When I Grow Up I Want To Be Dead

For my first teaching assignment of the year, I am dropped into classes of high school juniors and seniors and their first assignment of the year is to learn about writing their personal essays. I think to myself how lucky I am that this is the task today, and how lucky they are too, if only they knew it. We begin by talking about the essays they've read over the past few days. Those writers deal with the usual: cancer, alcoholism, the horrid ordinaries that make up all of our lives. I ask my classes: how many of you know someone who's had cancer? All morning 70% of the hands go up. Did you like this essay, I ask no one in particular. One boy answers: no. I ask him why not. It was retarded, he replies. That's not a word they get to use in my classroom, and I tell him so: try again. It's gay, he sneers, knowing I'm going to tell him that's the wrong word, too, although he seems surprised to hear me say it. It's dumb, he finally says, trailing off. The teacher keeps a thesaurus on her desk, and for a moment I consider picking it up and slamming him in the side of the head with it, just to see if we might be able to put some new words into him that way. I think to myself: this would be the most surprising thing that would happen to them all day. I wonder how many other teachers have ever felt that impulse. We move on, and talk about what they might use for a subject when they get down to their writing. No one has a clue what they could find to talk about. I try to remember if there was ever a time when I didn't have something to say. I want to ask my students, how many of you cower under your sheets at night because your alcoholic parent is in a drunken rage downstairs. How many of you have already been drunk yourselves and worry about the things you did, who's had their heart broken by that early abortion, how many of you have tacked up a Confederate flag on your bedroom walls. How many of you know what that means? What I saw to them instead: what's interesting about your lives, what story do you have to tell that no one else can tell? They don't know; they don't like it. No one can imagine what there could possibly be to say, never mind how they could possibly write about it. It's all dumb.

And then at the end of third period Ryan materialized beside me just after the dismissal bell rang. He is almost exactly a third my age, several inches taller but several pounds lighter, and I noticed the way his clothes hang off his skinny frame. I didn't notice right away that those clothes were fatigues, in his drab camouflage he nearly disappears into the bland background of the classroom. I think I might know, he begins, what it is I want to write about. His voice pitches up here in the beginnings of enthusiasm. Last summer, he tells me, I went through basic training. He falls silent for long enough that I begin to wonder if that's what he stepped forward to tell me. But he continues in a much lower voice: I'm going to graduate in the spring, and right after that, I'm shipping out for Iraq.

And then he began to shake.

I thought at first he was going to cry, and then I thought that maybe I was going to cry, and all I wanted to tell him was, get your parents, get a lawyer, it's not too late to get out of this. What I manage to say is, oh, and by that time he's recovered a little bit, has regained some of the swagger that I imagine is part of what they taught him over the previous summer. But by the time I get there, he continues, it'll all be fine: I'll be an engineer, and I'll be building roads, so all I'll have to worry about is reconstruction. I couldn't help myself, what I said next, because one thing I've learned about writing over the years is that you have to tell the truth, and sometimes when you're speaking you're really writing out loud, and so I said to him: well, that's all you have to worry about as long as you don't, you know, run into any IED's while you're building those roads...

There he puffed up, confident again and having regained his bearings. They taught us all about that, he tells me, and this is why that happens: those guys who are getting blown up have been there a long time, and they get careless. That isn't going to happen to me.

I don't know what I do think is going to happen to him, but I do know, as I watch him walk off to his next class, that he's been lied to plenty already, and I am suddenly pretty sure that eventually, all that being lied to is what's going to form the central chapter of his life, that he's on the verge of becoming someone who's about to find out he has plenty to say. If only he already knew it. If only he survives long enough to figure out how to say it. If only, all these days of thinking about him later, I could think of a way to tell it to him.

