Lighting Up for Christmas

“Katie, this is your mother.  I’m at home, finally out of jail.”  It’s Christmas Day and while I stand at the stove whipping egg whites for my grandmother’s egg nog recipe, Mom calls my sister.  The time flies.  She makes calls, smokes cigarettes, visits with her next-door neighbor, downs her egg nog and runs her fingers around the inside of the glass to get all the cream, eats a huge plate of food followed by espresso ice cream and chocolate cookies.  When it’s time to leave, she confidently heads down the porch steps in the dark with her walker.  When settled back in “jail” (really the rehab side of a nursing home called The Pines on Warren Street in Glens Falls), she says, “Thank you, Mary Jo, you don’t know how much good this did me.”  Although I didn’t say so, I could see what going home did for her:  the color came back into her face.  When we’d arrived, she was frail-looking, pale and unsure: “do you think this is a good idea?”  “I’m not sure I can manage church,” “Who gives us permission?”  But the staff was laid back and supportive and many people were leaving with their families.  “It’s so easy,” she marvels as we wheel her past the front door.  We’ve opted for the wheelchair, “just to be on the safe side,” as she says, but that was the only time we would need to use it during our three-day visit.  Her confidence returned quickly, but even I was surprised by the way her spunk would express itself.

Christmas Day, sitting around the kitchen table, she laughed about the easy time she’d had birthing each of us.  “But when I was in labor with one of you, I lit up a cigarette in the delivery room and the nurses came rushing in and said, ‘there’s oxygen in here, do you want to blow us all up?’”  That story floats around my mind, as I rummage through the remains of past lives.  On a slip of paper is a quote from my grandmother, “I’d rather be having a baby right now than sitting here doing this” [she was probably trying to have a bowel movement]; my grandmother, Lillian, was old and senile but witty, and we grew up along with her, given the strange way in which the very old do become young again—almost newborns.  “Hey, look at these!” my husband calls.  He is sorting old photos in the darkness of the dusty dining room.  There are three black and white pictures of my mother (taken by a professional photographer).  She is thirty-something with cigarette in hand, looking very drunk and very happy, with three young guys flirting with her, ogling her, and almost cradling her in their arms.  “I can’t wait to ask her about these,” I say.  “Oh no, she’ll be embarrassed,” says Paul.  “No she won’t,” I say emphatically, hoping Paul catches my implicit defense of the desire Mom glows with in the vivid photo.  

Later at The Pines, when I ask her about the pictures, she is clearly happy to see evidence of this past self, “Oh, that was at Ridings.”  The bar is in North Creek, where she hung out in the years when, after recently moving to Glens Falls from South Jersey, she was skiing and getting loads of male attention.  Even at The Pines, she is still something of a flirt.  For instance, Ike, the Nigerian male nurse, is her special friend.  “The night I fell, Ike rescued me, and we sat on the floor and laughed and laughed.”  When Mom introduced me to Ike, I noticed that he bowed slightly to my mother and called her “Miss Catherine.”  I’m impressed by her ability to get the love she needs to thrive wherever she happens to fall.

We arrive late morning.  Mom did two sessions of physical therapy while we hauled trash into the dumpster she does and doesn’t know is sitting in her driveway, filling up quickly.  The plan is to take her out for a drive and go to a restaurant.  “Well, I just had a pain-in-the-ass call from Kim.”  I ask her what’s up, and I learn that last night, after we’d brought her back, she’d lit up a cigarette in the room!  “Really?  Why?”  She doesn’t know.  She just felt like it, I guess.  The nurses came rushing in, and Jill explains that she was surprised Mom would lie to her.  “The residents across the hall smelled it, and I found ashes in your water cup.”  We sit through another lecture after she has had several from various family members.  The punitive words, I suspect, go in one ear and out the other because it’s full steam ahead on our plan for the day.  She enjoys the old photos.  She laughs at her own misdemeanor but moves on quickly to important business:  “I need to get a check cashed so I have some money.”  I watch her shakily form the letters that spell four-hundred dollars and sign her name more confidently.  Empowered by her spirit, perhaps, I make a split second decision to include in our afternoon itinerary a trip to the tattoo and piercing studio so Katya can get her “snake bites”—a dual lip piercing she’s been obsessing about for years, and Mom had sent her money for Christmas. 

After the small uproar a cigarette caused and all chastisement, Mom is surprisingly nonplussed.  I sign her out with the estimated return time of 3:30.  But the girl at the nurses station looks at us slyly and says, “Why don’t I put you down for 5:30 in case you’re having a really great time.”  “Great,” I say, and we head down the elevator and move toward the door.  I walk slowly behind Mom with my hands lightly on her hips—just in case.  A woman who passes us in a wheelchair says, “you two look like twins,” and, although I don’t quite know what to make of that observation, I say simply “thank you.”  We pass the sign advertising this place as “Your Passport Home,” and Mom declares to the girl at the desk that she is “going out” with “my family.”  The girl smiles, and I suspect they all think this is about cigs, but it really is about so much more.  We’re crossing the border and entering some strange new country feeling the glee of shedding our old roles.  Even getting in the car each time is a new experience.  Mom doesn’t have a system but does what feels right at the moment.  “Good foot in; no bad one in first,” she says aloud, talking herself through it.  “Swivel your butt, Mom,” I suggest, and she lands perfectly, reaching to lift her bad leg into the car manually.  I pull the seat belt across her puffy down coat (she bought two—one for her and one for me) and hand her the pack of Kools.  “Now where is that lighter?”  Paul reaches over to light Miss Catherine’s cigarette, and we’re off on our adventure.

