There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her.
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

Dear Mom,

Today, I’m sitting in your chair with your cat on my lap. Your absence is a palpable presence as we sit here in the home whose every wall and corner is filled with you. We think of you so often that our thoughts sit companionably beside us and open their arms in love. There is an intimacy born simply of thinking of you so often that your voice rings through our days, assuring us that we are not alone.

Still, like many who have lost their mothers, I’d trade this intimacy for the real thing. That is, I’d trade the intimacy born of simply thinking about and missing you for an afternoon with the real you. Particularly on this Mother’s Day when there are so many things I’d like to tell you.

I’d like to tell you–again–that I want to be like you when I grow up. Oh, I know that by all accounts, a 67-year-old woman should be grown up, but I like to think that I’m not done growing, that I still have time to become more like the woman you were. Each year, I would write this in your Mother’s Day card, this wish to grow into the grace and wisdom that are attributes of the quintessential mother. And each year as I wrote this, I meant it perhaps more sincerely than I’ve meant anything. I want to be the mother and woman who is sorely missed because she was an unfailing champion for those who needed a safe place to land, an advocate for those who believed they had no voice, and a lens through which others could see themselves as you did: loved and seen. You were all that–and so much more.

I’d like to tell you that your phone calls were lifelines. Through my own years of mothering and teaching, thirty minutes on the phone with you gave me the courage and conviction to face a new day, to meet it with your words in my ear, to suck the marrow from it with gratitude and joy. Four hundred miles away, I leaned into those conversations with hope. Now, I often find myself picking up the phone in expectation. And then I remember that you aren’t there to pick up your cordless phone with a familiar, “Hi, Shan.”

I’d like to tell you that I remember everything. That I remember too much. That, some days, the memories are too heavy to bear, while other days, they buoy my spirit as I sail into my day. I remember the power of your make-do-ness to transform a barely middle class life into a wonderland. I thought the lavender floor-length dress you made me for my junior prom was a confection in dotted swiss. I marveled at how you could stretch a dollar and a pound of hamburger. And when I said I wanted a blue birthday party during my kindergarten year, you broke out the bottle of food coloring and used it liberally, turning the cake, ice cream, and Kool-aid royal blue. (No one escaped without blue lips and finger tips!)

In his book, For One More Day, Mitch Albom writes:

But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.

Like Albom claims, behind all my stories are your stories. Recently after my granddaughter’s track meet, I was telling her the story of the district meet my junior year in high school. As I recounted the wind and sleet, the cold that cut through our cotton sweat suits and numbed our legs, I remembered that behind this story was another more remarkable story. This was the story of a mother who sat in the stands (one of a handful of spectators braving the weather), huddled under a Hefty garbage bag and sporting a plastic visor to keep the sleet from her eyes. This was your story, Mom. As I’ve told it over the years, people invariably chuckle at the image of a mom wrapped in plastic. But I want them to see what I see: a mother who showed up, again and again. Standing alone at the start of the 200 yard dash, I had only to look into the stands to see you smiling and waving and to know that–win or lose–you’d drive me home.

In her best-selling novel The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt describes the grief of a son whose mother is killed in a terrorist attack:

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her—to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her—but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too—drifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep—I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn’t actually remember, things like Throw me an apple, would you? and I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back? and This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness.

I want to tell you that I understand this grief and how waves of ordinary things keep washing upon the shore of my consciousness. Small things that would never be scrapbooked or photographed come in with the tide of a moment. In the months before you died, I keep remembering how when I hugged you, you were a bird with hollow bones. I felt as though if I didn’t ground you in my arms, you’d simply float away. Years after my father’s death, I remember all the times you told me that you’d been talking to him, your hard, physical longing laden with sorrow and with beauty. And I remember once when I was frantic with worry about something (I’ve forgotten what), you assured me that everything would be o.k. and offered me this: Just don’t get your blood in a bubble. And I thought, who says this? You did. And now I do, too.

Most of all, I’d like to tell you that when I close my eyes today, I can see you and Dad driving into the countryside where the wild honeysuckle is in bloom, and the sky hangs clear and cornflower blue above you. I can see the road open before you, and redwing blackbirds strung brightly along utility lines that stretch into the distance. And you are young and in love. The glorious May afternoon pours in through your open windows, and you can think of nowhere else you’d rather be.

Today, I can think of nowhere else I’d rather be but in the home you made for all of us. So, I’ll sit here with the cat on my lap, and the silence generous enough for my sorrow and my joy. I can think of nowhere else I’d rather be but in this place where I learned what it means to love and be loved.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

With all my love,

Shan

A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true. –W. H. Auden

“You really know how to end a poem.” After reading each new poem I sent her, my mother’s words were a constant and hopeful refrain. Months after her death, these are words to write by, and more importantly, to live by. For if ending a poem in truth is essential, so, too, is ending a life.

Sonneteers know the power and value of a good ending. Line by line, they drill down into a final couplet which delivers so much more than a poetically exciting rhyme. In these final two lines, sonneteers give us the wisdom that distinguishes the endings of the best poems. A poem should begin in delight, claims poet Robert Frost, and end in wisdom. Consider the final couplet in Sonnet 18, one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Now this is a great ending! Here, a lover proclaims that his words will forever testify to his beloved’s beauty and worth. Neither death nor time will diminish her, so long as his words live. Oh, to be immortalized by a great sonneteer who understands just how to make a final, grand statement!

