As I write, Gaza is being bombed. Again. On Monday, Israeli forces shot and killed 58 Palestinians and wounded at least 1,200 during a protest against the opening of the United States embassy in Jerusalem. Children lie among the dead. Again. Babies, one of whom was in her grandmother’s arms when she inhaled the tear gas that would kill her a few hours later. One of the Far away, I begin the mental mathematics. Adding it up, I know for sure only this about Gaza – children are still dying.
The news comes fast and furious, the way it always does. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. Mainstream media. Social media. Mixed-up media. From their early morning studios, Starbucks in hand, the “experts” weigh in, all the while equivocating their way out of circumstances they cannot comprehend. How could they? How can we? We, with our children who fall asleep at night under the non-threatening whir of a ceiling fan or to the sounds of laughter down the hall with Jimmy Fallon and a TV audience in New York city.
The other day, I heard one member of the mainstream media criticize another for not providing enough context in its coverage of Gaza. How much context would suffice? Some of the children in Gaza – the dead children – knew only the context of innocent lives under siege, the sounds of bombs dropped from F16 fighter jets, the stench of smoke from piles of rubble that smolder still where their houses used to stand. What do babies know of context?
Context: from the Latin ‘Contextus” – interwoven, connected, or united.
Sitting on the back of his ambulance, Mohammed Riza, a first-aid medic explains his context, telling a reporter, “They took our land, they took everything. We live in hell in Gaza…imagine yourself without work, without electricity, you can’t travel, you don’t have money, you don’t have medicine — you’re already dead!”
I remember reading a book about Northern Ireland and realizing I am probably a Child of The Troubles, even though I was always, by nothing other than luck, in the right place at the right time – at a safe distance. Still, I know the dull thunder-clap of a bomb, the tremble of our kitchen windows in its wake. I know the stench of smoke from rubble that once was a hotel, a supermarket, a restaurant. I know that based on images flickering from black and white screens on living rooms in faraway places, strangers tried to understand the context of Northern Ireland, reducing it to tidy phrases about Catholics and Protestants, about calls for cease-fires, about heartbreaking hard-fought compromises that led, after three decades to a residual uneasy state we dare call “peace.” I know about bombings and rubber bullets and booby-traps like the kind that killed three Israel soldiers at the end of July 2014. I know about the disregard for the lives of innocent people, like those killed in Omagh, a small market town in Northern Ireland, the weekend before a new school term began in 1998. I know too about a Tuesday morning in Gaza, when Israeli shelling killed 15 children who had taken shelter in a United Nations-run school. And I know that this past Monday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, in the besieged Gaza Strip, 58 Palestinians were killed – among them, six children under the age of 18. Thousands injured. Again.
How do we put this in context? How do we keep on working, loving, worshipping the way we were taught, and wishing for better days?
In May the Lord in HIs Mercy be Kind to Belfast, based on his interviews with the people who lived there, with Protestants and Catholics, Tony Parker makes an unsettling but astute observation that those born and brought up in Northern Ireland’s complex context, have a mutual need to know, from the start, about a person’s background, so they can go ahead in the dialogue, in what may even become a lasting relationship, without saying the wrong thing, “the wrong word.” The schools we attended, our last names, the way we pronounce an “H” all became clues to help establish “who we are.” “Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the struggle, or “The Irish Question?” “Ulster” or “The Six Counties?”
On the words we use in the context of Gaza – a lexicon familiar to those from deeply troubled places – Soweto, Belfast, Sarajevo – there is no easy answer. I first heard poet, Damian Gorman, as his voice on a PBS channel filled my Phoenix living room some twenty years ago. He was reciting Devices of Detachment.
It was poetry. Spare and searing, the words suggested that the bombs and bullets, the “suspect incendiary devices” all too familiar in the 1980s Northern Ireland were far less deadly than the “devices of detachment, as dangerous as bombs” its people used to distance themselves from the violence, to cope. Aware of it, yet so removed. We were, all of us, very good at “detachment.”
