Wherever you are, even if you’re feeling a bit lost, you are sure to find yourself in the final essay from Local Wonders by Ted Kooser. It’s a lovely reflection on life and loss and on looking ahead – where the world is waiting for us. Enjoy:
Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away.
There’s a windy, perilous passage between each car and the next, and we steady ourselves and push across the iron couplers clenched beneath our feet. Because we are fearful and unsteady crossing through wind and noise, we more keenly feel the train rock under our legs, feel the steel rails give just a little under the weight, as if the rails were tightly stretched wire and there were nothing but air beneath them.
So many cars, so many passages. For you, there may be the dangerous passage of puberty, the wind hot and wild in your hair, followed by marriage, during which for a while you walk lightly under an infinite blue sky, then the rushing warm air of the birth of your first child. And then so soon, it seems, a door slams shut behind you, and you find yourself out in the cold where you learn that the first of your parents has died.
But the next car is warm and bright, and you take a deep breath and unbutton your coat and wipe your glasses. People on either side, so generous with their friendship, turn up their faces to you, and you warm your hands in theirs. Some of them stand and grip your shoulders in their strong fingers, and you gladly accept their embraces, though you may not know them well. How young you feel in their arms.
And so it goes, car after car, passage to passage. As you make your way forward, the roadbed seems to grow more irregular under the wheels as you walk along. ‘Poor workmanship,’ you think, and to steady yourself, you put your hands on people’s shoulders. So much of the world, colorful as flying leaves, clatters past beyond the windows while you try to be attentive to those you move among, maybe stopping to help someone up from their seat, maybe pausing to tell a stranger about something you saw in one of the cars through which you passed. Was it just yesterday or the day before? Could it have been a week ago, a month ago, perhaps a year?
The locomotive is up ahead somewhere, and you hope to have a minute’s talk with the engineer, just a minute to ask a few questions of him. You’re pretty sure he’ll be wearing a striped cap and have his red bandana around his neck, badges of his authority, and he’ll have his elbow crooked on the sill of the open window. How impassively he will be gazing at the passing world, as if he’s seen it all before. He knows just where the tracks will take us as they narrow and narrow and narrow ahead to the point where they seem to join.
But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.”
Ready to step into the club car, I am grateful. There you are, waiting for me, glasses raised. Thank you.
Happy New Year.
yvonne
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all
This is from Ted Kooser’s lovely book, Local Wonders. Wherever you are in your life, you’ll find yourself in his reflection on life, the passing year, and how to greet the future:
Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away.
There’s a windy, perilous passage between each car and the next, and we steady ourselves and push across the iron couplers clenched beneath our feet. Because we are fearful and unsteady crossing through wind and noise, we more keenly feel the train rock under our legs, feel the steel rails give just a little under the weight, as if the rails were tightly stretched wire and there were nothing but air beneath them.
So many cars, so many passages. For you, there may be the dangerous passage of puberty, the wind hot and wild in your hair, followed by marriage, during which for a while you walk lightly under an infinite blue sky, then the rushing warm air of the birth of your first child. And then so soon, it seems, a door slams shut behind you, and you find yourself out in the cold where you learn that the first of your parents has died.
But the next car is warm and bright, and you take a deep breath and unbutton your coat and wipe your glasses. People on either side, so generous with their friendship, turn up their faces to you, and you warm your hands in theirs. Some of them stand and grip your shoulders in their strong fingers, and you gladly accept their embraces, though you may not know them well. How young you feel in their arms.
And so it goes, car after car, passage to passage. As you make your way forward, the roadbed seems to grow more irregular under the wheels as you walk along. ‘Poor workmanship,’ you think, and to steady yourself, you put your hands on people’s shoulders. So much of the world, colorful as flying leaves, clatters past beyond the windows while you try to be attentive to those you move among, maybe stopping to help someone up from their seat, maybe pausing to tell a stranger about something you saw in one of the cars through which you passed. Was it just yesterday or the day before? Could it have been a week ago, a month ago, perhaps a year?
