Their Songs Never Cease: Gibbons Ruark's "Hybrid Magnolias in Late April"

Gibbons Ruark

 

                         HYBRID MAGNOLIAS IN LATE APRIL
 


                         You bent to whisper to a small granddaughter,

                         Exposing the bald priestly back of your head,


                         Lifting her then and handing her to me:
      

                            See you in April.
 


                         Never the same, these northern magnolias,

                         As the great starred candelabra ghosting,


                         Even before I left them, the deep-shaded
      

                            Lawns of my boyhood.

                        And yet these too break wholly into blossom,

                        What somebody called the early petal-fall:


                        I walk out one day and the limbs are bare;
     

                           Then they are burdened


 


                        With the flared tulip shapes of opening blooms.


                        Two rainy indoor days in a row, then out,


                        The sun is out, and a fallen constellation
      

                           Litters the grasses.


                        What would you be up to this April morning?

                        Muttering to yourself, looking high and low


                        For the good stick fashioned out of laurel?    

                           I have it with me.

                        Patience.  Lean back and light another Lucky.

                        Whatever will kill you dozes in your rib cage.

                        Read a few more pages in the Little
      

                           Flowers of St. Francis,
 


                        Then throw a window open on the fragrance


                        Of even this, the northernmost magnolia.

                        By now the child you lifted in your arms has
      

                           Slipped from their circle
 


                        To cherish and polish your crooked old stick

                        Into a poem of her own so tender and deft

                        I can hold its wrong end and reach you the worn
                           Thumb of its handle.

Perhaps X. J. Kennedy put it best: Gibbons Ruark is a yea-sayer.

The son of a trailblazing Methodist minister, the North Carolina native is the author of eight volumes of poetry.  Deemed by Elizabeth Spires “the most accomplished formalist of his generation,” Ruark regards himself primarily as a love poet and elegist. His poems, widely anthologized and acclaimed for their attention to structure and music, eschew the esoteric and focus most often on what is close at hand and to heart: family, his beloved Ireland, the beauty of the natural world, and music itself, especially jazz.  

In verses often praised for their polish, grace, and authenticity, Ruark celebrates the milestone and the day-to-day.  Mementos – a bunch of cornflowers; a small glass swan -- become cherished gifts illuminating the bonds that tie across oceans and generations. A vacant lot brings to mind dark, feverish memories, as well as images of hope and reassurance.  Violent deaths in an Enniskillen bombing are cast against the fabric of the cosmos, the constellations in the vast night sky.

Yet uplifting every poignant line is subtle praise for life itself, and a gratitude for human connection. It is a sensibility perhaps instilled in the poet through all those Sunday morning hymns and his father’s affirming ministry.  

In honor of National Poetry Month, we’ve asked Ruark to share his thoughts on “Hybrid Magnolias in Late April,” a poem from his 1999 collection, PASSING THROUGH CUSTOMS.  As it turns out, his daughter Jennifer Ruark’s poem “Walking Sticks,” a gift for her father, provided inspiration.  We thank both for permission to reprint here.  Jennifer, with degrees in English from Swarthmore and the University of Michigan, is a managing editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education.  She lives with her family near Washington, D.C.

Gibbons Ruark has been publishing poetry for 50 years. His work has appeared in many publications, notably The New Yorker, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and The New Republic; and has earned him prestigious awards, including three Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize.  A frequent traveler to Ireland, he counted Benedict Kiely and Seamus Heaney among his close friends, as well as the acclaimed American poet, James Wright. Ruark, Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware, now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife Kay.

Tell me about your beginnings as a poet, the writers you read and admired, whose work most influenced yours.

My beginnings as a poet are hard to remember. Randall Jarrell once said that writing a poem is a way of making yourself forget how you wrote it. That said, my earliest influences are probably the Methodist hymns we sang in church and the passages from the King James Bible that were inevitably a part of the church services I regularly attended as a child. In college I became infatuated by highly lyrical poetry, especially the likes of Dylan Thomas, and I suspect he was among my strongest earlier influences.

As I grew older, I began to be suspicious of or impatient with those beautiful but limited lyrics, because they seemed to distance themselves from our ordinary speech, and I grew to prefer the more conversational cadences of poets like Robert Frost and Philip Larkin. This shift is actually documented in verse in my poem called "Larkin," an elegy for the poet written not long after his death. Yeats also has been extremely important to me, but he seems more like a monument than an influence. It is easy to love Yeats's poetry, but like Shakespeare he seems to exist at a level too high to imitate or be of practical aid as an influence.

