Alison McGhee's Blog, page 26

Andes Mint #1

In college, I used to haul myself through a night at the library with Andes mints. Fifty pages of philosophy reading = one Andes mint. (That must be a lie, because I can’t imagine getting through even ten pages of philosophy reading without wanting to claw my eyeballs out, but the number 50 sticks in my head, so I’m staying with it.)

An hour of listening to Chinese tapes in a tiny white soundproof room in the sub-basement of the language lab = two Andes mints.

Managing to complete one tiny problem in Baby Physics (I think the class was actually called Physics for Non-Majors, but I’ve always thought of it as Baby Physics), while all around me others were sailing through, having taken Baby Physics as their easy class for the semester (hello, Cecil Marlowe, I can still see you zipping merrily along in that lab while I sweated helplessly nearby) = three Andes mints.

That’s how it went, people. To this day Andes mints have a peculiar power over me.

Last summer at this time was when I set myself a personal challenge of Doing One New Thing Every Day for a month and chronicling it here. Learning how to count to ten in Mongolian. Devising a Signature Cocktail. Taking the cat on a walk with a wee little cat harness and little leash (do not attempt this at home). Typing an entire blog post with my two big toes. Etcetera. I contemplated doing the same thing again this year, but decided against it for reasons that have much to do with a) a dream I had the other night and b) laziness.

Also, it’s hard to believe that an entire year has passed since my month of doing new things. I mean, I’m sitting here typing this at the same table, on the same crappy laptop that literally burns my lap if I set it there, wearing the same exact sundress that I wore all last summer. I choose to take all this as a sign that the newness of last year has not yet worn off.

But I still want to challenge myself. So I will tell one tiny story here every day for a month. You’d think that as a fiction writer, the word “story” wouldn’t intimidate me, but it kind of does. Which is why I’m calling them Andes Mints instead.

A few nights ago I had a weirdly vivid dream. (If you’re the kind of person who hates it when other people start blabbing on about their dreams, my apologies.) In it, I had taken a job as pastor of a small one-room country church. Yes, I know, me, a pastor, but still, this was a dream, and that’s the way it went down.

The tiny country church was frame, painted white on the outside and left unpainted on the interior. This was my first Sunday on the job, and as I walked up to the door (which was on the side of the one-room church), I realized that I hadn’t prepared a thing. No idea what hymns to sing, what scripture to read, what sermon to preach. (Apparently, this was a traditional church; that they hired me as their pastor makes no sense to me either, BUT: dream.) (Just trying to reinforce that this was a DREAM. Got it?)

It was one of those horrid dreams in which you realize that you’re completely unprepared, and there are people counting on you, and you’re going to fail epically, and your heart is pounding as you walk into the tiny church. Beyond that, you barely know any scripture, and the only hymn that’s coming to you is Amazing Grace, and why the hell did they hire YOU to be their pastor. Etc.

At that point in the dream, it came to me that I could tell the congregation that I had somehow managed to leave all my notes and sermon in Vermont, and here I was in the Dakotas, so obviously I was going to have to wing it, and my huge, huge apologies; this would never happen again.

(That this would be a total lie didn’t bother me one bit. The onus was on them, right? They were the ones who had hired a pastoral idiot to be their minister.)

Then:

Just tell them a story, a voice said to me at that point. That’s all they really want anyway.

Instantly, the dream changed from one of those nightmare anxiety dreams to a dream of great calm. I knew exactly what story I was going to tell them. It would be about my son and his first tattoo. So I walked into the church and that’s what I did.

(Story below if you care to read it.)

* * *

Once there was a baby boy. He was an intense and passionate baby. Before he was born, a couple of weeks before his official due date, his mother sensed that he wasn’t yet ready to be born. She could feel that he needed a little more time, just a bit more, so that all his nerves would knit together and he would be ready for the outside world, with its unpredictable loud noises and its occasional bright lights and the sensation of air all about.

But the baby was born anyway, despite his mother’s sense that just a little more time would have been a good thing. He took a long time entering the world – three days – and by the time he made it they, they being others who were not his mother, felt that extra caution was necessary in case he was sick after his long and difficult journey.

So in went the tubes and on went monitors and there he lay in a bright room with a paper cup taped to the top of his head. His mother held him in her arms in a rocking chair and fed him, and a few days later home he went, minus the tubes and the paper cup.

Soft lights. Quiet. Tight swaddling in a baby blanket. Constant touch. These were things that he seemed to crave.

