Journey in Poetry

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Back in October, I gave you a little collection of poems that were perhaps talking to one another, and I’m doing the same today, just to remind both myself and you that though it is the end of February, we can remain confident that we will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. All our running in circles will not bring us either farther from or closer to him. If we are in him, he is with us. So here’s Walt Whitman (who did not know any of that), a draft-poem of mine called “The New Lazarus” which feels perpetually unfinished, and the middle passage of Psalm 139, which has been stuck pleasantly in my throat lately.

From Whitman:

Facing west from California’s shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d,
Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)

“The New Lazarus”:

Come along out! I want you out in the light.
You think it’s you alone, but we are many,
We mothers of our own exile,
Our teeming selves, but worse,
Imprisoning lightning behind our breast-bones, 
In our wrist joints, at the base of our skulls
Where it sears us, marks us.

Show me those well-documented failures.
Come out in your grave clothes,
Your skin pale in brazen light,
Show me the hilly scar,
The busted ear, the lips chewed to silence,
The huddled back, the head so wrapped in refuse
It thinks you can’t be made new.

Now, tell him, go ahead and tell him,
Tell the good doctor:
“Lord, the one you love is sick.”

Psalm 139:7-12:

Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend into heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there Your hand shall lead me,
And Your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,”
Even the night shall be light about me;
Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You,
But the night shines as the day;
The darkness and the light are both alike to You.

Christmas in London

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On the Friday before Christmas, I oversaw a bunch of teenagers decorating a gingerbread house while wearing my Christmas tree dress, then went home and changed into corduroys and a big sweater and got a ride to the airport from a friend. My first flight was delayed, then when we did board the pilot had us waiting on the tarmac before take-off for fifteen minutes “because we would make up time in the air,” and then after we landed there was no gate for us for some reason so we waited on that tarmac for about twenty minutes, and I was so convinced that I would miss my second flight and have to wait to travel till the next day that I’d already texted my family and said as much, but when I got off the plane I ran to the other gate anyway in an act of good faith. Another man ran along with me, though perhaps not for the same flight, and more than once we got stuck behind people on the people movers who did not really seem to want to move, but then I made it to the gate, and it was still open and I boarded and sat in my seat and it was a miracle.

This Christmas was a miracle, the kind I often forget to expect.

I landed in London the next morning, and then serendipitously ran into my own brother at Southall Station as if we have spent all our lives living around the block from each other in a small town (which we have not).

The next week-and-change was rich. I wore my sister’s sweaters almost every day. Time passed in a whirl of poems, and foggy Hampstead, and unusual non-perishable food stuffs gifted by my Uncle Jon, and hauling huge pots of paneer and rice to the church, and Christmas carols in the living room, and Asian aunties, and a Christmas group chat with my dad wearing a wig as the icon, and a fourteenth century pub on Christmas Eve, and getting motion-sick on the tube, and walks in Osterley Park (give me a path to tramp across a British field every day for the rest of my life, please), and a brewery in Bermondsey, and dishes done by our friend Zack, and a shop for Christmas dinner at Mary’s big Tesco, and a nativity play with lopsided head-dresses and clear-spoken lines, and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds at Piccadilly, and egg-white dosas with peanut chutney, and straining cranberry sauce that was much more trouble that I intended, and cream tea at the V&A, and seven adults in a Honda Jazz, and learning that William Buckland once ate the heart of a king, and a clothes dryer piled with all the Christmas goodies like my grandma’s breezeway used to be back in 2003.

I will tell you something: I am unsure if my family has Christmas traditions anymore. Every Christmas of my adult life has been different, this one especially, full of small revelations to bask in. We followed Mary in her hat with its orange bobble through a crowded Covent Garden to track down a Christmas market that had disappeared in the night. My dad sat cheerful and quiet next to an auntie just arrived from India who speaks only Telugu and is hesitant to wear socks. George laughed a lot—often at his own jokes—and rigged up the curtain of saris for the Christmas Mela. My mom bought a floral velvet dress at Harvey Nichols where all of the dresses were very beautiful (except for one which was very ugly). And it was easy to invite in people we haven’t always had with us—my mom’s younger brother and my parents’ student this time. They too can cook and laugh and walk and sing carols and sit on strangers’ couches and hear the good news.

