Poem of the Week, by William Butler Yeats

Posted on by alisonmcghee

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE
– William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

—
For more information on Yeats, please click here: here.
—

Little houses made of ticky-tacky

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The question must be asked: why does the container of colored blocks to the right of this paragraph keep disappearing? Not in real life, but in this entry. It’s becoming a real problem, and one can only hope that by the time one presses “Publish,” the blocks will still be visible. There are no guarantees, though – not in life in general, nor in this recently snapped crappy cell phone photo.

Another question which must be asked is why does one’s cursor keep leaping randomly over the text which one is typing. Yes, this text, the one which you –if indeed you are out there– are reading right now. The leaping cursor is a recent problem, one which began the very moment after a new operating system was installed on this computer. Coincidence? One thinks not.

And the third and final question: is it possible, or desirable, to write a post in which one refers to oneself only as one? One shall find out.

So, the jug of colored blocks, and the provenance thereof, both of blocks and jug. Two days ago, one journeyed to a nearby city in order to sign some books at a bookstore. On the way out of said bookstore, one noticed a large box filled with clear plastic containers, attractively shaped like small fish tanks.

“FREE!!!!”

That was what the sign above the large box read. The urgency of the multiple exclamation marks caused one to smile. One stopped and perused the FREE!!!! containers. Did one need one of these containers? No, one did not. And yet one idly imagined the things that such a container might be filled with, should one bring one home anyway. Tiny plastic babies, for example. Tea candles. Chopsticks. Miniature farm animals made of painted resin. Cookies? No, not cookies.

One took a container home and placed it on the buffet by the window.

Yesterday, a cold but bright and sunny day, one spent five hours –yes, five hours– in one’s car, loitering from block to block in south Minneapolis as two groups of two teenage girls each trudged door to door trying to sell the inhabitants a coupon card for $20 in order to raise funds for their lacrosse team.

Why did one volunteer to trail these girls for five hours in one’s car? One does not remember. It must have had to do with a latent sense of civic duty. It certainly had nothing to do with one’s saleswoman tendencies, which are pretty much nonexistent.

(Enough of this referring to oneself as “one”! How insufferable!)

No, you are not a saleswoman. At all. In fact, you were the type of Girl Scout who bought back all the cookies you were supposed to sell, just so that you would not have to do what the teenage lacrosse players are doing right now.

Why should these people be persuaded to buy a coupon card? The coupons are basically worthless. As the parent of a teenage lacrosse player, you yourself bought one, but that is only because you had to. These are the dark thoughts as you crawl from block to block, making sure that nothing bad happens to the teens as they plod onward.

You pull up alongside one team of two and roll down your window.

“Now girls,” you say. “If a man wearing a bathrobe comes to the door and asks if you want to come inside and see his new puppy, what are you going to say?”

“We’re going to say ‘Sure, we’d love to come in!'” say the teens. “We love puppies.”

You pull up alongside the other team of two.

“Now girls,” you say. “If a man in his underwear comes to the door and asks you to come inside, he’s got some candy for you, what are you going to say?”

“We’re going to say ‘Sure, we’d love to come in!'” say the teens. “We love candy.”

Excellent. It seems that the teens are in good shape. You have taught them well. Surely a quick stop at the estate sale right on this very block wouldn’t hurt anyone.

Out of the car and into the little house you go. It’s Sunday afternoon, the half-off everything time of day for those who, like you, are well versed in estate sales. Dishes, a heavy four-pedastaled table, a folding chair, a picture of Jesus, old muffin tins and coffeemakers, you peruse them all. The non-colors of the house are beige and tan and brown and whitish.

But what is this! Two large zip-lock bags filled with brightness. Red, yellow, blue, green. This is more like it. You are a woman who loves color. No neutral tones in your house, or rather, a few neutral tones here and there in order to set off all the color.

Did the elderly woman of this little house –for estate sales are almost always about elderly women– keep these little bags of blocks around for her grandchildren? Could they possibly be left over from when her own children were little? You decide not to think about this. Estate sales are replete with sadness, when you think about it, and today is a bright and sunny day with teenage lacrosse players trudging from house to house, and you just don’t want to be sad. You decide to make colored blocks in plastic bags a sign of happiness.

