Teaching and the Butterfly Effect

Chaos Theory tells us that the movement of a butterfly's wings can affect weather patterns on the other side of the world.  Henry Adams offered similar idea when he said that "teachers affect eternity; they can never tell where their influence ends."

Here's a potent example that happened, poignantly, just a few weeks before I leave teaching:

Kirubel and me

First:  A woman I met twenty years ago in a poetry class--Carmen Gimenez Smith--was coming to our campus as a visiting writer.

As so:  I taught her memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, in which Carmen explores her mother's interior life by writing her mother's imaginary journal entries.

And then:  I assigned my students to write three journal entries as though they were written by one of their parents.

And then:  When my student Kirubel started to write from her father's point of view, she realized that she knew his stories, but not his feelings.

And so:  She sat down with her father to talk about his rough childhood in Ethiopia with a cruel step-mother.

As he talked:  He began to illuminate his feelings more keenly.  While he could not excuse his step-mother's abuse, he realized she had been so young--only 19--when she became his step-mother.  And in short order she gave birth to eight more children.  As he spoke, he began to feel like he wanted to call his mother who was now old and ill.  He hadn't talked to her in years.

As so:  He called her. 

And:  Across continents, they talked for a long time.  Son told Mother how he felt.  Mother told son she'd always wanted to ask for forgiveness but didn't know how.

Later:  Kirubel's father told her he felt lighter, freer.  He was glad that he and his mother had talked about something that had been weighing on them both all these years.

And three days later:  His mother died.

And so:  The butterfly flapped its wings in a poetry class.  Twenty years later--through the empathic gift of stories--a daughter has connected more deeply to her father.  And her father can rest knowing there is nothing left unsaid.

Memories, Cesar and Poets n Writers

Laurie, an old family friend, sent us this. She's on the left. My sister Ann (who is the taller child, next to me, the shorter one) always thought Laurie was cool. And now here we have a photo to prove it. Also pictured are my parents.

Thanks to those of you who commented on my blog and emailed me personally about the situation with my mom. I know I'm not alone. Your reaching out means a lot.

In preparation for the experience of moving her tomorrow, I went on a 25-mile bike ride today. Cesar Millan's tactics with dogs work with people, too--well, they do with me. If I exercise hard, I'm much more centered and at peace the rest of the day. I also enjoy being "calm assertive" in my life.

(An aside to commenters: I know Millan is controversial, but I can't help loving the guy.)

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If you want to read a profile of one of your favorite contemporary writers, it might be here.

Poets & Writers magazine and website is a great resource for lots of other things too, including current calls for submissions. I like subscribing to the magazine, but most of the what is in the magazine is available for free online.

I just noticed they have an interview with Ellen Bass, whom I featured on a past Poetry Monday.

Yes, I Will Take You

"Hey Mom, do you want to eat in the dining room?"
"No, there are a bunch of old people in there."

Words from my 74-year-old mom, who is now in a rehab facility for about a week or so for rest and physical therapy. She'll be released when she is less of a fall risk.

Who can blame her for not wanting to identify as an "old person." Up until my father died in March, she was going to the gym, writing articles and books, attending a weekly writing group, making dinner every night, tending to my father's varied and many needs, and being active in a variety of ways in the community.

After he died she had two successive falls, and suddenly she has lost her husband, her home, her health, her independence.

I'm whirling from it all. I know my sisters are. My mom? I can barely imagine.

Grief? Loss? What are the right words?

My friend Gabriele Rico sent me the perfect Ellen Bass poem, with the perfect words. I'd read it several times before in Mules of Love, and re-reading it re-reminds me that what my mom and my family are enduring right now is ... well ... the human condition.

Here's the poem:

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs.
When grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, how can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you,
I will love you, again.

Giving Mom a Bath

(from www.simplytom.com)

As I helped her ease down to the stool in the shower, gingerly careful of her broken shoulder, and lathered her hair with minty shampoo and ran a soapy washcloth across her back...

I thought about all the times she bathed me. She'd sit on the toilet lid as I splashed around with with my washcloth and yellow squeaky duckie.

