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.

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.

Poetry Friday: He Attempts to Love His Neighbours

My neighbours do not wish to be loved.
They have made it clear that they prefer to
    go peacefully
about their business and want me to do the same.
This ought not to surprise me as it does;
I ought to know by now that most people have a
    hundred things
they would rather do than have me love them.

There is a television, for instance; the truth
    is that almost everybody,
given the choice between being loved and
    watching TV,
would choose the latter. Love interrupts
    dinner,
interferes with mowing the lawn, washing
    the car,
or walking the dog. Love is a telephone
    ringing or a doorbell
waking you moments after you've finally
    succeeded in getting to sleep.

So we must be careful, those of us who were
    born with
the wrong number of fingers or the gift
of loving; we must do our best to behave
like normal members of society and not make
    nuisances
of ourselves; otherwise it could go hard
    with us.
It is better to bite back your tears,
    swallow your laughter,
and learn to fake the mildly self-deprecating
    titter
favored by the bourgeoisie
than to be left entirely alone, as you will be,
if your disconformity embarrasses
your neighbours; I wish I didn't keep forgetting
    that.

-- Alden Nowlan

More Poetry Friday at Gotta Book.

One of Us

This was one of the  morning intercessions listed in Magnificat today:

For those who are rich in the gifts of the heart,

- that they may find blessing by loving those who are unlovable and unloved.

I was struck by the notion of being "rich in the gifts of the heart." What does that mean, exactly? When I was younger, I imagined that I was rich in this way, but I was mistaken about what the gifts of the heart really are. I fancied myself someone who had a limitless capacity to love, especially when it came to the men who interested me, men who tended to be sad, troubled, angry, addicted, oddballs or misfits, or some combination thereof.  Like many other women, I convinced myself that these particular men needed me in particular --  needed my own peculiar "gifts of the heart." I believed I had some sort of solace to offer in my love, something remedial, therapeutic, even redemptive; I even went so far as to believe that my ability to love gave me some sort of power.  I pictured myself wading out into deep waters, saving troubled men with the power of my love, men who would, in gratitude, love me forever in return. Strangely, that never happened.

Nonetheless these men were by no means entirely unlovable, just lonely (though a friend of mine used to caution that lonely guys were lonely for a reason). Still, they were intelligent, and relatively clean. When I ask myself now who is truly unlovable, a parade of images comes rushing into my mind: mentally-ill homeless men and women whom I saw on the subway or the street over many years; barefoot men and women whose feet were toughened and blackened with dirt, or who had improvised plastic grocery bags for shoes; men and women with wild hair and bulging eyes; men and women who stank so badly that they could clear a subway car; men and women I would shrink from. It would take someone rich in the gifts of the heart indeed to love these men and women, these brothers and sisters, these children of the Father. I was not that rich.

Our son Jude, who is coming soon, is a "waiting child." That is, he is in danger of being forgotten and unloved, and he might even be considered unlovable by some, because he has a birth defect.  But there are parents far richer in the gifts of the heart than I could ever be -- parents like self-professed Jesus-lovin' Air Force wife Sonia.

When I read the petitions in Magnificat today, what came to my mind, in addition to homeless men and women, was the cult-classic horror film Freaks. Freaks was made in 1932, before the Hays code began to be strictly enforced in Hollywood, and I'm quite sure it could never get made even today -- perhaps especially not today. It's the story of a circus troupe -- compellingly acted by a cast of actual sideshow performers with a variety of disabilities and deformities -- and its moral is that these "freaks" are more loving, more human, than the attractive, able-bodied strong-man and trapeze artist who are having an affair, and who plot to destroy their disabled colleagues. "One of us" is the motto of the freaks, who accept the trapeze artist as one of their own, in spite of the fact that she is an outsider who knows nothing of their own culture of mutual aid and kindness and who seeks to exploit it (this motto comes again at the end of the film with a chilling twist -- if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it).

"One of Us" is also the name of a song by the little-known American composer Theodore Chanler, the last number in a song cycle called The Children, in which Chanler set poems by, of all people, Leonard Feeney, S.J.  I could not find any Youtube videos of this song, but here is the text:

 

Husbands and wives!

Are we not your little lives?

Fathers and mothers!

Who but we will be your others?

Why do you fear us, freeze us out of your heart?

One of us was Jesus;

He played our part,

In His little manger,

Smiling in His smallness,

To protect us from the danger

Of nothing-at-all-ness.

