Advent Lessons and Carols

A friend invited me to her church, St. Paul’s Episcopal on East Avenue, for a late afternoon Sunday service of lessons and carols, and to go out for supper after. We grew to a small group of four, two of whom are members of the church.

Back in the day St. Paul’s was the wealthy Episcopal church in Rochester. The building itself is large, with marble and stained glass and ornate wood carving throughout, and I’m sure very expensive to maintain and heat. Now the community of worship there consists of people of more ordinary means, and they rarely fill the place. Part of the rector’s brief welcome was the announcement that there would be an offering, and he hoped we would be generous.

Advent lessons and carols are bible readings, which were done by church members, interspersed with musical pieces appropriate to the liturgical season. The church has a wonderful organ and choir, and the music was spectacular.

Having been baptized and raised Irish Catholic, I have a context for the words “liturgical season” – even though I haven’t practiced the faith since my early 20’s. I’m not sure my kids have such a context. When Jerry and I discussed what to do about religion after the kids were born, we agreed that neither of us wanted to prepare them in the traditions in which we had been formed: Roman Catholic and Conservative Judaism. Neither of us found our religious upbringing a salutary experience, and we didn’t want to teach what we ourselves had not taken to heart.

Episcopal worship is highly attuned to ritual. It matters that the choir enters two by two, with synchronous steps. When the worshipers stand, sit, or kneel matters – the nuns of my childhood with their famous clickers would be right at home here. The words of the Book of Common Prayer matter, are always the same, and become second nature to the regulars – no shout out to the Lord Jesus expected. Worshipers sing all the verses of every hymn, not just the first three. People still dress to come to church at St. Paul’s. The choir members wear robes. All candles are lit. The rector and two associate priests wear appropriate liturgical garb. In some ways the current Episcopal liturgy, even in a liberal church like St. Paul’s, is closer to the Catholic experience of my childhood than the current Catholic Mass I experience from time to time at funerals.

In the long wooden pews, instead of a common kneeling rail that is flipped down by someone – often with an unfortunate echoing thud – St. Paul’s has individual kneeling pads covered in needlepoint. The church must seat 1200-1500 people, so there are a lot of these blue needlepointed pads, hand-done in some former era by the ladies of the church. Each pad has a different pattern. Displayed rather than knelt upon, they would make a stunning collection of American needle craft.

To matters such as this did my attention wander during the readings. To get something spiritual out, you have to put something spiritual in. It’s been a long time since I’ve breathed that kind of air in the tight enclosure that is church.

Dreaming of Elvis

According to the latest issue of Vanity Fair, on January 8, 2010, Elvis Presley would have turned 75. That means in 1956, when I was 11 and in the 6th grade and listening every night on the radio to Cousin Brucie on WINS 1010 New York, Elvis was 21. I have spent my whole life thinking I was in love back then with an Impossibly Older Man.

I have no idea what time I went to bed, but my agreement with my mother was that I’d turn off the radio at 10pm and go to sleep. Cousin Brucie always played an Elvis recording as the last song, just a few minutes before ten. After that I’d reach over and click off the radio, leaving my glow-in-the-dark rosary beads as the only slim source of light in the room, and fall asleep dreaming of Elvis.

Life seemed simpler back when I loved Elvis, which was before my father died. My father went to work at nine, and came home at five. He never traveled for business, or had any other reason to be away overnight. We had one car; sometimes he drove to work, and sometimes my mother drove him so she could have the car for errands. Lacking a car on some days wasn’t a problem because we kids walked back and forth to school, to Len’s soda shop, and to pick up my father’s shirts at Wilbur the Hunchback Tailor’s storefront. My best friend Marion lived just down the street on the other side. Her father worked from before sunrise to mid-afternoon, as a bread baker in a large commercial shop in Newark. He came home every day covered from head to toe with fine white flour dust, and had to take a bath the first thing before he sat on any of the furniture. In later years he died of lung cancer, so apparently the flour dust covered him on the inside too. Marion and I usually played in my back yard, because after his bath and a sandwich her father had to sleep and couldn’t if we made noise.

I don’t remember if we had homework, but after school we always played out unless it was pouring rain. Sun was good. Cloudy and cold was okay. Snow was great. First we had to change from the dresses and real shoes we had to wear to school into play clothes. At that time I had four pairs of shoes, each with a distinct purpose. There were school shoes, leather with either ties or buckles. There were play shoes, which were often old school shoes if they still fit. There were white Keds worn only for recess at school. And there were dress shoes, which we mostly wore to church on Sunday as we didn’t go out to eat or have many other dress-up occasions.

