48.

Taking a Moment

Before every major birthday, I have taken a moment to reflect on the magnitude of the event. On the eve of my thirteenth birthday, I wrote a profound farewell to my youth in my Hello Kitty diary, paying homage to my childhood as I faced that first bold step into my teenage years. I stayed up late on a school night and wrote until my pink Sony cube alarm clock said 11:59. I watched the numbers and waited, feeling both ready to be different and terrified of it.

At seventeen, I wrote a similar farewell, again reflecting dramatically upon the sunset of my childhood and the dawning of a new, adult era. “November 15, 1995. Well this is it. In approximately two hours and fifteen minutes the childhood of Kelly Myers comes to an end.” I went to bed that night facing what felt like an unavoidable, inalterable transformation. “I’ll be eighteen years old when I wake up and there is nothing that I can do about it.” (It didn’t end there. I went on to quote Shakespeare—something about stages and performances. Really nerdy.)

Somehow, my thirtieth birthday came and went less dramatically. There was no diary countdown, no dramatic farewell. I was sound asleep at midnight. It was a little bit like the first time me, Case, and Meg slept in on Christmas morning. After years of getting up at dawn and racing down the stairs together, there was finally a year (not that long ago, if I’m being totally honest) when we just slept.

Even though there wasn’t a diary involved, I did take a moment to think about my 20s before falling asleep. If there’s an epiphany to be had, it’s that my window of self-doubt has narrowed, which means that I question myself less broadly, but what I do question is focused and deeply rooted. In my old diaries, I was searching and hoping in sweeping ways, trying out different personalities and aspirations and needs. At some point, though, the searching shifted and I started to make choices—big ones that I have been reliving for years and little ones that I didn’t even feel. As I sat in my house, my dog curled up on my lap, I realized that I’ve reached a point in my life where I have built the majority of my immediate world. The choices that I have made over the last ten years are all around me, lining my physical and emotional spaces.

Lee called on the night before my birthday and just before hanging up he said he would talk to me when I’m 30. He said it at the right moment and in the right way, just like Julie would have said it, just like my family would have said it. I fell asleep thinking about my people, feeling appreciative of all that is consistently good in my life.

47.

Aging Poets

“Do you know how long it takes for any one voice to reach another?”

I’m not sure what I was looking for tonight, but I know that I was hoping to be filled with something new. One night in college I happened to wander into the Soda Center when Carolyn Forche was reading and she simply stopped time for me. I honestly did not know that words could do that. “What you have heard is true.” Stopped time. Life in my body felt different.

And then another poet came to campus. She visited my Aristotle in Modern Literature class and sat right next to me—I could have touched her shoulder with my shoulder. We had been studying Aristotle’s Poetics, memorizing and scrutinizing Aristotle’s carefully laid out formula for how poetics work. But the moment she sat next to me, poetics buzzed in my body in a way that Aristotle could not contain. That night she read her poetry with such force that we all shook a little—the people, the chairs, and even floor seemed to shake slightly when she was reading. As I sat there, I did not want it to end, and, at the same time, I wanted badly for it to end so that I could begin to live my life with this experience. Tonight, thirteen years later, she came to Tucson, again to read her poetry.

With all of the vulnerability and rejection of the job market, I went to her tonight feeling depleted. I needed for her to shake me, to stir the poetics, to tip me back in my chair and remind me of the force of the female body. But somehow in the last thirteen years she has become an old woman. She stayed seated and her voice did not carry. I could not hear her.

My poets are aging. The forces that originally brought me to writing and the teaching of writing are growing quieter. I owe it to them to try to shake the ground a little.


http://www.blueflowerarts.com/cforche.html