Writing Cabin

From River Road to Richardsonion Romanesque

2012-01-29T19:09:00.008-05:00

I like grits. I really like them.

This Saturday morning I needed to replenish my supply of Quaker Grits. On my grocery run I bought a fresh container of the kind of enriched white hominy that can take an average of twenty minutes to prepare on stove top on a winter morning.

I would feel a little like Geraldine Page if I took the full twenty minutes, but I generally use a microwave. And then it is only eight minutes before a pat of butter blends its yellow with stir after stir of smooth, creamy grits, steaming in a white bowl.

What other New Englander had treated himself to that kind of breakfast Saturday morning?

Any of my fellow concertgoers Saturday evening?

I had not ever before been in the church where the choral concert took place Saturday evening. Friends who were members of the chorus were performing here for the first time. Not a fifteen-minute drive from my apartment, and I sat in a setting so unexpected and beautiful that I had to take pictures.

At intermission I stood with my usual crowd and gaped with them. I learned from one of them, a student of architecture, that the church was not -- as I had presumed -- the work of the architect of Boston's Trinity Church, Henry Hobson Richardson. The style was definitely Richardsonian Romanesque, but this 1888 structure had been designed by another architect -- John Lyman Faxon.

Well, what did I really know about Henry Hobson Richardson anyway, I asked myself this Sunday morning.

Not that he was a native of Louisiana, I assure you. But that's what I learned this morning, again and again, all the online resources corroborating the fact that he had been born and raised on a plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana.

I had travelled along the River Road through Vacherie time and again in my youth. My own father's mother had grown up in another of the plantation homes there. We had passed the home of Henry Hobson Richardson in our green Chevrolet, most likely, without knowing it.

Henry Hobson Richardson, the architect of Boston's Trinity Church, a man who ate grits for breakfast on winter mornings growing up?

Most likely.

Neo-Victorian Dust Jackets

2012-01-19T07:39:00.005-05:00

I think I know what the story would sound like that could use this solemn photograph for its dust jacket.

Something like French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles comes to mind. Or something like Possession (1990) by A.S. Byatt.

It’s a Victorian – or Neo-Victorian – image for me. If the book suited to this image had a distinct Victorian forebear, it would by something written by Thomas Hardy rather than anything by Charles Dickens or George Eliot.

If the novel were good enough, it might be hard for it to escape an eventual screen version. And that would be the disappointment – to have an easy way for the story to go away, reduced in memory to movie stills, an IMDb listing, a line in filmographies. The story would become so much data, fodder for Wikipedia articles, a target for comparisons, something you found in Google searches.

The image is about winter and an earth that absorbs the universal return to something indistinguishable. The image is about a point where no amount of care can preserve or make compelling. The image is about being forgotten.

A latter-day Matthew Arnold might agree to have his literary portrait snapped as he holds the book with this cover, his finger apparently keeping his place in a read he is determined to resume as soon as the photographer's session is over.

Who would not be aware of another mood when a book with this sunny wall on its cover happened to hand? Which of us latter-day Matthew Arnolds would not pause before just such a winter wall and salute the design below the window sill? What photographer of latter-day Matthew Arnolds would not drag his equipment outside to capture it?

If a book could be written worthy of that moment, its winter readers would be on their way to being cheered, heartened, infected with a chance for mirth.

The Measure of Our Days

2012-01-16T12:53:00.005-05:00

How do you take the measure of a week? What gives a week its flavor?

Do you measure it by a book you finished reading?

Do you measure it by a meal you ate at a friend’s table?

Do you measure it by whether you wrote something of which you are proud?

Do you measure it by a film you saw?

Do you measure it by the range of temperatures through which the sun shone through the dining room windows?

Do you measure it by the person who stopped by your office and asked for help?

Do you measure it by the meals you prepared in your kitchen that week?

Do you measure it by the number of nights you managed to sleep straight through?

Do you measure it by the plans you made to celebrate a family birthday?

Do you measure it by music you heard?

Do you measure it by photographs you took?

Do you measure it by the grocery run?

Do you measure it by the freshly laundered flannel sheets with which you made your bed?

Do you measure it by whether the reflection at Sunday services moved you to tears?

Do you measure it by an hour of therapy?

Do you measure it by a museum visit?

Do you measure it by the bills you paid?

Do you measure it by the dishes you washed and the rooms you cleaned?

Do you measure it by the ideas that came to you?

Do you measure it by love?

A Voice That Is Not on My Side

2012-01-12T08:00:00.002-05:00

There is a particular voice I sometimes hear inside that is not a reliable one or a helpful one.

I don’t always know to say it like that.

It is a voice that purports to explain things in my life about which I am fearful or conflicted. However, it is not a charitable voice; it explains by accusing; it explains by blaming me. It claims to represent the consensus of key individuals, individuals whom other people listen to and believe. When I don’t stop myself – and often I can’t – I mistake the script this voice reads; I mistake it for an objective and insightful analysis.

Its goal is not clarity, however.

In the language of classic sixteenth-century spiritual directors, this is a voice that requires discernment to recognize its true nature. This is not a voice whose goal is a peaceful awareness that can move things forward.

This voice is not on my side. I may initially assume it is, but it is not on my side.

Sometimes the patience and good humor I need, though, manage to make it through.

Even on a rainy January morning.

Christmas Puppets

2012-01-05T08:54:00.007-05:00

"Hello, Paul! Hello, Paul!"

My voice goes very high as I move a fat, fluffy lamb ornament across the arm of a chair toward a one-and-a-half-year-old on Christmas Day. Hanging on a low branch of his grandparents' Christmas tree, the lamb had been an easy target for Paul's finger. Rescued from the floor, the ornament became an impromptu puppet and I its puppeteer.

When Paul's mother was growing up, she and her sister and her brother used to take turns moving three creche figures of the Magi across the living room. Day by day, the three kings got closer and closer to where the doll-like figures of Mary and Joseph flanked an infant Jesus. It was a custom I did not recall from my own childhood Christmases, but I loved the idea of animating the figures -- making them puppets, in effect.

A little boy like me had been permitted to like puppets, slipping my hand into the cloth garments, nodding a puppet head with a sudden crook of my finger, making my voice sound like Tinker Bell or Muggs. Those were my favorite puppets, and I could make them hop and fly and appear to sleep and then wake up. I could do with the puppets what I saw girls my age and older do with their dolls.

On a corner of the mantlepiece in my apartment are three figures that belong to a creche set that I had bought when I was in grammar school. Each figure shows an old ink imprint of twenty-nine cents on the underside of its base -- these three kings had been a dollar's investment.

I think I have grown up to resemble one of them.

January Retreat

2012-01-02T13:12:00.025-05:00

The picturesque angels of Christmas are ready to leave.

Real angels only appear in real lives. In other words, they appear in lives that are not ready for angels or expecting the need of them. They appear in messy lives. They appear in lives that are about to change. They appear in lives that seem unable to change.

Do they ever appear in the Travel section of The New York Times?

Last night I was ready to say yes. The Sunday edition lay open on the kitchen table before me. At first I could not believe my eyes: "A Quick Shot of Peace, on a Budget" by Susan Gregory Thomas featured photographs of a retreat house that I have visited.

The real angel appeared in the columns of print threading the pictures. A real life appeared in those columns of narrative. A real voice named ways in which the author's life had hurt and bewildered and frightened her.

If her life could use an angel, I wondered, certainly mine could as well? My life with all its striving for the appearance of sage serenity, of emotional balance and elegant expression? Have you read this blog before? Have you ever wondered about the stories that keep safely out of the postings?

It is a customary month for me to wonder about angels. January four years ago I was planning a retreat, a weekend away at a monastery north of Boston.

January forty years ago I was getting ready for another kind of retreat, thirty days of silence and reflection in consideration of life as a priest.

I went back this morning to a retreat house about which I have written before. In a cemetery on the grounds, I searched out the grave of the spiritual director who had listened to me over the years. I stood under the grey sky and asked him again what a heart was for, what this heart was for, and whose approval it could be hoping for.

An angel like him sometimes made it possible to believe that I was perfectly all right.

New Year's Day Way Down Yonder in New Orleans

2012-01-01T17:06:00.004-05:00

For me, part of this sunny New England New Year's Day involves making a pot of blackeyed peas.

Part of this day also involves playing a 78 rpm picture record, one of my favorite Christmas presents.

For the moment, I know more about blackeyed peas than I do about Vogue Picture Records, but 2012 is the year that I get to taste both.

Happy New Year!

Ma and Pop

2011-12-20T19:09:00.004-05:00

Within five days of Christmas and I was praying to my father today. Sitting in sight of an altar to St. Joseph, I asked my father for help. All his careful planning had brought his family each year to a Christmas that provided something for each of us. On Christmas Eve each year he used to sit at the kitchen table and cut up apples and oranges for the fruit salad that would chill overnight and be served at meal's end the following afternoon.

He was a quiet man. His opening of gifts on Christmas Day was accomplished in a corner armchair with no show, no exclamations, no insistent expressions of gratitude. He knew my mother needed her space amid the stacks of presents we laid at her feet.

What do parents think when their grown children try to do Christmas for them? What do parents think about their own children's lives that look different in so many ways from how their own once looked? I want to think they had startled their own parents once upon a time, once upon a Christmas. I want to think that all the generations had sighed over bowls of fruit salad year in, year out, and had wondered -- each of them -- when they were going home.

Winter Journey: Shubert's "Winterreise"

2011-12-19T20:39:00.002-05:00

At a holiday open house this past weekend, I heard a guest talking about Three Pianos. I had already read about the Obie Award-winning play now in production at the A.R.T. in Cambridge. Winterreise, the Schubert song-cycle at the heart of the evening’s entertainment, is a touchstone for me, recalling a cold, sunny afternoon in an apartment in Boston’s Back Bay where thirty years ago a friend, a voice major, rehearsed the piece while I watched. A tall ficus tree had stood in the window next to the piano.

I have not listened to Winterreise with any regularity since then. I thought yesterday that I might try what a favorite high-school teacher had once suggested as a useful method for deepening appreciation of a piece of music. He had advised listening to a variety of recordings of the composition and noticing differences in the experience.

With YouTube as a source of recordings, I moved yesterday through three renderings of “Der Lindenbaum” (”The Linden Tree”), the fifth song in the cycle. The first performance of the song that I watched comes from a 1930 German film titled Das Lockende Ziel (The Alluring Goal), starring opera singer Richard Tauber. The movie tells the story of a singer, and an early scene of his singing “Der Lindenbaum” – almost off the cuff – in a restaurant or café is useful for showing the reaction of the people who hear it. This song touches something in a whole range of the restaurant’s customers. The scene told me to expect that I might encounter other people with a similar reaction to Schubert's song.

The next recording of “Der Lindenbaum” shows some of those other people. Some readers may be as surprised as I to learn that before The Sound of Music ever moved American audiences, first on the Broadway stage (1959) and then as an Academy Award-winning film (1965), there were two German-Austrian movies about the Trapp Family Singers. What appears an impromptu performance of “Der Lindenbaum” in Die Trapp Familie (1956) evokes reactions from listeners similar to those depicted in Das Lockende Ziel.

Sentimentality? There is no denying that both the 1930 movie and the 1956 movie strive for an emotional response. One movie predates the political victory of National Socialism; we witness the readiness on the part of ordinary Germans to respond to a song associated with the homeland of their youth and childhood. The later film follows the defeat of National Socialism by ten years; this time immigrants from all the continents respond to the very same song, reminded of the tie to homeland that they can all feel.

Without such external narratives, what does Schubert's musical setting of the poem by Wilhelm Mueller manage to convey? Listening for a third time to "Der Lindenbaum," this time to a 1935 recording by an all-male German choral group, a listener is ready to be haunted.

Ready for German text? Ready for English translation? Ready for the overarching structure of the twenty-four songs? I am.

I might be ready for a January project.

Bringing the Greens to Henry James...Again

2011-12-18T18:26:00.001-05:00

In Cambridge Cemetery is a plot where the family of American writer Henry James lie buried. One Christmas season a swag of greenery appeared at the writer's tombstone (I like to think) for the first time. The writer of writingcabin.blogspot.com had simply wanted to pay tribute to another, far greater writer in the way that members of a family do when they pay Christmas visits to loved ones. The urge to write, the need to write creates another kind of family. Again this Christmas the James family plot gets its bit of greenery.

The custom is repeated.

Saturday Morning Atlantic

2011-12-13T20:13:00.005-05:00

Friday had been a day for Teresa of Avila and Wislawa Szymborska.

Sixteenth-century Teresa was familiar. Her autobiography had been sitting on a shelf in my office for three years. What urged me to pick it up and read on Friday, I do not know -- but it was a real "Tolle et lege" moment.

The passage I found was about the uselessness of trying to quiet thinking. A cloistered contemplative and mystic, Teresa knew that thinking must have its day. Thinking must go its paths. Thinking must move on and on, unmuzzled, unmuffled, ready to try out a new way of understanding life and the things of life.

Teresa was aware of the suspicious urge simply to appear quiet, to feel quiet, to mimic a mystic quiet. She knew that only some readers would understand what she was writing when she spoke about God's way of finally making space in us to hear what we would never know how to hear on our own.

And then the Polish poet.

A recent review in The New York Review of Books alerted me to Wislawa Szymborska. I am late in knowing her and reading her, even here in the United States. Reading her poems at home Friday evening was the experience of hearing a voice I did not know to expect, a voice I did not know I wanted to follow until its ways kept making sense.

It is the sort of surprise that you need when you discover what has happened to lives you thought you knew. It is the sort of surprise that you need when you discover what has happened to the life you thought you could always have.

Saturday morning, fresh from my Friday with Teresa of Avila and Wislawa Szymborska, I drove to the Atlantic. Unplanned trip, I returned to pathways that I have walked at times in my life when I faced the kind of change another person cannot measure.

It was actually good to be back.

I Wish I Were in Venice Hearing the Bells

2011-12-07T08:42:00.000-05:00

Irish Wake

2011-12-03T22:40:00.004-05:00

The mother of a colleague at work died last week. She had lived to her early nineties, and in her later years there had been that sad wandering from self that can make death a release and a relief for a family. When I offered condolences early one morning passing my colleague in the halls, Pat gave me a gentle smile. She had managed her farewells to her mother a long time ago.

A Catholic of my own generation, Pat is articulate, well educated and utterly efficient. Her family gatherings – among the most recent her own daughter’s wedding – get into narratives that people at work recognize as Pat’s. It is a large family that many of us met just a few years back at the funeral of a sister; her struggle with cancer had been quiet and heroic.

