Only connect

J and I have an ongoing joke about the number of perfect strangers who talk to us whenever we go anywhere in public. We regularly get asked for directions, or if we’re dressed in Bruins gear on the way to or from a hockey game, folks will ask us who the Bruins are playing, or what the score was, or what we think about a particular player. Folks will inquire about J’s camera, or they’ll make chitchat about the weather, how crowded the trolley is, or any other sort of random topic. It’s as if in place of the proverbial “Kick me” sign, someone stuck a sign on our backs that says “Talk to us: we’re friendly!”

J and I speculate that we must look normal, nonthreatening, and otherwise approachable: if you’re lost and need directions, you don’t want to look like a creep by asking a solitary member of the opposite sex for help, and you don’t want to bother a couple who looks Too Young, Too Hip, or Too Completely In Love to take time for your problems. J and I, on the other hand, apparently look Just Right. We don’t look like we’re too cool to be bothered, but we also don’t look like we’re so lonely and desperate, we’ll latch onto anyone who strikes up a conversation.

J and I look, in other words, perfectly average, and it seems that random strangers like to talk with average folks. Over the several years we’ve been dating, J and I have given countless directions to out-of-towners, once helped a guy in Atlanta buy baseball tickets from a sidewalk scalper, and last weekend tried (unsuccessfully) to explain to a young bewildered Asian woman why there were so many sports fans on the T even after the Red Sox season is over. (Apparently, they don’t play ice hockey where she comes from.)

Although neither of our respective exes was actively antagonistic toward strangers, neither J nor I had this experience of being so popular with strangers when we each were married. Although I occasionally had folks ask me for directions when I lived in Boston and took the T to and from school, strangers didn’t regularly talk to my ex and me when we were together in public. J and his ex-wife didn’t go to as many events as J and I do, so they had fewer opportunities to talk to strangers, but still, J insists that he didn’t talk to as many random folks when he was married as he does now that he’s dating me. Whatever secret conflicts and resentments both J and I experienced in our previous relationships, I’m guessing that tension was apparent to the strangers who didn’t talk with us. Sometimes you get a “vibe” that a silent couple is harboring hidden hostilities, and apparently J and I don’t project that vibe. Whereas my ex-husband often accused me of flirting or trying to upstage him if I simply behaved in my normal outgoing fashion, J doesn’t feel threatened if I speak up and act friendly with folks, so I do.

Yesterday afternoon, after having stopped to chat with a neighbor we’d seen raking leaves on our way to brunch, we dropped by another neighbor’s house for an open house fundraiser for Connect Africa, an organization that provides business and educational support for Ugandan villagers. While J and I browsed crafts made by Ugandan women working to support AIDS orphans, we chatted with the neighbor who had organized the open house, her husband, the friend who founded Connect Africa, and several women who were also browsing the handicrafts. “You should buy one,” I advised one woman who was tentatively considering a pile of intricately woven baskets. “Then you can use it to carry the jewelry you’ll want to buy.” I pointed to a small basket I’d filled with beaded bracelets and necklaces, and the woman nodded. Later, while J and I were selecting a colorful woven mat, agreeing that we’d find somewhere to put it, I saw the woman I’d talked to standing at the jewelry table filling a basket.

J and I ended up buying two armfuls of handicrafts, much to our hostess’ delight. “This is great,” J remarked, admiring a goblet-shaped basket he’d chosen as a desk-organizer. “Every time I look at this, I’ll think about where it came from, and the story behind it.” After we’d said our goodbyes and headed home with our African treasures, J observed, “You just spent more time talking to the neighbors in one afternoon than my ex-wife did the entire time we were married.”

 

Softness

In the summer, sunlight poured down hard and bright, casting sharp-edged shadows as if carved in stone. Now in autumn, late afternoon light languishes in softness as it trickles down aslant, kissing surfaces with only a subtle hint of darkness. Summer light makes a bold statement; autumnal light skirts around the edges, smudgy.

This is my contribution to this week’s Photo Friday theme, Softness.

 

Nosy neighbors

I wonder which of us is the nosier neighbor: Reggie, who insists on sniffing every last one of our neighbors’ leaves, or I, who snap incessant pictures of same?

 

Inexplicable

I can’t explain why some days when I sit down to write in my journal, the words flow easily while on other days my thoughts and words are halting. On some days, my mind locks onto a track of thought and my scribbled sentences come easily, and on other days my words are halting and my attention gets snagged by anything but the blank page before me.

It’s not exclusively a matter of having “something to say,” for on some days I blather quite easily about nothing while on other days, my words and thoughts trip over the Profound Thoughts I want to convey. For whatever inexplicable reason, some days are smooth and some days are choppy: there is no rhyme or reason to it, just as there is no logical explanation for why some days it feels easy to meditate and on others it feels like torture simply to sit still.

