Kathryn Douglas, MFA, MFA

Palimpsest: Yale Literary & Art Magazine

2011-08-08T07:20:00.000-07:00

Project: Oversaw production, publication, marketing and distribution of four issues of award-winning multi-media, cross-disciplinary magazine at Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Palimpsest served as laboratory for student editors, writers, and designers across 13 graduate and professional schools at Yale: each issue is an artist book which includes a cd and/or dvd with original music, film, video and digital artwork. Issue #4 includes a make-your-own paper theater with changeable sets based on a play included in the issue and an alternative audio guide for visitors at the Yale Art Gallery, one of the many collaborations of the magazine. Advised editorial teams and managed print and dvd production with local and international printers. Issue #5 designed by artists of the firm agency: collective, click HERE for details.

Alumni Profiles from 2010-11 Employer Brochure

2011-04-05T13:22:00.000-07:00

Poster: Alumni in NGOs Career Panel, 2010

2011-04-05T13:17:00.000-07:00

LOGO for Career Development Office, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

2011-04-05T13:15:00.000-07:00

Poster: Fall Programs 08, Career Development Office, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

2008-07-27T13:58:00.000-07:00

Through Her Eyes Cover: 68 page exhibition catalog, Yale School of Forestry

2008-07-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

Career Development Office, Yale School of Forestry

2008-07-27T09:21:00.000-07:00

Environmental Career Guide Sample Page

2008-07-27T09:05:00.000-07:00

Poster: Federal Career Month at Yale

2008-07-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

Current Editorial Project: Ask Me How I Got Here

2008-07-27T07:51:00.000-07:00

Memoir Book Project for William Males, tentatively titled Ask Me How I Got Here. Subject: Story of draft dodger and deserter during Vietnam via Oklahoma and Yale. William deserted to Sweden, where he made a new life with his Swedish family. I have been working with William for several years on editing his work for publication.

DESIGN: Off The Beaten Track Logo

2007-05-04T09:25:00.000-07:00

PHOTO: Children, Portrait

2007-05-03T08:33:00.000-07:00

PHOTO: Family of Origin, 9 kids, Mom and Aunt Eileen

2007-05-03T08:14:00.000-07:00

DESIGN: Women Mentoring Women Book Mark

2007-05-03T07:56:00.000-07:00

DESIGN: Promotional Bookmark for Palimpsest

2007-05-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

PUBLICITY: Women Mentoring Women Programs

2007-05-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

As Advisor to Women Mentoring Women fellows in the McDougal Center of Yale Graduate School, I inaugurated mentoring programs for graduate women students.

For more information, and to see our monthly "Women on Campus" web-column, visit www.yale.edu/wmw.

The accompanying article is from Yale Graduate School Newsletter, Volume 9, no. 2, November 2007

PUBLICITY: Professional Development Programs

2007-05-02T13:18:00.001-07:00

As Assistant Director of the McDougal Center, I initiated a series of professional development programs for the Student Life and Careers & Professional Development Fellows at the Yale Graduate Center. During the pilot year, we offered sessions covering a range of topics including "What Makes A Good Meeting," "Presentation Skills," and "Conflict Resolution."

The accompanying article is from Yale Graduate School Newsletter, volume 9, no. 2, November 2006

PUBLICITY: Dissertation Boot Camp 2007

2007-05-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

As the advisor for Academic Writing Programs at Yale Graduate School, I developed programs to serve the academic writing needs of Yale Masters and PhD candidates. I introduced a new program, "Dissertation Boot Camp," modelled on other similar programs but with more of a "retreat" flavor to it. The program, in modified form, will be repeated in coming years.

Accompanying article from Yale Graduate School Newsletter, volume 9, no. 5, March 2007

See more programs at www.yale.edu/mcdougal/writing.

PUBLICITY: Palimpsest #5 Is Here!

2007-05-02T12:26:00.000-07:00

I served as advisor and essentially publisher/managing editor of Palimpsest: Yale Literary & Arts Magazine for four years.

For the fifth year in a row, the creative forces behind Palimpsest have pushed the boundaries of artistic experimentation and the form of the book, stitching together different sizes, weights, and tints of paper into a multi-media publication that includes a comics section; fiction and non-fiction; photography and other visual art; plus a DVD containing films, music, drama, and poetry. -- Yale Graduate School Newsletter, Volume 9, Number 6, May/June 2007

For more information see www.yale.edu/palimpsest.

