Escapes

My sister visited this past weekend. My husband took the kids beach camping with his brother, so we both had sibling time.  My sister and I went out for coffee and sat in the sun, went out to lunch and sat in the sun, went to the beach and sat in the sun.  We also woke up one morning and went on a hike because it was such a nice sunny day. Our conversations were sometimes on the heavy side, but usually those kinds of conversations are enlightening!  We also met up with friends for wine one night, so we felt sunny after that fun. By the end of the weekend, I had had so much sun - plus a lot of good conversation - my insides felt light, too. So on Sunday, when my husband was talking to his parents and mentioned to them that I had had a rough week and would tell them about it, I couldn't remember everything that had happened last week, except that I was being much better about wearing sunscreen.  So it was a wonderful visit, a brief retreat from reality. 

We did do some reading while we sat in the sun.  I didn't get very far with my current book, Washington's God, by Michael Novak, which I'm reading for book club.  It's not one I would have picked, but it does have some interesting parts and some points that might make for good book club discussion. For instance, Washington sometimes wrote or spoke of Providence protecting him and his troops during the Revolution, and of Providence favoring the founding of our nation. Does this mean that God favors democracy, and the project of the United States in particular? Does it mean He is on the side of those who take up the cause of justice and liberty?  Do we think He is still favoring our nation, which has even more liberties now that the abolition of slavery, women's rights, and the gay agenda have made advancements?  We don't usually get very political at book club - this is a Catholic women's group - so I doubt we'll talk too much about what God thinks about political movements, but it is an interesting question, and in my own heart, I might tend to be more Deist sometimes to the extent that I question whether God does favor one nation over another.  It is an interesting thought experiment, however, to try to unravel the workings of nations and the workings of God. And part of the adventure of a book club is picking up books you wouldn't normally choose. 

Other books I've read this Lent I've found easier to read.  My morning readings are coming from Between Midnight and Dawn, by Sarah Arthur, a book of meditations which are primarily poems and short stories about faith and God's work in the world.  Scriptures are suggested to accompany the readings, but I have been very lax about looking them up, despite a weak intent to read more Scripture.  Maybe that can be an Easter resolution. 

I did read along with the readings in the sample issue of Give Us This Day that I picked up. It seems to be a Magnificat alternative, complete with a similar font and paper size, color, and weight.   It doesn't have all the extra readings that Magnificat provides, but is only a few dollars cheaper to subscribe.

I brought home an armload from the new books shelf at the library a month ago and consumed them all with delight.  Some of Annie Dillard's essays have been collected in The Abundance.  My interest in Annie Dillard began in 1991 when I had to write an essay in response to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for a college admissions essay. I checked out the book, read it, and felt kinship for her descriptions of the Virginia Valley where she lived because it mirrored my own love for the woods of Michigan, where we spent a week every summer.  I wrote about lombardy poplar trees, got into college, and met and married my husband, and the rest is history, as they say.  And in college, one of my professors was Michael Waldstein, whose name came up in a conversation recently, because he taught Humanae Vitae and Familiaris Consortio and directly influenced the openness of our marriage to children.  So many webs.

Dillard's essays in this book continue to look closely at nature and our relationship to it, but often as a metaphor for seeing and observing and creating. Several selections in this collection have a broader scope.  "A Writer in the World" was my favorite. In this essay, she writes that the writer "studies literature, not the world," which is interesting from an author sometimes considered a nature writer, or a world watcher. (See this article for interesting description of how Dillard came to write Pilgrim.)

I liked this paragraph:  "Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened, and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages his intellect and heart - and our own? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaning, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?  . . .  We still and always want waking."

And this: "The artist is willing to give all his or her strength and life to probing with blunt instruments those same secrets no one can describe in any way but with those instruments' faint tracks.

190 A British journalist,[Malcolm Muggeridge?] observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, reasoned: 'Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.'

Another interesting essay was "For the Time Being," which examined the life of Teilhard de Chardin and his spiritual friendship with Lucile Swan.  Though he wrote "Through woman and woman alone, man can escape from isolation," he apparently never broke any of his vows despite the love he felt for Lucile and the joy he experienced with her. But obedience was a more difficult vow than chastity, though that might not be everyone's struggle. The restraints placed by the Church on his writing about his archaeological research caused perhaps more pain.

