(vacation)

sometimes the brain needs to air out:
like laundry drying in the breezes of a warm day
not just shedding moisture
but acquiring, too,
the aromas of the world around it,
a sprinkle of pollen, or even a lady bug—
becoming not just dry but also a touch pad
for tiny spores or even wings
whose involvement may seem inconsequential to the task
of regaining its initial character
but nothing could be more essential to longevity
than the inadvertent adhesion of the thing itself and something new

room to breathe

We are in the midst of the discussion when my mother changes gears. She had been commiserating with me in frustration over my brother's lack of involvement in our family in recent years. This is a topic she gets easily riled up about, as—since moving to his wife's country seven years ago—my brother has only returned home once, and never with his children. But in this moment, as I admit that he has entirely ceased calling me—which I used to be able to count on him doing once a week without fail—tears begin to flood my cheeks, and some mothering instinct kicks in, allowing her to see the situation, finally, in a new way.

"It's that apartment," she explains, suddenly uncritical of him for the problem; "no one has any room to breathe in there." My sister-in-law, she points out, grew up in a crowded home, sharing her small bedroom with a sister and an aunt for many of her younger years; she is used to this. My brother isn't. Even more than us—my mom and I both now living in apartments with no outdoor spaces, no patios even—he has no space to himself, no yard or even just a quiet room to move into when decompressing time is needed. Mentally we both compare that to the small house in which I grew up—snug but surrounded by land, by grass and bamboo stalks, a thick stand of trees and a creek. That is what he and I grew up thinking of as a home: a place with indoor and outdoor rooms: opportunities for family members to be together and to be apart.

Suddenly the concept of three children under age five and two parents living in a two-bedroom apartment seems ludicrous to me. Their apartment is hardly bigger than my own—in which I, living all alone, often feel captive, having never before, in 33 years, lived anywhere that didn't have some sort of green outdoor area to it. I would go out of my mind if I had to daily share this amount of space with four other people—three of whom, though marvelous in so many ways, are loud, ever making noise, constantly in motion. I picture his face when he sits in his living room playing his heart out on the guitar for 20 or 30 minutes each day, and despite the frenzy of games and paintings and children's books at his feet, despite the dancing of toddler toes around him, despite the effort of more than one little set of fingers to work their way between the frets alongside his--despite all those intrusions, for those 20 or 30 minutes each day, his eyes are shut, and perhaps only then is he ever anything like alone.

Perhaps, my mother suggests, his life is simply too crazed with all children beyond baby stage and in such a small home that he steals any quiet moments for himself instead of for calls with me. And perhaps that's all he really can do, she sees now.

She has, after all these years of being mad at him, discovered a sense of sympathy. Now I must learn to give him that emotional space too.

the will to live

What I am trying to muster is not a physical, keep-your-lungs-going kind of thing. Living is a lot more than breathing, than organs smoothly operating. The way I mean to do it is more like flying, like knowing the world from both earthly and aerial views; more like what these poets and a young I have described:

Octavio Paz:
Freedom is wings,
the wind in leaves, pausing over
a simple flower....


Neruda:
To
rise
to
the
sky
you
need

two wings,
a violin,
and so many things....


Little Lara:
butterfly wings
can’t take you high but
they will carry you low
where you can see
and they will sparkle under the sun’s light
as you rise
into the deep blue sky

delicate butterfly wings will carry you
where you can see


Cowboy Junkies (Townes Van Zandt lyrics):
to live is to fly
low and high
so shake the dust off your wings
and the sleep out of your eyes


E.E. Cummings:
who are you, little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window;at the gold

of november sunset

(and feeling:that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)


A.R. Ammons:
I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper--though
that, too--but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.


What I am trying to muster is not a physical, keep-your-lungs-going kind of thing.
I am trying to regain a certain way of seeing the world that once came as naturally to me as breathing; a way of making the moments of life into the verses of poetry.

nascent joy

It is hard to imagine experiencing the recounted scene: being on duty that evening, among the first responders, in the midst of the work of your profession and having that place you in the position of being the one to pull a severed hand from the dismembered, burning car, to then discover the face of a friend in the remains of two vehicles that moments earlier carried, respectively, a drunk driver and a young family—a couple and their two-months-old child whom you, the firefighter, had babysat the night before. It was the end of that career for him. This was probably 25 or 30 years ago, based on the gray in his hair now, but the memory clearly still haunts him. We only sat together on the bus for a matter of minutes, but when the banter turned from baseball to my profession, out of friendliness I returned the question, his cheerful chattiness with the men seated around us not suggesting to me any territory that would be hard for him to pass back through.

