Margotlog: From Trabbia to Pittsburgh, Somalia to Saint Paul
My oldest living relative Eleanora links me to her grandmother, also named Eleanora, who came from Sicily to New York, then Scranton, then Pittsburgh to marry the husband left with a small boy when her older sister died. Of course I never knew this first Eleanora, though I treasure and often visit her namesake and granddaughter, the 93-year-old marvel who still enjoys chocolate, teasing family gossip, television, and medical breakthroughs, all dispensed from her Lazy-Boy chair, in Dover, Delaware.
This family immigrant story, circa 1880, must have been common. That's one of the reasons it resonates with me today, when I have taught Hmong and Somali immigrants in Saint Paul. Italy invaded Ethiopia and Somalia in the 19th century, and many adults still speak Italian; some older Somali were even educated by Italian priests in Somalia, then went to Padova or other Italian universities for advanced degrees. One remarkable Somali gentleman with the equivalent of a Ph.D. in microbiology was a classroom aide when I met him in Saint Paul. Everyone referred to him as "Doctor." We exchanged greetings and a few sentences in Italian, then it became clear that his fluency exceeded mine and we switched to English.
Reading and writing in another language require many skill-sets (in clunky current educationese) not required of speaking. It's true that those blessed with a good ear, the right "mouth," and the best teacher of all--need--can pick up the rudiments of another spoken language fairly quickly. That doesn't mean they'll sound like a native, though sometimes even that is possible. Being born with the right "mouth" and ear will aid the acquisition of a spoken language tremendously. All through my childhood, I heard my father carry on in Italian--not paragraphs, of course, since he was the only one in our nuclear and isolated family of four who spoke it. "Eh, paisan!" he'd tease, tweaking my cheek between index and pointer fingers in a "pizzichille." Or starting the rhyming chant brought, I suspect, from Sicily, he'd raise his finger like a warning statue and intone: "Uno, due, tre cancello, suona, suona, suona bello, ecco si, ecco no," and after that the language spilled over itself to end with a mock beating. This "one, two, three" introduced something about cancelling and a bell ringing, and may have mimicked the "one, two, three, you're dead" of an actual Sicilian vendetta.
His mouth and ear now belong to me, and I'm proud to report that in Italy, natives sometimes mistake me for one of them. Of course, I look Italian, which helps. I'm pretty sure I'd have a much harder time acquiring spoken German or Swedish, my mother's countries of origin. Not only did I never hear her speak either language (I don't think she could, nor was she given to verbal play), but I also find the sound of German, at least, rather harsh and off-putting. Likewise the German practice of putting a verb at the end of a sentence sends me over the edge--English teacher, that I am. Contemporary American English is largely a language of incredible efficiency and directness: subject - verb- object, the trajectory of force moving straight from start to finish.
The first Eleanora had known her sister's husband in Trabbia; in fact, he who became the Reverend Leonardo D'Anna, started a renegade Protestant church--in that time and place quite a radical act. He'd been converted to Protestantism as a soldier in the Valdese mountains between France and Italy. Returning to Trabbia, he married an eldest daughter Giuseppina, they had a son, and when neighbors burned the little church, they swiftly removed to New York. There Leonardo he entered a Protestant seminary, and Giuseppina practiced the art of baking learned from her family in Sicily. The story goes that she followed the family custom of giving day-old bread to the poor, and waking the January streets of New York, she caught a terrible cold and died of pneumonia, thus leaving her husband and small son alone.
When Reverend D'Anna wrote to Sicily asking if his sister-in-law Eleanora would consent to come to America and marry him, he thus was requesting the hand of a young woman he already knew him and adored the little boy. Eleanora could not be allowed to sail all the way to America alone, however; so her father accompanied her. She never returned. The first voyage was so unnerving that she refused ever to set foot on a ship again. Thus her ties to her family in Sicily were severed completely. Well, not completely, because she and her minister husband, stepson and their three daughters--all lived within an immigrant Italian community, first in New York, then in Scranton, and finally in Pittsburgh. She did acquire spoken English, though many immigrant wives did not. Why would they need English if all their activities outside the home were among immigrants like themselves? It was their husbands and of course their children who made the leap into becoming American.
In the era when Eleanora's three daughters went to school in Scranton, there were no mandated state and national competency tests. Chances are that all three girls spoke both Italian and English, but maybe not. Certainly by the next generation, that is, my father (born in 1909) and his three cousins (born from 1919-25), all the children were bi-lingual because they were raised that way. My father's father, also a Protestant Italian minister, made it his business to establish schools to help immigrants acquire English and other skills necessary to become citizens. I don't remember anyone among my older Italian relatives ever weighing in on the problems of learning to speak, read, and write English.
Now I'm helping masters students in education struggle through the initial drafting of their thesis questions. Many are employed in charter schools established to educate various immigrant and migrant groups, for whom English is not their first language. These young teachers are often stymied by what's called the "achievement gap." Without going into the complicated differences among groups, I can say, simply and directly, that state and national mandates for achievement seem true impediments to the education taking place, especially among immigrants.
The few things I've picked up, during years of being a writer-in-the-schools teaching native-born and immigrant students include an awareness that learning two major skills at once is far more difficult than acquiring one, then building on that to acquire another. Expecting children who have a poor spoken knowledge of English to learn to read in that language, especially when they don't already know how to read in their own language--well it's like burdening a poor donkey with so many parcels that he can't possibly make it up a steep and rocky slope. At least not as fast as a donkey with no burdens at all.
As I listen to these dedicated young teachers describe the methods they employ to close the "achievement gap," I wonder about our thinking about equity and achievement. It seems to have gone awry in regards to immigrant students. It's a truism that it takes a student without spoken English twice or three times as long to master skills necessary to graduate high school as it does a native English speaker. Such a gap seems the obvious and simple difference in the many more things an immigrant must master. That we can't tailor programs to guide immigrant students steadily and surely, and at a reasonable pace through their learning challenges without gnashing our teeth and twisting the learning process into unnatural distortions, tells me that crazy ideology has taken hold. Our standards are no longer reasonable measures; they have become whips.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Margotlog: The Great Generals
Margotlog: The Great Generals
In our house we dislike war. My husband Fran spent seventeen months in federal prison during the Vietnam War for refusing to accept even alternate service. A thorough-going pacifist, he virtually insisted that his Iowa draft board send him to prison. Curiously, his older brother hadn't been touched in North Dakota. There, in the state's sparse population, the family was known: the Galts, the minister's family who lived on a reservation where Reverend Galt led a tiny church for the combined Hidatsa, Arrikara, Mandan. The Reverend himself had been imprisoned during World War II as a pacifist. Now when I ( the outsider) look back at this history, I wonder if Fran didn't follow suit simply because the family required it--one of those silent imperatives that may be harder to resist that the heavily voiced ones.