NON-FICTION: Girls Pretending

2007-05-02T10:48:00.000-07:00

Published in Palimpsest: Yale Literary & Arts Magazine, v. 4, 2006

Girls Pretending
When I was five years old, my friend Marybeth broke her collar bone. My mother baby-sat for her after our half-day kindergarten class, earning a little money, while her mother worked as a teacher. Marybeth had an incurable finger sucking habit, despite her mother and step-father's efforts to curb it with nasty tasting ointments painted onto her fingers and bribes. She also had the habit of twisting her hair around her fingers and pulling it out, a few strands at a time, leaving her with a bald spot.

Marybeth and I were Romper Room fans, and the day she broke her collar bone, we may or may not have been eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with milk in front of the television. My younger siblings, Suzanne and Jimmy, three and two years old, may have been taking a nap. Michael may not have been born, my mother may have been pregnant with him. What I do remember is the drama, the screaming, the whisking away of Marybeth by her mother who mysteriously appeared, called home from work.

The children on Romper Room that day, or some preceding day, or perhaps all week, were riding pretend cars around the studio--cardboard boxes with no tops or bottoms and brightly painted cars on the sides that they stepped into, picked up around their middles, then carted with them as they ran on their little lucky TV-star legs, much like the Flintstones.

My mother may have cut the tops and bottoms out of two cardboard boxes. Marybeth and I may have yanked them off ourselves. We may not have painted cars on the sides. But we did step into them, pick them up around our middles, and race around the den. I have no idea how long we enjoyed this activity, but I do know that Marybeth decided to race her car along the armless sofa, and on her last trip, tipped over and crashed onto her shoulder on the floor. That's when the screaming began. I remember fear, guilt, and a sudden whisking aside, far from the attentions of my possibly pregnant mother.

The next day, Marybeth re-appeared in a full upper body cast, with one hand sticking out of the front, making it extremely difficult for her to suck her pointer and middle fingers, or twist and pull out her hair. Of this I am sure.

Not to be outdone, either before or after Marybeth broke her collarbone, but also during kindergarten, I smacked my head on the radiator at the bottom of the stairs at her house, necessitating a visit to the hospital and stitches that I can still feel being sewn into my scalp.

As a later-in-life child with her siblings grown and gone, Marybeth had many attentions and things that I went without in a house of nine children. Her step-father was a pianist who gave her hours-long lessons on the baby grand in their den. She was an extremely talented pianist.

Her family ate things like tongue, while at my house the exotica included frozen store-brand fish sticks and melted open-faced Velveeta on white bread with mustard. They had matzos that Marybeth and I ate slathered with real butter even though her family wasn't Jewish, and Marybeth got away with not eating all of her peas but still getting dessert. We would lie on the floor near the piano, listening to Peter And The Wolf and Swan Lake with our eyes closed so we could imagine the wolf as a French horn like Leonard Bernstein said, and pretend we were Odette, our spirits flying high above the lake with Siegfried.

Their house was also filled with magazines and books--including her step-father's magazines with naked children in them that he showed us--a luxury that didn't exist at my house, as my father was firm in the belief that we should use our multi-million dollar library that his taxes paid for, rather than buy books or subscriptions. And I did use that multi-million dollar establishment, one I Can Be An ______ (Astronaut, Engineer, Artist) book at a time, nestled in the cardboard castle in the children's section, planning my life and earning my fiercely competed-for reading club stars. But still I marveled over the lavishly illustrated texts Marybeth owned, all shapes and sizes and scents lining the shelves in her very own room, including the oversized ones that made the most excellent sleds when placed on the carpeted stairs, tilted, mounted, and ridden down to bottom.

Which is where my head met the radiator.

But it wasn't all smashed heads and broken collarbones for us. When Marybeth moved and we were on to first grade in our separate schools, I visited her new house several towns away. While we were playing horseshoes, or a sorry game of two-person tag, or pretending we were settlers of the wild, wild West, her step-father, who was watering the garden, decided it would be good fun to drench our t-shirts. At the ripe age of six, I unwittingly entered my first and last wet t-shirt contest.

Showering later in the enormous blue (or possibly green)-tiled master bedroom stall, Marybeth and I pretended we were fountain statues by posing and spitting water out of our mouths. She told me that her stepfather had raped her, but only because he had mistaken her for her mother. I pretended to know what she was saying.

NON-FICTION: Meditation on Tupperware

2007-05-02T06:57:00.000-07:00

Published in Palimpsest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine, v. 3, 2005

Photo: Stephanie Kays

Meditation on Tupperware

I don’t know exactly when I lost touch with Tupperware, but it occurred to me today to ask, “Is Tupperware still going strong?”

