Reflection on Handwriting

If you want to have a really bad day, I recommend reading the sentiments written by others about your father shortly after he died. Because if there is anything worse than your own personal grief and pain, it’s reading about the pain of complete strangers almost two years after the fact.

When I was walking down the hallway and ran into the chaplain, I knew we were going to talk about my dad and I knew that she was finally going to give me that little book that had been displayed in the hospital chapel so that faculty, staff, coworkers, and colleagues could reflect upon what a {insert your preferred adjective here} guy my dad was. And, of course, it was fitting that she present me with this neat little package of highly charged emotions right before the highly charged, emotional event that has come to be known as “Dad’s Dedication”. Needless to say, the notebook sat in my backpack until I passed it off to my mother after the portrait had been unveiled and canapes had been consumed.

It didn’t occur to me until yesterday when I was thinking of every way possible to procrastinate, and further put off writing a rather tedious research paper, that I decided to rifle through my mother’s room to find the notebook. I clicked over to Hulu on my computer and put on “Parenthood” for background distraction and proceeded through the pages. It’s never good to attempt these things with complete silence. If reading the sadness in another person’s handwriting is much more difficult than thinking about your own sadness, then not being able to fully deduce what someone has written because their handwriting is illegible is infernally frustrating.

Wait, what did you say about the time when _____ happened? Is that a ‘k’ or an ‘r’? Reading someone’s thoughts about another person is like an archaeological dig where you discover things that you never ever knew. Things that suddenly put that life into context and unravel mysteries. Couldn’t you have thought to print neatly? When someone dies, you realize just how much you didn’t know about that person. Even when you shared the same living space with them for 24 years, you still weren’t privy to the day-to-day goings-on of another man’s life. And why would you be? We all lead separate lives to some extent. There is no possible way to completely know another human being. I find myself wishing for just another snippet or anecdote that will allow me to better hold on to those memories that are already seeming very distant and murky.

[This is for another entry, but if I could have a superpower, it would be that I could read minds.]

The best part about reading those two dozen or so entries was realizing how devastated other people felt. When someone dies, people offer their condolences because it’s considered polite human behavior. I am still shocked and awe struck by how sincere and genuine other people’s sentiments have been, how emotional they still become when I pass them on campus or in hallways. It’s almost too much to bear. And that’s the worst part. Because if there are other people feeling as ridiculously awful as I feel, then the whole terrible bad dream of prolonged illness and death must certainly be true.

If some people had better handwriting, though, I’d at least be able to thank them for taking the time to share their sadness.

The Slow Lane

I don’t believe in running.

I would sooner take a hammer to my knees and hips.

I believe in walking and slowing down enough to absorb my surroundings.

I don’t believe in racing past the all of the nuances that nature has to offer. I like when the only sounds are the crunch of gravel, the beating of a heart, the sigh of breath. I don’t put headphones in my ears because there is no music better suited to walking in the woods than bird calls and the whoosh of a chipmunk scurrying through the underbrush.

I don’t believe in being fast. Running seems to be about getting it over with, making it from point A to point B without taking any time to notice what is in between. Everyone is running these days. Entering a marathon is de rigueur for anyone wanting to prove they aren’t a couch potato. In social circles, people mention that they’re a “runner” as if it will afford them some sort of clout in a world obsessed with waist sizes.

I don’t believe in going farther faster. I like walking with a dog. Dogs enjoy life and nature and a good walk with such abandon. Everything is cause for celebration, a reason to stop and sniff. There are few things as wonderful as reaching the peak of the trail to look out between the trees to see a view you’ve never contemplated before. In the midst of the dense green, with no one around but me and my yellow lab, I spotted a bird I’d never seen before – a tiny scarlet body, scarlet like the color of blood from an artery, with black wings. A creature you can only notice in the quiet of a forest when you’re walking slowly.

