Artists in the Kitchen

Among other Sisyphean pursuits, I've spent the summer culling books from my chaotic "library." It's been an anxious and painful task, because it's forced me to confront my neurotic used-book-buying habits, and to recognize the ways I've attempted to create a kind of escapist utopia in my house by populating it with library discards. I discovered early on in our sojourn in northern Appalachia that there are fantastic library book sales here, and it's hard to pass one by when hardcovers are $.25 (I suppose this says something about the reading habits of northern Appalachia or of post-industrial America in general, but that's for another post). Those library discards -- some of them truly wonderful books -- have then gotten unpacked and placed in half-hearted, meandering subject order on various already-groaning shelves around the house, with the result that, when I search the shelves  for a book, I can't find it, and I panic. So my first step this summer was to cull the duplicates, of which there were more than I care to admit -- because, if I find something wonderful that I already have, I always purchase it, because it's wonderful, and no one else will want it, and I might lose the first one -- a thought process that has ended up, more than once, with me not being able to find either copy of the book, and then buying another on Amazon.

I grappled with most of this, and ended up donating 17 boxes of books to the library for their next book sale, which I am planning to not attend, or at least to drive by with my knuckles white from my death-grip on the steering wheel.

There is one category of my collection, however, that I will not be culling. It is my two shelves of vintage spiral-bound community fundraiser cookbooks.

It's hard for me to explain how I feel about these books, which were published from the 1950s to the 1980s, produced by such organizations as the Women's Service League of St. Paul's Episcopal Church of Burlington, Vermont; the Valley Calligraphy Guild of Harrisburg, Oregon; and the St. Joseph Altar Rosary Society of Endicott, New York. Looking through them gives me a sense of excitement and anticipation, as if I've discovered a secret passage back to a lost world -- not only a time, but even a place, of wisdom that I lack: a world where a budget-stretching, wholesome meal made from cans of soup, packets of Jell-O, and bouillon cubes would draw a family together in a near-mystical communion, giving all its members the strength and comfort they needed to face the confounding exigencies of the world beyond the kitchen table.

I love to read the names of the recipes in my spiral-bound cookbooks. There is Priest's Goulash; there are Lasagna Rollups. There is City Chicken; there is Grandma's Waistline. There are Orange Chiffon Pie and Cottage Cheese Cake. There are many, many casseroles. Some of them from the late 1950s and very early 1960s are hand-lettered in an artistic, leftward-slanting calligraphic hand that must have been popular at that time, since it is found across vastly distant regions. Some of the hand-lettered cookbooks also include little pen-and-ink drawings by the recipes' authors, generally the cooks' own idealized images of times that were long past even during their own lifetimes.

I also cook from these books, and it is a great pleasure for me. The best of them recipe-wise are, perhaps unsurprisingly, compilations in support of big-city cultural institutions: I have, for instance, a cookbook produced by the staff of the Library of Congress; another, called Artists in the Kitchen, by the Women's Council of the the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester; and two published by the Junior Committee of the Cleveland Orchestra. One of my favorites, however, was created in 1973 by the staff and board of trustees of the Metropolitan Museum (pictured above). It contains a short foreword:

It is a little-known and indisputable fact that museum people devote a great deal of thought and time to food, and the fare at the tables of colleagues is more often than not of the highest quality. We hope that you will enjoy this collection of recipes . . . the Museum's first venture into the culinary aspect of the arts.

And the recipes are redolent of a mythical New York City past. There are such 1970s-era staples as hot crab meat, Roquefort cheese ball, and tuna casserole, and there are still hints here and there of the rapidly-fading favorites of an earlier spiral-bound era, like green rice baked in a mold. There are also some bizarreries that, in my fantasies about what "museum people" must be like, I could not have imagined -- such as this one for spaghetti sauce:

But most of them are charming, interesting, and even touching -- like this one, whose name, use of Teflon, and offhand acknowledgment that it "will do for a light supper," combine to make me sigh with longing for an easier time -- a time in which an omelette with a bottle of white wine and a green salad would have made a lovely Sunday supper, and in which you would have eaten it with someone who loved beauty and simplicity, as you do.

But this one treads, for me, uncomfortably close to pathos. Mr. Hawkins was a bachelor, who nevertheless "[impressed] his guests with this spectacular dessert." I think about Ashton Hawkins. Was the notation of his bachelorhood a signifier of gayness? Or was he, perhaps, just lonely? I think I would have liked to have sat at his table and been impressed not only with his spectacular Calvados Soufflé, but also with the wit and mirth of his company and his colleagues'.

And it's not just the bachelor Ashton Hawkins. It's also Margot Feely, who submitted a recipe for "Desperation Shrimp," a lifesaver when dinner guests show up unexpectedly. It's Katushe and Danny Davison, who "have lived in London for the past several years and have found themselves in the enviable predicament of having their freezer bulging with pheasants," and who, to clear some space, invented the "excellent dish" of Pheasant Hash. It's Edward M. H. Warburg, who avers that his Veal Casserole with Peas, and his Curried Eggs, "are amongst my wife's favorite recipes."

