Part Two: Hot Type and Fragrant Ink

Traveling again...

Laundry Room with a View, After Pyrotechnics

This is what I see while folding clean teeshirts and undies. It has to be the best view in the world for doing laundry. I know there's a poem here but lately I find myself more attracted to the visual image, the immediacy of my little digital camera. I could say I'm lazy, but on this Saturday morning I'm too calm and happy for guilty self-defaming. A photo is a moment. Right now, a lovely one.

Doing laundry, as usual, is a welcome meditation, after last night's raucous Pedro fireworks. We sat on the balcony sipping what I'll call pom-agne, or, how about champ-egranate, a red blend of pomegranate juice and champagne, while the crazy neighbors down the hill shot off hours of their ill-gotten booty. Then we watched the "legitimate" show at Cabrillo Beach, also catching blooms from the Queen Mary across the harbor and even, in the hazy distance, Newport Beach.

Holly remembered a place in Missouri called Boomland where her family always used to stop and shop on their way home from vacation. I remembered one out in the woods of Central Ohio near my parents' nursing home. In both cases, we loaded trunks with giant fireworks and guiltlessly spirited them back to Michigan. I used to charge mine, enjoying going into debt for pyrotechnics. So much more colorful than, say, a washer and dryer!

Holly said Boomland blew up. Which seemed funnily appropriate. It happened in 2005 and they built another one, I see on Google. I'm not sure about the place in Ohio. Like the steakhouse and bar down the street from my parents' Tara-like last residence, the pole barn stacked with Iraq-sized pyrotechnics offered explosive relief from the gloom of my parents' decline. It was sort of like, mortality sucks, let's light a 36-Shot Happy! Once we tried to put on a show with our boomers at the pond behind The Home. We rolled my mother in her wheelchair through the grass to watch. The whole thing made her nervous and, after picking up the shreds of burnt cardboard and blackened fuses, we chalked it up as a possibly good-hearted but failed gesture.

My taste for the noise, especially, has subsided. I still think mortality sucks. Old age isn't looking all that great either. But like a photo, fireworks celebrate bright, brief moments. As Dennis said last night, "it's quite an art, to make that happen so fast, and then it's over." We wondered about the people who design them. They must have an amazing appreciation for the possibilities of five seconds of life in the dark.

Roses for a Sunday Evening

My friend Dr. Teddy dropped by last night with the amazing news that her mother, who we thought would have been dead weeks ago, is not only still with us but serenely declared, in her new adult foster care home, "I'm happy." There is a message here -- about the depths of mercy and possibilities not just for a good death, but for a redemptive final chapter. We sat on the back porch sipping our frosty gin and tonics and puffing Sherman ovals (just two each -- we are very particular about our cigarettes, both in quantity and quality) and smiled at each other. It's enough to make us believe in religion.

And Teddy brought these roses, from her garden. They remind me, I told her, of Sunday nights back on Gibbs Avenue in Canton in the 50s, where after the evening service on a summer night like this, the whole small congregation would troop over to Flossie McLaughlin's tiny house on Sherlock Place to see her roses. They were much like these -- prolific and delicate and sweet smelling. These sit on my kitchen table, gently scenting the whole room with nostalgia.

There's one more thing about this photo. I put the roses in a vase given to me 40 years ago when we'd moved from Canton to Akron, a difficult parish my father served for just two bumpy years. As I noted in a blog post earlier this month, my maternal ancestors' homestead was there in Akron -- they had been a prominent family with a big house and a lot of land. We lived across the street from what had been my great-grandmother's house -- a place my mother had visited many times as a child. I went to a junior high school named for my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Thornton. My grandmother, Amy -- one of Sam Thornton's dozen of grandchildren, had married a man from Akron named Austin Vandersall. By the time we moved there, however, the Thornton house was long gone, replaced by a row of tawdry storefronts. The neighborhood was in deep decline and the reminders of my ancestors' prosperous days were fragmented and ambiguous. It particularly affected my mother to be there; I think the street was full of ghosts for her.

Anyway, back to the vase.

It was given to me by a woman named Sarah Russ, who at the time (1962) was nearly 100 but still sharp and engaged. I still have the note she included, rolled up in a drawer. It says, in a shaky script: "Long ago my sister Anna taught a class of little girls in our Sunday School. I think your grandma Amy Youtz, who later became Amy Vandersall, was a member of that class. My younger sister Nellie was about the same age but she was in another class. Here is a vase my older sister Anna gave to her at Christmas. It was just like the ones she gave to the girls in her class. We thought they were pretty. I would like to give this one to you. Rev. A. Vandersall was our minister when I was a little girl. He gave me the nickname of Sadie. I liked him and I liked the name, so I used it for many years. I seldom use it now. But, in memory of him and your grandma, and in memory of my sisters Nellie and Anna, I will sign this...Sadie Russ."

I've always appreciated this small act of kindness from an old woman to a young girl struggling with a depressed mother at a time we were haunted by history.

On Not Being A First Wife

Wm. Kittredge: Middle Aged Love

Reading about the recently deceased Stewart Mott and his mother Ruth Rawlings Mott, I got to thinking about what it means not to be a man's first wife. Ruth Rawlings was C.S. Mott's fourth wife (according to the New York Times, though Wikipedia says she was his third -- I trust the Times more). At any rate, she was his last wife. At the time of their nuptials, he was 59 and she was 33. They were married 39 years. They had three kids and she outlived him by 26 years. Perhaps what I've heard about their courtship (below) isn't true -- that strumpet part and the window-climbing part -- but still, she appears to have had a vivifying effect on the rich old guy, who lived to be 98. The official biography says they met in Baltimore, a long way from Applewood's accessible leaded-glass defenestrations.

I'm my husband's third wife, and he is my second husband. (I was my first husband's second wife and he has since remarried his third wife, for whom he is her second husband. Thus it goes in the 21st century: eight of us all told in this marital geneology, five women and three men. Among us, interestingly, we produced only six kids).

