Ordinary time

It’s been over a week since I’ve written in my journal, and two weeks since I’ve posted here: busy days. The week before last, I had jury duty and ended up serving on a two-day trial, and this past weekend, I flew to Ohio to visit family.

Before and after any trip or commitment, there is the necessary work of prepping and debriefing. Before I leave, I hurry through long to-do list to make sure J and the pets have enough food, medication, and supplies to last while I’m gone, and after I return, there is laundry, unpacking, and yet more laundry.

I arrived home from Ohio yesterday morning after my flight the previous evening was cancelled, and both yesterday and today have been devoted to re-entry. I’ve resumed the household chores J did while I was gone, and I’ve re-acclimated myself to the daily routine that had been interrupted.

All day today I’ve felt like a fish that has breached the surface, flashed quickly in the alien air, and then splashed back into its liquid realm. The ordinary world with its regular routine of laundry and chores is where I live, so returning to it is like (literally) coming home.

The photos illustrating today’s post come from a quick walk at Scioto Audubon, a new-to-me Metro Park that skirts the Scioto River right near downtown Columbus, Ohio.

 

The real world

I spent this past weekend in Columbus, Ohio visiting family and attending my thirty-year high school reunion. I still can’t believe it’s been three decades since I graduated from Eastmoor High School, went to college in Toledo, and never looked back. In my mind, moving back to Columbus was never an option: moving home after college would have been an admission of failure, a white flag of surrender indicating I’d botched my one big chance to leave home and make it in the real world.

My ex-husband used to deride my lack of corporate experience, given I’ve only worked in academia, with brief, part-time stints in retail sales and secretarial work when I was in grad school. My ex-husband believed that because I’ve never worked in the corporate sector like he did, I didn’t have “real world” experience. But from my perspective, I’ve always been in the real world, and I never worked for a corporation because I never needed to. Even though my ex-husband dismissed academia as being too “Ivory Tower” to count as “real,” it’s taken me an inordinate amount of scrappiness to survive on a patchwork of part-time teaching jobs I’ve juggled not for fun, but to pay the bills.

And for the past thirty years, I have paid the bills, persevering with an exhausting assortment of adjunct jobs because teaching is what I do. There have been many times over the past thirty years when I’ve sweated the small stuff, wondering whether there would be enough paycheck to cover the month. But I always found ways to make ends meet–I always managed to scrimp, save, and budget my way–and it doesn’t get much more “real” than that.

The story of the past thirty years has been almost entirely self-motivated. My parents were proud when I earned a college scholarship, but they never pressured me to finish; even if I quit after just one semester of college, I would have achieved more education than they had. But even in the absence of pushy parents, quitting college was something I never would have allowed myself to do: the drive to finish what I started was mine. Although I’ve had friends, teachers, and mentors who have encouraged me along the way, I went to and finished both college and grad school because I wanted to.

What I lack in ambition, I make up for in stubbornness. My path through college, grad school, and a meandering career as an overworked adjunct instructor was a difficult, clueless road: I didn’t know where I was going, but I kept climbing. Because I enjoyed the work I was doing–because I enjoyed reading and discussing literature, researching and writing papers, and ultimately teaching and encouraging students–I kept doing it, persevering primarily because I didn’t know what to do other than take the next step, then the next, then the next.

The fact I’ve managed to support myself as an English major these past thirty years is, in my opinion, my greatest accomplishment: not even getting a PhD can top it. Simply surviving and supporting myself in New England, some 700 miles from where I was born and raised, is the thing I’m the most proud of. Not only did I go to college and get a degree, I’ve figured out how to support myself while doing the things I love. It’s natural at a high school reunion to compare your lot in life with that of your classmates, and I arrived back in Boston on Monday feeling pretty good about myself. I might not be the thinnest, least-wrinkled, or best-looking of my high school classmates, but after thirty years of making it in the real world, I feel like a success.

