Oh, I Will Miss This Woman

"Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died today at her home in Austin. She was 62."

Last year at this time it was Wendy Wasserstein. We are losing some of the great ones at awfully young ages.

Conversations That Happen

I.

Hallway in Orthodox Jewish School. Smart and Funny Crooked Grin Tenth Grade Boy, whom I taught for two years, is bubbling over with excitement as he waylays Preoccupied Teacher.

"Ms. C, the most amazing thing happened in drivers' ed."

"Umm-hmm."

"I was sitting next to this kid, who, it turns out, goes to a Catholic school, and when he saw my kipa he started asking me all kinds of questions."

"Umm-hmm."

"He wanted to know all about my religion, and what we do, and where I go to school, and why, and he was really interested."

"He probably was. Did you have a good time talking to him?"

"It was great. He really didn't know anything about Judaism at all, and I got to explain a lot."

"I imagine that you did a terrific job. It's too bad he hasn't studied Judaism in his school; I'm sure he has to take Religious Studies. Now did you do the other part of the conversation?"

"What do you mean?"

"The part where you ask him about his faith and life and school."

"Uh, well, no."

"Well, that's your assignment for next week in drivers' ed. If you are going to engage in this conversation, it needs to go both ways."

"OK! I'll come back and tell you what happens!"

II.

Same scene. Same characters.

"So, Ms. C, I did what you said, and I talked to that kid again!"

"And how did it go? Where does he go to school?"

"Famous Soccer Jesuit School. But he doesn't really know much about his religion."

"Really? What do you mean?"

"He couldn't really explain it. He said he goes to mass -- that's what you call it, right?-- once a week, and to prayers a couple of times a week, but that was about all he could say. He really couldn't explain any of the beliefs."

"Did you ask him why he goes to Famous Soccer Jesuit?"

"Because his parents made him."

"So of the two of you, you were far better prepared to discuss your life and beliefs and practices, and you're the one who has made some significant choices in your life?"

Smart and Funny Crooked Grin: "Yeah."

III.

Teachers' workroom. Same characters.

"Ms. C, I need to ask you a question."

"Umm, I'm on my way to a meeting. Walk with me in the hall and you can ask me on the way."

"This is a longer question than that."

"OK, why don't you tell me what it is and we'll see."

"Well, you know I am doing a lot of investigating and exploring right now, and trying to research a lot of things."

"Umm-hmm."

"So I wondered, would you explain to me why you believe what you do?"

Silence.

Now Not-So-Preoccupied Teacher is registering that he has asked, "Why?" and not "What?"

"You know, that IS a longer question than I was expecting. That won't fit into a short walk down the hall."

"I told you."

"OK, well, I really have to go to this meeting. But I would love to have this discussion with you. When we have real time for it."

IV.

A week later. I have figured out the answer. I told him today that he'd better come back soon.

30/365: Scotland as Viewed from from British Airways

Our church Session celebrated its annual (sort of) Robert Burns party this past week-end. I will spare you the raucous behavior, the poetry readings, and the dramatic presentation and evisceration of the haggis. Let's just go back to Scotland.

Why Church? (I)

It's in the windows.

The reason I go to church. You can find it in the windows. And in what surrounds them. In the buildings.

Chartres Cathedral is not like other buildings. For one thing, it has been built at least five times and, if in nothing more than your imagination's tracing of its earliest outline beneath the current stone floor, you can submerge yourself in 1500 years of worship there. Probably even more, as it is argued that perhaps the Druids were there first.

Chartres has stone carved into a myriad of possible formations. Arches, buttresses, pillars, columns, walls, window frames, statues, towers, stairs, massively placid, airily fragile.

Chartres has the labyrinth. THE labyrinth. A few weeks ago, in sadness and turmoil over my grandmother's death and the family chaos it unearthed, I went to a local Catholic college early in the morning to walk its model of the Chartres labyrinth. Back and forth, and half way round, and back and forth. . . . The labyrinth at Chartres has served similar purposes for centuries.

Chartres has the towers. Sun and moon. Asymmetrical. Unbalanced. A surprise. Like human life.

