Wild Heart

A Poet Writes about Life

Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet, died today. She was 89. I am grateful to her for writing her poems and getting them published. Below is one of my favorites.

* * * * *

A Note

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.

   -- by Wislawa Szymborska

Reader Beware!

Dear Reader,

This appeared in my in-box today in my Public Radio Market newsletter:

I read it and immediately felt compelled to raise a loud HELLO-O-O-O-O!!! Did the blurb-writer actually read Moby Dick? I think not. I, however, have read it twice - because it was required reading in two college Lit classes - and I am here to tell you that if you want a "gripping adventure narrative," you'd best read only the first 10 pages and the last 5.

Moby Dick opens with the now famous line, "Call me Ishmael." I love the narrator and the ship; I love Ishamael's bunk-mate Queequeg. The opening is compelling - and then we wade through hundreds of pages of details about whale blubber. We don't get to the whale until the very last few pages. Yes, I agree that the story is told in "an uncanny and unforgettable fashion," but only because I'll never forget having to read it twice, both times wondering how the heck it came to be known as a "classic American novel."

An aside:

I just went upstairs to find my copy of Moby Dick and make sure of the details. All of my old text books are in one area of my shelves (unlike all my other books, which are tucked in anywhere, Harry Potter keeping company with A.S. Byatt who is next to the Dalai Lama), and I couldn't find it. I scanned the shelves again, looking for that big fat book among all my other big fat books that no one wants to read but has to read in English classes. Nope. Moby Dick is not next to a (relatively) slim volume of Melville's shorter works. It's not stashed in with the wordy Victorians or the wordy Russians. As I scanned the shelves for the third time, I cracked myself up with this thought: Maybe I lent it to someone. Right. Someone borrowed my copy of Moby Dick. For a doorstop, maybe! Then I wondered if maybe I had used it for a doorstop, but no - I use my two-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary to keep my bedroom door from swinging shut.

I was an English major through two college degrees, and I've read a lot of books that - trust me - most of us would never pick up and read just for fun. And I loved every one of those big fat difficult complex fascinating enlightening life-changing books. Except for Moby Dick. Maybe I would have loved it if it hadn't been pitched to me as a "great American classic." Maybe I would have loved it in an editing class: trim all the fat and you've got a wonderful, engrossing 15-page story. I just never understood - and still don't - why it is considered "great."

So if you also get the Public Radio Market in your in-box and you read this lovely blurb and decide you've been missing something in your life because you haven't read Moby Dick, by all means buy it and read it. Enjoy the story of the whale hunt (of course, by the time you get to the end of the book, you will have forgotten the set-up for the hunt in the beginning and will have to read that part again). Enjoy the details of being on the open sea in a creaky old ship with creaky old shipmates. Enjoy the fascinating (I'm serious here) details of how to render whale fat. Learn everything you could possibly want to know about amber. Recognize where the name "Starbuck" came from in the TV series "Starship Gallactica." If you know anything about projection, note how Ahab characterizes the whale and ask yourself if the pot is calling the kettle black. In fact, I'm now feeling disappointed that I seem to no longer have my college copy of this enthralling story. Hmmm. Guess I'll have to run out to my local independent bookstore and get a copy - you know - to replace the one I lent to a friend.

Who Made This Mess!

A clean house is a sign of a wasted life. ~ Refrigerator Magnet

Here's something I've noticed lately: I do dishes, clearing off all the counters and wiping everything down and it looks great - for about five minutes. Then as if by magic, the counters are cluttered with cups and cereal bowls and the skillet I scrambled eggs in.

Same thing with the laundry. I do a couple of loads, fold everything, stow it, and while I'm wondering how my kitchen got cluttered, the dryer beeps and there's more laundry to do.

It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: When the painters get to the end, they have to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

There's something wrong with this picture. We can send a man to the moon, but we haven't figured out how to keep the house dusted and the floors mopped, the laundry washed and dried and put away, and the kitchen clear of plates with smears of tomato and bowls with a film of last night's mushroom soup.

And they call this the 21st century.

Holy Smokes!

