Mary's Room With a View

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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Poetic Moments

Poet Bill Carty opens the evening’s workshop asking, “Did anyone experience a poetic moment since we last met?” One or two writers share their moments. No one asks Carty to define “poetic moment,” as if they intuitively know one when they have it. Besides, as with all things significant, it is better intuited than defined.

For me, salmon migration from Hood Canal into Quilcene Bay; a journey to the Big and Little Quilcene Rivers to lay eggs, to fertilize them, and to die; creates a series of poetic moments beyond a biologist’s explanation. Every year, I reflect on the sheer determination of the salmon: the impulse, the mission, the harrowing journey past humans with snagging hooks, and spread nets – as well as dodging ravenous seals a hundred pounds greater than the fish’s silvery weight, and the penetrating eyes of eagle and osprey from great heights. Moses’s flight from Egypt pales in comparison.

I lean precariously over the Little Quilcene Bridge and hold my camera steady, my back against the glare of early autumnal light, to capture the thrilling swish of a spawning pair. The shallows swirl around them in mock frenzy, river water splashing upwards like reverse rain.

When the tide recedes, only the stream beds remain across the flats. What fish have not yet reached the river’s mouth, struggle up thin streams, surrounded by twenty to forty, rubber-booted people, their trousers rolled. They have parked their trucks along the road at the end of the bay and sloshed through the flats with fishing gear to snag the stragglers in the shallows. Determined to spawn, the fish have lost interest in feeding, ignoring any dangling bait, and thus victims only to snagging. Some sport.

Yet, in a way, I too am taking something from the salmon run. Within hearing distance of the fishermen on the flat, I sit on my beach with my journal open. Overhead, a raven calls, like a muse from ancient tribes who fished this bay before white intruders were imagined. I thank the salmon for another poem.

Decay

Through September’s opened windows,
comes a stench of chum rejected
from tribal nets, and tossed overboard,
rotting corpses half buried in sand
and whiskered eel grass.
I fetch a shovel and the rusty wheelbarrow
from my garden on the hill.

Where the tide retreats, September’s
light spills like olive oil
across the muddy flats.
On the beach where yesterday I swam,
three large salmon lie,
shining slabs in wasted stages of decay.

It should be easy to shovel
one into the waiting barrow,
then push it up the hill to a hole prepared
beside late-to-harvest squash.

Death’s stench softens in the salted sand.
Shovel ready, I thrust
the tool under a silver belly,
golden roe spilling like marbles intended
(in her unfinished swim)
for the cool stones of the Quilcene River.

Her agate eye– a stone too–
as is her three-foot corpse, a defiant
cemetery slab refusing to bend.
End over end, I wedge and swivel
with my tool, until feeling like a fool
flip her into the waiting barrow.

What would you expect?
Not her defiant weight,
nor the way her fragrance freed
from beach to garden gags me.
I wrap across my nose
a towel used to dry the morning dishes,
then push the little boat of a barrow
to tip it over radishes gone to seed.

I promise to visit her in spring,
when compost brims with mulching
autumn leaves and the soil is
turned for another hopeful crop.
One fish, a gift to earth, will with winter’s rain
nourish us with lettuce next July.
But when April comes,
not one flinty bone of her remains.

What’s Your Pronoun?

Yesterday, my granddaughter (college senior, English/Political Science majors) texted me a reference to a podcast she thought would interest me. The parenthetical information in sentence one is important – my granddaughter’s age, her political/social sensibilities and her language awareness. The podcast: Call Your Girlfriend (June 28, 2019); the subject: Pronouns. My granddaughter and I have twenty-one years of Word Nerdiness between us. I listened to two hosts interview a woman whose mission is to teach the use of “they” as a singular pronoun as an alternative to the binary dominance of “he” and “she.” I have two years into this linguistic issue since I first met a person who asked for the pronoun “they.” Recently an Op Ed in The New York Times, authored by a writer who introduces himself as a “cisgender Dad,” argued that gendered pronouns put people in categories they would not choose for themselves. The writer argues that, Grammarians aside, social inclusivity demands that we un-gender our language regardless of confusion between singular and plural.

I am one of those Grammarians whom he would dismiss. I imagine the red rivers of ink I traced connecting pronouns and antecedents on thousands of student essays. Granted, I may lose this one, as I have bowed gracefully to defeat with “between you and I.” Should I expect the world to know that “between” is a preposition and demands an objective pronoun (me)? Like a knife in my heart, I will hear “they” call up a single person. The Op Ed writer does not champion the non-gendered pronoun, “one.” I can understand it is the stuff that makes one crazy to identify with one gender and endure a life where you are referred to (via pronouns) as a gender you are not An ungendered pronoun or elimination of all pronouns seems fair.

