Lucky Life
It was a whirlwind weekend--so many highs and lows.
I got a text on Friday afternoon that S was having a flashback--the first in a very long time. She was lying down, weeping, out of her mind, had written down what she'd remembered. I canceled everything and rushed home. She was Ok in an hour. It was a bump in the road, I knew, not a catastrophe.
But I didn't call T, and later, T and I had our biggest fight so far--she was upset she hadn't been included, and I was upset that she was thinking about this and not about S. We said mean things to each other, then said we were sorry, talked it out, made some plans for how to handle similar situations differently next time, remembered we were in love with each other. Too many days of not taking care of ourselves--two weeks of working nights for her, too many late nights trying to meet deadlines for me--finally had its toll.
"You're not going to break up, are you?" S asked, tearfully. No, we both told her, again and again, of course not.
The same day, I got an e-mail that K had died. I can't claim to have been a close friend of hers, but she's one of those people who was always involved in one way or another in the things that mattered also to me. We worked together on multiple committees and projects over the years. She was deeply invested in community building, as I like to believe I am, also. And she was one of those people who actually did stuff. She didn't just sit on committees to share her opinion and hope others would do the hard work. No, she chaired committees, prodded people to follow through on things they'd promised to do (I know--I was one of those people), and showed up on the day of any community event willing to work. Yet she was unassuming, despite her bright pink hair (at age 67)--not somebody who tried to win awards or get credit for her work.
I was sad, so sad, but we had plans to go out to celebrate S's gotcha day--a fancy supper at the fancy restaurant in town. I told T I would need to talk about it later, and could we make the time, and she said yes, of course, and then she went to run a few errands, and I got online to see if I could get more information about K's funeral.
And that's when I saw the second piece of bad news in one day--my Theo Georgo, my father's oldest brother, was dead. Immediately I remembered the first time I'd met him. He had gotten stuck in Russia during The Greek civil war, either because he was a Communist or because somebody thought he might be. He met a Greek woman, a Communist who also wasn't permitted to come back, there. They married, had three girls who were raised as Greek-Russians just as we had been raised as Greek-Americans. And then, in 1980, the government opened its doors to those who had been told they would never again see their homeland.
For the first time, my father would be able to see his brother--something he didn't believe would ever be possible, given America's relationship with Russia at the time. We went to Greece during one of my mother's brief remissions from cancer, celebrated Christmas, New Year's, and my 10th birthday there. I will never forget when Georgo and my father saw each other for the first time in all those years. They touched each other tentatively, on the shoulders at first, looking each other in the eye and then embracing, and I turned away, feeling as if I was watching too private a reunion. And then we feasted and my cousin Eleni taught me to play a song on the piano which I still remember and we talked and danced and ate all night long.
I've seen him three times since--in 1998, I spent a lot of time with him and his family, but when I returned in 2005 and 2007, I spent only one day during each visit with him. I didn't see him in 2010--I had planned to visit him on my last night in Greece, but I had learned my father was dying, and I was too overwhelmed with grief to leave my hotel room that night, too worried I'd miss my flight home if I didn't stay put.
He was a gentle man--by far the gentlest and calmest of all the brothers. I called him last year when his wife Theodora died, and talked to him again this year at Christmas. Once a year, an awkward phone call during which he would always cry, tell me how much he'd loved my father. I would ask about his daughters and grandchildren, about his neighborhood, what had changed--same conversation every year.
It is hard to stay connected with an ocean between, even now.
And so I called T and said that I had just gotten more bad news, but I was Ok, and I wanted to go out to eat with S. And we did, and we told the story of the day her foster family dropped her off to be with me forever. I cried a little, remembering the letter I'd handed to her foster mother, the way her foster siblings had eyed me, unsure--would this lady be OK? S had demanded that I drive her to the mall, then softened, and asked if I wanted to hear her play the guitar. This is the image I remember best, S singing and playing a song on a child's guitar she didn't really know how to play with a missing string. She was so stunningly beautiful in that moment, so full of both a deep grief and a deep joy. I could see both things in her--joy, grief, not fighting but simply lying beside each other. I could see her breathing them in, out, in, out. She knew this was life, this breathing, and her wordless song expressed it perfectly.
