A Poet Comes to Dinner

I have a week to get the apartment ready for my dinner guest next Saturday night. He is a published poet with whom I last shared a meal two or three years back. We were at a restaurant not far from the college where he had read his work the evening before. Articulate, probing in his inquiry, steady in his gaze, he sat across the lunch table from me for two hours that day.

Fourteen years younger than I, he already had a first volume of poetry to his name as well as a handful of chapbooks. Our acquaintance had begun online, erupted in occasional phone calls, and found holiday expression in exchanges of greeting cards over the years. We both found in the other the kind of good company characterized by attention to language and alertness to religious and ethical questions.

His smile is an easy one in the numerous photographs that have been taken of him and posted on websites featuring Latino authors. He speaks softly in public; in private, he seems always to have ready two or more questions to follow the one he has just posed.

I will take care what books I have most easily visible in the living room next Saturday. I expect that he will squat next to the bookcases flanking the fireplace and eventually pull something off the shelf and turn to me and ask, “Did you like this?” I likely will not know until I answer whether he himself has read the work in question.

He will come and he will go. He will return home and take up any of a number of projects he has underway. He will craft his words for the next editor’s review.

I, on the other hand, will wait for the visit to settle. Maybe sit down again on a Saturday afternoon like this one. Ask myself what I have to say and how I want to say it. Ask myself and no one else.

The Smiles of Rome

I have a friend who recently lived part of a year on this slant of the Janiculum overlooking Rome.

Rome in late December can have a temperate feel. During the last days of this past year, I was able to walk on the Janiculum in a cashmere sportcoat.

At another friend's prodding, I let myself be photographed and I am a little embarrassed. It was a light-hearted moment, and I forgot that light-hearted moments make it feel all right to be silly. And look silly. Which I do here. And so what. Right? And so what.

Found

My collector’s heart has for some years focused on what are called “found photos.” Somehow separated from their original owners, these photos each tell a story to which no one any longer quite has the key. With or without inscriptions on the back, these photos pose who questions, where questions, when questions, and – usually most elusive – why questions. I have grown used to the elusiveness, gotten to know that peculiar taste of unknowing without any longer particularly needing or even wanting the “real” story told, the identities revealed, the details wrapped up.

This week I “found” something else that had been separated from its original owner. I had been combing and deleting the earliest emails in an online account that I started five years back. Some of the people who wrote the messages archived in this account are no longer in contact. They are no longer entertaining any intention of being in my life. It happens that they each in their own way some time back left me snapshots of a friendship.

I was about to delete one message, and then I stopped to read it again. I was in the presence of a moment of my life that I had forgotten. No one who reads the blog these days knows the writer of the message, and the writer of the message no longer reads the blog. Like a found photo, the message is free to pose for the random reader who questions, where questions, when questions, and those most elusive why questions. Read on only if you do not particularly need or even want the “real” story told, the identities revealed, the details wrapped up.

You will meet a moment in a man’s life. Reverence it. I do.

When I woke on Saturday morning, I found myself in the bathroom, looking in the mirror, saying, “I am hungry.” My hunger was not the type satisfied by a bowl of cereal or a piece of toast – but rather the type of hunger that comes from an awareness of the possibility of things – my life – being different. The thought took me by surprise and I recalled your question, “Are you getting what you need?” It was not, by this point, any great revelation that I have not been getting what I need and have not been getting it for quite some time. What has changed during these past three months is my being able to admit to myself that life as I know it, is not quite working. So, what do I need? What is this hunger that caught my attention at 7:30 last Saturday morning?

I love the thought of “taking one’s life seriously.” I have been pretty good at taking other things seriously – work, faith, friendship, situations that others face and sometimes share with me – but have I taken my own life seriously? Have I placed my own needs – those particular, unglamorous needs that somehow make a difference – in the background, not trusting that they are worth paying attention to?

They were, they are, they will continue to be worth paying attention to. So go my thoughts four years after these words were written.

Visiting an Art Museum in Paris

Visiting an art museum in Paris is not like visiting one near where you live.

What you like in the museum near your home, you can safely predict you will see again – if you want to. The question is whether you are the kind of person who wants to see again what you got to see once. The question is whether you discover more the next time you see it – and even more after that. The question is whether something you like in a museum near your home gets to feel more yours with each visit to the museum, with each standing before the painting, with each walking around a statue.