Because every year that news is new, every year we are children again, every year we wait to see what the miracle can possibly be. On Christmas day this year we read Tennyson: “Ring in the valiant man and free, / The larger heart, the kindlier hand; / Ring out the darkness of the land, / Ring in the Christ that is to be.” How much we still have to learn of Him, year after year.

2024 Retrospective

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On January 1st of this year, I wrote with triumph in my journal that all the mice that had been plaguing my kitchen for months were gone: “No more mice!” This did not, unfortunately, turn out to be true—full eradication would take until the spring, but we’ll draw a veil over that. Welcome to the exciting beginning of my 2024. My friend Laura sent me colorful pens for grading, and sometimes I sat in the big chair in my living room and made a mess with watercolors. 

My friend Regula and I joked that this year I entered my “club era”— full of the kinds of clubs that define your thirties. And it’s true that I seem to have become a joiner all of a sudden. Regular commitments include two—and sometimes three—book clubs (only one of which includes my parents), prayer on Thursday evenings, the women’s ministry team at church, and a couple other groups to breathe life into the curious child within me who still sometimes wants to put words on a page that preserve all the good and the odd in the world around her.

But my main commitment, in both time and heart, has been my job—spring teaching this year was hectic and sweet and occasionally made me want to tear my hair out. I cared about the kids so much I got honest-to-God angry at them sometimes and in turn they cared so much about what I had to tell them or teach that they cried earnest tears. A student told me I looked tired and when I told him that wasn’t polite, he took it as an invitation to elaborate on my lack of make up. I bought gold confetti from the dollar store to help teach a George Eliot novel, and it still lives on in my classroom to this day. And one day in mid-spring when we were all tired (not just me), I pressed pause on an honors Lit class so we could spend the period talking about the theology of clothing and I could pretend I was in grad school again.

In April, my friend Katie and I went to London to do teaching research, and it was sweet to see her experience it for the first time and also sweet to see the Victoria and Albert Museum and my sister and other people and things that matter. The week felt intense, but good for beauty and good for friendship. When it rained we sheltered under the awning at Royal Albert Hall. This coming June we’re going to go back and take eighteen teenagers with us. The planning process has sometimes been frantic, especially the financial side, because though I’m a reasonably sensible person, I’ve never been in charge of eighty thousand dollars of other people’s money before, but it will be so good to take the kids. Perhaps we too will wait out the rain at Royal Albert Hall.

My birthday was at the end of April after we returned and though some of those days felt very low, Katie and her husband threw me a birthday party with sparkly pink cocktails and at school students brought me flowers and a cookie cake and general frenetic excitement. 

And then came summer and I returned to writing (though it did not always return to me). I painted my kitchen cabinets and my bathroom. I sorted through nearly every item I own (especially the papers) and worked on applying for foster certification—including fingerprints, interviews, a fire inspection, CPR training, and a map of my home. I watched inarguably too much TV, got set up on a couple dates, listened to most of The Chronicles of Narnia on audiobook, went to the mountains for a day, and spent every single night in my own bed.

School started earlier than usual in the thick blue heat of August and for the first time I was teaching opposite one of my own former students. I took on a new role, helping manage our new(ish) house system, and spent most days teaching kids I’ve taught before, whose handwriting I know and whose growth over the years is a quiet source of hope to me, though many of them cannot yet see it. I had the same study hall advisory as last year and sometimes they argued with me about rules and facts the way kids do with their own parents perhaps because my classroom—sometimes too warm and cluttered—has some home to it. They are used to me and I am used to them.

Laura used to send me emails asking both facetiously and sincerely to hear about my adventures, because my life at the time was full of lots of unexpected newnesses, fresh delights and anxieties, but, as I’ve sifted back through, this year hasn’t seemed even to have many separate events in it, much less adventures. It has merely been long continual rhythms in various parts of my life, all layered on top of one another in syncopation. 

