The Complicated One
Susan Olsen
What possessed you to flip around,
Just as you were due to arrive in the world?
Sending your parents into crisis mode,
Then hesitating for days in utero,
Were you appraising the scene before you roared,
Feet first into the world?
Your entrance, that frantic, all too brief rush,
Left even the midwife breathless.
In the days of old that sort of trick
Could’ve killed mother, or baby, or both
Remember the photograph of dad holding you,
In the garden beneath the arbor?
Barely two weeks new, draped over dad’s arm,
Your over-long limbs handing down, limp,
You looked like an alien, not yet of this world.
At one, you were already so independent,
The new world explorer on cruise control.
I caught you taking your first steps out of the corner of my eye,
No fanfare, no audience, so unlike your older brother.
At two, your first sentence was heralded.
You were perched on the kitchen bench Daddy had just made.
Looking out the window at a squirrel munching,
You exclaimed, “Look at dat!”
Those early years we called you “dinky”
It wasn’t so much your stature,
Tall for your age, as your barely-there hair
And the bounce in your step
At four, during kindergarten screening
The parent volunteer brightly asked your name.
With no response, she went fishing, “Your mother’s name?”
She laughed when she heard you say,
Barely audible, “Blah, blah, blah”
By six, had that subversive strain gone underground?
Was it the weight of the world?
Your teachers called you “shy”
Had that boy with an attitude simply gone undercover?
By ten, we were becoming concerned.
Where had that independent, feisty, almost nervy boy gone?
We saw him at home, but what had the world done?
Do you remember what sent us over the edge?
Daddy was poised to be a parent volunteer
At the culminating event of elementary school
The long-awaited TOEC trip: cabins, canoes
Three days of real life adventures.
Four hours into it, you shut down,
Tearfully awaiting my rescue.
Your annual June sleepover party quickly followed
The birthday boy bouncing about with his buddies
Then crashing into his bedroom, tears turning to sobs.
Do you remember telling me to, “Send everyone home”?
Somehow we mustered our way out of that disaster.
Twenty minutes later you were back,
The antic center of cake and candles
So, what happened to the boy with attitude,
The independent observer with the silly giggle,
The boy who didn’t comb his curly mop for three years,
The boy who skipped more often than he walked?
Did the world squeeze it out of you?
You’ve become our complicated one,
One who greets the world
With equal parts annoyance and disdain.
We love those flashes of impish laughter
And innocent exuberance
As if the world is your toy
We have much to celebrate:
You seem content, at least, in school,
A self-proclaimed “nerd” with your posse of three.
You may be a You Tube fanatic at thirteen,
But you’re slowly negotiating the craft and art
Of movie-making: clay, legos, and pen in hand.
We’ve given you a love of nature,
And a family full of love, and beloved animals
I only pray you can take the complicated brew
Of who you are, imp and nerd, recluse and clown, artist and critic,
And fashion a self, a life, a balance.
The world is not yours to control, or design
Don’t close it off, or run away
When you open the door a crack,
You’re usually surprised,
Think about it, Galen, our little wise one
My little imp, may you never lose that long-legged lilt
As you go forth, shaping the landscape and continents of your world.
Kenya and Her Buddha
Susan Olsen
Kenya was worried about her mom. She was also worried that if she rubbed her Buddha’s belly again tonight, and asked for her mom’s boss to go soak his head in the toilet bowl, she might make things worse. Her Buddha wouldn’t listen, because she had been making too many requests lately. Last night she rubbed her Buddha when she was anxious about her math test. She was never very good at math. And two nights before that she rubbed Buddha when she was thinking about Jaime’s mom, who was in a car accident and broke her arm in three places. Kenya had a rule: She couldn’t make requests to her Buddha more than four nights each week. She could talk to him before falling asleep if she wanted to, but she couldn’t ask him for specific things every night. That would be too much.. It was kinda like what her mom said about God: If you ask for too much, he’s not gonna listen. So maybe she better learn how to figure things out for herself.
So, she really was in trouble. Her mom was so upset tonight she didn’t make dinner. And that meant her mom was really upset. Kenya had cereal for dinner. Things have to be pretty bad for that to happen. Her mom thinks cereal for dinner is the sign of a really hopeless family. If she thought about it, Kenya realized she actually liked having cereal for dinner sometimes. The problem was, it almost always meant something was wrong.
So what was Kenya going to do? Her mom must’ve spent an hour on the phone, talking to her best friend Marta. Kenya overheard her mom tell Marta that her boss called her the “B” word. Kenya couldn’t imagine someone calling her mom the “B” word. Her mom absolutely didn’t talk like that. And not only did Mr. Wilson use that word in front of her mother, he called her the “B” word. She knew Mr. Wilson. She could not imagine any kind of situation where he would talk like that. Sometimes adults were really confusing.
