Thickening the Culture

I know. I haven't posted here in ages. I'm really too busy to keep up this blog right now. Homeschooling has been hugely time-consuming, and I have to get the first draft of my book to the publisher within the next very few months. Besides, though my thoughts are often scintillating to me, I doubt that they would be to you. And no one has time to read blogs anymore, right? Where we once all connected, we've gravitated to Facebook instead, which takes so much less thought and deliberation.

I am guilty of of this too. I read blogs very rarely these days, even those written by my friends. I just don't have the time. I get up at five a.m. to try to do a little bit of research and reading before the day begins, and, once it does, I'm rarely sitting down, unless it's to drive somewhere. (Which means, come to think of it, that I'm actually sitting down quite a lot, since I seem to have become some sort of simulacrum of a suburban housewife, constantly driving to places that neither promise nor supply either satisfaction or rest.)

But I did read Melanie's thought-provoking post the other day, and have been turning it over in my mind. Melanie notes the movement among Catholic mothers -- or at least those who have an online presence -- to revive lost traditions. In the end, she finds herself mourning the loss of a "thick" Catholic culture (a term I love), one that draws American Catholics together in shared celebration, fellowship, and purpose:

We create ersatz holidays that have passing reference to the farmer’s world, we yearn to be connected to the seasons in a liturgical way, but most of us are grasping at straws, we have no idea really what we’re yearning for . . . . We have in our day no harvest feasts or mystery plays, no Michaelmas goose to share with out neighbors. But let us… Let us what? Let us be received? Certainly we are received at Mass, but is that enough? Time and time again I hear that it isn’t. It’s not enough to live the faith on Sundays, it must permeate our lives. And we try, we Catholic mommy bloggers. We try to revive an authentic Catholic culture in our domestic churches. But it seems to me we must do more. We must somehow make these traditions live outside the four walls of our homes, we must make our parishes as well as our homes the seats of authentic Catholic culture 

This is a real cri-de-coeur, to which I unite my own. How does one do this? How do we re-create what has been lost? Melanie suggests that we go outside of our homes, that we make common cause with other people in real life. But will we?

I started this blog in 2007, and the very next year we moved from New York City, where I imagined I'd always live, to northern Appalachia. The difference between the two places, in social customs and much else, is hard to overstate. When you live in a walking-around city, you make friends. When you're shut up in the private realm of your own automobile, you don't.

I assumed that, in a new place, I'd always make friends at church.  But I didn't. There is a vibrant community of orthodox Catholic mothers here, but they did not invite me in; I was so different that i might as well have moved here from Mars. When I received my doctorate and posted a picture of myself in my cap and gown on Facebook (at Lincoln Center, no less,  where my university holds Commencement), one of the mothers in this group said to me, "I didn't know you were still in school," evidently a shocking and bad thing for someone of my station. As a matter of fact, it was only this fall, six years into our sojourn here, that I was invited to one of this mothers' group's weekly meetings, and it was only because someone had gotten wind that I was homeschooling; I would never have been invited in if I had kept my older son in public school, evidently (I declined -- not because I'm too proud, but because it seemed futile).

(This is an actual real-life picture of me, a first for this blog. Did you know that when you get an advanced degree in music, your hood is pink, and your gown has pink trim?)

I'm convinced, sadly, that syncretizing a newly-vibrant Catholic culture out of recipes and crafts cobbled together from Pinterest and other mothers' blogs is destined to fail, or at least to fail to "thicken," and that the main reason for this is that we are all doing it in our own homes with our own children, and then posting about it on the internet. In short, we are not going out to meet each other -- not even in church, much less in the street. And if we don't meet each other, we can't invite each other over. We are not breaking down barriers; we are, in fact, raising them a little higher with our lovely photos of what we've accomplished and you can too! But comboxes do not make a community, and those crafts, no matter how lovely, are not a substitute for traditions and lore passed down from generation to generation.

I was particularly touched by Melanie's mention of making challah from a recipe of her husband's great-grandmother. I have often felt wistful about Jewish culture, which, in some ways, is the original "thick" culture. Jews -- at least religiously observant Jews -- have a shared sense of purpose and fellowship. They have jokes. They have excellent liturgical music. I used to sing the High Holy Days services in an eight-voice choir at a well-heeled synagogue near the U.N., attended by many diplomats, and the music we sang truly imparted to me, as a performer, a powerful sense of God's wonder and awe. That hasn't ever exactly happened to me at church. At synagogue, the elders fuss over the youngsters, and help guide them in the faith and inculcate in them a shared sense of cultural and spiritual endeavor. Some oof the ultra-Orthodox, like the Chabad Lubavitchers, have what can only be called a cult of joy. I had a Lubavitcher student back in New York who used to play at all the big Hasidic weddings in Brooklyn -- he was a jazz drummer -- and he often invited me to attend them. I didn't feel comfortable crashing, especially as an outsider, but I longed to witness the ecstatic music and dancing I had heard about. Joy! And what do we have? Well, if it's joy, I haven't tasted it, at least not in our culture or our so-called fellowship, in our music, in our gatherings, or in the ways that we deal with one another at Mass or outside of it. The Catholics here are cold, cold, cold.

I do not know if it's the same elsewhere. I've heard that midwestern Catholic churches are legendary for their outreach and hospitality; certainly the Protestants have that all over us, too. A few years ago there were some faint stirrings of a new Catholic agrarian-localist movement, inspired by the writings of people like Eric Brende and the briefly-Catholic Rod Dreher; but I don't know anyone who attempted such a lifestyle or whether it worked out for them.

I think in the end one has to assess the place where one finds oneself, and try to push into it, to knead it a little -- indeed, to thicken it with one's own flesh-and-blood actions. How do we do this? I don't know, but I suppose each in her own way, utilizing her own gifts. I think we have got to get out from behind our screens and do something in our communities, however small. I think of this often in my car as I drive around my down-at-heels new city (though it's not so new now), looking out at the depressed and impoverished pedestrians walking for necessity, not for joy, against the bleak landscape. Sometimes, at those moments, I find myself chanting aloud: "Make the desert bloom! Make the desert bloom!" I'm quite sure we are called to do this, though I'm not quite sure how.

