walking away on the last first day of school

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Her last first day at school – 2015

WALKING AWAY – Cecil Day Lewis

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.


The best year of my life was the one I spent at home after the birth of my baby girl. With her daddy off at work, our girl was all mine.  Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I held her in my arms as I danced around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison. In the afternoons, I spent interminable hours just looking at her.

Just. Looking. At. Her.

I examined every feature, every furrow, every flicker across her tiny face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, marveling that two imperfect people had created this perfection. Unbothered by my hovering, or maybe she was, these were the days before she had a cache of words or discovered the beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.

Mostly, our darling girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let us know she was right there in front of us. I couldn’t bear it. In spite of criticism from well-meaning friends who thought they knew better, I was one of those mothers who refused to let her ‘cry it out’ at night. When I heard the tiniest whimper, I bolted to her bedroom to pick her up and comfort her.  My mother encouraged me, reminding me the way only an Irish mammy could, that there would be plenty of nights further on down the road when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. She was right – of course she was right, and it has been on such desperate nights that I have found myself wishing we mothers could have banked all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children and built a rainy day fund to help us help them weather the waiting storms.

When the time came for me to return to work, I was unprepared for the crying – mostly mine – that preceded and continued after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, a cheery classroom assistant at the Montessori school. Most of the other mothers didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. In their comfortable cargo pants and Birkenstocks and – in the era pre-Starbucks – sipping coffee in mugs brought from home, they chatted in the parking lot.  I like to think I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits and a hairdo on the verge of sensible. A school principal at the time,  I was hell-bent on impressing on someone – mostly me – the notion that I was “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all, all at the same time.

In spite of my grown-up job, I failed to impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I would hand to her my wailing, flailing girl. Unflappable, Bonnie would placate me with reassurances that the writhing child in her arms would be absolutely fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to tell me more than once, Bonnie showed restraint, never once rolling her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I wanted my child to have Bonnie’s undivided attention. I wanted Bonnie to spend hours staring, like the Madonna – mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes –  at my beautiful girl, cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when she did something – anything – for the first time. I was sad that I would miss the first time she watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew bubbles. I would miss telling her daddy, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that Sophie 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 madly jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – with a magic trick up her sleeve to charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. Walking away from the child writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave, but I remained in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to children crying.  How, out of that early morning cacophony, could we mothers pluck out the sound of even the tiniest whimper from our own children?

Daily, I waited until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and the final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup I had wept off, and when my face matched the boring business suit with no hint of guilt-stricken working mother, off I went to work for other people’s children.

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Around this time, I discovered Kathi Appelt’s book, Oh My Baby Little One. Appelt knew this anguish of leaving a child to go back to work and relived it when her 12 year old son went 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 the book I would find one Saturday afternoon on the discard table at a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.

Every night, I read aloud the story of Mama Bird, who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love – a little red heart – would still be with him. Magically, this love 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.

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Every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask my sleepy girl, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper, as though it were a secret:

All around, mama. The love is all around.

It eased those morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and numerous other teachers throughout the years. There were too many of them. Never satisfied with them because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I knew best what was best for her, I kept switching schools. Why didn’t they understand I was sending them the very best child I have? By the time she was in the third grade, my daughter had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, hopping from school to school, while I kept searching for the one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine. Regrets? Yes.


On her last first day at school, I packed a lunch for my girl – now a high school Senior, a young woman –  and slipped a note inside the brown paper sack the way I used to do when she was in grade school. Watching her stride to the car her dad used to drive, my heart cracked open – another milestone without him.

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But I pulled myself together the way we do and gave into the day,  knowing as it released us to our respective distractions and mundanities, it would unfold with delight or difficulty or both in unequal measure.


Some days still, in an unguarded moment between emails and zoom meetings, in the middle of things that matter and things that don’t, I wonder what she’s doing, and find myself recalling my three-year-old darling, fighting sleep with all her might to search once more for the love so cleverly hidden on each page of Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations.

And I will remind myself – as I will again today –  that the love is all around.