A poet with whom I feel more kinship, as it were, is Edward Thomas, killed at 39 in World War I. He was, of course, encouraged to write poetry by Frost when the two lived near each other in England before the war, so there is a linkage there important to me. The two poems I have written for him show more about his value to me than anything I say here could.

Tell me more about your father’s influence.

My father's influence is in part inseparable from those hymns and scriptural passages mentioned in my earlier reply. But he always insisted on this: my conduct was not to be judged because I was a Methodist minister's son, but because I was his son. That, I need not say, was inconsistent with his congregation's expectations. His intelligence, kindness, quiet carriage and moral courage have always seemed exemplary to me, though I have not always successfully followed his example. He was ahead of his time in many ways, particularly in the area of civil rights. In 1947, during the first Freedom Rides in the South, he invited the black activist Bayard Rustin to speak at the Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, for which many in his congregation never forgave him. It was this act among many others that made his next move effectively a demotion. And he imbued me with a love of language that has never left me.

Let’s turn to “Hybrid Magnolias in Late April.” How did this poem come into being?

To go back about as far as I reasonably can, in the early 1960's, when I was in school at Chapel Hill and my parents moved from Laurinburg to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, my father suffered a serious but relatively mild heart attack. I wasn't at home so did not get full details, but suffice it to say that pretty soon he was on his feet again and improving. He was supposed to take walks but not to run, and that proved difficult because there were some fairly unruly dogs in the neighborhood, and it was thought that he needed a stick to ward them off. A friend brought an ideal stick, really a longish mountain laurel root, I think, down from the Carolina mountains, and gave it to him. It had a beautiful natural handle shape on one end, and my father sanded and sanded it with finer and finer sandpaper until it was smooth as glass and quite beautiful and he added to that by putting a clear varnish of some kind on it. I loved that stick and at some point (I can't recall when) I told my mother it was the only thing I cared about inheriting. I got other things as well, of course, but when my father died after "successful" heart surgery in February 1970, the stick came to me.

I often walked with it over the years, and eventually, about the time I started going to Ireland in the late 1970's, I started deliberately looking in curio and antique shops etc. for other sticks to go along with it. I got sticks from Ireland, New Orleans, the Finger Lakes and other places, and then people started making me gifts of sticks, so that by the time our daughter Jennifer was in her Junior year at Swarthmore, I had quite a nice collection, gathered rather like a bouquet in a brass umbrella receptacle of sorts I kept by the door. (That eventually wore out and was replaced by a nice tall basket.)

Thus the advent of Jenny's poem, which she wrote for me in the spring of 1986. I loved it of course, and have her inscribed typescript framed and on the wall in the study here. It stayed with me for a long time without my doing anything but taking pleasure in it, and then, a notebook tells me, in late April of 1993, the mystical seven years later, there appear the first inklings (I love that word in this context) that I can find that I was on my way to writing a poem of my own about my father's stick, but with Jennifer's gift much on my mind, as the Irish say.

By that time one of my cherished sticks was one made of cherry and sent to me by Jenny from Hiroshima. (I might interject here that I saw my father last around Valentine's Day of 1970 and that he lifted the 4-year-old Jenny up in his arms and said to me "See you in April, boy." He was dead ten days later, and you will see that those words got into my poem's first stanza some twenty-three years later.) I see, looking at my notebook, that I did most of the work on the poem in two days, April 24th and 25th, then tinkered with it off and on and sent it to The New Yorker on the 28th. It must have been summarily rejected there, since I was able to send it to Mary Jo Salter at The New Republic as early as May 11th.

Fairly early I decided to cast it in the form of Sapphics, and equally early I knew the last word would probably be "handle." Since the Sapphic stanza is quantitative verse and English measures are traditionally qualitative, Sapphics have normally been thought impossible in English, but one can try an approximation anyway, as I have done in several other poems.  I think that one reason my poem is in any traditional form is that it is in fact about tradition, handing feelings and standards down over the generations. I know I never thought about this at the time, but the reason it is in Sapphics in particular may have to do with its kinship to "Lecturing My Daughters," also a poem about my father and, in that case, both of my daughters.

Salter returned the poem to me on June 3rd, expressing the hope that I could work out what she saw as the awkwardness of the last few lines. I did so to my satisfaction, returned it on June 8th, and it was ultimately accepted and published in The New Republic for October 4th. The final acceptance letter and any proofs I received I cannot currently find.

