“Why do you speak to them in parables?” the disciples asked Christ. “He said to them in reply, “Because knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted…That is why I speak to them in parables, because they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.” [Mt. 13:11, 13].
I’m way up on a mountain outside Taos, New Mexico. I didn’t see a soul all day yesterday. I discovered the flower above, known I believe as a Mexican hat.
I wrote, read, prayed, puttered, dealt with a very alarming ant infestation, and around quarter past six lit out for my daily walk. (more…)
Back to LA today.
I cried when I said goodbye to Mom.
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
Call me biased, call me an overly proud aunt, but let me introduce one of the more mature, well-adjusted members of our family–one of crown jewels, really of a clan rich in crown jewels: my 12-year-old nephew Allen. Here he is, on an outing yesterday to Newick’s Seafood on Great Bay in Dover, New Hampshire.
No-one can say this child doesn’t know his audience: he held court the whole meal, telling vastly entertaining stories of the kids who huff Sharpies at school, his favorite COPS episodes, and one of his fondest childhood memories: the time his Uncle Joe showed up at Appleseeds Nursery, told the teacher Allen had a doctor’s appointment, and spirited the kid out to Dunkin’ Donuts for a chocolate with sprinkles.
Beside Allen is his father, my next youngest brother Ross, a teacher, scholar, and pastoral ministry student.
Here’s the fourth member of the party, our sainted mother Janet M. King: matriarch of this talented brood. We enjoyed a healthful meal of fried clams, scallops, shrimp, haddock, french fries, chowder, and a giant plate of onion rings.
It’s February but when I woke this morning and parted the drapes in my darling room at the Motel 6 on Gosling Road in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (for I am visiting my childhood from L.A.), I thought of one of my father’s favorite poems: “Snowbound,” by John Greenleaf Whittier.
“The sun that bleak December day Rose cheerless over hills of gray”…
I am loving being in New Hampshire: the ground blanketed with snow, the leafless birches and maples veiled ever-so-faintly with the pale yellows and deep reds that herald spring, the Isles of Shoals shimmering mirage-like, as they always have, ten miles off the coast.To me, “home” always means hours of introspective pondering over my past, present, and future: mulling over my history, discovering new clues to my psyche.
Apropos of which yesterday afternoon, I went to visit my mother at the Wentworth Home, the assisted living facility in Dover where she lives.
Not having seen her in a year and a half; and in light of the fact that, what with her Alzheimer’s, I wasn’t sure she’d know who I was; and more to the point because I am simply a terrible, terrible sap, I was a bit teary-eyed walking into her room.She was sitting quietly in a chair.”Mom, it’s me! It’s Heather. Your oldest child!”
Pause. “Oh?”
Talking to Mom these days is like talking to someone who was in a blackout the night before and doesn’t want to be caught out, so her responses tend to be extremely broad. “What did you have for lunch, Mom?” “Food.” “Who’s picking you up for Thanksgiving dinner, Mom?” “Uh…yeah.” I’d called her from L.A. several times to tell her I was coming, but L.A. doesn’t mean much, and though she has a vague idea of how many children she has, she’s far past remembering our names.Her room is really pretty lovely and has two large windows, one with a view of the Wentworth-Douglass Hospital to the south and one that faces Central Avenue to the west and through which she can watch the sun set.
And what ensued, I realized later, was the exact same conversation we’ve been having our whole lives, or rather the conversation we’ve never–in spite of my best efforts–ever had. We talked about my trip, the weather, our plans the next day for lunch. And then I launched in–to really, the only question that truly interests me about anyone.
“What do you think about, Mom?” I asked eagerly. “What goes through your head when you look out the window?”
“I don’t know,” she replied modestly. “I suppose they keep us so busy (Doing what? I wanted to ask, but whatever) I don’t have much time to think.”
Tremulously: “Do you think about Daddy?”
“Oh yes, from time to time. You never forget.”
THE SALT MARSHES, RYE BEACH, NH
Suddenly I was overcome by a huge rush of emotion: the pent-up emotion, in a way, of a lifetime. Everything I had ever thought about, felt, longed for with all my heart myself…my desire to “know” my mother, and to have her know, see, understand me…my deepest concerns from my earliest memories: the passion to belong, to connect, to bring our own family and the whole human family around one huge banquet table and be happy as we (or more accurately, I) had never had been in real life.
