- Sometimes you just need to pee by the side of the road.
- Flirting with the Santa Monica Subaru salesman to get a Harman/Kardon speaker installed in your newly purchased blue Subaru—while absolutely dirty—was absolutely worth it.
- After you read poetry about a friend being killed in a car crash, you learn that a friend of those in the audience was killed in a car crash the week before. And her best friend asks you to sign both of their names in her copy of your book. And what can you say to offer comfort? Nothing.
- “Walt Whitman,” a woman says, nodding her head. “I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of him.”
- You’re talking with another professor, and you learn he was also a student of one of your mentors. And it makes sense: this man’s kindness, the kindness of your mentor. Let kindness always spread from teacher to student. And back again.
- Cruise control is better than sliced bread.
- A nun comes to your reading and brings a bouquet of palm fronds woven into flowers. And you hold the bouquet and think of your father, who wove palm fronds every Easter: crosses, boxes, long chains. His bulky fingers, stiff hands—your hands—
- Exit 92 is the first exit with a Starbucks when leaving the Upper Peninsula. And the last exit with a Starbucks when you return.
- Christian rock is addictive. Bored in the car, you move through radio stations, find yourself dancing like crazy to a song about resurrection.
- A young woman who has gone hungry in order to feed her kids buys your poetry book. Always write remembering this.
- Some listeners dismiss your poetry as “death-obsessed” and “dark.” And some understand the need to sit with loss, to feel it. They share their own stories: searching for the decapitated heads of two teenagers killed in an accident, surviving any number of wars, losing friends to suicide, losing husbands. They cry as you read your poems of loss. They understand their crying as necessary and good and full of light.
- Even though you haven’t listened to the Indigo Girls in a decade, when you find their Rites of Passage CD abandoned in your car’s glove box, you still remember every single word.
- Your father’s favorite—and final—student has a photograph of the two of them on his office wall.
- When someone asks if you’d like to do yoga, say yes. When someone asks if you’d like coffee, say yes.
- You’re eating lunch when your friend leans in to you, whispers, “That woman looks just like Meg Ryan.” You turn to look, turn back. “That’s because she is Meg Ryan,” you say. You used to live in Los Angeles so you know you’re not supposed to react to celebrities. But Meg’s hair is gorgeous.
- It may be snowing ten inches at home, but it’s spring somewhere. Dogwood in bloom. Magnolia. Crocuses pushing through wet earth. And in Duke’s Gardens, row after row of tulips, opening.
- You seem to need more vegetables than anyone else. So when you return from six weeks on the road, don’t be surprised you can’t stop eating: rhubarb and cauliflower steaks and bags of baby carrots and romaine hearts and pea pods and handfuls of radishes and spinach and kale and beets.
- Do laundry every chance you get.
- You have made some amazing friends in this world. Friends who share their homes and pets and partners and kids. Friends who find money in recession-budgets to pay you to read your poems, visit their classes. Friends who buy stacks of your books to give as gifts. Friends who bring you to delicious restaurants. Friends who drive hours to see you in another city. Friends you haven’t seen for years but with whom you immediately re-connect. Friends who make you laugh so hard your stomach hurts. Who host you graciously even through their own exhaustion, busy lives. Who make you feel like the most important person on Earth.
- And you know it is your job as a writer to find words for all of this. That’s what you believe: words save us. Words catch hold of the ephemeral. You say “thank you” again and again. You write “thank you” again and again in cards. And it’s not enough. But until you find better words, you keep saying it. “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire,” Eliot writes, “Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” And you hope he is right. And you refill your gas tank. Get back on the road.
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