eleven
good friday world
There is the most ancient of sorrows in the world again, dead civilians and young soldiers. None of us knows quite what to make of things, or what to do. Since the war started last week, the days feel like midnight on the Serengeti, dangers everywhere, some you can see, but most hidden. The praying people I know pray for the lives of innocent people and young Americans to be spared, for peace and sanity to be restored on the global field. Everything feels crazy. But on small patches of earth all over, I can see just as much messy mercy and grace as ever: yesterday at Sam’s school, for instance, the kindergarteners and first-graders were outside when a dozen military planes flew overhead. The children knew we were at war, and were afraid, but when their teacher, Miss Peggy, told them that they were safe, that the planes were going to the Middle East, far away, the children relaxed. They watched more planes fly over. Then one smart child began to worry that there might be children in the Middle East, too, but that maybe these pilots didn’t know that. The children started to fret. Miss Peggy could not lie and say there were no children in the places where the planes were going. So she and the children got a giant sheet of paper, and the kids drew a huge peace dove on it, flying over children. They got some older kids to help, including Sam, and they all signed their names. The kids kept telling Miss Peggy that the pilots must not have known—otherwise they would never go to a country where they might accidentally bomb children.
What are you supposed to do, when what is happening can’t be, and the old rules no longer apply? I remember this feeling when my mother was in the last stages of Alzheimer’s, when my brothers and I needed so much more information to go on than we had—explanations, plans, a tour guide, and hope that it really wasn’t going to be that bad. But then it was that bad, and then some, and all we could do was talk, and stick together. We managed to laugh at ourselves and at her, and at the utter hopelessness of it all, and we sought wise counsel—medical, financial, spiritual. I prayed for her to die in her sleep, I prayed that I’d never have to take the cat out of her arms and put her in a home. A nurse summoned from the Alzheimer’s Association entered into the mess with us. We said, “We don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know if we should put her in a home, and if so, when. We don’t know what’s true anymore.” The nurse asked gently, “How could you know?”
That one sentence, more than any other, saw me through, every step of the way. We kept hobbling forward, able to do only the next right thing. I remembered a decal I had once seen, of a gorilla, with the caption: “The law of the American jungle: Remain calm, share your bananas.” That’s what we did—tried to make one another laugh and stay calm, and shared our bananas. And when the time came to know what to do, we did. I took the cat out of my mother’s arms; we put her in a home. It was a nightmare. It killed something in us, yet we came through.
A friend called today and said that since the war has begun, she finds herself inside a black hole half the time. “What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world’s poor,” she said, “and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?” Good Lord: What can you say in the face of such innocence?
“You didn’t stop taking those meds, did you?” I asked.
This made her laugh. “I just don’t feel like I can get through the day. Even though I know I will.”
Like her, I am depressed and furious. I often feel like someone from the Book of Lamentations. The best thing I’ve heard lately is the Christian writer Barbara Johnson’s saying that we’re Easter people, living in a Good Friday world.
I don’t have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion: I’d like to skip ahead to the resurrection. In fact, I’d like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday school, who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside the tomb: everlasting life, and a basket full of chocolates. Now you’re talking.
In Jesus’ real life, the resurrection came two days later, but in our real lives, it can be weeks, years, and you never know for sure that it will come. I don’t have the right personality for the human condition, either. But I believe in the resurrection, in Jesus’, and in ours. The trees, so stark and gray last month, suddenly went up as if in flame, but instead in blossoms and leaves—poof! Like someone opening an umbrella. It’s often hard to find similar dramatic evidence of rebirth and hope in our daily lives.
What is there to do in such difficult, violent times? I try to follow my own advice to take short assignments, and do shitty first drafts of my work, and most of all, to take things day by day. Today I am going to pray that our soldiers come home soon. I am going to pray for the children of American and Iraqi soldiers, for the innocent Iraqi people, for the POWs, for humanitarian aid, and for our leaders. I am going to pray for the children and youth in Oakland and East Palo Alto and Palestine and Israel. I am going to pray to forgive one person today—to give up a soupçon of hostility. Or maybe for the willingness to really forgive someone today—Bush, for instance, who got us into this mess—even though I do not expect it to go well. Forgiveness is not my strong suit.
You can always begin by lighting a candle. Since the United States went to war in Iraq, I’ve been thinking about A. J. Muste, who during the Vietnam War stood in front of the White House night after night with a candle. One rainy night, a reporter asked him, “Mr. Muste, do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?”
“Oh,” Muste replied, “I don’t do it to change the country, I do it so the country won’t change me.”
I am going to send checks to people and organizations I trust, including Oakland’s progressive representative Barbara Lee, who speaks for me. I will ask her to send the check on to someone who is nurturing children in the inner city, because this nation’s black and Hispanic kids will be the hardest hit by wartime deficit spending. I am going to buy myself a pair of beautiful socks, and my son some new felt-tip pens.