Many years later his mother thinks of the word “swaddle” and can feel her hands moving invisibly: smooth out the square of flannel, fold down one corner, lay the baby diagonally down, up with the bottom corner and then across – tight – with one side and then across – tight – with the other. Presto, swaddle-o.

The baby wanted to be held all the time. If not held all the time he screamed and shook and made himself sick. So his mother held him all the time. She had a contraption she called the “Red Thing” that she strapped on when she got up, and into the Red Thing he went, so that he faced out. His thin legs dangled down. His thin arms dangled out. His head lolled until his neck muscles were strong enough to hold it up.

From dawn till late at night, the baby boy’s back lay against his mother’s chest and he faced out. She cooked with the baby dangling before the flames – dangerous! but she was careful – and she vacuumed with the baby swinging with the rhythm of the long vacuum pole, and she never sat down with the baby in the Red Thing because if she sat, he screamed.

They stayed in motion. Much of the time, the mother ended up pushing an empty stroller down the sidewalk because the baby screamed if he wasn’t in the Red Thing. When the weather turned cold, the mother buttoned her long winter overcoat all the way up and put a stocking cap on the baby, so that oncomers smiled at the mother and then shifted their eyes downward and smiled at the baby boy. It was a two-for-one smile.

When the mother did sit down, she took the baby boy out of the Red Thing and sat him on her lap with a stack of books beside them. They read their picture books together, baby boy on lap, mother propping each book up while he reached out and turned the pages.

Where the Wild Things Are.

Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel.

Good Night, Moon.

Lon Popo.

Outside Over There.

Ferdinand.

Ferdinand was the boy’s favorite, the story about the little Spanish bull who didn’t want to fight, the little bull who wanted to sit just quietly under the cork tree and smell the flowers.

How many hours did the mother and the boy spend together, sitting on the couch, reading picture books? Many. Many many. Many years’ worth of many. It was their favorite thing.

When the baby turned into a boy, he went to sleep every night listening to stories on tape. He and his mother went to the library and checked out the stories on tape, and sometimes they bought them, and the boy knew the stories so well and loved them so well that once he was in bed he reached out and blindly pressed “Play,” not caring that he wasn’t anywhere near the beginning.

Once, on a long car trip, the boy woke from sleep to look at his mother and say, “Is this where we are?”

Years went by. The boy grew and grew. He grew until he was very tall and very thin, so tall that he towered over his tall mother. More years went by, and the boy turned eighteen.

One day, the boy sent his mother a text message: “Would you kill me if I got a tattoo?”

The mother would have been happy if the boy never got a tattoo, because she had been there at the moment when he was born. She could still see his newborn skin, so soft and paper-thin that touching it was like touching air. She could still remember crying in fury and sorrow the first time a mosquito bit that skin. That first scar.

But the boy was eighteen now, and 6’4,” and his body was his own. His body had always been his own, his mother reminded herself. She wanted to wrap her arms around that body and keep it safe, but. . .

But.

What sort of tattoo would he get, his mother wondered, and where would he put it? She thought of the needles drilling down through the layers of his skin, the ink pushing below the surface, and how much it would hurt. She tried to think of other things. It was hard.

“Not as long as it’s a heart on your bicep with an arrow and the word ‘mom’ in the middle,” the mother texted back.

The boy did his research and saved his paycheck, and the day came when off he went, to St. Sabrina’s Parlor in Purgatory. He got his tattoo. There it is down there. It is not a heart on his biceps with an arrow and the word “mom” in the middle.

But it could have been.

Poem of the Week, by Dylan Thomas

Fern Hill

- Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

And playing, lovely and watery

And fire green as grass.

And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

Flying with the ricks, and the horses

Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

In the sun born over and over,

I ran my heedless ways,

My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

 

For more information, please click here: http://www.dylanthomas.com/

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Poem of the Week, by Michelle Boisseau

Collect Call

- Michelle Boisseau

Whatever he means, my brother means no harm.

It’s 6 a.m. in his time zone. Was he awake

all night dreaming these children? a girl

my daughter’s age named Music,

and 12-year-old twin sons

born six months apart:

Seth Gábriel and Seth Gäbriel, named

for an archangel of double messages

whose secret translations my brother keeps.

