Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World

One of my favorite poems ever is Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls us to the Things of This World." So I was intrigued with the title of Sherman Alexie's poem "Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World," thinking maybe it was a parody. But no, it's a good poem in its own right:

The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

Who is blessed among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because

He's astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. "Hey, Ma,"

I say, "Can I talk to Poppa?" She gasps,
And then I remember that my father

Has been dead for nearly a year. "Shit, Mom,"
I say. "I forgot he's dead. I'm sorry--

How did I forget?" "It's okay," she says.
"I made him a cup of instant coffee

This morning and left it on the table--
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years--

And I didn't realize my mistake
Until this afternoon." My mother laughs

At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days

And sing our praise to forgetfulness
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.

Those angels burden and unbalance us.
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.

Those angels, forever falling, snare us
And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.

One time when my family stayed in a Holiday Inn in Little Rock, Arkansas for a family wedding, we got rooms that had tvs and telephones in the bathroom. We all thought it was the funniest thing ever, and kept calling each other from the bathroom to announce that we were calling from there. So I feel an odd urge to laugh and cry at the same time about calling your father because you know it will amuse him and forgetting that he's not around to be amused anymore.

And I'm thinking of Lemming's Sam, who isn't around anymore. It's so hard to remember that someone who has been a part of your life isn't going to be there for one particular thing after another. The days are a succession of slaps with those cold wings. Even years later, you expect to hear that voice, see hair that color out of the corner of your eye. Have you ever felt this way?

War Dances

Having been told I should read Sherman Alexie and having read only his children's story The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and one of his poetry volumes, Face, when I saw his new book War Dances (now a finalist for a PEN/Faulkner award) at the library, I picked it up.

It's an interesting mix of different kinds of short fiction and poems. The title story turns out to be mostly about his father, although it's also about his identity:

"The Indian world is filled with charlatans, men and women who pretended--hell, who might have come to believe--that they were holy. Last year, I had gone to a lecture at the University of Washington. An elderly Indian woman, a Sioux writer and scholar and charlatan, had come to orate on Indian sovereignty and literature. She kept arguing for some kind of separate indigenous literary identity, which was ironic considering that she was speaking English to a room full of white professors. But I wasn't angry with the woman, or even bored. No, I felt sorry for her. I realized that she was dying of nostalgia. She had taken nostalgia as her false idol--her thin blanket--and it was murdering her.
'Nostalgia,' I said to the other Indian man in the hospital.
'What?'
'Your dad, he sounds like he's got a bad case of nostalgia.'
'Yeah, I hear you catch that from fucking old high school girlfriends,' the man said. 'What the hell you doing here anyway?'
'My dad just got his feet cut off,' I said.
"Diabetes?'
'And vodka.'
"Vodka straight up or with a nostalgia chaser?'
'Both.'
Natural causes for an Indian.'
Yep.'
There wasn't much to say after that.
'Well, I better get back,' the man said. 'Otherwise, my dad might wave an eagle feather and change my name.'
'Hey, wait,' I said.
'Yeah?'
'Can I ask you a favor?'
'What?'
'My dad, he's in the recovery room,' I said. 'Well, it's more like a hallway, and he's freezing, and they've only got these shitty little blankets, and I came looking for Indians in the hospital because I figured--well, I guessed if I found any Indians, they might have some good blankets.'
'So you want to borrow a blanket from us?' the man asked.
'Yeah.'
'Because you thought some Indians would just happen to have some extra blankets lying around?'
"Yeah.'
'That's fucking ridiculous.'
'I know.'
'And it's racist.'
'I know.'
'You're stereotyping your own damn people.'
'I know.'
'But damn if we don't have a room full of Pendleton blankets....'"

The figuring out the identity part of the story is well-leavened with humor, as you can see. I also found it interesting that much of the story told in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is, well, absolutely true--that is, autobiographical. He evidently really was born with hydrocephalus, for example.

I also particularly enjoyed the story of a (so far as I can tell) fictional character who makes up stories about women he sees in airports, The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless. It begins with his sighting of and waving to a woman he is "instantly but ordinarily attracted to" and how he reacts when she ignores him:
"She's gone, she's gone." Paul sang the chorus of that Hall & Oates song. He sang without irony, for he was a twenty-first-century American who'd been taught to mourn his small and large losses by singing Top 40 hits."
After musing for three or four pages about the power of song in pop culture, Paul runs after the woman, introduces himself, and asks if her name is Sara, like in the Hall and Oates song "Sara Smile." They have a brief and mostly inconsequential conversation, and thereafter he refers to her as Sara, meeting her again months later in a different airport to have a slightly more consequential conversation and then remembering her later in yet another airport when he sees a different woman who looks a bit like her.

