by Laurie Wagner | Apr 23, 2018 | Blog
“Maybe you’ll teach me how to love.” That’s what he said to me as we lay in the sparse grass by the creek near his cabin. I didn’t know about that, though I did suspect that I was going to need to teach him about the conjunction of your – as in, your purse – and you’re, as in, you’re going home. I didn’t even know if it was called a conjunction. I don’t know what a conjunction is because I never took a serious English class – but he was screwing it up, was all I knew. * That week I had met two Jeff’s on Tinder, both 54-years-old. He was Jeff from Bakersfield. Jeff from Vallejo and I had joked that when people messed up the conjunctions it was an automatic swipe left. We just couldn’t abide by it. I guess I’d made an exception for Jeff from Bakersfield, whose real name was John, but who was changing it to Jeff. I may never get the story of the name change because I may not get to know the man, but it was worth noting. And let’s cut him some slack because his parents were practically teenagers when they had him back in Bakersfield. Then his mother went AWOL and left him early with his father, and within the last year he’d buried that man who’d spent most of his life drunk. If Jeff from Bakersfield wants to change his god given name, let him. Maybe you’ll teach me how to love. It surprised me that he said that because this man is a leader in the...
by Laurie Wagner | Apr 3, 2018 | Blog
That everything is actually okay – that your life is practically charmed; You’re not sick, are surrounded by people who you love, and who love you. You have work that is built on words, a career you conjured from air, feathers and wood smoke, a schedule you made yourself, a dog in the yard – buried yes – but a true and loving companion for years. Sometimes you go to exotic places to share your work with others, and every day you sit in circles of women, knee to knee finding new words for sadness, for joy, for grief and love. Your students are generous. Human beings who crack themselves open right in front of you, which you find startling even after 25 years. So much of the time you forget how precious this life is, and you rush around thinking that you have to do even more to be noticed and loved. And then these people you work with unzip themselves and step out of their human casings to show you what they’re made of – same stuff as you – all of us just longing for connection, so many of us believing that we should be more. They think you’re the teacher, but it’s always the other way around. You’re lucky. You have children who are just enough hoodlum to make them interesting, but responsible enough to get to work on time. They’re healthy, they know how to love other people, and even when you broke up their family of four, they kept coming home and loving you both. You’ve got, not just a roof over your...
