Checking in on Charlie

I lost my dog, Charlie yesterday. He was 15, arthritic, often confused, and having daily small seizures that left him panicked and panting. He cried a lot. It is always a terrible decision to make, and, while Charlie made it clear he already had his eye on the bridge, I did not want him to go. The night before, I slept on the rug alongside him, his chin on my leg. Every now and then he would open his eyes and look up, checking that I was still there. I spent the next morning and afternoon never leaving his side. He ate a whole bunch of hamburger and lapped water from a bowl I held for him. I took him outside for a while, to sit with the family of Muskovy ducks living in residence on the front lawn. At one point, three adolescent sibling ducks (I call the Three Caballeros) waddled over and sat next to Charlie, blinking their understanding and support. I held his head and talked to him as he passed. "Go ahead, my boy. Go run. There's the creek bed trail right there. Go run, and run, and run. I will be along soon." Two of my kids visited us a couple of weeks ago, and one night we decided to go see a movie. Of course, it was "The Art of Racing in the Rain!" I had read the book and knew what I was in for, yet despite the personal emotion I knew it would draw out, the film actually helped steel me for what I knew was soon to come. Enzo (the dog) decides to return as a human boy, offering Denny (his owner)the assurance that his beloved friend is well and happy, and, while I don't subscribe to that idea, I understand the deep-seated need to know. I need to know -- without a doubt -- that Charlie is well, happy, and living his best life. I got to glimpse that life all the years

he was with me. Is it too much to ask for another peek?

The Myth of the Guru

My head is swimming. Listening to NPR on my way to work, I intentionally nod -- Yes!, railing against Trump, white supremacy, and Islamophobia. But my life experience gives me pause. A Sicilian/Irish Catholic American through and through, 12 years of Catholic school, and a more personal search for self, landed me into Christian Pentacostalism, and, more importantly, 30 years of cult beliefs, where the leader claimed messianic status, and his theology absolute. What leads humans to seek a guru? A single person upon whom to pin hopes, beliefs, and loyalty? Historically, this has, of course, gone beyond religion. Adolf Hitler, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Gautama Buddha, Jim Jones, Jesus, Menachem Schneerson, Sun Myung Moon, every parish priest. And the list goes on. . .

 We do not trust ourselves. What would a modern world be like if each human individual relied solely on her or his own conscience? Would we be lost to anarchy? Or would we be challenged to locate the angels of our better nature, finding a way to live together, with wild differences, yet communally seeking co-habitation? Part of me wants to blame men for all historical problems. If women ran the world, it would be a far better place! But, as the mother of two amazing, moral men, I cannot go there. Here, I pose a most basic of challenges: How do we make our global community better? How do we appeal to each and every person's better angels? How?

Instructions for Opening the Heart

“How’s Walter?” I asked her on the phone. “He’s goooood.” She drawled out the word, indicating a more measured response. “We opened his chest today to look at his heart and lungs. It was amazing.” Cadaver lab was humming with murmured activity. Physician Assistant students began with small-opening incisions -- a forearm to look at muscles and tendons, a calf to see tibia and fibula connectors -- working their way up to more major organs. Today was Cardio-Vascular. Next week -- the brain and all its complicated grayness. Jenny had her new lab coat on. It was a Christmas gift, a cool Grey’s Anatomy brand jacket with a streamlined fit and better pockets. She was the first of Walter’s cohort to grasp her scalpel, creating a neat French-door over Walter’s sternum. There, like a muscular prize, lay his oversized heart. “Here are the aorta and the ventricles,” the professor intoned flatly. “Note the size of the organ. Its overly large circumference indicates what?” Jenny raised her latexed hand. “Considering his obesity, he most likely suffered from hypertension and hypertrophy,” she ventured, fairly sure of her diagnosis. “His heart had to accommodate his issues by growing larger.” The professor nodded. “That is most likely the case,” he agreed. “This patient may have been a good transplant candidate.” While Jenny was pleased with her correct answer, she also noted how her own heart raced during this class procedure. She, and her two lab partners set to work dissecting Walter’s various cardial chambers. Jenny could not help but look into Walter’s face, imagining him as an actual person with an actual life. Bad heart and romance jokes elicited giggles and groans around the lab. Walter’s chest was finally sutured with large novice stitches. They covered Walter and picked up their backpacks. As they filed out of the lab, Jenny took note of her own beating heart. “I will never take this for granted again,” she thought.

