Now You Know What Purgatory is For

My friend Tertium Quid does not blog regularly. But when he does, you can be sure that what he writes will hit hard and cut deep. May Jesus Christ have mercy on us all.

Crime and Communion

Speaking of old stomping grounds, my favorite crossing-guard is a black woman who hails from my old neck of the woods. She was born and raised in Yonkers, and later lived in Newburgh in upstate New York, a very tough town which, from what I gather, was the site of her near-total destruction from drug addiction. She got clean, found God, and moved here years ago to start a new life. In addition to being a well-loved school crossing-guard, she has a night job as the female warden at the county jail, and occasionally as we stand at the corner chatting after school drop-off she tells me about the women who are brought to jail in the middle of the night and their crimes (which are mainly robberies and drug offenses). She has a bad hip and a shunt in her heart, but she says she'll be standing on the corner with her stop sign in her hand as long as she "can still hop along."

Though I don't remember it all that well, I'm told that I was almost barred from receiving my first Holy Communion, so poorly did I acquit myself in the pre-sacrament interview with the priest. I apparently didn't know any of the answers to the catechetical questions. And yet I loved CCD, and I especially loved my First Communion prep class teacher, Mrs. B. I used to stay after class to help her clean the classroom. I remember being very excited the day that she took us into the church and showed us how to bless ourselves with holy water, and I wondered, as I erased the blackboard after class, if the proximity to the blackboard of my hand dipped in holy water would somehow bless it and all the words that would be written upon it in times to come.

Mrs. B. had ten children, and, though I didn't know this at the time, she was married to a bookie. Evidently there were as many telephone lines in her apartment as there were children, and her husband was in and out of jail. I found this out only recently, when my father mentioned seeing his name in the paper now and then on the occasions of his arrests.

I had occasion this fall to attend Mass at the parish in which I grew up, and, when I went up to receive Communion, there was Mrs. B., proffering the Most Precious Blood. I couldn't help smiling broadly when I saw her. It seemed truly good and right that we were both there together.

Music and Memory, Part 24: Theft

My work-study job at the music library notwithstanding, as an undergraduate I was constantly broke.  I used to shoplift at the supermarket sometimes, and one one of these occasions I somehow managed to push a whole shopping-cartful of unpaid-for groceries through the automatic doors and to my apartment a few blocks away.  Unlike a certain friend of mine, however,  an artist who -- questioned by store security about the brick of cheese he'd stuck in his coat pocket while buying some expensive pots of jam -- asserted that he wouldn't pay for something the government gave away for free, I felt bad about these heists.  I even told Professor R., the piano teacher I id0lized, about them. "Oh, Pentimento!" said she, ever a worshipper at the church of aesthetics, throwing up her hands. "You need to feed your soul!  You need to go to concerts, galleries, museums!" She proceeded to tell me with her usual great enthusiasm about an original-instrument performance of some Mozart string quartets which she'd recently attended.  "They were just sawing at their instruments!" she said, at which I must have looked horrified, because she clarified: "It was wonderful!" My kindly German professor, on the other hand, understood how things were.  She used to leave brown paper bags of homemade bread and cookies outside my door.

I remembered all this today as I drifted into a not-unaccustomed reverie of my former life in a particularly obscure corner of one of New York's many hardscrabble bohemias.  I thought of two old friends from that time and place, dancers who'd moved to New York from Austin, where they had performed with Deborah Hay, a legendary postmodern choreographer who'd relocated from New York to Texas in the 1970s.  I found some videos of Hay's work on Youtube, along with this brief recent interview:

I was intrigued by what Hay said about not grasping at experience or phenomena; about, instead, being aware of each moment before it passes away and another arises to take its place. I wondered if my clutching at memories, at emotions, at images and sensations evoked by the music I hear and sing, was a symptom of the millennial materialism that she speaks of. Is it harder, I wonder, to mourn the beauty that has gone, or to accept the present moment in all its apparent emptiness?  And must emptiness be desolation?