Jennifer Ruark

 

                         WALKING STICKS

There is a comfort in walking,

the easy rhythm of one foot

falling solidly to earth

and one foot surely following.

And with your newest walking

stick, a third beat, tapped out

by the shiny tip on the end

of a slender Irish blackthorn.

You left by the back door, pulling

it from the bright brass can,

shifting it in your hand

as you set out, to find

the proper place it held.

Your first one is still your favorite:

your father found

the root of a mountain laurel

with a natural grip,

worked it smooth

and polished it.

Now in the backs of dusty shops

you discover birch, maple and walnut,

some cool and clean as marble,

bits of light wood fit with dark,

others with the nub-ends of smaller

branches still attached,

and even one with a solemn-headed owl,

ivory carved to make a handle.

Now one by one you gather

them, but none like the first from your father;

walking with it you remember

one hand fitting into another.

Even as a young woman, your daughter realized the importance of those walking sticks, especially of that one you'd inherited from your father. Tell me more.

Jenny turned 5 the April after my father died in February, so although she knew and loved him, she did not have that much time to get to know him. So her strong feelings and high regard for him are significantly inherited from me in the way that the walking stick was inherited from him. The movement of the whole experience is interesting, I think. It starts out with my inheriting that single stick, then the other sticks gather around it and prompt Jenny to write her poem, and then in my poem I return to the single stick. I say "stick" here rather than "cane" since the latter calls up for me something more formal and not necessarily hand-made. Though several of the sticks I have might not be "one-of-a-kind," a number are and were just cut out of a hedge or off a tree somewhere and then finished to varying degrees. For instance, the one Jenny mentions with the "nub-ends of smaller branches still attached" is an old blackthorn worn by much use which I found in a curio shop in Dublin which no longer exists.

Walking sticks are much in use in Ireland, or at least used to be, and my great old friend Ben Kiely carried one routinely long before he needed it for support. Walking sticks are company on solitary walks. In 1983 when I was with Seamus Heaney in Dublin, I showed him the blackthorn I mentioned and he went upstairs and brought down a stick that had belonged to Charles Stuart Parnell and which had been given him by Conor Cruise O'Brien with papers about its provenance and instructions to pass it on to another deserving Irish writer when he thought it appropriate. More than just a few years ago he handed it on in a public ceremony to the poet Nuala Ní  Dhomhnaill, who was the first woman to receive it. So there's an Irish element in all this as well. Heaney has several poems involving his father's walking sticks, which were likely used by him partly to move cattle as he was a cattle dealer as well as a farmer.  A little 3-line poem about facing the ice in Cambridge when he was teaching at Harvard indicates that he inherited at least one of his father’s sticks.

Regarding the element of support that sticks or canes provide, I can't help thinking that it matters that my mother graduated over a long time from a wheel chair to a walking stick in her eventual recovery from paralysis owing to polio. The image of offering someone in physical trouble help by reaching out with a stick must also be involved. I think offering someone the handle rather than the other "wrong" end might be my invention. I don't know.

Ruark's most recent collection

Why does poetry matter?

I've just spent an afternoon with my friends who play Irish music, so my first impulse is to say that every poet is a failed musician. Walter Pater said: "All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music." At a certain level I think that is true. When one writes a poem he is trying to make a piece of verbal music.

But at another level poetry wants to be not equal to but somehow better than music. Since, along with physical touching, we want words to convey our deepest feelings, in one sense one wants a poem to tell something that matters in the most musical way possible. So form has always mattered deeply to me. It is a way of turning words into music.

The other feature of poetry that matters most to me is perhaps best conveyed by the title of the old hymn which gave its name to one of my books, Rescue the Perishing. What poetry does is to save what would be otherwise lost.

This interview appears in the April 2015 issue of The North Star Monthly.  Check out their site: 

http://www.northstarmonthly.com/ 

 

Unearthing the Past: Author Ruth Crocker to Keynote NEK Veterans Summit

Lon Oakley, platoon leader, finding David Crocker's name on the wall

      

We all have buried secrets. But few among us go to the trouble of having them interred. Fewer still, decades later, find the courage to dig them up.

     In Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War, acclaimed author Ruth Crocker reveals the secrets she kept after her husband’s death in Vietnam, her work to honor his memory, and her courageous journey toward healing herself and other survivors.

