Scrabble

The week of her exam, my mother and I play Scrabble nearly every night after dinner. Each game begins with the same routine, which she initiates with the same questions. 

    Now how many tiles do I take?

   

    Seven, Mom.

    Now how do we tell . . .?

    Who goes first? Let's each pick a tile and then we'll know.

    Okay. 

She picks one of the tiles from those I have amassed in the top of the old beat-up Scrabble box and stares at her letter. She looks up at me expectantly, but I don't speak. (Why do I make her ask? I know what she needs. Maybe I don't believe or understand yet. I am willing her to be my regular old mother, the one who knows and tells me what to do.)

    Is it closest to the beginning or the end?  

Her mouth is already getting set to say Oh to my answer. Almost like a pucker, a kiss, but if she was preparing for a kiss, there would be intention in her eyes. She is all reception, capitulation. And trust.

    Whichever tile is closest to A. So you go first.

I watch her fingers hesitate above the spread tiles turned face down. Her eyelids flicker. She looks at me and waits. She still has that expectant Oh ready for my next instruction. 

    We each pick seven tiles, I prompt, and her fingers begin to pluck and collect.

Once the game begins she is alright though. She comes up with as many high-scored words as I. Even when I decide I should try to win a game, she bests me half the time.

   Is zen a word? She asks me several times. (Funny that that word should occur to her repeatedly during the week. Is she channeling a reminder from my inner self? Does her receptivity go that deep?) 

   Sure, Mom. It's a form of Buddhism. I try to tell her what it is, even go so far as to read aloud a definition from the dictionary, but she is not interested. She has become absorbed in the game, where she can rely on her old skills. She only wants to use her z.

    

Splitting

 I was surprised when they allowed all three of us into the examination room, but by then I’d taken my chastening to heart and was holding my impulses at bay. I was behaving for the new authority in our lives. I had stopped trying to fill my mother’s silences. When she looked towards me beseechingly, I just looked back without a word. A pocket of space was growing around me or was it around her? I never could tell the difference. She was the isolated one, having been led by my father and me into the den of the enemy—that diagnoser, that final arbiter of her mental fitness.  Even though I kept still, I told myself I was sending her encouragement, but encouragement for what I wasn’t prepared to say. Even now, all I can come up with is courage and the strength to endure what would come next, last in her life.

My father had removed all but his physical presence from the room. I couldn’t detect even the slightest hovering nearby of his thoughts or emotions. Maybe he’d retreated all the way back to South Philly where he’d been the favored son in a prosperous family, strong, handsome, and in control. Or maybe he’d gone to wherever he went to bargain with his god—they’d always had a close relationship—what will you take to spare her?

I became the silent witness, taking in what I could, objecting only in my mind to the questions that my mother couldn’t answer. Even I don’t always remember the date, I thought when my mother couldn’t say what year it was. Don’t you see she’s wearing a digital watch?  I chided when she was unable to tell the time on the analogue clock with its moving hands. These are false measures! You didn't give her enough time! You’ve terrified her so that she can’t think! My objections tumbled over one another when she didn’t get a single question right. But I remained silent and submissive as others took over. 

That Moment

It's an easy line to cross without noticing, because it happens gradually and you don't want to notice. You and your mother used to finish one another's thoughts. Perhaps not out loud, but believing that you were hiding your deepest selves--your longings and secrets-- you always kept each other in your sights. You, because she was strict and fearful, and you needed to explore and experiment. She, because she was private and protective to the extreme.

You can't say when you began to fill in the holes of her thoughts. You can't remember when the holes appeared or when they expanded or when they began to alarm you. Different from the vagueness that used to crop up whenever you asked her a question she didn't want to answer. "You don't want to know," she'd say, brushing you away with the sweep of her hand, commanding you not to want what you clearly  wanted. Driving you back into yourself, both in your separate corners.

 You remember, though, when you realized that you were covering for her, speaking for her because she could no longer speak for herself. It was a lifetime later. You were in an elevator, you, your mother, your silent father, and the social worker. You remember going down, although you were probably going up to the examination room. A small cage. Your parents standing together, you behind them, the social worker facing your little family, her back to the closed door, trying to engage your mother in conversation. You spoke over your mother's head, filling in when she hesitated, helping her. You were just helping. The social worker shot you a stern look, shook her head. You stopped what you hadn't known you were doing or what your mother was no longer doing until that moment.

January 2002

Morris dropped me off at the Fort Lauderdale Airport after a short trip from the Century Village where my parents lived. He had established quite a business for himself, shopping, driving, and picking up take-out for his neighbors, who, over the years, had aged and weakened and lost the spouses they had come south with. Morris was a great resource for them my mother used to say. He had been lucky with his health, and this free-lance work was a cinch. He had been a seltzer delivery man in Brooklyn before he retired. Now that had been hard work, climbing countless flights of steps every day, carrying cases of glass bottles to walk-ups on high floors. His daily exercise for all those years had enhanced his excellent constitution.

My father had stopped driving to the airport the year before. At first, it was just pick-up. The cops who enforced the "no stopping" rules had always made him nervous, and he no longer could expect my mother to wait for me by baggage claim, collect me, and meet him a block away from "Arrivals" where the cops didn't bother shooing cars away from the curb.  But soon enough he found Morris' services to be such a convenience that he reserved him for both ways.

It was a relief for me to get out of the car and into the airport with little fanfare. I had said my goodbyes back home at the Century Village. Funny that I referred to it as home, since I had never lived there. But even though I had moved out of my parents' house many years before, and even though they had sold that house and lived in several apartments since my leaving, I habitually referred to any place where they lived as home.