On the way home that afternoon I was daydreaming in the car about the textbook I'd like to write for these kids. The first chapter would be about how everyone has an inner life--I suspect no one has ever said the phrase inner life to a single one of the students I saw that day--and how it's okay to use it. More than okay: it's what you need to survive. Then I'd have a chapter about how the pen is mightier than the sword. It's an idea that goes back to Euripides, that may well go back to the invention of writing. I haven't seen Ryan again since that day, but a few weeks later I was talking with the school librarian. He and I were discussing problem children, as the class I had that day was full of them. The librarian tells me: there's one boy who was a huge problem all last year, then he spent last summer in basic training. I know him, I say suddenly, although of course I don't really know him, I only spoke to him once, briefly and unimportantly. I can't get over the change in the kid, the librarian continues, and his tone is glowing: he's a whole different person now. It grew him up. I couldn't get over how scared he sounded, I reply, and the librarian and I look at each other across the counter, each of us wondering what on Earth the other could possibly be thinking, how dead wrong in their perceptions the other person really is. If only they knew it.

Autumn

By now the fields are sprawling with goldenrod, punctuated by stands of tall tipped asters that I recently decided are my favorite flower. We have a long history, the aster and I. When I was very young I thought that my birthday, November the fifth, fell in September and that the aster was my birth flower. When I later realized that November fell in November and that the chrysanthemum was in fact my real birth flower, still, neither of those things seemed that far off from my original suppositions.

Here is another story about asters, one that came back to me a few days ago. That morning I was driving, off on my way to teach English at the high school. We'd be talking about starting the personal essay--their personal essays--and my main point that morning was this: start big. Which is what kept me from starting this essay myself because later, I had no idea how to begin it. So I find myself now beginning by explaining that I don't know how to begin, and also that this is another memory that had kept itself hidden from me until I saw those tall wild asters nodding in the morning light.

The year I was in fifth grade I began to learn the clarinet. In the early weeks of that school year I used to go to my grandmother's house afternoons. I'd take my clarinet and walk down to the field behind her house, and from there into the woods that bordered it. I knew two notes on the clarinet, and I would sit down among those trees and play them for a long time: at first mournfully, each one in turn for as long as my breath would hold out. Then I would trill them together, flying my fingers back and forth between them as quickly as I could. Because I'd already been a pianist I wasn't half-bad at that; but because my teacher was stingy with his knowledge those two notes were all I had for some time (and because I wasn't much of a musician it never occurred to me to go off looking for more notes on my own).

Still, there was the novelty of the instrument's portability. My only other musical experience was with the piano, and you always went to it--which meant that when you were making music, you were generally in the vicinity of someone's living room corner. The idea of being able to wander about and play music wherever you landed was, therefore, a real novelty. And so I was drawn down into the woods, and sat on the damp mouldering leaves of the forest floor and mushrooms grew there, and a particularly short, vivid kind of aster which nodded at me the way they had been nodding every year, and I played my two notes all afternoon while the light shifted in the sky and my grandmother finally clanged her old school teacher's bell from the back porch and that was my signal to come back to the house, supper was near ready. Later I inherited that bell, inherited it from my mother who had used it to summon me those last nights when she was dying from cancer and couldn't call out loudly enough for me to hear.

Down there in the woods I loved the asters, loved how they shook off the first light frosts and were always there, underfoot and companionable. I hated how the clarinet reed felt against my lip, hated the clarinet I played because it was old, silver, and unfashionable. We were poor, and so I had been given my aunt's old instrument to play, while everyone else in my group lesson rented a new instrument, shiny and black. Most of them regarded my silver one with a bit of uncertainty--what was it? Was it even a clarinet, looking like that? I suppose it was a bit of serendipity that I had been assigned the clarinet at all. This is how you auditioned for the school band, when I was in fifth grade: you went into the musty auditorium of that pre-World War elementary school, and one teacher played a few notes on the piano, which you were to sing, and then another teacher--the instrumental teacher--examined your teeth and through the calculation of some mysterious formula known only to them, you were told flute, or trumpet, or trombone. Personally, I considered it a lucky thing indeed that no one had looked at me and said tuba.

As far as I know, no one in my family owned a tuba to hand down to me, so chances are I was never in any danger from that quarter, anyway. The clarinet I acquired was also different from the new ones in that it wasn't made to come apart like those were, and so even the case I carried it around in looked different from all the other cases in the clarinet section. In those days, to me, things like that mattered. But my perception of my family's relative poverty may also be why everything the land offered up on those two little acres my grandmother owned, seemed like real wealth. Summers I couldn't get enough of the blackberries that grew wild all over the property, and we picked and picked and the berries bled all over our hands; we ate bowls of them for breakfast and they were the first pie I ever learned to bake. The asters were wealth, too, for all you couldn't eat them.

