I was thinking about Christmas the other day. It’s the season, of course, but that’s not the reason. What started me off was the reporter who threw his shoes at George W. It made me think of the stories about bad little boys who got lumps of coal rather than toys in their stockings. Most of us at this point might consider throwing other things at him—like dead polar bears, shopping carts used by the homeless, cheating financial advisors (who probably ought to dropped onto him from, say, the top of the Empire State Building), and strips of mildewed and rat-chewed wall from the veteran’s hospitals. Most of us, also, might take more care with our aim. But I digress. As I said, I was thinking of Christmas.
It occurred to me that Christmas has changed a great deal over the years—over my years anyway, and I’m not sure that it’s been all for the best. Everyone says this and affects the proper degree of exasperation while rushing out to buy the stores out of anything remotely Christmassy. I, on the other hand, have retreated into a kind of cave from which I blink like a mole in daylight at the goings-on around me.
It wasn’t always this way.
My earliest memories of the season are actually among my happiest. There was just my mother and I and money was tight. I got one present. I knew what it was but that never stopped the anticipation. We always went up to London by train to see Father Christmas at Harrods or Marks and Spencer and the Regent Street lights, then we caught the train home. It was a splurge for us, always appreciated, and always cherished. Mum made a Christmas cake for us, a heavy dark fruit cake with marzipan and royal icing. She’d generally work an additional shift relieving other nursing staff so she could make a bit of extra money. I’d go along with her. Once I remember a slightly drunk doctor kissing all the nurses. I got kissed too. The first time anyone had ever kissed me on the lips.
When I married and had a family, I tried to duplicate some of the joy of my youth (sans inebriated doctors) for my son. The problem, however, was that my husband had family. My youthful enthusiasm for Christmas yielded to the expectations that came with the season. These became burdens as the volatile Italian family I had married into celebrated Christmas with fewer or more people, depending on who was talking to whom at the time. My sister-in-law held the record for non-arrival. When she actually appeared, it was like the second coming and the topic of conversation for months. We all endured and went back for more because it was Christmas, right?
Christmas took a sharp turn to the dark side when my husband died on December 16, 1997. I don’t know why I felt I had to proceed as if he was still with us. I think I was numb. It seemed pressingly important for me to have “a Christmas.” I think my mistake was forgetting that Christmas is not a stand-alone event. I should have understood that none of us had even begun the grieving process—least of all me—and that probably none of us was ready. My son and his wife and the children came to my house and proceeded to get into a disagreement. I sat watching things escalate until they packed up the kids and went home without even having dinner. I didn’t want to be alone, so I threw the uneaten dinner into the fridge and went out looking for some place to be. Nothing was open except a sports café with a small, tilted plastic Christmas tree on the bar. The place had a handful of regulars and I got the feeling they too had nowhere to go. I had a glass of white wine and a bucket of chicken wings and listened to canned Western music. I remember particularly the song, “All my exes live in Texas.” Then I went to see Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. I’ll always be grateful the movie house was open.
Since then, I don’t do much for Christmas. It seems pointless with my family thousands of miles away. On the other hand, I enjoy the opportunity to be in touch with friends who are spread across the country. Fortunately, the tradition of writing newsy accounts of the year is alive and well; otherwise, I might never hear of the good things that have happened. I also use the time to reflect and count my blessings for my relationship with Sid, for the health of the people I love, and the fact that I have a home and enough to eat. During this season, I share what I can with the charities serving the poor. Other than this, I retreat to my cave and remember how things used to be.
That’s why I find the case of the thrown shoes so interesting. The reporter must have reflected on what he owed our peerless leader at this holy season and felt that the great decider deserved only footwear, surely the presidential equivalent of a lump of coal. What a comment this is. The reporter will undoubtedly apologize. He will have to: punishment in that part of the world is swift and unpleasant. But I, for one, will long remember the image of the president ducking shoes; my bet is that it will appear in myriad history books in the future. Too bad it wasn’t a lump of coal given the mining he wanted in our shrinking wilderness, but—what the heck?—shoes are better than nothing.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
They
Now that Sarah has gone back to Alaska and back to making moose-meat chili, I’ve found time has lost some of its meaning. The election seems years ago and it's a shock to realize that George W. is still in possession of the White House. I feel only irritation over the mess the country’s been led into and somewhat hopeful that something can be done about it—but neither of them passionately enough for me to want to write about (just yet).