When I was a teenager, my mother tried to get me involved with Tupperware. The daughter of a friend of a friend of a friend of hers was selling the stuff, and apparently the product was wonderful and the money was good. And when you sold it, you got all sorts of freebies, including a hostess set, and I think that was what my mother was after. My mother wasn’t looking into this for herself. This was her ambition for me, her third daughter. And perhaps it was the daughter of a friend of a friend of a friend who had managed to buy her own car, to secure a proposal of marriage with a flashy diamond engagement ring and to dress professionally with an air of confidence to go along with her perfect body and hair cut that put the idea in my mother’s head that this might be a good thing for me too.

There were several problems with this scenario. I wasn’t ready to give up jeans, T-shirts and work boots for one. I had no car. We didn’t have the kind of family, friends and neighbors who would buy the stuff. I was extremely uncomfortable in a room of strangers, particularly middle-class suburban housewives who burped their containers to get the air out before refrigerating, and in truth, beyond the adorable key chain with the teeny tiny Tupperware bowl and real, detachable, burpable Tupperware lid I received at the information/training session--which would have been an ideal accessory for my younger sister Suzanne’s Barbie Carousel Kitchen had we been say, seven or eight years younger--I couldn’t have cared less about Tupperware products.

My friend Gina’s mother was heavily into Tupperware. Pat had a huge collection, not only of Tupperware bowls, rectangles and cylinders, but Tupperware closet organizing systems. Even though all Tupperware is stackable, there is only so much space even an enthusiast can dedicate to it. The Tupperware cabinets in her kitchen contained special racks on which to store the containers and lids. The lids, in addition to the trademark burpability seals, have a tab which is how you pull the lid back for burping (while gently pressing the center). The tabs are also notched so they can be hung on the organizer bars, and Pat’s were neatly ordered by size and color, biggest to smallest, like-colors together, cascading a surprise of crystalline order out of open cabinet doors, quite unlike the avalanche typically set off when opening my mother’s cabinets.

Pat was a great cook too, and her Tupperware was daily filled with fresh Tupperware Salad Spinner-spun greens, homemade sauce, and pre-boiled and peeled eggs, handy for an anytime, healthy snack.

The first time Gina and I got drunk, we filled a Tupperware container with a shot of this and a thumbsworth of that from her parent’s liquor cabinet, concocting something I suppose was like a Long Island Iced-Tea without the sweet part (we were ON Long Island, after all). We walked over to a nearby park and sipped from the Tupperware while swinging on swings, until we were suitably silly and the brew was gone. We tossed the container in some bushes and stumbled home, but a few days later, as Pat had noticed the missing container, Gina retrieved it, snuck it into the house and washed it out really well. We were quite relieved it was only the Tupperware she noticed missing.

Gina’s family didn’t have a huge amount of money compared to mine, but my parents had a few more kids, higher taxes and we only owned a few random pieces of Tupperware purchased at tag sales and thrift stores or the occasional piece someone forgot to bring home after a party. I don’t think it was a class thing; it was more of a priorities situation. We lived in a better neighborhood and took family vacations every summer. They had a wine cellar, rose gardens and lots of Tupperware.

I don’t know anyone who owns Tupperware anymore, at least not with the kind of vigor Pat brought to her enviable collection. My own kitchen has long been geared towards recycling and re-use (which, now that I think about it, is part of what Tupperware is all about), though I have discontinued the practice of washing and drying plastic bags. I have also for the first time recently invested in disposable leftover containers. I actually re-use these save for the occasional one-that-gets-away. When an overly ripe item I can not bear to deal with mano a mano presents itself, I dispose of the entire container and contents, as the SC Johnson Family of Brands surely intended.

My mother did pass on to me several small, trademark burpable Tupperware containers from the harvest collection--muted reds and oranges--but they were not transparent and any delectable of roughly 2/3 c. or less that found its way inside would rarely see the light of day again before it was far too late. I’m afraid I’m an out-of-sight-out-of-mind leftover engineer.

Am I sad that I don’t know any hard-core Tupperware users anymore? I think its less sadness than curiosity. I don’t know many Republicans anymore either, and that doesn’t bother me too much. But I am curious about them too.

I guess I would just like to know if this subculture still exists. Are there women and men out there with the resources, time and inclination to practice the high art of kitchen and food organization like Gina’s Mom did? Are there parties to which I am not invited going on in living rooms all over southern Connecticut? Once or twice a month, I do like to really cook. Sometimes I will even make up batches of sauce or soup or other freezables, which is where my disposable containers come into play. I bake during holidays, and am not totally inept at home economics. But even though I am efficient when I get going, and part of my periodic procurement of household reserves includes laying in supplies of healthy snack choices for my son Drew, the choices stand amid what can only be described as domestic chaos on the verge of order.

