Fade to Quiet

When a friend asked me while we dined on salads what I thought of the busking situation in Asheville, I almost choked on my salad.  "We have a busking situation?" He told me he'd seen the article in the New York Times . Again: almost choking, "New York Times is writing about buskers in Asheville?" I love this so much for so many reasons. The fact that we are in the 9th most food insecure city in America, the fact that people can walk around this town and not know we have a large African-American population scuttled away on the outskirts as a result of demolishing 2000 homes in the city center, the fact that we don't have affordable housing in town, all this aside: we make the Times for our "busking situation." This is why I love Asheville. This is why you really should move here: we have a busking situation. We have music everywhere. We have music outside t-shirt shops that print quotes by great songwriters on their organic cotton and...

Remember in elementary school when after an in-class exercise was completed the teacher just said, "Now you can have free-time?" Maybe it was just three minutes, but the idea of it felt like a patch of blue sky through a firmament of cloud. During free-time, I could doodle without being told not to. I could lay my head on my folded hands on my desk, I could talk with my best friend quietly in our third row seats. My daughter mentioned free-time to me yesterday. Having completed a two-hour standardized test in less than one she had two hours of free-time in which to de-standardize. Disallowed markers for drawing, she was permitted a book, which she was happy to have some quiet time read. She also folded her blue sweatshirt on her desk and took a little nap. "It was nice to have some free-time." I had forgotten about free-time. I have had unscheduled time. Plenty of it. As a university professor my classroom time is far outweighed by what has become nearly c...

. . . Three days a week we did this. I did it for a whole semester until one day I didn’t wake up and meet the van outside. I let it just go the way I let the balloon rope go once the burner had filled the silk. I never gave any of the team my phone number. Arthur had no idea which dorm was mine. I wish I could say it was because I didn’t need it anymore. I did need it more than ever. Everyone needs it--those early mornings of blackness, that uplift of seeing heat raise something so enormous simply by being itself up into the sky. There was a “move” I learned about in one of the very few conversations I had with my balloon people. We parked the van with a view of the balloon just as it lowered toward the earth. Normally, when we saw it descend, we tumbled out and started the most violent 500 meter dash over thorn bushes and yucca and pyrocanthus and every other miserable Florida plant that Florida produces to seize the ropes the Captain tossed down to us and which we ...

It's been a while since I've written about deafness. When I started this blog some seven years ago or something, that's what it was about. In the in-between years, I've gathered my life up and moved it into a new life, a quieter one. Things about deafness that frightened me then don't anymore: I can sit through dinner parties and not get much of the conversation and still honestly say I had a wonderful time. I have good hearing aids that let me hear my students read their work. I can take them out at the end of the day and have a very quiet world. For most situations I have accepted deafness into my life. That is. Until I have a horrible exchange with a young woman working at the cinema over the quality and performance of assistive listening devices after watching Cinderella. Cinderella keeps saying "have courage and be kind and all will be well." But I found myself today in a situation where I understood why "the disabled" are grouped...

“Where there is sorrow, there I dwell. Where there is grief in the world, love has its dwelling.”  ― Mir Sayyid Manjhan Shattari Rajgiri,  Madhumalati: An Indian Sufi Romance The world is frightened tonight of the last thing it said. My daughter tries on her first Valentine’s dress. When asked what color it is she said, “It’s the color of the galaxy.” (We found the jewelry to match on the moon.) I read tonight about the Muslim man who when the extremists took over the kosher grocery store in Paris hid the Jews he could in a freezer and turned out the light. The largest part yet of a fallen airplane was found in the sea, having flown where it wasn’t supposed to. The tree is still up. Each year I am more reluctant to take it down. This is not a religious statement but a statement on the art my daughter has made and which decorates all the branches. Each year I want to hold her closer than the last. Each year I let her go into the world a little bit...

" . . . dismiss whatever insults your own soul"                                                --Walt Whitman I often hear people mention that "a lot of doctors are poets." The list begins confidently with William Carlos Williams. It often ends there. My interest in Narrative Medicine moves from another list, the list of doctors who never wrote poems. At the top of this list is my father, an endocrinologist, a Fellow of The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. My father is a brilliant physician. His patients adore him. Though he is retired a decade now, his patients friend me on Facebook to ask me how he is feeling.  We don't often ask how doctors are feeling. More often we accuse them of not feeling . While my father is in assisted living in Sedona, we talk often about Narrative Medicine, me as the poet, he as the doctor. To summarily arc his career:...

