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.

Now, Voyager

I like the idea that someone took with him on a weekend away a book that I had lent him. I do not yet know whether he enjoyed it; I barely know if he opened it once the agenda of the group he was joining on the Maine coast took shape. Things he may have pictured having time for might have given way to the long friendly preparations of meals or a side trip to the area’s antique stores.

I suspect that if the soft-cover copy of Now, Voyager made it out of his luggage and landed on a kitchen counter, one of the other men sharing the condo would have picked it up – if only to peruse the Hollywood still of Bette Davis and Paul Henreid on the cover of the novel.

The 1942 black-and-white film based on this work of fiction is something of a classic. One of my earliest gay friends used to be able to recite two hours of key lines before Bette Davis ever opened her mouth. One night in the late 1980s when the movie was scheduled to air, I set up my cassette recorder next to the television. After repeated playings, I became familiar with the pace and tone of the dialogue. I came to know when a pause meant that Paul Henreid was lighting a cigarette – or, rather, two cigarettes.

The name Olive Higgins Prouty appears on the screen whenever Now, Voyager is shown. It is her 1941 novel that brought to life the character of Charlotte Vale and the setting of her elegant Back Bay home where Doctor Jaquith, the compassionate director of a local sanatorium, first meets her at the family’s request. He becomes her lifeline.

It never occurred to me that I might enjoy reading the novel until I saw the 2004 paperback edition in a local bookstore. I have owned my copy for close to ten years without ever probing too deeply into the story of its author. This weekend, though, I gleaned enough online information to realize that Olive Higgins Prouty is buried only fifteen minutes from where I live. I might be able to make the kind of literary pilgrimage that delights bookish types.

While my copy of the novel was up on the Maine coast with my friend, I set about a little sleuthing here at home. It helped that Memorial Day weekend had most cemetery offices open. I got to engage someone official who eventually paused over an index card, typed back in 1974 when the novelist had been buried. He pointed out the general area on a cemetery map where I should begin my search for the Prouty graves.

Before he put away the index card, I glimpsed a nearby address that had been typed under the author’s name. “Is that where she lived?” I asked. Without any hesitation, the cemetery official made a photocopy of the index card for me. I was on my way.

Ten minutes later I was standing over the grave of someone I had never met. It was a far-distant Boston that I got to sense briefly there, quiet and still on a Sunday afternoon. I took pictures with my phone.

I was ready to leave when I saw a locked gate at the end of the roadway along which I had walked in my search for the grave. I recognized something that I did not expect. As a car passed on the other side of the locked gate, I suddenly knew where I was. It dawned on me that here was a stretch of road along which I drive once a week. Seldom able to glimpse over the stone wall surrounding the cemetery, I nevertheless weekly drive within a short walk of Olive Higgins Prouty.

When I pass there, I am on my way to an appointment with my own Dr. Jaquith.

Do I Keep the Book?

What am I saying when I keep a particular book? What am I safeguarding when it is one among hundreds at home and in my office?

Again and again I propose to myself a simplifying of my office book shelves, a thinning, a discarding. This can be preparation, I tell myself, for the day when I will leave what has been my place of employment for over thirty years.

Do I intend taking home all of the books now on my office shelves? By that day – maybe five years away, maybe fewer – when I vacate this beautiful office (and, yes, it is a beautiful office), I will have made some decisions. I will have answered some questions about my life.

And I will possibly have postponed answering others. I will have packed away a book without facing squarely the question it and it alone poses me.

For that is the issue. How definitively am I willing to forgo the pull of the question that a particular book poses? How soon am I willing to forget that that question was once an important one?

What testimony to learning does a 1945 translation of the Georgics bear? How sad if I let myself be no longer reminded of the internment camps in Singapore where former schoolmaster L.A.S. Jermyn translated Vergil a few lines a night! The thin green volume of The Singing Farmer: A Translation of Vergil’s Georgics stays with me.

Hardly irreplaceable, the 1966 paperback The Documents of Vatican II is one of all the books on my shelves that has been longest in my possession. Its red cover identifies it as the early Walter Abbott edition of the documents, more forward-looking and ecumenical in spirit than the 1975 edition by Austin Flannery. What happened to me, to my teachers, to my fellow seminarians in those first years after the Council? That red cover can remind me.

On October 21, 2005, colleagues and I attended a poetry reading at Harvard’s Sackler Museum. The draw was Mary Oliver. The surprise of the evening, though, was a young poet named Kevin Goodan whom Mary Oliver had chosen to read with her. What are the ways that a voice not yet confident breaks your heart when you hear it the first time? I still page through In the Ghost-House Acquainted, listening for Goodan’s voice.

