Twenty Years

Twenty Years

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When I visited Lexington last month, Phillip drove me through the University of Kentucky campus. He  wanted to show me that the twin towers were gone. Not those twin towers, though Phillip saw those come down, too. He was working in New York at the time, his office less than two miles north on Hudson. But it was the absence of the Kirwan-Blanding Towers he wanted to show me, two 23-floor dormitories that housed students for almost 50 years and that came down carefully, a floor at a time.

Not so with those other towers, of course, which pancaked to the ground 20 years ago today, taking the lives of almost 2,700 with them. As is so often the case, we hadn’t known what we had until we lost it. We also hadn’t known that terrorists with fake IDs were learning how to fly planes — but not to land them. There was ignorance within our innocence. Perhaps there must always be.

In the days and weeks that followed 9/11, I cooked up a storm. I made bacon-and-egg breakfasts, chopped vegetables for stews and soups. I drug out the crockpot and pressed it into service. I was making food for the bereaved and serving it to my family. It felt like a way to heal.

But that was long ago. Our problems have metastasized. The terrorism is still present but now we also have a pandemic, climate change disasters, and an ignominious end to the war we started to avenge the 9/11 attacks. So many challenges … and so little consensus on how to deal with them.

Ten years ago, I wrote that our children grew up in a different world. Now my children have children. What kind of world will they inherit?

A Different Thursday

A Different Thursday

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For most of the summer, we’ve been watching our grandson, Isaiah, every Thursday. The little tyke and his mom head over here early in the morning, and Isaiah’s daddy picks him up in the afternoon. But starting this week, Isaiah has begun going to a family daycare provider, so it was quiet around here yesterday.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a babysitter-type person. Watching Isaiah (or granddaughter Bernadette) full-time are not jobs I’ve lobbied to have. Much as I adore my grandbabies, I know my strengths and weaknesses — and a daycare provider I’m not.

But I love to be around the babies, and watching them grow and change is a greater joy than I could have imagined. All of which is to say.that yesterday I missed the feel of a little head on my shoulder and of little arms around my neck, the softness of baby skin and the dearness of hands so plump that the wrist line looks like a bracelet.

I missed the devilish smile when Isaiah bangs the cabinet doors or opens up the crisper drawer, finds an apple and bites into it. Watching babies: so much of it is funny, so much of it is tedious, so much of it is tactile. So much of it is all of these at once. 

Before there were grandchildren I thought I remembered what it was like to have a baby in the house, But it turns out, I had forgotten. 

(Isaiah and friend plot their escape.)

Tranquil Contemplation

Tranquil Contemplation

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When 19th-century statesman Henry Clay needed a respite from his life as the “Great Compromiser,” he retreated to the shady groves of Ashland, his Kentucky estate. There, as the sign tells us, he walked the trails of his beloved farm, using them for “tranquil contemplation” of the issues at hand.

For Clay, as for many of us, walking and thinking went hand in hand. Maybe these strolls reinvigorated the legislator after the rigors of rough-and-tumble politics. Maybe they inspired some of his signature moves.

But even if they didn’t, the paths Clay created remain for current-day walkers to explore. When I strolled them two weeks ago, I felt the hush of the giant oaks and sycamores. They stilled my buzzing brain. 

Reading and Weeding

Reading and Weeding

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The reading and weeding I did yesterday seem worthy of a post. The reading was for class, a chapter called Biology and Ideology. It was about Social Darwinism, eugenics, the values with which science can be laden, the ways science can be used. 

I take notes as I read, because it helps me concentrate and remember. Reading a chapter takes a while, then, as I jot down the main points and attempt to digest them. 

Which meant that I was ready for the weeding when it came. I was ready to swing my arms and pull out great fists full of stilt grass, toss it over the chicken wire fence. The motion freed my limbs, loosened my brain.

Wouldn’t it be nice if every day held a perfect combination of mental and physical work? I’m not saying mine did yesterday. But it was close. 

(No picture of weeds handy; here’s a shot snapped on the way to class.)

Up Early

Up Early

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I’m up early enough today that the morning is still getting to know itself. Crickets have yet to turn in; their chirps form the rhythm section for which bird song supplies the melody. 

Copper has not only gone outside but has scampered down the deck stairs, an accomplishment no longer guaranteed and thus appreciated more. And in other pet news, when I uncovered the birds, Toby, the newbie, had found the highest perch and looked quite pleased with himself.

I hear bluejays and crows calling as I rise from the couch to make my tea. The back door is open. The back yard is mowed. Reading and weeding await me.

The details of a day I’m privileged to watch unfold. 

(A photo I took Saturday, a few miles from home.)

Labor Day?

Labor Day?

