She was standing on a wooden chair at the far
edge of Union Square Park, New York,
not far from a statue of George Washington.
It was New Year's Eve day.
As people passed by she called out,
"Whatever you do,
don't look back."

She said it again and again,
in an actor's voice, with dramatic pauses.
"Whatever you do,
don't look back."

Many walked quickly by. Several people stopped.
They asked what the words meant.
"Whatever you need them to mean," she said.
One man wanted to know why she chose to
stand there on her chair.
I wondered about the chair too. It had a cane seat.
It looked at like it would be more at home in a kitchen
or a farmhouse.
Had she dragged it across
many avenues to stand there at the edge of a set of stairs, and
the edge of the village at this very busy crossroads on December 31?
Why?
Performance art? A dare? A plaintive reminder to let the past go?
A nudge to look forward?
A coda for 2012?

It was thirty four degrees out with a bracing wind. Nearby a couple of guys
were engrossed in a game of chess. A group of friends met in the middle of
the park, one wearing a New Year's tiara. A man sold noisemakers, horns
and 2013 glasses in bright red and neon lime. We walked down Broadway.
I could still hear her: "Whatever you do, don't look back."

Maybe it was an act but she sounded earnest.
I wasn't entirely with the "Whatever you do" part of her statement,
I happen to like looking back. But it was a good thought
for the new year.
Yesterday? Last year? Let it be for a bit.
Revel in the right now.
And check out all that unfolds next.

Good Books ~ 2012

If the books I loved best this year had one common thread, it was that they were populated by good men.

The Book Thief.  We were in Chicago and The Book Thief  was their big city/ all city read. I’d started it once years earlier and didn't get far. This time I was struck immediately. The voice reminded me of Jonathan Safran Foer’s in that the author Markus Zusak is a chance-taker, a writer whose words collect and gather and move about in ways that are new, a writer who has Death narrate the book, Death who sees and speaks in colors. The focus of the book is Liesel who comes to live with a sharp-tongued foster mother named Rosa Hubermann and her foster father or Papa, Hans Hubermann. He was, to the world, “an unspecial person,”  barely visible, but Liesel saw immediately all he was, that his eyes were made of “kindness and silver” and that “Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.” He made the book for me.

Hans played the accordion, breathing it to life; he taught Liesel to read, encouraged her art, told funny stories, kept her safe as the Holocaust raged on around them.  “Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man’s gentleness, his thereness” (Zusak 35).

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce.  I’d heard about this book on NPR and liked the premise, that a man in his 60’s, whose life had grown quite small, whose marriage had been foundering for years, receives a letter from an old friend. She tells him she is dying and while he sets off to the post to mail a letter to her, he decides to keep walking. He later decides that he will walk all the 500 miles to see her, telling her to wait, to stay alive until he can get there.  The book unfolds at a walker’s pace, a lovely, sometimes sad, always thoughtful meandering, as if we are walking along with him, seeing the sights, meeting the people he does. His world begins to expand. So does his wife Maureen’s; she is back home.

Harold made me think about how having faith in something or someone can prop us up and push us forward. He reminded me too about that magic part of living, that there are second chances and third and fourth chances too. What will we make of them?

The Round House. Joe, who narrates Louise Erdrich’s new novel, wants to be a good man as he grows but he also wants to avenge a crime against his mother. From the start he is earnest; he’s real. He is thirteen, a member of the Ojibwe tribe, wrapped securely in his family of three, mother, father, Joe.  Something tragic happens to upend who they each are and all that they are together.  The world beyond the reservation won’t step in; justice, he feels, is left up to him. His is a heartbreaking and messy quest, a terrible but understandable yearning to fix what is broken.
 
The last good man I met (again) this reading season was Fezziwig  in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I like rereading the novella every few years around the holidays, mostly for him. Scrooge is being escorted back to his earlier life by the ghost of Christmas past. He stops in where he was once a clerk, at Fezziwig’s firm. It’s Christmas Eve and old Fezziwig cries, “Hilli-ho,” and gets his two young clerks to stop working and to clear the place out for a party for the office and for friends and family from all around. There’s dancing, and more dancing “and cake…a great piece of Cold roast … mince pies…” (Dickens 42) and unfettered joy all around. After the party, Ebenezer and the other clerk talk and talk about what a man that Fezziwig is.

