dare I?

"But if you'd try this: to be hand in my hand
as in the wineglass the wine is wine.
If you'd try this."

Rilke wrote that, and when I first read it, I felt in it a sorrow—an already having let go of hope. That's how I felt back then, when I was coming to accept that things were not going to work out with the first love of my life, and the poem was like a period at the end of a long sentence. If only you had tried this, I thought at the time. If only I had reached out my hand to you and asked.

I read the poem now with a sense of curious invitation, the but that previously seemed filled with regret now hinting at a gentle redirection of course that just might bring joy into the picture. But if you'd try this, I hear aloud in my head and feel a warm smile spread across my lips. If you'd try this, and serenity settles in.

Dare I ask it aloud this time?

losing balance (a first attempt at poetry after many years off)

the way a sailboat's keel
lets it right itself
after a wind blows it off center

I have something that stabilizes me
except it is not one entity
but a balance of many

and when it grows singular
I begin to dip
not just my gunwales into the sea spray
but also the sails that would guide me
and make me feel, to myself, known

(reflection after giving college advice to a high school junior)

Sometimes it can be hard to keep your mind from retreating: back to that time before anything was settled: that time when you were still deciding which way to step next. I can still see the images that filled my brain back then, see the myself of those years in the visual memories that glow brightly so many years later. So many images from those days are framed by tree branches -- my school embedded in 180 acres of mostly forest; my house encircled by evergreens and hardwoods; my weekends often unfolding in woods. Once a friend asked where I was applying to college, and what I remember more than my answer is the purple hue of the night sky behind the silhouettes of pine trees looming above us. Thousands of time I lay in my bed at night or through the morning and constructed my contemplations while watching the stars sparkle through the tree branches outside, the leaves rustle atop them, or a bird perch in their midst. I did my best daydreaming in the hammock at my grandparents' house, the feathery soft fishbone of each honey locust branch resting against the blue of the sky like dried leaves pressed onto construction paper. I said goodbye to the south from the front seat of a van trundling slowly down Pigeon Mountain, a good few months before leaving; it was April and the yellow of spring was warm all around me; the leaves were fresh and shaking gently in the warm breeze as though quietly applauding me. A year earlier, as I'd said goodbye to New England seated below pine needles, a flock of geese unsubmerged itself from bay waters in an instant of disturbinglingly loud wing clatter. A decade earlier I'd said my first and only prayer of this lifetime; lost deep in the woods behind summer camp, I'd known no other way to calm myself down. So many pinnacle moments of my life back then were surrounded by forestry. I felt no doubt that I'd always continue my romance with nature, my spiritual bond with what blossoms all around us.

I remember that me but don't feel that I still am her. I thought I would be for life, but you go to a college and then you find a profession and things unfold in such a way that segments of your existence feel disjointed. I wonder, sometimes, if I'd gone to a liberal arts college out in the woods if I'd be doing things the old way now, if I'd still go hiking and camping and know how to light camp stoves and pitch tarps in any setting. I miss that me that found such exaltation in simple things. It's so easy to retreat back to those memories, to bemoan the loss of the realities behind them. Yet it is enriching to discover other existences, to come to know them deeply as well. It is invigorating in its own right to explore worlds unknown to me: to intermix the loves of my past with the heartfelt investigations of the present.

regret

If I had to paint regret into a picture, I would capture the face of a long-ago friend surrounded by leaves falling on an autumn afternoon. He had eyes that always seemed to me to twinkle with brightness; on the day from which the memory comes, his whole being seemed to float and shimmer. There was something on his face that afternoon, something in the air between us; there was a moment that felt like a movie-ending moment. It lasted long enough for the thought to pass through my head that he was about to rescue me from another love that had consumed me for years and that was beginning to seem unrequited; he was going to rescue me and replace that with something better, surer, stronger.

