Razor's Edge

"At different stages in our lives, the signs of love may vary: dependence, attraction, contentment, worry, loyalty, grief, but at heart the source is always the same. Human beings have the rare capacity to connect with each other, against all odds."

This quote is from Michael Dorris, an author best known for "A Yellow Raft in Blue Water" and " The Broken Cord." Of course, you must pay no attention to the fact that he committed suicide.

It is a curious thing to me that good writers and poets are so often victims of mental illness and depression. They end up taking their own lives when their passion runs cold. It seems that sanity dances the razor's edge wherever one finds a burning source of brilliance.

I have been reading a biography of Anne Sexton. (I recently reread some of her poetry in Transformations and her life in letters which was a book of her correspondence published after her she took her own life.)

She had many writing relationships--male and female. Words and the exchange of words were her saving grace for years. She was self-taught for the most part, but won a Radcliffe scholarship for women re-entering the workplace/literary world after being mothers/housewives. Her favorite mode of operation was to apprentice herself to someone until she learned everything they knew. She loved the messy work of words and spent hours debating with friends and colleagues over the exact placement of a phrase. She went far before she finally crashed and burned.

She said it best in "Her Kind."

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

Imps in Eager Caucus

I can wade Grief
Whole Pools of it
I'm used to that
But the least push of Joy
Breaks up my feet
And I tip -- drunken

Emily Dickinson

Something about her words hits me like a shot of whiskey. The toss. The swallow. The bite. The warmth. Who can not love this?

"A wounded deer leaps the highest."

"God gave a Loaf to every Bird, but just a Crumb to Me."

"Imps in eager Caucus raffle for my soul."

I suppose I am most drawn to what she didn't say. And, I have always wondered if she reconciled her restless struggle in a way that gave her peace.

The Pilgrim Soul in You

When You are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

W.B. Yeats

Soul of a Shoplifter

"There once was a girl from Nantucket..."

There are those who get paid to write poetry, and those who should get paid to NOT write poetry. I fall into the latter category. You can thank me in advance for not filling this space with the versification of my feckless soul.

I have always liked to say that I have the soul of a shoplifter. And, then someone asked me "WHY do you say that you have the soul of a shoplifter?"

I had to stop and think. It might be because it seems a little sassy. Or it might be that I enjoy the way that it sounds like it has been lifted from a corny movie script:

"Of all the shipyards in all the world, she hadda walk into mine. She was tougher than a leather grommet and laced with twice as much trouble. She stacked the deck faster than a twelve-fingered card shark and possessed the soul of a shoplifter. I knew it. God knew it. All the angels in heaven knew it. But, even then I wanted to believe she could be redeemed."

The serious answer, however, fits within the framework of Aristotle's friendship definitions. Relationships formed solely for pleasure or utility allow you to slip little pieces of a person into your pocket--like a shoplifter thieving his way through the department store of life. We take what we want to get what we need and leave the rest. I have always been good at those types of relationships. And, I think that is what I really mean when I say I have such a soul.

The Kesters

The Kester family lived on a dirt farm just off Millingtown Road in the southeast corner of our rural county. There were dozens of them, not dozens of farms, dozens of Kesters, or that was the way that it seemed when our school bus rumbled up to their stop each morning.

There they would be lined up in varying shapes and sizes by their rusted mailbox. None of them really looked alike, but they did share one thing in common. The rich aroma of cow manure, unbathed bodies, cigarette smoke, and dandruff flakes seeped out of their collective pores. There was another smell too. It was only later that I learned to identify that other smell as poverty. Deep, irrevocable, heartbreaking poverty.

They jostled and poked one another as the bus lumbered to a halt. Sometimes their laughter would reach through an open window. But, a quiet seemed to settle over them as the big mechanical arm swung the doors open. There was always a slight hesitation before the bravest one put their foot on the step. I say brave because as the first Kester head became visible over the seat something evil happened on that bus. Evil in a way that only others kids can be evil.

Instead of making room for the rough and tumble family, people slid to the end of their seats. People stared right through the Kesters as if they didn't exist when they tried to sit down. The Kesters sat with each other if there was an empty seat, but often they were left to walk up and down the aisle even after the bus started to move again. It must have been a living hell for them.

This blackballing of the Kesters went on for months. And, then one day, I watched Ginny and her sisters get on the bus. Their eyes said that they were tired of being pushed around. Their familiar smell was now mixed with something I had never sensed before. The heady scent of defiance rose to meet my nostrils that morning. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine them rising up like The Who singing:

We're Not Gonna Take It
no, We Ain't Gonna Take It
we're Not Gonna Take It Anymore

I was fascinated in that sick sort of that way we crane our necks to look at a rollover on the highway. I watched as first one and then another advanced down the aisle. Each planted her feet and took hold of a seat back. As the bus lurched forward, they shoved their hips sideways into the person who was denying them entrance. The plan was brilliant. People toppled in surprise to the right and the left, and the Kesters sat that day. No one could quite believe what happened, but a shift took place in that moment. And, they sat, as far as I can remember, every morning for the rest of the year.

Part of me cheered, and part of me was frightened by the overthrowing of accepted social order. You might ask me, where were you in all of this? Was I defending the rights of the downtrodden? Was I advocating for the disadvantaged?

No. I sat in the seat furthest back with my friend, Brenda. On the left. By the emergency door. It was seldom that the Kesters ventured that far back. I wish I could say that I would have shown kindness, but I know that on the days that I was alone in that seat, I prayed that none of them would sit with me. I never spoke up. I looked away like everyone else when it was too awkward to watch. Don't even ask me, " WWJD?"

Anyway, I dreamed about them a while ago. The Kesters. As they were then, not as the adults I am sure they have become. I dreamed that I went to their house and walked in through the unlocked door. No one was home, but I saw stacks and stacks of clean laundry piled everywhere. Folded. Meticulous. Fresh. Pristine.

