He died today. (I feel fairly certain the two events are unrelated, though one never knows for sure, does one?) “For Patti, in the joy of meeting her,” he wrote in one of the books I shyly asked if he would sign.

May you rest in peace, Carlos Fuentes, you and all those words of yours and that name that sounds so beautiful when said aloud and your charming self. It was my honor to sit with you that afternoon in 1997 when you were just a pup at 68 and I was, yes, 37.

Here is the essay I wrote about reading, and about Carlos Fuentes, in 2006:

“We read to know we are not alone.” – C.S. Lewis

The Bermuda Triangle that has sucked up into its awful vortex my favorite fountain pen, my copy of Getting Things Done (ironic, isn’t it?), and my beautiful Canon Elph PowerShot SD600 digital camera has continued to grow in scope and intensity and greediness and sheer audacity. My winter coat, the right shoe to my favorite Merrell clogs from the Old North State Clothing Company, and the TV remote control are now gone. I haven’t seen my special highlighter in a week, the recipe for Gay’s mother’s pimento cheese is AWOL, and there have been no sightings of my button collection in quite some time. I lost my right stem yesterday, but found it this morning in a place even I couldn’t have imagined, which made me feel really terrible and small for secretly believing that the UPS man had stolen it from the front porch. I’ve hidden my favorite Moleskine and Zebra .7mm Cadoozles Fun Pencil to save them from the Centrifugal Fury.

My friend Rosemary insists that the camera and remote are in our family room; if they are, they are hiding quite assiduously. Losing the camera was devastating. I might have mentioned that once or twice or twelve times. But losing that remote control is the best thing that has ever happened to us. Except for missing “Whose Line is it Anyway?” and all those lovely animated Burl Ives-induced Frosty the Snowman movies, that tremendously cute if ornery Dr. House, the wonderful animated kids’ show, Charlie and Lola, and Kyra Sedgewick’s glorious Southern accent in “The Closer,” we are happier without it. Oh sure, at first we sat pecking at the cable box like barnyard chickens on crack, desperately trying to change channels without a knob, but then we realized we could just turn the TV off and move on to other things, like recreating the penultimate scene in Uccello’s “Battle of San Romano” in macaroni, or, something more low-carb, like reading books.

When I was a child, I begged to be allowed to read in bed and was told that I could, until time for lights out. Then, to thwart my parents’ wishes that I be well-rested rather than well-read, I would sneak and read under my covers, sitting up so my head formed the apex of a blankie tent, illuminated from within like a brilliant blaze was consuming the covers, using a flashlight to continue romping through Mrs Piggle Wiggle’s latest adventure—perhaps the one on the farm!—until all hours of the night. I’m sure it fooled them when they peered in and could see only the miraculous glowing bed tent; finally, the Long Arm of the Law caught up with me.

“You’ll ruin your eyes,” my mother would wail. “You’ll ruin your eyes.” Given that I was already practically legally blind and wearing really ugly bifocals by the time I was 9, I reasoned with her: “I wouldn’t have to risk their further ruin if you would listen to logic and let me read until I weep with exhaustion.” My initial attempts at lawyerly reasoning were futile. No go. Lights out.

I had learned to read at four, well before starting school because my brother was in first grade and already reading; I refused to be left behind. I was also desperate to learn how to write my name—theonly thing standing between me and my own library card was being able to write my whole name myself. Having scaled that hurdle, finally, there were years of Pippi and Encyclopedia Brown and all those little biographies of famous people to look forward to!

Mama took me to the library every week without fail, holding like the Holy Grail my little orange library card with the metal ID number on it, tucking and retucking it intently inside its beautiful little green paper slipcase. I still have that card. I even have my original application for it, written in a gorgeous 5-year-old handwriting, crooked and exaggerated, those two “t’s” towering above the “a” like redwood overlords, a large donut for a dot over the “i.” I’m sure the card and application are here somewhere. Perhaps they’re with my clog.

When I got old enough to work, I finally got a job there. Just imagine the absolute thrill of riding that Bookmobile, taking books to the unwashed masses!

The tallest three humans in this house are Big Readers, Emma most of all. She reads so much—in daylight, under a blankie tent with a flashlight—that she puts me and Mr Brilliant to shame. Tess is making efforts, but at three years old, isn’t quite there yet; she can do a pretty convincing rendition of her book about Gus the Troll who has a beautiful voice and isn’t especially good looking, but I think she’s faking it.

Emma learned to read in the first grade under the graceful tutelage of Miss Jones, a wonderful young woman from South Africa who was her first teacher at the Washington International School.

