Thanks-Giving

In our lives, we are all the keepers of stories.  These narratives tell us where we came from and who we are.  They also hint who we will become.

Yesterday, we gathered with family for Thanksgiving.  We told stories, some old and often repeated down through the years, and some new and tinged with sepia sadness at those no longer present, who live on only in our memories.  They are our recent losses, those of blessed memory.  Of course, we were also creating stories in present tense, right then and there:  my grand-niece’s first Thanksgiving.  Stories multiply and branch out from other stories to become trees reaching down to the past and up to the future.

As I watched people, I could read them as stories.  Or, at the very least, I could imagine them as characters in a larger fabric of our existence:  a crazy quilt of many colors, a host of fall-colored autumnal trees, strong and true.

Then, last night, I dreamed I told too many stories.  I had revealed too much, giving away secrets and the keys to the kingdom.  I awoke before the consequences of my storytelling were known.

But to reach maximum velocity, a story must put someone at risk:  the characters, the narrator, the storyteller.  Conflict and jeopardy rule the day in a good story.  They are the building blocks, the central core of any narrative, in truth or imagination.  Therefore, a storyteller must be brave.  We cannot tremble in darkness, nor should we shun the light.  Stand tall and simply tell it straight and true.  Relish the recitation; revel in its revealing detail.  The story is us.  And the keeper of stories is a trust sacred to this world.  For the storytellers and the stories, we give thanks.

A Friday Night Return

AP Photo / Bloomsburg Press Enterprise, Jimmy May

Years ago, there were Friday night football games, the marching band, cheerleaders, the smoke from hamburgers grilling out back of the snack bar, and that was the end to another busy week in the fall of the year.  Now, I hear echoes through the trees of the marching band and the roar of the crowd at my old high school just a few blocks away from my apartment.  High school football and smoke in the air:  nothing changes but everything.

“Notes on books, culture, and the life of the mind,” reads my blog tagline.  Well, I’ve been overwhelmed by all the life lessons lately, frantically scribbling away in journals and notebooks but not for publication.  What is this life?  What will happen next?  I could only ask my notebooks.  I wanted answers, and until I found them, I did not feel I had the courage to speak.  I had forgotten the prime directive of my own teaching philosophy:  the questions are more important than the answers.  The answers will always exist, but if one does not ask the right questions, the answers will never be found.

The last few years have been a crisis of faith for everyone.  Most of us were left to ponder:  where are we going?  Is the spirit of America dead?  What if we discover that the spirit has always been dead, that “all men are created equal” are just pretty words?  Maybe there is no equality and no justice, no liberty and no allowance for freedom.  Or, that we are slaves to our fears, our prejudices, our narcissism.  To the immigrant yearning for a better life we offer only the whip or the gun.  We sow the seeds of violence and celebrate the bloody harvest.  We are unwilling to reach out a hand to those in despair.  That is what we have become, a nation armed to the teeth against the Other.  A people too selfish and narcissistic to see we are all dreamers; we are all here in search of a better life.

We should be striving for a more perfect union.  Perfection may be unattainable, but like most sentences, in that one, the verb is the heart of the matter:  striving.  To paraphrase King, we may not get there in our lifetimes.  We may never get there, but we continue striving.  Always.

“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain,” goes the lament.  Depression is the black dog that follows us home and threatens never to leave.  Anxiety wakes us in the middle of the night and disturbs our vague and restless dreams.  “I grow old…I grow old.”  We do and we are.  We are old before our time.  “Would it have been worth it after all, would it have been worthwhile, after the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, after the novels; after the tea cups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—and this, and so much more?”

America is a colder place:  700,000 of us are gone from this autumnal world.  Where do we go from here?  The only answer, the best answer I have, is onward, while the ghosts flow in and around each of us and fall behind.  We try to carry some essence of them with us but it is like trying to transport the ocean to the desert with only our cupped hands.  It is too much to carry.  It is a futile enterprise on the way down to our own dusty deaths.

Yet, there is hope.  There is life and there is what remains.  We are more resilient than we know.

At the dawn of the new year, my grand-niece was born.  Charlotte Ileana, named for that patron saint of English literature, Charlotte Bronte.  I have watched Charlie discover her world.  In her face, I see my niece, her husband, his family, and my lost father-in-law.  She has not dared to eat a peach, as Eliot writes in his poem, but she did try mango the other night with hilarious results.  Mango and the world are her frontiers in these early days of her life.

