Fourth of July

I had an odd little experience yesterday; I was biking home from campus around nine PM when I saw some fireworks—and liked them. I used to like fireworks as a kid, but I haven’t recently. Last year I actually went with my mother to watch a display and I found myself completely distracted by the other people in the crowd and by the movements of a large moth flying in loops around a nearby streetlight. The fact of the rocket’s red blare above seemed completely uninteresting and irrelevant to me. I don’t know why I lost interest, but I expected the loss to be permanent. And then last night, right above the trees along the Ashuelot, right as I got ready to follow the bike trail out of town, an explosion bloomed green against the clear dusk sky. And it was beautiful.

I had a tendency to think of the Fourth of July as Fireworks Day, when I was a kid. I suspect many people did, and some still do. I remember going up to a park in Wilmington with my parents and buying ice cream from trucks parked in the grass among the crowds. It was always hot, and there was always a huge press of people, all strangers, but I didn’t mind. There was a bandstand with music and occasionally actors portraying Benjamin Franklin and other notables, and I never paid much attention. There were men walking through the crowd at dusk selling glow-in-the-dark necklaces, and I always wanted one and sometimes I got one, my sister and I both did. And then the show began, pop! pop! pop! pop! One year I was totally obsessed with the color green for whatever reason, and I cheered that color whenever it appeared. My mother’s favorites were the big bells of color, giant chrysanthemums of color that filled the sky and trickled down on all sides. And then the grand finale, which was always way too loud, and the world was all bright and color and sound and not thinking, and then it was over and smelling like gunpowder and I had to hold tight to the end of the beach blanket my mother’s hands were full of, hold tight and not get lost as thousands of people all fled to our cars at exactly the same time. 

I was intellectually aware of the patriotic dimension, of course, but it failed to move me. I’m not anti-patriotic, not anti-American, but I can’t love my country any more than a fish can love water. I can’t wrap my mind around it, can’t think of it as an object to have feelings about.

But I can wrap my mind around, feel emotions about, even commit myself to people, individual people, like, for example, John Adams, the second president of the United States.  I started reading about him some years ago and more or less didn’t stop. It amazes me that he, together with his colleagues, made a country for us. They did it quite deliberately. John Adams once said that he studied war so that his grandchildren would be able to study art. He put his marriage and his family and his life on the line—as a ringleader of the revolution he would certainly have been hanged if we had lost the war—because he thought it was the right thing to do, and because his wife and best friend, Abigail Adams, also thought it was the right thing to do. She has gotten popular in recent years as something of a proto-feminist, and as such I do admire her. She was a remarkable human being, and she deserves the recognition she is finally getting, though it would have flustered and embarrassed her. But it is him I identify with. We are a lot alike, John Adams and I, for we are not only both intelligent, dedicated, and idealistic, but also moody, a trifle vain, self-analytical, stubborn, and disorganized. When I visited their home and the tour guide showed us the room where Abigail died, I broke down crying, not in misty-eyed sympathy, but in frank, full sobs. About John’s death I felt only mild interest—but then, he would hardly have grieved over himself.

The Fourth of July thus becomes meaningful to me as a celebration of the work and the sacrifices of a particular man, John Adams, but it is also more than that. Today is the anniversary of the day he died. One hundred and eighty-six years ago today, John Adams was alive—and that statement will never again be true, never in the whole sweep of time. From now on, that number will always be bigger.

It’s easy to think of these people as somehow timeless, almost fictional, living always and forever in some parallel universe where tricornered hats are always in fashion and the debates of the Founding Fathers play out in an eternal, historical present. Actually, all those people, the founding fathers and mothers, are dead.