Where is Mrs. Warburg now? Where is Ashton Hawkins and all of his colleagues? As Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his 1936 poem "Encounter":

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Lenten Grocery Penances for Bourgeois Outcasts

At the evening Mass on Ash Wednesday I sat in the pew realizing that, for all my pushing away the truth of the matter, I am a failure. The proof could not have been starker -- here I was, sitting in my coat in an unheated church in the ghetto of a once-thriving, now-crumbling Rust Belt town, far away from all the things that, to my mind, had long defined not only my own life, but even life itself -- the things that had nurtured my belief that I was special, out of the ordinary, made for something important.

My older son was with me, half asleep in the pew. I shook him awake to get in line for ashes, and when it was his turn, the priest -- a gruff, stern, socially-awkward west African man with a heavy accent and a hortatory preaching style, who is known to have conflicts with some of his brother priests in the diocese and who has been mostly benignly ignored by our parishioners -- murmured to my son, as he daubed the ashes onto his brow, "Remember that you are dust, my brother. And to dust you shall return." I was struck by this entreaty; after all, Father didn't call me "my sister" -- and I mentioned to my son that Father's words to him were special. And I believe that they were, because Father loves my autistic son, and I heard his words as not only an exhortation, but also a greeting cast out across the chasm of loneliness, from one outcast to another. I recalled Father hearing my confession a couple of years ago, when I was still wallowing in my own sense of exile and loneliness (well, I still am), and I mentioned it to him; he said, "Oh, my sister. I understand." In loneliness, I became his sister. As outcasts, we were next of kin.

Of course, I've mentioned my feelings of isolation in my new hometown too many times to count. They stem from the obvious: I'm far away from home; my friends and family are at a significant remove. I can go through a day hardly seeing another adult except through the glass of my windshield; driving, while making my life incalculably better, has increased my sense of isolation, and also, I fear, my complacency. When I was still walking everywhere, I was forced to confront the poverty of my fellow walkers in the city; now I am safe from them.

Not that this place hasn't also forced me to confront my child-of-the-utopian-seventies notions about poverty, too. I have reached out to a couple of poor mothers here, and found their lives and their children's lives to be hobbled by the kind of disastrous decision-making that right-wing pundits like to rail about. But I have made disastrous decisions too. I think I know something about the fear and despair that drives people to cling to even the most harmful and toxic attachments, and I have seen that the lives of the poor are shot through with a loneliness much worse than my own.

I see now how we hold ourselves back, apart, and away from people who are not like us, and how I have done this, too. My singing was the thing that I imagined could keep me safe from the misery of broken human promises and relationships, and of stumbling and falling attempts at human love. I had something I could use to put up a wall of protection between me and the lives of utter loss and failure that are common to the poor women I have known: a key, a tool, an instrument, a wedge.

To counter this still-prevalent attitude in myself, I'm doing grocery penance for Lent again this year. I'm going shopping at Aldi's instead of Wegman's, for starters, and putting the price-point difference in our Lenten sacrifice Jar to buy formula for medically-fragile Chinese orphans. This means that I have to forego the smug sense of self-satisfaction that Wegman's lulls me into, the sense of being with other people like myself: clean, bourgeois, well-educated, able to pick out the freshest and most beautiful groceries in a warmly-lit, expansive space. Instead, I must stand out in the cold waiting, along with the gray-faced night-shift workers, the toothless, tubercularly-coughing women, and the lank-haired young mothers of children in dirty coats who ought to be in school, for Aldi's to open its doors and let us in to its boxy cheerlessness, to fill our rented carts with foods in knocked-off packaging (the Benton's graham cracker box looks so much like the Honey-Maid one, but just isn't), with brand names, like Cattlemen's Ranch and Happy Farms, both vaguely euphemistic and reminiscent of Chinese communism. 

And it also means that I have to strive to stop exalting myself, my knowledge, my gifts, and trying to use them to pry open the world to give me the things that I want, and to try instead to accept and desire being forgotten.

In "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," one of the songs he wrote to texts by the Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert, Mahler succeeded in creating a sense of stilled timelessness, of dying to self and to the world. The text says, in translation:

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world's tumult
And I rest in a quiet realm.
I live alone in my heaven,
in my love and in my song.

May it be so, eventually, for all of us.

No Gay Friends

Having reverted rather dramatically to the Catholic faith about ten years ago, I have an interest in conversion narratives (an interest which extends to my professional life, since the book I'm currently writing for a British publisher, one of the reasons for my currently scanty blogging, is about religious conversion in Victorian England). In light of this, I got hold of a book that made a bit of a bump in the Christian press a few months ago, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, the conversion memoir of Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, a reformed lesbian and erstwhile professor of feminist studies and queer theory. (I like that her name means "rosary"; she is Italian-American and was raised Catholic, but her conversion was into a Reformed, i.e. evangelical Presbyterian, denomination.)

