Aye...

Every now and then, even an English teacher feels that paragraphs are just too much.

List One: I feel compelled to share the reason for my prolonged absence. The reasons include, but are not limited to:
1. The pile on my desk that had 90 literary essays, 90 book responses and 90 memoirs all written by my darling 12 year olds.
2. My inability to ever say no to anything. (I have made progress on this, hence the reason I am writing this now.)
3. A roommate transition here at 90 W.
4. The planning involved in teaching the youth how to read and write well. (Meaning remembering to capitalize names. Seriously.)

List Two: Things that have happened today to allow me to write even this post:
1. Skipped basketball practice.
2. Skipped book club.
3. Skipped X rays.
4. (Regretfully but necessarily) skipped dinner with a dear friend.

List Three: Joys of this evening:
1. Getting the last of the literary essays graded.
2. Grading 30 of the book responses.
3. Making a real dinner.
4. Listening to "All at Sea" on repeat (yes, Jamie Cullum. yes, I love it) and wishing I were on a plane to Ireland.
5. Talking to one of my best friends from high school about my trip to the great state of Ohio this weekend!

That's all I got. If you are looking for something literary and/or deep, you will have to wait a little longer. I'm not short on ideas, just time.

Stop Scuttling!

(If you plan on reading The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, I recommend that you don’t read the following. The ending of the novel is at once incredibly abrupt and incredibly poignant, and I don’t want to assume responsibility for anyone missing that.)

The Inheritance of Loss was a book that didn’t envelop me in its characters or sweep me away with its story, but rather painted pictures of some of the hardest questions that people of modern times are faced with: What do we do with the life we inherit? Does everything come down to economics? Do people actually believe in justice? How can we establish authentic identities? How do we confront poverty? War? Injustice? Selfishness? Racism? Aye. It’s overwhelming.

That word is really the only way I can describe my reading experience of this book. It is a story of interwoven tales in India: a poor boy given the chance to go to America, his father, a cook, who places every ounce of hope in his son. A retired, hard-hearted Judge and his unredeeming back story of why he is so cold (or does it come redeemable if it is the result of forces beyond his control?). His westernized granddaughter, Sai, and her adolescent love affair with her tutor who goes home to life in a hut, who eventually turns on her in the name of rebellion.

It is through the stories of these characters that I, a white, educated American peeked into life in the aftermath of colonialism. For the past month, so many different thoughts have been swirling in my mind and I am uncertain of how to process through and deal with them all. At this point, I have only my thoughts, which I would like to spring into action. At this point, all I can ask is for you, too, to give it some serious thought. There are countless passages I could bring up, but for time’s sake, I will focus on just this one:

“He knew what his father thought: that immigration, so often presented as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that is was cowardice that led many to America; fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug to your conscience; where you never heard the demands of servants, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely looking after your own wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous” (page 329).

Here’s what I’m thinking. I have spent a lot of my life avoiding need in the world. It is so easy to put on a mindset of “if I can’t see it, then it must not exist.” And I have to say, that ignorance is often bliss. The longer I live in New York, the harder it is for me to ignore that poverty is real—not only here, but in the global community. I am faced with homelessness everyday. It has to be my choice to deal with it or ignore it. The longer I am a teacher, the more intertwined I have become in the actual lives of kids growing up without parents, without money, without support, without feeling valued. I don’t want to be in a place where I am ignoring reality and scuttling to places, either physical or mental, where poverty doesn’t exist. This is where I am right now.


I mentioned at the beginning that the end of the book is incredibly poignant. Biju is the poor young man who left his father to go to America. His experience in America includes working ridiculous hours in restaurants and sleeping in basement apartments with a dozen other people and rats. Unbeknownst to him, the land where he has grown up becomes ravaged by violent rebellion. Eventually, he decides that he must see his father again. Against the advice of his friends in America, who say that he won’t be able to come back, he returns to India. On his way home, he has to pay off the rebels, who then strip him of all his luggage, earnings and even clothes. He is left to walk to his father in a woman’s night gown. He finally makes it to his father’s:

“Kanchenjunga appeared above the parting clouds, as it did only very early in the morning during this season—
“Biju?” whispered the cook—
“Biju!” he yelled, demented—
Sai looked out and saw two figures leaping at each other as the gate swung open.
The five peaks of Kanchenjunga turned golden with the kind of luminous light that made you feel, if briefly, that truth was apparent.
All you needed to do was reach out and pluck it” (357).

This is the immaterial joy that resonates only from love. This is the immaterial joy that can exist even in the most grim situations. Sigh.

So this is what I’m suggesting:

1. Remember the poor to the point where it forces you to take some proactive steps. Whatever that looks like for you.
2. Treasure your relationships, not your things, most of all—and take the time to examine your heart and mind to the point where you really place people above (fill in the blank).

A Joy of Life.