John Adams died in the late afternoon, during a thunderstorm. His last words are usually quoted at “Jefferson survives,” or something similar. Actually, his last words were “help me, child.” The more popular version is probably the one he meant, for it would have been like him to think about what his last words should be, and to choose something heroic. Intellectually he didn’t mind dying; he was always brave, and of course Abigail had already died and he looked forward to seeing her again. But then, when he felt himself finally going, maybe he grew afraid, like how one sometimes feels afraid just before sleep, afraid to let go, and he made a grab for control and said “help me!” But he did say the line about Jefferson, he just said it earlier. He and Jefferson were the last two signers of the Declaration of Independence, and he must have wondered which one of them would be the last. Maybe he was gratified to at least have the answer to the question—except he was wrong. Thomas Jefferson had died several hours earlier. The two men had held on quite deliberately to make it to the Fourth, that year the fiftieth anniversary of Declaration. The day meant a great deal to both of them.

And the day after, in the days after, what then? John Adams’ oldest son, John Quincy Adams, could not be there when his father died. He was president himself, at the time, and did not have the freedom to sit vigil. In those years of horseback communication, it must have taken a few days for him to find out his father was dead, sharp news, unbelievable news, and he had to pull himself together and keep running the country. But gradually his grief grew less sharp, gradually it got easier to go on. A year went by, then two, milestones passed after which John Quincy could no longer say “the last time this happened, my father was alive.” Gradually, his status as adult orphan must have come to seem normal. It became his life, decade after decade, until he himself died, fell in the political traces on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and was grieved in turn.

Or imagine the more complicated wake of Jefferson’s death. Jefferson’s official last words (“Is it the Fourth? It is a great day, a good day”) were not his final words, either, but his real final words were not recorded. He addressed them to a group of his slaves--almost certainly his lover, Sally Hemings, and their grown children. What was that deathbed like for her? Thomas Jefferson had been the dominant fact of her entire life, and she had been his lover since she was a teenager. She had had some choice in the matter, since the relationship began in France, where she could have legally claimed her freedom; many black people did take advantage of French law, but Hemings did not. She chose to go back to America with Jefferson. But that choice must have been constrained by such a weight of non-choice as to hardly merit the term. Did she love him? Did she merely find him useful? Was she in any psychological position to even ask herself that question? Was she angry with him for the fantastic presumptions of his life, he who simultaneously believed that his slaves loved him and that black people would rise up and kill all white people if ever they had a chance? When Jefferson died, this embodiment of all the contradictions of his age, was she grateful? Grief-stricken? Or only frightened by the death of her patron in a world where she had no legal rights at all? Legally, she and her children and her entire social world were the property of a man who had died ten thousand dollars in debt. What would become of her?

A year went by, then two. Decades passed. People moved on, gliding out over the gulf of time as generations lived and died and coped, day after day until today, our day, one hundred and eighty-six years.

And we are no less real.

Happy Fourth of July, my friend. In a hundred and eighty-six years, what will become of our work?

Dawn

And your silence continues, unexplained. No echos returned, but having gone to bed with bats, the evening of the shortest night, this morning I awoke with birds, a fascination of birds, a din of birds, and the need to be up, out, before dawn.

For the record, I usually sleep till nine or ten unless something wakes me up first. As with my father before me, sleep for me appears to be a heavy thing, so that if you charted my sleep habitats on the face of a clock you could see my bedtime and my waking both grow later, finally centering my sleep across the very bottom of the clock, my personal midnight, six AM. Sometimes, however, I do the unusual thing, and saver a dawn.

My husband would laugh; he doesn't see how I can claim to be a morning person, since I have trouble being awake in the morning, but when I am awake in the early morning, I really like it. I always have--I love the liminal, and also the elfin softness of the dawn. I remember, too, certain mornings when I was a child when I would wake, full to delight with the possibility of...something. I could never quite figure out what I anticipated, or, later whether the anticipated thing had actually happened. What, exactly, was I so hopeful that I could get? I never knew, so I couldn't search for it, except by getting up, getting into the day. It still happens that way sometimes, though remembering all the other mornings when the hope faded with no clear resolution dampens the feeling somewhat.

But I wanted to go out and hear the birds properly, not dimmed by the trailer walls and my husband's gentle breathing. I wanted, not to ID them, but to hear them, count how many voices I heard, untangle the skein of chatter and hear them one by one. I grabbed a blanket and ran out.

