I watched an old movie last night, The Taking of Pelham 123. A remake came out earlier this year. I didn’t see it. I don’t want to see it. The point of the first one wasn’t the plot (silly) or the action (there is none). The point was the city, New York.
The original was made in 1974, when any movie set in New York was really about New York. And any movie about New York was about America.
New York in the 1970s was coming apart. The city nearly went bankrupt, its major industries were in decline, suburbs sapped its population and crime rates skyrocketed. New York became a byword for urban failure, a symbol of an America that similarly felt adrift after the Vietnam War and the economic upheaval of deindustrialization.
The Taking of Pelham 123 is about four hostages who take over a New York City subway car and threaten to execute passengers if a ransom isn’t paid. The metaphor is transparent. New York, and by extension America, felt similarly taken over by hostile forces. In the movie the city, humiliatingly, is so broke it has trouble coming up with the million-dollar ransom. The movie is about humiliation, the city’s and the nation’s.
And yet what strikes me is the exuberance of the New Yorkers in the film. The New York I know in the 2000s is a pale shadow of that dirty, seedy, broke-down and yet utterly alive city. Everyone is in everyone’s face in this movie. Everyone is a concentrated ethnic type, a factory of coarse verbal wit.
At one point a subway supervisor strides down the tracks toward the hijackers, heaping abuse on them not simply for threatening hostages but for bottling up his train system. He’s outraged, indignant. He sees their guns and he doesn’t care. He’s like a dried-up sinew of the city, invulnerable. The hijackers shoot and kill him of course. He’s not invulnerable. But he stands for a city that met its degradation with a sharp, hard kick.
I was mesmerized by that kick. The film happens to take place in a subway station blocks from where I work. I ride that line every time I shop at Trader Joe’s. The stations look the same today except they’re cleaner. Subway cars are air conditioned now. There’s no graffiti. A neutered electronic voice announces stations and politely encourages passengers to stand clear of the closing doors. “Remain alert and have a safe day,” the voice says.
How lame. Veteran New Yorkers have mixed feelings about the 1970s. They don’t miss the crime or the filth or the riots or the Bronx on fire. But neither do they much like what, say, Times Square has become, this weird no-place of chain restaurants, tourist traps, gussied-up theaters and, significantly, no New Yorkers. New York is cleaner and safer now. But it’s richer, too, rich with the wealth of out-of-town fools who work in finance or entertainment and who in fact do not like cities, or at least do not like ugly cities.
Ugly New York is gone, replaced as all New Yorks are replaced by the city’s incessant metamorphosis. For a moment last night I felt nostalgia for that ugly New York, though I was a baby when it existed and I knew it only through, of all things, Sesame Street, which in those days existed mainly to educate all those kids in the burning Bronx everyone else had written off.
If you notice, early Sesame Street takes place in the ghetto and what I learned from it is that it’s okay to live in ugly New York. In some ways ugly New York is my imagined ideal city.
Time passes. New York changes. It seems to improve but really it doesn’t. It merely swaps out one set of compromises for another. It grows enchanted with wealth and loses its soul. It’s a fairy tale, a trajectory we are all tempted to live. I prefer my ugly New York.
Summer ended this week and I was glad to see it go. Of course it’s not really over. Real autumn is weeks away and it’s still warm. But for the past few days the humidity departed and that’s what matters.
East coast humidity destroys all joy for me. I never knew it growing up in California. When Kate and I moved to New York four years ago in the middle of a sweltering, oppressive, leaden July, I mourned all summer long, wondering what on earth I had done moving to a place where the simple act of going outside feels like being encased in a greenhouse coffin.
Then came September and the first tantalizing crisp days. The sun brightened, as if stepping from behind a steamy window. The world looked as I remembered, clean, clear lines.
It’s that feeling of restoration I like best about fall. Here in the east I dread spring because it announces summer, that alien season taking from me the air and light I love, taking even my body, which endures the ensuing months in a permanent, hateful sweat.
