Susan Barr-Toman

SUSAN BARR-TOMAN‘s (05) essay, “Catching My Breath,” about yoga, jazz, and returning to writing, is publiched in r.kv.r.y quarterly literary journal.

 

Catching My Breath

Susan Barr-Toman

Beach at Scopello, Sicily, 2000

I signed up for a yoga class for writers because I needed to focus.

I’d successfully written a novel; it was even published. But for the past year or so, I’d been unable to concentrate. During the first class in the series, which was about sound, Lisa, the instructor, rang a bell and we listened until the walls soaked up the ringing. We ohm-ed three times as a group, and the room vibrated with sound. We could feel it against our skin. We stretched and repeated the sun salutation; our bodies morphed into snakes, cats, dogs, and children.

For our first writing exercise, we sat in pretzel legs as my kids say. Our backs were straight; our hands palms up on our knees, thumbs and index fingers touching. Lisa instructed us on how to breathe. Inhale and fill the belly, exhale and bring the bellybutton toward the spine. I focused, in and out. How difficult could it be? But of course my breath was choppy. My belly expanded as I exhaled. I tried again. Perhaps Lisa saw the frustration on my face. She said, “Breathe without judgment, but with compassion.” I’d been breathing all my life, so I must have had some idea how to do it. I just lacked any grace in the matter. I persisted and tried to look upon myself with compassion.

We stayed seated, breathing and listening as Lisa put on John Coltrane’s “In a Sentimental Mood.” I’ve always loved Coltrane, but hadn’t listened to him in a while. I sat breathing, breathing, and then, crying. I bit my tongue and tried to keep my jaw from quivering. A tear escaped and I wiped it away, then another. I was no longer focusing on breathing, but on not crying. While I loved the music; I didn’t have an emotional connection to it. I wasn’t listening to it at the birth of either of my children, it wasn’t playing at my wedding, and I didn’t immerse myself in Coltrane following a rough breakup long ago. So why was I crying?

After a few minutes, Lisa asked us to write about the music, or about the other sounds we’d experienced in class. My first sentence was, “What the hell was that about?” I kept writing. Writing was why I had come. I needed to get back to it. For the past year and a half or so, I’d been unable to concentrate. I’d become a caregiver, not only for my children, but for my husband who at forty was diagnosed with cancer, and then later his mother, whose lymphoma had returned. Caregiver is too strong a word; it makes it sound like I did more than I did. But after all that had happened, I was emotionally bankrupt. I was empty.

Why Coltrane? I wrote. Why tears? Perhaps Coltrane was speaking to me; he understood about the past and about what was lost. I realized that it wasn’t the music alone that made me cry. It was the breathing. It was me breathing. Me, after all that had happened, catching my breath.

The class ran late, so when I arrived home our company was already there. The couple sat at the kitchen table with my husband. The children were playing upstairs.

“We’re swapping cancer stories,” my husband said.

I sat in my yoga pants with a glass of wine. Our company was a couple we’d met through friends and had seen a few times. The reason I like them is that they are unapologetic about really loving each other. The wife had thyroid cancer a few years back. Her torture was hormonal more than surgical, months of treatment, then finding the right balance of medicine so she could return to stability, to her family and life.

My husband had chemo and radiation, and four surgeries in the past year and a half. Sitting at the kitchen table, Peter was only up to recounting his second surgery, the one that was supposed to be a “procedure” followed by a few days in the hospital. Then we were to join our children down the shore. Two days after the surgery it was apparent something was wrong. My husband was a grayish green, panting and sweating, barely able to walk 100 feet. The day before he’d lapped the hospital floor fifty times. As he talked, I pulled myself into a ball on my chair and felt acid rise to my throat. I wanted my husband to tell his story. And I really didn’t.

It is all too raw for me and I find myself back in the hospital recliner, wedged between his bed and the windows, the overcast day showing on his face. Peter is asking me to stay overnight. He’s afraid and I act like I’m not. I watch him barely sleeping. He’s been the perfect patient. Everything up to this point has gone as planned. This procedure was to be the end of a yearlong ordeal. But it isn’t. He’s dying, I think, and I can’t do anything. I walk the hall and ask the resident to check him again and again. They take him into emergency surgery the next day; he’s in septic shock, then he’s in the ICU. Twelve days all told and we don’t meet our children down the shore.

In graduate school, I frequently got into discussions with my fellow fiction-writing friends about whether to write autobiographical stories. I was adamantly against it, for me. My argument was that I needed more time to process what had happened in my life, possibly for a decade or two, before I could incorporate it into fiction. Meanwhile they seemed to be able to write the story as the door closed behind their lovers or the ambulance pulled away.

Joan Didion says she writes to know what she’s thinking. After listening to Lisa, and my breathing, and to Coltrane, sitting at my kitchen table, I thought maybe I don’t need to process before I write, maybe I need to write in order to process. It won’t be fiction, at least not at first. I may never share it. But I need to write to know what I’m feeling, and maybe to let go of all that was lost.

Listening to great jazz is like listening to conversations. Sometimes it’s an argument, sometimes wooing, sometimes goodbye. That afternoon, Coltrane was whispering to me: tell me. Tell me everything. And in the quiet of my own messed up breathing, I heard him.

Susan Barr-Toman is the author of the novel When Love Was Clean Underwear, winner of the 2007 Many Voices Project. She was born and raised in Philadelphia where she still lives with her husband and two children and where she teaches creative writing at Temple University and Rosemont College. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Visit Susan at www.susanbarrtoman.com.

THis article first published in r. kv. ry

Esther Cross and Ricardo Coler – My Favorite Text – Lamujerdemivida en FILBA – with Esther CrossEstán invitados: Domingo 11 19 hs en FILBA

Para agrandar, clickeá en la imagen.

La revista Lamujerdemivida coordinará esta lectura en la que escritores y periodistas leerán un breve fragmento de su obra favorita en un minuto. Una multiplicidad de voces para rastrear influencias.

Participan: Aníbal Jarkowsky, Guillermo Martínez, Gerardo Rozín, Sergio Olguín, Ricardo Coler, Eugenia Zicavo, Hinde Pomeraniec, Christian Kupchik, Daniela Kozak, Esther Cross, Javier Sinay, Leni González, Nicolás Hochman,Cynthia Rimsky (Chile), Andrea Jeftanovich (Chile) y Santiago Nazarian (Brasil).

Domingo 11. 19 hs. en Eterna Cadencia. Honduras 5582. Después, brindis.

Quedan invitados!