Music and Memory, Back to School Edition: Artificial Pearls

The music department at the community college where I teach moved to a new building over the summer. This is a good thing, even an excellent thing, since, up until now, the music department has been housed in a building that was apparently designed as a bomb shelter. All the classrooms in the old building were in the basement, and all their carpets were mildewed; I stopped reminding my students not to bring drinks to class, because the odor of stale spilled coffee was a marked improvement over what it could have been. The large number of linoleum tiles missing from the ceiling gave it the appearance of a menacingly-grinning, upside-down clown-smile, and the choir couldn't rehearse in the building, because so many of its members were stricken with mold-induced asthma attacks during practice.

Last week, before the semester began, we music-department adjuncts (who make up, incidentally, around eighty percent of the music faculty) converged upon the new building to clean it up and make it ready. It was a beautiful late-summer day, and my heart did strange things when I stepped outside the cinder-block building to make a phone call. The Soviet-bunker-style campus is nestled in a depression in the achingly-green northern foothills of the Appalachian mountains, hills that look so gentle, so kindly somehow. I thought about Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar," about how the jar on the hill in Tennessee "made the slovenly wilderness/Surround that hill," and how, here, the anecdote was turned upside down: how here the hills surround the makeshift slovenliness of the college, but the artifice of man does not add order to or impose mastery upon those surrounding hills. I thought, too, of Emerson noting that

The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land
With little men.

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I've been asked to give a paper at a conference being held in honor of my dissertation advisor, an important musicologist now retired after many years of teaching, an Italian-American woman from Brooklyn with whom I became, during the time we worked together, somewhat uncomfortably enmeshed in a sort of artificial mother-daughter relationship. She remarked to a friend at my wedding that she hoped I wasn't going to take my husband's name, because I had worked so hard to build a scholarly reputation under my own (Italian) name. When my dissertation voice recital was approaching, she, apparently worried over what I would wear, confronted me awkwardly in the hallway of the university, where she was a full professor and I an adjunct, and anxiously enquired how I was planning to do my hair. When my first son was born, she said something I wasn't sure how to interpret at the time about how some people thought you should change your life for your children, and others thought you should fit your children into the life you already had; to this day, I don't know which camp she, a mother as well as a scholar, fell into. I still worry that I'm disappointing her with my hair, my life, and my scholarship, and I still don't know what my paper in her honor is going to be about. But I felt like hanging my head when I saw the website for the conference, and saw my name (the version of it that's trotted out for performance and publication purposes, Italian maiden name first, followed by married name) and my affiliation (northern-Appalachian-county community college) next to the names of well-known musicologists who teach at Case Western, The City University of New York Graduate Center, Harvard, and Yale. I recalled how I wanted to be something great, to do something important, and yet, here I am.

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Someone once said that teaching is casting artificial pearls before real swine, which, to the extent that it's true, does not make the thrower of pearls any less swinish than his intended audience. How am I supposed to do this job -- to teach music to my students at northern-Appalachian-county community college? I want to do it, I burn to do it, because, as William Carlos Williams wrote (about poetry, though the same can be said about music):

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die every day
for lack
of what is found there.

I turned on the radio the other day while driving through my ramshackle post-industrial town, and I heard the adagio movement of a piece I know well, Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 27 in B-flat Major. I know it well because, when I was seven or eight years old, my mother had an LP of it that I would play over and over again. We had bought it while out grocery shopping; I had seen a display near the exit of LPs on sale for something like forty-nine cents, and this one had an image on the cover of one of Marc Chagall's designs for The Magic Flute -- Papageno, the birdcatcher -- though I didn't know this at the time. I begged my mother to get it. While driving the other day, I found that, though I hadn't heard the piece for years, I could sing every note of the piano solo and the melodic orchestral line. I noticed that the performance on the radio was actually played on the fortepiano, a forerunner of the modern piano, and that, delightfully, the soloist interpolated a fragment of Mozart's song "Komm, lieber Mai" into the cadenza in the coda of the last movement.

While singing along to the radio, I saw a shabby-looking, morbidly obese man with dirty legs riding in a self-propelled wheelchair in the oncoming lane. I thought about my mother's LP. Where would I be, who would I be, if my mother had not had it? Classical music is not salvific by any means (I remind myself), but, for me, it's always been anodyne, palliative, hallucinogen, and opiate all in one. It dulls pain, it comforts, it heals, it confers vision. Without it, I would be a miserable worm of a person, even more than I am now. And I wonder if this is true for everyone: if everyone, had he had access to my mother's record collection, would be a better person.

I thought about my wonderful voice teacher and mentor, A.B., who grew up, as it happens, in rural Tennessee. His parents were mountain people; his father was a self-taught singer who worked for a biscuit-flour company. The flour company would send out a string band to drive around the rural counties in a flatbed truck, from which they would play music, and then give a baking demonstration with a portable oven. A.B. told me about how, as a child, he was given a recording of the Nutcracker on 78s, and he listened to it until the records, as he put it, literally dissolved. He later found a recording of La Bohème at the public library, and played it, too, into the ground, memorizing every word and note of Rodolfo's Act I aria, but -- as he found when he got to conservatory -- memorizing it wrong, because the record had a skip in it that obliterated part of one measure.

Classical music, discovered as a child, taught me how to live, how to breathe. It did the same for A.B. I wonder if it might do the same one day for one of my students. I think of a recurring dream I've had for years, in which I am walking certain streets in New York that I know as well as I know the Mozart Piano Concert no. 27, but finding them slightly and ineffably altered, and looking for something as I walk -- something that, while I can't quite remember what it is, I know to be the key to everything. There's a beautiful children's book by Barbara Helen Berger called Grandfather Twilight, in which the twilight is personified as an old man who each night takes a pearl from an endless strand and walks with it to the sea, while the pearl grows larger and larger, eventually becoming the moon. I hope that the artificial pearls I offer to my students this semester -- not out of perversity, but because they're all I've got -- might be able to change into something real and beautiful for them, too.

Mother vs. Happiness

Where does it start, our downhill slide -- a slide into serious sin for the most damaged; for the rest. at best, into lukewarmth and mediocrity?

I suppose it begins with our desire to be happy, which is quickly corrupted by our belief that we deserve to be happy. I've known few people who don't secretly harbor this belief, including the very best of men. Our self-regard, our amour-propre, is so deep and intractable that even those of us who strive for holiness find it hard to escape the notion that this holiness, once attained, will curry favor with God and loosen up all kinds of neat stuff for us. It's hard to escape the thinking that if f I, say, pray and work for a sincere conversion, or go to daily Mass, or give lots of money to the poor, or pray for the people that I hate, then God, noticing with approval, will send me a really nice guy, or put in a word with my boss about a raise, or at least make my life just a little less painful and difficult. 

