My Knee, Our Cathedral

One of my favorite Zen stories (told by Joko Beck in one of her books--I don’t remember which one) tells of a woman sitting in sesshin with a number of other beginning meditation students. Unable to hold the lotus position, she fidgets on her mat, and her constant movement disrupts the concentration of those near her. Eventually, a monitor gently asks if she could sit a little more quietly. My knee hurts, the woman says. Well, a number of people here probably have hurting knees, counters the monitor serenely. Yes, replies the woman, but it’s my knee.

I relate to each side of this scenario. Of course the woman does not have the right to draw so much attention to herself, to hijack everyone’s focus. Yet, she’s right; it is her knee. It’s hard to ignore one’s own knee, especially if it hurts.

I bring this up in the context of writing. Personal writing, to be exact. And zooming in even further, my personal writing, my individual commitment to exposing my hurting knee.

For a while now, I’ve regarded myself as my best and dearest subject. My fiction is a sham, and I’ve never felt the magical ease with poetry that I do with narrative. Still, I struggle with giving myself permission to write this stuff. Hurting or not, why do I insist upon making everyone aware of my knee? Why do I hope and/or assume that others will be interested in it?

The recent writing workshop I took focused on creative nonfiction. The workshop leader, from whom I learned a lot, discussed the perils and rewards of essaying oneself. “What are you doing besides exploring your own nerve endings?” he asked us. He said he had a piece of paper taped to his computer that read, “You are not important.”

From what I can tell, the greatest goal of personal writing is to use your experience as a way to discover a connection with others—by traveling to the deepest, remotest, and most singular part of you, you paradoxically find the place where you end and everyone else begins. You dig down into the earth and reach a vast, continuous pool.

Whatever I write, then, should make clear that my story is tremendously general in the most exquisitely specific terms.

Coincidentally, I just assigned a personal essay to my first-year college students, all 47 of them. (I haven’t done this for a while; such writing was out of vogue at the last place I taught.) I can look forward to 47 stories, 47 sets of nerve endings, 47 hurting knees. I’m excited.

I gave them Raymond Carver’s "Cathedral" to read, not because it’s a good model (it’s fiction), but because it has interesting things to say about the writing process. In the story, a man entertains a blind friend of his wife’s for dinner. After she goes to bed, the two of them watch television. It’s an educational program, probably PBS, on cathedrals. The blind man asks his host to describe what a cathedral looks like. The host fumbles around verbally for a few minutes and then realizes that he can only use visual terms or rattle off the program’s empty, academic facts. He becomes frustrated and embarrassed, and he confesses that cathedrals don’t mean anything to him—a cathedral is just chatter and fantasy on late night TV. The blind man says he understands.

The blind man makes a suggestion. The two get a paper bag and a ballpoint pen from the kitchen, and under the blind man’s direction, the host begins to draw a cathedral. The blind man holds the host’s hand, the one with the pen. In this way, they draw the cathedral together. The host is deeply affected; he reflects how he “didn’t feel like [he] was inside anything,” and the story ends on this intimate, transcendent note.

Perhaps I can’t aim for anything better than this in my stories. I want to sit on the floor with my readers and build cathedrals. The touching of our hands is what will make this building possible.

(to be continued, most likely)

Essential Choices

Ten Things I Couldn’t Do Without

• Really cold water (to drink)

• Democracy

• Good books

• Writing

• Sex

• My marriage

• Friendship

• A freshly made bed

• The Internet

• Mechanical pencils


Ten Things I Could Do Without:

• Quinoa

• Cancer

• Clothes I shouldn’t have bought

• Global warming

• Sudoku

• Petty arguments

• Harry Potter (That’s right, I said it.)

• Splinters

• Stuck windows

• Doubt

Riding with the Fat Man, Part I

***Hey all:
Since I'm at a writers' conference this week, I thought I'd share some nonblog writing.

This is part of a (believe it or not) short piece related to a larger memoir project I'm interested in. My thanks again to the members of The Typing Class for their feedback!

***

The form the funeral home gave me for my father’s death notice listed three publications: The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Camden Courier Post, and The Gloucester County Times. No one read The Courier Post. Their telemarketers used to call doggedly at every dinner hour at both my parents’ houses. We generally offered a terse “we-get-the-inquirer” before hanging up.

