“Miracle…half heard” Linda Gregg

Now I Understand
by Linda Gregg

Something was pouring out. Filling the field
and making it vacant. A wind blowing them
sideways as they moved forward. The crying
as before. Suddenly I understood why they left
the empty bowls on the table, in the empty hut
overlooking the sea. And knew the meaning
of the heron breaking branches, spreading
his wings in order to rise up out of the dark
woods into the night sky. I understood about
the lovers and the river in January.
Heard the crying out as a battlement,
of greatness, and then the dying began.
The height of passion. Saw the breaking
of the moon and the shattering of the sun.
Believed in the miracle because of the half heard
and the other half seen. How they ranged
and how they fed. Let loose their cries.
One could call it the agony in the garden,
or the paradise, depending on whether
the joy was at the beginning, or after.

I have failed so often. Jumped jobs. Left lovers. Abandoned them really. I have failed to reach students, to be there when friends needed me. I have failed my children at times, my extended family more often. Most often, I have failed myself.

My maternal grandmother–we called her Miss Pearl–new to this country as an infant, orphaned only months later, then orphaned yet again at ten by a step-mother she adored, left school after the eighth grade. The culture of Appalachia in the early twentieth century didn’t, as my grandmother often said, put much stock in education, particularly for females. Her future as she saw it was tied inextricably to a man, to marriage. So when, at thirteen, she met my grandfather, older by six years, she was lured away by not only his lanky Irish beauty, but by the security she imagined marriage to him would give her. That security was an illusion, or perhaps a sweet-brogue fantasy she wove about him herself. She survived his brutality, his alcoholism, his moving her and the brood of children she bore him, of which my mom was the second, throughout the Depression era from squat-house to squat-house. And in what can only be seen as incomparable strength, Miss Pearl not only raised those children, but graduated all of them from high school, there in those hollers where education mattered so little.

My mother followed that example with us, moving us to the coast, to a town that was home to a state university, formulating a plan to send us to college on her meager income before I even reached my sixth birthday. She scrimped and saved and planned as we grew, figuring that if we lived at home, and she worked the two jobs she had my whole life, she could make it. Sometimes at night, when I’d slip out to the bathroom, I’d see her there in the yellow light of our trailer, at the kitchen table, one of those barefoot poverty-thin children Miss Pearl miraculously got through high school, bills spread out on the speckled Formica before her, night after night, finagling our meager finances and drawing up an energy that still astounds me, all so that her children could go to college.

And I did. I started college at sixteen. And failed out a year later.

The eleven blocks of bars just off of campus combined in a dangerous way with my immaturity. I look back now, and am amazed at my stupidity. The rare chance she made for us, especially in the world in which we lived, to not only go to college, but to do so without loans, without debt. Man, did I blow it. Not that I needed to be in college then. I didn’t. What pains me is that I didn’t recognize her sacrifice.

Thus began the chase, a decade of shit jobs and what other people thought were good jobs, all of which I left when I became bored. Years of dubious pursuits and even more dubious marriages. But during these same years–and from those dubious marriages–came the single most important successes I’ll ever know: my children.

Until I found both my vocation and the maturity to pursue that vocation in my early thirties, I flung myself into the newest chase, the most recent man, grabbing at the corners of whatever dream I’d glimpsed that day. And truthfully, I don’t regret a second of it.

That’s not to say that I don’t wish that I had done some of it differently. I wince at the memory of times I could have done better by people I loved. Shudder at the knowledge that I’ve left behind people who truly loved me, but whom I knew, even from the start, I would leave. I carry the weight of any wound I’ve left on another human being, but even so, I doubt, if asked, that I’d say I’d have done it differently. I doubt, if given the chance to bend the corners of time and return, if I got the proverbial do-over, even knowing what I know now, that I’d do all that much differently.

Who I am now, an I with whom I have grown very comfortable, a middle-aged I who, frankly, I like now more than I’ve ever done in the past, this I is the fruit of those failures, constructed more of each lesson I learned than of any of my successes.

The wisdom and humor born of surviving failure, more importantly, learning from failure, I’ve come to see, though, is not something we can teach or give; it must be learned through that experience–no matter how many learn from my mistakes lectures we receive or give. Success, the wisdom to be successful, and at peace with who we are, I think, is inevitably bound to how we recover from when we fail. This seems like a no-brainer. For those of us who have survived it, perhaps.

But as a teacher, I’m reminded of this constantly, reminded of the naivete of the young, of the pain and difficulty and frustration that always accompanies the learning required to rise above our own failures, to find in us the grit and heart to stand again, to start over if needed, to put away the shame and take up instead perseverance. This semester I watched a student, one for whom I have great respect and affection, tumble his way toward this lesson. And my heart breaks for him.

But I believe he will rise and make a wiser self, the already-strong fabric of who he is made stronger for having stood up again, for understanding, choosing making the joy deeper, after the fall.