For Frank: The First Time I Met Her

For Frank: The First Time I Met Her 

I was sitting in the volunteer office of the church arranging ballpoint pens under fluorescent lighting and registering in the hard-bound, red booklet the number of those who attended previous services. Holy Eucharist Rite I. Holy Eucharist Rite II. Holy Eucharist with Healing. I despise fluorescent lighting. It makes me feel like some rattled, disturbed scientist is holding every piece of my skin under the lens of a high-powered microscope.

Then she appeared in the doorway, diminutive, her old face wrinkled and her white hair shining like a baby dove. “I don’t believe we’ve met yet. I’m Minerva, and you are?”

Bored and uninspired by her, I told her my name. It’s Julie. She asked questions. I answered them.

“Well, Julie, it’s a delight to meet you. Jacques tells me you are here to help out and I’m so glad you are. I’ve lived a long, full life, thankfully, and I’m still here to talk about it to those who are blind or stupid enough to listen,” and she guffawed merrily, like someone else had told us a profoundly hilarious joke and I had failed to laugh.

Instead, I stared at her, suspecting and thinking, without noticing it, like almost anyone would, and as only the young and nonchalant can, that her next home might very soon be the cemetery.

She heard my thoughts immediately, and her frail left hand grabbed my wrist and squeezed it hard. Until that moment, I don’t think I’d felt it myself; that it was a part of my body.

“You know, Julie, when I was young, I was required to memorize poetry. It has served me well. I want you to hear some lines about death. I’d say that you learned William Cullen Bryant’s ‘Thanatopsis’ when you were in school majoring in English, yes?”

“Yes”, I said, but I couldn’t remember one single word of it. In fact, until she mentioned it, I’d forgotten the poem existed. Too many experiences since then? All of them washed in a sea of hormones and youth? I was horribly embarrassed.

“This is what I want you to hear, Julie, so listen closely.”

“So live that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan that moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”

She turned around, her back to me, and told me once more that it was a pleasure to meet me. Then loudly shutting the enormously arched, red door of the Parish Hall behind her, she left.

Today, when I saw her five-foot-two frame in the Sunday school hallway that smells like old books and the dirty hands that have held them, she stopped me and said, “I want to tell you something.”

This woman, whom I’ve heard for several weeks now quote George Bernard Shaw and other timeless writers, placed one hand on each of my shoulders, looked me straight in the eyes and said, “You are a child of God, Julie, and nothing will ever change that.”

This Is Not A Poem

Because of your limited vision, I cannot carry myself; what little I know of me as it is. Though I want to leave this house my body is pinned here, trying to stretch out of this chosen, helpless invisibility. It’s what I believe I deserve. I cannot breathe because of it. And you do not see or hear it: the sound of the world bleeding into this mess of us; the sight of the universe caving into this frail, inadequate light. If you did, I could finally speak the truth, and say goodbye. But as it is, I only crawl in the dark and mutter words that don’t matter. Soon, I will need to swallow this fear like a vitamin, pull my legs onto the floor of this space and leave it. And what will I say then, bleeding and powerful?

 

The Ravages of War and Faulty Religion

I am a child of the mid-1960’s born to parents who served in World War II during their youth  – my father as a Navy gun control-man aboard the U.S.S. Minneapolis and my mother as a Navy cadet nurse stationed in Oak Knoll Navy Hospital in Oakland, California.   

For them, the very mention of the word anxiety was unaffordable and unacceptable, not only because of war, but also because they hailed from impoverished, struggling families in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina - states still haunted by the Civil war and still steeped in a kind of twisted,  religious fundamentalism.

I wouldn’t describe either of my parents as “self-aware”, a term reserved for the industrialized, postmodern world into which I was born. They lived their lives out of a somewhat blind sense of tough, Puritanical, Christian duty and obligation in a universe that, for them, was highly unpredictable. All emotions were awkwardly and inconsistently expressed, swept under the rug completely, criticized by other family members, or contorted into a kind of dark, inner hunger, particularly in the case of my father.

In his late 50’s, my father, crippled by anxiety and depression, spent time as a patient in a variety of psychiatric hospitals; was briefly committed to a state mental hospital, and finally admitted into a V.A. nursing home all before I reached the age of 18.

This had a profound effect on me and my family. Because my parents had no tools to navigate their own emotions and identities, I really didn’t either, in spite of the outside influence of culture, school, etc., which actually caused greater anxiety for me because it didn’t match up with my life at home.

I had my first panic attack at the age of 17 in a dark movie theater. I became dizzy and claustrophobic and my heart and thoughts raced. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. To escape, I ran into the brightly lit women’s restroom and rested my head against the cool metal door of one of the stalls. Looking down, all I could see was my immediate environment, which, in this case, happened to be a very ugly, brown tile bathroom floor. I worried that it might cave beneath my feet. I told no one about the experience.

This severe attack subsided, only to be replaced by a chronic, lower-grade version. I wondered if I was losing my mind like my father.  I thought this meant I was a bad person who lacked trust in a loving and compassionate God. After all, my parents’ Christian worldview virtually demanded the suppression of all emotion. The result was my father’s mental illness and, now, my own.

Strong negative emotions such as hate and anger in a fundamentalist Christian world are understood not just to be sinful but to be, somehow, unforgivable. However, even emotions such as fear, sadness and self-pity can connote a lack of trust in the Divine. Combine that with the ravages of World War II my parents saw, and the result is a nasty concoction.

