Mid-December Haiku

The end of the year.
“Red light, green light” comes to mind.
A kids’ game. Stop. Glow.

*

Senses mark the days.
Rosemary, salt, marble, pine—
which smelled, tasted, felt?

*

Child's crayon drawing:
red cardinal, snowy bough.
That old novice dream.

One Haiku

It’s just a short drive 

to my childhood home. Surprise,

there, like memory.

Un-Ordinary

A couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail out of the blue from N., the daughter of longtime friends of my parents'. She had come across an essay I'd written about my family, prompting her to track me down. N. is about a dozen years older than me, and I never knew her well, largely because of the age difference, which made her an adult while I was still a kid, but I did know her parents. 

Her father and mine had met in college in the 1940s, then my father helped get her dad a job in Washington and they remained colleagues and friends for decades, even after their retirement from the government, when they both worked for a private firm for another 20 years or so. Our mothers were also close. I remember luncheons Mom would host for small groups of women friends, mostly wives of my father's colleagues, including N.'s mother. The menu might include vichyssoise or chicken in aspic or something prettily sliced like stuffed flank steak. Dessert could be plum kuchen or individual caramel custards.

I learned from Mom how to be hospitable, the value and satisfaction of welcoming people into your home and making delicious things for them to enjoy. (So why don't I do it more often?)

As N.'s parents, then mine, succumbed to the trials and diminishments of age, they fell out of touch. Her dad died in 1999, her mother in 2012, the same year my father passed away. All were in assisted living.

My mother, as I've written before, is still alive and in "memory care." I've also written here of a long-ago teaching colleague of hers who connected with me through the same essay of mine that N. read and who continues to visit Mom after more than two years. But N. is the first person to share with me in such detail the impression my mother made. Here's an excerpt from her note:

I was always fond of your parents, but I adored your mother. She was beautiful, stylish, talented, cultured, creative, articulate, and a wonderful cook. I still own and cherish some things she made for me—a knitted tea cozy, accompanied by a poem that she wrote, a patchwork hot pad, badly faded 40 years later, but still treasured, and a little collection of handwritten menus with recipes I still use.  Once she gave me a pretty glass jar filled with potpourri she had harvested from her garden.  Your mother was so un-ordinary, and I wish I had kept in closer touch with her. . . .  

Sometime in the mid-'60s, your parents gave a 12th Night party one winter afternoon after Christmas, and children were invited. Do you remember that? I can see exactly what your mother wore in my mind's eye—a gorgeous, long emerald-green hostess dress, which she told me your father had given her for Christmas. (I'm pretty sure I'm remembering that correctly.)  It was a wonderful party—lots of delicious homemade things, including candied grapefruit, which I'd never had before. 

Your mother never took the easy way out. If something was worth doing, it was worth doing to perfection. Once on my mother's birthday, your mom invited her over for lunch. My mother came home with lovely birthday gifts your mother had made—including homemade croissants in a basket with a beautiful embroidered cloth. By the way, I recall that your kitchen was all pink. Was it still pink when you sold the house?

I was sitting at my desk at work practically in tears at these lovely, unasked-for reminiscences—all, I might add, accurate. I do remember the 12th Night party. It was an open house—come anytime between, say, 3 and 6—and it became sort of legendary in the family. Mom would often say, "We should have another 12th Night party." But for all the other entertaining she did over the years—and she was essentially a shy person, a tough thing to reconcile with an inclination toward graciousness—we never had another bash like that.

I remember the green hostess dress, too—if you'd asked me what she wore to that party nearly 50 years ago, I couldn't have said, but N. helped me recall.

What I've realized reading and rereading N.'s e-mail (and we've continued the correspondence over the last two weeks) is that she has idealized Mom—and I love that she has. I think it's great.

