Category: Moving On

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The Last Friday Morning

After a day of off and on thunderstorms, oppressive heat, and finally enough rain so I didn’t need to water my gardens, it’s a bright, cool, clear morning.  Crickets are rolling their chirps over and over as a back drop to the clacking call of the bobolinks, the songs of catbirds and robins and chickadees and the complaining of the crows.

This is the last Friday morning, at least for now, that I’ll wake up relieved that the end of the work week is almost here.  I’ve loved my job — the challenge, the chance to make a difference, the incredibly smart and dedicated women I work with both here in NH and across the country — but I’m tired.  As I said at my farewell party on Tuesday evening, I consider my success at my job to be a result of luck, the great good fortune to have found a meaningful career that uses my particular talents to best use.  Other than very occasional sticky situations, this job has never been hard for me, but I’ve worked very, very hard.

So for years now Fridays have meant I’m close to a couple of days of longer sleep, a slightly (though truly only slightly) more relaxed pace, and the chance to do something other than concentrate fiercely on continuing to advance the work to end violence against women.

I still have three more days of work next week, but the weekend is almost here, and by next Friday, I’ll be looking at an almost unimaginable number of days ahead when my concentration and focus can go elsewhere.  Sweet.

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Channels 100 and 17

The tag line for my twitter profile is “I have 140 channels in my brain.”  There is a lot going on in there.

I’ve decided, in the poetry channel of my brain, or maybe it’s a haiku channel, that I’m going to take the haiku posts to 100.  I’m at 98.  Why stop at 100?  I’m not sure. Haiku is a stream in the poetry channel and that’s what the stream is murmuring to me.

In the countdown-to-the-end-of-my-job channel, I’m very aware that I have 17 days of work left.  Seventeen is my favorite number, because it’s attractive (that sloping 7 pointing back towards the 1) it’s a prime number (I love prime numbers though I can’t explain why) and mostly because 17 was John Havlicek’s shirt number when he played for the Celtics during my childhood.  My father was, and still is, an avid Celtics fan, and I grew up watching them play.  Havlicek was handsome and brilliant and captivated me.  I was twelve on April 15, 1965 when I got to listen live to one of the most famous play-by-play calls in NBA history, when Celtics broadcaster Johnny Most exclaimed “Havlicek steals it! Havlicek stole the ball!” after Havlicek intercepted an inbound pass to clinch the Eastern Conference Championship against the Philadelphia 76ers.

I have since moved in and out of being a sports fan of various sorts, and since Eric died, have been out of that zone.  The sports channels are more or less dormant.  But I’ve always hung on to number 17, and can still remember the thrill of a stolen basketball, a clutch play, an over-the-top excited sports announcer’s voice rumbling out of the radio, perfect awareness of a perfect moment.   Humming in channel 17.

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Indispensable

I have 25 days of work left.  “I can’t imagine the Coalition without you.” “I don’t want to talk about it.”  “What are we going to do without you?”  “I’m just really worried about what’s going to happen when you’re gone.”

I’ve been hearing comments like these since I announced a year ago that I’d be leaving in June.  And, to be fair to the talented, dedicated and amazing people who make up the Coalition, the staff, board members and member program directors, almost all of these comments are coming from people outside of the organization.  Now as the date gets close, really close, the comments are escalating.  And the fact that there’s no one identified yet to take on the job has shifted some of the questions to the vein of, “Are you really going to leave?  You’re really going to do this?”

“Yes,” I answer.  “And everything will be fine.  Voids don’t get filled until they’re created, but they do get filled.”  I’ve watched this phenomenon my entire adult life, and believe it whole heartedly.

Last night, after reading our Chinese cookie fortunes looking for clues about what’s next in our lives (there was an interesting and possibly relevant message — “don’t pass up a once in a lifetime opportunity” — but that’s another post), we got the real wisdom on our way out of the restaurant.  We ran into a woman David and I both know, and met her friend, Gary.  Talking about leaving our jobs, and the importance of leaving, the rightness of the path of moving on and recognizing that no matter what we’re doing at our jobs, it can still happen without us, Gary lifted his hands.

