of kindness, and cabbages, and the death of my father

Today marks one week since my father died.

It's not easy to write about my father. At least, it is not easy to write about my father in the manner people expect you to write about a father after he has passed. We did not have an easy relationship. He wasn't really such a good father.

The morning after my father died I walked seven miles before lunch. I crossed the railroad tracks to the spacious tree-lined neighborhood just east of my home, where the houses seem to preside rather than populate the streets. I usually walk in my own well-ordered neighborhood: small Craftsman homes, rope swings dangling over sidewalks, roadside vegetable gardens, beehives, bikes heaped on porches. But that morning I wanted to wander without knowing exactly where I was, so I crossed over tracks and past the golf course. The roads, no longer gridded, meandered as if they'd lost all track of time. The houses, too, were dreamlike—facades like elegant faces with half-lidded eyes, enormous shrubs like well-coiffed hair. The only people visible were landscapers armed with blowers and wackers.

I walked. Sometimes I cried. I didn't greet anyone because there was no one to greet.

When I was a child many people told me I was like my father. As I grew up this seemed to me more a burden than a boon. My father was not a happy man, and his bleak outlook on life seemed to drain joy and spontaneity from any endeavor. I did my best to not be like him, and yet many of my personality traits flowed directly from him anyway. The list of interests we shared is endless: photography, rock collecting, birding, weaving, botany, theology, paper-making, recycling, to name a few. Even making soup—the one kind of cooking I do without consulting a recipe, and by far my only polished skill in the kitchen—was one of his best as well.

Today my best friend sent me a poem. I texted her, this is the best poem ever! She replied it was written for you! But it could as well been written for my father.

T H E   A R T   O F   D I S A P P E A R I N G
by Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

*  *  *  *  *

I am that grocery store cabbage, ducking down the aisle to avoid neighbors. And it's safe to say that my Dad was that cabbage too. He didn't go to parties. He didn't like restaurants where the tables were close together. He was a quiet, private person; more comfortable alone than in a room of people. I am the same way: I endure parties, taking long breaks to walk outside. I have spent many a party reading in the car (I rarely feel this is a poor choice).

A few weeks ago, when my father was still able to carry on a conversation, he said something along the line of It's not easy, but that's just how it is. Life is hard. And I cringed. As a child, it was oppressive for me to hear this message over and over. Life is unfair. Life is hard. People are ungodly. People will disappoint you. I countered my Dad that day, even though I'd sort of given up on countering him at this point. My life hasn't been all that hard, I said. And it is true, all the doom and gloom I'd expected after my childhood never panned out. In fact, the opposite happened. There was so much light and beauty everywhere, people wanting me to do well. Helping me. Light pouring in every window, slipping through every chink in the wall. Some people were bad eggs, yes, and bad things happened: disappointments, heartbreaks, mistakes. But overall, the good seemed so much more substantial; the beauty so much more compelling. And somewhere along the line I found that the darkness bending around the corner was more a challenge to be met than a condition to endure.

In the last days of my Dad's life we read to him from the Chronicles of Narnia. He'd read those books to us so many times as children, and we knew he loved them. It seemed fitting to read them back to him now. And yet I puzzle over my Dad's love C. S. Lewis' imaginary Narnia—where no matter how bad things seemed there was a griddle on the stove with bacon cooking and buttered bread, where light and solemnity and joy were abundant—with his own darkly suspicious outlook. It seems to me that Lewis' fantasy world was not made up of inaccessible things: friendship, food, valor, beauty, kindness, and honor are available to almost anyone. (Well, of course I'd also like a crimson cloak, a healing cordial, and a friendship with a courtly talking mouse).

Which brings me to this: while I inherited many traits from my father, depression was not one of them. Once I was able to reject the murky worldview of my childhood, things got a whole lot better. Although I may want to hide from people in grocery stores, it's not because they are—or I am— rotten or evil. It's because I'm an introvert and find small talk exhausting. So many of the things my father seemed unable to appreciate and value in himself, I find also in myself. And yet, here's the rub: they are a source of joy and pride to me. Solace, enjoyment, meaning, hope, mastery, connection, and even professional fulfillment spring from these same traits and interests I share with my father. I protect these things in myself, finding ways to be that let them shine most fully.

