Breaking Bread

Last night I took five kids between the ages of 9 and 13 to Old Country Buffet. Old Country Buffet is a restaurant chain that specializes in being inexpensive. You pay according to your age. You eat, as the name of the place indicates, all you want. Last night, the younger kids were each charged eight dollars and change, and the older two were full price, eleven and change, which is a bargain considering what they packed away: macaroni and cheese; pepperoni pizza; big, pale slices of roast beef; tacos; cherry Jello; mashed potatoes, noodles and gravy; soft, pillowy rolls; garlic bread; french fries; roasted potato; ice cream with whipped cream, chocolate chips, crushed cookies, butterscotch sauce, hot fudge and strawberry sauce on top, chocolate cake with chocolate icing; and many cups of peculiar-hued fountain drinks (they'd fill their cups one part cola, one part Hi-C, two parts root beer, one part orange soda, and so on).

I've been to Old Country Buffet, the one right next to the DMV and down from the store that specializes in clothing for the workplace, maybe five times in the past five years, and I marvel at it each time I go.

The kids out and out love it. It's fun to watch them eat, once annually, unhindered by parental or dietary constraints. It reminds me of those daydreams we all used to have: what if the whole world were made of chocolate, and I could just pick up my pencil and chew, take a bite out of my math book, lick the desk. They fill their plates with one set of wonders, then go back and fill a second round of plates with more.

The staff and clientele all seem to have stepped out of a period or foreign film. Last night our clearer - there are no servers, because everything's buffet, but there are clearers who come by and remove the used plates regularly - told us her name was Gussie. She had gray hair but was not particularly old, chronologically. Maybe sixty. And yet she seemed more like the sexagenarians I'd met in my youth, back in the seventies. She had an ineffably archaic aspect about her. I went ahead and asked, because she was friendly, if Gussie was short for Augusta, and she said it was, that Augusta had been her grandmother's name, and it seemed to give her pleasure to say it.

Many of the people who eat at Old Country look like they have left their own old countries behind. You hear people speaking languages of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe, South America. You see women in head scarves and families with toothless babies and toothless grandparents. The white American-born people who eat at Old Country tend to be obese, or very old, or prodigiously tattooed. Last night there was a young white man with a true bowl cut - it really looked as though someone had to have put a bowl upside down on his head and trimmed around it - there with a frail woman he called "Gramma,"who kept fingering the tripod cane she had balanced on the end of the table. There was an Asian woman, neither old nor young, eating all by herself, plate after plate, slowly, deliberately. There was a large family - an intriguing quantity of fathers and mothers and grandparents and children - that sat at two tables pushed together and spoke - I don't know, Turkish? Farsi? Kazakh? There was a middle aged man with the delicate build and high cheekbones of an Ethiopian or Somali with two little children, one girl, one boy. The man was wearing a suit, no tie.

The walls are decorated with more than a dozen framed prints, every one a reproduction of a different Norman Rockwell painting.

I am humbled by this place. I feel a perverse gratitude as I watch the children I have brought here fill themselves with soft starch and glistening grease, with sugar and salt, blithely sating their stomachs, their desires. An embarrassed gratitude - embarrassed not only because the food is unhealthy, and not only because I am aware that none of these children has ever known real scarcity, as, I imagine, most of those around us have, but because I fear we do not belong here, I fear we are interlopers. The children eat away. They rise and come back two or three or four times, grinning over their bounty, unconflicted. They do not register, certainly, the sorrow that I feel here, the slow, terrible melancholy of the place. Yet I feel another kind of gratitude, too, one that is not perverse, one that confuses me, tugs and pulls at my core, carrying a sense of sharp beauty as well as desolation, a quality of small hope.

I am moved by the families and the solo diners, eating with diligence or with pleasure, moved also by the cashier and the manager and the table clearers and kitchen workers. I am moved by the place itself, with its perhaps well-intentioned but somehow insultingly wrong decor: the posters of an Americana that never existed lining the walls. I am moved by the wall-mounted Purell dispenser near the islands of food; by the signs explaining the rules; by the smooth green Formica and the darkly patterned, sensible carpeting; by the effortful but also, I think, genuine aura of optimism, of pride. I would like to think - a shyly formed thought - that we are all countrymen in this room, eating side by side.

Why Are My Characters So 'Nice'?

I'm not altogether sure my characters are, but the Women's Review of Books invited me to post a little piece about this on their blog. You can read it here:

WOMEN = BOOKS.

This new site ("a blog about women's books, politics, and life") is full of a great, vibrant jumble of voices, ideas, experiences and perspectives.

Rain of Cake

The Tree, Sandi Rigby

My parents went walking at Pocantico. This was maybe two weeks ago. This is all I know:

There were high winds blowing. There were cows, grazing in a field ringed by trees. My parents heard a great crack, and then the earth shook once under their feet, and then it continued shaking. They turned. Cows were running, pounding across the field. A huge tree had fallen. It lay on the ground, its branches still covered with green leaves.

Then as my parents watched the cows came back. I picture them not ambling but returning at a trot, with purpose, dog-like, their terror forgotten. As though they were at a banquet where a new heaping platter had just been delivered to table: they gathered round, they hastened to eat.

I was immediately jealous when my mother told me the story. I wanted to feel that sweeping wind, to hear the crack, to know the power with which the tree fell to the ground, to feel it in my own legs, to see the cows run and then see them return, see them munch the delicacies newly within reach.

There's a story about me when I was a little girl, riding around in the country in the back of a car with an ice cream cone. Someone must have told me, when handing over the cone, to mind I didn't let any ice cream drip. In the story my mother, up front, says, "Lele, look at the cows," and I say, "I can't. I'm being responsible."

When my mother told me the story, I felt an immediate lurching greed: I wanted to see the hole in the earth where the roots had ripped free, to glimpse proof of that hard-to-grasp truth, that the hidden roots spread themselves just as wide and deep as does the fanning flourish of the crown. I wanted to be there, to feel in my bones how the event was neither happy nor sad. Neither just nor unjust. Not fit, in fact, for any human gloss.

But almost as soon as I was jealous, I was not. I was glad it had been my mother and not me. I thought: I wish it on her, wish it for her, and if all my portion of life's feasts could be put on her plate for the duration, I would have that too. Anyway, she would tell them back to me, so I would have my cake and also I would eat it.

But I realize (just now, writing that): I do so every day. So do we all. There's the thing and there's the story of the thing - and also, I suppose the picture of the thing and the song of the thing and the dance of the thing and the rhyme of the thing and the dream of the thing and the collage of the thing and the sculpture of the thing, and even before we come to the end of one thing, a thousand new ones have rained upon us, and they each are limitless, so long as we pass them (this perhaps our true responsibility) from hand to hand. As limitless as we like.

Sonnet To a Writing Teacher

Chrysanthemum, Piet Mondrian

Jim. He had a funny grin. A looped light
he shone - sickle slice, moonlike, long of chin -
whenever struck by surpassing delight.
Which was often. We found we wanted in
on it, that freely felt, freely avowed
(what else to call it?) joy. And so we came
with pencils poised, but first he read aloud:
of stolen plums, of wheelbarrows and rain,
of host and guest who spoke no word, of white
chrysanthemum. The wonder was when time
arrived for fledgling flight - for us to write -
we weren't afraid, though green, to start the climb.
Once I tried thanking him. He'd only say,
'Shucks, all I did was get out of the way.'


