In the Eye of the Storm: Reading Lauren Groff

So already, sometimes people have no idea they're in trouble, even in actual danger. Other times, they do know, but they fear there is no way out of or through it. In this latter instance, it can be hard to tell whether there's no one who can or will help them--or whether, for whatever reason, they either fail to convey their need for help--or actively conceal it.

Saturday, I picked up the most recent New Yorker and read two pieces about people in dangerous trouble of different sorts.

One piece was  John Mathias' "Living With a Visionary," a personal history that reveals the severe toll that unceasing worry, caring, and grief can take. In this piece, the victim is the dedicated spouse-caretaker of a person with Parkinson's accompanied by hallucinations in the era of COVID-19. Reading this piece made me even more grateful for the cheerful window visit* my sister, cousins, and I had had with my mother earlier in day, courtesy of her dedicated care-givers: my mother had stood tall, recognized us all even though we'd been wearing masks, blown kisses to us, and told us, courtesy of speaker-phone, to be careful in the snow.

The other piece was Lauren Groff's very intense short story, "The Wind," which compelled me to keep reading, despite the sinking feeling I had after reading its first two columns in the print version. I have this same sinking feeling whenever I'm confronted with a tale of what I sense are diminishing odds, especially if they are at all connected to the  simultaneous terror and calm of children who are literally and figuratively along for the dangerous ride.

The short story presents, among others, three women in the same family, each of a different generation: the female narrator of the short story; her grandmother, who was the driver of the car in the story; and her mother, who was a passenger in that car, and who has shared the story of the car ride with the short story narrator and her other children.

After I finished the story, I kept rereading its last two columns on p. 54 of the print version. They do the following in this order: 

• describe the moment when the mother of the children in the car**--the short story narrator's grandmother--can't make her own body move--and the narrator's mother, the oldest child in the car, realizes "that everything depended on her"; 

• assert the existence of two stories of what happened next, the version the narrator's mother is known to tell in minute detail, and the "true story" the short story's narrator perceives beneath her mother's version; and 

• express metaphorically the legacy of such events, regardless of how accurately they're recounted.

I've watched enough Law and Order: Special Victims Unit to know all about escalation in domestic violence situations and to understand the particular plight of victims whose abusers are members of the police department. So on that score, this story does not surprise.

But "The Wind" is the story told by the child of the child who was an eyewitness to the events that I didn't want to watch unfold as I kept reading. It's not so much about the danger of rewriting the story, as the eyewitness does, according to the short story's narrator. It's about the impossibility of erasing the story's emotional legacy regardless of how it's told.

The final sentences of the story provide a metaphor for this pervasive legacy--I believe you can read them without damaging your experience of reading the story.

But always inside my mother there would blow a silent wind, a wind that died and gusted again, raging throughout her life, touching every moment she lived after this one. She tried her best, but she couldn’t help filling me with this same wind. It seeped into me through her blood, through every bite of food she made for me, through every night she waited, shaking with fear, for me to come home by curfew, through every scolding, everything she forbade me to say or think or do or be, through all the ways she taught me how to move as a woman in the world. She was far from being the first to find it blowing through her, and of course I will not be the last. I look around and can see it in so many other women, passed down from a time beyond history, this wind that is dark and ceaseless and raging within.***

I have to admit I was surprised when the experience of the wind went from being particular to the narrator and other members of her family and became something shared by people more generally, especially women--a kind of primordial legacy borne uncomfortably by one gender.**** 

The truth is that for me personally, even more memorable than the story's metaphor of the wind was the harrowing image created by the last sentence in the paragraph before the one from which I quoted above. It was so harrowing, so paralyzing, that my mind could not move beyond this particular story quickly enough for Groff's final general statements to resonate with their desired social significance. To experience that harrowing image yourself, however, you'll have to read the story.

That wind and that image stayed so much with me that I woke up on Sunday morning recalling another Groff short story that relates wind and memory. In "Eyewall," found in Groff's collection called Florida, a woman decides to ride out a major hurricane in her house despite being urged to evacuate: a neighbor even comes by to offer her ride. But we soon learn, due to the story's blending of knowledge of events past, present, and future, that that the neighbor who tried to be helpful does not survive.

