**Special Order** Casket Receipt

May 30, 2006

Found Magazine
3455 Charing Cross Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48108

Dear Found:

I found this casket receipt today stuck in my flower beds. I was returning home from a walk and saw this piece of white paper lying in my Irises. I picked it up, unfolded it, and then sort of jumped, chirped, and recoiled as though I had just discovered there was a dead mouse inside or something. (The chirp I can’t explain, other than I’m sick and it was the only noise of surprise my throat could create under the circumstances.)

I held it by its corner, like you would a really smelly diaper, and carried it in the house. I thought for a minute that maybe I should call someone—I mean, this receipt says that the receipt should be duplicated and the casket delivered as soon as possible. How horrible if your casket order got lost??

But, since it’s been ten days since the receipt was dated, I have to guess that the casket showed up, one way or the other.

It’s funny how creepy a casket receipt feels. I didn’t even notice the dead bugs stuck to the tape until much later.

Anyway, here you go, “**Special Order** Casket Receipt” enclosed.


Cheers,


Naomi Graychase
PO Box 787
Northampton, MA 01061
Graychase@gmail.com

body language

and my body screamed
touch me
but his hands did not hear

and my heart screamed
take me
but he did not speak my language.




[northampton, circa 2002]

morning

there is this time
in my mornings here
when the sadness knocks to come in.
it shows up at the door
to see if I want it
but each day,
i turn it away.
not today. no thanks.
and it leaves. no questions asked.
there is nothing for me to feed it, so it flies away.
trick or treat elsewhere. find another friend.
it's nice for me not to feel sad.

[Northampton, circa 2002]

so far gone

there is a difference
between gone
and
so far gone.
it is the difference
between
walking away,
and never coming back.

[circa 2001]

i gave at the door

he didn't ask me for it

but before we knew it
we were through it
and the door was just another thing
we'd left behind.

hotel beds, a meeting of the minds,
our bodies,
unrelenting in their quest,
their desire for one another

i have been unable to think
of letting it all go

so, i gave at the door
and then again on the couch

in the kitchen, my bedroom,
and if he'd had one, in his.

i gave until i bled
and we lapped it up, together
from sweaty fingers,
with dripping tongues,
vampires and cannibals

on the beach, the balcony, my car.

we think our diet is enough,
we binge and we purge,
cut calories and corners
until at last,
there will be nothing left of us

our vision will be spotty
we'll walk light-headed and slow
romantic anorectics
too caught up in the
necessity of starvation
to know
that carving off the flesh of a relationship
leaves only the bones

which are not enough for any one to live on,
let alone two.

we are headed down a street where
you turns are forbidden

we are building a house of straw
because we don't dare to use bricks

we are drinking diet shakes
thinking it will be enough,
but our bodies are getting desperate
our hearts are getting tired
of all this work
designed to keep them safe
from one another.

our words spill out of us
letters and lips
we gush and we moan

we thrive on the lushness
of the valley between us
of the peaks we arrive at
dizzy and panting
and living for now.
just now.

it breaks his heart to think
of breaking mine

he never asked for it,
but before we knew it
we were through it

and the door was just another thing
we'd left behind.

[Provincetown, 2001]

inkpens

i don't use inkpens
anymore
because they are so
likely to bleed,
like that letter
in his back pocket
and those notepads
that were caught with me
in that late night
summer rain.
all those words
washed away
not erased,
but blurred, melted.
irretrievable.
interviews and poems,
observations and stories
that came out of me
with shape and power
and an illusion of substance,
but bled away
on contact
with his sweat
and my rain.

[northampton, circa 2003]

after

kissing her was okay/
it was something/
human contact/
but hollow/
like elevator music/
--music, but not/
songs minus their substance/
i felt nothing for her/
we were two sticks rubbing/
that could never spark a flame.

[san francisco, 2002]

light

in darkness once
i saw the light
and this is what sustains me.
a tremorous hope
a fervent wish
and greater than that—
it is knowledge—

[san francisco, 2002]

Letter to Brian, One Year After He'd Gone

i thought of you today.

it was a damp day
gray and rainy
with a sky thick and low
and puddles built up
in every dip in the asphalt.
it was the kind of day
that would have been bad
with its soaked heads
and no parking
but, it wasn't bad;
it was beautiful.

i didn't mind my wet sneakers
or the way the cold air
made my fingers stiffen
because today belonged to me.
no one else had any claim
to any minute of it
it was mine,
so it was beautiful.

i thought of you
when i was leaving the café.
I walked out into the parking lot
and all the sounds
of the world
were muffled
by the low ceiling
of smoky gray clouds
and the constant
swishing and splashing
of tires on wet pavement.

there was just this white noise
cars…feet…water

then drums.

As I walked to my car
someone three stories up
amidst the bricks and open windows
was playing drums
loud and a little messy
cymbals crashing
wooden sticks meeting taut drumheads
it was music

and i thought of you
up there
amidst the bricks and open windows
making music in the rain on a Friday afternoon

and i wondered where you are—
they say you're in Brooklyn—

and I wondered if you're playing still
somewhere every day

or not?

i called you last night
but there was no answer
and no voice mail
just a phone ringing
somewhere in New York.

and that's how those drums
sounded to me today
like a phone
ringing in someone else's apartment
a rainy afternoon
when the light is shifting to darkness
and the telephone
rings and rings
in the place next door.

[September 2002]

Fish Drowned in Water

I am a mother without a child,

a Writer without words.

I am swimming in grief,
        a fresh water fish
         dumped into an ocean,
fighting against inevitable
suffocation and demise
struggling to find air
amidst the saline
        and the unfamiliar tides
exhausted by currents,
        so natural
and so bizarre.

I am working
with all my muscles
         and all my might
        twisting, thrusting, panting
for the wings
       that will sprout from my scales
       to save me.

[January 2004]

Ch. 17: How I Know My Mother Loves Me

We can never go back. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart’s longing.—bell hooks


I was kneeling in the dirt when she told me. I was elbow deep in green, exercising my right to choose which plants were pulled as weeds. My flowerbed was overgrown, and the unwanted things were about to outmatch the ones I had so lovingly planted in the spring. It was a slow and gentle process done in stages over days. It took careful hands to identify and pull out the thriving weeds without damaging the fledgling flowers and herbs, which were being trampled by a riot of uninvited guests.

I remember focusing on the sherbet-orange glow of my nasturtiums and the candy-apple blossoms of my impatiens as I dug my fingers in and tugged. The air was warm—it was July—and a soft breeze left my bare thighs and shoulders feeling caressed. I smelled of coconut-scented sunscreen, damp earth, and coffee. Pressed between my left ear and my shoulder was my phone. As I sorted through the growth, both intentional and spontaneous, I listened to my mother. As we talked, I made steady progress with my weeds, shifting now and again to spare my knees, my neck, or my shoulder.

