Roadside | Flash Fiction

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The only thing left is a photograph. Lilian holds it carefully, taking pains not to wrinkle or smudge. She studies the image, trying to imagine what the girl pictured of 28 years ago might possibly be thinking. Ten years old, she stands, smiling into the camera where her mother and father are watching her and she is still believing that life is fair and orderly and kind. That good things happen to good people. That there is meaning and purpose to everything. She is standing roadside in the desert. The front end of the family station wagon peaking to the left. This is quick stop lunch break on a family vacation. The sun is bright and happy. The family is happy and smiling. They are going somewhere. Together. They are laughing. Life is still good.

The girl is ten and Lilian desperately wants to tell the girl to be careful, not to let herself feel too happy. That feeling of easy contentment, of thoughtless confidence and ease. That feeling soon leaves and there is a crushing pain in the vacuum it has left behind.

This picture from that afternoon 28 years ago. She threw all the other photographs away. Let them go to rot. This was the only picture that mattered. This one was the only truth. Ten year old smiling into the unseen future self, that unseen future self staring back. And the emptiness that 38 year old Lillian feels, the gulf that separates them. One is a child who still has parents. The other is 28 years orphaned, which is a way of saying 28 years lost, 28 years bewildered.

The picture girl stands beside the car like she has all the time in the world. She doesn’t realize that all of the time has run out. That life is about to skid and careen, brakeless, into a deep ravine. The body of the car split by guardrail. The bodies of her parents pushed to paste. That girl doesn’t realize how fleeting these moments really are, even the good one, especially the good ones fixed on paper for the future self to see, to remember. She doesn’t yet realize how fearfully long, how interminable the days that pass from them to now. Life is short. Life is long.

And yet, as Lilian studies the photograph taken on the last day of her parents’ lives, she realizes that the girl has something to tell her. Something urgent. What is it? Lilian leans in, watching and listening. As if the girl can speak. As if the scene itself can escape the neat, well-ordered frame.

The girl is holding a half-eaten sandwich. A thing made for her no doubt by her mother. Some quick-made tasteless potted meat on white. What she wouldn’t do to enjoy that sandwich right now. A sandwich made by a mother for long summer car ride between somewhere and somewhere. Enjoy. Chew slowly.

I love you, too.

From the Sea | Flash Fiction

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Note: This is a piece of flash fiction I wrote at Campbell Folk School last weekend. I had the opportunity to read it and really bummed some people out. They were much relieved when I told them this is all made up. It didn’t happen. My grandmother is doing well. We have never stood in the surf together. That would be an amazing thing.

***

I am thinking of the time my grandmother and I stood together at the shoreline, the swirling, salty surf winding between our feet. How the ocean waves rose and fell with the steady, rhythmic tones of a vast, healthy heart. Measureless. We stood there, listening to the entire world breathe, both of us filling our separate lungs with the breath of shared life.

I stared into the waves. The casual press of constant breeze that glides on top. The hushed pulse of unseen lives beneath.

“We tend to ignore those things that crawl from the sea,”  she once told me. “We forget that we ourselves once crawled out from that very same sea.”

And now, I am wanting to cry but the nurses come by too often, peaking their clinical noses into the room, forever pressing buttons, turning knobs, muting alarms that find voice when someone begins to die. The nurses won’t look at me. They know what will happen next. But the orderly comes by, pushing his mop across the already clean linoleum. He looks up from his work, pulling his mop handle like an emergency break. He sees me. I see him. We breathe together, he and I. For just that moment, we share a life. He smiles, nods and gets back to work.

He is gone and I am alone with my grandmother, this fantastic refugee from the sea. And I see the ocean’s work in the soft puddles of her wrinkled face. The soft seaweed of her hair. The thin perch of her teeth pulling away from gum line. Everything about her is pulling away, receding.

I take her hand in mine, cold, frail. I feel the bones of her hand slide together under my careful grasp.

I watch her, wondering what thoughts, what memories, might drift inside that inner tide. And then I feel selfish, petty. Wanting to keep her here, like this, with me in this room, a place she never hoped to be. I set her hand down gently, softly. Let her bones drift back into place.

I try hard not to count the breaths. Counting instead the growing space between the breaths, the place where time seeps in. Trying hard not panic as the space widens and the breaths themselves grow more and more shallow.

I am not ready, but I will never be ready. Knowing full well that everything which once escaped must one day return to that sea. Hoping that everything I have learned from watching is true. That same tide which pulls things away soon returns. Life takes. Life gives. And all I can do for now is stand watch and notice.

This Tree. Specific.

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I became friends with a tree this weekend.