That year, by the time I had learned enough clarinet notes to play a whole song the asters were gone; I never did learn to tolerate the feel of the reed against my lower lip, nor did I ever learn to like the sound the clarinet itself made, and after that school year was over I gave it up entirely. The antique school bell sits on a book shelf, and every spring I study the pictures of asters in my seed catalogues, and every autumn it is a little piece of a miracle, a bit of proof that maybe the universe loves me after all, the way they appear all through the fields all on their own, despite the fact it has been forty years since I poured my music all over them, or maybe because of it. Forty years, and when they appear I am still celebrating my birthday at the wrong time, still sitting on the damp forest floor half-listening for some bell, somewhere in the distance, to call me in.

In Praise of Terminal Curiosity

My brother-in-law is driving, and he says, let's get off the highway. Don is nearly always the one driving, and always the one to say: back road! The rest of us say ho-hum. This time it turns out he's right. On that particular afternoon we drove only a few blocks out of our way, and in that stretch we saw: an old building whose brickwork was so beautiful I decided on the spot to become a mason. We saw a house where the porch had been draped, post-to-post, in long curtains, and it looked inviting and mysterious as a harem. And we saw backyard where a bright yellow caboose had taken up residence, complete with its own short set of railroad tracks. I saw the prettiest Arts and Crafts-style bungalow I have ever seen, in a town that's full of them. I saw a tractor-trailer hauling two long propellers that were headed to find a home on a turbine on a wind farm. They were nestled together like yin and yang on the bed of the truck, and I can tell you, without knowing exactly where this wind farm is, someone was raising hell about it appearing there at all.

Years ago Don told me that an elderly friend had said this: as you get older, you care less and less about more and more of the world around you, so that, by the time you die, you really don't mind so much. If this is the standard, I have to guess that Don is going to live well into his hundreds. When I met him nearly thirty years ago he was a one-trick pony, focusing on his business mostly and beyond that, I don't know. To see curiosity emerge as his primary trait now is fun for us both. His days are interesting, his curiosity is a window that opens onto his inner life and lets me have a look in. On our way home that night, we turn onto a back road in time to see a single hot air balloon drifting over the hill, toward sunset.

My kids are often unsuspecting captives on these trips, as their uncle is fond of hauling them around and never considers that they, as teenagers, might not share his enthusiasm for looking at things. Right now I have little hope that they find any of this one bit exciting, but I do have hopes that this trait of their uncle's gets into them now, and that it will find its way back out when they're old enough to appreciate it. I know it's not genetic; I hope it's genetic.

Don told me this story: the best thing I ever did, he said, was when I drove off the highway and into and through the town of Olney, Illinois. He said, I did nothing but go up and down the streets and look at houses and talk to anyone who would talk to me, and I told them all how their town's name was my name, too. By the time I drove back out of there at the end of the day, everyone was waving to me.

There's the back of the salt mine, there's an old movie theater, there's some beautiful brickwork, right there. When Don came to stay with my kids last spring while I was out of town, he brought his bicycle with him so that he could ride around and have a different sort of look at things. Every day is a back road sort of day, when you're him. He is examining an old train depot, he is photographing graffiti. He has discovered a web site where people are uploading two million images a day. There is not enough time, we tell each other. Probably there are not enough lifetimes to look at all these things, even if you calculate the probability of that on the high end of your rebirth odds. I wonder, given that, how do you decide which road to turn down, which thing you're going to look at, at the expense of every other thing you won't then have a chance to look at. Serendipity I guess. Serendipity, and you have to learn to not mind missing what you miss. Maybe that's what Don's elderly friend really meant by what he said: you make your peace with things. You look, and you learn to let that be enough.

Since I've Been Gone

To be honest about it I hadn't even noticed the widening gap there, how the space was growing between the time I wrote last and the time I wrote next. I was surprised when I finally thought, on the first day of this month, to pick up my morning pages journal and saw that its last scrawled entry was dated 3 July; surprised again when I looked around a little more and found, for instance, that was the same last date that I'd written anything here. Two months is a bad long time to go without writing, when you're a writer, and I wonder whether I shouldn't be punished for it -- although the commission of this particular crime really is a punishment all its own. When you neglect something you love, it comes out in your life in odd and insidious little ways; with me it manifests as a sideways sort of unease, the sense that I've forgotten something terribly important but am about to remember what, and that I'm going to be devastated when I finally get it back. Lots of things can wake me up too early in the morning, but since I've been gone, being on the verge of that memory is what has haunted me most during those long and patient hours.