The locomotive is up ahead somewhere, and you hope to have a minute’s talk with the engineer, just a minute to ask a few questions of him. You’re pretty sure he’ll be wearing a striped cap and have his red bandana around his neck, badges of his authority, and he’ll have his elbow crooked on the sill of the open window. How impassively he will be gazing at the passing world, as if he’s seen it all before. He knows just where the tracks will take us as they narrow and narrow and narrow ahead to the point where they seem to join.
But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.
Again, the sun will pause for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, outside Dublin, Ireland, they hold a lottery to decide who will experience the solstice the way it was intended by those ancient folk who built it over 5,000 years ago.
In its roof, is a little opening, aligned to the ascending sun. When that morning sunbeam shoots through the roof-box, it illuminates for seventeen minutes the chamber below, highlighting the geometric shapes carved into the stone walls. It is a magic time, long before clocks and calendars and compasses measured time and the distance between us, signifying the turn towards a new year.
This year, out of over 30,000 applicants, only 50 were selected to experience the solstice at Newgrange. Unfortunatley, Irish weather was as you would expect with clouds and rain keeping the light out.
From the outside, my house glitters like a Christmas card with its tree twinkling in the window and a sign for Santa to please stop here. A little house, it is no different than any other year, except the two women inside it are different, each of us adjusted and adjusting to a life and to living without the constancy of a man for whom our happiness was his heart’s only desire. Each of us wondering what’s next for us – what will begin and what will end.
I remember reading something about a woman who described two distinct lives – the one she lived before cancer and the one forever changed by the diagnosis – her turning point. When I close my eyes to recollect my own diagnosis, I can see myself get up and walk out the door, leaving behind the woman I used to be, offended by the nerve of that Breast Cancer Navigator telling my husband and me that I had cancer. Me?With cancer?
Like an unexpected snow, the pronouncement fell from her lips and rendered me wordless. In conspiratorial whispers, she informed my husband of all the details I would forget. It reminded me of the way we quietly speculate about the cause of a death when all the evidence points to hard living. On and on she talked, as if trying to soothe us even as she filled our ears with fear. So many scary words. Not to worry. She stressed that what we were hearing that day in her dimly lit office was not a death sentence.
Nonetheless, I heard a crack, the sound of a life being altered that would have me pondering still and more how to handle poet Muriel Rukeyser’s question:
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
I think it might.
I raged silently against cancer, indignant that it had barged into our lives, interrupting our plans to celebrate our daughter’s fourteenth birthday and Christmas. But we celebrated anyway. We decorated the house the way we always do. We had a party for Sophie and invited friends over. We remembered to laugh. We went to a Bob Seger concert on Christmas Eve. We scheduled the blood-work and the biopsies, the mammograms, and the mastectomy. The healing began. Sort of.
And then, another Christmas, the cancer contained, the promise of a better year. Relieved and ready to celebrate anything, my parents came to Arizona to help us bring in 2013. We set off fireworks saved for a special occasion and for good luck, we designated my dark-haired husband “the first footer” after midnight. Such relief to shut the door against 2012, a year that had skulked in and scared us, each of us terrified by the cancer and what it might do.
For me – and the woman I used to be – cancer became The Scariest Thing in my life. Like every scary thing that comes to fruition, it had never previously crossed my mind. No. My mind was too consumed with all the things that most likely will never happen. All that worrying. Why? It is such a waste. But the cancer happened, and I wanted everyone to feel as sorry for me as I did for myself and howl about the unfairness of it all. I wanted sympathy – the kind delivered by an Irish mammy over endless cups of tea with reminders that there’s always someone worse off. Always.