I am going to walk to the library, because my church is too far away to go to on foot. And it’s so beautiful out. The hills of my town are lush and green and dotted with wildflowers. The poppies have bloomed, and as summer approaches, five o’clock is no longer the end of the world. I am going to check out a collection of Goon Show scripts, and a volume of Mary Oliver poems. Libraries make me think kindly of my mother. I am not sure if this will lead me directly to the soupçon of forgiveness, but you never know. You take the action, and the insight follows. It was my mother who taught me how to wander through the racks of the Belvedere–Tiburon library, and wander through a book, letting it take me where it would. She and my father took me to the library every week when I was little. One of her best friends was the librarian. They both taught me that if you insist on having a destination when you come into a library, you’re shortchanging yourself. They read to live, the way they also went to the beach, or ate delicious food. Reading was like breathing fresh ocean air, or eating tomatoes from old man Grbac’s garden. My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you can find small miracles and truth, and you might find something that will make you laugh so hard that you will get shushed, in the friendliest way. I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space. So this afternoon, I’ll walk to the library.
I am going to pray for our president to believe that all people deserve to be fed, and to try to make that a reality. Bush believes in serving the poor, but only when they are the “deserving” poor. What on earth does that mean? If I were more spiritually evolved, I would mail him a friendly card, because if you want to change the way you feel about people, you have to change the way you treat them. I know that Bush is family,
and that I am supposed to love him, but I hate this—he is a dangerous member of the family, like a Klansman, or Osama bin Laden. Maybe I can’t exactly forgive him right now, in the sense of canceling my resentment and judgment. But maybe I can simply acknowledge what is true, spiritually—that he gets to come to the table and eat, too; that I would not let him starve. In heaven, I may have to sit next to him, and in heaven, I know, I will love him. On earth, however, when I consider that he is my brother, and I am to love him, I’m reminded of the old Woody Allen line that someday the lion shall lie down with the lamb, but the lamb is not going to get any sleep. So I will pray to stop hating him, and that he will not kill so many people, today.
I am going to try to pay attention to the spring, and look up at the hectic trees. Amid the smashing and crashing and terrible silences, the trees are in blossom, and it’s soft and warm and bright. I am going to close my eyes and listen. During the children’s sermon last Sunday, the pastor asked the kids to close their eyes for a moment—to give themselves a time-out—and then asked them what they had heard. They heard birds, and radios, dogs barking, cars, and one boy said, “I hear the water at the edge of things.” I am going to listen for the water at the edge of things today.
I keep remembering the inhabitants of those islands in the South Pacific where the United States air force set up a base of operations during World War II. The islanders loved the air force’s presence, all that loud, blinding illumination from above, a path of klieg lights descending on their land. They believed it was divine, because there was no other way to understand all that energy, and after the air force left, they created a fake runway with candles and torches and pyres, and awaited its return. I am going to pray for the opposite of loud crashing lights, however. I am going to notice the lights of the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars, the lights of our candles as we march, the lights with which spring teases us, the light that is already present. If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever. And that, today, will be the benediction.
twelve
diamond heart
If I could write only one more story in my whole life, it would be this:
Sam’s wrestling practice was canceled one recent afternoon, and he was driving me crazy with his pent-up energy. I was puttering around the house, which is my main spiritual practice, and he kept ambushing me with demands for food or attention, and demonstrations of wrestling menace—grabbing at me as if to put me in a hammer hold, or coming at me as if to pile-drive me into the kitchen floor like Hulk Hogan: “I’m not going to hurt you,” he reassured me, like a serial killer, flinging his leg around the backs of my knees so that I was afraid they would buckle. I’m fifty, but already I’m turning into an old dog, with poor vision, dysplasia, achy knees, a weak back, and flatulence, while he’s raw robust animal health. Something in him wants to flip me, Samoan-drop me into the carpet. I put up puny Rose Kennedy dukes and asked him if he wanted to go for a hike on the mountain. He said yes.
He’s two inches taller than I am. The other day he gave me a good-night hug and noticed that he was looking down into my eyes.
“Wow,” he said, stepping back. “When did this happen? You’re like a little gnome to me now.”
I am shrinking and he is shooting up, but we share that on the inside we both feel no different from children and we both get a lot of exercise. I am positive of only a few things in life, and one is that if you want to have a decent middle and old age, you have to get exercise almost every day. All the older people who are thriving have stayed physically active—there are exceptions, and everyone knows someone who smoked two packs a day and had a few social beers with breakfast every morning who lived to be eighty-five, but you have to assume that this won’t be you. You have to assume that without exercise, you’ll be the dead one, or if you’re lucky, the one in diapers, with a cannula up your nose.