Chartres has the portal statuary. It seems endless. I'm not sure how many statues grace the exterior of Chartres. More than hundreds, each unique. Each one, like all the rest of the building, crafted by an unknown individual, by someone who labored for months to create something of his own that would blend into a structure so vast that only the occasional visitor's eyes would light in appreciation on his particular contribution. And only those who care to explore at length would understand that the stone stories on the outside live in relationship with the glass stories on the inside.

And yes, Chartres has the windows. There are no other windows on earth like the windows at Chartres. The blue is not like any other blue. The stories, elaborated in ways that speak to us hundreds of years later. The conversation between Hebrew and Greek Bibles. The reminders of the near-destruction of that conversation in the twentieth century.

Last summer, I wrote, "As far as I'm concerned, a cathedral has everything ~ God, us, faith, history, prayer, war, music, light, darkness, joy, despair, clarity, chaos, solidity, spirit ~ and Chartres is the best one of all. "

I've been in lots of cathedrals. Attended mass in a few, heard concerts in several more, and wandered around many. I've spent two days, only two, at Chartres, the one that says, "Come back. This is you. This conglomeration of belief and question, of mystery and chaos. Come back. Come back."

Mostly, and oddly enough in light of what I've just written, I worship in Presbyterian churches. And most of them do not resemble Chartres at all. Sparse. Brick or clapboard on the outside. Bare walls on the inside. Clear glass windows. Not a statue or shard of stained glass anywhere in or on the building. One tower, elegant in its simplicity.

Oh yes, the Puritans have been here.

I love my church. I love its heritage, straight from Plymouth to the Western Reserve of Connecticut. I love its stark beauty. I love what it says.

It says clarity. The Protestant claim is to the clarity of the Word of God. The lines of the pulpit and lecturn are straight, clear. The windows are straight, clear. God is not told "slant," as Emily Dickinson would say. The voice of God is a clear voice, the words of God are clear words.

God is, after all, Word. In the beginning, God creates through words. In the beginning Christ is logos, Word. Words distinguish us from all other creatures. A Presbyterian church is about words. Words that we speak and words to which we listen. God seeps into our very beings through words.

I love them both. The windows of Chartres and the windows of the church that I call home. The collection of color and chaos that merge in the light to tell the story one way. The open clarity that tells the story another.

My own story is both.

26/365: The Little Lakes III

Another image from a couple of years ago ~ but it looks the same today.

25/365: Morning

The car needs to be cleaned off for the fifth time in 24 hours. This time the snow is damp and heavy, and there is ice underneath. I click open the doors of the red Corolla so that I can grab the scraper and turn on the windshield wipers and rear window heater.

Gregorian chant pours fluidly from the CD player into the dark and gray morning. I stand in the snow with the monks.

24/365: An Oldie From January 2005

23/365: The Little Lakes II

22/365: This One IS For Paul

Glasgow Cathedral Guild Window

In honor of Paul, who will retire from his distinguished ~ we think ~ teaching career at the end of this week: Let's begin the celebration!

21/365: Cemetery III

Skip This One, Paul

Major church week-end.

Session retreat from Friday night through Saturday afternoon. (The Session is, for want of a better description, the decision-making body of the local church in our denomination.) Eighteen church elders and two pastors off to the Catholic retreat center where we went last year ~ beautiful facilities and grounds and wonderful food. Really an excellent community retreat: lots of opportunity for getting to know one another in a spiritual and scriptural context, something on which we spend far too little time. Sadness and concern, as two men left early, one to accompany his dying mother on her final journey, and one to be with a brand-new granddaughter in a grave medical crisis. Laughter, especially on the part of those of us repeatedly reminded that we have no gift whatever for singing. Lots of genuine learning and some surprise as a few of us realize that we are in our third year of a three year term and finally understand, more or less, what we are doing.

