Into Those Bitter Waters

The secretary of the department in which my father taught for many years was Greek Orthodox. In other words, she Took Lent Seriously.

One day during Lent, my father bought her some bunches of daffodils sold for a charity fundraiser. When he gave them to her she burst into tears, explaining that her Lenten fast had been a kind of spiritual scouring-out of the depths of her soul, a purging of all attachment to beauty, and that the shock of he daffodils' scent and color completely broke her.

I remember this as I slog through teaching music history in the metal-gray days of late February. Coincidentally, I have begun reading Sister Wendy Becket's book Spiritual Letters, which is a collection of letters she wrote from the hermitage where she spent most of her adult life. Sr. Wendy, of blessed memory -- the Art Nun, famous lover of beauty -- writes to a friend in a different religious order:

I do feel that the grain of wheat never dies until, or unless, it accepts to fail. More than just accepts, goes down contentedly into those bitter waters, putting all its hope, now, in Jesus . . . God is always coming to us, as totally as we can receive Him, but from every side . . . the natural tendency is to romanticize the way of His coming. . . And he says: No, - I can't give myself, not fully, in any way that gives self a foothold. Nothing romantic or beautiful or in any way dramatic; nothing to get hold of, in one sense, because it must be He that does the getting hold. A terrible death in every way, destroying all we innocently set our spiritual hearts on: all but Him. So utter joy, in a sense that 'romance' can never envisage. There are depths of self-desire . . . that He must empty so as to fill them.

It seems to me that my father's secretary knew the pain of this hard and pitiless kind of self-emptying.

The thought of that pain reminds me of another gunmetal-gray late-winter day, when a long-ago boyfriend and I were crossing Seventh Avenue. We saw a tiny woolen mitten lying abandoned in the middle of a slush-puddle at the curb, and he grabbed my arm. "This," he cried desperately. "THIS is why I can never have children." And -- though that was one of the reasons we eventually parted ways -- I got his point. Because it breaks one utterly to have to cope with the devastating small losses and goodbyes that one must negotiate every single day with children.

Last week, as I drove past a block of early-twentieth-century houses constructed in a jumble of styles in my old, small-city neighborhood with little J., , he piped up from the back seat: "I love this place. Just driving past these houses makes me happy." My heart started beating fast, both from bewilderment and from recognition -- bewilderment because Who Is This Kid? And recognition because This Kid Is Me -- the kid who saw beauty where it was not, who pulled other kids' discarded drawings out of the trash to smooth them out and admire them, who thought the crumbling urban sidewalks were built with diamonds because of the way they sparkled in the streetlights. Only now my memories of that kind of encounter with the world -- an encounter of breathless wonder -- are hazy, and in fact I'm not sure such an encounter can do anyone any good. Should all beauty, and all pretense of beauty, be stripped away so that we can encounter God without any semblance of beauty? Perhaps; but Isaiah reminds us that when we did encounter him thus, we turned our faces away.

Please

Pray for little Ronan and his grieving family.

Your Crooked Way

My children wake up during the five o'clock hour each morning, which means that I do too. I find waking up in the dark extremely demoralizing, though, and often am filled with dread first thing in the morning. In order to mitigate this sensation, I make a cup of strong coffee using this excellent device as soon as I get downstairs to the dark kitchen. The three of us then say a morning prayer, which always includes the petition that God will help us to make the world a more beautiful place that day, and we sing one verse of this, our morning song.

I've had a cold for the past few days, so the other morning, because I was losing my voice, I told my older son to lead the singing. "You can sing, Mommy," he encouraged me, "in your crooked way."

You can sing in your crooked way: I thought about this later, and the expression seemed apt. Hadn't I spent years, after all, singing in my crooked way? I remembered the period in my life when I thought that singing was all I had, my only pathway to salvation. As a young woman, growing up and going out on my own felt like launching a cobbled-together boat into dark and perilous waters, or flinging myself off a cliff into some dark void. The world struck me as unkind and unreliable, and love as fleeting and evanescent. If there was something I could do extremely well, I imagined, it could be my shield against the inevitable bitterness and heartbreak that love and the world would deal out. I could not trust love, nor my fellows, but I could wield my singing like a weapon to cut through the dangers they proffered. Other people might have more and better gifts than I had; other people might have the gift of love. But I could sing, and I loved to sing, and I developed a rigorous self-discipline that enabled me, over the course of years, to become a highly-skilled and effective practitioner of that art.

It's not uncommon even for singers at the highest levels to sing flat. I've heard it happen many more times than I can possibly count, including at the Met. Indeed, I've heard mediocre and even lousy performances there, as well as great performances marred by mistakes, bad notes, miscalculations, and musical train wrecks. It happens to everyone. I remember feeling particularly bad for Plácido Domingo one Saturday afternoon when he was singing the title role in the rarely-performed opera Sly, which ends with a tenor aria, and he flubbed the final sung note in the opera, leaving the audience not with the memory of a compelling performance but with that of a single lame high note. There's something touchingly human, though, about singing flat; it's as if the heart, the moment's emotions, the character's words, all cause one's voice -- or, to be technically correct about it, cause one's ability to accurately replicate pitch -- to fail, and doesn't that happen in everyday, non-singing life, too?

There was a period in my career when I was singing in the wrong fach.  I was a small-ish young woman, and my size, combined with my high energy, quick wit, and fast conversation, led some in the field to assume that I was the kind of soprano capable of high, fast, virtuosic singing. As it turned out, I could do the fast singing part, but I could never reliably sing the notes above high C, which is what the fach requires. A famous coach commented on my low speaking voice and the disparity between it and the high-sitting roles I was singing; an assistant conductor at the Met told me that if I even "went one fach lighter" I'd be "working everywhere." I tried to be lighter, higher, faster, perkier. Finally, though, when things were falling apart in my everyday, non-singing life, I began to remember the advice of people who'd known me and my singing for a long time, including members of my own (musical) family, who had always suggested that my voice would darken and deepen. I had wanted to be something else, someone else, but I was not, in fact, that person; and how can the voice be compartmentalized, treated as its own entity separate from the singer's own body and interior suchness?

