My Lucky Day

All I can say is sometimes you just get lucky. Me, I got lucky three times in a 24-hour period, and each time it was because I put myself out there, either by picking up the phone or by walking instead of riding to run the day’s errands.The first time was on Sunday morning when I used my feet instead of a car to cover the two miles downtown and back. Just as I was passing the doughnut shop, I spotted a 12-year-old boy striding along with his father. They were both laughing and the dad had his arm slung affectionately around the boy’s neck when suddenly he stopped them both mid-stride and kissed the child smack on the side of his head.Seeing that would have made my day all by itself, but I got lucky again just a few hours later when I made myself call the cable company to see about locking in a good rate.“Your wiring is extremely old!” exclaimed the customer service rep. ...AND, you need a better router," she added. “I can actually send a technician out tomorrow, would that work?” She said he would be here for several hours, she and no, there would be no charge (!) And didn’t that technician sure enough come, the very next day. He slapped a ladder up to the side of the house, descended into the Land of Lost Things that is our basement and in general worked here for three solid hours, leaving me at day’s end with a signal strong enough to let me Facebook with the folks on the International Space Station.Then the last piece of luck came along the next morning when, headed into the city on business, I left my car on its perimeter to save on parking costs, then took a taxi the rest of the way.My driver was a woman in her 60s with dreadlocks and a big wide smile, whose cab was filled with the most wonderful music, to which she was singing along. Finally, I just had to ask: “What IS this?"She tilted the rearview mirror so she could see my face. “Caribbean music!” she said laughingly. “The music of Haiti!“ And then she gave a five-minute tutorial, with examples, on the difference between her Haitian French, called “Creole,” and the French that is spoken in Paris.I loved the lesson. “But I have to know,” I said then. “Who is this singing? ““Oh!” she said. “My friend and I made this CD. My voice is the deeper one,“ she added, and resumed her singing by way of demonstration.  When we reached my destination, she picked up a worn Bible from its place on the passenger seat. “This was our text,” she said. “It’s from the Book of Acts, Chapter 20,” she said and showed me the passage, all in French. “Take a picture of it with your phone!” So I did take a picture, and once I got home, I  looked up the English for this piece of Scripture that in part  has God saying, “I will show wonders in the Heavens above and signs on the earth below.”“Isn’t that the truth!” I thought, because today it seems to me there are signs and wonders coming thick and fast all around us - and all we really need is the eyes to see them.

Payback

The other day I drove 100 miles with  four feet of my scarf sticking out of the car and dragging along the ground. AND, it was 32 degrees and sleeting. Sigh. Such a pretty scarf too: I got so I was very vain, wearing it.I had closed it in the car door though I didn’t know it ‘til we got to our destination. It was frozen solid, like a brick, only sort of bent.Old Dave thought it was the funniest thing in the world. I think he saw it as payback, because when I say I was driving I was really only helping him drive, which I admit I do, since he’s so aggressive a driver, passing this driver, nosing right up under their petticoats of that one. I used to read, or nap, or treat him to my own brand of fascinating chatter as we drove. Now I seem to  be so vigilant I can’t do anything but 'help him' steer. It’s like this anniversary card I just bought to give him where they even got the name right. As you can see, the front says “Dave didn't have to watch where he was going...” Then when you open it up it reads “Because his wife was an excellent back seat driver." Just look at that woman sitting behind him. Of course I don’t look like a bit like her - not me! But the weird thing is, she does look a lot like my mom when she got her bossy hat on. Hmmm, what was it that Oscar Wilde said? "Every woman becomes like her mother. That is her tragedy. No man does. That's his"? (Good old Oscar Wilde: so epigrammatic always - and so RIGHT!)

Call the Darkness Light

The  solstice is past, but the days are still so short  many of us are traveling to and from work in darkness even now. I think this was the first year I really “got” why so many people deck their houses with  lights – sometimes even before they’ve polished off the Thanksgiving turkey.They don’t do it because they feel 'hurried into' the season by retailers. They do it to lift their spirits.So this year I tried doing it too, and wonder of wonders, stringing little lights did indeed help me beat back that shudder of dread I feel when the darkness comes to cloak us.In the classic Isaac Asimov/Robert Silverberg story Nightfall, the action takes place on a planet whose sky holds as many as six suns at a time, where, at 2,000 year intervals, a mysterious event occurs that causes the land to be enveloped in darkness for the first time in anyone’s memory.And yes, one ‘fringe’ religious sect teaches that it’s God’s judgment that brings the dark, along with the subsequent appearance of these fearsome things called ‘stars’ that rain down fire to destroy all of civilization. Few believe this though, because each time, the conflagration destroys all records.  The reader learns only as the story unfolds that it’s the people who are responsible, because as creatures who have never in their lives experienced darkness, they panic and set the awful fires themselves, for the light.All during December I wondered why this tale kept coming into my mind. Only in the last few days did I see it is because that same kind of wild and unreasoning fear lives also in me.Over the past six months, we have had many ‘systems’ problems in our house, as first the washing machine died, then the dryer, then the fridge. The shower pan in the upstairs bathroom also failed so that for days on end water dripped down into the room below it.We fixed all these problems, but not before I had expended a world of energy whining about them.Sometime in there, social media allowed a faraway friend to take note of all this and sit down and send me this message:

Terry, I am sorry to hear about your refrigerator and the discomfort you have been having. I know just how bad it has been for you. We have seen similar things happen here. Our bathtub legs fell off while one of the girls was in the tub, the bathroom sink got clogged up and one of the refrigerator doors broke so for over a month our food was constantly spoiling.“Thank God things are back to normal now – somewhat, LOL! The roof is still leaking but God is on that too. Remember, you are in my prayers.”

With what shame did my cheeks burn as I read this note from a woman who, virtually alone, raised up her own three children, sent them off to college, and then took in three teenaged girls to whom she has given love and care in full measure.  The one who was in the tub when its legs broke off was pregnant when she came into her family and is expecting her baby this month, a fact that only gladdens my friend’s heart, because - as she will tell you - God is on that too.And there it all is in a nutshell: One camp of people sees the approaching dark and panics, while the other just calls it sweet night and waits in trust for the light’s return. I think in this new year I'm going to try moving from that sad first camp into the second.  

On Death and Acceptance

Last month I wrote a column about the way we all used to tan so madly, all heedless of the consequences.  It was a humorous piece, or so I thought – until, this email about skin cancer arrived from a reader:“Parents and middle-aged adults can quip about how fun it was to tan, or do all the stupid things we did as kids and then ask coyly how we made it this far. The answer is that those who didn't make it aren't here to write an article.”Her words led me through many long corridors of regret and ended by bringing me to this memory: of an essay someone wrote for a class I once taught in which he described the final days of his robust 40-something son, who died of this disease, leaving his own young family to live on without him. The slightly shortened piece appears here below:

Our son’s death was a sledge-blow, but from the gentle way he told us of his diagnosis until those final days he lived his time with grace.He had no illusions about his illness. He recognized that this sudden ambush attack by a cancer of unknown origin had made his body a battleground.Doctors hoped he would have a few weeks of relative ease, and though his body lost the battle in a matter of days, his spirit remained undaunted. “It’s a good day to die,” he told us on one of those days. “‘I have just seen my beautiful place and I want to go there.’We knew he would, because anything he ever wanted he worked for, and he was working for this.There were important papers to be gotten together which would require his signature. If we worked all night, we saw that we just might have them ready. We asked him if he could hold on and he said, “I will wait.”On the road home that night, we received a call from his sister, herself an RN who had been in constant attendance. She said we should come back. Then our son insisted she hand him the phone  and his voice came clear through the night:“Mom. Dad. Don’t rush back. Don’t do any more work. We’ve said our good-byes. Remember when the children came in? Have you ever seen such a day?  I love them! And I know you love me. Good-bye!”We cried.Then his sister had the phone again.  We talked it over there in the dark and decided maybe it wasn’t yet ‘a good day to die.’ So we kept on, collected what we needed, and gave it to the lawyer who worked all night. The next morning we presented the papers to Scott. Propped up with pillows, he signed them with a barely legible signature.He and his mother talked for the last time. Then he smiled at her and said, ‘Night ‘night, Mom,’ reminding her that, as in childhood, he felt loved and unafraid as he went to sleep.When it was my turn, I told him I only wished I could have been as good a father as he was. He asked me to kiss him. As I bent down to his bed, he squeezed my hand, smiled, and said, ‘On the mouth, Dad.’Then something wonderful happened: As we held each other, a great clear aura of love filled the room. There seemed to be no furniture, nothing physical at all, and I saw that all the love he would have shown had he lived was now here, to be felt and used by us all. That love has already bound our family closer together, given us more understanding and more consideration. As John Lennon wrote, ‘All you need is love.’  Love is here for us all. Believe it , feel it, use it and add to it from your own stores.”

My thanks go here both to the wise reader who led me back to this story and to the brave grieving father who first set it down.

Above All Trust in the Slow Work of God

This poem has been much in my mind lately. My life is changing... Or no, it's that I am changing inside my life, so  much so that I wonder how the waters up on the surface can appear so placid. Much that seemed crucial now seems the opposite and vice versa.

Maybe change like this is happening in all of us all the time. I just know I haven't felt so much internal tumult since those three times that a new life was slowly stitching itself together inside my body.

Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.We are quite naturally impatient in everythingto reach the end without delay.We should like to skip the intermediate stages.We are impatient of being on the way to somethingunknown, something new.And yet it is the law of all progressthat it is made by passing throughsome stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,let them shape themselves, without undue haste.Don’t try to force them on,as though you could be today what time(that is to say, grace and circumstancesacting on your own good will)will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spiritgradually forming within you will be.Give Our Lord the benefit of believingthat his hand is leading you,and accept the anxiety of feeling yourselfin suspense and incomplete.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

I'm Not the Pope

When I joined the Fewer Than 12 Items line at the supermarket recently, the woman directly ahead of me turned and made the  ‘After You’ sign with her hands. “Go ahead,” she said. “You have only one item and I have 12.”“Nah, it’s fine,” I said smilingly back, and we both turned to watch as the sales associate rang up the purchases of the man in front of her, a process that took a while, what with the weighing of his produce and the waiting while he dug out his reusable bags.Finally he was gone and this nice woman was next - but instead of unloading her items on the belt she turned to me once again. “Go!” she said again, standing back as if to let me pass in front of her. “You need to go, I can tell. I have an instinct.”“No, really,” I said. “I mean, my day is no busier than yours.  It’s not like I’m the Pope.”“The Pope! I wouldn’t give my place to the Pope!” she laughed.“You don’t like the Pope?” I asked, worried that I had wandered into a dicey realm.“It isn’t that. It’s more that… well, you know. Popes, Presidents: they get all kinds of breaks.”This was true, as I knew from my junior high boyfriend, who has worked protecting both Popes and Presidents. They don’t even carry any money.She went on. “So see I like to do what I can for …”“For the little guy? Regular schlubs like us?”“Exactly,” she said.  “Now go ahead of me.”So… I went ahead of her.And she didn’t even seem to mind that I turned out to be carrying over one shoulder my own silky reusable bag, which I use to put my items in as I shop, to save the trouble of using one of the store’s wire baskets. Thus, like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, I drew forth a packaged salad, a bottle of water, and a pint-sized container from the aisle of bins where you can scoop out your own nuts, grains and seeds.“What’s this?” asked the cashier holding up the small container.“Oh I’m sorry!” I said. “It’s Red Wheat Bran. That’s what the bin it came from said.” He stopped and drew out a booklet and began laboriously hunting through columns of small print for it for the Wheat Bran code number. “I guess I was rushing so much I forgot to label it. I’m scheduled to meet someone in the eating area at the front of the store,” I added lamely.“See? I was right!” said the woman, now behind me. “I told you I have an instinct! You did need to go first!”I thought about this exchange for the whole rest of that day, and what we mean when we use the word ‘need.’I guess maybe I did sort of ‘ need’ to get through the line fast and meet my party. But what I needed even more was to meet someone like this, people who keep their her fine antennae tuned outward, toward others, rather than inward, toward themselves, ever aware of what they might do to help. Those people are our real spiritual leaders in my book.

Now and at The Hour...

my mother, with her firstborn Nan inside her

Do most people believe in ghosts? I think they do, if by ‘ghost’ we mean that sudden sensed presence of one now departed. In fact, show me the person who claims never to have had this experience; never to have ‘heard from’ such a one.I know I did, once. Only once, but I ‘heard’ all right. It happened about three months after I lost my mother, who died very suddenly, right before my eyes.She was 80 and I was 38 and still a child myself in some ways. All I knew was that living my life without her seemed impossible; she was still that much of a parent to me.She had a pragmatic kind of sense that she expressed with a wonderful bluntness.Take the time I called to tell her we’d be welcoming a 19-year-old Austrian girl into our home to help care for our baby while the older children were in school, she laughed right out loud.“Great! Now you’ll have FOUR kids!” she said, and come to think of it she was right about that. I felt such tenderness for this sweet young woman, so far from her home in the Alps, that my ‘office hours’ as a listening mom never ended. A full 90 minutes after I was supposed to be at church for choir practice, say, I’d still be sitting on the front hall stairs with one of them, whether the seven-year-old, or the nine-year-old, or the 19-year-old, listening, listening, car keys dangling in one hand – ‘til it got so late I knew the only lights on at church would be the outdoor ones illuminating the steeple.She was pretty frail by then and she could hardly see, but she weighed in on things just the same.“An aging actor in the White House?” was one tart remark from the spring of 1980.Another: “Cookies IN the ice cream? Isn’t that going a bit far?”Every week I would drive the 20 miles to my childhood home to see her and if I was ever delayed because of a deadline she'd be equally frank.“Just write anything!” she would cheerily say on those occasions, even knowing that the wonky, stay-up-all-night-doing-homework daughter she had raised could never do a thing like that.She loved to laugh. here she is the day she came home from the hospital with a broken hip that would keep her out of work for a month. Still smiling, as you can see.

