This is the latest in a series of written correspondence between myself fellow writer, Ultimate player and friend, Jonathan Neeley. To catch up, follow these links to:
My first letter to Jonathan, his reply, my reply back, and his most recent letter.
Letter #5
6/22/23
Dear Jonathan,
This is way harder than I anticipated. But I will press on. The writing is slow-going. Rocks all along the path. It reminds me of Rilke’s line: I feel as though I make my way through massive rock, like a vein of ore … It also reminds me of seven years ago when I broke my hand (my right hand) and had to learn to write with my left. It was laborious, concentrating on every stroke just to form legible words. That’s when I started writing poetry, my adult poetry — I did write in my youth up until my mid 20s or so. In the forced slowing down of my hand I discovered my thoughts were slowing down too. It took much longer for each word to travel from my mind to the page. Each word seemed to marinate in my body, and words and language itself began to feel more intimate to me. I really do believe there are gifts in every ordeal. I find myself so grateful to have broken my hand.
What this is is a sheet of paper embedded with the crushed remains of the official trophy of the 1996 UPA College National Championships held in Blaine, Minnesota. The trophy was a ceramic cup, heavy and clunky and clearly made in earnest by a beginner ceramicist — a symbol of victory, not only for us, but also in the way that all pieces that survive the kiln in your first ceramics class count as victories. It had decorative spirals and squiggles on the base and with little wings on the sides that looked like they may have been inspired by the winged shoes of Mercury. I was co-captain of that team, along with Pepe (Matthew Lefevre). Pepe took the trophy with him, many years passed, and he eventually moved to France. Twenty years later in 2016, we reunited at Virginia Beach to play together with a number of our old teammates to compete at beach nationals in the grandmasters division. Pepe had sent me an email a few days before we both flew out there — him from France and me from Portland — with the instruction to leave room in my luggage. When we got there, he simply handed me the trophy and said “Your turn.” One of the wings was missing, and he had placed it inside the cup. It had broken off in transit, he said, due to an unfortunate shift in the overhead compartment. I found it poetic and fitting that this awkward and precious and very much breakable object managed to stay safely intact under his care for twenty years, and then finally broke in the very act of giving it away. While I enjoyed getting to see it and hold it again, I knew immediately that the only thing for me to do was to break it further, to work with the momentum of the story, to transform it into art and to somehow distribute a piece of the trophy to the rest of the team. About a year later, I crushed it to bits and used it to make paper. I had envisioned using the paper to write a letter to each of my college teammates — but now after one page of struggling to push my pen through this rocky terrain, I am rethinking that plan.
[Moving off of the ceramic dust embedded paper and onto regular printer paper]
Ah, yes. This is much better. How grateful I am for this smooth surface!
I find it fascinating that you can track changes in your facial expression through your childhood photos. It makes me curious to see if I could do the same with mine. I remember how somewhere around when I was upper elementary or junior high school age, I started posing for the camera by plastering a huge, toothy smile across my face. I would bug my eyes out and stretch my face muscles to show as many teeth as possible, performing happy and enthusiastic at the most exaggerated levels of my expressive capacity. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was hiding something — both from the camera, and from myself. I think I wanted so desperately to be happy and enthusiastic, and I enjoyed the attention I got for the playfulness of making a face — at least it was somewhat amusing or entertaining to the adults who might chuckle a little, or if it was one of my parents, might not chuckle but rather tell me to smile for real. I think by that time I didn’t know what a real smile was. The big, cheesy grin was a mask, a shield, an exaggerated persona I wore to hide a grief from not only the world but from myself. I wasn’t aware that I was sad underneath the surface I performed.
My daughter resists the camera. She hates being asked to take pictures, and I admire her resistance, her unwillingness to succumb to social convention just because it’s the way things are done. And so, in photos she often wears a frown, or a scowl. But I love it — not that she’s miserable in the moment, but that she’s authentic. She’s real — sometimes real angry about being asked to pose for the camera. I think I would be too. More accurately, I think I was angry when I was being asked to smile when I was her age. I just responded differently, with a big smiley mask.
You asked if my grief has an origin story. First, I’d say that there are many stories, with many distinct threads. There were many events that created a sense of loss, or a feeling of being unmoored from a sense of safety and security and made me uncomfortable in my own skin. Certainly, there were some clear physically painful or emotionally painful situations and events. But putting on a face was more of an ongoing strategy of living life — most of the time I wasn’t in remarkable or obvious pain, but trying to manage an insidious inculcation that regardless of how I felt, that I had to perform happiness, or at least pleasantness.
I think I may have written about this in one of our writing groups — how when we were kids, if were were out in public, my parents would be vigilant about us not making a scene. If we were upset — my brother or sister or myself — we were to keep that to ourselves. We were to put on a face and not embarrass them with our bad, loud, annoying or overly exuberant behavior. I can remember father telling us on many occasions, in preparation for meeting others out for dinner or attending some social event, if an adult asked how we were, we were to respond by saying that we were ‘fine.” Even if my brother and I had just been arguing, or if one of us had been crying or upset, we were fine. I know my parents were doing the best they could.
Being fine became a knee-jerk response. One that I came to believe was true. I became a person who simply didn’t get angry, and I was proud of it. I saw my lack of anger in my young adulthood as a virtuous part of my personality.
You wrote about how you began to clearly see how angry you were inside a few years ago, and how that anger was rarely visible to the outside world.
One day, when our kids were around 3 and 4 years old, they were fighting with each other, and I lost it. I yelled at them to stop — overpowered them with my voice, my volume, my intimidating glare, my size. They burst into tears. I recall how startled I was by the sound of my own voice, by the feeling of anger rushing through me. There was a monster in me, and I was suddenly afraid of myself. In that moment, I felt as though I’d become my father.
I wasn’t fine. I was in pain. That day was only the beginning of seeing how much there was beneath the surface. And so I began to follow the threads back down to the roots of the origin story, where I began to catch my first glimpses of parts of myself I had lost, and began to see how deep was my grief.
I’m thankful to be on this journey with you, my friend.
Love,
New Fall Writing Classes Open
I’m facilitating a new round of Thursday and Friday Writing Groups that start up in September and are now open for enrollment. Click here to learn more.
I didn’t realize how valuable and important it was to write in community until I became a participant in Jonathan Neeley’s writing groups, and I recommend them to you highly. To find out more about Jonathan’s classes, click here.
Reminds me of reading Ross Gay and his call and response letters. I had notions of beginning this with a brother of mine who prompted the conversation. Life has moved on though and time is a vessel unto our own for the moment. Writing is visceral adn meaningful exactly because it requires thoughtfulness to be legible enough. The recycling is a metaphor for me of re-inventing into new life something that was of value before and has changed its usage into another. Best Wishes