I am a galaxy,
I am a stone.
I am a truth
lying in bone.
My emotions run wild,
I am colder than ice.
My big-hearted angel
has paid a great price
watching me stumble
and helping me fly.
The questions we answer
fall far short of why.
(stones: funnytweek.blogspot.com; galaxy: tumblr.com)
Not Without My Father: One Woman’s 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace by Andra Watkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“Not Without My Father” is ambitious adventure memoir. It is funny, poignant, agonizing, raunchy, and delightfully “out there.” Andra Watkins shows her mettle throughout the book and is not afraid to show her weakness, her doubt, and her sometimes dysfunctional relationship with her parents. The story moves skillfully between despair, hope, anger, and elation. I found it hard to put down once I settled into its rhythm.
Roy Lee Watkins, the father the story refuses to be without, spins his yarns and shares his own despair, doubt, and hope. His constant sparring with his daughter (they both know exactly which buttons to push) offers insight into a universal clash of generations, of fathers and daughters, and by Roy’s telling, fathers and sons, too. This memoir definitely contributes to the literature of the family dynamic.
I think it is a writer’s book, which is high praise. Ms. Watkins sums it up simply as she nears the bittersweet end of her journey:
“My body always did things my mind doubted. Growth happened when I overcame my mind.”
It is a story of raw wounds, both physical and emotional, and great heartfelt healing. The Watkins family courageously shows the good, the bad, the ugly, and the sublime. You cannot read this book without gaining insights about the American family that will probably enlighten you when it comes to some of your very own family dynamics.
Rain constantly swirls
rolling wet, in from the beach;
inside is just fine.
The fire warms us:
the dog sleeps before the stove.
Home is a haven.
(beach: pmansbach.com; woodstove: desertcanyonliving.blogspot.com)
“The problem with men is they were raised by women.”
~Virgie Wicks (1923 – 2000)
Our mothers made it up
as we went along early on:
they loved us, hugged up, scrubbed us,
taught us our little appendage was a
urinary device without imparting
the mystery we all stumble
over much later in our growing.
They never gave us our favorite toy.
We were born with it.
Sure, they did the heavy lifting
as it formed in the amniotic sac
where we were womb-locked fish,
breathing with magical gills,
oxygen somehow infusing us
in the miracle of our amphibian way.
Our mothers must have wondered how to
tell us what they did not know.
How could they know?
For all of that familiar texture and
behavior, it was ever foreign equipment.
As adolescents, as men, we spend too
much lifetime following it around,
pretending we’re driving,
conquest to conquest, heartache to heartbreak.
If we get lucky, maybe we find a partner with
whom we share our ignorance and make do
with what we uncover along our way.
Our mothers did well if
they gave us humor to cope with absurd.
If we join fatherhood we must
frame our ignorance and share
the depth of it with our boy children,
something to help with that first rise surprise.
Kindness is always the place to begin.
It will unwind with a mind of its own as
our mothers laugh and hope for the best.
(menshealth.com)
Last leg underway;
the roar is on the outside;
both my ears are full.
(top: postadvertising.com; bottom: seatmaestro.com)
This is wonderfully short novel, only better: it’s a poem.
By the bed in a cup the waiting water grows tepid, the medicine sleeping
in me like a watchdog. The air inside the room, cold & artificial.
Unable to warm, I feast on stars, picking from the constellations
my sister brought down to my side, calling in her loudest voice
for my head to settle. Getting ready for bed, I avoid turning off the bathroom light;
I do not want to recall, in the blue dreams, the night she lifted her
nightgown, posing nude
as a Miss America contestant.
We turn gray like the walls, gray like our hair, unconscious anymore
to emotions. I cannot remain living brightly and happy as she dies.
The foggy moon, and God’s last round of sheep, are full like ticks.
The days will soon grow larger & larger in aloneness
Stephanie Bryant Anderson lives and writes in Clarksville, TN. She edits Red Paint Hill…
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Seventy-two steps:
easy in the morning light,
steeper in the night.
(top: mexicantiles.com; bottom: bridgesandballoons.com)
The ocean riles up with the wind,
angry and insistent,
throwing wave upon wave against
walls and stairs,
stealing sand to hurl high and heavy
atop everything we built and all that we did not.
Roofs and thatch scatter, chaff
with the feathers of helpless birds.
Sudden stillness:
orange light and shuddering calm.
Trees sigh and mourn their roots.
The booming sea measures the quiet until
the roar of a hundred thousand freight trains
drowns the silence and
the wind rips the other way,
implacable and vehement.
We grasp and pray.
(top: article.wn.com; bottom: abc7chicago.com)
Rum is a sweet sip.
My companion is sweetness.
I am so lucky.
Plumbing is my bane:
water seeks its own level,
just out of my reach.
The audiobook is live!
Narble Furt Lives 