The fences are weird. No making sense of where they've been placed. But they're not as bad as we imagined. Right now, there are still small gaps to be found or burst through. There's an intoxicating exuberance everywhere, a blend of autumn color and cool, of Fall Break, and, yes, of Debate '08. Yesterday, if we wanted, we could tour where things will be: the inside of the immense press tent, the floor of the arena where the candidates will stand, etc. I understand there was little to see and surely all better left to the imagination. I have an appointment with a student at 3:30. By 5:00, no cars are to be left on campus. I seriously expect someone wielding a pole to rout Alex and me from my office, where, if anything had been locked, it must be unlocked now. It pleases me to think of Secret Service agents searching through the chaos of my files. Byron--"mad, bad, and dangerous to know," they'll read. Otherwise, what will they make of it?
posted by Sandy at 10:07 AM

Breaking Through

Christmas lights. Here they are, winning me, as many things more serious seemingly can't do. They lift my heart. If I were my doctor, I'd write a prescription telling me to go out driving every night, to find more and more places coming alight as the days continue toward the holiday. I want to go up to the doors of every house, to thank the people at home there for making the effort, for spending on the electric bill, for these gifts they are giving when they bedeck their homes.

I like colored lights best, a reminder of my childhood, maybe, or just tired of too much white or simply that I was once a colored-lights kind of girl. I think of how my grandfather strung lights around his porch and windows every year, that alone telling me that he couldn't have been as entirely soured on life as he seemed in the days when I knew him.

Really, I love them all. I like it when a virtual palace turns more wondrous with the glow on its lines. Yet, even in Brentwood, it's not always tasteful but still great. There's a big house, on the market for a couple of years, that sold during the summer. It's now a virtual zoo of light-formed creatures. I wish you could see my neighbor's lovely lawn scene: a tableau of snowflakes, white bear, Christmas tree. I don't think they bought it at Walmart. And there's a place I see from the two-way stop on Regent, during the minute before I have to turn right. One of so many ranch houses in Crieve Hall, I'd never notice it or even the tall cedar in the front yard had it not become nothing short of a hallelujah in all colors.

I also love that raindeer that some people on Trousdale set out each year, placed so that it seems to be nibbling on a flower bed, the one that looks exactly like a jackrabbit: something about the ears.

I think that more houses are lit this year. I could be wrong but I wonder. If the year feels kind of dark, if we're fearful of buying the gifts or paying for the flights home, as we enter such a winter, will we light it all the more?

Hey, I'll even take the mall lights. Or the candles in the window of the dirtiest gas station. I love the way Christmas lights transform places--not just the glitter of a single strand of multi-colored lights lining the roof's edge on any battered white cottage inhabited by people I don't know, but also the way they loosen the knots tied tight on all those places I once loved, the ones I can scarcely look at it now, all wrapped up in pain and disillusionment. Somehow, for this month, they are new, almost restored.

There's not all that much I trust of late, especially my own intuitive knowing of anything. Still . . . . all these places, lighting up one by one. It's as if someone had leaned down and kissed each one of them on the head.
posted by Sandy at 8:41 PM

Lovers' moon through bare trees, Christmas lights that always surprise me as if I'd never seen them before. I'm trying to soak it all in, just as I did Sunday's service and the party with friends because Christmas in Australia is nothing the same. It's not just the weather because it may well be 50 degrees and raining on Christmas Day. Even summer can't be counted on to stay summer that far south. It doesn't turn dark until 10 p.m. so hardly anyone bothers with lights (though many people in Florida do). Christmas simply isn't that big a deal there. For most, it's gifts for kids and a big meal and the start of summer holidays (vacation) immediately after.

I suppose I should say that's a good thing, and it is. When I lived there, I enjoyed most caroling in the hospitals and the carol sings put on by local councils in the parks. You can count on it to be hot any day one of those is on. Once we went to the huge program down near the Yarra which actually started late enough to continue after dark. I like sixpences in the Christmas pudding and that everyone wears the crown from the crackers. But it's a time you're so aware that you're not at home, so, at times, I'd go to the most "American" shopping center in the city just to see the decorations.
posted by Sandy at 8:33 PM

Christmas at Belmont. Walking on to the campus more dressed-up than I ever am. Richard S. making the carillon sing. Settled in my seat in the Massey balcony. Music so beautiful I have to close my eyes. Well, also music designed for the national TV broadcast. But even that is impressive.

From the balcony I search the small faces of the orchestra, the Chorale, the Chorus, the jazz groups, bluegrass group, Company, all of them--and over my shoulder I try to peer down the rows of the Women's Choir. Flautists in one balcony wing, tuba players in another. I'm looking for my students because I know some of them have been practicing for the day.

