Bowl o’ Cherriesbowl o’ cherries

For my 49th birthday last year, Mark rented me a cello. He also gave me a music stand and a beginner’s book. I drew the bow inexpertly across the strings and made a commitment to this hour-glass shaped beauty. Sound waves rumbled up my arms.

The summer passed before I managed to find a teacher and schedule lessons. Everything I’d been doing to coax sound out of my instrument was wrong. I’d been sitting wrong, holding the bow wrong. Even the size of the instrument was wrong. I rented a different-sized cello. And I practiced. Twenty minutes a day.

The more correctly I placed my fingers on the cello’s neck and the more expertly I employed my pencil grip on the bow, the more my elbows and wrists ached. The fingers in my left hand went numb. Joints in my right hand stiffened and swelled in protest.

Though I was in pain, I continued to practice. I learned ecumenical plucking: “Jingle Bells” and “The Dreidel Song.” Kids home on a visit in October asked for a concert, and I obliged. “Let’s hear that again,” they teased.

My sense of loss around the absence of Sam’s power drumming diminished. I was no longer lingering in the hall, recalling Max’s increasingly indifferent, irregular sessions on trumpet. My cello and I, we were making new music memories to fill the Big Empty.

A friend asked me how things were going with the cello. I filled her in, including details of numb fingers and joint ache. Why, she wanted to know, was I doing something that gave me pain?

“I just need to practice harder,” I told her.

“Will you listen to yourself?” she asked.

I knocked off for a few weeks. Sensation returned to the fingers in my left hand. My wrists ached less. The bow lay where I’d left it, its strings slack but still coated in powdery rosin. And I thought.

Or maybe I felt.

I wanted to fill my heart and head with vibrant sound. I wanted to try something completely new. I didn’t want any more pain than I was already experiencing.

So, this past January, I joined a choir. Every Wednesday, I retrace steps I took with my children to our neighborhood public elementary school. I climb the steps to the third-floor music room and slide into a stiff, plastic chair, squeezing in among the altos. The only pain I experience comes from climbing the stairs. That and the times I occasionally pinch my fingers in the metal clasps of the three-ring binder that holds my sheet music. Our brilliant, tart-tongued director warms us up. I take a deep breath and open my mouth. Sound waves rumble through my chest and out of my head. Our improbably named, almost 90-year-old accompaniest — Flossie — plays the first few bars of Morten Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna,” and we’re off.

I’m not good, but I’m getting better. I have trouble tracking the line, so I’ve highlighted the music staff in yellow. My counting is often off, so I’ve written in the beats, noticing time signatures, rests, and odd rhythms. I don’t practice, I won’t be in town for the year-end concert, so there’s no public payoff. But I am fully present each week. I join my voice with the rest of the choir and experience the joy of making music.

I need to return the cello to the rental company, since the year-long contract is almost up. In a month, I will no longer punch “49″ into the touch screen on the exercise machine I use at the gym. Fifty. And what have I learned in the first year of empty nesting, the last year of my forties?

To age gracefully has little to do with skin care, hair color, sagging neck, or even productivity. The trick, I think, is to hold onto the dreams that matter most and to be creative and flexible in making them come true.

Sam got home from school last Thursday.  I picked him up from South Station.  Max arrived this past Saturday evening on a bus from New York.  Mark and I were at a party for our favorite nonagenarian, so we couldn’t get him. A friend of his ferried him to the house.  And on Monday, after she’d finished her exams, handed in her last essay, and tidied her room, Lily got an extra special lift home from Max and Sam, who had driven out to Western Mass to bring her home from college.  The three of them took a detour on their way back to collect a gorgeous ceramic bowl they’d ordered.

Each is growing — up and out and away.  At the same time, they are choosing to continue to be a part of each others’ lives.  Perhaps it’s true that we middle class mothers at the beginning of the new millennium have fetishized child rearing to the point that we’ve created an even bigger chasm between rich and poor.  At the moment, I’m glad I’ve been able to give these three a sense that making family takes conscious effort.  Because now, in this first stretch of time away from home, they understand that it takes effort to continue their relationships with one another and with Mark and me.

And guess what? They gave me that beautiful bowl for Chanukah. I am filling it with new memories, the fruits of my labor.