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It’s my first Labor Day without a paid, full-time job to return to the next day. Does it feel different? Strangely enough, not much. I’ve known for a long time that what drives me is more internal than external. 

So there will be no 8 a.m. start time, no Tuesday 1 p.m. meeting — but there will be a to-do list — reading to finish, a class to attend, an appointment. And then there are the everyday tasks, the ones I don’t have to list: writing, walking, posting here. 

It has me thinking — what is labor, anyway?  And what is leisure? 

“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do,” said Mark Twain. 

But sometimes a body enjoys what it is obliged to do so much that it doesn’t seem like work. And now that my working life has changed, I realize that to make it full and rich I must insert tasks that I’m not obliged— and am maybe even afraid — to do. Is that labor? Is it leisure? 

On this sunny Labor Day, with a light breeze rifling the papers on my outside “desk” (the glass-topped table) … I say, who cares? 

The Company of Walkers

The Company of Walkers

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Sometimes the solo walker craves the solo trail, to beg off from the world and the bustle. But other times, a peopled path is welcome.  

A few Sundays ago I had one of those days — a mid-morning walk on the Glade Trail filled with dog-walkers and baby strollers, with runners and saunterers, with whole families, too.

And no wonder: it was early enough to be comfortable and late enough to accommodate the Sunday sleepers-in. 

The smiles and nods gladdened my walk, made me feel part of a company of walkers, rag-tag and accidental, but a company just the same. 

Short Season

Short Season

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I had long remembered the essay I’m about to excerpt but didn’t have it at my fingertips until I found it in a battered file folder of clippings a few weeks ago. I can’t credit it to any one author; it was an editorial in the New York Times. But I’ve thought about it often this time of year, during these golden days of just enough warmth and just enough light, days of languid loveliness like the one we have right now, temperature not even 80, humidity no more than 40, cloudless sky.

Labor Day is really the beginning of a short season all its own, an in-between time, a month of not-quite-summer, not-yet-fall. That season, whatever you call it, often feels more like the new year than the New Year itself — new books, new exhibitions, new music, new commitments, and never mind that it has all been in the planning for months.  

The city is full again and no longer in dishabille. The leaves are still green. None of the races, pennant or political, have been run to the wire just yet. Night closes in on both ends of day, and still on fair evenings the light seems to linger. The subways seem to exhale. ….

This is the time we should take off from work — only we never do — to watch summer and fall collide, to feel the sharp nights and the warm days, to walk through a garden that is ripening and dying all at once. In the country, a morning will come soon enough when all the gnats have disappeared, a sign that this short season is over.

Giving Up the Ghost

Giving Up the Ghost

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I just finished Hilary Mantel’s memoir Giving Up the Ghost, a powerful story of childhood fears, adult sorrows and the writer’s ability to triumph over them by putting pen to paper. 

Mantel writes that she has a “nervous sort of nostalgia” for any surface she’s written a book on. “I think the words, for better or worse, have sunk into the grain of the wood.” In Mantel’s case, many words. The Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and Mirror and the Light trilogy about Lord Cromwell top out at more than 1,500 pages.

In interviews, Mantel says she had the idea to write about Cromwell even before she was published, which means that it was likely on her mind when she wrote her memoir, too. Perhaps when she wrote these words, some of the most evocative I’ve read describing books not yet written:

“Sometimes, at dawn or dusk, I pick out from the gloom — I think I do — a certain figure, traversing the rutted fields in a hushed and pearly light, picking a way among the treacherous rivulets and the concealed ditches. It is a figure shrouded in a cloak, bearing certain bulky objects wrapped in oilcloth, irregular in shape: not heavy but awkward to carry. This figure is me; these shapes, hidden in their wrappings, are books that, God willing, I am going to write.” 

Write them she did. In an interview with The Guardian in 2020, Mantel says that as soon as she started writing Wolf Hall, she knew it was what she had been working toward. Starting the trilogy was “like at last delivering what’s within you … an enormous shout from a mountaintop.”

I marvel at such surety. I wonder what it would be like to feel it.

(The Old Library, Trinity College, Dublin)

Storm at Night

Storm at Night

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Thunder and lightning woke me up last night — that and the stagnant air that collected after a power loss. It was long-predicted — the remnants of Hurricane Ida heading this way — but no less frightening.

To see a storm brewing on the horizon, to watch as clouds darken and loom, is one thing. To be roused from sleep by a thunderclap is something else altogether. I wondered about the roof, the gutters, the tall trees that cluster around the house.  I felt at the mercy of the elements.  

I told myself that all would hold, the joists and metal and soil. I told myself to enjoy the spectacle of it all. But I couldn’t fall back to sleep until the torrents had slowed, until the heavens turned dark again. 

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)