In that moment, when I felt that he was about to kiss me, I rewound the tape in my brain to reconsider something he had said as we hiked that morning. "We should get a dog," he'd said, and I'd looked at him strangely, so he'd corrected his use of pronoun. I should have turned to face him just then, with the yellow beech leaves surrounding us standing as witnesses, and told him that since I'd met him when I was 18 I'd been measuring men against him. I should have told him that I had imagined marrying him, had pictured walking through a green field near the ocean and agreeing to move with him to whatever distant place he felt like living next, as he was a wanderer and an explorer, and I knew this country could only hold him put so long.

Though we had been friends for years at the time, this was the first time I had felt a romantic overture from him, and it took me by surprise. It's not that I was uninterested; in fact, I had been quite smitten with him when I first met him, as we built a quick and strong bond, and he, a few years older, seemed magically mature and interesting. But he was seriously committed back then, as good as engaged, and by the time he got cheated on and heart-broken from half-way across the globe, I had concluded that he thought of me only as a little sister and stopped allowing myself to consider him romantically.

Regret comes not from knowing that somehow I let that moment close with no kissing. My regret is knowing that I allowed the dazzling air between us to blow past so many times, over so many years. That I spent hours upon hours, conversation after conversation, pining to him about my other love interest. That though part of me hoped he would draw me away from that situation, I still built a wall around myself, made myself seem to him unavailable—mind and heart already set on someone.

Years later, after he had moved away and while I was visiting one weekend, those who spent time with us together told me he was blatantly in love with me. I wouldn't have believed it if just one had said it; but two said it separately: one of my oldest friends in the world and my mother. The latter asked me how I could be so blind, and I, in shock at the prospect, protested—having fully, after that kiss-less afternoon, come to believe that he thought of me platonically. But when I rewound the tape in my brain that time, I could see it: that the eyes glowed so brightly when near me, that the air became light and joyful when it drew us together.

By then, however, it was too late. When I tried to bring it up, he cut me off. He was already dating her by then—the woman he did one day marry. He got angry when I tried to talk about it. So I let it rest. Instead of making a declaration, I let potential love rest.

I don't believe in wallowing in regret; I find that counterproductive, depressing, self-halting. Instead I try to use it as a guidepost—as a lodestar to lead me down surer paths in the future. Yet every time I come near this particular path, the path of broaching topics that would reshape boundaries, I find myself hesitating. Perhaps that is because he and the other one from that time each skewed my sense of perception—the one seeming to love me but saying it wasn't quite so, the other not seeming to love me like that and yet perhaps all along doing so. They skewed my internal compass, my ability to accurately judge where the line between friendship and romance lies, so that now, many years later, I hang back from it, daydream and speculate rather than declare, inquire, or explore. I may not wallow in my regret, but I still have to not let it wall me in.

ode to clarity

I grew up surrounded by books—in the back hallway along which our bedrooms lay, in the living room and the family room, in my bedroom and my brother’s bedroom and my parents’ bedroom, almost all in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined up one beside the next. At my grandparents’ houses, the shelves lined most every available wall surface, running low along the corridors below paintings and portraits, covering the walls of studies, filling the empty spaces at the end of every bed. These books appealed to all ages, including children’s stories my parents or I once read as well as the fiction that youngsters and adults alike can enjoy (Agatha Christie, Dickens, Carson McCullers—you could take your pick) and novelists and nonfiction authors as disparate as Isak Dineson, Hemingway, McPhee, Theroux and Theoreau, and the Russian masters.

When I was little and couldn’t sleep, I sometimes snuck out of my bedroom, tiptoeing not because I was breaking any rules but because I enjoyed having quiet time in the house to myself. There was a particular book on a particular shelf that I always went for, stretching to get it down from its high perch. Sometimes I would sit with it in a rocking chair, turning on just one light beside me; other times, I would lie in my bed with only the desk lamp on, and I would finger the gold leaf of the page edges; run a hand down the soft, smooth leather cover; trace my finger tip over the gold embossed titling. When I flipped the book open, I was gentle with the razor-thin pages that rustled and slipped like the translucent pages of a Bible, turning them slowly, precisely, and reading a few poems as I went. I’m sure that it was the fanciness of the book’s binding, not the contents of its pages, that first drew me to it; but what I found inside was equally magical—the poetry of the greats.

