Refrain

          I sang the refrain

          from that song you and I know

          by heart

          I sang the refrain last night

          I refrained

          did not say what would not be right

          refrained from speaking

          what my heart could sing

          Identify with me

          you must know what it is

          to refrain

          Identify me

          I am the perpetrator of a casualty

          I dreamed it up

          A love that is unspoken

          dilates from the source of all love

          it passes between us

          then comes between us

          intervenes

          I need no more than this

Drowning

I recently read an article entitled “Drowning doesn’t look like drowning”.   The article asserts that a drowning person doesn’t thrash and call for help as one might expect---those behaviors are a sign of aquatic distress, but drowning is quite different.   A drowning person makes very little movement and is almost fully submerged.   She is physiologically unable to call out or wave for help.    The thing to be vigilant for is a noticeable subsiding of activity.  

In the weeks leading up to her suicide in 1996, my boss DJ (Dorothy Jean) became increasingly mechanical in her daily activities, not present, preoccupied.  She was disheveled, possibly not sleeping or bathing.  When I expressed concern, she replied, “Oh, please don’t worry about me.”  She was the sort to always take care of others, putting herself last;  we’d  become accustomed to her being there for us, more like a mother than a manager---she remembered our birthdays, helped us move, drove us to urgent care, attended our special events and touted our accomplishments.  Once when my boyfriend’s name appeared in a newspaper article, she cut it out of the paper, stapled a routing slip to it, and sent it around the office with the notation: “This is Tracy’s Mike!!”  She always noticed, always praised.  But in those last weeks, when I mentioned to her that it looked like Mike and I might be splitting up after 13 years together, she looked at me blankly.  This was so unlike her that I didn’t know what to make of it.  In contrast, she took pains to show me how to find all of the support documentation related to a project we were working on, when she was not one to delegate such things.  On the last day of her life, she placed sticky tabs around her house---noting when library books were due and when plants were last watered.

I discovered her now-yellowed obituary in the keepsake box that holds my childhood diaries.  I was going into the keepsake box looking for earlier shadows, but this one was right on top, so I read it.  I saw that she was 47---the age I am now---when she threw herself off the top level of the parking structure at Fourth and William, after a period of frantic pacing that had caused the parking attendants to call the police, but too late. The obituary ends with a quote from DJ’s writing, about being the middle child:  “The middle one, who is, without a doubt, sometimes a bother, but who is, hopefully, a source of ideas, aid and devotion, is therefore irreplaceable and unforgettable.”  At 47 I love life, every difficulty that forces me to grow, every chance to learn more about someone or something.  For me there is just not enough time in the day for all that I’d like to do, and it’s never enough, but it’s delightful.  But all of those things were certainly true of DJ too.   She too had a husband and children, a full, busy life, a lot to live for.  For complicated reasons she was drowning, and we failed to understand the signs.  

After her death, I dreamt that we (her work family) were standing in symmetrical rows before an archway, behind which stood a monolith.  A low-lying mist hung near our feet, and there were no natural features, just white light at the peripheries.  We all faced the archway, standing stoically like those Easter Island statues, humming.  I began to realize that we were intoning the Humming Chorus from Madam Butterfly in a significant ritual.  DJ appeared at the back of the group, and she proceeded to weave among us, looking at each of us in turn with urgency.   We were drably attired, but she was in full color.  We were very still, she was moving.  There was some kind of unspoken law preventing us from touching her or addressing her.   We had to keep singing---it was vital to do so.  She was sad that we couldn’t acknowledge her, and seemed confused and hurt by our inability to respond to her.  We kept humming as a way of trying to help her through the archway, but we felt cruel.

Shadow

This shadow is fragile.  She cries easily.  Things didn’t turn out the way she hoped.  She turns pain into excess; she does damage.  She won’t apologize for biting and scratching.   She thinks about ending it, leaping from a ledge, driving into a wall.  She’s seductive, then profane.  She avoids your demands, won’t be held accountable, feels sick, can’t get out of bed.  Everything is difficult.  She’s weak, corrupt.  She tells lies.

You’ll close your eyes and think of her.   She’s been harmed; she asks you to witness everything that has happened, unashamed, but you flinch.  She sings with her whole heart and body. You’ve never done that.  Her kiss creates an ache.  She has loved you for real and for life.  She won’t conform, despises limitations, expects more than is given.  She has made art out of your garbage and handed it back to you. She sees injustice, calls it by name, won’t allow it.  She looks you in the eye.  You’ll have to be honest with her.      