It’s been almost two weeks since Mark and I embarked on our empty nesting adventure.  My tears have dried.  I’m starting to enjoy increased freedom and diminished stress.  Fun is being had. A book — a library book, no less — has helped me shift into drive.  I checked out non-fiction writer Melissa Fay Greene‘s No Biking in the House without a Helmet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

Greene is a brilliant storyteller.  I first encountered her work in Praying for Sheetrock (1992), a lyrically written chronicle of the legal and political fight to bring civil rights to rural Georgia.  She belongs in the same class of writers as Tracy Kidder, Buzz Bissinger, William Finnegan, and Susan Orlean.  Orlean presents herself as a woman in a ballsy – sexy – edgy way.  Greene doesn’t trade on her looks.  She’s a public mother, a wife, a person deeply concerned with raising children (not with jetting off to exotic locales to commune with a fertility goddess).

In No Biking, Greene describes how she and her husband, Donny, went from a family of four (biological) children to nine (through international adoption). She’d hit her early forties and no longer had very young children at home.  Her oldest was well into high school, and she thought, “Why not?”  Greene got pregnant, but the pregnancy ended in miscarriage. She’d already done the hard work of choosing to expand her family, so when she learned of Romanian children languishing in orphanages, she convinced her husband and four children to make room for one more.

As she began her adoption journey, she stuck to one guiding principle: she would only consider healthy, older children who had started their lives in families where they’d had a chance to bond and love. From Romania, Greene moved on to Ethiopia in the height of the AIDS crisis. There, over time, she adopted a daughter and three sons, two of whom are biological brothers.

Greene argues passionately in No Biking for the power of family.  She exults in the beauty of raising children and the basic pleasures of having growing kids underfoot. It’s not all smooth sailing for Greene and her husband, though, especially as the oldest kids leave home. Greene realizes a bit too late that those older kids, the boys especially, have provided a pecking order that has kept the younger kids in line and relatively free from conflict.  Their absence produces a dearth of order and fun, leaving the family in a state of crisis.

Greene also realizes that no matter how many children she adopts, she can’t avoid the pangs associated with children’s inevitable departure.  She has launched her two oldest sons and finds herself sitting, alone, at a gate in the Cleveland airport:

It seemed especially unfair for these goodbyes to hurt so much, since the working THEORY was that Donny and I would AVOID the pain of empty nest by continuing to FILL the nest. I sadly phoned Donny from the waiting area. “I don’t think our plan is working. We’re getting all the pain of empty nest anyway…” “I know,” he said. “But we don’t get to go to Paris.” (280)

Raising children, Greene asserts, doesn’t diminish a woman’s intelligence or capacities. Raising kids takes patience and skill, not to mention organizational prowess. Without these, parents can wind up turning  a family into a “group home.” Her account left me feeling joyful.  There really is something profound to celebrate.  And there is also something profound to mourn.

I’ve been cleaning, clearing, re-organizing, re-painting, even redecorating all summer. Re-claiming space with an eye toward living in an empty nest. I have come across scraps of paper from a zillion lives ago, kids’ kindergarten art projects, files from projects left dead by the road. Some of these reconnections have left me with a sense of sadness. Others have brought outright joy.  By far the hardest? The Rolodex.

For those too young to know, a Rolodex is a “rotary card file” first brought to market in 1954.  I think it’s fair to say that its history reflects significant shifts in personal organization and business. One look at the company website, and you’ll get an idea of how hard the widget makers have tried to bring this vestige of 20th-century efficiency into the modern era. What, exactly, does one do with a rectangular, plastic, flip-top bin that sits on a desk and holds paper cards? It doesn’t plug into anything.

I acquired my Rolodex in 1986, when I began as a reporter at The Brownsville (Texas) Herald. I can still elicit a giggle from Mark, whom I joined in Brownsville that year, if I repeat the slogan the City of Brownsville inked on its trash barrels: “Crossroads of the Hemisphere!” For me, it was a crossroads in many ways, not the least of which was technological. The Herald had an interlinked computer system that allowed reporters and editors to write, edit, and lay out copy digitally. We even had an early, inter-office version of “email” that allowed us to gossip through our keyboards. We had telephones — not cell phones — and, yes, Rolodexes. I filled mine with important contacts I cultivated on the two beats I covered: lifestyles, then education. And then I moved that Rolodex with me from desk to desk over the next quarter century, relying on it — like the rest of the world — even as I first acquired email and then a mobile phone.

Yesterday, I found myself staring down the Rolodex, wondering what on earth to do with the thing. Update it? Throw it out? Archive it? I started with the “As,” picking through cards to see whom I still contact.  By the time I reached “XYZ” (there is but one category for the three neglected last letters of our alphabet), I had stumbled across names of friends and teachers and doctors and service providers (electricians, landscapers, babysitters) no longer part of my life. Hardest were the names of The Old Ones, friends of my parents whose addresses I had carefully logged at the time of my wedding and when I gave birth to send thank you notes, as my mother would have asked. Almost all are gone now, their homes occupied by people whom I wouldn’t know — and who wouldn’t know me.