 

Here, there, and back again

I’m back home in Newton after having spent the past two weekends away: first visiting a friend in western Massachusetts, then visiting family in central Ohio. I’m a creature of habit, so it takes a while to settle back into my usual routine after being away. Having been here, there, and back again, I’m still finding my feet here at home.

On Tuesday night, I gave interviews at the Cambridge Zen Center. Because the usual interview room was being renovated, I used a small Dharma room typically reserved for meditation classes. Before it was a meditation room with cushions and an altar, this room was a bedroom with a kitchen sink: the first room my then-husband and I lived in when we moved into the Zen Center some two decades ago.

It’s a bit surreal to teach meditation or give interviews in a room where you used to sleep: I sometimes joke that after I moved out, the Zen Center turned my bedroom into a shrine. It’s been years since I lived in the Zen Center, but it always feels like home when I return. Here are the same walls, floor, and windows that surrounded me as I juggled my marriage, graduate studies, and Zen practice. The particulars of my life have changed, but this place where I spent two and a half years of my life remains more or less the same.

Visiting my family in Ohio is a similar experience. I haven’t lived in Columbus since I left for college in 1987, and I haven’t lived in Ohio since I moved to Boston in 1992. On this visit, my parents and I walked through the twin-single unit where we’d lived when I was little: my first childhood home. I hadn’t been that house since one of my sisters rented it from my parents when I was in college, so it was strange to visit a now-empty dwelling where so much of my childhood happened. Despite the improvements my parents have made over the years they’ve rented out the home where we once lived, I can still remember the courtyard where I played beneath a branching maple tree, the basement rec room where I raced Matchbox cars, and the two bedrooms where I slept: first a tiny one, then a larger one after my sisters moved out.

After I gave interviews in Cambridge on Tuesday night, I walked through Central Square toward my car and marveled at the places I’ve been: here, there, and back again. Newton, where I currently live, is far tonier than the neighborhood in Columbus where I grew up; Central Square, where I used to live, is gritty and ethnically diverse like my childhood home, but far more cosmopolitan. When I first moved to Boston, I tried very hard to fit in here, my proudest moment happening on a morning when a tourist asked me for directions on the T during one of my commutes to campus. Although I was new to the neighborhood myself, I was pleased to think I at least looked like I belonged.

Settling into a daily routine is one step toward making yourself at home in a new place: first, you need a place to hang your hat and a place to rest your head. Once you have those, you can settle into a regular rhythm of finding your feet wherever your footsteps lead.

 

Time travel

In the summer of 2002, my then-husband and I took a long Western road trip, spending two weeks driving some 11,000 miles in a rented SUV with our dog. From our home in New Hampshire, we drove through Virginia, Arkansas, Texas, Arizona, then up the California coast before turning east toward home. Along the way we leapfrogged from one destination to another, stringing a great continental necklace studded with the Great Smoky Mountains, Petrified Forest, Redwood, Yellowstone, and Badlands National Parks.

I remember very little from this trip. It was before I’d started blogging, and my then-husband and I took only a smattering of pictures with a large, state-of-the-(then)-art digital camera that saved photos to a floppy disk. We spent most of our two weeks driving, trying to make good time rather than having a good time: many of my photos were shot from a moving car as we hurried from one destination to the next, the trip itself blurring into a fog of long-driving days and too little time spent walking.

I revisited the photos from this trip after recently starting to read Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks. Williams’ book is a meditative rhapsody on the impact national parks have had on her psyche: wherever she encounters it, wilderness is a balm that soothes Williams’ soul. When I reflect back on my own hopscotch trip from national park to park to park, what I (sadly) remember is the disappointment I felt at how little time we spent at each one.

Whereas Williams describes wilderness as a place to slow down and appreciate otherwise overlooked natural wonders, the pace of that long-ago road trip was set by my then-husband, who was habitually driven by his own restlessness. Looking at my pictures of that trip is both strange and surreal: although I was there to either take or pose for these pictures, it feels almost voyeuristic to look back on what seems like another lifetime lived by someone else. When you’re in a hurry to arrive anywhere but here, you come home feeling like you’ve been nowhere at all.