I’m not sure if I can remember what prompted it--we were talking about healing, I think--but my mother began to describe her most recent visit to her craniosacral practitioner. I knew that my mother had been seeing this woman who specialized in correcting the effects of trauma, and that she had benefited greatly from the treatments. It was life-altering care, and I liked hearing about it. A few months earlier, she had told me about re-negotiating her birth in a series of craniosacral treatments. I wasn’t sure exactly how it all happened, but I knew that it had been important to my mother and that its effects had been liberating, curative, and invigorating for her.

In order for you to understand what happened next, you must know what I believed about my own birth--and about my relationship with my mother--up until this day. Put simply, I believed that my mother had always hated me, that I was an unwanted and disappointing child, unwelcome in the world or in her life. I believed she had fought hard to keep me alive only because she was the kind of woman who took responsibility for things. I believed that she felt an obligation to get me to adulthood since she had, in fact, created me. I also knew, in terms of more factual details, that mine was a vaginal birth, that I arrived healthy, but a few weeks premature--narrowly missing the name July Morning by arriving late in June instead of in mid-July--and that, because it was 1972, my father was not allowed into the birthing room when I was delivered.

I had, as an adult, intuited that something went wrong that morning, but I was never clear about what. I simply identified the wrongness as a sad truth: that my mother hadn’t wanted me, and my father wasn’t able to compensate for that rejection. It was a truth that informed every event in my childhood and my adult life, and caused me to form a sense of self that was tragically lacking in self-worth.

A couple of years ago, I wrote an account of my birth. It was based only on my memory of photographs, stories, and details I could easily confirm by looking at my birth certificate. I did not ask either of my parents what that day was like before I wrote this:

At some point, during the winter of 1971, my parents surrendered to their teenaged urges on what must have been a mattress on a dusty floor or a blanket near the woodstove, and nine months later I was forced to leave the cozy comfort of my mother’s womb for the harsh whiteness of a delivery room. I have long suspected that my depression started on the morning of my birth, when I felt for the first time the shock and abandonment, the aching fright and isolation, the exhaustion of being forced out of the only home I’d ever known and into the world.

I suspect there must have been some special words from God before I left and was squished down that birth canal, some whispered promise in a language only babies can hear, in the thump of my mother’s heartbeat and the swish-swish-swish of her body’s fluids through my fingers while I kicked and swam, suspended there and dreaming. Whatever it was that was said to me in that womb, it made me expect love and greatness. It filled me with anticipation about the wonders on the other side, and it fortified me, allowed me to go willingly—three weeks early—through that tight and darkened passageway of muscle and into the light.

To this day, tunnels fill me with an incredible sense of power and optimism. I feel like a Super Bowl quarterback emerging into a stadium full of fans, confident in my ability to play and to win. I feel that sense of promise. I feel my power, my strength and my glory. But it always passes once I’m through the opening and I find myself again, blinking in the light, lost and sore, inside and out.

Each of us, at some point, wonders about the narrative of our birth. Where did I come from, we all want to know, and why am I here? In the question, there is so much more than a curiosity about where babies come from. We want to know our story. We want to know where and when, to whom and why we entered the world the way we did.

Most of us got our answer from whichever grown-up or older child we asked when it occurred to us as children. But we also pieced together our story from the clues we found all around us, the little bits of history that were dropped in conversations, found in photographs, and taught to us with insidious subtlety in other ways. This knowledge, these answers, become part of our personal mythology, absorbed and cemented into our psyches, the foundation upon which all other growth is mounted. What we believe to be true about ourselves, our beginnings, becomes an essential truth for us—even if we’re wrong about the facts. And at the very heart of it all, is the real question: was I wanted?

If you had asked me before--at any age--I would have told you that I wasn’t wanted. That my mother had wanted a baby, but that for some reason she didn’t want me. My childhood was spent gathering evidence of this--there was no shortage of proof--and then I spent my adult life trying to find a way to come to terms with and counteract the damage of that gigantic mother rejection. In my twenties, my longing for mothering triggered in me a desire to bear my own children that was so titanic it dominated all other thoughts. My failure to find anyone willing to love and partner with me to form a family, and my failure to earn enough money to do it alone, sent me to the brink more than once. I was constantly engaged in a wrestling match--always simultaneously trying to find ways to become a parent, and ways to cope with the fact that I probably never would be. Anyone I dated--or probably even met--during the last ten years could attest to the intensity of my desire to mother. I was so desperate to have a healthy mother-daughter relationship, to heal my broken child-heart, that I sought to play the role of mother as though my very life depended on it. And, perhaps, in some ways, it did.

But this summer, something changed. I traveled home to Maine as usual to celebrate my birthday with my family. My niece had just turned one-year-old, my nephew turned eight, and as I played games with, snuggled, and watched over these beautiful children, I felt as usual the unconditional, all-encompassing love they stir in me. But by the end of the weekend—by the end of my 32nd birthday--I realized I didn’t need children of my own. It was an odd liberation. It wasn’t that I had changed my mind about wanting to parent, but somehow, after a decade spent pursuing that holy goal, I just let it go--or, actually, it let go of me. It was as though I’d been trapped in a storm or a fever, and finally it had passed. My life no longer felt as though it depended on creating children. My close friend, Jon, had traveled home to Maine with me, and I shared this revelation with him on the drive back to Northampton, unsure of its source, but glad for its arrival.

It was about two weeks later that I was kneeling in the dirt, pulling weeds and listening to my mother. She was talking about her craniosacral treatment—telling me again how she had renegotiated her own birth earlier that year. And then, she told me, she had decided to re-negotiate mine. I stopped weeding for a second, and leaned back onto my heels. My mother told me, then, something I had never known. My birth, for her, had been a terrible trauma. Not because she didn’t want me--in fact, she said she wanted me very much--but because of what the doctors did to her.

Just as I was about to be born, they strapped her down. My twenty-year-old mother, all alone in that delivery room, giving birth to her first child in a room full of strangers--they strapped her down. My claustrophobic mother, who can’t even ride in elevators because they make her feel panicked and confined, was restrained, terrified, and then anesthetized against her will. She was filled with anger, horror, fright. And the last thing she remembers before I arrived, is screaming, NO!

