January 2nd, 2025
Wind and Words
By Bonnie Tarantino
Yesterday was New Year’s Day and we lost power. It was a windy, cold day, and the clouds moved fast. Our power lines don’t like wind or ice and take off whenever they feel like it, leaving the neighborhood in a quiet hum that feels like an exhale. I went to bed to keep warm with a book, computer, phone, and Walter on the floor beside the bed. Scott slid in beside me with cold feet and fell into a soft, warm nap. I snarled his feet between my warm legs, noting how my toenails had grown well past my Christmas pedicure. Our power goes out a lot; we know what to do.
The book I am reading is fkn beautiful. It is a meal. I have had to stop reading it every few pages to learn from it and digest it. It was a gift from a friend, and I so thank her here for it, (thank you Patty. “See: Loss See Also: Love”). In one of my moments of contemplation, the sun broke through wild and decisive, then fell back, captured in grey. I fell off to my side and pushed all my devices away, positioning my face in the moving sunlight. I noticed the cool blue-gray slate of my bare patio vacant of the chairs, the chaise, and two swing hammocks everyone loves to float and drink wine in. Without the furniture to stop it, I somehow felt the wind more. I imagined a huge tumbleweed blowing through, and with it came words, the muse, the thing that keeps me writing.
I got to thinking about the feeling I get when the words come, like catching a kite string after you lose its grip to the wind. Like a loose kite, you have to run after the words when they come for they come fast, and not necessarily for you. Words are gnarly seeds, designed to grab anything they can or else keep blowing. They know they can always find someone else if you are not open to their hooks. Elizabeth Gilbert in her book “Big Magic” writes of her precious meeting with the poet Ruth Stone. Stone reveals her creative process and truly captures what it’s like to hear words as they barrel past you in the wind. How impossible it is to capture;
“I met [Ruth] Stone when she was nearly ninety years old, and she regaled me with stories about her extraordinary creative process. She told me that when she was a child growing up on a farm in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields when she would sometimes hear a poem coming toward her — hear it rushing across the landscape at her, like a galloping horse. Whenever this happened, she knew exactly what she had to do next: She would “run like hell” toward the house, trying to stay ahead of the poem, hoping to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough to catch it. That way, when the poem reached her and passed through her, she would be able to grab it and take dictation, letting the words pour forth onto the page. Sometimes, however, she was too slow, and she couldn’t get to the paper and pencil in time. At those instances, she could feel the poem rushing right through her body and out the other side. It would be in her for a moment, seeking a response, and then it would be gone before she could grasp it — galloping away across the earth, as she said, “searching for another poet.” But sometimes (and this is the wildest part) she would nearly miss the poem, but not quite. She would just barely catch it, she explained, “by the tail.” Like grabbing a tiger. Then she would almost physically pull the poem back into her with one hand, even as she was taking dictation with the other. In these instances, the poem would appear on the page from the last word to the first — backward, but otherwise intact. That, my friends, is some freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic, right there. I believe in it, though.”
-Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
The wind blows past me a bit more, and I think of Mr. Shapiro, my high school English teacher who was a tragic mess. I didn’t have the word for depressed or even poet back then, not even alcoholic, but now I see him clearly. Rumor had it that when his wife died, he was so devastated that he put his head in an oven but didn’t realize a window was left open. I like to think his dead wife was the one to open the window from the outside, flew back into the house, and told him to get it together and get his head out of the oven and write and teach and survive like his relatives had survived the holocaust. Thank God, somehow, he did. He walked and mourned and taught until his pants bagged so bad that the cuffs cut right through and became a sort of stir-up. I had many teachers whose parents had survived or died in the holocaust. In White Plains, NY we had very good teachers who were sure to bring their parents in to tell their life stories. One day, the father of my history teacher encouraged us to rub the number tattoo on his aged wrist, and I did. Under my careful fingers, I rubbed the brail of the holocaust brand, felt the history of real terror but also the warm pulse and power of love.
One day, Mr. Shapiro gave us an assignment to write in the first person, first tense, about slavery. The words poured out of me. I was in a hot field; my callused hands pulled cotton, milk was running from my breasts, I still bled from birthing. My thirst was unbearable. I turned it in with my usually bad spelling, grammar, and handwriting, but he saw right through it. When he read it to the class, I didn’t even know it was mine. I had never heard my writing out loud before. At one point, he welled up as he often did, but this time, he paused and said, “The right word, in the right place, at the right time, can break you.” He then said, “This is why I entertain the idea of past lives; how else would we know this kind of suffering? This writing is lived, not imagined.” And he was right, At 16, I had never nursed, but when I did, the thirst returned, and it was unbearable.
Mr. Shapiro had wild, disheveled grey hair, a square chin, and burning blue eyes that told me he was once handsome and loved. He shuffled down the hall carrying his papers in a sloppy way that looked like they would fall at any moment. He read poetry to us with his broken heart, and because of this, I learned to read poetry with my heart open and a little broken. I believe he was a poet who heard words in the wind. I roll over to grab a pen, paper, my journal… anything. Somehow he taught me to trust that. I wanted to write about him. Thank him for taking his head out of the oven, for dragging his heavy burden to class each day, for being the one to let me hear for the first time what my writing sounded like out loud with the right word in the right place at the right time.
