To JDS, In Memoriam

I drove my son to school today.

I worked with students. 

It snowed most of the morning.

I read the last text I sent you yesterday, asking if the doctor had a plan. 

I read your answer: yes. He was a nice doctor. He sat with you for an hour.

Great, I said. What’s the plan?

I thought maybe you’d tell me today.

All day I thought of Roethke’s letter to his student who died. “If only I could nudge you from this sleep.” I read some Yeats. “...a crowd of stars.”

They didn’t help. We want to believe that writing helps. We talk about it in the hall before class. Writing is something, at least. Isn’t it? 

It’s Friday. It is an ordinary Friday.

On my way home, I see a car accident. I have to make sure. I slow down. Everyone’s ok.

Everyone is ok. 

No one is ok.

I don’t want to stop writing this letter. It’s all I have.

It’s all we’ve ever had. 

So, just me to you, just this, let me write you an exit. I’m going to pretend for a good long while that you are in the cabin in western Pennsylvania. You have gone “hunting," but everyone knows you are just reading. It’s a crappy novel, but you don’t care. The air is clean, isn’t it? The sun sets just a little slower here. The quiet. The peace.

The peace.

The peace.

I will try to remember how much you loved that peace.

To Commitment

[I wrote this one about/for a good friend who passed away today. So I'm reposting it for tomorrow's post. He was one of the few people who knew about this blog before I started it, and he was always very encouraging about my writing. I remain committed. More than ever. Because, really, that is all we have.]

My friend writes me, “Every morning I see my 60-yr-old neighbor head out for her walk. Today she was trudging along, umbrella open, head down against the driving rain. You should write a letter to commitment.”  Only, I think he doesn’t want me to write about commitment, really, but about her commitment: her umbrella angled against the rain, the implication that now that’s she’s 60, she could take a day off, the morning routine that could be so easily broken. One day you just don’t go.

He wants me to write about that, but of course, I want to write about his commitment. He drives 47 minutes to work, all through winter. No matter what time I get to the office--7:45, 7:15, 7:03--he is there before me, lights on, jacket off, grading or writing class notes. When his students come for help, he greets them with, “Hey! What’s up?” as if he has been doing nothing but waiting for that person to walk in.

He would say that’s not commitment, that’s just a day. We talk about the upsides of teaching and realize, in many ways, how lucky we are. How hard is it to commit to a life like this?

He married his high school sweetheart. When he talks about his 13-year old son, he says, “My little boy…” They live in the same area he grew up in. He has a PhD in literature. When his son’s baseball team traveled all over the Midwest last summer in an unpredictable playoff season, he went with them, staying in hotels and eating crappy road food.

Commitment is easy to see when it’s someone else’s. That’s you, we think, doing that again. We look and see all the other choices you could be making: staying in bed, getting to work at a normal hour, letting someone else drive the kids. When it is ours, though, the choice is often so obvious as to not even seem a question.

Commitment isn’t choosing every morning, even in the rain, to go for a walk. Commitment is defining yourself once as a person who walks every day, rain or snow, and then believing it, all the other options gone. It’s just me, you think, this is just who I am.

To The Indecisive Squirrel

Today is your lucky day because it’s morning, I’ve had my coffee, I’m not in a rush and the traffic is quiet.

So go ahead and take your time right in the middle of the lane. Please, do not rush. Shatter the stereotype we all have of squirrels as being frenetic little animals who can escape quickly at the very last second.

Not you. At least not today. Trees everywhere. It’s warm for a winter morning and the road holds the heat well. Something, a burn of sunlight through the clouds in just this spot or a memory suddenly appearing before you, has stopped you and and so, it has stopped me.

I have all the time in the world right now. The well of my patience is deep. This day will last forever. Nothing is more important than you.