Poet as Water

Recently, I saw a trailer for a film about John Keats' life. Or perhaps I should say, about his love life, which is much more film worthy than an hour and a half of someone coughing and sitting in a dank room in Rome trying to write poems. The irony of Keats being sent to the eternal city was that he arrived in January when all was wet with river and even the cobblestone streets under sun held ice all day long. I cannot tell you the cold I felt while living through two winters there and I certainly figured out how to say "bone cold" in Italian and purchased a coat that looked more like a sleeping bag with a fur collar to wear even in my apartment at night.

While I was teaching twelfth grade British English at the American School in Rome, I took a group of students to the Keats' House which overlooks the Spanish steps. We were taken on a tour by some overly-British Keats scholar who seemed to know the scent of the young poet's breath. While this scholar brought out artifacts and books, I couldn't help but notice how bored my students seemed. It's hard to convince a group of Italians that some meek man of 24 could contend with the likes of Virgil or Dante. They didn't even seem fazed by the fact that Keats was sent by his doctor to go to a Mediterranean climate, a respite from all the grey of England, only to find himself more ill-suited than ever while his more popular poet friends were off traveling in Greece and being Lord of something. Nope. Not even drama and death seemed to pique their interest. Not yet.

All the students acted sluggish and foot-heavy until we were lead into Keats' bedroom and shone his death mask. The students crowed the plaster and moved in closer. Finally a bit of curiosity filled the room while our tour guide's voice became a soft whisper. Keats had both a "life mask" and "death mask" and they were side by side each other under glass. Questions arose and suddenly I didn't feel like the outing was a complete loss. I stood in the back of the room, which is what you do as a teacher: you monitor and ask questions during the dull silences, feigning interest for everyone. But thankfully, everyone was engaged and I was silent. Trying to see over the heads of my students I couldn't identify which mask was which. I waited until everyone had left so I could get a closer look. No wrinkles, no lines, just lips and eyelids. Closed.

I'm not sure what I was expecting to see. As if images of death would be one of grief or anguish, but under the dusted glass of the case were two small faces of calm. As if they were just napping side by side; each other waiting for all the visitors and tour guide to leave them alone so they could wake up, look out onto the city and watch all the fashionable and beautiful people below.

We toured more of Keats' spots that day, including a cafe he used to frequent, and ended at his grave. We had another tour guide through the Protestant Cemetery and found Keats' tombstone with the inscription, "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water." It was the most decorated grave with fresh flowers and my students just kicked gravel around with their shoes and pulled out their cellphones from their pockets to check the time and for texts. I admonished one of my students, "Orlando, please get off your cellphone. It's a cemetery, you'll make all these dead people envious that you can talk and they can't." Maybe I didn't say that exactly, but it was usually humor I used with "disciplining" Orlando.

Orlando Miani stood at least six foot three, had a shaved head and large curled wooden earrings in both ears. Orlando was the kind of student that other teachers would say in passing, "Good luck with that one, Ms. Walter" and keep walking away. I had to meet with Orlando's father once. His father spoke of all the "bad things" Orlando had done in the past holding my eye contact as if looking for my compliance, looking like an overgrown child sitting in a student desk. His father appeared and acted more Germanic than Italian and perhaps was why Orlando stood as some Italian giant amongst the shorter Romans in his class. I cannot say Orlando become my favorite students, nor did I make some major breakthrough with him leading to some "after-school special" moment. And despite his father's catalog of horrors, Orlando pleasantly passed my class. But what happened that year which is far more impressive than passing was that Orlando understood Shakespeare.

I had decided not to teach Lady Macbeth as their textbooks had suggested that year, but Hamlet instead. My class of mostly twelfth grade boys, who were not in the AP English class and were most likely not going to Harvard or Oxford or even the voc-tech if Italy had one. These students were barely passing anything and not because they were ignorant -hardly the case, they were all just too busy enjoying life already, perhaps too experienced one might say. Such was the case with Orlando. While discussing Hamlet's need to do something and yet his inability to act on it. Orlando started talking. He didn't sit there and talk about his personal life or how Shakespeare made him feel, Orlando was both too cool and too private for that, but what he did say was that Shakespeare created this character of not acting to prod us, the audience to act. "It's as if he's (Shakespeare) giving us hindsight," Orlando just blurted out one day. Perhaps even surprising himself.

It's hard as a teacher sometimes not to jump up and down and scream, "yes, you crazy kids, yes you are finally thinking and not just feeling." I recall nodding, looking at Orlando and saying, "interesting point, does anyone want to expand on that idea of audience giving hindsight?" Yet privately, I knew Orlando was finally present in class. Privately, I wanted to tell him that he was right.

Later that year, I went to graduation and watched tall and bored Orlando collect his diploma and walk with his long gait off stage. I was getting ready to leave the courtyard after the ceremony and I felt a heavy tap on my shoulder and turned to be shadowed by smiling Orlando.

"Meez Walter, you are here. Thank you, really, you know you got me here."

"Oh, no Orlando, you got yourself here. We are all just players, just players Orlando, even me."

"Die Meez Walter, really thank you."

"You're welcome, Orlando" nodding I just didn't know how to even navigate hugging someone so big or so tall so I just smiled and walked away.

Had I had hindsight myself, I would have hugged him. I wished I had. Years later, I was informed by another student via a letter that Orlando had died in a car crash in London. He was only 22 and I believe going to art school.

I'm sure if you were to ask any of my former students from that twelfth grade class if they remember any lines from, "Ode to a Grecian Urn" or even our outing that fall day to follow Keats life, I'm almost sure they wouldn't. But I doubt any of them have forgotten the masks or if they have forgotten Orlando. I know I haven't. Nor have I ever written a poem about either. It is just too much. There are some things you don't put in poems, some things you let live as they are, without the encumbered task of being weighted by metaphors. For sometimes, we are capable of being and living in uncertainties. Sometimes we don't have hindsight, so we can ignorantly appreciate what we have, today.

Enjoy the poem.

Sweat Pants

Seattle swallows rain for a month

straight. Gutters fill, water parts in alleys

where men wrestle with cardboard boxes

and disappointment. A man waits

by the bus stop without an umbrella, exposed

when a few of us hunch under a store front, slickered

in rain jackets, while this man stand reading

without a coat, just a grayed Henley and a pair

of sweat pants. The sweats are blue, flap

at his calves. His socks hiked up, once white. None of talk

to one another, sulked in silence.

The man in sweats turns his paper, reaches

under his belly to scratch himself. Not a hesitant itch

or rub. A dig. He reads the Times and I wait

for something. A slight twitch, a nervous cough,

or shrug. Instead, for the first time in thirty-six days

I forget it's raining. I want to forget about everything,

expect for this man in sandals, who stands back

when the bus arrives, letting a mother and her child,

who's dressed like a lady bug, board first.

The squelch of tires pushes water onto curbs,

trucks grind back up. The girl turns and waves

to the man. He tucks his paper and waves back

with both hands.

Blogging Bombs

Perhaps it sounds oh so aptly convenient of me to say, I learned to cook about the same time I learned to write poetry. But I did. Yet, what wasn't convenient by any means for either pursuits was the location: Kielce, Poland. During my last year as an undergraduate, I had taken a class by professor Thylias Moss, who boldly titled her workshop, "Poetry that Matters." We were a "selected" group of students huddled around a small table like some boat that was sure to sink, while at the helm was a four foot eleven African American woman who stared us all down over her glasses if anything we wrote was considered fluff. How could we not write fluff? We were coddled. White. Isolated. Naive. Young. What could we possibly offer to the world of poetry?

