Kafka’s Dad

October 11, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Vermont may have a lot of sub-par weather (not now – these days have been about as perfect as possible), but at least we have no cockroaches. Early mornings, when a mouse occasionally shows its whiskers as I’m making coffee, still deep enough in the night to be in the nocturnal realm, I think of Gregor Samsa’s scuttling.

Telling my daughters this story, they both say, What? They’re truly mystified. He wrote about a giant cockroach? It’s a little hard to explain this one, and perhaps even harder to explain my decided affection for this strange story.

This morning, reading Kafka’s long letter to his father, I think, Poor Kafka.

You have a particularly beautiful, very rare way of quietly, contentedly approvingly smiling, a way of smiling that can make the person for whom it is meant entirely happy…. Yet in the long run even such friendly impressions brought about nothing but an increased sense of guilt, making the world still more incomprehensible to me.

It’s the incomprehensible word that catches at me in this painful letter. Poor Kafka. No wonder the cockroach vision.

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A Glimpse of Redemption

October 9, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Standing in a parking lot in Stowe, trying to negotiate the sale of farm equipment on the phone while my daughters buy doughnuts in a bakery, a woman pulls up beside me in a flashy red car and calls out my name.

I don’t immediately recognize this woman although I’ve known her for years, known her so well she was present shortly after both my daughters’ births. She’s beautiful today, this friend of mine, her skin glossy, her smile magnificent. She’s had a harder life than most of my friends, and as we talk, I marvel at how her life has turned – as she wonders, too. My happiness was so long in coming, she says, without a trace of bitterness.

As we’re just about to part, she tells me about visiting a person we both know well who had caused her suffering, years and years of suffering. We all believed his death was imminent then, and she had given him her forgiveness. She says she doesn’t know how to explain this, but when she forgave him, a great weight – like a stone she says – fell from her.

As we laugh and talk, I realize she’s in love. In a bit, she gets back in her candy red car and disappears into traffic again, but her charm has spread to me, whooshing away some of my daily dust with her radiance.

….Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

From Joy Harjo’s “Remember”

Photo by Molly S.

While The Season Lasts…

October 7, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was eight, my family moved from a cluster of townhouses to a rambling old house in a New Hampshire village. Behind the house lay tumbling down stone walls, overgrown gardens, and a great swathe of forest. Those third-grade autumn days – much like this one today – I stared through the classroom windows, longing to be out in those pine woods, building forts from fallen branches, lying on the earth still warm from the summer, so sweetly fragrant with fallen needles and hummusy soil.

Autumn is quintessential childhood.

This evening, my teenager leans out the door after dinner in the dark and insists we go for a walk. Along the dirt road, the crescent moon follows us, the air balmy, the light so clear the evening is a prolonged twilight. Three dim figures trail our heels: moonshadows.

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky–
the moon seals it.

– Buson

Woodbury, Vermont

Look at This

October 5, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Driving my 11-year-old to school this morning, I remarked on the stunning foliage, and she answered in her even-keeled way, I kind of hate to say this, but the leaves are a little boring. What if we were along the Pacific Ocean, driving on a cliff, and looking out at the sea? Now, that would be really interesting.

Oh, my daughter, my daughter. Isn’t that the way of the world? I asked if she wondered if the kids on the Pacific coast might want to see Vermont’s gold and crimson leaves?

My daughter thought about that for a good while. Finally, long past the time I thought she might have lost interest, she offered, Maybe.

….O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow….

– Robert Frost, “October” fullsizerender

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.