Clearly I need to move on and think about something else. So rather like the sherbert they serve between courses to clear the palate, I want to write about something from my childhood that set me on whatever crooked path my life has taken. I’ve shared this with only a few people because I don’t much like having to defend myself. It happened. I didn’t make it up. The memory has lasted a lifetime and forever changed the way I understand the world. But it’s one of those things when it happens to you, the memory is indelible. When it happens to someone else, people want to explain it away—that is, unless they already “know.” Things like what happened to me tend to upset the applecart of things that people have primary certitude about. If you are passionately fond of a particular variety of apple—you may want to skip this blog. If, on the other hand, you have curiosity and a sense of wonder about apples and trees and the universe--by all means read on.
It is about what I call “they.”
I was ten. I checked on my school records to be sure. The younger I was, the more enchanting it seems to me now. I was attending the Brighton and Hove High School, except it really wasn’t high school in the American sense. My mother was doing private nursing for a very rich old man who lived in the penthouse of an exclusive block of flats just down the hill from my school. Since Mum got on very well with the young wife and was always open to a bit of extra money to help with my school bills, she agreed to do a double—24 hours on, which required her to live in. I came along for the ride.
We settled in nicely and I rode my bike up the hill every day to school. The old man was in and out of it but I didn’t see much of him after my mother took me in to introduce this strange little urchin who was to share his flat, sleeping in the room directly across the hall from his. I think he noticed me. Mum sort of stage managed it. She introduced me and then whisked me out. Mum had seen that I’d been around death—even putting pennies on my grandmother’s dead eyes to set the lids down—because she never wanted me to be afraid of it. So from the brief experience of sort-of meeting him, I could tell from the slightly sweet smell of death that he was not too long for the world.
One night after about a week, I was awakened by noises that seemed to be coming from upstairs. It didn’t occur to me that this was a penthouse so there couldn’t be any upstairs, but no matter, to my childish mind that’s where the sounds came from. There were footsteps and doors opening and shutting, all distinct and noisy enough to have woken me up. I was annoyed. It sounded like a party and it was far too late—didn’t they know I had school the next day?
I opened my door to cross the hallway, which to my surprise was silent. I had expected the noises to intensify. I remember feeling perplexed as I crossed the hall to open the door to the old man’s room. I saw my mother get up quickly from her chair. She looked concerned and I got the sense I shouldn’t have bothered her. I whispered in my high-pitched little English voice, “Mummy, those people upstairs are making a terrible racket.” She didn’t seem angry after all but put her arm around me and guided me quickly back to my bedroom. “Lock the door, darling,” she told me, “and go back to sleep.” I heard no more noises until she knocked on the door next morning to wake me for school.
I learned then the old man had died in the night. No one explained anything and that might have been the end of the story except for some reason the memories refused to die. Years later I asked my mother why she had told me to lock the door.
By then, I guess, I was old enough to be admitted into the circle. It seemed I was not the only one hearing them. But the old man was not only hearing them, he was seeing them. Mum said that the footsteps came to the door and even though he was in deep coma and giving the death rattle, he spoke to whoever had come. He saw his parents. He saw his brother. He saw his dog, and my mother heard the sound of claws on a wood floor. She said she couldn’t be frightened because there was so much joy in his voice as he spoke to them. Well—maybe she hadn’t been frightened until I opened the door: God knows what she must have thought as she watched it open. The sounds ended, she said, the moment he died.
But the story doesn’t end there. It wasn’t just my mother and I. The young wife, who had not been the most faithful of brides, heard them and locked herself in her room with a bottle of whiskey, saying they were going to get her too.
Three of us heard them, one of us a child. The old man saw them, even calling his dog by name. They came for him. I cannot believe anything else.
Since then, I do not believe anyone who purports to tell me about death unless they have somehow looked into that place beyond life. All the fire and brimstone in the world cannot supplant for me being told of the joy of an old man who was seeing once more the things he had loved and believed he had lost.
For many, many years I did not speak of this. Those I told sometimes looked at me with sympathy and shook their heads. They offered all manner of explanations that best fitted with what they had been taught. From their doubting, I learned to be silent because it was easier.
