Old Wounded Men

He
greets us from an armchair in the lobby, and gets up slowly, groaning. There’s
a wan smile. “Our usual table is reserved,” he announces, and hands his bag and
cane to J. Fifteen minutes later we’ve all gotten our food from the buffet – it takes him a long time now – and are seated. “What sort of soup is this?” he asks me,
staring at the thick white liquid in his bowl.

“Clam
chowder. The New England kind.” He
turns up his nose.

“It’s
good,” I tell him. “There are lots of chunks of potatoes in it too, along with
the clams.”

“Eech,”
he says unhappily, searching through the bowl with his spoon. “I don’t want chunks of anything.” These days, what he likes for soup is
broth.

“So
how are you?” I ask.

“No
good,” he says, shaking his head. “Declining very rapidly.” It used to help
when I reminded him that while the part about decline might be true, the rate wasn’t, since he’d been saying the same thing for years;
today I don’t try that logic. He is declining, and any protestations to the
contrary would be denied for the pretense that they were. None of us can tell
how steep a slope he’s on, though, so we do our best to ignore it and talk of
other things, but as his world narrows that becomes harder and harder. He can’t
hear the television or radio and find world politics very depressing; his eyes
won’t allow him to read much, though he still tries; he has limited meaningful
or mind-stimulating conversation now that most of his friends have died; he no
longer writes letters, and phone conversations are getting very difficult. He
looks forward to sitting with us after these lunches, in his own room,
surrounded by books and papers, having a conversation that ranges easily from
one subject to another: the usual tour of the family members, what he’s gotten
in the mail, what he thinks of Bush this week, what he’s reading, how his
friends are, who’s been to see him. When we can, we try to engage him in
stories about his childhood or career, or the subjects he taught and cared
about. Today he’s crotchety, and he doesn’t seem to want to stay on any
particular subject, except to ask me to explain about the Anglicans in Africa,
and then, when I do, he tells me the whole problem is because my church has
lost its orthodoxy and is becoming just like the Unitarians – which is particularly
ironic, considering that he was a Unitarian Universalist minister. “You just
want someone to hold the line,” I tease him, trying not to allow myself to get
annoyed. “You want the Catholics to be Catholic.” He smiles a little, caught
out, and tells me about a former Episcopal priest in the same town where he
served. “He was a good man,” he said. “And very orthodox. But I felt closer to
him than any of the other ministers in town.” Tomorrow, he’ll call and offer a
half-hearted apology, saying he was very tired.

I’d
like to talk to him about the article in the Times the other day, about using
the story of Philoctetes to instruct young medical school students. Philoctetes
was a Greek warrior who, according to one version of the legend, was bitten in
the foot by a snake when his ship – bound for Troy – stopped for a while. The wound festered and refused to heal, and its stench
was so severe that he was left on the island while the other sailors continued
on. In the play that Sophocles wrote about him, Philoctetes is an old, lonely,
bitter man, complaining constantly about his wound and driving everyone away
from him. When a young man, who turns out to be the son of Achilles, appears on
the island, he is repulsed but also
drawn to the suffering old man; he wants to leave but can’t. His mission,
masterminded by the wily Odysseus, who waits offstage, is to steal
Philoctetes’magical bow and arrows, since it has been prophesied that only they
can kill Paris and bring an end to
the Trojan War. But that becomes secondary to the moral questions of suffering,
loneliness, and awakened compassion that Philoctetes – this ancient Greek
counterpart to Job – brings up.

Others
have been moved by this story: Seamus Heaney used it as the basis for a play,
“The Cure at Troy,” moving on from the action in Sophocles play to follow
Philoctetes, who, after Achilles’ son gives him back his bow and arrows, goes
with Odysseus back to Troy – against his will – is cured of his wound, kills
Paris (the one whose love for Helen started the whole bloody mess in the first
place), and becomes a hero. I haven’t read Heaney’s version, but will search it
out. I doubt if my father-in-law has read the Sophocles play either, in spite
of the statue of Socrates that sits beside him all day. But it’s the sort of
thing he used to like to talk about. Now that he’s “on the sad height” himself,
I wonder.

