Holy Cards

I’ve been looking over an old book of mine, Nonviolent Communication, a Language of Life, which is about how to listen and respond to people without offending them. The big problem with reading this book is the awareness it brings of how important it is to the health of body, mind and spirit to be heard fully and completely and to grant others the same gift – and how rarely that actually happens . . .

Most of us, when we hear a person’s lamentations, we want to dole out advice and solutions like pellets from a shotgun – Shut up, already! we seem to be saying.  That’s violent, according to this book.  Most often, people are seeking empathy and genuine understanding, not advice.  The book states that one of the best things a listener can do is to paraphrase or summarize what the other person has just said – that shows you heard them.

That’s one thing my mother could do well, listen – and on this third anniversary of her death I feel gratitude that I had such an experience as a teenager and beyond – one person who could listen well and not give advice.  I think I heard her say once that she wasn’t smart enough to come up with solutions and advice for other people’s problems. Little did she know that that is exactly the key to being a good listener.  She couldn’t solve anyone’s problems and she didn’t presuppose to try. So she just let them talk – usually while she went about the task of making dinner or canning tomatoes or washing dishes. Then again, maybe she wasn’t really listening at all!

I was surprised to learn, after I was married and had children of my own, that several of my high school friends still made the pilgrimage up the steep hill where we lived in order to “chit-chat” with my mother. She would casually inform me of their visits and of what they were doing in life, and I often wondered why they kept in touch with her but had lost touch with me! At her funeral, one of these old friends said to me, “I’m really going to miss our little talks – with your mother, I mean. She was a good listener.”

When my children were young and I was so busy with the never ending chores of motherhood, which of course left no time for writing, I would make a monthly-or-so phone call to my mother to unburden myself. I knew she understood the frustrations of a thwarted creative impulse because I had witnessed (and heard) her own struggles to pursue creativity in bits and pieces amid the chores of daily life. A few days later I’d get a letter in the mail – not crammed full of advice, but rather in brief acknowledgment of what I’d already said via phone. Then she’d go on to other things about the house or her church or her garden . . .

St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of writers 

Included in that letter would be a holy card of some designation – St. Jude was a favorite one she frequently sent, for he is the patron saint of lost causes. My family used to laugh about that. But there were other cards she’d send too, perhaps an archangel – Raphael, Michael, or Gabriel – to watch over me and guide me in the ways she did not presuppose to do.  I never knew why she sent me the card of St. Francis de Sales – until recently, when I looked it up. He is the patron saint of writers -- and he is known for his ability to "communicate with gentleness." 

I would put the “holy card of the month” on the refrigerator with a magnet – to remind me that someone had heard me – and that was a good solution.

Ode to Pesto, 1982

(Writing this at the library which just re-opened today, post hurricane) 

This is the fifth day of no power since Hurricane Irene – and while my losses are minimal and replaceable, and I'm grateful for that, I have to say I grieve the loss of my homemade pesto in the freezer more than any of my inconveniences. Basil, its main ingredient, is one of the few things I can grow without the squirrels eating it before harvest time – or before I awake in the morning. This year I went all out – I bought an extra special Romano cheese from Whole Foods Grocery at a price I don’t want to mention – it had just been cut at a Saturday morning "wheel cutting ceremony" of which there was much to-do. I bought organic pine nuts that were similarly priced – maybe more, I think. I always buy good Italian olive oil, so of course I bought more of the same. I found purple garlic which I remembered from my youth because my father used to grow it. I don’t know if purple garlic is better, but it was pricier and there was much nostalgia in buying it anyway. Those are the only five ingredients that make pesto – fresh basil, Romano cheese, garlic, pine nuts, and olive oil – but the dishes that can be made with that simple concoction are endless. 

My pesto recipe dates back to an old Bon Appetite magazine from June 1982, several years before my children were born or even considered – but the means and ways to use it have spawned with each passing year.  I’ve never skipped a year of making and storing pesto since 1982.  I assess that this year’s yield was the best I’ve ever made. 