In my more cynical moments, I begin to wonder if a true statement is a dying thing, an anachronism that lives solely in our memories. In the past few years, I’ve heard more people my age speak fondly of news anchors like Walter Chronkite who wrote:

As an anchorman for the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts with a simple statement: “And that’s the way it is.” To me, that encapsulates the newsman’s highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard to the consequences or controversy that may ensue.

I can’t help but envy the certainty of Cronkite’s parting words: And that’s the way it is. To leave your viewers with the truth, to live up to your highest ideal as a news anchor, that must be wonderful. When I consider what passes as news today, I salivate at the prospect of a newsperson whose integrity is forged and defined by such truthful statements.

American painter Jackson Pollock knows the value of making a statement. He writes:

It doesn’t make much difference in how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

Cynically, I also wonder if we’ve come to value technique more than truth, style more than statement. Today, our leaders and celebrities toss out lovely words which essentially say nothing. We’re offered pieces of art and photography which may be technically good but often fail to move us. They simply don’t arrive at a statement. They say nothing. I recall an assignment for one of my graduate courses in poetry writing. We were asked to find an example of a good poem, one that exemplified the traits we’d been studying throughout the term. During the next class, one of my classmates volunteered to read the poem he’d brought. I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like this: Outside my window, a sparrow chirps. Silence filled the room as he let these words sink in. Nervously, he finally broke the silence by saying, “I mean, there’s not much here. But that’s the point, isn’t it? It seems like there’s not much here, so there must be something. Right?” If this poem were intended to be an example of postmodernist technique, it left my classmates and I scratching our heads. Did this poem actually say anything?

Our postmodern age tends to thumb its nose at anything that smacks of being sentimental or absolute. It’s simply not cool to show that you care–in art or in life. Sadly, what this often means is that we don’t make statements for fear of being called sentimental or judgmental. Actor Jon Voight countered this prevailing philosphy in this statement:

“Climb Every Mountain” is a beautiful statement of philosophy. Critics may think “The Sound of Music” is saccharine, but I think it’s profound. The message, that we can’t accomodate evil, is just as important today.

Voight challenges us to consider that The Sound of Music is more than a saccharine, feel-good film. It goes without saying that the music is wonderful and the cinematography spectacular. The film’s statement about refusing to accomodate evil, however, is even more profound. Aesthetically beautiful, The Sound of Music also has something to say.

In art and in life, we may be tempted by the styles and techniques of the times, spending our time and money on appearance, on what culturally passes as “good.” But if these things become our statements–that is, if style and technique trump wisdom and truth–this should give us pause. If our legacies are built upon things which essentially mean little (or nothing), this, too, should give us pause.

I learned everything I know about how to end a poem and a life from my father, an unfailing champion for the heroic voice in an age of indifference. In advocating for the power and usefulness of such a voice, he wrote:

Which started me thinking again about poetry, especially its usefulness. If writers write long enough, they write for their lives. If they persist in wanting the right words in the best places, they begin to sense a floor beneath their work, something more than stylish or momentarily pleasurable. In short, something solider. These are the writer’s underwritings. Every long-term poet, even one who deflects a knowledge of it, takes a discernible stand, and his underwritings, whether he knows them or admits them, become as crucial to his life as to his art.

With each poem I write, I sincerely hope that I take a discernible stand, that I give my readers something more than stylish or momentarily pleasurable, that I write for my life. And I sincerely hope that my underwritings, my statements of wisdom and truth, become as crucial to my life as they are to my art. I hope that I answer my father’s call to action: In a dumbed-down age, why shouldn’t poetry speak up? Although it may feel increasingly risky to speak up, one can seek sanctuary in statement.

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
― Joan Didion, The White Album, 1979

I dream in places. Generally when I wake, I have only a hazy recollection of plot or people. What lingers is a sense of place. Although Longfellow High School in Kearney, Nebraska was closed and locked up years before my time (save for the north end which housed our junior high music and geography classes), I’d peered through the windows on many occasions, imagining what lay beyond the entrance and up the staircase. And in the decades since, I’ve dreamt about being in that grand building, waking to carry the scent of wood polish and old books with me throughout the day. This place belongs to me, for I’ve been one who’s claimed it hardest and remembered it most obsessively.

Years ago when we discussed ageism in a Human Relations course I taught for educators, I used Geraldine Page’s final movie, A Trip to Bountiful. I’ve probably seen this movie a dozen times, and each time, I find myself as moved by Page’s performance as I was the first time. An aging woman stuck in a city apartment with her adult son and whiny daughter-in-law, Page’s character spends most of the day, and often most of the night, in a rocking chair by the window overlooking the yard and street beyond. Time and again, she begs her son to take her back to Bountiful, the small Texas town where she’d grown up, married, and raised him. Her yearning is palpable throughout the film. She dreams and daydreams of the place that’s defined and grounded her. Her son, a man bent on climbing the corporate ladder and providing a better life for his mother and wife, ignores her pleas. Why do you want to go back to that old place? he asks. There’s nothing there any more.

