#814: Walking to Breakfast with Mark

for Mark Solomon

He had written a note to a friend,
inviting her to tonight’s
reading on the occasion of being
back after a two-year absence
from this annual conference
of alumni from the Warren Wilson
MFA Program for Writers.
He wrote to her about how he felt
to be reunited with his fellow
“Wallies.”

Mark graduated
from the program 35 years
ago, spending his first years
of graduate school at the
tender young age of 50,
has since attended dozens
of alumni conferences, where
at least two decades ago now,
he and I met for the first time.
My only octogenarian friends
are those I’ve met in these
sacred spaces.

We were walking together
to breakfast, and while we walked,
Mark read that note out loud to me
from his phone. I was not prepared.
“We old timers are dwindling,”
he read, “individually and collectively.
For each of us….to just see the living
bodies of those we grew up with
as writers back in the 1980’s and 90’s–
we share a sense of our own abiding
vitality and awaken that sense in
one another.”

You know that feeling, don’t you,
that nearly indescribable ache
in the chest, down there in that
whole heart area, rising into the
throat, all the cues that indicate
that you are about to tear up,
or cry, weep, or sob. That was in me
on the walk with Mark to breakfast
as he read to me that note for his friend.

It’s that mystery, the power of
words well written or spoken
to resonate with the reader
or listener so intensely that
everything shakes inside, and
the emotion comes not out
of sadness, but out of wonder
and gratitude at being recognized,
at reading or hearing someone
say precisely and eloquently
what was only a kernel inside of you,
what was inexpressible made vivid now
by a single sentence:

We share a sense of our own abiding
vitality and awaken that sense in
one another.

I gathered myself before we
entered the dining area, into
the din of conversation from our
fellow campers, our writer friends,
our tribe. It was like this.
I felt stupidly happy, as I have felt
all week long, as I have felt every
time I’m with this community.
We hold this abundance, this
miracle of a gathering. We carry
it with us everywhere we go,
sustenance to get us through
all these difficult passages
until we meet again.