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Archive for May, 2015

(Originally posted October 18, 2009)

I let my husband talk me into it.   “Come to the T’ai Chi class this afternoon,” he said, “you won’t have any trouble.  The instructor moves slowly and demonstrates everything.”   I should have known better.  Of the two of us, although I am the more coordinated and aware of the intricacy of body movement, I am also the perfectionist.  The one who doesn’t like to appear clumsy or uncoordinated.

I’ll bet you can guess the outcome.  I was faced with the task of learning unfamiliar movements and the likelihood of feeling clumsy.  Worse, being the new person in class, I was required to stand in the front line, meaning that every misstep was in full view of the entire class.  I might as well have worn a neon sign that flashed, “I’m a Beginner!”

Henry, the instructor, was encouraging.  “T’ai Chi is gentle,” he advised.  “It relieves stress. If you feel pain, your chi is blocked.  Relax.  Be gentle.”  I nodded in appreciation.  I knew all about T’ai Chi’s beneficial effects on the body. Twenty-five years earlier, I had taken a class and learned all 108 moves.  But that was then, and besides not practicing for over two decades, Henry’s form was different from the one I’d learned years before.  But I reasoned it was like riding a bicycle.  My body would surely remember vestiges of the movements I had learned so long ago.

Not so.  Henry, trying to accommodate his instruction to an imperfect rectangular room, was often in the corner, his back to me, his hand movements hidden from view.  “Uh, oh,” I thought as he positioned himself and began calling out instructions, “make semi-circle, grasp bird’s tail,” demonstrating as the class followed along in flowing unison.   That is, most of the class followed in unison.  I was the notable exception.

I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what I was supposed to do.  I felt my body stiffen in protest.  I twisted one foot one way, keeping the other straight and craned my neck over my shoulder to get a glimpse of Henry.  Where were his shoulders placed?  What were his hands doing?  I snuck furtive glances at my classmates.  What were they doing?  In one panic-stricken moment, I wondered if I could quietly sneak out of the room.  Not possible.  I was in the front row.  Secretive departures were impossible.

I took a deep breath and resigned myself to suffering through the entire class.  I eyed the clock every few minutes, its hands moving in slow motion along with Henry’s students.  Time seemed interminable.  When the session finally ended I realized I’d been holding my breath for a good portion of it and exhaled with considerable relief. Out of the 108 moves in the T’ai Chi sequence, I hadn’t even done one move correctly.  As for those health benefits of gentle T’ai Chi, they were nowhere to be found.  I returned home with an ache in my lower back as though my entire spine was in revolt.

The whole experience was humbling.  I’ve never been a patient beginner—that perfectionistic streak invariably finds a way to resurface—but it got me to thinking about how serious illness, age, or any major life transition requires we learn—even relearn—different ways of being, even some things we once took for granted.  As human beings, we’re resilient, but coming to terms with our altered bodies and imperfect selves demands we re-evaluate who we are now. The image we once held of ourselves (usually our younger, healthier selves) is challenged.  We’re forced to recognize that we may have limitations–physical pain, issues of stamina, agility or even memory–that we once didn’t believe would ever apply to us.  Those ailments belonged to other people.

What is survivorship about, really?  I think it’s about learning.  Stepping back into your old lives after cancer isn’t simple or even possible.  Not only do treatment regimens have adverse effects on the body, your life has changed too.   The ground beneath your feet might seem uncertain or at least, the steps you used to take with assurance feel clumsy and tentative now.  You’re faced with new learning, and not all of it may be pleasant.   It’s a bit like standing in the front row as the new student in a Tai Chi class, trying to understand and mimic every single movement everyone else seems to know by heart.  You feel little but awkwardness and uncertainty.

But this is about surviving—and thriving.   Whether cancer, the effects of aging, unexpected life transitions, you’ve proven, time after time, that you can adjust and move on.  Life changes in subtle and not so subtle ways, but you those new movements, necessary strategies and behaviors, and little by little, you begin to embrace the new life that lies before you.

This week, write about what it was like was to find your footing on uncertain ground and how you learned not only to survive but thrive and embrace the new life before you.

(Postscript:  I did return to T’ai Chi class, but one  for beginners, taught by Kathi, Henry’s protégé, and managed to achieve a modicum of grace with  a shorter series of moves!)  