Anyway, I happen to have had a chance to know my present husband briefly when he was on his second marriage, when I ran across him in Tonga. While we scandalously connected under the palm trees and never forgot each other's charms, he had a reputation for being arrogant, noisily opinionated and confrontational. He was. I fell for that street smart Alpha Dog in 1976, but I can see how it caused trouble in his rambunctious life back in the States.

When I met him again in 2001, he was 59, the same age as C.S. Mott when he married Ruth. I quickly ascertained that my old friend had seriously mellowed. He had been through ruinously hard times of professional and romantic turmoil. He had survived, but was, to quote an environmentalist I heard speak this week, deeply "adapted and mitigated." And the man he is today dramatically better suits me than when we first collided in our youthful heats. We've talked about this a lot: what if we'd decided to give up everything at the time to marry each other then? I think it would have been disastrous, despite our intense physical attraction.

I'm grateful not just to him or to the vagaries of life that polished his rough edges, but also to his first two wives. While they might look back on their marriages to my husband with exasperation, he learned from them and that made him a better husband for me.

Likewise, my own wildness has thankfully subsided. I used to want everything from a man, and when he failed me in even small ways (I broke up with one guy because I didn't like the way he chewed his food) I'd quickly dump him. I was the original mindless recycler -- piling men away in bins and never caring where they went from there. I thrived on adding up "experience" and cottoned far more to the conquest than the follow-through; in that regard, a therapist once suggested, I was playing out an extended agitated depression and frantic approval-seeking. I've calmed down. I'm still sometimes subject to bursts of post-menopausal flurries, but in general now I'm in a much more appreciative, less edgy, less judgmental place than I once was. My husband has learned to listen and, god forbid, open up his feelings to me. (Cue the Morris Albert) I've learned to relax and be grateful, to let him be. (Well, okay, in general. I'm still evolving.) I love his mature masculinity. I contend the ripening of many men in their fifties and sixties makes them finally able to be good companions for, um, women of a certain age. They don't care as much about fighting and proving. They appreciate tenderness.

Sometimes we're hit by waves of the mortality blues, and we turn to each other and say in quavering voices, "I wish I could be young for you again." Those are bittersweet moments that remind us to Be Here Now. I feel lucky my husband loves to touch my old dame curves. And I told him I'll sit in his lap from time to time as long as he will have me.

So, here's to being a third wife to a second husband. Three cheers for the fullness of conjugal contentment.

Sam Thornton, the "French Balloonist" and my blue Granny

Ancestors' lives, all finished and receding, dangle out there like ornaments on a tree, the fragments of facts about their lives compelling and tantalizing.

Today I found out that my great great grandfather Samuel Thornton once sold an island in his property around Turkeyfoot Lake in Summit County, Ohio to a French balloonist. Actually, if I've got this right, it may have been Frank Purdy Lahm, an aviator and associate of the Wright brothers. He was born in Mansfield, Ohio and educated in France. Or it might have been his father, who also had French connections.

Also, preparing for my visit with my second cousins Anne and Cyrus, I found among my mother's stuff a letter she received in October, 1924, when my mother was 14, from my great-grandmother Matilda Youtz, one of Samuel's many daughters. (It had a 2c stamp on it with a head of Washington) Grannie Youtz writes, among other things, "I get blue and lonesome about dark." An arrow to the heart. I recognize in that simple, plaintive confession a melancholy I know too well, the sadness of dusk. She was about 80 at the time.

She's considering taking in boarders and she writes, "enuf boys here for a room but all these night workers and I will not take them...no use for star boarders." Cyrus tells me there was so much factory work going on in Akron at the time some beds went to one man during the day, and to another at night. The "star boarders," he thinks, might have been so-called because they worked all night, under the stars.

The Here and Now is so much more complicated, the data pouring in from all directions, confusing and fluid. Yet, I find myself still turning back to what I know, what the senses have to offer. I'm still alive, unlike all those others, whom I thank for their idiosyncrasies and struggles, their stories.

Thunder and heavy rain, soothing.

P.S. Cousin Cyrus picked up the tab, very nimble at 91 in extending the courtly gesture. And yes, the gas was WAY more than the lobster.

Playing My Ex's Keyboard a Journey Back to First Music

So, as my first husband emptied out the house we were married in after its recent sale, he offered me a keyboard he'd bought his current wife that she no longer wanted. It's a convoluted way to start this story, except to set the emotional context and to get me to the point where I said yes and took it home -- the place that I now call home. I set it up in my dining room -- with its big table and expensive chairs we hardly ever use, and with my relatively new, upright hutch with its glass doors and inside lighting, the hutch that symbolizes, as I've written here before, my perceived ascension to full adult womanhood. It seems right to me to have the keyboard in a room devoted to womanhood; if I had not turned into a heathen and left the church as soon as possible, defying my parents' hopes for me, I might have been the kind of woman who'd play piano (and organ) on Easter Sunday, at prayer meetings, at revival meetings, and at funerals as needed.

So I set the keyboard up there, facing the wall in the northeast corner. For ten years of my childhood -- six to 16, when my mother mercifully agreed I'd learned enough and let me quit -- I took piano lessons from a trio of long-suffering teachers; first delicate young Carol Martz, a dark-eyed beauty in Canton; then a sturdy, intelligent woman named Pat Ramsay who tried to teach me how to improvise hymns in Akron; then sweet Jesse Williamson in Coshocton, a powdery, formal old dame who wore lacy dresses and cried when I played Berceuse. I faced the wall in three different parsonages, banging away on our dark brown Estey and setting the Seth Thomas metronome dutifully at adagio or andante or larghetto depending on the piece. Looking back, I liked it. When I quit I had had enough of my daily hour on the piano bench, but I liked making music, learning the keys, working first the left hand (always awkward and plodding, a slow learner) and my spunky right, then putting them together. I had a good long reach and long fingers. But I wasn't obsessed enough or driven enough to really get every piece down. I showed up in party clothes for a few recitals, an important part of childhood, but performed unreliably positioned somewhere in the middling mediocre.

