Staying Home

My teaching partner has been gone recently. She lives a busy life and between trips to the East Coast to visit family and pregnant friends and days when she's been fighting the recent flu bug, she's been out of the classroom more than she'd like. Her guilt has gotten to her and so she insisted that I stay home this morning and not come into work until after lunch. She offered it not necessarily as a favor to me, but more as a way to appease her guilt.

I couldn't say no.

But what does it say about me that I wanted to say no?

These are my "no" reasons:
1) To teach I must be in teacher mind. I've always found it difficult to shift from say, meeting mind to teacher mind or vacation mind to teacher mind. When we meet in faculty meetings before school, I am out of sync all day long with my class. My brain operates in some other dimension and shifting it back to teaching is a struggle.

This makes me think of current brain research that identifies something known as downshifting where the brain literally disengages and operates at a lower, less functional gear. When I'm not teaching, I downshift. So, an early morning without priming myself for work is a downshift and I find it hard to push the gears to function at a more precise and efficient level later in the day when I AM teaching.

2) I have my own guilt. Despite thousands of dollars spent in therapy, countless books read on the subject, and my own approaching commonsense middle age, I worry what others will think if I'm not at work. Will they know I'm sitting at home searching for puppies on the internet? Will they know I'm in my pajamas? Will they know that I've gone to the gym?

This morning, in fact, I walked to the gym just up the street and made the mistake of going before school started. Three separate families from school spotted me and waved, worry looks all over their faces because I was walking in the opposite direction of school, which leads me to...

3) I'm not a good liar. "Yes, that was me you saw walking away from school this morning," I'll have to say to one or more of the parents I saw today. "I was on my way to an appointment before I came to school." Will they know I'm lying? Will they see my ears turn red or the corners of my mouth quiver? Does it matter? Or better yet, why does it matter?

4) Letting myself relax is dangerous. Teaching is a lot like running a race. If I let myself consider how difficult it is in the middle of it, I'll struggle to finish the race. Each step will be torture. It's only January and if I let myself relax now, June will seem so much farther away than it already does.

Yesterday, on my way home, I pondered the thought of not coming back next year, of just signing up at REI for a job in retail. With full benefits even if I worked part-time, I'd probably be able to pay the mortgage and alleviate my stress. My job would be 40 hours a week and no late nights worrying about the parents who complain or the kids who are lost or the institution of education that is crumbling at my feet. No papers to grade, no phone calls home, no emails to respond to, no meetings to attend where my blood boils.

Everyone tells me I'd miss teaching and I probably would, but would I miss it so much I'd come back to it? Or would I just miss it enough to say, "Yeah, that was a good run, but now I'm on to something different?"

5) Lastly, I start to like relaxation. Even when I just get four hours of it like today, I start to think how much healthier this is not to be rushing around or answering a bazillion questions. I can workout when I want, I can spend time writing, I can bake something, I can organize my bills and my papers and even call the tax woman to set up an appointment to get my taxes done (all things I've done or tried to do this morning). This seems civilized. This seems like it's the way people should live.

I'm probably fooling myself that others live like this. Everyone is probably just as overwhelmed as I am, but it's interesting to measure this time (not at work) with that time (at work) and notice the gap between them.

Ann is overwhelmed with work these days, too. She's contemplating a change as well. Politics and incompetence are getting to her. We both got up this morning and looked at each other with a bit of resignation, but more with a look like "what shall we do about this mess?"

She, of course, had the perfect answer. We got online and looked for puppies. Then, as she headed off to school and I practiced "staying home to appease my teaching partner's guilt" I filled out a puppy application for Oh Henry! a 10 week old English Pointer. We'll find out if we're in the running in the next day or two.

A puppy, that will shake things up around here, refocus us on something other than our own choices.

Oh course, I'm trying hard not to get my hopes up. Others have applied for the same pup. Still, it's hard not to wish and dream about something other than a different job! I even hesitate to put our request on this blog...I don't want to curse us...still, it's important to dream, isn't it?

9 Months

First, a confession. Teaching is not just a 9 month gig. It's 10. August it begins, the middle of June it ends -- so really, 10 and half months. After 21 years (almost) of doing it, I am still surprised by the monthly cycle of feelings.

August -- a bit of excitement, a bit of resignation. I hold on for the onslaught by going to Office Depot and buying supplies...lots and lots of supplies. Buying pencils and markers and new scissors and paper is a high. I touch everything first, roll them around in my hands, smell them, feel the weight of them. Then I organize them into containers and boxes, throwing out the old pens without caps or the yellowed construction paper and replacing it with the new. Obsessively. Compulsively.

September -- Overwhelmed, exhausted, a hermit. Friends don't hear from me. It's go to work, teach all day, get to know my new students while grieving those who have moved on, moved up, and then coming home to eat too much and fall asleep too early. Septemeber is the month when my To Do list is miles longer than my Done list -- I cross something off only to add five more items.

October -- My grief has passed and I start to fall in love with the new group of kids. I'm still exhausted. I still have a million phone calls to make, emails to send, field trips to set up, and organizational systems to get going like my gradebook (entering names) and my address book (double checking all the parent contact information) and sorting out which kids are on meds and which kids should be, and on top of it all there is an Open House to plan where I must explain 9 months of work in a half hour or less.

November -- More relaxed. I get to see my friends again and hope they are not pissed that I've been absent for so long. And there's our first real break -- Thanksgiving -- to look forward to, but there's also parent conferences to organize and the demands of the institution that have NOTHING to do with teaching, but are required any way. Paperwork and documentation, all of which sits on a shelf in someone's office and does not make me a better teacher or my job any easier. Still, there's turkey and dressing and mashed potatoes and four glorious days when I can just lie around and relax hoping that I don't get sick with the latest cold now that I've let down my guard. There are also papers to grade and I never, despite my best intention, get them down before break or at the beginning of break. Instead, I'm up late on Sunday evening before we go back to school cursing my procrastination, cursing the obligation.

December --It whizzes by and my sights are set on break again. I know the kids, I know what they're capable of, we're in a rhythm, all is well and then two weeks to be with family and friends, to go skiing and get lost in rest and food.

January -- What am I doing? There's so much to get done and so little time left. June is now in sight, though really still 6 months away. January is when we hit our stride, but then there's report cards and more phone calls and emails. Then there's the kids who begin to irritate me, the ones who haven't grown out of their insecurities or their learned helplessness. There's conversations about courtesy and kindness, about comfort zones and organization. There's the kids Ilove to see every day and the ones who turn my hair gray.