This is not a book review; I'm only a few dozen pages into the book. I have to confess to being slightly put off by its slapdash writing and virtually-nonexistent copyediting (though I suppose a small Christian publisher like Butterfield's doesn't have much of an editing budget), but the book is both more complex and more honest than most conversion narratives I've read. What interests me most, though, is what Butterfield, after her conversion, did with her past. After becoming a Christian, she felt constrained to jettison not only her career, but also her friends, and she writes: "I felt like a vampire -- possessing no reflection in mirrors. I realize now that this is what it means to be washed clean, to be truly made new again. The past really is gone. The shadow of what was remains, but the substance is truly taken away." But is it really?

One of the things that stood out for me in the early pages of Butterfield's book was her description of  hospitality in the gay community.  She describes how "[on] Thursday nights, I had a regular tradition: I made a big dinner and opened my home for anyone in the gay and lesbian community to come and eat and talk about issues and needs." Wow, I thought; it sounds so beautiful. It reminded me of Christ, after the Resurrection, cooking breakfast for his friends on the beach and calling them to come and eat. Why can't we have that? Why can't we do that? Or is such friendship and camaraderie, such openheartedness, the special province of the marginalized and oppressed? I felt myself filled with longing for the community that Butterfield describes -- the community from which (thought I haven't read far enough to ascertain this) I am assuming she later cut herself off completely.

The book jacket states that Butterfield now lives in North Carolina with her husband and children, and I suppose that this kind of fragmentation of a formerly sprawling community into a nuclear family is not only the (hetero-)norm, but also the gold standard for a Christian family, but it made me wonder nevertheless how well such a narrowing and siphoning off of a once outwardly-directed hospitality would work. After many years of commitment not only to a sexual identity, but also to what sounds like sincere friendship and generosity within a community of the like-minded, what would it feel like to become someone else, someone suddenly rootless? Does the new community of believers who are strangers successfully take the place of the old community of hardened sinners who are beloved friends?

And then there's marriage and home life. If you marry young, when you're still becoming who you are, you and your spouse grow together in mutual recognition and come to share a certain language, a particular lexicon of references. But if you marry later, when you are already essentially who you are -- as I have done, and as Butterfield must have done -- I think there's a certain area in which you must always be a stranger to your spouse, and a certain degree to which you will have to attempt to translate the understanding of the world at which you arrived in the past, as if it were in a foreign language. If Butterfield's former friends are now strangers, she must now be engaged in the work of turning strangers, including those in her own home, into friends. Does this work?

The person that I believe myself essentially to be -- a lover of beauty, an associater of the workaday and the pedestrian with transformative aesthetic experience -- seems distant now from the person who performs the actions of my everyday life. When I think about my old life, I feel a sense of profound dislocation from its suchness, which was mainly concerned with finding meaning and beauty in the mundane. Now, perhaps like Butterfield, my life is primarily taken up with attempts to get through the day, to fulfill my commitments, and to make friends of the strangers with whom I live.

It's tempting to make a little joke here about having no gay friends, which was a bon mot in the opera world back when I was in it, and referred mainly to sopranos who chose unflattering audition- or recital-wear: "She clearly has no gay friends," we would say, because, obviously, if she had any, they would have put paid to these unfortunate sartorial decisions.

But when I think about it, it strikes me that I too have made it a practice to jettison people, places, and things when I felt that they had become (to quote the Catholic writer who once asked me to marry him, and later denounced me as a blasphemer and a bad wife, mother, artist, and person) "detrimental to me spiritually," or maybe when I felt they had just grown a little tiresome. So often in my life I've wanted to change, to be different from what I've been, to become somehow better, kinder, purer, and more sincere; and getting rid of personal effects, or dumping my friends, or going to hang out in new places were symbolic gestures that helped me believe I was inching forward in what I thought was a good direction. I left a thrift-store men's cashmere overcoat hanging over a chicken-wire fence once, because I felt it represented a dark time in my life; I gave away the flowing hippie skirts I'd purchased in the hopes that they would encourage a certain man to love me, since they would signal to him that we wanted the same vaguely-conceived alternative lifestyle; I gave a pair of expensive earrings from Tiffany's to my neighbor because of their painful associations; I left boxes and boxes of books in the basement of my building for the taking. And I placed my first wedding ring on one of the side altars at my old parish church a few years after that marriage went awry, and just walked away.

And I received my conversion. And eventually I got married and had a family and then moved away in space as well as in time from the site of my old self and my former understanding. Am I like a vampire? Am I washed clean? I don't know; but I do know that, when I walk through my new neighborhood at twilight, I sometimes wish for my old life. I sometimes wish for one of my old, far-flung friends to be there, one who would understand perfectly the lexicon of this particular darkening cloud, of that particular warm light illuminating a room in a house and pouring onto the grass outside, of the scent of this particular mock-orange tree, and would say, "Oh yes -- that." I do not know yet if Rosaria Champagne Butterfield wishes for these things too. I have to keep reading.

