Pass the Lexicon

I used to go to a storytelling group on Tuesday nights in Cambridge. The following is a story written and told for the forum.

A few years ago I had a chance to go to NYC with my girlfriends. We were all in our late thirties and early forties. And married. Very married, I might add. Sex and the City would not be an appropriate description for the weekend we spent in the Big Apple. We were definitely more like: Abstinence and the City.

But, even though we were practicing abstinence, AND WE WERE, the subject of sex entered our conversation many times. Who knew that this was what thirty/forty somethings talked about? On their weekend away? OUT LOUD?

I kept waiting for my mother to arrive and tell us to quiet down.

I squirmed in discomfort while my friends talked about all the really wild places and ways that they had done IT. In alley ways. On steps. Probably without flossing.

Not wanting to be left completely out of the action, I finally admitted that I had done IT --with the lights on--ONCE.

We also talked about SEDUCTION. Could we be seduced?

Which led us each to confess the ONE THING that made us vulnerable. The ONE THING that would make us lose all sense of reason and decorum. The ONE THING that could make us send traffic cones flying to the left and right like Diane Lane in Unfaithful.

We were in agreement on this ONE THING: IF we ever actually met a man who could make a plan. That included DETAILS. A man with a plan with details and FOLLOW THROUGH. Wellllll…we pretty much would be crumbs in the bottom of the marital toaster.

It is either a man with a plan---or chocolate-- for me. I KNOW that I can be seduced by all manner of chocolate. M & M’s with peanuts or without peanuts, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups…creamy, smooth, delicious…see even talking about chocolate makes me weak in the knees.

In fact, I know so deeply in my heart that I can be seduced by chocolate that I make it a point to go through the candy-free check-out at Shaws. I cover my eyes when I walk past the candy aisle and I know better than to leave myself alone in a room with anything even resembling a Cadbury egg.

Seriously though, one friend thought she could be seduced by a man who could dance. A man who could spin her around and trip the light fandango. A man who could match her steps to his. And, if this man could look like Denzel Washington, then she would toss all caution to the wind.

The other friend thought maybe she could be seduced by a certain tone in a man’s voice. I don’t know a lot about exact nature of this “tone,” but I think that it is safe to bet that Lenny and Squiggy will never seduce her. And neither will Michael Jackson.

That night I joked about the chocolate. And I might have joked a little about Sean Connery, (WHO wouldn’t be seduced by Sean Connery?)--but I know, whether I admitted it to my friends or not, that I am seduced daily by words.

Words. The grand and glorious mongrels of the English language. For years, I have collected articles, quotes and bits of poetry. I am voracious when it comes to words. I cram little snips of this and pieces of that into the corners of my mind. A clever phrase. A touching sonnet. Fragments of life.

Words like obstreperous, diaspora, divagation, gerrymander, naif and viff all twitterpate me faster than you can say, "Bob's your uncle." I am guilty of word adulation, adulteration and alliteration. Words. All shapes and sizes. All denominations and ethnic backgrounds. I am pretty much a word whore.

There. I have admitted it. I will be faithful... until you pass the lexicon.

Hello Operator

In addition to helping me solve the mystery of my maladies, Google has freed the phone lines that run from our house to the outside world.

You may ask, "How can this be?"

Once upon a time, if I had a question about anything such as "How long do you boil green beans?" or "Where is Malaysia?" or "What was the name of the actress who played opposite Robert Redford in Legal Eagles?" or "Who was the seventh president of the United States?, " I would call the operator. If the operator did not know, there were rows and rows of other operators seated around her (or him) who could be tapped for the answer. It never failed that someone held the knowledge.

It occurs to me that there might be a new form of operator/Google available to me in the resources of my collective readership. Can anyone tell me the correct attribution for the quote, "When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." (or some variation thereof) Both Nietzsche, the philosopher, and Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness have been given credit.

Even if you don't know the answer, please feel free to say "hello" when you pass through.

Pile it high, please

"Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit." ~~Aristotle

In some more scholarly incarnation of myself, I fancied the work of Aristotle. I have a notebook scribbled full of quotes and notes from a class I took many moons ago. I pulled some of it out to write here because:

1. I need to get sleepy.
2. It reminded me of some recent conversations about friendship and the limited capacity we have for taking on new "intimates" in our lives.

It was always interesting to me that more than anything else Aristotle considered human relationships vital to universal knowledge. He devoted much of his teaching to understanding friendship and the soul.