It's like that old joke -- Did you hear about the guy who decided to swim across the Atlantic? He got half way and decided he couldn't do it so he swam back.

You're in the middle of it and swimming back is just as exhausting as swimming forward.

February -- I start to think about other professions. Things aren't as stressful, I've hit a rhythm, I know where I've been and where I'm going...now it's just the day in and day out demands of teaching and all the institutional demands on top of it. There are times, in the middle of the lesson when I love my job, when it's all going so damn well I'm on top of the world and there are times when it stumbles and I'm spending more time being a peacemaker between kids who don't get along or families who are struggling. In February, the kids realize there aremore of them than there is of me so they don't listen as well, they don't want to please as much, they'd rather just talk with each other than take part in the lesson. I start to wish for a job that requires less of me, a job I don't take home, a job I can just do and not have to think about all the time -- like farming or retail or baking. A job without people. Just me and a brick and some mortar. Just me and a shovel and pile of dirt. A job that requires no head, just body.

March -- One of the longest months. No breaks, but there's sunshine. And there's rain, but it's warmer rain. And there's light. No more walking to work in the dark and walking home in the dark. It's a month of resignation. So many plans of all the new things I'd do this year and now the realization I can't get them all done. I spend March letting it all go.

April -- Another break and now I'm at the top of the hill. At the end of break it's all downhill. The kids feel it too. There's more antsy behavior. There are more disputes. There are more poor choices, but there's also more laughter. In the middle of spring break I'm glad I'm a teacher. No one else gets these kind of vacations, though most of vacation time is about sleeping and recovering from working too damn hard. And then the late Sunday night at the end of break grading papers again, cursing myself for not finishing them up a week earlier.

May -- THE longest month and I'm just holding on. I look back at the year and know we've done as much as we could and I spend most of May forgiving myself for not getting it all done. May is when I think I will turn in my letter of retirement. May is when I dream of working at a place where my job is all that is required of me and I don't have to play referee and I don't have to call home and talk with angry or confused parents and I don't have to feel guilty on my days off that the papers aren't graded or the lessons aren't planned.

June -- Coasting. Riding the wave of the year until the end. Ready for it to be over and have nothing to do but whatever I choose to do. Ready to start vacation because I know, in 6 weeks, I'll be back in the cycle, rolling around through the emotions that are predictable and inevitable. The things I love about teaching all tumbled together with the things I hate about teaching. Forgiving myself for what doesn't go well and dreaming about ways to make it better.

I don't want to be a bitter old teacher. I don't want to be lazy and uninspiring. But I can see the appeal after 21 years of giving it all I've got. 9 months...just like gestation. Over and over being born, birthed into the same world. Tossed around in the womb I've chosen as my career.

Push. Breathe. Push. Breathe.

Bread and Hands

I find myself starved for ritual this time of year. Perhaps it is the absence of them after an abundance of them in November and December. Whatever the reason, I've taken to making my own rituals of late. The most recent is baking bread. My forearms are growing stronger, my hands thicker with each knead and twist, knead and twist, and somehow my soul is satisfied for its need of something spiritual.

This morning I started at 7. I couldn't sleep. Another one of those dreams where my teeth fall out only this time it wasn't a tooth. It was a gold cap and the sight of its glimmer woke me up from a deep, deep sleep. I tossed and turned for a bit, then decided to just head downstairs, check out the headlines, and start the bread. Ann came down an hour later awakened by the sounds and smells of coffee.

Making bread takes five hours. There's the oatmeal soak first, followed by the blending of the yeast, salt, oil, and honey. Then the flour. Six cups. Each successive cup makes it more and more difficult to stir the ingredients. Eventually, inevitably the dough is pulled from the bowl and set on a soft bed of flour and I begin to knead.

The kneading takes about 45 minutes. About halfway through, I start sweating. I can feel the sweat roll down my back, between my breasts, and across my forehead. The ache in my arms and shoulders begins about the same time, but generally a cup of flour is left to mix in. It's the last cup that torments me.

Once I forgot the last cup, but didn't realize it until I sliced open a loaf and found gaping holes in my bread. Well, I thought, I don't need to be so precise...a cup short still makes a loaf, holey though it may be, it still makes a loaf.

The recipe I have calls for two cups of whole wheat flour and four cups of white. I played with the ratios for a few weeks, eventually settling on three cups of each. That's what I made this morning. Half and half bread I call it.

I'm not sure which part of the ritual I like the most -- the hot water poured over the two cups of oatmeal, the foaming of the yeast, the way the honey slips from the measuring cup after I've already measured out the vegetable oil. I don't enjoy the stirring. There's a point when it takes all I have to turn the spoon through the dough followed by the resignation that I must begin to knead. I do enjoy the kneading, all but the last ten minutes of it. It's satisfying to feel the dough change under my hands, the sticky giving way to the elastic, the colors deepening as the ingredients blend together. I love watching it rise as well, but perhaps my favorite part is when, once risen, the dough must be punched again, beaten down so the air bubbles are reduced and the dough, set in the pans, can rise again.

I love the smell of the bread baking, too, and the taste of the first slice when it's still steaming. But I think what I love the most is that this ritual, like any other, isn't about the parts. It's about the whole. Any step along the process is as important, if not as enjoyable, as the one that preceeds it or that one that follows it. When my shoulders ache and my forearms swell, when the sweat rolls off of me onto the countertop, even when the last few turns of the spoon are touches of agony I know they will be followed by equally important touches of magic.

I am not an expert breadmaker by any stretch of the imagination. I have one recipe I use and am afraid to experiment with any other than the simple ingredients of flour, oil, water, oats, honey, salt, and yeast. Ann keeps asking for cinnamon raisin bread or something with nuts, but I worry that would be like adding an extra prayer during Yom Kippur or an extra candle during communion. I'm not a religious woman, but I think I could become one were my god yeast, my saints honey, my altar flour. I think I could become fanatical about the temperature for rising, the ratio of white to wheat, the choice of glass pans versus teflon. For now, though, my spirit is moved by the five hours each Sunday when from these hands I can make something greater than myself.

When is a squash just a squash?

I wrote a really funny post to go with this picture...

...but my internet, which has been blinking off and on ever since the season of wind and snowstorms struck, decided to blink off before I could save anything.

I always tell my students, "Save every 5 minutes," but I didn't follow my own advice.

Maybe one day I'll recreate the funny blog that explained how this almost two-foot long squash came to live at this lesbian household.

