Birthday

Elizabeth would have been 29 today.  So many people have written and texted, and this blog seems hopelessly outdated, but it is what I have to carry on the tradition of remembering her, her humor, her sensitivity, her love of reading.  Her photography.  She was studying Latin, her notes all over the walls of her room so that she could study them.  I wish to learn a bit of Latin too, or to read Cicero, or to understand the philosophy of the stoics and I wonder if it would help me to carry on, and to remember to enjoy life without Elizabeth. 

Washington Market Park, 1989

 I wanted to say how much I (and I know Bill, too) miss her, ten years on. Here are the last few lines of Millay's "Dirge Without Music" which say what I feel.

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

We're thinking of you both today.

Love, Liza

This Morning, Tonight, Always

This morning I have your blue dinosaur in my pocket at work.
Tonight, I’ll go home and listen to the album “Either/Or” By Elliott Smith.

You introduced him to me when I was 15. Every year on the second of December, 

I sit with a glass of whiskey and the hauntingly sad yet beautiful voice of Mr. Smith. 

Every year I’m still sad, but celebrate the things you taught me.

I love you, Lizzie.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

When I finished the novel, I  knew why it was one of Elizabeth's favorites.  There is the range of characters: good, bad, ugly, beautiful, dim, bright, brave, cowardly, and every shade in between.  There is the sweep of the geography, from south Texas to northern Montana, each region with its own terrible weather.  There is the story, a saga of two men driving cattle and wondering why after a while they got sucked into such an episode.

 But mostly there are the two men themselves, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, ex-Texas Rangers who are more used to enforcing the law, but know how to break it expertly when it comes to stealing horses and cattle.  They are an odd couple. Gus is charming, lazy, funny, and almost educated.  Call  is grumpy, taciturn, a workaholic, and true to his word. 

After spending time with everyone in this book, I missed them when I was finished.  I have never cried so hard when people died in a book.  Not only did I get attached to all the people, but also the horses, bulls, bears, and even two pigs linger still in my mind.

This is a book mostly about courageous men who settled the west, and Indians who were chased off their land, and Buffalo driven to extinction.  The women are also important, even though it takes several hundred pages to introduce any kind of female who does not make her living selling her body.  The chief three whores advance the plot in major ways, and have excellent things to say about freedom and love.  When one civilized woman appears, it turns out it is Gus McCrae's one true love, and she is a titan of feminist independence.

I am very glad to have finally read something that mattered to Elizabeth, and salute her English teacher, Celeste Tramontin, who I suspect recommended the book to her.

The miniseries with Robert Duvall (as Gus McCrae) and Tommy Lee Jones (as Woodrow Call) is pretty perfect as well, but stripped of all the fine detail of the novel.     

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth G.

With the birth of Elizabeth came many unexpected pleasures. All humans have the capacity to love unerringly their offspring, and a tiny explosion occurs at birth, filling up the mother with love and joy and sorrow and presence for the new baby. So it was on June 23, 1988. A hot day. Mayor Koch still in office. St. Vincent's Hospital still in business. Ronald Reagan finishing up his second term. Many others being born that day. But only one Elizabeth G. Aakre. She was two weeks early, and weighed a little over six pounds. My mother came to see her, held her in her arms, seemed very pleased to be carrying a newborn around the room.

When I got home, my sister Cindy came to visit. Soon we were off to northern Minnesota to spend the hot summer on Lake Pokegama with Richard's family.

Richard's father held her in his arms, and sang the Hi Diddly Didey Didey Do song.

It was an altogether blessed event.

September 7, 2014

Out my window the moon is rising, the air is from the northwest, the wind bringing with it a breath of coolness
after three or four days of scorching and humid damp. The moon when it rises in the east always makes me think of the nights when I would put Elizabeth to bed and look out her bedroom window facing east and see it and tell her to look too.

I put the pictures back up today, the ones that had been in the closet for the summer, the pictures of her when she was ten, then fourteen, then when she and I were laughing in France and she was sixteen. We both knew something about life and about each other and were happy about the whole thing, or if not happy at least resigned to it with all of its imperfections. There were many moments like that, and I want to think that those moments outnumbered the times we were unhappy with each other, or were resenting each other, and just waiting for later when we would have gotten past all of that adolescent longing and rejecting not knowing that later would not come.

The wind blew hard today as I was coming home from the grocery store. Richard had said earlier, only Elizabeth knew how to teach him how to use the computer. She was slow, and patient, and understood how much time he needed. She was also spirited and she loved the wind. Tonight I felt the wind go right through me, and I thought it might be her reminding me to pay attention.

September 21,2013

Approaching the seventh anniversary of Elizabeth's death, it is hard to understand that she never heard Adele sing, or saw Julia Louis Dreyfus in the Veep, or watched a single episode of Girls.  Popular culture is something we shared, and I relied on Elizabeth, as much as a mother could rely on her teen daughter without being able to follow everything of her taste, to understand what was going on.  Now I listen to students at school discuss things, to navigate what is current.  I always find myself asking, what would Elizabeth think?  Most recently I wonder about Lake Bell, (what a name!) and how E would have liked In a World.  There is something about Bell's writing talent and offhand beauty that reminds me of her.

Back to School

The routines are familiar, but it is still rough terrain, this land without Elizabeth.
She would have done something for her father's birthday, she would have been working somewhere, or in graduate school. In her eighteen years, she was always a student, with her notebooks neatly labelled, and her array of pens. On her laptop were stickers.

 Since I work as a teaching librarian, I keep walking, keep going to school. Most days it is all right, just a slight hitch in my step. Children keep getting born, learning to walk, going to school, looking forward to those early days of making new friends, cementing the old ones.