Yet during that semester we read a book titled, Contemporary Eastern European Poetry which focused mostly on Polish poets and I was hooked. I don't think I really understood half of what I read. No, I am sure I didn't. But what I did know was this was poetry that didn't need a lot of show, ego or even gold-leafed edges. If poetry could be compared to furniture, Polish Poetry is like a Swedish couch. Upon first glance, one might say simple, subtle and good design upon first glance, but upon further study or sitting one begins to understand a lot of attention has gone into making something so modestly aware. So after a post-graduate course in teaching English as a Second Language and a trip to Poland in the middle of winter, I landed a job just 120 miles north of Krakow in Kielce, the knife city.

There is nothing in Kielce that would cause anyone to want to visit. No monuments, no castles, not even a walled city section left. There are rolling hills that surround the concrete industrial blocked town, but mostly Kielce is grey all year long. However, I had landed a job at a small British school and found myself teaching six year olds English via cassette tapes of sing-alongs with such phrases as "I can jump. Can you? I can skip. Can you?" Yes, I thought this was truly the beginning of a life of a serious poet.

Sure, I took Polish lessons twice a week and found myself slow to learn and practice with the shop clerks who smoked over muted colored vegetables at the market and addressed me with comments such as, " Cwzego" which means," What?" No, this wasn't your American in bountiful Europe or Julia Child in the post war streets of Paris. This was Poland and oddly enough, I found myself at a loss at being able to buy even groceries as much as I was at a loss to write poetry.

Needless to say, I found myself drinking more than writing and one evening having found myself with a small crowd of English speaking Poles at a bar, I met a young man by the name of Tomas Bomba, laughing I said, "your name is Tom the Bomb? what kind of post-war kid are you?" Not exactly the kindest thing to come out of my mouth. Luckily, Tomas had taught himself English by reading Henry James novels so even his insults sounded faintly like compliments. Also, I had read a bit of Henry James so I could muddle my way through his early 19th century English diction and also fumble an apology despite the potent vodka on my breath.

Thankfully, Tomas and I became friends and we both had Wednesdays off and decided to spend our midweek day collecting food and then cooking it in my closet of a kitchen. Tomas had picked up a Penguin edition of French Cooking in England while on his visit to his British girlfriend and this was our guidebook through the markets of Kielce. We made souffles, ragouts, and we even found a coconut once and made a delicious dish of chicken curry for my British roommate who had sworn off meat, yet when she came home and found the smells of the whole apartment drowning out the hint of vinegar of our apartment complex, she couldn't refuse. We'd make crepes with nothing but two bowls and a pan Tomas would borrow from his mother. Slowly my Polish did improve, but more importantly, I learned to shout back to the ladies at the market if they tried to give me a wilted bunch of beets. I started to forage not just for survival, but for pleasure.

I cannot say the same happened for my writing. Sure I could say, like Hemingway, I wrote about Europe in Michigan and wrote about Michigan in Europe. But really. I just didn't write at all while living in Poland. Really. This was the mid-nineties, the Velvet Revolution was still a visual memory for most of my friends and Tomas himself told stories of rations. Poland was still arguing to find itself part of Europe and not just The East. Internet cafes weren't like ATMs and I still paid for groceries with zloty. My contact to the outside world was via a staticed phone line plugged into a wall. No Facebook to post my days of collecting root vegetables, no blogging to write about how much I had witnessed now as an enlightened American abroad, no cellphone to text or send images quickly home.

And I'm glad. I'm glad I was forced to be present. Ironically enough as I write this on my blog now, I recall how before all this business of being connected, to text, to blog, to tweet, we had just one verb, to be. We had to just commit to be where we were. Regardless if you wanted to or not. Sometimes you had to just stand next to men who stunk of canned meat on a crowded bus, or to learn how to strike up conversations with others waiting to catch a train that might or might not arrive, to cook from a borrowed copy of French Cooking and to navigate yourself through an ugly city with nothing but your token ability to talk to strangers.

Neko Case states, "the most tender place in my heart is for strangers" in her song, Hold On, Hold On. And this is true for me too. It was true while I was living in Poland and even now as I am in Montana sending out these words read by friends, family and hopefully strangers, I believe in the importance of being present. Certainly this sounds vague and full of fluff and if Thylias Moss were to read this, I am sure she'd be looking at me over her glasses. But the simple act of being where you are and not trying to connect to someplace else is hard. It was hard for me and still is, but it is worth it. It is worth sometimes just sitting with what and who are really in front of you. Sure it sounds silly, but it is true. Being present is a simple and yet essential quality for writing poetry, for cooking and for being a good friend even to someone whom you might at first off have offended. And frankly, no matter where you live in the world, you still have to practice it.

This poem I share with you came from an evening of being stuck in a train station in the middle of winter in a town I don't even remember where, but I do recall stepping out to catch some air and from Yugoslavian smoke from the waiting room, to watch a woman repeatedly sweep iced sidewalks with a broom. I felt so alien and lost, but I had no cellphone, no one else to talk with and oddly enough I am grateful I had to be where I was. Hell, now I get to blog about it. Enjoy.

Stop Request

You wouldn't mistake your mother

for a woman who walks through glass

and sits beside your book.

So you pass the time and frame

the woman's face, the one who

isn't your mother. She's like a Budapest tram

ticket you carry in your wallet

next to the taste of oranges

shared by a boy whose name

you don't remember. You watch her hands

brush a bit of hair away from her brow while she opens

a can of beer. Not cheap beer either

and rinses her teeth. The warm yeast fills

the room like the smell of sex on cotton. She spits

on the floor. In that moment you love her

more than your own mother, who would never spit.

When you leave the room, she shouts

Happy New Year in German. And you believe her.

WWJD or What Would Julia Do?

I'm not certain that WWJD ( What would Julia (Child) Do) would be as popular as the other acronym by the same name. Despite the fact that I claim Julia Child to be my personal saint in and out of the kitchen, I don't see France creating any sainted sculptures of her six foot frame with pearls around her neck by a fountain in Pairs; nor would we, in the US, start handing out plastic wristbands with WWJCD as reminders for patience with plucking, cleaning and preparing an entire chicken in less than twenty minutes. Probably not. As a poet, it's easy to over inflate the importance of another person, especially when they are dead and then played by Meryl Streep. Seriously, I could also include Meryl Steep to my personal muse list for who else can make Robert Redford swoon with a Danish accent, play a believable lesbian, sing ABBA in the Greek Isles and now take on the great cooking icon of Julia Child?

There are certain expected icons that you would expect a poet to hold with high regard such as John Keats, whose death mask still haunts me. Emily Dickinson, well, for obvious reasons, and of course my poet of highest regard, Jack Gilbert, the heartfelt recluse who seems to rise as some poetic phoenix genius with each book he publishes. But in regards to cooking, I have had few people affect me with the same sense of depth as Julia Child. Certainly, this is just as expected as me selecting Emily Dickinson; however, it wasn't until reading her book, My Life in France, did I have a new respect for her sense of humble curiosity and American determination to be more than just a housewife cook in post-war France. Yet she didn't start out wanting to be any sort of icon, all she wanted to do was feed her husband she loved so much while also learning to understand and appreciate the culture around her.

