I wake after having slept without rest mind weary of turning, turning I throw off the heavy blanket of night of darkness to stand shivering on the chilly cusp
there is no sound just hush
and my heart grasps before my eyes glimpse the glimmering
before I know it I’ve thrown open the door to stand barefoot in the frost still nightgowned as birds glide high above round and round tracing infinity signs against rose-gold clouds in silence in ceremonial welcome of day
first light, ever bright parts the pink veils a sun so, so old yet so golden-new peeks through
and I think of beginnings not endings of possibility not inadequacy of movement not stasis
there are no words only the distant occasional rustle of feathered wings from on high
and in that
I rest
*******
with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the weekly Slice of Life invitation to write and to all who gather here to encourage one another on the writerly journey
If there were a portal from Now to Then and I passed through where would I find myself what would I do
what would I see of my childhood me
raggedy white blanket satin trim pulling loose rub rub rubbing my silky string between my fingers and over my nose as I suck my thumb
Pa-Pa pumping a spinning top reds pinks blues swirling like rainbow smoke —it’s playing music! Like an organ —what is that song what is that song
I can play Grandma’s organ shiny pretty red-brown wood with curved legs she presses my fingers on the white keys — 5653 5653 that is Silent Night oh and I am supposed to be holding the white C button down
I can drive my little red car along the sidewalks in front of the shops by pumping pedals while Granddaddy watches from the bench
sometimes he calls me Duck or Pig
I do not know why
but it is good
Daddy’s buying a house I do not like the way it smells like old old coffee
except that a neighbor kid shows me that there’s a door in the side of the cement back steps when we open it an even older smell comes out past dangling cobwebs on strange cool air —there’s a game under here, in a box soft with forgottenness for so long pictures of ghosts mildewing on the top
a roly-poly scurries away in the dust
there’s a lot of kids to play with and we run and run and run and run around my new backyard
—oh no, Daddy’s going to be mad we snapped his little tree —here, help me hold these two parts together while we pray for God to glue them back
it didn’t work
but it’s not so bad
except for the little tree
Mama’s friends bring their skinny black dog named Thing yeah I know Thing on The Addams Family it’s just a hand in a box
Thing digs a hole in the backyard my sister and I make it bigger and bigger and bigger it’s a giant crater we pull out a giant smooth white rock maybe a dinosaur’s egg
I smell the clay, orange, gray feel its slickness between my fingers while we dig to the other side of the world China
Ding-dong, Avon calling look at all these tiny white tubes of lipsticks they smell so clean —can you believe there’s perfume in this bottle made like a tree —see when you take off the green top and push the bluebird’s tail it sprays
Bird of paradise bird of paradise my own made-up song I sing it in the tub while the white hunk of Ivory soap floats in the cloudy water
At Grandma’s house in the summertime I find a stack of old records I put them on the record player while I dig through a tall wicker basket of dresses fancy ones the pink one is satin covered with tulle but the blue one is my favorite with the rows and rows of lace on the skirt reaching almost to the floor when I put it on
I’m a princess
singing
I’ll buy you a diamond ring, my friend if it makes you feel all right I’ll get you anything my friend if it makes you feel all right ‘Cause I don’t care too much for money Money can’t buy me love
and when I am tired of that and when the long day is done I’ll sit by Grandma here in the floor where she spreads the newspaper open on the braided rug I’ll read the funnies or the The Mini Page or maybe even Reader’s Digest
Granddaddy comes over freshly-shaved, in his pajamas for me to hug his neck and give him a kiss on his smooth Old Spice cheek
while outside in summer dusk cicadas sing and sing and sing, so loud and never stop
now I lay me down to sleep my childhood loves to always keep
Magic find on Etsy: Vintage Avon spray bottle with Her Prettiness Enchanted Cologne Mist. Not so sure how enchanting the scent would be after all this time… that this still exists, however, is surely evidence of one powerful spell.
*******
Thanks to Ruth Ayres on SOS: Magic in a Blog for the invitation to return to childhood loves, to linger there for a while, and to bring something back.