I couldn't do it, of course; there were too many. I could locate three or four voices, but then over in the trees was just a clump of chirpy sound. I walked towards the trees to hear better, and the voices just dispersed, dampened within the canopy, replaced in my attention by the vegetable details of trees and an ant. It was a very big, black ant, and I followed it for a while, to see what its ant business was.  I don't have the requisite obsession to develop the aural discrimination I need. I do have other kinds of obsession, however. I know all the trees here, and many of the flowers out in the meadow beyond the trees out by the river and the mud bank where swallows nest and strafe the invisible clouds of insects to get their daily bread. Grasses will be next. I'm becoming sensitized to grasses, seeing dozens and dozens of kinds when I used to notice only grass. I'm starting to learn them, feeding that lovely obsession.  These clumps of fine, flowering grasses that look like clots of cloud from a distance are, close up, caught pink and crystalline with droplets of dew, they look like the costume jewelry of a little, princess-preoccupied girl, such as my sister was. They ought to be scented with rose-water, my sister's first perfume, but they are not. And I will look these grasses up.

So, worst case scenario; you don't respond, don't answer my electronic calls. What would that mean? It would mean you could not answer, not that you wouldn't, certainly. It would mean you are sick, absent, or perhaps preoccupied by unending duties with which I cannot compete. And what would that mean? I shall not resolve the mystery of where you are in these pages, as whatever is going on is probably private--my bringing up a question I don't intend to answer probably counts as a cheap trick from the perspective of our readers, but that's the way it is. I won't give away confidences that are not mine to give. But I shall answer the secondary question, what it would mean to me if you didn't answer.

I would be disappointed, hurt, almost regardless of why, as a child can be disappointed by an adult's failings, a disappointment beyond excuses, beyond reasons, even if the adult has fallen short through no fault of his or her own, even if the adult's failing is only to have died. No child past weaning, of course, can avoid such a disappointment, for no human love but milk can ever be everything that we really, in our innocence, need it to be. So we learn to need less, we learn to be reasonable, not to expect anyone to be less fallible than we ourselves are. "So Eden bows to grief, so dawn goes down to day," as the poet says.

But there is a dawn every day. Every day the swallows wake and the grass shines pink like fairy chandeliers--

---Wait, that's not quite what I mean--I don't mean a renewed innocence, a willingness to start over believing that this time another human being won't disappoint. That way lies wreckage. What I mean is, rather, a secondary innocence, secondary in the medical, or perhaps the ecological sense, I can't think of a good example....What I mean is that there is a time before one knows one can be hurt, and we call that innocence, and after that there is a time of wounded caution, of knowing. But after that, maybe, there is a forest grown up again after harvest or fire, a secondary forest, a secondary innocence that comes from the knowledge that not only can we be hurt by other people but we will be hurt by other people, just as we have and will hurt others. Within human possibility is the ability to love boldly in the light of that knowledge, to let each other and ourselves permanently off the hook. 

And in that light, in the trees of that forest, sing the chattering birds of dawn.

Echos

Today, at the end of the longest day of the year, I found myself watching bats. They looked remarkably like Halloween fake bats flying by, with their little rounded, furry bodies and their scalloped, flapping wings. I have a memory of standing with my father in the garden when I was little and him pointing out the bats to me...and they filled the whole sky, the wings of each bat spanning broader than our yard was wide, huge. This is not literary hyperbole but a genuine trick of memory; they were 747's of bats, coming on down the length of the garden west to east like storm clouds, the way the Goddess of Evening comes in, in Fantasia.  I was not at all frightened, probably because at the time I saw them as they actually were, small, and they only inflated in memory.

I like bats. I like that they are mammals, like me, and yet so different. Aside from the whole flying thing, which is awesome enough, there is the prospect of living in a world of air and sound, dodging this way and that for flying insects...and they wake up at night. Daylight just seems like such a wakeful thing to me, but to them it means time to sleep. We live in the same world, and yet we don't.