Should you get the blocks? What would you use them for?

You could add them to the two lidded boxes of toys that you keep in your closet for when your nephew and your near-nephew and other little friends come visiting. The blocks would make them happy. They could add them to the Jenga blocks and build tiny houses and airports and factories.

Or, you could keep the blocks for yourself. You could spill them out on your big wooden dining table, the one where you don’t eat, the one where your teenage lacrosse player does her homework and where you play Bananagrams. While she does her homework, you yourself could make tiny houses and airports and factories. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Yes. Yes, it would be fun. You pluck up the bags of bright wooden blocks and take them to the semi-harried woman at the card table by the door.

“How much?” you say, dangling the bags of blocks.

“$4,” she says. “Which means $2, because it’s half-off Sunday afternoon.”

Two bucks. You walk out the door into the cold sunshine and squint down the block. Why, there are the four teenage lacrosse players. They have not been abducted by predatory men in bathrobes. They have made good choices in your absence. All is right with the world.

You put the blocks in the trunk. The four teenage lacrosse players fold themselves into your tiny car. Off you go to get some ice cream. And when you get home, why look, there is the perfect container for your new-old colored wooden blocks.

Poem of the Week, by Stanley Kunitz

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The Layers
– Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.

—
For more information about Stanley Kunitz, please click here.

I owe you

Posted on by alisonmcghee

There are people in the world whom you owe. People you think about, and wish you’d thanked, or more than thanked, at the time, but out of shock, or because you weren’t thinking straight, you didn’t.

All this long time later, how can you make it up them? You can’t, not to them personally. You can try to be kind, try to ease the lives of others, but that’s a going-forward kind of thing. You can’t go backward.

You’d like to thank those men in the rusty beater of an ancient car who saw you stuck in the middle of that snowfield between Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles that blowy winter day 15 years ago, that day when your tiny car slid right off Lake Street and sailed out into the snow.

How many cars drove right past? Dozens. It is and was a busy, busy intersection. You sat behind the wheel, calming yourself, ready to get out and trudge all the way back home, from there to call a tow truck. No cell phone, back then.

Then the ancient car full of Spanish-speaking men pulled off to the side of that busy street, and all of them jumped out, running across the snow to where you were just getting out of the car. Laughing, gesturing, they pointed you back into the car, and then they massed around the car, motioning you which way to turn the wheel, and pushed you back onto Lake Street. Two of them stood in the far right lane, directing traffic around you until you could safely make it back onto the pavement.

You got out again, wanting to thank them, maybe offer them some money, something, anything, but again they laughed and motioned you back in the car. They jumped into their rusty beater and they were off, leaving you with the memory and, ever since, a wave of gratitude whenever you hear a group of men chattering in Spanish.

You’d like to go back in time, fourteen years ago now, to a public park in Hangzhou, China. You and your baby daughter in her stroller at dawn, making your way around the paths. So hot. So unbearably hot, even at dawn.

A group of women practicing fan-dancing. A group of men and women and teenagers doing tai chi. A woman, swimming alone in a greenish, rubbage-strewn pond. You and your baby daughter, taking in the sights.

From across the grass came three men, two walking and their friend in a primitive contraption that passed for a wheelchair. Made of steel, or iron, low to the ground, with creaky unstable wheels, he pushed himself along laboriously. You watched. In a way, it was a beautiful and amazing sight.

“I like your vehicle,” you said in Chinese, unable to think of a better word for the thing that he was strapped into.

He looked up at you with dark, deep eyes. Raised his eyebrows.

“It’s very difficult,” he said.

Simple words that you have never forgotten. This man comes to you in your mind often. It’s very difficult. You can hear his voice still. You can see his two friends, standing patiently beside him.

Within an hour of leaving the park you were filled with regret. “I like your vehicle”? You had money, relatively so anyway. You had passed a store the previous day that sold wheelchairs, shiny new ones, ones like Americans used.