And he meant no harm years ago

when he scooped up a toddler at the zoo

and ran with her as far as Monkey Island

before the crowd pried away the child he fought

to save from them. While he was strapped

onto the stretcher and lifted, a cracker on a plate,

he watched me watch him speed away,

climb the stairs that wind through a hole

in the clouds and close around him like an eye.

“Oh, I have lots of children,”

he suddenly remembers, “lots and lots,

but I never get to see them.”

Perhaps each tooth he lost was sown

into a child that sprang up like a god

with a fanciful name. I hunch the phone

against my shoulder, try not to set him off:

“And how do you manage to support them all?”

“I give them lots of ideas.”

Upstairs I hear doors slamming, the kids

awake, running, laughing, a game

of can’t-catch-me. The winner chooses

the place at the table; the other pours the milk.

Perhaps he means the wind loved him.

Or that the blond aspen behind the Seven-Eleven

wept grateful in his arms.

Or maybe he does have real children,

sometime a woman slowly undressed

a small nervous man and gave him

a bit of evidence he wasn’t denied

every fruit in the garden—children,

jobs, houses, beds—our easy windfall.


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For more information on Michelle Boisseau, please click here: http://www.michelleboisseau.com/bio.html

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Poem of the Week, by Max Garland

Sciurus Carolinesis

- Max Garland      



It’s hopeless how she loves this life.

The gray squirrel digs a small moon’s

worth of craters in the yard.

Some she fills, some leaves open.

I’ve seen her work a walnut, still green,

round and round, shaving the surface

down to the meat. It moves in her claws

like a planet, or a bead

bigger and quicker than worry.

By love, I mean she uses the day

down to the last morsel of light—digs, barks,

insults the crow, wields

and lashes her tail like a glorified whip.

There’s a charge in her, wild volts.

A livid motion, leaping from red pine

to hackberry, the single forepaw catching first,

swinging under, then over, then onto

the branch. She’s a circus

when she takes to the power lines,

racing the live wire above the lowly

addresses. She’s a spiral of serious sleep

in the high hollow of the pin oak.

By love, I mean filling herself

with small right intentions. By life,

I mean she looks at you from the railings.

A kind of dare is in her, her tail curled

like a bass clef, or mutant fern.

You won’t catch her. She’s scrolling

from scent to sound to slightest motion.

However the light moves

might be ruin, or rich enough to rob.

The way she ransacks, hoards, loses,

lashes, bluffs the crouched cat,

the unleashed dog, her death,

a dozen times a day, is what I mean

by hopeless how she loves this life.



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For more information about Max Garland, please click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Garland

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Poem of the Week, by Sydney Lea

To a Young Father

- Sydney Lea

This riverbend must have always been lovely.

Take the one-lane iron bridge shortcut across

the town’s west end and look downstream

to where the water backs up by the falls.

Boys once fished there with butterball bait

because the creamery churned by hydro

and the trout were so rich, says my ancient neighbor,

they tasted like heaven, but better. Try to

stop on the bridge if no one’s coming

to see the back of the furniture mill

in upside-down detail on the river,

assuming the day is clear and still.

I’ve lived here and driven this road forever.

Strange therefore that I’ve never taken

the same advice I’m offering you.

I’ve lived here, but I’ve too often been racing

to get to work or else back home

to my wife and our younger school-age children,

the fifth and last of whom will be headed

away to college starting this autumn.

I hope I paid enough attention

to her and the others, in spite of the lawn,

the plowing, the bills, the urgent concerns

of career and upkeep. Soon she’ll be gone.

Try to stop on the bridge in fall:

that is, when hardwood trees by the river

drop carmine and amber onto the surface;

or in spring, when the foliage has gotten no bigger

than any newborn infant’s ear

such that the light from sky to stream

makes the world, as I’ve said—or at least this corner—

complete, in fact double. I’d never have dreamed

a household entirely empty of children.

It’ll be the first time in some decades,

which may mean depression, and if so indifference

to the river’s reflections, to leaves and shades,

but more likely—like you, if you shrug off my counsel

or even take it—it’ll be through tears

that I witness each of these things, so lovely.

They must have been lovely all these years.


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For more information on Sydney Lea, please click here: http://sydneylea.net/

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Portrait of a Friend: Happy Father’s Day

Unlike most friends, this friend has been part of your life for as long as you can remember. He figures in your earliest memories, and there hasn’t ever been a stretch of longer than half a year when you haven’t been in his presence.