Then one day, I went to the Spiritualist Society of Great Britain. I wanted to know—I had to know—were we all just delusional on the night that the old man died? No, I was told. When death is shared, as this old man shared his with us, there is always a reason. It was not my imagination, nor that of my mother and the young wife. What was unusual and very special was the fact that he shared it. There was a purpose--and in fact, I had betrayed it by letting fear prevent me from talking about it. Your purpose and your duty, the spiritualist minister told me, is to talk about this without fear of consequence or reprisal. Whatever communication we are given from beyond--whether in dreams or imagination or in more conscious contact--is a gift to guide us to become whom we are meant be.
My mother said that in fifty years of nursing, she never before or after experienced anything comparable. Hospice nurses tell me that it happens from time to time and that the transition to the other side is always easier when it does. The nurses tell me it always a privilege to share it when it happens.
This blog is the first time I am openly acknowledging my experience as a child. I wish that everyone could have direct experience to dispell the doubts. It has given me the knowledge that guides my life. I know that “they” come for you because I have heard it. I know that what waits beyond is hopeful and joyful. I know that we each have a purpose and that sometimes it is difficult to find and sometimes scarey in the demands that it makes of us. I find the sense of a community around us, waiting to welcome us back—to be profoundly comforting.
I just hope by speaking out at last, I am finally worthy of that night when an old man shared with us one of the most private things we will ever experience.
Clearly I need to move on and think about something else. So rather like the sherbert they serve between courses to clear the palate, I want to write about something from my childhood that set me on whatever crooked path my life has taken. I’ve shared this with only a few people because I don’t much like having to defend myself. It happened. I didn’t make it up. The memory has lasted a lifetime and forever changed the way I understand the world. But it’s one of those things when it happens to you, the memory is indelible. When it happens to someone else, people want to explain it away—that is, unless they already “know.” Things like what happened to me tend to upset the applecart of things that people have primary certitude about. If you are passionately fond of a particular variety of apple—you may want to skip this blog. If, on the other hand, you have curiosity and a sense of wonder about apples and trees and the universe--by all means read on.
It is about what I call “they.”
I was ten. I checked on my school records to be sure. The younger I was, the more enchanting it seems to me now. I was attending the Brighton and Hove High School, except it really wasn’t high school in the American sense. My mother was doing private nursing for a very rich old man who lived in the penthouse of an exclusive block of flats just down the hill from my school. Since Mum got on very well with the young wife and was always open to a bit of extra money to help with my school bills, she agreed to do a double—24 hours on, which required her to live in. I came along for the ride.
We settled in nicely and I rode my bike up the hill every day to school. The old man was in and out of it but I didn’t see much of him after my mother took me in to introduce this strange little urchin who was to share his flat, sleeping in the room directly across the hall from his. I think he noticed me. Mum sort of stage managed it. She introduced me and then whisked me out. Mum had seen that I’d been around death—even putting pennies on my grandmother’s dead eyes to set the lids down—because she never wanted me to be afraid of it. So from the brief experience of sort-of meeting him, I could tell from the slightly sweet smell of death that he was not too long for the world.
One night after about a week, I was awakened by noises that seemed to be coming from upstairs. It didn’t occur to me that this was a penthouse so there couldn’t be any upstairs, but no matter, to my childish mind that’s where the sounds came from. There were footsteps and doors opening and shutting, all distinct and noisy enough to have woken me up. I was annoyed. It sounded like a party and it was far too late—didn’t they know I had school the next day?
I opened my door to cross the hallway, which to my surprise was silent. I had expected the noises to intensify. I remember feeling perplexed as I crossed the hall to open the door to the old man’s room. I saw my mother get up quickly from her chair. She looked concerned and I got the sense I shouldn’t have bothered her. I whispered in my high-pitched little English voice, “Mummy, those people upstairs are making a terrible racket.” She didn’t seem angry after all but put her arm around me and guided me quickly back to my bedroom. “Lock the door, darling,” she told me, “and go back to sleep.” I heard no more noises until she knocked on the door next morning to wake me for school.
I learned then the old man had died in the night. No one explained anything and that might have been the end of the story except for some reason the memories refused to die. Years later I asked my mother why she had told me to lock the door.
