On the Last Day of 2020

     Well, it's almost over, this annus horribilis. We can look forward to happier days ahead, with a new president in the White House and a vaccine already making its way towards us.

    But so much of the horribilis of this past year for me has to do with Mike's dying. And nothing is going to change that.

    A year ago tonight, Mike and I went out to dinner, then walked back to his house through the brisk January air and stayed up till the wee hours of the morning working a jigsaw puzzle of the skyline of New York City, in anticipation of our trip there in April. We made our resolutions: Mike's to stay healthy, mine not to lose things. 

    Fat lot of good those resolutions were. 

Resolved: Not to Lose Things

My New year's resolve was not to lose things:

earrings that slip from ears, jackets left in restaurants.

I was afraid eventually I'd lose a precious treasure.

If I paid attention, I earnestly thought, I wouldn't lose things

like earrings that slip from ears and jackets left in restaurants.

My husband teased, "You can't keep that resolution."

"But if I pay attention," I earnestly said, "I won't lose thing,"

sure that being careful would solve the problem.

My husband teased, "You can't keep that resolution,"

and, indeed, it slipped from my grasp in five short months.

though I thought being careful would solve the problem,

I lost my husband (most precious!) to death's cruel clutch.

My resolution slipped from my grasp in five short months.

No wonder I was afraid I'd lose a precious treasure.

I lost my husband (most treasured!) to death's cruel clutch

That mocked my resolve not to lose things.

    By February Mike was losing his resolution, too, with bad back pain that we thought then was just the muscular kind of pain anyone might have.

    Then everything came crashing down. The coronavirus erupted, and Mike became seriously ill with cancer. He started radiation treatments but rapidly realized they were useless, so suddenly he was on hospice, and he was dying, and I was in a three-week frenzy of pouring as much love into him as I could in the time we had left.

    And then our time together came to an end.

    After Mike died, life was a blur of hiking and hiking and hiking, sometimes with friends, sometimes by myself. 

    Then the fires came. 

    And after the fires, the election, with all its divisiveness and anger, its lies and disinformation and unbelief. The country seemed to teeter on the edge of collapse. Then the strengths held. The system, badly strained, came through. There was no widespread corruption. One man lost. One man, and his woman running-mate, won. 

    Voila 2020. 

    During it all, I was writing poems. Now I end the year with a new book, From Friend to Wife to Widow: Six Brief Years, a book of poems about Mike—the early years of our relationship, our wedding in May 2019, the vicious return of his cancer a year later, the three weeks on hospice, my grief poured onto the page, the healing balm of nature and friends. 

    Tonight, as I take down the Christmas tree and contemplate the year ahead, I am grateful for that book that has so much of my love for Mike in it. I am grateful for my friends and family who have been so good to me during this year, especially for my son and my sisters. Without their love, I think I would have sunk. As it is, I am still swimming. I miss Mike badly. I regret all those good times we could have had in the years to come. I chafe at the unfairness of the universe. But we all know the world is not fair. It isn't picking me out for special unfair treatment. I will swim into the New Year without Mike, with an ache in my heart, but also with love and gratitude and brimful of hope.

You can order books from dicoog@gmail.com. $10 plus shipping. 

Christmas 2020

     It's Christmas Eve as I write but will be Christmas Day when you read what I am writing. 
    I have cut a tree from the forest and decorated it with my decades-old ornaments.The paper star that goes on top was made by my son forty years ago. 

    I do miss Mike. Christmases were always fun with him, usually at my house. Last year, we started working a diabolically difficult jigsaw puzzle my sister had given us: the skyline of New York, in anticipation of our planned trip there last spring. Of course, that didn't happen, coronavirus and cancer both conspiring against it.

    I will be by myself this Christmas but not alone, as I'll Zoom with my son and his family and will talk with my sisters. I'll make chicken Wellington for dinner, with bourbon-glazed carrots on the side. I'll have a simple panna cotta for dessert and maybe a piece of Harry and David's chocolates from the gift box my siblings sent me. I have many gifts under the tree. I feel surrounded with love.

    Tonight I opened a bottle of very good Cabernet Sauvignon that was supposed to be for us both. I raised a glass to Mike and asked him how the wine is wherever he is these days. 

    It wasn't too many years ago that I was falling in love with Mike. Here is a poem from my new book of poems, From Friend to Wife to Widow: Six Brief Years, which is my tribute to the man who brought me so much happiness, who deepened and broadened my life in the last six years. There was a whole lot of love between us.

I Knew I Loved You When

I knew I loved you 

when 

before you left

one morning

you chopped my kindling

and again

when

you brought me flowers

one non-occasion day of winter

and especially

when 

one late December day

you agreed to trim

my Christmas tree

and didn't fling the tinsel on,

as you intended

(your style)

but, sipping Zin,

watched me

meticulously bend

tinsel

over each limb,

and, the job ended,

said,

"The tree is splendid

with carefully tended

fastidiously rendered

icicle-pretended

tinsel."

    I am wishing all my readers a good Christmas Day and that the new year will bring us all the kind of happiness the world was so stingy with for most of 2020. Spread love. Spread peace. Spread happiness.

