Found: Old Yellow Notebook, Fall 1990

Why, exactly, it is so full of odds and ends is not clear. There is no title on the front, only notes of things I needed to remember during that first semester of college: an extra violin lesson before my professor left the country for a week or two, notes on an upcoming piano quiz. On the back are the phone numbers of the guys who convinced me to play in the band they were forming, an address with no name attached.

Inside is random, bits of everything important about the start of freshman year:

The beginning notes for an abandoned composition for violin—a chord, a rhythmic motif, a melody based on the pitches of the wind chimes on my parents’ patio. “story about person w/ eyes the color of peace” is written in that tiny up-and-down handwriting that filled barely a third of the college-ruled lines, that always seemed to float just above the blue line rather than sit neatly on it.

A list of things to pack for the dorm room: clothes, music, books, bicycle, typewriter, decorations. The glass unicorn bought in honor of “The Glass Menagerie” that years later actually did fall and break, losing the horn that made it so special. The doll received as a gift while a toddler in Japan, the books of Swedish  and Norwegian fairy tales from childhood, the thick new Webster’s College Dictionary and Thesaurus. Everything needed to continue as myself, everything needed to start this new life.

The rough draft of an essay written for admittance to the Honors Program, “The most important intellectual experience I have had to this point was learning how to communicate on paper.”

Unfinished letters, a list, plans for a never-sent care package—the skeleton of a breakup. So hard, and so necessary.

Notes from the first days of each class that first semester: Art and Literature in the Western World, a class that lingers in my heart and mind still; Class Piano; Music Theory; Intro to Philosophy (still I wonder about our section—if our inability as a group to correctly answer any of the TA’s questions was due to our lack of understanding of the nuances of philosophy or the nuances of language.)

A note written to a now-unknown friend during class: I’m really suspicious of a musician who isn’t impressed by any other musicians. 

A poem—I had forgotten how many times I started writing and gave up, frustrated by my clumsiness, by the stiffness of the words. It is truly clunky. Still, it is full of images I have come back to repeatedly, and also a dream I had forgotten.

A music list—“Strength, Comfort, and Identity Tape.”

If there is a theme to this notebook besides Fall 1990: First Semester of College, it could be The Things I Have Forgotten, or possibly A Vast Amount of Your Adulthood Has Been Spent Running Away From and Rediscovering This Girl (Abridged version: In Some Ways You Have Not Changed at All. More abridged: Still.) There is a silence in it, but also something breathing. Which brings me again back to that poem, and the dream: I was alone, my friends were gone. I sat drawing a picture of a tree, and as I worked a voice guided me. She told me exactly how to make the picture come to life: how to make the snow in the picture begin to fall—fat silent flakes drifting past dark branches, how to draw a squirrel to life to weave through silent flakes and dark branches.

I had forgotten that dream, but the image is alive again now within me.

The fact that all of it lives, still—I think that is the point. What we draw out of life, what we bring to life, what lives and breathes throughout a life—I am in love with that mystery, that art. Still.

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Found: "Sure, I can use that."

The box must have been among the last things we were sorting through after Gram died. Thread, pins, knitting needles—I had those at home, but thread is always useful, the supply of pins was diminishing, I don’t have every size knitting needle. Besides, you never know what tools you might need for mending, sewing, creating. You never know what might need to be held together.

Four years later, and I have not yet incorporated her tools into mine. Not exactly. Two pairs of knitting needles have gone to Middle and Youngest, along with bright thick yarn and once-in-a-while knitting lessons.

This seems fitting, since Gram is the one who first taught me to knit. I remember very little about the process, except that it was slow and I found it confusing, especially when it came to purling. I vaguely remember mint green variegated yarn, although that may have been a different project. Whatever color it was, that first piece was never finished. But years later when I decided to again try knitting, there was something still there from those first lessons. With memory for a guide it was not quite like feeling my way in the dark, and I stuck with it a tiny bit longer—until I decided I was too busy for a hobby. Adulthood was like that for me—I treated it for years like a narrowing.

A few years and two children later, I decided maybe a hobby was the thing. And my third try at knitting stuck. Most of what I know now has come from puzzling through books of patterns from the library, but I still count it as a gift from her, this widening of my adult life. My knitting lessons with her were brief, as were our forays into sewing and embroidery. I imagined them for years as failed attempts. The projects we started together were never finished. My interest in them diminished.

And yet.

