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I woke up around 4:00 a.m. this morning with that line in my head. One moment I was asleep, it seemed, the next moment my mind was surfacing–groggily, and to the sound of a strange noise and that line was just there, in my head, like something you see out of the corner of your eye, no matter where you turn. The noise I heard was the “whirr-whirr” of the bread machine, which we had set on timer mode. It had cleverly switched itself on sometime before 4:00 a.m. to start its business of kneading the dough and baking a perfect square loaf of bread for us. I did manage to go back to sleep, but I woke again at 6:00 to the almost overwhelming smell of baked bread. The line from the poem sprang into my head again, almost immediately.
It’s been at least seven or eight years since I last read that particular poem by T.S. Eliot. I had no idea why I woke up with that line in my head; I haven’t been thinking about that poem, or about Eliot at all. I know the brain does strange things when sleeping, but I wondered why my subconscious had chosen to pull out that line from the dusty recesses of my brain (it is feeling pretty dusty in there these days) and move it to the forefront of my brain, where it rattled about over and over again all morning long.
I grow old…I grow old…
Was I worried about growing older? Wearing my trousers rolled? Measuring out my life with coffee spoons?
It wasn’t until I was cutting up the newly baked loaf of bread for L. this morning and my knife crackled into the crust that the connection was made clear. I was amazed, then, by how memory can be so triggered by something as simple as the sound of a bread machine in a quiet house and the smell of freshly baking bread.
The last time we used the machine on timer mode was about eight years ago. We had just acquired the bread maker and in the summer of 1998 we were living in our funky apartment in upstate New York. Bread machines seemed all the rage among our group of graduate students–everybody had one; everybody was making bread–why, it was the Summer of the Bread Machine. Scott and I would toss the ingredients in about dinnertime and by 11:00 we’d have a new loaf ready to eat. Sometimes on the weekend friends would stop by on their way back from a bar outing and we’d invite them in and have wine, fresh bread and cheese and talk into the night. Coincidentally, at around the same time we were whipping up batches of fresh bread while we slept, I was also studying for my qualifying exams. I read constantly. The Summer of the Bread Machine was also the Summer of Books. I would take the bus into school, arrive there around 9:30, shut myself into my little office, and read and read until about noon. Then I would take a break, head to the gym, and swim laps for about 1/2 an hour. Back to my office for lunch (a packed sandwich and a soda from the machine in the hall), and then more reading and notetaking until about 4:00 in the afternoon. It was also the Summer of T.S. Eliot and his other Modernist pals. I must have read just about everything by and about Eliot that summer. By the time August came I felt as if he and I were kindred spirits–I knew him so well I could have walked into a room and started discussing any number of literary topics with him and known exactly what his responses would be.
And it was also probably one of the more personally and selfishly fulfilling summers I’ve ever spent. We didn’t have kids, so my time on campus was entirely mine and entirely guilt-free. By the time 4:00 p.m. rolled around I had put in a full day’s work, so I could enjoy my evenings without feeling as if I should be doing something else.
So when that bread machine cranked on at 4:00 a.m., in an entirely different context and about 8 years later, my mind must have kicked up that line from Eliot’s Love Song; almost a reflexive action, perhaps. It’s amazing to me how powerful unconscious memories can be: a smell, a remembered line from a once-loved poem–like a time capsule opened, spilling out its contents into a different time.
A few weeks ago I heard what I once heard termed a terrible story–one which stayed with me for many hours after hearing it. A woman, a neighbor and friend of one of Scott’s family members, had forgotten to put the handbrake on when parking her car and, in her attempts to stop it from rolling away, had somehow been run over by her very own car. She was, at the time of the telling of this terrible story, in dire straits in the hospital, leaving a confused and sad little girl and husband to teeter on the brink of irrevocable loss.
Tragic, or potentially-tragic stories involving parents and children hit me hard ever since I became a mother myself, as once did tragic stories involving young college-aged people when I was a young college-aged person. For those hours when I carried around that story, I thought too much about how brutal it would be for a young child to lose her mother’s body, forevermore; to crave so instinctively the touch, the smells, the contours and sheer physical presence so representative of safety and emotional and physical rightness. How could a child comprehend a mother’s empty, or failing body? See the tease of them there, so familiar, and yet so unreachable? Or, worse yet, how tragic it would be to have a mother disappear altogether, whisked away in a flash, leaving behind a confused and primeval ache in her wake.
Then, yesterday, at a family birthday party for Scott’s niece, we found ourselves at a farm on a cold November afternoon. L. was happily lost in a hay maze, and T. was in and out of the barn, waiting so eagerly for the chance to ride a pony. I struck up a conversation with an interesting and vibrant woman, the kind of woman who makes you feel you’ve known her all your life when, in fact, you have only just met. The wind whipped around us, horses blew out steam, the chickens scattered and regrouped, and her own daughter raced back and forth from mother to father and back again, content in the presence of both her parents; bookends, home bases, rightness embodied.
Well into conversation with this engaging person, I found out suddenly that this was the same woman from the terrible story–the one who only a few weeks ago had been in such a tenuous state. And here she was, in flesh and blood, on a windy slope, her curly hair waving around her face, and her daughter running crazy circles in the wind. I reached out to touch her arm when I found out, and felt just so amazed and happy that she was there, on the other side of it all, on a day probably just as ordinary as that other day, the one that was so terrible.
And by and by her daughter clamored to be held. She bent and scooped her up with one fluid movement, so practiced and commonplace–I must do it with T. fifty times a day. At once the little girl folded her body in close, her legs and arms settling just right into all the familiar places, her head leaning in against the curves of woman’s chest, the softness of her shirt, the body–her world–she had almost lost for good.
