From Going Out, the memoir: Getting Them Married

This is from the memoir.  Marriage isn't made or un-made in courts, but elsewhere....

I add my breath to your breath

that our days may be long on earth.

                        --Laguna Pueblo prayer

            Unlike cars, we have all learned that marriages are only interesting when they break down.

            Broken down marriages are the stuff of movies and books, TV talk shows and Hollywood celebrities. A good marriage is boring, everybody knows that.

            But I get to look at the faces of each couple every time I perform a wedding and I believe that there has never been anyone who wanted anything other than that most boring of things, a good marriage. Their faces give it all away. There is just a moment—it’s hard to describe—when naked hope seems to make their faces glow silvery and luminous.       

            It is a private moment and I am a privileged witness. But getting that shining glimpse of palpable hope almost always makes up for all the taxing parts of getting a couple actually wed.

            That said, weddings are one of the most onerous parts of parish ministry.

            First you have to go through all that pre-marital stuff with the moony-eyed couple in the pastor’s office. I like to keep it simple. I ask them to tell me their love story which, with the reciprocal narcissism of the deeply-in- love, they are always more than happy to do.

            They sit haunch-by-haunch on the couch in my office, well-groomed and dressed—they’re meeting with the pastor, so I guess they figure they ought to wear their Sunday-best. Each of them takes turns narrating the story of how they met, how they courted, what speed bumps they hit, how he—or more rarely, she—proposed.

            Often there is a ring story. I love the ring stories. Grooms can be very inventive in the ways they present their diamonds. One of them proposed in a hansom cab in Central Park, though it didn’t go quite according to his carefully-detailed plan. Just as they were about to get into the hansom cab, the groom realized they had left the camera in the hotel room. He insisted they go back and get it. The bride was freezing. Why can’t we just take the damn ride and forget about the camera, she wanted to know.

No, we need it. No, we don’t. Yes, we do. So they went back to the hotel, then back once again to the hansom cab and by now the bride was not only freezing, but pissed off, too. It might not have been the best moment to propose, the groom said, but he did it anyway. And he had the cab driver take a picture of them, the bride happy, contrite, teary-eyed and glad they had gone back to get the camera.

            Another groom gave his girlfriend a gift certificate for a manicure a few days before he planned on surprising her with the ring. She was offended—what did he think was so bad about her nails just the way they were? He thought she needed to wear nail polish? She passed it along to a friend who actually enjoyed getting manicures.

            Another groom proposed at the very top of Sacre-Coeur in Paris. Another hid the ring inside a Plexi-glass cube with filled with Post-it notes on which he had written out his proposal.

            So anyway, all the while the couple is telling me their love stories and their ring stories, they are sitting close enough to lean in to each other, to rub each other’s knees, little gestures that don’t seem to them too inappropriate to do in front of a person of the cloth who, no doubt, wouldn’t understand the first thing about sexual desire.

            When older people get married they usually want less of the pageantry and folderol of a storybook wedding. But younger people often want the all garish accessories of the day: the sappy unity candle (it doesn't always light); the white paper carpet (somebody always trips); the Purcell “Trumpet Voluntary” or, worse, “The Pachelbel Canon” poorly-played; a bevy of bridesmaids wearing colors found only in bridal shops and gelato stands; groomsmen anxious for the open bar.

            In the cases of these pageant-weddings, there comes a time when, late in the game, one or the other of them has had it up to here with wedding details. The spiral notebook they have been using to track their progress is looking dog-eared. There is a problem with one or more of the relatives. Or the reception site, or the transportation arrangements. Or all of the above.

            It happened with my own wedding: The pastor who was to assist at the ceremony got caught groping a thirteen-year-old boy and was removed from his job. The friend who had agreed to cater the reception severed a nerve in her hand a week before the big day. My in-laws were in a train wreck coming up from New York City for the wedding weekend. My mother became mysteriously ill and had to skip the rehearsal dinner.

            It sleeted the day of the wedding. The reception was in a gallery hung with oil paintings of dismembered heads and other body parts rendered in a style to make Gericault proud. Not only that, but it had been a posthumously-mounted show—in memory of the painter who had committed suicide the year before. If omens mean anything it should not be surprising that we divorced.