One of us was God.

Has this not been told abroad,

To some by song,

To some by star?

Then when will we be known

For what we are? 

I have heard this song performed several times by my friend and colleague Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, a gorgeous soprano and a scholar of music and disability studies. Fr. Feeney, who must have written the poem in the 1940s, was most likely referring to contraception, but Stephanie has noted that it also speaks eloquently to the question of who has the right to live. 

Since we can all accept that everyone has the right to live -- even the most disabled, the most deformed, the most likely to suffer, the most likely to cause suffering, the most likely to invoke horror, the most likely to die -- may we all become rich in the gifts of the heart. These gifts, like all of what Amy Welborn calls "gifts 'n talents," must be disciplined, and this is the hard thing. Love should be prodigious rather than prodigal. We must not be reckless in love; we must learn to love in the right way, that is, to love steadily rather than wildly, and with quiet force rather than frenzied ebb-and-flow. If everyone has the right to live, then we must not just accept that right in theory; we must somehow find a way to love everyone, even the unloved and the unlovable. I'm pretty sure that to do so is what differentiates Christians from pagans. 

As Father Zossima says in The Brothers Karamazov:

Brothers, have no fear of men's sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. 

Exile and Genealogy

Jude will soon be here. My husband is traveling to China in March, where he will be met by our great friend Otepoti. Jude will technically become our son, appropriately enough, on the feast day of Saint Joseph, the adoptive father of the Lord.

I have been reading Testimony of Hope by Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận, a collection of the spiritual exercises he preached to the papal household in 2000. Cardinal Văn Thuận, who was imprisoned by the Communists in his native Vietnam for thirteen years, begins his exercises by reflecting on the first chapter of Matthew, which describes the temporal genealogy of Christ. "For Asians," he notes,

and in particular for me as a Vietnamese, the remembrance of ancestors has an immense value. . . I myself know the names of fifteen generations of my ancestors going back as far as 1698 . . . Through our genealogies, we come to realize that we are part of a history greater than we are, and we welcome with greater truth the sense of our own histories.

Jude will know next to nothing about the ancestors who are, to use the Italian word, his genitori, the ones who physically and biologically generated him, or about his family history.  My husband and Otepoti will visit the orphanage to which he was brought after being found by the police, and the place where he was found, in order to be able to salvage some scraps of his unknowable past. But essentially Jude will be a deracinated person, transplanted into our family. I wonder what this will feel like for him as he grows older.

I must confess that, compared with Cardinal Văn Thuận, I know next to nothing about my own genealogy. I know when three out of my four pairs of great-grandparents came to this country (all at roughly the same time, about a hundred years ago). I even knew one of my great-grandmothers very well, because she lived with my family when I was little. But of the others, I know very little, and that's unlikely to change.

A few years ago I had a gig in Rome, and afterward I traveled south to the village of some of my own genitori to meet my distant Italian cousins for the first time. Although it was a marvelous trip, I felt very strongly while visiting that I was nothing like them, that I had nothing in common with them, that I was wholly unmarked by the biological circumstances of having been engendered by the same ancestors. While we shared certain physical characteristics, our lives, our circumstances, and our ways of thinking diverged so much that it was hard to believe we were branches of the same tree.  But the truth is that I had felt myself from a young age to be a deracinated person, too, without much commonality with the culture of my family, and in some ways I had consciously striven to set myself apart from that culture and that family.

In Testimony of Hope, Cardinal Văn Thuận notes that the "book of genealogy of Jesus Christ" is full of unexpected, even bizarre, disruptions of the biological family line.  Abraham chose Isaac as his heir, rather than his first son, Ishmael.  Isaac "wished to bless Esau, his firstborn son, but according to the mysterious plan of God . . . blessed Jacob." Jacob, in his turn, chose neither Reuben, his firstborn, nor Joseph, "the beloved and best of all his sons," but rather Judah, who with his brothers had sold Joseph into slavery.  Likewise, the women Matthew mentions "find themselves in strange situations. Tamar is a sinner, Rahab a prostitute, Ruth a foreigner. The Gospel does not even dare to name the fourth woman; she is simply 'the wife of Uriah'" -- Bathsheba, with whom David committed adultery and whose husband he contrived to have killed.