These bats today fluttered this way and that between me and the row of white pines, and on the other side of those pines was a sunset yellow and orange like splotches of organic, free-range egg, and I did, indeed find myself. I've been doing that a lot lately. I look up and I notice the wind in the green trees, or a soft, brown caterpillar with two pale stripes walks across the grass in front of me, or a small, round black beetle alights on my laptop and I see it has round, yellow spots. I've been asleep, preoccupied, psychologically busy, for too long, and I'm waking up, decompressing, finding myself by finding things outside myself, or letting them find me. Is this why I've been so unproductive lately? Something in me needs to rest and wake up?

I don't think I could be a workaholic if I wanted to, just like I couldn't be fashionable if I wanted to, or...normal if I wanted to. It's inconvenient, sometimes, and there are upsides to all of the things I can't do...as I hope you know, given how much and how hard you work. I hope that has meaning to you; it has meaning to us. I only mean that there are things I can't seem to make myself do, and I really hope there is room in the gap, in the set of things I can do, for a good and noble life for me. I don't know...and maybe I won't know. I've known people who consider themselves failures for no good reason at all, and of course the public arena appears to be full of folks who are quite satisfied as to their own goodness even though they are busy destroying lives and ecosystems....This week, for myself, I feel pretty bad about myself. I don't always--I'm often pretty chipper. But this week I just feel a bit like a failure. An incipient failure, perhaps. I'm not concerned about it, though; I already know feelings are unreliable, they come and go like the weather. And meanwhile, rain or shine, there are deadlines to meet and my thesis to finish, dogs to walk and clean up after, and on and on. If I must be depressed, I shall not be depressed about being depressed. If I must worry, I shall not worry about my worrying. Untangle the knots, move the mutually reflective mirrors out of alignment, step out of the echo chamber of my own mind, and watch bats.

Bats navigating the chattering silence of their supersonic world.

And from you, a silence. I have not heard from you lately. I expected to, though perhaps without reason. I know you are busy generally, and perhaps something has come up, so in and of itself a period of silence is neither unusual from you nor cause for special concern. But in this virtual world of words and posts and updates without location, those who do not speak become effectively invisible. So I send my words out into the electronic night hoping that even if I do not hear you speak, I might at least hear an echo, and find out where you are.

Now We Are Six

Hello,

Your birthday is coming up. I imagine that if I said that to you in person you would roll your eyes and say "don't remind me!" but I think that the fact that you have gone--how many years? More than me, anyway--without dying is a thing to be celebrated.

I remember, a few years ago, when I asked your age you sighed and said "too old," before actually telling me. Too old for what? I did not ask. I simply assumed that you meant older than you wanted to be, older than you thought people around you wanted someone like you to be, or even older than you think of yourself as being. Sometimes I'm surprised I'm not twenty anymore, even though I've had nearly fifteen years to get used to the idea, and I imagine that doesn't stop, that the passing years just make it harder and harder to wrap your mind around your real age. Like, sometimes your age does feel about right, not just accurate but right, and you think well, thank God I'm not the immature idiot I was even ten years ago!

And then you wake up the next morning and look in the mirror and think who is that old guy?

It's like that A. A. Milne poem that begins When I was one, I had just begun, and continues all the way up to When I was five, I was barely alive, before delivering the clincher; But now I am six and as clever as clever, and I think I'll stay six for ever and ever. None of us can ever really accept having been all the ages we used to be, because to some extent we were different people then. But none of us can ever really accept that we are about to become the people we haven't been yet, either. We think--wait, I'm not supposed to get old. Wasn't I going to stay six?

I don't think I will mind much getting old. I'm starting to look at middle age now, and doing it with a brave equanimity; I have my grey hairs, and I almost don't mind them. Maybe my attitude will change as I get more grey hairs and other symptoms, but maybe not. But I, too, have been "too old."

