and the days are not full enough

Today was a day that felt like a month, dear Imaginary Reader. Counselors in the classroom. Kids were absent. My AP Lunch group is starting to come together. And the first homework assignment in AP English Lit was due.

The assignment was to write a Curriculum Vitae poem based on one by Lisel Mueller. Twenty things in chronological order, using figurative language mimicking Mueller's poetic syntax at least five times. There have to be at least five illustrations or artifacts that reflect the content.

It was not too hard. I have assigned this for the past 10 years.

Over the past few years, with the advent of Chromebooks & technology, I have noticed marked changes in the work that's handed in for this assignment. The poems are shorter. The artifacts are just photos or clip art copied & pasted into a document. There is little figurative language. It's cut & dried, analytical.  It's like we're teaching them how not to be creative.

This year, I spent a bit of time showing them examples, "modeling" ( I dislike that jargon) and otherwise giving the students huge examples of how to proceed. I told them: I have to read 80 of these: don't make it suck. I do like to use humor in class, after all.

What happened next amazed me, as the immortal bard Buzzfeed repeatedly says. Kids started coming to me after class, after school.

They said: You're gonna think this is depressing.
They said: You're going to think I'm dumb.
They said: I don't think I did this right.
They said: You're gonna cry when you read this, because I cried when I wrote it.

I said: I'm not going to think it's depressing: It's life.
I said: I do not, and will not think you are dumb because of this.
I said: You're doing fine.
I said: You're right, I will cry. I cry every year when I read these.

A girl in my class came in last block and sat by my desk. She sat in the same comfy chair her older brother and sister sat in when they were in school here. Her mom lives in another state. Her poem was about running through fields after school, playing, and then, her parents split up and there were empty cupboards. No one to talk to. Loneliness and sadness and just wanting your mom, but she's not there.  And so my brother and sister disappeared, too.

You don't have to be in an impoverished school to know about all the different kinds of poverty.

But after all that struggle to tell her story, she wasn't sad or upset; she was beaming. It was hard, she said, to find the right words to say. But it was better than just coming out and saying: my dad went grocery shopping once a month for the four of us. My dog died. My mom moved to the desert without us. She found the emotions and she got to let them out, a little. That's what poetry is all about, IR.

After l last year, when I had such dismal results for this assignment, I really asked myself: Why assign such a creative assignment to an analytical class? Why do I have them plumb the depths of their lives and reflect on the past 18 years: the good, the bad and the lonely?

Because they need to. They need to look at their emotions from a distance, let them out a bit, so they don't get caught up with anxiety and pain and self-doubt. They need to feel pride in overcoming those emotions. They need to feel strong. They need to be strong.

When I was a child, Paul said, I thought as a child, acted as a child. How are kids who've been through painful times supposed to get past them if they can't put away their childish things? Confusion. Anxiety. Awkwardness. Grudges. Feeling unloved. If I could get them to see how much they are, not how little.

Or, as the immortal bard Jerry Garcia said: If  I knew the way, I would take you home.   

I'll be honest, IR. I struggle with all these things too, and I am allegedly a grownup. Fun Fact: I spent most of last year trying to better myself because I thought I just wasn't useful or ornamental anymore. I spent 15- 20 minutes every morning in meditation, then another 1/2 hour of reading and contemplation. I was looking for some answers to some pretty big questions. After a year, I didn't feel any better about any of those questions, and I still had no answers. I thought I could discipline myself into knowing something. All that discipline ended up turning into a routine, just as mindless as the life I'd been leading.

And then, in the blink of blue, it all changed, all of it. I didn't need answers any more. I didn't care about the questions, either.  I had been flying in a box canyon and suddenly pulled up into the clear blue sky. It was exhilarating, a little disorienting, and sometimes I still feel like my feet aren't all the ways touching the ground. I wrote a whole book, a small one, with cantos and sonnets and lyrical poems and dialogue and happiness. When I finished, I read it, then put it away when the weather turned cold and rainy, because it is a story that can only be a summer story, and summer is past.

