PRACTICE: Door – 15min

It is two weeks and two days since I walked through my own door, the door to my home, after being away also for two weeks. Four weeks, then, a month since my last trip to Vietnam, where everywhere around me there are doors.

Bellhops dressed in long satin traditional robes and hats who open the glass doors to my hotel lobby the night I arrive from the airport. I come sweeping in, even dog-tired after more than 24 hours in transit, and the moment I enter that grand foyer with a big marble table in the center and on the center of that table an oversized floral arrangement, I feel exhilarated. It’s usually 11:00 pm, and all I can think of is laying my body flat on a bed, but still, I have that Mary-Tyler-Moore-in-the-big-city moment, a feeling of being in the center of the action, in a global hot spot, where people come and go at all hours of the day and night, people from every country to this epicenter of the world.

The doors to my own home are parochial by comparison, set in the past, of a certain era, a place, a quiet time. They are large, two entry-way doors across from one another in the foyer of my home. Made of plain wood, birch perhaps, double Dutch doors, one set facing the front of the house, the other set the back courtyard. These doors also stand out. When I walk through them I notice the way they require an extra nudge to open them. They are heavy and sticky, substantial doors reminding me that this is the place where I, too, am destined to pass long years of my life.

Have I always been this comfortable in two places? I close my eyes and see myself striding, yes, not merely walking but striding in and out of those glass doors in District One, the first and oldest and most vibrant district of Saigon. It’s not that I don’t feel alone there, but rather in my solitude I feel strong and independent, like I know the place, and I almost wrote, like I own the place.

The hotel lobby is like any other hotel lobby, imposing and luxurious, with a certain lighting and an aura of hospitality that makes the traveler feel cushioned. Cushioned from the inconveniences of being away from the familiar, a toaster and a green tea kettle, butter pecan in the freezer. Cushioned from the thousands of miles of space and time from those we love.

There is a Gucci shop where young Vietnamese men and women dressed in black stand talking, store employees so elegant and hip they intimidate. I pass by their doors without staring and out I walk into the humid street where cafes and restaurants sit next to shops selling men’s suits and silk scarves and children’s dresses.

I walk through the door of the French bakery and buy an almond tart on my last night of this trip, and I tuck it into my purse as I consider whether to venture into a Spanish bodega where young expats eat tapas and drink red wine from goblets or get my last fix of Vietnamese food from Lemongrass, one of my favorite local spots. Either way I will sit alone, eat alone, consider solely how this trip has been and how it has revealed a few more mysteries.

And just in the moment when I am at the point where the people around me seem too jolly, where they only seem to appear in pairs and threes and fours, parents with children in contrast to me alone, I get to walk out of the glass doors held open by the man in robes and into a waiting taxi. Through the sliding doors of the airport and the gates and the portals and the passageways I go, flying through the day and night, back in time, back to the place where heavy doors wait, welcoming me to the other familiar.



-Related to Topic post: WRITING TOPIC — DOOR

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PRACTICE — Door — 20min

By Judith Ford

Image by Jude Ford, July 2009, in front of the Mathematics Building, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, photo © 2010 Jude Ford. All rights reserved.

This is my son, at the door of the math building at the University of Michigan. A month after this picture he’d go through that door to begin his life as a math PhD candidate and as a college teacher. He’d discover the frustration of trying to teach calculus to a bunch of freshmen who wouldn’t give a damn. Who wouldn’t share one drop of the passion he feels for his subject. Years before this photo, he’d told me, with tears in his eyes, that he wished more people could see how elegant and beautiful math was.

Despite the beauty of math, it was never enough.

My son started grad school a month short of his 21st birthday. He was overly ready and not ready at all. He’d had a summer of brutal awakenings, realization upon realization of all he missed out on by being a child math prodigy. Not that he could have avoided being who he was. He was blessed, as much as cursed, with an unusual mind, shunned by children who thought he was showing off, trying to make them feel stupid, when all he was doing was using the language and thoughts natural to him. He had a 30-year-old’s vocabulary by the time he was in first grade. I’m not kidding.

He and I had a conversation just a week ago, about his intellectual differentness. He pointed out to me that he’d met a lot of really smart people in the honors math program at the U of Chicago, from which he’d graduated last June. “There are a lot of people out there who are way smarter than I am,” he said. “I don’t think I was all that unusual when I was a kid.”

