So Long Ago

When my mother sang us
her old Japanese songs,
the window shades were pulled
and sunlight tiptoed
past the bedroom door.
I peered through the frames
of my heavy eyelids
into my brother's round eyes,
and saw the world,
its fullness.
I slept
and had no need
for dreams.

Rest in peace, Bobby. 
July 25, 1960 - October 19, 2011

On Seeing Eagles: Why Writing Matters

It was a few weeks after my friend, Fal, passed away, and I was missing her. Driving along the highway, I saw a dark shape flying up from the reservoir and over the highway. A hawk, I thought, or a vulture.  It was too early for osprey. I wish there were eagles around here. Fal loved eagles. I watched it as I got closer.

The bird veered low over the highway—low enough to leave absolutely no doubt. Pure white head and tail, strong yellow beak and legs—it was a mature bald eagle. I screamed in disbelief. An eagle in Groton? NO WAY!!! This eagle was far beyond the Connecticut River valley, far beyond normal eagle territory in Connecticut.

But it was there. I had seen it. And I might have missed it if I hadn’t been thinking of Fal and her love of eagles.

I didn’t see the eagle again for two months—but I eagerly searched the skies over the reservoir every time I passed by, and I looked a bit more carefully at every hawk and vulture that flew overhead, no matter where I was. This week I saw the eagle twice—once on its own, and once being chased by the osprey who had returned to its territory for the spring. My son got to see the two birds together, too—a rare treat, indeed!

The experience got me thinking about our expectations of the world around us, and how often we might miss some pretty amazing things if we operate only within the confines of our own thinking. “No eagles around here,” was a constraint I’ve lived with for years—so sighting one made me think about how we break free of those confines.

Our interactions with others are one way in which we expand our expectations. Missing my eagle-loving friend opened me up to the possibility of seeing eagles where I’d never seen them before, making me that much more observant as I drove along the familiar I-95 corridor, priming me so that I was ready to see a bird I may have passed by previously and dismissed without really looking. Talking with friends and co-workers helps us expand our pool of experiences and opens our realm of possibilities—we learn from the experiences of others, and our view of the world changes because of them.

As a child, I grew up in a very sheltered and protective family—my mother had lost two siblings and both her parents by the time she was a teen, and she worried about losing us, too. The fact that my brother and sister couldn’t really protect themselves from others made her fears even greater. We were limited in our experiences and traveled very little. And yet, I grew up with a sense of limitless wonder and possibility, and felt as if I had traveled and met many people whose circumstances were far different from my own. How was that possible? Through books, of course.

It began with Twenty and Ten, by Claire Huchet Bishop, which I read when I was in second grade. Twenty French school children hid ten Jewish refugees from the Nazis in World War II in this book, and I was transported to another time; I met children who were both alike and different from me, and my world grew larger. I was hooked. My mother, a Japanese immigrant, was proud of my reading skills, and she promised to buy me every book I wanted from the Scholastic Book Club flier that my teacher sent home that year. I wanted almost all of them. A large box of books arrived in the classroom the next month, and an enormous stack of books went home with me. I read them all, re-read them, and promptly ordered more. During my time in elementary school, Scholastic Book orders went home several times a year, and my personal library grew and grew (my teachers must have loved the bonus points!). There were times when the school would call my mother to pick up the books, because I couldn’t carry them all home on the bus. To this day, my mom still recalls the time our principal asked her, “Does Frances really read all those books you buy for her?”

 “Oh, yes,” Mom replied truthfully. “She reads most of them three or four times each.”

“Three or four times? Each?” asked Mr. Butterfield, whose son was in my grade. “I’m lucky if I can get my son to read his once!”

Those books lifted the limitations from my sheltered life. I see the world today differently because they became part of my life’s experience. I notice spiders spinning webs and clutching egg sacs; I watch for the promise of secret gardens; I believe that doing good acts matters more than in whose name you claim to do them; and I know that kindness is stronger than dominance. I am primed to watch for magic and miracles, even (and especially) the ordinary kind, such as seeing an eagle where you’ve never seen one before.

What does this mean to me as a writer? For most of my life, I've written only privately. Writing is what I do--it's how I sort out my feelings and process my world. It's an important act, but it wasn't until relatively recently that I began to think seriously about publication. I've had a few poems published, but it's my children's writing that I'm really working on now. And I wonder about my shift from writing privately, for my eyes only, to writing publicly.

