Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye
When my son was a year and a half he came down with a stomach flu. After a couple of days the vomiting and diarrhea had calmed down, but he was quiet and listless. I wasn’t terribly worried but something told me to take him to the clinic, so I did. His doctor examined him in the little bright-lit room the same way I had grown used to, with calm and gentleness. I trusted this doctor completely and instinctively the minute I met him. He was older, small and lean, with wise eyes.
“I feel kind of dumb bringing him in,” I said, “but I just wanted to make sure.”
The doctor nodded. “It’s good you did bring him in,” he said.
Then he went to the phone on the wall and called the hospital and asked them to reserve a room, that my son and I would be there shortly. I looked at him in bewilderment.
“The hospital?” I said, and he nodded. “Well, okay. I’ll go home and pack some clothes and”–but he shook his head. “Go now,” he said, gently. “Dehydration.”
So I went. And waited while the nurses and doctors sought to find a vein in my little boy’s small body, and then sat beside him for a couple of days while the i.v. dripped life-giving liquid into him. It was like watching a half-dead green plant revive. It took me a little while to realize that my baby had not been far from losing his life. I remembered how the doctor had pinched up the skin of his tiny belly, and how it had just stayed pinched up. I remembered how the doctor had gone immediately to the phone on the wall.
This doctor retired from active practice when my children were still small. Last week, for no known reason, the image of him flashed into my mind and I wondered where and how he was. It had been 20 years. Then, not two days later, I walked into my neighborhood bookstore to give a reading from my new novel, Never Coming Back, and just inside the door, there he was. He was older, still lean and small, still with those calm, observant eyes. He had seen that I was giving a reading, and he wanted to come. There was a lump in my throat as I hugged him.
That man is the kind of person that makes me think of this beautiful poem, one of my favorites, by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Famous
– Naomi Shihab Nye
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.
After a reading from my new novel 
Yesterday my faithful companion and I were out for his twice-daily walk, and by “walk” I mean amble. Wander. Meander. Pete is fourteen years old now, and the boy who used to tear around the lakes for hours on end, never tiring, with me half-jogging to keep up, and who would then come home to do hot laps with the neighbor dogs in our adjoining back yard, now sways from side to side and every now and then stumbles over sidewalk heaves and steps. He breathes heavily and coughs often (heart failure), his joints are stiff (arthritis), he doesn’t notice the squirrels he used to leap after (eyes/hearing). This has happened gradually, so that I’ve had time to get used to it. Or so I thought.
Sometimes I think cruel things about other people. I don’t want to think these things and sometimes I hate myself for doing so. You say that all matters to you is being kind, I think, and that was so unkind. Sometimes I try to be Buddhist about it: Recognize. Acknowledge. Sit with it. Let it go. Sometimes I turn to one of my lifelong mantras to forestall future cruel thoughts: You don’t know what his story is, Alison, or, You don’t know what his home life is like, Alison, or, She was once somebody’s baby, you know.
Hurricanes and earthquakes and floods and the ongoing human cruelty inflicted by our elected employees against their fellow human beings. Jeez. It’s enough to make me understand (a tiny bit, anyway) why religious people start tossing around terms like “the end times.” Screw that, though. Enough good people determined to make the world better will do just that. Let us be like the whales in this strange and unforgettable poem by Albert Goldbarth, and sing to each other.
People look at me with confusion when I tell them I’m deeply wary of charismatic people, with charisma defined in the broad sense as “a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (such as a political leader).” But wait, isn’t charisma charming, magnetic, powerful? Sometimes. And sometimes it’s a mask for manipulation, a bottomless need for adulation, attention, look at me look at me look at me, take care of me and do as I say because I am more important than you. Charismatic people so often go unchecked, no matter their behavior, because a) people are drawn to them by that magnetic personality and b) charismatic people often snap at anyone who calls them out on their behavior, in a vicious, malevolent and wildly cruel way. 
The other day a new friend walked into my house and stopped to look at some photos perched on a bookcase. “Is that you?” he said, pointing to one of a girl on a windsurfer. “No, that’s my daughter,” I said, admiring her, how the wind was blowing her long hair back. Then time did one of its weird pivots and I startled and sort of laugh/winced, because why had I said the girl on the windsurfer was my daughter? She wasn’t. She was me, long ago, when I was the age that my daughter is now. 
Alison McGhee 