We know how to cope, how to turn a phrase, a word, a hint, around and around until we have successfully distanced ourselves from the subject.
We have coped too well, the heart is numb,
~ Damian Gorman
Through social media, I have come to know Damian Gorman and consider him a friend. When I need words, he somehow finds the right ones at the right time. It was on his Facebook page following a harrowing, heartbreaking week on the Gaza strip in 2014 that Damian posted this:
For too many Palestinian and Israeli Parents (and for sharing)
July 23, 2014
Today I bury my child,
stop
And it was you who killed my child,
stop
I know that he wasn’t the target,
stop
But that doesn’t make him any less killed.
I know that “these things have contexts,”
stop
I have walked all around the contexts,
stop
I have tried unfamiliar angles,
stop
But they don’t make him any less killed.
You ask, “what should we do – tell me?”
stop
And I say, “don’t murder my child”
stop
“Walk as far away from that as you can'”
stop
“Move forward, away from that thing.”
stop
And you say you are “just like” me,
stop
That we feel and we do the same things.
stop
I know what you mean, but we’re not
stop
For today you don’t bury your child
stop
I stayed home with my daughter for a year after she was born. It was the best year of my life. With her attached to me in one of those Baby Bjorn carriers without which I would have been completely unprepared for motherhood, as one of those hovering salespeople in Babies R Us had warned me before she was born.
Business was slow that first year. Just the way I like it. Some days I made it out of my pajamas, but that was only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox, unlike Dolly Parton, who apparently checks the mail in full makeup and heels. Fair play to her. Other days, I might even have showered, but mostly, I was a bit like the imaginative little girl I once was, the one who had to be reminded to wash her hands or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play and a world of pretending. How I loved playing with my very own baby girl, feeding her, dressing her in miniature clothes with impossibly tiny buttons, brushing what little hair she had with a soft toothbrush, and bathing her in the kitchen sink. For twelve idyllic months, with my husband off at work, our girl was all mine, and I inhaled. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I danced around a house filled with the sunshine and Van Morrison. Almost sixteen years later, I remember thinking a bottle of that new baby smell would go a long way, if only to mask the Teen Spirit.
There were interminable hours spent simply looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. Examining every tiny feature and flicker across her face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, and wondering how it was that two imperfect people had made this one perfect thing. She didn’t mind the attention. Or she did, but this was before she had words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today. I used to call it hand ballet.
Mostly, my baby girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or just to let us know she was there. I couldn’t bear it. I hovered constantly (and still do, much to her chagrin). I was one of those mothers who picked her up the instant she began to cry at night. My mother made it worse, urging me to do so by reminding me that there would be plenty of times as an adult when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. Wouldn’t it be great if we mothers could bank all those hours of holding and comforting for such a time, like the night I lay in the ICU following eight hours of surgery while my fourteen-year-old girl wept in bed and rocked herself to sleep? This is why I hate cancer.
When the time came for me to return to work and take her to pre-school, I was wholly unprepared for the crying – mine and hers – that came immediately before and continued for some time after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, the cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school where it seemed that all the other mothers didn’t have jobs outside the home. They loitered in the parking lot in their shorts and Birkenstock sandals, drinking coffee from mugs they had filled at home – this was in the days before there was a Starbucks on every corner. While I was not dressed like Dolly Parton for a turn at the Grand Ol’ Opry, I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits bought on sale at Lohemanns and my hair on the verge of sensible. But only on the verge – where I faithfully remain. I had returned to my career in education as an assistant principal, trying to impress on someone – most probably myself – that I was “A Professional Working Mother.”
