The Art of Losing

One of the blessings of my job as a professor of English literature is that whatever I happen to be teaching in a given week worms its way into my most personal struggles and helps me through them.  Last week I had to fly to Albany, New York and drive up to Lake George where I grew up to help facilitate my mother’s transfer (temporary I hope) from an Assisted Living facility to a Nursing Home rehabilitation wing.  She’d had a bout with pneumonia two weeks ago and lost a significant amount of mobility.  The staff at The Home of the Good Shepherd had also noted a lot of weeping and confusion.  Headed home to help, I took with me a bag of books, more books than clothes, because I knew I’d have to study in my off moments.  I was lucky enough to be reading the poems of Elizabeth Bishop again.  

Elizabeth Bishop, 1911-1979

Bishop is one of a handful of female modernist poets, and what stuns me about her work is its deceptive simplicity.  Her poems are not pretentious:  they are about common homely experiences:  losing things, looking for home, sitting in a waiting room, riding a bus and sharing with other passengers the wonder of a moose-sighting.  Bishop worked on her poem, “The Moose,” for over twenty years before she published it.  She lived with her poems until she felt that they captured experiences truthfully in just the right words.  I’m going to share with you a poem (not one of my favorites) from her famous book Geography III because it helped me put together both a mother’s and a daughter’s struggles with loss.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

So many things seem filled with the intent

To be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster

Of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master,

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

Places, and names, and where it was you meant

To travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch.  And look!  My last, or

Next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,

Some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident

The art of losing’s not too hard to master

Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The poem reads like a “how-to” manual—how to get good at losing things, and it suggests that practice makes perfect.  But this is tongue-in-cheek advice because we all know that losing things just happens.  Socks, like door keys, and the free hours in a day just somehow disappear.  Most of us, without any training at all, are Olympians at losing things.  Even on a quick read, I’m sure you noticed that the items lost become more and more precious as the poem goes along.  Trivial losses are followed by the loss of a “mother’s watch,” and then houses, cities, “realms,” and even a “continent.”  By reviewing her losses, the speaker steels herself to face up to the hardest loss of all—a beloved person.  Losing things is easy (all of us do it every day).  It is part of the attrition that comes with time and life in the world. But having to live without the unique beings that we’ve grown to love deeply—those people who have “tamed” us, so to speak—is the disaster that no amount of practice can master.  The flippant face of this poem nearly cracks and breaks as the speaker forces herself to complete the final rhyme required by the villanelle form: 

“the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”  

When I walked into The Home of the Good Shepherd, I saw my mother immediately, slumped down in her wheelchair which was parked next to the “medicine room” or nurses’ station.  All the nurses yelled, “Here she is!”  My mother had been waiting since early morning even though I’d told her I’d arrive at 2:00.  She lifted her head and opened her lashless blue eyes that seemed hazy, giving me the feeling that intelligent life was far away.  “Are you Mary Jo?”  “Yes, I am.”  “Well, for cryin’ out loud.”  Just a while later, after I’d wheeled her outside for a cigarette, she kept wondering, “Now how am I going to meet Mary Jo?”  I had to say again and again, “Mom, I am Mary Jo.” 

I think of all my mother has lost since breaking her hip last November.  She lost her independence, her ability to drive, her house and her All-Nighter stove.  She lost the routines like golf and church and breakfast with friends that gave her life variety.  She lost her dozens of perfectly laundered white blouses, her cashmere sweaters.  It shames me to admit that she is now wearing junk:  Walmart sweat pants and tops bought at Goodwill.  She lost her husband 38 years ago, her beloved Newfoundland Nala, two old maples, her younger sister Ruthellen, and even her children to the necessary demands of adult life.  I had been thinking about volunteering to give a talk to the residents of the Good Shepherd, imagining I’d call it “What does Shakespeare know about aging?  I figured I’d talk about King Lear, the obvious choice, but, my colleagues discouraged me, saying it would be too depressing.  I still don’t think so.  The play is just painfully honest about the way the elderly lose control over their lives and how some (like the eponymous king) resist that loss of control.  I planned the talk out, thinking that I’d emphasize the need for the very old to keep struggling, to fight for the right to have a story.  The reason I never gave the talk is that I didn’t feel I could do it in front of my mother.  She has never liked my bookish life and analytical bent.  But, in truth, I couldn’t imagine myself standing in front of a room of more or less withdrawn elders, sharing insights about aging, gleaned from books, when they are coping with the daily indignities and fears that accompany the process.  Wiry, angry little Nancy, a woman who was recently moved to Mom’s table is living King Lear’s story.  My mother, herself, resented being moved to that table in the back of the room, which is marked as the table for hopeless cases, for people who won’t eat, who are at death’s door.  Nancy IS refusing food but, like teenage anorexics, it’s her only way to exercise control.  “Nancy,” would you like me to butter your bread?” asks a young tattooed aide.  “No, but can I move back to my old table?”  “Oh, I can’t make that decision.  You’ll have to talk to Angela.”  Nancy’s grievance was efficiently brushed aside like cracker crumbs, and she muttered, “It isn’t right, but we’ll get back at them, won’t we?” 

