Walking Authors Ridge

When I travel to Concord, Massachusetts, I end up wondering why I visit so infrequently.

Much that is familiar inevitably rises up around me. Much that is familiar rises up within me.

It is a storied landscape into which I drive, even if the goal is a restaurant bar where a friend from high school will stand me a beer in early celebration of my birthday. He and I determined long ago that Concord was close to the midpoint for us journeying from our homes. The ease of finding Concord and finding parking and finding places to walk and talk and eat can partially account for its appeal.

As well, it suits our age. We are among those growing up in the Sixties for whom there was no holier name than Thoreau and no prober of the troubled psyche better than the grim Hawthorne.

Rob and I retreat to Concord as to a place where ideas and the lives lived in accordance with them have enjoyed a venerable arena.

We listen to one another describe what our own lives have become – things that neither of us would once have predicted. We look at our divorces but from different angles. Our certainties have been tempered; our verities are tentative and hard-won.

We are men in our middle sixties, over-educated and literary and religious in a Walker Percy kind of way.

Putting down my brown ale last Sunday afternoon, I looked up from a bar plate of monkfish and asparagus as Rob finished a surprising admission. Against the increasingly solitary thing that his own life has become as children move away, he commented with admiration on how I have repeatedly put myself out there.

However I remember recent birthdays – flowers that one suitor sent me, the driftwood fire that a South Shore gentleman had built on the beach, a gray plaid flannel shirt from a Mainer loyal to LL Bean – Rob was serious in his respect. He did not suspect that I could look over his shoulder and see where I had sat with still another friend just a day or two earlier, immersed in nuanced confidences and a familiar wonder.

When Rob had driven away, I did not yet get into my car. I walked to nearby Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. It was four o’clock on a November afternoon, cold enough for a jacket and hands in the pockets. I knew where I was heading under gray skies, along empty paths, sometimes just below crests topped with weathered gravestones. No one else needed to be there.

I made my way, recognizing as I did a long-ago longing. I think I had always hoped to be just such a solitary man at this time of day. I think I had always dreamed of walking Authors Ridge at this time in my life.

Pierre Charles and Belgium in the 1920s

A writer like May Sarton can propose to take us back to Belgium in the 1920s and we are ready to think it a place and a time we could well visit. The opening lines of A Single Hound, Sarton’s first novel from 1938, create a scene like something from an old black-and-white post card.

Early in the morning between winter and spring, when the grass is frosty, when there is no scent and no sound but a heavy white stillness, and yet you know the blackbird may speak at any moment, a sharp sweet waterfall of sound fall down, and the earth wake – on such a morning the milkman whistles “Auprès ma blonde” as he drives down the little alley behind the houses on Boulevard Léopold.

The poet at the narrative heart of the novel is based on a mentor of Sarton’s, someone who taught her in the mid 1920’s when Sarton was twelve years old and a student at the Institut Belge de Culture Française in a suburb outside Brussels.

When a writer knows where she is going, when she uses sentence structures that show an awareness of the complexity of situations, when she employs words that are not the simple or obvious ones – doing so in the service of something that is not simple or obvious – I am snared. I follow her.

Many readers of May Sarton do. We become a following. We are linked by a feeling of shared allegiance to that solitary life and the words that got written when no one else was around. In a way, we own ourselves heirs of her quiet hours.

Recently in my own quiet hours I have turned to a Belgian author whose books would have been available in specialized bookstores in Brussels in the mid-1920s. Pierre Charles, S.J., and his writings are familiar from my seminary days. I do not imagine either the twelve-year-old Sarton or her poet/teacher Marie Closset being drawn to a book of meditations by a young professor of theology who then lived an hour away in the university town of Louvain.

In time La Prière de toutes les heures (1923) would be translated into nine languages. The custom of collecting a series of short meditations – each three or four pages long – and publishing them was not new when Pierre Charles was ordained a priest in 1910. A number of such collections would have been available in the seminary library in Tronchiennes where Pierre Charles had completed his two-year novitiate in 1901 and where he had spent a final year of spiritual formation after ordination.

