Possibilities

It is eight o’clock on a winter’s night and I am heading to my car.

Twice a week for seven months I have made this trek through an elegant old residential neighborhood. The windows of brownstones allow glimpses of bookcases and mantle pieces and lamps. It is a neighborhood I could never afford, but this part of the city feels more familiar with each evening I walk from my German class to the nearby public garage.

It is not a time for the residents of these buildings to be outside. I have never seen them standing in their lamp-lit doorways bidding guests goodbye. Even on warm early fall evenings I have not seen neighbors, arms comfortably folded, conversing at yard's edge. The quiet of these sidewalks has belonged to me, month after month.



I walk abuzz. I may be happy to be heading home, but my brain has been stretched for an hour and a half. I have not been passively absorbing information; I have been practicing even when comfort might have preferred quiet note-taking. I have answered out loud, strained to listen, copied dictations, interviewed classmates and reported my findings.

I may have initially simply wanted to read a poet like Rilke in the original from time to time. I have ended up knowing afresh the benefits for my fifty-something-year-old brain of a regular work-out.

The academically unfamiliar has become less daunting.

The intellectually daunting has become more familiar.

A friend who has heard me talk of these walks recounts a time in his life almost twenty years ago. Fresh from evening classes at NYU, he used to run to his train, sometimes through snow, his mind floating, buoyed by the possibilities opened up by that night’s learning.

I pass a public garden at one point in my walks every week. I inevitably look up at the sculpture in one corner of that park. A spotlight hidden in the shrubs outlines the wings of a monumental angel. Another era’s symbolism for intellectual courage and spiritual confidence seems then to be watching over my trek homeward.

And maybe my trek onward.

Photo from Hooked on Houses

Saturday Chores and the Last Glacier

There is no one way Saturday mornings have to look if you live by yourself. The routines of any household, though, take their cue from habit and example and practical realities. The inevitability of a load of laundry makes Saturday morning feel lazy and a bit self-absorbed unless there is a serious date ahead with Tide and Clorox and Bounce. A cat may slink under the bed at the sight of the vacuum cleaner, but you know that you have to pass it at least once a week, and Saturday feels right for that chore too.

What were Saturday mornings like after "the last glaciar scoured the New England countryside"?

Devastatingly peaceful.



The early March sun was out, the skies were blue, and temperatures were forecast to hit the fifties today in New England. The language of the Property Guide I had recently received as a new member of The Trustees of Reservations made the drive to Ravenswood Park in Gloucester, Massachusetts, take on its own inevitability. The caption of one photograph: "Lichen-encrusted glacial erratics are strewn throughout the woodlands of Ravenswood Park."

Be careful of the things you read at the breakfast table with your second cup of coffee! The distance might not have been negligible, but I pledged to be on the road when the first load of laundry emerged from the dryer. That plan also gave me time to unwind and rewind the vacuum cleaner cord the one essential time of the week.

I won't hide the fact that a significant part of the lure of the drive to Gloucester lay in its utter newness as a way for me to "do the weekend." That newness had been key in my applying for membership to The Trustees of Reservations -- the chance to have places to walk and muse and mull and savor during this coming year in a way that I had not given myself permission to do earlier in my life.



Would the walk through the woodland paths, some of them still snow-covered, have been more enjoyable with a companion this morning? There were certainly couples with dogs and new families enjoying the weather in Ravenswood Park. The truth, though? I thought through my first walk along those paths that the ideal companion for me would have been some other person who would not balk at the notion of a solitary introduction to this post-glacial quiet and lichen-covered history.

In time I turned back on my footsteps and made my way to the park entrance on Rt. 127. I found the interior of my car warmed by the strong afternoon sun. It was time for lunch, and a clam place that I have visited every summer for years and years was thronging with other people stunned by our unusual March weather.

A later detour to the rocky Atlantic coast gave me a final chance to sit and ponder the day. I spoke out into the air -- still winter air -- and said "Thank you" for being entrusted with this life of mine.

You know, I think I am doing all right with it.