First stop is Glens Falls National Bank where we wait at the drive-thru and hope the teller doesn’t need Mom’s driver’s license.  Apprehension gives way to smiles when the envelope shoots back up the space-age tube filled with bills.  Mom spreads them on her lap to count.  She’s still trying to count out four hundred dollars when we’re parked in the lot of her laundromat on Broad Street.  I go in the tattoo studio with Kat while Mom and Paul smoke in the car.  We tell an actual bearded lady (“I liked her make-up”) that we (or she) want(s) “snake bites,” and Kat asks me to get off my phone (role reversal) and hold her hand because she’s scared.  Her hand is cold and clammy.  Ushered into a back room, I watch as the young guy with the tattooed head, mark the spots on her lip where the needle will be pulled through.  “I think you want them lower, don’t you honey?”  “Yes.”  It looks painful and I see her wince once, but my fifteen-year-old is a trooper, and she knows what she wants.  After it’s done, we bounce out to the car, and Mom thinks they look “adorable” and “unobtrusive.”  She totally approves with not a jot of judgement in her voice.  Somebody brings up the subject of Mom’s illicit before-bed smoke, and Kat yells, “because we’re rebels!”  Laughter lights up the car.

“Where to now?” asks my husband, and we head west, passing the kitchen showroom where we stop to inquire about contractors, who could renovate a pantry into a stacked washer-dryer, which is Mom’s vision for making what had become a hoarder house livable again.  Later Mom will tell me how nice and patient and interested Katya was when they sat in the car together and talked.  We drive out toward West Mountain in the late afternoon.  At Pumpkin Hill farm, the sun is descending toward the mountain and its rays light up the snow blowing in the air, making it sparkle.  We turn left toward Lake Luzerne, and I think how long it has been that I have been out with my mother.  Year after year, visit after visit, I’ve felt so trapped by the stuff in the house that has seemed to immobilize us all.  We are free now.  Katya notices a group of turkeys in the woods, walking uphill through deep snow.  I love the bareness of the mountains in winter.  You can see right down to the ground how the leafless trees stand “with their pants down,” as Mom used to say.  At home, I clean, I sort, I throw out junk, I feel down to the ground of good memories, and I even cook.  But by far, my single proudest accomplishment is that I let Mom stand her ground.

We stop at the base of West Mountain and watch the skiers glide down, and Mom has time to remember the feeling of flying down a snowy slope (she was a skier once upon a time), and as our ride winds through the late afternoon like a festive ribbon, we follow her directions and end up at O’Toole’s sports bar on Quaker Road.  My mother walks right in the bar and parks her walker at a booth despite it looking difficult for her to negotiate.  She glides with ease into a spot along the wall and confidently orders a Coors Light.  We toast to her full recovery.  I look around at the four of us, and it seems to me that our faces are shining, and I think of the blessing, “The Lord turn His face towards you and give you peace.”  What made Moses’ face glow in the presence of the Lord, and what transfigures ordinary faces is, it seems to me, the gift of recognition.  Someone (God or a human other) sees us for who we are and sees that we are here for a purpose.  To live out our purpose we need others to give us the encouragement and space to express our selves.  I have no trouble making eye contact with my mother now.  In the past, I looked away from her gaze because I felt judged rather than recognized.  Now the self-consciousness is gone, melted away with the old roles. 

Mom has very few teeth but talks and laughs unselfconsciously.  I slip off my hiking boots and wet socks, and squeeze my cold bare feet between Katya’s thighs under the table.  “With me, you do not have to pretend.  I know you.  I knew you before you were born.  I know you because I made you, and I made you because I need you—or more precisely, because the world needs you.  There is a task only you can do.  Now, therefore, be strong and do it.”  This is what I imagine making eye contact with God feels like.  Sitting in the bar with my born-again mother, it feels like I am seeing her and she is seeing me for the first time.  It’s magical.  What people sometimes forget is that Reality is double, made up of both the actual and the possible; and the divine spirit that inspires each of us dwells in the realm of the possible, the kingdom of metaphor, the home of how dare I.  Children are born into families because families promote and preserve life.  But fostering life is about so much more than the provision of necessities—food, clothes, I-Phones, and shelter.  It really depends on how generously and graciously we make use of the stock of poetic resources every family group possesses:  do we remember the stories?  Do we share the songs?  Do we cry and laugh about the way things were?  Do we remind one another of who we used to be and who we hoped to be and who we still can be?  It is our serious responsibility as family members to give back what we’ve been given.  My mother gave me her curiosity, her love of learning, and her adventurous spirit.  “What do I have to give back?  What can I bring to the manger?”  

Weeks ago during a phone conversation I realized that the best gift I could give Mom was myself—the woman she’d raised.  I’d just finished watching a YouTube documentary on the famous English travel writer, Freya Stark, who rode a pony on a trek through the Himalayas up to 30,000 feet when she was 88 years old.  The doctors in Kathmandu told her that she shouldn’t go, that it wasn’t safe, but she went.  At 24,000 feet, the young man filming the trek asked her if she was glad she didn’t take the doctor’s advice.  Freya said, “If I live till 90, I might make a list of all the people whose advice I didn’t take.”  She lived 100 years.  After seeing that film, I thought of Mom’s plight in a new way.  With a new feeling of excitement, I phoned her at The Pines and told her about it.  “Listen to what Freya says, Mom: ‘If you knew yourself to be a part of something very immense it would be more satisfactory than to be a rather small little pinpoint of being.  That’s why we come back to our adventure because even the smallest adventure is a step, an experience, and that in itself is magic isn’t it?”  That very night, Mom tried to walk to the bathroom on her own and had a little fall.  But she laughed with her friend, Ike, picked herself up, and kept going.  The magic of adventure is the feeling of not knowing what’s around the next corner, but taking the step because we trust that somehow we are in good hands.  My mother gave me that trust when I was a little child.  If my return of her gift strengthens her faith, hallelujah! From my limited vantage point, I imagine I’ll be watching in wonder as Catherine Alice Walker walks with or without walker from one adventure to another further and further into that undiscovered country.

