once-in-a-while puller-up of chair, it might have rumbled through your head that, save for clicking on a button, the only real price of admission here is a simple, unadulterated passion for what the linguists call the morpheme. again, standing all alone, a single uttered sound; or strung together, syllable on syllable, root on one of the –fix fraternal twins, pre-fix or suf-fix; or bearing apostrophe or hyphen, the cement of linguists’ possessive and compounding tools.

a word, no matter how you cut it, slice it, tape it back together.

here at the table, words are pretty much our salt and pepper, the very spice, the essence of who we are.

words, it would be safe to say, are the surgeon’s tools with which we poke around deep beneath the skin, pulling back, retracting, examining the places often hidden from ordinary view. words, too, as we’ve suggested in the past, are jungle gym and slide and, yes, the swing set upon which we pump our little legs and point tootsies toward the sky.

i come by love of words quite naturally. words, as much as irish eyes and soulful soul, come to me genetically. from both sides, my papa who typed them for a living, my mama who as often as i can recall was holed away in secluded places, barricaded behind pages of a book that made her laugh out loud, or, sometimes, cry. she claims, though none of us has ever seen, to have a lifelong stash of poetry. free verse. so free it’s captive, under lock and key.

not sated, i married into words. the man to whom i wed my life—son of newspaper editor who, to this day, reads six or seven papers, front page to obituaries, stacks so high i fear the house might soon cave in, and teacher mother who, for 52 years and counting, has championed children struggling to decode long parades of alphabet, turning squiggles into sense, triumphantly ingesting every written line—word by word, we fell in love.

in olden days, before the days of email, we sent surreptitious blurbs of words back and forth across a newsroom. he took my breath away through certain verbs (and, no, not racy ones), left me heart-thumped at the way he furled a sentence. he went on, my wordmate for life, to take home what our 5-year-old at the time called the polish surprise, for the way he cobbled words into thought. thought that at times has left me in tears, the power of its message, the pure poetry of his rock-solid prose.

my life, it seems, is strung together by the syllable.

and some times, oops, i get carried away on winds of words, and ramble on and on, dizzied by the pure delight of watching strings of letters turn to words turn to joy, or, sometimes, crumble into sorrow, right here upon my screen.

my wordly destination today, the place i intended to meander to this morning, is really rather risky. before i even mention where, i must issue a disclaimer: this is fairly off the cuff. you cannot hold me unshakingly to my claims. not forever anyway.

i am proposing that as a gaggle at the table we put forth what we consider the most essential bookshelf. ten authors, ten books, your choice. mix it up. if you only care to offer one or two, that’s fine. we will all set forth with list in hand, and check out the nearest library. we might read and then concur. or we might strongly shout in protest.

i’ll go first. sort of like being the one dared, and dreading, leaping off the dock, into icy waters of the spring-fed lake just before the dawn.

in utterly no order—all right, let’s go with alphabetical—i would stack my shelf with these: dillard, annie; fisher, m.f.k.; heschel, abraham joshua; lamott, annie; maclachlan, patricia; merton, thomas; thoreau, henry david; webster, daniel; and certainly not least, the whites, e.b. and katharine.

dillard for “pilgrim at tinker creek,” and a sentence such as this: “a schedule defends from chaos and whim. it is a net for catching days. it is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”

fisher, for making food writing the most essential recipe for life.

heschel for being my guide into the deep rich soul of judaism, and expanding the envelope of what it means to be filled with spirit in any religion.

lamott for making me laugh out loud, laugh ’til my side hurts, and then taking away my breath with a profound irreverent sense of god alive in the darkest hours of our struggling, nearly-broken soul.

maclachlan for “what you know first,” the purest child’s poem–a “grapes of wrath” for tender hearts–that i have ever known.

merton for taking me to the mountaintop, for laying out the poetry of what a catholic soul can sound like, even and especially from inside the silent confines of a monastery named gethsemani.

thoreau, for taking me into the woods like no one else, and for all i’ve yet to learn at the foot of this great teacher.

webster, for being my dearest comrade in the aim to get it right, and for the pure delight of traipsing through his lingual play yard.

the whites, he for charlotte and stuart and just about any canvas to which he brought his richly colored pens; katharine for her views of the garden, for her new england (and new yorker) wit and wisdom, and for being the one who stole the heart of elwyn brooks.

your turn, who’s jumping next?

4 Comments
February 27, 2007

stuffing envelopes

in a world in which bank bills and passion, catalogue orders and invites, teacher notes and to-do lists, itineraries and plane tickets all can come into your screen, into your daily agenda, at the click of a button, there is something sublime about succumbing to the slow pace of letters with stamps.

something even richer if you slit open the envelope and consider the vast possibility for what you can stuff deep inside, cast off to the clouds, with little more than the 39 cents that, as of this minute, the mail minions claim is the bottom-line cost of doing the business that will not be stopped by rain, sleet or snow.

you’ve read and you’ve heard, you’ve considered, i’m sure, the rapture of actually picking up pen, choosing ink, choosing paper. putting down thoughts in that old chicken scratch that gets scratchier by the day, i swear, what with the lack of practice, and maybe the eyes that now make it fuzzy, fuzzy all over, oh no.

a letter for no reason. a letter for thank you. or i’m sorry. or i love you. or, god, this is bad, is there something to do to pull you out from the deep dark place you’ve plunged into?

it’s just that once in a while there is something marvelously breath-taking about stopping the flow, taking time out, creating in real time, and stuffing your heart in an envelope.