What struck me the most in the book came early on in a chapter titled, "Never Apologize." Again, growing up in the midwest, cooking and apologizing seem to go together as well as Campbell's mushroom soup and the word casserole. I cannot tell you how many houses I have been to when the person cooking placed a dish down and proceeded to tell everyone all that had gone wrong and then of course our response would usually began with, "It could be worse, we could not be eating... etc." But here's what Julia Child states in regard to this lack of cooking etiquette:

I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make. When's ones hostess starts with self-deprecations such as, "Oh, I don't how to cook"....it is so dreadful to have to reassure her that everything is delicious and fine, whether it is or not. Besides, such admissions only draw attention to one's shortcomings (or self-perceived shortcomings), and make the other person think, "Yes, you are right, this really is an awful meal! ...Usually one's cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile, as my ersatz eggs Florentine surely were, then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile---and learn from her mistakes. (pg. 77)

This was so enlightening for me to read. Finally, I had a reason to understand why a litany of apologies is so gauche after you have served another even if it is your husband who you know would truly would be happy if you just served him toast. But there is more to this paragraph that spoke to me. The end of this passage speaks to the responsibility of the cook to learn from their mistakes and not accept others to cover them with inflated comments to cover up the fact even if the food is truly vile. For me, this passage states the importance of three things, be accountable for your actions, don't apologize for being human, and above all smile. As if we can understand that if something is truly bad that we've made, we can keep it to ourselves and learn from it and above all, keep smiling. In other words, we need to not only find our inner Julia Child but also inner Sisyphus in the kitchen, Camus' version that is.

For me, I feel I was born apologizing. No, my first word wasn't sorry or forgive me, but "hot". I cannot deconstruct any greater meaning than I am sensitive to temperatures. But as for the apologizing, I am guilty of wanting to learn sorry first in every language I have learned to speak to ensure the fact that in case I blundered, I could gracefully and correctly apologize. Frankly, sorry seems to be something I have trained myself to believe I almost always am, so reading this passage about one of my favorite passions, cooking, as well as one of my not so favorite habits, apologizing, I somehow felt absolved. Reading Julia Child's honest and ego-less diary of her own transformation helped me to start to rid myself of my midwest guilt in cooking but also just for sometimes, just being born. But more importantly, Child states the need to move on and correctly learn whatever you've blundered for next time.

This approach to life, not to apologize, choose to laugh and keep smiling wasn't first introduced via Julia Child, but from my aunt Carol. My aunt Carol could have been European or Europeanly influenced for she wasn't afraid to wear fur, have a year round sun tan and would at most family gatherings laugh in her tall slim frame drowning out the heaviness of our grandparents' expectations. My aunt Carol also did something that I would like to think Julia Child did well, listen intently. Each visit to our house in the North aunt Carol would bring each of us three kids a book always wrapped in purple paper from the bookstore where she worked. Also with each visit, Carol would sit with each of us, individually, and ask us about our lives, our thoughts and always what we were reading.

I loved it when it was my turn on the couch. Perhaps if you are born with an innate sense of being sorry, therapy comes easily. But Carol didn't analyze us or evaluate us, no, she just listened. Sure, she had traveled to distant cities and seemed more stylish and younger with each visit. But I don't think I could tell you all where she has been because she didn't waltz into our home listing all the fabulousness of her life. No, Carol wanted to know what I thought about the The Island of Blue Dolphins, asked me about my thoughts on Holden Caulfield and what I got out of Steinbeck at age 13. Sure, again, I can glorify someone in memory, but really for me, Carol was one of the first women I knew who decided to choose joy in the face of adversity, and also prefered to listen to children and think we had something worthy of saying. Also, I saw Carol as someone who regardless of mistakes or blunders, could chose joy. Carol, despite divorce and adversity, still chooses joy. And finally, I don't recall ever hearing her apologize either.

Besides being my aunt who really listened, she is also a very good cook. There are numerous recipes I could choose from to show my gratitude, but this berry bread recipe seems to say it all. It is comfort Carol food. It's bread that seems to listen to you and your stomach's need to be fed. It's bread you want to eat while you have your morning coffee or make it for a friend who you want to sit and chat with, take it to a book club or just make it for your husband and watch him eat the entire loaf with a whole stick of butter in one sitting. Again, I am lucky that my husband is happy even if I make him toast, but here's a type of toast you can make and never find yourself apologizing over. Ever. Enjoy.

Carol usually makes this with strawberries, but any berry at the moment would do such as huckleberries, thimbleberries or blueberries.

Carol Murray's Berry Bread

1 stick butter, room temperature

1 cup sugar

1/4 teaspoon almond extract

2 eggs, separate yolks and whites

1 cup of berries, fresh

2 cups of flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

2. Grease a 9" by 12" bread loaf pan.

3. Mix butter and sugar and blend until creamed.

4. Add almond extract and egg yolks, one at a time, blend.

5. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

6. Add half flour mixture and half of strawberries to cream mixture and mix well.

7. Add the rest of flour and then strawberries and mix well again.

8. In a separate bowl, beat egg whites until stiff and then blend in berry cream mixture.

9. Place in bread loaf pan and bake for one hour.

Even Virgil Slam Dances, Sometimes.

Slam dancing has been a family affair. Seriously. I don't recall the first time I slam danced with my brother or if I just watched for years and then followed suit, bouncing up to his armpit while London Calling was playing, slamming to the line, "should I stay or should I go now." Call it the myth of the older brother, call it growing up in the early eighties or just call it what happens when sensitive people are tired of being so sensitive and they need a release. Really, slam dancing is perhaps some poets' favorite secret pastime from all those, well, from all those feelings.

I remember once someone telling my husband after they heard I was a poet, "wow, I bet she has a lot of feelings." And I do. Thankfully for me though, I grew up with men who do also. My father once told me, "Emily if you feel like crying, cry because well, not crying gives you headaches." My brother, a mechanical engineer, also has a very pragmatic approach to emotions. He just has them openly and we, my brother and I, have always shown them openly to each other. I cannot tell you how many phone calls I have made to my brother from where ever I have lived and while I ranted on, he would listen, be patient and always say something far more insightful than my winded over-talked analysis. We've been close growing up and even now as adults, so he knows talking to me can take some time. And thankfully he always seems to have time. Thankfully too, I've grown up a bit and hopefully listen more. Now, we mostly find hours to chat on Sunday mornings via the phone and during the week we send each other random videos of music we love or you tube clips we cannot stop laughing from.

Yet when my brother was in high school, I was in elementary school and he seemed, well, old. But during the summers, we were friends again. Growing up surrounded by cherry orchards, every summer brought two harvests: tarts and sweets. If you wanted to go to college or be able to buy records and maybe even a bike, most kids worked their summer away to the odd hours of cherry harvesting. There were usually two shifts, midnight to noon or noon to midnight. My brother started pulling tarp and then graduated to tractor driving and when he'd come home he'd fill the house with the scent of sulfur and sweat, never sweet hints of cherries, just labor. In between harvests, the crew would usually have time off to just chill and thankfully, for my brother, the harvest crew consisted of most of his friends. When it was down time for them, it was for me, fun time.

My brother is seven years older and could seriously be claimed the greatest influence in my life in regards to music, and for kids growing up in the middle of nowhere, music made you feel somewhere. The summer when my brother was 16, my cousin Eric came out from Baltimore to work cherries and being nine years old and held up at home with books and an occasional sleep over, summers felt long. But not that summer. That summer my brother let me tag along everywhere with him. One night we loaded up in the Horizon (my brother, Eric, me and my friend, Erin Sweeny) headed in to Suttons Bay to eat pizza at the Hose House. My brother drove and the radio blared, "I'm your Venus" by Bananarama while we all misquoted the lyrics, yelling out the windows to nothing but rows of trees and humid summer skies. I recall while we were driving along the road, my brother, without hesitation just drove off into an orchard and he took that horizon through the rows of cherries and then down onto a tractor road and then back onto the pavement without even blinking. Erin and I, seat belted in the back, laughed while being slightly afraid all at the same time.

