The Next New Thing at Airport Security: Palms Up

The two men in blue gloves, sort of kindly jocular but serious too, pull me off the line and say, “excuse me, ma’am, we have to check your hands.” “This is new,” I say, curious but there can’t be any joking, not even an evident curiosity, not even the slightest question, so I quickly divert my eyes and fix my face not to reveal itself, its interest in the notion of putting my hands out, palms up, to strangers. I think about how I think I look – clearly a 60-year-old woman, with gray hair at the roots, my hair pulled back; I’m wearing my black tunic with rainbow embroidery on it and my black yoga pants underneath; I’ve dressed for comfort in coach, but I’ve also picked my clothes to feel like “me,” like this woman who travels, who’s kind of interesting. I’ve got my favorite California necklace on, a circle of reassuring polished stones, with earrings to match, and I feel earthy and seasoned. Anyway, they make me reach my hands out, palms up, and one of the men brushes a brush over the soft pads at the base of the fingers, the crease of my lifeline, a brush attached to a tube attached to a machine. For just a moment there’s a weird intimacy, the palms of my hands, the two men, the machine – and I stand there and they turn their back and look at the machine. “It just takes seven seconds,” they say, like when you get a mammogram, like when the kind woman ducks off out of the room to avoid the radiation and you have to hold your breath and you wonder if there’s something dark and scary inside your most beloved part, the part that never got to suckle a child but that your husband loves and says so often, and then the machine stops and she says, okay, and comes back in and takes off the plates to see what’s there, to see if you moved and your breast left its mark or if you maybe moved and there’s the slightest blur, the blur of your body saying, no, no, don’t know this thing about me. Anyway, the seven seconds go by and I’m standing there with my arms still raised, my palms still up, and I'm balancing on my whole feet, the way I practice in yoga, feeling my toe mounds and my heels solid against the floor, grounding themselves and my chi or whatever you call it right down into the earth's core, and then the men say, "Okay, you’re okay," and I put my palms down, wondering what it would be like to have a bitter explosive on my skin, sabotaging crystals, instead of just the anxious pink airport soap and the knowing epidermis of my whole beloved life of touching and holding things and I head to Gate 2 and my next short-term escape.

Here's the Thing

Art is not nice. This is a place to be angry. Tonight, while we were trying to have an "open mic" poetry reading at Churchhill's, a drunk guy barged in, loudly asking where was his "wagon." Then he slurringly demanded a cigarette from one of the young women there, who gave one to him, and then he begged money off of her, which she gave him. It was an annoying and frightening moment. After he finally left, having disrupted most of a performance by one of the hardy readers, a Flint cop showed up and sat down among us, in full uniform. It was reassuring, especially in these tight budget times. If cops are stretched thin in Flint, it was nice that one of them was devoted to us, the Saturday night poets of downtown.

And art is not nice. There are times when we need to be angry, rude, intrusive...noisy.

Charred Remains

Feeling somewhat violent myself, I took Ted on a small tour today of some of the burned out hulks. I wanted to capture one of the signs that said "Do Not Burn Down." Here is what we found:

Oak Street

Oak Street, next to the "Do Not Burn Down" house

W. Court Street

Stockton Street

MLive reports today there were nine more fires last night -- only one actually sounded like an "abandoned house" M.O., but that one actually had been on the city's demolition list. Having just come from a writing conference at L.C.C., my mind and heart are full of this material, and I feel myself drawn into these charred remains.

Wrath and Headstands for Surviving Life in Flint

Here's my April column for East Village Magazine. I'll be reading with Grayce Scholt and Kelsey Ronan at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 13 at Flint's Longway Planetarium in the final "Poetry Under the Stars" reading, and then with four other EVM writers -- Grayce, Kelsey, Alan Mathews and Nic Custer -- at Buckham Gallery on Saturday night, May 22.

This morning, as an experiment, I said the word “wrath” out loud to my reflection in the bathroom mirror. It’s an interesting word. I noticed how in saying it, the mouth has to open, pushing out to the left and right, and the teeth show. “Wrath” on a face looks primitive and a bit scary.

And primitive, indeed, is the flavor of the arsonists who are torching houses in downtown Flint as I write this. And primitive indeed are the people yelling “baby killer” at Bart Stupak , and primitive indeed are those yelling “faggot” and “n***r” at supporters of the health care reform bill.

I’ve been considering anger a lot lately, having recently experienced a personal tsunami of this most fiery of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Lately, in a discussion about legalizing pot, Bill Maher said something like, “This is a tense world. It’s stressful to be alive. We need something to mellow us out once in awhile.”

Aside from Maher’s specific campaign, I found his comments touching and true. It’s tough being a human being. And the price of mounting tension seems to be wrath and more wrath, increasingly less modulated, increasingly mean.

I must admit that things don’t seem as clear-cut to me now as they once did.

Wrath, for instance, isn’t always purely primitive. There’s a mature kind of anger, the result of real injustice, that demands action, as in the abuse of children, women and animals, and the visceral energies of rage help us carry out what needs to be done, the way people in Carriage Town have united to try to stop the house-burnings.

