On Rage and Writing

One of the best parts of having a quartet of parents, as well as a large group of in-laws, family, and friends, is always having moments of support and inspiration. 

Yesterday, I have to admit, I did not write. Not one single word. What I did do, though, was spend most of the day with my mom and sister. Days with family are so precious to me - made even more valuable, I think, because I remember so clearly being a teenager, going through that difficult period of distancing which, while natural, is fairly unpleasant. I think you probably know what I mean: being that age comes with a fair amount of hubris (I know better than you, Mom), denial (Ugh, Mom, you just don't get me!), and a longing for the easy rapport of childhood (Mom, why don't you understand me anymore?). 

That was a rough patch. A very long, rough patch, an adolescence during which I experienced the normal growing up stuff as well as the manifestations of bipolar disorder. So, when I was diagnosed at nineteen and went home to live with my family, I was relieved not only to be thinking more clearly through therapy and medication, but also to find myself redeveloping a close, friendly relationship with my parents. 

All of this is to bring me back to yesterday, when my mom and I waited for my sister to come home and talked for an hour. 

We discussed a lot of things, many of which I am still mulling over and reconsidering, which I believe is the hallmark of good conversation. Something stuck with me, though, as I attempted to pick up the iPad and return to my daily practice this morning and found myself rusty and intimidated (yes, even after one day): 

What is my relationship with writing?

And, beyond that seemingly simple question, there are more:

How does my bipolar disorder interact with a continued practice? 

What habits have I developed - maybe procrastination, insecurity, guilt over things undone?

How can I view my disorder as natural, or even a gift, when it comes to creativity?

That last, I think, is very important. Yesterday, I found myself describing to my mother what I've come to think of as a predictable cycle - muted by meds and therapy, but still characterized by ups and downs. 

I've usually got about two months in each cycle, and it has become routine enough that I know what's going to happen and when. First comes a week or so of recovery, getting back into the swing of things, as it were, with a daily goal or inspiration, whether it be cleaning or writing or crafting. Then comes a week, or if I am lucky, two, of intense activity. 

I feel like, at this point, I should briefly define mania. Wikipedia, of course, has a whole article on the subject, but the most relevant tidbits to me are as follows: mania is characterized by abnormally elevated moods and energy levels; it is, sometimes, the opposite of depression; bipolar disorder can only be diagnosed if mania is present; the word, mania, derives from the Greek word which means madness and frenzy, and its verb form, "to be mad, to rage, to be furious."

My post earlier this week held clear examples of that second stage. I wrote 20,066 words in seven days. I mean, come on, if that isn't mania, I don't know what is. Obviously my mania now as opposed to the unchecked highs of my teenage years is a bit different - before, it was usually mixed, with a lot of pain tangled up in my creativity. Now, I charge head first into an activity and keep going, spending whole days completely invested in creating things (hair ornaments, workout plans, recipes, novels, poetry collections, you name it). And those days are very happy days. 

And then it tapers off - it all gets a bit more difficult, and those things I had been enjoying so effortlessly become an obligation. Slogging through something you love but which somehow has become dull, challenging, is a lot different than being able to achieve lofty goals without even trying. 

And then, the slump. I still get stuff done, sure, but I feel stupid and insecure and frivolous. 

And then I get back on the roller coaster and start it all again. 

I have to say I feel a bit nutty in describing this so publicly - I feel like this post needs a big disclaimer - I am not a crazy person, or, I am actually quite stable, thanks. But I think this is all important considering my questions on creativity and my experiences with inspiration and daily practice.  

Bringing all of those factors back to my conversation with my mother - an open, honest exchange of ideas, emotions, and support - I still find myself worrying over this cycle and how it can be turned from an involuntary process into a wonderful catalyst for my creative life. In other words, just because I know a slump is coming doesn't mean that I have to view my elevated moods as an inevitable symptom of mental illness. Rather, I could see myself as lucky that I am able to achieve in a week what might take a month or two had I not bipolar disorder. 

And the support I receive from family and friends during my productive phases - linked though it is to progress on a novel or my business - actually carries over into the days when I am not as energized, not as frenzied. My parents and grandparents, husband and in-laws, close friends and acquaintances, don't stop cheering for me when I find it difficult to cheer for myself. 

Again, I find myself thinking that I am lucky, because even in slumps and feelings of foolishness I know I can achieve things and I know that there are always people ready with kind words and affection. 