Fall’s arrival plunges me into memory, down far enough to be home again. I’m talking about the body’s memory, the kind you experience when you smell cut grass and remember childhood baseball games, or you return to your old elementary school and the past momentarily overwhelms you.
I had that feeling the other morning coming out of the swimming pool. It was a little after seven, the sun just clearing the upper Manhattan skyline. The air, heavy and dead all summer long, smelled suddenly alive. The light was magnetic, isolating and enlarging everything it touched. Apartment windows across the Hudson gleamed like polished bronze.
It was California light and for a moment I was back there, time stopped. Or rather time was compressed, all times gathered in one time. I was in college, biking up the Berkeley hills watching fog creep across the San Francisco Bay. I was in high school driving bleary-eyed to rowing practice, sunlight just cresting the ridgeline of the San Gabriel Mountains. I was on the beach playing in sand, at the park in late afternoon, on the bluffs above tossing whitecaps, cresting a freeway interchange enclosed in the endless, silent, radiant grid of Los Angeles.
Do you have those moments of compressed time? Do seasons restore you, too? I take such moments as evidence for the essential mystery and unknowability of human life. There are depths within us we rarely access, riches we are content to ignore. And I think, if we don’t even know ourselves, how much less must we know the world around us.
Time, eternity, death, life. All words trying and failing to capture that mystery, to make sense of yearnings so powerful I think we ignore them because to admit them would invite paralysis. Regardless, the taste of fall leaves me wanting more. I get myself back and with it intimations of joys and realities larger than any self could imagine. Happy fall!
The pleasures of parenting, no matter how small, are intense. This week Kate, Frances and I took a quick vacation trip to Cape Cod. Our last day there we spent the morning at a pond with a sandy beach. The weather was hot but the water was just right, like a bath after it’s cooled a bit. Perfect for kids.
I wasn’t sure how much Frances would like it, though. She’s not a huge fan of water. At the beach she steers well clear of waves. In the bath she wails against hair rinses. The one time I tried taking her in a swimming pool she flapped her arms in panic. “The water’s in my face, Daddy!” In two and a half years of life she’s had few experiences she hates more.
I admit I’m disappointed. I love water. I grew up by the beach and I’m rarely happier than when swimming. Just last week I could barely control my joy when I discovered the outdoor pool at the park where I swim here in New York was open early and I could get in it. Usually only the indoor pool is open before I have to leave for work. I swam back and forth, exulting in sunlight slanting through the water, the feeling of bright, unfettered movement. Water has always represented freedom to me.
“Want to go in the water?” I asked Frances at the pond. The day before, she’d surprised me by taking some tentative steps into the ocean at a beach. Still, I wasn’t prepared when she promptly declared, “Take me to the deep water, Daddy!”
The deep water! “Are you sure?” She was. I took her in my arms and waded out until the water reached my chest. She held on tight, pressing her face to my shoulder. We stood there a while and gradually she loosened her hold and looked around.
“What are those girls doing?” she asked. “Swimming,” I said. “Why?” (The standard reply to everything.) “Well, that’s how they get around in the water.” She thought about this. “Can I swim?” I said she couldn’t yet, but I was sure she would learn one day. She looked across the lake. “I want to swim to those trees!”
“How about we try some kicking?” I lowered her gently into the water and held her under her arms. “Kick your legs!” She paused, and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, kicked for all she was worth, sending a great spray of water into the air. I turned her over and held her so she lay on her stomach. She kicked again. I gently moved her forward. Her face took on a look of wonder that nearly broke my heart. “I’m swimming!” she shouted.
We swam like that for many minutes, moving this way and that, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Eventually her face dipped into the water and she remembered all her old fears and scrambled back against me like a limpet. But for that time there under the hot sun in the cool water Frances swam, and loved swimming.
Why does it matter that our children like what we like? I suppose it could be a kind of vanity, an external ratification of who we are and what we choose. But I hope there’s more to it than that. I hope it shows that pleasures, true pleasures, the exalting kind of pleasures, have a reality that extends beyond any one person’s enjoyment of them.