Prison introduced him to thieves, murderers, and scoundrels; he played chess with one. He worked in the prison office, administering "tree, house, person" tests to incoming prisoners. He got the job because he could type. He read voluminous 19th-century novels available in the prison library, and every now and then, he had a visitor: his mother, once; his newly married wife, perhaps every six months. Is it any surprise that a few years after he was released, the marriage began to unravel? Now, decades later, as a complete outsider to this period of his life, I recognize that had we met when Fran was well known at the University of Minnesota as an orator against the war, picketing, leafleting, protesting with other students and faculty--as I say, had we met then, when I was pursuing the "safe" existence of middle-class marriage with all the china, silver and assurance that went with it, I'd have run from what he represented. Not that I supported the war. I simply was capable of responding only to its horrendous sensations delivered into our homes for the first time, by TV. (Later, compelled to make his story public, I wrote it in the book: Stop This War! Americans Protest the Vietnam Conflict, available from Amazon.)
Yet, growing up in South Carolina, with a father who put on a military uniform to teach at The Citadel, having Civil War history served up with the peas and carrots and baked chicken every Sunday dinner, I couldn't avoid learning that wars changed lives. Drastically. The South was "beaten" to a pulp; Sherman's northern army burned its way through Georgia and only spared Charleston, so I dimly remember hearing, because somebody in Sherman's army had a sweetheart in the city. There on the battery, the cannons which had started the contest pointed across the harbor to Fort Sumter. And a huge marble figure with flowing robes dominated the headland, in honor of the valiant defenders.
But war from a strategic, tactical point of view was absolutely foreign to me. Whatever my father, the history professor, might have said about such things, passed right over me. That's why, listening recently to a recorded reading of "Grant" by John Mosier, has been a revelation. I've known for years that Grant was a U.S. president whose term of office was rife with corruption. I vaguely knew that Grant was an important Northern general during the Civil War. But that military historians now deem Grant one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the old-fashioned generals in Western history, up there with Wellington, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Montgomery and Dwight Eisenhower, took me completely by surprise.
Grant had none of the commanding presence of the great Southern general Robert E. Lee, nor the "dash" of Lee's compatriots, Longstreet, Sheridan, Bragg. Mosier emphasizes that when the Confederacy split from the Union, many of the finest US generals went with it. In fact, the North was plagued by totally incompetent military leadership, losing the first dozen major encounters, starting with first Bull Run, until Grant began to win in the west, Tennessee, Shiloh, Vicksburg--making a reality his strategy of securing the Mississippi Valley and as many railroad heads as possible for the Union.
Maybe I'm riveted by this history because directing an army bears some resemblance to teaching a class. "All plans are worthless after the first shot"--Grant's maxim--is also true of teaching. Improvisation, determination, and forward motion shape what will happen. "Strike hard and fast"--another maxim which Grant proved true time and again on the battlefield, also holds with students: a petulant or truculent attitude, left to fester, only gets worse. Tell it like it is, immediately and straight. "Write clearly and concisely"--Grant's written orders told his subordinate generals exactly where and what to do, and left the details up to intelligence and circumstance.
Grant also had two other signal characteristics which made him an outstanding general: with a painter's eye (he had studied painting at West Point), he could envision terrain and act accordingly, an extremely important skill in the period before aerial reconnaissance. The other was his imperturbable personality--the man could carry on a leisurely conversation on the night of a major battle. He rarely showed disappointment or anger; he did not lose heart. He held fast to the certainty that, despite the carnage and set-backs, the Union would prevail. I'll be mulling these lessons for a long time.
In our house we dislike war. My husband Fran spent seventeen months in federal prison during the Vietnam War for refusing to accept even alternate service. A thorough-going pacifist, he virtually insisted that his Iowa draft board send him to prison. Curiously, his older brother hadn't been touched in North Dakota. There, in the state's sparse population, the family was known: the Galts, the minister's family who lived on a reservation where Reverend Galt led a tiny church for the combined Hidatsa, Arrikara, Mandan. The Reverend himself had been imprisoned during World War II as a pacifist. Now when I ( the outsider) look back at this history, I wonder if Fran didn't follow suit simply because the family required it--one of those silent imperatives that may be harder to resist that the heavily voiced ones.
Prison introduced him to thieves, murderers, and scoundrels; he played chess with one. He worked in the prison office, administering "tree, house, person" tests to incoming prisoners. He got the job because he could type. He read voluminous 19th-century novels available in the prison library, and every now and then, he had a visitor: his mother, once; his newly married wife, perhaps every six months. Is it any surprise that a few years after he was released, the marriage began to unravel? Now, decades later, as a complete outsider to this period of his life, I recognize that had we met when Fran was well known at the University of Minnesota as an orator against the war, picketing, leafleting, protesting with other students and faculty--as I say, had we met then, when I was pursuing the "safe" existence of middle-class marriage with all the china, silver and assurance that went with it, I'd have run from what he represented. Not that I supported the war. I simply was capable of responding only to its horrendous sensations delivered into our homes for the first time, by TV. (Later, compelled to make his story public, I wrote it in the book: Stop This War! Americans Protest the Vietnam Conflict, available from Amazon.)
Yet, growing up in South Carolina, with a father who put on a military uniform to teach at The Citadel, having Civil War history served up with the peas and carrots and baked chicken every Sunday dinner, I couldn't avoid learning that wars changed lives. Drastically. The South was "beaten" to a pulp; Sherman's northern army burned its way through Georgia and only spared Charleston, so I dimly remember hearing, because somebody in Sherman's army had a sweetheart in the city. There on the battery, the cannons which had started the contest pointed across the harbor to Fort Sumter. And a huge marble figure with flowing robes dominated the headland, in honor of the valiant defenders.
But war from a strategic, tactical point of view was absolutely foreign to me. Whatever my father, the history professor, might have said about such things, passed right over me. That's why, listening recently to a recorded reading of "Grant" by John Mosier, has been a revelation. I've known for years that Grant was a U.S. president whose term of office was rife with corruption. I vaguely knew that Grant was an important Northern general during the Civil War. But that military historians now deem Grant one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the old-fashioned generals in Western history, up there with Wellington, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Montgomery and Dwight Eisenhower, took me completely by surprise.
Grant had none of the commanding presence of the great Southern general Robert E. Lee, nor the "dash" of Lee's compatriots, Longstreet, Sheridan, Bragg. Mosier emphasizes that when the Confederacy split from the Union, many of the finest US generals went with it. In fact, the North was plagued by totally incompetent military leadership, losing the first dozen major encounters, starting with first Bull Run, until Grant began to win in the west, Tennessee, Shiloh, Vicksburg--making a reality his strategy of securing the Mississippi Valley and as many railroad heads as possible for the Union.
Maybe I'm riveted by this history because directing an army bears some resemblance to teaching a class. "All plans are worthless after the first shot"--Grant's maxim--is also true of teaching. Improvisation, determination, and forward motion shape what will happen. "Strike hard and fast"--another maxim which Grant proved true time and again on the battlefield, also holds with students: a petulant or truculent attitude, left to fester, only gets worse. Tell it like it is, immediately and straight. "Write clearly and concisely"--Grant's written orders told his subordinate generals exactly where and what to do, and left the details up to intelligence and circumstance.
