Where am I from?

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I am from this green place, this wet place, that place of weak sun, of strong sun. I am from the shore where there is sand, where there are rocks not worn by the water. I am from this place where we speak with our mouths, we speak with our hands, with our hearts.

I am from places which I have never left. I’m from the language of my homeland. I am far from the language of my birth. I am from a town that had gravel streets. I’m from paved highways. We ate the most usual foods there, we opened boxes and cans and with heat we said we were cooking. We fed ourselves less than other people did. We sang more than other people did, and did it alone if necessary, and in the snow.

I am from telephones on the wall, and musical boxes on the table, and one television against the inner wall separating the living room and the basement stairs.

I am from staring at the moon. Where I began the earth was rock hard, and then soft as a marsh. The traditions I am from are so arcane we didn’t know what they were; they looked like nothing, like a non-Norman Rockwell, like a family broken, a family together.

I am from this earth, where I awoke this morning and at least a hundred other mornings, and I look around me with eyes wide each day, asking again and again: “Where am I from? Where am I from? Where did I ever come from, and when?”

Something I still have yet to accept

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I still have yet to truly accept that Tinta has left us. It is true that I saw her sweet body slim down to a wisp, from seven pounds to probably less than four. It’s true that I crouched beside her as she lay on her side and took her last breath. It’s a fact that the pads on her little paws began to cool quickly, and her eyes clouded as if she had cataracts. When I lifted her body, wrapped now in one of John’s old river driver shirts, her stiffness made Tinta feel heavy, much heavier than she’d weighed at her healthiest.

In the dark when the full moon was right above the magnolia tree, I placed the bundle of white shirt and dark cat into the hole John had dug by the elm. I lit incense. We placed autumn flowers from the yard – purple asters, mums, late snapdragons – beside Tinta. I kneeled in the damp dirt. I know this. It’s been nearly two weeks. I know this.

I know that when I’m alone in the house I will not hear the soft clicking of Tinta’s back nails on the old linoleum floor in the kitchen. I know that what catches my eye in the TV room on the Turkish rug is John’s black suede shoes, not Tinta sleeping in a patch of sunlight. When I pass the bedroom, Tinta is not curled up on the woven spread with loose threads; she is not on the windowsill above the radiator, watching birds in the camellia bushes.

When I enter the back door and call out, “Soy yo (it’s me),” Tinta will not trot in from some corner of the house, and jump onto the kitchen chair expectantly. I don’t have to interrupt my writing constantly to give her a fresh spoonful of food from the can.

But I still haven’t accepted Tinta’s absence. Not yet. She is still more here than not here, in my awareness. In my habits, in the way I know this house to be. I’m afraid I’ll start to search for her, the tiny cat with so many places to hide: on the quilts in the closet, beneath the bookshelf that serves as the headboard, down in the deep grapevine basket nestled in laundry. My heart is still reaching out to hers, still communicating, as if Tinta’s heart can still answer back.

The end of summer

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The black walnut tree across from my kitchen window always signals the end of the summer before any other signs appear. It feels premature, the green orbs falling to the paved street. They’re a bit smaller than tennis balls, leathery, firm. They pop when a car tire runs over them. They make a soft “pock” when they hit the ground. I never knew black walnut trees until I moved to this house, nearly 30 years ago, now. I didn’t know how slow they were to admit spring, and quick to acknowledge autumn.

The other early sign of the end of summer comes from people. So many tend to jump ahead, prompted perhaps by the commercial advertising on all forms of media, telling us we must prepare for what is still weeks, if not months, away. I am frustrated by this hyper-speed leap into what will come next. What about the now? For me, advertising is so pushy. When I see beach ads in winter, or snow ads in summer, I’m compelled into a yearning for something other than the present. That’s not how I wish to be.

The end of summer is bittersweet: the loss of sun, of the sense of freedom that warmth and lighter clothing give, the return of school schedules promising new mental expansion. I always loved school, with new pencils and books, but still the loss of summer made me sad. It’s hard to sit here at the point of pivot, to be just here and witness the change.

Writing for my father

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Dad died when I was 27. That’s when I began to write for him.

What I wanted – or needed – to do was to write his story before it disappeared from the world. In that sense, I wrote in his stead, rather than for him as in having him as listener or reader. A poem I wrote at that time was “Song for my father,” in which I acknowledged that I wanted to vocalize his words, but I knew I could only do my own keening for his loss.