My Friends

Twenty or so years ago I found a little pile of copies of this slim novel on the remainder table at the legendary and lamented Coliseum Books (just seeing their logo with the doric column, which was imprinted on the bookmarks that the cashiers, almost all of them aging grad-school refugees, would stick in the store's black plastic drawstring bags bearing the same logo, gives me a painful sense of nostalgia. Où sont les neiges d'antan?).  I bought one and read it, and it became, and remains, one of my favorite books of all time. It's the first-person account of the bumbling attempts of World War I veteran Victor Baton to maintain a life of modest freedom without having to work and to find some sort of meaningful human companionship in 1920s Paris. He fails fairly miserably at both, and the book is sweet and funny and suffused with an aching melancholy. Emmanuel Bove, himself a veteran, asserted upon its publication that he had created a new genre, the novel of impoverished solitude. If you can find a copy, you will love it.

I've thought lately about my own friends, and my own solitude, which is not now, as it once was, impoverished, and which endures only for the brief period each day when my big son is at school, my husband at work, and Jude napping, time during which I'm pledged to work on my scholarly book for the English publisher in between the scores of mundane tasks that need to get done and the occasional snuck-in mystery novel. One of the things I miss most about New York, apart from teaching, is my friends there, although the truth is that many of the dearest ones of my youth left New York long before I did, which makes me wonder if nostalgia is really the sense of longing for things misremembered, for the mistaken recollection of things that were really quite differently arranged or never perhaps even existed. It's such a cheerful thing, though, to have friends who are peers -- who are at the same stage of life, or engaged in the same activities, or love the same things that you do. While I had those friendships back in New York, here I have not found them. Perhaps such friends don't live here, or maybe it's just that it's so much easier to make friends there: everyone is out on the street walking around all the time; there's the sense of a flowing stream of humanity, and there are so many self-selective places where like-minded people can go and engage with one another, that one is sure to make some friends. I've always thought that, no matter how obscure your interests or obtuse your personality, there are at least 2,500 people in New York who are just like you.

My friends here in northern Appalachia are unlike me in my own forms of obscurity and obtuseness. While my New York friends were artists and intellectuals, my friends here include a heavily-made up Greek housewife whose American husband abandoned her for what we would call, back where I come from, a puttan; a hairdresser who's taught me everything I know about how to help my autistic son; and a Rwandan refugee I met at church, who works the night shift as an aide in a home for developmentally-disabled adults. There's the doctor's wife who taught me to drive and, when she found out my mother was dying, offered to, and did in fact, drive me and my children three hours to my mother's bedside, since I'm not a confident enough driver to make such a trip and my husband couldn't leave work until the following day. There's also an unemployed Iraq War vet whose biracial son is in my son's first-grade class, and who always treats little Jude with great warmth and respect. I'm the room mother in the classroom, and as such have all the children's addresses, and when I realized that he and his family lived in the worst house I've ever seen in my life (owned by an absentee landlord in New Jersey), and noticed at school pick-up that his children didn't have winter coats, I asked my husband, in lieu of a Christmas gift, to let me get them a Walmart gift card in an amount that would allow them to buy some, along with boots and hats and gloves (I did do this, and the card was passed along to them anonymously through the school social worker).

And I do have a friend here from New York -- A., the young single mother of three children who moved here in the hopes of giving them a better life. While she was able, here, to get a minimum-wage job and off welfare, it appears that improvement may have been short-lived, since her children's father, who joined the family here and stayed home with the children while A. worked, recently abandoned them, forcing her to quit her job because of the lack of child care. I went to see her last night, and found that she'd been inside with her children for two weeks and had no food in the house, having been unable to get them bundled up and down three flights of stairs by herself and marched off to the supermarket a mile away with one stroller in the freezing cold. I went to the store and got diapers, soap, and toilet paper and filled her refrigerator, though she didn't want me to, with food.

All of this makes me wonder whether perhaps we idealize friendship unrealistically in the same way we idealize romantic love. Perhaps friendship is not all Anne of Green Gables and Diana, just as romantic love is not all Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. We are often instructed that love is a choice, an act rather than a feeling; perhaps friendship is too. My friendships here are not based on shared intellectual or artistic pursuits, nor on a shared love of certain music, books, places, or food, nor on a shared parenting style, but upon the idea of mutual aid, even if its mutuality is not readily apparent at this time. I would like that A. not always see herself in the position of receiver of my beneficence, but as my friend. Perhaps A. "does nothing" for me, but I, in turn, "do nothing" for the doctor's wife who has shown me such great generosity. So, as much as I would like to have a "bosom friend" like Diana Barry in Anne of Green Gables, perhaps this place is providing me with the chance to be formed in the school of true friendship. In true friendship, as in true love, loneliness is not forever banished, as much as our longing for its extinction may motivate us to reach out in friendship and love to others. Those whose friends or spouses share their aesthetic values and ways of looking at the world may be lucky, but those whose friends or spouses do not are not necessarily unlucky.  I think that, being away from New York, where everything is always already in place and you only have to advance toward it, I'm now in a place that's stripped bare of everything I formerly wanted and loved and strove towards, but perhaps here I have the opportunity to learn what it means to love in all kinds of ways.