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(Originally posted on May 27, 2012)

Last night, I impatiently flipped through television channel after channel, irritated by the preponderance of reality television programs.  Just as I decided to turn off the set, I stumbled on a video clip of Peter, Paul and Mary, a folk singing trio from the sixties, being featured on our local public radio station, KPBS. I was immediately transported back to the first time I saw the trio in concert in 1963.  As I watched the show, I also remembered how their music changed and reflected the social and political unrest of that time: civil rights marches, campus demonstrations and anti-war protests.  I watched, and I remembered, singing along to their songs, recalling my own stories as theirs were told.

In those days, my youthful idealism was dominated by a singular belief that war was wrong. I knew or understood little about the young men and women who, by choice or by the call of the draft, were sent into war.  It was, unlike the war my father fought in, one that polarized a nation at home, without ticker tape parades or welcoming crowds to celebrate the veterans returning from Vietnam, so divisive were the politics of the time.

Some things haven’t changed for me.  I am still a pacifist all these decades later, anti-war, and admittedly disheartened by the tenor of political debate in this country.  But I now realize, unlike the idealistic young student I was in the sixties, the staggering toll war has on the human spirit, on those who have fought in any war, for any nation.  That kind of service to one’s country, whatever I may feel about war itself, is an extraordinary sacrifice.  I am saddened by the costs of war—the losses and injuries that mark a human being forever, the ruin and devastation of countries in the wake of battle.  This morning, I’ve been listening to the veterans’ voices on NPR, their remembrances of war as we celebrate this Memorial Day Weekend.  I am touched by their bravery, humbled by their stories.

First celebrated as a national holiday on May 30, 1868, and called “Decoration Day,” it was intended to honor the soldiers who died in the Civil War.  General John Logan, the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, is said to have chosen the end of May as the official holiday because there would be more flowers in bloom, flowers that were ultimately placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers in an act of reconciliation at Arlington National Cemetery.  Today, Memorial Day is celebrated on the final Monday of May, and it honors all U.S. troops who have died in war.

As a child, I didn’t fully understand the meaning of Memorial Day.  For my siblings and me, it was simply a date meant to honor the dead—no matter how they died.  Every Memorial holiday, my father’s extended family, then numbering between forty or fifty aunts, uncles and cousins, gathered at the family graveside in Hornbrook, a small town in Northern California.  While my aunts and uncles paid tribute to our deceased relatives and placed flowers on their gravesites, we restless children turned the cemetery into an adventure, examining all the different gravesites dotting the grounds and challenging one another to find the headstone with the oldest dates engraved on it.  We knew nothing about the stories or the people whose remains lay beneath the earth.

Perhaps it’s why, as I consider the traditions of our national holiday, that I remember warriors, other battles—illness, unexpected tragedies or disasters–that have taken peoples’ lives.  Many of these individuals, like our soldiers, also faced danger, fear and uncertainty, like those who experienced the relentless stalking by the silent enemy called cancer.  They also have inspired those who knew and loved them, taught us how precious life is, even as we knew the odds were stacked against them.  They, like our soldiers, are heroes too.  I think of the chorus to Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings,”  Did you ever know that you’re my hero?”  For me, Memorial Day is a time to remember, a time to honor them all.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed The National Moment of Remembrance Act,” calling upon all Americans to pause at 3 p.m., local time, on Memorial Day and remember those who died fighting for this country.  I plan to do that, but I’ll be remembering more than those who died fighting this country’s wars.  For a few moments tomorrow, on Memorial Day, I’ll pause to honor all those who, throughout history, have lost their lives to many kinds of  battles.  I invite you to remember along with me—whether in written or spoken words or simply honor each of your heroes with a moment of silence.

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Dear Readers,

Cancer or other chronic or life-threatening illness doesn’t respect our need for holidays,  taking a breather from all those pressing worries, appointments, tests or surgeries.  But we all welcome a break, a chance to get away from the stress and worry, even for a day or two, a time to enjoy family and friends and not think about the ever-present shadow of illness.  In my expressive writing groups for cancer survivors, we gradually shift the focus from writing about cancer to writing about life, no matter what diagnoses we’ve been given.  Call it a little break, a self-imposed holiday from illness, or simply recess, we all need to refuel and replenish, to consider what’s most important to us for however long we have to live.

For the next several weeks, I’m taking the advice I often offer to students in my creative writing classes. Take a break.  Let things percolate.  Keep writing, but without the interference of thinking about editing, shaping or publication.  In other words, let your muse out to play and, in the process, discover new angles, new subjects, a new slant on work you’ve been agonizing over for weeks or months…  Take a little vacation. I’m taking a break.  