I chose the Gloucester paper. My dad had worked for the Gloucester County Jail as the director of rehabilitation services. He taught convicts how to read, do basic math, and prepare for the GED. I hoped some of his “boys from the jail” would see the write-up.

As a child, I learned how to read and write from the partially used workbooks Dad brought home from the jail. My shaky letters sat on the same pages as his students’.

Although my father grew up in Philadelphia, his parents moved their family to the South Jersey suburbs when he was in his 20s. They chased a better life “across the river,” as we say. Sometimes people don’t realize that until only recently the segment of New Jersey between Philly and the Atlantic Ocean was mostly farmland. The folks who live there are modest, countrified. They like bacon and eggs for breakfast. They hunt and canoe in the Pine Barrens. They cheer for the Eagles (pronounced Iggles) and the Phillies although they’re never surprised when the Phillies don’t make the World Series. The women like when truckers beep their horns at them as they walk along Mantua Avenue. The kids belong to 4H, and the prom is a bigger deal for its attendees than the dead-end jobs that await them afterwards. This is the landscape of my father and his inmates.

There was never any question that I would plan the funeral. I was an only child, and my parents had been divorced for many years. My aunt had washed her hands of my father long ago. She’d done enough for him in life, she seemed to feel. And he was never grateful—he had acted as if her scrupulous attention was entirely his due.

I arranged a priest strictly for her sake. Dad had no use for religion; blind faith was alien and silly to him. The perfunctory service was modestly attended, and a group went to Charlie Brown’s Restaurant afterwards. People that I hadn’t seen in years surrounded me; I used to hug some of their knees. These former childhood giants, their faces grayish-white with age, told me what a wonderful and intelligent man Rick had been. The whole dining room looked golden and sepia to me, the same hues as my seventies toddlerhood, the same as when I had last encountered these faces. The dry white wine in my glass glowed in the table’s lantern light.

The previous year, I had spent a strained Thanksgiving with Dad at Charlie Brown’s. He doesn’t have anyone else, I had decided sheepishly, turning down my mother’s dinner invitation. We said little as we ate lukewarm turkey. Dad was strangely placid. It was the new medication he was taking for his bi-polar disorder, which was severe enough to put him in a hospital every couple of decades. Did I prefer him docile? Was this better?

David, my father’s best friend and a Christian missionary, waited until most of the plates were cleared and then took the empty chair to my left. He had a good anecdote about Rick that he wanted so share with me, he said. He’d already made me laugh that day when he told me how my father used to telephone him and pretend to be Billy Graham looking for a donation.

I had highlighted my father’s humor in my eulogy, along with his prodigious intellect. I wasn’t sure what else to say. Who wanted to hear about lithium? Slammed car doors? The surveillance and chronic mistrust of his daughter, whom he hadn’t wanted to begin with? Instead, I simply told the small crowd that Richard was a man more comfortable with the ideas of the world than the world itself.

David told me that he and my father had taken the Speedline into Philadelphia one evening for a concert. Two drug addicts boarded the train at one of the Camden stops. They were out of control, David said. I wasn’t sure what "out of control" really meant, but I didn’t ask. My father recognized one of them as someone from the jail. He began talking to him in a calm, friendly voice. In five minutes, he took what could have been a dangerous situation and defused it.

As I listened to David, I pushed wet lettuce around the bowl of my Caesar salad and wondered what my father had said. The inmates had called him the Fat Man--there was a gleam in my father's eye when he told me this one day when I was in high school. He seemed not to mind the name; he almost looked amused.

Your dad was a man of many gifts, David said. I sipped my wine and said, yes he was. The knowledge that I had not been privy to more of those gifts pricked me.

What had my dad said? He likely did not pretend not to know the kid—anonymity wasn’t a part of jailhouse life. But he probably didn’t go out of his way to bring up the circumstances of their relationship, either. No need to remind the spiller of the milk.

I suspected he wouldn’t have preached. There would have been no “You don’t have to do this to yourself…your parents must be so sad…you’re going to hurt yourself or someone else.” Dad was not a man for platitudes.

