Patricia Wild

Like Riding a Bike

[Panels & Rust; Somerville, MA 2015]

Yesterday I handed over my bike, Olivia, to my daughter. My sixty-fifth birthday gift to myself, Olivia cruised the busy streets of Somerville only a handful of times. Fo no matter how earnestly my younger friends assured me that Somerville had become a bike-friendly city, I never overcame my fears, my overpowering sense of vulnerability, to enjoy her.

So now my daughter will. Now my daughter can transport her daughter (in a helmut and super-safe bike seat) to daycare along the bike path half a block from her house on an olive bike as classy as her namesake.

Still . . . I’m reminded of a wonderful piece about aging —and about its challenges and uncertainties—written by my writing student, Irene Ficarra. Irene recounted how, every summer, her family had rented a little place near the ocean for a week and how, on the last day, room by room, her mother would carefully sweep out a week’s worth of sand and grit and family debris and then, room by room, shut the door, telling the children they could no longer play in the now-swept room. All these years later, I am still moved by what Irene, in her mid-seventies, wrote next: she likened those shut-off rooms to beloved activities, like ballroom dancing, no longer accessible to her. Aligning herself with the little girl who’d been resentful when her mother forbade her to enter those cleaned rooms, she wondered if some of those shut doors in her own life might have been shut off too soon.

I so understand Irene’s questioning—because so much about growing old is not instinctual. Like learning to ride a bike, once you’ve noticed a pattern—Whoa! I get tired faster, now!—you will never not recognize this New Old You. It’s incorporated. Literally. Your body gets it. You cruise. (You accept, submit, surrender.)

But, oh, the tottering, the wobbling, the bruising, skinned-knee moments before you figure this stuff out!

[I will be joining Quakers from all over New England for our yearly gathering next week. So next week’s post will be August 7th.]

Summer Sloth or “Well-Used”?

[Vineyard, Niagara-on-the Lake, Canada, 2014]

Recently I “cycled off” a committee at my Quaker meeting I’d served on for several years, a volunteer job I’d gladly signed up for but which had required a lot of my time. Last July, for example, several of us on that committee were hiring a new staff person; even now, dear Reader, remembering that Thumbs Up /Thumbs Down hiring experience makes my heart race! (Apparently I am not cut out for personnel work!)

So I’m having a delicious summer. One perfect summer afternoon a couple of weeks ago, lying in dappled sunlight on a hammock, a Trollope novel in hand, I felt held, both that every-bone-in-your-body-support of a hammock, but also that deep and warm sense of being held by Spirit; of being loved unconditionally. Is this just summertime and livin’ easy bliss? I wondered. Or, because I’ve been toiling in the vineyard I’ve earned this blissful, peace-drenched, birdsong-sweet moment?

Part of me scoffed at this notion of earned bliss. “This is a broken world,” my mindful self reminded me. “And so much more you could be doing! When you get home. . . ” And, then and there, my mindful self ignored those puffy clouds and birdsong and the neglected novel on my belly to create a long To Do List for me.

Reader: I’ve pretty much ignored her list. And am taking great comfort in thinking about those laborers who, the parable goes, were hired late in the day but were nevertheless paid for a full day’s work.

I see an old woman with nut-brown, gnarled skin and stooped over from years of hard work. Of course the landowner didn’t chose her first-thing that morning! But when, grateful to be called to service, she put in whatever time she had left with vim and care, her work, like that other Biblical old woman’s mite, was priceless. (Or at least worth a day’s pay!)

“Privilege Blinds”

[ Summer Vacation, 2015]

Last week, fifteen members of my family, three generations of us, gathered at a funky, run-down, eight-bedroom house on a lake in Connecticut—fairly easy to get to for those of us based in New England; much harder for those living in, say, Salt Lake City or Louisville, Kentucky. (But they came, anyway.)

On Day 2 my almost three-year-old granddaughter wondered, “Grandma! Is this your new house?”