This belief is reinforced by a popular narrative in Catholic writing, which features the protagonist's turning or returning to God, after which everything falls neatly into place. This narrative is (no doubt unintentionally) deceptive, because it implies cause and effect, actions and consequences. It doesn't acknowledge the untold numbers of people who turn or return to God -- who turn or return to Him daily, in fact -- and who strive to orient their lives and wills completely in the direction of His own, but who nevertheless suffer, who continue to suffer, and whose sufferings persist and even get worse. 

We all want the shiny stuff, and to shore up our uncertain futures with the goods which, in a logical and just world, might be purchased by our holiness. But I doubt it really works that way, and am more inclined to believe that, at best, we have our brief moments of triumph and delight, before we're kicked right back down to the curb again, which is, essentially, where we belong: for, as Hamlet said, "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" 

And why should it be otherwise? I used to know a sedevacantist mother of many children, whom I once overheard telling one of them about Jesus cursing the fig tree. She finished by explaining that the Lord would condemn those who squandered their gifts, adding (smugly, as it seemed to me), "So I had ten fruits." Nevertheless, I think we should probably ponder, and should perhaps shudder, before we assume that anything we've done is actually good, since we're no more than unprofitable servants doing our duty.

When I was a child and later a teen, I would often propose certain activities or situations to my mother, explaining that doing or having something, or becoming something, or going somewhere in particular, would make me happy. I bitterly resented her standard response, which was the sobering "You're not here to be happy. You're here to make the world a better place." But I know now that she was right. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's the only reason we're actually here.

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his poem "God's Grandeur":

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.

I believe that, when Hopkins says that the world is "charged" with God's grandeur, he means two things: that God's grandeur is immanent in all things, that the created world is imbued and shot through with it; but, also, that it is the duty of creatures to bear, to maintain, and to reveal that grandeur: that revealing it is, in fact, our charge. It is our duty, as unprofitable servants, as my mother would say, to make the world a better place.

A friend of mine who follows an eastern religion told me his guru compared enlightenment to one's mother being home all the time. I loved that analogy, but it made me wonder whether enlightenment is or is not synonymous with happiness. Is having mother home happiness? Is mother happiness? One would think so; but as the German Romantic poet Klaus Groth put it in his poem "Heimweh II" -- Heimweh meaning, essentially, grief over the lost home, which is not just a house, but is a whole universe: 

O wüsst ich doch den Weg zurück,
Den lieben Weg zum Kinderland!
O warum sucht' ich nach dem Glück
Und liess der Mutter Hand?

In translation:

Oh, if I only knew the way back,
the dear way back to childhood's land!
Oh why did I seek happiness
and let go of my mother's hand?

That image of letting go of mother's hand to seek happiness is so wrenchingly poignant, and it seems not only to suggest that happiness is not a worthy goal, but also to assert that happiness is not mother. Mother is something else, something different -- something more than happiness. In fact, in my own mother's formula, mother, while not happiness, makes the world a better place.

I don't believe that being a mother makes one happy, nor should it. I don't even believe that mother, or children, or anyone else deserves to be happy. But the ethos of having mother -- of having mother home all the time -- is better, somehow, than happiness, is beyond happiness, and I suppose it's what heaven must be like.

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Opera Singers

I've been scarce here lately for more than the usual reasons. In fact, I spent April doing something I never thought I'd do again in this life: rehearsing and performing a small principal role in a Mozart opera with a reputable regional opera company. To make a long story short, the music director of company in question, which is about seventy-five miles from where I live, called me when the singer who was originally cast was offered a more career-making sort of role with a different company, creating a scheduling conflict. I didn't know this conductor personally, but another conductor had recommended me. I demurred at first, because it just seemed crazy. I'm not in the game anymore, and it really wasn't the kind of role I would sing if I were; it's usually cast with an up-and-coming singer, whereas I am more of a down-and-outing one. I explained to the conductor that I don't do opera anymore, that I have children, and that it would be very difficult for me to make rehearsals because of the distance. I also told him that I could recommend two excellent colleagues who had sung the role. But it seems the referring conductor's recommendation counted for a lot, and in the end I was offered the job, and, after my initial protestations, I figured I should take it, because . . . . well, I'm not sure why. I had been strongly prevailed upon; the money was good; and it was the chance to sing in a Mozart opera. And I had been told that I would only have to make it to three rehearsals, which turned out not to be true. I think I had to make the trip back and forth from my home to the city where the opera company is located twelve or thirteen times, and as a result I had to make some creative child care arrangements, and I spent most of the month more sleep-deprived than usual, since I was getting home well past midnight and my children wake up well before six a.m.

During the production process, I felt like an undercover anthropologist. After so many years away, I was overwhelmed by how vastly different my life was from the lives of my colleagues in the show, and, indeed, how different my life is now from the way it used to be when I was pursuing an opera career. I didn't have the chance to get close to any of my colleagues, because they were all in residence at a hotel for a month, while I was driving back and forth, so I missed out on some of the best things about being an opera singer: the camaraderie, the jokes, and the friendships that form in the inevitable Canterbury-Tales/Gilligan's-Island-type scenarios that arise when strange singers find themselves together in a strange city (incidentally, there's a wonderful novel on this topic, Now Playing at Canterbury by Vance Bourjaily). My colleagues were uniformly the best singers I've ever worked with; out of the cast of nine, three had already sung at the Met, underscoring the current dire economic climate for opera, in which, because of multiple regional-opera-house closings, A-level singers are working in C-level houses, which is both a boon to those houses and a disaster for singers less-well established.

None of the other female principals was married. Only one besides me had children: a three-year-old, whom she'd brought along on the gig, and who was being cared for by babysitters in the hotel room. "I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this," the singer-mother confided in me. Two of the male principals did have children, but they also had wives to care for them back home while they were out on the road. I overheard one of the unmarried, childless female principals ask one of her male colleagues, upon learning that he was going to New York to see his wife on our day off: "Can I live vicariously through your sex life? Because it's going to be a lot better than mine, no matter what." 