By then, I guess, I was old enough to be admitted into the circle. It seemed I was not the only one hearing them. But the old man was not only hearing them, he was seeing them. Mum said that the footsteps came to the door and even though he was in deep coma and giving the death rattle, he spoke to whoever had come. He saw his parents. He saw his brother. He saw his dog, and my mother heard the sound of claws on a wood floor. She said she couldn’t be frightened because there was so much joy in his voice as he spoke to them. Well—maybe she hadn’t been frightened until I opened the door: God knows what she must have thought as she watched it open. The sounds ended, she said, the moment he died.
But the story doesn’t end there. It wasn’t just my mother and I. The young wife, who had not been the most faithful of brides, heard them and locked herself in her room with a bottle of whiskey, saying they were going to get her too.
Three of us heard them, one of us a child. The old man saw them, even calling his dog by name. They came for him. I cannot believe anything else.
Since then, I do not believe anyone who purports to tell me about death unless they have somehow looked into that place beyond life. All the fire and brimstone in the world cannot supplant for me being told of the joy of an old man who was seeing once more the things he had loved and believed he had lost.
For many, many years I did not speak of this. Those I told sometimes looked at me with sympathy and shook their heads. They offered all manner of explanations that best fitted with what they had been taught. From their doubting, I learned to be silent because it was easier.
Then one day, I went to the Spiritualist Society of Great Britain. I wanted to know—I had to know—were we all just delusional on the night that the old man died? No, I was told. When death is shared, as this old man shared his with us, there is always a reason. It was not my imagination, nor that of my mother and the young wife. What was unusual and very special was the fact that he shared it. There was a purpose--and in fact, I had betrayed it by letting fear prevent me from talking about it. Your purpose and your duty, the spiritualist minister told me, is to talk about this without fear of consequence or reprisal. Whatever communication we are given from beyond--whether in dreams or imagination or in more conscious contact--is a gift to guide us to become whom we are meant be.
My mother said that in fifty years of nursing, she never before or after experienced anything comparable. Hospice nurses tell me that it happens from time to time and that the transition to the other side is always easier when it does. The nurses tell me it always a privilege to share it when it happens.
This blog is the first time I am openly acknowledging my experience as a child. I wish that everyone could have direct experience to dispell the doubts. It has given me the knowledge that guides my life. I know that “they” come for you because I have heard it. I know that what waits beyond is hopeful and joyful. I know that we each have a purpose and that sometimes it is difficult to find and sometimes scarey in the demands that it makes of us. I find the sense of a community around us, waiting to welcome us back—to be profoundly comforting.
I just hope by speaking out at last, I am finally worthy of that night when an old man shared with us one of the most private things we will ever experience.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Early December
Sid and I exchanged our presents early this year—it was hardly even December but this seemed to be an appropriate moment, perhaps because we needed to cheer one another up. There are simply times when it doesn’t seem good to be alive and with the economic meltdown and the violence in India, I’d say this is one of them.
I don’t want to over exaggerate the difficulties—after all, it’s hard to find people who lived in a time that wasn’t desperate. The various groups who spread across Europe—Celts, Gauls, Norse, Germanic, Romans among them—didn’t occupy the land without inflicting harm on the previous inhabitants. Even when the various tribes had settled into their areas, there were continuing disputes over boundaries, trade, religion, and power. Asia and the Steppes have had an unquiet history as have the various regions of Africa.
More recently, our parents and grandparents lived through two world wars, a major depression, a police action in Korea, whatever it was in Viet Nam, followed by two gulf wars, and this doesn’t even begin to include various hot spots. Fact is that the human species occupying the planet is as restless as the planet itself.
Even given all that, though, I find the current upheavals profoundly depressing. In WWII, at least, there was a relatively clear purpose and everyone was involved in one way or another, if only collecting scrap at home. Korea was further removed, but by the time of Viet Nam (when I first started teaching college English) things were murky indeed. Afghanistan seems more clear to me, but our decision to go into Iraq seems to have been based on whatever justification someone thought might work: Hey—if you don’t like the reason for this war, wait five minutes and I’ll come up with another one.
