When you see a teacher, you think: Wow, they must really have loved school. The truth is: eh, maybe not so much. In my career in Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt & Responsibility High School for Girls, I was more often than not the girl in the back row with her feet in the aisle, doodling in the margins of her notebook. Of course, my feet did not stick out so far, as I was small even then, so that bit of teenage rebellion probably went unnoticed. I even had to stop the slouching for a while when I bruised my tailbone playing kickball. I don't recall much about high school: hating algebra, of course. Understanding why geometry existed, but not how it worked. Failing Spanish. Summer School. No, I really didn't like high school all that much. Once in a while I would get annoyed and speak up when someone didn't understand why Antigone was noble and not stupid, or said they were too queasy to watch the mandatory childbirth/ birth control video, but for the most part, I stayed silent and sullen.
It wasn't until one of my English teachers started writing nice things on my papers that I started to like her class at least. When I moved to Alaska, she wrote to me, getting my address from my sister, who now had her in class. She suggested books, which I read. She wrote to me. She read me. It was probably the first experience I'd had with someone "reading" me- and responding. Of course back then, I didn't know about constructivism, symbolists, reader response, linguistic interpretation, or any of that fancy literary analysis stuff. I was just having a conversation with someone.
And I have been struggling with a lot of shadows of the past in trying to write, lately: some people are dead that I write about, so they can't respond unless they visit me in my dreams; some things I want to say will crack people's perceptions of what I am like; some things I am still searching for words to describe. So I go back to singularities that work for everything: Fear. Courage. Loneliness. Nostalgia. Love. Where do these things fall on those continuums?
Away a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay....
On a continuum, everything is possible. All the choices are possible because you have not chosen yet. Maybe you will clean the house from corner to corner, jettisoning ballast, sweeping cobwebs from corners. Maybe someone will open the heavy glass door of a darkened bar for you and you'll sit in the cool dark and erase your darkened afternoon away. Maybe you will run down a forest trail and feel all the cares falling away when you hear creekwater rush over the ancient heavy rocks that lie in the creek like petrified angel's wings. Maybe I will adjust my yoke and pull. Harder. We all have our own row to hoe. The choice is the first step.
I came home one day this summer to find the H and a young man surveying our yard. Planning an addition, looking at the lay of the land. Figuring in their minds what would go where and how it would look. I am not cut from that cloth that is able to imagine diagrams in the air, schematics, floor plans. While they explained, they were building in their minds, and their minds were one and the same. They could see each other; they could read each other. How can that be so easy?
This is the frustration of writing: who is reading? What do they see? When I read my student's writing assignments, sometimes they make me cry: a student who lost a sibling; a student whose mother abandoned the family; a student who desperately wanted their parent to notice them. Do I tell them to stop writing? No. You have to tell the story to get it right in your own mind. I keep their secrets until it's breaking the law; up until then it's only breaking my heart. They trust me. I don't know if you know what that's like, dear IR, to have 130 people trust you with their innermost thoughts & ideas when you would just really like to have one person to trust with your own. The earth starts to head out of Summertown, and our orbits all adjust. Days grow shorter, we start to turn inward. The euphoria of summer has to end, lest we all turn into idiots, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
I am a keeper of secrets. Sacrosanct, inscrutable, I bury things I love deep in the garden of my heart where they bloom perennially in silence. I don't know how to get them to the light.
Here's one of my favorites by Frank O'Hara. A good contemplative poem for a grey Sunday. Sundays are the day I ask questions, some of them deep. Transitions were never my strong suit; I suppose I'll have to learn that if I'm going to do a triathalon. Today feels like fall is in the air; my shorts and floaty shirts are replaced with flannel and wool.
O'Hara never missed a chance to get transitions out there. Though I'm pretty sure he had a secret garden, too. And perhaps I will be myself again, and you will too.
From: Mayakovsky
Frank O'Hara
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.
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