The airport was its usual madhouse, even worse, since it was early January, winter break. The energy was bouncy and chaotic. College students were continuing their New Year's carousals. They shouted to one another, as if they still needed to make themselves heard above the boisterous bands. There was loud, raucous laughter. A few even tooted on noisemakers.

The din dissipated when I got to the end of the long, winding line for airport security. I was at the waiting portion of the hurry-up-and-wait that is airport embarkation. The people ahead of me were subdued and obedient. Even the college kids had quieted down, preparing to follow the new rules. At this point no one wanted any trouble.

Nearby, a girl was discussing with her friend whether or not she had to take off her oversized novelty sunglasses because they hid her face. No one was sure what was permitted or required. It was 2002. Increased airport security was new and in transition. It had not yet become a way of life.

The line barely moved while the guards seemed to be working out the details of security on the spot. After all of the activity of the past week, this sudden slow-down gave me too much time to think. I wasn't ready for that. Those silly sunglasses. They were on display at every kiosk and cheap souvenir store at the airport. Several people in front of me were wearing them. The center 00 made a perfect frame for the lenses, and 2002 was a numeric palindrome, which duplicated the symmetry of the double-0. A two on each end. Zeroes at the center.

Suddenly a ridiculous thought popped into my mind. What if I had brought a pair of those sunglasses to my mother's examination last week? I could have slipped them on when the nurse asked my mother what year it was.  I pictured myself pointing emphatically to my glasses so only Mom could see and not the nurse. Magic glasses. Invisible. Would Mom have been able to answer, "2002" instead of shrugging and murmuring that she didn't know? Would she have been able to make the connection between those glasses and the information they offered? Would she have gotten at least one answer right? No, of course not. She was that far gone.

Anniversary

Look up the word anniversary in the dictionary, and you'll find that it is the commemoration of an event, any event, that took place a year or years earlier. But that's not how we think of it in our culture. The word has come to mean a happy event, an event to be celebrated. Most often it means a wedding anniversary.

It is remembered by date, marked on our calendars and in our minds. If it is our anniversary, we remember it in its entirety--the year and the month and the day. There are some forgetful spouses who forget one or two or all three of those numbers, but that's another story. If it is the anniversary of a friend or relative, the month and day are all we need to note. The greeting card companies have made such commemorations simple to fulfill, so everyone is happy.

I wonder if we would feel a general sense of well-being during our wedding anniversary times if we didn't have specific dates so well documented. In earlier times, we didn't. Anniversaries (and birthdays) were associated with religious holidays or seasons. (Those were times less devoted to individual fulfillment and more towards community devotion.) But I wonder if happily-married people back then, without quite knowing why, just felt good and optimistic around that general time. If they had cellular memories of their transitions from daughter or son to wife or husband. Bypassing consciousness--a lightness of being, a spring in the step, an eagerness to please, and a willingness to be pleased.

I know that I feel the other kind of anniversary in my bones and spirit--the anniversaries of the passing of my loved ones. It isn't conscious. I don't always recognize just why it is that I'm feeling down, defensive, or particularly attentive to potential danger and loss. If I didn't get a card from my synagogue reminding me that the yahrtrzeit, or anniversary, of a loved one's death is coming on a specific date, I'd simply think I had fallen into a general depression.

But that's not it. I am reminded that this is different, my feelings arising from particular earlier events when I had no control over the well-being of the ones I dearly loved and still love. What I am feeling seeps up from tamped-down memories of those times--feelings of eternal helplessness, that no matter how smart I am, how resourceful, how hard I try I can't/couldn't make them well. They are memories of ultimate failure, the kick-at-the-knees reminder of  mortal limitations--mine and theirs.

February and March are cluster months for me. They are the months when my mother and father died. When my husband Al was first diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, which began his 18-month-long battle. A reminder of how I cared for them all, watched their suffering, witnessed their courage, and stood by helplessly when they left..

I'd like to say that I'm over it all, and mostly that would be true. I've made a good life for myself with abundant joys and challenges. I even find myself fretting over nonsense that I know is petty in the grand life- and-death scheme of things. I'd like to leave it all at that, but my memories haven't left me. Not entirely. I'm not stricken by grief anymore, but I'm changed by it. I guess I'm the keeper of a grief circle, as Sobonfu Some taught me nearly a decade ago. This blog is a grief circle into which people can visit and be supported in whatever ways work for them.

As for me, I acknowledge these times and my sadness, which begins to leave me even now. The rituals of grief are a receptacle for feelings. The dates put a frame around them. On the particular dates of my loved ones' deaths, I'll light a candle at sundown that will burn and flicker all night and into the next day. I'll recite a special prayer that praises life and acknowledges all I can't know or do by myself. It may not instantly lift my spirits, but it puts my mood in perspective and reminds me that I still have my life to live in gratitude.

In memory of Al Silverstein, Frances and Benjamin Letofsky, and my dear Star.


To learn about the way other cultures honor death anniversaries, go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_anniversary

Small Things

For now, I can only tell small things. The turn of seasons floods me with loss like new. Tears bring brief relief. Another long cold spell coming. Will I endure? Change for better or worse?

Yesterday I looked up from my desk and happened to glimpse the gold birch leaves catch the last light of the setting sun. They blazed against the dusky sky, miraculously unconsumed. I wanted to stare until that fire lit me too, but, distracted, I forgot and returned to my tasks. By the time I looked through the window again, all I saw was starless night.

Offer, Listen, Neutral, Feed Back: Writing Class, 9/11/14

A couple of weeks ago, I met with my poetry students equipped with some five-minute writing topics that I use at the beginning of class. Simple and general, these topics help clear the mind of surface thoughts. I began with "waking up" and unclasped my wrist watch to lay on the desk besides my unopened journal. Some students stared into space at first and some set to writing immediately. My own hands were idle.