My recall ain’t what it used to be. If you ask me to tell you a name, I might scratch my head for quite some time. But when I come across that name, the faces and memories dance through my mind. Couples who gathered for my mom’s swanky dinner parties at which my sister and I passed hors d’oeuvres and washed dishes. Marta Rita Prince de Garcia, the retired Mexican schoolteacher who marched me through Spanish verb conjugation twice a week in Matamoros, when I worked at The Herald. Fayek Shama, the rookie infertility specialist at Yale whose deft surgical hand translated the crude techniques of IVF into what would become my three healthy babies. I tossed card after card into the recycling bin yesterday, thinking to myself that I’d need a seance, not a Rolodex, to put  me in touch with most of the people attached to these names and addresses.

I got up this morning, gathered each and every one of those discarded cards, and put them willy nilly into a Ziploc bag. I don’t know where I’m going to put the bag. Don’t know which file or box or container it’ll go into. My business with these long-losts just hasn’t come to an end. I don’t think it ever will.

I dropped Max at South Station about an hour ago. He left New York at 10 PM Friday night to hop a bus for Boston, hoping to escape what at the time seemed to be a cataclysmic hurricane. By this morning, we knew that Irene was an erratic mess-maker, causing wind and water damage in spots, leaving other places unscathed. Time for Max to get back to New York and his new life as a City Year corps member.

On our drive to South Station, Max and I saw Boston washed clean. The rising sun shone blindingly, brilliantly.  Cool crisp winds shooed away the blanket of heavy, wet air that’d been stalled over the Atlantic coast.  I watched as Max lugged to the terminal a backpack and bags filled with freshly laundered clothing and giant speakers.  Should he have made such a fuss to get back to Boston, after all?

A radio announcer voiced a piece in which New Yorkers posed similar questions. They criticized New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg for what this morning seems like over-the-top evacuation plans. As I sped along the Mass Pike, the city before me, I wished we could all be a bit more grateful. Thank goodness it wasn’t worse. Halleluyah that an ordinarily pro-business public figure was willing to take an “anti-business” stance in favor of keeping people safe. How lucky we are that the worst most of us can complain of is a wet basement or a loss of power. I’ll bet the folks down in New Orleans, where today they’re marking the sixth anniversary of that storm’s landfall, would love to have so little to report.

An update from the Gray Lady.

Two Ends

Two of the kids – Lily and Max – finished high school in early June.  I know, I know.  They call it “commencement.”  It’s supposed to be a beginning, the start of what’s coming next.  I like the idea of “graduation.”  You move (up?) from one step to another.  But, really, it felt so much like an ending.  The end of waving kids off in the morning from the breakfast table, the end of dropping kids at the train station and picking them up again in the afternoon, the end of having supper ready for everybody and hearing holy hell when everybody is sick of chicken, the end of having gangs of boys hanging out in the basement in front of the TV.  It was hard to think about beginnings, especially because nothing had begun yet.  It will.  I know it.  But it hadn’t then and hasn’t yet.

We celebrated a lot of these ends, and it was joyful.  I threw parties.  Grandparents traveled to Boston from distant locales.  There were presents.  Everybody dressed up and looked spiffy.  Mark, the kids, and I traversed Alaska’s Inside Passage, from Juneau to Ketchikan, as a way to note these endings.  The five of us had – let it be publicly acknowledged – a lot of fun. Together.  As a family.  A dream come true.

For Sam, of course, things haven’t exactly ended, because he is spending another year boarding and will have his commencement/graduation/end next June.  It’ll be different, in part because he’ll already have made the leap to “away.”  And it’ll be different because he won’t be graduating near home, so I can’t make all my neighbors gather and fuss.  But with luck we’ll all be together again – grandparents included – and it’ll be a big huge deal.  That’s the way it seems to be turning out in this family.  Reaching goals, coming to a place of achievement, marking rites of passage: we notice, and we eat cake.

A Middle

So, now, it’s high summer – August – and I feel like a yo-yo.  I keep pinging around.  I helped Lily get set up on the Cape so she could work her usual summer job at the fruit’n’veg stand.  I helped Sam get started at Berklee, where he’s been percussing away. I’ve helped Max and four others find an apartment in New York, where they’ll be volunteering with City Year for 11 months in public schools. Max hasn’t started yet, but he’s fully engaged in planning and will soon head with Mark in a U-Haul filled with furniture donated from generous friends.