            But I am generally sympathetic to all the little wedding details that can go awry. Because I know that, one way or another, I’ll get them married.

The Rockport Transfer Station, Sept-Dec, 2010

At the Transfer Station

At the transfer station, life begins again.

The old becomes new. This is the truth.

It’s like Isaiah, the old Hebrew prophet, telling the redemptive story:

“I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth.”

Well, the Israelites couldn’t see it.

They had in mind just what they wanted

and they didn’t want anything else.

Maybe God had in mind messiah, salvation.

Maybe God had in mind better priests, more faithful people.

Maybe the unification of the twelve tribes, a decent king—

who knew?

Because the people wanted the IKEA shelving,

some good cable TV,  a sense of entitlement and election.

They wanted a convenient life.

Though the truth is, life had never been convenient—

--slaving for the Egyptians, wandering in the desert,

hearing Moses’s over-long sermons and eating

manna, which was like some pre-vegan version

of kale.

We’re not different. Or truly keen on kale.

But it’s different at the transfer station.

Here, you have some choices.

First, you ditch your garbage in the appointed

mausoleums: paper, here; plastic, there;

glass and cans in the farthest ones.

You stash your empty receptacles back in the car;

now you are light, you are shriven.

Now it’s time to visit the transfer station

shops, one for junk, one for books.

Maybe there’s a snowboard at the junk shop,

but you don’t snowboard, so you don’t take it.

Maybe there’s a bedspring and you and your

spouse have broken yours—maybe you’re both too fat,

or maybe you fucked too much. Anyway, it’s broken.

Load the bedspring on the top of the car.

Hallow your new bed. Have a fond fuck.

Or a good lie-in.

Now visit the transfer station book shop.

You are in the market for some dog-earred Rilke, that German mystic poet who made you believe

in whatever you had to believe in, whenever that was.
This from the Second Elegy:

“Every angel is terrifying.”

Well, duh! “What does this mean?”

as Luther asks, ad nauseum, in the Small Catechism.

It means, Martin, that every angel is terrifying.

Maybe not Clarence, in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

But the rest of them.

So fortunately--so as not to fulfill your own agenda--

You do not find any Rilke at the transfer station.

What do you find? Well, you don’t find much.

Just books that smell, books that have somebody

else’s handwriting in them—an inscription for a

birthday present long since discarded, notes

from a college class, something about Yeats

or atomic weight or a French cognate.You don't find much.

Though still you manage to leave the transfer station

with a full bag. Books you figure you

won’t read, don’t need. Books that leapt,

like fish, into your bag.  You will bring them back,

you say, next time you come. And you come often

because you’re not living here for long,

near the transfer station, where every week,

it’s always something new.  You’ve only got

a few months, living near the transfer station.

And you want to leave here lighter than when you came.

You take your bag of books back with you

to your temporary home. And what do you find?

Leonard Cohen’s Psalms?
One ofThe  Boxcar Children’s books?
A writer you hate
whose book you are happy to find among the discards?

Only, there are no discards. There is only the transfer station

where God—surely jesting—fulfills Isaiah’s earnest asking:

“I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth,

do you not perceive it?”

Fool that I am, I don’t. Fool that I am, I do.

My Big, Fat Palm Sunday Egg of Me

I was many months pregnant with my first of two daughters when I found the house I wanted to buy on Palm Sunday two decades ago. I don't know where my husband was, but my sister and I had gone off to look at possible real estate options (my husband and I called it slum-hunting since we were so poor). But that Palm Sunday  I found the ideal candidate: it had a stained-glass window that overlooked a wide front porch. It had a half-bath (more like a quarter-bath; it was so tiny you could wash your hands while peeing if you wanted to). It had its original wallpaper (this meant something to me--but why?--since Wharton's House of Mirth had won the Pulitzer Prize the same year as this house had been built). And it had a gas stove.


