She lived across the street from us, in a sturdy old house whose original construction predated her birth by only a few years. Mind you Millie did not actually grow up there. She moved to Valparaiso and into that particular home only after she married. Still it cheers me that the place amounts to her contemporary, and that she lived there long enough that its very boards and plaster must be imbued with her character, and so that its presence across the way will help me miss her less.
I would go over every Thursday to visit with Millie. Rain or shine, snow or wind, busy or not, I always wanted to go. She interested me, and I always had the sense that my visits were appreciated. Certainly she never chased me off. Always she was polite. I would let myself in through the mudroom and walk through the kitchen and stand in the door-frame of the kitchen looking in toward the living room and there in her arm chair she would be. Sometimes go figure, she would be watching cartoons on the TV, with the volume up very loud. More often though she would be reading or snoozing or just pondering.
"Hey neighbor," I would say.
She would always turn in her chair and smile brightly.
"Well hello! Come on in! Have a seat!"
I would do just that, both things: number one come into the living room and number two have a seat. Then I'd inquire how she was.
"Oh, ornery as usual, and you?"
"Fine fine."
That was the set script. After that, we just sat around and made up the rest. Our conversations ranged in topic, but they were always rooted in the immediate and the real, and when they segued into the past, as they often did, that did not break the rule of "immediate and real." Because for Millie, the past was both immediate and real; it was her mental food I suppose most of the day. Many many evenings when, on my walks, I would pass by her home, the light in the living room would still be on, and you could see her there in the armchair--again, sometimes reading, and sometimes watching the TV, but quite often just pondering, gazing inwardly surely on all the images and experiences of her lifetime. Here was the past considering itself. Here was a woman by the self-sufficient power of consciousness, conceiving and re-conceiving Time.
She would ask me how my latest play was going. She would ask after the health of our garden, or about my wife and son. She was particularly concerned that my wife experience no hardships at work simply on account of being a woman. Reassurances on these matters usually made her suspicious, and her personal past made it obvious why. Her parents having died when she was still young, she had been raised by an aunt, who by profession was a medical doctor, that is, a rare turn-of-the-century woman Md. "A lady doctor," as Millie would put it. Millie's own three daughters (I have met them all now) are all free spirits too. No one's going to impose on them. Good luck trying.
It's maybe politic and sensible to mention somewhere along the line--and here is as good a spot as any--that I am perfectly aware that the elder Millie was not perfect. That I was a guest when I met with her, and so saw her generally when she was on her best behavior. That in short, when she said she was ornery, she meant it.
But, as any person who has been around the block knows, or ought to know: our faults are inextricably bound up in our virtues, the way any shadow is roped to the sun. The corresponding virtue of orneriness is gumption, and gumption she had in spades. She had to. She was a physical mess--guaranteed at birth by the doctors to die very young, and certainly never to have children and certainly never...well you get the idea. She would never have made it through life without that fiercer, almost condor, side to her. In the words of one of her daughters, she made it her life's career to confound expectations.
Millie and I would talk about the weirdness of the weather, if there had been weirdness, and even sometimes when there had not. We would talk about the improvements around town, if there had been improvements, and even sometimes when there had not. On occasion we talked about religion. She was a Quaker, which to her meant that life was very much about the golden rule and about accepting people as they were, and about thoughtful speech. Here were three almost metaphysical propositions to her:
1. Every human being deserves some fundamental level of respect.
2. It doesn't matter how different people are from you, you welcome them, and listen to what they have to say.
3. You don't open your mouth to say pretentious things. Make your conversation worth listening to; otherwise, you're an oaf and an ass.
Respect, a welcoming heart, and an intelligent tongue was certainly what Millie on Thursdays always had at the ready for me. She never talked me down. In fact she did one better and consistently and specifically encouraged me in my work. She came to see three of my plays, despite the physical demands of doing so (she barely ever left the house), and she asked me without fail how my current projects were going. This was refreshing. You'd be surprised how people will, openly or subliminally, talk a writer down: letting you know for instance that they're keeping an eye out on the want ads for you, just in case the verbal fever breaks, or heck just informing you what sort of books they themselves think will sell (not the one you're writing), and what sort will not (the exact one you are). Once an acquaintance informed me that I should give up writing about my past, because at the age of thirty five, I didn't really have one yet.