You wish to this day that you had gotten that man a wheelchair, or given him money to buy one. It’s very difficult.

Many, many years ago, someone left a basket of food outside your apartment door. This was not a pre-made, cellophane-wrapped basket of cheese and sausage. This was a basket that she had put together herself, and it came with a note.

I’m not Jewish, read the note, in part, but there’s a Jewish tradition that when someone is grieving, you should leave them food. I wish I could do more.

You barely knew this woman. You had run into her a few times, was all. But she knew of the awful thing that had happened, and she went to stores and bakeries and put together that basket for you, and she wrote you that note. You brought the basket into the tiny kitchen and you put it on the table.

You owe her too, for that simple, complicated act of kindness. To this day you remember it, how she tried to comfort you when she didn’t even know you.

That man on the sidewalk below as you type this, walking his dog. That boy on the skateboard, the one who must be skipping school. Your own dearest friends and family. The woman ahead of you at Rainbow Foods. The girl behind the counter at Kinko’s.

You owe them all, somehow, and you will try to remember that.

What I've Been Reading

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I’ve been on a reading binge the last three weeks. Below are the books I’ve read, along with a one-sentence –yep, one sentence, sue me– review.

1. Borrowed Finery, by Paula Fox. Much of the power of this unaccountably moving memoir of a young girl rejected by her parents and moved from place to place throughout her childhood comes from Fox’s decision not to examine the past, but only to tell it, exquisitely, in one detailed fragment after another.

2. Aloft, by Chang-rae Lee. This first person account of a Long Island man at first turned me off by its chattiness and what I assumed would be a predictable mid-life trajectory, but by the end it had achieved a richness and depth that brought a lump to my throat.

3. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, by Steven Millhauser. On the surface, this book is a parody of a literary biography, but that, in combination with its exquisite description of childhood, psychological acuity and a stunning twist of an ending, blew me away. I loved this book and will never forget it. (Okay, that was two sentences, but this book totally deserves more than one sentence.)

4. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua. Read all the reviews, saw the scathing letters to the editor, listened to the NPR interview, and decided I had to see for myself what the big fuss was about before I joined in with the excoriators: Lo and behold, I found her honest, self-deprecating, fearless, willing to stand with the courage of her convictions and funny as hell to boot.

5. The Full Cupboard of Life, by Alexander McCall Smith. When the brutality of the world threatens to pull me under once and for all, I go to the store and buy another in the #1 Ladies Detective Agency series, and Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni lift me up and remind me that gentleness, decency and kindness are still out there.

6. Get a Life: You Don’t Need a Million to Retire Well, by Ralph Warner. And isn’t that a good thing (the not needing a million part) – idly scanned this while waiting for my daughter in a thrift store, was taken by its practical advice on living a good life (more friends, more goodwill, more of what makes you happy, less worry about money, seeing as there’s an entire industry based on making you fear that you will never have enough of it anyway), paid $1.69 and finished it at home.

7. Atlas of Remote Islands, by Judith Schalansky. Beautiful, haunting book of real places and (sometimes; it’s hard to tell) imagined stories behind them, complete with hand-drawn maps; a book that I keep beside my bed along with a bunch of poetry books, the better to read one entry at a time before dreaming.

8. The Grace of Silence, by Michele Norris. This memoir by my favorite NPR commentator (she grew up not far from where I live in south Minneapolis) includes stories about her family which she never knew until she researched this book, something which made me think hard about how silence within a family can both help and harm it. The unexpected bonus of this book is that I heard her beautiful, warm voice reading it to me in my head the whole way through. (Okay, that was two sentences too, but I’m tired, so please forgive me.)

Have You Been There Too?

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Driving hundreds of miles in the dark, heading north, two-lane road, high beams lighting the night, shiny eyes of deer waiting in the ditch. A fox. A feral cat.

The only station drifting in and out is an oldies station, “the songs of your life.” Is this the first time you’ve known every single song that a station plays? It just might be. One after another, you beat time on the steering wheel and sing along. For once you know almost all the words. You open the windows –it’s late, you’re tired, you don’t want to get drowsy– and the trees rise up on either side of the road. Your children aren’t in the car to tell you to stop singing, so you sing.

