The Good Life No One’s Selling

I was trying this new thing—composing without line breaks.

Confusion… Wandering in a daze… Losing words… Lost names… Dementia? Yes. Life on the heels of a 90-something parent’s medical emergency? Yes.

In their assisted living room, my parents and I are three peas in a pod.

Consider: How far would you go for your dearest love? To what extremes? Higher, larger, further, deeper…

Longer? Would you live longer than you can keep on going because your darling snuggles up close and puts her cold hands in your hot ones to wake you up, get you to eat some soup? And watch the really good football game that’s on?

When you’re not supposed to lie flat because of the fluid in your lungs, would you be so done with that doggone recliner, with not being in bed with her, that you take a few rare steps to join her?

Dad’s still teaching me how to live the good life—the kind of no one’s selling in the magazines.

This is not a eulogy. Not an elegy. As I write, my dad remains with us. Remarkably.

Rui Sasaki glass installation at the Portland Japanese Garden, March 2023. All rights reserved.

Some people live lives of integrity. Others live their love. Some give. And some keep showing up. A few do all of it, such that a person like me might despair—yes, despair—of making it as a writer because the odds I’ve overcome are only internal.

Precisely a year ago, I launched Mama Ephemera’s Muddy Feet because the time had come to storm the gates. Call them capitalism. Call them the gift economy that is poetry. Whatever the name, suddenly, acutely, life became too short to spend months and years in the crapshoot that is publishing creative writing in the United States.

Not to mention the fact that I was trying this new thing—composing without line breaks.

Writing is good and necessary—a creative act of the sort that is an inextricable part of being human. For me, a written piece is incomplete until it reaches a reader. Which means that a great deal of unfinished business is tied up in knots inside me. Inside my laptop. My folders. What fingers can untie them?

It is January—the time when people take stock. Substack writers have been marveling over their growing subscription lists, the income generated—however small, it’s a revolutionary thing for many of us. I marvel that some of you have subscribed even though we’ve never met—not even virtually!

When I was a girl, and the daddies would fly in (no women flew for the Navy until the ’70s) from the ship that had taken them away from us for 6 months or 9, or longer, and we on the tarmac in our Sunday best, the cockpit would open and the daddies would turn and wave in their shades and crewcuts. Then they’d climb down past their nickname painted on the fuselage.

Corky in his happy place, circa 1969. All rights reserved.

It was strange to me that you had to have a nickname to be a pilot. My daddy’s nickname, “Corky,” was bestowed when he was a wee lad in Kentucky. I always thought he was lucky that way.

In his talking through deliriums this week he has alternated between discussions of jet capabilities and being in church (son of a preacher man). The one time I heard him say “kids” is a treasure I’ll take home with me.

This is a weird way to say thank you, but here it is: I’m deeply grateful to you who read this. And to them who raised me to be able to write this, even though it is foreign territory for up-from-poverty parents. Their tight hold on their new economic class could be called Never Risk Falling Back.

(When I declared a major in environmental science, way back in the olden days when it was an almost unheard-of field, my dad responded in a grave yet encouraging tone, “Accounting is a very good field for women these days.” But bless him, he left it at that. For her part, my mom has never read a poem of mine she didn’t call “cute.” As a complement.)

In his essay, “Why Write,” Brian Doyle discusses creativity: “For dreaming and labor and passion are its ingredients, and wonder is both its engine and its product.”¹ I love that Doyle frames creativity in paradox—like all the best things in life. Like core of the human heart. Like loving someone so much you urge them to stay even as you release them.

1. From Brian Doyle. Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies (Loyola Press, 2003).