I  was fretting about a failed lesson from the week before and forming a plan to try it again this session. The failed lesson had to do with the students giving one another neutral feedback following the reading aloud of their pieces. I'd learned it from Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind) at workshops I'd attended in the 90s. Neutral feedback requires focused listening so that we can repeat the words and images that we remember back to the reader, thus telling her or him where the language was most memorable for us.

"It's neutral, not positive or negative," I'd explained the week before. "Just say the phrase or word. Leave out opinions and interpretations." It was difficult for most of the students to follow my instructions, and they responded to each others' writing with "I like..." or "That made me think of...."  I didn't correct them, probably because it had been our first full writing session, and I wanted to establish an initial sense of comfort in the classroom. When a student did attempt to follow my instructions, I'd merely nodded my affirmation. That was hardly enough of a distinction for a teacher to make. Quite simply, I hadn't been clear enough in the follow-through.

So I was determined to reinforce the basics of neutral feedback in this session. As the students wrote about waking up that morning, I was gearing up to retry teaching the theory and application of neutral feedback. "It doesn't only help the writer; it helps us all to develop our listening skills," I practiced saying in my head. 'We think that we know how to listen, but we can do better. We need to listen as writers listen. To explore how words can only bridge our thoughts and experience. To begin to understand the gap between being and telling." Teacher talk, likely just what Natalie had told me when I was her student.

Their five minutes were up. I told them to finish their sentences. They looked up expectantly, their pens poised above their books. "When I leave here," I said. "When I leave here," I repeated. They began writing again. My notebook remained closed. I watched my students leaning over their desks, noticing how some held their pens between their pointer finger and thumb, how some used their middle and ring finger."When I leave here," I thought, "I'll have my last office hour of the week and hop into my car to head upstate." Several of my friends had decided to retire last semester, but I didn't want to think about that kind of leaving.

"Time's up," I announced. "Finish what you're doing." In a minute most of the students stopped. One young woman bent further over her notebook, deep into her writing. She needed to catch whatever she was chasing. I didn't wait for her. The rest looked at me. I had another general topic ready, but I hesitated. In the back of my mind was the date of that session. I decided to give it to them to prepare them in some way for the day to come. "Nine-Eleven," I announced. "Nine-Eleven." Some nodded. A few closed their eyes." They began to write. After a moment or two of watching, I decided to open my notebook. Before delving in, I jotted down the time I should tell them to finish up in case I lost my teacher self in my writing. Then I began.

These students were around five in 2001. I want to know what they think. Not too reverential, I hope. Distanced, maybe. Not sure what to do with it, maybe. I wonder if I touched a nerve. I wonder.

I remember Al running home from his jog on the East River path, calling "turn on the tv!" Just before the second plane hit. I remember us rushing later that afternoon from hospital ER to hospital ER being turned away each time. No blood was needed. Four years before his diagnosis. 

"Time is up," I called. We were sitting in a sort of oval to accommodate the narrow room. "Let's do some reading." I reminded them of the listening rules. "Who wants to start?" As I listened to the first student read his piece, I remembered how hard it is to listen deeply, to quiet one's own thoughts and connect with another's. How one gets caught on a phrase and sets off on a long self-inquiry before remembering to rein oneself in. Settle down, I told my restless mind more than once. Go back and listen.

When it came time to give feedback, I said, "Just the words, phrases, images." A student did just that. So did another. "Good," I said. Another student offered her opinion. I firmly held up my hand. She stopped, and another said a phrase.

We listened to the rest of the readings. Although it wasn't required, all the students wanted to read their Nine-Eleven pieces. As each one finished, all of the rest--including the one who had earlier tried to give her opinion--offered neutral feedback. Go home quickly... I feel the panic... Live in fear. ..Hardened faces... President reading... I'm not sure... Very bad people... We rush home and have lunch. ..Teachers aren't supposed to cry... A mom planning her weekend... Happy to be getting out of school... Shield of grief... Inside domestic terrors... Abandoned... Rules and regulations... Mrs. O'Connor... Campfires of revolutions. ..Your dark hair...

I was feeling satisfied with the results of the lesson on listening. They had all gotten it. Then a student raised her hand. I nodded. "Would you read?" she asked.

I looked down at my page, unsure as any of my students of what I'd just written...and read. I hesitated before reading the last sentence about his diagnosis. But I read that too.

I'd forgotten how it feels to read just-written, unedited writing to a group for the first time. Humbled, I felt layers peeling off, something like soul showing, tenderness not meant for everyone. I lingered on the page, suddenly too shy to look up and meet my students' eyes.

A brief silence...then they began to give feedback. Neutral. I wonder. ..I remember... Running home... Turn off the tv! ...No blood was needed... Finally, someone said,  four years before the diagnosis. Others nodded at that last sentence."Thank you," I said and ushered them on to our next project.

That day still has me thinking. We hide so much of ourselves, our best maybe, in the service of dignity or whatever it is we believe keeps us intact and safe. What would it be like if more of us were to offer, listen, and feed back? I wonder.

Another Wounded Healer Lost: Robin Williams

Robin Williams gave his all when he stepped before a camera. He didn't hide his shadow traits or protect his vanity. We, the public, got to experience the extremes to which we all might yield if we hadn't chosen to separate our private from public, unconscious from conscious selves.Most of us hide our immoderate aspects. We rein in our indulgences and excesses (at least, in public). We take the customary routes to being respected or, at least, accepted.

We use our performers to do what we are afraid to do ourselves. We live safely through them for a few hours at no more cost than the price of admission. And then we go home and leave them to themselves.