Peace Train comes drifting in and you’re 16 and an exchange student, living with a Portuguese family, not long uprooted from their Angolan home near a coffee plantation, in Lisboa for the summer. Your Portuguese sister, Angela Paula Vieira Lopes, loves Cat Stevens and plays his records every day. Strange to hear English here in this non-English world, the first time you’ve ever been without language.

The blue wallpapered high-ceilinged room in the small apartment that you shared with her. The single hard-mattressed bed you shared. The overhead light with the push-button switch.  What is that thing next to the toilet? That thing is a bidet. But what is a bidet for? You never quite have the courage to ask, and all summer long, you wonder.

Your host sister’s beginner English, your few words of Portuguese.

Nao falo Portuguese, mas comprehendo um cadeinho.

That sentence is probably wrong –grammar, spelling– but it’s the sentence you recited all summer long, all summer as you rode the buses with your Portuguese sister and little brother, Paulo, who would point to his cheek and say beiju, beiju, and laugh when you kissed him.

Your Portuguese host mother in the tiny kitchen, making you homemade potato chips every day, making you caldo verde for Sunday supper, taking you shopping and wanting to buy you ice cream but not knowing how to ask if you wanted one. Pergunta ela, pergunta ela; her hand motioning toward you when in the presence of your host sister: Ask her, ask her.

Cat Stevens, Peace Train, Portugal. You, always the early riser, getting up before your host family every morning, going to the front door of the apartment and opening it to find the blue cloth bag of warm fresh rolls, just delivered from the bakery. The tiny kitchen table. The butter. You, rolls, butter, the silence of the early morning in a Lisbon apartment kitchen.

The gray pocked road of the north country unspools like a ribbon, winding in and out of trees, watchful animal eyes in the ditch.

Steve Winwood, Arc of a Diver. You in the late afternoon tying your long hair back, stretching before a run. The day of classes behind you, the cafeteria with your friends and the long evening stretching before you. You ran down the long hill and up the short hill, turned around and ran down the short hill and back up the long hill. A busy road. Not the prettiest run, but an expedient one that began right outside the door of the old house where you lived on the third floor.

Arc of a Diver brings Charlie R. back to you, walking by and grinning that bright smile of his. You’re quite the runner, aren’t you, Alison? Every day, I see you out here stretching. No, you are not quite the runner. But you smile back at sweet Charlie and head out. Up on the third floor, in her room next to yours, Ellen is playing Steve Winwood, the song drifting out the screen window into the bright air of that day.

Sixty miles to go on this long trip. The Happy Family Fast Food restaurant flashes by on your right, still open this late, and you do an about-face in the red car and pull in. Strawberry malt with extra malt, please. Small, thanks. And a fish fillet. Yes, lettuce and tartar sauce. Thank you.

Back on the road, heading north, twin eyes of oncoming cars once in a while crawling toward you out of the dark. Switch off the high beams. Remind yourself that if a deer leaps into the road ahead of you, you should not swerve. You should keep going straight. Know that if a deer does leap into the road ahead of you, you won’t keep going straight. You will swerve. Remind yourself anyway, knowing that it’s futile.

Pull the fish fillet sandwich out of the bag. What! This is a real fish fillet, real as in not rectangularized somewhere far away, frozen, and then deep fried in an approximation of something fish-like. This is a fish fillet in the shape of a real fish. You take a bite. My God, this is a real fish. Someone at the Happy Family Fast Food restaurant might have caught this fish herself. You’re in lake country, after all. There are lakes and lakes stretching themselves across the surface of the land behind the trees, behind the woods, northern lakes full of fish.

Back on the road and the oldies station confuses itself now, allows the jarring voice of someone telling you to get on your knees right now and pray to the Lord to come blaring in. You turn the volume down just as Neil Young comes crooning on. Comes a Time.

