Friday, April 27, 2012
Monday, April 16, 2012
A Way from Here to There
I had made it. And I wanted to prove it. I wanted evidence, alone though I was that quiet morning, that I had found the way there.There are fences around this lighthouse, and the former lightkeeper's house is a private residence. Signs urging me to respect private property turned me back on my tracks a number of times.
I had made it there, though, and I intended to try my best to get the kind of photograph I had seen again and again. The images of the lighthouse with which I am most familiar include part of the massive breakwater leading to it. How to get there? Was there a way from the various here's where I found myself to that one particular there?
That one particular there was worth recording. I wanted to take a photograph of it that did not raise the question: how did he get there? Examining the picture, I might be able to make out for myself the rough, pebbled path not far from the water's edge. I might recall the way I had to lift myself up onto the breakwater. I will forget in time the sound of the waves, maybe even the force of the wind that repeatedly threatened to take my cap and send it off over the water.No photograph I could have taken would suggest the key question: How did I get there?
I will find my own ways to tell that story. This is one of the ways -- showing the watercolor by Gloucester artist Judyth Evans Meagher that hangs over my fireplace. It is something that has been part of each place I have lived over the past seven years.
Yes, I had made it. And I wanted to prove it. I wanted to prove to myself that I had found a way there.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Hats She Wore
They are on their way to the costume room of a nearby theatre. Most of the actresses who will wear them are high-school age, young women who will never have seen their own mothers or even grandmothers wear a dress hat. If the costumer for the productions knows his or her stuff, there will be pairs of gloves to complete the look for each actress.
Long after my mother had stopped wearing hats for church or weddings and funerals, she kept her favorites on a high shelf in her bedroom closet. The hat boxes were all clearly labeled: "(Old) Black Felt Hat," "Straw Pill Box Hat," "Summer Navy Hat." From New Orleans department stores like D.H. Holmes, Maison Blanche, and Godchaux's, the boxes each carry the original sales slip glued in place with my mother's home address. She would have taken the bus to the stores on Canal Street in the morning and arranged to have her purchases delivered to our house later. The date of sale on each label remains legible: these were the styles of the Sixties.
Easter Sunday afternoon I accompanied one of my nieces down into the basement of her house. She and I brought four hat boxes up from where they had been stored since my parents' house was sold. When I opened the boxes later on the back seat of my car, I found each of the hats still stuffed with the paper my mother had used so her hats would keep their shape. It felt important today to take a picture of each hat before I forget -- again -- what that part of home life used to look like.
Long after my mother had stopped wearing hats for church or weddings and funerals, she kept her favorites on a high shelf in her bedroom closet. The hat boxes were all clearly labeled: "(Old) Black Felt Hat," "Straw Pill Box Hat," "Summer Navy Hat." From New Orleans department stores like D.H. Holmes, Maison Blanche, and Godchaux's, the boxes each carry the original sales slip glued in place with my mother's home address. She would have taken the bus to the stores on Canal Street in the morning and arranged to have her purchases delivered to our house later. The date of sale on each label remains legible: these were the styles of the Sixties.
Easter Sunday afternoon I accompanied one of my nieces down into the basement of her house. She and I brought four hat boxes up from where they had been stored since my parents' house was sold. When I opened the boxes later on the back seat of my car, I found each of the hats still stuffed with the paper my mother had used so her hats would keep their shape. It felt important today to take a picture of each hat before I forget -- again -- what that part of home life used to look like.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Ties
I don’t pop anymore.
That is the impression I have of myself. I know what I will look like most work days. I know what I will look like at family celebrations, such as the one we had this Easter Sunday. And I do not pop.
Sixty years down the line, I am wary of suggesting to anyone that I might want to pop. On the other hand, I envy women the satisfaction of adding accessories – something orange or pink or gold, an African scarf or a lacquer bracelet – as they imagine someone else thinking, “Oh, that’s nice.”
At Easter dinner I sat next to a man in his early forties, a member of our family for five years now. He was describing a photo shoot at work for which he had needed to buy a sport coat. When he spoke of the black t-shirt he had worn with it, someone at table asked him to repeat what he had just said.
I got that he would have popped with the black t-shirt. His instincts had been right, I thought. Besides, a photographer would never have allowed the wrong look in images destined for a work publication.
“Only old men wear ties everyday for work,” someone near me said – immediately adding an apology in my direction.
I did not mind. I do indeed wear a tie most days at work – as my father did before me. The shirts I wear are not expensive ones but with a suitable tie, they produce a look to which people nod, sometimes in a way they barely notice.
I nod to the look as well.
At seven o’clock each weekday morning, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I push the knot of a tie up to my collar. Briefly and privately, I pop. I think.