I arrived in Denver late at night, having flown across the U.S. losing hours along the way. Stella was four months. Her father and I had just ended it. I’d flown to Denver to spend Thanksgiving with my best high school friend, Audrey. Audrey’d said she’d leave the key under a flower pot on the front porch and would come back from Boulder in the morning, where she was presenting a paper on Kerouac. There was a snowstorm. She didn’t want to drive. The key, though, froze into the ice that gathers between the holes at the bottom of a flower pot so when I knelt (with my baby in a Snuggie inside my corduroy coat) to pick it up and feel around on the cold wood for the metal key I didn’t feel anything. I checked the flower pots on the steps and saw one at the far end of the front porch. When I lifted each of these, I moved my hand around on the snow planning to find that metal shape. I removed my gloves and felt the snow gathered under each one burn my fingertips. I carried...

In thinking about patient narratives in healthcare, I think of my father's patient who had played the munchkin who hands Dorothy flowers in Wizard of Oz. One of the few munchkins with speaking lines, he was also one of the few of my father's thousands of patients whose story flowed over into my life. I think of the countless others, the faces in the shadowy rooms he visited "on rounds," (I sometimes went with him when I went to the hospital instead of walking home.) If I think of hospitals as libraries of human stories, with some of the books with spines broken open and others barely browsed, then Mr. Cucksey was fully made into his own feature film. He was practically a part of our family, a mysterious circus and movie star uncle,  though I only met him once. Mr. Cucksey lived in a community for the retired performers in Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota, Florida. His mobile home was connected by a small bridge with a bell on it to his wi...

The other day I was listening to my playlist.  Vivaldi's Four Seasons came on and every note sounded so flat that if it weren't for the rhythm I wouldn't have known what it was. I couldn't over-ride it with imagination. I couldn't correct it by adjusting my hearing aids. This means I have to go back to the audiologist and get my ears tested in the dark little booth. Clinically, it means my hearing has declined considerably. Aesthetically, it means I have lost Vivaldi. I have been listening to Vivaldi all my life. I know the Quattro Stagioni like I know the lullabies my grandmother sang to me and which I have sung to my daughter. I know them like I know Beatles songs. Hearing aids are digital denial. They delay the actuality of deafness. Mine are excellent, and when I get them adjusted, I will hear Vivaldi again and enjoy that illusion that I can hear. However, here at the middle moment between technological cover-up and neurological over-ride, my degenerati...

Back in the 90s I taught at the Juvenile Evaluation Center out in Black Mountain. My students were teenagers locked up for anything ranging from possession of marijuana to sexual assault to assault with a deadly weapon. All my students were working on a GED so they could get out before they turned 18. All had committed their crimes while high. All were in drug programs at the center--all in recovery and trying to see a new life. It is illegal for me to write their names, but trust me when I say I know their names, and I know their stories, and I know what they dreamed of getting for Christmas. I wheeled a piano out of a broom closet and played music on it while they did math. Some of them learned by ear and played for the others. I taught them equally, and I cheered them on. Next to my desk I had a yellow chair where any student could choose to sit if they needed to "chill out" and not be bothered or asked any questions. It was a place of sanctuary within an otherwise...

As I begin a new school year, I think of the teacher who taught me how to teach. Marianne Weaver. The entire educational universe would be a different place if everyone could learn how to teach from Marianne Weaver. In every subject. In every institution. At every grade level. Marianne Weaver is that excellent a teacher. I first stepped into Marianne's Muscle Pump class at the YMCA a year after I gave birth. I had never lifted weights before in my life, having gone the yoga road through my twenties and early thirties but now suddenly completely uninterested in yoga. I wanted something else. Something tougher. Something that didn't ask me to develop an inner life. If there's anything I'd had enough of in that first year of motherhood, it was interiority, connection with my soul. I wanted pure, unadulterated body. When I walked past Marianne's class and heard "Modern English" singing "I'll Stop the World and Melt with You" over a roo...

