Brooks ages into paradox (1 of 3)

Part 1 of a 3-part "upside-down" episode! 

This upside-down 3-part edition of TAPIT opens on a poem, and ends on a dream. When Todd knocks on a stranger’s door to deliver a poem he wrote about the occupant three years ago when he lived across the street from her, a surprising friendship unfolds. 

Transcript

If you’re a regular listener, you’ll know that this show follows a certain format: A stranger calls, they share their most intimate stories, and then I write a poem for them.

But this special 3-part episode… is upside down, and inside out. 

Three years ago, I wrote a poem about a woman I’d never met, who lived across the street from me in a little house beneath a spreading live-oak tree. 

This episode  begins with that poem:

Three Weeks Across the Street from Her and I’ve Yet to See Her Face 

because she’s either rump-up rummaging weeds 

from flower patches or sun-bonneted pushing an 

electric mower over a square of garden-crowded 

lawn or shielded under the standing-seam eave of 

her front porch eating dinner from a plate on her 

lap or fully enwrapped as she is on this and every 

Sunday afternoon in the cocoon of the hempen 

hammock she hangs in like some sort of silkworm 

suspended end to end from the lower branches of 

her live oak which owing to its worthy genes and 

old age and a bowed carriage and its easy spread 

shares its earthy aromas and shady deeps with 

all of us grateful neighbors and strangers and sleeps.

Seems a shame I never shared that poem with the stranger who inspired it.., 

So now I take the risk. There’s a Poem in That. I’m Todd Boss

Car door slams here, footsteps 

I stop by her house, and knock, but there’s no answer. There’s a clothespin on her mailbox, so I clip a hand-written note to it, explaining, and inviting her to contact me.

Next morning, I get a message. 

[First 10 seconds of voicemail]: “Hi, Todd. This is Brooks. And you left a very interesting card and note on my door yesterday.”  

This is part one of a three-part miniseries about a very unlikely relationship. 

Second half of voicemail: So I'm calling you back to see what it is you have to say, and I'm often available between 9am and 9pm however, I do have a client coming at three and won't be available u ntil after five. Okay. Bye.” 

I’m committed to this now. We make an appointment for the following day.

Footsteps up to her house, cat meows, Brooks and Todd greet each other

This poet makes house calls.

“It’s so nice to finally meet you Yes, you too, and you lived over there. I lived directly here, across the street, this house, oh, in the lore before it was when it was a rental, yeah, it was 2020, and only just for about three months during the spring, because I don't remember. You know, we never, I never introduced myself. Well, well, all right, now, here you are. Can I offer you some water, some tea…”

It’s awkward, inserting myself into this woman’s life. But what did I expect? How would it be for you, if a stranger knocked on your door, to tell you they’d written a poem about you?

You sure you don't want a tea? Tea or water? Well, are you gonna make some for yourself? Yes. Can I come in? Is that alright? Sure? Should I wait outside? I always wondered what your house looks like. It's so beautiful inside. Outside. Your gardens are really something, of course, you know that well 

She’s 78 but energetic. She’s a natural beauty with a quirky grace. Her face looks like it has taken every bit as much weather as her garden has.

Wind chimes hang from a low branch of the live oak, a branch so low we have to bow to pass along the path into her garden, where a little table and chairs is tucked in its embrace.. 

This is your chair. And. Watch it because it wobbles. There's biscotti in cookies, if you like,

During our afternoon together, an outline of this woman begins to take shape … She has a son and a daughter – both around my age. She’s a massage therapist.  She rode motorcycles for 50 years and helped her husband run a beloved Austin Yamaha dealership.

Bill died in 2020, on Thanksgiving. And for the next three Thanksgivings, she went to the Gulf of Mexico, to recover. 

I went down to the coast. I went to Galveston, to my favorite condo, I rented 40 feet of glass and sky and water for a week, turn on the heat, open the glass doors,  so I can hear it, I can feel it. 

But the last time she went there, something was off. 

I had felt before I left, and for a good four of the four, four and a half of the days that I was there, pixelated, coming Apart, nothing flows. Nothing flows and Disintegrated. By the fourth day, I began to feel a little bit of flow, and I was allowing the visuals, but mostly the audio, to do what, whatever it does for me. And I was still, I did not move for a week, and I'm a mover. Walked on the beach for five minutes and was like, Nah, enough of that. So odd. My behavior was different, but I was listening to and see, here's the difference between men and women. I was listening to what my body wanted. Didn't want to move. I didn't feel stuck, but I didn't feel like moving. And

since I've been back, I don't have that feeling anymore. Something in me has shifted to some other level. It's the best I know how to explain it, of acceptance, maybe, of okay, this is how it is now. 

I tell Brooks that my own mother is dying of cancer, and has decided not to get treatment. 

B: What a loss that’s going to be. Or already is. Have you started your grieving process yet? 

T: Yeah thank you. I don't know. How do you know? 

B: You cry. 

T: I have done that. 

B: I  can feel it right now. Todd, we're all losing so much now, that it's well worth grieving.

Brooks doesn’t shy from grief. In 2013, she started the first Death Cafe in Texas. That’s right - a death cafe. 

The purpose was to talk about death and dying.