I arrived at the funeral home in a suburb of Boston yesterday in the late afternoon. It was a place whose address I needed to check on my phone at a certain point. I parked a block before the turn off for a parking lot that I expected to find crowded.

I did not see people from work on the walkways leading to the home. Some colleagues had talked about finishing their Friday work early in the interests of an easier commute to the suburban neighborhood. I got ready to greet Pat and her family on my own rather than as part of a familiar group.

At the front door of the white clapboard building, an employee of the parlor was waiting to greet me. When I nodded at him and started toward the line of people ahead of me down the hall, the gentleman extended his arm in the direction of a room to my left.

“This way, sir.”

With his guidance I found myself walking through two rooms to where the real end of the line of visitors was. I would eventually wend my way through still another room and then down two hallways before I got to the viewing area where Pat and her family greeted the arrival of wave after wave of friends and neighbors.

The laughter of recognition. Expansive embraces. Introductions and conversations, one head leaning close to another in confidential exchange.

Everywhere around the rooms and down the hallways had been photographs of a large, active Boston Irish family and their matriarch – wedding portraits, graduation groupings, vacation vans, anniversary celebrations. Everywhere had been flowers with the names of their donors prominently displayed and easily legible.

This was a Boston I could brush up against again and again and never fully know – a Boston of neighborhoods and Catholic parishes and parochial school friendships that lasted for decades. It was a Boston that had once boasted a priest in every family. It was a Boston down whose funeral parlor hallways generations of families had lined to greet the newly bereaved of other families they knew.

I arrived home over an hour later and amid the familiar intimacies of a Christmas season felt a newcomer still.

I Give Myself a Birthday Gift

2011-12-01T15:33:00.003-05:00

The Ease of It All

2011-11-20T17:30:00.013-05:00

Late Saturday afternoon a week ago, I was walking the Cape Cod National Seashore. In the company of four members of my family, I withstood the winds along the nearly empty beach. It was a dramatic landscape onto which we had launched ourselves for the short time. Everything about the wide sky above and before us spoke of winter coming, of cold deepening as each week passed, of darkness settling in earlier and earlier.

According to plan, early that evening two cars with those four members of the family pulled onto Route 6A. Within an hour they would be off the Cape; in another hour they would all be home. I would be sitting on the back deck of my niece's house in Eastham by then. Away from the shore there were no more winds, and a forecast rise in temperatures had already set in. The moon was big in the black sky. From the radio in my niece's kitchen I could hear a station familiar from last July, Outermost Radio in Provincetown. With summer instincts, I raised my BlackBerry camera to the sky.

Waking up alone in the Eastham house the next morning, I took my time showering, got in the car and went for breakfast at the Fairway. Afterwards I took a coffee with me and parked in the lot at Nauset Light. I rolled down the windows, sent out a couple of text messages, and wondered at the ease of it all.

What winter ever had the final word?

Along a November Trail

2011-11-15T20:44:00.005-05:00

Imagine living a life in which no one else has to be interested.

I am enjoying Piano Lessons by NPR commentator Noah Adams. A friend in his forties who has recently begun to take piano lessons mentioned the book to me. The copy that I borrowed from a nearby public library has been well handled, well used since the appearance on the shelves of this 1997 first edition. I live in a Public Radio kind of town.

You write a certain way if you are an NPR commentator. Your livelihood depends on living a life in which people are interested – or at least writing about it as though they should be. My friend learning the piano admits to being sad approaching the end of this narrative of a year in the life of an adult learner like himself.

This past weekend I accompanied my oldest brother, his wife, his grown daughter and his two-year-old grandson on a morning walk through a nature preserve on Cape Cod. The path we followed was quiet that early on a Saturday, but it was not empty. The wind was up, and we kept up our pace. When we had completed the trail and returned to the visitors' center, we seemed to separate fairly quickly and settle before different exhibits and into various interactive spaces.

In our walk I had been explaining to my brother some of the dynamics of writing a blog like Writing Cabin. I mentioned to him the variety of readers – a woman from France whose English class had once translated a posting about our mother's grandfather clock, twin brothers who had been classmates of mine in a New Orleans high school. When I took a picture of red berries on one bush along the trail and another picture of blue berries on a juniper tree, I did not inform my brother that the images would likely appear in a posting I would soon write for Writing Cabin.

Sturdy and hale, my brother is barely a month into his seventies. I watched him seated in the visitors' center after our walk. He had taken one of the chairs that was set up for observing the birds and squirrels in a protected area beyond a large picture window. He was very still. I don't recall ever having seen him that still before or for that long.

Ordinarily at the side of his grandson on these outings, pointing things out, naming and explaining and describing, my brother looked briefly like someone who had a morning hour that only he could live, a life that only he could explore. It was as though he were testing out what it might be like to have a morning in which no one else needed to be interested.

Bloggers – as well as NPR commentators – love to write about moments like that.

Anniversary

2011-11-06T20:47:00.008-05:00

On November 1 of this year, I observed the tenth anniversary of my father’s passing.

The evening before, I had begun work on a project that had as its earliest goal the easy creation of a Christmas gift that I could give to each of my brothers and each of my nieces and my nephew. With the thought of publishing a small book on a site like Blurb.com, I had set out to collect any postings in this blog in which I reflect on my parents and what I remember of them. A touching tribute, no?

What happened, however, is that I searched the blog and read – again and again – a record that was not always and everywhere a tribute.

I found questions.

I found what had been hard at times to say, what had been difficult to admit.

What right, I found myself eventually asking, did I have to present to the members of my family a book punctuated by those questions, those admissions, those difficulties?

Would I transgress some ethical boundary if I suggested that life growing up in that house had sometimes been hard?

Would I disturb in others memories best left forgotten or, more painful still, private and unnamed?

I have time to mull. I can give myself the leisure of some days and weeks to ask: better not to touch this topic? better to let it stay just mine? better to look across a Christmas table and smile and laugh and give a future the chance to unwind without its real past?

The Places We Need

2011-10-23T08:52:00.006-04:00

A friend is enjoying the final morning of a weekend retreat. He is in a place I know well, and it is easy to imagine the options from which he chooses the path for his last walk under a cool but sunny October sky. It is his birthday today, and he returns this afternoon to his family and its plans and its needs. With the retreat, he made a distinctive choice for how to usher in this next chapter of his life. It is a choice I understand.

Another friend is walking the streets of New York this morning. He is alone after an evening gathering of old friends and former colleagues. His train leaves in a couple of hours, but he heads this morning to places that he knows well from living here twenty years ago. He is a planner, and so I imagine he walks with a departure time guiding his steps, his pace. The city around him is an environment in which some people walk comfortably with themselves. This friend certainly does.

I reflect this morning on fresh memories of standing in a sunny field threaded by low stone walls. I had set out early yesterday with maps and directions to an old farm in the Blackstone River valley. Driving there alone, I got to make as many wrong turns as I needed near the end of the trip. Far from highways and interstates, I had almost resigned myself to not finding Cormier's Woods. I was ready to undertake the hour drive home when the road sign appeared, and in ten minutes I was standing alone in a quiet New England field.

We all get to the places we need.

Father Love

2011-10-20T07:15:00.005-04:00

I will admit that I cried when I first saw this photograph on eBay.

I did not need to know who the father was, where he had lived or when. I did not need to know who had taken the photograph. I wager a reaction similar to mine, however, had motivated someone to pick up the camera just then. The record of a father's love on a Sunday afternoon...

Who does not want a Sunday afternoon like that? Who does not want a father like that? Who does not want to live with that memory somehow touching every Sunday he still gets to live?

Red Beans

2011-10-08T08:04:00.024-04:00

It is the early morning hour of a day you have dinner guests.

The red kidney beans have soaked all night.

After work yesterday you went to the grocery store and picked out your sweet onions, the green peppers, the stalks of celery. You hunted and found the smoked ham hocks required by the familiar Paul Prudhomme recipe. You decided against more white pepper and cayenne pepper -- you know your mother's Monday pot of red beans never needed them.

Twelve hours to let all those ingredients bubble and thicken on the right front burner of your stove before you are ready to fix each of your guests a Sazerac cocktail. And then your New Orleans act can end.

You know these two guests well. You know you can get them to tell you more about Spain and the vacation there that they arranged for their families this past summer. You know they will be ready with questions about your own venture last weekend into the rainy Berkshires. They will understand a Melville pilgrimage.

You will not talk, though, about the grey skies above the field behind Arrowhead, the Pittsfield farm where Melville completed Moby Dick within sight of the mountains. You will keep that memory for yourself, the quiet, the cool air, the sense of yourself that comes in those moments.

Your guests are bringing a creamy Spanish dessert. The moment in which it comes out at meal's end will find each person at table smiling with his distinctive memories.

French Teacher

2011-10-06T16:47:00.005-04:00

In a bookstore in New Orleans this evening, a woman will read from a recently published book of her poetry. Emails from the bookstore keep me posted on such events. Ever since the December after Katrina, when I ordered my Christmas gifts from the store, I have received these regular prompts to imagine literary evenings in an uptown neighborhood of New Orleans.

I do not hesitate on a busy day to delete emails sent from the bookstore. After all, what’s the likelihood of my being in my hometown anytime soon?

In this morning’s email, though, I discovered a name that started me remembering. Forty years ago, as a sophomore in college, I had taken a course in twentieth-century French literature. It was a 400-level course taught entirely in the target language, and I had just begun my study of French the year before. After summer courses on the 200-level and a readings course from a delightful dandy of a teacher who taught perched on the edge of his desk, I resolved to take a serious plunge.

Madame was my serious plunge.

In my years of schooling I had grown accustomed to teachers who clearly took pains to win their students over. There were rewards for doing well – praise, smiles, the suggestion that we were on our way to interacting as colleagues. In contrast, I sat in my first week of classes on twentieth-century French authors and encountered a teacher who was not going to woo me or anyone else in the room.

Every class I listened to a French that was classically calm, sophisticated in its distinctions, never sentimental or fussy or confused. About Madame there was the severe elegance of the French academic. Or so I surmised, barely twenty years old myself and five years away from my first view of Paris.

The truth, hard to credit, is that she had been a woman in her mid-30s at the time, a young woman who had grown up in Colorado and Texas. She spoke, nonetheless, with authority about Gide and Giraudoux and Sartre and Proust.

Somehow or other, I have to think, she was even then in the process of becoming the woman who could write thirty years later:

…at most periods our lives just flow through undifferentiated and unremarkable territory… But there are exceptional moments when we become aware of the terrain, or realize it has changed under us, and at crucial times we find ourselves on an apex, looking Janus-like at ourselves and our possibilities—the past sloping one way, the future another.

I continue to learn my lessons.

So, I suspect, does Madame.

Passage quoted from Finding Higher Ground: A Life of Travels (2003) by Catharine Savage Brosman

A Writer's Home: John Greenleaf Whittier

2011-09-22T18:32:00.005-04:00

What does the bookish life look like? Some people visited Amesbury, Massachusetts, seventy-five years ago with that question in mind – enough people, it seems, that custodians of the Whittier Home had postcards printed for sale to its visitors.

In the 1930's there might well have lingered about a writer's house like this a kind of nostalgia. Sturdy hardcover readers that visitors would have encountered in their grade-school classrooms regularly featured writings by John Greenleaf Whittier. Here was the flavor of daily life in New England much as Thornton Wilder tried to evoke it for theatergoers in his 1938 play Our Town.

The wallpaper as it appears in the old postcards is still on the walls of the Garden Room. I saw the old green paper in the poet's study this past weekend. Likewise, the guide pointed out, the rug on the floor is the very one across which the poet had walked.

I got to stand this past Sunday by the window beside which the poet had rocked sunny days and snowy.

But then so had any visitor to the house in the 1930s.

What I would like a chance to do is stand by that window at night – lie in a bed upstairs later and listen to the house settle through the night – wake up at three o'clock and hear rain on the roof – drink a first cup of coffee on the steps to the backyard in the early morning. Unfortunately, I probably know all the practical reasons why the custodians of such literary properties cannot allow an overnight visitor, even one willing to pay generously for the privilege.

I bet a modest guestroom with a firm, modern mattress and a private bath would sell, though.

Nearing Summer's End

2011-09-09T15:54:00.004-04:00

One of my brothers collects random pieces of old hotel china. He and I have not spoken of the exact nature of the lure these items have for him. His decorating instincts are impeccable, though, and mismatched plates and saucers appear in just the right places on walls or atop side tables in his New Orleans home.

My brother has not put into words for me the imaginative place to which these old dishes invite him. I can hear him say, "They're just fun."

I suspect there might be something lost for him in anyone's attempt to probe the secret behind a vanished hotel or its dinnerware. He may not even think there is a secret.

He might sigh with a hint of exasperation if he knew I was writing about the whole situation.

Hotels that are no more suggest long seasons that will never come back.

The Checkley House no longer stands on a promontory in Prout's Neck, Maine. A vivid evocation of the life that once swirled on the beaches below it came from the brush of Winslow Homer. The painter's studio was not far from the Checkley, and it was a member of his family who later linked the hotel to Homer's 1890 canvas Nuit d'été.

That summer night is over.

All the summer nights that guests at the Checkley had the good fortune to enjoy are over.

An old postcard is a way to summon a ghostly glimmer of those days and nights.

A piece of old Checkley House china might do the same.

Bowls of Flowers

2011-08-30T20:36:00.000-04:00

Three Augusts ago a niece of mine was getting married. When she and her fiancé began planning the rehearsal dinner, I was able to offer them the use of one of the public rooms where I work.

The morning of the dinner I worked with the gentlemen from facilities in setting up eight round tables. Tablecloths hung neatly over the seats of the metal chairs.

I did not remember hearing anything from my niece or my brother and his wife about flowers for the tables. Amid all the wedding planning that they had been doing on their own, how easy it might have been to let something minor like that slip.

I got into my car and drove to a local market that had an extensive outdoor nursery. Eight hanging baskets of white impatiens fit into my hatchback for the short ride back to work.

Wicker baskets could effectively hide the clay-colored plastic pots, I thought. I headed to a nearby bargain basement. Before I could find eight identical wicker baskets deep enough for the impatiens, I came across a stack of ceramic serving bowls, each the same deep red orange.

In a short while I was back at work. I had placed each of the eight plants in its own bowl. The line of orange bowls, the row of white blooms made me stop. The calm regularity touched something inside. They might possibly prove unnecessary for the evening's tables, but I recognized that I had done something that provided me a distinctive pleasure.

