I’m grateful and overwhelmed with all of the new subscribers after my piece on school violence circulated so widely on Substack. If you’re new here, welcome. I don’t always write about politics, and when I do, it’s my perspective on the intersection between the personal and political. You can see more essays like that here and here if you’re interested. But I write about so many other things as well — namely motherhood, grief, aging, and writing about writing. I use this space as the mess before the rough draft, so sometimes my writing surprises even me by going somewhere I didn’t expect, and I take you along for the ride. As a booklover, I often thread pieces of what I’m currently reading into what I’m writing. This newsletter is not typically a purely political publication, but I’d be delighted if you’d still like to read. Thank you for being with me in this space.
I waved my kids off on Saturday morning for a week away from me. It is fall break in the school district where we live, but not in the school district where I teach. So we’ve been doing it this way for a few years now. They get to spend a week with their dad on vacation, and I get a rare week when I only have my paying job and not the other all-consuming job of motherhood.
As I pulled into my garage after running an errand a few hours after they left, I got a text that my son ran into Glen Hansard at the Atlanta airport. He recognized him, and they talked about music for a bit. It’s a name I haven’t thought about in years, but at the mention of it, it was 2007 again when my son was only a speck in the cosmos somewhere while I was a 26-year-old teacher, newly married and naive, obsessed with Once, both the film and the soundtrack. I saw the movie in the old pre-renovated Tara Cinema in Atlanta on a Saturday night and bought the soundtrack the very next day. The film is a story of music and a story of love, but not in the way you’d expect. It’s a story of almost-love, two people who could have and probably should have but didn’t. I read an interview long ago with director John Carney when he said something about how almost-relationships are the only perfect ones because you never break it in and never discover all of the hard parts. It stays in your head as a perfect could-have-been, shiny and unscratched. This time last year, I was knee-deep in my own almost story, and in hindsight, I think he’s probably right. But what’s the point of perfect if it isn’t ever made real? Thinking about this film, and my obsession with it nearly 20 years ago, makes me realize how age and time have changed me. The yearning for something imaginary is less appealing to me than it once was, as is perfection. Now I want to hold something in my hand, feel its rough edges, make it real. But 26-year-old me lived on yearning, and that soundtrack was my siren song.
After that reminder, I listened to the film’s score as I cleaned the house on Saturday afternoon, and I hadn’t heard it in well over a decade. Its haunting melodies carried me like a lullaby right back to some place I used to be. You know how it goes. Today is tomorrow’s nostalgia and all that. Thursday nights crowded around shared guacamole at a table with four coworkers talking about all of the things we were longing for that we didn’t yet have. How funny that I thought the pieces of my life were eternal, assumed they’d never dissolve and never move. About a year after the movie came out, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova toured together, and I saw them in concert. We went with two other couples, six of us seated around a dinner table in perfect symmetry. Like many memories from that period of my life, my recollection is like a three-wheeled car hobbling down the interstate with my ex-husband as the missing wheel and that odd ambiguous sense of loss divorce gives you when someone is still here but not here. A flash of memory comes with layers. It’s a recognition that there was pain and betrayal eventually, but sometimes there was also live music and shared laughter with a table of friends when the whole world was smaller and simpler. A decade later, I am used to the contradiction of feelings that comes with memories like this, but that particular night is one I hadn’t thought about in ages.
There was so much I didn’t know— like that one day I’d be in my own house in my own life, relishing a week alone after a decade on my own, and my son would grow to be a musician the size of a man and run into Glen Hansard at the airport long after his father and I split which was long after we swayed in darkness to Hansard’s music in a crowded theatre. How could I have guessed my son would chat with him about their shared passions 17 years after I dragged that CD around in my car for months, years before I’d even laid eyes on my son’s face? What a trip. We never know what life will unfold for us, big or small things; it’s always in some unopened envelope we cannot see yet. I love it when these circular moments happen because they assure me that there are more of them waiting for me around the bend somewhere, envelopes yet to be opened. Either nothing is miraculous or everything is. We get to choose, and I prefer to see it this way. Small miracles handed to me like breadcrumbs to guide my path.
Like a time portal or a magic doorway, that soundtrack put me right back in a long-lost place on Saturday afternoon. I remembered what it felt like to be 26 and living on yearning, and for a few hours, time was nothing. Then on Sunday I attended an annual get together with my mom’s side of the family, and I made my grandmother’s banana pudding as my potluck contribution. It is another portal to a lost place. She has been gone eight years, but I can hear her guiding me through the steps as I make it, and I taste her in every bite. When someone leaves us, it is that irreplaceable space between us and the craving of a presence that feels so painful. She was my person, a handrail I could grab in the dark to steady myself as a child lost in the landscape of family trauma and fast changes. That space between us will never be replicated with anyone else, and now it’s gone, and that’s a truth that will always cut like a blade. Her dying body, as Marie Howe would say, was the gate I would step through to finally enter this world. But there are pieces of her that remain, a shape of her that never leaves, tangible details that feel like I’m pressing my ear to a seashell to hear her whisper even though she’s gone. It’s banana pudding with soft meringue, and it’s also the mineral-laced smell of garden soil in spring sunshine. The scent of the face powder she’d use before church on Sundays and the sheen of the simple gold band she wore on her finger but only when she didn’t have her hands in the dirt. Her shy glance and her careful hands and the way I’m not sure if I absorbed them by genetics or by osmosis. I thought about all of these things as I layered the pudding in a baking dish on Sunday morning.