Sometimes I chuckle at my efforts and wonder if striving towards publication of my children’s books means I have: a) an unconscious need for recognition or approval b) a sense of pompous authoritative knowledge c) a desire to rally against mortality by leaving my words behind for the ages. But then I realize that it’s more like d) a wish to give back to the world of literature what it gave to me: A sense of wonder and joy. A sense of being recognized—the “hey, you feel that way, too?” moment that reminds us that we’re all part of one human family. And most of all, a sense of being primed to expect the unexpected--to notice and appreciate the world around us and all the small gifts life bestows on us each day. 

Books do that for people. They’re like interactions with friends that help us see a little more than we might ordinarily see on our own. That’s why I’ll keep working on writing my novels and picture books, and why I'll strive to have them published. It's those interactions with books, and with friends, that change the way we see the world. Which is why, from now on, I’m always keeping an eye out for eagles.

Irish Treasure

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”  

-- W.B. Yeats

St. Patrick’s Day is a bittersweet day for me. I’m a Kelley, with roots in County Cork, and I’ve always enjoyed the wearin’ o’ the green. But since my sister passed away in the early morning hours of March 18^th twelve years ago, St. Patrick’s Day and the first weeks of spring which follow have always been something of a tough time for me. If you’ve followed this blog at all, you’ll know what that means: it’s writing time--less expensive than therapy! And, as Sigmund Freud said of the Irish, “This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.” Glad I found an alternative.

The Yeats quote I opened with makes me laugh, in part because I recognize myself in it, despite the fact that I strive to overcome my sense of tragedy with gratitude. I’ve always known that life is unfair—how else to explain the fact that I, as the middle child, was the only kid in the family who escaped the genetic mutation that limited my siblings’ physical and mental abilities and shortened their lives? But I’ve also always believed that life is what we make of it—that we can find the good that’s ours for the taking, if we just look hard enough. Another Irish saying expresses the dark optimism to which I ascribe when I’m feeling low: No matter how bad things are, they can always be worse.

So, today, I am trying to buoy my sense of tragedy with a bit of joy. I am sad as I remember how much I miss my little sister, my big brother, and my friend, Fal. But remembering how lucky I was to have them in my life—well, that’s a joy that I’ll always have. I can mine for happiness just as easily as I can mine for despair. So here’s a little gem from my childhood years with Jeannette.

Olive Oyl—A Slippery Tale

Jeannette’s shriek had me out of bed before I was even awake.

I was about twelve years old, and Jeannette (aged 9) and I shared a bedroom. Our twin beds were pushed together, which allowed me to soothe her and pull up her blankets if she needed help in the middle of the night. It also decreased her odds of falling out of bed by half. Had she fallen out the far side?

“Wha’s wrong? Jeannette, what’s wrong?” I fumbled for my glasses, then turned on the light. By that time, Mom and Dad had appeared in the doorway.

Jeannette was sitting up in her bed, tears streaming down her face. “Ah-ee oy! Ah-ee oy!” she wailed.  

“Jeannette, are you hurt? Does something hurt?” She shook her head and began pulling at the covers.

“Was it a bad dream, do you think?” Mom and Dad and I checked her over as she continued to sob. We pulled back the blankets to check her legs. A bendable plastic doll, the kind with an inner wire frame, fell from the covers, and Jeannette gasped.

“Ah-ee oy!” Jeannette grabbed the small doll and clutched it to her chest.

My parents and I groaned. “Olive Oyl!”

It was a dime-store present. We’d purchased a bendable Popeye doll for Bobby, and another doll, Olive Oyl (Popeye’s girlfriend), for Jeannette. For some reason, Jeannette was enthralled with the gawky doll with the painted red dress. She carried her everywhere, setting the doll next to her plate at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, engaging in conversations that no one could understand, giggling at something that we could only guess was a joke . . . made by Olive Oyl?

“She must have taken her to bed instead of letting Mrs. Beasley hold her,” I decided. The bespectacled Mrs. Beasley doll with the blue polka dot body and the yellow plastic hair was still in her place near the bed, grinning amiably. “Did you bring Olive Oyl to bed with you, Jeannette?”

She nodded yes. Her shoulders heaved as little gasps pulled them forward.

“No wonder you lost her. Now let’s give Olive Oyl to Mrs. Beasley so we can all go back to sleep.” Dad headed back to bed.

“No!” Jeannette looked up in alarm and pulled Olive Oyl away from Mom’s reach.

“Yes, Jeannette. You can have her in the morning.” Mom reached again for Olive Oyl.

Jeannette began to cry. Mom looked at me helplessly.

“Oh, let her keep Olive Oyl,” I said. “I’ll find her if she loses it again.” I helped Jeannette lie back down in the bed. “Look, Jay, put her here, under your pillow. That way she won’t move around when you sleep. And you can put your hand up to see if she’s still there when you wake up, okay?”  Jeannette nodded happily, her eyes already closing as she tucked one hand under her pillow.

Mom turned off the lights and we all went to sleep. Problem solved. Or so we thought. At least we knew what the screeches were about when Jeannette woke in the middle of the night after that. Good ol’ Olive Oyl. It wasn’t too hard to find her in the dark, now that we knew what to look for.

But Olive Oyl, like all things well-loved, would not stay the same forever.

One day her head fall off.

“Ahhhhh!!!!!!!” Jeannette’s wail brought us running to the living room, where she sat on the rug, looking in horror from one hand to the other, a red-dressed torso clutched in the left, a smiling round head the size of a large marble in the right. She held out both hands to us imploringly. “Fix Ah-ee Oy?”

Sometimes we could work miracles, but this time we couldn’t. A small part of me—the tired part, the part which had spent numerous nights since Olive Oyl’s first escape searching for the renegade doll among Jeannette’s blankets—breathed a little sigh of relief. Maybe now we could find a suitable replacement for the wire doll—something bigger. Much bigger, and harder to lose in the middle of the night.

“We can’t fix her, Jay. I’m sorry.” I braced myself for tears.

Jeannette regarded the contents of both her hands solemnly. “Okay,” she said, handing me Olive Oyl’s torso. “You frow away?”

I looked back at her. “Um . . . yeah. I can throw her away.” Really? She’s just gonna let me toss her in the garbage? I was surprised, but not about to question her equanimity. I reached for her other hand. “You want me to throw that away, too?”

Jeannette pulled away in horror. “No frow! No frow Ah-ee Oy away!” If she could have added “you monster!” I’m sure she would have. She pulled Olive Oyl’s head close to her face and whispered something as she turned her body away from me. A protective spell, perhaps.  

“Uh . . . Jay? We can’t fix her, you know.” Jeannette ignored me stonily.

“Maybe we can get her a new one,” Mom offered.

“Oh, Mom!” I started, shooting her daggers.

“What?” said Mom.

“That doll’s too small! Every night she loses it in the blankets, and I have to find it.”

“Yes, but she loves it,” said Mom, watching Jeannette examine the dismembered head. “Let’s get her a new one.”

“But, Mom—“

“No new Ah-ee Oy!” said Jeannette, interrupting us. “DIS Ah-ee Oy.”

“But—“ began Mom.

“DIS ONE!”

And that was that.

Olive Oyl’s head went everywhere Jeannette went. The macabre, grinning, pebble-eyed pate sat at the breakfast table, the lunch table, the dinner table. Jeannette clutched Olive Oyl’s head on trips to the grocery store. Olive Oyl’s head floated in the bathtub among the bubbles. And, of course, Olive Oyl’s head came to bed with Jeannette.

Thunk! Taptaptap thunk! tap tap . . .

The sound of Olive Oyl’s head slipping beneath our two beds and bouncing crookedly away between our shoes and toys would wake me moments before Jeannette’s wail of alarm. I’d swim beneath the bed like a pearl-diver seeking treasure, hoping I could surface before Jay was out of breath from her sobbing. The constant interruption to my sleep began to take its toll on me. At night, I’d yell at Jeannette. “Not again! Can’t you let Mrs. Beasley watch her, Jay?” and worse, “Why don’t you try looking for her sometime?” Then I’d feel guilty and dive back under the bed until I found the hated head. By day, I’d imagine all the strange misfortunes that could befall Olive Oyl. An unfortunate nose-dive into a pot of spaghetti sauce? She was about the right size for a small meatball. Or maybe a trip to a driving range could set her (and me) free. Fore!

Mom must have seen how the lack of sleep was affecting my sanity--or, at least, my mood. One day I came home from school, and she held up a pretty little drawstring sack that she had crocheted. It was purple, Jeannette’s favorite color. “I think this may work,” she said. At the time, I had no clue what she meant. Did she think the sack could replace Olive Oyl? "Sure," I mumbled. "Whatever you say."

That night, Mom hung the little purple bag from Jeannette’s bedpost. “I made a special bed for Olive Oyl,” she told Jeannette. “She can sleep right up here, between you and Frances. And she’ll be here in the morning when you wake up. What do you think?”

We watched for her reaction. “Bed? For Ah-ee Oy?”

“It’s purple. Like the bedspread.”

“Puh-pah bed for Ah-ee Oy?” Jeannette whispered something to Olive Oyl. She nodded. Then she put her in the sack. “N’nite, Ah-ee Oy,” she said, patting the bag. And Jeannette went to sleep with her hand clutching Olive Oyl’s head through the corner of the hanging purple ‘bed.’

She woke up several times that week in a panic, but she learned to reach up and find Olive Oyl sleeping in her ‘bed’, and I found myself looking much more kindly at the silly plastic head by day, since I was sleeping so much better each night. I grew to appreciate the comfort and companionship she seemed to offer my sister. And I learned not to underestimate my Mom's good ideas.

Olive Oyl’s features wore off in time, and she was gradually replaced by a much bigger and brighter companion—a Big Bird hand puppet, who, wisely, never roamed from his place on Jeannette’s pillow each night.

---

In her three decades of life, Jeannette never gave up her need for “lovies.” She learned not to carry them to school—they waited for her at the top of the stairs each school day, and, later, they waited for her to return home from work at Seabird Enterprises. She grew a small collection of favorites. In addition to Big Bird, Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog became part of her circle of friends. Even when they were not with her, she carried their voices in her head. Like our brother, Bobby, Jeannette had schizophrenia as part of her list of disabilities—a very benign form which generally served to keep her happy and laughing at the goings-on of her favorite friends.  She whispered to them, she doubled over with laughter at some funny joke one or another had played, and she occasionally scolded and yelled at them for misbehaving. But mostly she just enjoyed their company.

Now that she’s gone, when I think of her, I sometimes wish I had that silly Olive Oyl head to hold onto. I wonder where it went. And then I laugh at myself a little.

A “lovey” or a token won’t ever replace Jeannette for me. “Lovies” get lost. Tokens break. Although my sister’s passing left a hole in my heart that won’t ever be filled, time helps heal the jagged edges of loss. And if I listen hard enough, I realize that her voice is still with me. It doesn’t intrude on my thoughts the way the voices of schizophrenia intruded on hers and Bobby’s—but it is there, nevertheless. I hear her laugh; I hear my brother’s; I hear Fal's. On the twelfth anniversary of Jeannette’s passing, I still remember the feel of her small hand as I pressed Olive Oyl’s head into her palm, and the feel of her arms wrapped around my neck in a sleepy hug.

Memory is something to be grateful for.

And a memory that brings a smile—that’s a treasure, indeed. 

Rest in Peace, Jeannette Irene Kelley

July 15, 1966 – March 18, 2001

May the road rise up to meet you,

May the wind be always at your back,

May the sun shine on your face,

The rains fall soft upon your fields.

Until we meet again, may God hold you

In the palm of his hand.

Choices

You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world . . . but you do have some say in who hurts you.                                John Green

I finished reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green this week. A few pages into it, I thought, “Maybe this was not such a good idea.” Since I just lost a close friend to lung disease which had no known cause, reading a book in which a main character had terminal cancer in her lungs seemed to have been a questionable decision on my part.

But I kept reading anyway.

And—wow. As I said in my last blog post, I knew that the young adult genre was the right place for me to turn when I was hurting. Young adult novelists face problems head on—no candy coating, no pretensions. Is this a world full of pain? Uh-huh. Do bad things happen to good people? You betcha. But young adult writers don’t leave you in existential nihilistic emptiness. A message of hopelessness and meaninglessness is not part of the unspoken contract between reader and writer. In fact, the opposite is true. Some small seed of hope is expected, despite the painful truths explored in a young adult novel. And I believe that John Green truly delivered on this promise in this work of art.

He hit on the truth. There is a layer of fear that the chronically and terminally ill face each day—the impact of their conditions, and especially of their deaths, on those who love them. It’s a fear born of love. We all face it—there is always a risk in loving someone: risk of disappointment, risk of rejection, risk of loss, risk of hurting those we love ourselves. But most of us choose to love others anyway—accepting that risk is our choice. We may not like the risk, but we choose love anyway.

Shortly after a hospitalization in which the critical nature of my friend Fal’s illness became evident, we were sitting on her couch talking. Her husband came in, and she spoke to both of us. “You know, I yelled at Rudi for calling you. I said, ‘Hasn’t this woman already gone through enough already without having to deal with all this?’”  Then Fal paused and looked at me. “I don’t want people taking on more than they can handle to help me,” she said. “It’s . . . too much to ask.” She knew what was coming—the risks involved. And she wanted to protect us. She wanted to give her friends an out, in case we couldn’t handle the pain.

But we have a choice. We can choose to toughen up, to turn away, to distract ourselves or distance ourselves from others. Sometimes we do it for our own good—we know that getting too attached will lead to heartache. Sometimes it seems the wisest course. And sometimes we choose to love despite the terrible risks.

