A few days ago, I got the most amazing photos via email from my mother, who received them from a second cousin she recently reconnected with, via facebook. Strangely enough, this social networking brought to my screen images vitally important to me from a time long before even televisions, let alone computers. The photos were of my grandparents, taken sometime in the 1930s, long before my grandmother Molly descended into debilitating mental illness, very likely rocket-fueled by a number of tragedies. The sadnesses that overtook her life included the loss of her first child, Irwin, to pneumonia, and the loss of all her brothers and sisters back in Poland to the Holocaust.
For my childhood, I new my grandmother — who we called Nanny — as wickedly funny but also prone to intense criticism of others in the family (lucky for me, I was usually excluded by virtue of being a beloved 
grandchild) and long stretches in mental hospitals when her manic depression got the best of her. I also knew Papa, my grandfather, much as he appears in these photos: loving, calm, steady, quiet but holding the family together.
Irwin died at age six, several years before my aunt and then my mother were born, but now I get to see as a well-loved and happy boy the great-uncle I never knew. Moreover, I have the immense pleasure to seeing Nanny back when she was Molly, a young mother, smiling and holding her son’s hand while her husband held her (and to his righ
t, his Irwin’s aunt). The woman I only knew as a old woman with a flair for driving my parents crazy and entertaining me by occasionally pretending to be a gorilla is young again, not so crazy yet, and not yet so sad and wounded. I see here who she was just a decade or so after she came to this country from Poland, brought here by her sister Ida, and determined to make a life for herself, and in these photos, happily occupying that life.
It’s a muted year, probably because of the excessive rain, but it’s still beautiful: everything saturated with yellow and gold, brown at the edges and green at the center. Last night, walking in the mist toward the car with neon illuminating the street, I remembered this was the first night of all when I felt that familiar wind, a little cooler than the summer breezes or blasts. All directions I look, I see the green fading tom something else, the gatherings of birds aiming themselves south, the litter of leaves. Welcome, fall! May you come however you will, but show us how much beauty there is in these wabi-sabi moments when we witness passing memory and memories past.
Last night, I read poetry for about 45 minutes to over 120 kind people who left the lush night air to sit in an auditorium at Pittsburg State University. Having just read to very small groups, I was a little surprised (I was hoping maybe I’d have 20), but delighted. Men and women, students and faculty, international students and long time residents listened as I read from each of my four poetry books. I felt a real kinship as I looked into the eyes of people — a young Indian woman, a dark-haired pony-tailed man, another man with a thick white beard, some of the astonishingly good students I had met with earlier in Laura Lee Washburn’s poetry writing seminar. I was also thrilled to see my uncle and aunt-in-laws from Joplin, Missouri, who made the trip. Not only was I was treated to this audience, but we were all treated — thanks to the PSU English Department — to a reception afterwards that even featured a sheet cake that said, “Welcome Poet Laureate.” On my way out with a box of leftover books in hand, two young women from China held the door open for me. One said, “You know, we couldn’t understand all the words, but we really liked your poetry.” The other told me, “With poetry, it’s not the language so much it’s written in because you can feel it,” as she placed her hand on her heart. I couldn’t agree more.