It goes two ways. Sometimes I simply don't recognize them in their all-dressed-up states. Sometimes I do. Transformation either way. Can that polished young woman with the angel voice be the same one sprawled in her chair in my freshman class, her face perpetually saying, "whatever...." I know that's the guy who makes silly jokes to cover his awkwardness in class. Here, he's a swinging drummer, cool as they come.

Now I know who they are in the music building, where they want to be, and it's good for me to know.
posted by Sandy at 3:55 PM

I've lived more than long enough to know that grief can end in gratitude, the pain, the memories of what once was. I know it, I say it, I hear myself say it. There's a book lying on my nightstand that promises the same. Time is a healer. Time. I say to my hurting students: "Just promise me you'll find a way to get through until 30." I say it will hurt less then. I say I have no idea why. I mean it: so many things are better. Accepting that you'll never get what you wanted from a parent. Not caring so much what others think. Knowing that the sky won't fall.

Maybe those are losses too, these more easeful things, but they're not the kind that make you sing all the sappy songs: "But I don't think time is going to heal this broken heart." Not the kind that turn you eloquent when you explain to a class why "(Write it!) "comes between "losing you" and "disaster" in a wonderful poem. Better to have loved.....oh, yes. It took Tennyson a long time to say that.

A long time it always takes and, years ago, the time between Halloween and Christmas--that usually flying-by-too-quickly-to-grab-hold-of time--had inched itself like sludge squeezed agonizingly through the straitened vessels of my still-beating heart. It was that first Christmas...after. And it had come too soon. I was still convinced that he would recognize he'd cast away something he'd "never see the likes of again," as we say where I grew up. I was equally convinced that he'd never see that. I had driven past his house once, and I swore I'd never do such a thing again.

It was Christmas and I even thought of buying gifts for him and then returning them. I could not bear to be the woman this could happen to, the woman who had already given much too much. Christmas and nowhere to go except to my hometown since my mother would be alone for the holiday otherwise. I wonder, now, what had plunged my mother into depression that year. She'd never been a huge decker-of-halls but she usually made some kind of effort. That year, not a solitary decoration. I think there may have been gifts; my sister asks me about some costly present but I have no memory of ever receiving it. I know that my mother and I spent Christmas Day in chairs watching the nothing on TV, neither of us able to call up the energy to cook.

We sat there silent, neither of us even thinking to ask a question of the other.

Late in the afternoon, I got back in the car and drove fairly empty roadways back home. I had to leave because I was committed to take a group of students to England for a Winter Break course; we were flying out early on Boxing Day. I remember asking myself in all seriousness whether I could do it. By then, I believed that grief could be hidden. I found it a marvel that someone could stand there with massive internal bleeding, still looking like anyone else in the crowd. But I felt that something in me was precarious, too close to the edge. What would it do to me to have to "carry on" with teaching, with leading 18 students traipsing behind me all over the south of England, students who had invested much money and more expectation in that "it will be wonderful" journey? (It had been easy to sell it to them several months before Halloween.) In a way I couldn't identify, I was afraid of what might happen.

I dragged myself to the airport where missing passports and teary good-byes, frightened flyers and too much luggage took the time before boarding. I arrived, jet-lagged, only to be told to hold an organizational meeting of my class in the hotel lobby, before any of us went to our rooms. A boy from another university told me "he wasn't going to do any work while he was on the trip" and I told him in a voice that I didn't recognize that he certainly would. My course was titled "Dickens and the Idea of Christmas" and I walked through the days and the streets feeling far less substantial than Marley's ghost. There were wonderful things to be seen, to be learned. I saw them; I learned them. I watched over my students, anxious for them to enjoy it all. I refereed lovers' quarrels, told the students to ignore the herring on the breakfast buffet, heard their in-drawn breaths at first sound of a boys' choir during a service at Westminster Abbey.

It was bitter cold. We saw Stonehenge in hoar-frost like snowfall. In the photographs taken at Dover Castle we hug ourselves with gloved hands. At night in my room I piled everything I owned on top of me in the bed and still shook my wakeful way through the nights. I took the students to Lincoln's Inn Fields to see the poor who live in boxes there. With their beautiful souls, they befriended the buskers, anybody in a pub, the men who slept on the grates outside our hotel. I wanted them to have freedom; I would have held them all under my coat if I could. I think I feared we all might die.

Then one day closer to the end than the beginning, we went to Oxford. The students were distressed by the meat hanging in the market. Much as I had been the first time, they were a little disappointed on first sight of the university. But I wanted to take them to a College that I knew would be lovely even in winter time, a College where hallowed writers had walked. Here I must stop to tell you of something that I found a wonder. The students had free days, half days, even a period of time now to roam Oxford as they chose. Invariably, though, five or six of my own students, the ones I had brought with me from my university, would choose to be with me, to go wherever I chose to go. I couldn't believe it. I thought they must see that I had nothing to give; I couldn't even answer many of their questions. People back away from the wounded. I understood that.

