Split Aparts

I've always envied those couples who say they've never spent a night apart during their marriage.  It seems so romantic, particularly in this modern world, to be able to return to each other's side every night no matter where the day has taken you. Sadly, Jim and I certainly will never achieve that goal.  We've spent many a night apart, not necessarily by choice, but simply by circumstance.  For many years, his job required him to travel, sometimes for weeks at a time.  And when I became more heavily involved in musical groups, I often traveled for outstate performances or festivals.   So over the years, we grew somewhat accustomed to being apart.

I say somewhat, because no matter how many times we were separated, we always felt a rather disconcerting sense of emptiness - a strange disconnect with ourselves.  There's an old legend about lovers, something about each person having another part of themselves that somehow splinters away during birth.  The story goes that we are then constantly searching for our true love, the one person who is actually our cosmic "split apart."

Whether that's true of us or not, there is a very definite sense of emptiness about life when we're apart, a kind of cold space (like they say ghosts inhabit) when we're living in different places.  There's no one to snuggle on the couch and watch reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond  with me, no one to kill the centipedes that pop up occasionally in the bathtub, no one whistling incessantly while they're shaving, no one to sympathize with me when my boss is micromanaging things.  And while we may not always be consciously aware of it, we've both noticed that life is simply more stressful without the familiar presence of our mate to act as a buffer against life 's vicissitudes.

Fortunately, in the past few years our separate traveling has diminished considerably.  Last month when we went to Florida, I had to travel a day early, and that was the first night we had spent apart in - well, probably a year. 

But I've been remembering those other times because my son and daughter in law may soon be separated for a while, the first real separation since the years of their courtship when they lived in opposite hemispheres.  They're a close couple in nearly every way, both homebodies who like to spend most of their time together.  Brian works at home too,  with Nantana a quiet, comfortable presence in the house during the day.  Certainly internet phones and email make long distance relationships easier than in the "old days," when we had to rely on land line telephones with exorbitant charges for long distance.  But they can't replace the physical companionship you become accustomed to when you share life with someone.  So I suspect if they do end up spending this rather significant period of time apart, they will feel a definite void in their daily life and routine, not to mention in their hearts.  

Of course, there are benefits to missing someone. I can't deny the truth of that old adage...absence does make the heart grow fonder.  You tend to appreciate someone more when you're deprived of their presence for a certain amount of time, and all those little irritating habits (like the aforementioned incessant whistling) become quite endearing when you haven't suffered through  experienced them for a while.  The reunion is always sweet, and it's fun to enjoy that honeymoon like feeling again, fun to recapture that sense of wonder you felt in the early days of your relationship when being together was like the greatest gift in the world. 

But, remember the part of the marriage ceremony (at least the traditional one) where the minister says, "what God has joined together, let no man put asunder?"   That's a powerful invocation to the notion of split aparts, isn't it?  Finally reunited with that perfect other half, it seems such a shame to put asunder that perfect whole, to split apart for even a few cosmic moments.  And so when I think of all the days and nights Jim and I have spent apart, I wonder if I'll someday regret them, count them as a huge loss in the grand scheme of our time together? 

The strength of a relationship comes from the accumulation of experiences, good and bad.  But life is defintely easier when both halves of the whole are one, when the ragged edges of daily life are smoothed by the presence of that one person who best knows how to make the pieces fit. 

Sunday Scribblings-Soaring

A sweet breeze drifted through Kathleen's car window, and she pressed the button to lower it completely with her left hand, while lifting a plastic travel mug to her lips with the right.  Only about ten minutes left, and she'd need to get on her way, but she waited patiently, sipping the last bit of her morning coffee, knowing she wouldn't be disappointed.  It had become a ritual now, stopping here at the pond every morning on her way to school, driving in along the dirt road and pulling up as close to the edge as she could.  She had a feeling the wild geese had come to expect her, for lately they hand't been scattering immediately as they had when she first started coming, gliding away from the reedy shoreline with an irritated shhhush  in their hurried attempt to escape her intrusion into their peaceful morning.  Now they simply looked up at her, the pair of them slowly raising their long necks and staring at her with marked disinterest, as if to say, "Oh, it's only that strange woman come to stare at us again."

Kathleen propped her head against the headrest and watched them go about their morning routine.  The male surveyed the horizon while the female dove down for food, coming up every so often to shake her beak at her mate.  It was only April, so the babies hadn't hatched yet, but Kathleen knew there would be a nest hidden somewhere along the creek bank. 