On my recent visit, my mother seemed positively obsessed with travel: “I have to catch a bus,”  “I’m afraid I am going to miss my train,”  “All of those women took a plane.”  I knew Mom was anticipating the move from Good Shepherd Assisted Living to Fort Hudson Nursing Home, and I figured that her own mini-trip (a fifteen-minute drive) had become magnified in her mind.  She also knew that my sister Jennifer had to fly to Dallas (or was it D.C.?) for work, and that I was taking a different plane from Flint, Michigan to Albany.  All of these flight patterns criss-crossed the circuitry in her brain, and they all became trips that she, too, was taking.  “I’m confused all the time, Mary Jo.  I really cannot keep anything straight,” she said as she and I sat in her room, trying bites of cinnamon roll from her favorite local bakery and staring out at the sunshine and the leaves turning along the edge of the woods.  I’m sure I didn’t help her confusion when I pulled out my book of poems and commented that it felt like we were in a college dorm room.  I wonder, though, if this journey obsession is just the innate human need for a narrative arc into a future in which change and transformation are once more possible.  Movement, any movement, is better than just sitting “waiting to die.” 

Elizabeth Bishop has another poem about an experience in a waiting room in which a young child (nearly seven years old) reads the pictures in a National Geographic, hears her aunt’s voice cry out in pain and has the epiphany that people are all connected, all “just one.”  To me there is something wonderful and true about my mother’s loss of a clearly defined “I” so that if a daughter is traveling, she travels, too.  When my own daughter Katya was a toddler, I’d sit beside her in dental appointments, holding her hand.  When the dentist said, “open up,” my mouth would open automatically.  This is more than empathy.  It is almost a synesthesia of experiences, a blurring of the boundaries that separate us as individuals.  I was reassured by Mom's feeling that she was traveling.  I took it as an indication that she was still our mother, still wanted to go with us.  But it felt terrifying the night I saw her 88-year-old body as mine, too:  the bruised and fragile skin (purple shins), the hairless pudenda, the flaccid and wrinkled flesh of her back, and the giant sores—open and white—on her rear end from sitting for days on end.  Without thinking at all I knew that that body would be mine in a few short years. 

The child in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “In the Waiting Room,” is taken “completely by surprise” to realize that her aunt’s voice, crying out in pain, is hers, too.

                                                What took me

Completely by surprise

was that it was me:

my voice in my mouth.

Without thinking at all

I was my foolish aunt,

I—we—were falling, falling,

our eyes glued to the cover

of the National Geographic,

February, 1918.

Later in the poem, the obviously older speaker attempts to make sense of this early experience:

Why should I be my aunt,

or me, or anyone?

What similarities—

boots, hands, the family voice

I felt in my throat, or even

the National Geographic

and those awful hanging breasts—

held us all together

or made us all just one?

How—I didn’t know any

word for it—how “unlikely” …

After a two-day wait, it was finally time for my mother to “catch her bus.”  From the time she woke up and saw me, she was a ball of anxiety.  “Now what do I have to do?”  “Nothing, Mom.  The van will drive you over at 1:00, after lunch.”  I tried to distract her with cigarette breaks and a game of Bingo.  Nothing worked.  She asked over and over again, “what am I supposed to do?”  Finally, the van arrived.  I thought of the carriage ride with the civil suitor, who is a figure for “Death” in Emily Dickinson’s poem, but this driver, a far cry from “Death,” was a magenta-haired girl named Tammy.  “Give yourself a big hug,” she instructed Mom so that she could raise the mechanical lift with her in the wheelchair.  “Are you following me, sweetie?,” she asked me.  “I go the back way but I don’t speed or nothin’.”

I got into my rental car and followed her.  After a rainy and overcast morning, the sun had come out.  Tammy wasn’t kidding about going a back way.  She turned right at a beat-up old schoolhouse and drove along the Hudson.  Sunshine lit up the wet yellow leaves, and through them, I could see the blue river and the footings of old bridges that looked like stumps of legs or teeth.  This is the old industrial part of the river.  Plants like General Electric and the paper mills, Finch Pruyn, and Scott Paper, polluted it until in the 1970s the United States government, through something called the “Super Fund,” paid to dredge out all the pollutants.  But Warren County still has the highest cancer rate in the state.  We cross the river at a bridge I’d never seen before, and then we are in Hudson Falls, moving slowly through back streets lined with decaying houses, wrapped in fake cobwebs with carved pumpkins already blackening along the cut lines with mold and rot.  We passed a defunct NY pizza business as we make it up the hill to the main street and, before I knew it, Tammy turned the van into the driveway of the Fort Hudson nursing home.  Mom is wheeled past birds behind glass and a few fish hiding in a salt water tank.to a “cage” of her own.  The trip was much too short.  So was the list of animals Mom could remember when asked by a therapist:  bear, dog, cat, bird, bluebird, and (after a long pause) chicken.  I gently prompt her:  what about all those Jersey animals (she was a farm girl)?  Nothing.  I guess the cows she milked, the horses she rode are long gone.  The art of losing’s not too hard to master—for my mother anyway, but for her daughter it looks like (Write it!) like disaster.

I tried to photograph the caged parakeets, and this resident enjoyed having her picture taken.  