The group who chose to go with me that day were the best of the best, the dearest of all the dear and diverse students who followed me to England. We walked the corridors; we marked the hallowed places. Then, attracted by unusual green on the lawn, we decided to walk by the river.

This past week one of those students wrote to me. The last she knew, I was in Australia. But she'd found me on the university website. She wrote to me about that day in Oxford. You must understand that, as far as I remember, we never talked about it. I might have tried to tell someone else about it, sometime during the intervening years, but, if I did, I'd have been unable to express it. But for me....so many times I have wandered among the trees beside the river with those young women. I don't remember what we said, but it doesn't matter. You see, they saved me that day. I believe that. You couldn't convince me otherwise. From that day on, I began to heal.

Since that time, I've had to admit that the love I mourned was best not continued. I have known far greater love, greater grief. I have risked perhaps even more. But I think I will never be in that kind of black place again, one that I believe had more to do with me than with the lost "us." Still, there was that time and there was that day.

I never thanked them, constrained as I was at the time about what was professional for a teacher to heap upon a student. I've seen two of the 16 students who traveled with me since they graduated. One, who had already loved medieval stories, was so moved by the 5th century churches we toured that she returned to England, borrowing the money to do a master's degree there. Since then, she has not been able to find the money to return. I wonder if she will spend her life trying to repay the loans, longing for what she sees as her "real" home. Another woman who took the riverwalk worked in our department for a while, long enough for us to move on to a simpler friendship. Then I left and she disappeared. She came by one day last year, hoping to find work again. But the troubles she had found were known, and no one would take a chance on her. I received an email this semester telling me she had taken her life.

Now, you may have a small idea what it has meant to me that Sarah wrote to me now. A small idea. She wrote to me about that day by the river, and she gave me a link to her blog where she had written about it. She also speaks of things later in the day that I don't even remember; she gives me back to myself and I smile. She confirms for me that God gives such days, gives us to each other for such days, so that we may take what we need from them.

If Sarah is willing, I will publish a link to her blog. Her writing to me has meant enough that I have, after such a long time, written here again.
posted by Sandy at 9:18 PM

"You shall go with me, newly-married bride,
And gaze upon a merrier multitude.
White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the Birds,
Feachra of the hurtling form, and him
Who is the ruler of the Western Host,
Finvara, and their Land of Heart's Desire.
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, time an endless song."

-William Butler Yeats, "Land of Heart's Desire"
posted by Sandy at 7:59 PM

I had an early doctor's appointment today and sort of never had breakfast, or lunch--one of them, anyway. So about 5:00, having worked up an unusual appetite, I decided to visit Cracker Barrel for some of that food my Mama can't make quite the same anymore and I don't allow myself to cook. Cracker Barrel is always a good place for a Southern writer to remind herself of her roots. Tonight I noticed a lot of good folks I recognized, though I'd likely never seen them before. I was surprised to see several interracial couples in such a place. The restaurant clientele was nearly all couples at that hour. And I noticed, though it didn't surprise me, how "couple" needs an alternative definition that has nothing to do with joining, something like "two people who came in the same car and are seated at the same table with each other." All around me men and women stared vacantly across each other's shoulders, obliquely, lest one's eyes meet the other's. Seated around me were at least three couples who never looked at each other or spoke a word the entire time I was there. I find it so sad for it to come to this emptiness for any two people who care or have cared for each other.

I saw another version of couple-distancing today. At the hostess's podium, I stood in line behind a young woman who held a cell phone to her left ear. She conducted all of her business with the hostess by gesture, not missing a beat in her phone conversation. And when her table was ready, she turned and gestured to the man behind me who, I then realized, was the other half of her couple. As he walked up to her, I saw that he had a cell phone pressed to his left ear. They followed the hostess in, both absorbed in their separate conversations. Each took a chair, pulled the menu open, and continued jabbering even more loudly against the dining room noise. I know she was talking about getting her daddy to help with child care. I think his subject was sports. Am I the only one who thinks this is strange? Why go out together?

