When You’re 65 or Things Seth Can Do

Today, my husband, Seth, turns 65.  When I look at him, his white hair startles me. Behind my eyes, his hair is brown and thick and he is 26 as he was the day we married. But the rest? A predilection for t-shirts and jeans? That never changes. His deep love for all of us—me, our children, his family, our pets our friends?  Unwavering.

These days, he sports one new knee, two new shoulders and, basically, a new back. He is teaching older adults to read and do math each weekday morning. When I think of us together, I see us with our children or our parents or driving to Eagles Mere or sitting next to each other in a darkened theatre. He is with his mom today—not everyone gets to celebrate a 65th birthday with his mother. I am thinking about how funny time is—that, in my mind’s eye, Seth is as he was when I met him lighting The Miracle Worker in college, and, simultaneously, he is next to me, his hair dyed green, as it was in March, cheering on the Laurel basketball team—he is their biggest fan! He is cuddling an infant; he is toasting Miranda at her wedding; he is doing whatever Cordelia says; he is smiling with pride as Atticus crosses the stage at graduation last week. He is in the beams in the DeWire Center, teaching ETC kids to focus lights. He is greeting the dogs when he comes back from doing errands. I married a Renaissance man—someone whose skills and talents are often hidden because he is so modest—when he is not insisting he is right. Here is a partial list of all the things my all my beloved can do that I cannot.

Here is an incomplete list:

Remember our credit card number by heart.

And our bank account numbers.

And phone numbers.

And how many feet in a mile or math formulas. 

Light the backyard in summer so it looks like fairyland and the front yard in winter, so that it looks like Santa’s elves live here.

Pack the car so that impossibly complex loads all fit (I could be responsible for the complexity of the loads) and never stress or curse while doing so.

Say I look nice without opening his eyes.

Be the pets’ favorite even though I feed them more often.

Not worry about things—well, he may worry quietly, but he rarely worries to me and he is good at reminding me that worrying about something will not change the outcome.

Fix any number of things—electronic or not.

Understand how things work—I guess this is related to fixing thing, but also economics, scientific phenomena, math puzzles…

Climb up to high places. Even though he acknowledges that he is afraid of heights.

Deal with cars—what they’re called, how they run, what to do when they break or make weird noises.

Be unintimidated by long road trips when the car is packed to the brim and rear window visibility is nil.

Drive on highways without worrying about trucks.

Let go of grudges.

Find what he is looking for in Home Depot or Lowes without needing anyone to help.

Not be afraid of Diva biting him even when she growls and snaps.

Not ask for help even when he needs it—this may not be such a good thing.

Not ask for directions—see above.

Go on Facebook and see nothing about anyone he knows.

Fix my computer or my passwords or manage other tech dilemmas I encounter without losing his patience.  His dad used to call in the middle of the night, desperate about a computer glitch. Seth would calmly get out of bed, open his own laptop, and gently talk Hal through whatever difficulty he was having. 

Teach math to little people. And big people.

Build a gaga pit out back in the Laurel field.

Watch scary movies without covering his eyes.

Repeatedly sleep through his alarm.

Read his phone while walking the three dogs around the circle.

Stop watching shows or reading books in the middle if he is not interested.

Eat peanut butter.

Eat pineapple pizza.

Know the lyrics to many Beatles songs and Warren Zevon songs and Bob Dylan songs.

Manage mangled dead and partially dead rodents, birds, bunnies left by the cats as gifts without screaming.

Instantly know which batteries are required for any item and how to put them in so they work right away.

Figure out how to keep my Micky Mouse watch running because it is my favorite.

Create the weirdest, longest passwords ever, including an odd preference for the right parentheses.

Design the most beautiful jewelry that he gave me each time one of our babies was born.

Rival Sclepi as the family favorite.

Know more about current events than the average person even though he was once wrong about which candidate would win a fairly recent Presidential election.

Design a home for the two of us considering every detail and, especially, light.

Believe in me when I doubt myself.

Love me even at my most unlovable.  For four decades.

Happy Birthday, Seth.  And yes, I will still love you now that you are 65!

A Poem About How to End the School Year

June sneaks up on me every year.  Suddenly, we are awash in commencement preparation and moving up ceremonies and awards and prizes and final reports. Cai, finishing first grade, comes to the door of my office for one more hug on the last day of classes. Nora and Indira and their mom present me with a gorgeous orchid.  I find notes on my desk and flowers and a dark green notebook more elegant than I am, embossed with my initials, from a beloved advisee.  We celebrate Green and White Day, our spirit day, on a gorgeous morning, the sky impossibly blue, the heat formidable. Little girls leap and play while this headmistress wilts, revived only by air conditioning. 

Last year, when I thought we still had days and days of school left, my ninth grade English class gleefully chortled that we were down to only three more classes. How did that happen? We were going full tilt and then suddenly we were processing across the finish line–decorous, students walking in and out of the Chapel or Severance Hall or the Conway Pavilion more sedately than they ever walked during the school year.  

My Facebook feed this week is full of the photographs of children on the first day of the year and the last, the first day of Kindergarten and the high school graduation. I forgot to take a first day or last day photo of my son. who is, himself, a recent high school graduate. It is easy for me to forget how much growth happens in a single year for a single child, for each of us. That old adage that it goes so fast feels resonant for me, an almost empty-nester after more than 30 years of every day mothering.

Thursday, after morning meetings, the faculty and staff gathered for our final luncheon.  I love this last luncheon, love seeing the adults assembled, some sitting in friend groups, others bravely sprinkling themselves around the room, across disciplines or grade levels, mingled. It’s a ritual that concludes our year. A period at the end of a sentence. An exhale.

Yesterday marked my 19th lunch as a head of school. We reviewed the year and reflected a bit. I used this list inspired by a NYT article as a prompt and people wrote or doodled at their tables for a few minutes with sharpies on index cards—two items I am never without. We honored those who have served the school for different lengths of time, heard updates from Admissions (good news!) and from Development (more good news!). We bid adieu to colleagues moving on and we gave several prizes for teaching excellence and spirit and going above and beyond. Along the way, we raffled gift cards and begonias and the huge flower arrangement that had adorned the stage at Commencement.  

Then I closed us out, but this year, I did so in collaboration. Earlier in the week, feeling like to the Little Engine that Could, I emailed with my pal, Nancy, who also leads a school.  We were both seeking end of year inspiration—a poem, a quotation—something to offer our faculty and staff as a gift at the year’s close.  I jotted some ideas and shared them with her. She took what I had written and made it better.  I edited my own version for my school; she shared her version with her school.  Collaborating with a friend about how to end the year made me feel as if we were holding hands–all the way from Maryland to Ohio.  I loved that we were leading meetings on the same day in our respective schools, acknowledging our faculty and staff’s commitment to the children in our care.  Her community loved it–I hope mine did, too.  

Here is my version of our effort: 

A Poem About How to End the Year

I google how to end the school year with inspiration—

Conscious that teachers end the year twice–

June and December. 

At the end of the school year, we 

Celebrate, mourn a little.

Clichés abound.

We say goodbye to children who have grown in our care—

Wildflowers, hothouse flowers, weeds.

They all get taller—mostly—some spindly, some robust.

Some break old patterns and finally learn

How to put a comma after an introductory dependent clause,

Or have a breakthrough in algebra,

Or get braver speaking Spanish.

And some still don’t remember to hold onto work we’ve turned back.

Or read the comments we offered--

On their essays and problem sets and projects.

Feedback is love, right?

But fertilizer, I remember, 

Thinking about flowers,

Is a kind of nourishment plants need, 

But often smells foul. 

Not everything that is good for us is pleasing.

Feedback or fertilizer.

The thing about our garden

Is that it is always thirsty.

If I don’t remember to water, morning and night,

Plants wilt--

Like all of us at the end of a long week and now.

Love is care and rain, which we haven’t had enough of—

And sunshine—which has been, perhaps, too plentiful.

I love the bright days, but the grass does not.

Love is 46 seniors crossing the stage,

A note from a grateful parent,

Acknowledgment from a colleague.

While I’m not looking, it seems, a nasty groundcover springs up overnight,

In my garden–

Voracious, tentacled,

And threatens to choke my little seedlings.

I started them in February in tiny peat pots on the windowsill.

I thought they were ready to go outside before Mother’s Day,

But I lost my nasturtiums because it was still too cold.

I miscalculated.

We do that–teachers, parents, friends.

We do not always get it right or know what’s best.

But we rarely give up.

We keep trying, keep investing in hope

And color

And scent

And mulch.

We dwell in what Emily Dickinson called possibility.

I imagine the garden I hope to have someday—beds full of

larkspur and stock and snapdragons

In lavenders and pinks and blues–

Vivid, fragrant, plentiful,

Calling me to make bouquets

I have the peonies, but the heat has knocked

Their heads down,

Petals drooping, kissing the dry earth.

The flowers at the farmer’s market

stand in for my would-be garden.

Gardens, my best friend and I say to one another,

are life-long projects.

Cultivation takes work and care.

We always imagine we will do more than we can.

There is never enough time.

The weather is unpredictable.

We don’t always know which plants will thrive or wither.

Gardens.  School.

We are, all of us, always growing,   Grateful.

Happy summer!

White Knuckles in Winter

This piece originally appeared some years ago in the lovely publication, Mothers Always Write, sadly no longer in print or able to be seen on the web.

The voice from my phone instructs me to turn right. Atticus, hooked up to headphones, misses the first hill.  Whoever described the mid-West as flat has never driven from Cleveland to Millersburg, Ohio. Implacable, the tiny woman inside the GPS directs me to drive ten miles. Ten miles of hills on a snowy Saturday afternoon. Up, up, up. Then, at the crest, hoping, hoping no other vehicle would appear, we begin to descend. Slllooooowwwly. Brakes pumping. Steer into a skid? Steer out of a skid? My brain goes numb.

“Oh, my sainted aunt!”

“What, Mom? What did you just say?” My son tugs an earphone from his left ear.

“I said, ‘Oh, my sainted aunt’ because this hill is so steep. I do not like steep hills and I, especially, do not like steep hills covered in snow and ice.”

“You’re doing great, Mom. You’ve got this,” Atticus, thirteen, encourages. “Only 8.6 miles before we turn.”

8.6 miles? Not possible. I consider my options. There is no place to pull over. If there is a driving equivalent of trudging, we are doing it now. My pace is glacial to complement the weather. I am not a brave driver in the best of times, and these are definitely not those.

The accident on I-91 in 1983 when I lost control of my car as it slid on black ice is always with me.  My little hatchback had been crunched by not one but two eighteen-wheelers. I’d had students in the car with me on my way back from New York City to the boarding school in Massachusetts where I taught. I remembered screaming—out loud or to myself?—‘God, you cannot do this again to my mother and father.’ My brother had been killed in a car accident when I was fourteen. From the wintry wreck on the highway, the ambulance took us all to the ER—me and Isabel and Melissa.  I demanded a plastic surgeon to stitch the cut on Isabel’s forehead, my voice shrill with shock. Isabel was a model; her face needed to remain lovely. My mother had taught me long ago, “When it’s the face, Ann, always a plastic surgeon.” My own parents arrived, hurtling to Connecticut from Philadephia. I was twenty-two, inexperienced with insurance and having cars towed and figuring out how to get us all back to school, but, trembling, we made it back, picked up our lives. 

The policeman first on the scene had shaken his head, muttering, “There’s no way you all should have walked away from this accident.”  His words echo thirty-five years later, throbbing in my memory as I grip the steering wheel, trying not to let my son know my fear.

“Feel the fear and do it anyway,” is a mantra I often tell my own children and the girls in the school I lead. I often repeat these words to myself on highways when I am trying to pass an eighteen-wheeler and remember my accident. I had not expected to need them today.