A Kind of Novel I Would Love to Find

Sometimes I browse the fiction shelves of a library or bookstore in a mood of reverie. Reviews from the New York Times or Amazon may have intrigued me weeks and months earlier, but I have kept no particular title in mind.

At those times I find myself hoping for a certain kind of novel. I can picture main characters I want to meet. I become aware of the tone I am searching for in narratives about people wrestling with a situation or arriving at a realization.

Maybe I will just have to write something like this myself one day. Experience tells me, though, that I do not have the fiction gene as a writer. What if somewhere I could find this storyline – or something like it…

The main character is reading a book. Or re-reading one.

Chapter after chapter I follow this character, a man or a woman immersed in the familiar process of finding the times and the places in which to read one particular book from beginning to end. An armchair by an open window on a Saturday morning gives way later to pillow and bedside lamp at 10 o’clock.

The novel I would love to find would explore what gets someone reading that book – maybe a novel, maybe a biography – and what else is happening in the reader’s life for the length of time it takes to finish the reading.

The novel I would love to read will focus as well on the days the character doesn’t manage to read or even want to read. The decision to cook a meal, the decision to clean the house, the decision to chat with a friend may each claim the time and attention that could otherwise make it possible to read a further chapter or even just part of a chapter.

The novel I would love to read might allude to models the character had early in life for a regular engagement with books. Had there been parents or grandparents whose bedside tables collected titles, fiction or non-fiction? Would the parents and grandparents understand why our main character’s life looks and sounds the way it now does?

The novel I would love to read could describe the weather through which a character moves each day of reading and maybe even some of the meals punctuating those days. Is there a cup of hot cocoa or a tall glass of iced tea next to the reader? A sandwich on a plate? A cocktail?

The novel I would love to read would discuss the company there is for this main character in the process of reading. Is there someone who regularly asks about the book and its pleasures, maybe its frustrations? Is there another character deciding to read the book simply on the basis of this reader’s recommendation?

The novel I would love to read may be ultimately about the self-image the main character is living out or consciously reinforcing by the choice to read just this title when other books or other diversions are available in abundance.

And maybe. Maybe this character’s life really changes during the reading in a way that had previously seemed possible only in fiction.

The Stuff of Lives

Last Friday I returned to my rooms at the end of the work day, fed the cat, and settled on the couch in the sitting room. I arranged a throw over my legs, leaned my head back, and for the next two hours I did not move. My eyes closed, I did not actually sleep but I was not my normal conscious self. I let go of Friday evening tasks. Dinner might or might not happen. Twenty-four hours had now passed since a work event for the smooth execution of which I had been – once more – successfully responsible.

Each work year brings these events for which a two- and sometimes three-month set of deadlines prepares. After years in this job, I no longer consciously acknowledge the stress of reaching each event and providing my supervisors the assurance that all will go well. It always does go well, and everyone involved in our work attends and witnesses and – often – gives the thumbs up to me at the conclusion.

On this Friday evening, however, after weeks and weeks of telling my body and my mind what was important, I let them tell me what was important:

1. I had received a gift that week.

2. I had also received a thank-you note for a gift I had given.

3. I had managed to read a short story in French.

4. I had cooked fish fresh from the grocer's.

The experience of according the achievements of the preceding week what I can only call heart-space was moving in those two hours of drifting consciousness.

Granted – cooking fish and reading a short story in French are not the stuff of eloquent personal testimony. They represent, however, I eventually sensed lying back on the couch Friday evening, the end result of choices made over the years to be someone with a particular history.

The thank you note came for a wedding gift I had given. Two academics, the bride and groom may not have needed another blanket, another set of salad bowls, another vase. The husband’s position in the classics department of a local university suggested that I locate vintage editions of a Latin poet. Pervigilium Veneris came up online in three fine editions, each with an English translation. The thank you note acknowledged the distinct and unexpected pleasure my two friends had taken reading aloud and comparing the translations.