I never wanted to grow up. I fought really hard inside myself to not grow up--and no wonder, if you really think about all the awful things many grown-ups say about adulthood where children can hear them. But I turned eighteen anyway. What a strange birthday that was. I'd already decided to go ahead and grow up at that point (and yes, it's a choice; leaving childhood is a requirement, but adulthood is optional and must be deliberate), but wasn't I going to stay six? Becoming a legal adult was a good deal more disorienting to me than a few grey hairs are. Maybe it's because I've been "too old," and then come to like adulthood that I suspect I will like being old, when I get there. I've learned that reluctance to cross a milestone is no measure of what lies waiting on the other side.

I know that your birthday will find you either working, ensconced with family, or misanthropically avoiding the whole human race. I have therefore not bothered to plan any sort of party for you, and if anybody else is planning to throw you a party, they have not invited me. But I imagine that if I did invite you to a party and then told you that party was actually for you, you would grumble that you would definitely not be able to come in that case. After all, humans show up at parties. Your own species is the only one, not counting mosquitoes and flies, that you don't actually seem to like.

But I know it's only in the aggregate that you don't like us; individually, you can forgive us our species and become fond. So I can also imagine that if I did invite you to a party, and told you it was for you, you would probably smile shyly and say "no, I like parties. That would be very nice." I am somewhere between knowing you very well and knowing you not at all.

Last week, as you may have surmised, I was in something of a bad place, sad and frustrated. Everything I was sad and frustrated about is still true, and will likely sadden and frustrate me again, but at the moment I am not in the mood. I'm not in a mood for sadness! 

This week I am pleased by the success of my Ice Cream Socials, by the presence of my Chris here beside me, and by dozens of other wonderful things, including your existence, whether or not I can attend a party with you for it. I will formally wish you happy birthday nearer to your birthday, of course, but I'm glad you've stuck around for all these years. You have done and continue to do good and noble work, you are an interesting and kind human being.

I am proud and grateful to call you my friend.

best, C.

Came to See Friends

So, yes, I'm back in town for a while. I hope this means I'll get to see you on a regular basis again, but I understand logistics are still up in the air. In deciding to come here, I did not take it for granted that I'd be able to see much of you, but the possibility was on my mind. There are other people, individually and collectively, I came here for, too.

Came to see friends
walk old streets again

Yes, Jimmy Buffet again. I've only been gone a year, but I still have that sense of returning to a place once familiar, yet not quite part of my real life. I'm getting used to being here now, but for a while as I walked, or biked, the old streets, I saw the past much more clearly than the present. It's especially bad on campus, where I go sometimes for this or that reason and walk by classrooms and offices hallowed by this or that memory, most of them, I know intellectually, not particularly important in and of themselves, but they seem so. How is it that a trick of memory can, across only two or three years, cast such a golden glow on events that I know were actually stressful or irritating at the time? Yet here are these temples in my mind. Even off campus I see them. There, that street, is where a friend and I walked, talking about the light of the town, and Rilke, and our futures. It almost seems like we must be walking there yet, as though I might bump into myself and my friend, if I wait just a minute more, on the right street.

In another blog of mine, I write of a fictional group of classrooms that are renamed every year. When I came up with the idea, I was only trying to evoke a kind of magical changeability in a non-fantasy setting. Like how in Harry Potter some of the stairways in the magical school move. I thought that if the names of the room were constantly changing, that might be whimsical and confusing in the same way. But after I came up with the idea, it occurred to me that this might actually be a truer way to do something, to define places not only by space but also by time. I can go back to a particular location on campus, but it's not the same place that I remember, because it's not the same time. If I could find the right place again, I could walk in and it would be Thursday morning at eight sharp and I could take my place among the other students and the adventure would be just beginning.

It's not exactly that I would rather be there than here and now. As I said, I worked very hard to get from there to here. To some extent I'm reacting to the persistent illusion that the past was less stressful than the present, an illusion created by the fact that of course I now know how those classes turned out. I know I passed, that I made friends with some of my fellow students and most of my teachers, that I made some mistakes but none of them were actually lethal, and so forth. To some extend, too, I'm reacting to the childlike quality of being a student with a lot of required courses to take; it's the condition of being both optimistic and confused, and being constantly told what to do by wise and benevolent grown-ups. But mostly I just come loose in time, falling into the past whenever  the places that I see in front of me have a stronger hold on my memory than on my present daily life. It will pass. I will re-orient myself. I will look around myself and see the present again.

