Falling Through Space

by Gilchrist, Ellen

  The most beautiful sight is the rice fields. In spring they are a green that equals the sky for beauty. They are sheets of green silk unfolding in the wind. Think how gorgeous this must be to people who depend on rice for food.

  We depended on cotton, which is why I love to watch it grow. But mostly I just love the drive. Just because I can drive a hundred miles an hour through this country doesn’t mean I always do it. Sometimes I slow down to eighty and enjoy the view. Sometimes I stop at Leroy Percy State Park and walk in the woods and search for four leaf clovers.

  I used to tell my editor I thought the reason people in New York City were depressed was because they never got to drive, or, if they did, it was always in heavy traffic with cursing and bad air. “We could make a million dollars,” I used to tell him, “by flying people to the Delta to drive on the flat, straight roads. We could send in crop dusters to race them along the fields.”

  This is not a journey for listening to the radio or thinking about your troubles. This is a drive for pretending you are Master of the World. One warning. Don’t stop the car and get out unless you are covered with insect repellant. The mosquitos will bite you anywhere. My trapper friend was bitten in the ear. I have been bitten on the legs through thick tights. Delta mosquitos will remind you it is a joke to think man is the top of the food chain.

  I have never seen a highway patrolman on these roads. Keep your fingers crossed that one doesn’t read this article and decide to spoil the fun.

  A Journey to New York City

  A TRIP becomes a journey when there is a destination. Our destination was the Egyptian Galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. My oldest grandson is very interested in history. He is especially interested in Ancient Egypt. What thirteen year old worth his salt wouldn’t be? Great stone tombs rising from the desert, secret hieroglyphs, mummies and golden treasures.

  I had been longing to take him and his sisters to see the museum, but I was daunted by the thought of three children in New York City, the cost, the logistics, the danger.

  This unfilfilled desire to show them my favorite city grew and festered in my brain. It got to the point where I could not enjoy museums anymore. They are thirteen and ten and eight years old. Perfect ages for great museums. Every thing I saw I would imagine through their eyes.

  Then one night last October they called to read me their six week grades. They had made straight A’s. All three of them had made straight A’s. That was it. The time had come. I got their mother on the phone. I asked her if we could take them out of school for two days the following week. And would she come with us. She said yes to both questions so I called American Airlines and asked them to find us some tickets I could afford.

  Luckily the children live in a small town on the Mississippi coast. The nearest airport is Gulfport, Mississippi and the mid-week flights to LaGuardia were wide open. By ten that night I had four non-refundable discounted tickets on their way to the coast. We were past the point of no return. Those children were going to see a bigger world. Or, at least, one that is dirtier and more populated and has better museums. We will be making memories, I told myself. But there’s no telling what they’ll turn out to be.

  The following Wednesday afternoon we were on our way. Marshall, age thirteen, Ellen, age ten, Aurora, age eight, Rita, age forty, and yours truly, pushing sixty. Here are some scenes from the next five days. These are the things I will always remember.

  In the sculpture garden of The Museum Of Modern Art, while the rest of us were gazing into the beautiful shallow pond by the Giacometti, Aurora climbed up on the Picasso goat and began to ride. A little black girl climbed up behind her. A man began to photograph them. Two well-dressed docents let out a scream. They went running toward the scene with their hands up in the air. We ran that way too. We converged around the goat. We stood in a circle telling the children to get down. We all apologized to each other. Still, I couldn’t help thinking, I have never appreciated Picasso until this moment. Two beautiful little girls sitting on his goat are probably a lot closer to what he envisioned than a lot of middle-aged ladies with their hands up in the air.

  As many times as I have been in that sculpture garden I had never really noticed that goat. It is an entirely evil-looking goat. It stood there, it’s evil eyes surveying our distress. Above the garden were huge gray clouds of many colors, gray and white and stone and porcelain and granite and black and ivory. “Those clouds contain water from the North Atlantic Ocean,” I told my granchildren. “In those clouds is the breath of seals and moisture that was once in icebergs.”

  “They are the color of the goat,” Ellen said. “Clouds and sculpture look alike, especially in the water.”

  “Naguchi would have loved it,” Rita added. The women warmed at that, and we all smiled and turned away.

  That was a day that had begun with croissants and orange juice and coffee on a bench in Central Park. Then a long walk down Fifth Avenue to see the Plaza Hotel, scene of Home Alone II, one of the children’s favorite movies. At first I rebelled at the thought of retracing the steps of a character in a movie, then I lightened up and took them, not once, but twice, to visit the lobby of The Plaza and look at the elevators and chandeliers. Art and beauty civilize and make clear. They are as welcome in a movie or a hotel lobby as in a museum. It was good for me to be reminded of that before I turned into a lady with her hands permanently in the air.

  We left the Plaza and made a cursory trip to F.A.O. Schwartz, which is across the street from the Plaza. Then we continued down Fifth Avenue to my favorite store, Steuben Glass. For years I had promised myself that I could buy a piece called The Sword in the Stone as soon as I sold a book. I have sold twelve books in that time and still have not bought the sculpture. It has assumed a strange place in my mind. It is a symbol of things I don’t have to own to enjoy. I am content to go and look at it when I’m in New York City.