These have been the days of small things, the days of inviting people to this and to that, of getting a french bob and watching it grow out, of my car shutting down as if possessed while driving home from work but then continuing to operate as normal, of a long weekend in Minnesota for a cousin wedding reception by a river, of going to Trader Joe’s, of borrowing a dress to wear to a high school friend’s wedding, of leading a Bible study on Ephesians, of bringing my cello to school, of realizing that there are too many small things and I cannot, in reality, foster a child right now, of driving to Greenville in the quiet, and of going to a reading at a bookstore, hearing flash fiction, then becoming entranced by small things all over again.

December has been a gift. When I walked into church on the 1st and realized it was the first Sunday of Advent my heart made a little leap. I always love this season, perhaps because for much of it the corners of my mind become preoccupied (and therefore filled) with light. When there is more darkness than usual, things that glow become precious: light hanging from trees, light nestled in windows, light bursting out of a night sky in a blinding choir singing “gloria in excelsis Deo!” 

Tomorrow I fly to London to spend Christmas with my family, and I’ll land on the winter solstice when there will be less than eight hours of daylight. But oh, there will be candles and oh, there will be stars. In all these small things I keep remembering some lines of T.S. Eliot I discovered as a teenager, stumbled upon as if they were El Dorado:

For all things exist only as seen by Thee, only as known by Thee, all things exist

    Only in Thy light, and Thy glory is declared even in that which denies

      Thee; the darkness declares the glory of light.

The Joys of Talking About Books You Don’t Like

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I’ve always been good at critique. It’s fun to take sharp words and slice something apart so that people can see the mess inside. I still have vivid memories of reading Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Live Coal in the Sea because I disliked it so much, and as I read I constructed scathing criticism in my mind, line by careful line, making the whole experience a delight. 

But in grad school I remember being at some friends’ house for dinner, and embarking on a treatise about either Marilynne Robinson or Wendell Berry. (Embarrassing that I can’t remember which, but there you have it. It really could have been either one.) My central thesis was that this revered author did not really understand what it meant to write fiction, only what it meant to have their head up their own rear end. I don’t think I said that exactly, but something significantly more lengthy and with nearly that effect. My speech was met with silent, wide eyes from everyone in the room. Though nobody spoke, the air was filled with reproach. And it occurred to me that perhaps I should have held my tongue.

So I’ve tried to keep my mouth shut in recent years, and when about a year ago a friend here in Greensboro invited me to join a book club she was starting, I suggested I might not be a very good candidate for it. “I’d be too critical,” I told her. “I don’t want to stop anyone from enjoying what they enjoy.” She told me that she knew what I was like and I should come anyway, which is always a wonderfully comforting pronouncement, so I did.

And lo and behold, these monthly meetings have been a gift, because they’ve turned out to have things to teach me. Mostly when I talk about books, they’re what I assign, books I already like and know, and I’m talking about them to students who, though they are free to disagree, have to listen to my perspective. My perspective is what I’m being paid for. But in a book club, rather than coming to the novel as a teacher, I come to it merely as myself. Of course that’s true when I read for fun on my own time (which I get to do a fair amount of) but I’m all the more aware of it when I carry my copy into Brooke’s living room and sit down with a group of other women who have all come as themselves too.

We sit and we talk and I will tell you a secret: I’m not the only one who dislikes things. Sometimes I recommend True Grit and no one else enjoys it nearly as much as I do. And sometimes someone else proposes The Women and I dislike it with such vehemence deep in my bones that I stop a quarter of the way through. But we find a way to disagree, and we manage to explain why we think the things we think without enforcing a painful silence on the whole room. We listen to each other, and in doing so we come to understand not only the books on our laps, but one another: our tastes, our comforts, our joys, our fears, our hearts. And then we lean back and chat about everything and nothing with warmth and wine and tea and cake.

For someone like me who talks about books all day while people who know less than I do listen, this is a sweetly humbling experience. And the best experiences with books are always humbling ones, ones that leave you feeling small and surrounded and grateful that so many people out there know the same language that you do and want to tell stories with it.

On Sunday, I drove down to Greenville, South Carolina to visit some friends for a few days and on the way I listened to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I’d never read it before and it starts off so funny and sharp, and even though I knew that he dies at the end I found that I deeply wanted to know how, not by what means but in what mental state, in what spiritual land. I listened as his illness pulls him down and the narrative slows, while the peasant boy holds Ivan Ilyich’s feet in a comfortable position and he struggles in terror with the value of the life he’s lived and then stumbles on forgiveness and, at last, “instead of death there was light.”

