Nov. 29

I am -still- sick.  I drag myself forward nonetheless.  And outside, the world does the same- the grey hours and the brown hours and the black hours, each knocking into the next.

Nov. 28

Thanksgiving.  There are pleasures that are only available as a result suffering.  My father would have called these negative reinforcement: rewards consisting of the removal of an aversive stimulus.

I am, for good or for ill, particularly receptive to these: analgesics, rest after toil, slow recovery, sleep after sleepless nights.

Nov. 26

I wish I remembered more.

Nov. 25

Sick; job destabilizing; grieving; worried; tired.

Nov. 24

The bizarrely bitter aftertaste of hearing so many lovely tributes to my father is that I no longer feel as specifically loved; perhaps our relationship spoke more to his qualities than ours.

Nov. 23

My father's service was today.  Lots of people got up to speak and sing about my dad.  It was like looking through a kaleidoscope, fragments coalescing into a whole.  I loved catching glimpses of both the deeply known and less familiar parts of my father as refracted through the eyes of others.  I came away understanding that my dad was attentive, appreciative, and interested in seeing things as they are, and that I have inherited some measure of these qualities.

Nov. 22

It is really something to be able to make everything OK for one person, even if the okayness, and your ability to bring it about, are both poignantly temporary.

Nov. 21

Pre-dawn drive, five hours, much of it in the rain.  In retrospect I should not have unpacked.  Margaret is taking small numbers of steps- she wasn't doing this when I left her.

Nov. 20

The weirdest gig.  I wore cool shoes, which I had to borrow, because I do not own cool shoes, and played music no one has heard before or likely will, after.  Also I heard a baby use his first word.  It was "up," which is fitting.  We spend our lives wanting up.  

Nov. 19

My father would have been 77 today.

Nov. 18

More pie.  Also Lake Michigan, which never fails to remind me of the border between sleeping and waking, when everything seems grey and possible.

Nov. 17

I have been two two restaurants entirely devoted to pie within the past two months.  This is not an accident.

Nov. 16

There are whole stretches of Illinois in which all you can see is corn and sky, and all you can hear is scratchy invocations of Christ.  No time to stop; no need.

Nov. 15

There is something so apocalyptic about the day before you leave.  Your immediate future is curtailed; you know this day is all you (temporarily) have.

Nov. 14

It's so interesting to think about what people want out of lessons- which may be different from what they think they want.  Validation, accountability, a route forward, solutions, a good time, someone to listen...

Nov. 13

Remembered a friend's birthday today.  There is something so lovely about having your arrival on earth acknowledged.

Nov. 12

There is a contentment to slogging through -not misery- but low-grade, ankle-deep irritation.  It is what I have always enjoyed about working a job I do not particularly enjoy.  The hours ooze by, and, in watching their passage, you accomplish something simply by existing.

Nov. 11

Margaret had her surgery.  It reminded me of flying on an airplane- how scary and profound it is for you, how routine for the staff, that massive gulf between.  Later, it snowed.  The world is full of wonder.

Nov. 10

There is something uniquely grueling about parenting small children.  Someone is always making noise; someone is always demanding, either actively or passively, your attention.  You are hardly ever   able to be, simply, yourself, because you are so frequently having to be parent- your voice and presence targeted, crafted, designed to manipulate or soothe the small.

I never realized how much of my parents' self-presentation was a front.

Or was it?  Sometimes I think spending so much time in the theater of teaching, pre-kids, inclined me toward performing parenthood in the same way that successful teachers are, essentially, great actors.  The best teachers (and actors) mix authenticity into their theater, and maybe, so too, do the best parents.

I am tired.  There is a soupcon of authenticity for you.

Nov. 9

William's birthday party: Asteroid hunt, astronaut ice cream, four small boys madly chasing a mechanical hamster.

Nov. 8

Margaret put two words together today: Hi, Kitty.  Hi, Mama.

A memory, not from today: Holding Margaret in the living room, a few weeks ago, her small sick form limp against my chest, feeling my father's love stream through me into her.