My Mother, My Mountain

The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth--

The Sweeping of the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity--

Mr. Quirk read this Emily Dickinson poem aloud in my senior English class when I was still in shock from finding my father dead.  No one dared to speak about the space left at the table, the great gap that prevented me from swallowing food for weeks on end.  Mom modeled marching on.  If she cried, she was very private about those tears.  But Emily Dickinson said, in only eight lines, everything that I needed to hear.  To cope with loss or avoid coping, human beings "bustle": they sweep the hearth and the heart.  Okay.  So maybe my family wasn't that strange.  This stowing away of feeling is ritualistic, part of the grieving process.  It is possible that the poem helped me understand my mother's stoicism instead of merely feeling outraged by it.  Furthermore, because the poem so quietly and sparely stated just what happens "the morning after death" and because it ends with a dash, it seemed to ask for my input, maybe even invited shouts of anger.  "No!  I will not put my love away.  I will not have grief that way ... not if I can help it."  At the time, I didn't dare stay with the poem long enough to think it through.  I heard it and knew.  It's true.  It just is.  Skittish like a frightened deer, I leapt away.  In the same way, I stole a furtive glance at my stone-cold father--Dead--on the pull-out sofa bed.  The existence of poetry as the real grace and the only meaningful speech in a very hard world was established from then on.

My father died suddenly.  My mother is dying slowly.  She fell and broke a hip, and she has continued to fall ever since ... pneumonia and urinary tract infections are weakening her.  She can barely handle a cigarette and has trouble feeding herself.  "She's not the same person we grew up with," said my brother in a phone conversation from the ER where Mom was taken after a bout of nausea from nerves.  As I listen to him, I think about how there are many ways that people begin to sweep the heart even before death.  Putting a parent in "Assisted Living"--a waiting room for the inevitable--is part of the clean-up job.  I didn't disagree with my brother, but I felt he was wrong.  Mom is very much the same person.  In her eyes--lashless and sky-blue--I see the bright ongoing everness, that same pinprick of absolutely lasting light .  Inside the body or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging, and in Mom there is a fierce tenacity.  The day after her ER visit, I attempt to take her home for a party with family and neighbors in her kitchen.  I had my doubts whether she could make it up the front steps.  I positioned the wheelchair so that if she could raise herself up enough to grasp the railing, she could, just maybe, pull herself up the two steps, and I'd be at the top to catch her.  She gripped the railing and with who-know-what reserves of strength, lifted herself.  One step.  There you go, Mom.  One more.  She was up!  Oh me of little faith!  Her arthritic hand clamps down on the wrought iron railing that runs along the top of the porch.  "Let go, Mom, I'm right behind you.  You gotta trust me.  Just let go."  She doesn't let go, and a flash of frustrated anger is eclipsed by pride in her ability to hold on ... for what? ... for the blessing of more and better life.

When I visited Mom last week, I stayed in a cottage on Indian Lake.  My dad died in a similar cottage just down the road.  I struggle to remember his face, the sound of his voice, the feeling of his presence.  I didn't intend to forget him.  I tried to resist putting love away.  And I don't want to prematurely box up my feelings for Mom.  After tossing around on the waves of a rough internal sea and listening to rain all night mixed with calls of loons coming through the open window, I went out for an early morning walk in mist and drizzle to search for my parents.  My cousin Melissa remembers that after my dad died, his daughters and nieces stood on the porch and wailed like loons.  On this particular morning (38 Augusts after Pop went away), I saw three loons swimming close to shore.  Why three?  I know that paired loons winter separately and return to the same lake.  They find each other and spend the summer diving and mating.  It would make sense for two loons to be trolling the shoreline, but there were three.  Suddenly I see Mom's face as it appears when my daughter and I walk into her room at the Good Shepherd.  "Oh, thank God," she always says, visibly relieved that we've found each other.  Normalcy restored, the three of us head outside to let her have a "relaxing cigarette."

I spent much of the vacation week gazing at the mountains and appreciating the way they hold the lake year after year, unchanged.  They stay because they are made of hard, hard stuff--granite bedrock, visible in the havoc of rocks in river beds and in the boulders that litter the footpaths.  Mom is something like my mountain--hard and ultimately mysterious, yet somehow promising ... in the way that the barren central highlands fated for Abraham were preferable to the lush Jordan valley chosen by Lot.  Having come of age in the foothills of these Adirondacks, one idea persists:  dominating the mountain, conquering it by racing to the top, is not the best way to know it.  Every mountain has a difficult-to-access inside.  I walk around it like a Buddhist monk.  I visit it, with no ulterior motive, as I visit friends.  My brother and sisters and I grew up making our own ways and places inside living mountains.  We learned early that to turn over a rock is to find an orange salamander, to sit quietly for a minute is to invite something to happen, to watch any part of the natural world is to see it arch its back and bristle.  And so it is with the maternal mountain.  I know from observation that this is, without a doubt, the same woman who fought the Niagara Mohawk workmen, who came into our back woods to cut down the tallest tree--our axis mundi, our tree of life--around whose trunk Pop built us a tree-hugging fort.  Made partially in Her image, we, her daughters and son, will not (even if we should) let go.  We will fight on against fate and one another, struggling (hopelessly perhaps) for an elusive blessing, waiting for water to flow from rock.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
p.s.  to my brother Jim (and any other siblings who might chance upon this):  after reflecting on what I've written, I realize something about my rejection of Pineview (the cemetery where he's buried).  To me it seemed like an anonymous or impersonal place, and there was something hard about seeing his name on the stone.  Now I see that what was really impersonal and hard was the way his death was handled.  Why should it have felt somehow taboo to talk about the love we felt from the living man?  That enforced silence has made it hard for me to take hold of the reassuring hand that was always ready to pat my leg or hold my shoulders and to feel the love that beamed from that ruddy face with the broad gap-toothed smile.  Joseph Kietzman was a real father who loved his children and wanted, more than anything else, to go to the lake with them.  I hope that all of you have had an easier time finding your way back to life before and beyond our great loss.  I am learning to understand--too late--that just as each of us experienced his death differently, we've each had different relationships with our parents.  What I write may not be true to how you have felt, but that should be okay.  I have to hope that that awareness may one day transform the gridlock of rivalry into love.

