Simple Tests

In his poem entitled "The Testing Tree," which he penned as an octogenarian, Stanley Kunitz writes of himself as a boy carefully choosing stones of just the right weight and size and aiming them at a tree whose might and constancy defines his place in the world and challenges and informs his notion of manhood. Recounting a recurring dream, which symbolizes the relentlessness of change, he calls up his long-dead mother and images of war. Finally, he closes, summing: "In a murderous time, the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking. It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and to not turn. I am looking for the trail. Where is my testing tree? Give me back my stones!"

I think of this poem often, particularly when I realize that the child I once was still lives within me and is more accessible than I sometimes remember. I tend to over-complicate things with mental gyrations, feeling challenged by the interconnectedness of everything. Sometimes it's hard to make a move, knowing that the ripples cast will span out well beyond the bounds of my perception. Dark times come, difficult things happen, and we wish to be returned to a time when tests were simply defined: can I hit this ancient oak tree, with every throw, at fifty paces? Making bargains with the tree: If I hit this one, I'll be kinder to my mother, more helpful to my sisters. Feeling the weight of the stones in your pocket but not knowing that this is the only weight you carry. The innocence, the simplicity, the honesty of childhood becomes a beacon as the body grows burdensome and the mind softens and everything intertwines with everything else. The wide-open, unquestionable courage of childhood calls to me, like Kunitz hears the trail, that tree, those stones. I don't want to go back. I want to stand here, in this time, imbued with the courage and clarity I felt sitting on the uppermost branch of the sycamore tree at the end of my driveway, watching the world unfold below me but knowing even then that I was a part of it all.

Back To School

I tested out of high school at the end of my junior year, when I was seventeen years old. I immediately enrolled in junior college, but when classes started I looked around and found myself surrounded by the people I had just succeeded in escaping from- it was just like high school, but with a smoker's lounge. I had already been working for three years, so I quit junior college, thinking that I would go back to it later, and began to work full-time. I didn't know then that "later" would be decades.

People warned me. They told me to stick it out in school and get my education while I was young because the working world has a way of swallowing you whole and never spitting you out. I didn't listen. I sacrificed myself at the altar of manual labor and for 32 years I've been a food service professional. I'm a hard worker. I don't really know what to do with myself if I'm not working hard. And, school never really felt like particularly hard work. Restaurants? Now, that's some hard work! School? That's my playground.

When I was thirty-seven, I went back to school at a two-year college just north of my home. I entered with an interest in Early Childhood Education, but quickly switched my major to Liberal Arts English, which allowed me to exercise the full scope of my nerd-superhero skills. Yes, I'm one of those people who actually enjoys reading the classics and writing critical essays about what I've read. I know, get a life. There is really nothing more exciting to me than receiving a particularly challenging assignment; I feel a great sense of purpose fill me up. I know, really, get a freakin' life!

When I was four credits shy of completing my B.A. and transferring to a four-year college, my marriage came to an abrupt end. Needing to prioritize my use of limited resources, I deferred acceptance to school and moved west to get my head and heart together. Two years later, I returned to Western Massachusetts and went right back to work in the family business, baking and selling vegan pastries. More than three years have passed since my return and I have loved every moment I have given to the cafe- it reflects my love and care in myriad ways both great and small. I am deeply gratified by its success. And, I am ready for my second career, one that doesn't require I stand at a table for eight to ten hours a day, poking my index finger into cupcakes.

This fall, I will return to school to become a paralegal, a fancy term for a legal assistant. I'm really excited about this and so happy and proud that I had the wisdom, five months ago, to create a space for myself in such an excellent school. When I tell people that I'm going to be a paralegal, their faces go a little blank and I can tell that they are working hard with the idea. I find it curious and funny, because it seems like such a natural thing for me to do, but other people see me more as a creative, artistic, entrepreneurial person than the word paralegal conjures. What some people don't realize is that I am happiest when I am behind the scenes, attending to details, while the front man gets all the attention. Besides, I need to sit down for a while!