Mary Oliver's new book Upstream was also on the shelf, so I snagged it and grabbed a book of her poetry, A Thousand Mornings, to accompany my reading. Oliver and Dillard both are immersed in appreciation for the beauty and transcendence of the physicality of the natural world.   They share some traits as writers: they see the sacred in the ordinary, they understand writing to be a way of seeing, they live private lives but bare their souls publicly.

Oliver's book is also a collection of essays about life lived in proximity to nature in Maine. She writes, "Attention is the beginning of devotion," and then reveals the world she is devoted to.  As a child, she used to run away to the woods with a backpack full of books. I used to do something similar, only the woods was the vacant lot next door to our house.  Literature and nature provided her and escape when she was a child as she summarizes, "And this is what I learned: the world's otherness is an antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness - the beauty and mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books -- can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."

Oliver also writes of the creative life: Creative work as "a hunger for eternity. Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always -- these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. ... The extraordinary is what art is about."  Discipline, a schedule, ready at all hours. anywhere, concern with the edge. , loyalty to the work. absentminded... "MY responsibility is not to the ordinary or the timely. ... My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and however it may arrive.  If I have a meeting with you at three o'clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.

"There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."

That last line is one to wrestle with.  Is there any voracious reader who didn't at some point want to be a writer? But does everyone who wishes to write have a gift that deserves the time and attention of the sort that causes Oliver to be late or to miss meetings with other people? What will be remembered - the poem or the missed engagement?

Oliver claims to have sought knowledge as certainties and then it entertained, shaped, and failed... "now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state. I am not talking about having faith necessarily, although one hopes to. What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude. Such interest nourishes me beyond the finest compendium of facts. In my mind now, in any comparison of demonstrated truths and unproven but vivid intuitions, the truths lose.  . . .

"I would therefore write a kind of elemental poetry that doesn't just avoid indoors but doesn't even see the doors that lead inward - to laboratories, to textbooks, to knowledge. I would not talk about the wind, and the oak tree, and the leaf on the oak tree, but on their behalf. ....

"I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. ...

"I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple."

From her poetry:

"On Traveling to Beautiful Places" "Every day I'm still looking for God / and I'm still finding him everywhere, in the dust, in the flowerbeds."

"And Bob Dylan ToOo"  '"Anything worth thinking about is worth singing about.' / Which is why we have / songs of praise, songs of love, songs of sorrow.'"

"The Gardener" - Then I step out into the garden where the gardener, who is said to be a simple man, / is tending his children, the roses."

Next time I find time to write: Reviews of Neil Gaiman's View from the Cheap Seats and Ben Hatke's Mighty Jack. And eventually perhaps I'll come back to the Joy of Love. So much to chew on.  Since all of that meaty reading, I have done very little the last couple of weeks, in between work and other responsibilities.  I did finish Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts after hearing so much about it. She says Eucharisteo so often, I am surprised she is not Catholic. She does a beautiful job of tying together the connection between gratitude and trust and joy.  I can see why her writing is the source of parodies, but also of many fans and I found it thought-provoking that her trip to Paris, away from her family and her world that were the source of all her thanksgiving, was the source of her apprehension of joy.  Perhaps she thought of her trip as more of a pilgrimage. 

Should travel through these stories count as a pilgrimage? What about the long meditative walks in the sun with my sister? I am always ready for that journey, wherever the destination.

A few book reviews

I was excited to see this review of Mariette in Ecstasy, one of my favorite books by Ron Hansen, in The Paris Review. The link was shared from the Image update. Not only is the book good, but the review by Nick Ripatrazone captures one of the reasons why so well: the strangeness of Catholicism. As the culture becomes more and more secular, it becomes harder and harder to live in it without standing out and harder and harder to explain what it means to be Catholic. Reason seems to be a lost art. One of the few ways to evangelize is through beauty - and the strangeness of Catholicism is often beautiful in its union of mystery and doctrine and liturgy.