The
medical students, of course, were supposed to put themselves in the place of
the young man: entreated to stay and talk, to show compassion, even when they
could do nothing to effect a cure. I thought of the research team whose work
I’ve helped publish for years, who ask the most difficult questions about our
health care system: “Is more better?”; “How much is enough?” “What kind of care
are we getting – and what do we really want – at the end of life?” I thought of
a Montreal friend, a nutritionist
who works with the very elderly and ponders all the bypass surgery that is done
routinely now, and often ends up prolonging the lives of people who would have died years before –
like my father-in-law – but, she wonders, to what sort of quality of life at
the end?

“In
some ways, it really would have been better if I’d died back then, before my
surgery,” he told me once. “I was still vital, still engaged, still doing work.
Still in the thick of it!” When he says that, he’s judging a whole decade in
the light of the past two or three years, and begging me to disagree. And while
I may not argue anymore with “declining rapidly”  I will continue to refute this one. He was an
excellent candidate for bypass surgery, and in his case, I think the resulting
years probably were worth it by just about any measure – including his own
estimation, when he’s being honest – even though he outlived his wife and has
had several years of increasing limitations. I think of his face last
year when his book was published: as in the case of Philoctetes, there was more
to be done.

Going Deeper (1)

Well, I don’t seem to be done, after all. I think I’ll be pursuing the following line of thought, interspersed with links and regular blogging, but not on the demanding schedule of November.

Halfway through last month’s blogging series, I wrote this
to a friend who had checked in offline:

What felt fraught about
my relationship with my mother was "trying to do the right thing" — and
the difficulty of figuring out what that was. Culturally our experiences became different enough that I came
to identify with immigrants who talk about trying to balance their parents’
culture and understanding and expectations with their entirely different life
in "the new world." That’s what I think an interesting book could be
based on, precisely because I’m NOT an ethnic immigrant, but an American
balancing a traditional/rural and post-modern cultural clash in her own life.

How we perceive and deal with cultural clashes varies
greatly, doesn’t it? Whole literatures seem based on this question, especially
now with so many talented young American writers of various heritages – Indian,
African, Chinese, Middle Eastern – turning out thinly disguised
autobiographical fiction. In a way, the fascination of an English-speaking
public and literary establishment with these subjects and their authors seems
like yet another form of the “Orientalism” of which Edward Said wrote – an
exoticism that is not only politically correct, but chic, seeming to deny one’s
own over-examined, over-written-about heritage in favor of the lure of
societies which may not only seem more colorful and exotic, but even dangerous. I
read a great deal of this genre myself, hopefully to learn more, but also
because I am terminally bored with Jane Austen.

Be that as it may, I was brought up short when talking about
this to a friend a long while back, bemoaning my bland, white, American
non-culture. He retorted that “we are just as ethnic as anyone else.” Hmm, I
thought. Maybe he’s right. And maybe that ethnicity, while having a good deal
to do with the culture revealed in much British and American writing and the
legends that went before, also might be involved with particular new-world
experiences that are ongoing not only for people who have come lately, but
people like me whose ancestors have been here for centuries but who are – right
now – coming to terms with a post-modern world and feeling themselves being
changed by it.

The world my mother inhabited and loved – and was often fiercely defensive about –
belongs to the past. It will persist for a while, and frankly I hope it does
because there is much about it that I love too – but it is just as endangered
as any “traditional” culture in the world today – hence the blue state/red state
divide, the rural defensiveness against the flocking of city dwellers with
their suburban values into the countryside, and the despair about the continual
drain of bright achievement-oriented students migrating from rural areas toward
the cities and more prosperous coasts.

I’m an example of that migration: frustrated by the lack of
opportunity in the depressed but achingly beautiful area where I grew up, I’ve
lived for thirty years in a prosperous semi-rural area, closer to eastern urban
centers, which is now being taken over by former city-dwellers and suburbanites
seeking their piece of paradise, but who have very little understanding of
rural life or rural people: theirs is the Disneyland version. At this point in my life, I would much
sooner go back to a truly rural existence, or live in a real city, which like
the country has genuine grit and glory.

We hear so much about the impact of the West on the East,
but Western culture is also changing. Some of this – much of it – is
reactionary, as we feel the pressures pushing back at us and react in fear and
anger. The rise of anxiety in America is palpable to me now whenever I go back
into the country from Canada, although I think it’s come upon us slowly enough
to be largely imperceptible to Americans who don’t travel that much. And I’m
talking not just about changes at the border, or Homeland Security updates, but
about the way people’s faces look, the way they walk, the way they drive, the
way they interact with their children and with strangers, the subjects they are
focused on and the subjects they ignore. The more money people have, the more
protected they seem to feel, but the water level is rising to the point where
all classes seem, to me, to be affected.

