On sickness and possible worlds

He’s sick. In five years I’ve never known him to be sick, despite his horrible abuse of his body. A sore throat, then a cold, now a cough and the aches and shivers. His eyes sink into pockets of darkness, look out on the unfurling world with dazed exhaustion. Still, he talks about philosophy.

“Did you know Dr. L met David Lewis,” he says. “Let’s read about him.” We Google him, and a Wikipedia article lays out Lewis’ life, poorly written, filled with typos and awkward syntax.

“You should rewrite this,” I suggest, but he shakes his head, smiling for the first time in a couple of weeks.

“Eight days,” he says. “Then I’m done. I’ll never have to write again if I don’t want to.”

He passed his thesis defense “with flying colors,” as his committee put it, and then he and I worked for a long day to shape it up for the cotton copies and get it printed to the graduate office’s finical expectations. One of his committee members signed in blue ink, and he had to go in the following week (which was this week) and get a new signature page, with all black-ink signatures, but at least the office accepted his thesis, and he could take a breath and know he was almost done.

One test in Sanskrit. One more research paper on epistomology. Then he’s done. But he’s been sick, dragging himself from meeting to the class he’s TAing in to his executive internship in the office of financial affairs, just counting down.

“In some other possible world,” I tell him, “you’re doing this and you’re not sick.”

He smiles. Modal realism. Counterfactuals. Terms like a priori and a posteriori. Statements of p’s and q’s that don’t mean please and thank you. I’ll never know them like he does, but I can bandy them about a bit now, conduct little thought experiments “You’re going outside the parameters of the thought experiment,” he’ll chide me. “You have to stay within those parameters.”

“It’s my thought experiment,” I’ll say. “I’ll do what I want with it.”

We walk the dogs and talk about the new Pirates of the Caribbean, which we took the kids to over the weekend, and he turns the conversation into philosophy, as he always does, and it’s fun. I’m glad he’s feeling a bit better now. Somewhere, I figure, in some other possible world, we know each other in a way that doesn’t fill me with guilt, that doesn’t haunt him at night. In that world, he’s not sick and I’m not dreading eight days of scoring AP papers, and the kids love each other and the dogs don’t throw up on the carpet.

That world, though, would lack the texture of this one, and I love texture. And I suspect that what I love about him is tied up in how forbidden he was for so long, and in something else that feels possible only in this world, right now.

I’m glad.

Fireworks love and afterwards

“You know the thing about love,” he said. “You fall in love, and it’s all crazy fireworks and adrenalin, and then reality hits. At our age, we know what’s coming after the first phase.”

He was a blogger I’d “met” early on. We’d been emailing for a while, sharing a little about ourselves. And then he wrote something like the words above, and I was stymied. But I guess it makes sense to assume that anyone who’s 42 is going to have fallen into, and out of, love multiple times.

Except that I’ve only loved one person, only one person in that glorious extraordinary fireworks way. Not that I didn’t love my ex-husband at one point. I just wasn’t ever in love with him, a fact I didn’t realize until I met the person who brought into focus those poems and novels of grand love and excruciating passion for the first time when I was 37 — five years ago.

Five years. In cancer, five years is a milestone. Five years without a reoccurance of breast cancer means you’re probably clear (not absolutely, not ever “cured,” but probably free of the threat. You can breath again, forget for long hours at a time that you ever had cancer, maybe not think about it for a day or more. No, I exaggerate. I can’t help but remember every time I get dressed, every time I take off my clothes at night, every time I see myself in profile, flat as an adolescent. But still, that’s a different kind of remembering than the gut-punched remembering of the weeks and months after diagnosis, which is really not a remembering at all but a constant presence, the Grim Reaper in shadow on every mirror, the surface of every fluttering leaf, in every breath). So eight years after breast cancer, I go long hours without remembering, and when I do, I don’t dread. But love? This love? I never forget.

Changed? Yes. Certainly changed. But under the calmer surface threatens that maelstrom of hunger and desire that overwhelmed me in the height of our passion. I cannot imagine feeling blank about him, feeling nothing at all. I cannot imagine looking at him and not seeing overlaid on his face the expressions that charmed me then, that still do, the way he looks with utter tenderness at his daughter; the way he looks over his glasses at me, wiggling his left eyebrow to make me laugh; the way he expresses reverence at solemn moments, such stillness in him.

I don’t know what’s coming after the first phase, because I’ve never experienced it. Perhaps this quieter, easier love is the after, the next, and if so, I’m content.

To be continued…

Immigration and justice: A prayer

I’m frantically trying to get ready to go to the AP reading on Saturday, the same one I did last year (had a year really passed since then?), but in Louisville, Kentucky now instead of in Florida. I’ve had little time to write, and don’t expect to have any time this upcoming week, but I did find the following prayer on a local political site. It comes from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and addresses the controversial issue of immigration reform.

