Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 174

The Better Part of a Day…Kid Land

Driving to pick up my daughter at basketball practice today, I kept thinking about David Lipsky’s book about David Foster Wallace, and Infinite Jest, which I can’t wait to read. Am I nuts? When am I going to fit in a 1,000-page plus novel? And yet, David Foster Wallace is now my current favorite three-word combination.

At school,  pleasant and convivial as my fellow parents may be, the finer part of a day is not talk about how legislation winds down all the way into our kindergarten classes. So much of this adult world is talk, talk, while the deeper issues that lie in our lives are often poverty – material and spiritual.

After basketball practice, the girls discovered hidden doors under the stage and crawled deep into the dark underbelly of their school. I crouched before the open little door and listened to their voices, young and female, problem-solving, figuring out the lay of their land, navigating obstacles. This, I thought, is what the adult world needs: a way to the look at the familiar world and find a hidden door, to look at our own world in ways we’d never imagined, from deep down in its guts, to see what holds us together.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?

David Foster Wallace

Hardwick, Vermont

Winter: the Whale’s Belly

Our kitchen was forty-two degrees this morning. I leaned over the range and chipped a ridge in ice along the bottom of the window, and thought this is getting a little ridiculous. And I forgotten cream for the coffee. Often, in these morning – no Biblical scholar, not even a church-goer – I think of Jonah in the belly of his whale.

But then, home again from a basketball game, the wind blowing snow in our faces, my older daughter sang out, You can tell the light’s coming back! 

Indeed. Through translucent clouds, the day was yet bright, the moon a glowing gem tucked above the bare branches of maple trees. After a frozen day, the end was such a lovely place, with traces of snow falling, the white all around pure and white, and the light familiar and beckoning as that long-off spring.

...Winter is for women ----
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanis walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

– Sylvia Plath, "Wintering"

Photo by Molly S./North Bennington, Vermont