On Poetry, My Favorite Poet, and Herons

My thoughts are still too far-flung to submit to the discipline of orderly, coherent words. School starts soon, for the kids and for me, and although two of us are returning to the same-old, same-old, my youngest will start middle school, while my oldest is off to her freshman year of college. We also had some sad news concerning the orange cat featured in the blog two weeks ago. Small wonder, then, that my musings refuse to coalesce into something worth sharing!

This is one reason I admire the talent of poets, although for the longest time, I thought I had no taste for poetry. I believed, wrongly, that it was too hard, that I didn't...couldn't..."get it." In fact, I may have been the person most shocked by my decision to write the bulk of my doctoral dissertation on poetry. Seventeenth century French poetry, to be exact. There were a few love poems in there, but mostly it was about satire. Turns out that satire, well, I totally "get" that!  Thus the door to poetry opened.

Since then, I have found comfort and inspiration in a number of contemporary poets. Chief among them is the incredibly wise and talented Mary Oliver. She sees the most ordinary things as though they were jewels, yet her style is anything but "precious." Yes, the writing is beautiful and evocative, the gift of an extraordinary mind, but it is also gentle and incredibly real. She does not condescendingly claim to see for us; rather she invites us to see with her, and so doing, brings us closer both to the world and to our own best selves. Take, for example, the following:

How Heron Comes

It is a negligence of the mind
not to notice how at dusk
heron comes to the pond and
stands there in his death robes, perfect
servant of the system, hungry, his eyes
full of attention, his wings
pure light.

I saw this beautiful creature on a difficult night not so long ago. I would have spotted him regardless. Birds fascinate me and the majesty of herons is impossible to ignore. Yet thanks to Mary Oliver, if this makes any sense, I saw him more.  

Nor, would it appear, am I alone. Just click here to learn more.

Bikes, bikes, and more bikes

Ever have thoughts so big they refuse to be disciplined into words? Yeah, me too. And when I'm not fighting that, I find myself wanting to rant extensively about, well, almost anything (trending now: LIARS, bad drivers, teenagers, and corruption, to name a few). Yet rants usually end up affecting no one but the ranter. So, in lieu of deep thoughts, the black cat brings you...

10 Reasons to Love the Tour de France
(in no particular order)

 At the end of every stage, there's a guy in polka dots.

What other sport rewards excellence with a yellow shirt and stuffed lion?

Clever (kind of) plays on words.

These guys climb mountains. On bikes...

...which gives new meaning to the term "switchback..."

...but also means you get to see views like this.

 Sunflowers.

 This church.

The guy with the yellow flag.

Need I say more?

Thank you to the official Tour de France website for posting these amazing photos. You rock!

Sometimes, The Cat is Orange...

This post is the first of several that I will occasionally publish on the theme of "questions I probably shouldn't ask."

One group of such questions usually arises between three and five in the morning, those hours when you've been in bed long enough to be blissfully asleep, and when, if wakened, you are unlikely to get any more true rest before life hauls you onto your feet for another day.

Lately, this question has all too often been, "who puked?" Follow-up questions include "where?" "how much?" and "what came up?" I have a dog, three cats, and three kids. This means seven candidates for the "who" question, not counting myself- I'd like to think I'd know if I'd vomited! And don't get me started on the answers to the follow-up questions. Let's just say that living with three cats exponentially increases the possibility of hairballs, and that my habit of walking around barefoot almost always shows me the answer to "where."

A somewhat related question is, "who ate the tops off all the corn muffins?" Again, we have seven potential candidates, eight if I have started sleep-eating, which I would not rule out just now. After all, I am the only adult caring for three human children and four fur babies.  Anything is possible, including the loss what little was left of my mind! All I know at six a.m., not having slept soundly since four, is that I really wanted a corn muffin with my coffee and now, I'm not going to get one.

The final question of recent days is, "do we have to hunt the orange felt mouse now? Really?!" The answer is always, invariably, a resounding YES. After minutes, or maybe hours (who's counting?) of yowling, pouncing, and dashing madly about, he sits by the side of the bed, expectant and triumphant. The old catnip mouse has once more been vanquished and left lovingly at my feet. And yet again, of course, it is not yet five o'clock. In the morning. I pet my baby and tell him what a wonderful cat he is, whereupon he flops over and curls into my side, purring contentedly. An hour later, when I give up on sleep for good and start yet another bleary-eyed day, he has made a nest of the covers, where he will likely stay until some new adventure, usually involving his belly, calls.