Such pleasures, I like to think, are not merely personal, subjective experiences. They are moments when we dip into a deeper current of truth, a reservoir of joy that hints at the greater, more durable joys we will know when we shed our crabbed, selfish natures and acquiesce to the demands—which is the same thing as the pleasures—of the presence of God.
I don’t know whether Frances will grow up loving water like I do. We don’t live by the beach and we haven’t even signed her up for swimming lessons yet because they’re so expensive here in New York. Regardless, there we were that morning in Cape Cod, in the water, in the sun. We were swimming. We felt free.
My two-year-old asked about death the other day. Well, not death, but sort of.
“Why does Grandma have to leave?” Frances asked as I put her to bed. She meant my mom, Robin, who’s staying with us for two weeks while Frances’ daycare takes a summer break.
My mom visits several times a year and each time she and Frances hit it off. My mom has an excellent way with children, straightforward and matter-of-fact. She and Frances walk to the park, play Play-Doh, build Legos, read books, bake cookies and eat popsicles.
In the end, though, Grandma has to leave. She lives in Los Angeles, we live in New York. When she goes Frances doesn’t like it. Frances cries and for awhile she seems listless and irritable. “Are you sad Grandma Robin left?” I ask. “Yeah,” she says.
This visit Frances is old enough to know the departure is coming. In fact she asked why Grandma has to leave the very night after she arrived. My mom will be with us till the end of the month but already Frances is dreading the day she says goodbye.
Like father, like daughter. My wife Kate says I never really get to enjoy vacations because I’m always mourning their inevitable conclusion before we even make it out the door. That’s not entirely true, but—well, okay, it’s pretty much true. I hate it when things end. Our old family friend Barbara used say there’s no present without a future and I agree. Knowing something is finite seems to rob it of joy.
Which is strange when you think about it since everything is finite. At least everything human is. People die, things they build fall apart, words they write fade from memory. The answer to Frances’ question, indeed the answer to anyone wondering why nothing lasts is—well, nothing lasts. Everything dies.
Of course the trite faith response to this rather grim scenario runs something like, Now, don’t you worry, dearie, the world changes but not God, and besides, you’ll see your loved ones again in heaven. That may be true—how can anyone know for sure?—but regardless I think it’s a bit of a copout. For one thing it’s too abstract to be anything more than cold comfort. More importantly, I think it only tells part of the story.
In Christianity, anyway, death is not entirely a villain. Yes, St. Paul celebrates Jesus’ resurrection by proclaiming, “Death, where is thy sting?” But that’s not all Paul has to say about death. In the same chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians (chapter 15), he describes the weird, thrilling and ultimately mysterious promise implied by Jesus’ life and death. “I tell you a mystery,” he says. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”
Changed. That’s different from you’ll see your loved ones again in heaven. That means Christians believe something profound happens after death, something wiping away what was old in our lives and replacing it with something new. Paul takes a stab at describing that new thing, but basically for him as for all of us language breaks down at this point and he’s left promising that after we die we will have a closer, more abundant and delightful relationship with God than we ever managed while alive.
It’s not quite true to say death causes this transformation, or even that death is necessary for it. But it’s clear Paul believes death is part of new life, a stage on the journey to God. Maybe even a crucial stage.
C. S. Lewis once wrote, “A thing will not really live unless it first dies.” That sounds harsh, but think about it. How else can you become that radiant, rejoicing person you yearn to become except by leaving behind—putting to death—all of the selfishness, control and do-it-my-way instinct that drives you?
Indeed, can you truly love anything without letting go—again, putting to death—at least some of your own self-regard? In some mysterious way, like a seed falling, lying dormant and sprouting, life exists in embrace with death. My belief is that life ultimately cancels death. But death has its role.
Lucky for Frances even the little separation of Grandma going home is a ways away. Lots of time left for Play-Doh and Legos and books. She’ll be sad when Grandma does go. But we’ll be able to tell her exactly when the two of them will see each other again. My mom is coming in November to help out after Frances’ little sibling is born.
Love, departure, new life. I don’t pretend to understand it all. But I like to hope it works that way for a reason.