Grant also had two other signal characteristics which made him an outstanding general: with a painter's eye (he had studied painting at West Point), he could envision terrain and act accordingly, an extremely important skill in the period before aerial reconnaissance. The other was his imperturbable personality--the man could carry on a leisurely conversation on the night of a major battle. He rarely showed disappointment or anger; he did not lose heart. He held fast to the certainty that, despite the carnage and set-backs, the Union would prevail. I'll be mulling these lessons for a long time.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Margotlog: Rats, Lice, and History
Margotlog: Rats. Lice, and History
Growing up in The Old Citadel, during the 1950s, we could very well have been inhabiting a medieval fortress, with its foot-thick walls, sixteen-foot ceilings, deep window wells, tall windows, and dark cavernous halls. My friend from across the courtyard grew sick with a disease the doctors couldn't diagnose for the longest time, until they hit on the idea of typhus, one of the scourges of densely packed port cities like London or Naples. Rats would swarm off ships from the Levant or Orient, my mother said, and I'd picture a ground-level tide of dark bodies, long tails held out behind them, as they searched for houses to invade. As my friend lay quarantined in her second-floor apartment, I stared across the courtyard in her direction, caught by the silent drama of fear and salvation, suffering and attention. Especially once a dead rat was discovered decomposing in the wall beside her bed, her condition commanded my daily curiosity. Lice had found their way through the wall and bitten her as she slept. I had no idea what lice looked like, nor was I particularly worried that these creatures would bite me, though my sister and I sported all kinds of mosquito bites.
What became imbedded in my psyche was the drama of the ill, sequestered to a dim room and quiet bed, over which hung a ministering angel, mother or doctor or both. In those days, doctors still made house calls. A doctor never visited us in the Old Citadel that I remember, but our doctor in Mount Pleasant, where we moved when I was thirteen, often climbed the stairs to my second-floor bedroom. I would turn a feverish face toward the door and find his handsome form silhouetted against the light, then feel the cold stethoscope against my chest and his fingers feeling for swollen glands under my jaw and down my neck. This encounter in my pubescent years no doubt carried some sexual charge, though I was too weak and bleery to take note of it. Rather, it was the swoosh of outside air that accompanied his entrance, his bulk and promise of a cure that I associated with his visit.
My mother was also a crucial player. Her energetic efficiency contained a perpetual promise that life would continue. My father, the "emotional Italian," to use her words, could convey none of this. He would sigh and rub his forehead, let out a slight moan as he sat down, Saturday morning, at the kitchen table. We were still living in the Old Citadel, and as I ate my Rice Krispies, listening for the "snap, crackle, and pop," I'd catch his voice bemoaning the loss of "la bella Rosalia," his mother, who had died recently, aged only 58 or was it 62? Death drew from my father and transferred to me a sorrowful melody, even tears. He taught me that after death, life was charged for the survivors by a drama of mourning. That deep, melancholy sigh.
That illness and death could inhabit drama and literature I also learned, early on. With my parents, we walked down King Street to the Gloria Theater for a filming of "La Traviata," Verdi's intensely beautiful and dramatic opera about the high-class prostitute Violetta, her reform through love for Alfredo, but then, with the connivance of his father, her abandoning of Alfredo for the brilliance and danger of high living. Eventually, of course, she lies dying of tuberculosis, the quintessential 19th-century illness, and in glorious voice, is reunited for one last duet with Alfredo.
My younger sister and I were entirely smitten with Violetta's dying. Camping out in our parents big bed, we played Violetta dying and her maid attending over and over. I think it was Violetta's languor, coupled with her power over the maid about, that appealed to us, too young to recognize or attempt an entry for the penitent Alfredo and the ecstasy of their last embrace.
Now, decades later, halfway across the country from Charleston and almost as far north, I return to that childhood fascination with the drama of illness. And I remember Dickens' Bleak House. Perhaps I'm the only reader who finds the core of the book in Esther Summerson's long illness. Esther is half-narrator of the book, orphaned and taken up by the kindly landowner John Jarndyce. She has had numerous adventures and encounters, come to love Jarndyce's other wards, cousins also bedeviled by a Chancery Court case which will not be settled. Then, almost dead center in the highly convoluted, crowded world of Dickens' book, Esther becomes gravely ill and lies for many days almost lifeless in Mr. Jarndyce's country house.
The cause is her goodness: she has befriended Poor Tom, a street-sweeper/beggar who has followed her from London into the country where she finds him gravely ill. Perhaps he has smallbox, yes now that I remember, it is smallpox, because even in her modesty and submission to the welfare of others, Esther will worry, once she begins to recover, that she will be disfigured by the pox. But before she is capable of such anxiety, her goodness guides her to bring Poor Tom into the lower reaches of Mr. Jarndyce's house, and soon to be herself infected. For days, weeks, she lies almost insensible while cared for by another young person she's befriended. Mr. Jarndyce who has come to love and adore her is disconsolate. All who hear of her illness mourn her fate. Except she begins to recover. Eventually able to sit up in bed and study herself in the mirror.
There we are again: the gravely ill young woman who has won our hearts, and her devoted maid, the threat of death and the prolonged uncertainty, mixed with beauty, of her care. In Esther's case, a miraculous recovery occurs, allowing me to revert to girlhood, trade places with my sister, and let her play the sleeping beauty, the caring and admiring "second sister," and the bliss of lying back, exploring the options of slipping away or rousing oneself to carry on.
Growing up in The Old Citadel, during the 1950s, we could very well have been inhabiting a medieval fortress, with its foot-thick walls, sixteen-foot ceilings, deep window wells, tall windows, and dark cavernous halls. My friend from across the courtyard grew sick with a disease the doctors couldn't diagnose for the longest time, until they hit on the idea of typhus, one of the scourges of densely packed port cities like London or Naples. Rats would swarm off ships from the Levant or Orient, my mother said, and I'd picture a ground-level tide of dark bodies, long tails held out behind them, as they searched for houses to invade. As my friend lay quarantined in her second-floor apartment, I stared across the courtyard in her direction, caught by the silent drama of fear and salvation, suffering and attention. Especially once a dead rat was discovered decomposing in the wall beside her bed, her condition commanded my daily curiosity. Lice had found their way through the wall and bitten her as she slept. I had no idea what lice looked like, nor was I particularly worried that these creatures would bite me, though my sister and I sported all kinds of mosquito bites.
What became imbedded in my psyche was the drama of the ill, sequestered to a dim room and quiet bed, over which hung a ministering angel, mother or doctor or both. In those days, doctors still made house calls. A doctor never visited us in the Old Citadel that I remember, but our doctor in Mount Pleasant, where we moved when I was thirteen, often climbed the stairs to my second-floor bedroom. I would turn a feverish face toward the door and find his handsome form silhouetted against the light, then feel the cold stethoscope against my chest and his fingers feeling for swollen glands under my jaw and down my neck. This encounter in my pubescent years no doubt carried some sexual charge, though I was too weak and bleery to take note of it. Rather, it was the swoosh of outside air that accompanied his entrance, his bulk and promise of a cure that I associated with his visit.
My mother was also a crucial player. Her energetic efficiency contained a perpetual promise that life would continue. My father, the "emotional Italian," to use her words, could convey none of this. He would sigh and rub his forehead, let out a slight moan as he sat down, Saturday morning, at the kitchen table. We were still living in the Old Citadel, and as I ate my Rice Krispies, listening for the "snap, crackle, and pop," I'd catch his voice bemoaning the loss of "la bella Rosalia," his mother, who had died recently, aged only 58 or was it 62? Death drew from my father and transferred to me a sorrowful melody, even tears. He taught me that after death, life was charged for the survivors by a drama of mourning. That deep, melancholy sigh.