Sophie was not impressed at all and showed it by crying, daily, all over my dry-clean-only blouses. In retrospect, I made this a much bigger deal than it was, realizing eventually that there must be some sort of lucrative pact between dry cleaners and the fashion industry. By accident, I discovered that if I didn’t put things in the tumble dryer, the dry-clean only blouses turned out just fine. So after thirty odd years, I have taken umbrage against the dryer, rarely feeding it anything other than towels and jeans. I still don’t get the concept of a dryer for people who live in a desert. The clothes will dry if we just hang them on a clothesline, but nobody in our neighborhood has a clothes line in the backyard. None of my Phoenix friends has a clothes line in the backyard. Is this not bizarre, given that the sun shines most days and the fact that “doing a load of washing” is in my DNA, having grown up in Northern Ireland? In the old country, everybody hangs clothes out on the line and then runs like hell to rescue them when the rain invariably falls. Fitting, then, that the first thing I bought for my mother with my first real pay check from Antrim Forum, was a tumble dryer from the Electricity Board.
This is fast becoming a bit of a rant, that has nothing to do with where the love is, actually, but the question remains – is it not illogical to own a tumble dryer in Phoenix? I once asked my husband about it, and he just looked at me like I had two heads. Clearly, the directions were lost on him – “tumble dry low,” “remove quickly from dryer,” “dry flat,” or “dry clean only.” His favorite setting was Permanent Press, but I don’t think he ever knew what that meant, because he never read the manual or the labels on anything. To be fair, I don’t know what it means either because it doesn’t actually press anything permanently and more often than not has reduced some of my favorite skirts and shirts to napkin-sized deformities. But back when I was pretending to be a grown-up, he didn’t do the laundry. I did. So all the clothes were safe. And so was I. This is not to suggest that I’m dangerous now, but, I am, as you know, on the verge.
In spite of my safe clothes and my sensible job, Bonnie wasn’t impressed with me. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I handed over my wailing, flailing girl, and Bonnie would try to placate me with reassurances that Sophie would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to say it three times, Bonnie showed amazing restraint and never once rolled her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I know, but I was mad that Bonnie would not be spending hours staring as Madonna (mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes) at my beautiful girl or cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when she did something for the first time. Anything. I was mad and sad that I would miss the first time Sophie watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew bubbles. I would miss telling my husband, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that she had experienced another developmental milestone as when she had spoken her first word, or clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of my hand and stood straight like a little warrior to my ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”
I was insanely jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – who had the magic trick up her sleeve that would distract my inconsolable daughter and make the damn crying stop. Walking away from my little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I’d pretend to leave, but I sat in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down so I could torture myself by listening to the unmistakable sound of my child’s crying, and I would wait until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs, and she finally stopped. Then, I would reapply the makeup that I had cried away until my face matched the boring business suit and not even a glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remained. Mind you, at the same time, all the other mother’s children were crying. It always amazed me that out of that early morning cacophony, each of us could pluck out the unique sound of our children’s specific anxiety. Mothers know the cries of their babies.
Around this time, I discovered a book by Kathi Appelt. Like me, Appelt knew the anguish of leaving a child. She experienced it again when her son was 12 and going off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he prepared to go off to college and inspired by the lovely Sweet Sorrow in the Wind sung by Emmylou Harris, she wrote “Oh My Baby Little One.” I found it on the discard table in a Borders when we still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.
Every night, I read to Sophie the story of Mama Bird who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love would still be with him. Magically, it would slip inside his lunch box or sit on his shoulder during playtime or nestle on his pillow at nap-time. At the same time, it would curl around Mama Bird’s coffee cup as she went about her daily business.
And every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask Sophie, “Where’s the love?” and she would tell me as though it were a secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
How it eased those goodbyes every morning when I left her with Bonnie and numerous other teachers throughout the years. And there were lots of them. Never satisfied with her teachers because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher, that I knew her best, we kept switching schools. By the time she was in 2nd grade, my daughter had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, hopping from school to school, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for that one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine. Incidentally, we are still looking, and maybe, just maybe, when she enters her Junior year at yet another high school in the Fall, the superhero teacher will be waiting to turn her on to literature or art or history.
A few summers ago, she took a college class, and I remember watching from my car as she strode onto the campus to study art with students who were ancient – at least in their twenties. She was as tall as me but infinitely more brave. I knew she knew I was watching and waiting for her to turn around and wave. And she did. She never lets me down. Kathi Appelt’s rhyming verse still sparkles:
So blow a kiss and wave good-bye –
my baby, don’t you cry.