I disagreed. “Yes, dear, you really were different. It was obvious by the time you were 2. You learned things in big huge gulps. At a rate that wasn’t usual, that was, frankly, a little scary. And you didn’t know how to play with other kids.”

“I still don’t.”

“That’s what was scary to me when you got tested and those scores came back so freakishly high. I knew you were going to be lonely.”

“I don’t remember ever not being lonely.”

“Kids your age were intimidated by you. By third grade, they’d started avoiding you.”

“I thought they all knew this secret thing that I’d somehow missed out on. I thought math could make up for that. I thought it would solve everything. I was pathetic. I never learned how to be a human being.”

“How brave of you to see that,” I think I said. “So now what do you need to do?”

“I don’t have a clue,” he answered.

There’s ivy growing over the top of this door, up at the right hand corner. Brings to mind the academic cliché of ivied walls and the idea that this door, being partly occluded, is yet another incomplete solution, leading to an unknown and no doubt imperfect path. Math, a career in math, still won’t solve my son’s life or end his loneliness.

See the way he holds his arms and shoulders. His uncertainty and discomfort are obvious. And that he’s trying to be patient with me as I take his picture. He squints at me. He frowns. He knows I’m doing a mom thing that, for some reasons not clear to him, I need to do.

Does he know how my heart hurts for him? How much I wish I could soothe away the pain in his face with something as simple as a hug and a bedtime story. How these things, too, are mom things that I can’t help feeling. He doesn’t need to know. I don’t tell him and I try not to let him see.

He tolerates my hug when I say good-bye. He doesn’t hug back. He doesn’t hold on. His gaze, over my shoulder, already fixed on that door.

It’s trite to say that when he walked through that door he walked into the rest of his life. But I want to say it. So I am. He did. He walked into his adult life without a clue. Which is the only way possible to walk into one’s life. And interestingly, the only way that is, in fact, a kind of solution.

Judith Ford is a psychotherapist and writer who lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was red Ravine’s very first guest writer, with her 25 Reasons I Write post. She joins ybonesy and QuoinMonkey in writing about Topic post WRITING TOPIC — DOOR. Judith’s other pieces on red Ravine include Mystery E.R. and a writing group practice I Write Because.

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PRACTICE — Door — 15min

I had a Writing Practice a second ago. But Mr. Stripeypants wiped his paw across my keyboard and accidentally hit the delete key. What was I saying about doors? Hard to muster the energy to walk through this one. Doors, I remember a door from childhood. Wooden, probably pine, not hollow, real, with a center and windows, three windows, rectangular, and spaced so that one fell a little lower than the next. There was a United Way sticker on the door. I’m reminded that Pants comes to the door to greet me when I get home from anywhere. He hears the car come up the driveway, maybe even the street. Superhearing. There’s something comforting about having someone meet you at the door.

Doors to the past. I tend to open them for a peek. Doors to the future. You can’t count on them. Might not have a future. Now, right now. Still, I make plans, hoping I will see the sun rise. No sun today. The sun rose but was way too gray and rain studded to see. So I suffice with a memory –yesterday’s whopping orange ball over the Jewish cemetery I pass on the way to work. A beautiful mounded hill surrounded by empty land in the middle of a busy city. I like that about cemeteries. They hold space. And they get away with it because most people honor the dead, respect for those who have passed before.

Doorways to another dimension. Do I believe in Spiritual doors? Yes. I do. Thin veils of what has passed. I think about that when I open the Chevy Silverado door, marking time, making my rounds, driving around the bowels of the Twin Cities. Places no one thinks about or imagines, living right beside their neighborhood park or favorite restaurant. I haven’t been drawn to photograph doors. Except for the bowling pin door I ran into in Burnsville. But I’ve always worked with windows. The metaphor of window. It’s different than a door. Windows are lonely, have a longing loneliness about them. Pining to get out. You have to crawl out a window. What wants to blow in? You see vampire movies where vamps slide through windows at night. Never come in the door. Only the windows, flying like a bat out of midnight.

When I was a child, doors felt like protectors. Keeping what was unsavory out. Unless it was a Holiday and the relatives visited. Then we ran to the door to see who it was, to let them into the house. The house seemed so much bigger then. If I went back inside a childhood home, it would be tiny. What about gates? How are gates different than doors? If you think about a gate, you can go under it, over it, around it. A door? You have to want to move through it. Gates, you can see through them, yet still might not be able to trespass forward. Doors are most times closed off to what’s inside. Unless it’s a glass storm door, that thick-paned thermo glass that keeps the heat in and the cold out. I’ve always wanted to be able to afford thick glass windows and doors. Winter hardware.

