From the moment she could talk, our daughter was telling us how she was going to take the “Big kid bus” on her first day of school. At first, she’d surf along the back of our sofa, peer out our front window, and point at it with a near-toothless grin.
“Bus! Bus!” she’d call out in excitement. Eventually, she’d walk to the kitchen and tug at my shirt, telling me how she wished she could be on that big yellow bus, too.
“You’re too little right now, but some day, honey, some day,” I’d tell her.
Some day arrived today. It crept up on us like dusk creeps up on one of those perfect summer days –the ones you wish could go on and on forever. They don’t. Nothing lasts forever.
“That’s just how it is,” our daughter would say.
I could have used her five-year-old wisdom as that school bus pulled away today with half of my heart sitting on it. You prepare yourself for days like this. You tell yourself you must be strong for your child. I was. But I wasn’t prepared for her to run up to the bus without hesitation, climb the stairs like she was conquering Everest, then sit somewhere on the far side. In the ridiculously perfect movie-moment that had played in my mind for ages, she was peering out a window in our line of vision, blowing big fish kisses at us, waving at us–needing us.
As the bus pulled away, I clumsily chased after it a little, hoping she’d hear me say “I love you,” hoping she’d catch me waving madly at her. This was, of course, the scene in the movie where Mom looks like a complete idiot. Our daughter was oblivious to all activity outside the bus. She was gleefully talking with one of her little friends from down the street. She’d made it atop Everest, and she was happy.
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t call a soul for fear of spending the morning like a blubbering fool, but when we got back to the house, my fingers magically made their way to the phone, then dialed my mother.
“So, she’s off then? Did it go okay?” she asked. The moment I heard her voice, I burst into tears.
“Yeah. It went great. She didn’t even wave goodbye! She sat on the other side of the bus!”
“So, for five years, you’ve been working hard, preparing her for this moment. Making sure she’ll be okay. And now you’re crying because she’s so well-adjusted, she didn’t need to wave goodbye?”
I couldn’t help but laugh as I wiped the tears off my cheek. “Yeah. I see your point.”
Parents who have been in my place before have hinted to me that today was smaller than I think. It was just a pebble in an ocean of slippery rocks and perilous waves. Someday, our daughter will want to cross that ocean, losing sight of the shore completely. Today was just a first step–and it’s pretty clear she liked getting her feet wet.
It’s been our ritual for years now to say goodnight in an unusual way. “To Infinity!” I call out from her bedroom doorway as I turn out the light. “And beyond!” she responds from under the sea of glowing stars Daddy pasted on her ceiling.
In my always flamboyant, often clumsy, non-Disney-Mom manner, I will love this girl to infinity and beyond.
Today, I just needed to love her all the way to that bus.
'Big Steps' copyright 2010 by Heather Grace Stewart
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‘Leap by Heather Grace Stewart (ISBN 978-0-557-29619-4)
Review by UK Poet Tom Phillips (Various Artists)
Following on from 2008’s Where the Butterflies Go and to some extent picking up some of the threads and moods from that collection (and, indeed, the odd poem, such as the elegantly fragile ‘Forecast’, itself now cast in a new light by one of the poet’s own photographs), Heather Grace Stewart’s Leap contains poems which are simultaneously sparer, richer and more diverse. Here, again, the essential drama is between the ordinary daily routine, when ‘there are/deadlines to meet,/bills to pay,/diapers to change’ (‘Coping’), and the extraordinary ‘other’ which both haunts and tantalises, the poetry finding its occasion in the unexpected emergence of the latter in seemingly simply everyday situations. In ‘Offline’, for instance, an ice storm ‘slowed us/for a few short hours’ but also keeps back the world and its routines so a couple can talk and listen ‘like it mattered/like hearing our own eulogies//and the minutes melted into hours’, while in ‘Progress’ a woman caught up – and dissatisfied – in the hurly-burly of instant, demanding, virtual communication ‘texts and types/Tweets and Skypes//then sleeps outside/where stars and/fireflies decorate the/infinite darkness.’ Tellingly, perhaps, ‘coming up for air’ is one of the phrases which echo from one poem to another: the moments isolated in the poems, whether they be a chance encounter (‘Paths’) or a parachute drop (‘The sun-filled sky says, “Brilliant!”/while the wind whispers, “Fool!”’), become restorative acts.
That this should seem such a strong theme in the book is, perhaps, at least partly down to the inclusion of Grace Stewart’s photographs. These, too, by definition, ‘capture’ the moment, their clear, sharp aesthetic providing, not mere illustration as such, but a visual commentary, a heightening of atmosphere, as in the shot of a barn beneath an immense expanse of sky cut only by a single jetstream or the layers of fading blue, like a Rothko painting, in a picture of a lake and landing stage. Photographs and poems don’t always make the happiest of bedfellows, the one making the other too explicit, narrowing down rather than opening up potential meanings, but here the A4 format gives the images plenty of room and they enrich rather than detract from the experience of reading.
All of which, perhaps, is to overlook other crucial aspects of Grace Stewart’s writing: its directness and its humour. As well as the poems which are, as it were, attending to transcendence, there are those which dryly, drolly comment on the foibles of the internet age –in particular, Facebook and Twitter addiction, and, as the title of one piece has it, that ‘New Poetic Genre: The Status Update’. ‘If he were living today/would Shakespeare/use Facebook?’ muses Grace Stewart, postulating such poetic ‘updates’ as ‘Will Shakespeare can see a dagger before him’, while ‘one smart old man’, a sort of virtual Humbert Humbert, transforms himself into the ‘charming and wise’, double-d-cupped ‘Lolita’, and, in the self-explanatory short, ‘140 characters of less’, the whole Tweetocracy collapses into a satirical slogan the marketing department almost certainly won’t be plagiarising: ‘I’m bored, I’m bitter, I’m on Twitter’. On the other hand, too, this more direct, more performative style leads towards other, more serious themes, such as post-9/11 anxiety and the detachment of the almost mythical political world from the one which the rest of us inhabit – ‘one hand’, after all, really can’t ‘hold the weight/of the world.’
Ultimately, in fact, you could say that this collection embodies a similar recognition: poetry, too, can’t hold the weight of the world but it can, as it does in these accomplished but unforced pieces, engage, entertain and enliven. (Tom Phillips, Various Artists) Leap is available here
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Heather Grace Stewart 