The Seasons with Edwin Way Teale

Will it ever happen?
Will I ever get there?
Will I ever see it? Will I ever stand in front of it?
Will I ever reach that point?
Will I ever know what it sounds like and feels like?
Will I ever…

Will it ever happen again?
Will I ever get there again?
Will I ever see it again? Will I ever stand in front of it again?
Will I ever reach that point again?
Will I ever again know how it sounds and how it feels?
Will I ever again…

If it happens again, will it be at all the same?
If I get there again, how might it be different?
If I see it again, can it ever be the same?
If I stand in front of it again, how different will it be?
If I reach that point again, will I be different?
As long as I experience again how it sounds and how it feels,
does it really have to be the same?

Isn’t it the nature of things regularly to look different and sound different?

Isn’t it the nature of things to want to be there again?

Pride 2016

A train had left the Brookline Village station a little less than ten minutes earlier. Looking up from time to time for the friend who would be my dinner companion, I walked along Lincoln Street within sight of the Newton Highlands station. The tracks along which the train would approach were below street level in this quiet old suburban neighborhood.

The sunlight that early Friday evening blazoned the nearby storefronts. I had already watched one group of commuters emerge to start their weekend, backpacks slung over their shoulders. At that hour of the day, it was a rare car that came to the stop sign at the intersection with Walnut Street. I settled on one of the sidewalk benches that faced the intersection.

I was ready to start an early June weekend. Pride weekend, as it turned out. This quiet old suburban neighborhood felt an odd place to begin the observance. The vegan and vegetarian restaurant to which I would shortly be heading provided carefully seasoned dishes to an informed clientele, women wearing their gray hair with ease, men smiling gently and nodding wisely. All fine but not what I would call a typical Pride venue.

Though "out" for decades, the man I was meeting for dinner had a spare history with regard to Pride celebrations. Articulate, intellectually acute, well read, symphony subscriber and balletomane, museum-goer and gardener, my friend selected the cold beet soup appetizer so readily that I followed suit. With no need to sound an opening Pride note, he set his gaze on me and settled into hearing my stories of the day and into telling his.

His stories growing up had not always been easygoing ones. Well, whose are? Here he was, though, only slightly my senior, launching his Friday evening alongside mine. We each raised a soup spoon carefully to our lips, savored the flavor of cucumber alongside the beets, and kept rhyming mood and pleasure and relaxation at week's end. The voices around us became for the next hour or two the sound of our village.

Wasn't this it, though? Two men in their late twenties sat at the table next to ours, immersed in some version of being a couple that needed the occasional note of petulance to be convincing. Andrew and I, meanwhile, felt the air around us and above us and smiled that so little was needed to make this evening as fine a Friday as two men could ask for.

At my apartment later in the evening, we slipped a library-loan DVD into my archaic Sony. Undertow was not a first viewing for either Andrew or me, but we may have been starved for the kind of message this 2004 film delivers about the kind of falling in love that two men can sometimes expect. With the great sigh of tears at a certain point from one of us, the comforting hand of the other reached out.

I call that pride. I call that Pride.

Guest Room

Pulling sheets off furniture, pushing curtains open, dispelling the chill of a long-closed room with a new-laid fire – these are commonplaces in period dramas on television. Getting a guest room ready on a BBC production makes for good theatre. In a few well-choreographed seconds, the clear message is given of the arrival of something or someone after a long absence.

When Mr. Rochester returns to Thornfield Hall, for example, the new governess Jane Eyre witnesses the energy of the household staff preparing the venerable mansion for his arrival. Something is happening – or happening again – after a length of time during which the hope of something happening had languished.

If I am honest with myself, a guest room was not common in the homes I visited as a child. When I saw one and knew it for what it was, I was usually in the home of married relatives without children. The order and the neatness of the room were not inviting. I could tell that something was missing that was natural in my own home, simple and few though the rooms were. Space in the home where I grew up was never without its practical use and its appointed caretaker.

So there is no easy explaining the comfort I derived once I left home and entered seminary and over the years had the frequent occasion of being assigned still another room where I could hang my clothes and make my bed for a night, for a week of retreat, for a semester in graduate studies.

There was something satisfyingly adult about being entrusted with the mismatched hangers in a strange closet, the scratchy facecloth and bed linens, the walls beyond which I might hear someone else making a space his own for a night, for a week of retreat, for a semester in graduate studies.

For the first five years I lived in my present apartment, I allowed one room with all the makings of a fine guest room to languish. It began and remained a place where random accumulation happened – happened with such regularity that it took a week each summer to restore order and to find enough manila folders to file away bank statements and insurance policies, gas bills and lab results.