For me, though, the hardest kind of anger to manage is the “helpless” kind, when I experience the results of something that seem outside of my control. A body in the throes of that kind of wrath, untended and misunderstood, causes so much havoc.
That’s how I’ve been feeling some of the time lately, and I have been exploring what to do. Obviously, some things that make me angry are so big that I don’t know where to start. But within the life of my individual body, I’m finding some intelligence, and a few surprises.

For example, almost every day since last fall, I’ve been standing on my head.

As often as possible, I roll out a blue mat, take off my rings, pile a soft pillow against the wall, cradle my head in my entwined fingers, and kick up my legs.

It’s part of my relatively new life as a yoga student, and I’m immensely grateful. Things look different when I’m upside down.
I’ve brought the headstand home from my yoga class at the UM – Flint, where with about ten other people I show up twice a week, seeking deep relaxation and meditation.

It starts at the moment of arrival, when we leave our shoes on a mat outside a nondescript door.

Inside, in a windowless room with bright murals of green trees, sky and water painted on the concrete block wall, it’s so quiet. And quieting. It’s a gentle and respectful group, everybody sensitive to others’ space as we adjust from whatever happened that day. Some people lie on their mats, legs up against the wall, eyes closed, arms relaxed at their sides. Others sit cross-legged, backs straight, breathing. When our teacher, Rachelle, comes in, we settle down, facing her as she begins in her melodic voice.

She says “sit tall,” suggesting that we unfocus our eyes, close our lids, and bring our palms together at our hearts. We inhale. We exhale. We chant slowly, beginning with a full-throated trio of “ommms.”

I love the chants. I don’t know what the words mean, and to be honest, I don’t always get them right, so I just mumble along. I’ve thought of asking Rachelle for translation. Since I’m a writer and college teacher, you’d think I’d need to know what everything means.

But yoga class is a place outside the analytic brain, and my body, which isn’t so much of an intellectual, gets what it needs. My body likes rhythms and the humming voices of others in the room, a lovely vibration, a loving energy.

Yoga is a Sanskrit word for “union” – combining breathing, stretching, balancing, and meditating as an integration of mind, body and spirit.

The poses are often hard and sometimes hurt. My hamstrings are a mess: tight and feisty. I get cramps. I fall over almost every time I try to do a shoulder stand. Rachelle says instead of calling it pain, we might say, “that’s interesting” and just keep breathing. She’s re-introduced me to my feet, their clever metatarsals and their horseshoe heels – all meant to anchor me solidly in the world.

Sometimes, at the end of the class when we lie recovering in the darkened room, I feel tears of relief well up.
It’s all quite un-Protestant, and I like that. In my anxiously fundamentalist childhood, the body was, of course, described as the “Temple of God,” but I didn’t get much help on how to make it so. The adults in my life were ill at ease with their own bodies, startled and discomfited when the body’s instincts – lust, let’s say, or especially wrath – outed them as actual humans, earthlings to the core.

To be human back then was to struggle with the body, an exhausting wrestling match with guilt, shame and defeat. To love the body, then, was to sin.

It is a lifelong journey, of course, to learn another way – to know that loving one’s whole self is in fact a key to getting through this bumpy life. I am grateful for practices such as yoga which ground and soothe me, open me to others and help me face adversity. I am grateful to Rachelle and my gentle yoga classmates.

If I am to survive in this raggedy world, in short, I need to learn to unite my disparate parts. Among other gifts, that helps me with my wrath, which really serves a purpose. It is not in fact, a deadly sin, unless it curdles into something unexpressed, misdirected and stuck in fear. I’ve come to respect my wrath and even welcome its abundant energies.
So now, to the wall, to upend myself into love and energy once again.

Easter Sunday

My father died many years ago, but every Easter Sunday, I remember the one that prompted this poem below.

And the Scilla are Blooming Today, Too

Easter Sunday

“Crocus” is just another one
of the words my father can no longer
remember. He asks my mother,
“What are the colors of those
little flowers by the house?”
He is bald from surgery;
seven metal clamps shine
at the back of his skull. My
mother says seven is the number
of perfection Every time
he whispers we lean in,
hoping for grace. Once he says,
“cranberries.” He whispers,
“I am glad I have two grandmas.”
He whispers, “It is good to be in
out of the cold.” He is given
communion at his hospital bed,
the paster remarking on my father’s
strong grip as he takes his hand
for the benediction.

The scilla are blooming on the
hillside. At my desk, I order
sage and tarragon for another
summer. It is the first night
of daylight savings and the
sunset is rampant. “Who is
this happening to?” he asked me
today. “Is it happening to you?”
“No, it is happening to you,”
I answered gently. He patted
his hand to his chest and said
knowingly, “It is happening to you.”

I seal the envelope to the seed company,
stamp it, prop it on my old bronze
lamp for mailing. Then the cry comes:
Recognize me, Father,
Call me by my name.

Mother and the Farmers' Market

Here's my March East Village Magazine column. Whenever I'm going through periods where wrestling toward happiness becomes an issue, she comes to mind. Of course. It's all so primal.