Magic

Adulthood, unlike childhood, holds little magic. Life becomes a steady routine of rules and responsibilities that you rinse and repeat day in and day out. It’s hard to find excitement in the simplicities of the every day the way five  year olds can. When the wind blows away the seeds of a dandelion puff, it seems much less mesmerizing.

Fireworks, though, are one of those things that never cease to amaze me. They are spectacular forms of pyrotechnic genius whose fleeting nature forces you to sit up and pay attention, eyes widening millimeter by millimeter so that you can take in every last ephemeral skyward burst.

Growing Up Is Hard to Do

I had intended to enter a recent essay contest sponsored by Real Simple magazine, but time got away from me and the deadline for entries has passed. The topic for the contest was “When did you first realize you were an adult?”. I’ve got no chance of winning $3,000 now, but I still want to put forth my own thoughts regarding that question.

I used to think that I’d feel like an adult when I left Philadelphia, drove off to New York City with a car full of belongings, and made my new home at Barnard College. I was 18 and, at that time, being an adult really meant one thing to me: being able to do whatever the hell I wanted without needing to solicit my parents’ permission. I pretty much figured that college would provide a plethora of such opportunities. But, like I said, I was 18 and pretty stupid.

In college, I ran into all sorts of obstacles and challenges that had me whipping out my cell phone – sometimes in hysterics, other times in tears – to call home and beg my parents to tell me what I should do. “Should I be pre-med?, What major sounds best? How much vodka constitutes a trip to the ER for stomach pumping?” and so on and so forth.

When being an adult at 18 wasn’t quite working out, I figured that age 21 was the magical number and I’d just bide my time as an adolescent until then. Shortly after turning 21 and consuming a few alcoholic beverages legally, I found myself thousands of miles from Philadelphia and New York City in South Africa. “Now,” I thought “I am truly an adult.” Afterall, what kind of child lives alone in a foreign country where she doesn’t know another soul? Things went swimmingly – I went to classes, learned how to drive a stick-shift on the opposite side of the road, dated a man from Cape Town, and traveled the Garden Route all by myself, all without managing to get myself killed – until I ended up horribly ill for the last 3 months of my stay. Instead of whipping out my cell phone this time, I was trudging down the stairs to my residence hall’s public phone in the wee hours of the South African morning to, yet again, consult my parents on whether or not they thought I had some life-threatening plague. When all was said and done and I was safely returned to the United States, an Infectious Disease specialist diagnosed the tiny parasite that had been causing me – and my parents – months of long distance agony.

By this time, I felt that it was obvious that I was still miles away from being a real, live adult and conceded to wait for college graduation. College graduation was all about entering “the real world”, or so I was told over and over and over again by the long ago graduated, so-called adults I encountered. The short of it is that neither graduating from Barnard, nor entering the “real world” made me feel any more like a capable adult. I felt like a pubescent boy, occupying a body that didn’t really fit. I was all gangly and awkward limbs that I hadn’t yet grown into.

If I still thought that being an adult had anything to do with age, I would say that I was thrown headlong and rather unceremoniously into adulthood at age 24. The exact age I am at this moment – give or take a few minutes, seconds, or whathaveyou – and the age I was when my father died. I realized that I was an adult the exact moment I stepped foot into my father’s hospital room and knew that he was no longer breathing. The initial feeling was like being stranded in a vast ocean only to realize that your life boat has just deflated. I could bail water as furiously as possible, but that still wouldn’t change the fact that I was on my own in a way I had never been before. There was no longer any man in the world who would always put me before himself. It was a slow realization, actually. When I found myself getting through the viewings and the funeral and the burial without breaking into millions of tiny pieces, I began to feel that I had finally grown into my capable, adult self. I was making my own decisions, forging my own life path in school and at work, and being a supportive sister, daughter, and aunt to my family. Despite unimaginable heartbreak, I was still standing on my own two feet and all with my cell phone tucked quietly away in my purse.

Father’s Day Special

This American Life is on NPR (WHYY in Philadelphia) every Sunday at noon. Every week Ira Glass narrates the life story or stories of rather ordinary Americans – people few others would be interested in except for the complicated themes that highlight their lives in ways no one would have previously expected.