Ruinaissance in Flint

                Cities rise and fall, and I have been teaching hard for twenty years (since 1996) in the saddest of fallen beauties, Flint, Michigan.  A twentieth-century powerhouse of industry, she was proud.  Now, she lays by her riverbank … recumbent, without beauty, shapeless in the rubble and loneliness of complete physical defeat.  We’re north and east of the center of America but might as well be at the end of the world.  Flint made the national news during the 2016 presidential campaign because of our lead-contaminated water, which many read as a sign of malicious neglect.  In fact, Flint is just like forgotten places all over the world where the only news is bad news:  war, contamination, genocide, birth defects, epidemics, and ruin.  From the time I arrived in 1996, I’ve never thought of living elsewhere—the idea of a nice suburb makes me physically sick, I haven’t been able to stop wandering through the ruins of neighborhoods, but I’ve also never understood my compulsion.  Am I here to be a witness?  Am I called to be an active sharer in this bleak reality?  Am I supposed to knock on doors and help?  Oh, Flint, what shall I cry?

Street after street of ruins on Flint's east side.

                I don’t think of myself as a poet, but I share the obsession of Renaissance poets (Italian, French, and English) with ruins of a bygone past.  When Petrarch gazed at the obsolescent grandeur of Roman decay in the 1340s, the dilapidated city was little more than sad farmlands: “As in our travels through the remains of a broken city, there too, as we sat, the fragments of the ruins lay before our eyes.”  In the cultural efflorescence of the fifteenth century, Rome’s gleaming churches, palaces, and monuments were built from stones pilfered from ancient buildings.  This salvaging of the past to rebuild the present seemed like a good metaphor with which to begin a course in the classics of the English Renaissance to University of Michigan-Flint students; it was a metaphor I hoped that would challenge them to figure out how the potshards of Renaissance texts could be collected and pieced together to mend the gaping holes in our city—a city whose emblem could be the Delphi plant, looking like an amputee, almost completely dismantled or the McDonald Dairy reduced to rubble, whose motto carved in stone used to read that “the farm is still the enduring base of America.”  My husband thinks that surely someone saved the engraved marble, but I know better. 

                For writers, the site of the ruin is the birthplace of poetics.  Why?  Because what Shakespeare calls the “dressings of a former sight,” ask us to remember and imagine the way things once were.  The biblical poets Isaiah and Jeremiah prophesied and cried over the destruction of Philistine cities and of their own beloved Zion.  As I walk through neighborhoods that most people speed past, run from, or walk through as if nothing has happened or as if it always looked like that, I am grateful that at least the exoskeletons of houses exist for the sake of the historical record.  When General Motors closed factories, they tore down, with stunning speed, the massive Buick City and Chevy-in-the-Hole so that people didn’t have time to think, to be angry, to grieve.  They didn’t want to leave behind evidence that the corporation made and marred, that the corporation used and abused, that the corporation is nothing but a tyrant that took from the people, polluted the land, and left it desolate.  Oh, Flint, what shall I cry?  But it’s hard to feel angry at the faceless acronym GM and easier just to go about one’s day numb, stunned, walking as if drugged through a world of eyesores (chimneys standing awkwardly amidst weed trees) or a world where the eyesores are torn down.  It’s desolate either way. 

Buick City brownfield.  You can tell the date of the plant's destruction from the plants
growing among the ruins.

What really makes me mad are my university colleagues who commute from Bloomfield Hills, East Lansing or Ann Arbor.  What kills me are all those robots living comfortable middle-class lives in the nearby College Cultural neighborhood, in the mansions off Miller Road, or the suburb, aptly named, Grand Blanc.  Big white flight is largely responsible for making areas like the east side ghost towns.  But what happened to the people who once lived in these neighborhoods, those who lost jobs and aid checks and witnessed the death by fire of house after house?  Some live on in varying degrees of numbness with no places to buy food nearby—just churches, tattoo studios, and St. Vincent DePaul.  Others flew off to other factories, to other places, like starlings in their thick clouds of bird bodies, black clouds, that remind me of the black soot that fell on the backyards and discolored the curtains of immigrant women trying to keep house in the Saint John’s Street neighborhood.  Where’s that?  It is gone from a landscape wiped clean by urban renewal.  Give me the ruins.  Let them stand.  They are a call to action, to speech, to art.  “I know people who left Flint and did well, and I know people who stayed and did well,” says one of my students.  “What do the ones who stay do,” I ask naively.  “They’re mostly artists, musicians, or chefs.”  “Because that’s all there is to do—make art?”  “Right.  Or do drugs.”

If only people would stay.

It's been this way for twenty years

Making my rounds

Thirty years and out

GM time till freedom

And I’ve wondered why

I felt called here

“Here I am!”  “Send me!”

Like a little prophet

From Boston all the way

To Flint to bring water out of rock

With words.  I speak to the students

Gently but walk mechanically

Not sure what to think or say

And students flee the humanities

Because they are products on an inhuman

Environment.  Just thirty years till freedom.

Houses burned from the inside out

And I walk and walk, taking it all in

Counting the lives lost to greed

But what should I cry? 

I wasn’t born here yet I feel bleak.

I didn’t choose to live

In the outskirts, didn’t choose to look away

I chose this life; so Prophet, look:

Candles on a corner

Tents in Kearsley park

RIP Grandpa—gone but not forgotten.

Houses in ruins

A city in ruins

And my life, too

Wrecked by repetition

And numbed service with a smile.

No!  God I don’t want this

Give me a word to speak

To the people, a role to play

That matters.

I see the houses in flames

And sleepers rubbing tears away

Awake in the cold

Where are you in all this?

God!  The great “I Am”

Who spoke from a bush that burned

But wasn’t consumed like these lives

But not my heart.

And I’m crying out

For all the lost ones

Who fled and for the

Sick and out of work who

Stayed and for the dogs

That wander the streets

And it’s not enough

To notice the perfect gray

Tear of a hornet’s nest in a tree

Along the Flint River

Or the one domestic duck in the flock

Of water fowl who dip down into a river

That a half a mile away is being dredged

For toxins.  Clean-up is not enough

People have to stay and they have to cry

Even if they don’t know quite what to cry

And maybe God—up there—flashing rose

on this gray December day

Would deign to come down with

some soft rags of cloud and

wipe all the tears away.