When she can no longer bear being pent up in that apartment, she decides to run away–again. This time, however, she not only makes it to the bus station but actually purchases a ticket, boards the bus, and departs before her son can find her and take her home. As she travels through the rural Texas countryside, she hums the hymns that have sustained her through the droughts of life. She tells her seat mate that she’s happier than she’s been for a long time. Because she’s going home to feel the soil between her fingers, to hear the birds, and to turn her face to the sun again. She’s going back to the place she believes will jump-start her soul and give her the will to return to the city, to commit her final days to living in that small apartment.

When her son finally catches up with her on the porch of her now dilapidated house, she’s smiling and greets him with, I’m home, son. I got my trip home. He chides her for taking such a risk–traveling alone in precarious health–but she tells him that it’s enough that she’s returned one final time, that this trip will carry her happily through the rest of her days. As she looks around one last time before getting into his waiting car, she reminds herself that when all the people are gone, the land and sky, the birds and coastal breezes will remain.

I understand this. As my father and his grandmother understood this. The open prairie of Nebraska and the timbered hills of Iowa become the protagonists of our stories. It’s enough that they will remain long after the people we love have gone and the memories we’ve made have faded. In his novel, A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway writes:

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

The names of places dignify those villages, rivers, roads, and fields where so many died as casualties of war. These places make the sacrifices of war real. They anchor the abstract notions of things like glory and courage in the concrete: stone, soil, water, wood. It’s no wonder that we return to these places and walk their hallowed ground. It’s no wonder that we say their names with reverence and wonder. Our most important stories inhabit these places. And they rise from the ash heap, recover, and remain when all else has disappeared. This is the power of place.

In her novel, Black Beauty, Anna Sewell contends that [i]t is good people who make good places. Having just returned from a visit to my family home in Kearney, I’m buoyed with a familiar sense of joy that emanates from this place. I walked into the closet of my childhood bedroom which spreads magically under the eaves, creating a private nook for book-reading and imaginative play. I remembered the hours I spent there in solitary contentment. I laid in bed and saw the room as it had been when I was young: an upright piano along one wall, my mom’s sewing machine on an old desk in the corner, and an ironing board under the east window. I could feel my fingers on the keys. I could hear the rumble of the old, black Singer as my mom guided a piece of fabric under its needle. Good people made this home, and within, good places abound.

In my mind, I can still walk the halls of the many schools I’ve attended as student and teacher. I can look down the aisles of the three-story department store in which I worked during high school and college. And, without thinking, I can tell you just where you’d find a bottle of calamine lotion or a 10-cent glass animal. If I close my eyes, I can climb the spiral staircase up to the balcony of the lighthouse overlooking Harmon Park’s rock garden. And when I’m miles away from and missing home, I can mentally walk the perimeter of our pond and watch sunfish travel through the shallows. I can do this because all these places–real and remembered–are sanctuaries for me.

If [a] place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, as Joan Didion contends, then I find joy in knowing that there are so many places that belong forever to me. If there are others who argue that they claim these places hardest, let it be known that I won’t release them graciously, and I won’t stop visiting them in my dreams.

Gethsemane

The olive trees drop their fruit in easy slumber,
and the ground gives up the last heat of the day,
draws the curtain, surrenders 
to sleep.

Nothing will keep watch.
The children of Jerusalem dream,
and the men who fill their nets with silver fish
curl contently into the shadows.

And we who believe we would stay awake—
for surely, we would prostrate our best selves in supplication—
sleep, too.

In dreams, we soak the earth with prayers
and wait. 
We circle the wagons, keep vigil,
stand watch.

In sleep, we are heroes
of a story that might have been.
We have eyes to see
and say all the things we might have said.

But in truth,
our intentions scatter like moths,
while the stones here               
bear better witness.

You get used to it, not in the good way, to the extent of the entire world oftentimes feeling like a place where you weren’t invited. If you’ve been here, you know. If not, must be nice.
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

Although there are days when I feel like I’m alone, alienated from the world at large, I’m pretty certain that I’m not. Alone, that is. I suspect that there are others who also feel as though the world is a place where you weren’t invited. And I suspect there may be others like me who’ve begun to feel like perhaps it’s better not to be invited, like the party just isn’t worth it, like staying home in your sweats with a bowl of popcorn is preferable.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Demon Copperhead, her protagonist is a contemporary David Copperfield born to a single, drug-addicted mother in a trailer in rural Tennessee. From the beginning of his life, Demon’s constant companions are hunger and fear. He dreams of a world where everyone is invited, a party with an all-you-can-eat buffet. His world, however, is no party. As a child, he learns to navigate the foster care system after his mother dies from an overdose. This is a world in which he sleeps in laundry rooms, works in tobacco fields, and survives on barely enough calories to sustain a mouse. This world is more like the Hunger Games where only the fittest survive. Demon often wanders this world as an alien, desperate to find a safe place to land.

Each day when I read or watch the news, I feel as though I’m looking in on a world that I hardly recognize and to which I’ve not been invited. This is a world in which battle lines are drawn with such power and certainty, that if you’re someone who finds herself taking time to carefully consider, to weigh evidence and opinions, to use your head and your heart, then you’ve not been invited. This is a world in which you can no longer send your children to school with the assurance that they will return safely at the end of the day. This is a world in which adults don’t play nicely, a world in which name-calling and shouting are expected. This is a world in which one’s convictions and principles are tested (or canceled) daily. In this world, then, it’s no surprise that many individuals feel alienated, as though they’ve been dropped unwillingly into an episode of Survivor.