Well, nothing stopped because I wasn't writing, other than my writing, but otherwise the Earth pretty much has kept to its course, dragging the rest of life right along with it. In fact life is the one thing that didn't stop at all, and since I've been gone it's changed enough that big parts of it aren't anything I recognize from even just a season ago. For instance I think to myself how the profile I wrote for this blog hardly fits me anymore, although it's anybody's guess how to change the thing to better reflect what the reality is now. At some point along the way I started to breathe again, just to give you an idea of how basic the changes are. Well, if you know me, you know all about that already, about the man I met, about the trials of our long-distance love affair, maybe you've already figured out that I'm thinking by now about how to transplant myself to yet another new environment, yet again. All of this has transpired across a span of fewer than six months, and the two months that I've been gone most of my energy has been given over to that. But don't think I'd forgotten about everything else. Times like these are part of the great mystery cycle of birth, death, and the transformation that comes in between. My deal with myself has always been to live with the silence that times of change bring, with the understanding that once they're assimilated, writing will come back through. All the while that I've been gone, I've been taking careful notes.

Since I've been gone, the Earth has curved around a bit somehow, so that now the nights are cool again and by mid-morning, I have to open all the windows and doors to warm the house, which has somehow retained the nighttime chill. Across the street Mrs. Gordon's cancer has come back, and by my side porch the goldenrod has grown up, and when I wander downstairs from my writing desk I like to look out and see those yellow heads as they unfurl in the noonday sun.

I Had Forgotten

I recently came across my friend Lunaea's blog and read about a story I'd told her way back in the once-upon-a-time of our friendship. The story concerned doughnuts, and in truth, much about my life can be legitimately examined through the lens of food. I'm not sure why that is, whether it's a reflection of my genuine enjoyment of the acts of preparing food and eating it, or whether it's an echo of the insecurity that came from growing up with a mother born at the height of the Depression, and the odd way no one from her parent's generation was ever able to let go of the memory of being hungry. Odder still is the way I inherited that memory, who really never went without something to eat.

But, the doughnuts: for a period of about ten years I worked in a café in northern Massachusetts, a place that was unusual on at least two counts: first, it was owned, run and mostly staffed by women (the occasional male dishwasher did appear over the years but otherwise, it was a female sort of universe). And nearly everyone I worked with then was there as long as me, and that kind of longevity, in a business that is largely known for its high turnover in help, was also unusual. You get to know people when you work with them that long, and much of the time we all read from the script of dysfunctional family. Like any good band of crazy relatives, we fought amongst ourselves viciously, but would turn equally quickly and as one upon any outsider who dared attack one of our own. We went through holidays together, and a number of births; a slightly lower number of divorces and other betrayals, pregnancy scares, break-ups, new love. Everyone had her thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth birthday there, and the ones who went through menopause spent those years pampering each other with water bottle fans and learning to duck when the hot flashes came on in the middle of stressful hours. There were two things we took care of every first week of January: a new calendar had to be hung up in the waitress area, and someone copied over from the old calendar the entire year's worth of birthdays: ours, and also those of our regular customers. And the owner would go over to the drugstore across the way and buy an entire year's worth of birthday cards, both for the help and again, some generic ones to have on hand for the regulars. If you worked there, you also got cake. If you ate there a lot and we liked you, you'd get a muffin with a candle in it, and all of us coming out to sing "Happy Birthday" to you.