In class I showed my slides of Flint ruins, many of which were taken along Lewis Street, Jeannie spoke up, “I lived on Lewis Street.  It’s my home.”  After class, I asked her if she’d be willing to meet me so that we could walk through her neighborhood together.  We’re over twenty years apart.  I’d known that she was an orphan and that her mother was murdered when she was just 14.  I didn’t know what to expect, but I never expected it to feel so happy, so good.  She got out of her car smoking a Marlboro and pulled down her big round sunglasses.  We headed north as Lewis parallels the Flint River, and the December wind blew strands of Jeannie’s purple hair around her face.  “I was born on Bennett, and I lived all over this neighborhood.  I was a street kid.  We rode bikes anywhere.  It felt safe.  It was home.  I knew people on every block, and there was a place up on Franklin where you could get a free bag lunch—bologna and ketchup.”  Along the way, she points out the churchyard where they “stole” forbidden apples, the substation on the river where she used to climb the girders and hide out, the restaurant side of Art’s Pub and Grub, that her mother owned.  We peer through the glass door:  “my mother laid those tiles.”  We moved into some pretty bad places and she rebuilt them.  She cooked, too.  I never knew what an instant mashed potato was until I went to my friend’s house over there.”  She points to a burned out shell of a house. 

All dressed up for the holidays off Lewis Street.  The shops,
 bars, and eateries are mostly all closed.

All but one of the houses Jeannie pointed to on our two-hour walk were either gone (empty lots) or burnt black caves.  She tells sad stories:  violent deaths, drugs, teenage homelessness, arson.  “I talked to a lot of the kids who burned houses.  They were anywhere from 9 to 14, and the landlords would give them a hundred bucks.  Kids will do anything for money.  When I asked them why, they said they didn’t like it but figured someone would clean the houses up.”  She told me about stealing bikes and selling them for 20 bucks a piece, about selling marijuana to get through Mott Community College, about sleeping in the empty houses and going to high school with frostbitten toes.  Her mother had died, and she was on the streets.  She remembers characters like Uncle Merle, who she once thought was the coolest, “Yeah, he’s still kicking around Flint somewhere, addicted to heroin.  I don’t talk to him anymore.”  With her nothing feels sad, and the neighborhood is not dismal.  It is what it is—alive with her memories and the energy of a young woman who resists psychological labels, whose character and mind were made here, who has been too busy surviving and educating herself and her kids to get sucked down the holes that take away Flint lives.  She owns land in Highland, Michigan, where her two boys can play outside, where she can fall asleep in a hammock pointing out constellations.  She’s proud of what she’s accomplished, yet she says, “Imagine.  This decaying city is still my home.”  She touches lightly on the inevitable shame but brushes it aside with cliché, “Flint’s a great place to be from.  It builds character.”  I’ve always felt that cliché is a way of covering up or neutralizing experience, and Jeannie resorts to it rarely.  Perhaps this walk gives her a chance to circle back into the past and avoid the amnesia that is, to some extent, necessary for those who get out, for those who seek to fashion new selves and better lives.

 “As strange as it sounds,” I venture to add, “I’ve always felt like these neighborhoods are my home, too.”  My words are like the inconsequential flurries of snow that blow around us.  I feel stupid making this claim.  After all, I did not have to live here; yet, here I am.  Jeannie doesn’t wear a hat, and her cheeks are glowing.  I sense an inward fire, and I feel like I’ve been invited inside.  But the last house she lived in with her mother is gone.  Even though there is no door to open, no kitchen table to sit around while drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, no photo album to flip through, I feel sheltered, clothed, and fed.  Then I think of poor Edmund Spenser and his incomplete epic which he wrote from the ruins of a castle in the west of Ireland in the late sixteenth-century.  Book One—The Legend of Holinesse—climaxes when the Red Crosse knight goes to a place called the House of Holinesse that doesn’t really feel like a structure at all.  He ducks in through a narrow gate, and then he’s engaged in talking and listening, repenting and suffering, walking and climbing Mount Contemplation.  What’s new for him is that he has a companion, Mercy, who helps him to the top, where he learns his real name and his purpose.  Jeannie and I walk for blocks, and at the very center of our walk, we are given something like a vision.  Two enormous greenhouses stand in a large space where four or five houses must have been removed, and a group of black men in work clothes, silently spread the frozen earth with metal rakes as snow swirls gently around them.  The world is at rest and is quiet.  Eden.  Gardening never ends.  Flintopia.  Bleak.  Tragic.  Missteps.  Mercy.  Home.

Coda

The day after kicking around the east side with Jeannie, I walked up the creek that runs alongside Mott Community College toward Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, and Dakota.  I thought that I would feel loneliness acute with only a dog for company.  Instead I found myself thinking about Jeannie’s utopian suggestion.  “Look at all these empty houses!  Do you realize that there are more abandoned homes than homeless?  What if every person in need were given a house to live in for five years.  People would say, ‘oh, it isn’t fair because they didn’t work for it.  But it would only be for five years, and after that, they start paying on it.”  I’ve long known that we all have it in us to be prophets if we open our eyes and feel with our hearts.  Occupied with such thoughts, I see a man coming down the path pushing a walker with a plastic box attached to the front.  I can see from one hundred feet away that he is grinning broadly.  I think he just climbed down off a bus.  And Moses face glowed when he descended Sinai to speak to the people.  When I get close, he calls to Panda, who races up to him and jumps all over his legs puppy biting the work gloves he wears.  “Hey this dog bites,” he says and I’m not sure whether he is angry or hurt.  You should train him better.  But before I walk away with tail between my legs, he looks at me and brings back that broad smile.

 “You’re a teacher,” he says.

 “Why, yes, how did you know?” 

“Ya look like one.”  In response to the follow-up, “where?,” I say “UM-Flint.”  “English,” he guesses.  I laugh and affirm that he’s right.  

“But tell me what author you think I teach all the time?”

 “Shakespeare,” he says definitively, and I laugh harder.

 “Yes!!!” 