The Transformation of the Woman in 20th century Africa: Identity and the Increasingly Fulfilled Presence of the Female Figure by Sanaë Lemoine

On this blog I like to promote good writing, and to expose talented writers to new audiences.  This week I am reposting an intriguing article written by Sanaë Lemoine, who lived in Japan, France, and Buenos Aires, just graduated from University of Pennsylvania, and is on her way to Columbia University to study for her MFA.

The Transformation of the Woman in 20^th century Africa:

Identity and the Increasingly Fulfilled Presence of the Female Figure

by Sanaë Lemoine

Mariama Bâ, in So Long a Letter, hardly restricts the vocal and psychological breadth of her language; she writes: “My voice has known thirty years of silence, thirty years of harassment. It bursts out, violent, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes contemptuous.” (Bâ, 60) The African female voice has acquired volume, complexity and international recognition in the 20^th century. The various changes wrought by Europe’s imperial ambitions and decolonization have placed great emphasis upon the role of the woman within African society. Through their literary works, their active participation in revolutionary movements and the political sphere, and finally their adapting role within the family nucleus, African women have challenged the traditional and often misconceived Western image of silent, oppressed women. It is therefore crucial to study the role of women within indigenous communities before colonialism to understand what changes they underwent—within the intimate sphere of the family as well as the public milieu of villages and cities—when Europe colonized Africa. To avoid a simple female/male binary categorization, issues of race and class will be incorporated into this study of African gender issues. If the European portrayal of the African woman as submissive and silent is not entirely false, it is incredibly limited. The female figure in African political struggles and in the face of a devastating capitalist advance has risen as courageous, capable and open to change. Most striking is how the women, while remaining the pivot of the African home as wives, child-bearers and educators, have struggled to leave the confined core of the family cell to take on roles traditionally attributed to men. Women’s positions have greatly transformed in Africa’s traditionally patriarchal societies. These changes, triggered by colonial suffering and necessity, have questioned the very foundations of indigenous values. They have brought to light issues of gender that cannot be ignored. The colonizers, by injecting modern Western tenets, introduced complexity and further opportunities for the African women. By doing great damage, they also allowed a multiplication of ideas, which have caused women to question their role within a traditional society. They struggled to negotiate reconciliation between two conflicting worlds: the West and the newly independent African nations. An analysis of the female status in Kenyatta’s writing, prior to colonial occupation, contrasts to the changes that took place during colonization in Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, and after independence, in Mariama Bâ and Cooper’s works. As a result of colonial influence and independence, women were provided with a larger scope of possibilities. These opportunities often went against the grain of traditional authority, yet the ability to take upon roles of leadership, to be an active part of modernity and history was exhilarating if not essential in the fulfillment of the African women as an independent and strong individual.

The status of women before European imperialism, in the case of Kenya, is explained in Jomo Kenyatta’s study of the Kikuyu people, Facing Mt. Kenya. Although few sections of the book explicitly set forth the position of women within the Kikuyu society, Kenyatta paints a portrayal that, to a Western reader, is increasingly biased by his male perspective. If the author’s details and anecdotes are exact, then the society depicted is overwhelmingly patriarchal—although it was once matriarchal. Yet, if Kenyatta divides his study into clear-cut chapters discussing broad topics such as education and marriage, the status of the Kikuyu woman cannot be simply described as restricted, submissive and inhuman. Perhaps it is best to begin with the basis of Kikuyu society: land tenure. The man is the owner of his plot of land, although he must clear parts of his land for his wife. The only possession the wife has in Kikuyu language is “my garden” whereas the man can say “my land” and he is the only one to retain such a title (Kenyatta, 30). The woman has no right to inherit land; it is only through her husband that she receives a plot of land to cultivate. In this inequality of land ownership, there is nevertheless a technical equality between the man and woman, stemming from communal education. Girls receive the same training in agriculture as boys (100). However, when it comes to other sectors of education, the very pragmatic approach to learning categorizes the boys and girls into different gender roles: the boys are trained in physical development whereas the girls are more focused on house-work (101). Along with these underlying, small yet perceptible inequalities, the women must undergo clitoridectomy. This custom is known to the Western world as genital mutilation. Kenyatta attempts to defend it as best he can, going through the pains of explaining in detail the operation, and by doing so, revealing the dangerous, hardly sanitary and excruciating clipping of the clitoris. Although his argument of tradition, that this practice is essential for the initiation of girls and their transition to womanhood, is valid in the sense that marriage and respect for the woman as an adult arise from this operation, the reality of the clitoris trimming cannot be ignored. Kenyatta sets forth the traditions of the Kikuyu people where it becomes a reality that many of the structures that define their society undermine a Western notion of the liberated or free woman. Kenyatta goes to the extent of claiming that “Masturbation among the girls is considered wrong. […] It may be said that this, among other reasons, is probably the motive of trimming the clitoris, to prevent girls from developing sexual feelings around that point.” (Kenyatta, 156)

If certain African women, in a traditional context of the pre-colonial era, appear to lack of independence, self-assertion and even physical comfort, Mariama Bâ attempts to reconcile the two side of this rift by acknowledging modernization without refuting customs of the Senegalese society. She writes, “It was the privilege of our generation to be the link between two periods in our history, one of domination, the other of independence.” (Bâ, 25) And yet she understands that this African society is “shaken to its very foundations, torn between the attraction of imported vices and the fierce resistance of old virtues.” (Ba, 76)  She coins the women of Senegal as the first pioneers in this struggle for emancipation. Bâ is skeptical or at least ambivalent when it comes to Western influence. Indeed, the struggle to merge family values and Islamic precepts with the modern world proves difficult for Ramatoulaye, the author of the “long letter” to her friend Aissatou. The novel reveals how gender issues are closely linked with those of race, class—in the case with Binetou—and colonialism, dichotomies between two diverging cultures accentuate. Female bonds are transformed with European influence. Mariama Bâ does not only focus on the oppression of women by men but also discusses the fine and complex interactions that begin to form between women, the obstacles to relationships, victimization of women by other women (the mother-in-laws), and how these women come to term with the confusion, the expectations and intellectual opportunities of independence. Ramatoulaye wonders how both Western and Senegalese values can thrive without eclipsing either one. She has faith in the Koran, however, she is disillusioned when her husband abandons her and distorts Islamic precepts by not treating his two wives equally. The differences between Ramatoulaye and Aissatou on a personal level, the latter lives in the US and works at the Senegalese Embassy, reveal the tensions of two cultures at odds and how they are not quite irreconcilable. Ramatoulaye depicts a nascent rise in feminist thought; when she goes to the cinema alone she perceives the “slender liberty granted to women.” (54) and sets off on a path of independence by obtaining her driver’s license, which she describes as a “battle of nerves and sang-froid.” (57) The true role and importance of the woman is in her language and spoken word: Ramatoulaye speaks more freely to Daouda, “women are the nation’s primary, fundamental root, from which all else grows and blossoms.” (64).These women are the mothers who nurture, in their womb and then household, the future leaders of the country.