What if I had grown up to be one of those junkies? Dad had routinely dumped the contents of my 8th grade book bag onto the cushions of the couch in the den. He examined the bag's seams closely. He looked for drugs he never found.

What would I have wanted him to say if he stumbled upon an alternative version of me in a train car, a druggie sweating through a rough patch? I imagined feeling engulfed in a red-pink electric cloud, seeing funhouse faces, and worrying that at any second the whole car would explode into flames. My hands would have shaken, and the pores of my face would have seemed to expand. I would have asked myself why this was supposed to be fun. My teeming brain would have quickly abandoned that line of questioning and tried to retreat into itself, like a turtle.

But then I would have seen the Fat Man sitting nearby, his big belly hanging over his pants—the khaki pair he endlessly tried to hitch up. His blue eyes, the ones that always reminded me of a gas stove flame, would have kindled benignly. I might have temporarily confused him with Santa Claus and decided that the train was his sleigh. How cool that Santa wore glasses, like me.

Little Sister

Little sister, I knew you were in trouble.

He was an odd choice—a math teacher from South Africa eager to master American slang and customs. He consistently made diction errors, like calling a place a “stop” instead of a “spot,” and using superannuated terms like “fuck buddy” instead of “friend with benefits.” He was fairly handsome, but nothing to write home about. His wardrobe was three years too young for him. You asked me not to laugh when you confided your crush.

We were all stuck in the mountains for three weeks, on a pretty, isolated college campus. What else was there to do?

At breakfast one morning, he plunked his tray down next to you and puckishly asked if you were hung over. You thought he was impertinent. The TAs get drunk and carry on at night, not us! Instructors are too busy communing with their subject matter. You pushed your sunglasses higher up your nose and pretended he hadn’t made this gaff. A lot is forgivable in a tight, temporary community.

He started following you around. He’s not shy, and you’re not the first woman to receive his attention here. Still, he made you feel newly desirable, like a long-forgotten silk scarf.

He teaches chaos. You cringe a little; this detail is too insipid even for you. Sitting with Chaos on a bench outside the library, you give him your patented naughty smile. He lets his hand rest gently upon yours.

Such encounters between strangers thrown together (highly educated and relatively young strangers at that) have all the ingredients to alchemize into pink and sparkling memory. It starts to feel like a memory even while it’s happening. You and Chaos could have been a Noel Coward play, or a Cole Porter song, except…well, except.

In your room that night, with the door closed, the Cocteau Twins playing, the joint lit, Chaos may have played with your hair and stroked your face. What you remember most vividly is him asking, “Do you want me to leave?” He had to ask a couple of times before the question took.

After he was gone, you curled up on your bed. The sheets were pulling away from the twin mattress.


You spent the whole next day hiding and throbbing with guilt. You went to neither lunch nor dinner. You avoided all common areas in the faculty dorm, especially the first floor lounge, with its elegant wood floor, brass lamps, and antique chaises. Much too romantic.

This dorm was for the teaching staff only. Why not? We were adults; we didn’t need our behavior monitored. We didn’t have to stand a minimum of eight inches apart like our gifted young charges. Our handbook did legislate that “Relationships between staff must be conducted with the highest degree of discretion.” But since the students slept all the way over on the other side of campus, you weren’t sure who this rule protected.

It’s tiresome to be the wife of the Great Man, you said during a walk we took to the Seven Eleven. You’re not married, but it feels like it—you’ve been together five years. Not that you are eager to commit. You both remember the scene when he thoughtlessly installed a toothbrush and a razor in your bathroom.

His philosophy dissertation is a Ceylon sapphire; yours in literature is a Hummel figurine a despised late uncle bequeathed to you. Your mother makes you keep it. Concepts that ceased to fascinate you a long time ago continuously roll from his mouth. He points out cultural incongruities in The Simpsons while you raise the television’s volume in a passive-aggressive attempt to silence him. He forgets his own birthday. You hate that.

This is why someone would cultivate an active fantasy life, I observed, hoping you were listening.

Unfortunately, you couldn’t avoid the farewell dinner. You tried the shabby excuse that you did not RSVP, but I assured you that no one would check. Your suitemate wanted you to go, too. She thought you do not socialize enough.

