There Are Many Kinds of Hunger

Thanks to Amy Cornell and the lovely Tessa, I've been thinking a lot about adoption lately. This takes me back almost 38 years ago when my son came into our lives. My husband Gary and I had a rough few roller coaster years of trying to start a family. These were pre-fertility expert years, so we didn't get much support from the medical community. We decided to adopt. We went to the Children's Bureau in Indianapolis. Gary wanted a boy and we were told that could extend our waiting time. I didn't care if we had a boy or a girl; I just wanted a baby. We requested a newborn boy and began what turned out to be a two year process. We jumped through all of the hoops, had our last in home inspection and tried to distract ourselves with busyness while waiting. It's kind of like when someone tells you not to think about elephants. What else can you think about? His room was ready and we were ready. (Well, as much as any parent can be "ready" when you really have no clue what it's like to be a mom or a dad.) We had been married seven years; it was time.

He was born October 3, 1972, nine months to the day after our final home review. I got the call on Monday, October 9th from a social worker who was filling in at the Children's Bureau for our social worker who was on vacation at the time. He said we could come up and "take a look" at the baby the next day. Take a look? Was he kidding? Had other prospective adoptive parents rejected babies because their ears weren't just right or their hair was too light? Please.

So now I've received THE CALL and I'm home alone. I wanted Gary to be the first one I told; so I was in for three hours of pacing before he got home from work. When he finally came through the door, all I could do was jump up and down. I couldn't even speak. Of course, he knew what all of the jumping was about. We hugged and laughed and cried. Then we called our parents and friends. Gary was sitting with his back to me when he was on the phone with his mom. All of a sudden he just raised his hand with the phone in it and handed it back to me. He was crying and couldn't talk at the moment. So I finished the conversation with his mom, who was crying also.

After we had called everyone, we decided to go shopping and get a few last minute baby things. The discount store of choice was Ayr-Way at the time. It was where Bed, Bad & Beyond is now. So we made our purchases and decided to get a bite to eat. Arby's on Third Street was close so that's where we ended up. I think I waited in the car and Gary brought the food out. I just remember us both unwrapping the roast beef sandwiches, taking one look at them, then each other, and wrapping them back up. We only hungered to hold our son. We were too excited to eat. We were almost as excited as our dogs who benefitted from our lack of appetite.

We didn't sleep that night either. I sat in the baby's room in the old rocker I had painted a dusty blue and imagined myself rocking him the very next day. We headed for Indianapolis the next morning. Gary was so nervous he ran a red light at a major intersection on Meridian Street. When we arrived at the Children's Bureau, our substitute social worker announced that they couldn't find our baby. WHAT????

He was exactly one week old and had been placed with a foster mother and they couldn't reach her on the phone. (This was all before answering machines and cell phones were invented.) Probably out of desperation, our social worker took us to lunch. We SO didn't care about lunch. I don't even know where he took us; I just remember watching the Jell-O melt on my plate. He kept excusing himself to go use the phone. Between phone calls he tried to make small talk. I think we both wanted to tape his mouth shut. After about the third or fourth call, he returned to the table and said that by the time we got back to the Bureau our son would be there. He explained that the foster mother was at her church bazaar for the day and had left him with her mother. She had left that information with someone at the Bureau, but it hadn't been passed along. It didn't matter. We nearly had him in our grasp!

When they brought him out to us, Gary held him first. I could tell he was going to be good at this. Then he handed him over to me. And there he was. Casey. Our son. The moment I saw him everything became clear to me. Why we didn't conceive, all of the waiting, all of the tears were because this was the baby we were meant to have. Here was someone I knew. A very old soul. A kindred spirit I already had a bond with. That bond has stayed strong and deep. My life with him so far has been an amazing journey. He has such a strong inner core, he is not afraid to be himself. He is a firefighter. It is a wonderful gift to admire your child. And I have been given such a gift. This is just the beginning of my adventures with Casey. I will write more about him on future blogs. In the meantime, I have included a poem I wrote about him, many years after he came into our lives.

For Casey:

The Oldest Soul I Know

I wasn't born to be a mother.

I was meant to be your mom.

No fertile seed inside my womb.

You grew inside my heart.

They say we look alike.

An optical allusion

to the matching twinkle

in our eyes.

Some days I dream you small again,

watch you running in the yard.

See the momma bluebird

let you pet her baby's head.

At times I'm Retroactive Mom.

All mistakes erased.

Am all that you deserve.

But, no regrets for us.

Our gypsy souls

will meet again.

Maybe next time,

you can be the Mom.

Rebekah for the Polpar Grove Muse

Ahh Italia!