The transformation of the woman, from a traditional wife and mother to that of a cultured, intellectual individual, appears to be relatively smooth for Ramatoulaye, although she is many times shaken by the changes she undergoes. In the case of Algerian independence, the role of the woman underwent abrupt metamorphosis, one that arose out of necessity rather than from a natural melding of the traditional past with the present reality of the Western culture. If the status of women in Algeria, according to Frantz Fanon, improved inasmuch that they became cunning and ingenuous in the battle for independence, I would argue that such liberation was too brief and spontaneous for substantial changes to take place immediately after decolonization. However, the capacity to adapt and to overcome psychological and physical hardships in this sudden transformation is remarkable. The woman’s inner struggle to look beyond traditions instilled from childhood and take part in the revolution demanded determination. In, “Algeria Unveiled” Fanon discusses how initially the French, with their notions of oppression, transformed the veil into an item of taboo. The women were able to reconfigure and adjust in the face of such a crisis, “the militant girl, in adopting new patterns of conduct, could not be judged by traditional standards. Old values, sterile and infantile phobias disappeared.” (Fanon, 110) Algerian women were forced to re-evaluate their most fundamental values so that there was almost this tragic component to the transformation of the woman from that of a mother to that of a combatant. Because “the absence of the veil distorts the Algerian’s corporal pattern,” the birth of a new body without the veil and haïk must occur, thus “The Algerian woman relearns her body, re-establishes it in a totally revolutionary fashion.” (Fanon, 59) The struggle for independence overshadowed the Algerian home. As the Franco-Algerian conflict was aggravated, the role of women within the family, out of necessity, was altered. Fanon mentions the fragmentation of the family, the stability of pre-war years is lost to a precarious future because the mother can perish at any moment. The woman-for-marriage becomes the woman-for-action: she moves outside the circle of the family to the level of the fighting man. It is as if the incredible changes that the women undergo are reflected on the males of the family: “The Algerian girl who was emerging into the agitated arena of history was inviting her father to undergo a kind of mutation, to wrench himself free of himself.” (109) In this case, the transformation is double. According to Fanon, the French men have a sexualized image of shedding the veil: it is what precedes rape, deflowering the Algerian woman, after it has been decided that the woman constitutes the turntable of Algerian society (38). The female response to this penetration is to transform the physical appearance, the movement of the limbs, the clothing, so as to fool the European. Without the veil gender is no longer perceived through clothing but primarily through the physiological differences, those of femininity.

The 20^th century marked necessary and elemental changes in the traditional image of the wife. With increasing access to education and political consciousness, women participated in rallies and organization—for example in Nigeria with the Aba women’s war of 1929, a non-violent protest of the Igbo women against unlawful taxation. In many cases, the key to a rising awareness of opportunities for women was the introduction of Western education. Ramatoulaye’s headmistress teaches her to look beyond the “bog of tradition, superstition and custom” and appreciate different cultures, without excluding one over the other (Bâ, 16). Furthermore, women left their homes to join the men in mining towns during the first half of the 20^th century while many cults Christian and others, were led my women prophets (Cooper, 129) and parishioners were disproportionately female. Out of necessity, the female sex was ripped out of her assigned, traditional habitat to find solutions to subsist; cooking, beer-brewing and prostitution were not excluded possibilities. And yet, even if Frantz Fanon provides an optimistic image of the strong Algerian woman who rises above male authority to assert equal roles within the society, such a sudden transformation seems to be only out of necessity in the face of adversity and not one to acquire rights for women. The gender divisions remained salient in the colonial and post-colonial era—Ramatoulaye deplores “When will education be decided for children on the basis not of sex but of talent?” (Bâ, 64). If the difference between male and female education decreased, for primary education in 1960 54.4% of men were education as opposed to 32% of women, a difference of 22.4, whereas in 1997, 84% of male as opposed to 69.4 of women were educated, a difference of 14.7, the lack of equal opportunity is visible. Ultimately, the emergence of Western values in Africa and the impact of decolonization, led to profound changes to unite the countries, men and women, in the face of the colonizers. The women of these newly independent states had no choice but to dismantle certain established precepts and the patriarchal society had to accept that a larger role would be played by women within the society: African family structures shifted and traditional customs were diluted. It is really only decades after independence that women have significantly increased their status, as for example in modern Algeria where women make up to 70% of lawyers, 60% of judges, dominate the field of medicine and contribute more to the household income than does the man[1].

 

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[1] Slackman, Michael. “A Quiet Revolution in Algeria: Gains Made my Women.” New York Times 26 May 2007.

this article first posted on Fword with permission from Sanaë Lemoine.

Read a short story by Ms. Lemoine titled Bathing.

Watch Lemoine on YouTube read a tale titled Foolish Story.

Sanaë Lemoine

Mortal

Mortal Cover

Mortal by Ivy Alvarez

Reviewed by Stephen Page

Demeter is the ancient Greek goddess of agriculture and fecundity. She is often depicted in artwork as carrying corn, shafts of wheat, or the horn of Cornucopia (or a combination). She governs harvestable food for the people and plant life for the earth. The myth goes something like this, depending which version of the myth you read: Demeter bears a daughter named Persephone. When Persephone is a young maiden, Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, spies her picking flowers in a field of Narcissi. She is humming to herself and roaming about the field without parental supervision. Hades bursts up from the ground and snatches Persephone, descends back to the underworld with her in his arms, and declares her his wife. Demeter, not knowing what happened to her daughter or where she is, searches the face of the earth for ten days with a torch in her hand. Her search is futile, and she is depressed. During those ten days, her wandering and depression result in negligence of the world’s crops, which wither. On the tenth day, she discovers that it was Hades who abducted her daughter, and that Zeus, the ruler of the gods, had some hand in the plan. Demeter is irate at Zeus, so she lets the crops and the rest of the world’s plant life die; and she promises never to restore fecundity to the earth until her daughter is returned to her. The people on the earth suffer famine, so they no longer pay homage to Zeus. Zeus, an egoist and a clever barterer, strikes a deal between Hades and Demeter-part of the year Persephone will live on earth with Demeter, and part of the year she will reside underground with Hades as his wife (where she is crowned Goddess of the Underworld). Demeter agrees to the deal, but secretly swears that during the months her daughter is underground, the world’s crops and plant life will wither and die; and during the months Persephone is on the earth, the crops and florae will flourish. This myth is ancient Greek reasoning for the seasons.Ivy Alvarez is obviously well read in Greek mythology. In order to know the Demeter and Persephone myth well, one must know many of the other Greek myths. In Mortal, Alvarez updates the Demeter and Persephone myth in a series of poems. A story unfolds between a contemporary daughter and her mother, who are named Dee and Seph. Alvarez refers to the myth numerous times in the poems, but she takes the liberty of revising the myth in many ways. One of those ways is to have Dee abducted by Hades. As Alvarez’s story progresses throughout the series of poems, Dee and Seph age, and a major theme of the collection links with the title of the book.