“Well, what do you know.  I’m psychic.”  Then, he looks me up and down, and says, “and you’re going to live one hundred years.  My name is Bob, what’s yours?”

What'd We Learn?

We were settling down to study for her history test—chapter 5 on the rise and fall of Rome.  “Do you want me to come to your room, sweetie?”  “No, Mom, I’ll come to you,” she says brightly, plopping her heavy textbook (unread) on the single bed in my office.  She hands me the one-page study guide, filled out with one or two word answers to very complex questions, penned in very childish script.  She is fifteen.  I only have two more years to work with her before the fledgling leaves the nest, and I’m often at a loss.  What will it take, I wonder, to make her feel that opening a book is entering a world?  What will it take to arouse real curiosity?  The text book may be boring and the teacher’s study guide nonsensical, but I wish she would care, even a little, about her schoolwork.  I ask the first question, and she answers correctly but misses the second one—“What style of art most influenced the Romans?”  She wrote “architecture,” and I laugh, “that’s not a style?  Didn’t you read this book?”  When I suggest she take it back to her own room and read it, she starts pulling her blue hair and pummeling her face as if she is a child with some kind of serious disability.  I speak calmly to defuse the situation.  I know my daughter knows things; moreover, I know she tolerates study because she enjoys sitting and talking with me.  I know this, but it is not always at the top of my mind.  It was Katya’s distress that sent it flooding into my brain.  The questions take us into what I suppose is familiar territory, “Who was the Jewish teacher that taught and preached in Judaea and Galilee?”  Jesus!, she says brightly. There is no way for her to miss that one: she was raised a Catholic, went to Catholic elementary school and Lutheran middle school.  And the next question, I think before I ask, should be easy for her as well:  “what was it about Christianity that made it spread so rapidly?”  Her face becomes serious while she begins to say what she knows, “Well, it focused on the person.  It was open to the poor and the lowly even more than the rich.  There were no animal sacrifices, and people didn’t have to pay a lot of money to be initiated.”  I scan the textbook and read selected pieces aloud to her, “and the fact that Jesus was a human being that people knew, made it easy to identify with him.”  She looks at me as if she is about to share a secret.  “So Jesus was real?”  “Yes, of course,” I say, surprised.  This, above all else, seems to matter to her more than anything we’ve gone over in her history book chapter, and maybe it matters even more than years of stories heard in church.  He was real.  If she remembers nothing else about ancient Rome:  the Etruscans, Caesar, the Goth invaders, and the causes of Rome’s decline, I think she may remember that Jesus lived and died.  What’s more, he lived in a very particular way—as strange as the Olmecs and Mayas, the Greeks and Romans and more like the nomadic Kazakhs.  He never had a place to lay his head.  He didn’t cling to things but gave everything he had away:  his cloak, his power, his prayers, his life.  She heard the gospel stories all her life, and I remember her saying once that she was tired year after year of celebrating the birth at Bethlehem to the crucifixion at Calgary.  Now I understand that she was bored with the story, thinking it was just a story.  An unusual college girl who tutored Katya in math, a girl who took pictograph notes in cartoon form, told me once that Kat was a kinesthetic learner.  So I have to hope that maybe after she sits with the knowledge that Jesus was real, she will get up and dance with it, letting it become the idea that Jesus could be real again, depending on what she chooses to do.  Ever since she stopped getting up to come with me to church on Sunday mornings, I’ve had the thought that it is because I failed to make real the words we heard together; I failed to bring them out of church because of my own confusion, my own lack of commitment and love.  If I do anything this Advent, I want her to re-experience the story of the virgin birth—it sounds like a far-fetched story, but it captures or contains the real experience of new life bursting out anywhere, in any person, at any time, even if Mary did not “know” man, even in the bleakest neighborhood of Flint—a city named for rock—water can spill from the faucets and be clear enough to drink.    

  

Mouse Problem

            Alone in the house, I still choose to sit at my accustomed place at the kitchen table.  I cannot concentrate on Othello.  Looking up from the book, I stare over piles of bills and a crowded lazy-susan, notice how healthy the peace lilies on the window sill look, and catch my ghostly reflection in the bay window.  It’s black outside.  I’d flown into Albany airport just a few hours ago, rented a car, dropped my few belongings in the eerie house that smells like mildew and cigarettes, and headed down to the hospital where I found my mother on the fourth floor.  “Who’s that?” she asks, looking bright-eyed, as I enter the room.  “It’s Mary Jo,” I say gently, and we talk for over an hour.  She had surgery for a fractured hip just the day before, and I don’t want to tire her, but I am very happy to see her, to be near her, hopeful that this time, maybe, my presence might matter.  I saw her through surgery once before and afterward she couldn’t say enough about how wonderful my brother had been.  “Oh, were you there, too, Mary Jo?”  She had forgotten I was there, but here I am—again.  “Oh, Mary Jo, I’ve made a mess of our lives,” she worries, sick with regret at the way a fluke fall—catching her foot in a purse hanging from the back of one of the kitchen chairs—may change everything.  “We have to hope you will heal, Mom.”  Even though I have read the statistics—one in four women die within the first year from complications—I know my mother will walk again.  The doors are locked, and I am free.  I could go anywhere in the house, get into anything, but I sit still as if something is holding me hostage.  The faintest rustle startles me, and I look up to see a black streak run behind the plants.  I’m glad when the phone rings and it’s Mom’s sister.  We gossip for a while and say goodbye.  I hear the noise again, and this time the tiny black mouse looks directly at me, regarding me amicably. 

I remember that before I left Flint, my husband had remarked unkindly, “So the little mouse is going home.”  He was alluding to his oft-told observation that every time I go home, I lose my personality.  “Even your voice changes,” he says and is right.  She asks nothing about my life.  When I bring up subjects, my sentences are choked off, suffocated by the smoke of her Kools and her utter lack of interest.  I can’t clean (she won’t allow anything to be thrown out), I can’t cook (the oven is full of take-out containers, pots and pans), I can’t wash (the machines are inaccessible and she goes to the laundromat).  I find a chair and a few inches of clear space on the table, and that’s it.  Listen.  Don’t speak.  Listen.  Scurry.  Try to get by on crumbs.  The cat’s away, but more mouse than the mice, I do not play.