But not tonight...I'm tired, it's late, and my modem is still blinking...sigh.

Waiting, Watching

Another snow day. Here, a young snow father watches his snow daughter play in the white while the snow father contemplates the clouds to the East for any sign of relief.

Meanwhile, their small dog sits frozen in pleasure...

Fido, here, is hoping the family heads to Starbuck's for a warm cocoa, a treat, and a warm chair on which to plant one freezing bottom ...

...which, they do...and Fido gets a chance to thaw...and watch ever-so carefully for family to reemerge...

It's been an interesting time, up here in the typically wet and dreary Northwest. Record windstorms followed by record cold temperatures, followed by snow and ice and school closures. We went for a walk today, braving the slippery streets and sticking to the sidewalks where the snow, so dry and fresh, crunched like cornflakes under our feet and clumped together on our boots. Soon, we had high-heeled snow boots. We'd stop every once and awhile to stomp our feet clean of clumpy snow only to repeat the action every 100 steps.

It's beautiful, though. What can you do? Can't make school happen. Can't make the snow go away. Can't make the temperatures change. Can't even stop the rain forecasted later today that will freeze overnight and make tomorrow even more iffy.

Treacherous conditions indeed...so more waiting and watching tonight...and maybe some chocolate chip cookies for the good of the order.

Turning

The sun is turning the ice and snow into glistening pools of water only to be glazed over tonight by freezing temperatures and a clear sky. I love the power of nature to turn a whole city on its side forcing us to stay home and actually spend time together.

But turning is multi-layered and as I turn into my 48th year, I am reminded that to everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn...

Two bits of news came my way today. First, an ex from years back has been diagnosed with breast cancer that has, unfortunately, spread to her lymph nodes. The prognosis is not good. I've had no contact with her for years. She ventured off to Spain then Italy, I think, got married (to a man), had kids, and keeps in touch with a mutual friend who was the one to inform me of the sad news.

I don't know how to react. Do I get in touch with her or just pass along through our friend my support and thoughts of wellness? I chose the latter only because it feels disingenuous to connect up only after such dark news.

The second news struck me more deeply. Don D. died at my exact same age. We were good friends all through grade school and high school. Because our last names were right next to each other in the alphabet, we always sat one behind the other in every class (that's when teachers always set their seating charts in alphabetical order). Don and I struck up a friendship because we liked the same things -- basketball, sports of any kind, really, and laughing. We always got the evil optical reprimand from our teachers because we'd be laughing about one thing or another.

Generally, in middle school or high school, tomboys like myself were shunned by the boys, but Don was always my friend. While we didn't hang out as much, we'd still play basketball after school or sit by each other at football games. He was a good guy. He was always kind and thoughtful. He really cared and never took on that sort of forced machismo so many of my other male friends aspired to.

I think, though I'd have to check, he was voted "Best Smile" in the yearbook and if so, that's exactly what I will remember about him -- his beautiful, authentic, warm smile. A number of years ago, I saw him at a Husky women's basketball game and he was exactly the same -- warm, friendly, and full of laughter and that magnificent smile.

When I read his obituary today, I was surprised to find out that he wanted donations to be made to local animal shelters as he was an "avid animal rights activist." I shouldn't be shocked, really, because it fits. He was compassionate and it's easy to imagine how that compassion could spread to animals.

Funny how love -- the kind I thought I was in with my ex and the kind I didn't know I had for a classmate -- turns out to be important so many years later...a time to be born, a time to die...turn, turn, turn.

A Very Long Play

Please note: The following post is something I wrote in the Spring of 2002. I was enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts Creative Nonfiction program at the time. One of our BIG assignments was to write what they called the 'craft' paper on any subject of our choosing. Since many of our discussions then (and to this day via our college's on-line discussion group and with the James Frey incident among others) were about the accuracy of memoir, I thought I'd post my craft paper (what I then affectionately called my crap paper) on my website...for what it's worth. After rereading it, I could add about three more acts including one on Ms. Vivian Gornick whose lecture at my former college caused a firestorm of response and still is to this day.

Also note that since it was a formal paper, the footnotes are listed at the end.


Perhaps, Maybe:
A Memory Play In Three Acts

"At any moment when you are you you are you without the memory of yourselfbecause if you remember yourself while you are you you are not forpurposes of creating you."
Gertrude Stein

Act One: Scene One

I decided to take myself to a film. There were only two showing at the local theatre and I’d already seen one of them, so I settled on A Beautiful Mind since it was nominated for numerous Academy Awards. I had read the book of the same name written by Sylvia Nasar and found the nonfiction story of John Nash’s life to be painfully intriguing. In addition, I admired the author’s ability to show Nash as human – filled with flaws, both brilliant and bothered.

Movies made from books always lack something, be it ironic twists of plot or the internal monologue of the characters. When the books are fiction, this doesn’t seem to bother me greatly and I’m able to enjoy films such as The English Patient or even Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone forgiving the limitations of cinema to successfully bring a novel, as experienced by the reader, to the screen. But when the book is non-fiction, and therefore considered to be a “true” story, I find the limitations manipulative, arrogant, and deceptive. This was the case with A Beautiful Mind. John Nash was a bisexual, a misogynist, a horrible father, and an anti-Semite who separated from his wife though lived with her for forty years so she could take care of him. None of this was shown in the film.

Yes, he was brilliant. Yes, his illness was sad and debilitating. Yes, his story is a complex web of reality and the power of the mind to create a world so real, so paranoid, it
tortured him and those he loved for years. But he was more than just a mind to be examined by the director and cinematography as a one-dimensional genius. He was a human being. He was a human being with a horrific illness. He was human being who was more than just his accomplishments, more than his manipulation of numbers. He was a human being and his humanness included his prejudices and his spite, his opinionated ego about children and women, and his child-like inability to trust something other than his mind.

I walked away from the film more than disappointed; I was angry with the director and with Hollywood for minimizing such a complex and beautiful story into something so sappy, thin, and myopic. I wanted to scream at all the moviegoers – those who just left as I had done and those waiting in line for the next showing – and say, “Read the book; it’s so much better, it’s so much more human!” Of course, I didn’t. Instead, I walked home all the while pondering that thin line between what is fact and what is fiction. I know it’s blurry. I know there is no clear delineation between what is perceived or lived and what is told as story or as fact, but the exploitation of such a powerful story for the coffers of Hollywood made me feel even more violated and cheated, as if they’d broken some unspoken contract with me.

