On walking and talking, words like paint, and other people’s specificities
October 24, 2019
Dear Eva,
These past few weeks my dad and I have renewed an old habit of taking daytime walks together through my neighborhood. It was something we did a lot when I first moved back to Iowa, often several times a week. I have really fond memories of our long conversations on those walks. It was a bit of a hard time for me, as I grappled with questions about what the move would mean for my professional future and identity. Our walks were a nice reminder of why we made the move. I wish I had been writing back then so I could have at least some record of what we discussed, though the meaning stemmed less from the specific details of what we talked about than from the time spent together. Conversations on walks are really one of my favorite things in life. Recently for Bill’s 40th, I asked family and friends to write about a special memory with Bill. For my own entry, I chose our walks — through familiar paths in cities we have lived and new terrain in other parts of the country and world through our travel. There is something about the meandering nature of walking, the fact that you are talking next to rather than at someone, that you are seeing new sights while your conversation ebbs and flows so silence does not feel unwelcome — it just makes conversation more pleasant, and often more memorable.
In any case, all of this is a very long buildup to what I really want to tell you about in this letter, which is a specific conversation my dad and I had in a walk last week. First, I should preface that my dad spent his career as an actuary at an insurance company. He is the kind of man who would count the stairs in your apartment building the first time he visited. The lens through which he viewed a good chunk of life was around demographics and the corresponding statistical likelihood of death. Now, as he goes through his late 70s, he is applying that lens to himself and pondering life and death, as you do. Because I know he thinks a lot about these things, for his birthday this month I picked up a book for him called Essays After Eighty, by Donald Hall. I haven’t read the book yet, but I read about it, and it sounded like a good irreverent mix of philosophy and humor so I took a chance and gave it to him without reading it to confirm. I am happy to report that he loved the book and devoured it in just a day or two. This happened just before the aforementioned walk.
On that walk, Dad wanted to talk about poetry because after finishing Hall’s book, he spent time reading up on the author’s life and discovered he was an esteemed poet. As we neared the top of the steep hill at the end of our block, Dad asked if I had read much poetry and started asking me questions about what and who I had read. I told him that I haven’t read much poetry, but that I have recently started to dabble and grow my muscle for reading and interpreting poems. Eventually, he said, “Poetry has just never made much sense to me. If you have something you want to say, why not just say it clearly in a way that people can understand?” He said he is a very literal person and spent his life working on problems that had right or wrong answers. He just couldn’t wrap his head around someone like Hall waking up every day and spending the morning writing and editing words that so many people may not even understand (Hall was apparently an excessive rewriter/editor of his own poems).
As he talked, I could sense him getting himself a little worked up, almost exasperated at the fact that he just didn’t feel he could relate to this different way of being. I was raised by this man, so all of this had quite a familiar ring to it. I could tell that while he was ostensibly making a declaration of what he felt was an objective fact, there was a part of him that wanted to be persuaded.
I asked if he ever felt like music could communicate with him, if hearing a song he loved could evoke feelings, memories, ideas. He said yes. We talked about what it feels like to hear and sing church hymns to the glow of candlelight on Christmas Eve, how the sound of the booming organ and human voices warm us, speaking far more clearly to us than the lyrics. He talked about the experience of driving to be with my mom’s mother after her husband (my grandfather) had died abruptly of a heart attack. On the trip, they heard some particular song and played it on repeat. To this day, Mom asks Dad to turn it off when he plays the song. It speaks to her.
I told him I think poetry is doing something similar to music — communicating to us in non-literal ways that get at a different aspect of the human experience. It just happens to be that the medium of poetry is words, but the words are more like paint.
To my astonishment, he stopped fighting it. He said, “Okay, I guess that makes sense to me.” We moved on to another topic for the close of our walk.
Later that evening, he sent me an email. He had stopped at the public library on the way home after our walk. He picked up a book of Hall’s poetry and tried reading a poem. He ended up reading the entire book of poetry in one sitting before dinner.
Words / an explanation / an analogy — it had changed his frame. It opened him. I can’t stop smiling when I think about it. Perhaps poetry will add a new texture to his life in this final chapter?