Each year as we enter Holy Week, I find myself in the Garden of Gethsemane. To the extent that I’m able as a human being, I live alongside Christ as he prays in anguish that the cup might be taken from him. Author and theologian C. S. Lewis wrote that of all scenes in Christ’s life, he was grateful that this scene in Gethsemane did not go unrecorded. He contends that it was here that all the torments of fear, despair, and even hope were loosed upon Jesus. Here, he explains, Jesus was fully human, subject to utter despair and desperate hope that, like Isaac, he might be saved at the last minute. To be alienated from God is to suffer exclusion as only a human can.

Yet, Christ was not only fully human but fully divine. Even as he anguishes in Gethsemane, he prays not my will but yours be done. As Son of God, he understands that he has come to offer himself as a living sacrifice, to take away the sins of the world. And just as the world has misunderstood and hated him, he knows that the world will misunderstand and hate his disciples, too. In John 17:15-16, Jesus confirms that his disciples should remain in the world. And yet as he speaks to his Father, he says: I have given them Your word and the world has hated them; for they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Christ understood that the cost of discipleship was founded upon a profound paradox: be in the world but not of the world. This is a different sort of alienation. Disciples are to live fully in the world, while they alienate themselves from its worldliness. That is, they are to live with their eyes upon Christ, turning their eyes away from the temptations and sins of the world. This is intentional, willful alienation.

Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead doesn’t choose his alienation. In the midst of its darkness, however, there are a few people who shine a light upon his worth and potential. In this passage, we can see one of these supporters, his teacher, who continues to advocate for and encourage him:

He looked at me. His hands were on his desk with the fingers touching, a tiny cage with air inside. Black hands. The knuckles almost blue-black. Silver wedding ring. He said, “You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I’m saying you are that driver.”

The world may appear to be a mangled wreck, but some drivers walk out alive and well. In a world that has alienated him, Demon perseveres and becomes that driver. In a world that hated and killed him, Christ walks out of it alive. We may intentionally alienate ourselves from the world, or we may find ourselves involuntarily alienated from the world. Either scenario is lonely and difficult. But we hear about these miracles where individuals not only survive alienation but thrive–in spite of or because of it. Easter is a time for just these sorts of miracles. In a world we may struggle to call our home, this is truly the best news.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain on anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

–Isaac Asimov                                                                                                                            

Tom Nichols uses these words from Isaac Asimov, American writer and professor of biochemistry, to open the first chapter of his book, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press, 2017). A cult of ignorance in our nation? A common credo that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge? Ouch. Harsh words, indeed. But they are words which echo Nichols’ fear that “the death of expertise actually threatens to reverse the gains of years of knowledge among people who now assume they know more than they actually do.” This reversal, Nichols argues, “is a threat to the material and civic well-being of citizens in a democracy.”

Ignorance may be a constant thread that has woven its way through our lives, but Nichols argues that there is a new sort of Declaration of Independence, one that would likely make the Founding Fathers weep:

no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.

In my first year of college teaching, I recall a class period during which I was giving instructions regarding an upcoming essay assignment. As I finished, a hand in the back shot up. I called on the young man who asked about how this essay would be graded because, he explained, everyone’s opinion and interpretation is uniquely theirs and just as good as anyone else’s, so everyone should get an A, right? At that point in my career, I was young and naive enough that I failed to see that he wasn’t joking. I probably chuckled. In fact, I may have guffawed. Until I realized that he was quite serious, and there were 24 sets of expectant eyes upon me. Inquiring minds really did want to know. So, I launched into my best explanation of why all opinions are not equal. My students looked at me through narrowed eyes and pinched lips. Clearly, I wasn’t preaching to the choir.

That was 40 years and a lifetime ago. This same argument–that all opinions are equal–has metastasized into something much larger and more dangerious than a grade on a college composition. For Nichols argues that “[w]hen students become valued clients instead of learners, they gain a great deal of self-esteem, but precious little knowledge,” and as a result, they fail to develop “the habits of critical thinking that would allow them to continue to learn and to evaluate the kinds of complex issues on which they will have to deliberate and vote as citizens.”

I’ve seen this firsthand in my own schools and classrooms, and I’m witnessing this on a larger scale through the eyes of friends, former colleagues, and family members who are growing weary of keeping up the good fight. In fact, recently I’ve read five articles from reputable journals in which their authors report on the demise of English majors (and other humanities majors) across the nation. The reason? These majors aren’t practical, their critics contend. After all, what do you do with an English major besides teach? What’s the cost/benefit ratio for investing in such majors? Isn’t it time for universities to replace these majors with other more vocational ones, ones that offer graduates a better chance of securing gainful employment? Those experts defending the humanities’ majors argue that these courses, in particular, have historically helped prepare students to become better humans, better citizens, better thinkers, better voters. And those who teach English, then, have born–and continue to bear–a great and necessary responsibility for developing these types of citizens. But as teachers and experts in the humanities, Nichols laments, we resent them and believe they must be wrong simply because they’re experts, members of an exclusive elite and educated group. Who are they to insist that the humanities are invaluable to a democratic society? What makes their research and insight so special? You should read what a guy I read on the Internet said about how worthless the humanities are . . .