In “a memory of corn” the crops that Demeter governs, the seasons, and the underworld are mentioned:

A sky blue with hysteria, roses blowsy and promiscuous, bees fat-bottomed and buzzing-it is a shaking, baking summer. Dee and Seph eat by the reservoir, the firepit coals sing to the meats roasting above them, which hiss and spit at them. Mother and daughter take a corncob each… the corns’ niblets darken in the heat…

In the poem before that one, Seph is born-via cesarean section-and the tale is told from Dee’s point of view:

they had to unzip me

to let the cat

out of the bag

blood bathed my belly

thighs

and baby Seph

I stopped counting stitches

forgave the marring

of my clean envelope…

Soon into the collection, we find the traditional Greek myth reversed:The abduction of DemeterThis time it is Demeter Hades wants. He

drags her through the garden, throws her to

the ground. It opens like a mouth. Grains scatter

from her hand…

…the wet earth swallows…

…Demeter

Disappears. Persephone falls silent, the

garden grows cold…

Alvarez so aptly implements assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme into her poems, they are unnoticeable-yet they add musicality to the poetry. Alvarez’s poetic ear is likely innate. Alvarez writes the poems from various viewpoints, which allows the reader an objective omniscience. The wonderful thing about this collection is that even if you are not familiar with Greek mythology, you can appreciate the book for its high-quality poetry, and the story for its narrative arc.this review first published in H.O.W. Journal

Check out Mortal on the Ivy Alvarez website

Twitter about Mortal or Ivy

Read more about Ivy Alvarez on Ivy is Here

Became a Mortal fan on Mortal fanpage

Purchase the book online here fromAmazon or from Small Press Distribution

Places/Everyone

By Jim Daniels

The University of Wisconsin Press
Reviewed by Stephen Page

Reading Places/Everyone will take you back home. You will drive through your old neighborhood where you grew up, shop at K-Mart, visit a pallet factory where you once worked, eat lunch in the break room, take a drive around the shop on a Hi-Lo, guzzle a six-pack with your friends out back in a vacant lot. O.K. Not everyone was born in Detroit, but most people have held at least one blue-collar job in their life. The poems in this collection set in the 1970’s and 80’s—and for that reason they are dated, but they read as though they have become timeless. The characters are menial laborers, factory workers, union-job holders, burger flippers. Daniels captures the entrapment felt by the middle class dupe, the working-class hero, the minimum wage worker, the assembly line jockey—almost anyone who has worked for a weekly paycheck.

“My Father Worked Late” depicts a Detroit working person’s dilemma, that is, each day could bring feast or famine, overtime or lay-off. A household earner usually had to work two jobs or overtime to pay the bills. It is stressful and tiring:

Some nights when he wasn’t too tired
he took off his shirt
and sat in the middle of the floor.
We wrestled, trying to pin
back his arms, sitting on his chest
digging our heads into the yellow stains
under the arms of his t-shirt…………..
he sat up, cradling us both in headlocks
in the closest thing to an embrace
that I remember……..

Other nights he looked right through us
mechanically eating his late dinner
yelling at anything that moved.
Some mornings we woke to find him
asleep on the couch, his foreman’s tie twisted
into words we couldn’t spell.
We ate our cereal as carefully as communion
Until our mother shook him ready for another day.

This poem shows the acceptable behavior of that time between a father and the rest of the family. The man was usually, but not always, the sole breadwinner of the family. His role was to make money, not provide love. There was not much demonstration of affection between a father and his children. The father in this poem is probably no longer intimate with his wife either, for he sleeps “sometimes” on the couch. This detached behavior is too much to handle for this father, and his days often end in depressive stupors and irate snapping at his family.

A number of the working men’s wives work, but only at minimum wage jobs:

Some of the wives work now
behind counters at McDonald’s
marking clothes at K-Mart
pulling in minimum wage
grocery money for another week.

And most of them do it only after the husbands have been laid off:

Up and down the streets
men mow their lawns
do yard work
many try to grow vegetables.

From the title of the poem, “Hard Times in the Motor City,” it is obvious that this is not just Saturday lawn work, nor a reflection of nurturing natures. It is men without jobs. They keep busy by working in their yards. Many men turn to drink as an outlet:

In the bar
Steve talks about
The afternoon movie….

He says he’ll dig ditches
or clean shitholes
all he wants is a job.
He’s got a wife, two kids,
He looks me hard in the eye:
“a man can always afford a drink.”

Of course, the irony being that turning to alcohol can result in procrastination and justification of spending money needed to pay for family food. It’s a downward spiral. Work less, drink more, squander money. Drink more, squander money, work less.

How does having no job affect behavior ? In “No Job”:

He pulls out
all the bushes in his yard
swinging a shovel at the roots.
He chases away the paperboy.

Television smashed in the driveway.
His wife hides from the neighbors.
No, no, no jobs:
He throws his knife in the air.

Frustration, frustration, frustration. Of course it does not help that most workers are not college educated, and cannot move out of their world. Most had only three choices when they finished high school, go to work for one of the Big Three:

High school, toking behind auto shop
parking lot sticky in the heat.
Ford, Chevy (GM), Chrysler—
where you gonna work?

The second section of the book is attention-grabbing because Daniels turns to second-person point-of-view, a technique not always easy to pull off. Daniels does it well, and brings the reader into the world of the working-class stiff. Digger, the main character of the section, becomes the man we all love to hate. He is obnoxious, crude, rude, and rough around the edges—but with second-person as his ally, we the readers readily empathize with him.

In Diggers’ first poem, he is in a traffic jam on his way to work, worried whether he is going to make it on time or not. It is not until we get to the line: “Maybe you’ll be late for work after all” that you realize he is kind of hoping he will be late. He is a man going to a job he hates, but he is going anyway. I am reminded of walking to school, hoping there would be an accident or some natural catastrophe that would make me late, for no other reason than to be late. However, I knew if I were late, I would be in trouble, so I kept walking, conforming to the rules but at the same time, wanting to break them.