The Justice Prayer

Come, O Holy Spirit!

Come, open us to the wonder, beauty, and dignity of the diversity found in each culture,

in each face, and in each experience we have of the other among us.

Come, fill us with generosity,

as we are challenged to let go and allow others to share with us

the goods and beauty of earth.

Come, heal the divisions

that keep us from seeing the face of Christ in all men, women and children.

Come, free us to stand with and for those

who must leave their own lands in order to find work, security, and welcome in a new land – one that has enough to share.

Come, bring us understanding, inspiration, wisdom, and

the courage needed to embrace change and stay on the journey.

Come, O Holy Spirit,

show us the way.

The states I’ve visited…

Now they just need to be in blue… (not for their actual political color, but for what I’d like them to be.)

create your own personalized map of the USA

Good Enough Mother

“Good enough,” my sister said. “Over there, I could be a good enough mother.”

We sat in a resteraunt that it has become a tradition to visit together when I go to see my dad. She was six months pregnant, and had just returned from a two-week trip to Ireland. She was finally showing a little, her baby curled into a tight round ball in front, the rest of her still tiny and thin.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“My friends, they don’t have much money, but they have all these kids, and the kids run around in old stained clothes, sometimes with snotty noses. Cait will just lean over and use some rag to swipe at Aisling’s nose when she’s running by, and Aisling will duck and keep running, and they’re all outside, milling around in the muck, playing in cardboard boxes. They don’t have iPod and playstations and their own rooms. And you know, if they were over here they’d be judged and Cait would be judged, and she’d probably spend all her time worrying because Brendan didn’t have the right rugby clothes or Maura wasn’t pretty or whatever. And now, she just hangs out and lets them play and they’re all out there having a good time with the neighbors’ kids, and she knows she’s a good-enough mother. She’s not always trying to be the best.”

“You don’t have to get kids brandname clothes over here,” I said. “They can run around in the muck and get dirty.”

But I couldn’t help remembering a couple of less well off acquiantances I’d had whose children were Zeke’s friends. One of them specialized in having garage sales where she sold off mounds of expensive, barely used children’s clothes because she wouldn’t let her kids be seen in “rags.” She could barely afford food, and I remember more than once paying to take her kids to the local fair and on the rides, but they sure did always have better clothes than my Zeke. The other friend stopped letting her children visit after the third time she arrived to find her twins and their older sister covered from head to toe in mud. They’d been playing in the sprinkler and then rolling in the ditch, pretending to be pigs. They were all having a blast. A little mud never hurt anyone. I’ve been known to hose off my daughter outside, fully dressed, when she was younger. Before she turned into the quintessential American girl, with her perfect hair and her perfect nails and her horror of anything that might harbor a germ. Sigh. Everything I did to raise her like a little hellion, the way I grew up, was subsumed under American commercialism.

I’ll never forget the day after her seventh birthday. We had bought her a pair of dance pants that she’d been begging for. She came home with a huge grin on her face. “I have friends now,” she said. “They liked my pants.”

I should have taken her out of that school right then and there. But what school over here is different? The pressures on girls to look a certain way, act a certain way, be pretty in a certain way are unrelenting. Zeke held out for a long time. In the most important ways she still holds out, an incredibly strong kid with a willingness to befriend everybody. Really she’s the only kid in her school I know who has friends amongst the skatboarders, the preps, the jocks and the stoners. But still, she likes her Hollister.

We’ve come to an agreement. She allows me to be dowdy Adah, with the well-patched and worn (and not purchased for $60 that way!) jeans, with the “crazy” hair and the ragged fingernails. And I allow her to be Zeke, always groomed, with the always -painted nails and the straightened hair. She wears makeup (not much, and tastefully applied), and I don’t. She buys brandname clothes, and I don’t. I marvel at how different we are on the surface, but I marvel even more because deep inside we’re really the same.

Back in the sandwich shop near my dad’s house, my sister sighed. “I wish I could move home,” she said. I felt the usual prick of resentment, and pushed it down. At least moving home could be an option for her. It isn’t, for me, the one sister who wants access to Ireland and who doesn’t have citizenship.

“Why can’t you?” I ask.

“Remember Cait and Ian’s house?”

“I do.” I have memories of an older council house on a corner lot on the outskirts of Dublin. Nice enough on the outside, but cracked walls and leaking ceiling and dry rot and fungus on the walls on the inside.

“Well,” Ruth May said. “You know what it’s worth?”

I shook my head.

“1.3 million Euros.”

I know house prices in Ireland, especially Dublin, are high. But that… that is ridiculous. Cait and Ian bought in before the housing boom. Their three-bedroom council house could buy more than 10 of my little condo. Well, I guess Ruth May really can’t move back. She’s as trapped here as I am.