Flint Farmers Market at harvest season, September, 2009

In the last few years of her life my mother ate almost nothing. She had had colon cancer and for a tortuous few months bore a colostomy bag. Then they unhooked it and reconnected her digestive tubes and she lived another couple of years. But food was a problem the rest of her life, and eating deteriorated into a thorny, bedeviling process, a lifelong pleasure lost .

But not before she left her mark on me. This is an essay about food. That is why it begins with Mom. Born exactly a hundred years ago this year, she grew up in a family that assumed itself upper middle-class -- white, Protestant -- morosely inhabiting a big, drafty Victorian house in Findlay, Ohio.

Their status wobbled in the difficult Twenties. My traveling evangelist grandpa, by some accounts a brilliant but erratic man, usually spent most of the take from his intineracy before he made it home to the Painted Lady on North Corey Street.

My grandmother took in roomers and fed her five kids Sunday night -- my mother remembered with a mix of melancholy and wounded nostalgia -- suppers of stale bread softened in warm milk, green onions poked in like swizzle sticks.

From then on, my mother cared deeply about making sure there was enough nutritious food on any table over which she presided. In college, she majored in that quaint, painfully proto-feminist curriculum, Home Economics. She could talk, not that anybody usually wanted to listen, about the chemistries of canning and rising bread dough.

In the Tara-like nursing home where she lived her last four years, she clung to some of her cherished food rituals. She held court at the head of the table in the dining room when we came to visit, folding and unfolding her cloth napkin and taking in tiny spoonfuls of creamed spinach, or pureed sweet potatoes, maybe a microgram of butterscotch pudding.

As always, she admonished her children, children’s children and various hangers-on to eat slowly, use our silverware properly, orchestrate reasonably small bites and chew discreetly with our mouths shut, one hand in the lap.

More important, even, we were supposed to converse. We were supposed to smile and be grateful, attentive to the sensory gifts of the table, and we were supposed to report on our lives and say interesting things. Nobody was excused before it was over. That concept -- children being cut loose for other, more entertaining activities -- struck her as uncalled for and indulgent. Everybody was required to stick it out for the whole shebang. That was The Way People Behaved.

She was a passionate gardener and food aesthete, often declaring upon hailing her guests to table with a little Chinese bell, that the meal was based on “good concomitants,” and pointing out her often ingenious selections of color and taste: sweet corn with Kentucky Wonder beans and pickled beets, eggplant with the carnelian tomatoes, the gooseberry with the rhubarb.

These days I think, what a waste, that her talents weren’t more noted and praised. She was an intelligent woman who never found an audience quite worthy of her devotions.

Yet I am healthier today, as my own old age sets in, because of my first 18 years, those daily “three squares,” of wonderful food she conscientiously and even joyfully provided.

And that leads me, all these decades later, to a sweet little miracle of downtown Flint, the Farmers Market.

This is what I'm talkin' about

Entering my sixties, it is more important than ever to me to find the corners of the world where I can be happy, where I can pursue the sanguine concept my mother never called “wellness,” where I can find both audience and stage for the goodness of life and share it with others.

And there is Dick Ramsdell, the market manager, up on a ladder in the middle of the big aisle, counting patrons. And there’s the Hills kid at the cheese counter, helping me decide between the English and French cheddar. He offers me an aromatic slice of the latest Stilton on a square of parchment and announces my favorite butter, wrapped in blue and white checked paper and tucked in a miniature straw basket, is in from Vermont.

And there are piles of glowing gold butternut squash and red potatoes, tangerines and pears, feasts of carrots, cauliflower and cabbage gathered by the Penziens and Coykendalls. And the fresh-cut chicken, whole roasters and Rubenesque ducks at Ron and Linda Howard’s stall.

At the bakery, Nancy & Costa Anagostopoulos bustle around behind glass-covered pastry cases. My nose flares at the fragrant yeastiness, and my husband buys his favorite lemon croissants.

At D’Vine Wines, I stock up on Leese-Fitch Cabernet and Protocolo, greeting Karen and Maria, and my husband picks up fresh milk in glass bottles. On the way back down the aisle, we buy hummus and tabbouli from David and Ani Jawhari, say hello to Todd the book guy, buy some Patty Warner cards, and pick up another pair of colorful hand-made socks from Soozie Q’s.

We culminate our Farmers Market visit by climbing the stairs to Steady Eddy’s, where Ted devours the BLT and I have the South of the Border omelet, mild.

I’m longtime buddies of Kim, Lisa and Chris, who serve me espresso in my favorite blue cup, and I am extravagantly smitten that “Daddy,” Lisa’s late father Mike Lord, overlooks the café’s goings on from a squat urn on a shelf behind the take-out counter.

My mother would approve of the Flint Farmers Market, where we take our time, selecting “good concomitants” for our week and chatting amiably at our Steady Eddy’s meals.

Like the spirit of the irrepressible Lord, a friend whose life I celebrate with every sip of thick espresso, my mother’s plucky ghost goes with me when I act in my own behalf, like when I linger contentedly over the good life of the Farmers Market.