In the past year, I’ve seen a kind of willful ignorance dominate a whole host of meetings and gatherings. Much of it comes from an inability and/or an unwillingness to listen closely enough to even entertain what someone else is saying. This is often confirmation bias at its best–or worst. That is, people come with their minds made up on any given issue or policy, and if they listen to others, it’s only to those who confirm what they already believe. Sadly, this reminds me of what children often do when they don’t want to hear something: they stick their fingers in their ears and repeat–loudly–I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you. I’ve witnessed people roll their eyes, talk over and shout down others, fiddle on their phones when others talk, and even grab their coats and storm out. It matters little what issue or what forum it is in which it’s being discussed (I use this word generously because there’s not often any genuine discussion). I spent my professional life trying to convict students that they have a moral and ethical responsibility to listen with open ears, even, and especially to, their opponents. So much for adults who model this responsibility. Tragically, the joke is on those of us who continue to believe that there is much to be gained from careful, respectful listening to those who just might know more than we do.

Nichols addresses this kind of willful ignorance in his book. He writes about the blind spot that people may have when it comes to their own abilities and inabilities:

And some of us, as indelicate as it might be to say it, are not intelligent enough to know when we’re wrong, no matter how good our intentions. Just as we are not all equally able to carry a tune or draw a straight line, many people simply cannot recognize the gaps in their own knowledge or understand their own inability to construct a logical argument.

How can I really understand the gaps in my own knowledge and the flaws in my own logic if I’m unwilling to admit that there are others–experts in their fields even–who have studied something and, as a result of their study, know more than I do? In short, I can’t. And herein lies the problem which is ultimately one of misplaced pride. Nichols goes so far as to call it narcissism. He argues that “there is a self-righteousness and fury to this new rejection of expertise.” We’ve all seen this play out nationally on political, cultural, educational, and social stages. There are those who not only dismiss expertise; they mock it, shout it down, and mercilessly shame it. Fury is not too strong a word to describe this kind of rejection. Wimp that I am, I confess that I’ve often had to turn off the television or turn away from the Internet because, even in the comfort of my own home, I cower under the weight of such fury.

In 1835, French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the nature of the American mind by contending that each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding.  To elaborate on this statement, Nichols states that Tocqueville speculated that this distrust of expertise and intellectual authority was founded “in the nature of American democracy.” Nichols also cites political scientist Richard Hoftstadter who confirms this particular kind of American individualism:

In the original American populist dream, the omnicompetence of the common man was fundamental and indispensable. It was believed that he could, without much special preparation, pursue the professions and run the government.

Hofstadter wrote this in 1963. I suspect he might say that that this populist dream has grown too big for its britches, that given the nature and complexity of the issues we face today, we must prepare ourselves extremely well if we are to succeed in our professions and government. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone must be an expert on everything. Even if we wanted to and were willing to devote hours to study, we couldn’t realistically develop expertise on more than a few things. We can, however, be willing and wise enough to defer to those who are experts and to carefully weigh differing expert accounts before drawing conclusions. We can and must know our own limitations and accept the responsibility for continued learning. We must do much more than confirm our biases, satistfying as this may be. And, difficult as it may be, we must admit that we face a staggering rise of willful ignorance that threatens our democracy.

My ignorance is not just as good as your knowledge. Asimov accurately identifies this as a false notion that has produced a cult of ignorance. We live in precarious times in which all sorts of groups are vying for power and dominance, claiming that they know best and, as such, should make decisions and policies. We live in a democracy, which guarantees that all of these groups must have a voice. I continue to pray, however, that these voices will be cultivated with expert and sufficient knowledge, sound reason, and respect. At the very least, I pray that we’ll collectively remove our fingers from our ears and take heed: the children are watching.

To mourn is to be eaten alive with homesickness for that person.
― Olive Ann Burns

This is my family home: 611 West 27th Street, Kearney, NE. This is the house where my mom made a real home for us, the place where, even now, I return to as a refuge; where both my dad and mom spent their final days; where my siblings and I shared so many moments which have become inextricably bound to this house.

Upon leaving after each visit to my family home, my mom and dad would stand at the curb, watching and waving until I turned the corner and couldn’t see them any longer. I am homesick for these waving parents. I am homesick for the respite they gave me from the busyness of my life as mother and teacher. I am homesick for their unflagging belief in me, for the hours of unadulterated love. Most of all, as I mourn both their losses, I am utterly homesick for them. American author Olive Ann Burns understands well the mourning which eats you alive with homesickness–not so much for a place but for a person.

In his 1982 novella, The Breathing Method, Stephen King writes:

Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly….perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness- the ache of the uprooted plant.

The notion that homesickness can be a terribly keen blade is not lost on those of us who grieve. Although I confess to moments of nostalgia, an almost beautiful emotion, there are just as many moments during which the terrible keen blade of grief slices through me. Deftly, decisively, it flays the hour, spilling the guts of all the pain I’ve stuffed inside. This is the terrible side of homesickness which often comes upon me quickly and without warning. Of course, I know that my experience is not unique, that all those who grieve feel the blade of homesickness in some way and to some extent. Still, those who grieve also understand the individual and solitary nature of their homesickness. This is a path they must ultimately walk alone, aching as uprooted plants.

