Tag Archives: Wayne State University Press

WHAT’S LIGHTING US UP: ANNE-MARIE OOMEN’S LUMINOUS CONTRADICTIONS

With “What’s Lighting Us Up” I’ve been inviting some of my writer friends to report on any books, music, movies, moments in nature, or life events that have been making them come more alive than usual. Here poet, essayist, and playwright Anne-Marie reflects on a difficult challenge in her life and discovers that there can be joy in even the toughest moments:

What lights me up these days? Contradictions. Being in paradox, touching enigmatic moments as though they were Braille, as though to decipher a mystery from the rough dots of hard experience. I hate it and I thrive on it.

In April my third memoir of a trilogy on rural life, Love, Sex and 4-H, was published. Since then, I haven’t been able to write much because my time has been divided between teaching, book promotion, and big concerns about my elderly mother. She’s 94, and last January, after four years in a home for the elderly, she fell and broke her leg. It did not heal well. She has not stood on her own, nor walked, since then. After a long and difficult decision-making process, our family moved her to a medical care facility—full scale nursing home. This is very hard; this lights me up.

What I am learning from her is not just what will happen to most of us in this new/old age, but the tender pain of how it happens. I watch her among her peers in the nursing home, and I ache for her, and I learn. In those efficient halls, with nurses bustling and busy aides in and out of an unquiet room, she is actually getting excellent care. She is getting stronger, little by little, though PT is her most dreaded part of the day. She won’t look at the therapist. She wants to go home. Home is the farm. I feel her longing like a knife; the blade bright with hope that I try not to dull without telling her outright lies. As I wheel her to get her hair done or watch her push-pull with her therapist, I feel her loss, but I see that she has gained muscle. She is interacting. She is eating. Her loss has some light around it. I can sometimes see to write by that light.

When I come home from being with her—usually two days a week—I try to honor our time together by writing down what she has said, what I saw her doing, how I came into her room to find her holding the corner of the bed quilt her mother (my grandmother) made for me, looking at the stitched name of her own mother and the date, 1973. I watch her fingers feeling the stitches; she is tracing her own mother’s name. She cannot always remember her grandkids, but she remembers her mother. She looks up and smiles, says, “Mama was here.” Then pauses, corrects, “Oh, I guess I dreamed about Mama.” I see her there, evening light falling on her shoulders, living in the past but not in the past. Because, of her, I am inside a moment and outside of time. I tell her I love her. I would not have this moment without her. I try to write those moments, to get one iota closer to meaning in a time that on the surface appears meaningless, unless we make it mean.

Mom 2This week, after two months in the facility’s therapy room, the physical therapists helped her into a standing position. I’ve attached pictures of the sequence. Here is light. Their goal is to get her to stand just enough to, with assistance, help with her toileting. It’s a hard thing: no one wants to think about that, certainly not in a blog about light, but here it is. Toileting is a matrix—who knew? It’s not just about safety and hygiene. It’s integrity, mind-body connection, physical and psychological strength, interaction, and if she can help with it, it’s so much easier on the nurses. That singular and simple goal has light around it.

So I stay present but on high alert. And I file away. This is also contradiction. My mother seems to know. She’ll look up from her favorite snack, Lay’s potato chips, and as she scatters chipflecks on her shirt, she’ll tease, “You’re the one who says, remember this and remember that.” Crunch crunch. She loves salt. She tells me stories she has told no one else—though she has told others different things. How does she choose? She lets me see her cry sometimes; tells me how much she misses my dad. She has let go of her anger toward me for many (not all) the stupid things I have done. We have finally become friends. This is light.

Many friends, and not only those in my generation, are going through similar experiences—I haven’t found a family that isn’t touched by this elder care issue and its growing complications in this medically politicized world.  I’ve come to recognize in my peers a certain charged worry when parents come up, and after living with the complexities of care-taking, an acquiescent shrug, so this is how it is. I used to hate that, to think there must be some call to action. I understand better by having observed my mother’s slow acceptance of powerlessness, even as her children take unwilling power over her life. More contradiction.