It doesn’t always seem like a choice. I could not help loving my friend, any more than I could help loving my own family. But, in truth, it is a choice. And that’s what Fal needed to know. That we, her friends, were walking into this situation with our eyes wide open. With a full understanding that we were taking on a big risk in sticking with her. And she wanted us to know that she’d forgive us if we couldn’t take that risk. She didn’t want us to get hurt.

I told Fal to let it go—she didn’t have any choice over whether we decided to hang tight or distance ourselves. We’d each do what we needed to do—she’d have to rely on each of us to make the right choices for ourselves. We knew she wouldn’t love us any less no matter what we chose. We’d promise to take care of ourselves and our needs, if she’d promise to take care of her own, and let go of ours. She reluctantly agreed. But she never stopped worrying about us.

Fal worried about her family above all else. When the kids are older, I’ll probably recommend The Fault in Our Stars to them. Because the other thing we want for our loved ones is the opportunity for each one of them to lead fulfilling lives, to be whole and to truly live and find happiness if we should pass before them. That’s what Fal wanted. John Green got that right, too.

The Fault in Our Stars doesn’t make the pain go away. But it reminds me that I had the choice to love Fal. I even had the choice to love my brother and sister.  And my choices have left me richer, despite the losses.

Thanks, John Green (and Augustus Waters).

Thank you, Fal.

Words

I loved my friend.

He went away from me

There’s nothing more to say

The poem ends,

Soft as it began--

I loved my friend.

                       by Langston Hughes

This week, I lost my friend. In the darkness of grief, when reality has become unreal, when tears don’t heal and the future seems like a long road of emptiness, where do I go? What do I do? I turn to words. And sometimes they fail me. “There’s nothing more to say.” There is more grief expressed in those words written by poet Langston Hughes than in anything I’ve ever read.

Words heal us. As writers, the words that flow can surprise us. W.H. Auden said, “I look at what I write so that I may see what I think.” It’s a primal kind of therapy for some of us, a way to pull from the jumbled brain something that has shape, or order, or meaning.

As readers, words connect us. Whether they make us smile—hey, I’m not the only one who thinks that’s funny!—or bring us to tears, it’s all about the human connection.

Writers for children must honor this need for connection in their work. Books like Each Little Bird that Sings by Deborah Wiles for middle graders, and The Last Summer of the Death Warriors by Francisco X. Stork for young adults deal with life and death, and living in the midst of death, in ways that acknowledge and honor all of our mixed emotions about moving forward in a world that can be filled with heartache. The fact that sometimes we don’t really want to face up to our fears and losses, while somewhere deep inside we are aching to come to terms with them—these are themes and threads that run throughout our lives, and that run through all good literature. Each Little Bird and Death Warriors both fit the bill here beautifully.

So where do I turn when my own words fail me? When I can’t write my way out of my own hurt? To the words of others. To books, of course. Young adult, preferably—tightly written, emotionally true. And for one other reason which I’ll get to in a minute.

Next to me is a copy of The Fault in our Stars by John Green. A novel of life and death and the people caught in between, says Markus Zusak’s review on the back cover. Because I need that connection right now—to feel a little less alone in my head with all these difficult feelings. Because I know that it will help me think about my own loss and view it in a different light. Because, despite all the crying I’ve been doing in the past few days, I need another good cry—the kind which connects me with people I’ve never met, all feeling some of the same sort of feelings that those of us who knew and loved my friend are feeling right now. A connection to the great ocean of the world’s sorrows, but at the same time, a connection to the world’s light. Because young adult books may leave us sad, but they will never just dump you into the middle of despair and leave you without a life vest. If John Green’s book is true to the tradition of young adult work, I’ll find what I’m looking for by the end. That glimmer of hope. That life vest I need so desperately right now.

As for my own words, I offer up a poem I wrote out of gratitude for having had my dear friend in my life. I include it here as a connection to the greater world. If you didn’t know my friend, at least you may get a sense of who she was—who she’ll always be. May she bring a little light to your life, as she has done for so many others. May she always be remembered.

   

Drawing a Lotus

with gratitude for Fal

From the dark paste,

like a seedling lifting

itself from the mud,

a flower emerged

and raised its head

to the light of the world.

From her warm hands

she gave the lotus life.

She blessed the skin,

she blessed the heart

of its bearer.

Mehndi maker,

on our souls

you drew a

life

so beautiful,

a pattern

so pure,

a love

so real

that it

could

never

fade.

Within the heavy

darkness of our hearts

a lotus stirs:

your love for us.

F. Prescott

1/13/13