Patricia Wild

Actually, Patience Has Nothing To Do with It!

Yesterday began Week Four after hip replacement surgery. The day before, as unfailingly supportive as it has been throughout this adventure, New England Baptist Hospital sent me another encouraging email with this subject-line: “Be patient. You’re still recovering.” (Without exception, New England Baptist’s staff and my care have been exceptional!)

So, yes, I am aware that I am still recovering. I am aware that recovery is an up and down, non-linear process. (We Quakers are rather fond of process.) And, yes, I get very excited when I notice how I can do something I couldn’t do before. (I’ll spare you the details about getting dressed.) And, yes, twice a day I marvel at the brilliant and savvy series of physical therapy exercises I have been given; they work! They’re working!

So why do I feel so sad?

Hoping I might find some insights—and marveling at its timeliness—I read Hermione Hoby’s essay, “Sick Lit”in this week’s New Yorker. And while sickness and recovery from surgery aren’t precisely the same experience, to be reminded that even gifted and breathtaking writers like Virginia Woolf, whose essay “On Being Ill,” was published one century ago, can only approximate how it feels to experience pain offered up a major clue. To translate this approximation into twenty-first century terms, though my nurses and doctors and physical therapists ask me about my pain as if on a scale of 1 to 10, none of them ask me to describe that pain. (Which, BTW, with initial help from oxycontin and now from Tylenol and ice packs, has never been worse than a 5.5.) Because they know I can’t. Not really.

This universal inability to adequately communicate pain? Suddenly, light dawned over Marblehead. Suddenly I had language to explain my foul mood. One word, actually, but as efficacious as Dumbo’s magic feather. It had been my grief counselor who offered me this one, apt word as I’d approached the one-year anniversary of my brother’s death. At one of our sessions, I’d described a recent, perfectly lovely moment. Happy, relaxed, and surrounded by beauty, waves and waves of grief suddenly washed over me; threatened to overpower me. But hadn’t.

“That must have been so lonely for you,” he’d offered.

Recovery is a lonely experience. Though I have been cheered and encouraged and deeply moved by New England Baptist’s staff, my friends, family, and my awesome PT during this process, recovery is a solo act.

My growing edge is to acknowledge and to accept this loneliness, this aloneness, this piercing and sad isolation. (And, yes, just naming it has enormous power!) Weirdly, naming and working-on-acceptance create their own peculiar solidarity with all who are in pain! And I also need to be reminded how, Week One, I’d so loved Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of An Octopus. Montgomery models pure, unadulterated and nonjudgmental curiosity when spending time with a series of these fascinating, multi-legged creatures! May I remember to remain curious.

But I already know this: Months from now, this whole experience will be but a blur—and a memory about as vague as whatever puny language any of us can offer to describe our condition. Fifty-six years ago, my LaMaze instructor had explained to my childbirth class that we’d certainly experience pain during childbirth—but we wouldn’t remember it afterwards. “No one remembers,” she’d pointed out. “That’s why women keep having children!”

Knitting Up

For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

At eighty one, I still feel such gratitude for my public-school music teacher from fifth to eighth grade. Young, pretty, with dark curly hair and warm, brown eyes, Mrs. Stasiw nodded, smiled at me as our class sang together, picked me to perform at school concerts, chose my artwork, inspired by the intriguing records she played for our class, to hang on her wall. (Trust me: that never happened before nor since!) That I also still carry one jarring, harsh, seemingly-racist memory of her has been one of those mysterious and puzzling cognitive dissonances I’ve pondered over the years; definitely an upsetting learning experience. (One of her colleagues, my odious eighth-grade homeroom teacher, routinely used the n-word. So in the late fifties, such uglinesses happened in the Fayetteville-Manlius school district, an affluent suburb outside Syracuse, New York.)

The incident occurred sometime during the Calypso Craze. As I remember it, one day Mrs. Stasiw made disparaging remarks about calypso singer, Harry Belafonte. Who’d seemingly become a superstar. Overnight. She’d been quite put out by his much-photographed bared chest. His gorgeous, dark-skinned, bared chest. Her point being, as I recall, that music was not about a performer’s physicality or sexuality but about, you know, music. More damning though: Belafonte’s dark skin was somehow offensive, questionable, it seemed; dangerous, perhaps? That’s certainly what I thought she was telling us.

