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.

life like a movie

Do you ever think about the music that would be on a soundtrack of your life? Do you ever catch yourself in a moment that's so ripe with emotion, aesthetics, or meaning that you can almost hear some song you like rising in volume in the background? Maybe what's more common is to find yourself innocently going about your life when a certain song comes on the radio—in the car, in a store, at a cafe—and you're in a certain mood or situation that makes it resonate; and for a minute or two, it's like you've become the movie star, and the scene unfolding around you has been constructed—crafted—to so perfectly carry the mood that's overtaken you.

Today I was driving at that hour of day a poet would call the gloaming—that time just before dark when the air gets a little blue before it loses the light altogether. At that time of day, leaves still reveal themselves in silhouettes pressed against the sky; but stars and planets also sparkle; headlights flash on; street lights begin to glow. In the car I sat quietly—alone except for the radio, which was emitting old-timey jazz; old-timey jazz tunes that dance with a playful joy. This time the movie I was in wasn't set right then and there; rather, the scene was taking place in the future—in what feels like a distant future. I was marrying. Not walking down the aisle or anything so romantic; no, just sitting in a room filled with people, buzzing with chatter and the movements of those I love most dearly, and this old-timey jazz was playing. Like in a dream, I could almost see myself leaning back and watching it all as something inside me danced with that same playful joy and contentment that the music hastened in.

Why did the music take me, I wondered, to some place so distant for me now? It could be something to do with wistfulness, but I think it isn't; I think it was just something clicking in my head, responding to something else that happened a few weeks ago. I had been in class; the professor had handed each student a card with an emotion written on it, and we'd done a free association with that emotion and a set of words. We worked in groups and shared our responses, trying to get others to identify the emotion we held in our hand with the vivid associations of feel, taste, sound, food, and memory that we had made. My word had been rage, another person's happiness. The burning of hot peppers on my tongue, the melting of chocolate chips as cookies baked—my group members had quickly deduced the first few words. Last to share was our professor, and his list of associations was beautiful; we told him his word must be peacefulness or inner calm or something along this track. But he shook his head no. Perplexed, we demanded the answer. "Falling in love," he said, and a classmate promptly informed him he was wrong. "That's not falling in love," she assured him, "that's being in love." No—he tried to protest; but he stopped himself, smiling, and said maybe he would have described it differently 30 years ago. "You would have," she insisted, because Merlot and Beethoven, she was sure, were the signs of a tie that's been shared and adored for a long time. I loved her assurance about it; and I loved that what I associated with inner calm she associated with being in love.

But his words hadn't fit with in love for me at the time, so they had lingered. He had conjured a scene in a living room, with Merlot and classical music and rain falling beyond the window, and I had imagined socked feet on a table, reclining, and faint smiling; I had imagined inner peace and contentment—the kind one gets all on one's own. The kind one needs to have before the falling or the being in love fit in. Only once that quiet steady calm blissful place has been created can the playful joyful dancing be more than fleeting, be sustainable by every breath to be taken for the rest of time. This way it has something sturdy to fall back on in those inevitable if often infinitesimal moments between musical movements, when we all take a breath and a pause. The trumpeter inhales deeply before exhaling the old-timey jazzy tune. I inhale deeply thinking about the emotion the song conjured inside me, knowing I have a sturdy place ready to set it whenever the real-life version comes along.

(let the process bring you alive)

I like going to or from campus best at the start and end of the day. Some mornings, when I bike to school, I get to cruise under the hanging arms of a row of palm trees, whose finger-like leaves glint in the slant of the early-day sun. As I pass by them, a Spanish-roofed building comes into view; beyond its gates, the ornate painted details of a church begin to show; and then I can see the golden hills beyond, and, above them, the blue sky, which here is almost always clear. On days when I walk, I take different routes, getting to know the architecture of this block and the flora of that one. A certain path leads me past a palm tree here while at the same time an old redwood there; another way tugs me through the arching stems of calla lilies as I admire roses stretching unfathomably upward across the street; others reveal the magenta of bougainvillea, the purple of a copper birch, and the deep blood red of a maple in such rapid succession it’s hard to remember that elsewhere the seasons don’t all happen at once. Elsewhere the golden leaves of a jacaranda won’t crunch beneath my feet as I traipse past a flowering magnolia, but they do here. In the evening, palm leaves imprint their silhouette on the graying sky as I head back home. The sky saturates with navy at its pinnacle, with yellow, orange, or pink along the westward horizon, and palm leaves imprint themselves on my brain as a chill sets in. The joys of fall and spring are rolled into one here; they feel magical in a new way here.

That I am living in an enchanting place is not new to me. The last time I commuted on foot was also when I was a student; then, too, I cherished the peaceful way I got from home to school, from relaxation to mental stimulation and back again. When I walk home at night here, my brain fills with visual memories of the paths I took through Cambridge in the evening. Most often I am walking through lightly falling snow; most often I am walking on a quiet city street, the brick sidewalks jostled and worn from hundreds of years of passing feet trodding upon them, the solemn museums and looming design school resting darkly and quietly at the close of day. I am walking past neighborhood houses; I am walking into the heart of the Square and toward my home; away from a street with a name like a metaphor—Divinity Ave, it’s called, and it’s where I spent much of my time in college. It’s a short block, housing a handful of buildings that hold within them a magnificent array of studies—East Asian studies; Russian studies; botany, with its massive herbarium; geology, paleontology, and archaeology, the latter with a warehouse full of artifacts from all over the world; the department of religion, with its walls embroidered with elephants, its yard bejeweled with large stone rhinos. I sometimes sat near those creatures just to enjoy the absurdity of them; and sometimes I wandered beyond them, the other side of that building offering a one-block-by-one-block stand of trees that I could walk amidst and almost fool myself into thinking was a forest, if I tuned out the sound of traffic, the glow of street lights, the smell of chimney fires at its edges.

It is important to me to live in places I love. There is something about the character of certain places that enlivens me. The satisfaction these places give me feels like the satisfaction of true love. You may think that sort of love is one-sided, but it isn’t; there is a vital dynamism to it. As I study the details of my surroundings and fall for them, there is a stirring of something inside me—an ignition of my internal fire. Love, it tells me, love what is around you; breathe deeply, discover, and savor; let the process bring you alive.