Also in the Image update: a review of my sister's CD, which is now out!

I just finished Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis - over 1000 pages of reading in two weeks. Read about them via Melissa Wiley's blog.  Too many late nights I stayed up reading until my eyelids couldn't stay open. That's the kind of books these are: you have to race through and stay in the story until you reach the last page, the end of the journey. The books are about time travelling historians stuck in World War II London. At times the pace is slow - an editor might cut a couple hundred pages - but I enjoy long reads every now and again because the length allows time to attach to the characters more.  On the other hand, long books take over my life, and I shouldn't be spending time right now on novels with the to-do list growing.  Reading is a form of time travel itself - the reader becomes someone else in another place at another time during which time wrinkles and passes much more quickly.

I didn't mark too many quotes, but my favorite highlights from All Clear were the characters of Sir Godfrey and the vicar of Backbury and the references to Agatha Christie - makes me want to reread some of her mysteries. It's not a scientific science fiction book - the explanation of time travel is a little sketchy, with "the Net" acting as a kind of surrogate for Providence.   Definite religious overtones, especially with the central role of the picture of Jesus as "Light of the World" in St. Paul's and the repetition of the "All will be well" reassurance, but no overt discussion of God or faith, other than this one part, when the small town vicar gives a homily on hope at a bodyless funeral: "But the vital thing is that we act. We do not rely on hope alone, though hope is our bulwark, our light through dark days and darker nights. We also work, and fight, and endure, and it does not matter whether the part we play is large or small. The reason that God marks the fall of the sparrow is that he knows that it is as important to the world as the bulldog or the wolf. . . For it is through deeds that the war will be won, through our kindness and devotion and courage that we make the better world for which we long. So is is with heaven... By our deeds here on earth, in this world so far from the one we long for, we make heaven possible. We not only live in the hope of heaven, but, by each doing our bit, we bring in to pass."

My spiritual book this month was A Right to Be Merry by Mother Mary Francis, which I read again for book club. (2010 was the last time: http://backbayview.blogspot.com/2010/07/postcard-from-road.html)I love this little joyful description of cloistered life and the remarks on simplicity, which reminded me yet again of the importance of making do with less and the freedom of having fewer choices and a regular routine/habit/rule and the discipline of loving the irritable.  I wonder how many young girls now form such a deep love of Christ that they would consider cloistered life as a way of unifying faith and life?  Or am I projecting my own active charism, which in fact many young contemplatives still are discerning such a call?

The book is a great read for Advent, which we are marking with our same Advent traditions of lighting the wreath, opening the calendar, and pinning up a few Jesse tree items, but most of our Christmas stuff is still in boxes because of unexpected company this past weekend. Last night was the community's Christmas parade with the tree lighting on our main street after Santa's sleigh went by. Some of the kids were in the parade, but it was too dark to get good photos.

From A Right to Be Merry:

 "Laudate, pueri Praise the Lord, ye children!"

"Virginity is not only a giving, but a receiving" : a fruitful, obedient, noble surrender.

An interesting part on education: "Education worthy of the name is built on integration and correlation of knowledge. It has nothing at all to do with the ability to spout facts like a geyser. Real educations brings to flower the seeds of intelligence in the human mind. Intelligence is quite independent of education, it is true,,, but education is a cultivation of the intelligence; and the blossoms it produces are just as fragrant in the cloister as anywhere else, and just as necessary.  ...

"A cloistered nun who has been trained to relate one science to another will ordinarily be quicker to relate the unfolding mysterious of the spiritual life one to another, and also to recognize the superb paradox on which the interior life is built and in which all mysteries discover their integrity: Humility is exaltation, effacement is enrichment, death is life, and all the other facets of the one splendrous truth which is Love. - cultivated mind cuts through the clutter"

"The greatest grace that a man can have under heaven is to know how to live well with those among whom he dwells. - Br. Giles 

A Trappist wrote to Mother:  "When you are convinced there is no fault or sin, no matter how terrible, of which you are not capable, you will just have begun to understand humility." .. St Clare: "For anger and worry hinder charity in themselves as well as in others." 