And my brother was like that. He would be so mellow and calm and then suddenly some surge of energy would come over him and he'd do something so reckless and wild, which is probably why slam dancing made so much sense to him. Maybe it isn't the aggression as much as it is the music that makes my brother so amped up. Maybe growing up on Donnybrook (our road my parents still live on) has something to do with it too. Or maybe if you're sensitive, this world seems to understand bold acts of energy more so than quiet displays of introspection.

My brother would get quiet, really quiet. I'd sometimes find him in his room, all dark and a slight volume of Morrissey playing in the distance. Sometimes, I knocked on his door, and always he'd let me in. We'd listen for hours together and ask each other questions about lyrics from U2 or Peter Gabriel and he'd say, "listen to this Emily, what do you think it means?" And he already had an idea, but he'd ask me and would really listen to what I thought. I recall feeling nervous sometimes as if I might not fully understand or be able to analyze some lyric, but Chris would keep asking me questions, keep helping me feel more like an intelligent equal, than some tag along. Sometimes we'd talk about life on Donnybrook, our family, our grandparents or aunts or uncles as if we would have each other as witnesses to make sense of our experience all while Sinead O'Connor would sing in the background from "The Lion and the Cobra".

Other times we would talk about depression. One time my brother told me about being young and feeling the weight of depression come over him and the odd fact he told me, "I remember liking it Emily and liking the darkness was what scared me the most." Sure, we both love Harold and Maude, The Smiths, we would share novels like The Brothers K and The River Why and sometimes find ourselves on the phone asking each other questions again, about the odd loneliness of being in a crowd, our love of traveling and searching instead of being still. But through time, experience and probably each of us growing up, we can now return to music again. We can share soundtracks from our individual lives and remind each other to not be afraid of the darkness. We both know it is there, but we don't have to be dark, anymore. We can walk away from all the weight of our past or who we once were and remind each other we will always be there in music even in a quiet dark house. There is always sound and light, somewhere.

And really, I like to think of my brother as my Virgil, a slightly taller and smarter version of myself who has been a voice and hand of reason for me. Sure, there are a lot of terms for big brothers, like bully or being over-protective and, don't get me wrong, my brother has been both. From dislocating my arm twice from politely shunning me from bad boys, my brother has been the typical older brother, but what I feel grateful for is that he has been an atypical guide and role model. It's as if my brother decided to close the door on all that Morrissey and The Smiths of our youth and has moved beyond the darkness and to listen more to Talking Head's "Pulled Up" but he knows when to pull out Leonard Cohen when needed.

This past week I was in Michigan visiting family, my sister's family and my brother and his wife's new baby girl, Wren. While we were all home, we (the three siblings and spouses) went to the Traverse City Film Festival and watched "Winnebago Man." While The Dead Kennedys were singing "Winnebago Warriors" in the beginning of the film my brother shouted out the lyrics. People turned around slowly and stared. But my brother just keep singing along as if he were slam dancing in the dark against people seated comfortably eating popcorn. I loved it. I loved hearing him and his earnest energy of angst come alive again. I felt oddly proud of my brother not to lose that gift of making people feel awkward by someone simply expressing themselves and sure enough, that was what the movie was about. Winnebago Man is about how a man spent one summer making Winnebago ads in the muggy heat of Iowa and how the camera caught him swearing on all of the out takes, which later become a Youtube craze where people find pleasure in someone else's anger. But it was about a lot more than that.

And so is my brother--a lot more than just someone who likes to slam dance and take his shirt off and mow the yard while listening to Van Halen. He's a lot more than just an engineer, a big brother, a mountain biker, a son. He's now a husband and father and he will always be the one who first taught me to really listen to lyrics and to try and make sense of them. Really, he taught me to be a poet. But to be a poet not attracted to or in love with darkness only, but to recognize that it is there, but to believe in light. The lightness of being in all of us and that we all have music. So we can sing, our "bittersweet symphony" (The Verve) to get close enough to "sound and vision" (David Bowie). To get close, enough.

Scrabble in the Hospital

Jet or zip will give you a higher score
than death or meadow. Even zoo
is greater than grief. Axe on a double word
will always be more points than embrace.
Our language in tiles can be separated
by vowels, but our bodies cannot speak
the sounds of the word for a baby born
without breath. There aren’t enough letters
for this loss. There are no words
for this color. And when they told me
of how you held your baby girl,
Ariel, I didn’t think of the sprite
on an island or the book of poems
which rests on my night stand.
I thought of your hands
around a blanket of a body
born cold in a room shaded pink.
The same pink of your cheeks in February
on frozen lakes when you’d tell of trout
in their slow sleep. And now your slow voice
staticed and wintered in a phone line
tells me of joy, the stubborn happiness
in loving what cannot live. Knowing
we couldn’t ever spell or keep score
of the light of each star, but we have the word
sky, elephant, and hope . To get close
enough.

Upper West Side Grace

The first time I saw New York City, I cried. I was fifteen, awkward and so fully aware of my awkwardness that I just kept quiet hoping it might not be so obvious as I sat on a bus filled with mothers and daughters headed up from Baltimore, Maryland for a weekend in "the city." Perhaps this seems melodramatic to cry from a view, but call it feeling overwhelmed by anticipation. As I sat under a dark hue of grey clouds and night skies on a coach weaving into light, I remember the city seemed to move like the moon--chasing me in the reflection of the window. It was my cousin's private school's yearly outing to go on a mother/daughter visit to NYC before Christmas and thankfully my mother and I got to tag along all the way from the Midwest.

As a girl growing up in the middle of nowhere in the middle of this country, you learn that frankly, you are in the middle. This is a good thing. You learn that there is always somewhere else that people are trying to live, wanting to live in order to tell themselves they are somewhere and when they leave their middle town they can "finally be somebody." Or tell themselves so. City names become more like identities, I myself am very guilty of this. At times I've said with pride I lived in Rome, and other times I sound like some pretentious privileged wannabe I myself would roll my eyes at. Yet as a child, I remember reading Madeline books and staring more at the city pretty women, then the twelve girls in two straight lines in Paris. I recall being older and reading about girls growing up in the Upper East Side of New York and taking elevators out of their homes and cabs to school and I would dream at night in the quiet of orchards of sidewalks and city parks. Long before I traveled outside of even Michigan, I would say distant city names: Paris, Warsaw, Prague and Florence as if they were fiction, as if they were some kind of distant gods I wanted to worship or at least live under.

And that first night I saw New York, it was the mere fact that the fiction of a city I had visited in my mind was becoming real. This is what made me cry. No, I wasn't afraid which may sound like a lie coming from someone who hadn't ever been to a city larger than Lansing. From that bus window, New York was a backdrop that I had nothing to compare to, nothing to identify as familiar and yet I knew I liked it immediately. I liked how it did seem to move from a distance and even closer in the city it was in constant motion with buildings towering over water and forgetting about anything wild.

As the bus dropped us off at our hotel, I was immediately hit by city-heavy cold air, the orange glow overhead, the wreathed sky scrapers and I recall forging for some scent of Christmas in all the concrete. It was mid-December and what I did notice women were in fur vests and matching hats and a frank resistant to showing any sense of being cold. I'd love to tell you all that we did from Radio City Music Hall to Central Park, but frankly I don't remember. What I do remember are the clothes and the fashionable fast moving New Yorkers moving just as their city did from a distance. The speed of the women rushing in their importance who seemed to me catalog fresh, and frankly, Vogue worthy.

