The obvious occurs to me: If you don’t consider your life a pilgrimage, it gets downgraded to a trip or even an aimless journey. It is we who make that decision.
Yesterday was Mom’s birthday. I found myself thinking about my good friends dying, and it was comforting to realize that it will happen to us all. It is not comforting to think about my children dying. I think this is because I want to be there when they go.
My house is like an exterior brain, storing memories that sometimes slip out between the folds—like the bound collection of funeral tributes for the writer Otto Friedrich that fell onto the carpet from under the ledge of a cabinet in my living room. Molly [his daughter] had sent them to me eight years ago. This morning I read them, some for the first time.
In 1955, when I was preening myself over one of the infinitely few fan letters that accompanied the publication of my first novel, Otto observed, “Those are the people who come after you in the middle of the night with an ax.”
—William Gaddis
History is about the passion of thought and the will to understand, about Darwin sailing for the Galapagos or Dostoevsky in trouble with the police, about Otto Friedrich, sick or in pain, blind in one eye, playing Bach’s Partita in C Minor on a winter night on a piano badly out of tune, planning his next raid on the kingdom of the past, wondering how he might hearten himself and his fellow men with a story not yet told.
—Lewis Lapham
Otto is gone, but these words about him will live as long as there are readers.
My brain is not the agile athlete it used to be. The same name can get lost and find itself a dozen times a day. But we are saved by the brains of others who remember for us. Over the phone, Lucy Childs told me a story I relayed to her nine years ago (who could remember that?) about teaching in a women’s prison and asking the class to create a family tree. One inmate wrote a date and, after it, noted: THE DEATH OF MY PARENTS. Of course I sympathized with her, saying how hard for her that must have been to lose them both on the same day. She nodded, with lowered eyes. Only later did I find out that she was in prison for plotting their murders.
Yesterday, coming home from errands, I had a new feeling of actually being glad that Mom had gone, that she didn’t have to endure her aged body, her shredded eyes, the oppressive heat of summer in Virginia. I also had to concede that her death was good for me. I have the freedom to move at will from one place to another now. There is also the feeling that she is in the wings, effecting some of the changes that are happening now, like my sister getting engaged.
Looking out at my unmowed lawn and unweeded flower beds, a thought that seems new occurs to me. When I don’t want to know something unflattering about myself (in this instance that I am not a good gardener), my first instinct is to go to a friend and ask if this is true, hoping they will say no. But not so fast. Isn’t it better to sit with my suspicions and examine them over the next few days and answer that question for myself? I might discover something valuable that a friend’s desire to be kind would deny me.
Little by little, the truth in the family whose oral history I am taking down is emerging. The grandmother’s diary alludes to the lack of love in her marriage, a son tells of the gardener being his steadiest childhood companion, a daughter talks of being the family scapegoat. Everyone in the family is dying for love—and forgiveness. My frien Alma sent me these thoughts on the subject.
“Thinking about forgiveness, I recently heard of a shocking custom in a primitive tribe. When someone in the tribe has killed another member, they strap the dead victim onto the murderer’s back until he eventually dies, too.”
“The Bible says, “He who hates his brother is a murderer. The man who does not love is among the living dead.” When we hold something in our heart against someone and will not forgive, we actually hate the person and that hatred binds us to them just as surely as love does.”
“Medical findings indicate that bitterness and lack of forgiveness can bring on all manner of diseases. Could it be that those we hate, and thus murder spiritually, are bound to us, slowly poisoning our own souls until we are among the living dead? This is a serious consideration, especially in the light of the fact that in Greek the word forgive means to unbind.”
Up very early, 4:30 A.M. Troubled dreams in which I do not fit anywhere, can’t find the right clothes or place to be. I feel like the parents in Jonathan Franzen’s novel, The Corrections. I am losing it, slowly but surely, word by word. So I get up to be with myself, even though I feel in need of sleep. I never knew how much of an anchor my mother was until she died. We were like geese, mated for life. And now that I am alone, I am stumbling over the emptiness, trying in vain to fill it by leaving town, and the price is too great.
Outside, the dark is filled with birds talking in soft cheeps, signifying another reality just as valid as my own. Sitting here, my strength returns, the way the presence of an old friend makes us whole.
NOTES ON MY VISIT WITH MOLLY W, WHOSE ORAL HISTORY I AM JUST BEGINNING
The time with Molly was a tonic. She is an admirable woman. At eighty-two she walks with a firm spirit and step and there is not an ounce of self-pity in her. Neither is there much room for reflection. She has survived by not looking too far beneath the surface, by her own admission. She loved her mother and maternal grandmother deeply and wants the book we are writing to preserve and vindicate their lives. Yet it will require some more reflection from Molly to do it right, as her mother and grandmother left little of themselves to draw from, other than a few photographs and, in her mother’s case, several diaries filled with what she did and with whom. After reading Molly’s mother’s journal, mostly about where she ate and shopped, mine seems like a biographer’s dream, not nearly as vapid as I feared.