“It’s about time to get happy,” I imagine her – or my dream mother -- saying. “Life is fleeting – savor it all.”

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.

Exactly What I Want

Blue Cup Espresso

Cold sunny Thursday, I drag my depressed ass in to Steady Eddy's all bundled up in my worn black leather coat, black LA cap, black and blue scarf Audrey made for me, my raggedy bag and backpack slung over my shoulder. I want to be alone and do some work. The ritual of it comforts me, climbing the painted concrete steps to the little cafe, plopping down at the table of my choice. Chris and Lisa would welcome me but leave me alone. We're known to each other, a lovely thing.

"Double espresso," I say.
"And a sprinkle of cinnamon?"
"Yeah, and lemon peel. And...could I have it in that blue cup?"
There's only one like it up there -- it's my favorite.

I tear off the corner of a Splenda, stir it in, and take my first sip: the bracing sweet and bitter taste of it perfectly curling my tongue. One simple cup on a shiny table, silver spoon, somebody who says, "everything okay?" Out of the cold, alone but not lonely, on a wintry morning before stepping back into the fray.

A miracle: Exactly what I want.

Apparitions and Late Fictions

Pile of new books waiting for me, thrust onto the slush at the back porch, the UPS guy's thick boot prints in fresh snow up and down the driveway alarming me when I got home from work -- there've been breakins lately. But in the Amazon box, a store of pleasures. Here from old friend Tom Lynch, continuing his remarkable literary career in his newest, Apparition and Late Fictions:

It was his favorite thing -- to hunt the stealthy, transparent, invisible fish, to know enough about its habits to isolate it in all that dark water, to present a fly or an egg of his own making, the right size and color, at the right angle at the right depth at the right speed to trigger the thing to animal desire, then to fight the thing in its own environs, counting on his knots, his timing, and the proper setting of his drag, then to catch the thing, to hold it, and then to let it go. -- From "Catch and Release"

Thomas Lynch
Oh, yes, you can tell this man started his writing life as a poet. Sheer rhythmic satisfaction, such loveliness and precision.

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.

Under the Street Light, February.

Walking out to the dark parking lot after yoga tonight, an intensely surreal moment. I saw my old red car waiting for me under the lights, the old car I leeched from my last marriage; originally "sporty" when I was young, now all streaked with salt, chunks of ice and snow stuck in the wheel wells, the car I'd carefully parked under those lights so I'd feel safe when I came out alone. Clicking my keys to unlock it for probably about the 27,000th time, a wave of extreme sadness and weariness washed over me...tired of the way things are, the drudgery of Flint and trying so hard. Day after day and now year after year, the same old red car waiting for me. For just a moment all the delusions and illusions fell away, and what was left was nothing more than the downright deadening repetitiveness of life, how utterly ordinary it is most of the time, how we're trapped in so much daily angst, how it never lets up. I wonder if this how people feel just before they die -- like, enough already.

So Much for My Dream of the Professoriate

When I was a freshman in college at Miami U. of Ohio, I rushed a sorority and joined it -- Delta Delta Delta -- even though I didn't really "believe in" sororities, and often made fun of them. I just wanted to see if I could -- me, nerdy preacher's kid who needed braces and couldn't play bridge -- because in high school I'd been the outsider, never one of the "popular" kids. To my astonishment Tri-Delt took me and for a year or so I paid my dues and even "went active," hanging out at beer bashes, taking diet pills to stay skinny, and acquiring a collection of mohair sweaters and A-line skirts.

But then I "de-activated" -- again, I think now, mostly because I could. I could say that the girls of Tri-Delt wanted me -- with a 4.0 GPA, I helped prop up the chapter's much-prized average. I was proud of that. Back then saying "no" was a rare act of power for me, and it did me good to spurn the girls of Tri-Delt when I'd had enough.

Silly me.

And now I've just gone into strangely similar territory.

I thought it might be possible to become part of another club: the professoriate.

Maybe at heart it's a club I don't want to join. And maybe, at 60, I'm way too old and life is too short to play another Tri-Delt game.

Whatever. At some point in the past few months, I convinced myself that the fact that I'd written a novel, published dozens of poems, essays, reviews, articles and stories, won some prizes here and there, re-organized and wrote large hunks of UM - Flint's recently successful Self-Study document for re-accreditation, received the 2008 Teaching Excellence Award, chaired a significant search committee, taught 780 students in the last five years and countless hundreds more in 14 different courses over the past 16 years, designed three Green Arts classes, created two graduate classes from the ground up, taught three students who won Hopwood Awards for writing at the UM, organized and facilitated visits by a half dozen visiting writers, wrote columns for East Village Magazine that are read by more people than read almost any poetry magazine in the country...well...I thought that would be enough to get me into the club.

I thought I might get to be a professor.

