Collage

I call it Four Women--by Bettie Friendenberg

Gold Buttons, Marsha Recknagel

I have not written a post in so long that I forgot my password to log into the site. 

When I remembered--after some scary seconds--I was heartened: it was a sign.  First, a sign that my memory is intact. A sign, also, that I should write. Write to you, from me to you.  Hello.  Hello.  

All my thoughts were random thoughts.  But I decided to throw them down like pick-up sticks and see if there could be something to arise out of the random jumble of ideas.

Always, I think, this "post"  doesn't have to have a middle and end--of course it must have a beginning.  And so it begins...... 

Perhaps I'll escape my training and leave dangling ends to be picked up later in what should be an ongoing conversation.  What will be an ongoing conversation.  Already it has started, today, with Marc from WheelchairKamikaze.

Marc runs an MS blog that I visit now and again.  Marc has a truly debilitating form of MS. Some neurologists don't think that what he has is, in fact, MS, but they don't know what it is, except horrible. Marc writes a lot about his twenties, years he believes he wasted by being depressed, dissatisfied, angry, and self-destructive.  I always want to shout at him--Don't waste time in anger, in regret.  He knows this already, but he spends a great deal of time immobile and so thinking is what he does.  

He wrote a scene from his life that was like nothing he'd written before, and it has stayed with me. He said that once he had tried to straighten himself out, hold himself erect to stand and untwist his left arm, get his right leg to appear to be the same strength as his left. He managed to get out of his wheelchair and posed just long enough to see himself in the mirror, to see himself whole.  

This was what Marc wanted--to capture an image to hold onto so he could remember who he had been. 

I can't imagine such a triumph of will or such a yearning to be put back together again.  

Two months ago I had another neurological exam in which the drill was sickeningly familiar. I tried not to try this time.  I wanted to see what would happen if I didn't concentrate. The doctor had me close my eyes and walk toe to heel.  I swayed as if on a rocking boat, and he put out his hands to catch me before I fell.  He said, That's good.  That's not bad.  

Was he kidding?

And why didn't I ask him if he were kidding? 

A couple of years ago someone I love said to me --You didn't make this happen to you.  Piercing my heart with her knowledge of my heart, she pressed me--You think that, don't you? That you brought this on yourself?  

Yes, I'd thought that. I'd thought my wild ways had made my body a good host for this mysterious illness. But I was ready to reframe and put an end to this particular mind-worm.  I'd just needed some shock therapy, which my friend delivered. I'd pondered the why and wherefores of my MS for many sleepless nights, for long hours on a plane, driving a car, washing dishes, taking baths.  She reminded me about the art of reframing, the way one can shift perspectives and dislodge the old way of seeing things when seen from a different angle. Just like Marc with his mirror, I wanted to create a new way to see myself.    

It was during this shifting and shuffling around the idea of how I'd come to think about MS and "our" relationship that I returned to another time in my life, a time when standing or sitting or bending was almost unbearable.  I could be flat out on the floor with some relief, and actually, it's funny to remember that walking was easier than standing, and much easier than it is now.  

I'd rarely thought about the back pain I'd had before being diagnosed with MS. Suddenly there were the details, the memory of dropping something on the floor and deciding to leave it there, whatever it was--a banana peel, a banana! There were other things scattered around the house that I'd decided to step over instead of bending over to retrieve.  

Suddenly the whole damn siege of the nightmare of my back pain was right there on the tip of my mind. The mind makes one forget pain once it is gone.  Onto the new pain!!  I've heard that anyone who has had a baby knows very well the tricks of the mind concerning pain. This amnesia seems important to the survival of the species.  

From July 2001 until around 2005, I'd had agonizing back pain, and over that time I'd become an expert on back pain.   Elaine Scarry's On Pain is a well-worn book on my shelf. During those years, I'd had three epidurals, wore a tens-unit, had acupuncture, took bottles and bottles of pills: hydrocodone, Advil, trazodone, valium, Ambien.  I'd worn powerful numbing patches, had a regular appointment with the chiropractor until she realized she was hurting more than helping so she turned me over to the resident massage therapist. I had one laminectomy that was a success until my disc reherniated--one in a thousand were the odds of such a thing, or so lamented the back surgeon--a very nice woman who hit herself on the forehead with her hand and said, Why didn't this happen to that jerk patient?  This laminectomy--an emergency one-- rendered me almost immobile, leaving me with the feeling that concrete had been poured into the small of my back.