Last week on vacation I went to one of my favorite places, Alamitos Bay in Long Beach, the city near Los Angeles where I grew up. The bay probably wouldn’t make most people’s favorite-places-on-earth list. It’s an inlet from the Pacific Ocean with a few small man-made islands, some beaches and pricey homes that mostly demonstrate how seldom great wealth is accompanied by great taste. There are no waves and sometimes the city closes the beaches because storm-water runoff fills the bay with contaminants.
Still, I love it, mostly because it holds good memories. I was on a rowing team in high school and all of our practices were in Alamitos Bay. I remember slipping out into the still, grey water at 5:30 a.m., the only sound the rhythm of oars slicing into the glassy surface.
Later, while home for the summer in graduate school, I swam in the bay, long, leisurely swims past beaches, yacht marinas, sailing students trying in vain to control their sabots, windsurfers, kayakers and other swimmers like me, all of us delighted to be in an expanse of sparkling water under the blue southern California sky, floating, untethered, free. It felt like stolen time, like sneaking away from the workaday world into a watery region that, though crowded on summer days, nevertheless seemed blessedly solitary.
So of course while visiting my family in Long Beach this summer I had to take my daughter Frances to the bay. Happily, she seemed to love it just as much as I always have. She’s two and a half and the morning we went she fell instantly to scooping sand into her bucket, wading into the warm water, making lumpy castles and splashing my mom and me for all she was worth.
I was delighted at her delight. But a strange thing happened as I waded into the water with Frances. Inwardly I found myself becoming deeply depressed. At first I wasn’t sure why. Then, as I watched a group of laughing young people dive into the water for a quick swim out to a buoy, I realized what was wrong. I felt like I didn’t belong.
It had been years since I’d swum in the bay. Decisive years. Since my last plunge into the bay’s blue water I’d gotten married, moved away from California, started a family of my own and, in some way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, changed.
I’d stopped being a person who swims in open water. I spend most of my life indoors now, the curse of a New York address. The pool where I swim in Manhattan is enclosed—and built atop a sewage plant. Floating, free, solitary, those words don’t describe my life anymore. I’m actually glad for that, since as a young single person I was selfish and self-focused, and I count among God’s greatest gifts the lessons in love and giving that come with marriage and parenthood.
Still, love of the outdoors is a gift too, and a vital one, as is a deep connection to the place you were raised. Those kinds of love, free from choice and self-interest, make more of the people who feel them. Certainly they made more of me.
Or at least I thought they did. How disturbed I was to discover the seeming loss of my old connection to Alamitos Bay. Is time that destructive, I wondered? Had the gift of this place, a gift I’d assumed came from God, been rescinded? Or had I somehow rescinded myself, closed off some part of myself that once was happy and easy in places like this?
Those questions shadowed me all that day. I couldn’t shake them. So the next morning I drove to the bay in my swimsuit. It was a warm day, warm sun softened by breezes off the ocean. I parked, walked a block or two and stepped onto the sand near the Second Street bridge, where my name, along with the names of my other rowing teammates, is still written on one of the pilings, assuming the tides haven’t washed it away.
I hesitated. The water’s always so cold jumping in. But then I ran forward and leaped. The water was cold! I surfaced and began swimming past some buoys marking off a kids’ play area. I went faster, finding a rhythm. With each turn of my head to breathe I saw familiar landmarks—familiar now that I was where I had always seen them before, in the middle of the bay, in the water.
There was the big house on Naples Island we always called Dogbark because a giant dog invariably ran right to the end of his tether to bark at us as our boat rowed by. There was the library where I used to check out books, with its floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on blue water and bobbing yachts. There was the promenade on Naples, just down a walkway from an ornate fountain, where I sometimes walked on warm evenings when the light lingers and lingers.
I swam on past marinas. I waited while erratic sabots tacked by. I kept a lookout for kayaks. Soon I was nearly a mile down the bay, near the jetty that points the way out to open ocean. I stopped to rest before turning around for the return swim. Suspended in the cool water, I moved my arms and legs lazily, watching kids Frances’ age potter about on the distant sand.