My dad was so unremarkable, so unheroic, that when Sinatra’s “My Way” was played over the audio at Dad’s funeral it was almost laughable. About the only thing my father did “his way” was his death. He literally died in his sleep, in a coma, but I’ve always believed it was suicide by stroke. The second day after he was found unconscious, I had a talk with Dad in my head. “You’ve been looking for a way out, Dad. Here’s your window. Take it.” It wasn’t what I wanted, but the doctor said the stroke left him “no quality of life” even if he continued to live. And Dad had prepared his three daughters for years – since we were children – with his expectation of an early demise. For no particular reason, he didn’t expect to live longer than his father, who died at 45. Dad paved the way with self-denial, depression, and lack of hope. He gave me a great deal of love, but his quality of life had already become very low when he managed to slip out of that open window.

So I wrote for Dad. He had actually made a few notes in the last year of so of his life, prodded by conversations with me. He even spoke to me in the notebook. What he wrote echoed his sense of uselessness and lack of direction in life. I wrote for Dad in hopes of filling in the blanks left behind. I wanted to show the value in his life, for me in particular, and in the way all individual human lives are valuable. I wanted to express how I could accept his absence because I loved him so much, and what it was about him that I loved. I remember standing next to his hospital bed after he died, whispering, “Okay, okay; it’s okay.” It felt as if he’d become my child rather than my father, and I was overcome with tenderness and the desire to reassure him that his daughters would be all right. That I would be all right.

That night I was ill. The day of the funeral my anxiety was enormous. As our car followed the gray hearse through the streets of Detroit, I sat between my sisters hardly able to breathe. At the graveside a spider navigated the green AstroTurf beside my foot. Spiders had always terrified me. I thought I could become hysterical, and then realized, “If I let myself become a basket case in my grief, it won’t honor my deep love for Dad.” I managed to pull away from the worst of it, but stayed desperate to write for my father, to try to find the meaning in his existence, to discern the real truth of his short life.

I’m still writing.

lifeinonescene

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I crouch on a carpeted step where the stairway ends in the kitchen. I’m near the bottom, with my curly-haired little sister below me. Above me, I can just sense my older sister’s breathing, as if she’s invisible.

My father speaks: “I’m not going to be living here any more.” My legs press against the scratchy, low-pile synthetic carpet, dark brown. Do I smell the vomit of those nights when my sister threw up on the stairs? My mouth is filling with saliva. Do I want to vomit, or to cry? My eyes are burning, dry.

I think my head is pounding with the thud of my heartbeat. I’m afraid I won’t be able to hear what Dad is saying.

I have words in my mouth but I know I’m not supposed to say them. Dad is the one who is supposed to talk. I know this, because Mom is quiet. He is not saying enough, so she is glaring at him. He is not saying enough for me to understand what this means.

“I’m not going to be living here in this house with you any more.” I am smothered by the vague smell of vomit. The stairway feels like a tunnel and the space is getting too tight, closing in. It’s like a dream where I’m pinned in place; I can’t go up or down.

Praise piece based on Joy Harjo

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Praise the darkened rooms.

Praise the empty-handed father

sitting in the early morning dark.

Praise the unfilled wished for love

from open-handed father,

and the clenched fist of the mother.

When your sternum is tender

with sadness, whether from today’s

death count or the emptiness of 1975,

place your own cupped hands

before your heart. Praise sadness.

Praise the ability to breathe,

praise the breaths you wished to take

to fill the lungs of your second father.

Praise his death,

and his humble willingness

to stop breathing. Praise

his completed Income Tax forms,

neatly sealed in an envelope

sitting ready on the piano.

Praise this strange year

when the deadline is extended

out to July.

Praise not knowing what

summer will bring, and not knowing

how, and how many of us,

will arrive.

Praise the notion you’ve had

of the Great Flood, the one you don’t believe in,

that was a way to curb the bad,

to purge the overflow. You’re not

the only one to ponder at the drowning,

hundreds each day now,

of the ones in hospital beds or

not in beds,

the ones who are humbled,

and those who were certain

they weren’t meant to be drowned.

Praise the ancient test of evil,

the crushing beneath a board and stones,

the present punishment of lungs

imposed on all, whether or not

they be witches.

Praise the bearing witness to lives

crushed or those who will crush

your own, to the purging of the

good and pure, the breath, the heart.

Praise your own cupped,

good, empty hands before you.

Heading out…

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Please trust yourself: in writing, in Zen, in everything.

— Natalie Goldberg

These posts are from writing practice, minimally edited, if at all.

They’re fresh out of my mind. Or I am.

I feel like I did when I was 17, sitting in the navy blue stick-shift Chevette that Pop used to let me drive to work. I felt powerful when I drove it, shifting gears. The moment seemed so full of possibility, as if I could drive into my future that very day. I didn’t particularly know what direction I might be heading, but I had no serious concern about that part of it.

Just start.