For how shall we live?

When I retired from teaching high school English, I asked myself, "What was the most important thing that I had taught my students?" Though most of my students probably wouldn't know how to identify it (or it would vary for each of them), for me, the answer came back immediately--Mindfulness!

What do Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, Buddhism, and Thoreau have in common? In the first year of my teaching 1972, I began to teach Our Town, and though it wasn't popular to teach into the 21st century, I continued teaching it through 2010 until I retired and never tired of it.

You may remember that in that play Emily has died in child birth. When she comes back from the dead to relive her 12th birthday, she realizes that we human beings do not appreciate life while we live it. She spoke these words, and I immediately knew them to be true (the italics are mine):

"Emily: Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama! Wally's dead, too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!

I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave.

But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking....and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths....and sleeping and waking up. 

Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every,every minute?

Stage Manager: No. (pause) The saints and poets, maybe they do some."

Now fast forward in my teaching life to about 20 years later in the mid 90s when I began to teach about the major world religions through literature. Besides Christianity, my favorite of those faith traditions was Buddhism--primarily because one of its main tenets is mindfulness or being fully awake:

The Buddha advocated that one should establish mindfulness (satipaṭṭhāna) in one's day-to-day life, maintaining as much as possible a calm awareness of one's body, feelings, and mind. Mindfulness, which, among other things, is an attentive awareness of the reality of things (especially of the present moment) is an antidote to delusion.

As I thought back to the religion that I am most familiar with--Christianity--I realized that Jesus lived an incredibly mindful life. Didn't Christ live in the moment and encourage us to do the same? Wasn't he fully awake and alive? Spiritually in tune.

Excuse the words on the picture, which I cannot erase and which have nothing to do with my blog post! I actually have this picture on my wall. It is one of my favorites of Jesus.

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life . . . do not worry about tomorrow." (Matthew 6) Isn't Jesus telling us to "stay in today" in this passage? "Let the little children come to me . . .for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." (Matthew 19) Jesus tells us to become like little children if we seek the kingdom of God. Before society (we) corrupts them, don't children live fully in the present moment?

And then there is always Henry David Thoreau's Walden, telling us to simplify, slow down, and live in the present, "Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature." Thoreau didn't just write about mindfulness, he lived it, especially at Walden Pond. He was teaching us that if we don't live mindfully, we will miss our lives. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." "We must learn to reawake and keep ourselves awake." "Only one in a hundred million [is awake enough for] a poetic or divine life." Isn't that the Stage Manger's answer to Emily's question in Our Town, "the saints and poets maybe"?

Thoreau cautions us about not living: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach me, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Still and all, though intellectually, I knew that mindfully was the way to live and that most of those whom I admired (living and dead) lived in the present, I was too much in the "doing" mode. Always doing, doing, doing, or if not doing, thinking about doing or going, going, going. Making long lists of what I "had" to do, where I had to go.

Why/how had I come to believe that living was all about doing and going? Running errands, working, cleaning, organizing, shopping, cooking, washing, planning lessons and grading papers, taking care of my child and pets and yes, husband, gardening, weeding, raking, paying bills, etc.

Wasn't I on that proverbial hamster's wheel? But how to get off?

Years and years ago, someone had said to me, we are human beings, not human doings. And I wanted to learn how to be more of a human being. But I didn't know how.

Oh I've had my moments: floating down the Hiwassee River in the late afternoon when the sun sparkled off its crystal clear waves, walking to school underneath the white pines with the early morning dew drops sparking off their evergreen needles, looking at my students' sparkling eyes and young faces as they comprehended the lesson for that moment. Apparently, one thing that I have discovered for sure is that living in the moment is a "sparkling" experience!

Thoreau said, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake by an infinite expectation of the dawn. To be awake is to be alive."

With that in mind, I have been doing--there's that word again--some research on mindfulness. In my next blog post, I would like to begin teaching us how to be more mindful, more awake, more alive in our lives. Because it's never too late to learn how to really live! And we shall start with the "being" mode versus the "doing" mode of living and how to tell the difference. So stay tuned, Dear Reader!

Cursive writing--an essential!

A friend of mine told me that she had had lunch with a friend of hers--an archivist. The archivist mentioned how disappointed she was with her new intern. "What are your concerns?" my friend asked. "She can't read," the archivist stated. "She's a junior in college. How it it possible that she can't read?" my friend questioned. "It's not that she can't read at all," the archivist explained, "but she can't read cursive writing, a critical skill when working with historical documents."

This story makes me wonder if the reading and writing of cursive writing will one day be like knowing a foreign language!

In 2010, Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) aimed to standardize math and language arts requirements across the United States. Apparently, the instruction of cursive writing had been declining for years, and it seems that the CCSSI's omitting any mention of cursive writing in their curriculum pretty much rang the death knell for the teaching of it in our nation-wide elementary schools.