     Crocker -- a playwright, essayist, and frequent speaker -- will deliver the keynote address at the third annual NEK Veterans Summit at Lyndon State College on March 14^th.  She will also hold a workshop, “Tell Your Story,” on memoir and story-writing for writers of all levels.

     Only 23 years old at his death, Crocker took her husband’s ashes to the Eiger, to scatter them where he himself had wanted climb, and filled his casket with keepsakes of their too few years together. And while the informing image of the memoir – retrieving that secret bounty – is most dramatic, it stands at best as metaphor for the secrets of the heart the author unfolds in beautiful, memorable prose. Kirkus Reviews praises the book’s “thoughtfulness and grace,” and calls Those Who Remain, “a moving exploration of widowhood.” Others have said it should be “required reading” for those who work with Veterans.

Ruth and David Crocker, June 1966

   

 Crocker, who lives in Mystic, Ct, and earned an MFA from Bennington College, has, she says, “many irons in the fire right now,” including a collection of essays and a collaboration with photographer Steven Horan on a book about people who live in and around Yellowstone National Park. She also holds workshops for emerging writers and helps them on the road to publication.

     As vital and rewarding as the inner journey of writing and remembrance has been for her, Crocker emphasizes the power of community and reunion, of spending time and sharing stories with those who have walked the same difficult ground. 

     This years’ NEK Veterans summit will provide an opportunity for veterans, their families, and those who support them to do just that. The day-long event will feature Crocker’s keynote, breakout sessions and workshops, and information booths hosted by more than 50 veteran services organizations. Visit the Lyndon State College website to preregister.

The author today.

Your son urged you to write Those Who Remain.  How did the book come into being?

Noah had always known my story because he grew up knowing Dave’s parents like grandparents. When he was in high school, he heard or read that Steven Spielberg was collecting the stories of Holocaust survivors, and he said, “Mom, you have to tell your story while you still can.”

I was involved with theater at the time and was actually producing a children’s theater program that Noah was part of. I decided to write a play – a fictionalized version of my experience. The experience of seeing and hearing the play in a performance was scary – I was still a little too sensitized about my life and had a great difficulty talking about it. Simultaneously, my mother became ill and I had to take over the family business, a 100-bed skilled nursing home. I had little time to write over the next few years as I ran the business and took care of my mother, but I worked on essays/stories and sometime during that time I wrote about the day I was notified of Dave’s death.

Little by little, I began to accumulate stories and bits of writing – I wrote scenes from snippets of notes that I had kept over the years. (I’ve always been a sporadic journal writer). Noah kept nudging me and praising my writing (I think he was the only person I shared my writing with) but, by 2000, he was also involved with his career and struggling to find acting jobs.

Ruth with her son, Noah Bean.

I don’t think I imagined a book at that point. I just began to get an intense desire to say what happened. It’s interesting that Noah’s career really took off in television between 2006- 2007 when he got his first big role on “Damages.” At the same time, I sold the nursing home (2006) and finally had time to do more writing – and I had my first reunion experience. I remember being in the hotel in Omaha and calling Noah in New York to describe how amazing it was to meet the guys and hear stories about Dave for the first time. My mother died on January 1, 2008 after ten years of dementia and I went to my second reunion with members of Dave’s unit which was also my first trip to The Wall on May 3, 2008. (by chance, my mother’s birthday). I kept notes on all of these events and little ironies.

So, writing stories/essays was my first step and it rose out my increasing need to tell stories. Getting stories down felt like I was unpacking a suitcase packed long ago. The concept of a book didn’t arrive until I went to Bennington College to study creative writing in 2009 and ultimately, in 2011, created a thesis that was a compilation of essays. This helped me to believe that I could create a larger narrative out of my stories.

I hadn’t thought of digging up the casket until then, either. The Big Dig idea emerged when I described the burying the letters to one of my mentors at Bennington and his reaction was, “You’ve got to dig up those letters.” My reaction was, “No, I don’t.” But the seed was planted that maybe I could. Digging up the letters ultimately convinced me that I had a story that could be a book.

 

"Must reading" for those who work with Veterans and their families.

And so, you did dig up the casket.

