Wimbledon then and now
So twenty-seven years ago I was sitting on the couch watching Wimbledon, watching a new generation take down the five-time champion. It’s right there in my journal, in my child’s hand. And here I sit on the couch tonight watching the fifth set of Wimbldon as Nadal tries to snap Federer’s five-match winning streak.
I can see my child-self waking up early – six time zones away from London, that match was in the Chicago morning – going downstairs alone, having “breakfast with Wimbledon” in the living room. I probably had a waffle and a glass of orange juice; since my parents would have still been asleep, at least in the beginning of the match, I probably snuck my breakfast into the living room and ate sitting at the low coffee-table and cleared my dishes during a break between games. I probably had a school-girl crush on Borg; I probably didn’t appreciate the quality of the tennis in the least. I did know enough to know something historic had happened – I can’t imagine another tennis match that would have made it into my journal.
Here I am watching Wimbledon again. All these years later I still hold on to my childish faith in the magic of sport. All these years later I still believe in the power of sport to lead us to our best selves. I still believe that winning with humility, losing with grace, and pushing ourselves beyond our limits along the way are among the finest of human traits, and I still think athletic endeavor can teach us those lessons like nothing else.
All these years later, I still think that at 2 sets apiece, 5 games all, 40-40 a person finds out who she really is.
Filed under What makes me tick | Comment (0)Sowing poems
Last night I booted up the computer, stared at the screen, and shut it right back down. These foggy-mind days of sleep deprivation drain me; after the boys have gone to bed I am too tired to think clearly, to do anything deliberately, but when I try to go to bed my mind is frantically finishing off all the half-finished thoughts of the day. I try to capture them but they flutter faster than hummingbird wings – I can hear them whirring and see the blur of their existence but I cannot isolate an individual thought. I stare at the blank screen. I stare at the blank journal page. I hover over a poem that needs editing, pen in hand, but the words swim on the page and I cannot bring the presence of mind necessary for the deliberate work of revision. I have many many first drafts, practice poems, nice lines that need the deliberate work of revision but my mind balks from the task.
I know C will not wake up three times a night forever. I know it is just because he rolls onto his front and cannot roll back over – and the knowing of this keeps me awake, too, peeking into his crib constantly to make sure he is not trapped on his stomach slowly suffocating, the knowing of this keeps the sleep I do get light and troubled with a part of my mother-brain always listening for a cry of trouble. I know A will settle into his new big-boy bed and stop calling for Dada in the night – he wants Dada in the middle of the night, not me, but the call, of course, wakes me as well. I know this will pass and that I should simply accept this time for what it is: the time of my baby’s babyhood. A time to take advantage of the way sleep deprivation can, in fact, allow me to access sudden strange places of creativity. Maybe this is my season of drafts. It is spring, after all, here in this farming region. The time of planting. Maybe I should take a deep breath, learn from my farming in-laws. Sow now, reap later.
Filed under Mama days, What makes me tick | Comments (2)Family lost, family found
I grew up not knowing much about my extended family. My paternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother died before I was born. My maternal grandfather died shortly after I turned four. I have a few memories of him, the sort of memories a three-year old would have: brief flashes, an image of a living room, a face – memories reinforced by photographs so that it is hard to be certain if they are truly my memories at all. My paternal grandmother moved across the country when I was eight, perhaps younger. There were short visits after that – she and my mother did not get along – and she died when I was fourteen. One set of cousins was a dozen states away; another set – my mother’s brother – lived nearby and we used to get together when I was young but for some reason contact ended abruptly. I imagine some sort of falling out between my mother and uncle, but I don’t really know.
But beyond these deaths and absences, these fallings-out and strained relationships, it was the general atmosphere of silence and secrets in my house that kept me from knowing my family. We were not a family of stories, we were not a family of family histories. That’s not uncommon in an alcoholic household. My mother did not like telling stories – at least, she did not like telling stories she could not control; she did not like revealing information that she, for whatever reason, deemed dangerous – and I quickly learned not to ask questions. It was a good survival technique for a young girl, but I regret it now.
I do not know how my parents met. I do not know why they waited so long to have children. I do not know my maternal grandmother’s maiden name and I’m not entirely sure how she died. I don’t know when her family arrived in the US. I don’t know how she and my grandfather met. I don’t know if she had siblings. I don’t know what any of my cousins – those four children of my mother’s brother with whom I used to play – are doing today or where they are living or if they have children of their own. I do know that my maternal grandfather was Swedish, but I do not know where his family came from or when they emigrated to the US, or why. And with both my parents dead there is nobody to ask even if I belonged to the kind of family that talked about this sort of thing.
After my parents died and before I married I often felt rootless. There’s a line from a Shawn Colvin song, “I’ve given nobody life, I am nobody’s wife, and I seem to be nobody’s daughter” that sums up how I felt for many years. I had no family history to connect me to the past, and I had no offspring to drive me into the future. Even after I married, married into a Swiss family that could trace its family tree back about 400 years, I felt like a jigsaw puzzle piece that had fallen out of the box. When my first son was born, my family, my blood family, suddenly had two generations. A doubling of my connections, but still my history was a blurry mystery.
Until Sunday.
Sunday, out of curiosity, I googled my maternal grandfather. He was quite an amateur photographer in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s; I have some prints of his that still bear the ribbons they were awarded in local showings. I was looking through family snapshots. I got curious and typed in his name. The first result that popped up was a link to a family tree website hosted by somebody with my maternal grandfather’s last name. I clicked through to the site, and it appears that his father and my grandfather were brothers – my grandfather had four siblings who lived to adulthood. I had only known about one. I spent the afternoon looking through his family tree; there is information there that matches what I know; many of the sources he used to verify his findings are foot-noted. I have a feeling that it’s reliable.