Yes, "correct" cursive writing is something that is difficult to test for!

As far as educational philosophy is concerned, I am an essentialist. I believe that certain things are essential to a "proper" education. Having been a high school English teacher, there are certain authors and literary works that I think are essential--but that's a post for another day!--there are certain speaking and writing skills that I believe are essential to a quality education--another post for another day.

I've also come to believe that cursive writing is essential for a complete education.  An article that outlines more detailed scientific information about the value of learning script or cursive writing can be found in a recent Psychology Today magazine, entitled "What Learning Cursive Does for the Brain."

Before retirement, I had begun to notice that some of my students printed everything. Now I wonder if they simply didn't know how to write cursively. Perhaps their elementary school teacher had skipped that particular skill, just as my daughter's elementary teacher omitted teaching her students the capital cities of the states!

Just because much of our "speaking" and writing is done with a keyboard doesn't mean that we won't need to use our fingers and hands to write on occasion. But there's something even more important to cursive writing than this need.

The same friend who told the above story about the archivist considers learning cursive writing to be a "rite of passage" into adulthood, like using an ink pen. She further tells me that practicing her penmanship led to her love of writing, "As I moved my fountain pen across the lined paper, my writing became my voice. I wanted to read more to gain the knowledge to write more. My vocabulary, spelling, grammar, and sentence structure all improved [with cursive writing]."

In hearing about this movement toward not teaching cursive writing, I thought about personality development and how my cursive writing has changed/matured over the years with my personality. It's fun to look back and see how you used to write in grade school, high school, college, early adulthood, etc. Cursive writing generally show your personality development.

Remember when you used to get a card or letter through snail mail, you could tell from the handwriting on the envelop who had sent it. As a teacher, if a name on a paper was missing, I could usually tell by their handwriting whose paper it was. Handwritten notes are usually more appreciated than emailed ones.

How I cherish today some handwritten recipes from my mother! When I tenderly touch her faded writing, it is as if I am touching her.

Also remember how handwriting analyzers are able to tell us about some of our personality traits from our handwriting. Someone's handwriting is their "signature. A part of them that is unique," my friend states. So if a person doesn't learn cursive writing, might that somehow change her/his personality development? His/her uniqueness? If we all write alike--from a computer keyboard--won't we be more like little automatons who do not have our own individual thoughts? (perhaps more Big Brother mind control--re-read the George Orwell novel 1984)

I, for one,  believe that we would. That's why I think that the teaching. learning, and practice (though I'm sure that it takes time and patience) of cursive writing is paramount to a quality education and to a person's personality development and uniqueness.

Let's bring back this essential skill--cursive writing!

An interesting sidenote: Since I was raised in the 50s, I guess that I learned cursive writing in third or fourth grade. When I began seventh grade in a new school, DuPont Junior High School, the English teacher there--a really old gray-headed lady (probably she was in her late 40s!)--told us students that most of our handwriting had become adulterated. She told us that in addition to the usual seventh grade English lessons she was going to teach us cursive writing from scratch! And so we all began again to learn our letters and to practice and practice. By then I had begun to write back handed like my mother--though neither of us was left handed--and it wasn't pretty. So I was taught once again to slant by letters to the right. At the time with my budding teenness, I resented having to learn cursive writing again, but of course, like many good lessons in life, it turned out to be a great value for me.

Schools are not mere machines

Yesterday, as I was listening to NPR, there was "leader/expert" in the field of education saying that our education system is over 100 years old and that it is like the model-T. His point seemed to be that either we can tinker with it to get it running again, or we can replace it with the latest model. Whatever model that may be?

I don't believe that this was a appropriate metaphor to describe the education system. Because a school is made up of humans, it is a whole lot more complex than an automobile has ever been, and a classroom is certainly not a mere machine. Thus this metaphor makes improving education sound too simple. Which I think that a lot of non-thinking politicians have fallen for.

A somewhat typical mind-set of a technological/industrial society, this man's metaphor implies that if it doesn't work, we can just fix it. Of course, I myself like to say, "If it ain't broke [broken], don't fix it." I also like to quote, "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!" Which replacing the model T completely with a new model of automobile would do, as would somehow creating a completely new model for schools would do. It would throw the good out with the bad. And our 100-year-old education system has had a lot of good in it, a lot of good worth saving!

In the last decade, it appears that "fixing" education means more and more testing of students. More and more taking away job security (tenure) and freedom to teach and to be creative from teachers. Testing of students has also been connected to teachers keeping their jobs or perhaps getting "merit" pay in some school districts. Testing students forces teachers to "teach" to the tests, to some generic tests that the state or federal government (Common Core) has come up with, not a test that the teachers themselves have created.