Perhaps the skill of creatively inviting a listener into a Gospel text was one that Pierre Charles early recognized as his own. An individual making a retreat led by the young priest or attending a Sunday Mass where he had preached may have asked for copies of his words. What evidently had the power of helping people think about their lives might have seemed worth sharing with a larger audience.

When a writer knows where he is going, when he uses sentence structures that show an awareness of the complexity of situations, when he employs words that are not the simple or obvious ones – doing so in the service of something that is not simple or obvious – I am snared. I follow him.

I do not know that many other readers do. A hundred years after their publication, I do not realistically expect that there is a following for his writings. I look at old black-and-white postcards of the seminary at Tronchiennes and imagine a young Pierre Charles along its paths and in its chapels, wondering to himself what his life will be like, wondering what the rest of the twentieth century will be like. My allegiance to that solitary life and the words that got written when no one else was around may have to remain itself a fairly solitary thing.

I do not regret owning myself the heir of another man’s quiet hours.

Georgics: The Landscape of Intellectual Adventure

It is good to record how an intellectual adventure began, how the seeds were sown.

It was in someone else’s blog in early August 2005 that I came across lines from Boston poet David Ferry’s newly published translation of Virgil’s Georgics.

O greatly fortunate farmers, if only they knew
How lucky they are! Far from the battlefield,
Earth brings forth from herself in ample justice
The simple means of life, simply enjoyed…

“The simple means of life, simply enjoyed” – an apt phrase by Ferry, poetry in English no matter how the original Latin might read. My impression of what had previously seemed a minor work by the author of the Aeneid was on the verge of deepening. I felt lured by the peaceful mood created around Virgil’s ideal of the farmer:

His sleep at night is easy, his life knows nothing
About deceit or trickery, and his life
Is rich in many things: tranquillity
Of the broad fields, of grottoes, and of lakes,
Of cattle lowing while in the shade of a tree
The herdsman peacefully dozes…

Reading further in the passage from Book II of the Georgics, I got a glimpse into a kind of writing that I had not associated before with the Rome of the Caesars. No matter the pantheon in which Virgil situated himself as a poet, I felt invited into the landscape of his family, into its weathers and shadows, into stars and waves.

Why is it that the sun in winter hurries
To plunge itself into the sea and why
Is the winter night so slow to come to an end?
But if the blood around my heart's too cold
To gain me access to such mighty knowledge,
Then may I find delight in the rural fields
And the little brooks that make their way through valleys,
And in obscurity love the woods and rivers.
I long for such places…

I felt the urge to read more – and maybe not only this most recent translation. I wondered what it would be like to spend time with the Latin of Virgil again. I had last studied Latin in an organized way in high school, eventually translating substantial sections of the Aeneid as a student in Latin IV. Taking advantage forty years later of online Latin texts of the Georgics, I began to explore anew the language of this strangely paced poetry.

My curiosity led me to other websites where I began to explore what other people were thinking of the Georgics. I located recommendations for commentaries and surveys that throw light on the mythological and agricultural references teeming in Virgil’s lines. With the help of Google, I tasted the flavor of the international community of scholars dealing with the Georgiques, the Georgiche, or the Georgica.

In discovering something of the range and history of English translations of the poem, I became fascinated by the variety of situations in which people over the years have decided to sit down with the ancient text and attempt a new rendering. Assigned by my high school Latin teacher to read an English translation of the Aeneid, I had responded to the pull of this epic narrative as rendered by then British poet laureate C. Day Lewis. Decades later I was to learn that Lewis had also translated the Georgics.

An impulse purchase of a used copy of the Lewis translation from a book dealer in Tennessee brought the 1947 hardcover into my hands, still bookmarked with a yellowed Christmas gift-tag labeled “Rindges from Chapins.”