The ghost can’t make sense of it and says, “A small matter to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.”

               Scrooge, looking down at the scene says, “Small!”

               “Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money. ..Is that so much that he deserves this praise?”  the spirit asks.
              “It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count `em up: what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune” (44).

           “He has the power to render us happy or unhappy, to make our service light or burdensome…" That line, these characters, will walk around with me for a while.

Snowed in
with a warm cup of coconut coffee.

In the far distance, a foghorn.
The steady snowfall fills in the rest,
muting the few cars that pass.
The light around the streetlamp is
softer; the holiday lights a hazy
gold, a quieter blue.

Poems in parks, poems on street corners,
poems splashed across the inside of a subway
car. I love a little verse tossed into 
the landscape.   

She Brought Pie

Is there anything this good country doesn't have?

It turns out it has a pie lady, Beth Howard, who traveled from Eldon, Iowa to bring pies to Newtown.  When her husband died several years ago, she found her sorrows eased when she made pies. Since then she opened a pie stand, wrote a memoir about pie baking and when she heard what happened in Newtown, she posted a message on Facebook that day: perhaps pies could help in some way. According to stories that have run in papers across the country, she loaded up her RV with crates of apples and other ingredients, many donated, and she stopped off for home baked pies in a small town along the way, made by people who said they’d bake too. When she arrived, she passed out slices to anyone who wanted one and then baked more. She taught high school students and little ones how to make a fine crust.

It made me think of a line from To Kill a Mockingbird,  “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between.” 

I thought about how Howard made this town, more than 1,000 miles from her own home, her neighborhood. She did what people do when someone becomes ill or, in this case, falls on the hardest of times. They bring soup by;  they drop a casserole off on the front porch.

“Heard you could use a lift,” they say, only without the words.

I've passed this statue twice now and each time I had to stop back and
just stand near it for a while, near the peace collected there and the 
contentment too.  

Let's hear it for uncles, those December 23rd, 24th shoppers. Back in those long ago times before smart phones and online shopping and just about everything open on a holiday, the uncles would pull up to the mall about 20 minutes before closing, and they, and a couple hundred other guys, would wing it. Some years if there were a  couple too many parties to stop  by, they'd do their shopping that morning at the only place open, the local news stand.

Christmas would be well underway and they'd pull up with one of those ice cream yule logs or maybe a couple six packs. While the aunts and grandparents knew exactly what it was you wanted it and had searched high and low for it over a series of days and weeks, and jingle and jangled up the presents in wrapping paper and bows, the uncles would have a small paper bag for each kid.

In the bag there might be a Mad magazine or a couple of comics, or some little wry gift that let you know they knew just where you were at that moment. There'd be skinny boxes of pretzels and fistfuls of caps to snap out in the driveway, setting the cats off sprinting for the bushes. They'd have picked out a candy bar and about seven or eight packs of gum.  Chew it all right now if you feel like it, the uncles would say, and you did.

I've always been the type who believes in good,
that it exists, that it matters, that good can win. 

This past week I lost faith in that. 

And then...
there were those people who brought dogs to cheer children and 
others who brought blankets to warm those standing out in 
the cold as the President spoke,
and the person who called the coffee shop this week to say, ` Please buy a 
cup of coffee for everyone who comes in to your shop today, on me' 
and there were the students and teachers in a nearby town who 
made a green and white paper chain `link of love' with lines 
of hope and support to string along the walls of the new school -
so much kindness from each corner of the world.      

I thought about that burly man in the red coat and cap who we search 
for in the skies, year after year, still hoping. And sure enough, in 
the midst of the saddest days in our state, he is here. 

As newsman Francis Church wrote to Virginia O'Hanlon in 
The New York Sun when her own young faith was tested 
in a different way, 

 "Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. 

Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence...Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see."

The beach was hushed on this late afternoon in December. The sun would be
around for just a little while longer but out on the sandbar a solitary man
continued clamming. The sky changed colors again and again and he
worked on.

                                    The Empire State Building, done up in blue light,
                                      peeked out from behind the mist and fog 
                                      over Bryant Park last night. 

