Requiem for a Friend

In 1995 I finished my doctorate in English from Florida State University, but I didn’t have much in the way of job prospects, so I cobbled together a meager living doing freelance work and adjunct teaching, and my family and I stayed in Tallahassee. It was through my varied pursuits that I met Freedan Wakoa. He came to me at the recommendation of a friend. He needed someone to help him turn his award-winning screenplay into a novel because an agent had told him that he might find a producer for his film that way. Seemed like a convoluted method to me, but I was willing to try and Freedan was willing to pay me a few bucks. (My fees were pretty much rock bottom.)

The story that Freedan had written involved a little girl who lived on a planet called Lumin. Everyone on the planet was born with wings, but they had forgotten how to fly. It was up to the young girl to help people learn how to fly again, but the mighty “wingless” class did all they could to prevent her.

I liked the story a lot, but there were also a few places where I found it read a bit too much like 19th Century Americana. When Freedan explained to me that the story had been inspired by a young girl who was part white and part African-American, I countered that people on other planets would not have the same racial backgrounds that we had, and another planet might operate by very different rules than ours. But, of course, in our minds, the heroine was a mixed race child with golden wings.

One of the the first things I did was change the spelling of each character’s name. The girl, Alexandra, became Alixandra. Thatcher (the insipid school teacher) became Thatchin, and so on. I decided that grass might grow down as well as up depending on the season, and I added a couple of moons. Otherwise, I kept the story intact, fleshing it out as prose.

As I transformed Freedan’s screenplay into a novel, I took a chapter every day to the small “hands-on” learning school my daughter attended and read it to the children -- about 50 kids from kindergarten thru fifth grade. It was such a hit that for the Halloween party that year, many of the children and faculty dressed as different characters from the book.

I finished the book, and in the meantime became close friends with Freedan. Although he was in his fifties, he had the boyish enthusiasm of a 20 year old. Quite fit with (Paul) Newmanesque blue eyes, he had a surplus of women in his life, and he had recently fallen in love with a gorgeous black woman in her 20s. She was calm, almost ethereal, while he bubbled over with joy.

Freedan told me once that he could “see.” Actually, he told me this several times. What he meant was that he could perceive the universal field. I believed him. There was something extraordinary about the man. He felt it was his mission in life to teach other people to see. That’s what he was doing with “Alixandra’s Wings.” It was an allegory, of course, but he had also created an exciting adventure story.

While we shopped that book around, Freedan lit onto another project. The light of his life was his beautiful teenage daughter. She’d been in some student films, and Freedan wanted to produce a movie that would feature her, as well as a student director from the film school at Florida State. I would write the script based on an idea that he and I came up with. I was thrilled with the idea. We rented some office space, we had long meetings, we traveled in search of locations, and I wrote and rewrote. We even managed to get a few investors.

In March of 1998, Freedan flew out to Los Angeles, where his girlfriend had recently moved, to try to find a “name” actress to help us make the film more enticing for investors. One day he called me from his girlfriend’s apartment. He said he couldn’t move half of his body, and his speech was slurred.

“You’ve probably had a stroke,” I said. “Get to the hospital. Now.”

But it wasn’t a stroke. It was a brain tumor, a particularly nasty kind called a glioblastoma. The next three months were dreadful. He came home, and we watched this vibrant, energetic man waste away. His daughter was devastated. Money was an issue because we had made certain commitments, most notably to our director who was afraid of being sent back to Belarus where she was from. Freedan’s ex-wife was understandably upset when Freedan gave me money to help keep her here. That was money his daughter would need. Looking back I realize I should have done things differently.

But the one thing I’m glad I did was to create an audio-book version of “Alixandra’s Wings” before Freedan died. I made two hundred and sold almost all of them. The money paid off some of the debts we had incurred in our movie-making venture. Freedan was pleased. He wanted Alixandra’s Wings to be like a virus. I learned years later that some kids listened to that book over and over for years. I know my daughter did. Adult friends told me they listened on long trips and didn’t want to get out of the car.

Freedan died in June, and the book became a file on my computer. I had my own books to write and sell. I had my child to raise. The book didn’t fit with what publishers wanted, and I didn’t have the technical expertise to publish the book myself. I also didn’t have illustrations for it. So I let it sit.

It took me 12 years to come back to it. A college friend of my daughter’s, who is a brilliant artist, jumped at the opportunity to make the illustrations. Someone else offered to help me with the technical aspects of publishing the book, and he did a beautiful job. His 11-year-old son, Jack, was the first to read it. “Awesome,” Jack reported.