 Within a few seconds, she began to hear it, the first stirrings as they prepared to take flight.  It wasn't really sound exactly, but sense, a feeling of portent, of expectation.  She couldn't figure out what their signal was, but they seemed to know with the habit of many seasons together, just when the moment to take off would come.   Within a split second she heard the effort of their mighty wings, scooping the air beneath them in preparation for push off.  She was never quite sure how they accomplished it, for one minute they were assembled there in the safe cove near the shoreline, and the next they were aloft, their wings spread wide and working furiously until they reached the perfect spot in the air.  It was that moment, that sweet spot in the sky, which she came to see each morning, the spot where they began to soar.

Sighing, she let her eyes rest on their shadowy figures, already nearly lost to view on the horizon.  Her students would smile if they could see her, she thought, and they wouldn't be a bit surprised that Mrs. Harkness visited a pair of geese each morning just to watch them fly across the horizon.  After all, wasn't her classroom papered with inspirational sayings aimed at teaching her students to "take flight"?  "If you can dream it, you can do it,"  "What would you do if you knew you would not fail" and "Refuse to be average - let your heart soar as high as it will." 

And it worked, too - seems she had a gift for inspiration.  Students were always coming back to the high school to tell her that. "I never would have made it if you hadn't encouraged me," they'd write on the Christmas cards which would come drifting in years later.  "You made me believe in myself," they'd tell her, stopping by to visit at the end of a school year.

Kathleen smiled ruefully to herself.  "That's all well and good," she thought, "and certainly nice to know.  I just wish I could work some of that magic on myself."

Fact was, Kathleen Harkness had nearly given up on herself, given up on feeling as if she could soar into life with her wings spread wide, master of the sky around her and the earth below her.  It was a talent only few could muster, she thought, and though she might be able to impart it to others, she couldn't seem to awaken it in her own heart.

At least not anymore.  Not since she lost Henry.

And she never would have believed that her Henry, with his gentle nature and soft spoken smile, his contentment with life that sometimes irritated her for its plodding regularity - how had Henry become the inspriation for her soaring?   

But apparently he had.  For ever since that awful day last fall, that just plain stupid day when he sat down to dinner and looked up at her with this stricken, surprised expression on his face before he fell right onto the floor, dead - ever since that day, she had been as hidebound to earth as if her feet were made of clay.

Putting her little car into reverse, she backed up slowly and carefully, turning the wheel sharply to avoid the rocks placed along the edge of the path.  It was good she discovered this place, having passed it every day of her career with barely a second look, always in such a hurry to get to school, get her day started, get another project underway.  Now it seemed she needed more time to set her bearings each morning, to remember the feeling of soaring, even if it came vicariously from a silly pair of geese.

Pulling the gearshift into "drive," she glanced into rearview mirror, but there wasn't a sign of those geese anywhere on the horizon - not a speck. 

But she knew they would be there waiting for her in the morning.

for more on soaring, visit Sunday Scribblings 

Inner Beauty

A few weeks ago, June honored me with this award.  There are lots of blogger recognitions out there, but this one really touched me, probably because I've certainly not felt very beautiful of late, or very powerful.  Today, reading this simple sentence, I started thinking about the times in my life when I did walk with a sense of strong inner beauty, times when I felt powerful enough to turn winter into spring and set flowers to blossom in my footsteps.  Times when I had the confidence to take on the world and all its challenges, when I felt as if my life had a purpose, as if it mattered in more ways than just getting through another day.  The first year of my marriage - oh, how beautiful and powerful I felt then.  And certainly that feeling arose from being loved so much, but also from being in charge of my own life for the first time, and seeing the future spread out before me, twinkling with promise like a million stars in the night sky.

Finishing college, finally getting my degree after 10 years, and graduating with honor, in spite of doing it all while working part time and caring for a toddler, gave me a unique sense of accomplishment, one I hadn't felt in a long time.  Walking across that stage to get my degree, I could almost see the ice melt and smell the flowers springing up behind me.

Certainly playing music, performing, working as a team with other musicians - that's heady sense of beauty for me.  Over the past dozen years I've pushed myself to new heights in that arena, worked to overcome performance anxiety and discovered what fun it is to entertain.  There is power and beauty in making people smile, through music.

And through writing.  Coming again to the practice of writing, finding a way to share thoughts and ideas with others- well, that provides a uniquely beautiful experience. 

 So it was good to recall those days when my sense of inner beauty reigned.  It reminded me I need to search for ways to allow the beautiful girl inside me to come out and play.  I don't do that often enough, and I suspect most of you don't either.  Because there is a beautiful girl inside everyone of us, even if they sometimes get lost among the tarnished realities of everyday life.

The words of Mary Oliver's poem, When I Am Among the Trees, have really been speaking to me lately.  As a matter of fact, I printed the poem on a small card and have it tacked above my desk at work.  Here are the verses that resound in my heart...