I'm sure I've mentioned this here before: you can't really be a mother and an actively-careerist opera singer. Well, you can, if you time your childbearing perfectly, and if you're commanding fees that allow you to pay for nannies, two conditions which almost never happen singly, let alone simultaneously. Some haters who used to read this blog a few years ago left comments suggesting that I quit opera because I lacked talent. While I don't think that's entirely true, it doesn't really matter that much, because once you get to a certain level of the profession, it's not even about talent. I'd like to say that it's about hard work, and that's certainly part of it; but it's much, much more about a confluence of things that are out of the singer's control, including the stars aligning. And of course, you have to really want it.

One of the principal singers in my production -- one of the unmarried women who had sung at the Met -- is enrolled in a doctoral program in voice at a prestigious conservatory. Since I loved my own years of doctoral study, I was surprised, when I asked her how she liked it, to hear her say that it was a total waste of time, but that she needed the piece of paper to get a good teaching job. I realized that our reasons for getting our doctorates were very different: I had already transitioned out of opera when I enrolled, and was performing concerts of material I'd found in my own archival research, and I wanted to learn how to be a better researcher. She, on the other hand, is coming up against a wall in the business beyond which, since she's a lyric-coloratura soprano approaching forty, she cannot go, and she does not have a husband, and she realizes that she needs to make a career transition in order to continue to eat.

It is an unhappy profession, peopled by lonely, unhappy people.

When I told a friend, a Wagnerian soprano who left the career in order to have a family, about my recent experience, she wrote me:

I can't even imagine trying to go sing with the diva girlies now. I really think opera is a dying sport/art form, so it is probably worse now than it was when we were out there.

The best colleagues I ever sang with were Wagnerians, since they are too busy trying to get all their shit together to be prima donnas . . . and I generally found that they want you to know the stuff so that if they stumble, someone can help!

I think I acquitted myself without shame, and I'm glad it's over.

Repost: Mother Mo Chroì

My mother is at the point of death. This is a re-post of a little essay I wrote about her exactly two years ago today.
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As some of my readers may know, my mother is very ill with a chronic degenerative disease from which, barring miracles, she will not recover.  One of the reasons I've been so busy this fall is that I've been traveling to see her every few weeks, which has meant mostly standing by helplessly as her condition deteriorates further, and more resources are scrambled for and determined to be out of reach.

My mother is one of the people I admire most in the world, though, until I became an adult, we had a stormy relationship.  She was a lonely girl, neglected by her own mother, who had essentially left her children for her one true love, the Communist Party.  At the age of fourteen, my mother became a Christian; in just a few short years, she also became a teen mother.  She left high school (her principal wept when she told him the news; a gifted student, she was going to be valedictorian) and worked in a factory for several years, later attending night classes and winning a full fellowship to graduate school, where she met my father.  She was a petite, dark-haired beauty who, even as a single mother, had many suitors.  She loved music, and I suspect it is from her side of the family -- musicians for generations, though she herself is not one -- that the musicality of my own generation is derived.  In her factory days, she would buy herself season tickets to the Philharmonic every year -- the cheapest seats available, which were in the top balcony, and which made the experience a mixture of transcendence and penance for her, since she was dreadfully afraid of heights, and the walk up to the top of the house, staggering in high heels and clutching the banister, was always a series of terrors.  She attended the concerts each year alone, since her friends preferred rock.

Later, in a sense, my mother left us too.  When I was a small child, she was hospitalized more than once for severe depression.  I remember my feelings of shock and betrayal when, as a five-year-old, I overheard her telling a friend that her psychiatrist had instructed her not to tell her children about the circumstances relating to her extreme grief.  Even if we found her crying, she said, she was not to tell us why, though she could pick us up and hold us.  As a small child, I was horrified by the implications of this deliberate withholding, although, nonetheless, I now know that there are some things that parents should never tell their children.

My mother taught me to read when I was three, because, she said, I was ready.  As a result, I was writing little books, perfectly punctuated and copiously illustrated, by the age of five.  Every day after school she had a project for us:  making paper, or soap, or butter; trying our hands at the arts of batik or stained glass.  Neighborhood children would come over to make our arts and crafts with us.  She was endlessly creative.  She was also a gourmet cook, which forced my siblings and me to become good cooks ourselves (one of us became a professional cook, and another semi-professional), or risk a lifetime of disappointment at our own tables.  She baked her own bread and made her own pasta, and every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas she made what my father called the Platonic idea of a pumpkin pie.  She ran a food co-op out of her tiny kitchen.

I am not exaggerating when I note that this wonderful mother also made some chilling choices, which harmed and will continue to affect her family for generations to come.  A deeply flawed woman, she made them out of fear and desperation, out of a lack of trust in God, in her children, and in herself.  She was and is, in this respect, what Nietzsche called "human, all too human."

It is one of the great sorrows of my present life to know that she is dying, though no one knows the hour or the day.

This is for her.  You'll have to turn it up.

Saint Henry's Funeral Mass

I have no words.

Henry is Home

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

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

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

Leila writes movingly:

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

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

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

The Business

I don't usually write here about how fantastic my children are, because, while it's a topic of endless fascination to me, I'm sure it interests no one else. Nonetheless, I'm going to put in a quick Jude update here to mention that the way he is being woven into the fabric of our family can only be described as amazing. He is a great little kid, and it seems as if he's always been here. He's also adjusting really well. I took him for an evaluation to see if he'd qualify for speech therapy under Early Intervention, and he didn't; in spite of the fact that the supervising speech-language pathologist has other adopted Chinese children his age in her practice, it turned out that Jude's acquired language, despite the fact that he was nonverbal in Mandarin and English three months ago, was too good. It is pretty adorable to see him point to various things and, when I hand them to him, to hear him cheerily reply "Ta-tee [thank you], Mama!" before toddling off, or when he puts on his little backpack which he's crammed full of doo-dads, calling "'Mon, Ree-ree," to his brother (whose name sounds nothing like Ree-ree) and beckoning with extravagant arm gestures before setting off on some adventure. As a friend of mine put it, "Jude is the business."

Someone to Hold Me

Some of you already know about writer Emily Rapp's chronicling of the brief life and approaching death of her two-year-old son.  Her essay in Salon is one of the best things I've read on any topic in a long time.