In anticipation of a recent trip to Italy, Family and friends loaded me up with books and sight seeing suggestions—most of which I left behind in Indiana in my disorganized rush to take off and travel light. Instead, I carried 30-year-old memories of a journey I’d taken through Italy as a 19 year old student vagabond. Those memories still vividly conjured first real-life viewings of masterworks of art, the shame-by-association with ugly Americans abroad, the cheap wine, the crusty bread and cheese eaten in San Marco Square, and all those pigeons that dawdled at our feet then flew up around us. Back then, it was train stations, hostels, lingering hours on street corners with other students, buskers, backpackers, and bad-asses with big hearts. I was open wide to everything!

This time, I went to celebrate having turned 50. I traveled solo with old friends there to meet me in Florence. I had some money in my pocket, a cool black “euro bag” that defies criminal mischief, newly-purchased, ultra-light wick-away undergarments and summer wear, an English/Italian dictionary, a journal I made by slapping a postcard of a very Italian-looking doorway on to the cover of a Mead composition book, and a sense of pure openness to where each day might take me. Most of that 19 year old me came along for the ride this time. She was happy for access to a few expendable Euros and the promise of more luxurious digs upon arrival. I was happy for her fresh eyes and open heart.

I passed through Indy, Newark, Rome, Florence, and , with my travelling companions, through the Chianti region, Siena, to an Umbrian Country House on the hill near the village of Grutti. There, we sat one night on a tiny patio outside the only cantina in town alongside 40 village men and boys who ate gelato and smoked cigarettes watching Italy play world cup soccer. In the mornings, l marveled at the quality of light that shone on ancient hill-top towns in the distance; that moved with the clouds across the rolling green, wheat, and olive-groved countryside, the enormous rabbits I mistook for small deer leaping in the meadow below the house, and at my own sense of belonging in a place so far from my home.

We spent one memorable day with Monika Iris in an 8 person passenger van, taking us to see her friends all over the Chianti region south of Florence. Eleanore’s 500 year old olive farm and family villa (Mona Lisa was a “neighbor” and guest in this house way back when!), Fernando’s small 5 acre winery in Montefiorelle. 84 year old Lena’s Bar for late afternoon coffee.
Throughout the day, Monika wove her philosophy of life through the narrative of our nine hour journey. “We go with the flow here”, she said. “Good can come from the unexpected –or, not everything bad comes to harm. Take your time. Respect food, nourish your body, and support your local butcher, bread maker, your vintner”. To my inquisitive friends and I, who had a hard time resisting the urge to pepper her with personal questions, Monika steered us back to the moment, suggesting without saying it, that we Americans have a curious need for back- story or quick intimacy which is not necessarily the Italian way. Look out the window, for god’s sake. Don’t miss what’s right in front of you! At one point as we were making small talk, she said “Italians don’t ask what they’re not interested in.” Note to self: Bless your guides and consider heeding their guidance.

We did and saw many things at a slower pace over 10 days. We lazed in the intoxicating scent of jasmine, scotch broom, lavender, and rosemary. We felt perfect weather on our skin, managed the markets and shop exchanges with friendliness and humor. We leaned against cool Etruscan walls in the heat of the day, walked cobblestone alleyways worn smooth over thousands of years. Thousands.

We made tiny cups of coffee. We ate gloriously fresh food, drank wine free of sulfites, traversed the awkward territory of language, then fell happily to trying to play that music while our Italian brethren joyfully applauded our halting, gesturing efforts. Goodwill abounded! One Chef in an out- of- the- way Umbrian restaurant kissed my hand at the end of one memorable meal for my efforts to roll with the language. Another time, our waitress abandoned her service of us in frustration when we mis-ordered and mistakenly sent the wrong dish back.
Not all bad comes to harm. We learned that next time we’d keep the food to take home. Either way, we paid for the extra meal and apologized to the extra friendly management then tried to let it go.

I return to Indiana on fire to learn Italian. The pure pleasure of hearing it spoken, the serious music of it, won’t leave me. I return restored, wiser and younger at heart, sweetened back to myself and my faith in the goodness of the world. I feel my presence back home potently and with gratitude. I return having learned something by being around people who live the moment, go with the flow and don’t sweat the small stuff. I’m reading MORE about Italy now that I’ve returned than I did in preparation for or during the trip. I find this reading in light of having experienced more meaningful somehow. Thanks to all who shared their resources with me and now don’t mind my holing up with them just a little while longer.

