Weekend Notes

Yesterday I spent the day mostly with my older brother, who, as I have written before, is wheelchair bound and without language after a stroke three year ago, although he does communicate fluently in other ways: gestures, facial expressions, and sounds that are not quite words. We went for a longish walk, because the weather was nice--picked up movies at the local emporium, then met my 85-year-old father at the donut place where he often spends time because it is close to where he lives and he can walk there. After a little while in the donut place my brother got restless and indicated he wanted to leave. Outside I asked him which way he wanted to go, and he pointed. We walked, me pushing the wheelchair, for another block or so, and then my brother indicated that we should stop at the corner with the big playground, and go in. I wheeled him to a spot in the shade and asked him which way he wanted to face, and he showed me.

There were some little kids on the swings in front of us, and we watched them. The swings were the soft ones, the kind you sink into. Two or three of the kids were there with their father, who pushed each of them in turn. Then another little kid at the end couldn't get going, wanted someone to push him. "Help!" he kept yelling. "Someone push me!" I kept wondering why the other kids' dad didn't go over and give him a push. It seemed mean of him not to. I almost got up but then I didn't want to leave my brother alone. And then I thought, maybe that's the playground rules now, you don't get mixed up with other people's kids. Finally the kid got his brother or a friend who was barely bigger than him to come and push him and he got going. He pumped his legs in and out to go higher and higher. I thought about how my mother had showed me how to do that when I was little.

There was lots of other activity--kids climbing up and down one of those big bright colored multi-level structures with curving slides (what we used to call, for some reason, the "sliding pond"). There was also a sprinkler going, and kids were wearing bathing suits, running in and out of the water. In what seemed an almost heartbreakingly innocent ritual of flirtation, the boys were tearing after the girls with cups of water and throwing the water on the girls' hair. A group of mothers with toddlers and babies in strollers sat along one side of the park, in the sun. It was a hot day but where we were sitting, in the shade, it was cool. The light was sparkling, reflecting off the leaves of the trees, the metal surfaces of the climbing structure and the swings, and of course the water spraying up from the sprinkler. I started to feel immensely content as I was sitting there, with my brother, amidst all the activity, and I said to him, "Well, if you can't get to the Hamptons, there's always the playground," kind of meaning the people all around us, but also us. He nodded.

After a while we left and starting going back toward the nursing home. We stopped at the drugstore and bought body lotion, shampoo, and cigarettes (for him) and contact lens solution (for me). When we got to the nursing home, the smoking hour in the front was in full swing. The rule now is that patients who want to smoke can only do it under supervision from one of the recreation directors, who sits with them at specified times (a half-hour every two hours or so), dispenses their cigarettes and makes sure they are wearing their red flameproof cloth aprons. My brother and I joined the group, and he let the recreation person put the apron on him. It was a motley group, with people of various ages and hearing, speaking, and limb capacities, but I was glad to see that my brother's buddy, a foul-mouthed, spirited old lady whom I will call Sheila was there. Sheila likes to say to my brother, "How was lunch today? Shit, right?" My brother will say a resounding, "Yeah!" which is one of his few words. Yesterday, they had an exchange of this sort and then the recreation director, Lisa, went up to Sheila (who is hard of hearing) and bellowed affectionately in her ear, "Sheila, you have the mouth of a truck driver"! Sheila responded, wickedly, and loudly, "I was a truck driver."

After some more of this banter (including a dirty joke from Sheila, which I had already heard my father's rendition of--he loves Sheila too, and has adopted her jokes as his own), I went upstairs with my brother to his room. We decided to watch one of the movies we had rented, which turned out be a kind of lame horror flick of the things-are-not-all-they-seem-in-suburbia genre. It was fun, though, watching it with him. We exchanged knowing glances at all the melodramatic turnings of the plot. At one point I had a coughing fit and said to my brother, "Could you reach me that bottle of water over there?" In order to do that, he had to actually move himself over to where the bottle was, which he can usually do pretty easily by propelling himself with his good foot. But I had forgotten that his other foot was off of its footrest, so he had to get the good foot under that foot so he could push himself over--not so easy, in fact. I realized that, for a moment, I had actually forgotten about his disability--just asked him to get me something as if it were no big deal. I said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked you to get that for me." But I think he was happy to be asked, and to do it.