The Souls of Shoes

They are lined up on low Ikea shelves in the cluttered mudroom, spilling everywhere onto the floor. Every person living here kicks off their shoes upon entering. Each pair is a portrait of its owner, and it is effortless for me to identify them correctly. Outward or inward pronations are as much giveaways as is style. Only Jina walks that way, hah! Since Daniel began working as a vet tech, he opts for medical Crocs, once a nerd style he would have shunned. Kalia’s tiny size five-and-a-half thrift store finds are a given.


In elementary school, I would doodle my classmates’ shoes in the margins of my marble notebooks. Since penny loafers were the uniform shoe, there was little variety in the Bic sketches, yet still, I could later identify each classmate by their shoe drawing. I did this for a couple of years. Was I working through something, or just bored? Not part of the popular crowd, this exercise allowed me clandestine entrée into the rarified atmosphere of the truly cool. Own their shoes, own them.


There are a number of shoe sayings. “Walk a mile in my shoes.” “Put yourself in my shoes.” “If the shoe fits . . .” And Cinderella’s, “One shoe can change your life.” There are more -- albeit fairly obscure sayings. When insisting fame had not muddled her sense of self, Oprah Winfrey famously stated, “I still have my feet on the ground. I just wear better shoes.” How is it that our shoes have taken the lion’s share of apparel metaphor? Shirts and pants? Dresses? Socks? Jackets? Not by a long shot. Are our shoes really a mirror to something deeper within us?


At the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum on the western flank of Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, there is a huge and eerie pile of shoes on display, taken from the feet of Jews on their way to the extermination camps. For survivors, bare feet conjured seared memories of the Shoah.


My barefootedness is not anything like this. On the contrary, It is a declaration of freedom, and even, maybe, a form of rebellion. I walk barefoot around the house, no matter the temperature. I like the feel of wood and tile and rug. If I must wear something, I prefer sandals and flip flops. When I was a child, we called them “thongs,” a term I can no longer use because of its other connotation. I wear flip flops well into winter, along with my down coat and double-wrapped scarf. It is a call of the wild, a spit into the wind. Defiance of weather’s strictures and society’s norms.


Yes, shoes are identifiers. “Give a girl the right pair of shoes, and she can conquer the world,” Marilyn Monroe had famously said. 19th century Irish labor organizer and feminist Mary Harris Jones (we know her as “Mother Jones”) wrote, “My address is like my shoes. It travels with me.” I imagine Jones’ sturdy oxfords, soles worn to nothingness, marching, traveling, stomping her feet in frustration and determination.


Shoes take us wherever we are going. They dance with us, run with us, march with us. They skip along with our childhood games, ski and skate down mountains and across frozen lakes. They supply support as we age, and often follow us into the ground, as if we might need them as we step onto the shores of heaven.


We know, of course, that shoes have soles. Why the homonym? Are they windows allowing us to peer into our deeper selves, our proverbial souls? Monroe, Winfrey, Jones and Cinderella might think so. If I brought this idea to my children, whose jumble of shoes hold court along the mudroom floor and Ikea shelves, they would surely smirk and return to their eye-roll-default setting of “mom is hopelessly ridiculous.”


Except Daniel. He wouldn’t think that at all and, later, over an excellent coffee, he would confide that he has often thought in similar metaphoric fashion, except with hands. “ Look at people’s hands and form judgements,” he says. “Their movement, the way they hold a pen, or type, or smoke. Thumbs, knuckles, nails, and all, a person’s hands speak their own language and cannot lie.” I agree with my son. It’s odd that it is not feet that we speak about, but shoes. Shoes and hands. Palms and soles. Speaking the language of our own souls.

Herbie

His head was down when he sang, as if that were helping him reach the really low notes of his bass part. Yet despite the solemnity of most of the choral music rehearsed every Wednesday night and performed every Sunday morning, Herbie's robust renditions always carried hints of pirate drinking songs. "Yo ho, yo ho, O Holy Night for me! Herbie played piano with the same gusto, turning every hymn Joplinesque, his meaty hands bouncing off the keys like fleas in a circus.
   
His day job was equally enthusiastic. As the dean of the law school at Hofstra University, he was often tapped to deliver public addresses to faculty, potential benefactors and students alike. Humor always won out, albeit enunciated in the most academic of speech. He was loved by his students and respected by his colleagues.

I sat in front of him in choir, the only other prematurely white head of the bunch. Although his generous profile was entirely different from my slight one, we were green-robed doppelgangers, separated at birth, my alto-with-an attitude to his boom-box bass, pun masters and pet lovers.

Herbie passed away a couple of weeks ago. I miss his voice, his grin, his bearded face and hair and hands. When I reached for my green choir robe on the rack, I pushed past his, a bit more rumpled than mine. His spot in the loft was left empty, as if we all were hoping to hear that unmistakable voice ringing through the veil.