I met my husband for lunch at the Broadway Diner (every city has a Broadway; this wasn't New York) to talk about it. I was so keen for him to see it, so hot to buy the house. I was wearing one of the maternity dresses I had sewn for my pregnancy. I had sewn all my maternity wear for this pregnancy. I wasn't a very good seamstress. In this particular lavender linen-polyester Vogue pattern dress I looked  a little like a larger-than-life-size Easter egg. For lunch I ate grilled cheese. My husband ate egg salad. He was always suggestible.

Just not about the house. He walked through the door and he didn't like it. Not at all. After all, my sister and I had picked it out. He had been someplace else, doing something else. Maybe just sleeping in.

Look, I said, pointing at the old wallpaper. She was blind, the woman who'd lived here. That's why she never changed the wallpaper. She was the grand-daughter of the original owners. Blind, she was. She knew enough to have the furnace changed from coal to oil, to have the gaslights changed from gas to electric. But she left the wall paper. We have to honor what she couldn't see.

He didn't follow my logic. Why should he? But it would be our home. And we were at least as blind as the last owner, the blind grand-daughter. We didn't know what we were doing. But we brought our first child home from the birth center to that place. And we lived there for two full years, calling the police whenever we needed to because we'd paid no heed to the "Location, location, location" maxim that keeps the feint of heart away from living amidst drug deals and domestic violence.

We loved it. And we sold it when I had to move to go to seminary.


It so happens I'm in town now and then and when I do I drive past it when I can. The clapboards have been replaced with siding. The porch rails, once tapered and white-washed, are Lowe's-unfinished, soft-pine slats. The stained-glass window seems ever more recessed. And this March--when I last drove by--the lilac I planted and never saw to bloom, is spindly, reaching upward like a communion-hungry hand, making more poignant the hope for spring.

"Do You Have a Body? Don't Sit on the Porch!"

There are so many good poems that every time I sit down to try to write one, I find one I wish I had written. Besides, I'm not good at writing mystical things like the Kabir poem below. I'll have to stick to writing poems about the mystical in the mundane. Maybe a poem about fish sticks.

Kabir was an Indian mystical poet, adopted as a child by Muslim weavers. It's said he became a disciple of the great Bhakti pioneer Ramananda by tricking him into giving him a mantra, thereby ensuring that he would become Ramananda's student. I think "Do you have a body? Don't sit on the porch" is a fine mantra, myself. The version of Kabir's poem below was adapted by the contemporary American mystic poet, Robert Bly




#24

Let's leave for the country where the Guest lives!
There the water jar is filling with water
even though there is no rope to lower it.
There the skies are always blue,
and yet rain falls on the earth.
Do you have a body? Don't sit on the porch!
Go out and walk in the rain!
The fall moon rides the sky all month there,
and it would sound silly to mention only one sun--

the light there comes from a number of them.

See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me

Okay, so this morning I was filling in at a colleague's church and it was time for the Children's Time/Sermon/Moment--it's called something different in every church. And these Children's Moments are not my forte. I mean, I was good with my own kids when they were little. Then again, I gave birth to kids who somehow grooved on me reading them poets who were super-cynical or simply insane. Maybe it was because they depended upon me for their daily bread and Happy Meals. Nevertheless, they did tolerate me reading excerpts from the mad eighteenth-century poet, Christopher Smart's "For I Will Consider My Cat, Jeoffry":

For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
(Trust me, this poem goes on forever.)

My daughters just never seemed too scarred by hearing Emily Dickinson poems and the occasional, only barely traumatic tale by Edward Gorey as bedtime reading. 

Still, I consider myself a failure when it comes the Children's Time thing. I'm usually something like, "Well, kids, how's about those 95 Theses?" And they're usually like, "WTF?" Even at seven. I'm serious.What DO they learn in school?

But today was different. Today the gospel story was about Mary, the sister of Lazarus, anointing Jesus' feet with fancy perfume only days before his death and Judas getting all pissy about it.  So the for Children's Sermon, I brought in a couple of essential oils and told the kids how, after their baptisms, their pastor might have made a little mark on their forehead with a fancy oil. And I told them they could do the very same thing if they wanted, since they wouldn't be able to remember their actual baptism if they had only been a baby when it happened.

