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(Thank you, Reference Librarian. Thank you, Susan Tekulve.)
For those of you who didn't know me when I was actually younger than I am today—that is my second memoir, Into the Tangle of Friendship, as well as my fourth, Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, nested in with Handling the Truth.
I eagerly anticipate my time with Converse students and the Converse community—not to mention friends, old and new.
My husband, who has found extraordinary happiness working with clay, recently began to clear out our basement to give himself more room to work. Boxes of unnecessary things have been disappearing, leaving more mounds of molting cardboard to be considered or reviewed.
Today, while Bill was showing me his latest sculptural pieces, he pointed to a row of boxes and asked if they were for keeping. I slipped the lid off of one and found, in an instant, a file marked, in my mother's inimitable handwriting:
To Betsy on her Birthday 4/1/01.The file contained a story she'd written while planning her fiftieth high school reunion. Lore Kephart was a proud alum of John Bartram High School in Southwest Philadelphia. She made friendships there that lasted a lifetime. Indeed, my mother's friendships, as I wrote in
Into the Tangle of Friendship, were legendary—for their diversity, their longevity, their inherent trustworthiness. My mother was loved.
Now, here today she is, in her own words, talking to me at the end of a long birthday week. Telling me about her born-and-bred Philadelphia self. I hear the cadence of her speech in these inkjet pages. I see her crossing one word out and substituting another in blue ink. She loved to write, my mother. And she loved our birthdays—made them entirely special.
Made this one special, too:
Bartram was notable because of its reputation as a premier school with the highest academic standards. Students allowed to come there from certain other designated neighborhoods always took advantage of it, even though many had to ride a bus or the old #36 trolley, as it was called, to reach the campus. Some even fudged their way in. I was lucky; I walked.
Bartram's teaching staff was an extraordinary source of pride to all of us. To a man and woman, they could have taught anywhere, but chose to travel to Bartram. I often marvel at the completeness of the education I received there. The ghost of Mr. Abner Miller, one of my English teachers, haunts me, lest I should ever end a sentence with a preposition! Teachers were not only entrenched in getting across their individual disciplines—Mr. Wapen's was English, better yet Shakespeare—but they were encouraging as well. One old friend with whom I just caught up told me that, despite the fact that he had gone into the service having attended college for only three semesters, he spent his career interviewing celebrities like Robert Mitchum and Barbra Streisand for the column he wrote for our town's largest newspaper. "It was Mr. Sonnenfeld," he told me. "He just kept on telling me I had this talent."
Every now and then, someone will write to say that they have found my name in a book they're reading. To be specific, they mention Lauren F. Winner's much-loved 2002 memoir,
Girl Meets God.
Here is my confession. I have read two of Lauren's books, one for review. We exchanged emails for awhile, but long after 2002. I really, genuinely like Lauren Winner. But if I ever knew how my name floated through Lauren's book I don't remember. I remember not wanting to hunt the passage down. I remember that I worried about intruding. I remember feeling surprised and stunned that a writer of the stature and quality of Lauren had read one of my books, long ago. Maybe I'd seen the passage at one point. If I had, the memory is lost.
But this afternoon, Bonnie Jacobs took the time to type the passage out and to send it along. The words, which I share here, fill me with new emotion at the end of a deep-dwelling day. I had, it is true, written a book about friendship. I'd called it
Into the Tangle of Friendship (Houghton Mifflin). It had been inspired by the return to my life of a lost high school friend, and by all the thinking I have done about how friends come and go, about how hard it is to know who a true friend is, about how devastating it can be when you learn that you weren't a real friend after all. I have been, from time to time, and indeed far more than I wish, that person who proved useful. Who could help escalate a career, perhaps, or see someone through to the other side of a dream, or listen for awhile, as trouble stirred. I have done my thing. I have cheered others on. I have been left for grander vistas, bigger prizes.
It's always stunning when you realize that the feeling of friendship wasn't mutual, that it was your utility, not your heart that mattered, but it's even more stunning when you know that in fact it is. I am blessed today by having the right people in my life— solid people, constant people, we-know-we-are-there-for-each-other people. Still, I think a lot about friendship.