Dear readers, meet Norbert, the answer to today's questions I probably shouldn't ask.

The Art of Showing Up

Not so long ago I had someone offer what I'm sure she thought was "constructive criticism" on my performance at work, which she had found, well, lacking. I truly believe she meant well, but predictably enough, I got hurt, then mad, and by the time I went home, I was beating myself up over what she'd said.

Admittedly, it has not been my best year since entering the college teaching profession. It might even be one of the worst, given that the whole year has felt like a living illustration of Murphy's law. 

So yeah, it's not been my best year of teaching. I have definitely been distracted, and I hate that, most of all for my students, who deserve better. But it's time to grant myself a little grace too, something I'm just now learning to do. After all, it's pretty obvious that most of this stuff was beyond my control. And...in spite of everything, every time it was even remotely possible, I was there. Maybe I wasn't polished or put together, maybe organization became a distant memory, and maybe I was working off plan B or even C or D, but I showed up. I sat down with my students, and one way or another, we got it done.

It is true that we need people to be there in a real and productive way. We need effective teachers and doctors and people with snowplows and villages to help us raise our kids. But sometimes we just need people to be present. They might not know what to do or how to do it, but they muddle through with us anyway. They sit in hospital rooms, offices, restaurants, cars. They are THERE. Which, as it turns out, is almost always enough. So here's to the art of showing up, the one thing all of us can do.

Shadow mothers

True story: I never expected that my kids would forget their birth mothers. That's just not reasonable. I have always known those women would always be a very real and important presence in their lives.

What I did not realize is that I would spend so much time thinking about their birth mothers too.  So much so that it is not really a stretch to say that I feel like I too have a relationship with them, even if we have never met and are unlikely ever to do so.

I spend a lot of time sending thoughts and prayers through the universe, hoping that somehow my children's birth mothers will catch them and know that our kids are growing up healthy and strong. And once in a while, my thoughts seem to reach their intended destination, for I sometimes feel what I can only define as a presence. The strongest manifestation of this happened just after I dropped off my eldest for an overnight stay at a prospective college. Just as with any time my kids hit a major milestone, I sent a thought out to her birth mother.

About halfway home, I no longer felt alone in the car. Somehow, I felt like my daughter's birth mother was trying to tell me that we'd done it. Our girl was going to make it. That was all, but it was enough to make me cry. I turned off the radio to see if there was more. There wasn't.

"Shadow mothers" probably sounds ominous or sad, and maybe it is, but really, it's just how I've come to think of the women who brought my children into this world. They are here, with all of us, as much a part of our family as the members I can touch and see.

_________________________________________________

Author's note: While searching Google Images to find the images that accompany this post, I learned of a book entitled Shadow Mothers. This post was developed independently of and well before that discovery, and in fact is about another topic entirely.  Also, I want to give credit where credit is due, but can find no attribution for the first image, which appears on numerous sites, as does the second, which I believe was taken by Ruth Malhotra. Whoever they may be, thanks to the photographers for their excellent work.

Planes, trains, and automobiles (minus the trains, for now)

So we've been traveling a lot during the month of June.

First, there was the 12+ hour drive to and from New York, during which my thoughts can be summarized as follows:

"Is it really THAT much more expensive to fly than to drive?  At least then we wouldn't be cooped up in this car together from now until the Apocalypse. And we wouldn't smell the dog farts either!"

Then, there was the flight to and from Cincinnati, passing through what may be America's ugliest airport, LaGuardia (though I do have to say I love how the runway literally ends in water!).  My thoughts during this went something like:

"Please, please, please don't let any strangers talk to me.  AARRRGGGHHH!  Why is that woman STILL talking?! This would not be happening if I had taken the car!"

At this point, you probably think that I hate to travel and should probably just should stay home. Wrong! I love to travel. A lot. I just don't always love what it takes to get to where I'm going.  Still, this trip featured nothing more than the usual inconveniences, for which I consoled myself by thinking it can always be worse. In fact, thinking about how it can be worse inspired me to share my two worst travel stories. Maybe they'll console you too. Or maybe you can top me. If so, please share in the comments section. I'm always a sucker for a good story!

