like a rolling stone

First you've got to get in the shit. And then maybe you can come back and sing it. (Keith Richards, Life)

This quote makes it sound like Keith, at 66, has pulled out of the game. Evidence pro: He wrote an autobiography. (It tolls for thee, Keith Richards.) Evidence contra: he's talking with Mick about getting together for another round. (Though Stones reunions have kind of become like my grandpa's college reunions, in that the number of people who find these events significant is rapidly decreasing.)

My faith in medical science might be overreaching, but I can't help protesting against resignation so early. Writing a book called Life at the age of 66? From Keith Richards, especially--the amount and intensity of what he has survived should promote a sanguine expectation of staying in the shit, at least for another ten years.

Or could it be that he's tapping out? Maybe he's eager for the blanket and slippers.

Socrates asserts that the unexamined life is not worth living. (Most distinctly in the Apology, if you wanted to know.) But does unrestricted examination qualify as a life? He didn't say the "unexamined self", you notice. If you stop being the self you were while you were living, life keeps happening around you. You have to keep up if you're going to examine it. Socrates also said that he only knew that he knew nothing (Republic). Does that not indicate that life well-examined should result in doubts of your examination's validity? ἔμοιγε δόκει.

The smart guys in school used to infuriate me with the way they sat apart from everyone, discussing in mutters and making notes in their Moleskines, responding only to each other's remarks during class discussion. Once satisfied that you're on the right track, you stop looking around, and you're liable to miss things. God help me if I spend all my time on hindsight, at the expense of seeing.

Is it unavoidable that we should live only the first eighty percent of our days, and resign the last twenty percent to examination? Couldn't we do both forever? Or is that privilege reserved for heaven?

the truest sentence you know

i asked K to remind me to write today. it won't just happen on its own. there is prayer, and there is faith, but there is also faithfulness, which is work. i mean to have some discipline.

she reminded me. she cheered for me. i sat down to work in the sun room.

it has been raining for days--a nuisance and a miracle, in this part of the world. the hills look like mountains, when it's raining. it makes a voyage out of going to work at six in the morning, so that it's almost a pleasure.

the sun room is full of tobacco-stained light. the couch is full of pillows and a blanket. fresh off the impetus of K's cheering, i stand in the doorway and think, "how did i get here?" i don't understand.

ernest hemingway said that the cure for writer's block is to write the truest sentence you know. but i have never yet found that sentence. does that mean that i don't know what i believe? how upsetting--i might have writer's block forever.

after an hour or so, as i stared at the retarded grunts i had accomplished, shades fell over my mind. i went to sleep.

i woke up feeling as if years had passed. i woke up staring at my Bible. and i thought, "i need to understand." i can't write until i do understand. i'm going on strike.

there's a verse i read a few months ago in jeremiah that says "let him who boasts boast in this: that he understands and knows me."

writing is the most boastful activity that i know. i'm pretty sure that is why i don't tell people who i am--i feel that i don't deserve it. and i don't understand anything.

i pulled myself off the couch. in the other room, K is sleeping on the other couch. her hair is splayed across the pillow. last night she went to the emergency room, one more time. i don't understand. i shake my fist, though timidly, at God. i don't understand. and i need to. i can't write fiction until i start understanding something about life. this isn't a strike. it's a handicap. i'm crippled, so it doesn't matter if i want to get across the room or across the world.

i've found the truest sentence i know. but it hasn't cured anything except my ambition.

magic words, vol. 10

Those who pride themselves on not being shallow run the risk of drowning in themselves.

according to c. h. spurgeon...

"Twenty miles onward is easier than to go one mile back for the lost evidence."

sometimes prayer is like those souvenir coin machines. you put in your twenty-six cents and the gears start to turn, and the arms and levers begin to pump behind the glass, and you watch as the whole mechanism churns and creaks, and you try for a minute to find where the penny is. but the trick is practiced and ancient, and it hides the penny from view, and with nothing else to look at, you become engrossed in the mechanics, in the shine of the brass wheels, in the size and strength and intricacy of the parts necessary to melt and press just this one, insignificant coin. you start wondering about who invented this technology and why--was it only for entertainment value, or does it ever perform some greater task? was this a source of genuine wonder for people at an earlier point in history? how much of it is really for the sake of pressing the penny, and how much is just for show?

and then the gears stop, and the penny drops out, and you look at its stretched and flattened backside longer than the newly embossed side, because more fascinating than what the penny has become, is comparing that to what it used to be.

why life is funny

it's one of the more obvious statements you can make, and i'd discourage its use. but sometimes the truth of it presses so heavily that you have to either laugh, or scream, or exhale it. life is funny. it's a fucking gut-buster.

not long ago, while i was in the middle of a busy afternoon at work, i learned from a coworker that i had somehow become the center of a really pristine little scandal, as childish and cute and nearly innocuous as a kitten yet to be declawed. it remains an utter mystery to me how this rumor ever got started, since i tend not to confide in coworkers. i traced it from my source to her source, the floor manager, who informed me of the breadth that this scandal had reached--"everybody knows about it," she told me, "everybody's shocked."

