Weekly Wide-Awake: I Remember Everything

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Weekly Wide-Awake: I Remember Everything

I remember everything
Things I can’t forget
Swimming pools of butterflies
That slipped right through the net
And I remember every night
Your ocean eyes of blue
How I miss you in the morning light
Like roses miss the dew

– from John Prine’s “I Remember Everything”

I grew up listening to John Prine. I was never an angel in Montgomery, but eating ice cream in Tuscaloosa made my heart sing. I breathed in Bluegrass culture as a child. Fiddle lessons. Festivals and parties with instruments all around. Musical friends. Learning songs like Sunday school lessons. Bluegrass meant connection with a world big enough to hold all my heart’s music.

The world lost John Prine and my heart still weeps. (It is fair to say he lives on in his music, but it feels different.) I got to see him perform at a small venue in Cincinnati. It was truly a bucket list moment. Paradise has always been a favorite. Brandi Carlile sang John Prine’s, “I Remember Everything” during a Grammy tribute.

When I saw him live, and when I heard her sing his song, I did remember everything. All the melodies and friendships and joy. All the longing and sadness and lamentation. All the skill and progressions and harmonies. All the rhythm and story and place. Bluegrass always felt like home.

Bluegrass, and John Prine, inform my theory of time and space.

Natasha Trethewey’s poem “Theories of Time and Space” offers a way to understand childhood and the memories we carry. My thoughts on Natasha Trethewey’s “Theories of Time and Space” connect my memories with my journey.

Mary Oliver’s “Summer Day” and my thoughts on living a wild and precious life, and “Praying” and my essay, “The Unspeakable Gift,” connect my theory of time and space with my journey, too. Birds, particularly cardinals, remind me of home like the first Saturday in May is for magnificent hats.

Karen Attiah’s Washington Post essay, “What a fig tree taught me about the fragility of life.” speaks to the role of grief in our theories of time and space, and the power in remembering it all.