That illness and death could inhabit drama and literature I also learned, early on. With my parents, we walked down King Street to the Gloria Theater for a filming of "La Traviata," Verdi's intensely beautiful and dramatic opera about the high-class prostitute Violetta, her reform through love for Alfredo, but then, with the connivance of his father, her abandoning of Alfredo for the brilliance and danger of high living. Eventually, of course, she lies dying of tuberculosis, the quintessential 19th-century illness, and in glorious voice, is reunited for one last duet with Alfredo.
My younger sister and I were entirely smitten with Violetta's dying. Camping out in our parents big bed, we played Violetta dying and her maid attending over and over. I think it was Violetta's languor, coupled with her power over the maid about, that appealed to us, too young to recognize or attempt an entry for the penitent Alfredo and the ecstasy of their last embrace.
Now, decades later, halfway across the country from Charleston and almost as far north, I return to that childhood fascination with the drama of illness. And I remember Dickens' Bleak House. Perhaps I'm the only reader who finds the core of the book in Esther Summerson's long illness. Esther is half-narrator of the book, orphaned and taken up by the kindly landowner John Jarndyce. She has had numerous adventures and encounters, come to love Jarndyce's other wards, cousins also bedeviled by a Chancery Court case which will not be settled. Then, almost dead center in the highly convoluted, crowded world of Dickens' book, Esther becomes gravely ill and lies for many days almost lifeless in Mr. Jarndyce's country house.
The cause is her goodness: she has befriended Poor Tom, a street-sweeper/beggar who has followed her from London into the country where she finds him gravely ill. Perhaps he has smallbox, yes now that I remember, it is smallpox, because even in her modesty and submission to the welfare of others, Esther will worry, once she begins to recover, that she will be disfigured by the pox. But before she is capable of such anxiety, her goodness guides her to bring Poor Tom into the lower reaches of Mr. Jarndyce's house, and soon to be herself infected. For days, weeks, she lies almost insensible while cared for by another young person she's befriended. Mr. Jarndyce who has come to love and adore her is disconsolate. All who hear of her illness mourn her fate. Except she begins to recover. Eventually able to sit up in bed and study herself in the mirror.
There we are again: the gravely ill young woman who has won our hearts, and her devoted maid, the threat of death and the prolonged uncertainty, mixed with beauty, of her care. In Esther's case, a miraculous recovery occurs, allowing me to revert to girlhood, trade places with my sister, and let her play the sleeping beauty, the caring and admiring "second sister," and the bliss of lying back, exploring the options of slipping away or rousing oneself to carry on.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Margotlog: Story! Story!
Margotlog: Story! Story
The first book I published, The Story in History (Teachers & Writers Collaborative 1992), demonstrates to students and writers--would-be and already accomplished poets, novelists, dramatists, memoirists--how to go beneath the statistics and dates of history to vivify what happened. I present forms--letter poems, poems in two voices, radio dramas, messages scratched on prison stones, Native American "Winter Counts," battle dispatches, laboring songs and harvest recipes--into which writers can pour the voices and drama of events, great or small, real and enlivened, to recount what happened as we crossed the terrain, suffered the weather, mastered the technology, strife, nourishment of the past.
Now I'm trying to convince writers in science and education to do the same thing. I think they fear two things: losing authority and the appearance of hard-and-fast objectivity.
Let me convince with a real-life example. Saturday night, after a fine turkey dinner and before Sunday's blizzard knocked the stuffing out of us, some friends sat in our living room. After a lengthy debate about ways to build community support for solar energy, another topic presented itself. "What do you say to this?" asked a communications expert who works for one of the biggest hospital complexes in the Twin Cities. "I was given the job of rewriting a final documentation of changes made within various departments over the past year. Departments had already submitted their accounts, but many of them were so compressed and "jargonized" that even I, who know a lot about medicine and hospital procedures, even I had only a glimmer of what they were talking about. The more I thought about the problem--because this document had to communicate to many people inside and out of the hospital--the more I realized that these hard-working, dedicated medical professionals had no idea how to tell a story. Instead of the jargonized compressed version of the solution, we needed a narrative--the story of the problems they'd encountered, the solutions they'd tried, where they'd failed and how they'd arrived at solutions (even if only temporary).
"What I did," he continued, "was to sketch out what I thought was the story. Then I took my sketchy version and showed it to them. A few acknowledged that, yes, they'd felt the need of some such account, but didn't know how to go about writing it. Others simply looked at me as if I were looney. 'But, we know all that,' they said in essence, a little suspicious that I, an outsider, had been able to penetrate their one line of jargon to write this elaborated history.
"'You certainly do know that,' I countered, 'but the rest of the world doesn't. The rest of the world hasn't experienced the difficulties you encountered, the CAUSE of your search for a new solution, nor can they guess what makes your solution either the brilliant conclusion it is or the interim stop-gap, holding things in place until a better solution is devised. We have to show them. We have to tell the story of how adversity taught you that something must be done, and how, through trial and error, you crafted a solution."
We listeners laughed and applauded his achievement. We agreed that often, too much of any history is skipped over, and once those who lived it are gone or have forgotten, the essence of the discovery/achievement is lost. The solution becomes codified, immortal, while the trial and error, the lucky mistake, the suggestions and discussion around the struggle--all crumble into nothingness. How is it possible to teach the next generations of doctors, lawyers, architects, farmers, cooks, teachers, business owners, and so on? How is it possible to teach the process of discovery, that gathering of apparently disparate talents and approaches, plus thoughtful planning and careful revision, plus the spark of intuition and lucky happenstance--how to suggest and demonstrate this very human process unless it's written down?
Well, the answer is simple: it isn't possible. Such a process can't be merely suggested. It needs to be told, as a story. Moreover, and this occurred to me after our friends had gone, and I lay on the floor surrounded by cats, while I did my midnight yoga: the credibility, the authenticity of the solution is impressed on the listener precisely by learning who created it. This "who" includes all honors and glory already bestowed, but they are not enough. The makers win our respect when we witness what disaster they encountered, how they struggled and attempted, failed and finally succeeded in solving the difficulty. The story becomes their accreditation.
Plus our stories expand our sense of what's possible. We're not left simply holding a keypad and 17 characters (or whatever Twitter allows) to tell the tale. We wade deep, out of our depths to practice patience, perseverence, defeat and accomplishment. We can crow with Whitman, "I am large, I contain multitudes."
The first book I published, The Story in History (Teachers & Writers Collaborative 1992), demonstrates to students and writers--would-be and already accomplished poets, novelists, dramatists, memoirists--how to go beneath the statistics and dates of history to vivify what happened. I present forms--letter poems, poems in two voices, radio dramas, messages scratched on prison stones, Native American "Winter Counts," battle dispatches, laboring songs and harvest recipes--into which writers can pour the voices and drama of events, great or small, real and enlivened, to recount what happened as we crossed the terrain, suffered the weather, mastered the technology, strife, nourishment of the past.
