LWP
Magazine Entry Justification
sbrowder
11/14/07
I have chosen to submit my piece, “The Telling of Two Lives”, to the online magazine, Literary Mama. “Literary Mama features writing by mother writers about the complexities and many faces of motherhood.” [submissions]
LM features a section of creative non-fiction. They prefer previously unpublished work. Their format is ‘mama-centric writing…that may be too raw, complex, or ambiguous” for the mainstream publications. My piece is definitely my “raw” and “ambiguous” feelings concerning the ‘second’ birth of my son, when he “came out” to me as a gay man.
In my search for an intellectual and spiritual understanding of my life from that moment, I am hoping other parents will find a place of peace. I am sure my quest is not uncommon but more unspoken.
I plan to continue to write this story. It is a story like any story - bittersweet. I only wish I had been able to find such a story on the bookshelves when I so desperately needed another voice. This will be a shared journey for all mothers who love their children imperfectly but completely.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
The magaizine justification for, "The Telling of Two Lives"
LWP
Magazine Entry Justification
sbrowder
11/14/07
I have chosen to submit my piece, “The Telling of Two Lives”, to the online magazine, Literary Mama. “Literary Mama features writing by mother writers about the complexities and many faces of motherhood.” [submissions]
LM features a section of creative non-fiction. They prefer previously unpublished work. Their format is ‘mama-centric writing…that may be too raw, complex, or ambiguous” for the mainstream publications. My piece is definitely my “raw” and “ambiguous” feelings concerning the ‘second’ birth of my son, when he “came out” to me as a gay man.
In my search for an intellectual and spiritual understanding of my life from that moment, I am hoping other parents will find a place of peace. I am sure my quest is not uncommon but more unspoken.
I plan to continue to write this story. It is a story like any story - bittersweet. I only wish I had been able to find such a story on the bookshelves when I so desperately needed another voice. This will be a shared journey for all mothers who love their children imperfectly but completely.
Magazine Entry Justification
sbrowder
11/14/07
I have chosen to submit my piece, “The Telling of Two Lives”, to the online magazine, Literary Mama. “Literary Mama features writing by mother writers about the complexities and many faces of motherhood.” [submissions]
LM features a section of creative non-fiction. They prefer previously unpublished work. Their format is ‘mama-centric writing…that may be too raw, complex, or ambiguous” for the mainstream publications. My piece is definitely my “raw” and “ambiguous” feelings concerning the ‘second’ birth of my son, when he “came out” to me as a gay man.
In my search for an intellectual and spiritual understanding of my life from that moment, I am hoping other parents will find a place of peace. I am sure my quest is not uncommon but more unspoken.
I plan to continue to write this story. It is a story like any story - bittersweet. I only wish I had been able to find such a story on the bookshelves when I so desperately needed another voice. This will be a shared journey for all mothers who love their children imperfectly but completely.
The magaizine justification for, "The Telling of Two Lives
LWP
Magazine Entry Justification
sbrowder
11/14/07
I have chosen to submit my piece, “The Telling of Two Lives”, to the online magazine, Literary Mama. “Literary Mama features writing by mother writers about the complexities and many faces of motherhood.” [submissions]
LM features a section of creative non-fiction. They prefer previously unpublished work. Their format is ‘mama-centric writing…that may be too raw, complex, or ambiguous” for the mainstream publications. My piece is definitely my “raw” and “ambiguous” feelings concerning the ‘second’ birth of my son, when he “came out” to me as a gay man.
In my search for an intellectual and spiritual understanding of my life from that moment, I am hoping other parents will find a place of peace. I am sure my quest is not uncommon but more unspoken.
I plan to continue to write this story. It is a story like any story - bittersweet. I only wish I had been able to find such a story on the bookshelves when I so desperately needed another voice. This will be a shared journey for all mothers who love their children imperfectly but completely.
Magazine Entry Justification
sbrowder
11/14/07
I have chosen to submit my piece, “The Telling of Two Lives”, to the online magazine, Literary Mama. “Literary Mama features writing by mother writers about the complexities and many faces of motherhood.” [submissions]
LM features a section of creative non-fiction. They prefer previously unpublished work. Their format is ‘mama-centric writing…that may be too raw, complex, or ambiguous” for the mainstream publications. My piece is definitely my “raw” and “ambiguous” feelings concerning the ‘second’ birth of my son, when he “came out” to me as a gay man.
In my search for an intellectual and spiritual understanding of my life from that moment, I am hoping other parents will find a place of peace. I am sure my quest is not uncommon but more unspoken.
I plan to continue to write this story. It is a story like any story - bittersweet. I only wish I had been able to find such a story on the bookshelves when I so desperately needed another voice. This will be a shared journey for all mothers who love their children imperfectly but completely.
The magaizine justification for, "The Telling of Two Lives
LWP
Magazine Entry Justification
sbrowder
11/14/07
I have chosen to submit my piece, “The Telling of Two Lives”, to the online magazine, Literary Mama. “Literary Mama features writing by mother writers about the complexities and many faces of motherhood.” [submissions]
LM features a section of creative non-fiction. They prefer previously unpublished work. Their format is ‘mama-centric writing…that may be too raw, complex, or ambiguous” for the mainstream publications. My piece is definitely my “raw” and “ambiguous” feelings concerning the ‘second’ birth of my son, when he “came out” to me as a gay man.
In my search for an intellectual and spiritual understanding of my life from that moment, I am hoping other parents will find a place of peace. I am sure my quest is not uncommon but more unspoken.
I plan to continue to write this story. It is a story like any story - bittersweet. I only wish I had been able to find such a story on the bookshelves when I so desperately needed another voice. This will be a shared journey for all mothers who love their children imperfectly but completely.
Magazine Entry Justification
sbrowder
11/14/07
I have chosen to submit my piece, “The Telling of Two Lives”, to the online magazine, Literary Mama. “Literary Mama features writing by mother writers about the complexities and many faces of motherhood.” [submissions]
LM features a section of creative non-fiction. They prefer previously unpublished work. Their format is ‘mama-centric writing…that may be too raw, complex, or ambiguous” for the mainstream publications. My piece is definitely my “raw” and “ambiguous” feelings concerning the ‘second’ birth of my son, when he “came out” to me as a gay man.
In my search for an intellectual and spiritual understanding of my life from that moment, I am hoping other parents will find a place of peace. I am sure my quest is not uncommon but more unspoken.
I plan to continue to write this story. It is a story like any story - bittersweet. I only wish I had been able to find such a story on the bookshelves when I so desperately needed another voice. This will be a shared journey for all mothers who love their children imperfectly but completely.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
What I have learned
LWP
11/11/07
sbrowder
What I have learned…
* “I took myself as the bottom line”[109, Inventing the Truth, “Lifting the Veil”, Henry Gates] I have permission to take off the blindfold and tell my truth. Thanks Henry! He also wrote: “But my advice to anyone writing a memoir is: Be prepared for the revelation of things you don’t even dream are going to come up.”[108] I will read and re-read, these two essential pieces as the law, as I continue to write my most honest, raw memoir about my son - twice born - once as I knew him from birth, and again when he ’came out’ to me years later - a gay man. I never knew what my feelings were, until “The Telling of Two Lives’. In fact, I may have just discovered the title of my book - “Twice Born”.
* There is writing that sells and there is writing that feeds the writer’s soul and sometimes these are the same pieces!
* Don’t rush the ending. It deserves the same attention as the rest of the piece.
* My first lines, for now, are found on the second page. I just need to get the first chunk of lines out of the way. Annie Dillard, in her chapter, “To Fashion a Text” from, “Inventing the Truth” [153-154],recommends “…not hanging on the reader’s arm, like a drunk…”. What I did or did not do is hacked at until what I have dug up is what I meant to say.
* It is OK to wall-paper my wall with rejection slips,like King did. At least it meant I had sent something out for others to see. No one is going to come to my door, knock, and ask if I would like to be published.
* I hereby give myself permission to write something and throw it away!
* Dillard wrote: “You can’t test courage cautiously.” This is a ‘must remember’ quote for me as a writer.
* Metaphors are wonderful, but please, just one to a paragraph. [And I thought dangling participles where my biggest fear.] Maybe I will write a book about metaphors and then read it.
* Knowing the rules of grammar are essential. King reminded me about this but I didn’t believe him - now I do. I have an !illustrated! edition of “The Elements of Style” on my writing table. It is on my current, “Must Read” list.
* All writers have something to bring and something to share that is needful to my craft. My response group became those kind of writers for me.
* I am a work in progress.
