Opinion – Page 2 – Mary's Room With a View

WE’RE ALL MAD HERE

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“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.

(Alice in Wonderland)

If Lewis Carroll were alive and residing in Seattle today, he would find the perfect atmosphere for writing Alice in Wonderland: anxiety circles around where we are going and how we will get there, wherever there is.

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” (Red Queen: Through the Looking Class.)

First, there is the upcoming Washington State Democratic primary on Tuesday, although our ballots arrived in the mail almost two weeks ago. In a city that is as Blue as any city can be, this primary looms as an important destination. Voting early left people struggling to discern, among six contenders, which best fit the ideal liberal candidate to beat Donald Trump in November. Those who suspected on March 7^th there might be fewer candidates from which to select, held their ballots close to the chest until the race fell to two: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. These voters are basking in the wisdom of their patience. The early voters feel the disappointment of wasting their vote, like eating dessert too soon, while still being passionate about the entree.

Then the Corona Virus. Seattle prides itself for so much: the home of Microsoft and Amazon, stunning national parks, an abundance of green landscapes resulting from weeks of rain. This past week, the Vice President described Seattle as the tip of the spear in the Corona Virus, for having more cases and, sadly, more deaths, than any other city in the country. Seattleites are used to dealing with affluence, rapid growth and tourists. They are not accustomed to germs. The University of Washington has suspended live classes for the next few weeks, and called home all students from their studies abroad. So too have other schools, public and private, are closing for at least two weeks. From our cottage two hours west of my Seattle church, I attended first-time online church services this morning. Prayer is necessary now, but not in a common location where many church members are over sixty-years-old, the population vulnerable to the Corona Virus.

Yesterday on NPR, the talk-show host interviewed a local mental health professional about the anxiety shrouding our Seattle citizens. What can we do to lessen that anxiety? “For one thing,” the therapist said, “ we can all stop listening so often to the media.” Yes, that is all well and good, but one is also advised to stay tuned for alerts and closures. Yep, straight out of Alice in Wonderland. But the therapist had a useful antidote to anxiety: calm, single-focused meditation. “ Take time to notice something slow-moving such as a fallen leaf drifting downstream.” With her advice in mind, I focused here on our wooded property by Quilcene bay. Join me in looking closely at moss:

Lying thick upon a fallen log

its green promise of alive

soft as the morning fog

that moistens, that invites

you to touch what is close

was always there inching along

while you were running through the woods.

Today’s close-up is moss

beside unfolding ferns,

a talisman to tuck

in your breast pocket

while the sun scorches

the fog away

opening up another day.

WAVES

Here on Kahana Beach, I have had two weeks to think about waves. The screen doors to our sleeping room remain open for the cooling trade winds, so the constant crashing waves soothe us to sleep, a welcome diversion from Seattle’s mid-city traffic. But there are similarities. Whereas the all-night movement of vehicles on our city street, coincidentally called East Aloha, is occasionally interrupted by an emergency siren, so too the predictable waves periodically burst upon the rocks like a bass drum upstaging a symphony. We are not startled into wakefulness, although an accompanying tropical storm, slamming its arrival against the screen, will shake us so we slide the glass door shut and turn off the ceiling fan.

Daytime, the waves froth over the lava rocks, hiding the most jagged peaks. In their rush to slam against the sea wall, they carry turtles along for the ride. (In the lower middle of the photo you may spot a turtle’s shell) Sea turtles feed on the greenery on rocks along the shore, so succumbing to slamming against the boulders is like an encouraging push forward to feasting. Huge shells, some the size of a dinner table, ride just below the water’s surface. Whether the flippers help the turtle to navigate at this point is unclear. Rather they seem to give in to the waves’ force, all decision-making left to momentum. There must be a lesson for us there, something about trusting what carries us ahead.

Does one wave differ even slightly from another? Why do I admire the pearly opalescence of some waves while others roll over in a blue-green sameness? How is it that the sea before me may depict a calm plane for miles out, then spot itself with wavelets where there are no rocks to be seen for crashing? Had a whale passed by? Was there a sandbar too far out for my imagination?

Those are five sequential questions for which I have no definitive answer. So much for Oceanography 101. No mind. Poetic connections to the waves complement what science offers. The string of curling waves evokes images of peppermint ribbon candy. When the wave hits the rocky coastline, it splashes high and frothy as thrilling fireworks, then recedes leaving a damp memory on the stones.

Currently, I am reading Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, a story that is an accumulation of soliloquies from siblings who, unique in temperament, are together an amalgamation of consciousness. It is as if Woolf wants us to see one identity made up of separate souls. How appropriate, then, to call her work, The Waves. Looking out now at wave after wave approaching, then receding to the ocean, I can follow one just so far before it is consumed by its neighbor and they become one wave.