Part of my disassociation from this now totally foreign world has always been there, traceable to that information session I attended twenty-five years ago with my mother, who herself was turned off when she realized that the hostess sample kit one used on the party circuit was not actually free. It was cash up front on that display carrying case filled with the latest wares, a lot of cash as I recall, to be earned back over time with every faithless converted to the cause. I am grateful because this freed me up to seek employment elsewhere, to don the brown, yellow and orange polyester of the affable, speedy burger-board queen I was during my tenure at Burger King (Gina was a McDonald’s queen) and to eventually trade that uniform for the dining hall apron worn over T-shirts and jeans while chopping onions and celery as a “salad girl” on the way to a no-frills marriage and my first college degree.

Another part of this disassociation stems from my inclusion in the single working Mom set, as well as still being, at heart, like my best friend Jan, another single Mom once from Long Island who passes children back and forth with the ex. Jan recently admitted being a “throw-my-clothes-on-the-floor-kind-of-a-gal.” And I think this aptly describes one of several essential qualities we share.

During our weekly or daily or monthly (depends on the crisis level) long distance telephone conversations, Jan and I comfort each other regarding our mutual inabilities to consistently work full-time, manage household finances, cook, clean, rake leaves, spend quality time with our children, chauffeur and change oil while simultaneously doing home repairs. I might complain about exhaustion and the four baskets of laundry I have yet to fold, and she will cheer me up by saying, “What? The clothes are clean, aren’t they?” Last week she advised me re: the overwhelming nature of the Saturday chores before me to: “Put on some music, throw on a facial masque and sweep the floor.” Likewise, when Jan frets about her inability to apply plastic to all of her northern New York subzero winters windows because she has been working ten hour days and cooking for her twins, I console her with my sage advice to “Just do the one’s upstairs. Don’t bother with the blow-dryer part, the wrinkles will work themselves out.”

I’m not sure if things would be that much different if I lived the leisure-class lifestyle with which I associate all things Tupperware and a concordant higher domestic order. In addition to being a “throw-my-clothes-on-the-floor-kind-of-a-gal,” I would have to say I’m also an “I’d-rather-be-reading” or “I’d-rather-be-in-the-hot-tub” or “I’d-rather-be-doing-anything-but-housework” kind-of-a-gal. Prolonged periods of domesticity, no matter how artful they may be, would inevitably lead me over the edge, and no doubt before long I’d be drinking in the middle of the day, schtooping the tennis coach and wearing work boots again.

It might be a different story if I had the wherewithal to employ others to feng shui my home while I read or soaked in the hot tub, but perhaps, like the Bushmen and women in the Kalahari desert in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, who, when presented with a Tupperware party, rightly had no idea whether they were looking at strange drums or some lethal, animated creature-that-burps, I am just better off incuriously out of the loop. As for Republicans, my father--inexplicably breaking with a long line of Irish-Catholic Democrats dedicated to the welfare of the common woman and man--was one and I do miss him, a lot. So perhaps in an effort to extend the democratic ideal of free and open debate to kitchens across the land, it’s not a bad idea to invite a few Republicans to my next potluck dinner party. Who knows, they might even leave a piece of Tupperware behind.

DESIGN: Yale Graduate Teaching Center

2007-05-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

Graduate Teaching Center
Fall Programs

DESIGN: Publishing Day Poster

2007-04-30T07:25:00.000-07:00

Academic Writing Programs
Publishing Day Poster
Yale Grad School

DESIGN: Family Life Brochure

2007-04-30T07:06:00.000-07:00

McDougal Student Life Yale Grad School
Family Life Brochure

DESIGN: Orientation Brochure

2007-04-30T07:03:00.000-07:00

For Yale Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
Orientation Schedule

DESIGN: Museum Career Panel Poster

2007-04-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

Museum Careers for PhDs
Yale Graduate Career Services

DESIGN: Peer Review Poster

2007-04-30T06:44:00.000-07:00

For Academic Writing Programs
Yale Graduate School

DESIGN: Grad Night at Yale Rep

2007-04-29T06:48:00.000-07:00

For McDougal Center Student Life Office
Yale Graduate School

DESIGN: Community Service Programs

2007-04-29T06:42:00.000-07:00

Community Service Programs
McDougal Center Student Life
Yale Graduate School

DESIGN: Yale Grad School Winter Ball

2007-04-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

McDougal Center Student Life Office
Yale Graduate School

DESIGN: Off The Beaten Track Brochure

2007-04-29T06:35:00.000-07:00

Page 1
Off The Beaten Track Literacy Services.
Brochure targets the educational market
for structured language training services.