11/11/07
sbrowder
What I have learned…
* “I took myself as the bottom line”[109, Inventing the Truth, “Lifting the Veil”, Henry Gates] I have permission to take off the blindfold and tell my truth. Thanks Henry! He also wrote: “But my advice to anyone writing a memoir is: Be prepared for the revelation of things you don’t even dream are going to come up.”[108] I will read and re-read, these two essential pieces as the law, as I continue to write my most honest, raw memoir about my son - twice born - once as I knew him from birth, and again when he ’came out’ to me years later - a gay man. I never knew what my feelings were, until “The Telling of Two Lives’. In fact, I may have just discovered the title of my book - “Twice Born”.
* There is writing that sells and there is writing that feeds the writer’s soul and sometimes these are the same pieces!
* Don’t rush the ending. It deserves the same attention as the rest of the piece.
* My first lines, for now, are found on the second page. I just need to get the first chunk of lines out of the way. Annie Dillard, in her chapter, “To Fashion a Text” from, “Inventing the Truth” [153-154],recommends “…not hanging on the reader’s arm, like a drunk…”. What I did or did not do is hacked at until what I have dug up is what I meant to say.
* It is OK to wall-paper my wall with rejection slips,like King did. At least it meant I had sent something out for others to see. No one is going to come to my door, knock, and ask if I would like to be published.
* I hereby give myself permission to write something and throw it away!
* Dillard wrote: “You can’t test courage cautiously.” This is a ‘must remember’ quote for me as a writer.
* Metaphors are wonderful, but please, just one to a paragraph. [And I thought dangling participles where my biggest fear.] Maybe I will write a book about metaphors and then read it.
* Knowing the rules of grammar are essential. King reminded me about this but I didn’t believe him - now I do. I have an !illustrated! edition of “The Elements of Style” on my writing table. It is on my current, “Must Read” list.
* All writers have something to bring and something to share that is needful to my craft. My response group became those kind of writers for me.
* I am a work in progress.
Friday, November 9, 2007
An Unwanted Guest of the Mind
LWP
Piece # 3 - Final version - 11/10/07
“An Unwanted Guest of the Mind”
sbrowder
My mind is a dark place. It is achy and flu-like. I feel sick with anger. It is raining on the inside of my ways. My mind is a gray and a testy place - skies filled with tornadoes and hail storms. No one dare to go near me or they may be blown away.
When did this anger slip in uninvited to my “mind place”? Was it simply a day last week? Did one incident open the door and let anger in? I remember smiles and I still hear laughter, but it has no affect on me. I fret over what has taken residence and rules my thoughts and emotions. I am even angry with those I love, those I do not know and even at myself. It would seem that I would of at least excused myself, but no, I cling to my anger like a lover. Only sadness keeps me from imploding.
Instead I explode. I reign fireballs - red, orange, white hot, words. I send out sparks of rage in a firework display. Those around me duck and run for cover. In the explosion I can see the damage as it happens. I hate my words, but the million pieces of an explosion cannot be sent back.
2
I do not hate my life and let sadness have its ultimate result - death, I just resent my life’s state of mind. I want to live but live with a promise - a promise that I will rise to a different level. I want to climb to find some new revelation of place and me in it. But, as I am now, I cannot find this place- hell, I cannot see the doorknob.
I can still smell eggs cooking in a buttered pan, but they have become rancid in my nose. I want to blow out all their smell like snot in a tissue.
I cannot finish eating the eggs. They are yellow and scrambled. They are too bright - that kind of yellow. These eggs spread out on my plate, spongy and messy. Yoke mixed with white, they are nothing. They taste like nothing. What does nothing taste like? Egg whites.
I think these eggs are crumpled nothingness. I look at them and wish they could become the fowl that struts around a farm yard, scratching at the ground. Instead these eggs are foul. I am done with eggs.
***
My dreams are an ugly place. Sleep is no longer sweet, lilac scented pillow places. An extension of my wakeful place my anger shows up here, too. Characters in my dreams are reversed. Instead of me being full of rage and nastiness, others fly at me. I whimper, pleading with them to stop.
3
My husband, who in my waking place , is beyond kind, is displaced in my nightmares, by some altered thing. My husband was one of those people who had a wonderful childhood. Then altered , when I came into his life, he
spoiled me so that I became rotten and in many ways. He said yes to me, when he should have said no. He allowed me to go, when he should have said stay. And with his own permission I spoiled his life. I took what he allowed, went where I wanted to go. I did not look back, nor could I stop. Now in my dreams he becomes the spoiler who abuses me emotionally, thus wreaking my mind with confusion and pain. It feels like he is taking his turn. It feels like paybacks.
I wake from my dream place disgruntled and broody. My mood is like a sour wash cloth drug across my face, filling my nose with its putrid warmness. I am repulsed yet I continue to wash my face with it hoping that the perfume of the soap will overcome the sourness. I wash and still feel dirty.
I am disgusted with this anger which drains all my brain juice. I am left tired and moody. I grope around in my “mind place” looking for a bright spot to snap me out of it. Surely there is some thought I dropped somewhere and by recovering it, I will be propelled forward and out of this
4
room of gloom.
I think maybe my unquiet mind is like the scary tunnel ride at the fair. I sit in the car twisting this way and that while all along the way mechanical devices bolt up-right from the dark , dangling webs and cold blasts of air assault my senses. I smell something electrical burning. I don’t want to think about what it could be. Then it’s over and the rickety, steely car bursts into the light. Why won’t my mind leave this Haunted House and leave me
free of this ride?
But no. I am an anchoress living in solitude. Everything is filtered through my “showings” - visions of the angry mind. Only unlike Julian of Norwich, I report “showings” of man’s relationship with an armless Devil. I warn mankind to leave their anger like an old coat on a chair and return to God. Yet I am locked away, a self appointed recluse. I am the living dead.
Then one day, like an accident, I find I have walked out of the Keep, the funk, this fog in my brain. My brain, once so twisted and tangled with angst, now is strung out smooth, white and glossy. I am no longer denied joy. Was this a gift? Was a basket of goodies left on my doorstep? Or did I muddle through the anger in my “mind place” by working out my own salvation?
5
Never mind, I am free. My brain is full of new wrinkles, endorphins, and serotonin. I look out the windows of my mind and see fair possibilities. Julian of Norwich has a new “showing”. She reports a “showing” of the righteousness of God. There are many words of comfort moving in and through the rooms of my “mind place” to a pace of lovers, happy and full of desire.
* * *
My time is up. Fifty minuets per session for five years of regression, I
have dug up every old feeling that latched itself to anger and swept every nook and cranny of my “mind place”. Emotions and moods are melded into parts and pieces that fit together like puzzle pieces making a new picture - a surprise.
Round again come family and friends. Their faces are full of relief and hope. I speak the words I mean to say. I come and go with care for them. I curl near with passion for their desires and my own.
My mind place is full of other thoughts. The dust floats gently down to settle on softer emotions and slower concepts. Here rest joy and peace, twin sisters at a party.
No explosions now raff and tare, but undulating wavelets of quiet,
6
kinder, energies rock back and forth in steady beat to new brain dendrites. How did I ever wander away?
I make a list of all things not anger. I write good reports and think on these things. I teach my mind place a new lesson. The chalk scratches across the board of my mind place with new notes to remind me of new ideas.
Will anger ever set up residence in my “mind place” again? Yes, I believe so, but it will be a fleeting guest who is checking out, baggage and all. No longer will anger so easily touch all those old rooms in my memory. I find myself in a new place. I can walk around in this place from room to room, moving through, holding the keys to each. Doors can open and close. I do not have to lock myself in any one room, I live in them all. I am no longer thoughtless.
In my “mind place” I have found social salvation. No longer bound by old anger, my place is no longer cluttered. Will kittens and puppies dance through all my thoughts? Not always, but the difference is that new anger will not be tied on a rope to old anger. My “mind place” has new furniture.
I have climbed out. I found the ladder. I left the scraps under the table.
Look at me. This has been my little rebellion against being stuck in one
7
place. My mind is a good place to be. I can eat eggs again!
Piece # 3 - Final version - 11/10/07
“An Unwanted Guest of the Mind”
sbrowder
My mind is a dark place. It is achy and flu-like. I feel sick with anger. It is raining on the inside of my ways. My mind is a gray and a testy place - skies filled with tornadoes and hail storms. No one dare to go near me or they may be blown away.