I also particularly enjoyed the poem Ode for Pay Phones:

All

That Autumn,

I walked from

The apartment (shared

With my sisters) to that pay phone

On Third Avenue, next to a sleazy gas station

And down the block from the International House of Pancakes. I was working the night

Shift at a pizza joint and you were away at college. You dated a series of inconsequential boys. Well, each boy meant little on his

Own, but their cumulative effect devastated my brain and balls. I wanted you to stop kissing relative strangers, so I called you at midnight as often as I could afford. If I talked to you that late, I knew

(Or hoped) you couldn't rush into anybody's bed. But, O, I still recall the misery of hearing the ring, ring, ring ring

Of your unanswered phone. These days, I'd text you to find you, but where's the delicious pain

In that? God, I miss standing in the mosquito dark

At this or that pay phone. I wish

That I could find one

And call back

All that

I

Loved.

Isn't the image of the "mosquito dark" nice, especially at this point in February, when nothing outside has much of a smell and there haven't been any insects since last fall? And the last four lines are fun because the double meaning is unexpected; don't you think?

FreshHell recently initiated a conversation about the use of technology in fiction; she thinks that too much modern technology complicates the plot unnecessarily. But I find the use of telephones in older mystery movies fascinating because of the way the plot so often revolves around the way they had to be used. As I said in FreshHell's comments, my children often find it mystifying. "Why didn't he just call on the way over there?" they want to know. Also, one of my favorite jokes from the Kevin Kline movie In and Out, where the fashion model from LA stabs ineffectually with too-long nails at an old-fashioned rotary phone, is pretty much lost on them. Do any of you have favorite jokes or references that no longer work well because of the way technology has changed?

Anyway, I found Alexie's use of stereotype and pop culture to be amusing and effective, and enjoyed wandering through War Dances.

Missed Connections

We didn't miss any connections this weekend. My (direct) flights with the kids to NYC and back went as scheduled, although it took me two and a half hours to get us to the airport over snowy rural 2-lane roads (normally it's an hour-long drive), and when we got back we had to shovel nine inches of snow off our driveway in the dark before we could get the car up it.

In between we had delightful urban adventures that quite fully restored my soul for coping with the rest of this snowy rural winter. It's snowing so hard this morning that the kids' school is canceled and I didn't even try to make my commute.

We started the weekend on Friday about 9 pm with a celebratory drink in the lobby of the New York Hilton (I had a "Big Apple" which is their name for an appletini), where we were watching the people go by: booted and fur-coated women, men in dark suits, and NCAA teams in matching tracksuits.

Saturday morning we met some friends for breakfast at the Carnegie Deli. Although we were warned to expect surly NYC service, the staff were all exceedingly friendly, which kind of disappointed Eleanor. (At 16, she wants to visit a place where everyone wears dark colors and gives each other dark looks.) The food was excellent, and there were literal piles of it; although all of us are enthusiastic about breakfast, hardly anyone could finish.

We took the subway up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we spent some very agreeable hours wandering around exclaiming over wonders until we reached that point you always reach in a museum where you walk past yet another wonder only half-seeing it, looking for a place to sit down. At that point, we had lunch in a cafe looking out onto Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park. Then we posed with some statues (a good way to feel the emotion of sculpture) and said goodbye to our friends underneath an enormous vase of real, blooming cherry blossoms.

We had dinner at the Russian Tea Room (where I met an unembarrassed bulemic in the restroom) and walked down to look at Times Square before seeing Phantom of the Opera (the second time for Ron and me, but first time for the kids).

Sunday morning we walked up to the Museum of Modern Art, right around the corner from our hotel. We giggled at some of the most modern pieces (a cloth womb with udder you could go inside; Walker and I did), made sounds of revulsion looking at a fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, glazed our eyes over looking at a special exhibit of Monet's water lilies followed by lots of Picassos and two Magrittes, and then got a second wind in the Tim Burton exhibit, which had funny figures and pieces from the movies, so everyone felt more crowded in there, but less reverent.