My previous exposure to fashion had been through reading Vogue at the local library and taking home back issues and trying to mimic outfits. Granted, I was in fourth grade at this time and had a healthy supply of OP pants and turtlenecks. Actually, I think I may have still been wearing Oskosh overalls and of course very thick glasses. I recall one outfit post-Desperately Seeking Susan Madonna consisting of bangles and a headband of lace. I overheard my sister that morning commenting to my mother about my assembled Madonna wanna outfit. As I came to breakfast with my still round belly and elastic pants shadowed by my twelve bangles on each arm my sister said, "you can't let her wear this to school, she looks ridiculous." And yet thankfully, my mother did let me even though I did look ridiculous. No, I didn't take it to the child-whore like a virgin state ever but I would like to think this was my first attempt at merging preppy and punk or maybe geek and goth. Regardless, in fourth grade I thought I would stand out. I'm sure I did.

Thankfully, my mother let me go through other tragic fashion phases and also she thankfully required that I buy my own clothes. So on that trip to New York City, I purchased a head band from Laura Ashley and sadly lost it two days later in a cab. My mother also taught me a lot about sensible style long before our first trip to NYC. I used get up and talk with her in the mornings before she would go to work as a nurse at our local doctor's office. She'd be getting dressed and say, "Talk to me Emily while I get ready." And I would. I would tell her about school, ramble on about something that worried me while my mother would transform herself from bathrobe to beautiful. My mother always looked and still looks attractive even in her uniform. During one of those mornings she told me her personal philosophy of style with clear authority: "Emily, there are three very important things to your sense of style that hardly cost you anything. Number one, always wear clothes that fit you, your body size and shape. Number two, always shower, nothing is more unattractive than someone who looks sloppy and smells. (she'd laugh at this point.) And three, always make sure you have a good hair cut."

I'd like to think these maxims are universally shared and honored for their simplicity, but I want to give my mother credit due to the fact that from a very early age she made her own clothes, took hand-me-downs from more stylish and wealthy aunts who lived in cities, but my mother always had something else. This is something that my husband's grandmother, Doddie also says, "a woman needs a sense of P-R-I-D-E." Yes, Doddie still spells this out each time she says it. This sense of pride is something that I am still developing. Due to a long phase of all black and only jeans and shorn short hair for years, I am still trying to discover my own sense of style. Basically, it took me years of watching old women in foreign countries and in America who would never be caught dead in elastic waist anything, especially sweat pants to really understand style is something you create, not buy, for yourself.

The elegant Roman signoras each day leaving their homes with high heels and stylish sunglasses carting their sometimes dated but always matching handbag have been my greatest teachers. No, it wasn't the women I'd watch slowly extending their long legs out of Ferraris on side streets in Rome, nor the city skinny women of Paris, not even the Eastern European heighted women smoking in cafes who moved as slow and as elegant as silk on skin helped me see style might be in what you put on, but beauty is how you carry yourself in your clothes regardless of age. Roman women taught me that even in age, sun damage and years of living under even a dictator of Mussolini couldn't take away their pride in asserting their beauty. For me, it took two years of waiting at my bus stop before going to school early in a Roman morning, Italy early like 8:30am, to see how women asserted their stylish beauty regardless of gravity or age. I recall when watching one woman barely able to board a bus clowned with her huge Gucci sunglasses and teetering her last days in high heels, I wasn't laughing, but longing. Longing for this kind of stubborn belief in yourself regardless of age or wrinkles.

So I've added another maxim to my mother's sensible sense of style: Beauty is an act of grace. Attractiveness is not youth, labels or even attitude, but something subtle and well, sublime that causes people to pause. Grace is defined as effortless beauty that I believe emanates by confidence. This isn't ego confidence or some kind of feminist edge, asserted over other women, but joy, pure joy in doing what you love and selflessly sharing this passion with others. This joy is an action, say, in making a pie for your family, riding your horse until you are 70, playing tennis into your 80's, looking sexy at 50 or just putting on your best dress at 95 for your birthday. But really it is the joy in still being present and part of this world, not aging into some sweat suit and cropped permed hair, that gives some women gracefulness.

Let me explain. This past spring Greg and I spent some time in New York City to visit friends and to get a city fix of food and to wander together for the first time in a big city as married people. We had such a good time eating cupcakes from Magnolia, an epic burger and fried pig's ear at the Spotted Pig to just loving any random deli sandwich we could find and of course watching beautiful people busily go by.

One morning, Greg had said he wanted to check out a bakery on the Upper West Side which was owned by his brother's college girlfriend's mother. Frankly, I heard Upper West Side and Bakery and that was all I needed to know to hop on the subway to find it. It was sunny and a perfect day to sit in Central Park and well, eat or ponder just how pretentious Paul Simon's lyrics are. As we walked along the sidewalk on the Upper West side headed towards 107 West 70th to Soutine, the bakery, the streets were quiet and bare. The only echo of sound was coming from a lone songbird hiding in the green of a city tree.

That morning as we entered the sweet of the bakery, Greg walked up with the air of confidence and introduced himself to a woman seated behind the counter. She was tallish with a pink stiff dress shirt, a white apron and a matching pink scarf tied around her salt and pepper bobbed hair. I recall smiling and saying nothing but watching her face change as she heard Greg's name. Now smiling she said, "Now that's a name I haven't heard in awhile" as she stood up and moved towards us. I remember watching her hands, her artist hands, for on the subway Greg had told me how Madge Rosenberg had recipes in the Joy of Cooking and how her bakery was famous for wedding cakes. Hands seem important to me as a cook, a writer, a woman and seem to show a person's history as if hands are like some still life attached to each of us. Madge had beautiful hands and she spoke with such clear and steady diction, never rushed, never forceful, just a slow ease of elegance as she filled white bags with sandwiches and fresh berry tarts. She spoke of losing her husband, her three grandchildren, her life in New York alone for the first time while I listened and stood slightly on the side. I just stood back and stared at the birthday candles in packages with a slight covering of dust and overheard Spanish coming from the back of the bakery.

As Greg and Madge were speaking, a group of ladies came in for their order of sandwiches and brownies. These women were part of the Garden Club of America meeting just down the street and stopping by Soutine to pick up their lunch. I noticed one of the woman's sweater had rhinestones spelling out Paris, Rome, Tokyo and Sheboygan. I couldn't resist. I said, "Are you from Sheboygan by chance?" Smiling she said yes and I told her of Michigan and living across the lake, growing up in a village called Suttons Bay. While speaking with this woman, Greg told Madge of my job and I fumbled into their conversation stating how cooking has really merged from my private passion into a job I really adore. She laughed and said, "You know, I never even cooked before I went to Italy. Before that, I just liked to eat. I was in college and I just decided I wanted to learn how to cook and how to bake." I'm not sure why this statement triggered something deep inside of me, but it did. Again, there I was in New York wanting to cry. How pathetic right? Here I go again, being overwhelmed. But as I spoke with Madge, I thought for some brief moment, I could take this feeling or being overwhelmed or intimidated and transform all this awkwardness into grace. I could carry myself like Madge even if I was as old as her daughter, I could resist the ego driven sense of myself. I could stand with a slow calm and say without feeling pretentious that, "I lived in Italy and it humbled and grounded me, while also teaching me to want to be beautiful. Because it did. It gave me the chance to see women who have a stubborn pride and hope in themselves who also seem to be taught as I was that there is beauty feeding others.