In Ethics he defined three kinds of friendship:

• Friendship for pleasure
• Friendship for utility
• Friendship for good

Friendship for pleasure occurs when two people are drawn together not really because of who they are but because they have a common interest in an activity that they can pursue together. Their mutual participation in that activity enhances their individual pleasure in life.

These kinds of friendships might be the most frequent and easiest for me to establish. The "crush," if you will. For me, crushes have never been gender limited and are seldom sexual. They last only as long as they can hold my interest. They may be intense, but they are never
deep or connected.

Friendships for utility focus on what use the two can derive from each other--"What is in it for me?" Each party supplies something to the other on some very basic level. Someone might know something you need to know. Someone might have access to something you need to have.

I think we all have these types of friendships to some degree and they last as long as each has the ability to continue to meet the need of the other person or until the driving need shifts and becomes obsolete.

Friendships for good, however, are the most stable and perfect of the three types of friendship. These friendships come into being when two people engage in common activities for the sake of developing that which is good in the other. Pleasure and utility can reside in a friendship for good--they just don't sit in the front seat or get to hold the road map.

By the nature of our human selves, we can and do outgrow friendship types one and two many times in the course of a lifetime, but the soul takes root and grows forever in the soil of friendship type three.

Aristotle said, "Friendship is one soul living in two bodies." I suppose it requires attention, time and intimacy to develop one soul. And, such connections, as they should be, are precious and rare.

Dear Snodsy

Anne Sexton was famous for her prolific correspondence. (see previous post Razor's Edge.) I was always drawn in particular to the letters she wrote to W.D. Snodgrass. She would begin with "Dear Snodsy..." The words that looped and marched down the page after the salutation were sometimes clever, sometimes pathetic, but always real.

It seems to me that everyone should have a "Dear Snodsy" in their lives. For me, Snodsy embodies the call to the universe that gets caught in the clouds.

I don't imagine when she was manically scribbling all those years ago that she ever realized that the festering stew of her troubled soul would one day be published far and wide. That entire classes would be dedicated to parsing out her metaphors, mapping her rise to literary greatness, and diagnosing the recipe of her demise. That her words would be plucked like feathers from a Christmas goose leaving only bruised and shivered skin for the world to see.

Blogging has taken most of the personal elements of communication and made them public. Today none of us will have to wait until we are dead to have our most intimate thoughts and insights shouted from the rooftops. From the halls of Montezuma, our demons dance over cyber waves of pain. Our ideas, our projects, our children, our faith, our pieces, are strung like laundry to flutter in the breeze.

"DEAR SNODSY," we type in bold black font, "come play in my midnight garden."

And, we wait, for his reply.

Though hell should bar the way

I once memorized Alfred Noyes' The Highwayman for a talent show. My favorite line was:

"Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight,
though hell should bar the way."

Something feels so claimed, fierce and devoted about someone saying that they will come for you though hell should bar the way. The whole "claiming" concept and being "chosen" twangs so deeply on the strings of my inner being that it was a multi-month topic when I saw my therapist several years ago.

Both growing up and in my adult life, the people important to me chose service to the church over what might have been best for me. A good part of me understands that this perception is skewed and not necessarily the truth, but the other parts of me feel abandoned and betrayed over and over again when I remember...

...the Bible study schedule that racked up the Michigan miles on the baby blue 1979 Chevrolet wagon. The knock on the door at dinner time. The holidays interrupted by another's breaking heart. The ministers who made parental decisions. The new year welcomed on our knees in prayer rather than watching the ball drop in Times Square.

The vacations that never happen. The cell phone that doesn't stop ringing. The weekends that end before they begin.

Life in a parsonage is like the Fishbowl California where you may checkout any time you like, but you can never leave.

We are, indeed, prisoners of our own device repeating the patterns modeled for us. I have put service to others over the needs of my own children. As the director of an organization that provides access to nutrition with a variety of different programs, it is ironic that it is easier for me to think about dinner for 70 than it is for me to consider a simple meal for the four of us. We eat in parts and pieces just like we live our lives.

Doing good is not always right.

It makes me sad to realize that I have created another child who will listen for the voice of the highwayman calling: I will come for you by midnight though hell should bar the way...

More than Kool-aid

I have been pondering many things this morning. Jim and I were talking last night about the parts of the Kingdom that we miss. There are many. The Sabbath, the Feasts, the tradition, the infinite extended family. We agreed that we both still feel loss even though we would never go back to the way things were.