You wore your sundress. Its spaghetti straps exposed your bony shoulders and your breasts. You picked at some salad and ignored the special steak dinner.

Chaos arrived. After all, he never missed a meal, and he talked to everyone. There was no room at our table, but he sat as close to you as possible at the next one over.

You mumbled that you were going back to the dorm to change. You’ll be back, you promised. But this was the last time I saw you.


I opened my own suite door at around two in the morning to use the bathroom across the hall. At the same time, Chaos was leaving your suite. We kept our heads firmly down.

Perhaps you really did change clothes when you went back—you may have genuinely intended to return to dinner. But there was a knock on the door, and Chaos’s welcoming, coarse face with its big nose and thick eyebrows appeared through the peephole. He had noticed your dining hall exit.

Once he was inside, you offered him some additional marijuana. He lay down next to you, and the two of you examined the cracks in your ceiling. You decided that they made a map of continents, which the two of you then named and described. This one’s major export was the honey produced by its indigenous purple queen bees. The adjacent island was known for the aphrodisiacal properties of its spring water.

He kissed you. It was innocent and exploratory. You almost imagined that you could tell the Great Man about it. It was an epistemological experiment: I made out with the math teacher for you, my dear. I wanted someone to compare you with so that I could love you all the more. But you know you don’t have the intellectual chops to convince the Great Man of this.

Your jeans crumpled off. So did Chaos’s. But your shirts remained on. These dorm rooms are drafty even in the height of summer.

He left, and you hastily packed. Some time before dawn, you slipped your keys under the main office door and drove off down the mountain. You couldn’t face Chaos again. You couldn’t face anyone—not me, not your suitemate, not the TA you lectured about snogging. What a shame it was, you thought, that you couldn’t drive away from yourself.

The Great Man wasn’t expecting you until early evening. He planned to take you to dinner at your favorite Eritrean restaurant. First of all, you wanted to shower. Again, the banality was crushing.

All of her stuff’s gone, your suitemate told me later in an alarmed voice. She left without saying goodbye! She sounded so sad and surprised.

I wish I was surprised, little sister. But I wasn’t.

Allentown Bus Station

Lehigh County is hilly, and the leaves on the trees are green and angular. It seems like a strange place for factories.

The Allentown bus station is on 3rd Street across from a row of empty warehouses. People do drugs on the stoops. The buses have two major destinations: Philadelphia and New York. A one-way fare to Philadelphia is 11 dollars: cash only. At the ticket counter, a sheet of plastic glass separates customers from the cashier. She has a light mustache, drinks coffee with powdered creamer from a Styrofoam cup, and speaks Spanish into the telephone. Women need a key for the ladies’ room. The vending machines contain peanut butter crackers, Hershey bars, and Doritos, and their bags and wrappers look dingy. Everything costs 50 cents. Close to the front doors, a little kiosk dispenses phone cards. It bears a red, white, and blue insignia of a rotary phone, half of which is chipped off.

The rows of blue and white bucket seats could have been installed in the 1960s. Smoking is not currently permitted in the terminal, but cigarette burns remain on the cushions, and there are holes for ashtrays in the armrests at the end of each row. Patrons smoke outside near the busy payphones.

I was there on a Saturday morning. While I waited for my bus, I saw a black couple disembark from an arriving one. They dragged three wheel-less suitcases behind them. Each case was overstuffed, and I noticed a big taped gash in the side of one. The man was short and wore a Phillies tank top. The woman had gold earrings and a tight dark-colored dress on. She sat down and waited in a state of happy impatience while he took directions to Dorney Park from the cashier.

An aging white man in a dirty brown blazer and wrinkled pants approached the counter next. He folded and unfolded a newspaper under his arm and asked the cashier about departures next Monday; he had jury duty. She had to repeat the schedule three times while a neglected Kelly Clarkson ringtone echoed. It played “Because of You.”

A little girl entered the building. She had kinky hair, cinnamon skin, and green eyes. Her pink shirt featured a chocolate ice cream stain. Blue shorts revealed knobby knees and calves dotted with mosquito bites.

“My grandmother wants to know how long she can leave her car here,” she said, looking up at the wide face behind the plastic screen. The adjacent parking lot was small, and there were no meters or fences.