 

Burning girls

One night last week, J and I watched an American Experience documentary about Manhattan’s 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 workers (most of them young women) were killed. J had never heard of the tragedy—I’m guessing many people haven’t—but about a year ago I’d read David von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, which was one of the sources cited in the program. Although largely forgotten today, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire marked a watershed moment in the American labor movement, the campaign for women’s suffrage, and the fight for workers’ rights and workplace safety: a tragedy so atrocious, the public came together to demand legislative change.

The Triangle fire happened at a pivotal moment in American history: had it not been an accident believed to have been started by a wayward cigarette butt tossed into a bin of fabric scraps, you might say the fire was perfectly timed. A few years before the fire, factory workers across New York City—most of them young immigrant women, or “factory girls”—organized a strike for better working conditions, and workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory were at the forefront of this movement. Although the strike resulted in slightly better wages, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory refused to allow its workers to unionize, thereby robbing them of any lasting bargaining power. Because the strike had made textile factories and the rights of workers into front-page news, however, the 1911 fire was the culminating factor that galvanized a horrified public into doing something to protect the rights of New York’s most vulnerable workers. The strike had made New Yorkers aware of the plight of factory girls, and the fire corroborated how bad workplace conditions truly were.

The Triangle fire took place near quitting time on Saturday, March 25, 1911, when crowds of passersby were walking to and from nearby Washington Square Park. The Triangle factory resided on the top three floors of a high-rise, trapping workers who thronged stairways that were choked with smoke and doors that had been locked by management to prevent employee theft. Horrified witnesses thronged the streets below the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, waiting for fire crews to arrive as smoke billowed from the building and frightened workers clung to a single poorly-constructed fire escape and crowded around flaming windows. When fire crews arrived, their ladders were not long enough to reach victims on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, leaving nothing for firefighters and bystanders to do but watch as the fire escape collapsed and workers started to jump out of smoking windows, their clothes, bodies, and hair streaming fire.

It was this image of burning girls falling or leaping from windows that turned public sentiment. Suddenly the poor, unwashed immigrants whom so many native New Yorkers had previously reviled became human: our own daughters, wives, and sisters. Because it happened on a Saturday afternoon, the tragedy, which killed 146 people (123 of them women) in less than twenty minutes, was witnessed by crowds of people, including a United Press reporter who filed a news report describing the sickening thud of burning bodies landing on pavement. For those who weren’t there to witness the fire in person, the newspapers printed gruesome photographs of smoldering bodies piled on sidewalks, and those who didn’t believe the photos could examine the bodies at a makeshift morgue setup on Charities Pier, where open coffins were displayed in an attempt to identify victims.

Although largely forgotten today, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is fascinating because it is one of those galvanizing moments in history when public sentiment changed overnight. Regardless of what New Yorkers had previously believed about teenage immigrant workers, unions, or factory working conditions, in the aftermath of the fire there was a widespread outcry for legislation to regulate working hours, child labor, and workplace safety. Sometimes I wonder what it would take to make similar sweeping changes in our society today: do we have to actually see gruesome photos of children killed in school shootings to turn public sentiment away from gun interests, for instance? The media in 1911 was infinitely simpler than that in our wired, networked, and perpetually plugged-in world, so why is it that a series of sympathetic newspaper reports and a dozen grainy photos had more of an impact than all the Tweets, Instagram photos, and 24-hour news reports of our day and age?

The photos illustrating today’s post come from “Think Pink,” an exhibit currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts.

 

Visible storage

Last week while J and I were in New York, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We’d been to the Museum of Natural History in the morning, grabbing a quick lunch from a Central Park vendor on our walk from one museum to the other. Had I but world enough and time, I could spend days rambling in either the Museum of Natural History or the Met, but last week J and I had only a few short hours to devote to each. We didn’t, in other words, have time to ramble: instead, we made a short list of things we absolutely wanted to see, then we made a beeline to those things, leaving leisurely exploration for our next visit.

