His first step was right here

Lost diary entry archive (Atlanta)

I was tidying Leo’s room last night and a vision appeared in my mind, a quick cloud of remember-when ... where I was entering Leo’s room in the middle of the night and comforting him because he was crying. And I realized – or really the point was just crystalized – that if we move (WHEN we move), we will move away from the rooms where those moments happened. 

We will leave behind the love seat where I nursed Leo every night for a year, or at the very least the room where the love seat now sits. And so the love seat -- even in a new house -- will be shorn of its context, its purpose. Shoot, it might even end up neglected in a basement. And oh mercy, mercy mercy me, that is so wrong. I might even be willing to stay here if I begin to be convinced that leaving Atlanta will somehow alter the legacy or my memory of the most important year of my life, the most pivotal, the most blessed.

So many memories – I mean, should I go around and take pictures of the rooms?! Take a picture, say, of the spot on the carpet – it's by his crib, mind you – where he took his first tentative step. 

Maybe.

(Editor's note: We moved. And the moment of where he took his first step lives on only in my mind -- and this blog post. The love seat? It's in the sun room in the new house. Shorn of its context, just like I thought. I guess that's life. But for a memoirist like me, whoa it's a blow to the head. Remembrance of things past, ahhh).

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Leaving Atlanta (redux)

Just before we left Atlanta for good in 2017, I found myself standing in the kitchen, convulsing from ‘the tornado of change that is tearing through my life,’ a phrase I'd bracketed in quotes in my journal ... Am I quoting someone? Myself? Who knows.

And then: 

"I am writing on a kitchen counter that's cluttered with all the things that were removed from end tables that have also since been removed – the house is empty and I think we are, too. 

"We are for all intents and purposes departed – most of the goodbyes have already been said, personal effects carted away – but we are lingering in a skeleton of a home so we can clean a bit. 

"Stranger to think I don’t like goodbyes since with all of these cross-country moves, I’m saying them much more often than the average person. 

"How do I feel? Well, I am listening to Steve Winwood’s album 'Cigano.'"

Which meant the song that should be called "What My Father Said" on repeat in the car. My go-to album when I want to indulge way too much feeling. 

"And I dipped into Van Morrison yesterday (“St. Dominic’s Preview”)..."

That song embodies such intense longing for me and I don't even know why. Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen have that uncanny ability to make me long for a past that's not mine. I've probably mangled the meaning but I imagine the song title to refer to a place in Belfast, where Van was born, or at the least somewhere in Van's childhood that he couldn't forget even if memories could be stomped to death.

"...so I am courting the ache," I reported to my journal. "Plus all the reporting for Delta Sky magazine and the AJC personal journeys essay. 

"I am stewing in nostalgia, by choice, as if to throw a bucket of cold water on my face: You’re leaving, you’re leaving, you’re really doing it."

We really did it. We really left Atlanta, after two tours of duty totaling 12 years. 

"Homeward we go. Toward something as yet undefined but which we think will mitigate the fact that it’s been 'all downhill' since we left Florence, so many years ago."

See a previous post for how it initially worked out ("Is walking the cure?"). Then look at every post from the last three years to come to a final conclusion.The move was good. 

But as I concluded when I wrote the "Personal Journeys" essay piece for the AJC, while the decision we made was a good one – an investment in Leo’s future and in the lives of other people we love, the takeaway perhaps was this: "Adulthood means doing the right thing even though it doesn’t feel right – and won’t feel right for a very long time."

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Is walking the cure?

I exhort my students -- and anyone who will listen -- to keep a journal, as you know by now. Jot things down. Keep notes. Pay attention, as the poet Mary Oliver might have said.

And sometimes my own little scribbled messages or entries in my digital diary work their way into published pieces. For example, recording Leo's early speech -- saying 'lello' instead of yellow and hangerburger for the meat you have with hotdogs -- was the subject of an essay I wrote for The New York Times about the "shooting star" of a child's early attempts at speech. And I was able to include bits of early dialogue that I'd recorded in my journal.