The passage here, from
Girl Meets God, with gratitude to Lauren and to Bonnie Jacobs:
The second bout was more recent. I was lying on my couch one night, reading a book about friendship by Beth Kephart. She writes about how friends are hard to make and hard to lose and how the only vocabulary we have for those losses is break-ups, romantic ones, but often the splitting apart of friends is harder, rarer, more long-lasting, grievous and generally devastating than any run-of-the-mill lovers' spat. My body lay on the couch like a valley, my head propped up on four fluffy pillows and my legs folded in, sit-up style, my back flat against the sofa's blue-and-white stripes. There I lay, listing all the friendships I had lost, all the people I'd betrayed or misled or just not kept up with, and then I felt gratitude again, felt it this time no less physically than hunger, felt the weight of it like a fog settling in over my stomach, felt it filling me heavy the way fruit fills a basket. Lying on the couch, I could not believe God had given me all these people to love. Even if I never had another friend ever, even if I spent the next seventy-five years rattling around lonely as a ghost of Christmas past, it would be too much ever to repay, all that love. I slept on the couch, then, blanketed by the weight of my gratitude, Beth Kephart's book under my pillow.
My friend (I call her Soup) is one fine writer. She taught me tricks a few years ago. Okay, so it was a few decades ago now, and she was my neighbor, and her real name is Andree, and if you want to know how much I just plain like this lady, then you can read all about it in a little book I wrote, a memoir called
Into the Tangle of Friendship.
But that is beside the point right now, because Soup grew up and I moved away, and Soup's children—they grew up, too. The last time I saw Soup's youngest, Aimee, she was young, very young. She was carefree.
Today Aimee is a high school student and a poet, and Soup just sent two of her newest works on to me. There is a line in one that strikes me as particularly alive and yearning and exquisite, and I hope Aimee won't mind if I share it here. Look at this. Say it out loud and listen. The words of a young soul leaned forward:
How
can I say what I’ve lost
if you’re not
drowning yet.
— Aimee Seu
As anyone who might have read my second memoir,
Into the Tangle of Friendship, knows, I don't have the best relationship with my mouth. Just about anything that could be wrong with it is (I'm talking about structure and soft tissue now, and not verbal emanations; there's much wrong with that as well). And so, through the years, I've had small surgeries and big ones, I've had jaw bones bolted to jaw bones, I've had the mouth wired shut for weeks on end, I've had a root canal gone desperately wrong (a shattered tooth, a pain killer to which I had a nightmarish reaction), I've had gum grafts that have made me feel and look like a flying UFO.
It's just my mouth. It is not life-threatening. People face far far worse things every single day—many people. But still. I woke up this morning and didn't feel like going to the periodontist who is perfectly nice and tres talented (his nephew is also high up on Obama's team, so he tells good stories). I didn't feel like it.
Here's what happened to make the day sweet anyway. My son woke up and said the kindest thing. My husband offered to make me a late-night brown cow (something to savor while watching
So You Think You Can Dance). Matthew Quick sent along
these generous words about The Heart is not a Size. I heard from friends (I love my friends). And.... the yellow finch that banged on my office window for months following the passing of my mother, the finch that launched
Nothing but Ghosts (or its near cousin),
started banging again the very instant I arrived following this morning of surgery and stitches. It had not banged for months and months and months. But here it was again—another message, I suspect, from my mother.
Life is good.
A long time ago, in a hospital room, a woman saved my life. I'd had extensive surgery on a jaw that had gone bad; I woke (as I knew I would) to a mouth wired shut. When, in the evening, all who knew me had gone home, when the nurses were on their quiet rounds, when there was no one looking, the machine that had been pumping my stomach failed. I could not scream. I could not speak. I was drowning in my own blood.
It is true what they say about the mind spinning back. Over time, over roads, over regrets.