Last summer I met a friend whose recent cancer surgery made travel difficult for a while. If he could not count on finding a place where he could rest during visits to friends, he wisely kept his ventures closer to home. I discovered in those circumstances a motivation I had needed for five years -- I would finally do what I had vowed to do from the first April I watched springtime sun flooding my apartment.

I emptied. I cleaned. I purchased a guest bed. I introduced my cat to still another place where she could feign ownership and autonomy.

I learned another way to mark the turnings of the years by making space for others.

Restoration

A little over ten years ago I was standing only a few feet from the casket where my mother lay. It was the morning that she would be buried, and the people surrounding me were my brothers and their families, cousins and a few childhood friends of my parents.

I knew that one of the defining moments of my life was before me.

 When I looked up at one point, two friends from Boston were coming up to me. I had not known that they would make the trip down to New Orleans for the funeral. As they walked toward me, I felt a familiar life walking toward me, the way of being myself that operates most days, an adult me with a long history.

Those two friends restored me to myself. They let me move through the next few hours with greater freedom and less fear. By being there, they told me that I had not died even if my mother had.

This morning I am traveling with those two friends to another funeral. Here in Pennsylvania, we will walk up to a friend of many years as she approaches a defining moment in her life.

She will come into focus for us in a way she does not in our day to day life in Boston. She will be flanked by her husband and sons, surrounded by her brothers and sisters, called with them to represent the father who will be buried later this day.

All the logistics of hotel accommodations and breakfast rooms, interstate highways and exits, garment bags and suits and overcoats are in service of greater freedom and less fear for a friend.

Not far from her father's casket, she will look up at a point this morning and see us walking toward her. It will be a familiar life walking toward her, the way of being herself that operates most days, an adult life and its long history.

We are hoping to play some part in restoring her.

Love Letters

Two principal dancers stood before an after-show audience gathered in the lobby of the Boston Opera House. A young man and a young woman, exhausted from over two hours’ dancing in Eugene Onegin, did their professional best and from the steps of the grand staircase looked into the upturned faces of their fans. The dancers tried to do what they had agreed to do, to speak about their understanding of the ballet in which they had just performed so gloriously. One dancer pulled a white pullover closer around her; the other stood at ease in his jeans, hands joined behind his back.

From time to time in the next fifteen minutes, the ballerina put her hand on her chest, looked up into the air above her and said haltingly, “I'm sorry. I'm just emptied right now.” It was an apology, a plea for our understanding of what she had poured out for us through her dance.

In two different scenes in the ballet, each of these principals tears a letter into pieces. In each case we understand what the letter had said, what it had offered of the heart, of the world in which someone smitten lives. In each case the returned letter is at first refused; the writer of the letter will not touch the letter even when it is thrust before them. The unwilling recipient must then shred the letter before the face of its writer if a clear refusal is to be understood.

Love in 1820s Russia was not easy.

The journalist interviewing the two dancers asked about the significance of love letters. Do actual letters, she asked the dancers, have power in them that can be matched these days by email or text messages?

The young man thought not; he confessed, however, with a smile that he had never written a love letter.

At greater length the ballerina replied that the communication of love in a written letter, a hand-written letter, is flowing from the heart through the arm into the hand that writes it. The material object, the very paper on which the message is written, is soaked in the love of the person who has written it. Nothing similar, she thought, could happen in an email, a text message or a tweet.

The audience laughed, smiled, nodded, agreed; there was nothing we would not do for this ballerina at the end of the evening.

Amid half-regretful applause, we allowed ourselves ready. We would head out. The evening was over. If the two dancers were exiting by a different door from those by which we issued onto a cold February sidewalk, the dancers likely checked their phones as automatically as we did.

We made our ways into our histories. All of us.

Which one of us had ever torn up a love letter?

How many of us would get to write one again?

What This Lent Can Be About

Last summer I stayed in a monastery guest house for three days. There was the welcome chance to hear chant sung in Latin and French and to walk the québécois countryside.

One of the places I frequented between chapel services and meals in the guest-house dining room was the gift shop. The shelves of the gift shop were lined with honeys and jams and chocolates and cider. Refrigerator cases displayed cheeses in rounds and wedges. Attention was obviously paid to expiration dates, and stock was kept fresh and fresh-looking. Over the three days I made thoughtful decisions, choosing items that matched my buying history in other settings. My purchases reflected me and what I regularly like to serve or give as gifts.

The shelves of the guest-house library offered a different kind of challenge, and what I took back to my room the first night was a soft-cover volume in French. Part of the lure of the book was that it was worn enough to assure me that it had attracted other readers since its printing in the early 1950s. The cover photograph showing pilgrims at Lourdes, their hands raised in prayer, had faded over the years; the pages were yellowed.