A long day in church. Our adult ed program on hospitality in an era of pluralism is going beautifully, today in the form of a gifted and knowledgeable speaker on Hinduism, with EIGHTY people in attendance. How cool is that? We had a fabulous lunch ~ none of that green jello with shredded carrots stuff that has been a staple of so many church meals in my life ~ followed by the annual congregational meeting which, while it has its tedious elements, is really an opportunity for much celebration. Don't let anyone tell you that the mainline Protestant church is in decline or despair.

And tomorrow night, a Presbytery meeting (the Presbytery, also for want of a better description, is the first level of the church above the local; ours oversees about fifty congregations) at which there will be a first discussion of an overture brought by several of our churches to counteract the work done by the General Assembly last summer, which left open the possibility for the ordination of gay and lesbian pastors without mandating same. I am trying to use neutral descriptors because the virtiol over this issue is of, um, some magnitude. I will just say that, from my standpoint, the proposed overture is a disheartening one.

Back to school for me tomorrow, after a 10-day vacation. I am still grading papers. I have, however, finished the ninth grade honors world history exams and, truly, they made me want to cry. They were wonderful. I am surrounded by students who are capable of great curiosity and generosity, and serious learning, too, about cultures and times far from their own. I am really honored to be their teacher.

20/365: Retreat Center

19/365: Cemetery II

More on Grey's

Lisa is right. The post about last night's episode at www.greyswriters.com is worth a read.

Another part of last night's episode just popped into my head. Meredith is talking to Christina. They know that George's father is going to die. And Meredith notes that her long-absent father is alive and well, upstairs with his second family, but that he means nothing to her. If he were to die, her life would not change. She wonders whether there is something wrong with her jealousy of George, who is about to lose the father he loves so much.

"Yes," says Christina.

At that point, we don't yet know that Christina lost her father long ago.

"Yes," says Christina, because she knows that for Meredith and her father, there is still the possibility of a future. And she is proven right, when Meredith later extracts her first tidbit of personal information about her father: that she inherited her capacity for snoring from him, and that there is a practical solution which may preserve her relationship with Derek. The father who means nothing to her helps her with the love of her life.

George's father at least got to meet the love of George's life, and to encourage George to put aside the baggage destroying that relationship. Christina's never even got to see her grow up.

Random Musings About Aging

I have, not surprisingly, been thinking a lot about my grandmother since she died on New Year's Day. And thoughts about my grandmother, who was 100 years old, lead inevitably to thoughts about the aging process. Yesterday I spent some time with someone who asked about her, and whether she had any kind of life of faith.

My answer? "I have no idea."

I mentioned in a comment to someone else's blog that I've concluded there's a recessive gene in my family that's popped up to express itself in me. A Pilgrim ancestor, one of those who braved the Mayflower voyage only to die two months later on the hard winter soil of what we call Massachusetts. A Methodist bishop, whom my grandfather once described as "the most tedious man" he had ever encountered. And me. Not a promising lineage.

In my family, people don't talk much about religion or faith or spirituality or anything else connected thereto. People don't go to church. At one point in her life (several decades ago!), my grandmother became great friends with a woman who had written extensively about Buddhism. Whether my grandmother herself ever practiced meditation or otherwise engaged herself with Buddhism, I have no idea. She would have considered religious matters to be of an extremely personal nature, and would have been reluctant to say anything which might have been construed as an imposition on others.

But I wish she had. What I would give to know whether and, if so, how, her thoughts turned to God, or whatever might have meant God to her, in that last decade of her life, as her brilliant mind became increasingly trapped in the silence that deafness and blindness bring. Of course, I would like to know her views on everything she considered in those last years, and they are all lost to me.

I would particularly like to know what her advice would have been on how to prepare for very, very old age. As we watch our elderly family and friends, my own generation of friends and I are making an endless series of mental notes, most of them on what not to do. Last night, in response to a situation in which one of my friends had been sucked into providing almost daily care for an aging friend of hers over a long three month period, we concluded that we need to remember not to impose ourselves on others when we become dependent and needy and lonely. It's probably an easy trap to fall into, so advance planning is required.

