The Fire Tower

I am ten or twelve years old, on a camping trip

to the White Mountains of Arizona.  We are

atop a peak, on a metal ladder, eight thousand

feet and counting, climbing up a fire tower, to visit

someone my dad kind of knows.  It’s the sort of

adventure that’s not exactly planned, but not exactly

random.  But why someone would live here, high on the fire tower,

surrounded by nothing but forest, I wonder, and maybe

worry just a little bit.  Because what would someone

do here, all alone, all summer, except for random visitors like us? 

We pause on the metal stairs, rough vertical

slices that catch even the worn treads of my red Keds. 

Through them, below, is the top of

my mother’s head, a vantage I’ve never had,

and the swaying tips of ponderosa.  Above,

shoe soles as my dad and siblings

wheeze and wait for their breath to return, and beyond

them, the square of hanging house, a grey block in the sky.  There’s

nothing we can say, breathless from the climb and

the mountain air, so we keep going up until we

emerge on the narrow catwalk that surrounds this

tiny roost.  The railing is barely substantial enough to

hold us to the structure, but the wind picks ups up and pushes

us back from the brink, holding us against the improbable

building.  We find the door, are admitted, the tower resident

a skinny man with a beard, who shakes my dad’s hand and

they chat.  My siblings explore, and my mother gushes at

the view:  who could fathom so many trees? 

But it is not the man who lives here, perched in the sky, who

captures my attention, nor what’s beyond the windows which wrap

around us, rattling in the wind.  It’s what’s just below the 360 degree view: 

Books, one long shelf of them, stretching from one corner, where

a slender cot is topped with a sleeping bag, past a hotplate and

cans of beans.  All around me, stopping only at the entry and a

narrow closet that might be a bathroom, books.  Books

with cracked and faded spines, lined up, waiting to be chosen,

patient, eternal.  And then it is clear, an epiphany of a

thousand reasons why this man would choose to live in such an

inconvenient place, and I knew at once that I wanted this,

too.  To spend the summer, with no one to interrupt me,

to read and scan the horizon with my myopic eyes, searching

for a plume, and not finding one, return to the horizontal

lines on the page, traveling far from here,

to any place, really, places I have not even yet imagined. 

This place, this tower, like those in books, that I wasn’t be able to

acknowledge as a somewhere I’d inadvertently waited my whole

life to visit until now, until the very moment I’d arrived.

Enlarged Hearts

This week finds one of our small town’s own in the international headlines.  Kayla Mueller, humanitarian aid worker and prisoner of the Islamic State, was killed during airstrikes against her captors by Jordan’s military over the weekend.  The airstrikes were to avenge the death of First Lieutenant Moaz al-Kasasbeh, who was burned alive while trapped in a cage.  The barbarity of al-Kasasbeh’s death and many others at the hands of Islamic State militants has sickened anyone with a heart and a conscience.  Kayla’s death brought the atrocities of the Islamic State to our town’s doorstep.

Prescott is small enough that even though I didn’t know Kayla, I know several people who did.  Our town’s size seems defined by this single degree of separation – just big enough that we don’t know everyone, but small enough that we know-someone-who.  From all accounts, she was a woman with enormous spirit and courage.  She was the type of person who embodied selflessness and who revealed humanity’s best through her actions while helping those who faced humanity’s worst.

As I’ve looked out at my students this week, I’ve felt a sense of unease and dread as I’ve noted the more idealistic among them - those students who have large enough hearts to believe that they can indeed make a difference in what appears to me right now to be a cruel and dark world.  There are shadows reaching across our planet that make me tense and anxious for my daughters’ generation.  And yet I’ve also felt wonder and great hope as I look into the eyes of my students.  I think of that damn starfish story that makes me tear up every time I even reflect upon it in spite of how cynical I feel.  To paraphrase Dr. King, only light can illuminate darkness.

I’ve read Kayla’s letter to her family several times and I’m blown away by the courageous and gracious heart it reveals.  And I am grateful that she existed and that her kind appear, like angels, to those in the most desperate of situations.  “Where is the world?” the people of Syria asked her.  She didn’t have an answer.  We cannot know much of Kayla’s work in Syria, and yet we can imagine that she brought some measure of comfort, and perhaps even joy, to those who needed it most.  Her death does not make sense to me, and I cannot fathom the despair of her family.  In spite of the horror I feel at her senseless death, I can’t help but also be grateful that there are others like her, others who will be inspired and moved by her story to do good, others who will remind us of our humanity by giving of themselves and shining their light into the darkness of the abyss, even if but for a moment.

Inventions and Imitations

Yesterday afternoon, Dan and I saw The Imitation Game, a superb rendering of the life of Alan Turing, the man who cracked Enigma, the Nazi cipher believed to be unbreakable.  Turing’s contributions to the Allied efforts remained classified until only recently and his tragic death at his own hand devastates me.  That one of the greatest minds of the past century was treated in such an inhumane way breaks my heart.  I broke down in tears on the way home from the theater.  I haven’t been so affected by a film in years.