For companionship, I open the Bible randomly to the last chapter of John’s gospel.  John was known as the disciple that Jesus “loved.”  It’s weird to think of Jesus having favorites, but he was, after all, human, and John was his.  But when Jesus “showed himself again to his disciples at the sea of Tiberias”—standing on the shore—they did not recognize him, until he recommends they cast their nets on the right side of the ship and the multitude of fishes caught make the net almost impossible to draw into the boat.  “It is the Lord,” said the disciple that Jesus loved.  I guess the moral is that love sees deeper than the eye, love listens, and love remembers.  But that night, alone in my mother’s kitchen, what I drew from the story was that I should be content with invisibility.

The next morning after a light sleep in which my mind scurried over anxieties and burrowed into memories in the same room where my grandmother slept next to a man she often forgot was her husband, I go to church.  I choose a pew in the general area where I used to sit next to my mother and study her nervous hands which have become my nervous hands.  When it’s time to say the “Our Father,” I reach out my hand to the old man next to me, but he refuses to take it.  Somehow, I am not surprised.  After Mass, I speak to Mom’s friends, who don’t recognize me because they haven’t seen me in thirty years.  I wait to ask the priest for a communion wafer to take to the hospital.  He doesn’t seem to know or care about my mother, but he gives me a special box, called a pix, marked with the cross.  Before going downtown to the hospital, I stop at Gambel’s bakery where the post-church crowd of seniors lingers over coffee and eggs.  I stand at the counter, aware that my mother and her friend should be here—“Cathy are you okay?  Are we still meeting for breakfast?” I heard the concerned voice when I played Mom’s phone messages.  When the girl behind the counter smiles, I point to some a crescent pastry with drizzled icing.  Somehow I remember that these are my mother’s favorites:  almond horns.  

It’s smooth sailing all day long.  I do nothing and say nothing to rock the boat.  I even sit through a tedious visit with my brother and sister-in-law.  I know that they are ready to be done with an old woman and her impossibly messy house, and they don’t even bother to ask me about my family or my life.  I question them about their vacations and their kids.  I joke about the state of things around the house—the woodpile, the mice, the plans for selling antiques.  Finally, I’m so bored I give up on trying to strike up a conversation and stare at the sunset.  There’s brilliant color between the bars of gray.  “Are those trees?” my mother asks idly.  She’s asking about a nondescript hospital print.  “Yes.  Yes, they are trees, Mom.”  There is some kind of tension in the room, in me, and I need to get out.  I wait out my brother, say goodbye to Mom (“I’ll be back”), and head home.  I make my usual walk along the cold pine woods down Potter Road to the West Mountain.  In the yard of the tiny gothic farmhouse, the carcass of a dead deer hangs from a tree, and under it stands a family group chatting.  A mother holds a child up, and I wonder how the child feels looking at a body with all the life taken out.  It reminded me of being in the hospital, and suddenly I remember the Thanksgiving a couple years back when my brother decided to show off his new guns.  He stood in his immaculately clean kitchen, looking down the sight of his new rifle.  I wish I had not remembered the gun.

In between hospital visits and errands to antique shops and doctors offices, I sit at home and try to concentrate, but it is as if there are tiny mice running around inside me.  They get quiet when I talk things over with Mom’s sister or Peggy Tulley, who lives across the street.  But this mouse problem has me thinking about a passage in Willa Cather’s novel, My Antonia, that I am reading to teach.  The narrator, Jim Burden, enters adolescence living in a prairie town with his elderly grandparents, and he is uneasy living within the guarded mode of existence that he describes as a tyranny.  “People’s speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed.  Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution.  The people asleep in those houses, I thought tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens, to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things.”  I know that I was raised to live this kind of guarded existence.  The times when my sisters and I were having something like a real conversation around this table, my mother would drift away, made noticeably uncomfortable by our passionate talk about ideas.  Families are social units, and like any society there is something like normative behavior.  I wonder if individuals in most families struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all.  In my family, I sense that each of the children have endured this struggle, and it has created an element of strain which has kept everybody almost at the breaking point.

Because I could leave my daughter and my students for only a couple of days, my second full day in Glens Falls was also my last.  I woke up, drove to Stewart’s where I got a large black coffee, and back at the house was a dervish of activity.  I had to clear out all the food—pre-packaged peanut butter crackers, bags of bread growing mold, old girl scout cookies, and ziplock bags of tootsie pops and peppermint patties—Halloween candy from years past.  It was immensely satisfying to pitch the perishables.  Then I began to clear the kitchen counters and sponge away the layers of dirt.  I thought how pleased my father would be since every time Mom went away, he would get the kids to help throw things out.  I made phone calls, collected information about local rehabilitation facilities, I bought mousetraps at ACE hardware, I dropped off one of Mom’s dental bridges for repair at an old house on a back street in Glens Falls.  I didn’t get to the hospital until noon, and when I did, my sister-in-law was holding court and “pampering” my mother.  I began to report my accomplishments, including what I’d learned about rehabs—Sunnyview is, hands-down, the best, Mom but it’s in Schenectady which is forty minutes away.  “Mary Jo,” says Kim imperiously, “her caseworker has been here and the rehab plan is already made.  She’s going to The Pines.”  But I’d heard that The Pines is just a half step up from a nursing home.  This felt like a major decision, and it had been made without my input.  Me, Mary Jo, Catherine’s oldest daughter.  “Kim, we are going to have to talk.”  The neighbors scatter, sensing discord:  “I can see where this is going,” said Coach Dennett, “and I’m leaving because I have plenty of my own drama at home.” 

