My Wobbly Bicycle, 17: A Tribute . . . .

. . . . To My Beloved HusbandWell over two decades ago, I’d just left a dangerously destructive marriage. I was terrified of another relationship, but lonely as hell. There was Jerry, my colleague in the English Department for lo those many years, himself having just eased out of a sad marriage. In our advance-and-retreat pas-de-deux, he was the perfect, gracious gentleman, leaving me all the time I needed to see what I needed. My head screamed “NO!” My heart played interception. “I will never hurt you,” he said. Verily, he spake the truth.Jerry’s the one you want with you if you are really sick, and he is the one you want with you if you want to have a good time. He’s interested in most everything except science, science-fiction, pretentious literary theory, and animated feature films.  He’s been a sessions singer in Nashville, he’s dated Pat Boone’s sister, had drinks with Robert Penn Warren, watched Elvis rehearse. He’s remodeled an eighteenth-century farmhouse, coached his daughters’ softball teams, farmed his 15 acres, as well as fronted a successful rock and roll band (“Jerry and the Juveniles”) while chairing a 60-member English Department, writing and editing seven books, being general editor of the works of the eighteenth century writer Tobias Smollett.. . . well, just to give him his due, before I get to what I really want to say.Jerry is nurturing. He’ll rub my feet until his hands get numb. He’s downstairs right now doing the laundry. He washes and folds it all, every week. He washes the dishes. (I cook! I’m not useless). He likes to do these things. He’s a detail person. When I got sick, he took my car to get the snow tires on, he took it in for service, filled it up with gas. He’s run dozens and dozens of errands for me. He wants to go to every daily radiation treatment, just to be with me. But he’s not cloying. He lines up my multitudinous pills for me and reminds me, but that’s because he knows how I am. He steps back if he thinks I’ve had enough of management, or closeness.He respects me. He’s not interested in Buddhist meditation, but he’s supported my practice by cheerfully sending me off to retreats (maybe he’s glad for the break!) and has never made one disparaging or dismissive comment.He's read and helped me edit almost every word I've written.He knows how to take care of himself. He’s going semi-weekly to a caregiver’s support group. So far, he’s the only one who shows up, but he likes the woman, so they keep talking. He has his own health issues which have been a trial for him for over two years—complicated neuropathy with possible spinal involvement, plus. He doesn’t martyr himself on the altar of my cancer. He’s doing what he can for himself with hopes that we can get to Mayo and see what the heck’s going on with him as soon as I’m through with all this.When I found that I’d need to have eye surgery in the middle of cancer treatment, he was in the retinal surgeon’s office with me. We were alone, waiting for the surgeon to come in. He looked up at me. Tears started down his cheeks. “You are so strong,“ he said. “And I see you sitting there looking so small and vulnerable. It hurts me.”So basically, this is in praise of our being able to cry together, which we’ve done face-to-face with fear, when it comes up, with sadness, when it comes up, and with sheer frustration, when it comes up. This is in praise of a man who tells me every day how beautiful I am, with my silly chemo hats and abdomen full of puncture scars, who runs his hand over my barely furry scalp as if I were Cleopatra.I’ve gotten irritated with him—he’s a tortoise and I‘m a hare—I’ve gotten frustrated by his meticulous attention to lining up the details in order. But not once, in 21 years of marriage, have I regretted marrying him.  We’ve been good for each other. We still are. Thank you, Jerry, for waiting with infinite patience until the moment—over two years from our first beer together—when I finally pled, “Oh, please PLEASE marry me!”

 YEA! THE MOMENT YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR! : Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, from Autumn House Books,  is now out on Kindle, $9.99.Go to Amazon, type in the title. Get your grandkids to do it for you! You’ll find this book of essays, a back-and-forth between Sydney Lea (current poet laureate of VT) and me (former poet laureate of DE), a comforting collection of geezerly thoughts about poetry today, about what’s happened to books, to reading, to sex, to our wilderness places, and what matters to us as poets, as poet-people, and as great friends.Please, if you have a moment, write a brief review, even one line, like “Wow, I liked this a lot!”  Amazon places their books according to the number of reviews. Give us a boost at the beginning! Thanks.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 16