The woman, however, does--not exactly with the help of red wine and visitors from her past, but certainly in their company. "Houses contain us; who can say what we contain?" she says at one point. Which winds are within, and which without? The storyteller survives them, but that's about all I can tell you. 

What I really want to know--and don't--is why she decided to stay in the house in the first place: throughout the story, she often seems more like a dazed, somewhat detached Dorothy watching the people and things of her Kansas life superimposed on the swirling tornado than like an Ebenezer Scrooge about to be transformed by the visits of the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. I can't say how, or even if,  Groff's narrator's hurricane experiences will affect her. And that bothers me.

In "The Wind," Groff provides us with two perspectives, and ultimately with two stories that together explain the presence and persistence of the wind. "Eyewall," in contrast, provides only one perspective--and frankly, leaves me hungering for a second perspective--like the one that might be offered by the eye in the top half of the illustration accompanying "The Wind" in The New Yorker (see above). I really need and want to know more. There may be some hope, or at least some wonder, at the end of the story. Pay attention to the chickens and the eggs if you read it, and please let me know what you think.

Winslow Homer's "Hurricane, Bahamas"--Not Wild Enough!

There's a difference between trouble and danger . . . sometimes . . . I think. The narrators of both  Groff stories are out of danger at the end of their respective adventures. But I'm not sure they're out of trouble. Maybe the truth is that in each of us--or at least most of us--lives some trouble that, like the ache in a joint that acts up in certain kinds of weather, can be counted on to rear its head with sufficient regularity, especially in predictable circumstances, making it impossible for us to forget that it's very much a part of us. It's like the last line of The Great Gatsby says: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." But maybe we learn, too, sometimes. Well, maybe some of us do.

* My mother's senior living facility discourages face-to--face visits during the pandemic except in cases of emergency. 

** Screenshot image of Illustration by Ping Zhu on linked story page: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/the-wind .  

*** Groff, L. (2021, January 25). "The Wind". The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/the-wind.  

**** Similarly, I felt parts of the interview with Lauren Groff on The New Yorker web site veered off in a direction of a topic I hadn't even been thinking about when I finished reading the story, namely who was to blame for the "evil" that happened to the narrator's grandmother: 

"I think that much of the evil of this world comes from people who consider themselves good people, who genuinely love their families and friends and communities, but who act just a little bit too slowly to be of much help, who give just a little less than they should, who don’t want to get involved in other people’s messes, who value their own comfort a little more than the thought of extending themselves as far as they can to insure the security and happiness of others.  . .  . we’ve made it normal to extend our collective acts of caring only far enough to protect our immediate families and friends. "***** 

I have to say I was so busy imagining the children in the car with their mother who suddenly was unable to move her body that I hadn't been wondering at all about whether the mother's friends and co-workers had done enough for her. If anything, Groff's words made me think about John Mathias's friends and family: what had and hadn't they done for him when they understood that he was in such distress? (Always, those troubling questions arise: did he hide his distress, and/or how much did they really want to know that he was in distress?) 

***** Leyshon, C. (2021, January 24). Lauren Groff on the Aftershocks of Violence. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/lauren-groff-02-01-21.   

*(6) Screen shot of the first frame of the video "The wind is blowing through my hair": https://8tracks.com/muffliato/the-wind-is-blowing-through-my-hair

A Different Mild January

So already, it's yet another mild January day in the Boston area, and it's just beyond a month since my father died. As everyone tells me, there's no way to prepare for the death of a loved one. I also hear that mourning is highly individual. 

 

I've been sad, functional, and incredulous over these last weeks. And while I believe I generally express myself better in prose than in poetry, my feelings recently have been expressing themselves to me in poem form. So I share here the poem that's been taking shape, not because it's a "good poem," but because it's an honest one. It's called "January 10." 

 

A year ago

On such a faux spring day,

I would have phoned my father,

Who would have been weighing

A winter walk,

Having already noted 

The fine blue sky and mild air 

Beyond his bedroom window.

We’d have discussed

What jacket he might wear

To seize the unseasonable day.

