An Invincible Summer - A Woman's Journey

There are days when my lack of education laughs at me. It pokes and needles.  It loves to put forward ideas that are foreign and large, and then says, “Nope, not you. Too much for you.”  Or it presents to me a speaker, whose ideas are so compelling, but whose rich and luscious mastery of the English language is such, that I sit with almost a sense of vertigo, certainly a feeling of not being included, with it almost at the tips of my fingers but not quite. Elusive. There is an club that I long to be a part of. There are no directions, no handbook, no assembly possible.  Then I wonder, is this what poetry is meant to do? Put one ill at ease? Am I suppose to be comfortable with the feeling of being uncomfortable? Is that the lesson I missed when I did not finish, or even start, AP English? Once in awhile I am gifted an understanding of something so beautiful. Perhaps a poem by Mary Oliver, who is a little more accessible to the swirling matter that is my brain. But in the n...

I had coffee with a new friend. It was interesting and enjoyable. My friend, Louise, has had a fascinating and difficult life. She is the daughter of a narcissist who still, at 92, bullies her and everyone else around her. If anyone has ever encountered a true narcissist, you know how difficult they are. Everything is someone else's fault, shaming those around them, little empathy for anyone but themselves, and a great need to be admired. We talked of Louise's education, with two advanced degrees in Mythological Studies and Depth Psychology, and her work as a college professor. I found she is trilingual. I realized this and reacted with the proper amount of admiration. She looked at me and shrugged, reminding me that it is very common in Europe for a person to be tri or quadrilingual. It occurred to me that our American education system fails us by not looking more outward. The Boy Scout reminded me that most middle schools offer foreign languages. That is my experienc...