Ellen Herrick

Author of The Sparrow Sisters

I Have No Elf on a Shelf

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XmasXtreeX2015

 

My children are grown now so we missed the Elf on a Shelf extravaganza. And, no I am not sorry. Not that we didn’t have our own, certainly less KGB, elf tradition. It began with my father. But really, it began with his five sisters and three brothers on a tobacco farm in 1930s North Carolina. There wasn’t a lot of money in this big family but there was a lot of love. The older children looked out for the younger right down to making sure the magic and mystery of Christmas, elves and all, was never forgotten. They are all gone now; my father was the last. But, they left me with a lasting love of the season and an unshakeable belief in the power of family love.

My sister and I lived on the seventh floor in an elegant building on Central Park West. There was a wood-burning fireplace in the living room and a long foyer covered in big black and white checkerboard tiles. We could roller skate out our apartment door, onto the elevator, through the grand building entrance and right into the park. This is not a real estate ad, just a little background. Both of my parents grew up in rural North Carolina; my mother went to college, my father did not. They came to New York in 1951 to be actors. My mother became a teacher, my father became an executive. We, their urban kids, became their audience.

Growing up in New York City in the sixties and seventies was a study in contrasts. I suppose it still is. Then the only reason you ventured onto Columbus Avenue was to go to the Sloan’s Supermarket, the drycleaners or to make your way, quickly, to Broadway and the World o’ Nuts shop for fruit leather. Then during the Christmas season I spent every evening–and afternoons on Wednesday and Saturday–in the State Theatre dancing (flailing, honestly) in The Nutcracker. No, really, I never could figure out why Mr. Balanchine picked me out of the back row every damn time. At any rate, this was my job for a lot of years. I would take the number ten bus down Central Park West to Lincoln Center clutching a book and a bag of tights, slippers and makeup. My hair was tricked out in ringlets and sprayed hard as rock candy but I had to depend on the kindness of one of the other dancers to paint me up at the theatre because my mother was of the opinion that you never wore stage makeup on the street. “Only an amateur would do that, darling,” she advised me.

Most evenings after the ballet I’d take the number ten back, much of my makeup smeared off with this sort of gelid cream that sat in stained pots all along the dressing room tables. But every now and then my father would meet me at the stage door and we’d walk home. Some nights it snowed and the street lamps were haloed with white light, the park blanketed and the taxis shushing down Central Park West like sleds. We sang Christmas carols as we walked until my father decided that either Broadway classics or the great American songbook standards would be more motivating in the cold.

One year a performance fell on the same evening as a grand party my parents were giving at the apartment. We walked home and into a golden whirl of people in their festive best, glasses sparkling, Noel Coward singing in the background (on the record player, that is) and my mother in the most marvelous black and white checked taffeta skirt that matched our foyer. Everyone applauded when I came in as if I were a prima ballerina instead of a skinny kid. Mom whisked me through the foyer and into her dressing room where she wiped off the rest of the makeup and slipped me into my Christmas finery. She was an excellent seamstress and made all our clothes when my sister and I were little. This time my outfit was a deep blue velvet suit; shorts, jacket, ruffled shirt and white tights, patent Mary Janes. I looked like an idiot. I was infuriated. Well, that’s neither here nor there; it’s just a Christmas memory that popped up. Stay with me, I’ll bring this home, promise.

Back to our elf tradition courtesy of the North Carolina family. It began the week before Christmas. We’d be sitting around doing not terribly much when suddenly my father would freeze facing the window.

“Did you see that?” he’d whisper.

“What?” I was already shivering in anticipation; it had begun.

“An elf, I just saw an elf! He was right there!” My father would point out the window. “Oh, another one!”

It never occurred to me to wonder how an elf got to the seventh floor just as it never occurred to me to question how Santa came down our chimney in a sixteen-story apartment building without shooting off into someone else’s hearth. Nope, I just squealed and hid behind my father while I searched for a glimpse of this creature somehow hovering over the Upper West Side.