Most of our planet is surfaced by the sea, yet until we are slammed by a tsunami, we look landward. The waves reflect our own inspiration, they inhale and exhale, a lub/dub of each heartbeat. Perhaps that is what makes the sound so comforting. It asks for familiarity, for identifying with its life force. All it takes is one venture in for a swim to trust those inhales and exhales. Gingerly, I walk across the sand, my feet sinking its prints until the place where the water has washed up, erasing sandcastles and the presence of swimmers before me. I take cautious steps forward, letting the wavelets tease me, toes-first. Step, sink a little, step again. As the waves surge to my knees I look out, guessing where the next large wave will rise. Will it break on top of me, sucking me helplessly under, grinding my face to the sand? Or do I wait until the breaking point and dive within its incoming belly, emerging only when the wave has receded for the next roller behind it. I dive. How successful I feel emerging up through the wave that took me, then I swim in a parallel line to the beach, far enough out to spot the fish, but close enough to see the shore where I want to return.

Alas, returning to shore requires more tact than knowing when to interrupt a conversation. I focus on the shore where I will land; my back must be to the waves. I have to allow a wave to ride me inland. I need to have my feet within inches of the sand so I can set them firmly for a fierce run up the beach before a kindred wave chases the one that carried me in, and thus sucks me back to the deep or splays my body across the sand. I have experienced both scenarios.

We have been coming to this small Maui resort for two weeks every February for over twenty years. IMG_0155 (1) On each visit, we note how the waves have chewed up more of the beach and/or the retaining wall that keeps the condos high and dry. The beach was once long enough for an invigorating walk at low tide toward a cave in the far rocks, a place I led my small grandchildren where we imagined pirates storing chests of gold doubloons, then hurried back before an incoming tide flooded the crevices in the rock. No tide is low enough to allow that walk today. Nearby, huge tractors work to restore a wall that had shored up the property of a wealthy landowner, his estate now several feet closer to sinking into the sea. Once long, the beach now is but a patch of sand. From half a world away and in eighty-degree heat, melting ice caps deliver messages in the rising seas.

When we return to Seattle at the end of the week, the weather will not encourage opening windows to hear nature’s noise. Traffic will replace the rhythmic surge of water plunging through my dreams. There I will look out for waves of spring rain, daffodils bending before each in-coming breeze.

The Readiness Is All

“Mrs. Kollar!” a student returning from her freshman year in college greets me, as she confidently bounds into what was our last year’s senior English class. “I have learned so much in my English 101 class at the UW. I found out that ‘between you and I,’ isn’t grammatically correct, because between is a preposition and it needs an objective pronoun.”

These weren’t her exact words, but she and other college returnees excitedly share some “newly discovered” wisdom that I had taught the year they sat in the front row of my senior College Prep English class. They may have recently “learned” that Emily Dickinson was a recluse or Walt Whitman sold verses of Leaves of Grass on street corners in New York. Unknown-1 How excited they are to fill me in on what I failed to teach the year they were in my class. Here I could groan in 3-D cynicism, not to mention disappointment. Instead, I share their joy that their minds are still engaged learning about their English language and literature.

I had not failed in the way I taught any of this knowledge they think they have now heard for the first time. When I taught prepositions or the poems of Dickinson and Whitman, they weren’t ready to take it all in. In college they are ready.

If I taught only one literary work, it would be Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In that play there is more truth and psychology than Freud could later explicate (as if for the first time). Unknown-2 In the final act, Hamlet is about to have a duel with Laertes, a fight that he will likely lose. Hamlet’s friend, Horatio, tries to deter him from the match, because Laertes is by far the better and more practiced swordsman. Hamlet won’t be dissuaded, saying, There’s special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. ( Hamlet, V, ii, 230-233). Hamlet knows he will likely die, so when he dies is not his concern. What is important is his readiness to die. He is ready. How lucky for Act 5 and for preparing the audience to accept the inevitability.

Well into my retirement, Hamlet’s accepting wisdom echoes. The readiness is all! Am I ready to retire, to slow down my life, to give up running, to see my friends leave the world, to die myself? And how do I make myself ready for what is coming next? This is a big question having to do with acceptance and a volume of self-knowledge. We humans are not quitters. We flail to keep going long after our muscles fail. Young Dylan Thomas exhorts his dying father, “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light / Do not go gentle into this good night.” I wonder if his father was simply ready to go. The readiness was more with the old man than with the son.

There is power in readiness. Children who are not “ready to clean up their room,” or the haughty person who is never dressed and ready when the car has pulled up the drive. On the opposite side, there is humility in readiness. These are the agreements we make with each other to step out of our comfort zone, to try something new. One-two-three- ready . . . set . . . go! and I am leaping off a small ledge to cold waters when my brother encourages me to swim downstream.

So far, I am seeing readiness as positive, something akin to preparedness for everything from earthquakes to college entrance. This week, reading for a UW class I am auditing, I see readiness may also lay the groundwork for evil. It is a Comparative Literature class: The Literature of the Holocaust. Holocaust Memorial Reading about the German environment prior to Hitler’s rise – the accepted antisemitism, distrust of immigrants (Roma), excessive nationalism, putting The Fatherland first – it is clear that enough of the German populace was ready for Hitler. He was duly elected in a “democratic” republic.