Was the story told still factual? Was the story I watched on the screen still the truth? Or was it now a distortion, a misrepresentation of an author’s work? If I had not read the book, would I walk away from the theatre believing a Hollywood lie as fact, as truth?

As I work on my own memoir, these questions trouble me daily. Memoir, or “a narrative of experiences that the writer has lived through”[i] is different than biography perhaps in that the writer is writing of her own experiences. In A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar was writing about the life of someone else, the life of John Nash. Yet are there different contracts we make with our readers, or in the case of a film, with our viewers depending on whose story is being told and who is telling the story? How much can we bias the truth?

The murkiness of this internal dialogue grows even murkier when I think about the role of memory when writing of self. One can’t tell of their past without remembering, yet what is remembered is often tainted, if not by time, than by what? By bias? By circumstance? By relationships? By perspective? By how much we have forgotten? If our remembering shifts and changes for a myriad of reasons, how do we, as memoirists approach our stories with any faith in accuracy, with any faith in our ability to tell an honest tale? Furthermore, how much will our audiences “allow” us to bend a memory and still believe us? Where are the boundaries of memory and at one point do they move beyond the boundaries of what we deem to be the facts or the truth of our lives?

Act One: Scene Two
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a work of fiction. I know this because when I checked the book out from the public library I looked for it in the fiction section. “F/O’Brien” identified the book on the computer screen as well on the spine of the hardbound book shelved in the fiction stacks. But the novel is not a novel. It is an experience of the Vietnam War as told by a man who lived through all the truths and lies of such a historical time.

I’ve read the book over nine times, but the last time I checked it out, the librarian behind the counter said, “I don’t know why this book is considered fiction. In fact,” she said stamping the due date on the inside cover with annoyed firmness, “I’m not certain why we categorize any of the fiction books as fiction since they all are assigned a Dewey decimal number just like the non-fiction books.”

“Is it perhaps because these works of fiction are just that, fictional?” I asked her trying not to sound too obvious.

“Yes, but have you read this book?” Her tone was emphatic. I understood her point. The first time I read O’Brien’s novel I didn’t know it was a novel, I didn’t know it was a work of fiction, I didn’t know until I got to the chapter that told me, “this is a work of fiction.” Then I realized all that O’Brien had written up until that point were simply stories, stories he made up in his head. I was shocked. I wasn’t irritated, just amazed that such writing, such honest stories were not real, were not actual events. I refused to believe it. All writing, I told myself, comes from some place real, some place lived and while these specific people and places may be composites and amalgamations they were imbued with such a truthful quality, I knew they were more real than real.

“Yes,” I told the librarian, “Yes, I’ve read this book and I don’t care where they shelve it. It feels real to me.” We smiled at each other. She nodded her head and we both knew we spoke the truth.

Act One: Scene Three
I miss the city bus. Another one doesn’t come for almost an hour so I pop into the Barnes and Noble bookstore on the corner. Truth be told, I hate Barnes and Noble, or as my friends call it, Barf and Ignoble, but I am bored and so I set out to find a few books I’ve wanted to scan through before I decide to order them from my small, local bookstore at home.

“May I help you?” an over-zealous clerk asks.

“Sure,” I say though I am a bit taken aback by the cheerleader authority of this employee. “I’m looking for two books. One by Violette LeDuc and the other by Elias Canetti.”

Stumped, the clerk leads me to the computer terminal tucked in between a few cushy chairs and the Sci-Fi stacks.

“Yep,” says the clerk after punching in the spelling I offer of the two authors. “Please follow me.”

I am led out of Sci-fi, passed Self-Help, and through the New Age section to the “Literature” shelves. I’ve never a seen a section of a bookstore labeled “Literature” and so, to break the spunky-like silence I ask, “What books are considered literature versus fiction or non-fiction?”

“What?” the clerk stammers, surprised by such a question or perhaps stumped again without a computer terminal with which to temper her ignorance.

“Well, the books I’m looking for are memoirs, or non-fiction and you’ve led me to a section called ‘Literature’ and I notice there are works of fiction here as well as non-fiction. So, what determines which books get put in the ‘Literature’ part of the store versus over there, in the fiction section?” I point to the huge wall of books shelved to the ceiling.

The clerk smiles, “Literature is great works of fiction and non-fiction both. You know, you wouldn’t put Stephen King over here or J.A. Nance, but well, works of Eudora Welty or Hemingway, they’d be over here, in literature because, you know, they are literature not just fiction.”

“Oh,” I force myself to respond to her interesting logic. “Thank you,” I say at last and pull LeDuc’s memoir from the shelf. “It’s nice to know I have taste,” I smile and give the clerk a wink, but she doesn’t get it.

“You’re welcome,” she says, with a bit of a nervous jitter in her voice and then heads toward the fiction section where she proceeds to straighten up some Stephen King and J.A. Nance thrown hastily back on their proper, fiction shelves.

Act One: Scene Four
“Slater’s work is appalling. She is an insult to all of us who call ourselves memoirists.”

The room is cool. The humid air outside can’t seep into this space and I am thankful. Heat would only make me hotter under the collar than I already am. A young woman – and I mean young – is criticizing Lauren Slater’s memoir Lying for crossing one too many boundaries. I’ve held my tongue up until this point, lost in the academic logic of this woman’s discourse, which has just turned into a tirade, but I love Slater’s work and I am particularly defensive when it comes to Lying, a memoir told using the metaphor of a lie or a multitude of lies.

“How is it insulting?” I ask, hesitantly.

“Her whole sensibility is that of a non-fiction writer, this is the contract she makes with the reader and yet she manipulates us, she lies and lies and lies without telling exactly what is the truth of her life and what isn’t.”

I’m frantically taking notes. Every word that flies from the gifted and childish writer I want to memorize. I’m not certain why, but I know she is good at her craft and I want to learn from her. Instead, I find myself seething.

“But,” I argue, “She tells us right from the start with the title and in the very first chapter and throughout the book, for that matter, that she is lying.”

“That’s wrong,” her strawberry blonde hair tosses back and she sits up straighter in her chair, “It is a violation of our contract to not tell the truth in this genre.”

“And what truth is she not telling?” I can’t toss my hair. It’s not in my nature. I pull it back; hold it tight against my scalp in a small ponytail, waiting for an answer.

“Perhaps this isn’t the best time and place for this discussion,” the professor steps in, “We can address this later in the program when we all have a chance to hear each other’s work.”