That is the impression I have of myself. I know what I will look like most work days. I know what I will look like at family celebrations, such as the one we had this Easter Sunday. And I do not pop.
Sixty years down the line, I am wary of suggesting to anyone that I might want to pop. On the other hand, I envy women the satisfaction of adding accessories – something orange or pink or gold, an African scarf or a lacquer bracelet – as they imagine someone else thinking, “Oh, that’s nice.”
At Easter dinner I sat next to a man in his early forties, a member of our family for five years now. He was describing a photo shoot at work for which he had needed to buy a sport coat. When he spoke of the black t-shirt he had worn with it, someone at table asked him to repeat what he had just said.
I got that he would have popped with the black t-shirt. His instincts had been right, I thought. Besides, a photographer would never have allowed the wrong look in images destined for a work publication.
“Only old men wear ties everyday for work,” someone near me said – immediately adding an apology in my direction.
I did not mind. I do indeed wear a tie most days at work – as my father did before me. The shirts I wear are not expensive ones but with a suitable tie, they produce a look to which people nod, sometimes in a way they barely notice.
I nod to the look as well.
At seven o’clock each weekday morning, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I push the knot of a tie up to my collar. Briefly and privately, I pop. I think.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Palmsonntag
With the arrival of Holy Week, German seems to make an entrance into even the humblest Christian parishes. The melody of the traditional "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded" is identified in hymnbooks as "Herzlich tut mich verlangen." Sitting through the Buxtehude adaptation for the postlude today at Palm Sunday services in my parish, I resolved to find time later this week to listen to the Bach St. Matthew Passion.
There was a lot of listening I was doing today in church. Meanwhile, the reading of the long Passion narrative started a slide show going in my head. From the hands of great artists and some not so great, I have images to match each of the Gospel stories telling how Jesus is arrested, tried and executed. The fourteen Stations of the Cross hanging on the walls of the church are still one more set of artists' renditions of the final twenty-four hours of the life of Jesus.
How many other ways could there be to see those scenes? How many other ways could there be to tell that story?
I realized today that there will be artists still at work for decades and centuries to come -- some very talented artists and many less so -- all with the aim of helping people picture what happened in Jerusalem two thousand years ago.
Why picture it, though? What purpose did it serve today to rehearse in my mind's eye what exactly may have happened to Jesus? Why attempt to stay in imagination with the dying of one man when the dying of countless others happens day in and day out without my least notice?
I say "attempt to stay in imagination" because today I did not succeed. I did not stay in imagination with Jesus. Questions from my own life arose again and again, and I failed to reflect on the questions that may have occurred to Jesus carrying a cross to Calvary. I failed to imagine the questions that occurred to bystanders witnessing those Jerusalem events first hand.
Who has time for this?
Or who has the heart for it?
For that matter, who has time for his own life sometimes? Who has the heart for it?
And that is the question, is it not?
If music, however, can trick us into it, if stories can trick us into it, if artists' imaginings can trick us into it, who would not consider himself lucky? Who would not consider himself lucky to have the questions of his own life there before him on a Sunday morning?
There was a lot of listening I was doing today in church. Meanwhile, the reading of the long Passion narrative started a slide show going in my head. From the hands of great artists and some not so great, I have images to match each of the Gospel stories telling how Jesus is arrested, tried and executed. The fourteen Stations of the Cross hanging on the walls of the church are still one more set of artists' renditions of the final twenty-four hours of the life of Jesus.
How many other ways could there be to see those scenes? How many other ways could there be to tell that story?
I realized today that there will be artists still at work for decades and centuries to come -- some very talented artists and many less so -- all with the aim of helping people picture what happened in Jerusalem two thousand years ago.
Why picture it, though? What purpose did it serve today to rehearse in my mind's eye what exactly may have happened to Jesus? Why attempt to stay in imagination with the dying of one man when the dying of countless others happens day in and day out without my least notice?
I say "attempt to stay in imagination" because today I did not succeed. I did not stay in imagination with Jesus. Questions from my own life arose again and again, and I failed to reflect on the questions that may have occurred to Jesus carrying a cross to Calvary. I failed to imagine the questions that occurred to bystanders witnessing those Jerusalem events first hand.
Who has time for this?
Or who has the heart for it?
For that matter, who has time for his own life sometimes? Who has the heart for it?
And that is the question, is it not?
If music, however, can trick us into it, if stories can trick us into it, if artists' imaginings can trick us into it, who would not consider himself lucky? Who would not consider himself lucky to have the questions of his own life there before him on a Sunday morning?
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Cape Cod and its Angels
My niece collects shells and stones and sea glass. On the mantle of her Cape house, in a pile on an iron table on the back deck, along the windowsill in her kitchen, she has left mementos of beach walks and wilderness hikes. By this point her son, close to three years old, has made his contributions as well. It does not take a lot of imagination for me to hear her words of encouragement to him as he looks for shells, her words of astonishment when he shows her what he has found, her words of thanks after he hands her one.