He’s a tall man, a big man. He has a big presence and a giant voice. His laugh, when he gets going, will fill a room and make all those around him shake their heads in admiration. This is a man who likes to tell a story.

He’s good at telling them, too. At the diner, where he goes every morning to meet his buddies for coffee, and where you go when you’re visiting, they sometimes egg him on.

“Did you tell Alison about the woman who propositioned you at McDonald’s?” one will say.

“Jesus H Christ!” he’ll say. “No I didn’t!”

“Are you kidding me?” you’ll say. “A woman propositioned you at McDonald’s?”

He will shake his head, that mighty laugh beginning to rumble out of him.

“Tell her,” his friends will say. “Alison needs to know.”

They will wink at you, and grin, while he looks down at the formica diner table, still shaking his head, still laughing. And then he’ll tell it, in that giant voice, so that the whole diner ends up listening. And laughing. And shaking their heads.

He is a man who has never been accused of political correctness. Nor has he, unlike most people in the world, ever tried to be anything other than exactly who he is.

Sometimes he would come to visit you during the four years you spent at that little college in Vermont, where most of the other visiting adults wore pearls and linen dresses and suitcoats and polished shoes.

Over the Adirondacks and into the Green Mountains he would come, cresting the hill in a big old station wagon. The door would open and he would haul himself out. Those were the years of the neon orange polyester shirt and the polyester pants with the grease stain. Those were the years of your friends, unused to big men with giant laughs, unused to hearing “Jesus H Christ!” so frequently and happily roared out in public, looking forward to his visits.

“Al-oh-sun.”

Despite a lifetime of knowing you, and despite the fact that your name is simple to pronounce, that is how he pronounces it.

“Alison,” you sometimes say, even now. “A-li-son. Emphasis on the first syllable. Try it again.”

He looks up and smiles, a gleeful little grin from a big man.

“Jesus H Christ!” he says. “I know how to pronounce your name, Al-oh-sun!”

This easy give and take, this banter, this happiness, wasn’t always there. When you were little, you were often afraid of him.

Was it that big voice, his height and his bigness? He was a man of enormous physical strength. He often spent entire days chopping down trees, chainsawing them into big chunks, then smaller chunks, then splitting them into smaller and smaller chunks that, finally, were small enough to fit inside a woodstove.

So tough and stoic is he in the face of pain that he once had to lie down on the floor of a doctor’s office and refuse to move in order to convince them that something –which turned out to be an appendix that had ruptured more than 24 hours previously– was seriously, terribly wrong.

You remember him once pouring Clorox over his bleeding arm to disinfect it.

Unlike now, he was often angry.

Like most children, you assumed that his anger was directed at you. That you were the cause of it. That you must have done something to bring it on.

Like most of the grownups close to you, he was a familiar mystery. In retrospect, you didn’t know him well. How could you? Each of you kept things hidden from the other.

You remember late nights when you were a girl, him working at the kitchen table, head bent over complicated graphs and charts, filling in tiny boxes with penciled numbers. He worked for a dairy farmers’ cooperative; he was keeping track of milk counts at various farms. Or he was charting milk tank truck routes; milk has to be taken to a processing plant within a certain number of hours, and winter in upstate New York is fearsome and unpredictable.

You remember him figuring out other numbers, bent over a checkbook, writing check after check, paying bills.

“Where does it all go, though?” you remember saying once, when you were in your teens.

You were talking about the money that he made. It was an honest question, an idle question.

“Where does it go!” he roared. That anger again, or what you interpreted as anger, anger at you. “Where does it go!”

Later that night he called you out to that kitchen table. On it was a piece of ruled notebook paper. BUDGET at the top of the page. Underneath, line after line with things like Mortgage and Taxes and Food and Gas and Car Payment, each with a dollar amount jotted next to it. Exact dollar amounts, written from memory, subtracted and subtracted and subtracted from that single figure titled “Income.”

“Now do you see?” he said. “Now do you see where it goes?”

Yes. Now you saw.

You didn’t, not really. But later, many years later, when you yourself were sitting up late at night, your children asleep upstairs, dividing a small number over and over again, trying to make it come out differently, you remembered that night so long ago. That piece of lined paper titled Budget.

He was a young man, back then, which is something else you didn’t know. Grownups, those mysterious beings. To a child, a grownup is born a grownup. Could you have imagined him, back then, as a child himself? No.

When you were a little girl you had no idea how young he was. You do now, though. You look back and you wonder at his youth. What went through his mind? What were his dreams? What had he put aside, for four children and the responsibilities that go with them?

