People have been good about not inundating us with stuff. There's the possibility that a dearly-loved shipment of instant oatmeal has had to high itself back to New Hampshire from whence it came because of our difficulties with getting mail. Some friends and colleagues have managed to get some very strange things my way--an oddly large percentage of which have been talismans involving Rob Halford, the metal god lead singer of Judas Priest--and N is kept busy grabbing Tupperware from hands on the dirty dirty street I am not allowed to walk anymore. My mother-in-law made it in for Mother's day. A pleasant diversion and good hours spent.
My father-in-law has been zipping about--medical advice when needed, secretive connections to a German chocolatier/deli that keeps the nurses in my corner when required. He can reassure N on the phone on a moment's notice, and not have to make an appearance. We're crowded in here. It is a balance.
But some stuff has gotten inside, and I would like to take note, because, for the most part, it is from strangers.
The students at the NYPL Centers For Reading and Writing, mentioned in the previous post, sent me a card. They were taken by the image of N as a sequoia--she's not all that big in real life--and so their talented tutor drew the picture you see above to help us see a path through the difficulties. It is a beautiful painting, and means so much coming from a group who know her, but not, really, me.
And inside the card were the small and heartfelt words of N's students and colleagues. And not just words, but fresh words. I have been socio-demographically lucky enough from the get-go to barely remember when making a word, making myself known with words, was even an issue. The simple act of putting pen to paper to jot down a thought exactly as I saw or heard it in my mind: unthinkably available since before I can remember.
For these students, it is a tidy little win, each time. Because English is farther down the totem pole, new to the lips, or absent altogether until until just recently, or because circumstances kept education from the writers, so that sending a though on paper was a hard, or as out of reach, as equal rights, a welcoming country's border, a kind landlord, or nights without fear.
A lot of the thoughts had god in them. Not a topic I tend to spend lots of time on, but so cleanly used here as a conveyance of generosity that even my secular-humanist cynicism gave way. Little thoughts. Get well. Fell better. Hope you are doing OK.
It is that these people would not know me if I bit them on the ass. It is these people need time and effort still to craft these clean-lined thoughts. It is that these gifts are given so freely.
Any further attempt to overstate it just shows how useless I still am with words after all this time spewing them. It is just...pure.
And a Baltimore and college friend set cards from her art class. A bunch of lacrosse-crazy kids with certainly better things to do with their days telling me to take time to eat sweets, drawing me on one card just reclining on a stage as waves of applause wash over me (I liked that one a lot), and giving me the moments in their lives they took to draw me a well-muscled elephant, a dragon, a pointillist palm tree.
What can I do but be thankful? What can I do but get better?