DESIGN: Off The Beaten Track page 2

2007-04-29T06:31:00.000-07:00

Inside brochure for Off The Beaten Track

PHOTO: Family portrait

2007-04-29T06:19:00.000-07:00

This is a photo of my nephew Michael, left, daughter Maureen, me and son Drew, taken last fall when Michael was visiting Connecticut for a conference.

POETRY: Wild Woman at the Drive-Thru

2007-04-28T16:58:00.000-07:00

Published in Palimpsest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine, volume 2, 2004

The wildish woman wants her meat—
to crack with bones of stony teeth.
By bone, by teeth, her bidding spits
towards shrouded disembodiment.
Her ruthless course of plunder done,
she nabs the prey, and presses on.
And of her feast she is well-pleased:
There is a straw, they held the cheese.

POETRY: Mud Season

2007-04-28T16:57:00.000-07:00

Heart, unquiet thing,
I don’t want to hate anymore. I want love
to trample through my arms again. – Henri Cole

I don’t know what happened to John
after the night he tried to return, bereft,
crying, “I don’t have what other people have,” and I
made him leave, nonetheless.

We tramped the Adirondacks,
Maureen between us on little legs
to the rotting mink traps near Uncas
under a snowy moon.

She tore off her clothes that same year
we hit the Pacific coast, exiled
from home in Raquette Lake –“In or out,”
we were told by the locals.

Chose 3,000 miles away instead of stuck
in wilderness—six unpassable miles became our road.
Mud season starts. Mohegan Lake stops
its freeze-groan.

We decided then to have Drew—Maureen nude,
waving a stalk of beach grass over pebbled sand,
running ahead like a white flag—in surrender
to California’s icy shore.

These days she likes her water warm.
I left love at a fork. “If you don’t leave, I’ll call the police.”
Wheat from chaff, and always too much chaff—
children, by far, the best piece.

NON-FICTION: Michael, Who Resembles God

2007-04-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

Published in Palimpest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine, volume 5, 2007

Michael, Who Resembles God

The fatal accident held up 10 trains on the main line from nine minutes to an hour and a half. The death train was delayed 68 minutes at the crash and lost 23 minutes at Patchogue where the damaged locomotive had to be taken off and a freight engine substituted for the rest of the run to Montauk. – New York Newsday, February 6, 1945, page 2

On the morning of February 5, 1945, my grandfather Michael kissed my grandmother May goodbye, dropped her off at Grumman’s garage where she was working for the “war effort,” and continued on to his job at the main plant in Bethpage. The night before he had a dream that my aunt Eileen, then eight, had lost a tooth—a premonition dream, according to family lore, which meant she would lose a friend. Michael was superstitious, and told May he was worried about Eileen.

While Michael was dreaming of Eileen losing her tooth, his sister Katherine lay dreaming of the banshee in her railroad apartment in Queens.

Due to the war being on, school was closed that Monday in February to conserve heat, and my then sixteen year-old mother Peg was at the movies with her fifteen year-old brother Michael and the eight year-old Eileen when their father’s body was tossed “400 feet from the crossing as the train carried the twisted truck chassis nearly a third of a mile scattering debris along the right of way.” Gregory Peck was in the film, but no one can remember the title.

I grew up knowing that my grandfather was killed by a train. It was part of my litany of family statistics: one of ten children, one died so I’m really one out of nine, number seven of ten, six of nine, three grandparents from Ireland, one from Poland, always had cats, Irish-Catholic yes hahaha that’s why there are so many of us, grandfather killed by train.

Every Sunday, with my grandmother in my aunt’s 1967 emerald green Mustang convertible (with white leather interior and roof that Eileen cleaned with a toothbrush) idling by the unmarked grave of my sister and the sizable granite stone engraved MANLEY/Michael, 1900-1945, we would recite ten times fast:

Hail Mary, full of grace
The Lord is with thee
Huminah huminah huminah women
And huminah huminah huminah Jesus

Holy Mary, mother of God
Huminah huminah sinners
Huminah huminah deaths,
amen.

Followed by an Our Father. I would get very lost. But not my grandmother, as she was the one fingering the rosary beads. One, two, three, four she thumbed. She got to kiss the cross at the end, too. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory... Smooch.

I don’t really remember what I was thinking in the backseat of Eileen’s super clean Mustang. I do know that when I went to church with my grandmother and aunt, the cemetery was part of the deal. But so was a quarter for the candy store. Then there was breakfast with the family no matter who I went to church with, including jelly donuts, fresh hard rolls, bacon and eggs. What did it mean to me that a man I never met garnered the undying love and devotion of his wife and daughters who mourned his passing with unrivaled freshness their whole lives? I was six, seven, eight years old. I had a sweet tooth and liked to run with the boys and climb trees. What did I know about loss?

