Farewell

Gratitude

Do not think I am not grateful for your small
kindness to me.
I like small kindnesses.
In fact I actually prefer them to the more
substantial kindness, that is always eyeing you,
like a large animal on a rug,
until your whole life reduces you
to nothing but waking up morning after morning
cramped, and the bright sun shining on its tusks.

“Louise Glück: Poems 1962-2012”

******** 

Dear Alex,

I regret to say I have not read a line by Louise Glück until after the announcement a season ago about her winning the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature. By the time I googled her, her newest and thickest book of poetry online had sold out.

Gluck sticks out like an outlier from the norm of poets, an anomaly so analogous to our teacup and torrent of agonies that we feel cheated for our nakedness exposed. She is writing about your weakest link, our anchorage in statistical significance and substantial payoffs.

We have been schooled to keep eyeing the fatty flanks of ideals which starve us, our mighty merits scoring empty calories. Get serious, I hear you write last time, about bouncing into the New Year not as a winner but as disruptor, alien, misfit of niceties.

I am resuming my year-long study for an exam, ramming into the subject of statistical analysis in research design. Make a claim and test it using heavy-duty math. Ideally you want a large sample size in your experiment to avoid the “small-study effect”, where minor stuff shows more significance than truly observed.

When the numbers don’t add up to any trophy and the “small kindnesses” feel petty, why bother with misplaced priorities that cannot even be soundly reported as a case study?

Yesterday for no well-defined reason, I baked some chocolate chip cookies for an acquaintance who was leaving town. We had worked on a project though we met once in person. We chased charts on spreadsheet, bartered numbers for meaning, winked at each other in emojis. I had known her mostly by her job title on email until I visited her home with my farewell tucked in the wrap of my homemade goods.

She showed me her garden and calico kitty, her cause for joy. Oh those herbs she had just moved indoors from her porch! Paw and tail smeared all over my shoes.

As the afternoon sun leaked light through the drizzle and her hair, I wondered if I’d see her again in this moment fleeting as a question missed, our legs frigid like stalks ready to thaw and uproot.

Back in the kitchen that night, my phone perked with her photo of the cookies, a crumb of delight so faint in the cosmos of ledgers it melted between Gluck’s lines.

Yours,
Kate