Nonetheless, sitting down now to the keyboard -- which has only six octaves, not eight -- I've been remarkably soothed and delighted by re-discovering the old patterns. My sheet music, saved over all these years in a dusty box, remains in the attic for now, so I've been playing only hymns, from an ancient Evangelical Hymnal from one of the churches of my childhood. Luckily for my neighbors, I quickly discovered the volume option, and thus I can save them from cringing at my repeated attempts to get the sharps right in "Christ the Lord is Risen to day" (labeled "Worgan 7777 -- the metrics -- with Alleluia, words by the prodigious Charles Wesley, from a 1708 tune) or handle the charming left hand in "Christ Arose," which although it's in the sharp and flat-free key of C still flummoxes me every time.

Anyway, I'm enjoying this re-emergence of an old skill. And the hymns, even to my apostate self, are fun to play. They were, after all, my very first music.

Hard Stuff in Cheboygan

This week I loved my life, even its bedevilments of memory and sadness triggered by retracing old paths. I want to praise the "mutilated world" in the words of Adam Zagajewski, and I am grateful for the blessings of language. Driving the 280 miles north up I-75 on Thursday, I found myself marking treasured mileposts: the three "G's" -- Gladwin, Grayling, Gaylord -- the 45th parallel, halfway between the Equator and the N. Pole, the turnoff for Hartwick Pines, where some of the oldest trees in the country still majestically survive. Then there's the exit for Topinabee and Cheyboygan, where my first husband and I used to get off 75 in our dash for the ferry from Cheyboyan to the property we once owned on Bois Blanc Island. It is hard not to reflect on the past, a past refusing to behave itself, an incorrigible past which sometimes still insists on nosing back into the present.

So, I did not successfully resist the flood of memory from those years. We used to have to leave at about 6:30 a.m. to make a 10:30 ferry, as I recall it. After pounding up the highway at about 90, keeping an eye out for tricky cops in the piney byways, I remember once making it to the parking lot just in time to meet two old friends who were joining us for a camping trip. I see us standing there in the morning dampness trying to catch our breath, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee spiked with whiskey from a green thermos. Man, I was younger then and could get away with such deliberate self-abuse and cherished decadence. I remember the gray water of the Straits, rippling and melancholy, and maybe some mallards or the occasional cormorant gliding up past the pier. I think we liked ourselves standing there in that parking lot enjoying strong drink in the morning, waiting for the ferry. I mourn the passing of that particular self-conscious wildness. I'm healthier now but less interesting to myself -- I suppose that is one of the disadvantages of growing up. Perhaps I simply haven't cultivated enough of a taste for moral and intellectual complexity -- pleasures available to an aging mind as the body retreats from the turbulent exertions of youth.

Now that I think of it, that's the moment I wanted to see again, from all the memories of my trip north -- the four of us huddled in a parking lot in the fresh and evocative Michigan fog, cracking wise, downing slugs of hard stuff, and waiting for the boat that would take us across the Straits to our next adventure.

The Blogosphere Further Remembers Dewey Whitwell

I've been very touched by a series of messages from the descendents of Dewey Whitwell -- Christian, Scott and Wanda Bradford -- who saw my post about him and contacted me (See comments under "On Dewey Whitwell's Knee" below.} It's remarkable that through the Internet we have been able to tell these stories in honor of this man who touched many lives.

I was most excited by the post that began "I am your Missy" -- from Dewey's daughter. Through her, I now know that her gun actually was a 20-gauge (pretty impressive for a girl!) and that on their hunting trips, they had picnics of Vienna sausages, cheese and Fig Newtons. Wanda's son Scott, a Methodist minister in Texas, still has the gun, obviously a cherished family keepsake. Like many men of his era, Rev. Whitwell was a "jack of all trades" -- he was, for example, also a beekeeper and devoted fisherman.

Also through "my Missy," I realized again how "relative," so to speak, and interconnected life can be. While I confessed to childhood jealousy of her, her gun and her walks in the woods with her father, she confessed to some envy of me -- I got to sit on her father's lap back then, she notes, and she didn't -- he was gone so much as an evangelist. Ah, childhood is very complicated.

Thank you again, Bradford family, for your affecting memories and comments.

A Hole in my Socks on the Ides of March

Can't think of a single betrayal tonight. Home alone, done grading, a glass of merlot after lamb chops, little red potatoes and asparagus. Feet up, a tiny hole apparent on the left big toe of my favorite socks -- the ones with dogs on them I bought with my niece on a happy day in Frankenmuth.

Ah, the pleasures of faux Bavaria. That day, as we walked by one of the chicken palaces, a guy who seemed to have had a bit too much lager checked us out and said, "Hey...mother and daughter, right?" I was deeply affected.

So maybe this entry is something about childbearing -- not childbearing. As of Jan. 15, I'm officially "post-menopausal," having had no blood for a year, and now, more. My reproductive years are over.

Of course, I never reproduced. For women like me, who've never had babies, menopause carries, I believe, a somewhat different significance. Never having had children can be a hard disappointment. I remember when I first realized I probably wouldn't ever have kids. I was in my late thirties and I'd just had a miscarriage -- as far as I ever got. I stood in front of my kitchen window, staring out at the trees at that many-paned window of another life, and I couldn't stop crying. It was the first time I faced down one of the major limits of my life. I would not experience childbirth. I would not be a mother.

Perhaps the traitor du jour is my own body.

It's the "not" of it that aches, I suppose. The words that go with it are sad and empty. Barren is one of them. A womb that has never expanded, a womb that has never experienced "quickening." I was never "blessed among women." I will not, at my deathbed, have my children around me, as I once wrongly predicted in one of my Tonga journals. I am likely to die alone, as do we all when it comes down to it. It is what it is.

But those sad years of grieving over what was not to be are mostly over. I am not unhappy. Here it is Saturday night and I'm at ease and at liberty, feeling only a little sad about that hole in my sock, the little damage that reminds me that living has results: hurts and disappointments and yes, betrayals. And the daily discovery that emptiness can be filled up with love. I've had twenty years, since that first day of mourning, to fill up the empty spaces, to cultivate the "what else."

