Author: jelizabeth

– (Mis)reading

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Glancing at the CNN headlines this morning, I saw one — “Clinton Crushes Obama” — and experienced this instant, non-processed thought: Oh, what a turn of events! Hillary is falling for Barack’s charm, too.

Perhaps I have been spending too much time in the company of teens and pre-teens, and reading their magazines and FB wall posts, a world in which everyone is crushing (on) someone. A couple of weeks ago, too, some tutor colleagues and I were talking about the phenomenon of the ephemeral tutoring crush, which seems to flare and die in an hour.

Well, at least my impulsive mind finds a sentimental, rather than a violent, meaning for the verb “crush.”

P.S. Go, Hillary!

– I spy

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I look for and appreciate good signage, and I especially study signs on commercial vans, trucks, and cars.

This one turned my head today:

THIS OLD SPOUSE

Handyman

781-444-1###

Simple, clever, complete. Who are you, excellent sign writer?

– Four characters

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Months ago, I asked a favor of Y., a student I have known for two years. She is a regular in the writing center, and she was in my composition class last spring. All teachers secretly root for and are attracted to certain kinds of students, and this is something you start to know about yourself, as a teacher, as semesters roll by. A colleague of mine, a steadily productive one, admitted to relishing her work with the “out there,” unpredictable students. And me? This student, Y., is of the kind I have my eye on: hard-working, quiet, smart without fanfare.

I asked Y. to translate for me the scroll that the Chinese father of X., another (former) student, made for me a few years ago, when X. was graduating from her Master’s program. The parents were visiting the United States for the first time, and the daughter asked her father, apparently a skilled calligrapher, to make a scroll each for a few teachers and bring them along as gifts; I was a lucky one. Although fluent in Mandarin, her native language, X. was as unable as I to read the scroll. She explained: “It’s traditional.”

Y., current student (and, yes, her name begins with the letter Y and the former student’s name begins with the letter X), took this on as a project. Once in a while, since I have asked her, she has popped in to the writing center to update me on her progress, to give me a clue or two about the meaning she was finding.

Yesterday she stopped by and asked to meet formally. Y. had heard it was my last day in the writing center, not just for the semester, but for always. We sat down together, and she translated, at length and with plenty of her own commentary on Chinese poetry, the scroll. In four lines, the poem is about what we might, in English, call melancholy. Set at the end of spring, a time of year that intensifies such feelings, it uses the imagery of the garden, grass, and water to evoke an older person’s recollections of “people who are missing” — people who have gone before, grown children who have moved away. “It’s metaphor,” said Y.

There was more for Y. to teach me. She gave me an envelope and said it was okay for me to open it. In her longish farewell note to me, written in careful English and careful Chinese, there were these four characters:

Excerpt from Y\'s note

The four characters represent these words: SPRING ** WIND ** TRANSFORM ** RAIN

Y.’s note offered an English translation — “educating the young” is what a teacher does — but her longer commentary on the characters, which she spoke aloud and illustrated on scrap paper, was richer. Let’s see if I can do Y. justice. Here goes:

SPRING seems to be a time of year that suggests both beginnings and the end of beginnings. This is the moment in which a teacher meets her student. The teacher is WIND, which, by its gentle force, TRANSFORMS and disperses the RAIN, which is knowledge. By transforming the rain into droplets that are not too small and not too large, and by dispersing them to the grass (grass, which stands for students, is implied), a teacher teaches.

I am so taken by this, these qualities of teaching and knowledge being powerful and yet ephemeral. I like, too, how the teacher is unbundled from knowledge; there is wind and there is rain; and neither contains the other, although they mingle. Y. shared a new metaphor with me that seemed instantly right.

It’s mid spring in New England. I’m moving on and might never see Y. again, although I don’t know. To each other, we may become, over time, people who are missing. Not gone, not dead: missed.

– Just to say

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First of all, this is just to say that the following poem is one by William Carlos Williams that I’ve never really liked. I knew in high school I was supposed to like it, for its straightforwardness maybe, its use of the word “delicious,” but I don’t think I ever did. I do like the sound of “icebox,” yet I don’t like the sound of the word “breakfast” (a stack of consonants and blends!), even though I do like to eat it.

Yet, the title, This Is Just to Say, has been speaking itself to weary me as I stand in front of the sink and look out on ladders in the back yard and see paint splashes in the sink or sit at the kitchen table and hear the builders thumping and singing upstairs, as if our house is their house. This is also just to say I want my house back.

Back in March, on the verge of construction moving from the outside to the inside

You can read the WCW poem and see if you like it. Then you can read my words crammed into his structure. I know white space is important in his work, but there is no space in my life right now and so no extra space between the lines of my attempt.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

*

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

*

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

*

–William Carlos Williams

*

This Is Just to Say

We have endured
the guys
who are in
our bedrooms

and whom
you were possibly
going
to hire

Pity us
they are industrious
yet such bulls
and so loud

–Jane Elizabeth Kokernak

—-

Picture taken by Jimmy on March 11, 2008.

