Friday, March 28, 2008

The Leap Home

I’m reaching that point in the semester when a few bold students feel comfortable asking personal questions. How old are you? Where do you live? Do you have kids? Last fall, I deflected these questions but this spring I’m kind of on the fence. Since I know I’m leaving this summer, why not tell people about my situation? And then, why share anything at all?

Sam Beckett used to handle these situations so well. The Quantum Leaper, not the playwright. Growing up, I loved that show. That the eponymous main character middle-browed an existential can of worms fraught with epic contradictions was lost on me (I’m pretty sure they teach both at university these days). I just wanted to leap: into the body of a journeyman pitcher with one last no-hitter in him, or a Mississippi bigot treating black and white patients during the civil rights era, or once, we learned at the end, into the neighborhood where little Stevie King witnessed deranged clowns, possessed clowns, and rabid dogs (turns out Al was the devil himself messing with Sam!). One episode, in particular, stands out in my mind. Sam leaps into a beautiful woman dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace, and to truly mess with his boss’s mind, describes the anxiety of male pubescent “self-discovery” with particular relish (what fun, to watch that one with Mom and Dad).

But the thing I really dug about Sam Beckett was his capacity for deflection. Sam could simultaneously flub his way through his current incarnation, all the while keeping his personal goal intact: if he got this one right, the next leap might just be the leap home.

When Katie was alive, nary a conversation unfolded into which I didn’t drop some combination of the following: my wife, our cats, the apartment, her family, our nieces and nephews, we, us, etc. I wore marriage on my sleeve in much the same manner, I suppose, that I displayed my own teenage heart. Look at me! Notice me! Except this time, it was: Hey, guess what? I’m married! To this cool woman named Katie! Who does all sorts of amazing things and hey, really likes me! I write poems and did you know: our wedding was at a barn in Indiana!

Teaching in Romania, such details were a regular feature of the back-and-forth. Being a foreigner made me exotic, so colleagues and students were curious to know details. At the same time, a foreigner, I was a permanent outsider; no matter what I said, at the end of the day, I was still that really tall American listening to his iPod on his walk to school. The last week of the semester, in June 2006, Katie and I had my book club students over for dinner, and I remember thinking how strange it felt suddenly to shift the playing field from classroom to living room. I wondered what had gone through my own teacher’s minds, on similar occasions, when I’d visited their homes.

Last week, at IUPUI, a colleague stopped by my classroom to congratulate me on the Stegner (and to ask if I still planned to teach summer semester). Thus, it was out there. Moving to California, to Stanford, not teaching next fall. In office hours that week, a student asked, “So, what will your wife do in California?”

Yesterday evening, I took off my wedding band, found Katie’s, placed both on a $7.98 hypoallergenic chain that Chloe and I found in Wal-Mart, and put it around my neck. It feels good against my chest, and a little more protected, less insistent and eager-to-be-inquired-upon. If you wear a wedding band, you invite questions about your spouse, right? Walking past the clothing section, Chloe looked up at me and said, “John, you could use some color in your life.” As is our custom, she then punched me on my arm. She’s leaning into her punches these days, not setting them up so much, and consequently they hurt a lot more. When we got home, I washed out the short-sleeve shirts I brought back from Romania and this morning, as I sit in Atlanta-Hartsfield airport, waiting out the connection to West Palm Beach, where I’ll be celebrating my Mom’s…39th…birthday in Stuart, FL with the family, I’m sporting a good hayseed look: Cubs hat, checked short-sleeve oxford, faded blue jeans, tennis shoes.

When I told Joe last night about the rings and wardrobe change, he said, “Well, I’m not comfortable commenting on the former, but with the latter you know, it’s a good thing. That whole black thing wasn’t working with your complexion. People would see you coming, pale skin with black t-shirt, and think, is he a minister? A serial killer? Is he going to talk to me about Jesus or cut me into pieces? Tough call. So, you know, the wardrobe change is a good thing.”

I really just don’t have the slightest clue what it means to be a widow in any public sense of the word. Not that there needs to be a “public sense” of the word, but if I’m honest with myself, and I try to be, I wonder, “Who know?” “Who can figure it out?” I know that Katie would have no expectation that I don said wardrobe—she would probably think, okay it’s what he has to do, but you know, it draws a little attention. Katie’s ability to lose and recover rings, much like hundred dollar bills and signed checks, is well-documented. My favorite example of the latter is when we moved from the place on Deming to Agatite in Chicago, and Katie found her post-Peace Corps compensation check (we earned $220 per month of service) under the sofa. Point being, I was the one in the relationship who assigned/s tremendous value to public symbols and the compulsive accounting of things.

I’ve compiled recently an iTunes playlist of songs I want to learn on the guitar. I know about 3,000 first verses to songs, and can pick up the chords easy enough, but kind of lose my way with the lyrics somewhere around the bridge. A few songs stick out, because they remind me of Katie: “Brian Wilson” by the Barenaked Ladies, “Ohio” by Damien Jurado, “The Wind” by Cat Stevens, “Joy” by Lucinda Williams. The night before I flew back from Bucharest to Chicago, I spent a couple of hours compiling a massive playlist of “Katie Visitation” songs. My thought was to program the music for Katie’s memorial service in Antioch, song by song.