Sister to the Stranger

I'm not the only ex-New Yorker in my new home town.  In my peregrinations on foot and by bus, I have discovered that there is a small contingent of poor single mothers from the outer boroughs of New York City who have migrated here, some two hundred miles away, in the hopes of a better life.

The other day I got a phone call from one of the Sisters of Life. She was working with -- or "walking with," as the Sisters say about their ministry -- a young unwed mother of two toddlers who was very down on her luck. The family was staying in a shelter, but their eligibility was about to expire. The mother, A., had a tenuous connection to my new home town. Would it be a good idea, Sister M. wondered, if A. relocated here?

This is a complicated question, and I tried to give Sister as clear a picture as I could of what things might be like here for A. and her children, but it's really anyone's guess. The poor single mothers who move here are largely welfare-dependent, as is A., and it might seem, on the face of things, as if moving here would be a step up for anyone trying to get by on the very little money offered by welfare; the cost of living here is very low, especially if you're coming from New York.  But that's not necessarily how it plays out. People are able to get by on welfare in New York because everyone has a hustle.  There are all kinds of shadow economies there, and women on welfare work in all kinds of sub-rosa ways; without another income stream, welfare recipients in New York would simply be ground-down destitute -- and some are, but those are mainly the ones who cannot work because of disabilities -- because things are so expensive. But here, there are virtually no jobs. What would happen to a young single mother, barely out of her teens, with no high school diploma, and no car in a part of the country where public transportation is spotty at best? How and where would she find work? How would she get to work? How would she pull herself and her children out of poverty?

I've heard that the administration of social services is quite generous here, which is not the case in New York, where it generally takes four appointments and hours of waiting for each one to qualify even for emergency food stamps. I surmised to Sister M. that A. would probably qualify for a variety of benefits, including a housing allowance.  But this is still a city, in spite of its tiny population, and even though I can find myself in the middle of ramshackle farming country by driving five miles, there are also dangerous neighborhoods closer by. These neighborhoods are where the poor single mothers live.  The social problems of the big city exist here in microcosm, especially when bad relationships can't quite be sundered, and boyfriends follow the single mothers here; there is even a brisk drug trade, with supplies being muled in from New York City.

 I have heard, too, that sixty percent of the county budget goes to social services, and that, because of declining population, this little city has in fact been actively recruiting poor single mothers from New York for relocation here.  I'm not sure this is a good basis for urban planning, especially for a place already so economically devitalized. Our downtown could be beautiful -- apparently it once was -- but now, half the shopfronts are vacant. This is not only because of the proliferation of suburban strip malls, but also because people are afraid to shop downtown; it's where the poor single mothers live and where the sketchy-looking men hang out on the corners with pit bulls. I do go downtown every week to make the rounds of library, independent coffee-roaster that does most of its business through mail-order, and, occasionally, crazy department store with falling-down ceiling tiles where everything is always on sale, but I'm one of the very few. And now that I'm a homeowner, I have other feelings of shadowy discomfort about the whole notion.

But I look around here, and I see such crushing loneliness: the loneliness of the single mothers, the absolute heart-emptiness that leads them to so carelessly disregard their lives and the lives of their children. As a post-abortive woman, as someone who sought so desperately for love in self-destructive ways, I am intimately familiar with this loneliness. It concerns me deeply, and I don't know how to help.

A. chose life. She needs help. She's desperate to leave her old life behind, and she's getting kicked out of the shelter on January 1st. I told Sister M. that she should definitely come up and look around before making a decision, but that may not be possible, since she can't afford the bus fare. I told my husband the whole story, and, after rolling his eyes and mouthing some conservative platitudes, he said we should wire her some money. If she comes for a look-see, I will meet her, and try to take her and her children around and be helpful.

As a final note, could you please add A. to your prayers?

True Friendship

For those wondering about our adoption, we are currently waiting for travel approval from China, which, according to our best estimates, should grant my husband permission to travel to collect Jude in January or early February. Even if there were anyone to leave my older son with -- a grandparent who wasn't disabled, say, or overwhelmed by the care of a disabled spouse, or a local friend who would open her home to him for two weeks and help him to continue his daily routine with a minimum of disruption -- that sort of separation from me would be devastating for him. This is a child who falls apart if I'm gone for a day. When the weather was warmer, I used to try to get out of the house to take a walk by myself every evening, and, as I walked away, I would hear him screaming in his father's arms all the way up the street (he would command me to "walk in a circle," i.e., around the block, and not to cross any streets, reminding me of James James Morrison Morrison Weatherbee George Dupree's advice to his mother to "never go down to the end of the town,/ if you don't go down with me").  But my husband won't be alone in China. A dear, dear friend whom I met through the offices of this blog (and who insists upon remaining anonymous) has offered to meet him there to help him with Jude, and to bring them both back.