My grandfather is still here with nine decades of wisdom, shoulders stooping only slightly so that my son matches his height now. He has a shape, too. It is very different from my grandmother’s. The shape of my grandfather is the curve of a swinging ax at the wood pile. It is crouching in the bright sunshine to reach a sun-worn hand deep into a bean vine to pick pods and drop them in a bucket. His shape is rich brown soil settled like fault lines into the cracks and wrinkles of his skin. It is black coffee and white t-shirts and faded denim and daily routines. It is watching him shine his shoes every Saturday night when I was a child, polish kept in a wooden shoe shine box, the rhythmic swishing sound of the brush as it met his shoe with each sweep. It is holding what you’re given and what you’ve earned, tending it, fixing it, mending it. I’m opening my eyes to these things now, paying attention to him closely, understanding that intolerable truth that we are not eternal. Sometimes I wonder what my shape will be, what breadcrumbs I’m dropping along the way so that one day my own children will be able to find me again even when I’m not here anymore. We never see our own shape or know what pieces of us others miss when we move on and out of their lives. We only ever feel the longing, not the being longed for.
I read Mary Oliver poems last week with my students. I assigned them in my co-taught classes because the curriculum expects us to move on to Whitman soon, and for a crowd who struggles with poetry, I knew we needed to begin somewhere more accessible. We read “Spring” together and discussed diction, the overall message of the poem, and the connection to American Transcendentalism, and then I gave them an assignment to demonstrate the importance of line breaks in poetry. The poem tells us about a black bear waking from hibernation and coming down the mountain wordlessly to breathe and taste and touch the cold waters of early spring. They worked in groups to take her poem and break the lines and stanzas apart differently to shift the focus a bit, and then we shared the end results to see the impact of line breaks. I won’t pretend it was some groundbreaking Dead Poets Society moment because it wasn’t. Those classes are still a struggle. But I do think they understood the poem with some small lightbulb flickers I could see as I moved from group to group and listened in. One group made a change that’s still in my head days later. Mary Oliver’s original poem says
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting
And one student changed it to
Whatever else
my life is with its
poems
and itsmusic
and its
glass cities,
it is also this dazzling
darkness
coming down the mountain,
breathing and tasting
I won’t go into specifics here because it is not my story to tell, but suffice it to say this kid’s life has been difficult in ways most of us couldn't fathom. He wouldn’t even make eye contact with me when he walked in my class weeks ago, so seeing him raise his hand to participate is an immense reward already. But do you hear that? Whatever else my life is, it is also this dazzling. Perhaps it’s what Oliver says in that poem anyway. We can channel the simple awe of the black bear waking from hibernation and see life for the gift it is, and life dazzles when we have the eyes to see it. His line break illuminated that in a new way, and now I’ll think of it every time I read that poem. Whatever else my life is – loss, struggle, change, fatigue, almost-but-not-quite love stories, the sting of small daily inconveniences – it is also this dazzling. Perhaps I just have to look at it from a different angle to see it.
In the middle of that poem, Mary Oliver hands us a line that becomes the cornerstone the rest of the poem rests upon. There is only one question: how to love this world. The black bear, we learn, knows how to love the world and the answer is simply by breathing and tasting and touching and just being in it. Maybe it doesn’t take much else, only being here and paying attention.
To me, loving the world means relishing these small miracles and full circle moments and trusting that there are more unopened envelopes waiting for me down the road. Loving the world is noticing these portals to another time and another place and not being afraid to step through them, even when those memories offer me pain and joy in the same hand. To truly love the world is to know nothing is permanent except the threads between us. But how dazzling it is, to be in these bodies with their mortal limitations, and to know that the only thing that lasts forever is what we cannot see.
This is the second piece of yours I’ve read and the second morning I’ve had to pause and collect myself after reading. I’m one of your new subscribers due to the school violence essay. I just retired from teaching high school in Colorado for 27 years so I could transition into the easier field of interior decorating and organizing. Normally I read design related blogs here and can easily formulate an appreciative comment or relatable story to what I’ve read. But I’m finding that difficult to do now and certainly difficult to do after reading the earlier piece, not because I don’t appreciate your essays or don’t relate to them - quite the opposite. For now, what I can say is thank you for being here and sharing your stories and thoughts with us.
Thank you. My gram was my person too. I miss her daily. I could almost taste that banana pudding you made! 🙂