This week?

“Go Ask Your Father”, a broadcast about a man and his father and a big “what if…?” What if we could choose our parents? What is truly wonderful about This American Life is that you can palpably feel the characters’ emotions in these stories in ways that tend to make me physically uncomfortable, upset, anxious, or undeniably optimistic and hopeful. This is a lost art – storytelling. This week there is confusion and anger, sadness and suspense, capped off by a DNA test where the man opens an envelope while tape recording himself. The paper crinkles audibly on the tape, the man tentatively reads the results, and, then, there is nothing but static-y radio silence when the news hits him like an atom bomb. I can sense the outward ripples of his emotions as they come over him, one by one, in waves.

If I could have chosen my father, I would have chosen someone who wouldn’t have died when I was 24 years old. It sounds cruel, but it’s one of many truths regarding how I feel about my father. I would have chosen someone exactly like my father, but a younger version of him – someone who would still be around to give me advice, tousle my curls, and call me by secret nicknames even when I am 40.

Corners of the Mind

A mind is a terrible thing to waste so they say. But that’s exactly what happens – the thing just wastes away, bit by bit. Just as you are born, you just as readily begin your inevitable, imperceptible decline. Apparently, the mind isn’t the steel fortress of filing cabinets and reel-to-reel movies that we’ve made it out to be. If you listened to WYNC’s Radio Lab you would know this.

Instead, it’s a rather delicate membrane. It is permeable in some spots, though not in others. As soon as you witness something and lock it away forever as the happiest day of your life, the mugging on 65th street, a college graduation, or summers by the sea, your memory has already gone and fractured the whole thing into an impossible kaleidoscope of nuances. Sight, sound, color, faces, places, and words are continually rearranged every time a memory is recalled. This is why trial witnesses often make or break a case – condemning or setting free individuals based on the possibility of having seen or heard something somewhere some place in time.

Memories are little more than reimagined vignettes that we replay for ourselves behind closed eyes. My own are like little films that are silent in some parts where the dialogue has faded to all but vigorously moving mouths because I’m not sure who said what several years down the road. I never remember the superlatives – the most embarrassing thing, the funniest thing, the scariest thing, the best thing. How does one choose when with a mere flick of the wrist the kaleidoscope shifts the pieces into a completely new pattern? Memory is a razor’s edge of truth with vast emptiness on either side. Overtime, the mental picture degrades and the details become vague generalizations.

My sense of smell or hearing is what brings most of my most favorite memories to the surface. Late summer nights when the cicadas are humming loudly in the dark remind me of the blackness of the South African night, lying awake in the heavy, humid heat. The smell of honeysuckle reminds me of hidden Manhattan gardens, Central Park in the spring, and Savannah, Georgia.

Memories of people are the hardest to hold on to. There are many things about humans that are ephemeral: the sound of their laugh, the smell of their skin, their handwriting…We go to great lengths to preserve moments with photographs and recordings and home movies, but nothing is as sweet as the vision you hold for yourself, even if it’s flawed by the workings of millions of tiny neurons.

Geneaology

Richmond is old. So old that it almost creaks under the weight of modernity as if catching up with the 21st century is just too much to bear after 400-some years.

The life blood of Virginia’s capitol city flowed steadily from the James River – English settlers, slaves, tobacco. The city and it’s inhabitants witnessed revolution, civil strife, deconstruction, and rebirth. Driving through Richmond provides a cheap tour of history in America – unwritten stories are featured in the massive statues of war heroes lining Monument Avenue, the nouveau-riche grandeur of Byrd Park and the West End, the remnants of Jim Crow segregation on the Southside, the long legacy of African American business and entrepreneurship in Jackson Ward, the recollection of bellowing steam engines and canal barges with their industrial cargo in Shockoe Bottom, and the possibility of new era that trails the students at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Richmond is easily one of those places where everyone knows everyone else and their business. Especially on the Southside. The Southside really started out as farmland in an area called Swansboro. My earliest ancestor, Rebecca Howlette, was a slave on the cusp of the Civil War. She was mother to 6 children and keeper of the “old place” for Mr. John Howlette – a wealthy landowner and father of Rebecca’s 6 mulatto children. We all trickled down out of her line like little tributaries from one, strong river – the Moons, the Martins, the Logans, the Howelettes, and so on.