Mother writes about the mortification of common life - paying attention to details of job - not selfish feelings, "for one may be more enfeebled by a passing indisposition than another by a grave and prolonged illness"  ... "Gertrude von le Fort wisely observed that we love one another across an abyss." -Everyone has secret pains- there is value in the effort to subdue those pains

"To anyone who thinks that the Gospel cannot be taken quite literally today, I can only borrow St. Andrew's words: 'Come and see!' Wild and sweet our Gospel rule of life may be, wild as the world considers voluntary penance, and sweet as the love of the Man in the Gospel" from Margery Kempe.

"All his life long, a man is walking steadily toward the gate of eternity, so he can never truly make an exit ... The joy of the enclosed contemplative life is stout-fibred and enduring precisely because its roots reach down deep into the rich soil of willing suffering. The choir doors are the binding on the diary of each nun's soul" 

And finally: "See what a small, poor, hidden Lord He is Who lay  unknown in Bethlehem, but held the whole world in His beating human heart. This is our season."  

Last month's book club read was Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship in Letters, by Jessica Messman Griffith and Amy Andrews, another good one I think I mentioned already, although our conversation at book club wasn't too in depth about the book. I enjoyed the exploration of Amy's conversion, her struggle with faith and complacency, and Jessica's experience with grief and presence. We were a small group last month, and not everyone had finished the book, and I had read it in the summer, so it wasn't fresh in my mind.  I do remember their letters seeming a bit overwrought at the beginning, but after the both have babies, they seem more grounded, less concerned with self and more concerned with the world and others. What a gift to have a friend with whom to share this thoughts and to be so matched in interests and spiritual inquiry and study!

Some good quotes: Jessica quotes C. S. Lewis: - "How can one be a Christian and remain properly depressed? There is always the threat of resurrection"
and St. Teresa of Avila: "the important thing is not to think much but to love much; and do that which best stirs you to love" Interior Castle.
and The Lord of the Rings : love what you are fitted to love - "you must start somewhere and have some roots"
and Middlemarch  about the fear of living "quiet lives, in unvisited tombs"

Meanwhile, Amy quotes Wendell Berry: "Religious faith begins with the discovery that there is no evidence"
and Steve Martin: "The  young are always beautiful"
and Marilyn Robinson: "Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations"
and finally Teilhard de Chardin "I am afraid of the future, too heavy with mystery and too wholly new, toward which time is driving me."

So many words, ideas, and reflections go unnoted.  Were we able to time travel and relive the small details that color our daily lives, would we do better about appreciating them?

The News from Here

The past week has been one of those whirlwinds that sweeps everything up into a muddle. Can it be March already? It's arrived like a lion in southern California with wind and rain and temperatures all the way down in the 50s. But this chilly spell won't bring those pretty spring wildflowers that make long and brutal winters fade to old memories.  The Midwest may be miserable right now but in a couple weeks they will have the advantage.  From great suffering comes great beauty: crocuses, snowdrops, jonquils, spring beauties, Dutchmen's breeches.  We can buy some of those at the garden shop here, but won't find them in a woods damp with melting snow in southern CA.

Aside from the quantity of rain that has fallen in the last few days, refilling reservoirs and saving wildlife and lawns, we have had a quantity of events.  My sister came to visit, but I'm afraid she awakened rather than satisfied her longing for sunny skies as she writes on her blog.  We spent a wonderful long weekend doing things we like to do - pretending to shop on Rodeo Drive, while only spending money at the Beverly Hills Goodwill, eating Indian food, walking and talking for miles along the oceanfront, scouring thrift shops in Ventura, sharing dinner and wine with friends, and wandering the campus and hills around Thomas Aquinas College.  She got to be rescued from a rip current by my teenager - I, fortunately, was walking her baby around the beachfront neighborhood and was not a witness to their near drowning.  Since that scare happened on one of her last days, I'm afraid that's the memory she'll harbor, rather than the scene of getting photographed with Dick Butkus at a fancy fundraising dinner the second night she was here. 