The references: two by William Carlos Williams: "This is Just to Say;" "The Red Wheelbarrow"
and a haiku by Oshima Ryota (1718-1787)

Prestidigitation

Even the manner in which he has acquired these new skills seems magical. He comes home one day with the ability to make a card disappear. Just a regular, ordinary playing card, he says. Right? And lets us touch it, test it, waits for our assent.

Then one, two, three, he waves it in the air and it disappears. Vanishes. There is a beauty to this, an airiness and simplicity that I have forgotten, though surely in my life I have seen sleight of hand performed many times. Never before by a child of mine, though. He's good, one has to agree. His poker face punctuated by a dirty-blond mop and a glint of silver braces. One, two, three, the ace of clubs is nowhere.

Then, before we have finished gasping: voila! he taps his head and the card flutters like a paper bird from the nest of his hair.

Where did you learn that? we ask, and he shrugs.
No, really, we press.
I don't know. His new baritone sounds sullen as ever, but he is suppressing something golden: a little well of honest pride. As he turns his shoulder we catch a glimpse of him basking in it. The dark brown eyes glinting with knowledge, the secrets they have spied held close to the vest.

He shows us another. This one requires our surrendering our cell phone. He holds it in one hand, a large pink balloon in the other. Presto. The cell phone has passed into the balloon, is altered, reimagined, encased in pink.

Amazing, we say.
He blinks modestly. The merest of shrugs.

In fact, he's been performing magical acts, metamorphoses, for many months now. It's not only cards and cell phones he manipulates: he has made himself disappear. At least, the old self, the familiar child, has vanished as surely as the ace of clubs. Like the cell phone, it's been swallowed, enveloped by a new material, something masking yet not altogether unpliant, something transforming yet not eradicating. The original remains. The magician gives a slight bow. We in the audience sit open-mouthed, at once disoriented and admiring, maddened and pleasurably confounded. Belatedly, we think to applaud -- but hush: already, he's beginning his next trick.

The Fear

Last night my youngest came home speaking in tongues.
"Wookie 39," he said. And, "Tie 5." He also said things like, "Spread formation," and, "QB bootleg, pass center to four."
I would have taken his temperature if he hadn't eventually handed me his playbook and said, "Can you quiz me, please?"
It was by then nine o'clock, and still close to ninety degrees in our kitchen. He stood by the table, freshly showered, wearing pajama bottoms and nothing else, eating alternately from a bowl of pretzels and a bowl of strawberries.
I took a look at the playbook. I looked up and said, "How am I going to know if you're doing it right?"
Patiently, kindly, he came around and explained what the different circles and dotted lines and arrows meant, taught me how to parse the diagrams, how to know what the nine-hole was, and the tight end and which symbol meant pivot.
"Okay," I said. "Uh...how about Q11?"
Somehow, his body knew. His feet began to trace on our kitchen floor the exact pattern in the playbook; his torso swiveled in the correct direction; he mimed throwing on a diagonal, sent an invisible football crashing through the window over the kitchen sink.

Imagine you've grown up Muslim and your child comes home asking to be quizzed on his haftorah. Imagine you've grown up Jewish and your child comes home asking to be quizzed on his catechism. Imagine you've grown up going on peace marches and your child comes home in full dress uniform, asking if -- well, he wouldn't ask you anything then, would he? He'd just hold the door for you, break your heart with his cool, impenetrable chivalry.

This is me as a football mom: I am a tiny bit heartbroken, but in truth, mostly just astonished. It's an astonishment no less potent for my realizing its ubiquity, realizing it's a puzzlement all parents, at one point or another, to share: "I produced this person. How could he, how could she, be so different from what I'd imagined? So different from me?"

When I was pregnant with my first, I hoped unreservedly it would be a girl. A boy would be so foreign. What on earth would I do with one? How would I love it, how would it love me? Although I'd grown up practicing the discipline of embracing other, loving other, going toward otherness both within myself and among people I met, what I experienced during that first pregnancy was, I now recognize, nothing other than the most primal, ancient, reptilian-brain fear of otherness, wedded to a profound, frightening doubt about the extent of my own ability to love, to connect, to understand. I had not known I harbored either of these fears. That turned out to be the first gift I received from my firstborn. Even before he was born, even before I met him, he introduced me to fears I hadn't acknowledged and thus, to myself on a deeper level than I'd previously known.

The second gift was instantaneous upon his birth, and it was another astonishment: I loved him immediately and I loved him tidally.

This experience set the pattern, I see now; this is always the undercurrent, the leitmotif, of parenting. In ways small and large, the children introduce me - and reintroduce me and reintroduce me - to my fears. And each time (they are born magicians, it seems) they perform a little trick - I never quite catch the motion - a flick of the wrist? a thing with mirrors? - at any rate, some sleight of hand that at the last minute manages to tilt the image, cast it in a new light, so that nothing is quite as I had pictured it. The world looks different, changed, more full of possibility, even, than it was before.

Last night, little football boy and I ran through all his plays together while simultaneously he polished off all the rest of the pretzels and strawberries. Then he went and sprayed himself all over with the plant spritzer and stood, giggling, dripping, before the fan. He has a great big red canvas bag now, given him by the league, for porting all his copious protective gear, including a girdle with five pads and a plastic cup, a kind of breast plate that (it now strikes me) is reminiscent of the knight costumes he was always fashioning for himself when he was much smaller, and of course the enormous shoulder pads and helmet that are emblematic of the sport ("Hit me," he says, when he has them on and is feeling invincible, "Go ahead. Harder. I couldn't even feel that."). There remains for me an ineffable sadness to all this, but it is a sorrow touched by lightness, or by light. We speak of heartbreak as though it were all sorrow, a thing better avoided, but what if the fissures are necessary, the only means by which new light may shine through?

Chemo

We leave the house at 8:30 in the teeming rain. The air is therefore slightly festive, as my mother loves the rain. I take an umbrella but my mother demurs, preferring just her raincoat: less encumbering. If she didn't have a battery of medical appointments today, she would likely go for a duck-walk. If she didn't have medical appointments and also if she had more energy.

We go first to Sloan Kettering's main campus. I was here three years ago, when she had her cancer surgery, a procedure called, with a bracing absence of euphemism, debulking. I trail my mother as she wends expertly now through corridors, up and down elevators, in and out of various reception areas, office suites and locker rooms. Registration. X-ray. Waiting room. Examining table. I am overwhelmed by the ease with which she navigates, the ease with which she greets technicians, doctors, nurses, fellows. Inquiring about their families. Joking with them about the weather, the scheduling mishaps, the broken light fixture, their bedside manners. I am a little in awe of her confidence and grace. I think I am getting a taste of what a parent must feel like, visiting her child at college for the first time, getting a tour of the dorms, the classrooms, the quad. A new world that is alien to the parent, utterly familiar to the child. Except she is the parent and I am the child.

We must hurry through these appointments because my mother has chemo scheduled at the 53rd Street clinic at noon. Of course, the phrase "we must hurry" is meaningless, as my mother is not in charge of the pace. She delivers herself to these buildings, these rooms, where she is repeatedly instructed to wait. At last her morning appointments are over and she guides us through a rabbit warren of not-quite public space, basement tunnels populated mostly by people wearing official badges and uniforms or white coats, until we come out on the other side of the building, on First Ave., just in time to catch the jitney, a jolly word. It's parked at the curb, a little gold bus that runs between the main campus, the parking garage, and 53rd Street. Ordinarily my mother would walk to chemo from here, nearly 20 blocks, but today there is the issue of time. We board, sit, look out the window. Outside the rain is still spattering. I can feel her wanting to be in it, wanting to walk, feel the unseasonably cool summer air on her face, feel the drops of rain.