It was my roommate who saved me. A woman I'd met just hours before. She heard me struggle and rose in the dark—sat at the edge of my bed and cleared the pump. And there she sat, through the rest of that night, warding off trouble, keeping me safe, urging me to look beyond the window toward snow.
The other day, while taking a train to the city, I saw a woman who might have been the woman who one day saved my life. She sat on this bench. She was reading this paper. We waited, both in peace, both of us breathing.
Thank you, Miss Em, for naming House of Dance one of your top ten reads of the year. I know how much you read. I know how graced that recommendation feels.
Mari, thank you for naming House of Dance as one of your favorite books of the year. I am in such tremendous company in your list. I'm ... astonished!
To Becca, who writes one of the smartest book blogs in cyberspace—her idea of a review being my idea of a review, her tastes often mirroring mine—thank you for giving me a set of butterfly wings in your latest post. To Lilly for so sweetly acknowledging me in her own blog, and for entering this community so gracefully. To Tapestry100, for being such a kind supporter of Into the Tangle of Friendship, and for naming it one of his favorite books of the year.
To Sherry, who not only raised the remarkable Miss Erin we all love, but who also leaves exquisite comments on this blog—thoughtful comments.
And thank you, Lenore, for your rocking yesterday honor. You are your own tour de force in this wide web world. I'm honored to count you as a friend.
Years ago I had a next-door neighbor named Andree with whom I exchanged, on an often-daily basis, letters. I'd write a poem about a missing tooth (her daughter's) or a bird's nest (high in my rafters); I'd write a short story; I'd rail at something; and then I'd tuck whatever it was into an envelope, walk it up onto Andree's porch and leave it in her box—being careful not to creak the hinged thing open, for it was important never to get caught. In time, Andree would write her response upon the thinnest paper imaginable with a loopy blue or black pen, and, at some never-once detected hour, return the favor.
Writing letters gave us room to say what we actually meant to say—between raising children (the thing we most loved) and scouring sinks and cooking dinners and bemoaning the hedge that grew too fast. It gave us a shot at intelligence, when what so much of what we had to do was a drumming, a mind knock, a scrape against the knuckles.
It's funny that we never caught each other in the act, but there it is: We didn't.
In any case, we wrote letters. We wrote our ideas down, our stories down, our critiques and encouragements and disagreements down, and when I moved, we wrote some more, but the almost everydayness of the correspondence was gone, and my world was smaller for it.
I have been remembering Andree these past few days while reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, the beloved epistolary bestseller that has, in my opinion, earned its following, those four-one-star reviews on Amazon notwithstanding. The book charms, of course, but the word "charm" is like "precious," like "gem." It's like "cute," when applied offhandedly to women (believe me, I know; I've had my fair share of "cute"), and by all that I mean that the word "charm" diminishes. It doesn't go far enough toward the heart of this book, the research tucked within, the evocation of characters that—while certainly and deliberately contrived so as to steep Guernsey in Austen-ese—forced me at least to throw down my guard and get involved. Charm doesn't say enough about the power of letters, the back and forth, the honesty that rises up between the cracks. The mysterious marvel of questions asked, of answers eagerly awaited.
From Guernsey:
Do you live by the river? I hope so, because people who live near running water are much nicer than people who don't. I'd be mean as a scorpion if I lived inland. Do you have a serious suitor? I do not.
Is your flat cozy or grand? Be fulsome, as I want to be able to picture it in my mind. Do you think you would like to visit us on Guernsey? Do you have a pet? What kind?
This is so lovely, Beth. And resonates with me, too, as I was just talking with Bobbi Wolf at Wolf Performing Arts Center about a performance her cast in "The Butterfly Project" gave at Bartram. Your mother's school is now nurturing a generation of refugees from war-torn countries, who have found safe haven in Philadelphia. xo
This explains much about who you are, dearest Betsy. Thanks for sharing. And the photograph is marvelous - two beauties who share an appreciation of friendship, a love for learning, and for Words. xo
Betsy :) What a beautiful find. Happy weekend, dear Beth.
What a find--what serendipity.