Patricia Wild

“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

Quality Quality of Life

[“Wellness Ambassador,” RiteAid pharmacy]

Having just finished Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, heartily recommended, I’ve been giving that “what matters” some thought.

It’s been an excellent week to be asking this question: I’ve been out of town a lot lately so am looking at my home and my life with the eye of the returning traveler. And it’s one of those crunch times when too many important things must happen within a couple of days of one another. And I’ve been both sick and a little jet-lagged so am not really bringing my A game to my extra-long-because I’ve-been-out-out-town To Do list. So need to cull, prioritize. And, of course, the earthquake in Nepal and the headlines re Baltimore—and the headlines about those headlines—both weight heavy on my heart and ask me to look at my life, my choices from a larger, tragic perspective.

What matters? (And will be accessible as I age.) Here are my Top 4:

1. Silent worship/opening myself to Spirit. Dare I confess that only because I’d agreed to meet someone after mid-week worship at my Quaker meeting yesterday morning* did I find myself sitting in silence with handful of people? (I guess I do.) After about ten minutes I was asking myself, “How come I don’t come here every week?”

2. Spending dedicated, unobstructed, no-distractions time with the people I love. Duh.

3. Nature–even the urban version I see and hear through my kitchen window. The wind through my wind chimes, watching clouds or a sparrow at my bird feeder matter. They feed me.

4. Writing. If I am not working on/mulling/stewing over a writing project I get very, very crabby. (And, strangely, anxious, too. Not sure why that is). Good to know, right?

What would be Your Top 4?

* Don’t get the wrong idea; we did not discuss spiritual matters. But rather how to self-promote now that I’ve just finished a book. Hmmm.

“They are in the darkness that grows lighter”

[For Jean and Sylvia, two women I knew and admired, who died in the past month.]

This is the poem that inspired Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Breaths (and which I’m hearing in my head a lot lately.)

“Spirits”

Listen to Things
More often than Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the sighs of the bush;
This is the ancestors breathing.

Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in the darkness that grows lighter
And in the darkness that grows darker.
The dead are not down in the earth;
They are in the trembling of the trees
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs,
In the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd:
The dead are not dead.

Listen to things
More often than beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the bush that is sighing:
This is the breathing of ancestors,
Who have not gone away
Who are not under earth
Who are not really dead.

Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in a woman’s breast,
In the wailing of a child,
And the burning of a log,
In the moaning rock,
In the weeping grasses,
In the forest and the home.
The dead are not dead.

Listen more often
To Things than to Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind to
The bush that is sobbing:
This is the ancestors breathing.

Each day they renew ancient bonds,
Ancient bonds that hold fast
Binding our lot to their law,
To the will of the spirits stronger than we
To the spell of our dead who are not really dead,
Whose covenant binds us to life,
Whose authority binds to their will,
The will of the spirits that stir
In the bed of the river, on the banks of the river,
The breathing of spirits
Who moan in the rocks and weep in the grasses.

Spirits inhabit
The darkness that lightens, the darkness that darkens,
The quivering tree, the murmuring wood,
The water that runs and the water that sleeps:
Spirits much stronger than we,
The breathing of the dead who are not really dead,
Of the dead who are not really gone,
Of the dead now no more in the earth.

Listen to Things
More often than Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the bush that is sobbing:
This is the ancestors, breathing.

—Birago Diop

My Hillary Conversion Experience

[Granddaughters; The Dinner Party, Brooklyn Museum]

They’re hard to put into words, these beyond words, transcendent moments, aren’t they? And sometimes happen when least expected or convenient. I clearly remember being both gobsmacked by Faure’s “Messe Base” on my car radio yet annoyed that I was on Mass. Ave. during rush hour. “I don’t want to be having this religious experience here and now,” I complained to the Universe, tears running down my cheeks. “I’m on my way to work. This isn’t a good time.” (Apparently the Universe had other plans.)

Yadda yadda yadda; back to Hillary. So there I was, a couple of days ago, in the “12 Items And Under” check-out line at the Market Basket. And in a hurry. And the young, check-out woman had apparently made a cash register mistake with the customer ahead of me so needed her (female, slightly older, also Spanish-speaking) supervisor to rectify the error—and, it annoyingly turned out, to receive some slow and patient on-the-job training as well.

Did I mention I was in a hurry? But before I could begin The Loud Sighing While Waiting Thing, I suddenly was gifted with: I am watching a young woman being coached by another woman so she can do her job better. So she can KEEP her job, maybe.

And suddenly I saw this scene both as a Yay, Sisterhood feminist and as if I were an impatient, self-important Anglo who just wanted to get the hell out of there. Yup. As a man. BUT this impatient man knew he now lived in the same, post-Hillary’s “I’m getting ready to . . . video reality. So he had to be patient. He had to remember that, sadly, the Market Basket is one of the very few “careers” available to many women. That one woman taking time to help another woman might very well have been about Survival. So he had to suck it up.

Yup. Hillary, someone savvy enough to have green-lighted that clever bit o’ branding video, is running for Prez. It is a brave new world. A world in which, maybe, it could be okay for one woman to coach another woman in public.

Maybe. (Conversion moments aren’t necessarily predictive.)

“They Are Our Kids”

[19th Century Young Girl’s Grave, El Campo Santo, San Diego, CA, soon after Dia de Muertos, 2014]

Don’t get me wrong: I love my daughters, I love my grandchildren. I loved sitting in my Quaker meeting this morning watching Meeting children happily search for Easter eggs outside. I love Christmas, I love birthdays, I love making any child happy by buying just the right gift.

Here’s what I don’t love: The disparity between children like my grandchildren and those happy children I watched this morning and the poor children of this country. As a recent “New Yorker” article put it: The American dream is in crisis, [Robert Putnam, author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis] argues, because Americans used to care about other people’s kids and now they only care about their own kids. But, he writes, “America’s poor kids do belong to us and we to them. They are our kids.”

Here’s what deeply moves me: That on October 31, 2014, someone placed those plastic necklaces and those two dolls on the grave pictured above. A Mexican-American child decorated that child’s grave for Dia de Muertos, I’m guessing. She swept the dirt, she arranged those bricks as best she could, she threw away—God knows what that child discovered in that gritty, surrounded-by-bars-and restaurants cemetery in the heart of San Diego’s Old Town. That generous child is very likely one of those “poor kids” Putnam wrote about.

My kid. Our kid.

The Words Beneath the Words

I’ve been thinking about the words beneath the words. About how sometimes what is not spoken aloud is, “I’m sad.” or “I’m scared.” or “If you knew my backstory, you’d understand me so much better! Forgive me. But I can’t/won’t tell you why I am the way I am. Although I wish with all my heart that I could.”

And I’ve been thinking about something a dear Friend, Cathy Whitmire, once told me: “Everyone’s doing the best they can.” ( I immediately replied, “No, they’re NOT!”) But I am slowly coming to believe she was right. Slowly.

forgiving my father

lucille clifton

  it is friday. we have come

 to the paying of the bills.

all week you have stood in my dreams

 like a ghost, asking for more time

but today is payday, payday old man;

my mother’s hand opens in her early grave

and i hold it out like a good daughter.

there is no more time for you. there will

 never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher

 old liar. i wish you were rich so i could take it all

and give the lady what she was due

 but you were the only son of a needy father,

the father of a needy son;

you gave her all you had

 which was nothing. you have already given her

 all you had.

you are the pocket that was going to open

and come up empty any friday.

you were each other’s bad bargain, not mine.

 daddy old pauper old prisoner, old dead man

what am i doing here collecting?

you lie side by side in debtors’ boxes

and no accounting will open them up.