Perhaps readiness may be a power we can wave like a flag against Authority. I guess it depends on who is the Authority. I am ready to plant my sugar snap peas with the first south western breeze in February. The soil turns easily beneath my spade. Earthworms rise to the soil’s surface as if to welcome the peas to join them. I imagine myself crunching on sugar snap peas in April, weeks before my patient neighbor who plants when she hears the spring robins. Inevitably, a freezing March wind, sometimes even a foot of snow, laughs at my readiness. I hear myself reciting from another sacred text: For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: . .. God has made everything beautiful in its time. (Ecclesiastes 3, 1 & 11). Yes, a time to plant and a time to sow . . .. Every year I jump the gun when my readiness does not match Mother Nature’s.

Readiness calls in voices other than my own. Perhaps this year I will be ready to listen. There must be a few other teachers out there to prepare me for what I might learn in 2020, even if the subject has been sitting on my lap for the last seventy-six years.

A Need to be Needed

When I retired from the classroom, my heart felt as if had been tossed on the beach at low tide for the seagulls to pick at what remained of me. Although I knew better, I wondered how next year’s class of Senior English students could be adequately prepared for college by another teacher. These feelings demonstrate either humungous hubris or festering fear. What I have since acknowledged is that I need to be needed. Being needed justifies taking up air and soil from a planet with a paucity of resources.

Only recently have I explored how and by whom these needs are defined. I suspect that many are defined by a patriarchal tradition: making dinner for my husband, doing laundry etc. – all necessities for myself as well. When I look outside of my own experience to other women’s lives, I see similar patterns of fulfilling needs for others, mostly domestic needs, that make others’ lives comfortable. Does the fulfilling of those needs enrich the “needed” woman? Would she have chosen the tasks without societal expectation?

I reflect on my mother’s life in trying to understand my own. My mother began her typical day setting out sack lunches for her children (if we were still in school), and then making breakfast for all. Soon after, she set off to work as a bank secretary, eventually an “executive secretary” to the manager. Not only did she type his correspondence, she approved loans and managed certain business accounts, jobs that would today earn a title of loan officer, or even vice president, but executive secretary sealed her salary and her prestige. During her lunch hour, she walked across the street to the supermarket to buy groceries for preparing dinner when she got home. After dinner and with dishes put away, she made her “creative time,” either haltingly playing the piano, a treat she afforded herself with biweekly lessons, MV5BMTQ1MTIzOTYwMV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTM3MzYwMg@@._V1_UX100_CR0,0,100,100_AL_ or she sat before the television watching Murder She Wrote with Angela Lansberry, who had a startling resemblance to Mother. As my mother did her vicarious sleuthing, she did needlework, usually a square of a quilt painstakingly appliqued or cross stitched. She played piano for no one’s pleasure but her own. Her needlework may have ended in a gift or a practical blanket for a bed, but ultimately, she stitched for the beauty of the thing. At the end of her workday, she fulfilled a call to be needed by herself. Did it also fulfill her to know that her family needed her food, her cleanliness, her salary?

Our family chuckled at my mother’s devotion to Murder She Wrote. Having recently read Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, I can revisit my mother through Levy’s words: “Did I mock the dreamer in my mother and then insult her for having no dreams?”

I considered calling this piece, After the Chores are Done, for that is when Mother’s needs were addressed. That is also when my needs are addressed. If there are domestic duties ahead of me, no writing happens. My piano stands silently accusing me of skipping another day to practice Chopin, although a lesson looms the next day. I ignore creative pleasures I hesitate to elevate to “need” status, because there are tasks ahead that improve the lives of others. Top on the siren call would be perceived needs from my grandchildren and daughter. My granddaughter, a college senior, emails me a draft of her senior English thesis for editing. Her request leapfrogs to the top of my to-do list, real or imagined. I am flattered to be needed, especially to be needed for something that acknowledges I have a brain, not only a scrub brush.

Her thesis has a reference to Mrs. Ramsey in Virginia Woolf’s To a Lighthouse. Married, and shrouded with the needs of her family, any creative vision Mrs. Ramsey might have is detoured through fulfilling family concerns. She knits socks, never quite finishing them. Juxtaposing Mrs. Ramsey is the unmarried Lily Briscoe who paints and completes a painting, Mrs. Ramsey’s domestic subservience to the needs of others shows a creative vision is impossible. Darning socks short circuits her visionary potential. I am considering that perhaps to be freely creative, a woman must be unshackled from family. On the other hand, an unmarried woman can be satisfied with fulfilling her own needs.

Would my mother’s life have been more creative had she not committed to a family? There is no way to know, but I am hoping she, like me, found enrichment in the creative imagination of thought, even in the sewing of quilts. For me, it would be ironing or kneading bread. For Mrs. Ramsey, as she knit, the narrative voice suggests a certain intelligence, a vision, so to speak. The reader has a sense of her visionary voice, however unfilled it might have been were she to complete a painting or write a novel.