But one essay I wrote actually included a Google calendar alert. "Is walking the cure?"

I use the alerts for anything and everything. Even: "Take a shower." And sometimes I will use them to register a problem I am facing, if only to get me to face it.

The problem was insomnia, brought on by our rocky relocation to Connecticut. Within the space of three weeks, we'd left Atlanta, moved into a new house in Connecticut, enrolled Leo in kindergarten and resumed our work. In my case, resuming work meant doing something completely new -- namely teaching Italian while also earning a graduate degree in Italian literature.

(On a related note, I will say walking is miraculous! But I digress...)

I wrote about all of this for the AJC (Atlanta's main daily newspaper) after they published a longer essay I wrote about leaving Atlanta for good. Here's an excerpt:

The fall had been a long, hard slog. One recurring Google alert I had set for myself read: “Is walking the cure?” Google alerts, post-it notes, scraps of paper shoved in my pocket. Until earlier this year, it was how I managed my life in Atlanta, teaching, editing and writing whenever possible while also running after a five-year-old – my son, Leo. The reminders keep me on track with writing assignments, grant applications and groceries.

Not so with this note. “Is walking the cure?”

I was grasping at a solution because in the short time since leaving Atlanta last summer and moving to Connecticut for a new life up North, I’d suffered the worst insomnia in five years. I could log at best six hours of shut-eye night after night, despite putting in long hours as a new part-time professor of Italian at a college in Connecticut. In between lessons, I was trying to master dozens of new tasks, including the route to campus, my students’ names and staggered class schedules (Italian I, for example, met at 9:30, except Mondays when it met at 9:05).

But none of this frenzy of activity moved me to sleep more than six hours. I would jog around the field behind our house some mornings, making me energetic on the surface, exhausted just below.  

You can read the rest of the essay here (you'll have to scroll down a bit):

http://specials.myajc.com/pj-past-2017/

This is Atlanta

From the lost diary entry archive (Atlanta division)

Aug 31, 2016

I often invent little errands for myself so I can SEE. See something – that’s my aim but somewhere down deep I must know I will also feel something, and then I will begin writing in my head, and I will remember why I am so lucky.

And without fail it happened on a short walk to mail letters in Cabbagetown this morning. 

I dropped Leo off at his new school and then hoofed it a few streets over to the mailbox on Boulevard in front of the Southwestern restaurant. Not knowing what I would see, only knowing I love the Cabbagetown neighborhood, and honestly I think I love it twice as much now as I did this morning. 

I took a chance on seeking to enroll him at the C-town campus, only later remembering that one of my small Atlanta to-dos was walking around Cabbagetown more, like I did when we first moved back. Walking around Cabbagetown makes me think Atlanta is cool. It’s why we came back, even if much of our life is away from the kookiness of that tiny neighborhood to the north of us.

So what did I see? Just the usual: morning glories crawling up the utility pole, old corner grocery stores attached to homes and re-purposed as artist nooks, lightbulbs strung on decks and across driveways to create ambiance, flower boxes everywhere to the point of obscuring the homes behind them, a front lawn given over entirely to sunflowers as tall as the one-story house’s roof, a workman moving a large cement block who asks me, “Are you having fun yet?”

No two houses the same, but every house working its little heart out to tell you its story, and there is a story. Each porch beckons you – sit down, read a book, enjoy a cup of tea.

I love Cabbagetown. And I think to myself as I walk, ‘This is Atlanta.’ 

***
-30-

Autumn in Atlanta

'nuff said.

Pianos for Peace -- Atlanta edition

Pianos for Peace -- I don't know who you are, I don't know where you're based and I don't need to know. I only know Leo and I were wandering around Piedmont Park one warm summer afternoon recently and we stumbled upon this lovely red piano. We had no agenda that day and were looking for an adventure. For 15 minutes or so, Little Red Piano, you provided it.

Because not only did we sit down and try to play ourselves, we managed to entice others to try their hand at tinkling the ivories, as they say. People were intrigued, like us (can we really just sit down and play this piano? Um, yep, it would appear to be the case!). And taking chance, I prevailed upon a few good sports to see if they could remember their childhood piano lessons.