Now Alixandra’s Wings is available as a print book, an e-book and an audio book on Itunes. I hope I’ve honored my friend’s vision at last.

Alixandra's Wings

For My Future Self

When I am on my deathbed, will I remember the last day of October in the year 2010? Will I remember walking through the field at the top of my neighborhood and noticing the small faces of wildflowers as I trundled through tall weeds, how I stopped to bend down and run my fingers over some yellow berries, low to the ground? Will I remember that day, the light a more subtle creature than summer's full-on blast, the warm sweet air? And how on that day I walked through the field in brown velcro sneakers, my green cotton drawstring pants and my white t-shirt? How there was no dog at my side and for once no ache in my heart? Will I remember how the dirt was sandy and pale orange-brown, the grass green and how at the edge of the field, dried oak leaves covered wide swatches of ground? And some leaves on the trees were still bright green, others were yellow and still others had turned dark red? Will I look back on that woman whose heart sang its two notes over and over, whose lungs absorbed life with such ease, and whose legs moved with strength and purpose? Will I remember that for once there was no longing, no pining -- just the simple pleasure of being.

Of course, I was decomposing even then. Cells had begun dismantling the set in preparation for the day we'd call it a wrap. Memories were being (and will continue to be) churned, crushed up, dissipated. But I hope that this one escapes and comes back to surprise me -- a gift from one me to another.

Coming Home

Tho it hasn't really been 'home' in 20 years. But last night when I flew in, that tropical wind blew my heart wide open. It's never long enough, the way I buzz in and out, reveling in the silk scarf air, wrapping it around myself. Then the rain explodes not in a torrent but gently like confetti. Welcome home, it says, stay, stay. Here's a place for you. Put your feet in the sand, turn your face up, inhale the sky, the sun, the whole atmosphere until the hungry edge of outer space devours you as you devour it, and you are completely gone. Complete.

Summer Evening

Officially summer ended

a few days ago, but

here we are in the warm night,

wearing shorts, tank tops,

sandals, dresses.

A breeze swims around us

whispering of the end

of ninety degree days,

soon, it says, very soon.

And we nod absently,

listening as Don plays

"Autumn Leaves" on his shiny horn.

The music melts like butter

in my body. Then: Salsa!

I dance alone, but not alone,

my family of friends seated here,

standing there, pretty wives,

a precocious child, smiles

on their summer faces, laughter

between the notes.

Life is grand by God. Oh amazing

and grace and all good things.

The languid, liquid night is in no hurry.

For Don's last set I sit

on concrete steps, my boon companion,

most excellent friend, beside me,

snapping fingers. And Don

is wailing now about how

the livin' is easy.

A flute answers his sax,

says yes and the cotton is high,

even tho we all know our gleaming city

is already gazing toward red October

and this is only a last lingering moment.

But for this moment

the babies are not crying.

One of them looks upon us

from the comfort of his carriage

like a wise Bodhisattva.

Amazing and grace and all good things.

Let us not say farewell to summer,

not tonight for we are rich in love

and good looking, too.

Amazing and grace and all good things.

On Civilization and Its Discontented

I’ve been thinking a lot about the role that emotions (especially anger) plays in our lives and in the affairs of the world. As I watch the posturings of TV pundits or stumble across the shrill invectives from the radio talk show screeds, I am stunned at the flood of emotions pouring out of them and the corresponding rage and hysteria reflected in the faces and incoherent ramblings of their followers. Anger has a place in the panorama of our emotional lives, but I fear it’s only purpose these days is to rip apart the fabric of our society.

This morning I had a dream in which a woman was saying terrible things about me to other people. I felt an enormous, engulfing rage. I screamed at her, telling her she was evil. I even threatened to hit her “upside the head” with a folding chair. When I woke up, I wondered what that was all about. I opened my journal, wrote down the dream, and made a list of things I was angry about -- my mother’s Alzheimer’s, my ex-husband’s various slights, a job promotion I didn’t get, the tea partiers, to name a few.

Then I realized that I couldn’t say I was honestly “angry” about those things because anger is an emotion with distinct physical symptoms, and I was feeling none of those symptoms. For me anger feels like a hammer banging around inside my head, my chest feels as if something is squeezing my lungs, and my heart feels like a roaring tiger in a cage. My eyes sharpen with the proverbial daggers, and my voice cuts like a sword. Of course, these are only metaphors, approximations of what anger feels like, but everyone who has felt it knows that anger is something physical with visible manifestations. If someone were to say to you in a calm voice with a smile on her face, “I’m angry about what you did,” you’d laugh dismissively. That isn’t anger.

