Sharon Charde's Blog, page 4

SILVER LININGS

“What are you going to do for your bonus day at Ucross?” Caitlin asked us as we traversed the winding road through the mountains from Sheridan back to Ucross after two canceled flights and a night at the Best Western. Caitlin was the communications director at Ucross, dispatched to bring Erica and I back to the comfort and safety of the Schoolhouse for the wait for tonight’s flight out to Denver.

Bonus day, indeed. Bonus days, really.

 Three of us were all packed and on the road to the tiny Sheridan airport two days ago when the text popped up on K’s phone and then mine, the United message saying the flight to Denver had been canceled “for technical problems.” Ryan turned the Suburban around, drove us back to the ranch house office, and proceeded to try his best to find other flight arrangements for S while K pursued her own.

I was feeling a bit smug as I’d quickly used the United app on my phone to snag a ticket for that night’s flight, and actually looked forward to the afternoon ahead –it was gorgeous out, sunny and warm, Cindy would make us another luscious lunch, I had ideas for another poem, and planned a long walk out by the creek, my favorite one here.

Of course, I thought,  I’d make the night flight, and would only miss part of a day with my long-planned visit to dear old Denver friends. As I strode down the creek path, I felt a satedness that I described afterwards to myself as one of my few experiences of actually being totally in “the present moment” that we all talk about but rarely achieve. The small ponds nestled among the dry sage grasses were the bluest of blues, the contrast of colors stunning. I sat in the grass, savoring the sight, the ring of snow-capped mountains in the distance. No judgement, no descriptions in my mind, just seeing.

Some might call it bliss.

It was only later I laughed on the phone to my husband, saying “happiness has term limits.” We drove back to the airport with Caitlin at four, this time with Erica and K, who would leave on an early morning flight to connect to New York. Erica and I were booked on the evening flight to Denver; she had a tight connection, but seemed confident she’d make it.

Then the delay announcements began. The plane hadn’t even left Denver. Erica and I opted to sit outside on a bench in the waning sun, splitting a last “Cindy sandwich” as we residents had begun to dub the delectable towers of cheese, avocado, garden tomatoes and various other filings such as veggie burger (for me) cold cuts for the others, tuna salad, even sausages.

  A good thing, too as after three delay announcements, people began coming out of the airport, one woman calling to us, “It’s canceled! They don’t have a crew.”

I tried to get us on a standby flight in the morning but when the airline agent informed me we’d need to be at the airport by 4:30 AM (the very time I’d gotten up at this morning) and probably might not even get on, I quickly discarded that possibility. We texted Caitlin of our newest dilemma, and she booked us rooms at the Best Western, arriving shortly to take us there as she lived in right there in Sheridan.

The rooms were on the second floor, no elevator, my bags were heavy and cumbersome; Caitlin and Erica carried them up for me, and we talked about food possibilities –everything here in Wyoming seems to be mask-less, even people in the airport weren’t wearing masks, but Erica and I were determined not to eat inside. We’d get Thai take-out, a bottle of wine and eat in one of our rooms. 

The glorious afternoon had evaporated, as all moments do, of course, and I was exhausted, grouchy and upset to miss yet another day with my friends in Denver. The next possible flight would be the next day at 6:30.

I’d hit a wall.

I flopped onto the wide white bed, phone in hand. There was a text message from Tracey, the program director, Find the silver lining if you can—we never know why these obstacles occur but they always hold a message/lesson.

Silver lining? Bah humbug to that, I testily thought.

But then another text from Erica, she’d found a Thai restaurant where we could get take-out, and Caitlin had showed us a liquor store close by where we could get a bottle of wine. It even had an odd little wine bar attached to it, we noticed when we perused the shelves while we waited for our takeout order of stir-fried veggies.

The wine bar was totally empty except for the proprietress, a hefty middle-aged blonde wearing a turquoise tee shirt and a warm smile as we peered in. Maybe we could bring our take-out here to eat and have a glass of wine with it?

Sure, she said, explaining the method to get a glass. You were to buy a “library card,” put it in the slot by the wine you want, and push a button. The card automatically deducts the amazingly low prices of various wines.

It was a plan. And for the next several hours, we sat there talking and listening, sharing our lives and experiences, words tumbling over each other, this beautiful young woman with a successful writing career already launched, and this much older one with a long history of stumbles, multiple careers, a lengthy marriage to her serial romantic experiences.

The proprietress came over with a nearly full bottle of Malbec. They had a tasting in the store this afternoon—he can’t use this, so why don’t you girls enjoy it. Evidently the Sheridan patrons were not fond of my favorite wine…

We slept well and deeply, and the next morning Caitlin arrived to drive us back to our cozy lair at Ucross where we met one of the two residents who were staying over for the next weeks, who’d just made a “McGyver’s soup” aka stone soup, from all the fabulous Cindy leftovers, simmering on the big restaurant range. Since neither of us had eaten besides the apples we’d stashed, we filled big bowls with it, ate chunks of cornbread and cups of tea, continuing the conversation where we’d left off the night before…

Now to the airport. So far, it looks like we’re flying out tonight. Fingers crossed, we’re both still exhausted, but in the best kind of way.

Silver linings, indeed.

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PS: Erica made her connection, and though my plane was delayed 45 minutes and I didn’t get in until 12:45 AM, I’m home too, trying to meet the challenge of reentry, looking hard for its silver lining…..