A blizzard had dumped about a foot of snow on Cleveland the day before, but we woke to a chilly sun. The Varsity basketball team had been invited to the Classic in the Country, a big deal girls’ basketball invitational in our region.  My son, their would-be manager, was desolate not to be with the team.  I decided we’d make an afternoon of it and go.  If my husband were home, a little snow and ice would be no deterrent. Michigan born, he is an intrepid winter driver, scoffing at inclement weather.  I am much more timid, worried not only about other drivers, but also about my own aptitude. He was out of town, but, for once, I refused to be ruled by fear.

We packed water bottles and Terra Chips and set off. The first hour was easy on the highway. I had to use my wipers a fair amount, but we listened to game shows on NPR, and I tried to avoid thinking about the snippet of a weather forecast of snow in Akron that I heard, but ignored.  Maybe we weren’t headed towards Akron.  All was fine until the turn. 

The nice lady of the GPS instructed me to exit the highway and turn onto a narrow state route that climbed hills of alarming heights. At the crest of that first hill, I gasped. The descent was terrifying. Atticus took on the role of cheerleader for his nervous mother-driver, coaching me to go slowly. I thought about Eagles Mere in the winter and the toboggan slide that runs from the top of the hill down across the lake, people screaming as they whoosh past the windows of our house. I felt like screaming. We crawled down, sliding, grateful there were no other vehicles in sight. 

But a few minutes later there was another hill. The childhood game I used to play on a spread palm, “Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, whoops, Johnny” floated inanely through my head. I tried to breathe, tried to fight the fear, my comforting self-talk drowned out by the tension in my neck and shoulders. Then: worse and worse.  Amish buggies shared the road with us. I am entranced by all things Amish in good weather, but today, under lowering gray clouds, I imagined crashing my car, my son, myself into Amish buggies, horses’ legs flying out from under them, splaying on the ice, tiny bonneted Amish girls flying through the air and landing, limp. I tried to chase the image away, asked Atticus to distract me from myself. He prattled—the Cavs, stuff at school, his excitement about seeing our girls play. I managed my panic, moved into more of a Zen state, imagined the drive was like being in a long, long MRI machine. Someday it would end. We would arrive.

“How much longer on this road, Atticus?” I bleated.

“Only three more miles, Mom. You’re doing great. You’ve got this.”

We passed hay tipis, tidy farmhouses, their square-ness startling in the bleak landscape. The occasional car coming in the opposite direction reminded me of roller coaster cars swooping in opposite directions. I hate roller coasters. I noted all the shades of white:  white snow--new and old--bleached sky, blanched fields, alabaster salt on white roads, whiter with ice. I noted, too, the absence of snowplows, the torrent of flakes loosed from the sky, falling like goose feathers, like salt, like ivory flakes.  White, gray, black. The landscape seemed a 19th century etching, a black and white photograph, frozen. Lifeless—except for those buggies, most sensible Amish people huddled inside cozy homes, rich in hues that I could not see.

Finally, another turn onto another tiny road. 

More reassurance from my son. “You can do it, Mom. Only another half mile.”

I was beyond reason, but my son’s words soothed me, kept me, somehow, moving us—and the car—forward, despite my fear.  I hate when grown ups ask children to care take them, yet I was so grateful for my son’s caretaking, for his certain calm that all would be well. I, his mom, no longer an angelic vision of his toddler imagination, but a mortal, flawed and human. Still I was his mother; therefore, he trusted I would prevail. Finally, we crested another hill and saw the community recreation center beyond an incongruous traffic light, its yellow barrel waving in the windy afternoon, lights glowing red, yellow, green. Comforted, I resumed breathing. My legs trembled as I got out of the car. I allowed my shoulders to drop away from my ears. Atticus, unscathed, was thrilled to arrive in time to watch most of our team’s game. We feasted on chicken and noodles--a dish rarely offered at high school concessions stands--and washed it down with treacly homemade blackberry pie. When the game ended, Atticus asked, “Do we have to go now?”

“No way,” I retorted. I was in no shape to get back into the car, to face those roads.

“Hey, Ann,” Sharon, our Transportation Director at school, approached me on the bleachers. “It was worth it to stay on the highway, wasn’t it?”

“You stayed on the highway, Sharon?”  I asked, incredulous. 

“Yeah, the GPS suggested all these narrow roads, but I knew that was a no starter with the bus and with the weather, so I stayed on the highway. It was a little longer, but it felt much safer.”

Disbelief made me mute.

“Ann, you okay?” she asked kindly.

“I will be,” I stammered. “Is it easy to find the highway from here?”

“Oh, sure. Go out the driveway, turn right and it’s a little way down on the left.  Easy as pie.  You can follow me if you want.”

I laughed, a slightly insane laugh. All along, there had been another path. I would not have had to worry about the occupants of Amish buggies had I known.

We watched the next game and the next, lounging in the stands with our girls, critiquing the other teams, one of which we would confront later in the season.  Atticus and the girls talked strategy, noted various players’ strengths and vulnerabilities. Marveling at my son’s knowledge, I half listened, floating above myself, allowing my terror to dissipate.  I was grateful to imagine the drive home on a less dramatic route.

“Are we ever leaving, Mom?” Atticus asked, tentatively. “I didn’t think you liked driving in the dark.  I mean—I’m really happy to stay, but you…” His voice trailed off.  You are usually a wimp? You hate driving?  I appreciated his decision not to finish. 

“We’re going, buddy. Just a few more minutes.  Sharon told me a better way to get home.”

By the time we left, darkness had fallen, but the highways were plowed. My son listened to his music with his headphones. I listened to the radio.  I followed the signs easily, relaxed behind the wheel.  The drive home was deliciously dull. 

Dublin: The Easter Uprising Tour and My Conversation with Kelan

I was early for the Easter, 1916 Uprising Tour in Dublin, finding the address and realizing it was a pub. Atfter using the loo, I took a seat at the bar, marveling that many were drinking Guinness at 11:00 a.m. I ordered a ginger ale that I didn’t particularly want. A boy and two young-ish grandparents approached. I asked if they’d like me to shift down a seat, so they could sit together, but the grandfather was leaving, they explained,  so it was just the boy and his grandmother.

“He loves history,” she explained, “So I thought he would enjoy the tour.”

“Me, too.”

“Are you from America?” the boy asked. He had short brown hair, big brown eyes, was wearing a football sweatshirt and brown track pants with trainers. I judged him to be about eleven, only a few inches shorter than I.

“I am,” I answered.

“What part?”

“Cleveland—it’s in Ohio.”

“The Cavaliers!” he announced, excited.

“Indeed,” I confirmed.

Did I know LeBron? Not personally.

“Were you mad when he left?” he asked. We were. We introduced ourselves.  Grandmother asked what I did, and when I answered that I was a headmistress, they seemed impressed. She had just retired, a special ed teacher.

“For primary kids,” Kelan added for my benefit.

After about ten minutes, we were herded into the pub's basement—mildew-smelling with a sticky floor—and our guide offered some back story, the cast of characters in Ireland's rebellions.  As people began to spill out onto the sidewalk for the actual tour, I found Kelan at the narrow door.

“He wanted to wait for you,” Grandmother explained.

“You’re the first real American I’ve ever spoken to,” Kelan told me as we walked toward Dublin Castle, admiring the bottle caps embedded like so many primary-colored polka dots in the cobblestones in Temple Bar—red, green, blue.

“And you’re the first Irish boy I’ve spoken to in Dublin,” I confirmed. We established that he had finished sixth grade, that he had gone to an amusement park the day before and recommended I add to my itinerary, that I had been to Disney World but did not care for the scary roller coaster rides he loved, that he would love to go there someday. He explained that he studied Irish at school, but when I asked if he could read a sign, he demurred: “I'm not so good yet. It doesn’t get really hard until secondary school.”

Huddled near a door where some revolutionaries had been tortured, we discussed our experiences on the London Eye. We agreed it wasn’t at all scary because it went so slowly.

Dublin is a low city, sans skyscrapers.  When the tour guide celebrated this fact, Kelan pointed out and then dismissed the Dublin spire as pretty dumb compared to other cities’ signature monuments.

“The Eiffel Tower, for example,” I suggested.

“Or The Tower of London or Big Ben, or the—you know—the tall one in New York,” he added. 

“The Empire State Building.”

“Right!”

When our guide gesticulated, full of anecdotes told out of chronological order, Kelan and I listened attentively. His grandmother made friends with an older New Yorker on the tour. I did not feel the need to reveal my own NYC roots, preferring to chat with Kelan. In the spaces between sites, we talked, peeling off layers of clothing as the sun grew warmer.  He tied his sweatshirt around his waist; I carried my jacket over my arm.

Kelan reported that he loved basketball, that he was one of four boys. We noted bullet holes in statues, jubilant when we pointed them out to one another. Our guide’s passion entertained us, and we admired him, even if we giggled a bit at his enthusiasm.  I said I thought England had been a mess about religion with Henry VIII and all those wives, but Ireland seemed much, much worse. Kelan agreed.

We learned that Frederick Douglass had spoken in Dublin. On the way home on a boat, a racist American had threatened to have Douglass removed from the ship until an Irishman interjected, saying to the ugly man: ”If there’s any swimming to be done on this trip, it’ll be you who will be doing it.” Kelan and I pumped our fists, celebrating Irish heroism. We saw the Statue of Justice, her back to the people, learned of starvation and poverty, heard about plans gone awry, messages undelivered, ships full of ammunition sunk, and a fighting spirit that could not be dimmed. We imagined ourselves part of a fierce and failed rebellion as we gazed at the statue of Big Jim Larkin.

At the post office, our final stop, the tour guide, exhorted us always to break all the windows if we found ourselves in a siege and told, us, too, that history doesn’t always remember the winners; in Ireland, it is the patriots who are remembered for their resilience and determination to achieve independence. 

Suddenly the tour was over. Kelan and his Gran were off to meet his grandfather. We didn’t think to exchange names or emails. We walked off in separate directions.

Perhaps we aren't supposed to hang on to some experiences--we have them and let them go, balloons up into the sky.

But the next morning, before I left Dublin, I found myself in Dubray’s, searching the Young Adult shelves for The Guns of Easter.

“It’s the best book I’ve ever read,” Kelan confided, “You’ve got to read it.”

There was one copy on the shelf. I bought it and read it on the drive to Dingle.

Thoughts on Turning 62

What I wanted for my birthday was snow.  I woke up this morning and there it was.

However, we forgot to get applesauce yesterday for my birthday dinner of brisket and latkes (Thank you, Cole).  I wish the dogs were bigger; we could harness them to a sled and drive down Green Road to Heinen’s.

All year, I thought I was already 62, but until this morning, I was really 61—or, as my dad would say, “Until 1:30, when you were born, Ba’nann—no birthday until you’re born.”  So, even these musings are a few hours premature.

My brother used to say I was the worst Christmas present he ever got because Mom had to stay in the hospital over the holiday.  I had a lot of hair; Mom held me up to the window, so Rod and Lili could see me from the parking lot.  I do not know if there were enough dark curls for a bow.

I wonder how my father managed Christmas that year. Mom had already wrapped the presents, I suspect.  How she loved Christmas.

As a little girl, I was jealous of those with summer birthdays, and, as a young woman, I found the round of family gatherings that surrounded Christmas slightly tiresome—cocktails with the Rothermels, Christmas Eve Dinner at Aunt Anne’s, which I barely remember; then at Aunt Marim’s and Aunt Dodo’s, Christmas Day lunch at Grannie’s followed by the trek to Montclair. Now, I would be thrilled to travel back in time to see and spend time with all those relatives.

Now, I like having my birthday jammed in next to Christmas—it feels like a multi-day celebration.