Her vacation home has become a safe haven at times for members of the family. It was an obvious location when I thought of taking a couple of days in this unseasonably warm March to breath different air. A friend got it right when he suggested that I was looking for contemplative time. Well before the regular season, Cape Cod roads and streets were quiet and at times empty. It was easy for me to get the feel of a mini-retreat.
I resisted packing the laptop and limited my books to one volume of Mary Oliver and the French translation of a spiritual journal by Pierre Favre. The writings of this sixteenth-century priest used to be favorite reading in my seminary days in my twenties. The soft-cover edition of Favre's Memoriale had been a purchase from a Paris bookstore during a summer stay in 1974. Packed amid boxes of books from recent moves, the volume was one of the mementos I uncovered in a basement clean-up a week ago. The paper cover showed rusty smudges from foxing that I had not seen before.
At a point during my Cape stay, I decided to do something that occurs regularly in Favre's journal. He used to pray to the angels guarding the different towns and cities through which he traveled. Addressing these angels, Favre would pray for guidance during his stay in each location.
Before the monotone winter landscape surrounding my niece's house, I prayed to the angels of that town. I prayed for the journey that had taken me from Paris in 1974 to this strange early spring of 2012. I prayed for the young man who had parted with twenty-nine francs to own a record of how memories in another man's heart had once been made and kept.
Her vacation home has become a safe haven at times for members of the family. It was an obvious location when I thought of taking a couple of days in this unseasonably warm March to breath different air. A friend got it right when he suggested that I was looking for contemplative time. Well before the regular season, Cape Cod roads and streets were quiet and at times empty. It was easy for me to get the feel of a mini-retreat.
I resisted packing the laptop and limited my books to one volume of Mary Oliver and the French translation of a spiritual journal by Pierre Favre. The writings of this sixteenth-century priest used to be favorite reading in my seminary days in my twenties. The soft-cover edition of Favre's Memoriale had been a purchase from a Paris bookstore during a summer stay in 1974. Packed amid boxes of books from recent moves, the volume was one of the mementos I uncovered in a basement clean-up a week ago. The paper cover showed rusty smudges from foxing that I had not seen before.
At a point during my Cape stay, I decided to do something that occurs regularly in Favre's journal. He used to pray to the angels guarding the different towns and cities through which he traveled. Addressing these angels, Favre would pray for guidance during his stay in each location.
Before the monotone winter landscape surrounding my niece's house, I prayed to the angels of that town. I prayed for the journey that had taken me from Paris in 1974 to this strange early spring of 2012. I prayed for the young man who had parted with twenty-nine francs to own a record of how memories in another man's heart had once been made and kept.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
A Trip to the Library
I had read that it was a beautiful library. My project today was to drive to the neighboring town and see for myself.
I loved that there was an old New England cemetery right next to it. Someone must have known that a stroll through one was a fitting path to the other.
Care had been taken to protect the architectural elements of an older style while providing the security of a sturdy renovation.
I took a chance and searched the Fiction Room for a copy of the book that I had purchased a few weeks ago in a used book store in downtown Boston.
I took down from the shelves the library's copy of Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins. Long since separated from its dust jacket, the book was the same 1956 edition that I am reading now. What this copy has that mine does not is that unmistakable library smell wafting from the pages as soon as I opened the cover.
On the covers on my bed, I had left the copy from which I read last night before falling to sleep -- page 393!
I loved that there was an old New England cemetery right next to it. Someone must have known that a stroll through one was a fitting path to the other.
Care had been taken to protect the architectural elements of an older style while providing the security of a sturdy renovation.
I took a chance and searched the Fiction Room for a copy of the book that I had purchased a few weeks ago in a used book store in downtown Boston.
I took down from the shelves the library's copy of Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins. Long since separated from its dust jacket, the book was the same 1956 edition that I am reading now. What this copy has that mine does not is that unmistakable library smell wafting from the pages as soon as I opened the cover.
On the covers on my bed, I had left the copy from which I read last night before falling to sleep -- page 393!
Friday, March 16, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
On the Road to See an Old Friend
The bus ride from Boston to Portland is two hours on a Sunday morning.
Two hours is not an inordinately long trip to see an old friend. I last saw him a year ago in my hometown of New Orleans, where he and his wife live ten minutes from my brother’s. At a table in an uptown coffee house, I had handed George a brochure about a March 2012 conference at Bowdoin College. Dressed in his lawyer’s long-sleeve white shirt and tie, George had taken the brochure and thanked me.