The point is, a writer always senses the presence of a doubter, though happily the converse is also true: you always sense a believer too. And I can tell you what category of person I prefer. The Millie category. The believers. The ones who sense the presence of your dreams and who, even if you failed two three four times in this project or that, would still stand with you and ask you how it's coming. Part of that believer side of her, I must mention, came from the fact that she herself was a poet of real competence and integrity. I look forward to her work finding its way onto the web, as I'm told her daughters wish to see happen. If it does find a home there, you can be sure I'll pass the address on.
Millie could never precisely recall her age. Not that, being a halfway intelligent man, I would ever ASK after a woman's age specifically. Instead the subject might come up like this: Say in some innocuous way I inquired after her health, well she would reply that though things were going indifferently for her, really she couldn't complain, because unlike most folks her age, she could still pretty do everything herself, why when a lady had lived as long as she had, namely...
"but now how long have I lived?" she would ask, as if I'd know.
"Is it ninety three?" I might say. "Ninety four?"
She would try counting on her badly warped fingers.
"Now why can't I remember these things?"
"But who's counting?"
"I am!"
"Maybe at your age though," I said to her once, "How many years you've lived should be more like a game of estimation. Like estimating the gumballs in the gumball machine."
She laughed at this. She appreciated this sort of thing. You couldn't lose her with metaphors. She always kept up with you, above all, because she wanted to.
Which brings up the most remarkably nine-volt thing about her, and why I feel she is so relevant here and now in this space: her surprisingly delicate and varied response to human conversation. She was like a fine Turkish cymbal and anything you said was like tapping her to make her ring with laughter and philosophy and remembrance. Just say the slightest intelligent thing and voila all those frequencies, all those associations, all those sessions of pondering, came into play. She would respond intelligently, wittily, relevantly, feelingly. She would respond fully, with whatever she could give you that day.
Compare that exquisite comprehensive responsiveness say with the young choral conductor I met yesterday at a gig I played, who when he talked to me, did so with his texting machine in hand, looking down two or three times during what at the most was a twenty second exchange. Such a high-voltage scattered state of mind is pitiable. Is to be pitied. But it is also to be mourned, as yet another sign that the scattering of attention encouraged by our machines is making us half-wit slaves to shallowness. Pray tell me, how do you taste the night-time summer lightning sparking from the brain of a distant cloud, or drink in the walk of a beautiful woman whose name you do not know, or honestly behold the butterfly perched quivering at the edge of the endless depths of a rose, or take part in the sadness of a ruined farmhouse, all torn tar-paper and aching splinters--how pray tell, can these all these sights vouchsafed to us for only these few years of life, all all these miraculous visions so fleetingly ours--how can they touch us if our mind's focus is so carelessly tossed (fanning out wastefully like pebbles or buckshot) into the high energy electrical rush and gush of what we call modern communicative life? But that is not life. It is not even true communication. It is the opposite of life. It tears us from life. It violates trust by spurning even the simple gift of a greeting. It is un-Millie like. It is un-Quaker. It is wasteful complexity. It is death by shallow facility.
Danger. High voltage.
But until that vision coalesces for me, goodbye.
Except wait! No, before you leave the stage of my bloggy mind, would you much mind it, if I passed on a memory of yours? I trust you do not...
When Millie was maybe five, on a hot summer's day, she and her sister went to the town pool with her father. Her father was not going to be around much longer. She would know him for a year or two more before he passed into the undiscovered country, but on this day on this eternal day he took his two girls to the town pool and when they finally got there he got into the pool with them and told them to watch this and down he went under the water and stood on his hands under the water so that the only part of him showing above the water was his two feet one foot two feet, which he waved at them again and again shaking them like flippers and making the girls laugh and laugh...
Millie when you told me that story, it might has well have happened the day before, and you might as well have been five, because you laughed and laughed, as if it was as fresh an event as that: a daisy of the mind still fresh in the vase. And I thought how wonderful it was that, ninety some years after that day in the pool, your father's little stunt still had that power to make you laugh. Surely he had thought of it, in the moment, as just a moment's entertainment. But it turned out to be a gift forever, and a gift not just for you and your sister, but (through the power of memory) for others too, and among them, me. I pass the moment on, just as you passed it on to me. I pass it on as part of the gift that you were to me and that I am now passing along to others.
Until eternal Thursdays then, Millie (when we are meeting now)
HB
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