Author: jelizabeth

Deep reading, restored

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I feared I had lost my attention span as a reader.

Over the winter, with so many work and family responsibilities, I maintained my daily commitment to reading (Jimmy calls it the “Jane Ten” — the 10 minutes I must read every night, no matter what, before I turn in — of which I’ve never missed a day) but only in fragments.

Here and there I read reviews in the New Yorker, articles in the New York Times or Onion online, magazine headlines at the grocery store check out, an essay or two from an anthology, and attachments sent my way by friends and colleagues: “Check this out.” I checked.

I wasn’t really reading, though. I was surfing the printed word. For me, real reading is a sustained, complete experience.

Honestly, I thought I had changed with the times. We multi-task. We browse. We lose interest. In April, I was worried it was over between me and books. They’re long! I don’t have the time! That was the inner dialogue of the new (fragmented, distracted) me.

The semester ended. Finally there was time to walk down the street to the branch library and wander its aisles and read jacket covers and first pages. I found the recent and umpteenth volume in my favorite series, the Inspector Banks mysteries by Peter Robinson. It was my transition back into whole books.

And the next three, one after the other, were Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (stories), by Maile Meloy; To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (because I had never read it); and How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer. Yes, yes, and yes.

I’m relieved that I am still a reader. That I wasn’t much of a reader (of longer works) during the academic year, however, tells me that having too much to do, in too many fragments, is an obstacle to sustained inquiry.

What other kinds of experience do our chopped-up days get in the way of?

Ready or not for my close-up

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A good thing about living in a household with artistic people is that there is always someone around to sing a song, pick up the guitar, give technical assistance with Photoshop or Audacity, draw a picture or diagram, edit a draft.

This morning, before she headed to camp, I asked Grace to take a photograph of me for a post I was writing for my blog on A Sweet Life. I gave her a few suggestions: I wanted a close-up of me; fatigue or frustration would be the emotional message; and I didn’t want my facial expression to convey the message — it had to be posture or color or something else.

We sat in the kitchen at the table, she across from me. She stage-directed me. “Use two hands.” Then, “Try one hand.” Or, “Too much hair.” She’d look at the camera display screen. “Smile a little so your face is smoother, but not so much that you’re smiling.” “One more time, and sit forward.”

She picked one. Wow, it looked so stark and real. I could see a ligament in my neck where it meets the collarbone and the nasolabial fold that improves when I’m smiling. But I wasn’t smiling. Did I really want to look this plain? Couldn’t I get this junior artist to put a visual spin on it?

“Could we try Toon Camera?” I asked. Continue reading →

Making a place

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I mowed the grass and bagged all the clippings. I hesitated a moment — hadn’t enough labor been done for a day? — and then filled a bucket with water and dish soap, uncoiled the hose, and scrubbed the winter mildew and spring birdshit from the plastic Adirondack chairs.

Yes, I sat for a while and surveyed my handiwork. I wish now I had taken it one comfort further and had a beer.

Eventually, I went inside. At some point I looked out the kitchen window to visually touch base with the order I had restored, and I saw Lydia had spread a quilt out in the middle of the chair circle. There were books all around her.

She yelled, “Please bring me a camera!” I did.

I discovered her photos later: the math textbook and worksheets on the quilt, another with her feet against a backdrop of trees, and an oblique view of her arm and a bracelet.

Nothing lasts intact. The birds and mildew will find the chairs again; the grass will grow shaggy. Already, Lydia’s math final is over and done with. Still, I feel as though something has been accomplished.

Pillars of civilization

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We unloaded the two busloads of Brookline fifth graders in front of the State House. Driving up Beacon Street, with all but the gold dome hidden by trees, I had not seen the huge Bruins banner hanging from the ballustrade and down over the portico.

Massachusetts State House, June 20, 2011 @10am

Our bundle of children, parents, and teachers stood on the sidewalk as the buses pulled away and left us. I leaned over to one of the other parents and murmured in her ear, “Ah, those twin pillars of civilization, politics and sports.”

Squinting, she nodded and agreed: “Especially in Massachusetts.”

This was the first stop on our Boston architecture tour. The teachers ran it like a quiz show with points for correct answers.

Teacher: Who was the architect of the State House?

Students: Charles Bulfinch

Teacher: Which English building did he imitate?

Students: Somerset House

Teacher: Who, in 1802, covered the wooden dome with copper?

Students: Paul Revere

Teacher: Why was the dome painted black during World War Two?

To this question, there were many responses, all guesses. One student answered poetically: “It was a dark time.”

Only the parent chaperones, all in their 40s, knew the answer to this one, having heard of the wartime practice of blackout. None of us, though, had ever lived it.