He went left, I went straight

Once upon a time, I was married, and my husband got a job in Houston. I had a fellowship requiring me to stay put in Indiana, so we loaded half our stuff into a U-Haul and his Ford Escort. We had a route, maps, a plan. Or so we thought. But somewhere in Illinois, he went left and I went straight (no, this is not a metaphor for our marriage...). This was before cell phones were ubiquitous, so there we were. I did the only thing I could think of. I went to the first rest area and waited. And waited, and waited, and waited. I put the cat's harness on, got her out of her crate, gave her water, and we waited. We met a group of really nice people on motorcycles, so nice I'm pretty sure you can't call them a gang. I used a pay phone -remember those?- to call my parents, then his parents, and told them where I was in case he called them too. Then I reached someone with the state police. Then the cat and I waited some more. Somehow, finally, the phone calls produced results. I found out he was waiting at a different rest stop this whole time. I loaded up the cat, climbed back in the car, and hightailed it over there. We were both tired to the bone but agreed to drive on to make up time. By the time we stopped, there were no rooms available, so you know where we slept? You guessed it:

Missed connections:

We were on our way to India to meet our third child. We both carried cell phones by then, but phones are precious little help against wind storms and massive delays at JFK. We saw our beautiful Air India 747 cued for take-off as we taxied to the gate on our flight from Cincinnati. After a night in an overpriced airport hotel, we returned to JFK, where we learned that the Air India 747 was still in Delhi. Our travel agent asked if we knew New York well enough to get to Newark. We did. So she told us to fly from Newark to Mumbai and then go from there. Any number of local carriers would be able to get us to our final destination, Bangalore (a planned stopover in Delhi had been thrown out the window long ago). We landed in Mumbai in full monsoon season.  Phone service was out, so we could not use our credit card to secure our reserved seats on the Bangalore flight. We changed money in time to get seats on the next one, but in the meantime, this happened:

That is a 747 stuck just off the runway. For hours, Aquafina, Cadbury chocolate, and new-to-us flavors of Pringles sustained us between nerve-wracking visits to the ticket counter and restrooms. The ticket counter agents were pleasant, yet somehow not reassuring in their insistence that our flight was most certainly leaving on time, even with the airport closed. The restroom attendant? She scared me, as did the restroom itself. Before you judge, when is the last time you used the public restroom in the old domestic terminal of the Mumbai airport? With the shiny new airport, you'll never get the chance. Anyway. We did... eventually... get to Bangalore. Our luggage, however, did not, and it was obvious that no one had any real idea as to where it might be. We filed reports, paid "tips," all to no avail.

All I can say is thank God for travel insurance!

Epilogue

Both stories have a happy ending. 

We got to Houston safely, though the cat never did willingly get in a car again, at least not without a hint of Benadryl. We moved back to Indiana a year later, but I refuse to believe that awful car trip had anything to do with it!

We also got to and from India safely.

PS  The luggage came home too, five weeks after we did!

Beautiful Creatures

I always cross my fingers for the underdog, from the Jamaican bobsled team to the kid picked last in Little League. I'll take that one kitten who seems a little bit "off," the one who hasn't been adopted yet.  Will those supposedly ugly ducklings all become triumphant swans?  Don't know and don't care.

However, there is also a lot to be said for swans. The quirky misfit has his place, but so do creatures of extraordinary beauty.  American Pharaoh literally brought tears in my eyes when he crossed the finish line to claim his Triple Crown.  Those tears reappeared when I watched the replays the following day.  You just have to look at him to know why.

While you're at it, don't just look the horse. Look at his jockey, Victor Espinoza. It's obvious that he knows what an extraordinary privilege it is to know this amazing animal inside and out. These two are so good together that we forget the Triple Crown had become all but impossible to win – I wasn't even ten the last time it happened!  What a gift to sit in wonder as that bounding, exuberant stride carried them to victory.

What's more, jaw-dropping beauty doesn't just happen when the whole world is watching. Sometimes it appears in a small-town theater, when a girl who has always wanted to fly floats across the stage. I once watched a group of teenage girls dancing. I knew well the one closest to where I stood backstage, bound to earth by a mere square of pink satin, fingers stretching to the sky. At three, that same girl stood on a railing wearing fairy wings, fully intending to fly. At four, she found a book on ballet and proclaimed, "I want to do this" as she pointed to a picture of a ballerina en pointe. She has been dancing, and flying, ever since. When she does, it's like getting a glimpse of the perfect oneness of creation. Her spirit, the same that animates American Pharaoh and Victor Espinoza, both defies and fuels imagination. Before you say my comparison is crazy, remember that an artist named Degas saw it too...

I will always root for the ugly duckling, and I will always be blown away by the swan.  Most of all, I will cherish the gift of all beautiful creatures, whatever form their beauty may assume.