When did this anger slip in uninvited to my “mind place”? Was it simply a day last week? Did one incident open the door and let anger in? I remember smiles and I still hear laughter, but it has no affect on me. I fret over what has taken residence and rules my thoughts and emotions. I am even angry with those I love, those I do not know and even at myself. It would seem that I would of at least excused myself, but no, I cling to my anger like a lover. Only sadness keeps me from imploding.
Instead I explode. I reign fireballs - red, orange, white hot, words. I send out sparks of rage in a firework display. Those around me duck and run for cover. In the explosion I can see the damage as it happens. I hate my words, but the million pieces of an explosion cannot be sent back.
2
I do not hate my life and let sadness have its ultimate result - death, I just resent my life’s state of mind. I want to live but live with a promise - a promise that I will rise to a different level. I want to climb to find some new revelation of place and me in it. But, as I am now, I cannot find this place- hell, I cannot see the doorknob.
I can still smell eggs cooking in a buttered pan, but they have become rancid in my nose. I want to blow out all their smell like snot in a tissue.
I cannot finish eating the eggs. They are yellow and scrambled. They are too bright - that kind of yellow. These eggs spread out on my plate, spongy and messy. Yoke mixed with white, they are nothing. They taste like nothing. What does nothing taste like? Egg whites.
I think these eggs are crumpled nothingness. I look at them and wish they could become the fowl that struts around a farm yard, scratching at the ground. Instead these eggs are foul. I am done with eggs.
***
My dreams are an ugly place. Sleep is no longer sweet, lilac scented pillow places. An extension of my wakeful place my anger shows up here, too. Characters in my dreams are reversed. Instead of me being full of rage and nastiness, others fly at me. I whimper, pleading with them to stop.
3
My husband, who in my waking place , is beyond kind, is displaced in my nightmares, by some altered thing. My husband was one of those people who had a wonderful childhood. Then altered , when I came into his life, he
spoiled me so that I became rotten and in many ways. He said yes to me, when he should have said no. He allowed me to go, when he should have said stay. And with his own permission I spoiled his life. I took what he allowed, went where I wanted to go. I did not look back, nor could I stop. Now in my dreams he becomes the spoiler who abuses me emotionally, thus wreaking my mind with confusion and pain. It feels like he is taking his turn. It feels like paybacks.
I wake from my dream place disgruntled and broody. My mood is like a sour wash cloth drug across my face, filling my nose with its putrid warmness. I am repulsed yet I continue to wash my face with it hoping that the perfume of the soap will overcome the sourness. I wash and still feel dirty.
I am disgusted with this anger which drains all my brain juice. I am left tired and moody. I grope around in my “mind place” looking for a bright spot to snap me out of it. Surely there is some thought I dropped somewhere and by recovering it, I will be propelled forward and out of this
4
room of gloom.
I think maybe my unquiet mind is like the scary tunnel ride at the fair. I sit in the car twisting this way and that while all along the way mechanical devices bolt up-right from the dark , dangling webs and cold blasts of air assault my senses. I smell something electrical burning. I don’t want to think about what it could be. Then it’s over and the rickety, steely car bursts into the light. Why won’t my mind leave this Haunted House and leave me
free of this ride?
But no. I am an anchoress living in solitude. Everything is filtered through my “showings” - visions of the angry mind. Only unlike Julian of Norwich, I report “showings” of man’s relationship with an armless Devil. I warn mankind to leave their anger like an old coat on a chair and return to God. Yet I am locked away, a self appointed recluse. I am the living dead.
Then one day, like an accident, I find I have walked out of the Keep, the funk, this fog in my brain. My brain, once so twisted and tangled with angst, now is strung out smooth, white and glossy. I am no longer denied joy. Was this a gift? Was a basket of goodies left on my doorstep? Or did I muddle through the anger in my “mind place” by working out my own salvation?
5
Never mind, I am free. My brain is full of new wrinkles, endorphins, and serotonin. I look out the windows of my mind and see fair possibilities. Julian of Norwich has a new “showing”. She reports a “showing” of the righteousness of God. There are many words of comfort moving in and through the rooms of my “mind place” to a pace of lovers, happy and full of desire.
* * *
My time is up. Fifty minuets per session for five years of regression, I
have dug up every old feeling that latched itself to anger and swept every nook and cranny of my “mind place”. Emotions and moods are melded into parts and pieces that fit together like puzzle pieces making a new picture - a surprise.
Round again come family and friends. Their faces are full of relief and hope. I speak the words I mean to say. I come and go with care for them. I curl near with passion for their desires and my own.
My mind place is full of other thoughts. The dust floats gently down to settle on softer emotions and slower concepts. Here rest joy and peace, twin sisters at a party.
No explosions now raff and tare, but undulating wavelets of quiet,
6
kinder, energies rock back and forth in steady beat to new brain dendrites. How did I ever wander away?
I make a list of all things not anger. I write good reports and think on these things. I teach my mind place a new lesson. The chalk scratches across the board of my mind place with new notes to remind me of new ideas.
Will anger ever set up residence in my “mind place” again? Yes, I believe so, but it will be a fleeting guest who is checking out, baggage and all. No longer will anger so easily touch all those old rooms in my memory. I find myself in a new place. I can walk around in this place from room to room, moving through, holding the keys to each. Doors can open and close. I do not have to lock myself in any one room, I live in them all. I am no longer thoughtless.
In my “mind place” I have found social salvation. No longer bound by old anger, my place is no longer cluttered. Will kittens and puppies dance through all my thoughts? Not always, but the difference is that new anger will not be tied on a rope to old anger. My “mind place” has new furniture.
I have climbed out. I found the ladder. I left the scraps under the table.
Look at me. This has been my little rebellion against being stuck in one
7
place. My mind is a good place to be. I can eat eggs again!
The Telling of Two Lives
LWP FINAL VERSION ANTHOLOGY ENTRY
11/10/07
The Telling of Two Lives
It was impossible to say. For me, it was more impossible to hear.
* * * *
He was twenty years old in the old photo I found of him in the act of fishing. But more than a still shot, it was a picture of an artist. He held his rod in one hand, so expertly placed. The cap in his other hand, dangled in a relaxed casualness. A slight smile drew his lips into a knowing look. He seemed to know that if a fish was there, its underwater days would soon be at an end. The fish would answer this fisherman’s lure like sacrificing itself to a god.
For me it was simply a picture pulled from a box. This blip of exposure, frozen in time, was my middle child. I wanted to breathe life into this flat snapshot of someone who I thought I knew. I wanted to see the familiar. I wanted to feel the intimate essence of the spirit of the boy who stood at the edge of brackish waters and brownish green marsh grass. I wanted to touch his tawny hair, teased by a slight breeze, that played at his
hairline revealing a high, intelligent, brow. I wanted to look into the eyes I knew would not turn to me but were following the rod’s line to the surface of the water and into the
2
depths of all things true. I wanted to kiss his full lips that sealed a mouth full of a secret. I wanted to know this son, this expert fisherman.
I knew this boy standing on the bank, but in just a few years, I would not know him at all. Never would I know him as he was in this perfect photo. How cruel for this picture to hide his life…but this picture was on the surface of him, not revealing the undercurrent of who he was. This picture fooled me into thinking that this expert fisherman was my son. But this picture was a lie.
* * *
My son had been a reflective child, a day dreamer. He was quiet and somber, almost aloof. He never blasted his way through life, he just went his own way, quietly. In the same manner, he allowed me to mother him in my own way. I never once remember spanking him for anything. Redirecting and explaining things to him was enough. He seemed lost in his own world, and only held his finger like a bookmark, in places that were important to him.
All through his elementary school years his teachers had recommended him for special classes, but I fought them. He may have been disorganized and had some slight eye-hand processing problems, but he had tested above average in IQ. He was indeed special, but not in the way teachers saw him.
He never wanted to play sports, but with a little nudging from his dad and some teasing from his older brother, he had played one season of baseball when he was eight. At ten, his grandmother had given him karate lessons. We had all been so proud but also terrified at the number of times he gotten the worst of it in matches. He loved to build
3
things, first with blocks then with his dad’s tools. But most of all, too soon to be out of my sight, he would sneak away to the nearest pond to fish. And always he would come home, elated with his catch, begging me not to be angry.
As he got older, he charmed the girls and the girls charmed him. He dated many, got
seriously smitten by one, got engaged, moved out, broke it off, and moved back.
I loved him more than my life. During those sweet remembered years of boyhood I had always been prepared for scraped knees, cuts and colds, ant bites and bullies - all the things a mother can fix. But life had a terrible way of building in an un-fixedness. There was no cure, no program, no priest, or band aid that could fix my son, my precious, delicate, expert fisherman - not even my love. If only I had known.