LSMFT: Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco
~ TV ad from the 50s

I wake in the mornings with my mother's smoker's cough, though I've never been a smoker in my life - except for that time in my late 30s when, for some stupid reason, I decided I wanted to smoke and someone had left a package of Kools in my car and I smoked them one night when I was driving back to San Jose after meeting a friend in San Francisco, and by the time I got home, I was sick to my stomach. I understand why teenagers think they look cool when they're holding that cigarette - I am quite sure I was the epitome of cool as I drove down 101 blowing cigarette smoke from the side of mouth - but I can't, for the life of me, figure out why they continue, since puking never looks cool and tastes even worse. Oh. Maybe they don't get sick, as I did. Too bad.

Anyway, I have her cough for the first 15 minutes I'm awake in the morning. Odd, that.

After her mother died, my mother took on some of her mother's characteristics. Out of the blue, she started saying things like, "Well, bless your heart!" which she had never done before but her mother was famous for. And while I loved those things about my grandmother, it was just plain weird coming from Mother. One day when I was hanging out with my sisters and we were talking about this, it occurred to me that maybe such behavior was a sort of rite of passage when a woman's mother dies, and I looked at my sisters and said, "Okay, let's settle this right now: When Mother goes, which one of us is going to be her, and I'm telling you right now, it's not going to be me." We all voted for Carolyn, my next youngest sister, but she never did step into Mother's shoes. In fact, the older Carolyn got, the sillier she became, and Mother was never silly, although she did have a sly sense of humor.

Summer, 1972: I'm at Mother's house with my two daughters, ages 3 and 5. I am wearing a dress that it is so short, it barely covers my butt (1972, folks!).

Mother says to my oldest daughter, "That's a cute blouse you're wearing, Lisa." Then she turns her gaze upon me and says, "That's a cute blouse you're wearing, too, Verna."

Anyway, I somehow got her smoker's cough, and really, I'd rather be blessing people's hearts.

One night a few years after Mother died, I was lying on the sofa reading when I smelled fudge. Mother made the best fudge in the world, and it was her fudge I was smelling in my kitchen - where I had never ever even tried to make fudge. The next day I was telling my youngest sister this story, and she said that on her way to work she had smelled cigarette smoke in her car, where there had never been a lit cigarette.

"Great!" she said to me. "You get her fudge and I get her cigarettes."

Dad started smoking when he was 12, and he lived until he was 84 without ever having that awful cough or emphysema or lung cancer. Mother took up smoking when she married Dad and died at 74 with heart disease and half of one lung gone to lung cancer. They came of age during a time when everyone smoked and no one ever heard of the dangers. Lucky me that my lack of good sense at 38 led only to dry heaves and the yucky taste of tobacco in my mouth. So where did the cough come from? No idea.

 

 

 

The Schooks Blow

So I was a little flip about the wind yesterday. I changed my mind: Wind is a big deal. It tears into stop lights and snarls traffic, unscrews full-grown trees from the their earthy sockets, whips wires off the poles and takes down a whole neighborhood's power. Cars veer and small dogs take flight. Airplanes are grounded and branches fall into houses and tree limbs fly through windows. No one sleeps for the walloping weight of the wind against the western wall.

I've lived here for almost 30 years, and every January the wind threatens to blow us to Kansas. I learned that this wind is called a "chinook." When I was teaching in the mid-80s, one of my students at a local community college wrote about the annual "schnooks" in Colorado. I live in a place that is famous for schnooks, apparently. One of my first jobs here was with a bunch of meteorologists at NOAA, where they told stories about wind damage that would have been unbelievable, except that they were scientists and knew what they were talking about.

So this is to say sorry for being a schmuck about schnooks in yesterday's post. I won't do it again. Probably.

An Earthquake of a Wind

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another. ~ John Muir

The wind blows mighty here in Boulder, Colorado, barreling down the canyon and whipping branches off of trees and windows out of houses (sometimes). Driving this time of year requires both hands and complete attention because if you’re not blowing across the lanes, someone else might be. And forget finding your newspaper in the morning, unless you get up at half past crack of dawn to waylay the delivery person.

This time of year, cats fidget, dogs cower, and god only knows what the birds do. A friend who grew up here told me that her elementary school used to call wind days - like snow days, you know, only windy. I grew up in San Francisco, and the only weather phenomenon that troubled us was the occasional earthquake. Not weather, exactly, but still . . . . Mostly we just rode them out. When I was in junior high, we were so shaken by an earthquake that we had to file quietly out to the bleachers where the principal addressed us, telling us not to worry because surely our parents were just fine, at which point, most of the girls broke into tears and hung all over each other, imagining that the hillside had come down and buried Mother where she stood ironing Daddy’s white shirts.