I knew all of the same traits of my mother's that she describes, along with the more human side that everyone knows of a parent: the misunderstandings, the bathrobes, the TV dinners, the workaday. But N. saw her from a remove; maybe she even admired things that were different from her own mother (I didn't know her mom well enough to say). But what she has captured in those sentences is true—all of it. There are so few people in the world whom I have access to anymore, outside family, who cherished the beautiful things Mom brought to the world. The fact that N. went to the trouble to tell me was a real gift.

And no, the kitchen was no longer pink.

Before I was born.

Same front porch eight years later (me on the right).

The Chapel That We Crave

"Happiness is absorption, being entirely yourself and entirely in one place. That is the chapel that we crave."

That's my favorite passage from a really nice essay called "Chapels" by Pico Iyer in this year's Best American Essays. I read it today while sitting in a little garden off Dupont Circle where in-the-know people bring their lunches, or just themselves, on a day like this in late November when the temperature lolls in the 60s. Beyond the garden gate, you can see and hear the life of the city, but it feels like nothing more than a sheer, rustling curtain waving in the near distance—non-threatening, even pleasant—while the greenery of this boundaried space holds you.

Even as I sat in a kind of outdoor chapel, reading the essay made me realize I need to spend more time in those places, physical and otherwise, where I'm entirely me, not split off in shards.

One of the things that make the Iyer essay notable is that he's talking about literal chapels as much as figurative ones, but he never mentions the word God—doesn't need to because that's not what his story is about.

He admits, "For all the years of my growing up, we had to go to chapel every morning and to say prayers in a smaller room every evening. Chapel became everything we longed to flee; it was there we made faces at one another, doodled in our hymnbooks, sniggered at each other every time we sang about 'the bosom of the Lord' or the 'breast' of a green hill."

I can relate to that feeling, having spent a fair amount of time in this musky chapel as a preteen and teen, even having acted (badly) in a 15th-century play within its walls:

As idyllic as it looks here, I don't miss it—almost never, in fact, think about it.

Iyer's essay is about the quiet spaces, sometimes but not always walled, that allow us to recharge. And maybe you have to be an adult to do that with intention.

"Chapels are emergency rooms for the soul," he writes. "They are the one place we can reliably go to find who we are and what we should be doing with our lives—usually by finding all we aren't, and what is much greater than us, to which we can only give ourselves up."

Call that God if you want, but he's not writing about religion, at least not to me. I have no interest in religion. Yet it turns out that this is the wallpaper I chose months ago for the computer on which I'm writing these words:


Hard to say which is the "chapel" in that picture—the space where I took it (on the way up the tower of the Freiburg cathedral, on a 50th-birthday trip to Germany with D. this summer to revisit some important parts of my life, in this case the site of my junior year abroad exactly 30 years ago) or what my eye was taking in.

Or was it where my mind rested at that moment as I held the camera, paused on the bridge between who I was and who I am now?

Mother, Child

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a preview of the exhibit "Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces From the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales" at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. It's a very nice show, even if its modest scope and content seem almost at odds with the grandiosity evoked by the word "masterpiece."

One work by a painter unfamiliar to me stood out among all the rest: "Maternity (Suffering)" by Eugène Carrière. It's markedly muted, nearly monochromatic, amid the vibrant colors of Renoir, van Gogh, Manet, and the rest. I don't think I've ever seen a painting quite like it from that period (1896-97).

In a way, it's not surprising that I was drawn to it because it reminded me of a 19th-century photograph -- not a particular one, but the photographer who immediately came to mind was Julia Margaret Cameron. (It's relevant to note here that one of my favorite activities in the world is wandering through a museum exhibit of black-and-white photographs -- far more enthralling to me than any collection of paintings.)

In refreshing my memory of Cameron's work online, I see that most of her photos don't have the haziness of the Carrière painting, as I thought they did: that blur of half-recall, like one's first mental imprint of a private time with a parent -- the smell of the skin or breath, the motion of a rocker, the mysterious warmth of a hand on one's head.

