Travel and the Ways Lives Go

I stumble upon churches.

I stumble upon graveyards.

I stumble upon topics with old friends that none of us set out in advance to cover in our conversations.

Some days off work last week allowed me to visit family and friends in both New Orleans and Houston and to do my inveterate stumbling.

I had never before been in either St Alphonsus Church or St Mary’s Assumption Church in the Irish Channel section of New Orleans. A traffic detour took me near them one day last week. I took a chance, parked the rental car, and walked into a piety that was a hundred and fifty years old, lofty ceilings and carved wooden statues and the tombs of nineteenth-century pastors under the marble flooring of a sanctuary.


Another day I wanted to go to the Garden District Book Shop and parked near Commander’s Palace, an Uptown restaurant that my family sometimes used for birthdays and out-of-town visitors. Locking the car, I turned around and found myself next to the open gates of Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. Sunny skies and uncharacteristically dry air encouraged me to venture in for five minutes and see still another of New Orleans’ “Cities of the Dead.”


Over coffee, over cocktails, in a retirement home, in a retreat house parlor, with Mexican food, with Irish beer, I spent time in the kinds of conversations that are lifelines for me. We all of us - classmates and teachers and friends - took the measure of our years together and resisted simple information and mused on the ways lives go. Again and again I found myself across from people who gained energy from the words, the attention, the memories invoked, the futures imagined.

I like the people and the places of my life.

Complex Pleasures

Drizzly Friday afternoon in March.

I was walking across a Maine campus that still wore some of this season’s snows. Fog made a milky, Gothic light. The silence of Spring Break was fast descending.


I had come to sit with over 150 other adult readers of a novel first published in France almost two centuries ago. Few people to whom I mentioned the weekend venture had heard of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. Few knew, I suspect, why I might want to get here.

Was it the lure of the university to which I was responding? Or the prospect of something like alchemists’ secret knowledge?

Maybe I just craved the company of people used to being reminded that mind’s pleasures require effort. Perplexity is not always a problem. One’s own complexity need not frighten or daunt.

Avoiding questions never makes for great literature, does it? Or great lives.

Marmalade and Toast Racks

If I attended a summer session at Christ Church in Oxford in 1985, it was because I was both a reader and, at that time, a teacher of British literature. In my early thirties, I finally got to set foot in a country whose authors regularly moved and challenged me. I had majored in French as an undergraduate, but for some time the poets of my leisure hours remained Keats and Tennyson, Eliot and Auden.

I was surrounded by other Americans at breakfast in the Christ Church dining hall those summer mornings. I would sit at the long wooden tables and reach for the daily bowl of orange marmalade and the dry hard toast in the toast racks. Negotiating mealtimes felt easier in the company of Priscilla from Houston and Kathryn from Chicago. I was not always sure I was doing it right, but at least my years in seminary had acquainted me with breakfast as a communal event.

I sat under the portraits of former Christ Church students high on the walls of the dining hall. Those three weeks were my introduction to the traditions of English university life. Against the ancient dark wood of floor and walls and ceiling, the light from the electric lamps along the long refectory tables felt warm and safe and forgiving.

One of the traditions of English university life? Frank Cooper’s Original Oxford Marmalade. What I could not foresee when my three weeks at Christ Church were over was how regularly in years to come I would move through a grocery store and slow down by the shelves of imported marmalades. I did not find the exact marmalade of those summer mornings in 1985 until this past month.

I may soon need a toast rack.

Photo of Toast Rack from Styles Silver

How Family Time Used to Feel

In January 1995, I had both of my parents hospitalized. My mother, 81, had fallen in the living room of their house, breaking her hip. My father, 84, had suffered a second minor heart attack after a first attack the month before. For about a week my two parents were on the same floor of the hospital in New Orleans, their rooms only a few doors apart, but neither my mother nor my father was able or permitted to visit the other.

As long as my parents were in the hospital, my presence in New Orleans would not have been that much of a help to my brother who lives there. In February, however, I took a week off work to spend with my parents in their home. They were both doing pretty well, my mother gripping her walker as she slowly walked from her bedroom to the kitchen, my father taking his afternoon naps after getting up in the middle of the night to help my mother to the bathroom. I spent one evening in the emergency room with my father, waiting for a doctor to examine the swelling in my father’s right foot that was making it hard for him to wear his shoe.

Sitting by myself in my parents’ living room one morning, I was praying, and the challenge came, could I presume to say that God could not be in all of this for me?

Actually the challenge was more – could I dare to say that I could not be in all of this?

I had felt for a while that I was disappearing in the midst of it all; that there was no room for both me and this sadness. But, God seemed to assure me, I could, and God could.


In early March I became my father’s main family contact while he was in the hospital anew, recovering from an angioplasty. Four hours after my second arrival at the New Orleans airport in a month’s time, I was at my father’s bedside in the coronary care unit for the eight o’clock visiting session. The television set in his cubicle was carrying a PBS program on Cajun cooking while my father and I talked about the medical equipment beeping around him.