  Aurora did not share my Puritan feelings. She was so touched by the beauty of the pieces that finally she grabbed my legs and said, “We should get one of these. Why can’t we have one of these things?”

  That afternoon her mother hailed a taxi and took her to Chinatown where there are things she can afford. She bought a ring with glass diamonds in it and a pair of sunglasses that make her look like Mata Hari.

  But what of the Egyptian galleries? The destination that was to make this trip into a journey? We went to see them on the first morning we were there. We woke in a beautiful suite of rooms at The Westbury Hotel on Madison and Sixty-ninth. We dressed and had breakfast and walked down Fifth Avenue to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I think is the most exciting museum in the world.

  We stopped at the fountain and let Rita take our photograph. Then we walked up the stairs and into this miraculous place where they collect and care for the wonders of the ages. We bought tickets and spent a few minutes with the Greek and Roman statues, then I took my grandson’s hand and led him to the tombs of the Pharoahs.

  “Awesome,” he said, and then was strangely quiet as we visited the burial chambers, the giant sarcophagi, The Temple of Dendur, the mummies, and the scrolls of heiroglyphics. “I have read about these things,” he said later. “But it is different when you see them in person.”

  “Do they seem smaller than you imagined?” I asked.

  “No, they seem bigger.” We shook our heads and looked into each other’s eyes. It is not possible to say in words the force of these powerful stone relics of the past. Either they speak to your imagination or they don’t. I had known that he would get it, and he did.

  The weather was devine. It was the first week in November, and I had expected it to be freezing. In order to go to the city when it wasn’t crowded with tourists I had decided bad weather would be worth it. I had even brought along an extra suitcase of gloves and hats and sweaters since these southern children do not need such things where they live. Instead it was constant sunshine and seventy degrees.

  “No one in New York spea
ks English,” my red-headed granddaughter Ellen, noted. “And none of them have red hair.”

  “I’ll show you redheads,” I told her. “We’ll be on the lookout for them.” After that I began to notice the diversity of the city. I have been there so much on business in the last few years that I have forgotton to use my eyes and ears for the real wonders of the city. We had Italian waiters, German hotel managers, Haitian taxi drivers. We had our hair cut by an Italian; we met a French family in the hotel elevator; we saw three beautiful Norwegians crossing a street in their brilliant knitted sweaters. At breakfast one morning we sat by an Oriental mother with a small child so perfect she took Aurora’s breath away. “She’s a perfect little doll,” Aurora said. “She’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Twice people cried. My daughter-in-law cried at Monet’s Lilies.

  “Why are you crying?” Ellen asked.

  “Because it is so beautiful,” she answered. After that the children and I went off and left her alone to look at paintings. The four of us went to the American wing and sat on a bench looking at Group of Bears and the Tiffany windows. We held hands and hugged each other and tried to explain to Aurora why she is not allowed to climb the marble stairs carved with dancers that sits in the middle of a bed of ivy.

  Later, on the last afternoon we were in New York, we came upon a copy of Group of Bears, in a playground in the park, and Rita photographed us climbing on it. Perhaps the reason to take children to the city is to teach them what to climb and what to leave alone.

  On the second morning we were there, I took Ellen on a sentimental journey. We went to Elizabeth Arden to get our hair cut. When my mother and my aunts were young women, they would go together to New York City to see plays. They would spend the first morning they were in town at Elizabeth Arden. I always think of them when I enter that red door. I think of them emerging at noon, perfected, ready to go and see My Fair Lady or Oklahoma or Brigadoon. They would bring home the long-playing albums from those musicals, and I would listen to them all summer and memorize the lyrics. Those were the days, although the ones I am living are good enough for me. Walking down Fifth Avenue with my oldest granddaughter to have our hair cut into matching ultra-chic short hairdos is something I will not need a photograph to remember. We emerged from the red door into the bright lovely sunshine and walked along the avenue giggling and looking at ourselves in store windows. We went to Trump Tower and rode up and down on the escalators and said, “I love your hair,” and “I love yours too,” about a dozen times.

  There are other fine memories. In The Museum of Modern Art, Aurora began to have the urge to paint. The next morning we went to an artists supply store and bought pastels and drawing paper and everyone drew and painted on the plane flying home.

  There was a wonderful moment in a restaurant when Aurora didn’t want anything to eat. It turned out she was lonesome for her school cafeteria. I left the restaurant and went to a deli and bought her a can of potato chips. “She is hungry for her native foods,” I told the Korean waiter when I returned. “She needs contact with her native earth.”

  We went to bookstores and record stores. We went to an athletic shoe store and bought Nikes and rubbed elbows with people in town for the marathon. We walked in the park and saw the castle. We went to The Museum of Natural History and marveled at the dinosaurs and saw the free movie twice. We worked the city from eight in the morning until eight at night. There were many things we left undone. We didn’t see the Statue of Liberty and I regret not taking Marshall to Yankee Stadium, where, he reminded me, Babe Ruth hit his hundredth home run. But that has always been the wonder of New York City. You can not exhaust its possibilities in a thousand visits. You always leave things half-finished and undone. There is a table in the Egyptian Galleries that contains a handkerchief that is the first clue that led to finding King Tut’s tomb. A curator of the museum drew me a map to it so I could take Marshall and show him that and in the excitement of the morning I forgot to do it.