But, as Văn Thuận asserts, "This list of sinners' names presented by Matthew in the genealogy of Jesus does not scandalize us. Rather, it exalts the mystery of God's mercy."

While not, in the terms of immigration law, a refugee, little Jude will be coming to us from a place of suffering and persecution. What I hope is that our home and our family will not be a place of exile for him from what he might under other circumstances have considered his true home. While in one sense he will be uprooted, deracinated, a person from nowhere, I want him to know the full citizenship that only love can confer. We are all in exile, refugees from the true home, and God in His mercy has adopted all of us; those of us not biologically engendered from the bloodline of Abraham He has most mercifully grafted onto the tree of the royal house of Israel. May we never forget His mercy in having adopted us, and may we all know the full citizenship of love.

Above: Belgian refugee children in England, 1940.

Love is a Teacher, But a Hard One to Obtain

Kyle Cupp has written a moving post about the brief life of his daughter Vivian. When I read it, it seemed to me to illustrate perfectly the quote from The Brothers Karamazov that prefaces this blog.

Love and Evil

Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.
-- Vaclav Havel

A few years ago, this blog sparked the interest of several self-styled Catholic-internet heresy-hunters. In this it was hardly special or unique, but I wasn't prepared for their attacks. My blog didn't seem like the usual target for this type, since I generally don't address controversial issues, or at least not -- or so I'd like to believe -- from a polarizing position. Nonetheless, I got vitriolic hate mail in the comboxes. Women (at least they claimed to be women) who assured me that they themselves could never, ever have fallen into the serious sin that I had, nonetheless informed me that my blog was a destructive example to other post-abortive women, since it wasn't the cheeriest thing out there. Another apparently-female armchair theologian emailed my real-life close friend Dawn Eden to advise her to drop my blog from her own blogroll, because of her (the reader's) interpretation of an emoticon I'd used in a combox response. I was rattled by this, and no less so when a guy I had dated, a fairly prominent Catholic journalist, piled on in private, emailing me to let me know that I had "more in common with the Gadarene horde" than with the Magdalene (oh, I forgot to mention that one comboxer -- if I'm recalling correctly, I think it was the one who contacted Dawn Eden -- accused me of styling myself a "new Magdalene" based on my email address, which was a reference to a novel by that title which I used in my doctoral research . . . you see how Talmudic things were getting), criticizing me for my artistic "unsuccess," and attacking virtually every member of my family. (This fellow had once asked me to marry him, though he may have been drunk at the time. I was so very glad that I had at least had the foresight to say no.)

I have always had very detailed dreams, and those dreams, as dreams invariably are, have often been extremely fantastical. Except in very rare circumstances, I don't believe that dreams are prophetic, or that they're often even in any way a reflection of reality. Occasionally, though, an image from a dream will stay with me throughout the following day, and, when I turn it over and over in my mind, it will start to seem like a comment on something that exists in waking life. I had a dream like this last night. Without going into all the arcane and byzantine details, the main image in this dream showed something that I believe is true in reality: that evil is seductive, that it cloaks itself in the trappings of the beautiful and the good. Hardly a new idea there, but one that we all need to remember, particularly those among us who believe that we could never, ever be in commission of serious sin.

If you yourself have never, ever been in commission of such a sin -- oh, how fortunate you are! How grateful you must be to God for keeping you free from evil and participation in it -- because you must know that it is only His grace that has kept you free from these things, and not your own merits. And remember that, as He told Saint Faustina, the most egregious sinners have the most right to His mercy. And that He did not condemn the woman caught in adultery. And that tax collectors and prostitutes enter the kingdom of heaven before the self-styled righteous.  And that He had a huge party for the repentant one, and that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine virtuous men. And so on.

I have no right to admonish anyone, clearly. But who does? Probably not the proudly orthodox Catholics who troll the internet looking for other believers to mock, blame, and criticize, nor the Catholic "apologists" who skate on the outer edges of preaching righteous hatred against those whom we are commanded to love -- including their co-religionists! -- or those virtuous ones who recoil at the sinner, even where he is repentant, and conveniently forget that, as Christians, we are required to aid in the reform and rehabilitation of even those sinners who are most personally repugnant to us.

