Category: Life Changes

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The Lab

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No one is more surprised than me that my son Sam is going to be starting a Ph.D. program in organic chemistry in the fall.  “Organic chemistry?” a friend recently asked.  “Isn’t that the subject that knocks kids off their course to medical school.”  Yes, but mostly because they fail it, not because they’re so good at it their professors ask them to consider graduate work.

That’s what happened to Sam.  Three years after finishing his B.A. in English, he was still figuring out what he wants to be when he grows up.  After considering graduate work in psychology, he decided what he really wanted to do was go to medical school.  He started taking chemistry courses last summer, to get his pre-med prerequisites completed with a plan to apply to medical schools next year.  He unexpectedly found he was a natural at chemistry and loves working in a lab, that getting a graduate degree would mean free school, a decent living stipend and health insurance, and a new path opened up in front of him.

David and I are in Tennessee visiting Sam and Marianna, and we went to see the lab where Sam works today.  It looked like a real mad scientist’s lab, with a tray of dishes tilting back and forth, a beaker of a yellowish glop twirling behind a glass window, racks of small tubes with colorful tops and bottles of chemical mixtures behind glass with mysterious symbols written in black.  Sam talked about the work he’s doing and showed us his lab book, full of notes and numbers and drawings of chemical structures.  As an English major myself, I could fully appreciate the papers Sam wrote during college and the short stories and essays he produced for his honors project when he graduated from Clark University.  The research he’s part of at the University of Tennessee is all foreign to me, but fascinating, and a reminder that the best way to figure out where you’re going is often to just keep moving.

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A New Relationship With Time

I think it’s happening.  My relationship with time is changing, which if you’ve been reading this blog since the winter solstice, you may remember was my wish for the new season of increasing light.

For the last decade at least, my relationship with time has not been friendly.  Time would move too fast, which seemed deliberate to me, as if the actual number of minutes and hours in a day was accelerated just so I couldn’t possibly get as much done as I needed.  And not that I didn’t get a lot done, because I did.  But mostly I did what I had to do, not what I wanted to do, though it wasn’t that I didn’t want to be doing what I was doing,  just that there was so much else I wanted to do.  What I wanted to do beyond what I had to do — write poetry and stories, read novels and memoirs and at least get a peek or two into the New Yorkers that poured into my house and mostly went unopened on the coffee table for a month or so before proceeding to the recycling pile, walk, sleep, spend unhurried time with family and friends — got squeezed in around the edges.  And very tight edges, measured in minutes if not seconds.

I can remember countless days, driving in to work, when I would say to myself, “I’ll go for a walk at lunchtime and pick up a few groceries at the Coop.”  The next time I’d notice a clock, it would be after 6:00, dark and cold, the day’s sunshine long gone, and I’d be starving and want to go home but would be facing an inbox full of unread messages.  Then a race would start, a race between me and the clock and email, seeing how much of the mass I could get through before I would give up, go home, eat a quick meal, crawl into bed and not sleep enough, and then start over again.

No wonder I sleep almost 10 hours almost every night.  I’m still exhausted.  But I can feel the pace changing if only in the fact that I have time to sleep that much.  I’m writing, a lot, even finished a novel and now I’m editing the memoir I finished 3 years ago and haven’t touched since.   My next book of poetry is taking shape in my head and in a file in my computer, and soon I’m going to be holding my first full length book of poetry in my hands.  I’m reading whole issues of the New Yorker and book after book after book.  I’m going for walks and seeing more of my family and friends than I have in years.

Now when I look up and am surprised at how much time has gone by, I don’t mind, because I’m not always working on something that has to be done right now!  Or ten minutes ago!  That horrible urgency that was like a cinder block in my chest has lifted, and I can let minute after minute after minute go by and it’s okay if I don’t get something done.  I can breathe.

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Legacy

One of the other poets in my Yogurt Poets group brought a poem to our workshop recently, in which a woman rises from her coffin at her wake to ask for a recipe.  Jennifer said, when we talked about the poem, that she’s come to think the only real way we live on after we die is through the perennials we divide and distribute and the recipes we share.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how people live on, have actually thought a lot about it since Eric died, but it’s been closer to the front in the last six months, as I helped to dismantle David’s family’s home.  A few things from David’s parents’ house ended up here, but mostly their possessions went to auction and Goodwill and the dump.