So maybe, when trying to answer the question of how my disorder is part and parcel of my creativity, I can view the chemicals of my brain not as a curse but as an incredible gift which allows me to make new things and strengthen my relationships with the people I love most. 

This morning I looked at the ever increasing document holding my romance novel and had a moment of thinking, can I really do this? It was so easy two days ago, so why is it intimidating today? Isn't this all a bit of silliness rather than a worthwhile piece of fiction?  

But then I remembered what I had talked about with my mother, how I had told her that I was trying to use my cycle of ups and downs to my advantage. And, though I didn't type out the four thousand or so words I had been able to just a few days before, I got in four more pages. It wasn't easy. But I did it. 

As always, I'm trying to remind myself that having bipolar disorder - that it's not all that I am. Even in slumps I can still call myself a writer, the founder of a home business, a pianist, a cook, and the handful of other things I enjoy and practice. And I remind myself that my bipolar disorder can be a source of great inspiration and happiness and achievement. 

And I am grateful, so grateful, to the people who help me with their support - on good days, bad days, and days of madness and fury. 

Fun, Pleasure, and Writing a Novel

Let me tell you - after six days and sixty-three pages, it surprises no one more than myself that I am writing a romance novel. 

The romance genre is pretty well known for unmitigated dreck, I think. We've all seen the paperbacks by the checkout - you know, bosoms and fluffy shirts and handsome princes with long, flowing hair. I've tried reading some traditional romance novels, and most of the time I couldn't get through them without giggling, or couldn't get through them at all. I'm not trying to make light of any writer's work, of course - after four years of training in "literary fiction," and after realizing that in general, that's not what people wanted to read, I've come to the conclusion that every writer, as long as they are having fun writing, deserves the space and respect to practice their craft. 

I admit, I have, in the past, said some pretty negative things about popular fiction. As much as I am grateful for the education I received from Hopkins, I also graduated with a healthy dose of snootiness, which I very much regret. I was unpleasant about a lot of books, and it took me a while to unclench my snobbery to realize the value of, a) reading for fun, and, b) writing for pleasure. 

This is not to say that I had never read anything other than literary fiction. Far from it. 

My teenage years were filled with fantasy novels, primarily, and (I'll come totally clean here) quite a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction. 

Like, a lot. A lot. 

I read and adored Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel novels, which were filled with adventure and romance, the alternate-history heroine trekking the globe and saving the world. I pored over them multiple times - still do, in fact, because I read all nine books set in that universe at least once a year - and I wanted to be a part of that world of language and rescues and pretty solid chunks of naughty stuff. 

What can I say? I was fifteen. 

I regularly read what one might call, "transformative works," a fancy name for fanfiction, until four in the morning. Hermione Granger in Rome, Cairo, Paris; Severus Snape and his pet snake, Esmé; Draco Malfoy, polyjuiced into a rat with a penchant for dancing to the Beatles.

Yeah. 

And not for one minute, when I was that age, did I stop myself and turn up my nose and think, ugh, what dreck. 

That reaction I learned later. 

As I said, I've been trying to break that habit. Slowly but surely I've turned back to genre fiction and honestly, I've been enjoying the heck out of it. Some series I return to again and again, some I drop (oh, Anita Blake, what happened to you?), some I start up because my husband gets into them. 

I'm lucky to have a stepmom who loves genre fiction and has always wanted to share it with me. She bought me my first copy of The Golden Compass (long gone, now, which is what happens when you read in the bath) and let me borrow The Mists of Avalon (which I also should not have read in the bath). 

I'm lucky to have a husband who has always read different kinds of books - some science fiction, some thriller, some espionage, some mystery - and who possesses not one bit of pretension. Without him, I never would have read the Camel Club series, or the Dresden novels. 

But I never thought I could write genre. Part of that was the attitudes of the JHU writing program, and part of it was my own insecurity - I think that because I loved genre novels, really loved them, I was convinced that I would never be able to live up to Carey, Hamilton, Pullman, Bradley, Baldacci, Butcher. 

So, you know, I fooled around with James Joyce's language. I tried to call upon Chekhov's understated pain and humor. And it just - 

It wasn't fun. 

I think I probably wrote sixty pages and more at Hopkins - but all different pieces, all shorts. I'd try to start a novel occasionally and ended up staring at my computer screen, stumped. I loved writing, but it wasn't something I could power through or a level of energy I could maintain; I think I wrote well, but I didn't write for myself. I couldn't get out of my own head - almost everything I wrote was semi-biographical, and if I thought I was being subtle I was, I'm sure, very naive and completely transparent. 