Not long after this surgery, I went to a tiny island off the coast of Honduras to try to heal myself.  I wanted to live without a car--getting in and out of a car was living hell--and I wanted to be able to swim daily in the ocean. While on Utila, I swam in the mornings and made myself walk each afternoon from one end of the island to the other, using my sun umbrella as a cane.  

Still each night I could not turn over in bed without screaming.  

One day by a pure accident of fate, I met some doctors who went each year from the States to Honduras to help the poor Hondurans who do back-breaking work--the doctors treated their weeping leg wounds by blocking off the veins providing the blood supply to such wounds. And, it turned out, they also used a method called prolotherapy to alleviate back pain.

 I had this treatment twice in La Ceiba, on the mainland.  Eight needles full of a certain mixture were stuck across my lower back--you can read about this if you do a Google search of prolotherapy.

Hondurans come from all parts of the country to stand in line to get this annual doctoring.  I visited the Red Cross camp with all the others -- and so in an open-air MASH-like set-up with frayed sheets hung with clothespins for privacy, my naked butt was exposed to the brilliant blue sky, my diaphanous skirt bunched around my waist.  

After I returned to the States. I followed up with a doctor in Austin who specialized in pain management, using prolotherapy mainly to help burn victims at the Shriner Children's Hospital.  He'd always bring me a handful of medical journal articles about prolotherapy for me to read while I waited an hour after the injections before I got up from the table where he'd injected my back.

After eight sessions over a six-month period, I was pain free for the first time in years.  

I tell you this to establish my credentials as an expert in back pain.  

 I often hear people say--My back just went out!  As if it happened that second.

What seems like a sudden event is actually the last straw of thousands of incremental insults.  

This I learned.

So this is why I thought I "got" MS. I had not treated my body as a DIVINE TEMPLE!!  I'd pitched myself headlong into life--breaking bones, hearts (my own included).  I had been reckless. 

Yet, I am reconditioning myself, reframing, changing out the old story for a new one.  In this one I have a memory that slips through the sieve of my mind in and out flashing at odd times throughout the last forty years.

 I was working at Texas Research Institute for Mental Sciences in the Texas Medical Center in Houston.  My supervisor--Lore--the head of public relations at TRIMS for whom I worked as "an editorial assistant"--had told me about a young woman she wanted me to meet. Baylor College of Medicine was across the street from TRIMS and there were many exchanges between us--feature stories to pursue for our newsletter.  

Lore had learned of a new study in the Department of Neurology at Baylor and because our center had some interns who worked at both Baylor and TRIMS, she was going to write about the Baylor study. 

That is why one day there was the woman standing in my doorway.  She was only a few years older than me; she was beautiful, thin and delicate. Her fragility was a high-pitched hum around her. She looked somewhat like Twiggy: she had long straight blonde hair, a pale oval sweet face with large blue eyes and translucent skin.  And she had a cane.  

I am ashamed about the way I romanticized her.  I was told she had Multiple Sclerosis.

There was somewhat of a scandal surrounding her--she had gone to Baylor to participate in the MS study, and her doctor fell in love with her, left his wife, and now lived with her in Montrose, not far from where I lived. This swaying vulnerable stalwart heroic figure stood in my doorway and imprinted herself permanently in my memory. Oh how many times I've thought of her since I was diagnosed.  

 It was also whispered that she didn't have long to live, which made her shimmering self seem to shine brighter than a regular old beautiful petite blonde.

 This was l977.  

I have to brush the image of her aside in order to reframe my story.  

I have a slow progressing MS.  

Perhaps I would have had a fast-paced disease if I hadn't done lots of yoga, lots of men, lots of drugs, lots of alcohol.

 A strange but true frame: my MS could have been worse if I had not lived so fully, so passionately. 

Last night I was on the phone with an old friend--a man who has known me since I was fourteen--and I told him that my assistant had asked me what I had in mind about the future of my artwork. I told him that others had suggested I get an agent, think about a show.  He said, You don't want that do you?  