Thanks also to the Poetry Friday-ers and to Mary Lee for hosting this week’s Roundup.
Oh yeah and thanks to The Beatles for the song “Can’t Buy Me Love” — and all the others.
My day mapped out in the planner: Lessons to review. Emails to send. Trainings to schedule. Reports to complete and submit. Meetings to attend. Agendas to make…
Quick check on the weather. In a word: Yuck. Raincoat and boots needed for morning bus duty and filling in at carpool arrival afterward.
Lunch packed (Note to self: Go to grocery store ASAP…).
—oh yeah, my temperature. I’ve learned I am usually below normal, in the 97.7 range (at the moment 97.8, but I just sipped my coffee. Kids arriving at school in heated cars can register as high as 105…we have a fleet of touchless thermometers that must be left out in the cold for a few minutes to calibrate. We will have to perform several rechecks before verifying a child does NOT have a fever and may enter the building…).
Enter my temperature in the district website and answer the COVID questions for this cheery message: Thank you. You have passed your daily health screening. You may report to your worksite. Remember your 3 W’s: Wear a cloth face covering over your nose and mouth. Wait six feet apart. Avoid close contact. Wash your hands with soap and water or use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Have a nice day!
Um.
But I am ready to go, with time to set up before the arrival bell rings.
Except.
I forgot I needed gas.
4 miles to E.
That’s okay. See, the gas station is only about a mile up the road here.
I pull in, happy to see no one is at the pumps: I’ll still make it in plenty of time!
There is, of course, a reason:
Every. Single. Pump.
I sit for a moment with rain sheeting across my windshield…
…nothing for it but to go back home and tell my son he has to take me to work.
—He has no gas in his car, either.
But he does have gas in Pa-Pa’s 1989 blue Cadillac DeVille. With the dented-in back door on the driver’s side where the boy cut the turn into the garage too close (it is a LONG car. And that’s one of the few times I’ve seen my young Cadillac Man cry).
There’s more to this story, because the unforeseen complications didn’t stop there; these were but a harbinger for a day full of absurd and unexpected turns. My neat list in the planner … poof. Suffice it to say I texted admin that I’d be late. I made it just as the tardy bell rang.
In an afternoon meeting—online, naturally—the facilitators (battling internet connectivity issues) closed with this message:
I did not throw my laptop of out the window (after all, the laptop nor the window belonged to me…).
I just kept on flowing.
Even when there was no gas.
A reminder that I’m only going so far on my own resources. With my best-laid plans that can disintegrate without warning.
Willing to be led by the process of life…
Even when diverted, to an absurd degree, with plot twists right and left…
And it was sort of beautiful, in its way, arriving at my destination in a vintage Cadillac with a willing and loving driver.
A little plane, sailing serenely past the clouds, fuselage glowing gold in the waning sunlight.
My first thought: I can’t hear it. And it can’t hear me.
Then: How peacefulit must be to transcend Earth’s noise and strife...
Reminds me of a favorite poem:
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air….
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace. Where never lark, or even eagle flew — And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, – Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr., Pilot Officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, wrote the verse in the summer of 1941. He would die in a plane collision four months later. He was nineteen.
High in the sunlit silence…with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod/The high untrespassed sanctity of space… that is exactly the sense I get while watching this little aircraft. A taste of sun-split cloud, a breath of whipping wind in the delirious blue, the holy hush…
But the plane vanishes, almost like a mirage. I am left standing here on the ground.
My son and I walk on, although we feel a little lighter for having seen it.
*******
The poem High Flight has been memorized through the years by cadets at the United States Air Force Academy; its lines adorn many headstones at Arlington. In my house it graces a plaque beside my father’s photo. Daddy joined the USAF at nineteen. Although he wasn’t a pilot or career serviceman, he always loved planes and is buried in a veterans cemetery by a military base where the jets go screaming over every day.
He chose the spot for this reason.
Tomorrow is Veterans Day; I am grateful for those who serve my country.