“Practice,” my granddaughter and the podcast urged. “Start with referring to your cat as ‘they,’ and the use will come naturally.” Couldn’t be more true. Language changes faster than sunrise sets to dusk. Practice makes perfect. Besides, I am on board with the ways gender stereotypes control our thinking. More than fifteen years have passed since my church replaced old hymnals with new ones that removed gendered pronouns, yet that change doesn’t take easily with all. My voice raised in song, I often miss complete stanzas to an old hymn I thought I knew. All around me, I hear parishioners of my age stumble as they pray, “Our Father, our Mother . . .” Yet gradually God has changed from the great white man I envisioned in Sunday School, until God is now a spiritual wholeness with the feminine in me. Takes practice.

As it was, the podcast’s topic itself didn’t shock this aging English teacher. But ah, the medium is the message, and the interviewee on the podcast, a woman likely in her 20’s and a purported pronoun expert who is writing curricula to change pronoun education, spoke every line of her talk with a lilt at the end of the sentence, as if she were asking a question rather than making a statement. I have heard many young women do this, but I cannot recall young men doing it too. To my aging ears, it sounds as if the speaker is begging for approval, unsure of her message, and so makes a declarative sentence into a question she can withdraw like a fishing line cast into a blackened stream. I think the tone infantilizes the speaker. MV5BMTgyNDg1MDQ3Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTU2NDkyMQ@@._V1_UY100_CR0,0,100,100_AL_ Similarly, the speaker peppered her commentary with “like” when there was no comparison intended that would call for “like.” Both the upspeak and “like” come from Valley Girl Talk, a dialect that connotes, for me, bikini clad California girls mostly interested in what they will wear to the next beach party. My granddaughter argues that “like” is the filler of her generation that allows the listener pause time to catch up; whereas in her grandparents’ generation is was “um.” Hmm.

I shared the podcast with a neighbor of my generation. Like me, she wants to to catch up on what younger folks are thinking. The upspeak that annoyed me, annoyed her. She added that she has been asked at the start of professional meetings to “introduce [herself] with preferred pronouns and feels like it is a ‘tell’ beyond [her] comfort zone.” An introduction with her name should be adequate. Now that is something I had not considered. I connect it to an experience related by an African American friend who recently moved into an assisted living residence. At her first visit to the dining hall, another resident asked her “What do you prefer to be called?” My friend knew the woman was fishing for Black, Colored or Negro. My friend replied, “I prefer Theresa.” As my friend righty assumed, no one asked the other resident whether she preferred White, Anglo or Caucasian. By announcing our pronoun, do we feel we are putting ourselves in a category; whereas, we might like to keep our gender preference to ourselves? For whom are we declaring our pronouns?

My granddaughter continues to coach me. Well along on writing this blog, she refers me to a Fresh Air Podcast (NPR) in which Terry Gross interviews linguists about upspeak and a related linguistic practice called vocal fry. https://www.npr.org/2015/07/23/425608745/from-upspeak-to-vocal-fry-are-we-policing-young-womens-voices I learned that both tics are more common to speakers under forty, but are equally employed by men and women. However, in audio media, women’s voices are much more often criticized than are men’s. The greater range of pitch of a female voice also exaggerates tonal difference. Most surprising is the information that younger listeners do not hear the uniqueness of upspeak as do older listeners. No doubt those under forty do not hear the preponderance of like. Do we make value judgements here? Unknown Is the English language going to Hell in an I-Phone? The evolution of language is more than accepting new vocabulary. It is also accepting new tones and inflections. If we are lucky enough to converse with our grandchildren we can ride along.

By the end of dinner, our granddaughter and we agreed that language changes with our social sensitivities. Another friend, a gay man in his 50’s, told me the Gay community used “they” back as far as the 70’s when it wasn’t safe to declare your sexual orientation. Social sensitivity expands. This morning, I sat comfortably with this conclusion as I rode my bike to the village store to get the Sunday paper. The mid-twenties man behind the counter greeted me, “Hi, nice morning.”

“Yes,” I answered, and asked, “How are you today?”

“I’m well, thank-you,” he answered. I almost dropped my six dollars for The Times. He didn’t say, “I’m good.” He knows the question of “how” demands an adverb. Maybe he even knows what an adverb is! Or maybe language does not change as a rapid-running creek into a stagnant pond, but rather a long, slow river, winding around like an ox-bow to the sea.