I cried passing Spartanburg, knowing myself to be small and glad. I badly wanted to talk about the book, sitting on a couch, and to hear what my friends thought too.

Poetry for the Meantime

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Alright, friends (this is the phrase with which I begin many of my classes nowadays) — this blog feels like a bit of a limbo space to me nowadays, so while I figure out what to do with it, I’m going to give you three poems: one from Emily Dickinson, one I scraped out during a Lenten exercise a few month ago, and then Psalm 19 from King David. I’ll just leave them here to be in conversation with each other for the moment.

From Dickinson:

The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and You — beside —

The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As Sponges — Buckets — do —

The Brain is just the weight of God —
For — Heft them — Pound for Pound —
And they will differ — if they do —
As Syllable from Sound —

From myself:

Emily claims the brain outstrips the sky
but these days the firmament looks large to me:
      Fields of cloud tuft—falling sediment—
      A pocked and glowing moon—
      Satellites laced with human noise—
      And beyond wheeling stars and crowned planets:
      Vast darknesses that lead to light—
      Powers-that-be waging broad-chested wars—
      Blood streaming cross universes, tie-dyeing heaven—
      The hand that holds it all—
By compare,
my own self within 
is small, mute.

And from scripture:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.
It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
    like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
It rises at one end of the heavens
    and makes its circuit to the other;
    nothing is deprived of its warmth.

The law of the Lord is perfect,
    refreshing the soul.
The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,
    making wise the simple.
The precepts of the Lord are right,
    giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the Lord are radiant,
    giving light to the eyes.
The fear of the Lord is pure,
    enduring forever.
The decrees of the Lord are firm,
    and all of them are righteous.

They are more precious than gold,
    than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey,
    than honey from the honeycomb.
By them your servant is warned;
    in keeping them there is great reward.
But who can discern their own errors?
    Forgive my hidden faults.
Keep your servant also from willful sins;
    may they not rule over me.
Then I will be blameless,
    innocent of great transgression.

May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart
    be pleasing in your sight,
    Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.

Late September

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The waters are still high in the mountains right now. In all the pictures I’ve ever seen of this or any flood the water is a creamy brown—dull, unassuming, lethal only in the way it wraps itself around the waists and necks of buildings, carries in its depths the shards of bridges it has washed out and whole shells of cars and porches.

I’ve had an unplanned long weekend down here in the low hills, since school was canceled on Friday. I read a novel set in Seoul, as well as Ephesians, did some laundry, waited out a power outage on Friday then helped put on an event at church. I walked to the corner farmer’s market in the sunshine on Saturday. Tonight I’m bringing shortbread and roasted veggies to contribute to dinner at community group, and I’ve gained a tiny, stinging blister on my finger from peeling rutabagas.

In the meantime, folks evacuate homes or drive up into the mountains themselves, toward that softly ugly water, to search out family they haven’t heard from since the storm came.

Tomorrow for me is work and Arabian Nights and Wordsworth and grading and leftovers for lunch in a classroom that’s just slightly on this side of too warm and coming home rightly tired at the end of the afternoon.

All these are the facts of the matter, and I balk at the task of ripping the threads of meaning from their core and arranging them before your eyes. You can see them well enough yourself. 

It’s late September. The sun is golden warm, knives are busy in four p.m. kitchens, and He holds our lives in his hands.

On Being Eleven (and All the Other Ages)

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When I was sixteen years old and taking AP Lit, Mr. Powell had us read a story called “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros. I still think about it often. In fact, I’ve thought of it at so many stretching, tender junctures of my life that I suspect it’s framed much of my perspective on growing up and aging (which, though we don’t always articulate them the same way, are in practice essentially identical.)

In the story, the narrator is turning eleven, but she is having a hard birthday—hard in all the small ways that feel searing when you’re a preteen. An abandoned sweater is found in the coatroom of her elementary school, and a classmate tells the teacher it belongs to our birthday girl, who is then, to her bone-deep mortification, made to put on a sweater which is not hers, which is old, stretched out, and smells bad. She cannot find the words to explain that it is not hers, and she bursts into tears in front of the whole class on her eleventh birthday. Because, she explains, she’s eleven that day, but she’s not only eleven.