 

I would have told him

What I’d seen on my walk--

Some foursomes teeing off

Beside the hilltop clubhouse

Unshaded by the leafless trees,

Others putting on greens too green

For days when darkness falls by five.

 

But not this year.

While winter’s mildness

Means my mind and feet 

Can wander the usual routes 

With their own blank knowing,

I crave a snowfall

That stills and silences the world,

Covers me in dreamless sleep

Until I wake ready for Earth 

To resume her rush to rebirth.

 

Cambridge Memories of My Dad

So already, my very sweet, very kind 94-year-old dad, Ben Soble, passed away peacefully on Saturday, December 12, one more of COVID-19's many victims. That's him to right, smiling proudly right before a holiday concert performance by his senior living community's choral group, which he joined as a 90-year-old. In my whole life, I'd never known my dad to be, or even to aspire to be, a choral singer. But at Orchard Cove in Canton, MA, music and companionship beckoned, and my dad heeded the call, with enthusiasm.

Needless to say, as the word spread that my dad had passed, many reached out to my sisters and me to share stories and memories. That's when it struck me that I had a very particular set of memories that members of my extended family might never know unless I wrote about them--though I suspect that what they reveal about my dad's nature and values will not surprise anybody. Hence this blog.

Geographically speaking, the memories I'm going to share are Cambridge-based, generated just north and northeast of Harvard Square. 

They are much related to my many years as a choral singer and public high school teacher. That's why on the adjacent satellite view, you see labeled Sanders Theater and the Swedenborg Chapel, where my various singing groups performed during my student- and post-student days, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where I taught for twenty-six of my thirty-five years in public education.

It makes sense to begin with my student days: my parents were Sanders Theater regulars because they attended all of my Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum and Radcliffe Pitches concerts. 

My Parents, Two Years Ago--Not at Sanders Theater

When the Pitches sang our first-ever Sanders concert, my parents were warmly welcomed in the group's onstage introduction because  they'd provided so much support during the group's first year--among other things, my dad was always willing to lend his station wagon when we needed it.

Forty years later, when the original Pitches performed again at Sanders Theater, my parents were in the audience again--in roughly the same seats they'd sat in forty years earlier--and were again specially welcome by the group's emcee. You can imagine how thrilled they were! As one of "the girls," as my parents called them, wrote to me in a note last week, "Joan, your dad was such a wonderful 'Father' to all of the Pitches. We loved having your mom and dad in the audience, cheering us on, at all the really big Pitch concerts at Sanders."

After I graduated from college, I still sometimes sang in Sanders Theater as a member of Back Bay Chorale. Soon, though, my parents had to acclimate to crossing Quincy Street and heading to the Swedenborg Chapel in order to hear me sing. It was one of the places the Oriana Consort regularly performed. My husband Scott had already been a longtime member of the Oriana when I joined the group and first met him. 

As he had in the past, my dad quickly made a positive impression on my fellow singers in the Oriana Consort. One former member of the Oriana, someone I've come to know well during the last few years since I began singing in several Hingham-based groups,* put it this way: "I'm thinking of your father's bright smile, and of all the times I saw him, beaming, beside your pretty mother after a concert. His was one of my favorite faces to see in an audience, as he was so obviously delighted to be present."

Recently, the Oriana recently recorded a virtual choir performance of Stephen Paulus' "The Road Home"; if you watch all the way to the end, you'll see that my dad is one of the COVID-19 victims to whom the group dedicated their performance.  Sadly, several current members of the group have also lost parents.

My fellow former Oriana singer was right about my dad's general delight in being present: frequently when I asked him what he really liked in a concert, he'd tell me, "I liked it all." 

"Delighted to Be Present" at Marina Bay With My Cousins and Mom

He had that same embracing enthusiasm about family occasions, especially if they happened in restaurants where there was something new and different to eat: "I liked it all" was something my dad often said about lunches and dinners, too.  

CRLS Seen From Broadway

But back to Cambridge--and to Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS), where I taught for most of my public education career. For my first thirteen years at CRLS, I taught in  CRLS's democratic alternative school. 