Then I let them smell the oils. There were some "ahhs!" There were a couple of crinkled noses. (We all agreed that not every perfume smells good at all. And they will learn more about this as they grow up to find themselves on crowded subway trains or in lobbies at intermission, breathing through their mouths.)

Then they got to try the oils out for themselves. This was the best part. Most of them couldn't wait to try, putting out their tiny index fingers for a drop of oil which they then brought to their forehead to make a mark to remember that they had been baptized.

Did they get it? Hell, no! Was it efficacious? Hell, yes! These kids are too young to know what it means to be baptized--maybe we all are. But they're old enough to know that something we can do with our bodies is an important and meaningful ritual. It smells good. And it feels good to have a pastor tell you that this is something you can do for yourself to remind you you are loved. This really was a children's moment. And it meant something. (And it made me realize I could actually do the same thing on my very own forehead any time I wanted to!)

And then.....later in the day, at yoga class, my yoga teacher (who was my former yoga student) came round as we lay in savasana or corpse pose. Savasana reminds every yoga practitioner of our mortality--why else would it be called corpse pose?

And my teacher/student came round to anoint each of us with oil, just as Mary anointed Jesus with oil in the days before his death. Her hands on my temple--her firm and gentle touch--reminded me, just as the Ash Wednesday service reminds all who come, that we don't get out of life without death. But that with our shared human touch, we will arrive safely there. 

Cleaning Mr. Graber's House

This is my most-rejected short story. It has been rejected thirty-six times, which is a lot. It is a multiple of 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 18 and 36. So I'm posting it here in the hope that you will read it and like it since it is a story I like a lot. Or maybe I've just got a soft spot for rejectees (I always picked out the mis-shapen pumpkins for Hallowe'en. Still do).

It also has some Arts and Crafts references, so I'll find some pretty Arts and Crafts illustrations with which to perk it up since it's not a really happy story.

Cleaning Mr. Graber's House 

Lori-ann had been cleaning Mr. Graber’s house for two years when she first started to think about taking something from it.

She never would, of course. When you cleaned houses for people you had to remember they were allowing you an unedited and intimate glimpse into their lives.

            She told that to Mark one time. He just laughed at her.

            “Get off it! ‘Unedited?’ ‘Intimate?’” he said, making finger quotes, “You clean houses for snobs who pay you, that’s all.”

            “They’re not snobs. None of them are,” she said, angry at him the way she was all of the time now.

Tools of the Trade

            She couldn’t remember when he had started making fun of her. Really making fun of her, not just teasing. He never used to do that. Now he’d gotten just out-and-out mean. Anything was fair game for him: her weight, though she wasn’t fat, her job, her cooking. They developed a pattern. He’d make fun of her. She’d get hurt, then get angry. He’d tell her she was too sensitive. Next, they’d be fighting.

            In any case, he was wrong about her clients. She knew that the way Mark saw it, anybody who wasn’t just like him—anybody who didn’t rent an old camp, but actually owned a house on the lake—was a snob. But they weren’t.

            Some of them were nicer than others, of course.

            Mrs. Mitchem, the old lady, was a sweetheart. She was pretty much home-bound, so she was always there when Lori-ann cleaned her house.

She must have been lonely, living by herself, no longer able to drive. Yet she didn’t try to talk Lori-ann’s ear off. She’d make some polite chit-chat when Lori-ann arrived and then, when the cleaning was finished, she would give her a mug of coffee and a home-made cookie on a cloth napkin. They’d sit down and talk for fifteen minutes or so. Lori-ann knew that Mrs. Mitchem had a son out in Seattle who worked for Microsoft. He had two kids who were in their late teens. Her daughter lived nearby. She’d adopted two Chinese girls, Susie and Rose. She was a stay-at-home mom now, but before that had taught second grade.

            Mrs. Mitchem knew that Lori-ann lived with Mark in one of those converted camps out on the lake. She knew that Lori-ann liked spending time with her niece and nephew, that she was taking two classes at the community college. She knew Lori-ann wanted to become a nurse someday.