Familiar though I was with the story of the Marian apparitions, I was hardly what one would call a devotee of the literature of healings and testimonies. The French prose of the opening pages was clear, however, written by a medical doctor accompanying one of the standard pilgrimages into the Pyrenees in the early 1900s; the tone of the narrative was intelligent.

I decided to spend time that first night of retreat with the young doctor as he moved through the cars of the train on its way into the mountains. I read how he examined one of the gravest cases, a young woman with tuberculosis; its progress left her in increasing pain and discomfort through the night of travel. The doctor described a discoloration under her fingernails that was a sign of the irreversible onset of the death agony. Giving her morphine, he urged her to consider returning to Paris, but she was strong-willed. She intended going on with the other pilgrims and praying with them the next day at the famous grotto in Lourdes.

I was reading a narrative that the doctor had kept from publication all his life. Other writings of his would get into print, but not this tale of a healing that the doctor had witnessed and could hardly credit at first. A long skepticism, one of the characteristics that had qualified him in a special way for his work on the pilgrim journeys, drove him to spend a solitary night before the grotto where apparitions of Our Lady were said to have occurred. Be real, he begged Mary during his night in prayer, be more than a beautiful legacy of art and poetry. Make the healing of the young woman with tuberculosis a real one and a complete one.

Why does this memory from the summer visit to a monastery come to me at the approach of Lent? In earlier years I have made thoughtful decisions about how to observe this season healthily and sanely. What might this Lent be about? A hunger for what?

A life more real at times than anything I might write about it.

An experience safely beyond what can get me raising the camera, almost involuntarily taking aim as though to ensure that no one can take issue or cast doubts or dismiss what is unfolding before me and around me.

A conviction about how I might live beyond the writing and beyond the camera and beyond the setting down and serving up my story like a gift of honey, like a wedge of cheese.

Is there something ready to come into my life that I can just look up and see? Can I just look up and even not yet see it and still know how all right my life has been?

The Space for a Name

For the kind of writing I like to do, I need to hold my breath. No one automatically sounds like this. No one in the midst of a day, in the midst of the night, in the midst of a life sounds like this.

When I go for a while without writing – and the evidence is clear in something like a blog – I begin my questions. Why not? Why not write? What else is there to occupy me these days?

When I do the kind of writing I like to do, I tend to look up. I tend to look for the surface but from below. And for that immersion I need to do something like hold my breath.

I can't need my breath for a length of time if I am going to go into that immersion. I can't need that breath for laughing. I can't need that breath for gasping with sudden wonder. I can’t need that breath for savoring the strong tea I love. I can't need that breath for singing hymns and carols. I can't need that breath for responding to the kind of attention for which a hunger develops over time in me.

The thing that someone says. The look that someone gives. The touch that someone allows. The time that someone lavishes over things that I, too, love.

I need my breath for those things. I cannot always with calm and deliberation immerse myself, lower myself below the surface, look up at light that is just on the other side of the surface. I sometimes lose the practice of holding my breath and feeling the words, yes, feeling the words arise on their own.

And if the words do not arise on their own, why write? Why hold my breath?

Why not trust, and this is an act of trust, that something is afoot when I do not write, something is happening, something full of light, just above the surface, worthy – in time— of words.

In time I will hold my breath again. The words will arise. The space where a name should go will get a little clearer.

Church-going

No, it wasn't the building.

It wasn't the flowers arranged and opening before the altar table. It wasn't the blue wall behind the Virgin's statue in a niche high up above the sanctuary. It wasn't the gesture, one hand raised with fingers gently curled, by which Christ, his mother and the saints communicate some message, some authority out of mosaic and stained glass and marble statue.

It wasn't the sound swelling out of organ pipes. It wasn't the procession, cross first, candles flanking, book of readings held aloft. It wasn't the words of the hymn, my voice joined by other voices from fellow singers I could not see, all of us bent over songbooks, eyes moving over the musical notations, dipping down into words separated into syllables, all of us guided by some familiarity gained by months and years of Sundays.

It probably wasn't even the celebrant, homilist, pastor, presider.

The injury, though, needed a building as tall as this, a ritual as old as this, a city congregation just this various and motley, or the injury threatened to pull me down, back into a pattern too old to recognize before it had started its weighing in, weighing down, almost blinding, nearly depleting.

I am at an age, though, and a stage of inner work to be able to rouse myself at the signs, the insinuating words of judgment, the ache of a deprivation so close to the bone that it sometimes passes for me.

Without all this building and ritual and congregation, where would I be? Without the host pressed into my hands each week by communion ministers whose faces I recognize, whose names I know, whose presence before me depends on nothing I ever do, where would I be?

I emerge, though, each Sunday face wet with tears. I am able to claim all this, own all this, move toward another week, await another Sunday.

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.