As far as that close local friend goes, she doesn't exist. Friendships here -- or perhaps just my own -- seem to be relationships of convenience and utilitarianism. There is not that soulmate thing that I have with my New York friends and with some of my friends met online. Sometimes I think that life in my new locale would be pretty good if there were such a friend nearby, someone who would pop over now and then and have a cup of tea -- or does that only happen in big cities? -- and with whom I could talk about the things that are really important to me. But then I wonder if I'm idealizing friendship the way that some Theology-of-the-Body-types seem to idealize marriage.

So my crushing loneliness is situational. The gift that I have of superlative friendship -- friendships like that with my anonymous China-traveling friend, or with Mrs. C, Jude's godmother -- is precious indeed, even if these friends are not near, just as the sun is still shining on even the bleakest and cloudiest days, and just as God is always near, even when His presence seems devastatingly imperceptible.

Poetry Friday: At A Window

Give me hunger, 

O you gods that sit and give 

The world its orders. 

Give me hunger, pain and want, 

Shut me out with shame and failure

From your doors of gold and fame, 

Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! 

But leave me a little love, 

A voice to speak to me in the day end, 

A hand to touch me in the dark room

Breaking the long loneliness. 

In the dusk of day-shapes 

Blurring the sunset, 

One little wandering, western star 

Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.

Let me go to the window, 

Watch there the day-shapes of dusk 

And wait and know the coming 

Of a little love.

-- Carl Sandburg

Above: Edward Hopper, Room in Brooklyn, 1932.

More Poetry Friday at Great Kid Books.

Quick Takes: Heimweh Edition

1. It's that time of year again, August, the cruelest month, mother of nostalgia.  New Yorkers and former New Yorkers, do you love August there as much as I once did?  Yes, it's hotter than hell (though the hotter-than-hellness has intruded ever earlier into New York summers over the past few years).  But the  sultry August air is redolent with mystery as it shimmers over the  asphalt, and cicadas sing even in the scanty grass that grows up between sidewalk squares, even in the parts of the outer boroughs most characterized by chain link fencing, used car lots, and metal recycling plants.  Every patch of green is like a reminder of lost paradise, reminding me of Tennessee Williams's poem "Heavenly Grass":

My feet took a walk in heavenly grass.
All day while the sky shone clear as glass.
My feet took a walk in heavenly grass,
All night while the lonesome stars rolled past.
Then my feet come down to walk on earth,
And my mother cried when she give me birth.
Now my feet walk far and my feet walk fast,
But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.
But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.

2.  Today I walked past an upstairs window in my house, and caught a glimpse of the brick wall of the house next door.  For a split second I actually thought I was back in my New York apartment, where the brick wall of the building across the air shaft was my constant view.

3.  I thought about New York again when a contractor came to put in a new front door.  He is my across-the-street neighbor's father-in-law.  The guy who paints your apartment in New York is always your super's father-in-law (sometimes his brother-in-law; sometimes both).  These in-laws rarely speak much English; nor did the father-in-law who came today.  The difference was that this father-in-law was Greek, and the New York fathers-in-law are usually Serbian or Dominican.

4. On Sunday I was so overcome with loneliness that I stood at my kitchen sink in Northern Appalachia and bawled like a child.  It's been nearly three years, and I still feel like I'm floating, untethered, in space.  But I tell myself how much better it is for children to be here, and it is, especially for children, like my son, with special needs.  Though I've considered homeschooling him, I know he needs to be with other children, and, though I'm an experienced teacher (albeit of older students), I'm not an occupational, speech, or physical therapist.  He is getting a panoply of services through our local school in the fall, including a one-on-one aide in his mainstream kindergarten classroom.  He wouldn't get that in New York.  No one gets one-on-one aides anymore.  Parents with means generally send their special-needs children to private school, and then sue the city for tuition reimbursement.  The city usually settles, because even private-school tuition in New York City is less expensive than a one-on-one classroom aide.

Today was a beautiful day, and we spread a picnic blanket and had our lunch in the backyard.  Though my son generally prattles on constantly, a rare peace settled over us as we turned our faces to the sun and listened to the breeze rustling the maples and copper beeches.  I let myself relax for about five minutes, which is something I would never do in New York.  I thought where we would be at that time on that day if we had remained there: probably at a playground, which would require me to be on the continual qui-vive.  I have heard that, when your children are of school age, you can make friends with other mothers at pick-up time.  I wonder if that will happen for me.

5. Heimweh, as you will know if you're an aficionado of German romantic poetry and music (or if you read this blog regularly), is often translated as "homesickness," a spiritual yearning for the home to which the sufferer can no longer return.  Nevertheless, the term, which originated in seventeenth-century Switzerland, was coined to describe the actual physical illness, sometimes resulting in death, experienced by Swiss regiments when they were stationed far from the Alps. "To ward off [this debilitating] nostalgia, Swiss soldiers were forbidden to play, sing, or even whistle Alpine tunes," because Alpine melodies "haunted the hearer with 'an image of the past which is at once definite and unattainable.'"

Perhaps Heimweh is, itself, a kind of disability.

6. Baritone William Sharp and pianist Stephen Blier sing and play Paul Bowles's haunting setting of Williams's "Heavenly Grass":

  
Above:  Community garden in East Harlem. 