And here is the moment, the present tense, the breath in the now. Gratitude for what is: for what still is. No knife in the back. No cramps, no blood. No kid to keep me awake, no kid to ratify or indict me. No begats to hasten my demise. Just this quiet evening, fingers on keyboard, pixels organizing themselves into various dances at my touch. This, to my retiring womb, feels very lucky indeed on an unlucky day.

On Dewey Whitwell's Knee, I Consider My Second Amendment Rights

Back then an eight-year-old girl not quite at home in a starched cotton dress with a grosgrain sash could climb into the evangelist's lap in the parsonage after the revival meeting, and nobody'd think anything of it. He had Necco wafers in his pants pocket and he handed me a couple and I took them, not my favorite candy but not bad either– such mild chocolate you had to think about it, secular host, dry powder on my tongue, tasting, before the chocolate kicked in, faintly of shoe polish and copper pennies, the stuff in his pockets. He was a robust man with red cheeks and a ready smile, a special guest, and my parents encouraged me to sit on his lap, his preacher suit pants scratching the backs of my thighs. Somehow we got it together, where I'd put my arms, shyly, one around his shoulder, and I can't remember where he put his arms, but it was proper and even a bit absent-minded. He seemed tired after his rousing sermon: being a traveling evangelist was hard work. I got the feeling my parents wanted me to be nice to him to make up for his daughter, just a year or two older than me, who was back home in Tennessee. Memory fails: let's call her Missy. Maybe he'd like to have a little girl sit on his lap to remind him of Missy, so he wouldn't feel so lonely so far away from home.

So I perched there, balanced on his shiny serge lap, and he told me about Missy, blonde curly headed Missy, and how he and Missy liked to do a lot of things together, how one thing they liked to do was go out hunting. Did you ever go hunting, honey? I think even a girl should know her way around a gun. My Missy has her own gun, he said. I gave it to her, a little .22. How he missed walking out into the woods together with her and coming back with a rabbit or two, he said, one that Missy might have shot herself, with Dewey Whitwell's help, of course. A little girl with her own gun? It astounded me. “I'm proud of that little girl,” Dewey Whitwell said as I cast my eyes downward and imagined.

Where were my parents, people horrified of the gun, not far removed from Quaker forebears who refused to have anything to do with killing? Was my mother in the kitchen regretting that gentle instinct to offer Dewey Whitwell my little substitute childlike love? “He's not like us,” she might have whispered, biting her lip, upbraiding herself for setting me up. But it was too late – there I already sat, transfixed on Dewey Whitwell's knee, imagining me in Missy's place, brandishing my own little private weaponry, placed in my pink and eager hands by Daddy Dewey, God's hearty messenger to half the Protestant Midwest. Me walking hand and hand through the Tennessee woods, the TVA booming not far away, the squirrels and rabbits dashing right into our sights. My hand in Dewey's, both of us in flannel jackets, my blue jeans rolled up...Dewey would have taught me how to walk as still as an Indian through the underbrush, and he would have whispered don't make a sound. The cinnamon air, the sweet swampy air – we'd appreciate it all together. I coveted what Missy knew.

Then the story about Missy was over and Dewey Whitwell kind of woke up and looked at who was sitting in his lap, and I was pretty sure he was disappointed to see that it was me, a poor substitute, a plain Ohio girl with straight brown hair in her scratchy church dress, a little girl who read Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins, a little girl who'd never held a gun and whose father felt really bad when he sliced through a snake with his riding mower. Oh, the glamorous Missy, whom I would never be. My embarrassment, my humiliating inadequacy stung: I didn't add up to Missy. Missy with her .22 and her daddy and hushpuppies and rabbit stew out on the porch and men playing banjos at night, Missy picking the chiggers off her blue jeans and accepting Daddy Dewey's praise for her steady hand and silent step. But most of all, I envied Missy's gun.

Fifty years later, after Malcolm X, and after Medger Evers, after Kent State and Jackson State and JFK and MLK and RFK, after Marvin Gaye and John Lennon and Vietnam and Iraq, the world and I have traveled a long, long way from Missy's gun. I'm sitting in conference with an earnest kid whose paper exhorts the government to “stop controlling guns." I listen with weary and conscious pretend dispassion as he says, “really, if teachers had guns maybe Virginia Tech never would have happened. And maybe not NIU either. If teachers just had guns.” He looks at me again as I say nothing. “It's your Second Amendment right,” he says.

I avoid eye contact, taking a breath. “Look at me, young man,” I say. “Do you really want me walking into class with, say, a holster and a six-shooter?” I quickly smile – but I really don't want to make fun of him. This is serious. He smiles wanly back, sure, I suspect, I'm about to launch into proof I'm one of those college liberals. But I don't.

What he doesn't know is that once I sat on Dewey Whitwell's knee, and wanted Missy's gun so badly I wanted out of my own life, and that back then walking in the woods and taking aim at other creatures and bringing them home for dinner was somehow tied to "God's plan" for my life, yet something wild and brave and big, something related to staying out of the eternal fires of hell. Having my own gun and walking in the woods with Dewey Whitwell, "God's plan"– it seemed to be my right, my destiny. But as I was about to learn, my mother the heretic still fretting behind the kitchen door, claiming my Second Amendment rights was one of God's plans, one of many of God's plans, that would thankfully elude me.

Goodbye to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Okay, I admit it. Back in about 1975, three or four years into my so-called adult life as a kid reporter in Southern California, I took lessons in transcendental meditation, and at the end of it, I showed up with a bouquet of fresh flowers and some fruit for my one-to-one meeting with a TM leader, passed along a handful of cash, and received a mantra. I can't remember exactly how much I paid. For a while, telling my story, I used to say it cost me $75, but now it seems like it might have been $125. I don't know why I say that -- as time goes by I'm less and less sure about certain specifics -- even finding myself asking "so what?"