Will a day really come when I no longer want to page through these three books?

Letters I Wrote as a Young Man

The novel I just finished reading last night is what we used to call an epistolary novel. The People in the Photo is a story told not only through letters but through emails and text messages exchanged primarily between two people whose parents appeared in a photograph in a newspaper clipping from 1971.

Last week I received in the mail a different kind of fiction. It was epistolary in the old-fashioned meaning of the term, and the amazing thing is that I had written all of the letters. The earliest dated 1973, the letters were some of them enclosed in the same envelopes in which they had originally been mailed. Most, though, were the simple pages of stationery still folded the way I had readied them for mailing, a triple thickness derived from the paper folded in thirds.

The two main characters in Hélène Gestern’s novel approach with care and curiosity and even reverence the photographs they begin to collect of their parents from various sources. The two of them become archaeologists of sorts, questioning what they find, recognizing that the meaning of the photographs will often rely on ways of thinking that have since grown outmoded. Warnings come from a number of people with whom they speak in 2007 that the truth of the summer of 1971 may not be something they really want to know.

The original recipient of all of the letters in the small Priority Mail box that arrived at my door last Wednesday had been a seminary classmate of mine in the 1970s. Our last visit took place over dinner in Boston in 2009, a cordial and easygoing exchange of information about the partners we had each of us left behind in previous years.

The visit had at first felt like it might prove the motivation for Karl and me to stay more regularly in contact. Our routines, though, mine in New England and his in Florida, would delay the kind of telephone conversation we finally had a little over a week ago. The occasion was his clearing out personal files in preparation for an upcoming move out of the country. He wanted to return to a number of people – seminary classmates and others – the correspondence from them that he had kept safe and secure over the years.

My letters and cards to him were on their way back to me.

So one evening last week I sat with a younger me. I met again the particular tone with which I had been accustomed to write a letter to Karl over those early years of our friendship. It was not a tone I used with anyone else. It was a tone that one man in his twenties used with another man in his twenties as they each camouflaged the kind of affections they wanted kept confidential.

Airy and breezy at times, ironic and sarcastic at others, glib and cerebral at their worst, the letters had been fiction. The moment of relief last Wednesday evening came near the end of the letters when Karl and I had each left seminary. I began to sound like myself finally in what I wrote and how I wrote.

Like the characters in the novel that I finished last night, I approached the reading of my letters last week with care and curiosity and even reverence. I too became an archaeologist of sorts, questioning what I read, recognizing that the meaning of the paragraphs often relied on ways of thinking that have since grown outmoded.

Encounters with Silence

My landlords are downstairs on this second night of Passover. Their grown children’s vehicles are parked in front of the house, one van, one compact.

I can hear a steady reading through the floorboards rather than the telltale exchange of dinner guests. After an afternoon of young footsteps running down a hallway, there are no eruptions of children around a table.

I am ready for gears to shift, I am prepared for familiar voices all raised around the serving of a meal. I do not play any music in my upstairs apartment just yet. I am poised to be respectful.

My landlord has completed a wild winter of snow removal, his snow-blower blessedly noisy on those mornings that I needed my parking space cleared. I was lucky to have someone watching out for me week in and week out as the storms visited New England.

I am sitting with a small book of meditations first published by a German Catholic priest in 1938. Encounters with Silence has long been understood as one of those remarkable compositions by a theologian who knew how to turn his reflection into prayer.

I have owned my paperback copy of the book from my seminary days back in the 1970s. It is one of those books that never disappoint, that never fail to carry me deeper into myself. I always have a sense of the author as an intelligent man, a learned man whose intellectual acuity could have been a protection from facing his need for God – but it never succeeded in doing him that disservice.

On the other hand, his critics have asked how he could never have addressed what was happening in the Germany of his day. I met a man who was his driver in the later years of his life, escorting him to the universities in postwar Europe where he was repeatedly invited to lecture. His reputation worldwide never flagged.

I attended a talk he gave on one visit he made to the United States in the 1970s. His topic was the dialogue possible and even inevitable among world religions.

In one of the meditations in Encounters with Silence, Karl Rahner as a young priest being groomed for university teaching recalled his baptism: “Then my reason with its extravagant cleverness was still silent. Then, without asking me, You made Yourself my poor heart’s destiny.”

I read those words last night in church as I waited for the start of the Good Friday liturgy.

Somehow I find myself a Christian. Somehow I find myself a Catholic. Somehow in 2015 I find myself a churchgoer still. I am grateful for Father Rahner and the way his words address the healing silence before which I get to live.