“Mom,” I blurted, “do you think after we die that we’re reunited with the people we love? Do you think afterward we’re all together?”
“No,” she replied shortly. “I think when you go you just go. I think we have what we have and then that’s it. I just try to enjoy each day as it comes.”
My mind raced. Mom was Protestant, Mom believed in God: what about the Resurrection? What about the seed falling to the ground and dying and bearing much fruit? What about Jesus appearing to the disciples after the third day?
“Really?” I said. “You don’t think there’s anything afterward at all?”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” she waved me off. “That will take care of itself. Let someone else worry for a change.”
“I’m not worried, I’m just wondering.”
“We all go someday,” she said firmly, as if I’d disputed the fact.
From there, I segued into a somewhat overwrought diatribe about how grateful I was for all she had given me. “Your love of nature, you’re kind of inward, Mom, quiet, you always loved to read…you gave me all that! Your mother was inward, too, and I inherited that! And then, that was so great that you and Daddy gave us all music lessons, even though you didn’t have much money. I didn’t know then how much music would sustain and comfort me, what a joy it would be as I grew older. I still have a piano, Mom, out in L.A. I still play my Mozart sonatas…”
“Oh,” she said. “I guess I never thought about it much like that. You just saw to it that your kids had music lessons. That was what you did.”
All right, then. We talked some more about her days, interests, and life, and then she asked politely:”So what do you do?”
“Well, I’m a writer, Mom!” (again, on the verge of tears). “You remember how I always loved to read, and getting there took me a long time, and lots of wrong turns, but now I get to write, Mom! The only thing I ever wanted to do. The only thing, really, I’m fit to do…” I clasped my hands over my heart. “I just feel so lucky, so mysteriously blessed….”
“That’s wonderful,” she said matter-of-factly. “That desk you’re leaning on, boy, is that handy. I put the…the stuff on the outside…”
“The finish?” I supplied.
“Yes, I finished it myself.”
“Beautiful, Mom! Nice job.”
I opened the drawers, one by one, and looked at the pencils, the envelopes, the magnifying glass, the rubber bands, all neatly, orderly arranged.
My own drawers at home are a pleasant jumble and I suddenly, finally saw My mother is a completely different person than me. She does not see like me, feel like me, experience the world like me–and she doesn’t have to.
Most people, I do understand, come to this realization at about the age of 5 but really, better late than never.
I looked across at that dear, simple, intelligent, common-sense face, and felt a deep, deep sense of peace, and more gratitude and love than ever. I must have driven her crazy with my head always halfway in the clouds. My way of being must have been just as foreign to her as hers had always been to me. One wasn’t better or worse than the other: they were just different. She was right about so much: Enjoy each day as it comes. Let someone else worry for a change. Everything was all right the way it has. Everything had always been all right.
We made plans for lunch today and I took my leave. But driving the back roads home, through the salt marshes, the old farms, the setting sun, a single child-like image rose stubbornly to mind. No-one, not even Mom, can convince me we’re not going to all be together after we die.
Here’s a moment I know you’ve been waiting for: the transcript of the September 21, 2010 “Face-to-Face” at the Crossroads Cultural Center in NYC with the truly wonderful Msgr. Albacete. Monsignor is a priest, physicist, theologian, one of the leaders of the international Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation, and the author, among other things of God at the Ritz. But more than that, or I should say maybe the reason he’s able to do all that so well, is that he has a sense of humor.
From God at the Ritz: “Have you noticed that many horrendous murderers and serial killers are said, at one time, to have been very religious? I always looked at my most pious altar boys with deep suspicion, wondering what was going on within their religiously agitated minds.” (more…)
I am back from NYC, where I stayed at the apartment of a friend of a friend in East Harlem. I have always enjoyed a building that smells of roast chicken, and cheap laundry detergent, and Raid. The sirens from the cop cars at the projects across the way, the free wi-fi at Burger King, and the friendly cries of “Americana!” also went toward making me feel at home.
I was tired the first day and thought, briefly, that I “should” go to a museum, or a gallery, or some sophisticated person-type thing, but I chose instead to lie in bed and look at the leaves on the tree outside my window, and listen to the sparrows. I am as driven, perhaps more driven, than the next person, but I am also deeply resistant to the cultural mandate of “busyness.” How are you? we ask. I’m busy, we reply, as if that’s an answer.I always think being too busy is a sign of some egregious failure on my part–a failure of faith; a failure of being true to my deepest self. (more…)
I have been to St. Louis, Missouri/Belleville, Illinois. I saw East St. Louis (urban blight on its way up, felt right at home), The Hill (linguine with white clam and shrimp sauce), and the green patinaed, copper-sheathed spires of many churches I wished I could stay longer and visit.