Universities, as most people know, are hierarchies -- caste systems based in part on whether you've attained the dire-sounding "terminal degree" in your field -- usually the Ph.D. It takes eight or ten years beyond high school for most people to get a Ph.D., and at the end of it, usually they've produced the notorious dissertation that's supposed to be the biggest hurdle of academic achievement -- a book-length research or scholarly project. All this, obviously, is a major life commitment. And if and when they get a job -- no small feat these days -- they're subjected to another long series of hurdles, often mediated by geezers long past their productive years, many of whom have become embittered, pointlessly pompous and sadistic. It all seems far from the ideal many of us cherished about "higher education." It's not an easy life.

What I am, in contrast, is what UM calls a "lecturer" -- one of the 200 or so folks on the faculty who teach more sections for far less money than the supposed Brahmin caste, those who are tenure-track or tenured. In exchange for my larger course load and smaller salary, I am not required or expected to do research or publish, though as what's called a "Lecturer IV," the highest status available to me, I get a three to five-year contract -- no small matter -- and I am expected to deliver service, keep up in my field, and serve on campus committees.

Like many of my "lecturer" colleagues, my path into academia has been unconventional. I started out with a bachelor's in journalism, worked as a reporter for a while, went into the Peace Corps, then came to Michigan for two years of graduate school -- in social work. With my M.S.W. I came to Flint for a job at a non-profit counseling agency, and then decided I wanted to return to writing. So I picked up a low-residency -- but competitive -- M.F.A. at Warren Wilson College while continuing to manage a program for about a hundred of Flint's most down-and-out street wanderers. With the writing degree under my belt, I started teaching part time at UM - Flint, and that was 1993. I was hired full-time in 1998. I'm grateful for this job, which allows me to write, talk about writing, read writing, and of course, teach writing for a salary that has gradually increased to a base pay of about $44K over the years. That M.F.A., by the way, is considered the "terminal degree" in my field, creative writing. But clearly I came to academia through the back door, and I've never struck the proper attitude of deference. I've got a mouth on me and frequently don't honor the fences that divide the various categories of livestock in the teacher corral.

In my department I can't vote on certain things; at commencement line-ups I'm always sent to the back of the pack; and as I mentioned above, I teach more classes and get paid much less than my tenure-track colleagues. But I have the support of a union, the UM-wide Lecturer Employees Organization (LEO) which has valiantly negotiated two contracts for me and the other members of the bargaining unit, and they're embarking on a third round of bargaining this spring.

Despite all this, my vanity florid, and getting to a point where I wanted...hmm...practical acknowledgement, I allowed myself to get sucked into trying to join the Brahmins. There's something about being consigned to a marginal slot in the hierarchy year after year that gets undignified and makes a person feel sort of wild. So when the department got approval for a new post -- a tenure-track creative writing job, and I seemed to meet the qualifications, I decided to give it a shot.

But the big kids decided not to let me interview for the position -- the post will bring in somebody new to do what I've been doing for many years. And I've been ticked off, furious, livid.

The main problem is that they wanted a secondary area in something I don't have: Queer Theory, Feminist Theory, or Genre Studies, for example; pedagogy in English Studies, Digital Humanities, or Composition/Rhetoric in postcolonial rhetoric or the rhetoric of gender, race, and class. Whoa.

This is code for Ph.D. graduate training far from my duke's mixture of social work, journalism, Peace Corps, poetry in bars, sticky divorce and, in general, the messy dramas of 30 years of eking out daily life in unglamorous postcolonial Flint, Michigan.

My secondary area of expertise, unfortunately for my dream of the professoriate, is the humble freshman composition, the low-status branch of "comp/rhet" devoted simply to trying to teach first-year writers to write. What was I thinking?

The more I think about it, the more I suspect I should appreciate the freedom my non-tenure track position affords me, if I still get to teach the classes I've been teaching. But I'd have really liked the academioids to see my value and invite me into the clubhouse. Of course, this usually isn't how the world works. It's not hard work that the world recognizes, especially delivered by an impertinent crone like me. I'm hopeless for the job. I've got gay friends of course and a few theories about them, for example -- but I have to face it, I can't tout Queer Theory inculcated by the dons.

Over the years I've rolled my eyes at the memory of how I fought to get into Delta Delta Delta, only to sneer with the privileged knowledge of an insider once I arrived. Yet here I have been in recent weeks, practically an old woman, struggling to get a chance to do it again.

I don't even believe in tenure -- or, at least, the kind of pointless hazing that goes with the tenure process these days -- and even with that being pretty clear for me, I wanted to be "one of them." I wanted one more fight, seduced by the dignity-bruising aphrodisiac of somebody trying to stop me.

I guess I'm not far from my Tri-Delt days after all.

Silly me.

But at least I still have a job, and tomorrow I get to go back into the classroom -- without tenure worries to distract me -- and talk about writing with two classes of interesting, almost impossibly lively students. I could do worse.