I walked into my apartment yesterday after work. Twenty-four hours after Hurricane Irene, the windows were open and sun filled the quiet rooms. The previous week I had used one of the red orange bowls from three years back for flowers to celebrate the successful completion of a work deadline.

The bowl of flowers made me stop. The calm and regularity touched something inside. Three years of conscientiously building a new life, and I have learned to recognize more surely the things that provide me that distinctive pleasure.

Coleus

2011-08-18T18:38:00.005-04:00

Lugustrum and boxwood and arborvitae.

Hydrangea and coleus and begonia. Sometimes zinnias and caladiums. One rare summer, sweet peas climbing up a trellis.

Childhood gardens hold sway over our hearts and memories. If there is a photo that brings any of them back, it brings them all back. There are mysteries about why only some things grew in the summer gardens my mother planted. Governing the front yard were landscape principles lost in generations of family gardeners long past.

So I have three pots of coleus on the edge of my side porch. They started a year ago as shoots from one summer annual that continued to flourish near my kitchen window through autumn and winter and spring.

Early this summer I bought the three clay pots and a bag of potting soil. I transplanted the shoots from their transitional jars of water. I placed the pots outside, a little unsure whether they would survive real air, real sun, real rain. Daily I carried my watering can down the stairs to the side porch connected to my apartment.

They take their mid-August bow before my camera.

They are all that remains of the begonia and hydrangea and caladium around which my mother dug her hand shovel decades ago.

The black-and-white photograph inspired an earlier post on Writing Cabin. Please feel free to visit it.

Early Evening Sun on Shades

2011-08-12T19:16:00.000-04:00

Early Morning Sun on Leaves

2011-08-12T07:36:00.000-04:00

Summer in the Old West

2011-08-08T11:28:00.016-04:00

This was one of those years in the Territory when Apache smoke signals spiraled up from the stony mountain summits and many a ranch cabin lay as a square of blackened ashes on the ground and the departure of a stage from Tonto was the beginning of an adventure that had no certain happy ending…

“Stage to Lordsburg” (1937) by Ernest Haycox has a well-paced opening sentence. The images are the commonplaces of a Western tale, and their accumulation is unexpectedly calming. I sense I can sit back, seated once more in the darkened movie theatres of my childhood. The black-and-white landscape before me and the characters who ride across it or walk in its moonlight will make only familiar demands.

All this while the coach went rushing down the ceaseless turns of the mountain road, rocking on its fore and aft springs, its heavy wheels slamming through the road ruts and whining on the curves.

Since the story is the basis of the 1939 movie Stagecoach, I obviously expect to read about the movement of a coach. I am not surprised that the author writes about the sounds of the wheels along the mountain roads. With nothing but the written word the author creates sounds that I seem almost to hear. With nothing but the written word the author plausibly re-creates for this armchair reader the discomforts and sudden motions of a kind of carriage in which I have never actually traveled.

When he came back to the yard night lay wild and deep across the desert and the moonlight was a frozen silver that touched but could not dissolve the world’s incredible blackness. The girl Henriette walked along the Tonto road, swaying gently in the vague shadows.

I am taken by surprise. This writer knows where he is taking his reader. The short story that first appeared in a 1937 issue of Collier’s Weekly would claim an hour at most of a reader’s time. To claim the full hour, a writer like Ernest Haycox had to know what he was doing. Haycox is not a name that has entered any literary canon that affected my reading lists in college or graduate school. There are other reasons to write then? Well, yes, says the history of American cinema.

Henriette sat with her eyes pinned to the gloved tips of her fingers, remembering the tall shape of Malpais Bill cut against the moonlight of Gap Station.

Ernest Haycox had created a quiet, composed character travelling in a “dove-colored dress” and named her Henriette. Dudley Nichols, writing the screenplay for John Ford’s Stagecoach, recast the complex Henriette as rough-and-tumble Dallas, played by Claire Trevor opposite John Wayne’s Ringo Kid. No one wants John Ford’s masterpiece different, but Henriette is worth meeting.

There was this wisdom in her, this knowledge of the fears that men concealed behind their manners, the deep hungers that rode them so savagely, and the loneliness that drove them to women of her kind.

The writer who created Henriette seventy years ago is good reading, I reckon, on a summer morning of vacation.

Excerpts from “Stage to Lordsburg” (1937) by Ernest Haycox collected in Stephanie Harrison’s Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen (2005)

Provincetown 2011

2011-08-04T16:59:00.003-04:00

It is fun to leave a place by water.

The 7:30 ferry had just pulled away from the Provincetown pier. I took my BlackBerry out onto the windy deck for a final picture of the day.

Let me record that early evening sky – and nothing else of yesterday’s gamble. I had taken a chance that the day could be merry and easy. I get to keep its memory that way.

August Morning

2011-08-01T07:05:00.006-04:00

It is the first of the month. I wrote the rent check at the kitchen table this morning in the quiet between 5 and 6 o’clock. It is a familiar time to me in these rooms.

Without straining, I let part of a dream return.

I am sitting at another table in last night’s dream. I am explaining something to a small group of people around me. Among them and seated directly across from me is Anne, a woman in her eighties whom I have known for almost thirty years. Every meeting with her over those years, not one of them planned or expected, she has been gracious and centered. She is listening to me now with her usual attention.

I have reached an important part of the explanation. Is it the plot of a fairy tale or myth or heroic fantasy? Whatever it is, I know clearly what I have to say next, but emotion makes speaking difficult.

I look across to Anne:

“You have to go to your deepest fear – or your hardest sorrow. That’s the door. You go in there if you hope to make it through.”

Cape Cod 2011

2011-07-30T08:14:00.000-04:00

The Book That Got Away

2011-07-29T19:26:00.006-04:00

When you take an hour of your vacation and visit a used-book store, you run a risk.

You start by making the same choice you would in any book shop. You move toward some sections and ignore others. You pass the travel section to spend more time amid old volumes of poetry; you let the vintage cookbooks rest in peace so you can make an extra careful perusal of the published journals and collections of essays.

There is a better than average chance that most of the books on the shelves in front of you are out of print. You smile to see familiar editions that you have had on your own shelves at home for thirty years. You examine other editions that you had no idea existed, covers that must have been redesigned by the time you were born. You hunt to see whether there might be a copy of a book you had read as a guest in someone’s home years before.

The risk, of course, is that the volume you return to the bookstore shelf in one town is the book you will be thinking of twenty-four hours later at your rental in another. You may even be describing it over drinks with a vacation companion, reminding him of the novelty of an anthology of short stories that were adapted into well-known movies.

Yes, this week I returned to a bookstore shelf in Wellfleet a soft-cover copy of Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen. What was the likelihood that I would really want to read Mary Orr’s short story “The Wisdom of Eve” on which the Joseph Mankiewicz classic film All About Eve (1950) was based?

Back from Cape Cod two days later, I went promptly to my hometown library and signed out that very collection of stories edited and published by Stephanie Harrison in 2005. In the comfort of home I read from my library book Mary Orr’s “The Wisdom of Eve” before signing onto Netflix and watching All About Eve.

The book that got away? It didn’t really.

And the movie is better.

Gondola

2011-07-21T08:12:00.004-04:00

Summer heat is a graceful black gondola.

It will take you places. You may have thought you were securely moored in this year of your life. Slowly it occurs to you, though, that you are adrift.

If you live with someone or work beside people, the heat is an issue, a problem, a complaint. It becomes and stays the topic of conversation. It is an excuse for things not going the way they usually do.

At times in the day when accommodating the heat is a solitary task, the surface of your life can ripple. You may remember things that don't bear mentioning. The sound of the exhaust fan in your childhood Louisiana home. June sun reflecting off a canal in Venice. The touch of bare feet on hardwood floors.

When I saw my copy of Joseph Brodsky's Watermark this morning, I gave in. I read, letting his thoughts of Italy and his memories of Venice take me again past parts of my life, even the palazzi and gentle waters of summers I barely remember.

Rebooted

2011-07-19T08:51:00.005-04:00

In effect, I got unplugged.

Whatever plans I had for the evening, whatever priorities topped tomorrow’s to-do list, whatever tickets I had purchased for the weekend ahead, I became whoever I could continue to be in an emergency room cubicle.

Without drama and fortunately without pain, I had entered the work day of a number of people I did not know. Nothing these professionals might uncover about symptoms that had begun earlier in my afternoon would be reason for any of them to re-think their own plans for the evening or their to-do lists for the next day.

As someone with high blood pressure and a heart episode in his history, I had not been surprised by my doctor's nurse and what she told me over the phone when I called her an afternoon six weeks ago. Directed to get an EKG at the nearest emergency room, I suspected there were various readings for the physical sensations I had begun to have after lunch that day. Only an EKG, however, could rule out the most troubling possibility.

It was with relief that I stood outside the emergency wing entrance later that evening. A friend was on her way to pick me up. I was going home - that was the good news. For a few hours I had not needed my ordinary Thursday routines and expectations. I had effectively been unplugged from them.

I work better now.

Evenings are fun.

Brimfield Antique Show

2011-07-15T19:43:00.003-04:00

Some part of me is still walking in the sun at the Brimfield Antique Show.

I may be sitting right now in the early evening rooms of my apartment, comforted by the presence of what months and years have made familiar in my life. This morning I walked amid what other people's lives had once found familiar and comforting. What had sat on shelves and tables in other homes, what had made earlier kitchens convenient, what had passed as decorative and interesting lined the tables of vendor after vendor.

The friend who had introduced me last summer to the Brimfield Antique Show was walking on her own elsewhere through the maze of displays. Linked by the pledge of a call on our cell phones every hour, we acknowledged the capricious lure we might each of us experience in the face of entirely different objects. We did what good friends do at times - we left one another alone.

Summer Humidity and Sweet Foxing

2011-07-09T11:54:00.019-04:00

I had first been attracted to the volume because it was in French. It was a library cast-off standing forlornly unread on the shelf of a library annex in a Louisiana seminary I had attended in the early 1970’s. A visit to old friends at the seminary some years back and a solitary perusal of dusty tomes up on the third floor of the building brought me in contact with La Prière missionnaire (1936) by Pierre Charles, S.J.

The author’s name had certainly been familiar to me. The seminary's library shelves had been home for a considerable number of English translations of this man’s collections of meditations. As first-year men, however, we had been gently warned off such “pre-digested” reflections. Reading them, we were told, would be no substitute for our sitting in our rooms in the presence of the words of the scriptures themselves, letting anything – or sometimes more importantly, nothing – suggest itself to our conscious reflection.

Some years earlier the soft-cover volume by Pierre Charles had evidently been withdrawn from another seminary library in Mobile, Alabama. The “Date Due” slip glued to the first page was blank; no one must have been enticed to practice his theological French with even a brief borrowing of the book. When I boldly asked whether I might be permitted to take the volume back home with me, the superior of the house graciously – almost eagerly – acquiesced.

Care had obviously been taken long ago with the look of the publication. The title pages of each of the thirty-three reflections in this volume have a distinctive layout with a page header of lines and bars of various thicknesses conveying somehow a flavor of the Thirties.

Opening the book some evenings and haphazardly selecting a reflection to read, I can be reminded of reading – and writing – blog entries.

Pierre Charles seemed always to start with a short Latin phrase, something taken from a scripture passage in his breviary or sometimes a directive clearly lifted from a liturgical text. And then he allowed himself to weave his thoughts into a meditative essay. The essay was not based exclusively on logical conclusions from definitions and distinctions he might have learned years before in theological textbooks; rather, it focused on the concrete realities of a vast world around him that the Belgian theologian was continually reminding himself not to ignore or dismiss or simplify.

There is foxing on most of these seventy-year-old pages – that's the book antiquarian's term for the discolorations that result on paper with the passage of years. Sitting in a summer living room one evening this week, I recognized my characteristic reaction against the humidity that had seeped through my open windows during the day. In a time before airconditioning and other archival protections, such humidity had been a cause for those changes on books' pages, but people had luckily not valued their books the less. With some of us, the evidence of a book's survival through years of exposure to days and nights of weather draws us into reflections that feel close to wisdom.

Some evenings I let my rusty French slow my reading of the words of Pierre Charles. I value those words and the journey they make through the reddish stains of the pages into my conscious reflection. I need at times to hear such a man try to make sense of his world, his life in it and his life for it – no matter the weather.

Summer Morning

2011-07-02T07:55:00.001-04:00

A Peach and a Pear

2011-06-19T13:15:00.006-04:00

I felt a breeze through the window above my kitchen sink this week. It was breakfast, and I had decided to try one of the peaches I had bought a few days earlier. I felt the serrated edge of the kitchen knife cut through the skin of the peach and move easily through the meat to the pit – and with a twist the two halves of the peach separated.

It was a relief to discover that I had not waited too long for this treat – and a relief that I had waited long enough.

I began to slice half moons of peach and carry each slice to my mouth on the side of the knife. I recalled as a boy standing next to my mother at the sink, watching her hand move carefully to my open mouth and deposit a fresh slice of peach on my tongue.

Canned peaches appeared regularly as dessert at our kitchen table when I was growing up. Fresh peaches were always eaten at the sink, however, with the faucet running so my mother could wash the knife and her fingers from time to time.

It was a rare taste of wildness in our careful home.

When a pear yielded just as easily to my serrated knife this past Thursday evening, I knew my dinner salad could sport still another shade of green.

Summer routines.

Modern French

2011-06-08T07:24:00.005-04:00

I like thinking back to a time when I did not know something that I now know. When it is something that I ended up knowing well and that I have enjoyed for most of my adult life, I can be curious about that earlier Donald -- the Donald whose wonder and desire to know were not yet transformed by the effort of learning.

An eager student in high school, I regularly paged through a textbook the very week I purchased it. Before any teacher's lesson plans or quizzes or quarterly tests could make some pages and charts and photographs more familiar than others, I liked seeing things for myself.

I knew there was a likelihood that the final chapters of a textbook would escape even the most conscientious syllabus. There is about the final fifty or a hundred pages of a textbook what I can only describe as a mood of loneliness. Some vocabulary will always remain unmastered; some laboratory experiments will never be done; some short story will survive at best as a solitary summer read.

Modern French (1964) by Dan Desberg and Lucette Rollet Kenan was selected by the American Institute of Graphic Arts for inclusion in its collection Fifty Books of the Year (1965). In the academic year 1969-1970, my freshman year in college, I used this textbook in French 101. Click on the photograph for greater detail.