I marveled as one does in a dream at the randomness of finding such order in a place where I expected chaos. I admired the mother who kept track of so many kids. I looked at a table set with paper plates and plastic forks. The pot in the middle held some sort of soup. There was a piano in the corner with a Thompson music book opened to Minuet in Somethingerother. No carpet covered the floor, but the wide boards were swept clean. When I heard them arriving home, I tried to get out of the house as fast as I could. In my haste to get out the backdoor before they came in the front, I knocked over all the laundry. I wept to think that their laundry was soiled by my careless exit.

Who knows what dreams mean. What parts of the past will come boiling to the surface while we sleep. And why.

Maybe it is good for me to remember how I learned the lessons I hold dear today. Maybe it is good for me to remember when I was afraid to be different even if "being different" only meant being kind to someone who the rest of the world deemed unworthy.

Maybe I just ate too much chocolate before I fell asleep, but it gave me something to think about.

Therapy

To all the therapists I've loved before who now belong on someone else's couch...

Several years ago I found myself in the unfortunate position of searching for a therapist. I made a list of questions, set up appointments and conducted interviews like nobody's business. Because if there is any business that needs interviewing, it is nobody's.

The first one was a man. He listened carefully to my questions and my basic information. When I told him I had a compulsion to eat glass and dance on lawn mower blades, he asked, "Do you think that is harmful?"

Well, yeah. Next.

The second was a woman. Older. Gray hair. Experience with life and lawnmowers. Yet, we stumbled around like dentures in the dark. At the end of our hour she sort of looked at me and said,

" What shall we do? How shall we leave this?"

It reminded me of a date gone wrong. Very wrong.

I answered, "I will call you."

And we both knew that I wouldn't be calling her. Ever.

You never want to hear your therapist say:

10. I would like to share my personal experiences with you. Get comfortable.
9. It took me a long time to save box tops for this license.
8. Could we cut this short today? I want to watch General Hospital.
7. Do you ever dream about me?
6. May I borrow your cell phone? I am over my minutes this month.
5. Here's a little haiku I wrote...
4. I am feeling a bit depressed this week. Do you think we could talk about me?
3. Luke, I am your father.
2. Does this hangnail look infected?
1. Buddy me. My screen name is ShrinkWrapHottie.

Mrs.Betty HoityToity From The Past

Once in a while something you thought you left far behind snakes forward from between the pages of the past to grab you around the ankle. This morning it reached me through the telephone line.

I was still sitting in my home office finishing a few calls and reviewing a proposal. I hadn't slept well last night, so I felt like I was moving through molasses when the phone rang.

"Hello there, this is Betty HoityToityFromthePast."

The cultured New England voice hadn't changed a bit in the years since I stood in her laundry room pressing the fine boxer shorts and blouses that clothed the backs and bottoms of the HoityToityFromthePast household members.

Yes, I pressed boxer shorts in a past life. And they all wore blouses. Even Mr. HoityToityFromthePast. His "blouses" required careful attention because they were to be BOX folded and put in his drawers NOT simply arranged on a hanger.

Those had been transitional years for me. Years where my childhood faith collided so hard at the intersection of reality that I left the career I had shared with my husband for more than a decade. Years where I avoided even the slightest shadow of the tabernacle. And years where my prayers, if they could be called prayers, were more like whispers of rage and disappointment spit through clenched teeth in the direction of heaven.

They were also years that took me back to school. They were years pieced together with odd jobs that allowed me time to study, write and still spend time with my children. Years that I pressed boxers and blouses, polished silver trophies for a local polo Princess, cooked for folks richer than I, raked leaves, baked bread, spoon fed Jell-o to a cranky invalid who spit it back in my face, changed the diapers of the elderly and held the hand of a dying woman.

It wasn't living. It was existing and a means to an end.

There was a bit of desperation in Betty HoityToityFromthePast's voice this morning. Her regular girl was going to be gone for two weeks and she wondered if I could "press" in her absence. In that moment I realized that she never heard me when I told her my path for the future. A career path that I have followed with a fair degree of success. She didn't listen when I told her why I propped my text books on the window sill next to the ironing board so that I could study while I worked.

Her smile did hold a mild curiosity when she walked me around her estate in early spring to show me the sprightly yellow daffodils pushing their funny little faces toward the sun, and I launched into a full recital of "I wandered lonely as a cloud..."

She never really saw who I was though or who I hoped to become. And that remains a shame. I didn't plan on "pressing" and "piecing" forever.

This week I gave testimony in front of a governmental sub-committee assigned to review the plight of the underprivileged across the state. As a community leader I spoke directly and from my heart. Everyone laughed where they were supposed to laugh. And they all took notes. Mostly they looked me right in the eye. I liked that. They saw me. They heard me.

"As I followed the trajectory of my life..."

(You will forgive me for not mentioning the pressing/polishing/baking/raking years, but I knew they were there. They helped shape the heart that speaks with such passion today.)

I did learn some lessons from Betty HoityToityFromthePast.

1. Always write thank you notes. (E-mail doesn't count. This was a pet peeve of Mrs. HoityToityFromthePast's. One she would speak on for a full fifteen minutes if given the opportunity.)
2. Never look through people who work for you. Really see them.
3. Listen.
4. Listen.
5. When you have enough money, you can have your boxer shorts starched and folded.

I told Betty HoityToityFromthePast that I had finished school and was happily launched into a satisfying career. My pressing schedule didn't allow time for "pressing." I thanked her for thinking of me, but I took her number just in case I decide to offer my daughter a chance to build the character that can only come from ironing the boxer shorts and pressing the blouses of the rich and famous.