March 9, 2008
Sunday

. . . a woman
walks the green mall lightly
. . .
She is not the woman
who started toward you
nor she who will finally arrive
. . .
Her heart beats in her ears
Her breath is wet silver
. . .
Should she consult her marvellous shoes
they would tell her nothing . . .
                  — Robert Dana, b. 1929
                      American poet

Today is my birthday.

I was nearly giddy with joy and optimism when I wrote about my birthday last year. “All my dreams are on their way,” I declared. I am less fizzy this ordinary, non-milestone year, but no less optimistic.

I’ve loved Robert Dana’s poem since I first read it in The New Yorker in 1970. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in English “with all the rights and privileges thereunto pertaining,” I was entrusted with instructing students barely five years younger than I in effective ways to express themselves. “Let her enter the schoolroom of broken children,” the poem continues, “she will teach them to touch their anger with the tips of their fingers,” and the irony is that I was fairly broken myself and barely able to touch my own pain. I was living alone for the first time, trying to figure out who I was and where I was going in this world.

The poem is an intensely personal one. Dana is very likely capturing a moment when he looked out his classroom window at Cornell College in Iowa and observed his wife walking across the central courtyard of the campus. It is something of a love letter to a woman he’s known for a long time, and it speaks of both change and constancy. What makes her shoes “marvellous” is unclear.

Like last year’s birthday week, this year’s was full of happenings that took me through a range of emotions. I went to two basketball games and saw my team win one and lose one, had a wonderful evening of dinner and conversation with one dear friend, and yesterday undertook a harrowing drive through heavy rain to help another friend through a difficult emotional experience. Over this past year I’ve become acutely aware of how much my friends mean to me, and how very many I have who return my love, and I know without question that it was their good vibrations gathered over this year and expressed in birthday wishes that helped propel me safely through the relentless storm so I could stand with another when he needed me.

As I climbed into the stands for Friday night’s basketball game, a chic young woman kept staring at me. “You have fabulous shoes!” she exclaimed when I got to her row. I sat two rows up from her, and when another fashionably-clad young woman joined her, she made her friend look at my shoes. Yet another young woman at the restaurant where we ate afterward remarked on my marvellous shoes.

They’re Nike’s Air Max 90 Valentine’s Day model for this year, bought on a whim about a month ago when I sought something external to jumpstart me out of my depression. Maybe when I wear them the swoosh makes me feel like I’m moving forward, and they put a spring in my step and joy on my face. That joy certainly comes more from inside me, planted and nurtured by my marvellous friends, than from Nike’s “visible air” technology.

Since first reading Robert Dana’s poem I’ve learned more about poetry, more about myself, and more about how to help broken people “touch their anger with the tips of their fingers.” I am not the woman who started toward this moment in my life, nor she who will finally arrive at the next birthday, and the one after that, and the one after that. By the grace of God and the love of my family and friends, I continue to walk this world lightly, and with great joy.

Thank you for walking with me.

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