I smiled. I laughed. I felt untethered, floating, free and solitary. And I knew with absolute certainty that my fears about gifts from God had been, as always, wrong. No gift from God ever goes away. No love, whether for a person or a place, is ever wasted. People change but only at the surface. The fault lies in forgetting that.
Happy with such thoughts, I plunged my arms in and swam back the way I had come.
A long time ago, when I had just finished graduate school and started my first job in Los Angeles, I took a car ride on a hot California night. I drove from L.A. to Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where I planned to meet friends for a weekend backpacking trip. I left after work Friday, sat in traffic, then finally dropped down into the vast Central Valley, where the air smells of farms and brown grass.
It was an anxious time. I wasn’t sure what I was doing with my life. Impulsively I’d taken a job writing for a small community section of the Orange County Register newspaper, hundreds of miles away from my friends and former life in Berkeley. Half of me wanted to be a journalist. Half of me thought I should have stayed in academia, what I’d gone to graduate school for in the first place. Had I just made a big, fat mistake, I wondered?
About the time I reached the Valley, with the long, straight ribbon of Highway 99 illuminated in my headlights, I put on an audio book. I’d picked the book up at random from my parents’ house, where I was living while looking for my own apartment. (More angst: Not exactly a morale booster to graduate from school and move right back into your childhood bedroom.)
The book was called Plainsong by Kent Haruf. It took me awhile even to figure out what it was about, since it unfolds slowly in spare, exact prose. Soon, though, I was pulled deep inside its story of a small rural town on the high plains of Colorado, where a high school girl gets pregnant and, through a series of events, winds up staying with two elderly cattle farmers, bachelor brothers who know a great deal more about roping steers than about teenagers.
The book instantly calmed me, and for a long time I puzzled over why. At first I thought it was the rural setting, then I wondered whether it was the language, a sequence of slender, line-straight sticks framing a window of perfect clarity.
Whatever it was, the book sustained me all along the highway, then up the twisty two-lane road through the foothills into the park. I remember being the only person on that twisty road so late at night. And I remember the road was under construction, so that a few times I had to stop, alone, at a flashing red light controlling traffic where the road narrowed to one lane. I sat with the window down, engine idling, oak trees diminishing into a vast blackness, and all the while Plainsong telling its strangely captivating story.
Only now, here in New York, a place as far from the Sierras as I can imagine, do I realize why the book so affected me. I just finished rereading it, and this time it was obvious. Plainsong is a book about goodness, more particularly about the goodness that emanates from obscure, out-of-the-way lives that go unnoticed by the engines of success in our success-mad world.
The McPheron brothers who take in pregnant Victoria Roubideaux are not what you would call promising. They’re a pair of scruffy old duffers who barely talk to one another and live in a falling-down house with tractor parts on the kitchen table. They are exceedingly competent with their cattle. But when a schoolteacher of Victoria’s, who happens to know the men, asks them to take her in—her own mother has kicked her out of the house—they are, to say the least, alarmed.
They manage, though, and by the end of the book Victoria has her baby, and the men, along with a few other troubled souls in town, form a kind of makeshift family. They even take Victoria shopping for a crib. When Victoria’s former boyfriend, a frightening and abusive man several years older than she, drives to the ranch to take her away with him, the men escort him back to his car with a sudden, startling show of strength. (“They lifted him off his feet, squirming and twisting and caterwauling, and carried him out the door, and they were hard and determined and stronger than he was.”)
Stronger than he was. That’s why the book captivated me. Above all else, Plainsong is a book determined not to languish simply as one more ambivalent demonstration of the incessant brokenness of human life. It is a smarter book than that, more deliberate. It says that somehow a life lived amid sagebrush doing repetitive chores in scouring weather with few words and less recognition produces a toughness and moral compass that will not fail.
I needed that then, on that dark, warm summer night, lacking an internal compass of my own. And I need it now, as I believe we all do. I need there to be goodness, and I need goodness to be stronger. Of course a novel offers no more than fictional proof of such a thing. But I like to hope that, sometimes at least, that’s proof enough.