Her question triggered a childhood memory: I remembered visiting a Cape Cod mansion built by my great-grandfather — where another branch of the Wild family summered. I remember how I much I’d wished it had been my extended family’s commodious summer home; how jealous I was that my blond, tanned, barefoot cousins were so little awed, so nonchalant that this elegant house, its private beach, and the pretty wooden sailboat waiting at the dock were theirs and at their disposal whenever they wanted. “I only tell of sunny hours,” the sundial in the garden in front of that memorable, longed-for house proclaimed. I remember how, despite my covetousness, that inscription intrigued me.

“Oh, little girl,” I wish I could tell that jealous, intrigued mini-me. “You have no idea how privileged you are!”

(She wouldn’t believe me.)

Re rebranding?

[Coal Barge, Ohio River, Louisville, Kentucky, 2015]

Along the same lines as thinking that fussing over a Confederate flag will truly address the deep, deep brokenness of this country, last week I tried to remove the visible label from a Coal purple, acrylic beanie my grand-daughter wears. (She loves the color and looks adorable in it.) Really?

The label wouldn’t come off. (Let’s hear it for Chinese workmanship!) So I was forced to, you know, accept, embrace, move on, maybe even consider that by naming their clothing company after a hated fossil fuel, the Seattle hipsters who started Coal were trying to tell us something about moving on, about transformation; rebranding, so to speak.

(Or not. Got into a conversation with a hipster recently about the coffee beans sold at a neighborhood cafe. He’d just bought a bag but had abandoned it on the counter—where I picked it up. I was reading the coffee beans’ label when he showed up to claim his purchase. “Is it fair trade?” I asked, handing it over. “I don’t know,” he answered impatiently. “I just know it tastes good!” )

Here’s where I am: I accept that my attempted label-removal was ridiculous, nutzo. But given that NStar, purveyors of another fossil fuel, just rebranded itself Eversource, thereby discarding that pesky N for natural gas—slick move, NStar, but I say fossil fuel and fracking and the hell with it—I shall remain vigilant!

[I will be on vacation next week. Check this space in 2 weeks.]

“GOOD MEN trashed”

[“GOOD MEN trashed,” Cambridge Common, Cambridge, MA]

Here we are again. Another slaughter and its ghastly, rote aftermath of stunned horror and outrage and flowers strewn, impromptu shrines erected—and prayer meetings and stand-outs and the NRA not missing a beat to issue its usual, obdurate public statement and, again, demands for gun control and better mental health policies and politicians spouting whatever they believe plays best with their constituency: “Tear down that Confederate flag!” “It was an accident!”

And something stunningly different: The families of the victims uttering the word “forgiveness.” Oh, my.

As I contemplate what I am called to do in the face of another horror perpetuated by another slight, white young man—Dylan Roof, Jahar Tsarnaev, James Holmes, Adam Lanza, Elliot Rodger, Dylan Klebold—those young men’s wide eyes haunt me, beg me to pay attention to the pain behind their eyes. Ask me to at least pray over that pain. Ask me to consider—with compassion if possible—why these young, slight, American males* murdered school children or movie-goers or families watching the Boston Marathon or college students on a Friday night or people of color in the sanctuary of their own church.

That the Emanuel [God is with us] African Methodist Episcopal Church victims’ families offered forgiveness as their contribution to our mourning nation’s conversation BEGS us to get beyond rhetoric and “We’re all complicit” and stridency. Yes, by all means let’s talk about slavery and racism and the white supremacy movement and mental illness and gun control; absolutely. And let’s talk about violence, war, let’s talk about bullying, messaging, gender expectations; let’s connect dots. Let’s get to work, the hard work of going deep, searching, praying for guidance. Yes.

* Jahar Tsarnaev was naturalized on September 11, 2012

“Own It!”

[People’s Climate March, September 21, 2014]

On a cold and rainy evening a couple of weeks I walked to Porter Square Books to hear James Wood, book reviewer for The New Yorker, give a reading. During the Q & A, one woman raved about a novel he’d written years ago. Renowned critic of other people’s novels (his piece on Penelope Fitzgerald means he’s aka as “Household God” to me), Wood pooh-poohed his early-on book. In so many words he said, “I could write a much better novel now. I’m older and wiser.”