The man in the picture remembered something -- I think if he'd had more time, he would have remembered all kinds of songs. He was a bit shy, perhaps the way we all are when we remember a past love or a past hobby or some activity we gave up, which now seems lost to time, seemingly with no way to ever recover it.

I think there IS a way to recover it, in this case. Perhaps Pianos for Peace can help. I've since seen another piano that is part of the initiative, stationed under the Freedom Parkway overpass on the Beltline.

Hey Atlanta, if you're not already bothering fellow citizens with your recollection of "Chopsticks," get to it. This one is near the pool in Piedmont Park!

P.S. -- According to the link, the pianos will be around Atlanta until Sept. 18.

Reading poetry on the porch

Diary entry for Aug 7, 2016

Forgotten moments of pure joy: We arrive home one afternoon, Leo and I, to find a plastic bag twisted around the handle of the front door. 

It’s a slew of Poetry magazine issues from our 84-year-old neighbor, Art, the former chemist. Something Leo has become accustomed to seeing (Old issues of The New Yorker make up my part of the exchange with Art). 

So many issues (bound, as they are, like little books) that it appears to be a bounty we must explore immediately. And perhaps one member of the team is particularly snoozy and so we sit on the porch, he and I doubled up in one chair, reading poems from Poetry magazine, as we wait for Daddy to come home from work. 

And he sits so happily, so quietly, absorbing words of modern poetry, while I sit so happily, absorbing a scene of uncommon purity and joy, in my favorite spot in the house, feeling the press of his warm skin against mine, hearing the string of verse spooling out of my mouth and into his ears, and please God, into his conscience, into the part of his brain that forms his being.

It feels a bit like grief (poem - “Summer’s Wake”)

It feels a bit like grief

The first warnings of fall

The sudden chill in the morning air when until yesterday,

There was nothing but heavy, humid, hot air mugging my every breath

I open the door to the front porch and something like a breeze comes toward me

I may even need a sweater, I think distractedly

The crickets are humming

Where have they been?

Hiding until this moment, this moment where the world signals

It will soon be coming to an end

(A fact forgotten while the days were frittered away)

Something else will begin, something equally wonderful

But what of it?

What we have, what we’ve failed to properly exploit

Is dissolving, vanishing, slipping away

What we’ve failed to properly exploit

That’s the source of the nagging feeling as

I follow the breeze's path across the porch, and across my body

The easy way I settle into the wicker chair

With the front door flung open, then left open

And the sudden desire to live my whole life on the porch

(My refuge, but one that goes on an uncanny hiatus during the summer months)

It’s a thought unfathomable just a few short days ago

It’s been so long

So long since that heavy, humid, hot air’s been molesting me

Not that I truly minded

I’ve learned to love the heat, the few moments ventured each day out of our precious AC

Like some last vital untamed element, savage and unapologetic

I’ve come to consider the heat summer’s blanket, 

Its birth mark

Its guarantee that every submersion in water will be a divine communion

A sign, perhaps, that I’ve assimilated

Into that other country, the South

Atlanta, my adult home

But that’s no consolation now that the chill is there every morning when I open the front door

To search for morning glories and the morning paper

Also of no help: Full knowledge of fall's thrilling rhythms

Not yet anyway

Childhood’s delineation of summer as fun and fall as funeral
Has me weeping silently into the breeze

"My other question is: do polar bears fly?"

I've been publishing excerpts here on the blog of my "Bits" journal, to borrow the expression, again, from poet and FSU writing professor David Kirby. Here's another excerpt below. It's just a collection of notebooks and computer files where I record everyday thoughts, inspirations, ideas for stories, etc. This one draws heavily from a 'sub-journal' -- the Leo Diary.

*

April 30, 2016

6:33 a.m.

I have to think Atlanta is some kind of bird sanctuary. I’ve never heard so much birdsong or such loud tweets anywhere else. My God! Lots of red-feathered cardinals – the only bird I know to recognize.