When he’d gotten on he’d sat across from me, smiling at my neighbor in the Giants jacket and asking about tonight’s game. All I’d thought at first was how sports can bring any two people together—the one a slick-haired white guy, donning a track suit and carrying a satchel with Oracle’s name sewn into it, leading me to suspect he was a comfortably retired professional; the other a pock-cheeked, yellow-toothed, shaky-voiced black man, whom I would later learn is a recovering meth addict struggling to comply with his counselor’s seemingly contradictory requirements that he take anti-depressants while he attempts to relieve himself of a substance reliance. Not long into their talk about the west coast final to be played tonight, a third man—latino, cheerful in his mustache, shorts, and flip flops despite the Vietnam Veterans hat atop his head—pitched in his own thoughts on the game, and I was so enjoying the affinity quickly felt among these representatives of different walks of life that I began to smile behind my magazine, inspiring the first one to ask if I followed baseball. To their delight, I responded definitively but kindly no, the sport moving too slowly for my tastes; my bold honesty thankfully coming across as sassy in a good way. Just minutes later, to make room for a passenger in a wheelchair, the first man moved to sit between the Giants fan and me, and there they began to jovially interrogate me about what I do for work, whether I am married, how I am possibly in my 30s given what they identified as youthful looks. Out of respect I asked what the instigator of all this communication among strangers does for work, and that’s when he explained that once he was a firefighter, but just for a few years. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked why he quit the profession, but the conversation was so casual and friendly that I felt no inhibition about doing so.

After he departed, getting off near the Social Security office that was his destination, the other man, the one with the sports jacket, looked expectantly at me, so I resumed conversation, asking what he did for work that, as he had already mentioned, had him riding this daily bus to San Francisco. He made an expression like blushing before explaining that his rehab clinic is in the city, that he takes a bus and a train and the MUNI each day to receive treatment, then returns home to care for his 80-year-old mother with dementia and closed-off 85-year-old father. He told me how smart, beautiful, and warm his mother still is, contrasted stories of her with a regretful statement about his hard relationship with his father. We went on in this vein for the rest of the bus ride, him sharing his challenges, me suggesting opportunities he could find to live outside himself: to give to others through volunteer work in order to clear his head of his own concerns or come to believe that he is needed by someone, somewhere, and not to feel so alone. The darkness of his mindset was evident, yet he was enlivened by our conversation, telling me that he would love to take me home to his mother, quickly following that with a “but you would never want me like that” laced with a hopeful glance in my direction. I remained focused on the discussion of him taking care of himself, and he said he’d like to live a moral life like mine—he appreciating my current profession immensely. He said he thanked God that we were having this conversation, that it was going to change his perspective. I asked if he might talk to his minister about opportunities to do service through his church, and he liked the idea but doubted he would really follow through on it. Now I asked him to be sure to do it. His response was that he thought God had put an angel on the bus with him today. Though I do not believe in either entity, I told him that if anyone on the bus was there to give him a wake-up call, it was the first man, who had triggered the whole conversation.

Craig, as I now knew his name to be, then turned to me sharply and said as though with relief, “I saw he had the NA badge on his clothes.” I had to ask for clarification, and he explained the acronym—for Narcotics Anonymous. At a moment like that even I wanted to believe in fate. But what mattered was that Craig believed in it, in God making plans for him. So I said warmly that I thought God was feeling favorably toward him today, and after that he smiled at me quietly before stating that though he might never see me again, he would not forget me. We said only little things after that, him checking that I knew which airport stop to de-board at and asking to carry my bag off for me. But I was left thinking that two people who really needed someone or something had found each other on this day, and though they had spent all of ten minutes together, and though they perhaps each left thinking more of my involvement in the conversation than each other’s, they had found in each other a shared struggle; and in recognizing each other, they had shown the outward signs of nascent joy.