I remember my mother cursing the cancer for the thief that it is but she’d temper her remarks with reminders that I was so lucky to be married to the best man in the world. “You could set your watch by him!” she’d say, and then she would jokingly ask him how in the name of God he had put up with me for over twenty years. Not known for my punctuality or having a place for everything and everything in its place, she regularly wondered aloud how I would ever manage without him since he waited on me hand and foot. Without him. In our house. Now that would be a scary thing. Me? A widow?
But in the wee hours of 2013 on a magical New Year’s Eve, I was still Ken’s wife, one half of an “us,” and I was looking ahead and happy. Like mischievous kids, we set off fireworks at the end of our street. My parents’ faces illuminated by sparklers bought one July 4th in San Luis Obispo, my daughter toasting us with cider that shone in one of the good Waterford crystal glasses, it was a magic time – life was sweet. I remember thinking, believing “All. Is. Well.”
When everyone went to bed on January 1st 2013, I stayed up, savoring the silence of our slumbering house and the opportunity to consider Ted Kooser’s assessment of life, that it is “. . . a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away …”
It is just like that. And on the shortest day when the sun stops for a moment, I find myself in between two cars, aware that I still have some distance to travel. Forward. And I am ready for it.
But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.
It is your birthday, and for the second time since we met, you are not with me on your day. How should we mark the occasion? Without any fuss, I can hear you say, and maybe you can hear me ignore you as I plan a fuss of some kind, the way I did for each of the 23 birthdays you celebrated with me. Anyway, my love, weren’t you the one who always told me not to throw away old photographs because they were proof that we were here? Proof of life. Proof of having lived. These markers matter, don’t they?
There are people who don’t know you lived, people who come to our house and knock on our door who remain unaware that you used to be here. Almost every day, the new mailman leaves in our mailbox at least one piece of mail addressed to you. He would not know that those envelopes bearing your name remain unopened before I discard them in the recycling bin. Should I tell him? How should I tell him that you don’t live here anymore? Is there some protocol in place for informing the mailman or the other “known” strangers who people my life? Maybe I can fill out a form at the Post Office so everyone will know that you don’t live here anymore. You don’t live.
But that’s not the way it used to be.
You used to do the last-minute grocery shopping, and I suppose I should tell you that we just have not been able to go back to ‘your’ store. What of Lisa, the cashier? She liked you and doted on Sophie. Does she ever wonder about you, I wonder? Does she know you died or, if you cross her mind, does she just assume you started buying our groceries somewhere cheaper? Then, there’s the old mechanic, whose old ways appealed to you. Unfairly, he is older than you. Last week, we had to take your car to his shop, because the damn driver’s side window got stuck again, and I don’t know how to fix it, even temporarily. Standing there waiting for him to tell me how expensive it was going to be, I noticed his assistant had already written your name on the work order, so I thought I should tell him you had died. Oh, honey, I had to look away. A cliche, but his jaw dropped, and he stopped what he was doing to remember you, to tell me he didn’t know and that he was so very sorry. “Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamn.” You made an impression on him. You made a mark.
No, I still don’t know how to fix things, and it seems as though things are breaking all the time. Yesterday, before the storm moved in, I called someone a friend of a friend knows to repair our patio roof. He climbed up your ladder, and when I heard his footsteps above me, I pretended – for a minute – that it was you. I almost waited for you to come back down and tell me it was no big deal. I wonder did he notice the clues you left behind, the proof that you were here. Your tools still lean against the shed; your lighter – empty now – remains surreptitiously upon one of the beams. I think you thought I believed you when you said you had quit smoking. Your pictures still hang on the wall, reminding me of the complete and smiling family of which we were once a part, and if he were to look in the laundry room, he would see your favorite blue chambray shirt hanging there. Maybe he thought you were at work or that you just weren’t “handy.” He didn’t ask, but I wonder if he wondered why I called him instead of you to fix our roof. I wanted to explain, to tell him all about you, but instead I looked at pictures on his phone of the patio he had remodeled for his outdoor wedding.
