Old Mary
My last defense
Is the present tense.
It little hurts me now to know
I shall not go
Cathedral-hunting in Spain
Or cherrying in Michigan or Maine.
I can’t believe I used to use this poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with my ninth-grade students. I thought it was a good example of things like metaphor and tone and how to say so much in so little. But they didn’t get it, and back then, I don’t think I really got it either. But now I am Old Mary, and I do get it.
Most of the kids thought talking about cathedrals and cherries was “stupid.” And aren’t there blueberries not cherries in Maine? What is the present tense? Why did Mary want to go to Spain, and if she did, why didn’t she just go? Why would she be “hurt”—is it dangerous in Spain or Maine? And who is Mary, anyhow? And even I couldn’t quite decide if Mary was really OK or if she was just putting on a stiff upper lip. (Whoops, how can your lip be stiff?)
Some of my family are currently vacationing in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. They’ve sent pictures of the lake they’re water skiing on and the mountains they’re hiking. It’s absolutely beautiful there, and I miss them, but would I want to be there? I’d have to get on a plane, which would terrify me, and then all the time I was there, I’d worry about the flight home. If I did manage to get up on skis, I’d soon fall off, flail around, and be embarrassed when the boat had to come back for me. I wouldn’t be able to hike far before my back hurt and I was out of breath. It’s OK. I enjoy walking around my yard, seeing what new daylily has bloomed.
I have friends who take at least one trip a year abroad. They see amazing sights, have great food, and meet interesting people. I like hearing their stories and seeing their photos—well, up to a point—but I can’t imagine myself being part of that. Too many tourists jostling for space, too much rushing, too much having to “ooh” and “aah.” I can see amazing things in my own neighborhood, like a newly uncovered stone wall, a wildlife protection area between two neighbors’ yards, and colorful poppies in a roadside patch of weeds. And everyone is interesting in some way.
Every spring and summer, my friend Cynthia and I used to chase garden tours throughout New England. We once went from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Hingham in the same day and another time visited Martha Stewart’s house and gardens in northern Maine. Along with my envy and grumblings about my lack of money and minions, I usually came home with ideas for my own gardens. If I were to venture off these days, I’d come home and look with total despair at my once well-planned gardens run amok, and whatever inspiration I may have had would deflate. I try to forget all that and be grateful for whatever blooms among the weeds.
Country Home and House and Garden magazines used to be my required reading. I spent years poking through antique shops and going to barn sales, looking for old cupboards like the ones in those pages. I collected wooden footstools to stack on top of one another (though rather than serving as a kind of end table like one pictured, mine kept falling over). Now the thought of poking through more old stuff has no appeal. I don’t care that my collection of old egg cups has only two to show for itself.
I often read about people who arrange their books in some kind of order—by genre or alphabetically or size. My bookshelves are arranged in no order whatsoever. Short, tall, fiction, nonfiction, hardcover, paperback, classics, beach—all jumbled together in variously sized bookcases. I’ve done nothing about the literary chaos for years, so I’m not going to start now. Just the thought of undertaking that job gives me a headache. Besides, in the process of looking for a particular book, I get to review some titles I’ve enjoyed over the years, some remembered, some forgotten, some probably never read.
So now I get what Old Mary is saying. Life offers endless opportunities. But inevitably, there are limits to those possibilities, and the best thing to do is to accept and embrace what is still possible. Other people can go see the cathedrals in Spain.
Carlene Phillips, author of “A Common History: The Story of Harvard’s Identity,” is a regular feature writer who pauses to reflect on the humor in the everyday. She was an English teacher at Acton-Boxborough High School.