I listened to my lesson tapes and watched my coaching videos and realized that, when I deviated from pitch, I was not singing flat; I was singing sharp -- above the pitch, even in repertoire that was, really, too high for me -- and I came to see that particular dysfunction as a metaphor for forcing myself into a box (fach, after all, means box) that was not the right size for me. Singing sharp, too, seemed very much in keeping with the use of singing as a weapon -- a sword is sharp, after all; a knife is sharp; so is  a switchblade. I switched to the lyric mezzo-soprano repertoire, a switch I've written about in more detail here, and everything settled into place technically; it felt comfortable, like finally finding clothes that fit after you've been wearing someone else's for the longest time.

I sang in my crooked way for years, and my aims, as an artist, were crooked too, in the sense that everything was predicated upon my singing. It was my heroin, the drug I immersed myself in when I was devastated, frightened, falling apart; it was my consolation when girls around me had husbands and families -- had love; I didn't need those things, or so I thought, since I could sing. It came before everything else in my life; I did not know how to have a life that did not heliotrope like a vine around the trellis of musical discipline and accomplishment. In fact, it was my life.

Even in the time since my own life has settled into patterns more closely resembling other, more usual ways of living, I haven't quite known where to fit singing into those alignments. I still sang, taught, researched, and performed after becoming a mother, but without the same . . . graspingness. I still believe that the ability to sing is a gift which, I now realize, God would have me cultivate (like all His gifts) in the interest of bringing beauty and consolation to others. I'm still trying to understand how to do that.

But I don't know if, in this life, I can ever leave my crooked way behind. I'm reminded of Auden's poem "As I Walked Out One Evening," in which the narrator, on a walk through London, overhears a lover declaiming the usual platitudes. Suddenly the declaration of love is cut short by "all the clocks in the city," who argue that

In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day. . .

and exhort the lover and his listener to

. . . stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.

I know now that my singing isn't the only thing I have; the only thing I have is my crooked heart. And because it's all I have, it's all I can give to this world; my crooked heart is the only means through which I will ever be able to live out my daily prayer to make the world more beautiful.  I pray that God will bring beauty and consolation out of my own crookedness.

Henry is Home

During Jude's adoption process, I had the pleasure of getting to know Carla, the giving and generous mother of a large family. Carla fought long and hard to adopt little Henry, a baby in a Ukrainian orphanage with a rare and serious health condition, and then longer and harder to provide him not only with a loving home, but also with the extensive medical care he needed to grow and thrive. Carla was Henry's fierce and untiring advocate from the moment she found out about him.

Last night, following complications from a recent surgery (the last of many), Henry went to his real home. He was two years old.

The writer Andrew Solomon has gotten a lot of adulation from the press lately for his just-released book, Far From the Tree, which explores the confounding -- to him -- ability of parents to love their children who, among other things, were born with severe disabilities. He would have done well to learn from people like Carla, who actively seek out and choose such children to love.

Leila writes movingly:

Carla had big dreams for her Henry -- that he would be free of pain, and that he would walk and dance and run! That he would be a faithful disciple of Christ Jesus, becoming a pure reflection of our Lord to all who encountered him, and that he would become a great saint, enter into Heaven, and dwell in the House of the Lord forever!

All these dreams of his loving mother have been realized tonight.

Henry is with God, in a place where there is no more pain and no more weeping. But his family is devastated. Please pray for them.

Quick Takes: Playground Procrastination Edition

1. After promising radio silence yesterday, here I am back again. Remembering how I blogged my way through my dissertation calls to mind how tempting distractions are when deadlines loom. So, in the interest both of feeding my procrastination jones and of trying to get some real work done during naptime, this will be dashed off in the form of quick takes.

2. Many of the playgrounds in my new city and its environs are beautiful in the sense that the equipment is new and top-of-the-line, and some are very nicely landscaped into the surrounding parks. Many of these parks, though, are bordered on all sides by expressway overpasses, busy roads, and dive bars, which gives you a jarring feeling when you look up from spotting your toddler and remember where you are.  I've written before about the weird emptiness of the playgrounds here and the metaphysical loneliness they call forth. Sometimes, however, we're not alone when we go to play. It depends on the hour and the weather. There is one park in particular where I often see children who appear to be participating in supervised visitation with a non-custodial parent. You can tell this because there will be a bunch of children with a feckless-looking dad, long sleeves covering his arms even in summer, and a woman who appears to have no relation to the family wearing a name-badge on a lanyard around her neck; she will later take the kids away in a mini-van, while the father rides off on a bicycle too small for him.

3. Sometimes in the playground I'll see a young mother sitting on a bench, her head bent over her hands, which are working rapidly before her. I'll think, "Oh, a knitter!" and have a warm rush of nostalgia for playgrounds in certain neighborhoods of New York, as well as for graduate school, the subway, and other places where women, including me, would knit when we had the chance to sit down. I move closer to see what she's working on, but as I come nearer, I realize that the mom in the playground is actually texting. It's a small reminder of the fact that very few people in our culture make things with their hands now, and that we spend inordinate amounts of time on the fleeting and the evanescent.

4. It's hard not to think of my new city as a troubled place. I don't mean just in the obvious economic sense shared by so many post-industrial cities in the Rust Belt; it also seems to me that people are unhappy here. The other day I drove to CVS to get a jug of milk, and parked my car next to another that was blaring hip-hop through the open windows. Inside were a preschool-aged white girl in a car seat and a dreadlocked black man clearly not her father. When I got into the store, I picked out the mother right away, in fleece pajama pants with her hair pulled back severely. Why is this an emblem of unhappiness to me? Because of the obvious rupture in the little girl's family of origin. Because so many poor women are on a chronic lonely search to find a man who will love them and their children, a man who will stay, and because that search so often proves fruitless. Because their children bounce from school to school as the women move in with boyfriend after boyfriend. Because this happens all the time here.