In “ Diggers Thanksgiving” we have a man whose parents are senile, probably at too young an age, and Digger thinks:

You think of putting them in a home.
You remember as a child
pulling the wings off flies:
so delicious, so delicious.

What can you do? How does anybody justify doing something unpleasant? Become apathetic? Hardened?
What does a person do when they feel trapped in their lives? How do he or she think? Probably, something like this:

The sky darkens into night
while you shovel and lift
the wet thinning snow…..

you bend down again
for the heart attack
you know will kill you.

Digger experiences the feast/famine predicament too:

You drink beer after beer
on your porch staring
at your sun-scorched lawn
on our first weekend off
in two months.
Your neighbor’s lawn mowers growl
at you from all directions
If it don’t grow
Then I don’t have to cut it,
You think, but lift yourself
at last out of the broken rungs
of your chair and move
toward the side of the house…
you unweave the hose tangled
from the girls’ water fight
like it’s a rope on a ship—
you are in a late movies you saw last week—
you are on the ocean and this rope
anchors you down.
Suddenly the hose unkinks
and squirts you in the face.
It’s not salt water,
not fresh.

You stand in the driveway
watering the lawn, garden
the side of the house
holding the limp hose,
pissing on everything.

Digger is working overtime. His first weekend off in two months and what does he have to do? Take care of his lawn, that status symbol lying in front of his house that shows everyone in the neighborhood who he is, how he conforms to the norm. He must maintain your lawn. It is expected. Most effective about this poem is Daniels’ choice of words at particular times. The “mowers growl” shows how Digger feels they are nagging him to get to his lawn work. Then, “ holding the limp hose,” reveals Digger’s feeling of impotence. Finally, “pissing on everything.” tells how digger still can remain defiant in his thoughts.

In part three of the collection we go back to the first person. “Short Order Cook,” one of the best of the collection, is a wonderful poem about the pride and ambitions of the minimum-wage worker. But in the next poem, the cook reveals his feelings of helplessness:

“I don’t need to be smart
to work here.”
The grease sticks to my skin
A slimy reminder
Of what my future holds.

Places/Everyone is an exceptional first book. Daniels’ voice is young, but not immature—it resonates with the authority of one who has worked many jobs and seen many places. Daniels’ language is simple, but that renders the personae in the poems. Digger, the main character, portrays the typical working-class Joe—the internal rebel and the external conformist, the one who gets up early to go to work everyday even when he feels the job is not what he should be doing—and that reveals the main theme of the book—conformity. You will enjoy Daniels’ depictions of Motor City life, and even if you were not born in Detroit, you will feel ethos because this book reaches out to Everyperson everywhere who has worked at least one honest job.

Purchase Places/Everyone

This review first published in the Buenos Aires Herald, the 5th of March 2011.

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A Sonny Day

by CHARLES NEWBERY on MARCH 7, 2011

Posted in: AUTISM,SON,SURFING

“Yipee!”

MY SON IS surprising me.

A lot.

My five year old has autism and that means most other children are different. He’s socially out-of-tune much of the time. He’s less coordinated. Things don’t come natural to him. His fingers move slower and with less dexterity, so too does much of his body. He has verbal dyspraxia so it can be hard to understand him. His words come out in the jumble and we have to key in on one or two to get his drift. The words are up there and he knows what’s going on. He even corrects us when we make a mistake or simplify things too much or take a different route home, or if we try to con him and his two sisters into doing something but don’t come through on our end of the deal. “But you said, ‘We’ll go to the beach in the morning if we went to bed.’” We had. Last night. In a bid to get the kids to bed quickly so Mum and Dad could have some alone time. A chorus of “Me, me, and me” met our suggestion of going to the beach. Well, then, we told the three children, all under eight years of age. “The quicker to bed, the quicker the morning comes and the quicker we can go to the beach.” With my son we’ve got to keep our word – with all of them, really – or we’ll get called up on it. We try. But sometimes things don’t work out as planned, and we scorn ourselves for making – and breaking – promises. And my son frets.

But not for long. He is making huge strides in everything. We are on the coast for a four-day weekend, with friends and their two children. The five kids are having a wizard time. There goes my son riding a skateboard across the patio, totally in control, agile and deft.

This is not the way it should be, according to his original prognosis for autism and a lack of bodily balance and symmetry. He struggles to sit down at a table. It’s tiring for him. He prefers to stand. Or to sit on his head, or to lie down with his head falling off the sofa, watching TV upside down. It’s the way he has always been. Yet, yet… he’s learned how to ride a bike on his own and without training wheels. And now he’s speeding across the patio on a skateboard. “Look at me, Daddy!” There he goes and here he comes back again.

We went to the beach as promised and I went surfing on my longboard, coming back to hang out with the kids and our friends. My son, who has never shown interest in surfing, came up to me and said, “I want to try.”

“Certainly,” I said.

Out we went into the surf that he loves so much to splash around in but fears so much. I’ve often taken my eldest daughter, now eight, out deep to ride the bigger surf on her boogie board. My son said, “No.” He’d had enough spills when I took him out to pick off some big waves to ride all the way to the shore. “This is a good one!” And off he’d go, whizzing to the shore. But holding tight and nervous. And doing it, I’m afraid, because Dad was so keen (and living his youth vicariously through his children) that he started to say, “No thanks,” when I asked if he wanted a whirl. I stopped asking and two summers went by without him having another go.

Now he’s keen.

He hopped onto the board and got into position and I pushed him out through the whitewater, over the waves and out not too far to catch a big one that would take him to shore. We turned and he didn’t look scared. No. He looked determined. He looked content. He wanted to have a whirl. And he certainly did. I pushed the board gently and the wave took him and he rode on his belly all the way to the shore with the broadest smile ever, so my wife reported to me when I reached her and him, still lying on the board in the shallows, and paddling as best he could. He slid off and we went for another and another. Then a double-up wave caught him off balance and he wiped out, and my thrill sank. He fell off and under and rolled and he came up spluttering. And his face for a second said, “That’s enough.” But then he smiled and let out a hearty laugh and he turned to look for the board. He grabbed it and said, “Another.” And we went for more and more and it felt good for him and for me. My son who had been too scared and too awkward to surf was catching the thrill. He wanted to surf. And a dream started formulating in my head of our family of five spending our holidays chasing the waves throughout South America and further afield to Costa Rica, Hawaii and Tahiti, and then to Australia and New Zealand. The world would become our playground for waves. But first my son wants to catch another wave right where we are, in Pinamar.

Let’s go!

“Let’s catch another!”

