The Reluctant But Grateful Gerbil
Two weeks of this January have been so far below zero both in actual temperature and wind chill that I have had to walk at my local YWCA. My days begin with an early morning walk of about a mile and a half, rain or shine. I walk in the street rather than on the sidewalk because my excellent chiropractor told me thirty years ago to do that if I wanted to be walking when I was eighty. It seems asphalt is much more “forgiving” than is concrete. Anyway, on those mornings when I could have gotten frost bite in 10-15 minutes, I’ve driven the six minutes to my Y and walked the same amount of time/distance as I would have done outside. I know I’m supposed to feel grateful to have a warm facility so close to my house where I pay nothing to belong now that I qualify for the Silver Sneakers program. But I have to work to get to gratitude.
When I’m outside, there are people walking their dogs. I’ve seen one dog grow into a huge black and brown adult from the days when he was a little pup. Occasionally, I’m lucky enough to meet up with one of the two shiba inu dogs that lives in my neighborhood. For truth in advertising, I need to say that I am a total cat person who often doesn’t delight in seeing the next canine. But these Japanese tan alert little dogs who so resemble foxes are something I can’t resist. If I ever had a dog, it would be a shiba inu for sure. Finally, I see very old dogs some with grizzled muzzles and bodies that limp or look stiff even to the naked eye.
In addition to all these dogs with their two-footed parents, I pass clumps of little children waiting for the big yellow school bus, playing and making happy noise while their parents converse in their own clumps. Over the years, I’ve watched the demographics of such adult groups shift from mostly mothers to mostly fathers, and registered what a positive sign that is about co-parenting in the houses I pass every morning.
In early spring, I hear the first mating calls of cardinals or see the first cadre of robins scouting out the territory before telling their fellows it’s good in South Minneapolis again. Always there are squirrels and the occasional kitty let out early by its keepers. Once I was graced by seeing a small real fox who froze when s/he saw me. I froze while we just stood and eyed one another as I tried to send out gentle energy that seemed to succeed because the fox let me pass slowly in front of it without fleeing into the surrounding bushes and I thanked her/him for sensing just how much I exulted in our convergence. Spring also brings new signs of growth as I watch trees and shrubs and then bulbs of all sorts make initial appearances and slowly but surely come to resplendent life.
When extreme cold drives me to the Y track, I simply put one foot in front of the other in whatever direction I’m told to go that morning. There is nothing to break up my movement, no sensory connections or familiar images. I merely get the physical exercise attendant upon walking the mile plus. If I think about how I feel, it’s always the same: I feel like a large gerbil in a sanitized cage. It’s become clear to me that I set out each morning not just for the physical exertion–I crave the connections to people, other living creatures, and nature’s flora. These aspects of my regimen are what nourish and sustain me for the day ahead of me. My body, then, is reluctantly grateful to the Y for a warm place to exercise its muscles and feel limber as I go home to breakfast. But my soul is expansively grateful to that larger world of the streets in my neighborhood and the life I relish therein.
Wasting Precious Time
When I sobered up after nineteen years of serious alcoholic drinking, the first coherent thought I remember having is: “What a waste of valuable time.” What I meant by that lament was simple–though I had lots of ideas about literature, I had not been able to write any articles or books to progress my career as a professor of English at a major Midwestern university. Gradually, the mental fog lifted and I began putting words onto paper and have been doing that ever since. That was forty-three years ago and I’m now beginning to live out my eighties as a retired professor who still has lots of ideas about literature. Now I also have ideas about a lot more, e.g., white supremacy in all its guises, the world of dance both classical and modern, politics, the world outside my windows, memories of my life in the past, and how I practice my beliefs in God and Jesus.
In 2015, when I learned that my aorta had closed in upon itself to a dangerous degree and surgery was required, I underwent a valve replacement and now happily carry around in my chest the membrane from some generous cow. A remarkable recovery led me to define what had happened as a “heart event,” suggesting something that occurred but came to an end. In the past year, however, events and tests and words from my excellent cardiologist have changed the word I need to use and inhabit from “event” to “condition.” Conditions are on-going and inconclusive, and they require attention and at times adjustments. So my heart condition will accompany me for the remainder of my days on this earth; I have a “new normal” that is affecting me in surprising ways, some of which hinge on my ideas about time.
Though I have learned to write more than I could when drunk every night, I still do not write as often or deeply as I would like. Recently, I decided I probably didn’t need to undertake more book-length projects. With encouragement from family and friends, I hired someone to design a web site for me that included a “blog.” Though periodically I promise myself to write a new blog more often, I tend to drift back into extended periods of silence. But this heart condition reality is pushing me onto new ground. My newest resolution was to write a new blog at least once a month, but my mind teems with many more subjects than the twelve that decision would create. The other day, as I was thinking again about ways I am experiencing mortality, a phrase came to me complete and clear: “You are wasting precious time.” So, all these years after I began to rediscover myself and felt I was wasting “valuable” time, I have come to view that time I’m wasting as “precious.” The difference surely comes from my recognition that I am living on what I consider to be “gift time,” and that, given that miraculous fact, I must behave differently. I want to stop pretending that I can begin to write more of what rushes around in my brain next year or next month or even next week. I want to order my thoughts and feelings and send them out to the admittedly tiny group of faithful friends who read my blog. Of course I love it when one of them writes me something after reading the latest entry, even if it’s to urge me to correct some misspelled word or smooth out an infelicitous phrase. But I want to write these little pieces to feel like a me that I have stifled too often and for too long.
The time before me is precious because it can no longer be taken for granted.