Perhaps I will take it out and read it in the bleak midwinter, when I am cold and need to feel the sun again.

Here is your assignment, dear IR. Write your Curriculum Vitae: The work of your life. Keep it short- 20 entries. You have to use figurative language, and it starts with "I was born" and ends with "So far, so good" looking forward.

Curriculum Vitae 1992                                     Lisel Mueller

1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.

2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of course I do not remember this.

3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.

4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.

5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.

7) My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes.

8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.

9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights of adolescence.

10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed behind in darkness.

11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually I caught up with them.

12) When I met you, the new language became the language of love.

13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. The daughter became a mother of daughters.

14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate present.

15) Years and years of this.

16) The children no longer children. An old man’s pain, an old man’s loneliness.

17) And then my father too disappeared.

18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my childhood but it was closed to the public.

19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone’s face was younger than mine.

20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.

Finnegan Begin Again

Here we are at the beginning of the school year, dear IR (I decided you might be imaginary after all, and am covering my bases).  I stand in the front of the room and try to find that balance between "This is Important!" and  "Don't Stress Too Much." If this year is anything like any other year in the past ten, the kids who should stress won't, and the ones who don't need to, will. In spades.

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.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation 2018

Here we are, dear  Reader, poised on the cusp of the precipice of the end of summer. Soon we'll be sliding down that rabbit hole of school and autumn, all the way back to the tea party of routine.  The signs are everywhere: I have seen the sweaty football players walking home after practice, seen the random freshmen walking the vacant halls, talking each to each. I do not think they will talk to me, as Eliot said- I don't teach freshmen. I have heard the rumbling behemoth buses as they practice their appointed rounds. I have felt the chill in the morning, the goldenrod pollen in the back of my nostrils.

The cicadas are dead: long live the crickets. 

In two weeks, I'll be back at school, safely ensconced in grownup clothes and hard shoes, crawling out of bed to coffee, commute, and community. So this is a time of reflection, a time to look back at those past summer breezes and say: this was the summer.

Also, the Water Authority has currently shut off my water to repair a water main so I have ample time for reflection while I wait to take a shower. 

What I  Read:  Wodehouse. Kerouac. Discovering David Foster Wallace, who broke my heart by being so brilliant, so deep, so ~there~ and knowing that now, he is a finite jest. Reading Vivian Swift on the front porch with a glass of iced something as the sun set and the cicadas whined. Starting and stopping so many works of fiction: just tell the story already! Do something! I stood over the kitchen table and waved my tiny fist at books. Then, I read copious amounts of Poetry: William Carlos Williams; Louise Gluck; e.e.cummings; and as always, Shakespeare. 

What I Watched:  RBG, which I loved. Sorry to Bother You which I got. Blackk Klansman, which  inspired. Mamma Mia 2: to which I sang in the theatre- sorry to the other eight patrons. Mostly I watched trees swaying in the breeze, or water lapping at the shore, or birds flying. I watched the scenery pass by. I watched people. I learned to like them again. 

How I Occupied my Leisure: I had a neglected garden. The roses bloomed early and fizzled out. The daisies followed suit. The morning glories overslept. I worked on my old house and still have not sold it. I tried as many new things as I could: open water swimming classes; running (!); biking; vegan eating. I made new friends. I found out I like being with grownups and doing grownup things. I hiked the trails of several parks. I went kayaking. I found solace in nature.

Where I Went: No funerals this year, no hospitals either. The Adirondacks, twice. Vermont, where I wanted to stay forever. A few foreign towns for lunch. I locked myself out of my car, so like a tetanus shot, I can forget about that for another 5-7 years. I spent time with my parents and realized how fortunate I am they are both still here, despite their penchant for driving me insane. Ex: Dad: You do know that new schedule of yours doesn't start till next year?

So overall, I would give this summer a grade of 92. There are about four things I would still like to do before I start school, but being superstitious, I'm not going to jinx it by telling you. And some of them are for extra credit.
                               