Annually, the Pilot School produced a variety show in which the students sang, danced, rapped, and performed scenes and skits, many of which they wrote collaboratively.** The play was always too long, the school's theater was always too hot, but my parents came every year. They enjoyed watching the students relish being in a play that they had helped to conceptualize and write--and watching the students grow up. "The boy who had the lead in the ____ scene--I think he's eight inches taller than he was last year," my dad once remarked; "The girl who sang ___ --she lost a little weight since last year; and luckily, she didn't sing as flat as she did last year," my mother shared one year.

But it was the annual Pilot School Academic Festival, which featured students' best and most interesting academic work, that really spoke to my dad. CRLS was (and still is) a large urban high school necessarily charged with educating all kinds of students; and as a proud public school product himself whose immigrant parents had arrived in the USA speaking no English, my dad was perpetually interested in how--and how well--CRLS managed to meet the individual learning needs of its diverse student body.

Part of the CRLS Student Ceramic Mural Depicting the Students' Homes***

At every Academic Festival, there was always a table covered with student essays that attracted far less attention than the more visually appealing posters and projects displayed on the nearby walls and easels. But it was at that table that my dad always positioned himself and spent the evening reading students' papers. 

In the days following the Festival, my dad always had comments to make about what he'd read--and learned about the students. "One student had some very interesting ideas about The Scarlet Letter,"  he once remarked. "I was really surprised that a teenager would write with such excitement about the New Deal--but he needs to keep working on his writing skills," he said on another occasion. "I think your students have been learning some things about American history that I was never taught in school," he noted one year. That last remark led us into a whole discussion of dominant narratives and missing perspectives and voices.

That discussion mattered years later when the removal of Confederate monuments became a major issue across America--and in my parents' den at Orchard Cove. When my mother made a nostalgic "Gone with the Wind"-influenced argument for keeping the monuments in place, my dad persuaded her to change her mind with one really good question: "Thelma, would you have wanted to attend the Adolf Hitler Middle School?"

In addition to the topic of how the teaching of American history was changing, my dad was also interested in the pros and cons of standardized testing programs and the factors that made it easy and hard for non-English-speaking students to become proficient English speakers. A couple of years back, when there was a ballot question about charter schools, he asked me to provide him with readings so he could educate himself about the arguments for and against them. 

But as much as educational issues and debates interested him, ultimately it always came back to the students for my dad. He understood that events and experiences played important roles in the way the students saw themselves and their futures. I recall his concern in the early 1990s about how the kids were feeling, and what the school was doing, in response to the police beating of Rodney King; similarly, in 2013, he had questions about how the students were making sense of the Boston Marathon bombings, especially since the Tsarnaev brothers were CRLS graduates whom some of the kids knew personally.

Actually, the second cohort of Kimbrough Scholars

My dad was also attuned to the positive events and experiences that affected students' lives. When the first cohort of CRLS Kimbrough Scholars traveled to Mississippi to further civil and restorative justice efforts related to a Jim Crow-era cold case, he remarked, "These children will never forget that they got to work on something so important."

Whatever education-related topic we were discussing, the background question was always the same: what would give every public school student the best possible chance to succeed, to have a good present and future life? It definitely reflected the values of somebody who liked people, who believed all people deserved to have a comparable chance to embrace opportunity, who believed all people should get to feel good, at least some of the time.****

With the Arizona Sobles at The Townshend in Quincy in Fall 2019

He was also interested in what had become of the kids, something he knew I sometimes knew from Facebook. A few years back, when I told him a former student had opened a new restaurant in Central Square, his immediate response was "When are we going?" We never got to go to La Fábrica Central together, but we did have a great steak dinner at Davio's last winter right before the pandemic changed everything.

I'm starting to ramble, I know; so let me conclude by saying that I'm glad that I got to go to several of my dad's choral concerts over the last few years. It was least I could do, considering that he and my mother had attended 150 of my performances--I think this is a conservative estimate--over the years.

And so in honor my musical indebtedness to my dad--actually, I'm indebted to both of my parents for so many musical and nonmusical reasons--I end with some choral music. It's the second section of Tarik O'Regan's "Triptych,"  which begins at minute 4:29 of this YouTube link. The first part of the section sets an adaptation of a text--Roland Gittelsohn's meditation in The Gates of Repentance (1978)--that will be very familiar to many Jewish readers of this blog post; in fact, my nephew, who's a rabbi, included it in the materials he provided when he officiated at my dad's graveside funeral on December 15:

In the rising of the sun and its going down,

      we 

      remember 

      them.

