While I Was Gone

While I Was Gone

"And then I realized with a shock that snapped me wide awake
that what I was feeling was a bitter sorrow with my life, a sharp envy
of Cass...That I wanted to be standing at the center of my life in hot
lights, moving in ecstacy to music that crashed around me, that came
from me, that linked me to others. That I wanted to be driving with
the band through the rain down some nameless country road to a place
where I'd never been before..."
To outsiders it would seem that Jo, protagonist of Sue Miller's
While I Was Gone, has a perfect life. Married to a minister who loves
her and mother of three adult daughters, she has a profession she
enjoys and financial security. But something is missing. In the
first chapter, fishing with her husband, she describes herself as
feeling unattached like an observer. Later that day, remembering the
intensity and vividness of life with young children, she feels like
she floats. She is not at all ready to accept the complacency,
predictibility, and tedious safety that many surrender to as they grow
older. Her descriptions of adult social events are painful.
[If you're anything like me you'll get her. I'm rocking "It's
my life and it's now or never...I just wanna LIVE before I die" not
Old Folks At Home. That's one of the reasons I insist on grad school
and student services as a career path.]
Jo's life hasn't always been so sedate. The defining event of
her younger years was the brutal murder of a close friend. In fact
she was the one who discovered the body. Out of the blue she meets up
with one of the others who had experienced the tragedy. She wants to
get together privately to glean his memories and thoughts...
...but maybe that's not all she has in mind.
Is she about to take a cross a line and irrevocably change her
life?
I'm not gonna tell you. You gotta read the book and see.
On a personal note, I had a wonderful Valentines Day. I helped the
CASE and mind spa people do a table where we gave out carnations to
people who wrote positivity notes and put them in envelopes and took
ones others had written. Then in the evening at Wilson Center we had
ice cream to celebrate my getting into grad school. i won a darling
soft panda in a riddles game. And Joey was very happy with his new
catnip toy. Then yesterday I read two of my poems at Spring into
Poetry, an awesome event put on by UMaine's Caribbean Club. Then I
went to an alternate coffee house where people across the political
spectrum shared thoughts calmly and listened attentively and my friend
Dylan and his band rocked. I love my life. If I wasn't living it I'd
be jealous of whoever was.
A great big shout out goes out to all who organized and participated
in these amazing events.
jules hathaway


Sent from my iPod