Real Life In Flint

Real Life in Flint

            I walk through Flint’s poor neighborhoods nearly every day.  On the East side where the streets are named for states, probably fifty percent of the houses are burned out shells.  Chimneys stand like the pistils of tulips after the petals drop off.  Trees of Heaven grow in the cellar holes.  There is the occasional altar of candles and notes on the porch steps that remain—prayers and love for family members who died in the blaze.  Graffiti on one house reads “R. I. P. Grandpa—Gone But Not Forgot.” 

Life goes on in the occupied homes, evidenced by the plastic backyard kids’ toys, the open windows, the dogs tied up and sleeping in the sun or standing at attention.  There’s one house that seems more like a homestead with a bright green John Deere tractor, a vegetable garden, and bee hives that are painted in Crayola colors.  A homemade sign on the corner of the property places it at the corner of Kansas Street and Kansas Street.  Every time I pass, I feel like I may not be in Flint anymore.  As I walk, I often wonder why I am drawn to neighborhoods like these and why I could never live in Grand Blanc or Flushing or Davison or even in the desirable neighborhoods of the city proper.  Why?  The simple answer is that poorer neighborhoods feel more real to me than perfect houses sitting on perfectly manicured lawns or those monstrous beige tract houses that we used to call “McMansions.”  I’ve lived in different cities around the world, and in each one, I gravitated to the poorer places:  the squatters’ shacks on the hillsides around Ankara, Turkey and the wooden Russian houses in the outskirts of Semey, Kazazkhstan.  When I was lucky enough to be invited inside, the furnishings were nonexistent or very simple, but the fabrics, the colors, the cooking, the crude bathhouse in “kitchen garden” with bushes of black currants spoke of life.  I feel the same thing in Flint:  in ruined neighborhoods, life shines out because it isn’t being choked off by middle-class conceptions of what is good.  When you think about it, aren’t most of our conceptions of what is desirable inspired by magazines and fostered by the media.  They are image-driven, but life is found in the blowing clouds, the running stream, the jumping dog—life is active—doing, making, thinking, being.  I can hear the objections:  she is romanticizing poverty!  There are real people suffering in Flint without clean water, without access to nourishing food.  How is there more life in such blighted, forgotten places?  I maintain that even in the miserable poverty of many Flint neighborhoods there is the force of direct human experience, misery, compassion, ignorance, and warmth all mixed up together.  There is an honest life there.  And there are backyards with homemade ponds and beds of flowers that a couple works hard on together.  There is a swing where a lonely teenager goes at night to listen to her music while fireflies rise and fall around her.  Life itself is damaged, and nothing which is perfect can be truly alive.

Note the John Deere tractor behind the house and the corn shoulder high

Beehives in the same backyard

            I moved to Flint from a very desirable city, Boston, where I’d lived for ten years while I was in graduate school.  I was very happy to be offered a job here, and despite Flint’s bad press—my mother and I had watched Michael Moore’s Roger and Me at Easter after I’d accepted the job—I was so thankful not to be moving to a college town like East Lansing or Ann Arbor.  Something told me that I needed to be in a “real” place to begin a “real” life.  So that gut feeling about Flint being more “real” has been with me for a long time, but I didn’t really take my own thought seriously until I encountered related ideas in a couple of books I happened to read for pleasure this summer.  News flash:  that’s why good books are essential:  they help us attend to our own experiences, to take them seriously, and to make something of them.  In short, literature helps us learn to think.

Summer Reading

Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (1854)

For years I’d wanted to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and I finally read it the first week of June and found it to be much deeper and more challenging than I’d anticipated.  The main take-away for me was that all of us ought to live more purposefully.  As you may recall, Thoreau, who’d lived in the village of Concord decides to give up village life and build a house on Walden Pond.  His was an experiment in discovering what he really needed to live a satisfying life.  He believes that most people don’t think they have a choice in how they live but spend the best part of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of life—old age.  Thoreau recommends that we take a deeper interest in the things we love to do—in our reading, our gardening, our thinking, our walking.  “With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.  In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.”  Thoreau arranged his life so that he had time to walk, to fish, to swim, and lots of time to read, reflect, and study.  Because the cost of housing and the cost of living is significantly lower than in Flint than in many other American cities, it is possible, with a little conscious effort, to arrange our lives so that we are not slaves to our jobs or our needs for a certain high lifestyle.  We can, if we desire, live in Flint as lifelong students—of Truth.