I can’t help noting that there is nothing new under the sun: this observance first began with Armistice Day in 1918…in the throes of a pandemic.
And that healing begins with ceasefire, whether with weapons or words.
High in the sunlit silence…with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod/The high untrespassed sanctity of space… even if that space is within my own mind, a sanctuary without parameters, where my spirit is free to keep reaching far beyond Earth, believing.
This week, Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog invites writing about masks we’ve encountered or worn, literal or figurative, maybe one from long ago…
Winter morning.In my pajamas on the cold kitchen floor, Onyx and Bagel jumping on me with joy. Half-dachshunds, brothers who look nothing alike. Onyx, black and tan (muddled markings; his whole head is tan) is the stronger of the two. A combination of rubber ball and coiled spring, he can jump high enough to give me a kiss even when I’m standing—if I lean over just a little. It’s a feat;at thirteen I’m growing tall. Bagel, long-haired, red piebald, snowy white chest, coloring that reminds me of Lassie, is the happiest dog on Earth except for when it thunders and he runs to hide behind the commode. My sister sits by the wall on top of the vent, her skinny eleven-year-old body drawn into a tight ball, pajama bottoms ballooning and fluttering in the rush of heated air. She doesn’t want to be up, doesn’t want to go to school, is too grumpy for more than a furtive dog-greeting.She’ll play when she’s ready. I embrace the wriggling, wagging, warm bodies, giggling, when I hear footsteps in the hall…Daddy’s familiar stride on the hardwood, in shoes that he polishes every night with a tin and stained cloth until the glossy surfaces reflect like black mirrors…
Suddenly the dogs shoot to the gate (or what we call the gate: a gray particleboard once used under a twin bed mattress when Mama was recovering from back surgery, we slide it back and forth) in the wide kitchen doorway. Barking, ferocious; I have never heard them—or any dog—make such violent noise. They charge the gate, lunging, sounding ready to attack…
There stands Daddy. His face is gone. Instead, there’s huge, opaque goggle-eyes, a distorted nose, pulled and hanging, elephant-like, no sign of human skin or hair; olive-gray visage, that of an ominous specter…
He’s wearing a gas mask.
I had never heard of a strike, picket lines, or unions before. I couldn’t understand why someone would be called a scab for going to work but it did make sense that people who protect said scabs would be scathingly called “Band-Aids”… I knew police were involved, somehow, but the picture in my mind was as muddled as Onyx’s markings, without defining details.
My father wore the same uniform as police but he wasn’t an officer. He was a company security guard. A protector of the gates. Duty-minded. Responsible. The parent who got up with me at night when I had asthma attacks, who would later co-sign my first college loan with the stern admonishment that I’d better pay it back because he couldn’t (I did).
He would die in uniform, but not for many more years, in an attack waged by his own heart, myocardial infarction, three days before retiring, while on his way to work.
The dogs are going crazy. I stare at the mask and the only word that comes to mind is ‘monster’— it isn’t right, it isn’t right, that such things should have to exist because of what people do to each other, that Daddy should need this macabre (newly-learned word) apparatus for his own protection—he removes it. He doesn’t mean to scare. “Gracious,” he says to Onyx and Bagel, chuckling, “what fierce watchdogs.” They cease barking and resume wagging the second his human face is restored.They return, pressing their little bodies against me. I can feel them trembling.
Or maybe that’s me, as Daddy goes about preparing for another day.
History, as we know, repeats itself in infinite ways. I inadvertently stumbled into this historical gas mask hall of horrors…or maybe it’s a hall of mirrors…
I’ve joined an open community of writers over at Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog. If you write (or want to write) just for the magic of it, consider this your invitation to join us.
The others will have their turn, soon. For now they wait in the wings and on the screens…
In a month when masks are normally worn for celebrating, they came masked for protection—of others.
Several of us stood as sentinels in the misty gray morning, waiting, also masked. Gloved, thermometers ready, when the first bus rolled up and its door opened to release three children.