The need to be needed may have hindered my creative life, or motivated it in inspiring me to be the most imaginative teacher I could be. Teaching itself is a creative act. With a filing cabinet stuffed with last year’s lesson plans, I recreated them each year. Although I may have been doing so to fulfill my students’ needs, I equally fulfilled my desire for change — delight in doing something different with certain literature I had taught several times.

For many women, the struggle continues in deciding whether we can live freely within a family structure. Perhaps the face-off of domestic duties and the poet within us creates an energized art that would not exist without the struggle. Deborah Levy quotes Audre Lorde in feeling that tension: “I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers”. (Audre Lorde)

Living inTwo Time Zones

A late September afternoon, I am walking home through Volunteer Park, past the playground, quiet as expectation now that children are back to school. Swings, slides, and sculptures for climbing stand silent midst a leaf-spotted lawn that borders Seattle’s historic Lakeview Cemetery. A chain link fence separates a high swinging child and rows of manicured tombstones, many erected in homage to the settlers who first populated our city with Gold Rush, timber-eager adventurers. Pausing before a limp swing lit with early autumn light, I am back seventeen years, lifting my toddler grandson into the swing, then swooshing the boy and swing for a high cemetery view. When both of us are ready to proceed to the slide, my grandson tells me, “I know, Nana, how all those people died.”

“How?” I ask, accustomed to his surprising perceptions.

“All those big stones fell on them.”

Well into my grandson’s nineteenth year, I have retold that story to my grandson and the entire family, so it is a chapter in our book of family humor and nostalgia. However, this morning, the passive swing not only reminds me of the funny story. I actually feel his three-year-old self is forever in that swing. Were he to ask, “Nana, push me,” I would not be surprised.

Here in my seventh decade, many of my waking moments exist in multiple time zones. It is a multi-tasking of the mind. I am here at my computer typing away at this blog, while I am simultaneously surrounded by humming electric typewriters in my high school keyboard class, learning to use ten fingers to travel between adjacent keys. I am in that 16-year-old body.

Is living in multiple time zones common? If so, is it more common with older people? This capability to exist mentally in various places at once, is it unique to humans? Is it the same thing as memory? Of course, memory is essential. Don’t tell me animals live only in the present with no vital memories. When it is time for us to go to our cottage, and we take out the cooler from the basement, our cats disappear. They know the cooler means travel, equals kitty carriers, equals confinement. We must put them in their carrier before even thinking of fetching the cooler. Yet remembering and simultaneous existence are not the same.

The brain has many rooms to visit, and with age, I find the doors are often left open. For about five years, every month I visited Florence Cotton, a long-time member of our church whose age and infirmities prevented her from attending services. In her 100^th year, she acquiesced to moving into an assisted living home. Because I asked how she liked her new residence, she told me that there were many programs there she wanted to attend; however, she often missed them for falling asleep in her chair. A woman who always sought the bright side of disappointments, Florence went on, “But it isn’t all bad. Even though I sleep many more hours now, in my sleep I visit friends and family I had forgotten I knew. They show up just the way I knew them at a certain time of my life.” She savored her time travel.

Simultaneous existence can also be painful. My friend Molly tells me about the day she got up to go to school and found no breakfast waiting, but her mother crying. Her beloved brother died in a car accident while young Molly slept. Decades later, remembering the day with another brother, she said they both began to cry, feeling again their loss as if for the first time.

For me, time has never been linear. It circles around itself like a whirlpool in a pond, gathering newly dropped leaves as it turns. We are brought back around as we proceed forward. Have you heard the declaration, “I don’t want to go there?” I have. The sentence suggests a benefit to burying the past. Understood, as a way to avoid adversity, but today I am thinking that having lived through so many experiences with so many people, I am in a position to live in two or more places at once, and thus able to be more empathic with others who may be experiencing something for the first time.

H.G. Wells, and other futuristic writers, embrace time travel. It isn’t a space ship experience where we go to the moon and beyond. Time travel is a ferris wheel circling in the amusement park of life.

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High Tide and Low Tide

Our cottage sits on a tidal bay, a thumb, if you imagine Dabob Bay as an open hand, one of many large bays on Hood Canal. Thirty years ago we looked every summer for a low-bank waterfront property we could afford, and curiously settled for a tiny cottage on Quilcene Bay where there is water in front of us for only half of the day. Summers, when the sun warms the tidal flats to swimming temperatures, we are “tied” to the tide book. No matter what tasks we are doing, we stop to run through the open gate and plunge in for a swim, push out in a kayak. or balance on a paddle board as soon as a chart in that book registers eight feet or more. Winters, the high tides can exceed 13 feet, and when married to high winds, the sea trespasses, often knocking out the gate with a floating log, white caps swamping our lawn.

