lenten journal: re-reading our lives

Today was the first day of the week that I have not had to go from school to the Duke restaurant. Instead, I came home to cook dinner. OK, first I took a basketball nap, meaning I dozed off watching first round games of the NCAA Men’s Tournament, and then I went grocery shopping, and then I cooked dinner. Around our table tonight were Cherry, Diane, and Julie, each one of whom we have known since she was sixteen, though they each marked that age in different years. Julie, our former foster daughter, is visiting from Boston, so I made Chicken Broccoli Ziti, her favorite, and the five of us sat around the table for three or four hours telling stories that moved through time as though it were a big old house with rooms of memories that could be explored at will.

I received my weekly email today from the Utne Reader, one of the things in my life that allows me to get caught off guard, to find a link to an article about “The Fine Art of Re-reading Books” written by Richard O’Mara. In the middle of it he writes of a recalled memory brought to light by his re-reading:

Why, I asked myself, had I not retrieved these memories before? Why had I let them lie there, darkened by the decades that had fallen over them like soot? My mind, or the office within it responsible for organizing and filing memories, apparently decided to lock away those recollections for good. It took the late Herr Remarque to spring them. That these memories had nothing to do with the book itself suggests that anything buried deep in the brain, when dredged up, can have clinging to it things that have nothing to do with the object recovered.

The article caught my eye because I am re-reading A Passage to India because one of my friends at the Durham restaurant wanted to read it. The last time I read it, I was teaching British Literature at Winchester High School, and I am finding the faces and questions of my students between the lines as I work my way down the page. When I was asked to teach the class, I asked my department head if I could do something other than start at Beowulf and march down through the years. When she said yes, I gravitated to colonial and post-colonial literature because it was what I knew experientially from my days in Africa and it was the literature that moved me. I knew from experience that offering literature that didn’t move me was to offer my students a corpse of a class: we would find no life there. That first year I went from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (still one of my favorites) to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to Forster to Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, moving from colonialism to the days of independence, from separation to the first attempts at friendship across the divides caused by imperialism and conquest.

Ginger, Cherry, Diane, and Julie were all a part of my life in those days, though none of them was in the class or reading the books. As O’Mara said, I find the memories of the days we spent together stuck to the pages as I read again of Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested:

They had made such a romantic voyage across the Mediterranean and through the sands of Egypt to the harbour of Bombay, to find only a gridiron of bungalows at the end of it. But she did not take the disappointment as seriously as Miss Quested, for the reason that she was forty years older, and had learnt that Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually. (23)

The five of us around the table tonight, eating and drinking and talking, took me back to any number of Thursday nights at our home in Charlestown. For several years we had Thursday Night Dinners for whoever wanted to come. If you came once, you had a place card; once you had the card, you always had an invitation. You just had to call by noon on Wednesday to let us know you were coming. The number varied, but the experience was the same: long after we had finished eating we sat around the table talking and laughing and making memories, just as we did tonight. Yet, we didn’t sit down tonight to recreate something that happened years ago. We re-read our lives together and fell into the stream of memory and meaning that remains as present as it does past.

An author puts words to page because he or she can do no other, I suppose, trusting that answering the call to art is a worthwhile response, even if that response feels somewhat feeble and futile. How could the story of an old woman in India be a response to the British colonial enterprise? I don’t know how to answer that question with anything other than I am reading the book again, eighty-five years later.

Wait. I have one more answer. The story is as significant as our supper tonight. On this seventh anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War, in the middle of the struggle for healthcare reform, in the silence and struggle that followed earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, in the middle of the change and grief and sorrow and hope that mark our own lives, we sat down for dinner together. We sat down with all of those who once gathered around the table in Charlestown, with the memories of our shared existence, and with the understanding that whenever the adventure presents itself we will be ready to remind one another to take the risk.

I left the table filled and ready for adventure, whenever it shows up.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: turns of phrase

I started rereading A Passage to India today.

One of the people I work with at the Durham restaurant was asking for books to read and I suggested my favorite of E. M. Forster’s novels. When she said she was going to read it, I decided I would go along for the ride. The flyleaf of my copy, which now has duct tape for the binding, says I bought the book in 1994, when I was working on my Masters at UMass Boston. I was taking a class on the English novel and wrote a paper on Forster, which required my reading of all of his novels. When I started teaching Honors Brit. Lit. at Winchester High School, I found a stack of them in the book room (the editions were older than I was at the time) and gave them to my classes. My copy has margin notes and markings in three different ink colors, for each of the three years I read the book with my students.

I remember passing one of them in the hall at school one day and asking her how she liked the novel. “It’s OK,” she said, “but you get so excited when you talk about it that I’ve kept reading.” I wasn’t two pages into the book today when I remembered why I got so excited. I love this book.

I’m a week and a half into teaching high school again and I feel like I’ve tapped back into something familiar and strong, like finding an old record album I listened to for years and having the songs come to life again inside of me. The heart of it lies in stories, but more so the living ones in front of me than the written ones I’m trying to get them to read. When I first started teaching at Charlestown High School, which was made up of kids from all over Boston, seventy-five percent of whom were nonnative English speakers and first generation immigrants, and she would say, “Whatever happens, don’t take it personally.” It took me a couple of years to catch on, but I finally did. I also learned that perspective works fairly well with most adults in any number of settings. The amazing thing about my job is I have a daily opportunity to be kind to people who are still learning what kindness is. Or not.

I got to thinking about it because of a phrase in the first chapter of Passage that has nothing to do with school, teenagers, kindness, or America, for that matter, but it set my mind sailing:

. . . so that new-comers cannot believe it to be as meagre as it is described, and have to be driven down to acquire disillusionment. (4-5)

We acquire disillusionment; it isn’t built in.

Forster is describing the colonial compound that sits on the mountain above the beleaguered city of Chandrapore, India. It’s location comes with the most incredible view that allows people to overlook the poverty and squalor that exists below. People had to literally be driven down to see what colonialism had actually wrought. The phrase hit me metaphorically as I read this morning and left me wondering what is capable of driving me down to disillusionment, and what bus I need to catch to ride back up and out of it.

The phrase also hit me because of another phrase I’ve been carrying around for a week or so, thanks to Nora Gallagher, its larger context being a prayer of St. Augustine that she quotes:

Keep watch dear Lord with those who work, or watch, or weep this night and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for love’s sake. (38)

As with Forster’s book, this is not my first time reading Practicing Resurrection, and that phrase caught me the first time around. Today it came back to me almost as soon as I read about acquiring disillusionment: shield the joyous. As tenacious as joy may appear, it is tender and vulnerable. A joyous heart is an open one; open hearts are sitting ducks. Shield the joyous.

Abel, my cooking partner, is a joyous soul. He works tirelessly, supports family members here and back in Guatemala, and is constantly looking to learn. I asked him tonight what he has been reading and he answered, “Cooking books.” He turned the steaks over on the grill and said, “And another book by someone named Rick Warren and it asks this question: what on earth am I here for?” He pointed his tongs my way and said, “That’s a good question.”

Yes, it is. Part of the answer is we are here to do more than acquire disillusionment. We are here to be joyous, and to shield one another. We are here, as the Body of Christ, to incarnate all the verbs in Augustine’s prayer: tend the sick, give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous.

All for love’s sake.

Peace,
Milton