FOUR DAYS LEFT

This place. These weeks. These mountains. These new friends and colleagues. This respite from the pandemic. This room I’ve so fully occupied, replete with the books, pads and notebooks I brought with me, now all (mostly) read and reread, new poems tacked up on the cork strips near my desk, old and new poems mixed on the floor behind me, struggling towards a possible next collection—all now to become part of the past, another challenge to let go and move on to the next place.

I am ready to leave, though. It wasn’t always this way for me—to which the many poems on the floor attest--I’ve spent years of my life clinging to experiences that gave me joy, wanting to push away those that brought anguish and sadness. Perhaps in my older years I may have learned something about the uselessness of trying to interrupt the flow of life’s episodes with wanting things to be other than they are.

 Or maybe it’s also the wholeheartedness with which I’ve inhabited this time out of time—I’ve felt every minute of it, walking up Coal Creek Road in the hot sun, the swirling snow, savoring the delectable dinners and compelling conversations around our nightly table,   sitting by the creek just listening to the sound of the water, feeling the mountains ringed protectively around me, and writing, writing, writing—with a passion and and discipline I’ve not had for a long time.

 In compiling poems for another collection as well as writing new ones, I’ve been forced to look squarely at my long life, its stumbles, joys, lessons, missed opportunities and heartbreaks. Because as most of you know—that’s what I write about, the way I try to make sense of my lived experience.

It has been sobering. 

And how much I’ve learned about what I don’t know here, too. The diversity of race, ethnicity, and geographical difference in which I’ve been immersed has been a gift I welcome but didn’t expect to get as fully as I have. Living a privileged life as an older white woman in a super-blue state with liberal friends and well—most family members—does not allow for the kind of mix of views and challenges I’ve been offered here in Wyoming.

I have been prompted to remember that we live on land that rightly belongs to the native tribes slaughtered by the whites that came to claim it as their own. I didn’t know that dreadlocks should be called locs now, as the word dread harkens back to the enslaved who wore their hair that way from necessity and were called dreadful. I grasp more clearly how populations here in these mid-western and western states are firm in their libertarian politics and resistance to mask-wearing and vaccinations, but have met individuals who, despite these beliefs and practices so different from my own, I care for.

A joyous freedom from politics and pandemic fears (aside from headline scanning on my computer) and television, has been another plus of my time here. You all know how much they affect me, as I’ve written about that so much in these posts. In the awesome, vast and austere expanses that surround me, I’ve been able to put a buffer between myself and the daily battering of bad news I succumb to at home. I hope I can manage to keep that balance—one of witness and consumer, yes, but also writer, wife, mother, grandmother, gardener, dog lover, devoted yogi and friend to many.

I know I will falter in this attempt. But I will keep trying, remembering the peace that comes from the absence of political and pandemic adrenaline.

Gratitude. I am bursting with it. For the Ucross foundation and its outstanding staff, which gave me this exceptional time, for my new colleagues and their acceptance of me despite my lack of knowledge of Tinder, Twitter and Twitch, a multitude of TV shows and internet intricacies of all kinds—as well as their surprising interest in what I think of as an ancient past (mine)--for this landscape which has enfolded me, allowing me a spaciousness of spirit and mind. For my husband, best and trusted reader of everything I write, who knows how much these residencies mean to me and supports them in all ways. For my new poems, wrung from these halcyon weeks.

 And for you, dear readers, whose responses are so affirming and mean so much.

Thank you, all. 

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Yippee! My new collection, The Glass is Already Broken, has just become available –here is the link:

https://www.amazon.com/Glass-Already-Broken-Sharon-Charde/dp/1421837064

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OASIS

The wind is wild outside, though it was a quite perfect day, warm and breezy, the cottonwoods starting to turn yellow, the formerly muddy paths now dusty and easily navigable. I’m at the Ucross Foundation, a writing residency in Wyoming, back after a year and a half when we all had to leave due to this mysterious Covid thing that was just beginning to make a name for itself. My fellow residents and I, gloved and masked to the hilt, braved the airports and the long journeys home—we had to, as Ucross, along with everything else, had closed down.

For the last fifteen years, I’ve been fortunate enough to have been awarded fellowships to various residencies, time that has given me both a much-needed creative tribe and protected space in which to dream, read, ponder and write in sheltered sanctuary free from all distractions. Those months have helped me generate much of my published and even more non-published poems and prose, but more importantly, they have sustained my singular self, the one not subsumed, however happily, by marriage, home ownership and maintenance, gardening, medical appointments, politics, the internet and all the other flotsam that arrives with daily life as a human in this world.

An oasis.

I crave this ability to move to my own rhythms, not those dictated by the needs and demands of others. I want to see what I’m blind to in the rest of my life. As a writer, I know there’s nothing I need more.

I spread the books and notebooks, blank pads, a glass of water, pens, on the big coffee table by the couch in my old studio. Yesterday was somewhat of a wash, taken up by settling in and computer and printer problems.  Ryan, the wonderful staff support person who picked us up at the tiny Sheridan airport, spent hours trying to solve them, finally bringing me his own printer, coming back later to struggle with the mouse that refused to work. Ryan warns us to wear fluorescent vests when we go out hiking as rifle season begins Friday, and will be bringing me tomorrow into Sheridan to get my Covid booster shot. Melissa, the  housekeeper, just brought me new dish soap for our little kitchen and summoned Mike, the maintenance man, to figure out the lack of heat in my studio. That’s the way it is here—everyone on the outstanding staff is devoted to taking care of us, supporting our privacy and comfort.

It’s like having a mother again.