  I’m Not Slave Material

  “YOUR CHILDREN are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself,” wrote Kahlil Gibran. How he knew this is marvelous to me, since I have striven so long and hard to learn it. The rules I discovered while raising my own three sons are simple. You have to let them go. You have to let them ride off on their bikes when they are seven, and you have to stop giving them money and advice when they are 21. Of course, as long as you are giving them money you will think you have the right to give them advice. They will resent the advice. If you raised them, it won’t be a thing they haven’t thought of for themselves.

  Nothing that you say now will help. They have to find their manhood. They have to forge their sword. Alone in the forest, like Siegfried, with only the broken pieces of his father’s sword for material, they must forge the weapon they will use to kill the dragons of the world. It is very difficult to believe that they are capable of doing this. You must try to see the face of a grown man before you, not the face of the child you taught to tie his shoelaces.

  I make it a point to live far away from both my parents and my children. If I lived near my parents I would be sucked into the morass of family problems which is the bread and water on which my parents thrive. They have partaken of this food for so long they think it’s nectar. On the other hand, if I lived near my grandchildren I would become their slave. And I’m not slave material.

  I believe that the greatest gift I can give my children is to have a life of my own that is not dependent on them. When they come to visit, they come of their own free will, not because they think I need them.

  I try not to ask my children too many questions. Every question that a parent asks a child is a leading question. I try not to compare them to other people. And I am trying to learn not to be proud of them. The thing I am proud of today may be the thing they need to stop doing tomorrow in order to grow and change.

  I am trying to learn to love them unconditionally, and this is where the money comes in. Giving money to a grown child is giving him power without responsibility. It will keep you from ever having a peer relationship with your child. A relationship where nobody gives advice or hovers or nags. In a peer relationship two people of equal worth and intelligence discuss the world outside themselves. They meet as equals and part without sorrow, trusting each other to return with good news. If I’m not paying for it, if it isn’t going to cost me money, I can listen to their wildest plans with enthusiasm and respect.

  Most of all I want to learn to trust in the future, which is always full of surprises. I am fiercely independent. So is my father. He is 85 years old, and last month, for the first time in our lives, I was able to do something for him that he couldn’t do for himself. I went to visit my parents and found him trying to read a book with a plastic sheet of magnifying material he had ordered from a magazine. He is a constant reader. If he isn’t working or plotting to control somebody’s life, he is reading. In the last few years much of his reading has been about groups who are plotting to control the world. What he reads is not my business. His failing vision is another matter. He had just received word from a third doctor that it was impossible to operate and let more light into his eyes. So he was struggling away with the magnifying sheet and not complaining.

  Luckily I had known a lawyer with a similar problem and had seen the marvelous magnifying instruments his wife had found for him.

  I left the house on some flimsy excuse and spent the afternoon combing Jackson, Mississippi, for magnifying devices. Finally, in a mall, in a German instruments store, I found it. A raised, lighted rectangle that sat upon the page and made up for the light lost to the retina. I took it home and gave it to him. It was a great moment for me. The next month, in Paris, I found an even better device that fits into the palm of the hand and can be moved more easily across the page. I had it wrapped and shipped to him with a bottle of Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue for my mother.

  There was a message on my answerin
g machine from him when I came home last night. In his kind, cultured, vastly humorous, sweet Southern voice it said, “Sister, I was just calling to thank you for that nice, sophisticated reader you got, and I liked the perfume I was putting on myself too. Ten, four.”

  A long time ago we had metaphors for all that I have said. Push them out of the nest. Cut the apron strings. These are vast metaphors. Even more important now that we live such long lives. Plenty of time to create real relationships with the ones we kicked out, or the ones we wish had kicked us out a whole lot sooner.

  Like a Flower of Feathers or a Winged Branch

  THIS IS Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s description of a bluebird. I read this one morning in a doctor’s office and have thought of it daily ever since. Every time I see a bird or a branch of leaves or a flower I think of it.

  This is the job of writing, to carve indelible metaphors into the mind of a reader. Can’t you see, the writer must tell the reader. It is all one thing. Look outside yourself and see that we are all fashioned of the same forms, the seven basic forms of crystals. Look outside yourself. Look at me.

  If that is the task, how can the writer achieve it? I think it is like building a wall. Let us suppose that the beginning writer is a man living alone on a piece of land. He wants to build a wall to keep other people from coming onto his land, but he has no tools or knowledge. All he knows is that he wishes to construct a barrier. He collects what he finds lying around, leaves and fallen branches. He stacks these things up. The first wind blows them away.

  He finds stones and begins to make piles of them but they are heavy and cumbersome and in short supply, so he soon gives that up. Then he travels to the next piece of land and finds a man who is making bricks out of clay and stacking them up. Our man likes that idea. He goes home and makes a wall of clay bricks, but the spring rains melt the bricks and the wall tumbles.