I was fresh from last year’s Winter Weekend centered on Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which had brought a number of scholars to the Bowdoin campus to address a gathering of readers. Treating the participants to a banquet that took its inspiration from the literary work under discussion had been part of the winning recipe on the part of the college. I was able to assure George that the upcoming year’s conference on the Iliad would prove a satisfying experience – especially for someone whose diversions include translating the Iliad from the original Greek.
My preference for the bus this past Sunday came from the leisure it would afford for the two hours up to Portland and the two hours back. I would get to read further in The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir. A happy chance of a purchase in a used bookstore a few weeks earlier, the 1956 novel promised six-hundred pages of political and literary discussions among characters based on Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and their friends. The French major in me welcomed the diversion.
Would George and I have a similar conversation over our own lunch?
There was some talk about recent publications by the presenters at the weekend conference. There was talk about preferences for translations of the Bible. There was on George’s part the frank admission that few reading prospects of his had yet supplanted the Iliad for the capacity to engage him intellectually and maybe even emotionally. One of the great sagas of war opening on a scene of dissension in the ranks – George smiled in savoring the possibilities for insight the old epic could offer.
Over lunch and later on a walk through the Old Port, our conversation touched on teachers we had shared in high school and classmates and other authors like Mary Oliver and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, before whose family’s home and parish church we paused. The ease of the talk and the welcome and trust we each could sense from the other made this walk a strange one – that it had taken us so many years to find our steps matching this way and our moods agreeing.
Within four hours of arriving in Portland, George was heading to the airport. Talk of his wife and daughters had made it easy to imagine his life in New Orleans, and I knew he was returning to questions and satisfactions that someone of his intelligence and thoughtfulness expected at our age.
After my two hours’ read on the bus back to Boston, I picked up my car from the garage and drove home. The light was late afternoon light, Sunday afternoon light. Briefly it would touch my pictures and chairs and plants in a certain way. If I decided to capture it, it was because of who I had been almost fifty years ago as well as who I have since happily become.
Two hours is not an inordinately long trip to see an old friend. I last saw him a year ago in my hometown of New Orleans, where he and his wife live ten minutes from my brother’s. At a table in an uptown coffee house, I had handed George a brochure about a March 2012 conference at Bowdoin College. Dressed in his lawyer’s long-sleeve white shirt and tie, George had taken the brochure and thanked me.
I was fresh from last year’s Winter Weekend centered on Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which had brought a number of scholars to the Bowdoin campus to address a gathering of readers. Treating the participants to a banquet that took its inspiration from the literary work under discussion had been part of the winning recipe on the part of the college. I was able to assure George that the upcoming year’s conference on the Iliad would prove a satisfying experience – especially for someone whose diversions include translating the Iliad from the original Greek.
My preference for the bus this past Sunday came from the leisure it would afford for the two hours up to Portland and the two hours back. I would get to read further in The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir. A happy chance of a purchase in a used bookstore a few weeks earlier, the 1956 novel promised six-hundred pages of political and literary discussions among characters based on Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and their friends. The French major in me welcomed the diversion.
Would George and I have a similar conversation over our own lunch?
There was some talk about recent publications by the presenters at the weekend conference. There was talk about preferences for translations of the Bible. There was on George’s part the frank admission that few reading prospects of his had yet supplanted the Iliad for the capacity to engage him intellectually and maybe even emotionally. One of the great sagas of war opening on a scene of dissension in the ranks – George smiled in savoring the possibilities for insight the old epic could offer.
Over lunch and later on a walk through the Old Port, our conversation touched on teachers we had shared in high school and classmates and other authors like Mary Oliver and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, before whose family’s home and parish church we paused. The ease of the talk and the welcome and trust we each could sense from the other made this walk a strange one – that it had taken us so many years to find our steps matching this way and our moods agreeing.
Within four hours of arriving in Portland, George was heading to the airport. Talk of his wife and daughters had made it easy to imagine his life in New Orleans, and I knew he was returning to questions and satisfactions that someone of his intelligence and thoughtfulness expected at our age.
After my two hours’ read on the bus back to Boston, I picked up my car from the garage and drove home. The light was late afternoon light, Sunday afternoon light. Briefly it would touch my pictures and chairs and plants in a certain way. If I decided to capture it, it was because of who I had been almost fifty years ago as well as who I have since happily become.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Grits and Bacon
The simple rhythms are the best ones for Lent.
Simple meals can be the most satisfying.
Saturday morning gave me the chance to bring three slices of bacon to old-fashioned crispness. The balance of grits and bacon and coffee did its customary job.
The lessons from years of preparing meals provide some of the surest ways we return to ourselves.
Simple meals can be the most satisfying.
Saturday morning gave me the chance to bring three slices of bacon to old-fashioned crispness. The balance of grits and bacon and coffee did its customary job.
The lessons from years of preparing meals provide some of the surest ways we return to ourselves.
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