We had no adventures in the airports or on the plane, which made us feel very lucky. We have no stories like Sherman Alexie's to tell:

Missed Connections (at the Santa Barbara Airport)

Descending, in our forty-seat airplane,
I saw an older man had parked his car
At the edge of the runway. He waved
At us, so I waved, but we were too far

Apart to see each other, and he was not
Welcoming me anyway. Near the back
Of the plane, a woman, hair in a knot,
Clutching a tattered Vintage paperback,

Waved and smiled and hugged her seatmate.
"That's my husband," she said. "I haven't seen
Him in ten years. It's so great, it's so great."
She shook and wept; it was quite a scene--

A mystery--and I was hungry to know
Why a wife and husband had lived apart
For a decade. I wanted to ask, but no,
I decided to imagine the parts

They'd been playing: She was the Red Cross
Nurse who'd been kidnapped by militant
Rebels, then blindfolded and marched across
The border, but he'd remained diligent

For ten epic years, pressuring despots
And presidents, until the March dawn
When Australian tourists spotted
Her staggering across a Thai hotel lawn.

Starved and weak, she fell into their arms.
"I've been released," she said. "I've been released."
Traded for ammunition and small arms,
And treated for malnutrition and disease,

She was only now, six weeks after rescue,
Reuniting with her husband. She was first
Off the airplane--we all gave her the room--
And she, aching with a different thirst,

Burst through the security gates
And rushed into her husband's embrace.
Later, after they had gone, as I waited
For my bags, I saw a friendly face--

A young woman who'd just witnessed
What I'd witnessed. I wiped away tears.
"Ten years," I said. "I'd die from the stress."
"Oh no," she said. "It wasn't ten years.

It was ten days." Jesus, I had misheard
The old woman and created glory
Out of the ordinary. Just one word,
Misplaced, turned a true and brief story

Into a myth. And yes, it was lovely
To see how the long-in-love can stay
In love. But who truly gets that lonely
After only ten days away?

I thought I had witnessed an epic--
A Santa Barbara elderly Odyssey--
But it was something more simplistic.
It was a love story, small and silly,

And this is cruel, but here's my confession:
Depending on the weather or my mood,
I'll repeat the myth because it's more impressive
Than something as clear and bright as the truth.

And here's my confession, too; tomorrow will be the thirty year anniversary of our own long-in-love story, and we were as happy to be reunited Friday night (after being apart since Wednesday morning) as ever.

Now it looks like we'll be home for a while, watching it snow. Are you getting lots of snow? How are you coping?

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

When I got to the part of having the flu where I could open my eyes for a bit, I lay in bed and read some children's books. The first one was Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian because I've been seeing recommendations of it everywhere and my friend the Lass particularly wanted me to read it.

Despite having grown up hearing stories from great-aunts and great-grandmothers about "our Indian blood" (in the south, this was often an attempt to gloss over "our African blood") and having been raised in a midwest city next to Trail of Tears State Park, where the Cherokee Princess Otahki died, I've never gotten particularly interested in Native American culture, aside from what everyone learns in school or from reading Mary Oliver and Louise Erdrich. I know just enough to be amused when I find out that a friend's child is in a school band called the "Marching Braves." And I'm always bemused to read about instances of prejudice against "Indians," which is a main feature of Alexie's book.

It seems that in the American west, there must actually be some prejudice, especially concerning reservations and casinos. To try to understand that, I found myself thinking about moving to Middletown, Rhode Island in the 1980's, when I remember encountering a kind of prejudice I'd never even heard of--against the Portuguese. The Portuguese?! At first it struck me that these folks had whirled a globe and chosen someone to pick on at random. Then I began to see some of the tensions between people whose families were brought to the area to fish or a living, and people who came to the area for other, often less desperate, reasons. It still seems strange to me, but if I close my eyes and squint a little I can see some of why it might have started.

The interesting part of this book, for me, is not how downtrodden the main character, Junior, is, or even how he deals with adversity. It's how he refuses to see through the narrow lenses offered him by the "Indian world" or the "White world." Although I'm not a fan of cartoon illustrations in general, I did like one picture with the caption "boys can hold hands until they turn nine." It seems to me the opinion of an extraordinarily gentle--perhaps extraordinarily hard-headed--boy; when I ask 19-year-old college students how long boys can hold hands, they generally tell me that it's not allowed after the age of 6, when the boys go to first grade.