Nov. 7

I wrestle with the fact that some students irritate me.   Not very many, usually only one at a time in any given studio configuration, but I struggle to get past it.  What is it about them, or what is it about me?  Should I rest content with my reaction, interrogate it, or try to stamp it out?

Nov. 6

Why do I hang on to the belief that people can't change?  As a musician, every day, I witness, attest to, and nurture the power of sustained practice over time.  How can I doubt that the same tools can be used to shape and cultivate our better selves?  I have been a fool.  Attentive repetition is a superpower.

Nov. 5

Six years.

Nov. 4

Margaret is full of declaratives and imperatives.  When I almost forgot her coat today at daycare, she pointed and urgently vocalized.  She can say "walk," and, almost immediately after, "home."  In that sliver of time between: "moon."

Nov. 3

Margaret grabbed her diaper and said "poop." William ticked off another day until his birthday.  I conducted four pieces about death.  David gave both of our children their weekly bath.  The tree outside church has edged past yellow, dropped its robe of leaves.

Nov. 2

Today, William walked along the curb painstakingly, exultantly, one foot in front of the other.  I had forgotten what it is to be so new in your body that its capabilities delight.

Nov. 1

How is it that the trees are still flaming?

Goodbye, Dad.

Splinter, seed: lodged in my gut.

You were here for a long time, and then you began to disintegrate.  Every visit, more of you had crumbled.  What is both beautiful and terrible is that your love for me was still there, overgrown, buried, half-strangled, but present, and sometimes I could see it. You wanted me to be OK.  You wanted to make things OK for me.

This is so easy, trivial even, when children are young.  You scoop them up.  You cradle them close.  You speak to them in the soothing voice that silts down into their bones to lie there, fallow, for decades, until one day it emerges from their mouths, bubbling up in response to a child's cry.

It's harder, later, as your children grow older and smarter, darker and more private.  You attempt; you falter.  You call when you shouldn't have called, stand to one side when you should have stepped up.  You can't stanch every wound, but you try, and your trying is, in and of itself, a balm.

It's even harder when the hurt is you, and the way you are unwillingly ceding yourself, acre by acre, inch by inch, word by word.  You give ground.  But you still ache to help.  You still hold my hand.  You still put out your hand to catch my tears.

I want to give you the gift of my happiness, because a child's happiness is every parent's secret dream.  But I'm human, piebald, so I give you instead an acknowledgement of my debts.  You made me, whole. You made me whole.  

I love you, Dad. 

1942-2019

Six Words

Trains trains trains; trains trains sky

Six Words

Well over halfway to death.  So?

4:30

After 4:00 AM, I don't mind losing sleep quite so much.  During the first part of the night, or the black middle, failing to drift off feels crushing, a deeply personal lapse committed against the backdrop of the universe's unstinting indifference.

But after 4:00 AM, acceptance creeps in.  You may as well get up, because you're not sliding back into unconsciousness anytime soon. Though it's still pitch dark, the birds are restive.

And you are alone.

I get up and pad as noiselessly as I can through the darkened rooms of my house.  The HVAC system is quiet.  The rain has lifted.  Everyone else is asleep.  Even the cat, who never sleeps and yet always seems to be some degree of comatose -miraculous in the commonplace way of cats- lies still.  In an hour or two, my obligations will snap shut around me.  But not quite yet.

Serenity Now!

Although it verges on trite, I am passingly fond of the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

As the last line hints, making the distinction between changeable and immutable can be troublesome. 

But the difficulties don't end there, because, as so many bromides do, this one fails to account for, well, life.

To wit:

The non-binary nature of fungibility.  Alas, mutability is a continuum.  Many things can be changed- but only a little bit.  Or a thing can sustain serious alterations, but remain profoundly problematic.  Do you really still want to get out of bed and put on clothes in order to very slightly improve your relationship with your mother?  Which brings me to my next quibble...