Seth likes giving me one sock for my birthday and another sock for Christmas. I have grown to accept this pattern.

The absence of lights (and blow ups) on the front lawn of Lyman House this year because of Seth’s surgery makes me appreciate even more deeply the magic he typically makes for all of us.

When my mother was 62, I thought she was really old.  I suspect my children think the same of me.

I thought when I turned 62, I would feel different—seasoned, maybe, like a cheese or a fine wine. So far, I feel pretty much the way I did yesterday.

Do I feel 62? What is 62 supposed to feel like.

“You’re as young as you feel,” goes the cliché.  How young is that?

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” my dad used to say.  That enraged me.  “Yes, you can, if the dog is willing,” I would shout inside my head. I want to keep learning new tricks.

Age, I am beginning to think, minus the aches and pains, is another social construct.

But age is also feeling like a gift—as in having another year to celebrate, as in having the opportunity for memories that stretch back decades.

I have been a schoolteacher since I was 21 in 1982.

2 years at NMH.

20 years at Chapin.

19 years at Laurel.

We started ETC when I was 23; we married when I was 24 and Seth was 26. We were babies—lucky babies to grow up together. We ran a version of ETC for 27 summers.

Miranda was born when I was 32.

Cordelia was born when I was 34.

Atticus was born when I was 43.

When Miranda turns 30 next month, I will have been a mother with at least one child at home for 30 years—that feels like a long time, but, as Emily in Our Town says, “It goes so fast…Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?”  The Stage Manager tells her few people do.

Miranda hung a tiny wooden stocking on the tree last night that my mother had made for her for her first Christmas.

Our Christmas ornaments—and there are a lot of them—chronicles the history of our family. 

I used to think it was so strange that my mother would talk about events that had happened decades ago. Now, I do the same.

I started writing, for real, about a decade ago.

The author of Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus, was 65 when her novel was published. There is hope for me, still, and for this memoir.

Feeling glad I am 62—for real.

Ablative Absolutes. Queens and Corgis

An Ablative Absolute with a perfect passive participle is widely used in classical Latin to express the cause or time of an action.

Years ago, our little, daughter, drawing a picture asked about, “That lady, you know, the Queen of Dolphins.” Puzzled, my husband and I looked at each other—“the one who died,” Miranda insisted, “and Mommy was sad, early in the morning.”

Diana. Princess of Wales. I was sad when she died, too soon, a victim of a car-chase, maybe pregnant, definitely pursued. I was sad and mad at Charles for cavorting with Camilla, now his Queen Consort.

When I wake on Monday morning to watch the rigamarole, the sendoff for the Queen, Diana’s mother-in-law, I am conscious of her absence, conscious of little Charlotte, smaller than her brother and lower than many of the cameras. The Queen, one year older than my own mother, who has been gone a dozen years.

This Royal family about whom we know so little and assume so much: the dutiful Princess Anne; Harry being punished by not being permitted to wear his military dress; Andrew, a pedophile, restored to temporary honor by his brother; the feuding beauties: Kate and Meghan.  A real-life soap opera that draws us in and titillates—there is the personality and the person; it’s hard to keep track of which is which. Diana and I are the same age; when she married Charles, we believed in Laura Ashley fairy tales. As her sons followed their grandmother on the gun carriage today, I wondered if they were thinking about their mom. How lucky they were to have their grandmother alive so long. Maybe lucky. Who can know, really, what went on at Balmoral or Sandringham or Buckingham Palace? The Royals were curated long before Instagram.

 Say what you want about the British Empire—and, to be clear, we could say a lot—the pageantry is extraordinary. I wonder where they kept all those uniforms and how they knew the uniforms would fit because when was the last time all those people wore them? I wonder if all the shops stocked up on black dresses and coats and hats and stockings—just in case.  It bugs me that the standard on the Queen’s coffin clashes with the flowers placed with orb and scepter and crown on top, a note from Charles, the new king, tucked into the bouquet. The flowers are crimson and pink, rosemary and myrtle, from her wedding bouquet, planted after that big ceremony in 1947, when the queen was just a girl…I suspect she, who left nothing to chance, left instructions about which flowers to choose.  And when did they rehearse all these elaborate and elegant machinations?

Listening to my son prep for a Latin quiz on Monday night, I marveled that I once knew how to identify forms reliably in Latin. By now, I have forgotten more than I ever knew absolutely. Perfect passives.  All those translations. Gone. A man drones from a laptop about the ablative absolute.  Did the use a drone in the top of Westminster Abbey?  Nouns with participles.  Dolphins swimming; the Queen of Dolphins. The Princess of Wales.  Having marshalled the troops, Ceasar…Why couldn’t Harry wear his uniform when he’s one of the royals who actually served in the military in Afghanistan. Protocol. Etiquette. Still, there are always choices that can be made; there is always kindnesss, isn’t there?  There is nothing absolute or fixed about my mind on Monday. Later, after I have turned off the funeral and gone to school, but before the Latin studying, my daughter phoned, sad about her sister’s grandmother-in-law, whose hold on life is ebbing. “There’s nothing I can do,” she says, her voice throbbing. Nothing. Death is absolute. Having finished her life, she died. Woman, mother, sister, daughter, wife, aunt, grandmother, Queen—it doesn’t matter.  Death doesn’t discriminate—that’s from Hamiton—but the line floats through my mind all day. Even Queens and princesses and grandmothers  succumb, are missed and mourned, their absence notable.

I wonder again if they used a drone in Westminster Abbey; the choreography from above looks like ants moving deliberately. Did rehearsals begin the moment after the Queen died? IT was a huge production, flawless and with very little time to pull it off—was there a stage manager or the royal equivalent? They even stopped the planes. For two minutes, all of Great Britain went silent, a tribute to the Queen, the only monarch most of us have ever known. The Queen’s piper played a melody before the Grenadiers lifted her—how heavy is a casket carrying a not very large queen? They move carefully, one step at a time, around to face the entrance of the abbey.  I wonder what she’s wearing in her coffin? I imagine her in a bright canary yellow with her handbag but shake away the thought. What will I wear before I am burned up? No coffin for me, no gun carriage or bag pipes, either. She wore those colors to be seen, so her subjects could find her easily, to be noticed in a sea of men. She was a head of state and a woman.

“And then the dogs,” my daughter continued. Two corgis waiting for their mistress, wondering in Winsdor, perhaps, where she had gone off to. In photos, the dogs are darling, lolling at the end of their leads, quizzical.  And her pony, Emma, also waiting.  The  black pony is 26 and had a headscarf tied around her saddle.  It’s the headscarf that makes me weepy. The Queen loved her dogs and horses. I remember my own trip to St. George’s Chapel, listening to the boy choir at Evensong. The Queen was not in Windsor that night though she could have been. She was still riding at 90.

 “In my father’s house are many mansions.” The new Prime Minister, who was asked to form a government by the Queen only two days before she died, reads clearly, carefully.  “If it were not so, I would have told you.” I love those verses. Having gone and returned, the speaker promises there will be enough room. I imagine the Queen sipping tea, reunited with her Prince.  I imagine Diana and wonder what she would make of the Queen’s arrival in her world.  Would they be glad to see each other or would they avoid one another.

Other than the perfect participle, ablative absolutes are translated like any other participles—nouns behaving like adjectives. Camilla, behaving like a Queen, since Diana is long-gone. What other characters are not what they seem? And what is absolute, anyway, except for death and the loyalty of pets?

The Opposite of Numb

Yesterday, sometime between the end of a meeting about office space and an investment committee meeting, I learn of another school shooting, this time in Texas. Walking home across the parking lot after another meeting, I think about needing to write another letter—another letter to my school community about unspeakable horror. I did not write to parents about the shooting Buffalo less than two weeks ago. I worry that all I do is communicate tragedy.  But this time, it’s a school. The children are small.  The almost cloying scent of French lilacs fills my nostrils. Usually, I love their fragrance, but in the dusk, I think of funeral homes and lilies—their overpowering aroma--and tiny caskets. I think about mothers who kissed their babies goodbye, never thinking that harm would befall them in school.  I think about Sophronia Scott’s remarkable essay called Why I Didn’t Go to the Firehouse, which I read for a graduate school class about a year ago: https://www.timberlinereview.com/why-i-didnt-go-to-the-firehouse-sophfronia-scott/ Her child went to Sandy Hook School on the day of that shooting. I wonder how long it will take me to make sense of another tragedy and who will take care of the teachers in my school who take care of our children every day—whether or not there is a school shooting.

Passing the school buses and heading up our driveway, I think about how much I hate lockdown drills, the fact that we simulate what to do if a gunman came into our school and tried to kill us. I hate being the one to rattle the doorknob. The children have been taught not to let me in. Because you never know.  My friend Rob, who knows about security, says we do drills to buy time, seconds even.  I became a schoolteacher because I love stories—reading them, telling them, writing them.  And I love children.  I did not realize that lockdown drills would become part of the routine of school.

Once, during an ALICE training some years ago, I saw the fake gunman aim his Nerf gun at me, and I leapt upon Leighann, the drama teacher in our Upper School, whom I have known since she, herself, was a girl. Her daughter, Olivia, and my son, Atticus, grew up together, had playdates.

“If I cannot save myself,” I thought, “at least I can save Olivia’s mother.” We crashed to the ground, she startled and I, somewhere in between the reality of the drill and the terror of what could be. We laugh about it now, my clumsy impulse to save her life even as I was pelted with Nerf darts.

At home, I go about feeding the pets, ordering dinner, logging into a grad school class. I take refuge in routine, in tasks I can complete automatically. It is 9:00 p.m. before my crisis communication partner, Julie, and I open a Zoom room and face each other.  I do not ask my whole leadership team to log in—it is too late and too familiar--but I am grateful when our two Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging experts, Candace and Lauren, join us and our school psychologist, Ilissa. We are efficient, tired, numb. Julie had started the letter and I had edited it during my playwriting class, feeling guilty about my split focus, worrying about a grad school classmate, who lives in Texas, and whose face was drawn during our online class. The letter to families comes together quickly. Too quickly. The resources we share with parents about how to talk to children after a school shooting are easy to locate. Again. 

I close the letter with a benediction I love by Henri-Frederic Amiel: “Life is short. We don't have much time to gladden the hearts of those who walk this way with us. So, be swift to love and make haste to be kind.” It is all I can think to offer. I am out of words.

This morning I speak with my schoolteacher daughter, whose third graders are presenting a play today on Changemakers: Lynn Manuel Miranda, Maya Angelou.  Changemakers. Children. I place my hope in the children in our schools who will grow up, demand change. 

“What I am most afraid of is growing numb,” I tell my daughter.  “Inured. When we stop feeling, allowing ourselves to be affected—that’s when I fear who we will become.”

On the way back across the parking lot to school, I think about all the schoolteachers who brushed their teeth, made coffee, buried their fear, and headed to school to be a reassuring presence in the lives of children who rely on them to smile and offer structure and routine.  Teachers are superheroes. They are a different kind of first responders.  ‘

The only way to avoid becoming numb is to keep feeling, to allow horror to wash over me.  In college, one of my most inspiring professors, Dorothee Metlitski, herself a Holocaust survivor, talked to us in every course I took with her about man’s inhumanity to man.

“What does that mean?” one of my ninth graders asked last week during one of our final English classes.

I turned the question back to her. “What do you think it means?”

“It’s about being cruel, one person to another.”

“Right,” I affirm, “And it’s the most important thing to fight against.”

The young person who killed the children yesterday; the young person who killed people in Buffalo—both were 18 years old. They could buy guns, but not yet drink alcohol. I am the opposite of numb; I am stretched taut like a violin string, like a wire vibrating with fury and impotence. I do not want a world in which children murder children.  