After she flew away home, I had to jump back into the routine with the kids' events, meetings, and doctor's appointments.  The older boys made it to the semi-finals of the county mock trial event, so we had some late nights. My second grader had a mini-retreat for her first reconciliation coming up next week, and she had to present her ancestor report, which entailed making 34+ whoopie pies as an example of something her ancestor (her grandma) makes. My husband spent hours on these while I put together a dinner for a friend who had a baby a couple weeks ago. (Shepherd's pie - I'm always at a loss about what to send to people. Something that fits in throwaway pans, can be easily refrigerated/frozen, satisfies potentially picky eaters, and can be made with what I have on hand since I didn't have time to grocery shop that day. Last time I made chicken enchiladas which my kids love, but not everyone does.)  I washed but still haven't had time to put away the bedding and towels from my sister's visit. (oh wait, am I spending time on the internet instead?) 

The upshot of all the busyness - or maybe of the change in barometric pressure - is that I woke up yesterday morning before daybreak with strong, regular contractions.  Got a drink of water, hoped they would go away for about an hour before waking up my husband.  Instead, they grew more frequent and strong. Thought of everything undone: borrowed crib unassembled, the carseat unwashed, no diapers and wipes, no name decided upon.  Laundry needs to be put away and more laundry needing to be washed and sorted. I called the doctor, and was told to go to the hospital. 

After some monitoring, iv fluids, and a shot of terbutaline, the contractions subsided.  I wasn't dilated very much or effaced, so the doctor is hopeful that we can postpone this baby's delivery.  My due date is 5 weeks away, so I've been put on modified bed rest for the next two weeks.  I've always kind of wanted an excuse to get more help with laundry, but the week coming up is full of fun activities:  I was supposed to help at the school again during the day for the academic decathlon, my husband's cousin just arrived for a visit (staying with his brother), and tomorrow is supposed to be my not-a-baby-shower party: a food walking tour in Ojai.  Then we've got the second grader's first reconciliation, the first high school track meet and first soccer practices, and at the end of the week, the Seabee Ball, for which I finally found a dress stretchy enough to pass for a maternity gown for a reasonable price. Good thing I didn't remove the tags. 

And, not to be forgotten: Ash Wednesday. 

So Blah.  Missing these fun events will be a true sacrifice that I can offer up for those women with really scary pregnancy problems or for those who suffer from infertility.  The challenge will be not to make bed rest a treat.  I spent yesterday in bed comforting myself by reading A Room With a View, and then I watched the movie on Netflix while the kids and husband hung out with the cousins and went to the Mock Trial awards ceremony. The book is a real indulgence - I'm so glad Forster stuck with a happy ending here, unlike Howard's End. I had forgotten how long ago it had been since I had seen the movie - it was made in 1986. One of Helena Bonham Carter's first successes and one of the formative movies of my youth. I thought I saw it at the theater, but I would have only been 13. My sister thinks my grandmother took us. There's that gleeful scene of Freddie, George, and Mr. Beebe bathing in the pond, chasing each other around in the buff, that I'm surprised wasn't censored by our parents, but they did let us read and watch some rather challenging material. Would that scene now (and was it then?) be interpreted as young men indulging in unspoiled nature, or as a suggestion of homoeroticism?  Sometimes I'm sorry that subtext is more obvious now. I miss reading it as innocent.  And I know I missed the conflict between religion and the Emersons' skepticism. I probably was influenced by the "abominable tourist" discussions, but didn't catch the subtlety of Lucy's rejection of being a "student" rather than what she really is - a tourist. It's a romantic book, but full of lots of interesting side conversations in addition to the unconventional development of the love affair. 

Now I've got to pick out what to read next and make a plan for Lent.  Of course, making a plan seems unwise; at this point, every day is going to be a day of anxious waiting and observation. The Lenten practices of prayer, fasting, and penance will be easier to remember without the distractions of the daily bustle. Now to add in almsgiving. And to decide on a name.

Anna Maria Is Coming, or Maybe Thomas Barton, or Max!

BY HILDA RAZ

New life! Will he toe out like Dolly, like John? Will her eyes be fires?

Blue and green, like Papa's, the ocean at the shore?

Will she sing in the bath? Play piano in her diapers?

Will her heart leap at large machinery? Will he say, "Dribe dribe,"

to his daddy, entering the tunnel? Will his hair be red? Will her hair curl?