That brings me to today. Because for the first time, I'm not writing about myself, and I'm not writing because I have to. 

I'm writing for fun. 

Writing is awesome. 

So what I'm writing now - it could definitely be called "dreck." But I'm enjoying the hell out of it, and I'm starting to form a new relationship with my writing which is revealing what I want to write, want to share. 

The books and fic I loved as a kid - they're about relationships. Yes, there's action and plot and drama in all of them, but even the Camel Club series is about friendship and the inter-connected emotional lives of fully fleshed out characters. A lot of the relationships I enjoyed reading about were - what's the word - unconventional? Whether through magic or sexuality, the people in my favorite books had complicated lives and complicated loves. 

If you think 50 Shades is weird, you should look at some of the stuff on my bookshelf. 

And, even, if all goes well, read my novel. 

So yeah, I'm writing some pretty out there stuff, and if I were back at school and tried to turn it in, it would not go over well, to say the least. Part of me is a bit embarrassed about it - this is so not how I thought I would reach 16,000 words and counting - but another part is pretty happy because spending four hours a day or more on romance is a lot better than staring at a blank computer screen, trying to sound like Dostoyevsky. (Though my stuff has always leaned towards the Henry Miller side of things.)

Tomorrow, I will have been writing every day for an entire week. I'm hoping to hit 20,000 words before I head out for a night on the town with my best friend, raise a toast to myself for sticking with it. 

And I'm hoping to just keep having fun. 

And maybe, this time next year, I can turn this weird, out there, magical, genre, romance novel into a book by the checkout. 

Expectations

I love being a big sister. 

Yesterday I was able to chaperone a group of kids, including my sister and one of her best friends, on a trip to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Festival. Now, if you know anything about me, you probably knew or could have guessed that I am a huge renfaire geek - so naturally sis and I were dressed up in garb and ready to roll. 

This baffled a lot of children - I can't tell you how many people asked me for directions at the faire, or whether I worked there. The idea that a grownup could dress up for fun was utterly mystifying to a lot of these kids. Most of them had never been to a renaissance festival before, and I think they couldn't imagine a world in which adults wanted to pretend for a day. It made me think about expectations - my experience growing up led me to believe that dressing up was not only enjoyable but sometimes mandatory (see my Anglican priests in their gold-tinged vestments). These kids didn't have the same experiences, so their expectation of what adults do was entirely different from mine. 

But these kids had expectations of their own. 

When I was little, going to the faire, I heard a lot of things, from recorders to hammered dulcimers to cannon blast and gunshots. I knew the music and I knew what blank ammunition sounded like. It scared me at first, sure, to see a man pull out a pistol and shoot somebody (who of course, didn't bleed) but soon enough I figured out that it was pretend, just like their costumes and renfaire personas. 

The kids I watched over yesterday initially found that music boring, but when they heard the gunshots, the cannons, they immediately stopped talking. Some of them ducked. Some of them hit the ground as if their lives depended on it. 

I am not exaggerating. These reactions were those kids' expectations - this was what you were supposed to do. 

As for me, I felt a shiver of foreboding when I saw that these children - elementary and middle schoolers - already knew how to react to the sound of a gunshot. Not just foreboding - maybe even shame. Because a world in which children have any understanding of this kind of violence means that we have failed them, that we have created a space of constant danger and fear. A space they live in every day. 

How many times do we have to explain to our children what's happening on the news? How many duck and cover drills, how many shelter in place routines do they have to endure before it becomes normal or even expected? I remember my first shelter in place experience - and it wasn't when I was little, but when I was teaching. A classroom full of first graders huddled away from the doors and windows, utterly silent, and none of them were moved by it but I most certainly was. They grew up with it, were growing up in a world of school shootings, domestic violence, domestic terrorism. 

Was I naive, as a little girl, to not think that this stuff could happen to me - or was I just incredibly lucky?

Some people might look at the kids I was chaperoning and assume - because of their economic backgrounds, their race, whatever - that they were naturally exposed to more violence. Statistics of urban gun crimes are thrown out there by common citizens and politicians as an explanation of why gun control doesn't work, as if there's a class of people (read: usually poor, usually minority) who just have to accept, just have to take the blame for pathetic gun laws and routine apathy. As if being Black, or being poor, or being generally disenfranchised and disrespected meant that gun violence was normal. 

