Author
[Walgreen’s, February 3, 2020]
This week, as I continue to read the amazing On Repentance And Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, a snippet from one of my favorite movies, “A Thousand Clowns” nudged me. And, lo, fifty-nine years later, this cinematic moment is actually better than what I remember! (It’s “scientific.”)
Unapologetically sick and worn-out this week, I am delighted to let Jason Robards/”Murray” explains what he’s discovered:
English novelist Barbara Pym is not everyone’s cup of tea. Slyly hilarious, her emphasis on cosy (British spelling) and the seemingly dull, drab, poetry-reciting, aging women who people her novels are not to everyone’s taste. But when “the world is too much with us, late and soon,” I will grab one of her books—and get cozy.
Long-accustomed, I think, to close-third writing, Pym’s revelation of multiple characters’ interiority is so skillfully done that for years I never noticed. (Her liberal use of adverbs never registered either. Until it did. And was forgiven.) Nor did I adequately appreciate how she’d created female characters like “Jane” in her Jane and Prudence who, I finally realized after multiple readings, deserve my compassion and not the scorn their creator ruthlessly heaps upon her badly-dressed and wretched-cook women! Professionally-thwarted women like Jane—whose thin volume of essays written before she’d married could have been the beginnings of a successful writing career! Discounted women. Lonely women. Women seared by their war experiences and the privations that followed. Like I said: Barbara Pym is sly.
Best of all, while exploring those women’s interiority, she’ll write something like this (The context is World War II in an air raid shelter, at night, as Nazi planes fly overhead on their way to Liverpool):
“It’s so terrible,” said Laura helplessly, wishing there were something adequate one could say. But there was nothing. It was of no consolation to the bombed that the eyes of women in safe places should fill with tears when they spoke of them. Tears, idle tears were of no use to anyone, not even to oneself. This oppressive sorrow could not be washed away in the selfish indulgence of a good cry.
As I grieve for Gaza, as I grieve for the dear ones I’ve recently lost, as I grieve for the pain and suffering surrounding safe-place me, I, too, know my tears are of no use. I, too, know oppressive sorrow. Yet how elegantly Pym captures this enormous, endlessly confusing and confounding dilemma of consciousness! (I would quibble with that still-upper-lip “selfish,” though.)
One lump or two?
I’m not a dog person. Which means quizzical-verging-on-contemptuous looks from the numerous dog owners in my neighborhood as I briskly walk past their adorable fur balls without comment or gushing. (“Sorry. I really don’t mean to offend you. I’m just not into your pet, okay?”) But, serendipitously, the same week an intriguing article on dog tail-wagging came out, which examines the long-term relationship between dogs and humans, a blue-eyed husky named Lumi reminded me that “dog” backwards is “God.”
This spiritual awakening happened like this: I was in New Hampshire visiting dog-owning family and offered the opportunity to try snowshoeing. Which I instantly loved! Although walking on snowshoes is a lot like wearing the heaviest, most mud-caked boots ever, snowshoes allow you to trudge on fresh, deep snow. (Duh.) So silence-lovin’ me immediately saw how eerily quiet and reverent such unsullied walks could be. And if, given global warming, it makes sense to buy me a pair, I’m in. (How do I even figure this out!)
Not that our Saturday trek was all that quiet. Two parents, one granddaughter, two dogs, plus me meant a less than worshipful stroll. Especially when Lumi would suddenly stop to frantically dig some piled-high snowbank. And have to be scolded, again and again, “Leave it!” Huh?
Under all that pristine, glistening snow were woodland creatures—and Lumi could hear them?! That stopped me in my tracks. (Which probably looked like Grammy catching her breath.) It wasn’t just the sudden gestalt when recognizing the symbiosis between ancient humans and dogs unearthing what’s for dinner tonight that earned my slack-jawed awe. I stared at Lumi as if seeing God made manifest: “You heard chipmunks or field mice or . . . under all that snow? What an amazing creature you are!”
And dog-owners get this, right? They get to have moments when their pets remind them: “Actually, creation is not anthropocentric. Humans just assume it is. If we’re incredibly lucky, we humans may be in a long-term relationship with lots of life forms. Dog willing.”
