Dreaming My Way to You

Sometimes we just wish we were on the way to visit our mother! Events today made me think about this old card that I sent to my mother one time and came back to me in her purse after she died. 

I remembered that I had seen it in her purse one time and asked her why she carried it around. She said it reminded her of me! That seemed odd at the time because I never imagined her wishing I were there. I only knew that there were so many times in my life that it felt like the only thing that would make me feel better would be if I could be sitting at her table. And after she died, I wished that more and more often.

It’s kind of ridiculous when you think about it, because the reality is that no matter how strong that feeling is, the truth is that as much we love our mothers, they can also drive us crazy! Sometimes they even make us feel worse, with that sharp, well-placed comment about what we’re wearing or our current hairstyle or how we’re raising our kids. Still, when something wonderful or horrible is going on, we want to run and be with them!

Last night I finished reading a book called “Spirit Car” by Diane Wilson in which the author travels through South Dakota, Nebraska, and Minnesota to discover her family’s history. At the end of the book, sitting with her mother, she remembers how her mother always told her that “she travels with us when we’re away. I know that her spirit travels at night, that she dreams her way to wherever her children are, checking that they’re safe, guiding them home again.”

I really never thought of myself in this way before but today I realized it’s true. I do dream my way to wherever my children are and I think my mother did too. It used to bug me so much when she worried about me and so I try to hide my worries from my kids. I know they’re adults and take care of themselves quite well without me and so the truth is, I don’t actually spend very much time worrying.

It’s just that even when our moms drive us crazy and even when we, as mothers, try not to drive our kids crazy….sometimes we just wish we were on our way to visit each other. And so we have to settle for spirit travels, for dreaming our way to wherever they are and checking that they are safe; sometimes guiding them home again, sometimes meeting them halfway.

Recollections

I feel like there’s an epidemic of friends losing parents, siblings, friends. Some are sudden deaths, some coming after long illness. Doesn’t matter. The pain is the same and I feel so sad for what my friends are going through. Of course it also brings up all the old feelings of grief that I’ve experienced. Here’s an old column from Life Magazine that I often pull out to read because because it makes me feel better for some reason. I would have thought that old Life’s were all digitized and available on line, or that someone had put together a volume of Loudon Wainwright’s columns, but I guess not. I scanned my old copy but it was too hard to read. Then I tried to download it and create a readable version — but the Life format was so large, it’s hard to get into a readable size. I’m sure if I worked really hard, I could figure it out. Finally, I transcribed it. The link below will take you to the Google Books page with this column.

