Facebook is a dream come true for someone like me. All my life, I have been kind of narrating myself in my head. I have one friend who confessed to me once that she does this too. I suppose it’s a writer thing, although I’m pretty sure that not all writers do it. But now we have a program that encourages us to share this self-narration with everyone we know! An audience--for all the little pieces of writing that constantly float through my head--wow. Who could ask for anything more??
When Aunt Maggie, also a writer, was dying, I sent what I didn’t know at the time would be my last email to her. In it, I mentioned Facebook. I said that I found myself crafting the status messages like little poems. I’m sure I am not the only literary-minded Facebooker who sometimes deletes her own content because it’s not well written enough. I love status messages. Even when they’re not really poetry, they often are interesting little snatches of life as we know it. (Go to your own profile page and read back through some of your old ones, and see what comes back to you.... Notice what you noticed at the time, and what you notice now... if you dare.)
Maybe our images of ourselves through Facebook are impossibly distorted. I think about all the different levels of privacy and self-disclosure that people are comfortable with. But I wonder, does our Fb behavior pretty much mirror how we are anyway? I am careful with my Fb postings--I do have a sense of privacy, and I don’t really want to embarrass others (well, occasionally I give in to the temptation to embarrass Laura, but that is just so damn easy). I am also careful not to “friend” just anybody who comes along. Even people I really do know, never mind the fake ones. I like Facebook because it really does connect me with people I care about. Writing has always done that for me, although like lots of people, I have always written letters and even emails in fits and starts, long broken-up lines of communication with old friends, extended family--always feeling the struggle to keep up with everyone I do truly care about.
I’m not sayin’ that Facebook is perfect, and I have perfect sympathy for all my friends who say “NO WAY”--as well as for the ones (like my brother Tim and his wife, hey I miss you on there!) who start and then drop off. It can be a time suck. I admit it. There are days when I like it too much. But all in all, in the balance, as I look at my life as the New Year approaches, I think that Facebook has enriched my life. As a writer, as a friend--even as a mother. And hell, it’s FUN. We could all use more of that, right?
I spent today in airports and planes en route to Vermont, in a state of Internet deprivation, still narrating my life in my head as I have always done, but now I have the reflex of crafting status messages out of this mundane material. I can see why people post messages from their mobile phones. (Uh-oh.) Have fun out there, and happy new year.
P.S. Oh by the way--the first free airport wifi I found all day was here in Burlington. Vermont ROCKS.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Soup (a seasonal poem)
soup:
broth
deep layers of flavor
edged with salt
sentiment at the surface
bright flakes of green parsley
scent of lemon
trick you into believing that you know
what is roasted in the bone underneath
and simmered long --
essences wrought for the tongue,
mysterious
and savory.
broth
deep layers of flavor
edged with salt
sentiment at the surface
bright flakes of green parsley
scent of lemon
trick you into believing that you know
what is roasted in the bone underneath
and simmered long --
essences wrought for the tongue,
mysterious
and savory.
Monday, December 21, 2009
A little bit about my mother's death
I wrote this piece about my mother's death in May 2007. It doesn't have anything in particular to do with Christmas or with my birthday, but today is my birthday, and tonight Laura and I decorated our Christmas tree, and I guess it's fair to say that everything is always about my mother, in some way or another - often poignantly, but not always.
~~~~~~~~
Let’s get this part over with right up front: my mother was killed in a car crash in August of 1988. It was a harsh way for her to leave the world. Her body was crushed. Her sister, who was in the car with her, survived and remained conscious throughout the aftermath. Imagine.
My mother drove a Honda Civic. This was in the days before air bags were standard. (I don’t think about how it might have turned out if her car had had air bags.) She was hit by a much larger vehicle; it might have been a Ford Explorer. It was something big enough to throw a Honda Civic right off the road.
The state trooper knew the driver of the big car: he had cited that man for reckless driving in the past. As I remember it now, the story went that this trooper had said to him on some previous occasion, “You’ll kill somebody one day if you keep on driving like that.” But he still had his license and insurance.