You can view this page in AIGA Design Archives. Among other features described by the archives, Modern French boasts a cover "stamped in blue ink and black leaf."

When we emptied my parents' house in 2004, I uncovered my copy of the textbook. There is a stateliness to the design. I am happy these days to see on my shelves the simple Baskerville typeface, the title in blue on the tan spine of the book.

The simplicity retains its challenge.

PAUL Et vous vous êtes bien amusés?

PHILIPPE Enormément.

The Last Day of May

2011-06-01T07:05:00.002-04:00

I sat with the comfortable shadows of the last evening of May.

I had opened all the windows in my second-floor apartment.

I did not turn on the lamps.

In the quiet after dinner I began to read next to a window.

Putting down the book, I let an hour pass while I thought:

What is the right question I should be asking myself these days?

I have reached a point in my life when there is no more important consideration.

Assigned Reading

2011-05-18T19:29:00.023-04:00

I am reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959) in part because it showed up on a table at work where my colleagues – a literate bunch – drop off books they no longer want.

I am reading Henderson the Rain King as well because it had shown up on a list of titles from my sophomore year in high school. It had been a list made up just for me. The compiler was a young teacher in his twenties for whose English class I had particularly enjoyed reading A Separate Peace (1959) by John Knowles. Full of questions about life and God, I had asked to speak with this teacher one day after school. Some recommendations for my reading followed. The only other title on the list that I recall is Atheism in Our Time (1965) by Ignace Lepp.

The man who compiled that list is about to retire.

Confession time: I did not read everything on the list. I am fifty-nine years old, and I am only now reading Henderson the Rain King. Not that I didn’t try to read it back in 1967. Henderson the Rain King was no Separate Peace, however. Forty-four years later, I read it – and read it with pleasure – but perfectly understand that Bellow was no easy assignment for that younger reader in love with the friendships at Devon School.

“I went back to the Devon School not long ago...”

The New England prep school setting that John Knowles had begun to create with that opening line of A Separate Peace is not too different from the setting to which my sophomore English teacher eventually moved for a forty-year career. Reading the brief biography that his school linked to an announcement of his retirement, I can locate the years he taught me in New Orleans. I watch the accompanying slide show and smile at the earliest photographs of him. An elegant man now in the signature bowtie of his professional maturity, he wears a turtleneck and sport coat in a black-and-white picture from the initial years of his employment.

I recall the pages of poems with which he used to supplement the bound texts for our English course. Across some of the ditto masters with their carefully typed verses he would slash random lines with his pen, arcs of enthusiasm to startle his students into spontaneity and fresh reading energy. His in-class recitations could approach a yawp if he suspected my classmates and I were unnecessarily passive or complacent.

I heard my teacher’s voice last night as I read one passage by Bellow. It is American millionaire Henderson speaking here to an Arnewi prince in the deep solitudes of the African continent:

“I know,” I said, “superficially I don’t look sick. And it sounds monstrous that anybody with my appearance should still care about himself, his health or anything else. But that’s how it is. Oh, it’s miserable to be human. You get queer diseases. Just because you’re human and for no other reason. Before you know it, as the years go by, you’re just like other people you have seen, with all those peculiar human ailments. Just another vehicle for temper and vanity and rashness and all the rest. Who wants it? Who needs it? These things occupy the place where a man’s soul should be.”

I can understand now why my teacher would have thought this just the book for a young man grappling with questions about life and God.

For a time as an adult, I followed him into the English classroom – a career choice on my part that kept me close to writing and reading. One day in the early 1980s, I went to visit him unexpectedly at his school; the National Council of Teachers of English was holding its annual conference nearby. I found him in his office discussing an essay with a student.

How much younger we both were then, my former teacher and I. What must we have looked like, though, to the young man whose writing was under the spotlight?

I want to think that in "the place where a man’s soul should be" that student now has what he needs – thanks in part to a remarkable teacher he and I both had.

And what list of books did he get the next day?

A Cloud of Movies: Five Months of Home Viewing

2011-05-14T12:21:00.002-04:00

"Movies 1"
Click on the link above to see this word cloud at WordItOut. You may also view it on this website if you enable JavaScript (see your web browser settings).

Word cloud made with WordItOut

On Mother's Day

2011-05-08T10:25:00.007-04:00

I do not feel like going to services this Sunday morning. I do not feel like sitting in a Mother’s Day congregation.

I do not want to intuit the family stories in the ways people sit in the pews surrounding me. I do not want to guess whether any of the women feel nervous that a homilist might presume to tell their story on this day.

I have to admit as well that I do not want to change out of jeans and the corduroy shirt that hangs comfortably outside them.

It is the sixth Mother’s Day that I have not needed to mail a card early enough to ensure its timely delivery to a house in New Orleans. I can walk into a Whole Foods today and not be sabotaged by the potted hydrangeas.

Were I looking for a place for spiritual strolling, I might visit a priests’ cemetery in a town nearby. The place is a familiar one, located on the grounds of a retreat house I know well. Men like these were actually a kind of mother to me at times in my life, sitting at a kitchen table with me over a cup of retreat house coffee, agreeing to meet me after class with a ready word of advice, writing me a note of encouragement when my life was taking turns I had not expected.

No sons or daughters ever needed to remember them on Mother’s Day. So maybe I will. Whatever their lives felt like to them through the years, whatever regrets or satisfactions their own aging brought them, I can pay attention to them as I walk up and down the cemetery pathways.

Do they walk calmly now somewhere?

Are there spaces of freedom through which their arms move at times, in something like a dance?

Do their necks (uncollared now) turn easily to left, to right, their faces raised up to an air that is friendly and kind?

I hope so.

Its Own Good Time

2011-05-03T21:24:00.008-04:00

At $3.99, I took my Easter lily home in a reusable grocery bag.

It was the Thursday afternoon of Easter Week, and the last of the potted tulips crowded a display table at the entrance of my food store. On the floor around the table were the lilies, most of the blooms sad and browned and spindly.

Except for the one I bought.

On the Thursday after Easter, two white wax trumpets sounded above a stalk of green curved leaves. Five days earlier these blossoms would have spoken a traditional message, reassuring and timely but a little predictable.

On the car seat next to me that Thursday, they asked a question: do you think it could all be true even on a Thursday after work?

Yes, I thought after turning the key in the ignition, I still opt for hope, still want this life, still thank the lucky stars, still pledge not ever to give in or give up.

I will not prefer anything to this moment, to what is unfolding in its own good time.

Space Odyssey

2011-04-19T17:47:00.003-04:00

Approaching a colleague at work a few months back, I asked whether he had any ready-to-hand impressions of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001. He and I have a playful routine of exchanging etymology and syntax questions in the morning when we are almost the only people on our floor. We trade Emily Dickinson and J.D. Salinger trivia. We reveal our adolescent literary crushes.

He paused and looked up from the book he was reading with his morning coffee.

“2001: A Space Odyssey? 1968? Keir Dullea?” he asked.

While he narrated the first time he had sat in a theatre viewing the film, I recalled listening to the soundtrack album with my high school friend Ted. Coming from a home where the purchase of a phonograph record was considered an extravagance, I almost memorized the tracks of each of the records that Ted played during our visits at his house. The experience of sitting in a theatre and watching a film like 2001 could get replayed in that pre-Netflix era each time he or I lowered the needle onto the vinyl.

Amateur Super-8 filmmakers, Ted and I listened closely to the music behind the film. Something in us knew to listen just as closely to the bands by contemporary Hungarian composer György Ligeti as to those by Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss. We felt we understood what inside us was responding to Also Sprach Zarathustra and The Blue Danube Waltz. On the other hand, we had to submerge ourselves in Ligeti’s music. Or rather we had to allow Ligeti’s music to submerge us. We explored what happened inside us when we did.

In Boston’s Symphony Hall this past winter, I got to explore one more time what happens then.

In late January the BSO had brought in as guest conductor Christoph von Dohnányi, and the man who had conducted Ligeti’s double concerto for flute, oboe and orchestra at its premiere in 1972 revived that performance. It was like lowering the needle back onto the vinyl, and I was watching again, listening again, a young man in his teens before new music and new images.

I watched again and listened again when 2001 arrived in the mail in February.

I recall my favorite English teacher in high school speaking to his classes about 2001, about the film’s structure, its symbolism, its use of music and silence. My colleague this past winter admitted that even without a fresh viewing of the film, he was sure he could write a two-page essay on what Kubrick had created.

Sometimes a challenge like that just appeals to me.

Leftovers

2011-04-10T16:07:00.007-04:00

Taxes are done.

They were not any more complicated or difficult than most years, but I had turned down a couple of invitations this weekend just in case.

My reward was the freedom of a Sunday morning with nothing that had to get done in the next sixteen hours.

So a weekend breakfast -- how to use that sour dough bread from two days earlier? And the fresh parsley from a Lenten Friday's tuna salad?

Easy enough.

To Act Out of Character

2011-04-08T07:15:00.004-04:00

I could not do that, could not make even one person believe I was capable of something like that – although there are parts of days when I wonder if people have not for a long time thought I was capable of just that but then I hasten to find my conventional voice, my predictable style, my telltale pacing and tone – well, it would be like claiming I could sculpt a statue in bronze and, no, the utter frankness of three-dimensional art does not call to me to be its creator – although I love the memory of purchasing a statue when I was in grade school, plaster and chalk and gleaming blue paint, and I wanted candles in front it (though we never lit candles at home) but I would like to have a candle lit in front of words like these, I would like to watch the computer screen later blink into darkness and hide my words but have the candle's flame mark the spot where they used to be, where they used to read safely and calmly and serenely – in character or out

Not the expected read? I am deciding to include on Writing Cabin an occasional experiment with what can be said when the customary rules are not the only rules.

By Your Own Best Lights

2011-04-06T09:11:00.004-04:00

Sun is getting to places in my apartment that it has not been in a long time.

Or maybe I've just not been around when it comes.

Each morning I sit some time in my living room. I sip a first cup of coffee. I may open a book. More often than not my cat settles beside me.

Few mornings the past three years have started differently. As the first full year in the apartment is coming to an end, I am beginning to see things that I may not have known to look for twelve months ago.

This morning's sun painted the tops of the spines of some of Thomas Merton's journals. It brushed the bottoms of collections of Mary Oliver's poetry. "That's me, those books -- that's who I still am," I realized with relief.

The light was a message I needed. "Continue," it said, "continue to live by your own best lights."

Grandfather Clock

2011-04-04T17:39:00.011-04:00

The grandfather clock in my apartment used to stand in the dining room of my parents’ house. It had been a purchase that my mother would have planned – like all her furniture purchases – for months and months. I used to listen to her when she returned from her Saturday appointments with the hairdresser. Before she called my father to drive to the mall and pick her up, she would stroll the stores and get her ideas.

It was her dream time, I suspect. Newly released from the dryers in the salon, she must have felt she looked her best. She got to browse the furniture sections of the various department stores, her hair fragrant and glistening with the spray that someone else’s hand had aimed.

My mother had no hesitation asking salespeople about the items she saw in the model living rooms and dining rooms. She learned her woods – nothing beat mahogany in her book – and she opened breakfront doors and side table drawers with a knowing air. There may have been an earlier, more formal time when she took the price tags and turned them over with gloved hands.

What day did she get the yearning for the grandfather clock? It was something she would only have considered in the years free of the school tuitions that long claimed a part of my father’s paychecks. Although a grandfather clock was for show, it was something that ultimately no one would look at more often than my mother did.

Its transport from New Orleans to New England with the close of my parents’ house affected the inner workings of the clock. It will take a professional to come to the apartment before I again hear the chimes I used to listen to through the nights on visits with my aging parents. One day I will make the call and arrange the repair.

I may not be just ready to live again with family sounds marking my hours.

Travel and the Ways Lives Go

2011-03-27T18:41:00.009-04:00

I stumble upon churches.

I stumble upon graveyards.

I stumble upon topics with old friends that none of us set out in advance to cover in our conversations.

Some days off work last week allowed me to visit family and friends in both New Orleans and Houston and to do my inveterate stumbling.

I had never before been in either St Alphonsus Church or St Mary’s Assumption Church in the Irish Channel section of New Orleans. A traffic detour took me near them one day last week. I took a chance, parked the rental car, and walked into a piety that was a hundred and fifty years old, lofty ceilings and carved wooden statues and the tombs of nineteenth-century pastors under the marble flooring of a sanctuary.

Another day I wanted to go to the Garden District Book Shop and parked near Commander’s Palace, an Uptown restaurant that my family sometimes used for birthdays and out-of-town visitors. Locking the car, I turned around and found myself next to the open gates of Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. Sunny skies and uncharacteristically dry air encouraged me to venture in for five minutes and see still another of New Orleans’ “Cities of the Dead.”

Over coffee, over cocktails, in a retirement home, in a retreat house parlor, with Mexican food, with Irish beer, I spent time in the kinds of conversations that are lifelines for me. We all of us - classmates and teachers and friends - took the measure of our years together and resisted simple information and mused on the ways lives go. Again and again I found myself across from people who gained energy from the words, the attention, the memories invoked, the futures imagined.

I like the people and the places of my life.

Complex Pleasures

2011-03-14T13:10:00.012-04:00

Drizzly Friday afternoon in March.

I was walking across a Maine campus that still wore some of this season’s snows. Fog made a milky, Gothic light. The silence of Spring Break was fast descending.

I had come to sit with over 150 other adult readers of a novel first published in France almost two centuries ago. Few people to whom I mentioned the weekend venture had heard of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. Few knew, I suspect, why I might want to get here.

Was it the lure of the university to which I was responding? Or the prospect of something like alchemists’ secret knowledge?

Maybe I just craved the company of people used to being reminded that mind’s pleasures require effort. Perplexity is not always a problem. One’s own complexity need not frighten or daunt.

Avoiding questions never makes for great literature, does it? Or great lives.

Marmalade and Toast Racks

2011-03-04T14:59:00.001-05:00

If I attended a summer session at Christ Church in Oxford in 1985, it was because I was both a reader and, at that time, a teacher of British literature. In my early thirties, I finally got to set foot in a country whose authors regularly moved and challenged me. I had majored in French as an undergraduate, but for some time the poets of my leisure hours remained Keats and Tennyson, Eliot and Auden.

I was surrounded by other Americans at breakfast in the Christ Church dining hall those summer mornings. I would sit at the long wooden tables and reach for the daily bowl of orange marmalade and the dry hard toast in the toast racks. Negotiating mealtimes felt easier in the company of Priscilla from Houston and Kathryn from Chicago. I was not always sure I was doing it right, but at least my years in seminary had acquainted me with breakfast as a communal event.