Something happened then. I began to sense myself sitting in the company of other readers of the Georgics. None of them were people I would ever likely meet, but all of us had been summoned on an intellectual adventure, invited into a landscape, its weathers and shadows, its stars and waves.

The Past Ten Years

New Orleans was noticeably absent from the textbooks I used in my classes at St. Agnes Parochial School in the late 1950’s.

Illustrations did not show red beans and rice on the kitchen table on Monday evenings. Nothing like the drive along the River Road on Christmas night found its way into our readers. Parents crossing themselves as my parents did when we drove past a Catholic church did not head the families about whom we read our first simple paragraphs. In word problems the pies that had to be divided into quarters or eighths were never pecan pies.

I was not surprised that New Orleans did not matter in the books we read.

I simply concluded that New Orleans did not matter.

I was not surprised at the readiness with which I believed that I did not matter either.

Or if I did, it was because I had raised my hand in class and had given the right answer. It was because I had appeared on summer mornings at St. Agnes and served as acolyte at an early Mass. It was because my academic prowess had given my parents a way to cut a figure at parent-teacher meetings at school.

My salvation was that I did not know on an easy, conscious level that I did not matter. A painful clarity flickered, however, when I looked for a place at a large family Christmas or searched out a bus seat on a school activity. No one at home seemed to know how or when to say, “John, let me tell you what I think is happening in your life.” No one confided, “You know, it’s scary sometimes how much you are like your dad or your mom.” But then whose job was that? I may not have felt worth the effort it would take someone to understand me, and I may have communicated as much.

I was frankly not surprised that I did not matter. I understood, though, that writers did.

Early on I practiced replicating the kinds of sentences and paragraphs that I found on page after page in library books. I managed to get read and I got to matter when articles I had written appeared in student publications. Friends from my high school years still remember particular editorials that I submitted. I had gotten to try out writing about life, even my life, and sounding like I understood it.

Writing became something about which I was confident. My professional life for a number of years involved the teaching of writing. In my late 40’s I began to work on a memoir of sorts. No one to whom I showed it suggested, “John, let me tell you what I think was actually happening in your life at that point.” No one confided, “You know, it’s scary sometimes how much you sound like your brother or your teacher in the ways you express yourself.” But then whose job was that? I may well have communicated that it did not matter.

By 2005 I was writing my first blog. I had found inspiration in a French newspaper article about the phenomenon of elder bloggers. Within an online world dominated by much younger commentators and critics, older people intent on finding an audience for what they understood of their lives and their world were creating blogs that actually got read. Those mature writers and photographers were telling stories that most people had not thought would be told. And all for free!

Please Forward: How Blogging Reconnected New Orleans after Katrina appeared in August 2015, the tenth anniversary of the hurricane. The title takes me back to that scary month and the relentless flooding of the landscape of my family, the homes and streetcars and oak trees and above-ground tombs where my memories had once seemed to find safe lodging. Wherever I had chosen to live my adult, professional life, I always thought it possible to travel back home and in time bring a wisdom to bear. With the perspective of age, I could finally counter the stubborn judgments I had leveled against myself as a child and as a young man.

I recall the online reading I did through that fall of 2005 as the damage sustained by my home town kept unrolling. Bloggers told an unsteady story of ways to live that might not return. New Orleans was gone, I began to conclude in the shock of the images.

A fearful suspicion kept trying to surface the truth that I was gone too.

With the kind of sorrow that emerged and the signs of sadness that stayed, I suspected what I needed to do. I might just have to pay someone to be the audience for what I understood of my life and my world. Facing the facts, I located a professional whose job it would be – one day a week – to listen and then maybe to say, “John, let me tell you what I think was actually happening in your life at that point.” I engaged someone to whom I could confide, “You know, it’s scary sometimes how much I sound like my father or my mother.”