Homesickness, however individual, is also born from emotions which are fundamentally deeper and more universal. Author Anna Quindlen describes the homesickness she experienced after the death of her mother:

[After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents’ house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle and good in life.

I like this so much. For me–and I suspect for my siblings– my family home in Kearney, NE is truly representative of all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle and good in life. In this place, we held glorious celebrations: birthdays, holidays, Friday nights of popcorn before the television. In this place, we laughed together, long and hard, sharing the kinds of family jokes that live happily in your soul for years to come. In this place, we cried without shame, bearing our greatest fears and failures, releasing them into the safe and gentle arms of family. In this place, we grew up, testing the waters of convictions and dreams. As such, I realize that, in truth, I’m most soul-sick for the greater meaning of home.

One of my favorite childhood characters, Winnie the Pooh, exclaimed “How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” As I left Kearney last weekend, I felt lucky, indeed, to mourn so hard for my parents and my family home. Such is the nature of my grief: that from its cold earth springs an insistent joy which blooms, season after season, pushing its way into the light. In The Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien writes:

Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?

Yes, I remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo. And yes, I can feel the coming spring and taste the first strawberries. I’m homesick for all of it, and for this, I’m more grateful than I can say.

I know I shall be homesick for you... Even in heaven. (Beth March to her family on her impending death)
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

--for my sisters
Dear Louisa May Alcott,

In waking and sleeping, 
I can’t stop wondering if my mother—
just one month dead—
is as homesick for me as I am for her. 

For I am Beth,
as I am all your little women:
homesick in death and in life.

Do you see how I stand at the edge of my hours, 
homesick for what has been
and what will be?

Do you see how I am forever walking
through my mother’s door where,
cat on lap, she is always there,
filling me well beyond the measure of my worth?

So, who will fill me now?
Who will keep the happy home of all my days?

Who will purple my meadow with wild lupine
and hang a clear, wide sky of hope above me?
And who will be my plumb line, keeping taut
these loose ends flapping feebly in the wind?

Louisa, I am homesick for things I can’t yet name.

But this, I know:

     How in the center of all these nameless things, 
     my mother holds court,
     all her little women at her feet, 
     each content to know there’s nowhere else
     they’d rather be. 

Sometimes you need things rather than just thoughts.
― Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here

Decades before author and journalist Patrick Ness argued for the necessity of things, American poet William Carlos Williams (I still can’t get my head wrapped around parents who would name their son William Williams) wrote that there are “no ideas but in things.” This line from his 1927 poem, Paterson, became a kind of credo for 20th century poetry. That is, he argued for a “direct treatment of the thing,” a contrast and reaction to the 18th and 19th century writers’ affinity to symbolism and abstraction. Ground an idea in the concrete, Williams contended, rather than float it, untethered, into abstraction.

For years as I taught modern poetry, I sought to help students understand this notion: that all abstractions are built upon concrete foundations; that what we know and feel stems from our experiences with the sensory world. It goes without saying that we learn to understand “hot” as children by directly experiencing it–generally after we’ve been warned not to do so. For the word “hot” is an abstraction that only carries real meaning once we’ve experienced it, that is, once we’ve felt it. “Hot” lives first in things–in steaming mugs of hot chocolate and bowls of soup ladeled right from the pot, on stove tops and radiators–before it lives as an idea. Both Ness and Williams understood this.

For years before my mom died, she urged her children and grandchildren to take things of family and sentimental value home with them. She didn’t push these things on us; rather she gently urged them out the door and into new homes. We all have pieces we cherish of the Welch and Zorn legacy in our own homes. Now as we prepare our family home for sale, once again, we look to the things that have defined every room, those things that carry so many experiences and memories with them. And as we’ve encouraged our children to find these things that hold such experiences and memories in them, I’ve often been surprised at their choices.

One of my nieces wanted the little white clock that lived on the ledge in the upstairs bathroom for decades. It’s not antique, nor has it been passed down from either my mom’s or dad’s families. But for her, it’s a glorious reminder of all the times she spent at her grandparents’ house and slept in an upstairs bedroom. Or take my nephew’s choice: the carved wooden bowl that sat on the coffee table for years. Underneath its lid, one could find real treasure: peanut M & Ms, holiday candy, assorted treats. Every grandkid undoubtedly has fond memories of asking–begging–for permission to sample the goods in the wooden candy bowl, which never disappointed.

For years, my mom collected and painted Goofus glass. In the early 20th century, this pressed glass was decorated with unfired enamel paint by several popular glass factories. Over the years, we’ve all been gifted pieces of Goofus glass: bowls and plates, vases and trays. In the whole world of vintage glassware, it’s worth relatively little. To us, however, it’s priceless, for it testifies to the many hours that my mom spent repainting it, lovingly restoring each piece to the glory she believed that it deserved.

The paperweight on the desk in the den, the countless trophies from decades of homing pigeon races, the bevy of small cobalt blue glass birds, the gallery of family photos in the upstairs’ hallway and scattered throughout the bedrooms, the blonde cedar chest, the books (a legion of books!). the envelopes of letters (love letters from my dad, letters from family and friends), the dining room table around which we sat for some of the best hours of our lives–these are, I know, simply things. If all of them were to disappear, we would still remember the memories they carry. Still, as vivid as these memories are, sometimes you just need the real thing. Sometimes, you need to pick it up, to run your fingers along its edges and over its surface, to hold it solidly in your hands.