Thinking of books today as all the notable and best books of 2012 get bandied about. I like to hear what my friends and family are reading and take many of my recommendations from them. But I always look forward to these best of lists, to copying down the titles of the National Book Awards finalists, to hear the authors talking about their work on NPR.

Three books on these best of lists intrigued me most: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, The Round House by Louis Erdrich and Beyond the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. I have heard that Boo's book is one of the best pieces of reporting and writing in years and years. I just got Salvage the Bones out from the library, after hearing so much about it, and fifteen pages in, I am in.

I stayed up way, way too late one night a week ago finishing The Round House. I'd heard her interviewed on NPR talking about the book and how it centers on justice and revenge. She had a lot to say about revenge and how it never gets anyone to a better place and I wondered about that. I can't shake the story or the family of three at the heart of the book.

Thinking about books reminded me of this fellow, one of the two lions outside the New York Public Library. I am not sure if he is Patience or Fortitude but I have such an affection for him. I often stop by just to look at the two lions and that library. An elegant home to books if there ever was one and a touchstone for me whenever we begin our city wanderings.

We went to Europe for the first time two summers ago and I still smile thinking of it. We arrived on a 100-degree day. After staying up all night on the overnight flight, far too excited to sleep, and then finding out our hotel had no water and moving our small suitcases to another hotel, we hopped on one of those double decker buses and rode all over Rome. We wanted to take it in before we’d set out all over on foot. Everywhere there were marvels, art and more art, markets, sidewalk cafes where life just stopped as the city whirred by, fashionable, beautiful people riding on scooters, zipping in and out of traffic; men in suits, walking through a park and stopping to stand at a kiosk for an espresso.

I carried a tiny book of Italian words and phrases. I love falling into conversations with people everywhere and there even more so. I am certain, though, that perhaps seven of my hundreds of words were understood by the lovely people of Rome. We took a train that passed through fields of sunflowers on our way to Florence and spent our days in markets, churches, museums, walking past the Arno River and mostly along the cobblestone streets, each piazza full of sculptures and vibrant people and fragrant foods and cappuccino.

But the very best part of the trip came when we traveled on three different trains to get to Ostra and Senigallia to see my husband’s family.

His cousin Laura is the bridge across waters and between generations. She lives on the land where my husband’s grandmother grew up and where her parents, grandmother and sister live. She lives with her husband and children in the house next door. Behind them are fields of sunflowers that stretch for acres. She works at a nursery and her mother tends a sprawling garden and chickens.

Laura grew up on stories of America, her father’s aunt and uncle had left the family farm when they were very young and came here. She had to see it and soon enough, she did. She loves the United States fully, with utter and absolute enthusiasm. She loves it so much that her father had a sculptor friend of theirs sculpt the Statue of Liberty. Just outside her front door stands a seven-foot tall stone sculpture of Lady Liberty.

Laura is a modern gal who has traveled everywhere but her roots run so very deep. She adores her family and every last branch of it that extends outward. She is the keeper of the connections. She and her family showed us the seaside and the hills, the country road that led to my husband's grandmother's first schoolhouse. She arranged a party for us and crowds of people gathered at their family farm, around long tables with sunflowers in jars at the center. There was endless food and so many of my husband’s – our - cousins and aunts and uncles to meet and know and love.

And now the keeper of connections is my friend and pen/email pal. I send her photos of her beloved New York whenever we are in the city. Though her English is fantastic, she writes in Italian, she says,  so mine will get better. I pull out that tiny phrasebook and try not to resort to Google translate. She writes often to hear tales from this side of the ocean and to tell us the news of her family and home. If Connecticut is in the news, she writes to be sure all is well.

Last Christmas she sent Italian honey and olive oil. This Christmas I sent little ornaments for their tree and she responded in this way today: Vi mandiamo tanti, tanti, tanti baci!!!!!!!!!!!Love Laura and Your Family in Italy GRAZIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:))))))))))) Being an exclamation point gal myself, I love her all the more for every last one.

When someone asks, so what did you bring back from Italy? I think about the pretty watercolor painting and a good friend, so many miles away.

Age

In the category of “it ain’t over til it’s over and then some,” I just read the niftiest news in The New York Times.  Cicely Tyson, 78, will be back on Broadway for the first time in almost 30 years and Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones will be back together on stage in the West End of London next fall.  Jones, who is 81, and Redgrave, 75, will play a pair of lovers in Much Ado About Nothing.  