Today I dig in, reading a bit from one book, then another, jotting down quotes, words. I think of including a poem in this post and get sidetracked looking through old poems, seeing them anew. It still amazes me how I can strike half of the words I thought the poem first needed and come up with a much stronger version of what I was trying to communicate. “Kill your darlings” is one of the mantras we poets—sometimes unwillingly—try to live by.

Staring out at the cottonwoods, I wonder what words will fill these empty pads, what new darlings I will create, which ones discard.

Later this afternoon I will put on my hiking boots and down jacket (today it’s 55, yesterday it was 90, almost too hot to walk) and head up Coal Creek Road into the wild open space of this place so far from New England, where I’ve spent nearly all my life. I love its vastness, its complete difference from what is familiar to me, though most assuredly not its distinction of being one of three states with the lowest vaccination rates. We here are all vaccinated, and do not leave the campus (22,000 acres!) except for the rare trip into town like tomorrow when I will get my booster and others will pick up a few necessities, fully masked. We know there is still a raging pandemic in the country and are both grateful and a little anxious to have braved the travel that brought us here.

I’d love to tell you about the very cool, talented and totally diverse group of nine who gather around the table every night to talk about their day, their work, their lives, while eating Cindy’s glorious food, but out of care for their privacy I’ll just say we are both women and men, writers, performers, and visual artists of all ages and colors. What a welcome change from Lakeville!

I have so needed this.

Already I feel suffused with peace, with acceptance of what is, what is to come. With freedom to create, to rest, to give the monkey always on my back pushing me to do more, do it faster, better, a rest. With tenderness for the suffering world and its inhabitants but without the need to give it and them constant moment-to-moment attention and judgement. 

Can you feel it?

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The Glass is Already Broken

I’m thrilled to give you this preview of my latest full-length collection of poetry, The Glass is Already Broken, with gorgeous cover art by Jarrod Beck, a brilliant sculptor and artist I met years ago at a writing residency. It will be out soon, and I’m pretty excited about it! More to follow on details about the collection and how to purchase a copy.

NO EASY ANSWERS

Were there ever?

Yes, when I was growing up in the forties and fifties, there absolutely were. Abundant in our catechisms and missals, the Sunday sermons, the Catholic school classrooms where we knelt by our desks for prayers several times a day, the pronouncements about what was right and would get us to heaven, they gave us a facile map to follow. “Sister says,” was a common mantra we learned to accept because our parents insisted we must. Questioning the priests and nuns who ruled our worlds was bad, maybe even sinful.

I know it sounds crazy to you who did not grow up in that naïve and simplistic way. But for us, it was real, and actually kind of comforting. “Say five Hail Marys and make a good act of contrition,” said the priests in our weekly confessions. All our sins were quickly wiped away and we could start over again with our souls cleansed of dirty stuff. Tallying up novenas and yes, “ejaculations” (!) like the phrases “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” and “Little Flower, in this hour show your power,” gave us early entry into Purgatory, allowed us to avoid Hell, though not quite Heaven-ready.

There were rules for every aspect of our lives, even the hereafter.

So reassuring. So painless. So easy.

In the liberating sixties, many of us slowly got the courage to acknowledge how completely crazy this way of thinking and being was. Everyone was questioning everything, even in our Catholic world.  Especially birth control and how bad they’d told us sex was, when we had proof positive from our experience of both how freeing it was, to say, enough!

At least, I did, furiously walking out of church in 1970 after the sermon condemning abortion, how the blood of unborn babies was on the hands and souls of the doctors and nurses that performed them. And in the ensuing decades my rage at the lies I was told for so many years escalated, as I was faced with the hard truths of social injustice, rank hypocrisy in organized religion, government and education, the long history of women’s second-class status, abuse and harassment that continued to infuse contemporary society.

But today in our complex and confusing world, there are no more easy answers.  In fact, not any answers. And even more questions.

When I began this post a few weeks ago, I had planned to quote from Margaret Renkl’s beautiful essay in the New York Times,  “I Don’t Want to Spend the Rest of My Days Grieving,” about life’s brevity, gratitude for the beauty around us, and “the need to attend to what is not dying.” I was feeling lighter, wanting to write my own similar reflections in the face of so much sadness in the world, experience a gentle breeze in the stormy winds of the daily news.

But since then, there has been a massive earthquake in Haiti, the sickening tumble of New York’s governor, the Covid surge and worry about breakthrough infections growing stronger, and now this horrifying situation in Afghanistan.

It’s hard to breathe anymore.

This morning Maureen Dowd had a powerful-op ed piece in the NYT (as hers usually are) in which she references “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats, a favorite of my English major years. And, it turns out, of Biden’s. How true the words for his rapid falling from grace, and for all that is happening now:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity. 

 As Haitians shelter under miserable tarps, thousand of unvaccinated die in hospitals supported by exhausted medical staff and more breakthrough infections are reported every day, as horrific reports and images surface by the hour of the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, the complete fallibility in our government’s ability to protect us is exposed.

The centre cannot hold.

I seem to repeatedly end up with the same message in these posts, despite badly wanting a different one. I, like many of you, cannot bear to keep facing these terrible facts, but nor should we turn away from them. They are our present moment, but yes, we must find a balance.

Last Sunday we went to see a magnificent outdoor performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear. I scribbled two lines on my program that seemed to invite that balance, despite, or maybe because of, their seemingly opposing messages.

How light and portable my pain seems now.

The weight of this time we must obey.