I've been thinking about these things since getting a call from Sister M. of the Sisters of Life about a poor young mother in desperate need of help, and also since reading a coincident combox discussion at Vox Nova, in which several of the loudest voices appeared to assert that it's justified to criticize pro-lifers, because pro-lifers tend not to regard post-abortive women (men are never mentioned in these discussions) in quite as blameworthy a light as logic dictates (um, I can assure you that these "anti-pro-lifers" are, in many cases, wrong to assume a lack of blame). The prevailing criticism against the pro-life movement is that many of its adherents also (and illogically) support policies that are punitive to poor single mothers who choose life; in other words, that once the baby is born, tough luck. Sadly, there is some truth to this. A., the young mother for whom Sister M. is trying to enlist help, is one of the most forgotten and despised among us, a poor, young, uneducated single mother of color living in an urban shelter. There is no good excuse for any of us, pro-life or not, to allow women and children to be as ignored and forgotten as she is, and those of us who are pro-life have a responsibility, whatever our political beliefs, to help her and the hundreds of thousands of others like her.

On the other hand, the tortured casuistry with which the Vox Nova commenters strove to make their point is just an exercise in intellectual pride, an excuse for a lack of action, a lack of charity, and a lack of true love. One commenter used Guttmacher Institute statistics to demonstrate that women don't choose abortion out of desperation, but he defined desperation as economic adversity, rather than, more accurately, as the kind of abysmal loneliness, the profound sense of failure, rejection, and unloveableness, out of which so much evil is born into the world, and which is the real reason for most abortions, and also the reason for most unwanted pregnancy in the first place.

Let us remember, as Advent draws to a close, that our enemy is our intellectual better. He knows how to use our tendencies and proclivities to induce us to acts of pettiness, vanity, selfishness, and unkindness, which only serve to snowball into more and more serious sin. He knows how to make what is ugly appear to be beautiful, and how to make what is evil appear to be the highest good, and thereby to tempt even the righteous to it. The only remedy for evil, and for the misery of sin, is true love.

The Madness of Love

Maria Horvath's Poem A Day is one of my absolute favorite blogs.  Maria is a master editor who chooses the poetry and images she publishes with a deep understanding and sensitivity of spirit, and who writes insightful commentary at the introduction of each post. I am mooching the wonderful poem she posted today, by the thirteenth-century mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp; it really took my breath away, and reminded me of Rabindranath Tagore's line "Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger," which has deep personal meaning for me.

The madness of love
Is a blessed fate;
And if we understood this
We would seek no other;
It brings into unity
What was divided,
And this is the truth:
Bitterness it makes sweet,
It makes the stranger a neighbor,
And what was lowly it raises on high. 

Love is Service

I'm not sure how I found this blog, but I'm so glad that I did.

An excerpt from a recent post about, among other things, women's work in the home:

"Last month I listened to a radio program . . .  that made me groan out loud . . . .  about adoption . . . . Who knows what gifts and treasures an adoptee might bring to the world, if they're only given a chance ([the commentator] said).  For proof, just take a look at what Steve Jobs accomplished!  And the same has been used as a rationale against abortion: don't deny the unborn a chance to become the next greatest CEO!

"What rot.  Children, refugees, women, men, the elderly, the disabled, the severely disabled, the unborn, are of extreme value because human life is valuable.  Period.  People are worthy of our service simply because they are people and as such have inestimable dignity.  Furthermore, as Blessed John Paul II said, women are particularly well-placed to humanize society.  He said that we need women because they are women, and by their existence and through their bodies and their experience, they bear witness in a special way to the value of the human person by just being women."

Read the whole thing at English Please. I Don't Speak Hindi.

In Which I Bitch and Moan a Little

I was leafing through an old women's magazine today while waiting for an appointment, and I found an interview with the actress Holly Robinson Peete, in which she contended that parenting a child with autism is like dealing with the problems of a typical child, only magnified by ten. That sounded like a high factor to me; after all, a mother-of-many at the Latin Mass remarked once about my son: "He's as much work as four or five would be!" (which I took as my cue to never go back).

Yes, it is hard work. Some days -- today, for instance -- are nothing but tears, and I feel locked inside of a world that's impossible to describe to anyone.  I'm sure this is compounded by my loneliness and isolation and sense of being in exile here.  Some days I wonder if anyone will ever understand him, or understand me, without making erroneous assumptions and faulty judgments about us.  And my son is high-functioning, intensely verbal, noticeably gifted, and in love with learning, so I probably have no right to my tears, when so many other mothers spend all their time trying to enter and topple the locked fortresses in which their non-verbal children dwell. I don't want to be too grandiose.  In spite of our struggles and pain, my wonderful son with autism is just right for me, and I pray that I'll be just right for him.