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in the shape of a heart

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And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old—or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give. ― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

Edgar came into our lives over a decade ago.  There he was, standing in an already busy intersection on 16th Street. We had just left the gym when my daughter spotted him, alerting me to that fact by screaming at me to stop the traffic, jumping out, and flailing wildly at a car which she successfully brought to a momentary standstill. Within seconds, she had scooped up the tiny Chihuahua trembling in the widening beam of the headlights before him, named him Edgar – an homage to Mr. Poe. Shortly thereafter she introduced him on Facebook as “50% tremble, 50% snuggle” and told the world that he would be moving in with us. While I had run several miles on a treadmill, I hadn’t yet had my first cup of coffee. I was neither alert nor ready for work let alone a Chihuahua. Somewhere way in the back of my mind, a plan was forming to post  “Found Dog” signs around the neighborhood. I was confident that by the end of the day “Edgar” would be back where he belonged, answering to a name someone else had given him. Sophie almost convinced me to let her stay home from school to be with her new dog. Shaking, Edgar was submissive and starving, his little ribs as noticeable as the heart shaped markings on his coat. Without saying it out loud, I knew Sophie also knew that based on our experience with Molly the Greyhound, a dog was probably not in the cards. 225596_1069916549279_6005_n (1) On the heels of a spectacular crisis in my professional life, we had only weeks earlier visited the Arizona Greyhound Rescue and brought home a beautiful brindle. Elegant and affectionate, Molly knew how to be retired. She lounged around the house all day eating Lays potato chips – but she did not want to do it without me. She needed a companion, preferably retired. She needed more space. Within a week or two, we found out that another family was waiting for Molly—with another greyhound and someone at home all day long. It was a better place, a “forever home.” It was also heartbreaking. Life with Molly, although brief, had sealed the deal as far as future pets were concerned. We would remain a one-cat family. No dogs. No fostering. No rescuing. No more dogs. No way. But there were tell-tale signs that Edgar was finding a way into my husband’s heart. “Surely someone is missing this little guy terribly,” he said, slipping out to Safeway for dog food and treats. He drove slowly around our neighborhood, posting “Found Dog” signs next to  “Lost Dog” notices on lampposts, hoping he would make some family’s day by returning their dog. He scoured Craigslist to see if someone in central Phoenix had lost the cute little Chihuahua that liked belly rubs. The next day, he took Edgar to the Humane Society where they checked for a microchip. No chip. No collar. No clue that he belonged to someone. The vet estimated Edgar at about seven years old. Malnourished and dirty with ghastly breath and worse teeth, Edgar weighed three pounds—less than a bag of sugar. It soon became clear that nobody was looking for him. In spite of having four perfectly good legs, he expected to be carried everywhere and dutifully, we obliged. All of us. He gained weight. He stopped trembling. He slept on Sophie’s chest every night, his heart beating against hers. He scampered towards us when we called “Edgar.” We were besotted, as poet Mary Oliver writes,
Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?
Edgar was ours.
On a gloomy Friday afternoon about a month later,  my daughter and I were out walking with my parents in the village where they live in Northern Ireland. I was killing time, keeping my fingers crossed that an old friend would come through with concert tickets for Van Morrison who had been granted the Freedom of the City and was performing in Belfast. But I was distracted— repeatedly—by thoughts of foreboding and by the unexpected sound of my voice when my phone-calls to Arizona went straight to voice-mail. Worried, I did what I always do when I have “a bad feeling” and sent a text to my best friend. I asked if she would drive to my house—just to check. I know I have a flair for the dramatic and, conventional wisdom be damned, I tend to sweat the small stuff and almost always find the devil in the tiniest of details. I make mountains out of molehills which sometimes works. Sometimes I might produce a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But this? This would be one of the most significant details of my adult life, wrapped up in a text that travelled across several time zones from a little village in Northern Ireland to Chandler, Arizona at 12:25PM Mountain Standard Time: “Trying to be calm, but afraid he is hurt or dead.”  I stayed on the phone, listening as she got out of the car. In the background, I could hear the freeway, cars whizzing past on the other side of the wall at the end of our street. I could hear her breathing as she walked up to my front door. I held on as she knocked the door. I held on as she looked through the bay window to see little Edgar staring back at her, still and silent, his heart beating faster than ours.  I held on as she discovered my keys under the doormat and as she came on in to our cheery living room with its sunny yellow walls. I held on as she called my husband’s name. Once, twice, three times before finding his lifeless body on the bed. I held on, hoping with her that he was just resting but knowing – knowing – he was gone. Still, I held on to something close to hope. I held on.   What has stayed with me more than the anguish of those moments, was that as his fragile heart stopped working, my husband’s last interaction on this earth was most likely one of tenderness, three pounds of unconditional love curled up like a comma on his chest. For a long time afterwards, Sophie told me that every day without her dad began not with sorrow and dread, but with Edgar licking her face and making her smile. He was always ready to walk—or be carried — into the world with her. Ready for her, always.
Edgar, you were a sure thing, a metronome in a world rendered shapeless by the loss of the man who was my daughter’s first word – daddy. Because you were there—a gift beyond measure—her path was a little easier, a little less lonely. How she loved you! She told me today that when you left this world, you left a little bandaid on her heart—and on the hearts of everyone who scooped you up when they visited our home. I’m so grateful to know that your last moments were in the arms of  the girl you watched over for almost a decade. If by chance, you pass this way again, I hope you’ll find a heart like hers – open, bounteous, and waiting for you.

