Pursuing a Happy Darkness

Here's my new column for East Village Magazine (eastvillagemagazine.org), the result of an evolving experience of confronting, accepting and sometimes even loving darkness.

Lately I’ve been renegotiating with the dark.

Darkness gets a bad rap, including in my own mind. Each year I dread the coming on of longer nights, culminating in the anachronistic switch to Daylight Savings Time. By then, it’s dark when I leave for work in the morning and dark when I get home. This long winter darkness is so claustrophobic for me, so depressing, that anticipating it is almost as bad as actually putting up with it.

The literal darkness of winter merges, of course, with metaphorical darkness – that “dark night of the soul” that 16^th Century mystic Saint John of the Cross first defined. Some of the hardest, most fearful moments of my life have coalesced at roughly 4 a.m., when the world seems most terrifying, most unpromising, most dark.

I know of course that darkness harbors danger. Evil hides in unlit corners, as our faithful neighborhood watch teams rightly point out. It’s not just nocturnal critters like possums, raccoons and bats showing up, rattling our nerves and trash cans. There are human critters all too ready to capitalize on the dark, stalkers and thieves and pyromaniacs, sneaking around with their badass intentions where we can’t quite see them.

But it’s not really the dark’s fault. Back in the day we feminists used to parade around once a year or so on “Take Back the Night” marches, including several through downtown Flint, and though our efforts only seemed to apply when there were a dozen of us or more, it did feel good to shout out that the night belongs to everybody. At the heart of that movement was a call for safety. For me, there also was a less strident song – that there’s something beautiful about the night, something primally necessary to reclaim.

We spend half our lives in darkness. Life is short -- why should I squander half of it in a state of fear and resistance? Wouldn’t it seem that nature’s effect on humans, the yin and yang of day and night, might have an up side? Why should daylight get all the good press?

Could there, in short, be such a thing as happy darkness?

This question bubbled up over friendship – a friendship built on walks and a restless baby. My neighbor Vickie figured out a stroller ride calmed newborn Frannie, and asked if I’d like to come along. We’d meet after dinner and, with a baby buggy between us, explore many streets in the neighborhood. As Frannie gaped and cooed at passing details, Vickie and I talked about everything, including the languorous sun drooping behind the silver maples of Maxine, Beard, Woodside, Lynwood, Calumet, Blanchard, Kensington. We went wherever we felt like going.

Eventually Frannie learned to go to sleep without her daily wheeling, but thanks to her daddy holding down the fort, her mom and I kept walking.

As the days shortened, we found ourselves starting out in dusk, each night noting decreasing minutes of light. When finally our whole walk was in the dark, I thought we couldn’t keep it up.

There are all kinds of logical arguments, after all, for not going out after dark. It flies in the face of everything we’ve been taught as women. We’ve been marooned in fear. But we enjoyed our nightly strolls so much we didn’t want to stop. So we didn’t. We take sensible precautions, but we’ve found it quite possible to feel at home, in the neighborhood that is our home, even after dark.

Spending three or four hours a week meandering into the night like we own it has been exhilarating and liberating. It is a luxury. It’s an antidote for claustrophobia. It’s a guarantee, almost always, of a better night’s sleep.

After dark, the neighborhood yields a remarkable glowing magic. This matters to my sense of our place, which so often saddens and worries me. At night the houses look calm and inviting, their rectangles and orderly panes of indoor light distinct and intriguing. We appreciate particular front porches, where porch lights frame interesting doors, brick steps, trellises, roof angles, and climbing ivy. We wouldn’t so much notice these in daylight, when many details blend together in equalizing swathes of sunbeams.

That is, we see things differently in different kinds of light. Part of the magic is it’s never really dark. Yet night light is different from the light of day: the variegated oranges, ochres and ambers of artificial light, the silvery moonlight through canopies of hardwoods – it’s elegant, nuanced, etched in mystery.

We pick blocks to stroll that have the best streetlights, and our progress from one cone of light to another is rhythmic and metered. Like a good poem, we move from dark to light to dark to light.