For years I knew no other poets than those highlighted in the verses of this anthology, knew no other compilations of their works. But when I was 14, on a day I remember vividly and have written about before, while seated atop the soft cushion of my brother’s shag-carpet floor, I pulled from a stack of books so deep and wide it took up more space than I did a yellow hard-backed book that I read at once, from cover to cover, and that I continued to read regularly for years to come. It was The Sea And the Bells by Pablo Neruda, and it won me over to poetry for good. I still remember the heft of the book in my hands, the crinkling of the library’s laminate around the cover; I remember, too, the beautiful new copy my brother bought me as a gift, with its thin body and crisp pages that soon softened from my persistent touch.

As a senior in high school I wrote an analysis of that book, having come to know what Neruda believed to be the crisp, clear truth of a bell, having understood all along his love of the sea. (What I wrote in opening the paper to explain all that was this:

When Pablo Neruda wrote the poems which are compiled into The Sea and the Bells, he was aware of his approaching death. The book became his effort at establishing that he had lived and establishing nature as the force that had sustained him until it came time for him to return back to the earth in his death. The sea, along with other aspects of nature, was his driving force; it provided for him spiritual renewal. In this book he wished to express his thanks for this renewal by praising nature and all its glory, which is most resonantly seen in this untitled poem which is an aubade of sorts:
 
I am grateful, violins, for this day
of four chords. Pure
is the sound of the sky,
the blue voice of air. 

For Neruda, the bell was a symbol of truth as he envisaged it: the sound of a bell is clear and resonant, a sound that is known by all who hear it. When heard, it is known to be beckoning home a ship or a loved one or to be reminding someone of something of the past. It is a calling or a recalling, and it is known by all. And what makes this sound, releases this clarity, is but a small metal object enclosing nothing, emptiness. The crux of Neruda's belief about bells was that these truths for which he yearned were released from emptiness, the interminable silence which he sought out in those final days of his life.

 
Is the sea there? Tell it to come in.
Bring me
the great bell, one of the green race,
Not that one, the other one, the one that has
a crack in its mouth,
and now, nothing more, I want to be alone
with my essential sea and the bell.
I don't want to speak for a long time,
silence! I still want to learn,
I want to know if I exist.

This yearning to establish himself, to show himself that he had existed, was driven by his passion for nature and his belief that it was nature that could renew him and give him the vigor to go on until the day when he would return through "the door of earth" to the sea and the ground and the silence. . . .)

By that time, I owned at least 10 volumes of his poetry (within a few more years the count would reach 17, including his autobiography), all bilingual editions from which I learned the Spanish words for everything to do with nature, love, and passion. In college, my brother—knower of all important things—took me to the Harvard Poetry Bookstore, introduced me to the one-room shop from which I would buy all my poetry over the next four years. The store had a single owner and seller, a quiet older woman with a serious expression and a tendency to hand me books without speaking more than a few words (I think you’ll like this one. / Try it. / Let me know what you think.). The store brought new meaning to bookshelves everywhere, with books filling every inch of space from the floor to the ceiling, covering every tabletop, standing propped for display in each window. She had to climb a ladder to find some of the rarities, but she had everything, it seems to me now (having failed, recently, to find a particular book I wanted to give to a friend in any of the mainstream bookstores in the vicinity), and more importantly, she knew every one of them. And she knew me.