As these things go, my two brothers and I ended up being represented by a PI attorney in a lawsuit against the driver’s insurance company. The attorney was a nice man, even a classy man, not the ambulance-chaser type I associate with that type of legal practice. He said that he had never seen such an open-and-shut case with such clear evidence of fault. He did what lawyers do, very competently I am sure, and as a result my brothers and I received sums of money in exchange for our mother’s death.
It was a strange thing to receive payment in exchange for feeling like an enormous hole had been ripped through me.
My then-husband and I went to see an investment broker because we knew nothing about what to do with this money. We did not tell her exactly where the money came from—we must have said that it came from my family, something vague like that. She remarked how lucky we were to have received this money. I liked her, and I didn’t like her any less because she said that. She just didn’t know. She is still my broker, and I still like her.
Several years later my father (who had been divorced from my mother long before her death in a guilty, uncomfortable, unresolvable, and protracted process that no one was ever able to feel good about) made some casual remark about this money—perhaps it was a comment about being able to afford to buy a house—which prompted me to say, “I would give back every penny right this minute if it would bring her back.” He looked at me, horrified, because of course he knew that. I’m sorry, Dad, I knew that you knew that. I know you would bring her back yourself if you could. You would have done anything to bring her back.
My dad was the one who told me she was dead. I was traveling in Europe at the time, and he had a terrible time finding me. First a telegram went astray, and then one night in a London guesthouse I got a message to call home. At the age of 27 I was still unacquainted with the inevitable signs of tragedy, and I did not realize what this message surely had to mean. My dad had a hard time making me understand. My brothers were backpacking together in the Cascade mountains and they didn’t find out until they came off the trail and my uncle picked them up. He had to tell them himself.
My father and his brother, it makes me weep now to think of them and what they went through in those awful days. Maybe they were not the greatest communicators who ever lived, but they loved us, and they knew enough of life and enough of my mother and of us to comprehend what we had lost. I think now that they, along with my aunt who was in the accident, my other aunt who was my father’s brother’s wife, and my grandmother who had lost her daughter, must have absorbed huge amounts of our grief and carried it for us, because we knew nothing about this kind of losing. It took us years to process this loss. We are still processing this loss. Our mother and the loss of her are layered into who we are in every way, at every level of our being. I cannot go a day without thinking of her. I have never been good at remembering her birthday or the anniversary of her death, but I am good at remembering her every day. Now, as I am starting to approach the age at which she died, I see her sometimes when I look in the mirror.
I do not really know why I am writing this essay about my mother now. I started it two days ago, on Mother’s Day, after I went on a bike ride. As I rode home I was thinking of my mother, and then I wrote a posting to my bike club listserv about the ride, and I added a paragraph about how I had been thinking of my mother. I have been writing to this listserv fairly often, even through the winter even though I don’t ride much in the winter, because there is a man in the group who interests me and I like the idea that he reads my postings. I didn’t think my mother would mind that these things coincided—my thinking of her on mother’s day, and my eagerness to come up with something good for the listserv that this man might read and enjoy. So here is the paragraph:
"It was chillier than I expected, and more overcast, and as I rode home, properly clothed, with Kleenex in my pocket for my runny nose, I reflected on how fortunate I was in my choice of a mother. She and my dad took us camping and hiking and canoeing throughout the Southeast during my childhood. I am now certain that my mother was the original inventor of the idea of layered clothing. She had that down long before the sporting goods companies ever thought of it. She also kept a Kleenex in every pocket of every article of clothing she owned. She was way way ahead of her time in carrying water bottles, and she never went anywhere without a snack in her purse or her daypack. She could pee behind a bush, change her clothes in the car, make instant coffee with a little electric gizmo that she stuck into a mug of water, and drink her beer from the bottle (or the can). In short, she knew how to be ready to go with what she needed. She died in 1988, and I still miss her, but oh how lucky I was, and I think I even knew it before I lost her."
~~~~~~~~
Let’s get this part over with right up front: my mother was killed in a car crash in August of 1988. It was a harsh way for her to leave the world. Her body was crushed. Her sister, who was in the car with her, survived and remained conscious throughout the aftermath. Imagine.
My mother drove a Honda Civic. This was in the days before air bags were standard. (I don’t think about how it might have turned out if her car had had air bags.) She was hit by a much larger vehicle; it might have been a Ford Explorer. It was something big enough to throw a Honda Civic right off the road.