So it is time to pick up that thread that connects us.  The thread always seems ready to snap.  Our humanity is always in danger of fading away.  But this is life and this is us, and we are striving to bring about that most American of dreams:  a more perfect union.  That is the only struggle that matters now.

This is a time for wonder:  “Do I dare disturb the universe?”  We have no choice because we are alive and among the living.

As for the blog, look for more notes on books, culture, and the life of the mind.  If I find a few answers in the smoke and fire of daily life, I’ll post those too.  “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky…”  Onward!

 

Poor Banished Children of Eve

 

It is the dusky shadows of an ancient September.  My grandmother sits on the porch of her house, reciting the rosary in monotonous, sepia tones:

“Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope.  To thee we cry, poor banished children of Eve…”

I was often pulled into this ritual.  She would hand me one of her spare strings of beads, and I would take my seat in the autumnal twilight, sinking into the recitation, the circular rhythm.  In the span of my childhood, I went from not understanding the words I breathed, to comprehending their significance, to finding them anachronistic.  Yet, there is a comfort in prayer, a reassuring spirit in following through:

“Glory be to the father, and to the son, and to the Holy Spirit.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.”

Except worlds do end, and begin again.

My grandmother is gone.  The house is unrecognizable, altered by another owner.  And I am middle-aged.  The ritual remains lodged in the shrouds of memory.  Yet, it is once again September.  In September, we use to go to play at my grandmother’s house after school.  That, too, is a strand of memory broken.

Our rituals have all been broken.  This only adds to our feeling that the world has turned upside down.  We do not leave our homes now.  We avoid contact and protect ourselves.  My ritual is to rise in the morning, go to my desk, bring up a student’s face on my screen, and work with her for an hour on her essay.  Later, I will pull up another face to discuss her struggles in her classes, the learning strategies and work-arounds that will help her get back on track.

Despite all our devices, our methods of communication allowing one person to see another in pixels on a screen, we are lonely still.  It feels as if the world is ending, but as my friend, William Michaelian, wrote recently:

“The end of the world is a strange and beautiful place. It keeps growing, and it keeps ending. And as it ends, it gives birth to countless new beginnings.”

To do this, we may have to let go of cherished rituals:  family dinners, baseball games, the rhythms and milestones of the workweek, the long walk at twilight.  We must adapt and change our colors, and recognize that we see the world differently now, and there will be new rituals to embrace.  “And as it ends, it gives birth to countless new beginnings.”

I do not pray anymore.  Mumbling words without the strength of conviction is an exhausted ritual I can do without.  I love silence.  If she were still alive, I would gladly go sit on my grandmother’s porch with her.  I would tell her how the world has changed.  She would tell me the torch has been passed.  And then she would say her prayers while I take in the gloaming in silence, feeling the wind on my face.

I have been dreaming of her lately.  Or, I should say, in the dreams, she is dead as she is in real life, but I dream of her house.  I am there again.  The house is empty, but the same as when I last was there.  I am responsible for repairing and renovating it, for keeping it preserved.  There are the gardens, the fruit trees, the lawns, the two-story house itself.  I rise every morning at dawn to walk the property, a single house on three connected lots.  I water the vegetables and flowers, mow the grass, prune the trees and shrubs in season.  If there is something to repair, the materials appear, and I can put it right again.  There are no other people in this dream.  I am the sole survivor of some colossal ending.  It is strange and discomforting.  I do not leave the property, and a ten-foot wooden fence protects the place from intruders.  I can see only the sky above.  Nearby houses are shadowy and undefined.  What kind of dream is this?  Purgatory?  Heaven?  When does solitude become loneliness?

There is no one left to perform the ritual, no mumbled prayers to Mary, the Mother of God.  I am not interested in continuing the nightly prayer.  I am more interested in the Orthodox Jew, swaying back and forth in prayer.  I am more interested in the Buddhist, in the lotus position, humming, gone into another plane of existence.  I am interested in the Muslim, on his knees, facing Mecca, which may be a million miles away on the other side of the globe, yet he is tethered to it by a strong and indestructible fiber of the heart.  Finally, I am the one who spans the distance and lands somewhere between agnostic and atheist.  I know the world is a sacred place.  I know that divinity lives in all things.  And I know that we do not end.  We are transfigured at the moment of death—we become light and air.