On the other hand

...Anger is a powerful physiological experience, as I've been experiencing. Adrenaline, I've been telling myself, is there for a reason: to propel fight or flight. As always, the conundrum is this: What does one do with the instinctive energy of fight or flight in a supposedly civilized world? In a fresh bout of sleeplessness which I fully understand -- kept awake by adrenaline -- I devise one scenario after another. Some for revenge. Some for justice. Some for escape. Some for vindication. Whatever, my body is sending me an insistent message: DO SOMETHING. Interesting how the body is programmed for adaptation. It knows when it is threatened, attacked and insulted. It knows what to do: flood the system with energy. And here I am, rooting around in a mucky pen of passive aggression, bullies and a distorted template of anachronistic noblesse oblige. Move, move, my body says. I'm appreciative that my body has its ancient human responses. I just have to figure out how to make it work for me. Could righteous wrath be the fountain of youth?

I think I'm beginning to understand

...that life is simply like this, cycles of worry and doubt and disappointment punctuated by the considerable pleasures of daily life. It's just the way it is. I understand these days how a human plodding through life eventually asks, "what does this all mean?" and how she might conclude, "there is no particular meaning" just as reasonably as any of the grander answers offered by the world's gurus and priests.

So I get up early, my fierce little chip of consciousness in the world a mystery of idiosyncrasy, the "me" I have to carry through all this pulsing, fleeting life. The house is a mess. I make a cup of tea, load the dishwasher, sort bills and throw away junk mail. At the dining room table, I sweep off crumbs from last night's dinner with Ted: lift off the brass candlesticks and pull off the long tablecloth to toss down the laundry chute.

It was lobster stew in the new blue bowls and macaroni and cheese in heavy little ramikins. I found an old opened bottle of red and poured myself a glass -- just enough left to go with dinner. We held hands and I offered "grace," the two of us warmly agreeing to that moment of "yes," our customized version of childhood ritual, not exactly our fathers' prayers, but words of gratitude nonetheless, thrown out to the universe, the impulse toward that Something Else.

So, though I'm technically alone down here, snuggled in my bathrobe in the LazyBoy, sipping my mint green tea, my black laptop warm on my thighs in this quiet hour before a February dawn, I also understand -- increasingly and with compassion -- that I'm part of the human race, and we're all like this from time to time -- ticked off and unappreciated, stopped from getting what we want by obtuse and stupid others, hurt by illness, politics, or nature, propelled by the adrenaline of anger and hope...we travel perilously in this world. If I didn't have to march out into it in just an hour or so, I think I've calmed myself down enough that I bet I could go right back to bed and sleep. And sleep. And sleep.

But I can't. It's time to get back out there.

Au Courant and Sleepless the Night Before Class

Getting ready for bed, my husband tells me
a joke that I don't get.
To make matters worse,
I'm propped up on six pillows reading
the latest touted book of poems.
It won a prize in New York.
On the jacket the poet is an eminence,
bearded, gray, a this-is-serious
kind of guy.
I read these poems and I don't understand.
What's with the marble wall, and how
can it be "dark" and "sunbaked" both?
And why are lemurs suddenly swimming
down the third verse?
My forehead furrows and my lips
tense up. I crimp my glasses and
look again.
I don't want to be lost the night before class.
I feel completely dumb.
Maybe I'm not smart enough to be alive.
Is the true thing finally here,
my smarty ruse a bust at last?
I took Valerian an hour ago.
I'm not sleepy.
Did you get to the first poem yet? My husband calls
from the other room, where
the electric toothbrush whirrs.
I didn't understand it, I mumble from
my billowed perch, the poem my bean
a mattress down.
Good, he intones,
You're not supposed to "understand" a poem,
Remember?
But I'm the teacher, I say. I'm the teacher.

Deepening Affection

I'm reading the New York Times review of the 2003 William Macy movie "The Cooler" while watching it and stopping it using this newfangled DVR as needed to make tea and settle my stomach from an emotionally tempestuous day. In the review, I come across the phrase "deepening affection," and I know I have something I want to say.

"The Cooler" is a hokey/sweet/violent flick, where sadsack Macy, always so excellent, surprisingly finds lucky love in an otherwise bleak Las Vegas life. Even his cat, who'd abandoned him and his row of dead house plants, comes back after he's inexplicably seduced by the believably authentic Natalie, played by Maria Bello.(Alec Baldwin is disturbingly convincing, too -- I'm glad I just saw him in "It's Complicated" for a slightly brighter persona). Anyway, the true-hearted Natalie develops, the Times review says, a "deepening affection" for Macy's innocent Bernie Lootz. Their love scenes are wonderful. Macy's expressive face has never been better. The movie's not over yet and I'm pretty sure it's going to end badly, but before it does I just want to pause to savor that phrase: "deepening affection."

Today I was confronted with one of my life's failures for the first time in awhile: packet in the mail -- passive aggressive bundle of indicting postcards (my own words thrown back at me), photos, uncomfortable reminders of years of unwieldy yearning and confusing striving, bound to disappoint. Some things never get quite cleansed, the glib promise of closure a misleading myth.

But I have deepening affections. My "mature" life, such as it is, finds its way these days -- not always smoothly, not always with perfect understanding. I'm slowly forging a life with Ted, with the interconnections of love and work that seem to suit me better than the life I used to try to inhabit like the wrong house, imperfect architecture. This life isn't the same as that -- less surface glitter, less naive, edgy ambition. But it allows for something true -- as I find out what that is.