One night Vickie said when you walk the neighborhood after dark, it looks like every family is happy. The quality of inside light, enjoyed from our outsiders’ view, is serene. It’s possible to imagine that lovely light means lovely life – it’s possible to imagine, a cozy, hopeful visual illusion. When we walk by the lit-up houses, in other words, they make us happy. That’s a kind of truth, a trick of the darkness and the light we all provide to counter it.

Saint John of the Cross’s poem “Dark Night of the Soul” describes a journey of the soul from its bodily home to its union with God. It’s instructive that that trip of the spirit takes place at night. Saint John’s pilgrimage involves the “purification of the senses,” a step the darkness accommodates very well. We rest our bodies, at night, from the daylight stimulations of eyes and ears, the way in yoga class we sometimes roll soft eyewraps around our heads to give the brain a break. People need a rest from daylight. What we find at night can be a journey rich with gifts. Even in Flint, there can be a happy darkness.

I swear this is what it looks like

Buds

Yes, buds. I saw them with my own eyes. Buds on trees. Pierce School yard. It's real.

I hope Feb. 21 is about the right time for this -- not toxically early, scarily early.

Because I found it touching, reassuring, like, get a little choked up reassuring while listening to Otis Redding on the iPod. Soul stuff. There are buds.

Walking Quotidian

Enough blessed light now for after-work walking in fluffy snow. Watched the flakes land on my old leather coat sleeve: old magic retrieved. IPod in the pocket the greatest invention since the flush toilet...I am in my own world, listening to Laurence Juber's lush "PCH" and reclaiming peace in my own life, remembering the night we saw him at Alva's on Eighth Street in San Pedro...just him sitting on a stool on that little stage, a gorgeous night with my husband and our friends, the West Coast commune. Lucky to have sturdy, sunny memories to get through February. Lucky to have life that thrives apart from assholes. Lucky to have the quotidian familiarity of legs and feet doing what they're supposed to do, gently walking, my hoodie snug over my head, my worn black gloves.

Rainy Day

Images from my last afternoon walk, in lovely mist and rain, the day before going back to Flint.

Friday Morning in San Pedro

View from the front deck Dec. 18

Awash in sunlight on this first day back to the coast. I am grateful as always for this bright hillside. And noting, as always, the miracle of waking up in the cold and dark of Flint early yesterday morning and walking along the ocean bluffs of San Pedro by mid-afternoon. I often think of those people who practically starved in their covered wagons struggling across mountain and desert. And here I am, having had nine-grain cereal with soy milk and a sweet cappucino at Rex's, having kissed my husband and held his hand over the breakfast table, reading him his Virgo horoscope (he will be "childlike" in the best ways, his sense of wonder blooming), having done my ritual head stand and meditation, and now moving back and forth between our front porch and our back deck, taking the sun, as they say, with the relief of a parolee.

And noting, too, how much better I feel than last winter, when I arrived in Pedro before Christmas full of angst and physical commotion. It is a great thing to be healthy. I ran up to the corner first thing this morning to greet my beloved hilly Peck Avenue, the route of my cherished long walks to the Korean Bell of last February and daily all through the summer -- a crucial element in my healing. The whole place seems full of love today.

Here's a poem I wrote last summer, in appreciation:

Walking on Peck

When I first came back to the coast
after the hard Michigan winter
I couldn’t take much.
I felt lost,
strange to myself,
and easily frightened
as if somebody new was living
alongside me in my body.
I wasn’t sure who that was
or what to make of it.
All I wanted to do
was walk, the blues and golds
shining off saltwater a relief
to me, the wide open harbor
like getting out of jail,
and especially the air – elixir of air –
every breath – I wanted one after
another – a sign I was still alive.
I walked up and down Peck Avenue
a hundred times, its steep dips requiring
lungs and legs to work together. I felt
my body doing its job and I could lose
my fractured self in thought
or not think at all,
getting to know myself,
old scabs shed, me the tender
pink miraculous skin
underneath
healed or healing, rosy.
Life wanted me. And so I
walked, and looked, and breathed.