The cashier appeared confused. “As long as she wants,” she replied.

“But, what if it’s like, three or four days?” the little girl persisted.

“That would be fine, I guess. But she would have to understand that she leaves it here at her own risk.”

The little girl left then, looking worried. She let the glass doors close behind her. They didn’t shut properly; they needed someone to push them into place.

Paper Trails

I never like to move without performing a considerable purge. These days, I have my own things to sort through as well as those of three dead people.

The last time I moved, I automatically packed all of my father’s personal papers; I had no idea if I would need them again. Six years have passed since he died, however, so I figure it’s okay to discard old bank statements and checkbooks. I will hold on to the tax returns, though.

One early evening, when I was first getting used to the idea that my mother was dying, I dug out one of my parents’ wedding pictures. This is them, I told my husband, thrusting the picture into his hands. This is what they looked like.

My mother got married in a sea foam mini-dress—mod for 1970. My father wore a plain gray suit. The world depicted in that image is now accessible exclusively through whatever account I cobble together.

Three months before my mom died, our great-aunt Lois died, too. My mother was Lois’s only close relative. These events have made me an archivist. I have turned into a depository for all of the drips and drabs of their individual existences: passports, diaries, leases, utility bills, medical records, high school yearbooks.

Lois never married and had few close friends. My father was an eccentric hermit. My mother, the social butterfly of the group, has no one but me, most likely, to take anything stronger than a passing interest in the minutiae of her life. Sometimes I’ve felt myself to be swimming in all of their folders, books, and papers, spinning in a whirlpool of their Polaroids and daguerrotypes.

I have my mother’s diaries, but I’m wary of reading them. I would rather study her check register or her address book. I hold on to them, though—it seems rude to discard someone’s diary.

Last Saturday afternoon, I sat cross-legged on the floor of my office and spread out a pile of my mother’s files. I scanned the cover of a tattered manila folder with writing on it. My mother had itemized the contents of a safety deposit box—deeds, bonds, the divorce decree. The last line read, in my mom’s careful penmanship, “Restraining order, 1983.”

The order must have been against my father—he’s the logical choice. But why did she keep it in the safety deposit box? Where is it now, and what was it for? I both want to know and don’t want to know.

Lois’s paper trail I keep mainly out of historical interest. Because of her, I have the 1928 handbook for the women’s student government organization of the University of Pennsylvania, for example. (I read it hoping to find something about young ladies’ conduct, but to no avail.) She had multiple copies of her birth certificate, too, so many that I wonder if people used to have to get one to renew a passport—Lois traveled. Pennsylvania birth certificates apparently used to be static forms that a clerk filled out by hand. It used to have boxes to check for “legitimate” or “illegitimate.” Some time during the 1950s, however, they appear to have dropped that question.

During this last purge, I found a letter to Lois from a woman named Dottie. She was returning some papers—someone had been to the Library of Congress to do genealogical research. Lois hadn’t made this trip, but she had the notes.

The notes were typed and detailed; whoever went to the library must have brought a typewriter. The oldest notation is from a census taken in 1797 in Maryland. The separate properties of a brother and a sister are inventoried. Each sibling had a farm, some cottages, carriages, and slaves--the sister fourteen, the brother four. My eyes lingered on that word and those numbers.

Once these archival boxes have found a new home (probably in a closet or a basement), I’m tempted to tear a sheet of paper from a legal pad and attach the following message:

Dear Future Child,
You may or may not be interested in any of this. If you are, you are welcome to read about your grandparents, who were both relatively unstable, and who both died fairly young. You can also get to know your great-great aunt, who was, by all accounts, a miserable, hoarding old lady. (Legitimate, though.)
You will also notice that we are the descendents of slave owners.
Feel free to get rid of it all. Your mother was funny about material things, but she knew that not everyone gets hypnotized by the past like she did.
(She would appreciate if you held on to her computer files, however, even if you never open them.)

