I dreamed last night that I had to finish my dissertation. It had been many years, apparently, and I was back in school, in a room full of graduate students all working on their dissertations. It took me a while to get settled. I found a desk, put a book on the seat because it was too low (who can account for dreams?), and gathered some materials. Where to start? I was intimidated (my subject was supposedly Eighteenth Century prose). I had to learn everything. I had to remember how to do this. But I was also exhilarated, excited. All my neurons were firing. Parts of my brain that had been dormant were kicking in. I could do this!
I’ve dreamed several times about needing to finish my dissertation. I finished it in 1983, actually. I have my Ph.D. and taught both literature and poetry for many years at the University of Delaware. Yet something must feel left undone. My career as a scholar has been left undone. I won the Best Graduate Student Paper. I had published a little. I was headed that direction. I loved the library’s musty stacks. I loved the note cards, the convolutions of the brain it takes to unravel a creative approach to someone else’s work. That part, if you want to call it that, of my mind maybe is a bit hungry. We no longer live in an academic community. That’s a loss, among all the many gains of living here.
But I was pulled harder toward poetry. Much harder. Oh yes, poetry has been my life.
Do we have only one life? Are the others out there, strings in the universe, being the other people we almost were. Or are, on some alternate plane. I was almost a minister. I was almost a monk. I was almost a therapist. I was almost a scholar.
My children may have picked up some of the threads. You know how that works. My daughter Kelly is a LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) in D.C. She has four children. She’s happily married all these years. She is first of all a great mom, filling in the gap in parenting that I left while trying to find my way through and out of a really screwed up childhood. My son is a Principle Software Engineer for a large company, designing programs to allow large companies to sort and share data. He’s recently happily remarried. He has two children, one an Engineer.
I tell you all this because you/I can see the threads of alternate lives playing out. (Scott’s dad was an Engineer, by the way.) The love of careful detail, that scholarly bent, working its way through Scott. My need to solve the puzzle of my family, to make it better, working its way out through Kelly.
And my alternate life as a monk, a therapist, works its way through the poems, the way, at their best, they locate unsuspected connections, the way they face mystery with awe.
I’m not unique. Jerry wanted to be a singer and an actor. As he says, after studying acting in New York for a while, there are too many brilliant actors starving. So he went back to graduate school for his Ph.D. There are those junctions. They don’t seem to be abrupt breaks. It’s more like a slow recognition that one route is pulling harder on us than another. When I had some poems accepted in major journals. When my first book of poems was accepted for publication, I gradually and happily turned loose of scholarship. That doesn’t mean that door closed. The doors are always open, but you can’t do everything, and one thing pulls harder. You begin to realize that this is your life’s work, so you’d better do it.
One of the alternate Fledas is still living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. What she’s doing there, I’m not sure. She is almost certainly writing poems. I hope she’s happy, that she’s managed to make a life that uses as much of her being as possible.
When I lived in Fayetteville, I belonged to an adult Sunday School class that was only tangentially religious. We read books like I’m Okay, You’re Okay. This was 1969 or 70. Maybe as an assignment in that book, we all wrote letters to our future selves. We had to predict where we’d be living and what our lives would be like. Our letters, by pre-arrangement, were sent to each of us about 15 years ago. I wrote that I’d be married to an architect and I was going to be teaching at a small college in Traverse City, Michigan.
The closest I’d ever been to Traverse City at that time was Murdick’s Fudge on the outskirts of town. My family would drive there once a summer from our cottage. But I had it in my mind, didn’t I? My career turned out to be better than I ever dreamed, all my books, and teaching at a major research university. But the subterranean streams of my heart sent me to Traverse City, after all.
The P.S. . . .This post is a day early because I’m leaving this afternoon for a three-day get-together with my two sisters. We’d better do this while we can. Time marches on.