This weekend my friend Donna is graduating with honors from the University of Maine. Donna and I have been friends for at least a decade, a happenstance event instigated by housewife boredom and toddler play group. When she moved to Bangor with her family, I assumed we would gradually lose touch; it seemed so unlikely that we would be able to maintain a friendship without, what seemed to me, the "larger" connections: reading the same books, for instance; sharing parallel ambitions. That was a childish assumption; for if there's one thing that Donna and middle age have taught me, it's the tenacity of a friendship that is based on simple, transparent, overflowing affection. Who cares about books, who cares about poetry, when my friend Donna sends me a one-line email that says "I love you so much"? And she does send me that note, and it arrives exactly when I need it.

So I'm sending her in return this poem: a way to keep reminding ourselves that life goes on no matter what--that people share memories without ever having been in the same place at the same time. These may be platitudes, but they are also fragments of our common humanity: our stuff, as another dear friend, Baron Wormser, would say. The poem is from Meg Kearney's new collection Home by Now--Meg being yet another of my beloved attachments even though we sometimes barely say two words to each other in six months. (And by the way, according to Meg, the German phrase in the poem translates as "work makes [one] free" and was a slogan that appeared at the entrances of several Nazi concentration camps.)

Congratulations, Donna. I love you so much.

1970

Meg Kearney

When I got my head stuck between the porch rails

I didn't know enough yet to hate my body, but I knew

a thing or two about smoking my father's cigars

with Patrick Dunn under the pines behind his house,

and puking while my brother rolled joints and stacked

45s on the record player in his room. My sister

turned me on to Carole King and JT, swore her friends

would die in Vietnam because her peace medallion

was flammable. She tried to teach me to dance, but

I was never graceful--it wasn't a surprise,

me wedged in that railing. How did they get me out?

Nixon was president; Martin Luther King

was dead. The whole country was in a fix,

my father said, though he never said a word

about the cigars. His heart was a shooting star;

I thought he could fix everything. My mother

believed she could fix his failing heart with home-

made tomato sauce and a Manhattan on the rocks.

My mother rose with the fish; she was unable to

cry; she put her hand to my father's cheek, then went

back to work. Uncle Frank called her a good German:

Arbeit Macht Frei, he said, and she nearly kicked him

in the shins. I loved Uncle Frank, but I don't want to

talk about him. Uncle Frank's dead. But let's say I do

remember how they got my head out of that railing.

It took a crowbar--took what seemed forever

because the adults had their loads on by then. That

night my best friend and I took turns wearing the wig

and high heels: we were knobby-knee glamorous, we

were nothing like our parents. Uncle Frank leaned

in the doorframe as we preened, fluttered, eyed

the dapper men, toasted each other with empty glasses.