I’ve been trying to convince her that raising a child over here isn’t that bad. “Look at Zeke,” I say. She looks at me and turns away. The truth is, in my family, Zeke isn’t that well regarded — except for my dad, who since my mother died has turned out to be the most tolerant and quietly loving grandfather imaginable. By Irish standards she’s totally obnoxious, though as Dad reminds my sisters, by American standards she’s absolutely normal. (I say she’s better than normal, but she is my daughter!). But the fact is, it’s hard. Hard to hold to the standards of my era, my country, my own upbringing. The only way I can face it is to let go of those expectations and just love her, even if, in Ireland, she might be misjudged. I tell Ruth May that. She looks at me suspiciously.

“Try not to let other parents judge you,” I said. “The baby won’t know the difference until it’s older, and by then maybe it’ll have learned something from you about not giving in to social pressure. And at some point it’s going to assert its own, individual self. Remember that plaque you gave Zeke when she was a baby? The one that says ‘children are not clay to be molded, but plants to be unfolded,’ or something like that? Well, it’s true. Your child will take his or her own path. But if you just hold firm to what matters to you, fight the big battles and let the little ones go, then it’ll be OK.”

I hope I’m not setting myself up for failure. Zeke is only 14, and could go astray yet. But I somehow don’t think so. She’s as strong-willed as I am about the things that matter to her. And she has a strong compass and a sense of what’s the right path for her. She has no problem withstanding social pressure either, despite — or perhaps because of — her constant association with older kids, some of whom have made questionable choices. But she rubs off on them, not the other way around.

As I sit with my sister it occurs to me that maybe I have been a good-enough mother — even though I’ve had, and will continue to have, many doubts about it. And I hope that Ruth May can get to a point when she can look at her child and say the same thing, and that in the meantime, she can just take a deep breath, stop doubting herself, and love.

Waiting and writing

I’ve been writing on my little book every day. I have a title for it now, and it’s taking over somehow. New characters have arrived in the last day. Like friends from the past, I find them familiar and comforting, even though sometimes where they take the story seems unpredictable, a little wild. I hope it’s adventuresome enough, not too filled with allusions that to a child will be just words that may or may not prick their curiosity. The Inquisition, the Troubles. Fiona has begun to understand what those references mean in her new world, but will the reading child? Will he or she be able to ignore such allusions, or to set them aside till later?

I was waiting for Zeke to call, and she just did. The dress rehearsal is over. The play opens tomorrow. I must go get her.

Esperanza

I have an 11-year-old friend. A week or two ago she asked me, “When are you going to finish that story?”

“What story?”

“You know, the one about Fiona and Rory and the Portals.”

I stared at her. I started it two years ago, wrote seven chapters in Ireland after my best friend, who had worked for O’Brien Press in Dublin for a decade or more, told me that a lot of writers start in children’s stories because they’re an easy risk for publishers. Cheaper to publish, more of a market. “You should try it,” she said. We had been take a cruise up the River Shannon in a little four-bed cruiser, me and her and Zeke and her son, and I’d seen an interesting piece of driftwood. A story arose from it, targeted at kids around the age of my daughter at the time, and a little older. I got about 35 pages into it and then stopped. My 11-year-old buddy (then nine) asked me about it when she caught me writing it one day, and I read it to her. And she’s asked again and again since then.

Nothing like a little 11-year-old prodding to get you writing again. I wrote about 5,000 words on it today, a glut of verbal expulsion. If she wants it, I thought, I’ll finish it. For her.

But I think it might be a fine enough book for kids, a layered book with something to offer for the older child too. An adventure story, but something beneath, calling to the more sophisticated reader. I don’t know. I’m no judge. It’s just calling to me. The characters live in my imagination, but they spill out too, follow me on my walks. “What if….?” Fiona asks, filled with ideas. The 11-year-old is calling too, transforming into a character who will rise soon enough from the medley of words on the page. I want to call her Esperanza, for hope, which this book is about, a hope for a world in which all peoples can work together, find commonality and communion. It’s a fantasy, I guess, just like my book.

I have to finish it by Christmas. I plan to print it out for my little Esperanza namesake and give it to her as a Christmas gift. Her father says she’ll like that. I’m just happy that she has given me hope for my fiction, remembering it as she did, and calling on me to finish.

Suspended

I feel raised, uplifted and suspended over the moment that is now.

Dale of Mole, one of my favorite bloggers, announced a few days ago he is thinking of quitting, or changing, his blog. I’ve been mourning a little, although after throwing us that disappointing nugget, he has updated a couple of times, perhaps teasing us with another and another last encore, though I hope not.

Diana of Diaphanous, who got me started, is slowing down. Patry of Simply Wait has slowed too. I can’t count the bloggers I’ve come to know in the past year who have simply stopped adding to the cyberwords on the internet, or whose posts come fewer and farther between.

