As a child the silent somewhat bulky presence of a piano always captured my attention. There was a piano in our family house, in the livingroom, holding its own, no matter what went on in our family life. Amazing to me, now, to recall that piano and how much space it occupied. It was truly a grand piano, stretching out its full body.
As a child I did not appreciate piano lessons and practice time; I’d rather be outside tossing a ball to a friend. However, when my mother sat at the piano, playing and singing, doing both so well, joy seemed to enter our house. She truly “played her heart out”, gave it full reign, and she sparkled with delight. I enjoyed stepping up to the piano’s side and singing along with her. This also happened at my grandparents’ house. My mother’s father would sit at his piano and suddenly he sparkled and came fully alive. This was the only time I saw my grandfather full of joyful energy. So, was it the piano I “wanted” or the aura of happiness and playful energy that took hold of these two people?
These days there is no piano in my living space. There are many flutes. On the rare occasion that I meet a piano somewhere out in the world I still feel the magic that took over my mother and grandfather. I will reverently sit on the piano bench, touch a few keys, and I am transported to a special inner sanctum of joy and delight. I never learned to read music. Each moment with any musical instrument, especially a piano, is improvised, fresh, and delightful. In that moment I join hands with my mother and grandfather, our hearts meet in a secret place, and we celebrate our delight in living. 🏮
What I always wanted most was to be who I am and not have to pretend to be what others expected or wanted me to be. This wasn't easy as a gay boy in Southeast Georgia in the early 1950s and 60s. Interestingly, this 'wanting' is a gift no one can or will ever give you; it must be fully claimed for oneself from some sturdy inner belief. There came a point in my young life when I realized that to be an artist, one must embrace truth as if it were my most cherished lover. I've never sorted out which came first: being gay or being an artist. And it doesn't matter. What matters is realizing that truth is our beginning and ending blueprint.
So: what did this for you when you were younger? What object held your want? How so?
It was not an object that held her want when she was younger. It was turning 18. She wanted to live to be 18. It meant she could move out of the house. It meant she could find a place of refuge. She could live in a place where no one tormented or hurt or hit her. She thought when she was 15 that either her parents would kill her or that she would kill herself to stop all this pain.
What she wanted was a sense of peace and security and belonging. Of love. Of being seen.
One of the spooky delights of Padraig is that he (and his chosen poet) frequently return me to an earlier version of myself. The refrigerator (a Coldspot) in my house in 1957 also held a beguiling and mysterious half-empty jar of Maraschino cherries. I could not reconcile my emotionally unexpressive parents’ standards of conduct and rules of behavior and utterly unglamorous lives with the flashy red cherries in the fridge - although it did make sense to me that they were never touched. Like so many temptations that life dangled in front of me that were unacceptable in our household, these cherries seemed to represent the allure of other lives and the indulgences forbidden to me. It was almost as if the cherries were there to remind me of the unbridgeable gulf between our family and what I imagined were normal families, where kids had fun and were allowed to watch The Twilight Zone and own a Barbie doll. The cherries suggested that there was virtue in withholding, and that asceticism was its own reward. The biggest mystery of all is that (as in Thomas Lux’s poem) some of them had been eaten. There were things about my parents I obviously did not know.
When I was a child, I loved horses, dreamed of them, devoured books about them, and briefly, in what turned out to be a beautiful mistake my parents made in a temporary moment of our lives, I had a pony who I later had to give up. But that desire remained with me, tinged with the childhood understanding that I wasn’t allowed to have the thing I most wanted. The desire, though, did not go away, even through my adulthood and the pursuit (and achievement)of other things—the desire to write, to learn, to teach— and when I found myself facing the loss of a job and career I had wanted, work that I loved teaching at a university I also loved, knowing I needed to put something under me before I fell into the loss, I asked myself “What have you wanted more than this job?” And the answer was so swift, so clear, “a pony.” And the desire leapt ahead of my doubt and I began to consider how I’d actually do that. How could I have a pony? So I followed the question, like the trained researcher I had become, and the universe ( or Holy Spirit) and eventually, I purchased a lovely Morgan horse, Will, and learned to drive (a carriage). I’ve never regretted it.