So I am thinking of past Septembers.  We just observed Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a moment we should all reflect upon, not just our friends in Judaism.  The world needs to recognize the pain and suffering we cause each other, the way we are hell-bent on destroying who we are and what we have built with our own hands as well as the pulsating Earth beneath us.

My grandmother, in an afterlife of her own construction, is probably sitting on her porch in some other unreachable dimension, mumbling her prayers and letting the beads slip over her fingers, keeping count of decades and prayers.  That is her path now.

I stay up late into the warm fall night, remembering all of it, the way we live, the poor banished children of Eve.

 

Circadian Dysrhythmia

I have a headache hanging on for more than a week now.  I know what it is:  things are out of whack.  Time is out of joint.  Tomorrow begins the new school year and I am having dreams that I am not ready, that I will forget to do something, or no students will show up, or they are in a room somewhere and I cannot locate them to start class.  I barreled out of bed this morning in the dark like a man electrocuted only to realize this is Sunday.

In short, I am plagued by a circadian dysrhythmia.  Night and day have become twisted and tangled.  I cannot sleep, then become exhausted at midday.  I forget where I put things and do some activities over again, forgetting that I’ve already completed the task.  I will go to my desk to retrieve something, a piece of paper, my keys, and forget what I went there to get.  Names of people and places sit just outside my memory and I must try to remember by not thinking about them.  Too much attention and they flutter away; emptying my mind and closing my eyes, sometimes they return to me.  Yesterday, in mid-sentence, I could not pronounce a word.  I stood there trying to form the illusive syllables.  I was, momentarily, struck dumb.

The stress comes from this new paradigm of teaching and working and living.  It is cognitive overload, and the fuse box is full of tripped switches and blown fuses.  The normal is gone; the new normal has not been fully processed.  We are in this hanging garden of obstacles and mirrors.  Did I do this already?  Did I write this already?  Am I paying attention?

Failing to find the land of Nod late Friday night, I ventured out to a twenty-four hour news stand to pick up some reading material.  To go out after dark is to experience a strange netherworld.  I drove past a few bars and restaurants that have taken over the sidewalk and street outside to set up tables for diners.  People packed these places, but no one was wearing a mask or practicing social distancing.  Other places were still boarded up and desolate.  No traffic on the streets, although buses drove past with throngs of riders, mostly grim people on their way home from the late shift.

At the news stand, the proprietor greeted me and asked if he could help me find something.  I’ve been there a thousand times, but I do not think he recognized me with the mask.  I told him I was browsing, and then he offered for no apparent reason, “Sure, yeah, I’m counting out the drawer.”  I looked over and saw stacks of bills on the little podium behind which he stood.  Robbery, anyone?

I drove back through the streets.  “We’re open for in-person dining!” screamed many dark and shuttered places.  They did not seem open.  Cars thronged the supermarket parking lot, even at that late hour.  Homeless people in tents lined the sidewalk under the freeway overpasses.  Among the tarps and carts, blue squares of light floated in the night.  People living on the streets with smart phones.  Back home, a lone rat ran across the telephone wire, a superhighway for the rodent world linking backyard fruit tree to fruit tree.  A cat screamed in the distance arousing the sleeping dogs to bark.

The list of stressors seems endless:  the pandemic, the start of school, the current administration and its threat to every American, the uncertainty of what is to come.  The only defense is to take one day at a time, one moment even.

As a new week begins, one that will bring new challenges and the stubborn continuation of old problems, all we can do is live.  I keep repeating that to myself as things shift and break down.  Put one step forward, bravely, and keep going.

 

Random Notes On a Summer Night

It is absolutely quiet with only the sound of the city rumbling in the distance.  Then the siren, the horn, somebody is in jeopardy somewhere.  The walls pop and crack as the heat escapes and is vented into space.  Outside the kitchen window, an opossum stares at me intently, resting on the top of a fence layered with ivy, wondering who I am and why I am standing in my kitchen looking out at him.  His eyes glow in the dark.