I said no, I didn't want that, but I didn't know what I wanted.  

He said, "Well, if you were forty and didn't have MS you might have wanted that."

I said, "Mainly I want to be forty and not have MS."    

What I want, and what I once wanted, and what I got use to wanting over time is so different from what I think I want now that I'm often confused about WHAT I WANT.

I continually am brought up short by the realization that what once made me happy doesn't really do it for me anymore.

I also once absolutely was insane for onion dip and fritos and for a lark I tried that particular combo of horrors a few months back, and it will come as no surprise that it didn't do it for me anymore.

I watched the documentary on Susan Sontag this afternoon--instead of Christmas shopping, instead of going to the Y.  This is what I wanted--to spend a whole day in solitude, painting, watching TV, paying attention to what I liked to do now in this new state of being.

A black and white photograph of Sontag flashed on the screen.  There she was in my living room--in her boots and black sweater on the book jacket of her second book.  This image brought such a cascade of blunt force trauma memories that I had to push "pause" and take a break.  I had used that book to get HERE.  Against Interpretation, Etc. Her sexy smart self had gazed out from that cover at me for years when I was young and wanting.......to find my way in the world. 

I'd first seen this book when I was twenty-two years old, newly living in Houston, and working in a used bookstore on S. Shepard run by a very strange and dirty old man named John Lyman.  I won't even go into the strange and dirty parts right now because that is another essay.  But this was where I discovered all the amazing books and all the amazing women writers I'd not discovered in college--I went to LSU where being an intellectual was frowned upon. Merely studying was looked upon as an odd "pastime."  This book was at the bookstore where I also discovered Colette and Anais Nin  and Doris Lessing and Isak Dinesen.  How could I ever have imagined that someday Sontag's close friend, Richard Howard, would be one of my closest friends?   

I also discovered Lillian Hellman's memoirs on Mr. Lyman's shelves and twenty years later I'd write a dissertation on these works. 

I recently had some of my artwork appear in a group show, and Richard and his partner David came to town for the opening.  Richard had been one of my first writing mentors and had seen me through draft after draft of my memoir.  David is a painter.  Over many years, I'd visit them in NYC, and I'd known they were disappointed in me because I  never wanted to accompany them to museums or galleries.  This was mainly because of THE BACK PAIN, but also because I was so ignorant about the ways to speak about art.

 Not much surprises Richard--he has a way of asking one questions, of listening to the answers--that makes him get a quick and pretty accurate profile of people. My new life of making art has completely taken him by surprise. He has asked me not a few times--Did you KNOW you could do this?  

Yes and no.   

I just knew I wanted to.

When I was in the second grade my mother signed me up for an art class that met on Saturdays in a building on the edge of downtown Shreveport within feet from the Red River.

I can recall the smell of the slow-moving sludge of a river, remember the steps that led up to the studio that smelled like a boathouse, a filling station, and a hardware store--the three of my favorite establishments.  

The art teacher was named Mrs. Friedenberg.  Bettie Friedenberg.  On the first day, she handed me some pliers and tiles and told me to break up the tiles and then cement the tiles onto a board. I was left alone to accomplish this task, sitting on a stool, the table in front of me richly layered with dollops and drips of paint.  I don't think I need to tell you that I felt as if I had been delivered into heaven on earth.  

This story could take a bad turn right now, and it has in the past. The worn-stone-of-a-story is that my mother took me out of the class because it was too much for her to drop me off and come back to get me.  But now I can see her side of the story.  She had two older daughters and a younger son. My oldest sister had two children and was a single mother at eighteen.  She'd lived at our house because she was divorced from the guy with whom she got pregnant when she was sixteen.  My poor mother.  All had gone to hell in her life.  My father had not wanted children--surprise surprise--which was what my mother wanted with all her heart. Then she got her way and had "her" family, and of course every mistake, every sorrow, every mishap was thrown in her face as a "I told you so."  

One afternoon of art class must have seemed one place that she could dial back and have a bit more time--to grocery shop, to prepare dinner, something she pretty much hated to do but she did it night after night after night after night.  

I just told my hairdresser that I had never made a Thanksgiving dinner, never cooked a turkey and that this was on my bucket list of things NOT TO DO before I died.