I love your meditation on the word "want;" ah, that sneaky English language - with wiley words such as "want" & "cleave" which can mean so many different things...When I was two and a half years old, my mother & I were watching the lift off of Apollo 11 on television. As she tried to explain to me the historic nature of the moment - that the men in the rocket were going to the moon - I told her to stop the launch so that I could go get my "pocketbook & my Sunday shoes" & join them on their trip! As my first words were "bye-bye," I certainly did not want to miss out on this amazing opportunity to travel, & those two objects represented to my toddler self the wonder of going places. That "want" has never left my being, & I'm grateful for all the places I've been privileged to go & the people I've met along the way. So good to see you in London this past June, Pàdraig; looking forward to seeing you in Boone in May!
More than anything, from maybe age 5, I wanted an Erector Set, to build cranes, cars, boats, buildings, anything. By the time I got one, I had outgrown it, even though I thought I would die without it.
the object of my desire as a teenager, wanting so badly to fit in. Instead
sensible, affordable, clunky
blue fake-suede capped
store-brand shoes with white vinyl rick-rack stripes.
Definitely not with the fast crowd.
I must have been insufferable; my mother caved in and got them for me. I wonder now if she paid dearly when having to explain the purchase to my tight-fisted father…
Those beautiful shoes didn’t help me run fast or fit in.
As a girl I attended a parochial school. No matter the weather all the children were on the playground, everyday, after packed lunches. I had friends, often a different best friend or group of friends each year. Between kids games or chatting I’d stop, carefully observe the traffic outside the boundaries of school property. I wanted to be out there. I was not alone but felt lonely. The traffic pulled. Oddly, it embodied a place, out there, where I may one day be alone, or not, but not lonely.
Music was my want. I grew up in a fundamentalist world that carefully restricted access to joy - I could & did consume as much music as was available, immersed myself in what could be found, but the limitations were fierce.
Wanting the music (and the dancing & the freedom) that I could glimpse but not touch carved a canyon of lack in me. Nowadays music feels like a language I lost as a child & am trying to regain access to. It is still the one way I feel like I can reconnect myself to the world that was ignored & outlawed while I grew up. It's a way to feel & ask & grieve & experience the parts I miss/ed.
I wrote of this and can still remember how I felt:
The country store had a toy carousel near the register. Carded horses with riders, hanging In cello prisons. But for color, they were all the same; bow-legged cowboy, horse with one bent leg. Mother bought me the palomino. Sunday, in the church playroom, I spotted an offering - a black plastic horse - a stallion, reared up, with unfurled tail. No rider. A wild one. I slipped it into my pocket. At home, I tearfully confessed. The next week, the playroom toy box received a palomino horse with a bent leg.
Didn’t the Saab 900 have incredibly comfortable seats, too? I wanted so many things when I was young that I’d be writing for hours. Now, in my old age, I have everything I want. Except I still want to give back. However I can.
The Saab 900! For years I drove a slate blue Saab 900S Turbo. I met a man who drove a Saab 900S and he became my long love. It (i don't even want to call it an it!) was an unusual being that held magic inside.
Yet, the want i continue to chase is a blue pen. Now i realize it wasn't the pen that i cried for want of when i was seven on Christmas Eve. It was the inability to describe the particular color...not Bic blue, not blue-black, but brighter without being garish. The pen fit my hand, and I made magic on the paper, or i thought i did.
i continue to search.
Still i find what i was looking for most times when my pen meets paper. That ability to think long thoughts and translate the funky movements of my mind into something sensible is the constant want. And some days, the alchemy of years of discipline shows up on the page. with gratitude to you and your readers, Katharine🌱
I longed for faraway and magical places, like the ones in the stories I loved reading. I'd spend hours watching the clouds, or the curve of the horizon, imagining those places and hoping one day to go there.
It’s interesting that want is linked to memory, so I am wondering what I want right this moment… it’s for the early Sunday sun to linger here just a little longer to stretch my time of quiet contemplation.
As a child the silent somewhat bulky presence of a piano always captured my attention. There was a piano in our family house, in the livingroom, holding its own, no matter what went on in our family life. Amazing to me, now, to recall that piano and how much space it occupied. It was truly a grand piano, stretching out its full body.