Years later, my three children would be welcomed into the wonder by my Dad. We lived in London, which made the idea of elves scrambling along the rooftops of Notting Hill utterly believable to us all, because Peter Pan, right? Dad was just as good at the game as he was when I was little and my kids were just as thrilled as they looked and looked out the tall windows, the old glass wavy with age. It was magic every single year.

Well, then here’s my point. Today, in Cambridge in our little jewelbox house, I have no Elf on a Shelf, nor do I have Dad (or Mom) anymore but I do have this tradition. In the days ahead I will have all three children home and no doubt, at some moment when I am sure everyone is distracted I will say, “Hush, look! Did you see that? An elf!” and they will turn to the window together and laugh.

 

The End is Nigh

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kid gloves

It is a fact that I tend toward melancholy.  This is not to be confused with having a sentimental streak.  THAT I do not.  At our recent yard sale—which nearly killed me and several of the shoppers—I all but threw merchandize (including vintage linen and quilts, 60-year old, pristine kid gloves, silver plate whiskey sour muddlers and a set of library steps) at the milling crowd.  “Take it,” I screamed, “Just get it out of here!”  When a particularly creepy man asked us if there was more to see inside the house I almost told him “Yes, just go in there and strip the joint!”

Anybody want an eiderdown?

Right, where was I?  Oh yes, melancholy.  That’s me.  This is my time of year, then.  I see the dark at the edges of the light, September whispering down August’s neck and I have a frisson of pleasure.  As much as I love summer; the sun, the sea, the surf, the sand, the laundry, the care and feeding of hundreds (no, really, hundreds) of kids and adults (Oh fine, I’ve kind of hit the wall on the care and feeding part), I am glad that I wake a bit later as the sun rises.  I am secretly thrilled as I stand on the porch and hug my shoulders in the chill.  I am also terrifically sad.

Last of the Last

The roses are gone, all but a few “volunteers” who poke up bravely, the Shasta daisies are beheaded, the cosmos ratty, the zinnias leggy and the blackberries all but eaten up by man and beast.  The petunias (God, I hate petunias) are limp and slimy and the tomatoes have gone hyperabundant so that when I go to the gym I sneak a bagful onto the reception counter.

Killer Tomatoes

The crickets are singing instead of the tree peepers and the beach has emptied out.  My sons are back at work and college, my daughter is dreaming of #2 pencils and pink pearl erasers.  “Can I get a new backpack?” has replaced “Do we have any surfboard wax?”  The shift is absolutely tangible and even the crows have given up their morning meetings on the lawn.

I have always lived at the sharp corner of bitter and sweet.  I look at a flower in full bloom and can already feel its death.   Even as I pick the nearly translucent lettuce leaves of my third crop, pinch off enough basil to dress the tomatoes, I am mourning their end.   In the positively electric glow of pink and orange and velvety deep purple dahlias I see the mold at their roots.

Dahlias, darling

I am inordinately fond of dahlias although they are just one of my favorite flowers.  Peonies, sweet peas, privet, lilac and roses are all in that list.  It is not lost on me that each of these is terribly fragile in their natures.  Their season is brutally short; their blossoms last a matter of days at best.  And, while their colors can be vivid, eye-catching, shocking almost, there is something particularly pleasing about the soft wash of pink and, pale yellow or lavender that marks the earliest flowers.  The scent of a new rose ranges from lemon to peach to your mother’s dressing table—provided your mother is Blanche Dubois, as mine often was.  The smell of a cultivated sweet pea catches cloyingly in your throat.  That of a wild one flies over the rock walls and tumbling dunes in a whisper-soft touch of clear water and tea.  Privet is sharp and sweet at the same moment and will forever remind me of the early days of childhood summer: biking down to the beach, brushing against a hedge and dodging the bees who got to the flowers first.  Dahlias, for their part, have no particular scent although when you cut the stem with a satisfyingly celery-like crunch, there is a whiff of tomato blossom.  And as for peonies and lilac, I can be overtaken by an almost Victorian swoon at first sniff.  I have an uncanny ability to recall these scents and more in my head so that in deepest winter I am able to reassure myself that summer will come again.  I suppose that gift is in part why I’m a good cook (pat to back); I am able to think of ingredients and mix them in my head until I can smell the aroma and very nearly taste the dish itself.