We headed out to Deer Park, which is the northern face of Mount Tamalpais, about half a mile from our house. I hiked on the southern side of the mountain with my father my whole life until he died. As young children, my brothers and I straggled along behind him, but when I got older, he and I would stride up steep hills together, sometimes in silence, other times talking, about books, politics, culture, family. I’d mention books or poems that I knew would please him—Kazantzakis, “Prufrock”—and sometimes before a hike I would read criticism or introductions to works so I could keep up in conversation. I lived for his admiration. I didn’t want to instill this need to impress in Sam, and luckily, “impress” might be a bit strong to describe how Sam acts around me. He loves me, most of the time, and thinks I’m hilarious, but he doesn’t perform the way I did: he doesn’t study for our conversations, he doesn’t chat up my friends, he doesn’t read books so that we can discuss them. In fact, he reads very few books. He reads what he wants, namely magazines in areas I have no opinions or particular interest in: motherboards for his computer, bike frames. I’d always imagined Sam and me strolling along together, talking like my dad and I used to talk, about intellectual things. But I get something better. I get this:
“Darling, did you finish Romeo and Juliet?” I asked this at the trailhead, hoping to kick off a bookish discussion. “And did you like it?”
“Yep. I loved it.”
“Tell me what you loved.”
“Great writing. Clever story.” That was it.
We set out on the fire road that leads to a steep trail, with Lily racing ahead.
“Did you ever notice how much Lily looks like Benicio Del Toro?” Sam asked. It’s true.
He and Lily dropped behind me, and I walked along lost in my thoughts and the beauty of the woods. After a while, I reached the high trail that meanders through bay and laurel groves. You get various climates here on the mountain: first, in the English dappled shade, it’s cool and it smells like spring and mulch; a few minutes later, you come out from under the trees and you’re in Sicily, in bright blue heat.
Hearing a commotion, I turned to find Sam. He was bashing the ground with a branch, whacking at the low-hanging branches as if they were piñatas. Rather than give a short talk on honoring the ecosystem that he and his classmates have studied extensively, I continued walking. I rest in silence and music and long strides, while Sam rests in noise and motion.
After a moment he stopped his whacking, and the silence was broken only by birdsong, our footsteps, and invisible animals moving around in the fallen leaves and twigs. Then Sam started whistling. His grandfather taught him to whistle when he was four—his adopted grandfather, Rex, my father’s best friend of thirty years. My father died ten years before Sam was born, and I was still struggling with an achy emptiness, a feeling that my life had been diminished by half at his death. How would my books and Sam even matter if my father wasn’t around to be proud? Now he’s been dead for as long as I knew him alive, and sometimes when I’ve done something fabulous, I feel like a gymnast who has performed a flawless routine in an empty auditorium.
Sam looks a lot like my father did as a boy. Sam also looks like his own father. The first time Sam and I took a walk with Sam’s father, John led the way through the woods behind his father’s house. Sam walked shyly, ten feet or more behind his dad, and I took up the rear, feeling terror and grief that I was having to share my son. But it cheered me to hear him whistling away. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel shy and nervous; it was just that Rex had taught him how to whistle.
Rex was one of three men who helped raise Sam during his first five years, the others being my brother Stevo, who taught Sam how to wrassle and goof off, and his unofficial big brother, Brian, who was bathing and diapering him when he was two weeks old, and taking him on adventures ever since—canoeing, train rides, farmers’ markets. Rex’s specialties were camping and workshop. They spent hours in Rex’s workroom when Sam was young, hammering, nailing, talking, silent. Rex discovered that Sam connects with his own spirit most when he is working with his hands. He would study a nail, or a w
asher, as if he were holding a butterfly.
Sam dropped back from me on the trail, then caught up, an edgy psycho-scamper. He stabbed the air with his sword, so joyous, so masculine. He’s always picked up anything that can be used to smash other things, or to make bombs, or to destroy piles of leaves or sand or stones. He’s a closed current of energy, like those flashlights you squeeze to make the wires connect inside, and then they pour forth their light. He walked with me for a few minutes in silence. He’s transparent at these times, like a baby, without any of the barriers or labyrinths people set up later, out of fear.
Before Sam was born, people told me how utterly transparent with beauty babies could be. I have a photograph on the wall in my study of a baby in Sudan, breast-feeding, and she looks like chocolate, wrapped in a blue and lavender napkin, pressed into what little we can see of her mother’s brown-black breast. This is a universal baby, a safe baby. I had thought Sam would be more like this, more of the time. I saw the same flatness in his nose when he nursed, like the Sudanese baby trying to get as close as possible to what nourished her, and the same deliciousness of baby arms. But the clutch of her fingers should have tipped me off—that grasping and clutching might come with the territory, grasping and clutching at you, and then pushing you away—and the openness of the baby’s ear—babies are listening, can hear, and will one day use what they hear against you.
Smash, bash, whack. Sam swung at branches above him as if delivering forehand volleys. Sometimes I worry that he takes such joy in wrecking things. When he was two, being awful and destructive on every level of his pitiful, loathsome, poopy existence, I told my friend Pammy, calmly, “He’s a bad person. He’s already ruined.”