Now I'm trying to convince writers in science and education to do the same thing. I think they fear two things: losing authority and the appearance of hard-and-fast objectivity.
Let me convince with a real-life example. Saturday night, after a fine turkey dinner and before Sunday's blizzard knocked the stuffing out of us, some friends sat in our living room. After a lengthy debate about ways to build community support for solar energy, another topic presented itself. "What do you say to this?" asked a communications expert who works for one of the biggest hospital complexes in the Twin Cities. "I was given the job of rewriting a final documentation of changes made within various departments over the past year. Departments had already submitted their accounts, but many of them were so compressed and "jargonized" that even I, who know a lot about medicine and hospital procedures, even I had only a glimmer of what they were talking about. The more I thought about the problem--because this document had to communicate to many people inside and out of the hospital--the more I realized that these hard-working, dedicated medical professionals had no idea how to tell a story. Instead of the jargonized compressed version of the solution, we needed a narrative--the story of the problems they'd encountered, the solutions they'd tried, where they'd failed and how they'd arrived at solutions (even if only temporary).
"What I did," he continued, "was to sketch out what I thought was the story. Then I took my sketchy version and showed it to them. A few acknowledged that, yes, they'd felt the need of some such account, but didn't know how to go about writing it. Others simply looked at me as if I were looney. 'But, we know all that,' they said in essence, a little suspicious that I, an outsider, had been able to penetrate their one line of jargon to write this elaborated history.
"'You certainly do know that,' I countered, 'but the rest of the world doesn't. The rest of the world hasn't experienced the difficulties you encountered, the CAUSE of your search for a new solution, nor can they guess what makes your solution either the brilliant conclusion it is or the interim stop-gap, holding things in place until a better solution is devised. We have to show them. We have to tell the story of how adversity taught you that something must be done, and how, through trial and error, you crafted a solution."
We listeners laughed and applauded his achievement. We agreed that often, too much of any history is skipped over, and once those who lived it are gone or have forgotten, the essence of the discovery/achievement is lost. The solution becomes codified, immortal, while the trial and error, the lucky mistake, the suggestions and discussion around the struggle--all crumble into nothingness. How is it possible to teach the next generations of doctors, lawyers, architects, farmers, cooks, teachers, business owners, and so on? How is it possible to teach the process of discovery, that gathering of apparently disparate talents and approaches, plus thoughtful planning and careful revision, plus the spark of intuition and lucky happenstance--how to suggest and demonstrate this very human process unless it's written down?
Well, the answer is simple: it isn't possible. Such a process can't be merely suggested. It needs to be told, as a story. Moreover, and this occurred to me after our friends had gone, and I lay on the floor surrounded by cats, while I did my midnight yoga: the credibility, the authenticity of the solution is impressed on the listener precisely by learning who created it. This "who" includes all honors and glory already bestowed, but they are not enough. The makers win our respect when we witness what disaster they encountered, how they struggled and attempted, failed and finally succeeded in solving the difficulty. The story becomes their accreditation.
Plus our stories expand our sense of what's possible. We're not left simply holding a keypad and 17 characters (or whatever Twitter allows) to tell the tale. We wade deep, out of our depths to practice patience, perseverence, defeat and accomplishment. We can crow with Whitman, "I am large, I contain multitudes."
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Margotlog:: Racism on the Train
Margotlog: Racism on the Train
Growing up as an outsider in Charleston, South Carolina, cut two ways: into myself when I recognized how divergent I was, how odd, how embarrassing, how ultimately unrecognizable. But also outward, toward the movers and shakers, toward the society that couldn't exactly place me except by my father's Citadel uniform. As I grew older and ranged beyond the Old Citadel, I began to recognize ironies and tiny rebellions; catch rueful resistance from the back of the bus; spy the loneliness of a doctor's wife in her splendid house, "South of Broad."
Charleston was one of the oldest cities in North America, founded in 1680 by English planters who'd originally stopped in Bermuda, then moved up the Atlantic coast, bringing their slaves. But they weren't the only settlers: French Huguenots seeking religious freedom, Jews with ancient Sephardic Spanish history; Scotch-Irish and Germans from Catholic/Protestant wars, and plain unadulterated Puritans, with their stiff uprightness going soft in the Southern heat. One of my best friends from grade school at Ashley Hall could trace her mother's family back to early planters: she was as blond and willowy as a sea nymph. She proudly sported four names.
My awareness of the fissures and ironies in Charleston life began when I started walking to school. Accompanied by an older girl and her sister, my age, we left the Old Citadel on King Street and took perpendicular Vanderhorst (Dutch, I'm guessing), past the lovely columned Baptist Church (I think that's right), into a broken-down neighborhood of formerly fine, three-story dwellings now inhabited by impoverished black people. Our voices hushed as I eaves-dropped on a dialect I couldn't understand. Under a huge tree in one grassless yard sat a turbaned old black woman in a over-stuffed chair. The ground around her was littered with orange peels. From the third-floor porch of another house--picture these houses with their narrow ends to the street, so that as we approached along the cracked and up-heaving sidewalk and glanced into the side yards, the three stories of porches faced us. As I say, over the railing of a third-floor porch hung a row of small black children, some wearing torn undershirts, and some without diapers of any kind. They stared at us, and for a few moments, we stared back. Even now I catch my young amazement that they were allowed to appear in public so unclothed, so untended. But the porch was relatively safe, like a playpen high in the air, and if they peed, it would drip off onto the ground. The conclusion I soon drew from these encounters wasn't stamped with ideas of race and social class so much as with a prickling discomfort at the difference between us walking to school and these apparently idle black people. Somehow I felt they offered a criticism of my existence; somehow because of them, I was able to be what I was. I was too young to understand racism, and my father hadn't begun his relentless rant against giving African-Americans equal rights. But walking through these neighborhoods, and later drinking the water from the "Whites Only" fountain in Sears made the effects of racism pretty plain.
Until later, racism didn't seem to belong to us, since we were outsiders. It was part of the Southern landscape into which we'd moved, and I was starting to intuit. That was all. Then, probably when I was in fourth or fifth grade, my mother, sister, and I took one of our frequent summer trips across country by train to North Dakota. We had spent six weeks in the quiet streets and fields around Papa Max's large, shadowing home in Hankinson. Now we were coming home. Probably we'd accomplished the first two legs of the journey--from Wapeton to Saint Paul, then Saint Paul to Chicago. On our way into Cincinnati, an altercation developed between my mother and the black porter. They stood in the aisle, all eyes (I imagined in my embarrassment) boring into them. She with her up-flipped side hair and trim traveling suit, her blue eyes flashing; he with the uniform hat with a narrow bill and white jacket. I have no idea what started the argument, but her voice rose and sharpened from its usual quiet modulation into nagging, dismissive tones. Under its "lash," he became ever more placating, shoulders drooping slightly, with his "Yes, Ma'am, yes Ma'am" bowing toward the floor. Her behavior deeply troubled me. She was so clearly abusing him with her voice, while his obsequious demeanor attempted to soothe and quiet her. That she took advantage of his subservient position, treated him not with dignity and kindness but with scorn and humiliation shocked me, and I intuited, though couldn't have put words to this, that racism could coarsen those in power, even someone like my mother who hadn't been born to the system. It was a profound and life-long lesson.