I sat under the portraits of former Christ Church students high on the walls of the dining hall. Those three weeks were my introduction to the traditions of English university life. Against the ancient dark wood of floor and walls and ceiling, the light from the electric lamps along the long refectory tables felt warm and safe and forgiving.

One of the traditions of English university life? Frank Cooper’s Original Oxford Marmalade. What I could not foresee when my three weeks at Christ Church were over was how regularly in years to come I would move through a grocery store and slow down by the shelves of imported marmalades. I did not find the exact marmalade of those summer mornings in 1985 until this past month.

I may soon need a toast rack.

Photo of Toast Rack from Styles Silver

How Family Time Used to Feel

2011-02-24T16:24:00.002-05:00

In January 1995, I had both of my parents hospitalized. My mother, 81, had fallen in the living room of their house, breaking her hip. My father, 84, had suffered a second minor heart attack after a first attack the month before. For about a week my two parents were on the same floor of the hospital in New Orleans, their rooms only a few doors apart, but neither my mother nor my father was able or permitted to visit the other.

As long as my parents were in the hospital, my presence in New Orleans would not have been that much of a help to my brother who lives there. In February, however, I took a week off work to spend with my parents in their home. They were both doing pretty well, my mother gripping her walker as she slowly walked from her bedroom to the kitchen, my father taking his afternoon naps after getting up in the middle of the night to help my mother to the bathroom. I spent one evening in the emergency room with my father, waiting for a doctor to examine the swelling in my father’s right foot that was making it hard for him to wear his shoe.

Sitting by myself in my parents’ living room one morning, I was praying, and the challenge came, could I presume to say that God could not be in all of this for me?

Actually the challenge was more – could I dare to say that I could not be in all of this?

I had felt for a while that I was disappearing in the midst of it all; that there was no room for both me and this sadness. But, God seemed to assure me, I could, and God could.

In early March I became my father’s main family contact while he was in the hospital anew, recovering from an angioplasty. Four hours after my second arrival at the New Orleans airport in a month’s time, I was at my father’s bedside in the coronary care unit for the eight o’clock visiting session. The television set in his cubicle was carrying a PBS program on Cajun cooking while my father and I talked about the medical equipment beeping around him.

One of my father’s earliest concerns was about recovering his Timex watch, which he had confided to my brother before the surgery. Upon his transfer to a private room the next day, my father asked me for my watch. I slipped the timepiece, a gift from two Christmases earlier, around the patches of white surgical tape on my father’s left hand and secured the band around his wrist. My father seemed happy.

The next day I brought my father’s watch to him. My father took my watch off and handed it to me. I removed his watch from my own wrist, and we made the exchange. The band that I snapped on in the next minute was still warm from my father’s wrist.

Image from Spanish Meadows

Serious Fun

2011-02-21T11:07:00.027-05:00

I know this book, I said to myself. I know this book, I said in the car, although it seemed the most unlikely book to hear about on NPR during morning commute. I don’t mean that Public Radio avoids religious topics or books about them. I mean that this was not a recent book or a bestseller or the work of someone newly deceased. By coincidence February 11 was indeed the 96th birthday of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of A Time to Keep Silence, and novelist Adam Haslett was introducing the book for the NPR series “You Must Read This.”

It is a slim book, 95 pages, first published in Great Britain in 1957. Its availability made an impression on me in March 2004 when I saw it on the English-language display table in an Amsterdam bookstore. Bookstores exert a lure whenever I travel. I do not visit them because I am technically in need of something new to read. I just like to imagine those other kinds of readers for whom shelves of poetry and tables of memoirs are arranged.

The price sticker of 17,50 Euros on the Fermor book in that Amsterdam bookstore had given me pause, however. I was not sure I needed to spend over twenty American dollars for the soft-cover volume. On the other hand, I had not heard of the book before although visits to monasteries were a familiar theme in my reading history. I might never find this particular book in print on the other side of the Atlantic, I rationalized, and I brought my purchase to the cashier.

The very habit of introversion that makes trips to monasteries and weekends on retreat appealing generally leads me not to expect friends and family to want to hear a lot about them. Something inside felt validated, though, by the time the on-air review of A Time to Keep Silence ended. How many listeners felt in tune with this comment of Adam Haslett’s after he had read a passage from Fermor’s book?

"To read that beautiful, restful sentence is to experience a small piece of the restfulness Fermor himself found. When we say that a book transports us, this is what we mean. The music of the words themselves sing us into a different world."

Um.

I often did long for the appearance of placid restfulness when I was a younger man on retreat.

Luckily, retreats sometimes bring exactly what some of us with our habit of introversion might never have expected but genuinely need. A God who tells us we need more fun in our lives? Yes, it happens. Thank God it happens.

And it is good to discover that sometimes the best fun happens with the very people who take us most seriously. I might need to write a book about that one day.

A slim book, no more than 95 pages.

Image from MorBCN

That Which You Desire

2011-02-07T21:41:00.001-05:00

Sometimes we do not know what we need or want until an individual who seems capable of understanding that need stands before us.

In the church where I attended services this past Sunday, there is a window dedicated to St Veronica. A tradition outside the scriptures places a woman on the narrow street where Jesus was carrying his cross to Calvary. Understanding what the condemned prisoner needed, Veronica emerged from the Jerusalem crowd and wiped his face with her own sweat-cloth (sudarium), or towel.

I kept looking up at the window yesterday morning. There is a solemn beauty of expression as Veronica holds open the towel which she had held up to the face of Jesus.

I got to thinking of the likelihood that within the century that this church has stood in its downtown location, there have been individuals with a quiet devotion to the saint. I pictured them in a pew beneath this window, looking up into the face of the saint as I did yesterday and spontaneously confiding a need or a worry, a desire for their lives that they had not tried to articulate before.

I got an insight into the tradition that directs someone to pray for a particular need nine days in a row. In the directions for a novena, an individual is urged to complete the nine days of prayers faithfully and to be confident of an outcome. Novena prayers regularly have a place where an individual names what he or she hopes to receive through the intercession of a particular saint.

It is one thing to confide a need or desire in prayer once. It is another to come a second and even a third time into the presence of a power that might understand what we are asking. In a counselling situation, the good therapist doesn't usually say to a client, "You've told me about that already. Go on to a new topic, please." The important psychological truth is that the teller might be changed by each telling.

Do we have the courage to face ourselves as people whose desires could change our lives? In sixteenth-century manuals used to direct someone on retreat, a spiritual director is advised to ask individuals to name the grace they want from a particular session of prayer: "Name that which you desire."

Do we realize that feeling alive will require at some point claiming the utter wildness of what we actually want?

Heading Home from the Office

2011-02-01T16:49:00.003-05:00

How did the end of the work day feel to my father?

What did he think about as he glimpsed an evening sky in winter through his office windows?

Was the signal to return home a welcome one?

What did he picture waiting for him once he had opened the back door of his home?

Was there somewhere a final stretch of quiet he counted on, a time to be himself a little longer, a reason to slow his pace even slightly?

I hope he got what he wanted in his life. The way he wanted it. The way he always hoped it would be.

When Snow Arrives in the Morning

2011-02-01T07:53:00.001-05:00

I live no more than a five-minute drive from my work so I take my guilty pleasures on a morning like this. I can sit in my office and actually enjoy the strange white punctuation covering the view from my window.

I hear colleagues down the hall talking about cities and towns an hour away and the snow those places are already getting. I sense the urgency in their quiet voices.

I recall the homes I drove past a half hour ago on my usual route to work. For the first time in a long while I was aware of which windows in each home were yellow with lamplight and which had stayed dark from the winter night just ended.

I do not think in my childhood in New Orleans I ever dreamed of being a man in his fifties living a morning like this one. I like that idea, though.

Favorite Restaurants

2011-01-23T18:52:00.004-05:00

It was the kind of meal by which I fill up a short list of favorite restaurants.

No restaurant is likely to become a favorite of mine unless a conversation takes place there that has stopped me in my tracks. I can easily forget an entrée, an appetizer, a specialty cocktail. I cannot easily forget the news about a son who is in trouble, the silent exclamation of a friend unwrapping a gift she had not expected, the update on someone long vanished that starts “Well, you do indeed have a good memory.”

Nothing matches the simultaneous lifting of heads and meeting of eyes over a first bite by which two friends corroborate the other’s instantaneous conviction: “We ordered the right thing.”

That happened last night.

The restaurant chosen for our visit belied the common wisdom of a Zagat’s review. On the other hand, neither of us felt the need to take on the reviewer’s role or prepare a sage critique to serve up on Monday morning to colleagues apparently ready for the scoop.

My friend and I had gone to be together. We had gone out for a meal to let the efforts of others provide us the time and space and energy simply to be company for a friend. We had gone out precisely to see the other across the table.

Oysters? They were a bit briny but nothing, we found, that the mignonette did not make more interesting. Memories? They surfaced with every stage of the meal. We named other restaurants, other meals, other years.

When you have a habit of honesty with a friend, you find the attention something that lets you forget why some things don’t work out, why some people can’t fathom the simplest things.

Like two friends at a meal who look across at the other.

Portrait of a Seated Man in the Studio

2011-01-19T14:28:00.004-05:00

I wonder if anyone else walks into one of the second-floor rooms of the Neue Galerie in New York and registers the reaction I did last October. Having climbed the curved stairwell from the ground floor, I had allowed myself to be pulled first to the wide luminous room where Gustav Klimt’s iconic portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer rules. Curators probably wisely planned on the lure of that work to move visitors along; it is also the third image in the slide show on the homepage of the museum’s website.

It is not that bright room facing Eighty-sixth Street about which I want to write. When I walked next door into the long paneled room facing Fifth Avenue and began my circuit of the hangings on those walls, I was looking up again and again at portraits. With one exception, I was also looking up repeatedly at portraits of men. Did Austrian painters in the early twentieth-century have mostly men sitting for their likenesses? Did someone specially plan this room of men painted by other men?

I am enjoying the questions. Why would I even have noticed that pattern on that day last fall? What was aroused in me with such consistency as I circled the paneled room a second and even a third time? Was I perhaps weighing not how good the paintings were but whether I would have liked meeting the men depicted in them? I recall being intrigued by what may have been going on inside each artist as he looked closely at one or other of these men, looked at him day after day, responding perhaps without knowing it to the subtle daily changes in the mood of his sitter, lamenting (or not) a daily contact that would end when the portrait reached completion.

There was one portrait in that paneled room that sent me to the bookstore before I left the museum an hour or so later. I wanted in one way or another to take home a reproduction of a painting by Viennese artist Richard Gerstl entitled Portrait of a Seated Man in the Studio. I had gotten to stand below the portrait for a comfortable length of time and later to gauge the mood of its subject from different angles in the room. There was no determined look in the man’s face, no tools of a trade positioned near him, no favorite setting to suggest his tastes and interests. Who would have found him interesting? He seems almost mystified that he is at the heart of anyone’s effort and creative attention.

None of the postcard racks in the bookstore showed that portrait. The only place I found a reproduction of the Gerstl painting was a hardcover coffee table book that had been the catalogue for the opening of the museum in 2001. I may actually have been ready to pay $37 for the book with all its essays on German and Austrian art. Near the end of my New York stay, however, I did not look forward to carrying still another parcel from my hotel to the bus the following morning. Six-hundred pages long, New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890 - 1940 was going to need another way to get to my living room.

As luck would have it, back home I located a library copy of the volume. In the past few weeks, I have gotten to sit some evenings with a full-color plate of the Gerstl portrait before me. The scholarly footnotes admit that it is not known for certain who the gentleman seated in the armchair in the studio is. I renewed the book once; I wanted not to return it until I had written something about this portrait that has fascinated me.

Who else has ever found this man interesting? I like the idea that he would feel mystified once again that he has been at the heart of someone else’s effort and creative attention.

Image of Neue Galerie from NewYorkDiaryStar

South Pole

2011-01-17T17:59:00.012-05:00

I do not have the easy gift of writing about cold. New England winter still has the ability to surprise me. Opening the storm door this morning to get the newspaper from the front steps, I encountered something stern.

At times there is a blizzard and at times there is 11 degrees Fahrenheit. Friends living farther north may smile reading that temperature. I prided myself on being ready for last week's blizzard. I was not ready this morning for 11 degrees.

I have sat recent evenings reading by lamplight, a cable knit throw over my legs, feeling cozy as I looked out the window at the snow-covered rooftops across the street. Moonlight made them blue like a ghostly winter graveyard.

The curious thing is that I spent a good part of December working through a book set in arctic landscapes. I had weighed the 600 pages in my hands at the start of reading The Last Place on Earth, Roland Huntford's carefully researched narrative of Amundsen and Scott's race for the South Pole. Defying notions about the things I like to read, I determined that I would make that trek into a topic that was largely unfamiliar to me. I wanted to read about setting off for the unknown and returning victorious -- or not.

A number of people I know who did not read Huntford's book had watched the PBS miniseries based on it. Having completed my read, I let Netflix tantalize me and ordered the seven episodes, full of the yelping of those marvellous dogs. It proved unorthodox holiday fare but satisfying.

Quiet House: Two Authors Record a Storm

2011-01-13T08:05:00.009-05:00

Now we were creeping ahead, groping our way through a blinding blizzard. At times we could see no more than a few car lengths before us. All the highway signs were obliterated by snow. So we advanced for ten miles, twenty miles...

It took us nearly half an hour to creep those last six miles. All the time the blizzard closed tighter around us. Once, in the very heart of the gale, I glimpsed for an instant a crow hurtling on the wind across the highway and into the woods.

Edwin Way Teale, Wandering Through Winter (1966)

Some black ducks
were shrugged up
on the shore.
It was snowing

hard, from the east,
and the sea
was in disorder.
Then some sanderlings,

five inches long
with beaks like wire,
flew in,
snowflakes on their backs,

and settled
in a row
behind the ducks --
whose backs were also

covered with snow --
so close
they were all but touching,
they were all but under

the roof of the ducks' tails,
so the wind, pretty much,
blew over them.
They stayed that way, motionless,

for maybe an hour,
then the sanderlings,
each a handful of feathers,
shifted, and were blown away

out over the water
which was still raging...

Mary Oliver, "In the Storm" from Thirst (2006)

Our Revels Now Are Ended

2011-01-09T20:59:00.001-05:00

Cobblestone Chimney

2011-01-06T08:13:00.004-05:00

Your childhood home should have some magic about it.