Sick of pictures of snow? It's the first day of Spring no less. The theme of today is unpredictability. I’ve been weak, needing long naps, and was about to write about weakness, when I find out my white and red blood counts are climbing back up. Woe is me, how can I get a trajectory going here? Once again I watch my body do things I have apparently little control over. I rewrite this post.Control. I’ve had good reason to keep chaos at bay in my original family and then in my own previous marriages. Kelly used to call me “the rock,” which isn’t altogether the best of epithets, for a mom. Steady and reliable, yes, but wouldn’t one want to see the vulnerability, the uncertainty, to see how it might be managed?Most of my life my nerves have been, as the poet Anne Carson puts it, “open to the air like something skinned.” As is true of many writers, I’ve been pretty smart in figuring out how to buffer, how to let the words hold me—or hold the words, my sheaf of arrows. It’s harder to buffer—for any of us---when things change so obviously quickly. I’m not complaining. I’m just looking at this. I’m looking at this through the lens of the visits of my daughter Kelly, Jerry’s daughter Pam, and my son Scott. Jerry’s daughter Amy will be along next week. A change: they’re all here mid-winter (not usual) because they love us and they want to help take care of us. I found Scott some plastic bags to put on his tennis shoes, and he and Jerry got the snow dug out and blown. Scott stayed almost a week: snow delayed his flight. But he works with Big Data stuff for IBM and can click from the wilds of northern Michigan to California and India. But I’m aware especially of just being taken care of.  Looking at my big son and knowing he’s brought not only several seasons of BBC Sherlock, but his own precious self. Seeing all of us-- in my present particularly fleshly awarenesss--as flesh, all breaking down at its various rates, all joyously hung in this void or un-void where we just go on, watching out for each other.I remember my Nana Simpich, who, it seemed to me then, wanted everything perfect—house, garden, flowers in vases, dinner table, yard. She used to pinch my cheeks because she said they didn’t have enough color. She was dismayed about my tomboyish clothes. Then she had a stroke. Then a woman was brought in to help out. She directed this woman with the best authority she could, but it was a trial to her. How would I be, how will I be, if my life comes to that?I have been one to plan, arrange, amass credentials. But now I’m reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Murial Barbery. (I recommend it!)  The main character, Renee Michel, a French concierge, intelligent and educated far beyond her station, has been flipping through her sister’s pretentious dissertation on William of Ockham. Renee says “The quest for meaning and beauty is hardly a sign that man has an elevated nature, that by leaving behind his animal impulses he will go on to find the justification of his existence in the enlightenment of the spirit: no, it is a primed weapon at the service of a trivial and material goal. And when the weapon becomes its own subject [my ital.], this is the simple consequence of the specific neuronal wiring that distinguishes us  from other animals; by allowing us to survive, the efficiency of intelligence also offers us the possibility of complexity without foundation, thought without usefulness, and beauty without purpose. It’s like a computer bug, a consequence without consequence of the subtlty of our cortex, a superfluous perversion making an utterly wasteful use of the means at its disposal.”I do know that the greatest joy is when we are able to see through (not obliterate, as if we could) that need for intellectual control, to be amused at it, to see our lives develop and disappear moment by moment.  I know this as surely as I know anything after over a lifetime of practicing Christianity and then Buddhist meditation. What I learned from Christianity has often been over-simplified to “Let go and let God.”Then it appeared to me that the wildly ambiguous word God is like a door-stop in front of the openness.  Just see. Just see what’s there, what’s beyond the fussing and the organizing and the desperate desire to hang on, to avoid change. Something is changing all the time. And Something is the wide sky of our own mind and is made of change-and-not-change. This is how it seems to me.Not to get all apocalyptic. But when one’s “ordered” life is disrupted, one ponders. Oddly, as I feel less “substantial,” there is a great joy underlying, or should I say pervading, or should I say behind? I don’t HAVE to be substantial. Or in charge.