"it's not true!" i told her. it was so untrue that i was laughing as i told her.

it's all one, her shrug indicated. "well, everybody thinks it is, and they're shocked."

i learned that her source was the general manager, with whom i have the most spartan of all my work relationships. his speculation was the funniest part of all to me--if i had anything of an intimate nature to confide, i would sooner whisper it in the ear of the geriatric pervert who sits in a camp chair on the sidewalk outside our building, sipping old-fashioneds and listening to smooth jazz while assessing the curvatures of women passing by, than to my high-strung, machinistic GM.

so i enjoyed another hearty laugh and assured her that it wasn't true, at all, and that if she heard the rumor again she should let the tattling parties know the latest and final word on the subject. i thought about telling the other person that the rumored scandal involved--because, of course, there was another person--but i decided against it; i simply hugged it to myself.

upon leaving work, which i did just as the sun was setting, i came around the corner and saw two men working on a boat. this sight was remarkable not only because it was on an urban side street, with no bodies of water larger than a parking lot puddle for thirty miles in any direction, but also because the boat was an arresting hue of turquoise green, and the men were an oddly matched pair--a guy of about forty with strong shoulders and sandy hair, and an overweight Asian guy with protuberant moles on his neck and a certain cast to his eyes that i took to suggest some feebleness of mind. (first impressions are necessarily judgmental.)

i liked the color of the boat, so i let my head turn to admire it as i walked past. of course i smiled politely when i met the eyes of these men working on it. but as i passed, i heard, "hello! excuse me!" i turned around and the feeble-minded Asian man lumbered toward me.

(i can't help it--i thought, "rabbits!" and felt a little bit of panic--blame it on john steinbeck.)

"what's your name?" he asked me. his voice was deep and thick.

"my name's bird," i said. "what's yours?"

"kingsley," he said. in addition to his moles, he seemed to have a few polished wooden claws, as long as my little finger, protruding in a pattern from the base of his neck. i can't explain that one--i didn't want to stare.

but he was staring, like a puppy at a pork chop being dangled over its head. "you're a beautiful woman," he murmured to me.

i almost started to laugh. "thank you," i said. "that's kind of you to say." and then i felt about ready to pop, so i turned around and booked it to my car.

i was trying to explain this to a friend i saw later that day. i said, "life is funny," but when he asked me why, i couldn't tell him--not completely. i couldn't tell him that i have spent my life feeling inconsequential and ugly, and to be confronted with big Lichtensteinian scenes indicating the contrary was absolutely ticklish to me. my insecurities were the backbone of the whole story, the canvas behind the Ben-Day dots; without them, the story was incomplete.

this is what turned life's funny on its edge, that summer evening, when hilarious began to be ironic, when the petals fell, when the rust spots started to show.

how we appear, and how we are treated, are delicate and dangerous things, to be sure. but the things we cannot bring ourselves to tell are the most dangerous of all. they are weapons we can only use on ourselves.

magic words, vol. 9

"What was your mother? A lioness!" (Ezekiel 19.2)

left behind

i can remember this piano recital that i performed in, as a kid. i was probably eleven years old. we had just moved to a new city and i was studying under a teacher whose approach was way more intense than any i'd encountered before. he wore black horn-rimmed glasses, and always a white oxford shirt and pants that appeared as if he'd slept in them. his hair was black and unruly, and his body was lank and sort of unwashed-looking. i can remember seeing the cavity of his pale chest through the nearly transparent shirt, and thinking, "what kind of man is that?" he had two kids, little wisps of black hair and olive skin that better resembled their Taiwanese mother, with whom he invariably bickered if she made a rare appearance. the kids, too, he would maniacally hustle out of the practice room whenever they ventured down to spy on his students.

i can't remember his last name, which i'm sure is what i called him by. i know his first name was david because i would hear my mom discussing him with my dad, as in "bird doesn't like david very much" or "david's students do competitions and get scholarships." she was right in both instances. david's students were mostly little prodigies, the kind that TV movies get made about later, cipher-faced urchins whose fingers ran like those wind-up Matchbox cars, and stopped as abruptly when they were through with their concertos as if they'd run into a wall. and i did not like him.

he always seemed occupied by something outside of my piano lesson. i can remember that he never looked me in the eyes. his arms would windmill broadly as he shouted "more! more!", in direction that i was supposed to play louder, and then he would hunker over like Quasimodo and murmur "less! less!" it seems to me now that he was more occupied with the technique than with the song itself, though i couldn't have said so at the time. i would only have said that piano lessons were a drag and that mozart's fantasia in d minor was not, and was unlikely ever to be, a personal favorite.

fantasia in d minor was the song he elected for me to play at the recital, which meant that not only did i have to be good at it, but i also had to memorize it.

i'd been through dozens of recitals by age eleven. i didn't get stage fright, and if i messed up the performance it was because i got distracted or bored. i liked the applause, and the cookies at the end of the event, and i always brought a book to read during the ages and ages it took to give the rest of the students their moment in front of the camcorders. nonetheless, i dreaded this recital because i really hated playing fantasia in d minor, probably for no other reason than that it was in a minor key and had some tricky runs that david's ungentle persuasion had set me against ever playing correctly. if i got the fingering right, the rhythm was off, and if i fell into the right rhythm, my fingers buckled like a foal's knees. and the pall over the whole affair was that i didn't care, and felt the guilt that i ought to.

the recital was in the small auditorium of a high school or community college. there were dark blue velvet curtains, and the piano was not as grand as the one in david's studio. i sat beside my mom in the back rows, and propped my feet up on the seat in front of me; as the first pocket-sized soloist took the bench, i opened my book. i don't remember anything else--what i had been made to wear, what book i was reading, how i knew when it was my turn, or even setting my fingers to the piano--until i was about sixteen bars into the performance.

i can recall the slow revelation, as i was playing, that this was not only a piece, but a song. i saw that it was a very lyrical and emotional song. without knowing what in it was moving me, or why it never had moved me before, i suddenly felt myself caring about the space between the phrases, about the pressure with which my fingers fell from one note to the next, and wanting urgently to express a "more" and a "less" that had nothing to do with windmilling arms and the inscrutable lenses that shied from a direct gaze. suddenly, i wanted to know what the music was trying to say, and convey its voice faithfully. i wanted to agree with it, to cooperate in making the beautiful thing hidden in the notation i had memorized.