That day after my Dad died, while I wandered along sloping lawns and under old maples, I opened the On Being podcast on my phone. A new podcast popped up, a conversation with the poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Nye is one of my favorite poets, and has been posted on my blog many times before. But that day she talked about a poem of hers with which I wasn't familiar: Kindness. As I walked and held the loss of my father—a loss more keen for the sad brokenness of what wasn't—her words on loss, on sorrow, and on kindness walked with me. Her voice creating a path through the sadness, like light streaming through the leaves overhead, and kindness walking beside me.

K I N D N E S S
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

[ F O R T H E S A K E O F A S I N G L E P O E M ]

   Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and knows the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,—and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

R A I N E R   M A R I A   R I L K E 
from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

{ p o e t r y   w e d n e s d a y }

a childhood

 
The fact is that anybody who survived
his childhood has enough information about life
to last him the rest of his days.

                                                                                    
                                                                     — Flannery O'Connor

It's a great thing to be given, a childhood; and a weighty thing to pass on. I see my children grow before me, breathing in our little family as the center of the universe. To them Charles and I are the only type of parents, and New York City the most obvious of all homes. They do not see the positives and negatives of living in an apartment in Manhattan as I do, nor grasp that their mother and father are just two of many different kinds of women and men. We comprise the universe. We and our parents and grandparents, ancestors reaching further and further back, adding a whole host beliefs, failings, propensities, and habits to the fabric of my children's world.

Sometimes this scares me. I want to solve all the problems in myself quickly, overnight, so as to protect them. I place myself as a hefty filter between them and the world outside our home. But, really, filtering out the "dangerous outside world" is the easy part—at least at their young age. It's the inside world, the things Charles and I carry with us, that are much harder to protect them from.

And yet I take courage. Courage because I know that I am giving this my all, and I'm not afraid to say I'm sorry when I fail. And because my parents both tried to give me better than had been given them. And even when they failed, which did happen at times, I did not merely survive. I survived with character and strength; with a sense that the world is more good than evil, more beautiful than ugly, with more joy than pain. And I learned to take courage, to seek truth, and to keep my feet planted firmly in soil—and these too are the things I pass on.


N O R T H   O F   C H I L D H O O D
by Jonathan Galassi

Somewhere ahead I see you
watching something out your window,
what I don’t know. You’re tall,
not on your tiptoes, green,
no longer yellow,
no longer little, little one,
but the changeless changing
seasons are still with us.
Summer’s back,
so beautiful it always reeks of ending,
and now its breeze is stirring
in your room commanding the lawn,
trying to wake you to say the day is wasting,
but you’re north of childhood now and out of here,
and I’ve gone south.

From North Street and Other Poems, Copyright © 2001 by Jonathan Galassi

{  Poetry Wednesday  }

the onset of summer, with a little praise for rilke

B E F O R E   S U M M E R   R A I N

Rainer Maria Rilke

Suddenly, from all the green around you,
something—you don't know what—has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood

you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
reminding you of someone's Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour

will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide
away from us, cautiously, as though
they weren't supposed to hear what we are saying.

And reflected on the faded tapestries now;
the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long
childhood hours when you were so afraid.

From New Poems, 1907-1908, 

translated by Stephen Mitchell

•      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •      •

It is summer, suddenly, the way that happens in New York City. When you wake one morning and spring is over, a blue-green haze hangs over the river and even the taxis' honking seems muffled after fighting through the humidity. There is a soft sensation of weight against your skin as you move.

Things are good. Genevieve is healing, and I notice she can hear better after the surgery. All that worry behind me, and the summer months nudging us forward. 

The poem above is one of my favorites by Rilke. I think I've posted it previously, but it bears reposting. Its four short stanzas paint as beautiful a description of the moments before a summer downpour as are written in English, and obviously German as well. What moves me most, though, is Rilke's understanding of how experience colors perception. It takes little imagination to see how a rain shower encompasses both solitude and passion. But here it also falls over the misunderstandings of generations in gracious, if not restrained, space—even grandiosity—, and reflects the way time slows in childhood, allowing fears to swell and settle upon a landscape.