5. I want to bring something good to this troubled place, but I don't know how. In spite of the fact that the music I spent most of my career performing is intimate, beautiful, even healing, and in spite of the fact that I believe people here truly need that kind of beauty as a tonic for the soul, I'm also quite sure that no one here wants to hear it. So instead I'm writing this book that I've been asked to write, which a few people will read, but not the right ones somehow.

6. Nonetheless, I think about my book contract. I think about my children. I think about my house. I think about the fact that I can drive a car, which is no small feat. I think that, had we remained in New York, these things would all look, and indeed be, very different. We certainly wouldn't have Jude.

7. But still, I would like to give something beautiful to this place.

Poetry Friday: Majority

Now you'd be three,
I said to myself,
seeing a child born
the same summer as you.

Now you'd be six,
or seven, or ten.
I watched you grow
in foreign bodies.

Leaping into a pool, all laughter,
or frowning over a keyboard,
but mostly just standing,
taller each time.

How splendid your most
mundane action seemed
in these joyful proxies.
I often held back tears.

Now you are twenty-one.
Finally, it makes sense
that you have moved away
into your own afterlife.

-- Dana Gioia, from Pity the Beautiful. © Graywolf Press, 2012. More Poetry Friday at A Year of Reading.

The Years of the Locust

Betty Duffy writes in a recent post about noticing how

the lepers, the possessed, the ones whom Jesus heals always want to follow him, but he always sends them home to tell their families what the Lord has done for them. Or, in some cases, to tell no one who healed them.

I think I've missed this point in the past, as I've always thought the highest form of praise is to "leave all things you have, and come and follow me."

To those he has healed, Christ says, go home to your family. Go be in relationship with your people. Make reparation, which in many ways, is a more difficult vocation than leaving a tragic past behind and starting fresh among new people.

In all of my years in New York City -- years of bad mistakes, of humiliation, of foolhardiness -- I harbored the secret fantasy of moving somewhere far away where nobody knew me, a place where my life would be a blank slate and I could start over. I had all kinds of career plans in this fantasy, most of which involved buying a dilapidated old warehouse in a decrepit town like the one where I now live and turning it into a thriving arts center. To actually move away from the city, though -- and probably to actually move anywhere -- you need a good reason, and to turn old warehouses into arts centers you need a lot of cash, so my fantasy stayed a fantasy.

And then it happened -- part of it, at least. We moved far away to a place where I knew no one and no one knew me. And so here we are.

Every day my life here becomes different in ways both big and small. The big ways include things like adding another child to my family through adoption. The small things include learning to accept that "all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil," that, in other words, all is not as I longed for it to be since before I can remember -- that is, a life lived through, by, and for aesthetic values, dominated by beauty, and redolent with the variegated shades of meaning not stated outright, but only hinted at in the music that, over long years of study, became part of me. The fact is that I spend a lot of time cleaning up messes, trying to neutralize extreme behavior (my children's as well as my own), and going to Walmart, all things entirely antithetical to my youthful aesthetic ideal.

Otepoti just did the incredibly generous and heroic thing of traveling from New Zealand to China to help my husband bring home our little Jude. She slept on my sofa for two weeks, and helped out with the kids, cooking, and cleaning.  She dealt fairly and compassionately with my autism-spectrum son's sometimes-maddening behavior, and she changed plenty of nappies. She also went to a big Rwandan-refugee house party with me, hosted in honor of my friends' daughter's baptism, attended rehearsals of an opera production at the regional opera company located here in which I am a cover (i.e. understudy) for one of the roles, and watched episodes of Portlandia and the marvelous Danish film Babette's Feast with me. 

At the end of the latter, there is a wonderful monologue spoken by General Löwenhielm, who, as a young man, had rejected the love of one of the two devout daughters of an austere Protestant minister. In old age he is invited to a banquet given in their home, and he gives the following speech at table:

Mercy and truth have met together. Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another. Man, in his weakness and shortsightedness, believes he must make choices in this life. He trembles at the risks he takes. We do know fear. But no. Our choice is of no importance. There comes a time when your eyes are opened. And we come to realize that mercy is infinite. We need only await it with confidence, and receive it with gratitude. Mercy imposes no conditions. And, lo! Everything we have chosen has been granted to us, and everything have rejected has also been granted. Yes, we even get back what we rejected. For mercy and truth are met together; and righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.

As he leaves the party, he continues:

. . . I have been with you every day of my life.... You must also know that I shall be with you every day that is granted to me from now on. Every evening I shall sit down to dine with you: not with my body, which is of no importance, but with my soul. Because this evening I have learned, my dear, that in this beautiful world of ours, all things are possible.

The first comment Otepoti ever made on this blog was from Joel 2:25: "I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten." Not only did this comment mark the start of a great friendship; it also gave me hope. And I have come to believe, like General Löwenhielm, that God even restores to us what we rejected in this life, though restoration of this kind may not look the way it did in our fantasies. Indeed, Otepoti helped with that restoration herself, when she helped to bring our Jude home. Now may God help me to make the reparations I need to make in order to be in relationship with people, to live in a family, and to demonstrate to others the ways He's healed me.

Prayers for Ronan

I have learned that little Ronan, the toddler with Tay-Sachs Syndrome, is now blind and paralyzed, and has started having seizures, all of which indicate that his death is not far off. Please pray for him and for his family.