Once, when you were about twelve and he was, what, 36, someone asked the people in the kitchen in which you were both standing this question. “If you could start your life over, would you?”

Almost everyone in the room answered immediately: “No.”

But not him. “Yes,” he said. “I would.”

And not you. “Yes,” you said. “I would.”

Looking back, it seems impossible that you, at that age, could have answered that way. How in the world could you have lived long enough, lived through enough, to want the chance to do it over? But the memory is perfectly clear.

You remember looking at him –that big, tall man, often angry the way he was back then– and recognizing that something in him, something he had never talked about, was in you too. Even if neither of you knew what it was.

If he never talked about the big questions, he was full of small ones. When you would return from a day or overnight at a friend’s house, for example, he would quiz you.

“What did you have for lunch?” he would say, “and what did you have for supper? Where did you sleep? How warm do they keep their house?”

He would lean forward so as not to miss anything, and you would describe it all.

“Jesus H Christ!” he would interject, fascinated and needing more details, which you would supply.

He loves a good story, and so do you. He will happily exaggerate if it will make a good story better, and so will you. His love of a good laugh, his keen interest in the people around him, his frustrated anger at his young children when he was a young man, his deadpan humor, his fierce need to make his own schedule, to be free, to get in his car and drive?

All these are in you too. Early on, you felt yourself so different from him. Not anymore.

You remember him coming out of a gas station on a summer day, somewhere in the middle of the two-week road trips that were your family’s annual vacation, his hands full of candy bars, one for each child.

You remember a dusty wooden-floored building out in the country, where every once in a while a polka band would set up. You remember setting your then-small feet on his enormous ones and holding on while he danced you around the room.

You remember a day in a restaurant with him and his mother, whom you adored, and the rest of the family. You remember his mother losing her balance and falling flat on her back and him, then in his 60′s, silently and swiftly scooping her up in his arms and setting her back upright.

Now, these many years later, you sometimes get eight or nine emails a day from him. Almost all are forwarded posts that he’s gotten from others: astonishing or weird sights, political jokes, cute pictures of animals, unusual historical facts. Jokes, off-color in the extreme, that almost always make you laugh.

Usually, the mere sight of a forwarded email, with those telltale and dreaded endless lines of recipients and senders, means an automatic delete. Not so if he’s the sender. You read them all. You respond to the ones you like best.

He likes late night solitaire. Sometimes, when you’re going to bed, you picture him, far away in that house in the foothills, his still-big body perched on a small chair, gazing at the green screen, seven vertical rows of cards.

The sound of a baseball game turned low on a television in the background of a room, or a baseball game on the radio in a car, any car, brings you back to childhood. When you visit you sit and watch with him, arguing about the Yankees.

You’re lucky people. Lucky to have both lived long enough to live through the storms. Not a day goes by that you don’t get up in the morning and sit and bow your head and thank the world for that. For having come out on the other side. For the loss of fear and the gain of love.

In your 30′s you read a poem, this poem:

* * *

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

* * *

You memorized it.

Poem of the Week, by Jeanne Murray Walker

If Found, Drop In Any Mail Box. Owner Will Pay Postage

- Jeanne Murray Walker

I’m grading papers in the motel room,

the teacher in me watching as my students

fumble with their keys in the lock of the world.

I crack down on the one who misspells

the minuet amount of imagination a person needs

to live well. And I give a C to the one I suspect

of telling me whatever I want: that summer is a newspaper

printed with no alphabet but pleasure. But I confess,

I feel a twinge for the one who postures,

as if he can’t imagine anyone loving him for himself.

And I admit, I cheat on the good side to help the one

who writes that he and his girl are one cell,

sliced apart by the scalpel of her parents.

When I get to the one who says

that he’s a lonely space ship flying between stars,

I put my red pen down. I could go under the knife

with him, I think, knowing that I won’t.

But let’s say this. It surprises me to find out I love them.

I’d like to tell someone, the woman in the next room, maybe,

like to spread this sweetness, to bring about some

minor good. Can I offer you this pale translation

of my students’ essays? Nothing special.

The sound of their keys turning in the lock of the world.

I drop it as I close the door, in case you need it.


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For more information on Jeanne Murray Walker, please click here: http://www.jeannemurraywalker.com/poe...

