When I lived in Kansas City, I was single.

This meant that I spent a great deal of my energy and mind space being frustrated and unhappy about my “alone”ness.

Like most young women (and men too, I guess), I really wanted to find someone special to connect with, to be with, so long as we both shall live.

And I did! YAY!

But before that time, I spent many Christmas times alone. Not the actual holiday itself, because on the that day I would head back to my parents’ house and hang out there.

But that time from Thanksgiving and the Plaza Lighting Ceremony to Christmas Eve … that was spent pretty much on my own.

This week, I’ve been nostalgic for Kansas City. I have so many great friends there. This is how I am remembering that time.

Even though I was “alone,” — a girl on her own in the big city — I had a family I created from people I met who loved me even though I wasn’t related to them at all.

Now that I have kids around here, I have lots and lots of things on my To Do List for this time of the years. LOTS.

So it is nice to reflect now and then on the “alone” days. I guess some days I even pine for them. But I also try to remind myself to not make them seem more wonderful than they actually were. Because I know I was pretty lonely back then too.

Now, I just want to remember them… the good, the sad, the beautiful.

The lights, the porches, the roommates, the parties, family visiting, the demanding customers I waited on, the smoky bars, the uncommitted men, and the house with two cats.

But most of all, the friends, the hugs, and the laughing.

–

This post is part of my BIG QUESTION December series “If Only in My Dreams.”

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I’ve discovered that my friend Colleen Bradford Krantz and her colleague, Paul Kakert (who is from my hometown!) have had their documentary film, Train to Nowhere, nominated for a regional Emmy.

I’m so proud of them, but not really for the recognition from the awards people. More than that, I am proud of Colleen and Paul for all the hard work they did to to tell the story of these forgotten immigrants.

I think sometimes it is easy to imagine dead things as just that — things. As if somehow, the moment something dies, all its history and humanity goes with it.

Today, Isaiah asked me:

“Mom when we die, do our bodies explode?”

I said: “No, our bodies decompose. That’s like what happens to the food bits we put in the compost.”

“So, we rot?” he asked, not particularly freaked out.

“Yes, kind of. Our bodies break down and turn to back to dirt, like the food in the compost does,” I said. “But the important part of us, our soul, that’s the REAL us. It isn’t in our bodies. It leaves our body when we die.”

“What happens to that?”

I explained to him that we don’t really know. I gave him the short list of  possibilities: Heaven, reincarnation, and just stopping.

“I choose reincarnation. I’d like to be a bear or something,” he said. “Or a baby again.”

What was inside the railcar was just the explosion of those 11 lives. It was just the thing we see after death.

What was missing was all stories of the human lives that reminded us they were not just things, but people.

The soul is a string of memories, in some ways, a compilation of the thousand kindnesses we do, the funny things we say to our parents when we were 6. Our quirks and our passionate entanglements.

Decomposed immigrant skeletons in a rail car once knew mighty love too.

Colleen and Paul did good work — in the book and the film — reminding us that all the little tragedies that flash by us in the news and in life are their own kind of tragedy … because of the beautiful humanity they hold within them. Millions of stories heaving to be heard.

Each is a story holding all the dreams and heartbeats of someone.

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I-74
Across the Mississippi–
That Familiar vein through
My life I
Cross this morning east.
Your still flatness hides
Lonely strong
Currents
Pulling me back.

Day 9, A River of Stones

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Into the northwest
On a thick summer
Evening come
Leaden skies
Like a bad dream.

Day 5, The River of Stones.

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… layered and wilting
into golden reds–
You put Disney
Princess blush
To shame

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Or, A Tribute to My Bossy Mom

My sibs and I basically had to be projectile puking or have an arm falling off in order to stay home from school when we were kids.

Mom’s philosophy on life? Get on with it. Impatient and ready-to-go NOW, Mom was at the heel, pumping us with her rhetoric even as little kids:

Let’s go! Move it. Step it up!

My Mom DID, in fact, bake apple pies from time to time. She even had irises growing near the garage in the backyard. But it’s for sure she was not the “apron and apple pie” sort of mom that we all love to see in commercial stereotypes.

No… she was strong, independent, outspoken, bossy, and a great teacher. Unlike me, she didn’t ever seemed to be plagued with self-doubt (though I suppose she was). She was kind, but tended to be unapologetic about the kind of person she was.

This translated into her living a modern-woman sort of life. She adored my Dad, but she expected him to adore her too, just the way she was.

