I was this many years old when I learned what an opus number means, how chronological order is not always set by composers, but by scholars, historians, and academics. And having looked up the word, as I am wont to do, having taken the head-first swan dive into another high tide, I recognize, while my biography intersects with that ocean of wisdom and tome (and an absurd amount of hubris)— sand-blasted, decoupaged, in pages of small print and rhetoric, shellacked, another tabula rasa mind eager to seal it all in early enough to still remember when later, it is needed most—I admit to having caused a bit of (good?) trouble in my adult years, and like all great and terrible figures of yore, some of whom I read about, managed to get thrown out of a college. And yes, that brought with it unneeded suffering, and yes, I still wear those heavy-hearted cover-ups, gauze and white and lacy, and while a bit warmer and prettier, are not very cozy. But I do have my favorite purple slippers, the ones with the waves and planets, shaped like little surfboards, ridiculous looking, cheap, big, but lovely in their own eccentricity—and plus, they do the job. And when I finally settle down to read the modern thinkers, or reexamine the classics, I am cognizant that with only one tremendously bad and possible exception, I got what I sought from education—not the equivalent of paying the bills (that would have been nice, too)—but the introduction to a more eclectic way of living, a hunting and gathering of sorts, a beach combing of filling steel buckets with beloved poets, philosophers, peacemakers, and rebels. And while I can no longer get through a book of Plato or Nietzsche, Achebe, Thoreau or Morrison, Baldwin or Angelou or Tan, I can still read them in excerpts, the way I do my lifetime, grateful to my deepest graduate core, that I was gifted with what it took my own teachers decades to learn, and that kind of offering can never be replaced—should not be replaced—by any trinket or trifle or designer anything. Because it is within the most ebony hours, the ones before dawn’s “rosy fingers” reach for morning sky, those minutes before the alarm rings, or a demanding dog or newborn reminds you it is time again to eat, that we need those things that are smarter, softer, kinder but firm, things that yield to touch without inevitably dissolving, something we can hug closely to our bodies. And that is what I am thankful for now, why I write this opus of gratitude, and number it something or other. That is why I am living a poem, instead of another catastrophe: I have cuddled up to the old and familiar, invited the new creative, accepted what they can impart, replacing code and betrayal with symbol and metaphor and imagery, and magically, have not disappeared. Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, copyright March 28, 2024, all rights reserved
Posted in Katherine's Coffeehouse