Twenty years after, with Nan beside her

Eventually, she moved to a wonderful assisted living facility in my town - and brought her renegade ways with her: Once during a fire drill there, with sirens blasting, she buttonholed her best pal Alice, who was obediently caning her way toward the elevator. “Never mind that nonsense!” Mom told her with a wink. “Come, we’ll hide in my room here, and have some sherry!”Ah, she was something. And what a hole her passing left in my life. In the weeks after it, I listened for her on every frequency I could think of. Where WAS she?I heard nothing for months. And then I had this dream:In it, she and I were descending a wide flight of stairs; kind of sprinting down them, in fact, with that galloping rhythm you develop when you do that.I suddenly realized what was happening. “Mom you’re RUNNING!” I said.“I know, isn’t it great? I’m not old anymore!” she said back.And that was the dream. It lasted maybe two seconds.Still, it comforted me.And in these weeks with so much stirring and returning to life, the thoughts of powers beyond our ken? Well, those thoughts comfort me still.

and twenty years after that, as Nan looks upon her face one final time

Not What I Expected

I thought Sunday was all about St. Patrick's Day so when I got to church and saw a fiddle on the cushioned pew seat up front I thought,  "Wow, we're going to have reels! Maybe even some step-dancing!"But I was wrong in several ways that day.First, in my attempt to wear green and still be warm on a mighty frosty morning, I wore a green wool scarf along with my fake-emerald pendant. I felt so good about the green AND the fact that I would actually be getting to church on time that I asked David to take my picture, which he very nicely did. The only problem was, I had put on one green earring and one purple one, which I didn't realize 'til I looked closely at the photo.But that wasn't my only wrong assumption, as I say. I was wrong as well about the fiddle music. The violin that lay on that first pew seat at the front of the church was there because this was to be a Healing service, something that I had forgotten had been scheduled for this third Sunday in March.I hadn’t expected when I arrived that I would soon see people filing quietly toward three healing stations in the sanctuary while a woman played that violin, accompanied by the organist/fill-in choir director who sat at the piano beside her. I had been to a healing service 20 years before at the height of the AIDS crisis and remembered the way people had come from all over Metropolitan area to be at it, some of them very visibly sick with the scourge that AIDS was in the early 90s.I hadn’t expected to feel so moved as I watched the folks seeking healing sit in the designated chair as two people on either side and the person directly in front leaned in to hear what each had to say. Some spoke of what they needed healing for and some just bowed their heads to indicate they sought general prayers and the blessing that would follow.In both cases, for me in the fifth pew, the sound of their whispers was as the sound of water over stones in a springtime brook.So there were several surprises for me on that day. Sure I'm always sorry to miss a chance to hear an Irish reel but the sweet sobbing of the violin more than made up for any sense of loss on that score.Here now is Greg Scott playing Jay Ungar's Ashokan Farewell, a tune we associate with the dim past because Ken Burns used as it the theme song for his documentary The Civil War. In fact it was written just 30 years ago. Listen to it now and think how for all the old beauty Creation shows us there is also much new beauty. Then think how, as my church teaches, revelation abounds, and God surely IS still speaking in this world.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFXbK9aZzXk]

Easy to Make Fun

Sure, it's easy to make fun of Carl Sagan, who I mentioned here yesterday. I bet even a six-year-old in Madagascar could do a take-off of the way he said "Billions!" in his effort to make us look up now and then from our antlike preoccupations.But look at this video below, which somebody made, setting and compressing his utterances into a kind of song. There's even brief footage of Stephen Hawking in it. How many have viewed it? You'll see when you pass the ad and click through: over 8 million of us, one of whom has written in the comments section that watching this video is what turned him/her away from a degree in Computer Science and toward a degree in Astrophysics .In case this doesn't appear for you, Click here to see the original video and then here to see the "Symphony" this person created. "Who knew Carl could beat-box?" might be your first thought; but your'e made of stone if you don't feel a catch in your throat when he speaks of not a sunrise but a galaxyrise.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc]

Death in December (Lighting Their Way)