This love is always with you
Like the sun is in the sky.
Thus our days began, each of us released to our respective distractions and mundanities, finding therein both delight and difficulty, the way we all do. Sometimes, in an unguarded moment at work, between emails and meetings, things that matter and things that don’t, I’ll wonder what she’s doing at school, and I’ll find myself smiling as I recall her as a three-year-old, fighting sleep with all her might and poring over Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations, searching for the love – a tiny red heart – cleverly hidden on each page.
And sometimes, I wish this book had been available to my own mother, given all the goodbyes and the sweet reunions we have shared at airports on either side of the Atlantic. I love that my baby girl knew that the love was all around long before Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister told us so in one of my favorite movies, Love Actually.
In the end, if you’re looking for love, you are sure to find it at any airport, where those who stay and those who go are often telling the only truths that matter:
Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.
It was leukemia that took Nora Ephron from us, a cancer she had kept private in a world that already knew many of the intimate details of her aging neck, her dry skin, the contents of her purse, her small breasts about which she wrote A Few Words, and her weapon of choice against not only the gray hair that grows back with a vengeance every four weeks, but the youth culture in general – hair color. With a quick and daring wit, she regaled us with stories of the indignities visited upon her as she grew older, but she did not tell us about the cancer. Cancer was not up for discussion. For Ephron, cancer was not copy, as her son explains in the HBO documentary about her life:
I think at the end of my mom’s life she believed that everything is not copy,” he says. “That the things you want to keep are not copy. That the people you love are not copy. That what is copy is the stuff you’ve lost, the stuff you’re willing to give away, the things that have been taken from you. She saw everything is copy as a means of controlling the story. Once she became ill, the means to control the story was to make it not exist.
Into my fifth decade, it occurs to me that maybe I have always understood the need to control and contain. As much as I have revealed of myself in this virtual space, I know for sure what is not copy. For me, breast cancer was copy. It still is. But I know what is not. I know what to keep and what to discard. I know how to control it and how to control myself – most of the time. I know how to be private. I know how to keep what is precious, private. I know how to – as Meryl Streep says of Ephron – ‘achieve a private act.’ I know how to avoid an ending, and I’m very good at the long game. I give enough rope – too much if I’m honest. I think it’s because I know what Nora Ephron’s son knows – that closure is over-rated. I can’t even consider the concept without recalling the first time I realized how much it mattered to other people, following a principal’s evaluation of a lesson I’d taught. In her report, she indicated, with some disappointment, that I had provided “no closure” for my students. I didn’t bother arguing with her, because I knew what she had forgotten, that I would be back in my classroom the next day and the next – to continue – not to close – with my students. It is the continuing that matters – along with what I wore along the way.
Continuance – it has a nice ring to it.
Like each of the five women in Love, Loss, and What I Wore, Nora and Delia Ephron‘s stage-adaptation of Ilene Beckerman’s book by the same name, I can peer into my wardrobe and hang on the clothes and shoes and handbags and boots that bulge from it, some of the most important moments of my life. Especially the boots. For those dwelling in cooler climes, there is perhaps a 20-day window for honest boot-wearing in Phoenix, Arizona. Seriously. The sunshine is relentless, the heat is “dry,” and I can offer no justification for my growing collection of boots other than still wanting to be more like my idea of a young Carly Simon or Linda Ronstadt. My favorite brown leather boots have a beautiful patina, best worn with the attitude I squeezed into them the morning I was fired by a man who might possibly have been great were it not for the misogyny that diminished him. Admittedly, it was not the best way to start a day, but how it pleased me to turn on the heel of those well-worn boots and walk away from him.Forever. And wherever he is, I hope he can hear someone tell him #TimesUp
Then there are the boots of patchwork leather that my mother gave me; they make me feel like Carly Simon in anticipation of a date with Cat Stevens circa 1971. There are the inappropriate patent leather boots I wore the first time we took our daughter to see the snow, where she fall with glee into its sparkling powder, creating her first snow-angel; there are six pairs of black boots that vary only in length even though someone, most likely me, pointed out that each is a distinct shade of black and – this is important – timeless. Too, there are the classic Frye boots that I simply could not pass up because they were, well, classic and on sale and at a consignment store; and, the pointy-toed suede knee-high boots purchased from a UK catalog at full over-priced price. They have been reheeled and resoled twice, and they require additional assistance and effort to remove from my tired feet at the end of a long day. I haven’t worn them as much since Ken died, because I know when the time comes to remove them that I will remember exactly how he used to say, “Goddammit baby. Goddammit.” And even though I have fallen in love again with a man who loves me, I still tell myself there must have been a mistake, that maybe Sophie’s daddy is not really dead.