She taught me enough about each of these things to bridge many years. Maybe she knew what it would mean to me—the joy of color and texture, the soothing nature of the work, the life-changing lesson that works its way into your soul: Sometimes the only way to have that beautiful thing you want is to make it yourself. I took up knitting several years before she died, but it seems there were always other things to talk about, so many other people around. Now I can only guess. It is a slender connection to her, I suppose, but that is the magic of knitting, itself: how you take a single long strand, humble thing, and work it into something else—solid, complex, warm.

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Found: This, Too

Husband and I have committed the last two weeks before school gets out to going-through, straightening-up, purging the house of Stuff. I have been anticipating and dreading this time ever since we decided to do it. There’s too much of it in the house, this Stuff, and it is part junk, part treasure. Deciding which is a big job I would kind of like to continue avoiding. I am sustaining myself with fantasies of Order, and some kind of clean efficient spareness that is probably impossible, considering the five of us seem to be part hobbit. I also promised myself  a new project: sharing some of what I find here on the blog.

So there's been lots of paper. Also bits of ribbon, misplaced scissors, markers (dried-out and not,) stickers. But so much paper. Paintings, coloring books, construction paper, origami paper. Sheet after sheet of hearts, hand-tracings, princesses. Books written in shaky hands on handwriting pages (blue line, blue dotted line, red line, lots of space in between.) Notebooks, journals, letters. Drawings that read like wishes and confessions.

And a growing stack of unused white paper. Not-new but clean, ready, waiting. So many possibilities. Do you know how good this is for the soul?

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Found: Ghosts

Husband and I have committed the last two weeks before school gets out to going-through, straightening-up, purging the house of Stuff. I have been anticipating and dreading this time ever since we decided to do it. There’s too much of it in the house, this Stuff, and it is part junk, part treasure. Deciding which is a big job I would kind of like to continue avoiding. I am sustaining myself with fantasies of Order, and some kind of clean efficient spareness that is probably impossible, considering the five of us seem to be part hobbit. I also promised myself  a new project: sharing some of what I find here on the blog.

They’ve been waiting for me in the basement. In the boxes of homeschooling stuff, in the old toys that haven’t been touched or thought about for years, in the things broken/torn/dirty that I could not fix and could not throw away. The ghosts.

They beg to be kept, they beg to be thrown away: the papers that threaten to creep out of their boxes, plaster themselves over everything, overwhelm the house. The drawings from years past that whisper of round hands that created them, of time that has slipped away, of all the precious things I treasured, but maybe not quite enough. The homeschool papers that murmur sweet memories, yes, but then their tone sharpens—peppered with doubt, regret, feelings of failure. I can talk back to them, but still. They are unpredictable. One never knows how they will respond, if they will listen to reason. They are unsettled; they are unsettling.

That’s the thing about ghosts. Each page I pick up has a story, a memory, something of my children scrawled or glued or stickered across it. They are treasures, of course. But they are not my children. They are not our Now. They are merely the things that want to swallow up Now. I suspect they never get their fill.

I admit I face the ghosts in small batches. I tell myself it is a special time, this communing with them. An appointment, only. I let go of what I can, even though something in me fights letting the past slip away, reaches out to grab on to every memory to hold forever in my hands. I would rather hold on to Now. I re-box what I cannot throw, knowing we will meet again. Knowing that new ghosts will have gathered.

We will make our peace how we can.

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Found: Angel Chime Thingy

Husband and I have committed the last two weeks before school gets out to going-through, straightening-up, purging the house of Stuff. I have been anticipating and dreading this time ever since we decided to do it. There’s too much of it in the house, this Stuff, and it is part junk, part treasure. Deciding which is a big job I would kind of like to continue avoiding. I am sustaining myself with fantasies of Order, and some kind of clean efficient spareness that is probably impossible, considering the five of us seem to be part hobbit. I also promised myself  a new project: sharing some of what I find here on the blog.

Our family seems to have created a new Christmas tradition. Every year, after we box up all the decorations, we find something we forgot. And sometimes instead of just putting the thing away somebody (like me) decides to put it someplace safe, instead, where we will be sure to find it when we need it next year.

Maybe you know that this tactic doesn’t work well.

One year it was the golden needle-like part from the angel chimes we received as a wedding present, the part on which the fan was supposed to balance and spin. For several years now when we get out the chimes for Christmas we discover we are missing the most important part. Every year I remember that I looked for it the year before, only to find it after Christmas was over, after everything was put away again. And every year Husband sticks a toothpick into the chimes to replace the lost part, and we hope we’ll find the real part before we put everything away again.

Now you need to know that there are a few things from my childhood that define Christmas for me: snow, a specific Vienna Boys’ Choir record, my dad’s socks for stockings as well as his dramatic reading of "The Night Before Christmas," lefse (with butter and lots of sugar, please,) angel chimes. Losing track of that one part bothers me, even though it would be easy enough to replace, even though I hardly think of it the rest of the year. That little tinkling sound is almost as important as the tree.

