Fall Cemetery in New England

 

 

The Reasons for Things

Autumn need not be anything special.

I find that hard to believe, however, each September when I take out my volume of Edwin Way Teale’s Autumn Across America. I am perennially willing to trust a book published in 1956 to guide me across still another season of flyways and harvests and dry leaves scudding across sidewalks.

I might suspect that I know more about autumn with each year, but I am not sure that is true. I am more sure each year that I do not know exactly what to say about all that stretches out beyond September 21.

I note chrysanthemums and corduroy. I bring up recipes for soups and breads. I search out sweatshirts and caps. I expect the surprise heartache one day of finding that I am walking with the wind in my face.

Winding my way between rows of old tombstones this coming autumn, I may get to feel at once easy and solemn. With the Roman poet of fields and harvests, I might well muse:

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas (Georgics 2.490)

Happy the individual who has been able to learn the reasons for things.

Create a Moment

From time to time I face my shelves at work and pull off Drawing from Life: The Journal as Art. It was a gift from a work friend who knows she can put this kind of book in my life – a book with no information I need, a book spotlighting accidental creativity. When she gave it to me almost ten years ago, she knew that it could stay untouched in my bookcase for months at a time without my ever entertaining thoughts of taking it home or giving it away.

A project at work got finished yesterday.

There was a deadline that I had kept in mind for weeks, and the hour after lunch today found me facing the shelves in my office with a concentration freed from deadlines.

I am not the kind of artist who can sketch at such random moments but suddenly I was leafing through pages and pages of just such sketching.

Since a journal makes room for more than lines and letters, why not play, invent, create a moment?

Why not write about it as well?

Boston Common at Twilight

It was a sunny weekday morning in August. The doors of the Museum of Fine Arts had just opened at 10 o’clock, and I was one of the first visitors in the Art of the Americas wing. I proceeded with quiet, steady pace through room after room until I was surrounded by Mary Cassatts and Childe Hassams.

The stillness of walls hung with American Impressionist paintings suited the morning I had taken for a final summer visit to the museum. Settling with Moleskine journal and a book of poetry from home, I was intent on enjoying a view of two favorite paintings. The gallery would soon lure other visitors, but for the moment I was alone with my appreciation.

I had arrived before two paintings with which I had a history. From my earliest years living in New England, I had encountered prints and posters of Boston Common at Twilight. One year I had sent Christmas cards with that golden winter scene by nineteenth-century artist Childe Hassam. Mary Cassatt’s In the Loge, meanwhile, was familiar as the cover artwork of a paperback edition of some classic text that I used to own.

Seated on a gallery bench covered in leather, I could look from one painting to the other. No one blocked my view. No distractions. No interruptions. Neighboring rooms of paintings opened off the gallery, each one deep with sunlit distances.

The trouble was that I did not exactly know what I hoped to achieve in the ideal circumstances I had secured by an early arrival.

The journal I had brought with me ended up not for writing but for re-reading something I had recently written. My book of poetry by Wislawa Szymborska was bookmarked at a favorite poem called “Hard Life with Memory.”

It took a while for me not to need all this expression and depiction – painting, paragraph, poem. It took a while for me simply to raise my camera before I moved on.

The Strange, Sweet Peace of Zane Grey

When I pay three dollars for a book at the Brimfield Antique Fair, I do not have a collector’s mindset. I am a reader who has stumbled upon an opening paragraph he likes:

When Madeline Hammond stepped from the train at El Cajon, New Mexico, it was nearly midnight, and her first impression was of a huge dark space of cool, windy emptiness, strange and silent, stretching away under great blinking white stars.

The vendor sitting by herself in the rear of her tent is almost invisible between two display tables. Visor over her eyes, she bends over a book of her own. Her tennis shoes rest squarely on the ground in front of her webbed lawn chair.

She remembered one evening at the opera when the curtain had risen upon a particularly well-done piece of stage scenery—a broad space of deep desolateness, reaching away under an infinitude of night sky, illumined by stars. The suggestion it brought of vast wastes of lonely, rugged earth, of a great, blue-arched vault of starry sky, pervaded her soul with a strange, sweet peace.

The only books on display in this vendor’s tent on the Brimfield grounds are vintage hardcover editions of westerns by Zane Grey. Otherwise her wares are sets of tumblers and ceramic pottery and leather shoulder bags, ashtrays and figurines.