Music and Memory, Part 26: Heroin

About fifteen years ago I began the transition from pursuing a standard career as an opera singer to pursuing a recital career based mostly on the fruits my own research, a transition that would become final when I left my opera management the day before September 11, 2001. This change was precipitated by my meeting F., a wonderful Italian collaborative pianist and musicologist, on Saint Patrick's Day, 1996. Before long, we were researching and performing together, and he was my exclusive recital partner until he took a teaching job in Europe in 2005.

One day we were on our way to a gig in one of the mid-Atlantic states. We had walked from our late lamented neighborhood across the George Washington Bridge to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to rent a used car, had driven back to get our stuff, and now were on our way. On that drive, my colleague F. said two things that astonished me. The first was in response to my putting a Joni Mitchell CD in the car's player: he ejected it, saying, "Life is too short for bad music," and replaced it with a live recording that he had pirated himself at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy (I continue to disagree with his assessment of bad music in this case). The second happened a little further down the road, as he told me about the sunsets, mountains, and animals he'd seen while on a concert tour in Brazil. "Really, Pentimento," he asserted, "all of that is far more beautiful and important than music."

I was speechless. How could that be? Music was my elixir; no, my medicine. Thinking more about it, I wondered if it might not, more specifically, be a sort of chemo drug, a life-saving medicine that carried the risk of certain potent side effects. Nothing was more important to me. It came before, preempted, and supplanted what should have been my most important relationships. My early life had been so tenuously established, my adult life so undisciplined; music was the only constant, and sometimes I felt it was a thing even more essential to my existence than a chemo drug would be: it was oxygen itself, the most basic ingredient for my survival from one day to the next. I clung to it like a vine that heliotropes its maundering way around a trellis to get to a patch of sun. Or maybe music was my heroin, the jab that could deliver a few hours of beauty and a sense of agency into an otherwise bleak life.

Performing -- even rehearsing -- with F. has been one of the high points of my life. Our musicalities complemented one another in a way I'd never experienced before. We had plenty of conflicts in our working relationship, but working with him was one of the essential steps in my maturation as a singer and musician. We performed together just once after he moved abroad, when my first son was one year old and I was pregnant again, though I didn't yet know it. Having a baby meant that I could no longer practice obsessively, as I'd always done before, and, as we rehearsed before the gig -- the only time we had -- F. stopped and said, "How is it that you're finally singing the way you always should have sung?" I suppose it had to do with lowered expectations, with not predicating a hundred other things upon my success in that one particular performance, and with having my single-minded focus distracted and dissipated by the needs of another person.

Now F. is far, far away, and so am I. And I wonder if there is some way to convert the heroin of my former life as a singer into some kind of methadone, to ease off my addiction to that intense inner world with a duller, less devastating version of it. It's been said that pop music anchors the listener to the place and time that he heard it -- that particular summer, that one party, that boy or girl -- and that, as such, it's a mnemonically static form, whereas classical music is redolent with all kinds of associative possibilities. I'm not sure I buy that; hearing any of dozens of classical pieces evokes for me the time and place when that piece entered my life, directed my thoughts, dominated the world of my senses. It's very difficult for me, for instance, to hear Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 without seeing a hundred moments from the years of my childhood to the years of my doctoral study; sometimes I cry when I think that Beethoven has to be dead, but I wonder if I'm not really crying for the past in general.

But the past is receding like a world seen through the wrong end of a telescope, and I must remind myself every minute to be here now, in post-industrial America, in crumbling northern Appalachia, a wife and mother, in the land where my own mother is dying and where my family members are wandering desultorily or struggling desolately, and where I seem to have lost the power and agency I once had when I was a young singer who lived for and through music.

(Above: Dame Maggie Teyte sings "Oft in the Stilly Night," which is not a folk song, as the announcer states, but rather one of the Irish Ballads of Thomas Moore, set to music by John Sullivan in the early years of the nineteenth century).

Running Up the White Flag

It's brutally hot here in northern Appalachia, but I hear that it is in New York City too. I think back upon those brutally hot days in New York, on every one of which you have to descend into the subway, whose platforms are ten degrees hotter than above ground. On days like these, the weight of your heavy backpack (in which you have to stuff all the things you need for the day because no one lives near their errands, university, work, or appointments unless they're rich, so it's not like you can swing by home to put down some things and pick up others) is more tiring, and its smell more noxious. And if you have a small child, you're schlepping not only the twenty-pound backpack, but also your child(ren) and stroller, up and down the subway stairs and bus steps in the roiling heat, and no one helps you because everyone feels insulted at some deep personal level by the weather, and so they hate you. And you hate them, too. I never realized how demoralizing this all was until I was no longer living it.

I met the mother of a first-grader at a massive end-of-the-school-year playdate yesterday who migrated here from another, deeper, part of Appalachia for her husband's work. She still owns and runs a business, however -- a boutique -- in her former town, and is going back there for the summer. In the course of our conversation, I realized that this is the same town in which my friend and fellow poetry-lover Rodak lives, and I was able to confirm that he knows my new friend's shop and has even been there with his daughters. This got me thinking about Rodak, about how he lived not at all far away from me back in the Bronx, but at a different time, a storied time, in fact, when New York was at the cusp of many things, when it wasn't what it has become today, which is, in most parts, a real-estate-porn set, a playground for people with a lot of money, a refuge for materialists who believe that being hip is about what you wear (and also about what you eat and drink and where you procure it from).

This mother's son is also mainstreamed with high-functioning autism, like my just-finished-kindergarten son. If every year could be like my son's kindergarten year, I would be overjoyed. Our neighborhood school is, quite simply, great, in spite of the fact that it's in an urban area and serves a diverse population and half of the students in the district are below the poverty level and all those other things that strike terror-about-public-school into the hearts of middle-class parents, but which are pretty much all the things I grew up with. I have been absolutely delighted with my son's classroom, teachers, and the various supports he has gotten because of his diagnosis, and he left kindergarten at the top of his class academically. He loves school, and says he wants to be a principal when he grows up, which has got to be a first.