The reading primers they used were British, the Oxford Reading Tree series illustrated by a man named Alex Brychta, complete with main characters named Biff and Kipper. Emma was so enamored of reading and of the small spectacles that appeared in each of Brychta’s illustrations, tucked into a corner, but there in each picture. “Why does he have those eyeglasses in every picture?” she would ask. “I don’t know, Buddy,” John replied. “Why don’t we call the man who painted the pictures and ask?”

And so they did, big John and little six-year-old Emma looked up Alex Brychta, found his phone number in London, and gave him a little ringy-dingy.

He was shocked. When he regained his composure, he very nicely told Emma all about the eyeglasses. It was to be the first of many such interactions for Emma. In fact, she assumed as a result that one was intended to correspond with all authors and artists, and her next conquest was an extended and delightful correspondence with a writer named Twig George. In the second grade, Emma was assigned to do a report on George’s A Dolphin Named Bob, so she, of course, expected that she would interview the author. Don’t we all?

In that way, she is truly Mr Brilliant’s daughter, a man who called the White House Pastry Chef to find out how to make a gingerbread castle, who called Clyde Barrow’s sister, Kurt Gödel’s psychiatrist, the janitor who cleaned up the Rosenberg’s execution chamber, and countless others. He called Hans Bethe once, who – at age 95 – answered his own phone.

“Everybody talks,” he told me, “if you come up with an interesting enough question.” I was going to have lunch with Carlos Fuentes once and John learned through transcripts of past interviews that Fuentes had a beloved second grade teacher who was formative in his life. Her name was Miss Florence Painter. Many of us mortals might have stopped there, but not Mr Brilliant. No, he tracked down that teacher. She had died, but we talked to her relatives, a series of calls and conversations about Carlos as a child that led me to an extraordinary welcome from Fuentes and his own fascinating stories of his childhood. He was thrilled to hear his teacher’s name, all these years later.

We are a family of seekers, it turns out, empowered by Mr Brilliant to call anyone and everyone. 

Last week, in the glorious wake of the Missing Remote, Emma and I devised a plan to read a book each week in 2007. John wanted in on the action, so the three of us are now compiling our lists. Even though it is true, as the crotchety but generally correct Edmund Wilson once said, that “no two persons ever read the same book,” every other week the three of us will read one book together and on alternate weeks, we’ll read books of our own choosing. Some of mine will be re-reads because, as Cliff Fadiman said: “When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.”

We will no doubt be putting some authors on four-way conference calls.

“I cannot live without books,” Thomas Jefferson is reported to have said. And so it is that when we moved from Washington, 7,000 pounds of books moved with us, and this after pruning our shelves.

They are ordered in a way that would cause any librarian to shudder: here, this shelf has books with one-word titles (my favorites!): Regret, Boredom, Crying. Jump, for example. The shelf below has unusual histories: the history of vacations, the history of old age, the history of the housewife, the history of reading, laughter as subversive history, a history of walking, the history of stupidity, the history of hosiery (that’s for you, Rosemary!). There’s a whole section on forgeries that was inspired by William Gaddis’ The Recognitions. Two cases over are some of the favorites from Mr Brilliant’s ephemera collection of 90,000 obtuse pamphlets, a veritable history of the United States in paper, those naïve surreal pamphlets of bizarre histories of double weight twine, the use of luggage, school lunches, shelled nuts, the United Brethren of Pullman Porters, and tin stamping.

Two shelves over to the left are the death books, a not insignificant grouping, then – of course – there’s the solitude section, which is near the section dedicated to Anne Lamott, the one focused on Jonathan Spence, Charles Hampden-Turner‘s shelf, and the shelf memorializing Carol Shields. There’s a section of poetry by an obscure American poet named Billy Collins—perhaps you’ve heard of him? And here’s the Tortured-French-Fiction-About-Art-and-Artists-Section, adjacent to the encyclopedias of hell, of heaven, and of everything in between those two points.

Amidst this Dewey Decimal nightmare, we’re creating a list of 52 books to read in 2007, 26 of which we all agree on and 26 wild cards to suit our own mood. To create my list, I’m looking at my own Massive Library of Unread Books and also at other people’s book lists. Ralph Waldo Emerson has written, “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.” And ask I shall: what 3 books do you suggest I add to my reading challenge list for 2007?

