"Since feeling is first . . . "

In my personal favorite of his poems, e e cummings tells us

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

landscape by e e cummings

All of my life I have paid too much attention to the syntax of things. I have wanted to figure my life out--as if it were a puzzle to be put together.

I have analyzed too much. Analysis is some comfort, but it is cold comfort. I wanted Life to have some order, to make some sense, to have a pattern to it.

To synthesize, if you will--to have a logical, coherent rhyme or reason to why things had happened in their certain ways.

To evaluate, classify, and assign things, and even people, to their categorical shelf.

I wanted to reach some new and higher level of Truth. To put together the pieces of myself into a unified whole.

I wanted my life--all Life--to have symmetry, beauty, balance, and harmony.

I did not want Life to play me for a fool.

Analyzing the games we all played, I worshipped at the altar of Intellect and Wisdom.

If the best gesture of my Brain could just work better. If I were only smart enough, then I could know. Know what?

The 1950s and my childhood had taught me that things were white and black, that there was a wrong and a right way (a certain way) to do something, to do anything.

Logic taught me that one thing led to another. Cause and effect.

Most times, I have let my Mind squeeze my Heart out. I didn’t allow my Heart to speak very loudly. I didn’t trust her; she had betrayed me too many times in my chidlhood.

Was I an illusionist? Was it Life’s illusions that mystified me?

I fell hard for the rationalist delusion. After all, I had a mathematical, scientific mind.

I leaned toward Classicism; I desired to be a Classicist. Didn’t they have all of the answers, rules, and reasons for everything?  The voice of my human rule-based education led me down that path, down the logical path.

Did you notice the repetition of the word down in the last sentence? Did you pay attention to its syntax? That’s just it, isn’t it? I went down a path, rather than up a path.

Ironically, one of the first classicist Horace coined the phrase “carpe diem.” Isn't it more reasonable, logical to work and plan for tomorrow? To be ready for any and every eventuality? An impossibility.

 Both Emilys have taught me to live mindfully and to "dwell in possibilities."

Of all that I tried to teach my students, by the end of my career, it was the concept of “mindfulness” that stood out the most for me, (and I hope that some of them got that message as well!) It was there and emphasized in the literature of Thoreau and Emerson, Wordsworth and Shelley, and Whitman and Dickinson, and Wilder’s famous play Our Town.

I have become an intuitionist--I now trust my Heart more and more, thus my Mind less and less. But it’s a long, long journey from the head to the heart.

Life is not black and white, but made up of a multitude of hues and textures and intensities and feelings.

All I know for sure is that I didn’t get to laugh enough in this lifetime. So unpracticed in laughing am I that now my laughter sounds hollow, even to me.

And I have no one’s arms to lean back in and laugh. But it is not too late to laugh nor to lean back. Will you catch and hold me? Will you be tender with me?

At long last, I have found no answers.

All I know to be True is that Life is definitely not a paragraph--it cannot to organized; it is not coherent. It has no topic sentence nor supporting detail sentences.

Perhaps it is not even a distinct division from Death.

And you Mister Death--the great mystery--are no parenthesis--you are not unnecessary. You are the only necessary thing in this life.

(As parentheses often indicate, Death is not just something that is explanatory, qualifying, amplifying, or digressing.)

Death is an interruption of continuity, though perhaps only an interval. And it is the one thing that gives meaning and sustenance and laughter to Life.

seascape by cummings

Grandmother--the most unimportant, important role I've ever played

Grandmother is a word, like the word retirement, that I have learned to love. Neither word nor state had I given much thought to, until they happened in my own life. Though not at first, but now, they are the sweetest words and states for me!

The word grand, after all, can mean magnificent, impressive, dignified, imposing. It can mean that which inspires reverence or awe, but I fear that as a grandmother I am sometimes too meek!

Four years go this month, I became a first time grandmother. Already I wrote a blog post about my early experience of grandmothering, which turned out to be somewhat humorous, and everyone loves humor. This post will be a bit more serious.

Being a grandmother, like so many important roles in our lives, is not something that we train for, go to school for, or are educated for. We just have to "wing it." And at this point in my life, I'm not so sure that I know how to "properly" play that role.