Well, I've made fun of myself through the years for "buying a mantra," as I've sometimes disparagingly put it. But when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died this week, apparently in his 90s, I felt a wave of affection for him, for his beautiful face and disarming giggle -- he is a memorable image of a time in the life of my Baby Boomer brothers and sisters and me when we still were having youthful fun, exploring, believing in peace, in some cases still toying with the notion of "free love" and generally still thinking that anything we dreamed of could come true. Other things I remember from that time are listening obsessively to Tom Waits' album Heart of Saturday Night, and hearing about Bruce Springsteen for the first time. One night a bunch of friends and I drank a couple of bottles of Cold Duck -- yes, that was a kind of wine, icky but effective -- and proceeded, half tipsy, to see All the President's Men. I was working the early shift as a copy editor at the Orange Coast Daily Pilot, going in at 5:45 a.m., and I used to shoot out to the track at a local high school to jog three miles on my lunch hour, which was at 10 a.m. As I recall it, I never experienced the slightest insomnia, but I lived my life on a lot of 20-something adrenaline, and I was fitful, always restless. I faithfully meditated, twice a day, for about, well...let's say, three or four months.

But, I confess, I still remember my mantra, and occasionally, in the middle of the night when I can't sleep and the scary realities along with the spectres of old age and death pursue me and interfere with my serenity, sometimes I lie in bed quietly and calm myself by murmuring my mantra, over and over again. It seems to help, and I'm grateful for it.

Stand Up Straight for the Ancestors

A couple of months ago, I expressed doubt about the possibility of ancestral messages.

The other day, though, as I walked to work on a brilliantly sunny 25-degree day I was breathing in the fresh air meditatively, enjoying the way my backpack felt bumping slightly against my back. Suddenly I heard my mother's voice distinctly say, "Stand up straight, Janice." I immediately pushed back my shoulders and sucked in my stomach, and as I did I visualized my mother smiling at me. I experienced a moment of piercing love, remembering my mother's many simple and not so simple acts of trying to shape me into a decent, healthy woman. She noticed me, she worried about me, she wanted me to stand up straight. She's been dead, by the way, for 14 years.

It got me thinking. My mother Carol's voice in my head as I strolled along on a winter's day is a kind of immortality. I wonder if her mother told her to stand up straight, and if she sometimes heard her mother's voice and pictured her mother giving her advice long after my grandmother was gone. And if so, could my grandmother Amy have experienced a similar voice from her mother Matilda, and likewise Matilda from her mother Mary Ann, my great great grandmother? Maybe that is how some things get passed along through hundreds of generations.

There's no way of knowing, of course, but it makes me newly open to the idea that some of my thoughts could be the same thoughts that my great-great grandmother had, and that they've landed in me through one patient and loving mother after another. I wonder what else is there. I'm suddenly fond of all those generations of women tending to their children, doing their best to make sure the kids remembered something, anything that would help them be safe in the world and live good lives.

Breakfast at Bishop

After a month together, a luxury for us in our conjugal cross-country life, Ted and I had to say goodbye this morning, probably our one hundredth "goodbye" at Bishop Airport. We know that sweet little airport inside and out, our own little Sydney Opera House. Today our route was rainy and dark, the brightening snow long gone in the spooky thaw, and at 7:30 a.m. there still wasn't even a glint of sunrise behind us driving down I-69. At that hour there's rare "rush minute" traffic in Flint, the headlights glaring, and I found it nerve-racking. (By the way, my spellcheck program insists that "nerve-racking" is a proper way to spell this word, not just "nerve-wracking" as I've always spelled it. I guess I owe about a thousand students an apology. Go figure) Anyway, I decided I wanted us to park so I could go in with my husband instead of just dropping him off, and then after our ardent departure hug I figured I'd buy a coffee and a New York Times and wait out the dawn; driving in the dark, especially a rain-slicked dark, wreaks havoc on my night blind eyes.

I'm saying all this to get to that 45-minute wait for solid daylight. When you're in a marriage like mine, where from time to time your beloved is pulled away from you and walks down that long hallway and into the skies for weeks at a time of absence, you get used to these moments of reflection, when you suddenly realize you're alone again. It can be jarring. But I've learned to embrace the comings and goings. You look up from your intense dyad and begin noticing the rest of the world again, seeing it anew. It freshens the spirit.

So I bought a mocha from the friendly coffee guy at the cappucino place, and accepted his jovial offer for an extra shot of espresso. Bought a NY Times at the gift shop and didn't mind when the clerk called me "honey." I think I looked a bit disheveled and might have had some "Hillary Clinton"-style watery eyes.

At a table in the cafe, I stretched out my legs and took a deep breath, then a sip of coffee, and then a good long look at the paper. An editorial by Gloria Steinem, predictably griping about how "women are never front runners." Another by David Brooks, usefully comparing Obama and McCain: "One man celebrates communitarian virtues like unity," he writes, " the other classical virtues like honor." And a bonus by poet Donald Hall, a onetime UM professor and former U.S. poet laureate, describing the scene in New Hampshire on primary day today -- not in the booths, but in his barn, "My barn roof bears a yard of snow, which is beautiful but worrisome. Can a barn built in 1865 withstand the weight?" he asks. It's a good day whenever poets make it to the NY Times editorial page. "On days when it doesn’t snow," he continues," the sun’s brightness bears down from the sky and flares upward from the ground." Settling for Michigan's oatmeal skies, I'm jealous of that sun.

On the cafe's big flat screen TV, CNN reporters interviewed wholesome looking people seemingly enjoying their limelight in some local diner, and then a cut to the midnight voting at tiny Dixville Notch. This is fun -- the most fun of any campaign I can remember.

So, I savored my hour until daylight. I looked outside finally and saw that the pole lights in the parking lot had finally clicked off, a milky blue light seeping through the electronic doors along with the travelers.

I'm "alone" again, but still in an very interesting world.

P.S. At the parking booth, the guy who took my two bucks said it had been an extremely depressing morning already -- about 200 soldiers leaving early today for tours of duty in Iraq. (From tonight's Flint Journal, I see that they were likely from the lst Battalion, 125th Infantry Regiment of the Army National Guard.) "All morning I've been taking money from women crying their eyes out," the parking guy said. Damn. Here's to their safe return. Let's hope we get out of this horrid war before everything and everyone we love is lost.

