Much depends on a string shopping bag...

I was wandering through the cafeteria of my school the other day supervising the eating activities of our multitudes, and one of the students called me, a lovely girl from the mountains of Vietnam, “Look!” she said, and held up the knitting she was doing.  I stopped to admire it and praise the consistency of the tension.  Next to her was Alice, a refugee by some long series of transitions, from some part of west Africa, who has never communicated much to me but shy smiles, and I remarked that as a child in Mexico, I had been taught to crochet string shopping bags.  This elicited a great burst of excitement from Alice.  She told me how all the girls in her school made shopping bags, of all colours, and how lovely and how useful they were.  They sometimes crocheted with two colours together, and competed with each other to make the most beautiful bag. “We were very proud and happy!”  I could see in her eyes the memory of her with her vanished friends, the laughter and jokes they made.  I tried not think of what she and her brothers had had to run from, only that she was here and for a moment was washed in a happy memory.

 It is a quintessentially female experience, I think, this making of bags.  I learned because I was in a Mexican school in the 50’s when boys were allowed PE, and girls allowed only the demure pastime of sitting in a classroom learning a useful skill.  I was Canadian, and while I relished and continue to relish my shopping bag making activity, I thought even then that it was silly that boys got to run around outside, shouting and playing, while we were considered…I never knew what, too weak? Or that it was unseemly for girls?

 But here was Alice, who never questioned the making of shopping bags, though it too must have come from a world where the boys were off doing something else, but loved it and the solidarity and companionship it signified with the friends she knew. She summoned up a world of colour and sunshine for me on that dreary, grey, BC day, with her smiling excitement, and we exclaimed and laughed like girls together at the memory of how we struggled with our bags.  I went away filled with gratitude for Alice, and that far-away Mexican teacher who handed me a ball of string and a crochet hook, all for this one moment of connection half a century later in a noisy Vancouver high school cafeteria.

October light

Eugenio Montale: “Bring me the sunflower crazed with light.”

Today’s Poem; Eugenio Montale “Bring me the Sunflower” ends with the line above. It is an image that blazes. It is raining dismally onto the skylight above me, and so it should; we are nearly mid-way into October, the dying time of year.  Where does the light go? The sun falls from the sky like gold flaking off a temple and collects around my feet, blinding me on a gray afternoon.  It is the sun exploding on trees that I kick into piles, and all the oranges and golds of the season’s colours are the falling light of the year.  My English uncle used to laugh at me for calling this season the “Fall”.  He considered it a quaint north Americanism; a kind of distanced ignorance, as if I’d strayed too far from the English of my ancestors.  But it is the fall, this great cascading of light from the sky to the ground; understandable that our European ancestors watched with misgiving as the sun buried itself in the soil, and devised every form of prayer and fire to bring it back.  But let me not get ahead of myself; just now there is the perfect juxtaposition of Payne’s Gray and Cadmium to flame the heart.

Armloads of drifting sun

I was not used to this falling

When I was young, near the equator

The sun never varied, but here it pulls me

With it, as if I must go into the underworld.

Light, life, everything swallowed into darkness

Singing its praises.

It is an Olympic battle, is it not?

 It has devised a creature

Whose heart can flame,

Can light a fire and wait it out

a beginning and a funeral

Herein begins my blog.  I imagine that in the end I will write most about the poetic process, or  things that could lead to poetry,  as it is the thing that in my scattered life that I do most consistently, besides having a home made chocolate chip cookie just before bed every night.  For me it is just that, a process.  A captured thought...and these are easier to lose than car keys... a reflection, and then sometimes, a poem.  It contains elements of how I have taught kids to write; head down, don't censor, and let's see where it leads you.  I am a habitue of Poetry Daily, and often spin off something I have read there; seeing the good contemporary poetry prods me into the right frame of mind; into wanting to capture briefly the ephemeral and hard to nail down.  But it is also a kind of dialogue, a response of sorts, to what I have read, that triggers something in my own life.

That is my first recommendation; read poetry.  Do not be deterred by how envious it makes you.  There is room in the world for every single person to be a poet. (Though I am momentarily stalled in my thoughts about what a wonderful world this would be when I remember recently hearing  Slavoj Zizek, the Slavonian philosopher, declaring that if you look into the past of many monstrous dictatorships you will find a poet).

But I will start with a death.   I went to the funeral yesterday of a twenty year old odder than any I have been to.  It was like a novice poem in a way, in which everything that might have mattered was kept hidden.   We were adjured, ordered even, by the pastor not to think of his death, but only his life, and only a tiny fraction of that.  A life recorded in mostly smiling photographs with no hint of who he might have been between all those snaps. It seemed to me that the boy I knew, who struggled bravely against, in the end, overwhelming odds, was lost somewhere in this memorial.

In life he shambled, as if his head and limbs had all been assembled by an apprenticed toy maker.   He looked like a young man set loose by Dickens; one brought up by hand, his hair flinging out from under a baseball cap, and the plaid shirt hanging off his skinny body.  His blue eyes were what you saw, though, always full of hope that this moment would turn out all right for him.

Someone whispered to me that they did not see his birth mother in the standing room only crowd.  The photos showed him as a baby with a very, very young father.  I wondered about all that we could not know about his life.  I remembered kids I had worked with in the 80s who found themselves with babies, and how they looked at them with feelings that mingled pride and fear.  They always hoped to build families like those they could imagine, but had never had, and in the end, they could not, and the babies were taken into care, or absorbed into the homes of their grandparents.

I wondered now if he might be such a one.  It is quite true that he was optimistic and loved everyone.  It was what made him so appealing.  But he struggled every day.  He was learning disabled; what a multitude of troubles that covers.  For him it meant he could understand everything, could see it, could imagine it all, but could never hold anything; knowledge and habits that might have been combined into something useful for him slipped through his fingers and was taken up by autumn winds.  He would forget everything except that he wanted to be good, and to be loved.  Whenever he got in trouble at school, or couldn’t get to school because he was still in bed and forgotten where he needed to be, he was terribly sorry.  It was so clear that he was, genuinely, deeply, terrifyingly sorry.

 The latest pictures still featured his astonishing eyes, but they  seemed sadder, more tired.   At what moment did it fall inwards? At what moment did his imagination show him a future where all the pieces would never come together after all? 

In the end I was sad that we were turned away from his life; it seemed to me that this forced him to be alone with his suffering even in death.  I wanted to know that those who knew him best did not block out what they could not help him with;  that those closest to him understood about the afternoon he died, and that it mattered in that disembodied moment, that in his real goodness, he took no one else with him out of this life.