I began to glimpse the ways I had learned over the years to communicate that it did not matter. I got help seeing that it might be time for that me to be gone.

I do not live now as I did ten years ago. After steps I was helpless not to take, along paths I was determined I would go, with the conviction that I would hear what I sounded like, I say with some incredulity that things are different.

And I keep learning.

I had not thought I could matter just this way.

Morning Walks

Since the start of this past summer I have opened my apartment door before 6 o’clock most mornings. The walk I undertake through my neighborhood rarely lasts longer than forty minutes, and I am generally alone as I move down block after quiet block. The sky lightens.

I am walking with a goal – avoiding a medication with which my doctor threatened me back in March if I did not bring my blood sugar levels down. The past half year has had a focus that affects what I eat and how much and how regularly and what I do in the way of exercise.

By this past May I had lost enough weight to convince my doctor, my work colleagues and myself that something had changed in my life.

As I began my regimen of walking this summer, I recovered energy. I began to find living easier when there was less me to carry around.

Easier to put one foot in front of another down neighborhood streets. Harder to escape a sense of the many directions my life has become accustomed to moving at other times.

How do I make sense out of a basket of old dairies and journals beside an overstuffed chair in my apartment? In the same room a laptop sits open on a collapsible table, and the kind of writing that populates this blog has often gotten done there but never on the iPad that lies on the leather couch in another room. There is a style of online exploration that has become associated with the iPad and even the iPhone, but I have not yet managed to read a book straight through by means of either device. Real books form stacks on what would once have been called a coffee table in front of my leather couch. When I am seated there and drink my morning coffee, though, I rest my mug on a side table on which stand photographs in frames. Other photographs line the mantelpiece. Guests regularly sit in another armchair near the couch, and we share the coasters where I rested my coffee earlier in the day. At times a cat perches and watches nearby or circles and sleeps on any number of available surfaces.

Can any of this become simpler, I ask myself? Forget about the television and the CD player and the portable record player that I recently recovered from storage to play the vinyl albums I found.

Sunday morning Mass? A symphony subscription for the coming year?

And then suppose I were to fall in love?

In how many directions could my mind move then during a forty-minute walk at 6 in the morning!

Another Man's Library

I am primed to explore another man’s library. On four separate occasions this summer I have been in his house, sometimes left by myself in one of the rooms where his books stock multiple shelves, sometimes seated across from him, able to glimpse over his shoulder the titles in a bookcase.

I can joke, one man in his sixties talking to another man in his sixties, and threaten to abscond with a volume he will never miss once I am gone. He laughs, waves his hand at the shelves around him and across the room, and lets me know I am welcome to take anything.

I laugh with one part of my brain and surprise another part already planning my moves.

All scholarly insight and humor, we might be Alec Guinness in conversation with Ian McKellan, each eyeing the other behind a gentlemanly white beard.

As I write, I look over the books on some of my own shelves. I know why the books are where they are, why some stand and others lie stacked. To which of these many might he be drawn when he has visited me?

Will their interest for him be anything like the lure of his books for me? Will he reach for a familiar cover and enjoy watching pages open where last I read from them – a month ago, a year ago, two decades?

Will we both get to wonder what the other had been like then, at a time closer to the original publication of a particular book? When one of us read just that page, might he have been picking up a wedge of orange, sipping a cold beer, biting into a slice of dry toast?

Will we both get to wonder what the other had been like at an age when being older than fifty would have seemed to either of us an unlikely event in an unimaginable future?

But here we are.

 

The Simple Door

Before I got into bed last night, I glimpsed my email – one new message.

It must have come while I leaned against the bathroom sink opening four small plastic bottles, shaking out one pill from each into the palm of my hand. Once a day for the past twenty years, I have done the same thing to help keep blood pressure and cholesterol under control. Some of the prescriptions are the same medications that my parents took until they were ninety.