Restaurants are different than other businesses with repeat clientele, and I think that has to do with the intimacy involved in the act of preparing food for someone else to eat. On one end, when you do it for people you love, it's an act of love, when you do it for strangers, for money, it begins as a business transaction, but then when you start cooking every day for someone you know because they're showing up every day, the business end of things softens. Customers understood the difference, too, although it always surprised me how a person who ordered the same breakfast every morning, six days a week, was himself surprised that you knew what to cook for him before he'd asked for it. Sometimes we would see Eric, for instance, pulling into the parking lot, and his 6-egg-white-spinach-and-feta-omelet with dry wheat toast would be already at his place at the counter as he walked into the building. For my part, I liked to bring in food from outside. I used to open on Sunday mornings--typically, one of the busiest days of the week--and most weeks I brought in sweet potatoes for the other cook and the two opening waitresses, and I'd throw them in to bake first thing, and by the time we'd opened and gotten the first dozen customers taken care of, we'd stand in the kitchen together and eat that roasted orange flesh and it was enough to keep you happy all morning long. It was our favorite part of the day.

Our customers liked to bring us food, too, which always struck me as a little bit coals-to-Newcastle, but, there it was. Aaron was one of the boy dishwashers who was with us for several years, working weekends when he was in high school and some years all summer long, if the regular dishwasher had quit. His mother sometimes sent him to work with baskets of cookies she'd made for us, same as if we were all her teen-aged boys. Our favorite were her peanut butter blossoms that she topped with mint chocolate kisses--such an odd combination that you had to wonder if it had started out a mistake, but for whatever reason, it worked. At Christmastime we got showered with candy, so much that most of us spent the holiday weeks with sugar hangovers, and people brought more candy at Mother's Day, a holiday we all worked, mothers or no. Sometimes a customer would come in with a 5-gallon bucket full of clams he had dug, and everyone would go home and make chowder. Every Sunday mornings for many years, my friend Woody treated me to a large cup of coffee from a local stand. It was twice as good as the coffee we served, and he brought it to me full of sugar and cream, which is not how I normally take mine but it was delicious, like having dessert at 6:00 a.m. I drank hundreds of them over the years, until the point where my husband's cancer came back and I had to quit my job because he was too sick to stay home alone anymore, or to manage the kids by himself.

There were two foods in particular we could count on seeing, and they are what make me remember how food is really a seasonal thing, an idea that's too easy to forget in a time when you can get strawberries in December, mangoes in climates where they've never grown. First in the year came the ice cream. The customer who brought it to us appeared otherwise infrequently, but he never missed coming on two particular dates. There was an ice cream stand in our town owned by a family who lived the rest of the year in Florida, but for the summer season they always returned to northern Massachusetts and opened up shop, turning out the most delicious hand-made ice cream I've encountered anywhere. Our customer always brought us in two quarts on their opening day, and then two quarts again on their last day of the season. These days always happened to fall on Fridays, and once he appeared everything else we were doing would come to a sudden stop, despite the throngs of people waiting at the door for their haddock chowder and their fish fry lunches, despite the phone ringing incessantly with people frantic for take-out orders. Who cared?--the ice cream was here! Everything paused for that moment while we all dug into the cartons with their slightly-melting contents, clutching our long iced tea spoons, and ate, and then someone would run the ice cream out back to the big freezers, where it would have to wait until the restaurant had closed down again. Thus our summer season was bracketed not by Memorial Day and Labor Day, but by Chocolate Walnut and Vanilla Supreme.


The other big food event--and this is the one that Lunaea reminded me of--was the arrival of the season's first cider doughnuts. We had friends who own a large apple farm there in town and while it's possible to get their cider doughnuts all year long, the best time is when they've done the year's first pressing of cider. It's late summer when that happens, and while it's not my favorite cider of the year still, it's hard to ignore the lure of the doughnuts that get made from it. The year I'm speaking of one of our regulars was the baker for the farm, and he came in one morning carrying a sack of doughnuts he'd just made from the new cider. In fact he had made this batch, pulled them from their oil bath, bagged them up and run...when they got to us the bag was still blisteringly hot from its contents. I can still see us as we were then, two cooks, three waitresses, the dishwasher, all standing in our sweatshirts and our shorts, while we tore open the waxy sack with those little spots of grease starting to bloom from its contents. We inhaled the spice of the rising steam, we inhaled the doughnuts like we'd never seen food before, and luckily it was mid-morning and a little slow in the restaurant, and so our customers sat unattended and drank their coffee while we stood and ate, and ate until every last crumb was gone. That year, that was the day autumn arrived. Ever since, whenever I remember the scene, the women I stood with, how hungrily we all ate, it is autumn's first day again.