The Sum of Recollection
     The word has come that an old friend has died suddenly, and bits of recall about him keep breaking past the frail guard of work I set against them. As I look out the window he pushes his glasses up over his forehead, his voice is on the other side of the phone’s ring. Stared at upside down, a piece of handwriting on the desk could be his. Fragments of him play back like short bursts of mnemonic film and I cannot look away.
     Nothing in the tumble of images surprises me about him and they show me how little I knew. It’s hard to get to know friend better. A lot of long relationships develop almost formal rhythms, and we learn to know each other’s margins and bruising places. Conversations often ply between unsaid limits and we respond to proffered cues with grooved fidelity. Exploring stops. New ground is left untouched while we glide comfortably along, turning over old stones, safe with rediscoveries. 
     Obviously we present clear variations of ourselves to different people. Our friend, another man recalled, had known a lot about the romantic poets and like to talk about them. Not to me he didn’t and I had an absurd flash of wounded feelings, like a child who’s been left out of a secret. But who can claim to know anyone? Indeed we are all simply the sum of others’ recollections about us. The gathering of them goes on for a long time.
     My father died 30 years ago last month, and I continue to think of him very often. There is no grieving in it. Rather, a sort of memory print of him lights up in my consciousness and nudges me for a moment. Any number of things can trigger it—something my daughter says, the sight of a boat, another man’s walk. Most often, the view is familiar, but now and then a new piece is added. Still, the feeling remains that my construction of him is far from complete.
     I was told of my father’s death while at school and instructed to travel to my grandmother’s where the family would gather. My mother had not yet arrived when I got there, and I recall being taken first to see my grandmother and then into another room. Here were two or three of my father’s brothers and my great uncle who, as the senior relative was presiding. A gentle and thoughtful old man with a delicate mix of modesty and strong family pride, he had been working for years on a genealogy. When I arrived, he had just finished writing my father’s obituary for the paper. 
     With real solicitude he sat me down and offered me whiskey — a courtesy in which he overlooked my age (17) in order to acknowledge my sudden rise to manhood. He asked me to read the obituary and give him an opinion of it. I told him I liked it, but I didn’t. I still recall how it felt to be reading those spare, longhand paragraphs whose facts, particularly the raw facts of my father’s name and death, seems so utterly unconnected to the powerful, demanding, volatile person who had been such a huge part of my life. The list of dates, of schools, the military service, the job, my mother’s name and mine told no more about him than directions describe the place they point to. Caught short with my father’s lack of newsworthy accomplishment in so relatively short a life, my uncle had revived a couple of our presentable ancestors to give the obituary some distinctive padding. Wrapped thus in dead relations, my father was given a suitable, but brief, public farewell.
     One might think that almost any life would produce material for a really good send-off. In his foreword to The Obituary Book, Alden Whitman, chief obituary writer for the New York Times, says the form should be “written with grace, capturing, ideally, its subject’s unique flavor.” Surely the unique flavor of some of the departed is best interred with their bones. And Whitman, of course, is speaking of those accomplished or powerful enough to have made the world notice them before they died. Yet most of the rest of us have qualities which can enrich the living and are well work the looking for. 
     A few years ago I saw a collection of old home movies that my father had made in the mid-1930s. Since he had held the camera, he never appeared in the films, although his long afternoon shadow occasionally fell across the scenes he shot. But his presence, the way he thought about some things and how he felt were extraordinarily evident.
     To make his movie during one bitter winter, he had walked out on the frozen bay near our house and shot a long piece of film looking back toward the land. What obviously interested him were the shapes the camera lingered on—great heaves of broken ice and pilings of docks wrenched into jagged angles against the sky. Watching, I was astonished at his selections. I had always thought of him as a completely direct man with no interest in abstractions of any kind. But here he was on film, working hard with the camera to find the right framing for the stark forms he saw. As it had been with my friend’s love of poetry, this was a large insight into my father’s being that I had missed completely. 
     The film showed me more than that about him. In another section he was photographing me as I skated near him. First I watched the movie with the fascination one usually feels when he looks at pictures of himself, especially pictures of a self in child’s packaging. Delighted with my own gay awkwardness on ice, I suddenly had the sense that the camera was projecting a clear quality of love. The child fell, the camera lurched as its holder moved in to help, then steadied when the boy rose smiling. The camera moved in for a close-up, then drew back and held as the child bent-ankled in one crude circle after another. Decades later, the photographer’s tenderness quite overwhelmed his subject.
     Even if we’re late, we can still reach out for fathers and old friends and find good moments for ourselves in what they left behind.
From Life Magazine, The View from Here, by Loudon Wainwright. February 18, 1972

http://books.google.com/books?id=clIEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=the+sum+of+recollection+just+keeps+growing&source=bl&ots=W7JBeMNF2S&sig=JSdrrNLg9AdDzsNZGH5fhTpZ8gE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_db9U9H6D4visASew4D4AQ&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=the%20sum%20of%20recollection%20just%20keeps%20growing&f=false

Dear Maya Angelou

Dear Maya,

Nooooooooooooooo! I cried. 

And I haven’t been able to see straight all day

Thought it was an eyelash in my eye. It was.

And then the tears kept coming. 

Not crying for you. I’m happy for you.

Crying for me. Crying for all of us left behind

Always wondering how we will get by

without people like you.

Last time I heard your voice in an interview

I said to myself

I said

Joni! 

Listen well! 

Hear this voice! 

It won’t be long now til it is silent.

Again.

Good thing we live in a world and time

when we can still hear your recorded voice.

Now, I just wanted to let you know how much

we need your words and your voice. 

Maybe more now than ever before.

I know that as a writer, you couldn’t help but write.

I know you couldn’t help but sing, dance, learn, teach, praise, give voice.

But I still want to thank you for all of it.

Thank you for sharing yourself with us.