Happy Birthday to My Sister

She was born at 4:27 p.m. this day in 1939. She repeats that detail today in our phone conversation. Her birth came at the end of one of the worst years in the Twentieth Century, yet she represented the start of our parents' creation of a family. They were painfully naive and awkwardly finding their way. Her birth was hard, and her life also has been fraught; she is, according to her horoscope today in the Akron Beacon Journal, which she reads to me, "a stalwart pragmatist." She knows the word "stalwart" well enough to say it, but spells out "p-r-a-g-m-a-t-i-s-t," and seems to enjoy my description of what I think it means: strong and practical, sturdy in the world.

She took herself to Belgrade Gardens for her birthday -- a Hungarian chicken restaurant in Barberton, Ohio where she lives. Disappointed that this capacious family enterprise no longer serves wine, a treat she allocates for herself once or twice a year, she ordered Diet Coke and fish, which she said was too crusty and hard to eat. But there was a bright spot: across from her, an unaccompanied gentleman watched her closely.

Finally he said, "Excuse me, ma'am, but were you a bell ringer for Salvation Army at the Norton Acme?"

She said indeed she was. She was a champion bell ringer this year. One day somebody wrote a check for $2,000 and said explicitly it should be added into the take of the woman he described to be my sister two days before Christmas.

"Would you care to join me for dinner?" the gentleman said, and my sister said, "Yes, I would."

"I hear it's your birthday," the gentleman eventually said. "Would you allow me to buy you a piece of pie?"

"Sir, I'm very full already," my sister said. But she told me it was coconut cream and it was delicious.

My husband and I have just climbed out of our giant oval tub after a long conjugal bubble bath on our last afternoon in San Pedro for awhile. It has been a stressful interlude, for a lot of reasons, but this afternoon I am at peace. I lie back on our bed, loving the sound of my sister's voice in my ear. She sounds so happy. My husband, still steamy and pink, naps serenely at my side.

"And he paid for the pie," my sister says. She and the gentleman sat there and talked -- about world events, she says, and how things have changed since the Forties. And then she came home, to her three cats and a four-pack of wine coolers in the frig -- her treat for the holiday. She wants to make sauerkraut and ribs for New Year's Eve, just for herself, and asks if I remember our mother's recipe. I don't offhand but look it up on Google, find one that sounds right, and read it to her over the phone. She writes it down, reading each item and instruction back precisely, as the cursor blinks congenially in front of me, and our mother, long dead, is a loving presence between us.

My sister seems to have been perfectly content to spend this day by herself, pursuing her own adventures.

I love my sister.

Gloom in LA

Arrived at LAX last night in pouring rain. Good for this desert everybody seems to treat like an oasis -- a solid inch of rain fell downtown yesterday. Bad for Ted who ended up driving my holiday rental car through rush hour, dark and rain. Angelenos are not particularly good at driving on wet pavement; it was nervewracking, especially on that stretch of 405 between the airport and the Harbor Freeway. Lucky me, nightblind and tending toward hysteria, to have a steady LA driver to pilot me home.

It's always discombobulating to be here at first, despite the advantage of being on Eastern Time in buzzy Pacific Time. At Von's, the local grocery chain, I bought two bright red cyclamen plants in green ceramic pots and walked right off without them, so after getting back to 26th Street, parking the Saturn Ion in a cherished convenient spot on Peck and carting in my sacks of provisions, I had to give it up and shoot right back again. Praise be, I made it back before anybody else could snap up the spot.

I hear "positive psychology" is the new thing, so I'll cite the benefits. The drive along Paseo del Mar is as spectacular as always -- the route we take just to pick up a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, a jug of wine, etc. etc. Today the bottom half of Catalina was boldly etched on the horizon, purple mountains' majesty doncha know, thick clouds obscuring the top half. Saw two pelicans right off the bat. I am alive and so is Ted. Beneficent universe, a big Yes.

And I'm also jet-lag grumpy, end-of-semester grumpy, just-got-a-brutal-rejection grumpy, tired-of-Huckabee grumpy, week-before-Christmas-grumpy, tired-of-people-throwing-tantrums grumpy, homesick-for-fresh-Jon-Stewart grumpy. Haven't had a period in 11 (count 'em) e-l-e-v-e-n months, which means I'm 30 mere days short of being officially "through" menopause. Almost-through-menopause grumpy and don't say anything smartass or I'll slap ya upside the head.

After the last rejection, by some blunt and tactless folks at a new lit mag in Ann Arbor I will never submit to again, and will discourage my students from sending to, I'm wondering why I even bother. It's hard to convince oneself to submit when the judgement process opens one up so wildly to potentially hurtful feedback. No wonder blogs and indie publishing efforts are proliferating. Meanwhile, back to doing whatever it is that I think I have to say. I hate the doubts that have to be exorcised after this kind of setback.

And speaking of that, I'm grateful to East Village Magazine which has granted me its back page for the past eight months. There's one unadulterated pleasure.

So, here's to the coming Solstice, and a bit more light.

The Smell of Sawdust -- My Father's 100th Birthday

When I was a kid in Ohio, we lived just a few miles from the runway of the Canton-Akron airport. We used to make fun of our father, who’d stop whatever he was doing every time a plane went over. He’d look up and invariably utter, “Isn’t that amazing?” We thought his unsophisticated awe was embarrassing. We, after all, were kids of the Sputnik age.

Our father never quite got comfortable with a telephone, either. He’d jump whenever it rang and hesitate before picking it up as if it were a poisonous snake. While he died before the era of a PC on every desk, computers likely would have flummoxed him.

But lately I’ve been missing the stubborn old coot. He would have turned 100 today, and even though he and I tangled endlessly through the years over everything from dancing to the GOP, I’ve begun to think that the world is deeply poorer without men like him. I wish he were back, with his contrarian self-sufficiency and plethora of skills.

