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.

Hands On Wooly Bear

Hands—“they are the way we connect with the world,” said a student in a class discussion when we were talking about how the hands of immigrants are almost never like the perfectly manicured and softened hands of American women.  Hands speak for the deaf, but I wonder, too, if they do not speak a language that underwrites our very existence.  If so, then a gesture—a recoil or a reach—could potentially alter our somatic life for years and maybe even forever. 

I remember the morning so clearly.  Thirty seven years ago in the bathroom of Camp Mary.  I was staring into the mirror, smearing Noxema over my face to keep the pimples away.  Katie came to the bathroom door and said, “Something’s wrong with Pop.”  I splashed water on my face, wiped it dry with a towel, went quickly to the pullout sofa bed, and reached toward him, recoiling before I let my hand rest on .... death.  Dead.  Was he stiff?  Was he cold?  I cannot remember.  All I remember was the instant recoil.  All my senses shut down.  I think I looked at his face and think I remember that his eyes were open, but I still do not want to look too close.  Then all the sisters and girl cousins were on the cabin porch screaming.  It was raining outside, and my brother was down on the dock shrouded by mist.  It was always that way in the mornings, and the fog would burn off in a few hours.  Neighbors came and took us away to their kitchen.  I remember blankly staring at a muffin on a plate.  I feel a lump in my throat.  Then, I was in the back kitchen of Camp Mary, being interviewed by a coroner.  He was young and handsome.  I knew the answers to all the questions.  I didn’t cry.  I don’t recall feeling.  Was Pop still there on the sofa?  I didn’t ask.  I never saw his body again.  I pulled my hand back, and the next thing I knew, he was gone.  No more.  Cold as any stone.  The mists of that morning never burned off. 

I am 54—one year older than Joseph Kietzman was when he died.  I saw him buried.  But I don't really know where the grave is exactly.  I stumbled upon it once, saw the letters of his name carved in the stone; again, I recoiled.  In tears, I ran from that place never to return.  Michigan is a safe distance.  But sometimes the past comes looking for me as it did today when I squatted under some spruce trees to pee, and something the trees said spoke of that cabin in the mountains.  I felt the lump in my throat and began to cry.  I quickly pulled up my jeans and strode out into the sun.  “You are just like Red Crosse [the knight trying too hard to be holy].  Remember when Fraudubio, “Brother Doubt”—the man locked inside the tree—told the story of how he was seduced by a witch, and Red Crosse, who’d been seduced by the same witch, didn’t pick up on the connection.”  Because he wasn’t self-reflective, says a student.  Yes, but why?  What stops him or any of us from being able to look inside ourselves and work on our own experiences?  Trauma.  The past gets covered with fog to save us from the devastating Medusa face.  Shame.  I was so embarrassed when I went back to school after my father died because I figured that everyone would know and they wouldn’t know what to say.  I was right: that was exactly what happened.  I am ashamed to be writing this now because I should be over it after thirty years … it shouldn’t be that big a deal (it's cliches like this that keep me from my self, and when I hear myself think them, my unspoken voice always sounds like my mother's).  But when students trust me enough to talk about horrors:  a murdered mother, sleeping in the funeral home, the "bonding experience" of helping to do her nails and hair for the funeral, I am honored because I know that these things are very big deals.  I was given this story just a few days ago, and it helped me realize that continuing to recoil from my own memory may mean that I continue to deny myself my own deep experiences.  I am writing about my father's death here because I don’t want to hide out in literature any more.  I want to have my own life, and I want to reach out and toward people and things rather than pull back and dive inside, hiding my tender flesh within my shell

Across the field is an old road lined with large maple trees.  It’s the kind of road that should lead to a clapboard farmhouse, but there is only a shed that contains the mowers and tractors used to tend the arboretum.  I look down and see a wooly bear.  These are caterpillars—black on both ends with a reddish band in the middle—covered with stiff bristles that don’t feel wooly.  Always on the move in autumn, they look for crevices and holes to winter in before they emerge in the spring to spin cocoons in which they will metamorphose into the Isabella tiger moth.   