Campbell Folk School is a very community-centered place, so I arrived fully expecting to make new friends. I met many fine people from all walks of life and from all over the country. I did not expect the closest of those friends to be the tree outside our Orchard House writing room. I spent a fair amount of my weekend admiring that tree and writing underneath its branches.

Throughout the three day workshop, our instructor admonished us to be specific. Don’t say tree. Say white pine or birch or cedar. The work of revision is always moving toward greater specificity. Not just any tree. This tree. Specific.

The problem was we had no idea what kind of tree my friend was. We didn’t know how to name it. One of the workshop participants teaches biology. She used a tree taxonomy guide to move through the criteria toward a name. Deciduous. Broad. Flat. Asymmetrical. Ragged edges. My biology teacher friend suggested our new friend might be an elm. This made sense. My tree friend was both incredibly familiar (an exemplar of treeness) and otherwordly. It is possible that I had never before seen a fully grown elm. Most elms in my part of the country were killed off by Dutch Elm disease before I was born.

“This Tree. Specific.” is the poem I wrote about my new friend. I was able to read this piece at Sunday Morning Song. Reading this poem on that last morning felt like an appropriate offering to show gratitude to my classmates, to our instructor, to the Folk School and, most of all, to my friend the tree.

“This Tree. Specific.”

We are friends now, you and I. I sit

beneath your branches, waiting to know your name.

Don’t bother me with binomial nomenclature. It is your stature I most admire,

and the welcoming way you spread your branches to embrace new friends.

And your tremendous, unwavering patience as you press careful roots into dirt.

Ever mindful of the bustling, burrowing communities teeming below.

So many questions you might answer.

Did you know John Campbell? Did he sit here where I do listening for your secrets?

Can you teach me to make a meal of sunlight and rain?

Never mind. I’m pestering you now. I do that to my friends.

It is enough for now to sit beneath your branches, to appreciate the way you exert yourself in the world. Patient. Dignified.

I do not need to know your name. You are this tree. Specific. Friendly. My friend.

 

Crafting Community: Impressions of Campbell Folk School

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We come to Campbell Folk School to craft some thing – a bowl, a scarf, a decorative rod of forged steel, a poem. We come to study and practice our crafts and, in the learning, we create for ourselves an entire community.

Find your community, the instructor tells us. This is imperative. Make a commitment and build your audience. And we set to work.

The writing is easier and better here, more forceful and clear, in the company of others. You meet gifted artists who don’t recognize their own gifts, people, who, like you, are plagued by self-doubt. You begin to notice that the joys and challenges and struggles are universal. You aren’t doing this thing alone. People notice your work. Your specific work. A specific line. A specific tone or phrase. And when they praise, you trust them because of the specificity of their praise. And you take second and third hard looks at your own work to help it be ready to share.

And the generosity of the instructor, laying down sheaf after sheaf of poems, a riot of prompts and exercises. You meet the older fellow, a librarian like you, but struggling today with his nerves, not sure he has found the right words to say what needs saying. You work it through together. Celebrate discovery of the right words. You laugh. You share. You allow yourself to be ridiculous, to say possibly stupid things. You are excited by everyone else’s success. Their success is your success.

The meals are a community of first name neighbors. You eat with black smiths, weavers, musicians, wood turners. In their other lives they are engineers, teachers, research economists. They gather here from Tennessee, Ohio, Florida, Russia, Bulgaria. You pass the bread. You offer each other second and third helpings. You clear the table together. You bring each other coffee. The meal is locally sourced and unbelievably fresh. Michelle jokes that the salad is so fresh someone found a snail in theirs.

And you befriend the elm outside your workshop door. It stands majestically tall, like a magical giant from another age. And only as you are driving home do you realize that the archaic majesty of this mighty tree is a true thing. This tree is thing you have never seen. There are no more elms where you live. They all died of Dutch Elm disease before you were born.

We offer our poetry aloud at 7:30 morning song. People listen. They comment. They applaud.

And in this spirit of wide generosity, poetry is moving. You are writing more today than you wrote the entire month of May. And it is good, strong writing. It is connected, specific. It has something to say.

This place draws art out of you. It helps you believe you are capable of creating beauty. It helps you remember that the effort of art is worthwhile.

And the sunlight is a smiling force. And there is harmony and all is well and all is right and you are finally ready to claim the gifts you have picked up so many times before only to set them right back down again. This time, you know, you can hold on to them. You can shape those gifts into a craft and let those gifts shape you.

This is why you are here. It is why any of us are here.

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Humble Brag: One year and 40 pounds

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One year ago today, my doctor gave me some heavy news. If I didn’t make some positive changes quick, I was going to end up diabetic and at high risk for heart issues. I was a whisker away from pre-diabetic and my good/bad cholesterol mix was upside down. We talked a lot about the link between diabetes and early onset dimentia. I came away from that conversation with my head spinning. I knew I wasn’t healthy but I had always figured I had time to get it together. Always sometime in the future. Suddenly, I had no time to waste.