Before purchasing this waterfront property, I lived blissfully unaware of the moon and the tides. I didn’t think about highs and lows, not to mention high low tides and low high tides, abbreviated by locals as High Lows and Low Highs. This morning my husband looked through the window as the tide seemed to inhale from the shoreline, revealing mud flats gleaming in the early morning sun, with intricate patterns of streams that ribbon across the shining silt. These streams are the terminus of two rivers and an old creek, all delivering salmon fry in the spring and welcoming returning fish in the fall.

“I love the low tide, as much as the high tide,” he said, reaching for the binoculars to spot heron tiptoeing between the streams and the violet green swallows checking out the boxes he has raised on poles along the shore.

More of a swimmer than bird watcher, I am happiest when the tide is in, but I have memories of my grandchildren flailing joyfully in the warm mud, emerging like faceless sea creatures to be vigorously hosed off before permitted inside the cottage. I too have ventured out on the flats where my feet sink, then my knees, until I fall helplessly in the sucking mud, leaving no option but laughter.

Before inhabiting our tidal bay cottage, I did not imagine the allegorical truths inspired by connecting with those fluctuating tides. In the past thirty years, by connecting to what the tides are communicating, I am discovering revelations of life itself.

Near dusk a few years ago, my brother and I shared a canoe we had paddled a few miles south of the cottage. As the sun continued to set, we turned to paddle back home. Sitting in the bow, I lengthened my stroke while I visited with my brother. He paddled deeper and harder from his seat in the stern.

“How do you think we are doing?” he asked.

Proud of my stroke, I answered, “We should be home soon.”

“Look to the shore,” he said, indicating the oyster company where the lights had just turned on. I looked. I paddled. I looked again, and I paddled. The oyster company lights remained fixed in place. The tide was retreating so fast, that if we didn’t double our efforts, we would make less distance forward than backward. The strength of the tide, accompanied by an expanded vision, remind me that all effort may be relative to some fixed reality. Changing tides inspire humility, helping me to accept what gifts I didn’t know were coming. Just as high winter tides carry a battering ram of a tree trunk to wipe out our driftwood fence, so the water retreats, dumping our fence and stairs at the end of the bay. Neighbors help us retrieve what is ours, and in our scavenging, we find even better planks for restoration. Low tides uncover oysters and clams: a table-is-set ebbing of culinary fame. Even baby crabs scramble along the shore. In late August, salmon return along the streams that lace the flats. Salmon battle determinedly up those streams between lines of families fishing for a big one to take home for dinner. The tides give and take away, like the hand of a natural god.

How do I answer the ubiquitous question, “How are you today?” Ninety percent of the time, I answer, “I am fine, or I am well.” Perhaps, it has been a good day, or I may venture to say a “bad day,” – if the one asking is a friend whom I can trust will hang around for sorry details. Certainly, our days are never all good nor bad. I like to think the condition of my days parallels the tides. If it is a Low – Low, I may forget that there ever were welcoming waves in front of our cottage. If it is a high tide day, I know I am riding a surface on a paddle board, head-high enjoying the sunset sink behind Mt. Townsend. Most days are those Low Highs or High Lows, but nothing is stagnant. All life is movement. We know the moon will turn from crescent to full, and the bay that emptied all but bubbling craters where clams breathe, will within hours, cover meandering streams with salt and sea.

HOPE

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –

And sore must be the storm –

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –

And on the strangest Sea –

Yet – never – in Extremity,

It asked a crumb – of me.

Emily Dickinson

Hope is the first green-gold bud of spring on winter’s leafless limbs. To have a word for hope is a miraculous thing, for how else could we express the force that inspires us to move forward in times of despair? Some linguists argue that without a word for an emotion, you can’t express, maybe not even feel the emotion. I disagree, but I understand the clarity that comes with being able to say, “I hope…”

Hope is not expectation, the latter assuming some planning and reasonable certainty. For example, we wait to plant lettuces until the last frost has passed so we may, according to the seed package, expectabundant produce in 58 days. Hope ,on the other hand, takes over as a word of the imagination, so we plant in April’s cool earth, regardless of knowing there could be more frosts, even snow or ice. Nevertheless, I press the seeds, little flecks, into the cool, damp soil while I imagine June’s salad.

Because it is a word of the imagination, hope reaches for the poet’s tools – simile and metaphor. Emily Dickinson writes “Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” We see, in our mind’s eye, not an amorphous soul, but a small, fragile bird chirping in anticipation of attracting a mate, a bird so fragile it would be easy prey for my cat. Emily’s hope is one pounce away from extinction. Nonetheless, her poem moves to gratitude that hope comforts without expecting anything from her. True, it has none of the planning and preparation of expectation, but hope is not fragile. It holds us in our own sturdy hands above the grave.

When does Dickinson hear the hopeful bird song? She hears it in the gale or on the chillest land or the strangest sea. We are most aware of hope when our lives face challenge. It faces off against another strong emotion, despair. Hope was the flag that preceded the march of youth from Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School to the steps of their nation’s capital. Students did not march to scream their despair, like King Lear howling to the heavens. They marched to speak their young hope for a violence-free nation, and it is that hope that sings in the gale. Hope looks forward, not backward. Barack_Obama_Hope_poster Barack Obama based his drive to the presidency not on a slogan to “Make America Great Again”, but on hope. The Barack Obama “Hope” poster is an image of President Barak Obama. The image, designed by artist Shepard Fairey, was widely described as iconic.