In front of us sit a man and a little boy. I think they may be grandfather and grandson. Who is sick, I wonder? Who have they been visiting? The grandfather says, with interest, "Look out there! See that?" A little white terrier wearing a lime green raincoat.

Two white men in their forties sit side by side, one tall, one short. The short one complains in a loud voice about the pharmacists at Duane Reade. He complains in a loud voice about the rain. In a loud voice, he asks his partner how he feels. Through all of this the partner says nothing. I don't see his face, only the back of his thin neck. The short man leans over and gives the tall man a kind of contorted jitney-embrace. "You're cold," he says in a loud voice. "We'll get you a blanket when we get home."

At 53rd Street, I follow my mother inside, past the waterfall in the lobby, past the basket of fat round hard candies on the reception desk. I have been here once before, with my children, who were terribly impressed by the waterfall, and even more so by the basket of fat round hard candies.

Here again, my mother is some kind of connoisseur, a tour guide in what has become her own country: graceful, swift, smiling, expert. We board the far elevator: less congested. She manages to check in with the receptionist who is the friendliest of them all. In the waiting room, she finds seats by the window, where we can see the rain.

I meet Harriet, her friend, also waiting for chemo. Harriet is beautiful, tall and straight. Her features are delicate and clear and her face seems very focused, in the manner of a lighthouse beam. My mother met her a few years ago, while waiting for one of her first chemo sessions. Harriet has the same kind of cancer as my mother. When my mother received her diagnosis, she learned that half the people with advanced ovarian don't live much more than five years past diagnosis. Harriet's in her eleventh year. It was Harriet who told my mother, the first day they met, that she didn't worry about her health. If there was any evidence, she said, that suggested worrying might help, even a little, she would by all means go ahead and worry.

The greatest worry may be erasure. The slow, steady draining away of presence, of mattering, of selfhood. At home my mother has made a photo gallery - a modest assemblage of a dozen pictures scotch-taped to the door leading to the garage. Photo of socks she has been knitting. Photo of grass she grew in a basket. Photo of a string of origami cranes she made as a graduation present for her oldest granddaughter. Photo of herself, teaching a card game to her youngest granddaughter. Photo of her and my dad. Photo of herself scattering her own mother's ashes in the north woods just last month. Things she has made, things she has done, people in whose lives she figures explicitly, crucially. It's a form of documentation, she says. Evidence that she is still in the world. Evidence that she still is, active verb, in the world.

Late in the day, chemo finishes. Out the window, down below, rush hour traffic has begun. The cleaning crew has wheeled out mops and buckets. In the waiting room, people are still waiting to be called in for treatment. We ride the elevator down, and passing through the lobby overhear the tail end of a conversation. A middle aged black security guard is talking to an elderly white woman in a head scarf. He is saying, "I missed you. Take care of yourself. I love you, darling."

My mother tells me one time she arrived for a chemo appointment and the young man in the reception area keyed her name into his computer only to pronounce, "No record of you."

My mother reenacts how she gasped, how she brought a hand to her chest. "Really?"

"No, just joking."

"That's a terrible joke," she said she told him, but trying to smile through the words, trying to recover her equilibrium even as her heart sped up, even as the great dread continued to flood her veins. She didn't want to burden him with the weight, the understanding of what his words had done.

They May Not Mean To But They Do

The other night I was working at my desk when the thirteen year old asked for help with an assignment. It's rare nowadays that he asks for anything that doesn't involve a router, remote or, you know, gigabytes, so I was pretty thrilled. Then it turned out he wasn't simply asking for help with an assignment; it was an English assignment. And it wasn't any old English assignment; it was choosing a poem. For declamation.
"Declamation?"
"We have to memorize it and say it out loud."
"Recitation?" I suggested.
"Declamation."
Whatever.
The only requirement was that it be a minimum of fifteen lines. I started pulling books off the shelves.
Robert Louis Stevenson?
Too babyish.
Neruda?
But those we looked at were either too sexy or too long.
e. e. cummings? I showed him the mudluscious one I'd loved as a kid.
Maybe, he said. I think my teacher likes him.
One of Shakespeare's sonnets?
Too short, he reminded me, not even looking. Twelve lines and a rhyming couplet for a total of fourteen.
Oh yeah, I said, impressed.
We looked at Osip Mandelstam, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens. We paged through Wilbur, Simic, Frost, Szymborska.
Okay, I'm lying. It wasn't "we." He'd long since drifted off to watch t.v.
"You don't have to keep doing this, Mom," he called from the other room. "Although it seems like you're having fun."

I miss him, this kid. I feel like a sap, but I do. He can bring me to tears with his woodenness, the way he grunts when I greet him, the way, when I ask how his day was, he looks at me like I've asked him to cut off his hands. "Normal," he grudgingly replies.
"He hates me," I say at the end of some days, curling onto the couch beside my boyfriend.
"He doesn't hate you."
"He never tells me anything anymore."
"I didn't tell my mother anything when I was thirteen."
"He's done with me."
"He's not done with you."
I try to come up with new complaints, fresh ways of looking at it, if only to spare my boyfriend the tedium of my litany, but by late at night my mind is dull, and I usually wrap it up with a simple reprise of, "He hates me."

Of course there's an aspect of humor in it all, an over-the-topness to my moans, most of which qualify as self-pity, a rite every bit as inevitable and trite, I suppose, as is my son's rite of separating from me.
But a piece of it is heartfelt grief over what we have lost, my son and I. Well. I.

So the other night, when I was sitting on the rug with books of poems scattered all about and thought of Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse," I decided to show it to my son even though it's only three stanzas, four lines each, for a total of twelve:

This Be The Verse


They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself. 

He liked it. He liked it enough that he brought it in to show his teacher. He liked it enough that he somehow convinced her to let him use it for his declamation, never mind that it fell short of the length requirement.
"Maybe it makes up for it in other ways," I said.
"She's making me say 'messed up,' though. 'They mess you up," and 'they were messed up.'"
"Oh." Public school. "I guess she probably has to."
"Yeah."

That was it. We never discussed the poem's content, or its meaning (meanings), or what meaning lay in the fact that I was the one who introduced him to it. I don't worry that the final line might worry him. Or worse, instruct him. I think he's at the age to see the humor in it, and maybe -- I should hope -- the pain, too, without being wed to the words' literal meaning.

The other day he came home and I asked how his day was and he grunted something that, upon questioning, was reported to have been "Fine," except by the time he repeated it intelligibly he was so put out by my requests for him to speak intelligibly that he snarled it. But a little while later he handed me a piece of paper with the grading rubric for the declamation assignment, and on top his teacher had written 98.

Mr. Larkin: bless your contrary heart.

Serendipity

The Long Black Veil (detail), 2003-2008, 27" x 27"
rose petals, handmade rose beads, synthetic hair, guitar-string ball-ends,
pennies, blue jeans, cotton fabric, rings, bone beads & buttons,
garnets, synthetic pearls, & thread
Copyright © 2008 Donna Sharrett

Early this spring I posted an entry called Authenticity III – What Does it Matter in the End, inspired by “The Library,” an image created by the artist Lori Nix. To my surprise, it generated unusually passionate and abundant reader responses. Some faulted me for reproducing the image and criticized what I had written about it; others found value in my words and expressed gladness at having been introduced to the artist’s work.

By far the most unexpected result of the post, however, was that it led to an invitation to visit the artist’s studio. This came about through the warmth and generosity of another artist, Donna Sharrett, who midwifed the event.

