Mortality - Christopher Hitchens, Florence Howe and me

Finishing Christopher Hitchen's book Mortality and receiving from Florence Howe her memoir A Life in Motion, I can only wonder what the hell I have been spending my life doing.  For sure, I am no Florence Howe, and with what my mother used to call "a memory like a sieve," I am no Christopher Hitchens whose memory Graydon Carter called a "staggeringly, almost punishing memory."  Am I hobnobbing with people who are WAY out of my league?  Of course, I am, but somebody has to read these books, and it might as well be me as few people I know seem to mess around with books anymore; oh, they talk about them with a ferociousness that borders on madness, but if posting on Facebook amounts to anything at all, it seems to me, it amounts to a heap of wasted pages and precious moments that could have been spent reading.

A slow reader and an earnest but rigorous teacher, I have to look back on what I have accomplished in my work; is it having students over to my house to bake pies for the homeless at Thanksgiving, as indicated in the above photo?  It hardly seems like anything worth poking a finger at, but I cannot bring myself to write books because I have so little to say.  Well, not exactly little to say, but it is the preciousness of the small about which I have a great deal to say: the birds, a worm, leaf ants, a shade of coral, the clip clop of the horses walking on the paved road outside my window in the mornings, and the bulge of an overly jammed peanut butter and banana sandwich my friend made for me.  These are the minuscule, the minutiae that draws me in and holds my attention.  But I'm no Mary Oliver, the poet who can make the feather of a small bird take on the significance of the resurrection.

Sometimes I write to tell my sister about some insignificant sparrows fighting over an over-sized piece of pretzel on the sidewalk or the feeling of a heron flying close to my shoulder.  She tells me I should keep a blog for my concerns, and I think she is telling me not to bother her at her busy day's work.  Here I am, writing on a stupid blog because I have no audience for small secrets or quiet mysteries.  Sometimes I think I would like to become a preacher so that I could share my spirit with a "congregation," but then, I realize that they, too, would be judges of sorts.

I suppose I'm better off just writing into cyber-space, savoring my own wee journey through the day, relishing writing with a pink marker on a white board at school, or listening to the jangle of my bangle bracelets as I scratch away with the white chalk on a blackboard.  These are the sounds and sensations of my days, diminutive but dynamic even if only to me.