I’m always delighted to see them because they bring a happy memory.  My father was an avid golfer, and even on the coldest October Saturdays, he’d be on the golf course.  But he didn’t forget us.  The proof was in his pockets.  As soon as he was in the door, we’d hug him and hope that he remembered.  He’d fish around in his pockets and pull out four or five wooly bears that he had picked up along the edges of the fairways.  He dropped them into the cupped hands of my sister, Katie and I, and we laughed because they tickled.  Then we were off to find our bug houses, rip some grass from the yard, and make a little home for them.  “Thank you, Papa.”  Every time I see them, I remember. 

Instinctively, I bend down and reach out my hand to stroke him with one finger, lightly enough so that he won’t curl up in a ball and play dead.  Petted, he crawls on.  My touch must have been just right.  I walk further down the road and pass a heavy truck, rumbling along.  Oh, no!  I didn’t move the wooly bear.  I turn around and watch as the truck, churning dust, drives right down the road.  Oh, no!  I hesitate in fear before I walk back to see if my wooly bear survived.  I look and look, but I don't see him.  I should have moved him to the side of the road.  Why didn’t I do that?  I don’t see him crawling, but I don’t see him squashed either.  All I see is the criss-cross of branch shadows that lattice the road.  In a passing thought, I wonder if he was ever there at all.  Here and gone.  What I do know is that I reached out, I touched him; and I wasn't so scared of death that I couldn't go back and see.

Joyful Study

I live in a tiny room in the back of our pink house.  It looks like an attic room with ceilings that slope down on either side.  I probably have close to one thousand books in this space, one and a half file cabinets, an old computer, an armchair that I can sink into to read and look out at what is left of a once beautiful walnut grove.  Nothing gold can stay—not in Flint anyway.  I also have a single bed, pushed up against the windows.  My husband snores, and I got tired of sleeping on the floor.  On nights I can’t find my way into the dreamwood, I yank the shades down, and they roll up, slowly opening our eyelids on stars.  Recently, a female confidante insinuated (in a tone that was both matter of fact and pitying) that, while my literary life was filled with intensity and passion, I hadn’t been able to participate in real life.  She is wrong.  My room may look like an anchorite’s cell, but it is my mindscape. 

Safe in this tiny space, I study, and when I lose myself in the activity, the room is full of conversations and thoughts and characters.  It is only joyless when I am too aware of the time or get anxious about how the lesson will be received by students or when, let’s face it, I take myself too seriously … and forget that these times alone with books are my music, my play, and my prayer.

There was one day last week when the texts I was preparing to teach—the Faerie Queene, Henry IV, and “The Blossoming of Bongbong”—all seemed to have something to say about the difference between joy and joylessness.  I was happy doing the preparation for class, but it occurred to me that much of the delight I take in these private walks and talks with my characters must be tamed or censored out when I talk about the texts in the classroom because I have to use public language and because I must make an effort to elicit student responses.  But maybe there is value in sharing something of the intimate sounds my mind and voice make when they animate these texts and ideas, even if it is only to persuade others not to be afraid of solitude.  I read in my room--alone, sounding my voice, in search of another.  I meet the intimate when I find a line that opens a new thought.  I meet the intimate when answers come quickly to the questions that have barely had time to form.

What brings people joy?  Is it holiness or wholeness?  Being a saint or being a human being?  Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spenser, says you must be both simultaneously and that you cannot, in fact, be one and not the other.  The “Legend of Holinesse” follows Red Crosse.  His name is George, but we don’t learn that until we learn his human story which is revealed at the end of the book on Mount Contemplation.  Why does it take Spenser so long to tell us the protagonist’s name.  Is he trying to say that our earthly origins are as mysterious as is our metaphysical destiny?  Red Crosse or RC winds up in fairyland waiting for an adventure, and he gets one:  he may rescue the lady, Una’s parents, the once upon a time king and queen of Eden, from the great dragon Satan, which he can do only if the special suit of armor fits him—the armor of a Christian man.  The suit fits, but the man inside remains an inexperienced rustic youth with all kinds of feelings he does not begin to understand.  