BLR –for the Poplar Grove Muse

I'm making a list

In a few short days I will leave for St. Mary of the Woods on the annual Women Writing for a Change-Bloomington summer retreat. I will get two whole days, and two partial days to spend in the company of myself and fellow writers while reading, writing, and thinking. I am thrilled at the opportunity to honor my writing life in this quiet, contemplative place.

In my busy life now, I take almost no time to write which is my favorite activity aside from reading good books. Writing takes careful time, and it takes a clear, well rested brain, neither of which I possess in much abundance right now. One thing I do have is a laptop and a list. While I am doing laundry or schlepping kids to the pool or looking for batteries for the Wii, I think of writing puzzles or memories I would like to explore or an idea I want to further or a turn of phrase I think would be great in a poem. I grab my laptop and jot it down.

This list has become pretty long over the past few weeks, and I intend to explore as much of it as I can at the upcoming retreat. It feels comfortable knowing I won’t set myself up in a cozy writing corner and feel the dull hammer of writer’s block. No, not this writer; I’ll have a long list of prompts waiting for me to explore. Here’s item number one on my list: why I hate numbers.

What’s on your writing to do list?

Amy for the Poplar Grove Muse

Summer!

Summer is here. Saturday night, a “Full Strawberry Moon,” according to the Farmer’s Almanac: "This name was universal to every Algonquin tribe. In Europe they called it the Rose Moon." Earlier in the week, the Summer Solstice, always a favorite in my household.

The heat and humidity are overpowering. Reluctantly, we retreat into our air-conditioned house, with the thermostat set to a guilty 82 °F. most of the time. We had a cold winter here, for south central Indiana, with six blessed “snow days” extending the school year to a palatable June 1 release. Now, we are having an early, hot summer. The contrasts are stark. (Thoughts of global warming are inescapable, and the BP disaster continues to pump unprecedented quantities of spilled oil into the Gulf of Mexico.)

Every year, I approach summer thinking it will be a blessed contrast to the school year, relaxed, giving rise to a completely different frame of mind for a good 6 weeks. This habitual misapprehension is, in part, a ruse to distract myself from the accrued losses of departing students, friends, and hard-won routine at the end of each academic year. I have always, from a young age, found myself reluctant to move beyond the comfort I have achieved (not always easily), with teachers, classmates, living situations, by the end of the spring semester. 
Having lived my whole life in academic communities (to my utter surprise), I still have not come to terms with this sense of loss, and the corresponding anxiety that accompanies the peeling off each spring of certain friends and acquaintances into other communities, other destinies, distinctly “other” paths of life.

I remember my childhood summers as endless, in a mostly positive way, allowing for a gradual accretion of sameness and satiation of my own direction of my own activities, preparing me to once again subordinate myself to the tutelage of teachers, music instructors, and peers. I miss this sense of vacillation between structure and non-structure. The divisions seem sadly blurred in modern life.

So far, this summer has brought extreme fragmentation, between the various pursuits of my 10- and 14-year-old daughters, the international travel of my husband to various conferences, visits to our aging parents (from whom we have strayed geographically about as far as possible within the continent), and my attempts to hold a work life together.

As I drove my youngest to yet another violin engagement the other day, she commented on how, with the trees all in full leaf, it is almost impossible to imagine how bare and stark they were not long ago. The contrasts are hard to process, yet one has almost to work to not acknowledge them. Indeed.

In celebration of this celestial, if not always as in-the-flesh-as-one-would-like turning of the seasons, I offer companion poems on Winter and Summer Solstice. To help us appreciate the miraculous contrast.

Summer Solstice

My girls, twisted in ropes of sheets,

Toss and turn, long

Twilight

Illuminating thoughts

That usually turn easily

Toward sleep.

They can’t sleep, can’t sleep, cannotsleep.

Nor can the grownups sleep.

Near 3, when I doze at last,

Light streams in again, from the kitchen,

Where my husband, alone, in briefs,

Spoons slow ice cream from the carton.

I retreat to a far corner of the house,

Unconscious for a desperate few hours.

I remember nights

In a white frame house on Center Avenue.

Hearing from my low bed below the windows,

Later, luckier children than I,

Calling out, the clatter of a coffee can

Kicked to end the game,

Jangling buzz of cicadas,

The neighbors’ dog eagerly barking,

My sister’s restless thoughts

From the next bed,

The seductive tinkle of an ice cream bell

One street over.

Let me store up this sleeplessness,

Allow this suffusion of luminescence,

Of hot energy to fill me,

Fuel me, into days and nights

Of oncoming darkness.

WINTER SOLSTICE

These last days draw down

Toward the solstice.