What? Huh? Household God’s use of wiser irked me. But because James Wood is someone I revere, walking home after the reading I spent some time thinking about why his word-choice bothered me so. And realized, rain drumming my umbrella, my discomfort wasn’t about him. But about me.

I am unable to stand in a public place, fifty or sixty people seated in front of me, and declare that I am wise. I have always inserted the mollifying “dare I say it?” before using the word wise when speaking of myself. Always. Unequivocally.

This ain’t false modesty. I really DO not feel worthy. Hoary-headed though I be, I am not yet able to own my wisdom. (Yet I am proud enough of my insightful and wise novel, Welling Up, to endure the rejection and yawny indifference and heartbreak of trying to get it published?!)

My own backstory : a few years ago I bought a fire-engine red, cotton, broad-brimmed hat from Davis Squared. Too broad-brimmed, maybe? I certainly felt conspicuous wearing it; that’s for sure. But when I told the (young and hip and model-worthy gorgeous) store’s owner how I felt she just shook her head: “Own it,” she advised.

Here are two (ahem) wise things I wish to say about owning it, about really embracing my wisdom:

1. This is about gender. Were James Wood a woman I think I would have reacted differently. (A clue: This past Sunday, a man at meeting for worship used the word wise to explain where “we” aging, spiritual people are developmentally. And again I bristled.)

2. This is about time and reflection and prayer. It took me years to write Welling Up. Off the cuff, off-balance, overwhelmed, I am usually ridiculous.

How fortuitous that in Quaker circles I can sit and vacantly stare into space as I ponder whatever’s before the group—collective wisdom is Good Stuff—and only if clear, wipe the bit o’ saliva that may have dribbled as I pondered, and say something!

Red in Tooth and Claw— and Feathers

[“Clawfoot Bathtub, Scrap”, Somerville, MA]

After the violent winter we had, one of my greatest pleasures these days is to sit on my deck with a cup of coffee and my journal and to wake up slowly to the bustling, preening, greening world of my back yard, my tiny patch of “the grace of the world”:**

A couple of days ago, though, my backyard was anything but pastoral or gracious. In a Norway maple, hidden by leaves, feathered warriors squabbled over territory—or, perhaps, a female bird. What drama! What a ruckus! When those birds finally decided to do battle in the air, not one, not two, but THREE brightly plumed cardinals took flight. I wish you could have seen how magnificent they were!

And I remembered a bit from a recent New Yorker article in which American novelist Nell Zink, an avid bird-watcher who lives in Europe, had this to say: “I saw a cardinal when I was in Brooklyn and I was almost moved to tears.” What stirred her was the fact that a creature so brilliant could survive in plain sight. “I was, like, I can’t believe this thing is legal. I can’t believe this thing is in the wild. How did this happen, how has someone not killed them all? They’re so conspicuous. They’re gorgeous. How can they still be alive?”

She’s right. It’s a miracle—and a blessing.

*“THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS”

by Wendell Berry

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

“Beautifully Banal”*

[“Felled,” Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville, KY]

Every year just before Halloween all the students in my (Unitarian) Sunday School class would each be handed a half-pint-sized orange carton and earnestly urged to collect money for UNICEF. And I always did (I took the offered candy, too), spurred on by my Sunday School teachers and my parents but most tellingly, by a UNICEF promotional movie. Sixty-five or so years later, I remember the dark-skinned, hollow-eyed, big-bellied children on the screen as a sonorous voice explained, “In the time you count to ten, someone in the world will have died of”—What? I no longer remember. Malaria, perhaps. I’m not sure. I am sure that sometimes on the bus on the way to my piano lesson or just before falling asleep, at times when quiet and alone, I silently counted to ten and, as I have come to say, held the unknown, unseen, out-there-somewhere person who had just died “in the Light”: a frisson, a self-induced horror; a moment.