Gerard Nadal believes that the burgeoning number of autistic children in our midst is a gift from God, and that God intends to use this "epidemic" to teach us how to truly love. It may be our only chance.

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.

The Tattooed Mothers You Will Have Always With You

My father, whose illiterate grandparents came to America about a hundred years ago (on the run from personal tragedy, as well as from crushing poverty and from the hated Camorra who terrorized Naples and its environs), used to urge his children to look their best at all times, saying that only the rich could afford to dress badly, because, for the rich, a sloppy appearance had no consequences. 

I was thinking about his exhortation the other day while I waited in the pick-up line for my son outside the neighborhood elementary school.  A disturbing -- disturbing to me, anyway -- number of the other mothers sport visible tattoos: not just things like hearts and flowers on their ankles, but things like large pairs of bat's wings across their shoulder girdles.   Now, there are plenty of tattooed mothers of young children in New York City, too (including some in my own family), but most of those mothers self-consciously partake in a sort of countercultural-outsider ethos, and tend to be employed in various creative professions, in which their appearance doesn't matter as much as it would if they were working for the man; their life goals, they presume, will be unaffected by the in-some-ways-shocking state of their skin, because they have put themselves outside the mainstream.  But there are two ways to be outside the mainstream.  The self-conscious, creative-class, New York City tattooed moms generally possess a level of education, or of family money, or, for want of a better term, of cultural capital, that ensures that they will not suffer major consequences from what would seem to be a willing self-exile from the workaday world enabled by symbolically marking their flesh. The tattooed moms in my community, on the other hand, do not have this luxury, and their marked skin sets another bar between them and meaningful employment.  So I wonder: is their tattoing truly subversive -- subversive in a way that creative-class tattooing is really not -- because it's a gesture of acknowledgement that, in being poor, they are already irrevocably outside the mainstream? Is it a self-marking of despair?

For the record, I have no tattoos, and I find them unappealing on men as well as women, which I suppose makes me a sort of oddity in my cohort (even up-and-coming opera singers I knew back in New York had tattoos).  And I wonder how the subculture of tattooing and body modification made its way from the edges of Bohemia in large urban areas to half-forgotten, post-industrial backwaters like the place I live now, a place that suffers from the worrisome combination of entrenched and widespread poverty and a dearth of meaningful and well-paid jobs, and how its meaning changed en route.  Sometimes I want to say to the other mothers in the pick-up line, "Why did you deface yourself like this? What does this mean to you, and what does it mean, socially, here, in this place?"  It seems to me that the poor and disenfranchised cannot afford to get tattoos, and I don't just mean that the hundreds of dollars each tattoo costs could be better spent.  I mean that there are certain consequences that come with putting yourself outside the mainstream, and that those consequences are particularly harsh if you don't have a cushion of money or education to soften them.

The public library in my new town -- there is only one -- is my absolute favorite place here. I get a rush when I walk through the front doors.  You could fit four of my branch libraries back in the Bronx into the Children's Room alone.  It is clean and beautiful, and they let me take out all kinds of books on interlibrary loan, and they call me on the phone to let me know when my ILL loans have come in.  I take the bus there once a week, and, as I descend the bus steps, I feel the eyes of those waiting to board linger upon me, because people who look like me don't ride the bus here.  By people who look like me, I mean people who aren't overweight and in their pajamas though there is also a certain ethnic sameness to the people here which I don't share, a sameness which I suppose comes from centuries of intermarriage among the Europeans who first settled in these hills.  People who ride the bus are poor, very poor indeed, too poor for even a few-hundred-dollars' beater car. Another non-tattooed mother in the pick-up line, who teaches remedial reading at the community college, told me that when her students have spent their financial aid grants on textbooks, they're generally strapped for ways to buy food and bus passes for the rest of the semester.  In the end, it's very expensive to be poor.

I walk from the bus stop to the library past small, decrepit apartment buildings with "No Loitering" signs affixed to the front doors, past empty storefronts, past a boarded-up old tavern whose walls are choked with climbing weeds.  One room of my massive library has been turned into a FEMA disaster assistance site, as have several churches downtown, including the parish where we attend Mass.  As I collected my books at the checkout desk the other day, I overheard one of the front-desk workers on a personal phone call.  She was broke, she was telling her friend on the phone, not sure when a child-support check was going to come, and lacking even in milk and bread.  When I left, I passed a family with young children waiting on the church steps across the street for the FEMA center to open.  They all waited patiently, with suitcases piled on the sidewalk around them. 

