Routine Lab Work

With only routine lab work to complete, I was a lucky one in the clinic at eight o’clock on December 23. I had been fasting since before midnight. The hallways down which I walked to the lab were nearly empty with only a security employee at the front desk. I had no wait after submitting my lab request form – went right in, hung up my coat, and settled in the first cubicle to get my blood drawn. With the easiest of topics my conversation with the lab technician provided just the distraction I usually need to avoid a glimpse of the needle or of the tube filling up with blood.

Sitting in the lab, I was far from the serious holiday business of the week. There could hardly have been a setting less infected by Christmas themes and colors. I took some reassurance from that life-as-usual atmosphere. Any presents I had left to wrap or rooms I had still to vacuum for a holiday guest would have to wait.

Until a decade ago I could not have envisioned a routine visit to any clinic the week of Christmas. I would have been planning to travel either to New Orleans to see my parents or to Pennsylvania to visit the family of my partner at the time. I would have been about the business of being a son or a brother-in-law. I would have been walking into homes where a television was almost always on; I would have eaten off plates and drunk from glassware that dated from the years of high school and college. Cotton snow on a mantelpiece, hard candy in a glass bowl – I knew that my Christmas would have to fit into the Christmas of people older than I, people with more of a right to the rooms in which I dropped my suitcases and hid my gifts.

In the clinic this past December 23, I was the man around whom younger professionals worked, entered data into online records, swabbed an arm and drew blood. Even if our age difference was only a decade with some of them, I was part of the population they were not surprised to see in a clinic the week of Christmas.

To get coffee and a little breakfast sooner rather than later, I took a chance that there was a café or a clinic dining room down one of the first-floor hallways. I was right and hovered inside the door to check where to order food and where to pay for coffee. In the half hour that I sat at one of the tables, I watched out of the corner of my eye as one customer with his arm in a sling ordered breakfast and another in a wheelchair waited for her husband to bring her food to the table.

What was the chance that either of them had expected to be in this clinic the week of Christmas? What would be different about this year’s celebration from those they remembered from just a few years back? Which patient did the man in a suit sitting near the counter expect to see first when he had made it up to his clinic office? What lab results would he have to report, what news deliver?

With only routine lab work behind me, I wanted to believe that I was a lucky one in the clinic at nine o’clock on December 23. I wanted the Christmas I had waiting before me. I wanted to believe that I had made the Christmases of parents and family happy in years past. I hoped I would have the courage to face a Christmas one day if it should ever be different from the one I had planned.

Writing Cabin in Snow

In Love at Christmas

If something takes time, we think twice before committing to do it in the week before Christmas. Just below the everyday tasks from December 17 onward, a seasonal pot pourri bubbles up within all of us – part planning, part spending, part music, part mail, part home, part family, part memory, part stubborn reality.

We may be careful in what we start to read, careful in what we venture to write, careful in what we agree to attend and who we agree to host.

Something like a metaphysical landscape rises up within us, the awareness that what does not make us proud in how we order our priorities during these end-of-year days may reveal values awry. We will get shown up, we fear. Who have we become if this is what we can leave undone? Who have we become if this is all we can afford?

Are there things we are too old to still be doing? Are there things we can never be too old to say?

Can we pass the vacuum cleaner one more time for a holiday guest?

Is there a friend who agrees that chocolate brown ornaments look great in a bowl?

Cabin

It was a rainy Friday afternoon in early December. I was riding in the front passenger seat, having taken on the role of navigator with the help of the GPS in my phone. The three of us were headed to a cabin in Pennsylvania, a destination that only one of us had ever visited before.

The rain was steady. Moving through Connecticut, then New York State, then New Jersey, we approached the Pennsylvania state line in the midst of rush hour traffic. We had inched through the merge of 287 and 78 and called our hosts when we thought we might be only an hour away.

The rural location of the cabin created the usual problems with the phone connection; text messages remained undelivered or unacknowledged for minutes at a time. The friend in the back seat directed the flashlight app on his iPhone and read a print-out of directions that one of our hosts had emailed him to help with the final hour of driving.

We were three men, each around sixty years old, taking an exit off the interstate onto state roads with the expectation of a welcome and a well-cooked meal. The driver in these last hours of the trip was a gentleman I had just met that day, a longtime friend of the man in the back seat who had invited me. When I turned around at different times, I caught the familiar outline of his face by the light of his iPhone flashlight.

I was trusting myself with this man.

I was trusting that the New York friends who had extended this invitation to their Pennsylvania cabin were people I could like and grow to know.

I was trusting that the dog who lay so quiet at the feet of his owner was going to like me as well.

The rain grew heavier, the deeper into the back roads we drove and the closer to the cabin we came. Eventually a pair of headlights moved slowly in our direction, minutes from where the cabin should be. One of our hosts had come to greet us on the unpaved winding road on which his and other cabins faced.

The next morning we all sat with our coffee and looked out on a creek swollen by the previous night’s rains.

I had made my way into warmth.

New England Birthday

Midafternoon in late autumn can grow dark enough to warrant lamplight. If it is not yet time to leave the office and go home, a gentle, wistful mood is possible.