Donna and I began to correspond last fall, when she, having found this blog, wrote and invited me to visit her website. I did, and responded to her and her creative work much as she had responded to me and mine; we recognized in one another a kindred spirit.

When, in March, the small uproar broke out over my Lori Nix posting - just at the moment, actually, when I was seriously contemplating taking down the entire blog - Donna wrote from out of the blue to say that, oddly enough, she knew Lori. She guessed that, far from objecting to my having reproduced and written about her work, Lori would get a kick out of it. In fact, she said, she’d call her up and ask.

One thing led to another, and on a rainy Thursday morning in May, at the Pavel Zoubok GalleryWest 23^rd Street in Manhattan, I met Donna for the first time in person. My mother, who is in so many ways the spirit behind all of this – by which I mean not simply the blog, and not simply my having found my way to writing in the first place, but the fact that I find myself living a life in which unlikely connections often get made – came too. The three of us spent an hour in the gallery, which we’d chosen as a meeting place because it was then exhibiting Donna’s show, Reverb, a series of mixed media pieces comprising, among other things, guitar string ball-ends, rose petals, bone beads, blue jeans, damask linens and hair. The more you look, the more you want to look even closer, and my mother and I took advantage of the luxury of having the artist there beside us: we asked countless questions, practical and not. Eventually we continued the conversation over lunch in a pub on the corner, and then we all rode the subway to Brooklyn.

Lori’s place was in the most literal sense wondrous. A rabbit warren of partially realized dreams. We went shyly around the rooms as she showed us her various workstations, each one overspilling its boundaries, and we drank in everything with eyes - the cliché feels apt - like saucers. Magical objects everywhere. Miniature music stands and folding chairs set up for an outdoor evening concert. An entire wall painted like the sky, in two different kinds of weather. A hand-made escalator. A wall-mounted taxidermied squirrel. A mid-size tree just beginning to turn autumn colors. An anatomical cow. An armchair half-hidden by books and art supplies, and lounging in it a live cat. A boxful of books, dozens and dozens and dozens of them, each roughly the size of a piece of Bazooka gum, each cut from foam and covered and painted to look like it wore a real dust jacket. Here, said the artist, as though extending a bowl of potato chips, Have some. She let us dip our hands in to sift through the texts - all of them blank as sugar cubes, yet somehow full, one guessed, of the most fantastical tales - and remove a few of the tiny volumes to take home. They were - tears came up behind my eyes - the very books she’d used in “The Library,” the work that had led me to her, the one I’d written about in this space.

No Other

The question comes up, who among us is Other?

The question is not abstract. It has never been abstract. As a fourth grader, I listened while my best friends sang mockingly about another girl, a classmate with an unusual jaw, an atypically flat face. I don't know if her condition had a name; we did not in any case think of it as a condition, but as an Otherness, a reason for some of us to sing a mocking song.

Recently, among colleagues, the question arose in reference to an incarcerated individual. Did the fact of his violent crime render him Other? Some of us thought yes. Some of us thought no. None of us had met him. None of us knew his story beyond the details in a couple of newspaper articles, and then the versions of those details re-reported to one another, amplified by people's prior experiences with violence.

Yesterday, in conversation with a relative, the question arose in reference to all the ordinary citizens who helped the Nazis. Had these people become crazy, had they metamorphosed under extraordinary circumstances into Other? Or were they precisely you and me, were they always only ever you and me?

As a child I dreamed of being a union organizer, an abolitionist, a partisan fighter, a conscientious objector, a member of the Abraham Lincoln brigade, a suffragette, a Freedom Rider, Wonder Woman. I grew up loving parents who made it possible for me to hold such figures in esteem. But I'm no absolutist. If I'd grown up in the antebellum south with parents who owned enslaved people, I think it plausible, even likely, that I would have upheld the institution of slavery as moral. If I'd grown up wealthy, with parents who made their fortune by paying low wages to people working in unsafe conditions, I imagine I might have developed a belief in the legitimacy of differential standards of living based on inherent ability.

It's not simply that I can imagine being a slave owner, an exploitative boss, a Nazi, a Mujahid, a murderer. It's that I can't not imagine it. To fail to imagine these possibilities would be to fail to imagine that we all exist on the same moral and experiential spectrum. It would be, for me, the act of grossest inhumanity, a giving up, a giving in to despair. It would be - I mean this literally - the death of me.

Today I was going into a shop. I was approaching the door, and several paces ahead of me a man and his eleven- or twelve-year-old son were approaching the same door. As I drew closer, the man stopped short. He stopped his son short, too, with a hand at the boy's chest. They looked at me. The man gestured. He even bent his head in a slight bow. "Please, go ahead."

They were black. I am white. I tried to make the best of a sickening situation; that is, I suddenly felt sick. I smiled as humbly as I could manage, murmured my thanks, proceeded to the door, and, pulling it open, stepped back and gestured in turn. "After you," I urged. But when the man demurred, as I'd known he would, I, not wanting to offend or to contradict the lesson he was imparting to his son, did not press. I entered the shop first.

My own children, my three white children, are routinely rude in public. They blow bubbles into their drinks in restaurants. They bicker and cavort in shops. They speed up to go through a door ahead of the meandering elderly. I reprimand them, but lightly. That is our privilege: the world smiles indulgently on these white, blond-haired, badly behaved children, and I never need fear for them, never need fear they will be summarily ill-judged by strangers, teachers, policemen, shopkeepers.

The man who put out his hand and touched his son's chest to keep him from walking was protecting him. He was protecting his son from the false belief that he had as much right to claim a place on the sidewalk as a white lady. He was protecting his son from the still-real consequences, in 2009, of a black boy assuming equal space in the world as a white boy.

I went away sick over our Otherness, that of the father and son and me. This divide, originating so obviously not inside us but outside and then cast upon us like a net, a grid, bars - this is an Otherness I recognize.

To fight Otherness - both the very real Otherness imposed on individuals by systems and institutions, and upheld by individuals invested in those systems and institutions; and also the perceived Otherness that we assign people with whom we fail to connect through the power of empathic imagination - is our great work.

The paradox is that this fight sometimes enlists us in the work of creating divides. When, in fourth grade, in quavering voice, I begged my friends to stop singing, I rendered myself Other. A fissure split the very ground between them and me, and I was flooded with shame for having caused it.

Ways of Passing

Two weeks ago my parents attended a memorial service for 26 people. My parents did not know the dead, nor any of their friends and family (almost none of whom, in any case, attended). The service took place in an auditorium at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan, and the memorialized were people who had donated their bodies to be cadavers for medical students. Those doing the memorializing were mainly the students themselves, more than a hundred of them: the class of 2012.

The service was coordinated by their instructor, Dr. Estomih Mtui, director of the school’s Program in Anatomy and Body Visualization, and when my mother arrived (she got there early; my father would be meeting her from work), he greeted her and showed her where to sit, in the area reserved for faculty and guests.

She watched a quartet of students who would be performing a choral piece; they were doing a last-minute sound check. Dr. Mtui came over and asked my mother if she would say a few words at the end of the service. She was taken aback, yet she knew she wanted to have the nerve to say yes. She asked whether she could decide at the last moment. Dr. Mtui said that would be fine.

My mother was there as a future donor – the second future donor in the history of the school, she was informed, to attend the annual service.