The first time we went there, my brother told her my passion for Neruda and she handed me Octavio Paz, assuring me that I would enjoy him, and she was right. Later I told her the poems I was liking in English class or had stumbled across in high school—Adrienne Rich’s “Solstice,” Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” or A.R. Ammons’ “Easter Morning”—and she would find me books by these poets or by others with similar tendencies; she would educate me, enliven me—this quiet woman with the serious face. I’ll never forget her expression when one day after four years like this I showed up with a friend in tow—a smart guy built like an athlete, dressed perpetually in exercise wear, and though she may have sized him up one way she did not smirk when I explained that he wanted to learn poetry “from the beginning,” as he had put it to me; she did not frown; did not even hesitate. Instead she pulled from a shelf one of the fattest books of poetry I have ever seen, a Norton anthology that started with Blake and Byron, and as she handed it to him and he began to—like she would—study it quietly, she stepped back from us and took a seat at her desk and then smiled at me, just that one time, a radiant vision of satisfaction. She thought I had found a new kind of love and so did I, but what matters for this story is not him or that feeling I had but rather her pleasure in being the provider of all these wondrously arranged words about such feelings and many, many others.

It is she who, without ever speaking it, taught me that there is a poem to encapsulate every experience, a poet who has felt something like anything I’ve ever felt. Like the books in my houses, these poems have surrounded me in my life, have quietly, restfully always been there for me, reflecting back at me whatever I am thinking; expanding or reframing or perfectly capturing my understanding of the world around me. For years these poems and distant poets have kept me company. To them and to her I am grateful; of the clarity of the emptiness from which each one forms the crisp ring of a bell I am constantly in awe.

phenomenal woman, that's me

Back when I lived in Cambridge and volunteered as a tutor at a homework center one or two nights a week, there was an evening when a girl I’d known for a few years but never really connected with brought in a poem and read it aloud to a small group of girls and myself. I remember Dominique standing in the doorway, holding open the anthology of African American poetry with pride and reading with intense focus. Dominique was 13 then, a gorgeous girl with a womanly body already well developed. She got attention from boys constantly, and the previous week, I’d found her tucked into the space behind the half-open classroom door, hand pressed to her mouth, modeling for a friend how to kiss a boy. I might have overlooked the scene if I hadn’t been at the same time listening to the chatter of the other girls in the room, hearing them whisper about Dominique and the older boy she was dating; but having heard all their theories, and watching as she held the one hand to her mouth and slipped the other around her own back, began to caress and wiggle her hip, I’d decided I had to step in. I’d pulled her aside quietly, not making a scene, but I could see she was flushed with embarrassment. When I’d explained to her that the only tutoring that was appropriate in that classroom was the academic kind, the red in her face had deepened and she, like a much younger child might, had slipped her hands into mine, letting tears come freely to her eyes, and promised me that she had done nothing bad, that she had only kissed him and only just a little. She’d told me her mama would have had her hide if she’d done anything more. She’d squeezed my hands, eyes pleading with me for trust.

I’d told her I believed her and was proud of her because she was a beautiful, smart girl who clearly knew that she had years and years ahead of her for dating, that there was no rush. She’d nodded vigorously, hands hot within mine, and promised me she was still a little girl. I remember, then, feeling a little regretful that I’d made her feel inappropriate, so I’d assured her that my concern was only that we not teach the younger girls anything they weren’t ready for, that I trusted her and knew she would make good decisions for herself. Her eyes were glowing by the end of the conversation, pride shining from her radiant face. She was responsible, she’d promised me, and finally let go of my hands.

The next week she came strolling into the classroom with one hand holding up the anthology and the other firmly planted on her small hip. She stopped dramatically in the doorway, asked for an audience, and then began reading: “Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. / I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size / But when I start to tell them, / They think I'm telling lies. / I say. . .” As she read, I could do nothing but grin. Somehow, Dominique, who rarely stayed put in a desk long enough to get any homework done, had found and studied one of the most womanly self-empowerment poems of all time, and she’d gotten from it, even at the confusing age of 13, that there is more to sexiness than just physique, more to appeal than just physical beauty. She read the poem terribly, stumbling over each line and sometimes going back to try to get each word right, but I could tell that she could tell what it was about, that the poem helped her take pride in her own newfound womanly-ness.