The state trooper knew the driver of the big car: he had cited that man for reckless driving in the past. As I remember it now, the story went that this trooper had said to him on some previous occasion, “You’ll kill somebody one day if you keep on driving like that.” But he still had his license and insurance.
As these things go, my two brothers and I ended up being represented by a PI attorney in a lawsuit against the driver’s insurance company. The attorney was a nice man, even a classy man, not the ambulance-chaser type I associate with that type of legal practice. He said that he had never seen such an open-and-shut case with such clear evidence of fault. He did what lawyers do, very competently I am sure, and as a result my brothers and I received sums of money in exchange for our mother’s death.
It was a strange thing to receive payment in exchange for feeling like an enormous hole had been ripped through me.
My then-husband and I went to see an investment broker because we knew nothing about what to do with this money. We did not tell her exactly where the money came from—we must have said that it came from my family, something vague like that. She remarked how lucky we were to have received this money. I liked her, and I didn’t like her any less because she said that. She just didn’t know. She is still my broker, and I still like her.
Several years later my father (who had been divorced from my mother long before her death in a guilty, uncomfortable, unresolvable, and protracted process that no one was ever able to feel good about) made some casual remark about this money—perhaps it was a comment about being able to afford to buy a house—which prompted me to say, “I would give back every penny right this minute if it would bring her back.” He looked at me, horrified, because of course he knew that. I’m sorry, Dad, I knew that you knew that. I know you would bring her back yourself if you could. You would have done anything to bring her back.
My dad was the one who told me she was dead. I was traveling in Europe at the time, and he had a terrible time finding me. First a telegram went astray, and then one night in a London guesthouse I got a message to call home. At the age of 27 I was still unacquainted with the inevitable signs of tragedy, and I did not realize what this message surely had to mean. My dad had a hard time making me understand. My brothers were backpacking together in the Cascade mountains and they didn’t find out until they came off the trail and my uncle picked them up. He had to tell them himself.
My father and his brother, it makes me weep now to think of them and what they went through in those awful days. Maybe they were not the greatest communicators who ever lived, but they loved us, and they knew enough of life and enough of my mother and of us to comprehend what we had lost. I think now that they, along with my aunt who was in the accident, my other aunt who was my father’s brother’s wife, and my grandmother who had lost her daughter, must have absorbed huge amounts of our grief and carried it for us, because we knew nothing about this kind of losing. It took us years to process this loss. We are still processing this loss. Our mother and the loss of her are layered into who we are in every way, at every level of our being. I cannot go a day without thinking of her. I have never been good at remembering her birthday or the anniversary of her death, but I am good at remembering her every day. Now, as I am starting to approach the age at which she died, I see her sometimes when I look in the mirror.
I do not really know why I am writing this essay about my mother now. I started it two days ago, on Mother’s Day, after I went on a bike ride. As I rode home I was thinking of my mother, and then I wrote a posting to my bike club listserv about the ride, and I added a paragraph about how I had been thinking of my mother. I have been writing to this listserv fairly often, even through the winter even though I don’t ride much in the winter, because there is a man in the group who interests me and I like the idea that he reads my postings. I didn’t think my mother would mind that these things coincided—my thinking of her on mother’s day, and my eagerness to come up with something good for the listserv that this man might read and enjoy. So here is the paragraph:
"It was chillier than I expected, and more overcast, and as I rode home, properly clothed, with Kleenex in my pocket for my runny nose, I reflected on how fortunate I was in my choice of a mother. She and my dad took us camping and hiking and canoeing throughout the Southeast during my childhood. I am now certain that my mother was the original inventor of the idea of layered clothing. She had that down long before the sporting goods companies ever thought of it. She also kept a Kleenex in every pocket of every article of clothing she owned. She was way way ahead of her time in carrying water bottles, and she never went anywhere without a snack in her purse or her daypack. She could pee behind a bush, change her clothes in the car, make instant coffee with a little electric gizmo that she stuck into a mug of water, and drink her beer from the bottle (or the can). In short, she knew how to be ready to go with what she needed. She died in 1988, and I still miss her, but oh how lucky I was, and I think I even knew it before I lost her."
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