Who decides which questions to put on a multiple choice test? Can such a test really come up with 50 or so questions that reflect what each student knows and what each teacher has taught? Before I retired in 2010, I remember teaching to these tests with my English II (sophomore) students because I was being judged as a teacher by something called value-added (some mathematical equation that hardly anyone could explain to us). Some years my value-added score was good, some years not so good though I could not tell what I had done differently. Perhaps I had different students.

The tests themselves had faults. First, some of the questions on the test were particularly specific and often insignificant, "Where would you put the comma in the following series?" when indeed the comma was optional, and secondly, other questions were opinions as far as the answer went, "What is the most important sentence in this paragraph?" Important how? Important to whom?

So I was forced to take up valuable class time making sure that my students would "play the game" of testing, rather than get on with teaching material that I considered valuable; material that could not be measured by any test, such as how to treat your fellow man, how to value yourself, how and why to speak correctly, how to write a coherent composition, etc., etc., etc.

A state or federal test cannot measure the value of a student nor of his teacher, for we are not machines. It cannot truly measure on any given day what a student has learned nor what a teacher has taught. For we are complex human beings.

We are complex human beings with multi-dimensions. We are mental and emotional. We are solitary and social. We are spiritual and physical. We come from different genetics and different environments. Thus we cannot be judged by the exact same criteria. We cannot be programmed like a computer to perform on tests. We cannot be programmed like a computer to teach a certain way or to teach only certain material. For we are humans. Not model Ts nor Cadillacs.

There may be many ways to improve public education, but generic state or federal testing is not one of them. At least not the way testing is presently being done in Cheatham County or in Tennessee. Even though most states opted onto the Common Core curriculum and testing as soon as our federal government offered it, and Tennessee later than some, many states are now seeing that it is not the answer or even an answer and are opting out. Many parents are also opting out, too, by not allowing their children to take such tests.

Some parents have been concerned about the impact of such high stakes testing on their children and on their children's teachers and on on their schools. According to Time magazine (April 21, 2014) test protesters hope that the parental opt-out movement "crushes the system, says Janet Wilson, an activist from upstate New York. "This is our way of civil disobedience."

So if only a few Cheatham County parents were courageous enough to start a movement to opt their children out of Tennessee's state exams, then that would be a step in the right direction to take back our schools and put them back in the hands of the educators-- the teachers and local school administrators who are educated/trained to effectively run a classroom or a school. Teachers and local principals who have a love of learning and a passion for our youth, not who are trying to make some political statement nor trying to reach some "pie-in-sky" educational goal.

So I dare Cheatham County parents to be civilly disobedient (as Thoreau encouraged us to do when the government was wrong). I encourage parents to take back their schools by opting their children out of state or federal testing--out of Common Core exams. The teachers and principals hands are tied on this matter. Only you can do it. Then, and only then, can we talk about improving education in Cheatham County.

This picture seems to be a private school situation because of the small number of students, and yes, because of the "uniforms." One of the ways to improve education is to lower the teacher-to-student ratio. As any parent who pays for private education knows, fewer students per teacher means a better quality education.  When I have visited private school classrooms, the ratio was usually one teacher per 10 or fewer students!

A memoir: the most important high school years

For a few years, fate threw us together in the same high school in the mid 1960s--the class of 1967 from Madison High School--and yet those years have left their indelible mark on our lives. We were the Madison Rams, our colors were orange and white, and we had merged into the high school, then 7-12, from four or more elementary schools. A few of us were catholic, two were Jewish, the rest of us were wasps--white, Anglo-Saxon, and and protestant. Although the Supreme Court had ruled segregation to be a violation of the 14th amendment in 1954, we were not yet an integrated high school. Most of us came to Madison High School still clinging to friends from those earlier schools. Some of us were ready to spread our wings and make new friends.

Last weekend about half of us met for our 47th class reunion. Most of us will turn 65 this year. As a memorial board cataloged, twenty of us have already died.

I came to Madison High School at the end of my freshman year and stayed until very near the end of my junior year. Coming from Louisville, Kentucky, where I had unhappily been since 7th grade, I was ready to make new friends and renew some old friendships from my elementary years.

For you see, I had gone to one of those elementary schools that merged into Madison High School for a few years before my family moved to Louisville, Kentucky. When I was in the third grade, we had moved from Richmond, Virginia, to Madison, Tennessee,  We lived on Berwich Trail with the mighty Cumberland River in our back yard, and I rode my bike to Neely's Bend Elementary School for the next three happiest years of my young life.

Last night at the reunion, many of the people that I remembered best had gone to both my elementary school and Madison High School. That may have been true for others, too, especially for those who had been together from first grade through twelfth grades. One man was going around and finding each of us from "the school on the bend"--Neely's Bend Elementary--and asking if we remembered each other. I certainly remember him.