Sixty

...For about three weeks now. Apparently there's nothing to be afraid of. Today, back from breakfast at the usual joint with 3/4 of the commune (the majority caucus, as "Teddy West" calls it) I meditated. On the coldest day of the winter so far, the sun through the southern exposure upstairs window warmed my forehead, that Third Eye chakra, and then I wandered downstairs and did a headstand on my new yoga mat, getting up to the wall on only the second try. Counted deliberately to 120, breathing from the diaphragm. Tried to hear my yoga teacher's voice urging the shoulders to take more of the responsibility. Couldn't remember which way is "up" for the shoulders in this pose.

Stretching, breathing, extending, bending...my body and I communing. It has been a long time coming, far from the stiff Ohio of my youth.

Later, a long Saturday walk, the sun of the morning's meditation long obscured behind thick clouds. What IS this universe, anyway? What IS it, going on and on out there forever? Sometimes I think it's the body of God, and we are tiny mitochondria in miniscule capillaries.

The photo above, ice on Cadet, on the curve to Pierce Park that feels like a little woods, a little country road in the middle of town. The essence of this time of year in the Midwest, brown, stripped down, tight, chilly. Poetry weather.

Michael's Cat Snowflake

This is what counts as Big News in World 'O Me as my long lovely summer in San Pedro winds to an end. Thursday I was walking down Peck Ave. for about the hundredth time, this hilly street I've grown to adore, and I came upon two men putting in landscaping at the brown house where the white cat lives. This little kitty with the yellow eyes has been one of the delights of my walks -- along with the Grizzled Man, whom I'll write about later, if I see her it's an anecdote, something to tell Ted. She never lets me touch her and I'd sort of named her Pearlie.

So she wasn't there when I got to the house, which is tucked snugly into the hillside facing the harbor and always looks beautiful to me -- California arts and crafts style, with an attractive wood and cast iron fence allowing just a few peeks into the terraced yard extending down from Peck. I always wonder who lives there and if they ever see me flirt with Pearlie.

Two men, robust senior citizens, were putting in big clumps of wheaty-looking grasses, and I stopped to say how good it looked. "Native grasses?" I asked -- something one always hopes for around here, where a deep drought makes fussy annuals like pansies seem silly and ill-advised. They said they didn't really know if they were native but they liked them.

Is the little white cat too scared to come out while you're working?
Oh, you mean Michael's cat?
Ah. Michael.
Yeah, I don't know him -- I just walk by all the time.
That'd be Michael's cat Snowball.
Not Snowball, the other one said, Snowflake.
Oh yeah, Snowflake. That's it. Michael's cat Snowflake.

Sigh. I love knowing she's a Snowflake, here where it never, ever snows.

The next day, Friday, she was out, stretched out elegantly on the sidewalk in the late afternoon sun when I walked by.

Snowflake, I whispered, respectfully. She got up and daintily circled me, sniffing. She still wouldn't let me touch her, but this time she didn't run away.

A Morning with Gilkey Creek

There's something I've been wanting to write about, something that's nudging at me, a bone in my throat, an agitation in my craw. (What is a craw, anyway? Note to self: Google "craw.")*

I begin with little winding Gilkey Creek, a feeder into the Flint River. It has been part of my life for about 25 years -- since my first husband, Danny, and I moved into our house on Seventh Street. Back then I started walking and jogging along the creek and over its three little foot bridges as part of a route through the neighborhood that has continued to this day.

Here's the thing: sometimes I am in denial about the huge chunk of my life that I've spent in Flint -- I don't know why, exactly, except that as I've said before in many other contexts, I never thought I'd stay this long, and sometimes it simply doesn't feel like "my kind of place" -- or the kind of place I thought I'd end up. Going there in my thinking dangerously leads to "it wasn't supposed to be like this," or, "I could have done better..." And thus to a tunnel of self-doubt if not outright self-recrimination, and nothing good comes of that.