 { more poetry wednesday }

living without fiction

I don't read novels anymore. Or at least only rarely. For years now it's been biographies, autobiographies, essays, personal histories, journals, ethical reflections and the like. But I used to live on fiction. As a little girl I would stay up late into the night reading--a word or two at a time--by the lit control dial on my electric blanket. Sometimes a shaft of moonlight from the window would help--needless to say, I now wear glasses.

I read anything that began well enough to get me through the first ten pages--Moby Dick, the Book of Revelation, Pinkwater's The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. I even made a good attempt at Plato's Republic. We didn't have a television at home so the weekly trip to the public library was well anticipated. We were allowed five books a week, and in my opinion far too few to get me through until next Saturday.

My parents, perhaps troubled by my unabashed reading of such "grown-up" fiction as Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, imposed the rule that library books had to come from the "juvenile" section of the library. In fifth or sixth grade I began to venture out of juvenile section and creep around the "adult" stacks, careful to avoid my father, who was more likely than not perusing a boring book on woodworking or wildflowers. Lucky for me his no-nonsense books were shelved at a safe distance from the juicy fiction aisles I was interested in. I would carefully select one or two books from the "adult" section and hide them under my other books. This was how I read Gone with the Wind, the rather trashy North and South trilogy, as well as glossy history books documenting the Roman Empire--on which I was nursing a girlish crush.

My mother made it known that I was too young to read certain books we had on the shelves at home, such as Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Which of course only ensured it was read in the dead of night by electric blanket light. And, as you can imagine, the wailing sobs of Catherine's ghost were only more bone-chilling in my darkened childhood bedroom.

Sooner or later my parents gave up on controlling my reading. Our little home-schooled, wood-burning, vegetable-growing Christian family was beginning to betray signs of disillusion, and what I read became less important. In fact, as family life became tense, I dug further down into my books. And I passed the reading bug onto my younger brother. One my fondest childhood memories is of us under layers of quilts in our cold, wood-heated home, reading Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

But as I sit here, writing on my laptop in well-lit bed far from my childhood home, my novels pile up unread. I crave stories of the real. For example, Luke's amusing Oedipal misbehavior, Jenny's attempts to free grieving balloons from trees, or (my current book) an interpretive history entitled Lincoln's Melancholy. I want to read the mass of lives considered, suffered, hammered-out, well lived: I'm just plumb fictioned out.

life, not unlike kickball at recess

I didn't like kickball, I didn't even particularly like recess. And so I sulked, lost in thought, in outfield--praying no one kicked a ball my direction.

The damp playground of Oliver P. Lent Elementary School comes to mind when I feel myself drifting away from the things I need to do. The problem with kickball was outfield. I'd stand awkwardly on the soggy grass, far from home base and other players, and think. Think about kickball and how much I hated it, how maybe if the clouds lifted a bit I'd see Mt Hood, how my fellow students were mostly a crowd of heathen imbeciles, and how when the sun came out the wet concrete would radiate cloudy scraps of evaporated water. If--God forbid--a ball came galloping my direction, I'd have to run, feign interest in the game's trajectory, and try to remember who was on my team and who wasn't.

Other recess games did not afford me such pondering. Wall-ball or four-square, for instance, required I pay attention; I had no time to think, "I hate this game." And even if I did not play particularly well, I enjoyed myself and finished each game flushed and animated. Right then and there I should have sworn off kickball permanently.

The problem is that people who think too much also tend to think that they should be like other people. What's wrong with me that I don't like kickball? That's what the cool kids are playing. I don't like kickball and never will, there is nothing to be done but accept this fact. It doesn't matter if I think I should like kickball, or wished I could gleefully race around after a blue air-inflated rubber toy with sixteen kids towards whom I mostly feel suspicious. Kickball is boring, and there are too many people involved, and it affords me too much time to think in outfield.

My life as an adult offers the same story: standing in outfield, doing something I have little interest in, gives me time too much time to ponder. There are things to be done--bills to pay, resumes to send, toenails to paint. And merely that act, merely not worrying that there is something wrong with me because I don't like kickball, gives me what I wanted all those years ago: abandon. It's time to ditch cool kickball and go play four-square.

a call from portland

You're in a car somewhere I called home,
sky wrapped around the windows, witnessing
swelling subdivisions, gas stations; the franchised,
highwayed loam turns red, then gold.