As it turns out, the movie didn't end quite as predictably as I thought it would. The director was Wayne Kramer after all, not Quentin Tarantino.

About time to check in in 2010

A night in downtown Flint: dinner at Blackstone's. Having dinner with a candidate for a post at UMF, I found myself talking about Flint like a real oldtimer. Driving home, my brief mile in the dark, I thought, "I belong in this place. It's my home." And it didn't feel so awful. Being a grownup in a place, being fond of its architectures and quirks, its ups and downs, isn't so bad.

Rainy Day

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

Flint is NOT an Iron Lung

Fifties Iron Lung Ward, from Google


I was lying in bed one night in mid-December before the solstice, when the day’s supply of light was still miserably shrinking. It was cold. I’d turned the furnace down to 62, resolved to be an ecological grownup, and the heap of comforters on top of me was so heavy that I got an isometric workout every time I tried to turn over.

This was before the snow, the world outside the clamped-down window dark, impenetrable and forbidding. Those kinds of nights, silence and dark are the enemy: one’s thoughts turn dangerously to end games and angst.

I found myself mumbling, it’s like an iron lung in here. I’m trapped in an iron lung. Until when -- April?
Claustrophobia and dread puffed up like giant anxiety airbags, avoiding the crash but threatening their own sweaty suffocation.

This is the start of my next column for East Village Magazine. It'll be out Jan. 8. Oh what the hell, here's the rest of it.

I slid one hand out and reached for the radio. It’s designed with a little bump on the “sleep” button so you can find it in the dark. Hmm, 1:17 a.m. BBC as usual, all night every night. I wanted hypnotizing cricket scores, but this night it was all foreboding and fearful – a litany of bee disease, dying coral reefs, starvation, terrorism in the usual failing states.

Damn, I muttered, don’t they know we’re trying to fall asleep out here? Cussing, I rolled the old-fashioned dial to the MSU classical station. I landed just in time for a lullaby – an actual lullaby – by George Gershwin, who I’m sure had a few sleepless nights of his own. (I’m listening to it now – a nine-minute version by pianist Alicia Zizzo -- it’s lovely and I’m thankful.)

Then there was a nice long piece by Georg Telemann, who, the mellow-voiced announcer murmured, was more popular than his contemporary Mozart in their time. Hm, how about that, I thought. I relaxed, and before the 60 minutes of “sleep” radio ran out, my fretful brain surrendered to the music, and I slept.

The next day, I Googled “iron lung.”

With a tendency toward claustrophobia, I’ve always been horrified and fascinated by the iron lung. People my age well remember the tubular, wheezing contraption from the Fifties when polio paralyzed the bodies, including, cruelly, the breathing muscles, of thousands of kids.

Some of them were saved by the iron lung. According to Wikipedia, at the height of the polio outbreaks, “entire hospital wards were filled with rows of iron lungs,” the polio victims’ poor heads protruding from one end, sad little pillows under their necks, their hair splayed out and a system of disconsolate mirrors overhead. When you went to the movies, they’d show films of those awful wards, and then they’d pass around a can for donations to the March of Dimes.

Things you might not know: the machine was invented by Phillip Drinker and Louis Shaw (thus its earlier name, the Drinker Respirator) originally for treatment of coal gas poisoning. The first one was used in 1928 on a child in Boston.

Most of those polio victims died, but some lived a long, long time. The family of Barton Hebert of Covington, Louisiana donated his iron lung to the Centers for Disease Control museum after he died in 2003 after almost 50 years in it.

Martha Mason of Lattimore, North Carolina, died at 71 just last May after more than 60 years in her iron lung. She wrote a best-selling memoir about her life called Breath. After she contracted polio three days after her brother died from the disease, she says in a 2005 YouTube video, doctors put her in an iron lung and decreed she’d be dead in a year.

She asserted her curiosity saved her. From that breath-sustaining prison, she managed to get a degree in English from Wake Forest University (number one in her class). She went back to Lattimore where she read and wrote voraciously, welcomed many visitors and hosted dinner parties.

In fact, about 30 people in the U.S. still are encased in iron lungs, even though lighter, less restricting ventilators are available. A New York Times obituary(Mason Obituary) said Mason could have opted for a different kind of intubation in recent decades, but she chose her familiar iron house because of the freedom it gave her – “it let her breathe without tubes in her throat, incisions or hospital stays…it took no professional training to operate, letting her remain mistress of her own house, with just two aides assisting her.”

Mason’s story knocks me out. It chastens me: January in Flint isn’t really like an iron lung, and it’s an insult to those polio survivors to suggest so.

Their amazing resilience, in fact, inspires me. (Ahh, inspires -- from the Greek “to breathe.”) I can learn from them how to make each day, even the frozen-up January ones, fly by. I have choices.

I turned to Facebook once again to ask Flint friends for January strategies. The always-endearing Michael Absher said, “I swear a lot and kiss as many pretty girls as possible.” Gary Weisserman advised, “Burger@ the Torch.” Renee West smiley-faced, “anti-depressants.” Dennis Brownfield reported he walks his Jack Russell terrier in his winter coat down Woodlawn Park Drive after dark and enjoys the beautifully lit houses.

