VML--Mom

Last year, my mother wrote me a letter that has been sitting on my desk ever since, awaiting my attention.  I kept it because there was a line that struck me, one that inspired me to write.  Today I finally got the chance to write the poem I've been wanting to write.  I include it here: it's no masterpiece, but I'm always glad to have something in words that was once only a vague idea.  Isn't that the ultimate goal of the writer?

Anticlimactic

For my mother’s birthday,

my father drove her up to a lovely restaurant—

a two-hour drive to find any establishment

that could be called “lovely”—

for a special dinner.

In that place, on that night

there was to be a presentation of wild birds

rescued from the wild, stern-eyed owls

and restless prey-seekers,

and a red-tailed hawk to be released

back into the wild from whence she came.

This last was the primary draw, I believe.

When writing to me about it later,

my mother deemed the event “cool,

even if it was a bit anticlimactic.

She just flew away.”

Were I that lucky once-captive,

I would have found meaning in that flight.

Having lived long years—a vast percentage

of her life—in captivity, wing feathers

brushing cages and human skin, in that moment

she lifted free of the supporting arm,

touching nothing but wind, higher than she had ever

dared to go before, only to look down

and see no one summoning her,

no one waiting for her return.

To see only farewells in human eyes.

Was there fear or contentment in her heart?

My mother and father, watching,

had no way to tell.  After all,

she just flew away.

Back in the Days of Bad Poetry

There is an annual poetry contest sponsored by Hollins, the Nancy Thorp Memorial contest.  Every year high school students from all around the country send in entries—some because their English teachers require it, but still—and Hollins undergraduate and graduate students serve as the judges.  This year, I was one of them.

It was a humorous experience for me, and an eye-opener, because at one point I was one of those high school students.  I remembered writing that quality of poetry, though at the time I was unaware of how very bad it was.  There’s a tendency at that age to be very overdramatic, to be angry at the entire world and to spill angst across the page.  Yes, there were many examples of teenage angst, and we laughed at many of them.  I mean, “tsunami of grief”?  Really?

But even as I laughed, I was struck by how many there were and how similar they sounded.  More fascinating was how familiar the tone of these poems was: almost exactly the same as some of the poetry I myself used to write as a teenager.  Poetry about being alone, being stuck in the darkness...I wrote that sort of thing at one time.  It seems the high school experience is much the same wherever you are.  What makes it so?  I suppose it must be that in large groups, teenagers begin to look the same.  They form the same groups, the same rules for themselves.

After the fact, we tend to roll our eyes and laugh, but I remember those years and how they were for me.  High school was a pretty miserable existence.  I was too smart for my own good, and much too shy.  It made me unapproachable, and so my social life flatlined for years.  In a world that demands social interaction, it made things difficult for me.  I wanted people to see something special in me and acknowledge it.  What I didn’t learn until later was that I had to do something in order to show that something-special, and with the doing comes a kind of self-acknowledgement that renders mass admiration unnecessary.

Now, I had left my angst-poetry behind by the time I reached tenth grade, but that feeling came back several times throughout high school.  I write this now in the hopes that I will come back to it later, when that feeling is harder to remember.  It is the kind of thing at which adults roll their eyes, but I hope that even while I laugh, there is a bit of understanding and sympathy underlying.  Silly though they seem, those hurts, those fears that you discover at that age are real, and there’s no way to escape them except to fight through on your own.

No Need to Panic, Folks, It's Just a Squirrel

According to the Washington Post, this week is Squirrel Week.  The columnist with the Post talks about “the mysteries of a furry woodland critter that, in some people, elicits as much fear and revulsion as a fanged creature from the deep.”  I believe this to be an exaggeration, of course, probably a humorous reference to Shark Week.  But it bothers me, somehow, that someone should make such an assumption.

I have quite a bit of experience with squirrels.  There are dozens of them on campus.  Most of them are about six times healthy squirrel weight, and I’ve never known any of them to be very dangerous.  Much more frightening are the feral cats that occasionally run by with a fat squirrel in their mouths. 

The first animal I ever ran over with my car was a squirrel.  I was distraught by the event, and my friend who was with me finally grew tired of my hysterics and made up a story about “the Squirrel Avenger.”  He would have a tiny machine gun, she said, as well as a bandana and a tattoo with his mother’s name, and he would be coming to get me in revenge for his bushy-tailed friend.  At this flight of fancy, I stopped my crying and laughed at the ridiculousness of it all.