As if it were expected. 

But I'll tell you now, those kids were more influenced by school shootings than by "urban gun violence." It wasn't just some subset of kids who got quiet and scared - it was all of them. All of them were living in a world of violent expectations. 

And that's what scares me. 

Those people who allow and even, by their inaction, endorse gun violence in the lives of little children can't see what happens to those kids. Can't see that they are good kids - that my sister's best friend loved the storyline at the faire and couldn't wait to go home so that she could play pretend and shout, "God save the Queen!" with her dolls the way she had been coached by actresses in pretty dresses. They can't see a group of kids from every background run up onstage to dance to the recorder and guitar - even though they had never heard that kind of music before, even though people were watching. They won't allow themselves to notice that these little people who spend their dollars on fake, furry mustaches and run around still wanting to play dress up are the same little people who live in a world of Columbine and Sandy Hook and who know how to duck when they hear gunshots. 

Expectations. How did I end up with garb, and they ended up with violence? 

I love being a big sister - wouldn't trade it for the world. I just wish that I could turn back the clock for this generation of children and bring them into a world without school shootings, mall shootings, movie theatre shootings. And I wish, so much, that our lawmakers could help to make that happen. 

We had a great day at the faire, and I can't help but think that maybe things would be better if I could have kept all those kids there, where bullets were blanks and cannons shot fireworks. 

Bodies

My last blog post was rife with the word, bodies. 

And I can't quite get that out of my head. 

When I was my sister's age, I was a Style Channel devotee. This was back in the halcyon days when said channel actually addressed fashion - more often than not, I could turn on the television and see actual runway shows. I was thirteen - I liked to sketch out costumes and leather corsets and replicas of period drama's full skirts and luscious curves. 

I was thirteen. I went to a private school where everyone knew about that one girl who was in the hospital for an undisclosed eating disorder, where buying uniforms was parting with hundreds of dollars and seeing a girl in the mirror who wanted to be an extra small. 

There are so many threads to that tangle, so many little bits of life which eventually form disordered eating. Believe it or not, most women endure some element of disordered eating - and how can we not? Thinking about those models and clothes on the Style Channel, thinking about advertisements with thin women eating fat free yogurt and giggling, thinking about the picture on the packaging of a bathroom scale, stuck permanently on 125 pounds - how can we not be disordered, even a little bit? 

But of course, there's so much more than that.

I know that food was always a challenge for me. I had an allergy we hadn't discovered, so eating often resulted in stomach problems. We had a limited budget, and while my parents definitely tried to (and succeeded in) putting food on the table I knew, despite my young age, that food was money, that money was a problem, that Chinese takeout meant a paycheck and red beans and rice didn't. Not eating seemed easier. 

And being popular was a challenge. I had never been overweight one day of my life, but once I got to middle school I learned hard lessons - I learned that I was terrible at sports (fat), that my body (as yet undeveloped) needed a bra to be acceptable (fat), that the pretty girls wore small uniforms (fat), that girls got more attention by passing out with hunger than by adeptly analyzing poetry (fat). I went to a very well known private school for girls, and the number one lesson I learned was the calorie count of yogurt in the cafeteria and how to get all of those pretty girls to ask me how to lose weight. Because, well, I did. I think that's the one thing I did perfectly. 

Going to high school? I was so excited because no one would be able to know when I didn't eat. I saw myself, somehow grown up between eighth grade and ninth, slugging back espresso and talking with friends and never letting on, never revealing, never showing that I stayed up late to eat Frosted Flakes at midnight because sugar was the only thing which kept me going. I'd stick to my ten grams of fat per day and eat cereal in the dark because no one, no one could see me eat. 

My mom just posted a brilliant piece on underage drinking in Howard County. It garnered a lot of attention, and rightly so. Underage drinking - or, more worrying to me, binge drinking - is a huge issue for people my sister's age and a bit older, and I applaud her for tackling such an important problem. But - or rather, and - there are other things I worry about. 

My sister has never been overweight a day in her life. 

I've been through a lot - I've done the underage drinking thing with gusto, I've made mistakes with boys, I've self-harmed, I've been through bipolar disorder and keep going through it. I've done drugs (very, very minimally, and very much as a youthful reaction to my disorder) and I've been pretty stupid about a lot of things. But there's this terror which I can't shake and which I pray to God will never touch my sister, and that's eating cereal in the middle of the night because somewhere in the back of your mind you know that if you don't you might die. 

