Balance and Rest

BACK IN THE OLD DAYS, when women feathered their hair back Farrah-style and wore pants so tight at the waist no one dared grow a muffin top, I had a shy student named Michael who sat smack in the first row but spoke almost not at all. I had his sister in a second class and his brother in a third. There were six kids in his family and didn’t their mom come to every Parents Night to see how they were doing.The years passed as years do and in time this shy lad moved out of state, becoming in time a husband and a father, a bookseller and librarian, even as he kept on writing the same wonderful stories and poems he was writing when he was 16 and had me as his English teacher.Happily, we have kept in enough touch over time so that he one day showed some of my writing to that mother of his. She and I wrote each quite frequently for a while and someplace in there she sent me a thick packet of verse by the person she called her favorite poet.The poet's name: Louise Guyol Owen, a woman born in 1901 who graduated from Smith College in 1923 and subsequently sold her witty and insightful verse to publications ranging from The Saturday Evening Post to The Mercury, from The Ladies Home Journal to The Christian Science Monitor.I mention all this because just last night, after a spare solo supper, I decided to do a bit of cleaning and came upon this very packet of poems at the bottom of a drawer I have not looked in for almost a decade.Alone in my bed at midnight, I read every one again, while the wind whistled and moaned outside.The poem below seems to be about a cat, but it speaks to us humans too.I can tell you it sure speaks to me.It's called "Still the Hunter Follows" and it goes like this:

Be lazy, mind; be lazy for an hour. Lie by the fire, and stretch, and close your eyes,

Untense the fine-drawn nerves; be tired, be wise;

Sheathe the small swords that give your paw its power.

Cease your nocturnal wailing a the moon –

Forget the picket fence’s dangerous height –

Idle a little, while you can, tonight;

This opiate moment will be gone too soon.

The red flames flicker. Restless and unrested,

Your head lifts up; your yellow eyes grow narrow…

Long enough respite for the nested sparrow,

For mouse and mole to scurry unmolested!

Steal out, resume your hunt, pursue forever

Your hurrying prey, but never hope to find

Satiety; and satisfaction never –

Never for the hungry predatory mind.

This weekend I would very much like to tell my own mind to be lazy and, for a little while anyway, reclaim some sense of balance.Maybe that former student will see his mother's favorite poet here and bring this to her, wherever she may be. I will hope for that, even as I hope that we might all use these two days to once again feel newly balanced, and nicely re-aligned.

The Past is Our True Home Town

Anytown High School here - sigh. Immediately after I wrote yesterday’s piece about an old Atlantic City-style beach town I was  invited to join a Facebook page called "I Remember Revere When…”  I don’t in fact "remember Revere when" but I’m glad for all the people who do, as I see them happily writing about their bikes and their hangouts and the brightly striped tube socks of the era.Last Sunday I spent the better part of an hour on a page called “You Know Your from Lowell when…” and yeah sure it bothers me that whoever put up this page misspelled the short form for "you are" but it seems mean to point that out, the site being full of so many tender memories.Turns out I'm very nostalgic about the place where I came of age and have been since long before Mark Wahlberg made The Fighter there. Before Ricky Gervais and the dimpled Jennifer Garner filmed The Invention of Lying on its streets too. I wrote about both films, one at the end of December of 2010 and one nearer to that month's start.  Lowell became my home when I was 9 and I lived there until the summer after freshman year in college when a prescription for diet pills so altered my judgment that I was walking eight miles to my job every day, madly cleaning the house when I got home at night, and generally living like a combination over-achieving social worker/nun and a speed freak. (I swear all the doctors who gave those pills out to people should have been barred from practicing medicine.)In early adulthood I probably thought the place hadn't affected me much but it did. Of course it did, though in a graduating class of 988 kids I really knew my neighborhood pals and the other drama-and-chorus nerds like myself.  We sigh looking back at the fashions of our young years.Whether it was the Princess Grace-style French twist or feathered-back Farrah-style bangs or that signature 80s  look like Jennifer Beals had in Flashdance when her hair rose like a living Burger King crown from the top of the head.Poodle skirts, saddle shoes, minis, maxis, the images of a hundred styles and ways to be all live in our minds. All are waiting for us, held and kept safe for us in the memories of the ones we are moving through time with. It's wonderful isn't it?