The collection of coats defies explanation, several of them purchased back home in Northern Ireland and carried back – in an extra suitcase – to the desert southwest where there is rarely the need for a sweater let alone a coat. I suppose coat-wearing allows me to make a statement about how Phoenix won’t stop me from being my own girl, complete with scarf, coat, and even a turtleneck underneath. I have other “signature” coats, one of which I have worn in public only once as an homage to Tom Petty. He would have rocked that coat. It is more art than coat and belongs only on someone on stage in front of 50,000 fans holding up lighters.
During the Christmas holidays, I always wear the long red coat I bought at Marks and Spencers one year in Belfast. I love the lining that nobody but me can see – white with tiny red hearts. And I don’t care if it is 80 degrees outside; that coat is a stunner. Against the backdrop of a holiday tree made of a triangle of pots of jolly red poinsettias outside Saks Fifth Avenue at the Biltmore Fashion Park in Phoenix, it makes me feel a bit like Santa. Or Red Riding Hood.
Along with the boots, and the Bridge vintage leather Gladstone doctor’s bag – which I bought on Ebay and have not been able to open for several years because the brass clasp is broken – hiding in a corner of the closet, are burgundy leather penny loafers, with a penny in each. I haven’t worn them since 1989. I don’t remember why I bought them and don’t know why they are still in my house, but I think it might be because they are reminiscent of the brogues I once wore to school or the tap shoes I wore for Irish dancing. Or maybe I was influenced by the collegiate style of a fifth-grade American girl wearing khakis from the Gap, white socks, and her grandmother’s loafers.
On those days when I have nothing to wear to a place I don’t want to go, it’s only a matter of minutes before the bed is hidden beneath a pile of dresses that are too snug due to a diet that has deteriorated (disappeared) in recent months (years) and an exercise regimen postponed (abandoned), I feel a bit like Meryl Streep‘s married character getting ready for a clandestine rendezvous in Brooklyn with de Niro’s character, also married (but to someone else) in a favorite movie of mine, Falling in Love.
For me, in the end, something blue wins; it always does.Even Meryl settles on a blue print blouse. In my case, it was often the blue dress I am wearing in many of the profile pictures on my online spaces. I finally donated it to Goodwill, having encountered too many of my social media contacts in real life, who probably think I have nothing else to wear. And, they are right. Right?
Resurrected in her son’s documentary, Ephron is among us once again. Vibrant, funny, and in control. I imagine her striding across a set not unlike The Strand bookstore in the East Village where all her books were almost sold out the morning after her death. In my mind, she is authoritative – and perhaps perceived as mean – as she provides direction to Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, while searching for the glasses that are on top of her head. I prefer to think of her laughing with the darlings of Hollywood, surrounded by books, as in the old Jimmy Stewart movie The Shop Around the Corner, which she and her sister charmingly revived in the romantic comedy, You’ve Got Mail starring, naturally, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Although by many accounts, a cynic with a sharp tongue, I suspect Nora Ephron was a romantic at heart, so it would have been poetic had real life handed her the happy ending like those she crafted in those fail-proof feel-good “chick flicks.” The happy ending would not have been real, and my guess is that Nora Ephron liked to keep it real.