There are people who see this and are young enough to want
to do something about it. Some of them are my companions here in the world of
blogging; some are friends in everyday life. Some of us are trying, first, to make sense of the world in which we
find ourselves by stepping outside of the normal channels of discourse and
information-dissemination; by thinking deeply and engaging in dialogue; by
challenging assumptions; by forming friendships that freely and deliberately
cross ethnic, social, religious and sexual divides. And based on what we’re
learning from that process, I see myself and other people not only changing but
making fairly radical choices about our lives, including what to do with our
creative abilities.

The world has always been filled with idealistic,
iconoclastic youth. They are not who I’m primarily talking about, though I do
see these same ideas and values at work among some of the young. The people I’m
referring to are generally older – old enough to have lived and seen and even
longed for “success” in a traditional American sense, but intelligent and
experienced enough by now to have seen the holes in that fabric and even the increasing disintegration of the looms. The number of people dropping out and looking for
new paths may be small, but they are an interesting lot: ambitious in a, shall
we say, non-violent way; committed to preserving their own integrity as they slip
through the cracks of a crumbling edifice, and not averse to looking for the
still-strong supporting beams when swinging through the rooms on their way out
to the overgrown back garden.

Going Deeper (1)

Well, I don’t seem to be done, after all. I think I’ll be pursuing the following line of thought, interspersed with links and regular blogging, but not on the demanding schedule of November.

Halfway through last month’s blogging series, I wrote this
to a friend who had checked in offline:

What felt fraught about
my relationship with my mother was "trying to do the right thing" — and
the difficulty of figuring out what that was. Culturally our experiences became different enough that I came
to identify with immigrants who talk about trying to balance their parents’
culture and understanding and expectations with their entirely different life
in "the new world." That’s what I think an interesting book could be
based on, precisely because I’m NOT an ethnic immigrant, but an American
balancing a traditional/rural and post-modern cultural clash in her own life.

How we perceive and deal with cultural clashes varies
greatly, doesn’t it? Whole literatures seem based on this question, especially
now with so many talented young American writers of various heritages – Indian,
African, Chinese, Middle Eastern – turning out thinly disguised
autobiographical fiction. In a way, the fascination of an English-speaking
public and literary establishment with these subjects and their authors seems
like yet another form of the “Orientalism” of which Edward Said wrote – an
exoticism that is not only politically correct, but chic, seeming to deny one’s
own over-examined, over-written-about heritage in favor of the lure of
societies which may not only seem more colorful and exotic, but even dangerous. I
read a great deal of this genre myself, hopefully to learn more, but also
because I am terminally bored with Jane Austen.

Be that as it may, I was brought up short when talking about
this to a friend a long while back, bemoaning my bland, white, American
non-culture. He retorted that “we are just as ethnic as anyone else.” Hmm, I
thought. Maybe he’s right. And maybe that ethnicity, while having a good deal
to do with the culture revealed in much British and American writing and the
legends that went before, also might be involved with particular new-world
experiences that are ongoing not only for people who have come lately, but
people like me whose ancestors have been here for centuries but who are – right
now – coming to terms with a post-modern world and feeling themselves being
changed by it.

The world my mother inhabited and loved – and was often fiercely defensive about –
belongs to the past. It will persist for a while, and frankly I hope it does
because there is much about it that I love too – but it is just as endangered
as any “traditional” culture in the world today – hence the blue state/red state
divide, the rural defensiveness against the flocking of city dwellers with
their suburban values into the countryside, and the despair about the continual
drain of bright achievement-oriented students migrating from rural areas toward
the cities and more prosperous coasts.

I’m an example of that migration: frustrated by the lack of
opportunity in the depressed but achingly beautiful area where I grew up, I’ve
lived for thirty years in a prosperous semi-rural area, closer to eastern urban
centers, which is now being taken over by former city-dwellers and suburbanites
seeking their piece of paradise, but who have very little understanding of
rural life or rural people: theirs is the Disneyland version. At this point in my life, I would much
sooner go back to a truly rural existence, or live in a real city, which like
the country has genuine grit and glory.

