Big Life, Part 1 - May 30, 2011

Mónica Hutchens Tipton I’ve apparently had what a colleague described ten years ago as a “big life.” It’s not something you expect to hear when you are not quite fifty years old. I suppose that means my life is even bigger now and that it has every prospect of becoming absolutely enormous by about 2050. This seems ironic in light of the observation by so many hundreds of wise people that a single human life is completely insignificant when viewed from the cosmic perspective. The inverse of this, however, might be that individuals can have cosmic significance in a single life. For some time now, I have felt compelled to write about some of those people who expanded my universe and made my life as large as it is today. My life is spherical, and I have now enjoyed it long enough to know that no single point in it is unrelated to the others. I like that. It feels solid without having weight, somehow, so that every new addition doesn’t add to the mass, only to the volume, rather like a gas. One of my scientist friends will no doubt gently correct me later if I am mistaken in that simile. However, I treasure my big, spherical life as it continues bobbing through the cosmos. I started to write that whatever part of my body or spirit that holds this big life of mine effortlessly expands to contain it, but that’s not true. Some of the growth process has been incredibly painful, and there have been several times when I nearly let go of my big life because I thought that was preferable to continuing to try to hold on to it. I wrote some interesting poetry during those times, but I held on. The first contributor of cosmic significance who springs to mind is my 10th grade English teacher. He taught me to write. Granted, I had been storytelling since I learned to read when I was four, but he taught me how to manipulate those precious words, how to wring every priceless syllable out of my dictionary and thesaurus, and how to create for my readers the passion, the pictures, the poetry, and the pathos that I was feeling. Thanks, Mr. Isaacs. You gave me my voice. Each of my daughters taught me to be patient in two very different ways. One of them needed me to wait silently for the desired result, while the other showed me how to repeat and repeat and repeat for years to reach the objective. They also taught me to receive love from a distance. Where the elder was reluctant to share her affection for fear of alienating the other parent, the younger struggled to comprehend the complexity of the communication system that would finally allowed us to understand our reciprocal feelings. I also learned that to be sisters didn’t necessarily mean to have shared the same womb, but most definitively meant to share the same heart. We keep some secrets that no one else knows. Their lives are also big. My husband Jeff taught me to not fear death. This does not mean that I embrace death, and he clearly fought it to his last breath, but I do not let the inevitability of death disrupt my life. Before Jeff, I was a fearful person. My list of boogey men was pages long and included such things as bridges, elevators, car crashes, strangers, my parents arguing in the night, guns, the dentist, the sound of jets screaming overhead, losing my glasses, Sputnik, losing my mind, flying, bankruptcy, and the annihilation of the world by atomic bombs at the hands of the Soviets. While Jeff was dying of brain cancer, I found out that death wasn’t something to be dreaded, just an event to be postponed until it was itself the preferred option. Jeff and I love each other dearly to this day; it’s just that he is gone now. That’s death. It is part of a big life. I have learned so much from the students in my classrooms. I found out from one that Down Syndrome doesn’t preclude you from memorizing and performing a monologue on stage. One girl with cerebral palsy taught me that you could be a great stand-up while seated. I found out from another that living in a car with your mom and siblings doesn’t mean you won’t be successful in school and won’t grow up to be a wonderful mother yourself. I discovered that the cocky, pain-in-the-ass kid who saved all but two bites of his Jumbo Jack for his little sisters could grow up to be a military officer with a masters degree as well as a devoted dad to his own little girls. I also learned from several young students that mental health treatment and basic health care are criminally inadequate in our prosperous nation. And I learned that repeatedly submitting reports to Child Protective Services does not always save that child’s life. Sometimes beautiful young people die from drug overdoses and AIDS after having shown up on my doorstep, in spite of the best efforts of a platoon of professionals. Far more often, however, students thrive and grow and mature and become your Facebook friends. Some of them even learned something from me. My parents, of course, began my education on this planet, and I thank them for reading to me daily until I had mastered that magic. They were very young and always tried to do the right thing, but they made mistakes that were apparent even to my childish eyes. I ultimately learned that grown ups make errors, and that knowledge made my own errors more forgivable. My grandfather taught me to play “Malagueña” on the guitar, to read all books on religion and philosophy with an open mind, and to ask not only “What would Jesus do?” but “What would Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, Creator, or Krishna do?” My nana taught me to make tamales and to love every single one of your children even if they infuriated you or if you didn’t understand anything about them, and to always leave the door open for reconciliation and a cup of fresh coffee. My aunt Marty taught me to follow my heart, and my sister taught me to persevere and to laugh until it you pee your pants just a little. My brother taught me that a simple life could be the most joyful life. It doesn’t take much stuff to make me happy these days. My family, for the most part, makes me happy. Friends have added a huge part of my big life. I shared divorce wars, love affairs, broken dreams, two-day hangovers, tragedies, life-changing decisions, fulfilled wishes, and embarrassing episodes of idiocy with them. Many of them still love me, and I still love many of them. To say otherwise would be lying because some disappointed me or got distracted or just chose to walk away after sharing some time and space on this planet, and vice versa. I divorced a couple of those friends, literally, as I had confused friendship with love. A handful of friends have been with me for nearly fifty years, off and on, and other friends have only recently entered my sphere. Neighbors have become dear friends, and some friends have become closer to me than my birth family. A big life, I think, includes lots of friends, not all of whom are currently active, but are most certainly people who have added to girth of life. There are unknown millions of others with lives that are far larger than mine, and I want to get to know some of them. I wish I could have had a few hours with Joseph Campbell, for example, and a few with Theodore Sizer. I’d have liked to gain some material from knowing Aristophanes, Helen Keller, Jeanette Rankin, Samuel Clemmons, and Dorothy Parker personally, as well as Wendy Wasserstein and Thomas Jefferson. Thank goodness they wrote about their own big lives or wrote about the small lives of others and/or that others wrote about them. I feel that I do know Isabel Allende, Eckhart Tolle, Mark Morford, and Tina Fey because I read what they write. Writing makes a big life portable, able to travel easily even through time, and enables one to effortlessly absorb the colossal lives of others into one’s own. THAT’S big. Thanks again, Mr. Isaacs.