Love, Joni

A whole lot of education.

2009

My mother died on May 17th, 2009 and so, of course I always think about her on that date. It also happened to be her grandchild’s birthday/graduation from college weekend. And this year it happened to be the youngest grandchild’s graduation from high school weekend. This is also a year that two more grandchildren graduate from college.

It feels like an important milestone to mark and so I wanted to send congratulations to my parents. Dad died in 1998 and I hope they are resting in peace. They raised and educated five of us — and helped educate a few others here and there. Now that the youngest grandchild graduated from high school, we can say we raised and educated their 12 grandchildren. 

My mother went back to school for her A.A. degree -- 30+ years after she graduated from high school. My father scared me straight when I was trying to flunk out of college. I'm sure we are all grateful to them for their inspiration and example. Perhaps the 12 educated grandchildren is enough thanks?

It’s nearly impossible to get all 12 of them together, but it’s happened a few times. I wanted to celebrate this occasion by documenting a few of those times, especially because I know we all would have liked to get together to celebrate the three graduations this year. This is not an exhaustive collection of photos, but it's the ones I have. Or at least it's the ones that aren't too embarrassing to anyone.

Well done, Mom and Dad! Well done to all of us!

1987

1992

1995

2001

2009

2013

2013

The Story of the "Lady Slipper"

Turns out it's really a "Baby's Ear" shell

I realize that I have way too many posts about people dying, but I feel like I have to post this one too. The other day a friend shared photos on Facebook of the beach near the house her parents owned. Her mother recently died and she and her sister went out to the house over the weekend. It was one of the nicer weekends we've had this January. It made me think of my experience at the beach at the Outer Banks the summer after my friend and neighbor died. Lynn died "suddenly" in that she died a month after being diagnosed with cancer. My friend's mother had not died that quickly, but several months is barely enough time to get used to the idea of cancer, much less the idea of dying. My mother-in-law died in that same "sudden" way in 2012. In September they said "cancer" and she was gone in December.

For whatever reason, Lynn's death was so devastating and I was still trying to figure it out that summer at the beach. And thus began the story of the "Slipper Shell" that is actually a "Baby's Ear" (according to shell ID sites) which has been passed around from friend to friend as a sort of talisman to remind whoever has it that her sister-friends are with her during whatever turmoil is occurring. I had never told the story to anyone but when Terry was diagnosed with cancer, I felt I should give her the shell. So, I gave it to Terry when we were at the beach for her birthday/cancer diagnosis weekend. Then Kathryn had it when she was diagnosed. Andi had it for awhile when she was far away and her sister and sister-in-law were dying. Marykay had it and then it came back to me when I needed help getting through the death of another friend. I don't know why I didn't think to pass it on to Gail when she told us about her mother. I guess we all figured there was plenty of time. Then we were all busy and then suddenly, her mother was gone.
Like the shell itself, I really have no idea what it all means. It really doesn't mean anything I guess. There's so many things I don't believe in anymore, magic included. But I do love having that shell. And I do love having sister friends--even when we hardly ever see each other. Perhaps it's just a story that reminds me that I can not control when or how or who will bring answers.
Here's the story:

The Lady Slipper
August 12, 2005, Corolla, The Outer Banks, North Carolina
Came down to the beach early to sit and read and write along with the walkers, joggers, the early birds (real ones) kayakers, no surfers, and the shell seekers.
Walked down around the bend
and started picking up shells and rocks as I walked back.
Thinking about Lynn. Maybe I’ll bring shells back and take them to the cemetery and say hello.
I look up and see an older woman approaching me…
I prepare to greet good morning and think “wow, she looks like Lynn’s Mom!”
She reaches in her pocket, pulls out a shell and reaches it toward me…
“Are you picking up shells? Here, I found this… It’s called a Lady Slipper.”
She turns it over; it’s intact.
“I thought you might like to have it. It’s rare to find one intact.”
She puts it in my hand.
I turn it over to look and say, “I’ve never seen one before. Now I’ll know what to look for” and try to hand it back to her.
But she won’t take it so I say thank you and stand there looking at it.
She continues on, walking passed me up the beach.
When I turn to say thanks, have a nice day—she is gone.
I am overcome. I brought down “Gift from the Sea” for meditative reading this morning…was thinking about Kathryn and her Mom as I walked down the boardwalk and down the steps to the sand and what I might say when I write to her.
Thinking about Lynn.
Just serendipity? (The name of the store Mike and I went into the other night.)
Karma? A balance to the little scuffles with the girls and Mike this week?
All this time I’ve been hoping that Lynn would come to me and let me know everything was OK.
Did she wait for this quiet moment alone, when I least expected her—instead of in the middle of life on Hope Lane where I’ve been watching and waiting?
How to know that? I don’t know, but I believe it.