It is your birthday, and I am annoyed that the men who mow the yard and trim the trees have shown up the way they do each Monday, as if it is an ordinary Monday. They make too much noise, but none of it is about you. They know you used to live here, but they never mention you. They never acknowledge that you were here even when I remind them that since you died, I need them to pay closer attention to the sprinkler system and to the branches that trail on our roof and the Mesquite seed pods that drop in the pool. You are not here anymore to pick up their slack, and they don’t appear to miss you.
To them and other familiar faces at the grocery store or the gas station, I look the same as I always did. Mostly. My hair is longer again, the way you preferred it, and I have been going to the gym again. My wedding rings now sparkle from the fourth finger of my right hand. It makes no difference. Ostensibly, nothing has changed. If you were to ask the people who know me as the woman who leaves the trashcans out on a Monday night, so the man who drives the City of Phoenix garbage truck can empty them on Tuesday morning, they would have no reason to believe anything has changed in our house.
But everything has changed in your absence, and after twenty-two months, I have not figured out how to turn away from a life with you to one without you. Some people who didn’t know you presumed I was ready to “move on.” There was the bank clerk, gently impatient as she pressed me – just weeks after you died – for a certified copy of your death certificate so she could erase your name from the checking account and the mortgage, and transform things that used to be “ours” into mine. All mine.
Until I had to do them myself, I underestimated the work you did just to keep our house – my house – functioning, and I somehow missed so many of the countless little things that now loom large in front of me. You always knew when to change the oil and rotate the tires, but you cared more about keeping the hummingbird feeder full and doing the laundry. All second nature, I thought at the time, but I know now you reminded yourself on yellow post-it notes that accumulated in the basket where you always kept your keys. Do you know I have been putting my keys in your basket every day? Sophie reminds me.
You always put things back where they belonged. You played a steady tune that I can barely hear any more. Yes, there were things you didn’t do and wouldn’t do and things you weren’t good at, but that’s where I came in. Between us and for us, we made it all work, didn’t we? Sitting here with you on your birthday, I want to scream to anyone who will listen that I can’t make it work the way it used to, because “it” is finished. Yes. I am feeling sorry for myself and I know I shouldn’t. There are so many memories to mine on your birthday, but it is no good. This grief has me in its grip, a kind of delayed reaction. I am adrift with no idea where this altered life will lead. I know you would tell me not to worry, but I wouldn’t be able to hear you above the noise of my own fears.
Do you remember the last time we were grateful? It was New Year’s Day 2013, almost a year after I was diagnosed with cancer. We were certain sure, standing there on the street outside our house in the wee hours of the first day of a new year. I was still your wife, one half of an “us,” giddy with the promise of a clean slate. Like mischievous kids, we set off fireworks at the end of our street. My parents were here too, their faces illuminated by cheap sparklers we bought one Fourth of July in San Luis Obispo, smiling at our smiling girl in her pajamas and one of my heavy jackets. Our lovely girl – just fourteen – do you remember she toasted us with cider that sparkled amber in a Tyrone crystal glass from back home.All was well. Life was sweet.
I remember staying up after you went to bed, just to savor the silence of our slumbering house. This was before I resented the silence. Curled up on the couch, I remember reading Ted Kooser’s End of Year Reflections, and today, I am drawn back to what he said of this life, that it is
. . . a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away …
It is just like that, isn’t it? On your birthday, I find myself still in between two cars. I still have some distance to travel.Forward. Ready or not. A slow turning. From the inside out.
Do you remember that song? Of course you do. I remember adding it to a playlist I made for one of your birthdays. If it began to play right as you pulled into the driveway, you would turn it up and stay in the car until it was over. I can see you right now, on your birthday, a September sun setting in the rear-view mirror and you tapping your feet and singing your favorite line:
I’m yelling at the kids in the back, ‘cause they’re banging like Charlie Watts.
How could I not make a fuss on your birthday? I will never forget you.