***

[Meta note: Because I'm heading to Pennsylvania tomorrow in order to teach the gifted kids, and because almost immediately after that I'll be penetrating the mystery of the Midwest (moving to Ohio), I'm afraid that I won't be able to post much for the next month. I will try to eek one out here and there--I'm generous (and self-centered) like that. Thank you for reading! I'll check in from either the 6-1-0 or the 4-1-9.]

meal magnificat: a tribute to food

I own a book about blog writing entitled No One Cares What You Had For Lunch.* Virginia Woolf would have cared:

“novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done…It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine.”*

Woolf herself goes on to describe a splendiferous meal, of course; the book author would be hard pressed to label it a boring blog lunch.

Everyone eats, and, in general, everyone likes to. But, for me, writing accurately and compellingly about food is a struggle. I can think of three methods that writers employ (I’m sure there are more):

--One simply names the food and garnishes it with a few run-of-the-mill adjectives (sweet, savory, etc), and then lets the reader imagine his/her own encounter.

--One uses metaphor and simile—introducing the food by means of comparison (the corn tasted like summer, we enjoyed the Awesome Blossom).

--One appeals to other senses and substitutes the look or feel of the food for its taste (ruby apples, lumpy oatmeal).

Apparently, we cannot communicate directly what happens inside our mouths.

Below, I have made an effort to describe a few foods of endearment. I might have had a few of these for lunch.



~ The Tequeño

Currently, I’m obsessed with Latin pastelitos, especially the tequeño, which is a hollow bread stick filled with guava and white cheese. It’s like the best croissant with jelly I’ve ever had, except that the bread is thicker—closer to pizza dough. Not even the boldest, sweetest strawberry rivals guava’s rhapsodic sting. I like a cafe con leche with it.

Kalamata Olives ~

I could live on these. I covet their smooth skin, and I dote on their color—reddish-brown leather mellowed by the sun. They’re salty without being a nuisance.

A friend of a friend found a jar of olives in a pantry during a party. She clutched it, stared wantonly at the contents, and said, “I need to be alone for a while.”

~ Fiddleheads

Fiddleheads are little crispy, grassy delights; they could be buttons on a wood nymph’s raincoat. I’m not a huge vegetable lover, so I appreciate the fiddlehead’s fanciful appearance and cereal crunch.

Tuna ~

I like my tuna excruciatingly rare. At a certain restaurant, I pierce its slick, meaty chunks with a fork and push it around in a tomato, garlic, and lime sauce. Tomatoes and fish is one of my favorite illogical combinations.


~ The Golden Katong

This petite cumin and coriander mixture is served in a yellow spring roll cup, and it commonly appears on Thai appetizer menus. It sits exotically on my tongue, but it also recalls a comfort dish, like shepherd’s pie. The mixture consists of ground chicken, peas, carrots, and shrimp. I either order it without the shrimp, or I do my best to ignore its presence (see bottom of post).

Round Italian Bread ~

I once had an apartment across the street from a 24-hour Italian bakery. They baked their bread continuously. Together with the person I lived with and one of our friends, I used to smoke a good amount of marijuana, shuffle over to the bakery, and buy a round, white loaf of bread. We would tear off hunks of it and consume it in a luxurious state of stoned bliss. It was the best three hundred -count linen that we could have eaten.

~ Pesto

The greatest pesto is the kind you can smell, the kind made of basil leaves that you saw plucked from the stem. I know of few substances that pesto does not improve, particularly if it has chopped pine nuts. If I peer closely at it (in the privacy of my own home, of course), I can see chaos theory in its variegated colors.

A Pear ~

One of the lustiest of fruits—all the more so because of its subtlety.

It’s a pity that the British have decided that “pear-shaped” is an insult. I like my food full-figured.

~ Classic Coke

The Coca-Cola Corporation is a dominant and pernicious global force. Sadly, this does not negate my enjoyment of the caramel, carbonated goodness of its signature drink. I love it chilled and poured from a green glass bottle.

Addendum: People have used “caramel” to describe Coke before. I don’t like resorting to it, but I don’t know what else to say. Coke tastes like Coke, and it’s delicious.

Shrimp ~

I present this item to demonstrate that there are gastronomic rivers I am not willing to cross. Shrimp is a teeming pustule on the surface of a forbidden planet. Do not lance it near me.

~ Finis ~

* I haven’t found it very useful, by the way. I suspect, however, that this has much more to do with me and my resistance to taking any and all suggestions.

* A Room of One’s Own, Chapter One.