It is President Obama’s version of hopethat connects with me in my seventy-fifth year. Words shift meanings when you enter the last couple decades of your life. My hopes are no longer so personal, though I may hope I don’t die of some long-drawn-out disease. I do know I will die, a knowledge I could shove aside in those years when my mirror didn’t offer me wrinkled skin and thinning hair. My hopes now are less personal and more universal. Having 75 years to look backwards, I have the courage to imagine 75 years forward in my absence. At a recent Seattle Arts and Lectures event, the host asked guest author Barbara Kingsolver where she found hope in today’s divided world. She replied that hope is a kind of energy she chooses to renew each day. To abandon hope, she would be abandoning her children, her grandchildren and the children of the world. Each day, as readily as pulling on her socks, she renews the energy of hope. I too renew hope in the storm for my grandchildren, for my planet. I may no longer imagine the June salad on my own dinner plate, but I can hope for food on the tables of a world where climate change has been acknowledged and ameliorated, where peoples around the world share the bounty of what each contributes.

April is almost here. I drive through the Suquamish Reservation to Hood Canal. The highway dips between stands of evergreens spaced by deciduous trees now wearing a yellow green hue, those fist buds on spare limbs, limbs that last week were winter stripped. The windshield wipers click rhythmically to clear steady rain. Like a chant, I hear the punctuated consonance of hope, hope, hope.

WHAT IS METAPHOR FOR?

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies –

Emily Dickinson

With metaphor, you know precisely what something is by explaining — if not exactly — then almost. You pinpoint a treasure by standing nearby. Long before Google, even before Johnson’s Dictionary, or the first written word, metaphorical thinking expanded the human world. I like to think of my cave sister explaining sex to her daughter when she ventures out to accept an invitation to mate. “Mating? It is like taking a long hike through unfamiliar woods with a person who will exhale his being into your being, like the wind that comes into our cave when we roll away the stone.” That may be a far-fetched example, but how else can a mother communicate the leaving home, then the joining of man and woman without using a comparison to something known? Such is the excitement of metaphor. It doesn’t travel alone into the unknown. It always has one foot in what we know so that we can extend the other foot into the unknown.

Metaphor is particularly useful for understanding abstractions, like TRUTH. Poets use metaphor for exactly that purpose. How do we communicate grief? It is both personal and universal. Archibald MacLeish writes in Ars Poetica, “For all the history of grief / An empty doorway and a maple leaf.” What profound absence he expresses in one metaphorical image, so that my heart hollows out with sadness as I picture that open doorway beyond which there is absence. In defining grief, a dictionary would settle for “deep, sadness, often lasting a long time.” The dictionary is accurate enough but cannot replicate the feeling of grief defined in MacLeish’s open door or the falling maple leaf.

My piano teacher explained to me how I should properly begin the music by Liszt that I was learning. He instructed me to first put my foot on the pedal, then slowly lift my hands to the keys — first the right, as the opening note is in the treble clef, then the left, joining it for the first chord.

“Think,” he said, “that you are giving a gift to the audience. Do you want to simply hand out the gift, or do you want to wrap it with a bow, then offer it? A polished performance is a beautifully wrapped gift.” Now as I play that first measure, I envision the notes, but I also see an exquisitely wrapped package. Without the metaphor, I might have played the measure correctly, but not with the same commitment his package metaphor describes.

In my church community, we regularly discuss how literally or metaphorically we read the Bible. Many Americans have left religion altogether because the Bible remains the cornerstone of churches, and in an empirical age, people will not subscribe to a belief in miracles such as virginal birth. Others, in some fundamentalist churches, turn off the reality button, permitting their literalism to deny what science disproves. The Bible itself abounds in contradictions, making “the word of God” as evasive as mercury spilled from a broken thermometer. For me, literal readings can make the Bible as shallow as a puddle in which we look no deeper than the reflection of our own face. Metaphorical readings expand in lakes and oceans, often feeding channels between islands no one mapped. Christ does not have to resurrect in the flesh, offering his wounds to Thomas or anyone else in doubt. Christ can “come again,” among his followers who, despairing his death, realize his teachings never left them, but will endure. Christ had risen!

For those of us who love to read and to write, metaphor is an engaging friend. I recently finished reading Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming. I will never be the First Lady of the United States and cannot possibly experience living in the White House for eight years when every move the family takes necessitates hovering protection from secret service agents. Even the windows of the White House are so thick that a helicopter landing on the roof cannot be heard from a top floor room. These are facts about Ms. Obama’s life there, but it was her metaphorical descriptions of her life from the South Side of Chicago to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that helped me to feel what she felt. Metaphor opens the envelope for empathy. What a wonderful organ our brain is that we can look at the moon while Alfred Noyes describes “the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,” and we can see a full sail sailing ship in rough seas and at the same time a real moon, flitting in a tumultuous dance among clouds.

