it rolled on until the smile poured through us like a river

Sometimes, I feel like I don't really have much of a story of my own. (I mean, listen, I have a lot of stories) but mostly they just feel like another way of understanding the stories of others. What I mean is that I can't tell you the part of my life that is my actual life. The only thing I can think of that's concrete about me is that I tell stories. And I love people. And so I tell stories about the people that I love.

There's a couple of ideas about what the writer/poet's role in the world is. Is that role as a conduit or a more assertive force? In college, I'd spend hours trying to sense in my gut which theory I thought to be true. But I was even more a bull in a china shop then, and so I used to really think I was the assertive voice. That was when I was convinced that my personal plot line was really important. But as the years have gone by, more and more, I just want to catch what's out there and open myself to let it flow through me and onto a page.


I was just dying for something to happen to me. And if it didn't, then I'd force it, often with disastrous results.  But now, I just want to be in the room when something happens. I just want to have my eyes open when something happens around me. What happens close enough for me to see, feel through, write down, share with. Maybe that's just an expanded definition of what happens to a person. If you were a part of it, didn't it happen to you?

I do know that you don't learn anything if you're not in the room. So it means a lot to me to participate in the lives and families (Which I've talked about before) of others. I'm a professional wedding attendee, surrogate aunt, babysitter, book publicist. But I'm not kidding when I say that I feel the victories of my friends as my own. I look at Eden and Charlie and Tigerlily and imagine little Mr. Beakley and just love them. It just puts my heart in my throat. It really does.

Whatever the difference is, it all began 
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers 
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again, 
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver; 
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin 
but his own smile, or one I'd rediscovered. 
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin 
and the true path was as lost to me as ever 
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran. 
See how the true gift never leaves the giver: 
returned and redelivered, it rolled on 
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men! 
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever. 
WAKING WITH RUSSELL by DON PATERSON (about his son)

"I just sit on the couch and watch her little feet kick out of the bassinet." -- Em