My daughter can see it on the horizon: Freedom like she’s never known before.

For weeks now, she and the other 71 fifth graders at her school have been a little more electric at the thought of graduating from elementary school and moving on to the next level. Visits by the various middle schools that she and her friends will go to have made their big shows, sharing with them all of the new activities, options, and freedoms that will be available in the fall.

There’s after school drama, step teams, honor societies, sports groups, and even a “radical ropers” team that blows you away with an amazing display of choreographed jump roping to upbeat pop music.

She and the others are ready. They have been king of the hill at the elementary school for half a school year, and they see that freedom just a few months away. Will I dance? Will I act? Will I play soccer? Field hockey? Basketball? What will I do with all of that free time now that I’ll be getting out of school nearly 70 minutes earlier every day?

I, on the other hand, see all that freedom for her as well and hold my breath. Although I am excited for her–even thankful that she’ll be offered so many new opportunities that she just doesn’t have right now (but is certainly ready for), I am having just a teeny weeny tiny bit of trouble facing the fact that, indeed, my little girl is growing up.

Last night, I sat in a large auditorium at her new middle school and listened to competent teachers (I bashed every one of them, by the way, as they talked to us–You aren’t good enough to teach my young daughter! How old are you, after all? And what’s up with talking to me like I’m a stupid parent afraid to let his kid move on???). I criticized every one of them. Judged them. Made up my mind that, no, this was not the school for her. I even drew little sad faces next to each of their names on the program as they spoke to us. Sure, one or two of them got the straight-line for a mouth (I guess they were ok), but everybody from the principal down to he counselor got a less than satisfactory rating from me as they spoke.

*sigh*

But then I came home, and I saw the look in her eye as she asked me if I thought that the principal was just about the coolest grandmotherly type person EVER, and what did I think of the classrooms, the auditorium, and the lockers. She asked me about the extra-curricular activities, the really great young teachers that she can already relate to, and the Mascot that’s ferocious enough to scare away any other middle school in the Baltimore area.

I saw that, despite all of my childish poopy-face drawings I might have scribbled next to the people who will be caring for my growing-up little girl for the next three years, she was going to be more than okay at this school.

I was the one screaming all the way down the hall….I don’t wanna go to middle school!

Maybe they’ll tell the kids at an early assembly just how hard the transition is for us parents, and it’ll be their turn to draw poopy smiley faces on the program as counselors warn them that this is a critical time in a parents’ development through early let-go adolescence.

Certainly I don’t think that I’m alone…I’m sure that when that big ol’ yellow bus pulls up to the front of my house in late August, I’m going to be the one dragging my feet all the way to the front door….

No!!!!!! You can’t make me deal with this!!!!!

I won’t I won’t I won’t!

But she will, and there’s nothing I can do but step aside and let her be happy and free as she graduates from more than just elementary school.

Oh–and maybe give those old, those young, and those patronizing teachers a second chance… right?

(I don’t wanna!…)

Right.

When I was in college as an undergrad, I spent a great deal of time studying William Wordsworth’s romantic works. He wasn’t an author I was assigned to research and analyze. I think it was more of an affinity that I felt for his writing and his passion for love and for life. I focused on his Excursion and Prelude epics, as I was caught up in the whole idea of journeying to a greater place, both physically and spiritually.

The other day, I picked up (and dusted off) one of my old copies of Wordsworth’s poetical works. Immediately I was drawn into his wondrous way of capturing life in such beautiful words and lyrical notes. Even his early works, as the excerpt from “An Evening Walk: Addressed to a Young Lady” shows below, Wordsworth portrayed the journey almost as another character, where so much of that experience was part of getting to that intended destination.

FAR from my dearest Friend, ’tis mine to rove
Through bare grey dell, high wood, and pastoral cove;
Where Derwent rests, and listens to the roar
That stuns the tremulous cliffs of high Lodore;
Where peace to Grasmere’s lonely island leads,
To willowy hedge-rows, and to emerald meads;
Leads to her bridge, rude church, and cottaged grounds,
Her rocky sheepwalks, and her woodland bounds;

Where undisturbed by winds, Winander sleeps
‘Mid clustering isles, and holly-sprinkled steeps;
Where twilight glens endear my Esthwaite’s shore,
And memory of departed pleasures, more.

Now, the Lady he was walking to was not a woman he was wooing; it was simply his sister, and he was no older than 14 years old when he composed these lines. Yet, it was in the journey that he was able to share so much with us about the total experience.

This is, I believe, what is missing sorely from so much of our writing today, especially our poetry.

We spend so much time holed up in our rooms, going over life in our minds, contemplating, conjuring what-ifs, lamenting what we don’t have, and wallowing in our own self-pity. Few are the On-The-Road pieces that Kerouac wrote. Instead, we’re reading volumes and volumes of woeful pieces where there is no movement, no journey. It’s all in our heads, our dreams, of what may be, but–most likely–probably never will be.
Maybe the Grateful Dead recognized this when they wrote “Truckin’”:

Most of the cats you meet on the street speak of True Love
Most of the time they’re sittin and cryin at home
One of these days they know they gotta get goin
out of the door and down to the street all alone

I think we all know that we got to get goin’, but we find it so tough to take that first step out the door and into the real world.