Into Your Hands

A few weeks ago at school, a third grader asked if she could pet my nail.

“Pet it?” I asked.

She nodded, brown eyes full of hope.

“Okay,” I said, stretching out my hand.

She reached out a tentative finger, stroked my fourth finger.

“It’s not wet,” she announced, surprised.  “I thought it would be wet.”

Another classmate, wise in the ways of nails, offered, “It’s just shiny.”

“And sparkly,” added another child.

And sparkly. 

Painting my nails is my luxury, an indulgence, a habit.  I do not have much of a beauty regime. My hair is most often found escaping from my bun. Beyond my love of clothes, a proclivity for Victorian earrings and the hasty application of eye makeup and lipstick, I make few daily nods to beauty. I was raised by a mother who was the opposite of vain; she was beautiful and lithe in her youth, a wavy dark pageboy framing her oval face, but though she could have worn clothes like a model, she was completely uninterested in fashion. By the time I was out of college, she favored elastic waist pants—an option in which I, too, delight—thank you, Chico’s—and turtlenecks, a style I detest.  She went to the hairdresser weekly but ignored her hair entirely between visits.  Her skin was as dry as mine, but she eschewed lotions.  I do remember Mom dressed up for an evening out in some gorgeous silk sheath tucked into a fur coat, carrying an evening bag and a handkerchief drenched in scent, but nothing beyond powder and lipstick. What I remember most was the coolness of her mink, the lustre of her pearls or sparkling diamond circle pins worn at her shoulder.

I do not often have my hair done; I like having it washed and having someone else blow it out, but my limp fine hair does not stay tidy for long; I can feel it losing its careful curls or flying away from the spray almost as soon as I leave the salon. I’m one of a handful of women my age with long hair.  This dates from a traumatic cut at 16 when the stylist said to me, “Of course you can use a round brush and what do you mean you need your hair long for the theatre?” She was full of disdain and explained that anyone could learn to blow out her hair and get the “wings” to sweep back from one’s head.  I was, apparently, the one person who could not. I looked preposterous—as soon as my hair grew out, back it went, secured away from my face in a ponytail or on top of my head in a bun. I love the silver streak I inherited from my mom, but I’m often the only one who sees it in, hidden as it is inside my bun.  

On my fiftieth birthday, shortly after my mom’s death, my husband sent me to Canyon Ranch with five friends. There, a representative from Laura Mercier was doing make overs, and we all succumbed, buying the requisite “must have” products. The lovely saleswoman approved my eye makeup routine, teaching me only how to blend a little better in my advanced years and reminding me that concealer was not just for acne but also useful for bags underneath one’s elderly—yet puffy—eyes.

My husband says I can get ready to go out faster than anyone he knows, and this is an odd point of pride for me. I’m not high maintenance when it comes to beautifying.  But there is one ritual I cannot forego.  Every other week, I have my fingernails painted. 

As a young woman living in NYC, though I noticed nail salons on every corner, it did not occur to me that I, a mere mortal, could walk in and have my nails done. A teacher colleague invited me to join her one Friday afternoon, and for $7, I purchased glamour! It’s a slippery slope—nail painting.  Once, one has lovely fingers and toes, it’s hard to go back to naked ones.  The toes got in on the act, too, when I wasn’t even noticing.  In labor with our babies, I focused on my berry-hued toes as I breathed through contractions.  My friend Beth filled me with awe, leaving the salon with wet nails and never, ever messing them up. I always stayed for the ten-minute waiting period, enjoying a shoulder massage,  and still often managed to mar a nail on the way home!

When we moved to Ohio, I said goodbye to the ladies on the corner of York and 86th and discovered Avalon in Beachwood Place. Run by Jen who was efficient and funny, Avalon became my refuge.

I justified the expense of a manicure because I had developed a split on the fourth finger of my right hand; when it’s not painted, it cracks all the way down and is quite painful in the way that small, invisible defects can be.  I decided I would be a Head of School with lovely nails.  The head for whom I worked in Manhattan always had a manicure; she just selected more neutral tones than my own lively selections. 

Every other week, I gave myself over to the fun of choosing a shade of purple—my nails are almost always purple, though today they are teal. I loved the limbo of the hour—being responsible to no one, listening to Vietnamese language swirl around me. I learned the cast of characters—Jen and her husband, her sister, Liz, and Megan, who became “my manicurist.”  Once, when a customer was impossibly rude to Jen, I said I was happy to cede my spot in the queue.  Jen, almost always able to keep her cool, was shaken by the woman—I was happy that I could do something tiny to help. On the day I learned of my father’s death, I went, mechanically, to have my nails done, Jen, kindly ministering to me as I tried to make sense of a life without my father in it. 

When Jen and Liz closed Avalon, I followed Megan to USA Nails, a little further away in Golden Gate.  Mindy became my person; she is gentle, knows I hate to have my cuticles clipped, managed around my cast and braces on my right hand for months and months. She is a constant in my life.  At her encouragement, I switched from gel to dip, though I worry for both of us about the acrid chemical smell of the process—I’m glad we are both masked!  I like the forced lack of productivity, sometimes daydreaming or eavesdropping on the conversations around me. The dynamics of nail techs interest me, but it feels rude to inquire who is connected to whom. Mostly, I surrender and enjoy the moments when Mindy massages lotion into my palms. 

When the pandemic hit, I had to stop having my nails done. I learned how to superglue a tiny piece of a teabag to my nail to keep it from splitting. But now that we are living with Covid, I’ve decided to risk resuming manicures. They make me happy.  And I don’t think manicures rise to the level of vice.  So, I plan to continue to indulge. 

On Being Mothered and Mothering

Happy Mother’s Day to those who mother and are mothered—in all ways—conventional and unconventional—that we care for one another. These single-day celebrations irritate me; mothers are mothers day in and day out. Some mother who are not taking care of children; some mothers stink. Still, today. I am awake early thinking about the privilege it is to have children—our choice—to be able to raise them, knowing that they are not ours, but we are theirs, and to watch them emerge into adulthood, to bear witness to their strengths and vulnerabilities as their champion.

 Last night, I pinned a white rose boutonniere to my son’s lapel for his Junior Prom.  He is taller than I am now, his face his own, but in it are our daughters’ features and my husband’s, too.  This week, I have sat near him in the dining room as he prepped for his AP US History exam, offering tea, but mostly trying simply to be a calming, loyal presence. It seemed the less I said the better. My suggestions typically got an eye-roll. When I made him Silent Night tea, he accused me of drugging him. I grinned. I was glad he allowed me to be near.

 At a doctor’s appointment in the city last week, our second daughter, Cordelia, saved the day, zipping back across Central Park in the rain to retrieve my belongings and helping me change in a tiny hospital bathroom, so I could be presentable for an elegant lunch.  I had demurred when she offered to accompany me to the hand surgeon; I am so glad she insisted.

 “No, Mom. You are not taking a bus and a train and another bus to get to Dingle,” my oldest daughter, teacher by day and personal assistant cum travel agent by night, scolds over the phone.  “I’ve booked you a car.  You do not need to wrench your shoulder alone in Ireland.  You’re worth it.” The luxury feels too indulgent, but part of me is delighted to give way, touched by her ferocious attention to my well being.

These days,I feel more mothered by our three children than the one who mothers them.  The balance has shifted. Often, I suspect our children consider us dithery and ineffectual, one step up from luddites, practically ready for the home. They shake their heads at the colors we have chosen to paint the Watts House. They cluck at our choices, roll their eyes.  Yet, they love us. I know they do, but the ways in which I can show my love have changed.

 The easy days are done. Dry diapers or more milk no longer suffice. In the beginning, we feel overwhelmed by all the needs they have that we must meet, but those are satisfying months—we believe we can fix things with a tighter swaddle or a new stroller. We feel sleep-deprived but learn competence. Now, my children are too big for me to hoist onto my hip, to distract with endless rounds of the Itsy Bitsy Spider, to amuse with finger puppets. They no longer climb into my lap to read picture books on Saturday mornings or ask to do art projects with macaroni. They do not need an elaborate bedtime routine comprised of songs and stories. They rarely request counsel about friendship issues or school drama or outfits—well, sometimes, outfits, especially if I am paying. They do not need to be told much anymore.  It is harder to offer comfort, to feel their needs are being met. Yet, they are remarkable—accomplished, funny, smart, determined. They care about human rights and the world and one another and about our family. They love their grandparents and Eagles Mere. Two of them have partners for life, and I love those new members of our family as well. The day-to-day mothering is evanescent, fleeting. Once Atticus leaves home, I will still be a mother, of course, but not one who makes dinner or races to Nordstroms for emergency suit alterations for Prom. I will miss being needed in those urgent, every day ways.

We waited so long for our children, hoped and hoped for their arrival, but infancy and toddlerhood and the awkward Middle School haircuts fly by; now, they are grown—or almost grown.  And their care—no longer expressed in cinnamon toast or Café Français on a Mother’s Day breakfast tray replete with a vase of tulips or lilacs—made with much squabbling and a mess for me to clean up later—has given way to other kinds of care.  It’s a funny and wonderful thing to be loved by grown children. Do I miss pigtails and matching frocks, stuffed animals and Cordelia’s sparkly red Dorothy slippers and make-believe? Do I miss trips to the Carl Schurz playground and the Merry-go-round and playdates and elaborate birthday parties and the Halloweens of their childhood? Absolutely.  Would I trade who my children are now for another chance at childhood? Not a chance. Now I have grand-dogs and grown ups and wise women and a chauffeur and a son-in-love and a daughter-in-law and so many more ways to be loved. I am lucky.

The question I ask today on Mother’s Day is how to show my love when it is needed in less obvious ways. How to stay present with the right amount of care and love and support and listening?  How to put my phone down and not worry about something at work when our son needs to talk? How to offer counsel on careers or the college process that hits the right note? How can I adjust a bridal veil or coo over an engagement video or pin a boutonniere so they feel the expansiveness of my love but not the burden? I suspect they will tell me if I get it wrong.  But how great on the days when I get it right and they allow me to mother them just a little bit.  What a privilege to have walked beside them on their journey of growing up.

Vanquishing Churlishness

On International Women’s Day, I felt churlish and did not post anything celebratory on social media.  I forgot, still partially existing in the pandemic world, to gather our students together in the gym to talk about the day. It was opportunity missed.  Women—internationally and domestically--deserve more than one day. Equity for women cannot be achieved until equity for all has been achieved. None of us are free until all of us are free. Years ago, I heard Gloria Steinem speak about the way indigenous peoples used circles to promote equity. Men and women were considered equals.  At Severance Hall, Steinem explained that idea that we cannot achieve real equity in bits and pieces; inequities for one group are inextricably linked to inequities for another group.  There is much work to do to level the proverbial playing field.

Even in the terrific school I lead, I worry that we occasionally prioritize compliance over empowerment. We want our students to claim their voices but can be discomfited  when those voices are too strident, too critical.  Systemic change and resistance, throughout history, have often been spurred by young people The energy younger people have to fight for change is a source of inspiration, a reminder of why doing the work for change matters.  We build on the efforts of those who have come before us.

The day after International Women’s Day, I visit the Kindergarten.  The girls are eager to show me the rain forest they have created in their classrooms.  They’ve made an enormous paper tree, cut out leaves, hung emerald tulle, created blue construction paper rivers. Olive shows me a jaguar resting on a tree branch and a pink river dolphin. Another little girl shows me a sloth.  Leah explains she has asked the anaconda (made from many green loops) not to bite me because I am the Head of School.  I thank her. While some are excited to show off their animals, others are coloring leprechauns, and Sascha invites me to join her in looking for one.  How delicious to be young enough to believe a leprechaun might be hiding in the reading nook.  Then, Olive takes me by the hand and pulls me into the hall.