What about Black Holes, doors to another Universe. Or are they drains, deep black, funneling drains to nowhere. I don’t really know what a Black Hole is. I read about them once but can’t remember how they form. And when I think about a door that huge, it makes me feel small and insignificant, which I am. I am also as big as my Spirit allows me to be. (Can I keep getting out of my own way?) The door is wide open. There are glass ceilings, mahogany frames, hollow doors, lead doors, steel doors. If I had to choose, the door would be red like my glasses. Or yellow like the Sun. You just don’t see yellow doors. Maybe a saccharin shade of bluish purple.

-posted on red Ravine, Thursday, February 4th, 2009

-related to Topic post: WRITING TOPIC — DOOR

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WRITING TOPIC — DOOR

Door etymology: Merger of Old English dor (pl. doru, “large door, gate”) and Old English duru (pl. dura, “door, gate, wicket”). The base form is frequently in dual or plural, leading to speculation that houses of the original Indo- Europeans had doors with two swinging halves. Form dore predominated by the 16th Century, but was supplanted by door. First record of dooryard is c.1764; doorstep is from 1810.

Symbolism of Doors

Doors symbolize hope, opportunity, opening, passage from one state or world to another, entrance to new life, initiation, the sheltering aspect of the Great Mother. The open door is both opportunity and liberation.

Gates shares the symbolism of entrance, entry into a new life, communication between one world and another, between the living and the dead. Gates and portals are usually guarded by symbolic animals such as lions, dragons, bulls, dogs or fabulous beasts. At the gates of the House of Osiris, a goddess keeps each gate, and her name must be known to enter.

A door is an important element of a house, a symbol of passage from one place to another, one state to another, from light to darkness.

Entrances to holy places (temples, cathedrals) are not necessarily invitation to participate in the mysteries contained inside. The act of passing over the threshold means that the faithful must set aside their personalities and materialism, to confront the inner silence and meditation that it symbolizes.

As an access to a refuge or the warmth of a hearth, a door also symbolizes communication, contact with others and with the outside world. An open door attracts because it signifies welcome, invites discovery, but a door can also signify imprisonment, isolation. A closed door signifies rejection, exclusion, secrecy, but also protection against dangers and the unknown.

Doors in Literature

A doorway has a narrow view of the world, but a person can walk through the doorway. The doorway is their opportunity to actually make a difference in the world. People who are more willing to make a difference in the world have an easier time walking through the doorway then others.

Characters in stories that are too scared to walk through a door are also scared about what the world might do to them. They would rather keep that doorway as their shell from the rest of the world.

Words for Doors

“Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”

~Emily Dickinson

“A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.“

~Ogden Nash

“I look like just like the girl next door…if you happen to live next door to an amusement park.”

~Dolly Parton

“The outward man is the swinging door; the inward man is the hinge.”

~Meister Eckhart

“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”

~Johnny Cash

Your Door Assignment

Write about doors. Doors of perception, cellar doors, sliding doors, The Doors. A portal or entry. A doorway. Indoors and out of doors. A door to your mind, locked doors, open doors. What does a door mean to you?

Off your hinges? You make a better door than a window? Katy, bar the doors! ybonesy is on her way, and Lord knows, we don’t want her shadow to darken the door.

There are so many door idioms. We beat paths to doors, get a foot in the door, see someone to the door, close one door only to have another open, and think fondly of the girl next door.

Pick up your fast-writing pen and your notebook and write without stopping. Cross that threshold, but don’t cross out. For 15 minutes. Now.

(Pssst. If you want to photograph doors, please do so and share your thumbnails in the comments section below.)

All photos were taken by ybonesy in January 2010, in or around
Hue, Vietnam, at three sites: the Citadel, the Palace of Emperor
Khai Dinh, or Emperor Minh Mang’s burial palace.

Sources

About Doors

• Door Etymology
• Door Quotes
• Symbolism of Doors and Windows in Modern Literature
• Portal Symbolism

About Vietnam (photos)

• Citadel in Hue, Vietnam
• The Royal Tombs of Hue

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