Now you’re back in time, many years ago. It’s a bright blue-sky day and you’re standing outside a building, a tall brick building among others. Where are you? Where is this place? It’s your sister’s college, that’s where it is. What are you doing there? You don’t know. You can’t remember. But that is where you are, and your boyfriend Greg came along, and you can’t find him. Where did he go?

People next to you are pointing and looking up, shading their eyes against the sun. You follow their gaze and there he is, redhaired boy, scampering up the side of the tall brick building. His fingers find a grip among the bricks and so do his feet, again and again, and up and over and up and over he goes. He’s three stories above the ground now, and a crowd has gathered to watch him.

He’s a human fly! says someone, and the others agree and laugh, but quietly. Tense. No one among them has ever seen such a thing before. You have. You have been with this man many times, walking along, when suddenly he stops, taking the measure of the building next to you, the one you wouldn’t have noticed. And then poof, up he goes.

You have a photo of him from back then in crampons halfway up the side of what looks to be a sheer ice wall, ice pick in hand, looking down and laughing. Is there any memory you have of him in which he’s not laughing? His face was made for merriment. The force of his laughter used to bend him double, and everyone around him would laugh too.

The people in the crowd now gathered around you shake their heads in amazement. The human fly has made it to the top of the brick building. No ropes. Nothing but hands and feet and the tensile strength of a body made to climb. Buildering, he calls it. He looks down and waves and laughs. Your parents are next to you now, shaking their heads and laughing too.

Years later you will see his happy, smiling face on the cover of Rock and Ice magazine. It will not surprise you.

Not far to go now, on this late night. You are tired. Very tired. So late at night, and will the doors of the inn be locked when you get there? Probably. This is not New York, after all. You’re in the middle of the woods.

Come, hear, Uncle John’s band, by the riverside. And again you’re back in time, on your knees, scrubbing someone’s kitchen floor. But where? Where is this now? Colorado. You have a job as a hotel maid for the summer but this is not the hotel. Now you remember. You took on some extra work, cleaning the apartment of some guys once a week. Again the sky is bright and the air is crisp and you’re up high, high in the mountains.

You’re playing their stereo as you clean up their mess, singing along with the Dead. One of the guys, the one who pays you, comes home just as you’re finishing up.

“You like the Dead?” he says.

“I love the Dead!” you say.

He shakes his head. “No you don’t. Not really.”

“Yes really,” you say. “Really really. I just went to see them last week.”

Again he shakes his head. “Have you sold everything you own and followed them around the country in a van, Alison? Do you wear flowers in your hair and tie-dye and dance for hours before every concert? Do you have set lists for every concert they’ve ever given for the past ten years?”

You look at him. The answer is no, to all those questions, and you both know it. You are a girl with a summer job in Colorado. You will soon leave, and he will be looking for someone else to clean his apartment once a week.

“A true Deadhead,” he says, “knows exactly what her purpose in life is.”

What is your purpose in your life? All you know, right then, is what it isn’t.

Here you are many years later, driving through the dark, the remains of an extra-malty strawberry malt next to you, watchful eyes in the ditches on both sides of the road. All these songs are making you cry, but you can’t cry because then you’d lose control of the car. Every memory brought shimmering up by these songs is bright and clear and full of laughter, full of love. Your throat hurts with the weight of unshed tears.

Poem of the Week, by Dean Young

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Restoration Ode
– Dean Young

What tends toward orbit and return,
comets and melodies, robins and trash trucks
restore us. What would be an arrow, a dove
to pierce our hearts restore us. Restore us

minutes clustered like nursing baby bats
and minutes that are shards of glass. Mountains
that are vapor, mice living in cathedrals,
and the heft and lightness of snow restore us.

One hope inside dread, “Oh what the hell”
inside “I can’t” like a pearl inside a cake
of soap, love in lust in loss, and the tub
filled with dirt in the backyard restore us.

Sunflowers, let me wait, let me please
see the bridge again from my smacked-up
desk on Euclid, jog by the Black Angel
without begging, dream without thrashing.