Another bus carried only one.
But when the first child passed inspection and entered the building, the gathered staff cheered. Applauded. Like welcoming a hero home.
They are heroes.
These kindergarteners, these first, second, third graders in their colorful masks, quietly navigating the building, sitting socially-distanced (alone) at lunch… I suspect these images are etched deep in my brain for the remainder of my days.
I saw this verse on a StoryPeople print by Brian Andreas (1993):
When I die, she said, I’m coming back as a tree with deep roots & I’ll wave my leaves at the children every morning on their way to school & whisper tree songs at night in their dreams. Trees with deep roots know about the things that children need.
I think about how trees
help us breathe
cleanse the air
provide refuge
absorb storms
soften hard edifices
beautify
welcome
are calming
are cooling
change with the seasons, yet remain constant
color the world
Tree leaves do whisper. Trees talk to each other (they do). They live in groups and look out for one another.
They carry the stories they live within them. You can read them, in their rings.
I cannot decide which is best, to be the tree with deep roots, waving my leaves at the children on the way to school, singing in their dreams…or to be the child, asleep, hearing the tree-song…
I stand, a sentinel in the gray silence of the empty bus loop, masked, gloved, thermometer in hand, watching bits of red and yellow and fiery orange swirling through the air as if stirred by an unseen hand… tree confetti, celebrating life, letting go in order to hold on through the coming winter, who knows how dark or cold, and I’m seized by the sudden desire to run into those dancing colors…
—I am bits of both.
*******
Thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the invitation to share on Slice of Life Tuesdays and for also knowing about the things that children need. They, too, carry their stories within them…
This week I’m participating in a five-day poetry Open Write at Ethical ELA. Day One’s writing invitation, “Bodies in Motion,” was sparked by the importance of sports to so many student athletes who haven’t been able to participate—when it may be the only reason they come to school. Many feel most at home with a team, on a field, writes host Sarah J. Donovan, needing to “move their bodies to feel joy, to feel normal, to feel self.” Instead they’re confined to screens and “plexiglass cubicles.” For the Open Write we crafted poems about our own athletic experiences, or those of family members, or even about what we used to be able to do but can’t anymore.
I’ve never been athletic, not ever, in the whole of my life.
My husband, however, was.
Through him I know the vital and abiding value of sports for a young person…
Here’s a scene I witnessed recently at home.
The Passing
She comes out of his study carrying it in her four-year-old arms and his face is transformed, glowing as if a passing cloud has uncovered the sun. He leans forward in the recliner as she drops it, kicks it, sets it spinning —Oh, no, he says, this one’s not for kicking, it’s for dribbling, just as the ball stops at his feet. He reaches down, lifts it with the easy grace of the boy on the court, hands perfectly placed on the worn brown surface in split-second calculation of the shot so many times to the roar of the school crowd so many hours with friends, his own and then his son’s, still outscoring them all, red-faced, heart pounding, dripping with sweat, radiant —and at twelve, all alone on the pavement facing the hoop his mother installed in the backyard of the new house after his father died, every thump echoing Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. The game in the blood, the same DNA that just last year left him with a heart full of metal and grafts, too winded to walk more than short distances, having to stop to catch his breath, deflated —it needs some air. Do you have a pump, he asks his son, sitting there on the sofa, eyes riveted to the screen emitting continuous squeaks of rubber soles against hardwood. —Yeah, Dad. I’ve got one and the needle, too. His father leans in to the little girl at his knee, his battered heart in his hands: —Would you like to have it? She nods, grinning, reaching, her arms, her hands almost too small to manage the old brown sphere rolling from one to the other like a whole world passing.
*******
with thanks to Ethical ELA for the monthly poetry Open Writes and Two Writing Teachers for fostering a vital and abiding love of writing in students— and teachers. Revise on.
Someone I love just gave me this “Brew” cup and infuser ball along with loose black tea leaves mingled with cinnamon, ginger, turmeric, milk chocolate curls, and calendula petals… what’s not to love? I am sipping liquid Autumn.