Pesto pasta, pesto potatoes, minestrone with a dollop of pesto stirred in, pesto-baked salmon, pesto-grilled-everything, and of course pesto butter on homemade sourdough bread – these are some of the foods of which there was never any dissent among my family members at any age from toddlerhood-on-up. We all agreed for just those nights when pesto adorned dinner.

I wanted my pesto to be extra tasty this year for those times when my grown children would come home from faraway places. I wanted the memory of "home-in-agreeability" to reign for them. And I wanted enough of it to serve at all occasions – Thanksgiving, Christmas, random weekends, and all birthdays straight through to St. Patty’s Day when the next seedlings are planted. And so I even bought more basil at the farmers’ market when my own plants had exhausted themselves – more basil to make more pesto.

Now every bit of it, all my neatly stacked containers, rot in the warm dark freezer. The kitchen smells acrid and garlicky when I walk into it. I can’t bring myself to open the freezer door and throw it away yet – though it had thawed entirely two days ago. I’ve crossed the threshold of caring whether the power comes on today – my losses are tallied.

I’m not talking about the price of ingredients, a mere number that follows a dollar sign – that’s not what I tally or grieve. That’s not the value I assign to homemade pesto.  And I realize there are things far more valuable that I have not lost.  But I still think about the extra special effort I put into it this year – early morning treks to obtain quality ingredients – and all for the promise of another season when everyone might come together and agree. Pesto is the taste of agreement.  I wonder if the likes of Irene can understand that.

A woman’s heart is crazy and secretive that way – she’ll do so much and spend too much to implant a thing of value in the subconscious storehouse of memory for those who will never witness the effort or know about it or maybe even care about it . . . only, strangely, sense it by tasting . . . 

The 1982 Recipe:
2 cups packed fresh basil leaves
2 large garlic cloves
½ cup pine nuts
¾ cup freshly grated Romano or Parmesan cheese
2/3 cup olive oil

Grind it all up together in whatever way you choose – mortar and pestle, or blender.  And no, Irene, it's not the same as store-bought.

Strolling a` la Anne Spencer

I receive one poem per day via email from http://www.poets.org/ – which is nice because it’s just one poem, and it’s usually one which I would not come upon through my own devices. Yesterday’s offering was one by Anne Spencer, a contemporary of Langston Hughes and a member of the Harlem Renaissance School of Writers.  She died in 1975.  The poem is called “At the Carnival.”

Poet Anne Spencer's home in Lynchburg, VA

As I read it, I fondly recalled the day a few years ago when I strolled in front of Anne Spencer’s historic landmark home in Lynchburg, VA, and knocked determinedly on the front door to see if a tour was available – then sat on her porch, talked to her neighbors and some gardeners, took a few photos, and . . . finally, left. I happened to be in Lynchburg visiting my daughter who attended college there until her graduation in 2008.

I love going to writers’ homes and taking tours – feeling that certain feeling.  That’s what I like – feeling that certain feeling. Anne Spencer loved gardening, as do many writers.  She even had a little garden house out in the back where she would write.  I imagine she would write for a while, stroll through her rosebushes and do a little pruning work, then go edit some words out, then stroll and prune some more, rewrite . . . that sort of thing.  There were some men working in her back yard the day we were there.  I suppose they had been hired by the historic society to maintain the grounds as Anne Spencer would have liked them.  But they acted as though they had never even heard of Anne Spencer – this was just another job for them, and they were eager to be done.

My daughter was embarrassed of me that day, feeling I had pushed the envelope too far by sitting on Anne Spencer’s porch and talking to gardeners in her back yard. She sat in the car and waited for me impatiently as I strolled the neighborhood looking for someone who knew something about the Anne Spencer home and whether a tour was available.