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Poem of the Week, by Phebe Hanson

Somewhere I’ll Find You

- Phebe Hanson

So we moved from my small town in western Minnesota

to St. Paul where I had to go to Murray High, a school

with more people than in the entire town of Sacred Heart,

and I had to walk two and a half miles every day because

there were no school buses, but it turned out to be not so

bad after all because I met a boy in confirmation class who

let me ride on the handlebars of his bike on the way home from

school and one Sunday my dad even let this boy pick me up

to go for a walk in Como Park, since after all the paths were

safe, filled with many families swarming with children, and

even though my dad knew the devil went about the city like a

roaring lion seeking whom he might devour, he let me go

with this boy because after all he was a Luther Leaguer and

we had sung together sitting side by side in church, “Yield not to

temptation, for yielding is sin / each vict’ry will help you,

some other to win / fight manfully onward, dark passions subdue /

look only to Jesus, He’ll carry you through,” but as soon as we

left my house this boy said he was going to take me some other

place I’d like very much and it was going to be a surprise so

off we went on the streetcar and new to the city I had no idea where

we were going until we got off and were standing in front of a

movie marquee and I said, “I can’t go in. You know my father

doesn’t let me go to movies. It’s a sin,” but he gently guided me

with his seductive hands, saying “Just come into the lobby to talk.”

There below the sign “Somewhere I’ll Find You,” starring Clark Gable

and Lana Turner in a “torrid tale of love between two people caught

in the chaos of war,” he persuaded me at least to go inside and sit

down and watch part of the movie and if I didn’t like it, we could get

right back on the streetcar and go to Como Park, so I decided since

I already was in this lobby den of iniquity surrounded by posters of

Jezebel movie queens and devilish leading men, I was doomed anyway,

so I might as well go into the darkness with him and even let him put

his arm around me and hold my hand and that’s the way it’s been ever since.

–

For more information on Phebe Hanson, please click here: http://www.rusoffagency.com/authors/hanson_p/phebe_hanson.htm

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My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by John Hodgen

My Mother Swimming

- John Hodgen

Chest-deep, my brothers and I, the waters of Comet Pond leaping at our little hearts

as we held on for dear life, shrivel-fingered, blue, to the cement boat dock,

as far as we dared go, the self-declared demarcation of our drowning,

our father back on the blanket, lonely as Liechtenstein, his shirt still on, always,

the polioed hunch of his back like a boat overturned on a beach,

my mother swimming alone before us, back and forth, smoothly, shining,

this one time and never again. Soon she would come in to us, gleaming,

pack up the blanket, the basket, sit like silence next to my father all the way home,

their heads and shoulders looming before us, the Scylla and Charybdis

we knew even then we would have to get past to make our way in the world.

But for now, for just this moment, she glowed. She showed us,

moving like language along the water, like handwriting on the horizon,

that even in the oceans of darkness that would come,

the long rivers of abandoned office buildings on a Sunday afternoon,

the silent crow’s-nest shadows of all the true angels of death,

the first step we would take from the train, alighting into the darkness

of our hometown, our mother and father no longer there to meet us,

their shadows long gone, run off and drowned somewhere -

There will be these moments, she said, smiling, as she turned on her back,

floating, moments like diamonds in our hands, candles on the waves,

that we could make our way to them, hold them one by one,

the gold buttons of the opera singer as he changes music into light,

the smile on the face of your lover as she closes the door and turns to you,

the twilight that gathers all afternoon in the nave of the cathedral,

the silver beads of water on the head of the baby being baptized,

the breath she takes in like a dream and lets go.


–

For more information on John Hodgen, please click here: http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2010/09/john-hodgen.html

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My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

The seen and unseen worlds

See that big rock in the upper right hand corner of this photo? It sits on the radiator cover in your bedroom, next to the other rocks you’ve brought back from various shores and woods, along with the beach glass your best friend gave you one year for your birthday.

“You can ride as far as the big rock, and then you have to turn around.”

The big rock marked the end of the driveway, which was as far as you and your sisters were allowed to ride your bikes, when you were little. You grew up on 130 acres of woods and meadows and you were free to explore all of them, but the road, the nearly-carless road, was the boundary of that world.

When your parents had the driveway paved, not all that long ago, they dug up the big rock and hauled it out to you. They figured that you would want that big rock. They were right.

One of your daughters is in the Galapagos Islands right now. She’s teaching English in a little school on an island there, where tall rock cliffs jut vertically out of the sea, where sea lions are as plentiful as the squirrels are in Minneapolis.

