The Ham of God

Yesterday afternoon I ran some errands, and when they were done I discovered to my joy that I had another 20 minutes before I had to pick up the kids from daycare.

I'm right around the corner from the library, I thought. Perfect!

I quickly perused the paperback bestseller shelves, where I occasionally find some gold among the straw. This time I found Anne Lamott's Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith.

I scanned the first chapter ("Ham of God") and was caught by this on page 8, where Anne is talking to her friend Father Tom, a Jesuit priest, about her feelings of hopelessness about the Iraq war:

"I want to know what to do. Where we even start."

"We start by being kind to ourselves. We breathe, we eat. We remember that God is present wherever people suffer. God's here with us when we're miserable, and God is there in Iraq. The suffering of innocent people draws God close to them. Kids hit by U.S. bombs are not abandoned by God."

"Well, it sure looks like they were," I said. "It sure looks that way to their parents."

"It also looked like Christ had been abandoned on the cross. It looked like a win for the Romans."

"How do we help? How do we not lose our minds?"

"You take care of the suffering."

"I can't get to Iraq."

"There are folks who are miserable here."

I remembered Charlotte's recent posts about AIDS in South Africa. Whatever your beliefs about Iraq, AIDS, or any kind of human suffering, these are wise words. Do what you can, right at home, one person at a time.

Lamott's chapter goes on to describe how later that day she won a free ham (which she dislikes) at the grocery store, and how she was able to pass it on to a friend she met outside the store who was short on money for food. Instant karma, perhaps?

The River's Little Brother

The other day our landlord's lawn service came by to do their last work of the season in our yard. The kids watched entranced from their bedroom windows as the men used their blowers to clear all the leaves off the lawn.

While the lawn is quite neat now, the leaves all went into the brook, where they clogged up among the rocks.

When we go outside to play, I try to be doing something active, like raking, trimming bushes, or just cleaning up toys. The kids seem to play much better when the adults around them are also engaged in something (though in the warm months I often choose to read a book instead).

It's been quite cold: it's about 35F right now at 2 pm. There's not much for me to do since the leaves are all raked away and nothing needs weeding or trimming, but it's much too cold to sit around reading. So I took a small leaf rake and cleared out some of the leaves from the rocks in the brook, freeing them to go downstream.

After I got tired of doing that and was sufficiently warmed up by my labors (wet leaves are amazingly heavy), I sat beside the brook for a few minutes. I never tire of watching the water, the birds coming to get a drink, or whatever there is to see along the banks that day.

I noticed that because I had freed up a few more places for the water to come through the rocks, the sounds of the brook were much louder. It reminded me of something from the very beginning of The Wind in the Willows, which I had just read to the kids the other day:

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before--this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver--glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble.

(Try reading that out loud--the alliteration is wonderful!) Our little brook is not quite full-fed as that, but it certainly makes a lot of music. Recently I figured out its entire route--starting about 2 miles away from us, it finally merges with a small river and then a larger one before the water ends up in Newark Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. If anything, knowing that helps me explain to the kids why we shouldn't throw things into the brook: we wouldn't want to make the ocean dirty, now would we?

Why I Love the Autumn

Anthropapa has been reading A Mantis Carol, by Laurens van der Post, one of his favorite authors. I was idly flipping through it the other day, when I came across an extraordinary passage (not really so extraordinary: his writing is consistently beautiful) that I want to share.

He is talking about how he has a deep love for his native southern Africa, yet the passing of the seasons is much more marked in other climates:

We have nothing so awesome as the fire of autumn sweeping through the great maple forests of America, stripping their leaves from them in tongues of flame until they stand naked and penitent before the reckoning we call winter. It is a moment always full of a profound and natural sanctity for me, when the earth round about me becomes like an antique temple wherein this conflagration, aflame and aflicker among the trees, accomplishes the final metamorphosis that fire did for the dead in those archaic places of the great forgotten mysteries, removing what was provisional, false and perishable from the spent life, so that only what was permanent, true and imperishable could accompany the spirit that once invested it on the journey to whatever lies beyond the here and the now.

It is almost as if in the fall everything around me there suddenly becomes allegorical and each tree represents some prodigal being, its inheritance spent in a summer of celebration, standing bankrupt before the great impartial necessities and recognizing for the first time that where it started from was the home to which it inevitably must return, and the bleak rounding journey about to some unimagined increase in that inexhaustible place of origin comes to us all, always disguised as a fear or retribution.