Let us be quick and accurate with the knife
and everything that dashes restore us,
salmon, shadows buzzing in the wind,
wren trapped in the atrium, and all

that stills at last, my friend’s cat,
a pile of leaves after much practice,
and ash beneath the grate, last ember
winked shut restore us. And the one who comes

out from the back wiping his hands on a rag,
saying, “Who knows, there might be a chance.”
And one more undestroyed, knocked-down nest
stitched with cellophane and dental floss,

one more gift to gently shake
and one more guess and one more chance.

—
For more information on Dean Young, please click here.

from a photo in the Times

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Before he uploaded that photo of you on his page, there were other photos of you, many of them, and we have them all. We have boxes of them. And we have books that your mother tucked photos of you into, books with acid-free pages, organized  chronologically, each one labeled with a date and description in black Sharpie. Somewhere there’s a photo of her pregnant with you, hands holding up her swelling belly. Photos of you with your big sister, hovering over you? Dozens of them. She’s pushing you in your stroller down the sidewalk. She’s trying to give you a bottle. She’s standing beside you next to a Christmas tree bright with lights. You and her on the first day of school, every year. I’m picturing them now, all those photos of you. Splashing in the kitchen sink. Smearing spaghetti on your face in a high chair. On a tricycle. On a bicycle. On rollerblades. On ice skates. Come with me now, into the house, down the hall with the row of framed school photos, you, shoulders back and hair combed, smiling for the camera. Oh that must be first grade, that’s when you lost your first tooth. Third grade, remember that sweater? Birthday parties, family reunions, restaurant dinners. Prom. High school graduation, there you are in your robe and there you are turning the tassel to the other side, and there you are throwing it into the air, and there you are standing in front of that big quarter-sheet cake, the one that says Congratulations Graduate in green icing. College now, and summers home, and there you are with that haircut you hated, and there you are in your new bathing suit, and there you are with your new boyfriend, the one we all liked, and there you are with that other one, the one we weren’t so sure of, and here you are, standing in the doorway of your first apartment, yes, that’s it, that right there is your first apartment, and how you loved it, and how we loved that you were so happy there, and remember the first time you made us dinner there, and you bought those tall white candles and we admired them, they were so grownup, and you were so grownup, pouring us wine and bringing out that dessert, what was the name of it, and us refusing seconds but urging thirds on you because you were thinning down, that’s what happens when girls turn into women with busy lives and busy jobs and friends and so many things in their lives to love, they get thin, they’re going going going all the time, and let’s go back and just look at you in this doorway again, your first apartment. We’re going to put this photo away now, because this apartment is the one where we found you, where we found you, beautiful girl, girl we loved and tried to keep safe your whole life long, wanted to keep safe your whole life long, would have laid down our lives to keep safe. We will not look at this photo anymore. We will put it away now. So many photos we have of you, hundreds, thousands, and that one, the one we didn’t take, the one he took, he who didn’t know you, didn’t love you, didn’t care about you, didn’t didn’t didn’t didn’t didn’t know you didn’t love you didn’t want to keep you safe is the one that the world saw, because he put it up for the world to see. And is his mother out there, and is she sitting in a dark room now, holding a box of photos of her little boy, because even he was a little boy once, everyone in this world is someone’s child, and that is what he forgot, or chose not to remember.

Poem of the Week, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Go To the Limits of Your Longing
– Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

—
For more information about Rilke, please click here: here.

Portrait of a Friend, Vol. 2

Posted on by alisonmcghee

You must have known her from kindergarten on, although it was in middle school that you became close friends.

She lived in a small bright green ranch house right across the street from the middle school, which was right next to the high school, which meant that all she had to do was walk out her front door, cross Route 365 –the main street of the town– and there she was, at school.

Unlike you, sitting on that accursed bus, groaning and lurching its way around endless curve after endless curve, down from the foothills, 45 minutes or more to school.

In your memory she is always smiling. She had silky dark brown hair, parted in the middle, falling over her shoulders. Her nose was sharp and red and a bit hooked, and her eyes, in your memory, are blue, blue, blue.