“I wrote that by myself,” she declares, pointing, “in my own handwriting.  On a pink banner, beneath a bulletin board full of portraits of women who inspire the girls, she has written: We honor EvrY Stroing Women in the Wrld Hray!  She is so proud.  I am proud, too.

The mission of our school is “To inspire each girl to fulfill her promise and to better the world.” Olive reminds me that it has always been the young who help society move forward.  She is a little girl whose belief in a world where women inspire women is firmly in tact. I squeeze her hand.

“That’s amazing,” I tell her, smiling,

“My mom’s amazing,” she smiles, “She’s a doctor.  She makes people feel better.”

Sitting at my desk later that day, it occurs to me that, Olive, too, is a healer. She has cured me, shaken me loose from my ennui. 

My churlishness, I realize, is a form of privilege. That I can indulge in feeling dispirited is because other women have fought so hard for girls to be educated, for women to vote, to be elected to office, to be equal. There is no shame in needing a rest, but Olive’s belief in her mom acts like a tonic.  I shake off my weariness and to keep moving forward--for Olive, for all the little girls yet to come. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us; we have an obligation to carry as we climb. I have work to do—every day—in leading my own small school, in working to better the world.

Jen Stratton: Word Warrior

I wish Jen Stratton and I had desks in the same office.  While I had no way of knowing that the day Kate connected me with Jen, my life would change, every conversation I have with Jen makes me long to spend more time with her. In schools, so much happens between and among colleagues because of proximity and relationships. Friendships emerge in the spaces in between. I cover your study hall or recess duty because we share an office, and I know you are overwhelmed because your mother is ill or your little one didn’t sleep last night. You are the person who knows I crave dark chocolate and leaves a piece on my desk.  Work relationships sustain us; it is good to work alongside people who mirror our passion for teaching and for children. But my work with Jen is virtual; she is my mentor and I am her intern as I pursue my M.F.A. through Bay Path University. We are both married to men named Seth, who share our dreams for using our talents to better the world.

Jen inspires me and has offered me new ways of looking at the world though I am her intern and she my mentor, though she is a higher ed professor and I a ninth grade English teacher, though she is still in the thick of raising children, and my Junior son will, we expect, leave us next year. She is a prodigious researcher and finds solace in the natural world. I, too, can quickly go down a research rabbit hole and love the natural world, but suspect I wade and Jen dives. She is knowledgeable, smart, measured, but beware crossing her–beneath her outward calm, she is a warrior, armed with words.  We are different ages, different stages, but I feel as if I have found more than a kindred spirit; she has ignited in me a passion for representation, especially the representation of children and adults with physical disabilities. I feel like her humble acolyte, ready to join her in the quest she devises. 

In December, we jumped into our collaboration without knowing each other’s stories. So, recently, I asked her to take me back in time before she wrote Nick Springer On the Move.  Always generous and so thoughtful, she offered me her own backstoryGrowing up in Springfield as a first generation college student, Jen had an English professor at U Mass Amherst, who stepped in at a challenging time in her life, sharing books with her.  This kindness inspired her to pay it forward, and she decided on a career in education, assuming she would teach high school English.  Experiences working with younger children convinced her that she might make a greater impact teaching younger children.  After receiving a Master’s Degree at Wheelock College, she coordinated a volunteer read aloud program in the Boston Public Schools, ultimately becoming a third grade teacher and then, as she fell more and more in love with unlocking the mysteries of teaching reading to young children, she did what she said she would never do and taught a multi-age  Kindergarten-First Grade classroom.  Along the way, she acquired a second Master’s as a reading specialist.  

Jen narrates this portion of her life as if progress was linear, though we know any such summary leaves out as much as it includes. When her first son was born prematurely, Jen realized she could not go back to work full time; Nolan’s needs were acute. Understanding that she and her husband needed more family support, Jen and Seth moved back home to Western Massachusetts.  

“Suck, swallow, breathe,” she explained calmly.  That was the sequence Nolan needed to learn; he would forget to breathe while nursing.  Over and over again, Jen and a host of therapists taught him all he needed to learn to survive.  His diagnosis of apraxia, an invisible disability, required him to learn how to do everything.  His first language was sign language.  Jen, working part-time as a reading specialist, spent her life immersed in  the alphabet soup of interventions Nolan required: PT, OT, Speech. Nolan’s needs plunged Jen into the world of disability.  Apraxia feels particularly cruel to me.  A quick Google search explains, “Apraxia is a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to perform learned (familiar) movements on command, even though the command is understood and there is a willingness to perform the movement. Both the desire and the capacity to move are present but the person simply cannot execute the act.”(https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/apraxia/)

Daughter Caitlin arrived two years later, and by then, Jen had re-established her career and was working full-time as a professor at Springfield.   

Jen’s husband’s cousin, Nick Springer, was a paralympian, and Jen had a poster of him on her office door. Caitlin asked if she could take the poster into school for show and tell. Nolan and Caitlin both wanted to share Nick’s story with their classes, but when Jen wrote to Caitlin’s Kindergarten teacher to say Caitlin was bringing in the poster, the teacher objected, saying the poster of Nick would scare the children.

As Jen recounted this story, nine years later, her eyes flashed across the Zoom screen. I had an image of Athena prepared for battle.  She was angry.  When the principal phoned, in response to the teacher’s email, which Jen had forwarded, Jen said, “It’s not if Caitlin brings the poster, it’s when.  Do you want to talk about discrimination? Does the teacher understand her presumption that every child is a member of an able-bodied family?”  I wish I could have heard her–I suspect she was magnificent.  Unsurprisingly, the principal did not want to talk about discrimination, but did join Caitlin in the classroom the day she told Nick’s story. Both children ultimately shared the poster and Nick’s story.

As Jen apologized to Nick for the Kindergarten teacher’s ignorance, Nick soothed her, “It’s okay, Jen, it happens,” but Jen was mortified, devastated and embarrassed.  Jen thought, “I teach teachers. How could this happen? Why is it happening?” and in her search for answers, began to look for the representation of physical disabilities in children’s literature. She found very few. So, she knew she had to write a book about Nick, but to make a faster impact, she started a blog.   

While all that was going on, Jen and her husband brought another child into their family. They had been exploring international adoption, but the process was not proceeding smoothly.  One day, Jen got a phone call about a high-need child from China who needed to be adopted; he was  a congenital amputee missing an upper limb..  His birthday was May 9th, the same date as Nolan’s birthday..  

When Jen and her husband returned from a walk–Jen often resolves problems and finds inspiration in walking–they shared Ian’s story with Nolan and Caitlin. Caitlin said, “Oh, we’re his family. We need to be his family cuz we know he can do anything.” 

While they worked on bringing Ian home, Jen began researching how to write a children’s picture book. Once she had the manuscript, she had some editors look at it and went to writing conferences to pitch it.  One literary agent wanted the gory details of Nick’s fight against meningitis; Jen was repulsed by the agent’s fascination with the macabre; it felt exploitative to her. Nick’s decision not to use prosethes. Because the publishing world is very much dominated by able-bodied men, Jen wondered if trying to tell the story of a quad amputee to children was simply too iconoclastic.  She decided she would work only with a disabled illustrator and artist. Serendipitously, at a roller-blading party seven year old Ian was invited to early in his time in Springfield, a mom struck up a conversation with Jen and asked if she was familiar with Mouth and Foot Painting Artists. She shared a card with Jen, who thought, “This is perfect,” and reached out. In the staff at Mouth and Foot, Jen discovered people as passionate as she about telling Nick’s story.  Kate understood the importance of telling this story. Jim demanded it be printed in hardcover, so it would literally “stand up” and hold space on the shelf. Chris, the illustrator, told Jen to send him what she was thinking. He translated  Jen’s vision–demonstrated, she explained,  in clumsy stick figure drawings–and turned them into pictures.  Chris was as edgy and funny as Nick; the two of them spoke, and Jen loved that they shared a feisty determination, the opposite of any treacly, overly sweet stereotype of a person living with a physical disability.  

The publication of Nick Springer On the Move was slowed by the pandemic—it was supposed to be earlier, but Chris got sick. Then, the book was being printed in Canada and  Covid shut down the plant. Then, unexpectedly, Nick died.  They had planned to release the book in late summer of 2021 in time for the paralympic games, but they moved the date up to June 9th, Nick’s birthday.  Nick saw the digital copy and was so excited; they made a decision about the back cover. They were all thrilled. His passing has left a huge hole for Jen and for her family.

Yet, even in her grief, she wrote another picture book, this one about  Dr. Ludwig Guttman, Father to the Paralympic Games. Dr. Guttman fled the Nazis and settled in Stoke Mandeville, where he oversaw a unit of patients with spinal cord injuries. Expected to die, the patients arrived at the hospital in lidless coffins; they were fully casted and died of urinary infections.  Guttman ditched the coffins and the casts and had patients rotated every two hours. First, he brought in cobbler’s benches and jewelry stations for the patients to do things; then he introduced sports.  Jen wants children to know his story–like Nick, Dr. Guttman was full of grit and determination and a refusal to let life flatten him.  Jen was able to interview Guttman’s daughter; that recorded interview is now part of the National Heritage Paralympic Trust in Stoke-Mandeville.  She has sent the book out to agents, but has not yet heard back.

Early on in my internship, Jen and I connected with the Perkins School for the blind; I suspect, knowing her love of research, that another book will emerge from those conversations. Additionally. She is planning another picture book for young children with illustrations of parents and children with physical disabilities.  

As we concluded our conversation, I asked a few more questions. 

Like me, reads several books at a time. Right now, she’s in the midst of three: Overcoming Dyslexia by Dr. Sally Shaywitz and Hawking, a new graphic novel about Stephen Hawking.  She’s re-reading Pema Chodron’s  When Things Fall Apart, one of my own favorites. If she could wave a magic wand and have more time, she would want to be able to walk in the natural world and have time to read and wite; she describes being on a bridge in Boothbay, Maine, surrounded by family, laughing and talking, eating good food, watching the sunset, and ultimately looking up at the stars. 

We end our conversation thinking about what it means to spend time with those we love who are with us physically and with us in memory. I wish I had known Nick, but believe, more than ever, my job is to help Jen continue to share his story.  

At some point during our call,  I asked what her personal mission statement would be. She picked up a pen and deliberated for a moment: To live with intention and purpose. I think she does this–every single day.  She is a woman of conviction, an advocate, an ally, a warrior with words. And she is my mentor.  

Jen writes: On the day that Nick’s book arrived in the mail, Caitlin grabbed it, ran outside and started reading it under a tree. Ian followed and sat there listening to every word. I watched them both in awe, feeling Nick close, and knowing that his story was in the hands of the next generation.

I Wrote a Letter to My Love...

I have been thinking about the pleasure of letters—of writing them and of receiving them. Real letters on paper in ink, sent in an envelope with a stamp.  I write a lot. By which I mean, I put words into emails and blog posts and essays and comments on 9th grade English papers and texts to my family. Those who know me well know I favor Lamy fountain pens and that purple ink is my favorite, but much of my writing—except for correcting papers or notes I take during meetings—happens via my fingers on a keyboard.

I miss writing letters and receiving them. Even this year’s Christmas cards mostly contained only a dashed “love you” or a typed message about all that had transpired in a year—I admire people who send holiday cards at all—we haven’t for years—and I love charting the growing up of children in photos, but they don’t really count as letters for me.  I miss the kinds of letters where we work out what we think as we write them, where we pour out our hearts, trusting that the reader understands that strangely pulsing muscle in the center of our being. I miss finding a letter from a friend or student in my mail, punctuating the inevitable bills and circulars. I even miss my dad’s missives, scrawled in blue Flair pen on yellow legal pads, often containing an Ann Landers column or an article about Katherine Hepburn or Princess Diana, two of his idols.

