From one of my grandson’s law firm office windows.
So, I went to NYC to spend a weekend with my daughter. We used to do this nearly every year when I lived in Delaware. It was easy and fairly cheap, coming up on the train. Now it’s not, for me. Cheap, that is. Now. Especially staying in Manhattan.
We saw “Music City,” off-Broadway, a really smart musical, the book written by the son of a couple who live here at Cordia. We went to the Whitney, we visited my oldest grandson’s law office and his darling fourth-floor postage-stamp-size walkup apartment. We had dinner with my nephew Kevin Puts, the composer, and his wife Lisa Kim, who’s a violinist in the New York Philharmonic, and their son Ben, a 14 year old cellist who’s keeping up with his schoolwork while also attending Julliard.
Such different lives! So many amazing opportunities compared to my life in Arkansas, in public schools, brief piano lessons and brief ballet lessons. No push from my constantly-money-and-otherwise-stressed parents. I had this feeling, when I was young, that I was missing out on a richer life that was going on in the north. I tried to avoid my southern accent. I only knew the North because of my grandparents’ cottage in Northern Michigan. That was essentially my only foray out of my small world.
Adam Emery Albright
Children Playing in the Creek
I think of Arkansas as digging around in creeks with a stick, looking for frogs and minnows. Of not boredom, but empty time. Of inventing lives I convinced my sister to join in on. Play-acting all day sometimes.
Whose life is richer? What part of “rich” is breadth and what part depth? I dunno. I don’t think you can deliberately create a good poet/artist/musician, but a delicate amount of pushing and modeling must be helpful. Would I have been a better poet with better nurturing? Possibly. It’s been an adventure, doing it myself. When I was young and living in Arkansas I felt like an adventurer. I didn’t know about the art, the poetry, around me. I thought it all lived in books and higher up on the globe. Not here. So I was free to try to make it myself.
At the university, I took an Intro to Art class. I went to performances, I studied the structure of paintings. How did I not see that this is what made me feel most alive? What made me think I wanted to be, what? A scholar? There was that appeal, too, wandering the library stacks, feeling like my grandfather, the famous economist. Taking notes in tiny, precise detail.
Blind but colorful alley
I was feeling my way. I was always feeling my way. It has been, it is, circuitous, stumbling, with blind alleys. But never mistaken. Nothing has been, is, a mistake. I am sure of that. To toss part of one’s life into the “mistake” bin is a mistake. All parts contribute to the whole. If I kept myself in miserable circumstances, more than once before I broke away, that was not a mistake. It was me, teaching myself to find the edge, beyond which sheer bravery was required.
I love the poetry of old poets. They have gone all the way. Whatever route they took, they paid attention, so stuff stuck to them like cockleburs. And that showed up in their poems. You can collect a lot of cockleburs in a lifetime. Not wisdom as such. More like fulness. Which may be wisdom after all, or at least we can get wiser, reading them.
Which makes me wonder, what is “wisdom” anyway? My life has been a series of jumping off cliffs, each different and each scarier than hell. Was/is that wisdom? Some wisdom deeper than my conscious mind, maybe.
The P.S. If you want a pre-publication discount for Doctor of the World you need to order soon! Jan 24th is the cut off date for discounts.
ORDER BOOK here.
Here she is again. :)