Month: November 2007

Baby Boy.

John Harmon Scully.

My new godson! I am so honored to be a part of the Scully family in this way. Hadley, I love you!

This morning, running across the river in the morning breeze, I felt buffeted, literally physically moved around, by the wind. I felt insubstantial. This is something I’m not accustomed to feeling: usually I am physically solid in the world, aware of my own presence and literally grounded by it. Insubstantial. An apt metaphor for how I feel these days, somehow: swayed by various winds that blow on me, not always firmly tethered, a bit adrift.

Thanksgiving. So much to be thankful for. And, still, so much here that I do not understand (Rich, Towards the Solstice).
What am I grateful for, on this dark and warm evening in 2007?

• Dear friends, near and far, old and new – friends from childhood, friends from adulthood, friends from motherhood, friends from all the stages of my life, and those few special friends who cut across the boundaries of those stages and identities
• Health, my own and that of my family – particularly salient at this time, with John’s new heart, Jessica’s recovery, and many others doing well in spite of steep obstacles
• As Lacy calls it, the benevolent universe – I never expected such blessings at this time in my life; complex though they may be, they are all good and I am aware of my great good fortune
• The memory of those no longer here, but nearby – Nana, Grammy, Ba, Gaga, Jonathan – family and others who are gone now but remain near. In particular, Nana and Ba, who I think of every time I drive to Providence, and whose spirit and memory animates much of my time in Rhode Island.
• The spirited generation that comes after us – Grace and Whit, Hannah, Sophia, Catherine, Johann, and the extended family: Charlie, James, Benjamin, Will, Emma, Charlotte, Jack, Thacher, and so many others … I am confident that the world is in good hands!
• Poetry, literature, writing of all kinds – “we read to know that we are not alone” – how much solace words have brought me over the years, to this day!
• My overly muscular legs, for letting me run far and long; it is on my runs when I can be blessedly alone with my thoughts. My favorite run of 2007: in the Stanford hills
• Mentors and teachers who have helped me to where I am now: Mr. Valhouli, Elaine Showalter, Amy Glass, Mike Ahearn, Katie Clancy, Paige Price. Your influence, wisdom, and advice means more than you can imagine. I am spurred onward by the memory of the commitment to and investment in me you each have made.
• Mum and Dad, whose example and love is with me every minute of every day. Now that I am a parent I am so incredibly, viscerally aware of all the ways in which you gave of yourselves. It is my profound hope that I can be to Grace and Whit a fraction of what you were (are) to me.
• Hilary Whitman Mead, of whom there is still no better description than that in the preface to my thesis: “the world’s only older-and-wiser younger sister.”

Thank you for all of these things, and for so many more. I feel full of life tonight, full of thanks and emotion and sadness, and of the poignant happy-sad dichotomy that defines my life.

Thank you, whatever comes.
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.
– Ezra Pound

Thanksgiving morning.

Matt and the children are walking & scootering by the river with Mark and Sophia, and I’m at home putting the turkey in, etc. Also finished The Year of Magical Thinking. Wow. This book takes my breath away. I’m not quite able to articulate why, or how, so for now I’ll just cite a few passages:

“…even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs…”

An excerpt by Gerard Manley Hopkins (I love the notion that the mind has mountains):

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come.

“In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.”

“Did mothers always try to press on their daughters the itineraries of which they themselves had dreamed?”

“We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

“Time is the school in which we learn.”

“I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portugese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that.”

My first Thanksgiving. I brined the bird, he’s outside in a big white paintbucket on the back porch. Made the spinach and the stuffing and cut up the squash and parsnips. Set the table and did some flowers. Tomorrow will be the real challenge! It feels like a rite of passage – in keeping with a sentiment that’s been a theme lately, I really feel like an ADULT right now. With all the good and bad that that entails.

I was IMing with Lacy recently and got deep into reminiscing about 5 years ago at this time. Grace was 4 weeks old, Matt’s father had his heart transplant: the memories are both vivid and murky. I remember the night that the phone call came, like it was yesterday. Matt, Mark and I had visited John in the hospital in the late afternoon. John was a little bit out of it, and as we left everyone was feeling a somewhat down. As we walked out, John announced, apropos of nothing, “I’m getting that heart tonight.” We all smiled, resignedly aware of the statistics that 75% of those on the heart transplant list die waiting, and walked to the elevators. Another thing I remember from those days is watching a lot of TV, nursing a newborn – whenever the local news would announce an accident, a car crash, an electrical worker who had fallen to his death, Matt and I would look at each other with a surge of guilty hope: is that his heart?

In the middle of the night the phone startled us out of sleep. It was Mark: “There’s a heart.” Matt rushed to MGH, I stayed home with Gracie. Midday I went over to sit with them while we waited. Mark, Marion, Marti, Matt, and me (I clearly have the wrong name to be a member of this family). We sat and we sat. Matt was so agitated; we walked miles through the MGH halls when the sitting grew unbearable. The surgery went on much longer than expected. I remember feeling as though I was going to burst with milk, and felt the incredible, poignant tension between a newborn at home who needed me and Matt’s father and family who also wanted me there. Youth and age. I wondered, also birth and death?

One month to the day after Grace’s arrival, that surprise baby that we did not plan for or anticipate, John underwent a successful heart transplant. Thanksgiving was the next day. We drove down to Marion to spend the day with my parents and my Mead relatives. The memories are a haze of exhaustion and emotion. I remember feeling shell-shocked, somewhat removed from the traditions and celebrations. I did know, in some visceral way, how tremendously much we had to be thankful for, but we were all still paralyzed with anxiety about John’s still-tenuous recovery.

I also remember taking Gracie to Dr. Goldstein for a checkup, and asking about whether it was OK to bring a newborn into the MGH ICU to see her grandfather, who was asking for her. You can’t imagine how much John asked for Grace in those first days post-surgery, as he faded in and out of consciousness. Of course it is a bad idea to have a newborn in a hospital. Dr. Goldstein, however, looked at me and said, quietly: “Take her. Feel her power.” I will never forget the look in his eyes at that moment. So I took her, in the bucket carseat and covered with a blanket, and I do believe that she provided a fixed point for John to focus on in his recovery.

Five years ago. Extraordinary. We will celebrate on Friday night, with Marti and John, Mark and Marion. November 26, 2002: Grace’s one month birthday, Marti & John’s 36th wedding anniversary, and John’s new heart.