When I was driving to the reunion at Old Hickory Country Club, I got to take a short walk down memory lane. Once I exited Interstate 65 North (which had not been there in the 60s), I passed by the old Madison High School on my left, which is now a middle school. I have always liked its welcoming u-shaped facade and am glad that the old building has not been torn down. Even before that, to my right I had recognized the name of the street that I had lived on when I was in high school--Marthona Road. I took a quick turn and looked for the old brick ranch house--the first house my family had ever bought, instead of rented--but could not recognize it. If memory served me, we paid $12,000 for that rather nice house! There were other street names--Graycroft, Vantrease, and Due West--that I recognized from the days that I was first learning  to drive.

1965-66--the school picture from my junior year in high school--On the back of the picture, it says Quill and Scroll (I was on the newspaper staff of The Ram Page, wrote poetry, and was to be the literary editor my senior year) and National Honor Society.

As I passed the familiar street names, my memory went back to an incident when I could have easily died. One of the things that we did back then was to drive past the house of our current crush, in hopes of seeing him or just to feel near him, I guess. Anyway a friend (Barbara Dunlap, I believe) and I had just driven past Tommy Cooper's (my latest crush) house and honked. Curious, he quickly came out of his house, jumped in his car--a Volkwagon Beetle, of course--and began to follow us. Not thinking, barely breathing, and not wanting him to know that it was me, I naturally sped up to get away from him. I was in my father's powerful, big Buick, and within minutes, we were at Gallatin Road, a major thoroughfare in Madison. Barbara screamed to me that the light was red and that I had to stop, but I told her that I couldn't and to hold on, because we were going through the red light. As we made it through, Barbara looked back to see that the cars on Gallatin Road had swerved to the shoulders to avoid hitting my car and that Tommy had stopped at the light. I just kept going--so afraid that the police were going to find and arrest me and put me under the jail! So afraid that my father was going to find out!

Tommy Cooper at Barbara's house. When I first met him, my sophomore year in high school, he was going steady with a girl named Cindy. Forbidden fruit, I chased him until I caught him in my junior and his senior year. I had dated another brown-eyed, handsome boy named Charlie Ligon through my sophomore year. 

When I walked into our 47th class reunion, a man came up to me saying, "You're Laura Drawdy, aren't you? And you married Tommy Cooper, didn't you?" Then he asked me if I had known what Tommy had recently died of. I had just heard in the last month that Tommy had died this past year. I had completely lost touch with him. The last time I saw Tommy was when he sold me my first Honda CRV after my Sabb had gotten totaled in Chattanooga. That must have been around 2000 or earlier. Tommy and I had been lovers through late high school, even after I moved to North Carolina to finish high school, and into college. We had married when I was about 20 and stayed married a few short years while I worked as a cashier at a small grocery store in Clarksville and finished college at Austin Peay. Perhaps I should have stayed married to him, but I had married him to escape my home life and because everyone else seemed to be getting married. We really had little in common. One day he told me that he never wanted to have any children. Though I wasn't so keen on having children myself and certainly not anytime soon, that was just the excuse I used to divorce him. Then I began my all-consuming teaching career. Later, after the divorce, Tommy and I were friends, even seeing each other occasionally, until I met John Mallernee.

At the reunion, I kept asking myself, "Who are all of these old people? Men with grey, thinning, or completely bald heads? Lots of women with grey hair, too. In my mind's eye, these people had frozen in time and should not have aged! They had name tags with their senior pictures (I had not been graduated from Madison so had no senior picture), but the pictures were really too small for most of us to see very well, without getting out our readers! We would look at the name on the tag and then at the person's face and sometimes we would see a slight resemblance! Other times the resemblance was quite obvious!

It seems to me that back then, we only took pictures at Christmas time!

Having not been to a class reunion since my tenth one, it was great fun to see people from high school again. It was fun to see who I remembered and who remembered me. Only good for about three hours of socializing, still being somewhat shy, and with the round dinner tables crowded together to accommodate all of us, I'm sorry to say that I could not get around to seeing everyone that I would have liked to see and to talk with. About 100 of us were able to attend, 50% of our original class. What surprised me was that some of the rather plain-looking people in high school were the most attractive now in our 60s. One lady from my elementary school who said that she had five great grandchildren did not look much older than 50, if that, and she had the loveliest face. And some of the people who were the most attractive in high school were not so attractive now. One studly looking guy in high school now looked like such an old man! Though many of those bald and grey-haired men that I alluded to in the previous paragraph were mighty handsome men, in contrast to their high school days.

It was good to sit at a table with some old friends from high school for a couple hours. But a lifetime had passed so quickly before our very eyes that we had little in common. Having not seen most of these people for nearly fifty years, I felt tenuous connections to them, connections as thin as gossamer. They didn't know me, nor did I know them. Wow to those who had not left Madison, who still lived in the area. How they must have felt connected to one another! But for most of the rest of us who had gone our individual ways, we were just reminiscing that night, as I am here.