* * *
Pictures. Like a room in my mind, I was led to the tricky place called, “memory”. I could place my hand on the cool, round knob of the door and go into the room of “him”. There I was greeted by visions of all things “him”. With eyes closed and the picture in my hand, I was free from the outside world. We were safe. The time spent there was sweet, like the taste of water after a long journey. We could meet there, cuddle, laugh and remember our lives. But I could not stay in this room. It was false. I am his mother but what I did not know then, it was not the true him.
Pictures. I was comforted by this picture of his slim figure with rod and cap in hand. I saw him there on the marshy bank of still water. Held there in time I knew him - the son of my memories, the son of my forever.
Pictures. This was a picture of a fine young man.. This picture would be a reminder of
4
my love for all things true. Like the color of his eyes, I would not have to choose to love him, it was love at first sight. The shape of love always remains - we fill it or empty it.
* * *
It was a day of awful rain and heavy traffic. I was driving my son to a friend’s house - a friend of his he wanted me to meet. My son was twenty six and had been planning to share a house with his friend. He told me I would like B-. He told me B- was about my son’s age, had a good job, and a friendly dog. I was happy to think that their plans seemed well thought out.
Secure in my thoughts, I focused on my driving. My son grew quiet. The wipers flapped back and forth, creating a splashy rhythm. The smoke from his cigarette stung my nose. I squeezed my watering eyes. How many times I had begged my sweet boy to stop smoking? He chuckled to himself, then coughed deeply, as if he knew what I had just been thinking. I reached out and touched his thin arm. He turned to face me…
I was not prepared for what would become a pivotal moment in both our lives. All I ever knew stopped and was replaced by something I could not grasp at all.
“Mother, I am gay”. His sentences poured out without periods, like the raindrops pelting my windshield - “I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time… I just never knew how… I was afraid… For all the reasons one person is terrified that he really is another person, in the same body, I was too scared to tell you… It’s not your fault, mom… This is not about you…it is who I am…I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be gay… I didn’t choose this mom…I love you… Please mom, don’t hate me…I love you…
5
This is me, your son”.
“No!,” I screamed. “You are not gay!”
My brain revolted, stopped, jerked forward again. I couldn’t see in this heavy rain. I couldn’t form a rational thought. Noting was clear anymore. All I could do was clutch the steering wheel, keep driving and stay on the road.
This was not a conversation for a rainy day. This was not a conversation at all, it was a slap in the face. I wanted to slap him back. How dare he say such a thing to me! He had to be wrong. Had he lost his mind or had I lost mine?
“For God’s sake, you are my son. I would have known. Are you telling me you just became gay?”
If only the rain would stop. If only his words would stop. If only I could turn around and find that place in the road - that place we where we had been - to the boy I had always known - the expert fishermen, standing on the quiet, peaceful, bank of the river.
“Is this some lifestyle you are wanting to try? Who talked you into this?
Smoking was a terrible habit. Some kids must have teased or dared him into taking his first drag. He was always experimenting with the world, tweaking things this way or that. That’s it! That friend of his had gotten him to experiment with his lifestyle.
I was thinking these things, but no words came out, just racing thoughts. Had time passed? The rain, this awful rain. I do not understand anything.
“ What can I do? How can I help you out of this? What will I tell your father? Do your brother and sister know about this?
What oinment will soothe this moment? Some fever dulled my son‘s thinking.
6
Where was the cool rag for his head? I can fix this.
And what will - how will - I tell his father? I cannot say the words. My husband is a kind but stern man. He has always worked hard to pay the bills. He has no patience for foolishness. He has no reference for “gay” and “son” in the same sentence. His father does not deserve this.
Why should I tell his father? Why should I have to carry this unspeakable message? It is not my fault, it is my son’s bad news - terrible news. And still it rains.
I suddenly hear myself screaming. I cannot stop the car, I cannot stop the screams, I cannot stop the pain for either of us.
My son slumped back in his seat. He was silent. Tears rolled down his thin face. He seemed impossibly sad. Then he became breathless as he his tears turned into sobs. His long fingers gripped the handle of the door. His face turned toward the window.
My screams turned into silent sobbing. I held back my pain. I wanted to be alone. I wanted time to stop. Someone had just died - someone had left me - the son of my heart. My knuckles were white as I gripped the steering wheel. I now knew I was driving my son to his lover.
This had to be an impossibility. Had my son just left on a ‘slow boat to China’. Had I failed to be at the dock to say good-bye? What would I have said? Would I have wished him luck? Nothing about being gay seemed to be lucky. But then what did I know about being gay - nothing , absolutely nothing. Differences always make everyone else feel so normal. My son had to be right - no one would choose exclusion.
“Do you still love me?”, was his unspoken question.
7
“ Are you the boy in the picture?”, was mine.
The answer to both questions was “yes”. When we found our voices, we said so.
When the rain had stopped and we were parked in B-’s driveway, we fell into each others arms and held on for life - but it was not the life either of us would have picked.
Tolerance for me has become a “sore spot”. Would I have tried to be so tolerant of gay people if my son had not been gay? My son laughs at my awarkwardness and my ignorance. He is not careful or mindful that I am confused or hurt. He just thinks I sould not be that way. He doesn’t go around all day thinking about being gay. But every time I see my son or think about my son, I wonder what being gay really means. The burdon to know has fallen on me. That makes me angry. What my son has always felt, I have not.
As I watched my son greet his lover at the door, I felt alone and abandoned. The rain had stopped but my tears had not. My son went back into his life. I had just excited.
I drove away from my son and his lover that day. Somehow change had brought us into focus, like it or not. We could fear it, rail against it, wail and wallow in it, but we could not stop it from coming. We had choices. We could be discontent or content, adjust our expectations and adapt, or be left behind. We chose to live in the now and hold on to what is true - the love of a mother for her son and a son’s love for his mother. We would not settle.
I would be lying if I said that growing does not hurt. But the truth is, in the end - we are who we are. To be honest about who your are is the opposite of lying about who you
are not.
Pictures. I have more than a picture, I have a promise, a promise to stay in love with my son - the expert fisherman - my son, and he with me - his mother.
11/10/07
The Telling of Two Lives
It was impossible to say. For me, it was more impossible to hear.
* * * *
He was twenty years old in the old photo I found of him in the act of fishing. But more than a still shot, it was a picture of an artist. He held his rod in one hand, so expertly placed. The cap in his other hand, dangled in a relaxed casualness. A slight smile drew his lips into a knowing look. He seemed to know that if a fish was there, its underwater days would soon be at an end. The fish would answer this fisherman’s lure like sacrificing itself to a god.
For me it was simply a picture pulled from a box. This blip of exposure, frozen in time, was my middle child. I wanted to breathe life into this flat snapshot of someone who I thought I knew. I wanted to see the familiar. I wanted to feel the intimate essence of the spirit of the boy who stood at the edge of brackish waters and brownish green marsh grass. I wanted to touch his tawny hair, teased by a slight breeze, that played at his
hairline revealing a high, intelligent, brow. I wanted to look into the eyes I knew would not turn to me but were following the rod’s line to the surface of the water and into the
2
depths of all things true. I wanted to kiss his full lips that sealed a mouth full of a secret. I wanted to know this son, this expert fisherman.
I knew this boy standing on the bank, but in just a few years, I would not know him at all. Never would I know him as he was in this perfect photo. How cruel for this picture to hide his life…but this picture was on the surface of him, not revealing the undercurrent of who he was. This picture fooled me into thinking that this expert fisherman was my son. But this picture was a lie.
* * *
My son had been a reflective child, a day dreamer. He was quiet and somber, almost aloof. He never blasted his way through life, he just went his own way, quietly. In the same manner, he allowed me to mother him in my own way. I never once remember spanking him for anything. Redirecting and explaining things to him was enough. He seemed lost in his own world, and only held his finger like a bookmark, in places that were important to him.
All through his elementary school years his teachers had recommended him for special classes, but I fought them. He may have been disorganized and had some slight eye-hand processing problems, but he had tested above average in IQ. He was indeed special, but not in the way teachers saw him.
He never wanted to play sports, but with a little nudging from his dad and some teasing from his older brother, he had played one season of baseball when he was eight. At ten, his grandmother had given him karate lessons. We had all been so proud but also terrified at the number of times he gotten the worst of it in matches. He loved to build
3
things, first with blocks then with his dad’s tools. But most of all, too soon to be out of my sight, he would sneak away to the nearest pond to fish. And always he would come home, elated with his catch, begging me not to be angry.
