A Maze Me

A Maze Me

POEMS FOR GIRLS

Naomi Shihab Nye

In memory,

Precious Nina

Precious Rubina

And for Jamie and Lyra Iris Skye,

Jenny and Lyda Rose,

Daria and Josephine

I am grateful to the Lannan Foundation and the town of Marfa, Texas.

—N.S.N.

At twelve, I worried about a skinny road between two precipices. Every day my mother drove on such a road, or so I imagined, to her job teaching school. I feared her car would slide off one side, into a ditch, or off the other edge, into a murky gray river. But I never told her what I was scared of. I worried day after day without mentioning my fear to anyone, till there was a fist in my stomach, punching me back again and again to check the clock. Wasn't she late? I was a nervous wreck in secret.

I did not want to be thirteen, which cast me as something of an oddity among my friends, who were practicing with lipstick and the ratting hair comb deep into the belly of the night. Mary couldn't wait to be thirteen. She stuffed her bra, packed away her dolls. Susie had been pretending she was thirteen for two years already. Kelly said thirteen was a lot more fun than anything that preceded it.

But I did not feel finished with childhood. I was hanging on like a desperado, traveling my own skinny road. The world of adults seemed grim to me. Chores and complicated relationships, checkbooks that needed balancing, oppressive daily schedules, and the worrisome car that always needed to have its oil or its tires
changed (“bald tires” sounded so ominous) . . . Couldn't I stay where I was a bit longer?

I stared at tiny children with envy and a sense of loss. They still had cozy, comfortable days ahead of them. I was plummeting into the dark void of adulthood against my will. I stared into the faces of all fretful, workaholic parents, thinking condescendingly,
You have traveled too far from the source. Can't you remember what it felt like to be fresh, waking up to the world, discovering new surprises every day? Adulthood is cluttered and pathetic.
I
will never forget.

I scribbled details in small notebooks—crumbs to help me find my way back, like Gretel in the darkening forest. Squirrels, silly friends, snoozing cats, violins, blue bicycles with wire baskets, pint boxes of blackberries, and random thoughts I had while weaving 199 multicolored potholders on a little red loom. I sold the potholders door to door for twenty-five cents each, stomping around the neighborhood, feeling absolutely and stubbornly as if I owned it. No one else had ever loved that neighborhood as much as I did.

If I wrote things down, I had a better chance of saving them.

Recently, a friend sent me an exquisite wreath in the mail. A tag was attached to it:
A SMALL AMOUNT OF
DEBRIS IS TO BE EXPECTED FROM THE VIBRATION OF SHIPPING.

Well, of course.

But who tells us this when we are twelve? Who mentions that the passage from one era into another can make us feel as if we are being shaken up, as if our contents are shifting and sifting into new alignments?

Earliest childhood: skillets and a fat soup pot and two cake pans and a funny double boiler with lots of little holes in one pan, lids and a muffin tin and two blue enamel spoons and an aluminum sifter with a small wooden knob on its handle, all living together in the low cupboard next to the stove.

A trove of wonders! Daily I was amazed and happy to take them out, stack them on the floor, bang them together a little, make a loud noise. Then I could put them back. There were ways they fit and ways they didn't. The door to the cabinet never shut perfectly. I can close my eyes even today and feel its crooked wood, its metal latch, and the lovely mystery of the implements living in silence inside.

My mother worked at the sink nearby, peeling potatoes, running water over their smooth, naked bodies. I felt safe. My whole job was looking around.

It strikes me as odd: I cannot remember the name of a single junior high school teacher. I cannot remember any of their faces either. Yet I recall all my elementary and most of my high school teachers very clearly. What happened in between?

In junior high, I stood proudly in the percussion section in the school band, smooth wooden drumsticks in my hands. I clearly recall the snappy beats we played to warm up. I still feel my cheeks flaming when I was forced to sit down, runner-up in the spelling bee, because they gave me a
military
word. I remember the smooth shiny hair on the back of the head of the girl in front of me in Spanish class better than the subjunctive tense in Spanish. Some things stayed, during those rough years of transition, but not the things I might have dreamed.

What
do you want to be? people always ask. They don't ask
who
or
how
do you want to be?

I might have said,
amazed forever.
I wanted to be curious, interested, interesting, hopeful—and a little bit odd was okay too. I did
not
know if I wanted to run a bakery, be a postal worker, play a violin or the timpani drum in an orchestra. That part was unknown.

Thankfully, after turning seventeen I started feeling as if my soul fit my age again, or my body had grown to fit my brain. But things felt a little rugged in between.

In college I met Nelle Lucas, who wore billowing
bright cotton skirts and lavish turquoise-and-silver Native American jewelry. She taught ceramics (favoring hand-building techniques—coiling, rolling, smoothing) and showed us how to prepare our own basic handmixed glazes. I think I took her class three times.

Nelle and her husband had built some modest, rounded Navajo-style hogans out in the Texas hills, and on weekends, they shepherded little flocks of art students to the country. We dug a big hole in the ground to fire our pots and sang songs while the pots baked under the earth. Sometimes the pots disappointed us— blowing up, or cracking. One person's pot might compromise someone else's—after exploding, fragments stuck to your own precious glaze. Or someone's glaze would drip strange configurations onto your perfect iron oxide surface. It was a tricky operation. Nelle sneaked wisdoms into every line of art instruction. She wasn't terribly impressed with anyone's pots, but she loved the process and she loved us all. Also, she made us laugh. She
experimented
. We slept in a circle, head to toe. We patted whole-wheat chapatis, cooking them over an open fire for our breakfast. Nelle loved freshly mixed granola, wild deer, and patience. She urged us to slow down and to pay better attention to
everything.
She was radiant, enthusiastic, unpredictable. And she was older than all our parents.

Somehow, knowing Nelle when I was in college gave me all the faith about “growing up” I needed. At every age, a person could still be whimsical, eccentric. A person could do and think whatever she wanted. She could be as spontaneous at seventy as at seven. I felt incredibly relieved.

Midway between Brady and Mason, Texas—two wonderful hill-country towns—there's a mysterious general store called Camp Air. A small red stagecoach sits out front, and a little sign says the store is closed on Fridays and Saturdays, but I have never seen it open. Some cows with very short legs are penned up nearby, next to a “watermelon shed.” There's a larger sign:
HEY IF YOU NEVER STOP YOU'LL NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU MISSED
. I always stop. And I still don't know. But I like it. I like it a lot. “Camp Air” has a good ring to it. That's where I want to live, every day, inside my timeless brain.

If you have a voice, and aren't afraid to spend it . . .

If you have many voices and let them speak to one another in a friendly fashion . . .

If you're not too proud to talk to yourself out loud . . .

If you will ask the questions pressing against your forehead from the inside . . .

you'll be okay.

If you write three lines down in a notebook every day (they don't have to be great or important, they don't have to relate to one another, you don't have to show them to anyone) . . .

you will find out what you notice. Uncanny connections will be made visible to you. That's what I started learning when I was twelve, and I never stopped learning it.

Every year unfolds like a petal inside all the years that preceded it. You will feel your thinking springing up and layering inside your huge mind a little differently. Your thinking will befriend you. Words will befriend you. You will be given more than you could ever dream.

—N
AOMI
S
HIHAB
N
YE

San Antonio, Texas, 2004