Check out a picture of this dog the year before when she was but a puppy in a blog post that I wrote about another incident in my Madison High School years. I think that I was trying to look "sexy" in this picture! I remember being so proud to have gotten that MHS class ring in my junior year!

One big thing for me in high school was the time that I had cheated in biology class. No, we didn't get caught, but I had felt bad all of these years--perhaps because it was wrong or perhaps because the teacher was so nice. Anyway, my friend and I had similar handwriting, and we were to memorize the names of  the major bones and the muscles in the body. She memorized one set, and I the other, then we exchanged papers. We both got a 100% on that test. When I asked my partner in crime if she remembered our cheating, she laughed and said that she did not remember the incident at all. So much for my decades-old guilt!

At the reunion, one of our classmates (the daughter of our chemistry teacher) was reading out fun trivia questions for us to answer such as "How many elementary schools fed into Madison High School?" and  "How many drive-in movie theaters were in Madsion in 1967?" when she shocked me by asking one personal question, "And who put those "for sale" signs in my yard?" I actually involuntarily raised my hand, but no one seemed to pay me any attention. But I was guilty as charged.

Let me tell you the story. It is one of my most vivid memories from my Madison High School years. I was in Mr. Jenkins chemistry class, and one day I got kicked out of class! Mr. Jenkins had once again lost control of his class and yelled at all of us to sit down and to get quiet. We misbehaved in his class because so few of us "got" chemistry. Except for some "eggheads" or "nerds" in the back row (you know who you are!), it was beyond most of our comprehension.

Anyway, as I said, Mr. Jenkins had lost his temper and yelled at the whole class to get quiet. In the meantime, Randy Fisher (who I'm sorry to say didn't make it to the reunion because I was going to fuss at him again!) was my lab table partner who sat next to me on those tall stools. Unknown to me, he was up to his old tricks and had just taken that big gold safety pin out of my plaid wool kilt and was taunting me with it. When I saw that he had it, I flipped my left hand over to him to indicate that he was to return the pin to me pronto. At about the same time, Mr. Jenkins just happened to look up from reading at his desk. He ranted at me, "Laura, get out of my class and go to the office immediately!" I heard a general gasp from the rest of the class as we were all rather stunted. I was a good student who had never been in trouble before.

I spent three days out of chemistry class, sitting in front of the office. When the principal Mr. DePriest came by, he asked me how yearbook sales were going. To which I responded that they were going well. I was ashamed for him to know that I was in trouble nor did he expect trouble from me. The vice-principle Mr. Bridgeman always took care of the trouble-prone students. He had told me that I had to go to Mr. Jenkins and ask him if I could return to class. Each morning during homeroom for three days, I went to Mr. Jenkins, apologized, and asked if I could return to his class. Each morning for three days, Mr. Jenkins ignored me. Besides all of my friends, my homeroom teacher Mrs. Eldridge seemed to be on my side.

Finally, Mr. Jenkins allowed me to return to chemistry class, but each day that I had been out of class and though I had tried to keep up, he had given me a zero--three zeroes that were to be averaged into my grade for the six-weeks! I had not told my parents about my getting kicked out of chemistry class. But when the report cards came out, there were those little blue Bs that I had gotten in all the six-weeks' grading periods before, and there, for the fifth six-weeks, was a big fat D, written in red!

Now I knew I had to explain that grade in chemistry to my parents, and I was plenty scared. When I did, they listened patiently to me and just said that Mr. Bridgeman had called them several weeks ago and explained the situation. They had been wondering when I was going to tell them! They figured that I had suffered enough already in silence and gave me no further consequence.

So my friends and I were out one night, looking for something fun to do, and we decided to "pay back" old (he must have at least been in his 40s!) Mr. Jenkins! I honestly do not remember who was in on the prank or whose brilliant idea it was, but we decided to do more than just roll his yard, we also "found" a dozen or so "for sale" signs to put in his yard. The next week at school was a nightmare of Mr. Bridgeman quizzing me and my friends about the deed. Knowing that I would get in even bigger trouble, all of my friends, some of who even confessed, remained loyal to me and kept me out of it. No matter how many times Mr. Bridgeman brought up my name, they would not incriminate me. I loved my friends for that.

That's how I learned the extremely valuable lesson that teachers are not always fair, and later in life, as a teacher myself, I would keep this message in mind. And I want Mr. Jenkins and his daughter (to whom we meant no disrespect) to know that as a teacher, I got more than plenty of pay back from my own students!

A grandmother by any name would be as sweet

As a grandmother now for four years, I go by the name Yaya, which my first granddaughter Tessa tagged me with. I was trying to get her to say Granna. (I wonder if she knew that Yaya means grandmother in Greek.) Actually what really happened is that, unknown to me and for some unknown reason, Tessa had begun to call her pacifier, which she truly loved, by the name of Yaya, and I thought that she was talking to me! It's funny how our nicknames come about, isn't it?