by the river on independence day

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I’m remembering the fireworks that exploded into the sky over Slane Castle on a summer evening in 1985 when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made their Irish debut. Close to 100,000 of us had made the pilgrimage through the sleepy and disapproving village of Slane to see The Boss. Between assurances of increased security and a promise–– that remains unfulfilled–– that this would be the last rock concert to disturb them, the residents had been placated. Even the weather cooperated. It was the kind of sun-drenched day the Irish pray for. Everybody was young that day, even the crotchety old farmers who let us park our cars on their fields. Everybody was Irish, even Bruce Springsteen. When the band burst on stage with Born in the USA, he turned his baseball cap backwards and bragged, “I had a grandmother from here.”

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We basked in his pride, denying for a few hours the truth that our weather was rarely that sunny, and that many of us would be forced out of Ireland as economic immigrants, forever branded the “brain drain” of the 1980s. But on that glorious day, in spite of Ireland’s economic and political realities and the narrowing possibilities before us, a defiant Springsteen held us aloft, and we all believed in America.

12825463_10208921968027586_1284566460_nI first heard Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” when I was 17 years old.  I bought the record and played it until I had memorized every song. Mr. Jones, my English teacher, was responsible, sensing that Springsteen’s plainspoken poetry would appeal to my blue-collar sensibilities. He knew I had never seen a Cadillac or a State Trooper ––most likely he hadn’t either. I had never heard a screen door slam or the crack of a baseball bat. But Mr. Jones also knew I knew  disappointment.  I knew about the dole and diminished opportunities. I knew men who worked at the factory, and when the factory stopped working, they did too. I knew they would never be the same. I knew pregnant girls whose boyfriends married them. I knew Derry Girls and Jersey Girls stood on a different stretch of the same river. I knew the drizzle of rain and small-town life in a tiny troubled country on the other side of the Atlantic. I knew young people were leaving that life for an American dream, and that I would too. Springsteen was talking to us.

When he  revisited “The River” one Thursday night in Phoenix, Arizona,  over three decades later, flashes of my teenage self resurfaced, a little tougher, and wiser maybe, hardened by the beginnings and endings that make up a full life; the marriage, the mortgage, the raising of a good person, the career, the cancer, the death of the man who had for so many years quickened my heart, the worry about what might come next, and the waiting – always the waiting – for the other shoe to drop. In the middle of my life, it occurred to me that my parents–– the people I rebelled against at 17, determined to escape my circumstances–– were once in the middle of their lives with beautiful dreams that were dashed, just like some of mine. I know now the darkness that sometimes got the best of us . . .

Papa now I know the things you wanted that you could not say . . . I swear I never meant to take those things away

12821593_10208905223048972_5730491656911144977_nFrom the cheap seats, I listened to Springsteen tell the stories of an American life, stories that could have been plucked from my dead husband’s life. The one about not being drafted to Vietnam because he was the only surviving son of a man who died in military service; the one about how he cut his hippie hair when his buddies didn’t come back; and, the one about trading in his beloved motorcycle and the muscle car to settle  down when he and his girl were just too young. He had settled. She had too. They continued to settle for too long, each of them making compromises and taking care of what became obligations until they didn’t even care much for each other.

With a shot of courage one hot Saturday afternoon in a Phoenix parking lot outside a place that could have been  Frankie’s Joint – he showed his cards. All of them. And, in the space of a heartbeat, he turned from that life, to follow instead a heart beating wildly, to follow me. The alternative he later told me felt like “dying by inches.”

Cause point blank, bang bang baby you’re dead.

He brought with him the shirt on his back and a shiny Ford Thunderbird. He had the heart – and he had the stomach – for all of it. All of it.  He was all in. He would drive all night just to buy me some shoes.

For as long as we could be young, we had a great run. Born to run, we raised the kind of hell that belongs in a rollicking Springsteen song. It had lost much of its luster before he died because the “in sickness” part of the deal was tougher than either of us could have imagined. Through it all, he was in my corner – always – and any regrets are so small now, they don’t matter. We were married for one day shy of 22 years, and together we had done something good – really good.  The lesson? It’s about time. It is always about time. We have only so much and not enough to waste to learn how to live and to live well with another person, a partner.