It was a NO! that came from the core of her being. A mother’s rage, summoned up from all the pain of contractions and all the heat of her swollen body and her urge to protect my swimming self inside her, it screamed through every cell of her body and mine, NO! Her scream went into my umbilical cord, reverberated into my tender aquatic ears. There was the rapid thumping of her heartbeat, and my fetal self, poised to part the curtains and jump on stage with a grand arrival greeted by applause, was instead smacked down in a fat thunder clap of rejection, deafening me with its howling rage, NO! before sending me through that painful chute and out into the cold alone.

I had not imagined my mother’s intense feeling of rejection--she did scream No! that day--but not to me; I had, for all these years, tragically misunderstood it. She was screaming No! on that day to the doctors and the nurses who held her down and denied her everything she wanted in that moment. Because of them she was not able to feel my body passing through her strong cervix and out into the world. And after I was born, she was not able to hold my little self to her chest. They took me away, immediately, refused to let her see me for hours. They wheeled her, dazed, angry, confused, to a room with other new mothers. And they wheeled me tired, disoriented, abandoned to a room with other babies.

They told her to sleep. She felt powerless and alone. For days this went on. I want my baby, she told them. I want my baby. But they told her, no. They let her nurse me, but then they’d take me away. But my mother kept on fighting. She fought with every nurse who entered the room. She fought with every doctor. She mounted a rebellion. She got all the other mothers riled up. We want our babies, they said. We want our babies--now. So they sent my mother home. Three days early. She took her baby girl and she went home.

By then, of course, the damage was done. In those first few minutes and days, I learned that I was not welcome here on earth. It led me down a road to agoraphobia and depression. To suicidal depression and years where I struggled to leave my house because the world seemed like a place where I didn’t belong. When I tried to open my door on the world, all I heard was, No! At the heart of all my pain was my broken-hearted knowledge that my mother did not love me, and because I thought that No was directed at my very existence, I thought she wanted me to die.

My mother did everything she could to win me back when I was little, to protect and to provide for me--but I rejected her. I turned only to my father, only to a man who would always love me, but who almost always let me down when I was little. I clung to him as though my life depended on it. My mother--the reliable one--became the enemy. Neither of us understood why, until now.

My mother, in her unflagging quest for healing, had the courage and the awareness to fix, three decades later, what had gone wrong on that late June day. Just before my 32nd birthday, she and her craniosacral therapist re-negotiated my birth. At the age of 52, she went through it all again--only this time, she wasn’t strapped down to a table. She wasn’t injected with any drugs against her will. She felt her baby pass down through her cervix and out into the world. She felt every contraction, every tear and push. She breathed through the pain, owned it, made it hers. And her daughter was greeted with strength and love, comfort and celebration. Her daughter was welcomed with joy, triumph and grace. And when the birth was through, my mother was given her baby. She opened her gown and pressed me to her warm, bare chest and held me there for a long time, so that I could hear the heartbeat that meant that I was home.

It was this act that caused the stormy fever of my desire to mother to mysteriously pass away. I felt it happen, even before she told me what she’d done. And once I heard the story, once I heard the words out there in the sunshine in my garden, I knew that I would be healed. It was so hard to believe--I had a lifetime of evidence to the contrary--but just as the sun cracks over the horizon and eventually lights up a whole day, I felt a new awareness dawning, a transfusion of warm love which would take the place of that cold and lonely rejection that coursed through my veins since day one. Because I was afraid that when I hung up the phone I would doubt my memory of what she had said, I asked my mother if she would write it down for me, write down that I was wanted and welcome so that I could see it there, and read it to myself over and over again, until I was sure that it was true.

Later that night, I was cooking in the kitchen with my friend Heather when I felt a sort of pressure, a deep and subtle cramping just beneath my belly button, where, I imagine, my umbilical cord had been. I left Heather alone and I laid down and let it come. Curled up in the darkness like a wise young fetus poised for a grand arrival, I let myself feel loved and welcomed by my mother. I let myself begin. There was cramping, then comfort, then joy.
Two days later, a card arrived in the mail.

Naomi--Just a note to remind you that you were welcome and fiercely loved at birth. You are welcome and loved today. In your own depths this experience of these energies waits to be remembered. Love, Mom.

I’m angry with those doctors who terrorized my mother. And I’m sad for all the terrible years of suffering she and I endured, when we didn’t recognize each other as allies, and we didn’t know why. But mostly, I am celebrating what we have now. We set the record straight, my mom and I. It’s so much easier to know her now, and to know myself. It took 32 years, but it might never have happened at all.

I am a treasured daughter. I am a woman who is wanted, who my mother fought for. My mother loves me--I never really knew this before. My mama loves me, I say out loud, when I’m working in my yard or driving in my car. I say it with the pride and certainty of a bragging five-year old: my mama loves me. And I use this knowledge like a sword and a shield--when lovers reject me, when friends disappoint, when I feel all alone--I can come home to something, for the first time ever, and I can fight for myself, channel my mother’s warrior soul, and fight for my right to belong in this world, to be held, to be known--and to be healed.

[draft, chapter 17, The Long-Awaited Time of Joy]

Nuts and Bolts, Nuts and Bolts, We Got Screwed!

Recent studies have shown that for women and men in this country, with exactly the same qualifications and exactly the same jobs, the following salary discrepancies still exist:

• For women with a high school diploma, lifetime earnings will be $700,000 less than for men in the exact same jobs.
• For women with a bachelor's degree, the difference is $1.2 million.
• For women with advanced/professional degrees, the difference is $2 million.

These are apples to apples comparisons. Not women who dropped out of the workforce to be full-time mothers for a portion of years. These are men and women doing equal work for unequal pay.

For sources, studies, and more information, visit the WAGE Project.

Of Lice and Men

hey,

so xxxxxx got lice from his little league helmet and then passed it to
xxxxxx, and xxxxx got bitten by some crazy insect in an air duct in a
hospital and his whole forearm swelled up and got covered by some
unbearbly crazy itchy rash that the doctors are mystified by. plus,
it's snowing there today, and the kids have colds.

but, they are still willing to come. if they are lice-free on
thursday, they'll head down on friday. good lord. also, i've been
informed that xxxxxx wakes up at 5:30 a.m. every day.

this is going to be a great five days! i should be very chipper and
energetic.

(my head is already itching!)