He held one hand as if gripping a glass of water, and dipped a finger from the other hand into the imaginary glass.  “Put your finger in a glass of water, and then pull it out.  The day the hole in the water created by your finger doesn’t fill back up as soon as you pull your finger out, then you know you’re indispensable.”

I don’t need a glass of water to know I’m not.

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Passover

A determined robin is singing outside, the notes coming through the windows that look out on another gray day.  “April is the cruelest month,” has come to mind often in the last 24 hours.  I’d envisioned these few days off around Passover as sunny and warm, days in the yard gardening, sitting in the sun drinking coffee, gathering with friends for a relaxed Passover celebration.

I woke up to a churning gut and head yesterday, Erev Pesach, the day before the beginning of Passover at sundown.  It was cloudy and cold and windy, making work outside uncomfortable.  With cooking to do for the seder last night, I turned to inside work and tried to focus my attention on making recipes out of Joyce Goldstein’s Cucina Ebraica, a wonderful collection of Italian Jewish recipes.

But the dozens of wheels floating in the air above my head (many thanks to David for this right-on image) just keep whirring, nothing touching down and able to get traction.  When I finally sat down to have some lunch, I found tears more than anything else coming up, and when I looked behind the churning and preoccupation that I was somehow “dithering away” this precious time off, I found grief.  As I often do when I look behind whatever is bothering me.

There, as soon as I recognized it, were all the years of Passover seders with Eric, and the five Passovers he’s missed since he died.  Grief is so sneaky and unpredicable — abating for months at a time, anniversaries of numerous events going by smoothly one year, then slamming me with a “ball to the head” (and thanks to Adrienne for that right-on image) the next year.

Mostly yesterday I keep seeing Eric the last Passover he was alive.  He’d been diagnosed with the metastatic cancer by then, and we’d missed the family seder in Connecticut, and had no capacity for the big seder with friends we’d planned for that weekend.  Eric was just home from the hospital on Saturday, and we had a small seder — Eric, Adrienne and Matt, and Sam and Rachel, his then girlfriend, and me.  Eric sat at the head of the table and told stories about Passover, about the mitzvah of retelling the story every year of the Jew’s liberation from slavery in Egypt, in the same order, “seder” in Hebrew.

It was one of the last times Eric was up at the table, eating with us.  His illness was vicious and swift.  The next year his mother and I skipped Passover all together, unable to imagine the holiday without him,

Now I’m trying to create new traditions, and now there’s a grandson who’ll soon be old enough to start learning Passover stories.  Last night the seder with friends was lovely — a lively reading of the haggadah, the Passover story, friendly discussions and reconnections, delicious food.  Today I’ll go out in the grey and pull the gardening wheel out of the sky and force it onto the ground, getting some traction with earth and compost and the first seeds breaking through the soil.

Tonight David and I have decided to read each other poems as our own, second night seder.  Folding up one set of traditions, we’re unfolding new ones.

I think I’ll read the begining of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Image courtesy of http://thesmartlyanonymous.com/

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Another Play Day

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I’ve been skiing up the ridge of Nottingham Mountain for decades, following the gradual rise of Tarleton Road to a sharp turn where the old road hairpins up a steep pitch.  At the top of the pitch, the road turns back to the north and follows the ridgeline out to the clearing of Neville Peak, where you can see the White Mountains on clear days, including the distant, often white tip of Mt. Washington.  Thirty years ago we skied up Nottingham on our old wooden Bonas, with 3 pin bindings holding the boot in front of our toe to the skis.  Control was minimal, but we never attempted the steep ski unless there was ample powder to fall into.  Which meant deep snow to climb up through.  Lots of work, lots of fun. 

In the years since my equipment has improved, greatly improving the control possible while skiing.  But the greatest control has come in better understanding what I can realistically do.  Today, David and I set off to ski up Tarleton Road with our snowshoes in our backpacks.  At the steep pitch, we’d leave our skis and snowshoe up to the summit of Neville Peak.  We’d still have the glorious run down Tarleton in ski tracks through luscious powder to enjoy, without thrashing up and down a nearly impossible, twisting pitch.  The ski down Tarleton Road, below the steep section, has always been a joy, enough of a drop to provide a fast run, sweeping around corners, dropping through hard woods and hemlocks, and finishing up with a long straight hill down to a bridge over a brook. 