I have come of age between two eras—the one when we wrote by hand and the one in which we live now where I tap, tap, tap letters on my laptop. I don’t need to wait for ink to dry.  I do, sometimes, have to wait for those three pulsing dots on a text—will the person respond?  Yes? No. But instantaneous communication, while good for things like what time a plane lands or could you pick up broccoli is less satisfying for the kinds of musings I am missing. Even this blog—Should I choose, I could post it almost instantly, though perhaps its quality would be improved if I waited, paused, re-read it in the morning.  I’m out of the habit of the waiting that letter writing and receiving requires.

In the bottom drawer of my desk upstairs are piles of letters. Marie Kondo might suggest I thank them for the pleasure they have brought and toss them. After all, do I want my children reading letters from people they never met? There are so many—from former students like my Laura, who was one of the best correspondents ever and whose loopy purple penmanship is instantly recognizable though she has been gone a long time now or from my dear friend Steven, also gone now, whose square, specific print revealed his designer sensibility, even in the way he addressed the envelope. His letters were filled with wit and kindness?  I had few beaux before my husband and even fewer who wrote to me, but Seth wooed me with letters, beautiful ones that I like re-reading from time to time.  His letters that convinced me I was enough—lovely enough, smart enough, funny enough—what a gift those letters were.  I would not mind my children reading those.  The others?  It feels sacrilegious somehow to throw them away.  Do I keep them to recall relationships that mattered to me, even if they were fleeting?  Perhaps.

A friend of mine who taught with me early in my teaching career lost his father unexpectedly. He quit his job and drove across the country.  My own brother’s death was still fresh enough that when my friend wrote to me about his breaking heart, I answered with long letters in which I tried to work out the puzzle for myself—though I believed it was for him—about what to do with all our love when the person we love so much leaves us forever.  They were not love letters; rather they were letters about love.  He introduced me to, among others, Thomas Merton, and we wrote back and forth for several years. I’d read his letters several times, thinking about what I might offer, how to stretch a thread of companionship from my life at a desk in a tiny greenhouse off of the bedroom of our apartment to his grief in a green SAAB a world away.  We do not see each other often and occasionally I’ll send him a text--You okay?—like casting a fishing line. Sometimes, he answers.  Sometimes, he doesn’t.

 Alone over spring break, I watched Jane Campion’s film, Bright Star, a beautiful story about two young people falling in love.  John Keats was penniless when he met equally impoverished Fanny Brawne; she was a flirt, a seamstress, a girl who loved dancing. He was a frail and serious brilliant poet. Few had any inkling of his greatness, including Fanny, who found poetry complicated and hard to understand. Marriage was impossible for the couple.  But love was not.  Love cannot governed by society’s rigid rules. Fairly early in the film, Fanny received a Valentine, and I recognized the feeling of her pulse speeding up as she opens the carefully rendered note only to discover it is from the wrong man, not from Keats but his patron, Mr. Brown. Her disappointment made me ache, the way only a much older woman aches in remembering what it is to be deep in crush or love or besottedness.  Love prevails; Fanny creates a butterfly garden in her room to remind her of their fragile, all-cosuming love—the act of creating the butterfly garden is so adolescent, so gorgeous, so over the top, and such a perfect way of showing how she can think of nothing but her love. Butterflies flit about, landing on her nightdress and her little sister’s fingers.  When she does not receive a letter from Keats, she is despondent. When she does, she holds it close, reading and re-reading it, as if she is holding him. Eventually—you already know the ending of this sad tale—Keats goes to Italy to try to cure his tuberculosis where he dies. Fanny is bereft, left to walk the heath reciting his exquisite verses for the rest of her life.  Alone in our TV room, I wept, listening to Keats’ words and sorrier, still, that he died, believing himself to be a failure. 

And from Keats, my mind jumps to those familiar verses from First Corinithians:

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Growing up is not always all that it is cracked up to be.  Reminiscing feels like seeing through a glass darkly. I’m not sure I have ever put away childish things. I hope I never disparage the love those younger than I find all consuming.  Why do those of us who have lived longer think it appropriate to say condescendingly, “It’s just a crush.”  Are we so cynical or have we forgotten what it is to give oneself over to love, to risk being so vulnerable to another soul.  Another friend, who writes faithfully to his three daughters, as my own dad did, says he writes as much for himself as for his girls—that reminds me of why I write—to make sense, to share a question or a memory, to connect.  

I am glad Fanny had Keats’ letters to read; perhaps she didn’t read and re-read them. Perhaps it was too painful. I love reading old family letters, trying to imagine the daily lives of relatives I didn’t know—an uncle writing from the Beachhead at Anzio, an elegant aunt writing from Bar Harbor and Newport, a great-grandfather instructing his grandsons…we write to record, to put our thoughts down.  No one is going to lift this laptop from a pretty marble-papered box and read and re-read what I have written. But letters?  I think it’s time to bring them back.

One Writer's Musings

Working with Jen Stratton reminds me that there is much more to books than writing!  I met Jen after she had published Nick Springer on the Move. I was not privy to her writing process, though I know she was inspired by her own relationship with Nick to write his story. Before his death about a year ago, she and he did numerous presentations together. I know, in her grief, that it has been challenging for her to move forward solo.  While I can’t assuage her sorrow, I hope by getting his story to more people, I am helping to amplify her commitment to sharing his story. 

We have discussed Jen’s interest in writing a children’s book that features adults and children with physical disabilities, but our conversation focused on centering all kinds of people, on normalizing physical disabilities as more routine than extraordinary. I’ve asked friends for ideas and leads.  When I reported back that one acquaintance had recommended a particular conference in NYC, Jen shook her head.  There are so many barriers to access—money, figuring out how to navigate spaces that are unfriendly to people with physical disabilities.  Able-bodied people take for granted that everyone is like them. Her reaction startled me—I, too, as an able-bodied writer and person, had not realized all the obstacles that are routine for those with physical disabilities and those writers, like Jen, who consider how accessible events or locations might be.

Jen’s work as a writer and as a professor of literacy inspire me and have made me think a lot about my own blind spots as a teacher and writer.  I’m tuned into representation—in terms of class and race and faith and family structures, but talking with Jen and thinking about the gap in children’s literature in terms of physical disability has asked me to consider more deeply other blind spots. I know I write as a 61-year-old, white, straight, married woman of privilege. I have spent my adult life as a teacher, spent the past 29 years as a mother. I think it’s useful to be doing an internship with a mentor who has gently and kindly challenged me to a greater awareness of all I had not perceived until spending time with her.

In a writing workshop recently, another student challenged my vocabulary—it was too fancy, she protested, too erudite.  She had to look up several words. First, I felt chastened, then defensive. Is my writing elitist? Maybe.   As a writer, I asked the parents of a child who uses a wheelchair for mobility to read a post I had prepared some weeks ago for grad school. The mother and I had a good conversation. She recommended that I remember the mantra “person first-disability second” as I wrote. I recognize that It’s important for me to acknowledge and accept all I don’t yet know or understand about the world Jen evokes so thoughtfully in her own work. I’m a beginner with a beginner’s mindset, trying to learn as much as I can and humble about the mistakes I have made and surely will make again.

And then there’s the call to action.  Last night, I listened to a talk by Jacqueline Winspear, author of the Maisie Dobbs series that I adore. Maisie is a psychologist, a nurse and a private detective; in the books. She solves mysteries, but Winspear has succeeded in creating a world that feels familiar and three-dimensional. When she understood she was writing a series, she asked herself what topics were important to cover.  Everyone in Maisie’s world is treated with respect and dignity. I aspire to be as calm and methodical as Maisie, who uses meditation and intuition as easily as she uses analysis and evidence.  I found myself wondering about what I will write—maybe after my memoir—about teaching and learning, how my time with Jen will influence the stories I choose to tell, how I might bring more of Jen and Jacqueline Winspear into my own prose.  It’s a tall order, but one I’m looking forward to considering.

Surprise, Surprise

Surprise, Surprise

First reading Nick Springer on the Move, I wondered how I could possibly be of use to my internship mentor, Jennifer Stratton.  She is passionate about adaptive sports, access, paralympians.  No one would call me sporty.  I knew next to nothing about disability or athletics or the intersection of the two. In third grade, fascinated by Helen Keller, I learned to finger spell, but now my fingers are stiff, and I can’t make the letters automatically anymore. In college, I learned rudimentary ASL to sign songs in our children’s theatre productions, but I was never fluent.  As a  drama teacher, I have often blindfolded one person in a pair and asked the unblindfolded person to lead their partner on a trust walk.  And, it’s true that our daughters attended an inclusive nursery school in NYC.  But my resume in this area feels slender at best.  How could I possibly be of use?

When Jenn and first spoke, we talked a little bit about the versions of disabled people we meet in children’s literature. I came up with Colin in The Secret Garden. He is frail and ill and not very likable, but neither is Mary Lennox. Both are healed by spending time outside and in finding some modicum of hope by attending to reviving the neglected garden. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, I recalled that Mary, Laura’s older sister, went blind.  She behaved better than Laura from the outset; blindness made her seem almost saintly.  Who else?  Ada in The War That Saved My Life, a book our fourth graders love. While our daughters’ library consciously included racial diversity, we had never considered physical disabilities as an important aspect of inclusion.

Jenn explained that Nick, a family member, had died last spring.  I felt sad. She had written his story, one full of inspiration, and illustrated by an artist, Chris Kuster, who held the paintbrush with his mouth!  Yet Nick was gone. How to get others to know and share his amazing story? Jenn had not done much over the past few months—she felt a little stuck—and I suspect, very, very sad.  Could I write to various organizations and tell them about the book? The least I could do was write letters.  But we didn’t get any responses. What other tactics could we try?  School librarians?  A grass-roots campaign?  Crowdsourcing?  I’ve done that a couple of times on Facebook as Jenn and I sought titles of books featuring physically disabled children, athletes, parents.  There are lots of things to try, and I will use my own spring break to do a lot more, but what has surprised me most is my new-found awareness of disability.

Jenn shared with me that her son, an amputee, plans to adopt children and wonders if he should adopt children with physical disabilities because they will understand that he “gets” it.  This story has lodged somewhere between my brain and heart. Where are the models for this boy? How is it we erase disability from children’s literature? And if we do include it, it is in villainous tropes—like Captain Hook or Peg Leg Pete, the Pirate—or overly treacly heroines who triumph?  Where are the real characters?  Our conversations inspire me, make me want to spend hours brainstorming, networking, shouting from the proverbial rooftops.

I am thinking about this topic all the time now. You know when you learn a new word and you suddenly begin to see and hear it everywhere? That’s how I feel—as if I have sudden clarity on something I had rarely considered.  My role for Jenn, whom I admire hugely, may be to be an amplifier.  I want to turn up the volume on her work, to broadcast it, to add my voice as an educator to insist that we, as a culture, pay attention and offer models for children like Jenn’s son, for children whose parents live with a physical disability, for kiddos who make use of wheelchairs and walkers and prostheses.  I know the legality of the word disability, but I don’t like the “dis” prefix.  I want  a world where all abilities are valued and the physically able don’t count more than those who live with physical disabilities.  Naïve? Idealistic? You bet. Inspiration comes from the Greek meaning to breathe life into. I am interested in breathing life into a topic I had never considered deeply until this internship.

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Of Pirates and Inclusion

Years ago, when our daughters were tiny, my husband stopped at at Barnes & Noble around this time of year; in the window, he saw a display of picture books featuring Black protagonists. He went in, purchased a number of books, and brought them home.  At the time, we had been deliberate about curating a library that featured girls as the main characters.  We recall even now being surprised at how many picture books about animals gendered those animals: the boy animals got adventures; the girl animals stayed home. So we sought books with girls who were the stars of stories, but Seth’s epiphany on 86th street galvanized us. What we read to our daughters had to mirror our own values, our own city.  We needed books with lots and lots of characters who were not white, so we sought them out.