And the gift I received? A package containing three jars of homemade tomato sauce from a restaurant to which a friend has regularly taken his parents over the years. The hometown Italian restaurant had been the setting for a fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration for his parents January last year. This January the family had convened again in the private dining room for the meal after his father’s funeral. One of the three jars is a puttanesca sauce, my friend’s choice, he informed me, on both of those occasions.

Galloping through a busy week, I had reached last Friday evening ready to be reminded and surprised afresh by what an everyday life can feel like.

There are sources of renewal waiting all around us, I learned again, and sometimes even tucked inside, just waiting for us to relax.

Bavarian Crosses

I intend to set aside time during my March visit to walk through at least one of the cemeteries of Munich. I discovered today that there is a German word for a visit to a cemetery -- der Friedhofbesuch. The word appears in an online review of Fremd in Cambridge, a novel by Ruth Rehmann that I had discovered by chance in my local library and borrowed last month. I had been lured by the epigraph, a famous sentence from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations comparing German or any language to an old city with its maze of ancient passageways and modern neighborhoods.

Maybe it is the suggestion of ancient passageways that lures me to cemeteries, even in cities that I don't know well. Some crosses in the Waldfriedhof southwest of City Center have a look that appeals. The sentiment inscribed in Latin in one Flickr photograph of the Munich cemetery is too absolute for my tastes (Extra Bavariam non est vita: "There is no life outside Bavaria"), but the wooden crosses visible in the background recall Alpine shrines.

Picture snow on those wooden gables, and one of the oldest Christmas cards that my parents kept over the years comes to mind.



Photo of Waldfriedhof (Munich) uploaded on Flickr by Artep ^_^

The Munich I Want to Visit

I am going to go into a bookstore in Munich in March.

I am going to go to the poetry section.

I am going to find an edition of Rilke.

I will probably look at all the neighboring R shelves and discover on the spines of books the names of German poets about whom I know nothing.

I will open some of those books and try to read a line or more with my first-year German.

I will likely find the edition of some unfamiliar poet and decide to buy it. I will have understood just enough of the words and the binding will be appealingly compact and the pages strangely beautiful with all the open space around and between the lines of verse.

I will take the books I want to the cashier and offer the credit card with which I have purchased books in Paris and Venice in recent years.

Five minutes later I will walk out onto the Munich street with a bag in hand.

No other time with those books will likely do as much to convince me of the value of the days I am planning in Munich as that half hour in the bookstore.

Wherever it is.

Whatever street.

Near whatever Munich church I will probably then wend my way.



Photo uploaded from Flickr member soozika.

Flannel and Jazz

Arms full of sheets warm from the dryer, I slow down and listen to the jazz voice of Melody Gardot. Yes, the new year has already brought this new voice – to signal, it seems, new moods. The songs I hear from two rooms away may be more late Friday night than Saturday morning. What is most important, though, is that the sound is January rather than December.

No easy or sensitive memories here. No Christmas darkness, no childhood lights. It is possible to walk out from under the weight of keeping the season and keeping it well.

I approach the bedroom this Saturday morning and start to make the bed. For the first time in a number of weeks there is no table-top tree, no ornaments to acknowledge when I fit flannel around the corners of the mattress. Smoothing the wool blanket over the top-sheet is a clean pleasure. Folding over the blanket’s top edge and aligning the red-and-brown-and-green woolen plaids feels as healthy as a solid night’s sleep in a mountain cabin.

A look around the room at task’s end brings the reassurance customary for a Saturday morning. Today it brings as well that particular January relief when decoration is over. Framed photographs have been returned to their places on bureau and window-sill.

House plants turn to the light.

Heart wakes to jazz.

Red Lentil Rhymes

I like rhymes when they occur unexpectedly, particularly slant rhymes. I am using a term from poetic analysis, but I am really focused on describing an event that echoes an earlier event in some way.

In the slow days after Christmas I accidentally came across the print-out of a recipe that I had known had to be somewhere among the papers from my move in summer 2008. I had almost resigned myself to keeping a particular red lentil soup as a fond winter memory and nothing more.

