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.

the trials of a single girl in her 30s

When I first told my mother I was going to graduate school, she was delighted. She has for years been telling me how much she regrets not getting a higher degree (she was one year into a PhD in biology when my dad got a tenured job and they moved 1,000 miles away so he could take it; she never got back to that degree she'd wanted and has felt hindered by not having it throughout her career). But pretty quickly, she realized there was another cause for rejoicing. She is an avid reader of the New York Times wedding page, and just as she has observed in its listings that many people are now getting married in their late 20s and 30s (hope for me yet, she says, though really she doesn't want me to have a husband so much as give her grandbabies who live in this country), so too has she noted that most of them meet in school. At Stanford, she decided, I would find my husband.

As it turns out, I am in a master's program that is 6/7 female, in a department with about the same percentage, so I'm not finding too many opportunities to meet my future hubby. When I do meet men who seem attractive, smart, and available, they tend to have one major deficiency: a significant number fewer years of life than me. Now given the treatise I once wrote on why younger men shouldn't write off older women, you probably know I'm open to dating younger men. My brother, after all, is four years the junior of his wife, and they have a terrific relationship—just the kind I'd like to find. So I'm as open as open can be. But how much younger is too young?

The first two guys I met on campus who seemed to take an interest proved to be, each, about 22. In both cases, they looked it, so I had to finally step away from the conversation because, really, what is the point? Last week I met one who seemed plenty mature and plenty appealing—but he proved to be just 24. Is seven years too much younger for dating? I couldn't tell he was that much younger—he didn't look it, and he didn't seem it. Does that make it OK? The question is rhetorical, really, because I doubt he would want to date someone so much older—for the self-same reason I identified in the PSA mentioned above. But given that my pickings seem to be mainly in the realm of those younger than me, I'm trying to figure out where to draw the line—or if I have to. It feels wrong, somehow, to be attracted to someone seven or ten years younger than me, but if I am, I am, right? Perhaps I've reached an age at which age matters less. What do you vote for, my dear readers—shall I become the next Mrs. Robinson??

(when something stirs in the dark)

Being back on a college campus these days and having a few seniors in my classes, my brain keeps drifting back to my own senior year. When I think about this exact time ten years ago, I can't remember exactly which classes I was taking or what job I had then, but I know what I was doing with a lot of my free time: I was quite surely falling in love. The story is long and its ending sad, with my love becoming unrequited; but I didn't know at the start (or even in the middle) that that's what I was heading toward; I didn't know anything but that there was this guy I was getting to know and with each inch we moved closer to each other, such a bond was forming that it would take years for me to be able to let go.

The first time I ever saw him, I had my faced stuffed into a lilac bush; I was smiling and breathing in the magnificent odor of the petals and he was passing through the courtyard around which it turned out we both lived. When he saw me, he grinned with a look like appreciation, and I remembered that when, a month or two later, we crossed paths again. This time it was in the stairwell; he was heading out and I was going to watch a movie with a friend who turned out to be his roommate, though I didn't find that out until halfway through the film. At that point he snuck through the dark room to the shower after a workout at the gym. As he finished in the bathroom, he must've heard a scene he liked in the movie, because he came out to watch in his towel, and no one who was there will ever let me forget that my mouth truly did drop open at the sight of his obscenely cut and dripping wet torso. That night I finally thought to ask his name.

A few months later, I had my first conversation with him, sitting in his bedroom and talking for what later seemed like an appalling amount of time for a guy who could happily be silent for days on end. I can't tell you what we talked about, but I remember something that went loudly through my head as I walked back home. I could fall in love with this guy, I had said to myself, and very soon I did.

It's hard, sometimes, to remember how perfectly our friendship unfolded. How it started with him coming over to hang seven or eight strands of Christmas lights around my common room and staying late into the night; how it continued with little things like him asking me to read poetry to him as he lay in bed and tried to get to sleep. He knew I liked poetry, so he had me sit on the edge of his bed and read—one, maybe two poems at a time. Sometimes before leaving I would kiss him on the forehead, just like at times he would lean down and do to me when we were standing somewhere saying goodbye. But that was early on, and everything was still unspoken, so sometimes I just read to him and said good night. On those nights it probably took a long time to reach sleep myself. There was a poem I so wanted to read to him, but I couldn't; things were still unspoken, and I couldn't even let a Rilke poem say to him what I had on my mind:

I would like to sing someone to sleep,
to sit beside someone and be there.
I would like to rock you and sing softly
and go with you to and from sleep.
I would like to be the one in the house
who knew: The night was cold.
And I would like to listen in and listen out
into you, into the world, into the woods.