In any case, when I finally reached the campsite where I was meeting my friends I didn’t want to turn the car off. I sat for a few minutes listening, until I remembered there were people trying to sleep around me. I cut the engine and immediately the dark took over. I could sense the surrounding mountains, their intent silence. I spread a tarp, got in my sleeping bag and lay down. Just before I fell asleep, I looked up through the trees. There, hard and sharp in the deep black sky, stars shone.
The storm came fast. Hard rain, whipping wind, water dancing on the pavement. The thunder woke us up. Or maybe it was our daughter Frances, who is two. Frances’ bed is beneath a window. The lightning must have lit up her room. Then a crack like sky splitting.
Frances cried out. Kate and I walked to her room. It was very late, very loud with rain. I remembered last summer’s thunderstorms, when Frances was just putting sentences together. “I no like-a da thunder,” she’d said then. But thunder didn’t awaken her. She still slept like an infant.
Frances is old enough for nightmares now. One night awhile back she awoke in terror. When I went in to lay her down she was bolt upright, sobbing, jabbing a finger at the dark space beneath her bed. “The bug! The bug!” was all she said. For the briefest instant I remembered—and it was my whole body remembering—that sensation of childhood terror. The world closes over you. You have no chance. Already the immense evil is at your side, biting.
This year, Frances heard the thunder like that. Her eyes were wide when we got to her bed. Her face was frozen in that rigid puzzlement of a child whose interpretive abilities have been overcome. She didn’t even register relief to see us. Another weird flash of light. Another crack.
Kate sat on her bed. I knelt beside her. We held her, said soft things, held a little harder when the thunder came. Frances didn’t move. She gripped her scrap of a security blanket and seemed to press into the bed, as if trying to become invisible. The thunder reached its peak, nipping at the lightning’s heels, reaching down with a black, smashing hand.
Preacher/Writer/Moviemaker Rob Bell tells a story about taking his infant son on a hike in a baby backpack during a sudden thunderstorm. The sort-of obvious point of the story, which becomes apparent as Rob rushes his son home through the woods, cradling him in his arms, is that we are like that baby, not only held by God but utterly uncomprehending of what’s really happening to us. To a baby a storm is fear and chaos incarnate, an uninterpretable wall of world-ending noise. Parents/God know better, and so they can offer comfort.
Nice, but I think there’s more to it. More to Rob Bell’s story, more to Frances’ fear of thunder. We parents are not like God. We don’t know better. We are, in fact, children ourselves. Yes, we are children with a little more knowledge, or at least knowingness. But sometimes that knowledge works against us. We should actually, I think, be more like Frances.
When I had that flash of remembering childhood terror, I suddenly realized how stale my normal engagement with the world has become. I’ve absorbed facts and I use them to construct explanations that help me feel in control. I know what thunder is and so I don’t fear it. But I wonder. Is that a gain? Or a loss?
In Frances’ fear lies a profound truth about the vulnerability of human life and the tremendous aliveness of the world around us. Our explanations are not definitive. Our understanding does not exhaust the world’s meaning. That is something to fear, yes, since it means we have less mastery than we so desperately desire. But it is also something to celebrate. Imagine the extinction of the last unknown in your life, the last element of unpredictability. What would you have left? The prison of your all-knowing self.
The storm gradually subsided. The thunder receded. I pictured it rolling like an erratic ball along the length of Long Island and into the ocean. Frances relaxed. We kissed her and tucked her blanket in and went back to bed. The next day, when we woke up, the streets outside were almost dry. “Will there be more thunder today?” Frances asked suspiciously. I looked at her, then out the window. “Maybe,” I said. “I hope not. But maybe.”
Our church held its kids’ talent show last night. This being New York, the routines tended toward Broadway musicals, opera arias and a Leonard Cohen cover. The Leonard Cohen song was called “Hallelujah” (if you don’t know it, listen to this version and you’ll understand why a high schooler would be so keen on singing it), and I thought about that, about the exuberance of singing and performance, anything a person makes and offers as a gift to someone else.
