Spoons

Spoon 1

I did a hard thing yesterday. I did it clumsily, inarticulately, and I hurt someone’s feelings badly. I went to bed early, unable to sleep but also unable to do much else. Cedar–who often curls up at the foot of the bed for a few hours just to be near me–actually slept in the little spoon position right next to me. I let her use the pillow.

Spoon 2

Today I led a meeting with some amazing young people. We always write together, so I prompted us to write in response to Marge Piercy’s “To Be of Use.” One prompt I offered was “Tell us about a thing that is beautiful and useful at the same time.”

These words surfaced near the end of my writing about a spoon Katie carved for me. “I’ve yet to sip anything from this spoon, except maybe my love for a young woman who is not afraid to make mistakes, who can imagine a gift into being.”

Spoon 3

I was recently telling Katie about how I had once seen photos of some fabulous driftwood spoons by an Unangan (Aleut) man named Phil Tutiakoff. They pushed the form of spoon by conforming to the form of driftwood. That memory made me think about how precious driftwood–yellow cedar, red cedar, and cottonwood, especially–was on the windswept Aleutian islands. And then I thought of my friend Ray’s stunning final lines of “Andrew Markarin Visits the Body of Lance Craig”. The speaker had last seen Andrew staring from a mountain pass, past his own skiff “anchored forever” and towards his abandoned village. In burning the chapel at Biorka, Makarin apparently did in the last vestige of traditional villages near Unalaska. “On these treeless islands,” the poem concludes…

I will tell you a secret.
A man burned yellow cedar. 
He burned the sea's gift. 
For the scent of yellow cedar,
because the scent of yellow cedar
pleased the one he loved,
a man burned what enabled him to survive.

-Ray Hudson, "Andrew Makarin Visits the Body of Lance Craig" in Moments Rightly Placed: An Aleutian Memoir, Epicenter Press, 1998.

I don’t think any of this adds up to anything. I don’t know if Cedar can smell grief. I don’t know why anyone else should care that my daughter gave me the most beautiful gift I can imagine. And I don’t know why Ray’s lines about Andrew Makarin have always haunted me so much, except maybe that tough times, like the grind of the ocean, teach what’s precious.