In my online writing voyage, I’ve just come to a new port of call—Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog.
Those words, stories and magic, are all the passport I need to disembark and discover…
Today’s open invitation is writing about a favorite fall food, or one loved as a child.
My mind goes immediately to the breakfast cereal Count Chocula. I look for it at the beginning of every autumn now, but, if I recall correctly, it used to be available all year round when I was a child. I could be wrong. At any rate, I hadn’t seen it in decades when, maybe three years ago, it reappeared on grocery shelves as if by magic—poof! Voilà! —catapulting me, wide-eyed, open-jawed, straight back into childhood, to age 8? 9? 10?, hunkered over the cereal bowl, immersed in a book (for one cannot eat a bowl of cereal without a book, right? Isn’t it some unwritten law?). I wouldn’t stop at one bowl, see. Usually it was two. Maybe even three… suddenly my father is walking through the kitchen again, scowling: “First ketchup! You use way more than you should. Now this. Nobody needs to eat this much cereal…I’m buying three gallons of milk a week! For only two kids!”
What would he say if he could see how many boxes of Count Chocula I have, at this very moment, squirreled away my cabinet? Yikes!
Once this prompt got me walking around in Long Ago, savoring my Count Chocula, I began tasting other things… my mother’s peanut butter cookies with Hershey’s kisses on top, slightly melted from the fresh-baked warmth. She made them when neighborhood kids gathered at our house to watch the annual airing of The Wizard of Oz on TV, in those pre-cable days. I think this was in fall… there was a chill outside. The grainy-crunch cookies with their soft-bottom chocolate caps, Dorothy, her comrades, her red ruby slippers (which I later went to see numerous times in the Smithsonian), dear Toto, Glinda in her iridescent bubble, the Emerald City, the music… all magic, all warmth… there’s no place like home in the living room with friends and family, taking a trip down the yellow brick road once a year.
I do not know why memory leads from that scene to school carnivals, the caramel apples and Crackerjacks that I did NOT like, the scent of hot buttery popcorn in the air, the delicious excitement of reaching my arm into a giant clown face with a cut-out mouth for a grab-bag full of little treasures…and onto Halloween, the shivery joy of putting on a costume and going out into the cold dark night with friends who looked funny, creepy, and spooky but never really scary, in a time and place where it was safe to go trick-or-treating from house to house to house…oh, and I never did like candy corn, although it’s pretty and fun to use as decorations, like for turkey beaks or tail feathers on tabletop arrangements at Thanksgiving.
—Thanksgiving.
My mother’s carrot cake.
Locally famous, the only carrot cake I’ve ever really liked. Everyone loved it. I have her recipe. I make it every Thanksgiving and again at Christmas. Her secret: carrots finely-grated to pulp and extra cinnamon.
—And there it is.
My favorite flavor of fall.
Cinnamon isn’t exactly a food in itself, but to me, it’s the essence of celebration in my mother’s cake, the aromatic allure of my new autumn spice latte tea, the crowning glory of hot apple cider, the thing behind my longing for pumpkin spice coffee at the first hint of coolness in the air, just as reds and golds begin tinging the leaves… interesting, isn’t it, this tree-connection. Cinnamon is, after all, bark. The dying of the leaves, the dying of the year, going out in a blaze of glory, cinnamon their royal embalming spice, rich, fragrant, preserving like memory, like immortality, like being a child at home, face pressed again the window soon to reflect candlelight, the holiness in holidays, flickering bright with hope and promise when the days grow short and dark…
My best-loved taste of fall.
Well, and Count Chocula.
—Yum.
*******
I’m joining an open community of writers over at Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog. If you write (or want to write) just for the magic of it, consider this your invitation to join us. #sosmagic
I would write this as a letter but there is no point as you would not receive it, would not read it, would not respond, so I write it as verse instead because I want to talk to you and because poetry, like love, transcends.
It’s dark and gloomy today, steady rain tossing itself against the windows, not at all the crisp, bright day it was, that fall eighteen years ago.