“Group With Parasols” by John Singer Sargent
That mustachioed, opened-shirt guy with an umbrella? That’s my great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Wild; who’d preferred to be called Frank. (Did anyone ever joke, “Can you B. Frank, Frank?” I sure hope so.) The shyly smiling woman seated in front of him, who may be holding Frank’s boater, is my great-grandmother, Amy Prescott Faulkner Wild. Because I have seen other photographs of those people in those same clothes, I happen to know that they, like Sargent’s four snoozers, had actually been enjoying the out-of-doors the day this stiff, posed [studio?] photograph had been taken. Which means that Frank’s umbrella is actually a parasol! And, as his open shirt indicates, that day had been as indolent, as lovely, as deliciously warm as the snoring moment Sargent has so magnificently captured.
Sargent, who also sported a mustache, was born in 1856; Frank in 1853, Amy in 1858. Knowing a little about how their respective timelines overlapped, I’d walked through the current Museum of Fine Arts’ “Fashioned by Sargent” exhibit yesterday adding historical context to what I ogled. And the same questions.
I knew, for example, how The Gilded Age, a time of enormous wealth and equally enormous exploitation, had overlapped a fierce, post-Civil War battle: the suffrage movement. Who was to get the vote first? Women? Or African-American men? So when I looked into the eyes of one of Sargent’s exquisite women, for example, I could ask her the same questions I’d already asked Amy Prescott Faulkner Wild: Had you been a secret or even an open suffragette? Did you, like my great-grandmother, ever consider the workers who produced your wealth? For my great-grandmother, it would have been miners whose harsh, dangerous labor produced the coal her jaunty husband sold all over Greater Boston. Did she understand how those faceless miners made possible her mansion on Somerville’s Highland Avenue, her gorgeous summer home on Cape Cod’s Bass River, the family plot in Mount Auburn Cemetery?
I’d like to think my shy ancestor did. But, knowing a little something about White people, I doubt it.
Sargent’s “Group with Parasols” is displayed with several other white-featured paintings; towards the end of his career, the great portrait painter became fascinated with white. And therein lies a profound difference between his subjects and my family: My ancestors may have been wealthy—but they hadn’t been rich enough to wear white to a picnic!
Such a vast scale of difference! It echoes the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire.(The magnitude of difference between billion and million can be illustrated with this example of the time scale: A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.)
Oh.
To listen another’s soul into a condition of disclosure
and discovery may be almost the greatest service
one human being ever performs for another.
Douglas Steere
As my father got more and more frail and his children and grandchildren had begun to take on the major responsibilities at family get-togethers, leaving him with nothing to do, he’d say, “Never mind. I’ll just sit in the corner and drool.” He didn’t drool. But sometimes a younger family member would pull up a chair, sit down beside him, and listen to his stories. Which were wonderful.
As I and the warring, climate-disrupted world we all inhabit get more and more frail, asking the Universe: “What am I called to do?” seems an existential/spiritual question with some asterisks:
* at almost-eighty.
* that doesn’t add to my carbon footprint if I choose to witness/show up/minister.
*that would actually make a difference yet which I, on a fixed-income, can afford.
(You get the idea.)
Lately I have been pondering some ways we potential droolers might be useful in this unimaginably challenging time. Let me count the ways (so far):
Like the wonderful Steere quote, we can listen as others share their grief, their fears, their suffering.
Like my father, we can share own experiences; we can offer a long-view perspective. No, let’s be clear, there has never been a time quite so fraught (my dad’s word) as this. Yet surely our stories contain some nuggets the present generations might appreciate? Dare I say learn from? (Some buy-in’s probably required. Someone willingly chose to sit beside my father. Someone needs to ask us to recount the time when . . ., right?)
We can speak to the non-binary-All because we, too have suffered. We, too, have experienced unmitigated joy. And here we are. Our breath of experience adds more to the spectrum of What Being Conscious Is About, the All of it, its spectacular, wondrous, terrifying, maddening, unlimited array of experiences.