Happy Birthday, Jesus
Every year, I set up a crèche in my living room, an act that gives me tremendous pleasure. Creches are supposed to focus on the manger scene with Mary and Joseph looking down on a crib housing the baby Jesus. These little collections may include the three Magi with flashy gifts; some have an ox and ass or cow. My crèche bears no resemblance to that pattern. Rather it mirrors a beautiful poem by John Milton, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” This poem devotes only four or five short stanzas to the actual birth while the majority of this extended poem is about the effects of that moment on the world in which it occurred and on the world in which Milton lived.
That’s how it is with my little thatched house. Tucked away in the back are tiny terra cotta figures of Mary, Joseph, one cow, one ox, and a very tiny crib with an infinitesimal babe in it. I found these little figures decades ago in a shop in Paris near St. Sulpice church. My crèche tells a story about how a few people and scads of animals and birds have come to stand in amazement as they realize what the tableau inside the manger is going to mean. Some of my figures are expensive, e.g., two magical old women made in Germany, a tiny sterling silver rabbit, a stately bronze stag with a wide rack of delicately carved horns. Most of my visitors, however, are delightful ornaments contributed by friends or found by me over a span of about 40 years: a fluffy yellow camel bought at a fund-raiser for some worthy cause; a wooden white and black cow resting on her feet; a very pink china pig that was part of a friend’s own childhood collection; a white wooden cat who has lost his two stick arms but who still wants to be present at this strange moment in human history; a bright tiny china puffin from Iceland; literally scores of cows, chickens, kitties, turtles, horses, owls, cardinals, and pigs. The oldest piece is a faded orange pre-plastic camel that was part of my first crèche given me by my mother when I was four and set up every year on a shelf in our living room where I could sit and move the various pieces around as long as I wanted to do so.
Children who come to my house are fascinated by this set up. Two little girls next door used to ask me around Thanksgiving “When are you going to set up your house?” When they were too little to see the high bookcase ledge, I’d let them stand on a chair so they could see all the little animals. Adults who look at my menagerie respond along a wide continuum: some “get it” about what I’m doing with the whole jumbled assortment; others wonder about the seriousness of my Christian observance; and some see how delighted I am so they indulge me by looking for or even bringing new additions.
What am I doing? Certainly the birth of Jesus of Nazareth came to have a tremendous impact on the world around him and on the future of western thought and worship. My amassed and expanding motley crew attests to my firm belief that humans are not the center of the universe; we merely inhabit and share it with the rest of creation. St. Francis of Assisi understood this, even learning to speak with the animals and birds in the woods around him. Many philosophers and aestheticians believe that at some stage of evolution, all species could comprehend one another. I believe we lost more than we gained by coming to separate ourselves from the rest of sentient beings, so I bring more and more silly and beautiful animals to my manger. The December after the election of Pope Francis, I felt hopeful enough to add a beautifully carved wooden figure of his particular saint. My delicately carved wooden figure stands tall and has a tiny white dove perched on one finger of his left hand. He fits right in with my bunnies and chicks and camels and pigs.
So happy birthday to the baby who grew into a kind and wise man who encouraged us to see God in every living being we met, whether that being had two legs or four or just gills or wings.
I Come From Alabama…
Most of my life, I’ve felt some degree of embarrassment or shame when I’ve said those words. That shame is framed by a series of horrible images from my long life living in Alabama or reading or watching about it once I left: Governor “Big Jim” Folsom plastered on the cover of Time magazine, passed out drunk on the capitol steps in Montgomery; groups of black men dressed in gray and black striped uniforms and attached to each other by strong ropes or chains as they worked along highways picking up debris; white guards on very large horses and holding very large rifles ready to fire at any of those chained black men; Governor George Wallace standing defiantly (legs spread, arms akimbo) in front of a building on the University of Alabama campus declaring that no “colored people” would attend; the main street of that campus lined two or three deep with angry white laborers from the Tuscaloosa paper mill and rubber plant holding bricks/bats/boards as Arthurene Lucy was driven to class by our new white Dean of Women who was a “Yankee” from Michigan; black parents and children trying to escape many police dogs who had been told to “sic ’em” by their white handlers in uniform; black people being fire-hosed into streets or against brick walls or onto park grass by police led by Chief Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor; streets of Birmingham deserted and department stores closed because a “Negro” had been elected mayor and all white people who could have fled to suburbs some of which were being created to house such people.
So when the child molester running for the U.S. Senate to replace Jeff Sessions was accused of sexual abuse of very young girls and women, I once again felt embarrassed and ashamed. Knowing absolutely nothing about Doug Jones, I knew well enough that his opponent would win because too many Alabamians connect Democrats with all manner of dangerous and even supernaturally evil beings. My college roommate who has returned to Huntsville to be closer to her family told me she might have to move is the abusive man won–something we both predicted. But we were, thankfully, wrong. Doug Jones won because a lot of people worked long and hard talking about his positive qualities and his opponent’s unspeakable qualities. And Tuesday, December 12th, in his cogent and heartening acceptance speech, Mr. Jones told the significant truth that he could not have won without the huge turn-out by black voters in the state. He also said in a later interview that his successful prosecution of the two men who boasted to friends of helping bomb a church and kill four precious little girls was “the best work I’ve done.”
It turns out that Doug Jones isn’t just a fellow Alabamian, but he grew up in Fairfield, a near suburb of Birmingham and home to TCI (Tennessee Coal and Iron Company), the southern steel mill run by U.S. Steel in Pittsburgh. I grew up in that same Fairfield, a generation before him, so we share all sorts of local souvenirs. What his election has done for me that is a gift of the greatest magnitude is this: Watching him speak in a municipal building in Birmingham, with a young black woman and an old black man right behind him, both laughing and crying in equal measure has given me a new image to set beside all the frozen ones I began this blog by listing. This moment of transformation can’t erase or even replace all the sickening memories, but it can sit beside them, nudging them ever so slightly to the periphery of my vision.