Bit by bit, the rest of the students and faculty arrived, and also my father, and the family of one of the donors. The service began with remarks by faculty and clergy, and musical offerings by students. Then came the Flower Presentation Ceremony. Twenty-six clusters of students -- a foursome for each cadaver -- came forward one at a time. A designated speaker from each group delivered brief remarks. A few of them chose to read a poem. Each made a statement of gratitude to the individual, whom they called by name (first names only: there were an Agnes and a Mildred, a Harold and a Norman, two Helens, an Esther). The students spoke of the bodies as their teachers. They talked about the individuality of each body, their apprehension of the excellent, inevitable dissimilarities. Each group laid a bouquet for its cadaver on a table. The bouquets, my mother made a point of noticing, were not all the same.

Near the end, my parents were called up on the dais and my mother, too, was presented with flowers. Then Dr. Mtui called her to the microphone. My father speaks publicly quite a lot; my mother rarely does. Actually, I cannot recall a single instance of her speaking in public in my lifetime. This is her best memory of what she said:

I'm in my fourth year of making my way with advanced ovarian cancer. It took me about a year to come to the decision to donate my body. I read about it and mostly just thought about it. I was pretty much decided, but one piece was holding me back: the stories I'd heard about jokes and levity on the students' part regarding the bodies. When I mentioned this to a friend, she laughed and said "Oh what fun." and then everything melted for me and I was fine with it. I simply felt we're all in this together and it's all okay.

I want to tell you what it's been like for me attending this service. I've loved seeing your faces and hearing your voices and seeing the soft side of you. I hope you take good care of it. It's amazing for me to see medicine-as-science sharing space with things of human spirit. I'm very happy whenever I think that my last act in this life will be to become a part of this. Thank you for the opportunity to be here.

Telling me afterward, separately, about how long the people clapped after she finished, both my parents sounded quietly shaken. My mother would later write:

I wanted to march right up to the brink of my physical end and peer down in. I didn’t know what I would find, but I wanted to know it. For a while, sitting there alone in the dimmed light and hushed pre-service murmurs, I felt like I’d stopped being a person and had become chaos, stone and dust and liquid all at once. If I moved or breathed or had a thought, I’d crack open and disappear. Then the service began and the words and meaning tugged at me. I don’t know now what was said, but I realized that the end of my body was no longer about me. It had as large a setting as I chose to allow. It was about the – not my -- life cycle, about the beauty and rightness and excellence of the pattern of life and death. And how splendid that it could actually be useful! I could join the large community of past and future donors. I could join the lives of a roomful of young doctors-in-the-making. And join something else wordless and beyond. I found myself awash in a sense of peace and well-being and certainty and gratitude about being a donor. And this may be crazy, but I somehow think there will be a sort of unobservable, unquantifiable stream of joy pouring out of my dead molecules that semester and circling around the ceiling of the lab up under the fluorescent lights.

Most of the story, however, she told me on the phone, about an hour after the service. She was at chemo then, where, having come directly from the service, she'd arrived with the bouquet from the medical students. She’d given it to the nurses. The blooms would live, while they lived, at the nurses’ station, for their pleasure and also that of the patients and doctors and visitors and custodians, all those who happened to pass.

Notes:
Anyone interested in learning more about donating can contact Mike LeVasseur, the Anatomical gift coordinator at Weill Cornell Medical College. He can be reached at: 212-746-5677, or mil2015@med.cornell.edu.

The painting above, by Karl-Friedrich Schinkel, was a set decoration for Mozart's Magic Flute.

Builds Strong Backs

About a year ago, we gave the oldest child a wall.

The back stairs wall, to be precise, the one connecting our unit with the cellar. I'm up and down those stairs nearly every day with a load of wash in my arms. In fine weather, the kids are up and down more often than that, taking them two at a time, letting the screen door bang shut as they go searching out stilts and scooters in the damp, crumbling garage, or tracking in mud and grass on their way back to the kitchen for glasses of water.

We gave the child the wall to paint. This came about after a year or two of his sporadic musings-aloud that he'd like to paint the walls of his room. A forest mural, he thought. Or an under-water scene. Or large blue polka dots. The plan kept shifting. Having ample experience of his pattern of embarking on fantastic projects only to find ourselves, at least some of the time, then living with the detritus of his supplies (paper cuttings, bits of tape and wire, snips of pvc tubing, cotton swabs, carefully disemboweled ball point pens, the odd battery attached to a motor removed from some ancient, broken toy) and a half-completed project languishing in a corner of the living room, we offered in the service of his undertaking not, initially, the walls of his room but those of the back stairwell. After registering mild dissatisfaction, he accepted.

For a while he went like gangbusters, and it was beautiful to see him apply that particular brand of intense, problem-solving ingenuity he has. He found images of old cereal box designs online and decided these would make a fine subject for reproduction. He printed them out in miniature, then readied himself to transfer the images, enlarged, onto the wall. He penciled the outlines of boxes, following the sloping line of the wainscoting and using a t-square and algebra to get the proportions and angles just right. My mother bequeathed him an old cookie tin full of little bottles of acrylic paint in dozens of colors. He applied blue painter's tape to the borders, fashioned newspaper tarpaulins, helped himself to a paper plate that would serve as his painter's palette. He painted three cereal boxes and then lost interest.

For something like eleven months, then, we lived with the stalled artifacts of the project cluttering up the stairway. The newspapers, the tape, the jar of brushes, the print-outs of cereal boxes, the tin of paints, the paper plate with its caked-on, festively colorful splotches of paint -- for eleven months I navigated these items every time I passed, clothes-laden, on my way to or from the washing machine. We maneuvered around the supplies every time we used the back door to take out the trash or recycling, every time we went went looking for wiffle balls or jump ropes in the garage.

And every time he declared himself bored, we'd say, "Why don't you paint another cereal box?" and he'd answer, "I'm not really in the mood." Finally one day I asked, "Do you mind if other people paint them?" and he gave -- not so much his blessing as a noncommittal shrug that translated as permission. So I tried to entice the other kids. "No, thanks," they'd always say. I thought about doing it myself, but there was always some chore demanding my time and attention.

Then a couple of weeks ago, my parents came to visit, and my mother and I just sort of looked at each other one morning and picked up and went and stood on the back steps and painted for an hour or two straight. I copied one of the old designs my son had found. It's for Beech Nut Oatmeal, and features, incongruously, a rabbit in overalls pushing a wheelbarrow of enormous carrots. My mother made up her own cereal box. Actually, she made up her own cereal: Snow Flakes. Keep Frozen, her box says. And: Builds Strong Backs.

It's so her. Not only making up her own thing, but that thing being snow. My mother, the snow lover. The lover of shoveling snow. Of making physical demands on her body and rising to those demands. She has always relished her muscles, her limbs, been grateful for the ability to inhabit and exercise with appetite, with zest, the full bounty of her earthly body. It's so much of who she is: the way she embraces manual labor, physical work. For years she had a scrap of paper tacked up on the wall above her bed bearing the Benedictine motto, "To labor is to pray."

The painting itself was physical work, and I began to worry just a bit, about her being on her feet so long, kind of scrunched in the narrow turn in the stairwell. She'd been through two rounds of her new chemo regimen, and although her hair wasn't yet coming out in handfuls again, some bone pain had set in, some energy flagged. I thought I could see, after a while - after I had finished my cereal box and was hanging about, seated on a step, waiting for her to be done - the strain on her face. I suggested she take a break, knowing even as I spoke that she would not heed me. She was, plainly, living at that moment entirely within this one large snowflake she'd painted and was trying to get right. And after that there was the matter of finishing the lettering. And getting the falling snowflakes to look randomly spaced. And then, where was that tube of the blue - not the turquoise-y one, but the dark denim color?