I saw Dead Poets Society in a theater in Piccadilly Circus in 1989. At the time I was a junior in college, studying theater, literature, and philosophy. My walks to class included passing by the former homes of T.S. Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Sarah Bernhardt, mirroring my own passions, my own indecisiveness of what I should focus upon. I was acting in a play in a small South Kensington theater, but I was waking up at 3 am with a head full of poems that I'd crawl out my window and write by the streetlamps along Queens Gate Terrace, careful not to wake my room-mates.  One evening after rehearsal, my director and fellow castmates decided to venture into town to watch a movie. I hadn't ever asked myself what poetry was or considered it to be something of a great gift. I had written it forever and belonged to it and loved it as one feels love for something always there yet forever surprising. But I walked out of the movie with a very clear view of what I would devote m...

As Thomas Wolfe becomes increasingly famous, again, and as Asheville rises with the Wolfean tide, again, here are some responses to the question, "Have you read Wolfe?" that won't make you sound like an idiot, even if you don't read Wolfe. The key here is to avoid saying, "His sentences are too long." 10. The Planned Engagement: Like a lot of people of my generation, I haven't come across much Wolfe. I plan to pick up a copy of the short stories. Do you have a favorite? 9. The Deflection: Oh, you like Wolfe! You can tour his house here! It's just over there on Market Street. You can also stand in his shoes. They've been bronzed! 8. The Shut Down: I have indeed! I've read every word, and the journals, and the letters, as well as multiple published versions of Look Homeward, Angel. I found O Lost to be much more satsifying and loved reading the two side by side, highlighting the altered passages. My dream is to spend a summer thumbi...

THE RISE OF VALERIE MACON (to the tune of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald") The legend lives on from the Catawba on down, Of the poet named laureate by McCrory, Folks said O Brother. No one had heard of her, Not a song, a poem, or story. Of the governor and crew, none of them knew Anyone reads this weird stuff they called poetry. The post it was said was every bit as good as dead, And he appointed a woman named Valerie. (slide guitar in mournful sea chanty moan of Lake Superior) The Laurel is the pride of the Creative side, For whom the work of the words is of value. The craft of the verse seems obsessive at first But like love it serves to enthrall you. And from Valerie’s pen flowed the truth of men In lines that felt as they fell like renewal. This was the gift of the poetic shift, A storm in the soul that will call you. (slide guitar in mournful sea chanty moan of Lake Superior) When the press release came, the voices were...

                                    for James Shaver I want to live every moment as a promise unbroken and flowing to my grandfather who when we walked to water pump In the park in Orillia looked up and announced in his French Canadian ancestry, “Quelle mélange de couleur” and I asked him what he’d said and he, being deaf and understanding the question to mean I hadn’t heard him, repeated it en Francais and I somehow understood him the second time and didn’t need to hear it the third. Language is its own water underneath the earth of thought. From his deafness, now my deafness, he only spoke to illuminate, to magnify some lost treasure the rest of us were missing. Family arguments died under the blade of a Shakespeare quote. Rough waters calmed. “You going to be a poet, pet?” he asked as we clipped the wet laundry onto the line between their cottage and the ne...

Last February I attended the Columbia University Narrative Medicine workshop led by Dr. Rita Charon and the remarkable faculty of the Columbia Program in Narrative Medicine. I had heard about Narrative Medicine while showing a Lee Gutkind video to my Creative Nonfiction students at The Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative at Lenoir-Rhyne, the M.A. program I direct and get to see unfold. Gutkind was listing the subgenres and applications of CNF. When he said "Narrative Medicine," I knew I'd found my next fascination. In Narrative Medicine, care providers develop narrative competence, the ability to recognize, interpret, metabolize, and be moved by stories. Be moved by stories. Something happens when a group of people get together and close-read a story or a poem. It isn't a book club, though book clubs are awesome. It isn't a class, though classes are awesome. It is a community moment, one where strangers move through an experience together and are transfor...

photo: Derekolsonphotography.com Whereas, the City of Asheville situates itself in one of the most beautiful locations in the world, and Whereas, the City of Asheville’s founding visionaries E.W. Grove, Fred Seely, George Vanderbilt, Thomas Wadley Raoul were all devotees to the Aesthetic Age which embraced a certain wildness of spirit and allowance for Beauty, and Whereas, the City of Asheville’s preserved architecture was designed by the masters of the Aesthetic Age finding in Asheville an open space in which to practice the new “Fine Art” that elevated people's character through proportionate balance of order and the unforeseen, and Whereas, City of Asheville’s favorite son Thomas Wolfe bore witness to the passion and Beauty of the city in words so powerful William Faulkner named him the greatest writer of their generation, and the City did not listen, and  Whereas, the City of Asheville’s brickwork of former slaves and their sons create visual music of j...