I don't remember seeing the exact photograph of Cameron's at left before, but I very well might have -- why else would she have come to mind? Could I be reliving an encounter with it in a gallery from long ago? Or a moment from my own childhood? Are both of these pictures echoes of countless mothers and children through the years -- one brush, one lens, one memory after another burnishing an impression on canvas, on paper, on the farthest reaches of our eyes?

Triumphal Spirit

Though I'm not far into it yet, I'm enjoying Reynolds Price's Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back, a memoir of his years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the 1950s and his first few years teaching at Duke upon his return. The opening paragraph in particular interested me:

On the afternoon of September 30, 1955 an elegantly trim and all-but-new ocean liner slid from its berth on the Hudson River in New York City and headed for England. With its other passengers in tourist class, I was among a group of some thirty American men bound northeast for Oxford University. Our ship was the S.S. United States which, on its maiden voyage three years earlier, had shaved ten hours off the prior record for transatlantic voyages. We'd be five days on the early-autumn sea and, with any luck, could dodge the great storms that had roiled the Atlantic in recent years.

The reason for my personal interest is that eight years later, as a 21-month-old, I was a passenger on that same ship, sailing in the opposite direction, from Europe to America, as my family returned from two years abroad. Just something Reynolds Price and I have in common with Vivian Vance, Bill Clinton, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Suzanne Pleshette, JFK and Jackie, and Eydie Gormé.

Last year I came across a nine-page typewritten account by my mother of her voyage in the summer of 1949 on another ship. She was on her way to a summer of study at the American Academy in Rome, a scholarship she had received from the Ohio Classical Society. Her account, which includes a description of her entire sojourn in Italy, was apparently a required summation of her experience for the classical society. It's moving to me to read her plain but elegant description of this wonderful journey that she -- a Latin teacher of 29 who had never traveled abroad -- was embarking on:

Our ship was the Italian Line's Vulcania, just recently renovated and decorated after the war. Our vacation started immediately, and we literally swam our way across the Atlantic in the second-class swimming pool. . . .

Compare her ten-day passage (yes, ten days) to your last transatlantic airplane flight -- or any flight for that matter (some of which probably felt like ten days, and not in a good way):

Each day the ship's activities for cabin class would be printed on brightly-colored paper and distributed to the passengers. A typical program began with mass in the chapel at eight, breakfast from seven to nine, luncheon for two sittings at eleven-thirty and twelve forty-five, movies -- either in English or Italian -- at two, an afternoon tea accompanied by a concert in the verandah, benediction in the chapel at five, dinner beginning at six-thirty, and in the evening again more movies or horse racing games, both of which were followed by dancing until the last tired couple decided to leave.Her travelogue -- which includes an idyllic-sounding postwar summer of classical lectures, sightseeing, siestas, dining in trattorias, and trips to Assisi, Naples, Pompeii, and Florence -- ends this way:

Last May when I learned that I had been selected by the scholarship committee, I thought I could not be happier or more grateful, but now that I have spent those seven unforgettable weeks in Italy, and know exactly all the things that I am thankful for, I find that there simply are no adequate words to express my deep appreciation to you all. Moreover, such a summer full of profitable learning, pleasures, and friendships cannot be repaid. Now because of falling in love with Italy there remains, along with memories, only an insistent need to see her again.


She did see her again, when she returned to Rome for a year as a Fulbright scholar in the early 1950s. For her, no memories remain. The Vulcania was scrapped in 1974.

The SS United States, which last sailed in 1969, survives. As of last May the owners were seeking a buyer, and according to this report, the ship may have a second life:

"The worst case scenario is that she's torn apart on the beaches of India," says Susan Gibbs, president of the S.S. United States Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to saving the ship. Gibbs hopes potential buyers will want to adapt her as a hotel, restaurant, or museum. "She needs to endure as a vibrant symbol of postwar America, the triumphal spirit of that age."