A Story

I had the thought yesterday I could pinpoint the date I ran away from DeSisto School because the Moody Blues played Tanglewood that night, and that information (even the setlist!) would be online. My “RA” was at that concert and many others from our dorm, too. If they hadn’t been I could never have run away. As it was, Carolyn, the dorm parent who had an apartment off the main dorm, suspected I was going to run and made me sleep on the floor in her living room. My roommate was put guard over me, sleeping next to me on the couch. I had to lie there silently and breathe even, calm all of everything but stay awake. My grandmother had given me a gold bangle bracelet–not real but I wore it all the time. It clunked on the floor when I started to make my way into a crouch so I took it off and left it on my pillow, knowing I’d never see it again. I inched across the floor, crawling a bit at a time and freezing, then going a bit further and freezing. When I got to Carolyn’s front door there was a Hebrew character hanging on it that kept knocking against the door so I had to lift it off and leave it on the floor. I always felt bad about that because I didn’t mean any disrespect to her religious beliefs but I knew she would easily take it that way. I just needed to be quiet.

I finally made it out of there and down the hall to my room, where I got dressed and grabbed $50 in one dollar bills I’d been stashing along with my other, regular roommate Beth. We were saving to run away in the fall when she got back from her enforced camping expedition with a group from the school. So I stole her contributions to that fund along with my own to run away with Craig. It hurt her. I didn’t mean to hurt her or do the wrong thing. It seemed like the right thing to do under the circumstances…but to be totally honest I just wanted the chance to be alone on the road with Craig. I was a little shit in a lot of ways but not out of malice. I had to do things. I don’t know. I didn’t think about how I affected others or more to the point it didn’t occur to me that I affected others much. I was smart and knew how to bravado my way, and I felt how guys looked at me too. I don’t think I took much advantage of that but I noticed it and felt its power. After being powerless for years it was heady and I was a lonely girl. But here it was different, something had changed. I wanted to be near Craig and I wanted him to touch me and I wanted to touch him.

The school, on a few acres of land outside of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was an experimental school. We were all butterflies…rather we were caterpillars and chrysalises striving toward being butterflies.

It was a bad place. I was actually kind-of excited to be going there after five long months in the hospital. It felt almost like I was going to college. I was going to get my shit together and make something of my life eventually. The first night I got there they let me unpack and eat dinner at the dining hall, outside of which I first saw Craig. They let me get into my pajamas and go to bed and lie there in the dark for awhile, getting my bearings, thinking this is a bit weird but OK. I was the new girl again, nothing new about that. I’m starting to relax when the door opens, the light comes on, and five girls pounce on me, holding me down. They had all my limbs and I fought but couldn’t move. I spat in one girl’s face. I don’t even know where that came from but that’s what I did. Like an animal.

They dragged me up to a room on the second floor that had bunks along the walls and about 10 girls sleeping in them and also on the floor. I forget what they called this, but these were all the girls at high risk for running away. I was here because I needed to earn their trust that I wouldn’t run. We had all these kids in a room on the second floor, and they blockaded the door with a dresser.

So this was the environment. A lot of money there. My parents had always done well for themselves even though their investments and houses kept us living poor in a lot of ways. It looked good from the outside but it was weiners and beans for dinner. lol. And cold. Not loving. Appearances matter more than what’s inside. Aaaanyway. DeSisto attracted a far richer set than any circles my parents traveled. Judd Hirsch’s son was there when I was. People spent a lot of money to send their unruly privileged troubled teenagers to a place that promised they would come out creative, productive, and even specially gifted citizens. It was a fucking concentration camp with a real chef to cook our meals and culture and nature all around, and Alice’s Restaurant.

Craig and I hit it off immediately. We both knew exactly what was going to happen so we didn’t waste any time pretending it wasn’t happening. I think it was the second day I was there–it was May, just after Mother’s Day–the afternoon was warm and muggy and brought a torrential thunderstorm, which the group of us stayed out in, enjoying the heavy, warm water pelting us. I looked at Craig and felt a burst of joy, stepped up to him and threw my arms around him. He was surprised but only for the briefest beat before he smiled and hugged me back, lifting me off my feet. That was it.

So five weeks later when he and Tex stood outside my window and told me they’d been kicked out of the boy’s dorm to fend for themselves for the night…when he said they were running away and he wanted me to come with them, I had to say yes. I would meet them later in Lenox. But my summer roommate heard the tail end of this and they shut me away in Carolyn’s apartment because everyone was at Tanglewood for the Moody Blues.