My grandmother herself never sold her house, which became a haven for various members of her family whenever a temporary place to live was required, especially during marital separations. But now it sits there, dilapidated and lost, and needs to be dealt with. Advance planning would have been a good thing. At some point around the age of seventy, you need to look fearlessly into the future and acknowledge that whether you have one year left or thirty, a two-story house will soon be beyond your capacity to manage.

Property. Friends. Family. Faith. They are all as challenging at the end of adult life as they are at the beginning. But are they as absorbing? I don't know. And the only person who might have told me is gone.

They Got It Right

George: I don't know how to exist in a world in which my father doesn't.

Christina: Yeah, that never really changes.

*************

I knew there had to be a reason why Christina is my favorite character.

18/365: The Little Lakes I

17/365: Cemetery I

House

We moved in twenty-three years ago today. It was a Saturday, one of the coldest days ever. Sixteen below Fahrenheit. By the time we had finished, with the door having been opened and closed repeatedly all day long, it was about fifty in the front hall. My husband set up our bed and I climbed under a pile of blankets and sleeping bags and barely peered out again until March.

I was so sick.

It snowed heavily several times that winter. Sometimes as I stumbled back to bed from the bathroom, I would hear the sound of the snowblower in front of the house. The Episcopal church parsonage was next door, and the minister's son, who had never met us but had heard that I could barely move, took care of the front sidewalk for us over and over again.

In March as it warmed up and I opened the windows, I discovered that, when one purchases a home, one should first stop by at all hours of the day and night. It turned out that we live on a side street that takes you straight from the 'burbs at the top of the hill to the major university-hospital complex at the bottom. Our little street has rush hours. I lay in bed morning after morning and listened to the world whizzing by.

I was so sick.

In May I took my bearings and walked the dog again. I had about a month in there when I had stopped puking and could still breathe. We had a big dog and I had a big belly. People asked me all the time, "When are you due?" and blanched when the answer was "In three months." I hung the pictures that had been in boxes in the hallway since January.

In the summer I kept walking, but it became considerably more difficult. We stayed in town because my doctor had told me that the babies were likely to come early and that I should honor the fact that we lived five minutes from a Level III NICU. It was an excruciatingly boring summer, and much too hot to hang around our new (actually old, and not air-condiitoned) house. I spent a lot of time floating in the city pool, the only locale in which my whale-sized self could loll in comfort. I did my part for teenage abstinence. Oh, the looks on the faces of the kids whenever I emerged from the water, swimsuit plastered to my belly! ~ I knew that the back seats of cars would be somber places those nights in response to that view.

In August everyone drove me crazy. The doctors wanted to take ultrasounds every five minutes. The breech baby flipped upright and the doctors (my doctors that summer always came in multiples themselves) assured me that he would stay that way; there was just no room in there for those babies to budge. A week later he flipped upside down again. The minister and his wife came over one evening to make sure that we were all right ~ we had unplugged the phone in a desperate move to avoid the calls of the grandparents, and one set of them had somehow managed to convince information to give them the number of our neighbors, whose names they did not know, so that they could check on us.

In early September we brought our first two children home. That was a very scary night, the two of us and two week-old babies. My mother-in-law came the next day and stayed two weeks, but that first night was terrifying. What were we supposed to do if they cried? Where was my battalion of mother-and-child nurses? Couldn't we just move the entire fifth floor women's hospital staff up the hill?

I remember the next few months as possibly the most joyful in my entire life. My friends tell me that I was close to comatose much of the time, and I'm sure that there are, in fact, many stretches of existence lost to me. One of those friends, now a new grandmother to one, asked me recently how you sleep when you have newborn twins. "You don't, " I said. "Not as a regularly-scheduled activity." Of course, there are pictures of me passed out on various chairs and couches, always with a just-nursed infant curled up next to me. But what I remember are long walks pushing a double stroller through a beautifully warm autumn and along a windy December beach in Florida, and hours lying around on the living room rug or on our bed, just watching and laughing with two tiny boys.

Twenty-three years ago today we moved in and things didn't look too promising. But except for the puking, it was a very, very good year.

16/365: Early Morning on Recycling Day