Ocean City with Sister-Friends

Happy Birthday Grace Paley (12/11/22-8/22/07)

I pulled this page from Ms Magazine in May 1980. This is a scan of a copy because the original page is now filed somewhere deep in my archives. Every once in a while I pull it out to read. And so today, when I heard mention of Grace Paley's birthday, I had to find it to read. In 33 years, I've probably read it at least 33 times and I'm still amazed by how much she packed into 400 words. Maybe someday I'll be able do that. 

One day I was listening to the AM radio. I heard a song: “Oh, I Long to See My Mother in the Doorway.” By God! I said, I understand that song. I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway. As a matter of fact, she did stand frequently in various doorways looking at me. She stood one day, just so, at the front door, the darkness of the hallway behind her. It was New Year’s Day. She said sadly if you come home at 4 A.M. when you’re 17, what time will you come home when you’re 20? She asked this question without humor or meanness. She had begun her worried preparations for death. She would not be present, she thought, when I was 20. So she wondered. 

Another time she stood in the doorway of my room. I had just issued a political manifesto attacking the family’s position of the Soviet Union. She said—go to sleep for Godsakes, you damn fool, you and your communist ideas. We saw them already, papa and me, in 1905. We guessed it all. 

At the door of the kitchen she said—you never finish your lunch. You run around senselessly. What will become of you? 

Then she died. 

Naturally for the rest of my life I longed to see her, not only in doorways—in a great number of places—in the dining room with my aunts, at the window looking up and down the block, in the country garden among zinnias and marigolds, in the living room with my father. 

They sat in comfortable leather chairs. They were listening to Mozart. They looked at one another amazed. It seemed to them that they’d just come over on the boat. They’d just learned the first English words. It seemed to them that he had just proudly handed in a 100 percent correct exam to the American anatomy professor. It seemed as though she’d just quit the shop for the kitchen. 

I wish I could see her in the doorway of the living room. 

She stood there a minute. Then she sat beside him. They owned an expensive record player. They were listening to Bach. She said to him—talk to me a little. We don’t talk so much any more. 

I’m tired—he said. Can’t you see? I saw maybe thirty people today. All sick, all talk, talk, talk, talk. Listen to the music—he said. I believe you once had perfect pitch. I’m tired—he said. 

Then she died.

__________

Grace Paley has written two books of stories, “The Little Disturbances of Man” (New American Library, paperback) and “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” (Farrar, Straus & Girous, hardcover and paperback).

A Few Words about Bill Fitzgerald

I’m not naive. I know there’s no such thing as a perfect parent or a perfect marriage. But it’s important to give credit for trying.

And so, among the many thoughts I have about Bill Fitzgerald on the day of his memorial service, there is this:

Bill and Martha raised 11 kids to be strong individuals. Among them you can count 11 different ways of thinking and viewing the world.  Bill and Martha did this during some difficult times in the 60’s and 70’s. As if that weren’t enough work for them, they also taught and inspired so many others of us along the way.

Bill truly meant it when he greeted you or said farewell with “Peace” and I do too. Sending out lots of love to all the Fitzgeralds. Thanks for sharing Bill and Martha with the rest of us. 

Peace.

(With apologies for the slightly awkward photo that includes my brother and a few Fitzgeralds at awkward ages. Bill, center with glasses. Martha, kneeling right front)

Me, with Bill at Andrew and Leah's wedding

 P.S. Here are two places you can learn more about this amazing man.

http://memorialwebsites.legacy.com/bill_fitzgerald

http://www.lmu.edu/fame/inductees/fitzgerald.htm