When I first started cleaning out the house in Lancaster this summer, I noticed a small bulletin board made of wine corks in the kitchen.  “Ah,” I thought.  “Alison would like that.” She’s been collecting wine bottle corks for years, maybe even decades.  She plans to someday make a table with a top of wine corks, or some sort of cork-sided object.

This winter when David and I were doing the final clean out of the house, while the auctioneers were there carting away room after room of furniture and decorations, the cork board was still hanging in the kitchen.  I took it down, took the old papers and tacks off it, and put it at the top of a box I was filling.  When Alison came to my house a week later to help me move some rugs into our house, we opened a box looking for scissors and there was the board. “A cork board!” Alison said and I lifted it out and handed it to her.  “It’s yours.  I brought it back for you.”

When I was at Alison’s this past weekend, there was the board, hanging in her kitchen by the table.  So now there is a bit of Betty and Baird in a corner of Alison’s house, a sweet and simple legacy.

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Paris?

Several weeks ago, the day David signed the papers to sell his parents’ house in Lancaster, we went out to dinner and talked about our need for a vacation.  It seems strange, that two people who left their jobs 7 months ago would need a vacation, but we do.  We’ve actually had very little free time, and certainly haven’t had a vacation in the sense of stepping out of our lives, into another way of being and experiencing the world.

So as we ate a fabulous dinner and drank good wine, we talked about where to go and decided on Paris.  “I want to go someplace sophisticated,” David said.  We agreed we didn’t need to go someplace warm, as at that point we’d yet to have any winter weather (and have barely had any since).  Within a week I had dividend mile plane tickets and had found an affordable apartment to rent in the Marais district.  We were set to go.

Then David’s back went out.  Then his mother got sick.  Then Eric’s mother got sick.  We emailed the owner of the apartment to say we didn’t think we could get to Paris.  We let go of the idea of going.  Then David’s mother passed away quickly, David’s back got better, and Eric’s mother got better.  So, we emailed the apartment owner and said we were coming.  Then just last night there was another major scare with Eric’s mother, but now it seems she’s going to be okay.

Do we go to Paris?  It seemed like such a simple decision when we made it.  At this point we’re going, and I just managed to call Paris and make a reservation for a restaurant that’s been recommended by a couple of friends.  The person on the phone in France gave up on my clearly struggling-to-speak French conversation, and confirmed the reservation in English.  I’ll keep trying with the French, and keep trying to imagine that we really can manage to get away.

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Petrified Stone

I’ve been keeping up with the River of Stones, noticing at least one thing fully each day, then writing down whatever comes from that attention.  A number of those small stones have been on this blog, others I’ve tweeted.  Today’s moment of attention came from David.  He just walked into my study, where I’m working on finishing the novel I got almost finished during NaNoWriMo.  One of the benefits of doing NaNoWriMo, the website tells you, is being able to go to parties and say, “I wrote a novel,” rather than, “I’ve always wanted to write a novel.”  I don’t want to have to say, “I wrote most of a novel, then never finished.”

My writing attention has been more drawn to poetry lately, maybe in part by the ever-complicated life we seem to be living, the constant coming and going of visiting family, being with aging, and dying, parents and ailing in-laws, balancing errands and connecting with friends, exercise and being outdoors and creative pursuits.  Poetry works well in short spells of time, something Maxine Kumin told me when Adrienne was a baby, and I approached her at a reading, complaining about how little time I now had to write, now that I had a baby.  “But poetry is perfect for that,” she said.  “You can take small snatches of time and focus in.”  Now I have a lovely blurb from her for my book (more about that coming soon, page proofs are about to go back to Turning Point Books and I’m getting a book launch and readings scheduled), and here I am, ADDing it again, writing about all the distractions in my life as I’m distracted from working on the novel.  I even got distracted from writing this blog post and looked for a roast chicken recipe online because I’m making roast chicken for dinner with friends tonight.