Memory is tied to melancholy, I think.  Whatever your trigger: sound, scent, sight, it is almost impossible to remember without the hint of loss.  After all, what’s remembered is, in fact, gone.  Still, I find comfort in melancholy.  I remember gazing in exhausted wonder at my infant children and mentally preparing for the day they would dismiss me.  And they have, naturally.

Outer Beach

I watch the summer sky and picture the ladder of clouds that will stack up over the ocean in the fall.  The smell of gin and tonic not only recalls July evenings on the lawn but June afternoons in England.  Both send a trembling sadness through me because both are done.

Striped Bass

Striped Bass

Hey, let’s not get all maudlin (or madeleine since we’re on the subject of remembrance), and let me tell you, I do not for a moment feel sorry for myself or indulge in navel gazing (mostly because I have no desire to locate my navel these days).  It’s just that I seem to practice a kind of brinkmanship when it comes to happiness.  I just can’t quite ‘forget your troubles, come on get happy’ unless I am teetering on the edge of sad.  It’s a kind of compare and contrast exercise.  Any trouble, or to be more accurate because I am terribly lucky (knock wood), my tendency to see the shadow that defines the light, does in fact make beauty more intense.  My children seem more crisply outlined as they walk away, my garden both heavy and weightless in the sun, the striped bass magnificent and tragic as it heads for my table (or the back of the Jeep in this case).  I will feel the same in October as the sharp poke of winter nudges at me, the day after Christmas when all the wrapping, the stockings, the snow, the tree itself look tawdry as a streetwalker in daylight.  In June I’ll cluck my tongue when the sweet peas give way to the clematis and the leaves on the dogwoods go from a translucent green to a dusty olive.

The Boards

For now, I will breathe deep of the sharp, acrid scent of marigolds, sweep away the drift of pollen beneath the sunflowers on my table, tuck a last basil plant into the raised bed.  I will begin the march toward fall by packing up the unopened box of sea salt, putting the butter in the freezer, gathering the stray clothes pegs from the lawn, putting the boys’ bathing suits away and everyone’s surfboards in the barn.  Each of these steps, rituals if you will, is right and proper and signal that I am about to cross the border from season to season.

The Inlet

I do not feel cheated of a single moment and yet, there it is, the twinge of regret, the slight hitch in my step as I give one last look at the receding shoreline of summer.

20/20

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It’s time to put on my reflecto-vision glasses.  What?  You don’t have a pair?  You know, the ones you buy off the back of an Archie comic, right next to the X-ray Specs and the itching powder.  Most people go for the X-ray Specs because the picture shows a lady in her undies.  But, in case you haven’t wasted that allowance yet, they don’t work.  The reflecto-vision glasses, on the other hand, are guaranteed to show you the past with a mixture of insight and nausea.  I know, mine are hanging on the chain with my readers. January is as good an excuse as any to take a look through them.

We had a lovely Christmas.  Everyone was home, we had to stack the boys like cord wood in the Cambridge house.  Once Emma was out of school we hightailed it to the Cape so that we didn’t have to circle, like jumbo jets, outside the bathroom.  Before you haul out the Bing Crosby and The Bishop’s Wife…oh go ahead, haul ’em out.  The roast and Yorkshire pudding, the capon, the chipped beef on toast and the Boxing Day lunch tradition lived on.

Satisfying on every level.  Then, we returned to Cambridge with everyone and everything in tow.  Because a family Christmas fills me with joy and sucks the life out of me simultaneously, I ran right back (screaming) to the Cape.  My husband saw my eyes beginning to take on that marginally lunatic cast and suggested I might need some “alone time” and by that he meant, step away from the…well, just step away.  So I did.  The children are fine, in case you worried.  David is recovering nicely.