There were two obstacles to the idea of digging up the casket. The first was my own pledge to myself that I would never do it. It was meant for eternity. The second was how I imagined the logistics of the digging operation to be. Whenever I thought about the process, it seemed like it would be loud and dramatic with backhoes and pickaxes and piles of dirt. It seemed too disturbing to even contemplate. What changed my mind about that was my conversation with the funeral director and his relaying to me that he would do the paperwork and make all the arrangements. (one additional note about the funeral home and my "crew" who did the digging up, they have been very happy with the book and how I described them - even though I was a little worried what they might think about my frankness about the experience). I tried not to imagine what I'd find in the casket, and even though I discovered the unimaginable, I'm still glad that I did it. The act of digging up the casket has made me feel even more courageous and settled about other aspects of my life.

The subtitle is Remembrance and Reunion After War, and both subjects are key in your memoir. You've spoken about the power and importance of remembering the past. Why is this so vital for veterans and their families?

I think “remembering” and “remembrance” are different. Perhaps one leads to the other. Remembering is more of a rumination of the past but the act of remembrance suggests a coming together and a collective act – a kind of combining or recombining of memories that helps to situate people in their own narrative and in historical time. The act of remembrance helps to turn a situation into a story. It’s a focusing of feelings that acknowledges what it is to survive something like war.

I think – in a way – to get to a state of remembrance we have to have accepted that things happened and we remember them and we can still survive. When we have some difficult things to remember, like some of the horrendous things that people see on the battlefield, it’s hard to share them, as if bringing them forth is like opening Pandora’s box (sorry for the clique) but, when they can be shared, it’s actually a gift for each one.

I spoke with one veteran who said, when he first started to speak about his war experience he couldn’t make himself formulate enough of a story to speak about the bad stuff. Things came out in sound bites and nonsensical bits.  He started with a funny story about wanting to make a hot meal for his buddies in Vietnam and creating a giant soup out of a case of C-rations. “No one would eat it. They all said it was more horrible than the war,” he said.

I think that to get to the stage of “remembrance” is very grounding for people. It is the organization of memory that makes our separate memories tolerable.

Meeting President Obama, Memorial Day, 2014

While you were in the early stages of the book, your brother-in-law discovered on-line tributes to you husband from those who remembered his courage and leadership in Vietnam, which lead to an invitation to a reunion of the 22th Infantry Regiment Society.  Tell us about that experience.

After Tom initiated contact with the guys who had written the tributes, they each wrote to me and repeated their glowing memories of Dave. At first I was terrified at the prospect of meeting them in person. It seemed too real, but at the same time, because I had been writing and thinking about Dave’s death and what our life had been – and I realized that I had only scraps of memories about some things – I was curious to meet them.

My biggest fear was to be immersed in a “military” environment again. I had scrupulously avoided contact with the military for years. But, when we arrived and walked through the door of the hotel in Omaha – they were there with open arms, literally. Suddenly, I felt as if I had known them all along. I felt recognized in a way that I’ve never quite felt before, as if they knew who I was, who Dave was, and what I had suffered – but it was all presented with a buoyant kindness and sensitivity.

Why is it so difficult for some to attend reunions or gatherings with other veterans or their families?

I think it’s the fear of bringing back old memories that are hard to hold. Everyone I’ve met at reunions says that they felt they just couldn’t go back – particularly Vietnam veterans – They had a terrible experience at a very young age and then returned home to a lot of hostility and resentment. They had seen things in the war that they had tried to forget, and to go to a reunion meant they might have to remember and even talk about it.

However, everyone says the same thing about the reunion experience – it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. It’s a warm bath of kindness and appreciation. And best of all, people know what you’ve been through and what you want to say and not say – before you say it.

 

The author in Switzerland, 1969.

You're a Gold Star Wife. Are you active in the organization?

I wasn’t active for many years. They reached out to me, but I didn’t want to think or talk about that aspect of my life for a long time. Finally, a few years ago I went to a meeting in my area, mostly out of curiosity, and discovered some interesting women and heard their stories, and for the first time, I felt a bond with them. I volunteered to do something (I can’t remember what) and the next moment I was elected to the national board. I’ve been the Chapter/Region Liaison to the national board for about three years and I’ve come to know a hugely diverse group of women from all parts of the country who have only one thing in common – and it’s fundamentally not a good thing. 

By the way, this year is the 70^th anniversary of Gold Star Wives. It was created in 1945 by two WWII widows who had the tenacity to go to Eleanor Roosevelt and describe the plight of widows and their children trying to survive without benefits or services.  The organization is still battling to preserve and improve what we have today. I was representing the GSW in Washington, DC when my photo was taken with the President.