One of my father’s earliest concerns was about recovering his Timex watch, which he had confided to my brother before the surgery. Upon his transfer to a private room the next day, my father asked me for my watch. I slipped the timepiece, a gift from two Christmases earlier, around the patches of white surgical tape on my father’s left hand and secured the band around his wrist. My father seemed happy.

The next day I brought my father’s watch to him. My father took my watch off and handed it to me. I removed his watch from my own wrist, and we made the exchange. The band that I snapped on in the next minute was still warm from my father’s wrist.

Image from Spanish Meadows

Serious Fun

I know this book, I said to myself. I know this book, I said in the car, although it seemed the most unlikely book to hear about on NPR during morning commute. I don’t mean that Public Radio avoids religious topics or books about them. I mean that this was not a recent book or a bestseller or the work of someone newly deceased. By coincidence February 11 was indeed the 96th birthday of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of A Time to Keep Silence, and novelist Adam Haslett was introducing the book for the NPR series “You Must Read This.”

It is a slim book, 95 pages, first published in Great Britain in 1957. Its availability made an impression on me in March 2004 when I saw it on the English-language display table in an Amsterdam bookstore. Bookstores exert a lure whenever I travel. I do not visit them because I am technically in need of something new to read. I just like to imagine those other kinds of readers for whom shelves of poetry and tables of memoirs are arranged.


The price sticker of 17,50 Euros on the Fermor book in that Amsterdam bookstore had given me pause, however. I was not sure I needed to spend over twenty American dollars for the soft-cover volume. On the other hand, I had not heard of the book before although visits to monasteries were a familiar theme in my reading history. I might never find this particular book in print on the other side of the Atlantic, I rationalized, and I brought my purchase to the cashier.

The very habit of introversion that makes trips to monasteries and weekends on retreat appealing generally leads me not to expect friends and family to want to hear a lot about them. Something inside felt validated, though, by the time the on-air review of A Time to Keep Silence ended. How many listeners felt in tune with this comment of Adam Haslett’s after he had read a passage from Fermor’s book?

"To read that beautiful, restful sentence is to experience a small piece of the restfulness Fermor himself found. When we say that a book transports us, this is what we mean. The music of the words themselves sing us into a different world."

Um.

I often did long for the appearance of placid restfulness when I was a younger man on retreat.

Luckily, retreats sometimes bring exactly what some of us with our habit of introversion might never have expected but genuinely need. A God who tells us we need more fun in our lives? Yes, it happens. Thank God it happens.

And it is good to discover that sometimes the best fun happens with the very people who take us most seriously. I might need to write a book about that one day.

A slim book, no more than 95 pages.

Image from MorBCN

That Which You Desire

Sometimes we do not know what we need or want until an individual who seems capable of understanding that need stands before us.

In the church where I attended services this past Sunday, there is a window dedicated to St Veronica. A tradition outside the scriptures places a woman on the narrow street where Jesus was carrying his cross to Calvary. Understanding what the condemned prisoner needed, Veronica emerged from the Jerusalem crowd and wiped his face with her own sweat-cloth (sudarium), or towel.

I kept looking up at the window yesterday morning. There is a solemn beauty of expression as Veronica holds open the towel which she had held up to the face of Jesus.

I got to thinking of the likelihood that within the century that this church has stood in its downtown location, there have been individuals with a quiet devotion to the saint. I pictured them in a pew beneath this window, looking up into the face of the saint as I did yesterday and spontaneously confiding a need or a worry, a desire for their lives that they had not tried to articulate before.


I got an insight into the tradition that directs someone to pray for a particular need nine days in a row. In the directions for a novena, an individual is urged to complete the nine days of prayers faithfully and to be confident of an outcome. Novena prayers regularly have a place where an individual names what he or she hopes to receive through the intercession of a particular saint.

It is one thing to confide a need or desire in prayer once. It is another to come a second and even a third time into the presence of a power that might understand what we are asking. In a counselling situation, the good therapist doesn't usually say to a client, "You've told me about that already. Go on to a new topic, please." The important psychological truth is that the teller might be changed by each telling.

Do we have the courage to face ourselves as people whose desires could change our lives? In sixteenth-century manuals used to direct someone on retreat, a spiritual director is advised to ask individuals to name the grace they want from a particular session of prayer: "Name that which you desire."


Do we realize that feeling alive will require at some point claiming the utter wildness of what we actually want?

Heading Home from the Office

How did the end of the work day feel to my father?

What did he think about as he glimpsed an evening sky in winter through his office windows?

Was the signal to return home a welcome one?

What did he picture waiting for him once he had opened the back door of his home?

Was there somewhere a final stretch of quiet he counted on, a time to be himself a little longer, a reason to slow his pace even slightly?