On this one-week anniversary of the killings in Newtown comes this  last meditation, which appeared all  around the country as my column for the week. Peace of mind and rest to us all on this day of Solstice. From here on, more and more light, we pray...The weather has been warm for December, though the lilacs are huddled down in my yard as if bracing themselves for what New England has taught them to expect of winter.At this time of year, all growing things bow earthward, their heads tucked under their wings, so to speak, in preparation for the assault of killing cold.Yet still the assault has held off. The other day the air felt so moist and forgiving the branches of the forsythia began swelling into life.It reminded me of a winter day like this when our friends welcomed a baby into the world.The delivery had been normal, and the child was a beauty. All seemed well – until his color changed a few hours after the birth.He was X-rayed and CAT-scanned, hurriedly placed beneath the microscope of modern medicine. It turned out his heart had not developed properly—not in the early months when Nature means for a heart to grow whole—and not later either.He could not live, our friends were told. He might not last the night. His small pump of a heart could not sustain the effort necessary to keep him alive, the doctors said.But this is not just a story of loss.It is a story of love, and what love can do.The baby lived four days. His mother kept him in her room at the hospital. Grandparents arrived from out of state, and his two-year-old brother was brought in to meet him.They rocked and talked to their child. They greeted him like any family would greet it new­est member.  They said,  “Here you are, finally!” They said, “It’s us: the ones you have been given to!”They held him and said their hellos. They held him and said their good-byes.They took the short time given them to love this child, and  put it to good use.Without ac­knowledging the darkness ahead, they sunned him in the light of their love and it was easy for them to do so.Why?Because he was here today. Because that’s the most any of us can be sure of: that we’re here now, for a while, to carve out a bright place in the surrounding darkness. To connect with one another, just as these grieving families in Newtown are doing now.Like that doomed newborn, their children surely had felt love in their time here. And I don’t doubt that in the place where they now reside, they hold in their immortal souls the memory of how rich a thing it is to dwell upon this earth.It is a memory given them by their families and their community,  families and a community dissolved now in grief.To bury a child is a crime against nature, they say, a cruel twisting of the natural order.It can only feel strange and unnatural, like warmth of days on winter’s threshold.But winter is winter and death is death. Children do die, and the earth dies too and the grass turns to brown. The book of our lives is shot through with sad chap­ters such as these.Yet death is not the story’s title. And death is not the chapter’s close.It’s what is done in the face of death that makes the tale worth reading. It’s forsythia buds swelling in December. Or people like the parents we grieve with this week, lighting their children’s way, with their candles and their prayers.

Ladders

Some years ago, when riding home in the family car from her grandmother's house, my little girl sat up front, making the most of time alone with me her Mom, as that noisy baby slept in the back. She looked at the sky.  “If I could make a big enough ladder,” she said pensively, “I could climb there.”Time keeps slipping for me this week. I think of the cold night earlier this month when I found myself in a florist's greenhouse. It was near suppertime, but the shoppers there seemed reluctant to depart this damp Eden with its glass walls and ceilings all misted over with moisture.Then time slips again to a long-ago night: Our then six-year-old had gone to bed. Downstairs, his father was playing his weekly bridge game with his pals. Elsewhere in the house, our other kids attended to the night's homework. Then here came suddenly a sound of weeping, faint at first, but building in despair as it built in duration.Our six-year-old appeared suddenly at my bedroom door. It was he who wept so. What was it?, I asked rushing toward him. A bad dream? He shook his head no. A pain? No again.He sat on the edge of our bed and, after a long time, did his best to convey it: "I was thinking about death," he finally whispered. "How when you die  you just have to lie there. Forever.""Ah but most people don't believe that. None of us has been there of course, but most people picture Heaven.""I don't want to go to Heaven!” he burst out. What would I do there? What do people do when they’re  there?"I remembered an image that had comforted me once. "Well, they say it's like a big party and everyone you ever loved is right there in the room with you -  and your old pets, and the toys you lost and thought you'd never see again...""But even a party can go on too long." He shook his head sadly. "And what if there is no Heaven and you just.....end?""I don't think it's like that," I said, hugging him now and swallowing back my own tears. "Why don't you stretch out here a while?"And so he did, as I busied myself nearby. Thirty minutes later, he was still curled in a tense ball.  I went over and lay down beside him; buried my face in his little-boy neck. "Listen!" I said at last. "Can you hear all those sounds? Daddy downstairs with his pals? Two kinds of music? Your brothers and sisters all talking and moving around?"He nodded his head without opening his eyes." Always you will have that: other people all around you. No one is alone, you know.""I know," he whispered, and gave a final shuddering sigh.He had looked over the edge into that terror. Most people look there exactly once, then get to work building a structure against it, whether you call it belief in the hereafter or faith in one’s fellow men or That Which Does Not Die.I can’t say if  that youngest child of mine began building his then and there. I can tell you that as far as I know he never wept like that again.In that wintry greenhouse, I watched the clerk wrapping a plant against the cold with all the care of one easing a baby into a snowsuit. So. I told myself, there is this care, then.There are the long bars of sunlight, winter or summer.There are the voices of others as you slip into sleep.And then there’s that ladder, which, built of strong enough stuff and fastened with Belief, may let us climb it upward after all. 

As the Funerals Continue

Today, as the funerals continue, I think of the first time I heard the song Suo Gan, sung by a very young Christian Bale in Spielberg's heart-rending 1987 film Empire of the Sun.It’s an Old Welsh lullaby, always sung in Welsh and the translation of one verse goes like this:

To my lullaby surrender, Warm and tender is my breastMother's arms with love caressing Lay their blessing on your restNothing shall tonight alarm you, None shall harm you, have no fearLie contented, calmly slumber On your mother's breast...

