Month: May 2012

20 years

Recently I went back to my high school 20th reunion.  And, again, I experienced that collapse of time, where years fold in on themselves and and a lifetime and a minute twist together in an disorienting spiral of memory and emotion.  It’s not a secret that I wasn’t particularly happy while I was at boarding school, but it’s also true that with every year that passes I respect my alma mater more.  I respect it for giving children credit, for holding them to an incredibly high standard, for asking a lot of young people because it knows that they are able to deliver it.

My memories of my time there are few, but vivid.  They revolve around cold, dark mornings and nights, running in the snowy woods, wet hair at late afternoon classes frozen into icicles, hours upon hours of homework, the senior play, and oval mahogany Harkness tables.

It was wonderful to be back.  Perhaps because my time on campus was not marked by particularly strong social bonds, returning is mostly devoid of the anxiety that revisiting this time in life holds for many.  There were, absolutely, joyful reunions with friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.  And happy conversations with people I didn’t know on campus but have come to since.  Perhaps most of all, it was powerful to watch my children with the children of my friends, all so much closer than we are to the age we were when we met, a fact that is dizzying, unbelievable, and irrefutable in equal measure.

There were a couple of places I was disappointed not to be able to get into, like Phillips Chapel and the indoors of the English classroom building, so I missed seeing them.  But otherwise, the day was jammed with special moments.

For instance, my daughter standing in front of the building where my love for words caught fire.  Those first two windows to the right of the front steps were where my favorite teacher taught.  It was in Mr. Valhouli’s classroom, and in the light of his kind, probing pedagogy that I first sensed my passion for reading and writing throb inside of me.  My daughter standing in the intersection of the quad across which I ran, holding my acceptance letter from Princeton (the first line of which said only, in bold all-caps, “YES!”) to hug my dear friend who was also going to Princeton.  The friend who is now Whit’s godmother, a true friend of my heart.

The new science center is downright awe-inspiring, and we wandered around it, agape, aghast, awe-struck.  The whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling, the large, professional-looking labs filled with shiny equipment, the walls filled with photographs, equations, and samples of bridge-building projects all drew Grace and Whit’s attention.  Mine was captured by this piece of paper, a photocopy of one of Mary Oliver’s poems, stuck on the wall of a Physics lab.  That right there tells you a lot about my high school.  And a lot about why I respect it so.  There’s a place for poetry even inside the world of Physics.  This is how I grew up, and it remains how I see the world.

The Academy Building in full sunshine, against a cornflower blue sky, reminds me most of all of my graduation day from this place.  It was a hot, early June day in 1992, and all four of my grandparents, my two parents, my sister, and my two godmothers were all there.  I am bewildered now to fathom the depth of this showing of support, and while I know I basked in love and family, I wish I could return there to look each of those people in the eye (three of them now gone) and tell them how much I love them, how often I thought of their counsel, how much I valued the ways they had shaped me as I grew into a young adult.

It has been 20 years since that day.  It feels like these 20 years flew by in a heartbeat, but I know that each year was lived thoroughly, to its depth and its width.  As I grow into my  middle-aged skin, inhabiting these years at the top of the ferris wheel, these years in the early afternoon of life, I reflect with nostalgia on a time when I was so young, so mutable, so filled with both promise and sorrow.  I feel deep compassion for my long-haired, confused, emotional adolescent self.  With the perspective of years, it is simple to identify those two years in New Hampshire as the ones where I learned how to learn, where my intellectual self took flight, where my passion for all the central cerebral interests of my life began.  And it is impossible to convey my gratitude for that gift.

Happy birthday

This is the 15th birthday of yours have celebrated together.  We were on our way to Africa for six weeks, and then into the slipstream of life as a family.  Every single day of this family life holds both breathtaking treasures and grinding monotony.  As Craig said on our wedding day, of marriage, “Kilimanjaro is nothing compared to this.”  And he was right.

The oxbow turns in the last several months have been sharp, and I know we both feel the weight of time’s passage in a keen way.  This middle of life carries with it a new awareness of the way moments pile up to become years, a new sensitivity to how small things over time carve the contours of our lives.  I’m grateful to have you by my side as time floods by, helping me try to catch as many of its small, shimmering moments as I can.

I hope that 15 birthdays are just the beginning.  Happy, happy, happy birthday.  We love you.

On my mind lately

(my endless task, in the golden light of dusk last week)

Once in a while I like to share pieces of loveliness that I’ve found out here in the wild and wonderful ether, as well as small things that are on my mind.

I’m hugely honored to be featured in Amy Kessel’s glorious Unfurling series.  All of her interviews are wonderful, so I encourage you to click through and read them all!  What a privilege to be among these brilliant, wise women.

Hilary reminds us that life is always now or never.

Bindu explores how each of us finds our own ways of taking refuge.