*

It gets light so early these days. Which means SOMEONE wakes up early, cutting severely into Mommy’s writing time. I put these words down to give a sense of my life, not really to complain. It’s the change of the seasons wrought into a specific detail: Here’s what early spring means to me…abbreviated writing sessions, and also one of the few times of the year when the morning darkness dissipates quickly here. 

Atlanta, city of darkness. Lately I’ve been tweeting that it’s a city of murals. And it really is. It’s one of the few distinguishing characteristics. I guess thanks in part to Living Walls. And maybe also the specific geography of Atlanta: lots of train tunnels. The Living Walls in Cabbagetown, after all, are along the train wall that leads to Krog Street Tunnel.

*

I hear a voice outside – which turns out to be cat – and I look over my shoulder to see the pinkening sky through the transom window. This image = my life in Atlanta. My early morning writing life in Atlanta. The pinkening sky, glimpsed briefly through the transom window.

April 27, 2016

The lyrics and the music to the song “Graceland” replay in my mind. ‘My traveling companion is 9 years old. She’s the child of my first marriage…. I have reason to believe we’ll both be received in Graceland….Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee…we’re going to Graceland.”

Songs of redemption.

April 26, 2016

Leo: “My head is so full of questions.”

He asks a fairly mundane question, and then says, “My other question is: do polar bears fly?”

No, but nice try.

Houses of Atlanta

In Cabbagetown.

I love taking photos of houses. And Atlanta offers a smorgasbord because the housing stock can sometimes change block to block or neighborhood to neighborhood. This is a project in search of a real photographer. I imagine an exhibit where the walls would be covered with photos of houses in Atlanta, as distinct as people's faces.

In Grant Park.

In Home Park.

Atlanta in the Fall

Atlanta in the fall is a delight...and remains so late into the season. To wit, these two photos, taken at the park in my neighborhood.

But which one is better?

(For my little photo hobby, as if I have time for it).

#ThisisAtlanta -- Kudzu covering street signs

Street signs at an abandoned intersection in southeast Atlanta, covered with kudzu.

This is Atlanta.

My other Atlanta photo obsessions

An old shed in the back of my neighbor's house...

What I like to call 'country in the city.'

We've got a lot of that down here in Hotlanta.

"Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers of Democracy"

I went out last night to a screening of a French documentary film about political cartoonists that was organized by the Atlanta Press Club, and as I walked to my car, I felt a little surge of life!

It’s easy to see why. I went to see a film. And not just a film but a documentary. Moreover, a documentary film in French! About cartoonists who are boldly lampooning politicians specifically and inequities in general.

Do I really need to say it was cool?

The film, “Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers of Democracy,” followed around a dozen cartoonists from across the globe as they observed their culture, including the explosive events they’ve chronicled through their drawings, and explained how they worked. It thoroughly captured what it was like to live in their worlds.

The cartoonists were interviewed in their native tongues – Arabic, French, Russian, Chinese, Spanish – as they worked, or in the case of the Russian cartoonist, as he danced in the countryside with friends. Imagine an aging Russian cartoonist dancing on the grass with friends!

The press club had several Georgia cartoonists on hand, including Rick McKee of the Augusta Chronicle. When I asked Rick about being in such an elite group, he said, “There are about 50 of us around the country left.”

There’s just something about the cartoonists’ ability to conjure up so much with just a small square of a drawing. And the stories they tell in the movie! Of being summoned by the KGB or banned from publishing or threatened. One scene included an interesting conversation between two cartoonists in Africa about the limits of what they could and couldn't publish. Spoiler: the scene includes a part of the male anatomy!

And as a board member of the Atlanta Press Club, I was super proud we could sponsor such a cool event!

I should also mention the French Consulate here in Atlanta was an important partner in pulling off the event. Now if only I could say that in French!

Found and lost (Cat streetscape)

I took this photo (I think of it as 'cat streetscape') in an enclave of artist live-work spaces, off the Beltline, back in 2009.

And it's somewhat curious that this little bit of street art is now gone.