My objection was, evidently, too aggressive, and it set the tone for the day.  I had to concede to The Pines because, when I talked to the social worker, it turned out that Mom was not a candidate for Sunnyview because of her age and condition.  Still there was the fact that they didn’t give me a chance to say anything, and this was about my mother’s future.  “Kim, can I have some time alone with my mother?”  I tried to contain my feelings by staring at the rain or the black water running in the river, but as soon as I saw neighbors come into the room from what felt like a past life, and throw my arms around them and cry, relieved to be expressing feelings that had no place in the spaces between me and my mother or between me and my siblings.  At the end of the day, it was Mom, my brother, and I alone, discussing the house and the likelihood of Mom’s return.  He started to lecture, to say that home would not be the safest place for her, that it needed major work, and he said it all in the familiar patronizing tone, as if we were too stupid to grasp basic facts.  “You do not have to talk to me that way,” I exploded, “Please just stop it.”  My mother began to try to take his side, and I snapped, “and you do not have to defer to him.  You’ve been doing it for years, and all he does is treat you like a child.”  My mother doesn’t quite grasp that he wants her put away in a home, in a bed, in a grave.  She doesn’t know that I defend her because I love her.  Somehow the tension is contained, helped by a cheerful Eucharistic minister, who knocks on the door and asks if anyone wants communion.  The timing is providential.  Before we receive the body of Christ, all of us pray “Our Father” together.  I hug my brother as before he heads out, and I wonder if he loves me.

Back at the house, I sit down at the table and try to concentrate.  Mom used to block us all out and spend hours grading papers, sitting right here.  Othello is open in front of me, but I feel more unnerved than ever.  In my peripheral vision, mice race across the kitchen floor.  They’re getting bolder.  But the fantasy I cannot shake is that my brother has a key to the house and he has a gun.  How can I rest when I fear for my life?  I have to go.  I hurriedly pack my things, fold up the bed, and go out into the rainy black night to a bleak hotel that really isn’t much better than the house.  On the plane back to Flint I felt proud of fleeing a mouse problem that wasn’t mine, but now I suspect that my panicked scurrying to one more safe hole was merely an indicator of how deep the infestation really is.  Two days later, the mechanical voice of my caller identification announces, “James Kietzman.”  I say hello.  He tells me Mom is failing.  He also reports that the traps I bought were merely bait boxes.  The creatures injest a poison which makes them so thirsty that they jump in the toilet and drown.  The image still troubles me as did his matter-of-fact follow-up, “I just flush them.”

Daughter of Abraham: Unbound

     Economics determines everything on Flint’s east side.  The human print is muddy here.  Paths through yards of refuse to porches with stacked cases of Aquafina plastic water bottles and oversized sofas worn-out and brown from the press of heavy bodies in unwashed clothes.  These houses were once the equivalent of tenements when Flint was a boom town—housing for white workers up from the Missouri boot heel.  Now the neighborhood is racially mixed but universally destitute.  Halloween decorations—plastic pumpkins, an odd skeleton, and purple lights—add to heaped disorder and general sadness.   

Charles Burchfield, Haunted Houses

       I drive through these streets, drawn to St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Franklin Street in Flint to be set free.  It is a very simple brick building—like the Flint Shelter one block south—not a church created to impress anyone.  In fact, the only things that differentiate it from the other houses of this poor neighborhood are its size, its small steeple (not much taller than a chimney), an in tact roof, a stack of bells at the entrance, and a man wearing a wooden cross who opens the door on Sunday mornings for those who make it on time.  Once inside, the church holds the familiar smells of candle wax and a touch of holy oil or incense.  It’s small enough to feel homey and the colors of the cheaply done window glass are warm kitchen colors—oranges and yellows with cool pools of lavender.  I slip into the pew next to the Last Supper window and feel that I am sitting across the table from Jesus.  In this home, talk is not taboo and communion depends on remembering.  “Without seeing you, we love you; without touching you, we embrace.”  After my father died, I was told not to look back.  One of the few memories that stayed (because it is a bodily memory) is the feeling of his hand on my shoulder, pulling me toward him in the pew at some Sunday mass.  He was Lutheran and never converted but went with us kids to the Catholic church, Our Lady of the Annunciation, anyway.  He must have wanted to share the experience … to be there with us.  It has always seemed mysterious that intimate moments with my father and even with my mother (though she never touched me) happened in church pews. 

     At St. Mary’s, the people are not well-heeled, and since coming to Mass here, I’ve stopped buying extras on ebay or from catalogues.  Although the people make an effort to be clean and neat, it’s obvious that they wear what they have:  windbreakers and shorts even in the chill of autumn, polyester hugging imperfect bodies with arthritic lumps and rolls of fat, sequins (Walmart glitz) for the godparents of the baby to be baptized today.  The shoes are heavy, functional (mainly black), and cheap.  In the communion line, I see some sandals, a pair of rubbers, sneakers, work shoes.  There is no place for the poor to hide, they look back at me with bright eyes and uncovered gray, pock-marks, and wrinkles.

This is the only picture online of the interior of Saint Mary's, Franklin Street, Flint

       There is a feeling of freedom here, which is strange because the Catholic liturgy is much more choreographed than, for instance, that of the Russian Orthodox Church:  there are specific times to kneel, to sit, to stand, to shake hands, to raise your hands, to cup your hands, and so on.  Although the movement can feel mechanical, at its best it works to help us remember all the good things we can do with our bodies and, especially, our hands.  We lift them up.  We offer a sign of peace to our neighbor.  We make the sign of the cross on our head, lips, and heart.  Our movements are accompanied by congregational response, prayer, homily, and song.  Today, it felt fluid, almost as if I were dancing.  A few rows ahead, I watched an African-American man rock back and forth as if there was music in him, sort of like the mother, who holds the baby and sways him to and fro so gently.  When we lift our arms, it signifies the lifting of hearts.  We come forward with cupped hands to receive a round white wafer.  “This is the body of Christ.”  It looks like what I imagine manna to have looked like, and the manna collected everyday by the Israelites, tasted different to each person, tasted like her favorite food.  In the repetitive movements, expressive of so many different things, I feel restored to my natural self.  The trick is how to stay this light, this fluid, and to feel this loving when I return to the world, where even though I still want to reach, touch, lift, and move, something holds me back.  I feel strangely confined.