but then came the long, cascading runs; my heart sank. i hadn't cared, and i wasn't worthy to play them right, and they were going to let me down now--justly, because i had let them down. i limped down the network of intervals, shuffled through to the end of the piece, took my perfunctory bow with the browbeaten attitude of the prodigal son, and went back to my seat.

i found out later that the recital had, in fact, been a competition, and that david had told my mom i should have won it if i'd practiced more. as it was, some eight-year-old Taiwanese kid took the scholarship money home. my mom asked why i hadn't practiced more.

i told her, "i did practice. i just don't like him."

also, i wanted to say, i hadn't known there was money riding on my performance. and i hadn't known anything of what mozart or d minor meant, until it was too late.

resting restless

It was a strange day, full of puzzling gifts, occasioned by helpless gratitude. So I had to wander. I woke up just before sunset, not knowing that I'd fallen asleep, and I felt the imperative inside me. I tied on my worn-out shoes and ran from the house.

I walked eastward, up the hill, over the freeway bridge. The sun was turning everything the color of ripe fruit; all the windows looked like stained glass. I smelled about twenty different dinners as I wove between 26th and 28th streets, and I saw the TV sets playing flat faces in flat colors. Across the ravine, the park had turned into Shangri-La, black and mysterious.

I love going out to wander when I know I'll be caught by the twilight. When the day exhales its final breath in a haze of car exhaust and jasmine fragrance, when the lights in the kitchens come on, when I can walk down the yellow line of the street with impunity, when the streets are so quiet you can hear people playing the piano from blocks away.

It turned dark when I turned on 30th Street and headed south, doubling back on my route rather than going in a complete circle, because I wanted to see the same neighborhood from a different angle. The bars were opening up; the back patio of Station Tavern was lit with a string of bulbs and children were playing under the tables; couples were walking their dogs. I saw a church for lease--a Mission-style edifice in white stucco, with green frames on the doors and windows. A jeep passed me, playing ranchero music at a respectful volume. The sky was lapis blue, like the time I got lost in a suburb of Buenos Aires, walking for miles trying to find my uncle's church, certain only that it was somewhere east of where I'd started from. The sky kept getting darker and darker blue, but it never turned black, not even when the stars were all out. And then I found that I'd passed it, and I turned back around and came in through the front door, and one of the girls ran to tell my uncle, who betrayed his relief only through the slight widening of his eyes when he saw me.

When I turned west again on A Street, I saw a square loft built over the roof of a house, and then I was on the terrace of the Cooles' house in Castle Comfort, in Dominica, in the Caribbean, surrounded by palm trees and banana trees, eating stewed breadfruit and tomatoes, smelling the sulfur that bubbled under the hillside as the dormant volcano began to pulse in the evenings, listening to the tambourine-punctuated music of the church at the bottom of the mountain, as their nightly revival meeting gathered steam. I saw Dr. Cooles dipping packaged wafers in his decaffeinated instant coffee, murmuring in assent as Sandra told me things about their life there, and the life they had left behind in England. I saw the faint light illuminating the spines of their thousands of books, ranked along the indoor walls as thickly as the vines that climbed around the house.

And as I came to the crest of the hill and began to make the descent toward 14th Street, I was suddenly in a place that is not past, but somewhere forward. I was on a porch, a wide front porch with low eaves, and I was bending over something--maybe a stereo, because the music from Buena Vista Social Club was playing. I had a white dress, like the one I tried on yesterday in the store, and my hair was tied up in the same scarf I was wearing, and there were earrings dangling under it like unripe fruit. There was light inside the house, and I was waiting for someone to come out, to join there me on the porch. I stood up and looked inside to see if someone was coming yet.

I love walking over the freeway at dusk, or at night. Any bridge is a good place when the sun goes down. It's a place to be still and absorb the motion of something else. I remember the Williamsburg Bridge at dusk, and also the Pont Alexandre III. No matter where I am, or where I am in my head, a bridge at nightfall feels like home. I can't, for the life of me, tell you why.

Something wonderful must be happening tonight, because in my apartment building courtyard, someone is playing the harmonica.

defouler

She wanted to know if the baby was a boy or a girl, but it's too early to tell. She asked if the baby was tall. The technicians laughed, and said we won't know that for a long time. M asked if the father was tall. She said, yes, he was. Then, said M, it's a good chance that the baby will be tall. And we were all quiet, watching the strange, unlikely wink of a pinpoint on the screen, which the tech told us was the baby's heartbeat.

Francine's baby is ten weeks old. Do people count the age in utero? Like, three months from the baby's birth, will he be a year old? Or she...will she be a year and nine months on her first birthday? I don't know. I haven't thought much about things like this. M was trying to translate words like "effaced" and "diaphragm" and "internal os " into French, and I was sitting by, trying to picture them in English and coming up with nothing.

I've never cared. Women get pregnant, I watch them blow up and wear cute clothes, I go to their parties and watch them unwrap more cute clothes, and then I get their birth announcements in the mail. They bring the babies to church and show them around--I admire some, I've worshipped at least one, and most of them I am polite toward.

But now there's this little brown baby whose life I am a little bit responsible for. Who knows what will happen a few months down the road, but for the present, I haltingly translated it out of the abortion clinic and into an ultrasound machine. Here's something spooky for you--the projected due date is my birthday.

My French-speaking skills are best personified as Quasimodo. Looking at the butterfly-wingbeat improbably representing the baby's heart, I thought how altogether absurd it is that my crippled language skills allowed us to see it.

I didn't mean to get into this drama, this Lifetime TV special. I just wanted to practice French, to regain the sophomore-level fluency that I'd attained a few years ago. Meeting with Francine a couple times a month was cheaper than taking classes somewhere, and I thought it might have the side benefit of letting her get out from time to time and help her feel a little more at home in America.