As I read Walden, I had a strong desire to buy a ruined house on the east side and rebuild it.  But the more I thought about this urge, the more I realized that I can work on the house and garden I occupy on Avon Street in the East Village.  Thoreau’s book actually did move me to clean out my closets—to pitch and purge—to work my way through the layers of delusions and illusions to see if the life that I am in is “real”—and by “real,” I mean a life that I am choosing.  Here is how Thoreau puts it:

“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui (a base), below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer*, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.” 

“We crave only reality,” Thoreau writes; and when I read those words, I could not help but think back to the feeling that led me to Flint.  I wanted a “real” life.  But I hadn’t the courage to push my thought further, and it was only general feeling of dissatisfaction or desire for something else that Thoreau’s words worked on.  One day when I was reading the book, I happened to be walking in Kearsley Park, and I asked myself: “why can’t real life be found in Ann Arbor?  What do you have against college towns and ‘cool cities’?”   The answer I came up with is that in such places, the good life, comes ready-made.  As long as you have enough education to get a job that pays six figures, you can buy a really “nice” house.  You can eat in very good restaurants.  You can go to concerts, lectures, arts’ fairs—events where you can meet other interesting, educated people.  Your sliding debit card satisfies all of your needs.  You don’t have to make up a life, you don’t have to pull it out of yourself, you don’t need other people ever.  In short, you don’t have to feel hunger, cold, pain.  You will be living in padded comfort—warm in winter, cool in summer; and you will never think that this sheltered life is not terribly dissimilar from a padded cell.

William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794)

It’s in a prison cell that the eponymous hero of Godwin’s novel—a book I, thankfully, chanced upon this summer—has a key insight, and it is this:  with his mind, alone, he can transcend the abjection of his lower-class position.  I’ll summarize the plot in a few sentences:  Caleb is a very intelligent young servant who enters the employment of Ferdinando Falkland, a cosmopolitan and benevolent country gentleman.  Falkland is subject to fits of unexplained melancholy, and Caleb discovers that he harbors a dark secret:  he is guilty of murder and, worse, he let two poor men take the rap and be hanged for his crime.  When Falkland discovers that his servant, Caleb, knows his secret, he accuses him of robbery and has him locked up.  When after his prison awakening, Caleb uses his ingenuity to escape, Falkland pursues him relentlessly.  It is a compelling read and offers a searing critique of Britain’s legal system and social system.   

But what captured my attention was Caleb’s prison awakening to the reality that, even in the most hopeless-seeming situation, he can be his own master if he learns to control his thoughts.

“I found out the secret of employing my mind.  I said, I am shut up for half the day in total darkness without any external source of amusement; the other half I spend in the midst of noise, turbulence and confusion.  What then?  Can I not draw amusement from the stores of my own mind?  Is it not freighted with various knowledge?  Have I not been employed from my infancy in gratifying an insatiable curiosity?  When should I derive benefit from these superior advantages, if not at present?  Accordingly I tasked the stores of my memory and my powers of invention.”

Had Caleb Williams not been imprisoned, would he have been forced to fall back on his own ingenuity?  Had I moved to Ann Arbor instead of Flint, perhaps I would have had so much mental stimulation coming from without that I would not have had to use my own mental powers to write two books, many articles, keep a blog, and come up with writing projects and classes to convince students from working-class backgrounds … and you, dear readers, that literature is essential for living a good life.  If we don’t discover that “the mind is its own place” perhaps we will never escape the various forms of tyranny that continue to subdue us even in this so-called democratic country.

William Godwin understood society as constituted and maintained by strategies of inclusion and exclusion.  Because Caleb was born into the lower-class, it is almost impossible for him to prove his innocence in the face of Falkland’s accusations.  A victim of “class profiling,” he will always be vulnerable to lies that derogate his character and criminalize him.  Sound familiar?  Sure.  It’s the injustice that the Black Lives Matter movement was created to address.  But Godwin offers a slightly different solution:  he thinks that each individual must speak out and share his or her experiences in conversation and in writing.  In the course of the novel, Caleb becomes a writer:  from hiding, he writes the lives of criminals to make money, and in the climactic trial scene when he confronts a Falkland (radically transformed by guilt and malevolence to the resemblance of a corpse), he decides that the only thing to do is what writers strive to do—”lay the emotions of my soul naked before [his] hearers.”  His story  proves the strength and goodness of his character to the jury, to Falkland, and to the reader.  Black lives matter—yes!  Poor lives matter—certainly!  But how many individuals, in the throes of loneliness or depression or addiction, wonder if their own life matters?  I wager that many of us fight this battle every day.  If we would only take the time to read more and better books, novelists and poets would help us be more interested in our own experiences, help us value and pursue our own unique lines of thought, and help us sing--

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.*

Inspiring Flint

Flint is a Realometer that we must check everyday.  Some days it can feel like a prison from which we want nothing but to escape.  Other days it feels like a laid-back mother that gives us the time and freedom we need to play at what we love.  Everyday Flint is, for me, a muse or an angel of Reality that will, if we I her, help me see the earth again, “cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set.”*  What I felt twenty years ago is true:  real life is more possible in Flint than in Ann Arbor because Flint, minus the easy-ride of GM factory jobs, throws us back on our own resources, while the city awaits the much-needed creativity of her people.

*Nilometer, a device used by ancient Egyptians to measure the rise and fall of the Nile.

