Right Now

{Home} after a weekend in Chicago where I went to my 20 year high school reunion on one day, and a memorial service for my Grandpa on the next day.  I’m quite conflicted about this pairing of events. I spent a lot of time writing about high school for my thesis and back in Oak Park, as I walked around the halls of my high school, I felt like I’d gotten a lot of the story right. But at night, during the reunion, I started to feel worse as the evening progressed. I don’t quite know why but I think it has something to do with how many memories those faces contained. The room felt too small for all of them and by 11, when a couple generous grads bought more open bar and DJ time, I had to get out of there.

It’s not that I didn’t like seeing everyone. Well. I just can’t figure it all out.  Then this morning I read these words from My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman: “An artist is conscious of always standing apart from life, and one of the results of this can be that you begin to feel most intensely what you have failed to feel.”

Do you think that’s why I write? Because I can’t (or won’t) feel what I’m supposed to feel and so I have to look at it again and again until I’ve said, “There. That’s what I think. That’s  how I feel.”  I’ve always found comfort in this practice but today I feel a little sad about it.

{Getting ready} to talk about the most heartbreaking scene in To Kill a Mockingbird. That small paragraph after Scout describes what the Ewell home looks like, and then this: “Against the fence, in a line, were six chipped-enamel slop jars holding brilliant red geraniums, cared for as tenderly as if they belonged to Miss Maudie Atkinson…people said they were Mayella Ewell’s.” I want to ask my students what we do with that kind of beauty; the kind that shocks and haunts and doesn’t seem like it ought to be in places like the Ewell yard. I don’t have an answer for them, but I think it’d be good for me to point this beauty out to those thirteen and fourteen year olds. I think they should look for that kind of beauty, think about it and cling to it for the rest of their lives.

Things feel heavy, as they always do this time of year.  Someone told me once that the fall always makes her sad because it reminds her of death. Fall has always been my favorite season but she is right, things are dying.

Jesse pointed out all the boats on Lake Michigan as we drove along Lake Shore Drive after my Grandpa’s service.  The sky was its bluest, the lake was glistening, and Jesse says, “They’re all out there while summer takes its last gasp.” I thought, damn that kid for coming up with a phrase like that. You can’t save people from hurricanes and be a poet, too.

And on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, as we drove home, I studied the trees to see if they’d changed in the 72 hours we last saw them. They had. There were these red leaves that coiled around the trunk of the trees that I’d never noticed before. It was like they were reaching up to join the other leaves that were changing; as though every inch of the world wanted to be a part of this glorious death.