It is frightening to approach a place like the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay if you know you cannot get there again in a few weeks. So much has to be seen before you exit through those doors. So much about a single masterpiece waits to be noticed and appreciated and absorbed before you move out of that gallery.

It is good to consider what you like to do in a visit to an art museum. Is it fundamentally an outing with a friend, a chance to walk around in the company of someone you enjoy in these settings? Is it a pilgrimage, planned and determined, an approach flavored by some awe and reverence until you stand before particular works, particular artists? Is it a plunge into history, an emotional adventure, a leap into the great conversation that women and men of talent and vision felt their lives could manage to be part of? Or is it simply an acknowledgment of the current cultural scene and its opportunities?

A year ago I had begun to plan a summer visit to Paris. I had gotten to think about what to expect returning once again to that city of my heart.

You go to Paris again because there may be more to what that city is than you ever understood.

You go to Paris because there may be more to you than you have ever understood.

Couples

I am doing a lot of thinking about couples these days. I am watching how they act together. I am listening to how they talk about and to one another. I am looking at how they look at one another. I am curious about how they show that they understand the things that mean a lot to the other.

Yes, it is just a few days past Valentine’s Day. For the first time in close to thirty years I did not have someone on whom to lavish the attentions peculiar to the feast. No one to send a text message to before six in the morning. No one to expect flowers and a card from. Three men have sat across from me at different times during these thirty years for some sort of Valentine’s meal. There was no such meal this year.

I have been lucky, though. No denying that.

No denying, either, how my instincts warned me not to be sitting at home the evening of Valentine’s Day this year. I arranged to exchange one of my symphony tickets, and I was back in my favorite section of the first balcony in Symphony Hall on February 14.

By arriving in the hall early, I got settled in time to watch a couple locate their seats in the row directly in front of mine. Two men in their early thirties were wearing what looked like matching black blazers. Each had on a white dress shirt and a tie. They were sharp, each of them, and I daresay they knew it. They probably liked the way they looked together that Valentine’s evening, but the pleasure had little to do with anyone else’s noticing. Their demeanor said – but only to the other – “We’re doing pretty good, aren’t we? This kind of rightness is what it’s all about, and we’ve managed it this evening.”

Not burying their heads in the program notes for the concert about to begin, the two men kept turning to one another. One of them suddenly stopped and dug into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out an iPhone. He leaned his face next to his friend’s and then the two of them looked forward together, heads touching as they faced the camera phone.

What I witnessed, amazing to say, was something I had done myself in just those seats in 2010. It was the gala opening of the BSO season and I had gotten first balcony seats for myself and one of those three men who have shared a Valentine's meal with me. Before bass-baritone Bryn Terfel began the all-Wagner concert that September afternoon, my friend had pulled out his iPhone and taken our picture.

I was watching myself all over again last Thursday evening. Was this how we had looked, I wondered. Here again was that dizzying sense of a universe happy to see two people just where they wanted most to be, with the person they most wanted.

I watched the lights go down in the concert hall, listened to the applause as the conductor came on stage. I was caught up in music that had caught me up before.

The Blizzard of 2013

Though next-door neighbors, the two men I was expecting for drinks Saturday night had never seen the second-floor apartment where I live. They were able to name earlier tenants of the two-bedroom unit and even tell stories of them, but no invitation to ring the downstairs doorbell had been extended to them before mine.

I had been their guest one evening a year earlier. The backyard that I can see from my upstairs windows looks different when you are all seated in lawn chairs, mixed drinks and appetizers on low tables beside you. I remember sitting with my two neighbors in their yard, playing with their dog and looking up at the second-floor windows of my kitchen. It was strange that the exterior wall of a room where I spend so much time each day did not look at all distinctive.

One of them had mentioned the red lamp shade that is visible in my kitchen window when the two men are sitting outside late in the evening. This past Saturday night I made sure that the small kitchen lamp was turned on when they walked in. I wanted them to say, maybe just to themselves, “Ah, there it is.”

It was an odd day to have company. Nothing odd about inviting neighbors over for drinks on a Saturday night, of course, but the invitation had been extended two weeks earlier when none of us knew about the Blizzard of 2013. None of us knew that we would be spending a significant part of that Saturday shoveling out steps and walkways and cars from underneath two feet of snow and sometimes even taller drifts.

