The Art of Losing

by Marion Bailey

A few weeks ago I lost my address book, the entire record of my social world.  I realize address books are going the way of the dinosaurs - why write down an address in a book when you can type it into a device.  But I grew up in a world without computers:  recording the addresses  and telephone numbers  of the important people in my life was the height of organization. I owned my first book in my early twenties.  Now seventy I’ve owned four or five different books, approximately a different book for each decade of my life.

I had owned this record of my social life for at least ten years, because I remember carefully transferring  names from my previous book while my father watched;  he was the model for carefully kept records, and he died more than ten years ago. My book was not in good shape:  the carefully chosen cloth cover, with a Biblical theme, was ripped, pages were loosened.  I knew I had to replace the book but it was a daunting task, transferring a lifetime of connections into a new book.

I used to read my address book to review the history of my life. My daughters in their twenties and thirties moved around.  Different addresses and phone numbers were carefully recorded and crossed out when they went to a new place. One daughter went to college and graduate school in the mid-west, lived in Japan, later moved to New York City for a first job and her own apartment. Another daughter worked at an outdoor school in Maryland, moved to New Hampshire for a master’s degree, to Vermont for a teaching job and back to Massachusetts where she now teaches.

My friend Bill’s name was recorded; he died of cancer several years ago.  Seeing his address and telephone number reminded me of how much I loved and missed him. My father’s trajectory at the end of his life was in the book:  first his Long Island address, next the move to Florida, finally the Beverly address where he moved to be close to Ed and me.

   Before my father died he gave me his address book, the record of his long and full life. I had the task of calling my father’s friends and family to tell them of his death.  Because everyone was listed in his book, calling was easy.  I’ve kept his book because it’s  a record of his life.  Once in a while I look through it;  I’m always amazed and heartened by the richness of the life recorded there.

How did I lose my address book?  I was rushing.  Although I knew it was foolish to take it out of the house, I did.  I needed my sister-in-law’s address in Arizona to mail her a  Christmas  present.  After the post office, I walked to the supermarket with the book under my arm. The last I saw of it was when I went through the checkout line — the book was safely in the child’s seat of the supermarket carriage.  I went back a few hours later when I realized it was gone.  No one in the grocery store had seen it.  The book had vanished into thin air.

I felt naked without it.  I had no record of my life:  it was as if friends and family had disappeared.  Even my daughters’ peripatetic lives were lost to me.  A few days later I searched for a replacement.  I found only one  in the different stores I looked –- obviously people are not using address books anymore.  Names, addresses, phone numbers are all stored electronically.  There are no more cross outs, just deletions.  If a friend dies, it’s easy to delete him from your IPhone.

My new book is glaringly white, a loose-leaf, with a sticker on the inside back cover giving a phone number if I want to order more pages.  Will this company still be in business if  I ever need new pages.  I doubt it.  I started to reconstruct my new book, address by address.  Luckily it was two weeks before Christmas so many return addresses  were on cards sent to me.  I made a few phone calls to get more addresses.  I even found new addresses on email.

I began to like my new book.  My life looked orderly.  Each entry was carefully entered with a lot of white space on the page.  No cross-outs, no blurred ink, no torn pages, no painful names of friends I don’t see anymore.  There is a feeling of lightness, of going forward, a fresh beginning.  I would have held on to my old book if I hadn’t lost it, but I can see the benefits of letting  go, starting over on a clean page. Besides, I still have my father’s address book.  When I first lost my book I kept thinking of the lines in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”

The art of losing isn’t hard to master

So many things seem filled with the intent

To be lost that their loss is no disaster


Marion Bailey taught English in a high school in New York City and at North Shore Community College for thirty-four years.  "The Art of Losing" can be found in Marion's self- published book Looking Over the Fence.

Epiphany

by Tom Holland

February 21st, 2001

I woke up in a bed at High Point Detox in Plymouth, MA ready (terrified) to start my day. This was to be the first day in 6 years that I wa...s going to not go to a clinic window, give my name, receive a dixie cup filled with 100mg of methadone mixed with orange tang, drink it and be able to function for the next 24 hours. I had spent the past 5 days weening from 100mg to 5mg and I knew that my next 30 days would be torture, mentally and physically.

6 days prior I had been living in a $100 a week motel room paid for by my Mother in Hyannis. I had to walk the streets picking up cans to get enough money to buy a pack of Camel straights and a little Debbie snack cake as my meal for the day. This had become my life, this was all I had left and I realized just how far down I had taken myself. I went from a traveler of the world seeing amazing places, meeting incredible people and experiencing one of a kind moments to this...