I love a broad margin to my life. —Thoreau
Yesterday was a perfect summer day. All the earth was perfectly moist, the weeds came up easily, the grass glistened, and I spent nearly all day outside planting flowers, pulling up lamb’s-quarter, and reclaiming the garden. It is beginning to have a luxuriant cared-for look. And even though, at various times during the day, I realized that I was alone and should perhaps be uneasy over this, I dismissed the thought as unworthy of the day itself.
Sometimes it feels as if the relationships with my children are suffering a kind of gradual death by neglect or lack of communication. Yet when I consider the alternatives, I don’t see any that are better. Do I want them to live with me or me with them? Do I want to reclaim my old position at the center of their lives? No. What I want is to be at the center of mine, and yesterday, all day, I was.
The notion of not wanting to be in charge of my own life interests me now that I feel I am. For so many years, more than half my life, I struggled with the emotional belief that if I could rest secure in the love of a partner I would blossom, like a flower well and truly planted. The idea that I had soil enough of my own took a long time to mature.
I am doing some hard thinking, and Thoreau is helping me:
I was thinking, accidentally, of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do; and with the vision of the diggings before me, I asked myself why I might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles—why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine.
This long, delayed summer lies around me like a perfumed lake, the trees thick with leaves and birds, every field loaded with daylilies, foxglove, and Queen Anne’s lace. The most important truth to accept is that we are continually changing. The daylily I snip for a kitchen jug is on its way to extinction. As the Buddhists teach, we must imagine the glass in our hand as already shattered.
My days have been full of small things: choosing paint colors, cleaning out kitchen shelves, arranging for doctors’ appointments. Yet there is a harmony to them, a feeling of anticipation, as if I am readying a ship for a long trip for which I have neither destination nor itinerary.
Yesterday I heard the story of how bald eagles, when the
y get old, stop eating, and if it weren’t for the younger eagles who bring them food they would die. But then they are given new life and come out of their decline stronger than before. It is the way I feel about my children’s importance in my life. One needs to be around young people or you lose something very important.
Yesterday, my chief joy came from spending several hours with Peggy, working on her autobiography. Then an hour on Ellen’s front porch with a gin and tonic, followed by a stop at Mary Lou Brown’s and a long porch talk with Conde Hopkins. I felt rooted in my life, lacking in nothing that is not provided.
In Charleston, South Carolina, staying with my friend Nikki, who was stunned to realize that I had recently signed up on Match.com. I told her I was somewhat stunned myself, but it was an easy entertaining way to see who was available in different zip codes, without even having to comb your hair. We decided to look at the men on Match.com around Charleston. As each new man came onto the screen Nikki would editorialize.
“Loves to cuddle. Cuddle? No, I would want to get to work.
“Christian? Out!
“Sullivans Island. He’s rich. But what does he have on his head, a woman’s hat? Enlarge his photo. Oh, my God, he’s on a horse. One of those dressage types. No way!
“A southern gentleman. Oh, no, that’s out. I hate southern men. He probably has a belt with a Confederate flag on it.
“Look, he’s eating a pizza! What kind of person would have a picture of himself eating pizza?”
I haven’t been here long enough to feel Charleston in my bones, but the summer air is soft and slow moving. On Wadmalaw Island, the live oaks are hung with moss, ivy climbs up the tree trunks and ribbons of water wrap the land into separate islets. There is something reassuring about being in a place pulled back and forth by the tides. You can see the land respond, the water move. The beach on Sullivans Island is a Prendergast oil, with clouds and pelicans and necklaces of bright green tendrils with white morning glories casting a net across the sand. This is beautiful country. More and more I understand why Southerners prefer one another’s company and culture. There are fewer sharp edges.
Nikki’s house is like her: small, shiny, and intelligent. Coke bottle cap crucifixes, postcards of Marilyn Monroe, white Christmas lights and seashells on the front porch. The fever of having me, or anyone, here seemed to have broken last night. I could sense, at dinner, that she was finally relaxed. We talked about writing, ideas for columns, and books.
Through Match.com I made a coffee date with a Charleston man. But I think I’ve caught the cyberdating wave too late. He is not my idea of anything except a man with fixed ideas and bad bridgework. I do not feel that old or broken down, and never could I imagine being physically intimate with him or anyone like him. My present life seems so much more expansive.
Nikki is right. Growing old together lessens the shock of meeting someone old for the first time. The married couple in front of us in the movie house was rosy and overfed. Like two cows in a field, they have aged together, and daily proximity has softened the reality. Perhaps they are bored beyond belief with each other and the contents of their lives, but they have each other in the movies, and that—for many people who are afraid to be alone—is the point.
Okay, so maybe this entry about going online to look for a relationship took you by surprise. That makes two of us. All I can say is that I am 50 percent embarrassed about it and 50 percent not. But as decisions go, this one didn’t have a lot of lead time. One night, sitting in front of the upstairs television watching Entertainment Tonight (now that’s embarrassing) while ironing a stack of napkins, onto the screen came a former “bachelor” from that now-defunct reality show to talk about his new job—as the PR representative for Match.com. I listened to his spiel, turned off the iron, and walked across the room to my computer to log on. By the end of the week, I had written a brief autobiography, selected a recent photograph (taken at my older son’s wedding), and joined up.