Back to the novel for a minute, then to the small stone.  I think there may be some very good bits in this novel and I want to finish this first draft, so I can put it aside for a few months, then come back to it with fresh eyes.  In the meantime, I’m starting to pull together poems for my next volume of poetry, and am planning a whole Paris Chapter, because in a week we’ll be on our way there (and more about that to come also).  And I’m also starting to edit An Island Journal, a memoir I wrote three years ago and have done basically nothing with since.

So, what is this petrified stone?  David brought this to me in the palm of his hand.  He’s sorting through papers from his parents’ safety deposit box, which we emptied and closed before we left Lancaster earlier this week.  Looking like long sticks of thick straw, these are actually dried out old rubber bands, petrified into the shape they held around some stacks of papers from the box.  They could easily be 50 years old.  My small stone?  Appreciation for rubber bands, in all their usefulness, along with recognition that at some point rubber bands get old and dry and useless.  As a couple lines from a poem in The Truth About Death say:

I’m the living yin yang, the love, the quiver
in the middle, it will work or it won’t.

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Big Stone

A year ago today, not by the date but by the day, Emilio was born, early in the morning.  I came back to Adrienne and Matt’s house to get a few hours of sleep, after having been up for most of two nights.  Sam woke up when I came in and I called up the stairs to him.  “You’re an uncle, and you win, you have a nephew.”  He was really hoping for a boy.

This morning Adrienne brought Emilio in to me, in bed, a bit before 7:00.  She went back to sleep, and I lay under the covers with Emilio tucked up next to me.  Adrienne had handed him a little plastic penguin and he slapped it against the pillow, over and over.  We were both drifting a bit in the early light just starting to come through the window blinds, warm and comfortable.

Then I heard my phone vibrate, and a few moments later, vibrate again.  I got up to the expected text from David.  His mother died early this morning, he was going to bed to try to get a few hours of sleep.

What a year it’s been.

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Small Stones Meets On the Road Again

I’ve still been doing a small stone every day, but have only managed to tweet it the last two days.  We’re on the road again. Last night we drove to Long Island, David leaning back in the heated passenger seat to ease the back pain he’s been dealing with all week.  Today I stayed in NY to help Adrienne get ready for Emilio’s 1st birthday party tomorrow.  David headed to Lancaster, PA on the train, heating pad along, to be with his mother who is failing fast.  Another death vigil, like this summer with his father.  So here we are again, together, apart, on the road, and at home, all of us spinning on that big wheel.

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Metaphors

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David and I went for a walk today in the warm, wet woods.  There was a bit of snow several days ago, which had left a crust of white, but it was nothing that lasted, and all washed away in the rain we’ve had since.  We were talking, as we almost always are, and the topic today has been a pretty consistent topic — what are we doing, how are we handling this passage into a life without very challenging jobs as a central organizing factor, how do we balance family, friends, consulting work, play, creative ambitions, etc. etc. etc.  Yes, sometimes we are very etc. etc. etc. but we both are, so it works.

We took a turn off our usual woods path, towards the marsh that opens in the woods north of Canterbury Road.  And there on the path, right where the decades-old cars are rusting into oblivion beside the trail, was all that’s left of the snow around here, a snow man, covered with oak leaves.  Who made it, why here, and what’s the metaphor?

The next metaphor was easier to figure out.  We were deep into etc. etc. etc. as we walked up the east side of Narrows Brook, looking for a place where we could cross and get to the woods road that would bring us back to Canterbury Road.  There were occasional logs across the brook, but they were all narrow and slick with the day’s earlier rain.  Rocks bridging the span of water were scarce, as the brook is running high, and mostly covered with ice.  We kept bushwhacking upstream and finally came to a place where the span of rushing water narrowed, and there were ice-free rocks to provide secure footing across.  The brook bed and rocks were ringed with goblets of ice along the water line, but there was plenty of clear surface for crossing.  We crossed, and made our way out of the woods.