Yes, I chafed under the rules. I never quite fit, but I belonged. My feet always had a place to stand. And I guess I do miss the sense of purpose. The connection to something more.

A few months ago someone left the television on in the other room. From where I was in the house, I could hear the voice of a faith healer calling through the screen.

"Repeat after me out loud. OUT LOUD," he commands.

"Lord, Jesus..."

And the crowd obeys.

"Come into my life right now."

And the crowd mumbles back and then everyone cheers.

What is it about spiritual authority that so attracts and repels? What missing pieces keeps us searching for something more? How do people get taken in?

Remember George Orwell's Animal Farm?

From the moment Napoleon, Snowball and Squealer stepped out from between the pages of Orwell's novella, Animal Farm, into my imagination, I was reminded of the Kingdom structure. Not unlike the elite class on Orwell's Animal Farm, certain Kingdom leaders manipulated information to exploit the others in the name of truth for their own purposes.

Orwell's porcine princes set out to form a utopian society. They constructed fair rules by which all would live. They posted the rules. And, then told others what the rules said. What they meant. How they should be lived. In the final chapter of the book, if you remember, all rules are broken save the last which has been modified to read: "All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Even principled people are corrupted by power.

The human condition requires the hope of something more. C.S. Lewis talks about the "eternal weight of glory." Lewis recognized it is that very longing that motivates us toward heaven or hell, to becoming a child of God or of the Devil. He also understands that we do not journey alone instead we intertwine with our fellow sojourners. No action of ours is neutral; each holds eternal consequences for us and for those whose lives we touch.

And people have been drawn by this through the ages. Purpose. Community. Understanding. Interconnectedness. More often this longing inspires someone take a yoga class, join a reading group, take a creative writing class, study enlightenment, or eat chocolate.

But the intrinsic longing for utopist ideals sometimes causes people sell their homes and move their families half way across the country to join religious movements. Young zealots, fresh from college, are seduced by charismatic men of God and fall into the rigid strictures of "community." And, manic depressive leaders build their vision on the backs of those who want to believe.

Sometimes they do drink the Kool-aid. And sometimes they die in fires when the government storms their compound. Sometimes they build spaceships and lie down to die in hopes of reaching The Kingdom Level Above Human.

Sometimes I think those may be the lucky ones. Lucky because they died believing instead of living to learn the truth.

Preparing to live

My friend Jan whose presence spanned my entire life has been gone for just a little more than a year.

I wasn't very old when my mother was struck with pleurisy. My parents lived and worked on the Goshen farm. Jan was one of the "withersoeverers," sent by headquarters to help take care of us kids and carry my mother's load of the chores until she could get back on her feet. Jan was barely nineteen and painfully perky. Her sense of humor and adventure kept us hustled and bustled and well-cared for during those months that my mother was too weak to leave her bed.

Years later during my first (and last) year of Bible school, Jan and her husband would let me stay with them when a stomach ulcer grew like a Sycamore tree up out of my guilt. She would make me peppermint tea and lend me books that were definitely not on the approved reading list. I learned to appreciate her spirit, and how even though she tried to bend and conform, she never really lost herself.

In the early 90's when Jim, Jayna and I moved to NH, we worked on staff with Jan and her husband. She had given birth to a daughter late in life. We had something in common through our girls. Laurie was two and Jayna was three when we began to know one another in a new way. We learned about each other over our children's squabbles, through the sticky days of lemonade stands and cookie baking, and in those moments of deep motherhood understanding that you share when you watch your children climb on the bus the first day of school. The bus is so big, and they are so little that you are sure the doors will close and they will disappear forever behind that hinged mouth. We prayed for our kids. Swapped recipes. And, we tried to be good wives and mothers.

We also shared an intense passion for yard sales. Because we didn't shop on the Sabbath, we would sometimes take the van to Lewiston, ME where yard sales always started on Friday. We would leave before the sun came up and arrive at the Ramanda Inn just outside town. We would gulp coffee or cocoa from our thermos and eat some sort of nourishment from a baggie. Then we would buy the paper. Jan spread a laminated map out on the hood of the van. Because she was most familiar with Lewiston, it was her job to circle all the addresses as I read them off. This process would take about 10 minutes. Then Jan would calculate the best route to hit the most yard sales in the least amount of time in the best neighborhoods first. This ritual was always part of the trip, and it yielded us both a great deal of pleasure and treasure. We would fill the van and sometimes even strap furniture to the roof as we headed back home at sunset.