Now in my rather limited experience with my own grandparents, I adored my Granddaddy Clark (my mother's father) and his second wife Etta. Unfortunately, Granddaddy died when I was nine. My two other sets of grandparents (My mother's parents were divorced and remarried to other people, which gave me three sets of grandparents.) were not as significant in my life as the Clark set.

The Mundricks (my mother's mother and her second husband Wassil) lived in the large city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and we usually traveled north to see them once a year. Though Wassil was a jolly enough person, my Grandmother Mundrick was somewhat taciturn. She would sometimes take me into New York City though to shop and to see the Rockettes! Wassil would occasionally take me and my sister Lynda to movie matinee double features. Once we saw a horror movie that so scared me, I woke up in a cold sweat that night and had nightmares for years to come and still well remember the movie--entitled The Shrinking Man.

Living in the small country town of Bowman, South Carolina, the Drawdys (my father's parents) had nine children and dozens of grandchildren, and we usually saw them only once a year, too. My father's father, Papa, was rather quiet. With so many grandchildren, I certainly didn't feel particularly special.  It seemed to me that Mama Drawdy seemed to favor an older male cousin of mine, as she appeared to favor her five sons. But I loved to visit their old farm as a child and run "my heedless ways" among the animals and fruit trees and sleep in the high old beds covered with heavy piles of quilts and blankets. After frolicking on the farm all day,water would be heated up on the kitchen wood stove for me to bathe in an old metal tub. Afraid of the outhouse at night, I hated to have "to go" in the middle of the night, and of course, would wake my mother up to go with me. As I recall, my small family of four slept in two double beds in the large middle bedroom of the large old farmhouse.

It was the Clarks that I got to stay with in the summer for a week in Columbia, South Carolina, and who made me feel particularly loved. I have already written a post about them entitled "Someone to love me."

So with Granddaddy Clark in mind, I thought to myself, all I have to do to be a good grandmother is to just love my granddaughter. And trust me, I do! But what does love look like, feel like? I went about being completely indulgent of her. When she was here, I was "on call" for little Tessa. It was Tessa-time the whole time that she visited me. I played with her, fixed her favorite foods, bought her lots of things, etc. Need I say it, I "spoiled" her. I had often been told that I could do just that, and then give her back to her parents for disciplining!

But that's not working out so well for me. A big difference between my being a grandparent and my own grandparents is that as opposed to once a year, I am fortunate that my granddaughter gets to visit me once a week for 24 hours or more at a time. And oh the difference that is! For her first two years, my being so compliant with Tessa was all right. But here we are four years, over 200 visits, and a new granddaughter later, and I'm thinking maybe I've been too indulgent with her. Now that she is nearly 4, going on 14, I feel as if I need to discipline her more, and it feels uncomfortable to me, yet necessary.

You can easily see from this picture and the next one how adorable and hard-to-resist Tessa is!

Let me give you a few examples of my concern. Last week on her visit, she told me that my house was her house, not mine! And the way she tears through it as if she owns it, one would think that that were true. I have been in the bad habit of not making her pick things up after she has played with them. So when she leaves after a couple days at my house, well, you can imagine the clutter!

Later that evening as she was brushing her teeth before bed, I noticed that she was not brushing her top molars and reminded her to do so. She told me that this is how her daddy had taught her to brush her teeth and that it was the right way. She often tells me that she is right and that I am wrong about such things!

The next day Tessa argued with me about the order of the days of the week; she told me that Monday came after Saturday. Then she proceeded to sing a little ditty about the days of the week, and sure enough, she had memorized it wrong, "Saturday, Monday, Sunday." But she once again insisted that I am wrong and that she was right.

Probably one mistake that I am making is taking all of this too personally. Nevertheless, I feel as if I have been a "push-over" as a grandmother, and I want my granddaughter(s) to respect me. So the fact remains that I'm gonna have to be a bit tougher as a grandmother. Even if it is not my usual MO, even if change can be challenging, even if it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks, and even if it comes as a shock to Tessa's little system, I must earn her 4-year-old respect! After all, I want to be one of those awe-inspiring grandmothers! Please wish me luck!

Here are my daughter Ellen and I and her two daughters, my granddaughters Livvy Lara and Tessa Jean about four months ago.

      

A memoir--the Louisville years

The junior high and high school years are as foundational as those first years of our life in forming who we become. (In April, I am going to a Madison High School class reunion, and it's been 47 years since I graduated from high school in 1967! When did I get so old--and yet how do I still, at times, feel only 15?) 