News Flash! Next week, look for the link to Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, Sydney Lea’s and my ebook from Autumn House Books. Our thoughtful/crazy essays about how things used to be, how we see our lives in poetry, how our children, sports, food, music, and more have shaped our work and our lives.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 15

This week has been, well, not so easy. I had a vitrectomy (My spell-check wanted to call it a vasectomy, but no.). My eye has been a bit sore, fuzzy, and I’ll have a large gas bubble in front of my vision for the next few weeks. But it’s done! And it needed to get done now rather than later.Imagine me typing this in 18-point just so I can see it. And my face two inches from the keys.Then, radiation of my upper pelvic region, which includes my stomach, has made me nauseous and gastrically disturbed. My radiation doctor gave me Friday off because I looked so peaked, and I missed most of a long-awaited meditation retreat lying in bed instead. There was talk of lowering the area of radiation to miss my stomach, but that would be risky. But I’m happy to report that it appears we (I’m now a “we”) have come up with a cocktail of drugs that keep me feeling pretty decent.  The addition of a small amount of steroid to the mix seems to settle my stomach. I don’t question why or whether this will last; I’m just grateful. This morning, to celebrate, I came down to breakfast wearing my funny hat, made by my friend Devon.Speaking of hats, I have a bunch, plus the wig. I wear the wig out, but at home the hats are more comfortable. I think a lot these days about apparel, about hair as apparel, which it clearly is for women and also for many men. We have a way we wish the world would see us. Or, rather, the way we wish to see ourselves.I am such a poor shopper! A couple of years ago, I asked a young writer friend, Holly Wren Spalding, to shop with me. She brought a folder of magazine photos of things she said would look good on me, and she was right. She picked out what I wore to the gallery opening of Bill Allen’s and my exhibit at the Dennos Museum. I have never looked better. Well, at my age.I have an essay called "Unruffled"  about my history with clothes that just appeared in a wonderful on-line journal called Numero Cinq.This essay will appear in Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives that poet Sydney Lea, the poet laureate of Vermont, and I co-wrote. It will be out April 1 from Autumn House Books exclusively as an e-book.Here’s the editor’s lovely introduction to my essay, You can read the whole  (fairly short) piece on their site,  http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/03/11/unruffled-essay-fleda-brown/#.UT3qoHqMKas.gmail  ************* Fleda Brown herewith offers a wonderfully smart, touching essay about girlhood, clothes and, amazingly enough, poetry! How does she rope all this together? And touching? Yes! The sweet free tomboyish little girl (of a certain era), a professor’s daughter, running free the summer long half-naked and innocent, suddenly a young lady, going to school, in dresses and appliqued sweaters, proper girl’s clothes, an awkward and constricting mask that delivers her to the agony of fashion and fitting in and the awful kindness of friends who feel sorry for her. Fleda delivers the goods, the terrible moments of humiliation, guilt and misunderstanding we all go through as children, often centered around money, precious money and small dreams that go awry, often small events in retrospect yet still capable of making you wince and yet which do not defeat you — as evidence by the delightful pun in the title.This beautiful, human, raw essay is the last installment here at Numéro Cinq of a series of essays by Contributing Editor Sydney Lea and Fleda Brown, two old friends, also two poet laureates, who have been writing a book together, a call-and-response essay book as Syd likes to call it, one essay calling forth another on a similar topic. As Sydney writes, “My friend Fleda Brown, lately poet laureate of Delaware but now escaped to northern Michigan, and I are writing a book together. She writes an essay on a topic (food, sex, clothes, houses, illness, and wild animals); then I write one on the same topic. Then I write one and she follows suit. Etc. It’s fun, though I don’t know who in Hell will publish it.”In fact Autumn House Books is publishing the book next month, April, as an e-book called Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives. Other essays from the book published here at NC include Fleda Brown’s “Books Made of Paper” and three essays by Sydney Lea “Pony and Graveyard: A Dream of the Flesh,” “Unskunked” and “Becoming a Poet: A Way to Know.”*************I'll give you the link when it's available. We had such a grand time writing this book. I think you'll like it.   