Six things

Today I stumbled upon a Word file I made in March of 2010 titled "25 Things".  Not remembering what that title was about, and curious, I opened the file, to discover a list of six "things" I had taken the time to document.  It took a minute to reconstruct why I started this list: it was my attempt to participate in one of those Facebook fads, when I was new to Facebook and eager to get involved.  The idea was that you would make a list of 25 things people may not know about you.  It appears mine became heavy and revealing almost immediately, causing me to abandon the list at item 6 and never publish it.   It's number 6 I'm still uneasy about two years later.  I'm at peace with the others.

1.      I prefer ambivalence and process; certainty and completion make me restless. 

2.      Give me a warm, rainy day with wind. 

3.      I’m really about 17 years old. 

4.      I’ve never been to Europe and irrationally believe it’s out of reach. 

5.      I rarely feel understood or seen. 

6.      I’m extremely attracted to moody, complicated people before I resent them.

Synchronicity

I was about 26 years old the first time I experienced a jolt of synchronicity between my puzzle solving and real life.   It was bedtime, the pillows were poofed, the reading light was on, and I had my crossword puzzle.  To my left, Mike was reading a hard-boiled detective novel, most likely something by Raymond Chandler.  I was stopped by a clue that had something to do with a fabric or a city or both (that detail I don’t remember).  I asked Mike if he had any ideas.  He said no, but to tell him when I worked it out.   “It’s Madras”, I said after a bit, and his jaw gaped. If you know Mike, you will appreciate how emphatic he can be at expressing astonishment.  He’ll stammer and huff and gesticulate.  “What is it?” I asked.  “I just read that word!” he replied.  “In the book I’m reading!  This guy is wearing a Madras shirt.  Look!”  He pointed to the page, and there was the word.  Well, that was odd and interesting, but a fluke, I thought.   

Each year, though, these sorts of convergences have increased in frequency, until, 20 years later, I’ve come to expect every puzzle I work on to be pushing tentacles of synchronicity into the rest of my day.  Sometimes you can chalk it up to there being certain memes or ideas floating around in the media, so that everyone is somehow hearing about the same thing.   But then there is the Madras-type event, which happened again last year.  It was bedtime, the pillows were poofed, the reading light was on, and I had my crossword puzzle.  To my left, George was watching TV, flicking through the channels.  “What was Eddie Murphy’s character’s name in Coming to America?  Do you remember?” I asked.  He said no, but to tell him when I worked it out.  After a bit, he poked my arm.  “Look at this!” he said, pointing at the TV.   “It’s that movie, I think.  Coming to America.”  Just then Eddie Murphy walked into the scene with his robes and crown and declared “Greetings!  I am Prince Akeem!”   Not just the movie then, but instantaneous delivery of the name that I was looking for.  How random. 

    

I can never quite convey to people how deep this goes, how it’s not just once in a while and not just often, but it’s every single puzzle, and how it’s not always those little jolts where an answer serendipitously appears like in those bedtime tableaux.  It might happen in the other direction, where I tell someone I like the word “naysay”, and it turns up in the puzzle that night.  It might happen that I do some research on ditto machines, as happened recently when I was trying to write a puzzle clue for "ditto", and the next morning I receive an email from my friend Gene describing dittos of musical scores he found in a box of his mother’s possessions, complete with descriptive detail about his memory of the smell of the pigment and the way it would smear if you touched it too soon.  These days when a convergence like that happens, it’s not astonishment I feel.  I expect it.  It’s a dear, old friend I knew would appear at some point with a nudge and a wink.  I nod, smile with recognition, and take a moment to acknowledge that something is at work in my life.  I don’t know what that something is, but I don’t fear it or shrug it off.  Perhaps it’s just that puzzles are meant for me and I for them.  There are daily reminders that we belong together.

    

Awakening

I discovered the New York Times Sunday puzzle when I was 16.  New England had been slammed by one of those sudden, brutal ice storms that leaves every twig crystal-sheathed, every tree a chandelier of glinting, prismatic diamonds, breathtaking but treacherous.  I was visiting my friend, who, along with her latest boyfriend, was caring for two big dogs (white boxers I think) in a small house in Vermont while the homeowners were away.  I wasn’t supposed to stay over, but the roads weren’t navigable; so I slept on the couch for two nights.  Whenever I woke up to reposition myself in the stillest, darkest hours, I would discover a large, jowly, pink-eyed head inches from my own face.  It seemed as if one dog would “guard” me while the other slept.  They were, in turn, vigilant, silent watchers, especially just before dawn.  