My father and his career with the DuPont Company moved us around about every two years as I was growing up. The longest that we stayed anywhere--three years--was recorded in my last memoir piece entitled "the very best of my childhood years."

After my elementary school years ended, we moved to Old Hickory, Tennessee, for a few months and then on to Louisville, Kentucky, where I lived from mid-seventh grade through mid-ninth grade.

It is not good for most teens to move around in their high school years. Adolescence can be a confusing enough time without adding unnecessary uprooting. Perhaps if there is a strong family unit intact, then maybe a teen could take moving around in stride, but my family's dysfunctions began to surface more with each new move.

All total, I attended four high schools. Into the middle of my seventh grade year, my family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, in Northern Kentucky. Even though I consider Kentucky to be a southern state, because of its proximity to Indiana and its large size, Louisville definitely had characteristics of a northern city.

This is me in seventh grade in Old Hickory, TN at DuPont Junior High School. After Christmas that year, we moved to Louisville. Once again, I had been given a permanent wave to curl my unacceptable straight hair. Apparently, though this is 1961, I was still wearing those late 50s' petty coats under my skirts on special occasions! That little dog is Jose. 

It was in Louisville that I also started high school, that I immediately began to feel less than intelligent and particularly unattractive, that I started my period (but don't tell anyone!), that I learned about the supposed importance of expensive clothes and large houses, that I came to love the Beatles and other rock and roll music, and that I began to learn to keep the family secrets.

 As usual with a move, when we first arrived in Louisville, we lived in a motel, while my dad searched for a house for us to rent. Once he had decided which part of the city that he wanted to live in, my dad took me and my older sister to enroll us into the local school.

In this large city, it was Waggener Junior and High School. Of course, the school didn't have our transcripts from our Madison schools yet, so the guidance counselor asked my father what kind of students we were, to which he humbly responded that we were just "regular kids." He did not realize, nor did we until later, that he was sentencing us to imprisonment in classes that we didn't fit in.

Thus at age 12, I began an academic journey for me that would make me feel "less than" or "not good enough." What my father had no way of knowing was that in contrast to our Tennessee schools, Waggener had an intense tracking system for its students--from R1, R2, R3, to S1, S2, S3, and up to A1, A2, A3. Nine different rankings from R3 all the way up to A1!

Each class from English to math could be a different track. Even though I had made mostly As and a few Bs throughout my elementary years, because of what my father had said about our being "regular" kids, I was put into all R classes.

R stood for regular, S stood for superior, and A stood for advanced. So there I was in all seventh grade R classes, knowing nothing about tracking. Apparently, the school was so large that when my previous school records did come in, no one was made the wiser about my grades. So I found the work rather easy in my classes and began to try to make some new friends.

One really embarrassing memory from those first days of school at Waggener was that the music teacher had me stand up and sing a solo a capella on my first day in her class. Since I had been told all of my short life that the Drawdys could not sing, I lied and told her that I didn't know any songs. But she kept calling out titles until finally she came up with "Oh where have you been Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" to which I shook my head and stood up and sang the song to the best of my young ability. The look on her face and the faces of the other student confirmed what I had been told.

One of my first friends was a girl named Louisa, whose parents managed/owned a local drive-in movie theater. When I would spend the night with her, we would watch Jerry Lewis movies from the front seat of her parents' old car and get free popcorn and candy. We were also often left alone at her house with her older brother for short periods of time, which I didn't tell my parents. From my friendship with Louisa, I would learn a few things about the forbidden subject and about how to ride on top of an old wooden sawhorse.

A strange mix between tom-boy and otherwise at age 13, if I had been encouraged, I probably could have gotten into some sport, but neither my father nor the society at that time, encouraged girls' sports. 

Still loving small animals (remember the hamster story in my last memoir post ), I had adopted a guinea pig from a fellow student before we left Madison/Old Hickory. After we arrived in Louisville, she got very fat and would cry for food when she would hear the refrigerator door opening.

One day as I was saying good morning to my guinea pig in her cage at the bottom of my closet, I got to watch her give birth to three baby guinea pigs! One that looked just like her--brown and white spotted and twins that were solid white. I then felt really bad about her being so hungry, and my parents swore that the boy who gave her to me must have known that she was pregnant! I only knew that I was glad that I had three new guinea pigs to love, but my parents said that I had to give them away.

