An Interview With Zenobia Barlow
Many children who weren’t excelling in the classroom have suddenly become academic superstars, because they have aptitudes — kinesthetic, spatial, musical, interpersonal — that tend to emerge more successfully outside the classroom. When you give kids rich and varied contexts, they rise to a level of excellence you might not have anticipated.
While they visited, that invisible beast Loneliness would shift on his paws and pad quietly out of the room, only to return faithfully when darkness fell and I crawled into a bed that was too big. Lucky for me, the kids always stayed as long as possible. Norah, especially, hated to leave. She’d cling to my hand or my neck with the ferocity of the early-abandoned.
In Henry I’d met a man with no sense of proprietorship in the presence of true words. In one sense I’d been, as I said, a mere parrot, but in another sense I’d plucked Henry’s insight off the radio and taken it to heart. Henry honored this second capture as the solo philosophical event it was. He was loving a neighbor’s insight as one loves one’s own. He was being a father whose nondogmatic stance let grace flow in an adoptive son.
My parents hail from a generation who must arrive at least an hour before every engagement, for whom being on time is a divine mandate. Thus, we pull into the Charlotte airport well before the departure time for their return flight to Pittsburgh.
A brilliant, shimmering, whirling ring of light; time with loved ones; soft words of encouragement
Is it possible to live each day knowing that everything will go wrong — that everything is falling apart right now — yet remembering, too, that this in no way denies the living truth, the love at the heart of existence?
School was a worry to her. She was not glib or quick in a world where glibness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn.
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