What’s interesting about a museum like the Met, however, is how difficult it is to avoid rambling. J had two specific eras he wanted to explore—Modern and 19th century—and these were housed in sprawling galleries on different floors. It took a fair bit of wandering, in other words, to arrive to the specific sites we were making a beeline for, and once we were there, we engaged in more wandering, roaming from one gallery to another without a clearly delineated path or plan.

Appreciating art at the Metropolitan Museum is like looking for a good place to eat in Boston’s North End: you can’t make a bad choice because everything around you is excellent. By the time J and I succumbed to museum fatigue and decided to head back to our hotel, a detour to find a restroom on our way to the Museum’s main entrance led us straight into the mazy corridors of a place I swear I’ve never been before: the Museum’s visible storage area, where seemingly endless artifacts and decorative objects are meticulously arranged in glass cabinets, like a closed closet or catalogue turned inside-out.

Had I but world enough and time—had my feet not been aching from an entire day of Museum-rambles—I could have easily spent hours looking at this stunning array of objects—an embarrassment of riches—with only curiosity rather than curatorial captions to guide me. Without the narrative storyline of an curated exhibit to tell viewers what they “should” get out of these objects, museum goers are left to sift through the troves on their own, picking and choosing their own masterpieces from the aisles.

How could I have missed on previous visits these cabinets of wonder, their shiny surfaces like a natural historian’s curio cabinet stocked with specimens: an infinite world of riches contained in glass?

 

Beneath the blue

Last week, J and I took the train to New York City, where he attended a conference and I kept in touch online with my classes, both of us working in the mornings then exploring in the afternoons.

Some of the places we explored were new to us: we went to a taping of The Daily Show, for instance, and we spent an afternoon wandering around the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum. But other places we visited are familiar sites that have achieved an almost ritual significance. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been to the Central Park Zoo or Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance: these are places I want to re-visit no matter how many times I’ve already been, each new encounter feeling a bit like going home even though I’ve never lived in New York.

One place in New York that has an irresistible pull on my imagination–a place I visit with almost religious fervor–is the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History, where you can walk under a life-sized fiberglass replica of a full-grown female blue whale.

I could probably spend a week or more in the American Museum of Natural History staring at the dioramas in the Hall of Mammals, letting my imagination take me to exotic locations, each meticulously detailed set a portal into another world. But even though I brace myself, it’s always the blue whale that amazes me the most, each visit a jaw-dropping surprise. Is there any place on the planet, I wonder, that could be as awe-inspiring as the shadow beneath a blue whale?

 

Nesting

Last weekend, I took a quick trip to Columbus, Ohio to visit my family, a trip that involved more than a bit of bird-watching. In past Ohio trips, my folks and I have watched nesting yellow-crowned night herons in Bexley, ospreys in Pickerington, and eagles in Delaware. This year, my folks and I didn’t see any night herons, osprey, or eagles, but we did see a pair of killdeer at Pickerington Ponds guarding (and noisily trying to distract us from) a clutch of speckled, well-camouflaged eggs.

Also at Pickerington Ponds, we saw a half dozen barn swallows who had transformed the ceiling of an under-used picnic shelter in an open-air nursery.

The barn swallows in particular were being run ragged by their hungry offspring, whose cavernous mouths simply would not be filled, no matter how many insects their parents stuffed into them.

But what impressed me more than these hard-working swallows was the steadfast tenacity of the killdeer, who had built their minimalistic scrape of a nest on the edge of a gravel path leading to a lookout blind (and which park rangers had dutifully circled with yellow CAUTION tape).

It takes guts (and healthy vocal cords) for two robin-sized birds to keep an intermittent stream of park visitors from inadvertently stepping on a nearly invisible nest, but that’s exactly what these two killdeer did, first trying to lure us away by feigning a broken wing (a quintessential killdeer distraction display) then noisily dive-bombing us as we tried to locate the nest they were guarding. (In the picture above, the adult killdeer is standing right next to her eggs, but we stared at the bird for a couple minutes before we realized that.)