I spent three days in a deliciously empty house with my reflecto-specs firmly perched on my nose.  No blinding instants of clarity, no aha! moments.  Just a little time to remember how lucky I am.  Lucky to have been slightly overwhelmed by sheer numbers, lucky to drive back and forth to Boston in the snow to collect my Dad, and then again to return him.  Feeling particularly lucky to be kneeling on the floor at midnight Christmas Eve trying to find the little green army man that made it through 16 years in London, one Christmas tree at a time, all the way back to America.  That army man belongs to William, he used to make bases behind the presents and in the branches of our Christmas trees and it was suddenly terribly important to get Cap’n Bob back up for year 17.  Luckily, I found him.

I use the word lucky a lot.  It isn’t always so smart or safe.  At the end of August, 2001 just after my sister came for a visit to the Cape I went on a “we are so lucky” spree.  I was so pleased by the visit, the way her children, mine and the rest of the cousins built the world’s most rickety tree house and sailed and swam and laughed.  I was thrilled to have David around for two solid weeks.  The whole time felt slightly enchanted.  About a week later it was September 11th and a week after that may sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, and in what felt like only minutes everything turned to shit.  But of course, that wasn’t true.  I was still lucky, because none of these horrible things happened directly to me.  Still, suddenly everything was so terribly fragile.  And, yet, here I am, feeling lucky again because I’ve got this messy, sprawly family with every ailment and blessing that comes with that.  I know I should be more careful, keep an eye out for the “Your life looks entirely too happy” Gods (they sit on a much higher level than the Traffic or Weather Gods so their punishment goes far beyond a jackknifed tractor trailer or rain on vacation) but I just spent those three days ALONE and the glow lingers prettily.

People who know me know this; I am strangely sensitive to over-stimulation.  This from a woman who can be extremely loud and incredibly close.  That is, if I love you (or don’t), think something is funny (or not), boy do you know it.  But, I definitely have a saturation point (even for myself).  It’s kind of like having a finely tuned gag reflex.  I can pack it in: the lights, the kissing and hugging, the laughing and cooking and yapping, the washing of the guest towels and sheets.  And in the flush of all that goodness, I know how lucky I am.  But then, it all comes back up in a rush of fever dreams and aphasia.  I can’t remember my children’s names or why I’m standing in the living room with an oyster knife.  I can’t bear the sound of family voices arguing over trivialities or laughing at YouTube.  When I lean over to pick up the scattered bits and pieces that spill out of their lives a headache builds and I feel as if there is a box of photographs and thread and old matchbooks and pencil stubs knocking around in my brain.  That’s when David offers the release valve–and the words “I am no Stephen King victim”–so I drive off, laughing maniacally.

After floating around the Cape for a few days with the specs on, group activity overdose hissing gently out of my pores, I did have one extremely useful revelation-ette.  I have been so busy feeling lucky that I forgot to feel grateful.  There is a difference.  For instance I was lucky enough to spend a couple of crisp November days on Nantucket with my friend Lisa (the one who taught me to swim–not how to do it but how I must do it).  I am grateful that we belong together and that she feels that too.  I am lucky to be within hours of my sister for the first time in years.  I am grateful that she stops time to spend some with me.  I am lucky that my husband still wants me by his side.  I am grateful that he stands shoulder to shoulder with me when it gets awfully dark (or when I put on skates for the first time in 20 years and my daughter hip checks me into a nearby pine).  There, you see the distinction.

So, I think I can take the glasses off now.  I passed the (hind) sight test and managed to draw a lesson from it without having the ophthalmologist of present and future weigh in.  It reminds me of the psychological experiment where they put these upside-down glasses on some patients. The whole world was stood on its head.  After a few days, the subjects adjusted.  When the glasses were removed, the poor things were already in the habit and continued to step OVER the door lintel and turn their cups bottoms UP causing hot tea to pour all over their wrists.

I guess I’m in for a bumpy few days as I try to remember exactly where it is I stand.

Lucky me!

I Do Believe in Faeries, I Do, I Do.