You've said, "War leaves us transformed, but never unscathed."   What do you hope readers take with them?

I think perhaps we are so used to the idea of war in our society that we don’t think about the fact that, when we become involved in some way, either as a soldier or family member, we are entering an unpredictable situation to which we have to respond. The transformation is the result of trying to comprehend what we see and hear, often when we are young and innocent. Sometimes the transformations might be finding ourselves suddenly in life or death situations, or thrust into leadership positions that might have seemed incomprehensible before.

When I hear veterans talk about their experiences there are often positive things, like “I didn’t know I had it in me to survive that!” or stories of feeling extraordinary brotherhood and making the most intense bonds of their lifetime. When Dave went to war I found out a lot about myself and my ability to wait and try to understand what Dave’s job was, and it made me understand why my family was so intensely against it. I didn’t have to think about that until I was actually “in it” myself. Their opinions and ideas had just been noise in the background.

The question of being unscathed is that we pay a price for the quick intense education that war provides. We can be haunted by scenes in our memory, we can be left with questions like, “what if…”, and we have come to know the reality of war – that’s it’s about killing or being killed and for whatever reason, we don’t seem to be able to stop war from happening. We learn that “war is hell” is true.

This interview appears in the March 2015 issue of the award-winning The North Star Monthly. Check out their site. www.northstarmonthly.com

The Dogs of Palermo

I went blonde for a while, a rash act spurred on by both desperation and the desire to reinvent myself. I am at an age where a woman might be forgiven for wanting to try on another personality, another life even, and at the same time, do something about her hair. The gray at my sensibly just off-center part has started to come in coarse and plentiful. Given my height, the top of my head is highly visible real estate.  Going blonde I thought might make for easier upkeep.   

Blonde was a mistake. We’ll just be frank about it. It was, in a word, disturbing. Since then, over the span of a year, I’ve experimented with various shades of light brown:  gold, natural, warm, ash, honey.  Always hoping to find a miracle in a box, I’m as gullible as beauty product consumers come.

In a similar attempt at reinvention, or perhaps reinterpretation, I attended a writers’ conference in Sicily last September.  I am, conveniently, an actual writer, with actual books and many articles to my name.  But ‘owning’ that designation as some might say requires a self-confidence that doesn’t come naturally to me. And conferences of any sort are most apt for participants who work well and play nicely with others.  Also not my strong suits.  I am nervous in crowds and ill at ease with strangers – your garden-variety recluse.

But I’ve wanted to change. I’ve wanted to become a better, more genial, outgoing human being.  I make the effort.  An example: So it’s the middle of the week at the conference, a leisurely morning amidst a fairly leisurely week, as conferences go.  I’m seated at a long table with a few others, chatting as we sip coffee and rip into pastries (me) or spoon out the contents of tiny plastic tubs of yogurt (others).   And I’m making conversation. So far, so good.

A member of the faculty takes the empty seat to my right. I recognize the face and know it belongs to someone of literary stature, and wish I had read more than the titles of the writer’s works before finding myself at the person’s elbow. 

Buoyed by the minor conversational victories at the table, I think to myself, “Self, this would be a fine time to practice your pathetic interpersonal skills.”  I say, “Good morning!” Others do as well.  I introduce myself.  And I blunder straight ahead.  I ask about the writer’s work.

The writer contemplates the items on the breakfast tray.  No eye contact is made. There is a grimace, and a short pause. And then the writer says, “I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

A true statement. The writer had not. I consider this. The saw about old dogs and new tricks crosses my mind.

This exchange wasn’t characteristic of the conference as a whole, though it summed up in hindsight a series of my own missteps, missed opportunities, mistakes, much like my hair color experiments. Why didn’t I participate in the group reading? Why did I falter, refrain, hold back?  Regardless, I did that week meet some inspiring folks and make a few new friends, and I received invaluable encouragement and instruction concerning my work.  It was meant to be.

For this reason:  if I hadn’t attended the conference, I never would have gone the extra mile  -- making arrangements to spend time with my daughters in Palermo, the birthplace of my mother’s parents.  And in the end, Palermo was the real classroom.

I loved Palermo, though of course I was hard-wired to love it. I was enthralled by the mix of ancient and modern, the music of languages from all over the world, and by the fascinating parade of people in all sorts of costumes: men in Muslim attire, women in bright saris, the beautiful Sicilian girls and handsome young men in the late summer garb of youth, and older couples walking together hand in hand, dressed as if for a first date. 

