forty days

Begin with this. Forty busy days, days that seem to hold whole different days inside of them, days that are more or less negotiations with myself about how much I can get done. After the children are in bed I climb the stairs to my office to continue work, my mind awash with pieces of seemingly disparate puzzles. I feel like a cup full to the brim, but someone is continuing to pour.

My sister is sifting through the accumulations of my father's life: drawers of string and tape and glue, treasured cuts of exotic wood waiting for a purpose, colored glass, old books with torn cloth and broken bindings, and far far too many small pewter vases. He collected: plastic bags and garden tools, wool and cotton cloth for weaving, seeds, staplers, rocks, dried flowers, pencils, pads of paper with sad little sayings written on them, marbles, meat grinders, dental tools and surgical clamps, peppercorns, coffee pots, jars of honey, bars of soap, corn husks, magnifying glasses, plaid flannel shirts. My father prized that which could be put to use. He gravitated toward items that would be useful for homesteading in the 1800s, or if the electricity went out for a good while. I imagine he saw each busted garden tool restored, the rusted head rubbed shiny with steel wool, then carefully refastened to a newly turned and oiled shaft. As he stashed away plastic bags I suspect he imagined them reused until they turned brittle and torn, then twisted and woven into bath mats.

There is a lump in my throat that doesn't go away. It is a reminder, but of what I am not sure. I went to the doctor, she glanced down my throat and assured me I didn't have strep.

Forty days, and then some. Wednesday night we held a panikhida, a short and beautiful rite of remembrance, to mark forty days since my father's passing. I said a silent prayer asking him to forgive me for having a service for him in the Orthodox Church. My father was a man of religious conviction and theological intransigence. I'm not sure he believed I was truly a Christian once I joined the Orthodox Church. To his mind the Orthodox Church was some lesser and more antiquated version of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Roman church he regarded with grave suspicion. But pray for him we Orthodox did anyway, "with the saints give rest / to the soul of thy servant / where sickness and sorrow are no more / neither sighing but life everlasting."

My eight year old son said afterwards that it was a wonderful service. He wondered if we could also have a panikhida for his beta fish, Thunder, who also recently died. Thunder lies in a decorated box in the freezer alongside his favorite rocks, awaiting burial. "So many people are dying lately," my son said, "Grandpa, Thunder..."

I have not gone back to my father's house since the night he died. I can see the things all piled up there without going over to see them with my eyes. I remember the way he treasured it all. When I was twenty and moving out, I took a stapler from my parents home. Years later, when I'd moved the stapler with me to New York, my father found it in my apartment while visiting me there. He took the stapler with him back to Oregon. Apparently he'd been missing that particular stapler all the eight years it had been in my possession. My sister reports there are any number of similar staplers at the house and I can have one if I want. But honestly, I do not want a stapler.

Nor do I want piles of yarn or small pads of paper or pewter vases. I might be tempted by scissors, or local honey, but I don't need more of anything. Not really.

What I need is time. What I need is time stretched out and softly unfolding in front of me. Time unhindered by crisis or heartbreak or urgent business, just the business of walking and cooking and laundry and applying band-aids and bactine. Time just circling around the weeks like water, like leaves spiraling yellow to the ground.

the space within my chest

  Wave Hill. © 2012 Amber Schley Iragui

The whirlwind of our days lately, I think they started sometime last summer. Or maybe when Valerie died without letting us say goodbye. But they haven't stopped, and I don't expect them to. I imagine they will stretch like this across many summers: I see my daughter grown tall before me, a young teenager asking permission to take a summer trip with friends; my son jumping off something too high and splintering a heel bone. There will be more sleepless nights, trips to the ER, lengthy discussions with my husband and difficult decisions.

There were years when I wished for something to happen, anything to happen. I would have welcomed an earthquake. Days when I had the embarrassing luxury of a dream journal. And more recently, there were stretches of time where just the normal routine of things was all I could bear. My energy pulled inward with a dogged desire to understand: Psyche sorting seed from grain, but within a seemingly Sisyphean time frame.

But then the grains are sorted, the larder stocked, the broken things swept away. And something marvelous happens. My gaze turns outward again, but from a deeper place; with less to prove and more to give, the space within my chest slowly unfurling.

This weekend was a blur of urgency and activity: we spent six hours in the ER with Genevieve, celebrated Charles' birthday and also a neighbor's birthday, had brunch with family from out-of-town, combed Manhattan for a prescription medicine that seems to be in a city-wide shortage (only to find, well past midnight, a lone bottle in Midtown East), went head-to-head with some of the legal obstacles facing our small little Waldorf school, and yet still managed to find time to peruse the aisles of an old-fashioned bookstore and wander in our beloved Wave Hill. Yes, I felt anxious much of the time, yet not done in—as if the opening in my chest made room for each thing in its turn.