I thought of the Gospel reading for today, in which Christ insists that anyone who wishes to follow Him must take up his own cross.  Might one man's cross, I wondered, be that everything beautiful he knows is relegated to the place of memory? Indeed, such a cross must be a rather common one.  And might another's cross be having to confront each moment as it is, free from what he thinks it ought to be, and to stand in the place where he finds himself, and even to bloom where he's been planted, be it ever so far from the time and place he has invested with the meaning of "home"?  Indeed, at Mass today, when the priest read Christ's words, it occurred to me that every gift bears the cross with it, and that perhaps the cross itself is the gift.

All this made me think of William Blake: 

He who binds to himself a joy 
Doth the winged life destroy; 
But he who kisses the joy as it flies 
Lives in eternity's sunrise.


(Above: frontispiece to the 1794 edition of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience)

Music and Memory, Part 19: Reparations

For most of my life, my behavior was so selfish, willful, amoral, and defensive that, in recent years, my fervent wish has been not only that the people I've known along the way would have peaceful and happy lives, but also that they might forget me completely.  So it was with some trepidation, and a great deal of embarrassment, that I sent a check to the workplace of A., the Columbia boy I'd borrowed money from years ago.  Although it was during Lent of last year that I remembered this unhappy incident, it took me until the end of the year to make reparations, because, although I went out on gigs with some frequency in 2010, after travel and childcare expenses were figured into my fee, I generally returned home each time with something like fifty dollars.  In December, however, two large-ish fees came in that did not need to be offset by as many expenses as usual, so I took myself to the post office, praying that paying off this old, until-recently-forgotten debt would not open up some unpleasant can of worms.

A letter from A. came in the mail yesterday, and I opened it grimly.  To my astonishment, he was not only happy to hear from me, but also, unbeknownst to me, he'd been at a concert I gave last month in Boston, where he now lives.

He wrote: 

. . . I don't want to be a creep, which is the main reason I didn't approach you at your concert.  That and -- well -- certainly the memory in my mind is not the actual person you are . . . . it was at a recent bored moment at work [that I undertook a "Pentimento" internet search and] saw that you were giving a concert soon, and in fact it was in my own backyard. . . . And the performance [brought] tears to my eyes.  [Your] voice was soothing to the soul, and especially exciting given that I knew you back when you were first going down this path . . . .

Most striking [were your] expressions after the songs.  The bashful turn to the pianist, the being exposed, the being vulnerable and showing it.  I could see why you have specialized in [concerts given] in salon or intimate settings.  You share yourself with your audience.  You are there with them, not above them . . . You share their vulnerabilities. . . To see how that path you started -- to see the beautiful place it has progressed to -- that also brought tears.

The letter brought me to tears too.  I thought of how the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen had told his friend, my old voice teacher Barbara Conrad, that she must never give up singing, because she could never know when it might make the difference between life and death for someone in the audience.  I doubt that my singing carried that import for A., but perhaps some healing did come out of it, some reparation for the past.  If only A. knew how bitter the road was that led me to the point of being able, now, to be vulnerable onstage, and to share in the vulnerabilities of the audience.  For so many years, I sang defensively, acquisitively, planning what I could get from it.  Life -- everything -- has changed so much since then.  Once, when I mentioned to my husband that my singing had changed, he suggested that one can't compartmentalize one's life; when one's heart changes, everything must change along with it.  As the poet Jane Hirshfield writes:

let one animal/eat from your hand and the whole herd comes.

Hirshfield's poem, "Letting What Enters Enter," concludes with the line

she forgave me nothing that I love.

But after reading A.'s letter, I believe that God, in His mercy, somehow forgives us everything that we love.

Coffee Break with God

(My title is shamelessly mooched from a book I've never read, and has pretty much nothing to do with this post.)