Our conversation last night made me feel like i wanted to share
something with you. I wrote it to xxxxxx, not intending for you to see
it, but I'd like for you to know this, so i've pasted it below. She
had written me to say, basically, she didn't understand why you'd be
so awesome to her (her word) and that she felt like she needed to do
something, buy you a car, send you on vacation, give you some
fantastic gift in exchange.

this is what I replied:

>>listen, the only thing you can ever do to thank xxx for his support,
is to live your life as best you can. and to not take him for granted.

i mean it.

the only thing he would want for you or from you is a life lived with
courage, honesty, passion, and a refusal to quit. and that's what
you're doing, so consider him aptly thanked.

doing your work, being strong, looking at yourself, knowing yourself
better today than you did last year--these are the things xxx xxxx
looks for in a girl.

your crazygirlways seem like madness and mayhem to an amateur viewer,
but to xxx xxxx, they represent beauty--potential.

the struggle you're going through is not a sign of weakness, but a
sign that you are living big, doing the hard things, looking into the
dark places and facing up to what you see. this takes guts. feeling
crazy and weak while you do it is normal.

i suspect you have some idea how beautiful xxx is--and this, in
itself, is evidence of your own beauty. it's like this: in order to
see how great xxx is, you must first be able to see that such
greatness exists at all. to be able to see that greatness, is to
realize your own potential for it--to see it, at least a little, in
yourself.

without that vision, you can't see xxx. so, just being able to see
him, to know him as you do, is an indication of how well you are doing
in your life. did that make sense to you?

it's like, for people who can't conceive of the incredible depth and
grace of xxx, he is invisible. but you can see him, which means that
you have some of that in yourself. you know?

and know this: he chooses carefully, and he gives completely. when he
graces your life, you have the opportunity to never be the same.

don't ever feel as though you are not his equal, or as though you are
not worthy of his care. he knows best--and he has chosen to care about
you. trust this, always. he is never wrong. not about this. if he
cares about you, then you are worth it. you cannot trick xxx. he Sees
you, and he cares. and that's that. be honest. be good to him. be good
to yourself. and remember you are lucky to have him.

[e-mail; april, 2005]

Choice

Dear xxx,

...I have not been a good e-mailer-slash-potential-friend-slash-love-interest-slash-as-the-young-people-say-"whatever."
I'm sorry for that. I'm in the midst of one of those times in life when I feel tossed about in a storm. My boat is too small. My oar is cracked. And yet I'm too stubborn to settle for any port. I keep trying to get where I was going. Sigh. (Growl.)

I would be amused by myself if I weren't also so busy bailing and paddling and checking my charts to see if I'm anywhere near still on course.

Sigh again. (Growl again.)

Reproductive rights: this is one of the things in life I am deeply passionate about. Were I a senator, I could filibuster about it until my tongue dried up like a dream deferred.

Since I am not the junior senator from Massachusetts just yet I have to settle for passionate e-mailing, rousing dinner party conversations--preferably with people who agree with me--and the occasional public speaking engagement.

A couple of years ago, I had one of those moments of beautiful clarity, when the words all come out right and the light is shining on you and the audience is hanging on every word--no, not hanging, but rather something more uplifting. perhaps buoying under every word?--anyway, it was a room full of people who were mostly my age or older. And I reminded them that for most of us, our mothers did not get to choose. This stuns me every time I think about it. My mother is only 54. She's young. Her youth is not that far off from mine. And yet, she did not get to choose. It's stunning.

I know you know this--thank god, good for you, bravo, yay--but it's amazing to me how near those years are and yet how few of us really get what that means. us, being women. us, being men. us, being pretty much everyone alive in this country (for crying out loud).

Anyway, I was hosting this event, and said to the room that I would give up my life if it meant that my mother could go back to her 19th year and choose. And I meant it. I would. I feel that strongly about it.

I think, actually, that my mom wanted to be pregnant. That she wanted to have a baby, who turned out to be me. But I find the result of her choice to be irrelevant. The point, really, is that her right to choose supercedes my right to exist. And I will bare knuckle fight anyone who wants to convince me that this isn't true.

So, I told this to a bar full of 200 women (and a handful of others), and then I said that since I can't go back in time and give my mother options, i consider it my duty to live this life as fully, as bravely, as brilliantly as I possibly can, and to do all in my power to make sure that my daughters and their daughters and their daughters' daughters have the right to choose--to choose healthy birth control, to choose consensual sex, to choose when and how and what they will do with their bodies when it comes to sex and pregnancy and child bearing (and everything else). (Frankly, I don't even think the state should be able to tell adults that they should have to wear seatbelts or helmets, but that's a whole other rant.)

In retrospect, I think before I agree to give up my life in exchange for my mother's right to choose, I would want some sort of rider attached that said my giving up my life would give all women (at the very least in this country and in every country where we impose our fiscal and moral and military will) full access to reproductive rights til the end of time.

Since, like you, I abhor the exclamation mark--one of my favorite teachers/editors once told me that every person should be given only three exclamation marks to use in her/his lifetime and I *love* this idea--I hope you will understand the implied exclamation mark when I say I'm glad you're doing this work. And I look forward to hearing more about it...

[e-mail; 2006]

Dire Straits

it's 11:06 PM eastern, and I'm listening to Normandie FM through my computer while I try to work on some proofreading I'm doing for a company based in Belarus.

Normandie FM is a radio station out of Alencon, France. I like it because I like to listen to people speaking French, and because the songs are almost always upbeat, and in between them there's often this cheesy little sing-song jingle, "nor-man-dee-eff-emmmmmm" that could just as easily be "dubble-yew-kay-arr-pee-in-sin-sin-aaahhhhhh-teeee." there's some cross-cultural/universal need for radio producers to create these jingles, and it makes me smile and feel like the world is small and that's okay. it's like seeing some African nation's president in traditional garb but with Reeboks on his feet. My point is, I find it charming, not disturbing--whereas the McDonald's inVersailles is disturbing.

So here's the thing: I'm sitting in Northampton, Massachusetts. I'm listening to a live radio broadcast from halfway around the world. Without a radio. And I'm writing to you in Salt Lake City, but this morning I wrote to you in San Francisco, and you wrote me back, from a restaurant and then from an airport. And when I click Send, all of these words will travel as bits of data out of the cable that comes up through the floor in my office, out of my house, through who knows how many little transfer stations--hop, hop, hop--and virtually instantly it will arrive in your inbox. and since you have this stunning ability to be online at all times thanks to the (now famous) KR1 router and your cell phone, you'll probably be reading this before I've even had time to listen to another song from France. Which, right now, is "money for nothin." It's almost 5:30 a.m. in Alencon, France and somewhere in that town, some late-night/early morning DJ decided to spin, of all things, the Dire Straits.

I remember this song vividly. It's inextricably connected to my memories of the summer I turned 13 (but most definitely not connected in any way to my ideas about France). It's not just the music--it's the video I so distinctly remember. I am having a *visual* memory of a *song.*

This is because I was the perfect age for the dawn of MTV. From 1981 on, I soaked up music videos like the little adolescent sponge that I was. And this Money For Nothin' video was on heavy rotation.