"Those that we call monsters are not so to God"

My friend and reader Ex-New Yorker sent me a link a while ago to an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Emily Rapp, a memorist-mother whose toddler son, Ronan, is dying of Tay-Sachs disease. If you click over to the link, you will see what an almost-celestially beautiful boy Ronan is; nevertheless, the progression of his disease means that he is losing all of his senses and abilities -- by this time, he has become blind -- and that he will likely die in a vegetative state before his third birthday.

I check Emily Rapp's blog, Little Seal, occasionally (the name Ronan means "little seal" in Irish), and found a powerful post there today which refers to Michel de Montaigne's essay "Of A Monstrous Child," in which the Renaissance humanist describes seeing a grotesquely-deformed toddler being exhibited by his caretakers as a begging lure. Montaigne surprises the reader by concluding that it is the shock and horror that men express when they encounter something so outside of the ordinary that is contrary to nature, and not the thing itself. As Rapp notes:


The burden . . .  falls on the looker, and the looker is held accountable for the lens through which she sees – and sorts – the world. I love the way Montaigne makes that child . . . extraordinary in the truest sense: brilliant and shiny.  The thing you want most to pick up when it glints at you from the street. The man born blind in the Gospel of John did not exist to make people feel grateful for their vision; the text is very clear that he, in fact, possessed the vision that others did not. That his was a looking that saw wonder, saw God, when others did not.

Rapp also references a politician who has stated publicly, as she puts it, that "disabled children are a woman’s punishment for having abortions in her sullied, slutty, ho-bag past." There is no comment worthy of this perversion of the Christian proclamation, but it is germane to note that it directly contradicts the passage in the Gospel of John mentioned above:

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

As Rapp says of the man born blind, "His body was not a punishment; it was a kind of divine revelation."

This reminded me of the assertion of Gerard Nadal, bioethicist and father of an autistic child, that the huge spike in autism diagnoses is taking place so that we may truly learn how to love. It reminded me, also, of the passage in Saint Faustina's diary in which she suggests that God the Father regards the world and its creatures through the wounds of His Son. May we learn to look at each other that way, too.

Quick Takes: Advent Theology for Tykes and Regular Grown-up Ingrates

1. I frequently read on other people's blogs about the great love of God and near-mystical grasp of holy truths expressed by their young children. Lest I believe these qualities to be inherent in children, or somehow conveyed by the solid faith of their virtuous parents, I have my own son. He used to have a mini-devotion to John the Baptist, which sprang to life when he learned of the method of the saint's death, and every supper until the start of Advent he would close out grace with the plea: "Saint John the Baptist, pray for us forever." That appeal has now been replaced by "Santa, pray for us forever." I tried to unpack this one, only narrowly avoiding the argument that we can't ask Santa to pray for us because he's not real. Instead, I feebly remarked that we can't really ask Santa to pray for us because, well, he's not dead. My son acknowledged this, though not as any sort of preventative to Santa's prayers; "Santa never dies," he noted.

2. We still don't have our Christmas tree; we're always last-minute about it, a holdover from being broke in New York, where you can get a big, gorgeous tree on Christmas Eve for small change, because the very handsome Canadian tree-sellers who set up shop on every street corner in the city on the day after Thanksgiving are packing up and heading home. I did, however, set out a creche that I got at a garage sale last year for a dollar (it includes the swooning pasha above, who I don't think was original to the set, but I thought could stand in for one of the wise kings -- or maybe not), but my son immediately used it to enact a battle scene in which Baby Jesus killed everyone.

3. His kindergarten teachers invited me to come and read the wonderful Tomie DePaola book The Clown of God to his class. I suppose I overprepared a little, making a chart of the Italian words in the story (Really Rosie phoned me in the middle of this, and asked if I was planning to give an exam too) and discussing pictorial symbolism with the wee ones, but it was a hit nonetheless. Yes, this happened in public school (the teachers are required to teach about other holiday traditions too; my son announced the other day that he celebrates Kwanzaa).

4. My son has told me that he doesn't like speaking English; he prefers to speak Italian and Chinese. Admittedly, he knows a few words in each language, mostly curse words in the former (though not their meaning) and polite expressions in the latter, which he's learning in school. We say a decade of the rosary together each night as a family, so sometimes, to mix it up a little, I'll say a Hail Mary in Italian.  My son can actually say all the prayers in Irish Gaelic, and he does. Then we mention our intentions. His are usually along the lines of "That [his friend] will stop saying 'poop,'" or that another friend "will stop calling me 'poop-man.'" But most often, he says, "Thank you for my good day."

5. It's that time of the year -- it always is, isn't it? -- when I question God assiduously as to why He took me from a life I knew and loved and to which I felt profoundly connected and put me in this backwater. But it helps to remember that the Savior of the world was born in one place, and raised in another, whose backwaterness probably rivaled this one's.

Hard Edges Softened by Joy

A beautiful photoessay about children at play in my beloved city.  My favorite slide is number 11.

Poetry Friday: Bedtime Story for My Son

Where did the voice come from? I hunted through the rooms
For that small boy, that high, that head-voice,
The clatter as his heels caught on the door,
A shadow just caught moving through the door
Something like a school-satchel.  My wife
Didn't seem afraid, even when it called for food.
She smiled and turned her book and said:
"I couldn't go and love the empty air."

We went to bed. Our dreams seemed full
Of boys in one or another guise, the paper-boy
Skidding along in grubby jeans, a music-lesson
She went out in the early afternoon to fetch a child from.
I pulled up from a pillow damp with heat
And saw her kissing hers, her legs were folded
Far away from mine.  A pillow! It seemed
She couldn't love the empty air.

Perhaps, we thought, a child had come to grief
In some room in the old house we kept,
And listened if the noises came from some special room,
And then we'd take the boards up and discover
A pile of dusty bones like charcoal twigs and give
The tiny-sounding ghost a proper resting-place
So that it need not wander in the empty air.