Nowitna-River

THE PHILOSOPHY OF FEMINISM

After dessert at a dinner for University of Washington supporters, our host asked each to say what we love about the UW. “I appreciate the Access Program,” I said. “With the permission of the instructor, senior citizens can audit any class for only five dollars.”

“Are you taking a class this next quarter?” she asked.

“Yes, The Philosophy of Feminism.”

“Isn’t there a course in Masculinism?” quipped the man next to me.

“Sure,” I said, “It’s called The History of the Last 2,000 Years.”

Everyone laughed.

So began my thinking about the Philosophy of Feminism a week before I walked into a lecture hall with 140 undergraduates. I was prepared for Female vs Male. I was prepared for Slam the White Patriarchy. All of this without giving time to define Feminine or Masculine.

The professor, an exceptionally thoughtful woman, began the class asking each of us to write down our name, what pronoun we preferred for addressing us, and any needs that might affect our equal access to the class.

Ah, the pronoun thing. I was ready for that, even though my English teacher identity cringes when a single person selects they. Needs? Well, vision and hearing. What if the students felt they had no needs worth noting? “Everyone has needs,” the professor explained, “so if you are inclined to say you have none, please say, ‘I anticipate my needs will be met.’”

Got it. If I say I have no needs, while the student next to me announces her deafness, she is cast as “other,” or “outside the norm.” This class practices inclusion, and so it did, all the way to the final exam.

When I told my friend Bindy I was taking The Philosophy of Feminism, she asked how Feminism can be a philosophy. I looked up philosophy, and among many definitions is “the way one looks at the world.” Then if we can have Marxism, named after a man, and Socialism, named after an economic structure, both recognized as philosophies, a Feminist lens can be a philosophy as well.

As the class progressed, I noted the elasticity of gender. We read essays by noted Feminists and women who struck out for equal rights to vote and work, but we also studied other marginalized groups, many ethnicities and all genders. Starting with oppression, the professor invited volunteers to tell about occasions when they have felt oppressed. A young black woman raised her hand. “It is mostly older white people who say this,” she explained, “but I feel oppressed when people think they are flattering me by commenting on how articulate I am.” What she heard in that compliment, was “You are a black woman and so I am surprised that you speak so well.” The black man sitting next to her added he was tired of representing to others the conditions of a black man in America. “Just read the front page of your newspaper, if you want to know what it is like to be a black man in America. It is not the job of the oppressed to educate the oppressor.” Although that quotation came from one of our readings, hearing it from him, I heard it as Truth.

I was learning from these young, progressive students to view a world that I had not experienced in similar ways. I reflect on the fewer opportunities for women when I was a coed in in the early ‘60’s. Yes, I was marginalized as a woman, and now may be marginalized as a senior citizen. When a student saw a solution to many of our country’s issues in eliminating congressional representatives over 60 years of age, I raised my hand — Ageism, the one marginalized group not yet addressed in the class. After class, he apologized to me, the one over-sixty student among them. I accepted his apology and thanked him for all the words his generation gave me that were not available when I was nineteen: sexual harassment, date rape, non-binary, intersectionality micro aggression.

Our language stretches every year to better accommodate events, debates, and feelings. If I had thought Feminism simply concerned advocating for women, by the end of the class, that definition was too narrow. I grew to see that Feminism represents advocacy for a world where every person has an equal access to well-being and to power. It is personal and it is political. It is a philosophy ready for the embrace of all people who see the world as a community with differences, but ones that do not elevate a group at the expense of another. Anyone can be a Feminist.

This summer the UW does offer a class in Masculinism. Yes, a class to discuss what it means to be a man. I wish I could attend that class too, but it IS summer, so I am at our cottage on Quilcene Bay, not in a campus classroom My student desk is replaced by an L.L. Bean rocking chair on our deck where I can read and reflect on my connection to others – even the violet green swallows flitting over nesting boxes and swooping up bugs for their babies.

Paying Attention

In a college linguistics class, my professor explained that idioms make American English a challenge to learn. “For example,” he illustrated, “how can a person who understands the separate meaning of put, up, and with, infer put up with means to endure?” Likewise, understanding pay and attention, why would someone combine them for pay attention, as in to notice, or to focus on something? Pay suggests debt and remuneration. Could it be that paying attention is a choice to purchase, or a willingness to invest something of yourself?