The other day I was picking up shoes at the shoe repairman, and I couldn't find my ticket. I apologized profusely, to the point that the shoe repairman was a little nonplussed by my extreme contrition. I explained by telling him about a time when I lost a shoe repair ticket in New York, and the shop owner, rather than berating me, looked through dozens of boxes of fixed shoes while casting looks of such scorn and disgust at me, and telling me mournfully that people like me were the reason he wanted to close down his shop, that I was relieved when he actually did. "So you're a New Yorker?" the local shoe repairman asked. "Sort of," I said. I walked out of the shop scolding myself. Sort of? What did that mean? Had my allegiance flagged? Had I betrayed my beautiful city?

All of this is to say that I'm glad to be here now. And I guess I'm not really a New Yorker anymore.

(The video above is a popular, and extremely excellent, track from my youth. Be forewarned that it contains the b-word and the n-word if you're sensitive about things like that.)

Repost: Mother's Day

On Sunday evening, after the party ends
and family have gone, you’d love to say
how you can’t bear this gathering each May.
Your thoughtful husband usually sends
a rose bouquet, but changed his mind this year:
a special gift, it makes your finger shine
with emerald and ruby. “Too much wine,”
he banters as he wipes away your tear.
But you and I know, mother, what he can’t -
your April foolishness; how bit by bit
they snipped me out of you, took care of It;
how through the years I’ve been your confidante,
the reason for this night’s unraveling,
the garnet missing from the mother’s ring.


-- Catherine Chandler

On Dating a Man Who Wants His Future Wife to Homeschool

[E]xpecting a woman to act in the place of an entire educational institution and raise kids at the same time is, like camping, deeply irrational. I'm not telling anyone to not homeschool; all I'm trying to do is point out is that men who have an idea in their heads about it should probably put some actual thought into what is or is not a reasonable expectation to have from a potential date.

If I said, "I want to find a man who is willing to live in the woods in a tent, away from civilization and running water, for the sake of the KIDS," would that be reasonable?

This seems to be the week that sacred cows are tipped by smart young Catholic women writers.

Interests and Talents That Do Not Involve You

I was surprised to see this blog mentioned favorably in a recent post on motherhood by Dartmouth undergraduate Clare Coffey in the "On the Square"  section of First Things. Coffey, who discloses in the second paragraph that she has no personal or quantifiable experience in her subject, nonetheless attempts in the piece to unpack certain cultural constructs of what we might call "the new motherhood," and to offer her ideas for remaking it along more humane lines. In case the reader should question her credentials, however, she lightly suggests that "if anything I say seems presumptuous, unrealistic, or stupid," the reader should "just chuckle."

It appears that more readers scratched their heads than chuckled, wondering why First Things would publish such a facile sort of piece that gets so much wrong by an admitted non-expert. Sally Thomas addressed these concerns in detail at Castle in the Sea, focusing in particular on Coffey's assertion to the actual mothers out there that "[it] is perfectly acceptable to say 'No, you’re not doing trombone camp this year, because I have interests and talents that do not involve you, and spending my life in the car prevents me from pursuing them.'” "Only a sociopathic narcissist," Sally counters,

would declare aloud, to her child's face, that he isn't going to get to do something because frankly she has better things to do with her life than drive him around. I don't think there's anything remotely, let alone perfectly, acceptable about saying that sort of thing to a child, who in any case is naturally going to think, "Who said we were talking about you? The subject of this conversation is me and trombone camp."

I have to conclude that the reason Coffey recommended my blog along with the excellent blogs of some of my esteemed friends is that this one (which does NOT, by implication, extend to theirs) has historically been heavy on the "interests and talents that do not involve you." The idea that this blog might be paradigmatic of some sort of platonic ideal of rightly-engaged motherhood has led me to consider, with some chagrin, the course of my own attempts to maintain my activities as a scholar and performing artist while trying to be a good-enough mother.

There was a time a few years ago when this blog had some very active detractors who, in the interest, I think, of correcting me on my evidently bad course, left hurtful and even vicious messages in the comboxes (must I mention that these trolls generally self-identified as orthodox Catholics?). One, after I had written something in a comment about one's art, if one is a mother, being able to flourish more readily when one has cash in hand for child care, helpfully sought to remind me that the arts were for "people with TALENT," which is to say not for poor schlubs like me, international performing credits, scholarly publications, and at-that-time A.B.D. in music notwithstanding. Another real-life former friend, a self-styled apologist with a strong internet presence, incensed by something I had written here on a different topic, similarly blasted me for my "unsuccess" at everything I'd endeavored, from music to marriage to motherhood (this same erstwhile friend, before he started hating me quite so much, had asked me to sing at his father's wake and funeral, which I did, taking a cab from the Bronx twice to another far-off outer borough of the City of New York, vomiting from morning sickness much of the way), and, further, suggested that I wickedly blamed this unsuccess on my children, both living and dead. You have a happy life too, buddy!

But there is enough fodder for a mommy war waged by me against myself right here in the present. I was asked recently to translate some academic-musicological essays from the Italian for a prestigious forthcoming publication from a major publisher. I felt I couldn't say no to a well-paid gig of this nature, which could potentially generate similar money-earning opportunities, and was being overseen by a scholar I respect. As it turns out, though, I've already had to renegotiate the deadline, because I'm fairly fried from my current nighttime parenting duties, and I'm recalling a woman I used to know who also did freelance translating but concluded, after the birth of her second child, that she just couldn't do it anymore.

Then there's The Magic Flute.  While it's an opera I've never done, the only roles for my voice type are ensemble roles, so it seemed like a low risk to agree to cover those two roles (Second and Third Lady), especially when the chance that I would go onstage in one of them was miniscule and the conductor welcomed my children at rehearsal. But as it happened, I took him at his word. I brought my children to rehearsal.  While the conductor continued to be supportive, saying it was "a delight" to see them there (the fact is that, out of the entire cast and production staff, he was the only other parent; such is opera), the stage director and his staff begged to differ. It seems that Maestro had asked the stage director not to curse in front of the wee ones, and the stage director made it clear that that was "how he worked," and that children were not an appropriate ancillary to his method (in all honesty, Maestro needn't have been sensitive on my behalf; I curse like a truck-driver, though I try to remove myself to another room when I feel like I have to, or else do so in Italian, though I know neither of those tactics are exactly praiseworthy). This has meant that, because of the sudden and unexpected need for child care, I've been to attend only a few rehearsals, and that, as a result, I wouldn't be able to execute the staging in any kind of admirable fashion if I happened to get a last-minute call that one of the mainstage singers was sick. I've done covers before, but this is the first time in my life that I haven't been prepared for the eventuality of going onstage, and it's a very uncomfortable feeling, not just because of that eventuality, but also because it's in violation of my own strict work ethic. I am grateful to the conductor for making accommodations on my behalf, but the truth is that few other people would have done so.