I’ve been posting g a weekly writing reflection and prompt on this site since 2006, and for the summer months,  I’ll be taking time to travel a bit, play around with words and ideas,  return to a folder of unfinished stories, or even (maybe) pick up that novel I put aside a few years ago and take another look…In the meantime,  I’ll draw from nine years of weekly writing prompts and re-posting them on this site.   For this week, I’m choosing one from April 24, 2011:  Rewriting Your Life.   Happy Summer ahead–and keep writing!

REWRITING YOUR  LIFE

For the past several months, I’ve been re-writing sections of a novel begun a couple of years ago.  When I began, since this was my fifth revision, I didn’t intend to change as much of the story as I have.  “Since it’s a fifth revision,” I thought.  “I’ll have this done in no time.”

I couldn’t have been more mistaken.  The story, lying fallow for the better part of last year, has changed.  The beginning is completely altered; I’ve dumped a couple of characters; a new character surfaced.  It’s no minor revision.  It’s a complete rewrite.

I’ve been working on my rewrite, that’s right
I’m gonna change the ending
Gonna throw away my title
And toss it in the trash
Every minute after midnight
All the time I’m spending
It’s just for working on my rewrite
Gonna turn it into cash…

 Paul Simon’s “Rewrite,” the fourth song on his latest album, So Beautiful or So What?, has become my theme song, blasting from my car’s speakers as I run errands around town.  There’s more to the lyrics that a process of writerly revision, though, and probably one of the reasons Simon’s song lyrics were published in a recent edition of The New Yorker under the heading, “Poetry.”  Listen to the complete song, and you realize it’s a story of a man, a Vietnam vet who’s had hard times, asking for help to rewrite his life, to create a happy ending.

Think about it. How many times have you, in the midst of hardship, illness or loss, wished you could change the life you have, that you could dump those old pages of script and start with a clean sheet of paper?  How many times have you said to yourself, “if only I could go back and do that differently?” Well, what if you could?

I’ll eliminate the pages
Where the father has a breakdown
And he has to leave the family
But he really meant no harm
Gonna substitute a car chase
And a race across the rooftops
When the father saves the children
And he holds them in his arms…

We can all fantasize.  Look back and imagine how our lives might have been different, but that’s the stuff of old dreams and wishes, of fiction instead of reality.  What we can do is honor the uniqueness, even the struggles, of our lives, learn from them and perhaps, write a new script for the life we have in front of us.

In an interview by William Young, published in the Winter, 1993 issue of The Paris Review, William Stafford commented on the choice of the title of his book, You Must Revise Your Life.  “I wanted to use the word revise because so many books about writing make it sound as though you create a good poem by tinkering with the poem you’re working on. I think you create a good poem by revising your life… by living the kind of life that enables good poems to come about.”

To love life, to love it even

When you have no stomach for it

And everything you’ve held dear

Crumbles like burnt paper in your hands…

When grief weights you like your own flesh

…you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you  hold life like a face

Between your palms…

And you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you again.

(“The Thing Is,” from: Mules of Love, 2002)

Ellen Bass’s poem hangs, printed and framed, above my desk.  I re-read her last two lines on those mornings my old sorrows hover nearby. “I will take you.  I will love you again.”  No rewrites here, just the acknowledgment that life offers me the chance to learn from what has gone before, to live differently, if I choose, from here on out.

Given the chance, would you rewrite your life?  How have the events of your life prompted you to revise your life or embrace the one you have?

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There was little time for me to think about Mother’s Day this past weekend.  I flew to Northern California on Friday afternoon, reluctantly boarding the airplane with the beginnings of a head cold, waiting nearly three hours for my delayed flight in the crowded and noisy Terminal One at San Diego International, and, after picking up the rental car, sinking into a hotel bed exhausted, wondering how I’d lead the all-day writing workshop with faculty, students and alumni of the Stanford Medical School the following day.

I didn’t feel any better when morning came, but thanks to a great group of writers, a little decongestant and cough suppressant, the workshop went off as planned.  That evening, I drove over the Santa Cruz Mountains to Aptos for a short visit with two dear friends.  They had anticipated my fatigue.  I was greeted with the warmth of a fireplace, appetizers and a light supper, then shown to the guest room, where cough drops and a vaporizer had already been set up for my ailing self. Honestly, I felt mothered—taken care of and loved.