For Christmas 1944 Michael asked May if she wanted the diamond engagement ring he could never before afford. He was already giving her the clear deed to their house that year. He had come from Ireland with nothing, following my grandmother who, ticket to America in hand, refused to marry him in Ireland. I think she knew that if they married in Ireland, children would come and they might never make it abroad. She was determined to join her brothers in New York—perhaps for adventure, perhaps to make a better life for herself and her family. Twenty plus years later, after saving and working, the tide was finally turning for May and Michael Manley.

May, being the practical woman she was, told Michael she would prefer to hold off on the ring and get a washing machine. And so the brand spanking new Bendex arrived on Christmas morning. She was thrilled. Seven weeks later, her feelings changed, and she would always regret this choice.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. – Psalm 23

When I was growing up, May had a photo of my grandfather mounted on a piece of wood and jigsaw-cut in silhouette—a gift from my mother. She kept it in the built-in bookshelf behind her TV chair. The photo was mounted on a base, with Michael preserved in perpetuity like a thick paper doll, slightly contraposto, one arm close to his side and weighed down with a stack of horseshoes like ballast, the other arm poised in the fore, caught in that moment where the eye and hand silently measure distance between shoe and post, considering weight, velocity, the arc of the swing. Or perhaps he was just posturing for my mother the adoring photographer who loved to watch him fling horseshoes into the mortgage-free side yard. He is tall, dark, handsome, captured in a crisp suit. It was most likely a Sunday. My mother recently gave me this little statue, and so now my grandfather stands in my curio cabinet, nestled amongst my children’s clunky clay creations and school awards, considering his next move.

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.

When May left her mother’s home in Ireland at the age of 19, she promised to return in five years. Five years came and went as May tried to save the fare for a trip home. Peggy and Michael came too, ten months apart. Then six years came, ten, eleven? And then the letter from Ireland months after my great-grandmother Mary was dead and buried. There would be no trip home to see Mom.

I wouldn’t fully comprehend the significance of this loss until I made my own pilgrimage to Ireland. May never talked about it, though along with my grandfather’s death, it shadowed me my whole life. I didn’t understand why May was so emotional when I went off to college, crying like she would never see me again. Her crying scared me—I think it scared all of us, Mom and Eileen included. But of course now I see a woman who said goodbye to her own mother, fully expecting to return. Who kissed her husband goodbye one morning, never to see him again. On her eventual trips back to Ireland with my mother and aunt, driving down the narrow roads of Dunmore in County Galway, May would call out, “Mom, I’m home.” And then there would be tears. It seems perfectly obvious to me now why goodbyes were so hard for May—why there was nothing light about them.

When May was bed-ridden in my mother’s house after the stroke that eventually killed her, she asked my mother, “Did my mother like the coat I bought her?” to which my mother replied, “Oh yes, she loved it.” May also called out constantly for Michael, and, given that she had a father, husband, brother, son, grandson and great-grandson named Michael, we couldn’t quite figure out who she meant. My brother Michael was the only one actually around, and so he would come to her with tea or to fluff her pillow, to be whichever Michael she wanted him to be. Michael the leader of heaven’s armies, Michael the archangel, Michael who is like God.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. -- Matthew 5:4

I am 45 years old now, avoiding a trip to the endodontist for a look at a failing molar that may have to be pulled. “Keep your teeth as long as you can,” May always told my mother, who, like me, has spent thousands and thousands of dollars preserving the masticators. I don’t think May’s advice has to do with the superstitious dream of losing teeth/losing a friend, I think it had more to do with the real discomfort May experienced when eventually, she traded the last few in for a full set of dentures. Still, I am trying to put all these pieces together in a meaningful way, through stories and bits of information gleaned, imagined and possibly invented over the years. The anecdotes are disjointed, though the feelings, the shadow, the extended mourning create a strong and steady arc.

I used to be puzzled and even annoyed by this never-ending sorrow. It felt like an imposition on me somehow—the dramatic and easy flowing tears, the idolizing of my grandfather, a seeming inability to move on. 10 years ago my father died. It was devastating, and as a family we came together, laughed, cried, eulogized, got angry, and for the most part, eventually moved on. Fathers die, life goes on. What was wrong with my grandmother, mother and aunt?

About two years ago Eileen sent me a copy of the newspaper accounts of my grandfather’s death. The front page headline of the New York Newsday South Suffolk Edition, February 6, 1945, in 1 inch bold letters reads:

SUFFOLK MAN DIES IN CROSSING CRASH (Story on page 2)

A photo of the mangled truck my grandfather was driving accompanies the article, along with what I imagine was the most important piece of information for my grandmother, that he was “killed instantly,” and the information quoted earlier that he had been tossed 400 feet from the point of impact. As I discussed the article with my mother, I realized that she didn’t even know this last detail. She knew his body was beyond recognition. The wake was closed casket, and when she and her cousin tried to peek inside when no one was looking, they discovered a metal seal beneath the lid.