Here is a poem for the last days of August. It's a strange poem for a strange time.


A MAN SAW A BALL OF GOLD
Ron Padgett

A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;
He climbed for it,
And eventually he achieved it--
It was gold.

Now this is the strange part:
When the man went to the earth
And looked again,
Lo, there was the ball of gold.
Now this is the strange part:
It was a ball of gold.
Ay, by the heavens, it was a ball of gold.

To whom do you write when you write (to me)

Dear  Reader,

I have stopped calling you imaginary. I have to believe that a reader is a real thing. Otherwise, why would we write? A piece of writing is a story, a thing to tell. It is innately a thing to be shared. And they say writing is cathartic; but sometimes it's scary and sad and a little like flaying your innermost being in a public square. And in that flaying, you lose some skin. It heals, but there are scars. And pain.

I just found a card from a college friend, someone I've known for the better part of 40 years. In his letter, in beautiful penmanship, he acknowledges how close we've become over our years in correspondence, and in the second paragraph comes out to me, tells me his story. We hadn't seen each other in about 10 years at that point, just corresponded. The card is signed: "I value your thoughts, your perspective, and most of all, your friendship. From the heart------."

How much of a leap of faith he must have taken to reveal that to me, and to all of his friends. Every act of writing- of good writing- should make the writer a little uncomfortable. You are, after all, exposing something of yourself that previously was hidden. A fear, love, a hidden treasure that may not be what others expected of you. Cracks may appear in your facade. Your melodious voice may screech. You might look silly or stupid or naive or asinine. But you were those things, all along, anyway.

Every act of writing is a leap of faith. It is faith in yourself, surely; that you will tell the story well and true as you can, or embellish and bedazzle it as to make it whimsical or wistful or wondering. But it is also faith in your reader - that's you- that you won't reject or hate or judge too harshly the storytelling: the foreshadowed warnings ignored; the poor choices, the easy outs, the things we did for love, the missed opportunities, the surprise endings.  Reader, I married him, but lived unhappily. Reader, I ran away. Reader, I'm still seeking something. Reader, I trust you.

One of the most important (in my opinion) love stories in the English language is that of the poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He was a serial monogamist, she a closeted lesbian. Despite their differences, they had a love affair of the mind. Each read the other's works. Each respected the other's voice and opinions. They missed each other and pined for each other in a way that was romantic and tragic and unfulfilled. But they never broke with each other. They knew each other's minds were fitted together, and really, what more could you ask for as a writer?

To write something- and share it-  is to open a door into another room. You don't know how big it is, or who is in there. Might be three people, might be 300. You're going to share something with them- maybe they'll like it, maybe they'll hate it, or worst of all, maybe they won't care at all.

In the middle of the journey of our life, said Dante, I awoke an found myself in a dark wood, for the straight path had been lost.  After that, he met Virgil, and Beatrice, and had all kinds of adventures in Hell, Heaven and Purgatory. So that's the writer's path, then. You wake up, start walking in the dark,  and go through heaven & hell to get the story out before you lose it.

Here's part of the story of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Who is she talking to in the parentheses?

Read it twice, I tell my students every year. It will make the losses easier to master.


ONE ART
Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

How to tell a story

Dear Imaginary Reader, 

I have not, loured around these pages for some time. Procrastination, some.  Mostly, gainful employment. It gets in the way of leisure and writing. But I have had some top-notch encouragement lately; one person has told me to open the faucets and write like hell. And so I have. 

I've been struggling to try to tell a story; in part because I tell stories every day, and my students all tell me to write a book. Every year, more students tell me this, but I don't know where to begin. So I began this way. What comes next is the beginning, or the middle, or maybe the end. 