In the best of all possible worlds, it looks like something out of a children's book in the library. The landscape sprouts boy-size and girl-size gates and walls and gables. Weather rolls over it and hovers beside it, presses on windows and makes you glad you're inside.

When your dad makes magical things happen in your life, the house itself can be more modest. When your mom weaves tales at bedtime and then clicks off the light, you are ready for dreams that are sure to come to you as you burrow under the covers.

Sometimes you get to grow up in a fun house. Sometimes you just get to imagine it for years and years to come.

January

2011-01-02T21:40:00.007-05:00

Some photographs tumble through years and years and land at your steps.

Nameless, she can be a patron saint for this month of January.

Out of a silence too deep to fathom, she looks. The oval frame is lost, the glass broken. Flowers may once have stood in water in a vase beside this portrait.

Someone's daughter, she may have been her father's pride. Someone's mother, her younger face may have seemed a pattern for her daughter's.

Sometimes all that you need is a reminder of a time when there was no serious question of someone's not always being around.

1-1-11, 11:11 AM

2011-01-01T11:11:00.000-05:00

Stand-in Father

2010-12-31T15:19:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I visited a cemetery near the home I had sold two Christmases back. During my eight years as a resident in the neighborhood, I probably walked through that cemetery at least once a month. Even in winter months, sometimes under falling snow, I paced the pathways.

When my father died at age 90 in his New Orleans home, I returned from his burial to a New England fall and winter.

In my upbringing I had gotten to watch my mother grieve the death of her own mother. The drives to the New Orleans cemetery with my parents had been almost weekly at first. I received lessons in what people looked like when all they could do was place their hands on the mausoleum wall and whisper, "Mama..." I learned that rhythm and sound of grieving from the French Louisiana culture in which I grew up.

What would I do after the death of my New Orleans father if I was fifteen-hundred miles away from the cemetery where he was buried?

I found a grave to visit in that New England cemetery.

Yesterday I drove again to the grave where I had mourned my father in 2001 and 2002. I parked the car and rolled down the window as I had done that first winter. Fresh cold air on my face again, I recalled the determination with which I had focused on this man's gravestone back then. Deceased in 1964, he has no wife buried beside him. When Easter came in 2002, I put a pot of daffodils by his stone. I sometimes wonder if there was family that had come while the flowers were there, puzzled at this gesture by someone unknown.

What my sudden visit to this cemetery accomplished for me yesterday was a calming at the close of the year. It brought a reminder of the earnest pleading for guidance I had made on these walkways over the years. It was important to experience again within this landscape the affirmation I had found for the journeys I keep undertaking in my life.

And it is good to have a father nearby.

Two Mothers

2010-12-30T16:04:00.004-05:00

Let me say it starkly – I had two mothers. None of my brothers would have a notion what I mean. The December sun had to remind me of the truth this morning.

When my twin brother and I were born, our mother had already been the owner for fifteen years of a mantle set of Roseville Pottery. The cornucopia vase on the left in the cabinet is an example of what antique dealers identify as the blue apple blossom pattern. No water or flower ever touched this or its companion vase. A wedding present, they were display pieces in my parents’ home, resting on a pair of gilded sconces flanking a framed sofa mirror.

House pride was a besetting sin of my mother. She purchased a mahogany dining room set and breakfront when I was in high school. No meal was ever eaten on that table until one of my nieces inherited the set five years ago. My eye, meanwhile, had been on the Roseville Pottery, nothing extravagantly valuable these days but evocative for me of an era of dark woodwork and sheer curtain panels pulled taut over glass-paned doors.

How we looked, how we sounded when my mother told stories of my brothers and me to relatives and visitors and hospital nurses and emergency room doctors mattered to her.

When my mother reached her late fifties, I entered seminary (a good story for her to tell to lots of people). What my mother did not realize was that a woman even older than she would begin to pay me a particular kind of attention.

Eighty years old, Katie had been a member of a religious congregation for fifty years when I met her. Meeting at Mass sometimes, we enjoyed the kind of conversations we kept having. It became a custom to arrange an occasional afternoon over convent china and to sit across from one another on cane-back furniture. She asked about my family and my training, about my experience with daily prayer and retreats. We would sometimes walk under the crepe-myrtle trees lining the walkways on the convent grounds. I heard about her family in Columbus, Ohio, and the discernment that had led her to convert and to embark upon her long, productive years in the convent.

When her sister died and her Ohio home was sold, Katie was sent some early photographs of herself. The pictures show a Katie before she entered religious life – earnest, soulful, intelligent. In a comment she had written to a family member on the back of one of the pictures, she poked fun at the seriousness of her expression.

One day Katie gave me two of those photographs. They would end up lost in the province archives if they were still in her room at her death, she confided in me. Katie seemed to want to acknowledge the kind of friendship we had enjoyed. They have gone with me wherever I have lived for the past thirty-five years.

The sun this morning hit the cabinet in my apartment as I sat reading the opening chapters of The Red and the Black. On this day off from work at the end of a momentous year, I was ready for the different world of bourgeois society in post-Napoleonic France.

Alert to the look of my home and alert to the transforming power of good questions, I was ready to nod in gratitude to my two mothers as well.

2010 Ornament: The Nest

2010-12-27T08:28:00.002-05:00

When I decorated a tree on Christmas Eve, I had no hesitation about the first ornament. It needed to be something I had received from a friend a few hours earlier. That friend understood that "The Nest" would be the theme for Christmas in a new home.

City in Winter

2010-12-21T20:37:00.006-05:00

Walking through the Old Port section of Portland this week, I recalled a photograph I had taken two summers back. It was an image I had been proud of capturing -- the balance, the morning light, the peaceful surface of the water. A picture like that explains why I used to sit there some mornings when I was visiting friends in the area. I would sip my coffee from nearby Standard Bakery and indulge in slow reverie, tasting a mood reminiscent of retreats I have made in years past.

Want to see a contrast?

Not a Chamber of Commerce shot, is it? Not an image around which to create a visitor campaign with an eye to local development and tourist dollars. But when does the way we spend our days in real life have to do that?

On the other hand, the picture actually fits the mood of some retreats. Some of us manage to take time out during the winter months and choose to stand under grey skies and feel cold winds off the water. With nothing merely picturesque to distract us, we get closer to feeling what our lives are like -- or what they could be. We yearn for lives that do not close down when the circumstances in which we lead them touch on grief and loss and economic uncertainty.

Briefly freed from the routines of holiday hospitality, I gave my eyes permission to see things that no tour guide would point out. I discovered myself across the street from a building that looks to have been at one time a confident addition to a busy portside neighborhood. The five windows on its second storey surprised me and encouraged me to keep my eyes open for architecture that may have had something to say in years past.

I kept my eyes open that day and I recorded what I saw. Time visiting with friends sometimes feels like it has to be filled up with outings and amusements. I ventured to presume on the better instincts of friendship and earlier today in a gesture of holiday sharing showed these pictures within an early draft of the post. I even asked to hear the first paragraph read aloud.

Gifts look so many different ways. I liked the way they looked this morning.

City Evening Snow

2010-12-20T21:38:00.000-05:00

I Listened to Vinyl as I Wrote My Cards

2010-12-19T17:25:00.016-05:00

I walked somewhere yesterday.

A mere week before Christmas and I walked rather than drove somewhere I needed to go, the countdown of holiday deadlines notwithstanding.

There is a post office a fifteen-minute walk from my new apartment, and around 9:30 on Saturday morning I set out on foot with the twelve Christmas cards I had written and stamped Friday evening. I had been playing Nat King Cole on vinyl as I wrote them.

I have never actually walked to this post office before; there is always on-street parking nearby and I usually tack on post-office visits to other errands with the car. I looked at the keys on the kitchen table as I put on my jacket and cap. I recalled a colleague’s exasperation midday Friday recounting the traffic frenzy she had encountered on her lunch break. I opted to avoid the possibility of frenzy.

I took what started out as an errand and made it work for me as a journey that I wanted. No one else was walking my street, and that solitary status let my imagination play a bit. The suburban neighbors along whose quiet sidewalks I made my way Saturday morning were already out, I presumed.

It was good to feel the cold air and know that house after house, I was passing story after story of people who did not need to think important any of the things that were preoccupying me – this year still again – a week before December 25.

What was the story behind that second-floor window, for example?

And then I stopped.

Could the story be any more unpredictable than the one that I have lived the past eight months behind my own second-floor windows several houses back – the story, in fact, that I was telling in the twelve cards in my hands?

Will twelve people behind their own windows in various parts of the country later this week read with the curiosity and intentness that I strove to inspire as I sat at my writing Friday evening?

And the people whose cards I addressed upon my return – will they sense the sun of my easy Saturday afternoon?

In Search of New England Holiday Reading

2010-12-10T07:40:00.005-05:00

Sea gulls and a lobster roll in the middle of December.

I’d prefer a novel with these elements but – to be honest – I’ll settle for a cable movie. And I’d prefer an older novel off a library shelf but I’ll settle for a paperback from an aisle in a giant food store.

I know the flavor of the narrative to which I am ready to respond in these weeks approaching Christmas. Somewhere other than poetry and scripture and homily reflections, I am willing to be gently tricked into reflection. With the aid of character and plot and setting, I can ease myself into a consideration of life’s changes and time’s passing and unexpected disappointment and nagging hope.

Let the reader of the first page follow a car through late afternoon village roads.

Let the camera pan and tilt up to a background of gray waves off a New England coast.

There should be a simple house on a side street, a family home. The headlights of the car briefly illuminate a realtor’s sign in the front yard, and then they go dark. Sound cues: the click of a key in the front door, the cry of sea gulls suddenly muffled as the door is pulled closed.

A man in his forties stands alone in a hallway. He lifts his face and catches the familiar smells that intrude on him from the darkened rooms. At the moment he turns on a floor lamp, you see him from afar, paper bag in hand, framed by a kitchen doorway.

Do you know where the story is going? Can’t you almost tell?

Maybe this novel, this film won’t use flashback – visual or auditory – although that would be an easy way to suggest what used to be the life of this home, a Christmas in this family, the feel of growing up as a tow-headed boy of eight. Maybe you won’t see or hear anything about the funeral of this man’s father within the past year.

I prefer to catch our hero at chapter’s end seated at the kitchen table, half-finished lobster roll in a nest of crumpled deli paper, when the door bell chimes. Or the text message arrives. Or the wall phone rings.

I want to think I know what he would say next.

I want to think there are holiday messages I know almost by heart.

Staying Green

2010-12-03T14:22:00.024-05:00

Will I learn anything from the people who took these pictures of Christmas trees long years ago?

What must have seemed crisp magic proved elusive.

I think I know why people take pictures of their Christmas trees, and I think I understand why such photographs disappoint. Without the equipment or expertise of magazine and catalog photographers, some trees look a muddle in the picture on which you or I click. Our trees with their lights and ornaments appear the earnest efforts that they are when they promised instead to be something mystical.

The truth is, I fear, that photos of Christmas trees rarely appeal to anyone other than those who decorated them.

I salute – somewhat wistfully – these three photographers and the earnest hopes at the heart of their Christmases.

I am safe for a few more days from the temptation to preserve a memory of any tree this year.

Might Christmas trees stay best and greenest forgotten?

Greening of the Home

2010-11-30T13:38:00.005-05:00

The Courage to Shake and the Courage to Be Still

2010-11-18T06:52:00.013-05:00

Who needs Christmas?

Who needs the ruthless lesson of darkening days, winter tides, stone surfaces cold to the touch, winds moving through bare branches?

I surprised myself this past Sunday morning thinking about Christmas, and I surprised myself thinking about it at the Cape Cod National Seashore. I leaned against the weathered fences and railings beyond which, signs warned me, loomed the danger of sliding cliffs. I watched what the wind did even that sunny morning to the low undergrowth covering the cliffs. I thought of the nights ahead when the shivering of the undergrowth would not lessen or stop.

No one would call it courage to shake when there is no alternative, no defense, no energy or even way to stop.

No one would call it courage to shake unless nature had long ago decreed this capacity as vocation – unless nature had decreed it as identity.

Ten years ago I visited a Romanesque abbey church in the Loire valley. In the remote village of St-Benoît-sur-Loire in the 1930s, French poet Max Jacob had made his home in the shadow of Abbaye Fleury. In flight from a Montmartre that no longer sustained his hopes for authentic identity, Max Jacob had taken quiet refuge near the ancient abbey even though there was no monastic community in residence there.

I remember standing outside the church ten years ago and staring up at the rough-hewn capitals topping the twelve columns in the church porch. In my mind’s eye I pictured the same stone columns in late December, icy in the early darkness of the afternoon before Christmas, festooned with wreaths of evergreen. It seemed that something about Christmas would be comprehensible only in that remote winter stillness of stone.

No one would call it courage to be so still unless nature had long ago decreed that capacity as vocation – unless nature had decreed that patient stillness as identity.

In a shop attached to the rebuilt monastery guesthouse, I purchased a greeting card. Into the white card stock had been embossed an impression of one of the Romanesque capitals in the church porch. The scene comes from the Gospel story of the Flight into Egypt. I had the image framed when I returned home to New England.

It is in my new home – a place to be still with the slow approach of Christmas, a place to shake as well at times with the danger of sliding cliffs. No Christmas worth the name will come if I consider myself exempt from either vocation.

A Month of Birthday Treats

2010-11-14T16:48:00.009-05:00

The modest but loyal Provincetown Bookshop carries a ready supply of signed works by hometown poet Mary Oliver.

One of my treats to myself this birthday month was a trip to the Cape to purchase Swan, Mary Oliver’s latest volume of poems. I knew last May to expect the book in September; Amazon had offered to let me pre-order it. I determined that I would wait.

I got to the Provincetown bookstore Saturday afternoon within a half hour of its four o’clock closing. If I had splurged on an overnight stay at one of the local inns, I might have taken my new purchase there and begun my reading by a window in the common room. Instead of an armchair, I found a nearby restaurant overlooking the bay and perched on a stool at their bar, ordered a half dozen Wellfleet oysters with a martini, and began reading.

It was not a crowded place in late afternoon on a Saturday. It was not noisy. It was not likely that anyone would elbow too close to a man with a book of poetry open on the bar. And I refused to hurry the pleasures before me.

An hour later, however, I felt reluctant to order a second martini with the evening’s drive back to my niece’s house in Eastham before me. I paid my bill, returned my new book to its bag, and headed down Commercial Street.