My father was born on a farm in Central Indiana. In 1907 they had no cars, no electricity, and no indoor plumbing. The first house he remembered burned to the ground. He grew up in a punishing seasonal cycle of efforts to keep the farm afloat: a few cattle, horses, chickens and hogs, about 80 acres of corn and alfalfa. Once he was bitten by a rabid mutt and had to take the train to Indianapolis a dozen times for painful shots in the stomach – a terror that filled his adult nightmares and fueled a lifelong fear of dogs. There was not much fun. It was a crushingly difficult life and he craved adventure and aimed to escape. At 18 he rode the rails to North Dakota to work another harvest for a German farmer – a journey that morphed into an epic family myth. But he came home after just one season to his own extended family. A mix of Quakers and Nazarenes, they were opinionated and devout, and they encouraged him when he received the call to the ministry. Halfway through divinity school in the depths of the Depression, he had to drop out when his father was hit and killed by a car in front of their farm on Route 40. The family struggled to survive but lost their land, a crisis that plagued my father with grief and guilt for the rest of his life.

Eventually, though, he did become a minister in a succession of parishes in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. In one of his assignments, he was a “circuit rider” among four small churches in the Coshocton County, Ohio villages of Nellie, Blissfield, Layland and Shepler. He bought a motor scooter to travel between them, not always avoiding ice, floods on Killbuck Creek, turkey vultures on road kill and slow-moving tractors.

I’ve often called him “fundamentalist” for want of a better word, but he was also an intellectual, poring over original Greek and Hebrew texts for his sermons and even reading Saul Bellow and John Updike to try to understand the secular world. He studied the theologians Reinhold Neibuhr and Martin Buber. One of his favorite writers was the Quaker Elton Trueblood.

In 1950, concerned about not owning any land as they moved from church to church, my dad and mom scraped together a few hundred dollars for a single acre of Ohio land. It had problem drainage so my father brought in topsoil and designed and installed an elaborate system of drainage pipes. He drew up plans for a small house and built it from the foundation up, doing the masonry for a stone fireplace. He planted a modest orchard of pear, plum and apple trees. And then there was the garden – a quarter acre of potatoes, melons, tomatoes, strawberries, corn and beans that kept our family healthily fed for years. He was self-sufficient and shrewd.

For fun, he started designing wall “sconces” to hold candles and antique oil lamps. His favorite woods were cherry, knotty pine, wormy chestnut and walnut, and there was nothing that roused his passions more than a pile of seasoned lumber. Forever scarred by the Depression, he paid cash for everything, and it turned out that his sconces were also puzzle boxes, with secret compartments where we eventually found astonishing rolls of greenbacks he’d squirreled away. While he was suspicious of “art,” he created it, including a screen carved with grape leaves, the symbol of plenty, for one of his churches. The trustees, scandalized by such idolatry, made him take it out: he and my mother used it as a headboard for years. (I wrote about that notorious "raredos" here months ago. )

The other day I tried to tell my students that writing was like building a house. But before I’d gotten very far, I realized they weren’t getting my point.

On a hunch, I asked, “How many of you have ever built anything?’ Only one lone hand went up.

It hit me hard that they haven’t grown up like I did – with the smell of sawdust never far off, the apple trees tended with care, and boxes and jars of fresh beans and corn frozen and canned for the winter. My father left me with many gifts, but today it also feels like something rare and irreplaceable is gone.

Putting Hope on With Our Shoes

I woke up today, my birthday, with a keen sense of delight. My husband was next to me in our big brass bed, the world outside was bathed in warm late autumn sun, and gold leaves from the silver maples on Maxine Street swirled around like gold leaf (ah!) in the air and on the street. Most of my birthdays for the past 58 years have been brown, gloomy and rainy. This was a rare pleasure.

It is easy to despair -- lord knows there is ample reason. The dark side of life certainly threatens and looms, sometimes taking over everything.

But today I am happy.

With only two more years to go until my seventh decade, the simplest way to describe my mood on the morning of my 58th birthday is to say "phew, I've made it. I'm still alive." And then my husband nuzzled me and gave me a kiss. Who can stay glum in the face of a morning kiss? This is more than just surviving. This is the 99.9th percentile of contentment.

I rolled over and turned on NPR, another of my daily rituals. The first thing I heard was a commentary by "Speaking of Faith" host Krista Tippett. Its tagline was "Deep gladness meets deep need," and here is some of what she said:

"Our emerging national conversation about sustainability has a decidedly "eat your spinach" tone. We're steeling ourselves to enter the realm of sacrifice and penance. But as I've explored ethics and meaning in American life these past few years, I've been struck by the heightened sense of delight and beauty in lives and communities pursuing a new alignment with the natural world.

Innovation and sustainability often begins, I've found, with people defining what they cherish as much as diagnosing what is wrong. I think of Majora Carter. The cutting-edge program she founded, Sustainable South Bronx, began when she and that people of that borough began to reclaim their riverfront for refreshment and play.

I think also of the author Barbara Kingsolver, who found in a year of sustainable eating that when it comes to food, the ethical choice is also the pleasurable choice. And she says that as we face the grand ecological crisis of our time, one of our most important renewable resources is hope. We simply have to put it on with our shoes every morning."

I loved that this was the first thing I heard on the morning of my birthday.

With the temperature in the mild fifties, I set out to walk to work. On the way, I stopped to talk to Ray and Nancy Sinclair, who are building a beautiful entryway on a house between Calumet and Court. I enjoy watching Ray's progress -- it is a pleasure to see the work of any master craftsman, and he and I have known each other, superficially but fondly, for 20 years. And on the bridge between Chavez and the UMF campus, I ran into Nic Custer, one of the talented offspring of the Custer family of East Village Magazine, and again it was enjoyable to stop and chat before moving on to work. My 26-year history with this town, the warmth of long association with good people, was deeply satisfying to me today. And, of course, it's simply wonderful to stop and chat.

As I consider my life over the past year, enjoying the beauties of the harbor at San Pedro, and cherishing the loveliness of my neighborhood here in Flint, my rich life with my students, my marriage to Ted, I am deeply grateful. And I pledge to put on hope with my shoes every morning.

First Night: The Case of the Missing Purse

With my previously banked startup cache, I'm up to 3,910. It's a different way than I've ever written anything -- what's liberating about it is the express freedom to simply write, keep writing, and write some more, without stopping to edit, judge, fret. What came out tonight offered a few discoveries, but like a momma cat who just gave birth, I'm feeling secretive and protective. Tried to get on the NaNo site but it was apparently being barraged with first-nighters, so I'll use this spot instead (along with Cathy's cute contribution of an office chart for all four of us NaNoWriMo freaks -- thanks, Cathy.)

