Broken.
But already they are starting to put everything
back together again.

And they asked, "How can I help?"

In these last two days before the storm started in earnest, I heard a report
on the news that said that so many people were calling Milford's emergency 
operations saying they wanted to help, they had to turn many of them away. 

One of my most vivid memories when our old house flooded in 1992, was my brother
floating on a piece of wood under our house, pulling out insulation that had
filled with gasoline. People's small gas tanks, for filling lawnmowers, had floated 
free in the flood waters and mingled with the salt water. It was December, raw, 
cold, and picnic benches, plastic toys, pieces of fence bobbed around in what 
lingered as knee-deep water.  There he was with my husband,  in the cold water under
the house, helping in a way we could never forget. That was just one way 
people pulled for people in that neighborhood all those years ago, neighbors, 
family, friends and strangers asking, "What do you need?"
" What can I do?" 

It's what is already happening now before the brunt of the storm hits. They're  
stepping right in for others up and down the coastline, turning to people 
they know and people they don't, asking that same question, "What can I do?"   

Late last night the movie Seabiscuit was on.  The main character is hungry and
has been for such a long time, for the same things so many others hungered 
for in the time of the Great Depression, a good meal, work, respect and 
human connection. He is offered work and a chance and a big bowl of soup. 
He digs in. 

And the narrative voice says:
"They called it "relief" but it was a lot more than that. 
It had dozens of names...W.P.A., the C.C.C.
But it really came down to just one thing.
For the first time in a long time, someone cared. 
For the first time in a long time, you were no longer alone."

Raking the yard the other day, we made a couple of massive piles of leaves.
The cat flitted in and out of them. I remembered when the kids used to
romp in the leaves and thought even further back to when my brothers
and sister made leaf piles so tall they could jump out of the trees into them.
The jumps: daredevilish; the landing: soft.

I still love the crackle and crunch of leaves underfoot.

Seems like it's always calm before the storm.
Today the news was all about "Frankenstorm"
but the waters on the beach didn't let on
that anything at all might be approaching.

And yet

A haiku, at first it seems the merest of gifts.

17 syllables.  Three lines. One sustaining image.

Jot one down on the corner of a notebook page, fold it twice and tuck it in your pocket

and it’s smaller and lighter than the comic in a piece of bubble gum.  

Often, though, these pocket poems and their three lines have burrowed their way inside and

stayed.  I think about a haiku by Issa, translated by Robert Hass.

The world of dew

Is the world of dew,

            And yet, and yet—

So slight, so full. There's an ache that lives there and a hope too. 

Issa gives us miles to walk around in the last line and much to mull over. We can walk and notice the dew and the whole of the world.  

 “And yet, and yet--"    

                                                                                      ~ Poetry on Wednesdays

A Red Pick-up and a Pair of Cowboy Boots

We were driving on the highway when we passed this car carrier and seemingly dangling off the back was a bright red pick-up truck. 

For a minute I imagined rattling about in that pick-up, hay tumbling out the back, on a dusty ranch road someplace out in Montana or a long stretch of plain in Nebraska. I saw an endless sky and a white house with the two front windows open, curtains waving in a soft wind, an old barn out back.  I saw a pair of well-worn cowboy boots, scuffed up and pretty.

I wondered what that life would be.

Why so serious?

Last Rose of the Season

Each year, as the leaves change color and fall, collecting on the front steps, drifting and dashing around the backyard, inevitably a slender rose blooms. Sometimes the rose lingers, through frosty mornings and cold grey afternoons. One small rose staying on through late November, a quiet reminder that once all the leaves are gone, the branches empty,  the airy, pale blush of colors will be back again next Spring.

A ride on the red line, Chicago, Illinois.

At the street fair, an artist

Work/One: 

They find words and phrases they like: “just” or “true” and “paint your life” or “I like people” or “everything moves” and they heat press the words onto canvas. Then they take to their sewing machines and sew and sew some more, turning the old into something new - wristlets and passport holders and bags and necklaces. They sell their wares at street fairs and holiday fairs and online as 100percentcool designs. They are two artists, Evija and Inga.