When she was done I asked for the anthology, and then I read the poem back to Dominique and the other girls with all the sass and assurance I can muster into my voice. I read with a careful cadence, giving time for certain words to hover, for the grin on my face to surface between verses, for the grins on their faces to surface too. These girls all got the poem after I read it like that, all sass and self-confidence, and to my delight, at the end-of-the-year celebration a few months later, three of them read it aloud together, gliding over words they’d clearly rehearsed numerous times, beaming as they spoke, cheeks filling with the best kind of color—with exhilaration, and purpose, and passion. They’d grinned at me at the end, and I’d wiped my eyes and wrapped those girls into my arms and promised, silently to myself, that I would never let go of the feeling that poem conjures inside me. That I would never, no matter what I faced, think of myself as anything less than what Maya Angelou assured me I could indeed be: a woman, phenomenally.

“Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman

Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

dating paradox

Do you ever leave a situation feeling like someone else has just been an asshole and then realize, in one clarifying moment, that it’s not quite the case? You suddenly hear the truth of it loud and clear in your mind: I’m the asshole. I’m the one who hung in.

And yet you know why you did that—you know what you believe in. First there is the fact that you trust people; that you by policy take them at their word. Next there is the fact that you are open to prospects; that you by policy let things wander, wait and see where they might go. Though you were born with little of that gem of a virtue called patience, when it comes to things of the heart you believe in letting things breathe and grow. You also believe in trusting your own instincts, which is a harder one for you in this arena, because you had to rebuild that skill a long time ago. But you try to believe in trusting your own instincts; you try to remember all the rest of what you believe in, too. That’s supposed to be the buffer against the I’m the asshole feeling, after all. It’s supposed to be the way you know you’re giving your all. You know how hard it can be to go out looking and actually find someone, so you try to just lead your life and be open to everyone who comes along. That attitude is supposed to be your buffer; yet sometimes it leads you straight into disappointment, and then you wonder what it was all for.

Perhaps it’s just a dating paradox, whether you really can have one without, at least sometimes, the other: the utter faith in waiting and seeing, the knowing in hindsight that you probably should already have let this one go.

the top grain on the peak

The top
grain on the peak
weighs next
to nothing and,
sustained
by a mountain,
has no burden,
but nearly
ready to float,
exposed
to summit wind,
it endures
the rigors of having
no further
figure to complete
and a
blank sky
to guide its dreaming

-- A. R. Ammons, “Uppermost”

Ten years ago I used to read that poem regularly, standing as it did atop my dresser; pasted toward the top of a pale-blue-and-white gingham-patterned piece of cardboard I’d gotten somewhere; rising, it seemed to me, upward. It was my senior year of college, and for the first time since age two I faced no more school to go to once that last semester was over. No more of the exams I’d been taking every semester since sixth grade; no more of the hours and hours of studying I’d always done on weeknights and weekends. I’d been a well-rounded kid and a somewhat well-rounded college student, but I’d always put a lot of effort into my school work and so it was novel, this thought of doing anything else every day, and so exciting.

The morning I took my last exam I felt elated; I’m never taking a test again! I’d shouted as I ran into Jenny and Olivia’s room and grabbed them, and dragged them across the fire escape and into my bedroom, and danced with them atop my bed as I blasted Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” at full volume. I had no job lined up yet, no clue what I’d be doing next. There were just a few days left before graduation, before adult life started, and my mother was beyond worried about my lack of employment; but I just felt elated. Anything and everything lay before me; for those next few days, I remember feeling like I was floating.