I didn't want to die. I wanted to live for my sister, then just born, because I didn't want the last thing she saw of me to be a picture of my too-thin body. A body which didn't even look like me. A body which fit in with the Style Channel and yogurt and scales but not with my incredible love for her. 

But I wouldn't eat. 

That's what scares me - and I'm scared of all of it, too, the drinking, the Adderall, the Oxy, the boyfriends, the girlfriends, the bullying, the rape, the hate crimes, even the freaking internet - but I'm so, so scared of my beautiful baby, my literal life saver, thinking that she is fat. 

Maybe we could de-stigmatize bodies. Maybe a girl of thirteen could buy uniforms in a medium and know that she would grow into them perfectly. Maybe we could keep our daughters out of hospitals and model whole body and mental health. Maybe the image on the box can show a scale reading a higher number, or lots of numbers, or just a smile; maybe we can have all sorts of bodies on runways, bodies of different shapes and different colors with thick or thin hair and muscles and yeah, a little fat. 

Maybe we could also do away with this image of what women are supposed to be, or what real women are supposed to be. Imagine - we could be moms and sisters and grandmas and aunts and not hate our bodies like we've been taught and instead teach our children to love theirs. We could be naturally thin or naturally not and have it all be okay, have our daughters and sisters and granddaughters and nieces see us as we are, beautiful. See themselves as beautiful. 

I remember what it was like to be thirteen, and I wouldn't wish that on anybody. What I do wish? 

I wish that my sister had better role models than the people on the Style Channel. Or on Nickelodeon. Or on Disney. 

I wish I could be her role model and finally, finally, feel like my body is something to be loved. 

Learn

What have we learned?

If you're like me, you've probably seen - on Facebook, on news sites - countless references to today's date and the anniversary of a terrible moment in time. I know the blogosphere has blown up with posts about today, and videos and memes and repeated tragic ephemera have set the tone for us all to examine not only our memories but our present life. I thought a lot about writing today - I thought about my experiences, my freshman year of high school, the smell of school-lunch spaghetti, the prayer (illegally) bidden by my voice teacher. 

But coming again and again in my head - between waking up this morning and sitting here on my porch as the sun goes down - is a simple and miserable question: what have we learned?

I'm afraid to answer that question. If I really examine it, I am afraid I must say - not enough. 

Not nearly enough. 

I just watched two videos - one, a slam poetry performance about 9/11, and the other, about a homeless man begging for enough money to get a room for a night. The first was shocking in its raw emotion; the poet described what he felt as a twelve-year-old boy, living in Manhattan, not knowing if his father was dead, dragging his fingers along the ash-covered window sill and knowing that his skin was covered in bodies. The second was almost as shocking - perhaps less so for its familiarity; it was of a nameless man describing the life he endured. 

He said that people walked by him and shouted, "get a job, bum." And I've heard that line before - never said it, no, but I've stood in the same party with a young woman saying the exact same thing. It shamed me. It shamed this man, too, because - as he described - how can you get a job when you look homeless? What phone number can you give, when you sleep under bridges or on benches or in boxes, for people to call?

The commonality between these two videos begged that question again. However dissimilar, both narratives were about something so simple that it is often overlooked - 

Bodies. 

Agency. 

Sadness. 

What have we learned?

In the twelve years past, I think we have learned a lot of things. We've learned more about war, about not-wars, about tyranny in our own country, about racism, about new ways to hate, about guns in the home, about pointless wars on drugs and how the US fuels them with poverty and poppies. We've learned new words for brown skin, new words for religion, new words for homelessness, new terminology for the other, the not-American, the socialist, the Muslim, the homosexual, the female, the liberal. Maybe it isn't that we haven't learned enough - maybe it's that we've been so busy learning the wrong things. 

We've been learning the wrong things about bodies. We've trained ourselves to think of certain bodies as lesser - though the ash on the windowsill was grey and anonymous, somehow that ash has given rise to some deep and desperate part of ourselves which longs to exclude and shame and deride. Bodies in the street begging for money, bodies in the airport with dark skin, bodies which must be male or female and unchangeable, zygote bodies, fetus bodies, female bodies. Bodies to scorn, to fear, to blame. 