I read and read.  I journey into the darkness to find the light.  I marvel at the ideas, the insights, the communion with the mind of the writer across time.  This book is about murder, about disembodied voices, about unexplained noises on the street or in the alley.  There are those who prowl the night like predators, but my doors and windows are locked.  The A/C is on and for a brief moment there is no pandemic, no uprising, no unidentified forces taking people off the street.  I am alone in the night.

I never feel entirely safe anymore.  I trust no one.  I marvel at the strangeness of the times in which we live.  We whisper about the new normal.  Will the pandemic die out?  Would we take the vaccine if one were available?  I would be hesitant.  Again, the trust factor.

Should I try to sleep?  I have appointments with students in the morning.  I must sit in on a Zoom meeting with others from the university.  I need to be fresh and focused, but here in the middle of the night, my mind is running through the past, the future, and back to the present, all jumbled together.  What do I know?  What do I know?

I know this is all not business as usual.  What will happen in the months to come?

I hear muffled footsteps outside and go to the window to see what is happening.  A man is jogging down the street in the darkness.  I wonder about his intentions, but it does make sense to be running at this late hour:  no need for a mask and no encounters with other people.

In the distance I hear fireworks or gunshots again.  They had tapered off after the fourth of July but every night a few small explosions in the distance, ominous and muffled.

The refrigerator hums and periodically drops ice into the reservoir.  The yellow light from my lamp falls all around me, concentric circles of shadows flow from my fixed position in my reading chair.  I harness the artificial sun over my shoulder to illuminate the page.  I am reminded we have had two power outages since the stay-at-home orders were put into place.  More than a few times, the internet has gone down.  These failures take on ominous pretensions in this time.  When the power went out on the first occasion, I could not find my keys and began scouring the apartment.  I never lose my keys.  I have never lost my keys.  I simultaneously try to reassure myself and chastise myself.  How could I have been so careless?  But my entire daily ritual and procedure has been thrown out of whack by this pandemic.  I panic.

I open the door and go out into the night.  They cannot be outside.  It is an impossibility.  I notice the hot wind has picked up a bit.  I go to my car and shine the flashlight around the driveway.  I spot something near the driver’s door:  my keys.  I stand there in the darkness, mesmerized.  How did they get there?  I do not even remember going outside before this moment.  It is an unsolvable mystery, but I am relieved to have my keys back and my car secure.  I go back inside and deadbolt the door.

Several times over the last month, I pass a room in my apartment on my way to the kitchen or to check the street and I see my father-in-law standing in my den or sitting on a couch in the living room.  I don’t see him clearly; he exists in my peripheral vision.  If I look right at him, he is not there.  I am not scared or creeped out.  I know he is trying to figure out his status, his new existence as memory and shadow.  I am reminded how much I miss him.

Do I see the soft glow of light beginning at the edge of the window?  Is it morning already?

The mourning dove begins the day with a sad song.  Outside the kitchen window, the opossum is gone, off to raid an uncovered trash can.  Squirrels begin to poke their heads out of the ivy and junipers that run along the driveway.  More joggers materialize.

In this night-into-morning, everything happens and nothing.  The universe did not pause.  The stars kept whirling around in the sky.  They are composed of dead light—some of them have already burned out and the light I see in the sky is only their light echoes through time.  I am only now getting the news that the star is dead and gone.  For now, the light remains in the heavens, a reminder.

And dawn comes.  The world awaits.  I close my book and put it aside next to my chair.  I will revisit it again in the night, when all is silent, and I can focus on the circle of light and the print on the page.  In communion, I am alive in the darkness with the dead, the memories, and the future, all at once.

And So We've Come To This

More and more these days,

I see your face staring out at me

From the shadowed darkness of the looking glass.

It’s me, not you,

Or you and not me.

It is, in truth, both of us together and apart, as we were in life.

Always, always the paradox:

So many things to tell you

But you did not understand them

During the Great War of Years;

How will you understand them now?

They are just echoes out there

In the black hole of space.

So now that all the talking is done,

And we have exceeded the limits of heart language,

We remain alone on our separate islands.

Do we wave across the water occasionally,

Just to let each of us know the other lives on?

No, we hold up our hands, palms to sky

To shield us from the burning sun of all eternity.