Today, in the present, there is too much noise. The camp ground we call home for the moment has been invaded by an excessively loud three-day music festival. If I were Queen of the Universe, there would be a law against this sort of thing. But I'm not Queen of the Universe. I'm not even sure I'm Queen of the Trailer--no, I just asked, and Chris says that I must be Queen of the Trailer, because he sure as hell ain't. So I'm Queen of the Trailer, hurrah! But my jurisdiction is extremely limited; I cannot entirely keep discordant noises out, nor can I order people to visit whom I miss. I can't even keep the dogs from puking on the bed. I must be more of a figure-head royal.

I saw a phoebe the other day and thought of you, not least because I was not entirely sure it was a phoebe, and you would have known. It was tending its nest, and trying to pretend that it wasn't, so that I would not guess where the nest was. The phoebe failed, in that I spotted its nest, precisely because it was so characteristically pretending not to have one. But the bird needn't worry; I will keep its secret.

Walking in May

Hi, there.

It was good to see you today, both to interact with you and, simply, to see you participate in the ceremony. You’d said before that Commencement was something, a side of the school we don’t normally see—the only time it feels like a “normal” school. You said this with a surprising fondness, considering that I’d never pegged you as a particularly normal person, but I’m glad you were there, and I’m glad I went.

I liked the ceremony and the dim grandeur of the auditorium, and the quirky details of tradition not all of which were explained. Like, ok, they explained what the mace was, and someone described the colors of the hoods, but why have hoods to begin with? And why does academic rigor call for tassels and strange hats and men in robes that hang past their knees? We don’t need to understand all things consciously. There are some who make the mistake of too much explication.  I say, let the Mystery go unexplained, sign and signal of deeper Mysteries to be artistically explored and scientifically plumbed. Let the procession of men and women go by in black, preceded by the Mace held aloft, the President of the campus coincidentally robed in red like some academic bishop, everyone else in black with colored ribbons and trim, variously grand, scholarly, or foppish, let speeches be made and obscure higher-ups be thanked, and let us be created masters or doctors in turn by the power vested in incantation. And let the men and women in black process away again to the chanting oompa oompa of horns.

You were one of the grand ones. Academic regalia suits you. My mother once said once of a certain person that he looked as though he had on an “invisible opera cape.” I don’t remember who she was talking about, and I don’t have a clear idea of what an opera cape looks like, but in an analogous way, I’ve always thought you seemed to be wearing an invisible black robe. To see you really dressed that way looked so right.

I’m not sure what, if anything, this actually means about you. I don’t think pomp and circumstance itself is particularly your thing—and you actually looked kind of bored during the ceremony.  Maybe it’s that something about the look of medieval formality suits you; academic regalia must be the sartorial first cousin of wizards’ robes (after all, the first scientists were medieval alchemists), and you do have dried bats in your office. Or at least, you used to.

I sat around in my own robes noticing these things in part because I was not sure what else to do. I sat through a ceremony meant to confer upon me the degree of Master of Science, but I have not finished my thesis yet…and neither have a lot of other people who sat beside beside me. So what did the ceremony do? What did it do to me? I feel as though the degree today conferred is floating above my head in a small, golden cloud, there to follow me around until I finally finish my thesis and the cloud settles upon me at last. Then, truly I will be robed in accomplishment.

I should have walked last year. I could have, and I did not, because I wanted to wait till I was really finished—but if I waited now till next year, hardly anyone would be left who knows who I am. So now I’ve given up walking with my own cohort for nothing—except I was quite proud to walk with the cohort that commenced today.  But I was quite torn last year—I could have gone, and did not, and the whole time my cohort was graduating I walked the streets of town with a song stuck in my head;

Once upon a time there was a tavern,

where we used to raise a glass or two.