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Tagged as: argentina, autism, beach, learn to surf, parenting, pinamar, surfing

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“What it’s like living here” from Donigan Merritt in Patagonia

Trekking on top of the Perito Moreno glacier

An Estancia in Patagonia

Donigan Merritt

Porteños, the people of Buenos Aires, like to refer to their city as the Paris of Latin America. It is not. (Neither was Prague when calling itself the new Paris.) Depending on one’s level of chauvinism, this may or may not be seen as a compliment, but what Porteños can accurately claim is that their city is the most European and the least Latino city anywhere in the Americas.

Buenos Aires is thought to represent Argentina, but it does not. At least Porteños should hope it does not. People outside of Latin America usually know five things about Argentina: Eva Peron’s crying song, the “dirty war,” the economic meltdown and debt default in the early years of the 21^st century, steak houses, and Patagonia. Wise Porteños should claim that Patagonia is representative of the real Argentina.

Somewhat similar to “dude ranches” in the States, an estancia is a working ranch that now takes in guests to make ends meet. Although the word estancia simply means ranch, and many, if not most, are working ranches, not bucolic B and B’s with a few decorative cattle and sheep, plus a couple of decked-out gauchos strolling about in picturesque berets. Many estancias are huge, thousands of acres, particularly in the West Texas flat of the Pampas, where gauchos still work much as they have for two centuries.

The estancia at Nibepo Aike

Not all estancia guest ranches are alike. I have visited two. One just an hour and a half’s drive from the center of Buenos Aires, the other a long flight down the length of Argentina, to the bottom of Patagonia. The former is more hotel (two swimming pools, for example, one an infinity pool), with the only ranching activity being performed as a show for guests; their feature was horseback rides along the creek. The other was a working ranch with a large herd of range fed cattle, and even larger flocks of sheep. That one, Nibepo Aike, located a rough one hour slog on a ragged dirt road from the airport in the town of El Calafate, houses the few guests it can accommodate in a wing of the ranch house that used to bunk gauchos, and offers mainly one service: food and drink. Although they are helpful with directions and setting you up with excursions.

Joined by six friends from Europe, my wife and I spent a few days at Nibepo Aike this past January (mid-summer down here), using it mostly as a base from which to explore the nearby glaciers, in particular, thePerito Moreno glacier, one of the only glaciers in the world that is not receding rapidly; no one is quite sure why it is still expanding. The estancia is, convenient for explorations, on the far edge of the Glacier National Park, at the terminus of the dirt road from El Calafate – terminating because just past the estancia is the impassable Andes range and the border with Chile.

The view of the Andes and one of the small glacier lakes from the Estancia

The rooms are along each side of a narrow, creaking hallway leading away from the large main room, behind which is the kitchen, from where an amazing amount of food is delivered three times a day. Most of the décor remains from the days before guests were taken in, and the few additions fit nicely with what’s already there. My favorite piece was an ancient Underwood typewriter made into a lamp.

There is a large stone fireplace in the main room – a wonderful evening treat even in the middle of summer (it’s not much further down the road to the jump off to Antarctica, it’s worth remembering), to while away the late hours with a glass, or a bottle, of Argentina’s fine vino tinto – Malbec. When we were there, it was full, but that means only two other couples; with our eight people, that took all the rooms. One couple was Swiss, the other from Buenos Aires.

Gauchos bringing in the sheep in the afternoon

Awakening the first morning early, hoping to get in a long hike in the nearby hills, I encountered grazing cattle milling about on the lawn next to our room. The gauchos were already on their horses and at work. On the way in to have breakfast, two gauchos moved a group of fifty or sixty sheep along the road out front.

We spent that day hiking around one of the small lakes just a short walk from the estancia, and in the hills behind the estancia, that grow up to be the Andes on the other side. That night we were treated to a full Monty parilla (it means grill or BBQ), during which Malbec flowed through our glasses like water and burdened platters groaning under the heaping weight of cow and lamb parts, half of which I had never considered edible before. (I still hold that opinion about some of it.)

Only able to eat a bit of yogurt the next morning, we were picked up in a van and driven to the Glacier National Park, where we boarded a boat on Lake Argentina and wandered around among ethereally blue ice bergs and ice islands on our way to Perito Moreno.

Cooking up the lamb

There is no way to write about this that can come even close to what it looks like, up close and personal, and even less to be able to describe the sound of ice cracking within the glacier itself, and chunks the size of buses or houses exploding away from the glacier’s leading edge. The best I can do is say that ice cracking in a glacier sounds like a howitzer firing next door.

To come to Argentina and only see Buenos Aires, is like going to the United States and only visiting New York. What is best about this country, what is best about the United States, for that matter, is not to be found in its signature cities, but in the “out there,” and Patagonia is the most out there place I have ever seen.

—Donigan Merritt

This Post first published on: Numéro Cinq

What Work Is

By Philip Levine
77 pages. Alfred A Knopf Books, $15.00.
Reviewed by Stephen Page

Philip Levine is the voice of the working class, the undereducated, the unambitious. He speaks for those who do not know how to speak for themselves or were never taught how to stand up for themselves. He gives voice to those who never thought to ask, “Is this what work is really all about?” He creates portraitures of laborers and brings them to life, allowing them to communicate to the reader, even if it is only through their actions. Levine, a master artist, after giving the subjects sound and movement, mutes them again, paints them back into their frames.

We are drawn into the first poem, a rendering of man wearing rubber protective gear and a respirator descending the steps into a pickling tank to work with a cocktail of hydrochloric acid and other caustic chemicals. The man knows of the dangers of his job, but continues to go down into the tank twice a day. At lunch he sits apart from the other workers in silence. He is proud that the other workers know him only by his nickname, and proud that his dangerous job gives him reputation and meaning in life.

The second poem, “Coming Close,” mootably the best of the collection, begins with the narrator pausing for a moment to scrutinize a fellow worker to whom he delivers parts:

Take this quiet woman, she has been
standing before a polishing wheel
for over three hours, and she lacks
over twenty minutes before she can take
a lunch break. Is this a woman?
Consider the arms as they press
the long brass tube against the buffer,
they are striated along the triceps,
the three heads of which clearly show.
Consider the fine dusting of dark down
above the upper lip, and the beads
of sweat that run from under the red
kerchief across the brow….
then lifting with a gasp, the first word
of tenderness between the two of you,
then you must bring new trays of dull,
unpolished tubes. You must feed her,
as they say in the language of the place.
Make no mistake, the place has a language,
and if by some luck the power were cut,
the wheel slowed to a stop…she would turn
to you and say, “Why?” Not the old why
of why must I spend five nights a week?”
Just “Why” even if by some magic
you knew, you wouldn’t dare speak
for fear of her laughter, which now
you have anyway as she places the five
tapering fingers of her filthy hand
on the arm of your white shirt to mark
you for your own, now and forever.