According to Auntie Eva, Daddy came down to Decatur Street talking all proper after being born in New Jersey. They could practically smell the North on him. Auntarie – my grandmother Marie – ran a tight ship, though, and nothing pleased her more than knowing her home and her child were clean as a whistle. She had love enough for 4 or 5 children that she squeezed into her one and only. Grandma Marie stuffed him full of all the hopes and aspirations and dreams that she had had for herself but were dashed by racism and segregation. Her “angel baby” wouldn’t have everything snatched out from under him. She was a force to be reckoned with.

There used to be a grand house at 29th and Hull Steet where he lived with his parents and grandparents. It used to have a lovely porch. Grandma Marie surely thought that cleanliness was next to godliness as she mandated that daddy bathe in the deep metal tub on Saturday evenings. She used the left over water from boiling corn, strewn with husk silk and a large, scratchy bar of Octagon soap. When you were rubbed nice and raw, you were ready for starched Sunday clothes and the minister. Auntie Elaine says that Grandma Marie was a “fly chick” in her day with nary a heair out of place. She wore her thick, silky hair long, refusing anything resembling pickaninny braids. If you had any ounce of respect for yourself, you didn’t dare show your face to the public with a head full of curlers. She always longed for a daughter with whom she could share these lessons.

When Grandma Marie and I first had occasion to meet, I was a squirming infant and she, an old woman whose mind had been turned to swiss cheese by dementia. In pictures, she holds me stiffly, not seeming to understand what I am or from whence I came. Her greyed hair is cut short and leaves little trace of the glamourous woman she had always been. I arrived decades too late to be any sort of dream-come-true for her.

A squat carwash now occupies the lot where my daddy and his cousin used to mow the grass on Sundays for a quarter until they fought so much over splitting the money that Big Pa Howlette – my great grandfather – decided to give each boy 25 cents. The rest of the clan was spread out over 28th/29th Streets and Midlothian Pike – a veritable Howlette beehive. The clapboard shack on the corner of 28th Street and Midlothian Pike still stands with its lonely barber pole adorning one wall. So does one Howlette residence whose green awning bears a large, stenciled “H”.You could walk up any one of the major thoroughfares to the Five and Dime or Miller and Rhoads. On summer evenings, Big Pa would send daddy down to the corner store and pharmacy for nickel smokes.

Over in Newtown South, at Decatur and Pilkington, is the 2nd Baptist Church. Rebecca – being a fierce Christian and community advocate – pushed for the opening of a church that would be closer to her home. A stained glass window near the pulpit quietly honors her memory and contributions. Maybe if I stare through the fragile light filtering through the colored glass long enough, Rebecca just might appear, mother of our generations, like a vision of the Virgin Mary.

The memories, the stories – histories and herstories – triumphs, tragedies, and the germane goings-on of many a person are palapble here. Richmond is the wellspring from which many a black family poured out. Death seems to always be an event that leaves the living with more questions than answers. I’ve lost many years in learning these family intracacies, of knowing people who look like me, of being able to put an answer to the classic life questions: Where did I come from? Who am I?

Sometimes the answer is simple. It’s not wrapped up in all the superficial things we think distinguish us as individuals. You can’t really be defined without the “other”.  So you realize that there has been a place for you all along, among these others that exsited and continue to exist: I am a Howlette; daughter of Bernett Logan, born through a long lineage of capable women – Rebecca, Fannie, and Marie.