Cicadas and Stars

August nights are made of nostalgia. The crickets and cicadas sing the same songs I remember from my childhood and the lightening bugs (that's what we called them) dance and flicker to the music.
I am lying on my back in the backyard. Dusk has made way for dark and the heat of the day bows to breezes coming from the Sound, a few miles away.

The grass is wet from the sprinkler, but I don't mind. My hair is wet anyway from the shower and my pajamas will dry before bedtime. Stars are beginning to appear, and I can name a whole bunch of them. Like the cicada song, the stars have also been my companions through all my years.

Who made the summer night? Why does it seem so full of magic? I stay still while the world slowly transforms from one thing to another. Is God part of this? "There was evening and there was morning . . ." -- that's what the Bible says over and over, seven times. Did Abel and Cain play outside after dinner?

I relive in my mind those nights of stars, of the ice cream man ringing up the street, the whistle for dogs to come home and children to be in bed.

The Graduate

Most people graduate from college in their early twenties. This was my original trajectory too. But circumstances and life choices sent me in other directions, and that elusive degree faded into the background while family and children took center stage.

I had always wanted to return to school. As my kids grew, I found many practical excuses to put it off. Finally, as my marriage ended and my life took new and unexpected turns, I found the fortitude to go back.

I started my new college career at Nassau Community College (NCC) in 2012. Hurricane Sandy disrupted my first semester, and despite its ensuing turmoil, I persevered that fall semester. Since my basic required classes needed fulfilling, I found myself in two math classes and two science labs. Ugh!

As I continued, I realized English was my real love, and I took as many writing and literature classes as I could. In the spring of 2015, I graduated Summa cum Laude from NCC. My Associate’s Degree, coupled with good grades and my being awarded the State University of New York's Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence offered me several continuing ed options. I was accepted into Queens College’s prestigious Transfer Honors Program and gratefully accepted.

In the fall of 2015 I started classes at QC, working toward my English major. While I took all requisite English classes, I also found room for other forays. Painting. Drama. Anthropology. Urban Studies. Creative Writing. Spanish. This colorful array of subjects added depth and breadth to my educational experience, and while I was mainly focused on my declared major, I discovered many, many pertinent tributaries within these other classes.

I did well at QC. My lowest grade was a B+ in Spanish -- a class in which I worked hard, whose professor was a motivated young woman named Ruth Rodriguez. Profesora Rodriguez was well into her first pregnancy when she taught my class, and, understanding my aging brain’s weakness for short-term memory, offered a number of extra credit options to bring up my grade. A week and a half before our final exam, Profesora Rodriguez went into labor and gave birth to a fine baby boy named Octavio. Several days later, we were shocked and saddened to hear that Profesora Rodriguez passed away, after suffering a post-partum stroke. A number of us went to her funeral services and did our best to comfort her husband, another QC professor. Sitting for her final, reading her questions, hearing her voice over and over -- surreal and heartbreaking.

The seasons turned and the campus took on the hues of autumn, winter, spring. The campus hawks flew around the quad, perching within close proximity, reminding me that flight and freedom were within my grasp.

My final semester was stressful. I was in the second half of my Honors English seminar. Theses were due and the final exam loomed as a daunting shadow over everything. I concluded with an A+ on my thesis and High Honors on my final -- better than I had expected. Our Honors Conference was great -- each of us presented excerpts from our theses and sat in panels to answer all manner of intellectual questions. Two weeks before graduation, I was informed by the Advising Department that, because I had 56 credits at QC instead of 60, I was not eligible for any honors designations. Together with my advisors and the college’s Vice president, we fought the ruling and, on the very morning of the honors Baccalaureate ceremony, I received my formal invitation to participate. Such drama, I could do without!

So, I graduated Summa cum Laude, a designation that stands as testimony to years of hard work, and many late night papers.

In years past, whenever I would visit my kids at their respective college campuses, I always envied the atmosphere there. I longed to walk the quad, study in the library, get coffee from the dining hall Starbucks. Now I have done these things. And while that magic dust may have eluded me when papers were due and exams loomed, I must say that I loved every minute of my college career.

My white head was singular at graduation. Still, I felt an integral part of my cohort. My school friends -- brilliant all -- worked and walked with me throughout this journey, never thinking less or more of me than any other classmate. How wonderful. That black cap and gown, those honors stoles and ropes were worn with a grateful pride I had not yet felt in my lifetime. I am a college graduate. And I have to pinch myself each time I think of it.