An across-the-street neighbor named Brooke became my best friend. She was different from Louisa. At first, we were not in any classes together (she was in all S and A classes), but we just connected. We both liked to play outside in a nearby woods, and we rode bikes together around the neighborhood and to Woodworth's dime store to get 25-cent hot fudge ice cream Sundaes in the afternoons. (My allowance was 50 cents a week, but occasionally, I got to babysat for a few families in my neighborhood for 25 cents an hour!)

A mixture of child and adult, Brooke and I both still liked to play with our dolls--albeit mostly with our Barbie and Ken dolls. And we loved to play cards--canasta--for hours on end in the summer time. I did not tell her about what I had learned from Louisa nor about what was going on at my house.

I think that this is a school picture from either 8th or 9th grade at Waggener. Sometimes I let my hair grow out and flipped it up by spending sleepless nights in large brush rollers. Oh my, what we do for beauty's sake! 

Before seventh grade ended for me, slowly but surely, some of the teachers began to recognize that I needed to be moved up into the S and A classes. So by the time I entered eighth grade, I was in a various of classes from R1 up to A1. For example, I may have been in an A1 English class, in a S1 history class, in an A2 math class, in a S2 science class, in an R1 music class, etc. Crazy but true! So I was beginning to meet different people--almost as if I had transferred to a different school.

It was about this time that I noticed that the other students (in the S and A classes) wore clothes that were different from mine. Instead of clothing from Penny's or Sear's or the Ship 'n Shore brand, they wore Villager and Ladybug dresses and skirts and Bass Weejuns and blouses with Peter Pan collars--what I now know as pre-preppie and Ivy League clothing. I began to yearn with all my soul for these demure blouses, cunningly tucked shirtdresses, A-line skirts, and blazers. I myself, at ages 13 and 14, passionately desired a complete wardrobe of floral cotton.

Suddenly, with a terrible pang that was the real beginning of adolescence, I wanted to be one of the glamorous school crowd. Some desperate instinct whispered to me that the right outfit just might take me a magical step closer. I also knew that those well-dressed people didn't live in our moderate neighborhood of Lansdown Estates, but that they lived in Indian Hills--a place with rolling hills on top of which sat huge mansions.

Madras and madras cumberbunds were also part of the Ivy League clothing style, but certainly not those shoes! The in-crowd at school would be wearing weejuns with this outfit! Back then, we wore hose and girdles to attach the hose to (whether we needed girdles or not)! 

On the day that I started my period, I had no idea what was happening. Neither my mother nor my sister had told me a thing. I felt afraid and ashamed for some reason, but I told my mother that I was bleeding. She gave me a sanitary belt, some kotex, and a book entitled It's Time You Knew. Though I pored through the book, it was pretty technical and not much help. I did not exactly understand what it was talking about--especially the part about "sex." So on I went, stumbling my way through life in my rather innocent and naive way. It's hard to believe in this day and time, but "sex," and anything to do with sex, was taboo in our society and especially in my family. We used to actually spell the word "s-e-x" on the rare occasions when it was mentioned!

On TV my family and I were still watching "Wagon Train" and "Gunsmoke," rooting for the white men in white hats, and the new doctor shows "Dr. Ben Casey" and "Dr. Kildare." I still loved "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver." Then the Beatles made their debut in America! Though my parents hated it, I loved their music and loved to dance to it. "Oh, yea, I'll tell you something/I think you'll understand. When I say that something/I wanna hold your hand! I wanna hold your hand!"

So I saved my money and bought the first Beatles' album. Every chance that I got, I would play that album on my parents' stereo record player, which was in a big wooden cabinet in the living room. Of course, I could only play it as loudly as I wanted to when my parents were not at home. Later, I also liked the Monkees, the Kingston Trio, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, the Mamas and the Papas, Motown, etc., but it was the Beatles, who really began my musical evolution into adolescence.

Check out the back of that car to the right! I don't remember if it was ours or not, but I do remember this big old elm tree in our front yard in Louisville, because I used to climb it! The outfit certainly wasn't Ivy league, but those are definitely Weejuns on my feet. On the back of this picture, my mother had written to my grandmother (her mother) , "Laura with her new outfit. See, she's not so plump any more." When was I ever "plump"? 