Williams was a wounded healer. He brought laughter and empathy to millions, but he could not heal himself. Some people are born that way, porous, unboundaried, deeply connected to the world. What we call inspiration must have felt to him like a barrage of feeling without a turn-off valve.

And what a world he was channeling at the end. Everywhere, people fighting, distrusting, betraying, hating, abusing, and killing. These days, it seems like everyone is somebody's enemy, and the only way to deal is war. I don't have to name the global conflicts; we all know them. Too many are yielding to their basest instincts. This is our zeitgeist in 2014, and it's sickening to us all, whether we know it or not.

Our media rushes to explain Williams' suicide in terms of financial pressures and substance excesses, but that's just our culture reducing the pain of an extraordinary being into the most simplistic, ordinary terms. We want a rationale so we can put the disturbing to rest, and we don't want to work too hard or stretch our imaginations too much to achieve it. We're anxious to move on and forget.

Photographing Stonehenge

I'm thinking about buying a new camera, one of those point-and-shoots, easy to carry, and with creative choices that my iPhone doesn't offer. My old, heavy SLR is a throw-back to an era of burdensome, conspicuous ownership that no longer entices me.

I just returned from a trip to Greece and Turkey without a camera of any kind. I went with the notion that putting a camera between myself and my surroundings would interrupt my experience. I like the naked eye, a preference I first discovered many years ago, after I spent a summer semester in England and had taken a side trip to Stonehenge. Back then I carried another big bulky camera, which hung from my neck like the ancient mariner's albatross.  A telephoto lens counter weighed my backpack. My expensive gear was borrowed, and I bore it with pride.

I took the Stonehenge trip in a heavy rain, hitchhiking with a friend. It stopped before we got to the monoliths, which were made even more picturesque by the mist that surrounded them. As I lumbered with my load through the crowd of tourists, I overheard one say that a week-long pagan ritual had just ended the day before.

There were stanchions that kept the crowds away from the stones. I asked if they had been removed for the ceremonies and was told yes. This piqued my imagination. I thought about the ones in the inner circle who were entrusted with touch and proximity. They were distinct from the rest of us who knew these stones were special only because we had been told. I think now that I used my camera as a shield, its brand (a Nikon, I think) the crest with which I could proclaim not who I was, but who I wanted to be.

I imagined the first group giving back as well as taking from the site. What they gave I wasn't sure. That site of worship had its mysteries and energetic exchanges that I couldn't understand. I belonged to the second group, or maybe that isn't the right word, since we consisted of everyone who didn't belong to the first group. We were less a group than a temporary collection of "others" who had amassed at Stonehenge out of curiosity and cultural longing, with our different beliefs and backgrounds. We would soon disperse and go back where we came from, and that would be that.

Except for our pictures. They were our link. We would all have our pictures when we got home. Along with the others, I held my camera between the stones and myself and clicked away, focusing on light adjustments and shutter speeds, keeping the faith that one or two photos would ultimately please. Someone pointed out that twin rainbows were emerging, which got me to look up. But only for an instant. I didn't want to miss the photo opportunity and quickly knelt on my knees to steady myself as I tried to encompass the stones and the sky with its double rainbow in my limited frame.

Once my roll of film was filled with these rainbow-covered pictures, I felt that my trip was complete. I might not be one of the inner-circle, but I had caught an extraordinary scene. (I didn't stop to think about rainy England with its high rainbow probabilities.) I believed I was moving towards the inside of another group--sophisticated travelers--better than ordinary tourists, although I couldn't have said how.

I'm glad I felt that sense of satisfaction that day because none of those pictures turned out. Back home in the fall, I searched through shot after shot of haze and blackness. Of all of my photographs from that summer, Stonehenge was the only spot that didn't take. Shots of London, the lake district, Westminster, Scotland, Ireland all shined brightly on glossy contact sheets. Only Stonehenge refused to be captured. It was then that I began to think there might be something to the energy in some places in the world. And it was then that I began to distrust photography for its promise of post-gratification.

But that was a long time ago. Now I begin to want the simple fun of cropping a beautiful figure or scene, a garden gate, an open door, a road. So many sensations have passed through me, some remembered, some not. I once again want to relate in another way, giving my love of this life to the things of life itself. Not to try to capture what can never be caught, but to say this is how I saw it that instant and then I moved on.

Passport

Preparing for the trip I just took to Greece and Turkey reminded me that I'll need to renew my passport in a couple of years.  The last time I did that was in 2006, soon after my husband was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. I don't remember a thing about that last renewal. We had no plans for any trips abroad. Our routes were etched between home and hospital, home and doctors' offices. My solo journeys were from home to work and back again.

I had abandoned my own concerns to concentrate on those of my family. Besides Al's illness, I was in charge, long-distance, of my mother's care. It surprises me to think I even noticed that my passport was about to expire. I always kept it in the same place--in the top right-hand drawer of my desk. That's where I keep the things I need to grab quickly. A stapler and remover, scissors, stamps, envelopes. Somehow my passport fits there, even though I've never grabbed it, thrown some things into a carry-on, and hopped a flight to some exotic place at the last minute.

That's the thing about a passport. It holds a place in the imagination for fantasy. It promises the simple pursuits of curiosity and enthusiasm. A safe passage and a safe return. In a word, hope.

Did I have hope then? I lived with my fingers crossed, not quite the same thing. I didn't expect much for my mother. Her dementia was claiming her, little by little. It was too strong for her to fight. But Al was a gifted fighter. Through his intellect and physical strength, I hoped against hope that he would win.

Maybe he reminded me to renew my passport. That seems likely. Before he got too ill, he looked out for me while I looked out for him.