As we gather for my mom’s memorial service this weekend, we will all gather at our family home once again. My sisters and I will encourage those who haven’t found their own special thing to select one. Our memories may be abstract ideas that live in our heads and hearts, but how well they first live in things. Now and in the years to come, we need these things. These are memories with skin on, so to speak; these are the concrete objects through which the Welch and Zorn legacy will live on.

Marcia Lee Welch

January 10, 1943-February 2, 2023

How can you measure the worth of a life? Over the course of his lifetime, my father wrote love letters and tucked birthday and anniversary poems into the corner of my mother’s vanity mirror. But from the very start of their courtship, he knew that even his finest words could never begin to bear witness to the remarkable life force of Marcia Lee Welch. He knew this, and I know this, too. For I’ve carried my finest words in my heart and have written them into letters, cards, poems and blog posts for decades. For days now, I’ve begun this post with fits and starts, and words fail me.

But my father once claimed that “Words have no other choice. They have to risk space.” And so I begin, allowing my words to risk space.

For as long as I can remember, I told my mom–in conversation and in writing–that I wanted to be the woman she was when I grew up. Of course, I’m still growing up, still hoping to become that woman in the years I have left. In my brighter moments, I find bits and pieces of my mom in me in ordinary ways. I clean and fold pieces of used aluminum foil and stack them neatly in the drawer next to the stove, just as she did (and her mother before her did). I continue to argue that her frozen cherry salad is much better with nuts, just as she did (while she graciously served a nut-free salad as well). I say–much to the chagrin of my family and former students–things like, “Well, don’t get your blood in a bubble” (something she regularly said and that’s always stuck with me). Like her, I haven’t yet met a cat I didn’t like–and couldn’t love. A frozen coke from McDonalds is the right drink for all occasions, and a cookie that disappoints with raisins instead of chocolate chips is just wrong.

Sharing my mom’s love of a good chocolate chip cookie is one thing, but sharing the other attributes that made her who she was is quite another. Whereas my dad lived his life on a rather public stage–in classrooms and auditoriums, through published words and speeches–my mom lived on a more intimate, domestic stage where her primary focus was her family and her neighbors, She hosted neighborhood coffee parties, held holiday teas for our Park School teachers, provided beds and meals for visiting poets, foreign exchange students, and friends-of-friends. One of my treasured memories is our family living room filled to capacity with my son’s UNK football buddies, some sprawled on the floor sleeping off their food comas. When an Iowa community college student of mine was considering a four-year college to attend, he remembered how I’d spoken about my family and the university in Kearney, NE. “I’ve decided to attend UNK and play tennis there,” he announced one day. I gave him my mom and dad’s address and phone number, and the rest is history. My mom offered him a home-away-from-home during his college years and corresponded with him up until weeks before her death. He is one of countless others whom my mom adopted into a family that grew gloriously larger and more diverse over time.

A couple of years ago, I discovered that my mom and dad had hosted poet Mary Oliver in their home. I couldn’t imagine the winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize sleeping in my former bedroom and eating around our family dining room table. Stunned, I asked, “What was she like?” My mom simply smiled and said, “She was one of our favorites, a really humble and genuine person.” In truth, my mom treated all who crossed her door as if they’d won the Pulitzer Prize. She listened with intensity, convincing you that she heard you, that her time was wholly yours. When you left her presence or hung up the phone, you always felt as though you’d been understood and loved. You felt like a million bucks.

When my mom’s health confined her to her home, she continued to host a steady stream of family, neighbors, and visitors. I suspect most of us came with the same hope: that we could offer our love and leave with some of hers to sustain us until the next visit. She was the consumate cheerleader and advocate for all those who needed an encouraging word or nudge towards their dreams. When you left her house, you walked with a real spring in your step, and the world opened itself as an oyster before you. From her maroon recliner, her outreach was just as powerful and wide as my dad’s. Each day, she Facebook messaged countless people all over the country. When she began to keep me informed about the health and circumstances of some of my former high school friends, I once asked her how she knew these things. “I message them,” she said. Astonished, I responded, “I didn’t know that you knew how to do that on your iPad.” And she gave me a look as if to say, “But of course! It’s the 21st century, after all!”

Over the course of her lifetime, she became my dad’s first and best reader. When he’d finally revised a poem to his liking, he’d give it to her and wait expectedly for her response. After my dad died, she became my first and best reader, too. Packing up some things from my family home last week, I found scrapbooks of all the writing I’d sent her, Inside were many pieces I didn’t even remember that I’d written. But there they were, lovingly archived in homemade scrapbooks. Each time my mom would tell me that she could hear my dad in my poems, that my imagery reminded her so much of his, I wept in gratitude.