She also heard her mom say, “So help me, Marta, if I have to be in the same room with him tomorrow, I’m walking out, and not coming back!”
Did that mean her mom would quit her job? Kenya had heard her mom complain about work, about her boss, about her “lousy paycheck”. But this time it was different. Kenya was an expert at reading her mom. Usually her mom’s complaining was all mixed up with laughing, in a funny way. Her mom always said, “Kenya, you gotta laugh about it, so you don’t cry about it.” Tonight was different: cereal for dinner, the “B” word…..This was bad. Kenya could hear it in her mother’s voice. She’d know it, even if she hadn’t seen her mom run into her bedroom twice, crying.
Kenya also knew that her mom was juggling the electric bill and the phone bill, and wasn’t sure she had enough grocery money to get to the end of the month. Her mom had this funny habit of talking out loud to herself at the kitchen table when she paid bills and looked at her checkbook, so Kenya knew all about that stuff. This month was a bad one, Kenya knew. What would happen if her mom quit her job, or got fired?
So how could Kenya not ask Buddha for help? She wondered if she rubbed Buddha’s belly real gentle, and explained to him how she wouldn’t ask for anything for four whole days, maybe he would listen? She was really worried about her mom, and she thought maybe, with Buddha’s help, her mom’s boss could at least get sick with a stomach ache, and not come to work tomorrow.
No, she couldn’t do that. Her mom always said, “You can’t use the tactics of your enemies, or you’ll be corrupted.” Kenya didn’t always know what that meant, but she knew in this case. She had to come up with a better idea than toilet bowls or stomach aches. Somehow she had to figure out a plan without being nasty, or begging her Buddha for help. Her mom always said she had good ideas, if she’d just stop for a minute and think.
Stop and think. Stop and think. Stop and think. Maybe she could make a deal with Buddha. Sometimes Kenya did that with her mom. And her teacher did this when she promised them an extra five minutes of recess if they finished all their math problems by 10:15, or a special art project on Friday if they all passed the science test. Was it O.K. to make a deal with Buddha? Was her Buddha like God? Or more like Santa Claus? You didn’t make deals with Santa Claus, but did people make deals with God? She wasn’t sure. Her mom didn’t do that. Who else had she ever heard talk to God? The list was short: Aunt Julie and Mr. Lopeda. Mr. Lopeda didn’t count, because most people thought he was a little crazy. And he was really old, and maybe that made him crazier. But Aunt Julie wasn’t crazy. She talked about God sometimes, but did she ever talk to him? She wasn’t sure. Then she remembered those few weeks before Uncle Jake died. She remembered Aunt Julie telling her mother that she was going to give a thousand dollars to the church building committee if Uncle Jake came home. That was like a deal, wasn’t it? And Aunt Julie wasn’t crazy, like Mr. Lopeda. But Uncle Jake had not come home from the hospital, so maybe deals in this situation were not a good idea either. She just had to think about this a little longer.
Post script: This is part of a longer piece, and I don’t really know where it is going yet….
Finding One’s Voice
Susan Olsen
Voice: “O.K. Stop right there. Who’s singing that sour note?…O.K. one by one……Ouch.
It’s you.”
That was the end of my brief career in church youth choir. From that moment forth,
I just mouthed the words silently, and slipped out of choir a month later, with as much grace as a ten year old can muster.
Who knows whether I just can’t carry a tune, constitutionally speaking, or whether I was simply a child extremely sensitive to criticism. In any event, singing was decidedly taboo from that point onwards. There were only two situations where you would ever hear me singing: wailing along with Bob Dylan, in good company because everyone knows he can’t sing. And singing nursery rhymes to my toddler, which was O.K. as long as he fell asleep.
There you have it: I can’t sing. I’ve given up on changing that state of affairs, or even dreaming about changing it. Resignation is my mode. But obviously, I am still in mourning.
When I think about it for a minute, I wonder if this little secret is connected to my taste in music. I listen to what the music stores call “world music”, mostly African, some Latino, some Portuguese. I have a fondness for many vocalists, but the funny thing is I don’t understand a word they’re saying. My musical friends say my musical taste is actually very sophisticated, but they don’t quite “get” my taste for lyrics in foreign languages. My kids think Mom is pretty weird when it comes to music.