As we stood there, I started to pull out my wallet to pay and Madge who just shook her head and in a quiet voice said, "just put that away, Emily." Our bags were full and as we were ready to walk away and say good-bye, Madge said slowly, "wait." She walked back into the kitchen which I couldn't help but peering into, where there was a tray of brownies still warm in the pan. Madge carefully selected a few and put them into yet another white sack. She smiled at me as she extended her arm full of brownies, "these broke" shrugging her shoulder, "enjoy Emily keep cooking," she said holding my eyes with her eyes and smiling fully.

Greg and I walked loaded with food and silently headed towards the green tips of Central Park, passing the Botanical ladies and saying hello again, we kept walking in silence. As we found a place along a small pond to sit and eat our sandwiches, I said to Greg. "I feel like we were just in the presence of someone so beautiful, so present and I cannot explain why I feel like crying." Greg nodded and thankfully he didn't joke about how sweeping of a comment I had just made, he himself was about to cry. He just smiled a slow smile nodding his head while steadily holding my eyes. As we pulled out our baguettes of ham and cheese carefully wrapped in holed plastic, we couldn't stop talking about how Madge had remembered so many details of Greg's family, a visit with Greg's parents and how Madge almost cried herself when she told Greg how sorry she was to hear of Greg's dad's death. Almost finishing our sandwiches, I put my nose into the still warm bag of brownies and said, " I don't think you can make beautiful food without being beautiful yourself." Again, a silly broad generalization, I guess I haven't fully learned the ability to be quiet and graceful yet. As we sat on rocks watching young Koreans practice a wedding, a Russian couple sat slowly in a row boat, and the Majestic seemed to almost hang in the perfectly sunny sky above our view, we ate those brownies and every last crumb in silence watching other couples lose themselves to the midday afternoon in the city park. As if all of us gathered to find a place to slow ourselves down.

Thankfully, Greg and I wrote to Madge to thank her for everything and of course I asked her for her brownie recipe. I want to share it with you so you too can make the simplest of desserts an act of beauty. Remember folks, this is a person who has been in the Joy of Cooking, so this is the real deal. I feel so honored to have met her. Enjoy.

Madge's Brownies

8 ounces semi sweet chocolate

2 ounces milk chocolate

1/2 pound sweet butter

1 3/4 cup white sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

5 large eggs or 4 jumbo eggs

1/4 teaspoon vanilla

1 1/2 cup all purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 cup walnuts

1. Preheat oven to 350 and grease a 9"x 12"x 1 1/2" pan.

2. Melt chocolates and butter over double boiler or in microwave.

3. Beat sugars and eggs, vanilla very well.

4. Beat chocolate mixture into eggs and beat until well combined and color lightens a little.

(Do not over beat or brownies will be crusty).

5. Mix flour, salt, baking powder and nuts into chocolate just until everything is well combined.

6. Spread batter in pan and bake for 40 or maybe less, check at 30 minutes.

Yields: 12 brownies and can be kept wrapped in plastic and refrigerated and kept for three to five days.

The Horoscope of a Wife

I wouldn't claim to be an astrologist. Nor would I say I'm guided by people's "signs" or find myself saying something like, "that is so Cancer of you," to my husband who will be celebrating his birthday tomorrow. Yet, I must admit like many people, I read my horoscope almost religiously every week. I give it my full attention and sometimes, I even cut the column out that lends itself to insight or reflection. Rarely do I find myself justifying people's behavior due to them being such a Virgo or Pisces; however, after teaching nuns who read my palms, told me about the nature of my character based upon the hour I was born and being born under the sign of Taurus, I started to give astrology a bit more credit. Frankly, you don't argue with nuns. You listen, carefully.

I taught a group of international students in Northern Michigan for a year. Despite the remote location of Marquette, we were a varied group including a few nuns from South Korea and Vietnam, a mother and daughter from the Ukraine, and an overly stylish Japanese boy, Haromi, who spent more time on his eye makeup than his homework. Our lessons were four hours long, but with such a varied group, we had a lot to discuss. When you are working with a textbook with titles like, "America, your new home!" you want to supplement with news articles, short stories and songs. We did a lot of role plays and acting in class, which most of the students enjoyed, especially the nuns. Okay everyone, you're at a dinner party socializing, how do you interact, what do you say you like to do? I once overhead someone say, "Hello, I am Sister Jeanne, I enjoy praying and power point presentaions." Besides role playing, most students really liked to learn lyrics to popular songs. Almost everyone, except Haromi, who preferred heavy Icelandic death metal. There we'd be, all sitting around a CD player out looking at a window with snow and sleet while we mouthed, "blackbird singing in the dead of night." Somehow, it seemed pretty beautiful.

A few days before Valentine's Day, sister Maria announced that she wanted to perform a love song. I thought she was going to sing, but as she stood in front of the class with her black orthopedic shoes tapping out the rhythm on the carpet, dressed in her woolen grey habit and gown, she pulled out a harmonica and slowly, but confidently played a sorrowful love song from her country. At first we all just stared, Haromi turned away and put a misplaced hair back in place, but we all sat in silence while sister Maria closed her eyes and what I'd like to think might have been the hum of some God. There were no words to the song, no melody any of us recognized, just her steady confidence of sorrow that had each of our, even Haromi's, black mascara running.

Later in the year, Sister Maria would show the same sense of confidence while reading my palms, telling me "watch out for rabbit men. find man born year of the rat. very important." Sure, I thought, just want I needed, more rats in my life to claim as boyfriends. But when my birthday came around, sister Maria came up after class soliciting me to listen to her advice. "Emelie, you must be careful, your heart so big, but you are bull. Bulls not move fast unless push." What could I say to that? Sure, sister Maria, you take that bumbo jumbo stuff back to Veeitnaam. No, I didn't question a woman raised a Buddhist who chooses to live as a Christian nun. Nope, I listened carefully. Frankly, I even prayed that I might be able to teach her something she didn't already know in one of the three langauges she spoke. Maybe even a fourth or fifth language if you include palm reading, astrology and speaking with gods.

I'd love to claim that year that my teaching of English as a Second Language was all taught in metaphor, folk wisdom, history or even poetry, and all my lessons were moments of insight, but really I taught grammar everyday and sometimes for the entire four hours. Grammar isn't boring, actually it lends itself to all of these other topics I mention, especially when you teach the second conditional. The second conditional is used for unreal situations that might happen in the present or the future. For example, If I were you, I would drive more carefully in the rain. But the best part about teaching grammar, would be to have each student come up with their own examples. Sister Maria's, " if you steal from friend, then God mad." or Valerie from the Ukraine, "if you cheat on love, then you would marry cheat husband." Sure, these students were new to English, but what was I going to say, "No, sister Maria, that's God would be mad. God get it right, already." Don't you think Sister Maria already knew enough about what would or wouldn't happen having grown up during the Vietnam War and choosing to live a life of chastity and poverty? Somehow, I think she didn't need me telling her what to do. Don't get me wrong, I would correct them, but first I'd make sure to compliment their insight.