BEGIN

When you tell a story, the hardest part is always where to begin. Do you begin with background? My lousy childhood, as Holden Caulfield would say, or in my younger and more vulnerable days as per  Nick Carraway. But I am not a great writer of the canon; I am only a high school English teacher. And my story is not one for the ages, it is one for a particular Age; because that age has passed.  Many of the people in my story have died, or moved; the old places have burned down, been vacated, neglected, deteriorated, fallen back into the land. Or worse:  the old rough log houses and trailer homesteads and wild places we lived have been upgraded, modernized,  paved over by progress and turned into a quaint nostalgia of What It Was Like, a museum piece of life that falls so far short of really, what it was like. 

 Starting is such sweet sorrow, because there are so many stories to tell that you don't know which one should go first. There are so few of us left of that time. I will try to be their bard. 

So the best place to start is here, now: August, 2018,  staring off into space, typing. Trying to recall memories, timelines, who-did-what-when. But at this point, after 20-some years have passed, these memories are less linear; they are images, triggered by a feeling or a glimpse of an old Subaru or a Queen Anne’s Lace or smoke from a campfire. Now we see through a glass darkly, but then, we saw face to face.

DEPARTURE

I’d never really read Thoreau, not in great detail. I didn’t know about living deliberately. Life can be a series of apathetic decisions that lead you somewhere. I had a relatively passive childhood. Leaving that behind was an act of open rebellion, a rejection of the suburban dream my parents had worked so hard to provide. 

My parents met in college, at the University of Toronto. He was an only child of Irish immigrants, from Bay Ridge Brooklyn. She was a middle child of eight from Rochester NY. There are all kinds of photos of them in their youth: in phone booths, with lampshades on their heads, chugging from champagne bottles, sleeping in the backseat of someone’s car - a coupe, or a roadster. They were right out of Mad Men, down to the Manhattans every night and overflowing ashtrays every morning. So being young, Irish, Catholic- of course they had lots of children – 6 of us- and one died.

In our suburban rabbit warren, many fiefdoms had lost princes or princesses to illness or accidents- one of our neighbors loses a little girl when she has a reaction to anesthesia during minor surgery. My first adolescent boyfriend gets leukemia and dies. Another family loses a son when the parents have a terrible car accident on vacation in Colorado- the car tumbling over an embankment, killing the baby, and injuring the other boys while the Great Divide looks on unaffected. These occurrences were sad and unexpected, but not uncommon.  Life was more of a crapshoot in those days.

When my sister dies- at home, on the sofa, with a priest, a doctor and all the family there- it is sad, but, I think, not a surprise. Doctors have been telling my parents for years that my sister is dying, but I suppose at some level, they didn’t believe them. As devout and faithful Catholics, perhaps they believed  there was going to be a Divine Intervention or a miracle. As intelligent and educated people, they believed in Science as well. My mother followed things to the letter; respiratory therapy, medications, checkups. And despite the best efforts of scheduling and routine, of prayer and medicine, my sister dies at an age when she should be blossoming. It’s a cold March day, iron-grey clouds shingling the sky, bitter winds from all directions. I feel like I should be on the deathbed watch, but I need space, I need to breathe. I go out for a drive with a friend. I can go back and take care of the detritus afterwards. I am gone for thirty minutes. While I am gone, my sister dies. 

 There is a wake. My parents sit in padded metal chairs for six hours and don’t talk, so I do: Shake hands, so good of you for coming, maybe a hug, a smile, no tears. My parents are zombies with blank eyes.   I conjure images of Jackie Kennedy to keep myself composed during the funeral. My parents look at me and I see a nest of baby birds: helpless, featherless, flightless. 

I am 19 years old. I just want to work my dead-end job, live in my apartment, have a boyfriend, go out and get drunk on weekends like everyone else. I am working full time in a nursing home. I love the old people. I know they’re going to die, they know they’re going to die, sometimes they don’t know where they are, even, but at least we’re all on the same page here. Sometimes I sit with the dying patients to atone for leaving my sister. I clean the bodies of the dead, I wash and smooth and wrap them and take them to the morgue. Everything in its place. I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of life, of life here in the suburbs.

