Notes from an Urban Cabin #20 | The ambassador of move; M.F.K. Fisher being salty; the liturgy of literary readings
Last Saturday morning, I looked out my window at breakfast and saw people in the street, runners and walkers in the annual community 5K run and 1-mile walk sponsored by the local Y. As people jogged or walked up the street toward the finish line, a little boy ran in circles.
They were purposeful circles, more like ovals. He ran through the intersection, curved to the right, ran around a blue bench on the sidewalk, then came back downstream. Sometimes he stopped, near a woman standing on the corner who was probably his grandmother, and studied the approaching trotters and shufflers. He would clap and call encouragement to the people approaching him. Then he'd zoom toward someone, or several someones, and escort them through the intersection.
Three women were walking along with the race tote bags strung over their backs. He ran up to them, said something, then turned and started running, looking over his shoulder, slowing down a little to let them almost catch up. One woman started jogging, then another, then all three. He did a little skip-hop and ran with them to his own finish line around that blue bench.
He paused back at his spectator post. Unlike the other spectators, including his dignified grandma, the kid couldn't stop moving. He danced sometimes, in the exuberant natural un-selfconscious way of small children, who need no music to bounce to a beat.
Then he spotted someone else he thought needed encouragement: a boy a little smaller than himself, of a different race, walking with his mother.
The ambassador of move ran up to the boy, squatted a little with his hands on his knees, cocked his head, looked that kid in the face and spoke to him with a grin I could see even from my top-floor window. He trotted backwards, talking to the little boy. Then he turned and ran. Forward. Tight circle back. Repeat. Eventually the walking boy started jogging with him.
Then the younger kid felt it, the freedom, the joy, the airborne-lightness-of-being of running. He took off and they zoomed through the intersection together. When the first kid peeled off around his bench, the other kid followed him, and Mom had to call him back to the route. He ran a few yards ahead of her, jogged in place until she caught up, and sprinted onward.
That self-appointed grand marshal of the fun run didn't know it, but he was encouraging a stationary woman six stories above him too.
In other news this week:
1. The mouse body count got up to 5, but the entry points seem to have been successfully sealed.
2. I've been reading Sister Age by M.F.K. Fisher. I bought the book (hardback, first edition) years ago at a used bookstore. I almost gave it as a gift last weekend to a friend on her 65th birthday, but then I decided I'd better read it to make sure. I've hung onto it, partly because I didn't think it was "a good fit at this time," as we say, but also partly because, honestly, I want to keep savoring it myself for a while.
It's a mix of nonfiction and fiction, though there's nothing in the table of contents or at the beginning of each piece to signify which it is. Would such a book be published today? Would it have been published then if it hadn't been her? I don't know.
She's such a good writer, partly because of the richness of memory, partly because she's such a stylish and honest thinker. I know different things stand out to us depending on the season in which we're reading. Here's one thing that stands out to me as I read it at this point in my own middle age: the way she writes about tears. So far someone cries in nearly every essay or story, and it's different every time.
She briefly mentions it in the introduction, then begins there in the first essay, "Moment of Wisdom":
Tears do come occasionally into one's eyes, and they are more often than not a good thing. At least they are salty and, no matter what invisible wound they seep from, they purge and seal the tissues. But when they roll out and down the cheeks it is a different thing, and more amazing to one unaccustomed to such an outward and visible sign of an inward cleansing. Quick tears can sting and tease the eyeballs and their lids into suffusion and a new clarity. The brimming and, perhaps fortunately, rarer kind, however, leaves things pale and thinned out, so that even a gross face takes on a porcelain-like quality, and in my own case there is a sensation of great fragility or weariness of the bones and spirit.
I have had the experience of such tears very few times. Perhaps it is a good idea to mention one or two of them, if for no other reason than to remind myself that such a pure moment may never come again.
There are certain qualities we love in people, no matter whom they appear in. One thing I love in some of the people I love is the fact that they are not alarmed, surprised, ruffled, discomfited when someone cries in their presence.
3. I went to a reading the other night. Julia Kasdorf (poetry) and Ira Sukrungrang (poetry, fiction, nonfiction) read in a barn on Eden Hall Farm, the campus of Chatham University's Falk School of Sustainability & Environment. The reading was one of three faculty readings in Chatham's Summer Community of Writers, a 10-day writing workshop/retreat that coincides with Chatham's MFA program's summer residency. Luckily, the readings are open to the public. (I found out about it from the events calendar of Littsburgh.com, an online site celebrating literary Pittsburgh.)
It had been a while since I'd been to this kind of reading, and it was quietly exhilarating. It made me remember the younger self decades ago just starting her own MFA program, surrounded by the hopeful earnest confidence of mostly young people so alive with their immersion in writing. In fact — and I realize the barn setting at sunset may have had something to do with it — it felt a little like visiting a church I used to go to, the way we recognize in a dream somewhere we've never been in reality. There is a liturgical progression to a reading, and that was part of it. It's hard to put my finger on. But it felt a little like beginning to believe in something again.
I said that little street ambassador encouraged me. Now that I think of it, so did the younger kid who had to be entreated into running. All it took (at least this is how it looked from up here) was two things.
First, the question, the invitation, whether explicit in words or implicit in that entreating stance: Why aren't you running? Why not move, kid?
Second, the momentum from realization of possibility to acceptance to action: This is an option? Am I allowed? Why not? Am I the only one stopping me?
I'll try it.
I like it.
I'll keep going.