The Shape of My Days

     For years my days were shaped by the academic calendar. When the teaching came to an abrupt end, suddenly my days lacked any shape at all. I missed teaching. I missed being around young people and learning what they think. I missed the classroom and the challenge of teaching students how to write with graceful prose, how to apply critical thinking, how to recognize creditable sources. Teaching was my tiny contribution towards a better world. Even though I only taught two days a week, my days were shaped by grading papers, preparing syllabi, and brainstorming lessons in addition to the time in the classroom.

    I never worried about the shape of my days after I retired because, after all, I had been a part-time writer as well as a part-time teacher, a career that left me time to do other things, too: reading, sewing, hiking, backpacking, cross-country skiing. But then I was forced to retire. Suddenly my days were shapeless. It wasn't so much that I didn't know what to do with my time as that I felt my usefulness in life had been snatched out from under me. The days were turning into an amorphous blob.

    Gradually I learned how to give shape to my days, mostly by creating challenges for myself. How hard could I hike? Could I do seventy-five things of seventy-five repetitions each in one year? 

    Then Mike stepped into my life, and I began to shape my days around him. When we decided to get married, we agreed we would not live together day after day and night after night (after all these years? not a good idea). Nonetheless, my days were shaped by this relationship. And I loved their shape. 

    We can order our lives only to a certain extent. A year after our wedding, my husband died. I came home to my own house to learn how to reshape my days, this time around grief. I felt the way I had after I returned home after earning my Ph.D. in 2012: "Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water," as in this Golden Shovel poem I wrote (meaning that the Zen saying is laid out in the last word of each line): 

Living Zen

 

    I went and got my Ph.D. before

    I was seventy, and then with that intellectual enlightenment

    I came home again and found myself chopping

    Vegetables for dinner and hauling wood

    For the fire to warm the house and

    Wondered what difference it made, all that hauling

    Of books and stimulating the mind with ancient water.

 

    Then I got married, after

    I was seventy, and lived the enlightenment

    Of love until cancer came chopping

    Down my beloved liked a piece of wood

    For the funeral pyre and

    Left me hauling

    My emptiness around like a bucket of water.

    The emptiness comes to us from time to time, unshaping our days and forcing us to create ourselves anew. When it does, whether from retirement or a death or a pandemic that locks us in our houses, we have to create, again, the meaningfulness of our lives. Today I shape my life around the family that the coronavirus temporarily prevents me from visiting, the writing that has always been my mainstay, crafts that I enjoy, and, most of all, hiking day after day, by myself or with a friend, in these beautiful mountains I have called home for half a century.

France via Books

    A few months ago I wrote, for this blog, about the months I lived in France when I was a sophomore in college. (See post on October 15, 2020.) Because that sent me on a whole nostalgic spin, for today's post I'm reprinting an essay from my book An Explosion of Stars, about my life in Aix. I hope you enjoy it.

     One day while I was teaching at Rogue Community College, I went to a book sale in the library. There I found a dozen little paperback books in French that made me catch my breath. These were the same Classique Larousse editions I had used as a student in Aix-en-Provence in 1964. Their bright purple covers, each with its white square for the title and author's name, were swathed in a smoke of nostalgia. I picked up Jean-Jacques Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloise and opened it. Like a genie kept in a bottle for thirty years and now set free, the life I had once lived swirled around me.

    As I turned the pages I heard the Mistral rustling through the sycamore trees along the Cours Mirabeau. I heard the water of the big fountain at the end of the Cours, spilling from tier to tier, and, at the outdoor cafés lining the sidewalks, a subdued chatter accented by tiny espresso cups settling into saucers. I turned a page and saw myself sitting in one of those sidewalk cafés with my French Algerian boyfriend, Paul, and his pieds noirs friends. I turned a page and was in Cézanne's studio, gazing over his easel at Mt. St. Victoire; I turned another page and was sorrowfully telling Mme. Herbeau that Vanderbilt University was moving me to another house—Mme. Sévin's—because they objected to my having to bathe at the communal baths down the street.

    When I lifted the book to my nose, I smelled, in the old paper, the musty stink of socks from the ground floor of the movie theater in Aix and saw myself in the balcony watching Un Homme et une Femme, Jules et Jim, and the American westerns my French friends loved. The smell of the book was close and warm, like the sun at Les Calancs on the Mediterranean, where I sunned on white-sand beaches in my first bikini; like the hot yeasty smell sifting through open windows of cellar bakeries as I walked to early classes; like the steaming cup of café au lait Mme. Sévin gave me every morning for breakfast. The smell had something of a bare wooden floor in it, too, the old-house smell of my room at Mme. Sévin's, where I studied at a tiny plank table and where Gunilla, my Swedish roommate, would lull us both to sleep in our narrow beds by speaking Swedish, the most beautiful language in the world, she said.

    As I touched the slick, brittle paper, I was not turning pages but walking down a Provençal road, reaching up to pick cherries dangling from overhanging branches, the sky so blue above the cherries and the wall over which they hung so white (and I so young), that I thought, suddenly, "Even if I were in prison, no one could take this happiness from me."

    I turned a page and read, "J'ai longtemps hésité a te faire cette confidence," but the words were mere sounds, the unintelligible flow of indistinguishable words of my first days in France. Then I turned the page again, and they flowed into the music of a beautiful language I once lived with and made my own.

    I bought La Nouvelle Héloise. I didn't want it to read but because it is a genie's bottle. To unstop the bottle and let the treasures tumble out, all I have to do is pick up the book and turn its pages.