I’m trying to figure out how to digest those lines, integrate them into my own experience of the cascading catastrophes that continue to assault us daily. And sending a warm hug to all of you. Because right now, love is the only answer I can think of that matters.                                                          

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Here are the references to Renkl’s essay and Dowd’s op-ed, as well as a way to contribute to a charity in Haiti sent by one of my college classmates who has been long involved in work there:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/opinion/nashville-summer.html?referringSource=articleShare

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/opinion/afghanistan-kabul-biden-blinken.html?referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR0Uuae6FRSn6r67kyKqSIbfM8pBUoZ2U_6ZoUwiLkB_X4rWN9x9GH673uE

From Michele: If you can help, even in a small way, please go online to NDMVA.org and click Donate. There is a place on the form to designate the money for the Notre Dame Boulangerie. The money goes directly to the organization for this Haiti project.  

DISENTANGLING THE TANGLE

                The weight of the world feels so intense, and I am so tangled in it.

I just completed a half-day online mindfulness retreat and boy, did I ever relate to that reflection. I’d recently finished Ben Rhodes’s After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, described by The New York Times book review as Rhodes “going out into the world to understand how it has become such an illiberal authoritarian mess.” He feels we, as a country, particularly due to the invasion of Iraq and the 2008 banking collapse, are largely responsible for “disseminating the toxins that now infuse the world.

     It left me reeling.

We have fallen from grace in the world, he tells us. It’s a chilling and compelling narrative, and as if it wasn’t enough, the list of suggested similar reads that followed my kindle version—Last Best Hope, Twilight of Democracy, The Cruelty is the Point, Preventable—amplified my anxiety just with their titles.

And fast on the heels of reading Rhodes’ s book came this: “Citizens, Not the State, Will Enforce New Abortion Law in Texas”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/abortion-law-regulations-texas.html?referringSource=articleShare

My God. People in Lakeville figuring out who in Texas has had an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and suing them or the doctors who’d done it, getting $10,000 as a prize?

And then there’s the voting rights catastrophe.

                  I want to care about the world without collapsing into its suffering.

But just being alive these days is feeling like an emergency. My back has started to hurt again—fused fourteen years ago, it’s succumbing to more arthritis and nerve compression, despite my yoga practice and daily 3-4 mile walks. The painters still haven’t finished after months of being daily companions, we need a new roof, and the deer and groundhogs had a party in my garden when we were on vacation. Our only son has moved to Europe for his work, and I miss him terribly.

My constant anxiety was forcing me to know I needed to relearn everything I’d struggled to master in the last thirty years of countless retreats, dharma talks and sanghas. I’d been lately resisting the sitting practice that had been so much a part of my life for those years –I wasn’t sure why but didn’t stop running long enough to figure it out. But in the quiet of my sitting at Sunday’s retreat a possible answer emerged. I have just turned 79, and although many people glibly say, “age is just a number,” I know they are wrong. I have most likely lived the lion’s share of my life and because I am so aware of that, I am running to do, see, feel, everything I can --before I can’t. There are more books to write and read, places to see, yoga classes to attend, love to make, meals to prepare, mountains of saved cards, letters, files, and pictures to go through, friends and family to spend time with, flowers to plant. That growing pile of unread New Yorker magazines. Another retreat. Strawberries to eat.

I guess it was hard to be still because of fear, usually the culprit. But since the reasons for my resistance were pretty unconscious, I hadn’t needed to pay the kind of attention that would have made me stop and face my finiteness.

What would happen if I did? If I continued to?

I feared I would collapse into that suffering.   

The retreat teacher suggested putting all these concerns into a “nest,” saying we could have freedom in the midst of suffering. The world will keep spinning, she said, but we can simply notice that, feel its pain, creating that container to sustain us despite it.

But.But.But. I want to say. Not so easy. Can I do this now with all these new and frightening issues? Untangle the tangles of my worries and shape them into that nest she talked about? Can I simply be a witness for a time, find some peace and silence to take back into my messy, finite life, accept things as they are? After all, I just wrote a whole book about struggling to do exactly that.

Maybe I’d better reread it.

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To help a bit, I just became a monthly contributor to Planned Parenthood—it’s something I can do for myself as well as for PP. I suggest you do it too; they have a huge fight on their hands, and we must win it. https://www.weareplannedparenthoodaction.org/onlineactions/6iOI0_HnUUmPu_6_SRgayg2?fb=true&sourceid=1006441&ms=4NALz2100K1N1A&&msclkid=ba0ca7bd350a186b16fbc74dbce4a86d&gclid=ba0ca7bd350a186b16fbc74dbce4a86d&gclsrc=3p.ds

Also, great news! One of “my girls,” Eileen Ahmed, has published a collection of her poetry, foreword by me. Get yourself a copy, be inspired, and help her out. https://www.amazon.com/Couldve-Been-Inspiration-Soldiers-Spiritual/dp/0578839814/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Ahmed%2C+Eileen&qid=1626377244&s=books&sr=1-1

COMING OUT

It’s been awhile.

I wrote a whole blog post before we left on vacation, wanting to feel the sense of freedom that a completed task list could offer for the next two weeks, but the narrative just struggled too hard to make its point or tell the story I wanted to relate. 

My husband, best reader and critic, shook his head after reading my third attempt. “It’s just not your usual good writing, Sharon.”

It was lifeless, that was why.  

Not only the writing, but the subject.

I’d wanted to post about my first mask-free outing. Invited to a gathering of local writers to watch the Author’s Guild Gala Awards night at a nearby gorgeous home on the lake, I’d thought—well, it would be a good idea to go and mingle—I don’t really know any local authors and this might a be good way to meet some…and everyone will be vaccinated so I’ll feel safe…

Wrong.