Though I liked "Yaya" immediately, I've discovered that the name that we call a grandparent doesn't really matter. What matters is the relationship between a grandparent and a grandchild. And of course, these relationships vary as much as there are stars in the sky. And we probably won't know what the relationship means to us until possibly long after it's over.

My own relationship with my three sets of grandparents I have mentioned in another blog post. Even though I only got to see my grandparents once a year, they were important in my life, and one set--one grandfather, in particular--made a world of difference in my life. Why? Because I knew that my Granddaddy Clark loved me. If I didn't feel important to anyone else at that time in my life, I knew that I was important to him.

My daughter Ellen basically did not know her grandparents. John's father died of cancer when I was pregnant with her, and his mother was not well and died soon after Ellen was born. My own parents lived in far-away South Carolina and were not well either. Both of them had died by the time Ellen was six. So inactive in her life were they that she does not remember them. I find that sad for her, for me, and for them. Having active grandparents, whom I could trust with her, would have been a blessing.

Here is Livvy Lara at my house back during the winter. In contrast to her sister's green or hazel eyes and her mother's grey blue eyes, hers turned a dark, dark chocolate brown like her father's. Also in contrast to Tessa's, her hair has been really slow to grow in, but we have noticed that it is really beginning to sprout now that spring has at last arrived! 

There are some definite things in my life that I believe to be God's plan, and one of these is my experience of being a grandmother. I never really gave being a grandmother much thought. Grandmother, like the word retirement, was just not a part of my vocabulary! But my daughter Ellen and my son-in-law Nekos up and decided to move to Nashville just a couple years after college and right after Ellen lost her newspaper job in Knoxville. I never expected their moving here, but of course, I was delighted since Ellen is my only child, and yes, she has been one of the orbits in my life.

This is Tessa last week, dyeing her first Easter eggs. 

So once Nekos and Ellen started their family, I got to be there. I mean really be there from the beginning. When Tessa was about three weeks old and I could hear extreme fatigue in Ellen's voice on the telephone, I said, "Do you need me to come and take her for the night?" To which she replied, "Oh, would you, Mama?" And thus began a weekly overnight visit from Tessa. Sometimes in those first two years, I even got to keep her for several days while Ellen and Nekos went on trips/vacations.

Being the artist that she is, she loved dying the eggs and putting stickers on them! With each visit, art is almost always something that Tessa and I do together.

Then less than three years later, along came Livvy Lara. I said that I would not keep them together! I wanted to appreciate each granddaughter of her own. But now almost 18 months later, what I've been working out is keeping Tessa and Livvy together about every other week and keeping them separately on the other week. That works out well for all of us. I like to see the two sisters interact/play together, but I still get to cherish them one at a time! Ellen and Nekos get a date night every other week, and they get to have one-on-one time with one daughter on the other week. So this arrangement of having one grandchild visit, then two grandchildren together visit, every other week, has been a God-sent for all of us.

Here the girls are at my house this past week.

Tessa is so loving and protective of Livvy.  And Livvy so loves her big sister, following her around and emulating her. (It looks as if my camera focused on big Bisquet in this second picture or else the girls are just really riding that horse!

All of this is not to say that the visiting with me is perfect. I mean it's real. There have been a couple of rough times indeed when I have called and asked Ellen and Nekos to come pick Tessa up (but that's out of over 200 visits!), and there were times when I didn't call them and just endured. (Tessa can be as stubborn as her grandmother when it comes to getting her own way!) And always there is my house getting pretty much wrecked, those stinky diapers to change, loud screams of pleasure and of pain (Tessa is very sensitive to any real or perceived hurts.), and my confusion about how to discipline granddaughters (Most times, I just don't have the energy to discipline anymore. Discipline takes energy--it did as a parent and it did as a teacher!) Then there is my fatigue level.

A sweet though blurry moment, Tessa reading to Livvy.

There that's a better picture.


Of course, I talk more about Tessa because she is four and has been in our lives longer, and I think that I know her better, whereas Livvy is only almost 18 months old. She's just beginning to really talk, instead of grunt. The second child doesn't feel the need to speak words as much as the first because her needs are even more promptly met by her parents and her sister, who tries to speak for her. Having had only one child, it's been interesting for me to note the differences between the first and second child. For one thing, their personalities and temperaments have been quite different.  

This is my baby Ellen with her baby Livvy!

Next month, I look forward to keeping Livvy all by herself for four nights while Ellen, Nekos, and Tessa take a trip to the Outerbanks, North Carolina, with friends. I can already see Ellen running up my walk with happy tears in her eyes when she returns to get Livvy because that's what she used to do with Tessa after being away from her on a trip for several days. Being the mother that she is, Ellen loves her breaks away from her children, but her heart aches for Tessa and Livvy when they are not with her, just as mine does after about a week's absence from them. Who knew?