The narrator is aghast at the appearance of the worker, thinks it a mutation, an unnatural being. It is only at the end of the poem that he admits she is a woman, with the image of the feminine fingers. There is no direct conversation between them, only their mutual knowledge of work slang, a gasp, her laughter, and a final physical touch. She doesn’t question her existence, would only question why the wheel stopped, if it did, as if her work were her only means of identity. The narrator does not tell but allows you to figure out that it is possibly the work that has changed her physical appearance.

In “Growth,” we have another statement on the dumb self-image:

In the soap factory where I worked
when I was fourteen, I spoke to
no one and only on man spoke
to me…..
where I hammered and sawed, singing
my new life of working and earning,
outside in the fresh air of Detroit
in 1942, a year of growth.

The boy, bursting into adolescence and the age of individuality, celebrates his place in the world by being proud he is earning money, not a bad thing considering it is a time of high unemployment, but he is not even considering the dangers of working in a soap factory. There is only a snide remark on the polluted air of Detroit. He feels no need to talk to anyone. He identifies himself through his newly found job as if it were a badge pinned on him saying, hey, this is who I am.

“Among Children” is a portrayal of a schoolteacher in a fourth grade classroom. His students are the children of the factory workers that live in and around Flint. They are at naptime, a metaphor for how they are inevitably going to sleep their way through life, “so as to be ready for what is ahead,” slaving silently at dangerous jobs until they meet death. The children at ten years old are already being trained as physical laborers, evident by:

…how there backs have thickened,
how their small hands, soiled by pig iron,
leap and stutter even in dreams.

The teacher has no words of encouragement for them, no hope that they will be anything else in life other than what they are, what they were born into. He even reflects back to their births, stating, “not one said, I am sick, I am tired, I want to go home,” revealing personalities that will be perfect for silent acceptance into the working life.

In another teacher-student poem, “M. Degas Teaches Art & Science at Durfee Intermediate School,” the teacher makes a diagonal line across the blackboard and asks, “What have I done?” Several children offer logical answers, “You’ve broken a piece of chalk,” “you have created the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle,” “you have begun to represent the roof of a barn,” “You’ve begun to separate the dark from the dark,” but M. Degas is waiting for only one answer—hers. This is a statement on conformity, the taking away of free thought that is prevalent in working-class public schools, and perhaps for a reason. How else will these students grow up and tolerate their grinding lives if they are not taught to accept authority. An orange is blue, if that is what the boss tells you. And, you, the worker, will agree, may even come to believe it.

The collection ends with “The Seventh Summer,” a poem about the narrator’s problems with his Jewishness. He receives all kinds of flak for his religious identity, and for several hours one fine summer Sunday, he doubts his teachings and his God. He spends the afternoon enjoying the beauty of the world and life, thinking that it could possibly be the suffering of the Son of God who made salvation possible. In the end, he rescinds into himself and his belief, though he never tells anyone, never stands up for himself. He slips out of the poem in silence, holding his head down with his Christian friends during grace, abstaining from saying the words, most definitely not thankful for what is being fed to him, and not accepting the norm.

Levine is from Detroit, where most of these poems take place. Unlike most of the people portrayed in What Work Is, Levine went to college and received a degree. He, unlike his portraitures, chose to do physical labor because he wanted a non-thinking job in order to free his mind to write. Levine offers no hope for the majority of the working class, offers no solution for the masses. He offers no demonstrations, no sit-down strikes, no cry against working conditions, no ripple in the fabric of society. There is only hope for the individual, not for the group. Does that diminish from the collection? On the contrary, it is non-didactic. By exposing these conditions Levine allows the readers to draw their own conclusions, to learn from the mistakes of others. Yes, Levine deserves the recognition he received for this book. He is a master poet—a maestro of maestros.

This review first published in the Buenos Aires Herald, 20 February 2011.

His Last Days

A New Path to the Waterfall

by Raymond Carver

Atlantic Monthly Press

$12.00

Reviewed by Stephen Page

A New Path to the Waterfall was Raymond Carver’s last book that he worked on while he was alive.   Most of the poems were written after he was diagnosed with cancer. Initially there was hope that surgery and chemotherapy could halt the disease and prolong his life, but that hope was slim and the prognosis for time left on earth was short.  I think anyone knowing his death was impending would spend many of his remaining days contemplating how he had lived and what he would leave behind.  Carver did, and he recorded his hopes and glooms with a well-written collection of poems.

The first Carver poem of the collection, Thermopylae, goes like this:

Back at the hotel, watching her loosen, then comb out

her russet hair in front of the window, she deep in private thought,

her eyes somewhere else, I am reminded for some reason of those

Lacedaemonians Herodotus wrote about, whose duty

it was to hold the Gates against the Persian army.  And who

did.  For four days.  First, though, under the disbelieving

eyes of Xerxes himself, the Greek soldiers sprawled as if

uncaring, outside their timber-hewn walls, arms stacked,

combing and combing their ling hair, as if it were

simply another day in an otherwise unremarkable campaign.

When Xerxes demanded to know what such a display signified,

he was told, When those men are about to leave their lives

They first make their heads beautiful.

She lays down her bone-handle comb and moves closer

to the window and the mean afternoon light.  Something, some

creaking movement from below, has caught her

attention.  A look, and it lets her go.

It is interesting that this poem was chosen to open Carver’s sentiments.   Even though the poem was written before Carver became ill, it is inserted in this collection for a reason.  The outnumbered Greeks represent Carver and the Persians represent cancer.  Carver is hoping to fend off a formidable enemy.  Hair imagery is sure to catch the reader’s eye as it appears and reappears several times throughout the collection.  Hair is something that should worry Carver because if he were to go through chemo, he would lose it.  That might be his reasoning for including this surreal poem, Threat:

Today a woman signaled me in Hebrew.

Then she pulled out her hair, swallowed it

and disappeared.  When I returned home,

shaken, three carts stood by the door with

fingernails showing through the sacks of grain.

The woman loses her hair but disappears anyway.  She dies.  Then there is the implication of corpses in the sacks.

The Toes, is a humorous-serious poem:

This foot’s given me nothing

but trouble. The ball,

the arch, the ankle—I’m saying

it hurts to walk.  But mainly it’s those toes

I worry about.  Those

“terminal digits” as they’re

otherwise called.  How true!

For them no more delight

in going headfirst

into a hot bath, or

a cashmere sock.  Cashmere socks,

no socks, slippers, shoes, Ace

bandage—it’s all one and the same

to those dumb toes.