It was a ghastly affair, the kind of fancy small-talking cocktail party I generally despise. I slipped out early and drove happily home to my pre-pandemic solitude.

So, the pandemic is sort of over. I guess. Maybe. Anyway, it feels that way to me, in my small universe, but I imagine, not to many working and living in the larger world. Many people are mask-free now, restaurants are opening, we can safely gather with other vaccinated people for indoor dinners. I’ve gone back to the grocery store for the first time in a year and a half, bought plants at two garden centers, had breakfast in a restaurant this morning, and it just feels so good to be out in the world without fear.

I’m trying not to think pessimistic thoughts, or too far into the future. It’s not hard, here on vacation in stunningly beautiful Little Compton, RI, nestled in a charming little cottage a brief walk from a gorgeous beach. There are good friends here from college and high school, newly made ones too as we’ve been coming here for years-- there is delicious fresh fish, the joy of sea and sand, long walks by the water, great books to read, lively conversations with others than my husband, but best of all, the total absence of stress.

I don’t think I’ve felt that for a long time.

I know it won’t last; already I’ve had some bad news about an in-person writing weekend I’d planned for the fall, and going home will bring a new list of the tasks, repairs and phone calls that managing our house and property bring. I’ll have to cope with how to deal with unvaccinated friends and family, a non-pandemic host of appointments and obligations, and the frightening political issues that grip our time, especially the voting rights legislation being passed in so many states and whatever horrors come from Biden’s talk with Putin tomorrow. I’ll be 79 next week, and though I feel fine and agile, aging is unavoidable and with it will come a whole host of new questions and problems as I try to face it.

First world problems, I know.

But “coming out” for me has been pretty smooth so far and I am really grateful for this halcyon time that restored and refreshed my pandemic-slammed spirit.

My hope for all of you is that you’re able to take some time, somewhere, to do the same.

SYNCHRONICITY

        I should be watching the Derek Chauvin trial. Reading today’s New York Times, answering multitudinous emails. Taking a hike with Stella up the trail near my home. Vacuuming. Closing the door to my study and reading the new poetry books on my shelf, writing a new poem. Choosing the cover art for my upcoming collection of poems. Meditating, definitely. Doing a yoga video. Cleaning the toilets, or finally tackling the pile of New Yorkers on the dining room chair, cutting out all the good poems as I’d promised myself I’d do for the last year.

     “Thou shalt not should on thyself,” read a therapist’s office poster in the old Housatonic Mental Health Center where I worked in the early 80’s. Sometimes I remember it. Most times I do not, and the tug of war among all those competing shoulds torment me most days.

     But today I would be ruthless with myself, choosing one, staying with it. I had been struck with a big dose of synchronicity, and since writing is the way I make sense of my life, I knew I needed to capture it in words on the page.

     I recently did an interview for Poetic Lines, a Boston NewTV poetry show, and listened to/watched it to it a few days ago. In answer to one of  the interviewer’s questions, “How do you think about Geoffrey today?” I responded quickly with “Synchronicity.” Over the thirty-three years that he’s been gone, I’ve kept him close by finding messages in what the dictionary describes as “the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.” 

     It happens when I am really paying attention to what I choose to believe he is whispering to me in those moments. I try to be conscious that I am always surrounded by signs and coincidences if I keep my awareness high.

     “Mom, stop! Put down your phone, step away from the computer, TV news, all those conflicts and shoulds. Feel what you are feeling. Pay attention,” he told me in a very loud voice two days ago, when the constant tearfulness I was experiencing pushed for a release I couldn’t allow it.  

     My yoga class had been canceled because the teacher’s power was out due to the fierce wind that day, so, I decided to accomplish a task on my to-do list instead. I drove to the hardware store in Millerton, not Lakeville, the town where I live, because I’d been told the “expert” paint mixer worked there and I wanted a match to a color I thought might be perfect for the paint job our old house desperately needs. I didn’t really notice his last name on the brass plate on his shirt, but when he heard mine, he asked if I’d known his parents, well-respected local folk singers now deceased.

     I looked at his nameplate. “Of course I did,” I said. “They sang at my son’s memorial service. “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

     We’d been so lucky to get them. All of the talented singers who were friends of ours protested that they couldn’t do it, saying they’d be too unable to control their emotions to perform. We knew we had to have that Dylan song, not only a favorite of his, but the product of another synchronicity—when we’d been in Rome, after arranging for Geoff’s  funeral there and transport back here, we’d gotten into a taxi to go back to his apartment, where we were staying.

     “Do you hear that? “I asked my husband, “Oh my god, do you hear that?”

     “Blowin’ in the Wind” was playing ---but there was no radio in the taxi.

      “Didn’t your son fall off a wall in Italy? he gently asked. “I remember reading about it in the paper.” 

     “Yes,” I said. “And suddenly remembering today’s date, I added, “Thirty-three years we were on our way to Rome, where we saw him for the last time.”

     He rang up the pint of paint, and I went back out into the wind to drive to my weekly acupuncture appointment.

     As I lay on the table, I told her about the close-to-tears feelings I’d been having for days, and the conversation with the paint mixer. She wanted to know the story of Geoff’s death, and all its unanswered questions came tumbling back as I related the details to her. At one point, hoping to shorten my explanations,  I asked her if she’d ever been to Rome and knew Trastevere and the wall along the Lungotevere.

     “Oh, I lived in Rome for a year.” she said, totally surprising me. She asked me fresh and piercing questions about his death, and mentioned a friend who’d won the Rome Prize for a second year, but had been unable to go due to Covid.