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I have been reading a lot of books about faeries and shape shifters lately. I read a lot of books, period.  But, you knew that about me.  Since my daughter Emma became a more eager reader in the last couple of years I have taken up Young Adult fiction.  No, that’s not true.  I have rediscovered that kind of fiction and I am terribly grateful to Emma for that.  Right now, there is a lot of crud filed away under Young Adult, a lot of scary, ugly, angry stuff in those books.  But, there is magic, too.  There’s the real kind, faeries and wizards and talking animals, and there is the more subtle kind, those words written by a grownup, a mother or a father perhaps, that so perfectly capture a voice (theirs, maybe, their own voice remembered) that both Emma and I say “Yes, that is exactly how it feels!”  Exactly how it still feels.

I learned to read (at birth, my mother would say) in the grass, at the beach, along the sandy lanes of East Hampton, New York.  In an unlikely scenario, my family summered there from 1952 until the year Emma was born.  My father, the child (one of nine) of a weary tobacco farmer and my mother, the last daughter of an unhappy, careless boarding house owner, found each other in the theater. They built for us a stage set of such unexpected beauty and sophistication that we swept, thoughtlessly, joyfully through the curtain and into the life they had dared to dream for us.

East Hampton wasn’t a chic, crowded place in my years.  It was a wonderful tumble of artists and farmers and bicycles and salty boys on surfboards.  It was a world of best friends (besties) who met at dawn and dusk to fly kites and play light tag in the gathering dark.  It was Charlie and Liz and Claire.  It was my father coming down to the beach on August 5th, 1962 with a silver thermos of martinis saying “Marylin is gone.”  Oh, fine, I don’t remember that precisely but it has become such an iconic image in our family I might as well.  In the cool, shadowy halls and stacks of the tiny East Hampton Library I learned that as fine a place as this was, there were other finer, wilder places I could go.  And go I did, sometimes while still sitting on the floor of the stacks.  I would stumble out, blinking in the light and heat of the summer sun, startled by the foreignness of the real world.

I remember one day, standing in bare feet (you could still do that then) running my finger across the spines of the books.  It occurred to me that I would have to start reading grown up books soon.  I was about 30.  No I wasn’t, I was probably no more than 12 or 13, Emma’s age.  I was filled with melancholy, weighed down by the realization that I would never, surely never, feel about any book as I did about Charlotte’s Web or A Wrinkle in Time.  There were tears (really) and I walked slowly past the low shelves, the boxes of toys, the displays of picture books and into the main fiction stacks.  I thought that was it, there was no going back.  I had left the childrens’ room for the too big tables and heavy chairs of the adult section.  But, of course, I have gone back, again and again.  I have returned most recently with Emma.  Oh, not to East Hampton, I don’t think I could bear to see it now, but to my book world and hers.  And, if we are no longer barefoot, the floor cool beneath us, we are still transported magically, effortlessly.  We have our documents in order, our passports, our permission slips and we cross the border, together.

I look at Emma sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, when she isn’t looking at me.  Her silver blond hair has deepened to something more like gold, her soft, pliant limbs are now long and lean with muscle.  She is still slight, girl-like though never girly.  But there is a simmering just under her skin.  It is the glow of the young adult, the sharp light that threatens to crack her skin and break my heart.  And it will, as it should.  The confidence she had in me, the way her body gaveas it bent towards me has been replaced by a prickly independence, a distance that makes her as unknowable to me as an actual faery.  And yet, there she is, lying on her stomach, one knee bent, foot waving in the air.  There, the book open before her, hair falling forward, tongue poking through her lips in concentration.  Yes, that is my child, just a glimpse before she parts the curtain, wanders away from me and passes through to the life I dared to dream for her.

Keeping Faith

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I spent a bare 24 hours in deepest, darkest Wiltshire last week.  It isn’t that deep, a couple of hours outside London and it isn’t that dark, the sun duked it out with the rain the whole time we were there.  And let’s be honest, 24 hours is hardly a trip, it’s a ‘tripette’ as my friend Fiona would say. In fact, she did say it as we piled into the car with my husband.