Out of the gate, riding along in complete steel marked with the cross, he did seem “too solemn sad.”  From the beginning, RC is taking himself too seriously, is too worried about failure, winning glory, impressing the ladies, and completing the task to perfection.  When he has dreams of loves and lustful play, he wakes up horrified.  The psychological mechanisms of repression and projection are everywhere in Spenser’s poem.  Because he doesn’t trust his feelings, doesn’t use them to guide him through the wandering wood, he gets utterly lost:  led by a witch to the House of Pride, he fights the knight Sans Joy for nothing more than the trophy of his slain brother’s shield.  So much of modern life is taken up in serious competition for such meaningless prizes.  So many people are popping pills to feel better, to be less anxious, to sleep.  Most people are joyless. 

This is the backdrop to the work I was doing on Tuesday: figuring out how I can teach the story to help us all get out of our deep holes:  depression, despair, self.  Is it possible to recover from major sin and big time failure?  Enter Arthur.  He is the knight in shining armor, but he is also all too human.  After helping the lady (who is carrying around RC’s armor, the relics of his ruin), he defeats a giant phallic symbol, and pulls RC, who looks like a corpse, out of the dungeon.  To him the lady rushes with “hasty joy,” but he cannot respond in kind.  He is “cheerless.”  A way out opens when we hear that Arthur has been through all of the same experiences:  he mocked love and repressed any desires he had, and, like RC, he, too, sat down to rest in the middle of his race.  It was a warm day in the woods, and Arthur was tired of riding so he lay down and dreamed the fairy queen made love to him.  He woke up and she was gone, but he is convinced that she was real because she left a sign—pressed grass in the spot where he dreamed she lay.  Trusting that this dream, this idea, this ideal is part of a larger plan, he set out in search of her.  Arthur is truly joyful.  He lives in the moment, taking opportunities to listen, to help, to love.  Two knights have had similar experiences:  RC has a sex dream, and he runs away from his lady and his feelings.  Arthur has a similar dream, but runs toward the dream queen.  One is depressed and one is joyful. What is Arthur’s secret?

His character says to me:  Accept yourself.  Trust your feelings.  Pursue your ideas and dreams.  Stay in your own story.  Don’t listen to critics.  Don’t get hung up on outcomes.  Dwell in the eros of every moment that gives us new ways of becoming more whole by giving ourselves away.  These are all the things I was thinking as I worked on my lesson for Renaissance Literature.  But I had to put RC aside to get ready for Immigrant Lit, and I was a little terrified of the story I’d planned to teach because the character was very strange, and it wasn’t clear how an oddball with the nickname Bongbong, who rejects the American dream (work, material success, upward mobility), fit in with the themes of the anthology that focuses on the immigrant experience.  As I worked it all came clear.  He comes to America to live a human life but finds himself surrounded by androids.  He rejects linearity to pursue enjoyment:  books, films, friends, visions, music.  Madman or mystic—who can say?  What I concluded was that emigration is a self-scattering experience.  The self splits or doubles as the emigrant takes on new identities, learns new languages, attempts to make a new home.  Instead of panicking and trying to assimilate, making himself over in the image of a young executive, he lives in the moment and feels things.  Artists live like this I think—they tolerate the scattering of themselves into images, characters, ideas; and as their works take shape, they form and reform themselves.  It’s like jazz.  No wonder Bongbong listens to Coltrane’s “Meditations” in which the saxophone reaches for the melody of compassion, love, and serenity out of noise and chaos of the streets.  Saint John Coltrane.  There is a church in San Francisco in which congregants pray by meditating to his music.  