What I have done--some years before I'm dead--is go back up those stairs in my imagination and sit on that stool and run my hand over splatters of paint, but this time the Rorschach blots of paint are made by me.

 When I was fourteen, I fell in love with a long-haired, skinny, smart boy named Geoff.  In l968 I went to his house for Thanksgiving dinner. When I opened the front door, I entered a small foyer.  Right in front of me was beautiful piece of furniture over which hung a beautiful painting.  I looked  at the signature at the bottom right corner of the painting and there it was--Bettie Friedenberg.  That day Geoff's mother told me that it was a "collage."  Years later, Geoff's mother moved from the house into a townhouse and gave me the painting--the collage.  I love this work. And I have continued to love Geoff Pike, who remains a dear friend.  

Tonight I went out to my studio and looked at the collage.

These four women, images created from tissue paper and oil paint, have stared out at me since before i ever bought brushes and paint. They were in my first home, hanging in a place I could see when I talked on the phone. I've studied them over my lifetime, through the words and stories and plans made with friends I'd stared at them. They stared back. 

Certainly a mirror of sorts.  

Here I've attached Friedenberg's piece as well as one of mine that I finished this morning. Something, I believe, has been exchanged, something between me and the woman who gave me this painting, something between me and the woman who created these women, and between me and this creation. What do I want?  I want to create something that holds the gaze of a viewer until she knows who I am, whole, and who she is, and maybe who she can be in the future.       

Thoughts on Writing, Not-Writing, Illness and Painting

Only after I stopped writing did I begin thinking about what compelled me to write in the first place. 

For the last seven years I stopped writing almost entirely.  

My first memory of thinking about writing is as vivid as my hand that types this post.  It is of a girl who is seven years old.  That girl is me, yet such a kernel, such a ghost-like nimbus of a sensibility, hardly able to catch a thought before it floated away.    

Yet some thoughts sank deep within the me who is me now, germinated, fully flowered into this memory:

 I was on a blanket in the front yard of 3254 Centenary, yards from the sidewalk, almost a mile away, she'd remember, from the ladies in their hats and heels, gripping their shiny purses, getting the purses at the right angle near their elbows, pulling their gloves up and their sleeves down.  

This was Sunday, the day they intruded on my privacy as well as on what I considered my stomping grounds, their long paved driveway, their sunken garden ivy-covered,  shaded by massive oaks that dripped moss.

The only thing I knew about the people who attended this church was that THEY DIDN'T BELIEVE IN DOCTORS.  

They were Christian Scientists. The church was the Christian Scientist church.

My stuffed animals, trundled there in my small red wagon, were circled around me.  I was watching as the churchgoers walked past me with a sense of purpose, and for some reason I still can't figure out, they never waved or nodded at me. It was as if I were invisible.  I ventured little waves at someone now and again, yet there was nothing in return.  

I wondered how they could be ALIVE.  I had already been saved by doctors several times.  I don't know who told me they didn't believe in going to doctors but I knew it.  I think that once, after my persistent questioning, my mother explained that "they" depended on their "faith" to heal them.  

 The memory I have seems to be one of my oldest memories.   On that Sunday morning I thought:  I am going to write a book.    

As anyone who has read my other blog posts knows by now, I have no sense of direction.  Geographic direction.  But when I think about myself on that blanket, conjuring my future, I see that I have found my way.   Again.

My major obstacles, detours, hurdles have been, for the most part, health related--getting myself out of the funk of a bout of illness.  When my body has broken down--which started with a mysterious fever when I was less than two that left my muscles limp, my eyes crossed.  Then there was asthma, pneumonia, a blinding headache, perhaps meningitis, mono, endometriosis, thyroid, pituitary, my endocrine system blown apart.  After these dramatic sieges of illness, I was always left shaky, weak and chastened.  I understood early on that I was at the mercy of my own frailty.  

Fragile, sickly, failure-to-thrive.  These are the adjectives I had to outrun, outlive, and I did.

Then in my middle age, the body turned on me once again, and with a vengeance. Seven years ago I was diagnosed with MS.