      Back in the car, I was startled by a brand-new thought. Years ago, Livio, Geoff’s teacher and our dear friend in Rome, had suggested I apply for the Rome Prize.

     “No way,” I said. “I’d never have a chance.” And honestly, I couldn’t imagine living in Rome for a year, away from everything familiar.

     But the answer was blowing in the wind, Geoff was telling me. “Look at this string of coincidences, mom. No yoga, windy day, Millerton instead of Lakeville, the date and its heavy memory, acupuncturist living in Rome, those conversations with both her and the guy who mixed the paint—you need to apply for the Rome Prize and write about your experience there as a bookend to mine, your next book. You’d be doing the same thing I did, leaving a small town for a foreign city, struggling to learn the language of something so new, embracing being a beginner again. So what if you’d be eighty, four times my age when I went? It would be a great book, mom, and maybe the final best way to integrate all your conflicts and confusions about my death. It could really be good for you. Think about it.”

     When I got home, I googled “Rome Prize.” I wrote for more information—applications can be made in August, final notification in November. I wrote Livio, our friend and Geoff’s teacher in Rome, who said he still believed I had a good chance of being accepted, loved my idea, and why not? I remember my oldest son Matthew would be living in Zurich starting in June of this year. I told my husband, who excitedly championed the idea. I let myself sink into the whole crazy scheme, imagining myself in a studio on the Janiculum Hill, studying for the Italian classes I’d always wanted to take, wandering Rome alone, savoring its history and beauty as my son had done and writing about it each day, but most of all feeling the intense connection to him that synchronicity had brought me.

     And that, whatever else comes of all this, was enough.

                                                                  *******

     Thank you all, again, for your many generous responses to these posts. It was a relief to not write about the pandemic, though I almost feel like apologizing for not doing so. I am quite sure it will be reappearing soon, as it continues to loom large for us all.

     I hope you all had a Buona Pasqua.
Arrivederci, alla prossima!

P.S.
Here is the link to the Boston NewTV Poetry show I mentioned in the blog post.
https://newtv.org/recent-videos-community/127-poetic-lines/6714-poetic-lines-sharon-charde

SECOND SHOT

     I got it, a week ago now. This time, my arm isn’t even sore. After the first one, I woke up two days later, with a piercing headache, nausea, and a fatigue so overwhelming that I spent the afternoon napping and went to bed at 7:30, my body so leaden it was hard even to move. The next day, I was totally fine.

     On our daily walks, we meet neighbors with whom all conversation centers around “the shot.”

     “When are you getting yours?”

     “We got Moderna, what did you get?”

     “I hear the people who got (Moderna, Pfizer, you choose) had the worst reactions.”

     “My friend was in bed for two days afterward. She got the Pfzier.”

     “My friend was in bed for two days afterward. He got the Moderna.”

     “We had to wait two hours and drove home another two hours in second gear –the roads were so slippery.”

      “I just walked in.”

     “You are so lucky! I am jealous.”

     “I’m going to wait until my daughter comes home this summer to get mine.”

      “Now we can get together for dinner—inside!”

          I should be happy. I should feel relief. I should be excited, ready to re-enter the world, if only in a limited way.

         Shouldn’t I?

        Again, I’ve struggled to find words for this post. I haven’t shifted gears. Despite the shots, I’m still living in this strange discordant landscape. Tired of bitter cold weather, aching from the sciatica in my left leg that tells me my old stenosis might be returning, riven by conflict between the need to create and the necessity to manage a household with all its demands, I’m exhausted. For the last fifteen years, I’ve been in residency at this time of year, lucky enough to have gotten fellowships to various wonderful places where I could settle in to read all that I have no time for now, write poems, work on my book, be fed and cared for by wonderful staff, and meet and interact with great new creative friends.

     Not this year.

     I wonder if my body remembers these much-needed breaks from my daily, distracted life, and its new aches are just subliminal longing for those times.

     A few days ago, I received word that I’d received second prize in Connecticut’s Nutmeg Poetry Contest for this poem, written at one of those residencies. The judge said it was “a nonce poem,” which is a poem written for a particular occasion, and “the occasion is now.” 

HOSTAGE

I’ve been feeling peeled, like a fruit
that needed a sharp knife. Ripped,
like the final gash in old cloth
already frayed, whispering in the dark
for soothing from something I’m not
ready to call god. The world is breaking
and I’m breaking with it. White men
in black suits making hell on earth. I
thought I’d seen the end of that,
what man can do to man, to woman.
Auschwitz, Birkenau, the Killing Fields,
bones and teeth on gritty paths, mounds
of shoes and suitcases, cyclon cans,
typed lists, numbered photographs.
Shouldn’t it all be history?
I’m too angry for metaphors, too scared
for rhyme. Savage unmothered earth
we live on now. I want to have a bottom
line, a limit to what I can bear, a scream
that says enough, a key to tenderness.

    Yes, it’s the tenderness that’s missing, a universal body/soul longing. But I think the only kind of tenderness most of us feel now is a pin-cushion kind of vulnerability, a creation of fear, irritability and anguish, a loss of focus and confusion about what “normal” will be, can be, in a future in which we are all vaccinated.

     And that’s a long time from today.

     Sure, the second shot has given some reassurance that neither I nor my husband will fall victim to this monstrous virus, but what is the life to step back into? Everyone talks about hugging their grandchildren and I surely would love to as well, but even without a pandemic they are far away at college and high school, deeply into their own lives. And anyway, I think they would rather be hugging their girlfriends.

