Poetry & Pushpins

~ The Writings of S.L. Woodford

Poetry & Pushpins

Tag Archives: empathy

French Fries, Fear, and Pigs

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by poetryandpushpins in Pushpins (Daily Life)

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countryside, empathy, Midwest

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“So, who wants to feed the pig?”

I look around, my brother is already back with the horses. And my friend, who runs the farm I am currently spending time at, has important paperwork-like things to do. Slowly, I breath out.

“I guess I will.”

I take the white Styrofoam carryout box, containing the leftover French fries from our lunch plates, and make my way to a small barn. On its threshold, I unlatch the main stall gate and enter a world incensed by animal musk and sweet straw.

“Hey guys.”

I nod to an unblinking Alpine goat. When I turn to close the gate behind me, a grey haired donkey nuzzles my hip. With my free hand, I stroke his mane, tufted and wild.

“Sorry love, this isn’t for you.”

I pass by the goat and the friendly donkey, slipping between an iron gate and a wooden stall. I hear a delighted squeal and feel an eager prodding at my ankles. Taking another deep breath, I look down.

“Hey Lola, I’ve got something for you.”

She prods at my ankle again and I flinch. Her touch is concentrated and hard. I hope that I don’t bruise. Why did I agree to feed the pig? I’m afraid of pigs.

I first discovered this fear in college, during a spring break trip to a Heifer Project farm outside of Boston. The farm had two large hogs, who would eat everything from donuts to vegetables, and those two large hogs needed to go to the butcher’s. My classmates and I stood in two lines from pen to truck, behind thick boards that we fortified with our body weight. We hoped that the hogs would go quietly, but if they didn’t, only our body weight on the boards would keep the hogs from getting away—and us, from being trampled.

Shaking behind the board I braced, I realized that I was afraid. Pigs have a low center of gravity, are usually very muscular, and have one-track minds. Woe to those who get between them and their comfortable pen or their dinner of donuts. In order to meet their needs, to survive, they wouldn’t mind trampling you.

Or, in the case of Lola, bruising your ankles.

I stoop down and put my free hand on Lola’s nose.

“That’s enough, my girl.”

Surprisingly, she stops.

I sit on the straw and spread a handful of French fries in front of Lola. She snorts them up and then eagerly looks back up at me for more. Her actions are playful and energetic, almost dog-like. It isn’t long before the Styrofoam carryout box is empty.

Though Lola is finished with her snack, she isn’t finished with me. She turns around, carefully backing her stout little pig butt onto my lap. We sit together as I absently run my fingers along the black and white bristles on her back. Perhaps it isn’t pigs that I’m afraid of after all. Perhaps what makes me leery of them is their tendency to trample anything and everything to get what they want. Pigs can be dangerously selfish, but, as Lola is currently showing me, not all pigs are prone to bad behavior brought on by greed and desire.

And if I’m being honest in my musings, selfishness isn’t restricted to the actions of pigs.

I went to graduate school at a well-respected research university. Though my colleagues were not pigs, some of them had a tendency to show pig-like behavior in the presence of tenure-track positions, publishing deals, and eligible mates. I had to brace myself mentally and physically and politically from time to time, just so I wouldn’t get trampled in the name of someone else’s desires. And though I was strong and braced myself well, I was always very afraid.

No, it isn’t pigs that I fear. It’s the behavioral tendencies they’ve come to represent in my life. Thank goodness there is Lola though, whose sturdy little form feels like comfort and redemption and new beginnings as we sit in her stall filled with straw.

 

Note:  The farm where the above took place is called Sand Hill Stable. It’s a beautiful horse stable and farm located in the outskirts of the Ohio Western Reserve. If you ever need to board horses in the area, or just want to visit a beautiful jewel of Northeastern Ohio countryside, contact the marvelous stable manager.