We finally left the neighborhood and went to an historic cemetery nearby. We walked through a good portion of the cemetery’s 20,000 plots looking for Anne Spencer’s gravesite, but never found it. I later learned she was buried in a newer cemetery a few miles from there. We did learn all about African burial practices, however, and I took a few pictures of the gravesite of the most famous whores in Lynchburg, a mother-daughter team named Agnes and Lizzie Langley. They ran what was called “a sporting house” in Lynchburg during the Civil War era. They say it is uncertain as to whether the Langleys bought the elaborate grave marker with their own money or if their patrons bought it for them:

RIP, Agnes and Lizzie Langley, circa late 1800's

Then we ate some Indian food, perused a used bookstore where I couldn’t find any books by Anne Spencer but found a few other gems, and then drove to Poplar Forest which was Thomas Jefferson’s little-known summer retreat house nestled amongst 5,500 acres of . . . poplar trees. Poplar Forest is a bona fide tourist destination now, but in 2008 it was still in the process of being restored to its architectural authenticity, and we were privilegd and free to wander the house and gardens to observe the restoration in process. Jefferson said he went there "to be a hermit and to read and to entertain his absent friends." 

Thomas Jefferson's silent retreat called Poplar Forest

 Reading “At the Carnival” made me recall the spirit of that day – searching, strolling with my daughter, having fun, eating, finding things we didn’t look for, and not finding things we did look for. It was a carnival of sorts . . . and here are some lines taken from the center part of Spencer's long poem:

 I came incuriously—
Set on no diversion save that my mind
Might safely nurse its brood of misdeeds
In the presence of a blind crowd.

Starry Starry Plans

Driving home from my son’s college graduation last May, we decided to bail ship from the truck infested interstate to take the older and less traveled road, known as Highway 11, which traverses Virginia from east to west, and continues into Tennessee.

Driving through the gentle and open-armed Shenandoah Valley, we stopped at a small country store because of the sign’s promise of hoop cheese and real ham biscuits. There was some minor construction going on at one end of the store – actually, it was ‘de-construction’ of a sort – the old man who owned the store explained that he had decided to pull off the siding which he put up in the 1950s to ‘modernize’ the store by covering up the original log cabin architecture which dated to the mid-1800’s.  The store had been in the family that long . . .

He didn’t talk about a son or grandson or anyone else taking over the store in the future; he worked alone along the quiet highway with his hoop cheeses and real sorghum molasses, his jars of everything that could be pickled or canned by the nearby Amish women, his bushel baskets of seasonal produce the earth brought forth from nearby Fancy Hill, VA., and his tables full of smoked hams. His pink aged face was alive with plans for the ‘re-modernization’ of his family store – back to the old log cabin work of his ancestors . . . still full of plans.  He said something like that as he cut a wedge of hoop cheese for me, “As long as I’ve still got plans, I figure I’ll never get old.”

All the while he talked, I looked at the table of hams behind me, the hoop cheeses in the background. What voice inside me whispered, starry night?  Suddenly I saw Van Gogh’s famous painting in a table full of hams and hoop cheeses – but the painting had turned pink and red and cheddar instead of blue and green and summery.  If I were a painter – and I wish I were, for there are times when words are tiresome and harsh – I would get out my palette of pinks and lavender-reds and browns, moss greens and silver-greys. . . and I’d paint a table full of swirling hams and call it “Starry Starry Plans.”

August, my least favorite month of the year, is just around the bend.  My own writing plans are on hold until September . . . and my son works long into the night on his plans for a stellar future . . .

Cool Breeze

Abelard and Writer's Block

I think the biggest cause of writer’s block is too much to say, not too little to say. We hear of writers facing a blank page and nothing to say. When I am blocked, it is not that I feel blankness inside, or openness, or silence – it’s that I feel clamor, stuffiness, a scramble of voices all blocked and mired in each others’ push. There’s too much wanting to say . . . therefore I just walk away. Go feed the birds. Check the emails. Wash some clothes . . . much like leaving a noisy billiard parlor.

