Trip Taking

It is time to look at the clock and make final preparations. Taking a trip makes one look at the basics of life, the core needs one has.

If walking out the door each morning is an individual adventure, embarking on a plane to another country is a communal adventure. How we rely on so many other nameless, faceless individuals to ensure that all goes smoothly!

Taking a trip makes one look at faces differently: with appreciation.

Hummingbird

Yesterday, a hummingbird danced in the spray from my hose. I fell into wonder.

My garden – emphasis on “my” – sits behind the tomatoes and squash because it doesn’t need the full sun that tomatoes crave. My garden is full of herbs and small flowers. I let the forget-me-nots and creeping buttercups and bugleweed find their own snuggle spots between the pavers salvaged from different places. Now and then, however, I do a bit of tending to Jon’s vegetables if only to ensure that I get some. That is why I planted some marigolds around the squash to keep the rabbits from eating the flowers, and that is why when I saw the marigolds’ leaves hanging like deflated balloons around the stalks I pulled up a lawn chair and the hose and relaxed into making rainbows over the garden.

Somewhere we might still have a working sprinkler, but I don’t know where it is. I turned the nozzle between “shower” and “angle” to reach the plants most effectively. I had it on “angle”, which produced a square of heavy mist, when she came. I am sure the hummingbird was female because of her subtle coloring. She could have been a shadow with flecks of gold as she dipped and swerved, entered and retreated on the edge of the mist. She graced the air, drinking and then landing on a tomato cage.

Little sprites, little blessings, little visitors dance in and out of our days. How we wait for these moments wondering when they will come, hoping we will be graced. She flew to the coral bells and sipped from several blossoms before leaving me. Years ago, when I brought the coral bells from my mother’s garden, I had been told that they would attract humming birds. I had smiled politely and said, “How nice,” since I had never, ever seen a hummingbird in my mother’s garden. I had chosen the coral bells because I remembered how they had come. They had ridden around the corner in Mrs. Vance’s little red wagon and were part of the gift of love and beauty that was the garden my mother watched from her window.

As the coral bells bloom through the summer, I remember Mrs. Vance’s visits. In the coy progression of one blessing touching the next, her gift of kindness to lady in a wheelchair is why a hummingbird danced over my garden.

Distractions of Food and Markets

I will admit to anyone who starts talking diets, I love food. However, my guilt regarding wasteful overeating equals my fear of blowing up like a blimp. I will be good about not taking a second helping, but I am horrid about keeping to a strict count-something-to-loose-weight regime. My best defense is to talk myself out of the in-between attacks that invariably come twice-a-day and use strategies to help distract me from thoughts of food. Writing is one of my distractions. You should know – for the sake of understanding this rumination – it is 10 AM.

It is the craving hour between breakfast and lunch when it is incredibly dangerous for me to walk into a grocery store. If I am stuck in to middle of a chore like sorting papers or doing laundry, I might conjure up the most glorious images of cheese and crackers, cherries and peaches, chocolates and nuts ever piled on a tasting counter. I begin reviewing the contents of the refrigerator and making mental notes of my food wish-list.

It’s always at the in-between times when I feel like I could hit the all-you-can-eat buffet and clean-up! 10AM - after being good at breakfast, oatmeal and fruit, maybe some sunflower seeds - the nibblies hit. On a normal day, I avoid food distraction by being in front of 25 students who might be gleefully explaining the irony of “Cask of Amontillado”, but this is summer. At 10 AM my summer schedule usually finds me at a between-chores stage measuring the time I have left in the morning against the new task I am beginning. What a great time for food, the wonderful comfort for planning the next excursion.

Of course, by the time lunch comes around I have settled a bit and can be sensible with my salad and fruit, usually. I confess I might – if it is available – have nuts or chocolate for being good and to delay (without success) the next in-between at 4 when I am certain I will perish by suppertime. When I start cooking supper, I invariably start nibbling. If Jon is cooking, I am saved. He hates having me in the kitchen when he is preparing food. I avoid being accused of each ingredient he spills and each onion he scorches and the opportunity to put cheese and other savories into my mouth, and I leave him to his commission.

Yesterday, Jon prepared lovely BLTs with Amish cured bacon purchased at the West Side Market. It was so lovely. The tomatoes were not-yet-marvelous since our backyard plants have only just set, and we have a few weeks before the Shaker Saturday Market (and, at a later date, our garden) will overflow with real Ohio tomatoes; but, the bacon was the real McCoy. I could actually taste the meat, and the fat was crisp, salty. I had the chance to relish the minimal processing of the market’s goods. At the moment, I can imagine the taste, and I remember buying the bacon at the Market.