Earlier today you watched a six-second video of a sea turtle clambering across the sand, a video sent to you by her on her phone. At the last second the camera swung around and there was her smiling face, her waving hand, her long sweep of dark hair. Hi, daughter, you said to the screen. You could almost smell her hair, hear her voice. And then the video disappeared.

When you were the same age that she is now, you got on a plane in upstate New York and flew across continents and oceans and landed in the middle of the night in a city so foreign that small children looked up at your vast North American height and, terrified, began to scream.

Sometimes, during the half-year you lived there, at a time of night when you knew that no one would be home in the Adirondacks to answer –international phone calls were ruinously expensive back then– you would pick up the heavy Chinese phone in the apartment you shared with a friend and two Chinese roommates and dial your parents’ phone number.

You wanted to hear it ring. You pictured it ringing there in the empty house, on the wall by the dining table, no one around to pick it up. You needed that connection.

This is what you are thinking about these days, in small and large ways: connection. Between people, between ideas, between silences and loudnesses. Between continents and oceans and worlds.

You woke this morning thinking about a friend who lives in Germany, wondering how she is. You lay there in bed picturing her hanging laundry on the line, a task that both of you love. This friend has been part of your life for some years now, a kindred spirit. You send each other small notes, poems.

You’ve never met this friend in person. Never stood in the same room with her, sat side by side drinking coffee and talking. Never spoken on the phone. Everything between the two of you has happened invisibly, in silence, via email.

It often happens that after a day in which she suddenly appears in your mind, you wake to a note from her, written while you were sleeping. That is what happened this morning. Eight weeks and eight poems but no blog post, she wrote. Are you all right?

Of course, of course, you wrote back. But it’s not always easy to know if you’re all right. Sometimes, like now, you’re going along and going along and then you look up and suddenly the world has changed. You’ve vaulted onto some new plane of being without intending to. You read a certain line of poetry, or you listened to a faraway someone’ s voice on the phone, or you came down hard on your heel and something inside twisted, and in the twisting, you pivoted into a slightly newer person than you were a moment before.

A bunch of flashing neurons, said someone on the radio the other day. That’s all we are. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that a miracle in and of itself?

It seems like a miracle to you. You love reading about science, how the brain works and the ways in which it compensates when it’s injured. Two halves to a human brain. Two kidneys, two eyes, two ears, two ovaries, two hands and legs and feet.

We are made in duality. Our bodies contain two of many separate worlds, side by side, working together but separate. Parallel universes.

You’re working on a strange novel these days, a novel which has you in its grip. It’s taken you six hundred pages of wandering before you could begin to see what it was about, at heart, and what it’s partly about is the seen and unseen worlds.

You keep finding yourself writing in and about a place you can’t see and can only imagine, or remember. Where do our spirits go when we sleep? Is a dream real? Were we somewhere before we were here? Where will we go when our bodies die?

The ideas of heaven and hell make you laugh. You care so little about the concepts that you don’t think about them and never have. You’re one of those people who says things like Heaven and hell are right here on earth, and you mean it.

But still. Can’t help but wonder where I’m bound, where I’m bound, sings Johnny. Can’t help but wonder where I’m bound.

What comes after this?

Twelve thousand miles away, is a phone ringing in an empty room as you type this?

Hello stranger, sings Emmylou, put your loving hand in mine. You are a stranger, and you’re a friend of mine.

Right now, as you type this, your old friend Kingsley is in the hospital, where he has been for weeks.

“I’ve been thinking about my father these days,” he said the other night, on the phone. You lay on the couch listening to his voice, so familiar, hoarse now from a dry throat. In the background you heard the chatter of aides, a nurse, something clinking.

“Remember that photo you sent me of him?” you say. “The one at the party? I keep it on my desk so I can see his big smile. He smiled a lot, from the looks of it.”

“Yes. He did.”

Kingsley is old, and he is so weak that he cannot lift his legs, and his father has been gone for many, many years now.

“Do you miss him?” you ask. This is not the kind of question that you would have asked, twenty years ago, but it’s the kind of question you ask now.

“He always gave me good advice,” said Kingsley. “I could always go to him, and tell him my problems, and he always had good advice.”

You listened to his tired voice, and you glanced at the photo on your desk of his smiling father, bending over a birthday cake with a big knife in his hand.

“Maybe he’s with you right now,” you say. “Invisible but there.”