And this comes from not writing something every day, from ignoring the little things that seem unimportant and unworthy of the paper or the time – saying to myself, this is unimportant – this is just complaining – this has already been said – worst of all, who cares anyway? Letting things build up and get blocked.

                                                                      *  *  *  * 

I think of a book I’ve been reading, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, the twelfth century monk and nun who left a trove of love letters behind when they died. You see, they had had a torrid love affair while he was studying for the priesthood – and she was his precocious student, 21 years his junior, who never intended to take vows herself but just loved learning (from him; he was quite handsome they say). Abelard had been hired by her rich Uncle Fulbert to teach her the scripture in their original languages, Greek and Hebrew. But once the uncle found out about the goings-on under his own roof, he had his henchmen castrate Abelard in his sleep. After much pain and remorse and a lot of secrecy, Abelard took his final vows, but not before ensuring that Heloise would do the same – so they should “forever be together in spirit” – that is to say, so she would be unavailable to any other man (my opinion).

 Then, after each had taken their vows and was embedded in separate monasteries, I suppose the hormonal changes began to set in from the castration.  Abelard ignored her, took a more fatherly tone in his letters, and made little attempt to see her.  That’s when she writes one of her most straightforward, insightful, and beautiful letters to him:

“Tell me one thing, if you can. Why, after our entry into religion, which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you that I have neither a word from you when you are here to give me strength nor the consolation of a letter in absence? Tell me, I say, if you can –“

Did you not love my soul? Was it the flame of lust rather than love that bound you to me? I took the veil for you! Those are her very words, though I’m taking license to extract and scramble them together from several pages of text – a letter that rankles even 900 years later.  She details all her young school girl passion and hope in him.  She reminds him that she even bore his child in secret at age 17 and gave up the baby just so it wouldn’t taint his reputation or stand in the way of his career (vows).  Yet after she took the veil, forever marrying herself to God, as she puts it, he neglected her! “In truth I have done none of this for God but everything for you,” she laments. “Tell me, I say, if you can.”

His reply is a 20-page discourse on female complaining, “. . . a recital of your misery over the wrongs you suffer,” and “your old perpetual complaint against God concerning the manner of our entry into religious life and the cruelty of the act of treachery performed on me.”  This one pivotal letter seems to be the turning point in their relationship.  I know I think differently of Abelard forevermore after reading this letter.

The way I see it, his 20-page letter is nothing but fancy rhetoric meant to act like mirrors that deflect light into crazy patterns on the ceiling. I hope she saw it that way. He never answers the question of ‘why have I been so neglected and forgotten by you.’ Instead, he performs a sleight of hand – he angles the mirrors to cast shadows on Heloise.

After that game-changing letter, she stopped the complaining – but she also stopped writing heartfelt letters. Maybe she got her answer, maybe she believed she was wrong to complain, maybe she just gave up. The female in her was vanquished, just as the male in him had been. “I have set the bridle of your injunction on the words which issue from my unbounded grief,” she writes in reply. That’s it – her letters become short and to the point, mostly questions about how the nuns ought to conduct themselves under the Rule of Saint Benedict which was written for men – the cowls, for example, she writes, “What are we to do about the cowls?”

And then he answers her about the cowls. That becomes their relationship after he had secured her in the convent and told her to stop complaining.

It is difficult to finish the book now that Heloise has been shushed – a shushing which endured even through the two decades she lived after his death at age 63.  I wish she had written something in the privacy of her monastic cell about all that she really felt. We will never know – not because there was nothing to say, but because there was so much – and who would care? she must have thought – and so she walked away from saying it.

The Occasional Virtue

I read a newspaper article entitled “Study: College Kids More Cocky.”  The woman with the credentials to be quoted in such an article is Jean Twenge, author of the book Generation Me and a psychologist at San Diego State University.  She has published a new study concluding that college students “feel far more superior than their elders” – at least 60 percent of incoming freshman rate themselves as above average in all areas, compared to about 39 percent in 1966.  “It’s not just confidence. It’s over confidence – narcissism even,” she says.