     I still don’t feel comfortable going into a restaurant, though dinner with vaccinated friends in my home seems possible. Movies—how I loved going to the movies. Our wonderful theater remains closed. The trips I used to love to New York City are out of the question, as the things I cherished there are all off-limits—theater, museums, seeing friends, walking the streets. Travel is out of the question—where to go? Italy is my favored destination, but it’s all shut down, as is the rest of Europe. Nothing else appeals. My yoga classes are all on zoom for the foreseeable future. Everyone is wearing masks, standing away from each other, and that’s a good thing, yes, we need to do it, but it’s just plain weird, even after a year.

     And then there’s the living, breathing catastrophe in Mar-A-Lago, the crazies in the House and Senate, the terrifying prospect of voting rights being curtailed.

     I’m not even going there. The poem says it all.

     I feel spoiled and selfish even listing these very white privileged problems—thinking about the moms and dads trying to work and school their kids, the teachers worried about going back into the classroom, bus drivers, grocery store clerks, nurses and doctors, and most of all the families who’ve lost members they’d loved, who have to look at that empty seat at the kitchen table.

     But as I told another riddled-with-guilt friend recently, in my very first counseling class in grad school, the teacher began by encouraging us to remember that “nobody’s toothache hurts like your toothache.”

     It’s definitely worth remembering. All of us are entitled to be anxious, grouchy, tearful, selfish. Just not to reside in misery too long.

     Catastrophe does force reinvention.

     And the “in-between place,” where we all are, is the hardest to be in.

     And yes, lucky me, I got that second shot, after all.

                                                               ***

     I continue to be so uplifted and grateful for all the responses I receive to these posts, and I apologize for not getting back to all of you. And if anyone wants to watch/listen to my last library talk, it was a good one, with “girls” (now very much women) and staff from both Touchstone and Hotchkiss reading their poems and discussing what it was like to be in our writing groups. Here it is: https://www.sharoncharde.com/readings-and-interviews

LOVE STORY

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

                      ---Wislawa Symborska

     When I was a junior in high school, as a future editor of my school newspaper, I received a scholarship to a month-long journalism course at Catholic University in Washington along with the two other editors. We lived near CU in a spartan boardinghouse, in an area of DC called Brookland. The July course was intense and challenging, an experience unto itself, but we wanted to see the city. In every spare moment we boarded the downtown bus and took in everything we could—tramping around in the intense heat to the Capitol, all the museums, the White House, Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool, Georgetown---just glorying in striding amidst the stately government buildings around the Mall. We watched fireworks at the Washington Monument on July 4rth, spreading our borrowed blankets out on the lawn with hundreds of other joyful revelers. We even tried to fry the proverbial egg on a hot sidewalk one particularly sweltering day. Each moment was crystalline and special to those three young Connecticut girls. 

     I fell in love with Washington that summer.

     When it came time to pick a college, my choices were narrowed to the women’s Catholic schools my parents and the nuns at my high school approved. I got into all four of them, but Trinity College in DC was my first pick. I would get to spend four years in that amazing city!

     What made those years even more special, in addition to meeting my future and present husband, a Georgetown student a year ahead of me, was that they were bracketed by the inauguration and funeral of John F. Kennedy. A period often referred to as “Camelot,” was our Camelot too. My classmates have been exchanging email memories with each other of that time, prompted by Biden’s inauguration. Many of us watched the spectacle on that icy cold January day—I remember stuffing newspaper into my useless leather boots—it was thrilling, magical, to be a part of such huge history in the making. Some were lucky enough to get tickets to one of the inaugural balls—my roommate got one as a reward for writing postcards for an Iowa senator and dressed up in a blue tulle and lace gown with long kid gloves. I was so jealous!

And then, senior year, November 22, 1963—he was dead. I can remember right where I was sitting, in the student lounge we called “the smoker,” when someone shouted out the news. I and my friends waited for hours in the long lines to get into the Capitol Rotunda, that cathedral of democracy, to pay our respects. People had come from all over the country and we talked, shared snacks, and mourned together as we waited in the cold, one big family united by common grief over our beloved president’s death.  The next day we lined Pennsylvania Avenue and watched the riderless horse, John John’s salute, Jackie in her dark veil clutching Bobby’s arm as they walked behind the hearse. We were again surrounded with crowds from all over the country, again shocked by someone’s transistor radio announcing that Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin, had been shot by Jack Ruby. We wept and hugged each other, connected with what felt like the entire world joined together by the worst tragedy our young lives could have imagined.

     Washington was my city, our city. To this day it is my favorite city in the world. I’ve visited often, marched many times, returned to my college for an award in social outreach as well as class reunions, and thrilled to its new mission of educating young women of color who otherwise would not have had a chance at such an excellent education. I’ve been filled with pride at our classmate Nancy Pelosi’s brilliant reign as Speaker of the House, especially at her stunning ability to handle Trump’s dangerous lunacy with such grace and elegance. I’ve become a total political junkie, thanks to that city and in it, my birth as a woman, compelled by everything that happens there, sickened beyond belief at what it has become in the last four years.

     So, January 6 was exceptionally anguishing for me.  Along with the world, I watched disbelieving at what happened at the Capitol, its desecration unfolding in a shocking slow- motion horror show. Legions of Trump flags and banners, rioters in army gear, men in furs and feathers, shattered glass, gunshots, the Confederate flag waved inside the Rotunda, a hangman’s noose—a hangman’s noose? How could that have been?  

     Shouts of “Hang Mike Pence! Where’s Nancy? Invade the Capitol today!”