We told this story, and she joked about how much I love to embarrass her, and later that night, I found a photo of my uncle from 1998 and posted it to facebook. His granddaughters, my second cousins, immediately friended me, sending me beautiful messages of memories of my visit, of how much he had loved us, despite the distance.
Today after church we went to our favorite diner with S's godmother and ate well again, then took a long walk on the first warm day in weeks with Cody the dog, then rested, then I worked for awhile. Then we made another good supper and had fudgesickles for dessert and she was off to bed. "Tomorrow's Cody's gotcha day," she reminded me. On a whim, I'd picked up Cody on the way home from a student who had posted to facebook that she needed to find him a home. It was love at first sight, and I'm fairly convinced that S wouldn't be doing as well as she is if it weren't for Cody.
I wanted to try to make sense of all this grief and joy mixed together. The lesson S had taught me six years earlier when she sang that wordless song had sunk in then, but after a string of days like these, it was hard to remember how to contain joy and grief without getting lost in either.
Not surprisingly, everything I picked up to read seemed to be speaking to me about this theme exactly. Henri Nouwen, for instance, in the Lenten devotional I'm using, reminded me on Saturday, "Healing happens by leading people to gratitude. We tend to divide our past into good things to remember and painful things to accept and reject. Once we accept this division, however, we quickly develop a mentality in which we hope to collect more good memories than bad memories, more things to be grateful for than things to be resentful about..."
I was a bit puzzled. So we categorize things. It's human nature. So what?
On Saturday, he explained further, "'The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. Say it three times. We know it's not true, because we want many things. This is exactly why we're so nervous."
I tried it: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
I shall not want.
I shall not want.
And then Pema Chodron, the Buddhist teacher whose books T and I read from daily, told me this: "The fundamental change of attitude is to breathe the undesirable in and to breathe the desirable out. In contrast, the attitude that is epidemic on the planet is to push it away if it's painful and to hold on to it tightly if it's pleasant. The basic ground of compassionate action is the importance of working with rather than struggling against."
And then, tonight, I was thumbing through some of the poetry books that used to be old favorites, and came across Gerald Stern's "Lucky Life." I remember weeping so hard when I heard him read it out loud at a reading the first time. I remember weeping almost every time I'd read it since--but it had been at least five years, maybe longer, since I'd last read it. I read it aloud to S and T, saying that I remembered that it had once mattered to me, but couldn't remember why.
By the time I got to the last two stanzas, I was crying--and I also remembered why I'd loved the poem so much. It is about the moment S bent over that guitar with the missing strings. It is about the time I drove out of Phoenix, ready for a new life, blessing rather than cursing the bad things that had happened to me there. It was about the time I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time, how I was at first annoyed at the tourists, then realized I was one, too, and laughed and breathed and noticed its actual beauty. About all the times I've been beside S or T during crises, all the times they've been there for me. About the night my father died, how my sister told me calmly in the car on the way to his apartment from the airport, "He died a couple hours ago." It is about my father and his brother, reaching out for each other, looking each other in the eye, and about my friend K, who didn't apologize for dying her hair pink or for calling us out when we didn't follow through on what we said we'd do. It was about falling in love in one's 40s and not being sure if it's too late and then realizing nobody's ever sure and then realizing that it's never too late.
It's about being too late and just in time over and over again.
It is about not wanting: I shall not want, shall not want.
It is about breathing: I shall breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, whatever it is.
I shall see, then, just what a lucky life I live:
Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let met take my long steps in the cold sand?
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study
the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and old monoplanes one more year?