Online exchanges between us during the days leading up to the storm insisted, however, that nothing could be that difficult about walking to a house next door. I had two pairs of heavy woolen socks waiting on the radiator near my front door. If my neighbors took off their shoes there at the door, they might welcome an extra layer of warmth as they padded through an unfamiliar apartment.

What were they going to see? I had promised a brief tour of my rooms, and at different times during that snowy Saturday I had gone room by room, scouring kitchen sink and white porcelain stove top with Soft Scrub, spraying Lemon Pledge on the dining room table and a bedroom chest of drawers, swirling blue disinfectant in the bathroom bowl. I had vacuumed and sent the cat scurrying under my bed. I had moved stacks of mail off the pub table in my kitchen. I had sorted the books on the long leather ottoman in front of my living room couch. At the last minute I had lit a single tea light in its holder on the mantle.

Surveying the living room right before their arrival, noting with satisfaction the quiet light of the three lamps, I suddenly felt the solid decade that separated me from the older of the two men ready to visit me. Briefly I fought the feeling that I was living out a stereotype. I reminded myself that I had simply done what any number of people do when guests are coming, reminding myself as well that few of us ever notice all the preparations that hosts put into making their spaces welcoming.

The two men were good company that evening. Their visit to my apartment was prelude to our all three of us returning to their house for fettuccine with homemade vodka sauce – something they had prepared especially for me. Walking down my stairs on our way out, one of the two men slowed down as we reached the bottom and pointed to something on my wall – a favorite vintage photograph that I had framed with multiple mattes and hung there at the entrance of my home.

He turned to me and said, “I really like that framing.”

O Great Winter Sky

Beauty, eh? Beauty trumps everything. Right?

I can be filled with bravado at the start of what the forecasters call a winter event. Transplanted Southerner, I wonder what it could look like this time, feel like, this snow, this cold, this play set in the air, in the clouds above me. A transformation of some kind will take place, and the heart that is ready can find wonder in that transformation.

O great winter sky!

I apostrophize in my way. I celebrate in my way. I defy anyone to bring me down, make me wary. I am its equal, humid South of my youth meeting the freezing rain on my Northern windows late in the evening.

I walk through the apartment, through certain rooms that may not yet have grown warm, radiator or no.

I imagine facing these temperatures in the simple New Orleans homes in which I grew up, the single thickness of their windows helpless against an unseasonable cold. I recall space heaters, incandescent red bars, humming in the dark of a bedroom. What if it did not end? What if this cold kept on, kept its grip, I used to wonder in my long pajamas under layers of quilts and throws.

Adult now, I trust that it will work out. How far could I really be from help, from heat, no matter what that freezing rain does overnight to front steps, to car door handles, to the slight incline of the side street where I live?

On the other hand, I am not unacquainted with the way slippery steps can ignore whatever cautious footsteps I place on surface after surface as I exit my front door. Will I make it tomorrow morning as I leave for work? Will the surprise come all the same? Will this be the place where the ache of years to come is born in hip hitting pavement, hand breaking fall, back attempting a stand without the strength it needs? How long will I lie there if I fall?

If I say it, if I name the foreboding, if I use all my powers of expression and imagination, can I make those scenarios remain distant? Can I live just for beauty a little longer? Can I apostrophize in my way? Can I celebrate in my way?

O great winter sky!

Going Alone

“That’s my violin teacher!”

The young woman sitting next to me at Symphony Hall this past weekend had not been able to help herself. Stranger though I was, she turned to me with undisguised glee. She talked to me but it was clear she would have talked to anyone in my seat. The conductor was not yet on stage, and the young woman had just been stretching, half standing in her seat to survey the members of the orchestra. Maybe she responded to my grandfatherly look; maybe she presumed I would be able to appreciate the excitement she was feeling on being connected to someone seated on the stage of Symphony Hall.

So I became her grandfather. I stretched as well to get a glimpse of the violin section. I smiled encouragingly at my fellow concertgoer as she pointed to an announcement in the program booklet. She would be performing the next afternoon with the Boston Youth Symphony; there would be a production of Verdi’s opera Rigoletto at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge. She was in a cloud, a musical cloud, that weekend.

I had come close to not being her grandfather. The ticket at my disposal that Saturday night was a single ticket in the first balcony. There had been a moment at 5:30 that afternoon when the lure of staying home and fixing an easy dinner and making progress in a novel that I had just discovered was strong. I had spent the morning with a family whose three daughters I taught over twenty years ago. Why venture out one more time? Who would be there to notice if I did not make it?