One week from today I know I’ll feel that way again. These moments of transition are rare in life; and brief; and so worth savoring. They bring such marvelous things: That feeling of completion and new beginning; that knowledge of the mountain of effort and experience in between; the empowerment of it. The thrill of looking upward, and outward, after such a long period of looking inward. The elation of not knowing, of having yet another blank sky to guide my dreaming.

out of reach

The day I met David was my first time volunteering after college. I’d walked into the homework center nestled between a Boys and Girls Club and a health clinic in a community center associated with a low-income housing project across the street, and I’d been directed into a classroom and toward this fourth grader, whom the Program Director had asked to show me around. He shook my hand and introduced himself as he walked me through the three classrooms, explaining which grade levels each served. Ours was for fourth and fifth graders, at the time, and later also for middle schoolers; and there, in that room, I would sit surrounded by students one or two nights a week for five years. I’d work on homework and study skills with a handful of kids; and I’d introduce them to poetry and politics and some of the history or geography I was editing at work. Over the years I tutored a handful of students who all seemed to know and never seemed to mind that David would always get my attention most. It had been so simple, his winning me over within just a few minutes that first night. He’d taken me through the classrooms and then into the computer lab, where his eyes had lit up. “These are our computers,” he told me, “they were a gift.” There were sixteen of them, all purple iMacs, and they looked pristine. “Every night I clean up in here,” he’d explained as he pulled out a duster, then swabbed at each keyboard and pushed in each chair. “These were a gift from MIT,” he’d told me, “so we have to take care of them.” And then he’d walked around the circle of computers and shut down each one, squaring the mouse up on each mouse pad as he passed.

This ten-year-old was responsible, he was compassionate, and he showed such great respect. But as I sat with him so regularly and worked with him through assignments, I saw determination and frustration intermixed. Memorizing was hard for him, multiplication a beast. We’d chant and we’d sing and we’d repeatrepeatrepeat, but it took many months for those multiplication tables to lock in. He hated how much more time he had to spend on math than other kids; yet he stayed focused, turned his eyes wide toward me and listened to everything I said. He stayed focused, he pushed himself, and one day, after I’d tried visually depicting division as many ways as I could, he took the pencil from my hand and redrew something I’d done. Near where I’d created apples he made a row of small tick marks, then circled them in batches as I had shown him so many times. He looked up at me, expectant, and found me grinning and probably a little teary eyed to boot.

The next week he was too excited to start homework right away; he had to tell me something; he wanted me to know. He’d shown his teacher the way he could draw out each division problem and solve it, and she’d asked him to redo one on the board in front of the class. He had never kept up with the other students before; now he’d gone and taught division to the entire class.

I will never forget his face that day, as he told me how good that felt; nor the time he asked if he could read one of the textbooks I’d been working on, and did read it, and then told me which parts he liked best; nor the moment, years later, when without any hesitation he emailed me his first Shakespeare paper and asked me for help. I’d moved to San Francisco by then, just a month into his freshman year of high school, and he knew how to reach me and I knew we’d stay in touch; but realizing that he wanted me to keep tutoring him was one of the most poignant learning moments of my life. The homework center aimed to help low-income students academically; but what David showed me as he sent me every iteration of every English and history paper he wrote over the next four years was that the experience had bred in him that same love of learning that I regularly wish all schooling was about. David always wanted to make his work meaningful; to engage with his readings and have something to say about it that made sense. He had a strong affinity for issues related to justice and personal offense; he reveled in sharing that with old William, in writing about Shylock and Iago with the same seriousness he pondered the civil rights movement and the history of his parents’ native Haiti and the plight of families in the ghetto, as he referred to his housing project both while and after he lived in it. He always wanted to make the world meaningful, to consider things carefully and then craft out his clearest thoughts.