So if I’m not feeling any symptoms, I can’t honestly say I’m angry about something. I can say that I “get angry” about these things. But I’m not walking around feeling angry all the time. Anger is an emotion, a chemical reaction, that arises in certain situations. We can also bring it on by obsessing about those situations, nursing old slights, or fuming about the wrongs of the world.

Sometimes we use anger as a tool to get other people to behave a certain way. My ex-husband used to say (rather regularly I’m afraid): “That pisses me off.” The plosive “p” and spitting “s” of pisses effectively conveyed his interior physical state. I would try not to do things that would provoke that statement because his anger created unpleasant sensations within me of guilt and worry. Let me not pretend to innocence here or victimization. I have used anger as a way to bludgeon others to my will as well. With the exception of a few saints, we all do it. Yet most of us realize at some point that anger’s usefulness is limited. In fact, anger and its accompanying tantrum is more destructive than helpful in most situations. We look foolish, we drive people away, we do things that later we wish we hadn’t. Sometimes we hurt or kill innocent people and damage or even destroy our own communities.

In our less civilized days anger must have been extremely important to our survival. Anger is the “fight” part of our “fight or flight” response. Nature programmed us with two options in the face of danger -- anger or fear. Fear tells us to run, but sometimes running away from a life-threatening situation is the wrong thing to do. Sometimes to survive we need to pick up a stick and slam it upside our assailant’s head.

The problem comes when the perceived threat is not really a threat. Nature gave us anger for life or death situations when an immediate response is required. But we have learned to use it for the most minor infractions. Someone is going too slow in the fast lane so we snarl and pound our car horns and figuratively shoot them with our fingers. This anger gives us a little charge of superiority, which is no more real than the supposed threat.

You don’t have to watch your television or scroll through your Facebook status updates for long before you see someone exhibiting signs of rage. Because we are communal animals, we often “catch” it. We may feel that person is attacking us or we may feel that whatever is threatening that person also threatens us.

This threat or perceived danger often has no basis in reality. Our lives are not in danger. Even our way of living is rarely affected. As a friend of mine noted when we were marveling over a recent public display of fear and resentment, “These are people who have never missed a meal.” Our feelings, which feel so real to us, can be manufactured or manipulated by someone who stands to gain from the blind anger of others.

That’s the thing about anger. It’s a blind beast. For good reason. When our forebears were being attacked by another tribe, they needed to be able to face the threat fearlessly -- with a certain blindness as to the consequences. Often, however, that very blindness keeps us from recognizing the factual evidence that tells us that the outrage du jour is not a serious threat. The adrenaline in our system says, “yes, yes, yes, the threat is real, kill it.” So we dance around in our anger like puppets and blindly begin destroying whatever we can lay our hands on.

And even when the threat is real. We can choose to overcome it without resorting to rage. We are more than the chemical cocktail stirring around in our bloodstream. We are also rational beings. We do not have to react from our lowest instincts. Or if we do react, we can ask ourselves what is really behind the reaction. It’s easy for me to see someone behaving angrily and to get angry in return. The challenge is not to get hooked into their anger. The challenge is to stay focused on factual evidence. The challenge is to choose love instead of anger.

Interestingly enough, love is a rational choice. Genuine love of others builds community and does not destroy it. If the community is healthy, then we will be healthy. Love is not blind. Love chooses to look beyond the faults and foibles and fears of others and see the truth. Love is fearless.

I am trying to figure out how to answer anger with love. I’m not quite there yet, but I know that’s where I want to be. I want my message to the angry people around me to be: there is nothing to be afraid of. We have problems, yes, and we can solve them if together we look at them rationally. It’s easier than you think.

Feather by feather

Today I got a phone call from the assisted living place where my mother stays. It was the nutritionist. It seems that a doctor has asked her to look at my mother’s case. My mother has lost fourteen pounds since November.

“And . . ?” I ask her.

“Well, she doesn’t drink milk,” the nutritionist says, “and doesn’t seem to be interested in drinking Ensure. We do have some ice cream that has protein and other nutrients in it.”

“She’s 92 years old,” I tell the woman. “Don’t push anything on her.”

The nutritionist says she won’t.