But then, there's this little creek that I've been pausing to look at on its many curves and byways when it's crusted with ice in February and gushing with green life in early May; there are sometimes ducks noodling around under the bridge on Brookside. I've noted the way October leaves dapple the water in red and gold; I've delighted in the little rippling rapids at the footbridge by Kensington. This little creek has meandered its way into my daily life, and I've come to count on it. Maybe it's like an arranged marriage, where after years of just living one day after the other, you suddenly realize you've grown fond of the mate conjoined to you by fate.

There's passive aggression in keeping my feelings at bay about a place I've lived in much longer than the whole of my childhood, much longer than anyplace else I've ever lived, for that matter. It strikes me suddenly that one can take out one's individual resentment and disappointment on the land -- by withholding commitment, by ignoring its needs and travails. By simply refusing or failing to notice.

This dolorous line of reflection from individual circumstance leads me deeper: sometimes individual difficulties, unresolved baggage about ourselves, can become something bigger, taking a toll on Mother Earth. If we're not taking proper care of ourselves and unearthing (ohh...untentional but lucky slip...to "unearth" like digging potatoes out of the dirt, a gift, a consequence of our husbandry) thus, unearthing the meaning of our lives, perhaps we also stop paying attention to the natural world that sustains us.

So this is partly an argument for taking care of ourselves -- not just at the superficial "yes, I exercised today," but at the spiritual level -- "yes, I am finding a path to forgiveness, moving on from the griefs and disappointments of the past."

I woke up Saturday, in short, and decided to get up and go to Gilkey Creek, where good-hearted folks not as ambivalent or reclusive as me had organized a Flint River cleanup, including my little tributary. This new, uncharacteristic decisiveness, not without resistance or misanthropy, overall felt refreshing. I thoroughly enjoyed the morning, getting muddy on the banks while tugging out drenched plastic bags ("Toys 'r Us" being the predominant logo in my assigned stretch of creek), shards of styrofoam, candy wrappers -- the usual detritus of thoughtless humanity.

Hmm...that casual little reference just jarred me into insight -- "my little tributary" -- it IS my little creek, as it is all of ours. As I was arguing myself out of bed, dreading having to interact with "people" in my current not-quite-completed rehabilitative state, I thought "you don't have to make nice with the people. But you could care about the creek." That little creek in all its imperfections has given me many moments of pleasure. It's part of the land that was here before us and now, as always, is deserving of our love.

*Craw: a pouch in many birds and some lower animals that resembles a stomach for storage and preliminary maceration of food (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)

Today's Flint Walk: "My Lizard Likes Them"

In bright sunshine, I met Helen, a woman I'd seen walking from time to time. (It felt soothingly Old World that we shook hands; she looked like she might be in her 80s but has a fine strong handshake. I will mourn the loss of shaking hands if the flu epidemic forces us all away from simple physical gestures.) Helen was walking her dog Maggie, who Helen said is 17. We stopped to chat on the sidewalk east of Pierce School, looking at the caved-in spot where the big old ash tree used to be until a December ice storm got it.

We started talking about dandelions, which are just busting out all over the yard around Pierce's playground. Helen confessed she actually likes them and feels no need to root them out. The other day on her walk, she said, she ran into a woman with a handful of picked dandelions. "Oh! So you like dandelions, too!" Helen exclaimed. "No, I feed them to my lizard," the woman replied. "My lizard likes them." We smiled broadly at each other. What a great neighborhood!

I recalled how in Ohio's early springs my mom used to pick dandelion greens and cook them up in a cast iron frying pan with a vinaigrette dressing -- it was fabulous. But as I told Helen, I never have enough nerve to pick the greens from my own yard to try this dish, which was one of my favorites as a kid. I keep thinking about the parade of dogs on the street and the raccoons that obviously explore my back yard at night. When I was six and we moved from the country to the city, one of the things my mother mourned was the ready supply of "clean" dandelion greens in April.