It was darker than when I had first arrived, and only a few shop windows were lit. I walked almost alone down the street, in a direction no one else appeared headed, and that seemed just fine.

The next morning I took the Mary Oliver volume with me on my morning drive to get coffee. Within an hour of waking, I was sitting in my car overlooking the Cape Cod National Seashore with coffee and poems in hand. The wind coming off the water shook the car from time to time, but I cracked my window open. The cry of gulls was loud, and the moment was perfect.

I did not need to be anywhere or anyone else. There was nowhere to hurry to, nothing to hurry from.

Experience tells me that the only thing that can deepen a satisfaction like that is to hear someone ask at that very moment, “What are you thinking now, Donald?”

Experience tells me it can happen.

Saving Daylight

2010-11-04T07:16:00.004-04:00

All Souls Day 2010

2010-11-02T07:45:00.001-04:00

“I am sorry. It actually seems to be a problem with the hard drive.”

I knew to sit quietly. I took in the information with a look of courage to match the sympathy in the eyes of my colleague from IT. She had broken the news like an exhausted surgeon.

I closed my laptop and put it aside, opening my conference binder on the table in front of me. I had taken the laptop to New York last week for a workshop my supervisor had been sure a number of colleagues would enjoy. A laptop was not essential to that enjoyment. Toting the laptop on the subway had been a bother; I could leave it in my hotel room the next day.

I knew that nothing irreplaceable had been lost or jeopardized. I knew that with a practical, no-nonsense assurance.

Two mornings later, my inert laptop packed away, I was ready for the four-hour trek home to New England. I decided to take advantage of the early hour and walk over to Fifth Avenue and St Patrick’s Cathedral for a moment of quiet and reflection. I took a seat in one of the pews off the far aisle where the fewest visitors were strolling with guide books.

I claim no special devotion to Our Lady of Czestochowa but my pew was across from the side altar with her traditional image. My gaze wandered to the lofty ceilings and arches of the cathedral. I let myself imagine all the people who had sat here in other times, with God knows what cares and hopes, with what hard news or unexpected possibilities. I began to understand this (or any) church as a place people go when their personal hard drive goes – or threatens to go – or seems not at all the familiar, dependable thing on which they were counting for the life they wanted.

What wild, mysterious hope is needed then!

Serious Buds

2010-10-28T20:33:00.042-04:00

I try not to stare.

It is early to exercise the imagination about these small cactus buds. Enough that they are already there, apparent for the first time just recently when I was attending to something else.

I know what these flowers will look like when the weeks ahead are over. I recall the process of daily irresistible burgeoning into silly flounces of color. When the blossoms flair and fly up, I will be hard pressed to understand what could have gotten me writing today about these seriously round buds.

Maybe I am getting better at letting the present be, lowly and gently promising. Maybe I know that the aftermath of any blossoming will require an adjustment of perspective, a heart permission for the universe to do its customary and cyclical fading.

There will surely be distractions to make the smudging of that beauty and that intense color hurt less.

Maybe buds of another sort, soft white sift across a January window, early movement in the air that sets explorers' thoughts racing.

Simple Monday

2010-10-26T15:56:00.002-04:00

An eight-month-old sat on my lap last night. He watched his mother and his father on their chairs across my dining room table, heard their voices speak his name and mine, raised his hands and touched his hair.

It wasn’t clear how long he would let someone hold him when beyond the plates and glasses of our simple Monday meal my niece and her husband were within sight but out of reach. Their attention stayed focused on Paul as they cooed their approval at his ease in a stranger’s arms.

Could I manage it? Could I maintain a comfortable position for him and distract him with bounces and sway him to left and to right and back again and feel him willing to be held?

And suddenly he looked up and saw my face.

And I looked down and instinctively rubbed my beard against his forehead. Gently I joined my coo to the easy movement of my chin against his small head.

And then we started – now touching, now not, now touching, now not. A playful rhythm that made a stranger less a stranger to Paul.

A baby in my arms, an infant in my home, a grandnephew joining the memories that will collect around this quiet table.

Feast of the North American Martyrs

2010-10-19T21:20:00.002-04:00

I shouldn’t have liked them as a child but I did.

I shouldn’t have found the wilderness landscapes through which they pressed a source of fascination – nor the autumns and winters that darkened their travels.

On this yearly feast in the calendar of saints comes the reminder of a connection that is fresh and stubbornly powerful.

Not everyone chooses the French explorers Isaac Jogues and Jean de Brébeuf for soul companions. If I prefer to call them explorers rather than missionaries or martyrs, it is because I find myself on a day like this attuned to the unknown into which they kept venturing. Surer than any of the certainties I may at one time have imagined centering or grounding them was the inevitability of those unknowns – the next minute’s safety, the next day’s destination, the next chapter to unfold in a story that could go anywhere.

On a day like this I want the courage and the intensity that made those unknowns life-giving and profound.

Sunday Evening Kitchen

2010-10-17T17:32:00.004-04:00

I was coming up from the basement with pants on hangers, fresh and warm from the dryer. The upcoming week's laundry was that much closer to being done, I thought. Shouldering open the back door of the kitchen, I should simply have headed down the apartment hallway to the bedroom.

But the evening sun stopped me. Movement and light in squirming squares on the wall above the kitchen counter stopped me. The tossing branches of treetops from backyards two houses away filtered the horizontal sun that found my second-storey kitchen wall.

The surprises that do come! And for free!

Please Touch

2010-10-11T11:39:00.005-04:00

When you frame a photograph, you plan for it to be seen. You imagine at least one visitor who will stand before it or sit beside it and then turn to you, an expectant look on his face, saying, “Can you tell me about this?” You know that you will welcome that look and that question. You hope that the conversation is about to happen that the framing was originally meant to signal your readiness for.

Sometimes the better-than-expected happens. The pleasure you had first felt in fitting a favorite photograph in a frame and setting it in its space revives at the sight of someone else picking it up. You may not have known that you were waiting for that response on the part of anyone. There it is, though, the familiarity and confidence that your framing was after all – all along – an invitation.

And it was. Of course it was.

I might not explain to everyone the comfort I derive from the vintage portrait of an Australian curate and his dog. The priest’s thoughtful, intelligent ease, though, and his readiness for the dog’s companionship had made the purchase of the photograph a prompt and heartfelt one. I knew I wanted his company.

I am glad, even relieved that the flavor of that company appeals to others.

Speaking of Angels

2010-10-06T07:23:00.005-04:00

That's exactly what I was doing one day almost twenty years ago -- speaking of angels. A group with whom I met regularly in those days had asked me to compose a reflection for the Advent season. A friend who remembers the talk asked me about it last week near the feasts of the angels. Some passages in the reflection sound like I could have written them twenty minutes ago rather than twenty years ago. I still need such angels.

Like Gabriel, angels appear in our lives in the people
who by their very presence invite our lives to be different.
Such angels appear in the people
who refuse to abandon a message before it has been heard,
in people who tirelessly ask us to respond,
to believe the good news of what’s possible.

Like Michael, there are angels in our lives
who fight and speak up for us.
They give us the courage to face whatever’s in our way.
Like Michael, these angels give us strength
against those voices that tell us we can’t do something,
that we’re not good enough.

Like Raphael, there are certain angels
who travel with us
through darkness, through pain,
even to the foot of a cross.
Like Raphael, such angels may be hard to see, to discern,
especially on journeys whose end we cannot guess or imagine.

An invitation has been quietly extended to each of us
to give a name to what we know is unnameable.
It is the experience of grace,
grace felt when we are inspired to pray,
to quiet ourselves,
to acknowledge that ours is a God
who protects us and challenges us,
who speaks to us and invites us to respond.

Gate Opens

2010-10-05T21:25:00.003-04:00

No one needs what I am about to write.

I am the only reader who may want one day to be reminded of something.

Winds are moving. Some life needs no record in ship’s journals to convince that its power has cleared the decks and filled the sails.

If the logs are without detail, believe that a new tale is nonetheless ready for the person who can tell it.

Meanwhile meals are prepared, laundry is carried down to the basement, sandwiches are cut in manageable halves. Windows are closed against the customary fall in temperatures. Books lie open and candles are ready for lighting.

Seasons are noted by their changing.

Night’s dreams, vivid and relentless, recently make each awakening an adventure.

Gates open.

Another fall begins.

Roast Chicken

2010-09-19T10:16:00.001-04:00

I am roasting a whole chicken this Sunday morning. Within an hour I turn on the oven and begin preheating.

This is the time of a meal when all is still prospect and possibility. I am guided by family memories of open windows in a September kitchen, a bulletin from 8 o’clock Mass on the counter, sections of newspaper stacked on a chair.

There is no television on and no radio. I get the flavor of Sunday quiet rather than Sunday programming as I change my weekend schedule and prepare a noontime meal.

Black-and-white photographs hang on the walls. A cat sleeps on the sofa. Lives move on in a way that consoles and surprises.

Writing in a Mountain Lodge

2010-09-10T19:35:00.003-04:00

As a high school student I picked up a Scribner’s paperback edition of Look Homeward, Angel (1929) by Thomas Wolfe and fell in love. My oldest brother had purchased the book for a college course, I believe; he had written his name on the inside front cover. I was taken by the exuberant, lyrical prose of the North Carolina writer and hunted for Of Time and the River, the sequel which a New York editor had carved out of mountains of manuscript. It was easier to find paperback copies of two posthumous volumes of Wolfe's, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again. I ended up taking an unprecedented step in my life. I had a local bookstore order Of Time and the River, available only in hardcover, directly from the publisher.
.
I planned a car trip to the author’s home state the summer after my freshman year in college. In the car that one of my best friends had received as a gift from his parents, he and I headed to the Smoky Mountains. The route was a familiar one to my friend from summer visits to a particular mountain lodge that his parents had favored year after year. Knowing my fascination with Thomas Wolfe, my friend had agreed to continue on to Asheville so that we could visit this favorite author’s grave and childhood home.

Look Homeward, Angel is autobiographical, and in a key section of the novel Wolfe narrates the days leading up to the death of his older brother Ben in the flu epidemic of 1918. Within an hour of arriving in Asheville, I got to the city cemetery, stood at the family tomb and read Ben’s name. The next day I toured the home where the Wolfe family had lived. I moved from room to room, reading next to each doorway passages from the novel about what had taken place in that room. It was particularly important to stand in the room where Ben had died and read the familiar passage affixed to the doorway.

In the presence of a close friend, someone who had known me well enough to accompany me on this pilgrimage to Asheville, I still could not summon up in that public place the kind of feelings that each private reading of Thomas Wolfe’s novel had inevitably evoked.

I was there – at the grave, in the room where Ben had died – and I could only acknowledge that something had happened there about which I had read and been moved reading. Miles and miles of travel, and I was not touched in the ways I might have expected.

At least not immediately.

Within twenty-four hours, however, in the mountain lodge where my friend had stayed so many times before, I began my writing about the Asheville visit. I wrote about someone who had been so moved by a favorite author that he had been willing to visit the place where that author had lived his early years and been buried.

The visit to Asheville sounded significant when I wrote about it.

It might also have felt significant – even as it was happening – if I had been able to sit still for a while in those places. If I had turned to my friend and said, “You know what’s happening now?” If I had thought to whisper to my favorite author, “I’m here. I came here for you and to thank you.”

I’m better at that now.

Back to the Writing Cabin

2010-08-28T17:47:00.006-04:00

Almost three years after my first visit, I was hiking again today along the pond at Trail Wood. The visitors' register for the 200-year-old Connecticut farm showed only one other signature from earlier in the day. It was a quiet bridge I crossed to the writing cabin.

For a second time I had signed my own name in the register. Leafing back, I was able to find my signature from the Sunday in October 2007 when I first visited the home and study of Edwin Way Teale, the American naturalist writer whose books had lured me here.

For a second time I got to sit today on the stone steps leading to the front door of the log cabin that Teale had built facing his pond. A guide had unlocked the cabin that Sunday afternoon three years ago, and the chance to walk into the rustic space with the writer's desk and chair had been stirring.

When I understood what Edwin Way Teale had set out to do at Trail Wood at age sixty, I knew that dreams of my own were not negligible. Why not acknowledge the right to center my life on what my heart longed to do? Why shy from the journey that opened before me?

If the register I had twice signed in the last three years could not vouch for a larger number of visitors, it nonetheless testified to the power of something that I might otherwise have ignored or dismissed. Dreaming happens in the quiet of the night, in the stillness of a Saturday meadow. Such dreaming is everyone's right.

I knew people I wanted to contact today as I grew calmer and calmer in this holy site.I read out loud the handwritten letter from one friend. I spoke into the early afternoon air all the gratitude and wonder that I could muster at what human lives can manage to be. I thanked Edwin Way Teale for his dream on behalf of all the lives it has already touched.

It will touch more.

August 14 ... again

2010-08-14T16:22:00.005-04:00

My father was ten days away from his sixtieth birthday when I sat – not yet twenty myself – in the back seat of the family Chevrolet on the entrance day assigned for my seminary class.

Each summer the anniversary of that drive looms, a drive with my parents on hot Louisiana highways to a rural seminary. Each August I expect the invitation to reflection. I never resist the reflection nor fear it. It is, in fact, a yearly challenge and even a delight to which I look forward.

The significance of the day derives from what I was finally stepping out of, a life at home that had not been easy. The significance of the day also derives from what I was getting ready to try, a life that I might still be leading if later discernment had not directed me elsewhere.

Where I got to do that reflecting this August 14 was new. The windows of my second-floor apartment were open to a drier New England morning than we have had for most of the summer. The neighborhood streets were quiet. After breakfast and coffee, I settled in an armchair that I had selected just for this living room. Despite its arrival two months ago, I had not yet spent a Saturday morning in it.

How had my father prepared for that drive almost forty years ago? I am barely two years away from the age he was that August morning. By this point in my own life, I know my patterns and my rhythms, my predilections and habits. I know there is nothing more natural for me than to review my life before milestone events and on anniversary occasions, to muse on it, to write about it, to sit before its surprises and directions. Two years in that rural Louisiana seminary may have taught me how and why to do that kind of reflecting – even, in some circumstances, how long to do it.

I do not know how my father went about facing the departure of another son from his household. We did not have a long conversation – father to son – about my decision. I wish I could say it was customary to hear my mother say to him, “Come, talk to me. You know this is an important moment in our lives as parents. When you get quiet like this, I know you’re mulling things over. Tell me about it.”