I like structure. I value order. Every morning, I wake up and make a parmesan cheese Eggbeaters omellette with barbecue sauce and a carafe of half-caffeinated coffee. In the evening, before I got to bed, I set aside some time to review the day’s writing. Before dinner, I do Jennifer Kries’ pilates DVD. When Ben and I took our road trip across Pennsylvania, one evening he looked at me and said, “You know, I always thought you were the laid-back one and I was the neurotic one, but it’s really kind of the opposite, isn’t it?”

Every few episodes, they’d show Scott Bakula “inside the machine,” leaping around, talking to Dean Stockwell, which basically involved both men standing in front of a kind of enormous static-ball, wearing silver-and-blue jumpsuits. No matter how nattily-dressed, we knew that, really, Sam was clad in the same nondescript futuristic get-up; the period clothing was just what the non-leapers saw. Grief, I guess, really is something that you do alone, at your own speed, in whatever way works. What made Sam Beckett so cool wasn’t that he could leap everywhere—anyone getting into that machine could do the same—it was how, wherever he went, whatever riches and advantages his temporary self inherited, he just wanted to leap home to his wife. Of course, we, the viewers, knew that, as long as we kept watching, they’d keep making episodes and he wouldn’t actually ever make it back. I’m pretty sure that’s how the series ended: he leapt home, saw his wife, pulled a Rocket Man, turned around and went back to doing good all over the space-time continuum. Seems as good an analogy as any (if, oh, just a tad self-indulgent) for living with loss. Any ideas on where I might find a XXL (50XL) men’s spandex jumpsuit?

Friday, March 21, 2008

New Poem

Tbilisi

9 Months

When you walked through the door with soda bottles
sealed in wax, filled with homemade wine,
I wanted to tell you everything.
I wanted the coincidence of your good news
to say something good about myself.
But it was morning. We drank instead to health.
While you slept off the red-eye hangover
on our yellow couch overlooking another city
I baked cookies and stocked the fridge with apples.
I pinned your shirts to the living-room clothesline,
eager for the powdery scent of your deodorant
to overwhelm, again, our little room
like the first syllable of a city you’d loved all year
in letters I found last week in our storage locker.
How did we leave things? These things,
I mean, that should never belong to one of us?
Tell me I’m getting this wrong. Or right. Tell me
it is a kind of blessing still to speak the name of your city.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Shitty First Drafts

In Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott says you have to write a bunch of shitty first drafts before you get to do the revisions that make for good writing. Flying back from Miami last night, I sat behind someone who was writing an especially apt example of such a draft. I would look over every few minutes to check on the evolution of the first sentence of Chapter One, which went in one version, "He woke suddenly and realized he did not know where was." There was a beach involved, some expensive shoes, amnesia--all the content, if not quite the polish, of a best-selling suspense novel. After a while he lost interest and started playing some video games, but toward the end of the flight, as the harmonica-playing pilot started to warn us about turbulence over the Smoky Mountains, he was writing again. And I was watching again, editing from a good distance, without invitation.

My doc warned me last week that my love of revision and finished products might prove especially challenging for the Miami visit, and he was right. If I could go back right now and do this weekend over, I would do pretty much everything that I did, but I would do my best to feel differently about a lot of it. I processed what I could, as it happened, but mostly closed off the rest, to unpack, in therapy and in conversations with friends and family who want to talk about it, at a later date. The order of events went like this: alumni/Katie event (FRI)—storage locker clean-out (SAT)—up to Mom and Dad’s with the family—Mike’s birthday (SUN)—mad Miami dash to see friends and fly-out (MON).

FIU did a wonderful job with the alumni event. Remembering Katie, and grieving for her, was tastefully at the center of everything. There were a lot of tears during Anamarie's, then Kristy's remembrances. I gave a short speech about the scholarship and KMF, then presented the former on behalf of the latter to Nicole Kellier. It was wonderful to meet her, as well as to meet Dean Sztam and Dean Ciccazzo, both of whom went out of their way to be gracious, accommodating and sympathetic hosts. What a wonderful group. When we packed up and moved out around 9pm, to hit the airport hotel bar, it was with the sense of what a different closure, for different people, might eventually be: beloved, admired, and missed Katie, FIU alumnus (MPH, 2006).

*

I'm seeing a new doc, up in Chicago. We talk every week by phone and meet once a month in his office in Hyde Park. He's pretty great, more of a thinking doc than a feeling doc, which is a nice counter-balance to my previous therapist. I feel like I leave sessions with good things to think on, and a better sense of what and where my life is, both currently and in the context of the last eight months, the last seven years, and the last thirty years. He says that the rich get richer in therapy, meaning that the same passion I have for putting ideas into words, and playing with those words, and using them to make meaning and understand things, works well on the couch, too, and that seems about right to me. I was lucky to find Dr. Rohn in Indy (retired last month) and I like this new guy, too.