Roxane’s beautiful love letter to Jerusalem, a city I am pleased I can now imagine first-hand.

I tweeted recently that I am a Myers-Briggs INFJ.  I’ve never met another one in real life.  I was initially startled, and then not at all, when several of my very favorite on-line friends responded that they too were INFJs.  Freed of the constraints of real life and geographic location, it makes total sense to me that I’d gravitate towards truly kindred spirits.

A friend recently lent me the third issue of Kinfolk.  I’m absolutely smitten.

I’m also working my way through a stack of Wendell Berry’s works.  I have long loved his poems (here, here, here) but recently felt pulled to read much more of his writing: essays, fiction, poetry.

What is on your mind these days?  Any wonderful links to share?  And what is your Myers-Briggs type, if you know it?

It’s always worth it to play

Saturday was an absolutely perfect day.  Cloudless sky, 75 degrees.  I took Whit to soccer and then he and I joined Matt on the sidelines of Grace’s game.  She had only been on the field for a few minutes when she took a simply heroic fall.  She literally went flying through the air before crumpling to the ground on her left shoulder.  There was an audible gasp.  And then, worse, she was slow to get up.  All the players on the field sank to their knees.  I watched her coach approach and ask her if she wanted to keep playing, watched her shake her head, and watched her walk off the field next to him with her head bowed.  I purposely didn’t rush over to where she sat with her coaches and team on the other side of the field.  I felt like I should stay out of the way.

But at half time, Matt and I went over, and Grace was in quiet tears, holding a tiny bag of ice to her shoulder (one of her teammates had scooped a few ice cubes out of her water bottle and put them into the bag that had held the snack apples, a detail that charmed me).  I immediately announced I was going to take her to the ER for x-rays and neither coach fought me.  Yes, that makes sense, they nodded.  The whole way to the hospital, she cried softly.

After a long wait they finally put us into a room and I helped Grace change into a johnny and lie down on the gurney.  “Will you lie with me, Mummy?” she asked plaintively, and I did.  I curled my body around hers and rested my chin on top of her gold-streaked brown hair.  She whimpered quietly, and I could tell she was in a lot of pain.

“You’ve broken bones too, right, Mummy?” she said suddenly and I smiled in spite of myself.  For years and years I’ve maintained that if you haven’t broken any bones you’re “not trying hard enough.”  This is an obnoxious thing to say, I realize, and I think mostly I’m trying to explain to myself why I’ve broken one ankle, one arm (both bones, both compound fractures), three ribs, and assorted fingers and toes.

“Yes.  I’ve broken a lot of bones.  Unfortunately I think getting hurt is part of the deal.  It’s going to happen sometimes when you do sports.  I’m pretty sure there will be more injuries to come in other games.  And in general, in life.”  I hesitated.  “But I promise,” I blinked back the tears that sprang to my eyes.  “I promise you it’s always worth it to play.”

We lay there quietly for a while.  Then it was time for x-rays.  She was very freaked out by being alone in the dark room, by the lead apron, and by the big machine aimed at her shoulder.  By the time we were finished there she was weeping in my arms again.

Then we went back to the room and onto the gurney.  It was quiet in the ER on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, and I could hear our breathing.  “Mummy, you know what?”  Grace turned her head slowly to look at me.  “This is like when I had something in my eye the other day.”  (After a protracted effort to get an eyelash out of her eye, she had been in real pain for hours; my guess is that she somehow scratched her eyeball).  “You know, I realize how much I’ve been taking for granted all along.”

I tried hard not to cry.  I looked right in her mahogany eyes, nodding, biting my lip.  I felt the feathers of holiness brush my cheek, the sensation of something sacred descending into the room, as undeniable as it was fleeting.  There have been a few moments like this in my life – more than a handful, but fewer than I’d like – when I am conscious of the way divinity weaves its way into our ordinary days.  This was one.

That night when I tucked her in her arm was propped on a pillow pet and her eyes were wary.  She was very worried about rolling over and injuring herself more in her sleep.  I smoothed her hair back from her forehead and kissed her cheek, murmuring again how proud I was of her and how brave she had been.

“Mummy, I just want to say thank you again.” With her good arm, she clutched her teddy bear to her chest as she spoke.

“Why, Grace?”

“Thank you for being there with me all day.  For always being with me.”  Her eyes brimmed and mine did too.  I hugged her because I didn’t have words to express what I wanted to say.  Which is that there’s nowhere I want to be but right here with her.  That I don’t want to miss a single second of this season of my life, or of hers.

 

 

The predicament of loving the world

… what a gift to die on the verge of tears.  I have spent my life trying to understand the way this rock and this ache go together, why a granite peak is more dramatic half dressed in clouds (like a woman), why sunlight under fog is better than the sum of its parts, why my best days and my worst days are always the same days, why (often) leaving sees like the only solution to the predicament of loving (each other) the world.

– Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted