SWA from SMF to PDX

I had just taken a break from grading papers--an in-flight ritual, it seems--when she begins talking. And smiling. She is a pleasant woman, a bit heavy, glasses, reading a book titled Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. I'd noticed the book's title, I imagine, about the same time she'd noticed me with my papers. I'm not a fan of self-help books, though I suppose I haven't read enough of them. But if anyone needs help, I'm the guy, I think.

"I didn't want to disturb you," Kimberly says. "I waited until it looked like you were taking a break." I assure her it's no problem, that I need to be disturbed when I'm grading papers. "Are you a teacher?" I tell her I am, at least part-time. "I'm Kimberly," she says as she reaches her thick hand across the empty middle seat. I tell her my name. "Nice to meet you," she says. "I always loved school, but I didn't start college until late in life. I tell her that I think it's wonderful that she started at all. "I participate in this health-thing at work," she says. "I get an email every morning that gives me a goal for the day. Today's goal was to introduce myself to someone I do not know." I smile. "I guess I'm that someone!" We talk some more about where she works, what she does. I don't remember now if I told her what I do, where I work. Maybe she thinks I'm a full-time teacher. "Oh," she says. "I've already forgotten your name." I laugh, and I tell her my name again. "I should remember that," she says. "That was my husband's name."

Uh-oh.

The flight is short, but I learn a lot from her. She tells me she loves college, and she has 5 associate degrees. She has two daughters. One daughter went to college, graduated, and got a job in the travel industry; she has traveled all over the world. Kimberly and her daughter go on cruises together because they can get such great deals. Her other daughter has some type of unspecified (to me) learning disability but is a wonderful photographer. Kimberly has two dogs. She met the man would be her husband online. "He knew he was dying when we met," Kimberly says. "I didn't care. It gave him a certain presence." 

Kimberly is on her way to Eugene, Oregon, to spend a few days with some of her husband's friends. "I still feel so comfortable with them," she says, and she starts to tear up. "How long has it been since he died?" I ask. She says that it has been a couple of years. "You miss him," I say, because I am an expert at nothing if not the obvious. "Yeah," she says, "I do." And she says they used to go on grand hikes together until he could no longer walk. She mentions a couple more times that she is really looking forward to seeing her husband's friends. I'm reminded of on a flight home from England, the woman next to me told me how her daughter had died just a year earlier. She said she still didn't know how to respond when people asked her how many children she has. I wrote about that experience somewhere in this blog. I liked writing it. There was a cat and a snake in that story if I remember correctly.

Kimberly says that when her dead husband died, she and all of their friends wrote messages on the man's skin, just as people might sign a plaster cast that hold someone's bones in place. "The hospice nurse said she'd never seen anything like that."

Kimberly looks out the window, and I put the students' papers in a folder. The plan will be landing soon, and I want to be ready. As we leave the plane, I tell Kimberly that I hope she has a wonderful time, that I hope she thinks about her husband the entire time. She says she will, and she says she is glad to have spoken with me.

Then, I'm out of the plane and walking through PDX, wondering if the extra weight I feel is weight that Kimberly didn't need.

The Change

I stopped being able to write decent poetry a long time ago. Something happened, I guess. Perhaps I did not feed the Muse, did not make it known that I was available. Some people lose other things in the same way: love, opportunities, careers. I've lost some of those too. But the ability to write decent poetry hurts the most.

But, that's the time of day and the glass of wine talking. The poem here is almost decent, I think--simple in language and theme, a bit too similar of things I've written before. But it's nice to have written something, isn't it? Anyway, this one floated around my brain for several weeks before, once again, a writer-friend gave me the little push I needed to put it down somewhere. "Change" works on a couple of levels here, and it's the idea that I started with. In fact, the last line is how the whole poem began. The idea of having a sister in the poem appeared early on, too, as did Coltrane.
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The Change

During our summer walks my sister and I learned

to whisper the names of landmarks so that when

the day came we could find our own way home.

Our father, always several paces ahead of us, knew

each alleyway, knew who was on the other side of

each closed apartment  door and each opened window.

We learned the names, too: Johnson, Kominski, at least

three Smiths. During one summer’s evening humidity

the old man stopped, so we stopped. He tilted his head

upwind toward something new. “He’s trying to play Coltrane,”

our father said. “Listen.” So we listened: not the Top 40 we

spun in the basement after school while the humidifier worked,

but to indefinable rhythms we could not yet catch. “He needs

a new reed,” our father said. “But he’s getting it. Hear that? 

Hear how he held that note for almost long enough?”

My sister and I shifted our stance, ready to move on as he

tapped  his foot just enough so that a passerby might notice.  

The sun was nearly gone, and its light revealed the hidden

grayness deep in our father’s hair. He looked down at us,  

gauged that light against our bedtime. “Another minute,”  

he said. “A few more  measures. Just give me those and we’ll

all go home.” He turned his good ear back toward  the window

and the failing reed. “Get ready,” he said. “Listen for the change.”