I still might try it, though. Helen reminded me I could just wash them carefully. Next week probably will be too late -- the greens have to be young and tender.

Giddy Friday

I'm giddily happy tonight. My car has been in the garage, untouched, since a week ago, and I've walked to work every day this week -- five days, an hour each day, a half hour each way, in brilliant tangy autumn weather, my beloved black backpack secure against my body.

And it's possible that the country is not quite so mindlessly infatuated with Sarah Palin this week as last, and maybe I feel fizzy because of the huge financial crash we've seen happen this week -- it's like the way you feel after getting high on LSD and thinking you're never going to come down and then you wake up the next morning and everything is ultra-clear and daily life in all its ordinary beauty is a relief.

Here's Barbara Mikulski: " Democrats wear lipstick too, and we need somebody who gets it! We don't need George Bush in lipstick!" That image is making me giggle, but maybe that's because my system is flush with fresh-air endorphins and the two glasses of rose from the bottle I found in the refrigerator door (Verget du Sud, 2006) It's so funny because Barbara Mikulski doesn't really look like she wears lipstick, but God bless her! The Wall Street Journal (yes, the Wall Street Journal!) lambastes John McCain for his hot-headed call to fire Christopher Cox from the SEC. So I relax and play with my tiny zen garden (see photo above...for the record, the bottle is empty now.)

The world's complications are amusing and fascinating tonight. I'm in a much better mood. Even while listening to idiot Bay Buchanan bluster about Palin and McCain on CNN. Tonight she just seems silly and irrelevant.

And by the way, how about Joe Biden saying it's patriotic for people making $250,000 or more to pay more taxes? I say, three cheers. I don't think that was a gaffe. It makes sense that the rich should pay more. This of course means that prosperous Americans would develop some late-in-the-game altruism, which doesn't seem to accompany standard capitalism. We don't know from sacrifice. How 'bout a little dose of sacrifice, damn it? I like what Joe Biden said.

I'm not saying I'm happy about the bailout. Welfare for the bigtime capitalists, at a massive scale, probably means that any hope for universal health care, decent public education and -- yeah, even -- the arts won't be in the picture for the rest of my lifetime. We've just rewarded the slobbering, snarling dog for stealing food from the baby.

Nonetheless, it's a beautiful autumn night and that rose has me mellow and optimistic. I'm going to sign off and enjoy it.

Buoyant, Ghostly Weediness at Chevy in the Hole

I just know I'm going to write a lot more about this: 2008 is the 100th birthday of General Motors, and that blessed event, beginning a whole century of exuberant innovation, huge-scale manufacturing, massive migrations from the South, flamboyant Big Money, and the collapse and abandonment we've had several decades to adjust to, occurred right here in Flint.

Specifically, it began at what we now affectionately call "Chevy in the Hole," a huge compound of factories in bottom land of the Flint River just west of downtown.

The site is now a giant brownfield. I find it irresistibly ghostly and haunting.

I took my "Green Ink" students there on a bike tour a couple of weeks ago. Increasingly, it seems right NOT to drive a car when paying tribute to this fallen behemoth. Pausing to catch our breath on Bluff Street overlooking the acreage, we didn't have much to say as we took in the concretized channel of the river and the silent expanse where some of the fights of the 1936 Sit Down Strike took place and where millions of cars were banged out on noisy and oily assembly lines. Several mallards noodled along in the brown water. A red-winged blackbird sailed by. A remarkable single cottonwood did its leafy hula. It really is a cemetery.

The brownfields of Chevy in the Hole are not really brown: there are many green things growing in the cracks and edges. I asked our tour guide, Christina Kelly of the Genesee County Land Bank, what they were. "Just weeds," she said.

My biology professor friend Tracy Wacker, with her usual bracing candor, said "The definition of a weed is a plant growing where somebody doesn't want it to. Looked at that way, none of the plants at Chevy in the Hole are weeds, because nobody cares if they grow there."