And the smile. A big, merry smile that showed off her high cheekbones. You can picture her in the yearly school class photo. She would have been in the back row, with you, because when you were kids she was tall, too. She would have been smiling that big happy smile.

In middle school the two of you used to escape at lunch and walk across the street to the bright green ranch house. She lived there with her older brothers and her older sisters and her mother, who was, you’re pretty sure, a teacher down in Utica. Her father had died when she was a baby.

Her sisters and brothers were in high school, unimaginably older and cool. They were hippies. You and she were too young, you missed out on that. But often, when you walked into that little house with her, they and their friends would be there. Lying on the old couch, sitting on chairs, laughing and talking and wrestling and making offhand comments and jokes about things like sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll.

Had you been alone you would have been stunned and cowed and half-paralyzed by their coolness, their easy laughter. But you weren’t alone. You were with her.

Why did she like you? In retrospect you were quiet and reserved and an observer and not much fun, although maybe you’re not the best judge of that.

But one reason she liked you is easy: she liked nearly everyone. She had a huge and generous heart. She was also unafraid of things that you were afraid of, like saying out loud that which scared you, hurt you, made you angry. She was honest about things. She saw life clearly, and stating the obvious didn’t scare her.

The boy you had a crush on used to ask if he could have a punch off your lunch ticket.

“Sure,” you used to say.

“I’ll pay you back,” he used to say.

You would watch him run across the grass, back into the school. You and she were nearly to Route 365 now, ready to zip across and into the safety of that little green house.

“He won’t, you know,” she observed. “He won’t pay you back. And you’ll give it to him tomorrow if he asks.”

You looked at her. She looked at you and smiled. She was wise. She was honest. She stated things the way they were. And she was unjudging.

Into her house the two of you would go, breaking the school rule, although in retrospect it’s hard to imagine that any number of teachers didn’t see you zipping across that street every day and mentally shrug.

The cool older siblings and their cool older friends might be lounging about. She would greet them all, smiling, and then the two of you would go into the tiny dark kitchen and pour enormous glasses of milk. Stir in the Quik with tall-handled spoons. Dig the knife into the big jar of peanut butter and spread giant swaths of it on slices of Wonder bread.

You’d sit eating and drinking, trying to overhear the conversations in the other room. Trying to get some sense of what life could be like, were you cooler and older and wore tight bell bottoms and peasant shirts.

She was one of the few friends you kept in touch with after high school. She stayed there, in the tiny town, population 300. She went to college, sure, but she never wanted to leave the town.

You? You left at 18 and never went back other than to visit your family. Not that you didn’t, and don’t, love it there, love the way you grew up.

But staying there never felt like a choice. For her, there was no other.

“I love it here,” she said. “I want to live here my whole life.”

She got a degree in gerontology and worked with old people. She loved them too. People on the fringes, people unnoticed, people quiet and shy, she saw them. She noticed them.

Twice that you know of, because she told you, men asked her to marry them.

“I said no,” she said. Smiling that big bright smile.

You asked her why. She shrugged.

“Didn’t feel right,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m happy just the way I am.”

She was Catholic and that, too, was something she loved. Hers was a happy Catholicism, a big bright generous religion whose God was always with her.

Everyone in the town knew her. At the drugstore, at the one tiny bar, at the church, in the one tiny grocery store, at the bank. She was one of those rarest of creatures, a human being completely comfortable in her own skin.

She’s been gone twelve years now, but you think of her every day. Every morning, you talk to her. Picture her.

When she appears in your mind, it’s always in winter. She’s always brushing up against you, wearing a bright blue nylon parka. That dark hair, those blue blue eyes, that grin.

When you pour a glass of milk and stir in some Quik, you make a toast to her. When you and some of her other friends organize an annual fundraiser in her name, for an annual scholarship in her name given to a high school kid in that little town, you do it for her. When you write your annual check to the food bank in that little town, you fill in the “in honor of” box in her name.

If she were still here, she’d no doubt be running the place.

You wish you could go home and see her again. Walk into that bright green house and have a peanut butter sandwich. You’d go to the bar with her, let her introduce you around.