The Indigo Girls, as well, wrote of this in their song titled, “Least Complicated”:

I sit two stories above the street
Its awful quiet here since love fell asleep
Theres life down below me though
The kids are walking home from school

Some long ago when we were taught
That for whatever kind of puzzle you got
You just stick the right formula in
A solution for every fool

I remember the time when I came so close to you
Sent me skipping my class and running from school
And I bought you that ring cause I never was cool
What makes me think I could start clean slated
The hardest to learn was the least complicated

So I just sit up in the house and resist
And not be seen until I cease to exist
A kind of conscientious objection
A kind of dodging the draft

So now, when I’m reading Wordsworth’s poetry, there’s a new melancholic tug that makes me wonder why it’s just so hard now to get out and journey. We’ve become so focused on our thinking that we’ve forgotten to live life a little dangerously without all of the pregame analysis and the probable percentages for failure to meet the targeted objective or goal.

In Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” he writes about what it means to be a saunterer, and he looks closely at the possible origins of the word. According to Thoreau, Saunter comes from people who were walking to Saint Terre, to the holy land. Children would exclaim, “there goes a Sainte-Terrer,” and thus the words blended to become “saunterer.” He suggests also that the word may be derived from “sans terre,” meaning without land or home, thus concluding that such a person would be equally at home everywhere he or she went.

I like to blend the two possible origins and think of myself as a journeyer, comfortable most anywhere, on my way to a more spiritual place.

Thoreau recognizes, however, that sauntering is not cherished as much as it might have been in Wordsworth’s day. He writes,

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least–and it is commonly more than that–sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say a penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and the shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them–as if their legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon,–I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

So let’s go. Get out there. Take that journey. Walk toward your sister, your love, your friend, and embrace each step as fully as you might embrace the one you are destined to meet.

Even Wordsworth himself recognized the dangers of not living fully. In his Sonnet titled “The World Is Too Much With Us,” he warns us in the beginning of the poem that we are already succumbing to the unnatural pulls of our industrialized society:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God!

Great God indeed! Right now, I don’t think that it even matters how traveled the road is. Just take any road, for goodness sake, and take the time to look around.

Saunter.

It may just be the greatest idea you’ve ever had.

And so we enter week three of that lifestyle change: new diet, new exercise program, new way of thinking, new everything.

I’m less than a pound away from that first benchmark of losing 10 pounds. I’m confident I’ll reach it–perhaps even surpass it–when I weigh in on Friday.

I’m fortunate that Maryland offers so many opportunities to walk outdoors. Many of our railroad lines have been converted to paths in what’s known as the rails-to-trails program (do you have that in your state?) that run throughout central MD. It’s nice. We also have Loch Raven Reservoir about two miles from our house, and on Saturdays and Sundays, they shut down the portion that meanders closest along the shoreline. From gate to gate, it runs a mile and a half. There are a few hills along the way, especially the ascent to the gate that marks the halfway point. It’s really quite dramatic for us newbies walking the entire length; as you enter the final quarter mile and turn a bend in the road, you can see the gate at the top of the hill. We took great pride in reaching the gate together, touching it as some sort of inspiring moment before turning around to head back to where we began.

What made the moment even more dramatic and made-for-tv is that, at the very touch of our cold fingers on the even-colder gate, the very first flakes of snow began to fall. On the mile and a half back to the car, the snow intensified just enough to change the entire landscape. It was like walking in a loop, unchartered territory, virgin land covered with silk-white innocence.

A new beginning indeed.

Maybe that new beginning was marked by what happened in the first quarter-mile.

Before we began our walk, I made a conscientious effort to set my stopwatch so that I could record just how long it takes me to walk three miles along the shores of Loch Raven. When I’ve done this exercise regimen in the past, I’ve been really ridiculous about recording every workout, every walk, every moment and how it was spent before, during, and after the workout.

Why would this be any different?

I looked down at the ground and synchronized my first step across the gate with pushing the top right button on my watch.

Step One, Second One. Step Two, Second Two. . .And so on.

Until that watch began to itch around my wrist at less than an eighth of a mile into the walk. I made sure I kept my stride while being momentarily diverted by this “equipment malfunction.” I took the watch off, double-checked the time to make sure I had not reset it, and tucked it gently in my jacket pocket.

Ever-nervous that I would reset it by putting my hands in my pockets, I kept my hands out in the bitter cold as we walked.

About fifty strides later, I heard a beep from that pocket, a solitary, somewhat sad note that I had never heard before (at least from my watch). I broke stride. I couldn’t help it as I reached into my pocket and pulled out the lifeless, stiff watch.