I at last saw the St. Louis Arch, which is apparently some kind of national landmark (perhaps especially known to sports fans?), and over which my little brother Joe came very close several years ago to disowning me when I confessed that I had never heard of it.
I sampled a local delicacy known as Gooey Butter Cake. Jim Cavataio, husband of event/retreat organizer Rosalee, very kindly went to some special bakery and bought me a whole cake, which I shared with the receptionist at my hotel and who is now my friend for life. (more…)
I’m feeling just a teeny bit shaky, I find, as I prepare to share a living space with another human being for the first time since my marriage imploded, I mean since my dear ex-husband and I parted ways around 2002 (I know those divorce and annulment papers are around somewhere, but I can’t bring myself to look at them just yet).
I’m realizing it probably won’t be cool to just put pushpins and little tiny nail holes, brads really are all they are I should just tell her, all over the walls to hang up my vast array of old Cavallini calendars (Renaissance Madonnas, Russian icons), tin crucifixes, prayer cards, postcards, notecards, mirrors, bits of old tapestry, Dorothy Goode paintings, and the Our Lady of Guadalupe altar with the Lux Perpetua candle, the empty Mitsouko bottle, and the skull of some small desert animal I found in Joshua Tree, et cetera.
I’m realizing there’s no place in the bathroom to set my stuff.
I’m starting to consider what my eating habits might look like to a stranger: the incessant brewing of “sun tea” (if your throw a bunch of tea bags in a glass pitcher and fill it with water, the stuff will basically brew in the dark, I’ve found), the hoarding of so much as a quarter-cup of leftover coffee for iced later, the capacity to subsist for days on end on carrots, boiled eggs, and this weird barley cereal I get at the Korean market. Am I “allowed” to just lie on the sofa like a slob and watch my little netflix movie? And what of the movies themselves?–hey, pull up a chair, you’ve been dying to see Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, right? No? Okay, then how about Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthasar? You’ll love it, the main character’s a persecuted donkey…
It’ll all work out–or not–but I must say I felt a little pang last night as I regarded my heap of belongings lying in the middle of my new bedroom floor.
For 17 years, I lived at 915 ½ S. Hobart Boulevard, in a way-below-market-value apartment in a section of L.A. called Koreatown. I had a courtyard, French windows, hand-painted tile in the bathroom and kitchen, and a balcony filled with succulents and bromeliads and cacti I’d grown from cuttings filched from friends’ gardens and median strips. I had Oriental and kilim rugs, paintings, icons, sconces, crucifixes, incense. I had a living room with crown moldings, a fireplace mantel carved with cherubs and bunches of grapes, and walls painted a contemplative deep gray-green called Sparrow. People walked in and said It’s so you! They said, It’s so warm! They said, You’ll never find another place like this.
Something about that last began to irk me. Perhaps I never would, but perhaps 17 years in any apartment—especially one that was more or less in the ghetto—is also long enough. I’d come in some sense to believe that my identity lay in that apartment. The apartment, with its combined weight of decades of mementoes, photos, keepsakes, and journals, had become a kind of psychic albatross. Did I really need the falling-apart Fitzgerald Reader—a “gift” (exchange, really)—from the guy who’d deflowered me? (more…)
L.A. is the last place I ever thought I’d end up. Though I’d never felt particularly at home in New England, back in 1990 L.A. seemed more of an idea—a really bad idea—than an actual place. My older brother Allen, who’d been a building contractor in Manhattan Beach for 20 years, seemed to bear out my worst suspicions. Whenever he came back East to visit, he went around in his Bugatti shades and hundred-dollar haircut saying, “Everything’s so small! Everyone’s so fat!”
What a snob, I used to think.
As it turned out, Allen was the main reason my husband Tim and I ended up moving to L.A.At the time, we were living on Boston’s North Shore, Tim was a carpenter, and I was trying to work up the courage to 1) start using the law degree I’d earned in an alcoholic blackout; 2) start writing; 3) start over. When we got married in 1988, Allen gave us week-long round-trip tickets to L.A. as a wedding present. (more…)