And, finally, this: I have seen what Love can do. Love is thoroughly embedded in that All; Its all-embracing power continually takes my breath away. It feels naive—silly—to write that, now, as wars wage everywhere. Everywhere! Yet over a lifetime, in the midst of conflict, when I remembered to speak or to act from a place of Love, everything shifted. Improved. Softened. This I know at almost-eighty.
Where is Love in Gaza? Where is Love in Ukraine? Yemen? The streets of Haiti, the streets of vandalized San Francisco? That’s impossible to say. What I can say is this: some of us along Elder Path may want to listen to your grief, your rage, your fears. Grateful to be able to experience this “greatest service one human being ever performs for another,” we can hear you with Love.
While still dark, the Garbage to Garden driver arrives in front of our house; the truck’s rattling wakes me up. Quietly, very quietly, the driver disposes of our sodden, green-plastic bag of compost and leaves a neatly-folded new bag tucked around our compost bucket handle before, slowly and respectfully, pulling away from the curb.
Three-quarters asleep and still under the weight of the existential dread I wake up with these days, I think: “This is why those of us who are warm and cozy and safe in our beds think everything’s okay. We tell ourselves that climate disruption isn’t happening because: look! We’re doing our part and, look! How smoothly, how gracefully that swap-out just happened! Seamless! Efficient! All is well.”
But it isn’t.
Three-quarters asleep I was reminded of that old, old “New Yorker” cartoon of a NYC garbageman who, I all-these-years-later realize, was probably drawn as a man of color, who stands at the end of a dark, Manhattan alley, grinning maniacally, as he prepares to heave the heavy, metal garbage can he clutches across the alley; another warm and cozy and safe in bed’s [purposely loud, evil] version of another unseen worker’s toil in the dark. And a racist depiction—if I’m remembering correctly—the “New Yorker” would abjure today.
Earlier that evening, I’d talked with friends about visiting the Cape Cod Art Museum’s current exhibit featuring Bob Staake, brilliant, whimsical illustrator, sculptor, children’s book author, et al. And “New Yorker” covers artist. Because they’re friends I could share my overwhelming joy to see Staake’s “New Yorker” cover when Obama had been elected. “I remember how incredibly hopeful I’d felt when I pulled that issue out of my mailbox,” I told them. “And,” I sternly instructed, “I do not want to go there about how I feel about this country now, okay? I just want to remember that moment. That joy, hope, sense of possibility. That’s what art does, right?”
Three-quarters asleep, I again remembered that precious moment. That glowing Lincoln memorial; its quiet, watery reflection; that O of YOrker as moon, as Light, as that Light that has never been overcome by the darkness.
Thank you, Bob Staake.
Years ago my Mets fan son-in-law, he and my daughter toying with the idea of leaving The Big Apple to live in Boston, did a really smart thing: he rode the T.*
“Nope,” he declared, when he finally made it home.** “Too many young people.”
He wasn’t wrong. With its 64 colleges and universities, greater Boston’s demographics are definitely skewed. Some MovingDay/Labor Day weekends, when thousands of people under the age of twenty-five return to this part of the world, I celebrate our region’s abundance of youthful energy. Some years: not so much.
This year, for an abundance of reasons, I teetered. (Pretty sure that our planet’s burning up has made me a little cranky.) But Friday, aka Moving Day, in late afternoon, as I walked in my neighborhood, its sidewalks strewn with all the stuff—like dish drainers and books—no one could deal with after a long, hot day of hefting boxes and furniture, I overhead this:
She: “So how was it?”
He: (Blustery, upset): “It was. . . ” (Stops. Considers; calmly) “I had an experience.”
She: (Pauses; warmly) “Right.”
*The T is what we greater Bostonians call our (ancient, ailing, maddening) public transportation system.
**Did I mention slow, too?
Tom Jones, who wrote “The Fantasticks” book and lyrics, died this week. This news means something to me: In 1966 after graduating from college, I’d lived in Greenwich Village and a block from the Sullivan Street Theater where “The Fantasticks,” the world’s longest-running musical, played for forty years. So I saw it of course. And throughout my twenties I’d probably listened to its 1960, Jerry Orbach-as-El Gallo (the “Our Town”esque Stage Manager) soundtrack at least once a week. “Try to remember“*? Vividly.