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The Inner Thoughts of Inner Thighs: Adding to an Exercise Regiment

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by poetryandpushpins in Pushpins (Daily Life)

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empathy, running

My inner thighs hate me right now. I am making them do exercises they are not used to. And they let me know their disdain for me and my recent life choices through short, spasmodic, daily yelps of pain. They especially like to scold me when I make them walk down stairs or start a run.

After years in the shadows, my inner thighs now have the spotlight. I no longer play rugby—so, there are no bruises of both interesting shape and color to distract me, to give me a deep sense of accomplishment and a great sense of gratitude that I made it through another match without breaking anything or loosing teeth. It’s just my inner thighs now, grumbling at my new exercise regiment.

“Why couldn’t you stick with your daily 5k?” they moan, “We were used to that. It was easy. We didn’t have to work. We didn’t have to see our limits. We don’t like seeing our limits, it makes us feel weak…”

Yet, I don’t mind their complaints. Their grumblings remind me that I am stretching my body, investing in it to live a longer and more healthy life. Soon, their whining will dissipate, for deep down, they know this mild pain is good for them. Their weakness today will become their strength tomorrow. And by this week’s end they won’t mind at all. In fact, they’ll be quite surprised at how fun it is to bend and stretch in these new and wild ways.

…Until I add a few more reps next week.

Narrative Intimacy, Writer’s Trust, and Free Indirect Speech

28 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by poetryandpushpins in The Creative Life

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empathy, the creative process, writing

Last week, I wrote a paragraph’s worth of free indirect speech in a short story I’m drafting. This little paragraph made me so happy, because out of all the third person narrative techniques I’m familiar with, free indirect speech mesmerizes me the most.

Used by famous writers like Jane Austen, Goethe, and Virginia Wolf, free indirect speech is a narrative technique that blends the distance of third person speech (S.L. Woodford wrote with vigor) with the direct engagement of first person speech (I wrote with vigor).

So, a writer can write things like:

S.L. Woodford wrote with vigor and refrained from watching Tom Hiddleston teach Cookie Monster about the importance of “delayed gratificatiion” on YouTube. The restraint will be worth the effort.

Instead of :

S.L. Woodford wrote with vigor and refrained from watching Tom Hiddleston teach Cookie Monster about the importance of “delayed gratificatiion” on YouTube.

“My restraint will be worth the effort,” she thought.

Or:

S.L. Woodford wrote with vigor and refrained from watching Tom Hiddleston teach Cookie Monster about the importance of “delayed gratificatiion” on YouTube. She thought that her restraint would be worth the effort.

Free indirect speech seamlessly allows the writer to take the reader into the thought processes of a book’s characters by incorporating their voice into the larger narrative structure. And in the process, the reader’s eye is neither distracted by the starting and stopping of direct speech’s quotations, nor is it fatigued by the constant repetition of indirect speech’s reporting phrases. I don’t know about you, but I can only read “she thought,” “he said,” “it groaned,” so many times before my innards start simmering with a quiet—yet wrathful—rage.

Because free indirect speech slips intimately into the thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations of a character, a reader and character can have a communion of thought, feeling, and physicality without superfluous punctuation and phrases cutting in at inopportune times. And, within this communion of thought, there are more opportunities for the reader to cultivate empathy through directly experiencing a character’s inner life.

How I love it when writers use free indirect speech well. It makes me feel like they trust me, the reader, when they make me privy to their characters’ most intimate thoughts. Through it, their character’s can be vulnerable. In that vulnerability, I can better understand their character’s actions and interactions with others.

And, how I love it when free indirect speech occurs in my writing. For its presence reminds me that I am giving up control. I am at last trusting my readers with my characters, my narrative, and my art.

 

P.S. Remember that Tom Hiddleston / Cookie Monster video I used in my grammar examples above? It is quite delightful if you like Tom Hiddleston, Cookie Monster, slight Shakespearean references, cookies, and delayed gratification (or any combination of those things). So, I’m just going to leave this here…

Balance

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by poetryandpushpins in Pushpins (Daily Life)

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empathy, grief, Midwest, New England

It still sucks that our Mom died when we were both still in our twenties. But, these phone conversations with my brother are becoming some of my life’s most sacred moments.