It is not unlike the feeling when you were much younger and your parents were not yet home from work and there was nothing to be done to hurry supper along. The hour felt determined to last as long as it could.

Or you were walking home from school, classes and club meetings behind you, and you looked up into the random trees lining the sidewalk. You walked past one house and then another, each front door closed, each window shade drawn. If there were no cars heading down the street, the quiet and the space around you reinforced a reflective turn of mind.

It is what happened later in your life when you went on retreat and you had gotten to the second or third day. The novelty of a space away from your everyday routines had begun gently to wane. You were back to being yourself, just without the regular things to do.

Who had any thought for that person who was just yourself? If you were not doing something for someone, what could you count on in the way of attention?

I approach a birthday in two days. It is easier to stay with questions like that at this time in my life. Nowadays I suspect that the answers are not anywhere as dire as I once feared they might be.

I have a great weekend before me.

Stacks of Books

Stacks of books. Shelves of books. Whether they appear in a Paris bookstore or in an upstairs apartment in New England, they tell a story for the person who notices them.

The bookstores of Paris are a treat. Online purchaser of books though I am, I still stop on the sidewalk before a display of books in the window of a Paris bookstore. Abundance characterizes these displays, book above book, books leaning on other books, books gathered around flowers and framed pictures of authors. Lamps glow in the older bookstores on a late October afternoon and reveal readers inside perusing titles on a table or upon a shelf.

For an American visitor the bookstores of Paris intrigue by the lasting trust in paper to which they testify. In the large Gilbert Jeune on the Boulevard Saint-Michel or in one of the compact librairies on the nearby rue Racine, individuals approach each new text, open it, test its potential for engaging them.

Where do they go then, those readers who carry a volume to la caisse? They pay for the adventure of taking the book home. They foresee wanting its pages to make a claim on the finite number of hours left free from work commitments and family duties and online diversions. They may know in advance the room in which the book will likely stay, the table on which it will await its reading, the shelf on which it may eventually win a spot.

But, no, where do those readers go? Where do they go if they opt for a text that is more than light diversion? Suppose the new translation of a play by Sophocles is the text they purchase. Or something by George Eliot. Or Flaubert or Gide. Where do they go if they choose to suffer the honesty of one of those classic tales of an individual hitting a wall in his life? What illness, what heartbreak, what termination of employment provides the subtext for that purchase made by someone calmly dressed but sober before her evening journey home?

Those of us who keep bringing books into our own homes, lining them on our shelves, stacking them beside bedside tables, where do we reveal ourselves willing to go?

And the people who visit us and who see the rows and piles of books, what might they suspect about the hopes amid which we live and the questions we seek to absorb into our lives?

If we saw those people in a Paris bookstore on a late October afternoon, would we suspect what illness, what heartbreak, what interruption of life might recently have become their own new story?

Walking Out of a Play

Did I really do that?

It is ancient history now, but I had never walked out of a theatre performance before.

Yesterday I was in search of online reviews of the 2007 production of the musical Parade by SpeakEasy Stage here in Boston. It had been a popular show with which the local company was closing its 2006-2007 season. Broadway success and Tony nominations a few years earlier had probably made it easy for most local reviewers to see this production as good news for the company and good news for the Boston theatre scene. But I had walked out.

When intermission came that May evening in 2007, I turned to my partner and told him I would meet him and our friends at the end of the evening’s performance. I may have said something like “I just can’t take any more of this.” I had sat long enough looking down our row of seats with everyone laughing and applauding at the end of each musical number. No one seemed the least disturbed by the Southern stereotypes being perpetuated on stage, actors and actresses whose exaggerated drawls seemed enlisted to communicate their characters’ ignorance and at times their ethical slyness.

Parade is an unusual musical about a lynching in 1913 Georgia. Leo Frank, a Jewish man from the North who married a Southern Jewish woman and settled in Atlanta, has been falsely accused of the strangling of one of his former employees. With a basis in history, the story ends with a Southern mob descending on the jail where Frank is serving out a life sentence: they take him out and hang him.

Yesterday I discovered that not everything written about the performance in 2007 communicated unqualified delight. What I read reminded me of factors with which I was struggling in silence while I sat through the first half of the play. In her review in BroadwayWorld.com, Jan Nargi described the play as “inflammatory and unapologetically stereotypical.” According to former Boston Globe-reviewer Thomas Garvey, “Parade wants to think of itself as daring, but no Broadway show would venture into the moral territory that a truly probing examination of the Frank case would require. Thus there's a void at the heart of the musical…”

I continue to reflect on what motivated the action I took that night. It was the first walking out I had ever done. It was the first time I had claimed the right with this group of friends to do something else that I alone preferred to do – or not to do something I clearly had no taste for.

Who was I that night? I think over events in my life the three years before that evening in 2007. I was a man who three times in a single year had traveled home to a Southern city to bury people who used to sit around the holiday table with him. I was a man who a year later watched hours of television coverage as his Southern hometown underwent the unprecedented destruction of Katrina.

And on the stage that evening in 2007 were Southern parents and children, Southern friends, Southern family. On the stage was a Southern city. On the stage was Southern death. But none of the usual sympathy in the face of death was what the play intended to evoke or make room for.