This is just the start of what I have to say, but in quick summary, when Tracy and I walked back to Chevy in the Hole yesterday, scrambled around a chain-link fence and poked around in the humid overgrowth on the cracked concrete and the river bank, she called out the names of least 30 different plants: rumex, chicory, bachelor's button, black nightshade, common mullein, curlydock, dogwood, catalpa, coreopsis, lanceleaf plantain, milkweed, dames rocket, buckthorn, bull-thistle, crown vetch. That's about half of them.

One of the most prolific species butting into the ruins is a lusty compound-leafed interloper named, ironically, Tree of Heaven (shown above). It is everywhere. It stinks. The reason is that it contains compounds that keep other plants from growing. Its deep and feisty underground runners make it almost possible to kill -- cut it down, it comes up two feet away. Okay, really, I can't resist this metaphor. I'm chewing on it avidly, like a local betel nut spiking my adrenalin.

But there were also small and hopeful willows, that yellow coreopsis -- a native plant -- and that dogwood. The cemetery is birth to some kind of regeneration -- quiet, slow, shy, fascinating. In the silent breezes there's something to notice. In the persistent weediness, a whisper of history receding, a hint of something lusty and green coming back in its place.

Smells Like Summer

Ahh! Somebody's barbecuing chicken tonight. Walking along Calumet, I could smell it for at least five blocks. Red spiricles are uncurling from the tips of every silver maple and the chickadees are making that earnest LOVEyou LOVEyou call from the rooftops. Can true summer be far behind?

Solitary Easter Without the Peeps

I keep forgetting how big Easter is in Flint. The first three spots I aimed for on my early afternoon rounds were closed, the streets almost deserted. Odd to think of all the church hoopla going on in various bedecked sanctuaries as I putter along up and down Court and Center in my trusty old Honda: song, flowers and scripture ("Up from the Grave He Arose" used to be my favorite). I liked the sunrise service on Easter Sunday as well: the break in routine, the novelty of getting up before dark for various theatrical and often endearing rituals of resurrection. An exuberant day in the church, to be sure. These, for me, are memories of childhood. The way it is now: alone all day, happy to be peripheral to this Big Moment, theologically speaking. I'm at home with my longstanding retreat from zeal.

So, Adult Easter 2008: writing for several hours. A meandering walk, the crisp air and sky in late afternoon more like Thanksgiving than Easter. Quiet dinner of chicken, salad and a crisp apple. Two phone chats with my husband, who says it's 80 in LA. Long talk with my sister on the phone. The latest episode of "John Adams" on HBO -- excellent. Poor John Adams just didn't cotton to those French. Ben Franklin playing chess in a bathtub with the comtessa. Abigail, meanwhile, plowing, planting and furiously cleaning window panes at midnight, furiously lonely for John Adams. Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney are great, as is Tom Wilkinson as the worldly and infuriating Franklin.

A renewing day, even without the banks of lilies, chocolate rabbits and hard boiled eggs.

Not the Reaper -- This Time

Walking my route, gloomy late afternoon, spring fog rising from the ground. Maybe it was that moody mist that got me in a spooky trance, rounding the long curve on Cadet Street especially, where the mist hovered over the drainage ditch (well, in the Wordsworthian mood I'm in, I'll call it a rivulet), and I wouldn't have been surprised to run into Sherlock Holmes stepping nimbly over potholes somewhere in the pea soup by the nine-hole.

Exactly. Coming out of the parking lot to Sunnyside, ahead of me I saw a hulking figure, all in black, black cape, a head covering (a hood?), standing still. Some sort of stick in hand. Looking at me. My fur -- or my vestigial fur, those hairs along my spine -- stood up.

When the Grim Reaper comes do people have a chance to see him in the distance? Does he stand there waiting while a woman (who as a matter of fact has quite recently and freshly declared she's in her prime) strides forward, taking in big gulps of air? I checked all my body parts. Lungs clear. No chest pain. Digestion fine. Slept well last night. Bones fine, muscles flexing. Quick communique to liver, stomach, pancreas, lymphs, cervix and cerebellum: hey -- you guys okay?