I thought about how when I was growing up she wrote out a dinner menu and stuck it with a magnet to the side of the fridge. Monday, Meatloaf, string beans, ice cream. Tuesday, Baked Chicken, potatoes and salad, cookies. There were always vegetables and dessert. She shopped every Sunday to buy all the ingredients needed for the week because in addition to raising three kids and a husband (!) she worked as a school nurse.

I thought about how she used to hang all the clothes that needed ironing in a closet and then once a week fold out the ironing board, heat up the iron, and make all our clothes presentable.

I thought about how she volunteered as a nurse at a camp summer after summer so my sister and I could attend a ritzy camp for free. For her, it was a summer of dispensing medications and tending to kids with stomach aches. For us, it was a summer of horseback riding, waterskiing, hiking, archery, and campfires.

I thought about how she used to sit on my bed when I was cozy in my pajamas. She'd be holding a cellophane-covered book we'd gotten from our weekly visit to the library. I'd read one page and she'd read the next, and she'd let me turn the pages.

I thought about how she once told me, "Don't ever worry about my feelings or what I think when you're writing. Write whatever you want." She was telling me to feel free to be myself as a writer and a person.

I thought about how, after 48 years of marriage, she lost her husband--my father--last month. And then a week later she fell and broke her shoulder. And I thought about how no matter what I do now to help her make it through, I will never be able to repay her.

Maybe Dad's Finding Ways to Say Hi?

Example #1: The Phone Rings
The day after my father died, my mom and I were sorting out some things in the kitchen, and I came across a piece of paper written by my father's hand. It said "Bob Newman"--a name unfamiliar to me--and a phone number. I held it up and was just about to ask my mom if this was something to keep, when the phone rang, interrupting me.

I picked it up. The person on the other end said, "Hi, is Bob Newman there?"

I looked down at the piece of paper in my hand, eyeing my father's familiar scrawl. "Bob Newman" it said in Dad's loopy blue ink. And now someone on the other end of the phone was asking for that very name, at the very moment I was about to ask my mom who Bob Newman was.

"You're not going to believe this," I said, "but I'm holding a piece of paper in my hand with the name Bob Newman on it. Who is this?"

"This is Jim," said the male voice. "I'm in Bob's poker group."

"My dad, Don Evans, was in a poker group."

"Yes, that's the same group," he said.

"You called his home."

"Don Evans? Your father? Oh, I'm so sorry. I just heard he passed away."

I asked him what number he was calling. He said the number. It turns out that my father's number was accidentally listed as Bob Newman's on the Poker Group phone sheet. I just can't get over the fact that at the very instant I was holding a piece of paper with Bob Newman's phone number written in my father's handwriting that the phone would ring, with someone asking for Bob Newman.

Example #2: Goulash
After the funeral, when Annie and I were back home, our friends Lisa and Marissa asked if they could come by and bring us dinner. A very sweet, compassionate gesture given all we'd been going through. Besides, we love to hang out with them and talk about life. They came through the door carrying a wonderful-smelling pot of something and bags of other items.

"Wow, smells great!" I said. "What's for dinner?"

"Hungarian goulash," Lisa said.

"Did you know my dad was Hungarian?"

Lisa and Marissa looked at me. "We had no idea."

And so...
...there you go. Hi Dad. I miss you.

Post-Father Life

I'm starting a new blog in the midst of total life change. I'm now in my post-father life. My father died on St. Patrick's Day. I was with him and my mom when he died at his home, in his bed, in the middle of the night. I suppose I have a kind of post-traumatic stress or shock right now. It's hard to focus, to think, to be in my skin.

My father was quite ill for a long time. But he was so obstinately in love with being alive that I never thought he'd really let go. Up until his last day he was living big.

I miss him like you wouldn't believe.

Or maybe you would.

I know most people have gone through deep loss.

Welcome to age 44, I hear the universe saying to me.

Here's a piece I wrote about my dad, with some pictures:

http://kateevans.drumtable.com/My_Father__a_Tevye_at_Heart

May Sarton once said she never truly felt free until her parents died. I feel free in the way an unanchored boat or a helium balloon let go feels free: wavering, lost, floating with no direction, no path.