Of course I could have searched the online archives of the newspaper in which the recipe had first appeared. However, that would mean that my usual reasons for sitting in front of a keyboard had somehow coincided with a longing for red lentil soup.

That longing usually emerged on the rare occasions that I handled the squat, compact white cups from a set of dishes I had purchased for my first apartment in 1981. The cups do not hold enough coffee to displace the hearty blue mugs that have done service every breakfast since August 2008. The white cups are, however, an ideal size for a taste of something – a soup that will accompany a sandwich, an appetizer away from the table.

As though I have had enough guests in my rooms this past year to suggest habitual uses!

What did coincide this week, though, was the surfacing of the recipe and the time to shop and cook and test on a Saturday morning – yesterday morning, January 9.

This fond winter memory moved back onto the calendar. The kitchen counter still cluttered with food processor and cutting board, ends of carrots and a spray of chili powder, I contentedly ladled the red lentil soup into a white cup after its final half-hour simmer. I even brought a sample later to a neighbor who had trusted me this past year with occasional tastes of his curries.

A simple enough recipe to balance the sunny January snowscape outside the window.

And the rhyme?

The date at the top of the newspaper article that had first featured this recipe was January 9, 2008.

I like the idea that the year 2010 can be about bringing life back to sounds and flavors that I may have lost track of, to special moments and enthusiasms that bear remembering and playful reviving.

Fortune Cookies

I can’t say I did anything different this morning.

With the time that a holiday morning brings, I took a skillet out and turned on the burner. Leaning my glass bowl over the sink, I brought the wire whisk down into two eggs and beat them steadily with the milk. Later I chopped parsley that had stayed fresh enough from its purchase earlier in the week and sprinkled it over the eggs in the skillet.

Two slices of multi-grain bread went into the toaster. The small exhaust fan over the stove whirred.

At what I guessed to be the right moment, I grasped the handle and tipped the skillet, first this way, then that. The eggs, puffy and just dry, slid this way, then that. Spatula ready just in case, I tipped and tilted the skillet until it hovered over the plate. I jiggled again.

The yellow folds of the eggs slid onto the plate, the parsley a creamy green under the surface.

Nothing had stuck. My simple meal, the first of 2010, was simply fine.

Finishing the last bites of buttered toast a few minutes later, I thought of the lunch a friend had taken me to this week. In a Chinese restaurant that was new to me, the meal and the company both just the easy-going thing for the final week of the year, I joked when the bill came with fortune cookies.

Would the eerie appropriateness of the fortunes that had punctuated my lunches this past year in a Chinese restaurant near work follow me here?

“Today’s a day to nourish yourself. Feed yourself well,” I read aloud.

“I have,” I said, smiling up at my buddy, “and I will.”



Winter neighborhoods through which I rode later that day put me in mind of the approaching turn of the year. I know I welcome this one, despite the snows and the cold, with a greater readiness to be nourished and surprised than twelve months ago.

On the desk in my bedroom is another recent lunchtime fortune: “Believe it can be done.”

All right, 2010, I do believe.

Just let me know what “it” is when I’m ready for it.

Retreat Morning in Late December

There are mornings that you wake up in a room that is not your usual room. You don’t always remember at first that you chose to forego home in the interest of… well, of something that you don’t yet have the words for.

That’s what retreats are about: venturing into wordless regions of your heart that you may lead your daily life acknowledging without knowing how to enter them, feel at home in them, speak the truth from them.

The words are just not there.

Not yet.

It is hard to expect the people who are family and friends and colleagues to ask you about regions of your heart for which you yourself don’t yet have words. So any retreat is a solitary venture.

There can be sadness that surfaces in a retreat. It is simply a sadness most of us manage not to feel in our daily lives. At times, that sadness is a first step in recognizing that we are a little lost, that there is no map for this.

So what is the wise step after waking up in a room that is not your usual room?

You break the fast. You walk yourself into a kitchen. You find the cup around which you can curve your hands.

And you look out into a cold morning sky that only gulls seem yet to have found a home in.