Imagine This

October 4, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other misty autumn afternoon I was standing in front of the Woodbury general store recreating the library’s sign when an acquaintance came out of the store with a gallon of milk and two quarts of Ben & Jerry’s. Naturally, I offered to relieve him of the weight of that ice cream. With the foliage burning an orange hue in the clouds, he and I talked about kids and our own childhoods, and how mightily imagination can work through a life, propelling people in all kinds of different ways – or not, if imagination is lacking.

I thought of a short piece I’d written for Kids VT about a 9-year-old boy who, hanging out in his dad’s East L.A. auto parts store with time on his hands, no kid companions, and piles of empty boxes, constructed an elaborate arcade from cardboard. By chance, filmmaker Nirvan Mullick appeared to buy a door handle for his Toyota corolla, and this short flick and a greater story evolved from their meeting. Caine is a smart and inherently likable kid, but the filmmaker equally interested me – in a story behind the story kind of way. Who was this adult who took such an interest in this lonely boy? Doubtlessly, the story widens….

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact…

– William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Greensboro, Vermont

E.R. Visit

October 3, 2016October 4, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Doubtlessly, I talk too much with my teenager, as if I can fortress a wall comprised of vowel and consonant around her. Yesterday took an unexpected curve when she had a knuckle stitched up in Morrisville’s ER. Dark thread; alabaster skin.

In hours of waiting, just once I asked her to look at her gauze-wrapped knuckle. I asked, Do you see what my words mean?

This girl pushing-hard-toward-womanhood said one word: Yes.

Yes. A word overspilling with meaning, used in manifold humdrum ways (is it raining yet? do you want more kale? would you wash that laundry?) and then, in that afternoon, between the two of us – mother and daughter –that word arched between us in the clearest possible manner, resonating with all our 17 years together.

Do you see what I mean? Yes.

That yes acknowledged the misery of the present ER, the unwieldy bulk of the past, and yet that yes joined us, mother and daughter. Yes to my love for her, and yes in her acceptance of my love.

Parenting books are chock-full of advice, both decent and downright dumb. Seeing my daughter’s hand x-rayed, with her long elegant bones, ethereal in beauty, hidden beneath the bloody tear of her flesh, pulled me down into that near wordless place where only a few things matter.

Rain began falling as I drove home around Elmore Lake too cold for swimming this late in the season, and the autumn leaves golden and crimson on the familiar mountain. My brother, home with the 11-year-olds, holding up the pieces of my domestic life, had texted a request for paper towels and beer. My daughter and I stopped at the small Elmore store, where years ago this girl had eaten her first grape popsicle. My friend had carefully split that frozen treat in two equal halves for two 2-year-olds. She had used a plastic toy saw as a tool.

Going that final stretch home, I drove slowly, the two of us eating chocolate chip cookies and talking.

Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.

– Joseph Campbell

Summer of 17, Greensboro, Vermont

Birds of Prey, And Us Non-Birds

October 1, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night at our little local library, a high school student told his story of visiting a falconer. The falcons, he said, have one primal force: to eat. He described feathered creatures who will sit for hours, waiting for a mouse to appear – almost sure prey at a hole – rather than using calories to fly randomly and seek the unknown.

The world of training these regal birds, the teenager relayed, centers on one primary object: a morsel of London broil on a leather gauntlet. That is so not the human way. Perhaps in hunter-gatherer days, single-minded patience and determination dictated human action, but it’s nearly impossible for me to imagine when the human terrain of desire – for food beyond sustenance, sweet, salty, and spicy; for silk and myriad dyed colors for fashion; for adulation on a small and great scale; for the comfort of coupling in bed, complicated or not – hasn’t constantly jumbled up civilization.

Aggravating, infuriating at times, this world I inhabit, and yet this morning, waking in the dark with a child murmuring in her sleep near me, what a wondrous world, too. Not far from my desk, a mouse scurries in and out of its tiny hole, busy with its own rodent variation of London broil. More generous this rainy morning, I think, Go about, little one.

Autumn Haiku

Even from my front porch
the rusted sewing machine
yearns for golden thread.

– Warren Falcon

Woodbury, Vermont

Ah, Céline….

September 29, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

When I was 21 and writing my undergraduate thesis in philosophy, I supplemented Kant and Plato, naturally, with novel reading, a truly great human pleasure. From a friend, I snagged a copy of Death on the Installment Plan – arguably one of the best titles ever. (How could anything more accurately sum up human existence?)

I remember lying on a mattress in that apartment in Brattleboro, with the enormous windows open to Main Street below, unscreened, street dust drifting in over the mahogany sills. Living alone in a gorgeous old apartment building, with bustling town life below, was new to me, and I was new to life myself then, the world of my womanly life barely unfurling.

I must have spent hours reading Céline, in that college-age life I had then, devouring that book with a passion. I’ve read many authors whom I’ve loved and admired and wanted to emulate. Céline is Céline; no one else. What raw joy to read that book for the first time. Early this morning, me and the scampering mouse were awake, and I was reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, in that inimitable world of the novel. Yes.

Here’s a sentence I read this morning:

…things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.

– Hanya Yanagihara A Little Life

And then Céline:

That’s the hatred that kills you. There’ll be more of it, so deep and thick there will always be some left, enough to go around…it will ooze out over the earth…and poison it, so nothing will grow but viciousness, among the dead, among men.

– Céline, Death on the Installment Plan

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Construction Paper

September 29, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This morning, colored paper leaves spruced up our kitchen windows. My teenager had spent some late hours busy with arts and crafts and Netflix. Our house is the better off for this.

Which got me to thinking… what are the things a kid needs? The obvious ones, of course: steady meals and sturdy shoes and an arc of adult arms. But beyond survival, I see how my own children thrive into their imaginative spaces, busily not finding but creating their own niche.

As babies, their whole lives commenced literally turned into my heart to suckle, but now I see my kids intentionally widening their worlds, painting their bedrooms but also expanding their realms through deepening friendships and giggling nights, or their own journeys on foot or bicycle or down the highway.

What does a kid need? Perhaps what as an adult I need, too: freedom to spread out and explore, and a home to hold your artwork.

Here’s a few lines from what I’m reading now:

There was a period… with every painting or project when the life of that painting became more real to you than your everyday life, when you sat wherever you were and thought only of returning to the studio, when you were barely conscious that you had tapped out a hill of salt onto the dinner table and in it were drawing your plots and patterns and plans, the white grains moving under your fingertip like silt.

– Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

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What makes us who we are?

Autumn Commences

September 27, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I took an unusual route to work this morning, in an attempt to avoid construction, and was rewarded with fog so rich along the valleys my little car crept along, the headlights no doubt mere smears in the white layers.

As I passed through one rise of mountains, my children traveled the other, each of us parting in the early morning, surrounded by infinite layers of pure, wet white. How I would love to jettison a day’s obligations and disappear into those high rocky peaks, the mist melting in the rising sun, the woods whispering their own particular language in my ears.

At my desk, I think of my daughter with her black and silver-keyed clarinet, an instrument new to her, her brown eyes merry with happiness this morning, anticipating music.