It originated in Europe with a Swiss psychologist who invited people that he knew over for tea and tea and chocolate, always chocolate – you gotta have chocolate if you’re gonna talk about death. 

B: It's not necessarily about somebody that's lost their mom or fixing to lose their dad, or they just had to put their dog down. It's not only about that. It's really about all the losses that every day we experience. 

T: Cool. It’s really about loss and grief in general. 

B: It's really about being alive, right? And it's bringing to the forefront that every breath that we exhale is a loss.

Brooks surprises me by giving me a little tour of her home. 

Bill and Brooks moved into this house way back in 1969 - and she has lived here ever since. The old screen door has a gnarled branch for a handle. The wood floors creak underfoot. No need to kick your shoes off, although she goes barefoot. It’s the kind of house a farmer might live in, maintained for comfort, not show. classic layout, and just a simple farm, farm style, right? Yeah. But bohemian. Cut flowers in vases, houseplants a shelf of vinyl LPs three feet long… [records, frank zappa etc etc ]. Big agates, crystals, asian brushworks. The kitchen is utilitarian, stained butcher block countertops and all manner of cooking utensils hanging above the sink. So this is where the washer dryer was, right. And then I've had this wall put in.Downstairs, in what used to be a tuck-under garage, she’s got an in-home massage studio. And in the back of the house… 

  Look at your art room, please. Oh, my goodness. And so you've got a little bed in here, and you must, oh, my goodness. Oh, you have a dream house here and tons of books everywhere. Look at all your watercolors and your paints and your brushes and your markers and your paper. Oh, are you a paper fiend? Oh, I am. Oh my Oh, my paper. Yeah, look at them. So collaging is fun. Great, yes, water coloring is fun. Photography is fun. Your bottles, my bottles, bottles, bottles, bottles, glass, glass. It's nice to catch the light with some glass.  This is just dreamy. Wow, you are something else. 

And there are books – in little intentional stacks – everywhere. She tells me her grannie once chided her for not having read all the books she owned. 

And do I continue to buy books? Yes, of course

A World Made New, by Paul Selig. How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields. The Book of More Delights by Ross Gay. Quantum Body by Deepak Chopra.

This is all poetry. So you actually read poetry, you're that rare bird,okay, but, and, but my favorite poetry books are over here, next to the bed.

I forget my manners, and ask if I can borrow one I’ve never read:  10 poems to change your life by Roger Housden– but she says no. 

B: I don't lend my books. 

T: You don't lend them, okay, shoot.

B: Because most people don’t respect books like I do. 

T: Do you write in them – do you write in the margins?

B: Yes of course I do [laughing]

B: And there's a distinct possibility, depending on how I feel, how many trusts are operating with you, and what kind of words you might say to convince me that you would actually return the book in a decent amount of time? 

I open the book to its Introduction, on page 2: “Great poetry can alter the way we see the world. You may never have read a poem in your life, and yet you can pick up a volume, open it to any page, and suddenly see your own original face there; suddenly find yourself blown into a world full of awe, dread, wonder, … joy. Poetry at its best calls forth our deep being, bids us live by its promptings; it dares us to break free from the safe strategies of the cautious mind; it calls to us, like the wild geese, from an open sky.” 

I wonder what safe strategies this woman’s cautious mind keeps her from. But maybe there’s a reason I’m already thinking of this episode as upside-down… Is it because my cautious mind has become accustomed to a few safe strategies of its own…  

Brooks hasn’t asked to hear the poem yet. And I haven’t pressed the issue. . What are we waiting for? What has this first meeting been about? What am I doing here? 

B: Okay so without, of course, reading the poem now, what would you say the…zeitgeist, the feeling of the poem is, what's the energy.

T: you're asking me? 

B: I am asking you.

T: I suppose you could think of it as a slightly nostalgic poem. It's very reverent.

B: Well I’m liking these words, 

T: it is, I think, a single sentence. It's shaped in the form of a sonnet. It's only 14 lines 

B: that's very formal

T: but it's not formal but it's not formal because it doesn't rhyme.

B: And does it have the same metering of a sonnet?

FLASH BACK TO POEM’s opening lines: Three weeks across the street from her, and I’ve yet to see her face because she’s either rump-up rummaging weeds… 

T: an internal rhyme and rhythm that's all its own, but not structured

B: Then you shouldn't be using the word sonnet.

T: I can use it if I want. [lots of laughter here]

B: but poets don't misuse words

T: unless they want, 

B of course!

I may not have written the poem that will change her life. But that doesn’t seem to be the point of this visit anymore. She is managing, without really trying, maybe, to turn the tables on me. 

B: we are in, it seems to me, a period of decline. We we do not have a democracy anymore. It's been a plutocracy for a number of years now, and we this is the end of this version of democracy, yeah. So just, let's get you get on with it, right. And in the meantime, here we are today. It me and you, how do I how do I exist? How do I offer in kindness? How do I pay attention to my own fear and find tools with which to deal? With which to deal – that just did not come out right and i’m an english major! And so how can I be present in my heart?

T: yeah. I get that from you. I got that from you two years ago when I lived across the street. 
 B: Yeah

How can I be present in my heart? Are you present in yours?  There’s a poem in that continues with Part 2 of this 3-part upside-down edition, coming up next.