I knew at that moment, at my lowest point in life that there had to be something more. I was always told that Heroin addicts were losers, that we didn't have a chance to recover. I believed them because for the prior 15 years I never could recover. My attempts were always half-hearted at best anyways, usually results of some jackpot I'd got myself into and not because I truly wanted to change. I knew something was different this time though. I had an epiphany while I was pulling the plastic tag around the top of the short cigarette pack and tearing the silver folded paper off of those Camels, that I had a greater purpose in life and something needed to change. I had felt it growing in me for a while now this total discontent with my lifestyle, the people around me, the choices I continued to make. I sat on Main St watching normal people go about their day and I was so jealous. I just wanted to be one of them to go about MY day routinely, to stop and talk to the guy in the suit and discuss whatever they were talking about in whatever crazy language I thought they must speak. I saw parents with kids and I felt a twinge of jealousy deep inside my gut, that I had lost something unidentifiable yet wonderful and that was a new, weird feeling.

I always thought I was free, that I was above everyone else because I was "living" and not tied down to a place, a person or a thing. I had such a grandiose and superior feeling about myself and my purpose. I always thought I was special, that I was meant for something bigger and greater. I thought I was meant to change the world, that people would know me and remember my name. At the time plenty of people knew my name but it was not spoken with joy, I was a name reviled by the many I had hurt along the way. All of these people, all of the loss, all of the regret flooded into me with each drag of my Camel non-filter and I knew I had to do something!

I found the number to High Point Detox and when I called I think I may have stammered and hesitantly spoke the words "I need help" I know every muscle in my body fought the urge to slam the phone down in fear and run straight back to what I knew best and because of that I heard the woman say "We have one bed and if you call me at 8am tomorrow and can get here it's yours." This wave of relief came over me and I knew at that moment this was what I wanted, this was the first step to a new life. I called my Mother and asked her if she'd bring me the next morning and the saint that she is my mom took another day off from work to pick me up and drop me off. More than likely she was thinking the whole time that yet again this will be a temporary delay before the inevitable phone call she'll receive in the middle of the night saying that I like so many of my friends before me overdosed and died. What she didn't know was this time was different, that I was different. I made a choice before walking in the door to High Point that this time I knew that if I had any chance at all of overcoming my addiction that I had to ask for help, shut up and listen and most importantly to do whatever anyone that knew better than me told me because I knew nothing about this new life and so that's what I did...that's what I do.

Fifteen years later I haven't found the need to pick up a drink or a drug and my life is beyond wonderful! I am here today because I made a commitment to listen to others that know more than me. I am here today because my family has supported me throughout my journey. My wife and kids have never seen me take a drink and I pray they never will. I am here today because of my belief in a power greater than myself and I am able to release the burden of controlling the world to that power and I can just focus on what is in my control that day and it is liberating.
As I look back and reflect on those darkest days I realize that I was correct when I believed I had a higher purpose in life, that I was going to change the world and people would know my name. I just had no idea at the time that the name I'd be known as and remembered by in the world was "Dad".

February 21st, 2016
(I have never mentioned what my addiction was to in public, I always just say I don't drink. I must admit I am not totally comfortable with my decision to do so this morning, I am always very private and protective of this because of the stigma that comes with Heroin Addiction but I feel today more than anytime in the past people need to hear from us who have seen the other side of addiction and known a better life. This addiction is tearing apart our kids, our friends, our family and I hope that maybe if one person sees it's possible than it's worth it to share something so private with others.)

We Are Quiet

by Lucy Sinclair

Grade 11

Now the muted music comes on warm
I lean back in my seat and watch the stars
In brake lights and in roadside signs
With half-closed sleeping eyes
I hold my mother's fingertips
and fall into the night

(Honorable Mention Finalist, 20th Annual Teen Poetry Contest, Beverly Public Library, 32 Essex Street, Beverly, Massachusetts. Readings & Awards Ceremony, April 26, 2016.)

Readying for War

by Terri McFadden

Round and round the playroom we marched, a platoon of small children, my sisters and cousins, the creaky oak floor adding rhythm to our song: “You’re in the army now, you’re not behind the plow, you’ll never get rich by digging a ditch, you’re in the army now!”  This is one of my earliest memories; I was just three or four and proud that I had learned the words and tune of this song from the Second World War.