I know my Mom and Dad had some tough times while we were growing up… now that I am a mother, I see how much the kids can get in the way of even a solid marriage. I am thrilled every time I hear my mom say: “Your dad is so wonderful.”

This another part of her wonderful qualities: even though my Dad is more sensitive, more likely to complain about his ailments, more like to feel bummed, she observes that that is part of his true nature and loves him just the way he is.

I mean, sure, her first instinct would be to say: “Oh, c’mon, Howard. You’re fine!” But it is sure she will love him and understand him — and by extension, her kids — after all.

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I haven’t been posting as frequently lately.

I don’t consider this writer’s block, though I once did.

This is because I have been thinking.

A Little Story

Once I sign up for a pottery class. My friend, Rita, forced me. She berated me until I went.

Fine, I said. I am not writing anyway. Might as well make a fool of myself with clay.

Larry the teacher made us start with pinch pots. Make a ball, then shape it into a bowl. Old school, play-doh kinda stuff.

It didn’t matter how much I whined about wanting to get started on the wheel. I had to sit and do my pinch pots.

Then we had to master building a box.

Then, after that, we had to work with coils.

The class was mixed levels — one of those amazing Communiversity courses where the woman across from me chatted while she sculpted lilies from black clay.

Nothing happened in my brain while I coiled and pinched.

My thinking bone rested.

The psychic across the table (she worked for the police department from time to time) even said so. She glazed her plate and listened to my mutterings, enough.

“You aren’t blocked,” she said. “You are absorbing.”

I made it to the wheel, eventually. I threw a beautiful bowl and glazed it Celedon green.

Then, after awhile, I looked around in writing again.

I’ve stopped to think, now and then.

But I have never been “blocked” again.

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Colin and I met when we both lived in Kansas City. This June we will have lived away from Kansas City for 7 years.

We left because we felt the call of life all its opportunities. We wanted to launch our life on a raft of experience we could build together.

On Understanding Risk

I am not sure if we knew this definitively when we got together, but this attitude towards life was essential to what holds Colin and I together. Even though our some of our interests and our careers are different, we have a parallel vision of life.

Life is risk. The human frame takes on Mother Nature at every turn. Everyday we wake up, we don’t have the answers to what is to come. We can’t save ourselves from certain death by any means!

If we want to delude ourselves into thinking “we know” or we are “safe,” well that is a choice to make.

As for Colin and me, we prefer to ride risk, love it, and find what is there for us.

Colin lived that way before he met me. It was the sort of life that made him quite happy to ride his bike from North Vancouver to UBC everyday. And back. It was the sort of mindset that makes him love skiing and rock climbing.

I lived that way before I met him. I quit my stable job as a TV news director to work freelance. I took internships at Disney World, and I was a live-in volunteer at a soup kitchen and halfway house when I was 19.

It was natural that we continued our lives in that way. So even though we both had dozens of friends and a happy life in Kansas City, we chose to move on.  We felt life and all its risky expectations calling again to test the boundaries of our joy. We sold it all and moved to London.

In the seven years since we got married and moved away, our life has been a domestic roller coaster. On the outside, it looks quite suburban and blase.  We even have white pickets and a minivan. But our life of risk rolls on in magnificent tumult as we say “yes” to the unexpected twists and turns of “normality.”

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At least three times since I have been back to visit my parents, I have thought:

“It’s nice to be home.”

Then I remembered that I haven’t lived here since 20 years, half my life.

Home comes when I feel my heart
Drop its weight in relief
At the sight of flat land running
Forever towards a early storm.

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Want to torture me? Ask me who my favorite AUTHOR is. Or my favorite film. AAHHH! It’s really like asking the old woman who lived in the shoe which is her favorite child. I mean, can she even remember all of them?

But I do have a poem that I love and come back to time and again. Ironically, I can never remember the name. The author said an alternative title suggested by his wife is “The Lowly.”

Well, I’ve decided to put it here, so that I could always find it when I am looking for it.

Oh and I first heard this poem from a guy named Hampton Stevens. Some of my KC friends might remember him. He was a column writer for the Pitch, then moved on to New York City and edited a website for awhile. After that I lost track of him (we were only acquaintances so I haven’t even googled him), but he was the one who read me this poem, probably a dozen or more years ago, at The Cup and Saucer in the River Market (now closed).

Thanks Hampton.

Still

By A.R. Ammons

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I’ll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled through transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!

From The Selected Poems: 1951-1977, Expanded Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1986 by A. R. Ammons. You can listen to the author reading it here.

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