May had neatly folded the article and kept it in her dresser drawer with valuables, showing it to no one. Like her grief, she tucked this piece of the story away, though we could all feel it. It wasn’t until May’s death that Eileen found it, and then she kept it to herself for another 12 years.

Beyond the gory details, the dramatic report of the “death train,” I, through the impersonal distance of reader to newspage was struck for the first time by just how sad and tragic this event was to this fledgling family. It hit me hard, like it happened to some other family yesterday and I was hearing of it for the first time. My father died at the more reasonable age of 69, after raising nine children to adulthood alongside my mother, and to a long illness where we had the privilege of preparing ourselves over time and gracefully escorting him to the cusp of the next world. But at 45, my grandmother was left with two teenagers and an eight year old to support, her heart broken in the most shocking way. Overnight she became a single mother and widow, and spent the next 25 years standing on her feet 40 hours a week, selling notions at
W. T. Grant and altering clothes in her home on the side.

Mom, we’re home!

I grew up with stories and photos of my mother, aunt and grandmother’s trips “home,” May’s house in Dunmore had been converted into a mechanic’s shop, and they always visited it, along with the cemetery, church and the neighbors and friends May knew. I ached to see this place, and finally took the trip with my mother, aunt and two sisters in 1998, the five of us packed in a mini-van, my mother and aunt shouting conflicting directions from the back seat through the streets of Dunmore. “I think we passed it.” “No, it’s just ahead on the left, set back from the road next to the bakery.” I drove past the bakery and pulled over. Before us stood a large parking lot. Since my mother and aunt’s last visit, the house had been razed.

We were shocked. The five of us got out of the van and walked around in disbelief. We took turns crying, asking Eileen and Mom to tell us every detail about the place they could remember, exploring the ruins of the (Episcopal!) church still standing next door, and eventually took pictures of each other standing where the house used to be.

Towards the end of our visit to Dunmore, we went to the old church cemetery where the bones of Mary and Michael Ryan lay—in one of the crumbling, unmarked graves where there is no one left to point and say “They’re right over here!” The rest of my crew was too tired for this last leg, and so I hiked up the hill and through the rusty iron gate, walked around a bit and then stood very still amongst the graves and weeds. I took long breaths, waiting for my heart rate to slow before returning to the van, and in the stillness felt something snap deep inside me. It wasn’t a breaking snap, it was something snapping together. It was something much larger than me, something that had long been apart.

After Dunmore, we drove on to my grandfather’s homestead in Crossmolina, County Mayo, covering the fifty miles by van that he used to cover on his bicycle when he returned home on breaks from his job as a gard in Dunmore, the job that took him to the chance meeting of my grandmother. We were greeted by celebratory shots of whiskey followed by a meal of meat, dark bread and root vegetables prepared by my grandfather’s niece and nephews, who have inherited the homestead which they still farm and on which they raise dairy cows. They have built a new house on the property, and the calves now live in the original structure where my grandfather and his seven siblings were raised.

NON-FICTION: Lucy Stoners

2007-04-28T16:44:00.000-07:00

"Lucy Stone: in her lifetime, achieved a number of important "firsts" for which we can remember her. She was the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She even achieved a "first" at death, by being the first person in New England to be cremated. She's remembered most for one first: being the first woman in the United States to keep her own name after marriage."

I am not a Lucy Stoner, and I don't know if there is a moniker for women who take their husbands name and later, take their father's back, when, thwack, the husband is no longer in question.

I WAS the first person in my family to earn a masters degree.

I was sentimental about names, took the name Keefer for my father-in-law really, conjured respect I guess it was, so he could have grandchildren with his name. I wasn't a Stepford manikin, I had thoughts about it, it was a question, a question my foremothers never asked. But it because of them that I asked it at all, and probably following the lead of my eldest sister, I took John's family name, as she took her John's family name, Nolan. This can be a tricky thing. Now my sister has her new husband's name, and her daughter, from another man, has John Nolan's name.

Later, I learned this chant: I am Kathryn, daughter of Margaret, daughter of Mary, daughter of Margaret, daughter of Sarah. But then I lose Delia. Delia Douglas nee Mitchell. Daughter of Ganley. So I am Kathryn, daughter of Robert, son of Delia, daughter of Brigid.