I do love the human voice, in song and poetry, but give me my songs in foreign tongues. Does this convoluted preference connect in any way to “voice”, to my ability, or inability, to give “voice” to myself, in speaking, or writing? I don’t know. When I ponder this question, I realize “voice” is a theme running through my life in strange ways…
Voice: In the old days, way before I was born, when my sister was six and my brother must have been nine, tonsillectomies were done almost as a matter of course. In fact, the story goes that the pediatrician had pronounced that my brother “needed” to have his tonsils removed, and my sister might as well have it done at the same time, much like you would haul both your kids to the dentist for a cleaning. According to family lore, they both had a grand time, the nurses entertaining them with limitless amounts of ice cream, standard operating procedure at that time.
The story begins to take a different turn when they returned home the next day. My sister’s throat healed, but along with the missing tonsils, she’d lost the power to speak. My parents took her to a speech therapist, who guided her through the process of learning to speak again, and regaining her lost vocabulary. Her speech came back quickly, but to this day she says she has no memory of anything in her childhood before the tonsillectomy.
If you asked my sister the most significant event of her childhood, she will undoubtedly tell you this story. I know she felt robbed of her tonsils, her voice, her memory, and the first six years of her childhood, in one fell swoop.
I don’t think she’s ever talked to me about the medical explanation for what happened to her. She once said something about waking up during the operation, and the trauma robbed her of speech and memory of words, for a time….. It sounds like one of those far-fetched family stories that’s part truth, part myth, but I like it just the way it is. “Voice” is mysterious. We gain it and lose it, sometimes, for inexplicable reasons.
Voice: I remember the moment I had a small epiphany about my relationship to my brother, and it revolves around his disembodied voice. I’ll start way back in our childhoods. He was the first born, the center of his parents’ universe. Eleven years later, when I was born, probably not entirely planned, to aging parents, my mother was no doubt relieved that her first born, my brother, was a “natural” with kids. He entertained me effortlessly, and even, the story goes, did far more of the caretaking, the meals, the diapers, the baths, than my father. From my earliest childhood memories, I remember idolizing my brother: the silliness, the continual games, the Halloween costumes he made to my specifications, the friends he brought home who would pamper me. I also remember his wedding, which was traumatic, an event my ten year old mind could not wrap itself around.. I tried to contain my emotional upheaval, keeping it inside the reception hall ladies room. The problem was that, in my young mind, this wedding was a tornado that would whisk my brother out of my life. Of course, that did not happen. The geography of our family changed, especially with the later addition of my two nephews, but the basic dynamics were the same. A casual ease and closeness, the older brother ever ready to laugh, or dispense advice.
Somewhere in my twenties, the geography shifted again. We grew apart, in small unspoken increments, a slow continental drift which was so gradual as to go unnoticed. More than a decade later, I recall a strange moment at our annual family gathering in Florida. I found myself alone in the condo elevator with my brother, in a moment of silence. Gazing at my brother, I said to myself, almost in wonder: “This man, my brother,
I don’t know who he is anymore. He is now a stranger. How could that be?”
And then the “disembodied voice”, a small moment which grew larger in my mind. I think it happened during my next visit to Florida. My brother and his family were absent this time, home in California. I remember being on the phone in my parents’ bedroom, listening to my brother speaking to my mother, who was on the kitchen phone. The intonation of his voice when he was speaking, the small “uh huh”s he made to indicate he was listening…… I suddenly realized, in a small epiphany, what had been driving me crazy about my brother, driving us apart like an unacknowledged wedge: His egotism, a subtle “I know everything about everything, and so much more than you do”. It was an issue I had been vaguely aware of, and my sister and I sometimes joked that we needed our brother in “small doses”. But his disembodied voice, its timbre and intonation moving through that phone line, suddenly allowed me to define the problem I had not been acknowledging. It centered on his ego, I realized, and it crystallized into a powerful sense of loss.
Voice: My older son has been a classified special education student since Kindergarten. The diagnosis was officially “LD” or language impaired. In concrete terms, he has difficulty processing language. Two or three step directions often befuddle him. All the “listening” school requires has been tough because he’s processing the language slower than most kids. Speaking, also, has not evolved naturally for him. The early pre-school stutter was replaced with a confused and meandering way of describing things or sequencing a story. Now, at sixteen, many observers wouldn’t single him out of a group of teenagers. But if you spend some time with him, you’ll notice that he easily gets lost when he’s telling the plot of a movie, or explaining the steps in a history project.
Language simply does not come easily to him. He doesn’t organize his thoughts easily, and sometimes he has trouble finding the right word. He’s always had great compensating skills, a remarkably positive attitude and a sunny temperament, so he continually surprises us and exceeds expectations.