Our bucolic little town couldn’t have been more peaceful, yet we seemed to be surrounded by echoes of past and future wars.  All the fathers we knew had served in World War II and we’d hear occasional stories from them, nothing gruesome, usually funny.  But somehow we knew that they had been involved in something terrible. They marched with our grandfathers, many of whom were veterans of WW I, in parades on Memorial Day and Armistice Day. On a regular basis the radio announcer would tell us the station was testing its emergency warning system and a shrill sound would be heard for a minute, and then the voice would tell us what we should do “…in the event of a real emergency”.  In school we participated in air-raid drills.  The shrieking alarm would go off and we would hustle out of the classroom and hunker down in the hallway on our knees with our arms covering our heads.  Our teachers stressed the importance of walking quickly – NOT RUNNING, so everyone would make it to safety. We were told this was to get us as fast as possible to the windowless hall, out of the way of the flying shards of glass that would follow the bombs dropping on our tiny town.  No explanations were offered as to why the “enemy” might wish to destroy us – I don’t think we knew who the “enemy” was. 

The neighborhood where I lived for my first nine years was built on a series of hills, a former farm.  The old farmhouse and barn were near the bottom and that was where my grandparents lived.  Streets were laid out in rows, one above the other and lined with little post-war houses.  When I was nine my family moved to a new house, about a mile away.  A mile isn’t much, but was huge to me.  In my old neighborhood I was surrounded by kids my own age, and nearly all of them were related to me.  Anytime of the day it was easy to skip outdoors and find someone to play dodge ball or Red Rover to ride bikes or to go sledding in the nearby fields.

Our new house was much larger, with an enormous yard, formerly a field on another old farm and set just above a lovely woodland of 16 acres. That we needed the room there was no doubt.  Our family had grown from five children to seven when my mother gave birth to two daughters just a year apart, making the tally six girls and one boy. It was a lively household. I loved the new house, but at first hated the isolation of the almost empty sub-division that my father was in the process of developing.  There were no children around for me to play with, except my elder sisters or my next younger sister.  Somehow this never seemed to work as I was not especially athletic like the sister three years older and the sister five years younger was too much a baby for me to want to spend much time with her.  I had great admiration for my eldest sister, but at five years older than me, she had no time or interest in entertaining me.  I was thrown on my own a great deal and discovered that I loved the woods, stream and pond below our house, roaming far and wide, imagining the Indians who had lived there, the dinosaurs that had ranged there, spotting the occasional fairy.  My active imagination became my best friend.

Soon after my dad built our house he’d added, as he described it, a present for all of us, something to keep us safe from enemy attack. One night after dinner he led us all out to the side yard, beyond the barn where our two horses, Suzy and Molly stood in their stalls munching hay.  Dad pulled open the double door steel bulkhead that stood alone, apparently unattached to anything, and gestured for us to head down the steep stairs.  At the bottom was a concrete room, lined with bunk beds.  At the far end was a tiny kitchen, with canned goods neatly stacked.  Jugs of water stood ready.  Blankets were folded on each bunk.  A stall at the back hid a toilet.  All the comforts of home!  I don’t know what the rest of the family thought, but I was appalled.  At age ten, the thought of being stuck inside that gray bunker with all my siblings and my parents was almost as terrifying as being blown away by the A-bomb.  I had eventually learned from overheard conversations who the enemy was and what would probably happen to us. 

About that time I started having a recurring dream.  In it I stood looking at our house, or rather where our house used to be.  It was gone, though the huge double-trunked maple and the oak that graced the front yard were always intact.  There were no sounds, no people in the dream. Everything was gone except, oddly, the living room drapes.  Those green and white drapes always survived, lying on the gracefully on the ground – and me.  It was the aloneness that always seemed terrifying to me.  It was, after all, almost unimaginable to be truly alone, what with my large family and school classes which had 35 or more students.  Although it had taken some time to adjust to the move, I’d grown to love the solitude and I always felt a little guilty enjoying it so much.  Perhaps that is why being alone in the dream was so frightening – I feared I would get my wish.

In October of 1962 I was looking forward to my 12^th birthday.  As was my usual habit, when I could manage it, I was watching TV by myself.  My sisters usually watched television with my mother in her bedroom.  My father spent the evenings working or reading in the living room.  My brother was away at college.  So it wasn’t all that difficult to slip into the TV room and watch my favorite shows without having to argue about which of the three stations to turn to.  That night my program was interrupted by some newsman and I was furious. Then he introduced the President of the United States.  At first I didn’t understand what he was talking about, I just kept hoping my show would return.  It didn’t.  Without even meaning to, I started to pay attention to President Kennedy’s words.  It began to seem to me that the bomb shelter in the yard might get used after all.

Terri McFadden has been writing since she was nine years old when she submitted her first story to Jack and Jill Magazine. (She experienced her first rejection at the same time, a sad introduction into the world of writing and publishing!)  In the years since Terri has written a novel, Han, set in 19^th century Korea and many non-fiction pieces written for EBSCO and the Beverly Historical Society where she is employed as the director of research and education.  Currently she is working on a novel based on the life of Juno Larcom, a slave in 18^th century Beverly and a personal memoir.