What Can I Do?

Holiday parties bring together long-time friends who don’t keep in touch on a regular basis, so conversations often begin with inquiries about what engages us these days. Telling my friend Lynn that I had started a blog featuring thoughts as a septuagenarian, she suggested I write one on retirement. Lynn complains that her husband, who recently “retired” after 40 plus years teaching high school art and coaching soccer, has retired his regular paycheck but not his person. Soon after packing up his classroom, he volunteered to show up for any little jobs around school. He can fix anything, no payment required. There he returns many a weekday morning, in his green VW bug, its odometer brimming with commuter miles.

I sympathize with both Lynn and her husband. When I retired from teaching high school over twenty years ago, my identity felt as unstable as a leaf clinging to an autumnal oak. My daughter consoled me with her version of an old saying: “You can take my mom out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of my mom.” I would continue to behave and to think of myself as a teacher. In “retirement,” I became the nanny as well as Nana, to my grandchildren, reading them books, instructing them on names of mushrooms on our walks to the park, and later pressing their chubby palms in to dough as we kneaded loaves of bread.

While working in the pay-day world, we fantasize about retirement, especially when our backbones ache for sitting through late-day faculty meetings, or our Sunday afternoons disappear under stacks of essays in need of grading. I had two fantasies: one was to wait tables so I could still enjoy the company of others, even serve them a pleasant dining experience, but not wake up in the middle of the night revising a lesson plan to better suit a challenged student. The other fantasy was to drive a big truck, sitting high behind the wheel watching the landscapes exchange their variable beauty from one state to another. There would be no student hovering by my side to complain about a grade — the cacophony of high school pep assemblies replaced by soft jazz from the truck radio. This fantasy focused me so completely that one morning I almost missed my freeway exit to school when I saw the sign: North to Vancouver, B.C.

No doubt, restaurant servers and truck drivers would educate me on these naïve perceptions of their jobs. My husband reminds me that driving the truck is only part of the job. I would have to be strong enough to unload it upon arrival. Fantasies serve to get us away without getting away. Once retirement comes, we have finally escaped those parts of our jobs we didn’t enjoy. Yet clinging to those displeasures like a demanding child, are those tasks that actually fulfilled us. In teaching, fulfillment might be that very clinging child whose progress depended on our support. From serving others, our work and ourselves gain importance. I confess that upon leaving Woodinville High School, I couldn’t imagine how seniors unable to take my college prep English class would ever survive in college. (Time here for laughter)

Retirees miss not only their jobs but the routine that employment offers. Sure, my friend’s husband is still driving back to his old school. I walked to and from the University of Washington my final years teaching on campus. I walked down the hill each morning, stopping for a latte and scone on the way. At the coffee shop, Jackson, a garrulous Scottish baker, swapped stories with me as I bit into one of her jam-filled scones she pronounced as “Skhanz.” On the way home, I took the opposite bridge across Lake Washington’s ship canal and back up Capitol Hill. Seasons blessed my exercise with meditation on falling chestnuts and blooming early plums. In retirement, I missed that walk, though I could still walk down and around the university whenever I wished. But without a purpose? Years passed until I began offering to walk my daughter’s golden retriever down the hill and through campus, where the dog’s “I love people” expressions and wagging tail attract undergrads who miss their dogs left at home. Now the walk resumes with “purpose. ”

Routines plug us into the circadian rhythms of a day. My husband’s friend who this year accepted “forced” retirement for those over 70, is depressed. “I don’t know where to go mornings,” he said, with the grief of loss. Something needs to call us, and now it is time to listen for new voices. With time, they may speak from within.

Each Labor Day I feel called to buy notebooks and new shoes. I have not returned to a classroom of my own; however, I have volunteered for after-school homework help at the library and a couple of years tutoring in a ninth-grade classroom at Garfield High. In 2004, a poetry box I affixed to the fence surrounding our home offers a routine of selecting and printing a poem I copy each month. I email the monthly poem to those not close-by to take a poem from the box. On telling those folks this is my 15^th year with the poetry box, my husband’s niece wrote, “We appreciate the lessons and places you’ve taken us with your 15-year commitment to the Poetry Box. Roger and I would likely never discuss poetry without the Poetry Box so thank you for this gift!”