I made it out of the dorm and skirted the buildings, down to Route 183, turned left and headed up the road, jumping to the side into ditches or shadows every time a car was coming because I was walking straight toward Tanglewood. A whole lot of adrenaline going through me that night, and it is going through me now, thinking about it. Ha! The wonder of Google…I can tell you I walked 3.6 miles to Lenox wearing my very stylish and practical outfit which included moccasin boots–no support at all. But it was my best don’t-fuck-with-me-I’m-cool outfit. There is power in image.

It was very late when I got to Lenox. Traffic had died, the concert long over. I walked through the empty streets…I didn’t really know where I was but I thought I could find the place we were meeting. Starting to get a bit scared I turned down a street I was pretty sure was the right one and I hear something and saw at the same time motion across the street in a recess–he stepped out and I ran over and hugged him and never had a hug felt warmer or more welcome, ever.

We walked over the mountain to Pittsfield, singing Ozzy songs and enjoying our freedom and power in the moment. In the early morning we all bought one-way tickets to Albany at the bus station, along with a couple packs of Marlboros.

And that is in large part how I came to be in the Cultural Education Center on July 17, 1984. A Tuesday. Thirty-five years ago yesterday.

Rocks

In Memoriam.

“Rocks” is a reference to the Jewish custom of leaving rocks on someone’s grave, in remembrance. “Rocks” is a place to re-member those whom I have loved or admired, or who have done good service in Thee Old Cause. (I am not Jewish, although I feel an affinity with Jews and if I had to choose a religion I would be a Jewish atheist.) I first learned of this custom from the movie, Schindler’s List, in which the survivors and their families lined up to place rocks on Schindler’s grave. It has always stuck with me.

Today, on the hunter’s moon, October 2018, I’d like to remember my professor, Arthur Clements. I took a course with him in fall 1993 that wrapped together Medicine, the New Physics, Mysticism, Poetry, and damn–D.H. Lawrence! I’d never read Lawrence before, and we didn’t read Lady Chatterley’s Lover either. We read The Man Who Died. It was a great class. He was both fierce and compassionate–if you didn’t read the material, he might kick you out of class, but if you did he would listen to you, even if you said strange things, and take you seriously. I contacted Art in 2003 because I was writing again, and we talked a few times on the phone. He was dying of cancer then. In the spring of 2004 I got an email from his companion–that is what he called her, which seemed to me both cozy and maybe a little distancing for a lover–asking me if I would be willing to speak at his memorial, that he had wondered if I would in his last days. So I wrote the following piece and drove to Binghamton, where I stood, and shook, and read. One last lesson.

Art and Life

I took one of Arthur Clements’ classes in the fall of 1993, my second semester at Binghamton University. It was not an easy class, and I regard it as formative. I am still learning the lessons he laid out for us then, for, as so often happens with a good teacher, I understood what he was talking about while there, in his class and steeped in the material, but it has taken me years to apply it. I am still weaving it in, and I suppose I always will be—because the subject Art concerned himself with was far more than academic; it was Life.

Allow me to give you an example. Our final paper was to be 16 to 20 pages, discussing the works of Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Galway Kinnell. We were to “find a theme tying them together—what is common, what is distinctive, and how they distinctively express what they have in common.” A difficult task indeed—one which I worked very hard to fulfill. On the last day of class, before we handed our papers in, Art told us we had a choice: we could tell him not to count our paper, in which case he would automatically give it an A, or we could tell him to make it count, in which case we took our chances on the grade it received. I still remember the mingled fear and hope of that moment when I gave up a guaranteed A in favor of an honest appraisal of my work.

This is what I am grateful for—he took pains to elicit the very experience of being awake and alive that we were studying in these authors. He tried to show us that every moment we have a choice to either make ourselves comfortable or take the opportunity to push our boundaries, defy convention, give up the standard measures of success. “The object,” he once told us, “is to live intensely, feel intensely, love intensely—happiness is not a state of constant comfort and ease of soul.”

It is therefore with conviction that I can say to those who are feeling pain in the wake of Art’s passing: he would want you to embrace that pain and see it for the gift it is—another opportunity to experience the fullness of life, here and now.

April 2004

Arthur Clements

“This is a subtle truth: Whatever you love, you are.” ~Rumi

A Taste of Wild Raspberries

August 2010.
For a long time I have largely avoided writing because I had done it so much I began to feel it got between me and experience, the way cameras and video recorders can get between you and watching your child grow up. The recorder, the reporter was always there, translating experience into simile and metaphor before I’d had a chance to taste, let alone digest, what was happening. But writing has been my main mode of digestion for most of my life—to make sense of the exchange between my inner world and the outer world, to extract nourishment from the meanest and the most expansive movements of these worlds.