As a child I did not appreciate piano lessons and practice time; I’d rather be outside tossing a ball to a friend. However, when my mother sat at the piano, playing and singing, doing both so well, joy seemed to enter our house. She truly “played her heart out”, gave it full reign, and she sparkled with delight. I enjoyed stepping up to the piano’s side and singing along with her. This also happened at my grandparents’ house. My mother’s father would sit at his piano and suddenly he sparkled and came fully alive. This was the only time I saw my grandfather full of joyful energy. So, was it the piano I “wanted” or the aura of happiness and playful energy that took hold of these two people?
These days there is no piano in my living space. There are many flutes. On the rare occasion that I meet a piano somewhere out in the world I still feel the magic that took over my mother and grandfather. I will reverently sit on the piano bench, touch a few keys, and I am transported to a special inner sanctum of joy and delight. I never learned to read music. Each moment with any musical instrument, especially a piano, is improvised, fresh, and delightful. In that moment I join hands with my mother and grandfather, our hearts meet in a secret place, and we celebrate our delight in living. 🏮
What I always wanted most was to be who I am and not have to pretend to be what others expected or wanted me to be. This wasn't easy as a gay boy in Southeast Georgia in the early 1950s and 60s. Interestingly, this 'wanting' is a gift no one can or will ever give you; it must be fully claimed for oneself from some sturdy inner belief. There came a point in my young life when I realized that to be an artist, one must embrace truth as if it were my most cherished lover. I've never sorted out which came first: being gay or being an artist. And it doesn't matter. What matters is realizing that truth is our beginning and ending blueprint.
So: what did this for you when you were younger? What object held your want? How so?
It was not an object that held her want when she was younger. It was turning 18. She wanted to live to be 18. It meant she could move out of the house. It meant she could find a place of refuge. She could live in a place where no one tormented or hurt or hit her. She thought when she was 15 that either her parents would kill her or that she would kill herself to stop all this pain.
What she wanted was a sense of peace and security and belonging. Of love. Of being seen.
One of the spooky delights of Padraig is that he (and his chosen poet) frequently return me to an earlier version of myself. The refrigerator (a Coldspot) in my house in 1957 also held a beguiling and mysterious half-empty jar of Maraschino cherries. I could not reconcile my emotionally unexpressive parents’ standards of conduct and rules of behavior and utterly unglamorous lives with the flashy red cherries in the fridge - although it did make sense to me that they were never touched. Like so many temptations that life dangled in front of me that were unacceptable in our household, these cherries seemed to represent the allure of other lives and the indulgences forbidden to me. It was almost as if the cherries were there to remind me of the unbridgeable gulf between our family and what I imagined were normal families, where kids had fun and were allowed to watch The Twilight Zone and own a Barbie doll. The cherries suggested that there was virtue in withholding, and that asceticism was its own reward. The biggest mystery of all is that (as in Thomas Lux’s poem) some of them had been eaten. There were things about my parents I obviously did not know.
When I was a child, I loved horses, dreamed of them, devoured books about them, and briefly, in what turned out to be a beautiful mistake my parents made in a temporary moment of our lives, I had a pony who I later had to give up. But that desire remained with me, tinged with the childhood understanding that I wasn’t allowed to have the thing I most wanted. The desire, though, did not go away, even through my adulthood and the pursuit (and achievement)of other things—the desire to write, to learn, to teach— and when I found myself facing the loss of a job and career I had wanted, work that I loved teaching at a university I also loved, knowing I needed to put something under me before I fell into the loss, I asked myself “What have you wanted more than this job?” And the answer was so swift, so clear, “a pony.” And the desire leapt ahead of my doubt and I began to consider how I’d actually do that. How could I have a pony? So I followed the question, like the trained researcher I had become, and the universe ( or Holy Spirit) and eventually, I purchased a lovely Morgan horse, Will, and learned to drive (a carriage). I’ve never regretted it.
