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i am a committee, and my committee is currently on a wee bit of a roller coaster ride . . .

i’m going through photos albums, you see, prying photos from those albums with sticky-back/cellophane overlay pages. the emotional roller coaster ride it takes me on comes as quite a surprise.

one committee member is enjoying the ride . . . as much as you can enjoy experiencing laughter that starts in the stomach; heartbreak so intense it immobilizes; moments of insight and realization; and unanswerable questions that start with what-if or if-only all in the space of a minute. another committee member sets forth a plan of three albums a day and constantly admonishes me to stick to the plan, even over the objections of the committee member who encourages me to plow my way through all of the remaining albums today so i can put everything back in the cabinet and close the door.

okay, those last two – they’re identical twins.

or not.

perhaps one is trying to get me to finish up so i can write what’s really on my heart while the other is trying to set a pace that allows for processing, totally disregarding the fact that i just don’t do well living in physical chaos for more than say three minutes.

my albums aren’t labeled on the spine, so i never know who or what time period will greet me when i open the cover. the waterfall sings its song in the background. the dog snores quietly in the corner.

some of the photos are blurry, some have faded beyond recognition. others – like the ones i took with my little brownie camera – were taken from so far away (and without benefit of a telephoto lens), i’m not even sure if the dots are people or specks of dust on the lens.

i go through albums of my chiclets, and i want more time to spend more time with them. i want to keep them at home instead of sending them to 3 and 4 year old kindergarten. i want to hold them close, hug them tightly, feel their head on my shoulder. i look at the photos of my parents with my children and i long to hold a grandchild in my arms, to have a second chance to make up for anything i might have done better with alison and kipp. it could be my hormones talking, but i don’t really think so, and who cares, anyway, chimes in the committee member i want to hear more from.

in daddy’s album, i see the face of a young man who had the world by the tail, a smiling face that eventually becomes a blank stare. it takes my breath away when i come upon the picture of him in the hospital, his face covered with tubes and tapes attached to machines to keep him alive just a few more days. i spend a few quiet minutes with photos obviously taken of me, but there, in the background, sits my daddy looking at me, and i wonder what he was thinking. was he proud of me? did he think me a good mother? did he wish i’d become a professional something-or-other instead of a career mom? did he wish he could go back and do my childhood over and if so, what would he have done differently?

believe what you will, but my dad still watches me quietly. when my car slid down the icy, curvy, hilly driveway, i turned the steering wheel over to daddy who apparently didn’t want me coming to visit quite yet because he guided the car safely down to where the ice was thin enough to allow the gravel to reach up and stop my tires. when i don’t have a clear sense of what to do, i ask daddy. and because i don’t want to wear him out or use him up, i also tell him stories about things that have happened so we can laugh regularly.

a wise friend once asked me to write to daddy and ask him what advise he’d like to give me. “be as specific as you want,” she said. but of course i never did that, for reasons that escape me now except to say that the committee member who measures herself worthy by measurable accomplishment and productivity has a very loud and convincing voice.

when i look at the photos of a jeanne gone by, try as i might, i just i don’t see the litany of flaws i once did. i look at photos of me and see that i was not fat, and trust me when i say that i’m sorry i wasted a single nanosecond belittling myself for being overweight. when i come upon the photo taken about a month before i was raped, i cry a bit while stroking the black and white photo, remembering the smooth blouse of red, white, blue, and yellow stripes with an eggshell sheen under the somewhat-scratchy navy v-neck pullover sweater. i was beautiful, and now i am loathe to tell you that it makes me sad that i begin to resemble my paternal grandmother. don’t get me wrong – i love(d) her hugely, but she did not have what society would call a beautiful countenance. a series of strokes rendered her mute, unable to care for herself, and eventually dead at a point in her life that’s now considered young, and a quieter committee member wonders if my resemblance to grandmother hewell is only skin deep or if i, too, will die young.

i don’t want to die an unlived life – i seriously do not. i want to live into my life, and i want to start yesterday (but, shoot, i guess today will do just fine).

Last week we got our North Carolina driver’s license, and let me tell you: it’s been a long time since I’ve been so nervous before a test. Though never my idea of fun, taking tests never really bothered me before – due in no small part to the fact that I knew how to say, how to repeat back to them, what they wanted to hear. I also had a way of knowing ahead of time what was going to be asked – and I don’t mean by cheating or seeing a copy of the exam ahead of time.

I’ve been driving for, well, a while, and I have a very good record, but that was not considered in my grade, of course. I studied the booklet – even causing us to leave later than planned when I decided to go over a few pages one more time. I knew – I just knew, they were going to ask questions involving numbers. Numbers are easy to judge right or wrong, but I don’t remember numbers. (“You could if you’d quit saying that,” my husband counters.)