As he got older, he charmed the girls and the girls charmed him. He dated many, got
seriously smitten by one, got engaged, moved out, broke it off, and moved back.
I loved him more than my life. During those sweet remembered years of boyhood I had always been prepared for scraped knees, cuts and colds, ant bites and bullies - all the things a mother can fix. But life had a terrible way of building in an un-fixedness. There was no cure, no program, no priest, or band aid that could fix my son, my precious, delicate, expert fisherman - not even my love. If only I had known.
* * *
Pictures. Like a room in my mind, I was led to the tricky place called, “memory”. I could place my hand on the cool, round knob of the door and go into the room of “him”. There I was greeted by visions of all things “him”. With eyes closed and the picture in my hand, I was free from the outside world. We were safe. The time spent there was sweet, like the taste of water after a long journey. We could meet there, cuddle, laugh and remember our lives. But I could not stay in this room. It was false. I am his mother but what I did not know then, it was not the true him.
Pictures. I was comforted by this picture of his slim figure with rod and cap in hand. I saw him there on the marshy bank of still water. Held there in time I knew him - the son of my memories, the son of my forever.
Pictures. This was a picture of a fine young man.. This picture would be a reminder of
4
my love for all things true. Like the color of his eyes, I would not have to choose to love him, it was love at first sight. The shape of love always remains - we fill it or empty it.
* * *
It was a day of awful rain and heavy traffic. I was driving my son to a friend’s house - a friend of his he wanted me to meet. My son was twenty six and had been planning to share a house with his friend. He told me I would like B-. He told me B- was about my son’s age, had a good job, and a friendly dog. I was happy to think that their plans seemed well thought out.
Secure in my thoughts, I focused on my driving. My son grew quiet. The wipers flapped back and forth, creating a splashy rhythm. The smoke from his cigarette stung my nose. I squeezed my watering eyes. How many times I had begged my sweet boy to stop smoking? He chuckled to himself, then coughed deeply, as if he knew what I had just been thinking. I reached out and touched his thin arm. He turned to face me…
I was not prepared for what would become a pivotal moment in both our lives. All I ever knew stopped and was replaced by something I could not grasp at all.
“Mother, I am gay”. His sentences poured out without periods, like the raindrops pelting my windshield - “I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time… I just never knew how… I was afraid… For all the reasons one person is terrified that he really is another person, in the same body, I was too scared to tell you… It’s not your fault, mom… This is not about you…it is who I am…I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be gay… I didn’t choose this mom…I love you… Please mom, don’t hate me…I love you…
5
This is me, your son”.
“No!,” I screamed. “You are not gay!”
My brain revolted, stopped, jerked forward again. I couldn’t see in this heavy rain. I couldn’t form a rational thought. Noting was clear anymore. All I could do was clutch the steering wheel, keep driving and stay on the road.
This was not a conversation for a rainy day. This was not a conversation at all, it was a slap in the face. I wanted to slap him back. How dare he say such a thing to me! He had to be wrong. Had he lost his mind or had I lost mine?
“For God’s sake, you are my son. I would have known. Are you telling me you just became gay?”
If only the rain would stop. If only his words would stop. If only I could turn around and find that place in the road - that place we where we had been - to the boy I had always known - the expert fishermen, standing on the quiet, peaceful, bank of the river.
“Is this some lifestyle you are wanting to try? Who talked you into this?
Smoking was a terrible habit. Some kids must have teased or dared him into taking his first drag. He was always experimenting with the world, tweaking things this way or that. That’s it! That friend of his had gotten him to experiment with his lifestyle.
I was thinking these things, but no words came out, just racing thoughts. Had time passed? The rain, this awful rain. I do not understand anything.
“ What can I do? How can I help you out of this? What will I tell your father? Do your brother and sister know about this?
What oinment will soothe this moment? Some fever dulled my son‘s thinking.
6
Where was the cool rag for his head? I can fix this.
And what will - how will - I tell his father? I cannot say the words. My husband is a kind but stern man. He has always worked hard to pay the bills. He has no patience for foolishness. He has no reference for “gay” and “son” in the same sentence. His father does not deserve this.
Why should I tell his father? Why should I have to carry this unspeakable message? It is not my fault, it is my son’s bad news - terrible news. And still it rains.
I suddenly hear myself screaming. I cannot stop the car, I cannot stop the screams, I cannot stop the pain for either of us.
My son slumped back in his seat. He was silent. Tears rolled down his thin face. He seemed impossibly sad. Then he became breathless as he his tears turned into sobs. His long fingers gripped the handle of the door. His face turned toward the window.
My screams turned into silent sobbing. I held back my pain. I wanted to be alone. I wanted time to stop. Someone had just died - someone had left me - the son of my heart. My knuckles were white as I gripped the steering wheel. I now knew I was driving my son to his lover.
This had to be an impossibility. Had my son just left on a ‘slow boat to China’. Had I failed to be at the dock to say good-bye? What would I have said? Would I have wished him luck? Nothing about being gay seemed to be lucky. But then what did I know about being gay - nothing , absolutely nothing. Differences always make everyone else feel so normal. My son had to be right - no one would choose exclusion.
“Do you still love me?”, was his unspoken question.
7
“ Are you the boy in the picture?”, was mine.
The answer to both questions was “yes”. When we found our voices, we said so.
When the rain had stopped and we were parked in B-’s driveway, we fell into each others arms and held on for life - but it was not the life either of us would have picked.
Tolerance for me has become a “sore spot”. Would I have tried to be so tolerant of gay people if my son had not been gay? My son laughs at my awarkwardness and my ignorance. He is not careful or mindful that I am confused or hurt. He just thinks I sould not be that way. He doesn’t go around all day thinking about being gay. But every time I see my son or think about my son, I wonder what being gay really means. The burdon to know has fallen on me. That makes me angry. What my son has always felt, I have not.
As I watched my son greet his lover at the door, I felt alone and abandoned. The rain had stopped but my tears had not. My son went back into his life. I had just excited.
I drove away from my son and his lover that day. Somehow change had brought us into focus, like it or not. We could fear it, rail against it, wail and wallow in it, but we could not stop it from coming. We had choices. We could be discontent or content, adjust our expectations and adapt, or be left behind. We chose to live in the now and hold on to what is true - the love of a mother for her son and a son’s love for his mother. We would not settle.
I would be lying if I said that growing does not hurt. But the truth is, in the end - we are who we are. To be honest about who your are is the opposite of lying about who you
are not.
Pictures. I have more than a picture, I have a promise, a promise to stay in love with my son - the expert fisherman - my son, and he with me - his mother.
Fear of the Dangling Participle
Sharon Browder FINAL VERVION
9/12/07 11/10/07
“I” Piece - A Moment in Time - Revised Piece # 1
FEAR OF THE DANGLING PARTICIPLE
I had made the cut. It had come down to me and just one other teacher. The position I was interviewing for would be my ticket out of a bad school and into a good one. But I blew it.
The panel and I met in a conference room off the main office. I was on one side of a large table and the six of them were seated across from me. This was the English department headed by, an aged, stern looking woman who, I was sure had seen many teachers come and go. I also imagined, that it was the ones she had dismissed, who had given her the self-righteous, smug look on he face. Now it was my turn to answer their questions, while they weighed my answers.
After introductions all around there were some harmless questions all teachers expect to be asked concerning classroom management, what strengths I would bring, and areas of success I had in the past with particular lessons. It was my best suit - I answered with ease and confidence. Teaching was my passion and Language Arts was the subject I loved
2
the most.
But then that one awful question - that one which ultimately would be so costly.
That one question was linked to an on-going fear. Some fears can be very rational, like the fear of spiders, which even has a name -“arachnophobia.” Then there are the fears that are irrational, without a “phobia” name - that would be mine - the fear of “dangling participles.”
* * *
All through school I was force-fed parts of speech with scary sounding, unknowable names. Who knows why a verb is also known as a predicate? What is the etymology of a predicate? What about those ant-like prepositions running all over a sentence, needing to be scooped up by commas, separating clauses? Slumped in my desk, I would sit in a soup of parts and pieces of sentences, knowing the dreaded dangling participle lurked somewhere, somewhere hidden just out of my understanding of it.
All I really wanted to do was create magically written sentences. These sentences would be embedded in flowing paragraphs and stanzas, seamlessly transitioning into story, essay, prose, and poem. Surely those pesky participles need not concern my content. For using grammar to write was a division of the brain into segments inferior to the whole. Suffering over those grammar tidbits only stopped the glorious flow of creation!