And I’m in the middle of too many projects.  I’m working on the syllabus for the course I’ll be teaching in the fall.  I’ve done another round of research for a long piece, but I haven’t written it yet.  I’ve emptied my office of books, but I still have a dozen, deep file cabinet drawers to sort through and vast stacks of papers to sort.  Good news: underneath the horrible, mouldy carpet lies a hard wood floor.  Such potential.  Kind of a metaphor for everything else.  Who knows what’s underneath?  Maybe something that with a bit of polish will shine?

I feel stuck in the middle, meanwhile. After all the fanfare, not much has changed.  I’m still buying groceries and emptying the dishwasher.  The kids are keenly aware that new sorts of independence are just around the corner, but they haven’t quite reached the corner yet.  A bit of push-me-pull-you has ensued.  Normal, I know, in the Separation Derby, but not always comfortable.

A Beginning

You give everything you’ve got to these growing, shifting children, and if you are actually able to give what they need – not necessarily what they want or you expect – you get … to be left alone.  This somehow seems a bad bargain at the moment, although older friends tell me it’s actually great.  Right now, I think, “Who’d be crazy enough to sign on?  Three times?”  But that’s what the Bowl o’ Cherries is all about.  You’ve got to savor the delicious fruit of raising a family, recognizing that you’re going to be left with a messy napkin filled with pits.  The tasty fruit is gone.  The seeds are to scatter.  They’re going to mature into the loveliest trees. Probably in someone else’s yard.  You’ve been so busy getting to this point that other parts of the garden have lain fallow or even gone to seed. What to do?  Begin again.

Mired in the middle after so many endings, I am engaging in a tiny beginning. I’ve had my first two cello lessons and can now play both the “Dreidel” song and “Jingle Bells.”  Pizzicato only.  I told this to a neighbor’s son, a young man I have loved since he and my kids were all 5.  He’s a wonderful musician with a wry sense of humor.  Next, he assured me: Bach’s cello suites – preferably Number Two.  I told him to check back with me in 2014.

Lily and I strolled along the shore this afternoon for our first beach walk of the spring. We saw a dark figure from a distance. What was it? The undulations made it clear that we weren’t looking at anything with legs.

Had to be a seal. Was it a baby? Or just small? Neither of us could tell, but we felt protective, all the same. We weren’t carrying cell phones, so we couldn’t call for help. As we moved closer, our shoes ran over the edge of a message some previous walker had left in the sand. “ANIMAL STRANDING KNOWS.” We weren’t the first to have come across the seal. No point, then, in trying to send an alert. I wrote my own message in the sand: “SEAL VERY TIRED 3 PM TH.” Who would read this? Certainly not the seal.

We watched the seal labor its way to the dune.  It left an odd trail, pushing off with flippers, propelling its sleek, round body in short slithers.  Eyes open, blondish whiskers on end, it drew deep breaths from its muzzle into its chest, then drooped its head onto the sand. Were we anthropomorphizing to imagine the seal felt defeated?

Last summer, we routinely swam at high tide with seals in the Atlantic. We walked on the beach at low tide and waved to them. Our dog Amos barked and barked, begging them to come ashore to play. And then he braved the surf, paddling out to meet them. They didn’t appreciate his pathological friendliness, diving beneath the waves as soon as he got near. All of us, human and canine, wanted to bond with these pup-like creatures.  We stopped trying when the Coast Guard issued alerts about Great White sightings. The sharks were apparently as interested in these uncharacteristically large groups of seals as were we.

What was the kindest thing Lily and I could do? Lily walked behind the seal, thinking the seal might move away from her down towards the water. The seal made a few short moves, then took a deep breath and stopped. Our distress increased. The tide was going out. If the seal didn’t get itself into the ocean, it’d be another six hours before the tide rose enough to buoy it back into the sea. By then, we figured, the little seal would be dead. We spoke to the seal as if we were speaking to Amos. Which is sort of how we’d speak to a toddler. The seal lifted its head and opened its eyes. It took another deep breath and looked — we thought — as confused as we felt. Then it moved towards the high water mark in the sand.  We cheered it on as it approached the water’s edge. And then it stopped.

I bent down low.  My hands scooped wet sand, which I threw at the seal. Lily was appalled. But the seal scooched towards the water.  So I scooped more sand and lunked it seal-ward. “Wah!” the seal said. Lily and I froze. “Wah!” we said back. The seal took yet another deep breath and stopped moving. The water was so close! A few more slide-hops, and that little round pinniped would be in place so the waves would grab it. Lily and I reverted to the only seal language we could muster.  We pulled in our elbows and clapped our hands together, making barking noises that sounded like…humans trying to sound like cartoon seals. I threw a little more sand. The seal began to wriggle parallel to the water, then once again faced the dune.