I’m an avid Jorge Luis Borges reader; he is a man who spent a lot of time in libraries in his career. “Like all men of the library,” he wrote, “I have traveled in my youth, I have wandered in search of a book.” Borges worked as a cataloguer at the Miguel Cane branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library. The job didn’t interest him and he usually disappeared into the basement to read, write, and translate. The never-ending process of cataloguing inspired one of Borges’s most famous short stories, “The Library of Babel” (1941), in which the faithful catalog of the Library is supplemented with “thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog.”

In 1955 Borges became Director of the National Library. “I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at once 800,000 books and darkness,” Borges noted alluding to his now almost complete blindness. As he wrote in “The Secret Miracle”: “A librarian wearing dark glasses asked him: ‘What are you looking for?’ Hladik answered: ‘I am looking for God.’ The librarian said to him: ‘God is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes of the Clementine. My fathers and the fathers of my fathers have searched for this letter; I have grown blind seeking it.’”

Still, he imagined that “Paradise will be a kind of library.” In an odd and Populist way (back to TV!), and to connect alpha and omega dots that rarely, if ever, are connected, Borges is like a character played by actor Burgess Meredith in a 1959 “Twilight Zone” episode called “Time Enough at Last.” In it, Meredith plays Henry Bemis, a bank teller thoroughly obsessed with reading, much to the dismay of his boss at work and his wife at home. Bemis suddenly finds himself the last man on Earth after surviving a nuclear attack (like Borges sneaking into the library basement, Bemis had snuck into the bank vault to read over his lunch break and emerged to find himself alone in a destroyed world.)

When he sits in a pile of rubble that used to be the library, (somehow the books have survived the vast conflagration), he is distraught until he realizes that now he can read all the time! Overjoyed, he makes piles and piles of books to read for the years to come—until he drops his significantly thick eyeglasses and they shatter, smashing his only lenses and leaving him unable to read.

If Paradise is a library, hell is a library with shattered eyeglasses—or, in Borges’ case, being in an infinite library while blind.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

When I first traveled to Stockholm on a business trip, I had one thing in mind: ditch the fascinating and no doubt life-altering conference on modern human resources measurement systems and find the Holy Grail. Go to the place where Astrid Lundgren lives and stand in front of her house. Lundgren was, of course, the creator of my childhood she-ro, Pippi Longstocking. By the time I was in Stockholm, she was very old and not to be bothered. And so I just stood there, looking at her house.

Throw your TV remote away and be a book fool. Read, write in the margins, talk to people about the books you read. Create interesting questions. Find Miss Florence Painter, your favorite writer’s second grade teacher. Talk to her.

Call writers. Support the book publishing industry and independent bookstores. Renew your library card. If you have children or access to children, create traditions for them that center on your public library.  Always carry a book, a pen, and an index card. Always.

And tell me: what 3 books do you suggest I add to my reading challenge list for 2007?

Victor Hugo said that “to learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” There are so desperately many people in the U.S. who cannot read. Can we help spark a fire for them?

Teach someone to read. Give them a whole world.

Related posts: Don’t sell your red books, Always carry a pencil, Save face for someone else

Just one short year ago, here’s what I was pondering: Listen to fishies

Images: http://goodfelloweb.com/nature/images/vortex.jpg, http://www.carltonartgallery.com/images/Warren%20Dennis%20Gallery/Couple%20Reading%20Under%20Tree.jpg

It started late last night with a call from Emma. “She’s calling to wish you a Happy Mother’s Day,” John said as he handed me the phone. “But it’s only 11:57!” I joked. “Hi, honey,” I said. “Happy Mother’s Day!” she said. “How’s your new apartment?” I asked. We chatted for a moment, and then, suddenly, she appeared around the corner of the room. I dropped the phone and leapt up. She had driven the four hours from Raleigh to surprise me for Mother’s Day! I can’t remember ever being so surprised! Oh, my, yes, tears.

And then today, a quiet day of naps and rain, and then Tess decided she needed to learn to ride her bike. The back story: She tried years ago, and instantly fell. And that, my friends, was the end of her bike-riding career. For years she wouldn’t touch a bike. Just as it took her two years to go back to a movie theater after losing a stuffed animal at a movie one day. No bike for her, until today. And now she is a bike rider, suddenly. Only she can determine that timing. I can only imagine the feeling of freedom and sheer joy she is feeling.

Both girls making my heart soar as they fly, fly!

Mother’s Day, happy.