Luckily, we wouldn't just sit in a classroom with textbooks all the time. Sometimes, I had them over for meals and we would each take turns cooking, teaching each other how to make a favorite dish. Sister Maria taught us how to make Pho, the Ukrainians made ciasko, a Russian apple cake and poor ole Haromi just couldn't seem to ever make it to these classes. But I'd like to think it was in the kitchen, that all of us women really were able to learn from each other. Yet as you might imagine, whenever you have a group of women in the kitchen regardless of where they are from or if you have nuns, the issues of men almost always surfaces. "American women don't know love," Valentina said while sipping on her borscht one cold January afternoon, "American woman are so hard, so cold, and" she paused and leaned closer into us around the table, "they don't know how to cook." She took another sip, while I felt slightly ashamed having been the only American woman at the table. Valentina clarified, "they don't know how to cook for their husbands." At first, I was thinking she was referring to some sad pork chop and a lump of potatoes on a plate, where some Cossack sat slumped like his potatoes with a empty bottle of vodka. But she continued, "you cook to feed family, but you feed family for love." We all sat with bowls in our hands and nodded. I remember telling myself, remember this Emily, you might someday have a husband who might thankfully if Sister Maria had any say, be born during the year of the rat. I didn't say anything. How could I? Who was I to go off on feminism and woman's rights to a woman who had raised three children under Communism and by the slap of the hand of a husband who drank himself to death. Now Valentina was here with her daughter at age 55 to start her "new American life!" Again, you don't argue with Ukrainian women or nuns. You listen and hopefully you remember what they say.

And really, I think Valentina's right. It can be the simplest of soups, a pot roast or a favorite meal for your husband's, mother's or child's birthday or even your new friend's girlfriend in a foreign country. It doesn't matter, you make something that helps everyone who's around the table feel the presence of love. Sure, I know the image of the American housewife with a wooden spoon in hand, a bowl full of chocolate cookie dough and a smile that seems sponsored by Prozac is an image we all as women recognize clearly as a poster for suppression. But really, it doesn't have to be. Once, I made a baked Alaska in January in Poland for a fellow teacher and we gathered around the shoe box apartment I had and ate cake while sitting on the floor. I still like to think that was one my better culinary moments. But bare in mind, I am from the Midwest and I have tendency to fall into the kitchen as my safe place in times of stress and intimidation. Never mind Emily, she's making meat loaf one might say, but really, I'd like to think I follow the advice of Valentina and we cook out of a need to show love.

I cannot say that my husband was born during the year of the rat, but I would like to say, I love to cook for him. Sure, I struggle at times with asking myself how I went from single in stilettos living in Rome to now being a wife who runs a Cooking School in Missoula, Montana where I have to wear sensible shoes because I work on my feet all day. Sure, one could say I sold out, lost my freedom and independence and my European Life! But that would be too easy. Really, I'd like to think I gained something more. And thankfully, I listened to women with more insight, my students, who each dedicated their lives in their own way to love and learned to make or bake something to show for it.

This soup I share with you is one of my favorites in my cache of simple foods. I made this for my mother in-law and some of her friends, for my father who recently visited and of course many times for my husband. It is a good seasonal spring soup, but even in the summer for those random rainy days this feels just right. I first found this in Bon Appetit this past April, but I've made a few changes. Enjoy.

Petite Peas and Tarragon Soup

2 16-ounce packages of frozen petite peas (let thaw)

2 tablespoons of butter or olive oil

1 1/2 cup shallots

4 cups of chicken broth, (use veggie broth if you want a vegetarian soup)

3 tablespoons of fresh tarragon

1 cup milk or cream

1. Heat oil or butter in a heavy large saucepan.

2. Add shallots and saute until golden, about seven minutes.

3. Add thawed peas, four cups of broth and tarragon; bring to boil until flavors blend and peas are tender, about six minutes.

4. Cool slightly.

5. Use a hand held blender, immersion blender, for best results and puree soup.

6. Add milk to soup and let flavors blend.

7. Heat soup on low and serve with a dollop of sour cream or yogurt.

8. Garnish with tarragon leaves and serve.

The Song of Reverse Innocence

It's been over a month since I have written.  As for the delay, I can catalog events and reasons, such as a well-needed trip East to see Greg's homeland and some friends in New York City, a new job promotion, which means running a cooking school, but this is taking more of my time. Therefore, my early mornings are spent either planting or exercising, but really, perhaps my pause from posting is as simple as: I had a birthday.

I have written before about the myths and stereotypes of poets, but as I have admitted before, some of these images can be true. Like most people, poets have birthdays, but for some a birthday is a good passing in your craft, unless you are Keats or Hart Crane. In poetry, age isn't really working against you. Frankly, poetry is an art that takes so much time to be even sightly okay at. Really, I try to tell myself that getting older is actually better for my writing. I tell myself two words every birthday: Elizabeth Bishop. I say her name with reverence for her work and for the girth of her years she dedicated to writing poetry and to perfecting her craft. Yet, I must admit, another birthday sometimes reminds me of yet, another year without my book published. 

Like most people, I try to set goals. I have my everyday to do list, but secretly there are other to do lists, like say, be the poet laureate someday, publish from Copper Canyon Press, go on a book tour and not look so eager. Some of these goals might be too abstract, too lofty or too unobtainable.  But I bet most people have some sort of list around either their desk or in the depths of their minds they want to some day cross off or feel like they are getting closer to reaching.

So this past birthday, I turned 35. Yup, the mark of what some might say, middle age. There seems to be a desire to not fall into typical patterns of say, well, most middle aged people. Such as, changing your dress from designer denim to say, L.L Bean ensembles. But I am not speaking about shallow changes, per say. Most of us don't want to really admit that there might come a time when birthdays shift in focus from celebration to contemplation. Most of us don't want to think that turning a certian age might start to worry us, or say, make us reflect more on being old than being born. Maybe even start to make you think about also, what you wear or really how you see yourself, both physically and mentally.

The idea of birthdays has started to become, for me, a notable notch on the imaginary plaque I have hung above my head that says my name in a changing font from say, balloon shaped letters with squiggly y's to one more bookishly legiable. The once Emily now looks more like, Emily. This past year, my name has changed too from Miss Emily to Mrs. Emily Seitz. This change from seeing yourself, as once just a name being called off on a roster in an English class to seeing your adult name in blank type on an envelope for a gas bill. This shift from youth to well, maturity seems perhaps normal. This sudden awareness that you're seemingly older, maybe not as wise as you had hoped by your age, but certainly well, matured is perhaps a result of just being on the planet another year longer. Yet even regardless of your sex, you find yourself perhaps looking in front of a mirror and seeing a slightly changed version than the person you saw a year previously. As if you stand in front of the mirror, feeling like you need to introduce yourself, "why hello, perhaps you met my younger sister?" Maybe this all seems too typical, too expected to act shocked by becoming older, especially coming from the voice of a woman.

I never thought as a woman I would start to worry about age. Sure, I have now finally started being serious about sunscreen. I recently colored my hair to somehow slow the inertia of grey surfacing out my my skull, and yet it is not the physical elements of age that daunts me. It's the recognition of youth in others. No, not the girls in droves in short shorts parading towns in long summer afternoons or the thirteen-year old boys on bikes carving themselves in trails and pedalling into some sense of freedom. No, these are typical images of youth that are expected and also revered. What is surprising to me are the people who you thought would always be older, dermatologists, divorce lawyers, police officers, most of the profession you hope to land on if you are playing LIFE the game. These are the people who shock me in all their tight skin and bright eyes of youth.