 My mentor, Jenn Stratton, and I, speak every three weeks.  She is on a mission and I am her adjutant! Children’s books, she explains, rarely show characters with physical disabilities and even more rarely show parents with physical disabilities. There has been some progress. Who doesn’t like the feel good story of a champion athlete who triumph from a wheelchair or another books about how Helen Keller beat the odds, but what Jenn helps me understand is that there are very few books in which the disability, itself, is not the main event.  I begin to scrutinize our children’s book library. Characters who are amputees?  One.  Captain Hook. Jenn confirms that in her experience the only amputees who show up in picture books are pirates—and pirate villains to be exact.  She shares with me a Power Point she did recently (linked here).  I am staggered. How could I never have noticed this?

 When it was time for our daughters to go to nursery school in Manhattan, we wanted them to go to Merricat’s Castle—a neighborhood nursery program that mainstreamed children with special needs—physical and emotional—with children from the Upper East Side. Here is how they describe their approach, one rich in love:  For nearly half a century, our school has served as a national model for inclusionary education. We have brought together children from different economic and cultural backgrounds, children with disabilities, children who are seriously ill, and typically developing children from our neighborhood. Children with special needs are loved for their strengths. Merricat’s provides a unique opportunity for children to understand and appreciate diversity in the truest sense. At its simplest, we provide an opportunity for over 100 children to enrich one another’s lives by playing and learning together, ultimately assisting everyone to develop all of their abilities. Merricat’s is an inclusive space that is enormously enriching for children as they make immeasurable gains in patience, love, tenderness, and humanity.

 Miranda and Cordelia both grew up with classmates who were wheelchair-bound or who used crutches to navigate.  They were familiar with children undergoing or recovering from cancer treatment not having hair.  They knew not to stare but to accept. At three, they had learned about empathy. 

Once, when our son was young, he drew away in fear from a child at a rest stop who was in a wheelchair. I chided Atticus gently, reminding him there was no reason to be afraid, but his sisters sighed, “Mom, he didn’t have Merricat’s.”  True.  By the time he went to nursery school, we lived in Cleveland.  Now, a child in the school I lead uses a wheelchair. I am proud to lead a school that is also focused on inclusion and am so aware of what all children gain by being around others who are like and not like them.

I told Jenn about our little Laurel girl. In turn, Jenn shared her hope to publish a picture book that features disabled children and parents—fast—so that the little girl in my school and other children will see more people of all kinds of abilities in picture books—a common choice rather than an unusual one.

Last week, I went up to the art studio, where Upper School students were working on individual projects. One student was drawing on her I-pad. Somehow, we got to the topic of the book she is writing and illustrating. 

 “Don’t draw any of the pirates as amputees, okay?” I entreated.

 “Umm. Okay, Ms. Klotz,” she nodded, puzzled.

 I launched into a diatribe about pirate amputees in books, how that’s the only version of an amputee we show to children, how we must do better.  She nodded, patient.

 “My pirate’s a bad-ass, Ms. Klotz. And she’s a girl and she’s a force for good, but I do have an amputee, and he’s a hero, too,” she added.

 I grinned. Yesterday. I shared the story with Jenn in an email. My internship, it seems, is spilling into every moment of my life.

Beginnings and False Starts

 I am thrilled to be working on my internship with Jenn Stratton.  I’m hoping to be of use to her, but these days, I feel a little bit like a child who has ordered too much food in a restaurant. I’m overwhelmed by all that is on my plate. My appetite is not equal to what I had hoped to accomplish by now. I can hear my mother chidling me, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach, sweetheart.” The little Ann of memory nods, somehow ashamed,

Obligations at school have collided over the past three weeks with my responsibilities as an intern.  Tomorrow, I am going to get a grip—or so I tell myself each day. We are supposed to have a big storm, and if that is the case, we will have a Snow Day, and I will use it to catch up—fast—before I meet with Jenn on Sunday.  I remember being in high school and knowing that I had assignments that were overdue. My teachers were kind, yet I’d wake up each morning with a feeling of dread.  In college, I learned to manage my time better—in part to be sure I didn’t feel that combination of guilt and inability to knock something out—for the first time in decades, I’m feeling that way again.

Jenn has set me a list of tasks, all of which I feel I ought to be able to knock out quickly, but when I sit down to send emails or do research, inevitably, I get interrupted. I feel as if I need to go to an undisclosed location to get anything done!  I also notice that I am easily (and often) sidetracked by all the interesting materials Jenn has shared with me.  Yesterday morning, determined to have something to report for this very blog, I watched an amazing video she had shared about diversity in Children’s Literature and the impact Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day, published in 1963, had on the world of children’s books.  I knew vaguely that having a Black child on the cover and as the main character was significant, but I don’t think I realized just HOW significant it was.  I talked to my English department chair at school about it; I’m thinking about showing it to my 9th graders as we continue our study of The Harlem Renaissance.  But the images of how Black and Chinese characters were portrayed are racist and ugly—could I show that to the girls in a way that does not crush my Black and Chinese students? I am mulling.

I have used my own social media contacts to acquire some information for Jenn.

I;ve started a spreadsheet about women/girls with physical disabilities, and Jenn shared a spreadsheet she has, too, so now I will transfer my entries onto hers.  She’s given me an assignment to review the literature that currently exists featuring children with disabilities—I am planning to talk to my school librarian about how to go about such a big task.  I emailed with a friend who works at Scholastic about how Jenn might proceed to get her board book published. She wants to do a book for very young children that features moms with physical disabilities. My friend was not very encouraging—kind, but said that having an agent is really the way to go and that children’s books need to avoid being “teachy.”  Good to know in case I ever wanted to write one… and that is an interesting piece of this internship that I am, so far, not very efficient at doing.  I keep thinking about what I would do if I were the writer—Jenn is the writer.  I am the intern. I can feel myself imagining my own board book—who doesn’t love Good Night, Gorilla? But until recently, I had thought about writing children’s books or YA books, but never board books.  Ayyyyiii. I am suffering from scope creep in my writer’s life—I write creative nonfiction, don’t I?  Actually, I’m not doing very much of that either these days…

Beginnings are often my favorite bit of a process—it’s all before us; we have a metaphorically blank piece of paper, so much to look forward to, opportunities galore.  And that is all true in this case, because, as it happens, thus far, I have not begun much!

Remembering Chekhov

This piece was published some years ago in Under the Gum Tree, shared here in honor of Chekhov’s 101’st birthday, Jan. 29, 2022

Last summer, I was invited to play Liubov Ranyevskaya in a staged reading of Acts I and II of The Cherry Orchard in Eagles Mere, the community where I spend summers, where for years, my husband and I ran our own summer theatre training program for high school actors, now on hiatus. I found myself playing a character mired deep in denial, unable to take action to save the orchard she so loved.  Liobov is expansive, joyful in her return home and utterly unable to hear the protestations that she must subdivide and sell off the orchard to save her estate. From my folding chair in the front of the Fire Hall, I looked out and saw Eagles Mere, not an orchard in frothy bloom, but the place I love most in the world, and the place I last saw my own brother.  Liubov grieves her little son; I was grieving my brother and the innocence I lost the day he died. Denial is her recourse.  I recognized her longing, her powerlessness.

I fear loss in all its forms--that the time might come when Eagles Mere isn’t possible for our family; the houses too expensive, the lake no longer suitable for swimming.  Every time I am away from my family, I fear the worst. In Eagles Mere, I am full of memories of my family, my brother, of teaching acting to decades of teenagers right here in this Fire Hall, urging them to do less, to trust more, to be vulnerable.

Vulnerable.  A word it has taken decades to understand.

Until recently, I had forgotten my fourteen-year-old self, wooden and inarticulate, praised for her vulnerability on stage. In July of 1975, I studied acting at Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, PA, a regional company, a real theatre! In the morning, I took typing. Two afternoons a week, my mother drove me to Media for scene study class.  I remember the wood planked floor, windows, lots of afternoon light. For a long time, I couldn’t recall my teacher’s name, but it floated back eventually: Penelope Reed.  We called her Penny.

I loved being onstage, pretending, imagining I was really the character I was playing. In those days, however, simplicity was hard for me. Though I understood what the teacher meant when she asked others to show us without “telling,” to trust that the text, the work of talking and listening would be sufficient, I didn’t yet know how to do that. 

“You need to be more vulnerable,” she said kindly.  I had no idea what she was talking about.

I think I was playing Anya in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a dreamer. I had dutifully copied out the whole scene into a notebook, spiral bound, small, with a cover out of a type of thin reddish-brown cardboard that was old fashioned, even in 1975.  I felt serious, professional.  While we didn’t have to memorize our lines, I was proud that the notebook could lie flat on my lap where I didn’t often need to refer to it. I learned about beats and actions and Stanislavsky’s Magic If. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to want to go to Moscow, a place I had never been and didn’t yearn to see.

One bright August morning, my older brother died in a car accident.  I didn’t go to my acting class for two weeks, but by the middle of the month, frozen with grief and longing for life to feel normal again, I returned, telling no one.

It was my turn to do my scene with a scene partner whose name and face I have forgotten. Numb, I said my lines, listened, nodded, breathed, feeling as if I were an robot version of myself.  No one in the room knew what had happened to our family.  At the end, Penelope said, “Ann, that was lovely, so truthful.”  Was truth what happened when everything else was stripped away?

“So simple, so open, so vulnerable.”

I nodded, mute.  What was she talking about?  Was my brother dead or was I dead?  I couldn’t really tell.  I felt as if I were a paper cut out of myself covered in paste, the thick white kind, scooped out of jars in elementary school with popsicle sticks, as we inhaled its sweet, sickly scent.  I felt sticky, as if stray bits would attach to me and dry, disguising my real self.  I could not say what had happened, could not tell her.  As long as I never said it, perhaps it had not really happened.

The summer finished; I went back to school, wary of being looked at or whispered about or pitied.  I learned I could prevent none of it.  There I was, vulnerable offstage, too. Vulnerable, every day.  My feelings were Vesuvian, but, to the world, I appeared a well-organized, studious tenth grader, quieter, certainly, than I had been, moving through her life in a permanent state of disbelief.  How had everything turned upside down and why, day after day, could I not find my way back to before? Eventually, an extraordinary English teacher sent me to an audition at the boys’ school for the play, Our Town.  There, I figured out that acting could allow me to scream and sob and rage—behaviors not encouraged within the quiet contours of my silent, grieving family. Role by role, play by play, I picked off the hardened paste, dirty now, and found a new version of myself, a girl more vulnerable than she had been.

Vulnerable.  Undefended.  Helpless.  Ironically, this is the state actors seek, the quality directors and teachers prize.  Vulnerable is better than guarded or showy or strident.  Vulnerable means open, willing to be changed, affected by an emotion or a conversation or a relationship. Vulnerable, I learned, requires a kind of humble courage, the willingness to allow others to see you un-retouched, simple, true, naked.  The state began to scare me less when I stopped fighting it, welcomed it, in fact, and began to grow accustomed to its gifts.  I was a good friend, sought after for my empathetic listening, someone to be counted on.  I was a good daughter, far too afraid to misbehave, for look what had happened to my brother.  A designated driver?  I was your girl--hanging out with all the drama kids who drank and smoked pot, but holding myself back, unwilling to risk a vulnerability born of being out of control.  It was okay to be vulnerable on stage or in my journal or falling asleep at night; it felt dangerous to be vulnerable when other people were in charge.