My point is, squirrels seem to be one of the least dangerous species out in the world.  Yes, perhaps you might get rabies if bitten by one, but what is the likelihood of that?  There aren’t many popular portrayals of deadly squirrels, either.  The squirrel character in Prince Caspian is a scatterbrained chatterbox, and even such a classic as It’s a Wonderful Life shows a random squirrel climbing up onto Uncle Billy’s arm in his moment of deepest trouble.  They are symbols of cuteness, forgetfulness, and general woodland life, but not darkness or terror.  

So it seems to make sense that no one should be afraid of squirrels as the columnist suggests, but are they?  Like most of my generation, when in doubt, I turn to Google.  A search turned up a Facebook page entitled “Im afraid of squirrels” (yes, I did cringe at the grammar, but I’m almost finished and mustn’t lose focus now).  A whopping nine people were members.  This, to me, is the best possible evidence that squirrels are not, in fact, dangerous, despite what Mr. Kelly at the Washington Post claims.  I’m sure most of you are quite relieved.

*Disclaimer: I mean no offense to Mr. Kelly—in fact, I want to thank him for the inspiration.  You can find his column here: Squirrel Week

Not Another Carpe Diem Blog Post

I walked into the lobby of my dormitory today and saw a heart with an arrow drawn on a dry-erase board.  For an instant, I had a small panic attack—have I missed an entire month?  Then I remembered: oh yeah, our culture gets ready for holidays weeks in advance.  Christmas is the worst.  This year I knew several people who had mentally skipped both Thanksgiving and Halloween.  But hey, we just want to be prepared, right?  Heaven forbid we not be completely sick of a holiday before it even arrives.

People always say to live in the moment, but it seems to go against human nature.  We spent so much of our time looking forward to something, with certain special dates always in the back of our minds.  For me, it’s March 1^st, March 13^th, May 20^th, and after that I have to be worried about not having plans.  There are others in there, family birthdays, days I have to pay my bills…all days that have not come yet, but still take some of today away from me in how much I think about them.

When we’re not looking forward, we’re looking back.  This kind of reflection normally comes under the category of “should” and its relatives “could” and “would.”  I should have worked on that project, I should have made that phone call…I could have gone to the gym, I would have finished my paper.  It’s a strange concept—I missed doing this, but at least I regret it, that makes it better, right?  No, actually, regret over such small things wastes even more time.

Let’s all make a mental realignment.  Save your neck the strain, figuratively speaking, and spend some time in today.  Appreciate January while you can—it’s a nice month, after all, rather relaxing after all the fuss over Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Take the day and use it well, because that’s all you can do.  In my opinion, it’s better to have few plans and be surprised than to have many plans and be surprised anyway.  Tomorrow will come when it’s good and ready.

For She's a Jolly Good Fellow

Today is my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday.  She was born on January 17^th, 1922.  Yes, I did pull out a calculator to make sure my math was right.  1922.  Isn’t that amazing?  When Grammy was born, there had only been one World War.  The United States was still trying to figure out whether it was a hermit or a hero.  Radio was just getting started, and the suffrage movement had finally won out.  In that year, Egypt and Ecuador gained their independence; the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated; King Tut’s tomb was discovered; and Babe Ruth signed on to the New York Yankees while construction began on Yankee Stadium, which in my father’s opinion meant a greater concentration of evil in the world.  Mohandas Gandhi, Annie Oakley, Walt Disney, and Pope Pius XI were some of the great names of the day.  And to satisfy my thirst for weirdness, a woman confessed in that year to having been married sixty-two times, while the duck-billed platypus was first exhibited in a US zoo that year.*

All that in one year, so can you imagine what ninety of those years amounts to?  What a life; what an incredible journey.  My grandmother saw television, computers, planes, and phones come into being, watched them evolve and change and become part of daily life.  She saw the world change, too, as the Nazis rampaged Europe, as the Communists rose to power and lost it again, as the Civil Rights Movement tore through America.

I imagine that Frances O’Connor, née Mims, took it all in with her usual aplomb.  As her husband moved her back and forth and up and down the nation, as he went to war and came home, as she raised four boys into men, she made so much that was extraordinary in her own life.  She’s coped with the hard things—a long estrangement with one of her boys, leaving homes which she loved, and the loss of her husband, her granddaughter, and another of her sons.  And she’s gathered around her a large, rather nutty family which looks to her for wisdom, guidance, and the occasional gentle scold.