Her contribution to the movies is but a tiny part of her legacy as a writer, but those films are such a big part of the soundtrack to my American life as a woman who immigrated to this country around the time When Harry met Sallywas released. Granted, it is not the most memorable part of the movie, but there is one scene that always makes me laugh and snaps me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who shows up now and again to remind me just how little time there is to become who I am supposed to be. As I have learned, life happens in the twinkling of an eye, and it is for the living. I have learned that too.
In the scene, Meg Ryan’s Sally has just found out that her ex-boyfriend is getting married. In tears, she tells Harry that she is going to be left on the shelf, a spinster, all alone at forty. Mind you, she is barely thirty, with a very cute hair cut that, at the time, I was convinced would work with naturally curly hair like mine. It didn’t. In fact, I carried in my wallet, for several years – maybe a decade – a page from a magazine featuring the many cute haircuts of Meg Ryan. I really did. And, for countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page, as though it were the Shroud of Turin, to politely asked them to give me a Meg Ryan haircut. Not until I turned 50 and found Topher at the aptly named Altered Ego salon, did they ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before. Too many times, perhaps.
And I’m gonna be 40 . . . someday
Just yesterday I felt the same way. Forty was a lifetime away from eighteen, and by all accounts the deadline for “letting oneself go” and, I suppose, Eileen Fisher. Fifty was sensible and dowdy. Sixty heralded blue rinses for hair – not jeans. Seventy was out of the question, and definitely not a new fifty. Having passed the half-century mark, I’m wondering about what I’ve done and what’s next. With my thirties behind me, my forties too, I am accepting a couple of truths about myself. Some are minor – I do not have sensible hair, and I talk too much. Others are more painful. I should be kinder and more patient. Too, I should stay far away from insecure men in positions of power and recognize earlier those folks who are nice to me only because they need something from me. Like my hair, they perform poorly when the pressure rises.
Being in my fifth decade is a bit like being in IKEA, one of my least favorite places on the planet. A planet itself, IKEA is just too big, with all its “rooms” requiring instructions and assembly and Scandinavian words I find just as intimidating had they fallen from the lips of an errant Viking. I’m worried that I might run out of time to do the things I need to do, not necessarily the kinds of things that might turn up on a “bucket list” but definitely those that will bring me closer to those I love the most. These days, Iknowwho loves me and who loves me not.
Still, none of this self-awareness in any way diminishes how much I resent the aging process in general and the way it just sneaks up on me at the most inopportune times. One minute, I am reading the small print on the back of a shampoo bottle, the next I’m desperately seeking one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I bought at the carwash or found on a desk, forgotten by some other woman in the same predicament. My hearing isn’t what it used to be either, which I would rather blame on my attendance at very loud concerts over the past forty years than on something as wholly graceless as aging.
About six months before he died, my husband and I went to see Fleetwood Mac in Phoenix. Other than the fact that it was the last concert he saw on this earth and the last time he and I would stay for an encore, I hold on to the moment I caught a white-haired Mick Fleetwood bow out and off stage in his bright red hat, pointed red shoes, and the dangling wooden balls, and Stevie Nicks still spinning in black. Mesmerizing. Just like the white winged dove sings a song. Stevie, at seventy. Rock on gold dust woman.
So many beginnings and endings, with more to go . . .
Since Sophie was little, I have saved every drawing, handprint, book report, birthday card, report card, certificate, and, apparently, every receipt from Target. Not in one place, of course. Stuffed in vases and between the pages of books are random letters from the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and her grandparents. There are even pieces of notebook paper that bear only her name in the top right corner. In the spirit of those ever-so-organized professional organizers on documentaries on The Learning Channel, the folks who would direct me to place everything I own on the front yard before organizing it into piles of things that should be stored, displayed, or dumped, I have realized that it is time – theoretically – to tame the paper tiger.
