A version of this piece also appeared in The Houston Chronicle in the Gray Matters section on 15 December 2014.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/December-graduation-and-the-things-I-want-to-5957963.php?t=dd6b3c43f279b87a02&cmpid=twitter-desktop

It’s 63 degrees in December, and I am flying down the highway to Houston Baptist University.  I have left early, but I am still running late because I didn’t count on all the closed ramps around Clear Lake.  I am in a hurry because I will be reading the names of the graduates for the first ceremony that starts at 9 am.  That is, if I make it.

I start to wonder what my explanation will sound like if I can’t make up the time on Beltway 8.  I start to think of all the people who might wonder where I am, what I am doing, and why I am late.  I start to feel a little sick, and I realize I don’t have the cell phone number of Linda Clark, the Provost’s Administrative Super Woman, who seems to handle everything with perfect ease. She is the easiest person to work with in the world, and I hate the thought of letting her down. For heaven’s sakes, we are a team at graduation!  I can’t just not show up! This isn’t like missing a class–there isn’t another one to make up.  Then I realize everyone–President Sloan, Provost Reynolds, the board of trustees, donors–will know that I have been unable to fulfill the one requirement I have today:  showing up.

It’s not like they are going to hold the ceremony for me–I mean I am not Lindsay Lohan. But I am starting to understand what she might feel like sometimes, with her ridiculous tardiness and lame excuses. Oh, Lindsay:  this is no way to live.

All I want to do is get on 45, but all I see are red tail lights, feeder road, and despair. Continue reading →

This piece was also published by The Houston Chronicle in the Gray Matters section on 10 December 2014.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/Emily-Dickinson-5948202.php?t=2017a4d5be79b87a02&cmpid=twitter-desktop

Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December in 1830, but on Monday at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., they celebrated early with a day-long marathon reading of her poems–over 1700 of them, in order.  How many other American poets would get this kind of birthday recognition?

Try zero.

I may be far away in Texas, but as Dickinson herself wrote, “There is no Frigate like a Book,” and I can be all the way in Houston and feel her angst (and joy) in my beaten-up, highlighted, and dog-eared collection of her poems.  Sometimes it takes awhile to wrap your mind around her poems, because she can turn on a dime, turn it up a notch, even turn on you–sometimes even before you know it.  Like all drama queens, she keeps it lively, even 184 years after her birth.

If you read her poems individually, you might think you could figure out her position on a few things.  The doyenne of the declarative statement, she can define things with confidence, letting you know that “Publication– is the Auction/ Of the Mind of Man–“, or that she would rather be “Nobody” rather than “Somebody” if it means that one is praised by “An admiring Bog.”  Yet, there is a wistfulness, a desire to be heard, by someone, maybe a better reader than most of us are, as when she wrote the famous Atlantic Monthly editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  She wanted to know if her poetry “breathed.”  In an age of click-bait and Buzzfeed, it might be hard to comprehend that she didn’t care so much about crunching the numbers or what would be the equivalent of “breaking the internet,” but that doesn’t mean she did not want to be heard at all.  Her poems were her “Letter to the World,” but she was also okay with selecting her own “Society.”  Dickinson has something to say to us about being “discriminating” before that word became so politically charged.

You cannot read her poems individually and figure out her final word on anything. You have to see her as a poet who can channel the contradictory emotions we all feel through the venue of the poem.  Think of the poem as her stage, and her words as the monologues that fit her mood at that moment:  it is great theater, something to see.  Just when you think she couldn’t be angrier at God (a “burglar” who makes her lose twice–and that is “in the sod”) then you witness her turning to God for inspiration–a way to define the divine, even if she is conflicted about it.  I know it sounds sacrilegious when Dickinson says “The Brain is Wider than the Sky” followed by “The Brain is just the weight of God”–but the point is her frame of reference is what she can imagine, and that changes.  For someone who claims she doesn’t like “Paradise,” she sure spends a lot of time thinking about it. And, through Dickinson’s queenly decrees, so do we. Continue reading →

This piece also ran in the Gray Matters section of The Houston Chronicle on 2 December 2014

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/Last-month-s-angels-5930509.php?t=c7a4c1ac4c79b87a02&cmpid=twitter-desktop

For David E. Wilson and James Meredith

Today it is the first of December, the month that seems to outshine all previous months through lights, cameras, action.  There is so much to be done.  We have Christmas and its hopes; New Year’s Eve, the promise of a clean slate.  Still, it is a lot to juggle.  We shop a lot, looking for things.  Things for others, maybe for ourselves.  Sometimes, a lot goes into being merry and bright.

But November was a heavy month.  Some months are harder to let go.  Maybe we need to think about them a few more days, hold off on the next big thing.  Although it is December, ready or not. I know that, but still.

I.  Angels Above Us

The first weekend in November I take  my son Christopher and his friend Matthew to the Wings Over Houston Air Show.  I don’t really want to go–my father, who retired as a full colonel from the Air Force Reserves, has taken him in the past.  But he is out of town, and Christopher is obsessed.  Space City Parent Magazine tells me that if I donate a gift card to a needy teen I can get tickets.  Who can say no to that?  We are going.  It is a good thing, as it turns out it is the most amazing thing I have seen in years, and I am no recluse.  My resistance is just one of those times when I have no idea what I am talking about.  Luckily, my guardian angel intervenes, sets me straight, gets me to where I need to go, which is the Air Show, at Ellington Air Force base, in Webster, minutes from my home.  They have it every year–don’t ask me where I have been. I have been prejudging things, dismissing miracles, missing out.

When we arrive, the first thing we see is a replica of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C.  It is the memorial that lists the names of the fallen in the order of their deaths.  There are so many names, I can’t even wrap my mind around it.  We stay there awhile, donate money to its upkeep.  It seems so paltry, but it’s so sad to see those names you want to do something–anything.  Most of those men and women listed were just kids.  But then we get our tickets scanned, see so many in military uniforms at the air show.  Some are in uniform, some are in fatigues.  Some of them are in wheelchairs, back from Iraq, Afghanistan.  Some have lost limbs, maybe part of their minds, maybe more–more than we will ever know. So many of them look so young to me. Just kids.

We see replicas of the planes that dropped the bombs on Pearl Harbor–the planes were used by Hollywood in the movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!”  Later, those planes will ascend into the sky–reenact that fateful day.  They have something to remind you of almost every war–the pyrotechnics are amazing.  They are real–just done at a different time.  Like now.  You can’t really picture any of this from pictures–you have to see it in action.  My eyes go up to the sunny Houston sky over and over–it does not matter if it is the woman from La Porte, Texas who has won more military championships flying her plane than anyone, or the huge plane known as “Fat Albert” that soars through the air as graceful as the smallest fighter jets–you are amazed, and you cannot look away. Continue reading →