This little jaunt came into being last August.  I told David I was setting a part of my second novel in Wiltshire because I so enjoyed visiting with friends who weekend in one of Henry VII’s hunting lodges in Wiltshire.  “That’s in Hampshire,” David said.  Oh.  I guess I’d better look up a few things about Wiltshire, then.   “We can do better than that,” he said.  “Let’s take a drive out when we get back to England, and let’s take Fiona.”  So, I owe this tripette to David.

Wiltshire is the home of Salisbury Plain, Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge.  Oh, and about as many sheep as there are cows in all of Vermont.  It is also home to a tiny village called Lacock.  As you can imagine, our mispronunciation of the name Lacock was quickly corrected by Fiona and was an endless source of amusement to us all.   It is pronounced Lay-cock.  OK, spelled out this isn’t much better.  And, we got just tad lost trying to find it.  “Have a little faith,” David said.  When our map told us that we were, indeed, in Lacock, we cheered.  It is one of the most beautiful places and has appeared in countless films: masquerading as a village in several Harry Potters and a couple Jane Austens.  Some of the most quintessentially English countryside images on film owe themselves to Lacock.  We stayed at The Sign of the Angel.  It was lovely, ancient, and owes it’s name to an Elizabethan era gold coin.  I love that they display the original 16th Century kitchen draining board as if it were a priceless piece of art.  Which it is, really.

We had a nice wander around the village.  The houses lean companionably against each other as they have for centuries and the now empty Tithe Barn surprises you with its austere beauty.  Great, arching beams bend across the ancient brick and plaster ceilings echoing the cloisters down the road at the Abbey.  We stopped at a pub for a pint by the fire.  The hearth is huge and still boasts the 16th Century spit which owes its usefulness to the little ‘spitdog’ who ran around the ‘spitwheel’ which hangs on the wall by the front door.  The owner explained that spitdogs were bred specifically to run the wheel in two shifts.  One dog started and the other finished making sure that the slab o’ meat was done to a turn.  The starter dog only had to run first shift every other day and if the dog on call had hidden from his duty, the other one hunted him down.  I mean, it was his turn, after all.

We sat and watched the regulars ebb and flow through the pub, ducking their heads as they came in and out of the low-beamed front door.  An older gentleman took the table near ours and gave a polite nod to us.  Fiona gave her musical hello (“Hah-lo-oh!”) and the man was done for.  I rolled my eyes, I am distinctly unfriendly.  Here it comes, I thought, chit chat of the dullest sort.  Shame on me.  Under Fiona’s gentle questioning we learned about this elegant gentleman: how long he’d lived here, far from his home in the North, because he followed the woman he loved fifty years ago.  And, how he loved her and this village.  When she died, he couldn’t bring himself to leave, nowhere else felt like home anymore.  He told us that with a hitch in his voice.  He’s alone now, I thought.  This is sad.  I wish I didn’t know this about him.  Just then another, equally old guy came in.  He didn’t have to duck, his back was so bent by age he was nearly doubled over.  “Hullo, Dad,” he said to our new friend.  “Hullo, son,” our guy replied, and they both laughed.  “The usual?” they said to each other.  Both men were so far, FAR, from being alone or sad that I laughed not just at their little joke but at my sloppy, swift slide into melodrama.  Thanks, Fiona, I owe you.

That night we ate in the restaurant at our Inn.  Everything was delicious but nothing so much as the simple boiled new potatoes in butter and parsley.  Taking a bite was like opening your mouth to the moon as my mother used to say.  That first bite was so sweet, so clean it tasted like laughter.  Now, I laugh a lot.  So do Fiona and David.  And, when we’re together we verge on gentle hysteria.  There was only one other table in the restaurant and two men sat chatting and eating.  They’d given us a cheery greeting when we sat down and they had chuckled enough with each other that we felt comfortable yucking it up as per usual.  Halfway through the meal Fiona and I were snorting about John vs Bob Denver (don’t bother) when one of the men said, “It can’t be that funny.”  Fiona looked at him and said, “No, it’s funnier,” which only made one of those tiny new potatoes threaten a nasal exit from my side of the table.  The two men laughed nearly as hard at Fiona’s answer.  They had a great dinner, thanks in part to us.

