Beginning: In a first grade classroom down the road, there is a piece of chart paper stuck to the wall. “ON GATHERING STORIES,” is the title of these notes. You should listen, pay attention to small moments, use details that are vivid, and my favorite reminder: “You might think you’re done, but you’ve only just begun!” I know about the chart paper because for a few days a week, I’m working in this school, helping K-2 students with their reading and writing. (“I just sang a poem!” one boy exclaimed after finishing a book that rhymed, and since it rhymed, he decided the right thing to do was sing the story instead of read it. Seemed like a good choice to me.)
The day I started, I wore my Grandma Lewis’ opal ring, and on the drive over considered the end of Twirl, and how I was really, really, really upset that the book ended with a question. I begged my editor to change what I wrote to a statement. “I don’t want to look weak,” I told her.
“You have to trust me on this one,” she wrote back. “It’s the strong people who can ask the questions.”
It took a strong person to ask if I’d consider the job in the first place after I’d benched myself. (She’s a fellow Drill Teamer – don’t ever underestimate the Drill Teamers.) I suppose it takes a strong person to stand up, put her dancing shoes back on and ask, “Why not?”
Learn to love the questions themselves, right? Who said that? Shakespeare? Jesus? Annie Dillard? Whoever. No great story began with an answer.
Reading: On the Come Up by Angie Thomas. Hadley’s reading it as well, though neither of us knew the other chose the book, so it was a fun surprise. I love talking about the book with her. We both love the main character, Brianna, and her poetic rapping skills.
I put down The Empathy Exams and Marie Kondo’s tidying up book for Thomas’ book. A teacher in a classroom I was working in the other day was explaining that one of the ways students become stronger readers is to read empathetically. “Empathy is something you feel in your body when you read,” she told her first graders. (This teacher is one of the best I’ve ever seen – she makes me think I might be able to teach again someday.) On the Come Up is a story I feel in my body. The story makes me think of walking into Perry, one of the schools I worked in last year, and knowing that without a doubt, I am unqualified to do the work I was hired to do, that the amount of trauma and heartache was insurmountable, but equally sensing that this is where I belonged. Walking into the library in that school was my favorite way to start the day.
My love for Perry reminds me of a scene in The Gilmore Girls where Emily and Rory are antique shopping, and Rory picks up a trinket and asks if it’s worth anything. Emily says, “Do you like it?” Rory says she does, and Emily says, “Well, then it’s worth something.”
I don’t think Marie Kondo would like that scene too much. I’m thinking more of the setting than of the sentiment.
I respect Kondo’s book, and admire her way of life, but a few Sundays ago, when I was knee deep in Marie Kondoing my life, I happened to be one of the last people at church, facing the empty and dark sanctuary. Could you call this space useful even though it’s used for only a few hours every Sunday? How much is a silent exclamation point* that could swallow me whole (and I don’t think I’d mind), worth? I don’t know about holding joy so much as I want to wander around in mystery. I want to always experience the mystery of things, so I walked through that dark sanctuary alone, to get to the world outside. (* “Silent exclamation point” comes from Jeanne Murray Walker’s book of poems, Pilgrim, You Find the Path By Walking – go on and get it, asap.)
Written: For Coffee + Crumbs: Variations on a Foundation For TSP: On Mystery, Begin With Your Feet, Wasps As Metaphor
Considering: Hadley will be 13 in thirteen days. Harper’s nickname on her soccer team is, “Killer.” Each morning, our three footsteps imprint the golf course on the way to the bus. Hadley’s first, then mine and Harper’s. Each afternoon they fade from the sun that’s dried the dew, and each morning we put them back – not in the hope that this time they’ll stay, but because that’s the path we use again and again to get to where we need to go – whether the marks we make fade or not.
Thanks for reading.
October 2015: Hopeful Red Geraniums
October 2014: The Next Station Won’t Be As Hard
October 2013: On Reading
October 2012: Spooked
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