It was a bright, hot day at the end of the school year. Summer beckoned. The dome sparkled. Among the lucky, we feared nothing more than sunburn, lost lunch money, and a dawdling child. Our leisurely tour through Boston history — a stand-in for the American struggle for independence — began.

A hard and bitter seed

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heather, brought down by winter

The first few fragments here have been knocking at the door of my attention. So I wrote them down, and then I followed one sentence with the next, the next, the next, and so on. At some point it became what we call free writing, and it ended where it did.

I hate writing.
I hate skating.
Yard work.
Teaching.
Parenting sometimes, and reading.
All of these things I supposedly love: I hate them.

That’s how I feel on the verge of doing them.

A couple of weeks ago and with enthusiasm I bought some supplies for my yard clean up. I took the afternoon off. The next day I went out there and faced what I intended to do. Tear out two old bushes and bundle them up for the town’s compost pickup. Dig up the weed patch and lay down rolled sod, heavy and awkward.  Move an azalea, in too much sun, to a shady spot, and an American cranberry bush from shade to sun.

I sat in a dirty plastic lawn chair for a while and thought how it didn’t matter, how fruitless my effort would be. Who cares, really, who will ever notice, if the azalea gets more comfort in the shade and the cranberry more berries in light? Okay, I will notice. But I won’t always live here. Some future owner will look at my non-artistic, non-modernist attempts at gardening, rip them out, and install beautifully identical boxwoods with space in between. And the old screened porch (with original and much-repaired screens), buttressed by the elderly hydrangea, will get torn down to make room for a family room. And the ferns and hostas might seem like garbage plants to a fancier owner and end up in a brown paper bag on the curb.

Still, it’s possible to begin even with a fog of pragmatic despair hanging over me, so I did.

I feel this way, too, the more and more I skate. I must be improving, right? I can look back on five years ago, and even five months ago, and say to myself, “I can do this now. I can do that.” An hour before I gather my things and car keys to leave the house for the rink, though, I say to myself, “There is no forseeable outcome to this: no contest, no show, probably no mastery.”

But then I go, because it’s on my calendar and I promised myself that I would.

And I smell the dirt, or I smell the ice, and the shovel makes a sandy, muffled sound as it connects and the hockey player over there digs in until the ice groans its particular protest which is so satisfying to the human ear, and I feel as though maybe I can begin. (Beginning is a kind of restarting.)

At first I am hating it still, but I am also giving it a chance. I say, “Jane, try ten minutes, or thirty. If nothing happens, you can stop.” I am without grace, as though I really am a beginner, yet of course I lack the utter, naive enthusiasm of the absolute beginner. I am between beginner and master, that no man’s land. Continue reading →

Tightening my gardener’s belt

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This year, I’m putting my yard on an austerity program. There have been a few purchases to take care of a barren spot in the backyard, which was a weed patch inherited from the previous owners that I’ve left empty while I’ve ruminated on what to plant there, but otherwise I will mostly shop for plants among what’s already growing out back.

Here is the extent of what I’ve purchased, to the tune of about $150:

  • 2 clethra “Ruby Spice”
  • 3 New Guinea impatiens (white)
  • 3 verbena (blue)
  • 1 Japanese primrose (white) — my only purchase off list
  • 3 heuchera “Encore”
  • 3 trays of impatiens (assorted whites) — four plants for $1.39 at Christmas Tree Shop
  • 4 bags mulch
  • 1 flimsy trellis

ready and waiting for duty

rolled sod: heavier than it looks

From the yard, I have more than 30 irises I dug up in the fall, separated, and dumped in a bin with some dirt. These are the most forgiving perennials, and they survived winter above ground and are now starting to bloom in that bin, clamoring to be planted.

The excessive winter snow and spring rain have given a boost to the green perennials, like hostas, ferns, and Solomon’s seal, and I’ll dig some of those up, divide them, and move offspring around the yard to fill in.

my own shade plant thrift store

At my mother’s house, I noticed some ferns growing up happily among the stones in a wall, and I think I’ll browse my rock pile (doesn’t every gardener have one?) and distribute some rocks around transplanted ferns.

In the next few days, the weather looks perfect for outside labor. My goal is to get it all done in one sprint and then enjoy the yard. I have other projects to nurture without undertaking one of my intensive yard projects. To do all this, as well as scrub down the outdoor furniture, will have to be enough this summer.

Stay tuned, though: I’ve always wanted to plant some quick-growing fall crops, like lettuces, and there may be a late season experiment later on.