Although minor to me, some grammar slips were always caught by giddy English
3
teachers, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting students. That correction was the one that constantly mocked me when I asked, “Can I…?”, instead of “May I…?”. With a Cheshire cat smile the know-it-all, arrogant teacher would reply, “I don’t know, can you?” God I hated that question but I did not fear it. To tell the truth, sometimes I made
this dreadful mistake on purpose just to be a smart ass. I would answer, “Yes, I can or maybe I can’t.” The “may” in “may-be” was the closest satisfaction I was going to give the purple-haired old bat.
* * *
Now here again sat the purple-haired old bat, reincarnated in the form of the department head of all those hard working English teachers. She slowly and in low, deliberate, tone, leaned in and asked, “How would you teach a lesson about subordinate causes?” My mind went blank and then just as quickly rocketed me back to every grammar lesson I ever hated. But then, worst of all, I became that gifted, smart ass child, again. I wanted to pull out that neat and tidy, model lesson centering around craftily placed clauses, but I did not have the ability to do so.
Instead I became Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society” leading his fearful, restricted, pitiful students onto the top of the desk of new perspective and unbridled freedom. Those in my class would not settle for dusty, crusty clauses, however creatively presented. My answer was bold, reckless and full of self-righteous indignation.
4
I watched the loss of this coveted position play out like my life passing before my eyes at the moment just before death. Of all the things we could have so pleasantly discussed, this was not one of them. Why not ask me about how to get reluctant students to care about language? What tricks did I have up my sleeve that would result in students begging for just one more chapter in a read-aloud book? What about that sure-fire way of engaging your reader to keep reading something you had written? How would an ending to a piece bring the reader back to the heart of the writer‘s purpose? These kinds of questions would have sparked a teacher to show her best hand. But no, it had to be about clauses.
“First of all,” I quipped, “ the need for a subordinate clause would have to relate, in a meaningful way, to whatever we, as writers were trying to communicate. And if failing that objective - there would never be a multiple choice quiz trying to stump students to pick the independent or dependent clauses or sentences full of clauses to underline, then label. In my class, content, creativity, and purpose would rule! We would be fresh and take risks in our writing, while grammar would only come, if at all, in mini lessons. We would be a class of writers in progress.”
Obviously this was not the answer this grammarian was expecting, nor one she would accept from a prospective teacher in her department. I was dismissed with a cool “Thank you. We will let you know our decision soon.” And I knew, I would not get this job.
5
I waited for a moment after the other teacher took her turn in front of the waiting
grammar queens. My inquisition was over. I lingered, just outside the door, wanting something. It was then that I heard the infectious laughter erupt from the other side of the
closed door. I knew the other teacher had said something very witty and correct.
Subordinate clauses, and all other grammar morsels would rule her class.
I found my way out of the front office. I knew I had sacrificed this job to the purple-haired old bats everywhere, but I had remained true to myself. As I straightened my shoulders and reclaimed my worth from somewhere down around my ankles, I was glad that I would be heading back to my bad school and my rough, tough, and bluntly honest students. They had always driven me to deliver only the “desk-top” discoveries.
* * *
I unlock the solid, wooden door to my classroom. I take just one step inside and put down my book bag full of plans, graded papers, hopes and dreams. I do not turn on the lights. I pause. I am back where I belong.
The buttery sunlight filters through the only window in the room, giving a soft flood of light across the student’s desks. I can still taste the chalk dust that that lodges in the back of my throat, keeping me hoarse all year. I can smell textbooks and pencils, a mingling of odors I have always found alluring.
Alone, for just a moment, I think of all my seventh graders. Some they will stream into the room like the sunlight. They will each bring something with them, something valuable - a fresh start - a willingness to try again. I too, will meet them with the same
6
willingness. We all will face our fears - for some much more dreaded than dangling participles.
I sigh and make my way to my desk, still cluttered with yesterdays remains. I ease a bundle of graded work out of my bag. I run my hand over the top paper, and smile at all the comments I made, which look like fire ants running down the margins. I am hoping that each remark will help the child re-focus and at the same time be encouraged.
There is a faint knock at the door - too soon for students to be in the hall or classroom. I go to the door ready to shoo a student back outside. But I am greeted by Jacob standing there in his army fatigues - a match, he had told me, to those his father wears while serving his latest tour in Afghanistan.
“ Ms. B, I know I’m supposed to be out side, but I had to ask you one thing. I know we have a grammar quiz today but those clauses are all jumbled in my head. I can’t remember just how they go and what they are called. I know for sure I’m gonna fail.
“ Jacob, come inside, and I’ll go over what you will see on the test. But I want you to remember one very important thing - something even more important than clauses - school is the place where it is OK to make mistakes. There will always be another chance to try again. This is one test, but there are many ways to “know” things in this classroom. Did I ever tell you about my fear of dangling participles?
When I was in the sixth grade…
* * *
7
“In a landmark case that is bound to excite civil-rights campaigners, a local man was arrested on Tuesday for the crime of dangling his participle in public.” I don’t get it.
9/12/07 11/10/07
“I” Piece - A Moment in Time - Revised Piece # 1
FEAR OF THE DANGLING PARTICIPLE
I had made the cut. It had come down to me and just one other teacher. The position I was interviewing for would be my ticket out of a bad school and into a good one. But I blew it.
The panel and I met in a conference room off the main office. I was on one side of a large table and the six of them were seated across from me. This was the English department headed by, an aged, stern looking woman who, I was sure had seen many teachers come and go. I also imagined, that it was the ones she had dismissed, who had given her the self-righteous, smug look on he face. Now it was my turn to answer their questions, while they weighed my answers.
After introductions all around there were some harmless questions all teachers expect to be asked concerning classroom management, what strengths I would bring, and areas of success I had in the past with particular lessons. It was my best suit - I answered with ease and confidence. Teaching was my passion and Language Arts was the subject I loved
2
the most.
But then that one awful question - that one which ultimately would be so costly.
That one question was linked to an on-going fear. Some fears can be very rational, like the fear of spiders, which even has a name -“arachnophobia.” Then there are the fears that are irrational, without a “phobia” name - that would be mine - the fear of “dangling participles.”
* * *
All through school I was force-fed parts of speech with scary sounding, unknowable names. Who knows why a verb is also known as a predicate? What is the etymology of a predicate? What about those ant-like prepositions running all over a sentence, needing to be scooped up by commas, separating clauses? Slumped in my desk, I would sit in a soup of parts and pieces of sentences, knowing the dreaded dangling participle lurked somewhere, somewhere hidden just out of my understanding of it.
All I really wanted to do was create magically written sentences. These sentences would be embedded in flowing paragraphs and stanzas, seamlessly transitioning into story, essay, prose, and poem. Surely those pesky participles need not concern my content. For using grammar to write was a division of the brain into segments inferior to the whole. Suffering over those grammar tidbits only stopped the glorious flow of creation!
Although minor to me, some grammar slips were always caught by giddy English
3
teachers, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting students. That correction was the one that constantly mocked me when I asked, “Can I…?”, instead of “May I…?”. With a Cheshire cat smile the know-it-all, arrogant teacher would reply, “I don’t know, can you?” God I hated that question but I did not fear it. To tell the truth, sometimes I made
this dreadful mistake on purpose just to be a smart ass. I would answer, “Yes, I can or maybe I can’t.” The “may” in “may-be” was the closest satisfaction I was going to give the purple-haired old bat.
* * *
Now here again sat the purple-haired old bat, reincarnated in the form of the department head of all those hard working English teachers. She slowly and in low, deliberate, tone, leaned in and asked, “How would you teach a lesson about subordinate causes?” My mind went blank and then just as quickly rocketed me back to every grammar lesson I ever hated. But then, worst of all, I became that gifted, smart ass child, again. I wanted to pull out that neat and tidy, model lesson centering around craftily placed clauses, but I did not have the ability to do so.
Instead I became Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society” leading his fearful, restricted, pitiful students onto the top of the desk of new perspective and unbridled freedom. Those in my class would not settle for dusty, crusty clauses, however creatively presented. My answer was bold, reckless and full of self-righteous indignation.
4
I watched the loss of this coveted position play out like my life passing before my eyes at the moment just before death. Of all the things we could have so pleasantly discussed, this was not one of them. Why not ask me about how to get reluctant students to care about language? What tricks did I have up my sleeve that would result in students begging for just one more chapter in a read-aloud book? What about that sure-fire way of engaging your reader to keep reading something you had written? How would an ending to a piece bring the reader back to the heart of the writer‘s purpose? These kinds of questions would have sparked a teacher to show her best hand. But no, it had to be about clauses.