I know that there too soon will come a time when the girls are in school and busy with their own activities, and they won't have time to come visit me for a full day and night. Then my house will stay in perfect order and the quietude will be a constant, and then I will really miss them. 

A memoir--my mother, myself

In the drama I Never Sang for My Father, Robert Anderson tells us that “Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind toward some resolution which it may never find.”

I am just beginning to work on excavating my rather complicated relationship with my mother. Actually, some of my last memories of her are so harsh that I have not allowed myself to think much about her since she died 25 years ago this May. But she is my mother, and whether I want to admit it or not, she is still majorly affecting me--or so a soul reader told me many years ago.

This is my mother and father in the late 1970s in Camden, South Carolina, after my dad retired from DuPont.

What is that statement/belief about how we become more like our mothers all of the time. Some of us are even afraid of turning into our mothers. There's an old book entitled My Mother, Myself on my bookshelf, but I have yet to read it.

Once I have completely "figured out" a relationship to the best of my knowledge, then I do breathe easier and feel lighter and am happier. So here goes it with my mother.

Here is my mother Mary Laura Marguerite Clark Drawdy in her early 20s.

My mother was known for her beauty, but the first twelve or so years of my life, I only knew her as my mother, and I adored her. I trusted her and what she did and said. When I was young, she would play a lot with me--she would draw paper dolls and their clothes--and I would color and cut them out. I loved that about her. Later, I would always take her side when she and my father fought with each other. I have already begun to piece her story together as best I can in another blog. When I turned 16, some things happened that made me feel as if my mother had abandoned me; I blogged about the most significant of these events in an earlier entry. Still though, I sometimes hear my mother's voice in my head.

She was indeed a beautiful young woman! Always a fairly petite woman at 5'5", she was not much interested in cooking nor eating and was forever thin.

Generally, once I was on my own here in Tennessee, my parents always lived away from me. So through my 20s and 30s, I visited them at least twice a year--for several days at Christmas and again in the summer. I would always drive far distances to Kansas or Illinois or South Carolina to see them. Though the visits were not always pleasant and sometimes downright disturbing for me, I had thought that they were the norm and that they were expected of me. One of the last times that I visited while my mother was still fairly healthy, she said to me, "I asked your dad, what do you want when you visit?" When such remarks were made, I didn't know how to answer her. Now I believe that I was still desperately searching for some signs of her love for and acceptance of me.

Granted the last 5-10 years of her life, my mother was quite sick with what is now called COPD, and there were no medicines, like today, to give her much help. She was on oxygen the last few years. All of her life until she developed this terrible disease, my mother had smoked--like many people of her generation. When I was a child and got separated from her in a store, I would just wait for her familiar cough and then know where to find her.

Here is my mother in the early 1980s when she had quit coloring her hair in her late 50s. She and my father had retired in SC.  Still a beautiful woman, this was a favorite photo of hers, and she had several copies made.

One of those harsh memories that I have of my mother was after Christmas in 1987. In my late 30s, I had told my parents that I wanted to start making my own Christmases at home with my young family, but my father had coaxed me into visiting my mother in South Carolina once again. Although things were certainly tense and not going well at my home, I left my wayward husband and young child behind and flew to be with my parents.

Again, my mother was in the small town hospital, where she would recover enough to go back home and to be miserable. Pretty much my mother was miserable the last years of her life and not at all pleasant to be around. My father had even made a recording of her in one of her "fits"--bitching him out for his behavior or lacks thereof. He had played the tape for me until I begged him to turn it off. I did not want to hear my mother like that, but I understand why my father needed to share with someone. Dad said that he thought that the reason my mother acted so mean sometimes was because with her COPD, oxygen was not getting to her brain. Still protecting my mother, I tore up that tape after my father died as soon as I got the chance.   

Anyway, back to this particular visit in December 1987: After my rather long trip, my dad picked me up at the nearest airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, and drove me to the hospital in Camden, South Carolina. Because the small hospital was out of space, my mother had been put in a private room in the maternity ward. As I waited outside her room, I heard one of her oldest friends in there with her. My father walked in and proudly announced that he had a surprise for her. When I entered the room with a big smile and went over to give her a hug, she said in the nastiest voice, "Oh, it's you." I was embarrassed and mortified that she would speak to me in that way and in front of her friend Ginny, who was such a loving mother to her own daughter.

After the visit, I allowed a few tears to fall as I waited for my father beside the window that looked in on all of the newborn babies. I felt then such a strong desire to have another baby--to become a mother again. Little did I know, not until a few weeks later, that I was already pregnant with a baby whom I would lose about six weeks later on Valentine's Day.