Full of good intentions one day – and for about an hour – I began “organizing.” I made a few folders for my daughter’s school work and special photographs, I threw away those greeting cards that were made not by her but some stranger at Hallmark, I filled a box with books to donate to the local bookstore. While flipping through the pages of a school composition book, I came upon something she had written when she was in elementary school:
I don’t know what or who inspired it. I love the leggy and winking 29 year old, hand on her hip, but I am almost afraid to ask what happened to her. I wonder what Nora Ephron would think of my little girl’s “mountain of life.” I can almost see a wry smile creep across her face as she tells that 50 year old to straighten up for Act Two, to cause some trouble, just as she urged a bunch of Wellesley graduates in her 1996 Commencement Speech – to continue.
No closure.
Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your life . . .
I have conducted many of the most significant relationships in my life almost entirely by telephone. With so many miles of ocean or freeway stretching between me and those who matter most, it is often easier to continue the conversation from the comfort of our own homes. There is always something to talk about even when there is nothing to talk about. Before Skype and Facebook, I treasured long-distance phone calls with my mother, usually during the weekend when we could be less circumspect about the time difference and the cost per minute. And, there were sporadic phone calls from childhood friends, the rhythm of home so achingly familiar we would fall softly into conversation, easily picking up where we left off years ago.
By telephone, I have delivered and received the most important news of my life. from that which cannot be shared quickly enough: “I got the job!” “We’re getting married!” “I’m going to have a baby!” “It’s a girl!” to the kind that startles the silence too early in the morning or too late at night to be anything good. From a village in Wales, my oldest friend calling to tell me her husband had been killed in a car accident: “My darling is gone! My darling is gone! Gone!” From me in a hospital parking lot to my best friend, who, fingers crossed for “benign,” answers before the end of the first ring, only to hear, “I have cancer.” Two years later, I wait on the other end of the line on one continent while she on another, enters my home and calls my husband’s name once, twice, and after the third time, “He’s passed away! He’s passed away! Oh, he’s so cold. I’m so sorry.”
Thus, two people are connected in an ephemeral silence that leaves each with nothing to hold on to.
Nothing but the distance between them.
Writing a letter is different, giving us time to shape our tidings with the very best words we have, but in spite of my best efforts, the letter-writing of my youth has fallen out of favor, snuffed out by e-mails and text messages, that regardless of font and typeface ( or supplemental emoticon) are just not the same.
I miss walking out to my mailbox and opening it to find the red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail – Par Avion. I have saved all my letters and will likely always keep them – to read and reread, because they are immortal reminders of people and places I treasure.
In part, it is this sentiment that is behind the Letters of Note website, a veritable homage to the craft of letter-writing. Editor, Shaun Usher, has painstakingly collected and transcribed letters, memos, and telegrams that “deserve a wider audience,” taking me back to the reading of telegrams at wedding receptions in Northern Ireland. They arrived from America and other places to be read by the Best Man. It makes sense then, that when I ordered the book that grew from the website, I opted for the collectible first edition because it was accompanied by an old-fashioned telegram.
Considering telegrams and old letters, and the heart laid bare on stationery this Valentine’s Day, I am reading again the letter of fatherly advice from author John Steinbeck to his then 14-year-old son Thomas, at the time away at boarding school and smitten by a young girl, Susan. There is both heart and craft in it, and the reminder we all need – ‘nothing good gets away.’
Steinbeck’s letter below can be found in the bestselling book, Letters of Note.
New York
November 10, 1958
Dear Thom:
We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.
First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.
Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.
You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply—of course it isn’t puppy love.
But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it—and that I can tell you.
Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.
The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.
If you love someone—there is no possible harm in saying so—only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.
Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.
It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another—but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.
Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.
We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.
And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
There are the inappropriate patent leather boots I wore the first time we took our daughter
On those days when I have nothing to wear to a place I don’t want to go, it’s only a matter of minutes before the bed is hidden beneath a pile of dresses that are too snug due to a diet that has deteriorated (disappeared) in recent months (years) and an exercise regimen postponed (abandoned), I feel a bit like 