I was torn between the desire to be protective and the desire not to patronize. I made little murmurs about her stopping, sitting down, having something to eat. At last, perhaps twenty minutes after she did confess to feeling light-headed, she agreed to be done. I think we both took some pleasure in her native stubbornness, her refusal to quit when her body first sent signals of being tired.

There's a silly little thing about me and the back stairs, which is that for as long as we've lived here, but especially since my mother became sick, every single time I go up and down to do the wash, I am purposeful about not minding the chore. I am willfully conscious of relishing, instead, the physical labor, of taking pleasure in the workings of my muscles and heart and lungs. My mother doesn't know it, but she is always with me there, on the quiet, yellowish back stairs. Climbing them with an armload of clothes is my version of shoveling snow. My version of prayer, my mother-hymn.

Now when I climb them I not only feel her in the air, in the silent stillness, in my body's labor - I see her, too: her hand, in the snowflakes she painted, in the shovel stuck in a frozen mound, in the lettering of the words. In the words themselves, so carefully chosen. In the not-quite random dabs of falling snow.

The Ombudsman's Reply

(Ahem. I'm not really the ombudsman, let me just say up front. Regrettably, this operation isn't of sufficient size or stature to employ someone in that position on a regular basis. However, in an effort to address a recently identified need in the area of responding to reader criticism, the regular author of this blog will attempt to take on the role of public editor for a few minutes. I will now apply a neat little mustache with spirit gum to my upper lip in the interest of helping me get into character. Speaking of inauthenticity. All right. Damn, it's crooked. And slipping. Never mind. Who needs this thing. Skip it.)

My mother has just begun a more aggressive round of chemotherapy that has removed her, these past few days, from being as present in the world - well, more to the point, in my world - as she often is. This morning she made mention of this, and expressed rue, especially in light of the fact these past few days have brought a series of unusual challenges, one of them being the strong anonymous rebukes directed at this blog and at me. Then we both spoke of how, in the space of the unusual silence between us, an interesting thing had happened: Other voices had risen up, offering thoughtful questions and possibilities, many of them very much in the same manner as my mother might. Other people had come forward and set steady hands on the clenched, shivering pulse of things. "It's as if all these other people - people who have been there all the time - were gathering up your energy and passing it along," I said.

"But it isn't my energy," she corrected me. "The energy is there. It just is. For anyone to feel and work with and pass along."

This is how I feel about the things I make, including the things I make with words: they're not mine. Oh, they are - in a limited sense. They come through my brain and fingers, and I bear responsibility for them. But I wasn't born with them tied in a velvet sack around my neck. And when I die I'll have no ownership of them in any meaningful, practical way. I'm in relationship with the things I write, but it doesn't feel to me like an owner-object relationship. Anything I make of words (or of paint or yarn or tomato sauce, for that matter) was first given to me; I receive it as a gift first, and only then become able to pass it along. If my writings are mine at all, they're mine to borrow, not keep or control.When I first began this blog, a friend cautioned me never to publish anything for free. I could get no purchase on this notion. It made no sense to me at all. If I could figure out some other way to feed and clothe my children, I guess my preference would be to publish everything for free.

It does feel nice when someone "pays" me a compliment (although I'm not sure such compliments help me grow in my capacity to reach beyond myself and understand others, and in this sense, I don't know that their value is profound). Nicer yet is when a friend tells me he saw a well-thumbed copy of one of my books in the ship's library on a Galapagos cruise - what floods me with pleasure is not thinking that whoever read the book might have attended to the author's name and credited me for the work, but that the work - the story and characters - is enjoying some kind of life beyond me, beyond my ken. This is the gift returned to me.

All that said, I think the person who has posted several comments as 'Anonymous' on this blog is right to fault me for not crediting Lori Nix more clearly for her art. I think he might be right, too, to fault me for not asking Lori Nix's permission first, but I'm a little less clear on that, because the world of the internet, and of art on the internet, seems confusing. I could imagine that once an artist places her work in that big fluid environment, she might be signaling that it is meant to circulate. But it's possible I'm projecting my beliefs about art and ownership onto others, wrongly.

In any case, gratitude to everyone who has taught me more about compassion and about questioning these past few days, including 'Anonymous.'

Authenticity III - What Does It Matter in the End

"Library," by Lori Nix, from The City series

for L.T.

My friend emails me this picture. She's found it on a site of 'found things' - original provenance unknown.

She knows I love libraries the way young girls are said to love horses: giddily, mystically, reverentially. She knows I'll love this picture, and I do.

The books nestle like birds in a dovecote, a dovecote built high as the sky, and there is the sky - what? - oh - the simplest blue at the tippy-top, where the shell of the building has been split away like the top of a soft-boiled egg tapped with spoon and summarily uplifted - and the sun washes down upon the branches - the what? - the leafy branches of the trees - birch? - which receive it, the golden light, with the speechless wisdom of every book ever written.

Who are those figures up by the crown molding? Rulers? Thinkers? Saints?

Why are those chairs tipped over, those books lying on the ground? Are these signs of the violence of humans or the violence of nature? Or perhaps only the stately violence of time.

What countries appear on that globe? What are their names, where are their boundaries drawn?

And who lights the glass globes mounted by the stacks? And by what means do they illuminate? Bulb, kerosene, whale oil? Firefly.

I call my friend, hot and bothered: Is this real or did someone make it? Did this - happen - or is it staged, a theater set or an art installation? I feel a push to know, to have settled this matter of which.
It's real, she decides. I think, she adds.
(This is very like her. This is the only answer she would ever give; always, always this friend would rather err on the side of believing than doubting. I knew this when I called, when I put the question to her. I knew but asked anyway.)

As soon as she answers, I think I understand it's not real. I look more closely: are those red-and-blue birds perched on two of the branches? Whoever heard of such red-and-blue birds? Whoever heard of a building this damaged, in this state of serious disrepair for at least as long as it takes a tree to grow to towering height, preserving its contents relatively intact: the glass unsmashed, the balconies unsagging, the gold trim still agleam? Wherever existed such strange beauty?

But this line of reasoning does not help, for the answer to the last question is: in life.

Oh gift, oh gratitude. If you know, don't tell me. It isn't that I crave blindness. Only that in a certain light - the light of cast-off ceilings, the light of rain-spattered words - all that is, is. Oh democracy. The real and the made-up: those fine, those stalwart citizens of our waking dreams. Red and blue. Book and tree. Globe and globe. What does it matter in the end.

With mixed feelings, I add this update: the image was found at lorinix.net. I have been illuminated, and go off to mourn, lightly...

Authenticity II - The Remark

When I was sixteen I fell in love with a married couple, friends of my parents. They were artists and struck me as being full of such wit and glamor as made me giddy to contemplate. They seemed, too, the freest and consequently most powerful people I'd ever met.

Over the next several years I flung myself at them embarrassingly. I tried to materialize, as if casually, whenever they were near, in hopes that one of them would engage me in some thrilling repartee - preferably with a pointed, cleverly laden comment that would obliquely but unmistakably confirm their recognition of me as being, at bottom, like them - and in terror that should this happen, I would be unable to do more than stammer and grin stupidly in response. In private I tried to compose the sparklingly serious conversations we might one day enjoy. When I left for college, I persisted in courting them from afar, sending letters and the occasional poem or story I'd banged out. Every now and then, one of them would dispense a crumb in return: a baffling comment that might or might not be interpreted as flirtatious; a postcard containing a single scrawled sentence in response to my latest creative effort, or, more often, simply advising that said effort was still languishing somewhere near the bottom of a pile of papers they might, in time, sift through.

