what we bring

I wish I could describe the wonder it is to bring you to the world,


to bring you words and ideas,


to teach you beauty


to teach you truth,


to bring you laughter,


and,


to receive


all


that you give


to me.

on beginning (this morning's reading on the bus)

When in our age we hear these words: It will be judged by the result--then we know at once with whom we have the honor of speaking. Those who talk this way are a numerous type whom I shall designate under the common name of assistant professors. With security in life, they have a permanent position and a secure future in a well-organized state. They have hundreds, yes, even thousands of years between them and the earthquakes of existence; they are not afraid that such things can be repeated, for then what would the police and the newspapers say? Their life task is to judge the great men, judge them according to the result. Such behavior towards greatness betrays a strange mixture of arrogance and wretchedness--arrogance because they feel called to pass judgment, wretchedness because they feel that their lives are in no way allied with the lives of the great. Anyone with even a smattering of nobility of nature never becomes an utterly cold and clammy worm, and when he approaches greatness, he is never devoid of the thought that since the creation of the world it has been customary for the result to come last and that if one is truly going to learn something from the greatness one must be particularly aware of the beginning. If the one who is to act wants to judge himself by the result, he will never begin. Although the result may give joy to the entire world, it cannot help the hero, for he would not know the result until the whole thing was over, and he would not become a hero by that but by making a beginning.

S. Kierkegaard; Fear and Trembling, 1843

My Story: part 2

What do we know of an event we no longer remember? I have only one image in my mind anymore of that humid, late Boston summer when mother and father divorced. There was dark wood molding, oily and still in the heat, brown to match everything else in the house. The molding loomed, (was I in the Johnny-jump-up, or playing on the hard wood floor?) framing him as he passed over me, turned and left. The image plays in the stillness of a silent film. Mother would tell me that long afterwards I would cry whenever she left the room. Another detail that my mind must have chosen not to remember.

Twenty-five years later mother would fly out to visit me in Milwaukee, just after my daughter was born. As we sat in the car together I listened to her talk.
“Why did it end?” I asked her for the first time.
“Me and your father? I don’t know—he could be really mean…. But mostly I was just really lonely. I’ve never felt so alone as I did when I was with him.”
“Oh.” Was I hoping for something more compelling? Was I looking to fill in all of the dark spaces in my memory?
“I told him to leave and he did.”
So simple
“I think he might have been having an affair.” She added.
Silently I traced a line from that momentously understated point when I was three years old under the oily brown Boston molding, through the move to Seattle and mother’s marriage to my first stepfather when I was six, their divorce when I was nine, second step father at twelve, and up to the present. I hoped she was no longer lonely.
“You know,” she said, “I probably could have made either of those marriages work if I had tried hard enough.”
“I know mom. At least you can keep making this one work.”
Wonderful, wonderful woman

Once, father asked me if I wanted to know his side of the story. I felt my heart tighten and told him no. Maybe something of the change in mother helped me to hear it from her. I had not yet seen that change in my father. Better, I suppose, not to know for now. There are more than enough feelings occupying the spaces left by displaced memories.

a wrinkle in films

One of the best things about growing older, and over time collecting an ever-broadening vocabulary of cultural images and expressions, are those happy moments when an artist gives you a particularly arresting focal point and, in that moment, you make the connection to whatever source that the artist was himself drawing from. Suddenly, you share a common frame of reference through which to view the work at hand, and hopefully, to anchor your own subjectively rooted understanding in the objectively intentional meaning conveyed by the artist himself. So, the other week I had one of these experiences in reverse. Having watched Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain” only a few days prior, I sat down to watch Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” (To Live). In one of the crucial scenes of Ikiru, our hero leaves the office of his doctor having just found out that he has terminal stomach cancer and not more than a few months to live. As he walks away from the clinic, the camera tracks along with him from the opposite side of the street. He walks without hurry, but unaware of his surroundings. He walks in front of stores, posters, under scaffolding. He is at time obscured by passing cars. He is locked inside of his thoughts, and Kurosawa skillfully draws the viewer into the same suffocating tension by filming the scene in silence, aside from the faint beating of our hero’s heart. The moment is broken by the blaring of a truck’s horn, startling our hero who had just stepped out into the street and into the truck’s path. With that, a transition is made from the before; when our hero went through his life as if already dead, and the after; when he begins to live what little time he has left with intention. Watching it I couldn’t help but smile, as the scene had been perfectly recreated in The Fountain. A stitch pulling together two points fifty years apart.
Into their dialogue, my mind insists upon stitching another point—words voiced by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in his Harvard address, A World Split Apart—that I think compliment Aronofsky and Kurosawa’s fascinating meditations upon a Human response to the fact of death:

If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.

favorite teapot

This is my favorite teapot. It is a typical, unassuming, glazed iron teapot of Japanese design and origin. I haven’t seen many others like it—I think that its lack of embellishment must have made its parents nervous about sending it off overseas. Here, we are more drawn to the Chinese or European sensibility, wherein beauty is to be found in the details, oftentimes an overwhelming number of them. But my little teapot’s beauty is rooted in an overall harmony of form. Nothing detracts from its geometry. From the graceful arch of the handle, to the sloping sides that tuck in just beneath the base of the spout, at angles complimentary to one another, it echoes the Parthenon in its divine proportions. I imagine it would be perfectly at home in some rural Japanese farmhouse, placed just a few inches above the ground, in the center of the room, over the ubiquitous hearth. And that is the beauty of the thing—utility as art; humble in its presentation; rough, pebbled iron as if only just pulled from the earth and thus not too far from it; coaxed into its present form but still looking over its shoulder at the mountains. Now it steeps my tea.
There is another reason why I am especially fond of this little teapot. When Summer and I were living in Milwaukee, come Christmas we were again without gifts for each other. It seems that every year without fail we spend all of our available gifting funds on friends and family and are left with only an apology for one another and the hope that the Christmas spirit will provide for us in understanding what our pocketbooks could not. But, that year we came upon some unexpected money and so, without hesitation we gave ourselves fifty dollars each, and one hour at Marshalls, to find each other Christmas presents. This wonderful, humble teapot was what Summer found for me, dusty and alone on a shelf at Marshalls. She bought it because she knew I would adore it. She knows me well.

my story: part 1

Mother and father met on the metro. One of those wonderful Bostonian fall days I imagine it to be. And, I hope, on the green line; that wonderful, pre-war wooden trestle subway that fed into so many of my treasured childhood memories, and still evokes the smells of hot iron and grease. Distracted young nurses, students with their book-bags, and tweeded, old men bearing scuffed leather cases would all ride the line as it wound beneath the avenues and parks of Boston. Beneath the bay, beneath the Charles, over to the MGH and Boston Common where Brattle Street Book Shop wheeled out their anticipated dollar racks for all to scrutinize. Mother and father met each other across the five feet of aisle on the green line. He was a graduate student in English, teaching courses to students who would soon drive his passion for teaching away from anyone else and solely towards himself. She was all young, no doubt attracted to the age and wisdom conveyed by his sad eyes locked behind horn-rimmed glass.
When I was conceived, they had married and moved to the north of Whidbey Island. A continent away from New England, they were closer to mother’s family, living out of the naval base at Oak Harbor. There, they rented a cabin in the humid woods and watched mushrooms push up out of the carpet. He worked evenings as a wine steward at the Captain Whidbey’s Inn and slept fitfully at night. She would lay awake and watch for his deliriums--wondering if he would wake, muttering about webs covering her face. The winter before my birth, they returned to Boston, then renting a brown two story by Tufts University. Only a few snowy walks remained for them alone over the uneven brickwork of the Somerville sidewalks. There, I was born--on their bed at home in the morning. Mother would tell me that she ate pancakes afterwards. What must she have felt—finally a mother to the first child she would keep? What must he have thought—given a life to put before his own?

a conversation between two generations

-So you’re the new kid, huh?
-What’s it to ya’ old man?
-You’re a bit small to be givin’ me lip like that, kid….
-I got three feet and seventeen pounds here—and I’ll put em’ all over you!
-You’ve got some moxy, kid.