praise: a story revisited

It was the second to last day of classes, and the seventh grade was getting restless. They were doing a stellar job of reading at a quick clip, and hanging in there while we did the Stick with Me, This is Too Important dance. On Summer Vacation -1, we pulled our classes together and played the 1961 film of To Kill a Mockingbird. We saw the end of the trial, the tribute to Atticus, the death of Tom Robinson, the attack on the Finch kids, the sole appearance of Boo Radley, and Scout's beautiful lingering gaze of recognition. 

Then it was time to go, and Emma stood amid a hungry, boiling crowd of kids and held stock still. Tears brimmed her eyes. She looked at me and waited for the others to go. Her face looked stricken. I asked her what was happening. She was speechless. Another student gave her a hug, then closed the door as she left. Facing each other, we each leaned back against a desk in the now quiet classroom. 

I waited for her to speak, but Emma stared out the window, silent, trying to catch her breath. 

"Are you a little overwhelmed?" 

Emma nodded slowly, thoughtfully. 

"I understand." I waited a moment. 

"Would you like a piece of chocolate?" I opened my lunch and handed her the last two triangles I had brought to share. 

She nodded, took a piece, and bit off a tiny corner. 

It got stuck in her braces. 

"What's going on?" I asked her. 

She thought as she dislodged it.

"It's hard to put it...in words," she said. 

She breathed deeply a few times, exhaling with focus and intention, and then continued. 

"They never see Boo Radley again." Her face contorted with wonder and sadness. 

I had to fight back a smile. 

I remembered sitting on the couch in Maine the weekend before, wondering how this book was going to get across to my students. How to convey the importance of the equal measure of the kindness and cruelty humanity is capable of? How a man like Atticus can take it all in perspective, and see all people and behaviors as part of a whole? I had been floored reading this book again, had laughed and cried almost in the same breath. It seemed too big to pin down in a few forty-five minute sessions. I doubted the timing, the pacing, the choices I had made. At the same time, it was essential to keep in perspective that this was still a story told by the winners, that it had its flaws. Yet, I had gotten completely swept off my feet in a way I could only hope some students would, and thought that, until they had more experience and perspective, they wouldn't. 

Here was one who had gotten it all, the beauty and the sadness and the heartbreak and the hope. I was reminded of how simple reading is, and how complicated we make it. I got teary too. I felt I had permission to, in this audience with Emma, a reader half my size, and the same age I had been when I first read the book under duress. 

Against my best intentions,  I went professorial. "It is ovewhelming...the trial...the saving grace of Boo....cruelty and kindness...needless suffering.....the book will be there for you to reread it." 

Emma nodded. She didn't say anything else, but stared beyond me out the window, glassy-eyed. I tried to put her at ease while not saying too much, letting the silence be. 

I felt a breach of time and space open up as I saw my own former age and size looking to me for understanding, for a chance to linger in the story, or at least to come to terms with what it encompassed. 

Emma turned her gaze back to me. In her eyes, I saw someone far older, and very patient looking back. 

She sighed after a moment, and in a shaky voice, summed it all up:

"It's just...such...a good...book." 

"It is, Emma," I said. "Yeah, it is."

praise: Modern Antics

The Practical Guide for Gnomes, or Duende's Travels Part I

Duende was named for the Spirit of Flamenco, because he wields a guitar and looks mighty happy playing it. Deunde is approximately one foot tall. Duende has a goofy, opiate-induced-looking grin. Duende is a garden gnome. 

Here's how it all started: my friend Chris, who is one of those willing to overcome the time-space continuum to have coffee with you tried and true college friends, offered me a Gift of Welcome and Housewarming upon my arrival in his beloved Metropolis. I held Duende at arm's length.  

"What is this?" I said (see photo for look of amusement/incredulity/distaste).

 "It was thirty dollars," he said. 

"Okay," I said. 

So I adopted a guitar-playing garden gnome, we launched a tradition of buying each other expensive tchackies, and the adventure began. Chris's anonymous hung over high school friend was staying over. Having just returned form a trip to South America, he was full of Flamenco terminology. In some dialogue I scarcely remember, the word and definition for duende was uttered, and the Guitar Playing Gift Gnome was thus christened. 

So that's the back story. 

Now, how did Duende the gnome get to Maine? A cow pasture in the Midwest? Alaska?  San Francisco? The Phillipines? And back to Maine? Read on. 