Or so I’ve always thought. But this week, learning of Jones’ death, I listened to that original-cast album for the first time in years. And was gifted with a sixty-year old “Wait! What?” memory, aka a cognitive dissonance moment. (Are more of us thinking about this phenomenon after seeing “Barbie”? I know I am.)
My brain-scrambling, illogical moment happened when El Gallo sings “It Depends On What You Pay.” Which is a song about rape. (El Gallo argues that while “attempted abduction” is a more fitting description to what is about to happen, rape is “short and business-like.”) Wait! What? Up to that moment I’d loved everything about this charming, cardboard-moon-hung-on-a-tattered-curtain production. So why was I suddenly so disgusted?! And confused? Yet still in love?
At twenty-two, twenty-three, I had no language to explain my swirled, internal processing to myself. Any more than at that age I could have explained why I, whose grandmother had died of lung cancer, still smoked! Nor did I know enough to ask that all-important and all-clarifying question: Would a woman have written such a paean to sexual assault? Sixty years ago I had little to no understanding of another polysyllabic word: patriarchy. Nor know that I would continue to feel vaguely uneasy each subsequent time I listened to the LP. And that my uneasiness would eventually feel normal.
“Deep in December,” I know a little more about myself and my species. I now have two fancy words to explain my all-too-human self to myself—no, three. Because the patriarchy hasn’t exactly disappeared, has it.
Could I extend that same generous spirit to, say, someone who, despite all the compelling evidence/multiple indictments, still plans to vote for TFG?
Yikes.
One morning years ago, wearily trudging down the basement stairs carrying yet another overflowing basket of dirty clothes, I distinctly heard a woman screaming, “Endless, endless, endless!” Was it my mother’s voice? Or my own? Wading through the mound of waiting laundry in front of the washing machine, I suddenly realized it didn’t matter which one of us had lost it. One of us understood something basic, fundamental, unequivocal: laundry happens. Deal.
“Galloping charlie,” a seemingly benign, scalloped green leaf just there, coyly nestled in my backyard grass, happens, too. (It’s really “creeping charlie” but such a formidable foe deserves a more imposing name, right?)
My endless, ill-fated battle with GC began in late April, early May, when my husband, recovering from open-heart surgery and still unable to garden (He’s fine, now), pointed out that what I’d thought a lovely, purple flower was actually a weed—and taking over our backyard. Oh.
Purple? One of my faves? Well-played, GC. First round: Yours.
So I began to pull up those lovely flowers. A newbie gardener, I actually believed that if I devoted enough time and energy, our backyard would eventually look like a tiny golf course. [Okay, seasoned gardeners. I hear you snicker. And those of you questioning this absurd goal?You’re right! I’ve clearly lost my mind.]
In my defense: Two things happened as I began. (Well, if you count all the rain we’ve had, making weeding that much more pleasurable, three.) One, I discovered the indescribable joy of battling an inventive, just-wants-to-propagate weed. Because, yes, it creeps. It creates an amazing network to spread, thrive, survive. After a while, my eager fingers learned what was grass and what wasn’t, what to sift through, and what to carefully follow, strand by strand, and then to gently, oh so gently tug up, twist to possibly engage even more strands, as I pulled. If I’m thorough enough, patient enough, gentle enough, a great, honkin,’ multi-tentacled weed emerges.
And if I’m not? Another GC win.
But that’s the take-away, right? GC’s inevitability. That Serenity Prayer’s acceptance thing. Which, as I sift, tug, twist, and lift, I contemplate again and again. And as another quiet weeding afternoon progresses, the relentless sun glaring on the other side of my house, immersed in this literally-in-the-weeds-spiritual practice, I am able to consider climate devastation’s inevitability. [There. I’ve admitted that. Let’s move on.]