By the time I returned home yesterday afternoon—again, on a delayed flight—I wasn’t even thinking of Mother’s Day, but cards and flowers from my daughters and husband were there to greet me—along with some cough syrup, aspirin, and a vaporizer filled and ready to go, something my husband had retrieved from the garage and set up in the bedroom.  “We’ll celebrate tomorrow,” he said, as I slipped beneath the covers and inhaled the familiar set of Vicks Vapor Rub.  Memories overtook me.  My mother’s hand on my fevered brow when, as a child, I suffered through colds, flu, fevers and assorted other childhood illnesses.  Vick’s was always part of the care, part of the healing, and something my daughters came to know during the worrisome nights when their anxious mother laid awake listening to the sound of their coughs, and rising two or three times in the night to place my hand on their foreheads just as my mother had done with me.  It’s a ritual of motherly caring that they now practice with their own children when they are ill.

Mother’s Day has passed, and yet, the scent of Vick’s has me remembering so many little things about the way my mother cared for me and in turn, my first years as an anxious, worried parent living thousands of miles away from my mother and father.  There are stories in each of those memories, some funny, some tender, and others tinged with sorrow or regret.  Each offers many writing possibilities.  Here are some suggestions from my 2014 Mother’s Day post:

.  Think about your mother (or anyone who was like a mother to you) and the role she has played in your life.   What are some of your most important memories of your mother?  What qualities or anecdotes best describe your mother?  How can you bring your mother’s character to life on the page?
.  How we feel about our mothers—and ourselves as mothers–—is complex.  Remember the poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens? In each stanza, the reader is offered something like a snapshot, all different but always, the word, “blackbird,” appearing in each.
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime…

One writing suggestion is to try imitating Stevens’ structure and write thirteen ways of looking at a mother (or motherhood) and see what happens.

.  Of course, mothers also give us advice, lots of it; some that we appreciate; some we don’t want to hear.  In a delightful essay entitled, “Advice from My Grandmother,” Alice Hoffman creates an unmistakable portrait of her grandmother, Lillie Lutkin, by offering the reader all the advice given to her by her:

Cook badly.  Even if you’re already a bad cook, make it worse.  Trust me, it’s easy.  Throw in anything you want.  Too much salt, too much pepper.  Feed him and see what he says.  A complaint means he’s thinking about himself, and always will.  A compliment means he’ll never make a living.  But a man who says, “Let’s go to a restaurant,” now he’s a real man.  Order expensive and see what he’s got to say then.  (In Family:  American Writers Remember Their Own, 1996).

.  We learn from our mothers lessons of love and life, many of them not appreciated until we’re much older.  What a mother teaches us can become material for a character portrait as Julia Kasdorf creates in the poem, “What I Learned from my Mother.”

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point…

(From: Sleeping Preacher, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992)

Today and this week, write about mothers, yours, your mother’s or anyone who has played the role of mother in your life.  Write from whatever idea or memory comes to mind.  Remember your mother in as many ways as you can.

Mother’s Day may be over, but how we think of and communicate our appreciation and love for our mothers and grandmothers is, I hope, not limited to one day of greeting cards.  Remember mothers and motherhood—and the stories you have of yours.

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The garage has not been allowed to breathe
for months now. The smell of moving,
uprooting, cures in the arid Texas heat—
scents that cannot be romanticized, but must be
handled carefully so that no boxes topple.
We are looking for “The Middle Passage,”
first we must clear a walking path…

This is how we will find him:
on our hands and knees
combing over flailed books—sea shells
beneath a forgotten tide.
Occasionally we’ll wrench something up,
not what we are looking for, and read it anyway.

(From:  “Search for Robert Hayden,”for Charles Rowell, In:  The Listening, by Kyle G. Dargan, 2004)

Each spring, I begin cleaning out closets and the accumulated items we “store” in our garage.  It’s an onerous task.  Somehow, despite our good intentions, the order and labeling I meticulously execute each year dissolves into clutter—things intended for donation, assorted pillows, folding beds and blankets still piled in a corner, placed there in January after one family member’s visit, old journals, keepsakes, clothing intended for colder climates we occasionally visit…

Invariably, as I did yesterday, I stand in the center of the garage feeling completely overwhelmed, wondering how in the world we managed to create disorder out of what was so carefully ordered a year ago.  Good intentions aside, my plan for cleaning out garage shelves quickly fell apart as I shifted boxes around, opening a few to examine the contents before deciding what needed to be available for access, what didn’t, and what could be donated to Am Vets or another nonprofit organization.