I hope he got what he wanted in his life. The way he wanted it. The way he always hoped it would be.

When Snow Arrives in the Morning

I live no more than a five-minute drive from my work so I take my guilty pleasures on a morning like this. I can sit in my office and actually enjoy the strange white punctuation covering the view from my window.

I hear colleagues down the hall talking about cities and towns an hour away and the snow those places are already getting. I sense the urgency in their quiet voices.

I recall the homes I drove past a half hour ago on my usual route to work. For the first time in a long while I was aware of which windows in each home were yellow with lamplight and which had stayed dark from the winter night just ended.

I do not think in my childhood in New Orleans I ever dreamed of being a man in his fifties living a morning like this one. I like that idea, though.

Favorite Restaurants

It was the kind of meal by which I fill up a short list of favorite restaurants.

No restaurant is likely to become a favorite of mine unless a conversation takes place there that has stopped me in my tracks. I can easily forget an entrée, an appetizer, a specialty cocktail. I cannot easily forget the news about a son who is in trouble, the silent exclamation of a friend unwrapping a gift she had not expected, the update on someone long vanished that starts “Well, you do indeed have a good memory.”

Nothing matches the simultaneous lifting of heads and meeting of eyes over a first bite by which two friends corroborate the other’s instantaneous conviction: “We ordered the right thing.”

That happened last night.

The restaurant chosen for our visit belied the common wisdom of a Zagat’s review. On the other hand, neither of us felt the need to take on the reviewer’s role or prepare a sage critique to serve up on Monday morning to colleagues apparently ready for the scoop.

My friend and I had gone to be together. We had gone out for a meal to let the efforts of others provide us the time and space and energy simply to be company for a friend. We had gone out precisely to see the other across the table.

Oysters? They were a bit briny but nothing, we found, that the mignonette did not make more interesting. Memories? They surfaced with every stage of the meal. We named other restaurants, other meals, other years.

When you have a habit of honesty with a friend, you find the attention something that lets you forget why some things don’t work out, why some people can’t fathom the simplest things.

Like two friends at a meal who look across at the other.

Portrait of a Seated Man in the Studio

I wonder if anyone else walks into one of the second-floor rooms of the Neue Galerie in New York and registers the reaction I did last October. Having climbed the curved stairwell from the ground floor, I had allowed myself to be pulled first to the wide luminous room where Gustav Klimt’s iconic portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer rules. Curators probably wisely planned on the lure of that work to move visitors along; it is also the third image in the slide show on the homepage of the museum’s website.

It is not that bright room facing Eighty-sixth Street about which I want to write. When I walked next door into the long paneled room facing Fifth Avenue and began my circuit of the hangings on those walls, I was looking up again and again at portraits. With one exception, I was also looking up repeatedly at portraits of men. Did Austrian painters in the early twentieth-century have mostly men sitting for their likenesses? Did someone specially plan this room of men painted by other men?

I am enjoying the questions. Why would I even have noticed that pattern on that day last fall? What was aroused in me with such consistency as I circled the paneled room a second and even a third time? Was I perhaps weighing not how good the paintings were but whether I would have liked meeting the men depicted in them? I recall being intrigued by what may have been going on inside each artist as he looked closely at one or other of these men, looked at him day after day, responding perhaps without knowing it to the subtle daily changes in the mood of his sitter, lamenting (or not) a daily contact that would end when the portrait reached completion.

There was one portrait in that paneled room that sent me to the bookstore before I left the museum an hour or so later. I wanted in one way or another to take home a reproduction of a painting by Viennese artist Richard Gerstl entitled Portrait of a Seated Man in the Studio. I had gotten to stand below the portrait for a comfortable length of time and later to gauge the mood of its subject from different angles in the room. There was no determined look in the man’s face, no tools of a trade positioned near him, no favorite setting to suggest his tastes and interests. Who would have found him interesting? He seems almost mystified that he is at the heart of anyone’s effort and creative attention.

None of the postcard racks in the bookstore showed that portrait. The only place I found a reproduction of the Gerstl painting was a hardcover coffee table book that had been the catalogue for the opening of the museum in 2001. I may actually have been ready to pay $37 for the book with all its essays on German and Austrian art. Near the end of my New York stay, however, I did not look forward to carrying still another parcel from my hotel to the bus the following morning. Six-hundred pages long, New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890 - 1940 was going to need another way to get to my living room.


As luck would have it, back home I located a library copy of the volume. In the past few weeks, I have gotten to sit some evenings with a full-color plate of the Gerstl portrait before me. The scholarly footnotes admit that it is not known for certain who the gentleman seated in the armchair in the studio is. I renewed the book once; I wanted not to return it until I had written something about this portrait that has fascinated me.

Who else has ever found this man interesting? I like the idea that he would feel mystified once again that he has been at the heart of someone else’s effort and creative attention.

Image of Neue Galerie from NewYorkDiaryStar