The heart of that puzzled adolescent still beats in me--seasoned acting teacher and director. I think of the many young actors with whom I have worked, encouraging to be simple, to stop trying so hard and simply to talk and listen, to be vulnerable. 

I was medium in last summer’s reading--not terrible, but too full of feeling to summon technique, too out of practice. Just for a moment, on that hot July night, I remembered Anya and Liubov and my own powerful impotence in the face of situations that cannot, ever, be resolved, fixed, healed.  Cherry orchards, journeys to Moscow, girls grieving brothers, mothers fearing the unspeakable.

I was not in the car my brother drove that morning so long ago.  I lived. Perhaps this is what Chekhov reminds us to do.  To live. Not to squander time or relationships or the orchards we are given.  To allow ourselves to be our flawed, full selves, unfettered by the fear that nips at me, at all of us, of the circumstances beyond our control that render us impossibly, irrevocably vulnerable. 

World’s Oldest Intern

I have reached the age of 61 without ever having an official internship!  In college, I was busy teaching drama, mostly as a volunteer, through the community service organization. I went on the payroll of the New Haven Public Schools as a college senior, doing homebound tutoring. My summer jobs were all children’s theatre related and then were teaching gigs. So, here I am, undertaking an internship for the first time in my life. I’m excited and a little uncertain. 

A year and a half into an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, the direction of my memoir feels less certain than it did when I started, but until I write my thesis next year, I am trying not to worry about it. This year, I’m doing a deep dive in publishing.  Despite my love of books—reading them and acquiring them—I knew very little about how a book actually gets published.  In fact, after last semester’s Introduction to Publishing, I’m amazed that any book EVER gets published—there are so many obstacles, so many manuscripts, so much about the business that was unknown to me.  I’d always harbored a secret fantasy of working either in a bookstore or a flower shop, but my admiration for booksellers—real booksellers, not Amazon or Barnes & Noble--who figure out how to sell books and pay rent and salaries--has grown exponentially over the last few months. Bookselling is not for the faint of heart!  It’s a labor of love and courage, a flame of idealism in a world where better, faster, cheaper seems to be the currency. 

For the coming semester, each student in my class undertakes an internship.  When I first heard about this requirement, I panicked.  How could I jam one more obligation in to my already packed week? But, my wise professor, Kate Whouley, connected me with another professor at Bay Path. Jenn Stratton teaches teachers and has written a book about her cousin, Nick Springer, a Paralympic Gold Medalist, who lives on in Jenn’s work. 

Jenn has enlisted me to help her gather all the stories we can about disabled GIRL athletes, so we can figure out what already exists and where the gaps are. I am thrilled.  My first idea was to email the archivists at Perkins School in Boston. They were generous and swift in their response, and Jenn has already had a follow up conversation with them—I’ll be able to watch the video of that call this weekend.  Next, I asked my daughter, queen of the spreadsheet, to help me set up a template that will allow me to keep track of all the suggestions I crowd-sourced from my Facebook feed—women athletes who are disabled in many ways. 

So, I will be a research assistant and as much of a help as I can be. Talking to Jenn inspires me and makes me feel useful—I love something she said today: she wants her work to be universally designed.  So, a book about a visually impaired athlete is illustrated by a visually impaired artist and the text is in braille as well as in words, so that the visually impaired reader can access the story.  This idea of multiple ways to share a story reminds me that adapting a form to make it work for more people is not cheating—it’s asking form to reflect content.

And I am all in!

A Map of a Reading Life: Bookstores I Have Loved

There are places where we feel as if we have stepped through the back of the wardrobe with the Percival children into our own personal Narnias. My magic world is any bookstore I visit.  Though I understand forces of evil exist to make a plot more compelling, bookshops are mercifully without villains unless expense counts as the evil I futlely attempt to subdue!

While I love libraries, with their musty smell of old paper, the solid color book covers made of the book version of linoleum embossed with white letters on the spine, the Dewey Decimal number at the bottom, beckoning me, the hushed reverence of the reference section or the scholars busy at long tables, bookstores have a different seductive power over me. In them, Narnia meets Eden—magic meets paradise.  They are full of temptation and the lustful lure of acquisition.

Library books must be returned, and I practically break out in hives if I discover a book is overdue—I’m too much of a goodie-goodie to break the librarian’s laws. But bookstore books are mine forever, despite lack of shelf space, despite a family that kindly suggests I have a problem akin to an addiction, despite lack of time to devour new titles as quickly as I wish.  And, given Jeff Bezos and his schemes, I’m now even more of an independent bookstore book junkie—supporting an indie bookstore somehow assuages my pangs about buying MORE books. I eschew Barnes and Noble for the delights of Loganberry on Larchmere—painted purple on the outside and equipped with easy chairs and cats for an improved browsing experience! Too many bookstores I have loved are gone now, but they live in my memory.

As a little girl, trips to The Country Bookshop were for special occasions: birthdays or Christmas wish lists, a treat after a particularly painful operation on an ingrown toenail. While ordering from Scholastic was one of my favorite events at school and trips to Ludington Library occurred weekly, the Country Bookshop felt special.  Up a short flight of stairs, the store, in my memory, was paneled in dark wood, the children’s books displayed at the front to the left. It was there I acquired a gorgeous hardback on the stories of the ballets.  More than 50 years later, I can smell the wonderful combination of paper and ink, the perfume of the coiffed and suited ladies in pumps who helped me pick out titles, the thrill of being allowed to choose a hardback, so different from my typical Yearling paperbacks, replete with shiny covers and full color illustrations.  I have never gotten over my love of picture books.

Coffee, French bread, books?  Is there a better combination?  Atticus on Chapel Street in New Haven opened when I was a junior in college and was a favorite destination.  No one bothered you, no matter how long you sat, drinking French Press coffee, working (by hand) on a paper, reading a book.  It smelled great and was a beacon of light and words on gray winter afternoons.  When our son, Atticus, was born, he received a number of t-shirts from his namesake bookshop.

As a young schoolteacher, I would often drive from the campus of Northfield Mount Hermon fifteen minutes up I-91 just across the Vermont state line to Brattleboro. With shelves of blonde maple and many nooks with cozy chairs for reading, The Book Cellar—gone now--was a refuge for someone brand new to teaching, offering a quiet respite from a busy week and lots and lots of new titles to browse and buy.

Later, as a Master’s student at NYU, I haunted The Strand in the village in NYC looking for books about theatre, browsing the stacks, willing to be surprised and hoping what I discovered would be on a shelf I could reach with the help of a stepstool. 

Still one of my favorite NYC destinations, The Corner Bookshop, like The Country Bookshop of my childhood, exudes refinement.  Books are displayed on tables in the center of the store and on shelves around the store’s perimeter.  The clerks are knowledgeable about books but never fuss; they answer questions with kindness and patience, cheerfully sending books to their regulars’ apartments. Oh, to be a regular and to be able to read first run fiction in hardback.

On the first floor of our dear friends’ building on the corner of 107 and Broadway, the Bank Street Bookshop beckoned me every time we went to see Marcia and Paul.  My friend, Andy, managed it for a long time, so visits were doubly precious—smart people who really knew books helped me find the latest picture books that might resonate for the little girls in the school I lead—and there was always a chance I might run into Andy!  That store’s closing made me weep.

When our grown daughters moved to the Upper West Side, expeditions to Book Culture were high on my list of weekend visit activities—bright and inviting with gorgeous displays and lots of other tempting items—finger puppets, purses, household goods, there was a rewards program—buy a certain number of books and get a free book.

Each summer, I take a trip to Otto’s in Williamsport, about 45 minutes from Eagles Mere.  There, the booksellers fill my arms—the latest Louise Penny? Of course, it’s August, and her new volume about Armand Gamache has pride of place. Something to read at Convocation?  Certainly. How many years have I visited Otto’s? I can’t remember, but it is a treat to savor.  The day my beloved friend, Jane, died unexpectedly, I went to Otto’s, and Alissa and Nancy’s kindness comforted me. Alissa sent me home with a book she insisted I could not pay for:  Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude.  When the pandemic hit, Alissa and Nancy to the rescue.  Quarantined in Shaker Heights, I longed for new books to hold. So, I phoned them and asked them to fill up a box and send it to me—when they asked what I wanted, I said, “You have never steered me wrong,” and when the box arrived, it was like Christmas in April. I rationed the titles because each one felt like a piece of Turkish Delight with which the Snow Queen assured Edmund’s devotion in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

There are more, of course.  Shakespeare and Co. across from, Notre Dame, Joseph Banks,  the bookshop that greeted me when we first moved to Cleveland, the used bookstore in Eagles Mere itself, the Owl Bookshop of Bryn Mawr College, down a steep flight of steps on the Upper East Side, bookshops in college towns—I love the Kenyon College bookshop where I bought my first Lamy fountain pen. And here on Larchmere, in Cleveland, there is Loganberry. Purple and delicious with armchairs and a cat, gifts and kind, wise clerks, it is a favorite weekend destination. We all have our Meccas.  Bookstores are mine.

Accomplished?

Accomplished.  An adjective that feels entirely subjective.  What have I accomplished today?  I brushed my teeth and hair, got dressed, fed the pets, poured my coffee, wrote in my journal, went to school, taught English, ran and attended meetings, read and answered a million emails, watched the first graders do a mermaid dance, walked home, noticed that I need to weed the garden and didn’t, unloaded the dishwasher, fed and walked the three dogs, read, corrected a set of papers. Most days, what I accomplish feels small.  There is a parallel list always of what I did not accomplish. In the 19th century, an accomplished woman could navigate an elaborate table setting, speak in French, manage a household. Today, while my French once was passable and I generally know what fork to use, it often feels that my household manages me or that we are orbiting into chaos together—pets, books, laundry, self. 

As a writer, I have published essays and a few chapters in anthologies. I’ve been working on a memoir for some years. But “big publications” have thus far eluded me. I submit in a flurry, then wait and wait.  My approach feels a little scattershot, not a lot of strategy, more like whimsy. 

Seven years ago, I went to a writer’s workshop at Kenyon with Dinty Moore and Allison Williams, and that was exciting.  I wanted to write. About five years ago, I began to take online classes through Creative Nonfiction and then through 24 Pearl Street to learn more about craft and am now a year into an MFA.  Does that render me accomplished?  In whose eyes?  My own? Writing courses have helped me be more aware of style and structure, more interested in being intentional, rather than just writing spontaneously.  In Mel’s class, I worked on being concise; with Sister Karol, I tried to mind my muses.  Jenn helped me be sure not to gloss over the hard stuff.  I have read much more non-fiction, particularly essays, than I had ever read before.  Does this equate with accomplished?  I don’t think so.  I think, in a corner of my heart and brain, accomplished means publishing a book.

What would lead me to feel “accomplished” as a writer?  Perhaps external confirmation matters more than I wish it did: publishing a book, winning a prize? I’m not sure. At 60, I am conscious of the fact that writing is a refuge for me. I write for pleasure, not for work. I  try to be patient with the fact that I am not publishing much right now because of the demands and pleasure of coursework, of leading a school, of life.  When someone tells me—in person or on Facebook—that something I wrote touched them, I feel a little spark of joy, as if a candle sputters to life inside me.  But I write mostly for me, I think, to make sense of the world, to understand what I think, to record a memory.  And yet, there is an ember of ambition I struggle with. Would I want to write full-time?  I fear I would miss school, miss being with people. But I think it might be fun to try—even for a month—to be a “real writer” instead of a person who writes in the spaces in between.  It annoys me as a feminist and as a teacher of girls that, this late in my life, I still feel some version of the impostor complex as a writer, as if I am claiming an identity that I may not have a “right” to claim. But who gets to decide?  I’m a writer.  I write.  And I am determined to claim that identity more regularly with fewer justifications or qualifiers.  Maybe then, I will feel and be accomplished.