When you talk about chronology to your students –chronology defined in a writing class as the order in which something’s told– you tell them that many writers begin in the now and then go back in time to fill in the inbetween, skipping here and there in time, back to the present and back to the past, skipping here and there in time. That’s because it feels natural, you say, it’s the way we live our lives.

Once there was a five year old girl who stopped at the big rock at the end of the driveway.

Once there was an eleven year old who had to stop in the alley on her way to the fire house that day after school and wrap her arms around her skinny self because the dark blue sky and the fiery maples were so beautiful they hurt.

Once there was a twenty year old who forced herself to leave her hotel room in Taiwan because she was starving, who found a dumpling stall and sat there eating potsticker after potsticker until, finally, she was full.

Once there was an exhausted young mother who wore her baby boy strapped to her body because unless he was touching her, part of her, he screamed.

Once there was a woman in mid-life, sitting at a long wooden table typing this post late at night, a glass of wine to her right and an oblong phone in a sea-blue case to her left.

You think you’re one person but you’re not. You’re all the people you ever were, at all times, everywhere.

You’ll be going along, going along, going along, and then something happens, you come down hard on your heel, or you look up at the sky at just the right moment and rays are streaming down from above between the storm clouds, and suddenly you know you’re not exactly the person you were before.

Three days ago you woke up and read the blog of a a college friend whose family is gathered around her these days, who writes about what it’s like to “plunge into the truth” of her life. You silently vowed that everything you did that day would be a secret celebration of her, out of love and respect.

On that day of secret celebration, you were hyper-aware, the way she would be, of the scent of lilacs everywhere you walked and ran in this green and rain-laden city. Aware of the pavement underneath your feet. You pressed shuffle on your music and trusted that every song would have meaning, and every song did.

All that day you cried, on and off. Running down the pavement from the Y. Sitting in your car at a red light. Walking the dog past the endless lilacs.

You didn’t care who saw you. They weren’t tears of grief so much as tears of fullness. A song by Jon Dee Graham, that astonishing musician, the man who can’t write a bad song, came shuffling up.

I know it’s hard, but I know it’s sweet, complicated and incomplete, but I am in love with the world so full. Don’t turn away, don’t turn away from a world so full.

I’m trying not to, Jon Dee, you thought. Trying hard.

Is it a stretch to feel that if something once was, it will in some form always be? Invisible, maybe. Untouchable. But still there. Still here.

“When we’re old,” your mother says. “Ten years from now. Always ten years from now.”

The book you’re working on keeps shifting time and place, skywarding up into some place that for lack of a better term you think of as the spirit world, a world parallel to this one but existing in its own dimension of time and space. You don’t want the book to do this –for God’s sake, aren’t you already plotless enough? and don’t your novels already curve endlessly around on themselves?– but the novel does what it wants, and this, apparently, is what it wants.

Maybe this is the way the world really is. You and everyone else live in duality –eyes, ears, hands–and maybe, even if you don’t think of it that way, you already live in more than one world at a time. You already take, on faith, so much that is invisible: Air. Electricity. Love. Why not this too?

It’s possible that what you have long thought of as reality –the things of this world you can touch and hold and smell and taste– is only one small part of a far bigger whole. If, when you talk to your grandmother in the early mornings, to ask her advice or just say hi, you can feel her with you, then isn’t she still there?

If, when you think about a long-ago night when you made your way down to the shore and slept on a quilt on the beach because you wanted the sound of the waves in your ears, and you can smell the salt air and feel your body soothing down into the sand from the sound of the waves, then isn’t it still happening?

If, when you imagine the hand of someone you love stretched toward you, and imagine his fingers wrapped around yours, are not the two of you holding hands?

Technology and its gadgets are bringing the seen and unseen worlds closer, beginning to dissolve the boundaries you have lived by, have believed in. But it’s possible that the boundaries were never there to begin with.

The phone in your back pocket chirps again. You press a button to behold a mother and child sea lion, sunning on the rough shore of a Galapagos sea. The mother sea lion stretches and flops over. Then the camera flips around and a girl with wide eyes and a tumble of long dark curls is smiling at you. Love you, Mom, she whispers.

And immediately the screen goes blank, replaced by a static picture of a tiny yellow ghost.

What is the meaning of kindness?

Speak and listen to others, from now on,

as if they had recently died.

At the core the seen and unseen worlds are one.

(Solution, by Franz Wright)