All of this makes me wonder, and wonder again, about the calling I've always strongly felt:  to show other people, to teach other people, to guide other people to the sublime beauty of the western classical music tradition. Pope John Paul II wrote in Redemptor Hominis about the essential humanity of man's natural "nostalgia for the beautiful," and noted that this "creative restlessness" is part of our longing for God.  But what good is it to tell my tattooed cohort about how uplifting,  how deepening, how connecting, how humanizing, how healing is the stuff with which I usually deal? To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht in Threepenny Opera, "First food, then aesthetics."

And, too, all of this brings me face-to-face with my own hard lack of charity.  I do not love these poor; I fear them. They seem so shaky, so unstable, to me; they are so different from me. Though surely not all of these poor are addicts, they remind me of the junkies I used to see around New York, who you could tell were junkies because they were rail-thin, were young but looked old, walked really fast and crookedly, and, when they had fixed, moved in strange, jerky ways, as if they were marionettes.  I found them terrifying and repellent even as an adult.

Last week, Mark Gordon wrote a hard-hitting and moving piece for Vox Nova about helping the poor. "[Am] I responsible for helping poor people that I know personally?" he asks himself, then answers:

Yes. Am I personally responsible for helping the poor in my community? Yes. Am I responsible for working toward a just social and political order in which poverty itself is eventually eradicated? Yes. Am I responsible for helping the poor in foreign lands? Yes. The poor who are in this country illegally? Yes. The poor with substance abuse problems or criminal backgrounds? Yes. The poor who don’t appreciate my help? Yes. The poor who disgust me in their helplessness? Yes. All the poor? Yes.

OK, I thought, I'm good with a lot of this.  We continue to support N., who's desperately poor and illegal (though I admit to grumbling as I stand at the sink and wash dishes because we just sent the money that was supposed to have gone to a new dishwasher to her when she was in danger of being evicted). I have no problem helping the illegal poor; the fact is, I have a lot more in common with them than I do with the tattooed moms in my community.  The reason the illegal poor are here is that they're strivers, adventurers, risk-takers, and extremely brave; they work their asses off; and most of them share my religion.  The poor in my community, on the other hand, frighten me. They are not like me. They reject the things I hold dear.

Nonetheless, as Sister Mary Martha wrote in response to a reader who voiced his objections to Appalachian culture more strongly than I have (yes, I know she's not a real nun, but that doesn't make her wrong):

Jesus never had a job and just lived off of other people who put Him up in their houses and fed Him AND all his friends. He actually told His friends to STOP WORKING and hang out with Him. His final words to them was a commandment to never even try to earn money and have any money or nice clothes or even shoes. Lazy slobs. No wonder they were all killed.

Jesus loved sinners. Remember? We never have to condone sin to love a sinner. God does it every single minute. It makes me extremely sad to think that we can not let go of calling people some kind of name and that we insist it is just fine and dandy to do so.

Can you imagine if Father stood in the pulpit said "white trash" and meant it? Why is it not okay for Father to say that, but okay for you?

Maybe it's time to bring back the ruler.

Food writer Mark Bittman (whose recipes I love, but who, as a professional chef friend of mine memorably put it, is prone to a kind of "soapboxing tinged with a**hole") wrote a recent post displaying a similar sort of arrogance and lack of understanding when it comes to the food choices of the poor (yes, similar to my own arrogance and lack of understanding about the poor in my community).  Many people in the combox put him straight, and, as one writer put it in a letter to the Times:

Mark Bittman would persuade poor families that nutritious food prepared at home can be cheaper than the fare available at fast-food outlets. He points out that if you can drive to McDonald’s, you can drive to Safeway, but doesn’t mention other realities.

Shopping after work means crowded stores and long wait times, which are likely to interfere with child-care arrangements. Then the meal must be prepared, which with Mr. Bittman’s recipes entails chopping, dicing, shredding, sautéing and cooking. After the meal, the preparer must clean up or persuade someone else to do it.

A trip to McDonald’s allows a family to spend time together having their food brought to them, enjoying the meal and walking away, in less time than is needed for the Safeway option. 