Growing up as an outsider in Charleston, South Carolina, cut two ways: into myself when I recognized how divergent I was, how odd, how embarrassing, how ultimately unrecognizable. But also outward, toward the movers and shakers, toward the society that couldn't exactly place me except by my father's Citadel uniform. As I grew older and ranged beyond the Old Citadel, I began to recognize ironies and tiny rebellions; catch rueful resistance from the back of the bus; spy the loneliness of a doctor's wife in her splendid house, "South of Broad."
Charleston was one of the oldest cities in North America, founded in 1680 by English planters who'd originally stopped in Bermuda, then moved up the Atlantic coast, bringing their slaves. But they weren't the only settlers: French Huguenots seeking religious freedom, Jews with ancient Sephardic Spanish history; Scotch-Irish and Germans from Catholic/Protestant wars, and plain unadulterated Puritans, with their stiff uprightness going soft in the Southern heat. One of my best friends from grade school at Ashley Hall could trace her mother's family back to early planters: she was as blond and willowy as a sea nymph. She proudly sported four names.
My awareness of the fissures and ironies in Charleston life began when I started walking to school. Accompanied by an older girl and her sister, my age, we left the Old Citadel on King Street and took perpendicular Vanderhorst (Dutch, I'm guessing), past the lovely columned Baptist Church (I think that's right), into a broken-down neighborhood of formerly fine, three-story dwellings now inhabited by impoverished black people. Our voices hushed as I eaves-dropped on a dialect I couldn't understand. Under a huge tree in one grassless yard sat a turbaned old black woman in a over-stuffed chair. The ground around her was littered with orange peels. From the third-floor porch of another house--picture these houses with their narrow ends to the street, so that as we approached along the cracked and up-heaving sidewalk and glanced into the side yards, the three stories of porches faced us. As I say, over the railing of a third-floor porch hung a row of small black children, some wearing torn undershirts, and some without diapers of any kind. They stared at us, and for a few moments, we stared back. Even now I catch my young amazement that they were allowed to appear in public so unclothed, so untended. But the porch was relatively safe, like a playpen high in the air, and if they peed, it would drip off onto the ground. The conclusion I soon drew from these encounters wasn't stamped with ideas of race and social class so much as with a prickling discomfort at the difference between us walking to school and these apparently idle black people. Somehow I felt they offered a criticism of my existence; somehow because of them, I was able to be what I was. I was too young to understand racism, and my father hadn't begun his relentless rant against giving African-Americans equal rights. But walking through these neighborhoods, and later drinking the water from the "Whites Only" fountain in Sears made the effects of racism pretty plain.
Until later, racism didn't seem to belong to us, since we were outsiders. It was part of the Southern landscape into which we'd moved, and I was starting to intuit. That was all. Then, probably when I was in fourth or fifth grade, my mother, sister, and I took one of our frequent summer trips across country by train to North Dakota. We had spent six weeks in the quiet streets and fields around Papa Max's large, shadowing home in Hankinson. Now we were coming home. Probably we'd accomplished the first two legs of the journey--from Wapeton to Saint Paul, then Saint Paul to Chicago. On our way into Cincinnati, an altercation developed between my mother and the black porter. They stood in the aisle, all eyes (I imagined in my embarrassment) boring into them. She with her up-flipped side hair and trim traveling suit, her blue eyes flashing; he with the uniform hat with a narrow bill and white jacket. I have no idea what started the argument, but her voice rose and sharpened from its usual quiet modulation into nagging, dismissive tones. Under its "lash," he became ever more placating, shoulders drooping slightly, with his "Yes, Ma'am, yes Ma'am" bowing toward the floor. Her behavior deeply troubled me. She was so clearly abusing him with her voice, while his obsequious demeanor attempted to soothe and quiet her. That she took advantage of his subservient position, treated him not with dignity and kindness but with scorn and humiliation shocked me, and I intuited, though couldn't have put words to this, that racism could coarsen those in power, even someone like my mother who hadn't been born to the system. It was a profound and life-long lesson.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Margotlog: Poetry OUT LOUD
Margotlog: Poetry OUT LOUD
Along with Shakespearean Sonnets, "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear, and "Invictus" by Ernest Henley--all great warhorses or bird/cat chariots of the p'try world, students at a recent Poetry Out Loud presentation I judged in Minneapolis gave us poems by Langston Hughes, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Irish poet Eavan Boland, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Dudley Randall. Over the last ten years, Poetry Out Loud has become a national "night out" for spoken word. No longer do we declaim solely from a school stage, though this is where each school starts the selection of its contestants. We carry our voices all the way to Washington.
I couldn't be more for it. Not only did I get to enjoy Khadro (I'm guessing of Somali origin) in a voice like milky silk present Mary Howitt's "The Spider and the Fly" with the simpering irony perfect for this lightly ironic enchantment, but I welcomed stout-hearted Hassan turn Benjamin Alire Saenz's "To the Desert" into a celebration of one who "taught me how to live without the rain." Now after a few minutes with Google, I've read Saenz's website biography and understand that his desert is the American Southwest, its vivid complicated border history, his own peregrinations through priesthood, service in Tanzania, graduate school in Iowa and California, and the publication of many books of poetry and fiction.
Our Poetry Out Loud presenters in what's called the Metro Central area couldn't have been more varied--some quiet and intense; others flamboyant and visceral. "You should have been in Winona," commented the coordinator of Minnesota's Poetry Out Loud: "Almost everyone spoke in subdued tones." In part she referred to the wide variety of origins and ethnicities present on our stage. Though I'm guessing, I'd place our students' recent origins on a world map with an emphasis on Africa, either directly or via their parents. Whereas Poetry Out Loud in southeastern Minnesota undoubtedly was performed almost entirely by third or fourth generation German/Scandinavians with a few Irish thrown in.
The guidelines for judging Poetry Out Loud emphatically support presenting a poem in what I'd call the "inside-out" style, meaning that the presenter absorbs each poem's complicated means--rhyme and rhythm, tone and color of language, sound and sense--and subdues declamation and theatrical gestures in favor of intense, subtle delivery. In fact, many of our Metro Central participants did NOT follow these strictures. The Africans among them come from a tradition of oral declamation. In Somalia, for instance, the history of poetry has been, until very recently, entirely oral, and poets are renown for the long sagas they have by heart, and for their ability to rivet an audience with a full-bodied, richly declaimed presentation. When you live a nomadic life, with no film or TV to mesmerize you with drama on demand, a poet must kindle all kinesthetic, oral and literary organs, dramatizing against a wide empty sky. American notions of poetry oral presentation come from a very different tradition, one in which poetry has developed internal castles of complicated associations and shades of meaning which can easily be missed in excessive dramatization.
More recently, too, we poets have been forced to find a niche separate from film and TV's often empty excesses. We tone down in order to be heard. The winner of the Metro Central competition did exactly that. She went deep inside the poems; she subdued herself to let the poems speak through her. Her voice had resonance and subtlety; her gestures were minimal. She gave a memorable performance, well within the guidelines established for the competition. But hers was not the only excellence. The second-place winner gave a vibrant performance. In her hijab and head scarf, with a vocal range more like singing than reading aloud, she breathed warmth into her chosen poems.