Opportunity cost.  Say I can make a change, but only if I put forth Herculean effort.  Or effort that is less than Herculean, but is still effort.  I could have spent that time eating lemon cake.  I could have husbanded my emotional energy and therefore  had the fortitude not to snap at my coworker when she once more failed to note an important event in her calendar.  I could have taught my coworker to use her calendar.  I could have cured cancer.  Instead I staggered around trying to make a life change.  Ergo...

Unintended consequences.  Say you make your change, but then you don't have the energy to cure cancer.   Or say you make your change, but in making that change, you have created another, bigger problem: You may have cured cancer, but now overpopulation will decimate the globe.  You may now have enough pasta salad, but all your relatives are vomiting. Which means you will now spend an even greater proportion of your life than you had previously estimated cleaning up bodily fluid -an eventuality you could accept as unchangeable, but actually yourprobably could have changed your fate had you not embarked on your Quixotic quest to rip apart the fabric of the universe in the first place. 

I am not serene.  This is some false advertising.

1040

My father no longer consistently recognizes me.  I barely feel the sting of this; it is simply one more link in a chain of loss that stretches back, now, a decade and a half.  Loss upon loss, the whole thing still unfurling from my gut like a tapeworm.

I say "still" because this loss continuous and current- my father is still declining, and, lately, I've begun to feel myself tipping off the edge of my own cognitive plateau, beginning to slide.

But here is one new thing: After 15 years, the present is losing its grip on the past.  What I mean is this: always before, my father's debility leached backward, discoloring not only the man I loved as an adult, but the man I loved as a child and a teenager.  A letter he wrote to me while still cogent, a picture of him cradling my infant skull, a draft of the toast he gave at my wedding- these were agonizing artifacts, a reminder of the man who no longer was.

But finally, unaccountably, the present is receding, abandoning the past in its wake.  Going through my own tax records this year, I came upon an old return my father had filed for me when I was eighteen.  I do my own taxes now, just as he did.  I have opened college savings accounts for my children, just as he did.  And I am preparing for an uncertain future using what tools I am able to access- just as he was once able to.

The tax return is brief but assiduously completed; he used the numbers to open, and contribute to, my very first retirement account.  Here is another copy for you in case you want it, he scrawls across a duplicate form from 2002.

I know what he means: I love you.  I love you, and I always will.

In Which I Lose a Student

The thing about being in a service profession, particularly one in which you have sustained contact with individuals over time, is that people eventually quit you.  They gain new priorities, tire of lessons, have life events, grow old, die.  Reliably, this hurts.

It hurts whether you've been expecting it or not.  It hurts whether you've been teaching for one year or twenty.  It hurts whether you enjoyed the person or not, though it hurts much less when you didn't.  It hurts whether or not you had a part in the departure, though it hurts more when you know you did.  And it hurts whether you've served the person for years or just a few sessions, though there's a clear correlation, for me, between length of relationship and degree of hurt.

I was expecting this latest departure.  The student had recently taken a voluntary break, which is a key sign of disengagement.  If a student takes an involuntary break, they may well return; a student who takes a voluntary break usually returns for a time, but eventually quits.  I enjoyed the student, and she was long-term; I also precipitated the departure by enforcing my cancellation policy.  I don't regret doing that, because the policy is necessary for my sanity and financial health, but I guessed when I enforced it that it would cost me my student.

So it hurts.

The specifics shift, but the loss persists.  In part this is because, in order for a student to end an existing relationship, they must formally reject you.  It makes the up front sting worse, but is a better option, over time, than the ghosting or disappearing a friend can do.

I know ending the professional relationship is hard for students, too, because I've found that many try to wiggle out of it: they "go on hiatus," or "take a break," and "forget" to return to lessons.  I find this gutless, and prefer it when students make a formal break.  Lately I've grown tired of letting the dodgers off the hook, so I've taken to forcing he issue- checking back in on my students who are on hiatus and making them commit themselves one way or another.  It's cleaner, and ultimately kinder.