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t…You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven. Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay.

It was half my life ago when I first read that passage, so now I’ve spent years and years being conscious of those layered ages as each new one stretches over me like another skin: seventeen and nineteen and twenty-two and twenty-six and twenty-eight and thirty and so on and so forth. And I know this is ridiculous, but in the last year or two, I’ve begun to feel that those previous years have gotten to be too far away, separated from the surface of myself by too many coats of film, that I’ve got to mine down into myself to reach them, and mining takes effort and a pick-ax. 

I want to reach them, though. My fourteen-year-old self was foolish and dramatic and selfish, but boy, did she know about joy. And myself at twenty-two, though terrified of nearly everything, knew the value of growth. She knew how much she needed it and, more than that, she knew how to make it happen. I am firmly adult now and I too easily to tell myself the lie that the main goal of life is good administrative functioning—writing the to-do lists, making it to as many meetings as possible, being eminently reliable, having answers to all the questions that anyone might ask at any given time—when, if I remembered to be eleven and eighteen and twenty-seven as well as thirty-two, I would recall that the actual main goals of life are simpler and larger: to walk faithful and humble, to allow Love to make me new, to laugh without fear of the future.

So here’s to letting the oil of gladness soften the layers the years have made, to becoming like a little child, and to trying to make time for everything, but always leaving an hour slot open for nothing, an hour when I can walk my neighborhood in the sunshine or the rain, softly telling myself strange stories of what could be.

Adult Cool Kids

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You grew up, I think, watching movies and TV shows full of the cool kid archetype. The cool kid was good-looking and confident, had boundless social goodwill with others (usually even the grownups) and got away with being mean to the not-so-cool kid: the shy, the smart, the self-aware, the try-hard, the poor, the awkward, the lonely. The cool kid usually had hair which was a sinister shade of blond, while the outcast (never blond) was inevitably the hero. You liked these stories—everyone liked these stories—because they taught you that you did not deserve to be treated badly, that one day the cool kids in your own benighted school would be penalized (probably publicly) for their meanness, and that all underdogs would ultimately win love, respect, admiration, and maybe the country of Genovia.

Of course the word cool, when applied to a person’s general demeanor, really just means that you have social capital, that you are well-liked without seeming to make too much of an effort, that you carry yourself with confidence. But a word is never just a word, so for most of us who have ever had the excruciating gift of being an adolescent, “cool” carries the weight of all of the above. Even now, all these years into adulthood, there’s cool food and cool clothes and cool music and cool cars and cool shoes and cool water tumblers and cool bedroom furniture and probably cool gas stations, and God forbid any of us ever forget it.

And there are still cool kids. Wherever people gather, however old they are, they seem to eventually stratify, and some effortless folks rise buoyant to the top. Who these people are depends on context. Some groups of adults still unfortunately reward the mean among us, allowing them to rule: those who call the new hire “weird” behind their back, who text their friends under the table when the woman they don’t like speaks up in a meeting, who form ranks and never break them, who are horrified at the thought of inviting an outsider to book club or run club or crochet club. I hope you have managed to avoid the murky communities that foster this kind of adult cool kid. 

You probably have. You probably know that in many places it is cool to be the welcomer, the warm laugher, the one who remembers everybody’s names, who tells good stories and better jokes, who listens, who shares their cool resources indiscriminately. In the right sort of adulthood, the cool kid is the kind one.

But you cannot, under any circumstances, tell them that they’re cool. That is the rule. Sure, they will be flattered that they are well-liked, but the truth of the matter is, they watched the same movies you did when you were all twelve. They, like you, probably identified with the underdog’s journey, and they too are innately suspicious of blondes for no good reason on God’s green earth. If you tell them they are cool they will worry that rather than “having friends,” which is what they thought they were doing, they have actually been existing in a semi-isolated sphere of potentially sinister social power, awaiting their eventual humiliation which may well take place on the stage of a literal school auditorium.

I mean, fine, if they actually are as confident as being “cool” implies, they won’t worry about all that. But you still can’t tell them, because none of us like to look at our most immediate spheres of influence and think about some people having more social capital than others. And to some extent, that’s the right impulse. “Cool” is a juvenile concept. Yet the things we learn as children shape our core indelibly—they mold our bones.

