August 24, 2025: “High School Senior,” Dreams, “Breathing”

It has been a week of ghosts, strangely.

It started with a memorial service for the father of a good friend of mine.  A lovely, selfless man who launched me on my career as a writer.  That service happened on the tenth anniversary of my sister Sally’s passing.  On Thursday, I led an open mic at Al Quaal, a little recreation area in my home town.  The open mic was, among other things, in honor the third anniversary of the transition of one of my best friends..

If you’re keeping count, that’s three ghosts.

Sharon Olds writes about the ghost of her daughter . . . 

High School Senior

by: Sharon Olds

For seventeen years, her breath in the house
at night, puff, puff, like summer
cumulus above her bed,
and her scalp smelling of apricots
—this being who had formed within me,
squatted like a wide-eyed tree-frog in the night,
like an eohippus she had come out of history
slowly, through me, into the daylight,
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there, like a mother.
I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell
the difference between her leaving for college
and our parting forever—I try to see
this apartment without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
fingers, her pupils dark as the mourning cloak’s
wing, but I can’t. Seventeen years
ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
and saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young for
weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me—no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.

Yes, Olds is hearing the tiny, ghostly feet of her daughter pattering around her home.  In all truth, I’m in the same boat as Olds.  I have a daughter who’s in med school.  A son who’s a high school senior AND.a college freshman.  My days of hearing little feet patter around my home are long past, unless you count my puppy or the occasional mouse.

I miss my toddler daughter and son.  My friend’s father was one of my favorite profs.  I think of my sister, Sally, every day of my life.  (Sometimes, I think of her hourly, depending on what’s going on in my life.)  And my friend—three years gone—well, I hear her voice every time I sit down to write a new poem or watch a fantastic movie or read an inspiring book.  All of them have been hovering around all week long.  

I start teaching again tomorrow.  The start of a new semester.  I spent a good portion of yesterday updating my online course content.  I’ve got my textbooks packed up, laptop fully charged, and The West Wing playing on the TV. (I’ve started watching the entire series again because I need to see a President of the United States I can get behind—even if said president is fictional.)

Sometimes ghosts aren’t scary.  Sometimes they remind you to be a better person.  A better husband and father.  Better teacher and writer.  And a better friend.  Maybe that’s what being “scared straight” means.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about dreams, based on the August 20th prompt from The Daily Poet:

Write a poem about a dream that has seven syllables in each line.  If you can’t remember your dream, ask a friend, lover, spouse, or child about a dream s/he recently had and write a poem about that.  For extra credit, write this poem immediately after waking up in the morning.

Breathing

by: Martin Achatz

Listen.  Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?

          — Mary Oliver

I never remember dreams.

They slip away like one-night

stands as soon as I open

my eyes.  I can almost hear

the front door closing behind

them, cologne or perfume still

lingering on the pillows.

I want my dreams to hang out,

maybe stick around for eggs

and bacon, or to listen

to morning news, sip coffee,

talk about how amazing

last night was, exchange contact

info that I’ll never use,

because that’s the way dreams are:

they slip away without a

word, walk up the street, vanish

around the corner, leaving

a vague sense you’ve lost something,

some deep, wild, and precious breath.

July 31: Some Men Feared, "The West Wing," Josiah Bartlet

Santiago thinks about hurricane weather . . . 

He thought of how some men feared being out of sight of land in a small boat and knew they were right in the months of sudden bad weather. But now they were in hurricane months and, when there are no hurricanes, the weather of hurricane months is the best of all the year.

If there is a hurricane you always see the signs of it in the sky for days ahead, if you are at sea. They do not see it ashore because they do not know what to look for, he thought. The land must make a difference too, in the shape of the clouds. But we have no hurricane coming now.

Some people live in fear.  

It's an easy place to take up residence.  Living in fear means you don't take any chances.  Instead, you simply stay at home, binging TV shows or Twilight films or poetry collections.  It's so much easier than stepping out the front door into a world of killer viruses and crazy politicians and melting polar icecaps.  What I'm about to say may sound crazy, but I sort of miss that time at the beginning of the pandemic when everyone was ordered to shelter in place.

I had a shelter-in-place kind of day.  Not because I am living in fear.  Nope.  I did play two church services this morning.  Went grocery shopping after church.  Then, I binged about seven or eight episodes of The West Wing.

I was addicted to the Martin Sheen presidency when I was first married.  When the series started, Bill Clinton had just been impeached.  It ended while George W. Bush was still lying to the American people.  In short, Josiah Bartlet was my favorite President before Obama started working in the Oval Office.

Watching The West Wing now, I still get inspired by the starry-eyed idealism of its main characters.  It's a series that revolves around hope for a better world.  That particular sentiment has been in short supply in recent years.  In fact, I would venture to say that hope has been under attack, at least in the United States.  So, living in a Bartlet country for seven or eight hours today has been comforting.  

Of course, the problem with binging The West Wing is that, eventually, I have to return to a country plagued by Trumpism.  I'm not quite ready for reentry just yet.  Once I'm done typing the blog post, I think I'm going to watch another episode.  Forty-two more minutes of hope before I go to bed.

Saint Marty's blessing today:  President Martin Sheen.