Whitman

Closing a door

Last Thursday were Grace and Whit’s school closing ceremonies.  As he leaves 1st grade, Whit leaves the Morse Building, the part of the school for the very youngest children.  It’s where both of our children started at this school, at age 4, as Beginners.  The Morse Building will always be the first place I dropped my first baby off for her first day of school, and its halls, lined with large bright drawings and full of the clamor of small children, will always bring nostalgic tears to my eyes.

I sat in Whit’s closing ceremony, my husband on one side of me and one of my very dearest friends on the other, fighting tears as small voices songs from Free to Be You and Me and the theme from Greatest American Hero.  It was just moments ago that Whit was cross-legged on the mats on the floor while Grace sat on the stage, a member of the 1st grade, the “big kids” of the Morse Building.  Again, as it does so often lately, time collapsed and the radiance and sorrow of everyday life collided, sparks flying.  I fought to be here now as the past exerted itself like a riptide, dragging me down the disorienting corridors of memory.

Then the Morse Building children sang their traditional last song, Now It’s Time to Go, and I began to cry in earnest.  This year has not been any more full of lasts than any other, but my last child leaving this deeply special place has made them feel especially poignant.  The last Morse Building holiday concert, with a child curled on my lap on the floor as we all belt Snow Pants and I Am a Latke.  The last 1st grade assembly.  The last harvest festival.  I remembered Grace’s observation that she gets the firsts and Whit gets the lasts.  I swam in a morass of lasts, of endings, of farewells.

Once more, in that same small gym where so many transitions have been made and celebrated, the air was thick with both wonder and loss.  Wonder and loss, which are inextricably wound around each other, are the central notes of my life.

Then Grace celebrated the end her school year with the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades.  Grace’s music teacher, who was also my music teacher, rushed over to me before the ceremony began and showed me a mimeographed page of the 1982 class lists.  My name appeared there, under IIS, with a star next to it to show I had been new that year.  The past clanged in my head and I held the back of the metal folding chair to keep my balance as that dizzying, familiar vertigo rose up: between past and present, between my daughter and myself, that this moment somehow contains all the moments that have come before.

And then it was over and we left.  We walked out through the Morse Building, through the doors I’ve pushed open with one hand so many hundreds of times, the other hand clasped by a small child.  Through the lobby where I’ve sat for hours, waiting for classrooms to open in the morning and for lines of children to emerge in the afternoon.  Past the nurse’s office where I’ve picked up children with strep, with stitches that have reopened, with mono, with sore collarbones.  Into the sunshine, blinking, through the playground where we’ve spent countless hours playing.  I can squint and see 4 year old Grace propelling herself around on the push tricycles, smiling at me across the yard while I sat on the faded wooden bench trying to restrain a wiggly toddler Whit from hurling himself into the fray.  The memories blinked in my mind like fireflies; they were brilliantly bright but I couldn’t make them stay.

And the heavy green door clicked shut behind us.  And we followed them out of the gate, which Whit is finally tall enough to open himself, and down the street.  My children leading me home and simultaneously walking away.

Radiance and sorrow.  Wonder and loss.  This one precious, devastating life.

Bumps

I separated my shoulder last fall, part of my brief sojourn in and introduction to the foreign and awe-inspiring land that is pain.  The injury hurt a lot in the immediate aftermath, and it has mostly but not entirely healed.  I’m told that’s part of the deal with separated shoulders: the joint is never quite the same again.  On random days, doing motions I do every day I will experience a startling jolt of pain.  I can never predict when or why it will come.  Also, I have a small but noticeable bump where my collarbone meets my shoulder.  Fortunately my collarbone and shoulder are sort of bumpy in general, so it’s not quite as stark as it might be, but it is still noticeable if you look.  I have a bump and I always will.

After 6 weeks of recovery, I went back to my orthopedist.  I asked him, tentatively, whether the bump would ever go away.  He is a tall, gentle man about my age, and he looked directly at me in the small room.  I’ll never forget what he said next.

“No, it won’t.”  I swallowed.  “But you know what?  If you’re living, you’re going to get bumps.  I have a bump on my shoulder.  You’re 37.  Don’t we all have bumps?  Everybody’s got a bump.”

I laughed it off in the moment, but in retrospect I think there was deep wisdom in this comment.  Of course this moment has been on my mind lately as Grace’s collarbone heals.  She has a small but visible bump that we are told will flatten out as she grows.  It’s on her left side, too, and I find this parallel both totally coincidental and breathtakingly not.

These bumps are just like our scars, outward manifestations of places we’ve been broken and healed.  Whit’s long scar on his leg, the trace of a skidding epi-pen, has already faded from angry red to raised white.  Grace’s broken bone, originally an enormous protrusion from her collarbone, has begun to flatten out and presumably the bones have begun to knit together.  At 7 and 9 my children have already been marked by life.  I myself am a map of scars, internal and external: several different bones healed, spots where suspicious moles were removed, the scar where I was hit on the face by a wine press when we lived in France.

We are all marked by our passage through life.  Some of these marks are visible and some are not.  I think it is valuable to remember the moments and experiences that made marks on us, for better or for worse.  They are part of what shaped us into who we are now, after all.  This reminds me of a passage from Donald Miller’s lovely book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Last year, I read a book about a man named Wilson Bentley, who coined the phrase “No two snowflakes are alike.”  He is the one who discovered the actual reality that no two snowflakes are geometrically the same.  Bentley was a New England farmer who fell in love with the beauty and individuality of snowflakes…. What amazed Bentley was the realization that each snowflake bore the scars of its journey.  He discovered that each crystal is affected by the temperature of the sky, the altitude of the cloud from which it fell, the trajectory the wind took as it fell to earth, and a thousand other factors.

Big thanks to Erin, who told me she likes her own private collarbone bump for the reminder it is of her brave, tough child self.  I hope Grace feels the same way someday.

photo Wednesday 1

 

How I found him when I went in to tuck him in, Saturday May 5th.  He won the disco ball at our school fair and, unbeknownst to me, installed it himself.  This child also sleeps, at various times, clutching a compass and wearing 3D glasses.  I’d love to see what his dreams are like.