(exhalation)

Writing, I have always said, is like breathing for me. A regular habit, you could take that to mean, and I often have; but it’s something else as well, I remembered while reading the latest work of fiction by a dear friend; it’s a vital processing—the inhalation of what life gives you, the exhalation of something you’ve done with those things, something you’ve done to make them useful.

Early in my years of writing, I crafted pure fiction—the kind that contains no semblance of real events. Still, for me producing it was an autobiographical effort, as I took deeply churning emotions from inside me and released them in new form, using their intensity, if not their exact essence, to flavor short stories and poems. The pains of growing up the child of a fragile marriage and, later, a volatile divorce was not something I could, as a teenager, write about directly; it’s not something to this day I would feel inclined to put in public terms. It is a too uniquely defining element of who I am for me to gain anything from simply stating it. But to work it like the clay my mother used to spend hours spinning and lifting into gorgeous forms; to turn it over in my hands like my father would the plastic replicas of molecular structures, considering their elemental components and using these to inspire creative thinking—to contemplate it as an essential input into a system—my system of well being—through which I could spin it into something like poetry, now that felt productive. That felt like healing.

In later years, as I began to encounter other stimuli for my emotions, I took the vital process in a new direction, creating fiction infused with real stories that I recast in characters’ lives. In this way, I not only rinsed the emotions out in a metaphorical washing cycle but also sifted through the thoughts of mine left dangling from these memorable moments or experiences and found marvelous revelations, the way once upon a time I sifted through dirt piled over hundreds of years atop a Maya kitchen and in it found objects of utility, beauty, and skill. The new process felt like discovering artistry within me. Like discovering that in addition to being able to right myself internally I could also sculpt from what I had known something of poetic worth.

That others enjoyed reading my writing was delightful, rewarding, exciting. Yet it had never been what drove me. What did so was that fundamental physical need: that productive processing of experiences, that acceptance and then ensuing output of them—that way of letting go of them enough to get myself going forward from them, to avoid loitering romantically or regretfully in the past. Writing gave me the opportunity to return to a creative work and consider its craftsmanship—rather than revisiting a memory and the feelings that may have come with it.

I have for years admired this friend who also writes fiction for her skill with words, her resonant capturing of human experience on paper as though it were three-dimensional. I am reminded now, after closing her elegant recent work, that she breathes her words as I do, infuses her own experiences, aches, and ascensions into her fiction for the dual sakes of artistry and wellness—and for that I am profoundly glad for her. To see her undertake this in the very way I myself have found to be so enlivening inspires me and also obligates me. I know I can only honor her (our) effort by returning to the act I am undertaking now: by writing, by letting out a long held-in breath and with it, I hope, at least some of what’s caused me to keep it in.

the art of home cooking

I'm in the den—maybe lying on the gold shag carpet, maybe slouched deep into the arm chair—and the tv's on. I've done at least some of my homework so I'm taking an hour out of the packed day of a teenager to veg in front of some videos or a rerun of The Facts of Life or Cheers. The tv's on but not so loud that I can't hear, sizzling above me, the dancing patter of grease in a hot sauce pan—the sound of home cooking, of mom being artful in the kitchen. She's standing just at the top of the stairs and through a doorway—or at least I've always pictured her standing there over the stove while the chicken or hamburger or pork chops and onions simmer loudly. I've always pictured her just standing there, her gaze infusing into my dinner a kind of nurture, a kind of mom-only-can-give care. Perhaps she is actually seated at the table, reading the newspaper or the New Yorker or doodling with charcoal pencils on a pad of drawing paper or the edge of the news; but I've always pictured her standing over the oven, no matter how late she's gotten home, nightly letting the aromas wafting out of her culinary creations pull the details of her workday away. Perhaps I too need to return to cooking, not just for healthy eating or creativity but for healthy living, for peace of mind.

a weight lifted

like the way your arms rise
if you press them into a doorsill

a weight
lifted
acts a little like a sea breeze
or that first spray of spring blossoms:

some things move
of their own volition

sometimes in a discernible moment
my heartbeat settles
or a smile finds its place again upon my cheeks