My friend Teddy says her alleviating secret is “happiness lights.” She keeps corners of the house brightly illuminated, trying to stay ahead of Dennis, her frugal man who keeps turning them off. I rely on color – my rainbow “postage-stamp” quilt cheers me up, and I’ve got a big poster of wildflowers framed above the bed. In January you’ll find me decked out in red, yellow, lavender and green – often all at the same time. Don’t mock me – it’s what keeps me from kicking the cats.

Whatever we do to get through January, it’s a compromise between sustaining cheer and respecting the Earth that tilts us toward dark to begin with. And that same earth will tilt us right out of the dark again, come spring.

In the meantime, I’m keeping my radio dial away from the BBC. And I’m very glad that I can breathe, on my own, even in the darkest winter days.

The Hardest Part

...of being a teacher is grading, and I've just finished off the end-of-semester marathon: 14 fiction projects, 14 final personal essays, and 45 freshmen papers. The last round of the semester is especially difficult: one evaluates not just the last piece of writing, but the student's whole semester, aiming to come up with a final number for class participation as well as for the class. And of course, one evaluates onesself.

So many decisions. I feel my forehead furrow even as I write this in a moment of breathing and debriefing.

Yes, I'm aware I have to really work on my breathing while grading -- I tend to tighten up, tense up, hunch up...an old, unhealthy habit I fell into long ago when working hard. Now I'm picturing my yoga teacher admonishing me to throw back my shoulders -- sit up tall!, she says. Or as my beloved therapist said gently all last spring, "it's okay to breathe..." This matters, I've gradually come to understand. Grading is a process of hard truths: grading is the field and the farmer both -- the humus scrutinized for depth and health, the farmer taking a taste of the soil, like my dad used to do, and taking a measure of what's there. Did we seed with enough rye grass? Is it getting enough oxygen and drainage? Is it too alkali?

Funny to be thinking about my dad standing in his much-fussed over little plot down in Ohio decades ago. But I see the instinctive rightness of this analogy for me. There's a cycle to it -- a cycle of planning, high hopes, constant tending, the frenzy of planting and harvest, then the hard realities: the strawberries just didn't make it. The rabbits got into the lettuce. The beans are diseased. The tomatoes never ripened up right. But those potatoes -- what a crop! And how will we deal with all those glossy green zucchini? Did you ever taste such sweet cantaloupe? Welp, I can hear him saying, there are a few things I'll have to do differently next year.

Over the past couple of years, I've become a tougher grader. I'm on the alert about this: part of me wary of advancing codgerly despair at the lunkishness of the young. But another part of me argues it is right to demand something of the younger generation. I want to say to them (and do -- probably more often than I should) , "Pay attention, dammit. Some of this stuff matters. Wake up!"

So I anguish over individual situations that I know affect my students' performance. Was I too hard on the one who's pregnant? Was I too hard on the one I got into a kerfuffle with midway through the semester because he loudly complained about the book I'd chosen -- and then proceeded to give me some of the worst writing I've ever received in a fiction class? Was I too rough on the kid whose thinking sparkles but whose proofreading is horrible -- knowing that she grew up in foster homes? Was I too easy on the eager kid who did okay, not great, because I know his mother was in jail? Was I too easy on the one who praised me and shared my political beliefs? Did I bend over backwards for the one who quoted Glenn Beck and was watching for any sign of liberal bias? How to keep the head clear and focused on the text: the paragraph after stumbling paragraph rolling out on that screen.

We only had 14 weeks together -- not nearly enough to really learn to write. Or for me to concentrate on these individuals before me, focusing on their complications, their needs, their resistance to learning.

It is not a question of whether I am objective or subjective, but rather a question of how subjective I am and in what direction. Even within the system of criteria, rubrics and points I have devised with few illusions, the matter of how many points I dole out has at least a partly visceral dimension. With writing there is hardly a cut-and-dried system, at least not that I am ready to embrace. Some of it is intuition -- and thus the perils of teacherly misuse of power.

But then again, my job is to try to help my students be better writers, not to solve all their late-adolescent life crises. So it probably doesn't help much to give them a break if they don't deliver what I think they need to know. It doesn't help them, I say primly, and it doesn't stand as good teaching. That's what I say to myself when I make the hard calls: give 'em consequences -- build the connection between what they do and what happens to them as a result. Good old Skinnerian behaviorism. But then, but then, writing IS life. All those complications, all those complexities -- they're what feed and challenge the writer. Tra la, tra la.

So, my body achy and craving relief, I fill the bathtub with the hottest water I can stand and invite my husband in for a long chat. "The point of life is learning how to adapt so you can survive," my husband reflects, the steam puffing at our faces. Our tub is big enough for us to sink in up to our armpits with heaps of bubble bath on top of that, our knees white Pyrenees. Used this way, the two of us sharing it, facing each other, our legs intertwined, the hot water lasts far longer than a quick and thoughtless shower, and it does us both good to take our time. It's something we've learned.