Ours was a small world, bound by the places to which we could walk and the things we could think of to do. We had no computers, or cell phones. Movies were for Saturday afternoon. There was both a morning and evening paper, should we need to cut out an article for Current Events at school. I had a record player, which could handle one record at a time and had to be changed manually. The machine had an insert to play single-song 45’s, which were cheaper to buy than LP’s. On Sunday nights the whole family watched the Ed Sullivan Show, but we didn’t watch much TV otherwise. There weren’t very many stations, and not much choice of programming. Late afternoon TV was all about the soap operas, which I didn’t care for. I preferred westerns, with Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and Hopalong Cassidy who always dressed in  black and rode a white horse.

Within that small world we had a lot of freedom. After school wasn’t about lessons or organized sports or other adult distractions. After school was ours. As we got older that wasn’t as true for the Jewish kids, who had Hebrew School several afternoons a week. We had catechism only one day a week, on Wednesdays.

When I was 14 my father died, and during those years just after Elvis began to use drugs and get sloppy. He still had a great singing voice, but there were other vocalists and groups and he wasn’t the only one any more. Life got infinitely more complicated, and I began to have different dreams.

The Rest of Life

I had dinner last night with a new acquaintance, a business owner a couple of years younger than I. She’s in the process of selling her company, and wondering – worrying a little – about the rest of life. Will her world become intolerably smaller? Will she become invisible to people for whom she is now an important person?

These are the questions I had hoped to address in my second book project, now on hold because of the terribly slow publishing market. I still think about the questions a lot. I notice that many people facing this point in life have the same two concerns, often expressed in the very same language.

Work is a highly structured way of bringing us into contact with new people, and pushing us to cope with new challenges. At the same time, work requires intense focus, smart strategy, and great anticipation. People who are successful in business master the ability, a la Wayne Gretzky, of being where the puck is going to go, not where the puck is. We learn a lot about maneuvering well in a narrow and small slice of life. What seems like a big world is, in that sense, not.

The rest of life is highly unstructured. You actually have to think about what you want to do, what you find stimulating, what challenges you enjoy. You get to walk away – without giving a reason – from things you thought would be fun and interesting but turn out not to be. You get to try things, pick them up and put them down, without needing every move to add up to some future goal. You get to be intrigued by anything, even though there’s no apparent reason why you should be. What might seem like a narrow world – post retirement – is in fact infinite.

Visibility. There’s a lot of ego gratification in being part of a chain of movers and shakers, people who can make things happen with a simple phone call or two. To have that power you have to be seen in the right places, hobnobbing with the right people. Stardust rubs off. Alas, it turns out that The Right People can be incredibly narcissistic and boring – not always, but often enough so that it’s noticeable. Being in a position of institutional power and being interesting do not automatically go together. What happens in a post-work world is that you have to ask yourself two complicated questions:  what you really find interesting in a person? To whom do you want to be important? The answers can be surprising and unpredictable.

The rest of life is big, and I’m trying hard to take in as much as I can.

Fighting a Cold

Most people with colds have 7-10 days of misery, and then they begin to perk up. I have an odd immune deficiency – not the kind you die from – that presents me with a different challenge. I have a normal amount of resistance against respiratory infections. Once I get one, I have no resistance to its getting worse. I can go from a cold to bronchitis to pneumonia within the span of a few days. Antibiotics are my friend. The trick is figuring out when antibiotics are appropriate. Taken too early, they do nothing and increase my likelihood of suffering antibiotic-resistant infections. If I wait too long, I can get really sick and sound as if I’m on death’s door. At that point I can’t even read. I park myself on the couch, drink hot liquids with my meds and turn on CNN, which I’ve come to understand is not a 24 hour news channel, but an hour of news repackaged 24 times.

Yes, I have a good internist and she guides the timing of that decision. But, having lived with this condition all of my life, I also know pretty well what she will say. If it’s early in the respiratory infection and my lungs are clear, she’ll counsel watch and wait. Once the infection is in my lungs and my breathing is affected, we pull out all the stops – including an inhaler.

I’m on day 4 of a cold, and so far things have not gotten worse than a stuffy nose and sinuses. That’s a very good sign. I always visualize my infection-fighting capacities rising to the occasion and defeating the invaders. That doesn’t usually happen without reinforcements, but I live in hope.

New Book

I’m contemplating getting a Kindle or equivalent electronic device so that I can read new books while on extended travel without having to take up space and add weight to my suitcase. That said, I’m mindful of how much I enjoy the experience of going to a bookstore, picking up books, reading a few pages, and perhaps finding a gem.