I have seen these cycles within myself over and over. Everyone has their own rhythm, that mine move at a pace imperceptible to even me has been hard to accept. But my body, heart, and mind play a gentle melody together, and do so best without my anxious intervention. I cannot hurry myself out of fears, or convince my heart of things it does not believe. My body takes its cues from a place far deeper than my mind, and it is best not to mess in its business. Collect the facts, I tell myself, and just sit them there, on the counter of my mind. Ask. In time it will all be clear.

Lately I have taken joy in my slowness, in my deep stubbornness of heart. As if I can feel my roots reaching down further into ground, daring the wind to blow hard enough to move me. Just try, I say, I'm not afraid. But I also take comfort in I knowing I am so little. I may be a tree but I'm by no means an impressive one. All my own truths are partial truths: I am not in possession of the whole, and will never be. Lord have mercy, I whisper, give me the eyes to see.


T R Y I N G   T O   N A M E   W H A T   D O E S N ' T   C H A N G E
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change
is train tracks. She’s sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery
by the side, but not the tracks.
I’ve watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.

Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track
near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train
is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.
The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Every Tuesday on Morales Street
butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.
The widow in the tilted house
spices her soup with cinnamon.
Ask her what doesn’t change.

Stars explode.
The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.
The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.

The train whistle still wails its ancient sound
but when it goes away, shrinking back
from the walls of the brain,
it takes something different with it every time.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems
Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. 

{ p o e t r y   w e d n e s d a y }

time is an anxious habit I'm longing to kick

T  U  R  N  I  N  G

Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can remember

almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back

that I did not notice when they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them

this morning the black shepherd dog
still young looking up and saying

Are you ready this time

—W. S Merwin

* * *

Today is a normal sort of day. Today we will eat breakfast and lunch and dinner at home. The baby will nap in her bed, and not after a fit of rage in a restaurant. We will not get the car from the garage and heist wheelchairs and strollers inside, squeezing ourselves between car seats and stashing packages underfoot. We will not troll the blocks looking for parking, nor will we take a taxi. We will not go to the zoo or the museum or the toy store.

Today is a normal day. It is also the day my mother-in-law leaves. Her trip was rather uneventful this time, I didn't break down in tears or flee to the car to pout. But, because Genevieve had bronchitis, I didn't see her as much as I have in the past. Which says something.

Balancing kindness toward my MIL and kindness towards myself is a difficult act. The golden rule doesn't help when that-which-you'd-like-done-unto-yourself will inevitably cause displeasure when done-unto-the-other. I am left with a bewildering puzzle of a person--the woman who raised my husband--whose motives, sensibilities and mores are quite unlike my own. Her presence is like spending a week with someone scraping her fingernails across a chalkboard: I am forever trying to get out of earshot.

I have been waiting for it all to be over, and now it is. I am here. Now. I remind myself, I am here.

Being a mother is a difficult stretch for me in one way: timing. I am so not good at it. Left to my own devices I just do one thing after another with no reference to the clock at all. Deadlines--such as dinner at 7:00--would pop up on me unawares and in response I'd brandish a cereal box. But the responsibility of parenting weighs heavily on my breezy time-management policy. Naps must be taken, meals prepared, wet diapers cannot be worn all day without bursting out with sticky little gelatin globs. As much as it goes against my nature, I am now mostly, if awkwardly, Aware of Time. But this awareness is an anxious habit I'm longing to kick. (And I will, if I have to wait until the kids are in college.)

But I take breaks from this new regime. I lay quietly with the baby as she sleeps, I abandon the orderly charts, draw innumerable dinosaurs and volcanoes, read the same book five times in a row, lay on the floor whispering "ba! ba!" and, needs be, break out the cereal box. I am still occasionally late for church, and miss appointments. Because I am here, now. I am here.

{ p o e t r y  w e d n e s d a y }

my do-nothing birthday

I loathe rushing. I begin to doubt the whole point of going, and often the whole point of life, when rushing about trying to get somewhere. My philosophy is if I get anywhere at all it should just be a lovely surprise. This is really not the most functional attitude, and has made me late to every doctor appointment I've made for my son in his 16-month existence. And late for everything else too.

For my birthday C and I went down to the Lower East Side (sans Ike). I haven't been there since I was pregnant and Rachel was in town. And we did nothing. It was so nice. We sort of had a destination--the tea house near the tenement museum, but walking in that direction from the subway we came across a charming bookstore. We stopped in. After 15 minutes C was ready to plunge on, but it was my do-nothing birthday. So instead we took five glossy photography journals over to the bookstore coffee shop and sat for an hour or so and carefully looked them over. When we finished glossy photo journal number 4, I felt it was time to move on. Now that's my speed.