For her parents and sister, her husband and children, her grandchildren and extended family, her neighbors and friends, Marcia Welch was undeniably one of God’s greatest gifts. For 89 years, she was His hands and feet on earth, offering love and comfort to so many. For 89 years, the world was simply a better place because she was in it. Undoubtedly, there is much heavenly rejoicing as she stands before God who welcomes her, saying, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

So, how can I measure the worth of my mom’s life? In the end, I really can’t. But I can live out my days grateful of the many ways she’s loved and changed and touched me. I can pour myself out into others as she did. And I can risk space, courageously using my words and deeds to make the world a better place while I’m in it.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
― James Baldwin

Like Baldwin, books have been the primary means through which I’ve walked a mile in others’ shoes. To the extent that a willing reader can experience the pain and heartbreak of others, real and fictional, I have. That is, I’ve given myself over to the stories of those whose trials and failures moved me beyond the walls of my own sensibilities and self-consciousness and into worlds I would only experience through books. And yet, as Baldwin contends, even as a young reader, I realized that the very things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. I remember closing a book and thinking You, too? Yes, you, too.

Reading became a primary means through which I learned empathy. I lived vicariously through thousands of characters, sharing their joys, their disappointments, their conflicts and pain. In the process, I pushed myself through complex text and remarkably beautiful–and often challenging–language. For most of my life, I’ve been an empath-in-training who’s become increasingly grateful for my rich, literary training ground.

In her article, “Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound” (The Guardian, 2018), Maryanne Wolf writes: When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age. Wolf, a neuroscientist, researches the reading brain and its influence on the development of some of our primary intellectual and affective processes. She studies the effect on analysis and inference, critical reasoning, empathy, perspective-taking, and the development of insight. Her conclusions are disturbing. She explains that we are not born readers but rather, we need an effective reading environment in which to become good readers. We will adapt, she claims, to the demands of this environment. Currently, however, the dominant digital environment promotes processes that are fast, geared toward multi-tasking, and designed for large volumes of information. And the result, she contends, is that less attention and time will be allocated to slower, time-demanding deep reading processes, like inference, critical analysis and empathy, all of which are indispensable to learning at any age.

In the past few years, I’ve had many conversations with fellow English teachers about the “state of reading” in our schools. Many have confessed that administrators have encouraged (or demanded) that they replace classical texts, which are traditionally challenging and complex, with lighter, more “relevant” choices. Never mind that these classical texts provide us with some of the most valuable insights into human nature. Never mind that the language of these texts–albeit challenging–is exquisitely well-crafted. Never mind that these themes and plots have stood the test of time. Students don’t like them, the powers-that-be argue. They’re too hard, too long, too old.

In her article, Maryanne Wolf cites English literature scholar and teacher, Mark Edmundson, who laments how many college students avoid courses in which they’ll be expected to read the classic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. These students, he claims, don’t have the patience to read such texts. Wolf argues that we should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience” however than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts, whether in literature and science in college, or in wills, contracts and the deliberately confusing public referendum questions citizens encounter in the voting booth.

Wolf refers to another researcher, Ziming Liu from San Jose State University, who states that what passes for reading today is often skimming or word-spotting and browsing through the text. When readers skim, they aren’t taking the time or using the skills necessary for deep-reading processes. And failing to spend this time or use these skills, they often struggle or fail to understand complexity, empathize with others, perceive beauty, and generate their own thoughts.

Many of us undoubtedly made New Years’ resolutions to improve our health, to get into better shape. Use it or lose it, we profess as we uncover our treadmills and elliptical machines from under the clothes we’ve hung there to dry. Wolf explains that the same adage is true in neuroscience. This is good news when it applies to reading, she says, for we can recover what we’ve lost (or are losing). We can once again begin to use those reading muscles necessary for deep-reading. She argues that this recovery doesn’t mean that we must reject the digital medium and embrace only the traditional, print medium. Instead, she proposes a new kind of brain: a “bi-literate” reading brain capable of the deepest forms of thought in either digital or traditional mediums. She explains that this issue can’t, and shouldn’t be, reduced to a print vs. digital reading. The most pressing “collateral damage” is [t]he subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy that should concern us all.

Recently, I talked with an English teacher who was nearly reduced to tears as she confessed her failure to make her students care. They’d been studying the Armenian and Rwandan genocides when a student interrupted her to ask, Why should we care about any of this? Why, indeed. I suppose one could attempt to explain this away by arguing that adolescents are often ego-centered, happily sheltered in their own world of friends, pleasures, and concerns. Still, I remember the first time I read about and saw an image of Auschwitz. In an instant, I was sleeping four to a wooden bunk, head shorn, the cries and ragged breaths of fellow prisoners filling the room. In an instant, I was contemplating my impending death and fearing that my family members would suffer the same fate. In an instant, I felt my world become so small, so tenuous, that a single crust of bread was life-giving. And I wasn’t alone as I watched the faces of my classmates. Certainly, there were some students who may have been unable or unwilling to empathize, but there were more who were. Then again, when I was in 8th grade, there were no cell phones, no computers or I-pads, no digital medium of any sort. And what I was asked to read in 8th grade was challenging, even by high school standards today.

I’m sure that I didn’t understood all that I read, but I worked at it enough to understand much of it. As I became a better reader, more importantly, I became aware of what it meant to be a better human being and to create a better world. I thought critically about what I’d read, and I felt those things that the best writers believed should torment me because they were the very things that had tormented, and continued to torment, all humans. To the teachers who demanded that I read complex texts and to the authors of these texts, I owe so very much.