Neither meditating nor writing necessarily gets easier over time; you just learn to keep doing it–to keep showing up–whether it feels easy or difficult, smooth or choppy. After you learn that it’s possible to write or meditate even on choppy days, it becomes easier to keep doing it consistently, even though there are plenty of days when the actual doing feels difficult. Like walking the dog in all seasons, you learn to roll with whatever weather the day offers, persevering even when the way feels difficult.

 

Dropping the ball

Around 5:00 this morning, I gave up hope of finishing the thick pile of essay drafts I’d promised to return to my first-year writing students at noon. Going back on my promise wasn’t a huge deal, as we did something other than what I’d originally planned to do in today’s class. Keeping these drafts another weekend will give me time to prepare a grammar handout based on sample sentences from these essays, so it’s ultimately a good idea for me to take time finishing them rather than hurrying through the pile.

This marks that point in the semester when I realize there simply isn’t enough “me” to go around. For every one task I cross off my daily to-do list, a handful more remain undone. I have unanswered emails, unpaid bills, and a dusty apartment that demand my attention; the kitchen sink is filled once again with dirty dishes only one meal after I finally dried and put away the last overdue batch.

I sometimes think that teaching a course overload–full-time here, part-time there–is practice for growing old, because there eventually comes a point in any semester when you finally let it all fall away, like a gradually declining body finally surrendering to mortality after a good, long fight. Eventually, you just give up the ghost, throw in the towel, and let it all go. One by one, you loosen your grip on things you never had a hold on in the first place, giving way to gravity, inertia, and momentum–the inexorable trinity of Powers-That-Be–as you let things slip and sag into their naturally slouchy state.

It’s merely an arbitrary preference, you learn, that insists upon perpetual cleanliness, order, and timeliness. Lines don’t naturally want to be straight, ideas don’t naturally want to be ordered, and bodies don’t naturally want to be slender, upright, and toned. Something there is, they say, that doesn’t like a wall, and something there is that prefers life, work, and love all to be untidy. Why spend precious time and life-blood fighting that inescapable Something?

We did something other than what I’d planned in my noon writing class, and I’ll finish reading drafts over the weekend so I can hand them back in class on Tuesday. In the meantime, I’ve re-learned an important life lesson: deadlines can slip, promises can break, and your own tight hold on your schedule can weaken, but life presses on regardless. Is the true test of any juggler the number of objects she can keep aloft at any given instant or the skill, dexterity, and grace she exhibits in retrieving a single dropped ball?

 

Late fall

Yesterday was gray and brisk; today is bright and blue. It feels like late fall–fleece weather–with most of the leaves having fallen except for the copper-toned tenacity of beech and oak.

It’s an entirely different palette now than it was the last time I took a bunch of photos along the railtrail, with brown and bronze replacing last month’s red and gold. Now most everything is dry and earth-toned, with the exception of bright red berries–honeysuckle and crab-apple–that stand out with an almost artificial garishness.

They’ve cleared at least one of the lots down the street from my house, one that’s been empty since I moved to Keene some six years ago. Eventually even the long-empty spots fill in, houses creeping into every available corner like dusty, wind-blown leaves: a constant reminder of change.

 

How my light is spent

This weekend’s time change has flipped the light-switch on my weekday dog-walk schedule, as it is now dimly daylight when I walk Reggie at 6:00 in the morning and pitch dark when I walk him at 6:00 at night. Soon enough, it will be dark for both morning and evening dog-walks, the day having shriveled to a sliver of its summer length.

Already this autumn, light seems like a precious resource that we are learning to savor as it becomes increasingly rare. In summertime, we can take light for granted as it pours down in an abundant shower from an omnipresent sun. In fall and winter, we have to trust that the sun is present even on days, like today, that are overcast, and we have to trust that the sun will eventually appear on days when dawn arrives late and sunset comes early.

During those months when daylight is short, I grow protective of those hours I can spend in my normally bright-lit apartment. On winter weekdays, I spend most of my daylight hours on campus, seeing my dog and apartment primarily in the dark. On my at-home grading days, I want simply to soak up sun, enjoying the sight of light slanting through slatted blinds as the sun continues its diurnal course from horizon to horizon. As autumn slouches toward winter, sunlight is a waning phenomenon we can’t afford to waste.

 

Retrospect

I can never write today’s date without remembering its significance: my wedding anniversary, one I celebrated twelve times before divorcing exactly one week before what would have been my thirteenth.