No blood-stained attic harboured the floating sounds,
We found they came in rooms that we'd warmed with our life.
We traced the voice and found where it mostly came
From just underneath both our skins, and not only
In the night-time either, but at the height of noon
And when we sat at meals alone.  Plainly, this is how we found
That love pines loudly to go out to where
It need not spend itself on fancy and the empty air.

-- Peter Redgrove

More Poetry Friday at A Year of Reading.

Music and Memory, Part 23: Auf dem Strom

Warning: if you dislike reading about poop, venture no further.

My son, whom his preschool teachers call "brilliant," scores in the mentally-retarded range on IQ tests because of his near-total non-compliance.  He can memorize a book or a song after a first hearing, but our daily violin practice sessions are fraught by my continual redirection of his efforts, and by my own efforts to quell my frustration at his insistence on "playing it my way."  I picture myself jumping to my feet and shouting, "This is MUSIC, dammit! This is only the single most important thing in the created world!" but I manage to restrain myself, because he's five years old.  (I was going to write, "because he's five years old and has special needs," but his ability to comprehend the importance of music is not one of them.)

Yesterday we were having one of our frequent bathroom struggles, in which he refuses to poop, swears he doesn't have to, flings himself to the floor and lashes out, screams and cries, has to be physically transported to the toilet, and then sits meekly and finishes his business.  The process is generally quite demoralizing to me. Yesterday, after having plunked him down on the toilet, I went into the other room to catch up on some ironing, and thought maybe I could snatch a few minutes to practice before he needed me to help him wipe.  The motion of the body in ironing, it seemed to me, would pose no obstacle, and might perhaps even by an aid, to working on certain vocal technical issues.  Singing, after all, is a physiological process that involves the fluid motion of the entire body, usually enacted in subtle movements which audiences do not see.

As I stood ironing and singing, however, my focus was interrupted by other concerns. I thought of a poem I'd read in college by Tess Gallagher:

I Stop Writing the Poem

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I'm still a woman.
I'll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I'll get back
to the poem. I'll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there's a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it's done.

And, for some reason, a totally unrelated piece by Schubert came rushing into my head, a piece I've never sung because it's for tenor or high soprano, the little chamber scena "Auf dem Strom" (On the River).  (I do not have time to write my own translation, so I am copying someone else's of the poem by Ludwig Rellstab.)

 Take the last parting kiss,
 and the wavy greeting
 that I'm still sending ashore
 before you turn your feet and leave!
 Already the waves of the stream
 are pulling briskly at my boat,
 yet my tear-dimmed gaze
 keeps being tugged back by longing!

 And so the waves bear me forward
 with unsympathetic speed.
 Ah, the fields have already disappeared
 where I once discovered her!
 Blissful days, you are eternally past!
 Hopelessly my lament echoes
 around my fair homeland,
 where I found her love.

 See how the shore dashes past;
 yet how drawn I am to cross:
 I'm pulled by unnameable bonds
 to land there by that little hut
 and to linger there beneath the foliage;
 but the waves of the river
 hurry me onward without rest,
 leading me out to the sea!

 Ah, before that dark wasteland
 far from every smiling coast,
 where no island can be seen -
 oh how I'm gripped with trembling horror!
 Gently bringing tears of grief,
 songs from the shore can no longer reach me;
 only a storm, blowing coldly from there,
 can cross the grey, heaving sea!

 If my longing eyes, surveying the shore,
 can no longer glimpse it,
 then I will gaze upward to the stars
 into that sacred distance!
 Ah, beneath their placid light
 I once called her mine;
 there perhaps, o comforting future!
 there perhaps I shall meet her gaze.

I recalled how, in the 1990s, my teacher A.B. had had a famous coloratura soprano in his studio.  She lived in California and flew to New York for her lessons, and my knees would invariably turn to jelly and I would inevitably choke up when, having the lesson time after mine, she would open the studio door while I was working.  One day, A.B. remarked to me that she was performing "Auf dem Strom" in a famous summer music festival.  "Oh, I love that piece!" I gushed.  He laughed me off, explaining that it was dreck.

Oh no, it was not dreck.  How could A.B. and his prominent pupil gang up on "Auf dem Strom" like that -- on the gently-resigned opening melody in the french horn, drifting down, as it were, from a distant rise on the other side of the river as the speaker's small boat is already picking up speed in the current and bearing him away; on those lovely, arching vocal phrases, so full of longing and loss, but also of hope?  No, the piece was beautiful, was true, even. It was, quite possibly, even healing.

Yesterday, as I stood there ironing and waiting for my son to finish in the bathroom, I realized that I hadn't heard it or thought of it in years, but the delicate phrase, repeated in the coda, "Ach, bei ihren milden Scheine/Nannt' ich sie zuerst die Meine" (Ah, beneath [the stars'] placid light, I once called her mine) flooded into the ear of my memory, and I thought that perhaps  I too, one day, might be able to greet music once again as an old friend, might even be able to take hold of her as a balm for the healing of myself and others.

Back, Safe, Home Again

(I quote, of course, from that great work, Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.)

I'm back home after a somewhat grueling trip to New York and Boston, where I had a concert engagement.  I brought my son along, and while, like so many children on the spectrum, he has difficulty dealing with the mundane disruptions and pettty annoyances of quotidian life, he proved to be a champion traveler, handling many hours on buses, trains, subways, as well as new faces and strange places, with impressive aplomb.  We also had the great pleasure of seeing old friends and family, and the time spent with my great friends Rosie and J. made this trip deeply enriching for me on the level of bones, marrow, and soul.

As I walked the streets of my old neighborhood, I was welcomed so warmly by my old neighbors and shopkeepers that I began to wonder if my former sense of alienation there, on account of my for-that-part-of-town ethnic otherness, had been a delusion.  Perhaps one of my many flaws, after all, is the sense of being alienated everywhere.  (Nonetheless, as my fellow former-Bronxite readers who know whereof I speak can attest, if you're not Irish in the old 'hood, you do become the object of certain amount of suspicion.)