One day when I was eighteen or nineteen, one of them shared with my mother, privately, the opinion that I was dishonest with myself. I know this because my mother promptly repeated the statement to me. She was indignant. I was stung. We were both perplexed. Whatever was it supposed to mean? In what context had this verdict been formed? Apropos of what? I never learned.

Yet I carried with me ever after a sense of shame; I was persuaded that though I could not locate any evidence of self-deception, it must nevertheless exist. If one of that exalted couple - those keen, discerning artists with their keen, discerning gazes - had seen it - and not only seen it, but seen fit to remark on it - then it must be true. My own failure to understand was nothing but further proof of how little I knew myself truly, how pervasive the extent of my own duplicity.

To believe that others know more about one than the self knows, to endow others with such power, is a potentially self-injurious act not unusual among those poised between childhood and adulthood. What do we know of ourselves then, at the age when we cannot tear ourselves from the mirror, not out of vanity but out of the urgent search to identify, to see, oneself? Up until this time we have been who we are, c'est ça: matter of fact. And someday we will settle again, if less innocently, less righteously, into being squarely ourselves, no more and no less. But there is a time in the middle when we are ciphers to our own minds, when the robust vines of self-consciousness threaten to overwhelm the slighter tendrils of self.

This is when we are prone to spend hour upon hour trying on accents, attitudes, gestures, hats. Colors and moods. Props. We might practice holding wineglasses by the stem; beer bottles by the neck; cigarettes betwixt our fingers; a book in one hand, a hank of our own hair in the other. We try on scowls and sneers, we purse and pout, we analyze our smiles for traces of the beatific. We experiment with unwashed hair, unshaven legs, unmended rips, ungrammatical and ungracious pronouncements. We experiment with posture, with kindness, with the limits of humor and of despair. We do none of it to deceive; rather, we are researching in deadly earnest. We are taking astounded stock of our enormous range. And we are on the lookout all the while for what rings true, for the moments of recognition, for the rare and precious moments we sense home.

Perhaps this is all the artist friend meant by the remark. Perhaps it was merely an observation, offered without judgment, of the stage of development I was then passing through. I should add that I believe it is the case I passed through this stage rather less flamboyantly, indeed more meekly, than the average youth. In any case, and regardless the intent, the remark cut me to the core. It was a blow delivered, intentionally or not, to that weakest place: my wobbly sense of authenticity. When I look back I have to consider that the one true act of self-deception I performed was allowing this statement to suggest to me that I had done something shameful.

Speaking of Loving

A copy of the following correspondence recently came across my desk:

*

Dear grandmother how do you stand Ocky being a Yankee fan. i wasx wondering how life is thes days.

love,
Jorge

*

Hmmm. A very interesting question. I'm going to ponder it for a while and then answer your question later.

Meanwhile, life is beyond excellent these days.

1. I am up to my eyebrows in making valentines for all my beloveds (your family already got yours).

2. Snow blankets the ground and the pond is frozen.

3. Easter egg time is just around the corner.

And what about you? How is your life these days?

Love, G

*

Dear, grandmother how are you doing you told me WHAT you were doing but not HOW YOU ARE DOING. I vill answer your question now it is that I am doing very well.

*

Dear George,

Jeepers you're picky.

So you say you are wondering how life is these days. And you want to know, specifically HOW I am doing. Well, I'm doing "beyond excellent". I am euphoric [means "happy and feeling a sense of well-being] for some reason. It's as if I were on drugs, but I'm not. I mean not that kind of drug. Here are more specifics:

1. my hair is a little bit longer
2. my knee is still a little clunky, but it doesn't really hurt much
3. I have enough energy to do the things I want to do. I haven't tried hiking yet, but I'd like to try walking a mile or two and see what happens.
4. I go to the hospital once every 3 weeks to get chemotherapy. It's an IV that stays in for 30 minutes, but I need to be there for about 4 hours each time. I also get a blood test each time. I like those days because I know all the staff so well and it feels like my community. I even have waiting room friends. Plus it's nice to be in the City. On my next chemo day (next week) Ocky and I will go to the Opera at night.
5. my brain is nice and shiny: I always knew how to do sudoku, but lately I decided I wanted to learn the strategies for doing the hardest ones. So I have books and I'm studying them. They tell about things to look for, like conjugate pair chains, XYZ wings, and swordfish patterns. It's a good mental workout.
6. I don't worry at all about getting sicker and dying. I mean, of course I will someday, but I just don't worry about it. It doesn't seem like a problem. More like an interesting development somewhere in the future. Something to be curious about.

Have I answered the question?

Now, about how I stand Ocky being a Yankee fan . . . George, when somebody is as perfect as your grandfather, it's a privilege to stand everything about them. Him being a Yankee fan is exactly like you being a Sox fan -- you both love your homeboys. It's not so much about who you love as that you love. You both do a good job of loving.

And speaking of loving, I sure do love you and your questions.

G

*

Authenticity I: Book in Snow

for B. C.

He was a grown-up of twenty or twenty-one; I a child of seventeen. Not a broad gap, except I really was a child, stuck firmly, even doggedly, in childhood, while he bore a deep intelligence, at once sharp and courteous, that bespoke worldliness and maturity. He was kind, though reserved, and on occasion, palpably sad. He was a good poet, I recall.

This was at N.Y.U., where we both happened to be majoring in drama - although he was graduating and I just beginning, so that even now it feels something like blasphemy to speak of it in equal terms. He'd been born in Dublin and had an Irish name that rolled off the tongue like water. You had to say the first and last names together to get the full effect. He was tall, perhaps a little too lean, with dark hair and a white complexion, less handsome than striking. We had jobs in the same campus office, where the other girls and I were in agreement about the fine unusualness of him - he was, we decided, like Seymour Glass, and we felt proud to know him, and just a shred proprietary about it. We didn't have crushes so much as we simply loved him. Yet at best I knew him slightly.

Not only did we work together, in a building on Second Avenue, we also lived in the same Fifth Avenue dorm. This is how it came to be that we set out across town together one Saturday morning, walking east through driving snow. We'd been called in on the weekend, along with a few other work-study students, to help with a special project (stuffing envelopes, it seems to me as I look back, for some kind of huge mailing; the labor was not glamorous, but we'd been glad for the extra hours). It wasn't by prior arrangement that we walked together; we didn't have that level of camaraderie. Simply, chancing to arrive in the black-and-white tiled lobby of our building at the same time, we fell into step.

How hungry I was that winter. For what, I did not know. For romance, but not sex. For mystery. For knowledge. For transporting excitement. Hungry to leave my skin, to leave gravity, go bounding. To become what I did not know.

This hunger was accompanied by a hope so strong it was almost unbearable -- it made my fingers ache, woke me in the night, kept me conscious of the tireless muscle in my chest -- and by a sporadic, wilting sadness.

That morning, the snow was strong enough to meet my hunger. The two of us bent into it, the swirling flakes spilling from the low gray sky, covering the heavy gray city with their lightness. I do not know how far we'd gone - a block, two? - before each of us realized the other was relishing it. At some point the feeling of fun simply caught on between us. And he did something that made my heart surge.

"We're Russian peasants," he said, casually.

I was quick to agree. When I did, a feather of snow got in my mouth and melted, burning my tongue.

"We're crossing the taiga," he narrated, as we crossed University Place.

"The what?"

"The Russian forest. We're starving."

I clapped my mittens together. "We're going to dig for potatoes," I said. "Under the snow."