On a blog entry a few days ago I said that I write in part because I like putting words together. I do that well enough to have had a book published, and when I’ve submitted reports and assessments and other written material I’ve always been told that my writing is cogent and persuasive. A very early editor, after reading a manuscript, told me that I’m a fine writer – distinct praise indeed from someone whose stable of authors is long and renowned.

Then there are people for whom putting words together rises to artistry. Flannery O’Connor, short story writer, created gorgeous sentences throughout her body of work. Beyond the content, which is always compelling, she quite simply writes at a level almost unimaginable. Sometimes, while reading, I’ll stop and re-read a sentence a few times, marvelling at the elegance. Louise Erdrich if often capable of of writing at that level. Now I have a new book, Say You’re One of Them by Nigerian author Uwem Akpan, in which I find stunning sentences. I recommend the book highly to those of you who like to read.

There is writing, and there is content. The first story, “An Ex-Mas Feast”, is about life in a shanty town at a level of poverty few of us in developed countries can imagine. This comes right after I was part of a group considering a very high end trip to Southern Africa, at a cost of roughly 20K per person. Another guest asked if, in addition to the planned excursions mostly centered on animal sightings and views of natural wonders such as Victoria Falls, we might visit and get to know some of the locals.

When I read Akpan’s stories, I think, “No, we can’t possibly ever know each other. Our lives are too vastly different.” The closest thing I have to crossing those socio-economic chasms are my trips to Panama, which are wonderful but complicated. And my Panamanian family has food, and shelter, and clean water and electricity and medical care and access to public transportation. They never have to sniff glue to quiet pangs of hunger that rarely, if ever, disappear.

I will continue to travel, and read in one form or another. I will continue to pick my way carefully across chasms. But I will never be able to reconcile the differences in our lives because of the simple event of where we happened to be born.

Compromises

This idyllic fireplace is not mine. I get to enjoy it in Maine, in the garden room, when I visit my brother and sister-in-law in late fall or winter. On the right side of the fire, by the tools, you’ll notice some long, thin sticks that can’t possibly be for burning. You’re right. They are for roasting marsh mellows. We also make S’mores, drippy and messy though they can be. This is a warm and welcoming house, serving up comfort food as well as Chef Paul’s more gourmet creations.

The fireplace in my living room in Rochester was originally wood-burning too. While Jerry was alive we dutifully had it cleaned on schedule. Every fall we ordered and stacked wood, and throughout the winter we built fires and sat in front of the warm crackling hearth, reading. Jerry usually cleaned out the ashes the next morning and set up the wood for the next fire. I’d like to say that was because he was more compulsive than I was and got to the messy task earlier. That’s true. But it’s also true that he and I had evolved a silent understanding in our marriage of what constituted Boy Jobs. Setting traps for the odd mouse or six that had wandered into the basement. Cleaning out the gutters in November, when the leaves were wet and heavy and the days had turned cold. Doing the early shoveling to remove snow from the front walk, so the morning paper could reach the steps.

The first winter after Jerry died I didn’t light a fire at all. There was no specific reason. I’m quite capable of lifting an armful of logs, building a fire, and of going out to the wood stack to replenish the supply. When pressed, I can do Boy Jobs such as cleaning out the ashes. I just chose not to.

The next fall I made the decision to have a gas fireplace installed. Now I have a fire almost every night, going in to read for a couple of hours after the evening news. When I’m done the fire is too; I just click the remote, and the flame dies. No more ashes. No more waiting to close the damper. On/off. I can even set the flame to go on and off automatically, so the room doesn’t get too warm.

A gas fire is a trade-off. You can’t roast marsh mellows over a gas fire, or burn the napkins you held under the S’mores so they wouldn’t drip on the rug. On the other hand the ashes are simulated, not real, and they never have to be swept up and taken out. There’s no buying, stacking, or carrying wood. The flame is real, but it’s a gas flame, similar to the broiler in your oven, not a wood flame. There is a difference.

On the whole I’m glad I made the conversion, and I use the fireplace a lot. Even a gas fire throws off a lot of heat, and reading in my toasty warm living room on a cold Rochester night has a very high joy-to-effort ratio. With that, I’m glad not everyone has made the compromise. There’s something about the crackling of a real wood fire that just can’t be simulated.

Blogging

I began writing my blog just shy of a year ago, typically entering one or more posts per day. Occasionally I miss a day, but not very often. My biggest single day got 523 hits; that was largely due to the unfortunate choice of the title “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” I was writing about Minga’s daughters, who grew up in rural Panama poor and without much free time to play. Now, as women in their late 40’s and early 50’s, they are my guests at the villa I rent near the small place where they were born. We drink margaritas and play Jacks and Old Maid, and giggle a lot. Alas, I suspect many readers who clicked on my blog that day were looking for porn – not the simple pleasure of a card game among adult sisters.