 

“Hey, Mattie. Thanks for calling me back.”

I sit on a garden bench, behind a mansion-turned-Yale-administrative building, concealed from the casual observer by clematis vines. As I lean further back into my verdant hiding place, my “e’s” and “a’s” ascend up my nose and echo in my nasal cavities. The carefully enunciated speech I use daily at Yale—the speech that others sometimes mistake as an English person’s when I’m either very nervous, or just trying to create polite, social distance at cocktail parties—begins to relax, nestling itself into a warm, Northeastern Ohio twang.

My words instinctively know that I have no need for nerves or polite social distance as I sit concealed by clematis vines. I’m speaking with my younger brother. And, concealing myself from the once little boy, who used to wipe boogers on me, is a very unwise thing to do. Especially, since that little boy is now a competent, gentle young man.

We talk about his forthcoming visit, maritime history, human psychology, and his friends. Subjects we have often touched upon in previous phone conversations. But, now that our Mom has been dead for exactly a year, our conversations also explore something else: family management. We talk about how our Dad and our 93 year-old Grandmother are actually doing, comparing conversations, trading observations, voicing concerns, and brainstorming solutions (if necessary). We also cry (me more than him) while uttering reflections about our Mom. Reflections only we two would understand, because we were her children.

The more we speak to each other in this way, the more I believe that we are creating a form of healthy communication we shall use with each other for the rest of our lives. We will only continue to make decisions about how to maintain and ensure our family’s well-being, property, and monetary assets as Dad and Grandma continue to age. I’m glad that we’re building this strong, open report now. I find that hard decisions become less difficult if you’re making them with someone you love, trust, and understand.

It still sucks that our Mom died when we were both still in our twenties. But, these phone conversations with my brother are becoming some my life’s most sacred moments. For through them, I see time shrink, merge, and fall away. Mattie is 24, and I, 28—a four-year age gap differentiating our life experiences. A huge chasm in our youth, especially during his booger-wiping phase, that is a chasm no longer. This young man on the other end of the phone and I seem to share more and more as we age. Though he has Mom’s coloring and I have Dad’s, we share our Mom’s cheekbones, eye sockets, and weirdly Romanesque nose. Though he is a mechanical engineer that specializes in historical machines and I am a librarian who specializes in Christian theology, we both deal with creating mechanized order and preserving history in our careers. Though he was socialized as a male and I a female, we have socialized each other to appreciate compassionate men and self-sufficient women. And between us, we have cultivated a penchant for Jane Austen, the Sandman comics, video games, British sitcoms, hiking, classical literature, sailing, and history.

But, most importantly, Mattie and I share the deep pain of losing our Mom, and, the responsibility of loving our family well in her absence.

I tell Mattie this, all of this, and he is quiet for a long time. “Well you know Sis, the universe always has a way of balancing itself out.”

It is my turn to be silent as I stare up into the sky, letting Mattie’s words properly seep into my thoughts. The sky is thick and dense with flat gray clouds. Yet, a rainbow gracefully arches across those clouds, its colors made even more vivid by the stark gray background.  A spray of water hits my cheeks, I only now realize it is raining, and I look up—higher—into the sky. This rainbow has a twin. A quiet echo of itself in color and shape.

“Yes Mattie, I must agree with you. The Universe does have a way of balancing itself out.”

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A Tissue, a tissue, a tissue for my Grief

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by poetryandpushpins in Pushpins (Daily Life), The Creative Life

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empathy, grief, New Haven

And here we are, perched on the precipice of May. In New Haven, that means final exam studying for Yale students, the cherry blossoms burgeoning in Wooster Square, and the one year anniversary of mom’s death.