I am also many things. Poet, administrator, Mom. Networker, sometimes hermit, but I can work a crowd. I can work strangers. When I walk the 3/4 miles from my car to work it is a veritable gauntlet of street people, friends, students, merchants that I must greet. And it is at these times that I practice love and kindness, practice treating everyone the same, pretending that we are all part of the same one. I learned this somewhere along these lines of naming.

My father's name, Douglas, is a Scottish name. But my grandfather, Louis, or Ludavich, changed the name from Dlugasz, a Polish name, when he came to New York from the small town of Brody, now part of the Ukraine.

What's in a name?

I was so young when I got married, that I didn't really lose my professional self with the name change, as is often an issue. There was no professional self at the time. There was a human woman bent on making babies, and so she did. With a little help.

Margaret Manley, Mary Ryan, Margaret Gleason, Sarah Malarky. Malarky is funny. One can be full of malarkey, and so my foremothers and forefathers must have inspired this joke. Seems to fit.

Back and back. Can't duck the assignations or genetics, salt from earth that I feel, from all quarters. The mixing up of it. William Keefer's DNA, from Raymond whom I loved more. Grandpa, who watched John and I build a pool deck for the family saying, "I love to watch a woman work." He had eyes for me.

Bill was another story.

I remember him announcing one drunken night in front of the tv that he was a "leg man," daring John, I think, to announce what kind of man he was. Like the elephant in the room, there my breasts were. I am more known for my breasts, so not sure if he was asking if John was a "breast man," but John didn't say.

NON-FICTION: Panorama

2007-04-28T16:43:00.000-07:00

pan·o·ram·a [pan-uh-ram-uh, -rah-muh] –noun
1.an unobstructed and wide view of an extensive area in all directions.
2. a continuously passing or changing scene or an unfolding of events.

Ziggy hasn’t gotten over yanking on the leash, so I’m anxious to pass the ballplayers, reach the trail by the river to let him off.

An unseasonably cold Holy Saturday in April, intent on a good dog run and scamper, I deliberate on our route. Up a little to the right, a long flat path doubles back easily above the ball field for my shorter days.

I haven’t been to the top of West Rock since winter’s days of comfort raised it up, since my legs grew accustomed to rest. If I wasn’t alone I would do it. I would be the one coaxing my friend Maryann along, or Maureen, reluctant, complaining that she doesn’t like hiking, though as a child, she was our little mountain goat, bounding up Blue Mountain’s high peak while I halted, caught my breath, tried to keep up.

What if this was my last time, if after today I wasn’t able anymore?

To the log, I push, I’ll try the log, see how I feel. If I wasn’t alone I’d do it, caught in conversation lifting me easily along, and so I think of all the peaks achieved, how West Rock Mountain is relatively small.

I remember Dad swinging his arms as we walked part way down Watkin’s Glen, head turning from side to side. The perfect exercise he said—this former soldier and high school football, basketball, baseball and tennis star would know, even though I never once saw him wear sneakers.

We stopped at the overlook, the panorama he’d say. Better than that other four-syllable word he loved, ignoramus, teaching us instead the longest palindrome in the world—A man, a plan, a canal…Panama. We’d be tired, but he’d push on. And I see how it was both for us and through us that he would lead, as my children give me the strength and will to do what I otherwise might skip without them-as-point. What’s the point? Maureen and Drew.

At Camp Uncas, I canoed Maureen over to the peninsula where bears have been spotted, 10 miles into heart of wilderness, unafraid with her, but afraid to do it alone.

Strength by five-year old in tow. Strength with five-year old in tow. The mystery of parenting, how it makes us stronger. Puts a point on everything. Imparts wisdom to ignoramuses—of panoramic palindromes and the wonders of the natural world. Parented, parenting, caring for a pet.

I start to focus on the two feet of ground in front of me, peripheral vision as the trail turns rocky and steepness increases with my heart rate, slapping on the leash just before the summit, the asphalt road hardly anyone travels from the other side of the mountain.

What if this were the last time?

How does winter manage to raise the mountain every year, a few yards higher than I remember from beneath my sister Laurie’s afghan in my recliner?

I walk off the slight burn in newly discovered inner thighs, ambling towards Judge’s Cave where half a dozen cyclists rest in self-satisfaction knowingly shared. It’s been a while since I had a good and tired dog, since I tamped that mountain down into a manageable piece of weekly routine. In the heart of summer it’s nearly daily, shrunk to a reasonable size, no big whoop.

Here, on what is perhaps the last day I am able to, Ziggy and I circle the summit, then turn off the asphalt for the big descent. Just past the dangerous drop, I raise my hand in the signal for “sit,” which by some miracle of training he does. Slip off the leash. He darts ahead and down, as is his nature.