My divorce remains, five years later, the single biggest transformative event in my life so far. I guess that’s the true meaning behind anniversaries: they mark those memorable dates when your entire life changes overnight, a temporal Rubicon delineating the inescapable shift from Before to After.

I’m learning, five years later, that you don’t get over divorce; you just move on. Even after your heart has healed from the initial shock of loss, the divorce itself–the end of almost thirteen years of marriage with someone you assumed you’d spend your entire life with, and the complex emotional aftermath as you disassemble that assumption and build something different with your life and dreams–continues on. You don’t get “over” it in the sense of forgetting it happened or returning to who or what you were “before.” The Biblical definition of “marriage” is “two people become one flesh,” and there’s a more-than-metaphoric sense in which divorce is an amputation. You can resume a normal life after losing a limb: you can learn to walk on one leg, for instance, and you can return to living a full and rich life. But you never really forget that you once had two legs.

My ex has literally moved on since our separation and divorce, remarrying three years ago and moving from place to place in search of a happy life: I wish him and his wife well. The path to divorce is an incremental abandonment of hopes and promises: first you give up hope that you’ll ever be happy in your marriage, then you give up hope that you’ll ever make your partner happy. That latter hope was the last to die, and its passing was, for me, the one I couldn’t ultimately handle. In twelve years of marriage, I had long practice letting my own dreams die, but the thought that I’d ultimately failed my spouse–the realization that I’d never tame his wildly changing moods, never succeed in settling him down into an existence that was, to my eye, stable and content–was the one sacrifice I ultimately couldn’t swallow.

In retrospect, my ex and I defined happiness differently…and to be perfectly honest, I never did learn much less understand his personal definition of the term. For me, happiness is defined (or at least it is indicated) by stability and constancy: if you’re happy with something, you’ll stay with it rather than perpetually looking for something better or simply different. It’s telling, for instance, that I still have the same job, the same apartment, the same hobbies, the same spiritual practice, and the same creative pursuits now as I did when I was married: because I’m happy with those things, I haven’t changed or replaced them.

My ex, on the other hand, was eternally beholden to change, seeing constancy as boredom and boredom as creative death. My ex always wanted to travel, to move, to change jobs, and to embark on new enterprises, and when the novelty of any one of those wore off, he’d seek a new diet, a new hairstyle, or a new piece of musical or recording equipment to console himself with “something different.”

For almost thirteen years, I blamed myself for my then-husband’s volatility, assuming that if he wasn’t happy enough to settle into the mundane boredom I find sustaining, it was because I wasn’t making him happy. Only in retrospect have I come to fully realize that mutability was an essential part of who my ex was (and possibly still is). “Taming” my ex’s addiction to novelty and change wasn’t the kind of thing I or probably anyone could accomplish: perpetual change was an essential part of his character, something I simply didn’t and probably couldn’t understand.

Even without the impetus of an anniversary, I think of my ex-husband every autumn, his favorite time of year: it’s no accident, I think, that he married both me and his second wife in this season of change. My ex was prone to seasonal depression, and autumn offered a spell of brief, bittersweet beauty before another long, emotionally turbulent winter. My ex’s dark moods were like an old girlfriend who arrived in November and made herself at home through March: there really were three of us, at least, in that marriage. In retrospect, I blamed myself, again, for my ex’s light-starved upheavals, somehow thinking that this year, if we did something (anything!) differently, he wouldn’t feel the onset of winter quite as heavily as he had in the past.

A year or so after my divorce, in talking with an old friend who had lived with my ex and I when we were still married, I mentioned my ex’s Seasonal Affective Disorder, the only name he would allow for year-round mood swings that became more marked in winter. “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” our friend, herself a mental health professional, repeated with a hint of incredulity. “I always assumed he was bipolar.” She paused a moment, the crackle of the phone connection between us masking, I’d hoped, my sudden intake of breath. “You always seemed to keep him stable,” she continued, “although I can’t imagine that would have been easy on you.”

Her words, even a year or so after my divorce, rang like a gunshot. Bipolar? So others had noticed? I’d always assumed that my then-husband’s moods were our little secret, it being my responsibility to maintain our careful facade of a “normal” relationship even though much of the time I felt I was married to at least two (if not more) different men. My ex always refused even the suggestion of psychotherapy, even when he was the most unhappy, insisting that he didn’t want to change even his darkest moods since they were, he assumed, the source of his creativity. But had he agreed even to a diagnosis, if not treatment, how might that have changed the trajectory of our time together?

