Assigned Reading

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

Word cloud made with WordItOut

On Mother's Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.