I bought her a coat for Christmas and felt uncomfortable about being viewed as some kind of patron, so I asked her to pray for me about my difficulties at work. She grabbed my hand in the car and lofted an oration that could have taken the unclean spirits out of Benny Hinn himself.

Two days later, my manager at work stopped treating me bad.

Two months later, Francine asked if I could take her to the hospital. On the way there, she pulled out the paperwork with a Planned Parenthood logo stamped on the top.

She met some guy "en route"--just some nobody that she ran into at a bus stop or on a corner, while she was taking a walk. "Prendre l'air" is the phrase she used, "decouvrir la vie un peu." Taking the air, rediscovering life a little. They went to a restaurant, then they went to a hotel. His name was Mike, and he was black. That's all she knows. She's never seen him since and doesn't care to. It wasn't a big deal, she said. It was a little "defouler." It relaxes one, it's amusing. It's just a little fooling around.

She called me while I was at my friend's birthday party last weekend, saying she was in pain and wanted to go to the hospital right then. I didn't know if she meant go back to the abortion clinic, or if she needed the emergency room, or if she was just being emotional. I went into the bathroom and collapsed on the floor, sobbing strange, unlikely tears that came as heavy and cleansing as vomit. I can't do this, I said. I'm completely alone and I don't know what to do and I can't even talk to her about what she wants to do. I can't shuffle this responsibility off on anybody, and I can't just drop it, either. I came out and my friend, whose birthday it was, began to comfort me and exhort me. She said, you can do this, you have everything you need in Christ. And, like Francine, I sucked it up and said, you're right. I can.

Do we all do this, or is it just me? Just blunder into other people's lives for our own amusement, our own enrichment, thinking we'll give a little to them of what they need and take a little of what we want. A little "defouler" that unexpectedly leads to "le coeur qui bat", the beating heart. My French is improving, no question.

Francine was afraid to have this baby when she first told me about it. "I'm a refugee, I have no job, I have no money, how can I have a baby?" she said to me, over and over. But today, while we were talking with the counselor at the pregnancy center, she smiled with more warmth and vulnerability than I've ever seen her show. She wanted most of all to have a picture of the baby. They gave her the ultrasound photos and asked, "Who are you going to show them to, first?" She handed them to me and said, "Á toi."

I'm irresponsible, I'm barely making any money, I can barely get on time to the places I'm supposed to be, I forget to call and show up. I didn't plan on this. I don't feel ready for this kind of commitment.

How can I be the kind of friend this woman needs?

miracle chains

the fall, which led to the garden, which led to a few new friends, which led to more gardens, which led to a niche at my workplace, which led to writing, which was an answer to prayer, which led to unexpected encouragement, which might lead who knows where, which leads to faith.

the fall, which led to depression, which led to fear, which led to courage, which led to hurt, which led to prayer, which led to despondency, which led to ill health, which led again to prayer, which led to the dream (i suppose), which led to fear of a different kind, which led to prayer, which led to conviction, which led to dependency, which leads to faith, which might lead who knows where.

effusion

there is here kind of a lot for you to dig, today.

today represents several months--at least since last summer, when things began to change. when things began to take an organic shape independent of my plans. kind of like taking a ruined espalier off a tree and letting it do its thing. the tree might not be straight or symmetrical but it gets a gnarly shape that sets it apart from all the others.

what brings me to this fever pitch of excitement is two things. one is that i've started writing in a semi-official capacity for my place of business. you can find the link to it here, if you want to have a look.

well, really what makes me excited is that a coworker saw me typing away at the company blog and blurted, "you're a great writer." nobody told her to say that. i didn't even know she was reading it. she's not one of my teachers or one of my parents.

i said the worst possible thing in response--"no. really?" i sounded like i was fishing for more compliments. but i was really stunned to hear her say it. it was almost like hearing a guy say "i love you."

which brings me to my second reason for excitement.

...no, no. no.

what happened was that last night i had this dream wherein i was set upon by a couple of demons in the form of rabid animals, one on either side of my bed. in my dream i was watching myself over my bed. they bit my neck and my foot, and it really hurt, and in my dream i thought, "these are demons and i have to rebuke them in the name of Jesus." this is not something i think about often, or ever. i rebuked them and they let go, but i was really scared to stay asleep so i launched myself out of the dream, which, if you've never tried it, is a lot like swimming to the surface from very deep under water. i talked to my housemate about it and we prayed together for a little while, because i was really kind of terrified to go back to sleep. it was a strange war of skeptical reason and holy fear--i didn't want to make a big melodramatic deal of the whole thing, but i really didn't want to go back to sleep. i also didn't want to pretend i'm stronger than i am, and not ask for help.

as we prayed, i got a pretty strong sense that the dream had to do with my addictive behavior toward love.

there have been two occasions in my life--one a few years ago, one very recent--that my heart got a little broken. in both cases, the breakage was not the guy's fault at all--it was mine. neither guy asked for it, neither guy hurt me on purpose. in fact, they were both polite and respectful to an unlikely extreme, especially considering their own personal addictions.

but there's something in me that absolutely splintered over both of them, in spite of all my reasoning and efforts at good humor and good faith. i haven't figured out what that is yet. nor have i figured out why it took that terrifying dream to help me out of the most recent heartbreak. it's just that when i prayed along those lines--for release from the occupying pain of those relationships--i felt peaceful enough to go back to sleep. and when i woke up this morning, i felt clean again, for the first time since the end of last summer.

what shall we say in response to these things? if God is for us, who can be against us?

not even we can be against us.