We both simmer for a moment and then get back to the discussion at hand: What is memoir?

Intermission
In a typical paper, in a typical paper that examines craft in writing, the writer would, traditionally, state a thesis or a question to be examined in the paper. So, in this brief intermission, let me share with you the theses that haunt me. First, memory is not the same as truth. Second, truth is not the same as accuracy. Third, accuracy is not the same as honesty. And fourth, honesty is not the same as memory. Therefore, it is impossible to speak an accurate truth through an honest memory just as it is impossible to speak a truthful memory through honest accuracy. Furthermore, it is impossible to speak an accurate memory through truthful honesty. In conclusion, my thesis is: it is impossible to speak.

Act Two: Scene One
What is memoir? Vivian Gornick writes, “Modern memoir posits that the shaped presentation of one’s own life is of value to the disinterested reader only if it dramatizes and reflects sufficiently on the experience of ‘becoming’…”[ii] That’s all well and good, but what if one’s becoming is trapped in unattainable memories, in the black tongue of silence brought on by trauma or self-inflicted sequestration? How do we tell of our “becoming” if we are only left with snatches and prisms of our lives?

This is the struggle of every memoirist. How do we tell the truth at all times and not be seduced by the colorful allure of a good story? In Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Lauren Slater writes, “What matters in knowing and telling yourself is not the historical truth, which fades as our neurons decay and stutter, but the narrative truth, which is delightfully bendable and politically powerful.”[iii]

Storytelling is an age-old tradition. Whenever two or more people come together, they share the narratives of their lives usually in short anecdotes or in longer, more detailed accounts. Stories make us who we are, mark our existence in the world; connect us to others through common experience, validating feelings, beliefs, and values. For a fiction writer, what is told is done so through the words of characters created for the sole purpose of telling a story or a series of stories or one small strand of a story within the context of something larger. Non-fiction writers, even if they attach the term “creative” to their profession also write using characters, but the difference is, of course, that characters in fiction afford far more benefits to the author than characters do for even the most creative of non-fiction writers. Or do they?

While both are creating story, the assumption is that fiction writers are using their imaginations to tell of the events, characters, and emotions that make up the basis for plot while non-fiction writers are just that, they are writing with-non or without fiction. They are to be truth-speakers, willing to put on paper what is real and factual. Within the subtext of creative non-fiction writing is a range of genre from autobiographical works to strict news reporting. What falls between these two extremes are works of memoir, biography, personal essay, book reviews, and something called immersion journalism. What rules apply? Are they the same for memoir as they are for feature stories? Does a newscaster have the freedom to bend what is remembered like a memoirist might?

If we accept Gornick’s assertion, and I do, then we must accept that the rules for a journalist are different than that of a memoirist. Journalists are not in the business of becoming though the stories they report may be about the becoming of someone else and therefore, there is no room for bending what is perceived as truth or truth as perceived by the subject of the story. The subject of the story is becoming in her own unique way, but her journey is not up for interpretation by the journalist.

Gornick explains further, “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”[iv] Memoir, then, is combing through one’s life to make sense of becoming. So, why would it upset people to know that in becoming, in combing through her life, Slater uses a lie, or in the case of her memoir, many lies?

Act Two: Scene Two
What upsets us about lies? A recent Washington Post article begins, “A moving, richly detailed New York Times Magazine profile of a boy who became an Ivory Coast laborer turns out to have been a fabrication.”[v] This, then, is a violation. This is not truth. This is a lie. Yes, it is true that young boys are exploited in Africa as laborers. Yes, it is true that child slavery is a horrendous and growing problem in the ever-burgeoning world of global economics. Yes, it is true the writer of this specific story has written other such stories that are about “down-on-their luck characters in remote corners of the globe, gripping anecdotes [with] hard-to-check details.”[vi] But the lie is this: in the world no such young man with the specific name given in the original article existed. Others existed, millions of others exist throughout the world, but this one, this one that wrenched at our hearts, demanded our personal attention, did not exist and therefore it is necessary to dismiss the entire story, perhaps the entire career of the journalist.

Or is it?

Tim O’Brien can write a true war story and call it fiction, but a journalist cannot write a child slavery story and call it fact unless it is fact. That’s rule number one. Understand it. That is rule number one. Facts can be fiction, but fiction can’t be facts.

Or can they?

Act Two: Scene Three
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies specifically to electrons and is stated something like this: It is impossible to know both the exact position AND the velocity of any particular electron. The reason for this impossibility is partly related to the fact that the measurement itself, which relies on the use of light particles, affects the electron in such a way that it is no longer behaving in the same way while being measured as it was before it was being measured.[vii]

A writer, say a journalist, looks at an African child in a coastal village and sees poverty and hunger, sees a boy dying (and I mean dying) to find work, to find dignity in surviving. They talk, this journalist and this boy, and the journalist is moved by this story, so moved he knows he must tell this story, he must tell all of their stories because right now, in this coastal village of Africa, there are hundreds of these children with swollen bellies and panicked eyes. And so the journalist makes a decision. He will tell this story, but he will tell this story fictionally. He will take this boy’s story and that boy’s story and the story of that young girl holding her dying baby sister in her arms. He will tell of what he sees. But what he sees is influenced by what he knows and what he knows is not, and this is extremely important, what he knows is not what that boy knows or that boy or even that girl with the starving baby in her arms.

They are electrons and the journalist, despite his good intentions, is measuring their lives with a beam of light. It is impossible for the journalist to know the velocity and exact position of these children because the tool he is using to measure them changes what he sees simply because he is seeing it with Western eyes. Starvation is relative. Work is relative. Child labor, yes, even child labor is relative.

Isn’t it?

Act Two: Scene Four
Does the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle apply to memoir? Okay, Ms. Slater, by looking at your life, at the lies of your life, at the truth of your life through the lens of a metaphor, a lying metaphor, have you changed what is observed simply because you have chosen to observe it this way?

“Not quite.

“This is a work of nonfiction. Everything in it is supposed to be true. In some instances names of people and places have been changed to protect their privacy, but the essential story should at least aim for accuracy, so the establishment says. Therefore, I confess. To the establishment. I didn’t really fall into the grave. I was just using a metaphor to try to explain my mental state. The real truth is I went to the funeral, the hearse had engine trouble, the coffin was late, I looked into the grave, and I thought about falling in.”[viii]

Ha! Take that, strawberry blonde who flips her hair with academic arrogance. Ha!
“We are in the presence…of a mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows – moving from unearned certainty to thoughtful reconsideration to clarified self-knowledge. The act of clarifying on the page is an intimate part of the metaphor.”[ix]


Act Two: Scene Five
Why write nonfiction? Why write memoir as nonfiction? Why not just write a memoir like Tim O’Brien, fictionally?