“No more sand throwing!” Lily shouted. I argued that we should do everything we could to get the seal back in the ocean. Lily argued that if the seal wanted to get into the water, it would already have done so. After another fifteen minutes mostly of watching, we walked back to the car. We periodically swiveled our heads to check — the seal still wasn’t near the water.

Was it sick? Was it too tired to swim? Do seals get too tired to swim? Was it a very small, very old seal whose time had come?

My run-in with the little seal reminded me of the stunned birds I’ve tried to nurse back to health, the stray animals I’ve tried and failed to revive. Unlike others who might nurse the stunned and stray out of altruism, I’ve always been hoping that if they get better, they’ll tell me what happened. No matter who or what I meet, I always want to have a conversation.  I want to hear the story, to understand.  And this exasperates my husband and children. Sam to me, a few years ago: “Can’t you just go through the check-out line without…asking???”  The answer then, now, and probably forever?  Um, no. Today, I longed for a translator fish to pop in my ear, a la Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide, to communicate with everyone and everything — strangers, teenagers and, especially, seals.

I had to stop myself before filling in the customs re-entry form on the flight from Heathrow to Boston last Wednesday. Name: fine. I remembered it. Address: ditto. Carrier, flight number, passport number, passport issue date, passport expiry, yadayadayada. At the bottom — profession. I gripped my pen…and then I remembered: “housewife.”  I had gone to India as a housewife, so, I figured, I’d better come home as one, too.

Amazing what this housewife got to do in India. Serendipitously interviewed a fascinating bunch of people while working on a documentary about a 90-year-old left-leaning missionary. Chatted animatedly with an elegant older Bengali gent about educating students with special needs in India and America — and spoke of what I would do from Boston to provide contacts. Stood in line to clear security at the Taj Mahal with my daughter and got whacked in the ribs by a coterie of be-saried Afghanis intent on cutting the queue. Ate in the home of an actor-cum-driver and his nurse wife, savoring chole and chapatis, watching their 7-year-old son dance on a coffee table. Got a sense of Indian community health when the beloved 90-year-old fell and fractured her collar bone and shoulder. Rode a jeep through a tiger preserve and saw tiger paw prints. Huffed and puffed my way through a string of bazaars overlooking the foothills of the Himalayas. Shared a wild, segmented, 10+-hour taxi ride from Landour to Delhi with a gracious, garrulous movie star.

What to do with all of these experiences and memories? A good housewife would cook. And since I am an excellent housewife, I’ve been studying the recipes and techniques of Auntie Manjula online. A good housewife would also put together a pitch for a radio story and begin piecing together video and sound for her documentary. And do laundry. And give friends gifts. And watch the Oscars with her husband. And write a few thank you notes. Check, check, check-check-check.

Ah, to travel the world under the capacious mantle of “housewife!” A privilege? A disguise?

If you want to see what I saw — and also to see what daughter-of-housewife is seeing and doing — follow this link.

Rebecca from the visa service called with an update. She wanted to let me know that by listing myself as a “writer” on my application form, I was putting myself in a category that would require five to seven weeks of scrutiny. “The consulate will read everything you’ve ever published. They’ll want to know what you might be writing about the country.” I protested that I also put down that I’m unemployed. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “They’ll consider you part of the news media.”

I let out a deep sigh. I’d need the visa in five — not seven — weeks to make the flight. I didn’t want to risk a delay. I didn’t want to lie, either. But the truth of my professional identity is layered and multiple. Any number of labels fit. The squirrels in my brain did a few backflips.

“What if I were to put down ‘housewife?’” I asked.

“Perrrfect,” Rebecca purred.

I filled out the forms again, FedExing them to New York. Five days later, my passport returned to me in the mail, visa affixed.

“Housewife.” The term traditionally refers to a woman whose sole role it is to tend a home while her husband earns a living in public. Feminists have objected to “housewife,” preferring, instead, the term “home maker,” because the latter doesn’t presuppose dependence on a man. Either way, the assumption — as the consulate concluded — is that housewives and homemakers are harmless. Whom would you rather let into your country: a writer or a housewife? A writer might be dangerous, cause public trouble. But a housewife? Can she bake a cherry pie?

An obscure British definition of “housewife” refers to a sewing kit, complete with needles. I like this one. A lot. Self-contained. Portable. Able to provide valuable assistance with the most ordinary of objects. Handled unwisely, capable of wreaking havoc and causing pain.