Technology savvy I am not. This is a post for me to play around with adding pictures. This is of Julie, me and Jenna last July at the Eagle and Child in Oxford, England. (Did you read the New York Times travel section today? It's mentioned on the front page.) This is where The Inklings, Tolkein, CS Lewis and friends, would meet to talk literature. Needless to say, besides the fact that we spent our entire trip traipsing around the English countryside reading and drinking tea, being the nerds that we are, we were quite excited to visit the pub where our literary heroes met.

Sigh. I think that's half the reason why I love my job so much. I get to talk with kids about books all the time. It is amazing to watch the way that reading can change the way we view so much of the world. I belong to a somewhat overachieving book club. We meet every week in Brooklyn after school. We have processed through topics that otherwise would have no real voice in my life: post-colonial India, the role of memory, the Black Plague, what motivates people to action. I walk away thinking every time.

So, if you haven't gotten the hint yet, here are a few book club recommendations:

Atonement by Ian McEwan
Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton

Or, here are my current books on deck. Let me know if you want to read:

East of Eden by John Steinbeck (my book club's next pick)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (teaching it to the kids!)
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Go read with someone. Seriously.

Everyone Needs Some Patty Griffin

It is amazing when one line can completely sum up my life:

"I need a little place in the sun sometimes or I think I will die!"

I suppose it's half in jest, but really, winter, it's time to end.

A Little Will For You

Tomorrow’s high temperature is 18. 18! If you know me, you know that I have issues with the winter. But more than the winter pulling me down, I think the haunting of spring might be worse. There’s a flower store on my walk to and from work in Brooklyn that puts potted hyacinths out in February. February! Apparently they don’t know that such an essential smell of spring messes with my Seasonal Affective Disordered mind. It is impossible for that scent not to travel directly inside of me and make me truly believe, for a moment, that the beloved season that ends winter has come. But then I look at my ankle length, down coat and the wool mittens threaded through its arm holes. Blast.

The spring is in front of me, but I continually refuse to believe that it will actually come. I have no patience, especially in March. One of my best friends from high school and I used to go hiking every March 1st wearing shorts, declaring to our friends that spring had finally come. We searched for tiny flowers as proof and clung to them until real spring appeared sometime in mid April. Upon return from a week long camping trip in Florida to cold Oxford, Ohio, my friend and I cooked dinner on a camping stove and hung bags of oranges from our porch. It was as if I refused to trust the promise that spring would actually make its way into my life.

I recently revisited Macbeth and saw the same thing. The witches are the trickiest characters in the play to understand. They haunt Macbeth and Banquo with visions of the future and each time I read it I picture their tone differently. Sometimes I see them as strange and prophetic, sometimes haunting and crazy, mysterious or funny. Regardless how their message comes across, though, they paint a picture of future glory in front of these men. They are able to disregard the witches’ craziness for the beauty of the promise they speak: that Macbeth would be king and that Banquo would father kings.
Macbeth is completely unwilling to wait around for that day, though. Instead of letting his future wind its course, he jumpstarts it all by planning ways for it to happen by his power as soon as possible. Macbeth refused to trust in the promise. He has Banquo, among others, killed to ensure his way to the throne.

Banquo’s ghost appears at Macbeth’s dinner party, and only Macbeth can see him. We have two options here: Macbeth is either hallucinating because of all he has done or Banquo’s ghost really is there and is trying to warn Macbeth about what he is doing. I guess this is the beauty of drama—it really is up to interpretation (translation: read or see the play and tell me what you think. Seriously.) Regardless, his inability to trust in the promise is haunting him and causes even more distress.
The question of this play rings in my mind—did the witches know this would happen? Could it have happened another way? Are they the reason it happened at all? The only insight into that question I have is that the play is called the Tragedy of Macbeth. There is a lot of blood spilled and minds lost. So what’s the moral of the story? Is there ever just one?

What I see today is wanting myself to trust wholeheartedly in what I am promised in the future—heaven—and not the hallmark heaven that people talk about in bad poetry, but the heaven that is the home that my heart hears calling. I need to trust that the longing that my heart feels on so many levels will be fulfilled. One day. I’m promised the kingdom of heaven, but not given many more details about what will happen in between. But lucky for me, God isn’t a (pick one: sadistic, scary, prophetic) witch whose mood we can’t read for the life of us.

I just hope that I can begin to trust in the promise rather than taking it all into my own hands, thinking that my ideas might get me there faster.

And maybe just for now, I just need to begin to trust that winter will end and I will get to hang up my sweet coat.

How do we move forward? On Memory, Part 1

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco is a title that I hesitate to bring up. It is the blasted book that I haven’t been able to finish, which I mentioned in my last post. This is distressing for multiple reasons. One is that it bothers me to leave something hanging incomplete. Character flaw or anal retentiveness? Both? Aye. The other reason is because it was incredibly intriguing when I first began. The main character is a man who suffered a stroke and with it lost his episodic, or autobiographical, memory. (“It’s episodic memory that establishes a link between who we are today and who we have been, and without it, when we say I, we’re referring only to what we are feeling now, not to what we felt before…” page 13). An antique bookseller in his sixties, Yambo can remember how to brush his teeth and drive a car, but cannot remember his wife, children, passions or childhood. The book traces his attempt to recover who he was and if that connects to who he is now post-stroke. Please don’t ask me how it turns out because I don’t know. Yet.