In the seven years that we knew each other, Katie and I lived on three continents in four cities, and never in one city for more than two years. The friendships that stuck with us were those that were both intimate and flexible enough to endure constant transition. We sort of segmented off these friends, not unlike political parties, into two camps—John Friends and Katie Friends. Sure, there was overlap, and even some hard-won crossovers (Florida Democrats, New York Republicans), but in the end there was also the distribution. Since Katie’s death, I’ve appreciated just how fond of Katie many John Friends were, and I’ve also enjoyed the chance to talk with many Katie Friends. My interaction with them, before Katie’s death, was limited to group dinners and occasional visits, but not a lot of one-on-one talking. I do feel that my life is richer, and my understanding of Katie more nuanced, for a lot of conversations I would not have had when Katie was alive. That’s both good and bad, but I’m choosing to focus on the good.

Opening up that storage locker on Saturday was like opening thirty-odd jack-in-the-boxes. Like Buddy the Elf, each box exploded unpredictably, even if I knew to see it coming. I felt distinctly unready for every hastily-assembled box and at-the-last-minute sealed package of papers, whose contents were mine by law but not entirely mine otherwise. Nevertheless, they required identification, classification, and valuation (goodwill, trash, family, home), all in a quick moment. It could have gone either way: we could have spent all day, then all week, then all month chipping away at things piece by piece, but it would never have gotten done, not on this visit, probably never. In the end, I just wanted to release Katie's stuff back into the world, for other people to use. Katie didn't feel very invested in either ownership or things, so I didn't want to feel very invested, either. In the end, most every object went off to goodwill or the library, and friends and family took some of the rest.

If I love finished drafts, I hate the ambiguity of working drafts. If grief has parameters, limits, blank areas that the mind conveniently wipes clean, the data of reality is direct, unflinching, and indifferent to its audience. Grief is full of shitty first drafts, whereas death is death and the past is fixed like a bobber on the surface of our subconscious, conveniently appearing and disappearing as we go after whatever we're trying to slow down. I’m sure there’s a poem in there, eventually, but for now let me turn the metaphor one last time. Katie was my first, and often my best, reader. The more time passes, the more I wish we could have had some time to look at these shitty first drafts together.

For my Stegner application, I proposed spending the next 2-3 years writing a book of elegies named for an album that Katie liked, Rehearsals For Departure by Damien Jurado. In writing these poems, I will have a chance to compose, revise, and publish, and hopefully in the process come to some understanding of what our relationship was, what Katie means to me, and then, if I’m lucky, write something that touches on the more universal aspects of grief and remembering, that will mean something—beyond, “oh, that poor guy”—to those who did and did not know Katie. Anne Lamott says that it’s not the shitty first drafts that are the good writing. You don’t just suddenly write one. It’s the process of writing several drafts that, whether you intend it or not, produce the variety and depth of material from which the good stuff gets culled.

Apparently, I am programmed, from long before I had any say in the matter, to be optimistic, and hopefully my poems touch on whatever there is in the world about which we can feel connected, positive, valued, and loved. I still cannot get my mind around receiving a Stegner: what it says about my writing, the writing life I will be able to lead, the writing I will do about Katie, and the other writers with whom I am and will be lucky to work. I guess I’ll leave it at that. It’s a great honor and validation of my writing, and I am very excited to begin my work there.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

KMF and Stegner

Hey Everyone,

Tonight, The Katie Memorial Foundation (KMF) will be awarding the Katie Evans Memorial Scholarship as part of an alumni event in Miami hosted by the FIU Alumni Association and The Robert Stempel School of Public Health at FIU (Katie's graduate school alma mater).  This afternoon, KMF will be meeting to formalize our board and to go over all of the ins and outs of the organization.  You can learn most of the details about KMF and its mission by visiting our website.  Some 30 friends and family members are flying in from Illinois, Indiana, Texas, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and throughout Florida, to attend the event.  I'm looking forward to writing more about the event, and KMF, next week.

Also, I wanted to let you all know that I found out yesterday that I will be a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University this fall.  I will post more details on this sometime next week.




Wednesday, March 5, 2008

New Poem

Oyster


To see death on the television now is to see only
resurrection. So the actress returns next week,
freed by providence or dumb luck
to eat peaches, wash her face, start a new book.
In this way we know to admire her perseverance.
Lawrence said the dead walk among us
so slowly we cannot hear their footsteps.
The skein of past closing over the living
is a critique of apostasy he wrote in the madhouse.
It is static disrupting the digital feed.
It is the music that plays when there is no music
to articulate our eagerness for restoration,
our expectation of one last epilogue.
What perpetuates itself seeks no beginning
among the forms of our triumph.
Jelly beans ornament unremarkable seeds
but the finches, like constellations, know not to pick them out.