Sun at its lowest slant

Deep in the horizon, the light,

Thin and pale, concentrates

Itself into a few bare hours,

Creates what intensity it can

From scant essentials.

I would do the same. In this season

Of every excess,

We ward off darkness

With gathering and celebration,

As our ancestors

Scattered across the northern landscapes

Hoarded light and company at the table.

Let me, too, cling to essentials:

Breath, life, love.

Let me treasure my treasures:

Faithful partner, children, dog,

That walk in bleak light,

Stripped trees reaching toward

The waning glow,

A warm cup cradled in chill hands.

Soon enough, the turn will come, the days

Incrementally lengthen out to contain

An abundance of brightness and soft fruits,

The easy dilution of slow hours

By darkness outlasted.

Mary, for the Poplar Grove Muse

What Comforts Us

Recently I’ve been thinking about comfort and what that means to me. Amy mentioned in her last blog post that Steph has moved to Portland; to say she will be missed in our writing community and in our lives is the very definition of understatement. Steph had a difficult decision to make and leaving Bloomington was hard for her so I wanted to do something to help her transition. I sent her this quote in an email to be opened when she arrived: “Whenever I go on a trip, I think about all the homes I’ve had and I remember how little has changed about what comforts me." Brian Andreas Mostly True Collected Stories & Drawings.

After sending the quote to Steph, I began thinking about what brought me comfort. This led me to question the definition of comfort, so I looked it up. Thank you Merriam-Webster Online!

Main Entry: 1 com·fort
Pronunciation: \ˈkəm(p)-fərt\
Function: transitive verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French cunforter, comforter, from Late Latin confortare to strengthen greatly, from Latin com- + fortis strong
Date: 13th century

1 : to give strength and hope to : CHEER 2 : to ease the grief or trouble of : CONSOLE

I realized that the thing that has brought me comfort consistently throughout my life fits both definitions. That thing for me is coffee.

I grew up in a chaotic, shifting environment. The only constant in my life was my maternal grandfather an inveterate coffee drinker. One of my first solid memories is of sitting on his lap at Grandma & Grandpa’s kitchen table. He’s drinking coffee and has made me a cup of my own, mostly milk with a little coffee and a lot of sugar. I remember feeling very grown up having my own cup of coffee. Their kitchen table was small and covered in a red checkered oil cloth. Grandpa used an ivory colored mug, its surface paint crackled like the lines on the back of his neck. I used one of Grandma’s tea cups because it wasn’t too heavy for my tiny hands. Coffee is forever bound to the feelings of safety, hope, strength and ease that I associated with Grandpa. He was a man who always had time for each of his ten grandchildren; a man who somehow knew what each of us needed and made us each secretly feel that we were his favorite. For me, he had patience. He knew that I needed downtime from my household of drama. He would take me to Miller’s Dairy for ice cream and never once tell me to hurry up no matter how long it took me to choose chocolate every time.

When I was twelve, Mother taught me how to make a great pot of coffee in our Pyrex glass stove top percolator. It felt like a rite of passage. I know I was twelve because that was the year Grandpa died. I can close my eyes and still smell the difference between that brewed coffee and Grandpa’s instant Sanka.

I always feel immediately at home when I walk into someone’s house and they offer me a cup of coffee. It feels very congenial. My surrogate mother, Dorothy Young, always had her stainless steel Hamilton Beach percolator going, the coffee inside the glass knob on the lid bubbling away happily. That coffee pot produced its own unique aroma that I remember well also. Her home and her coffee always brought me comfort.
.
There is a coffee concoction that Grandpa taught me how to make: Coffee Bread. In a shallow bowl you place two slices of buttered bread (in those days it was Wonder Bread and what Grandma called oleo), sprinkle a little sugar on them, then pour about a half mug of milky coffee over it, and eat with a big
spoon. That recipe probably sounds weird to most people, but about twice a year I make Coffee Bread for myself. I sit with it and savor it and am comforted by it. Some times when I make it I wonder what inspired this concoction and I think it was probably a poor man’s dessert for someone who raised four children during the Great Depression.

Rituals are very important in my life and I love the ritual of making the coffee, preparing my own cup with just the right balance of milk and sweetener, and sitting with the cup in both hands, savoring the aroma. It feels very luxurious just to take the time to sit with my coffee. It takes me back to the days when Grandpa had all the time in the world to sit on his front porch swing with a little girl, watching the lightening bugs in the garden and listening to the katydids.

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse

Who's Your Gaga?

Dennis Hopper’s death a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about Lady Gaga. Not that the 20-something pop diva and the 70-something film star are similar—I can’t picture the steely-eyed Hopper wearing latex and hula hoops, nor can I imagine the hyper-styled Gaga straddling a Harley (her outfits wouldn’t allow it). No, the two luminaries are not alike … or are they?