Will you still let me draw my sacred figures
and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?
Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.
I got a text on Friday afternoon that S was having a flashback--the first in a very long time. She was lying down, weeping, out of her mind, had written down what she'd remembered. I canceled everything and rushed home. She was Ok in an hour. It was a bump in the road, I knew, not a catastrophe.
But I didn't call T, and later, T and I had our biggest fight so far--she was upset she hadn't been included, and I was upset that she was thinking about this and not about S. We said mean things to each other, then said we were sorry, talked it out, made some plans for how to handle similar situations differently next time, remembered we were in love with each other. Too many days of not taking care of ourselves--two weeks of working nights for her, too many late nights trying to meet deadlines for me--finally had its toll.
"You're not going to break up, are you?" S asked, tearfully. No, we both told her, again and again, of course not.
The same day, I got an e-mail that K had died. I can't claim to have been a close friend of hers, but she's one of those people who was always involved in one way or another in the things that mattered also to me. We worked together on multiple committees and projects over the years. She was deeply invested in community building, as I like to believe I am, also. And she was one of those people who actually did stuff. She didn't just sit on committees to share her opinion and hope others would do the hard work. No, she chaired committees, prodded people to follow through on things they'd promised to do (I know--I was one of those people), and showed up on the day of any community event willing to work. Yet she was unassuming, despite her bright pink hair (at age 67)--not somebody who tried to win awards or get credit for her work.
I was sad, so sad, but we had plans to go out to celebrate S's gotcha day--a fancy supper at the fancy restaurant in town. I told T I would need to talk about it later, and could we make the time, and she said yes, of course, and then she went to run a few errands, and I got online to see if I could get more information about K's funeral.
And that's when I saw the second piece of bad news in one day--my Theo Georgo, my father's oldest brother, was dead. Immediately I remembered the first time I'd met him. He had gotten stuck in Russia during The Greek civil war, either because he was a Communist or because somebody thought he might be. He met a Greek woman, a Communist who also wasn't permitted to come back, there. They married, had three girls who were raised as Greek-Russians just as we had been raised as Greek-Americans. And then, in 1980, the government opened its doors to those who had been told they would never again see their homeland.
For the first time, my father would be able to see his brother--something he didn't believe would ever be possible, given America's relationship with Russia at the time. We went to Greece during one of my mother's brief remissions from cancer, celebrated Christmas, New Year's, and my 10th birthday there. I will never forget when Georgo and my father saw each other for the first time in all those years. They touched each other tentatively, on the shoulders at first, looking each other in the eye and then embracing, and I turned away, feeling as if I was watching too private a reunion. And then we feasted and my cousin Eleni taught me to play a song on the piano which I still remember and we talked and danced and ate all night long.
I've seen him three times since--in 1998, I spent a lot of time with him and his family, but when I returned in 2005 and 2007, I spent only one day during each visit with him. I didn't see him in 2010--I had planned to visit him on my last night in Greece, but I had learned my father was dying, and I was too overwhelmed with grief to leave my hotel room that night, too worried I'd miss my flight home if I didn't stay put.
He was a gentle man--by far the gentlest and calmest of all the brothers. I called him last year when his wife Theodora died, and talked to him again this year at Christmas. Once a year, an awkward phone call during which he would always cry, tell me how much he'd loved my father. I would ask about his daughters and grandchildren, about his neighborhood, what had changed--same conversation every year.
It is hard to stay connected with an ocean between, even now.
And so I called T and said that I had just gotten more bad news, but I was Ok, and I wanted to go out to eat with S. And we did, and we told the story of the day her foster family dropped her off to be with me forever. I cried a little, remembering the letter I'd handed to her foster mother, the way her foster siblings had eyed me, unsure--would this lady be OK? S had demanded that I drive her to the mall, then softened, and asked if I wanted to hear her play the guitar. This is the image I remember best, S singing and playing a song on a child's guitar she didn't really know how to play with a missing string. She was so stunningly beautiful in that moment, so full of both a deep grief and a deep joy. I could see both things in her--joy, grief, not fighting but simply lying beside each other. I could see her breathing them in, out, in, out. She knew this was life, this breathing, and her wordless song expressed it perfectly.