Today I walked in the fields and woods of Thacher Park, the first time in many weeks because I have been so busy—busy-ness, busy-ness, busy-ness and I no longer have my sweet joyful dog expecting and needing me to take her for her weekend excursions. And myself, though I need these walks as much as she did, myself I can put off and deny in the face of work that must be done during the precious little time I am not at work, at The Job.
Every time I go to Thacher Park now, since Heidi died in May, I weep a little. Sometimes quiet, tears rolling down my face for brief moments before the wind in the trees or birdsong or the peace of the place soothes me and I walk on. Sometimes I stop and gasp with sobs, seeing her smiling face looking up at me with joy and adoration. Never for long, though. I think the disinterested benevolence of those woods has much to do with this, but I also know that it is because I am slowly digesting the enormity of her absence. Like a snake who has swallowed an elephant.

Heidi had been sick for a year and a half at least. She started throwing up after meals months before emergency surgery to remove her spleen and a tumor the size of a navel orange. We didn’t know whether it would be worth putting her through the pain at the time— the vet gave her two months tops post-surgery—but we could not bring ourselves to euthanize her then, when the last time she had seen us was in the examination room and I could not stop crying and holding her. So damn the expense, and the pain of recovery, and the dismal prospects. We gave the go ahead, and brought our doped-up girl home a day later, wincing at her slow movements and the twenty-seven shining staples along her shaved belly.

Two and a half weeks later, on a mild March Saturday morning, I coaxed her into the back of my old Ford Escort wagon and we went to get those staples taken out, picked up my friend Eileen, and went to Thacher Park to walk through sloppy mud and melting snow. It was a bit too much for her, those two miles or so of trails, and she lay down on the drive home instead of holding her pretty head up for me to see in the rearview mirror. Heidi spent the day sleeping and I felt guilty for having pushed her, but Sunday saw us back up there in the woods, for a shorter walk this time, and she was a little better. A little stronger.
Every weekend after that we walked in the woods, as we had been doing since autumn 2002, when I sought solace after an ill-conceived foray into law school. Every weekend I said good-bye, letting Heidi lead me wherever she wanted to go. We walked every trail we had ever walked, and even found new ones. Every step was precious, every time perhaps the last time we would walk this way together.

Spring bloomed, summer ripened, and August offered me wild raspberries for first breakfast three yards from Beaver Dam Road—the small ritual I had observed for years made sweeter now by the question of her presence, the ever-present last-ness of each ramble. But Heidi lasted. Longer than the vet’s prediction, longer than my most hopeful hopes. We walked through autumn, then winter, until I fractured my hip in January and was forced to stop for weeks, each one passing interminably as I let Heidi out to throw up in the backyard after every meal, wondering how much longer she would last, each weekend passing irretrievable.

We walked again, and again, and spring came again, and we passed the anniversary of Heidi’s surgery. She remained joyful and always willing, eager to go on our rambles though slowly starving to death, throwing up more and more often, until one Thursday night in early May she couldn’t stop. Every twenty minutes all night long we ran a slow race to the back door, and by dawn I knew the time had come. Even though I knew she could continue this way for weeks, or maybe months, longer, I didn’t want her final days to be lingering, didn’t want her to die when she could no longer go up to her Place, the woods.

Friday morning I called in sick, then called the vets and made the appointment for Monday evening. Dr. Jarvis would come to our home to spare Heidi from having to spend her last moments in fear. I allowed myself a few tears, a moment of tears, then vowed not to cry, not to mourn—not this weekend, not our last weekend—and then we went to Thacher.
Twice a day that weekend we went to Thacher, except Sunday, when I could not coax Heidi from her spot on our bedroom floor in the morning. I went alone, thinking I must get used to it. I walked fast along the trails, escaping the fact of her absence, which sat inside my heart like a great, heavy stone, and then I saw, sitting on top of a boulder, a large rock. It called to me. I lifted it and felt its weight as I walked back to the car. Heidi’s headstone.
Later that day my younger son accompanied us to Thacher, then Heidi and I went again on our own Monday morning, and Monday afternoon my older son, Heidi, and I climbed the Long Trail up the steep hillside across Beaver Dam Road. We stood and looked down at the valley as the wind gusted around us. And walking slowly down, down to the car it really was the last time.

Heidi died on her soft, red flannel sheet, in the grass under the old cedar tree back of our house, with birds singing and the westering sun shining in her golden red hair, all of us around her, petting her and telling her what a good girl she is.

And I did not dissolve into tears as I thought I would. All the holding back I had done that weekend really had turned my grief into a heavy stone that filled the whole of my trunk, both solid and cavernous at once.