My picture startles me when I open the cover. There is no vanity, no smile. My mouth is open, as if I am gasping. As if I had paused for an instant while running a race. I stare straight ahead, but not at the camera or whoever was behind it. I am staring at nothing or nothingness. It was not good back then for me to pause. I needed to keep moving.

I didn't use that passport for several years. It stayed in my desk drawer until 2009. Since then I've carried it to Israel, France, Ecuador, Turkey, and Greece. It's only when I open its navy blue cover that I see who and what I once had no time to consider.

Every now and then, it isn't a bad thing to come face to face with the wounds that we believe have receded into the past. It reminds us of our strength under pressure and our ability to endure. It helps us appreciate the good in our present. And it gives us the opportunity to cherish our loved ones who have passed.

In a year or so, it will be time to take a new picture to stick on my renewal. So it goes. The story of a life.

Emergency Room Redux

A nasty dog bite sent me to the emergency room on Memorial Day. The first time I went to an emergency room, I was three years old and had blacked out after I'd tried an experiment involving an electrical outlet and a hairpin. What I remember from that trip was my surprise at seeing grown-up strangers wearing pajamas in the public waiting room. All that intimacy among strangers.They seemed to lack the purpose and drive I was used to seeing in adults. Yet, they weren't relaxing, the way my father did when he'd come home from work. They seemed more like me, a child, waiting to be called by whoever was running the place. I wondered, had they done something wrong too?

By the time my husband died seven years ago, I'd become quite familiar with ERs, each one seeming like a clone of the one I knew best at Sloan Kettering. They were all set up similarly. It didn't matter if we were in Pittsfield or Great Barrington or Manhattan, I knew by then what to expect from the many days and nights we had waited in one or another of those rooms. I'd learned to carry a sweat shirt and socks for the frigid temperatures and to give the strangers who shared the room with us some psychic space and pretend privacy. In such close quarters, I'd learned to focus on the television screen eternally blaring the "news," while ignoring the real news--people hurting and dying, new ones each time.

I'd learned to ask if there were any warm blankets for Al, and to offer to get one myself since the staff was too busy with paperwork and other patients. Since his heart hadn't stopped or his breath, or he wasn't bleeding, the wait could be very long. But I can't say that I learned patience. It was suspension that I practiced. Of thought. Of feeling. . . except hope. I never stopped hoping for one more save, until our last visit on his final weekend.

The overcrowded weekends still puzzle me. I can understand gunshot wounds and injuries from drunken brawls or accidents of children home from school, but why do so many people who are just minding their own business get so sick after 5:00 on Fridays until 8:00 Monday mornings? I realize that the answering services of off-duty doctors send them to ERs, but what I mean is why so many?

It's a child's question. The unanswerable why. I hear it from a distance, even though it comes from within. This place of crisis and angst stuns a part of me that apparently hasn't healed or moved on. The best I can do is isolate it and try to back away.

The mind is funny, isn't it, in its insistence on returning to the past. The trauma of the dog bite must have triggered my earlier memories, which remain so vividly real to me. I can't recall much about my recent visit to the emergency room in Hudson. It was practically a non-event. I do remember that I couldn't stop shaking, although it wasn't overly cold in there. My treatment was some minor cleaning, bandaging, and medication. My wait was short and my stay over quickly. Except for the scabs that are all that remain from the puncture wounds on my leg, no one would be able to tell it happened.

Red Geraniums

Every year, towards the end of May when the possibility of sudden frost has passed, I buy eight red geraniums to plant in my kitchen window boxes. It's a mindless excursion--just what I need to mark the end of a mentally draining school year. I chose my flowers by my senses. Like a hummingbird I let myself be drawn to the red of the moment. Some years it has a hint of orange. Some years blue.

But it's always red. When I moved into my house fifteen years ago, I was seduced by pinks and mauves, but unlike red, those colors don't hold the light. They don't draw my eye the second I turn the last bend of my driveway and glimpse home. They don't glow from a distance or blend into the weathered gray cedar siding. No consensus building here!

I want to be surprised by an opened bud when I l glance through my kitchen window. Bright and crisp, it has made it into this world where every element has to be just right to foster its growth. A cultivated flower in a root-bound setting, but you wouldn't know it to see it in all its stubborn radiance.

Color, life, growth--and all I have to do is add water.

The Place of In-Between

The newly-mowed grass, three days of rain, and a robin's nest in the crook of the birch tree outside my bedroom window all signal to my senses that I've moved into the new season of spring. The semester's over, but my brain hasn't stopped rehashing course work and final grades. At night my sleep in still troubled by self-interrogation. What went well? What needs adjusting for the next time I teach?

It will take some time to realize where I am--the in-between. I don't yet feel right in my spring season. I'm nervously anticipating the coming days when my self-discipline and sloth fight it out head to head. I'm wondering which will win out in summer 2014. And I'm still not free from my tightly-committed semester, when it seemed like every minute required being in two places at once.

Meditation would help, but right now nothing could convince me to sit still, contemplate my breath, and watch my thoughts arise only to let them go. I'm in no state to do that. . .yet. Like a racer who has just passed the finish line, my adrenaline is still pumping, fooling me into believing there are more laps to run.

It's taken me years of practice to even recognize this place of in-between, let alone attempt to dwell in it with some effort towards patience. It's stressful letting go of the known only to move into not knowing how things will turn out. I want to get it over with and move on to something tangible and nameable. Something other than the uncertain, out-of-focus present before my self-directed work begins. Or doesn't--it's up to me.

I tell myself that this state of in-between, as uncomfortable as it is, is where insights arise. I know this from experience. There I am buried under the oblivion of doubt and regrets, when suddenly I see a new, clear perspective that's just right for the present moment. Maybe I even need the distraction of chaotic feeling to let the shift happen. Each time it's a revelation to me that my mind has been active behind the scene, puzzling and creating new paradigms.