This is their work and they love it, Evija said.

It was a street fair that went on for blocks and blocks down Broadway in Greenwich Village, with all the usual odd and wonderful stuff, pickles in wooden barrels, corn on the cob grilling over hot coals, scarves and t-shirts and sunglasses and tiny yellow cabs for sale. One booth had a long canvas sign that read, “Handmade from recycled materials, fabrics and clothes:  Wallets, bracelets, bags.”  A crowd had gathered around the table so I stopped for a look.

A woman was admiring a handbag, and the artist, Evija told us how she and Inga, the two-person design and production team, do their work. They go in search of nifty fabric, a pretty piece of canvas, a long stretch of material. They gather up ties and belts and turn them into bag straps. Sometimes they’ll take out turquoise or lavender or red paint and spread material across the floor and paint stripes or bursts of color. They heat press those words and put it all together.

The woman left with a handbag she held close. At the table a man searched for a while and then chose a wallet. He showed it to his girlfriend and he seemed quite taken with it.    

“Where is it going?” Evija asked him.
He looked down at the wallet he’d just purchased. “To Italy,” he said. “Genoa.”

She said she always asks where each piece is going. She likes knowing that their art travels, whether to Italy or Connecticut or the next borough.   

Work

Work

Jobs.

These two words are such a part of the national and international conversation, we can’t pick up a paper, listen to the news, talk to a friend or a family member much of the time without one of them coming up.

They are words that have the power to shape and define us.

Work is what we do, how we spend so many of our waking hours. Work is what many seek and can’t find.  Work can be enthralling, dangerous, numbing. These words clothe us and feed us, literally and sometimes, if we are lucky, in many other ways. Work can inspire us or sometimes even undo us.

I have been thinking a lot about what work is. I wonder about that question we ask or are asked from the very start, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” We also ask, “How can I make a living?” and I think about the word “living” and how essential our work is. Are we our jobs? What does it mean to love a job or to endure one? To wake each day jazzed to get there, just to get started. 

How can we create jobs that move us forward as people and as our own individual selves? What jobs do we hope our children and grandchildren will have? It seems to me everyone should have the right to work and to work hard each day and do work that matters, and, dare I say, work we like? But how?  

So I decided I’d start by talking to people, asking questions about what they do and why they do it and what their work means to them. Maybe I will find out what work gives or doesn't give them.

If I am lucky, I will gather up the stories and see a larger picture form.

I love the company of a cafe,
the steam off the cup of cappuccino or a
good morning cup of tea,
the  music, the old friends meeting up,
the barista who hums show tunes. 
I like the moments that unfold while I'm 
typing or talking like the time when a Dad 
said to his daughter, who was maybe four or five, 
"I see a new freckle on your face." She stopped
sipping her hot chocolate and said, "Yay!"
and then she danced around the place
and the Dad laughed 
and folks smiled.

Hopscotch

I stopped by to visit my sister, one of the best things about a late Friday
afternoon. My nephew dashed in with a couple of his buddies. They'd walked
home from middle school. He filled me in on the latest and then they were
off to toss the football around out front.

When I got home, I saw this picture on a kitchen counter full of family pictures.
He was three or four then and hopscotching along the driveway.

I was struck, again, about the way time moves. Where had those seven or eight years
traveled to exactly?    

Lean on

The barnacle's hitchhiking on the shell
that's hiding out in the tin-plated can,
broken open and jagged, yet resting there
on small rocks
on the sand.

                                 


                                                   The landscape around us that day was
                                                   a muted brown, fallen leaves near-to-crunchy,
                                                   grass grown pale-green-tired
                                                   and suddenly: this!

Not Falling

I was listening to the news this morning and I felt like Henny Penny. The sky was falling.
Economies were cracking some more; candidates were slinging fresh mud and I switched stations before I could hear anything about crime.

They didn't mention the kid yesterday who held the door for the woman who had her hands full or the girl who finally hit the high note or the man who walked into his lab, closed the door, looked into the microscope and worked all afternoon toward an answer, toward a cure, like so many other afternoons before it. I didn't hear about the guy who took his bike on the train, got off the train and rode across many city blocks to get to the class he really liked.