Like me, my father had an understated way of suggesting that things with him were all just fine. Like me, though, and like any of us, he could have used some patient prodding. He could have used a listener who knew how to get him to talk.

He could have used some help that August day forty years ago.

I could have, too.

Cézanne, Corona, Crawfish Étouffée

2010-08-01T17:08:00.003-04:00

Sunday dinner nourished on all sorts of levels today.

What Are You Reading?

2010-07-29T14:57:00.013-04:00

I am -- briefly -- holding off finishing the book I brought with me on this vacation week, fifty pages from the end.

I just turned my gaze away from the open windows behind the couch where I have settled to read off and on this day, resting the open book on the back cushions, finding myself again and again drawn to reflect on this familiar activity.

It is a book that was recommended by a friend who claimed to see me in one of the main characters. I started it in the evenings last week as these vacation days loomed. I did not really expect to be surprised by anything I read in its four-hundred pages. It read like the page-turner that people claim to love to bring to the beach. (I do not love to read on the beach.)

A key premise of the novel is that people can mistakenly think they know what is happening around them and who the people are with whom they deal daily.

In my reading on this holiday, I too began by thinking I knew what I was doing and why I was doing it. Isn't this one of the most predictably enjoyable things I have done on summer vacations through the years?

Reading as a child and reading as an adult, however, I think I have actually expected more than simple enjoyment. Other things happen or don't happen while you read. People often don't bother you if you're reading. People can wonder less why you're not joining them in activities that they themselves enjoy. Some people don't think that a reader needs anything other than space and time alone and a little bit of quiet.

On the other hand, comments you hear suggest that some people don't think anything particularly important is happening while you read. They don't realize that you may be traveling somewhere and trying on worlds and maybe meeting your habitual ideas and finding them simplistic or one-sided.

But you know that a communication is underway. You know that with certain books, certain authors, places inside you are getting attention that they may not have gotten in years.

Fortunate are those readers who can remember as children having an adult sit next to them and ask, "What are you reading?" At its most powerful, the question was never a ploy to get you to substitute talking for your reading. It was rather an acknowledgement that the world you had entered as a reader was worth hearing about.

It was an acknowledgement that you were worth hearing about.

Midway through a Summer Lunch

2010-07-23T19:05:00.006-04:00

I met my oldest brother and his wife for lunch this afternoon.

Vacation has officially begun!

On a Saturday Walk in an Old Cemetery

2010-07-18T20:58:00.007-04:00

Why is someone else not here? How do I get to be the only one to enjoy this right now?

I shake my head at times, incredulous at my good fortune. Without needing to make way for others or wait my turn, I step up to a view that reveals depth upon depth of morning green. Early sunlight conspires with the highest branches of trees and outlines leaves that no ladder could reach.

I do nothing to make this moment possible except show up, but a whole world seems ready to address a message to the fortunate person who does.

Who wouldn’t listen to a message when it comes with such generosity?

Who wouldn’t send a message in reply, speak words into the morning air and the silence and the welcoming heights above which these leaves lift their green?

Who wouldn’t vow to be back in the same place at the earliest opportunity to speak again?

Lake Cabin

2010-07-16T08:05:00.004-04:00

There is the smell of pine needles about the pictures of this cabin on a lake in New Hampshire.

There is the smell of summer sun on the wooden boards that make up the deck.

It takes imagination to understand a need for that desk lamp visible through the windows.

It is the imagination that any writer loves to use.

Thank you to a reader of Writing Cabin for these photos.

Summer Blue

2010-07-07T08:43:00.009-04:00

I enjoyed the prospect of reading one of the first ten Penguin paperbacks from their inaugural year 1935. I had never heard of Poet's Pub nor was the author's name familiar to me -- Eric Linklater. I followed the links on AbeBooks.com, however, and placed my order for a used copy of the 1929 novel with a bookseller in Guelph, Ontario. IMDb revealed the existence of a 1949 black-and-white British film based on the novel, but I could find no leads to copies of it available for purchase or rental.

Eighty pages into Poet's Pub, I confess that I am enjoying myself enormously even in these hot New England days.

One passage early on provides a taste of the Twenties and near-Gatsby excess. Proud of a blue cocktail he has created, a bartender named Holly prepares a sample lot for guests of the inn where he works:

'Anything that a lady like Miss Benbow suggests is all right, sir,' said Holly politely; and deftly poured measures of this and measures of that, crystal clear, faintly yellow and richer orange, a glass delicately poised with the rising meniscus unbroken, a drop, two drops of wormwood, a fluid ounce of sweetness and an ounce of twice-distilled strength...gravely, intent on his task as an alchemist seeking the elixir, the aurum potabile, Holly poured his chosen liquors into a long silver shaker, added broken fragments of ice, screwed down the top, and, like a man with the palsy, shook. His hands were clenched on either butt, his muscles were taut, his face was set like a mask. And all this time his audience watched him silently as if a conjurer were at work, and where paper flags had gone in the doves of peace might emerge. Then the rapid shaking changed to a long swinging movement like an old-fashioned concertina-player swinging his instrument to spread his melody wider, more powerfully. And at last he was done. He set six glasses on the bar and poured into each a liquid, at first cloudy-blue like the sky at morning, that slowly cleared to a hue ineffable and serene.

The writing is rich fare, perfectly overdone, excessive and amusing.

May I join in the fun and provide hints of the blues with which I am entertained these warm summer days, both in the kitchen at home...

...and above a bookcase in my office at work?

I am just trying to stay cool. These serene hues help.

Recipe for a New England Fourth of July Cake

2010-07-02T21:00:00.001-04:00

Three Weeks Before
1. Crack eggs

Visit a nineteenth-century home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Walk from room to room where a poet spent her days. Listen to thunder in the stillness between rooms. Look through bedroom windows as grey morning skies grow darker. Think back forty years to your first purchase of a volume of the poet's puzzling verses. Take a picture of the house where words you grew up loving were first committed to paper and stored in a dresser's bottom drawer.

One Week Before
2. Sift flour

Visit an eighteenth-century manse in Concord, Massachusetts. Wait outside in the shade for the tour to begin. Ask a friend what he recalls from visiting this house with his father and mother thirty years ago. Watch your head as you enter rooms. Hear the ticking of a clock from days when a favorite author wrote here. Later in the nearby cemetery hear your friend call him "Nate."

Four Days Before
3. Stir gently

Visit a lighthouse in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, that you last saw two years ago. Leave the tour bus and walk to the place where you had taken your earlier photographs of it. Think about your life.

Becoming a Reader of Future Authors

2010-06-23T19:37:00.005-04:00

If I wanted to read what authors like Ray Bradbury and Charles Simic and Woody Allen and Herta Müller were writing for publication these days, I could scarcely have done better -- I tell myself -- than subscribe to three journals that have begun to arrive at my new address. I have ignored the voice of experience that reminds me of other subscriptions over the years that each promised a new lease on my reading life. Alas, month after month the issues had collected, barely perused and largely unread, on bedside tables and back porch chairs.

Well, so what?

I am furnishing my new rooms, and I have fallen victim once again to the lure of the printed page to help create a look that would engage me if I met it in someone else's home.

Zoetrope was the wild card in this trio of publications. Thanks to the "Frequently Bought Together" feature on Amazon, I discovered the fiction-and-film journal, first launched in 1997 and headquartered in San Francisco. If Francis Ford Coppola can market wine and The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola can market a literary magazine, and I decided to taste the vintage. Like some unknown author whose novels I will check out at random times from the local library, Zoetrope seemed worth a gamble. I take as a good omen the appearance of an entertaining piece by Woody Allen in the first issue in my subscription.

Subscribing to The Paris Review seemed a privilege. It was a seat unexpectedly pulled out for me in a sidewalk cafe, a place cleared for me at a table strewn with cream-colored Gallimard editions. It is a twentieth-century tradition of writing and reading which I had forgotten to join over the years, and I feel fortunate to have found in the past months that I might still join the conversation. I can discover that cultural link between New York City and Paris as something still capable of bringing alive the hunger for thought and supple expression that should never go away. Lives feel on hold for some of us until that hunger is acknowledged and honored and assuaged.

East Coast and West Coast, Left Bank and Washington Square -- I might not have thought to revisit those literary roots without a nod to the authority of Granta. It is a subscription to Granta that initially led me on online crawls to look for an affordable ticket to a publication that has become synonymous with new writing. Begun long ago by undergraduates at Cambridge University, it was reborn within the last four decades and became a place for the emerging talents in British fiction to reach a reading public.

Beyond fiction, beyond Britain, the magazine has served up a range of writing that deserves attention. I was fortunate by means of the first issue of my subscription to be introduced to British poet Michael Symmons Roberts. His record of an extended visit to a Scottish Benedictine monastery, a record included within a Granta issue focused on writings on Sex, is breathtaking. If you're wondering what he could possibly have said to earn a place within that context, buy the Spring issue.

Renovated Kitchens

2010-06-06T22:04:00.021-04:00

It is not clear what had gone wrong with the garbage disposal, but my accountant-landlord knew that the simplest and most cost-efficient way to deal with the issue was to purchase a new disposal and install it himself. No plumbers needed, no team of electricians – one of my landlord’s grown sons came upstairs with him this afternoon and later called down from my unit to the basement so his father knew when the right current had been shut off for the installation.

The son looked around the kitchen at one moment and admitted to me, “You’ve made it look good.”

In the past two months I had worked with the white of the painted wooden cabinets and the gray-speckled Formica counters, had used Soft Scrub on the stainless steel sink and the white porcelain stove top, had created a comfortable eating space with a newly purchased pub table and stool. The chrome from my mother’s Lincoln BeautyWare canisters and breadbox reflected a new red lampshade on the little lamp that had lit dinners for me over twenty years ago. The black frame around a collection of vintage photographs of families at meals looked fine above the metal dish rack next to the sink.

However, I knew that this was a far cry from the renovated kitchens that sell houses and condominiums.

I remember the first renovated kitchen in which I sat thirty years ago with friends of my brother’s. These men’s professional decorating skills had directed the hanging of copper pots over an island and the dimming of lights over granite counters. One of my hosts stood authoritatively that night, martini in hand, as his guests, perched on stools, leaned under the copper pots to listen to his description of the long rebuilding.

All this for a kitchen, I had wondered quietly to myself.

In the years ahead I would have the chance to listen to various friends describe the months of negotiations with contractors and architects as the kitchens of their dreams took shape in spaces hollowed out of vintage floor plans. I came to recognize the renovated-kitchen look in open houses I attended in the search for new homes years later. In time even I got to sit at a table with a contractor and an architect and take part in discussions about undoing one kitchen and creating another.

I got to see the inside of walls in time. Months later I saw the right glass finally arrive for the cabinet doors. Professional photographers came in shortly afterwards to record the kitchen for the architect’s portfolio.

The truth I found, though, is that renovated kitchens change nothing about dreams.

One day, if you’re lucky, you find yourself back in a kitchen that is really yours. You find another kitchen that you can welcome as part of your history. You want the meals cooked on your white porcelain stove top, served in dishes stored in your white painted cabinets.

And you do indeed think yourself lucky.

And your new garbage disposal works just fine.

Readers of Yesteryear

2010-06-02T18:58:00.007-04:00

I have a past.

I have a blogging past.

I have a file full of comments that go back to 2005 in the archives of an email account linked to my former blog.

I remember the first comment on any post I had written. From his home in Mexico City, a fellow blogger wrote about the intense admiration and love he felt for a priest. My long-ago past as a seminarian and what I wrote about my decision to abandon those early goals and to pursue a life alongside another man had snared this reader’s interest.

Google helped readers find me. I was not an overly cautious blogger when it came to naming organizations and parishes and schools that had figured in my life. I named internal conflicts that other people recognized. A number of bloggers wrote posts about my blog.

I wrote about a life that some people had not thought possible. I had a career that was not always a safe one to identify publicly if you were living with another man. I had a family who supported me and welcomed my partner. I had a spiritual life that provided the surest interpretive thread to connect a long-ago Donald with the person I had become.

I wrote about a life that readers occasionally admitted they envied and wanted. To be honest, I wanted people to envy it. I seemed to need the assurance that I had gotten a life that other people would want. I could weave musings about home life and fall in love with it all over again.

Writing Cabin goes back to the fall of 2007 when an anonymous reader of my former blog wrote a series of letters whose denunciatory message eventually reached a range of people, including my employer. I got cautious, I got careful. I have written here about that time. I contacted readers who had followed me for years and asked them to help me start afresh.

Since then my life has changed in significant ways. On the surface, mine is no longer an easy success story. Not everyone would want the kind of transition through which I have been moving.

I do, though.

I love where it is going while it is still hard to name where it is going.

It seems time to extend a hand to those who used to read what I wrote and whose writings had been part of my day. Maybe more than a few of us have learned lessons about courage that we never suspected we could handle.

Welcome back!

Pentecost in Green

2010-05-22T13:59:00.004-04:00

Pentecost is about feelings you do not think you will ever have – or have again.

When any of the great Church feasts approaches, I can go through a period asking what possible difference this specific lens on the human story makes.

I grew up attending a Catholic elementary school where my classmates and I recited the rosary every weekday afternoon in May. On different days of the week the repetition of the Hail Mary’s was flavored by references to different events in the life of Jesus or his mother Mary.

In theological language those events were mysteries -- events that could make a difference in human lives. Each Wednesday the Glorious Mysteries allotted time for meditation first to the resurrection of Jesus, then to his ascension into heaven, next to his sending the Holy Spirit upon his apostles on the first festival of Pentecost after his death.

There are images involving these events that I still recall from the prayer books and missals in my parents’ home. Artists’ images of the Glorious Mysteries invariably featured a world open to the sky, airy visitations by flames, angels pointing to the clouds. I sensed that I was meant to like these light-saturated landscapes, and I used to try. In my experience, however, sunny summer days were humid and inevitably uncomfortable, and May in New Orleans was already summer.

In the years that have passed since then, I have had enough experiences of reflecting on a story from the Gospels or listening to preaching inspired by one of them and finding myself unexpectedly and sometimes unaccountably consoled, restored and even healed. The stories have helped me face my life and what I may have resigned myself to and what I had forgotten to expect.

For the past two years, I have found myself on the road at this beautiful time in the New England spring. Both times I have driven up the Connecticut River valley and let my life and its hopes breathe again in sight of the green mountains. Both times I took a journey into an unknown future and met what I thought I had lost.

A glorious mystery. Pentecost is indeed about feelings you do not think you will ever have – or have again.

Photo of Walpole, NH from Seattle Tall Poppy