The absent homeowners had left a stack of the New York Times Sunday magazines on the coffee table, and my friends were spending seemingly impossible stretches of time in the bedroom (such is youth), so I began to rifle through the topmost issue for something to occupy my mind.  I browsed the articles listlessly, then happened upon the crossword puzzle.  

Puzzles were my thing.  It started with jigsaw puzzles.  I was avid about them at age three, so the family story goes, mastering my own age-appropriate puzzle collection, blowing through my big sister’s collection, and demanding ever harder puzzles to work on.  Later on I was handy with those Wordfinds on restaurant placemats, and I became an expert Jumble solver.  The scrambled letters would reorder and reveal their truth to me in seconds flat, just like that, much to my own amazement and self-esteem.  I hadn’t met a crossword in the local paper that I couldn’t conquer by applying a little bit of creativity and concentration.  I secretly believed myself to be a quiet genius.  So I found a pen and got to work.

Reality began to set in after about 40 minutes.  I could tell from the clues that the long answers were connected, and I wanted to work that out.  It was vexing to repeatedly slide over the surface of this puzzle and get no traction, no foothold, no way in.  Words were my thing!  Puzzles were my thing.  I would put it aside, then come back to it; every time I came back some little section opened up, and this was just enough to keep me going.  A dictionary was my last resort, to look up the plethora of words I simply didn’t know (like “plethora”).  I discovered that I could hit upon an answer by going systematically through the alphabet and crosschecking against the dictionary, plugging each letter into the blank square until something made sense across and down.  Without realizing it, I was setting up a database in my brain, one that I would add to incrementally, using this method, for the next 4 or 5 years.  I finished the puzzle somehow that weekend, and found a lifelong devotion.  

As a reward to myself for my hard work and ingenuity, I took the whole stack of magazines with me when I left, apparently not even considering whether the homeowners might miss them.  Such is youth.  Surely some higher power had arranged things just so, meaning for me to have them.  

Friendship

Daniel came home with a picture in his backpack that his friend Ian had drawn, on which Ian had carefully written the words “Self-portrait of you”.   The innocent sublimity of his title delights me.  It’s the sound of a singing bowl struck once.  It’s a charm for good fortune, written on a Möbius strip, kept in a locket.  It contains a secret. 

Gratitude

Charlotte’s Web might be my favorite book.  I want to always remember that Wilbur was not innately special.  Not more special or more gifted, at any rate, than any piglet in the barnyard.  In fact he was the runt of the litter, destined for elimination.  It is Fern’s devotion to him that transforms how he’s perceived and treated, and how he perceives himself.  And it’s not so much that he goes from being ordinary to extraordinary.  He doesn’t, and that’s an important theme in the story.  The miracle resides in love’s transformative power, the potential for love to generate, in its recipient, a higher sense of purpose beyond survival of the next day. 

 

Charlotte’s Web was among the first chapter books I read independently, when I was the age my son is now, and the first book to make me cry in that way where joy and grief are inextricably entwined.  I can still visualize where I was sitting when I had read the final lines and closed the cover: the knotty oak table, the kitchen counter with its scattered teacups and dishes, the particles of dust suspended in the afternoon light angling through the window, the smudgy grime in that linoleum floor, and the feeling that everything around me was being held up so that I could touch it. 

 

A teacher gave me that book to read.  She knew what it would open in me and what I needed at that moment. I remember how much she seemed to respect us kids for no reason, how much she seemed to understand about our interior lives, how many questions she asked us to answer by examining rather than consulting.  She acted as if we were without question good, curious people, full of intelligence, interesting, worthy of her time and energy, no matter how we behaved or what mistakes we made, and we came to believe these things about ourselves.  She created in her teaching a sacred quality very close to love:  revelation of the soul, kindness of the heart, wonder and gratitude, something that resonates beyond the moment and generates more of itself.

There have been other such thresholds in my experience of life, times when a generous, perceptive and capable person took the time to really see me and really nurture my understanding, and not because I am special or more deserving or more talented than another individual.  I’m not.  The teacher is sharing enthusiasm, cautioning, guiding, responding to old questions by asking new questions, providing tools and experiences at the right time.  That may not be extraordinary.  The extraordinary thing is what an attentive teacher can unlock in a receptive student.  Something happens in the teaching itself, the seeing and being seen, that is intimately experienced and liberating.