For Gracyn on her 9^th Birthday

Cross-legged, you sit before a pink plastic palace,

a remnant of your childhood now dormant

in the preteen years.

Brushing the mouse droppings and sawdust from its rooms,

you finger a canopy bed and mirrored vanity.

You suck in your breath

as you pull a yellow-haired doll from beneath

a tangle of tables and chairs.

Yesterday you delivered a handwritten birthday list:

shorts and tank tops,

cute sandals,

throw pillows for my bed,

decorative stuff.

I scanned the list for what was not there.

At nine, there would be no dolls,

no tea sets or tiaras.

At nine, we will talk fashion and décor

as we eat cake from yellow paper plates

with no trace of Disney princesses.

Oh, but you are so lovely

in this nether world of becoming.

Your freckles, once invisible, now spread across your nose,

a pale dusting of cinnamon.

Pink-polished now,

your slender fingers tease the air.

And your eyes, still blue enough to shame the sea,

speak light.

Still today, you will hold my hand

as we walk from my house to yours.

And palm to palm,

we will remember these last days

of April.

With love,

Your Grandma and biggest fan

Photo by Brian Schrack

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

Edith Wharton

Early in my teaching career, I sat with a community college student in an empty classroom at the end of the day. He had come to see himself as a poet in mid-life. For months, he had been trying on different voices, different forms, different perspectives. Now, he said, he wanted to learn to write traditional poetry with perfect meter and rhyme. The rhyme part was coming along, but the meter? I’m struggling, he confessed. Teach me to hear the rhythm, so I can master meter. 

Truthfully, I had never considered how I heard rhythm and counted meter. I just did from as early as I can remember. I inherited an ear and love for the rhythmic symmetry of perfect meter. Iambic pentameter? Its five iambs registered in my ears naturally and musically. And iambic pentameter gone wrong? Like the gash of a bow raked wildly across violin strings, its discord was an auditory assault for me.

As we sat together peering over a poetry anthology, I began to read aloud, exaggerating the meter of each line. My student listened intently through an entire William Wordsworth poem and then said, I just don’t hear it. I could make an educated guess at the meter, but I’d be guessing. I just can’t hear it. 

And he couldn’t and didn’t–even after several tutorial sessions. He conceded that he would stick to writing free verse and leave the meter and rhyme to other poets. He desperately wanted to hear that symmetry of rhythm, the predictable metric pattern of many classical poems, and he understood this compulsion to be one of the most inveterate of human instincts. This is the power of symmetry. Even when we can’t achieve it or wholly understand it, its instinctual presence lives to remind us of what is perfectly there, just beyond our grasp.

There is something in us that loves and seeks such balance. A candlestick on either end of a mantle. A pairing of photos on the wall. Two silos of the same height and width silhouetted against a Colorado sky.

Socrates writes:

If measure and symmetry are absent from any composition in any degree, ruin awaits both the ingredients and the composition. . . Measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue the world over.

To a great degree, there is beauty and virtue in symmetry. Consider the intricate beauty of a snowflake. Each snowflake is unique, but each is completely symmetrical with itself. Or consider the beauty we find in such natural phenomena as romanesco brocoli, an amazing example of fractal symmetry. Each part of the broccoli has the same geometric pattern as the whole.

Symmetry is such a show stopper. Ladies and gentlemen, in the center arena: the coneflower! To your left: the fern frond! And to your right: the chambered nautilus!

And the Master of Ceremonies? Such exactitude displayed in so many magnificent creatures and creations can only be the work of an artful and mathematical designer. Symmetry flies in the face of chance and thumbs its nose at randomness. Mathematicians kneel, awestruck, in the throne room of the Golden Ratio. Musicians bask in the faultless marriage of treble and bass. In adoration, lovers marvel in the light of their beloved’s face: one eye, one cheekbone, one nostril mirrored perfectly in the other.

Novelist and playwright Stefan Zweig writes:

Art knows no happier moment than the opportunity to show the symmetry of the extreme, during that moment of spheric harmony when the dissonance dissolves for a blink of an eye, dissolves into a blissful harmony, when the most extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation, fleetingly touch with the lips of the word and of love.

And what of the symmetry of extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation? What of that blissful harmony when the dissonance dissolves for a blink of an eye? When two individuals, two extreme opposites, come together in respect and understanding, this is symmetry that can change lives. And when from the greatest alienation one warring nation with one particular philosophy comes together with another warring nation and philosophy, this is symmetry that can change the world.