                                                      ******************

Six weeks ago I was interviewed for four hours about my lifetime of medical issues. Finally, after the doctor turned off the recorder, I looked out his window and was close to breaking down into "a crying jag." (my mother's term for my sobs.)  There was a sudden time-lapse, or a collapsing of time that happened in that second--and I realized my life's two major narratives are writing and sickness.

As I looked out the window and into my own memory,  I said more to myself than to the doctor, "I hate to go over this history.  I have felt like shit my whole life, and I don't really like to think about it."

The doctor looked astonished. 

I was equally perplexed that he hadn't heard this in all that I'd told him.  

He said, "You never said that!" 

He then asked, "As a teenager? "  

Yes, I said, the teenage years were the worst.   I told him that my mother would have to wake me from the couch, where I'd gone to directly from arriving from school.  Every day after school I'd fall into such a deep sleep that being awakened seemed like torture; I'd be angry, only wanting to sleep and sleep and sleep.  

"But those are the most vital, the most energetic and healthy years of a human!" the doctor said. 

Well, I said, I felt awful.  

Yet I wrote poems; the poems were published in the school paper.  I wrote stories: my teacher read one of my stories aloud.  From the outside looking in, my friends said then and would say now that I had energy, that I was busy and present and made myself known to the world.  But that was the public world and very separate from the private world of sickness.  

                                                      ***************************

 I've had a bad couple of weeks.  First a spinal tap that made me dizzy; I felt strange, as if my body had to readjust after being punctured and drained as if I were a Frankenstein experiment, four vials of spinal fluid to be sent off to BIOGEN laboratories in California.  Lyme?  Lingering meningitis?  Or "just" MS? 

Then I caught a cold. A "common" cold, it's called, the viruses that spark all the MS symptoms.  After a week, I was listless in the old familiar way.  Seemingly defeated by the uncommon cold, I sat on the couch and closed my eyes and felt hopeless and helpless.  Within and out of the darkness, I struggled to break the spell, to shake the sick self into health.  I reached for the computer and began to write this post.

 I realized when in search of a topic:   It has always been like this.  I'm going under and then there is the blank page, the compulsion to break out of my bubble of sick solitude and write; it has to be a desire to connect with others, the need to have life breathed back into me by the prospect of writing something that pulls someone toward me, someone who stops and sees and savors.  I throw out my sentences, they arrange themselves into paragraphs; I begin to warm to thaw to be engaged by being engaging.    

The years since my diagnosis I think of as the Mute Years, seven years of not sure what to say, or to whom to say it or when and where NOT to say it, much less write about it. MS became a meta-story that swallowed me whole and plucked my words from my brain and threw them away.

When my "gait" changed, the rhythm with which I'd walked in the world, I also discovered  I could no longer string together fluid, graceful sentences.  I could not make sense.  Of any of it.  

I would come home from doctor appointments where I'd been inarticulate, and I'd paint, paint wildly and with no concern for my clothes or my floors or the walls.  Paint splashed and spattered onto every surface. and there was no coherence to the end result.  Seven years ago I signed up for a course at Kripalu, picking anything that didn't have to  do with writing one's feelings or  moving one's body.  The class was a painting class.  What became my lifeline, the introduction to painting.  

If I were writing about this person as if she were not me, I'd speculate that she was beginning at the beginning; she'd been busted back to kindergarten and must fingerpaint and sometime along the line she will paint herself toward something recognizable to herself, to others.  Not a bird or a hat or a feather.  But a plea, a confession, a cry, a scream, and a raucous, bawdy laugh.  

 A developmental stage, pre-verbal, her state of being a person with a "progressive degenerative neurological disease" too frightening to talk about just yet, much less write about.

 I painted obsessively for five years, painted until I got "better" at painting and at being a person with MS.  I painted until friends urged me to sign the paintings.  I hesitated.  After a year of this, I signed my name in tiny letters on the far right corners of my paintings.  Then I continued painting until some paintings were sold.  Then I was asked, "What is this painting called?"  

These steps were small steps back to writing.  The paintings were linked to, were an extension to WORDS, and to faith in my ability to remember how to use them. Each painting both was a story in and of itself and had a story.  Just like where I'd once been and from where I thought I'd fled.  I was the chaos before the coherence, but the meaning and the message rose up to greet me.  