On the other hand, there are people I get to notice when I do make it.

The rows of seats of the first balcony wrap around three walls of Symphony Hall. Someone sitting in left center, where I had my ticket on Saturday, can see people seated to the left, to the right and even across the hall. At the end of the row where I had my seat, a gentleman in a tan cashmere sport coat raised a pair of opera glasses from time to time to watch the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and four soloists perform Verdi’s Requiem. Without the aid of opera glasses, I had a chance to record concertgoers who had joined me that evening in the first balcony.

1. One elderly gentleman had been brought by his adult daughter. He lumbered in with her help, settled his bulk in an end seat, kept the sweetest smile on his lips even as his eyes closed behind his glasses within the first ten minutes of the concert. His tie stayed neatly in place for the length of the evening. His daughter did not fuss over him as he slept; she read carefully through the libretto as the chorus moved from one part of the Mass to the next.

2. Two graduate students who had opted to share an evening of classical music sat close together. They leaned into one another as the evening advanced. They were equal to the demands of being part of a symphony audience, their posture seemed to communicate, at the same time that they meant this to be a date. With more to follow if they had their way.

3. One well-dressed woman with steel grey hair was sitting forward in her seat. There was no one nearby with whom she needed to confer, no one whose reaction to the music needed to rhyme with hers. She was smiling as she leaned forward. Her hair was long and fell over her shoulders and down her back – it was a way of wearing her hair that must have become her signature over the years. There was no mistaking the satisfaction she intended to savor during this evening of music.

4. A young family of four sat in balcony seats across the hall. From what I could make out, the two children were doing their best with a choice their parents had made – a choice their parents may have made before in other venues. The little boy seemed to know that he could fall asleep against his mother if that was his preference. No struggle there.

5. Not far from my row, I watched a man who from time to time could not stop his right hand from conducting. The hand remained low, never very high above his lap, out of sight to most of his fellow concertgoers. His dark shirt, buttoned at the collar, was tight around him. His eyes remained shut but only for concentration’s sake.

6. Two women sat at ease, each of them wearing a black sweater of some kind. Directed to the musicians on the stage, their looks of attention were mirror images of one another. They did not need to hold hands to communicate that they were a couple. They were used to facing a world together, used to knowing that the other would never be long from her side.

Hearing about my Saturday plans, a friend last week had asked me, “Are you going alone?” The answer that came most readily to my lips was not the true one. I know that now.

Moving On

The winter sky, blue and sunny and cold, seems enormous. It has returned, and no probing stare up into heights of glacial air will find any message there. Head held back, I find no sign that the contents of books will ever have something to say equal to that vastness.

That vastness shows me my size.

There are retreats that I have made in January, most starting on a Friday evening and going until Sunday morning. One in my early twenties lasted a month. I have tilted my head up toward a January sky in the middle of daytime walks and at the end of nighttime walks. There were sometimes stars, sometimes clouds, sometimes relentless sunshine that got me squinting.

It is January in New England, and I know not to be surprised if life comes to a standstill.

A snowstorm can be responsible. An arctic freeze. The three-day MLK weekend. A bout with the flu.

Any of these factors can briefly reinstate something like the holiday mood of late December. Life slows at points like the traffic on a snowy highway. What used to take thirty minutes of careful travel ends up needing at least forty-five.

Some years the brooks and ponds become walkways and skating rinks. The sounds of water in motion become muffled and blurred and eventually disappear.

Regular and unchanging, with no kindness in them but no malice either, winter days simply ask if you are ready to move on.

The Uneasiness of Assisi

All tranquil in its Umbrian valley, Assisi is a place where life’s usual plans broke down. It is a place where a family broke down. Off a side street, far from the great basilicas, a chapel stands strangely quiet over the home where a thirteenth-century family of means had lived, where a father had chained his son.

The peace of Assisi is not an easy peace although something calms down inside as you walk the stone streets of the medieval town. Someone had turned his back on what this town – or any town – could offer as enticement or solace or future.

Rituals and festivals and images suggest that there is a path that Francesco Bernadone took that each of us can take, a behavior that we can emulate, a set of values that we can make our own if we study his life. No one really wants to imagine the disappearance of family and financial resources, though.

Where did Francesco go? What did he hear and choose to believe although no one else could hear it? Did he eventually think that he had indeed rebuilt a church?