The "Above the Bridge" Reading Series asked me to read the piece below at an event on 3/18/13. I realized I had done a reading for them almost exactly a year ago, and that the experiences between then and now have led me to a completely surprising place.
The theme was "Ides of March", which also extended to Shakespeare. I read Sonnet 29 after my piece, and a lot suddenly made sense.
If you are going through a rough patch, you need to focus on one beautiful thing.
And I did.
Ideas of March
Sister Celestine gave me an anniversary. When you are young and impressionable and 14 and learning Latin, you can become convinced that you have found a time machine. For me, it was called Latin and quickly propelled me back through the centuries, as if the years and calendar pages unwound like a spiral of dancers in a Busby Berkeley musical. Latin roots were hidden in all sorts of modern words, unlocking layer upon layer of meaning and association. “Fabula” is the root for confabulate, fable and also, fabulous.
Sr. Celestine taught us our declensions with a fervor that I didn’t know nuns were allowed to have. “A, Ae, Ae, Am, AAAAAAAAAA” She’d throw back her head. Knowingly overacting her part and making a fool of herself in front of teenage girls in uniforms. She was smart enough to make a joke about it, “Even if you remember nothing else about Latin, you’ll remember that.” She certainly helped us to remember more than what we needed to pass her tests.
She taught us self deprecating humor. “Latin’s a dead language/as dead as it can be/first it killed the Romans/now it’s killing me,” She taught us that the Gregorian Calendar is essentially the Julian calendar, but with Leap Year days added in. Which means that we can only commemorate the death of Davy Jones only once every four years. Before Caesar got his own calendar going, the year 46 BC had 445 days in it, marking it the “last year of confusion”. The more years I live, the more I want to argue with that. 1988 and 2004 were both very confusing to me.
Romans lived by the moon. They marked on the Roman calendar the first night of complete darkness, when there is a New Moon just beginning, the Kalends. And when the first quarter of it appears, the Nones. The Ides indicated the night of the Full Moon.
From Sr. Stella Maris, (aka “Sister Star of the Sea”) I learned that a soothsayer told Caesar to “Beware the Ides of March” in Shakespeare’s play. And that Shakespeare had taken the scene from Plutarch. How odd that the saying would come down through the centuries, not as some idiom involving useful advice, but as a warning that a leader overlooked. What if someone had told John F. Kennedy he would not live to see Thanksgiving of 1963? Or if my 23 year old father, watching Walter Cronkite, could have been warned that he was exactly halfway through his own life, and would miss Thanksgiving 23 years later?
I remember on the day of 9/11, nobody had any words to name it. For a while, it was a euphemism, “Recent Events”. And then, it claimed a date that nobody in our time or city can forget.
The calendar is filled with days like these. Birthdays, holidays, anniversaries of things that have managed to stay around long enough to seem important. Birthdays, and death days for people we have loved. There is some day that passes every year that marks our own death day; is it best to go just as spring has arrived or just as winter is starting? To have your last breath on a summer day, or to be forever entranced by the leaves in fall? Caesar must have looked at the days laid out on his own calendar. Did he ever get a chill down his back when he looked at his own calendar? Isn’t it nice to live in blissful ignorance?
What warning would I give my 14 year old self now? If anything, it would be to make sure that you don’t forget who you are from day to day. Back when I was just learning Latin, I remember the Ides of March being a phrase, nothing to be scared of in particular. Just another day in the calendar. A holiday of no special significance. A day of me just being me. And the more Ides I enjoy, the more versions of me I seem to be recognizing.
The passing of years has not settled on me a fear of age, like some of my contemporaries. The calendar leaves represent a layering of self upon self. A way for me to hear an echo, to find myself in a funhouse mirror, surprised at how much I haven’t changed.
Sr. Celestine is doing fine, and looks exactly the same, even decades later. Every March 15, I think of her. And I think of Julius Caesar and Shakespeare and Sr. Stella Maris and my high school friends and that version of me, a girl who had an insatiable curiosity. Who wanted to understand everything and become someone different everyday. Last March 15, I was buzzing about my first Above the Bridge reading, having no idea what craziness lay ahead of me. This year, I can identify myself as an Artist, capital A, with a piece hanging in a gallery. A piece from a massive project that I hadn’t even envisioned a year ago.
Instead of fearing the Ides, I choose to “be aware” of them. And celebrate my every day self in all my myriad variations.
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