We hear so much about the impact of the West on the East,
but Western culture is also changing. Some of this – much of it – is
reactionary, as we feel the pressures pushing back at us and react in fear and
anger. The rise of anxiety in America is palpable to me now whenever I go back
into the country from Canada, although I think it’s come upon us slowly enough
to be largely imperceptible to Americans who don’t travel that much. And I’m
talking not just about changes at the border, or Homeland Security updates, but
about the way people’s faces look, the way they walk, the way they drive, the
way they interact with their children and with strangers, the subjects they are
focused on and the subjects they ignore. The more money people have, the more
protected they seem to feel, but the water level is rising to the point where
all classes seem, to me, to be affected.

There are people who see this and are young enough to want
to do something about it. Some of them are my companions here in the world of
blogging; some are friends in everyday life. Some of us are trying, first, to make sense of the world in which we
find ourselves by stepping outside of the normal channels of discourse and
information-dissemination; by thinking deeply and engaging in dialogue; by
challenging assumptions; by forming friendships that freely and deliberately
cross ethnic, social, religious and sexual divides. And based on what we’re
learning from that process, I see myself and other people not only changing but
making fairly radical choices about our lives, including what to do with our
creative abilities.

The world has always been filled with idealistic,
iconoclastic youth. They are not who I’m primarily talking about, though I do
see these same ideas and values at work among some of the young. The people I’m
referring to are generally older – old enough to have lived and seen and even
longed for “success” in a traditional American sense, but intelligent and
experienced enough by now to have seen the holes in that fabric and even the increasing disintegration of the looms. The number of people dropping out and looking for
new paths may be small, but they are an interesting lot: ambitious in a, shall
we say, non-violent way; committed to preserving their own integrity as they slip
through the cracks of a crumbling edifice, and not averse to looking for the
still-strong supporting beams when swinging through the rooms on their way out
to the overgrown back garden.

30. Companions

Grief dogs me through the city. At first it was sharp and
yapping, close at my heels, always threatening to take a potentially-crippling
nip at that exposed tendon. Now it’s merely a faithful companion, trotting
along behind or beside, so familiar I can reach out and pat it, knowing the
position of head or furry neck without looking.

Before, I didn’t know these breeds of grief with their
different temperaments and varying demands. The aftermath of other deaths had
taken a clear trajectory through shock, fatigue, and sudden tears, then
gradually fading from stabbing pain and lack of control to sadness – to be
conjured more at will than not – and, eventually, forgetfulness. This was the pattern for great-aunts,
grandparents, friends, and cats.

The sharp teeth are gone now. I no longer wake with tears or
find them welling when I think of her as living, and then remember. I am…going on, and realize that I can, and must. It’s hardest when I am sad for
other reasons – when life has been wielding its unfairness or randomness – and
I long for uncomplicated, unconditional love. No one will ever love me as much
as she did, and she is no longer here. Facts.

That sort of loss is permanent and irreversible, so you
swallow it and find – one day, sitting in a park or when a spray of red tulips startles
you in a November florist’s window – that it lives, familiar, dark, and gently
weeping, watering the seeds of your own ability to love, and keep on loving.

This is the final installment, for now, of this series.

29. The Dentist

It was easier to concentrate on a book, I realized, with
French rather than English swirling around me in the dentist’s crowded waiting
room. I could simply choose not to follow the words, and they became sounds,
babel. My appointment was late, even though the office had called and asked me
to come an hour later than scheduled; the dental surgeon had had a long case
that morning and was running behind. I had left the house on foot, taken the
bus, then the metro, engrossed in the book I was still intently reading when
the assistant called my name and ushered me into the examining room with its
particular smell and bright fluorescent light.

As a child, I feared the dentist and sat trembling in the
silent waiting room which always smelled of oil of cloves, wintergreen, and
antiseptic. My mother sat beside me, unhappy to be putting me through something
I hated but impressing her own calmness upon me. She and the dentist were old
friends; he had been a few years ahead of her in school and had, I think, tried
many times to take her out but my grandfather hadn’t approved of their
difference in age. She liked him for his intelligence and sense of humor, and
the easy warmth between them put me more at ease. He was the president of the school
board in our town, nearly forever, and as I got older he always engaged me in
talk about the school, the teachers, the facilities, and opportunities or lack
thereof, asking my opinions and taking them seriously. Our conversations
mitigated the unpleasantness of what he was doing, and if I didn’t exactly come
to enjoy our visits, I didn’t dread them.