Over 40 years since I first listened to it, “The River” reminds me to take stock. Just like the America we’re celebrating today,  something good is  just up the road.  It always is.

The River is how you learn the adult life and you choose your partner and you choose your work and that clock starts ticking and you walk alongside not only the people you’ve chosen to live your life with but you walk alongside of your own mortality and you realize you have a limited amount of time to raise your family, to do your job, to try and do something good. That’s ‘The River.’

That’s Independence Day.

please read the letter . . .

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The 74-year old man in black still sounds like the Robert Plant in your memory … the one who never failed to hit the paint-peeling high notes on a Led Zeppelin classic, the one who belongs up there on a Mount Rushmore of rock and roll frontmen.

A sold-out crowd at the University of Arizona’s Centennial Hall is on its feet by the end of a revamped ‘Rock and Roll, and then a kind of hush as Plant leans into “Please Read The Letter.” It’s a slow-burn of a song that hints at infidelity and mistakes that can’t be fixed. It’s also a song about the way we used to set words down on a page. With intention. It’s a song about making sure that what must be said is said —and heard. Goodbye. I’m sorry. I miss you. Thank you.

Written by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in 1997, the song transports me back to a time before emails and emojis and texts and Tweets, a time when letters helped close the distance between us. Requiring a little more labor from us, a little more time to shape our news, one sentence a time, with the best words available to us, letters forced us to slow down even as the world around us spun at increasing velocity.

I miss them and all that  Simon Garfield says we’ve lost by relinquishing “the post, the envelope, a pen, a slower cerebral whirring, the use of the whole of our hands and not just the tips of our fingers.” I miss walking out to a red brick mailbox, to find a red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail – Par Avion. I marveled at the journey of such a fragile thing, imagining all the hands it passed through on its way to me from a red pillar box in a rainy Northern Ireland village all the way over the Atlantic Ocean and on to the Arizona desert. I miss the creases and ink-smudges; the tea-stained ring of my mother’s cup; and, the barely-there fragrance of her soap.

Like remastered Zeppelin records in the 21st century, letter writing will maybe a comeback …


Against the beat of a steady snare drum, Robert Plant takes me back. With exquisite harmonies and an unexpected fiddle solo from Alison Krauss, I find myself sitting down to read a letter …

While sorting through papers one evening, de-cluttering and discarding, I found folded in four between a hand-made card and a letter of recommendation from a former supervisor, a letter from a former student. I’m embarrassed to admit I do not remember the woman who took the time to explain in writing her decision to withdraw from my Introduction to World Literature class, nor do I recall how I received her letter. Had she turned it in with an assignment? I don’t know. I don’t even know her full name. I’m guessing that in her effort to explain herself on just one side of the note-book paper, she had to tightly position her signature—Carol F.— in the bottom right corner  – diminutive and different from the great loops of flowing cursive that had preceded it.

I never saw Carol F. again. Almost a quarter of a century later,  I want her to know I read the letter and that I appreciate it.

9.17.1999
Dear Ms. W.
I wanted to write you a note to tell you how very much I have enjoyed your class. You are a delight and a terrific teacher. We have just learned that my mom has cancer, and it is in the brain, lung, and bones. We don’t have much time, and I need every minute I have to be with her. I remember you saying that your mom is your best friend – it is the same with me – and I hardly know how I can get through life without her.

I wanted you to know also, that because her eyesight has been going – and she has always been an avid reader (and all the zillions of stories she read to us . . . do you know of the poem, “You may have riches and gold – but I had a mother that read to me . . . “?) She has been so frustrated not being able to read, so I have been reading to her. I read her “My Oedipus Complex,” and oh, how we giggled – I told her that I wish she could have heard you read it, with that slight, but wonderful Irish accent! So I was especially glad to have O’Connor’s other story – “First Confession” that you handed out. We call them his ‘little boy stories’ – and they have brought her smiles. The Oedpius Complex was especially wonderful, because my father was a pilot in the Army, and was in Korea and WWII  so – she with 3 boys (and 2 girls) could certain relate to ‘Daddy’ coming home and the competition for her attention.

Isn’t it strange – I bet you don’t think about the ways you touch other lives – but you have added something beautiful to ours, when we most needed it. I will in time retake this course – so I will be looking for YOUR class.

Thank you,
Carol F.