And maybe the part of what “cool” has always meant to us that we can’t shake is that to be cool means to be effortless, not to have to try—not even a little bit—and still succeed anyway. But, of course, that describes none of us, not a single solitary one. We all put in so much effort. If we are accomplishing anything positive—even simple kindnesses—on a regular basis, then we are trying. So adult cool kids are kind of a mirage. If you get to know them well enough to see behind the curtain where all the strivings and the worries and the failures and the getting back up and dusting themselves off live, you will find no longer a cool kid, but a person: an underdog who does not want to have their hair laughed at and who would probably very much like to be your friend. (And so you should be. That would be cool of you.)

The Summer of the Project

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This has been the summer of the project for me. Said projects have included sorting through all my papers stretching back to childhood, painting the bathroom dark purple, beginning the application process to do respite foster care, cleaning beneath the sink where for a few dreadful months a legion of mice took up residence, organizing students to come into school on their summer break so I can interview them on camera for a larger undertaking, painting the kitchen cabinets dark teal, listening to all of Narnia on audiobook, making lists of things to read and places to clean and food to cook, emailing with a travel agent about the course I’m leading to London with a teacher-friend next summer, hanging curtains in my living room that actually block light, finishing the non-fiction piece I started last summer about my endless adventure on Amtrak, and coming across a bag of cut-up t-shirts and deciding to make a quilt, though Lord only knows when that will happen.

All these things are for more than keeping myself busy. I paint because it improves my home, and therefore, by gentle degrees, my life. I plan to foster so that I can share that gently improved life with others. I take on creativity of various kinds to give myself a stable basis for joy.

I suppose on a larger scale, projects in general are all part of the good life, perhaps most of all in their unfinished state—when we are in the midst of the doing, the nailing the roof tiles, the writing the chorus of the song, the signing of the umpteenth form. Because we were designed to try. We are the strivers, the dreamers, the sweat-ers, the laughers, the wanderers and the wonderers, and the pursuers of goodness.

And the best of it is that though in our bones we are tryers, we do not finish the good work. The Lord is the one who brings it completion, who perfects our faith. That truth makes trying much easier, the burden of it light. His promise that he will finish the project that is us, the project that is all creation, his promise that he has already done it, means that we are free to try our best and understand just how little that is, to receive participation trophies in the form of abundant grace, to be prodigal children stumbling home reciting our apology speeches as our father crosses the finish line to meet us, to become transformed children of God waking up with paint still staining our nail beds to each fresh morning in which we can do it all again.

Popsicle Castles

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The first time I remember hearing the story was on a long car trip with my dad and some family friends. We were driving to Gettysburg, and he was waxing eloquent about his grad school days in Chicago. I was only half-listening, and then, all in a moment, I was fully listening because the story he was telling was not one I’d heard before. The characters and the setting were all new. In my memory the first telling of that story went on for forty-five minutes and felt like a whole tv miniseries, fantastic and weird and wonderful.

I’ve heard it a few times since and it doesn’t seem to last quite as long anymore or be quite the fully immersive experience. Over time it has become less funny and more moving to me, and with each new time I hear my dad tell it I find myself with more questions about its heroes. But here—to the best of my ability—is the tale, likely embellished over time in small hazy ways by both my father’s memory and my own:

My dad moved from California to Chicago for grad school around the summer of 1981, but California was not the only place his people were from. His grandmother was from Louisiana out in Goldonna, which I’ve always pictured as sepia-toned, railroad-track-laden swampland. He wasn’t really in touch with any family from back that way, but his grandma of course still was, and when he left for Chicago, she reminded him that he had kin there. One of her Louisiana cousins, Aubyn Hoyle, and her common law husband, Joe Sebold, had lived in Chicago for several years. Like a good boy, he would, of course, need to look them up. 

Perhaps he did or perhaps his Grandma Veonia, called up Aubyn herself to pass along my dad’s number, but the fact remains that they invited him to spend Thanksgiving with him that first autumn. Aubyn and Joe were going to show him a day on the town.