     In Washington, DC? In my city? That sacred space?

     I’m still taking it in—seeing Washington turned into an armed camp with tall fences and curls of barbed wire, soldiers instead of happy celebrating Americans lining the streets for Biden’s inauguration, Pennsylvania Avenue empty, senators and congressmen on our TV screens speaking of the fear they felt that day, how close they came to being killed. 

     Surreal. The word everyone’s been using.

     And then, another inauguration, but with masks on all attendees, chairs spaced far from each other, no ceremonial, peaceful transfer of power but a petulant whiny child of a now ex-president warning us all that he’d be back, “in some form.”

     After every war/someone has to straighten up.

     The job is huge and possibly impossible, although I hate for those words to come off my computer keys. Competent, experienced men and women of all races and ages are filling out hollowed agencies left by the last administration, dogs are returning to the White House, authenticity and truth are back in the Brady Press Room, a pandemic plan is in place though available vaccines are not.

     And a brilliant young African American woman wants to know where we can find light in this never-ending shade, tells us that quiet isn’t always peace, but that somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

    After every war/someone has to straighten up.

     Joe and Kamala, we’re right behind you, brooms, mops, shovels and cleaning cloths in hand.

     Let’s do this.
                                                                  *******

      Thank you so much, everyone, for reading these posts. I so appreciate your responses. And please join me on February 11 at 7 for another library talk, this time at Scoville Library, in my hometown of Salisbury, CT. I hope to have some of “the girls” with us to add to the discussion. I’d so love to see you!
Register here:
SCOVILLE LIBRARY TALK REGISTER HERE

Exhausted

     For months, Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson, lay parked on the far end of my dining room table. I’d borrowed it from a friend late last summer, and been neglectful about returning it, thinking I’d pick Caste up any day and begin to read what I knew was such an important book for the times in which we live.

But I kept putting it off, even though I felt guilty about keeping my friend’s book for so long.

     Now that I’ve finally started it, I understand why. Yes, I knew it would be dense, heavy reading, powerful, painful subject matter about such an important issue, but I’ve never shied away from such material—in fact, I’m usually drawn to it.

     I procrastinated because I’m sure my unconscious knew what bombshells would be lurking within its chapters. It’s hard to get through even a few pages without being overcome by shock and pure fury. And loaded up as I already was with outrage at our current political situation, the pandemic and its escalating deaths and despair, and my own angst at feeling trapped in an optionless COVID cage, I suppose I didn’t want to add more fuel to that emotional tinderbox.

    But now I have; it’s burning hot and high.

     Wilkerson tells us early on that the Christian philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing about the Holocaust, says “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.” Yes. I’ve long believed that bearing witness to society’s inhumane treatment of those less fortunate than myself was of great importance. Sometimes we are able to make actual, practical efforts to sow seeds of caring and compassion amidst the injustice we see close to home; in both my therapy practice and work with delinquent girls I tried to do that. Sometimes we can only read about it, try to empathically experience histories of monumental intolerance. But I believe we must speak. That’s why I’ve become a writer.

     I can’t be silent.

     I can feel the escalation of my wild fury as I turn the pages, slowly, so I can take in Wilkerson’s words, try to comprehend that the horrors done to people of color have been done in my lifetime—in my country--lynching as entertainment, burning black human beings alive, hideous other formerly unimaginable travesties, relegating blacks to a caste system they can never escape.

     I want to scream.

     I realize, as I piece together the then and now, that Josh Hawley, Mo Brooks, Louie Gohmert, Rudy Guiliani, Sidney Powell, the QAnon crazies—almost all the Republicans in Senate and House, and yes, most of all, Trump, are continuing this astounding disenfranchisement. With their lunatic claims of election fraud, it’s the black vote they want to subtract, that they think is embezzling white people from their place in the hierarchy of human beings.

     With their disregard of the escalating deaths in the pandemic, the largest portion of whom are black Americans, they are saying great, let them die, less votes for democracy and equality of all races and genders.

     And I further realize, as I reflect on the raucous and syncophantic Trump rallies, that they exactly mirror the mobs at lynchings and burnings of the past. Lock her up! Stop the steal!

     I want to do something, but I don’t know what, except to give money to the causes that I know are working towards changing the race dynamic in our country. But that doesn’t seem like nearly enough. I wish I were younger and could go to law school, engage somehow with Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy) in his incredible work.

     Exhausted, my energy further hijacked by these fresh insights, this book, the daily news, I feel so totally powerless, so broken. In my “therapist hat” I would say, “Sharon, you’re allowing this to happen. You can reshape your thinking.” I would say, “Remember impermanence, things will change.”

      But the deluge never stops. You say, tomorrow is a new year, there is hope on the horizon with a vaccine, Biden is to be inaugurated on the 20th despite what these monsters do.

     Yes. Maybe.

     Awareness precedes wisdom, the Buddhist dharma says.   

     The same friend from whom I borrowed Caste gave me an amaryllis bulb some weeks ago.

    On a sunny table in my living room, its crimson petals are slowly unfolding.

    *****

     I’ll be giving another talk on Thursday January 7 for The Oliver Wolcott Library in Litchfield. Click on the link below and there will be a zoom link to the talk and discussion on my book, I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, How Poetry Changed A Group of At-Risk Young Women at 7:00 PM. I so hope some of you can show up in the “zoom room!”

https://www.owlibrary.org/adult-events.aspx#anchor_sharon

And this Sunday, I’ll be taping an interview for a Boston TV station, very exciting! I’ll send the link in a future post.