Amusing start to my NaNoWriMo life. Had to work late -- till 6:45 p.m. today -- and when I got ready to come home, looking forward to my two hours or so at the computer, I realized I didn't have my purse. I quickly deduced I'd left it in another campus building at an earlier meeting, and after Safety sent an officer to check the room I'd been in, they called back and said it wasn't there. I retraced my steps, frantic, thinking about all the credit cards, checks, and my low-tech but much thumbed and beloved address book. When I got to the other building to see for myself, it was locked up for the night. So I pounded back to my office and begged Safety to let me back in to see for myself. And raced back a second time. A tolerant officer let me in the building and we looked together -- no purse, much unladylike cursing. All I could think of was, DAMN, what about NaNoWriMo? Does this ruin my very first night of November writing? Then, out of desperation, I made him let me in to the adjacent Advising Center (an office I'd once spent many long years in, incidently) to see if anybody'd dropped it off and it was lurking on a secretary's desk. And then I made him let me go into the Director's office, who'd been at the meeting with me. AND THERE IT WAS!

When I finally got home, my purse securely swinging from my left shoulder, I was still in an adrenaline rush, and I brought that with me to my first night of NaNoWriMo. The 1800 words for tonight flowed out fairly speedily. I was so grateful to be writing instead of calling credit card companies and loathing my stupid self!

So there you go, a happy ending. Shouldn't every story have a happy ending? Isn't this nervewracking "missing purse" event somehow just the right kind of ultimately harmless drama to propel my first night of story telling?

I am wondering about happy endings. Humans really don't have happy endings. We get old and die. Or at least, die. But I'm still feeling exuberant, so I don't want to let it stand there...I'm banking on some happiness between now and the day I die -- the "aho lahi" as the Tongans used to call it, the "Big Day." I don't know if my novel is going to have a happy ending. But the mood I'm in now, with my reclaimed purse hanging beautifully on the back of a chair in my bright and lovely kitchen, is that I think it will. I think it will.

The Hutch of Womanhood

Furniture makes me feel grown up. Even that word -- furn-i-ture -- sounds substantial, reliable, and reassuring. I suppose at my age this should be far past relevant, but anybody over 30 knows there's nothing about one's years on earth that guarantees maturity. I'm always on a scavenger hunt for signs and symbols that I've made a dent on life's confusions. Furniture, for whatever idiosyncratic reason, seems to say "yes, you have."

This matters today because Ted and I recently added a large, significant piece of furniture to our household. It's a tall oak china cabinet in two heavy pieces -- what my mother called a buffet and what Ted and I have been calling a "hutch." The latter seems the right moniker -- it's big, yet designed for peaceful, cozy purposes, like housing the remnants of my Great-Grandma Youtz's flowery china and my collection of cordial glasses. And, of course, "hutch" is also the word for a rabbit's house. What a language! How can anybody who speaks English not be a poet?

Anyway, there was once a time when I was proud that all my "stuff" fit into my '67 Bug. Those were days of heady road trips across the U.S.A., as I freely flew down freeways, 10 and 40 and 80, east to west to east to west, enjoying my unencumbered youth. I think what I had was a bunch of hippie clothes and a "stereo" in three pieces: the turntable and two speakers that slid onto the right and left. There would have been a couple of boxes of books (Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing, Leaves of Grass, Emily Dickinson) and a box of "records" -- yes, children, that's what we called them -- Grateful Dead, The Band, Joni Mitchell, Crosby-Stills-Nash-and-Young, Cream, Janis Joplin, Beatles, of course. And a few keepsakes like a small black ivory elephant my dad brought me from the U.N. and a vase given to me by Sadie Russ, a 98-year-old woman in Akron, Ohio who had been friends of my long-dead grandmother.

I still have all that stuff -- well, not the Bug or the stereo, but most of the rest. Eventually the open road, actually and metaphorically, lost its luster as it so often does when one's knees and neck begin to go, and I wanted not a million choices, but anchors to one spot, one house, one man. I wanted to get to know one tree intimately and watch it grow. I wanted to get to know one man and I wanted him to stay awhile. I wanted dishes and cloth napkins and rugs and a real bed with an actual headboard.

I learned that furniture doesn't keep a marriage together, but can outlast it. One of the hardest things I had to walk away from in my first marriage was a dining room table with leaves to seat a dozen. We'd had years of memorable dinner parties there, and it meant something to me. I gave it up. But it is somewhat easier to replace a table than a husband: when I left that marriage, one of the first things I did was buy another one (a table, that is!) -- smaller but solid, suited to what I hoped would be my intrepid solitary life. The emotional reward was mixed but irresistible.

Later, my present husband and I bought a dining room table and big chairs that please me immensely. They haven't been seasoned by the rowdy soirees of my thirties and forties, but they were made by Mennonites in Pigeon, Michigan -- built with deliberate, loving craftsmanship, I like to think, that took some time. When we bought it I told Ted, "Some day I'll need the 'hutch' to go with this." He remembered, and this year, in the sign of the Scorpio -- mine -- he delivered.

It matches the table and chairs and has glass doors and a mirrored back and built-in recessed lights that make my granny's china sparkle. The other night I left the lights on dim, just so that if I woke up in the middle of the night I could come downstairs and look at all my keepsakes shimmering in the dark.

It doesn't change the world or feed a baby, but it makes me feel rooted and substantial. I have a hutch. I must really be a woman now.

Thirty Years Ago...

...this was me, standing outside my second house in Tonga.

Finding an old photo can be a bit jarring. But I like the looks of this young woman. She was having high quality fun. Note the bare feet...ah, that was reckless, with so much sharp coral around. That black British one-speed was my constant companion and friend -- imagine the pleasure of piloting a bike all over a remote, impossbly green Polynesian island, 9.000 miles away from home. There were moments in those two years, I must say, when just being there was enough -- an unalloyed satisfaction.

Life doesn't often offer such pure pleasure. Here's to Peace Corps.