Maybe the ding of the email had gotten lost under the drone of the electric toothbrush. Passing the whirring bristles over my top teeth, front and back, and then my bottom teeth, front and back, I had long ago stopped resisting the repetitions of that procedure that are recommended. I rinsed then and spent a final minute or two with the floss and interdental brushes.

I knew what faced me when I got back to the bedroom, three open windows where there are usually at most two on a summer night. Earlier in the afternoon I had removed my one air conditioner from the third window. It had stopped cooling – no cleaning of filters succeeded in getting cold air. I opted for the chance of breezes crossing the room from one window to the other two. I aimed a floor fan at the bed.

I pulled down the bedspread and cover sheet, picked up a pillow and tossed it to the foot of the bed – closer to the open windows. I would sleep with my feet toward the wall. I knew from past experience that there was some comfort in feeling night air against my face. It was almost an outing, choosing to sleep another way on the bed. Something from childhood summers.

I sat on the edge of the bed to read the email from Alex. Alex was a friend from my earliest years in New England, and he and I had re-connected only a week earlier – a kind of stab-in-the-dark Google success story. His customary good manners notwithstanding, there was no misreading the satisfaction that Alex had felt in our resumed contact.

This email a week later was an announcement that he would be going into the hospital. By 7:30 the following morning, when I would be heading into work, he would be undergoing cancer surgery, a procedure scheduled to last no fewer than seven hours.

It was news that put into perspective the discomfort of a summer night without air conditioning.

But there was a kind of echo in the room. Only a few hours earlier I had exchanged text messages with someone finishing his first week home after a stay in the very same hospital. The visiting nurses who arrived daily at the house were monitoring John’s recovery from another kind of cancer surgery.

Two men I knew were not looking at anything like a normal work week for some time to come.

In the dark, my head on the pillow, facing the air of the open windows, I answered Alex’s email, typing into the light of my phone’s screen a promise of prayers and support.

When I woke, it was perhaps four hours later. The dark room from my angle at the foot of the bed was different from what I was used to, but I was awake enough to know that nothing was really different. Everything that was there had always been there. Even the door whose white frame stood out in the shadows.

Briefly but strongly, though, it was the door that is always open. Each of us will walk through that door one day.

Such a simple door, inevitable, always there.

And I fell back to sleep.

Saint-Benoît-du-Lac

Many people, I presume, could name the model of the wide white car following my black Honda Fit on Vermont Route 105 a week ago. In my rear view mirror, I could make out behind their sunglasses a young man at the wheel and a woman in the passenger seat. The driver seemed desperate to pass me. He twice accelerated when the broken line appeared on our side of the two-lane road and both times had to slow down when oncoming traffic suddenly appeared.

What I could not explain to this man was the car marked “Border Patrol” that I had spotted behind roadside shrubbery ten minutes after being stopped at customs. My three-night stay at the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Benoît-du-Lac had been my first entry into Canada in close to twenty years. I had admitted as much to the customs officer, but I wondered whether there was a pattern to how people drive in their first miles into Vermont that alerts officials to suspicious activity.

I was innocent, I was at pains to explain.

I could not help, though, looking like a man in his early sixties. I could not help driving a modest car. I could not help having barely more than a Google Maps acquaintance with the landscape around me.

I felt compelled to drive within the posted limits.

And I resented that scarcely an hour after a final silent breakfast in the guesthouse dining room I was losing the mood of my days away. More precisely, I felt the ebbing of the long-familiar wonder with which I customarily greet my life and the sky over it when a retreat is over. I had wanted that time with my history of days away and weekends of recollection to last a little longer.

Sometimes rural Louisiana. Often the coastline of New England. Even once the Loire Valley.

And then the white car passed me.

In a little while the road was mine again.