We pulled into the Stonehenge car park (imagine a gravelly expanse decorated with Stonehenge-iana) and I prepared for a quick walk around the place with David saying things like, “Don’t take a picture, they’ll think we’re tourists.”  Who, the Druids?  The busloads of other tourists?  But, Fiona picked up the free audio guide and an hour later we were all standing in front of the massive stones saying “Wow!  How cool was that?”

Our next stop was Salisbury Cathedral.  And, yes, it is beautiful.  Looking up you’re reminded of the Lacock Abbey and its monks and the Tithe Barn and it’s farmers and of all the hands that gave and worked to make it.  You see how the arches bend and bow like silent waves through the air and then the choir voices rise and it is almost too much as the sound laps over you until you feel the music fill your chest, crowding out everything but awe.  And, in the center of the apse, the new baptismal font.  Dark, lambent green and deep enough for full immersion, it is modern in its spareness.  Or is it?  It, too curves in on four sides like a cross, like the beams and the arches.  The surface of the water is absolutely still, black and reflective. You can see the cathedral in it.  It is so perfectly designed that the water flows continuously out of four graceful spouts into the cathedral’s stone floor.  Silver as mercury, as a safety pin, it pours down in a thin stream.  The foundation of Salisbury Cathedral is only four feet deep.  It is built on a flood plain, and I can feel the holy water returning to it, blessed beneath my feet.  In fact–and this is what kept me from having a total conversion experience (well, not much to convert, but I was never baptised and feel an occasional frisson of terror at the thought of spending eternity in God’s version of a bank queue)–the verger must check the water level daily.  He uses a long pole ending in a rather bedraggled sponge to dip through a specially made hole in the floor.  As long as the sponge comes up wet, all is well.  So, I was pulled from the brink not by a hook but a sponge pole.  Along the walls of the cathedral are stone crypts, their lids effigies of their residents.  Nothing makes me happier that when I see a knight and his lady side by side in death as in life, their pointy little chain-mailed feet and gloved hands draped gracefully together.  I grabbed David’s and Fiona’s hands in an unconscious echo.

Right, that’s Salisbury Cathedral, then.  We went on to see one of only four copies of the Magna Carta, to which all democracies owe a great debt, the Salisbury Plain and all the ghosts of battles past that roam its rolling green, and sheep, lots and lots of sheep.  But here’s what kept whispering through me:  from the ancients who hauled the massive stones into place to mark the seasons (or the hours, or their gods), to the monks in silent devotion as they paced their cloisters, to the farmers who gave of their wheat to keep the Abbey, to the stonemasons who built the great cathedral, to David and Fiona who swept me off to see Wiltshire because I’m writing something that may become something or may not but, damn it, should at least be accurate in its settings, they all had faith.  Each one of the named and nameless have faith that what they do should be done.

Along the font in the cathedral are four lines from the baptism service.  One is “I have called you by name, you are mine.”  Somehow, all of us are called to do this thing that makes and remakes our world.    We continue to do this thing, or that one, because we must.  We must continue.   Just as the arches bend to each other, the one ending at the next’s beginning, one kind of faith gives rise to another.  Or, put another way, its all just one big faith that the world will keep spinning, that, yes, it is funnier or more beautiful or more beloved and brighter and better than you can ever imagine.  And why not?  Why not celebrate it?  All of it.

Joy Rising, Sorry Oprah

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I have a friend, one of those real ones that your kid brings over to you on the playground or in front of the school and says, “Here, this is so and so’s Mum, you’ll love her.”  There are other real ones, like the girl you met Freshman year in college who is so different from you and yet so alike that you can’t stop listening to her stories and you start using the same soap she does because you want to smell just like her.  But more about her, another time.

Anyway, I met this particular friend, as I said, at my son’s school.  She has what is called here a double-barreled surname.  But, in her case, it’s a quadruple-barreled surname.  You know, Eugenia Tibble-Spencer-Blatherington-Smythe, III.  I would tell you the actual name but then you’d think her veddy, veddy English and snooty, which she’s not.  Not. At. All.  Although, to be fair, her voice is elegant, her tones pear-shaped, her skin so like a rose you’d be forgiven for wanting to curtsy.  Never mind.  If you did wobble into one, she’d just tell you (in a voice that makes you want to stop talking, forever) “Oh, do get up, darling, you make me feel like a fucking idiot.”