  

I remember once seeing Shirley MacLaine singing and dancing on an awards show. At the time she was 50 and I was in my 30’s. I experienced some kind of seismic shift in my sensibilities about age at that very moment. I thought I knew what 50 looked like but this woman did not look or dance like whatever I thought 50 was. She seemed 35. I was wise enough then, I guess, to know that was really cool. Fifty didn’t have to be any certain thing.

Nor do 81, 78, or 75. 

I saw this tree yesterday morning, on a grey, chilly day and it made me
think of this line from a song, "It's just as natural as the weather in this moody sky today."

I had to think for a minute, where was that line from?  I remembered it was from "Hejira," one of Joni Mitchell's most beautiful songs. It's funny how a line from a song I first heard perhaps 25 years ago would float up into my consciousness as I looked at a tree.

I went back and listened to "Hejira" again and marveled at Joni Mitchell. "Hejira" is of those songs you can't listen to if you're standing on ground that's even the least bit wobbly; the song is that heavy with ache (until the very last line!)

At the start of the song, she speaks of a break-up, "I'm sitting in some cafe, a defector from the petty wars that shell shock love away."

Then she writes,

"I see something of myself in everyone
Just at this moment of the world
As snow gathers like bolts of lace
Waltzing on a ballroom girl."

It's a lucky thing that someone like Joni Mitchell writes down words and turns them into songs we take with us.

Driftwood.
I like the sound of the journey that lives in its name,
the sea taking it for a ride, marking it up
and smoothing away the bark.

But this was no piece of driftwood, it was a tree that arrived
one morning on the beach.
Where had it once been rooted? Had the storm taken it?
Why did it look like it was reaching out to the water,
poised to return to its wandering?

The two gulls spent several minutes squawking
back and forth to one another from a couple of craggy
rocks in the water. They flew off in tandem, alighting on
the air for a while, and then they gave the sidewalk
a bit of attention.

They strolled along, one behind the other,
for quite a stretch. Two old chums, it seemed.

                                                  Swept up by the sky.

Like everyone else, I have been thinking often about the picture of the New York City police officer kneeling down to help a homeless man put on a new pair of boots. I keep thinking about the man's feet, how cold and tired and sore they must have been. I think too about the officer's impulse, to go into the nearest shoe store and buy the man a warm pair of boots.  I think about the gentle approach of the officer and the way the photo came to us, a tourist taking the picture, noticing the beauty and sadness mingled in that moment. How she sent the picture to the police department and they put it up on their Facebook page without the officer knowing it. It says something, I think, that millions of people looked at the picture, liked it, shared it, tweeted it and mulled it over. I wonder where that man is now and if he is warm and safe.

I know this season is made up of thousands of such gestures, that there are Santas everywhere, young and old, finding quiet ways to give. But that moment on that bitterly cold Manhattan sidewalk will stay. 

I imagined what it would be like if one random December day everyone found a way 
to give another a pair of boots. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/nyregion/photo-of-officer-giving-boots-to-barefoot-man-warms-hearts-online.html

I pass this small scene almost every day,
two seemingly sturdy sets of stone stairs,
un-moored and fallen.

The Yale Art Gallery re-opens in full December 12th after renovations that went on for years. On Friday, much of it was open for a peek and so we peeked. All of it was worth the wait.

It made me think of those very first visionaries who thought up museums and public parks and libraries, those who said this beauty has to be shared! These acres of trees and meadows and rock, these stories and plays written hundreds of years back or just last year, this splash of color on canvas, this wooden mask, each must kept up and cared for and passed on to the next person and the next. 

Who wrapped it well in soft cloth until it ended up, somehow, here? So we could look closely and see and ponder. 

http://artgallery.yale.edu/

From The Daily Mail, August 1, 2012  
                                                  

Perhaps my favorite image of the Olympics was this one. The irrepressible Mayor of London stuck on a zipline above the gathering crowds.

Dangling there in a suit and sensible shoes, he quipped, "Get me a rope?” He called for a ladder and then he decided if was going to be there a while, he might as well root for the home team, waving the Union Jack.