Two years later, when I meet the guy that I’ll marry and have four children with, I jump at the chance to get as far away from here as possible. He’s a fun guy- buys food for the apartment, brings wine,  cooks for us, fixes my car. He writes letters from his job: three or four a week. He calls when he can: sweet words over static lines. I go visit. It’s October; the aspen is golden around the silty green glacier-fed lakes; the sun is warm and the skies are crisp and clear. I see the aurora borealis for the first time, ribboning sheets of green and golden in the skies, waves of stardust all around. I walk on glacier rocks, I shoot a gun for the first time. I feel strong and safe. There are no nests of baby birds with their mouths open, no pitying stares, no sainthood halo. There is wool and leather, cold and rock and dirt, metal and fish and game and woodfires. I can be myself here.  I can be here.  

By the following May, I have packed my clothes and am leaving. My friends from college come to stage an intervention. How well do you know this guy? Alaska is awfully far away. Yes, I think. Almost far enough. 

So this is the beginning of my story.  Everyone else enters in the next chapter. 

I'm trying to be as truthful as I can, and I don't know how this sounds.  Most of the people I will tell 

about are dead; some moved away; some flit between warm and cold climes. It's hard to tell a story 

like this, because it's my story and I have to share it with you, whoever you are. I don't want to bore

you, or worse, exaggerate or lie. 

I don't want to break my arm patting myself on the back, as we used to say. 

This is not just my story. It is Alaska's story, too. 

(1263) 

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

The Heart Dictates; The Hand Obeys: Or, Why I Did It

Dear Imaginary Reader,

You might be wondering why. You might be puzzling over why two people with the passive laissez-faire approach to relationships would take a definitive step like marriage. You might be wondering, as Charles Bukowski did, "Do you want to screw up the works?"

Or, as one of my best friends said: "Are you SURE?"

It is difficult, when you are over a Certain Age to justify a step like marriage. You have your own careers. You have your own interests. You have your own checkbooks. You have your own houses. You have your own children. You each  have your own histories, complete with Creation, Evolution, Ice Ages, Dark Ages, Renaissances, Industrial Ages; Wars, Marshall Plans and Cold Wars. It would take more than Howard Zinn to bring this all together in one tidy package successfully.

And yet, the idea that "we" have been a couple for 13 years also brings about the idea of laziness or recumbency or even fear. And, of course, Guilt:

When you have lived through a history of your own, sometimes you bear the scars, personally, financially, or on your progeny of the Marriage That Came Before. You don't want to make the same mistakes, you don't want to repeat the past; you see people come together and uncouple with acrimony or apathy and you think: Really? That's all? You didn't even put your back into that.

But you know from experience that some things can't be made whole when they didn't fit together well in the first place. Once your marriage has collapsed, you are gun-shy of making a new situation where That could happen again. The guilt over coulda-woulda-shoulda is a three-headed Cerebus that guards the gate to your heart, disallowing entry to anyone, even yourself. You find an easy prison  in Safety and Solitary and stowing your baggage under your seat instead of checking it. Hanging On when you should be Letting Go.

After 13 years together, we have been through some things. I was there when he had major medical traumas: sitting with him, holding his hand in the ER while a doctor amputated part of his finger, seeing him through colds and the flu and all those tests where you need someone to drive you home.  And he was there, when I had foot surgery, washing my hair, driving me to work, doing the heavy lifting.We were together at funerals and weddings, at parties and wakes. We've seen friends have babies and become grandparents, get promoted and die of cancer. He's supported me as a writer, and given me space I need. I've tried to let him yoke up every morning to his shop and his customers and hoe his rows, even if that means he's at work until 11 pm.

So we've gone on this way for a decade: tolerating each other's foibles, sharing each other's joys, comforting each other in sorrow. Of the question of love, there is no doubt. Of commitment, well that was the issue all along. Neither of us was ready to take that last step. It felt like running off a cliff, like we would be falling, falling, out of control, and it seemed in the long run, to be too costly. The goodwill we'd built up among our children, the separate-but-equal financial status, the extra house that I could always return to if need be. Were we really ready to leave all those safety nets behind?