We told this story, and she joked about how much I love to embarrass her, and later that night, I found a photo of my uncle from 1998 and posted it to facebook. His granddaughters, my second cousins, immediately friended me, sending me beautiful messages of memories of my visit, of how much he had loved us, despite the distance.
Today after church we went to our favorite diner with S's godmother and ate well again, then took a long walk on the first warm day in weeks with Cody the dog, then rested, then I worked for awhile. Then we made another good supper and had fudgesickles for dessert and she was off to bed. "Tomorrow's Cody's gotcha day," she reminded me. On a whim, I'd picked up Cody on the way home from a student who had posted to facebook that she needed to find him a home. It was love at first sight, and I'm fairly convinced that S wouldn't be doing as well as she is if it weren't for Cody.
I wanted to try to make sense of all this grief and joy mixed together. The lesson S had taught me six years earlier when she sang that wordless song had sunk in then, but after a string of days like these, it was hard to remember how to contain joy and grief without getting lost in either.
Not surprisingly, everything I picked up to read seemed to be speaking to me about this theme exactly. Henri Nouwen, for instance, in the Lenten devotional I'm using, reminded me on Saturday, "Healing happens by leading people to gratitude. We tend to divide our past into good things to remember and painful things to accept and reject. Once we accept this division, however, we quickly develop a mentality in which we hope to collect more good memories than bad memories, more things to be grateful for than things to be resentful about..."
I was a bit puzzled. So we categorize things. It's human nature. So what?
On Saturday, he explained further, "'The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. Say it three times. We know it's not true, because we want many things. This is exactly why we're so nervous."
I tried it: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
I shall not want.
I shall not want.
And then Pema Chodron, the Buddhist teacher whose books T and I read from daily, told me this: "The fundamental change of attitude is to breathe the undesirable in and to breathe the desirable out. In contrast, the attitude that is epidemic on the planet is to push it away if it's painful and to hold on to it tightly if it's pleasant. The basic ground of compassionate action is the importance of working with rather than struggling against."
And then, tonight, I was thumbing through some of the poetry books that used to be old favorites, and came across Gerald Stern's "Lucky Life." I remember weeping so hard when I heard him read it out loud at a reading the first time. I remember weeping almost every time I'd read it since--but it had been at least five years, maybe longer, since I'd last read it. I read it aloud to S and T, saying that I remembered that it had once mattered to me, but couldn't remember why.
By the time I got to the last two stanzas, I was crying--and I also remembered why I'd loved the poem so much. It is about the moment S bent over that guitar with the missing strings. It is about the time I drove out of Phoenix, ready for a new life, blessing rather than cursing the bad things that had happened to me there. It was about the time I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time, how I was at first annoyed at the tourists, then realized I was one, too, and laughed and breathed and noticed its actual beauty. About all the times I've been beside S or T during crises, all the times they've been there for me. About the night my father died, how my sister told me calmly in the car on the way to his apartment from the airport, "He died a couple hours ago." It is about my father and his brother, reaching out for each other, looking each other in the eye, and about my friend K, who didn't apologize for dying her hair pink or for calling us out when we didn't follow through on what we said we'd do. It was about falling in love in one's 40s and not being sure if it's too late and then realizing nobody's ever sure and then realizing that it's never too late.
It's about being too late and just in time over and over again.
It is about not wanting: I shall not want, shall not want.
It is about breathing: I shall breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, whatever it is.
I shall see, then, just what a lucky life I live:
Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let met take my long steps in the cold sand?
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study
the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and old monoplanes one more year?
Will you still let me draw my sacred figures
and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?
Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.
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