I love your meditation on the word "want;" ah, that sneaky English language - with wiley words such as "want" & "cleave" which can mean so many different things...When I was two and a half years old, my mother & I were watching the lift off of Apollo 11 on television. As she tried to explain to me the historic nature of the moment - that the men in the rocket were going to the moon - I told her to stop the launch so that I could go get my "pocketbook & my Sunday shoes" & join them on their trip! As my first words were "bye-bye," I certainly did not want to miss out on this amazing opportunity to travel, & those two objects represented to my toddler self the wonder of going places. That "want" has never left my being, & I'm grateful for all the places I've been privileged to go & the people I've met along the way. So good to see you in London this past June, Pàdraig; looking forward to seeing you in Boone in May!
More than anything, from maybe age 5, I wanted an Erector Set, to build cranes, cars, boats, buildings, anything. By the time I got one, I had outgrown it, even though I thought I would die without it.
Sleek, streamlined, smooth
light turquoise running
shoes with a sun yellow swoosh:
the object of my desire as a teenager, wanting so badly to fit in. Instead
sensible, affordable, clunky
blue fake-suede capped
store-brand shoes with white vinyl rick-rack stripes.
Definitely not with the fast crowd.
I must have been insufferable; my mother caved in and got them for me. I wonder now if she paid dearly when having to explain the purchase to my tight-fisted father…
Those beautiful shoes didn’t help me run fast or fit in.
I bought store brand shoes for my daughter, too.
I LIVED for riding my bike! It felt like freedom.
As a girl I attended a parochial school. No matter the weather all the children were on the playground, everyday, after packed lunches. I had friends, often a different best friend or group of friends each year. Between kids games or chatting I’d stop, carefully observe the traffic outside the boundaries of school property. I wanted to be out there. I was not alone but felt lonely. The traffic pulled. Oddly, it embodied a place, out there, where I may one day be alone, or not, but not lonely.
Music was my want. I grew up in a fundamentalist world that carefully restricted access to joy - I could & did consume as much music as was available, immersed myself in what could be found, but the limitations were fierce.
Wanting the music (and the dancing & the freedom) that I could glimpse but not touch carved a canyon of lack in me. Nowadays music feels like a language I lost as a child & am trying to regain access to. It is still the one way I feel like I can reconnect myself to the world that was ignored & outlawed while I grew up. It's a way to feel & ask & grieve & experience the parts I miss/ed.
I wrote of this and can still remember how I felt:
The country store had a toy carousel near the register. Carded horses with riders, hanging In cello prisons. But for color, they were all the same; bow-legged cowboy, horse with one bent leg. Mother bought me the palomino. Sunday, in the church playroom, I spotted an offering - a black plastic horse - a stallion, reared up, with unfurled tail. No rider. A wild one. I slipped it into my pocket. At home, I tearfully confessed. The next week, the playroom toy box received a palomino horse with a bent leg.
May God forgive that it wasn’t an even trade.
(I still have the horse.)
Didn’t the Saab 900 have incredibly comfortable seats, too? I wanted so many things when I was young that I’d be writing for hours. Now, in my old age, I have everything I want. Except I still want to give back. However I can.
Padraig, congratulations on Season Eight!
The Saab 900! For years I drove a slate blue Saab 900S Turbo. I met a man who drove a Saab 900S and he became my long love. It (i don't even want to call it an it!) was an unusual being that held magic inside.
Yet, the want i continue to chase is a blue pen. Now i realize it wasn't the pen that i cried for want of when i was seven on Christmas Eve. It was the inability to describe the particular color...not Bic blue, not blue-black, but brighter without being garish. The pen fit my hand, and I made magic on the paper, or i thought i did.
i continue to search.
Still i find what i was looking for most times when my pen meets paper. That ability to think long thoughts and translate the funky movements of my mind into something sensible is the constant want. And some days, the alchemy of years of discipline shows up on the page. with gratitude to you and your readers, Katharine🌱
I longed for faraway and magical places, like the ones in the stories I loved reading. I'd spend hours watching the clouds, or the curve of the horizon, imagining those places and hoping one day to go there.
It’s interesting that want is linked to memory, so I am wondering what I want right this moment… it’s for the early Sunday sun to linger here just a little longer to stretch my time of quiet contemplation.