Seven lessons from a middle-aged beginner

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There is beginner’s mind, and then there is beginner’s body.
*
Around the time I turned 40, I got this idea that I wanted to become a good skater by the time I turned 50. The impulse hit me when I was at the rink in Brookline, skating with the kids, and I noticed a woman older than me who was powerful and fluid on the ice. I wanted to skate like her, and, even though her skating was more advanced, this suddenly seemed doable to me and desirable. Later, I found out she had started skating in her early 40s when her son was playing hockey, and she found herself looking at the ice and longing for it. So she began. At 60, when I met her, she was strong and graceful. This, by the way, is the first lesson in learning something new and hard: (1) Look for real-life models.  Famous athletes may inspire us but, because their talents are stratospheric, can’t really convince us that we can do it.

I had been on the ice hundreds of times — if you grow up in Massachusetts, as I did, it’s almost a requirement that you get a new pair of cheap skates every year for Christmas and spend lots of time clumping around on frozen ponds or public ice rinks — but I couldn’t  skate well. At age 40, I started taking group skating lessons for the first time. I learned a lot, starting with this basic fact that skates have edges (and if you have two feet, there are four edges altogether, or eight if you include forward and backward), and control of those is the foundation for everything. I also learned, from a teacher named Mark, that you can be afraid to do something and still make yourself do it. “You will fall,” Mark said. Being mindful of the possibility of injury makes it harder to try new things as an adult, and this fear must be managed in order to proceed. Which leads me to this: (2) Be afraid to fall, and skate anyway. I am, and I do.

You can only do beginner lessons so many times before you start to bump up against a ceiling. This winter, at age 45 and at my halfway point, I decided it might be time for private instruction. Happily, the teacher of the group lesson I was taking also teaches privately, and the transition was easy. I discovered, too, that the decision to do this was a signal to myself of the seriousness of my goal. You can’t hide in a 1:1 learning situation as you can hide in a group (and one can even hide, paradoxically, by excelling against other beginners). Another lesson: (3) When it starts to get easy, become more vulnerable to the task.

It’s a luxury to have the devoted instruction of an accomplished professional for one hour a week. (No wonder students like meeting with me alone for an hour to work on their writing.) There is an intensity to the learning experience that is different from a group experience that is a deep pleasure. The learner is also scarily exposed in a private lesson; there is no stepping to the side to let someone else skate ahead, and there is no half-assed trying just to get a little cheap credit for having gone through the motions. Continue reading →

Second chance for the rejected

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On the floor in the cellar, I found an encouraging rejection — part form letter, part handwritten note — I had gotten from an editor at The Sun and then set aside for safekeeping. The letter must have slipped out of one of those cardboard boxes I’ve marked JANE – STUFF and put on a shelf, intending to sort its contents (some day).

So, the rejection stuck in my mind for a day and prompted me to think about all the good writing out there that never finds its place among readers. A lot of writing no doubt gets turned away because it’s not good. Some writing, the kind I’m interested in here, may get turned away because it’s not a so-called good fit for the publication.

These literary misfits need a place, like the Island of Misfit Toys where cool playthings hung out and waited for the day when Santa would take them to the right child. There are cool poems, stories, and memoir that didn’t make it into one of many (low paying, highly competitive, and prestigious) literary journals.

Good yet misfitting submissions need their own Santa Claus. I have an idea for a journal, called Displacement (for the condition of having been displaced, and also the psychological defense mechanism in which emotions or desires are shifted from some original object to another one), that could be it. Continue reading →

Relics

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oak seedling and acorn relic

This fact once had a hold on me: that a baby girl is born with about 1 million ova. When my daughters were infants, I would stare at them, trying to grasp the reality that future grandchildren, if I were to have them, had gotten their start as cells inside my body. And the baby that I was diapering, was watching play with her toes, was soothing to sleep had a package of potential life inside her.

Contemplating this, I had a feeling not unlike the one you have when you stand in front of a mirror holding another mirror, and hold it in such a way that you see yourself reflected on and on and on and on.

Even as the babies grew into children — the daughters and the son — and their once physical connection to me was lost, I held on to the idea that cells that had originated inside me remained inside them like traces, souvenirs, relics. At the same time I felt perversely proud of my body (for doing what it does sort of automatically), these immigrant cells felt like losses to me, too, as though they took something from me.

My contrary feelings and ideas about my old cells residing in my children were so pressing that I of course had to write a poem about them. An early version (not the first draft) looked like this:

Relic

       for a daughter

Cheeks full. Lips
dripping pearl. You
have sucked

me soft.
What I had—
sinew leaping
blood replenishing
bones toughening—
spent.  Clean shell
I cultivate urge:

grow, colony, grow!
Multiply and billow
like yeast yet keep
my relic.

Moored boat,
patient seed, egg
inside me inside she
(my harbor, my flower),

remain, and divide.

Later, perhaps years, I dug the poem out and revised and revised it. I was going through a period of loving the cooler voices of poets like Mark Strand and Louise Glück, and I was a little embarrassed by my exclamation and stacked images. Continue reading →