“Your mother mentioned being sad sometimes.” Did I know that, the nutritionist wonders. Yes, I knew. She’s been sad for years -- ever since the botched operation on her back took away her mobility. I’m sad, too. Sad that her once-brilliant mind is now a series of misfires. A couple of weeks ago she told me she couldn’t remember her last name. She sat in the dining room of the AL facility waiting for dinner and asked if this was something special, something they did once a year. I didn’t ask what she meant, only said, no, I didn’t think so.

I repeat to the woman: “She’s 92 years old. She’s not having a good time. I’ve talked to the doctor about anti-depressants but he doesn’t recommend it at her age. I visit as often as I can, usually daily unless I’m traveling.”

The nutritionist understands.

“I don’t want to do anything unless she’s in pain,” I say even though the truth is that she is in chronic pain. She is too fragile for any of the usual remedies. Her mind breaks apart completely under the influence of narcotics. So she suffers. And we watch. I will not press food upon her. I will not let anyone else.

A couple of days ago one of the people who work at my mother’s AL facility told me that she never wants to live in a place like this. We shake our heads. Never. Or worse, much worse, one of the nursing homes.

“Every time I go to one of them, it takes me days to recover,” she says.

I know that there are people who live happy, fulfilling lives well into their 90s. But my mother is not one of them. It isn’t a terrible life. She’s in a good place. She plays the piano every day. She plays a daily Scrabble game (very, very badly). But she’s lonely and isolated. Losing your mind does that. She can’t interact with people, only dredge up a repetitious cycle of half-memories. Her Scrabble partners wait patiently while she tries to remember what she’s doing with these letters in front of her.

Yesterday my mother told me she has been talking a lot to her younger sister who died a couple years ago. They did not have a whole lot in common; nevertheless their sisterly bond held fast over their long lives. I’m hoping that Hazel is talking to her, keeping her company along this journey, this journey that is not for the likes of us, the living.

I’ve thought seriously about quitting my job, getting a house with accessible bathrooms and just making do with her social security and my freelance work. Would that make her happy? But this is probably a ridiculous pipe dream. Her constant needs, now taken care of by a staff of people, would quickly erode me if I tried to do it by myself. Besides, it’s no easy matter to dump the house where I now live.

So my mother is losing weight. In an hour or so, I’ll shut down my computer and go over to sit with her. I may take away her television before the next rent cycle. She doesn’t watch it any more and I am paying for cable that she doesn’t use. But when I tried to take it yesterday she became upset -- even though she’d just told me she hardly ever watched it. So I left it -- a reminder of a person who once watched the television.

Outside my window right now black crows are screeching and charging through the branches of the trees. A hawk has sent them in a flurry of outraged conferences.

And I’m thinking of my mother -- diminishing feather by feather.

A Bit of Sanctimony

I come by my sanctimoniousness honestly.

I teach at a university where a significant portion of the students smoke cigarettes. A little more than half of these students plan to go into the culinary field, and they seem to believe that smoking is a prerequisite for success in that pressure-cooker environment. I can understand this. When I was in graduate school in the mid-1980s for creative writing, my fellow students and I thought that alcoholism was simply part of the job description, and if it didn’t help us become Faulkners and Hemingways, at least we’d be oblivious to our failure.

But understanding and condoning or even tolerating are very different things. I may understand my students' plunge into self-destruction, but I refuse to condone it.

I like to take my students on field trips. Some of them have never been to an art museum before. They’ve never seen a play. Even if they have, it’s not a frequent activity. So I arrange trips to both for three reasons: 1) I enjoy it, 2) it exposes them to forms of artistic expression thereby fulfilling the education mandate and 3) it gives them something to write about other than lowering the drinking age or why abortion should be made illegal.

The field trips either take place during class time or I substitute a trip for a class period. So when we go on a field trip, I consider them to be on “my time.” And they are so shocked to discover there is no smoking on my time. They look at me as if I’ve slapped a puppy when I tell them to put out their cigarettes.

“Really?” they ask.

Really? I wonder. Is it possible that the vivacious, smart 17-year-old girl who graduated from high school a year early will have a seizure if I expect her to go without a cigarette for two hours? Is her addiction already that overpowering?

But I am unyielding. No cigarettes in the parking lot before the play. No smoking on the street on the way to the museum. If you come up to me and blow smoke in my face, I’m going to tell you point blank to get away from me before I puke.