The screen was a pale olive green. Dark, blank. Within a quarter-mile of my walk, the only means of measuring my success had passed on.

At first I panicked. After all, what was this walk for if I couldn’t measure it? Analyze it? Put it on paper and compare it with the previous three walks already archived in ink? Where would this walk now fall among subsequent walks?

But then I did something I’ve been doing a lot lately. I let this panic consume me fully for five seconds. I let it run through me so I could feel fear in every extremity, feel it as if it were all there was left to feel.

And then I let it go. I picked up my stride, threw the watch in the big blue trash can on my right, and carried on, no longer worried about time, statistics, spreadsheets, or post-exercise analyses.

This workout thing, this change in lifestyle is not about the individual workouts and pushing myself to extremes. It’s about all of the things that genuinely matter in life and making these changes to enjoy those meaningful things. It makes no difference if, when I walk later in the week, I shaved off 13 seconds off my mile. To me, it makes a difference that I walked; I looked up at the sky instead of down at my watch; I heard the beat of the ruffed grouse’s wings as it moved across my path; I lived fully in the walk, and not back at my desk in front of a spreadsheet charting the latest trends of my exercise program.

Slowly, but certainly, I’m remembering what all of this is about. One fully-lived moment at a time.

yikes.

Well, the unthinkable happened, and after a week of sobbing over the loss of the Colts over two decades ago and vowing revenge once and for all, we lost the game.

This city, my friends, will be in need of deep psychological assistance in the coming days, months, and even years.

Heck, it might even be another two decades before we get some closure on this situation.

Hey, it was a good game, we got beat, and it’s over. My goodness, fellow Baltimoreans, please tell me that we can all move on with our lives now that this game is over.

Please?

Therapists with any background in PTCD (post-traumatic Colts disorder) need not bother with any application process. Just get here. And quick. you are guaranteed to make a ton of money off of us as we try to grasp how such a devastating thing could happen….

It’s hard to imagine any writer not being influenced in some way by the now-late Donald Murray, even if the name doesn’t ring a bell.

I was first introduced to his writing and his teaching in 1989. I was a Summer Fellow at the Maryland Writing Project’s Summer Institute, a newbie still to the world of teaching, but a hack writer who knew only that this bug, this thing inside me that compelled me to write was here to stay.

The Institute, a five-week program that invited teachers from around the state to devote most of their summer to learning about writing and teaching, was supposed to prepare me to share this new-found knowledge with other teachers in my school and around the county. That was the goal. But I couldn’t plan the untimely death of my father just two months before our first meeting, and I certainly couldn’t plan the timeliness of just how life-changing the Institute would be for me as a person, me as a writer.

The teaching impact, that came later.

For me, on that first day, I bought my copy of Murray’s Write To Learn, a rather flimsy paperback book about how writing leads to discovery of our selves, and discovery leads to a life worth living, and a life worth living leads to–well, to everything good. Including all that happens with writing in the classroom.

The first section of Murray’s book was all about the Daybook, claiming your place to write, your place to be you. And with the timeliness of my father’s passing, I jumped headfirst into the pages of Daybook I, a cheap, green-blue spiral notebook of 70 pages that led me along the paths of self-discovery for those five weeks. I pondered Thoreau’s writings, my own father’s actions in his life, the power of spirituality, of love, of patriotism, of life itself. In those five weeks, Murray gave me license to be me, take risks, ask the questions I never had the courage to ask.

Since that summer, I have completed over 30 daybooks, some of them spiral notebooks, others with leather covers, some blank, some ruled, some large, some small (I’ve come to favor the bigger blank books, with the hard cover). Between the covers of all of these books remains me: raw, emotional, contemplative, happy, sad, angry, hopeful. Story ideas, examples of good writing, good living, life-changing quotes, drawings…it’s all in there, uncensored.
At just about the same time Donald Murray was leaving this world, I was making the decision to pack up all of my daybooks, finished and unfinished, and focus only on my one Daybook throughout 2007, a sort of tribute to the sanctity of this journal of all-things, all-thoughts, all-me. It wasn’t until a few days after I made this decision that I learned of his death.

Donald Murray worked tirelessly with writers and with teachers about the importance of relevance, the importance of understanding your audience, and the importance of taking risks. I can think of no successful writer who has not mastered any of these three essentials when it comes to communicating effectively. The fact that we are all better writers because of these essentials is due in no small part to Mr. Murray.

His passing comes at a time in my life where my writing and my career is in a wonderful but risky transition. After reading a memorial written by Chip Scanlan at the Poynter Institute, I feel like I’m back at the Maryland Writing Project’s Summer Institute all over again. But this time, it’s 2007, not 1989. The risks I am ready to take will begin on the pages of my daybook, just they always have, but thanks to the life Donald Murray lived and the countless contributions he made to writers all over the world, those risks in ink will spill forward into a new career of writing and teaching–one that I hope makes a difference not only to me, but to my family, to my readers, and to the many writers and teachers with whom I proudly share this profession.