It took me a while to find the missing part this year. About five months, it turns out, but this week I found it. And tonight I went down to the basement and put it away. Next Christmas the angel chimes will be whole again.

This practice of putting things in their place, making things whole—it is good. 

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Found: 1985

Husband and I have committed the next two weeks to going-through, straightening-up, purging the house of Stuff. I have been anticipating and dreading this time ever since we decided to do it. There’s too much of it in the house, this Stuff, and it is part junk, part treasure. Deciding which is a big job I would kind of like to continue avoiding. I am sustaining myself with fantasies of Order, and some kind of clean efficient spareness that is probably impossible, considering the five of us seem to be part hobbit. I also promised myself  a new project: sharing some of what I find here on the blog.

On June 10, 1985, I went shopping with my mom. I bought a bracelet, an O.P. shirt that showed a bit of my midriff, and a fabric-covered blank book with lined pages. I probably wore the shirt twice, if that often, because with the exception of two bikinis the summers on either side of my freshman year of college I did not feel comfortable baring my midriff. I have no memory of the bracelet. The book, however, came back into my life recently, tucked into a box of things my mother purged from her own home.

The summer of 1985 was the Summer of Penicillin, the Summer of Tonsillitis That Would Not Shake. Within 36 hours of ending a ten-day course of antibiotics, without fail, the tiredness and fever and sore throat would return. Finally the doctors gave up on ten-day courses and I swallowed giant pills daily for two months straight: at Confirmation Camp, at Norwegian Language Camp, on vacation, at home. I learned not to gag on them.

The summer of 1985 was also the summer I went on a diet, the summer I (first) dreamed of having the perfect tan, the perfect body, perfect hair. The summer I scared my parents with my dieting and perfectionism. The summer I read a book about a girl with anorexia that for some became a how-to manual but for me was scary enough to be a life-saver.

I wrote in the journal for seven months.

I thought about boys a lot, or at least wrote about them: I still like ____ a lot. But so does X, and Y, and now, since I’ve told Z I like him, she says she does, too. That’s depressing. X and Y are part of W’s group…and I’m not. I don’t have a chance against girls like them.

I turned 13. I wrote about it six days after my birthday, and one day after surgery to have my tonsils removed: Besides that [the boombox] I got a unicorn notebook, bubble bath, bath oil beads, a Perlman tape, a Tears for Fears tape, bath crystals, 4 pairs of earrings, bracelets, paper dolls, three lolypops [sic.], a Butterfinger, a jump rope, a Chinese yo-yo, two purses, and two stuffed animals, 50 dollars, and a 10-dollar gift certificate to Debbie’s Dollhouse.

I got philosophical and sent unwitting messages to my 41-year-old-mother-self:

That (social) part of my life is better now. But I have trouble getting along with mom. I realize that grownups aren’t really perfect. Nobody is perfect...it's just at different times of life people can conceal (and see through other people’s) faults. As a teenager I can see most faults, but I can’t conceal my own very well.

I was mystified: I want to see “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “That was Then, This is Now,” but they’re both rated “R” and Mom’s prejudiced against movies like that. And—I guess all the boys I’ve liked I’ve only liked as friends. I’m confused.

My last entry was January 18, 1986. It was long. Started with an update about a boy, descended into confusion about boys in general. I resolved to talk to my mom about it. And then this:  PS—I guess I was worried and insecure about the dance too, and everything was fine then…Bye.

And then blank pages.

The dance was fun, I remember that. And the PS--I still talk to myself that way. The PPS is not actually recorded in the book, even though it is written throughout the pages: Dear 41-year-old-mother-self, Listen more, and be gentle. Maybe most things are fine now, too. Maybe “bye” isn’t necessary anymore.

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Bloom

Maybe

you are not the flower

but the plant,

pushing roots deep into fertile darkness,                        

stretching toward heaven,

sending out shoots.

And what you offer up—

whether it blooms or not

seems fraught with ifs.

If rain,

if sun,

if space.

If enough,

if not too much.

So many ifs with each bud

but you learn

to send them out anyway,

over and over.

You learn

that the blossoms themselves—

they are prayers

and shouts

and defiances

and offerings

and hope—

see how they tremble,

how they reach,

how the light shines through.

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In Concert

At our last class before the concert, I made them a promise:

No matter how calm I look when we’re up there on stage, I will be nervous too. I’ve been doing this almost my whole life, and I still get nervous. But we’ll all be there helping each other, and it’s going to be great.