After that conversation, I became very focused on sugar. My choices became very simple. Sugar is hurting me. Don’t eat sugar. I trimmed most of the sugar and processed foods from my diet and got more active. I had a Fitbit and started paying attention to more than just my steps. I started tracking my calories intake/output. I had specific, measurable goals that I could monitor in realtime and make useful choices throughout the day. I started taking my breaks to walk at work and walked on my lunch break. It wasn’t hard. It just required consistency.

I’m no longer pre-diabetic and my cholesterol is mixed the right direction. I lost 40 pounds and feel good most days. I joined a running group and am pushing my mileage toward my first half marathon in November.

This isn’t just a humble brag. Everybody’s journey is different. Losing weight is easier for guys than girls. It has to do with metabolism, muscle mass and such. I’m not bragging. I just want to say that I’m proud of what I’ve done for myself this past year and that it wasn’t as difficult as I had told myself it would be. In fact, I succeeded because it became very, very simple. Avoid sugar. Drink water. Get active. Be consistent.

And that’s the takeaway: Keep it simple and be consistent. Every day do the thing that matters most. Whatever it is you want or need, it is right there for you. It is possible. Start now. Keep it simple. Do it everyday.

A Planet Called Rizak

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I wrote my first short story when I was 10. It was about a planet called Rizak that was facing ecological collapse. Rizakian scientists had discovered a path away from inevitable destruction, but it required everyone on the planet working closely together and no small measure of personal sacrifice. Rizakian politicians and religious leaders hated the plan because, if everyone worked directly to fix the problem, politicians and religious leaders would no longer be needed. Rizakian business leaders hated the plan because it was expensive and meant no one would have time or money left to buy the things they were selling. So, everybody died.

I grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (site of the WWII Manhattan Project) during the Reagan administration. At the time, I felt pretty certain I would die by sudden nuclear annihilation. Funny how, despite the preoccupations of the conscious mind, the unconscious mind finds the more plausible story.

Easy Outrage

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Let’s stop moralizing with each other. There are no rules anymore. Kathy Griffin did an outrageous thing. I don’t care. Every day since November has been full of outrageous things. Just this week I have woken up to news reports about a Congressman elected to office the day after publicly assaulting a news reporter and a Texas state legislator who threatened to shoot his colleague in the head as his solution to a peaceful but inconvenient demonstration in the state chamber.

Meanwhile, our country is preparing to abdicate responsibility to my daughter’s generation by stepping out of the Paris Climate treaty. New health care laws are coming that no one actually wants or understands. We are staring down a budget that systemically underfunds education, science, and welfare assistance. Nine years after the Great Recession, we are already deregulating the very industries that recently crippled our economy with unbridled greed and excess. Across the country, state legislators pontificate about limiting the role of government in our personal lives while blithely extending the reach of government into the vagina of every woman of childbearing age. Shameful.

Kathy Griffin doesn’t matter. She can disappear. Like all celebrities, she only gets to have the power we lend her with our attention. Our tweeting, celebrity president understands this very well. His rise as candidate was fueled by mendacious assertions that the sitting president was not a United States citizen. Our civic discourse has been downhill ever since.

This isn’t democracy. This is celebrity culture run amok. These people aren’t serious people. They don’t even pretend to address the needs of our time. They hook our attention with sensational acts, inflammatory tweets. We feed them in turn with our easy outrage.

Don’t be fooled. Easy outrage is a trap to keep us constantly dispirited and deeply distracted. Easy outrage keeps us fighting against each other rather than making common cause to fix our dangerously broken system.

Today it was Kathy Griffin. Tomorrow it will be someone else. It doesn’t matter. Keep your seat. Try to stay focused. Save your powder. You are going to need it.

History > Biography

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Here in America, we make a big deal about “We the People.” We’re always going on about the “will of the people”, the “voice of the people” and such. Veneration of The People is a core aspect of how we describe and discuss ourselves. And yet, an awkward tension exists in our democratic lives. While we espouse a deep, sacred reverence for The People, the stories we most often tell about ourselves are dominated by a few strong, individual heroes.

Think about the version of American history you were given in school. It probably goes something like this:

In 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered America. Soon after, European explorers like Cortes and De Soto came in search of gold. After them came John Winthrop and John Smith to colonize the North American wilds. The colonies grew until they could no longer tolerate the abuses of King George. And so, General George Washington crossed the Delaware River with his crew and defeated the Red Coats. A group of smart men led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote the Constitution and then elected George Washington as our first president because he was very honest about cutting down that cherry tree. Over time, the States disagreed about slavery and how to organize their individual economies. Grant and Lee fought a Civil War. Thankfully, Abraham Lincoln was there to make the Civil War turn out right.