I won't say more now but only offer for us all imperishable music,  the lullaby itself,  from the throats of these youth:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM9uyA0wVIA]

We Are Here. We Leave a Mark

In light of the horror that unfolded Friday in Newtown, it is easy to believe we make a scant mark for good in the world - that we are each just another account number at the bank, another face on the morning train. There's even a philoso­phy to suggest as much, as in the comment made by the Spanish sage. “Place your finger in a bucket of water,” he said. “Then pull it out and see what a hole you have made,” the melancholy thought being that the waters close over us and we are forgotten.I don’t buy it.I once visited the old walled city of York in England, where the earth had been draped and clamped and laid open like a surgical patient so citizens of today could look upon the painstaking process of archeology.At the end of the Disneylike underground ride through a re-creation of the old Viking village of Jorvik, you see a cross-section of the earth itself, sliced straight down as you would slice a fruitcake, and holding within it bits of pottery, and metal, and animal and human bone.This is what happens, I thought at the time: You live and you die and you're tamped down into a pudding of mud.Lucky for me, our group went just after to a Ves­pers service at the house of worship called the York Minster, built a full thousand years ago.We heard music written back then, woven in words penned at the time of King David, then held and sent forth pure and clear from the living throats of elders, and youths, and little boys not yet ten.Words live, then, and music lives, even as good deeds and careful instruction lives, to a far greater degree than most of us realize and long after our little lives have yielded to ultimate gravity and fluttered to the ground like the glorious crimson leaves.I picked up some photos last night from that shoe box I talked about yesterday.I had taken them the day my youngest started kindergarten.Here he is smiling shyly on the lawn, squinting a bit against the horizontal glory of early-morning sun.Behind him the lavish branches of that certain stand of maples wave brashly to the camera.Before him, invisible to me until now, visible to him some time ages hence perhaps, on the lettuce-green grass, the clear and unmistakable shadow of his mother.However hard that may be to believe at times, we do leave a mark on the world. We do.And now, a version of Pslam VIII sung in that great cathedral, very much like the one I heard when I visited there.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdKQh7pHlwc]

All That We Don't Understand

 What’s nice about the writing life is you're never really alone in it. Yes, you may start out alone carrying your armful of fuel down the road in the form of the images you use and the stories you tell, but then suddenly here comes this nice other person who offers to help you carry the kindling all the way to the hearth, as fuel for your ‘fire.’ 

What I’m trying to say is that that person is your reader, and your reader meets you halfway on any road, coming with his own fresh take on things. He or she sees what you're trying to say, sometimes more clearly than you see it yourself. I think this is why telling what happened to me, telling what ideas burbled up in my mind can act as such an antidote to loneliness, leading me forth out of the stuffy closed room of my mind.I wrote the other day about how my young grandchild seemed to have somehow lodged himself inside the Play Place structure at McDonald's and was sobbing inside it.I had no clue what to do and that was the story I thought I was telling here Tuesday.It wasn’t until I got to the end of my telling that I suddenly saw the whole event as a metaphor for parenthood: Our kids go where we can’t follow and so on. And ll of that was me carrying my fuel alone on the road. But the everything changed when this one reader name ‘met’ me on the road and added his own interpretation. In the comments section here he wrote, "Perhaps [your little grandson] was not so alone in that tube but rather quietly listening to another guide, in addition to you of course, who pointed the way back to you.”'Another guide'! Another Capital ‘g’ Guide! See? A wholly fresh take on the same event. My little grandson's  predicament had suggested just two ideas to me. (1) I fall short as a caregiver and 2) We can't go before the children we love, taking joy in their joy and quelling their fears. The time comes when they will go where we can never follow.But now here was a whole look at the event, that acknowledged  what else might well be happening in this world every day, in fact, realms and realms beyond the understanding of  us bossy grownups, who are so smug in our belief  that we are the ones who move the world. Another Guide indeed! Thanks, fellow traveler. Thanks for helping me see that this child will never be alone, truly.