There’ve been several less-pleasant dentists in my life, but
over the past decade I became good friends with our Vermont dentist who was very involved in a different church in the community and its
music program; he too liked to talk and looked forward to our appointments. I
realized, somewhere along the line, that it must be quite awful to be feared
and dreaded in your profession. Dentists, I learned, have a high suicide rate. But
he retired; we moved.

Yesterday, in the waiting room, I had thought once of the
line in Buddenbrooks, where the malevolent dentist repeatedly utters the
dreaded words, “We will proceed to extraction,” but when I came into the examining
room, the dentist smiled and extended his hand. “Madame,” he said, with a small
bow of his round head and a large smile that showed his own perfect,
brilliantly white teeth. “I apologize for the delay.”

“Don’t worry, I said, sitting down. "You’ve had quite a day, I gather.” He
sighed, smiled again, and shook his head.

“I made taboulleh last night – chopped all the parsley, put
in all the ingredients – I brought it and haven’t had a moment to eat. I made a
cup of tea a while ago and haven’t even been able to drink it! What a day. I
did manage to pee – once. That’s enough! But I have a yoga class tonight. I am
looking forward to that.”

He swabbed two places on my gums with anesthetizing salve. I
was lying down on the chair and turned my face to look at him as he peered at the
x-rays and notes on my case. “Are you playing any music these days?” I asked.
He and his wife had emigrated from Eastern Europe a
number of years before. He knew from my husband that he loves to talk about
politics, but in a previous visit I’d learned that he was a violinist.

He turned, with an odd little smile, and sat down on the
stool. “I can’t,” he said. “I just don’t have the time. But my daughter is
practicing an hour and a half every day – she is going to be good. She already
is good.”

I told him that I had had no time to play the piano either. “Have you been to hear the symphony since Nagano took over? We haven’t, yet, but I want to…"

“Oh! I love him," he stated definitively. "It is incredible what he’s done. He’s
rearranged the entire seating – it isn’t the traditional
violins-violas-cellos-basses anymore – he has mixed them up – and the sound –
the sound! We went to hear Joshua Bell playing the Bruch violin concerto and it
was…well…it was a very memorable experience. Now it’s hard to get tickets.”

We continued talking like this for five minutes more. The
chair-side assistant waited, behind her mask; I tried to read her eyes. Finally
he and I looked at each other, smiled again, and we both said, “All right!” and
he took up his syringe of novocaine and I opened my mouth.

He was working on two upper teeth, one on the left and one
on the right. I focused my eyes to the left of the adjustable lamp, between his
face and that of the assistant, and went off somewhere, playing music in my
head. When he had finished the first tooth, he cupped my chin in a warm hand
and gently turned my face to the other side. “If you need more anesthetic, tell
me right away,” he said, laying the other hand on my shoulder. “Don’t suffer.”
He began, and after a few minutes I could feel the probe scraping the side of
the root near its tip. For some reason, I decided not to tell him; perhaps I
wanted to feel this strange connection between us, perhaps I was interested to
see if I could stand the pain. I went into it, and through it, and it wasn’t
unbearable. When he stopped I said if he was nearly done it was fine, but if he
had a lot more to do, I could begin to feel it. “But I don’t like the novocaine
that much either,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Just a drop,” he said, smiling and lifting the syringe
again. “Please.”

When we were finished the assistant rinsed my mouth with
antiseptic and unclipped my bib; she left the room. The dentist gave me
instructions for the next two days, sighed, and stretched his arms over his
head. I got up and thanked him. He rose, asked after my husband, and then
reached over, grasped my shoulders in his hands, and kissed both my cheeks,
formally and gravely. He nodded, and smiled.

“Have that cup of tea,” I said, as I walked out the door.

“Yes,” he said. “Tea!”

28. Politics

My mother didn’t have her mother’s attitude of superiority
toward men – if anything, it was the opposite – she preferred them. She
disliked cattiness and gossip, and was disinterested in much of what passed for
girl talk, especially in the 1950s world that persisted in our small town for many years later. She avoided the women’s groups that
were popular in places like ours and only participated in them when there
was no polite way of escaping, or when the cause was something she agreed with.
When I was young she volunteered for PTA and the American Red Cross, working at
blood banks and on fund drives; the county leader was a hard-working
intelligent woman like my mother and they quickly developed a good rapport. She
was our Girl Scout leader, and rather than teaching us to bake cookies, she
taught us to make fires and tie complicated knots.