Palermo is not entirely tourist friendly.  Sicilian is not Italian, and French is more widely spoken than English, as the guidebooks warn. However, if you travel with your beautiful daughters, language barriers often disappear. Rick Steves probably doesn't mention that. 

I took the bus tour twice just to drink in the sights, and we walked miles every day.  Palermo is a feast for but also something of an assault on the senses. It's noisy and congested, and not a clean city; the sidewalks are littered and graffiti adorns many buildings, occasionally even the most sacred structures.  I marveled at it all.

We took a cooking class with the Duchess of Palma, and made an excursion to Mondello Beach one afternoon that turned rainy. Another day, while the girls trekked up Mt Pellegrino, I hopped on an open-air tour bus to Monreale.  Waiting for the cathedral to unlock its doors for the afternoon, I ate a plate of ravioli and enjoyed a glass of local white wine served in a goblet the size of a goldfish bowl.  As I stepped into the towering nave, the majesty of the space, the overwhelming splendor of the golden mosaics brought tears to my eyes. 

People watching enlivened every step of the itinerary. Sightseeing on foot, we passed a group of laborers gathered around a table at midday for some game of chance in front of the Norman Palace, and I wondered how many years these friends had met for that entertainment. And there was the elegant gentleman in his fine suit and bow tie, holding court at a table beside the entrance to a posh eatery.  “What’s his story?” I asked the girls as younger men stopped to bid him hello and pay their respects.

Street crime is a concern in Palermo; we were always, smartly, on our guard, though one evening we were followed back to our bed and breakfast. We sought shelter in a gelato shop until our unwelcome hanger-on grew impatient and took off.  And at many a corner, even in the cafes, beggars confronted us, some selling flowers, some simply holding open their palms. I confess that only now and then I capitulated. One solicitor, hopping from table to table while pushing a baby in a stroller and leading another child by the hand, did not win my sympathy. Or Euros.  

Most days, the girls and I scheduled our expedition around food and wine, consumed in outdoor cafes while breathing in the bustling, gorgeous atmosphere of Palermo.  We didn't get through even the short list of "must sees" I'd drawn up before hand, but the time away -- to see my grandparents’ homeland, to simply enjoy the city without a “to do” list -- provided not only vivid memories I’ll carry the rest of my life, but a glimpse of possibilities.  It was, as such journeys often are, transformative.

As I write this, I’m thinking of those foodstuffs and local wine we sampled:  the octopus and anchovies that took center stage; the blood orange in salads; the almonds and jasmine that graced several plates. And the astonishing beauty to be found in that blend of the historic and the “au courant,” the strange nonchalance of drinking a cappuccino in the shadow of a 16^th Century church.

I’m also thinking that perhaps even a travelogue as brief as this one ought to mention the dogs of Palermo. Stray dogs are part of the scenery.  They slept in alcoves and sprawled out comatose on sidewalks; stood guard on street corners; or traipsed about in motley pairs.  Some were used as props for panhandlers. One homeless man sat on a doorstep, surrounded by his few belongings and his napping pack of four.

Pampered pets, too, swelled the scene: Puppies and old mutts with their attentive best friends; dogs the size of kittens out for a stroll, tugging at the ends of jeweled leashes. And one memorable pair of dogs, and their memorable owner, a woman roughly my age, wearing a finely tailored jacket and expensive boots, shoulders back and head held high as she strode down a wide avenue, with two large, handsome dogs strutting ahead. Not a matched set, not litter mates, but close enough to make a lasting, intimidating impression. 

She was a honey blonde, that woman. It suited her. As did her confident, “don’t even think about it” attitude, offset just the tiniest bit by her slight smile.

Some mornings, when it’s below zero here in Vermont, I check the temperature in Palermo, where, the Duchess proclaimed, it never snows, and I think about how lucky I was to have visited with my daughters, how much I’d like to go again. In that captivating city, I saw the faces of my cousins in the crowded streets. I saw my mother carved in marble.

I returned home with a handful of authentic Sicilian recipes and a deep respect for pesto, chickpea fritters, and gelato: an enlivened love for the past; and a renewed sense of what life – wherever lived – can be.  And one of the first things I did, even before I got over the jet lag and resumed the daily routine, was dye my hair back to its rich brown roots.

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This column appears in the February 2015 issue of the award wining publication, The North Star Monthly.  Check out their site:

http://www.northstarmonthly.com