Just now for a more pleasant distraction while the gears turn in the background, I'm heading out into this breezy spring morning to the farmer's market to buy red geraniums.

On Turning Sixty-Five

Maybe it was the card I got from the government that got me to start telling my age again. I had taken a five-year hiatus from blurting it out, starting when I turned sixty. Before then I'd had no trouble, even been proud to declare I was forty and fifty and fifty-five. But sixty bested me. I found myself smiling and keeping mum when the opportunity arose for me to reveal my age in any conversation.

Without forethought or intention I went into a closet, where I hid an essential part of myself. What some might call discretion--no big deal--felt to me like a lie. I was no age or any age, but I was not my actual age. I left it to others to guess, assuming (hoping) that they would guess I was younger.

I tried to rationalize that a person's age should have nothing to do with shame or pride. Shouldn't those feelings be a result of our actions? But I realized that those "shoulds" meant that my argument had a weak foundation. I needed to focus on what "is" and not what "should be." Just like any other closeted person, I felt ashamed of myself for being, well, for being myself. In this case that meant being over sixty or just plain old.

You'd think I'd have known better. After all, I understood first-hand the alternative to getting old. In a previous five-year span, I'd lived through the deaths of my husband, mother, and father.  But what had been upper-most in my mind then--that life is precious and too, too brief--got buried under the cultural stereotypes of aging.

Despite such exemplary models of aging as Susan Sarandon, who seems immune to type-casting, and Jane Fonda, who exposes her own conflicts for the edification of us all, I let myself be swayed by the voice of television. I had used tv as an escape from the loneliness of bereavement, perceiving it as "white noise." But its constant and consistent message had gotten to me. Whether as "news," drama, talk, or advertisement, it calls anyone over sixty old, elderly, a senior citizen. It sells potions and creams for fine lines and signs of aging to thirty-year-olds, played by twenty-year-old actors. (Notice it's "signs of aging." They don't use the word "wrinkles" any more. The mere mention of "aging" is enough for us to react in fear and reach for our wallets.)

I bought what it was selling and paid for it with my hard-won knowledge. But I'm reclaiming it now. However I look to others, I'm sixty-five years old. Sometimes I feel just that age, and I like it because I have glimpses into what life is about for me. Sometimes I feel much older than my years with my intimate knowledge of cancer and dementia, care taking and the deaths of those closest to me. Sometimes I feel very young with much still to learn about life's mysteries and my own path.

Whatever it was that snapped me out of my cultural enchantment (that Medicare card?), I'm glad to be awake and struggling to be authentic. I suppose that struggle is a funny thing to be happy about, but it means that I'm alive, evolving, and looking forward to the next challenge.

The Best We Could Do

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

W. H. Auden

Last week my college sponsored a Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust. It took place in the students' cafeteria, and the first part was the reading of the names of the dead. They were children mostly, no older than 17, many much younger. The participants were instructed to read the names slowly and not to worry about mispronunciations. The eastern European names with all those consonants butting up against one another tends to trip up an American tongue.

Each volunteer read from the list for fifteen minutes. I was the last to read, arriving after my morning class. The crowded cafeteria was buzzing with the students' conversations. It took me a minute to locate the speaker at the very back of the room. She was standing behind a podium with the microphone turned down low, so as not to interfere with the studying, texting, and talking of the students.

I sat down at a table besides the podium and strained to listen to her reading of the names and ages of the kids killed in the Holocaust. As I listened I watched the kids in the cafeteria. Most were utterly absorbed in their own business. It was, after all, the week after spring break and close to the end of the semester. The pressure on them was intense. They had projects to finish and finals to take. They had summer jobs to find and, for some, graduation and its afterlife loomed. Their minds were in the future, not the past.

A few students who sat near the podium looked up occasionally from their iPhones to watch the speaker for a quick moment before diving back into their personal screens. I wondered why they had chosen those seats. They may not have had a choice and had to take the only seats left in the cafeteria, the ones that the kids who got there first had avoided.

When my turn came to read, I stepped behind the podium and considered the final few pages. All of the family names began with W. There were groupings of siblings or relatives who had shared the same last name. The speaker before me had read the age of each victim as a number, and I wondered if the kids in the cafeteria understood that these were children who had been executed. I had decided that when my turn came to read, I would say ¨five years old¨ instead of just ¨five¨ or whatever the age for each child, but somehow when I spoke I didn't deviate from the previous format. I was frustrated with myself for locking into a mode that had already failed to wake up this potential audience.

Or maybe some of them were awake and thinking of other genocides that had no acknowledgement or memorial service. Other genocides. Multiple genocides. Their innocent dead. That's enough to put anyone back to sleep or make them want to escape into the tasks at hand.

I stumbled many times as I spoke the names. My speech sounded too quick and monotonous to my ear. Those names should have been sung or chanted. Or echoed. Or cried. But I did none of those things.

In years past the ceremony was held in the school auditorium. It may have been moved because of a conflicting event, but more likely the reason was low attendance or no attendance. I myself have skipped it in the past because I was too busy, too tired, or not in the mood. On this day, in fact, I felt somewhat self-congratulatory for participating. I tried to kick away that feeling to make room for something more comfortable--solemnity or sanctity--but that was too much. I had to make do with just showing up, standing, and speaking to an indifferent crowd.

On this day passive reception had to suffice for us all. I, with my contradictory thoughts and conflicting feelings. The students, with their overwhelming projects and fears for the future. All of us consciously or not, absorbed some essence of those children, aged one and four and seven--all the way to seventeen. Their names washed over us. Maybe for a brief time they connected us. It was the best we could do.