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The Story of the Wheel

Written on the plane home, 12/21/11, hours before the Solstice:

This story began last June, when David and I left for his family’s annual get together on the Jersey shore, and David’s father finally admitted the care arrangements for Betty, David’s mother, needed to change.  Or maybe the story began even longer ago, maybe when David was born, or when his parents met, or when they fell in love and married.  Or maybe this story began on Monday morning, when we woke up before dawn to catch our flight to Baltimore.  When I went out to get the paper, the hard frost on the lawn was sparkling in the lights from the porch.

We flew to Baltimore and rented a car to drive to Lancaster.  We were there to do the final sorting of David’s parents’ belongings, to be at the house as the estate auctioneers emptied it, and for David to sign the closing papers for the sale of the house.  David’s sister-in-law met us at the house, and for the first time since David’s father died and his mother went into Country Meadows’ Memory Connection Support Unit, Lars was able to look through the house and think about what she might want, what her son Owen might want to help preserve his memory of his grandparents.  Lars looked at paintings and lamps and small pieces of furniture.  I went through Betty’s desk and was again struck by her good taste in stationary and note cards, impressed by the box of cards sorted by occasion – anniversary, get well, birthday.  Lars and I together found a box of beautiful antique linens and agreed they needed to be kept in the family, the delicate lace of the placemats and napkins making them probably impractical to use, but too pretty to let go.

I still remember the first time I visited David’s parents and was struck by how beautifully their house was decorated.  A stunning and eclectic collection of art and ceramics and silver from their world travels were arranged attractively in the living room and dining room, even as the kitchen and porch and sunroom were sinking under the inevitable accumulation of stuff that comes with aging.  David and I spent a good part of this summer sorting through the stuff that wasn’t going to be interesting to the estate auctioneers, the cases of paper towels and endless bottles of dishwashing liquid, the stacks of old newspapers and magazines, the banded piles of Christmas cards with return labels on the envelopes but nothing written inside, the countless paperclips and big black binder clips, the cough drops and pens and yellow paper pads, the cases of Coke and pyramid piles of soup cans.

Lars rented a small storage space, and we spent yesterday taking loads of her final selections and ours to be stored until we can come back with a car, her with a truck.  More clothing was taken to Goodwill.  All day the estate auctioneers were moving quickly through the house, disassembling the family home room by room.

This morning I ran through the neighborhood as I did this summer, admiring the grand old trees and lovely homes and yards.  I returned to 1503 Hillcrest Avenue for the last time, and the auctioneers were there, ready to do the final clearing, including the last room, the bedroom we’d slept in.  David walked from empty room to empty room before we left, saying good-bye.  I thought about a dinner we had with friends a couple of months ago.  Two of the men at the dinner had been at a funeral earlier that day for a colleague who’d died, in his 60’s, of cancer.  One of the men raised his glass in a toast and said, “The wheel just keeps turning, and here we are, on that turning wheel.   So let’s enjoy ourselves.”

I thought about that wheel, how it’s been whirring in the background of my life for years now and will only get more insistent in the years ahead, I’m sure.  I woke up in an emptied house and had an email from Adrienne, with a video of Emilio watching the candles being lit for his first Hanukkah.  He burbled and chattered and ambled around the room, and I got up and made coffee.  When it came time to take a final photograph this morning, the clusters of bright red berries on the big holly tree in the yard were what struck me.  Already, the lawn beneath the tree was sprinkled red with fallen berries

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Rainy Morning

The warm November is sliding into a warm December.  It’s raining this morning, but it’s still plenty warm enough for writing on the porch.  Now it’s time for a run, and I’m waiting for the band of showers I can see on the radar loop to pass over.  Slowly, I’m beginning to figure out how to manage my days without the overwhelmingly intense central focus of a big job.  What is my job now?  Is it okay to not have a “job?” How much consulting work do I want?  When will David and I have an actual vacation, a real step-out-of-our-lives break of a week or two?  What matters beyond being with my family and friends?  How often can I manage to be with Emilio?  What do I want to do?  What am I doing?

Noticing how the beads of rain are hanging from every horizontal surface this morning, the twiggy branches of bushes, the red winterberries, the prickly foliage of the barberry, the wire fence of the pasture across the street.  Be. Here. Now.