When we got to the beginning of the trail up Tarleton Road, a young man was just leaving.  I asked him where he’d been.  “I went up to Neville Peak,” he said.

“Up the steep ridge?”

“Yes, it was great.  But I needed my skins to climb up,” he said, and then talked about how wonderful the ski down was.  I wasn’t the least bit tempted.  I don’t have skins and I don’t need to be able to do everything I could 30 years ago.  Much of it, but not all.

When we got to the beginning of the steep rise and changed into snowshoes, I felt as if I was floating.  With the weight of the snowshoes out of my pack, and only the snowshoes on my feet to navigate through the powder, climbing the last of the ridge felt almost effortless.  As we got to the top, the sun came out and drew sharp shadows on the snow.  On Neville Peak, we could see snow clouds coming our way.  We had a snack and started down, flakes floating around us like tiny pieces of our day settling deep to be remembered in the work week ahead.

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Playing Silence

This morning I heard steps across my porch.  My neighbor and friend Amy was at the door.  “We’re hoping you and David want to ski with Paul and me?”  It was like a childhood friend knocking at my door 50 years ago to ask, “Can you come out and play?”  Earlier this week, another friend emailed to say her husband “can go out and play for a couple of hours on Sunday.  Are you guys up for some snowshoeing?”

Three weeks ago it suddenly became winter in NH — snow, frigid air, snow, snow, snow.  The skiing and snowshoeing is the best it’s been in several years, and all our outdoor friends are taking advantage of it.  Last weekend, when I got home from NY, there was a message on my answering machine from Alison.  “The skiing’s great if you’re interested.”  I didn’t get the message until late that evening, after skiing with David, but Alison called again on Sunday morning.  “Anne and Peter are coming over at 11:00 to snowshoe, then Anne and I are skiing.  Want to come?”

I called back.  “Yes, David and I want to come over and play.”  And play we did, snowshoeing the new trail through the Epsom Town Forest, then skiing up a snowmobile trail to the untraveled rise of Tarleton Road, making our own tracks to the height of the ridge.  The snow was dry, light, deep and very cold. 

Today is warmer.  There’s been more snow. After skiing with Amy and Paul, David and I came home and had some lunch and headed back out to play.  This time we skied the snowmobile trails from our house, then followed the ski tracks we made last weekend down an old road to a marsh, out across the open expanse. We crossed the brook that feeds the marsh and skied up along its bank, the snow keeping us high above the few spots with water still running between deep mounds.  As we crossed the marsh, I thought of a weekend just about four years ago. 

It was another frigid winter, but there was less snow.  Adrienne had come home for the weekend, as she did almost every weekend that winter after Eric died, and we went for a walk in the woods.  The brook had frozen solid and clear, a long flow of ice, into the frozen swamp.  The poem I wrote that night ended up in the book I wrote that year, and was published the following winter.  Here it is, and here I am, four years later, playing my way through the winter, bumping up against deep snow and silence. 

Silence

I am squatting in the fireplace, hands out
to catch the heat off the first flame, the only
heat in the house, the furnace fan out,
the belt and pulleys jiggled off their mounts. 
Last night a friend and I were comparing pathetic
and now I win.  I am trying silence today,
lie on the floor, again, in the sun on the carpet
in the room where you died, heavy wind,
the shadow of plants below the great windows,
warm, how grateful you were for this room, open
and high.  I don’t want to make sense, I am fed up
with misfortune.  I walked the frozen brook
into the wind of the marsh, following the tracks
of a dog.  I sat in the sun but it was too cold.

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Snowed In

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As mostly happens, the snow storm that came through New England last weekend didn’t deliver the expected depths here in Northwood.  New York and southern New England got slammed, but we only got about 8″, disappointingly less than the predicted 12″ — 18″.  But I’ve been snowed in anyway, for reasons beyond the storm.