Remember how we’d laugh away the hours

And dream of all the great things we would do?

It was one of the songs traditionally sung at my grade-school’s graduation. The song is all about nostalgia, how the good times are all in the past and the best part of life is being young and foolish…which is a pretty sick thing to play at an eighth-grade graduation, if you think about it. At the time I didn’t think about it, except I knew I liked the song for its fun rhythm and fond associations. And then for years I didn’t think about it at all, until last year it just popped into my head, as clearly and instantly as if I’d had a radio in my brain.

From the door there came familiar laughter

I saw your face and heard you call my name.

Oh, my friends, we’re older but no wiser,

For in our hearts our dreams are still the same.

I’m really glad I’m both older and wiser than I was when I was thirteen. I was pretty crazy and really depressed at that point in my life. And while I’m in pretty good spirits these days, I hope to get wiser than I am today. I don’t think that involves giving up dreams; it involves using those dreams to do something practical and marvelous. But I guess that while my friends processed, I joined them in my head with the old graduation song of my childhood.

Why didn’t I get the actual graduation march stuck in my head? We played that at 8^th grade graduation, too, after all. Maybe because I didn’t like the song as much. It reminded me less of graduation in general and more of my 8^th grade graduation particularly, which I did not want to go through. I’d been at the same school for seven years, and it was part of my world.  Intellectually, I understood what was happening, of course, but emotionally, it felt like I was being arbitrarily evicted. After all, I had never gone to school in order to achieve anything, I just went because I was a kid, and kids went to school. For many years, the graduation march was unbearably sad to me—it’s such a proud, grandly triumphant song, and  it so denied the reality of my experience that day.

College graduation went rather better. As an adult, I can and do pursue my education for an actual reason, and I can be happy and proud when I reach my goal. I was proud of my school, and at the same time happy to leave it, happy to move on with my life. I heard the song that time more like it was meant. I kind of like it, now. But Pomp and Circumstance wasn’t the song that was stuck in my head all day today.

No, I had the theme for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Wouldn’t that make a great graduation march? I mean, it’s even done with a horn ensemble, same as the march they actually played—it’s got a faster beat, though. As my husband suggested, if we processed in that way, we’d have to do Silly Walks. While we were waiting in the cafeteria, lined up waiting for the procession to start, I did started dancing. Did you know that academic robes and bare feet are just the thing to dance in? The tassel and the big ol’ sleeves go flip-flop, and bare feet slap on the floor, and I just was having a great old time. At first I sang “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” but then I changed it to “it’s the end of the line as we know it,” since our group was indeed at the back, not counting the PhD people. The man standing next to me in the procession hid his face with his program, muttering that he doesn’t know me. But he smiled. And then I danced to Monty Python for a while, not that I sung it, as I can’t usually sing things without words to keep me organized, but it was in my head clear as anything.

Afterwards, when I thanked you, you said that this day changes nothing, that we are, first and foremost, friends. That is true. But never again am I likely to see you dressed like a wizard. And never again am I likely to find my education directed by such a constellation of excellent people.

And now for something completely different!

Waking the Living

As you know, you weren't at the retirement party the other day--though someone who looked oddly like you was there, which was disorienting. I kept looking and looking to see whether perhaps it was you, but changed somehow.

And change was very much the order of the day. As I've told you before, I've always thought that leaving a distinct community, like a school, is in some ways akin to death; the graduate, or the retiree, or anyone else who leaves, has to go on into the unknown, has to leave behind the context that previously defined part (or all) of his or her life. The people who are left behind feel a kind of draft at the door, and have to meet together to affirm the changing relationships--not just with the departed, but with each other. When someone retires or graduates, we call that meeting a party. When someone dies, we call it a wake.