But an obituary in yesterday’s Boston Globe makes me now question how I’ve remembered that nasty incident. Because a world-famous Trinidadian calypso singer, Slinger Francisco, better known as “The Mighty Sparrow,” had died, his obituary offered a brief history on calypso music. Which, I learned, was and still is protest music. As they’d engaged in the back-breaking and dangerous work of producing sugar, the enslaved people of the West Indies plantations sang sly, disparaging calypso songs mocking their oppressors. (And if you listen to The Mighty Sparrow’s lyrics, calypso is all about the sexual prowess of its singers, too!)

So is it possible that Mrs. Stasiw, perhaps a musicologist as well a gifted choral director, was actually trying to tell our class something about that history? And her disparaging remarks about a gorgeous man-of-color musician weren’t about his dark skin but more that Belafonte prettified a raw, unvarnished, transatlantic slave trade story?

There’s A Story There

Had a miracle happened? Is this forlorn and neglected Somerville corner actually a holy place? Like Lourdes, had a disabled pilgrim been cured? And gratefully left behind their no-longer-needed crutches? Or could it be that those awesome folks stealthily posting “Board of Peace” notices all over the city decided to add those poignant props to their anti-war message? “Remember?” those crutches demand. “Those daily headlines about ‘Strikes in the Middle East’ result in death, maiming, injury.” Who knows?

Guess I’ll just let the Mystery be.

Here’s what I do know. I’m about to need crutches, myself. (Actually, post hip-replacement surgery, I’ll probably be using one of those two-wheeled walkers, instead.) So it’s not mysterious that of all the detritus we city dwellers encounter daily, guess what I noticed. Yes, to put this into Quakerese, they “spoke to my [literal] condition.”

The real Mystery I’d like to solve is this: What am I not seeing?

“Waiting”

Arlo: “When’s my [fourth] birthday?”

His mother: “In two weeks.”

Arlo: “It’s waiting for me.”

Besotted yet a long-distance grandmother to this exalted, goldilocks child, I often wonder how his growing-up-in-a post-COVID-world mind works. Our connectivity maintained by Saturday morning FaceTimes, for example, sometimes he “feeds” me some little breakfast treat. I make suitable munching noises; praise whatever I just “ate.” We both know this isn’t real. One of us still marvels at the technology required for this shared moment. One of us doesn’t.

But both of us wait. Both of us, clear-eyed, see the horizon. His is about a party, cake, candles, gifts. And mine is about mid-term elections, upcoming surgery, wondering, hoping if I can live long enough to witness a future I’ve spent most of my life working for and now must simply pray for without ceasing.

Light Dawns Over Marblehead

September—and early fall—upon us, I slept with my bedroom window open last night. At dawn this morning, three voices woke me up. Pre-coffee obviously, it took me a few moments to grok what I was hearing; conveniently, the still-undetermined creatures just outside my window repeated their call-and-response long enough for me to decode: a young man and a young woman encountered a turkey and the turkey and the young woman were having a moment.

Some background to this groggy moment: Like the bear invasion in Vermont, like coyotes gobbling up the household pets of more leafy greater-Boston communities should those pets wander outside, turkeys now share my densely-populated Somerville neighborhood. Well, actually, just like those intrusive and insouciant and fearless bears and coyotes, turkeys don’t “share.” Ask any impatient driver who has hooted at a mother turkey and her offspring as they slooowy cross a busy street at rush-hour. Or the unfortunate young man in Harvard Square sent to the hospital recently because he’d mistakenly thought turkeys were like seagulls or a pigeons; you could just shoo them away. Um, nope.

More background: Like many women, should I hear a male’s and a female’s raised voices, I am instantly on High Alert. Do I need to grab my robe, noisily and dramatically open my front door, phone in hand, be a sudden and stern presence? (It’s happened.)

But this is what I want to write about: despite how confusing this scenario had been, and how half-asleep I was, happily and joyfully I knew that I knew. Yes, male voice, strident, loud, blustery, yes, female voice, more gentle, soothing, appeasing. So, then, yes, of course! Grab my robe. But then, hmmm, that third voice, that back and forth between the female and the whatever. Who, what was it?

It was that unseen woman’s mollifying tone and how she’d repeated a one-syllable call that called up a memory. (Eventually. First I had to foggily conclude that the third voice wasn’t human.) Like my neighbors, I’d heard that third-party’s sound before. Lo, light dawned over Marblehead: That’s a young woman who knows not to mess with a turkey! That’s a turkey actually responding to her call!? (Later I learned, that sound is known as a cluck.)