People die. We all die. I’ve understood this since I was five. (As I write this, someone in India dies from horrific heat.) And yet on Friday sitting beside the nursing home bed of a dear friend who’s ready to die, I wanted to jump up and scream: “Hey, you! Yeah, you! You In the next room having such a great time playing Bingo. Do you understand? ATTENTION MUST BE PAID! Yes, [my friend’s] lived a long and rich and fulfilling life. Yes, she’s ready. But how ’bout some reverence, huh?

“Or how ’bout you two? Yeah, you! Standing on the other side of this cloth divider? Think you could whisper as you change that woman’s bandage? Would that be possible?”

I didn’t, of course. For my friend was deeply, profoundly asleep; the two nurses companionably working inches away and the delighted shrieks and outbursts from the next room and, yes, my fretting presence, were of as much concern to her as the discarded Kleenex under her bed.

So I sat and contemplated, I practiced as best I could both Letting Go Of It All and the Intensely and Reverently Holding On/Cherishing It All, this beautifully banal thing called Life, yes, even that shadowed Kleenex—but especially, of course, the life, the soul, The Light of the amazing woman, “my spiritual mother,” whose breath slowly and rhythmically raised and lowered her blue-print hospital johnny.

“Trust the process,” she instructed me.

Okay.

* James Wood’s perfect words, not mine.

“Dangerous Optimism”

[“Rainbow Fountain,” Bryant College, Smithfield, R.I.]

This week, rather than writing something, myself, I’d like to share this wonderful and poignant excerpt from a speech Martin Luther King, Jr. gave at Bennett College, Greensboro, NC, in 1958.

After reading another piece I’d written recently that referenced Dr. King’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” my friend Katy sent this excerpt along. She had transcribed the entire speech when working at Boston University—Dr. King’s alma mater. Katy is responsible for the ADDED EMPHASIS.

“…This [after acknowledging that a lot of progress in civil rights had been made] would be a wonderful place to stop–be a great place to stop. But I’m afraid, if I stopped here, I wouldn’t be telling the truth, I’d be stating a fact. YOU SEE A FACT IS MERELY THE ABSENCE OF CONTRADICTION BUT TRUTH IS THE PRESENCE OF COHERENCE. IT IS THE RELATEDNESS OF FACTS. [laughter, then applause] You see it’s a fact that we’ve come a long, long way—that’s a fact—but it isn’t the truth. You see in order to tell the truth, you’ve got to go on and put the other parts in. If I stopped at this point, I would leave you the victims of a dangerous optimism. If I stopped at this point, I would leave you the victims of an illusion wrapped in superficiality. So in order to tell the truth, I must move on [laughter], say clearly that we’ve not only come a long, long way [applause]–so I must say that we’ve not only come a long, long way, but we have a long, long way to go….” [emphasis added]

Word.

“Progress Is Our Most Important Product”*

[Russian submarine from the Cold War era, Maritime Museum, San Diego, CA]

Saturday I spent some time at FirstBuild, a state-of-the-art machine shop cum high-tech appliance incubator in Louisville, KY run by GE. Talk about a layered experience!

A little background: My beloved father, who died in 2010, worked for GE for many years in war time and peace time, inventing both the butter conditioner (the little box in your refrigerator that keeps butter at its optimum temperature) and the computer used as a machine-gun defense system for the B-29; “the plane that won World War II.” He also sold GE television equipment in the earliest days of TV and as a “Cold War warrior” (and self-labeled “merchant of death”) negotiated contacts between GE and the military. So wandering through GE factories or TV studios some random Saturday to stare, stupefied, at work benches and machinery and dials and gauges and fancy, mysterious equipment, carefully stepping over jumbles of wires as my father excitedly explained The Latest Thing/GE’s newest project was something I did as a kid.

More context: A couple of weeks before, I’d given a talk re Way Opens and my own experiences during the Civil Rights Era to a group of bright, tender middle-school students at Cambridge Friends School. Who were “heavy,” as their teacher put it, Freddie Gray’s death much on their minds. Their collective heaviness stays with me.