*W.H. Auden, “Elegy for W.B. Yeats”

*Wallace Stevens, “Angel Surrounded by Paysans”

Maree-Anne On Avon Street, Flint

When I moved to Flint in 1996 to teach Shakespeare at the university, I rented an apartment on Avon St. in the East Village (#701), and, as it happened, the man I married lived a few houses down on the other side of Avon Street (#710).  Mary Jo upon Avon:  the Shakespeare teacher reading the plays on a street named for the river that runs through Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon.  It was not chance that determined the street’s name.  It was Edward Thomson, a lawyer who lived in our neighborhood during the nineteenth century and who amassed the largest collection of Shakespeare volumes in the state.   His collection--746 volumes--was donated to the University of Michigan main campus in Ann Arbor at his death in 1886, and the Avon name is about the last trace of his presence in Flint.  The summer before I started teaching at UM-Flint, I stayed in the Bed and Breakfast at the other end of Avon.  It was a June of humid air, cloudy days, and fireflies.  I walked up and down the quiet street, imagining myself holed up reading, wondering whether that activity alone could make a satisfying life on Avon Street.  Twenty years later, I can say that this has been a great place to disappear into books, but I am more and more thankful for the people—my neighbors—who are pulling me out of my hole and into the river of life.

Edward Thomson's library in Flint, circa 1876

Avon Street Bed and Breakfast 

My porch at 710 Avon St. becomes a sort of library in the summer

Late last winter I went to an educational session on baroque music before a performance of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” that was to be performed on original instruments at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor.  I sat in a circle with other adults.  The Asian women to my left said her idea of a good way to die was listening to classical music in a bathtub, and a handsome professorial type on my right, wearing a purple shirt and corduroy jacket, started chatting me up.  What did I teach?  Where did I live?  FLINT?  REALLY?  Is there anything to do there?  Do you meet people like yourself?  That question was provocative.  What did he mean … “like myself”?  I assumed he meant people like him, people with the same level of education and the same basic cultural interests?  “No.  Definitely not.”  What I didn’t tell him is that I am deeply grateful to be surrounded by true Others. 

Things have changed on Avon Street since Edward Thomson’s day.  The mansions of General Motors big-wigs that once lined Kearsley Street are gone, and those who live on our street are a mix of home-owners (factory workers, a pair of professors, and a retired nurse), down-and-out renters, single-mothers, group-home inmates, students, and, until recently, one very public alcoholic.  My husband often brags that we live within our means and aren’t in an all-white suburb, but I’ve been more self-critical: “Get real, honey, how much do we interact with the neighbors?”  Ay, there’s the rub.  Fran, who rents rooms across the street, remarked once, “You guys keep to yourselves.”  This is and is not true.  I’ve always opened the door to people like Mary, a squatter in a nearby abandoned house who used to come around a few years ago, asking for change to do laundry or ride the bus, and once she just needed menstrual pads.  Moreover, my reading is not self-isolating or self-comforting (not completely) but an act of love, a going out of my own nature, a sympathetic identification with the mystery of the other, whether the other is a neighbor, a stranger, or God?  But it is true:  books are not enough and have only whetted my appetite for real interactions.  In my own way, I am just as hungry as my neighbors.  Maybe that’s why I have become such an avid walker.  I walk to shed the “tiny, tiny myness,” and to be swept up in the life of nature or the street, to feel myself a part of what Virginia Woolf describes as, “that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s room.”  But I credit the group-home guys—men with an array of psychological disorders, living lives of radical dependency—for pulling me out into the stream of life. 

Eric with Panda on the porch of Harmony House

Even in the cold of the winter months, they are out on the porches of the two houses nearest Court Street.  “I like your dog,” yells a newcomer, sitting alert and smoking.  I thank him.  The next night, he shouts the same thing, “I like your dog.”  “That’s a cool dog.”  “He keeps you company, doesn’t he?”  Another night he asked me if I read the Bible and warned me that “Jesus was coming,” but mostly he stuck to talking about Panda.  Eventually, I asked his name, and over time we talked more and more.  He introduced me to an older black man, John—quiet and unassuming.  But through Eric, I gradually warmed up to another, more pesty guy who shuffles around in a down vest and army hat and doesn’t hesitate to ask for empties and spare change.  At first, I didn’t like him because he commented unselfconsciously about my January-May marriage: “Hey, that your husband?  He’s kind of old, huh?  Ha, ha.”  Paul says “Bottles’-guy” (our name for him before I learned his real name) is “way out of it,” but I disagree.  “Captain Frank—U.S. Army” is perceptive and enterprising, just trying his best to keep some dignity in a lousy situation.  He told me that he’d tried to join the Army, but they “kicked [him] out.”  Undeterred by rejection, he simply pretends.  When hot weather hit in late May, Frank started asking me for pop.  I’d open to the knock at my door and see him standing there, begging for “a can of Coke or something.”  Coke?  Sure, no problem.  What’s a can of pop?  I got in the habit of picking up liter bottles of Fanta at Kroger for him and the occasional box of cookies.  I’d leave them with whoever was sitting on the porch.  When we had a bumper crop of strawberries, the group-home guys passed around the brown paper bag filled with red berries right off the bush.  I don’t mean to make myself sound like a do-gooder because I’m the one who benefits from the exchange.  I may nourish them with food gifts, but they nourish me with their greetings and the opportunity to be a provider.