More later.

Is Beethoven the Voice of God?

I'm being facetious, of course.  But it did cross my mind yesterday, after I woke up in the dark of early morning, and, in a bit of a panic, asked God the Father to send me a hug (I'm not usually that sentimental, but waking up in the dark really kicks the ass of my soul).  Later, I turned on the radio, to hear Beethoven's Symphony no. 7 -- again: the last time I asked God for some sort of a sign, the same thing happened, and the same music played (and I was annoyed).  So, I thought, is this it?  Is this you talking to me, God?  I would have maybe preferred the humanity of the Symphony no. 6, the Pastoral, which contains whole worlds of delight and terror and the wistfulness of nostalgia.  But the Seventh is awesome in the truest sense of the world, and this was God the Father I'd been talking to, after all.

Then, today, I was helping my son clean up the dozens of empty wooden thread spools we'd been building with (I've become obsessed with this slim series of English craft-and-early-learning books from the 1960s, Learning with Mother, which features all sorts of things you can do with wooden thread spools), and put on the radio again.  And this time, I felt as if I were not only being hugged by God the Father, but also kissed by God the Son, for it was Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, op. 80.

I can't explain why I love this piece with the intense passion that I do, but to me, it is the most perfect piece of music ever.  I love the simple, anthemic theme, so redolent of human hope, which Beethoven cycles through the sections of the orchestra, treating it with grace, wit, and -- if a composer can be said to feel this way about his own tunes -- heartfelt love, before handing it over to the full orchestra, where it erupts into a swelling lyrical outburst that foreshadows his other great anthem, the "Ode to Joy."  The theme starts at 1:20, below.

And then, out of nowhere, what has been, to this point, a piano concerto becomes something else entirely, when the voices suddenly appear as if wafted down from above, singing self-referentially about the consolations of music (about 2:51 here).

I remember hearing the Choral Fantasy fortuitously on the radio one day when I was a lonely new mother, and how I shouted with joy at my newborn, "That's Beethoven!" as if he could understand. Later, when he was two, he was playing the harmonica one day, and I told him he sounded like Bob Dylan.  "Beethoven," he loftily corrected me.

Today I did something similar, feeling like a real music geek.  I could feel my face light up as I turned the volume higher and explained to my now-four-year-old that the music had been composed by Mr. Beethoven, and then pointed out, one by one, the different instrumental entrances.  I know he's going to be really embarrassed by me one day; I was embarrassed by myself.  And then, without meaning to and without any warning, when the piece was over I burst into tears.  "What's wrong, Mommy?" he said, alarmed.  "Nothing," I replied. "Just that the music is so beautiful."  "It's not beautiful," he said, trying to comfort me.

I read once long ago, in a book of essays about English literature by an early twentieth-century Indian scholar whose name, like the title, I can no longer remember, that the aim of literature is "the total eradication of sorrows and miseries."  God must have intended music to be a similar balm.

(The picture above illustrates a famous incident in the life of Beethoven.  He and Goethe were walking together one day in the Schönbrunn Palace gardens in Vienna when they met the Archduke and Archduchess.  Goethe made as if to move aside to let the imperial party pass, but Beethoven linked arms with him and made him walk on.  They marched right into the midst of the royal entourage, which humbly parted to make way for the two great artists, the true nobility of the modern age.)

Diagnosis Imitating Art

If we hadn't left New York, it might have taken much longer to notice that there was anything clinically atypical about my son.  I would most likely still be teaching part-time at the university, during which time my son's babysitter, who lived around the corner, would be looking after him in our home.  There was a private preschool in our old neighborhood, but it probably would have been too expensive for us; and our district school (New York has a complicated system of decentralized school districts, the result, in part, of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teacher strikes in 1968) did not have Pre-K.  It took experienced teachers in the preschool he began attending in our new city to alert me to the fact that he might not be developing typically.

My son was a late talker who spoke only about five words before he was two.  I enrolled him in a language study conducted by a doctoral candidate in speech-language pathology at my university, who ran a full battery of tests on him and concluded that "he's just one of those kids who's a late talker and we don't know why."  I did not sign him up for Early Intervention because he began talking exactly on his second birthday, and in three months was speaking in complex sentences with clauses and antecedents.  His potty-training experience was similar:  he started late, but mastered it almost immediately.

The speech-language pathologist ruled out autism for my son, because he made great eye contact and his cognition was clearly unimpaired.  However, I had noticed unusual things about him as a baby and toddler:  for instance, he never had the tight grasp on your finger that most infants have (my woo-woo homeopath and former friend claimed that he didn't need it, because he felt so at home in the world; whatever), and he didn't point at things until he was almost three, though he did indicate things in other ways.  He also avoided drawing and cutting activities like the plague, so I didn't push him in those.

We started the evaluation process in March of this year, and my son was given an IEP in June.  He's going to be attending an integrated Pre-K in the fall in which there are four teachers in the classroom, and half the students are typical and the other half disabled in various ways.  But he still doesn't have a diagnosis, just a collection of symptoms and behaviors; he will not get an official diagnosis until he sees a developmental pediatrician in October (the appointment was made in May, and we will have to travel over a hundred miles for it).  Nonetheless, reading between the lines in the evaluations, I anticipate a diagnosis of Asperger's or another high-functioning autism-spectrum disorder, which I confirmed with my son's occupational therapist.  In some ways, he is absolutely textbook for Asperger's, and, in addition to his delays and behavioral problems, he also has certain prodigious gifts, which is not unusual.  I am anticipating that after kindergarten I will be homeschooling him, because I fear that there is no school program we can afford that can teach to both his gifts and his delays.  Public schools are required to address disabilities and provide growth for students who demonstrate them, but not to provide enrichment if those same students also exhibit giftedness; private and parochial schools are not required to do anything for children with disabilities.