The Second Thing: So far, our neighbors have been mercifully quiet. (One exception: Memorial Day weekend, one family sang along to Brazilian music. Delightful!) Circling swallows, butterflies, relentless bees, a gentle breeze tinkling our wind chime, the delicious shade of our japanese maple my companions, I am.
I win.
Due to some fortuitous timing this week, a writing assignment arrived as if a prayed-for thunderstorm on a torrid summer day. What a gift! A new friend, Tom, drawn to the intersection of theater and truth-telling and brevity, encouraged me to write a five-minute play about climate change. (Tom’s helping to organize such a national festival.) So the same week when it’s this part of the world’s turn to endure a terrifying heat wave, I’ve been given the opportunity to write “Hot Enough For Ya?” (Believe it or not, this stringent attempt at truth-telling may be less than five minutes. Don’t blink!)
But here’s the thing: What most excites me is this: that generous gift. I was trying to explain why I’d felt so moved by this serendipity to a group of friends last night. “It was like the Universe was being kind, or my Muse showed up, or it was kind of like grace or . . . ” my voice trailed off.
A dear friend—whose childhood had been vastly different from mine—offered another version. “‘Krisha‘s mercy,’ it’s sometimes called.”
I love that!
Years ago I taught a women’s writing class which met in the cafeteria of a nearby elementary school. Working-class mothers of grown children and longtime residents of Somerville, Suzanne, Gladys, Harriet, and Mary were blessed, as was I, their rookie teacher, that Irene, born and raised in Boston’s North End, showed up on Tuesday nights, too. Tiny, with knowing, amused, button eyes and a wry wit, every week Irene told beguiling, detail-rich stories from her “Little Italy” childhood which, no matter what the in-class prompt, she could instantly scribble. Given Irene’s star power, maybe it wasn’t surprising that when it was Suzanne’s turn to share, she’d begin with “This stinks!”
Except that it didn’t. Mother of eight and grandmother of many, whose unhappy relationship with her adoptive mother and father was strongly hinted at but never spelled out, Suzanne was a sensuous writer. ( I once told one of her daughters that; not well-received information!) Suzanne felt. Deeply. She probed. She mused. She speculated on paper. Like her foggy childhood, what she offered aloud each week was through-a glass-darkly. And brief: maybe five or six sentences to Irene’s scribbled page, page and a half. But true; painfully true, sometimes. Had she enough time—and her own thesaurus (something I’m only now wondering about)—would she have felt more satisfaction with her work? I’d like to think so.
Re-entering my writing life after nearly a year, I’m remembering Suzanne’s self-assessment. Yup. Compared to every gifted writer I’ve ever read, this stinks, too. As I again begin to hone my craft, may Suzanne’s humility and, much more importantly, her integrity inform whatever I can do.
Every night for the past week or so, hours before dawn, a nearby robin begins to chirrup. And wakes me up. Now I’ve learned from countless dark-night-of-the-soul tossings and turnings that if I allow myself to think about anything negative, I will anxiously stew and stew and never fall back to sleep! So instead of focusing on how pissed I am to be awakened, I listen. With curiosity. “What do you want me to know ?” I sleepily ask that unseen, winged creature. For surely such relentless urgency deserves my attention, yes?
That his song is varied, complicated, intricate in my first half-awake discovery. Could it be that what I’m hearing is a sales pitch cum love song? An enthusiastic, juicy details, over-the-top description of his outstanding nest-building and sexual prowess? And when I hear a phrase repeated, it’s because, like any skilled sales person or lover, he’s sensed a theme, a riff, a woo he’s realizing has enormous appeal. So: repeat that bit. Of course!
But, dear robin, why this pre-dawn performance? Is it that the early bird gets the mate? Or are you, like my forsythia blooming two months early, thrown off kilter by climate change? Do you no longer know when dawn arrives? Are you, like all creatures great and small victimized by my species, deserving of my deepest compassion? Or does your pre-dawn performance mean something else?
I do know this: You, singing from a nearby branch or nest, and I, warm and dry in my luxuriant bed, both occupy the same tiny plot of land. You and I are neighbors. You’re relentlessly, emphatically here!
And that’s what you want me to know.
