old age

Dad, at 89.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

In the summer of 1980, my parents had the summer off. Dad was a college teacher, and my mother, an RN, was encouraged to take unpaid time as the hospital census was low. My parents owned a Jeep, and my dad loaded sleeping bags and two tents in an oilskin on the luggage rack, and secured the bulk with bungee cords. From New Hampshire, my parents headed west with their three kids.

Now, older than my parents were at that time, I wonder what the heck my parents were searching for. As a kid, of course, you simply go with the family flow, show up at the picnic table and eat chili from a plastic bowl. As a writer, I know that all life is propelled by desire, for that bowl of chili, for the wilderness my parents loved, for the far murkier desires that lurk in a human heart. We were never a Bobbsey Twin family (although good lord how I longed for that, a long-quelled desire), but three of us grew up and created our own complicated lives, never far from the wilderness.

Today, my old man is 89, a remarkable age. I woke thinking of him on one of those summer trips, back in the world before cell phones and internet, when no one knew where the five of us were, just us—dad, mom, the three kids—rattling around in that Jeep. Dad always packed tools, and he fixed our vehicle along the way. High up in the Wyoming mountains one summer, it was cold as heck. He got up before any of us, brewed coffee on the Coleman stove and made buttered toast. He unzipped the tent and handed in toast and hot coffee. Stay in your sleeping bags until it warms, he said. We’d been on the road for weeks by then. He was unshaven, bundled in a jacket, and he kept that makeshift hearth of the Coleman stove burning, feeding us toast. Happy birthday, dad. ❤️

And the Hayden Carruth poem that reminds me of my parents…

Birthday Cake

For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past. 
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost 
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor of another
era. But how lovely it was, that time
in my restless memory.
This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.

Cats, Coyotes.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

The return trip from my parents’ house in New Mexico to my own Hardwick, Vermont, house was 20 hours. When I stepped off the plane, I was effusively grateful to see my daughters waiting to drive me home, to wrap me again in our own particular kind of family — loving and funny, with the fierce rivers of stories that run between us.

A friend texts me and sweetly offers to make me a meal; these days, about all I’ve done is trudge into work, then lie on couch with my cats, reading Michael Crummy and soaking in Jon Stewart’s election update. When my daughters were babies, I lived in a rarefied kind of atmosphere, of warm milk and scant sleep and intense curiosity: what now? what next? As if bookended, my parents in very old age live in a unique world, too, suffused with New Mexican sunlight, and with a similar uncertainty: what next?

In that middle-of-the-night drive to Albuquerque, circling through the airport parking lot, I spied a coyote. I pulled over, opened the car door, and looked back. Under the amber streetlights, the coyote hurried along, brushy tail bouncing, not so much as glancing over its shoulder at me. Around us, so much cement, then the desert, undulating, spreading up into the hills, disappearing from sight.

The wild creature vanished into the dark.

“A body must bear what can’t be helped.”

— Michael Crummy

Stitching, in Friends & Wool.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

December, and by five o’clock, the dark has hammered in for the night. A friend and I walk to the post office, talking about work and family, laughing as we avoid icy patches glowing beneath the streetlamps. We meet a neighbor walking home with her two children from the afterschool program. The boys have glowing strips wrapped around their wrists, red and green, that draw lines through the darkness as they pinwheel their arms.

We return to my dead-end street where the light glows on my back porch. At the silhouette of mountains across the valley, an immense column of amber light illuminates the night sky. Moonrise. It’s not particularly cold. We linger and watch the stars and planets rub on against the darkness, one by one, and keep talking about those complicated stories of family, of how history bends back upon itself and what this might mean for our children who are in the time of their youth.

Above, stitches of a sweater I knitted for a faraway friend, something I created with pleasure and gratitude, that I’ll box up and mail away. Who knows when I’ll see these friends again. But it’s the only way forward that lends any illumination for me: stitch. When need be, unravel and begin again.

“The products of science and technology may be new, and some of them are quite horrid, but knitting? In knitting there are ancient possibilities; the earth is enriched with the dust of the millions of knitters who have held wool and needles since the beginning of sheep. Seamless sweaters and one-row buttonholes; knitted hems and phoney seams – it is unthinkable that these have, in mankind’s history, remained undiscovered and unknitted. One likes to believe that there is memory in the fingers; memory undeveloped, but still alive.”

— Elizabeth Zimmermann