The recent government shutdown leaves many feeling helpless. Many complain, “But what can I do?” That sentiment is akin to the helplessness experienced with retirement. Our years after the routine of salaried employment may offer time to put usefulness in perspective. For me, often a poem rises from memory. John Milton, who felt his career as a writer was his service to God, lamented how his blindness curtailed his writing. From his sorrow came Sonnet 19, that concludes:

“God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and wait.”

images

TRADITION

We do something on a regular basis and call it habitual. But when does Habit become Tradition? Tradition is an aggrandizement of Habit that brings people together. When my daughter was eight years old, she asked that I bake for her birthday the same cake her friend Katherine’s mother made for her. Winnie Sperry, known for her famous Mother Sperry’s Plum Pudding, made a birthday cake that requires four hours to finish. Even so, this year as my daughter turned 49 years old, I made that cake again. Once during her 14^th year, I thought I would save time by making from scratch only the frosting, then using a yellow cake mix instead of the 5 eggs, 3-times-sifted, everything-at-room temperature recipe Winnie used. My daughter, clearly disappointed, complained, “Mom, how could you? That cake is our Tradition!” All it has taken over a lifetime with our daughter is for her to announce something is Traditional, and it might as well be etched in stone with gold-leafed letters.

December, including Christmas and Hanukkah, is weighted with traditions. We can easily trace traditions from lighting Menorahs or evergreen trees to Black Friday sales following Thanksgiving. Yes, some traditions have more luster than others. And we cannot judge Traditions by reason as much as a by familiarity. Today, some may be frosting cookies to set on a plate by the fireplace for when Santa descends. The custom may continue each year, long after the children have left for college. Many families either follow established traditions or stumble on to their own, without realizing a little habit or ritual grows like a child whose appetite wants feeding.

For many Traditions, a new one may hang like a leaf on the branch of an established one. Take Christmas cards. In the early lean years of our marriage, we decided to join the card tradition by making our own. My husband graduated with an MFA in printmaking, and the heavy steel presses lined up waiting to be used in his basement studio. Influenced by the etchings of Rembrandt, Allan drew an elysian image of a descending angel, etched it in a metal plate, and ran twenty-five original prints for those to whom we wanted to send our Christmas greeting. We made no commitment to ourselves or to others that there would be another the following year.

Over forty years later, this week we are sending out four hundred original prints. As the recipient list lengthened, my husband moved to silk screened prints. He completes a watercolor painting of his image. Then he cuts a stencil on a film for each separate color. There are several pigments. Next, he runs each color on every card, layering the stencils as he goes, and hanging each to dry between colors. In the early years, as he pulled each color, I would run the card to a drying rack. We were still under a hundred cards then. Recipients collected them, made special Christmas books for their coffee tables with a new page for each year’s card, framed the cards and hung them in their homes. Every time I climb the stairs from the first to the third floor of my friend Loui’s home, I follow the framed cards she has hung in increments along the stairwell. It is like climbing our history. Inevitably, we needed to trust the reproducing work to a professional with a large studio. Allan still creates the image and cuts the stencils before passing on the stencils to Tori, our third professional printmaker.

In the twelfth year, as I admired Allan’s watercolor of ducks on a frozen bay, I told him, “This one reminds me of a winter solstice poem I wrote.”

“Why don’t you copy it and include it with the card?” he suggested. Shyly, I included Winter Solstice on Quilcene Bay. Our friends liked getting a poem with the print, and so . . . fifteen years later, my poem, Thin Spaces, accompanies this year’s print.

More than a repetitive practice, Traditions can be the creative force in a marriage. I don’t know when Allan first thinks of next year’s image, though he starts on the watercolor between October and November, getting it to the printmaker to allow her a few weeks’ work. I wait to see the watercolor, sit with it for a bit, and let it take me where it will. I never ask him what he intended. I don’t tell him what inspiration ignites me. Here we are separate creative entities. It may not be apparent why this poem and this image would be in the same envelope; however we ride this Tradition on different horses set out for the same horizon.

As much as making that birthday cake for my daughter, our Christmas card, like any tradition, requires time. In addition to old friends and relatives, our list includes my Bible Study group, Allan’s basketball buddies, our neighbors to whose mailboxes we hand-deliver the cards on Christmas Eve. Then there is the Washington Athletic Club group. What started as a small gathering of early-morning athletes celebrating a Holiday Season breakfast, grew to sixty strong. Gordy dresses as Santa. After handing out our cards, Allan describes the artistic process, and acknowledges the fellowship of starting each day with a workout among friends. I read the poem aloud. Each year, we wonder if maybe we should forego the task of contacting catering, renting a room, taking sign-ups in the locker rooms. But each year, club members ask, “What is the date of this year’s breakfast? We love that tradition.” Suspending a “Tradition” can feel like desertion.

Within a weekend or two after Thanksgiving, my husband and I turn up Christmas music and sit down at the dining room table, one across from the other, while we address, write notes, and slip those cards and poems into envelopes for mailing. As tired as we are with that long sit, we are also remembering each recipient, sometimes sadly erasing the names of those deceased. We smile when a friend’s name takes us back to those early years when not having a lot of money to buy Christmas cards, we started a new Tradition and made our own.

Thin Spaces

The space is thin

where heaven and earth meet,

shallow as an ebbing tide.

Thin is winter wakening

beneath diaphanous snow

on hills seen through leafless limbs

of an oak planted in hopeful spring.

Thin is that hovering hush

before the raven calls,

a cry we know will come

with the returning tide.

The year divides itself in half,

speaking in a space without words.

Mary Kollar

December, 2018