What about this: “I need to write this as quickly as possible, because it is about my mother. I want to write it while we can still remember how we hoped that she would get well. That is sentimental and extravagant, I know. I once told my mother that I would never forget her because there is so much of her in me, but this year, I’m not so sure that I can rely on myself to recall everything I possibly can. Did I get this sentimental and extravagant streak from her? Five years ago, I would have said that it came from my father, but now I’m not so sure.”[x]

Fact or fiction? Hard to tell, isn’t it? Can it be both? Can Andrew Solomon tell us of his mother’s death through the voice of Harry, the concert pianist? I mean, can Andrew Solomon really tell us the story of his mother, tell us the story of Andrew and his relationship with his mother, all the while naming his voice Harry and not Andrew?

“My mother decided to kill herself on June 19, 1991, at age fifty-eight, because if she had waited longer, she would have been too weak to take her life, and suicide requires strength and a kind of privacy that does not exist in hospitals.”[xi] Whose voice is that, I ask you? Andrew’s of course, Andrew’s true and clear, and the situation, the dreadful situation of his mother’s cancer, of his mother’s choice to end her life is told in the fictional story Solomon tells through the voice of Harry and the non-fictional story he tells in his intensely non-fictional work through his true voice, the voice of Andrew – the son who had to write of his mother.

Is Andrew’s voice a truer voice than Harry’s?

Act Two: Scene Six
Character offers distance. To create yourself in the voice of someone else makes it hurt less. Try it. Tell a story, a story you know well, one that you actually remember about your life through the voice of a character named Mildred or George or Spike. Can you make it ring as true as the voice with which you normally speak? Can you dig deeper into the emotion claiming it not as your emotion, but as the feelings of Mildred or George or Spike?

Don’t lie; you know it’s different. You know, too, that it is the same. You’ve just taken those feelings and placed them where? You’ve placed them in another container, one that can tell your story without a connection as powerful as the one you would have if you, just you and not Mildred or George or Spike, just you had spoken the story.

So what? So what’s the point? Yes, I ask myself that often. What’s the point? Just write this story as if you were telling someone else’s story. It’s easier. Hell, it’s safer. Yes, we can agree upon that, can’t we? It’s safer because face it, who’s going to come after you if you play around with the delicate spring day when you experienced your first kiss? Who’s going to question their portrayal in your fictionalized account of this particular story? You can always write this in tiny, tiny print on the inside cover of your published work: “This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.”

You can’t write that in the front of your memoir, can you?

Act Two: Scene Seven
Why can’t you? Ah, now we get down to it. Why can’t you have a coincidental imagination in your memoir? You could say, “This is a story of my grandfather, but any resemblance to the actual person is entirely coincidental.” You could say it, but then, key question here, but then who would believe you? Who would believe this is a memoir, a narrative memory of your life and your experiences?

So it comes back to truth, that slippery devil who haunts us all, writers or not. Is the simple difference between memoir and fiction that one is truer than the other? Is the simple difference between memoir and fiction that you can make up details in both, but if someone else questions those details you don’t, in the case of memoir, have that disclaimer in the front of your book and therefore, yes, therefore you are caught in a lie? And lies, let’s admit it, lies hurt people. Even if that lie, that one lie or two or perhaps even ten of them, helped you tell a truer story than one you could tell fictionally, it doesn’t matter because it is still a lie told as if it were true and it misrepresents your grandfather, or your sister, or the best, best friend of your entire life.

So, why Ms. Slater, would you choose to open this Pandora’s box? Why would you choose to piss, yes piss, everyone off by daring to write a non-fiction book, a memoir, filled with lies upon lies upon lies? Simply because you could? Simply because it required great skills as a writer to layer metaphor upon metaphor in such a way that we, as readers, believe you? We believe you are an epileptic. We believe you suffer from Munchausen Syndrome. We believe you surgically had your brain split in an attempt to control your uncontrollable seizures.

I don’t believe you, Ms. Slater. I don’t believe you, but I’m asking you to believe me; I understood you. I got it. I got the clues, the scent of jasmine as a tip that this next story, this next anecdote was a lie or possibly a lie and therefore, therefore I should pay close, close attention because it is in the lies you tell me the truth. Yes, it is in telling the truth you are making it all up. And I understand. “…we become what is done to us.”[xii]

Intermission
It is a struggle for any memoirist, this one in particular, to know completely if the story they are telling is worth the telling. I want my writing to be true, to be honest, to find a common ground outside myself, but in writing about self I must write about what makes up all of my self and that, dare I say, includes what is remembered. And we all know, or I think we all know, that what is remembered is a gray area, is an open field, is an abstract painting interpreted by those who bring to their viewing all they have experienced and all they have believed.

In a typical paper, in a typical paper that examines craft in writing, the writer would, after she’d stated her thesis (mine being that is impossible to speak), provide a minimum of three points to support and explain her thesis. Consider what follows as my three points:

1) Voltaire once said, “There is no history, only lies with varying degrees of plausibility.” Change the word “history” to the word “memory” and what you have before you is memoir. Uncertainty, yet still an attempt to find a story of one’s self that is plausible. That is the honest search. That is the truth of becoming.

2) “…sometimes you just don’t know how to say the pain directly – I don’t know how to say the pain directly, I never have – and I often tell myself it really doesn’t matter, because either way, any way, the brain shivers and craves, cracked open.”[xiii] We are limited by words. We are limited by what and how we remember. Still we desire story, we desire an honest and truthful story. We desire to know we are not alone. We desire to know others have suffered as we have suffered, others have laughed as we have laughed, and others have struggled to understand the pain of becoming.

3) The story we write in the end, may not be the story that is read, may not, in fact, be the story we intended to tell at all. As readers, we covet the writer who can draw us in, who can link our lives with theirs, who can tell the story we have always wished to tell, but were unable to tell for lack of time, lack of talent, or lack of patience. As readers, we covet the writer who can tell more of our story than we knew was even there. As writers, we covet the reader who is drawn in, who links with our lives, who understands what we wish to tell. As writers, we covet the reader who can hear more of the story than we knew was even there.