Yesterday morning, driving my grandson to school, I was attentive to his lively accounting of his weekend’s crew regatta. Showering me with details of the course, wind and water, he suddenly excused himself to change the subject. MaxRegionals2019 Then he began, in acute detail, to describe the sunrise over a semi-cloudy horizon above the Cascades. The scene called for his attention as we drove at 55 mph over the Ship Canal bridge. I remained attentive to cars ahead. Max described a ribbon of light between mountains and clouds, a “urine yellow beneath a black cape.” Mid-range, between Lake Union and the Cascades, he noted marshmallow clouds hovering at vacillating heights opening to reveal snow-spotted peaks. “ It seems even more dramatic,” he said, “because we are driving past.”

“Like performance art,“ I offered.

“Yah,” he agreed, then returned to telling about the regatta and medals won by his team.

“My medal for Max,” I thought, with a grandmother’s pride “how he notices the world. He pays attention. His is an investment in creative consciousness.”

Surely spring seduces our attention, a welcome price to pay for warm sunrises, the embryonic unfurling of ferns in early May. We notice each new flowering dogwood tree or rose, pausing because we know the blossom will not last for weeks.

Yet every season, I cannot think of paying attention without recalling the evocative plea of Linda Loman referring to the decline of her husband, Willy Loman, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

“Attention must be paid,” she demands in a prophetic voice that mourns the waste of a human being by the crushing jaws of capitalism.

51KZD1D8vuL._SX340_BO1,204,203,200_ My generation sometimes boasts that it is The Greatest Generation and romanticizes cruising Route 66 in gas guzzling cars. Our generation paved miles of farmland for highways to take us to strip malls cemented over where valley farms once stood. Were we so inattentive to the environment we took for granted? Now we foresee a great debt called in for our children and grandchildren to pay.

Two afternoons a week, I audit The Philosophy of Feminism at the University of Washington. Surrounded by a hundred students between the ages of 18 and 22, I am hearing where they are attentive. Yes, cords connect their smart devices to their ears, so folks from my generation assume young adults are inattentive to all but their own music or messages. However, in class discussion of generational differences, these students are paying attention to my generation’s arrival at journey’s end, with remaining years of dependence on social security that these students’ salaries will fund until Social Security is depleted, likely before today’s youth reach retirement age. Especially in Seattle, they are aware that student housing costs as much as their tuition, in a city where the two richest men in the world live in mansions. Unlike our generation, these young adults do not expect to surpass the prosperity of their parents. As Max focused on the beauty of a sunrise, they are paying attention to climate change and the very air they breathe.

This morning, the sun spills through Volunteer Park Café where I sit attentive to long shadows cast by the fully leafed-out sweet gum tree outside the café window. I remember that we are exhorted to “live in the moment,” inviting me to drink in the loveliness of the leaves. At the same time, human consciousness sweeps my attentiveness to years spent and years to come. When I was teaching high school, if my students tumbled into pleasurable distractions, I would say, “Listen up,” another curious idiom. At the end of this day, I want to recall how I cashed in my hours paying attention.

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.

My Feminist Garden

I am a seventy-five-year-old poet

who writes lyrical poems

tuned to iambic pentameter.

Today, I want to write a modern poem

about daffodils I planted in October.

Some line up in a row by the split rail fence,

but more often now I plant them in clusters.

I’ve learned over the years that one flower

isn’t beautiful because she stands

next to one that is plain.

In clusters, or circles, the yellow bells

sing like a choir of sopranos.

That simile slips out from the lyrical

voice I am trying to suppress,

in order to present as post-modern.

Yet, over seven decades, I’ve learned to be heard

by suggestion, not assertion,

a voice others call strident in women.

I have endured cruel winters

like my green daffodils

standing unblossomed in March.

January tricked them with moderate rain,

so they pushed through soil

before February snow muffled their mouths.

The package of bulbs boasted

they would regenerate each spring

without my having to do a thing.

It is like a law, once passed —

say a woman has a right

to choose motherhood or not —

forever she might decide.

Yet, I return to our nation’s capital to march.

holding high a drawing my granddaughter made–

a uterus with flowers growing from within

reading Not a Political Object.

Two generations from my granddaughter,

my seed within her germinates

in colors I will not live to see.

She speaks in phrases I did not have:

sexual harassment, right-to-choose

equal pay for equal work.

She didn’t have to work at the corner drug,

where the pharmacist draped mistletoe

above the counter where I reached

for packages to deliver to nursing homes.

I am straying from my struggling daffodils,

something I do often these days,

meandering like Wordsworth in my garden.

I text my granddaughter to tell her

I enrolled in a University class:

The Philosophy of Feminism.

She texts back: Woohoo!

Spring arrives in twenty days,

but I have history on my side —

the bulbs I planted will bloom.

I will still need to pull weeds.

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.