They call out to us from their porches.  They shout requests, greetings, blessings.  How many neighbors in “good” neighborhoods do that.  No one comes around asking for an egg or a cup of sugar anymore or to borrow a rake or screw driver, but these guys have needs and aren’t shy about making them known.  Because they do, they draw us close, invite us to share something of their lives.  The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes, “Happiness is made up not of an absence of needs, whose tyranny and imposed character one denounces, but of the satisfaction of all needs.”  What I take him to mean is that happiness is accomplishment:  it exists in a soul satisfied and not in a soul that has extirpated its needs, a castrated soul.  Frank needs pop, Gregory (a wiry black man with a broad toothless smile) needs an onion a cup of ice a hug, Eric needs a friend, and I know that I need to feel part of a community.  “Life is love of life, a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than my being:  thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, working, warming oneself in the sun,” and, I would add, sitting under a tree or on a step and talking to my neighbor.  “Distinct from my substance but constituting it, these contents make up the worth of my life.”  Levinas’ philosophical musings are spot on.  The human being thrives on her needs; she is happy for her needs.

But the truth is—meeting my neighbors’ needs has not come easily.  The relentlessness calls of the group-home guys may be teaching me kindness, but I have at other times struggled with being the only affluent open-hand around.  How much can I give?  Are they going to hit me up for money every time we meet on the street?  Every time I express my curiosity about their lives?  My dealings with Cathy made me acutely aware of my own needs for friendship.  Cathy is black, poor, lives with a younger black man, Jamie, who is, as she says, “slow” but nice and “learning to cook.”  She tries to work—collecting signatures on petitions and sometimes cleaning houses—but she’s also addicted to pain meds and sells half her monthly prescription on the streets.  I’d given Cathy rides downtown when she regaled me with stories from past lives when she went to UM-Flint, did theater, had a career as a singer, made $50,000 a year, had teeth and lots of friends.  When I bumped into her last summer around the Cultural Center, she said her brother was dying of brain cancer and wondered if I had any cleaning work for her to do.  I didn’t.  I like Cathy, but it bothered me that she could never remember my name.  I knew hers.  I knew her story.  The fact that she kept calling me “Mary Ann” or “Mary Jane” or “Mary Lou” made me feel funny, like she was just talking to me to get something.

One day in early December, it was cold.  I’d come in from walking the dog and had a small bit of time before picking up my daughter from school.  There was a knock at the door which I had not closed.  “Mary Ann!  Mary Ann!”  It was Cathy.  “You got any pain pills?!”  This was before I knew of her addiction.  “Well, I have some Tylenol.  That’s all I got.”  “Really?  I figured you must have something stronger.  I mean, we ain’t getting any younger.”  I was annoyed.  I stomped upstairs to the medicine cabinet, picked up the mostly empty bottle of Tylenol, stomped down and handed it to her.  “And MY NAME is MARY JO.”  I know she heard the annoyance in my voice, and hers came back lilting and laughing, “honey, you know most days I can’t remember my children’s names.  Not since I had that stroke.”  And somehow in that conversation, she tucked in a very clear statement of her needs and values for “food, sex, and travel” in that order.  I remember admiring her clarity and thinking that that wasn’t a bad short list of necessities.  I closed the door and locked myself into my own trap.  I knew what was bugging me:  maybe Cathy was in pain, but she had enough gumption to walk across the street on a cold, cold day and ask for help.  She had enough spirit to find a man to sleep with.  She could say what she needed.  Could I?  I felt shitty for taking out my frustration on her.  And after picking up Katya from school, I stopped at Rite Aid, bought her Motrin, a couple of small bottles of whiskey, and a chocolate bar.  Christmas was coming.  Settling my daughter in the house, I carried my purchases across the street.  Cathy and Jamie lived upstairs in the same house where I used to have an apartment (701 Avon).  The doorbells are broken now—out of state landlord—and to get their attention, I had to shout up toward the window which is usually open.  “Cathy!  Cathy!  Hey, I’ve got something for you.”  She came down, opened the door, and invited me upstairs, but I said I couldn’t stay.  I apologized, gave her what I’d put together, and we hugged.  I was grateful that she was so forgiving, that she was willing to give me a second chance.