What I liked about Match.com was the ability to pick a zip code and see who was available. I trolled the west side of New York, the Monterey peninsula, all of Marin, the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., Montana—what about Billings, or maybe Missoula? It was fun. Then I hopped across the Atlantic to Europe, but the language barrier got in my way. Still, for an extrovert who feels a little restless in a small town, it was great entertainment, tinged with hope.
My life did not change. There were a couple of men I thought looked interesting, and I e-mailed them but got no reply. Maybe they were plants, put there by Match.com to dress up the stag line. I had lunch with a really nice professor from a nearby university who was an avid bike rider, but I outweighed him, and I just don’t think he could imagine me pedaling alongside. And once I wrote someone back and said I didn’t think we were a match (I think he was a retired soybean farmer on the Eastern Shore of Maryland), but I knew someone he might like. He must have been insulted as he never wrote back.
I was actively involved in this mostly virtual dating scene for about three months, and then I got bored and went on to other things. But my membership was for six months, which turned out to be a good thing.
Yesterday afternoon, the sun shattered a jug of hydrangeas into shards of light on my dining room table. It was there for anyone to look at but I only did so in passing, the way a king glances casually out the carriage window at his kingdom.
An overnight at the Blanchards’ house on the river. I loved the small brown birds in the oak trees by the back deck. They fell from branch to branch as silently as drops of water, small and adorable, no bigger than plump figs.
Buck admitted that his father’s death had given him a greater sense of confidence. He is no longer his father’s son. When he goes to people in the community as a businessman, the background tapestry of his father’s living presence is no longer there. I can see how important it is that our parents die. That we die. The field would be too crowded; the ability of our children to extend themselves in all directions would be too limited.
Tobias’s birthday. Seven! He is such a remarkable and remarkably loving boy.
A second grandson [Christian, Jr.] will be here within the next twenty-four hours. The whole family is keeping watch from coast to coast.
The baby came last night around seven. In California. He is perfect and calm, a little boy who lies in his mother’s arms looking at the world with quiet curiosity. Unspoken but real is the fact that he is not damaged in any way.
Christian’s love of his baby is bringing new feelings to the fore. “How could anybody be mean to my child?” he asked.
I am reading Arthur Miller’s autobiography, Timebends, which is quietly astounding me. Everything he examines becomes vivid and poignant at the same time.
On his mother:
She was a woman haunted by a world she could not reach out to, by books she would not get to read, concerts she would not get to attend, and above all, interesting people she’d never get to meet.
On the playwright Clifford Odets:
Odets seemed to me to share something of Marilyn’s special kind of perceptive naïveté; like her, he was a self-destroying babe in the woods absentmindedly combing back his hair with a loaded pistol.
On artistic failure:
In American theater the quickest route to failure is success, and if you can’t get there yourself, there are plenty around who’ll be happy to give you a lift.
The disconnections between what I believe and how I live are almost too numerous to mention: I abhor hunting and eat meat, consider myself someone who doesn’t care about material things but take way too many trips to the mall, think television has a terrible effect on the imagination but go to sleep with it on, love solitude except when I’m on the phone.
Yesterday I had one of those chance conversations that light up my imagination. A writer from Austin, Texas, called about my seminars and cottage. She told me that her parents had been circus performers from Tuscany who emigrated to the United States (Las Vega
s) and finally, after twenty years, returned to Italy, where they now own a restaurant on the Amalfi coast. Growing up in the United States, she said her mother juggled, tamed lions (until she decided that menstrual blood was dangerous in that line of work), and tossed people back and forth with her feet for a living. She never learned English, and instead of reading her children bedtime stories she would lie on her back and juggle the kids with her feet. The caller said she would like to write about her family but is more interested in a book about Hebrew women at the time of Christ. I smell a Christian theme not to my liking or style. When you’ve got that sort of family in your kit bag, why on earth would you want to write about anything else?
Walking into Ellen’s house last night, I felt depressed. The unreality of my situation seemed too hard to imagine living with—the absence of Mother, Christian, Eliza, Justin—and the liveliness of the Papoulakos house came down on me. “I think I will stop drinking,” I told Ellen.
Later, sitting on the bleachers at a Patrick Henry High School football game, I had trouble catching the football spirit. But there were a couple of plays, when a lightning-fast kid grabbed the ball and cut through the players like a panther, that were thrilling. And the wide-eyed Papoulakos girls, their social antennae out as far as they could extend, were a visual delight. Like all the other perfectly groomed teenage girls at the game, they drifted like starlets around the bleachers, saying hello to their friends.
Once again, I’m faced with the truth that I am not a sex object. A third man, hooked online, slipped away. I can’t say I’m upset. He was a nice person but not interesting. What he thinks of me can be summed up in his silence since he left. I was interested when he said his ex-wife had warned him before marrying that she didn’t love him and she wasn’t a good bet for marriage. “She must have been quite something,” I said, “for you to want to go ahead with it.” He nodded. “She was a very electric personality, made everything fun, knew everybody, and was a sharp dresser.” There it is.
The Journal Keeper Page 15