After hours spent wandering through these books, I feel a bit dazed.  I get in my car and drive out to For-Mar which is on the way to my daughter’s school.  It is sunny and the colors are popping orange and red.  The deer come a little too close.  A pheasant beats its feathers in the dust.  I lay down and roll in orange pine needles—and, all at once, I’m home in the Adirondacks of upstate New York even though this place is just an overgrown farm turned arboretum.  I am part of everything.  The characters and the lines of poetry float around my head, but I make it to the little hill on the far side of the park.  I like this hill because as I walk up the mowed path, it looks like I will walk straight on into the sky or up into the oak tree planted just behind it.  At the top of my own Mount Contemplation, I lay down, forgetting how little or how much time I have and soak up the sun like a pumpkin in a field, not thinking, just being.  Down on the level of the homeliest weeds and grass, I see a little thistle plant, browned from nights of cold, trying to release a clump of white fuzzy seeds.  The wind and the warm sunlight work and work to take those seeds, but something in the plant holds on to them still.  Let go.  It’s okay.  Let it all go.  Self-scattering, I think: that is the secret of joy.  To lose yourself, spend yourself, share yourself, knowing that all can never be lost and trusting that undreamt of things will be given along with our daily bread.  I can’t quite tell the students all of this while standing in front of them in a bland classroom when most are still swimming between sleep and waking life.  But maybe after writing my thoughts in this form that wavers between sound and sense, I’ll find ways of injecting the sounds of intimacy into my school marm speech.  Maybe one morning, I’ll walk in at 9:30 and sing, “Morning has broken, like the first morning.  Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.  Praise for the singing.  Praise for the dawning.  Praise for them springing fresh from the Word.”

The Undiscriminating Beach

We joined the groups of people hauling stuff along streets and across the sand.  Brigantine—a sea isle off Atlantic City—was, in the nineteenth-century, a stretch of strand and dunes, bayberry flats and stands of red cedar, holly thickets and salt marsh.  I’ve been coming here in August since I was a baby as did my mother before me—only she got to ride in the rumble seat of a seven passenger Packard.  In my memory, the hotel built in the twenties dominated the shore as it does still, only the condos have increased in number and ugliness.  The modernization of life only adds to the poignancy of people flocking to the beach, looking like so many refugees, seeking a home.  They come toting their belongings, hefting chairs on their backs, hugging umbrellas under their arms, dragging wagons, pulling coolers, and urging children to help.  We are the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free in the sea air.  Two days ago we heard that Emma Lazarus’ poem on the Statue of Liberty really didn’t mean much—“it was added later”—and that President Trump is proposing new requirements for immigrants coming to America:  a certain level of English proficiency, employable skills, and entrepreneurial promise.  This is America the great (if not “the beautiful”) with Trump in charge.  His base voted in a businessman to do the job of “draining the swamp,” yet, former Marine general, John A. Kelly, now chief of staff, said the Trump White House is the most dysfunctional organization he’s ever experienced.  The beach, thankfully, doesn’t discriminate:  we watch the family groups circle under the shade of umbrellas and tents, we listen to the common talk, and I marvel at the unselfconsciousness of people in bathing suits that do nothing for them.  “It’s not how you look here,” I remark to my daughter, “what’s important is how you feel,” and even I let myself take pleasure in the warmth, the air, the salt, and sound of the surf.  The beach takes us all in, and we return the favor.

Later in the afternoon, we head to the boardwalk in Atlantic City to satisfy my daughter’s desire for loud, bright, busy, shops, tattoo and piercing places, and elephant ears.  The decaying resort is a sea of immigrants:  Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, Africans—you name it.  They came with the casinos and the hotels, meeting the resort’s need for unskilled labor; but they have stayed to open restaurants and other businesses and to raise families.  We drive past a basketball court in the rose light of 5:00.  It is filled with all manner of movement—jumping, skating, cartwheeling—excited and happy noise and not a white face in the bunch.  Atlantic City reminds me that we all came from somewhere else.  It doesn’t matter whether you imagine that other place as Europe or Africa or the Far East, the primal sea of the womb, or the ocean of blue-black space between stars.  We are here, we are here, and even though “here” is overlaid with layers of tacky, tawdry carnival blare and throwaway culture, the earth is especially beautiful on this marginal strip of sand.