I'd say it's time to reconsider the guidelines, to recognize the widening experience of American poets and their student presenters. This is a change-in-the-making. I'll be watching to see what the poets-in-power make of it.
Along with Shakespearean Sonnets, "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear, and "Invictus" by Ernest Henley--all great warhorses or bird/cat chariots of the p'try world, students at a recent Poetry Out Loud presentation I judged in Minneapolis gave us poems by Langston Hughes, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Irish poet Eavan Boland, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Dudley Randall. Over the last ten years, Poetry Out Loud has become a national "night out" for spoken word. No longer do we declaim solely from a school stage, though this is where each school starts the selection of its contestants. We carry our voices all the way to Washington.
I couldn't be more for it. Not only did I get to enjoy Khadro (I'm guessing of Somali origin) in a voice like milky silk present Mary Howitt's "The Spider and the Fly" with the simpering irony perfect for this lightly ironic enchantment, but I welcomed stout-hearted Hassan turn Benjamin Alire Saenz's "To the Desert" into a celebration of one who "taught me how to live without the rain." Now after a few minutes with Google, I've read Saenz's website biography and understand that his desert is the American Southwest, its vivid complicated border history, his own peregrinations through priesthood, service in Tanzania, graduate school in Iowa and California, and the publication of many books of poetry and fiction.
Our Poetry Out Loud presenters in what's called the Metro Central area couldn't have been more varied--some quiet and intense; others flamboyant and visceral. "You should have been in Winona," commented the coordinator of Minnesota's Poetry Out Loud: "Almost everyone spoke in subdued tones." In part she referred to the wide variety of origins and ethnicities present on our stage. Though I'm guessing, I'd place our students' recent origins on a world map with an emphasis on Africa, either directly or via their parents. Whereas Poetry Out Loud in southeastern Minnesota undoubtedly was performed almost entirely by third or fourth generation German/Scandinavians with a few Irish thrown in.
The guidelines for judging Poetry Out Loud emphatically support presenting a poem in what I'd call the "inside-out" style, meaning that the presenter absorbs each poem's complicated means--rhyme and rhythm, tone and color of language, sound and sense--and subdues declamation and theatrical gestures in favor of intense, subtle delivery. In fact, many of our Metro Central participants did NOT follow these strictures. The Africans among them come from a tradition of oral declamation. In Somalia, for instance, the history of poetry has been, until very recently, entirely oral, and poets are renown for the long sagas they have by heart, and for their ability to rivet an audience with a full-bodied, richly declaimed presentation. When you live a nomadic life, with no film or TV to mesmerize you with drama on demand, a poet must kindle all kinesthetic, oral and literary organs, dramatizing against a wide empty sky. American notions of poetry oral presentation come from a very different tradition, one in which poetry has developed internal castles of complicated associations and shades of meaning which can easily be missed in excessive dramatization.
More recently, too, we poets have been forced to find a niche separate from film and TV's often empty excesses. We tone down in order to be heard. The winner of the Metro Central competition did exactly that. She went deep inside the poems; she subdued herself to let the poems speak through her. Her voice had resonance and subtlety; her gestures were minimal. She gave a memorable performance, well within the guidelines established for the competition. But hers was not the only excellence. The second-place winner gave a vibrant performance. In her hijab and head scarf, with a vocal range more like singing than reading aloud, she breathed warmth into her chosen poems.
I'd say it's time to reconsider the guidelines, to recognize the widening experience of American poets and their student presenters. This is a change-in-the-making. I'll be watching to see what the poets-in-power make of it.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Margotlog: Flowers upon the Water
Margotlog: Flowers upon the Water
We hardly ever received messages on Isla. We had no cell phones then; nothing ever collapsed at home, except once, during our late February vacation, 2003. Then I returned from strolling to town and found that the "Office" at Posada del Mar had brought a message up to our room. The assisted living, where we had transferred my mother six months before, had called: she was in the hospital. Trembling and terrified, I gathered as many Mexican pesos as I could and returned toward town to a pay phone.
It was strange to stand with sea breezes ruffling my hair and a sandy street under my feet, while the faint voice of the assisted-living administrator told the story. My mother (three months shy of turning 95) had not been well for a number of days, pale and weak and eventually passing blood in her urine. They'd taken her to her doctor where the nurse hadn't been able to "raise a pulse." This should have been an immediate sign to send my mother directly to the hospital. But no, the nurses and soon the doctor proceeded. Here, Reader, you must forgive my anger and bitterness: these medical professionals, who professed to be skilled in geriatric care, insisted against her wishes on inserting a catheter into her bladder. What other enormities of medical interference they perpetrated I'll probably never know. But I do know what happened eventually: they sent her back to the assisted living facility, where, appalled at her weakened, almost lifeless condition, the facility called an ambulance and had her taken to Roper General Hospital.
During the five hours that she slowly expired, the two women who had taken care of her, first at home, then in assisted living, took turns sitting beside her. She died with a familiar hand stroking her hair. And she died quietly, after the intrusions of the doctor's office. The hospital had enough sense not to try and resusitate a body so clearly shutting down. When I phoned again, several hours later, I was able to talk to my sister who had tried valiantly to reach her side from Boston, but been held up by a connecting flight in Charlotte.
During that second call, I decided, without any agonizing soul-searching, that I would leave the funeral to my sister. Though we'd done a fine job of sharing our mother's care during the five years of her slow decline, we had quite different ideas about how to put her in the ground.
I had already said good-bye to Mother three weeks before, at the end of January, when I'd spent a long weekend with her. As I'd entered her room in the late afternoon, she was still lying asleep in her long afternoon nap. Sitting at the end of the bed, with light filtering through closed blinds, I saw death in her face. Her pallor matched her white hair; her features were somewhat sunken. It was as if an invisible, but palpable arm was gently reaching through the closed blinds and drawing her away. I was attentive, noting the awareness that transferred itself to me in that shrouded room. My intuition hadn't been prefigured by any "rational" thought, yet it was as clear as an certainty, framed into words, could be.
I decided not to put myself through the rigors of changing my flight and attempting to fly from Cancun, probably via Miami, to Charleston. My sister could arrange the funeral as she wished. Our mother, with her intensely practical attention to detail, had planned it all in advance.
Yet, I had to pause and attend her passage. Make some homage formed of Isla's beauty and my own sorrow. Later that initial sorrow would mount into true mourning, when for months, I would sit in the sunlit front rooms of our second floor and weep. That kind of grief whose agony cleanses our souls, that kind of grief doesn't come immediately. What I needed immediately was a pageant I'd remember through the years to follow. A ceremony of sorts when I could gather sky and sea, flowers and birds to help commemorate her life and waft her on her way.
Putting on my swimsuit, though I rarely swam on the "bikini" beach just beyond Posada del Mar, I passed through the lush green of the Posada grounds. Many hibiscus had dropped their blossoms as new ones appeared. The green grass was littered with red hibiscus. Gathering up the fallen flowers, I headed toward the beach which faced north, across the Gulf of Mexico toward the Atlantic, toward Charleston.