I really only started suspecting Asperger's last spring, however, when I picked up the book Tobin Learns to Make Friends, by the Northern-Ireland-born social worker Diane Murrell, from a library book display.  The book is about a little train (trains are a common obsession for kids on the spectrum) who exhibits classic signs of Asperger's, and has various scrapes learning the rules of making and maintaining friendsips with other trains.  I cried when I read it:  In the stories of Tobin's misadventures and difficulties with his peers, I might have been reading about my son.

And then, on Retired Waif's sporadic blog, I read about an unfortunate incident that sent shockwaves around the autism blogosphere earlier this year, when Smockity Frocks, one of those funny, witty, self-deprecating Christian-mom-of-many bloggers, wrote about her trials at the library one day when a little girl my son's age was behaving very, very badly and the child's caretaker did not respond in the way that Smockity thought she should have.  Smockity's truly cruel mockery of a child obviously on the spectrum made me cry again, because, once again, that stimming, perseverating little girl could easily have been my own child.  And even worse were the congratulations of most of her commenters, and Smockity's defensive response to the ones who suggested that the girl might have autism and that Smockity might have shown a bit more sensitivity (not to say charity) towards difference (after the ensuing pile-on, Smockity took down the post, but it can be read in cached form here).

Because of all of this, I'm in some ways very glad that we have moved away from New York, in spite of the fact that there is a much greater variety and amount of services available to children with disabilities there.  In New York, I would have been far more caught up in teaching and scholarship and my other historical concerns, and it might have taken me even longer to cotton on to the fact that my little boy has some special needs.  And I'm extremely grateful to Retired Waif for her friendship back when we were neighbors in the Bronx.  She's a gifted scholar and an excellent person all around, and l have learned a great deal from her approach to disability.

Music and Memory, part 13: By the Waters of Babylon

"Sing to us," they said, "one of Zion's songs."  O how could we sing the song of the Lord on alien soil?

I hope to have my driver's license by the end of the year, but I need to practice a lot more than I have been, and practicing has proven logistically hard to arrange.  This month I've been taking my son, who I anticipate will be diagnosed with a high-functioning autism spectrum disorder, to an agency that provides occupational therapy to help him develop his fine motor skills and find creative ways to address his sensory-seeking behaviors.  This agency, while lovely, is located in a post-industrial ghetto, surrounded by abandoned factory buildings and bordered by a defunct railroad track with tall weeds growing up through the ties.  We can take the bus within a half-mile of the agency, but then we have to get off, walk down a struggling neighborhood block, and plunge through the desolation.  The first time we did it, I was more scared than I've ever been anywhere in New Yor City, but made it seem like a fun adventure to my son.  Then I got used to it, and started to become interested in our surroundings.  Sometimes we see a solitary figure walking on the tracks.

Yesterday we were running late for various reasons, and I called a cab to take us to my son's appointment.  The cab driver was a young woman whose beauty was unmarred by her multiple tattoos and piercings.  The agency my son goes to has the words "handicapped" and "children" in its name, and she asked me about it and what they did. Her son, it turned out, received services for a high-functioning spectrum disorder from another agency, one that I've heard is located in an environ slightly scarier than ours (there is a high number of spectrum disorders among boys in my new city, but that's a different story).  My cab driver's hands on the wheel were slender and long-fingered, unencumbered by any jewelry, including a wedding ring.  For some reason that I can't explain, my heart went out to her.  While I waited for my son in the waiting room, tears came to my eyes and I prayed for her.  I kept thinking of how we are all in Babylon, in exile from what is good and beautiful.  And it seemed to me that those of us who strive to bring heaven down to earth, to create small utopias of goodness where there appears to be none, are perhaps in the most desolate kind of exile of all.  Of those people who order their lives according to daily mass and prayer practices, I know of few who have any real sort of peace in their hearts.  Just as I cling to the cross out of desperation, knowing that there is no salvation without it, the people I know who engage in orderly devout practices sometimes appear to be white-knuckling it.  And I stress that there is nothing wrong or untoward about that; it's simply the way it is.

I thought about the wide social gap between my cab driver and myself, and about the fact that disability is the great leveler.  And I thought about all the beautiful things I've always wanted to do, here and elsewhere:  there must, I've always thought, be something I can do to help other people with the skills that I have.  But the skills I have are so specialized, and there's so little concrete, applicable need or place for them.  Going to sing beautiful music for the pierced and tattooed is not going to save them.  Bringing beautiful music into the schools is not going to save their children, whether spectrum-disordered or otherwise.  I remember doing a small concert tour in rural Wisconsin about ten years ago, and, before one performance, speaking to a high-school chorus.  I observed their rehearsal, and noted that the best soprano was about six months pregnant.  During question-and-answer, a boy raised his hand and asked, "What are you doing here?"  I scrambled for a sincere answer that wouldn't further widen the gulf between us -- something in between the cynical "It's a gig," and the idealistic "I'm here to show you something beautiful that will uplift your soul and help you make a deeper connection with our shared humanity."  I don't remember now what I said.

I consider myself lucky to have been brought up in what may have been one of the last homes of my generation whose inhabitants listened to classical music.  There's no doubt that this family pursuit formed the basis of my life as a musician.  As a result, however, I have spent my entire adult life practicing a craft that has little-to-no value or perceived benefit in our culture, and for which there is a tremendous dearth of opportunities to make back the copious amounts of money invested in advancing to the level of professionalism.  There's been talk recently about the necessity for classical musicians to become "teaching artists," doing outreach in the schools, but with education budgets cut to the bone, and with -- The Mozart Effect notwithstanding -- unquantifiable outcomes for the students expected to benefit from this exposure -- this might just be another pipe dream (my trip to Wisconsin ten years ago was funded by local educators influenced by the ambiguous Mozart-effect research).