That day we were all dismissed from school with the admonition to go straight home, and being a good girl, I did. When I walked into the house, Mother was changing the baby. “What are you doing home so early?” she said. That’s mostly how we dealt with earthquakes: What? They sent you home from school?!

That one was big enough to be accompanied by a night full of aftershocks. I slept in an Army cot kind of bed that was against one wall. By morning my bed had been shaken to the middle of the room.

Wind? Big deal.

MLK: In Gratitude

. . . an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968. ~ Joan Didion, The White Album

In the the mid-80s, I was living in California and teaching a night class at a local community college. One night I came out at break time surrounded by students, all of us heading for the cafeteria, when I heard a young man say to the young woman walking next to him, "That history exam was rough. What year was President Kennedy shot? I think I got it wrong."

November 22, 1963: It's a cold day in South San Francisco. I'm taking my four-year-old sister downtown to do some shopping, and we go into Woolworth's so I can buy her a pair of mittens. We're looking at the mittens, she's trying them on, and I realize that the store has gone silent except for a radio. I look around and see that people are frozen where they stand, many of them crying. Nan and I hear the radio announcer repeating, "President John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, Texas . . . " We put the mittens down and walk out onto the street that is  quiet but for the sound of people crying. No one knows where to look.

My father remembered where he was and what he was doing on December 7, 1941. To me it was history, just as Presidnet Kennedy's assassination was history to the young people on that campus. Young people today will remember where they were when they heard about the attack on the World Trade Center in NY, and that, too, will fade into memory.

1968:

Martin Luther King is assassinated in April.

Robert Kennedy is assassinated in June.

World-wide protests against the Vietnam War

Richard Nixon, George Wallace, Abbie Hoffman, the Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, Bonnie & Clyde, the Rolling Stones, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, Lady Bird Johnson, Christian Barnard, Eugene McCarthy, Tet Offensive, the Nehru shirt, Jackie and Ari marry.

In 1968, entering the Age of Aquarius, history unfolded with the assassinations and protests, a presidential election (the first one in which I voted), the first successful heart transplant, and more atrocities in Vietnam. I was a young mother in an apartment in the suburbs. First Martin Luther King. Then Robert Kennedy. TV footage and echoes from 1963, people crying in the streets and standing frozen in the grocery stores and filling stations. No bombs dropping to tell us the world and our way of life was forever changed, but we were shell-shocked nonetheless.

It's history. And it isn't. Every year we evoke Martin Luther King, and I remember that when he was shot to death, I was young and naive enough to not understand how anyone could possibly disagree with his non-violent approach to civil rights. I'm older now, maybe a little wiser, but I still don't understand why it is revolutionary to believe that

. . . little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

 

 

 

Mystery

Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. . . . Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery.
~ Gregory Maguire, from Son of a Witch
(quotes in the following text are from the same source)

Dad used to say, after making a pronouncement that was completely arguable, "It's the truth," and he'd give me a squinty-eyed look that invited me to contradict him, which I started to do in 1961 when I was 15 and the Civil Rights movement was heating up. I can remember shouting matches in the living room, in the kitchen, in the car. And we didn't stop our shouting until I stopped challenging him on what he called "the truth." I was probably 60 at the time, and I could say that he was darned good at triggering me - which was true - but I also see that I was just as stubborn as he was, and I knew I was right.

Can two people be right when their opinions are so divergent that one of them must surely be wrong?

I like to think that as I get older, I become more willing to not know, to just float on the mystery. But as I said, I was 60 before I gave up rising to Dad's challenge. I could see that the more Dad knew "for sure," the less he was likely to understand. And from there, I saw that "understanding" is just a big fat lie.

Everything said something, and it wasn't her job to consider the merit or even the meaning of the message: just to witness the fact of the message.

A few years ago there was a short-lived TV drama that I forget the name of that was about a group of college students who all have a special gift, like ESP or seeing ghosts, that sort of thing. One of them read the world - literally read the world in the various random ways that messages come to us in words: graffiti sprayed on a fence, a pink flyer announcing open mic night, headlines in a newspaper, an ad on a bus. All of these words came together in his mind as an important message. I remember being fascinated with this idea. Have you ever been reading a newspaper, say, and you see a word like "substantiation" just as the radio announcer says that word?