I guess we were.     I guess we are.

Neither one of us could fathom our lives without each other. The "proposal" came one night when he turned to me and said:" You planning on going anywhere? Because I'm not. Not without you." And that was that. After all that talking about the pros and cons, after all the Help Wanted Education ads in the Sunday NY Times, after all the trolling for beach houses in Charleston, that was it. And it's been like a door opened up. Instead of feeling trapped, like I thought I would, I feel like I've finally found a place where I can forget all the failures and guilt, and just be happy. Am I sure? Yes.

So instead of anxiety, there is a feeling of contentment. Instead of falling, we get to the edge of the cliff and we can float. It feels like we are adults in our own right, not simply someone's parent or -ex. It is lovely. It is freeing. It is .... love.

So last February, at the Village Hall, the Mayor said a few words. We exchanged rings & vows with a small group of family members. Then, we all went out to lunch. Afterward, we stood at the threshold,a threshold we've shared for 7 years,  a threshold that nobody is going to be carried over. We'll walk through that doorway together, face whatever comes together.


Here's a poem, DIR. If Raymond Carver could wax poetic about love, well, that's a threshold in itself.

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Friday the 13th : Monday Edition

Routines: gotta have them. If for no other reason than when half asleep your muscle memory knows how to turn the coffeepot on, do a few down dogs, twist & stretch. And when there are two routines and one small bathroom, the routines become more like choreographing a tightrope walker. A good routine, carefully and methodically implemented can keep a day together.

This is how it falls apart:

You went to not one, but two social events over the weekend. Normally, you spend most of your weekends trying to stay away from people. But, like shit, birthdays and reunions happen. And there is all kinds of things a lactose-intolerant Cohabitating Significant Other should not eat, but hey, he's having fun and who wants to be the finger-waggling voice of lactose doom? So the normal bathroom routine is disrupted. Showers pushed back. Toothbrushing delayed. Extra visits required. Someone knocks over a glass of water. And finally, you realize that it's going to be a Monday, and you're going to be late.

You get out the door and realize that while traffic is light, everyone in the cars ahead of you seem to be Old Retired Guys coming home from the gym. The guys who'll be in the hardware store later this morning, making those speedboat noises with their lips: "Pppptttt pppPPPttt." As you get on the expressway, you note the lovely shade of blues and oranges and single twinkling stars on the horizon. Yep, gonna be late.

You get to work and hey! not that late. As you're exiting your car, the plastic badge you wear, the one with the really unflattering photo breaks off. You get to your classroom and the kids are all standing outside. Class starts and it's plain that nobody has read the book. It's not even 8:00 yet.

Then, a kid gives you an envelope. It's got a thank-you note in it. "Thanks for helping me with my college essay. You helped me write the best essay I could." And a gift card for coffee.

After school, the creative writing group comes in. They are so sweet: Kira with stories about her Swedish Grandma; Harry who writes stories in haiku; Laura, who lights up when you break out the chocolate-covered espresso beans; Sarah, the little red-haired girl.

Make a list, you tell them. Ten Things. These are some of the results:
Ten Things I Hate About High School
Ten Things To Do After the Apocalypse
Ten Things I Wish I Could Have
Ten Things I Can't Tell You.

Ten Things I Hate About You:
1. You smell
2. You drool
3. You always have a runny nose
4. You drive too fast
5. You drive too slow
6. Your vocabulary
7. You always use the wrong form of "There," even when you are speaking
8. You are way better at math than I am
9. You never pay when we go out
10. You stare at me unblinkingly from inside the mirror.

Sometimes, I feel a little like giving up that creative writing group- it's a lot of work, twice a week, and it's like teaching another class. But then someone writes: "After the apocalypse, you can lie in the middle of the road and look up at a star."

And so you can. In 12 hours I will be back there, doing it all over again. Looking for that star.

Here's a poem, Dear Reader. Have a good Tuesday.

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

Dan Albergotti

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.