To Live: Love, Judge and Forgive, Not Always By the Book

One of the first words out of my little sister’s mouth was “booksh.” Forming this word required her to contort her lips into an indescribably awkward shape we came to call “funny face.” This is the extreme to which a tiny kid must venture when jealous of a sibling five years her elder, especially with parents who encouraged that particular skill-- reading. I could read and she could barely talk, and that pissed her off. As it turns out we both have a love of books and in the year 2009 I read a few good ones, but not enough.

My top two best reads of 2009 were Child 44 by Rob Tom Smith followed by Beautiful Boy by David Sheff. However, the most pleasurable reading came when I was able to read two books in two weeks while on vacation. It’s hard to say you “enjoyed” reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel when on chapter two something so hideous and hurtful happens to a child that I didn’t know if I could continue reading. But I did, continue reading, that is, and did enjoy the book for its candid nature and informative point of view.

But the final book I read in 2009 was given to me from the shelf of that very sister who could say book before she could read a word. Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture turned out to be more heart than schmaltz, definitely the Moose Milk version of all things cheese.

In case you have not seen the posters, the plot is simple: Professor Pausch is going to die. He has cancer. He’s young. It’s terminal. We know how this ends.

But I liked a few things about this book and that is it serves as a reminder about how you should live your own life. This is not to say that Pausch tells you how to live, rather serves a reminder in how to live—with honesty, following your own dreams and with an unending joy to find yourself.  I found a helpful reminder in thinking how I want to live and I was constantly forming opinions about my own life while reading the book.

One section within the first chapter of the book entitled “The Parent Lottery,” made me realize this guy really appreciated his life and knew his parents were to thank. They didn’t do anything extraordinary, they just let him be him.  And I've come to the same conclusion that Pausch had, I want to earn their respect.

His description was the opposite of Oscar Wilde’s in The Picture of Dorian Gay:
“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”

But is it not the same for parents, who love their children, come to judge them and sometimes, they forgive them? And maybe as they all grow older it’s a rotation of all three: Love, Judge and Forgive all at the same time.

Today’s poem is an ode to mother by Billy Collins, but exalts parents who are somehow gracious in loving, judging and forgiving.

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.