Vignettes

My cat, Fiona, likes to do uncomfortable things like squeezing herself into the narrow well at the base of my window. She only does this with one window in the house – the one in my bedroom that receives a blinding amount of sun no matter the time of year. As a kitten, she fit quite neatly into this space that is all of 3 or 4 inches wide. Now her fur spills over  in a soft cascade. She likes to stretch her paws out and push against the jamb where window meets wall. The screen is peppered with single strands of tabby fur that wave like little flags in the breeze.

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The rhythmic drumming in my African dance class is intoxicating in a way that nothing else is. My rather ungraceful body often betrays me with twitches of movement I know I am not initiating – a foot tap, a flutter of the fingers. This seemingly innate need to move to the slapping of hands satisfies something in me that I didn’t even know needed satisfying – like the way fried pickles at the Memphis Taproom satisfy a craving, a hunger you never knew existed – for spicy, sour, salty, savory grease. 

We move our bodies in wide-open, exaggerated movements – skipping, jumping, windmilling arms, and stomping feet. There is no ballet precision in this room; no rigid lines or sharp, bony angles protruding from underneath gauzy pink. Everything is loose and flowing: the drum rhythms connecting every body, dictating our speed, beckoning our hips to offer sensual, uncensored undulations. Everyone is of “traditional build”. That’s what women in African countries might say to describe their wobbly, unrestrained flesh – pendulous breasts, softly rounded hips, pouched stomachs, sturdy things. 

There are no delicacies in the room. These dances are for sturdy people whose movements are wholehearted conveyances of joy or of sorrow.

Worsts

Everyone has a “worst day of their life”. I know this because people like to say it out loud to other people. 

“Dude, I just had the worst day of my life!”

And generally, it isn’t true. It’s just a hyperbolic way of saying…

“I had to work late.” or

“My boss is an ass.” or

“My girlfriend is sleeping with my brother.”

But really, it’s not so bad and they’ll recover and go on to lead a completely normal life.

In healthcare, though, there are a lot of opportunities for worst days. In Nursing, not only are you responsible for how your own day turns out, but how your patient’s day turns out as well. You’ve got to, like a video game character, safely navigate them through a maelstrom of tests, diagnoses, medications, pain, nausea and whathaveyou, to the end of your shift when you can hand them off alive to the next contestant,  go home and hope to forget. 

There are a great many things that can really send you heading face-first towards a worst day.

One of these things is fetal demise. The rather sterile, clinical term for the death of a baby. Sometimes, this isn’t so bad because the baby wasn’t really a baby yet. It was an “embryo” that is quickly and quietly scooped out from the woman’s body like plucking bad fruit off the vine.

It is bad when the baby is a baby – a full term baby that was really living and breathing and had plenty of chance of surviving in the alien world outside the womb. Now you not only have to help a mother navigate the usual clinical things like pain and IV fluids and insensitive doctors, but also the tides of anger, grief, sadness, denial, heartbreaking loss.

You’re probably going to have to request the baby from the morgue. A hospital transporter will bring the child in a wicker basket, like Moses. You will have to take the baby to a room where you will unwrap this unlikely “package” in order to prepare the body so that the mother can see her child. This won’t be any ordinary baby, though. This baby is badly broken – it’s epidermis only existing in small patches over limbs and hands and feet; the body completely red without it’s outermost covering; no hair on the scalp; one ear canal not wholly formed and only a tiny flap where the lobe should have been; the cranium is bulging and distorted on one side; the belly is unusually flaccid and pouch-like. 

Now you have to try and make this Frankensteinian child look somewhat normal for the mother on this, the worst day of her life. And so, as you gingerly clean the body – still so much blood! – and lay a t-shirt over the bare breast and a fresh cap on the head you, too, are having the worst day of your life.

Unexpected

I never really realized how tall my brother is or that he could actually be comforting until he took my 5 ft. mother in his arms yesterday to keep her from completely dissolving in the sadness that overtook her.

Maybe he’s not such a little brother afterall.

It is difficult to adjust to this new role – that of being caretakers for the ones who took care of us.