“First of all,” I quipped, “ the need for a subordinate clause would have to relate, in a meaningful way, to whatever we, as writers were trying to communicate. And if failing that objective - there would never be a multiple choice quiz trying to stump students to pick the independent or dependent clauses or sentences full of clauses to underline, then label. In my class, content, creativity, and purpose would rule! We would be fresh and take risks in our writing, while grammar would only come, if at all, in mini lessons. We would be a class of writers in progress.”
Obviously this was not the answer this grammarian was expecting, nor one she would accept from a prospective teacher in her department. I was dismissed with a cool “Thank you. We will let you know our decision soon.” And I knew, I would not get this job.
5
I waited for a moment after the other teacher took her turn in front of the waiting
grammar queens. My inquisition was over. I lingered, just outside the door, wanting something. It was then that I heard the infectious laughter erupt from the other side of the
closed door. I knew the other teacher had said something very witty and correct.
Subordinate clauses, and all other grammar morsels would rule her class.
I found my way out of the front office. I knew I had sacrificed this job to the purple-haired old bats everywhere, but I had remained true to myself. As I straightened my shoulders and reclaimed my worth from somewhere down around my ankles, I was glad that I would be heading back to my bad school and my rough, tough, and bluntly honest students. They had always driven me to deliver only the “desk-top” discoveries.
* * *
I unlock the solid, wooden door to my classroom. I take just one step inside and put down my book bag full of plans, graded papers, hopes and dreams. I do not turn on the lights. I pause. I am back where I belong.
The buttery sunlight filters through the only window in the room, giving a soft flood of light across the student’s desks. I can still taste the chalk dust that that lodges in the back of my throat, keeping me hoarse all year. I can smell textbooks and pencils, a mingling of odors I have always found alluring.
Alone, for just a moment, I think of all my seventh graders. Some they will stream into the room like the sunlight. They will each bring something with them, something valuable - a fresh start - a willingness to try again. I too, will meet them with the same
6
willingness. We all will face our fears - for some much more dreaded than dangling participles.
I sigh and make my way to my desk, still cluttered with yesterdays remains. I ease a bundle of graded work out of my bag. I run my hand over the top paper, and smile at all the comments I made, which look like fire ants running down the margins. I am hoping that each remark will help the child re-focus and at the same time be encouraged.
There is a faint knock at the door - too soon for students to be in the hall or classroom. I go to the door ready to shoo a student back outside. But I am greeted by Jacob standing there in his army fatigues - a match, he had told me, to those his father wears while serving his latest tour in Afghanistan.
“ Ms. B, I know I’m supposed to be out side, but I had to ask you one thing. I know we have a grammar quiz today but those clauses are all jumbled in my head. I can’t remember just how they go and what they are called. I know for sure I’m gonna fail.
“ Jacob, come inside, and I’ll go over what you will see on the test. But I want you to remember one very important thing - something even more important than clauses - school is the place where it is OK to make mistakes. There will always be another chance to try again. This is one test, but there are many ways to “know” things in this classroom. Did I ever tell you about my fear of dangling participles?
When I was in the sixth grade…
* * *
7
“In a landmark case that is bound to excite civil-rights campaigners, a local man was arrested on Tuesday for the crime of dangling his participle in public.” I don’t get it.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Annie Dillard Book Review
”[250]. LWP
“An American Childhood” by Annie Dillard
Book Review
sharonbrowder
To see adolescence through the eyes of one who honestly celebrates it, is to get next to Annie Dillard, as she leads us through her awakening, in “An American Childhood”. Dillard’s first person account draws the reader into her memories filled with the giddy rampages of youth coming awake. Each chapter snatches at the past and sifts out what matters.
Outlined by the detailed scaffolding of place, the reader is left to wander through the halls of memory. There were many visits to the library and fond first knowings of the images of nature that would latter pave the way to her Pulitzer Prize winning book - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. For her the Homewood Library, [81] with its quote, “Free the People” graven across the façade, gave her a card to the nonfiction of her life to be. She consumed nonfiction, with “The Field Book of Ponds and Streams” as her favorite, along with Nicolaides’ “The Natural Way to Draw”. [I felt that I was sitting with her on the cool marbled floors of the library. I too had pulled from books that would lay the groundwork for a life-long love - animals. I spent hours, like Dillard, pouring over volumes of books about dogs and horses. I would bring pencil and paper to log in the titles I investigated and to draw what I saw of the anatomy and outline of type and poses. Dillard says, “…things were interesting as long as you had attention to give them. How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt? As long as you had attention to give it. Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first imagined.”[79] I knew exactly and instantly what she meant. As an only child I had the time and the need to know. I gave myself over to all things dog and horse. Then I narrowed than need down to reality, I could own a dog, not a horse. So my focus became dogs. When Dillard writes about “finding books about what one actually did.”[78] igniting her fervor for conscious drawing, I am there with her. I can still remember begging my Big Daddy, to search for a specific book, “Drawing Dogs” for his red-headed granddaughter. No other book would do. He was helpless to find it. So one Saturday, hand in hand we walked downtown, into the bookstore, to the shelf on animals, and to the volume I had fingered so many times, “Drawing Dogs”. I was beaming and tingling with anticipation as he paid the clerk. I knew I would soon be engaged, like Dillard, in “conscious drawing”.[78] I titled this chapter in her life and mine, “Free to the People: Books”. For me it was a gateway memory.]
Dillard’s tone of textual dialogue filled in the lines that made the colorful picture of her real-life characters - her mother and father. When she wrote of her father’s “bar jokes”[51] she wrote the words that defined his character - “…raffish air of a man who was at home anywhere. [How poignant were his ‘you knows’ directed at me: you know how bartenders are; you know how the regulars would all be sitting around. For either I, a nine-year old girl , knew what he was talking about, then, or ever, or nobody did. Only because I read a lot, I often knew.”][51] This inside view of her dad is typical of Dillard’s memories. She idolized her dad and let us in to see what she saw in him. [ I too had a dad who was ‘at home anywhere.’ As a traveling salesman he was the star of his territory. As he made his rounds from town to town, store to store, I saw him joke and cajole his way to sales. I would stand with my fingers curled around the edge of a pharmacy counter, watching and listening, while my dad pitched his wares. He was like a magician, as he pulled words out of his hat. I would see many he approached did not want to buy what he had and yet by the end of the ‘show’, they bought cases. He often told me, “They may hate you, but they will not forget you”. He was the greatest show on earth to me. I wonder now how he talked mother into letting me go. That had to have been his best sales pitch!
Dillard remembers her mother’s “…staccato, stand-up style; if our father could perorate, she could condense. Fellow goes to a psychiatrist. “Your crazy.” “I want a second opinion!” “You’re ugly.” “How do you get an elephant out of the theater? “You can’t; it’s in his blood.” [51-52] Styles, both different, and yet necessary made up Dillard’s own character. They provided the “dazzling verbal surface”[53] through stories, one liners, and “cracks”, which revealed a life lived - the bread and butter of everyday life. From this richness Dillard is nurtured. [ I too, cut my teeth on the humor in life. A quick wit was required at my house. If you did not get the joke, you would find yourself the butt of it. One had to keep up. Like Dillard said of her household - “When my friends visited me, they were well advised to duck.”[55] When I was dating my, later-to-be-husband, he would sit very still, and a little frightened, at the quick and quirky verbal exchange between my parents and I. If he could just be still enough, he may go unnoticed, because if noticed, he would not be allowed to remain on the sidelines, and he knew it. Sometimes I would let him get away with it. In these lessons of the fine art of humor, I was given the gift of seeing the light side of life. Whenever I could not “ make the sale”, I knew I could still laugh. Humor became my safety net. Knowing laughter was there, I could swing freely form one episodic adventure to another, without fear but plenty of drama. Being with me meant you would be offered the same deal, with gusto!]
It is through this vivid lens we look into the childhood of Dillard. Like looking through a family album, Dillard turns the pages, chapter after chapter. I gave titles to all her chapters, so that in re-reading them, I would know what I was in for. There was the chapter in which Dillard told about “living and breathing her history - her Pittsburg history - without knowing or believing any of it.”[74] This was a chapter of discoveries in which she “…walked oblivious through its littered layers”[74] Then in another chapter I called, “Shooting Sparks and Overturning Streetcars” she filled each page with the sensual details of ‘place’. She craftly submersed the reader into the night of the tornado and the power line which had been loosed - “…the fire ball of sparks - the thick twisted steel cable melting a pit for itself in the street”.[101] Then the streetcars “orange, clangy, beloved things - loud, jerky, and old”, sounding their “mournful bells - emitted a long-suffering, monotonous bong…bong…bong… smelling of gasoline, exhaust fumes, trees’ sweetness in the spring and, year round, burnt grit.”[103]. I am there in the telling of it. Dillard is a master story-teller of time and our place in it.