We don’t have a lot of models for how this part of life is done because every single elder’s story is unique and relates differently to family. Contradictions though—like learning to be friends with your mother only as her calendar and clock disintegrate—that’s not unusual. In the end, we do what we can as best we can with what we have and hope we’ve done so out of the right motives. We walk in some kind of shadow. But as her needs become greater, she has offered me opportunity and slow as I am, I am seeing the light. There’s a process here about our love maturing, something I somehow missed before. I don’t understand this; I know it’s true. Most of us are learning to love our way through this. Contradiction becomes mystery. Wonder. Light.

(Anne-Marie Oomen is the author of three memoirs, Love, Sex, and 4H, Pulling Down the Barn, and House of Fields (all from Wayne State University Press); An American Map: Essays (Wayne State University Press); a full-length collection of poetry, Uncoded Woman (Milkweed Editions); and seven plays. She and her husband, David Early, have built their own home near Empire, Michigan. Visit her website here.)

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WHAT’S LIGHTING US UP: Mike Delp’s “Work”

Every week, starting this week, I’m asking friends to comment on the books, movies, music, art, natural events, and creative projects that they’ve been finding most interesting and inspiring.

For the first post, I’m honored to present a powerful new poem by Michael Delp. Mike’s an old friend and fishing pal and a terrific writer who spends part of every year in his cabin beside the Boardman River. What’s lighting him up lately? Here’s Mike, in his own words:

“This is the beginning of a series of new poems about the value and necessity of doing work with the hands. I’m talking about what Jim Harrison calls, ‘making the long thought’ which comes to us doing boring, hard manual labor. At a young age, my father taught me tools: saws and hammers, drills and bits, how to work wood into a boat that would actually float. I spent hundreds of hours as a kid weeding, mowing, trimming Christmas trees and later, in college, running an 80 lb air hammer in the summer. I have unloaded boxcars of dried milk, 75 lb bags and a full boxcar, all day in the summer heat, enough time to kill yourself, if you desired. I know what it’s like to dream with weight on the back, and an ache in the arm from pounding nails through two sheets of roofing steel building a pole barn. It all comes down to doing the work, and working the work to make the mind a healthier place where anything, even a poem, might enter into that brief instant of time between the lifting of the hammer and the explosion of the nail into the wood.”

 

WORK
by Michael Delp

Wondering how it felt for my step-Grandpa, Eby, to see two of his fingers
sliced off in a press at the Lansing Drop Forge,
dancing, he could have thought, in that instant before pain,
to the music of factory vibrations,
while behind him, men at other presses
never stopped or heard his screams over the pounding of their own work.

Wondering how it was that my own father, his heart stuffed with
engineering equations and cigar smoke came home from his office every night,
and helped his only son learn how to run a table saw,
each time teaching, testing the blade’s teeth with his right thumb.

Wondering how his father, an alcoholic sheriff’s deputy stumbling home at night from a
job in what must have seemed like life in a tunnel with no exit,
a black locomotive with a light like God’s eye about to plow him down,
work him into the gravel bed between the tracks.
But this man, my dad’s dad, knew how to build stuff.
He taught my father the value of hands and how they did work.
For six weeks my dad and his two brothers, both younger, tore down
a neighbor’s house and saved every nail and straightened every nail.

And I remember this now, watching him lift a deck board, hand it over to me.
He’s 94 and still in the work. He could do this blindfolded, this work done by hand,
setting wood and nailing it in place, and when I slip my hammer past an 8D sinker,
wrench it almost double
he bends to pick it up,
hands it back and I do what I learned:
set it down and put it back to the shape it was
when I first laid my hands on it.

And both of us, an old man and his son, growing older,
turn again to bend our backs into the work.
And when I say into it, I mean down our arms and through our fingers, the tools working
as if they had blood inside them.

 

(Michael Delp is a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction whose works have appeared in numerous national publications. He is the author, most recently, of the limited-edition letterpress chapbook, The Mad Angler Poems, published by Deep Wood Press, and of a story collection, As If We Were Prey (Wayne State University Press). His other books include The Last Good Water (Wayne State, 2003), The Coast of Nowhere (Wayne State, 1997), and Under the Influence of Water (Wayne State, 1992). He recently retired from teaching creative writing at the Interlochen Arts Academy, where he received several awards for his teaching. Mike invites you to visit his Facebook page.)

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