Right there, Boris, the mayor, made it clear these Olympic Games weren’t going to be some kind of buttoned-up affair, more about pushing the limits athletically
and making merry. 

I miss the Olympics. The hope of them, the stories, the way the world felt those two weeks this past summer: smaller and wider and so full of  a kinder promise. 

I miss Boris. I miss the collective cheer, the new wonder.   

I miss Mary Carrillo riding around in a James Bond car 

and Missy Franklin and how she could break a world record and in the same breath seem to be saying, ‘ how fun is this, right?”  How her future held endorsement deals and probably more Olympic gold next time around but what she was really jazzed about was her senior swim season with her high school friends. 

I miss Mo Farah’s eyes. I'm not sure I'd ever seen a pair of eyes more intently focused on a finish line. Yet in  the last seconds of the 10,000 meters, he looked away to see where his friend and training partner was. He was there, behind him.  They placed first and second and, as they ran a victory lap, Mo Farah’s eyes, glittering and great, filled with tears. 

I miss Misty May Trainor and Kerri Walsh and how whenever they looked like they might falter on their way to beach volleyball gold, they flat-out refused. Before them, what I knew of volleyball was that in high school gym class the ball was always ricocheting off the wrong wall or someone else’s head, none of it pretty or easy on the forearms. Yet there I was swept up into a kind of beach volleyball mania. Those shots in sand ankle deep - how did they pull them off? Perhaps because they were a team at its most elemental, setting up shots, dusting each other off, whispering, shouting, cheering each other on, willing each other to win, in ways fierce and tender.  

And I miss Oscar Pistorius and how, as we  watched from our couches and living room chairs, he reminded us about guts and the notion that no matter what life hands us, the next day we have to rise up and move forward. Or we can  decide not to and live within `not to's’  boxy limits. 

In interview after interview he was asked how he did what he did. When he was little, he said his mother would tell him, Oscar, put on your legs, as matter of factly as she’d tell his brother to put on his shoes.

Go on.

So Oscar went on

and on

and, for those two weeks, took us with him.

It's a funny thing about holidays. I love them so, yet they remind me of

time passing and the swirling changes that life brings. I think about 

earlier Thanksgivings, that huge crowd of us around the card tables at 

my grandmother's little Cape, cousins spilling out of every corner, 

making mischief, dashing around the backyard, stealing back in for pie.

There was a soft comfort as it grew dark and our parents and grandparents and

aunts and uncles played cards and told tales and laughed and laughed 

before we were all gathered up for home. 

I think of Thanksgivings at my aunt's house, fringed by a beautiful woods. I loved how the house filled up with people and conversation, my grandma's apple pie, my aunt's spinach bread, my mother's clam dip, my father's salad, the turkey.

One Thanksgiving, it snowed and I remember dancing about in that snow for a moment and the boys - more than a dozen of them - tried to get a snowball war going with the merest dusting of snow.

We laugh now conjuring up that first turkey I made in perhaps the world's tiniest kitchen, in San Diego, calling my father 3,000 miles away for turkey tips, my mother for tips on everything else.

Then suddenly, we were the parents and the aunts and uncles and the folding tables and chairs were set up at our house and our kids and the cousins ran about, making a little merry and mayhem, in the best of traditions.

And I want it all back, those moments when our kids were little and when we were, all of those in our family who are no longer here with us. All at once I am wistful, for all of them and for each of those moments.

Yet, here is another one. The turkey's in the oven and there's cider with cinnamon sticks and nutmeg and cranberries in a big pot on the stove; the pumpkin pie is on the counter. Soon enough, the house will fill up and get loud and the kids will run around and we'll eat and talk and eat and laugh.
We'll put the coffee on and talk some more, together.

The Locks at Ponte Vecchio

When we first passed this garland of padlocks near the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, I had no idea that these were part of a legend on love.

I just knew that the bridge, which has stretched across the Arno River since 1345, was as beautiful as people had said. It lasted through world wars and massive flooding. The cobblestones that led up to it felt as if the footsteps of merchants and travelers from centuries past still echoed in them. 

The sun set slowly over the bridge, golden yellow and pink turning to a dusky blue-lavender and grey. Couples lingered there and leaned in close to one another. A guitarist played and sang.