Act Three: Scene One
So, forget about honesty and truth and accuracy in relationship to memory. Forget about the critics and the breadth of the genre and the New York Times reporter who is worrying he may lose his job because he tried to tell a truthful and honest story that wasn’t exactly accurate. Forget about Lauren Slater’s assertions, Vivian Gornick’s guidelines, and the beautiful strawberry blonde who is absolutely clear about truth, honesty, accuracy, and memoir. Just take a look at memory.

First, try to define it. “The mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience; the ability to remember.”[xiv] Then, in the little print at the end of the definition: from Latin memoria, from memor, mindful. So second, be mindful of what you remember. Once a writing teacher told me if I was going to speculate then I should use the words “perhaps” or “maybe” to tell the reader I am speculating. In other words, she was telling me to be mindful.

Third, look up mindful. “Attentive; heedful. Used with of.”[xv] When writing my memories I am to be mindful of my ability to be accurate, truthful, and honest in what I remember. When writing my memories I must pay attention to what is remembered, and when what is remembered borders on speculation, I must say perhaps or maybe, I must write a secret message to the reader that says, hold on, please, while I explore the accuracy, truthfulness, and honesty of this memory, while I am mindful of what I am saying.

If only it were that easy.

Letter to the Strawberry Blonde

Dear Colleague:
You seem to understand something I don’t. Actually, you seem to live your writing life by a rule I can’t seem to comprehend. You have said, as writers, we have a contract with our readers and as memoirists we have a contract to tell the truth as best we can and if we can’t, we must tell the readers that in this instance we are speculating, or in fact, we are making it up to better examine what might be true.

So I try. I try again and again to write my memories using this rule, this rule that seems so clear to you and so murky to me. Yet, when I’m in the middle of remembering it, remembering it on the page where I am writing, the rule eludes me. Instead, I am sucked into the energy of the memory, the little me who is remembering the scraped knee or the color of my bedroom or the smell of the family dog after her bath. I want my words to take you there, yes you who are so very clear about this contract, but even as I write that I know it’s an impossibility because what I really want is to take me there, take me back so that the telling of this particular memory is seamless. You will not have to “go back” because, through my writing, the going back will be brought here, brought to you via the page where I am writing.

But you, the young writer who I envy in so many ways, you can’t experience what I experience. You can only experience what you experience while reading of my experiences. Therefore, let’s redefine the contract. I swear, on this date in the early spring, that I will, as a memoirist, do my very best to remember mindfully in order that you might feel your experience with my experiences as authentic. I will write, from this day forward, authentically.

With the utmost respect,
*****


Intermission
An expanded traditional paper thesis: How does one speak authentically if one is writing from what is remembered? If I mark my past with orange flags or yellow tape the way the sheriff cordons off a crime scene, where is the outermost border of what is remembered? Ironically, this question doesn’t matter to Vivian Gornick who believes the persona, the voice of the memoir, is essential to the authenticity of the memory. “Yet the creation of a persona is vital in an essay or a memoir. It is the instrument of illumination. Without it there is neither subject nor story. To achieve it, the writer of memoir or essay undergoes an apprenticeship as soul-searching as any undergone by novelist or poet: the twin struggle to know not only why one is speaking but who is speaking.”[xvi]

For Lauren Slater, the metaphor is crucial. “…even those things that are not literally true about me are metaphorically true about me, and that’s an important point.”[xvii] For the librarian bound and confused by the Dewey Decimal system memory is classifiable, memory is story shelved next to the How-to books and Moby Dick simply because the call numbers require it. For the bouncy clerk in Barnes and Noble authenticity is determined by something more prejudicial. This is good, but this, yes, this is much better and this is considered a great work and therefore is shelved in this section as literature not simply as fiction or not.

And for the filmmaker, the authenticity of the story is limited to the slice the director chooses to view through the lens of a camera. A Beautiful Mind was truthful, but it was not honest. A Beautiful Mind was mindful, but it was not accurate; it was merely a story told by someone else who read what someone else had written about someone else who lived the life they were minimizing (due to time constraints and budget, no doubt) for the screen. It was a story of a life, but not the whole story.

Act Four: Final Scene
In conclusion, (though I know it is not really a conclusion, but a summation of something delicate and uncertain) memory is a field, a large, grassy field that stretches as far as the eye can see in all directions. In this field lies your memory. Not right on the surface of the green, green softness, but underneath at varying depths. This then is your task as a memoirist: to find authentic memories to tell the story that must be told through the voice that must tell it, the story of your authentic becoming.

To unearth these recollections imagine you are carrying a memory detector. You walk this field in measured steps, slowly and methodically. You hear the steady beep of your instrument through black and heavy headphones. You hear your shallow, anticipated breath echoing inside, pressing against your chest. Suddenly, the beeps increase in volume and frequency and, with smaller and steadier accuracy you measure the ground just beneath your feet. Below you, one foot or maybe ten lays a memory. With a small hand shovel, you dig to unearth what is remembered.

Sometimes you pull up small bits, round pieces of metal that are worthless or insignificant, rusted screws and bent, used nails. Sometimes you must dig deep to find the smallest treasures, or scrape the field wide for a large mystery you can’t quite understand. Some days you want to give up the work, rest your weary body in the hot magnetic sun of your life. Then a memory unfolds, offers itself to you like a diamond or a cool glass of water or the slicing blade of knife sharp against your skin. You remember a goodnight kiss, the words to a lullaby, or even this: a wicked hand leaving marks across your innocent face. Yes, even these corrosive memories are worth the search, worth mining for they, collectively, form the you that is you, the you that you are becoming.

It takes a lifetime to walk this field and even as you walk, what lies before you grows vibrantly and more elusive. You come back to you in snatches and lies, in the memories of others and the memories you once thought forgotten. And when you get home, when you place what you’ve found in front of you, spread it full across the scarred and shiny table, the mystery of you is still unsolved. The pieces are disjointed, scattered, reluctant in their assembly. Among the rust and the dirt, the smell of sweat and the taste of your own salt, nothing feels profound, nothing feels understandable.

Until late at night, right before you fall into bed, two objects come together. There, that piece in the corner and this piece, this piece you once thought unimportant, this piece you almost tossed in the trash. From a distance you see how they suit each other and you place them side by side, breathe in deep, and slide them into the tight fit they once knew years and years ago. There is only a moment to admire the work for the pieces combined are small compared to the pieces yet without a home.