So I kept the news off and read a poem, "Possibilities" by Wislawa Szymborska. At first it seemed like not much more than a list. As usual with a poem, I had to look again. I thought about it for a while and then I read another poem, "Ode to my Socks" by Pablo Neruda.

It was raining outside but the sky was washed in pale blue. And it wasn't falling.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-poems-4-e.html

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ode-to-my-socks/

Jack-o-lantern

I have yet to find fault with anything pumpkin. 

Pumpkin spice in a coffee.

A pumpkin on a front porch, pumpkins filling a stretch of field, 

cinnamon-y pumpkin candles

lit up on the wooden table on a cool October night. 

In October

And sometimes...

And sometimes there are a Frank and a Will just when you need them.

I was driving along early in the morning, that quick dash to get ahead of a busy day
and then a thunk and a steady drumbeat not coming from the radio and the messy rumble of a flat.
I limped the car along to a side street, pulling into a lot full of truck trailers. I was only about a mile from home and considered for a minute riding on the flat. In the lot, I saw a tent tucked in between some cars and trucks and a dog tied up in front of the tent. He eyed me and I eyed him back. 

I wish I could say I knew how to change a tire. There was that one keystone cop-ish time I tried to help my husband as we both bumbled about, tangling with lug nuts that just didn't want to let loose.
So it remained on that back burner to-do list: "learn at last to change a tire!!" like "learn more Italian" and "reorganize the kitchen drawers," those items that somehow never quite make it to the top of the list but should.

I called home and then I remembered my husband was out talking a walk. I was about to call Triple A when two guys  pulled into the lot. They were heading into work, cheery as anything on an early Sunday morning. Before I could say a word, the man who later introduced himself as Will said, "Got a flat?" and his buddy Frank said, "We'll change it for you."

Turns out, Frank said, I ran over a long thin wrench that was lying in the road. It wedged in and tore a massive hole in the tire. "Would ya look at that!" he said. "What are the chances?" It took some doing to get it out.

And of course the spare was flat; happens all the time they said; the spare loses air waiting around in the trunk. They filled the spare with air; they pulled off  the flattened tire and got the spare on. I had seven dollars in my purse. I said I would be back with more. They didn't even want to take the seven dollars.

"Nah," Frank said. "We like helping people. It's what you do, you know?"   

The Words We Keep

She was sitting in a bookstore in New York, in the toy section, with a little boy who played at a Lego table. On her arm was a tattoo with words that wrapped themselves around her biceps and down her arm. I’d never seen so many words on an arm and they were delicately written.  I wondered what the words meant to her and why she’d decided to keep them, probably forever, there on her arm.

I was just breezing into the bookstore to buy a present. I bought the book, took the elevator down and turned around and rode back up.  I had to ask her about her tattoo. Was it a story? A song she loved?  So I asked.

She smiled and said, “They’re poems.”  She’d written one for her mother.  The other poems were for her sisters.

We keep words in so many places, notes tucked inside books, quotes on a fridge, cards with words we love in a favorite box or a kitchen drawer, words on our walls. Words that anchor us for a couple of minutes or make us laugh or remind us. She can look at her arm and find her mother there and her sisters too.

                                                 The old barn door drew me in.
                                                   

Poems on Wednesdays

I arrived a little late to the poetry party but I am so glad I decided to go.

I’ve hopscotched around the world through poems. Found and lost myself in poems. Felt a little less alone. Tried on other points of view. Felt the cold of a winter and the loneliness that lived there; danced with daffodils and listened to the crickets in a poem.

For a while, I kept a poem in my purse, folded up somewhere there at the bottom of the tumult but there.     

One day at a bookstore I found the March 2004 edition of Poetry. Inside were a few poems by Atsuro Riley. Even his named sounded like a poem.  The first one, “Picture” started like this:

“This is the house (and jungle-strangled yard) I come from/ and carry.”