. . . though far below them they delighted in spectacle of wild tsebra [zebra] wheeling and cantering in their winter migration toward the south, a flurry of black and white markings against the brown ground, an alphabet in the act of writing the story of tsebra migration.

We can conjure a meaning of Life in the metaphor of a flower, from seedling to new growth to lush, full, blossom, and finally to fading and falling and crumbling to compost. But what about this? What if the compost stage is middle age? And what if we come into a second blossoming - should the seeds of the old fall just right? Couldn't I, at 60, have finally come to the end of my knowing only to start the new growth process all over again by not knowing? I'm 66 now, and I have no doubt that I know less now than I did yesterday, and it's a great relief to not know. There's a rightness to it that is so much more satisfying than arguing the finer points of all those things Dad was so certain about.

What if death comes when we are in the fullness of the mystery? Ripe, lush, and open to reading whatever the universe has to tell us?  I'm willing to read the birds in flight to see what they have to say.

I Re-create You in My Heart

 A mind is something a young woman from Kansas learns to keep private.
~ Gregory Maguire, from Out of Oz

 Dear Dad,

Tonight I was coming out of a bookstore and into the sulfurous yellow light of the parking lot, not sure I was at the right car until I looked into the front seat and saw the cup holder you bought for me the year I came out there to sit with you through chemo. We went everywhere in my car, a challenge for you who loved the control of being behind the wheel, and among your complaints about my Honda was this one: "You don't have enough cup holders in this car." I have plenty of cup holders most of the time because I rarely have someone else in the car with me, and how many cup holders does one woman need. But I didn't say this.

We went into Walmart and you settled into one of those battery-operated carts, which I had thought you would hate but you actually enjoyed, zipping around (zipping being a relative term for a battery-operated shopping cart), waving your cane at people to get out of the way. I had to run to keep up with you, and I finally flagged, losing sight of you as I traveled at my own pace, looking down each aisle for a glimpse of your waving cane. When I found you, you were berating a blue-vested young man barely old enough to shave: "Where didja move those cup holders that were here last week!"

The young man led us to an aisle of sale items, and, mollified, you picked out a two-cup holder that slides between the two front seats. When you paid for it, I didn't mention that I don't drink out of cups small enough to fit into that holder, but then, your complaint wasn't about my car not having enough cup holders, was it. It was about saying I love you in the only way you had ever figured out how to do.

So tonight in that yellowed parking lot, I unlocked the door, settled into the driver's seat, and put my cell phone into one of the cup holes where it sat upright and showed me the time if I glanced down. I've used that cup holder for many other things since you gave it to me that summer, but mostly it's there to remind me what it means to love someone unconditionally. No, I don't grant you that ability, you who seemed to make it your end-of-life's work to alienate anyone who ever cared for you, and you did a good job of it, but isn't it an odd thing that most of us found our way back to love after you were gone.

You've been gone now for a year and a half, and I miss you - the man you were before you got sick. I also understand more than you ever knew about alienation and how it's really about defending oneself, which has allowed me to let you back into my heart. Being with you during those last two years was like standing in the Fun House at Playland at the Beach. Remember Laughing Sal? Remember the House of Mirrors, where you could stand and see yourself reflected so many times it was dizzying? I saw so many versions of myself in you, and I wept for you and I wept for me and heard Laughing Sal competing with the seagulls and the tinkley music from the carousel. I was a kid whose father could do no wrong and a grown-up woman who was becoming the worst of her father. Well, that was the story I told myself.

We loved you in spite of your efforts to make us go away. Well, most of us do. And really, I can only speak for myself. It would surprise you to know that your death brought your kids closer than we had been before, and we were already close. Coming on two years after your death, what I have left is photos and good memories and wisps of bad memories (so I don't romanticize the man I referred to as Mr. Cranky Pants). And I have the cup holder you thrust at me as we left Walmart that day.

"There. Now you have enough cup holders." And you raised yourself out of the shopping cart and strolled toward the car, not using your cane.

 

 

Music from the Angels

Sleep won't come. I grab some tunes and create a mood, let the thoughts roll out and the feelings roll over.

Happy accident: I browse Spotify, search Wynton Marsalis, and bam! Get down with Willie Nelson, Wynton Marsalis, and Norah Jones celebrating Ray Charles. Am I lucky or what?

Tonight it's OK that I can't sleep. Tonight I have music and tomorrow is Sunday and I can roll out of bed whenever. Life is good.