Why exactly do people like performing and watching others perform? Imagine future anthropologists happening upon a parent’s video of that talent show. What would they make of eight-year-olds singing “Anything You Can Do” from Annie Get Your Gun? Or the harmonica-piano duet? Or the first-grader’s inspired, lisping rendition of “Little Red Riding Hood” that somehow included suitcases and other objects never before encountered in that story?
Why, the anthropologists might ask, are these kids doing this? And why do the grownups seem to love it so much?
Obviously it’s all hilarious and fun. But it’s more than that. People can’t help performing, every day. Not necessarily on a stage. But any time a person talks to someone, waves, writes a letter or e-mail, posts something to Facebook—any act of communication is a performance. No one simply transmits information. They transmit themselves as well, adjusting their voice, movement, words, everything to create a particular impression. They take a bit of themselves and expose it to the world.
There’s necessity in that of course—we all have to communicate. But I believe every one of those little performances reveals something deeper, a desire to be known, and known perfectly, that we long simultaneously to fulfill and escape.
I think of the kids onstage last night. Every note they sang shouted, “This is me! This is what I can do!” Every time their parents applauded they too shouted, “That little one is part of me! That’s what we can do!” They all drew back the curtain a moment on their most hidden selves. “This is me! This is what I can do!”
Isn’t it frightening to draw back the curtain like that? What if you do and someone laughs? Or, worse, what if they turn away indifferently? Is it possible to exist unregarded by others, unknown? Is a person still a person if they perform for no one?
For me that desire to be known, so powerful it expresses itself in everything we do, is one of those telling signs of our yearning for God. It’s telling not just because it’s there, but because it repeats itself so incessantly. We spend our lives searching for that perfect knowing. Nothing quite satisfies. None of our relationships measure up. Is it, then, a desire without an object, destined always to be frustrated? Or is there something—I should say someone—who will know us like that?
The world as a children’s talent show. A strange image, but strangely apt. We’re all up there, singing our hearts out, hoping against hope someone hears and says, “I know that song.” Well, in my opinion someone does. Hallelujah.
I spent the weekend on a farm with nuns. Four nuns, actually, each of them farmers. The farm is in a town called Brewster, about an hour and a half north of New York City. Kate, Frances and I took a train there Friday afternoon for a three-day family retreat. We needed one. The city, as it does, was beginning to crush us.
The farm brought us back to life. Technically it’s not a farm as you would picture one, with barn, silo and fields of grain. It’s a large, old, rambling house surrounded by a big organic garden, a guest house, a chapel and a school.
Nuns have lived there for several decades. It’s owned by an order called the Community of the Holy Spirit, which also owns a sister house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. That’s how we know these nuns. Their city house is only a few blocks from ours. Kate has led church services for them.
What brought us back to life wasn’t just getting outside and away from the city’s noise and just-recently-returned summer garbage smell. It was spending time with women whose lives are very different from ours, more intentional, more focused, more directed toward truth.
Nuns live according to a rule. The sisters at Brewster have adopted a modified Augustinian rule, a pattern for monastic life dating from Late Antiquity. They divide their days into regular periods of work, prayer and study. Those periods are not mere suggestions or notations in a daily planner. They are the rule. The nuns took vows of chastity and obedience when they entered the order, and they are expected to follow the rules.
That, oddly enough, is what brought us back to life. Not living the rule ourselves—in fact we spent most of our time goofing around in the school playground, bothering the nuns as they weeded the lettuce, chasing chickens and watching trees sway in a lazy wind. No, what gave us life was being, just for a few days, in a place that exhibits all the fruits of that rule.
Life at the Brewster convent feels real and alive. The women there don’t bother with all the frivolous things our society is so enamored of—status, possessions, celebrity. They know about all that—in fact you can watch them, in full habit, wishing Whoopi Goldberg happy birthday in a recent appearance on The View—and they’re wickedly funny as they storm around their kitchen preparing Saturday night pizza, which we ate with them.