Jon had invited me to accompany him on a summer excursion to the West Side Market. I had not actually stopped into the Market for several years. It is no longer within my travel range. Except for the Saturday market and other shops in Shaker, I have a tendency to go east for my market goods. This past year, since Jon had been a consultant at several west side schools, he had begun stopping at the market to indulge my request for fresh fish. Aside from fish, he began bringing home dried fruits and vegetables that were superior to any of the commercial brands. I had found the veggies wonderful for my in-between nibblies
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The tented outside booths with their high piles of produce were just as I always remembered, but the interior with the meats and huge cases of cheese seemed darker. Florescent, the primary light source, was cold after the sun-glow canopies. Jon and I had just been to the North Market in Columbus a few days before, and the difference was marked. Between the meat counters and fish displays, Columbus’s North Market is full of eateries where one can get a box lunch or a complete dinner to take home. It caters to the young professionals who do not have the hours or expertise to prepare the food they have grown used to eating. Cleveland’s West Side Market is for basic food in its fundamental form. I admired the marbling in cuts of beef and the pile of haddock cheeks. We stopped by a counter that sold a wide variety of salts, lentils and grains and bought green bamboo rice and a rice mixture. We wove in and out of the smells and noise and glories of food making purchases until our arms were full.

As lovely as those thoughts are, I don’t want to be hungrier than I already am. I will grab some of my dried green beans while I try to distract my thoughts away from food.. The crunchy beans should have enough sweetness and salt to satisfy me while I sort through three more piles of notes and books.

My problem with dieting, or simply maintaining, is that food is so easily available. I have access to wonderful markets and high quality produce. I am placed in a very fortunate place. Of course I want to enjoy the largess, but I still have the Catholic-school-girl guilt about wasteful overeating. I do love food, but that is not a sin.

The picture is of Jon and Shane shopping in Columbus' North Market.

A view of LIFE: one response

I was surprised, after puzzling through the youthful sexual awakening of young Michael in Schlink’s The Reader, to find myself drawn into the questions, truly deep questions about one’s responsibility to life. I should shout LIFE in three-inch capitals and then spend the next three months defining the concept I am presenting with the four-letter word. But, I won’t. I will let others ponder that personal relationship with all that is affected by existing and acting on during that existence. How one defines and views life is personal.

Schlink presents the character Michael’s understanding of his own life as intricately chained to the woman who awakened him to sex and to himself. As a youth, he was ashamed to acknowledge her, and as an adult he continues to be ashamed, “I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her. I tried to talk myself into the state of innocence in which children love their parents. But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible.

“And perhaps we are responsible even for the love we feel for our parents. I envied other students back then who had dissociated themselves from their parents and thus from the entire generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the willfully blind […]” (170-171).

Unfortunately, even though he tries to disassociate himself from Hanna, she is as intimate as his skin. He knows she has touched and molded his personhood with the personal intensity of a parent’s relationship to a child. Michael’s bond to his father is less strong than his bond with Hanna, but he is a crippled soul. He cannot visit Hanna; he can only read to her on tapes.

This novel, that I had thought would simply develop into another bildungsroman, opened complexities. It jabbed a question that made me uneasy, “What would you have done?” (128). The question was asked by an illiterate woman who had tried to figure out the actions of a war-beleaguered modern world without having read stories, essays, religious tracts, letters to the editor, or any of those things that make a reader pause and adjust the way conscience sits on her head. Without having been able to hold words still before her eyes with awareness of all the potency of their meaning, how could she extend herself and her decisions beyond the present, beyond immediate reaction to an act? She couldn’t. She was limited by her inability to read. She could not delve more deeply than the oily surface of life that was presented to her.

There is the crux of Schlink’s message to each person who prides herself as civilized: one must read stories of others who have made good and bad choices if one is to be capable of decision. “What would you have done?” Hanna asks the judge with the sincerity of a person who encountered a machine that needed to be fixed but had no schematic. She reaches from her sensible simplicity, from her neat uniforms and cleanliness to the complicated messiness of law and judgments. At a moment when a simple action would have saved lives, she chose no action, because she could not act in a manner that would be orderly. Is this an inability to be moral? Is this an inability to see beyond what is practical?

Michael, having studied law, is aware of judgments expected by society’s codes of honor. He judges his parents; he judges his parents’ generation. But Hanna taught him a different connectivity to people, and he has lost understanding of her sensible touch.

As predictable as the ending was, it made me very sad. It seems to affirm my own lack of reaching out with understanding. How brutal I can be when I keep my life confined in the same way that Michael confined his visits to Hanna. He visited with someone else’s words on little plastic cassettes.


Schlink, Bernhard. The Reader. Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Vintage International, 2008.

Lists and Silences

One of the assignments I give my students is to interview a person and write the story. I encourage the students to interview someone over 50 who is not their parent. Frequently students will call up a grandparent or family friend and begin to go through a list of questions. I have had several students sheepishly admit that they got to question #2 during the two-hour interview. Most people are anxious to talk about experiences that have been changed their lives. My father had experiences that he was silent about.