It was, as always in late February on Isla, a beautiful day, with billowing white clouds spiraling into brilliant blue. The water, shallow for a long ways beyond the white sand, was warm and friendly as a big dog, lapping my ankles, then knees, then thighs. Still carrying the blossoms, I lowered myself into the green depths and slowly drifted toward the north. Whether sun-bathers watched me, I do not know. I kept my eyes on the northern strip of land on the Cancun mainland, and let the water carry me. Slowly the flowers left my hands and bobbed on little and bigger waves. Some were caught and went further out toward the channel until I lost sight of them. Others like friendly stewards of my grief stayed close, bobbing and reappearing, their fuzzy stamens pointing toward the sky, their petals catching drops of water and sometimes submerging.
I was aware only of sending my love with the flowers toward her, as if an invisible stream flowed through the warm green water north directly to where she was. Overhead almost as high as the clouds, the zig-zag shapes of frigate birds elevated my thoughts. Gulls flew over, lazily flapping closer to the water. Gradually some of the flowers, further out in the channel, completely submerged and were gone. Others remained close, still rising and falling with the gentle waves, still keeping me company.
I must have made some sort of pact with myself--that I would swim and loll, weep and remember as long as the red tips of flowers still accompanied me. Who knows how long it took as the north tugged at my desire to communicate across the miles to the watery coast where she would be buried. Each red flower was like a small boat, an emissary, bobbing with me, moving with the gentle force of wind and waves, finally losing its contact with me and going on its own way.
Eventually the flowers had wafted too far north for me to track and it was time to return. It seems to me now, looking back, that I scooped up one or two still floating around me and carried them back to our second floor room where I lay them on the balcony rail, my last flowery homage. It seems the perfect gesture, the perfect goodbye to a woman who loved flowers to the very end of her life, who grew camellia bushes far taller than herself, which at this time of year in her beloved Charleston yard were covered with wide, waxy red blossoms, with gold crowns in their centers.
We hardly ever received messages on Isla. We had no cell phones then; nothing ever collapsed at home, except once, during our late February vacation, 2003. Then I returned from strolling to town and found that the "Office" at Posada del Mar had brought a message up to our room. The assisted living, where we had transferred my mother six months before, had called: she was in the hospital. Trembling and terrified, I gathered as many Mexican pesos as I could and returned toward town to a pay phone.
It was strange to stand with sea breezes ruffling my hair and a sandy street under my feet, while the faint voice of the assisted-living administrator told the story. My mother (three months shy of turning 95) had not been well for a number of days, pale and weak and eventually passing blood in her urine. They'd taken her to her doctor where the nurse hadn't been able to "raise a pulse." This should have been an immediate sign to send my mother directly to the hospital. But no, the nurses and soon the doctor proceeded. Here, Reader, you must forgive my anger and bitterness: these medical professionals, who professed to be skilled in geriatric care, insisted against her wishes on inserting a catheter into her bladder. What other enormities of medical interference they perpetrated I'll probably never know. But I do know what happened eventually: they sent her back to the assisted living facility, where, appalled at her weakened, almost lifeless condition, the facility called an ambulance and had her taken to Roper General Hospital.
During the five hours that she slowly expired, the two women who had taken care of her, first at home, then in assisted living, took turns sitting beside her. She died with a familiar hand stroking her hair. And she died quietly, after the intrusions of the doctor's office. The hospital had enough sense not to try and resusitate a body so clearly shutting down. When I phoned again, several hours later, I was able to talk to my sister who had tried valiantly to reach her side from Boston, but been held up by a connecting flight in Charlotte.
During that second call, I decided, without any agonizing soul-searching, that I would leave the funeral to my sister. Though we'd done a fine job of sharing our mother's care during the five years of her slow decline, we had quite different ideas about how to put her in the ground.
I had already said good-bye to Mother three weeks before, at the end of January, when I'd spent a long weekend with her. As I'd entered her room in the late afternoon, she was still lying asleep in her long afternoon nap. Sitting at the end of the bed, with light filtering through closed blinds, I saw death in her face. Her pallor matched her white hair; her features were somewhat sunken. It was as if an invisible, but palpable arm was gently reaching through the closed blinds and drawing her away. I was attentive, noting the awareness that transferred itself to me in that shrouded room. My intuition hadn't been prefigured by any "rational" thought, yet it was as clear as an certainty, framed into words, could be.
I decided not to put myself through the rigors of changing my flight and attempting to fly from Cancun, probably via Miami, to Charleston. My sister could arrange the funeral as she wished. Our mother, with her intensely practical attention to detail, had planned it all in advance.
Yet, I had to pause and attend her passage. Make some homage formed of Isla's beauty and my own sorrow. Later that initial sorrow would mount into true mourning, when for months, I would sit in the sunlit front rooms of our second floor and weep. That kind of grief whose agony cleanses our souls, that kind of grief doesn't come immediately. What I needed immediately was a pageant I'd remember through the years to follow. A ceremony of sorts when I could gather sky and sea, flowers and birds to help commemorate her life and waft her on her way.
Putting on my swimsuit, though I rarely swam on the "bikini" beach just beyond Posada del Mar, I passed through the lush green of the Posada grounds. Many hibiscus had dropped their blossoms as new ones appeared. The green grass was littered with red hibiscus. Gathering up the fallen flowers, I headed toward the beach which faced north, across the Gulf of Mexico toward the Atlantic, toward Charleston.
It was, as always in late February on Isla, a beautiful day, with billowing white clouds spiraling into brilliant blue. The water, shallow for a long ways beyond the white sand, was warm and friendly as a big dog, lapping my ankles, then knees, then thighs. Still carrying the blossoms, I lowered myself into the green depths and slowly drifted toward the north. Whether sun-bathers watched me, I do not know. I kept my eyes on the northern strip of land on the Cancun mainland, and let the water carry me. Slowly the flowers left my hands and bobbed on little and bigger waves. Some were caught and went further out toward the channel until I lost sight of them. Others like friendly stewards of my grief stayed close, bobbing and reappearing, their fuzzy stamens pointing toward the sky, their petals catching drops of water and sometimes submerging.
I was aware only of sending my love with the flowers toward her, as if an invisible stream flowed through the warm green water north directly to where she was. Overhead almost as high as the clouds, the zig-zag shapes of frigate birds elevated my thoughts. Gulls flew over, lazily flapping closer to the water. Gradually some of the flowers, further out in the channel, completely submerged and were gone. Others remained close, still rising and falling with the gentle waves, still keeping me company.
I must have made some sort of pact with myself--that I would swim and loll, weep and remember as long as the red tips of flowers still accompanied me. Who knows how long it took as the north tugged at my desire to communicate across the miles to the watery coast where she would be buried. Each red flower was like a small boat, an emissary, bobbing with me, moving with the gentle force of wind and waves, finally losing its contact with me and going on its own way.
Eventually the flowers had wafted too far north for me to track and it was time to return. It seems to me now, looking back, that I scooped up one or two still floating around me and carried them back to our second floor room where I lay them on the balcony rail, my last flowery homage. It seems the perfect gesture, the perfect goodbye to a woman who loved flowers to the very end of her life, who grew camellia bushes far taller than herself, which at this time of year in her beloved Charleston yard were covered with wide, waxy red blossoms, with gold crowns in their centers.
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