Besides the Beatles, another strong memory from that time period in my life was the news of the assassination of our president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It felt as if when our country lost its "innocence," I began to lose mine. I was sitting in eighth grade study hall on Friday, November 22, 1963, when the intercom suddenly broke into our quietude and announced to the teachers to turn on the classroom television sets. President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. What an incredibly tragic, scary, and confusing time in all of our lives!

Meanwhile back on the home front, things were heating up or cooling down, depending on how one looked at it. We did not do things together as a family, and there was no fun nor laughter nor lightness in my family life. My parents were wrapped up in their own lives, of which I didn't feel a part. They were fighting even more, which made me really nervous and afraid. Periods of screaming, followed by periods of tense silence. Always pretending, pretending that everything was all right in my family. My parents had parties with their friends, mostly bridge parties, with lots of drinking and smoking. I remember late at night that my father would pull out this album with "dirty" jokes on it to play for the other couples. It was called "Knockers Up," it was a female middle-aged comedian's voice, and its vulgarness offended  me. In this particular house, my bedroom was next to the living room, and unfortunately, it shared a wall with the stereo record player.

Now here's a really weird thing: I do not remember much about my older sister Lynda during these years. Did she just hide away in her room? She had already proved to be somewhat strange and distant when we lived in Madison. By the time we moved to Louisville, she was in the eleventh grade. I do remember that we both had English essays chosen for the literary magazine the next year; I was in eighth grade English, and she was in senior English. I have a slight memory of my mom taking us to an "outlet" store to buy a few of those Ivy league-type clothes, which mom thought were outrageously priced.

My clearest memory of Lynda is one that I wrote about in an earlier post--When I was in middle school, my eyebrows had begun to grow across the bridge of my nose. One night at the dinner table, my mother asked my sister if she would show me how to pluck them properly. To which Lynda responded that it didn’t matter if I plucked my eyebrows or not, that I “was so ugly that plucking would not help me.”

And then from another post--When Lynda went off to college at the University of Kentucky, Mom, Dad, and I drove her to her dorm on campus. I was 14 years old at the time, just starting high school that same month. We were all so proud of Lynda's going off to college! When I went up to hug her good-bye, she roughly pushed me away. Stunned and deeply hurt, I walked back to the car in a shock of confusion. Though there was usually little to no affection between us, there had been nothing between us that led to such complete rejection. But now I realize, that’s just it, there had been “nothing between us.”

And after that incident, I wrote about this one on a third post about Lynda--One spring afternoon when I came home from my freshman year in high school, no one was home, and a neighbor informed me that my parents had gone to get my sister Lynda from college. No one would tell me what had happened. It was all a secret. Hush, hush. Don’t tell. It took me months/years to piece together that Lynda had tried to commit suicide (had swallowed pills and had to have her stomach pumped) because she had not made it into a certain sorority. Later she admitted that she had taken the pills for attention, knowing that her stomach would be pumped. We also discovered that she had told people at her college that she was adopted and that her real father was a famous psychiatrist! My parents were stunned.

I remember two incidents where my sister accused me of stealing from her--once when I was in middle school, she tattled to mom and dad that I had stolen an ink pen from her. Still later after Lynda got pregnant and got married in college at age 20, I, at 16, still thinking that we could be "sisters" went to visit her for a few days. As I was leaving to catch the bus home, her husband had me open up my suitcase, saying that I was stealing the record albums in my suitcase (that my sister had actually loaned me). I was shocked and embarrassed and hurt. Later, I realized that Lynda had told him that I was a thief.

Even though my sister had left home by this time, her behavior was still affecting all of us adversely and would continue to do so for the next three or more decades.

The not-so-mixed messages that the young and impressionable me were receiving were that I "ugly," "plump," not well-dressed, not part of the in-crowd, couldn't sing, wasn't smart.  "S-e-x" was bad, something to be made dirty jokes about, something that got you shamefully pregnant. Also hush, hush, don't tell anyone about my sister Lynda nor about my father, even if my heart was breaking.  And there was no Granddaddy Clark's love to counter these negative messages. All I knew for sure was that my family was nothing like the "Father Knows Best" family, and that I so wanted them to be just like that fantasy TV family.