Will her little face have the circumflex eyebrows of her mother?

   The pointed chin?

Her hair be fair, bright blonde? Will she frown at the light by the river?

Oh, let her head fill with Greek Owls, her mouth with honey wine.

Let his hands cup the keys, the air of the studio filling with sound, the crunch of

cornflakes, the sift of raw sugar on the tongue, the great chords.

And let the parents be fierce forever, Lord, as You are, exacting

price and penalty for Your gifts, so they grow strong and joyous,

blessed by the memory of the black car, open to air,

chosen by a child in token of the power they give over,

their lives in service to new life, the great melt of petals under snow, the green rising.

Hilda Raz. "Anna Maria Is Coming, or Maybe Thomas Barton, or Max!" from Trans copyright © 2001 by Hilda Raz and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Source: Trans (Wesleyan University Press, 2001)

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180265

Backtracking again

I started this post a couple days ago – before my sister more eloquently described our day. I wouldn’t bother to post it, but I know at least one person in my audience will read it, and I don’t have time to rewrite it in a letter to him. Other issues around the household have absorbed my attention of late; because of their unresolved, tawdry, and emotionally exhausting nature, I don’t have much to say. All I will say is that tonight was the last chance to go to confession at our parish before the Triduum, and I showed up, after committing about 100 sins getting all the kids in the car, at the wrong time. In the next two days before we are going out of town for an Easter celebration and spring break trip to Texas, I might try to hunt down a church with sacraments for last minute penitents, but I’m also hoping that God will accept some of these trials as sufficient penance.



***

Thanks to our most loving mother, my sister and I were able to take a day trip to New Orleans sans enfants. We sat in on a couple of the Tennesee Williams literary festival talks, held in the Counting House at the beautiful Historic New Orleans Collection, a room that was painted wedgewood blue with near white trim. On the wall behind the lectern was an enormous portrait of three sisters in white Scarlet O’Hara dresses. I had a hard time keeping my eyes off them.

 

from www.hnoc.org

The wall to my left was also adorned with portraits from two centuries ago: a scowling older gentleman, the lady of the house, several young people, including a young girl who must have been the house maid. One dashing young man could have been a stand-in for Mr. Willoughby, with his dark tousled hair and flirtatious smile. Were these people actually related, or had the historical society collected some portraits and arranged them to indicate familial connections?

We also had time to spend wandering the streets of the French Quarter for a couple of hours. Browsed in a couple of shops pretending we might actually buy something. Stopped in for a sandwich at one little corner bistro but were overwhelmed by the patchouli, so we passed out again through the side door. Peeked around the Ursuline Convent, now a museum, and studied its intricate model of New Orleans, its reproductions of old Bibles, and its display of actual Episcopal jewels, which suggest that a great strength of humility is needed by the man who wears them to withstand the intoxication of power. The convent church was repainted in unfortunate pastels. The empty tabernacle indicated that it isn’t currently in use; unfortunately, it wasn’t repainted to represent the period during which the convent was flourishing. I noticed in the festival program that one of the presenters scheduled later in the weekend had written two books about the Ursulines, who settled in New Orleans nearly 3 centuries ago, and who must have represented order and peace in contrast with the bacchanalian pursuits indulged in a few blocks away. The partially tended garden, peopled by contemporary statues of southern spiritual leaders, scented with orange blossoms, and sprouting a few random herbs, suggested the peacefulness of the cloister that must once have thrived here. The visit to the convent was at least as instructive as the festival.

After visiting New Orleans on three separate occasions, the feeling of having arrived in a foreign land has faded a little. I feel like I can orient myself around the French Quarter: That way to the Mississippi River, the opposite way to the city park, which we only drove through, west to the Garden District, east back home. There is still much of the city to discover; I know we’ll be making a trip to do the Audubon zoo and insectarium at some point, and I’m daydreaming about a weekend trip with my husband after his return: we’ll check into one of the quaint little European style hotels a couple blocks up and over away from the shopping and bars. Then we’ll stroll at a romantic pace along the city streets for awhile before dining at one of the little bistros. The next day we’ll visit some churches and look for the oldest tombs at some cemeteries, before spending the rest of the afternoon at the art museum and picnicking in the city park. Maybe whoever is watching the kids could meet us there, so that we all could enjoy the little storybook theme park there.