My Wobbly Bicycle, 5

I’m leaning my bike against a tree for now, since I won’t see the doctor until tomorrow. I’ll report next week on what we learn, how chemo will go, and so on. In the meantime—you’ll see this is relevant—I want to tell you about a book I’ve co-written with Sydney Lea, called Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives. It’ll be out from Autumn House Press in April exclusively (O brave new world!) as an e-book. I have had the BEST time writing this book over the last couple of years with my dear friend Syd.Syd and I share being poet laureate of our respective states. I’m former poet laureate of Delaware; Syd is the current poet laureate of Vermont. You should know his work, if you don’t. His eleventh poetry collection, I Was Thinking of Beauty, will be out soon from Four Way Books. The University of Michigan Press recently issued A Hundred Himalayas, a sampling from his critical work over four decades. A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife (Skyhorse Publishing), a third volume of outdoor essays, will be published in early this year.We had an idea that a book of essays from two people who’ve given their lives to poetry would be good reading. We then had the idea that if we picked topics and each headed out as we wished with that topic, we could cover a lot of territory, both artistic and memoirish.  We picked our topics as we went along: some, such as “Wild Animals” are downright silly; some are, shall I say interesting, such as “Sex, “Music,” and “Food”; some are mundane but ultimately pretty revealing, such as “Clothes,” “Sports,” and “Houses.” The last one is called “Becoming a Poet,” but really, the whole collection is about us as people-poets. Poet-people. Poetry never completely goes off-stage.Here’s the beginning of one of my essays that’s less directly concerned with writing than some of the others. How ironic it is to me, now. I wrote this no more than six months ago. Our topic was illness.  It begins this way:

I loved being sick. If my body couldn’t work up the germs, my mind could. Through grade school, all the way through high school, I was deft at turning a slightly scratchy throat into a wicked possible strep condition that would keep me home from school. To cinch the matter, I would vigorously rub the thermometer, or hold it under warm water at the bathroom sink when no one was looking, I don’t know if my mother bought any of this, or if she was just too harried and/or depressed to fight me on it. The half-year my aunt Cleone and her three wildly healthy boys lived with us in Columbia, I would be “sick” and my Aunt Cleone would position herself at my bedroom door, frowning.  “Fleda, are you really sick enough to stay home?” she’d ask. She was onto me, which almost spoiled my day, but not quite. Our house, in truth, was a house of illness. My brother was severely mentally retarded and had grand mal seizures so awful that each one would take your breath away. There was a heap of bottles, all full of potent drugs, on the kitchen counter, along with an apothecary’s mortar and pestle to grind up the ones too difficult for him to swallow. My mother had severe arthritis—no wonder. My father had only allergies, but he was able to make a great deal out of lying on his back on the bed with his head over the side, dripping Neo-Synephrine into a stuffed-up nose. Don’t get me wrong—we were also very physical. My mother loved to walk, arthritis or no. She could move really fast, her scarf tied under her chin like a Russian peasant; my father rode his bike several miles to school when almost no one did such a thing; my sister and I rode bikes, swam, played rudimentary tennis, and walked. But it appears to me now that the one way I could be assured that my parents’ attention would be directed at me was to be sick. And also, I was shy —I guess you could call it that. In any case, I found being at home, being taken care of, very comforting. My mother would have liked to be a nurse and seemed to enjoy having me home, bringing me poached egg on toast, straightening my covers, finding the paper-doll pages in McCall’s magazine for me, bringing me scissors and Scotch tape. The kid in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Land of Counterpane” was me: When I was sick and lay a-bed,I had two pillows at my head,And all my toys beside me lay,To keep me happy all the day. In fact, I remember lying there reading A Child’s Garden of Verses. They were too young for me, but I loved them anyway. School was always pressure—get the math problems right, do well on the test, and carefully manage to fit into certain groups of friends.  I think I was a bit afraid of people. Being alone felt safer, easier. . . . in the mornings when my father was at school, teaching, and my mother was putting around, taking care of Mark and washing clothes, the house was quiet, peaceful—her little radio in the kitchen tuned to the Arthur Godfrey show or whatever followed that. 

 My essay has a postscript: “If I follow the lines of this essay, would I have to say that I brought this cancer on?  Not on your life. I have a good life, and work that I’m eager to continue. I’m happy. I don’t want to stay home from school anymore.”Syd has posted his essay on “Music” on his website, http://sydneylea.blogspot.com/ . I think you’d enjoy reading it. I’ll post part of mine on music later. I must, however, get back to this illness thing. Such a nuisance.