Katya disappears into one more tee-shirt store while I watch an aquarium full of hermit crabs in shells handpainted with familiar characters like Sponge Bob or symbols like Batman.  At first, all I see are the brightly painted shells, but then out come the creaturely claws grasping at things, and two hermits begin to climb the screen of their cage.  Pretty limber despite the cumbersome shells they carry, up they go and—surprise—there are bunches more of them at the top, clinging to the roof, desperate to get out and into real sand, wet near the sea.  “Would you like to buy hermit crab,” says the lipstick pink mouth of a brightly painted Asian woman.  “No, I am just watching them” and thinking that they express something about the consumerism of this seaside Mecca (est. 1853 … I learn from a tee shirt).   

In the day when this place was so young, so gay, my great grandparents had a photo postcard snapped on this beach, having come by boat down the Mullica River to sell berries in the fruit market.  He wore a suit jacket and tie.  She wore a skirt and proper white blouse.  With their two young children, they kneel in the sand.   

Great grandfather, Philip Wescoat, with his wife Katie and two children.

My mother said that in her day a horse dove off the end of the Steel Pier.  Today the entire pier is given over to amusements and tee shirt shops.  “We have to find that Hot Topic we saw last year—it’s ginormous,” she enthuses.  The last place I want to go is a store that we have at the mall at Flint.  But it is her “brand,” and after we walk for blocks in the heat past Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church and gardens surrounding Mary in upended bathtubs, through the historic black neighborhood—the poorest purple properties in Monopoly—with markers describing notable black lives like that of Sara Spencer Washington, the first black woman millionaire, who patented some sort of curling iron, we make it to Katya’s store.  Looking at the walls of band tee shirts—the colors, the labels, all I can think of are the heavy shells that the crabs claim and carry, and I wish my daughter would one day soon feel the urge to climb a little higher and get out.

I’d been walking around wearing only a blouse over a damp bathing suit.  I was hoping for one more dip but was vaguely aware of looking like all the other dumpy middle-aged women with sun burns and frizzled hair.  After we’d shopped to her satisfaction, it was my turn.  I dashed off the boardwalk across the dunes—balding with only a few stray wisps of grass.  “Rip Tides” warns a sign, and the lateral pull of the water is strong, but I rush to meet the incoming waves as they smack and roar.  The work of meeting, greeting, negotiating, being torn up by each one is so all-consuming, I don’t have time to shiver.  “Up or under?” was the game I used to play while holding hands with a much younger Katya.  “Up!” she’d cry, and we’d leap just enough to let the wave lift us.  Sometimes the top would curl and kiss our cheeks or slap us across our faces.  We never knew.  Other times we’d duck or dive under.  Occasionally the wave would play rough, and we’d roll over and over in its white foamy way.  The ocean is a great teacher, preparing us to meet with glee whatever comes.  Even the sticky feeling of skin after a dip and the impossibility of running a comb through salty sandy snarled hair is an experience.  I lay atop the waves with my unbound hair drifting behind me.  I see nearby bathers smiling—perhaps because I look like a human jellyfish or a selkie (the mythical seal-woman who eventually returns to the sea).  But maybe, like me, they are just happy to be experiencing the same delight with strangers side by side.  This may be the closest America gets to being a true melting pot. 

Salt scrubs away all images.  And my mother used to say that it would heal all of our childhood scrapes and cuts.  These days, they sell bottled seawater in piercing salons for after care.  “Does it work on emotions?,” my daughter asks.  “Absolutely,” I say, but you can’t worry about your dyed blue hair turning green.  You have to go with it, take the plunge, “You’ll be the perfect mermaid either way you look at it,” I suggest.  But instead,  she stands in the shallows, watching her mother play.

Steel Pier Diving Horse