So now, here I am. It's twenty years later, and I'm listening to Norrr-maaann-dee eff-emm through my computer, where a song from 1985 is making its way back to me, in ways I never could have imagined possible back then. Ways I don't totally even understand right now.

When it first came on, I thought, isn't that bizarre (tres bizarre) and silly, that I went seeking relief from American radio and what I got from this obscure little French station in the middle of the night was not French pop, or folk, or even techno. What I got was a song practically synonymous with the concept "American pop phenomenon."It's even *about* one of the most significant pop phenomenons of our era--MTV.

That video, it turns out, was considered groundbreaking at the time, for its use of computer animation. And, it was the first song ever played on MTV Europe. Recorded by a British band (in the West Indies, London, and New York), it broke technological ground with its video, set international sales records as a single, and was performed most famously at Live Aid, that unforgettably giant concert attempt to end world hunger.

I can't help but enjoy the song as it plays. My foot is tapping and I'm singing along with guest-vocalist Sting, at every chorus: "I want my, I want my, I want my em-tee-vee." But when I think about where it's coming from, I am also reminded of the disappointment I felt when I fulfilled a lifelong dream and strolled down the Champs-Elysees for the very first time. I thought it would be a beautiful experience--a very French experience. But when I got there, I didn't even feel like I was in France. I felt like I was in America. Worse than that, I felt like I was in an American stripmall. Madonna T-shirts, Nikes, American brands abound--there was even a Ben & Jerry's.

American consumerism is like a virus that we're spreading across the so-called "free world." Our products are like invasive non-native species that, once introduced to a virgin landscape, will grow and spread and choke out everything else. I was nine when that little animated astronaut landed on that TV moon and planted his MTV flag, changing the world forever--so much more so, I might argue, than those actual, real life astronauts. Ask anyone from my generation who did the moonwalk, and i guaran-damn-tee you, they will not mention Neil Armstrong (or that unfortunate runner-up Buzz Aldrin). They will tell you, of course, that it was Michael Jackson, and that they first saw it on...MTV.

Ch. 18: The Long-Awaited Time of Joy

It’s March--or maybe April--and I am sitting on a riverbank alone.

Tomorrow, I will see a lawyer about filing bankruptcy. And right now, it’s bitter cold. Actually, the cold itself is not so bitter--on its own it should not bring me to my knees. It’s the context that gives the bitterness to today. This is the kind of late-winter freeze that kicks you when you’re down. It should be spring, but winter is still here, strutting around our springtime, running up the score.

The snow is gone, though, so I decided to go for a run on the trails down by the river, swollen from the melt. I wore my gloves and layers; I covered up my head. But the air still attacked my nostrils like I trespassed on its nest, punishing my eyes and nose with stingers and blasting fire into my lungs.

I had to run. I was feeling too panicked to sit at home alone. My winter body is more used to reclining with books and movies than dashing in the cold, so even fueled by my frustration, my legs and lungs convinced me quickly that I should do as I was told and sit down beside the water instead of pounding my feet against the frozen earth.

I was warmed up a bit from jogging, so I found a sandy spot and I sat down and looked around, hearing not the wind or water, but the sounds piped through my headphones, Jerree Small and her guitar.

I feel stoned on misery, dazed by all the failures in my life. I feel like I was stuck in a martini shaker and someone drank me over ice. I am pretty sure that things will never get better, that I have been running up a hill that has no peak and no plateau. I am a fool who will always be alone and lonely, broke and tired, paying rent instead of walking the lines of my own property each spring, praying to God and then ignoring all the answers.

I will never be a wife, an author, a mother. I will never be someone who swims instead of drowning on the land. I am sitting, pondering these things, feeling woeful--full of woe--when into my pathetic narration a feathered thought arrives and perches in the sagging branches of my soul. Maybe it’s the music or maybe there is something in the air, but this thought, it chirps, maybe this is it.

Maybe this is the long-awaited time of joy—this. Right here. Right now. A walk by the river, a seat in the grass, young lovers wrestling barefoot in the sand across the way, a bleached and knotted rope swing swaying above the slow-running icy water on a colorless March or April day, everything sepia-toned, except the misplaced sky, blue and white above me, out of place, like colorized eyes in a movie born black and white and altered to suit us later.

Maybe the women in pairs and the children with dogs and the couples jogging by—maybe they are all a part of my time of joy, if I decide to see it that way. Maybe joy is not about waiting for a mysterious package to arrive. Maybe joy is about just showing up—whether the package comes or not. Maybe joy is not in the hope of an arrival, but in my existence as a destination. Maybe this sand and that girl in the blue kerchief and the ache I felt as I passed that dancing family--maybe that is joy.

Maybe the tears I shed as I ran, maybe my healthy heart pounding into my ribs--maybe this is my joy. Maybe joy is something I can choose. Maybe that pink plastic trash bag dangling tragically from that branch, the only color here pollution--this--is joy?

It feels true for a second, that a girl can seize joy in anything, even trash hanging down from branches; that this is the gift we were given along with opposable thumbs and the ability to make fire. There is poetry in the notion that the secret to joy is in your freedom to choose it, like that caged bird who sings.

But then that second passes. And I am knee deep again in the icy confusion of my life, panning for gold against the current while the water rises, because what I’ve just found is not gold enough to get me through. Birds in cages are tragic, like road kill and animals caught in zoos. They are trapped, outmatched, outnumbered unfairly. Their worlds are shrunken and controlled, their wings clipped. Their singing is a prayer, I’m told, flung up to heaven. So--feeling trapped, outmatched, outnumbered--I fling one up there, too.

I pray for love and prosperity, for new beginnings and a happy heart.

A few days later, I will meet a man in a magical way, and he will fill me with so much joy, I will glow. This is not find-the-beauty-in-a-plastic-bag-stuck-in-a-tree-by-the-river-joy, this is actual, quantifiable, visible, incredible joy. Even strangers will notice it, comment on it every public place I go: sidewalks, restaurants, and bars. I will be loved, and nothing else will matter quite so much as this. After two and a half years of loneliness and isolation, a handsome man will come into my life and heal me like an elixir. He will bring adoration and affection, deliver passion like fruit from the harvest overflowing in my baskets. He will shower me with devotion as thick and as satisfying as monsoon rains in a dust bowl. He will awaken in me a sleeping giant of sexuality, a beautiful beast that I thought I had lost forever.