In 1969, when Easy Rider hit the theaters, I was a young teenager. Hopper played a chopper-riding, drug-smuggling hippie named Billy. My slightly older brother was a bona fide hippie at the time, with the long hair and fringed jackets to prove it, but I was still a wannabe, making good grades and saving my babysitting money while I secretly yearned for everything my brother and Dennis Hopper stood for. All that hell-raising and rebellion and youthful defiance. All that edginess and ballsy courage. All that independence. All that freakin’ freedom on the open road riding those ridiculously long motorcycles.

I’m sure my parents hated Dennis Hopper for the very same reasons that I glorified him—instead of defiance, they saw contempt; instead of courage, rudeness; instead of independence, self-indulgence.

I know, because all these years later, as the parent of two teenage girls, that’s how I see Lady Gaga.

If you’ve been living under the proverbial rock recently, you may have missed Gaga’s music video sensations. These 8 or 9-minute productions are hardly the music videos of yore. They are epic statements, replete with… well, replete, that’s all I can say. I hate them, the videos, that is. Poker Face, Bad Romance, Telephone, and the newest blockbuster Alejandro (replete with machine-gun boobs)—to me, they are dark, garbled messages about bad sex, violence, intentionally inflicted pain and abuse.

But my daughters think these videos are “amazing.” Where I see degradation, they see defiance. Where I see humiliation, they see guts. Where I see pornography, they see power. Where I see gratuitous grotesqueness, they see independence and courage and, yes, all that freakin’ freedom to sing and dance very nearly naked on the World Wide Web.

I can’t like Lady Gaga. Actually, I do like her music, and when the songs come on the radio (or the kids’ iPods), I hum along. But much to my daughters’ dismay, I can’ t like her twisted, death-obsessed, violence-mongering videos, just as I am sure my parents never liked the drugs and violence and rock-n-roll of Easy Rider.

I have tried to express my opinion to my kids, but they long ago shut out my rants about the Gaga videos’ “bad messages.” Dennis Hopper’s death has helped though—I am now trying to hold on to the realization that 30 or 40 years from now, my own children will be shaking their heads over the excess of who knows what kind of musical genre. They, too, will face their Gaga.

In one of Dennis Hopper’s obits, I read a comment Hopper made about his days of directing and starring in films such as Easy Rider. In those days, he told the New York Times in 2002, “I thought the crazier you behaved, the better artist you would be.”

Maybe Lady Gaga will grow up like Dennis Hopper. And maybe I’ll grow up too, enough at least to shut up and let my kids love something I hate, for the sake of feeling that rush of freedom we all crave.

Meanwhile, rest in peace, Billy.

--LB

A year in the life...

Dear Readers,

It has been not quite a year since we launched The Poplar Grove Muse, but we have had a recent change in our writing team, and we wanted to give readers a quick update, take our blog temperature, so to speak.

When we launched back in August of 2009 our intent was to:

"present a community blog....to profile the writing life and the poetics of daily living especially as it pertains to Bloomington, southern Indiana and the WWf(a)C community."

We had a team of 4 regular writers and invited anyone who was part of our community to participate by joining the team, guest blogging, or offering writing suggestions. We will even take poetry submissions.

We managed to post at least once a week, and we heard from a number of you, either on the blog, on facebook or in person about various posts and ideas. We feel the blog has been a positive addition to our writing community and would like to continue to urge fellow women writing for (a) change community members to contact us about ideas or post responses to our blog or to facebook. We welcome the conversation.

We would especially like to urge you to become a part of the team. We will make room for your regular contribution OR if you would prefer, we can put you in a pool of guest bloggers and you would be asked to contribute on the occaision that a regular blogger cannot post. We really value the diversity of writing and ideas in our community. Please email amy@womenwritingbloomington.com to volunteer to write or suggest ideas.

We would like to pause here to say farewell to regular Poplar Grove Muse blogger and fellow writer Steph who has moved to Portland, Oregon. You can continue to follow her adventures on her regular blog. Thanks for the gift of your words, and we'll look forward to hearing about WWf(a)C happenings in Portland.

Rebekah has kindly agreed to step in and begin regular blogging for us. She posted just last week on the PGM, and you can also catch her at her wee blog about Scotland, a place that has captured her heart.

So let me say again, this blog is for our community, and we would like you to take part. It is meant to be an ongoing gift of words and writing and is open to anyone who is familiar with the ethos of presuming good will.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Amy, for the PGM