Everyday Mercies

Apologies, first of all, to readers of the Aggieland Star-Ledger who had difficulties finding this blog.  Your editor made the foolish mistake of typing an “@” where she should have typed a “.”  Congratulations on finding it, anyway!

A couple of days back, I was thinking more along the lines of an essay called “Everyday Tragedy,” but then mercy struck, and I don’t mean the bright and beautiful McGee daughter.  My mother always used to say, “be grateful for small favors,” though she generally changed it to “flavors” by way of irony.  The “small favor” or mercy, if you will that changed the course of the week – and maybe my life – happened on Wednesday, on the way back from the airport.  But more on that in a moment.

Living in this beautiful, gritty megalopolis, we are aware that tragedies are certainly happening daily.  We watch KRON-4, our favorite purveyor of weather and news and advertising every morning for an update.  There is the same wise-cracking, sports-loving anchorwoman, Daria, who was there when I watched regularly in 2001-2, and George the traffic-guy, and Marc the co-anchor and former weatherman.  (Actually they all seem to be former weather-folk:  James, the other local news-guy really lit up when he did the weather for Erica this morning, and Marc confessed to majoring in meteorology…) 

Anyway, we get our daily dose of burglary, murder and traffic mayhem from unexpected and expected spots, all over the Bay, and then our parents will frighten us with health setbacks, and I think – well, here we go again!  We will drive home to Texas in January only to find that one parent or another is deathly ill and one of us must fly back again…  My father, for example, has become vaguer than usual this week, and we wonder how much longer he will hang on.  Then there was the tremendous back-up on the highway outside our window, complete with helicopters and sirens, and the grim rumble of a thousand vehicles idling, going nowhere for a very long time, coupled to the knowledge that somewhere up ahead on the road, a tragedy must be unfolding.

But Wednesday changed all that sort of thinking.  Wednesday, we escaped being on the KRON-4 News by inches.  Wednesday, we looked up just in time and one of us yelled just in time and we did NOT collide with the back of that stopped truck, in the lane directly ahead of us.

It was a gorgeous, clear afternoon with unusually interesting clouds and a double rainbow, and we were pointing out the sights to two scientific visitors from France – had just waved towards the Campanile, as a matter of fact – when that particular Highway 24 exit lane from Highway 580 decided to put on its brakes.  Another lane was open and we veered uneventfully into it, but not before all the other possible outcomes had raced before our eyes:  ranging in seriousness from inconvenienced visitors to expensive car-repairs, hospitalization, and death.  But nothing, nothing happened; we didn’t even have to skid to a scary halt; the folks in the backseat seemed unaware of the danger, probably thought we were over-reacting. 

But all day it echoed around our minds, along with deep gratitude.  How sweet is life without inconvenienced visitors, expensive car-repairs, (another) hospitalization and (more) death!  Fathers rally yet again – yes, we know it will not be forever, but for now they do – and considering the size of this Megalopolis, there is a remarkable degree of mercy happening daily.  Most houses don’t burn down, most people don’t murder one another or embezzle the government, and most cars don’t crash.  It’s anything but a small favor; it’s a mercy!

“An Insufferable Prig”

A month of my hospital-, friend visiting-, spouse birthday-, nephew wedding- and Thanksgiving-doings, the manufacture of home-made gifts of the literary variety as well as the writings and mailings of Christmas newsletters and a brief excursion to Cambridge, MA have eaten November.  Chapter Two remains unfinished, but I have submitted my three novellas to Kindle for their consideration, in an offhand sort of way.  The incredible rains of last week are gone, the limbs are cleared out and the sun is very much out in Berkeley, CA.  There has been an earthquake today in Japan, but with “only” a one-meter tsunami.  Is that appropriate for a “date that will live in infamy?”  Yesterday was Saint Nicholas’ Day, and children in the Netherlands looked in their shoes to see what Sinte Claas brought them.  I have been out on Santa’s behalf, scouring odd corners of the town for stocking stuffers appealing to 20-somethings.

But the “brief excursion to Cambridge, MA” has probably left the deepest impression of all… except that I am naturally hoping that the “off-hand mailing” will really amount to something.  Really being someplace makes all the difference, doesn’t it?  Really sleeping in the same building where Robert Frost spent the last twenty years of his life, really hearing gorgeous music on the spot where the original Congregational church stood (and the current one is not so young, either), really, really reading a collection of Longfellow poetry a few doors away from where he lived and wrote it, really moseying past where Joan Baez and Bob Dylan got their start in folk-singing or where Washington first mustered and trained the Continental army, really knowing that it was here that people decided both that education must be required of every citizen and that the Church must get out of that education, at least at Harvard… even just looking up and seeing the little window at Harvard square reading DEWEY, CHEATHAM & HOWE, marking the office where “Car Talk” was taped, all those times… all this confirms the notion that people who make a start at something really matter, that each person really matters, and that believing that really matters.  It also matters that we examine what we do, and why we do it.

Something in the severe self-examination in the literary air of our little top-floor room must have set my spiritual antennae waving, for the very night we arrived, I had the strongest sense of being SUCH a prig!  Yes, the phrase insufferable prig leapt to mind as Robin complained mildly that I had been nagging him ceaselessly for the last few days and if possible moreso during the weary, hungry hours after we arrived and began foraging for dinner at 9:30 p.m. or so.  All at once, I saw myself in the stark, Puritan light of Cambridge, and it wasn't pretty:  a know-it-all, pedantic, self-righteous schoolmarm, thinking she is somebody, pretending to write legible prose, intending to dust off and brush up her poetry:  a dallier, a dilettante, a sponge and yes, an insufferable prig, always telling people what to do and how to do it, judging, correcting… how could anyone stand to be near me? 

Increasingly on edge as to what the publisher will say about my novel waiting patiently on his desk to be re-read, increasingly self-critical for both my wild hopes and my despair, puffed-up at the least sign of praise for stories I love, spending whole days focussed on my own creative process, a deeply selfish enterprise, I had become a jangling ganglion of self-love and self-loathing, lashing out at my own best-beloved as if to blame him for an imperfect world.  What rot!

Yet, having realized all that, I also realized that I was becoming hyper-sensitive to things “not done right” for the first time in a very long time, and that, with considerable dialing-back of sensitivity levels – and stiff resolution not to say whatever comes into my head, whenever it comes there – I saw that after months of numbness, of stumping dully along like some saddle-sore mule, I might just be growing younger again, and might have recovered a long-missing bounce-in-the-step.  Nerve-endings seemed to be working again, certainly, if perhaps unfortunately for everyone around me!  All the same, the stinging correction was liberating as well as painful, like a snake peeling off an old skin and sliding forth quite new and clean.  Quite empty, I roamed the streets, took the subway to the art museum, wandered at will through the art and lost myself in familiar and unfamiliar poetry and delighted to learn all I could: all the above for starters.