After the heartbreak I endured in 2001, and after the physical trauma of rape in 2003, I thought that my body and my sexual soul had been brought down like twin towers. But with the arrival of this man and his immediate, fearless, and boundless love, I will find myself feeling for the first time ever a sense of completeness and joy—unmitigated, untainted, undeniable joy. He will release in me the woman who had been held prisoner, who--I will rejoice to discover--had not been destroyed in the attacks. She had only been injured and buried all this time beneath the rubble. With him, my love will spring forth like flowers from the pavement, irrepressible, miraculous, and full of life.

I love you, he will say and I will protest at first, unwilling to trust his eager heart. But he will insist. He will string his declarations together into shimmering necklaces of grace. I love you, I love you, I love you. Everywhere I go I will hear him say, I love you. Even in his sleep he will reach for me half-conscious and say, I love you.

As I sit in the cold sand along the river, I don’t know this yet. Nor do I know that as quickly as he gave it, he will take it away. After just two months. After choosing names for children and making wedding plans, after a thousand promises of love, he will leave me without warning, one day in early June. He will tell me lies, choose not to mention the other woman. He will take from me not only money I couldn’t afford to lose, and time I should have spent on other things, he will take from me my joy, my long-awaited time of joy. And that will be the hardest thing of all.

But, you love me…, I will say that day, not recognizing the new, empty face he has brought to say goodbye with.

It was all a fantasy, he will say. And later, in a letter he will simply write, I lied.

My loneliness will go into remission while he is here, and a return to that illness will seem more than my heart can bear. In the past, always in the past, what would come to fill the gaping hole left by such a departure would be sadness, self-hatred, a suicidal grief. But this time, things will be different. At first, I will feel those old familiar feelings of dismay, dejection, and despair. I will blame myself. But this time, with some coaching from a friend, I will decide to take a new approach. I will decide that I can get mad.

Not since I was a girl have I unleashed a rage upon anyone. I have always swallowed it down, taken the blame, been polite, allowed my anger to poison my own good self instead of whomever had done me wrong. I have a friend who says that all depression is anger turned inward, and I think perhaps she’s right.

A few weeks after Rob leaves me, when I finally discover the truth of what he’s done, I will decide that it is time to try my anger on for size. I will tell myself that it can be ugly, that there doesn’t need to be poetry or grace in anything I do. I will give myself permission to rage.

It will be early summer then, and I will drive down to the fields that flank a much larger river than the one I visited today. The wheels of my red truck will kick up clouds of dust as I rumble to a stop at the end of the small airfield that is tucked away amidst the farmer’s fields. I will cut off my engine and step out into the heat. I will look around, make sure that I am alone, and then--I will scream.

I will kneel down, press my bare shins and ankles into the cool summer grass, and I will shout my anger into the earth, cupping my hands around my howling mouth so that my screams will not be diluted by the giant cauldron of air that surrounds me. I will scream over and over, for every lying I love you for every moment that he stole, No! Over and over, I will scream, No!

I will holler until my rage has been emptied out into that earth.

And then I will stand and I will scream it to the sky.

I will shout it to the corn, thousands of young witnesses growing one foot high, waving gently for acres in neat green rows, and I will scream it to them all. I will scream it at the dry, unsympathetic dirt between them, and I will scream into the sweet air up above.

Eventually, I will worry that the world will hear my screams—-farmers, pilots, strangers--they will want to know who it is that’s standing out here, screaming No! into the corn.

I will climb into my truck, then. Shut all my doors and scream it even more: No! into the windows, No! into the doors, No! into the silence, No! I want to roar.

Eventually, it will break, this tidal wave of rage. And something will wash over me, some other emotion will erupt and spill itself out, some truth held in secret will move through me and I will tell him what I’m worth. Tears will come to cleanse me and I will say to him out loud, What you did to me was wrong.

What you did to me was wrong.

Over and over I will say it, What you did to me was wrong.

And I will be talking to this man, but also to every other person who has used me, hurt me, left me, robbed me blind. Every bitter pill I’ve ever swallowed will come back up and be spit out of me that day. Every bully, every friend, every boss, every stranger, every institution who has ever insulted, hurt, or trampled me--I will fling their poison back at them. Spit, vomit, and volume--nothing pretty, nothing nice--I will stand and I throw it back up out of me, my rage.

What I do not know as I sit here by the river, cold and lonely, overwhelmed, is that the secret to my joy is not in picking little bits of beauty out of the trash heap of my life. The joy is not in swallowing down whatever disappointments or failures come my way and then pretending they taste good.

The joy is found in spitting out the rank and bitter judgments that my friends, my family, or my lovers serve up on gilded platters or slip into my drink. The joy is in knowing that I matter--and in punching out the lights of any man, woman, or law that says I don’t.

As I sit here, I do not yet know that I can never reach my joyfulness without surrendering the myth of my helplessness, or without saddling up my rage and riding it frothy-mouthed and fearless across the forts and beds and pathways claimed by the liars, fools, and charlatans who think that they can do me wrong.

I will believe, when he arrives, that this man has brought me joy—but when he leaves and nearly breaks me, I will finally come to understand that my long-awaited time of joy does not include him. And that it has only just begun.

[Draft; Chapter 18, The Long-Awaited Time of Joy]

The View From Your Shoulders

My mother was born in 1952. When she conceived the ball of cells that became me, she had no choice but to keep them. She was nineteen years old, and choice was a crime. The Roe v. Wade decision, which recognized my mother’s right to terminate her pregnancy, was not handed down by the Supreme Court until after I was out in the world and walking. I think my mother wanted me--I’ve never asked her--but I would give up my life if it meant that she could go back and choose. She had a right to life before I did.

Damn The Tall People

damn the tall people.
damn the men
but also,
all the women.
damn them
for their irresistibly
angular
shoulder blades
karate-chopping
through the backs
of their T-shirts.
damn them
for the way they rise up
from this hard,
lowly earth
and leave me here,
below the glory.
damn them
for their cocktail
of power and vulnerability
which intoxicates me
with optimism
and desire.
damn them
for the way their
clothes hang
and the way they
glide
or gallop
at twice my
little-legged speed.
damn them
for standing in line
at the coffee shop
or in the corner
of the bar,
riding
my peripheral vision
like it was the jet stream
damn them
for causing me
to jerk my head around,
hoping—
only to find
it's not him,
but some other
impossibly tall human
whose hip bones
I could cradle in my palms
if only he—
or she—
would let me.
damn the tall people,
for what they start in me,
and never finish.
damn the tall people.
damn. them. all.

For Her, in December

thank you for last night.
you are golden and delicious,
my prince.

my thighs,
they worship your tongue.

to my eyes
your shoulders are deified.

your skin pressed
against mine
is celestial, electric.

your lips make me drunk with their power
and their passion.

you kiss me
and I smile,
I swell
and I long
to give you everything,
to climb inside your head,
read your dreams
like a compass
and pull you towards North.