To tell the truth of your life, to tell it honestly and accurately, memory must be unearthed and placed before you on the table. There is no easier way and, in fact, the way is not easy. It is arduous, painful, exhilarating and irritating. It rewards and hurts you. It angers some and mesmerizes others. At the end, at the end of this life remembered, this life lived you will place what you have found in a frame upon the shelf. After your body turns to ashes, your bones crumble under the weight of worms, people will argue about the meaning of it all. What do we make of this life? What do we call it? They will ask. And you will laugh from your grave beneath that green, grassy field and whisper just like a breeze an answer we cannot hear for we must walk our own field of memory in measured steps, slowly and methodically.

“When I die, and am judged, either by myself or by the spirit that seeps through the universe, what will be said? Will I be considered brave for the fog I’ve tolerated, or too cowardly to face the bright light of truth, or, simply, too crippled, my brain too broken?”[xviii]

Encore
Presumptuous, I know, but let me leave you with this:

“If you do not keep remembering yourself you have no identity and if you have no time you do not keep remembering yourself and as you remember yourself you do not create anybody can and does know that.”[xix]

And finally, for the strawberry blonde who knows what she knows and what I don’t know, I ask what Lauren Slater asks: “Perhaps I’ve just felt fitful my whole life; perhaps I’m using metaphor to tell my tale, a tale I know no other way of telling, a tale of my past, my mother and me, a tale of pains and humiliations and illnesses so subtle and nuanced I could never find the literal words; would it matter? Is metaphor in memoir, in life, an alternate form of honesty or simply an evasion? This is what I want to know.”[xx]

This, too, is what I want to know, though I think I hear it in the wind when I look out on the field of my remembering whispering perhaps, maybe.



Works Cited
[i] Morris, William, editor. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin Company. New York, New York. 1989
[ii] Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, New York. 2001. Page 93.
[iii] Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Random House. New York, New York. 2000. Page 219.
[iv] Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, New York. 2001. Page 91.
[v] Kurtz, Howard. “New York Times Feature Was Fiction”. Washington Post. Washington D.C. February 22, 2002.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Discussion with David Thielk; high school science and math teacher and dear friend and philosopher.
[viii] Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Random House. New York, New York. 2000. Page 60.
[ix] Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, New York. 2001. Page 36.
[x] Solomon, Andrew. The Stone Boat. Penguin Group. New York, New York. 1994. Page 1.
[xi] Solomon, Andrew. Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Scribner. New York, New York. 2001. Page 276.
[xii] Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, New York. 2001. Page 116.
[xiii] Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Random House. New York, New York. 2000. Page 204.
[xiv] Morris, William, editor. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin Company. New York, New York. 1989
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, New York. 2001. Pages 7-8.
[xvii] Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Random House. New York, New York. 2000. Page 162.
[xviii] Ibid. Page 215.
[xix] Stein, Gertrude. “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them”. The Best American Essays of the Century. Oates, Joyce Carol editor. Houghton Mifflin Company. New York, New York. 2000. Page 137.
[xx] Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Random House. New York, New York. 2000. Page 192.


Works Not Cited But Influential

1. Baxter, Charles. Editor. The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting. Grey Wolf Press. Saint Paul, Minnesota. 1999.
2. Friedman, Bonnie. The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy. Beacon Press. Boston, Massachusetts. 2002.
3. Kincaid, Jamaica. My Brother. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, New York. 1997.
4. Kitchen, Judith. Distance and Direction. Coffee House Press. Minneapolis, Minnesota. 2001.
5. Mairs, Nancy. A Troubled Guest. Beacon Press. Boston, Massachusetts. 2001.
6. O’Brien, Timothy. The Things They Carried. Peguin Books. New York, New York. 1990.
7. Walker, Rebecca. Black, White, and Jewish. Riverside Press. New York, New York. 2000.

Pay Attention

There are things you never notice you're noticing. Expectations of sorts. Like a breath. When it stops even momentarily, you notice, but the million and one breaths you took the hours before go unnoticed. Day in and day out.

Every day after lunch my students ask if we can go to the park so they can play on the equipment, chase each other around in a game of tag, or madly launch themselves to the sky on the swing set. If the weather isn't particularly nasty, we go. I need it as much as they do. Being inside all day with the venting system and the overhead lights gets to me as much as it gets to them. I need daylight. I need fresh air. I need to see birds fly and busses go by and even the drug dealers at the corner store. These are solids and my life diet just doesn't feel complete until I touch my shoes to the wet park grass or sit on the park bench and watch the girls play.

I always loved the catalpa tree at the edge of the park. It was enormous and its shade cooled the park on hot fall and spring days, its leaves whistled in the wind, and the branches snaked and stretched like some old man rising to greet the day. Even without its heart-shaped leaves, the tree was dignified and inviting. With thick, sturdy limbs all the kids wanted to climb on it, but with liability issues, such adventure was discouraged. Still, we used the tree for art projects. We drew its expanse in our field journals. We wrote poems about tree. We talked about the function of bark and counted the ripples at the trunk of the tree.

I knew the tree was important to me. I knew that my need to go to the park as often as I could during the day was more about the tree than the fresh air or the delight in watching the girls play. I knew the tree was a way I could center myself on a busy day, a way I could disconnect from the stress of teaching and reconnect with the calming beauty of the natural world. The tree was a little wilderness escape in the middle of an urban life.

With our recent tragic windstorm many things were lost. Our electricity. Some lost parts or all of their homes. Some lost loved ones.

I lost the tree. Or maybe we all did.


The tree fell in a great crackling heap pulling up the sidewalk along with it. All the pieces are still there, weeks after the "storm of the century." Caution tape surrounds it and limbs upon limbs are piled up like stacked twigs ready to start a fire.

The girls went out the other day and drew a picture of the downed tree. Then they wrote odes to the tree finding the poetry of loss in the upturned roots and split bark. Over New Year's Eve someone must have celebrated by it for at the base of the great wreakage are beer cans, a champagne and vodka bottle, and cigarette butts. One student wrote a simple ode-- "You are alone now, your only friends champagne and vodka..." while others wrote about the age of the tree..."Older than me, I hope my death is as brave..."

One student took a shoot from the base of the tree and placed it in a plastic cup filled with water in the classroom. "I'm hoping," she told me, "I'm really hoping we can save a memory of that tree."

They noticed, didn't they? I noticed, too, though I hadn't really noticed how much I'd noticed. Still sometimes, when we go to the park now, I can still hear the leaves hum in the wind. They sing what they've always sung and now I'm noticing. "Pay attention" they say, "Pay attention."