Why We Stay Up Late

What do we stay up late for these days?We stay up to read about our friends on the Internet. Say what you will about Facebook, it brings you closer. There’s a woman in Colorado who once lived just five minutes from me here in New England. I knew her not at all then, except by repute as a writing tutor to the young. And I was jealous, knowing her this way. "What's wrong with ME that I'm not a writing tutor to the young?" is all I could think when I heard her name.Today she lives among those mountains. Somehow we found each other on Facebook and now almost I every day I feel her gentle spirit as she shares a thought or a photo. (And my, how she loves her dogs! If they added to the Seven Cardinal Virtues surely loving animals would be right up near the top.)So we stay up to check on one another.We stay up with sick children. Also with children having nightmares, hallucinations, irrational fears. We have them ourselves.We stay up late to watch YouTube videos like the one I recently posted of the grand swoop of that owl with his mighty thighs and his outward-reaching talons as he comes to snatch up his prey. A video like that thrills us, clear witness as it is that something is coming for us too, something fierce and strong.I stayed up so late a few nights ago I had a kind of waking dream. It was of my grandfather about whom I have never dreamed even once since his death 50 years ago.As a small child I felt so safe living in his house as we did. In my dream I didn't notice him until someone said "Hey did you see who’s here?" and there he was, working in the garden out behind the farmhouse where he passed his boyhood in the 1880s. I recognized the place because I have every picture he ever took.Also every journal he ever wrote in.I have his degrees, rescued from the attic and framed now, Also framed pictures of him both old and young. This picture below shows him inhis very first year as a lawyer, looking so proud to be sitting at a real desk with his own law library behind him and his assistant beside him, he who went barefoot most of the year and got to school only when they held school, the typical thing in those rural communities.It was so nice to see him again in this waking dream. He even called me "Blackberry Top", a name he gave me for the shiny black curls clustered tight together on my two-year-old head..At my mom’s 80th birthday party I read aloud a letter he had written her when she was a college sophomore, eating too much and flunking French and smoking her brains out with the dorm windows flung wide to the cold night air. He knew she was doing all that – other letters were filled with admonition - but this was a birthday letter and it was only loving.When I got done reading it aloud to all gathered there for her special day, she turned to her younger sister and said "Did you feel that Grace? He was HERE in the room!” Then, 20 minutes later, she closed her eyes and died.Some months later, after writing to a childhood friend about what had happened, he wrote me back: “In my faith tradition we’re taught that one who loved you in life comes for you at the end. Maybe that’s what happened with your mother: her dad came for her.”What a comforting thought! That someone comes for you, strong with beating wings, and lifts you up and carries you home.

Heard at the Coffee Shop

I was in line at the coffee shop on August 1st when a young woman appeared beside me who was evidently known to the store manager. “How’s it goin’?” asked her pal behind the counter.“Great! Hey, did you know that I’m fasting?”“Fasting, no.  Why on earth are you fasting?”“Ramadan began yesterday. "And my boyfriend, he’s a Muslim. So I just thought, whydon't I fast too and see what happens. Inside my mind, you know. Inside ME.”Well now! I thought.  Maybe this is how minds are opened, one person at a time, who admittedly is just sticking a toe in the great river of Islamic thought – of a new spiritual belief – but isn’t that the way we all begin swimming? By sticking a toe in?  I overheard this conversation on August 1^st and the next day  saw this picture with the women looking so lovely in their pale sherbet-colored garments.

The caption says they are  "Indonesian women, performing  the evening prayer called tarawih, the night before the holy fasting month of Ramadan begins.’" It was taken at the Istiqlal mosque in Jakarta.

Now, today, with the celebration of Eid al-Fitr, Muslims mark the end of the month-long fast of Ramadan and I was thinking: Our cities and towns all suspend school for Christian holy days, and many do the same for the Jewish High Holidays. Maybe one day we’ll do the same for Eid.The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp for both of the Eid holy days  ten whole years ago, under President George W. Bush, so can other kinds of official recognition be far behind?  That’s where the real strength of this country lies, remember. It lies in our ability to welcome new people, and embrace them and learn from their ways.It's a good reminder: whether August 31st is Eid or the anniversary of the day your father died, or the day you got sober or the day your firstborn landed in the world, every day is sacred to someone. 'Put thy sandals from off thy feet for the place where thou art  standing is holy ground.'   That's Yahweh to our pal Moses.Holy ground, this earth. Holy people, us, when we try to be. 

The Love That Brought Us Here

14 years ago my husband's mother had to be put in a nursing home due to the diminished mental capacities brought on by Alzheimer’s. There she suffered mightily until one Friday in November when she took a turn for the worse. We all hurried to her bedside. When a cart of food and beverages was wheeled in for us we got the message loud and clear: she was in her final hours.I called our church office and told the story to the woman who picked up the phone. I did this automatically, even though our mother was not a member of our church but only an occasional visitor. Chokingly I described what her breathing was like and the way, from time to time, her eyes would open and she would look at us so pleadingly. “I know it’s Skip’s day off but I was hoping someone could help us...” I started to say.“Oh for heaven’s sake!” the kind woman interrupted me. “Let me call him right now!”Skip, this senior pastor of ours, was at the lumber yard at the time, elbow-deep in a construction project. Still, less than 30 minute later he walked through the door in workshirt and jeans. He saw right away how frightened we all looked.He asked if there was anything we would like to say to this small suffering woman so dear to us all but somehow none of us could speak, paralyzed as we were by sorrow and dread.“Well why don't we take hands and circle her bed," he said quietly, and so we did that.Then he called her by her name and said something about how the love that had brought her here was the love to which she was now returning.  I can’t give you the exact words - I still have around those moments a strange sort of amnesia - but in some few hours more she did in fact return to the love that brought her here if that is indeed what we do at life’s end.So that's what this church of ours is like that later married our daughter and our brother to their two beloved partners, a full year before same-sex marriage became legal in our state. This church says God is still speaking and so we must not place a period where God has placed a comma. Maybe you'll take a minute to watch this photo montage and ponder for yourself all the hope contained in a humble punctuation mark.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJyKHXdTnz0]