We've been learning the wrong things about agency. We've been relying on an American Dream which, at this moment, is nearly impossible. We've been talking about Welfare Queens and tax dollars and health insurance and never, never getting an answer, and never understanding the terrifying complexity which is being poor or a minority or sick or worn all the way out by the humbling and humiliating process which is proving your worth in a society which thinks you are worthless. And we've taken agency, also, away from people of any faith - we group everyone together and make assumptions: Muslim, Evangelical, Jewish, Catholic, Atheist - all boxes to check, all generalities, all terrorists or nutjobs or killers of Christ or blood-drinkers or apostates. 

And sadness?

We've learned a million ways to be sad and a million ways to stave that off. We've learned to brush past the homeless person on the street and not notice the truth in their eyes. We've learned to watch videos about 9/11 and post statuses and never get to the root of it and how terribly we have failed at turning it into a greater thing, a better thing, a new motivation to love each other. We have emojis of the American flag. We have pictures of soldiers. If we're lucky, we haven't lost anyone to the horrible drone of death which is unprevoked war on countries we needed for oil. Sadness - we can be sad, today. 

We can be sad for everything we haven't learned. 

Maybe, on today of all days, I should be waving the American flag. And none of this - not one single word - is intended to take away the tragedy and power of men and women who died, and who tried to save others in the midst of an unthinkable act. Yeah, for them, I'll wave a flag. Of course. 

But what have we learned? What was their sacrifice worth? 

When I was in the black box theatre in my freshman year of high school, the director of the department came in and told us the news. I don't think he knew how, but he did it. It was unimaginable, but still, we cried.  My voice teacher bade us to hold hands and she told me to offer up a prayer. I'm pretty sure I prayed for peace, pretty sure I prayed for love. 

God, I'm still praying. I pray that we learn more, and that we learn better. 

I pray that all bodies be equal, all persons have agency, and that all of us turn our sadness into compassion. 

I pray that on this, and all future anniversaries, we pledge our allegiance to more than a flag. 

Hard

The process of writing is entirely grasping at straws. 

It's the first game of football season, Ravens/Broncos. I've been spending the evening at my local haunt, the Second Chance in Oakland Mills. I've been hiding my eyes between tight hands, raising my arms, shouting and cursing and feeling passionate. I've taken moments away from the game, in the bathroom, belting out Sinatra and being young. I've spent the evening texting my best friend, Jamie, as we watch the game separately. Now, back at home, my husband is upstairs watching the second half and I am, as always, out on the porch. 

I'm listening to music. 

I adore football, in a way I never thought I would. I've written a bit on my childhood here, but to reiterate, I was not raised in the Ravens Nation. Rather, I was raised in albums, in Berlioz, in Poulenc, in the soundtrack to Henry and June. I was music, from the late Friday nights in the back garden with Jazz to the early Saturday afternoons with the broadcast from the Met. I never knew there was anything else. 

But now, oh, how I love football. Watching the game tonight, I expected that I would write about how football and the American identity are intertwined. I had this whole thing about consumption and fellow-feeling and the Roman games. I had a dialogue prepared between me and my mother, in which she told me I could be anything except a ballerina and a professional football player. I had all of that. 

But here I am, on the porch, feeling something else entirely. 

If writing is grasping at straws, so am I. So is life. 

In everything I've done - in Puccini, in Satie, in Charpentier - I have never felt young. I was always the "old soul" in the group. There I was, with the opera length gloves, the feather boa, the fanfiction habit I couldn't kick, the teeth dyed blue with cheap red wine, and I was old. And suddenly, tonight, I feel terribly young in a way I couldn't before. And I feel old, too. My husband, upstairs, watching the remainder of a game which is apparently not going well, and me, on the porch, listening to music and the crickets and the beat of night. 

Grasping at straws. 

Maybe football isn't quite this complicated to other people - maybe music isn't, either. But I'm sitting on the porch utterly paralyzed by some kind of internal choice - to be old, to be young. To join my husband, to listen to music and feel like my teenaged/middle-aged self. I honestly don't know what to do. 

I could go on and on here, as I usually do. Maybe tomorrow I will write that post about football and consumption and glee. But the more I think about it, the longer I sit here on the porch by myself, I think that the straws I grasp are only the shreds of an identity limited by a narrow experience. And frankly, as much as I love listening to my music, I love spending time with my husband more. 

Good night, y'all. And Ball So Hard. 