i feel all giddy, like a second-grader on the first day of school. even in the sordidness of the last few months, there have been so many good things God has wrought--involvement with some groovy social activists, playing in the dirt with community gardeners, weird and wonderful friends emerging out of unexpected corners, small children, old people, sunsets, dances, conversations, ideas, connections. adventures, i'm saying! those are my absolute favorite, and ever since i took off the espaliers, i am not even lying, every damn day has been an adventure. not always a good one, but still--what a killer way to live. whose idea was this?

it wasn't mine. i had plans.

love resists being the object of addiction. it won't let you lean too heavily for too long--it pushes you back to stand on your own feet. it makes you use your own lungs to breathe, and your own eyes to see. what good are we when we're absorbed in someone else? people may love being worshiped, but nobody really loves the person who worships them. only God is that magnanimous. he's the only one who can afford to be. he can make us fit to receive just what we'd have always wanted if we'd known it existed.

dear soren

I just forgave Soren Kierkegaard today. For the last couple of years I haven't been able to hear his name spoken without a deep stirring of resentment for the way he ruined my life during my last year of college. Fear and Trembling hit me right when I was weakest from heartbreak and faltering faith, and as a result of the book's emo metaphors and intuitive writing style, my heart continued to break and my faith continued to falter for the rest of the calendar year and beyond.

As I remember it, Kierkegaard takes his well-warranted amazement at the story of Abraham and Isaac as an opportunity to construct an apology for faith, always with the caveat of "I don't know what it is, I only know what it is not." This seems like a holy transcendence until you realize, after bitter experience, that he's excusing himself from making any true statement worthy to provoke dispute or provide direction. But like I said, I've forgiven him. It's not his fault that I continually threw my heart at someone who didn't want it--picked it up off the ground and lobbed it again and again, until my throwing arm got tired. It wasn't Kierkegaard's advice to blame the failure of my game on God and to hold him hostage until he gave me, at the age of twenty-five, what I thought was the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of my life. He didn't assign me the homework of obsessive circumstantial analysis which I told myself was prayer and submission of my requests to God. He just wrote a book about faith and illustrated it with a fairy tale about a knight and a princess and, cleverly, left out the end. He had a hard life, himself--that should have been a clue that his book is not an instruction manual. But we believe things that we hope are true--it is easier than believing some things that are true.

That's what I realized today, that helped me cut Kierkegaard some slack. Submitting our requests to God is not like submitting a list to our personal shopper. It's like submitting a manuscript to an editor--there will be changes made. He doesn't promise to grant our requests in return--he promises peace, that transcends all understanding. And I'd suggest that peace is at the bottom of all our requests, anyway. God, I need a job! (...so I won't have to worry about money anymore) God, I need a fulfilling job! (...so I won't have to worry about money or wasting my life away anymore) God, I need a boyfriend! (...so I won't have to be alone anymore) God, I need a cool thing I can't afford! (...so I won't have to be obsessed with thinking about it anymore) Ad nauseam.

My prayers are so often mere lists of my anxiety triggers, not actual submissions. I'm not seeking peace when I pray, I'm seeking service. From God. Wow.

Half the time, my anxiety triggers are desires for good things. Things like provision, relationships, friends' salvation from hell--things that we are supposed to pray for. But to fling them at God like he's my assistant undercuts the nature of prayer as a spiritual discipline. Prayer is really more about me knowing my place than about getting results. God will manufacture results whether I ask him to or not. (Back me up, Calvinists.)

And though it sounds harsh in my proud, American, educated, feminist ears, knowing my place is actually quite freeing, and staying in it is quite peaceful.

What I realized about Kierkegaard particularly is that he is really very devout. He doesn't advise doing anything against God's will to obtain that good thing I desire. Abraham knew God wanted him to have a son, but God told him to kill the son he had. Rather than argue the point, he believed what God had promised and he also proceeded to do what God had said to do. He was able to separate the knowledge of "God wants me to have a son" from the knowledge that "God said to sacrifice this son that I have."

Furthermore, Kierkegaard advocates silence. I wish I had paid a lot more attention to that feature of the book. He says that the greatest faith is, on the face of it, ironic, and that the greatest irony is inexpressible in words. You know what God said, and you know what God said to do--sometimes they are incompatible, a paradox. (The use of that word has returned to me.) You can't reconcile them, so you don't try--you just shut up.

There's a lot in the book that I ought to read again. There's a lot in the book that is still pretty emo and will find its primary audience in angsty post-teens high on unrequited love. But it's not Kierkegaard's fault if we take his writing as an excuse to stay there.

I just wanted to issue this public apology, and to endorse Fear and Trembling. Buy it for your friends for Christmas. It's a perfect read for Valentine's Day.

magic words, vol. 8

"It would be better to lose your life than to waste it."

according to my cell phone...

"hey. i heard 'bout u, and i wanted to say hi. Umm, i'm kinda unsure, so how about you come check me out online. I got a profile at date-shake.com"
CB#: UNKNOWN
11:43A Thu Oct 23

what it is

A plane took off today at 11.15, and I saw it leaving the runway as I headed north to pick up my new friend on the way to my parents' house for Thanksgiving. I surfaced from the music cracking through my stereo long enough to think, "How tiresome to be stuck inside an airplane on the morning of Thanksgiving." But if that's the quickest route to the ones you love, then wedged against a window in coach class probably feels like a great place to be.

It was a gathering of displaced persons at my folks' place that afternoon. Not only my new friend, who had never met my family before, but also my sister's friends, who are fresh off the boat from Gambia (which is in northern Africa, for those of you who secretly have no idea), had joined the party. Also, our friends J and L had brought with them J's nephew, who didn't talk except to his cell phone and who wore a blank and hunted expression all afternoon, like a deer caught in the headlights except more like a sheep, or a St. Bernard.