And then you come to rain. That cold mother
grows everything, even the asphalt gives way
to green. I miss her cold face, but also the way the
dull landscape brightens when the sun burns

the sky clean. You complain about the clouds casually,
as if I would agree, but I think of rain jealously.
I see evergreens under wet blurry skies, cafés, coffee
brewing, wide windows under awnings, dripping.

Here, above my eastern apartment, the clouds
themselves are ancient, the heavens august. A land
settled, its stone walls tired, its trees don't know me.
But here is where I wait for you, and wonder.

Return from my horizon, from the drizzle of memory.
Bring with you the slip-shod light of morning, the creak of
stairs, and a bed full of library books: my childhood under
the wet sky run down the eaves of my parent's home.

clouds aren't hard

I read an article in The Sun Magazine about a flood in upstate New York. The author wrote, "It's like being the victim of abuse... It's like your father hitting you. But it's not your father, it's a body of water. Or God."

This reminds me of something my father often said, usually before or after he attempted to correct my behavior with physical discipline. He would sit before me with a look of cheerless inexorability, as if forces beyond his control had long since taken over, and say, "I play softball, but God plays hardball." I believe this was meant to comfort me. Or at least encourage me to view this punishment as a cushy ride that I should enjoy while I could.

I expect my father would've included floods in God's game of hardball. Floods, hurricanes, drought, meaningless work, heartbreak, failure, divorce, the slow and lonely hand of time. All were acts of God, all for my good. And, he was right, much harder than a spanking.

Funny thing is I think the spankings might still have been worse.

When I was in New Mexico I took a photo of a cloud peering out over the embankment beside the road. There is a drought in the Southwest, a six-year drought. White clouds float overhead, the kind that rarely darken to droop down heavy with rain. And yet I don't believe these ephemeral clouds are God's game of hardball. And neither are the floods. Or global warming. Or failure.

They are glory.

a park within a park, hidden within a dream

On Monday I discovered a secret dream. A secret dream of a park concealed within a park.

I've taken to going over my dreams each morning when I awake. I'm searching for evidence of a particularly unpleasant reoccurring dream, of which I'm trying to rid myself. Monday morning I ran through the night's offerings. The first dream emerged clear-eyed and relatively whole, then moved, like a run-on sentence, into another dream and then another. I followed these threads to smaller and more obtuse dreams, dissolving as I touched them in the bright morning light. I was pleased: there were no sign of my villains.

I stretched and moved to get up. As I sat up I remembered something from my childhood: a park my Dad took me to on top of a hill, tucked away inside another park. I blinked: but no, there was no such place. Yet I remembered it—dark with pine and douglass fir, a small gate with giant rhodendrons on either side, a mossy and meandering path. And I remembered remembering it as a child, and wanting to go there again. My brow furrowed. I am acquainted with the parks in and around Portland: none fit this description.

As I sat on my bed further details emerged. The land surrounding this particular park was expansive and public and the inner park was well-kept secret concealed within. My father was aware the inner park, and he knew the way to the gate. The surrounding public park was also wooded, but in an open and sunny way. It was a Portlandy park: azaleas, bike-racks, brown information signs, pebbled paths, the fauna a careful mix of deciduous and evergreen. But the hidden park had a private feeling: damp and woody, intricate, personal. Ornate maiden hair ferns grew beside the path, shy trilliums under the firs, red-winged blackbirds called from the trees. It was the park of hidden things, rare blossoms, uncommon birds.

We arrived at the park by car, following some awkward and anfractuous route. In the reoccurrences of the dream our course was different: a back road over a hill in Lake Oswego, or North over the St John's Bridge, or routes that weren't in Portland but in unidentified cities with lacing overpasses and layered bridges. In this last dream it seemed we were headed to Canby, but then doubled-back toward Portland on another road, only arriving at the park after going an unnecessarily long stretch out of the way.