Then there was an art opening.  I hung a painting called Faulkner's Girl that has  photos of me in the yard of 3254 Centenary.  I am embedded deep inside and tangled brush and trees and fences surround me, hold me until years later when I discover Faulkner, when I write of Faulkner, when I stop writing of Faulkner, and return to her, paint her into being, then name her.  I'm told I must write an artist's statement.  I write my "statement" and then I write more and more and more.  

The young woman who I hired to help me with my life, handed me my laptop and said, Look. This is YOUR blog.  You can just begin writing here.  The space was blank, the space inviting; I was invited to fill this space, the space that had been empty for seven years.  

I imagine the notes exchanged with Boo Radley.   

I can't stop putting these notes-- tucked inside this website-- up for you to read.  

I imagine you out there.  I imagine I am visible to you.  I imagine I wave.  I imagine that you lift your hand and wave  back.    

True Confessions!

When I learned last night that Galway Kinnell had died, I gathered all his books I have into a stack next to me and looked at them, flipped through some, read what I'd underlined--I'd taught The Book of Nightmares in an undergraduate Contemporary American Poetry course at Rice in l989; I'd used an excerpt from the poem The Wandering Shoes for the epigraph of my memoir in 2001.  This morning I went online and read the Times' obituary, and particularly loved the last paragraphs, the words of James Dickey about Kinnell.    

"Galway Kinnell cares about everything,” the poet and novelist James Dickey once observed.

"... he held that it was the job of poets to bear witness.

       “To me,” he said, “poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on this earth at this moment."

 I thought back to when I was first exposed to the real thing, to when I first heard the voice of a poet who showed "what it is for him or her to be on this earth at this moment". 

 All I'd known of poetry until I was eighteen was Longfellow, Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Allan Poe. 

 In my sophomore year at LSU, I'd signed up for William "Kit" Hathaway's poetry writing workshop.  We were to hand in some of our poems and sign up to meet with him in his office before the workshop began.  

I think I remember every single second of that day.

I remember the beige tiles of the WPA hallway, his cramped corner office, the old-fashioned wooden chair with a desk attached that I tried to get into gracefully.  I'd never met with a college teacher before. God the misery of my shy self, sweating, short of breath.  It was hot as hell--it seems like it always was in Baton Rouge.   He had my poems in his small hands, clutched and crumpled and damp.  Damn, some of those poems had been published in my high school newspaper, the originals framed by my mother!   He waved them around his head; his white shirt was half tucked in, half out.    He told me my poems were not poems, told me they had nothing to do with poetry or with the world around us or with anything except some greeting card mishmash of sentimentality.  He said they were sappy and sickening and I was never EVER to write anything like them again if I wanted to be in his workshop. What are "all these fucking balloons and rainbows and crap that makes me want to puke?"  he asked.  At least I knew it wasn't a real question.

Of course, I ran toward this madman instead of running far, far away. 

       I knew just enough to know I knew nothing.

I got in the writing workshop but didn’t say one single word nor submit one single poem the whole semester.   

So it wasn't until l974 that I understood what poetry could do to you.  I'd signed up to be in Hathaway's Contemporary American Poetry course.  I was the only undergrad; the rest were grad students, most wanting to be poets, hippies with bare feet; some of them had their dogs with them--an Irish Setter, a yellow lab mix. (I even remember the way the afternoon light fell into the room, the dog hairs seen floating, illuminated by the shafts of sun).

  It was the first contemporary poetry class the English department had offered in the four years I'd been there--for all I know, the first one EVER offered. The faculty was incredibly traditional as well as hierarchically.  Since he'd been there, Kit had not been "allowed" to teach anything except creative writing because he didn't have a doctorate. He "only" had a master's degree--and a book.  Later I'd learn first-hand about these departmental conflicts between writers and scholars.  All I knew then was simply that I had to learn about contemporary poetry from Kit.  It seemed it was my only chance.  

Kit was the youngest teacher I'd had in college; he was only fifteen years older than me.  