Later that night I stood before a group of friends who had followed my partner and me to our home. At one point I attempted to explain to everyone why I had done what I did earlier. No one in the room that night seemed to know what to say to me.

I expect that these people who knew me found it hard to understand my doing anything like what I had done. Not only had I walked out but I had not asked anyone’s permission before I walked out of the theatre for the length of the second half of the show.

I broke some rules that night, I guess?

Playing Virgil in Paris

More than once during our weeklong stay in Paris, my friend Kathleen called me her Virgil. The allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedy was both generous and characteristic of my learned friend. I was not leading her through anything close to the epic circles of hell and purgatory, although a major world capital can be a daunting landscape to negotiate.

Having written about a tour through the underworld for the Roman hero Aeneas, the classical poet Virgil was an understandable guide for Dante to summon into his own epic. A visitor to Paris on multiple occasions, I may have seemed to Kathleen the same kind of reliable and well-informed travelling companion.

Kathleen and I have been not only friends but colleagues for a quarter of a century. The conference we were attending would claim only part of the week, though, and our evenings were always free. Where ought we to eat? What interesting sites were close to our hotel? When destinations warranted other modes of transportations, how would we negotiate taxis or the Metro? This visit was not Kathleen’s first to the French capital, but she admitted she was not a planner.

And I am a planner.

The week before our arrival at CDG, I had used Mapquest to print out maps showing walking routes from our hotel to restaurants and museums and churches we might want to visit in the neighborhood. From my office at work I ordered tickets for a concert performance of The Marriage of Figaro at the Salle Pleyel on a Friday evening. An hour before meeting up with Kathleen one morning, I went to a nearby Metro stop and purchased a carnet of ten tickets from the kiosk for our rush-hour trips to the conference center in the 19th. I either called restaurants myself to make our dinner reservations or engaged the concierge to help me with that task.

If Kathleen thought of me as her Virgil, she did things for me that Dante did not do for his Virgil. She let me take her to places that had a sentimental value for me. She helped me buy a simple begonia from one Monceau florist at the end of the rue Mouffetard and sat in Saint-Medard while I brought the flowers to a side altar in that favorite church of mine. At every lunch and dinner she moved effortlessly into the kind of significant conversation that I love, each of us probing both our own history and our friend’s. She offered me a day on my own if I wanted it and so made possible a solitary venture into the Marais and lunch at a restaurant another Boston friend of mine had recommended.

I am home now for two weeks. Last night I turned the heat on in my New England apartment for the first time this season. I walked from room to room and lowered the storm windows. I made the bed with flannel sheets.

Friends call and write. We tell stories and make plans.

Thank you, Kathleen.

Thank you, Paris.

A Landscape Now Wholly Autumnal

It is a year since I last visited the writing cabin of Edwin Way Teale on a Saturday morning in late October. The companion with whom I had traveled to the writer’s two-hundred-year-old farm in northwest Connecticut took this picture of me without my knowing.

“A landscape now wholly autumnal,” to use words from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journal. The words are quoted by Lawrence Raab in his own poem “Hawthorne on His Way Home.” I have written about Raab’s poem more than once in this blog over the years.

It is a landscape in keeping with the man walking down the road. It is a landscape in keeping with a man walking away from a part of his history. The winter that would follow this solemn autumn afternoon might benefit from a steady companion, but it might just as well be faced alone, standing outside the familiar comforts, snow falling.

I know now that I was frightened this time last year. I was a man sixty years old and in a month I would turn sixty-one. It may not seem a big difference in age, but for someone who had just spent months getting used to his fifties’ being over, the approach of sixty-one was a definitive move into the new decade.

I am much less frightened after the year that has passed.

In Paris by Week's End

I am going to Paris. Again.

There are work commitments claiming certain days there, but other days are unscheduled and uncommitted. They are available for caprice.

One of the first days of every visit to Paris I inevitably stop before some corner flower store. Nowhere on my list of things to do or places to go have I included this or any florist’s shop windows. In tracking in advance the time and location of organ concerts and gallery exhibits, I tend to forget the beauty of fragile petals opening on a stem in a Paris flower shop window.

I have purchased flowers once from such a store and walked outside with them in my arms.

I have ordered flowers once and had them waiting in a Paris hotel room.

I have been given flowers once on a Paris sidewalk, bought minutes before from a flower store about to close for the night in the eighth arrondissement.

Flowers are a language I understand. I usually forget until I get to Paris that I can speak it and understand it even there.

I am not a tourist when I look at flowers in Paris. They are not a souvenir. They are not a memento. They are what they would be if I saw them in a florist’s window in Boston or New York or New Orleans. They are a tribute to the person who gets stopped in his tracks by them. They are a tribute to the person who has to catch her breath when they first lie in her arms.

They are extravagance.

They are an extravagance that so suits Paris.

On the other hand, no one sees a photograph I take of them and exclaims, “Ah, Paris!” Only I know the story they tell of the Seine and the streets that lead down to it and the dream I get to live when the flowers and I walk together down those streets.

Image from Artisan Fleuriste