And, not surprisingly, he loves music. He’s a committed and accomplished saxophone student. It makes sense that music is a different, more accessible, language for him. But it’s his other direction and talent that is surprising: The boy who has struggled with language, with expressing himself in words, has become a budding actor. He walked into high school, and snagged one of the eight roles in a Neil Simon comedy for the fall drama production. It was a comedy about miscommunication and missed connections. At the end of the play, my son’s character fabricated a very entertaining but wacky story on the spot to foil the cops in the midst of a dinner party. In the closing scene, when the other seven characters toasted the inventiveness of the story my son’s character had spun, I knew in an odd way that theatre was imitating life. When he acts, my son is able to be playful and imaginative, even creative with language. He starts losing that “burden of speech” he was born with, perhaps. When he takes on another persona, I suppose he loses his own muddled connection to making language. He can speak simply and freely, for once, in another’s tongue. In an odd way, he’s finding his own voice by taking on another’s voice.
My son is a parable for me, of the importance of perseverance and positive thinking. He probably won’t find a dependable “voice” through the written word, but he is finding his own “voice” through the spoken word, in theatre.
Voice: My father was a second generation American of Norwegian heritage, raised in a middle class family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was fairly conservative and conventional in lifestyle and politics, but he had a strong and unconventional spiritual strain that infused his life. For at least half of his long adult life, he was a practicing Hindu. During my childhood, if I had insomnia, or came home past midnight, I would often find my father sitting cross-legged on the living room sofa, a green velvet headband over his eyes. I always knew if he had fallen asleep while trying to meditate, because he would then be listing to one side.
His spiritualism is one of the legacies he has passed down to me, in ways that are difficult to articulate. I know the one piece that made me uncomfortable during our long discussions was his conception of “karma”. It stuck me as too moralistic in a constrictive way, like original sin in Christianity. It also seemed so mathematical, as if our good deeds and bad deeds were weighted on God’s grand scale. Or maybe he was at a blackboard, using a complicated addition and subtraction formula of moral valences that determined the course of our next life, our “karma”.
I do though vividly recall the piece he was so passionate about, and it was a part that made sense to me from a young age. He would explain how the universe, when honed to its essential essence, is a “music of the spheres”. His would often tell me that the goal of mediation is to become one with that “music” , like a voice which is really a sound, which is a universal current or life force.
My father was not a writer, nor was he a good storyteller. And my son’s taste for acting certainly didn’t come from his maternal grandfather. In fact, if I look back on my dad’s long life, I’d have to say that he never had a very assertive “voice” in his own life. My mother continually harped on the fact that he was “too passive” in his work place, and was constantly undervalued. My mother was a life of the party while her husband was a reluctant wallflower. His voice, both literally and figuratively, was a decidedly quiet one. He expressed who he was in small deeds and in intimate conversations, and he left a legacy for his children in his quiet but passionate voice. I could sense that voice most clearly when he spoke of the unity of life, and the “voice” of the universe. My father’s “voice” was undoubtedly one of the influences that sent me down the path of philosophy in college, and gives me my predilection for seeing the big picture, the unifying forces in the world.
Voice: I celebrate my student’s writing when they find their own “voice”, and I try to describe what “voice” means. It may be difficult to define, but they usually recognize it in each other’s writing. And, though they don’t say it, I think they know that writing with voice “matters”. Indirectly, they sense that a writer with ‘voice” is invested, and that usually engages them as readers.
I think about the range of students in my classroom. Some will find a voice in writing, some will find a voice in theatre, some have a distinctive “voice” among their peers in life, some will find a “voice” in a specific career direction. I can only hope to open up writing as a venue for that voice, and know that the power of words will capture a few of them, or help them choose other paths for their “voice”.
I think about my own voice in writing, how it comes and goes.
And I think about the connections between “voice” in writing, and poetry, and song. I am fortunate to sometimes find my voice through writing, and I marvel at how my son has transformed a weakness into a strength, and found his voice through assuming the voices of others, in theatre. I think about my sister literally losing her voice, and finding it again. I have been heartened of late to hear how my brother, in his sixties, may finally be recognizing the effect of his “voice” on others. And I think about my father, spending an entire lifetime essentially searching for the voice in the universe.
“Voice” has been a current in my life that has many threads. It ripples, rises to the foreground, then fades, like water lapping against a shore.
I live on the cove of a lake; I find water “very centering”. Finding one’s voice is similarly centering. If each of us were more able to give ourselves “voice”, to express ourselves more freely and honestly, in words or simply in our lives, and, if as teachers we could help each student find his or her “voice”, in whatever form, we might actually be able to change the world, and move mountains, so to speak.