Ten years ago, there was a big party for her eightieth, with many tributes to her from all her loved ones.  Then, my contribution was to play the birthday song on my trumpet, little eleven-year-old granddaughter in my Easter dress.  Today this is my tribute, how I sing her praises.  I wish you the best, Grammy, with many lovely happy returns of the day.  With luck, I’ll have a novel to dedicate for your one-hundredth.

*1922 fast facts come from http://www.brainyhistory.com/years/1922.html

VML--Mom

My mother is the queen of letter-writing.  She sends me about five four-page letters a week, in addition to writing regularly to my older sister and my younger brother.  These letters are written well in advance of sending, so they don’t usually have recent news.  Rather, they’re full of her thoughts and opinions on things, old family stories, and the occasional nag or scold.  She begins and ends every letter in a similar fashion: “I hope this finds you well and happy,” and “Lots and lots of love, Mom.”

I love these letters.  They’re the subject of envy from anyone who comes to the post office with me.  I have a shoe box full of saved letters on the top of my bookshelf, with notes on why I saved them, so I can refer back to them later.  They help me learn more about my mom, my family, and myself. 

Frequently they are thought-provoking.  A letter I read a few weeks ago was talking about how difficult it is for my mom to believe that I will be graduating college.  She gave me the usual “It seems only yesterday” talk.  Then she told me a story about how, when she was about five or six months pregnant with me, she had an epiphany.  As I understand it, she and my father had planned out the names of all their children long before any of us were born.  I was meant to be Margaret Anne.  But a few months before I was born, my mother decided very suddenly that I was not a Margaret Anne.  “I just KNEW,” she told me.

I wonder how she knew?  What changed in that moment to make her realize that I was gearing up to be an Eileen Michelle, and that she had to change her plans to suit mine?  And how would my life be different if she hadn’t?  I wouldn’t have a little sister named Margaret Anne, for starters—she’d have some other name.  I think I would make everyone use my whole name, or if they had to shorten it, use Anne.  I might have turned out to be a musician rather than a writer—it just seems to me to be more of a music-y name. 

It all comes out for the best.  I like my name, and must always have done, as I used to go around spelling it for adults.  It’s reassuring to know that even in utero, I knew my own mind.  Makes me feel like I got off to a good start on life.  And I think it being an uncommon name has set me apart a little bit from the crowd.  Sometimes I don’t like that; sometimes I do.  Either way, I am who I am.  So thanks, Mom.

Grow Up and Be Kids

For my senior honors thesis, I am writing a novel, and this January that is my primary focus.  It isn’t surprising, then (or it shouldn’t be), that many of my thoughts are connected to the story.  The thought in question this morning is based on a scene of dialogue between the main character and an old friend of hers.  They are talking about a young man, whom the main character believes to be fully grown.  “There are different levels of being grown,” her friend tells her, and the main character realizes that this is true, that there were points in her life where she believed herself to be a sage adult, only to be proved wrong.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since.  It happens to all of us.  One day we wake up and decide (for whatever reason) that we are adults.  It may happen to some of us at age eleven, to others at fourteen or fifteen, but it always happens.  Even those who try to retain childlike habits and beliefs still usually wanted to be treated like equals by their peers.  From the moment of that decision, we struggle with the world to make it believe that we know what we’re doing and that we can make our own decisions.

For me, this impulse began to show its head when I was about eleven—I remember trying to look dignified in family pictures, not realizing that others only found it cute.  To a child’s mind, a “grown-up” is someone who has the answers, who knows what they want from life and how to get it.  Therefore my adolescence was spent scrambling to figure out what it was I wanted and learning to speak confidently about it, even when I changed my mind six times in a weekend.

I think, though, that there is a reason that most people older than eighteen or so don’t use the word “grown-up”.  True, it sounds a bit infantile, but also there is no such thing.  There’s no stopping point to growing up.  There is no age that is marked out at which point one is considered fully grown.  After age eighteen or twenty-one, maybe even twenty-five, life is a journey, not a destination.  And I imagine I will continue to be proved wrong on the basis of my own wisdom and self-sufficiency throughout life.  That’s the way it goes.

It’s not always a bad thing.  If you can’t be a child all your life, living between childhood and adulthood is the next best thing.  You can have the best of both worlds, living successfully and realizing how great that is.  If you never decide that you’re grown up, then living itself is always an adventure. 

Note: the title of this post is borrowed from a song by the Cab, from their album Symphony Soldier, which I highly recommend.