ah, but here’s where we rip open that envelope. think outside the confines of words penned, flatly, on paper.

here, people, is where we go into the third dimension. here, people, is where we really consider what you can do with the limited room of an envelope.

here’s where we see what we can stuff down the throat of the folded-up paper with the gummy north rim.

i am particularly fond of sending mail-sized surprises, stumbling across some little thing that triggers a thought, makes me think of a someone. and rather than waving goodbye to the thought as it travels along out the distal hole of my head, simply succumbing.

just the other day i was perusing the aisles of a spice house, an amazing, intoxicating shrine of a spice house, filled with all sorts of jewels with fine smells. the furled logs of cinnamon sticks, the shining little stars of anise, peppercorns in pink and green and white, vanilla in long lanky pods you couldn’t wait to rip into, for the soft sweet treasure inside.

well, in my mind, this is just the sort of place for envelope stuffing. imagine the joy of opening an envelope stuffed with, for no reason, a packet of herbes de provence. or slitting the sealed edges of something postmarked to you, and finding three anisey stars spill in your palm. maybe even a recipe napping there, too. let loose your inner marco polo, dispatching spices from hither to yon.

bulbs, too, make for fine winter wonders. even just one tucked in a safe nest of papers. or packets of seeds, beckoning spring, promising summer. imagine the reverie of twirling the seed tree and picking nasturtium or sweet pea, big boy tomato or chocolate bell pepper, or the one i’ll never forget, forget-me-not. a packet of bath flakes. a few bath oil beads, especially the ones in shapes like the moon or the stars or the proverbial rubbery duck.

anything little. anything sweet. anything willing to slide into the confines of a letter-sized, legal-sized, or heck even a manilla-sized lickable post.

these are the sorts of once-in-a-blue-moon surprises i delight in mailing along. packing some wholly unanticipated folly into the folded-up paper that is addressed and sealed with a stamp.

what a sumptuous treat in these drab days of the winter that will not scat, to know that, just a few days after you stuff, lick and stamp, someone you love will reach to pick up the mail, expect nothing so much as more grist for the recyclable mill, and suddenly, unexpectedly, stumble upon you and your envelope whimsy.

suddenly inserting a good dash of joy into the spiceless stew known as a long day in winter.

i know you’re an imaginative lot. so you’ve probably already thought of, and executed, a vast army of marvelous mailings. anyone willing to open the envelope, and divulge the contents inside?

5 Comments
February 20, 2007

paper trail

tucked in the spine of m.f.k. fisher i find scribblings for how to make brisket. bedded down in virginia woolf i find a love heart once ripped from a reporter’s note pad and wedged onto my windshield. the biography of dorothy day, for some reason, contains a motherlode: a check, uncashed, from long long ago; a construction paper anniversary card, now faded along the edge that peeked from the pages; the fresh-faced first-grade school picture of my firstborn; and jottings that tell the tale of a heartbreak borne long long ago.

apparently, i leave my life scattered in bits, buried in bindings, waiting to be exhumed at the flip of a page.

it is the paper trail of my heart. the dots unconnected. the ephemera of a life recorded in scribbles.

i never know what i’ll unearth, or when i’ll stumble upon, say, the train schedule that captured the breathtaking quote my little one spewed about his new jersey grandpa as we rumbled home in the amtrak sleeper in the fall of ’98.
or, sorry about this, the surgical photos documenting the removal of the womb that carried my children, two born, three heartbreakingly not.

each scribble is a passage, a dispatch, that matters. whatever it is that i jotted, it moved me deeply enough that i grabbed for a pen and put pulse to paper. whatever i’ve tucked in the folds of a book is something i can’t bear to lose. even when it hurts.

maybe it’s because i write for a living. but really, i think, i write to keep breathing. if i put it in ink, some brain cell tells me, i hold onto this moment, this thought, this jumble of words in ways that otherwise would not hold. life slips away, i have learned. what’s once in your fingers is gone.

so i scribble. i tuck. i leave paper crumbs. i save the story in snippets.

one christmas, long long ago, i wrote a letter to my whole family. one of my early opuses. poured out my heart. my father, an irishman who kept feelings furled, said only this: “you have a real sense of history.”

that was the last letter i wrote to my father; ended up being the letter they read at his funeral. my father, as always, was right (though i did not understand at the time): i do have an eye locked on history. i do watch it unfold. it’s almost as if one eye lives in the present, the other dwells in the future when what’s now will be the past.

were it not for the notes that i scribble, i would not however know this:

that on september 26, 1997, when my now big boy was just four, he said this: “mommy, i have to tell you a little lesson. when you get a little huffy, you need to calm down. that’s what daddy’s talking about when he says, ‘freddy, calm down.’ you could say sweetly, ‘willie, i’m feeling huffy. could you go out of the room for a little while?’ because when you’re huffy, i say, what the heck. why is mommy huffy? did i not clean my room or something? it makes me feel like i live in a house with no friends.”

or, how on october 4, 1999, an autumn when the first-grade playground for him was a very lonely place, he said: “my heart is open but no one wants to come in.”

or, how after saying prayers on the night of january 19, 2000, he looked up and said: “God must love it at night. i bet he waits all day for it to be night to hear beautiful music.”

i think, given the scribbles, given the puzzle they’ll all put together, i’ll never give up writing my story in torn bits of paper, tucked in the hushed resting places that wait on the shelves of my heart.

do you keep your story in scribbles? do you go digging for how to make chocolate fudge cake, only to find a phone number from long long ago? do the bits that you tuck in your books, or your pockets, leap out and replay some story long past?

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