I had my birthday before Greg and I headed East, but this thought of people getting younger around me occurred while we were flying. When we landed in Maine and while leaving our plane, not a small puddle jumper as we call them in Michigan, an actual jet, I noticed the pilot. It had been a very smooth ride from Detroit to Portland, Maine. The pilot's voice sounded calm and assuring and he didn't carry any strong accent through the static. Yet, as we exited and thanked the stewardesses and pilot, I noticed above the starched, short sleeve button-up and ironed navy slacks rested the face of a boy. Not a nervous vein, nor a hesitant smile. Just a boy of man nodding, thanking us all, giving good eye-contact after having completed his probable route he could have done in his sleep. I couldn't stop thinking of his face. He didn't look like anyone other than the hundreds of pilots I have thanked in the past, but what seemed so shocking to me was how somehow while I was sipping ginger ale and reading through the in-flight magazine, it was I who had aged, who felt, older.

As we waited at the baggage claim, for our luggage. I said to Greg, "Hey, let's start playing a game. It's called, "you know you're old when" and then you fill in the blank. For instance, you know you are old when the pilot looks like your nephew. " I waited for his eyes to stop circling the carousel for our now matching luggage. (It's just one of the many perks and standards in getting married. Greg likes to tell people, "we may have eloped, people, but we still have matching luggage." Needless to say, Greg's eyes stayed on the revolving suitcases. Greg didn't find this game as amusing or as fun as I thought he might. But really, it's kind of, well not fun. Greg is two years younger than I and at times likens comments, jokingly of course, by saying, "you know Emily, a woman your age...." And usually I laugh. Age is something we both don't feel haunted by, joke about really, but we know we are amoungst the older crowd of newlyweds. 

And this was one of the reasons we were in Maine. Despite the fact that we are newlyweds by almost a year, we went to Maine to meet family friends, relatives, have a clam bake (thanks to Greg's mom) But mostly we wanted to visit Greg's grandma of 93, Audrey Thibodeau, who goes by Doddie. Doddie lives in Presque Isle, Maine about five hours north of Portland in what is known as Aroostook county or "The County." Doddie still lives in the same house she has for nearly forty years. From my part of the world, we would call her home a manor, but really stepping into Audrey's home is like stepping into, "Doddie's World." Yes, there is Elmo's World and now there is a new version for adult audiences. 

In Doddie's World the world is interesting and vast, yet not distant to her. In Doddie's world, there exists one gas station which she goes to and she believes regardless of what time or day, someone will come out and pump her gas. The gardens around her home are lush and green and surrounded by a history so thick, you'd expect mositquitos to be constantly circling. But no, in Doddie World, she doesn't carry the weight of history with a bitter tongue or a sense of saddness for being one of the only remaining in her family. Doddie is busier and more full of the future than most people I know who are middle aged or say even twenty-one, and, even some second graders.

As you walk into her open home with relics and antiques, she has projects in piles, paintings which hang from all over the world--with cursive lettering on the back telling of the location and date the piece had been either given as a gift or picked up as a souvenir from countless travels around the world she went on with her husband, Tibby. Yet, what struck me the most about Doddie's World was not her petite frame, the mass of black hair she still carries on her head, nor her physical health, but her spirit. Her spirit to want to participate in life. At 93, Doddie feels busier now and more excited by her projects than I can recall when five and days were all Legos and barefoot exploring. In Doddie's World, her to do list is constantly growing and she makes darn sure, goals are also constantly being crossed off.

Doddie is trim, agile, and bright-eyed with the clearest diction I have ever heard. She knew every back road around the dales of northern Maine and could tell you the history of each house and its occupants along with the location of some of the best ice-cream I have ever had. Doddie's stories aren't indulgent or random, she tells stories that are interesting, have direct meaning to context and if she doens't know something, she refers to her Encyclopedia Britannica that dates back to 1972. She said, " I know you kids have that web, but I like these. You know, you just don't know where the question might take you."

And she's right, we sat looking up a question we all had about tapioca and later found ourselves delving into the life-cycle of plants. Sure, this might sound boring to some, but for me, I was in heaven. I have always felt comforted by the slow assurance of being around older people, who are often slower, but more careful with their words. For some older people, it's as if they out grew their ego and decided to hell with it anyway. Maybe it's the simple fact that I feel they are willing to take the time that I myself sometimes need to take to explore ideas. My Woody Allen outlook on life is a tiresome act for some, but with most older people, I fit right in. For example, Doddie had numerous clippings from newspapers and wanted to discuss a recent article she read about prisions in America and their cultural purpose. She said, "you young people read this and tell me what you think." All of us, Greg, myself and Ann, Doddie's sixty-five year old daughter, is still thankfully part of Doddie's young people. While we all chatted about the article, I was engaged, spirited too, and adored Doddie even more for her ability to be interested in the world which seems in many ways, years away from her Aroostook county.

Our day was spent exploring northern Maine, going into antique shops, gazing at the border of of a river and eating French Canadian food. We were all tired by the day and when we went to bed, we all went upstairs to our rooms. Doddie was in the lead and I asked if she needed some help, she smiled and shook her head. She said, "Most people tell me, Doddie how can you live in that big house with all those stairs." She said turning to look me straight in the eye.  "I tell them, you know these stairs are keeping me alive. I go up them about eight times a day and they are keeping my knees, well, keeping my knees working. So I tell them it's actually these stairs that are keeping me alive." And she's right. Doing the daily tasks that get us from each point keep us moving, maybe it cannot keep us our young, but it keeps us living. As we all reached the top Doddie turned to me and say, "You know, stairs also get where you need to go. And I'm tired. Good-night."

The next day before we left, Doddie told me a story about having some members of a Russian orchestra stay at her house. She told me the pianist had stayed and could play some of the finest Rachmaninoff she has heard. She said she waited for him to finish and when he stopped she asked him, "Do you know any Boogie Woogie? Sure enough, he did," she said bright eyed and almost dancing, "you know, he played some of the best Boogie Woogie, I have ever heard. Right here, in the house." I believe it. And I bet she even danced too.

When it was time to leave, Doddie held my arm tight and just smiled looking at me and saying nothing. I found myself almost crying. Maybe it was the fact of just being in the presense of someone so alive, maybe it was the fact that it was Greg's 93 year old grandmother, but I'd like to think it was because of a simple fact: here was a woman who sings the song of reverse innocence. She doesn't seem slightly worried at all about age. Someone who still climbs stairs and likes it. No, she doesn't do it for some midwest martydom of "no, don't worry about me. I can do it. I'll get there, it just might be slow. Don't worry about me, I'll be fine." No, she climbs stairs because well, "it gets me where I want to go," to use Doddie's words. I like to think of her like Sisyphus, Camus's version, who doesn't just push the rock up the hill over and over again, he pushes and chooses to smile.

So as I turn older, middle age and slightly wanting to avoid the fact of time, I have a new female image to reflect upon. One that I'd like to say is spirited by youth and stays mentally active with what interests her. So maybe it is another year without my book published, but I have more stories and female roles to keep me focused. To keep me writing. This villenelle is old, but seems so fitting for Doddie. Times when I like to remind myself of how getting there is sometimes up stairs and getting old doesn't have to be all ego and wrinkles. Enjoy.

How To Get There

I walk alone to where I want to go
Each trip I take, I always travel light.
Alone, but never lonely with my shadow.

Traveling in groups, you're forced to follow,
compromising your future or flight.
I walk alone to where I want to go.

In streets, under the sun and slight glow,
I walk into the last hours of light
alone, but never alone with my shadow.

In an open field, forest and meadow
wildflowers open to the young light,
I walk alone to where I want to go.

On treks, journeys, hikes, I travel solo.
I don't leave a trace or track in sight.
Alone, but never lonely with my shadow.

For directions, never trust your ego.
Follow your shadow, you won't lose sight.
I walk alone to where I want to go.
Alone, but never lonely with my shadow.