At the rate she was going she figured she’d be thirty before she finished. School cost money and took time.

            She also cleaned for the Robenses. She didn’t like the Robenses. The kids treated her as if she were invisible—which, for them, she supposed she was. They took for granted that their mother didn’t clean their house. That some girl named Lori-ann did it for her.

Mrs. Robens was all-business. She didn’t even pretend to be friendly. Lori-ann had never even seen Mr. Robens, just his underwear which she sometimes found under the bed. He was a large man, she’d determined, who cut little slits in the elastic waistbands of his boxers so they wouldn’t bind so much.

            She cleaned for the Massarellis and the Adamses and the Whitlocks and the Wongs. In each case, they were almost never home. Sometimes the McGees were--they both had home offices and two teen-agers, so you never really knew who you were going to run into there.

            Sherry Schwartz was always home because she had three pre-schoolers and was at her wit’s end most of the time. She loved Lori-ann. It was more or less mutual. Sherry just couldn’t keep on top of things—who could with three little kids?—and she was so grateful for Lori-ann’s help.

            “You’re like a big sister to me,” she told Lori-ann one time when she was in the midst making home-made Play-dough, “I mean, I know I’m older than you and all that. But I think you may be wiser.”

            Lori-ann thought that might be true—she never would have had three kids all under the age of five, for example—but she was flattered nonetheless.

            It took forever to clean Sherry’s house. She’d spend almost twice the time she did at any other comparably-sized house. But she never told Sherry that she was giving her what amounted to a 50% discount. That’s because it actually made her happy to see Sherry visibly calmer when everything was clean and back in order—even though she was sure it didn’t stay that way for long.

            Mr. Graber’s house wasn’t the biggest, but it was clear that he was the richest of her clients. Probably the one closest to being a snob, too. Except that he wasn’t one.

            He lived out on Innisfree Road, the direct opposite side of the lake from where she and Mark lived. It always made her laugh to think that both Mr. Graber and she had lake views—hers from the trashy side, his from the wealthy.

Hearing Pictures at an Exhibition

When Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky's architect friend Viktor Hartmann died of an aneuryism in 1873, Mussorgsky felt compelled to pay musical homage to Hartmann's imaginative ideas and designs. He conceived the programmatic "Pictures at an Exhibition" as a narrative--Mussorgsky strolling from frame to frame, regarding and hearing the music of each of the pieces.

Here are the first couple of bars of the repeated 'strolling' music that links all the pieces of "Pictures at an Exhibition": 

It sounds like this: (This is Valergy Gergiev with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.)

The whole work is a fine tribute to a friend and as brilliantly evocative as program music gets. And actually, it's enormously touching to think that this is what can come from friendship--sheer artistry that exceeds the artistic vision that it also honors. Plus, Mussorgsky loved writing it. In a letter to a friend he said, "Hartmann is seething as Boris [his opera, Boris Godunov] seethed, — sounds and ideas hang in the air, I am gulping and overeating, and can barely manage to scribble them on paper.....My physiognomy can be seen in the interludes. So far I think it's well turned."

He wrote the piece for piano and seemed content with it that way. But in 1922 Maurice Ravel had his way with it, creating an orchestral version and today that's how most people know "Pictures at an Exhibition." And it's a grand piece, with that opening horn solo you heard above and ending with a clashing rush of bells and cymbals, timpani and horns.

And yet, I saw pianist Vladimir Feltsman perform it on Sunday afternoon and I'm not sure I'll ever need to hear the orchestral version again (though I am, in fact, attending a performance of it this Saturday). Feltsman's "Pictures" was transcendent. It was as if he were channeling Mussorgsky, as if his hands were on the piano, but the rest of him were hovering elsewhere, hanging with Big Modest, looking at Hartmann's works and hearing the music of them. And yes, the way Feltsman played, Mussorgsky's physiognomy could be seen in the interludes.

If you want to hear Feltsman play it, just go to www.classicalmusicarchives.com (my favorite website) and search for a recording. Then close your eyes and listen to the pictures!