If you've seen the film Amélie, for which I have a soft spot because it played an important role in the romance that is now my marriage, you may already be over the story of a traveling gnome. But you have to give Duende some credit for overcoming a few obstacles.  First of all, he hailed from an antiques store in roadside Mass. Then, I had to smuggle him home on the subway (Chris had nothing for me to take him home in but a bag from Ralph Lauren.) I had to sneak him past my minimalist-at-heart husband, and propose things like "He could live on the balcony (read: fire escape)," or "Just imagine if we kept him in the fridge, the look on people's faces when they came over..." all to no avail. The gnome had to hit the road. 

The gnome was made to roam. 

So I called my brother. Ben has a lot in common with a foot-tall garden gnome. He's seven feet tall, but he plays the ukelele and the banjo, likes wearing baggy rustic clothes, and smiles a lot. He also likes gardening and farms. It seemed like a match made in heaven. So when Ben came to visit, I took the gnome out of the Ralph Lauren bag and handed it to him ceremoniously. "Try to keep it in the family,"  I said, since it had come from Chris, and I didn't want to just pass him off to anyone. 

Ben tucked Duende under his arm and kept him there while we scoured Williamsburg for a dinner spot. We were the hit of Roebling Cafe where Duende silently played in the candle light while we enjoyed simple/complicated/cheap/expensive food and a few cocktails. Ben, in college years, had learned to hold his liquor. I, in my yoga years, had not. We snapped a couple of photos of Duende in the candle light, smiled to nearby table occupants, paid up, and left. 

Ben took Duende on the train with him to Boston, where he played the ukelele and sang and bosqued up enough change for breakfast with Duende as his sidekick. Then, when he got home to Bar Harbor, he took him to the health food store where he worked; A+B Naturals. Duende, he said when he called, fit nicely in the band above the counter with a bongo-playing monkey. He kept an eye on him while working, he said, and after all, he reminded me, he had filled up his living room with a ten-foot orange bean bag chair and the goat-skin djembe he had made for me in Gambia. 

Then Duende went missing. 

Post cards appeared. Duende talking to a couple of brown cows. Duende digging a ditch. Duende at the foot of  redwood tree. Duende atop Chistopher McKandless's  bus in Alaska (we think this one was a Photoshop job). Duende in Somebody's Livingroom. 

Then Duende reappeared for a couple of weeks and kicked it on the counter with the monkey.

One of the postcards from the west somehow got misread at the post office, and instead of going to "A+B Naturals, Bar Harbor, Maine" It went to "A+B Naturals...The Philippines." Upon learning the non-receipt of the most recent postcard, the perpetrating kidnappers, or their accomplice, shot a fresh copy under the door from a Mini Cooper. A few days later the original appeared, bearing the stamps of its own misadventure. 

Then Duende had his biggest adventure. He vanished again for a week and postcards appeared of Duende in an anonymous man's backpack overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, and then in front of graffiti art in the Mission.

When he came back, he had on a satchel. Its contents contained a box of Rice-a-Roni, a commemorative coin, a tie-dyed t-shirt in gnome/infant size, and a book by Noam Chomsky. 

This was the state of affairs when I showed up in Bar Harbor for Ben's graduation last weekend. I paid a visit to A+B Naturals and  pointed behind the counter. 

"That's my gnome, Duende," I said to the young and well-meaning cashier. "Can I see his postcards?" 

She looked at me with incredulity/amusement/distaste and let me take pictures. 

"Where is he?" I asked, peeking around the basket of an elderly man as he carefully placed his items on the counter.  "I'd like to see him." Secretly, I had thought of stealing him myself, taking him to France or Pennsylvania. 

"He's around somewhere," she said, "go ahead and look." Amid tall bags of Natural Herb Popcorn, brussel sprouts, whole grain breads, dried mango, and Seventh Generation cleaning products I sought, but did not find, Duende. 

 I returned to the cashier at the front and reported this. 

"Oh," she said nonchalantly, "really?" She kept ringing up the elderly man's purchases and barely looked up as she shrugged.

"He must be traveling again." 

conversation: The Convenience of Distance

The world is no longer

nation and nation, 

my companion said last night

over a bowl of warm rice.

It is one being, one body. 

And if the abdomen suffers, 

the whole being suffers. 

Brackish water, elsewhere

engulfs lives and leaves us indifferent. 

We are told that in  illness thrives

the opportunity for healing, I said, 

the white grains tipping 

to rim our bowls,

but we are busy 

creating anthills so quickly 

they crumble under our feet as we climb. 

We dig into 'reality' screens that harden

the lacquer of our false perceptions. 

We each take our spoon and begin. 

I look up as he says this: 

Brackish water churns and the abdomen, the leg

the hand, the arm suffer. 

And I think,

we thrive elsewhere, 

but the infection arrives.