Five Hundred Miles

This song has been on my mind.  It seems to me such an essentially American song: simple, strophic, tuneful, and mournful, sharing its themes -- of a trip taken far from home, of loneliness, of a kind of exile imposed in equal measures by the exigencies of circumstance, and by those arising from personal shame and pride -- with other great American songs (like "Poor Wayfaring Stranger," for instance, or Woody Guthrie's "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad").  It's supposed to have been written by Hedy West, a singer on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the late 1950s-early 1960s, who based it on songs sung by her Appalachian grandmother, and wrote it from the point of view of a railroader.

 My friend Rodak has recently made me a Peter, Paul, and Mary convert (which didn't take much), and here is their almost-heartbreaking version of the song:  

Here is Joan Baez's winningly ingenuous version.

And perhaps my favorite, by the Australian group The Seekers, which sounds slick in comparison to the simplicity of the others, but whose beauty can't be denied.

Happy Fourth of July to all my American readers.

The Book of Tears and Remembering

It's a Saturday, and I'm surprised to find myself doing what I used to do on Saturdays for years back in New York City, before I was a mother, before I had fully accepted my reversion back to the Catholic faith (and even then for a long time after), before I moved to the Bronx, a move about which a friend of mine said, "I thought people went there willingly only to die." I am sitting at the enormous sixties-era oak desk that I got for fifty bucks at the apartment sale of a divorcing Argentine woman in my old neighborhood, editing text while I listen to Jonathan Schwartz's weekly radio program on WNYC, on which I know he will play at least one song that will make me want to take to my bed in a paroxysm of tears -- probably something sung by Audra McDonald or Nancy LaMott -- and sleep until my heart is healed, a moment which, of course, will never really come.  In those days, however, most of the text I was editing was my own, and I was often longing for love, love either past or ambiguously present, and working against the feeling of shikata ga nai, the sense that everything I was doing was just to fortify my own very small world against the encroachment of despair, so I had better keep working.  And then, as now, I was constantly nagged by the feeling that I had to get up from the desk and go over to my little piano and start practicing already, because I probably had a gig or a university recital requirement right around the corner.

Back then, when I would hit the wall and not be able to read another word, I would push up from my mammoth desk and flee the apartment, letting the steel door slam behind me.  I would go out the side entrance of my pre-war apartment building and walk to Fort Tryon Park.  Now, I slink out the back door of my house and walk through my silent neighborhood, often meeting no one on the street except a young man with Down syndrome, like me an inveterate walker no matter what the weather.  Days like this, I miss everything about New York.  I miss the colors and the smells.  I miss seeing people on the street, even if I didn't want to talk to them, even if I hoped and prayed, as I did on many a day, that I wouldn't run into anyone I knew.

I know there must be a reason for my coming here, besides accompanying my husband to the place where he got a job.  When he got the job offer, he told me that if I wanted to stay in New York, he would turn it down.  But even I, with my more-than-occasionally faulty grasp of the theory of mind, knew that I couldn't hold him back from what was a step up.  Even I had a shred of humility large and sincere enough to swallow hard and accept that we would be leaving everything we knew and many of the things we loved, but that it would be willful and cruel of me to put my foot down and keep it in the city I love.

That was two years ago.  It's been a hard, lonely two years.  There have been many struggles, and few bright spots.  Sometimes it feels as if things are just getting more and more difficult, and as if none of my prayers are being answered in the way I want, not even what seemed like the inocuous-enough one for a friend.  I feel like my life is contracting, getting smaller and narrower, rather than expanding, which is of course what everyone wants to happen in their lives.

It is so hard for my prima-donna self to accept this smallness, this forced humility.  My heart aches when I think of what might be happening in my old neighborhood.  The plane trees are turning yellow and dropping their leaves to the sidewalks.  My friend N., the opera singer who lives on the other side of the building, is writing some software code for a design client.  My great friend F., who was my recital accompanist before he moved to England, is swinging his book bag full of bottles of Italian wine from Astor Wines and Spirits as he trudges with his idiosyncratic gait up the hill from the subway to his apartment, which is around the corner from mine, and from which he can see a sliver of the river and the bridge out of one window.  My beloved downstairs neighbor, Mrs. M., an Austrian refugee from World War II who died last year a month before her ninety-ninth birthday, is walking back from the hair salon, looking natty in a tweed jacket.

But all of this is long ago.  My friends are dispersed, and some are dead.  And if I remember hard enough, I will see M. on the street outside, waving to me over his shoulder as I stand in the window of our apartment, on his way downtown to work a night shift in a building that was destroyed in 9/11.  And then I will remember the day he stopped waving.

And then where will I be? At my desk in Appalachia, my heart aching, asking God that, if He's going to allow me to remember all of this, to let it be for a reason that will be helpful to someone else, even if I never know it.  As Pablo Neruda wrote, "Es tan corto el amor, y tan largo el olvido" -- love is so short, and forgetting is so long.  And now I really do have to go and practice.

Here's some music about tears and remembering on this lonely Saturday.