I didn’t make much progress.  Some of the boxes, when opened, yielded evidence of our past lives:  keepsakes collected on international trips, a misplaced journal filled with my writing and a few comic sketches from my final year in the corporate world, drawings from grandchildren—well, more like scribbles—executed as they were first learning to hold a crayon, a few old photographs, misplaced among the many black and white postcards of images I use in my writing groups, a luggage tag in my father’s handwriting, something of his I found after his death.  The garage never did get cleaned yesterday.  I managed only to move a few boxes around, lost in the memories contained in those few I opened.  Before I knew it, the day had passed.

In his 2009 memoir, Unpacking the Boxes:  A Memoir of a Life in Poetry, former U.S. poet laureate, Donald Hall begins his story as he unpacks seventy or eighty boxes, stored in his home and cottage since 1994, shortly after his mother’s death and a year before his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, died from leukemia.

For a longtime, I could not open them… From [the] … boxes my childhood rose like a smoke of moths–a 78 of Connee Boswell singing “The Kerry Dance”; all the letters I ever wrote my father and mother; photographs of my young parents on the boardwalk at Atlantic City; my father’s colorless Kodachromes of Long Island Sound, snapshots of cats dead for fifty years; model airplanes and toy cars and a Boy Scout manual, a baseball, and a baseball glove with its oiled pocket chewed by mice.  I felt the shock and exultation of exhumation… Remembered scenes flashed like film clips… (pp. 2, 3, 10)

Whether stacked in a garage or closet, tucked under the bed, or stored in our minds, we all have boxes filled with fragments and memories of our pasts. We turn to them sometimes, remembering feelings, smiles, nostalgia, even heartache, all reminding us of who we were then.  But there are other boxes, those virtual ones, tucked into the far corners of our mind, taped shut, yet always carried.  These are the ones we are reluctant to open, fearing what we might find.

Author Sue Diaz, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, opens her 2010 memoir, with a reference to those boxes:

This is a story about boxes. Mine contains news clippings about that day in Iraq — what led up to it and what came after. It’s a brown leather box where I’ve also stored notebooks, journal entries, essays published with my byline, photos, letters, and printouts of online conversations. A scrapbox of sorts, filled with bits-and-pieces connected mostly to Roman and to the past few years.

My son has his box, too. It is the one that soldiers returning from war carry within themselves, the box that holds everything a combat vet has seen and felt and heard and done in the line of duty.

As the daughter of a World War II veteran, I know it’s not uncommon for vets to want to keep the lid on their memories. Opening up can take some time. Years, for some. Decades, for others. Many never do.

But it’s important to try. …

Sue’s memoir is a touching portrayal of a mother’s experience of a son fighting in a distant and dangerous war.  That experience led her to lead writing groups for war veterans, and not infrequently, the stories written in her groups, were ones never shared before, even though it had been years, even decades, since several veterans’ war experience.

What they’ve written in their spiral notebooks on those Wednesdays has given me a glimpse into the boxes they have carried with them from places like Danang and Fallujah, Saigon and Sadr City. 

The words “Open at Your Own Risk” are stamped all over their boxes, because what’s inside can be scary as hell.

Scary as hell. Those are the boxes that contain memories of the difficult chapters of our lives, whether  trauma endured as a child or an adult, whether war, horrific events like 9/11, the bombing in Oklahoma City or the shock of hearing, “I’m sorry…  It’s cancer.”  We also know that there are real costs to health when traumatic, painful memories remain locked inside of us.  Healing takes time, often in small steps, but to begin, we have to summon the courage to open those boxes.  It’s important to try.

Remember Pandora and the box she was warned never to open? How curiosity got the better of her, and as she lifted the lid, evil escaped and spread over the earth?  It’s a good metaphor for the boxes filled with painful or frightening memories we sometimes hesitate to pry open ourselves, because remember too, that after the evil escaped, Pandora discovered one last thing left lying at the bottom of the forbidden box Hope.

This week, explore your boxes, whether real and tucked into a corner in your attic or garage, or one pushed back into a far corner of your mind. Take one out. Open the lid. Explore the contents:  the memories—sights, sounds, smells—and the emotions they evoke. Write the memories, the stories, evoked by the contents of your box.

 

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