[December 2003]

Poets

Tony Hoagland
Michelle Tea
Ishle Yi Park
Sara Seinberg
Alix Olson
Letta Neely
ani difranco

Great Ships

He's reading to me now, on a blanket in the shade, and I am struggling against grief to enjoy it.

If you knew when you stepped onto it that the Titanic was going to sink, how would you spend the ride? Would you enjoy it? Or would you cry and waste those last good hours?

Fine brandy and dancing, music, making love--would savoring those last few days make it all the more bitter when you went down beneath the waves? Or would it make it all the more sweet?

[little lined notebook; september 2005]

My Father's House

It was the house, I think, that saved my father--although, really, all the credit should go to him. If he hadn't been ready for that house when it came, then it would have missed him, or crushed him, like a witch.

[little lined notebook; december 2004]

Mother Considering Divorce

it's not that they won't be able to see it, to know it, to name and reckon with the memory. instead, it will be a feeling, a truth folded into them like batter for a cake.

[little lined notebook; possibly 2004]

Love Thy Neighbor

Our bedrooms are 50 paces apart. I know this, because the other night, in the rain, I measured it. I walked it off. As though I could pull her closer by covering this distance myself.

[little lined notebook; circa 2003?]

The Opposite of Getting Rich

a dime

of your time

when i want millions

[little lined notebook; circa 2003]

The Fucking Vineyard

all my faults come bubbling up
(into the daylight)
from wherever they hide, down below
shadowed and true
all my secret things, my mean and special agonies
rise up (with him) like vicious pixies
in a swamp-brewed stew
mossy fecund wraiths
armed like ancestors, defending their land
their legacy of bones and angry answers
growling hissing whispers learned
from birth ‘til this,
adept at survival, at eluding the sun
they lurk near trees
on the edges my forest,
blending into the bark, camouflaged
seeking cool and darkness, surviving
even the best of times
by feeding on the knowledge
that what they say is true--
unworthy, they speak from deep
in the inevitable darkness,
which is the consequence of light,
scowling, cowering, eyes averted from the sky
they are shy until you know them,
a gang of bony loners, each on its own
maybe nothing nearly
but now, formidable in numbers,
sensing the end is near
they burst toward the surface
as they feel the temperature rise
unrestrained
they show themselves in voice and body
tricksters, liars, villains all
a pelting rain storm of ugly...
and yet, he stays.
undeterred,
smiling into the maelstrom
blessing snake bites and mopping up my blood
he loves me
empty-handed, desperate fools
he loves me.


[May 29, 2004, at the (fucking) Vineyard.]

Loving Kansas

Today, the sky was impermeable—as though while we slept the world was wrapped inside a pussywillow. From horizon to horizon, a gentle silvery fluff covered our heads and all the light was filtered through it.

There were no shadows because the sun didn’t shine. I knew it was out there, lighting up our little edge of the universe, burning nuclear, dangerous, vital. But in here, this spring day, before the green and the heat and the brilliant sunshine of summer, came a pussywillow glow on brown lawns and bare trees.

You can pick any time of year to begin again. Every point comes round again and makes a new year, however you count. Mine, for now, is the vernal equinox, when day and night are even, and spring is on its way. This is my new year, my begin-again, my new moon, my fresh start. This is my breath of fresh air, my finish line and starting block—this—here and now.

It’s a part of the year that is fleeting and may seem inconsequential. The birds aren’t yet chirping, the colors haven’t yet arrived. In fact, there is almost no color at all. It’s like Dorothy’s Kansas, the place you begin and end from, the place you leave in search of something better, the place you return to after the storm.

[2004]

The Kiss

I hadn't thought of making love to you, until you mentioned the kiss.

[small, spiral bound notebook; possibly sometime in 2003.]

With a Love Song Stuck in My Throat

Upstairs, the room is packed and servers bustle around delivering beer and food to the tables, and the people standing at the back. Kris has traded in the faded blue T-shirt that she traveled in for a nicer, tighter, darker one, with a colorful phoenix-like creature embroidered on the front. I climb the stairs up and out of the belly of the Iron Horse and take my seat. A few minutes later, the band climbs up too, and takes the stage to rousing applause. And then the room is quiet.

The music begins and some members of her mostly female audience rock and nod and smile a little. Some close their eyes to listen, some sing along. This is no whiney, self-indulgent folk. She is bluegrass, banjos, and whiskey; vocals that can tear your heart out or soothe you like a lullaby. When she plays, it actually seems like she's playing, not working-—like this is what she does to relax.

She makes the men she plays with smile and laugh. She's charming, sweet, and genuine. She becomes completely absorbed in the music, but doesn't leave us out. Every now and then, she looks up and coyly smiles at the room so we'll know she hasn't forgotten us.

I sit in the darkness--flanked by her kind-hearted manager, Lisa, and her bandmate's roommate, Nolan--and look past the candle flickering next to my beer at Kris singing on stage. I watch the gold band on her right hand glint as her fingers strum those strings so confidently. I see her eyes close and her hips sway and I think to myself, she is the best of what's feminine. She's beautiful and soft, but strong, too. There is something about the equality, the mutual respect between Kris and her all-man band, which feels like the best kind of feminist victory. There she is, surrounded by four large, male musicians--her substantial 5'9" body looks so small next to them--but her presence is strongest. She's no diva. And despite her beauty, she's not using sex to control these men, or ego. What you can sense between them is respect and genuine affection.

One of her greatest gifts is collaboration; she is at her best, I think, when she is in the company of other musicians, and she has a reputation for never saying "no" when asked to play on other people's records. If you ask her what her favorite gig ever was, she'll mention the night she got to play solo for 10,000 people at the Telluride Festival, but then she'll tell you that her actual favorite show was the one she played at Sanders Theater in Boston with two other local independent artists, Lori McKenna and Jess Kline.

"We all had our bands, and we were booked into another place, but then that place closed, so at the last minute, we moved. It was 1,200 people and it was packed and I loved sharing it all with friends, playing together, sharing a really exciting show together," she says.

Her lyrics are evocative, and as they listen, her audience finds themselves transported to times and places when they felt exactly what she is singing about. In Damn Love Song, she sings, "How can I carve your name/in the trunk of a tree/that'll be here long after we're gone?/I can't even write it/in the steam on the mirror./And with nobody listening/not even myself/ it's as much as I can do/to whisper those words in your ear. /After all of these years/ look at me here/with a love song/stuck in my throat. /Got the weight of the world on my shoulders/I won't let it go... "

And I can't help but think of the love that I lost just a few months before. As the music fills the room, I rock slightly in my seat and I am there with him again...He holds me close, wraps me up in sweatered arms. I press my cheek against his chest, close my eyes, and smile. Knowing it couldn't last, hoping it would, doing it anyway. It comes in flashes as she sings: his muscular forearms, my hand brushing gently across his tattoo, his figure framed in a doorway.