     Outside the church, I am thrall to my schedule, my duties, and my books.  We think we are free, but in fact, my movements—and maybe yours—are, on any given weekday restricted and minimal:  I drive the same roads to Katya’s school.  I stare at my email Inbox.  I read books and review my notes in the same room.  I teach my classes that never go as well as I wish they would, I sit in my office, and I feel as lonely and desperate as if I were in solitary confinement.  At home, my husband and I live like roommates.  No one touches me, and I go through my day almost like a robot.  But it was a Renaissance play that sensitized me to my own bodily constriction.  Doctor Faustus, who signs his soul away to Lucifer, wants to repent through much of the play.  Even at the end when he sees Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament, he wants to lift his arms toward “My Christ,” but he feels devils pulling them down.  Because I was a slave for ten years to an abusive man—locked into waiting for phone calls and utterly dependent on him—I may be more sensitive to the way sin turns our natural bodies into something grim and mechanical.  I was one of the dead, sitting on my porch puffing away at a cigarettes, sometimes one after the other, watching the sparrows and spiders, and longing to be something other than human.  I was very like the woman in Luke 13:10-17, who for eighteen years had been crippled by a spirit.  Even though she was bent over, completely incapable of standing erect, she continued to go to the synagogue.

When Jesus saw her, he called to her and said,
"Woman, you are set free of your infirmity."
He laid his hands on her,
and she at once stood up straight and glorified God.

      If I could begin every day by dancing at Mass, then maybe I could begin again in my life.  And Mass today reminded me of starting over because we all had to participate in the baptism of Douglas Lee.  His parents were ushered up to the front of the church.  From my place in the back, I saw his flower of a face—white with dark eyes and petal lips swaddled in a fleece blanket.  As the priest anointed the crown of his head with the sweet smelling chrism oil, I was happy to be reminded that we all have a crown on our head—that spot that is still soft in newborns.  His mother held him over the font, the waters of baptism washed away his original sin, and the priest spoke of the way God used water:  His spirit brooded over the deep at the creation, after the flood He pulled back the water to enter into covenant with all mankind and animals, and when His chosen Israel was enslaved he walked them through the Red Sea to a fresh start in the wilderness.  All of us come into the world through water as we push out of the motherland between knees and are drawn up to breasts.  In baptism, God’s water breaks over us, and out we come, wearing a white garment and given a human angel (a godparent), who holds a candle to light our way.  The white garment symbolizes the soul that we must bring unstained to paradise.  It’s a nice thought, but how many people return to the Father unstained?  How many godparents keep that candle of faith burning?  For most of us the candle is boxed up and collects dust on a shelf or is forgotten.  We all need renewal.  We need to be asked the questions and to answer on behalf of a baby and because we are all young in spiritual things:  Do you reject Satan, and all his works, and all his empty promises?  Do you believe in God the father, and his son, our Lord Jesus Christ?  

After this dance and this song I feel almost as new as Douglas Lee.  I go to communion.  I long to rest my hand or head on the shoulder of the gray-haired man, who goes before me in the line.  When my turn comes, I hold out my hands, and I place the manna in my mouth:  “this is the body of Christ.”  Hastening back to my place, I kneel and bury my face in hands.  There is just enough time for a simple prayer before the song begins.  “God, I want to be a mother, a wife, a daughter, and a child.”

This daughter of Abraham,
whom Satan has bound for eighteen years now,
ought she not to have been set free on the sabbath day
from this bondage?"

Shameless

            A colleague sent me an email today in which he made a remark that filled me with shame.  Is he reading these personal posts?  Does he think I am irredeemably odd?  His remark seemed to set his life in pointed contrast to mine?  I read his message and was momentarily confused by shame until I went for a walk in the rain and saw bright yellow leaves falling silently against a gray sky filled with noisy rain.  For the first five minutes of the walk, I was even ashamed that such simple things bring me pleasure.  I thought of Francis—Saint Francis—and how he taught his followers the technique of attending to their shame, saying that “shame is the enemy of salvation” and that they should not be “confused by shame.”  Shame confuses because it obliterates the sacred plane while re-establishing the conventional world.  The walk washed away most of these feelings, and I was almost as present in the present as my little dog when busy with a scent or trying to touch noses with Jack, the black pit bull on the neighbor’s porch.

St. Francis giving away his cloak

 

            Later in the afternoon, I was in the car, headed for the expressway to get Katya from school.  The rain was coming down, and I had the wipers going, clearing leaves and water.  Swipe, swipe, swipe.  Someone was on foot coming down Third Street without an umbrella.  No umbrella!  I’d been thinking about the poor a lot lately, and I wished I’d brought my umbrella so I could try to give it away.  The man was wearing a garbage bag, and it was jutting way off his shoulders as if he had a two by four underneath it to create this makeshift poncho.  I recognized the frizzled afro and wide set eyes, and I realized it was Gregory.  I know him well.  We’ve talked to each other in passing for many years:  “How’s my beautiful wife?,” he used to joke.  Last year he was still driving a dented black pickup, and he used to live on Avon, but times have gotten harder.  Now whenever I see him, he’s on foot and looking tired.  The rain is making him move along quickly today, and as I get closer I start to wave like he’s my brother or something.  He breaks out into a wide smile of recognition, and I see that he has almost no upper teeth.  There is a very big gaping hole with two square jack-o’-lantern teeth hanging down inches apart.  His smile is imperfect that’s for sure, but it is truly happy.  If he ever felt shame, it’s obvious that he faced it down and won.  

            Now I get why the poor and the poor in spirit will see God.  Because they can't wait, and don't put off seeing God for some hazy future date.  Because they aren’t anchored to the conventional world by the weight of stuff and aspirations.  Gregory was bouncing or floating in his plastic bag through the East Village, and when that wide-open smile broke, he seemed as weightless as the orange leaves that for a split second I saw as indistinguishable from little birds—flown or blown.  I want to be that shameless, that light, that poor.