In the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter,

      we 

      remember 

      them.

In the opening buds and in the rebirth of spring,

      we remember them.

In the blueness of the sky and in the warmth of summer,  

      we remember them.  

In the rustling of leaves and in the beauty of autumn, 

      we remember them. . . .   

When [we're] weary and in need of strength,

      we remember them. 

When [we're] lost and are sick of heart,

      we remember them. . . .

So long as we live, they too shall live,

For they are now a part of us, 

      as we remember them. 

 

Thank you for reading all that I've shared here. It's comforted me to write this, to have shared with you some stories you may not have known, and to have listened again to the music embedded here. Happy New Year to all; and please, please stay very safe!

* Specifically, I've been singing in the Unicorn Singers and Broad Cove Chorale--the former a mixed group and the latter an all-women's group--and in the Crossroads Singers. The Crossroads Singers are a 6-person vocal ensemble that annually--at least when the world isn't in pandemic mode--offers 10 minutes of poetry-related seasonal musical entertainment at the annual Old Ship Church Winter Solstice Poetry Reading. Scott and I are two of the six.

** Note: the staff sang, too, so I count the Pilot Play among my performances that my parents attended, too.
*** Photo by Kristin Knowlton Daugherty; thanks, Kristin!

**** And definitely the question of someone who always chose to play golf at public golf courses, which often meant showing up and becoming part of a random foursome that was getting ready to tee off. Because he often did this at the Fresh Pond Golf Course on the Cambridge-Belmont line, he sometimes ended up playing with one or more of my CRLS colleagues. As a result, one of them always greeted me not with "Hello, Joan, but with "How's Ben?"

Open Hearts, Open Minds #7: Walking November

So already, during the first two weeks of November, I worried, like so many others did, about who won the presidential election, and then about whether our current president would manage to overturn democratic process and steal the election. Even when it became clear who would lead America in January, I couldn't stop my incessant news-watching.

Frustrated one day, I turned off my television, looked out my window--and just had to take myself to task: Wait! This is November! You love this month. What are you doing sitting in here when you could be out there? Yes, there's plenty of scary, ugly craziness going on in the world, but there are a few beams of hope, too. You can watch the news when it's dark outside and monitor the craziness then. It will be there.

That's when I decided to walk November. Does walking open the heart and mind? I'm not sure. What I do know is that I've come to feel in so much harmony with my walking world. Which may or may not mean that my heart and mind are open when I walk. Frankly, I don't think about my heart and mind while I'm walking: I just feel that harmony.

I share with you a poem below that can't decide whether to be about November or my walking of it. For sure, my walking became about more than just turning off the news. Your impressions and suggestions are welcome. 

Here's "Walking November, 2020."

I set out to walk November,

Always having loved the way 

Her slant-lit, muted grays and golds 

Stretched across the length of day, 

Then bowed to sunset’s unloosed fire. 

Harvesting her unclaimed moments, 

Abundant in this strangest year, 

I vowed to watch her truth unfold.

Many days of drifting mildness

Cheered me as I walked my pledge. 

Though not quite sure what was at stake, 

My legs divined that my intent 

Was more than for my body’s sake, 

So chose for me peripheral paths, 

That lengthened shortened afternoons 

And showed me places close but new--

‘Til pressing sunset, brash and bold, 

Urged me ‘round the trail’s next bend 

To watch November as she blazed, 

Late year’s seering prophetess.

Fierce with fury, ripe with 

     life,

Unperturbed by moonlit 

     winter 

Mustering in the bare-

     branched trees, 

November blared her 

     burnished truth: 

That waning light burns 

     no less bright— 

And may in fact burn 

     brightest.

 

The month’s last day was wind and rain--

A day that bade me stay at home. 

So with my legs curled up in rest, 

My heart and mind began this poem.

I set out to walk November

As if my life depended on it— 

And it did.