I’m happy my mom and sister felt the instant enchantment of New Orleans on their first visit. You always want the people you love to love what you love. Like this picture.

Youth Serum

There is nothing for shaving 20 years off your age like sharing a bed with your sister. I finally had someone to put my ice cold feet on. Last night my visiting sister and I lay in my bed and whispered and giggled like we used to when we were afraid our mother would rap on the wall and tell us to quiet down. And maybe in the back of my mind, the little girl me was half afraid her half-awake mother, hair tousled into horns by sleep, was going to appear at the doorway and demand what in the world we were thinking. But we kept talking anyway until we became incoherent.



My sister and I look like two different sides of the family. If we were going to the Oscars, I would wear one of those simple, sleek column gowns like Gwyneth Paltrow. She’d wear something with a little décolleté and feminine curves like Kate Winslet. But we often think alike: while flipping through one of her fashion magazines while we were talking with my mom, who came along to visit too, I paused at an ad that showed two bronzed beauties in expensive clothes at the beach with their arms draped over each other, one looking directly at the camera, the other staring off into the horizon. “Look, it’s you and me!” I said.



She laughed. Apparently on the drive down here, my mom was looking at the same magazine and held up that ad with a disgusted, “Look at this.” And my sister said, “It looks like me and Emily.” Of course, the magazine is trying to suggest the eroticism that my mom picked up on, not sisterly love, although the two models do look alike. And if my sister and I hung around the beach like that, I’m sure we would get some stares because we don’t look alike. But we have often lamented that the sisters in Jane Austen’s day were allowed to be much more affectionate without suspicion.



Not that suspicion has deterred my sister from harassing me with irritating shoulder squeezes. She does not mind attracting attention. But then she has always been the beauty and I the brains in our sisterly partnership. (Not that she’s not brilliant, too, of course.) As teenagers, she read fashion magazines, and I read our grandfather’s scholarly magazines. Two nights ago we stayed up late detailing some of our differences: she’s afraid of getting old and ugly; I’m afraid of getting old and senile. And our mother, who is the most youthful mother of 30somethings I know, assured us we were both wonderful. But, motherly affirmations aside, we shared our struggles with coming to terms with being nearly middle-aged and having such a long way to go in our spiritual lives, although we are happy to point out each other’s root sins.



This visit is going to be a short one. We are off to New Orleans today, with two carloads of children in tow, so we are going to eat beignets and window shop in the French Quarter, peek into churches and then play at the park. Meanwhile, my sister and I are plotting our return to the fabled city on Thursday, if we can figure out the logistics of leaving our mother with the 11 cousins, so that we can sit in on the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and learn the failproof method of writing a novel in six months.  If we had planned ahead at all, she should have used one of her free vouchers to fly down here just for that.

An Encomium to My Sister

It is a truism in my family that my sister has been known for going a step too far. She likes to push conversations to points where people in the room feel slightly uncomfortable, and she is good at knowing what will make others squirm. But this trait is probably what makes her writing so powerful. She takes an image, a scene, and cuts out the extraneous details to focus on something (likely to be something thorny and uncomfortable) that is universally familiar, and then she ties up her story with a moment of personal metanoia.


Occasionally she has written about our family, and the thought crossed my mind that it would be interesting to tell a counterpoint version to her experience, but then I realized I lacked her courage to pinpoint the truth, as well as her gift to craft a well-written blog post. She has a writer’s knack for bringing life to her words with imagery and insight to her readers with well chosen phrasing, although she might leave out some details in preference to others, or embellish some facts. In one jocular reply to a commenter, she claims she can't tell lies. As a child, this was because her dimple always ratted her out when she tried to lie. As an adult, she doesn't lie, but edits her experiences, retells them in the distinctive voice of her online persona, and focuses on her spiritual dramas to craft interesting, enlightening, and well told stories.

I hope she continues to tell them, even if they may not always be what we want to hear.