The clocks shout to one another striking,
and one sees to the bottom of time.
And down below one last, strange man walks by
and rouses a strange dog.
And after that comes silence.

I have laid my eyes upon you wide;
and they hold you gently and let you go
when something stirs in the dark.

One night he took me walking, aimlessly, I thought; but it got dark out, and we had gone quite a ways, so I finally asked where we were headed. We were by the river when he told me; there were tall grasses beside us, and I knew we were almost to the next town. On a walking tour of my childhood, he told me as we reached his favorite basketball court, and then he described how all the boys he grew up with first tasted alcohol sitting out on the court. He laughed as he thought back on that; he smiled as he sat me in the hammock behind his parents' house and swung me; he grew quiet as we lay down on the grass of the golf course beyond their home and stared at the sky. We lay there a long time before he told me that I was stretched out on his favorite patch of grass on this earth, that I was taking in his favorite view of the stars in the sky.

A long time after I let him go, I told myself it was OK to hold on to one or two of the best memories, it was OK to hold on at least to that memory—because it's not so often in life that someone fully lays himself open to you and asks you to walk on in. I don't think back on it often anymore; I kicked him out of my life five years ago, almost exactly five years after we started growing so close without putting the right words to things before it was too late. He wasn't available, emotionally, when I met him; and by the time he finally was, I had gotten over him. We had a bond like family by then, but he hadn't been able to go where I wanted us to go and so I'd gotten over him. But we held on to each other like family; we spent time together like family. Eventually it was just too much; we were too bonded for people who weren't in a relationship; my heart was still tied up in him and it hindered me from dating, and his eventual girlfriend seemed to think the same thing for him.

One weekend after five years of all this, we went to stay at his parents' ski condo and had a great time. I skied my intermediate slopes and he hit the big ones; afterward we sat in his favorite cafe and I drank hot cocoa and read poetry while he did his homework for an engineering class he was in. Sometime in the middle of that quiet afternoon by a snow-filled window, I told him my dream of owning a bookstore with a cafe in it—a cafe just like this one. The other memory I may never let go of is the way he looked at me in that moment; me, sitting in this place that he had loved since childhood; me, sharing a dream with him; me, there, with him after all those years; and he told me that he could build it for me, the bookstore with the cafe in it just like this one; once he (started and) finished architecture school, he could build it. In the meantime, a few weeks later, he gave me as a birthday present a book about the business of opening a cafe, and he told me he thought I really should do it; he really wanted me to do it.

In that moment between my dream and his affirmation of it, I knew that I was still in love with him. It took six more months for me to tell him so—for me to tell him so and ask him to step out of my life in the very same breath. But I knew it in that moment, that I loved him and he loved me but it was never going to be in the way that I hoped. He had a girlfriend then, when he looked at me and told me he could build my dream into reality, and perhaps that's what made it possible for me to finally see that whatever he and I were just was not right.

That all comes into my mind when I'm on campus and thinking back on college, but it's really at the forefront because of something that happened a month ago when I was back in Cambridge, where all this unfolded. I was there just two days, going to a wedding, and as I got on the red line to leave town, I thought I saw him. If it had been him, he'd be an architect now, fully licensed and practicing. If it had been him, he'd be a husband and a father; he might have had his baby in his arms. When the man's face rose I knew it wasn't who I'd thought it was, but in those few seconds afterward, I considered what I would have done if he had been there, just a few people down from me on the train. Five years had passed since I'd seen him; I would have smiled with all my heart. Five years had passed; I would have smiled and stepped off the train.

(for a beloved friend on this day of great loss)

from Theodore Roethke's "The Far Field"

All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree:
The pure serene of memory in one man,—
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.