And I’m not all that great at spatial concepts, either. I can tell you that a sofa will not fit against that wall, but if there’s nobody else around leaving me to read a map, I have to turn the map so that it’s facing the direction I’m wanting to go. I can tell you how much will fit in the back of my car, but I can’t mentally flip an object over and turn it around and envision a mirror image.

For most of my life, those who are strong in math and spatial concepts and the (seeming) definitive rationale of science have been considered smart. Now we know that there are several different types of intelligences, that there are different ways of knowing, and I can’t help but wonder how my life would’ve been different had we (or they) known these things decades earlier.

But I digress . . .

As I studied for the exam, I paid close attention to numbers because I knew that’s the favored knowledge, but I have to tell you that I’m eversomuchmore interested in knowing how to best negotiate a slide on ice or how to prevent catastrophe when hydroplaning than knowing fines for speeding or what the default speed limit is if not posted in small towns or how many seconds I should allow between cars using traveling speeds to calculate.

As I fought back panic and did my best to move resolutely and positively into sheer unadulterated dread, I realized that it’s been a very long time since I was required to – since I was willing to – be judged on my performance. Oh, sure, it happens all the time, but I went headfirst into this judging situation . . . and I didn’t like it one little bit.

We all know that I have authority issues – I’ve never made any bones about that – but it doesn’t mean that I’m always wrong or should be discounted. While I don’t have any alternative licensing questions in mind, I do know that it’s just as important (more so to me) to know how to drive in certain situations for the protection of yourself and others. (And I’m not saying that those questions weren’t asked on another version of the test, so don’t get sidetracked into that comfortable little black and white area.)

Taking that 15-minute test really unpacked a lot of issues and selves (past and present) for me. Once I (finally) get settled, I’m whipping out my copy of books like Willing to Learn: Passages of Personal Discovery by Mary Catherine Bateson and Women’s Ways of Knowing by Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule for a fourteenth read, and you can bet your sweet patootie I’ll have more to say about learning and knowing and teaching – a lot more ’cause it’s one of my favorite authority issues.

Technorati Tags:
knowing, teaching, learning

one day
you get an offer you can’t refuse
and you say “yes”
and start packing
and in that short, one syllable exhale,
you turn your life upside down.

for two straight weeks
day in and day out,
your family
and strangers alike
come in and help you
put your belongings,
both public and private,
into liquor boxes.
then into trucks
then into the new space.

and when all the boxes
are brought in
and stacked
and stacked
and stacked,
and stacked
and stacked
and stacked,
they leave
to go back to their
orderly abodes
and you wave bye
and go back inside
to try to find a place to
sit and rest.
for just a minute, though,
because
you’re only
part way through this journey.

you’ve thrown out
and shed
and given away
many, many, many things
because the reality is
that you only have
half the space now
and
there’s still so very, very much
to situate.

you open boxes
packed by other people
and you’re surprised
to find things
you didn’t even remember
you had.
and sometimes,
many times,
you remember where
you were when you got it.
and though you remember the appeal
it had at the time,
you put it up for
adoption
because
there’s simply not room for everything.

you sift through,
sometimes tempted to
send things away
if they can’t
justify their existence,
if they can’t earn their keep
with obvious, undeniable function.
and other times you come across
something that just makes you smile
or even laugh out loud
and you realize that
laughter may not
dry you off after a shower,
but it can cleanse
nevertheless.

you spend
every day
wondering where to put things
and eventually you find a place
and the satisfaction of knowing
that this thing
fits right here
and will stay here forever and ever
is immeasurable.
but you open more boxes the next day,
and you prioritize all over again,
sometimes moving the things placed
so carefully the day before
to make room for something that now
seems more essential.

after a week,
people say things like
“i trust you’re settled in by now,”
and you feel like a
failure
or worse
because there are
still
unopened boxes
everywhere
and storage shelves
in the kitchen
and suitcases
in the bathroom.

things get broken,
though not as many
as you might expect,
and it’s funny
how pillowcases
still elude you,
but you can put your hands on the tiniest
little oddball
wire support
for the lamp
that you never used all that much
because it lived in the guest room.
and when you produce that
tiny little oddly-shaped wire
moments before you husband
tosses the seemingly-broken lamp
on the truck, sealing its fate,
his “huh”
is dressed in surprise
with maybe
just maybe
a splash of admiration.

there’s more to come – so much i want to tell you about this move – but for today, just take a peek at my writing table . . . and chair (once belonged to my paternal granddaddy, the banker. i’m researching a book about him now.) . . . and muse:

and my view:

for reasons we’ll talk about later, my writing space has been relocated and reduced to this:

into which must fit this:

and this:

and this:

there is some serious magic-making in my immediate future.