There are varying degrees of exile.  I remember well the existential friction I felt practicing my profession as a singer and dissertation-writing musicologist once I had gotten married and moved to the Bronx -- an existential friction I would give much to struggle against now.  There was an old man in our neighborhood, a successful retired plumber from the County Roscommon, who had bought an old house a block away -- a house where a bishop had been born, grown up, and come back to live in his retirement and finally die -- and was renting it to an Irish music school.  The plumber from Roscommon knew my singing (it would have been hard not to if you walked past the corner where we lived on a summer day), and he came over on the very day I was home having a miscarriage to offer me unlimited access to the house for my practicing.  I was in no emotional state, and I politely rebuffed his kind and neighborly offer, because it wasn't really space I needed to practice my craft; it was child care.  But soon thereafter, we moved here.  And I realize now that I wasn't in exile in the Bronx anywhere near to the extent that I romantically believed.

Where we live now, I see an exile much more severe all around me.  My heart's longing is to comfort that exile, but I am currently stymied as to how.

The Gift

Lord, You may not recognize me
speaking for someone else.
I have a son.  He is
so little, so ignorant.
He likes to stand
at the screen door, calling
oggie, oggie, entering
language, and sometimes
a dog will stop and come up
the walk, perhaps
accidentally.  May he believe
this is not an accident?
At the screen
welcoming each beast
in love's name, Your emissary.
-- Louise Glück

How You Get Unstuck

This is not the sort of thing I usually link to, and I only found it myself through a confusing concatenation of links and recommendations, as one does sometimes:  an online advice columnist in an edgy online cultural journal, The Rumpus, extending help to a woman mourning a late-term miscarriage  (I clicked through some of the other articles, and they looked to be the sort of garbage that I try to stay away from).  But I was riveted and moved by the columnist's harrowing story of her young clients, and how she finally resolved to help them salvage their lives.

It is heartbreaking that the lives of so many are untouched by beauty, or even by kindness.  It is heartbreaking that so many children are betrayed.   It seems that the young girls Sugar writes about were very fortunate to have encountered her.

Please be warned that Sugar describes painful situations of abuse in some detail, and uses offensive language.

Down the One-Eared Rabbit Hole

The first few months of an adoption are taken up with what's called a home study, which involves compiling many pages of personal documents, writing autobiographical essays, getting background-checked and fingerprinted, and being interviewed on diverse occasions by the social worker overseeing the adoption process.  It's a little disconcerting, especially when you remember how relatively easy it is to get a baby in the usual way, should you be able to swing it.

I like the social worker who's handling our adoption.  She is soft-spoken and kindly, and she lived in New York for a time, which is enough to endear anyone to me around here (I almost started bawling at Mass the other day, at a parish in my town's old Italian neighborhood, when the old man behind me began intoning the responses in the cadences of the Bronx).  But I felt at a loss in our meeting the other day, when she was probing me about my relationship with my husband, and wanted to know what had drawn me to him when we first met.  His kindness, I answered truthfully, his masculinity, his qualities of strength and steadiness, the beauty of his voice.  Were these the qualities I had been looking for in a man? she asked.  Well, I answered, I didn't have a checklist.  And it was true; I didn't.  Nor did I plan on marrying him, no more than I had ever planned on doing anything.  It's usually been the pattern that I'm not sure what to do, but something appears to present itself as a logical option, and I investigate the option and see where it leads.  I don't believe in a dream spouse (I doubt that anyone who's had some of the experiences I've had ever could), and I don't believe we have very much control over the things that happen in our lives or in the lives of those around us, though I do believe we can influence those lives for good or ill (and that, perhaps, more than we know).  For the most part, however, I think that it's probably more realistic to wake up every day with open hands and abandon ourselves completely to the will of God, though I didn't tell this to the social worker. 

She had given me some adoption magazines at our last meeting, and I had enjoyed reading them, but I felt as if they created the expectation of a fairy-tale ending around every adoption story, and I told her so.  The editorial thrust seemed to be that you wait and wait for your child, and you finally bring your child home, and everyone is henceforth happy all the time (not, come to think of it, unlike the tone of most books and magazines directed towards bearing, bringing home, and parenting one's biological children; if there were less of that around, there would probably be less post-partum depression).  The social worker agreed that the magazines were very glass-half-full, which is not a bad thing; nor is presenting adoption in a positive light a bad thing at all.  However, she said, most prospective adoptive parents are mourning the loss of their dream baby, the biological child they didn't have, and many have come to adoption with the attitude that it is a second-best way to become a parent, so it helps them to have the dream story reinforced.

I don't see it as second-best, and, just as I don't think there's a dream spouse, neither do I think there's a dream baby.  No matter how you get your children, they will always be unplumbable, even incomprehensible, mysteries.  How can we ever really know anyone else, including our own children?  The people that God brings into our lives as friends, spouses, children, are, and will always be, vast, unexplored continents.  "Thou has brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger."

For all of my confusion and lack of planning, and all my lack of belief in goals and dreams, I do have a memory that has remained all these years, and has given me some sense of direction.  When I was a child, I loved and collected stuffed animals.  I would line all my stuffed animals up around the edges of my bed at night so that none of them would feel excluded while I slept.  One day, when I was about seven, I was with my father at a drugstore, where I spied a bin of little stuffed rabbits (this must have been around Easter) with coats made of real rabbit fur.  One of them, I noticed, was missing an ear.  I started to cry out of pity for this one, and begged my father to buy it for me.  He suggested that I get a nicer one with two ears, but I stood firm:  it had to be the one-eared rabbit, I said, because no one else would ever love it.  So he bought it for me, and I brought it home and loved it.  In fact, I may have loved it more than I loved my stuffed animals with both ears intact.  The one-eared rabbit, after all, just needed more love.

I wonder if finding and loving the one-eared rabbits is my real calling in life.  If it is, I have to trust that God will give me the strength I need to carry it out.