 I am so distant from the hope of myself

in which I have goodness and discernment

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly and bow often.

And yet, the trees remind her with their simple grace and inner beauty, it's really quite simple - "you too have come into the world to do this...to go easy...to be filled with light...and to shine."

So now -thanks to June and Mary Oliver- I'm looking for ways to shine, my friends.

How about you?

Raised to Read

Although my mother wasn't much of a reader, she honored my lifelong passion for the printed word, and took great pride in the early manifestations of my bookishness.  Books were never denied me, and whether obtained from the library or local department store, they were the things I most coveted throughout my childhood (along with fashion outfits for my Barbie doll).  I give my parents a lot of credit for indulging my book addiction, since an obsession for reading was probably rather foreign to them. My son would likely have a different story to tell about me, and the way books figured in his life.  I suspect he would relate to Eudora Welty's description of her mother, which I happened across yesterday while re-reading One Writer's Beginnings...

I think of her as reading so much of the time while doing something else.  In my mind's eye, The Origin of Species is lying on the shelf in the pantry under a light dusting of flour - my mother was bread maker, she'd pick it up, sit by the kitchen window and find her place, with one eye on the oven.  I remember her picking up The Man in Lower Ten while my hair got dry enough to unroll from a load of kid curlers trying to make me like my idol Mary Pickford.  A generation later, when my brother Walter was in the Navy and his two little girls often spent the day at our house, I remember Mother reading the new issue of Time magazine while taking the part of the Wolf in a game of "Little Red Riding Hood" with the children.  She'd just look up at the right time, long enough to answer - in character-"The better to eat you with my dear," and go back to her place in the war news.

Reading is infectious, but there are lots of ways to raise a reader - just because you aren't necessarily one yourself doesn't mean your children won't be.  I'm thankful my parents and grandparents recognized and nourished my love of stories, for it is one relationship that has stood the test of time.

All this by way of introduction to my essay, Raising a Reader, which appears in this week's issue of BiblioBuffet.  Go read it - and the rest of this fine e-zine, which focuses on the living the literary life. It's one of my favorite bookish reads each week. 

And ~ keep reading.

cross posted at Bookstack

Sunday Scribblings-Telephone

She was on the phone when it happened.  I was playing on the floor in the living room, so I could see her standing in the archway between the dining room and kitchen, the dark corner where the telephone sat on its narrow wooden table.  I wasn't listening to her conversation, being wholly absorbed in lining up a series of Matchbox cars on the ramp of my Fisher Price service station.  I can still hear the skittery sound their tiny wheels made on the hard plastic ramp, like dry leaves blowing across the pavement on a fall day.  The pleasant tone of her voice droned in my ear, probably an ordinary conversation with one of my aunts, whom she talked with daily. From the corner of my eye the hem of her pale blue house dress was visible, its wide circle skirt hanging in gentle folds just above her ankles.

It was the skirt that first caught my attention, for it puddled across the hardwood floor when she fell creating a pale lake on the dark wood.  I turned my head just in time to see my mother's body crumple to the floor, a dull thud the only sound she made.  The heavy black telephone receiver fell from her hand as she went down, taking the rest of the telephone clattering to the ground behind it.

Within seconds my grandmother came tearing through the kitchen door - I"m sure she was screaming, because she screamed at everything anyway, and the sight of her only daughter lying unconscious on the floor would certainly have set off paroxysms of alarm.  But I didn't hear her - I was frozen, transfixed by the sight of my mother so still and motionless on the floor, one arm awkwardly folded beneath her back, the other outstretched, reaching toward me.  The next sound I remember was the relentless cry of ambulance sirens, racing toward our house.  Huddled behind the brown sofa, I stared wide-eyed as paramedics burst through the front door, quickly buckled my mother's still form onto the stretcher, and rushed her into the ambulance.  As they sped down the road, sirens screaming away into the distance, I became aware of the telephone, ominously droning one long penetrating tone into the empty room.

In medicine we talk about sequela, a pathological condition resulting from an injury, disease, or attack.  Not surprisingly, there were a number of sequela resulting from my mother's allergic reaction to penicillin, back on that spring day in 1959.   For her, it spawned a life long fear of taking medicine - even though she had been taking penicillin all her life,  that one dose nearly killed her.   For me, a frightened three year old who watched her mother collapse instantly in front of her eyes, and then be rushed to the hospital where she would remain for nearly two weeks, it triggered an obssessive need to be close to her every moment, so great was my fear that something would happen to her.

Oh, and one more sequela from this event - I despise telephones. 

for more telephone tales, go here