First, there was the storm.   We got home Sunday night after three days of visiting and parties, just as the wind was whipping up the flakes.  We woke Monday morning to continued snow and got right out into it, skiing for hours.  By the time we got back to the house, cozy and snug in front of the fire, the wind got truly fierce, blowing sheets across the fields so the view out the windows was nothing but white, white, white-out.  Tuesday morning when we got up to go to work, there were two almost four-foot drifts in the walkway between the porch and cars.  I decided to work at home and spent a good part of the daylight hours shoveling and listening to the beep beep of the back hoe backing up as it cleared the drifting snow from my road.  The pastures to the west are slightly higher than the road, so when the wind drives the snow off the field, it dumps it in the road, often sculpting beautiful drift lines along the top of the bank.  I’ve seen a plow truck stuck trying to clear the road — now the road agent is smart enough to send a back hoe over when the snow and wind combine in a blizzard like this one.

But as I said, it wasn’t all that much snow.  Still, I’ve felt snowed in all week, hovering in suspension.  I’m waiting for a phone call from Adrienne, to tell me her labor has started.  But I think I’m also waiting for 30 years ago to happen.  As the dusk collected in the living room this evening I could feel the sadness welling up.  Thirty years ago my labor started at dusk on New Year’s Eve, and Adrienne was born at 1:30 a.m.  1/1/81. 

In many of the years since, Eric and I hosted what was for us, and many of our friends, the party of the year.  Eric and I would start planning the menu months in advance, and then would shop and cook and set up for days, throwing a gourmet dinner party for a dozen or so of our closest friends.  The group varied a bit over the decades, but a core knot stayed with us.  The New Year’s Eve after Eric died I had the party.  I didn’t know what else to do.  Late into the night, I was sitting at the table with a good friend.  “Look at you,” he said.  “You’re proof of the resiliency of the human spirit.  Here you are, going on with your life, with the party.”  “I think this may just be proof that I like to party,” I said, at least a bit drunk, I’m sure, as I proceeded to be for much of the next year.

I got over that, but the next year I agonized about the New Year’s Eve party.  It had been an excruciating year.  I’d let myself get conned into an email relationship, and then a date, with a literal genius I met at Vermont Studio Center.  The process of deciding to possibly let another man into my life had been highly anxiety producing, and he turned out to be a cad, trying to cheat on his famous poet girlfriend.  That was layered and intertwined, in complicated ways that make their own entire story, with losing my best friend in the fall out from her husband crossing some boundary of affection and imagined passion with me.  Nothing ever happened, but I’d been too grief-stricken, and frankly intoxicated, most of the time to realize what was happening until too much damage had been done.  So all I wanted to do that New Year’s Eve was crawl into a cave.  I didn’t do that, but I came close. 

This week the cad emailed me again.  After 3 years.  I figure he’s run out of prospects for a side cheat on his famous poet girlfriend (they’re still together, it was all I asked in my reply to him).  Which makes me think of losing my best friend, who was with me 30 years ago tonight, there with me as I had Adrienne, there with me through Adrienne’s childhood and teenage years and young adulthood.  There with me when Eric died.  Eric who isn’t here tonight, cooking a fabulous New Year’s Eve dinner with me. 

And now Adrienne is about to have a baby and here I am.  Snowed in by sadness and memories and some regrets.  But the benefit of staying present to all that’s happened all these years is I know how to carry whatever I’m feeling.  And I’m free to walk out the door as soon as the phone rings.

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Frost

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The cars are sheened white this morning, and there are patches of white still on the grass where the sun hasn’t reached yet.  The delicate ice of frost rims a red leaf, frozen dew, fall finally here.  When we got up Friday morning the temperture was 74 degrees, yesterday it was 37, today the frost fell before we woke. 

Yesterday we picked apples with my parents, and the trees were loaded with fruit.  Trying to eat local as much as we can, apples are the fruit we’re eating right now, and we have a refrigerator bin full.  The old maple tree in front of the house is getting bare, and the leaves that are left are yellow and orange and red.  Today we’ll bring in the plants from the porch, I’ll clean off the garden, and pick whatever basil didn’t get browned by the cold.  We’ll finish taking down screens and washing the windows, clearing the path between inside and out.  We’re turning into the dark and letting in light.