It traces the Swedish branch of my family back to before 1730. I have gone from rootless to seven Swedish generations in the blink of an eye. And that’s just my grandfather’s paternal line. I haven’t even begun to dig around his maternal line. There are people out there with my grandfather’s name, with my blood, with my son’s funny ears and high smooth forehead. There are people out there, my people. I have people.
My how I love the internet.
Filed under Bloodlines, What makes me tick | Comments (3)That’s me running around on the field
I love this line from Trish: “Emerging writers are just seven year old kids, playing their hearts out and hoping that someone on the sideline thinks they’ve got potential.” That’s where I am with my poetry right now: full of the enthusiasm of a seven year kid (and perhaps sometimes turning a phrase as clumsily as one) just playing the game. There are days when I believe I am talented. There are days when I’m full of doubt. But mostly, these days, I’m running around kicking words like a ball and laughing to see which direction they fly off in. I’m having fun; even the work of revision is fun. In fact, the work of revision is often more fun than the rush of the first draft. Honing, fine-tuning, molding something raw into something with form and shape and purpose. Finding just the right word and putting it in just the right place. For now this is enough, knowing that I enjoy this.
I want more. I’ve got plans for more. I’m working towards more. But I also want to enjoy running around barefoot on the cool grass kicking balls with all the passion only a seven year old can muster.
Filed under Poetry, What makes me tick | Comments (3)1 for sorrow, 2 for joy…
A crow visits our backyard, our postage stamp of a backyard here in this urban neighborhood, almost daily. It swoops down from the same direction every time – from the east – and lands at the back of the yard by the vine-covered brick wall that divides our piece of green from the apartments behind us. We make up a nice little green patch, the six little city gardens of our apartment building and the grassy stretch attached to the apartments behind us. Several large trees, the wall to perch on, the hedges. It attracts the sparrows, a motley crew of song birds, and this crow.
Last Thursday while I was drinking a coffee on a balcony that overlooks an open-air market a glossy black crow landed on the railing a foot from my elbow. Its claws clicked as it grasped the railing and it gleamed in the sun. He – was it a he? how does one tell? – tilted his head this way and that as he inspected my table; finding nothing to eat he inched his way down the railing to the next table, then the next. He flew the brief distance back to the spot at my elbow, I met his gaze – glossy black eyes in his glossy black head – and then he soared away over the market.
I’ve always loved crows, those collectors of the shiny, those companions of the wolves. These visitations feel like a blessing, like a message from my totem, like a guide to the way forward.
Filed under What makes me tick | Comments (3)
My shiny days
But it also feels like this: shiny things, so many shiny things to gather and hoard in memory.
So many first things from you, my second son: your first smile, glittering and glowing, reflecting all the rays of the sun back at me. Oh, I swept down for that one. A coo and a sigh to tell me you’re awake. Small fingers in the middle of the night pulling at my shirt, grasping my finger, squeeze-release-squeeze-release until you drift back to sleep against my breast. The first time you pulled your bare foot into your mouth, your surprised and delighted eyes that you’d actually done it. Kicking and splashing in the bath, coming out smelling like water and lavendar and that scent that is simply you.
And last things from you, my first son: the last time I nursed you before bed-time, the two of us in your darkened room, quiet in the rocking chair in the corner. The last time you crawled into bed with us in the morning. The last time you came running calling “Ang au! Ang au!” in your mispronounced Swiss-English mix that only we understood meant “Me too! Me too!” The last time you said “Alllllll done!” at lunch. When was that, exactly, that last time? I have recorded all your first but these small simple lasts, they slip past me. It is their nature.
These days of your changings. You are running now, big one, down hills at full-tilt showing no fear and you, you little one, you are almost sitting up by yourself. All these things to hoard, giggles and smiles and kisses I want to put in a box. Days full of these shiny things. Yes, it also feels like this.
Filed under Mama days, What makes me tick | Comments (2)
My magpie days
This is how it feels: I stand on the threshold of my day like a child hovering outside the candy store clutching a penny in her hand. So many choices before her and just one penny. So many things she wants, the chocolate and the licorice ropes and the gumballs. Who knew there was so much candy? So much to try, so much to taste, but there is just the one penny. How can she possibly decide? She wants it all, and what if she picks the wrong thing? What if she doesn’t like it? What if she never finds another penny? Indecision sends her home in tears, the penny unspent and with no candy to show for the trip.
This is how it feels: I look around the workroom of my day and see pieces of time scattered across my floor like scraps of material, bits of shimmering silks and honest calicos and comforting wools and none of them big enough for a bedspread. The best I can hope for is stitching these stolen blocks of time together into a patchwork quilt of a day, fitting the scraps into a pleasing pattern, into a sunburst if I’m lucky.
This is how it feels: I am always looking for time, seeking out minutes the way a magpie seeks out shiny treasures to line her nest. I see minutes scattered through my day like a bag of sequins spilled out onto the floor; like a bird I hop to and fro gathering up their glittering promises. I dive and swoop at the smallest shiny shard of time, clutching it in my beak and soaring away. I steal time, I hoard time, I defend time with ruffled feathers. I hide it in my hole in the tree thinking that I will come back and reclaim it later, thinking that I can fuse this tin-foil second to that birthday ribbon minute to that carnival-ring quarter hour, soldering these fragments of time into some workable whole.
This is how it feels trying to pull words out of the air when the hands of the clock seem to be turning backwards, or sideways. I want more time, more shiny minutes on these magpie days.
Filed under What makes me tick | Comment (0)