I might feel regret, but something has shifted in me. I want to just hold each moment as is, to fully absorb it. Right now, I’m sitting on my swingset on my patio, with my wireless laptop, typing, and the temperature is mild, the light gentle, the road sounds punctuated by bird call, the birch branches lifted by the barest of breezes. Right now, that’s all I need.

Discombobulated

I left work early today, frustrated by my 5-year-old computer, which grunts and ticks as it works, too slowly, freezing up occasionally in the middle of something I’m doing. I have a brand new computer in my brand new office, but I can’t move there until the formaldehyde has offgassed, probably in September. Yesterday I had to move to a new, temporary office, and my files are in boxes or lined up on an otherwise empty bookshelf. I went looking for a handout and couldn’t find it. I must have boxed up that file folder. The stack of 101 papers on my desk looks formidable. My students comment on my crankiness. “I’m discombobulated,” I tell them. “Do you know there are 96 steps I have to take between my old office and my temporary one?” I counted the steps because I was bored, yesterday, making countless trips between offices with a single box as my vehicle of transport. No carts. They’re all being used for other moves. I carried plant pots (I have a lot of plants in my office) two at a time. I carried armfuls of books and folders. My coat rack and recycling box, and gifts that students have given me over the years. My poster of Irish writers, all male, of course. My new office, with its small window looking out on a brick wall, looked sparse and gray. I shifted stapler and tape dispenser and pen mug about on my desk till I found a configuration I liked. My computer, ticking and groaning at me, slowed and froze again. I tried to force quit, but that, as usual, wasn’t working.

I want to curse my lungs, with their damaged bronchial tubes. Why can’t I just move into the new building like everyone else? But every time I walk into the front door, I start coughing. The familiar chest tightening squeezes a band of warning around me. I end up outside again, in the sunshine and the foreshadow of heat, knowing I need to be careful.

I taught here for seven years in an office without windows, one the size of a closet, smaller than my not-expansive bathroom. Then I moved into the “luxury” office of the old building, with an extra eight square feet or so, and window that looked out onto bricks. If I craned my neck I could see a few leaves from the tree outside. Still, there was enough light there, between the seeping window and my plant light, for plants to grow, and I surrounded myself in green, getting a reputation for one who could save dying house plants. When my lungs clogged and sputtered three years ago, and I was forced by allergies to move into an office in Decker, my new office was huge, with a window looking out to the hills on the outskirts of town. I never got completely unpacked, though. I knew it was temporary, and several shelves of belongings from the previous occupant remained through my stay. It felt like a place to perch between long flights. I sat in my chair and stared out the window, absorbing a view I knew I would soon lose.

Now I’ve lost it, to a smaller office, with a smaller window, but still luxurious compared to my closet of the first seven years, and still better than the windowed office where I worked in the old building till two years ago. And the fact is, I have my own office. I can set my own temperature for my own little space. I can line up my books as I want, and ask for more bookshelves on the authority of being faculty. I can fill my world with plants, hang a plant light, if I need it, and lock the door to the world while I work. Even in my first office, I could arrange my space as I wanted to and close the door. It’s a pretty easy life. This temporary transitional office, and the discomfort of not knowing where things are, will pass, as everything does.

And if all else fails, I can leave my groaning, moaning, deathbed computer and come home to work.

The infinite universe

“Do you know,” my father says, “that some scientists say the universe is infinite?” He stops, looking out towards the water, to the far mountains draped in their veil of dusk. “I just can’t quite believe it,” he says. “Infinite.”

Infinite. When I was a child, I used to look up and think, over and over, “Does the sky go on forever?” And then I would try to imaging “forever,” and I would thrust my imagined self up through the blue, from the transparency of my spot on earth into the deepening blue of the highest reaches of the sky, and onwards, the color darkening — sky blue, royal blue, navy blue, then a blue so dark it was almost black, but lit by the sparkles cast from stars everywhere, and onwards, onwards, till I was no longer in my body at all. The word “forever” that had started the flight upwards would disappear, replaced by a wordless wonder, a sense that I was not “me” at all but something else inconceivable and unknowable. Something would echo in my head, fizz through my body, a sensation indescribable. It was terrifying and comforting at once, the awareness of how tiny I was, how utterly insignificant, in the vastness of forever, and yet also how enduring and inseparable I was from what “was,” what Is.

Last week, at RCIA, another rite involving candles: “Why do we love candles so much?” the woman leading the rite asked. And then, “What lit your candle?” regarding the search that had brought us to our initiation into the church. “An experience when I was 10,” I said, remembering forever. Remembering the infinite universe.

“If the universe is not infinite,” I respond to Dad’s comment, “then it has to end. Then there have to be boundaries. What do those boundaries look like? And what’s on the other side?”

He looks at me, silent for a moment, shaking his head.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “I just don’t know.”