Wouldn't it just figure this would be my day, some regular Tuesday, nondescript March 18, feeling good, checks in the mail, spring on the way -- that would be the day, wouldn't it?

I drew closer, keeping up my pace so as not to appear cowardly. I squinted my nearsighted eyes and plastered on an alpha female smile, trying for "devil may care," so to speak. He looked big: maybe the drizzle exaggerated his girth. He seemed to turn away -- good sign. Then I realized his cane or walking stick or shillelagh or whatever the hell was really a thick, long leash, and at the end of it, sniffed a big loopy hound. Only one hound, not seven. Only a mournful basset, growling melodiously. And the man? A wide-faced smiling fellow with, I think, a small, endearing gap between two teeth. The Grim Reaper, I'm pretty sure, would not beam like this out of a face like a big banana cream pie. His scary cape, actually a fabulous great coat, brightened with a tartan scarf. And his hood -- not a hood, but a handsome black fedora. How stylish. How distinct.

"Her name's Daisy," the gentleman said. "Notice that her tail's wagging."

I could have said, "I'd like to stick around and chat but I thought you were My Death -- so you'll pardon me if I just move along."

Instead I shouted, "She's gorgeous!" which she was, and I trucked out of there.

"Have a nice walk," the neighborly man in the Great Coat called after me.

I'd like to imagine that I disappeared quickly into the mist -- like the reconciled victims in Cold Case -- but I don't think I did. I think he could see me clearly, almost running now, entirely vivified, for at least three blocks.

Metrics in Late Winter

1. Sometimes, I imagine myself swimming.

2. Crow chicks wheedle over crusty black mud.

3. Silver maples arthritic in March sun.

4. Junk mail on a table meant for feasting.

5. I want my house to be pretty again.

6. Sprouts like green dunce caps fool snow under elms.

7. Walking eyes closed to feel light: am I nuts?

8. Dust on laptop like strewn zirconium.

9. Dead goldfinch on fieldstone a bad omen.

10. Copper bandits worked fast and no one guessed.

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.

Friday night in My Old Town

I'm in love with my old town tonight, after a desert-dry martini (a once-a-year treat) some decent red wine, a long night of delicious food and four naughty Marlboro Lights at my friends' Dennis and Teddy's house. The drive home in rain-slicked streets, streets I've been driving on for 25 years, past Kettering and the bridge over the Flint River and along Second Street past the bus depot. On my car radio, the BBC, an interview with Stephen Frears, a person I admire...his exceptionally Brit voice a pleasant companion for my careful journey home, my trusty Honda Accord humming along smoothly, my windshield wipers sliding back and forth rhythmically keeping my view of my hometown clear and glistening. I don't know how to explain it; I never thought I'd stay in this often-infuriating town this long, but tonight, after rack of lamb and hours of wonderful conversation and a round of port at Teddy's house, I can't imagine that I could be happier in any other city in the United States of America -- this is my place.

Walked to work and back today for the first time this year, an invigorating half-hour walk both ways. I got to see a DOT crew unloading concrete flower boxes on the Kearsley Street bridge over 475, and I stopped to chat with the workmen and women, whether they wanted to or not, about how nice it was that these boxes were installed on both side sof the street, and how nice it was to look forward to flowers blooming in them in a few months. I may be nearly an old lady and I don't see life in terms of an unlimited future any more. but it is sweet to be happy where I am, right now, in this moment, in my home town, worn out and somehow beautiful old Flint.

Moments of uncomplicated happiness are hard to come by. I celebrate this one with gratitude.

And Today's Delight...

A walk to the Korean Bell on a crisp, blue-lit day. Sat on the grass above the gun emplacements and contemplated the wide, serene silhouette of Catalina Island off the point. Walking back I could see the skyscrapers of downtown LA from the top of Carolina Street, and the blue-black backdrop of the San Gabriels.

