Does Yesterday Count As A Day?

I suppose I’m cheating. This essay, which is now masquerading as a blog post, was written nearly twenty years ago. But it turned up as I idly went through my archives this morning. I was just looking for memories and ideas or something worthy of resurrecting, a lazy practice, but oh well. Maybe I was drawn to my old middle school musings because earlier in the week, I’d had lunch with two of my former colleagues, Donna and Julie, and we waxed nostalgic about those wonderful days. In any case, except for the fact that my father has now been dead for more than forty years, and I no longer teach middle school, and the children quoted are grown-up and married and living lives of their own with guts and gusto, except for all that, the essay seemed as current as ever.

Let’s face it. This thing isn’t current at all.

Nevertheless, I want to share it here, because it’s about writing and love, and that’s where I live, and I’m still asking the same questions.

“I’m putting my heart and soul into this,” said Austin. “In fact, I’m putting in a whole truckload of guts.” We were in a sixth grade writers’ lab and Austin had chosen to respond to a prompt titled: How to write a love letter. Kids focused on elements such as coming up with an appropriate salutation (the preference was for ridiculously extravagant terms of endearment) and even pen choices (a purple glitter gel pen was recommended, and every i would be dotted with a heart.) Austin intuitively recognized that a large part of it was about getting in the mood, and although he had no particular recipient in mind and not much in the way of content, he certainly approached it with the proper degree of passion.

His enthusiasm was a bracing tonic for my wilting spirit. After teaching middle school kids for ten years, nothing they say surprises me much, but I often find unexpected wisdom and delight in their comments. Well, maybe I’m particularly attuned to this because I am actively - - one might even say desperately -- searching for wisdom and delight. It’s a strange time, after all. The news depresses me and sleep has become a series of fitful naps. Everyone is working too hard. Several friends are fighting cancer. And autumn always makes me sad.

Especially today. This morning as my bedroom filled up with fall’s soft light, I remembered the phone call that woke me twenty-five years ago with the news of my father’s death. It was October 12, 1978, and I slept then in the upstairs space of an old house in Syracuse, New York, where I was attending graduate school. The leaves of the maple outside my window were outrageously yellow. Autumns were shameless in that time and place, bleeding bright color into everything, a veritable banquet of decay, but I knew nothing of loss until that very instant. My father was abruptly and inexplicably dead, and twenty-five years have not erased the capacity of this fact to stun me.

I suppose it is the self-indulgent compulsion of writers to try to articulate everything they have experienced or imagined, hoping perhaps to discover in the process what it means. So I wondered this morning how twenty-five years can happen so suddenly, and why I am always ten steps behind, still scratching my head and searching my heart and trying to figure things out after everyone else has left the stage. Does anyone understand what’s happening while it’s happening? Why is there such a delay between event and meaning? Is it our nature to perceive the full depth of love only when it is too late to act upon it? But let’s not dwell on this today, for I am already tediously intimate with sadness and drink too often of the poison of regret. Instead, what I wanted to rally on this anniversary morning were the understandings I had gleaned over twenty-five years -- a progress report, an optimist’s transcription.

There were many ways to begin. But for some reason I snagged a sudden memory of my father assembling tall fruit baskets as gifts to customers and friends. I hadn’t thought about it for years. He would select the roundest oranges, the most exquisite grapes, an arc of firm bananas, and arrange them artfully in woven baskets, covering them all with stiff yellow cellophane twisted and ribboned at the top. My mother told him he was a show-off and a fool wasting time and money on something that no one would appreciate and for which there would be no return, but the small pleasure of creating and giving was perhaps his gift to himself -- its own sufficient satisfaction. I used to think the taunting commentary had ruined it, but now I see it would not have been so easily taken from him. And I find myself on this October morning decades later holding in my heart two gifts that have not expired: a graceful example of giving, and a lavish image of beauty -- fruit in basket, a still-life spilling over.

I was a watchful, well-intentioned child and I, too, wanted to do something beautiful. I tried to draw, having observed my father for many years painting murals, boughs of tender heart-shaped leaves, peacocks, clowns, and exotic flowers, even on the ceiling. I remember the smell of the casein paints, oily sweet dollops from silver tubes in colors like burnt umber, crimson, and cerulean. Alas, nothing would come from my brush but amorphous curly curves, and my pencil yielded only trivial doodles that never seemed to evolve.

I tried to write, striving for the ornate incongruous eloquence my father had forged from his bilingual background, from the hard streets and sad stories, from an innate sense of poetry that no one could have taught him. My best composition was a note on loose-leaf paper that I left for him on the kitchen table in which I wished him good morning and told him I loved him, with a penciled daisy by my name. He turned the note over and responded in kind on the back. Many things happened in the rush of time that followed, some of them hurtful and terrible, but I remain at the core of me the same earnest girl, and I know with certainty that these words we exchanged are still current.

So maybe it is no coincidence that I now teach about letters and love and respond with ridiculous sentiment to declarations of passion and curiosity, especially from children. Which brings me to my all-time favorite middle school question: Does yesterday count as a day? This came from Arthur, and I know what he meant: it was a three-day camping trip, and he wondered if the days we spent traveling were included. However, I heard the question in its grander context, and like all adults who were present, I instantly imagined having the capacity to selectively keep or delete each day of my life, simply whiting out the bad ones, getting a second chance at everything. We laughed. But I pondered the question for a long time.

And I never could come up with a yes or no answer, for that would be a linear response to a circular mystery. All I have are further questions. What is the sum total of a life? Do the events of its conclusion necessarily supersede the thousands that preceded them? Can we pick and choose from the inventory that is left to us? Can we transform some of the pain into compassion? Replace constrictive reason with defiant hope? What, in the end, really counts?

It is twenty-five years since my father’s death. I am sure love has no expiration date. I believe that parts of yesterday count, but only as I choose to see them now. And I think it takes a truckload of guts to live a life.