But herein lay the real rub. Even to surrender to innocuous emotions like happiness, peace and contentment meant that you were ignoring your Christian duty to “suffer as Jesus suffered”; to focus solely on the happiness of others to the exclusion of self. Life becomes a purely black-and-white world floating amidst the “absurdity” of the real.  

Still, I don’t blame Christianity for my personal anxiety or that of the world. I believe the genuine teachings of Jesus are gentle, forgiving, creative, and not easily understood by the average mind. After all, the parables of Jesus are jam-packed with paradox.

However, it is still easier for people, especially those who have experienced the trauma of war, to give into a dualistic, all-or-nothing interpretation of Christianity to the exclusion of genuine spirituality because to do so would mean to risk vulnerability. This is dangerous, anxiety-producing, and pervasive in American culture and in spite of progress such as the Civil Rights Movement, the sexual revolution, and the existence of all great American art.

I am now in my mid-40s and have lived with anxiety and depression since my youth. I have even been hospitalized. Though I still fall into dualistic thinking and struggle to find some solid sense of self, I’m gradually learning to let go of the notion that such a self exists.

In my living room hangs Pablo Picasso’s “La Guernica”. I’ve come to personally view it as redemption not only for the legacy of war that I, and the world, have inherited, but also the influence of faulty religion. It’s curved asymmetric images reveal the chaos of war. Painted in black and white, though, they also reveal what happens when we see the world without color, through a dualistic limited lens. 

 

  

Death Is An Advertisement

Since my last post on this blog, I have moved from Washington, D.C. to Tennessee and then to North Carolina. I've also gotten married and taken a new job. In short, my life has rotated 360 degrees.  No, that's not right.  Maybe more like 180 degrees.  I definitely haven't come full circle.  I wish I knew what I was doing, exactly, but I don't.  Nevertheless, I plan to live out loud.  After all, I don't think anyone really knows what their doing anyhow.

I am now employed by a media conglomerate that owns several newspapers and television stations in the Southeast.  My new title? "Obituary Specialist".  I process obituaries for six newspapers (Well, only three right now, but the plan is to take on three more in the coming weeks).  This means copying text forwarded by e-mail from funeral homes into a program designed to process classified advertising.  Today, I was told I no longer am required to implement AP Style, or, really, edit the obituaries much whatsoever.  They are now considered paid ads and nothing more, and newspapers will now print only what funeral homes provide.  If you've ever seen an obituary written by a funeral home, what I just said may disturb you.  Funeral home directors aren't exactly prolific writers.  Most of them seem on the verge of death themselves.  Anyhow, this news, to me, doesn't bode well for the individual grieving process, or how we as a society deal with death in general.  If death was already considered an after-thought where news is concerned, now, it's an after-thought that is also solely a method by which funeral homes advertise their business and make money.   This is not uplifting news. 

Why I Admire Amelia Earhart

 It's not the flying, though we wouldn't have ever known her if she had never flown.  And it's certainly not the fact that the media/government needed to promote her as a ray of hope during the Great Depression.   What struck me, and still does, about the story of Amelia Earhart was her determination to hold on to some sense of self through the journey.  She knew her love of flying was her own.  Even though her husband, and the government, and the world at large clung to her as a beacon of light in darkness, as some extension of their own desire to soar; she had the strength to focus on the thin line that separated her own fragile veins from theirs, and held on to the mystery of her own evolving identity. This is what separates heroes from the famous.

The Train and the River

On the train yesterday a young girl, maybe 12, stood at the front and held tight to the silver pole with her left hand.  On her right arm she wore a cast colored with red and blue magic marker to look like the American flag.  She focused on keeping her balance.  A few feet away from her, everyone else in the car was seated.  Watching her.  Reading.  Sleeping.  Staring out the window.

Her two younger brothers sitting in the front row seats were dressed alike in plaid shorts and striped shirts. Off to the zoo.  The younger one flirted with me while sitting on his father's lap. Looked at me seductively. Dismissed their parental comments. He must've been 3 or so. Funny.

There is something about the train that is like the river. It delivers. It is generated from a source. It can rescue but will not hesitate to annhilate. Its final destination may be indifferent to the individual. It brings out the best, and worst, in people.

Today, on the train, a young kid offered me his seat. He was wearing a Redskins jersey and khaki shorts with his hair cut short. "Normal". I'd been careening my head around to see if there was an open seat and had found none. Then he sprung off the gold vinyl bench and told me I could sit down because he felt like standing. He must've been 16 or 17. Eighteen at the most.

I sat down and immediately started crying. Chivalry is not dead, even in the young.

A couple of minutes later I listened while two teenage girls (one of them wearing a flowing blue dress with black palm trees on it) studied for a vocabulary quiz. They were discussing the difference between "empathy" and "apathy".

It was only recently I realized that copperhead snakes swim in the Nolichucky River in East Tennessee, my home.

Even though I grew up not far from its winding, omnipotent current, I didn't want to admit that, like me, copperheads need to cool off now and then.

After years of basking in the sun and swimming in the river, I finally saw a copperhead last summer. It was coiled on the sandy beach like a useless, rusty hose suddenly sprung to life; its small head greeting the air, kissing it. My friend Debby asked me to hold onto her dog, Sammy.  "It's a copperhead,"  she said.

I don't remember what happened next except that, now, I live in Washington, DC.