They pulled up to his apartment at the University of Chicago in a pick-up which didn’t seem to have enough working parts to power a lawnmower. They were probably in their forties, but because of hard-living and a scant amount of teeth, looked much older. They were, however, thrilled to have a chance to be hospitable, and to a polite young relation on top of that.

The first place they insisted on taking their PhD-bound cousin was to see their doctor. Doctors, they felt warmly, should associate with doctors, and theirs was especially good, they assured my dad. So soon they were climbing up long flights of stairs to see Dr. Aspirin, their veterinarian. Despite the fact that it was Thanksgiving Day, his waiting room was full of folks who did not look entirely well themselves speaking a variety of languages with decrepit animals languishing across their laps and at their feet. Canine skin diseases seemed to be prominent. Aubyn and Joe marched my dad to the front of the line and asked the wildly overworked receptionist if they could see Dr. Aspirin. “This here’s our kin, and he’s studying to be a doctor, so we want him to meet our doctor.” The receptionist said she would see what she could do, so Aubyn and Joe and my dad settled in with the rest of the hoi polloi to wait. They waited and waited, which of course was to be expected at a doctor’s office, particularly when you were just there to make a social call, but eventually, the honest-to-goodness Dr. Aspirin appeared. He was a tiny Filipino man in a white coat marked by all manner of fluids. Aubyn and Joe explained who my dad was and what they had in common, and the doctor shook his hand very cordially. Aubyn and Joe were well-pleased.

The next stop was Navy Pier which, in the early eighties was no great attraction, but a crowded gray hulk reaching an arm out into Lake Michigan. And then onto what my dad’s hosts assured him was their favorite piece of sculpture in the whole city. And it was, in its own way, a marvel. Forty feet tall, on a rotating platform at the edge of a junkyard were washers welded to lawnmowers fused to the bumpers of old trucks all sticking out at various angles, forming a looming silhouette of machine life and art. It looked as if the thing had grown there, though in retrospect, it couldn’t possibly have. As they wended from stop to stop Aubyn and Joe kept up a regular chatter in the front seat, often turning around to my dad to address him about various aspects of their lives or their city. At one point Aubyn, craned back and announced, with a clear belief that my dad needed to be informed, “You know, dog is God spelled backwards.”

Thanksgiving dinner was special, Joe told my dad, and turned out to take place at a cafeteria in which the turkey consisted of a variety of meat substances stuffed into a fowl-shaped mold, like a sausage casing, and then revealed in glory to the beholder. It was simultaneously a feast for both the eyes and the stomach, as well as appropriate for Aubyn and Joe’s great dearth of teeth. After dinner they took my dad back to their apartment, which was up many flights of stairs, just as Dr. Aspirin’s office had been, and, once inside, was piled high with all manner of things. But as one does with kin, they extracted the family album from one of the many piles and laid it across my dad’s lap for him to appreciate. He opened it, and three cockroaches ran out, skittering across the room and away to cover. Aubyn was not concerned by this intrusion, but began the pleasant due diligence of pointing out all the photos of his grandma as a little girl, as well as legions of relations he had never met.

At last, as my dad was hoping to make his exit, Joe announced that they needed to show him “what they made.” So they led him to the second bedroom, and he opened the door and peered in. But instead of disordered hills of junk, he found tables covered in careful architectural miniatures: the White House, the Empire State Building, the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, all built entirely of popsicle sticks. They were intricate and ordered and clearly represented many hours of work. Aubyn and Joe glowed with pride behind him. These people had dedicated themselves to building a world. My dad couldn’t think of what to say, and so he asked, “Where do you get all the popsicle sticks?” It turned out to be a foolish question, because they then led him to the kitchen and opened the freezer, which was full, of course, of popsicles. Joe smiled his toothless smile.

My dad never saw them again after that one Thanksgiving with all its revelations, but there is a coda to the story. Years later, he was contacted by a lawyer who told him that Joe Sebold had passed away and left my father a few acres of land down in Natchitoches Parish in Louisiana. There were no buildings to speak of on it, and it was hot and sodden and isolated. My dad was in the midst of finishing his doctorate and getting married, so he did the practical thing—he had the lawyer sell the land sight unseen. But Joe had, at the last, done that thing he and Aubyn knew best—reach out to kin, and hold nothing back, offer the very best of what you’ve got.