So there I was, gobstruck by the cool, nifty appliances in FirstBuild’s showroom and my first look at a 3-D printer and, knowing how much my dad would have loved every single moment, desperately missing him. And aware that despite all this progress, just blocks away people of color were living under pretty much the same conditions as they had during the Jim Crow era.

See what I mean by layered?

* GE’s slogan during the 50s and 60s, i.e. the Civil Rights and Cold War era.

“A Thousand Tongues Can Never Tell”

[“A Thousand Tongues Can Never Tell,” a spirit root sculpture by Bessie Harvey]

Mother’s Day, I woke up to a mockingbird practicing a song unlike anything I’d ever heard before from a mockingbird. Sleepily I remembered a Mary Oliver poem.* Sleepily I wondered if I might be hearing the theme song from “the Rockford Files.” (Especially that doodle-doodle-dee-dah-do-do bit at the end of the first phrase?) But then, more awake, I realized I needed to get a grip. “Unlike Mary Oliver, you do not know what music that bird’s been listening to!” I scolded myself. “You do not know all the songs, human and bird, to identify what you’re hearing! Only that bird knows. All you can do is to appreciate that lively, inventive music.” So I did.

Later that bright, sunny morning, wearing a “Black Live Matter” sticker on my Mothers Out Front tee shirt, I joined thousands of people in Boston for the 19th annual Mother’s Day Walk for Peace. Although I was walking with other Mothers Out Front folks, the groupings and clusters of people and baby carriages and dogs snaking our way through the streets of Dorchester were pretty fluid—so at one point along the 5K route I walked beside a young African-American woman I’d never met before.

“What brings you here today?” I asked her after we’d chitchatted about the gorgeous day and how the crowd seemed bigger than ever. (An estimated 10,000 marchers participated this year.)

“I have a son,” she said. “And I want him to grow up safe.”

Such simple words! But a thousand tongues cannot tell all that her stark statement encapsulates, all the stories of all the mothers and all the sons in Dorchester, in Baltimore, in Ferguson; every place and every time since time immemorial. Like that sleepy moment earlier that morning, I was humbled by all I will never know.

“I want your son to be safe, too,” I replied. Because that was all I could say.

*The Gift

I wanted to thank the mockingbird for the vigor of his song.
Every day he sang from the rim of the field, while I picked
blueberries or just idled in the sun.
Every day he came fluttering by to show me, and why not,
the white blossoms in this wings.
So one day I went there with a machine, and played some songs of
Mahler.
The mockingbird stopped singing, he came close and seemed
to listen.
Now when I go down to the field, a little Mahler spills
through the sputters of his song.
How happy I am, lounging in the light, listening as the music
floats by!
And I give thanks also for my mind, that thought of giving
a gift.
And mostly I’m grateful that I take this world so seriously.
Mary Oliver

To Slog: elucidated

[“Quaker Notes”]

As I’ve recently noted to a loyal reader of this blog, I am currently engaged in what I call The Slog, i.e. the process of sending off query letters to agents and publishers so as to find a good home for Welling Up. It’s an apt word, slog, for all its pithy four-letterness, meaning both toil—oh, yeah!—but also to walk “with a slow, labored gait.” Again: oh, yeah!

Etymologically, slog and slug seem to share common ancestry, also apt. Because query letters are, basically, trying to grab super-busy people’s shoulders; getting their attention, hitting them hard: “Hey! You! Yeah, you! Listen up! Do I have a book for you!”

And, yes, I’m braced for those super-busy people to slug me back, so to speak, with indifference or polite, rote phrases: “Thank you for interest but . . . ” Rejection is integral to The Slog. (And this is not my first rodeo.)

‘Course the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting something different. The Slog will not continue indefinitely; Plan B will tap me on the shoulder when she’s good and ready.

But meanwhile, while she’s polishing her nails or getting her hair done or whatever Plan B needs to do before making her grand entrance I plan to slog, to walk slowly and as I’ve been urged to do, cheerfully.*

“Walk cheerfully over the world answering that of God in everyone.” George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends (Quakers); 1656