“There are some advantages and some disadvantages to self esteem, so having some degree of confidence is often a good thing,” she begins.  But, as she sees it, too much self esteem can cause ‘a disconnect’ between self-perception and reality.  The Greeks called it hubris, as I recall from my own college days – and it was the downfall of almost every tragic hero (and more than a few modern day politicians, I might add).

I could have composed such an article myself last week, if someone had been with me to write it down while I was driving – when a very young teenage blonde, way too sexy for her age, made a stupid move in her BMW car while chattering wildly and laughing enthusiastically on her cell phone.  The stupid move put her ahead of me with no apologies or acknowledgment of the life or mishap I had just saved her by not asserting myself and rather deferring to her blind stupidity.  She will never know she was wrong – she will never know what she could have lost or what might have happened.  And so, I felt for just that time like a silent guardian angel who had watched out for her life (and mine) while she plodded along in the insular world of her own self importance – unconscious of me, of others, of danger, of wrong, of cost, of invisible forces to which one ought to be grateful . . .

I possibly saved her life, mine too, and certainly much inconvenience at the least.  Two cars did not collide that day because one of us deferred to the other who was in the wrong. Farther up the road, we two strangers sat side by side in parallel lanes at a stop light, and I looked over to see if the young driver might at least acknowledge the guardian angel who saved her – but she was still swaddled in the bubble wrap of her own private cell phone conversation and the climate control of her car and the slightly tinted glass and probably the stereophonic sound too – protected from intruders like me, immersed, disconnected from reality – just as the author had explained. “A disconnect between self-perception and reality.”

She did not look at me from her controlled environment.  And if she had, she might have been offended by the middle aged intruder trying to make eye contact through her tinted glass. She might have called her mother to report me.  She might have made some awful sign or mean look at me.

I don’t generally speak on cell phones when I’m driving because I’m not confident of my ability to do both without mishap – but I will never shy away from talking aloud to myself.  In those ensuing moments I recounted the young driver I once had been – always two hands grasped firmly on the wheel at 10 and 2 as I’d been taught, my neck and back muscles tense with the knowledge I could die while doing this, a foot and mind always poised to break on a dime if necessary.  I was not confident as a young person – in driving or in any other aspect of life.  The driving analogy might transfer to everything I did as a youth – sure of danger, only myself to blame, poised for sudden stops, and aware that others were probably right and I was probably wrong – always.

There’s a lot to be said for a lack of confidence at times.  I said this aloud to myself as the young blonde driver accelerated to the green light and sped beyond me into the sunset.

My own children were young and growing in self esteem in the late 80’s when Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers told them daily how special and wonderful they were.  I used to think, passing from room to room with a load of laundry or a wet mop or fresh baked snacks from the oven, I used to think, “Wow, no one ever told me that when I was young . . . how nice.” But then in later years I began to notice – and I’m not talking about my own children or their friends because I think that a moderate dose of confidence is a necessary thing and I wish I’d had it, and all that – however, I began to notice an over confidence and false importance and entitlement in some members of their generation.  I could see it regularly in the malls or neighborhood setting or my children’s schools.  They deferred to no one; their kind of confidence seemed to outshine my hard earned variety in every instance – and I began to think that the self esteem inducers had somehow over shot their mark. They had aimed the arrow at healthy self esteem, which needed to be done, but they had somehow landed it in the insular world of narcissism and self importance.

I never talked about it back then because I was afraid I was wrong or just getting old – but after reading this article and seeing the data that confirms my hunch, I’ll say what I’ve been thinking for many years – that Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers might have done well to add this caveat to their daily message:  “. . . and not only are you special and wonderful, but so is everyone else – and don’t forget it!  That’s the part they left out.