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.

Saturday Night with Robert Hass

This day started glumly with the specter of 40 freshmen papers to grade on a shimmering autumn day. I wanted to be elsewhere. Doing something, anything, else. All those oppressive theres for theirs and vice versa, mixing up the place with people. There were no theirs there, as Gertrude Stein would not have said. All those defiantlies for definitelies, adverbs all earnestly confused by silly spell-check. Their grip on rules is slippery at best, these children of the American high school.

But they were writing about the Farmers' Market, and as I read them I began to hope: they sampled cheese and apples and stared at red speckled beans and noticed the man with a funny hat and let the chocolate from a fresh croissant squish out onto their chins and looked into barrels of fish and made the vendors name them: whitefish, wide-mouthed bass, catfish. They made fun of the overweight rock band but sat in the sun to listen. They chose honey wheat bread and noticed a woman slowly going down the aisle (they spelled it isle, but still) in a walker. They bought cheap lockets and they held hands with their boyfriends and bought pints of raspberries and baskets of plums.

So I gradually perked up. At the end of the day, I went for a walk, wanting to go as fast as possible, wanting to breathe in the almost-autumn evening. Without my now-familiar backpack, I felt light and lithe. Back home, I poured myself two fingers of single malt and sank into a deep bath as, on the TV in the background, Tom Friedman repeated his mantra to Tim Russert: compete, connect, collaborate? Is that the third C? I'm always missing something.

Fresh from all this generally joyful sensory mishmash, it felt right to settle down with Liesl Olson's piece in the latest American Poetry Review, "Robert Hass's Guilt or The Weight of Wallace Stevens." I'm especially interested in Hass because he made a memorable visit here to UM - Flint in the fall of '06, coming to support and celebrate our "Green Arts" program designed around the Flint River Watershed. After reading from some of his new poems at a big community event, he genially lingered at the de rigueur party in my own living room. He seemed to love the Flint River in the same way he has loved many rivers, and just before his reading that night, he went off by himself to walk along the river, a beleaguered waterway that people are only beginning to see -- again -- as life and art. He said it looked as beautiful as a French painting. My students and I have never forgotten that.

Anyway, I didn't think Olson's treatment was much about guilt -- though certainly that is present in his work and that point would have been clearer had she noted his alcoholic mother; can any child of a drunk mom not feel guilty? It's best conveyed in "Our Lady of the Snows," I think, from his 1997 collection Sun Under Wood.

But the piece did help me understand the swing in his work between abstraction and an immersion in sense detail -- in a way, that is the manifestation of a kind of guilt, the pulling back from delight: he has been accused of "evasion," as she points out, by some critics, and in a taking the risk of "delimiting terror, in sizing it down." She asserts that Hass's poems often "begin with and return to the safety and pleasure of small things: a bath, a dragonfly, a late dinner, 'the little flare of dwan rose in the kernel/of the almond.'" That's part of what I love about his work, though -- the assiduous naming and sensory vividness played against and offered in answer to the Big Ideas, whatever those are. I've read his poems to my students to point out that explicit, sumptuous love of naming, and then have to sit back while they notice all the abstractions, too. Why did he do that? they ask. And I say, I don't know...think about it more. Now I could quote Olson in answering, "Pinning down the precise words of things is not always enough to satisfy what Hass is after, but it becomes the source of exploring language's power and its limitations, or what a word can do."

Olson's piece is accompanied by an absorbing set of 14 poems from Hass's new collection, Time and Materials. I remember when he told us the proposed title for this new book, his first in eight years, we tactfully turned away and groaned. It seemed so...plodding. But Olson says it "emerges with tremendous, expansive grace," and especially praises its confrontation with war. I can't wait to see the whole thing. Here are two tiny appetizers:

Iowa, January

In the long winter nights, a farmer's dreams are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrow.


After Trakl

October night, the sun going down,
Evening with its brown and blue
(Music from another room)
Evening with its blue and brown,
October night, the sun going down.