This is a woman who wears a hat like nobody else, and an evening gown, and Wellington boots, and an apron that says “Keep Calm and Carry On,” probably all at the same time.  She is organized and efficient and completely incapable of letting anyone down.  She also radiates light in the most effortless, self-effacing way.  She would be extraordinary if that was her whole story.  But it is not.

This friend has endured tragedy on an unimaginable scale.  I won’t be more specific but try to imagine it anyway: think of the worst loss you can, and multiply it.  Then, throw on a wallop of more crap, and then, pitch yourself down a flight of stairs.  So, now that I’ve beaten you into a senseless depression, listen to this: She still radiates light.  She still makes me laugh so hard I blow tea out my nose.  What my friend does, and what has saved her, is this: She takes joy in other people’s joy.  She can dip her long, graceful fingers into their happiness and let it spill over her, into her.  Her joy in genuine, it is not forced or false.  It’s the real deal.  It becomes her, is her.  She’s like an empath that way.  And, as you see your happiness reflected in her, it only intensifies it for you and you can’t believe your great good fortune to have landed in her world.  She does all this without making you feel as small as the Who on Horton’s trunk.  She makes you feel clever and special and lovely for having a wonderful thing happen to you, because you so deserve it.

My dear friend has an expression when you thank her for something.  “Only a pleasure,” she says.  Or, if you’re terribly lucky, she graces you with “Pleazh, Treazh.”  Pleasure, Treasure.  But, really she’s  the treasure, and you’re the one blessed with the pleasure of her presence in your life.  And you think, just for a moment, that, yes, you do deserve it.

Riding in Cars with Boys

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In the mornings, after everyone has gone to school, I make my way through the house.  I pick clothes up off the floor, stack notebooks, flush toilets and yes, make beds.  Now, while it’s true that my children make their own beds, I remake them.  I wonder if, when they are in their rooms at the end of the day, they look at their beds and marvel at how the duvets are smooth and unruffled, the pillows piled just so. Do they think, damn, I make a fine bed?  Do they silently thank me for my controlling ways?  Probably not.

All this to preface a confession.  Sometimes, if it is chilly or I am tired, I crawl into one of the beds, like Goldilocks.  It is still warm under the covers they’ve hastily spread.  My daughter shares her bed with a dozen stuffed animals who stare glassy eyed at the pop star posters on her walls.  My son shares his bed with a laptop, Blackberry and, currently, Plato’s dialogues.  It is dark in the bunk bed and smells of little girl.  It is light in the double bed and smells of man.  When I stumble out I step over cleats and socks and jewelry boxes and ponytail things.  I am disoriented by my detour, confused by the people who have moved into my children’s rooms, the changelings who have replaced them.  I am thrilled and saddened by their “otherness.”  I realize that the better I know my job, the less I will know them.

Years ago I stood at a crosswalk with my sons.  They were no more than four and seven and I held their hands, waiting for the light.  A car pulled up in front of us.  A mother and her teenage son sat silent in the front seat.  Neither spoke, nor did they spare a look at each other.  I could hear the radio, tinny through the half open windows. I felt my heart clutch, watching two strangers beside each other, lost to each other, no longer mother and son but, I supposed, adversaries and I dreaded the day I would take my place, just like them.  The boys tugged at my hands but I couldn’t stop looking at the car.  Suddenly, the mother and son turned to each other and cracked up.  They laughed and laughed and I saw the boy pound his hand on the dash and lean his head toward his Mom.  She tipped hers, too and I noticed that their hair was the very same color.

In that moment of (unnecessary) preemptive mourning, I saw my future and if I didn’t yet know that it would include a daughter, I was certain it would include having a laugh with my son in the front seat beside me.  My point, if I have one, is that whatever time and growing up has stolen from me, it has given to my children and, if I do things right and hold very, very still, they’ll give it back.