This book may contain language, sexual content, and themes of grief and loss, which may be challenging for some readers. Reader caution advised.
Ignorant to the Conclusion
by Clifton Butt
Hello, this is Clifton Butt. I’m an English teacher in Amarillo, Texas, and I’m here to briefly discuss the collection of essays Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl.
My favorite act of heresy as an English teacher is to judge a book by its cover. I’m only interested in the maxim not to when a cover does not attract me. Margaret Renkl’s Late Migrations immediately pulled me in like a bug to the light, or to find a more apt simile for this book, like a blue jay to a meal worm.
I feel comfortable recommending this book just based on the cover art and the art inside of it. The book itself is a splendid object, but somehow Renkl transcends the art with her essays. Her episodic essays that flit between the present and past, life and death, and love and grief worked their way into me, just as easily as a squirrel can work its way into a bird feeder. Even my similes reflect just how much this book has caused me to consider.
The essays simultaneously stand by themselves and fit together in a unifying whole. The essays, like days, come and go, but always adding up. Their extraordinary power seems to rest in how ephemeral they are. Each essay is full of life and then is gone too soon. Their form reflects their subject matter, a reminder that our lives are passing the same way.
We are here, and then we are gone. It is tempting to view this as a beginning and an end. It’s much neater that way. But Renkl reminds us that we all “entered this story in media res: unaware of its beginning and owed no right to witness its end.” As I watch my parents age, and slip slowly into nearly unrecognizable versions of themselves, it is helpful to remember that we are all in the middle of a story we have never heard before. My mother is 71 for the first time and is begrudgingly learning how to use a cane. My niece, swimming through a t-shirt seven sizes too big at at-ball game, is here for the first time just the same (though she has already mastered how to look cute in any picture). The story goes. And will continue. No single one of us will witness its end. All of us ignorant to the conclusion.
As a teacher, especially as a teacher of stories, I’m uncomfortable with that ignorance. However, Renkl reminded me in this book that the corollary to ignorance is astonishment. Astonishment takes no talent but takes a whole lot of practice. Days feel the same. There is a rhythm and a familiarity that deceives, but I have never been here before. I’m somehow 38 and an uncle now. My nieces and nephews are growing like weeds as my mother sometimes has to steady herself to simply walk down the hall. The white inundating my dog’s face reminds me of my first dog who I last saw so long ago. But the neighborhood blue jays come out sometimes when I walk him. My mother’s daylilies are biding their time until spring. And there are still green chile cheeseburgers I haven’t eaten. I am not owed anything, but I do owe my astonishment.
Thank you for listening to this BookByte by me, Clifton Butt. I hope you keep your head up and your heart open out there on the High Plains.
