Small Talk

August 14, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Last evening, an elderly doctor I was introduced to asked me how I survived childhood.

For folks who don’t know me, I’m small — I mean, really small. I’m a smidge over 4’8″. Technically, I’m tall for a dwarf.

Only as an adult did I realize my smallness, to some extent, defined my habits. Teased in elementary school, I was ridiculously shy. Find me sitting at a school board table, and I can be fierce and demanding, the playing field innately leveled. In a crowd, I instinctively gravitate towards the kids.

Once upon a time, I know I cared tremendously. Now, being small is such a minor thing, a mere curiosity.

My job requires I ask questions of people — sometimes reflective questions, sometimes difficult ones. But this one? Like anyone else, I know people who have had terrible things in their childhood. But smallness? I skipped school sports and went to the library a lot. Could have been worse.

Here’s some Alice Munro….

‘The thing is to be happy,’ he said. ‘No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you’re just there, going along easy in the world.

Cat’s work day

This Old Book

May 7, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Walking with my friend through town, we find a cache of free, reeking-of-basement-mold books — a strange collection of Zen and psychoanalysis and car repair that might have come from my own jammed shelves.

I pull out a skinny book with no title on its cover, only a black-and-white photograph of a long-haired girl in a white dress on a pile of rubble. An early edition of Brautigan’s The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster.

For the rest of our walk, I hold the book loosely in one hand, past the the old granite cutting sheds, houses well-tended and houses abandoned, through the wet woods and blossoming bloodroot and a hillside of trout lilies just beginning to open. I keep thinking about my second book I’m finishing now, how I’m lacing together the connections within that story: a stolen jar of farmers market cash, a dead dog, a torn crimson scarf.

That night, reading the book, I discover a bookmark jammed in the book’s pages, from the Bedford, NH, bookstore of my childhood.

In a Cafe

I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread
as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking
at the photograph of a dead lover.

— Richard Brautigan

Random February Late Afternoon

February 7, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

With the number of snow days this year, I imagine my daughter will be picking handfuls of peas from my garden when she walks to school in June. The lilac blossoms will hang limply by then, past their sweet prime, fading. No sense mentioning this to her, now.

Ice skating at the end of the day, just before the beautiful February twilight began folding around us, the girls’ former bus driver appears from the snowmobile trail where he and his dog had been walking.

He stops to talk to us as I lace up my skates, and points out a nearby house where he grew up. I ask what it was like. He’s in his sixties, and I know he’s traveled, worked in Costa Rice, and returned to Hardwick again.

It was all kids. There were six kids in my family. Everyone had at least four kids. Sometimes a lot more. He stares at the house. Irish Catholic.

I wait. On a night of freezing rain a few years back, he came to the town’s bookstore when I read my from my new novel. Later, picking up my kids at the bottom of our driveway, he told me a particular character reminded him of his father, long dead.

He tells me where the ice skating rink was in those years, stares at the house a little longer, then wishes us a good skate and disappears.

No one else is around. The ice is perfect. Before we leave, we prop the three folding metal chairs and two chairs high in bank, so they won’t get lost in more snow.

Mount Fuji in winter
The sun and stars are big-hearted
and strict.

— Lida Dakotsu

One Large Step

September 26, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The first tooth my daughter lost she threw into the woods. She had been eating a wild apple in our sugarhouse driveway, and the tooth pulled free into the fruit, frightening her. She spit the mouthful into the forest and threw the half-eaten apple, too. I actually spent some time looking for that tiny white tooth.

That milk tooth seemed so important to me then – as if with that tiny tooth I could hold her childhood in my hand.

Since last summer, my younger daughter has wanted to leap from a bridge into Mackville Pond, near her friend’s house. Standing on the metal railing the other day, her friend and sister coached her, while I sat on the grassy shore, certain the girl wouldn’t jump.

She did; I nearly missed her leap. Swimming, laughing, confident: I got this.

And so it goes.

It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely…

From “Childhood” by Rainer Maria Rilke

FullSizeRender

Hey, Kid!

August 12, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other evening I walked by a kid in shorts and a t-shirt crouched down in the mess of road construction on Main Street. What the heck? He was about seven-years-old or so, his hands on a thick stake with a blue triangle flag hammered into the bulldozed dirt.

The little boy was so serious that I stopped and looked back at him. Evening, the workers had long since quit, and no one was around except for cars and pickups on the road. The boy snapped off the stake, immediately put it over his shoulder, and walked down the road quickly.

Slow-thinking perhaps, I didn’t realize what the child was up to, until I saw his yet-serious face glance over his shoulder at the blue flag, and then his fingers came back and brushed the triangle, lightly, without lessening his speed.

The kid was working, doing serious stuff, holding up the veritable imaginative life of the village. So intent he never smiled, he hurried across the street and disappeared around a building, out of my sight.

When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions – such as merit, such as past, present, and future – our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

– Peter Matthiessen

Summer girl

Where Are Those Bracelets?

July 11, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was a kid, my aunt from New York City gave my sister and me bracelets she had bought at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gift shop that had been handmade in Africa with unique and somewhat mysterious beads. Each bracelet was different. One had a milky glass bead. Another a tiny pale green elephant.

This week, with my kids and my sister’s kids together again, busy in their childhood world of trampoline and croquet, biking and baking, I remembered again how that bracelet sums up childhood for me: filled with mystery and marvel.

So it was fitting, perhaps, when I snapped this photo in the Hardwick community gardens. What else should we be nurturing but the soil, this green grassy and stony and muddy earth beneath our children’s running bare feet?