Poet and Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott argues that if we break a vase, the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. Perhaps it is in the reassembling, the coming together, the matching and piecing of parts to the whole that we love the best. For if we take symmetry for granted (and I think we do), recreating it makes us painfully aware of its magnificence. And when symmetry is restored, for a time at least, all is right with the world.

Humans may duplicate the perfect designs they see all around them, but they neither imagined nor created them. Symmetry is, indeed, an exquisite effect of a more exceptional cause.  In the sanctuary of symmetry, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we can find this exceptional cause in God. And seeking God, too, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Emily Dickinson

In my middle years, I mostly lived in a hard-kept house with double-pane windows meant to keep things in. And to keep things out. Things like possibilities that glimmered tauntingly on the horizon. And doors? They were solid, oaken slabs that shut convincingly with no need for weather-stripping. Like most, my middle years were working years during which responsibilities and obligations left little room for possibilities. And in my middle years, my days marched with regularity inside the perimeter of these four walls.

Oh, but the earlier and later years! These years are a fairer House with numerous Windows. And there are superior Doors which, by their very nature, are open more than closed. This is a house that glimmers. This is a house of coming and going, of trying on and moving on. This is a fairer house, indeed.

Last week, I attended an event at my granddaughter’s school in which third graders researched and dressed up like famous figures. As I entered the gymnasium, I looked out upon a sea of possibilities, children who were living the lives of such men as Babe Ruth, Elvis Presley, and Albert Einstein and of such women as Rosa Parks, Indira Gandhi, and Annie Oakley–if only for a day. Gracyn stood along the north wall as Shirley Temple, her blond curls loosed by the April wind of two recesses.

Third grade houses are such fair ones! At 8, becoming the next Shirley Temple or Babe Ruth is not only possible, it is palpable. Just within your reach, a presence so tangible that you can see your life spread out before you, and it is glorious. Never mind that you can’t sing or hit a baseball. These are formalities, details to be swept out with the day’s dust. The doors are open, and you see yourself walking from possibilities into realities.

And if third grade houses are such fair ones, imagine the houses of preschoolers. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, admitted that Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. In this photo, Gracyn, as Alice, folds her arms against her chest as if to keep the possibilities from escaping. Her costume is merely the outside trapping of a heart whose windows and doors are magnificently flung open to impossible things of all shapes and sizes.

French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire writes that Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity. There is something akin to infinity when one lives in a fairer house. For seasons of my life, I remember how, in those minutes before sleep, I shaped and reshaped possibilities, creating stories into which I took on heroic roles of rescuing, creating, and inspiring.  And when I tired of one story, I tried on another and then another and yet another. From this springboard of infinite possibilities, I dove into magnificent dreams each night.

In my later years, I have found myself loosening the strictures of my formerly hard-kept house. As I wake many mornings–with the sun and not an alarm clock–it takes a few moments to realize that a bell will not ring every 45 minutes, that I won’t have to wolf down a meager lunch in 19 minutes, that I won’t have to plan bathroom breaks, and that I won’t haul a laundry basket of student essays home for grading. But when I do, a day of possibilities stretches out before me. I could take a walk along the old highway and stop to pet the horses in the small pasture off the south side of the road. I could read anything I want and for as long as I want. I could call my mom on the phone in the middle of the day. I could start a home project and finish it. Or not. I could wander the mall in search of something or nothing. English novelist, George Eliot, claims that the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities. Oh the handsome, dubious eggs called possibilities of these years! I may not have been able to imagine them in my middle years, but they are real nonetheless.

Poet Wendell Berry writes:

A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility. It is only when I am ensnarled in the meaningless ordeals and the ordeals of meaninglessness, of which our public and political life is now so productive, that I lose the awareness of something better, and feel the despair of having come to the dead end of possibility.

I am painfully aware that despair growls at the door of even the fairest houses. It comes in the shape of chlorine gas and fatherless children. It peers in the windows with sharp eyes of hunger. And we are tempted to pull our blackout curtains tightly to protect ourselves from the dead end of possibility. 

Still, there continue to be those who go about the business of building fairer houses. They can imagine better lives and see the glimmering possibilities of something better on the horizon. They choose infinity over dead ends, and they press on.

As I helped Gracyn out of her Shirley Temple dress and tucked a loose curl behind her ear, she said, “You know what I want to do when I grow up?” Sing, dance, star in movies like Shirley Temple, I thought? ” I want to start a slime-making company. I think this could really be big, don’t you?” From Shirley to slime in a single day. Such a fair, fair house of possibilities!