There is no apology for her wares in the tilt of her neck as she reads. Neither gregarious nor sullen, she looks up as I count out three dollar bills. I have placed a copy of The Light of Western Stars on the table next to her.

She was sated with respect, sick of admiration, tired of adulation; and it was good to see that these Western women treated her as very likely they would have treated any other visitor. They were sweet, kind; and what Madeline had at first thought was a lack of expression or vitality she soon discovered to be the natural reserve of women who did not live superficial lives.

Back home, I sit with my purchase and settle into a read of the first four chapters. The pages of the 1914 novel are soft with age. The box fan on the floor across from me makes a comfortable sound at its lowest setting. I feel like the Easterner getting off the train in El Cajon, New Mexico.

She became conscious of the faint, unmistakable awakening of long-dead feelings—enthusiasm and delight. When she realized that, she breathed deep of the cold, sharp air and experienced an inward joy. And she divined then, though she did not know why, that henceforth there was to be something new in her life, something she had never felt before, something good for her soul in the homely, the commonplace, the natural, and the wild.

Man on Steps, Smoking

I love sitting on steps.

I enjoy the ease of reflection when there is nothing pressing enough to keep me away or inside.

No one has to take me too seriously when I am perched on the porch steps of my apartment.

I do not complain of being alone with my thoughts at such times.

If I smoked like the man in this vintage snapshot, I would have something to hold off to the side, something to claim my occasional attention amid the rambles of thought.

It would be a vacation of sorts, a distraction from anything too practical, a gentle exhalation of questions and concerns.

I love the moment of turning away.

Why tell a man like this that a camera is settled on him and his moment aside? Why ruin it?

Under a Tuscan Sun

I was twenty-nine years old when the Arno flooded its banks on Friday 4 November 1966. According to the Sunday New York Times the damage wasn't extensive, but by Monday it was clear that Florence was a disaster. Twenty feet of water in the cloisters of Santa Croce, the Cimabue crucifix ruined beyond hope of restoration, panels ripped from the Baptistry doors, the basement of the Biblioteca Nazionale completely underwater, hundreds of thousands of volumes waterlogged, the Archivio di Stato in total disarray. On Tuesday I decided to go to Italy, to offer my services as a humble book conservator, to help in any way I could, to save whatever could be saved, including myself.

  From The Sixteen Pleasures (1995) by Robert Hellenga

I do not remember whether I had read that opening paragraph of the Robert Hellenga novel by the time of my 1996 visit to Florence. I had certainly seen Merchant and Ivory's A Room with a View (1985) and recognized the church of Santa Croce from the film's scene of a deadly fracas during which Lucy Honeychurch falls fainting into the arms of George Emerson.

My niece and her husband and their two little boys are now in Florence, “ensconced” (their word) in an apartment less than a block from Santa Croce. Thanks to Google, I am allowed a glimpse of the front door that they use whenever they return from a family walk under the Tuscan sun.

Meanwhile I get to be of some help to them here under a New England sun. Armed with keys and alarm code, I entered their townhouse last Tuesday evening for the first of several visits. I watered the plants that they had told me would all be collected on the kitchen table. A last-minute email from Italy had included a further request to check the floor around the dehumidifier in the basement. When I left, I was able to reassure them that water was where it should be.

And I am where I should be. A welcome challenge each of the past three summers has been to get enough water into a hanging basket of flowers outside the porch door of my apartment. I have learned what a New England sun can do if I neglect the watering can even one day.

Settling into June evenings inside my apartment, I frequently use martini glasses purchased in Florence back in 1996 when I am ready to pour from the cocktail shaker. Sometimes I sit with a friend across from bookshelves where a book showing Fra Angelico frescoes from the cloister of San Marco stands. I fall asleep each night within sight of a majolica tile that came home with me from Italy.

 

Communion Line

It will be time to stand up soon.

Sometimes close to an hour has passed before I get to move from my place in the pew on a Sunday morning. I have sat there and for stretches of time knelt and occasionally stood; I have sung hymns and listened to readings and recited the Nicene Creed; I have exchanged greetings with the other people in my pew and in the pews in front of me and behind.

I have gone through something similar most Sundays of my life. There was a time when my parents and my brothers were the people to the left or right of me in the pew. There were years when classmates from seminary flanked me. For most of my adult life, however, I have entered a church alone on Sunday morning.