Lift Me

When I was young and under the influence of the nuns, I was told to keep silence on this day, at least from noon until 3 when tradition says Jesus suffered that death-by-strangulation that crucifixion is. I couldn't do it then or for many years after, even though I knew how silence concentrates the mind.  I always thought the Jews had the better idea at the Seder, having the youngest ask that great starting-point of a question, “How is this night different from all other nights?”  which kind of translates to “Who are we and how did we get to this place?” This is a question I ask myself every morning on waking from the kind of deep sleep I always sleep, so all-forgetting I sometime wake and calmly think  'Soon some kind person will come and lift me from this crib!'  For Christians today is  Good Friday . I remember the Good Friday they played "We Are the World" on practically every radio station all over the country at exactly the same hour. I was driving through beautiful western Connecticut calling on newspapers to sell them my column. I had just had my last baby and knew he was my last felt..... I don't know, released into the rest of my life somehow. I spent much of yesterday driving too and just at sunset when I finally stopped the car and sat looking around, three deer crossed the field front of me and it was as if I had been waiting all day for them; as if seeing them proved that there really is this other reality just around the corner and out of our everyday sight, which is pretty much the idea communicated in most of the world's religions.    Here for you now accordingly ,  "We are the World," written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, as it was sung at the funeral  of poor Michael not quite two years ago now.  Note the ecumenical symbols above the singers’ heads.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-ToznKNe6U&feature=related]And to really walk down memory lane, treat yourself to the original version here below. And remember this week to keep holy the Sabbath, whatever form a Sabbath day has for you.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy1gp3F5NhY]

The Holy

I remember it myself, riding in the big black car that would take us to our grandfather’s casket one last time. I remember looking out the window and wondering how all those people could be having their ordinary days when such a blow had been dealt to us: the man in whose house we lived gone, his protection gone, the shelter of his income gone and nothing for us to do but find a new place to live, our mom and us two kids in our falling-down socks and our funny haircuts.As I drove from one funeral to the other and in between got myself to the hospital for that  X-ray I have long been postponing, I noticed all the little ways that life goes forward. And yes at the funeral of John the firefighter the knees of my old friend buckled when saw me and she collapsed sobbing in her chair. And yes at the wake of Gene whose baseball team were state champs back in ‘45 and who got to try out for the Red Sox, the eyes of his children and grandchildren filled and refilled with tears as they stood all those  greeting the many who called.But all day the rain was gentle and the air was warm and the yellow leaves shone bright on the wet black asphalt. And when an old man next to me in the X-Ray waiting room asked for help because the leg supports on his wheelchair were hurting his calves three strangers leaped from their seats to help him. And always there is the Sacred in the Everyday and the Everyday in the Sacred and the braiding of the two brings a kind of  comfort... Even a strong sort of joy as when you turn a corner on a busy street and there before you is this young and mortal woman with the gorgeous deathless music spilling like a fountain from her throat.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjaN9hI9ZRc]

The Innocents Laid to Rest

When the moon rose at dusk last night it looked burdened, like the head of poor mythical Atlas stooping under the weight of Earth. I had gone for a short walk, passing the church where our four murder victims will be remembered today. The street was already lined with signs to save space for the funeral cortege as I assume, or possibly the media. “EMERGENCY NO PARKING" the signs all said, though the emergency felt far behind us now. There was a quiet feeling at that hushed hour with the birds swooping low and a plane out of Logan ascending like a prayer.I could look in the windows of the church hall and see the Gifts and Memorials Committee at their meeting. At other hours in the week this hall plays host to other groups as well, among them the local chapter of Rotary International and those following the Steps and Traditions set down nearly 80 years ago by Bill W. and Dr. Bob. Additionally, according to the sign out front, the Cloister Concert Series will take place, tonight featuring contralto Marion Dry in an evening called “Saints and other Mortals” from 7:30 to 9:00, ice cream afterward.Just as I passed, the Reverend Thomas Brown himself emerged from his car carrying his robes for today, freshly ironed as they looked. He seemed as burdened as poor Atlas, perhaps from standing so long in these last days by the woman who was sister and daughter and aunt to the victims; yet he had such a beautiful light-filled countenance I wished I too could attend tomorrow and hear his words of comfort.I can't. This morning I rose at 4:30 and worked for two hours and sit now on my front porch awaiting the very early arrival of the little boys 3 and 6 who are my grandsons; and, several hours later - because teens need their sleep - the arrival of the big boys who will help me care for them while their mama keeps a vigil by a bedside.They say we'll see heavy rain before the sun goes down and a hard thing it is to leave any graveside in the rain. But who knows? Perhaps a cleansing rain will bring some relief for these mourners, or at least the end of the time of the first hot tears.In this life we are again and again delivered from sorrow without ever knowing by Whose hand. But if we could see God’s face even just once I think it would look the way Reverend Brown’s face looked last night: filled with somber care, but shining; shining.