A Gift To My Future Self

At Fire & Water, there hung on the wall a manifesto, the final line of which read, "Art is the salvation of the soul." I have always been a creative, expressive person yet have been reluctant to call myself an artist. But, if art is "the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance," and is created by individuals of unusual sensitivity, perceptivity, and communicativeness, then I am, indeed, an artist.

Lately, I've been noticing the role of art in my life more intimately, seeing how the art that I create- the written works, the photographs, the drawings- are like missives I am sending out to the potential future me, to arm myself with the tools I will need to face the challenges life will, no doubt, offer up. I recently wrote a poem which I believed was an offering to a friend who has had a particularly tough year. The very next day, I needed those words of wisdom more than anyone else I know, for I suddenly found myself in emotional dire straights.

Not only does my own art work this way, but the art of others does as well. I remember being with Jesse at Boston Children's Hospital, feeling so weary, so shattered and disoriented, and hearing Star's songs, penned many years previous, with new ears, as though he had just written them. The words seemed to touch on every moment we were living with Jesse, as though visionary Star had sent them ahead of himself so that we would have a way of touching down in the experience and gleaning deeper meaning from it through the songs. The songs encouraged me to slow down and savor every moment with confidence, as if I was following a map that had been sent well in advance of me ever knowing I'd be taking a journey.

And, art is like this. It's the gift we send out across time, in all directions, believing that some day it will help someone, and sometimes (probably most often) that someone is the artist him- or herself. Art has delivered the immaterial part of my being from harm, from ruin, and has brought me joy, communion, and the courage to withstand, and the wisdom to celebrate, the greatest challenges of life. I find it poetic and beautiful that I pinned that manifesto to the wall, as a gift to the world, so many years ago, and it is only now that the full strength of its message has reached me- yet another gift to my future self.

To Help The Helpless

About a week ago, my friend and I were assaulted in a restaurant in Northampton, by a man neither of us knew. He saw us sitting close together, talking intimately, and sexualized our relationship, and then asserted that we had an obligation to satisfy the ideas this gave him. When we protested, he attacked us, verbally and physically. I cannot remember a more frightening encounter with a man. Though my most immediate fear (that he would beat my friend as I watched, powerless to stop him) was averted, the terror he inflicted upon us has hurt me, hurt us both, deeply. And while the overwhelming sense of crisis has quieted, the fright evoked by the experience has lodged in my body and lies so close to the surface that sudden movement, unexpected sound, a raised voice trigger in me an immediate panic response, unfamiliar and unwelcome. I am unusually vigilant in public, hyper-aware of people, quick to swerve off of the path of any man who nears me. I am poised for flight at every moment. I have not slept deeply since the night of the attack and I am tired. I lost a week of work, my body too badly bruised and misaligned to labor physically.

All of this has been terribly hard for me to believe, for me to bear, but the hardest reality of all is that no one attempted to help us. Not one person called the police when I shouted throughout the space, "Call 911! Someone call the police!!" over and over. Their eyes met mine and they walked away. Right here in our little Happy Valley, a very large, raging man attacked two women in a restaurant and no one helped.

There is something seriously wrong with that, people.

Now, I know I'm preaching to the choir here as I am amongst friends, but pass this story far and wide, please friends, to remind one and all that we are in this life together. Have we become so utterly desensitized to violence that we don't know what it means to do the right thing? I am your sister, your daughter, your girlfriend, your lover, your friend, your co-worker, your grandmother, your wife, your neighbor; I am every woman you love or ever will love, every woman you cherish, every woman with whom you have a meaningful connection. When someone hurts me, they hurt us all.

I am not suggesting that anyone ought to have put themselves in grave danger to stop this man. I am reminding that the police are a phone call away, so tell everyone you know: the next time you see two men arguing on the street, tempers rising, or a couple fighting in a car, or a parent slapping a child in the parking lot of the grocery store, make that call. Get help for the momentarily helpless. Don't avert your eyes, or walk on by thinking someone else will help, it's none of your business, not your problem.

Because, it is.