Today it is August 28, and I have missed many weekends at Thacher Park. So much can get between you and life. I stopped writing because I wanted to experience without the reporter constantly interpreting. And this is really valid, except I think about how often I have been filled with gratitude to my former selves for setting down in words their experiences, so I could read them and taste those moments in their immediacy once again.

Today I passed by the wild raspberries, hoping to find a few lingering berries at the end of their season, but the clusters had been picked clean by birds and other hikers. I found a few broken berries on one cluster and picked them, held them in my hand for a moment then popped them into my mouth—more crunch than sweetness. Faint regret for allowing busy-ness to come between myself and this small, yearly ritual, but I swallowed and walked on. I started thinking about writing, about the taste of wild raspberries in August, and saw with reluctance that the reporter was back and the trees were passing by unnoticed as words strung themselves into sentences in my head.

Midstep in my thoughts I was arrested by the sight of a perfect cluster of raspberries just off the path, a long way from the bushes I usually visit. Red and fully formed they hung there before I reached out and gently pried the caps from their heads. I held them in the palm of my hand, wondering at their perfect forms as the reporter in my head said, “how like the faintly ridiculous bathing caps those lovely water-ballet ladies wear.” Then I ate them, one at a time, savoring their perfect sweetness as I walked slowly on.

Miss Heidi

Miss Heidi, the Fluffernutter

I Wish I Knew Joe

September 26, 2010, a bit before midnight, day before the 6th anniversary of CS’s death and two days after leaving the job.

I am sitting on the porch with the few crickets left singing outside in the cool night, peaceful, after listening to all the cut conversations from Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. I am so glad to be here…this little ramshackle house in Albany, NY, United States of America, Earth. I’m a person among many persons in an overcrowded world of persons and not nearly enough wilderness ~ but a lot of wilderness if you count our minds.

(God, that man’s hands. Have you ever really looked at hands? They are stars. They are magnificent and improbable and so fine. Like faces they have beauty that transcends any conventional beauty if you really LOOK.)

Look. There is beauty all around. What can you do? Smile at strangers. Bring some comfort. I am indebted to Joe Strummer and The Clash for giving me back my anger and my joy, my self-respect, my strength. I don’t know where I am going. I don’t know what will happen, but I am free. And I always could have been, if I had looked. Jumping into the next thing isn’t always the right path. Beware. Hold yourself steady and really look.

“Anger can be power—don’t you know that you can use it?”

Something I saw  when I was very young and resisted the gray life ahead, but when I got older it tore me apart because I finally bought into the notion that being free was something that could be attained by playing the game, by fitting in where I had no real connection.

Of course, you make connections….You make them wherever you are, to try to make a place feel like home even when you are screaming “Let me out!!” You can tell yourself all kinds of stories about duty and love and giving the benefit of the doubt—doubting your SELF all the time while you sicken and die trying to fit a mold.

And there are approximate fits. Where you think you could bear spending most of your waking hours, giving your soul for a fistful of dollars and dreaming of retirement when you will really be able to do what you want—but of course we’ve seen that story played out a hundred different ways, or maybe just one or two. People who no longer have any lodestar because they gave it up to work for IBM or some other sure bet, security and lifelessness in exchange for life, juice, adventure, reality. Enough money for a house, car, kids, and maybe a diamond or two at Christmas. (Filthy diamonds ripped out of the earth by people who have been enslaved by the diamond industry.)

It’s all connected. It’s all connected. The sparkle and the filth. And if you are on one side then you are most assuredly on the other. So what’s the middle ground? Where am I going? Where do I want to be? I wish I knew Joe.

Thing is, it’s all connected. The net of gems is cast out upon the universe and one strummer on six strings can reach millions of people and change the lives of many more than that. Ripple effect. Your smile today can make a great difference in a moment that will be remembered by one and maybe felt by many others who will never see you or know of your existence. Because you make one person feel better for one moment.

So in a way I do know Joe, because he has given of himself and that ripples out to me ~ those ripples found me as I was drowning and lifted me up, not just enough to get air but enough to see. To look around and know I was not where I wanted to be. And then gave me the courage to think that I could have the audacity to leave.

No one, none of us, is a saint. And who ever said our heroes must be? I’d rather learn face to face from a bum than at the feet of a holy roller.

I am grateful to be here on this porch in the cool night air, looking at the layers of peeling paint on a window that went out of production 80 years ago. I am grateful for The Clash, and Joe Strummer, and all those people who spoke about him in that movie. I am grateful for September, the month of endings and beginnings. I am grateful for the freedom to write into the night.