A few days and a few hospital visits later, my father took me back to the airport in Charlotte. Despite my mother's mood, he and I had had a fairly amiable visit, and as we talked there in the airport, for the first time I felt a real connection to and compassion for my father. Unfortunately, that was the last time that I saw him. He died suddenly and unexpectedly that next summer of a massive heart attack at the age of 64. I was 39 years old.

Some other rather harse memories of my mother have to do with my buying a house and my having a baby. Late in life (at 35), I had finally gotten a home of my own. Before purchasing that house, I had lived in various apartments and in a glorified apartments called  condominiums. I had dreamed of a house of my own for years, and one of my favorite pastimes on a Sunday was to drive around and look at houses. Actually, that's how my then husband John and I found our home here in Kingston Springs. By the time we moved into our house, I was nearly 35, and I was so proud of our new home. Back then, I was a crazy perfectionist and kept things spotless. Of course, I just couldn't wait for my parents to visit us and see our new home. When my mother finally came to visit, she sat on the couch in my living room, looked up, and remarked that she had never liked cathedral ceilings. Later she informed me that there was soap scum under the soap dish in the bathtub (The “soap scum” was actually cement!)  and dust on top of my refrigerator (which I was sure that my tall dad had told her).

Also late in life at age 33, I had had my one and only child--a daughter that I named Ellen Clark (after my Granddaddy Clark). Like most parents, John and I loved that little baby s-o-o much. She was definitely the light in our eyes, and of course, we delighted in taking her to visit my parents. My mother had already been a grandmother for 16 years by then. Their only other grandchild, a granddaughter named Shelley and her mother had lived with my parents for several years when she was a toddler. I really didn't think that my mother gave much attention to my daughter Ellen, but I rationalized that she was older and didn't feel well. On one of our visits to SC, my mother declared, "You and John just love Ellen too much." Again I didn't know how to reply to such a remark.

This is my first visit to my parents after Ellen was born. Ellen is about six months old here, and I am 33.  My mother was 59. She died just 6 years later in her mid 60s.

  
After thinking and thinking about my mother and me this morning as I wrote this blog post and in comparing this last picture of her with the first one in the late 1970s, I notice that my mom really doesn't look well as early as 1983. That COPD must have been brewing several years before it got a complete hold of her in the mid 1980s. She may have even felt sicker than she let on. By then I was certainly too enmeshed in my own personal drama, too busy with being a new mother, and teaching in a new school to have much time and energy for her.

Though she never talked about it, I think of her dark-hued childhood, of the hurt and shame she must have felt when her parents divorced in the late 1930s. Though she never mentioned it, her father was an alcoholic, who died when she was 35, and her own mother was geographically and emotionally distant and solemn. Again how sad and shameful when her only sibling and teenaged brother Joe went to jail for robbing a gas station in the early 1940s. Later in her early 30s, how incredibly tragic that she became completely estranged from him for the rest of their lives. How melancholy that my mother never did find the love and acceptance that she was looking for in my father's large family. No wonder my mother depended on her good looks and on my father to make her happy. And of course, both of them eventually failed her.

My mother never worked outside the house once she married my father in her early 20s. For nearly five decades through her 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and into her 60s, she was a wife, a mother, and a housewife (married to her house?) Like many in her generation, she was a stay-at-home mother; she was an active mother through her 20s, 30s and mid 40s, while my sister and I were still at home.

Because my father's career moved us around, she could not have held onto a job outside the home for very long anyway. She kept a really clean, uncluttered house, but I do not recall her having a passion for any hobbies or outside interests. Though she put good dinners on the table for us, she eventually became a disinterested cook.

After I left home, at times she turned to drinking, and at times she was severely depressed. Being a life-long housewife had not fulfilled her. When her marriage became unbearably unhappy in her late 40s and she would call me to complain about my father, I encouraged her to leave him, but she did not have the confidence to do so. A few months after he died, she was happy for the first time in a long time, enjoying the birds singing in the mornings and the taste of a Reese's cup. She must have felt free of him and his bi-polar disorder at long last. Unfortunately, my mother died of the COPD in the spring of 1989, a short 10 months after my father’s death. In contrast to what some may think, it was definitely not her grieving for him that took her life. It was her weakend heart from her disease and from her anger at what life dealt her.

I weep now cooling tears of understanding and forgiveness. Mom, I am sorry that I have neglected you for these last 25 years, since your death. I have come to believe that your seeming not to love me was all about you. It was never about me. It's too damn bad that we children take on our parents' shit so much. We always blame ourselves for our parents lack of attention and affection; we think that we have done something to cause our parents not to love us, to deserve their neglect. We project their stuff onto ourselves. But the fact is that my poor mother did not love herself, so how in hell could she love me?

British poet Philip Larkin expresses it so well in his short poem called "This Be The Verse."

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

"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