A big selection of healthy foods isn’t available at fast-food prices. Until it is, Mr. Bittman shouldn’t lecture people who are making not-unintelligent tradeoffs.

In the end, there is an appalling lack of love among some of us who are well-fed, well-educated, and even champions of beauty -- of love, that is, for the unbeautiful.  I suffer from this lack, and I pray that God will show me a way to truly love those I would shun.  But I fear this love, too, and its consequences.

Rupture

As we wait and wait to adopt little Jude (our application is currently under review by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and I got a letter from them yesterday which said that our social worker at Catholic Charites had forgotten to sign our home study, and could I please send another, signed copy), I have been thinking a lot about what it might be like for him to leave behind everything that he's ever known to join our family.  I have been considering the grief this rupture will engender in him, and how he won't be able to explain that grief to us in words.  And I think about all the other children who he will leave behind; do they grieve, too, for their companions of the orphanage?  And do the orphanage workers who care for the little ones grieve to see them go?

I think about the unimaginable Middle Passage, and the millions of Africans who perished on the journey to new, unsought-for lives as slaves in the Americas, lives that were foisted on them by force.  Does the sense of that sundering, that rupture, live on in subsequent generations?  Is there a shadowy cultural memory of a trauma shared by millions that resonates in the blood and the bones, that cannot be shaken or denied?

In a small and very different way, the break with the past, the rupture from all that is known and loved (even if to love it was a compromised kind of love), is an ethos familiar to me from long experience.  Does Jude love his friends, his caretakers, his orphanage?  They are family and homeland to him.  Will he have a better life in America with a family who will love him (and perhaps, in some small, particular way, with a mother who knows a little about rupture and grief), with people who can give him opportunities to form secure attachments and to learn how to trust?  Objectively speaking, yes, of course.  As for me, I have a better life now than I had when I was bereft, lonely, and overwhelmed by sin, but this doesn't mean that I don't sometimes grieve the provisional home, family, and friends I have left behind -- a leave-taking that is inseparable from my conversion.

My father often notes that life is loss, and, well, it is.  Real love is inextricably bound up with the painful losses and diminishments of every day.  I hope, in spite of all that little Jude will lose in joining our family, that, like me (and even if, like me, he is unable to forget), he will gain much more.

"Brothers, love is a teacher, but a hard one to obtain . . ."

Gerard Nadal, bioethicist and father of an autistic son, asks:

[Why] so many autistic children?

I believe that in His infinite Love and Mercy God is permitting this . . .  as a means of rescuing us from ourselves. 

. . . . Autistic children are Love’s answer to our designer approach for offspring, especially as there are no clear genetic markers or physical attributes to pick up in pre-natal testing. We are being given one last chance as a civilization to get it right, to learn the meaning of sacrificial love through a condition that strikes at the very heart of social communication, to walk ourselves back from the precipice of the abyss of narcissistic annihilation. We are being given the chance to learn the true meaning of human dignity and marital love, a love that creates new life and is large enough to swallow any imperfection that comes with that new life.

Such capacity results from . . .  having allowed ourselves to be the recipients of God the Father’s healing love. If we haven’t, we must begin there . . . . This may be our last chance.

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.

A Holy Family

Sally has a post up for Saint Joseph's Day that blew me away.  It's always good to be reminded that broken vessels can, and do, carry and pour forth a surprising abundance of grace.

Shrove Tuesday: Good Morning, Heartache

I have been one acquainted with the night.  -- Robert Frost

Hello darkness, my old friend.  -- Paul Simon

Today, as I learned from Elena Maria Vidal, is the Feast of the Holy Face of Jesus. instituted in 1958 by Pope Pius XII.  One of the Mass readings for this feast is Isaiah 53:3, the prophecy of Christ as the Suffering Servant.  Reading it today, I was struck by the words:

He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

These words are deeply familiar to me not only as a Christian, but also as a mezzo-soprano, and yet I felt today as if I were reading them for the first time.

Like Charlotte Hellekant's interpretation above of the Handel aria, Isaiah's description of Christ as "acquainted with grief" is delicate and restrained, and at the same time arresting and almost startling.  It occurred to me, reading the familiar text today, that Isaiah is making obvious reference not only to Christ's suffering in the Passion, but to something else beside -- to a profound, protracted intimacy with grief, with loneliness, with humiliation, with what Richard Wilbur calls "the punctual rape of every blessèd day."  Suffering -- the long, broad, dull, leaden waves of it that break on our hearts, eroding them, in the midst of the rush of life -- was His familiar.  Perhaps He even regarded His grief tenderly, with a kind of resigned affection, in the way that Billie Holiday conveys so touchingly in the song "Good Morning, Heartache."