On the other hand, she liked to bake! She taught me to cook, and to sew, and to
knit, and to paint; we did innumerable projects together, from Christmas tree
ornaments to making most of our own clothes, cutting them out on the dining
room floor. She didn’t disdain so-called women’s work; she just wanted to talk about
something substantive while she was doing it. She read constantly, devouring
every word of the New Yorker each week, and Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly,
and the Sunday New York Times, plus whatever books she could get her hands on.
She read to me when I was young, and often read the books I was reading for school later
on, as well as whatever she had picked up on our frequent trips to the town
library; she patiently read vocabulary lists to me as I learned French, and critiqued my essays for English and history courses. She read widely – novels, history, biography – but her real
passion was politics and current events.

As a girl, she had wanted to go to Cornell and study
medicine, but her father wouldn’t let her; he didn’t think that was a suitable
profession. So she went to Alfred University in western New York State instead, and studied fine art, majoring in ceramics. It was wartime, and there
were few men at the university; she worked hard and enjoyed it, and remembered
details of what she had been taught years later. Later in life, I think she
realized that perhaps her true aptitude would have been for the law: she was
interested in it, and had the requisite memory for details. When she went into the real
estate business with my father, after my grandfather retired, she had a chance
to use those skills, and people often urged her to run for the school board or
for town office. Her shyness and sense of priorities kept her from doing that –
she always put my father and me first, and later did a great deal for her own
parents as they aged. But my parents’ downtown office became a center for
discussion, with people dropping in all day long to sit and talk, about their personal lives for sure, but also about politics. In that milieu, sitting behind her desk in an office decorated with antique maps and prints of the surrounding towns, she was not only comfortable, but shone, and
could easily hold her own with even the most opinionated men. She was disgusted
by small-minded, short-sighted politicians, and had great admiration for
intelligent men and women with strong convictions, idealism and courage. In a
hotbed of rural Republicanism, she voted for very few, and was happy to explain
why.

As it turned out, I was the one who went to Cornell, but I
found myself back with the Greek myths she had read me, studying classical art
and culture rather than medicine or law. I decided against academia and went
into business as a graphic designer, and later established a design and communications business with my own husband. Later, when I became a community organizer
and started doing more public speaking, I was asked to run for the Vermont legislature, but turned it down. My mother watched all this, always supporting
and never interfering, but some years after that, when I had settled down into writing as my
means of expression and vehicle for change, she once remarked, quite
matter-of-factly, “It surprised me that you chose writing – I always thought
you’d do it in politics.” 

There wasn’t a drop of wistfulness in her voice, either for
my choices or her own. She was like that: accepting things as they were, doing
the best she could with the moment, and not wasting time on regrets. I regret
that she didn’t run our town, or hold state office, but she put her energy
where she knew it had the best chance of doing good. Over the last twenty
years, she served first on the town library board, and then as a founding trustee
of a charitable foundation set up by an old friend who died, giving grants to
worthy projects for the benefit of the town’s citizens. I cried when I read her
resignation letter, written to her fellow trustees just a month or so before
she died, because I knew how much that work had meant to her and that only a recognition of impending death would have made her resign. During her last
hospitalization, and at her funeral, I met several of the men who had worked
with her, and I could see in their eyes and in their words that they had known
her at her best; we didn’t need to say much at all.

27. Doubts

I don’t know, yet, quite what I’m doing with this writing. I want
to tell her about it, and I can’t; I just want to say the words to her, and
hear her patience on the other end of the phone. It used to annoy me when I’d
call her, needing to talk, and there would be no substantive response, but that
was years ago, and I was both a lot stupider and a lot needier then. Things
change.

You’ve gone so far beyond us, she said once, not that long
ago, and I caught my breath and felt her sentence tumble into me, hitting rocks
on the way down. I’d never thought she felt that way, but it was the
explanation for why she felt it difficult to respond in kind. I had left, and done new things, in places
unfamiliar and strange, it was true, but I never felt like there was some
comparison or judgment to be made: they were living their life and I was living
mine. Now her words made me picture her very far away, waving to me, a small
form in the far distance, but then I realized that was me looking through her
eyes. I’d felt like we were walking side
by side; her opinion was valid; I always respected it. I tried to tell her
that. It’s not easy, on the phone.