You get the idea. The stories we tell ourselves about our own past do not belong to us. They focus exclusively on the acts of powerful, privileged few. There is no doubt that powerful individuals often make bold, sometimes courageous decisions that impact their times and future generations. But, too often, we mistake their biographies as our entire history. History is bigger than biography.

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is an antidote for the usual biographical mode of telling history. Reading Zinn’s book is a strange, unsettling experience. There are dangerous ideas hiding inside. Ideas about war and voting as methods of domestic subjugation and social control. Buried accounts of civil disobedience, social action and unrest that resulted in lasting improvements in the lives of working people across the country.

Zinn’s history is full of surprises and surprising takes on a once familiar history. But the thing that makes Zinn’s prose most powerful is the lack of a biographical narrative. The usual heroes are absent from the center stage. When they appear, it is in reaction to the collective acts of organized masses — organized in their shared need, anger and frustration.

Zinn offers an account of American history focused entirely on the accumulating success of collective actions rather than the biographical quirks of a selective, impressive few. That the book succeeds in telling our shared story without making it the province of a few powerful players makes it a useful touchstone for understanding what America is and what America might become. 688 pages that give your country back to you. Highly recommended.

Reality TV Show President

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Back in November, slightly less than half of American voters elected our first reality TV show president. For many, it was a genuinely painful choice. They didn’t like their options, but, since America is an Option A or Option B kind of place, they held their nose and pressed what they hoped would be the least bad button. You know the rest.

Since November, I have come to realize that many hoped the button they were pushing was connected to much needed change. Some saw their choice in terms of Ultimate Washington Insider vs. Ultimate Washington Outsider. Some thought they were voting for a successful business executive. That’s completely understandable. There are very tall buildings all around the world with his name on them. He had casinos and a university. Who am I to know if any of these ventures are actually successful? You don’t see my name on the top of tall buildings, casinos and universities.

Unfortunately, those who voted for the successful business executive got the reality TV star, instead. Now, we all find ourselves trapped inside a reality TV show. The usual rules of logic, evidence and careful deliberation do not apply. Facts are debased. Conflict is amplified.

Fans of reality TV know how this goes. There is no script. All that matters is a compelling, engaging narrative every day with obvious heroes and villains. When the story goes stale, the conflict is easily refreshed with a few well-placed tweets. This story will be a shambling, nonsensical cascade of escalating conflict and aggrievement until the season ends or the show gets canceled.

In the meantime, we are all trapped inside. I never hoped to be in a reality TV show, but now that I’m here, I’m desperate to know which TV show this is so I can understand the rules.

The White House itself seems to operate like The Apprentice. Each week, the cast is given an impossible, ridiculous task, and, each week, someone hear’s the unfortunate, but expected tagline: “You’re fired.”

Congress seems to operate like Big Brother. A crowd of mismatched strangers forced to get along without any real purpose or sense of direction except trying not to look like a total loser on live TV.

The rest of us, I fear, are Naked and Afraid. There are no tools. There are no ready-made shelters. We’ve just got each other and the ever-present hope that, if we work together and stay focused, someone will eventually show up in a rescue jeep, boat or helicopter before we die of starvation, bacterial infection, or get eaten by wild animals.

Talent Show

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Tonight we enjoyed the elementary school talent show. My daughter chose not to perform but we went to support her friends. There was singing and dancing. A few guitar and piano solos. A violin duo. Two magic acts. Martial arts. A break dancer on a pogo stick. An Elvis and Michael Jackson tribute. Ukulele punk rock. A girl who solved two Rubic’s Cubes with ACDC’s Thunderstruck playing as background music.

I was struck by the bravery of these kids standing on stage and showing themselves — their interests, their passions. Some of these kids were already well-trained in their talents. Otherwise were just finding them for the first time. These kids were audacious and wonderfully weird.

I began wondering how many of these same kids would make it through middle school still as eager to stand in presentation before all their peers and be so bravely, unapologetically themselves, so wonderfully weird. I hope all will, but I fear too many will not. Something tragic happens to us sometime between elementary school and adulthood. Just as we begin to explore and understand our passions, our curiosities, our interests, something tells us to stop being silly, to set those things aside. We begin to question our innate riches. We stop ourselves from exploring. We surrender our talents.

We make too much of talent, I think. We praise it too highly in others and too often fail to credit very much of it in ourselves. The elementary school talent show is a reminder that we are all innately talented. We can’t all sing beautifully but we can all sing with exuberance. Discovering and developing a talent is a wonderful thing. Better than talent is the courage to stand in front of your peers and be known as you truly are – audacious and wonderfully weird.