It was Jan who taught me how to haggle. How to look not interested when you were most interested. It was a fine art, but one she had mastered. While my heart would pound at the mere thought of asking someone to lower the price on their mother's rocking chair, Jan would maneuver so smoothly that the people would end up thinking it was their own idea to take $10 off the original asking price.

The fall before she died, I visited Jan with my friend, Peter. I wanted Peter to know who she was. She loved him and was every bit the gracious lady sitting with us in a pile of leaves on her lawn. Her full denim skirt billowed like a tent around the flesh and bones that had been so dear to me through the years. She weighed 105 pounds at the time.

A few weeks later, I returned alone to see her. I spent two hours with her in her room helping sort photos of her life. When she got tired, I lay with my head in the crook of her arm. She absent-mindedly stroked my head and comforted me. If that was wrong, I am sorry, but I needed a chance to say g'bye to a woman who had meant so much to me through the years.

She asked me if I thought God intended sickness, and did I think that maybe if she just believed more, would she be healed. Grief and anger choked me too much to respond immediately.

When I did answer, I said: I don't know what you have been reading or who you have been listening to, but you need to stop. NOW. God does not always heal people, and it doesn't mean that you failed somewhere along the way.

We had been so taught that if bad things happen, it could be directly traced to sin in our lives. Like the guy in the Old Testament who hides something in his tent and everyone gets sick until he confesses. The legacy. Our legacy. Even at the end.

She said she was preparing to live and preparing to die. And, I thought that if I learned nothing else from my dear friend, that was a lesson I could practice every day.

Less than six months later on a Sabbath morning in March, I was traveling to the Maine Boatbuilders' Show in Portland. What prompted me to think of Jan in that moment, I will never know, but an image of God's breath warming Jan from the inside out came to me in such a real way that I felt only peace. It was then that my phone rang, and I heard the news that Jan had gone to heaven.

"Prepare to live while you prepare to die."

I don't think you can go wrong with that one. No regrets.

Razor's Edge

"At different stages in our lives, the signs of love may vary: dependence, attraction, contentment, worry, loyalty, grief, but at heart the source is always the same. Human beings have the rare capacity to connect with each other, against all odds."

This quote is from Michael Dorris, an author best known for "A Yellow Raft in Blue Water" and " The Broken Cord." Of course, you must pay no attention to the fact that he committed suicide.

It is a curious thing to me that good writers and poets are so often victims of mental illness and depression. They end up taking their own lives when their passion runs cold. It seems that sanity dances the razor's edge wherever one finds a burning source of brilliance.

I have been reading a biography of Anne Sexton. (I recently reread some of her poetry in Transformations and her life in letters which was a book of her correspondence published after her she took her own life.)

She had many writing relationships--male and female. Words and the exchange of words were her saving grace for years. She was self-taught for the most part, but won a Radcliffe scholarship for women re-entering the workplace/literary world after being mothers/housewives. Her favorite mode of operation was to apprentice herself to someone until she learned everything they knew. She loved the messy work of words and spent hours debating with friends and colleagues over the exact placement of a phrase. She went far before she finally crashed and burned.

She said it best in "Her Kind."

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

Soul of a Shoplifter

"There once was a girl from Nantucket..."

There are those who get paid to write poetry, and those who should get paid to NOT write poetry. I fall into the latter category. You can thank me in advance for not filling this space with the versification of my feckless soul.

I have always liked to say that I have the soul of a shoplifter. And, then someone asked me "WHY do you say that you have the soul of a shoplifter?"

I had to stop and think. It might be because it seems a little sassy. Or it might be that I enjoy the way that it sounds like it has been lifted from a corny movie script:

"Of all the shipyards in all the world, she hadda walk into mine. She was tougher than a leather grommet and laced with twice as much trouble. She stacked the deck faster than a twelve-fingered card shark and possessed the soul of a shoplifter. I knew it. God knew it. All the angels in heaven knew it. But, even then I wanted to believe she could be redeemed."

The serious answer, however, fits within the framework of Aristotle's friendship definitions. Relationships formed solely for pleasure or utility allow you to slip little pieces of a person into your pocket--like a shoplifter thieving his way through the department store of life. We take what we want to get what we need and leave the rest. I have always been good at those types of relationships. And, I think that is what I really mean when I say I have such a soul.