But it’s easy to mourn the loss of someone with such potential, someone who used his powers for good in a time of such darkness.  It’s easy to mourn someone so exceptional in his thinking, someone so ahead of his time.  And while I am incredibly sad for all of us that we lost Turing too soon, it’s impossible for me to not also mourn the potential of other lives lost, other suicides of young men and women, who still today cannot fully enjoy the same rights and privileges as me.  The right to marry, for example.  LGBT teens have a suicide rate four times higher than straight kids.  LGBT kids have hopes and dreams, just like anyone else, and yet they suffer quietly the traumas of adolescence that we all did, and more, and most do so with a great deal less support and a great deal more derision.

This week, Brandon Stanton’s photography blog, Humans of NewYork, featured a boy named Vidal from a dangerous neighborhood in Brooklyn.  When asked who he most admired, the boy championed his principal Ms. Lopez, who held the students to high standards and refused to allow the students to think poorly of themselves.  Brandon found his way to the school and met Ms. Lopez.  Together they brainstormed a way to provide critical opportunities to the students at Vidal’s school.  They launched a fundraiser which raised a half million dollars for the school in a very short time – a few days, only.  I was simultaneously grateful and resentful.  Grateful that Brandon Stanton and Humans of New York had created an opportunity to make school funding sexy, and resentful that many of the donors perhaps voted against school bonds and overrides in their own communities.

And so, how do the stories of Alan Turing and Vidal from the Brooklyn connect?  As exceptional as Turing was, viewing his life and times through our modern, enlightened lens, we can see that he was treated poorly and our instinct is to go back in time reward his exceptionalism by canonizing him, just as we feel compelled to reward the exceptional leadership of Ms. Lopez by empowering her students.

But let us not forget that all children have dreams – it is not unique to those who are exceptional or to those who find themselves in otherwise dead-end circumstances, like a dangerous and violent neighborhood.  All children have dreams, even the ones who are annoying, who have few social skills, whose parents have little to do with them, or who think themselves above following rules or doing homework.

Late last spring, I happened upon a quote from Father John Naus, a Catholic priest who had recently passed away.  He said, “See written on the forehead of everyone you meet, make me feel important.”  I set that as a goal for myself for the school year.  I wrote it out and taped it to my podium in the classroom so I’d be reminded of it every day, multiple times a day.  I’ve been grateful for the reminders, because I need them, as I am not able to remember it when facing 150 students each day, each with his or her own particular need to feel important.  The goal has manifested in a consistently singular way every day.  It’s forced me to be a better listener.  What I hear again and again is that each of the souls I’ve been entrusted with has dreams, big and small.  Some have dreams that are reasonable in scope, and others so far beyond their reach.  Again and again, I remind myself to make each child feel important simply by hearing what he or she has to say, which is light years away from making someone feel different, or apart, which is perhaps our unfortunate human inclination. 

I have no idea if, in my classroom, lurks the next Alan Turing or the next Adam Lanza.  Neither is likely, for which I am grateful and relieved, but I can’t know.  For now I’ll keep reminding myself to listen to each of them, because, as a wise one once noted, we have two ears but only one mouth.  Perhaps Virginia Woolf said it best, “It seemed to her such nonsense----- inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.  The real differences, she thought, standing by the drawing room window, are quite enough, quite enough.”

A Tangle of Snakes

The glimmer of light on wire

like water sliding along a string,

both move with a grace,

a simplicity which eludes the rest of us.

Or do we elude it, yearning

to be complex and complicated,

wanting at once to be more,

everything even, so much more

than the knot of desires

that sits within, deep, low in the belly,

writhing like the tangle of snakes

it is, becoming less as it twists,

tightens, until after a time it is

spent, this knot, as fragile and dense

as a delicate chain abandoned in a box.

If yearning could set us free

we would slide, unencumbered
to the other side.

Bathtub on the Mississippi

Now and again I see Mr. Twain,

white-haired and white-suited,

pipe in hand, twinkly eyes,

like someone else’s grand dad

that I secretly wish were mine.

We float down the Muddy,

a clawfoot tub our raft,

chased by Huck’s dad

who chucks bottles at us as he drains them.

Mr. Twain never flinches while

I row, my arms aching.  I dodge and duck, each bottle

mere fractions of an inch from clocking me.

Somehow the bottles are filled with rolled paper

messages, I think, I hope, some paramount

lesson that I must read, learn, remember.

But when let go of the oars, uncork the bottles,

and  unroll the papers, the ink

is smeared, wet from the river.

I can’t read a single letter.

Mr. Twain beams at the river like a father.

I realize abruptly that I’m sunburned and

homesick, and we’re quickly being sucked into

the churn of a steamboat.

Huck’s dad has long since rowed for shore,

his canoe vanishing in the reeds.  I look

at Mr. Twain, and our oars have disappeared,

chewed up in the turning cylinder of paddles from the

steamboat, which grows larger, louder.

We’re sprayed with water, the bathtub

is sinking.  Mr. Twain, though, is his

characteristic calm,

observing the situation and

smacking his pipe.  I’m drenched

and about to be pulled under,

the churning water is deafening.

Mr. Twain puffs again, the pipe still

miraculously lit.  “You don’t expect me

to save you, now?”  And I’m

submerged, my lungs imploding

from the pressure of the water until

somehow, I surface and gasp, inhale –

I’m on the couch, my hair damp and river-smelly,

an open book on my heaving

chest, Tom, Becky, and Injun Joe racing into

the cave.  I sniff, catching the faint scent
of pipe smoke in the air.