Whether or not my then-husband was bipolar then makes little difference now: we both have moved on in the five years since our separation and divorce. But even the mere suggestion that his moods had a Name–that there was, in short, something other than me to blame for his volatility–feels like a crucial piece in a puzzle I’ve spent the past five years poring over. One of the reasons you don’t get “over” a divorce, I’m learning, is because it stays with you like an unsolved mystery: no matter how many times you go over, again, the facts of the case, you’re still stymied by the simple question of “why.” Divorce marks an end, and it also marks the possibility of new beginnings…but it also leaves you with unanswered questions, a maddening lack of closure that no court-date or notarized document can ever sufficiently seal.

If there was a simple medical reason for the disconnect between my ex-husband and me–if any of a number of pharmaceuticals could have calmed a character quirk I spent nearly thirteen years thinking was My Fault–I can finally, five years later, let myself off the hook. I didn’t “fail” my then-husband because I couldn’t keep him happy; I finally left that relationship because I ultimately came to believe my vow to remain constant “in sickness and in health” didn’t apply to a sickness my partner refused to investigate, refused to name, and ultimately refused to treat.

Are we beholden to help someone get well if ultimately they don’t want to be well, or if they define “wellness” differently than we do? Are we beholden to make ourselves sick, too, while tending another’s unadmitted illness? I understand my ex and his wife have moved to the Midwest and now have a child, and I find myself fervently hoping they all are happy. Perhaps my ex-husband’s second wife is better equipped than I was to withstand his emotional upheavals, being more flexible in the face of ever-constant change? Or perhaps a child who grows up walking on the water of her father’s moods will easily adapt and acquire the sea-legs I never found? These are the questions–slightly different now, but still unanswered–I find myself asking five years later, no closer to closure, as I consider my divorce in retrospect.

 

Plenty

When I was a child in Ohio, a friend and I used to lie on our backs on late summer days watching long skeins of blackbirds fly from horizon to horizon, high overhead, sure that these linear flocks streamed from a far-off factory whose entire job it was to crank out birds, one after one, without ceasing.

It’s the kind of image only a child could dream up, or perhaps a child-like author. To this day, whenever I see a large flock of grackles, starlings, or crows, I think back to those late summer days in my now-distant childhood when blackbirds were presumably gathering for migration, winging across the sky in long, loose-knit throngs. I’ve long left Ohio, and I’ve visited many places between here and there, but I’ve never found that imagined factory that belched flocks of birds rather than billows of smoke. I’d like to think, though, that this childhood fancy reflects an inherent faith in the infinite abundance of nature, a faith that stays with me still.

It perpetually amazes me that Nature can crank out leaves the way the late summer sky seems to manufacture birds. Every autumn, the sky in New England rains down as leaves, and every spring, green leaves return in unimaginable abundance. Just as there is no end to late summer skeins of Ohio blackbirds, there is no end to New England leaves in autumn. No sooner do you rake, bag, and haul them away than this weekend’s leaves are replaced by next weekend’s and the next and the next.

I’d like to think that thoughts are like autumn leaves or that words are like late summer blackbirds. Imagine, for instance, that words are like birds, and each letter is a feather. Right now as I sit here typing, blackbirds fly across the blank sky of screen, migrating from left to right, left to right. Each word is a bird that is followed by fellows, and these words like birds keep coming, one by one, as long as my fingers, like those of diligent factory-workers, keep moving.

When I was an undergraduate then graduate student in English, I used to worry that as a writer I might someday run out of words, but now I know from long experience that words are like those blackbird flocks I watched as a child: they never end. As fast as you can type, words will show up beneath your fingers, or if you write longhand, words will never cease appearing beneath your pen. I’ve learned from long practice that your mind, like an infinitely deep well, gushes and fills from hidden springs below: the more you write, the more you have to write.

With this implicit faith in creative abundance in mind, this year I’m participating in National Blog Posting Month, a conscious decision to post something–anything–on each of November’s thirty days. Last year, I made an informal commitment to participate in NaBloPoMo, and at the end of the month, I was grateful for the “nudge” the exercise provided.

The mind, like a world full of blackbirds, autumn leaves, and words, words, words, is more fertile than you know, and having an arbitrary requirement, like a public commitment to write and share “something” for thirty days in a row, sends you back to the bottomless well where ideas come from. In this month when we officially give thanks for brimming cornucopias and bountiful harvests, it seems appropriate to take advantage of (and blog) whatever plenty that surrounds us.

Click here for more information about National Blog Posting Month, a slightly more tame version of the National Novel Writing Month that sends so many writers to their keyboards in November.

 

Well groomed

Technically, this ghoulish fellow (one of an entire tree of dangling ghosts, skeletons, and beasties that appears in a neighbor’s yard this time every year) is well dressed, not well groomed. But semantics aside, you have to admit he’s a delightfully dapper dude.

This is my contribution to yesterday’s Photo Friday theme, Well Groomed. Happy Halloween, everyone!