Perhaps Our Lord's acquaintance with grief was more than that; was, in fact, more of a friendship with grief.  Not only was He despised and rejected, after all; He loved those who were despised and rejected too, sought them out like a suitor would.  Why would He then seek to avoid the grief of daily life, His grief infinitely compounded by the long griefs of those He loved and still continues to love?

The Only Word for Love is Everybody's Name

Fathers and teachers, I ponder, "What is hell?" I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.  (Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov)

It's hard to argue against the position of Dosoevsky's saintly Father Zosima, and yet this raises the question: what does it mean, then, to be able to love?

I've noticed that the orthodox Catholic circles I began traveling in since my reversion in 2002 provide, among other things, a harbor for people who seem not to believe that they are required to fulfill the great commandment to love one another, and much less that to love their enemies.  To be clear, I've never heard anyone say that he thinks he is exempt from this command, but, just as the progressive church waters down some of the more difficult teachings of Christ, so does the orthodox one -- or at least, in my experience, so do many of its professed adherents -- water down this one, which is no less difficult, and perhaps infinitely more so.  For example, during the brief period when I dated a moderately-well-known Catholic journalist, I suggested that he pray for abortionists and for those who promote abortion.  He replied, with disarming honestly, that the thought had never occurred to him.

Indeed, I have often heard orthodox Catholics, when speaking of their responsibilities vis-à-vis other people (not forgetting, of course, that other famous definition of hell -- that it is, itself, other people) use the word "charity" in place of the more powerful, intimate "love."  But even in the Douay-Rheims Bible, favorite translation of the orthodox Catholic, Our Lord's commandment is "Love one another."

But my point is not to scold; I'll leave that to others who have far more right to it than I do.  My point is to ask the question again:  what does it mean to be able to love?  And how does one do it?

I've been reading some of the unpublished writings of English mystic Caryll Houselander, and in one diary from the 1930s, she writes:

Nothing helps me more to love other people than doing penance for them.  If it is an individual for whom I have any bitterness it is a sure cure, but since I took to praying and offering penance daily for all sinners I have found my love of people growing in proportion . . . It seems that in proportion to the love we give to God, He gives us love for each other.

Houselander was a natural-born misanthrope, and yet she strove to love other people; she also noted that Christ himself "sought [the] love" of others.

I used to think I knew all about love.  I now know that I know approximately less than nothing about it.  But there is a beautiful line in a beautiful song by Dar Williams, "It Happens Every Day":  "the only word for love is everybody's name."  How do we put that into practice, I wonder?

You can here the song performed live here, starting at 2:42.

Be Mine

I love this poem, perhaps because I know so well the delicate balance between misanthropy and the kind of bewildering love for humanity that forces you to your knees .  I also love the punning title, which is also the last line of the poem.  Happy new year to everyone.

I love mankind most
when no one's around.
On New Year's Day for instance,
when everything's closed
and I'm driving home on the highway alone
for hours in the narrating rain,
with no exact change,
the collector's booth glowing ahead
in the tumbling dark
like a little lit temple
with an angel inside and a radio
which as I open my window,
a little embarrassed by
my need for change
(until the silence says
it needs no explanation),
is suddenly playing a music more lovely
than any I've ever heard.
And the hand—
so open, so hopeful,
that I feel an urge to kiss it—
lowers the little life-boat of itself
and takes the moist and crumpled prayer
of my dollar bill from me.
Then the tap, tap,
tinkling spill of the roll of coins
broken against the register drawer,
and the hand returning two coins, and a voice
sweeter than the radio's music,
saying, "Have a good one, man."
I would answer that voice if I could—
which of course I can't—
that I've loved it ever since it was born
and probably longer than that.
Though "You too,"
is all I can manage,
I say it with great emotion
in a voice that doesn't sound like me,
though it must be
mine.

-- Paul Hostovsky, from Bending the Notes. © Main Street Ray Publishing company, 2008. 

H/T:  The Writer's Almanac

Above:  "Two Big Black Hearts" (1985) by Jim Dine (DeCordova Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts) 

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.