That was the moment I actually wanted to write this post about, but it took a while to get to it! There's more on this--on the day, and my thoughts on it, and other things, but I think this a long enough post for right now.

More soon.

I'm Here

I have a minute or two, at last, so, yes, here I am after many weeks.

During the semester it's all madness and sleep deprivation. Now my semester is just about over, although I have to give a final and collect research papers on Monday, and I can take a breath, share a few thoughts.

Hmm, what to share?

Last night a friend of mine, an academic, dropped into the conversation a reference to writing as what "feeds her soul." (I thought of putting brackets around the "her," to show that I am quoting her indirectly, but instead I will pretend that I am Jane Austen or Maria Edgeworth and use free indirect discourse.) Anyway, my friend's comment made me think, what is it that feeds my soul (besides yoga)? I think for me also, writing falls into that category, but I haven't found a way to keep up with the scholarly writing since the dissertation, and I'm not writing in any other formal or consistent way, except, sometimes, here. Not that the blog entries are so formal, but they are more formal, more polished, than what I might jot down, for example, in a journal. More thought goes into the construction of them. And I have mostly sought to write about the things I have to celebrate in my life, not the other things, or if I write about those other things, I try to do so obliquely or briefly and not in a self-indulgent or whiny way. So, what I am trying to say is that I like keeping the blog for several reasons: it keeps me writing (sort of), it keeps me positive, and it provides a record of what has been going on that is connected to how I feel and also separate from it. And then, of course, there is the sense of being part of a community of readers and writers, however evanescent or intangible.

Here's something that crossed my mind as I was writing, above, that I like to write about things to celebrate:

Wednesday, my last night of teaching for the semester, I went out with two colleagues who had also just taught their last class. We went to a bar not far from school, a real old-time New York joint that is a restaurant too, with good hamburgers and tough-looking, no-nonsense-taking, world-weary, aging but still glamorous waitresses. We sat in a little table in the bar area, tucked into the corner near the front of the restaurant, windows on two sides of us, ordered beer and burgers, and traded war stories from the semester: our favorite students and the ones who made us uncomfortable, how we dealt with the latter, the things we discovered about our teaching selves. As we left, I had that same feeling I've described before, how wonderful it is to be out in New York in the spring, the conversations all around us as people left the restaurants and bars, the air warm and soft, it's nighttime but it feels like day, only more fun, more glamorous.

I took the subway home, latish, to Brooklyn, with my one colleague who also lives in Brooklyn. It was almost midnight but the subway was crowded, which is a good thing, a reassuring thing, when it's nighttime. As we crossed over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, my colleague handed me a xerox of Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which he had taught that night.

I read, silently,


FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face;

Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.


Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.


I looked up at my colleague after I read that last line. "It's about us!" I said. "Here we are: 'you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence.'

My colleague smiled, and I read the rest of the poem to myself as the East River sped away below us, as we approached Whitman's "proud hills of Brooklyn."

"It's so great," I said, when I was done. "It's . . . comforting."

"Yes," my colleague said. We talked a little then about how it went in class with the poem, how his students seemed moved by it, and yes, did really believe that the poet was watching them, was with them somehow ("Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?")--that, as the poem says, "It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not."

Just then, our own time and place called us back in the voice of the train announcer: the train was only going as far as stop-that-neither-of-us-lives-close-to. We could take the Q train shuttle if we wanted continuing service. "The Q train shuttle?" my friend asked. "What's that?"

"I don't know," I answered. "It's a made-up thing."

As we got ready, resignedly, to get off the train at the wrong stop, my friend said, "I think I should just leave this on the subway." He placed the xerox of the poem on the corner seat, folding it so it was propped up slightly, waiting for the next reader, the next among the multitudes that cross from shore to shore.