One Year

When I got to his marker, I sat on it,
like sitting on the edge of someone’s bed
and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite.
I took some tears from my jaw and neck
and started to wash a corner of his stone.
Then a black and amber ant
ran out onto the granite, and off it,
and another ant hauled a dead
ant onto the stone, leaving it, and not coming back.
Ants ran down into the grooves of his name
and dates, down into the oval track of the
first name’s O, middle name’s O,
the short O of his last name,
and down into the hyphen between
his birth and death–little trough of his life.
Soft bugs appeared on my shoes,
like grains of pollen, I let them move on me,
I rinsed a dark fleck of mica,
and down inside the engraved letters
the first dots of lichen were appearing
like stars in early evening.
I saw the speedwell on the ground with its horns,
the coiled ferns, copper-beech blossoms, each
petal like that disc of matter which
swayed, on the last day, on his tongue.
Tamarack, Western hemlock,
manzanita, water birch
with its scored bark,
I put my arms around a trunk and squeezed it,
then I lay down on my father’s grave.
The sun shone down on me, the powerful
ants walked on me. When I woke,
my cheek was crumbly, yellowish
with a mustard plaster of earth. Only
at the last minute did I think of his body
actually under me, the can of
bone, ash, soft as a goosedown
pillow that bursts in bed with the lovers.
When I kissed his stone it was not enough,
when I licked it my tongue went dry a moment, I
ate his dust, I tasted my dirt host.

-Sharon Olds

One year seems incomprehensible. And then two. In his absence, I lived in Munich, finished college. Then four years. Graduate school, a marriage, a job. Then eight, ten, fifteen. Trips around the world, work. A divorce. A marriage. A child. Eighteen years, then twenty. Twenty-five. Unthinkable. Another child. Deaths and disappointments, great chest lifting joys, a book and then two then three and now seven. And you, my dear sweet father, you missed it all. All except the birth, the skinned knees, the piano lessons, the sledding down steep wild hills, the sits in your lap, Sunday afternoon football, the obsession with Johnny Unitas, the blackberry picking and cobblers, the whistles at suppertime to call me in from the creek, the Sunday School, the Big Church, the Hillcrest Elementary School, the dropping everything to pick me up, the dances on your black wingtip shoes, the junior high angst, the high school marching band, the friends, the sleepovers, the midnight frenzied drives to the emergency room, you clutching your chest, you human rivet the loss around which my life has spun, the strong point that has held it together, even in your absence.

Thirty-two years. One year. The same.

What were you doing thirty-two years ago today? Do you know?

My friend Elina Rodriguez posted something on Facebook two years ago that stopped me. I had heard parts of her moving story of coming to the U.S. before, but I didn’t understand that as she experienced her treacherous journey to the U.S., I was in a hospital intensive care waiting room as my father lay dying. Elina wrote: “Thirty years ago today, at 2am, I left my home in Havana, Cuba. Hope and Faith sustained me during the longest 3 days of my life, journeying from Mariel harbor to the land of some unknown thing called ‘freedom’.”

Daddy would die on the second day of Elina’s trip; I was struck by the parallels of the journeys, so different and yet shared. Elina wrote back: “Patti, thirty years ago tomorrow, I was in an overcrowded lobster fishing boat, with 120 other people including my 2-year-old son, “refuged” from a storm in a harbor controlled by authorities that had banned us as ‘traitors’, hungry, thirsty, not able to go back and not able to go forward, unable to touch land anywhere–Striking that we were both journeying; he to a place of peace. My love is with you.”

We are all on a shared journey.

I miss Daddy. Can you tell? It was his heart that gave out. My job, all these years later, is to make sure that you know who he was. Melvin Lonnie Digh. We keep people alive by telling their stories.

Death ends a life, not a relationship.

Please, please listen to these nine minutes and forty-five seconds, and pass it along to others who will also listen (from the audiobook version of Life is a Verb). The end of the recording may give you some idea of my loss, all these years later:

Click here to listen to Live An Irresistible Obituary 5-11-2010

I was deeply honored to wear a Harry Potter robe on Saturday morning and march onto the gorgeous lawn of Guilford College to give the commencement address 30 years after I received my own diploma from there.

Here are some photos from that special day, some 3x3x365 posts about it, and a link to my remarks, “The Geography of Verbs,” (excluding my preliminary remarks offering advice to any menopausal women in the audience who might be considering wearing a heavy robe and hood-thing to give a commencement speech in the sun, and my dedication of my remarks to my physics professor at Guilford, Sheridan Simon, dead far too young). It was a day of full circles.

Thank you for the honor, Guilford.

Emma was there!

This man, Bill Rogers, presented me with my diploma at Guilford College 30 years ago when he was president of the college!

I never knew teaching an online writing class could be such a wholehearted, full-bodied experience.

But it is.