At the corner of Broadway and Eighth we stopped for a light. Cars - wolves with glowing yellow eyes - slunk wildly down the avenue before us. "Look," he said, nodding toward the curb. Potatoes? A book lay in a drift, furred by a rapidly thickening coat of white.

I picked it up. It was an ill-used thing, small, black, leather-bound, badly tattered and heavy with damp. Yet it also seemed to possess an air of having been well-loved. I cannot name any feature that lent it this air. I suppose the impression derived simply from our belief. We believed it because it fit the narrative of our pretense.

This was the problem that led me to abandon acting by the end of that year, to go off to another college and study writing instead: I could not seem to tease apart what was authentic and what was made up, in all sorts of interactions and observations, but most troublingly within my own feeling self.

The book was filled with a script neither of us recognized. Cyrillic? Aramaic? Elvish? Runic? Through the film of falling snow, it was hard to guess. Or was it that we wanted the script to be obscure, an undiscovered language, a tear in the fabric?

We crossed the taiga, arriving, finally, in a old building with clanking radiators and the smell of fresh paint. We spent our Saturday stuffing envelopes with other students. I kept the book, promising that I would conduct some research and report back on my findings, but I never did. I didn't have the heart to subject the thing to the indignity of objective scrutiny. Or to subject that fine, gray-lit morning's trek to the altering light of data. For a long time I kept the book, its magic mostly, but not all, drained, among other artifacts of that time and place. I don't know what became of it, only that I have it no more, just as I have had no contact with my brief comrade since the spring of that year.

But he gleams for me still, heroic for the grace with which he (crucially, in my eyes, a grown-up) navigated between reality and fantasy, never missing a beat. The whole world grew softer that morning, more yielding and full of possibility. The hope he ushered in was not the feverish sort; it didn't give me shakes and palpitations and achy fingers. It was like a breath, a long, patient, potentially endless breath - a fermata.


The image is by Tim Graveson, who has taken photographs of books in all sorts of places - click for his site.

Little Snow Poem

Once mom showed me a photo
of snow. In it,
a path
made by the feet of all who'd gone
to and from the white building
in the center (a
library)
all winter
long.

Beneath the snow, mom
said, a paved path
ran straight from the road
to the entrance.
The one the people
made
of their own
involuntary accord
curved.

See how it's longer
she pointed out, her finger
tracing the line,
and more
lovely.





The picture above (obviously not the one in the poem) comes from a book on my shelf called "A Prairie Boy's Winter," by William Kurelek. On the flyleaf, in my mother's hand, it says, "For Dad. You taught me to love the snow. Love, Sue. December 25, 1973."

The Missing Prayer

How I wish it were Gene Robinson the nation would hear today, giving the invocation at the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Bishop Robinson (his name is almost invariably followed, in news reports, by "the openly gay Episcopal Bishop" - a reductive moniker with echoes of "the flying nun") is a breathtakingly honest, measured, and challenging thinker. He gave the invocation at Sunday's opening inaugural event, the concert held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but his prayer was not carried by HBO's broadcast, nor was it audible to many of the people gathered on the mall; at least part of the public address system was not functioning while he spoke. The Presidential Inaugural Committee has taken responsibility for what it calls "an error."

Today some hundred million people will hear instead from Reverend Rick Warren, the megachurch pastor who pushed successfully for the passage of Proposition 8, banning gay marriage in California, and who has compared gay marriage to incest and polygamy. It diminishes this transcendent day that it will begin with the words of a man who believes in a small-minded god. I don't pretend to know about religion, but I know I cannot reconcile the idea of god with the idea of small-mindedness.

Yesterday, the day after Sunday's strangely suppressed invocation, Neal Conan interviewed Gene Robinson on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation. At one point, Conan gave the bishop an apparent platform to speculate about blame or motives for not airing his prayer, or perhaps to emphasize the importance of the words he had delivered. "The controversy," said Conan, "over scheduling and the public address system seems to have deflected attention away from what you said to how it was handled."

In previous interviews, Robinson had spoken freely about what he was likely to say. He'd mentioned studying dozens of invocations delivered at past presidential inaugurations, and talked about his decision not to mention Christianity or quote from the Bible; he wanted to make sure his words would not exclude Americans of any belief. He said he would refer to "the God of our many understandings" -- a phrase, he cheerfully volunteered, borrowed from the language of Alcoholics Anonymous.

I was prepared to hear him use Conan's opening as an opportunity to paraphrase the highlights of the prayer he'd spent so many hours composing that so few people had heard. Instead, he replied simply that it had "meant a lot" to him that the president-elect, the vice-president-elect, and their families had heard it. Then he said, "After all, it was a prayer to God. God heard it. And that's what prayer is about."

I think that is remarkable. I, myself, confess to being less spiritually evolved: I cannot let go of the wish for everyone to know what he said. (And when he said, "Bless us with discomfort," I could not help but think of my mother, and the things they both understand.)

Here is the transcript of Bishop Robinson's prayer:

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN.

A Glass Float

I was lying in bed with my first child, then not quite two days old, ensconced in a state of joy so round it was like being inside a glass fishing float, when the knowledge went through me that he would one day leave. I mean the knowledge went through me as heat travels through a chimney - it was that pervasive, that searing. And the pain from it was so great I felt I might die, or that I might want to die. But that wasn't the whole of my feeling, because I was, still, aware of being cupped inside a deeper curve of bliss than any I'd ever known. We lay there in the big wooden bed in the quiet room that was itself like a curving dream, he not having yet circled twice around the sun on this planet outside of my body. He was sleeping, I unable to leave him long enough to sink into sleep; both of us were breathing, our faces close - and I understood something new about how awake and divided it is possible for a person to be.

This spring that boy will become a teenager. Already he has left a thousand times over. For my part, I have long since learned how to let go, how to fall asleep. The boy returns, always slightly changed: more himself, more of and for himself, less known and less knowable to me. And I wake to him repeatedly, always glad to see him, but wary, too, of the missteps that are inevitable whenever the terrain is shifting underfoot.

This morning, the first school day of the new year, I was putting something away in his room after he'd gone and I saw, lying open on the floor beside his bed, a familiar-looking book. I remembered his coming upstairs late last night. He'd reported he couldn't sleep, that his mind was "twisty-turny," and then he'd proceeded, pragmatically and almost affably, to tick off the half-dozen items that were preoccupying him, keeping sleep at bay.

This in itself was remarkable. A year, two years, three years ago, he used to come upstairs in the night plagued by unnamable anxieties. Often, his inability to name them seemed to bring as much anguish as the root causes themselves. Nothing we could say or do seemed to help. Unable to stand apart from his thoughts and feelings and consider them from even the slightest distance, he was, rather, entirely at their mercy, encompassed within their sphere, from which he could only look out, miserably, alone and teary, to see us mouthing our ineffectual consolations.

Last night, we said pretty much the same thing we'd repeated so often back then: "Try reading."
"I finished my book."
"Tomorrow we can go to the library. For now pick out something from the shelves."
"I'll get some picture books," he decided, and then, with a breathtaking lack of worry or ambivalance, departed.

So when I saw the book beside his bed this morning, I bent, curious to know what he'd wound up choosing, which book it was that had buoyed him from the whirlpool of twisty-turns into a space of gentle floating. I was astonished to see first my own handwriting, then the spiral binding and the blue speckled cover. It was one of the baby books I'd kept for each child in turn - it wasn't even his own book, but his little brother's, and it was open to a page simply describing a day in the family's life when each of the children was small.