“the aim was song” kind of sunday…
October 14, 2012.
Still Sundays.
It’s Sunday evening on the farmhouse and I am holding onto stillness like a child does a finger while crossing the street on which he or she had no business walking in the first place.
I have been sitting here just listening to the sun pour itself through every window. The birds are calmer now than in the morning, the song sweeter and less urgent. Do they need stillness to sing? Dogs are sleepy.
No one is here right now. It was a full farmhouse here this weekend. Lots of family. My maternal grandfather, nana gi, is gone. No, not like that. After two months at my parents’ farmhouse he is now going to stay with my uncle’s family who lives four hours up north. He switches amongst the four siblings across states like a child does a babysitter. It’s not easy. He is restless every two to three months.
Watching my mother and her adult siblings and my grandfather this weekend I concluded the most important thing for me as I get older is to maintain physical strength. In our society—east and west (the veil separating the two has become absorbent of differences due to access to internet, media and movie industry influences)—there is so much emphasis on “weight loss” and not enough on maintaining muscular and bone strength. Genetic predispositions aside, no one can keep up good health for you. And in order to have discipline to do so requires an attachment beyond looking good. You have to want to feel good. We are not as shallow as the advertisement industry would like us to believe.
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Today I found an old Robert Frost collection. I have been looking for this since I was in middle school. I had lent it to a girl named Emily—now I can’t recall her name; I am not good with names—who lived behind us when we first moved to Shawnee, Kansas. School hadn’t started yet and I was delighted to have made a new friend so I wouldn’t be the “new girl” in school when Fall began. At that point in my young American life I had only lived in Texas and New York City. It was through Emily that I learned about children getting paid to babysit. I had never heard of such a thing. Having spent time outside the United States, I thought older children had to take care of younger children! Emily also introduced me to another girl in the neighborhood. I know her last name. And first too. Weird how some names are hard to forget even if you tried. It was then I learned that having a bad attitude is what made someone “cool” in middle school in Kansas. This girl was annoying, rude, and well, knowing what I know now, just an angry kid who had a hard time dealing with her parents’ divorce and her mother’s multiple boyfriends. I wasn’t allowed to stay the night at her house.
Anyway, I am not sure how long Emily kept the book but eventually I asked for it back. She insisted that she had returned it. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Middle school came with all its harshness as it comes for all those who just don’t fit in. I quickly concluded that both girls had befriended me for the wrong reasons and even quicker I bowed out of the friendship. This definitely set the alarms for “new girl” alert. I accepted the book was “lost” and I took an oath that I have yet to break: I don’t lend books. I have bought many books (some used and others brand new) for too many people (some strangers!) throughout my life but I have never again shared from my own library. Also, after a year of no friends because I felt all the friendships were fake, I befriended my neighbor who was two years older than me. We are still friends. I learned that as long as I was willing to walk away from what didn’t feel real, I would continue to get closer to real. To date, this has served me well, although it hasn’t been easy. At all.
And today, in the barn, there it was, filled with Robert Frost and dust from many moves to many places. Apparently it had been living with my parents’ book collection, clearly the discarded one since it was in the barn beyond the backyard and not inside the house!
I opened it to the page from which the yellow post-it note was sticking out. I read the poems. Two familiar and one new to me.
I recalled I was 12 years old when I discovered Robert Frost. It was before moving to Kansas. It was in 7th grade in New York City. We had to write a paper on a poem of our choice and explain the metaphors, similes and the general meaning of the poem. When I would become a teacher many years later my training as well as expectation by principals would entail teaching kids weeks of lessons on how to do this. Back then we were just expected to go read and think and makes mistakes and learn from them. I picked Robert Frost and “The Road Not Taken.” I couldn’t have picked a more challenging poem. My father spent hours going over it with me but I had to write what it meant in my own words. After a few days, Mrs. R. (many know of her name), my English teacher and favorite teacher, asked me if I had had anyone help me write it. I told her the truth: I had unintentionally picked a very challenging poem I didn’t understand so my father helped me. Then I spoke three languages including English so I was very confused about metaphors and similes. But yes, I did write it all myself. She told me I understood a lot more than I knew and she was very impressed.
I couldn’t be happier; the prettiest and kindest teacher in the entire junior high had decided to share what I wrote with the class. It wouldn’t be very long before my innocent perspective about her was hijacked. The boys also liked her but not because they respected her: she wore really short silk skirts that probably violate school code now. Or maybe they did then too and she could get away with them for certain reasons. The girls envied her because she smelled like Bloomingdale’s. And then there was me, who felt she understood Robert Frost’s poetry like I had. It would be a matter of few years after our relocation to Kansas through our correspondence (that first year away from New York City, for all of the year, my entire seventh grade class, teachers and even principal, remained in touch with me via letters) where some personal information was exchanged and I learned that she had not taken the road less traveled, I just reminded her of her younger self who could have.
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In the short time I had this evening I wanted to write about many other things. I had plans for truths and here I am…
What can I say to Stillness when it has so much to offer?
So many of us go through so many relationships that are actually the exact same experience. So few people actually have new experiences.
It takes immense effort to love the best in ourselves that exists because of our parents as we acknowledge those parts that require perpetual mending also because of our parents.
Sometimes we don’t hold onto the past but the past holds onto us, but only so far as to be released, not deleted. Word by word. Objects in the past appear closer than they are. Past is a phantom limb that doesn’t actually hurt.
“The Aim Was Song” by Robert Frost
Before man to blow to right
The wind once blew itself untaught,
And did its loudest day and night
In any rough place where it caught.
Man came to tell it what was wrong:
It hadn’t found the place to blow;
It blew too hard – the aim was song.
And listen – how it ought to go!
He took a little in his mouth,
And held it long enough for north
To be converted into south,
And then by measure blew it forth.
By measure. It was word and note,
The wind the wind had meant to be –
A little through the lips and throat.
The aim was song – the wind could see.