C and I recently wrote out personal mission statements. Here is how I sum up this slowness of mine in my mission statement: "to let go of the outcome, recognizing that a preoccupation with results often involves failing to notice the beauty of the process."

get my hooky fix

My freshman year in high school two of my friends suggested we skip school to go see Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I had no interest in the movie, but for some reason I agreed, and discovered that--besides the unpleasantness of sneaking on and off campus--skipping school was entirely my cup of tea. Having gotten away with it once, I began to skip school often, justified in my own mind by my good grades. Being a rather risk-adverse teenager, my outings were fairly tame: I rode the light rail to the large downtown library to browse, walked quietly by the homeless punks hanging out in Pioneer Square, sat in on my friends' classes at MLC (Portland's alternative public school where the teachers apparently welcome stray children into their classes). I wasn't a good liar, so I made it a habit to tell my mom when I cut class--setting a stellar example for my younger siblings whose subsequent school skipping activities were more likely to include shop lifting, pot smoking, and train hopping.

Playing hooky has become a life-long vice, or love, depending on how you look at it. I delight in stealing time for myself when I'm supposed to be elsewhere, doing something serious and official and un-fun. Time becomes more precious and satisfying, it's like getting the extra daylight savings hours year round. Of course, skipping as an adult lacks the glamour it had in my young adulthood. It's not really fun to stretch an office lunch hour when going back late just means I'll have to stay even later. And now, as a mostly stay-at-home-mom, I can barely find activities from which to play hooky. But I do manage: for example, there is church.

This past Sunday, as Charles was getting ready for liturgy, I lingered in bed. Charles doesn't like arriving late, and so he had dressed Isaiah and headed out the door with time to spare. I heard him loudly bless our apartment and his journey (a five-minute walk) to church as he left, and I wondered if this was in the hope that his wife would soon follow him. For awhile I entertained thoughts of arriving before communion, but even that was making me feel confined, so I gave up pretensions of going altogether. Instead, I did nothing, mostly. I took a long shower. I sat wrapped in my towel in the streaming sunlight and slowly applied lotion. I thought. I thought a lot. I made coffee. I read a little. I did the dishes and slowly tidied up the apartment. I even made the bed. I felt absolutely wonderful.

When Charles returned with Ike, he suggested that instead of missing church I take Saturday mornings for myself. This seemed to be a good idea, and I agreed. But later I thought it's skipping church that makes the time so delicious. And it's not that I don't like church--I do! I love our little parish, my friends there, not to mention our world-class coffee hour. The draw of missing church is that I'm playing hookey. I remember sitting in the sun outside the chapel at St Vlad's, late for liturgy as usual, talking to Jenny. Jenny, of course, had come out of church because of baby Anna--a completely legitimate excuse. I, on the other hand, just liked missing church. Our conversations were all the sweeter because the church, a few feet from us, was packed with praying people.

But maybe I can find other ways to get my hooky fix. Yesterday I hired a sitter to continue some urgent freelance work. As I was trudging through the snow to my little office, I passed a coffee shop. I felt annoyed that whenever I have a sitter all I do is rush rush rush to work, to the store, and rush rush rush home to feed Ike. I swung around and headed back to the coffee shop. I sat in a window seat for an hour, sipping chai, reading The New Yorker, and leisurely watching the snow fall on my neighborhood. Ah, it's so delicious.

I could use a cute watch

Lord knows timeliness is not my strength.

Time is a just a big blurry wash of moments that ideally should be spent drinking coffee, listening to music, practicing yoga, taking photographs, designing books, reading books, spending time with my friends, and kissing. Balancing my checkbook, writing business emails, sitting in dentists' waiting rooms, opening mail, getting the oil changed, and scheduling anything cramp my style. Not to mention soak up hours and hours of time I could spend fooling with images in Photoshop and reading my friends' blogs.

But my commitment to leisure has become problematic, as you can imagine. Partially because the it is difficult to relax during yoga if I'm wondering if I have enough money in my checking account to cover my most recent trip to Starbucks. It has occurred to me lately that I might enjoy yoga more, and enjoy my coffee more, if I wasn't avoiding my responsibilities to do so.

Yes, I know, roll your eyes. I am thirty-three and should have come to this conclusion long ago.

But although habits are hard to break, I'm trying. For one, I now open my mail immediately, instead of looking in askance at the thick white business envelopes and stashing them in an ever-growing pile of unopened fears. I am trying to get to work on time, regularly, and I email a friend each morning to tell her when I got in and when I leave. A friend lent me a DVD on time management, which I am actually looking forward to watching. And I'm thinking it's time I bought a watch. Or you could send me yours, if it's cute.