We listened to the little girls perform their Christmas choir numbers, and we went around the table and told occurrences of the past year that made us thankful, and the boys played hacky-sack outside, and inside people talked about things that they mostly agreed upon. It was pleasant and warm and mild, like our climate. Then I left to go to my work party. The owner of the restaurant had invited everyone to his home for a Thanksgiving meal cooked by our chefs--I was eager to see what they would prepare on their off hours. They live in a Craftsman bungalow just up the hill from my apartment, a house with beautiful bones and lots of paintings from local artists and, as I discovered later while helping to clean up, no garbage disposal. The kitchen staff was better represented than the front of house staff--Leo and Javi and Ana had brought their spouses and children. The chefs had brought their girlfriends. I was the only server and the only singleton who attended--both facts I only just realized. There were also several friends who don't work at the restaurant but are familiar customers. As people milled around the kitchen, where the appetizers were arrayed, and the backyard, where the turkey was deep-frying, I recognized much of the food and drink as coming from the restaurant--cans of Modelo, Sunburst clams, baby radishes, fried oysters. By twos and threes, people shuffled into the back garage to get high, and I felt a little bit high myself as I sat in the kitchen with my glass of well-watered whiskey. I was grounded, my feet hooked firmly around the legs of the chair, but light-headed and disoriented, unsure of where I stood in this well-established chain of acquaintance. Were they mostly people who had nowhere else to go? Had they been looking forward to this gathering since last year? Did they only come for the free food and booze? Were they tipsy because of high holiday spirit, the glee of friendship, or out of desperation and boredom? I settled into my chair and focused with what I hope was Zen-like intensity on A, the girlfriend of one of the chefs who spends most of her evenings after work at the restaurant. Every segue in the conversation felt like a blind leap from one stepping stone to another; I never lost my footing, though. In fact, by the time we all sat down to dinner, I felt almost comfortable. The owner was red-faced and laughingly imperious, like a Fezziwig at the head of the table; the chefs were gabbling drunken rhetoric as they passed the plates; the kitchen staff were jovially sober, probably on account of the children who were beginning to fall apart at that late hour. G sank into the seat beside me with red eyes and confessions of her affection for me; M was tired and bloated, having already eaten a big Thanksgiving dinner that she herself cooked for her boyfriend's family. I listened to people talk around me. I chewed very slowly. I felt the weight of myself in my seat. I wondered what time it was but did not want to ask. I thought, "Whatever I am right now, it isn't unhappy. It isn't unhappy, at all."

I thought about people that I wished were there with me, but I didn't feel alone. That was perhaps the most alien experience of the night. Surrounded by people I know very little, who I share almost nothing with, who are neither family nor even truly friends yet, unable to make myself heard in the crossfire of conversation and with nothing much to say, anyway, nevertheless I felt assured, small but solid. I felt my own unassertive worth.

I suppose it came from being prepared to be uncomfortable, attending the party as an exercise in neither receiving, nor giving, but simply reaching out. It was a lovely freedom to ride through moments of discomfort without surprise--to drink with others and not get drunk, to smoke with them but not get high, to mention my church experience, to sit in quietness and solitude among a company of loud cohabitators. I felt like I'd been handed the key to the city.

A said, "It was great getting to talk with you." G gave me her scarf and a long embrace. People hugged me and laughed at my parting jokes, and I remembered that they were unlikely to remember any of it much, and I decided to love them nonetheless.

We can't all be family. Family can't all be friends. We can't all be Christians, at least not all at the same time. I don't know if anything is possible for "we all"--there are so many reasons and valid excuses and heartbreaks and hangups. But I can be grateful. I recognize it now. It's that deep, unemotional, spoon-fed sense of settledness in my gut, like a warm meal. It's a beautiful gift to be passed an overflowing platter and, asking "What is this? This looks good," to be told, "This is enough."

sundays were free

"Sundays were free! They were days of tranquillity and general bliss. Perhaps we slept later on rainy winter Sundays, but usually we got up early and eagerly. Breakfast was special, with waffles now and then, and no school, and no piano practice. We talked and laughed." (M.F.K. Fisher, "Hellfire and All That")

The pause afforded by a Sunday afternoon has, historically, been a dangerous thing for me. The manic nature of a busy week leads to a proportionate depression when, with the dying of the car engine in the driveway upon returning from church, everything stops. Time, it seems, falls into a rut and doesn't feel like dragging itself out again.

I used to get ravenously hungry when we walked in the door, at about 12.30pm. My church clothes would be digging creases into my waist, and my feet hurt. I would run upstairs to my room to change clothes. Then, no matter how hungry I was, or how urgently my help was needed in the kitchen, I felt influenced by the torpid warmth of my room, freshened by a little breath of breeze through the door I had just opened for the first time in three hours, and the suggestively wilting sun glowing behind the slats of the blinds, to fall face-forward onto the bed and sleep like the dead.

There was always somebody sleeping on Sunday. When lunch was over, my mom went up to bed. My dad would fall asleep in front of a game on the TV. I would go upstairs and start to listen to the rebroadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, and wake up in the middle of This American Life. When I went downstairs, I had to be quiet, since someone else was usually asleep by then. Until around five in the evening, it was highly inconsiderate to talk in a normal tone of voice.

When I went away to college, Sunday afternoons were the worst times for my chronic nostalgia. Or, maybe, they were the best. Nostalgia is like the pain of getting rid of a hangnail, or what I imagine trichotillomania to be--as much a pleasure as it is a pain. I know I never tried hard to get past the overwhelmingly heavy sweetness that crept upon me while I sang the final hymn at church, engulfing me when I came in the door of one of my series of lonely apartments (on Maryland Avenue, on Spa Road, on Prince George Street, in Pinkney Hall). I never tried to fend it off. Sometimes I would call home, to hear a voice, but more often I just took off my shoes and my coat and fell into the warmth of my bed and pulled the covers over my head and sighed. Sometimes I cried a little, but that was more the tremors of tiredness than of real heartsickness, like the weakness that comes the day after having the twenty-four-hour flu.

