I should be watching the Derek Chauvin trial. Reading today’s New York Times, answering multitudinous emails. Taking a hike with Stella up the trail near my home. Vacuuming. Closing the door to my study and reading the new poetry books on my shelf, writing a new poem. Choosing the cover art for my upcoming collection of poems. Meditating, definitely. Doing a yoga video. Cleaning the toilets, or finally tackling the pile of New Yorkers on the dining room chair, cutting out all the good poems as I’d promised myself I’d do for the last year.
“Thou shalt not should on thyself,” read a therapist’s office poster in the old Housatonic Mental Health Center where I worked in the early 80’s. Sometimes I remember it. Most times I do not, and the tug of war among all those competing shoulds torment me most days.
But today I would be ruthless with myself, choosing one, staying with it. I had been struck with a big dose of synchronicity, and since writing is the way I make sense of my life, I knew I needed to capture it in words on the page.
I recently did an interview for Poetic Lines, a Boston NewTV poetry show, and listened to/watched it to it a few days ago. In answer to one of the interviewer’s questions, “How do you think about Geoffrey today?” I responded quickly with “Synchronicity.” Over the thirty-three years that he’s been gone, I’ve kept him close by finding messages in what the dictionary describes as “the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.”
It happens when I am really paying attention to what I choose to believe he is whispering to me in those moments. I try to be conscious that I am always surrounded by signs and coincidences if I keep my awareness high.
“Mom, stop! Put down your phone, step away from the computer, TV news, all those conflicts and shoulds. Feel what you are feeling. Pay attention,” he told me in a very loud voice two days ago, when the constant tearfulness I was experiencing pushed for a release I couldn’t allow it.
My yoga class had been canceled because the teacher’s power was out due to the fierce wind that day, so, I decided to accomplish a task on my to-do list instead. I drove to the hardware store in Millerton, not Lakeville, the town where I live, because I’d been told the “expert” paint mixer worked there and I wanted a match to a color I thought might be perfect for the paint job our old house desperately needs. I didn’t really notice his last name on the brass plate on his shirt, but when he heard mine, he asked if I’d known his parents, well-respected local folk singers now deceased.
I looked at his nameplate. “Of course I did,” I said. “They sang at my son’s memorial service. “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
We’d been so lucky to get them. All of the talented singers who were friends of ours protested that they couldn’t do it, saying they’d be too unable to control their emotions to perform. We knew we had to have that Dylan song, not only a favorite of his, but the product of another synchronicity—when we’d been in Rome, after arranging for Geoff’s funeral there and transport back here, we’d gotten into a taxi to go back to his apartment, where we were staying.
“Do you hear that? “I asked my husband, “Oh my god, do you hear that?”
“Blowin’ in the Wind” was playing ---but there was no radio in the taxi.
“Didn’t your son fall off a wall in Italy? he gently asked. “I remember reading about it in the paper.”
“Yes,” I said. “And suddenly remembering today’s date, I added, “Thirty-three years we were on our way to Rome, where we saw him for the last time.”
He rang up the pint of paint, and I went back out into the wind to drive to my weekly acupuncture appointment.
As I lay on the table, I told her about the close-to-tears feelings I’d been having for days, and the conversation with the paint mixer. She wanted to know the story of Geoff’s death, and all its unanswered questions came tumbling back as I related the details to her. At one point, hoping to shorten my explanations, I asked her if she’d ever been to Rome and knew Trastevere and the wall along the Lungotevere.
“Oh, I lived in Rome for a year.” she said, totally surprising me. She asked me fresh and piercing questions about his death, and mentioned a friend who’d won the Rome Prize for a second year, but had been unable to go due to Covid.
Back in the car, I was startled by a brand-new thought. Years ago, Livio, Geoff’s teacher and our dear friend in Rome, had suggested I apply for the Rome Prize.
“No way,” I said. “I’d never have a chance.” And honestly, I couldn’t imagine living in Rome for a year, away from everything familiar.
But the answer was blowing in the wind, Geoff was telling me. “Look at this string of coincidences, mom. No yoga, windy day, Millerton instead of Lakeville, the date and its heavy memory, acupuncturist living in Rome, those conversations with both her and the guy who mixed the paint—you need to apply for the Rome Prize and write about your experience there as a bookend to mine, your next book. You’d be doing the same thing I did, leaving a small town for a foreign city, struggling to learn the language of something so new, embracing being a beginner again. So what if you’d be eighty, four times my age when I went? It would be a great book, mom, and maybe the final best way to integrate all your conflicts and confusions about my death. It could really be good for you. Think about it.”
When I got home, I googled “Rome Prize.” I wrote for more information—applications can be made in August, final notification in November. I wrote Livio, our friend and Geoff’s teacher in Rome, who said he still believed I had a good chance of being accepted, loved my idea, and why not? I remember my oldest son Matthew would be living in Zurich starting in June of this year. I told my husband, who excitedly championed the idea. I let myself sink into the whole crazy scheme, imagining myself in a studio on the Janiculum Hill, studying for the Italian classes I’d always wanted to take, wandering Rome alone, savoring its history and beauty as my son had done and writing about it each day, but most of all feeling the intense connection to him that synchronicity had brought me.
And that, whatever else comes of all this, was enough.
*******
Thank you all, again, for your many generous responses to these posts. It was a relief to not write about the pandemic, though I almost feel like apologizing for not doing so. I am quite sure it will be reappearing soon, as it continues to loom large for us all.
I hope you all had a Buona Pasqua.
Arrivederci, alla prossima!
P.S.
Here is the link to the Boston NewTV Poetry show I mentioned in the blog post.
https://newtv.org/recent-videos-community/127-poetic-lines/6714-poetic-lines-sharon-charde