So I have been thinking about the degree to which our experiences, that turn into memories by the minute, influence who we are right now and the decisions and thoughts we have today. Yambo’s experience is the following: “Whatever feelings I once had were no longer mine. I wondered whether I had ever been religious; it was clear, whatever the answer, that I had lost my soul,” (page 21).

Whatever is in my past, good and bad, has shaped the way that I view the world. This is why it makes sense to me that different people understand the world in different ways depending on their experience. It is absolutely frightening to think about not being able to draw upon the past to process what is going on in and around me. In essence, Yambo is in the same position as a baby who has yet to create a framework of understanding. If this happens, is it possible to ever be the “same” person?

I have found myself wanting to wish certain parts of my past out of my memory—be it things that hurt so much to remember, or times where I have hurt someone else. But if I honestly think about that, I think most shadows of my past have—for better or worse, I guess—shaped part of my soul, as Yambo puts it. Who are we without our personal story? Does it matter if we remember every word we have ever read, but forget our narrative? One of the most heart wrenching moments in the book is when Yambo talks about his grandson: “I knew all about Alexander the Great, but nothing about Alessandro the tiny, the mine,” (page 20).

Romans 8 is making a little more sense to me in light of this: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” I was talking with some friends last night about His transformative power and this is where I see it…taking our pasts and producing a person closer to who we were meant to be, as if He knows who we can be and draws it out. We need to have our pasts to see this transformation and how making it through the moments that seem to take the life out of us are what help us to become as we reflect…and that is a good thing. And for that reason alone, I no longer want to white out the parts of my life I wish I could revise.

At the same time, I want to remember the times that have most shaped my soul in a pure, painless (unless you count the heart-hurt of beauty, of course)—the summer air of Ohio, reading Anne of Green Gables and The Chronicles of Narnia, laughing with friends and feeling understood. The sweetness of those memories overwhelms me. I’ll leave you with one more thought from Mysterious Flame: “If you don’t back up, you won’t go forward,” (page 28).

And a post-script: It appears that I only read to page 28. I know I teach 12 year olds, but I try not to be as rash as they are—I did read until page 300. I am currently mustering the strength to make it to 450.

So maybe I don't want to be cynical...

I have a confession. I couldn’t make it through the end of “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.” It’s true. The guilt I feel in not finishing a book is horrible. I tell my students that it’s ok if they need to abandon a book every once in a while, but I have a hard time following my own advice. Four of the five other people in my book club have abandoned it as well, which is ample justification. They are much smarter than me. But still. The past week has probably been the worst reading week I’ve had in quite a long time. I am 100 pages behind for our new book club choice, The Inheritance of Loss. Blah.

So my writing today is based on the things that have been going on in my head, not necessarily based on my reading of text, but more of my reading of the world. I promise to follow up with thoughts about the good that came out of “Mysterious Flame” because I do want to still think Umberto Eco a genius. But not right now.

Last Sunday I was distraught because of the apparent lack of love and caring that I saw in books and movies that seemed to realistically portray the heartaches and misunderstandings of life that leave us feeling incredibly alone in a big world. However, I spent that evening and the following two days with my family at the funeral of my mother’s aunt, and I saw a completely different heartache…one that I have tasted in the past that I cynically forgot about while watching and reading “The Last Kiss” and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. Haunting my thoughts all week has been the aching that comes from loving much.

I’m struggling with words right now, trying to decide how to portray the deep ache that I witnessed in my family last weekend, trying to give their feelings the poetry that is due to their depth. I cannot. But the one thing that I can write about is that there is a difference between the brokenness that comes from a selfish pursuit of happiness which plagued me the week before and the brokenness that comes from the loss of love that was strong enough to shape who we have become and who we want to be.

Both sides of the brokenness show us pieces of truth. Coming from selfish decisions, we become convinced that there is something utterly wrong in the world. Things are not as they should be and our compass for what is good and true and noble becomes completely skewed. But the brokenness that stems from the loss of loving much…that shows us what is right in the world and how things are supposed to be. Here we are left knowing, though, that deep, real love does exist and does change us. And at the end of the day, it’s what we’ve been craving all along.

Last Monday I was sitting at my aunt and uncle’s house with my cousins, parents, brother and grandmother where old stories and laughter were the order of the moment. In the midst of the people who I adore most in the world, I felt a part of something so much bigger than myself—my grandmother who described meeting my grandfather to me in song, eating french fries from the drive in where they still know my dad’s name from working there 30 years ago, stories that make us cry in our laughing. A slight fear of losing any of the people in the room caught my heart for a moment. But it came out of an overflowing cup—the kind of love that has tightly been woven around my life since before I was even born. A moment where everything seemed right.

I want to live out of that cup. I want to be motivated to love by the purity of that moment, and even the sorrow of watching my aunts and mother and the funeral Tuesday morning, knowing that they were loved by a woman who thought them special.

“Where O death is your victory? Where O death is your sting?” 1 Corinthians 15:55