The weather’s playing havoc with my Internet connection but then, so few things are connecting anymore as they should, in these dark and gloomy times —you can’t imagine, even though you lived your own.
One of my favorite stories about you: Little boy, running hard as you could down the old dirt road, bursting into the house, “Mother! Mother! I just heard on Grandma’s radio—President Roosevelt is dead!”
She couldn’t believe it, could she, but soon enough, everyone was wondering: What will happen to our country now? Who will lead us out of war? Is it ever going to end?Is there life beyond?
If you were here, would you recognize our country now? Eighteen years have come and gone (I think you’d love a GPS and texting, so much better than e-mail you’d just learned to use) in the interim of our lifetimes, this last one, an accordion of implosion.
Did I ever tell you I once had a dream that you and I were standing on a ridge looking out over a barren land, as if an apocalypse had occurred, leaving us as the only living things?
You tried to explain but I couldn’t make out the words, couldn’t understand, but I knew that you knew why and I wasn’t afraid, mostly just surprised and curious, looking over that desert wasteland —I ponder now: Is now what I was seeing then?
Although you aren’t here anymore to say, to lead by example of unfailing duty, to give insight and wisdom, and perhaps courage —I do wonder if you ever thought of yourself as courageous, despite your saying that a smart man would have gotten further in life.
No one is smart all the time and how I long to hear what you have to say, now more than ever, never mind that I am grown and my children are grown, for I find myself yearning, returning, to the arrow of the compass that you were.
If I could write the letter, I’d say I miss you, you’ve missed so much, the boys are well, you’d be so proud. I’d say I took a corner of your protective cloak and wrapped it over them for as long as I could, the way you did for me.
If I was granted a wish for changing one thing in the past, it would be for more carefree times like the day you raced me on the beach when I was little and I knew you let me win.
We only did it that once, you running between me and the tide, your shadow hopping over shells and disintegrating sand castles, dipping in small hollows, until you swept me up into your young arms, laughing there with blue eyes, blue sea, in the sunlight.
Yes, that’s what I’d wish, the freedom, the light, the salt, the joy, the time to play, for it was rare and I doubt if you’d even recall these momentsthat stay with me like an old photograph, fading, becoming fragile, curling up at the edges.
But I still hold on, gently, feeling the pulse of memory while seeking silences where I can sort the images and collate them in some semblance of order when I need it most, and when you seem most near.
These lines won’t bring you back and I don’t wish it, I just trust that my words, beating like memory, like the waves on the shore, will ripple on into infinity to the place where our circles coincide, where you still guide, running between me and the tide.
*******
Just a draft, on the anniversary of Daddy’s passing, September 25th. Shared for Poetry Friday with thanks to Jone Rush MacCulloch for the invitation to “bring poetry goodness to the world today.”
September whispers the first hint of autumn with a cool breath caressing our faces our bare arms and legs in the still-warm sun. Whispers an invitation to walk woodsy trails under trees communicating in rustling green tongues. One leaf already fallen crispy and brown cartwheels across the path. It is longer than we realized. One of us would push for a more vigorous pace but the other of us is tired. A restful respite in the almost-chilly tree-proffered shade just short of the bridge we didn’t know was here. Cicadas chorus high above a big black ant hurries past and somewhere a bird sings as if it is the very heart of all things. We’ve come this far. We walk a few more steps one a little ahead one leaning on a cane one breath at a time. Not until we reach the bridge can we hear the water talking to itself below in a wordless trickling flow going on and on and on. And so we do even though we can’t see how much path is left to travel nor what lies ahead around the bowery bend. The bridge cannot whisper invitation. It only stands offering silent invocation. It is enough. We cross over. We go on.
*******
Thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday invitation to write a Slice of Life and to my Spiritual Journey Thursday friends for the writing fellowship along the way. For more spiritual offerings see Karen Eastlund’s collated posts under “Finding Direction” at Karen’s Got a Blog! (Thank you, Karen, for hosting).
lit bits and pieces 