26. To Live with Eyes Open

My mother – a stoic and a rationalist – put no stock in
signs and portents, though she is the one who stirred my young mind with
auguries and mystical happenings by reading aloud books of myths and legends:
Greek myths; the Song of Roland; a child’s version of the Nibelungenlied; abridged versions of the Iliad and Odyssey; Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Her own
feet were planting firmly in this world, especially the natural world that she
loved and observed carefully all her life. She would never have missed the
arrival of a flock of snow geese, or snow buntings, or a pair of migrating mergansers
and the odd loon or two – and would have been sure to tell me about it. These
were the everyday miracles of life that gave her joy, and gratitude for every
day.

I’m not sure if I told her about the white stone, though I am
quite sure we talked at length about the snow geese being on the lake that day
and went out together to watch them. Our phone calls always included the daily
nature report; she saw a lot and found much more solace in the woods and lake than
she ever found in a church. I respected that, and like her, feel sustained by nature. I share her skepticism about reading too much into
convergences and chance, but it is also easier for me to suspend my rational
mind and approach the mystical; perhaps that is, as much as anything, merely a difference
in emotional temperament.

My mother’s favorite poet was Mary Oliver, whose work often
includes this sense of the miraculous found in the natural world, venturing
occasionally into speculation on the divine but rarely into talk of God as
anything separate from life and creation. I’ve often thought it was unfortunate
that my mother was raised in a time when religion was so theistic, and God had
to be interpreted as a great and powerful male being separate from we lowly humans, let alone from the fast
beating breast of a snow bunting or the audible wings of a great blue heron
passing over the house. Her turn-off from religion in general created a difference between us that I never quite managed to bridge in
words. Oliver expressed what my mother felt, I think, though she rarely spoke
of it, other than to call me and ask if I’d seen the latest poem in the New
Yorker, or tell me that the peonies just blooming in the garden had reminded her of
Oliver’s poem. At the beginning of her new collection, Oliver writes, "My work is loving the world." I think my mother would have agreed.

So I was not surprised today when my friend Dave sent me a
link to this poem, "In the Storm," from Mary Oliver’s new book, Thirst, saying
that my previous post had reminded him of it. Go read it and you’ll see why.

Belief isn’t always easy.
But this much I have learned—
if not enough else—
to live with my eyes open.

-Mary Oliver

25. A Passage

None of us slept much for the next three days, but especially
not my cousins and me. In addition to our own grief, and the shock of our
grandfather’s sudden death, I think we all realized the extent of the
earthquake that had just hit our family. Privileged to have had these
remarkable and long-lived grandparents, we had not only grown up in an
extended-family environment that was becoming more and more rare, but it had
continued long beyond our own childhoods to encompass yet another generation.
The centrality of the house and its inhabitants was something we had almost
taken for granted, and even though Aunt Inez, Aunt Minerva, Uncle Frank and
even Aunt Patty were now gone, the central pillars had, miraculously, held.

After two nights of long calling hours at the funeral home,
then the funeral and the burial in South Otselic, we
went back to the lake. I’d hated the funeral – which took place in the maudlin,
plastic environment of the funeral home, not the church where my grandparents
had spent their lives – and little had been said to truly commemorate my grandfather’s
life. I felt no sense of completion.

It was cold, though the lake hadn’t yet frozen. Flocks of Canada geese were still landing on the water at dusk, floating and honking all night,
and then leaving flock by flock, like platoons of jets from aircraft carriers
each morning, to spend the day in the nearby cornfields. I hadn’t brought a
parka, and in the downstairs closet I found my father’s old red-and-back plaid
LL Bean wool jacket. I put it on and went down to the shoreline, and walked all
the way around to the furthest point, below my grandparents’ former house.
Beginning there, I walked slowly back around the shore toward the furthest
point on our own land, tracing the nightly circuit my grandfather used to walk
with his fishing pole, meeting me partway where I was often fishing too, and
then going together the rest of the way together around the shore. As I walked
I wept, and thought, and after I had gone all the way around, I came back to
the midpoint, where a long dock had once been – a place for solitary fishing
and star-gazing; for swimming; for picnics; for tying up the boats – it was a
place filled with hundreds of memories. I stood there and gazed out at the lake
– cold, grey – the trees reflecting in the stillness just shy of the freezing
point. I looked down at my feet, and there I saw a perfectly white stone.