When I Am Weak

It's been a hard day, and a hard time in general, I suppose.  I am everywhere conscious of my inadequacies and my loneliness.  I know I was supposed to rejoice with my Facebook friend over her status: "I get to snuggle my newborn. I get to chase my 1 yr old. I get to watch my 3 year old practice cart wheels & I get to teach my 4 year old how to read. On top of that I get to be married to a loving, faithful husband. Praise God!"  but instead it made me want to roll my eyes a little (um, that's a euphemism).  Does anyone deserve such happiness?  No.  But so many of our problems, whether we have such happiness or not, stem from the simple fact that we keep forgetting that we don't deserve it.

Today I felt overwhelmed by loneliness and frustration, and I asked God to show me He was thinking of me.  I turned on the radio and heard . . . Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.  Well, I love it, of course; but if God had really been thinking of me, the tune would surely have been something very specific, a duet, say, by Schumann or Brahms, not a symphony by Beethoven.  He could have been thinking of anyone at all to that soundtrack.

I had made a promise to Padre Pio on his feast day today that I would go to the hospital chapel that is in walking distance of my house and sit in silent adoration.  But I kept putting it off and putting it off, until finally I had a window of about ten minutes for it.  That's when I went, and I sat and cried.  God knows I'm angry and frustrated with Him, but I begged Him to give me some guidance through the Bible before my ten minutes with Him was up.  I opened to 2 Corinthians 7-10: "That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong."  Um, no, God, that's not what I had in mind.  And besides, it doesn't describe me at all.  I was thinking something more along the lines of my friend's Facebook status.

Then I came home, and there was a message from a reader of this blog, who said that reading it had helped her through a very dark time.  I was amazed.  And then I thanked God.

Danse Russe

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

-- William Carlos Williams

Saint John of the Playground

It was a beautiful, clear day in Northern Appalachia yesterday, which made me think of that beautiful, clear day nine years earlier when the lives of everyone I know changed forever.  My little son and I walked to the playground, which is in the center of a large park planted with hundreds of tall oaks.  When he saw that no one else was there, my son began to cry.  "I thought there would be children here," he wept. 

I started to cry too, thinking of how I've been unable to give him brothers and sisters, of how lonely he is, and of how lonely I am.  I'd been praying that God would send me a good friend -- a spiritual friend -- but, even if He is so good as to do so, I know it'll never be like the old days, when Retired Waif would pop upstairs for a cup of tea any time at all,  and every other day or so I'd get on the downtown train and go hang out with Really Rosie.  The emptiness of public spaces here, even on a beautiful fall day, is striking, and if other people on my block are home during the week, I wouldn't know it.  It also struck me as poor parenting that, as my son sat on a horsie mounted on a metal spring and cried, I sat on the adjacent elephant mounted on a metal spring and cried with him, mourning the fact that there is so little I can really do to alleviate his own loneliness, or my own, or anyone else's.  Should I distract him with a game, I wondered, or would that just be dishonest, since loneliness is such an unavoidable truth of our human existence?  

And then I thought, Oh God, why can't You just speak to me in a language that I can understand?  Why can't You give me some clear direction about what You want me to do?  Why can't You allow me to feel that the things I profess to believe -- the communion of saints, for instance -- are really true?  For I'm no saint, able to withstand the spiritual darkness that Saint John of the Cross called "nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing."  If not a friend on earth, can't You at least let me know that the saints I pray to are indeed praying with me?  I know I'm asking for my blatant materialism to be confirmed and satisfied, but sometimes I need a symbol, something sensory, just some teeny little phenomenon to let me know that I'm not totally, irredeeemably mistaken about every single thing in my life. 

Soon enough, a little boy toddled up with his mother.  The boy was black and his mother was white, pierced, and heavily tattooed.  She sat on a bench and got on her cell phone, laughing, screaming, cursing, and discussing a friend's seven-year prison sentence for possession of "a pound of weed," while I helped her little son (who told me his name was King) and mine on the monkey bars.  I see many mothers like this in my comings and goings around town -- if I lived in the suburbs, where most mothers of my class and education appear to live, I never would -- and I'm inclined to judge them.  And I wouldn't doubt that they're inclined to judge me -- ethnic, no make-up, sitting on the ground with the kids, wearing a sweater and clogs, with a young son who is not quite like other little boys his age -- as well. 

Eventually, though, King's mother came over, and we got to talking.  Her son's father, it turned out, had recently been deported to Haiti, in spite of the fact that his parents had brought him to America when he was two.  He'd grown up on Long Island, and had been sent back just in time to lose his leg in the horrific earthquake.  Had she seen an immigration lawyer, I asked.  Yes, and even marrying him would not have made him legal, she said.  He was going to try to apply for asylum in Canada.  My heart went out to her, and I told her I'd pray for her.  She soon left, yelling at her little boy every step of the way for having wet his pants, and I walked home with my own son, who was now happy for the chance he'd had to play with another child.

I suppose King and his mother were the sign I'd been railing at heaven for, though I would have preferred a more lovely and gratifying one.  Please, readers, pray for them.