They even looked zonked out

and depressed, as if

somebody’d pumped them full

of Thorazine.  They hunch there

stunned and mute—drab, life less things . . .

The poem is obviously about those absurd digits we have at the end of our bodies, but Carver uses tropes and associative connotations.  The phrasing “terminal digits” not only refers to the end of our extremities, it also implies the end of our lives.  In this context it brings to mind a dead body.   After all, what is the first thing someone might notice when he sees a corpse laid out?  Toes sticking in the air.  What pokes up under a sheet pulled over a dead body?  Toes.  Where is the identity tag on the body at the morgue?  On one of the toes.

Caution is a poem about a writer awake in the middle of the night:

Trying to write a poem while it is still dark out,

he has the unmistakable feeling he was being watched.

Laid down the pen and looked around.  In a minute,

he got up and moved though the rooms of his house.

He checked the closets.  Nothing, of course.

Still, he wasn’t taking any chances.

He turned off the lamps and sat in the dark.

Smoking his pipe until the feeling had passed

and it grew light out.  He looked down

at the white paper before him.  Then got up

and made the rounds of his house once more.

The sound of his breathing accompanying him.

Otherwise nothing. Obviously.

Nothing.

Obviously some kind of paranoia is going on here.  What is he paranoid of?  What is he being watched by?  Death.

Section three has poems about but is not limited to his childhood.  Section four, “Some Prose on Poetry” tells the tale of how, at the age of eighteen, Carver first found out that poetry, which he had been scribbling for some time, could be taken as a serious endeavour. The last section, Foreboding, contains poems of final reckoning, most notably What the Doctor Said and Gravy.  The latter is one of his best poems, where Carver uses the slang phrase “it was all gravy” as a rhetorical device to display his love for Tess Gallagher and his years of non-dependence on alcohol; moreover, it is reconciliation with his death, his acceptance of the  inevitable, his letting go of any anger.  The last poem, Late Fragment, is Carver’s last wish, and his self-eulogy.  He does not say he wants to remain a famous writer, he does not say he wants to be read and discussed by intellectuals at ivy-league schools, he does not say he was sorry for his mistakes — he only  says that he wants to be “beloved.”

A New Path to the Waterfall was Carver’s preparation for death and his contemplation of life.  Carver was putting things in order.  The book is chronologically scattered, but I think it works well this way.  It better represents the method in which the mind works.  A man contemplating his life and his imminent death would not start with his first infant memory then move forward to the present.  No.  The mind would skip around.  One day while waking around he house, a photograph might be found and memories arise from the time of the photograph.  The following week, slips of scribbled notes might be found in a robe and more memories appear, which might be occurrences that happened before the photograph.   It would seem unnatural if the book were set up from childhood to death.  The order in this collection reflects the way Carver prepared for his death with his musings.   The fact that several of the poems were written before he was informed that he was ill might be a statement in itself.  It might mean Carver was saying that he was unknowingly preparing for death all his life.  It might mean Carver was saying that everyone is preparing for death all his life.  It might mean Carver was saying, “You will die too.  How do you want to be remembered?”

This review first published in the Buenos Aires Herald, 19 December 2010.

Stay, Fetch, Lick: Love Me, Love My Dog. Literally.

By Laurel Saville

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My husband recently made this observation: “You took 8 years between husbands but couldn’t last 8 months without a dog.”

Guilty as charged.

I don’t love my dog more than my husband. It is that I love – no, I need – solitude. I need some time alone. And it’s easier to be in the extended and deep silence of solitude with a dog than with a husband.

When I was single and had untrammeled expanses of hours that were empty of men and full of dogs, I was not so sure. I, like many – most? – single women, felt I was ‘missing something.’ That perhaps something was ‘wrong’ with me. I had lots of friends, dated regularly, but was, fundamentally, alone. And many days, lonely. However, I believe much of that loneliness was not innate, but learned.

No matter how much progress we’ve made, society is still skeptical of a woman alone. Solitary men are romantic and independent; solitary women are home-wreckers, spinsters, closet lesbians. Lone wolves are always male. Lone females are unwanted, cold, suspect. Dinner parties were off limits to me, as a single woman, I discovered once I hooked up with the man I’m now married to and invitations to multi-couple events suddenly appeared.

This suspicion towards a solitary female did not change when I remarried. I recently took three days in the mountains with just a book, dog and bike for company; other guests at the B+B, all couples, seemed to require an explanation for my single-yet-wedding-ringed state. A mention of my ‘supportive’ husband and the implication that he ‘allowed’ me this getaway seemed to soothe them.

Apparently, women are still judged, and judge themselves, primarily by how well they relate to others. Most women I know expect themselves to be excellent mothers, wives, employees, housekeepers, schedule coordinators, lovers, cooks, daughters, sisters and in-laws, and keep long lists of “To Do” and “To Do Better.”  Bookstores are jammed with tomes proffering advice and counsel on how to improve how we are doing for others. The men I know ask less of relationships and less of themselves in relationships. This, I think, is a good thing.

There is also a cultural compulsion – very American – to stamp loved ones with some identifying mark that tells the world they are “mine, mine, mine.” But, relationships are no less rich when they’re not connected through blood or law. My friend’s relatives are often as important to me as my own. I’ve borrowed other women’s husbands for biking and snowboarding. I’ve traveled Amsterdam with a male friend and without my husband. I’ve nurtured plenty of kids, even without an umbilical cord.

I learned to love my solitude on the day a friend, whose married-with-children and stay-at-home status I’d envied, asked about my weekend. After I had somewhat sheepishly described a few hours of mountain biking followed by even more hours of reading, napping, gardening, writing, a quiet dinner, movie and a long night of sleep, she surprised me by saying, “Wow. I would give anything to have a weekend like that.”

The truth is that I was more lonely in my first marriage than I ever was when single. And the other truth is that there is nothing quite like a real-deal, main-squeeze partner in life. But, this two-person enterprise is also made even better when each individual takes time to reconnect with their inner selves, their deepest desires, their unstated longings, in a way that I think can only happen in extended moments of solitude. I was once asked if I thought I’d be a better partner, having spent so much time single. Yes. Being single taught me to hold more back, enjoy experiences just for myself and their inherent qualities, shared or not. I know this makes me a more contented, calmer, happier person. I’m fortunate I finally found someone who knows it also makes me a better partner.

Laurel Saville is a writer, teacher, communications strategist and author Postmortem, a memoir about the complex life and tragic death of her mother. Saville’s fiction, essays and articles have appeared in the Bennington Review, House Beautiful, Room and many other publications. In addition, she teaches in the MFA program at Western Connecticut State University and at the College of St. Rose in Albany, NY.

 

This article first published on Single Minded Woman