His school "uniform" was a short-sleeved white polyester shirt with a white t-shirt with sleeves underneath, khaki pants, a clip-on tie, and a gold watch.  Sometimes he wore a white shirt with small faded blue stripes.  He adhered to the university dress code--nice shirt, tie--but with his ironic twist.  Kit wanted, always, to dress like a "townie," those he most identified with from his hometown of Ithaca, NY, though his dad had taught at Cornell.  Years later I learned that Kit's father was Baxter Hathaway, who started Cornell's creative writing program.  But Kit had run with the rough crowd of the town, always, and made cracks about any who put on airs, as in feathers in one's hair, or moccasins on one's feet--if you weren't an Indian.  

At that point, Kit was a young, bitter man whose alcoholism had just begun taking its toll; ultimately it would exact a high price, costing him his teaching career, one might even venture, his poetry.   But in l974, he was in good spirits. He had a pale baby face with smooth skin that kept a pink flush on his cheekbones.  He had all sorts of energetic bursts and tics; he shuffled but it was a fast shuffle; he made fun of his own movements sometimes by doing a little cha-cha—perhaps after he’d had his drinks with lunch; he paced when teaching and he talked fast; he said "You know what I mean?" about every six sentences.  Even though his face was round, he had a way of being pointy--he bore down on you, on a subject, his eyes growing beady and fierce when riled.  When you could get him to laugh, well, that was nice, a softness happened around his eyes.  But that was rare. (Kit ultimately stopped drinking and has remained sober, though he no longer teaches.)

True terrible confession: this course was listed as a two-hundred-level course.  By taking it instead of a four-hundred level, I would not be able to graduate "on time."  

I lied to my father after the fact and said this had been an accident. Didn't tell him until a month before graduation. I blamed it on the person assigned to English majors to help them organize their semesters.  I said she sucked at math. 

I did experience enough remorse to take the only job I could get on campus, which was in the Poultry Department.

 There were rats where I worked.  Rats came up through the toilets in search of water because of the poison. They'd hemorrhage in the ladies'; it happened my first day. From then on, I held it until I got off work and went to the student union. Chickens attract rats. It was my sacrifice, my act of penance for my lies, for my love of poetry.  

    It was worth it.  

Kit's class--the poetry he chose--that's when it happened: that's when I first heard "what it's like to be on this earth at this time."  That's where Kit read to us the poems of those who were "bearing witness."   .  

On the first day of class, he shuffled in, a cool dude we all called Hathaway.  He opened a dog-eared book and began to read James Dickey's poem, The Sheep Child.  I had experienced nothing in the world heretofore like what I felt when Kit rasped out the last lines: 

Dead, I am most surely living In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf And from the chaste ewe in the wind.They go into woods         into bean fields         they go Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,They groan         they wait         they sufferThemselves, they marry, they raise their kind.

Twenty years later, Kit told me that what he mainly remembered about me was how wide-eyed I was, sitting there, never speaking, my big brown eyes unblinking.  

During each class, Kit paced around the room, spewed saliva, his shirt pasted by sweat to his chest as he read to us. There was Dickey's poem Falliing, the inspiration drawn from an actual event, about a stewardess who fell from the emergency exit of an airplane.  As he read, I fell with her; fell and fell and fell: 

She is hung high up in the overwhelming middle of things in her

Self    in low body-whistling wrapped intensely    in all her dark dance-weight

Coming down from a marvellous leap    with the delaying, dumfounding ease

Of a dream of being drawn    like endless moonlight to the harvest soil

Of a central state of one’s country    with a great gradual warmth coming

Over her    floating    finding more and more breath in what she has been using

For breath    as the levels become more human   

 These were poems written by people that Hathaway actually knew.  James Dickey, Alan Ginsberg, Richard Hugo;  People who were alive.  Not only were they NOT DEAD, but they were like Kit--wild and crazy and drunk on language. 

I fell in love.  With James Dickey.  With Theodore Roethke.  With John Berryman.

And with Kit Hathaway.

 It was years later that I discovered Galway Kinnell, but it all started in that room with that crabby poet, William "Kit" Hathaway and his love of poems, the kind that take the top right off of your head, the kind that bear witness, the kind that tell you what it is to be on this earth at this time.  

There was a direct line for me, one that ran straight from that day until this one, from Hathaway to Dickey to Kinnell.   As I live and breathe, I promise you that.