This summer David will turn nineteen; next week he’ll become a high school graduate. His face has thinned, his cheek structure hardened, but he still looks at me, when I visit, with a youthful trust and faith in his eyes. Two years ago when I saw him for the first time after leaving Cambridge, he was so clearly a teenager, with a handsome grin, a deep, rich-toned voice, and a sturdier handshake than that first one he gave me when he was just ten; but he still hugged me and held on for a very long time. When I left that day, I couldn’t help but hug him again and tell him I love him, and he said with no hesitation the same thing. This boy, now a young man, is like a brother to me; he’s like family; but he’s also something else. He’s my muse, my motivation, the driving force behind my (hopeful) career shift. He and his siblings and classmates and that homework center are why I want to fill this country with great programming for low-income kids; because there are thousands of young people out there who love learning and will work hard at it and yet no one invests in them or gives them much to work with. David is with me in every class I take at Stanford, in every hour I have spent tutoring or teaching creative writing to kids. (He even asked about my west coast tutees, checking in on them, big brotherly.) David is with me in the college awareness program I have volunteer run the past few years, and he is with me especially in every class session and reading for a course I’m taking on postsecondary access. Today he is with me louder and clearer than ever before because today we have spent a long time on the phone talking—for the third or fourth time in recent weeks—about financial aid and student loans and future earnings and not knowing, neither one of us, how to figure this out. David’s family has moved out of public housing; his parents must now earn enough to not be deemed low-income because even with seven children they did not qualify for a Pell Grant, did not qualify for all the financial aid for college that we had thought. And college is on the table now, as David has finally been accepted despite his continued difficulties in math, his persistent struggles with grammar, spelling, and syntax in writing, and his resulting low GPA and SAT score. I was not sure David would get into a four-year college because on paper he has not excelled to the extent that in person it is so clear he has; and yet three colleges have interviewed and accepted him, I trust because his commitment to hard work and his passion for learning and doing and being involved in the world around him are all too evident to anyone he meets. He wins others over so easily in person; he is one of those young people that many adults cannot forget.

David has struggled and he has conquered and yet he may still not get to go to four-year college because the cost is just too much for his large and not well-off family. I came to Stanford wanting to make sure that every young person would get the same supports that have benefited David so much; yet in two weeks I will leave it unsure that even that is enough; because all this hard work and focus feels a bit like a tease when the price tag on the American dream is out of reach.

(conversing with myself)

I wonder if I can put into words what it is like for me to have this blog and not be using it. I've always said that for me, writing is breathing; that finding poetry in the written word and everything else around me is inherent to my being. Not having the time to indulge that for so many months now sometimes catches up to me. I find myself pining for the free time in which to sort out my thoughts and then capture them—like long ago on summer nights I caught fire flies and then enclosed them, for a time, in a glass jar with holes poked in the lid and a punched-tin cylinder made in art class encircling it; and through the star-shaped punctures of this structure (this piece of paper, this computer screen, this bit of poetics) the flickers of the bug's radiance flashed.

Sometimes when my emotions get stirred up, I find myself pining for the shaping of thoughts into paragraphs, the reification of what flickers inside me. I don't, lately, have time for it, but I have discovered a short-cut. The wonderful thing about writing is that you've made a recording; so on a day like today, when I am running out of steam for working, getting derailed by life-thinking, I remind myself that I can at least revisit the past postings. And in one of them today I have found something uplifting. I have found my own resiliency, and I have reconjured it within me. Know thy self, I read from my own words of more than a year ago, and I can't help but start smiling. Know thy self, I read, and the pot begins again to steep. Life can bring on its uncertainties, its frustrations, its repetitions of annoyances; I will take them. I can take them. I love taking them. They are the ridges and bumps that give my world texture.

the tone of precious things

Trillia, mayapples, the possibility of muskrats—these are what we’re in the woods hunting for; these are his joys. The “oh, look!” and then “careful where you step!” when he spots a gentle forest slope covered in the purple blossoms of his favorite wildflower come out with the same tenderness he reveals when speaking to his puppies and little grandchildren. This is the tone of precious things, of life’s simplest yet richest delights. Soon he is tiptoeing along a fallen tree, standing almost in the river, and studying the mud banks alongside it for the right sort of paw prints, the right sort of holes. When I was a child, we always saw muskrats along the Chattahoochee; but Atlanta is more populated now, the paths along the river speckled with trash and trodden by dogs. We are lucky if we come across raccoon tracks now. We are lucky if the sound of traffic on the highway overpasses up river dies down, if all we hear in the air for a moment is the honking of geese calling to one another from rocks spread across the slow-tumbling whitewater.