Especially after reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, featuring a British schoolboy who gets special powers from a 50-year-old school book, I don't sympathize with Junior's anger when he gets a geometry book that's 30 years old and belonged to his mother. If it was a History book, maybe I'd understand, but geometry hasn't changed that much in the past century. Yet this is the perceived "unfairness" that gets Junior out of the reservation school and into a nearby small-town public school where the children learn more. One of Junior's new classmates is a "genius farm boy" named Gordy, who tells him to look at the small high school library (3,412 books) and consider that "if you read one of these books a day, it would still take you almost ten years to finish." When Junior asks what his point is, Gordy elaborates: "the world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know." What redeems Junior as a character, at least for me, is that he's eager to learn. He befriends people who at first seem "racist" to him, and he learns enough about himself to start showing his best side to people, rather than always pushing them away.

Perhaps because this is a book for children, the type of Indian Junior identifies with is not well delineated. He tells stories like this one:
"Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated.
Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones.
Gay people were seen as magical, too.
I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers.
Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives!
My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians.
'Jeez,' she said. "Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who's going to pick up all the dirty socks?'
Of course ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance.
Indians can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person.
But not my grandmother.
She still hung on to that old-time Indian spirit, you know?"

This story, with its unspecified "kinds" of "Indians" reminds me of the response a friend of mine once got when he correctly identified the home country of a visiting student as Cameroon. The student was so grateful to be recognized that he blurted out "most Americans...you think that all of Africa is one small village!" Rather than "the Spokane Tribe," which is mentioned, most of Junior's musings seem to be about generic "Indians" as if all Native Americans were from one small tribe.

In the part of the midwest where I grew up, a game children sometimes play is reciting how many different countries their ancestors came from, and the child who can remember the longest list without being suspected of making them up on the spot wins. I wasn't terribly good at the game; usually only getting in three or four from my mother's side and the same from my father's. How good would you be at this game?

How to Make Your Mark

One of the book blogger appreciation week discussion questions for today is whether you tend to mark your books as you read, or whether the idea of writing in books "horrifies" you. And I am slightly horrified by the question. Marking in books is the single best way to learn critical reading skills, so if you're not doing it, how are you compensating?

A writer must learn to make notes as she reads if she wants to have some ideas to consider when she finishes. If you're hesitant, start with sticky notes. Then add a pencil mark bracket or star to the side of an interesting passage, and then try to advance to pencil underlinings of key passages. Some people--and I'm one of them--never do get to the point where they can take a highlighter to a book and/or write their own words in the margins.

A lot of us had early training in not scribbling on our story books with crayons. But we're past that, now. It's like the feeling at the end of this poem by Sherman Alexie (from his volume Fire) called "How to Create an Agnostic":

Singing with my son, I clapped my hands
Just as lightning struck.

It was dumb luck,
But my son, in awe, thought

That I'd created the electricity.
He asked, "Dad, how'd you do that?"

Before I could answer, thunder shook the house
And set off neighborhood car alarms.

I thought that my son, always in love with me,
Might fall to his knees with adoration.

"Dad," he said. "Can you burn
down that tree outside my window?

The one that looks like a giant owl?"
O, my little disciple, my one-boy choir,

I can't do that because your father,
Your half-assed messiah, is afraid of fire.

One of the appeals of this poem, for the mother of teenagers, is remembering the days when my kids believed what I said. But once we're adults, we need to think more about the reasons we do things, lest we end up like the woman in the joke about cutting the end off the ham. (Child: Mom, why do you cut the end off the ham? Mom: Because my mother always did. Child: Why did she do it? Mom: I don't know; Mom, why do you cut the end off the ham? Grandmother: "because it wouldn't fit in my big black pot otherwise.") If it's early training that makes us reluctant to mark in our books, then we need to think about why we received that training. My parents kept only books they wanted to reread, and presumably my father didn't want to reread his copy of The Collected Plays of Jean Giraudoux complete with my markings for my high school speech club interpretive reading of two pages from The Madwoman of Chaillot.

Maybe you should think about why you keep books, too. I buy mostly books I intend to reread, and I don't think of them as decorator items or relics. I put old tickets in them as bookmarks and dog-ear the pages until I'm done with the book (and then turn the ends up again as I go through collecting the ideas I marked that way). I love my books, and I leave my mark in them.

One of the most interesting experiences I ever had as a reader was getting a rare copy of a very minor 18th-century satire from the Folger library, and finding Robert Southey's marginal notes all over it. Southey himself is a minor 19th-century poet. But all of a sudden he came alive for me. What better way to be remembered could I imagine for myself?