to the "strong in the broken places"

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Ernest Hemingway

Earlier this week I roamed the downtown area of Oak Park with a friend. We went in search of discovering the roots of a distinguished American author. The town takes great pride in their once resident, although I find it fascinating that the pride wasn't shared by the individual.

Ernest Hemingway wanted a different life, so he reinvented himself. He broke from his family, religion and hometown and traveled to Paris, Spain, Florida, Africa, Cuba and ultimately Idaho where he took his own life at age 62. The same age my dad was when he passed just this November.

The meat of Hemingway's messages is in the unsaid: One true sentence. What is whispering in the background is the immense difficulty in that venture. As if truth were readily tangible. As if this crossroads on which I pace suddenly illuminated one distinct path. Hemingway was constantly reaching, so am I and coincidentally so are my sentences.

It's unsettling to grasp at the ghost of what was. Maybe Hemingway dealt with that discomfort by moving or marrying another broad. I wonder though, if the bigger challenge isn't to pick a path and run full speed down it, but rather to stay and face what is.

I didn't know my father and he didn't know me. And since this was a fact even when he was alive, I wasn't convinced that much would change when he was gone.

That's one truthfully ugly sentence.

But somehow, everything has changed because options are no longer available.

You sit at that proverbial crossroads too long and alternate roads disappear. (Back off eternal optimists who claim it's never too late to do something.) It is too late for me to have a working relationship with my dad, roots that for so long I was convinced I should be separated from. I missed many opportunities but then, so did he.

Hemingway, if we could sit across from one another, I'd order you and me a mojito and ask for your truest sentence. If I'm brave enough, I'll stay and try to find mine.

I don't believe it is possible to put things behind you, not when it has already become a part of you. You can go on, fortifying new memories and work to enrich the here and now but what has preceded will always be step-in-step with what is.

So as the skeletal eyes stare back at me from the hospital bed, I can't help but feel like I've been here before.

The question is, does he know it?

Date: 6/16/11 - Location: Dublin Airport - Time: 9am

The flight out of Chicago O'Hare was a success. It was the longest flight I have been on to date BUT it had the right tools to keep you occupied: games, movies, music, food -- just not enough sleep. I could have used a few more winks of that. Melissa let me sit by the window (nice girl) and we marveled at the cumulus clouds and the sunset above them and eventually at the glowing effervescent moon. As we were landing in Dublin I watched the landscape change from bubbly endless clouds to calming vast farmland - fisherman were out early this morning having a great day, no doubt, as I could eye the little ripples in the bay made by the numerous fish touching the surface. What a great day to be alive.

The airport is an interesting place - mixed with bittersweet emotions - a place that brings together as it tears apart - a place of relief - excitement - yearning - but overall waiting. You wait. You wait. You wait some more. Sometimes you do that waiting standing, sitting, sometimes with a breakfast sandwich in hand, sometimes on the phone with your mother as she tells you her embarrassing customs story when she tried to bring a plant from Holland back to the U.S. There she was sternly instructed that you couldn't bring into the states anything "growing."

All in all, I feel extraordinarily lucky to be here...waiting for our plane to Paris.

6/15/11 O'Hare Airport

C: "Sometimes I think fiction is truer than non-fiction...I'm going to let that muddle"

M: "I get what you're saying"

C: "You smell what I'm cookin?"

M: "I do...it smells good."

EDU 601: Contemporary Issues in Education

"To have emotional resources that are healthy, one needs to have an identity" (Ruby Payne, A Framework for Understanding Poverty)

My finger stops on this sentence. Then my mind. Then my heart.

While the class gets up for a bathroom break, I run my pencil over this sentence that I've copied in my notebook. I'm almost certain that whatever the questions may be, this right here, is the answer.

form and function: a lesson in

i like that i can
just

SHOW YOU

and
you
get
the
point.

if the choice is words
or space

i always choose

just say yes to the memory

Sometimes the impact or significance of an experience doesn't hit us until much much later when you have had ample time to reflect, joke, reminisce, obtain distance and with that then clarity or understanding. And yet in other moments we feel the depth of the event as it marks us, alters or adds to who we are and how we see the world... ("the secret that know one knows - the root of the root - the bud of the bud - and the sky of the sky")

I hadn't known that junior year of high school, while wasting away the morning minutes, as was our soccer team tradition, that writing in permanent marker, "Hannigan drinks her own pee," would be a memory I would be laughing about with that good friend ten years later. We are amused at the recollection of just how frantically I tried to erase the crude remark from my poor coach's dry erase board, (although, now thinking about it, I'm sure my coach who also taught biology could have figured a way to work that into the curriculum). It was a moment. Seemingly insignificant, but over time, valuable because it was shared. Our lives are made up of many many instances like this -- something may have even happened to you today, that you'll push aside and over the years will become a gem.

But then there are also those moments that as they are happening, you feel as though time has stopped and taken a picture; you are frozen in the emotions, cemented in the weight of the frame as if somehow you are directing the camera but simultaneously playing a role. It was an honor to be at that door that night. We grouped, we gathered, and we rang...I was clutching the neck of a champagne bottle with my left hand and biting my lower lip with great anticipation, as if I were playing the lotto, ticket in hand, breathlessly waiting for balls to drop and for life to change. As the door opened and we saw her floored face the frozen frame shifted to a flip book that took me back to the moment they met: A fateful weekend in the mountains, flash forward to the day he asked her to just say yes.

And she did.

Melissa handled her waves of surprises (first wave being engaged and second having all her friends know about it and show up for a make-shift engagement party celebration) in true Melissa fashion, with grace, gratitude and the truest form of happiness known to mankind. The rest of the evening was spent hearing both sides of their story and toasting to the future Mr. and Mrs. The ring was glowing although it had strong competition with Melissa's smile. Her father excitedly filled up my wine glass multiple times and we had laughs and tears interrupted by bites of cookies and cakes.

I don't need time or distance from this memory to understand its significance because each time I think about it, I'm there, in the moment.

There may only be a few of those in our lives and how lucky am I that I was able to share in it?

How lucky are we for knowing these two who show us what it means to love?