When my older son was an infant, I was asked to chair a panel at an international conference on British music being held that summer in Vermont. I explained that I would need to bring him along, as he would be seven months old and couldn't be away from me. The conference organizers -- all men, fathers and grandfathers -- were happy to oblige, and so were most of my male colleagues. But I was not prepared for the reaction of the other women at the conference, who looked at me and my baby, whom I wore in a wrap, as if we were the shit on their shoes.  I asked a colleague if it would be all right if I brought my son to his panel, and I sat on the floor in the back of the room with him to minimize any disruption he might cause, and to have easy access to the exit. Luckily my baby was fine, only making a few baby sounds here and there, and no one seemed to mind. The keynote address was scheduled for later that day, and I was eager to hear it, as it was given by a scholar whose work interested me keenly. When I entered the hall, however, with my son in his wrap, another scholar, an up-and-coming young Englishwoman, fairly snarled, "If you're sitting there, I'm moving. I heard your baby in that panel discussion," and she swept up her things and flounced to another seat far from us. I got up and left the hall with my son and burst into tears, and ended up spending the keynote sitting under a tree with him and crying. Ironically, one of the conference organizers, a gay man who had recently adopted an infant with his partner, brought his own baby in on the last day, and father and son were swarmed and cooed over by the same women who had shunned me. My contribution to this love-fest was to give the dad a copy of Mothering that I had brought with me and finished. I won't take the time now to unpack this whole experience. but any conclusions you might draw are probably fairly accurate. Just trust me when I say that the world of academia is no more child-friendly -- if you're a mother, that is -- than the world of opera.

I was also a little embarrassed recently when I had to contact an editor who's involved in my own book project about a deadline missed because of my new son's baptism. If I were a man, this would never need have been mentioned.

Although I have no evidence, I'm fairly certain that the long-ago combox troll who reminded me that the arts are for people with TALENT was neither a mother nor an artist, and I would pretty much bet my life that she wasn't both those things at the same time. And while his scathing email ended my friendship with the "friend" who had suddenly become a self-appointed music critic and, though unmarried and childless himself, a marriage-and-parenting authority (this friend also helpfully brought up the "unspeakable crime" I'd committed against my unborn child years before he knew me, and years after being absolved), and while I no longer follow him nor his fairly prolific work for various online outlets, I would be willing to bet that he has remained unmarried and childless, because, seriously, with a personality like that what are the chances?

But I digress. My point, I suppose, is that, pace Clare Coffey (and thanks for the shout-out, Clare; it's a nice difference from the haters of yore), I'm hardly a paragon of, well, anything. But nonetheless (and this is probably what riled up said haters), I firmly believe that if you give up your whole prior life when you have children -- if, that is, your whole prior life contained anything that you found beautiful, nurturing, or salutary for your soul -- it's going to come back and bite you in the ass. I don't believe in what you might call "professional" motherhood, unless that's a life you've been trained for and have always wanted, which is undoubtedly the case for many mothers. And on a related note, I'm convinced, whatever lurking trolls and former friends might think, that the only way to maintain some sort of culturally-defined "success" -- the flip side, that is, of my troll-former-friend's concept of "unsuccess," the kind of "success" that the other arts-critic commenter seems to have imagined is the natural outcome of being a talented person in the arts -- is to have access to some kind of reliable child care, in which someone other than you, the artist-mother, cares for your children for certain periods of time during which you practice your art. And the cultural imagination notwithstanding (I have it from someone who knows that Angelina Jolie has six nannies, one for each child!), not a lot of artist-mothers have this access, so a lot of artist-mothers stop practicing their art. If you, dear reader, have any thoughts that suggest otherwise -- and generally the thoughts I give credence to are those that can be backed up, if not by quantifiable evidence, then by anecdotal experience; they are generally not, that is to say, wild guesses about what motherhood must be like, made by non-mothers -- then kindly let me know, in an un-troll-like fashion if you can manage it.

Ye Kindly Gods, Do Not Deceive Me!

 O ihr guten Götter, täuscht mich nicht.

Prince Tamino utters these words in Act I of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), after the Queen of the Night has asked him to rescue her daughter, Pamina, who has been kidnapped by the evil Sarastro. Tamino, who has not yet proven his manhood (he faints while being menaced by a dragon in the first scene, and the Queen of the Night's Three Ladies kill the beast while he lays unconscious), sets off to fulfill this charge. In a shocking twist of events, however, he learns in Act II that Sarastro, the high priest of Isis and Osiris, is a good man who has taken Pamina away from the evil Queen for her own good. Because they love wisdom, Tamino and Pamina seek to be initiated into the sacred mysteries of the Egyptian gods.

One of the most remarkable things about Mozart's last opera is its ethos of complete and stunning reversal. What was one way in the first act turns out, in the second, to be its exact opposite; what appeared good proves evil, and vice versa. A close study of the score provides early clues that all may not be as it seems; for instance, the Queen's entrance aria, rather than musically portraying her as a grieving mother, instead clearly reveals her to be steely and domineering, and, when sung and directed well, is actually a little scary (indeed, the voice type that sings it -- dramatic coloratura soprano -- has often been used in opera to represent characters who are not quite, or are somehow beyond, human):  


In a classic moment of overcommitment, I agreed, before Jude arrived, to cover (i.e. understudy) the roles of Second and Third Lady in a production of Zauberflöte being staged by a regional opera company in my area, in spite of the fact that it's been more than ten years since I last appeared in an opera. The conductor had heard me, and was very supportive, even telling me that I could bring my kids to rehearsals (a rare accommodation in opera, where few performers -- at least few women -- have children, and one that in the long run did not go over well with the stage director and his staff). The chances of me having to go onstage are slim, thank God, because I'm not ready; in addition to the usual parenting, homemaking, and post-adoption stuff, I'm also doing some editing and translating work for pay in the few moments I can spare for it, as well as working on my own (academic-musicological) book.