I thought to myself, how could anything seem more important ever again to that mother and child, there on that slope, in the wind, than all of that?
For Students D. and N.
He is of average build, broad shouldered, dark skinned, with hair so closely shaved you can see the creases in his skull, where the skin folds around his ears and neck, like a newborn’s. When he wears his military khakis he is the picture of order, pants tucked perfectly into his black laced-up boots, every inch of him washed and pressed and buttoned, not a stitch out of place. He wears two oblong disks around his neck–dog tags, of course. On one is etched his mother’s name, on the other his military identification numbers. His mother passed away seven years ago from cancer, but he wears her name close to his chest. When he runs during training days, boots thudding into the dry ground, he feels the dog tags thump against his chest, like twin heartbeats, reminding him of what he has to live for, to do, to achieve, all in her name.
He is, like so many others, serving his country so he may serve himself; so he may one day walk across a stage and receive his diploma, and keep on walking, into his future, lying before him so glorious and filled with possibilities. Everything he does, he does for his mother. He misses seeing her face every day, and hearing her call his name; when she first passed he couldn’t imagine not having her in the world. He is respectful, and motivated, and determined. He will set his jaw and head off and fight in a war he says he doesn’t really understand. He talks of his mother watching him, and feeling proud. I think: please keep him safe, bring him back home again.
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She is the type of tall, tall woman who seems almost ashamed of her own height. She must be 6″2 or 6″3 and she hunches her shoulders to hide herself. But she’s beautiful, long legs and arms, big eyes, and soft, curving lips. She has come here all the way from a small town in Africa, to run track, but her heart is back in the country she left and, when she speaks about it, her voice quiets, and grows small and shy, trying to hide itself in her words. She was raised entirely by her grandfather, after her mother abandoned her and her two small brothers. Her grandfather was all anger and scolding one minute, and then gentle, rough hands smoothing away tears the next. He had a low voice, and skin like leather.
When she was a young teenager she awoke one night to smoke and fire. Everything was burning: the house, the things inside of it, the bushes outside. She grabbed some things and ran, with her brothers, to the outside, where it was safe. They hadn’t thought to find their grandfather–or they couldn’t get to him, she doesn’t remember exactly the way it happened. But later, when help arrived and the smoke hung thick in the air and rose in gray columns from the charred remains of their house, they discovered that he had died in the fire. No one had saved him; no one could have saved him. She lives with the guilt, and has only one small picture of him left, this man who raised her and her spirited brothers, who was all hard words on the outside, but gentle heart inside, where it counts.
I’ve been thinking about love lately–love and marriage. Partly because I’ve been writing about this topic in some of my other creative work, and partly because yesterday was not only Liam’s medieval birthday party, but our 11th wedding anniversary as well.
We don’t have much of a history as far as anniversary celebrations go. One was obviously spent in the hospital recovering from childbirth, another was spent in heightened anxiety and sadness over T.’s impending surgery, only days away, and many were spent–sometimes disastrously but always in memorable fashion–at favorite restaurants with the kids in tow. We have never celebrated an anniversary alone, actually, but I think this was the first year that we didn’t celebrate at all–we’re both fighting colds, exhaustion, stress, and general grumpiness has been in the air.
Eleven is a funny anniversary year, too. Ten is such a big deal–a decade, and all the years leading up to that milestone seem big, too. But eleven has a flat tone to it, those strange matchstick numbers standing side by side, with no roundness to them, no pleasing curves.
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I had some solitary time today to think about these things. I walked back from the pool a little early this afternoon, leaving Scott with the kids, so I could get a head start on grading the stack of midterms waiting on our kitchen table. I passed by our neighbor’s house, as I always do. For weeks now since the tragedy next door his brand-new white sneakers have been sitting, perfectly lined up together, under the stool outside his front door, exactly as he left them. I walk by each day with Willa and look at them and wonder when someone will come and take them away, clean house, box up those shoes and do–I don’t know what–but something with them. Today–finally–our neighbor’s son and a friend brought a silver trailer and carted away furniture and boxloads of things all afternoon. Later, after they left, I walked past the house again but the shoes were still there. Someone had kicked them aside in the process of moving out the furniture and one of them was flipped over. I wondered why no one had set them straight again, or why they were even still there, and why those shoes bothered me so very much. It was jarring to see that one shoe there, at a right angle to its partner, askew, still white and hardly-used.
But it made me think about love. Their love. His love.
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When I think about love I think about my grandparents, married for so long. I think about how I woke up one morning in their apartment, lying on the hard fold-out couch bed in their living room. I heard their voices from the veranda outside the room, mixed in with the scraping of a knife on toast as someone–my grandmother perhaps–spread jam on her bread. They talked, quietly, but intently, in a way I’d never heard them speak before. I thought then about how that was love: the rise and fall of their voices, the companionable sipping of coffee, the things that didn’t need to be said hanging between them like light.
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Last night Scott and I exchanged cards briefly, quietly, on the futon in our family room. It was the first chance we’d had to talk in days. Our trip to visit our friends had been stressful; we’d spent Wednesday running interference for L., who literally bounced off the walls all day, non-stop. And I really mean non-stop all the way through the morning, through the 40 minute car ride into the Shenadoah mountains, the 30 minute hike, the 40 minute ride down, lunch (which he refused to eat), the afternoon “rest” time, the walk we went on because things were so out of control, the party, and the fireworks. When he finally went to bed at 10:15 our nerves were stretched taut, our tempers frayed; it’s taken days to mend them.
I realized then, and today too that marriage isn’t always years of rounded pleasant curves and loops and soaring times. Sometimes it’s about being staid and stalwart; being the two walls side by side that hold up and protect what you love the most: each other, your children, all those moments of understanding hanging between you like light.
World of One Thousand Different Things 