Cathy with boyfriend, Jamie in front of 701 Avon Street

Even before I began talking to Cathy, I’d connected with her boyfriend, Jamie, because Jamie loves my corgi, Panda.  One day, when he was still just a puppy, Panda squeezed through the fence and ran straight over to Jamie, who often sits in a white plastic chair along the sidewalk.  “Hey Panda, Panda, Panda,” he says, putting his face close to my dog’s, brown eyes staring into brown eyes.  For a long time I’ve known that Jamie needs an animal to care for.  He’s familiar enough with us now that if he sees me in the porch or in the backyard, he’ll come over and come right on in.  The first time he lifted the latch and let himself in the fence, I was troubled.  This is MY YARD.  I didn’t say you could come in.  I felt the annoyance of having an interloper on MY property.  I hated myself for having these feelings, and, thankfully, I was able to put them aside and enjoy watching Jamie play with Panda.  And we talked.  I asked him if he was born in Flint.  “No.  Thailand.  I’m adopted.”  Thailand?  I was really surprised.  He explained very clearly—not “slow” at all—that he was born in 1968—“a Vietnam baby”—in Bangkok to a Thai woman and an American father, who was a soldier.  He loves Chinese food and isn’t angry about having been abandoned.  “Things were unstable.  There was the war.”  He grew up in Hurley Children’s Center and was adopted by a white family in Flint.  “That’s why I get along with white people better than most blacks.”  Eventually, after we’ve compared notes on adoption, talked about Flint, and Panda is dead tired from the tug of war game, I tell Jamie that I need to start cooking dinner.  I tell him that because I am used to my own quiet and my own space, and I am ashamed that I have such a low tolerance for human company.  Something I want to change.  “Okay.  Hey,” he asks with a big tonal question mark, “can you spare a few bucks?”  “What d’ya need?” I ask, feeling friendship corrupted by obligation.  “Oh, I don’t want to be greedy, but maybe like ten dollars.”  I go inside and pull a ten out of my wallet and hand it over, once again feeling that ugly feeling that everything with them comes down to money.  We just had a nice conversation, I’m thinking.  Why does money have to enter in?  Of course, the answer is that he and Cathy are poor.  She, as I’ll find out later, needs pain medicine and she had already spent her monthly check.  Jamie was trying to meet her need.  What’s wrong about having needs and asking for help?  Nothing.  And I pray the day will come that I will, with genuine gladness, meet such needs because, in the scheme of things, I can … without suffering any loss.  And because, Cathy does pay me back.  Several days later, she comes trundling over, heavy purse on her arm, waving dollar bills in the air like a fan, “Mary Ann!  Mary Ann!  I got some money for you.”

A week or two later, I’m pull my car in the driveway and Jamie runs over.  “Hey, you know that white guy …” , and, weirdly, I do know the man he’s talking about—the drunk who, for many years, has sat on his porch downing box after box of Rose wine and smoking … for hours everyday … winter, spring, summer, fall.  He was the neighborhood watchman.  “He died.”  I was genuinely shocked.  Jamie knew his name was “Brad,” and I knew there was a lot of traffic between the two porches—Brad’s and Jamie’s—and that Brad had had some kind of relationship with the rail-thin black woman, “Vivien,” who I somehow imagined to be a crackhead.  I’d stayed away from Brad when he started giving flowers to my toddler daughter and later when he got in my face and told me I needed to call Child Protective Services about Sam and Jasmine’s mother.  I wrote him off as a judgmental jerk.  Did I think … that I was the only neighbor who had the right to form judgments?  Just as Brad was a constant presence on his porch, watching the street, so he was a touchstone in my mind.  Some winters he’d drink outside, wearing a hard hat and a beige Carhart jumpsuit, and I envied him his freedom from responsibility.  More recently, he’d hibernate during the winter and I’d worry when he hadn’t come out even once the weather got fine.  I hoped quietly that he’d survived.  During my own deep depression two years ago, when I was smoking and drinking during the day (little sips of wine from a demitasse cup), Brad’s presence two houses away made me feel less alone and less messed up.  “He died. … How?” I gasped.  “I don’t know, but when they found him, he’d been dead in the house for three or four days.”  “Oh, God.  That’s awful.”  There would be no second chance this time.  No hugs.  No liquor exchanged.  No nothing. 

That night, all the neighborhood blacks hung out in the yard across from Brad’s apartment in those white plastic chairs.  It seemed to me they were waking him.  By the time I picked and washed a mess of strawberries to take over, they were gone.  Not quite:  there was Jamie coming up a side street.  He must have seen me standing in his yard, looking … for someone.  I gave him the bag of fruit.  He thanked me.  He didn’t seem to feel threatened by my presence in his yard, but, then, his has no fence. 

Just the other day, late afternoon, I’d walked Panda around a block and came up to Cathy sitting under the maple tree eating a plate of something she’d cooked.  She gave the dog her last piece of food and asked me to sit down and talk.  She filled me in on Brad—how he lived and how he died:  “He was in the Navy … cook on a submarine,”  “a hoarder,” “hundreds of wine boxes,” “spoiled meat crawling with maggots,” “Vivien was goin with him.”  She asked me about my life.  “What’s it like—Boston?”  When I told her about my recent troubles with my daughter, she said, “she’s not a lesbian, not screwing black guys or Mexicans—don’t let her go with any Mexicans,” and “she’s not having twins and needing an abortion … honey, your problems small compared to real-world ones.”  I laughed and agreed.  “Make yourself some banana splits.  Get yourself a journal.  You growing up with her.  Plus, I can tell she’s a good girl.  She’s beautiful.  Remember that day I was over at your place?  She came out of the house, looked me dead in the eye, and handed me a quarter.  She’s alright.”  I stand up to go, and this time, she doesn’t ask for anything.  “See ya later, Mary Ann.”  It no longer matters that she doesn’t know my name.  “Okay.  Enjoy the evening, Cathy.”  In the pale night light of summer around 9:00 I see her racing down Avon Street on a bike. 

My Avon may be a street in a rust-belt city and not a river in Warwickshire, but it, too, has a current.  Lately, I feel glad when I hear someone shout out, “Maree-Ann!” or “Hey, Jo-Jo.”  When I answer to these new names, I step into the current, let go my hold on all the tiny mynesses I’ve clung to—my name, my yard, my money, my free time, my work.  And free at last, liberated by my neighbors’ needs, I have to wonder where, oh where, does this Avon go? 

There were still horses on Avon St. in 1996 when I moved here.