After we’d found the killdeer nest and stepped off the gravel path they were guarding to take a circuitous route behind the observation blind, we looked back and saw one of the pair investigating a water bottle my mom had set down while she was scanning the skies with her binoculars. When you’re a killdeer guarding a well-camouflaged clutch of speckled eggs, you have every reason to suspect every odd or unusual object.

Click here for more photos from Pickerington Ponds: enjoy!

 

Best of 2012

Today’s Photo Friday theme is “Best of 2012,” which gives me an excuse to review the photos I took in 2012. This past year wasn’t a particularly photo-rich year for me: for the first few months of 2012, Reggie was so frail, we didn’t go far on our daily dog walks, which meant I didn’t take many pictures…and after Reggie died in April, I walked even less, which again meant I didn’t take many pictures.

My favorite photo from 2012 comes from an August trip to the Columbus Zoo, which points to how few interesting photos I took close to home last year. Taking photos at a zoo is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel: you have a captive subject, so it becomes a matter of choosing which angle on which flamingo is your favorite. The Columbus Zoo has large, grassy enclosure where flamingos wander freely around an artificial pond, and the flamingos were vigorously flapping, squawking, and fussing when J and I saw them: captive subjects that were nevertheless moving and active.

Given how many and how active these birds were, it a bit of a challenge to choose the three flamingo pictures I included in that day’s photo set. When you are blessed with abundance, you can afford to be picky, and the photos I ultimately picked showed solitary flamingos at rest: not the entire flock, but a quiet moment experienced within the flock. Apparently I like my flamingos calm and elegant, not fussing and squawking.

One of my resolutions for 2013 is to walk more, which also means take more pictures. Only time will tell how the “Best of 2013” compares with the “Best of 2012.”

This is my contribution for today’s Photo Friday theme, “Best of 2012.” I originally blogged that first flamingo photo at the beginning of this post. Here are links to past “Best of” posts: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.

 

Sudden hummingbirds

One morning last month while I was standing at the kitchen sink doing dishes, I saw a female ruby-throated hummingbird hovering around our backyard bird-feeder, confused, wondering why a red feeder should hold birdseed rather than sugar water. Hummingbirds are lightning-fast and iridescent, so it always feels like an unexpected gift to see one: a sudden spark of motion and color that zips into view, pauses, then darts away, an elusive apparition that already seems like a memory even before it’s gone.

It still seems strange to watch our backyard bird-bath and feeder while doing the morning dishes rather than spending that time watching for Reggie. It’s been over five months since Reggie died, and my morning ritual of watching Reggie in our backyard dog-pen while I did dishes before our morning walk—my glances to make sure he wasn’t pacing and whining at the gate, or to check that he hadn’t fallen into a tangled heap somewhere, unable to get up—was such a staple of Reggie’s last year, it seems strange to no longer do it.

I think of Reggie most often in the mornings when I do dishes, as there are many reminders of him then: not just the dog-pen in easy sight from the kitchen window, but also the digital photo frames that show a random history of J’s and my life together, including many photos of Reggie in various stages of his prime, middle age, and decline: images appearing occasionally and at random, as if reminding me of experiences I can never forget.

There are also all the memories I have of standing at the sink in Reggie’s final months and weeping as I watched for him—mornings when I knew his end was near and that someday I’d look back on those hours as precious, simply because back then, Reggie was alive. “Anticipatory grief” is the official term for this process of beginning to grieve before you’ve actually lost something, as if grief were a task you could get a head start on: a full, heaping serving you could eat bite by bite, over time, rather than swallowing in one choking gulp. Regardless of when you start grieving, whether your experience of loss is gradual and anticipated or sudden and surprising, you can’t digest it beforehand: when the actual moment of “goodbye” arrives, there’s little your anticipation can do to prepare you for what is to come.