For one of Dad’s birthday-father’s-day-something-day presents I gave him a blank book. It was a very nice blank book with a leather cover and a poem on the front sheet. There were faint guidelines on the pages and a discrete ribbon to mark the writer’s place.

“What is this for?” he asked me with the same tone he had for the boxer shorts that were printed with boxer dogs on a previous gift day. For that gift explained that boxers were now all the rage; they were novelties, more than just underwear. He put it down as one more crazy not-a tie gift that I had come up with. The blank book, however, was different.

“I thought you could write stories or thoughts,” I said.

“What stories?”

My explanation fell flat. I got a gracious smile and hug, but the puzzled look on Dad’s face and the many times I saw the blank book in the corner where he had placed it made me realize that he would not write any narrative in it. On one visit, I actually peaked in the book and my suspicions were confirmed – it was still blank.

What was I expecting from Mister Silent, from Mister Hold-it-in, from Mister Keep-it close-to-the-chest? Why would I think, after his years of keeping his stories for only select ears, that he would write them for me.

Dad had opened up to my son when Jon was doing a report on WWII. He told Jon more than I had ever heard. Dad also told my brother-in-law stories when they were cleaning out the garage one year and Dad opened a box of memorabilia. I heard of the afternoon third-hand through my sister. My sister, too, had been surprised. There was so much that we didn’t know. The stories Dad told Jon and Ed referred to horrors and hardships he never wanted to share with my sisters or me. Daughters, in Dad’s world, needed to be protected from such reality.

Because Dad’s death was sudden, all of his notes and calendars were placed where he had been using them on the day he died. There was a pink blank book that Mom had used for notes, Dad had continued to use for lists and notes regarding handymen and people to call. The pink book was on the counter next to the leather covered blank book that I had given him so many years ago. The first page was still blank, but the next two pages opened facing each other with lists and figures in columns that Dad had measured out. I laughed.

All through out the house there were lists. Most of the lists related to measurements some budget notes. Some were so cryptic I was not certain what their purpose was.

This was the story I received from my father: he was a man who conversed more easily in numbers than in words, he showed his love through action, and he did use the gift I gave him.

“Wisdom sings her own praises and is honored in God,
Before her own people she boasts;
in the assembly of the Most High she opens her mouth,
in the presence of his power she declares her worth.”
Sirach 24: 1-2

The quote is from the Lectionary for Mass and is sometimes used for the second Sunday after Christmas. It has a different tone from the Jerusalem Bible’s which more strongly recognizes Wisdom’s power and her stronger unity and relationship with God.

“She opens her mouth in the assembly of the Most High,
she glories in herself in the presence of the Mighty One;
‘I came forth from the mouth of the Most High,
and I covered the earth like mist.
I had my tent in the heights,
and my throne in a pillar of cloud.’”
Ecclesiasticus [also Sirach] 24: 2-4


How often we rely on the mothering power of Wisdom to get us through days that alternate between being frenetically stuffed with affairs and, then, empty as an upturned box. To be close to Wisdom is to be close to one who acts, who nurtures, who is close to God. It is also to be close to one who thinks of goodness and meditates on the needs of others.

There was time, this last week, to think about the breath of Wisdom and the breath of life as I sat with my dying Mother-in-law. She is the last of my children’s grandparents to die. I felt Time's softness settle as her hand, so strong and so busy for so many years, was puffy and still in my hand. It would, at times, give a gentle tightening as though to tell me she knew I was there. We were quiet together.

I will confess, I had come with papers to grade (since I have trouble disconnecting from work), and I tried to grade a few. In over two hours time, I finished one and one/half papers. Being present for Edith consumed my time. Her hands surprised me, for they were so different from what were hands.

Edith’s hands were strong. When I first met Edith, she had an ancient typewriter set against the dining room windows, there she typed notes and letters. She had an awl for punching tag board and other heavy papers and cardboards for mounting her various competition buttons. She sewed, gardened, baked, taught Latin and Greek. She was willing to speak on a number of subjects: her trips to Europe, Uniforms and uniform buttons, paper dolls and other antiques. Her voice and her hands were always in use.

As she grew into her late 90s, my husband reminded the children when they were going to visit, “hold her hand when you talk to her, she likes that.” And that became more and more true as her eyesight and hearing continued to fade. Holding Edith’s hand seemed to make communication so much clearer. Her hands continued to have a strong grip, and she continued to use her hands in the pottery class and doing other crafts. She was prolific in making things.

I accept my loss of my mother-in-law, and I think of my own mother’s voice that sometimes rests with the strength of memory’s hands on my ears. They were women of presence and action, strong grandmothers to my children.

I think of them as I think of the breath of Wisdom that moves like a mist, the song of Wisdom that boasts and declares her worth to be present before God. It is a daily resolution to live in the breath of life and strive for Wisdom.

The photograph shows Edith reviewing a book with her granddaughter Beth and great-grandson Shane. Edith died Jan 17th; two months shy of her 100th birthday.