The five poems were thick with imagery, taking me to a South I didn’t know.  Told through the point of view of a young boy, we see his Mama, “mainly: boiling jelly. She’s the apron-yellow (rickracked) plaid in there.”

He takes us to his front porch: “Our (in-warped) wooden porch door is kick-scarred and/splintering. The hinges of it rust-cry and –rasp in time with/ every Tailspin-wind…”

Rust-cry! How does Riley know to put his words together in this way? How does someone make such lovely, lively mayhem with the same stack of half a million words everyone has to pick from? He crosshatches words and backbends others. He dares.

He ends one poem with these lines:

“Ex-anchored for example/

Yesterdaddy./

Zags.”

His poems tell stories I am still puzzling out.

   

Traveling

 12,554 miles.

I haven’t gone anywhere.

Yet I’ve gone everywhere.

I first got on the bike in May 2005 and I couldn’t get the pedal around once.

My knee was miffed. Round as a pancake as it was after surgery, it was hard on the eye and it seemed to know it, so it decided not to bend.  After many days getting on the bike with the pedal not budging, one afternoon at physical therapy I started to cry. I tucked my head down as if that would somehow make me invisible but an older gentleman who’d been walking on the treadmill paused on his way to a weight machine. “It’ll go `round eventually.”  When it does, he said, just keep going.

It did. And I have.

We bought a stationary bike, carted it upstairs and there, when the sun is near rising, I hop on.

A few months into it, I wondered how far I was going. So I copied a map of the U.S., mapped a route and kept track of the miles. Four miles a day.  After five weeks, I made it across New York into Pennsylvania.  It took me two years and a month to make it to the Pacific. After a while I didn’t map the route anymore but I penciled in the miles. Four miles, five miles each morning, now six.

I didn’t see the pretty back roads I would have loved to have meandered by. Didn’t ride the just-waking streets of Chicago or stop to admire a sudden field of sunflowers just around a bend, didn't smell the sweet tang of just-cut grass.I didn’t see a river threading its way through a hillside or a small town as the evening lights start to twinkle on.

But a few minutes into each ride, something always shifted. With Joni Mitchell playing or Chaka Khan, Wye Oak or the B-52’s, my mind would flutter off elsewhere. The world would wash away and I’d start traveling.

This week, it turns out, I’ve gone 12,554 miles. A grand number built on four and five and six. I’ve discovered there really is something to what Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher,  said so many, many years ago:  a journey of a thousand miles does begin with a single step, or once around with a pedal.

                                   ~                                             ~                                           

282 miles - London to Paris

32 miles - the Greenway bike path around the island of Manhattan

1,599 miles - Key West to the tip of Maine

655.8 miles – the length of the Pacific Coast Highway

13,171 - the span of all of the parts of the Great Wall of China

1,290 miles - Victoria Falls, Zambia to Mt. Kilimanjaro

312. 4 miles - Lisbon, Portugal to Madrid, Spain

2,981 miles – Connecticut to San Francisco

Tangible

I heard a radio guy talking about Derek Jeter the other day. In a conversation with a caller, he was saying that Jeter didn’t have the best arm, the quickest legs or the strongest bat. Yet he will one day be called a baseball immortal.  

What is it then that makes Jeter so good, if not his arm, his bat or quickness?

The intangibles, he said.

The intangibles. I am a big fan of intangibles but the tangibles seem pretty clear to me:

Derek Jeter loves what he does.

He works at it every day.

He listens to himself, not the naysayers or the know-it-alls.

He’s a team guy. As he reaches milestone after milestone, every once in a while he will admit he was “a little excited” to move up a rung on the all-time hits list. But then he starts talking about the team and what his teammates did.  Every time.  

He’s clutch. When the game is on the line and he’s up at bat, he has said he knows he can get a hit.

He believes he will win. What a way to make your way through the world. Will I win? Yes.

And when he says it, the funny thing is, he’s absolutely humble. He just knows he has something inside himself he can draw on.

He leads the team in his own quiet way.

He is never effusive or ebullient,

just rock steady and reliable as a new dawn.