What I find to be so curious about this dream is that I've apparently had it over and over. And yet until Monday I never remembered it as a dream, but as a vague memory of a real park. I only remembered it at the tail-end of my other dreams, after I'd finished going through them and started about my day. The secret park dream itself was hidden within my other dreams, disguised as a memory.

pinecones aren't the clearest arrows

When, as a child, my family went camping with other families, there would be a herd of us children—sleeping in tents and vans, making fires, canoeing across lakes, rolling down sand dunes, spying on each other. In the evening our parents would be eager to be rid of us, and would without fail suggest we play the arrow game. It was a suggestion greeted with enthusiasm because it meant more time without parental supervision. We would split into two teams, one to seek and the other to hide. The first team set out from our camp site and fabricated arrows out of sticks, rocks or pinecones pointing in the direction we were headed. Then about every fifteen to twenty feet we'd make another pointer. The second team waited for 10 minutes, then set out to find us, following our rustic signs. The trick for the first team was to make the arrows clear enough to keep the second team on track, but vague and staggered enough to keep things interesting. The arrows were often hard to find, as they blended easily with wooded paths or crumbling campsite cement. As time went on, and the first team needed to find some place to hide (in drainage pipes, under roads, up trees, behind dunes, in docked canoes, in campsite shower stalls), the more ambiguous our arrows became. Sometimes we would just draw them in the dirt, and by this point we'd leave wide spaces between the our signs. This was a clue in itself to the second team: you've almost found us.

This was by far my favorite camping game. If I was in the first team, I was usually the one constructing the arrows. If I was in the second team, I was out ahead, nose to the ground, diligently seeking the next clue.

All the information I need is before me, the task is to heed it. The twiggy markings and odd pinecone-contructed arrows of life lay at my feet.
Last night I dreamt of children whose torsos were locked inside wooden boxes, with just hands, heads and legs below the knees protruding. The children were indentured servants, they had some sort of debt or duty to pay off. I attempted to help one little girl—to carry her up the stairs because walking was so difficult—but was reprimanded: she must do the work to free herself.

This dream, like Varda's The Gleaners and I, or meeting Gabe, or my current financial woes, are no coincidence. They serve pinecones arrows. It would be foolish to stop following them, more foolish to assume that because I haven't recently seen three sticks configured arrowishly that I can give up the game altogether. The game is being played, and I must continue to walk in its direction.

driving to church

This story is about me. About me sitting in Mary's sunroom looking at the sun shine through the leaves of the golden pothos vine and thinking about about driving to church as a kid, and smiling.

Mary wants me to make new stories so that my body remembers my past differently.

I smiled because when Mary asked me to change a childhood memory of my father, I immediately thought about our family going to church. Of course the trip to church. I recalled that awful ride and all the dread associated with our Sunday morning spectacle. I remember our car, old and beat up, and fighting with my brother and sister about window seats. I remember pulling into the parking lot at church and circling around to park in the back. Other people's fathers drove up and dropped them off under the awning to protect their Sunday best from the rain. I don't think Dad ever did that for us. I remember cringing and hoping nobody would be getting out of their car when we got out of ours. I remember walking across the blacktop, looking down, dreading. I remember the glass doors under the small awning that led into the vestibule. I remember the stale smell of the unused building, the striped upholstery on the bench next to the door. But I remember most clearly wanting to hide. Wanting to avoid everybody, their gaze, their implicit judgement, even their friendly greeting.

Our whole entrance into the church was uncomfortable. Our position there apparently without dignity, at least in my Father's eyes. Yes, we were poor, but more importantly, Dad felt slighted. He put on a stern, self-righteous act which became the context in which we walked. Entering the sanctuary was as difficult as arriving at the front doors. Dad chose back rows, or when he felt particularly ill-at-ease he skulked off to the balcony. He said it was because he did not want to be asked to pray.

I felt so unentitled at church, so second-rate, so much the daughter of my unhappy, grudge-bearing father.

Sitting there with the sunlight I tried to imagine us lightly getting into our car amid good-natured bickering, to ride to church peaceably, with space in our movements and ourselves. To imagine pulling into the closest parking spot to the door, like a normal family. Or getting dropped off under the awning. To imagine entering and seeing my Father smile and shake someone's hand warmly, engage in conversation without an edge or grudge. To see my Mom walk with dignity, not hiding her husband's angry inadequacy with smiles or sweetness. To hang our coats with pride. To run and find my friends and not slink away somewhere with a book to read. To enter the sactuary with my family comfortably, casually sitting in a pew near the middle of the church. With space and dignity in all our movements.