As I mentioned I come by my sanctimoniousness honestly. When I was an addict, no one who was not also an addict would have said to me, “Hey, it’s okay if you shoot up around me. I don’t mind.” No professor would have smiled while I cut a few lines of coke on my desk and snorted it up.

I’m sure there are those who think my comparison unfair, but I would disagree. My addictions never infected the air space of others. Simply because cigarette smoking happens to be a legal addiction doesn’t mean I have to act like it’s okay. I’m thankful today for the people who heaped scorn upon my addictions. They didn’t enable me, support me or condone my behavior. They were intolerant of it. Not around me, they said. It took a long time, but eventually I got the message. And maybe, just maybe one of them will think, “Maybe this isn’t as cool as I think it is. Maybe I do look stupid.”

See the real reason for my intolerance is that I kind of love them, and I’d like to see them love themselves.

For whom the bell tolls

I suppose this is not the first time in American history that it has seemed as if we were on the brink of collapse. But it is the first time in my lifetime that the very ground under my feet has felt quite so earthquake shaky. Of course, on the day of 9/11, a lot of us had the sense that the world as knew it had ended, but somehow in the weeks and months that followed we realized that the world was still spinning around in space and people were still getting up and going to school or work. We would mourn the dead and lose what little sense of trust we had, but our civilization -- this democratic republic with all its corruption and petty scandals -- would march forward defiantly.

Then the economy lurched. When my next door neighbor, an architect, lost his job, I didn’t worry too much for him. Surely, another job would fill its place -- in time. When my journalist friends lost their jobs, I understood that journalism was floundering and not likely to recover. The prospect of a country without a powerful fourth estate is not a happy one, but we are an enterprising people, and I was sure we would cobble together another (though certainly less comprehensive) system for disseminating information. We do have the Internet and while bloggers are no substitute for informed and tenacious journalists, funded by high-powered media organizations -- okay, I’m thinking “all the president’s men” not FOX news -- there is still enough journalistic fire out there that I figured a new system would eventually emerge from the rubble.

Architects and journalists and all their kin aren’t the only ones suffering. Almost everywhere schools have started cutting back or even closing their doors; public education has always had its head on the chopping block. And yet somehow it didn’t feel as if the sky was caving in. Economies falter, but they also recover.

So what is it now that makes my breath catch and my brow furrow in fear. It is simply this: the closing of the libraries. In my municipality, twelve libraries are shutting down. One of them is “my” library -- a bright, attractive building with lots of light and lots of books. While it isn’t usually overcrowded, it’s never even close to empty. Always children can be found in the children’s area, surrounded by Harry Potter and Goosebumps, teenagers write their awful research papers on the computers, and adults wander the stacks looking for a good mystery.

My friend, who is without an Internet connection at her house, goes to one of the doomed libraries several times a week.

“Where will all those old people go?” she wonders. “They’re always there, reading magazines and newspapers. What will they do now?”

And what about the people who can’t afford to buy books? That’s what I’m wondering. I’m thinking of all those stories of great people who grew their intellect in a little local library. Quite often I resist the temptation to whip out my credit card and clutter my already cluttered house by buying books that I can find in the library.

Who doesn’t love a library? A library is a place you can go to in any town and discover the world. A place you can go to sit in a comfortable chair and read great literature or great trash. A place where books and other media are free for the taking as long as you bring them back later for someone else to enjoy. A place with free wifi and the sound of an air conditioner humming.

And buried under that loss is the nagging question -- where do we go to learn the truth? What happens when a populace is not able to freely educate itself? The library stands for something in our society. It represents the last vestiges of freedom and opportunity and equality. That’s a hell of a lot to lose.

I know there’s a recession going on, but I live in a rich city. Shiny buildings cut the skyline. We’re even building a museum for NASCAR. Last night some friends and I ate at a fancy restaurant -- all chrome and glass -- and big square plates filled with delicious foods like roasted butternut squash ravioli and risotto. Handsome people laughed and drank as if they were in a commercial for some random product. Nobody was going hungry there. Sometimes I take walks in the neighborhood of McMansions near where I live. The houses are not for sale. No foreclosure signs stain the mahogany doors. In the driveways: big boxy vehicles for sport and transport, jet skis and a Mercedes, BMW or some other foreign coupe.

And yet we can’t afford to keep our libraries open? What will happen to all those books? What will happen to those buildings? And what about those wonderfully patient people who are always willing to answer the stupidest questions and eager to help you find a book or answer a question?

The canaries are dying in my city, and there’s nowhere we can go to escape the poison.