In those quiet moments, we both attune our ears to the rustling of the new leaves above us; we adjust our eyes to the brown of the branches around us, the brown of the dried leaves under our feet, the brown of the hairy vines that will soon sport the lush green leaves of poison ivy. I spot a blue bird in a nearby tree; he a blue heron on the far side of the river. As I stumble over a patch of small star-like flowers, whose petals I count so I can look them up in a field guide later, he lifts a rock slowly, ready to catch a lizard whose pattering footsteps atop the mat of leaves have caught his attention.

This is how we enjoy the woods, my father and I. It doesn’t matter if we have walked this same path twenty or thirty times over the course of our lives; if we have seen these birds before, these flowers before. Something always awaits us. This time, it is the plethora of trillia; on another visit, it might be the first burst of color on the red buds, the fresh opening of leaves on the hickories, or the slow gliding of a hawk across the sky. Something of the natural world always awaits us—something that persists despite all the intrusions of humanity upon it. There is a massive earth beneath and around us, which he has always revered. So too has my mother. If there is one thing they have in common, it is this way of looking. This way of understanding. This tone of tenderness in their voices when they first see, then examine, then know something small, rich, and exciting in the natural world. This is how they raised me; what they raised in me. It is the legacy of their marriage, now long ago ended; the legacy of what united them long enough to bring me into this magnificent world with my eyes and ears open, my curiosity bursting forth like fire, illuminating many things.

the gradations of childhood

It’s only when I am holding Isa’s hand and walking beside her that I realize how small she is; I have to will my legs to shorten their stride enough to match hers. Most of the time, she seems less like a toddler and more like a full-fledged girl. She talks constantly; she sings songs learned at school; she does my hair; she plays games; she informs her younger siblings when they are doing something against the rules; she “reads,” which entails narrating aloud the images in story books that she cannot actually yet read—because she has, in fact, only recently turned three. She seems so fully grown because of the constant contrast with Lidia, who is almost two, and Raul, who is seven months. Lidia is part baby and part toddler, speaking single words occasionally but using her face, hands, and body to relay much more information about what she wants and feels than she can let be known with her voice. Lidia is still small enough to be carried easily; yet she feeds herself, puts herself in bed for naps, climbs into her stroller and takes a seat before walks. Raul can do none of these things for himself; the most he can do on his own is roll over, swallow, and sing songs no one understands.

That Isa can put her own shoes on, put her dishes in the sink and her trash in the trash can, pull on her own pants and snap the button; that she can laugh at jokes and play-act dramatically and ask questions and learn innumerable new words in two languages and immediately begin to use them—that she can do all these things makes her seem immensely mature in comparison to the littler ones; so it is easy to forget that at heart she is still a tiny little thing—still very tender emotionally, still very reliant on the big people in her life for everything she needs.

It took three or four days for Lidia to warm to me. Before that she sometimes smiled at me, but she wouldn’t let me hold her or often kiss her—she didn’t trust me; she didn’t know me. She had been a baby the last time I’d seen her. It took something as simple as me holding her in my arms and pretending to drop her; letting her swoosh upside down toward the floor and then catching her, over and over; later pushing her, suddenly, as high as my arms could take her—catching her by surprise, interacting not emotionally or mentally but physically with her, these were the ways to build a bond with her. Once she knew I’d thrill her with moves that would scare a timid child like Isa, Lidia and I were best friends, and she’d happily nestle into my lap for snuggling time too, happily outstretch her arms toward me and let me carry her. It was a moment of victory when I figured out how to initiate a relationship with her—and a moment of trauma for my first niece, who had already entrusted me to focus intently on her, and only on her. The day I befriended Lidia, Isa threw tantrums constantly. She refused a nap and stomped her feet at her parents and threw toys on the floor. She wailed before taking a shower.

She was being the tiny little girl that she is. With three siblings so close in age, the gradations of childhood make a strong contrast—make her seem older and more competent at handling things than perhaps she is.