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, because I know from long experience that they tend to be swept out with the eggshells and coffee grounds sometime around the end of the first week of January, and I like to save myself the embarrassment that my own broken resolutions cause me.  Sometimes I toy with various resolutions, however, trying them on and then, more often than not, rejecting them.  Here are a few that I'm idly considering this year:

1.  No longer swearing like a truck-driver, if only inside the echo-chamber of my own head.  I almost never swear in front of my son (not in English, anyway, though I have to admit to having said some really gutter things in Italian at times, when I've stepped on a Lego, say, or given myself a paper cut), and I've been very relieved that he's never yet, to my knowledge, said a curse-word (at least not in English).  And yet, we now know that swearing is much more effective at relieving pain and frustration than consciously resorting to blithe euphemisms; the real words just seem to work, and are so much more satisfying emotionally, perhaps because of their taboo status.  I often take myself into another room alone so I can swear out loud in English, but mostly those four-letter bombs are just dropping in the quiet of my mind as I face the frustrations of the average day.  And yet, for all the silence of my cursing, it still doesn't seem . . . seemly to even think those words.  So perhaps I'll silently substitute some corny-sounding euphemisms in my inner monologue in 2011.  Or perhaps not.

2.  Giving up coffee. I consider undertaking this heroic feat every so often, and even went so far as to make it my Lenten sacrifice a couple of years ago, an intention which lasted one solid day.  The truth is, I sometimes go for whole weeks without drinking coffee, but I have no wish to put it away from me forever.  Not only do I love the taste -- it's one of my favorite flavors, the darker and bitterer the better (no sugar, and lightened with half-and-half or cream; if only milk is available, I will forgo the coffee altogether) -- but I also love the idea of coffee.  There is something so companionable about it.  Two mothers having coffee together while their children play are engaging in a kind of conspiracy of community, it seems to me.  Tea, though I drink it, seems insubstantial and a bit fey in comparison, and herbal tea is something I dislike and generally avoid unless there's a medicinal reason for taking it.  (It's crossed my mind once or twice that if I gave up coffee, perhaps I would be able to conceive again; I've heard the anecdotal notion that coffee suppresses fertility.  But the truth is that I was drinking coffee all the other times I conceived; I believe God intends for us to add children to our family through adoption; and the possibility seems strong that conception wouldn't occur, and then I would have . . . given up coffee.  Is this a foolish, fetishistic, fatalistic line of reasoning?  Perhaps.  Maybe I will give up coffee after all, though it will be with great reluctance.)
  
3.  Being more patient. My son, who's quite advanced in some ways, is quite delayed in others.  He doesn't draw (though he is very specific in directing his parents and teachers to draw according to his designs), partially because of his fine-motor delays, and partially because he's intensely perfectionistic, and melts down completely when he attempts to draw something that doesn't come out as he'd envisioned.  Today I was helping him draw a tugboat puffing smoke.  He was trying to draw circles for the smoke, but, as he said, his circles had tails.  He flung himself down in tears, and didn't want to continue.  This brought me to tears too, because I felt that he had to.  The ability to practice a skill until it virtually becomes ingrained into the sinews of the heart, and the ability to love that relentless practice, are probably the most important capacities I've cultivated in my life.  But how can I teach a volatile, neurologically-puzzling preschool boy to love practice, to love discipline?  I was stymied.  With him, I realize that I will have to take many deep breaths and work very slowly on the same basic skills over and over again, when I want him to dance, to leap, to fly, as the ethos of intense practice has allowed me to do.  He is the sort of child who, I believe, will fly eventually; he is very bright, musical, and imaginative.  But I am so attached to the idea of self-discipline as the means to becoming skilled and independent, and to the notion of becoming skilled and independent as the means to intellectual and artistic freedom.  I suppose that, in 2011, I should resolve to learn how to slow down my own wild thinking and imagining.

Which, to sum up, is why I love this ad from the 1980s.  It suggests that, when you're hitting the wall in your ethos of relentless practicing, and especially if you're a musician whose work is starting to sound like sh--,  you need . . . coffee.  I guess the shadowy forces of the coffee-industrial complex figured, back in those pre-Starbucks days, that Americans just weren't drinking enough of it.