These predictably bittersweet morning moments at the kitchen sink aren’t the only ones when I remember Reggie, however, as his memory comes to me, unbidden, at random, unforeseen times. Sometimes it’s the sight of a dog who looks a bit like Reggie—one of the dogs who barks behind a chain link fence beside my parents’ house in Columbus, Ohio, for instance, or a Reggie-colored dog walking with its owner on a wooded path. In each case, there is something about This Dog that reminds me of That One, and the spark of recognition is undeniable, my heart hearkening with a start: “Oh!” It’s often a recognition only I see: the other dog doesn’t really look like Reggie, but an awareness of resemblance appears because such a large part of my heart still looks for Reggie, expecting him naturally to be in any of the places where I am.

A month or so ago, for example, a friend and I walked around the lake at Wellesley College on a beautiful Sunday afternoon when countless families and dog-walkers were enjoying the sunshine, including one woman who sat reading in a beach chair beside an elderly keeshond who reminded me so much of Reggie, I could barely speak. This dog was sprawled comfortably on the grass while the woman read, resting and showing no desire to go wading into a lake where every other passing dog had hurled himself with great, splashing enthusiasm. This dog was midsized, gray, and irrepressibly fluffy, lolling with such an expression of quiet happiness, you’d think there was no greater joy in the world than simply lying in the grass next to a lake on a sunny, late-summer Sunday afternoon.

As the woman packed her things to leave, the dog still lay there quietly, happily indifferent, refusing to heed her calls to come, get up, and follow, ultimately tugging back on the leash when the woman tugged to stir him. It was exactly something Reggie would have done—a mischievous stripe of stubbornness tempered by the mellowness of age. There was no anger or aggression between the woman and dog, just a quiet refusal on the dog’s part, as he refused to be tamed even in old age. When the dog eventually stood up, his motions were slow and obviously achy, a second stab of recognition. Creaky and arthritic, the fluffy gray dog got up and slowly hobbled away, shadowing the woman’s steps in a manner that was so eerily reminiscent of Reggie’s arthritic gait, it might as well have been him, reincarnate.

“Enjoy him while you have him,” I wanted to shout, but I didn’t because the woman didn’t need my exhortations: she already knew. I could tell this in the way she’d knelt to the ground to kiss the dog on his snout, ruffling his furry mane, before urging him to his feet. This too was something I did, something that owners of old dogs do universally, the world over, I think. It’s a universal language that needs no translation.

You’ve surely seen the famous photo that made the rounds this summer of a man with a ponytail wading up to his neck in Lake Superior, his elderly shepherd mix floating beside him, the dog’s face resting with a blissful expression on the man’s chest. That dog, too, reminded me of Reggie in terms of his size and general shape; the blissful expression is one I recognized, as one of an old, arthritic dog finding a moment of peace.

When I first read about the man and his 18-year-old, arthritic dog, it brought grief over Reggie’s passing back as if no time had passed at all. Grief is a fruit that remains perpetually fresh, preserved in some hidden cellar of the soul. Seeing the photo, I wept as if Reggie had died only yesterday—wept because I remember how desperately I looked for ways to make him comfortable in his final months, and wept because I recognized that expression of trusting comfort that marked those elusive moments when I had succeeded. That blissful look, I think, is what Reggie had on his face when he died with his head in my lap, at peace at last: a look I would have done anything in my power to elicit.

There is another form of recognition that is even stranger—even more tenuous, and even more powerful—than these encounters with dogs who remind me of Reggie. For at random, unpredictable times, I’ll see things that are entirely unlike Reggie that nevertheless remind me of him—a bright eyed, inquisitive toddler exploring the world just beyond his mother’s reach, or an elderly man doddering on slow, achy legs down a grocery store aisle, or a friend’s hushed story of how his mother died while he sat watch over her, alone. These people are not like Reggie—it’s silly and even obscene to compare them—but there is this same sudden spark of recognition: “Oh, yes. This life too is precious, beloved, and destined to pass.”

These lives, too, are like sudden hummingbirds which zoom into the receptive spaces of our soul, brightening everything with the quickening glint of their unanticipated coming, pausing, then flitting away: beautiful, enlivening, and ultimately ephemeral.

Click here for more photos from the Columbus Zoo, from last month’s trip to visit family in Ohio. Enjoy!