Of course Tom isn't dead, or even really academically gone, as he plans to keep his hand in. But neither are the dead really gone--and I'm not thinking here of the spiritual afterlife. I'm thinking of a great tree that, dying, serves as nesting and forage opportunities for insects, spiders, birds, and bats. Shelf fungus weaves its way, eating wood like some blind animal, before flowering out its hard, perennial toadstools. When the old tree finally falls, you can tell which shelves predated the fall because they're still pointed along the trunk. Fungus gets disoriented, too, by change. The newer fungal shelves will come out properly sideways. In the dark, the mycelial threads feel the change and adapt.

Depending on species and location, things grow on the trunk, or don't. The bark rots off, or it doesn't. Moss makes its green inroads, or it doesn't. If it's a big, old chestnut, rotting from the inside out but never very much or very fast, the tree could make itself a tunnel in which children could build a fort, generations after the tree died, suddenly. Like any small animals, children want a safe, enclosed space they can call their very own. How's that for environmental education?

Or I'm thinking about whales, or even, maybe, great ships, especially the ones made of romance and wood. They disappear--pop!--from the surface, from vision, but inside the sea they persist, lying on the far side of the water, temporary islands of food and shelter, as successional waves of clams and worms and hidden things eat the leviathan and each other and then swim or crawl away, on to the next island dropped down to them by Providence.

Neither tree or whale nor ship (nor the trees that made the ship) is a living organism anymore. The nature of its relationships has changed profoundly. But tell it to the ship worms or the termites if you think the great being is really gone. We organisms like to keep our hand in.

The party had some element of reunion, students coming from all over, graduation years from prior decades pinned to the sweaters of game old women, groups of people standing together, rocking babies, talking of how it's been so long since we've seen each other, and we should really get together like this more often. We should start having real reunions.

Maybe.

Maybe we will have reunions. We probably should. But not so many people would come. Not all the people who think today that we should have reunions would come.

The reunion as life transition marker reminded me of the memorial service for the headmaster of my old boarding school. Unlike Tom, Michael really was dead, and unlike Tom, Michael was not really liked by many people--or Michael was not simply liked by many. He embodied and inspired a powerful ambivalence, but, for better or worse, he shaped our lives. Or parts of our lives, aspects of our lives, periods within our lives. Michael never admitted publicly that there was more than one way to benefit from the school, and there was never more than one acceptable way to leave it. If you didn't graduate--and most of us didn't--you weren't welcome back. Not ever. Of people who ran away (an admittedly dangerous and hurtful thing for a teenager to do), Michael famously once said "if you have to pee, go pee, but not on my leg!" In other words, get your needs met within the community, not by violating it. Fine, a noble sentiment, but to continue the analogy, Michael never did provide his students with any real choice of urinals. His leg got wet a lot, and there were a lot of exiles.

But when he died....it was like he couldn't keep us away from him anymore. Something collapsed, and we all rushed in, flowing across the country on only a few day's notice, dropping everything, to come to him, and to each other.

We had a reunion.

I doubt we'll have another one. There was a second reunion, a few years back, after the campus was sold--waking the school, as opposed to just Michael--but I didn't go, and I've heard no talk of anything regular. We're all involved in our own lives.

What is it that collapsed, that drew us all so powerfully in? I'm thinking of the death of a huge star, when nuclear fusion finally fails, gravity suddenly trumps radiance, and the star-stuff rushes in towards its center and then explodes, shining. I'm thinking of the attractive, descending vortex when a great ship goes down.

I have not had the opportunity to wake you professionally. I doubt I will. I wonder what I would say? Something complimentary, I'm sure; I've seen you work, and you are a treasure. But so much of our relationship has transcended the professional by now. So much of it is in these letters, which probably wouldn't make it into a professional wake. They'd have to wait for the final, personal wake, a thing I will likely endure, as I am much younger than you, and not particularly self-destructive at this point in my life. And I don't intend to drift away from you, not so far that a current from you could not reach me. But I will not think of that eventuality. Whatever happens to lives, I know life goes on. The old tree dies, the old hawk falls from the sky and something--what would it be, a tufted titmouse? You'd know, I'm sure--plucks the ruined feathers for its new nest.  Life goes on.

But I am partial to some lives particularly.

Best, as ever,
Caroline