I did not tell them that I’ve been nervous for months.

My violin students—Violin Project and private students—were invited to play with the local community string orchestra back in January. I looked at the music and said yes, I think we can make that work, knowing it would be a stretch. Knowing this was new territory for all of us. We had time, and we got to work right away. I believed that together we could rise to the occasion.

But I was nervous. Afraid of letting people (my students, their families, the conductor, the orchestra) down. 

One month before the concert, I was quite nervous. We had been working hard, yes. But we had a lot of leaps to make.  The second violin part didn’t always make sense to a group of kids who had always played melody, and the form was more complex than they had ever encountered. This is not such a big deal if you can just follow what’s on the page in front of you, but to a pre-reader it matters. Memorizing something you would probably never hum to yourself is not a simple task.

The third violinists had their part down quickly, but they had to be able to hold their own rhythmically, and again—not easy. Not playing on down beats when everybody else is playing, not being swayed by the four other parts around you but listening to and sticking with your own part: that is sophisticated stuff for a beginner.

The first violinists—they had a lot of notes to learn. And life is busy, and so many important things want to get in the way. I knew they could do it, but I was concerned about their confidence.

The week of the concert, however, things came together. I started to relax. I got excited. I was thankful for how good everything sounded. 

Then the day of the concert: I taught my regular lessons, picked up my kids at their grandparents’ house. We ate half our dinner in the car on the way home. At home with a few minutes’ turn-around time everybody had a job: Oldest, help set the table, Middle, change clothes, Youngest, go back out to the car and bring your backpack and jacket inside.

A few minutes later, crying. Youngest back inside with her hand to her head. Blood. And then she moved her hand away and I yelled, I couldn’t help it, because Oh-God-she’s-really-hurt.

Somehow what felt like one hundred decisions were made in an instant. Call Husband. Call Friend who will be at the concert. Do not let on to Youngest that she needs stitches until you absolutely have to if you want her to stay calm. You do not have to be at the concert. Your students can do this without you. Somehow I got Middle and Oldest to the concert location along with the stack of violins I had brought home with me “to make sure they all make it safely to the concert tonight.” Somehow I drove to Urgent Care answering Youngest’s questions as calmly as I could, even though every few seconds I had to clench the steering wheel hard. The image of her wound, my bleeding hurt child, flashed fresh in my mind over and over. Over and over I glanced at her face—pale, eyes half-shut—in the rearview mirror. Clench. Release. Clench. Release.

Clench.

Somehow everything worked out.

At Urgent Care: help. The nurse’s eyes looking at me over Youngest’s head after peeking under the gauze, the whole wordless conversation that passed between us. Oh, Honey. Yes. She needs stitches. I knew right away. Oh this girl, she fell really hard. She did, didn’t she? Husband arriving sooner than seemed possible. Youngest, scared and brave, fighting the stitches, still managing to be all at once sassy and funny with the nurses. Her confession to me with deep serious eyes: “I thought maybe I just wouldn’t tell you I fell. But then I thought maybe I should.” Her forehead mended, bandaged. Her arm sore, but not broken.

All the fear and worry that went into this concert—

They moved everything around on the program, and announced from the stage that the orchestra would just keep playing until I arrived to lead my students in their part of the program. Husband took Youngest for ice cream. I arrived at the church where we were playing and my students, a good number of them up past their bedtime at this point, were sitting in their designated seats, listening to the concert. Everybody behaving like angels, as far as I could see. Questioning looks. "She's okay," I told them. "She's going to be okay." We got up and played and I had moved far beyond nervous to shaken and dazed, but even so I could tell how well everything went. 

I am so thankful for all these people—family, students, friends. We were there for each other. I made it there for them. And they were there for me. For Youngest. For each other.

There is this thankfulness, too: I do not understand how Calm can be there in the middle of Fear and Worry, but it was—the whole time. I felt it there the same way I have felt it each time the world threatens to unravel, like the skin that holds my body together when everything beneath it feels shattered. Like that place deep within—at the center, maybe, of my heart—that remains solid and still when everything else is whirling.

And finally there is this, the deepest thankfulness: The day of this concert, there wasn’t room for much more. The day was tightly-scheduled, and there wasn’t room for more than just getting to the concert and playing it, everybody doing their best. I knew it would be great, and enough. And I almost always have a plan like that. The thing is, even when I think it’s a big, grand, wide-open plan that stretches me it ends up being a tight little thing. So when a Hand reaches down and breaks the whole thing wide open, I am shaken, and thankful. Because for a moment I see it all—larger, wider, and more beautiful than I thought it could be. Or than I would have allowed.

Release.

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