The song is wrapping up, and I see his eyes looking so sad behind his glasses, hear him apologize and call me baby and then I watch him drive away again, into the darkness and the pouring rain…that turn to applause. I am clapping.

I'm shaken up, glad when it ends, but still…happy for the visit. I can tell, as I look out at the rapt audience, that mine are not the only heartstrings Kris's music and lyrics tug at. These singer-songwriters turn their hearts out for us; they bare themselves and invite us in. They do it with poetic and powerful lyrics, and by doing so, particularly from a stage in a darkened room or from a CD we can play when we're by ourselves, they let us know that we are not really alone. They help us to understand what it is that we are feeling, to name the thing that haunts us.

Sometimes the message is like the one scrawled downstairs in the green room mirror, "You're you. Deal with it."

And other times, a lyric will perfectly capture in a few simple words, an emotion that feels too complicated to explain.

"You are still a cliff, baby/and I still know how to fall," she sings.

And I think, "amen."

[ from an early draft of Naomi's unfinished, unpublished music book, "From The Mouths of Babes." Kris Delmhorst chapter. circa 2002; Photo credit: Cian Dalzell]

SACRED

we believe that when there is a problem--a shortage of science space, for instance, or a shortage of parking--that the college should work hand-in-hand with the people who fund its efforts (alumnae) and the people who will live with the consequences--students, faculty, and Northampton residents.

[undated, piece of small notebook paper]

Refugees

dear xx,

i'm so glad to hear of the work you and your church are doing for the refugees.

on the night of the last Presidential election, when it really appeared that there was no chance President Bush would be unseated, I left my friend's house where we'd been watching the returns on this teeny, tiny television.

i was in a kind of stupor, stunned, i suppose. i went out into the crisp november night and i was only aware of three things--how impossibly fresh the night air felt, how velvety the night sky seemed, and the sound of a voice in my head that said, with quiet certainty, "this is a time of darkness."

i drove like that toward home, breathing the air and watching the night, and listening to that voice. i was on the brink, i think, of despair.

but my inside self was working on something. and just as I turned the corner onto my street, i heard the voice complete the sentence:

"this is a time of darkness," it said.

"and what do we do in times of darkness?"

"We shine our lights more brightly."

i immediately set to work doing as much good, giving us much compassion and grace on a daily basis as i could. i started sister spit in an attempt to create a place where people could feel safe and supported, where art could flourish, where diversity would abound. it bankrupted me, but i don't regret doing it.

i have this vision of all the people in the world who have good hearts, shining their lights into the darkness, in little ways, everyday, until collectively, the darkness has no power anymore. or at the very least, so that we don't all go down beneath it. this work you are doing, with your church, and i think in general in the world, it is a point of light to me, and i am so glad you shared it.

on a more mundane note, my weekend was good, but a mixed bag. the weather was erratic--when we began the pride march it was raining. by the time we reached the end, it was blazing sun. i got a sunburn when i thought i'd get soaked. i had a good time with my dear friend anna, but when she left on sunday morning, i was lonelier than ever. i'm just very sad and unable to shake it. things with xxx are hard. and things with xxxxx were/are disappointing. and i just feel hopelessly lost and very tired.

when i lived as a lesbian, i had a community where I belonged. for years and years, i felt safe and welcomed, i had an identity that was more important to me and to my sense of self than almost any other part of me. it was personal, it was political, it was beautiful.

when i fell in love (and lust) with a man six years ago, that all came crashing in. it was ever so much worse--exponentially worse--than coming out as gay. now, i just don't feel like i belong anywhere. people think that if you can date both men and women, the world is your oyster. but really, it feels so much more like something came and took my home away. without warning, i became a foreigner, and the world became a place where i simply don't belong.

Roark

You are not the only one, my kitten, you are not the only one, my man. You are not the only visionary eager frightened warrior poet soul. You are not the only one seeking silence. You are not the only one standing before your grave. Your allies are all around you, hunkered down. Your detractors are so visible, so numerous, so loud. But carry on my wayward soldier. Carry on my artist friend. Let us stand for what is honest. Let us do what must be done.

Dated: 5.31.05
Scribbled on both sides of a Dave's Soda & Pet Food City receipt dated 5/30/05. The last line was added later, in different ink. Scribbled in the corner is also one word: "Roark."

After New York

even amidst the storm of my grief, the gray spraying wetness gusting all around me, I could tell I was standing on a platform of certainty called The End. I knew that it was solid, and that when the storm of grief had passed, there would be this sure thing. So I stood there, and let the rain lash and blind me, and I focused on my feet.

Dated: 10.06.04. Scribbled ver batim on the back of an envelope addressed to "Naomi Garychase." No return address. Postmark, Springfield, MA PM, 05 Oct, 2004.

Paper Sailboats

for years, i've been scribbling things down on bits of paper--napkins, receipts, anything handy. Some of them became essays, some of them became poems, some of them became lint in my pocket, some of them, I suppose, never became anything at all.

Now they are here. As I unearth these scraps, these bits and pieces of thoughts and words that have been stowed away in pockets, purses, and book margins for years, I am typing them here.

It feels a bit like making paper sailboats, and sending them down a stream, like my brother and I did when we were kids. There was an odd sense of enthusiasm, of excitement and possibility, as though something had been created and you had no idea where it would go, only that it would be good. I did not find my enthusiasm odd then--it was pure, delightful, quite rightfully childlike--but now, as I re-visit those moments, I think that it was odd...because none of those ships survived--and we *had* to know they wouldn't. What hope could there be that a paper boat could ever sail?

And yet, I can still feel my heart's pace quicken when I think about those moments. Nine years old, bending down to set things sail in the fast and swirling currents, I sport an irrepressible smile

Now, as I look more closely--or perhaps from farther away--I think that I was excited because something was about to begin. A journey. I wanted to see how far it would go and what path it would take to get there. No two trips were ever the same.

We'd lean out over the water, as far as our arms would go, and lower our boats down gently. Then we'd jump up and run along the banks, cheering each other on, shouting out what was happening, even though we both could see.

Here's what's especially interesting to me now: I don't ever remember the end of the line. I don't recall a single shipwreck, a single boat going down beneath the churning water of our miniature sea. I only remember togetherness--my little brother and I--breathless and excited, pounding barefoot along that stream, trying to keep up and feeling as though we could fly.