There are so many aspects to getting old that suck. Like, as a friend and I agreed just yesterday, watching dear friends get old, frail, confused, too. But, oh, the joy to realize that over the decades you’ve learned a thing or two.

“Mill Girls: The Women Who Brought You the Ten-Hour Working Day!”*

Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five” playing over and over in my head this morning, I’ve been reminded that today is also Women’s Equality Day, the day commemorating when some women were finally allowed to vote. That painful some—most women of color had to wait until the 1965 Voting Rights Act to be allowed to vote—plus Parton’s somehow-cheerful song of oppression urging me on, I want to lift up—and commemorate—our nation’s first labor organizers: mill girls. (Who’d called themselves operatives.) Yes, my child, before there were suffragettes there were young women, first in Rhode Island and then in Massachusetts, who’d organized strikes to protest longer hours with less pay. (Can you blame them?) Although in those earliest days of labor versus management, those plucky and determined young woman called their collective action turn-outs, not strikes. An ingenious strategy, it turned out. Because if the women working in just one room of a mill turned out, i.e. turned away from their power looms and spinning jennies and marched outside, the whole mill became inoperable! Brilliant.

Why, you may wonder, am I writing this bit o-distaff history today? (Besides wanting to acknowledge Dolly Parton.) Because stories like these are what I, unconsciously imagining my granddaughters as my audience, perhaps, am led to write about these days.

*That first turn-out in RI was in 1824. The first in Lowell was in 1836. The 10 hour day in Massachusetts began in 1874! Women largely led this initiative, repeatedly signing petitions, giving speeches, sending letters to the editor, begging the Massachusetts state legislature to intervene, etc., but since only men could vote, men were called upon to help, too.

When It Seems Too Good To Be True, . . .

It could have been so wonderful. In a flash, I saw just how perfect it might be. After all, this “Sharon M. Torres” so obviously, so exquisitely, so sensitively got me, got Strands! And “she” wants to promote my book?! (Even now, even after discovering that “her” adoring email’s first sentence is a scam classic,* I struggle to use those quotes; I still cannot fully accept that “she” isn’t real. Somehow I feel uneasy; as if I’m betraying a kindred spirit?) What a joy it would be to work alongside such an insightful and thoughtful woman—who writes so well!

It’s odd: At eighty-one, mostly I feel as though I’ve weathered a spectrum of feelings over the years; life’s thrown me enough curve balls that, mostly, I’m “Oh, that again?” But as if I were some benign, Other-Me poised a few feet above my desktop as I read “Sharon’s” email, I watched myself, as my sister would say, be torn. At my age, I have had plenty of disappointments, of course. I am no stranger to cynicism; to mentally sneering “Yeah, right!” So, immediately, I told myself: “This is obviously too good to be true.” But how thirsty I was, apparently, how much more desperate than I’d actually understood or acknowledged I’d been to be so thoroughly seen, understood, lauded! I watched myself sneer as I read—yet drink in and linger over every AI-generated syllable.

Sigh.

* In case this happens to you, here it is: I hope this message finds you well, and perhaps even finds you smiling, because I have just finished Strands: An Apprenticeship with Grief and Loss, and I have to tell you: it stayed with me long after I put it down.

“Where am I? Where Are We?”

In preparation for an upcoming reading/storytelling session, I spent some time this week with two ancient stories, one available at an Imax theater near you, the other, Numbers 21, from the Hebrew Bible. [Fun Fact: “The Odyssey”was written at about the same time as the Book of Isaiah—which comes eighteen books after Numbers.] In order to encourage my listeners to tell their own stories at this reading, I parsed both tales for key and, literally, telling elements.

One such element is truly stand-out: both stories’ tension, their drama, is because both Odysseus and the Israelites, who have fled from bondage but who still wander, yearn for something. They’re in-between. Which agitates us! In-between-ness/waiting for the other shoe to drop, our protagonist (s) lost, confused, thwarted? We humans hate that! It makes us quite anxious. And why both stories are so compelling.

[Another Fun Fact: If you’re yearning to learn way more than you probably wanted to about this unresolvedness in music, this video about “The Tristan Chord” is exactly what you seek.]