But in Brewster everything has its right place. The pizzas were made with ingredients from the garden. The dough had been prepared by Sister Catherine Grace during one of her work periods. The time for eating was marked as time for community. Everything had a purpose. Nothing was wasted. And therefore a moment as mundane as dinner became immensely special and meaningful.
That’s what we had been missing in the city, that understanding that this moment, now, whatever it happens to be, is a moment of immense importance. All of us, whether we like it or not, live according to a rule. We allow ourselves certain things and disallow others. But for the most part we don’t acknowledge that, don’t even know it. We do what we do without thinking it through. We barrel through our routines, resent them mightily and look for something, anything to distract ourselves. We’re always yearning for time off.
Nuns never get time off. There are times of rest and recreation built into the rule. But they’re never free from the rule. And yet I’m sure the last word they would use to describe their lives is confining. Freed from compulsion to escape the ordinary, they have the luxury of making daily life an act of deliberate relationship with God. They know why they do each thing they do. And so they are grounded and perceptive in a way few other people can match.
I felt relief just being with them and thinking about that. I don’t quite know how to do it myself. Perhaps it’s impossible in the workaday world, raising kids, battling the subway, juggling work. I don’t think so, though. I think everyone can learn to pay attention, to be thankful for this moment now, whatever it brings, and to live as if in the presence of God. That was my hope, anyway, on the train back home. I'm still holding onto it.
Sometimes the rewards of my job steal up on me. Today a writer I edit sent me a revised version of a story and—well, I got the shivers. Julie had submitted this story, about her teenage son pulling away from her, awhile back. “It’s not working,” she told me. “I can’t figure out why.”
I looked at the first draft, thought of a few suggestions, and gave her a call. The call ended up lasting quite some time. Turned out there were lots of buried feelings in that story, all the conflicted emotions a parent feels when a child suddenly becomes an adult, or at least starts trying to act like one.
Julie’s first draft had barely touched the surface of those feelings. As we talked, she kept saying things like, “Are you a psychologist?” Like somehow I had some rare insight into her feelings. I didn’t, actually. I was just asking obvious questions. It was Julie doing the psychologizing, figuring out what she wanted to say as we went along.
That was a reward of one kind, helping a writer see what they wanted to say but couldn’t. Then I got the revised draft. One of my worries about the story was that Julie would have trouble making her emotional transformation—accepting her son’s growing up—tangible to a reader. Communicating feelings is hard. They’re so abstract. You need something concrete.
Julie found that something. In the story her son breaks his leg playing football—he’d joined the team against her wishes—and in the doctor’s office she frets about the damage. The doctor chuckles and reassures her the leg will actually end up stronger, like all healed bone. And that’s where Julie found her image. Something in her relationship with her son has broken, she realizes. But it can heal. And it can become stronger. Laying down what you have gets you something better than you could have imagined.
It was then that I got the shivers. Not just from the image, or the lesson, which is a common one in GUIDEPOSTS. I was moved by Julie’s mind, by the mysterious process, a kind of alchemy, by which she'd poked around in the storehouse of her memory and somehow, miraculously, found the perfect words, the perfect idea.
I always say writing can be taught only up to a point. After that it’s alchemy. As an editor I get to watch that alchemy, sometimes help make it happen. Which I really do consider miraculous. Any act of creation is a mystery. But acts of language are the biggest mysteries. Without language we would know nothing, and so when we shape and make language we are shaping and making our world at the same time. It’s an awesome power. Sort of like the healing of bone. Or the breaking and rebuilding of relationships.
Like I said, the rewards steal up. So hats off to you, Julie. You broke your story down and made it that much stronger. Truly, a miracle to celebrate.
The storm came fast. Hard rain, whipping wind, water dancing on the pavement. The thunder woke us up. Or maybe it was our daughter Frances, who is two. Frances’ bed is beneath a window. The lightning must have lit up her room. Then a crack like sky splitting.
Sometimes the rewards of my job steal up on me. Today a writer I edit sent me a revised version of a story and—well, I got the shivers. Julie had submitted this story, about her teenage son pulling away from her, awhile back. “It’s not working,” she told me. “I can’t figure out why.”