It was strange to find it there – we didn’t have as many
veins of white quartz as, say, New England, but occasionally you’d find some
white rocks that had, perhaps, tumbled along under the glaciers that carved
these valleys and created this lake. I picked up the stone, and turned it over
and over in my hands until it became almost warm. And then, spontaneously, I
threw it high into the air, and toward the center of the lake. No arm in white
samite reached up to catch it, Excaliber-like, but the stone hit the water and
disappeared, and something suddenly released in me. I felt an inexplicable
acceptance suffuse my spirit, like spreading warmth.

Just then, the first geese wheeled high overhead, and began
their descent, spiraling downward, calling to their comrades who appeared –
miraculously it seemed – from all directions, the wedges breaking into lines
that joined the spiral, nearly as large as the lake itself. The noise became deafening.
The geese – hundreds and hundreds of them – came closer to the water and to me,
feet outstretched, wings out to the sides to slow their flight. I watched,
mesmerized. The flocks circled and began to land in a wide ring of brown and
grey, and then I looked up and saw, in the very center, a flashing of white: a
rare flock of snow geese, their wings catching the last rays of the sun,
descended and slowly landed, right where the stone had disappeared.

24. The Day After

Thanksgiving, 1988

In 1990, we said goodbye to my grandparents on Thanksgiving
afternoon. At the back door, my grandfather smiled and pressed into my hands
the largest of his collection of antique glass salt dishes that he had been
gradually giving me over the years. We backed out of the driveway, waving, and
I watched them in the window, behind the geraniums, my eyes a little more full
of tears than usual.

The next morning when I called home, there was no answer at
my parents’. I called my grandmother’s number, and my Aunt Meredith answered.
She hesitated, and then said, “I guess I can tell you, Beth. Daddy died this
morning. He got up, had breakfast, and said he was going to go out and put some
seed in the bird feeder, and when he got up he simply collapsed. He died a
little while later at the hospital.”

He had seemed –- transparent. I’d remarked on it to J. as we
drove back to Vermont. I had
watched him walking through the familiar rooms holding one of his
great-grandchildren in his arms, talking to her, and felt that he was only
partly with us, becoming more spirit and less flesh. The news shocked me, but
it didn’t surprise me. We quickly re-packed our bags, and got back in the car.

We slept that night in my grandparents’ house, to give my
parents and Aunt a chance to go home and sleep in their own beds. As my father
and I were making up the bed in the downstairs bedroom, next to my
grandparents’ room, my father said, “This is where you slept your first night
in this house, when we brought you home from the hospital.” I had never known
that, and I had never knowingly slept in that room in the past forty years. My
parents left, and we went to bed.

My grandmother lay beyond that closed door, alone for only
the second night in more than sixty years. Was she sleeping? Weeping? I heard
no sound. How could it feel? I had never been this close to such grief, but my
grandmother’s stoicism gave no outward clue of how she was feeling. And there
was something more that had come home to me as we ate the casseroles and salads that had been brought to the house, and I listed to my relatives telling their stories: everyone else in the family had been summoned; seen him
lying on the floor, the couch, loaded into the ambulance, on the gurney; they
had heard the final words from the doctor. I was the one who was never there,
loving fiercely, but from far. And now I was here, in a home that surely was
mine as much as anyone’s, three paces away from a closed door that now felt
symbolic as well as real.

After a few restless hours I rose and went upstairs. I
walked through our old apartment, opened the kitchen cupboards, felt the cold
linoleum of the bathroom on my feet, looked out at the big maple tree still
towering over the garden in the moonlight. I lay down on the bed in Aunt Inez’s old room, which
had later been mine, but I still couldn’t sleep. I found some herbal tea in my old
kitchen and made a cup, and crept back downstairs. In the book case in the
parlor I found several volumes of poetry, and took out Frost’s collected poems.
With one of my grandmother’s hand-knitted afghans wrapped around me I curled up in her chair, the
one where we had read together so many times, and read Frost until dawn. I
didn’t read the familiar, pastoral poems, but the longer ones, the stories with their harsh truths:
“Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” “Out, Out–”. Then I went back to bed
and lay with my own husband until morning.

My grandmother came out then, and greeted us as if
everything were normal. “Well, what shall we have for breakfast?” she asked,
and brushed away any suggestion that I might prepare it. She insisted she had
slept. I set the table while she fussed in the kitchen, and then sat down. Methodically
I buttered my toast and spread it with jam.