If you are drawn to knowing who you are, where your creativity resides inside you, and what stops you from expressing yourself like your hair is on fire, I hope you will join me for the next VerbTribe online writing class (starts May 16th). Go here for more info!

It may change your life, not just your writing.

Here’s what a few folks had to say about it:

VerbTribe is pure magic. The real kind. The life-changing kind. Conjured from the brilliant mind and boundless heart of Patti Digh, this is, hands down, the BEST way to really get your writing on. Patti’s served up something that’s wildly fun, deliciously different and profoundly effective – a special sauce that dissolves excuses in the blink of an eye, opens doors you never knew existed and gets you in the most gorgeous word-ey groove ever. I felt different by day three. And, really, this is about so much more than writing. VerbTribe has given me new eyes. The awesomeness that I’ve experienced here will stay with me for life. – Fabeku Fatunmise

“After only 8 days, I am remembering WHY I write and HOW I write. The daily work seems so simple and easy, yet it has taken me deep into places I had forgotten and am so glad to be rediscovering. This course is about so much more than just creating a regular writing practice. It is about connection and adventure and exploring our edges, using our words to find the way.” -Ruth Davis

“VerbTribe = 37 days toward building a sustainable writing practice. We’re on day 10. This has already been a game changer for me with most changes having nothing to do with writing. That Patti Digh lets people believe she’s all southern charmy and genteel but she’s an ass kicker of the highest caliber…” -Martha Atkins

Life is short. Write accordingly.

Come, let’s write–and in the writing, learn.

Love,

Intangible

I am in love
With the light that illuminates the dust
Resting on her hair
Convinced that those diamonds are god’s way of saying hello
And reminding me that this very common is not so common at all
But part of something bigger and much older than
Floors I haven’t had time to sweep

I am in love
With the soft sigh of an animal body
Laying next to me
Trusting the sigh itself is the voice of god
Saying good morning, you are sweet, and something bigger
Than a warmth emanating from a heartbeat
That does the dishes and takes out the trash

I am in love
With a breeze that slips under my door
Around my toes
Reminding my soles they are meant for a holier path
Than the walk I take to fix the draft
That might just be saying, this
Is the blessing of love

-Jess Ryan

I love this offering by Jess Ryan, a member of the first VerbTribe, in celebration of National Poetry Month.

[photo from here]

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

~ David Wagoner

You must let it find you.

In continued celebration of National Poetry Month.

My friend Amy McCracken (Richmond on our 3x3x365 blog) has declared today to be the National Day of Tess Ptak. Here’s what she wrote on her Facebook wall this morning:

I love the responses that are pouring in:

Folks are making suggestions for how to celebrate:

Singer/Songwriter Tamara Bailie even wrote a song for Tess, a beautiful paean to kids who are different, and special, and loved as they are.

Click here to hear the song, Fly, by Tamara Bailie

“Fly”  Tamara Bailie – March, 2012

Some of us can see the colors
Some have never seen
Some of us can tell the stories
Some have never dreamed
Some of us are used to hearing
Something isn’t right
Some of us are learning something
Some may never find

Fly
Close your eyes
Let your light shine
As you rise
Into the sky
Leave the rest behind
Just Fly

Some of us love deeper than
Some others think is wise
Some of us are more than
Someone else may recognize
Some of us see beauty in
Some of the smallest things
Some of us are made of
Something stronger than we seem

Fly
Close your eyes
Let your light shine
As you rise
Into the sky
Leave the rest behind
Just Fly

May you be brave
May you be strong
May you write every word
To your own song
May you be bold
With every choice
And sing it all
In your own voice

Fly
Close your eyes
Let your light shine
As you rise
Into the sky
Leave the rest behind
Just Fly…

It is easy to feel broken when you see the world from a different vantage point, when you get in trouble at school, when you feel panic and rage and don’t know why. It is really easy to feel broken then. Today we are taking Tess for a day-long assessment to see how we can better help her feel happy and whole. My thanks to a whole community of people, most of whom have never met her, who can see the beauty in her differences and be inspired by them. My love. April 17th. National Tess Ptak Day. Rock on, y’all. Rock on.

My thanks, Amy, for loving her and starting this fantastic celebration of her on a day when it would be easy to focus on what’s “wrong.”

This is a day for everyone who makes strong offers into the world just as they are. Perfect in their delicious differences. Amen. How will you celebrate?

Start Close In

-David Whyte

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another’s voice
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don’t want to take.

My celebration of National Poetry Month continues with this poem by David Whyte. With thanks to VerbTribe member Eileen Getches for pointing me to these words.