Hauntings and Rosaries

One of my aunts claimed that she knew exactly when someone must have entered her Louisiana home through its sliding glass doors and then gone through her pocketbook. She had made her customary grocery run one afternoon and had left her handbag on the kitchen counter as she put away her purchases. Then, she recounted, it was her usual time to say the rosary and so she had repaired to her bedroom in another part of the house. When she emerged from her bedroom, she found her handbag lying opened on the counter.

My aunt was proud of her deductive reasoning as she narrated the events to me. There was no doubt in her mind where she had been and what she had been doing at that time on a weekday afternoon. It was her rosary time, and a long-established habit had taken her to one of the sure places in her everyday life.

A retired classroom teacher from the same small town along the Mississippi River where both my parents had been born and raised, my aunt was not one to take fright easily. She had taught generations of the residents. They held no surprises for her, it seemed, and she would not let herself be undone by the evidence of misbehavior.

With someone made of feebler stuff, I might have been on the watch for the lingering signs of trauma. I knew better, however, than to voice commonplace cautions to this woman with her Cajun ancestry.

I do remember listening to my aunt that day and registering astonishment at something I was not in the habit of hearing. I was hearing someone talk about a sure time in her day for prayer.

My aunt had not set out to talk about her prayer. Accustomed to hands raised and questions posed, she would have handled that topic thoughtfully and confidently if I had asked her that day to say more.

By saying no more about her daily rosary time, she seemed to suggest that there was nothing more to say. No justification for prayer as part of the day of a Catholic woman in her seventies. No defense of this or other repetitive methods of traditional prayer. No explanation of the benefits, spiritual or psychological, that accrued to her by sliding a set of wooden rosary beads through her fingers once a day.

A year ago I had the good fortune of sharing my living space for a time with a man close to my age whose religious background paralleled much in my own. We got into the habit of taking out our rosaries at a point in the evening. We each slid the wooden beads through our fingers, took turns leading the Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s, invoked at the start of each ten beads an event from the life of Jesus or his mother Mary. There would inevitably come a point when I would stretch out the rosary between my hands and admire the simple craftsmanship involved in creating this article of prayer.

Graduate studies in theology and religion – including courses on the Jewish feasts and life cycle – equip me with a vocabulary to talk about the devotional life by which a range of people allow themselves to be haunted as they grow older.

I own myself haunted.

Planning Retirement

Summer evening in early June. No need yet for the lamps in my friend’s condo. Through the sliding glass door that leads onto his balcony, light comes in across the stretch of a green suburban field.

We are some distance from the city into which my friend travels five days a week. The starched shirt and tie he wears on his twice-daily journeys on the commuter rail have been dropped this evening in favor of polo shirt and walking shorts.

Because of an unseasonable coolness earlier this week, he pads around his unit in white socks. I am not the kind of company he needs to tailor his look for. He expects to be able to spend an hour or two with me this evening and put on no airs.

He rests a foot on the edge of the coffee table. With an easy sigh he puts aside the man who tackles projects head on during the day, sticking his head into colleagues’ offices, delivering the occasional bad news, relying on the weight of decades of employment within the same institution.

It is an employment that he does not yet consider leaving. He is entering his sixties, though, and we talk retirement. Do we either of us know what we expect that to mean? Any idea what we want it to mean? And how soon?

Will it end up a bit like a weekend we leave unplanned? We can wonder sometimes what stories we will get to tell on Sunday night or Monday morning when we have taken no particular pains to create the stuff of stories over the previous forty-eight hours.

Would it be all right to spend the next fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years in a similar mode? Let’s call it “more of the same.”

And then my friend surprises me. There is something in his voice. He does not want to imagine having waited until retirement to do certain things and then find himself facing an illness that extinguishes plans and projects.

He is thinking of his parents and their final years over which he personally watched. In both cases, final years lived too early, concluded too soon.

He wants to learn how to play the organ, he confesses. The right way, not the way he taught himself years ago.

I want to spend more time each day praying. And writing. And reading.

We vow to look for ways in the near future to take long walks together on a regular basis. We want to stay healthy.