– Seven year wait

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This week I played hooky from life — our ongoing construction project, my piles of paper, an empty fridge, gray pants and wool sweaters — and went to the Cape for a few days with Lydia and Grace to visit my parents. We biked, ate ice cream, and, on glorious Wednesday (temperature 74° F. at the coast), lounged at the beach and walked on the jetty. With my mother and sister Sally, I went to a restaurant and enjoyed a meal that (a) I didn’t cook or clean up from and (b) lasted, over drinks and four courses, way more than 10 minutes.

One can only play hooky for so long, however.

We drove home in sunshine. Back home, even warmer, and a surprise.

The magnolia in the front yard, planted and staked seven years ago by Colleen (gardener/artist) and coaxed, watered, fertilized, and generally clucked over by me, had finally — finally! — burst into yellow bloom. I’ve been waiting.

Magnolia branch, April 25, 2008

Last year there was one bud on the entire tree: the pioneer, the advance guard, a canary. This year there are multiple buds on every branch.

Magnolia buds, April 25, 2008

The buds open at their own pace. This one begins.

Magnolia bud, April 25, 2008

This one is either next, or perhaps proudly insisting on holding out for the last moment of the tree’s spring glory.

Magnolia closed bud, April 25, 2008

Some flowers show signs of later life; petals wither and curl and droop. Green leaves unfurl.

Magnolia with leaves beginning, April 25, 2008

One doesn’t want to have to wait too long for labor and attention to bear fruit; waiting can be wearying. However, in this instance, my thrill with these profuse blooms, which arrived at their own pace, is a match for the weight of waiting, which has suddenly lifted.

—-

Thanks to Jimmy for the camera work while staff photographer Eli is occupied with other spring concerns, most notably, rowing on the Charles River and “erging” at Simmons College with his high school crew team. (Go, Eli!)

– The long bones

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Bones

A student in the college’s funeral service program brought into the Writing Center her paper on organ and tissue donation. Before I read it, I asked her about the assignment, and I also asked if there was anything in particular she’d like me to read for. The assignment, she told me, required her to cover all aspects of the subject — religious, legal, ethical, and technical — in about five pages. When I raised my eyebrows at this, she remarked, “Yeah, it’s a lot to cover in a short space.” And she asked me to read “to see if it’s all right.”

Her writing was all right: clear, grammatical, good paragraphing. As reader, though, I found myself most fascinated by the one or two page technical section, which described how enbalmers remove organs and tissues and then prepare bodies after that, and especially by a paragraph or two on the long bones: the ones in arms and legs (and later I found out, in fingers). Not only did I not have any previous knowledge that these could be donated and transplanted, I loved the sound of the phrase “the long bones.”

I thought of telling her how all the action in the paper was in my favorite section and presenting the possibility of revising around that section. I stopped myself. She didn’t ask me how to write an exciting paper; her feedback request was more practical. In the end, I gave her a compliment about how well she described the hands-on work of her intended profession, and I raised a few questions to get her to sharpen a couple of meandering paragraphs.

Later, on my own and with friend and colleague Jan Donley, I reflected on myself as a demanding reader. How does that affect the way I respond to student writing? To friends’ writing? I hope I have the self-restraint to allow their work to be about what it’s about for them. Do I only exhibit that, however, when the writer is a pretty good one? I fear that, with student writers I consider lesser, I step in and give stronger, more shaping (and possibly diverting) feedback.

As a hungry reader, I am foraging constantly for something good in everything I read, whether it be a bit or the whole thing. I can’t stop thinking of the long bones. The phrase has been ringing in my imaginative ears. I drive around from place to place, and look down at my legs, at the span of my arm from shoulder to wheel, at my fingers. The long bones, the long bones, the long bones.

—-

Drawing by Nadav. Found on Flickr.

– Sentence love

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Every night Dusty and Honey lie in their twin beds and talk before they fall asleep.

I didn’t write that sentence.  I heard it today, in the middle of a broadcast essay by Hillary Frank on This American Life.  The story is about two sisters in their 70’s who are not twins but who have lived their entire lives together, buying matching clothes, eating matching foods and snacks, and making a matching life.  It’s called “Matching Outfits Not Included,” and you should listen to it.  The author/producer gently raises with the sisters the urgent questions of selfhood that gnaw at many of us, and the sisters gently push back.  Love, not the self, is their currency.

And I love the sentence.  Hearing it, I instantly pictured the sisters, like old girls, in their beds on their backs with blankets up to their chins.  I superimposed on their faces the faces of my grandmother and her older sister, Mae, who lived together in later life: bickering, sharing, knitting.  As I wrote down the sentence on a pink Post-it note, a beat after it was spoken, I admired the author for saving it until the middle of the piece.  It would have been easy to use it as a first sentence — what great names! — like a good pick-up line.  But Frank holds onto it, until the moment after she establishes the sisters’ genuine intimacy.  And then the sentence brings us, the audience, in closer.