Yet it was this strand of locks that struck me most. Legend has it that if a couple placed a padlock on or near the bridge and tossed the key into the river, their bond would never be broken. 

The problem was these locks started marring the bridge and its surroundings. The keys were filling up the bottom of the river. Now, couples can be fined for placing a lock there. Yet, each time the locks are cut away, locals told us, more locks turn up, from around the world. Hundreds and hundreds of them. I think about all this says about love.

Just the other day I was looking out the window
and the sun was starting to set and it wasn't quite
4:30 p.m.

Where did those July weeks go - when the sun won't quit
'til well after 8:00 p.m., when daylight stretches on and on?
The party ends far too soon on these dark-by-dinner-time,
nearly-December nights.

Then I remember the Husky season is upon us
and almost-winter doesn't look so bad.

Bliss.

I realize now I caught this gate on a tilt, a
jaunty angle. But still, I was captured by its endless detail
and for the stories I imagined it might whisper
to Stephen King or Toni Morrison or J.K. Rowling
or perhaps Walt Whitman if they'd happened
upon this New Haven sidewalk and stopped for a look.

The pale yellow lights winked on and
it's beginning to look a lot like...!

Reasons #894 and #895 on why I love New York ~
Union Square Park

One of my very favorite New York moments happened a few Decembers ago. It was a cold night, flecks of snow falling from the sky. I was walking through the city and wound up in Union Square, stopping by for hot apple cider and a look at the holiday fair. But there sitting on a short concrete former fountain was a guy with an actual portable typewriter and a homemade sign that read "Poems." The sign said they were free but donations were certainly welcome.

Turns out he was a college kid, trying to make a few bucks. Several people were in line. They told him what they wanted their poem to be about. He posed a few questions and he took a skinny strip of paper and typed the poem right there. I walked away but, curious, I returned. I waited my turn and then he asked me what I'd want the poem to be about and I said, "My husband." He asked me to describe him in one sentence, a kind of defining sentence. "He's a good man," I said. He asked for just a handful of other details. He was a poem or two behind, so he asked me to come back in 20 minutes.
When I did, there was a poem, real and true.
A poem that captured a guy he'd never met.
By then his hands were red with cold and more people were in line. I gave him $25 and I took
home that precious poem on a thin piece of light blue paper. I framed it and gave what might have been one of the best Christmas presents I've had the luck to give.

Take two/Union Square.
Last Saturday we were walking and came upon three guys in folding chairs holding up signs that said, "Advice 25 cents." Sure enough, there were people lined up. I stepped into line and posed a question to a guy named Scott. He was quite thoughtful about the question. He mulled it over. He took his time and talked it out. What he said gave me pause. "Are you a psychologist?" I asked, figuring he wasn't. No, he chuckled, he's a creative director and he showed me a bottle of juice he'd designed. The guy sitting next to him taught or went to MIT. I asked him what prompted him to set up his shingle there. He wanted to know the community more, hear what was on people's minds and offer something to them.

We walked back through the park much later in the day and he and others were still there, giving advice, piles of quarters and dimes and nickels in the cups on the ground in front of them.

A magic little box

When I got my Iphone almost two years ago, the guy selling it to me said, “I think you are the most excited person I have ever sold a phone to.” (He had been selling them for quite some time.)

“Gee willikers! Would you look at this; it’s a magic box!”

I seemed that naïve and goofy! But I didn’t care.

I was really stoked.

I still am.

This may be the second item I have owned in my life - an item that runs on some kind of power source - that I can totally rely on. (The first is our Toyota. It has 265,000 plus miles on it and it still travels  500 miles each week, most of the time willingly.)

But the car doesn’t fit in my pocket. It can’t take pictures. I can’t use it to find a new recipe for turkey stuffing or what time the next train leaves for Stamford.

It’s rare that I would say that something I bought changed my life but this has. It is unlike so many machines I've known, the fridge that froze everything on the second shelf no matter the temp, the washer that went on strike if it had to wash a couple extra towels, the computer monitor that tinged everything in a pale green and took two people to lug across a room or the computer that said “fatal error” now and then just to spice up an afternoon.  

This phone, well, it works! That’s just the very start of what makes it so fine.

