There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
— Zora Neale Hurston
Several years ago, when my mom was in the middle throes of her long passage, one of my first supervisors in speech pathology and an eventual friend sent me a T-shirt. It is a wearable piece of art, really, by one Sue Handman.
The plain black shirt is embellished with fabrics and an old-fashioned picture. Under the picture is a quote; the one by Hurston at the head of this piece. At the time I received it, the shirt alternatively brought me great comfort or despair. On a good day it was a reminder that things go in cycles and that pendulums inevitably swing. On a not so good day, it was a plea.
Overall it is a hopeful message, one that holds the promise that the world will yield answers at some point, for the apparently pointless. The thing I am having trouble understanding right now, however, is that there seem to be many more years that beg questions than there are years that give answers.
You know by now that I am impulse girl, a grand schemer. It is my strength and my weakness. But since Nov. 30, I find that I am learning, finally, to wait.
Not waiting has given up a good yield in my life. I didn't wait as a child for my grandmother to ask me to sleep over; I just showed up with my bags and engendered much head shaking in my family because of it. My grandmother was quite different from her own daughter, my mother. Nanny was the picture of patrician reserve. She spent day after predictable day to my childhood eyes. Church on Saturday. Beano on Friday. News at 11. Winters in Fort Lauderdale, summers in North Hampton. A new Caddy every year whether she needed one or not (usually not).
I didn't get to know my grandfather, he died when I was 2, but all signs point to him as the one responsible for my tendency to act first, ask questions later. My vision of him is of a larger-than-life kind of guy. There are his friendships with Johnny Pesky and Ted Williams. There is the letter to him from John F. Kennedy. There is the company he built, and the stories of my grandmother telling him, Larry, you come home now or else.
And there is his final night with us, my brother and sister and myself, in the house I was born in on South and Broad streets. The story goes that he taught us to jump on the bed that night. Sounds about right.
Without his joie de vivre as model, I sometimes ended up feeling the fool. But, call me foolish, I got to go to Florida every year to visit my grandmother. Because I asked. I got to spend summer weeks on end at her house on Chapel Road, walking to the beach, rolling down the hill or wandering through Fuller Gardens. I think my solitary love of reading was born in the gazebo across the street from her house.
As I aged, not waiting got me into a good school, a very good graduate school and a wonderful job in Boston. It got me to California and back. It got me to start writing. And it got me to start writing again, just this past August.
For all I gained by plunging ahead, though, there were the inevitable losses. They ranged from opportunities to people (some better lost, some not). The important people, though, I have realized, have waited for me. They waited for me to come around, to change my mind or my actions. They waited for me to shed my cocoon and try to be a butterfly. They waited for me to learn ... to wait.
My friend and I were on a meadow walk in Western Massachusetts this week when we hooked up with another dog owner for a while. Since I could talk to a stump and get it to talk back, we eventually got around to the question of why I moved to Northampton.
I waited before answering. What I told him, eventually, was that I had always wanted to live in Northampton (true). I said that I was between jobs (also true) and that it seemed like the thing to do (most certainly true).
What I didn't say hung in the air between my friend, this man and myself, like bits of snow blown off the trees on a sunny day, glinting. But, because I waited, he was unaware of why, at midday in late January, I had the pleasure taking a long walk in the woods and along a river with three dogs and my best girl.
Wait wait! Don't hit that send button yet. suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.