It's hard to describe how strange it is to be sitting on the sidelines during rehearsals, either with or without my children. To be benched, as it were, has forced me into a position of unwonted humility, since singing was always my ticket up and out, the simple tool I used to make a better life for myself. I watch the mostly excellent young singers and learn the staging, and I wonder what their lives and careers will be like. Two of the singers in the cast recently married each other: what will happen to them? Will one be successful, the other not? Will they have children? Will they stay together? In the world of opera, all of these matters are open to question.

And to be here, doing this, in Applachia is doubly strange. I think about my old life in New York, and I wonder if it was really real at all. After moving here, I longed greatly for that life, which I regarded as my true life, and my life here as some sort of shoddy bargain-basement substitute for what I might be doing. But now I'm not so sure of that hierarchy of lives. As I sit and watch rehearsals, I wonder if this was the life I was always meant to have, and if everything leading up to it -- everything which is now falling away as if it were a dream -- was in fact like Tamino's understanding of the world and the cosmos in the first act of Die Zauberflöte: shiny, deceiving, baffling, and completely opposite to the way things really are.

(Above: The Queen of the Night's entrance, from a stage set designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for an 1815 production of the opera.)

The Years of the Locust

Betty Duffy writes in a recent post about noticing how

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As he leaves the party, he continues:

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

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

Prayer Request

Our friend Lissla Lisslar is in the hospital on bedrest waiting to deliver her twin girls, who will be born at thirty-five weeks. Please pray that she will have a safe and easy delivery and recovery (she has to have a c-section), and for the health of her babies. Thank you, and may God reward you for your prayers!

Quick Takes: Walking Distance

1. My son has moved up to the next-sized violin, a one-quarter which he has dubbed J.J. It's the first instrument he's had that actually sounds, when played, like a real violin. When I rented his previous axe, a one-eighth size which he called McGillicuddy, it already had little pieces of red tape stuck to the fingerboard to help little hands find the right notes, so I ignorantly asked our violin teacher, an elderly Hungarian master, to put some tape on J.J.'s neck for the same purpose. He fixed me with a stern look. "Pentimento," he said, "that is Suzuki nonsense.  Do you think I learned to play with pieces of tape on my instrument? He will learn to play the right notes by tuning with his ear and adjusting his fingers accordingly." I was embarrassed; of course, he was absolutely right, and, by the middle of the lesson, my son was tuning and adjusting and playing the right notes all on his own. All of a sudden I saw the proliferation and near-cult status of Suzuki instruction in this country -- perhaps unjustly -- as a money-making conspiracy, and started to wonder if it had played any part in the precipitous decline in musical literacy we've experienced in the past fifty years in America.

2. I brought McGillicuddy with us as I walked my son to school this morning, because the violin rental shop, operated out of a private Victorian home, is another three-quarters of a mile's walk away. A dad dropping off his daughter said to me, "It's so great that you walk everywhere!" I explained to him that not only was I not legally licensed to drive a car (though I may be by the end of this week, after I take my road test on Friday), but that if I didn't walk each day, no matter what the weather, my head would probably explode.

3. I hadn't had breakfast, and was hungry after dropping off McGillicuddy, so I walked the few blocks to the main commercial thoroughfare in the neighborhood, and went to the only place that was open at 8 AM, which was McDonald's. Until we moved here, I would go to McDonald's maybe once every five or six years, but things really change when you move to the greater U.S.A.  I remember mentioning this to Really Rosie once, and she scolded me, saying, "Haven't you read Fast Food Nation?" In fact I have, and so I know that McDonald's is destroying not only American society but also the entire universe. Nonetheless, I'm not a great believer in the efficacy of ideological boycotts, especially when you're hungry and it's the only game in town.  We boycotted Nestlé when I was little because of their greedy, unethical formula-pushing in maternity wards in Africa, which led to the deaths of thousands of infants; but it occurs to me now that few people who boycott Nestlé probably believe that abortion should be banned, which raises inevitable questions about the efficacy of such protests. About boycotting, I guess I have a sort of "circumcise your hearts" attitude.

4. As I ordered a sausage muffin and a coffee with five creams on the side, I briefly hoped that the front-end worker wouldn't think I was a junkie, which I probably would have thought if someone had ordered a coffee with five creams from me. But then again, I didn't ask for sugar.  I contemplated the offer on the wall behind the counter of Braille and picture menus, which gave me the good feeling that McDonald's is friendly towards people with disabilities, immigrants, and those with selective mutism. As I had my breakfast, I thought about where I might be if I were still in New York. Probably on the subway on my way to teach at the large urban university where I was an adjunct in the music department. Some of my fellow riders would be nodding off on strangers' shoulders, while others would be attempting to construct impenetrable self-contained universes around themselves with their iPods and newspapers. Young orthodox Jewish women, looking like it was 1949 in wool coats, platform pumps, and smart chapeaux, would be reading from little Hebrew prayer books with their red-painted lips moving silently, and would finish by kissing the books and stuffing them back into their pocketbooks.

5. After McDonald's, I walked over to the dollar store to get some cleaning supplies, and one of the grotesquely-tattooed moms from my son's class -- the one who drives a new Cadillac -- pulled over to offer me a ride. "I see you walking everywhere in the neighborhood," she noted, correctly. As we drove the few short blocks, she told me she was a vegan, that she didn't wear leather shoes, and that the U.S.D.A. allows one eyedropperful of pus in every glass of milk. There's more to these tattooed moms than meets the eye, I thought.

6. On my way to the violin shop through a run-down working-class neighborhood, I saw a little old Ford parked on the street covered with bumper stickers, one of which said, "I'd rather be reading Charles Bukowski." And when I entered McDonald's, they were playing "Bring It On Home to Me" (above), one of the most perfect songs ever written. It made me feel as if strange epiphanies might be happening all over the world in the most unlikely places.

7. My favorite crossing guard is training her elderly father, a man named Loyal, for the job. Yesterday, his first day without her, he asked me how many children I had. I told him just my kindergarten-aged boy for now, and mentioned our upcoming adoption. Loyal, who is what evangelicals call a "Bible-believing Christian," responded to the news about the adoption by noting that those who are merciful will be shown mercy. Somehow I hadn't thought about mercy in the context of adoption before, and as we stood there chatting at the street corner, he with a yellow reflective jacket and a stop sign in his hand, tears rolled unchecked down my cheeks.

8. All of which makes me think that, even if I pass my road test, I will still want to walk everywhere, lest I miss something beautiful.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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.