Toward the second half of my second year, the nostalgia started to wear off my memories of home, because home started to change. J and W had become my new home in almost every way--I didn't live with them under any formal agreement, but theirs had become the safe place, the unassailable sanctuary of nourishment and comfort and hope and rest. Sunday afternoons I went to their house, whenever I could make the excuse, and I chatted with J while she alchemized in the kitchen. Usually she was baking something on Sunday afternoons--blondies for her kids, or cinnamon rolls for no reason, or gingerbread for Christmas. One time I came over and she was sculpting mushrooms out of cinnamon-dusted meringue, for a buche Noël. We played with her birds, and knitted, and watched her kids come in and out of the kitchen, and made fun of people we knew, and griped about our mothers, and quoted movie lines, and I wished that Sunday afternoon would last for freaking ever. The pain was glorious. She usually went to take a nap at some point within all of this, and I would clean up the kitchen and talk with whoever was around. If no one was around, I would do homework or read books while lying on the couch, or fall asleep while listening to A Prairie Home Companion and wake up in the middle of This American Life.

When I moved to New York last year, Sundays were a push and pull of longing and distaste. On one hand, church didn't start until afternoon, which gave me the freedom of Sunday morning, with tea and the radio, that I had long coveted. On the other hand, the imperative sleepiness of Sunday afternoon must, in that case, give way to the project of helping set up for the church service in the cathedral we rented on West 22nd Street. And by the time church was over, there was no time for the ensuing nostalgia with its anticlimactic nap--I had to get ready for work the next day. It resulted in the break-up of the entire rhythm of the week. My nostalgia was not cured, only stifled.

When I decided to leave New York and move back to California, one of the things I most eagerly awaited was resumption of the Sunday afternoons of my childhood. The foggy morning drive to church, followed by the impatient return home to divest myself of the uncomfortable church clothes, the urgent preparation of Sunday lunch, the ensuing lethargy with my dad falling asleep on the couch in front of the game, and my mom staggering upstairs to nap, and myself sprawled on the floor, half-listening to the radio and steeping in the fulfillment of ten years' longing.

I really thought that.

A few complications, naturally, ensued. This year has been the hottest I have ever known in southern California--foggy mornings and honeyed noontime warmth were unavailable. More to the point, my church, and my family, and I have changed dramatically in character and behavioral patterns since I lived there. Specifically, I don't live at "home" now. The elements are out of their old order, and the resulting composition is unfamiliar. The worn-in ways I longed after were discarded so long ago that nobody knows what I'm missing.

Can you imagine the rude awakening?
Can you conceive of the glorious freedom?

It's really laughable to see how long it has taken me, since moving back here, to realize that Things Are Different. For eight months, I have been going to the family's house and trying to fit what now happens on a Sunday into the frame of my expectations. Trying to remember according to the present. It has been more frustrating, more distressing, than you might guess. Have you tried switching to green tea when you are used to coffee? It's been like that. The heavy, sweet addiction requires much to feed it.

I started to be nostalgic for J's house, then, but it wouldn't suffice, for two reasons. One has been discussed in an earlier post--I visited her last spring and came to terms with the inevitability of change there. The other reason is that I had begun to feed my nostalgia with the hope of fulfillment. That is strong stuff. Mere indulgence of memory was no longer enough.

Last Sunday, I was bone tired, from a busy week and several early mornings in a row. Instead of making my dutiful pilgrimage to the family house, I went to my lonely apartment and shucked off my shoes and fell into bed and pulled the covers over my head. Then I reached out and turned on the radio. Prairie Home Companion was on. I fell asleep. I woke up in the middle of This American Life. I looked around my darkened room, badly in need of tidying, insulated by the hum of the air conditioner, feeling my bones slowly reform after their melting repose. I thought, here it is. This is all I needed. The Sunday afternoon of the past has become the Sunday afternoon of the future.

our epic screenplay

FADE IN

SCENE: a comfortable house in a pastoral setting, more country than suburban. Crepe paper and decorations float from the porch railing and the trees in the front garden. As the camera pans in closer, we see little children running around with Easter baskets, hunting for eggs. Tracking shot brings us to the back of the house, a wide green lawn that slopes down toward a pond. About a dozen adults of various ages are standing together. It's a family party, obviously.

EMILY (or insert your character name of choice) is standing next to a card table that has food and party ephemera strewn all over it. She is filling up more plastic eggs with candy. An OLDER WOMAN, an aunt or somebody of that ilk, comes up to her.

OLDER WOMAN: It wasn't that long ago that you were hunting for eggs like them.

EMILY: (laughs) Almost twenty years. Not that long?

OLDER WOMAN: No! How old are you now?

EMILY: Twenty-three.

OLDER WOMAN: Really? My! I always see you as younger, somehow.

EMILY: Well, that's fine with...

OLDER WOMAN: Let's see, when I was twenty-three, I had just had Lucy and was pregnant with George.

EMILY: Yeah, that would make me feel old, too.

OLDER WOMAN: So, any men in your life yet?

EMILY: (with a good sense of humor, but a little annoyed) None. Ever.

OLDER WOMAN: None at all? Goodness, honey, what are you doing?

EMILY: (holds up the plastic eggs) Hiding my eggs.

(She heads toward a group of little children; CATHERINE, the cute little one whom we meet later, runs to meet her.)

SCENE: The family has gathered in. The children are opening their eggs and comparing results. The adults are half playing with them, half talking together.