For someone who fears rejection, I have ironically set myself up for a lifetime of it.

On the other hand, everything ends.  Every student I have will ultimately leave me, every connection I maintain will be severed, every single thing I cling to in this life will be taken from me.

So maybe it's good practice.

In Which I View Art

I went to the city's art museum today. I usually thrill to art museums, and I am particularly fond of this art museum, because it is free, and because I believe a free art museum is a treasure without price, or at least without a price that I have to pay.

So I went.  But for the first time in as long as I can remember, I grew impatient.  Maybe it's because I had my family with me, and families are nothing if not destroyers of solitary joy.  At its best, an art museum is that singular combination of refuge and spaceship, harbor and port.  But maybe it only works like that, for me, if I am alone.

But maybe it's that I am middle-aged, and the middle-aged grow weary of trying to be people we are not.

Today, as I strolled around gazing at the art, reading the miniature disquisitions on intersections and interrogations and indictments and influence, all I could summon was irritation.  Does art-speak have to be so smug?  Have we really lost faith in the power of art to communicate without a varnish of insufferable prose?

I am glad, after all, that I did not enter academia.

Jewel Box

The Jewel Box is a glorified greenhouse tucked into an odd corner of an urban park.  It costs a dollar to enter, and the price is right- there is a reason it is not numbered among the park's main attractions.  You enter the greenhouse and find...a greenhouse.  Plus toilets, a drinking fountain, and an scattering of sad white chairs that scream"busy wedding venue."

But in winter, on a weekday during the daytime, it is quiet and light and warm and smells of blooming.

I write this post to attest to the payment of my dollar.  The requisitioning of my white chair.  My open eyes, my breath.

My Time

Is everyone at my stage of life this jealous of their time?  In a burst of irony, I spent 15 minutes yesterday penning an enraged screed in response to a Target returns department customer survey, railing against their policy of UPS drop off.  Really, Target, really?  You force me to take 25-30 minutes out of my day to print out a label, pack up my item, and drive to a UPS store and back, all to return an item you shipped to me damaged?  Your error, not mine?????

The fact that I can still summon an instantaneous, righteous blaze of anger about this speaks less to the petty injustices of late-stage capitalism and more to how scarce a resource time seems to me now, that any unwanted demand on it must be met with full-scale resistance.

I must now take a caesura to feed the baby.

***

I'm back.   I am only able to come back because I have taken today off.  If I had not taken today off, I would not have been able to start this post, let alone finish it, and I would have had to farm out feeding the baby.

I wonder if this is an American affliction.  Do people in other developed countries, which ascribe more cultural value to leisure, and less to work and motherhood, feel less vicious about their time?  

I know for certain it is a female problem, insofar as it is a burden that falls disproportionately on women.  When I look at my husband and all the things he doesn't have to deal with (most cleaning, most meal planning, all finances, taxes, any major life decision, any research regarding major and minor life decisions or medical conditions, all research and hiring regarding home repairs and household acquisitions, buying clothes and kid stuff, presents, birthdays, doctor's appointments, making sure we have toilet paper), I think that must be nice.  

I also wonder what I would do with more time if I had it.  I have some inkling, because the nature of part of my work is cyclical, so I have periods in which the onslaught of the demands on my time relaxes slightly, as well as periods in which the inundation is furious I just try to close my eyes and think of England.

But when I do have slightly more time, I definitely waste a good portion of it.  I putter.  I fuss.  I contemplate changing careers and meal planning and uprooting my life and cleaning the toilet.  I read back page articles on New York real estate and follow Internet rabbit holes to learn what kind of rabbit I am, or how to make my peace with cheese.

I'm also creative, in a way I'm unable to be when my life is stretched like a drum head over my allotted hours.  I might write, or plan workshops, or invite over a friend.  I might take a new route home, or go someplace I've never been.  But I simply have no space to make space most of the time.

Hence my rage against UPS drop off.  I want my time to be mine to waste.

I am sorry that it has come to this; I'm not sure how to fix it.