Elizabeth Kester and Elizabeth Aakre

The way she held a bat

ready for gravity
or for hurtling orbs
when she swung
the ball went straight at me
I had to dodge it
or it might hit me
straight in the heart.

Every day I say her name

At the Salvation Army in Honesdale, at Lisa's Not Just Antiques, channeling Elizabeth's looking for something that would suit her style, I say her name over and over again, remembering the times we were there together, remembering how lost we would get looking at objects for the meaning they could bring to you, there, that antique pin in the shape of an airplane, or there, a rhinestone necklace that has three loops in concentric circles.  Those were keepers.  I still have them.

Sometimes she would try on dresses, and come out of the dressing room looking fabulous.  She could turn heads with her beauty.  It wasn't just physical.  She had something else, a spirit that was warm, and witty, and you wanted to know her better.

Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Elizabeth.

December 26, 2012

Every place I encounter for the first time since Lizzy died—places we were together when she was alive—has a feeling of fresh mourning or grief to it. Today it was the Captiva library.

I try so hard to live in the moment, but how can I forget the joy of finding this place away from home that gave her a feeling of familiarity and friendship? The library world is our world, something she was raised to from the beginning of life.

Captiva Library is just off the beach, behind the cemetery, adjacent to the church, three blocks from Jensens where we stayed. The library shares a building with the community Center, not unlike the Arts Alliance in Narrowsburg, frequently given over to arts exhibits and cultural events.

Today I was happy after settling in with the ghosts of former lives—missing her keen intelligence, friendly way with strangers, and instinct for the best things to be had in a library—to find a table and chair for sitting and scribbling in my note book.

Captiva Cemetery markers

Tree in cemetery adjacent to library

Elizabeth's writing

Instead of writing about Elizabeth, here are some pages written by Elizabeth. She had legible handwriting, and wrote in those Mead ruled writing tablets. I think this must date from when she was 17 or 18.

A Memory

Elizabeth and I were in the theater, watching Little Women, the version with Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder.

Since the movie came out in 1994, that means that Elizabeth was six, barely old enough to sit through a feature length movie.   Perhaps we had read Little Women together by then, or I had forgotten how sad it was that Beth dies young.  The costumes and the sets and the family feeling, and Kirsten Dunst as a silly vain sister were all winning us over.  Claire Danes played a saintly Beth, pure of heart.  Kindly Mr. Lawrence surprises her with the gift of his piano, and Beth comes down from her sickbed to receive it on Christmas day.  She plays and everyone gathered around the piano sings "Deck the Halls."   It is a very moving scene in the movie.  Mr. Lawrence reveals that the piano belonged to his little girl who died.  We know those of us who have read the novel, that Beth is not long for this world.  Tears stream down my face just thinking of it.

As I sat in the dark theater, moved to tears, I heard the sound of Elizabeth's voice joining those on screen as she sang Deck the Halls.  She showed no self consciousness as she sang out the words so recently learned.  She had become part of the movie by singing along, and I felt proud of her. 

After a Death by Tomas Transtromer

After a Death
by Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robert Bly

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Ruth Orkin

In honor of the summer days when reading was all Elizabeth did, here is a photo by Ruth Orkin.

i carry your heart with me (e.e. cummings)

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

I just received this poem from Claire who is always remembering me and how hard it is sometimes to face each day.
Thank you, Claire. You are very kind.
Patty

Mother's Day

When Elizabeth was born, my heart burst open to take her in.  Amazing how this happens to new mothers.  Where there was no one before, suddenly, there was a baby deserving of all of your love and care and future planning.  As she grew she was independent from the beginning, wanting to do things on her own, yet coming back home to the safe embrace of her parents. 

I still have cards that say: Good for three free hugs.

It is an honor to be her mother.

I miss you.

I sit and I wonder when the next time I can see you will be. It won't be during the summer with lazy days on the Delaware or at Leonard's house for a barbeque we both used to feel too cool to be at. It won't be in the winter upstate in Syracuse sledding down treacherous terrain, shopping for bargain lotion at Target, playing video games until our thumbs hurt. Although it won't happen anytime soon, I see you everyday. Mostly through little things, the sparkle on a river, a kind old man, a book, my camera, a warm and gentle breeze. Sometimes the signs are goose bump causing incredible. The world keeps moving and so do you. You were too fascinated with it to stop. Instead of moving on, I am moving with... With your spirit and inspiration and love. I love you always and you will be forever with me.

Sorry for the improper sentence structures. Thoughts from my head to paper.

Lively

Even when she was inside of me, she kicked and squirmed and made her presence felt as a person who needed to be moving.

When she was six months old, we got her a walker, one of those bumper cars for infants which allowed her restless feet to move her about the floor.  Back then the walkers didn't have any toys attached, and the wheels were big.  Because it made so much noise, R. put down a layer of foamcore on the floor hoping to reduce the racket to the downstairs neighbors.  She would rattle around and visit us in the kitchen, the bedroom, pushing off with her strong feet and legs.

Next came the Johnny Jump up which we hung from the sprinkler pipes.  This let her have the joy of flight,  bouncing straight up toward the ceiling. 

The minute she could walk she could run. The minute she could run, she wanted to learn how to roller skate, how to roller blade, how to jump rope.  The skip it toy let her skip before she learned how to hold the handles of the rope to loop over her head.



She was an expert at tag.  Her friends loved to run with her in the park.  She loved to swing on the swings in the park.

Later, she would walk everywhere in the city in her beat up sneakers.  Her feet took her places I could not follow.