As I left the dining room, full of cornbread and iced tea, I found the shop full of people, rush hour in full flourish at 5:45. I couldn't get through the crowd directly to approach the cash register. As I circled the candy display, my eyes, which weren't focusing on much, could not miss a huge display at the center of the shop. Halloween decorations and costumes! Hey, people, I like Halloween, but it's JULY! July! The late rainy, spring and the imminent semester have already made me feel as if I've missed most of summer. I don't want Halloween now. I swear, the retailers will soon create some holidays to fill the gap months; just wait and see. Something between New Year's and Easter, something between Easter and the 4th of July. And Labor Day just doesn't work, so what will the August holiday be? Maybe Harry Potter Day. :) Yeah, that might work.


posted by Sandy at 4:50 PM

Summer turns surreal, a phone call from my sister announcing that my dad is headed by ambulance for Jackson. Another summer, another emergency hospital stay. Multiple blockages in the small intestine this time. He's neither as critically ill nor as abusive this year, but I have to admit that I can't shake the emotional imprints of other times. I can hardly bear to stay in the room, especially when I'm alone. Once last week, I left for coffee, while he was asleep, and I realized, as I pushed open the door of room 813, that I felt within me my lifetime of doors opening to where my father is: I felt fear. Yet at other times, when his ankles hurt and he wants to sit on the side of the bed, I tell him to lean on my shoulder, I lay my head on top of his, and I am overwhelmed with tenderness for this old man, part hardwood, part fragile child.

In Daddy's room, the window is blocked out two-thirds of the way down but, where the glass is clear, the sun bursts through-- too strong to look at. Out there is basically the same view I sought when my dad was last here on the eighth floor, a view across rooftops to West Forest Avenue, to clinics and doctors of my past. I search through the trees for the upstairs apartment on Campbell St. where I lived for one autumn and winter long ago. I was pregnant with Christie but didn't know it. One day at the Memphis fair I'd felt woozy and needed to sit down on a curb , but I put that down to heat and corn dogs. I worked that fall until I was six months along, on my feet all day at the Sears catalog desk, lifting tires and boxes as big as I was. But when the management found out, they made me quit. So I tried to pass the time in that tiny apartment, so cute with its built-ins and slanted ceilings. I cleaned every inch of it every day and still had too much day left. Sometimes, I'd walk down to the park and feed the ducks. My mother has a photo of me there on the banks of the pond in my first maternity dress, so proud of the bump showing on my skinny frame.

I've lived in Jackson three times, during Christie's dad's odyssey for promotion. I know the city. But one morning last week as I drove from the bypass to the hospital, I turned on Hollywood instead of Forest and wound up nearly downtown before I turned around. I drove slowly past a lovely house that is for sale, saying to myself, "Sandy, you don't want to live here." My cloudiness is illness, but more.

As I ride the elevator to the eighth floor, the lullaby plays again, twice in a row. Twins, I guess. Or it could be just two unrelated babies, born at almost the same time. The hospital is bouncing with births; perhaps it's a full moon. Earler, I circled the parking lot, full at all times of the day, windscreens decorated with writing like wedding cars. :" Mom and Dad of Tyler," one says, and two rows over: " Grandpap of Tyler. " Once, the elevator door opens on the third floor, and the people outside the nursery window are four deep, like the crowd viewing the Mona Lisa. I hear someone say, "We look like a flock of vultures." As I walk down the eighth floor corridor, past two nursing stations, I think how the lullabies and the sun seem incongruous here, like noisemakers and purple mylar balloons at a seance.

It is on my mind as it has been before, the brief encounters of our lives. What do they mean? Does it make one whit of difference in the universe that I have happened into the photograph of a tourist from the Netherlands and that every time he looks at the Hermitage gardens, he will see me?

Is there any meaning that I have smiled at the musical announcement that a child has been born, a child I will likely never see? What about the young LPN in green scrubs who tries to adjust my father's IV and learns that it is leaking? Somehow, he has decided that she is Canadian, although if he just listened to her speaking, he should know better. But he's certain of it and is trying mightily to convince her that she should admire Anne Murray rather than Shania. "Daddy," I say, "She doesn't know Anne Murray. She's too young." She nods at that, and he tells her how it makes him feel when Anne Murray sings. I am delighted at this. And I am grateful to that girl who kneels beside the bed, so gentle, so patient with this conversation. I think of the ER doctors who, for four times now, have seen something in a glance and saved the life of an old man who should have been dead by all accounts and would have been had he continued to rely on whatever doctor comes to the local clinic one day a week. How much of life is about these relationships?

Long ago, I taught an essay that called such meetings "plug-in, plug-out" relationships and lamented that our lives were becoming nothing more than such easy encounters with hair stylists, store clerks, ministers at the back door of a church. I saw the point but doubt that many lives are so limited. Advice columnists seem to deal with the same questions about the same long-term meshings as ever. Sometimes, though, a "plug-in, plug-out" may more than we admit, more than we can possibly know. I don't know about total chaos theory, but sometimes I wonder if a shared smile may not rock distant stars.
posted by Sandy at 2:37 PM