A more typical very good day yields between 75-100 hits, and I seem to have a core of about 20 readers who visit my blog on a regular basis. Total hits since I began are 7224.

My book How Much is Enough?, published in 2002, sold around 6200 copies that year at $29.95 or some discounted version thereof. The average unknown new author sells around 5000 copies the first year, which makes my book a slightly better success but not nearly the blockbuster Basic Books had hoped for. The book is still in print, and there continues to be a trickle of sales – thanks to Basic for that.

I do understand the difference between clicks on a blog and book purchases. In theory, I could have one reader who has clicked 7224 times – although I don’t think that’s an accurate picture of my modest following – and clicks are free.

All of that pushes me to think about why I write. Not to make money, surely – the only people who rake in big bucks are the mass market writers such as Grisham, Danielle Steele, and Suze Orman.  Nor do I write to become a public figure, with a following that leads to paid speaking engagements, CD’s or other after-book products, and appearances on CNN.  As an introvert, I found that part of the book publishing process the hardest. Appearing at a local Barnes & Noble or on early morning TV news in the markets where the book was being promoted was a grind. I apparently have a low need to be an oracle. Nor do I write to change the world. Barack Obama is trying to change the world, and look how hard and thankless that is.

I write mostly because I like putting words together, and because I think every day should have something worth writing about. If not, I feel as if I’m not living to the fullest. Thanks to those of you who come along for the ride.

Namesake

I’ve never had someone named for me, but Sara has. Here’s a picture of her with dear friend Ari, and Ari’s daughter Gwendolyn Sara.

 

Sara, Gwen, and Ari

I’m learning from my adult kids how to maintain friendships at a distance. Ari, her husband Josh, and Sara were friends at Tufts. Ari and Josh have stayed in the Boston area, and Sara has moved a lot since undergrad years. Sara and I drove down from Maine on Sunday so that we could have dinner with Ari, Josh, Gwen, and her big sister Grace.  Sara is “Auntie Sasa” to the kids, and I’m “Grammie Pammie.”

Time and distance seem not to matter. We had a very, very good time.

 

Grace, Gwen, and Sara

 

 

 

Taste Buds

Nicodemus proved his feline hunting prowess shortly after being let out by nailing a squirrel and eating the head. The body he left askew in the grass.

Blue has cataracts, and is largely deaf. He’s also slowed down considerably from his prime as a herding dog. He’d never be able to catch the squirrel himself, but being let out after Nicodemus, Blue happened upon the corpse and began to gnaw. We rushed to take the morsel away from him, as his stomach no longer tolerates such food.

This morning my sister-in-law baked warm, home-made popovers for breakfast. The inviting smell filled the house, and we could hardly wait to dig in.

It’s all in the taste buds.

No One Gets to Choose

Last night, just about the time turkey sandwiches were being made, friends arrived with their 22 year old daughter, who is severely autistic. Like the other young people bubbling about the house, L. is beautiful. She doesn’t speak, although she communicates after a fashion. When she wants to ingest something, like the contents of the salt shaker, she is lightning fast. When she spots something of interest she is not easily distracted, and she does not forget. That means everyone around her watches all the time.

She doesn’t sit, but remains moving, roaming all the time, picking things up and putting them down. Sometimes she chooses someone, often her mother, and puts her hands out, gently calling the other person to rock back and forth with her. I was surprised last night when she chose me. I have known her since she was a little girl, but don’t see her often. We rocked. She took one of my hands and held it over her head, then twirled around like a dancer. She liked it, and did it again, and again, and again. People with autism perseverate.

We parents are in our early 60’s, and we love hearing our offspring talk about their lives. Ian is negotiating for a great new job. His significant other, Debbie, teaches at Brown and is close to beginning her dissertation. Suzie has been offered an attending job in anesthesiology at the hospital where she has trained. Sara may be headed to Bangalore to manage the rollout of a new initiative.

L. lives in a group home with four other young adults affected with severe autism. Her mother is heavily involved, seeing that her daughter’s need are met. There is a lot of turnover among the staff. The young adults have behaviors that can rub off on each other, and that has to be managed with compassion. The future will be much like the present. Young people with autism typically live to grow old.

We in the older generation are mostly at the end of our careers. L’s mother has retired from the practice of obstetrics. L’s father is a serial entrepreneur, just in the process of selling his latest business. They still make decisions for their daughter, in a way the rest of us do not. They are her legal guardians. L. is an only child, so eventually someone else will have to take up that role.

We are all together in the warmth of the kitchen, with turkey and wine and the leftover desserts, talking and laughing among ourselves and watching out for L. as she wanders.

No one gets to choose.