A Good Time to Remember

Last week we made a Seder for 28 people at my house. My nephew flew in from LA. David's relatives drove great distances for the day, despite the predictions for rain and snow. I started shopping weeks before, and cooked brisket, kugel, and chopped liver the previous weekend. Our friends brought the chicken soup and matzoh balls, tsimmes, and desserts. On borrowed tables and chairs, our blended family and friends followed the Exodus story in their Maxwell House Haggadahs.

There are more enlightened versions of the Haggadah around these days, but this was the one my parents, aunts, and uncles used, so that's the one I wanted to use. The history of my family, more than of the Israelites, was on my mind even before the Seder began. As I chopped and diced, I played the radio in memory of my mother, who used to sing while she cooked for holiday meals--all four burners going at once. Onions sizzling in a saute pan. Soup simmering. Fruit stewing. Water whistling in the kettle. When I sent David out to the market for one more piece of brisket, just in case, I remembered Mom fretting that there wouldn't be enough.

As I worried about the logistics of seating and serving 28 guests in my less-than-accommodating living room, I thought of her fitting her shopping, cleaning, and cooking into the hours from her full-time bookkeeping job. I don't recall her inviting more than twelve people at a time--the limit of her good china service and dining room table with all of the leaves inserted, but still... Had she ever awakened in the middle of the night with hives, as I did the week before, wondering if she hadn't overreached?  Or if all that brisket would turn out dry? Or how the weather would affect attendance?  The term "event planner" hadn't yet been created, but that was surely what she was, among her many other responsibilities at the office and at home.

And yet, all of her labors were secondary to the main event. Back in the 50s, the men took center stage for the Passover Seder, lecturing and leading the pre-meal service and deciding when everyone could finally eat. It was my father or uncle who called on a child to ask one of the four questions or an adult to read a passage that he chose for them from the Haggadah. I remember wondering, as a young girl, how he knew what should be read and what skipped from all that heavy text. There were some variations depending on the leader. Yet each man led with grave certainty. No one judged his choices, although I wondered at the time--how did he know? Had his authority been sealed in him pre-birth? Or was it the natural outcome of his Hebrew education, which was mandatory for boys only? In either case the men in my family accepted their roles and the women supported them.

David and I recreated this old act, he leading the Seder, I working behind the scenes. I didn't feel any particular impulse to resist these traditional roles for the few days of this holiday, although I would have in years past. I'd have insisted on sharing the spotlight in the spirit of gender equality. But so much has changed since I was a child. Life gave me answers to many of my questions. And then more questions. And understanding beyond both.

I was content to cook my versions of my mother's recipes and set the tables with pieces of her old china and silver interspersed among my own. I was pleased to provide a home for new memories. The ones who are gone lived with us that night. Maybe they always do, but I felt them, worrying, struggling, feeding, and loving us.

Phone Addiction in the Classroom

Now that spring break has begun at my college, I have some space to catch my breath and reflect on the semester. This has been a trying time for us all--students and teachers alike--from flu, bad weather, and compressed schedules due to snow days. It's been more draining than usual.

For me, some of the strain has come from the growing number of students who are glued to their phones. They can't put them down--not to participate in class nor to look where they're going in the hallways. They've more or less vacated the premises.

It seems as if every year the number of phone addicts increases, and this semester has been the worst. They will not be pried from their lifelines. Even my best students sneak a peek from time to time. The slackers don't or can't hide it. They sit in class in plain sight, riveted to the ethereal light glowing from their hands or laps. It seduces and then swallows them, their eyes first, followed by their spirits and minds, until all that remains in the classroom are their vacant shells and empty smiles.

I've tried humoring, lecturing, and scolding them, but they will not be deterred. I know one professor who collects all phones and tablets and keeps them in a basket during her graduate seminar in musicology. Her students may not like her Draconian measures, but they have a crucial stake in pleasing her. There's a good possibility that she'll be writing recommendations for them or referring them for jobs, so they comply.

I don't think confiscation would work with my students, many of whom are taking my literature courses as a requirement for completing their degree programs in art, design, business, or technology. The hard-core among them might revolt. I've considered marking them absent--or half-absent, since their bodies are present. I suppose they should be given some credit for hoisting themselves up from wherever they're parked (bed, floor) and making their way to a seat in my classroom.

I'm thinking of going into my classes after spring break visibly clasping my own phone. I'll stop intermittently during the lesson I'm teaching to gaze rapturously into the screen and lapse into long, deep silences. I imagine ignoring the class while I count in my head to 60 or 100. I don't think I could hold out much longer than that.

I wonder if I could make an impact. If somehow I could create a teaching moment about engagement and disengagement. About role reversal and empathy. I'd like them to ponder how their phone addiction distorts their thought patterns and corrupts their brain cells, but I'd be happy if they managed to glimpse all the lost hours that they will never regain while there is still time for a correction. Carpe diem, the term they learn in my literature lessons, relates to their very own young and fleeting lives.

Sanctuary

My dear friend is in the early months of widowhood. When we spoke this weekend she mentioned how relieved she was to get home after work. She turns on the television to something mindless and watches, but not the screen, the hours pass. It's her relief.

I wanted to say it would get better, but for me it hasn't. It's been nearly seven years since Al died and I have a full, busy life, but I still need my solitary and, yes, mindless hours. I wish I could say that I use the time to meditate or reflect, but it isn't that. It's more like needing a recharge for my run-down battery.