As April ends, my body seems to be simultaneously remembering and bracing itself for the raw pain and disbelief that occurred in the early hours of a late May morning last year—my brother in Ohio and I in Connecticut, linked together by technology and shock, as we waited for the paramedics to leave and the coroner to come.

That shock, that silence, I experienced last May has quite worn off. Now, for the first time in my life, I am prone to tears in public. Everything from the singing of my mother’s favorite hymn to a flitting memory of a place, a time, an object we shared, brings on an onslaught of silent tears. Snotty, gross, face-pinching tears.

This Sunday was no exception. I attended a friend’s recital, and, as I’m prone to do these days, I thoroughly read the program notes in advance. The final piece, Triptych by Tarik O’Regan, dealt heavily with death and remembrance, i.e. plenty of emotional triggers for me. I breathed a sigh of relief. Big emotions would hit me around movement 2, and I’d be ready.

Except, I wasn’t.

As the choir began to sing about how we remember our dead through all life’s the seasons, both emotional and natural, I began to cry–quietly and hard. I reached into my pocket, looking for a tissue, a soft, white wisp of paper that would make my emotional rawness a little more polite (one should not have snot running down one’s face in public; unless, you are a toddler and do not yet have the proper motor skills to amend the situation). There was no tissue. I was out.

But at that moment, something soft fell on my left hand. I looked down. There was a tissue: white, clean, and from my friend Tawnie. She had also been reading the program notes, figured out that movement 2 would be hard for me, looked over for confirmation, and mercifully threw me a tissue.

I couldn’t help smiling through my tears. There was something utterly ridiculous and wonderful about the whole encounter. Though my body possessed a grief that was raw, deep, and barely controllable, that little white tissue, barely the weight of a feather, freely given, freely thrown, gently answered my loss and pain with love and care. That which appeared to be fragile conquered that which appeared to be fathomless.

 

Warm Cats and Restless Laps

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by poetryandpushpins in Pushpins (Daily Life)

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empathy, learning patience, Midwest, New England

When I was five, my family made the acquaintance of Peppermint, a seven-pound, black-haired, green-eyed cat. One early fall day, Peppermint jumped onto my father’s knee as he worked in our backyard. The tiny cat wouldn’t get off, and so, my father brought him into the house and Peppermint became our family pet.

Peppermint and I rarely lived in harmony when I was younger. Quiet and slow, he preferred the calm, languid sunbeams that warmed the front room’s bay window to my fidgety, kindergarten self. Despite our differences and my total lack of empathy for his disposition, I wanted him to be my friend—but, I always went about it the wrong way. Trying to pet him as he dozed in the sunbeams got me far more scratches than approving purrs.

Sometimes, and this was always a rare occasion, Peppermint would jump down from the bay window and up into my lap. As he curled into a tight ball, his small body would start to feel like seven tons rather than seven pounds. Seven tons of hot, furry mass pinning me down, keeping me from doing the important things kindergarteners do:  playing in the woods, artistically arranging dolls around my bedroom, dancing to cassette tapes of the Beatles. I resented Peppermint’s presence when he sat in my lap. I resented the time he made me wait for that presence. And most importantly, I resented his inability to be my loving pet when I wanted him to be.

Trying to pet him as he dozed in the sunbeams got me far more scratches than approving purrs.

Twenty-three years have passed since Peppermint first sat in my lap. Now, I’m no longer a squirming kindergartener (though I still spend time in the woods and dance to the Beatles). As I type this post to you, two happily purring cats sit on my outstretched, blanketed legs. They are my neighbors’ cats. I often look after them when my neighbors go out of town. In the beginning, both felines were suspicious of the strange person who chose to occupy their usual humans’ couch. Yet, with the blessing of time and cold weather, the cats finally decided that my lap was an okay place to be.

This time around, I didn’t mind the process. For I know something at twenty-eight that I didn’t know at five: As long as I am patient and understanding and without presumption, even the slowest of cat hearts will eventually open up and take comfort in my lap.

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