On some occasions I have gotten to look out on the pews and the people in them from the vantage point of the sanctuary. When I perform the duties of a Eucharistic minister, I raise a host as each fellow parishioner steps forward in the communion line. It is something to see one face and then the next and then still another as the line moves toward me.

It is another experience to be in the line. Being in the line is my experience most Sundays these days.

To be in the line, I have to know when to stand up. I stay aware of the people who have been sitting to my left and to my right. Sometimes I have to step over their feet if they are not heading where I am going.

Stepping into the aisle, I may know the person ahead of me in line or I may not. I may know the person behind me or not. I do not need to know either. My glance can sweep over the people already returning to their pews after receiving communion. From the time I was a small child, however, I knew it was better not to let myself be distracted from what I was doing.

What am I doing? That was the stuff of many a grammar school religion class. The early instruction focused on how to hold my hands, at what pace to walk, where to look. Fifty years later I retain a sense that when I enter that aisle, I am joining a walk that is more than getting myself from one location in the church to another.

In recent months, I do not usually enter the aisle alone.

In recent months, I have learned what it feels like when I know a person wants to walk before me or behind me in just this line. In a few minutes, when we return to our places in the pew, we will each of us be aware that the walk was about more than our getting ourselves somewhere in the church and back.

The walk was about getting back to ourselves. Together.

Being Read To

I know I must have been read to on some occasion since I was a child.

I do not mean the kind of reading to which I listen most Sunday mornings when someone looks out over a lectern and shares the scripture passage assigned for that day’s service. Nor do I mean the reading by which a scholar in a lecture hall models for me and others the intonations best suited to unlock the message of a famous orator or poet.

No, for the old-fashioned kind of reading I mean, it will help to picture a Victorian parlor or rustic New England hearthside. Watch the scene unfold as one person, holding open a book or balancing it on her lap, reads while a companion rests his chin on his hand or perhaps closes his eyes, leans his head to the side and listens.

Being read to: it was one of the activities by which an individual during convalescence might pass the time with a minimum of fatigue. My own mind left to wander, however, and my strength of concentration nothing close to what it usually is, I would tire quickly of such bedside readers. I suspect I would even grow depressed imagining how fast I could have gotten through the same page or chapter on my own if I were only once again in the pink of health.

If I go to these examples, I am attempting to explain a kind of reading I am enjoying these days with a particular friend. Sharing a background in teaching and theology, we have taken to choosing books of reflection, spending some time during our visits reading a text aloud to one another. We alternate paragraphs, moving between reading and listening, keeping a steady rhythm, neither rushing nor indulging any excess of expressiveness.

We started with Father James Martin’s My Life with the Saints. We have just finished the opening chapter of Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor.

Neither of us proceeds under the misapprehension that the other could not understand the text perfectly well on his own. The experiment involves observing how making our way through a text with a companion in tow takes on for each of us a bit of the flavor of the companion’s emotional and spiritual journey. We listen and manage to hear more than the author’s words. We hear a friend when he does not get to choose the words by which he will communicate.

It is a subtle flavoring that I am talking about, to be sure. There are times, however, when I look up and wonder why I would not have asked for this pleasure before from other friends in my life.

I am enjoying being read to again.

House Envy

I just listened to a new colleague tell a story about a conversation she had had last night with someone who lives, I was told, right next to the house I own on Cape Cod. In the course of their conversation my colleague had heard all about being invited over for drinks at my house. “And what a wonderful house it was!” She seemed happy to pass that compliment on to me.

I have no problem accepting compliments except that I do not own a house on the Cape.

I knew almost immediately the person I had been mistaken for – another colleague, complete with grey beard.

It had been hard to find a moment early in the narration of the conversation at which I could have interrupted. Instead I got to enjoy the look of slight envy that my new colleague leveled at me at the close of her story. I briefly imagined what it would feel like to be complimented on a beautiful house on the Cape. I remembered what it had felt like to accept compliments on a 1920 Arts and Crafts home I had co-owned until six years ago.

House envy.

Since I am no longer a homeowner of any stripe and since the prospect of ever being one again appears distant and unrealistic, I felt funny just now being mistaken for one. I have moved somewhere in my life, I understood afresh.

I mix with people on a daily basis who cannot imagine that move or the circumstances that would bring it about.

The truth is that I meet more and more people who can and do. Like mine, their status can remain long undetected. A door has, nonetheless, opened for them and for me. Just beyond it is a walkway into a future around which there are fewer guarantees but a certain kind of ease.

You do not know you want it until it appears.