And I’m left with a question: Now that I better recognize how potent such unresolvedness is/feels; now that I’ve isolated and named this particular and very human source of unease, will I feel less anxious, tense? (Pretty sure I know the answer.)

There’s A Story There:

Saturday, I’d helped to host a memorial at my Quaker meeting. Neither the deceased person nor his partner, who’d arranged the memorial, nor any of the guests were Quakers; because both once attended our Meeting’s Wednesday night sharing circle, the deceased’s partner chose to hold her boyfriend’s memorial at Friends Meeting at Cambridge. By design or by happenstance, the deceased person’s large, multigenerational family and a much smaller number of the partner’s adults-only family arrived hours apart. As host cum amateur anthropologist, this gap allowed me to interact with and to closely observe the deceased’s family. And discovered something.

Youngest of eight, the deceased and his family had grown up in Jefferson Park, a public-housing project in North Cambridge, now torn down. A tightly-knit community, apparently, I gleaned that everybody knew everybody’s business at Jefferson Park. And maybe got used to spending most of their time with family and those they’d grown up with? So why say something everybody already knows? Which might explain something about that family: they were not storytellers! (Of course, to be fair, having never attended either a Quaker-style memorial nor a sharing circle such as the one the deceased and his girlfriend had attended, no one had given any thought as to what they might want to share; the story they’d wanted to tell.)

Yet in a sort of disjointed, one member of the deceased’s family offered a little this, another added a little that, one amazing story emerged: One of the children, an autistic and non-verbal great-nephew, had gone to the hospital with his extended family to pay a last visit. This ten or twelve year old (whose non-verbal interactions I’d already noticed) hugged his dying great-uncle, “one last time,” as one contributor to this story put it, then that child and his immediate family left. In the hallway, however, that little boy told his mother, “He needs one more hug.” And went back to do just that. The deceased died soon afterward.

“He’d told you that?” I asked his mother, astonished. “Out loud?” She’d nodded.

“That is a wonderful story!” I gushed. She looked at me with what seemed surprise. But, perhaps, something else?

The next morning at meeting for worship, I spent more time reflecting on the story, itself; its message of the Ineffable. Beyond words. Mysterious. How the Love that great-uncle had generously extended to that child—and to all the children of his bounteous family, apparently—and that such a generous soul lay dying had so moved that always-silent child to speak? And to hug? What a gift!

During that shared-silence space Sunday, I’d felt such teary gratitude, too, to have grown up with stories! My grandmother’s stories of growing up in a huge extended family in Worcester who’d spent summers at their family’s farm in Princeton. The “Martin and Judy” stories I’d heard in Unitarian Sunday School as a child. And how, apparently, over time, I’d had the joy—and privilege, the luxury, it seems, I realized, remembering that mother’s face—to recognize what makes a great story. A telling story.

For as the mother of a child with such profound challenges, that woman might very well have been thinking: “My son’s special needs are not intriguing. And I am always exhausted!”

Maybe.

Who Tells The Story; Who Listens

Mulling over facilitating a smallish group—maybe six to eight people—taking turns telling stories online. And they’d meet for a finite amount of time? Six to eight weeks? And each week’s stories would center around a pre-determined prompt? And I would offer different time slots for these six-to-eight-week sessions so as to accommodate different time zones? Lots of details to work out, lots of logistical questions remain, lots more mulling required. But such an absolutely-free venue feels like the next, organic, and faithful iteration of my leading to write Strands.

In order to ground myself better as I begin this exploration, this morning I did an online search for a well-remembered short story I’d read twice in 1959, first as a freshman at Fayetteville-Manlius High School, outside of Syracuse, New York and then, after my family moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, as a sophomore at (segregated) E. C. Glass High. Though my classmates and teachers in those two English classes radically differed, “Sex Education” by Dorothy Canfield Fisher remained solid, fascinating, and illuminating both above and below the Mason-Dixon Line. (And, let’s face it, what teenager, whether northern suburbanite or southern small-city dweller, wouldn’t devour a story entitled “Sex Education”?)

Why do I use the word “solid”? Not only does Fisher’s story address the fundamental questions posed as the title of this post, that a piece of writing I’d admired in one classroom again showed up in a completely alien and confusing place and time and setting? What an enormous relief! Finally! Here was something I’d actually known, experienced, had opinions about.