What sets this age apart, I think, is the understanding that much of it has descended into mindless and random violence. Consider the confusion about knowing who’s responsible for the explosions and rockets and bombs that fill our newspapers. Strange new hybrid groups spring up, detonate something (often themselves), and then disappear into the crowd. In Mumbai, the gunmen sought people with US and British passports (I would have been shot twice), but for what reason since most of the people they killed were Indian? It seems someone believes the greater the number of people killed, the more serious the purpose behind it, except that the purpose is sometimes not even clear either.
When I was in college some eons ago, I had an assigned reading on relativism. It disturbed me. It wasn’t that I minded different cultures and different beliefs (no—I don’t justify cannibalism just because it’s practiced in New Guinea--that, after all is not good manners to the person being subject to it). I objected to the lazy, intellectually bereft offshoot that claimed that something was right if it felt right at the time. I could accept different viewpoints as long as they were based on self-analysis and a modicum of respect and compassion. In today’s violence, I’m not seeing anything beyond the raw expression of passion and misogyny masquerading as purpose, perpetrated by a group of people who have raised personal vendetta to political philosophy. Don't they realize this is how Sicily managed to depopulate itself?
What scares the hell out of me, though, is not the violence, terrible as that is—but what will follow it. Even if all the perceived injustices in the world were to be removed: the kashmirs, the Palestinian state, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka among them—I am afraid that our species will just find other reasons to justify violence. Once this chain was begun, I truly see no end. I hope I am wrong, and I hope that someone will come forward with a magic way to end this cycle while we still have a planet left.
I don’t want to over exaggerate the difficulties—after all, it’s hard to find people who lived in a time that wasn’t desperate. The various groups who spread across Europe—Celts, Gauls, Norse, Germanic, Romans among them—didn’t occupy the land without inflicting harm on the previous inhabitants. Even when the various tribes had settled into their areas, there were continuing disputes over boundaries, trade, religion, and power. Asia and the Steppes have had an unquiet history as have the various regions of Africa.
More recently, our parents and grandparents lived through two world wars, a major depression, a police action in Korea, whatever it was in Viet Nam, followed by two gulf wars, and this doesn’t even begin to include various hot spots. Fact is that the human species occupying the planet is as restless as the planet itself.
Even given all that, though, I find the current upheavals profoundly depressing. In WWII, at least, there was a relatively clear purpose and everyone was involved in one way or another, if only collecting scrap at home. Korea was further removed, but by the time of Viet Nam (when I first started teaching college English) things were murky indeed. Afghanistan seems more clear to me, but our decision to go into Iraq seems to have been based on whatever justification someone thought might work: Hey—if you don’t like the reason for this war, wait five minutes and I’ll come up with another one.
What sets this age apart, I think, is the understanding that much of it has descended into mindless and random violence. Consider the confusion about knowing who’s responsible for the explosions and rockets and bombs that fill our newspapers. Strange new hybrid groups spring up, detonate something (often themselves), and then disappear into the crowd. In Mumbai, the gunmen sought people with US and British passports (I would have been shot twice), but for what reason since most of the people they killed were Indian? It seems someone believes the greater the number of people killed, the more serious the purpose behind it, except that the purpose is sometimes not even clear either.
When I was in college some eons ago, I had an assigned reading on relativism. It disturbed me. It wasn’t that I minded different cultures and different beliefs (no—I don’t justify cannibalism just because it’s practiced in New Guinea--that, after all is not good manners to the person being subject to it). I objected to the lazy, intellectually bereft offshoot that claimed that something was right if it felt right at the time. I could accept different viewpoints as long as they were based on self-analysis and a modicum of respect and compassion. In today’s violence, I’m not seeing anything beyond the raw expression of passion and misogyny masquerading as purpose, perpetrated by a group of people who have raised personal vendetta to political philosophy. Don't they realize this is how Sicily managed to depopulate itself?
What scares the hell out of me, though, is not the violence, terrible as that is—but what will follow it. Even if all the perceived injustices in the world were to be removed: the kashmirs, the Palestinian state, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka among them—I am afraid that our species will just find other reasons to justify violence. Once this chain was begun, I truly see no end. I hope I am wrong, and I hope that someone will come forward with a magic way to end this cycle while we still have a planet left.
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