We have written quite a bit in past letters about the power that our own narratives can have on our futures. I have been listening to a few podcast interviews recently with people who study neuroscience and consciousness. It is breathtaking to discover we were even more right than we realized. We were just thinking too small. It is not just that we can shape our moods; it is that we are constructing our own entire realities every minute of every day. Frames are everything.
What are we changing in our lives by maintaining this writing practice? How will the words we write and read on these pages alter our realities and our futures? It is ever delightful to imagine.
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday October 25 2019
Dear Sarah,
I am feeling pleased and cozy as I settle down to write to you. It’s Friday at the end of the day — happy hour, from whence your letter was wrung last week! — but I feel like I’m existing in a timeless zone where it’s not exactly Friday and not exactly the end of the day, it is just more time at the end of a long, continuous stretch of time. I left Minneapolis this past Saturday to travel to the metro Detroit area to see my parents. I left the house early in the morning after a weird, scattered night of sleep — the nights before early morning flights are always odd-sleep nights for me; even though I wake up early most mornings, I get worried that I will suddenly sleep and sleep through all alarms and my regular circadian rhythms and completely miss my flight — and I feel like this is the first moment I’ve paused in the last week to relax a bit and stop moving from here to there. I returned from Michigan on Wednesday afternoon and then spent Thursday and Friday at a conference in Rochester, a 90-minute drive each way, which has left my eyes blurry and my brain feeling like an overcooked noodle. But now I have a cup of hot tea and a slightly stale yet edible shortbread cookie next to me and I am settling in to send my words to you and to creep toward the pleasant moment when I will deem my letter done and I will open yours!
I’m reading back over your letter from last week and thinking about your notes on Krista and the idea that the specific is more universal than the abstract. I believe and agree with this, and yet I always find myself zooming out from specific stories, trying to extract their all-purpose essence. Actually — I do this when I think about telling (writing) stories of myself — perhaps the zoom-out is somewhat of an attempt to skitter away from focusing attention on my own stories, toward some common space we all share, a safe space where there is no particular focus on any one person and instead we can exist in a shared human space. At the same time, I love to get at other people’s very specific stories of themselves, stories of how they made choices, moments they lived through. I like to turn the lens of specificity on others and to keep it off myself! But I think perhaps I can’t fully participate the common space I claim to love unless I admit that I have stories, and let the lens dwell on them a bit.
Also thinking about your letter from last week — whether because we’ve now written truly dozens of letters to each other, or because of the way the past week has felt — I think I’ve started to tend away from outlining my letters to you. Please take this statement with a grain of salt, as it might just be something I’m saying to you and to myself on a week when I haven’t outlined a thing and am writing off the cuff to you, as it comes! This might also be a bit of a fib because I’ll sometimes write notes during the week that I think are notes to myself, and then it turns out they are in fact notes about what I’ll write to you in my letter that week. The conversation between us continues even on a subconscious level!
These past couple of days I was at a nonprofit conference where, for the first time in a while (perhaps ever?), I wasn’t attending under the auspices of any particular organization. I was myself, a freelancing writer and fundraiser getting to know the nonprofit landscape in Minnesota and getting to know the people who work at nonprofits across the state. I’ve been learning since I arrived here that there is a deep vein of human services support in the state, sometimes emerging from the practice of religion and other times not, and the conference confirmed this. As I chatted with people who are ensconced in various nonprofits — working long hours without enough resources, wearing many hats — it was interesting to tell, retell, and shape my story of myself, and to consider how to best exist on a sort of meta-plane wherein I didn’t work with any one of the organizations represented at the conference, but could feasibly find ways to work with any number of them. I’m still reflecting and I think there will be more I’ll want to talk about with you as I digest it all!
In the meantime, I’m going to digest my tea and cookie and settle in to read your letter, and to relax my way into what I consider to be a much-deserved weekend. Enjoy these last October days as the fall crisps up and starts to pull back the curtain to reveal winter around the corner!
Until next week!
Yours,
Eva