I love that my photos can live on it, that they’re all here: the people I love, the places I’ve been lately, the adventures.

I can type in a few words and have so many, many questions answered; I can check a calendar, calculate a figure, search a map, read a book and flip through a half dozen newspapers and listen to music. Call, text and write family and friends. (No smoke signals? my husband always asks.)

It has a yellow legal pad that never runs out of pages and stores everything I need to write down, from the reminder to call the furnace guy to work notes, to the beginnings of a short story.  

There are the apps that let me:

Listen to lectures around the world I could never attend

Try to hit homeruns on a funny little baseball game I uploaded for one of my nephews

Play Words with Friends with friends miles away

Make a movie

Translate paragraphs into Italian

Receive a haiku daily

Play a teeny keyboard

Buy a plane ticket 

Check the weather in Chicago and Florence and Watch Hill, Rhode Island

Carry a flashlight

Look up at the stars in the sky and then hold the phone up and see

what might be hiding beyond what I can see in that deep black night,

other stars, planets and galaxies.

Magic box, indeed.

Handmade Wings

Each morning, I wake to a little gift in my inbox, a poem from Poets.org. I signed up for “A Poem a Day” a few years ago during National Poetry Month and each day a poem arrives. Sometimes, I don’t have time to read them but many days I do. Starting a morning with a poem, even for a quick minute, sets the world on a slightly different spin, a better one.

Today,  a poem arrived, "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert. I remembered seeing the poem before and, after I read it, I knew why I loved it. It centers on the idea that what may look like a mistake or even a spectacular fall to the observer may not entirely be the case. Between the attempt at something and a fall or an end, there was life lived.

  

It can be found here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16872

It begins this way:
"Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly."  

 While the poem is about a marriage or relationship that did end, he focuses on some of the moments in between; beautiful moments happened  that can’t be denied or forgotten.

I never was a fan of Greek mythology. I didn’t care much about Icarus until I shared a painting and another poem with a class of mine and some of the kids starting talking about how cool it was that Icarus actually did try to fly close to the sun to see it in all its brightness. They liked how he tried to soar, even if he was using wings made of wax and feathers, even though his dad said, “Hey, fly but don’t fly close to the sun.”  Being fourteen and fifteen years old, this made utter sense to them. Wings, sun, flying, a parent saying,  “Be careful!” - of course he would fly upward toward the sun.

But then of course, he falls.

In the painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by Pieter Brueghel,  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bruegel,_Pieter_de_Oude_-_De_val_van_icarus_-_hi_res.jpg)

a small pair of legs stick out of the water and a whole landscape, several people, animals and a traveling ship seem to pay not a whit of attention. He tried to soar; he fell and no one notices.
Still, it mattered.  I think that is the point.

We are all flying around on these handmade wings, on journeys epic and small, toward love or a new job or a creative inclination, stepping off and out toward a possibility. The falls happen, so do the mistakes. In his poem Gilbert seems to be saying ah, but the attempt! 
The chances we chase and take, they are what make life quite sad sometimes but also good and, every now and then, absolutely grand.

After I read the poem, I wanted to see if I could write to Gilbert and tell him how much I liked the poem and so many others of his, "A Brief  for the Defense" and "Horses at Midnight without a Moon." I went in search of a mailing address this morning and, sadly, I found out that Gilbert died this week at 87 after years of fighting Alzheimer's. The poem sent this morning from Poets.org was a quiet tribute.
I went back to the poem and felt cheered by the last lines, his own hurrah:
"I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph."

                                                ***                                        ***

Icarus turns up in a number of other poems like:

“Musee des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden

“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams

I’m more intrigued by Greek mythology now, thinking about how a story travels on and on across centuries and landscapes, how a myth leads to a painting. Then a poet writes a poem about a painting about a myth.

                                       ~                                 ~                              ~

                                                         Poetry on Wednesdays

Rallying around,
in all kinds of ways.

First Snow

The snow keeps dancing down
and it's just the seventh of November.
I made some corn chowder and it's warming
on the stove. Two candles flicker;
some quiet piano drifts around the room
and a good book waits nearby on the table.
A sweet little reprieve,
a night-time snow day.


 

Hope

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
and never stops at all..."

        ~ Emily Dickinson