Because Fisher’s work had been so pivotal and so gratifying, over the ensuing sixty-seven years I’ve searched for that still-treasured story—although I couldn’t remember its author or title. But this morning, either because I finally entered the salient keywords (“women on porch telling stories,” “cornfield,” “minister”), voila! And, BTW, just to underline one of the story’s basic themes of how a remembered story shifts over time and when told to different-aged audiences, “women on porch telling stories” is not exactly right. That’s not exactly what happens.

Close enough, though, apparently. Or maybe this graced, “Open Sesame” moment is the Universe telling me: “Keep mulling. You’re on the right track.”

Let’s Talk!

To date, I’ve given seven readings since August, when Strands was published. Each reading has taught me something about how best to share this many-themed memoir. What I am noticing is that more and more, these “readings” are actually opportunities for wonderful and deep conversations; folks have shared powerful and moving personal stories, too. Family stories. Stories about transgenerational trauma. About learning to live with uncertainty. And radical acceptance. The loneliness of sorrow, grief. Stories about how we relate to the word God. And how to offer a safe and confidential space to talk about Big Feelings. Good stuff!

So for the next month or two, as I finish another memoir, I will not be giving any more readings. Instead, in worship and in community with my Nurturing Faithfulness Group, I’ll explore how I’m being called; what does this unexpected but exciting development mean? (Which, frankly, may actually be more exciting and fulfilling for me than for the others in these de facto sharing circles? So I’ll need to pay attention to that, too!)

A one-woman PR/Marketing/Promotion Department with a zero budget, I have walked, driven, or taken the T to these readings; all but one have been hybrid. So I am, of course, exploring both more local options and online venues. If, Gentle Reader, you would like to offer your book club, cozy living room, church basement, the community room in your favorite cafe, etc. as a possible space for such conversations, let’s talk!

Almost As If She Knew

[this is an edited excerpt from a book I am currently working on.]

Although there are countless facts about my great-grandmother, Amy Prescott Faulkner Wild, I don’t know, I have recently learned this. My grandfather’s mother, seventeen-year-old Amy Prescott Faulkner, entered the very first class of a brand-new Wellesley College in 1875; she dropped out after one year. My father, vocal that his mother had gone to Radcliffe, never mentioned this. (Like Amy, my “Cliffy” Grandma did not graduate with her classmates either.) Perhaps my father never knew; perhaps his paternal grandmother, unlike mine, was not a storyteller. But most likely Dad, very much a product of his times, may have dated Wellesley women, but utterly failed to appreciate this intriguing bit o’ distaff history.

So how did I discover this? Because in 1940, ten years after husband had died and now living in a modest cottage in Winchester, Massachusetts, Mrs. Benjamin Wild donated two autograph books, signed by her classmates, to her alma mater. Almost as if she’d understood that Wellesley College would consider these page-after-page tributes to the art of nineteenth-century penmanship of historical significance. And therefore, like other alums’ artifacts donated to the college, would be archived in Wellesley College’s Clapp Library. Eventually, her contribution would be digitized. Almost as if my great-grandmother had known that in 2025, one of her descendants would wonder: Who was Amy Prescott Faulkner Wild? And when making an online search, that descendent would discover Mrs. Wild’s 1940 gift online—and would gratefully leaf through those exquisite little books. Almost as if Amy had known how touching it would be for that descendant to read these exquisitely written names, maiden names, of course, the autograph signers’ hometowns—Savannah, Dubuque, Boston—beautifully penned in smaller letters beneath.

I’d hoped to discover why my great-grandmother had dropped out; sadly, penned names, no matter how artistically written, disclose very little. I did glean a couple of things well-worth my long and rainy trip to Wellesley, however, one of historic import, one significant to my current work.

More than once, Amy’s friends seemed to indicate that during Wellesley’s first year, there may have been some confusion—or tension?—around its identity as a college. More than once, the signers referenced “Wellesley Female Seminary,” the name of the original, preceding institution; one woman wrote “Wellesley—?” As if to say, “What is this place? A finishing school or a college?”

Second, I came upon a gap where two or three pages from that autograph book had obviously been torn out. And was reminded of all the gaps, all the shadowed moments, all the unrecorded or unremembered or binned stories; all the ways we can only know through a glass darkly. Especially when it comes to family history, I think.

It’s almost as if Amy Prescott Faulkner Wild understood that!