OLDER WOMAN: But really, Emily, don't you think it's time to face real life? You're going to have to sometime.

EMILY: (playing with CATHERINE, who sits in her lap) I know. It's just so easy to hide in the shelter of going to college, working full time and paying bills, you know?

CATHERINE: Look, I found a ring! (She tries it on her finger.) Emily, where's your ring?

EMILY: What ring?

CATHERINE: Your wedding ring.

EMILY: Um. I lost it.

CATHERINE: Well where's your husband?

EMILY: (laughs, but notices the aunt staring at her) He's parking the car, Catherine.

CATHERINE: That's what you said before. It's taking a long time.

EMILY: Well, I guess he must be lost, then.

CATHERINE: Well, did you look all around the car? Did you look under it? Did you look over it?

EMILY: (looking straight at OLDER AUNT) You know what? I'll go look right now, Catherine, okay? I'm just going to go look right now. (She gets up and walks around the side of the house.

...TO BE CONTINUED...

where are you now?

I don't remember how I met Annick. I think it was between the first two years of college--my first first year and my second first year. At any rate, I was about nineteen and bored, and I had begun to study French from a book-and-tape series I found at the library. "Le Francais est Facile" or something like that, produced for tourists and business trippers. I loved it. I did pushups in my room as I chanted with the dry British host of the program, "Je suis alle, tu es alle, il est alle..." (I was also trying to condition myself for surfing, another wished-for skill.)

That was why my mother pointed me toward Annick. Her family started coming to our church after theirs broke up. Her husband had been a pastor there, and as I learned much later on, he had come to our pastors almost upon arrival and asked when he could start preaching at our church. Maybe this doesn't seem so out of order to some people. To us, it seemed something like the former president of one country approaching the president of another country and suggesting that they begin to share duties.

Somebody must have mediated the introduction--it might have been my mother, but I can't remember that she was particularly friendly with Annick. It seems so unlikely, as I look back on it. I was nineteen, restless, lazy except for a few chosen projects, with no immediate goals beyond making an hourly wage at Starbucks and practicing French and push-ups. She was in her mid-thirties, with three little girls and an out-of-work husband. She was tall, with black hair improbably long for a woman her age, that stayed shiny and smooth though she wore it loose. She had ice-blue eyes and a classic profile and graceful arms. She carried herself like the curator of an art museum. She spoke with a southern California accent. I can't even remember how she came by her French pedigree.

Somehow I ended up at her house for dinner one night, on the purpose of practicing French together while she made dinner. We conversed innocuously in French, but here and there she broke into English when she confessed the difficulties of her life. She was afraid for how they were going to pay the rent--they had just lost their house and had to move to a condo community in the northern wilds of Escondido. Their neighbor was a drug addict, or a pervert, or both--he had come over once or twice, in the beginning, and one day had sneaked in the open window of the house and surprised her while she was in the shower. Most of her friends had deserted her, now that her husband's former church had split up. And her husband...there she paused. No one understood him, and she allowed that he was sometimes hard to understand.

Her little girls were drawing pictures at the kitchen table. The oldest one, who was probably seven, drew a boy and a girl wearing striped middy blouses and berets with pompoms. The middle one scribbled. The baby I remember best--she was not a chubby American-style baby, but long-limbed, almost lanky, with a mature face and solemn eyes as big as puddles. Her reddish hair tendriled over her forehead in a china doll curlicue, as if it was her concession to infancy.

Annick wore a long dress with no sleeves. She opened plastic freezer bags and somehow constructed something that looked like Provencal chicken in her frying pan. I remember that it smelled delicious and that there were mushrooms. I asked her how to make it, and she gave an unexpected laugh--there wasn't any recipe, it was just something you throw together. Most French cooking is like that, she told me. She pulled out a couple of old textbooks and a dictionary, and gave them to me, saying that sometime I should give her back the textbooks but I could keep the dictionary.

Then her husband came home. He slammed the door and looked at me with an aggression that was almost lewd. He seemed to be sizing me up, whether I was worth challenging or not. He never smiled, even when he kissed his daughters hello. We sat around the table and he threw some French phrases at me--grammatically correct, atrociously pronounced. He asked if I spoke any other languages, and I told him that I spoke Spanish. Then he assailed me with a barrage of questions, straight out of Spanish 4. I didn't want to fight, so I gave simple answers and tried to indicate my willingness to be the beta dog. He gave up on me and looked at his middle daughter, saying, "Eat. Mangez." I smiled at them all, in turn.

Annick gave me a ride to the church, where her daughters did Awana club that night, and where my mom was going to pick me up. We chatted some more in the car, but a somber resignation seemed to have come over her. We stood in the parking lot and watched the kids mill around in front of the entrance to the church. I wish that I could remember what she told me then, because it was probably the key to much of her mystery. It had to do with her husband's pugilistic nature, the circumstances of their church rupture, and the uncertainties that plagued her more than ever. All I can remember is thinking, "I'm nineteen. She shouldn't be telling me this." She finished it by saying, "And there, now you know it. Our histoire triste." Then I realized that I should have been paying much more attention. Why didn't I, I wonder now? Was I bored?

But I also look back with wonder on the way she concluded. It seems so melodramatic, so uncharacteristic of her, at least according to how I had learned her that evening. It was a mystery then how a woman like her ended up with a man like him, but that precipitate confession with its final phrase--"our histoire triste"--might be just what would resolve it all.

Somehow, that last phrase embarrassed me so that I hardly spoke to her again at church. They did not stay long, whether because of her husband's insufferability or because no one but a nineteen-year-old would befriend her, and even that for only an evening.

magic words, vol. 7

"All we have to do is live long enough and we will suffer."