I can't speak for my friend, but for me one of the reasons for this need for sanctuary might be an intimate knowledge of  bereavement. As the years go by I tend to forget that most of the people I spend my days with are innocents. They haven't had their minds and spirits altered by the early death of a partner or child. We all look the same and carry out the same tasks at work, but we aren't. We're sure of different things. We're influenced by different beliefs. Living along side those invisible differences takes a lot out of a person.

And there's the high alert state that preceded our loved one's death and which never fully dissipated after he died. I long for refuge from that. I still find myself agitated by the most petty events, those I believe I can control and those I can't. Will the Time Warner cable guy stand me up again and waste another day of my life? Will the melting mountain of snow at the top of the driveway flood my basement? Will I accomplish the week's tasks (the ones Al used to do plus the ones I always did) that need doing and which I forgot to write down? Which ones are critical? Which ones are not? I can't always seem to distinguish between the two. They can all feel like issues of life and death to me.

Not everyone copes with bereavement in the same way. Some keep super busy, finding forgetfulness in ultra multi-tasking. Some take to drink, drugs, or the internet. Some are quick to superimpose new loves or child substitutes over the ones they lost.  But I only see their activities from the outside and can't know if they serve to satisfy,  distract, or further sicken the spirit.

It's a lousy position to be in, anyway. Whatever gets us through our dark night or decade of the soul is what our instincts lead us to do. My self-imposed inactivity is no better or worse. No, I can't tell my friend that it will pass. It lessens, but then sometimes it reappears in its full force, brought on by who knows what? Anniversaries. Holidays. Memories. Dreams.

Sidetracked

I lost last week to a head cold. I ignored it as well as I could. Tried writing entries, but my words made no sense to me. I couldn't tell whether my writing was off or my reading of it, but it didn't matter. I believed I couldn't post what I myself couldn't follow.

My mind wasn't working right. My higher mind, I should say. I couldn't follow myself in the ways that I've trained and practiced. By which I mean a sort of witnessing, somewhat objective, but leaning towards encouragement and positive critiques--like a good coach. When my developed consciousness is functioning on that level, I'm discerning, yet kind. I get out of my own way.

But I was sick. My spaciness stressed me. When I am stressed I retreat. When I retreat I regress. (Note the eternal present. It's a pattern it's taken me a mere 64 years to recognize, sometimes.)

When I regress, I don't want to be too visible to the outside world. It isn't safe when I don't have my wits about me. I fall back into my parents' beliefs that the world is never safe, not for an instant, that one must live defensively. This means in private and invisibly.

My parents were first-generation Americans. They shared a perspective developed by hearing their parents remember the violence of pogroms and conscriptions back in the Ukraine at the turn of the twentieth century. My parents' beliefs were reinforced by their experience of the Depression, their understanding of the Holocaust, and decades of overt prejudice against Jews right here in the United States. I shudder as I write the word. Jews. I hear my mother's loud whisper, "Sh-h! Don't tell!" As if our origins weren't apparent through our name--Letofsky. It always was apparent, and what she and my father wished for wasn't really invisibility. Their highest hope was to be ignored, left alone to live in peace.

This is not an optimum background for a writer, for this writer, anyway. For some writers, this very same family friction enhances their creativity and productivity. But my temperament made me fiercely loyal to my family's world view, at my own expense. "Be quiet! Don't say a word!" Refocusing my loyalty towards my work has been a major challenge in my life. It's almost second nature now. Maybe second and a half nature.

But when I'm "not myself" because of sickness or other stressful situations (like what's happening right now in Kiev, near where my grandparents lived), I fall back into the old ways. Don't look at me. Don't read my words. Leave me alone. Let me live in peace.

The thing is, living in peace could mean keeping out of everybody else's way, like my parents thought. Or it could mean living how I need to live--visibly and verbally--in trust, even when I'm not sure that I'm making sense.

The Flurry Festival

The Flurry is an annual event that takes place in Saratoga, New York. It's held on Valentine's Day weekend--a perfect time for everyone to immerse themselves in live music and dance. Singles and couples are welcomed, and the overlapping sessions are set up to encourage everyone to join in the fun.

Even in winters less harsh than this one has been, we all need some bucking up for our sagging spirits. Outside, it's relentlessly gray and cold. All the eating and drinking holidays have been over for more than a month. February slumps in its middle, and spring is just an idea without substance.

 Enter the Flurry Festival, where the spirit of inclusion and celebration abounds. Participants range from toddlers to the elderly. Highly-skilled musicians of all stripes accompany the multiple sessions of dance. Those who aren't booked come to make music with their peers. Impromptu concerts spring up in corridors and corners.

Walking through the corridors of the Hilton and City Center, we hear chamber and classical music, country reels, folk, swing, bluegrass, and Zydeco. As a novice, I can't name all of the kinds of music I hear or identify all of the instruments. The sounds of reeds, strings, and percussion surround us wherever we go from Friday night to Sunday afternoon.

We have our choice of dance sessions. We go to hour-long lessons in contra, Cajun, hip hop, waltz, and country dancing from different nations and cultures. Some sessions are unstructured, offering the space and music for more experienced dancers to let loose.

When we are tired, we find a lesson to observe from the chairs on the perimeter of the room. Sometimes we decide to get up and give a new dance a try. Sometimes we watch, contently, until rested, we find another place to dance.

Or we walk through those music-filled corridors and plop down to listen to jam sessions. They expand before our eyes. What starts as a duet or trio draws more and more musicians. On Saturday morning, we pass a group of about ten violinists on our way to check out a session called Waltzes by Women. When we pass that way again later, the number of violinists has grown to forty plus.

It's a privilege to be at this unusual event. Whether listening or dancing with it, music is magic, lifting us from the midwinter doldrums.

Check out flurryfestival.org  to see what you missed and plan for next year.