Digging

You get to a certain age when it matters that people die. 

When I was very little, a family friend passed away. He had known my grandparents for years, had been my mother's choral director at St. John's, had thrown parties with culinary curiosities. I called him Uncle Duck. My mother and I were in the car when she told me, and I remember crying a little because I knew that my mother wanted to. Later, when Mom was on the phone with a friend, I overheard her saying that I had cried. I had never felt so alien, so unlike myself. Death was strange and foreign - so was grief. We roasted a chicken with orange peel and brought it to Aunt Daisy, fulfilling the role of compassionate mourners who are sad, torn, and helpless in those moments of loss. 

My grandmother died when I was nineteen. We made the trip to Indiana, car speeding through long fields of corn and soy, and found ourselves drowning in casseroles, in chicken with noodles, in that same compassion on other people's faces. I read at her funeral and cried because I was supposed to. 

When my Grandpere died the world broke. Somewhere in the years before his passing I had begun to understand the end of things, the soft sucking of those last days of life. When Grandpere died, that grief which had been so remote and unthinkable became a part of me, a ticking thing like clocks or the keys of our old piano or the metronome constraining my wildness. 

Why is it that we reach some point in our lives where it all becomes real? Everyone dies. People die all the time. What makes us age into the natural order of grief? Maybe it's not the first loss, or the second - maybe it's when someone we love fiercely passes away. Maybe it's when we confront our own limitations - a bad case of 'flu, an inability to process junk food, weight gain, food poisoning, cavities, a tracery of fine lines around the mouth. 

When Dennis died I felt that alien thing, a perceived misappropriation of his partner's sadness as my own. I didn't want to mourn. But within the first few moments of his memorial service - before it even began, in sips of wine and nibbles of sandwiches from Clyde's - I cried. Somehow living through my Grandpere's death made me susceptible to the shock of others'. 

Death comes too soon. 

In my poetry classes at college, Seamus Heaney's work was required reading, and rightly so. I always felt some dizzying sense of gratitude that I had met him and heard him speak at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, that I had a carefully preserved copy of his poem, The Blackbird of Glanmore, signature at the bottom. I didn't know him at all, but I felt so lucky that I had been in the same room with him, drinking tea, eating chocolate biscuits. When he read his work he read with passion, with a calm voice but a compelling one. So many poets can sound dry and frail - his work and his voice were filled with vigor and a commitment to the beauty of poetry. I fell a little bit in love with him. When we studied him in college I was eager to read Digging aloud and share with my classmates some morsel of his wonder. 

When I read news of his passing I felt alien again, alien because I had never really known him, alien because that ticking metronome of my Grandpere's death faltered, out of sync for just a moment, loud and brash and imperfect in my head. I immediately thought of Dennis, how he had touched my life through his praise and acceptance of my writing about bipolar disorder - how I hadn't really known him, either. It felt like the three of us - three people passing each other, three people who were seemingly disconnected and removed - were bound together through writing: Sligo, Clyde's; a pen, a keyboard;  blackbirds, dogs; tea, beer; turf, the people tree. 

I honestly don't know what to say about the nature of grief. Grief is selfish - or at least I feel selfish and indulgent, not really knowing Dennis, not really knowing Seamus Heaney, but crying anyway. Grief can be a celebration, too, and an affirmation of life. Grief separates us and joins us together - it is lonely, it is shared. Grief tastes like my Grandpere's French pastries, lemon curd, parsnip soup. Grief smells like beer, like dogs. Grief warms my hands like a mug of tea with milk, like the sticky residue of chocolate and crumbs. Grief is red and green and orange. 

My grief today can be all of those things, but it also must be a blessing. This is the first writing I have done in weeks. I can fairly say that Dennis and Seamus Heaney, as removed from me as they were, are two examples of the kind of person I want to be. I'm not trying to make their passing all about me - rather, I want to make their impact on my life a part of the core of me, a part of making me a better person and a more committed writer. I want to celebrate them. 

I've gotten to that age when it matters that people die - matters not only in sadness, not only in grief, but in honoring and rejoicing in lives lived in beauty. Parts of me still feel alien and detached and guilty, sure - but the other parts of me are striving to never forget the words and work of people I have loved. 

Death comes too soon - it did for Dennis, it did for my Grandpere, and it did for Seamus Heaney. But the legacy of these men is great and unforgettable. 

I will miss them all. 

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.