Dillard touched the chords of childhood all the way to her emergence from it. She finally leaves us to wave good-bye as she looks forward to Hollins College to “smooth off her edges”[243] I wish my mother had known to phrase it just that way. Then I maybe I would have not gone so wildly into my freshman year. But like Dillard, “I was in no position to comment.”[244] My mother was desperate to get me out of the house. My stepfather could not tolerate me another day. My mother needed to have her on life…always had…I just had not known how to graciously grant her her wish.
Whether it is college or just the act of any ‘leaving’ at life’s change points, it is the “smoothing off of the rough edges” that is always needed. Dillard had figured out her life as best she could to that moment and now the only thing that was required [as is for all of us] is to take the next step - to do the next thing. Dillard tells it this way:
The setting of our urgent lives is an intricate maze whose blind corridors
we learn one by one - village street, ocean vessel, forested slope -without
remembering how or where they connect in space. You travel, settle
move on, stay put, go. [247] For it is not you or I that is important, neither what sort we might be nor how we came to be each where we are. What is important is anyone’s coming awake and discovering a place, finding in full orbit a spinning globe one can lean over, catch and jump on. What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch - with an electric hiss and cry - this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.[248-249].
Like old friends Dillard and I met again in lines written and pages turned. I am never disappointed [except by her fiction]. I lap up my own memories as I savor hers. When I remember with her, I too “break up through the skin of awareness
“An American Childhood” by Annie Dillard
Book Review
sharonbrowder
To see adolescence through the eyes of one who honestly celebrates it, is to get next to Annie Dillard, as she leads us through her awakening, in “An American Childhood”. Dillard’s first person account draws the reader into her memories filled with the giddy rampages of youth coming awake. Each chapter snatches at the past and sifts out what matters.
Outlined by the detailed scaffolding of place, the reader is left to wander through the halls of memory. There were many visits to the library and fond first knowings of the images of nature that would latter pave the way to her Pulitzer Prize winning book - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. For her the Homewood Library, [81] with its quote, “Free the People” graven across the façade, gave her a card to the nonfiction of her life to be. She consumed nonfiction, with “The Field Book of Ponds and Streams” as her favorite, along with Nicolaides’ “The Natural Way to Draw”. [I felt that I was sitting with her on the cool marbled floors of the library. I too had pulled from books that would lay the groundwork for a life-long love - animals. I spent hours, like Dillard, pouring over volumes of books about dogs and horses. I would bring pencil and paper to log in the titles I investigated and to draw what I saw of the anatomy and outline of type and poses. Dillard says, “…things were interesting as long as you had attention to give them. How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt? As long as you had attention to give it. Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first imagined.”[79] I knew exactly and instantly what she meant. As an only child I had the time and the need to know. I gave myself over to all things dog and horse. Then I narrowed than need down to reality, I could own a dog, not a horse. So my focus became dogs. When Dillard writes about “finding books about what one actually did.”[78] igniting her fervor for conscious drawing, I am there with her. I can still remember begging my Big Daddy, to search for a specific book, “Drawing Dogs” for his red-headed granddaughter. No other book would do. He was helpless to find it. So one Saturday, hand in hand we walked downtown, into the bookstore, to the shelf on animals, and to the volume I had fingered so many times, “Drawing Dogs”. I was beaming and tingling with anticipation as he paid the clerk. I knew I would soon be engaged, like Dillard, in “conscious drawing”.[78] I titled this chapter in her life and mine, “Free to the People: Books”. For me it was a gateway memory.]
Dillard’s tone of textual dialogue filled in the lines that made the colorful picture of her real-life characters - her mother and father. When she wrote of her father’s “bar jokes”[51] she wrote the words that defined his character - “…raffish air of a man who was at home anywhere. [How poignant were his ‘you knows’ directed at me: you know how bartenders are; you know how the regulars would all be sitting around. For either I, a nine-year old girl , knew what he was talking about, then, or ever, or nobody did. Only because I read a lot, I often knew.”][51] This inside view of her dad is typical of Dillard’s memories. She idolized her dad and let us in to see what she saw in him. [ I too had a dad who was ‘at home anywhere.’ As a traveling salesman he was the star of his territory. As he made his rounds from town to town, store to store, I saw him joke and cajole his way to sales. I would stand with my fingers curled around the edge of a pharmacy counter, watching and listening, while my dad pitched his wares. He was like a magician, as he pulled words out of his hat. I would see many he approached did not want to buy what he had and yet by the end of the ‘show’, they bought cases. He often told me, “They may hate you, but they will not forget you”. He was the greatest show on earth to me. I wonder now how he talked mother into letting me go. That had to have been his best sales pitch!
Dillard remembers her mother’s “…staccato, stand-up style; if our father could perorate, she could condense. Fellow goes to a psychiatrist. “Your crazy.” “I want a second opinion!” “You’re ugly.” “How do you get an elephant out of the theater? “You can’t; it’s in his blood.” [51-52] Styles, both different, and yet necessary made up Dillard’s own character. They provided the “dazzling verbal surface”[53] through stories, one liners, and “cracks”, which revealed a life lived - the bread and butter of everyday life. From this richness Dillard is nurtured. [ I too, cut my teeth on the humor in life. A quick wit was required at my house. If you did not get the joke, you would find yourself the butt of it. One had to keep up. Like Dillard said of her household - “When my friends visited me, they were well advised to duck.”[55] When I was dating my, later-to-be-husband, he would sit very still, and a little frightened, at the quick and quirky verbal exchange between my parents and I. If he could just be still enough, he may go unnoticed, because if noticed, he would not be allowed to remain on the sidelines, and he knew it. Sometimes I would let him get away with it. In these lessons of the fine art of humor, I was given the gift of seeing the light side of life. Whenever I could not “ make the sale”, I knew I could still laugh. Humor became my safety net. Knowing laughter was there, I could swing freely form one episodic adventure to another, without fear but plenty of drama. Being with me meant you would be offered the same deal, with gusto!]
It is through this vivid lens we look into the childhood of Dillard. Like looking through a family album, Dillard turns the pages, chapter after chapter. I gave titles to all her chapters, so that in re-reading them, I would know what I was in for. There was the chapter in which Dillard told about “living and breathing her history - her Pittsburg history - without knowing or believing any of it.”[74] This was a chapter of discoveries in which she “…walked oblivious through its littered layers”[74] Then in another chapter I called, “Shooting Sparks and Overturning Streetcars” she filled each page with the sensual details of ‘place’. She craftly submersed the reader into the night of the tornado and the power line which had been loosed - “…the fire ball of sparks - the thick twisted steel cable melting a pit for itself in the street”.[101] Then the streetcars “orange, clangy, beloved things - loud, jerky, and old”, sounding their “mournful bells - emitted a long-suffering, monotonous bong…bong…bong… smelling of gasoline, exhaust fumes, trees’ sweetness in the spring and, year round, burnt grit.”[103]. I am there in the telling of it. Dillard is a master story-teller of time and our place in it.
Dillard touched the chords of childhood all the way to her emergence from it. She finally leaves us to wave good-bye as she looks forward to Hollins College to “smooth off her edges”[243] I wish my mother had known to phrase it just that way. Then I maybe I would have not gone so wildly into my freshman year. But like Dillard, “I was in no position to comment.”[244] My mother was desperate to get me out of the house. My stepfather could not tolerate me another day. My mother needed to have her on life…always had…I just had not known how to graciously grant her her wish.
Whether it is college or just the act of any ‘leaving’ at life’s change points, it is the “smoothing off of the rough edges” that is always needed. Dillard had figured out her life as best she could to that moment and now the only thing that was required [as is for all of us] is to take the next step - to do the next thing. Dillard tells it this way:
The setting of our urgent lives is an intricate maze whose blind corridors
we learn one by one - village street, ocean vessel, forested slope -without
remembering how or where they connect in space. You travel, settle
move on, stay put, go. [247] For it is not you or I that is important, neither what sort we might be nor how we came to be each where we are. What is important is anyone’s coming awake and discovering a place, finding in full orbit a spinning globe one can lean over, catch and jump on. What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch - with an electric hiss and cry - this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.[248-249].
Like old friends Dillard and I met again in lines written and pages turned. I am never disappointed [except by her fiction]. I lap up my own memories as I savor hers. When I remember with her, I too “break up through the skin of awareness
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