The image of the leaf color as a fire burning away the inessential, and the bare trees reminding us of what is essential, somehow resonated with me.

I've noticed over the last few years of living in such a maple forest, that in the cold months I experience an opening up -- when all the leaves are gone and there is little but dark trunks and white snow, I feel as if I could see for miles where in the warm season I am constrained by the intense greenery all around. Even the falling of the leaves themselves and the snow floating down evoke a distinct sense of space, an experience of three-dimensional space become visible with each falling particle near and far.

I think it will take a long time for me to really penetrate why I have always loved the autumn. There are easily seen practical reasons -- a love of warm clothing and winter holidays, a love of returning to school -- but those are not the root of the feeling. There is something personally symbolic about it, which van der Post comes close to in this passage.

Probably I'll never come to any permanent conclusion about it. But as it's such a strong feeling that has been with me my whole life, I'll keep trying as an attempt at some sort of self-knowledge.

The Pirate Queen

My latest library find was The Pirate Queen by Barbara Sjoholm. I found it in the paperback section, amongst the Shopaholics and The Latest Diet Craze Promoted by Celebrities That Involves Bizarre Food Combinations and No Exercise At All.

There is a certain kind of travel book that appeals to me. Not too pedantic, not too witty either, with enough facts and good imagery to give me a sense of place alongside a sense of the author. Sjoholm gave me all that, plus a fair bit of culture and history of the North Atlantic.

Sjoholm is Irish and Swedish by birth, and has been fascinated by the sea since childhood. In her twenties she even washed dishes on a steam ship up and down the Norwegian coast. She's also a successful writer of mysteries and travel books, publisher, editor, and translator.

She undertook a long voyage, primarily by sea, from Ireland to Scotland, the Orkneys, Shetlands, and Faroes, then to Iceland, and finally Norway, to seek out stories and records of women who "rowed and sailed, commanded and fished, built boats and owned fleets."

While full of her own thoughts and feelings -- at one point she steeled herself not to become too crabby like Paul Theroux -- the book brings these seafaring women alive, even though some were fairly shadowy figures from a thousand years ago:

Grace O'Malley, the Pirate Queen herself, who commanded a fleet of ships along the western Irish coast, was known as such a scourge that Queen Elizabeth I put a bounty of 500 pounds on her head.

In the early 1800s, Christian Robertson owned a successful shipping company and recruited for the Hudson Bay Company in Stromness, Orkney, at a time when women just did not own their own businesses.

On the island of Yell in the Shetlands, Sjoholm meets a woman who worked on a passenger ship in the late 1960's -- one of only 15 women out of a crew of 500, as the "children's hostess" who amused the 200 or so children emigrating from the UK to New Zealand with their parents.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, independent "herring lassies" worked long hours gutting and packing fish on the docks, some in the Shetlands and Orkneys and some following the herring migration from Scotland down the coast of England.

Aud the Deep-minded, a Norwegian noblewoman, sailed from Scotland to Iceland around AD 900 after her husband (the Norse-Irish king Olaf the White) died, bringing with her vast wealth and a large retinue to settle there and prosper.

Sjoholm interprets these women's stories through the lens of modern feminism, pointing out how many of these women braved the ire of society to secure their financial and physical independence. She points out that all of the "fisherman's wife" statues, supposedly erected in honor of women's hard work and contributions to fishing culture, all depict women passively looking out to sea -- either waving goodbye to or waiting for a glimpse of their fisherman husbands -- rather than engaged in their true work.

Sjoholm also goes on a personal journey within the sea journey. She gives us peeks into her personality and life story throughout, but the main "subplot" is her search for a new last name. Her father was adopted, and Sjoholm doesn't feel any connection to being a Wilson. The moments where she muses on what is important to her and how that can be reflected in her name are fascinating reading.

Two Little Reviews

Sammar is a young Sudanese widow living in Aberdeen, Scotland working as an Arabic translator at a university. She is depressed and grieving over her husband who was killed in a traffic accident, and has left her young son to live with relatives in Khartoum. Sammar lives alone in a small apartment with little personal effects, and has few personal interactions other than with her co-workers. Her daily prayers give her something to hold onto, something that sustains her in her grief. Sammar is an observant Muslim: she wears a headscarf and only eats halal food, fasts for Ramadan, and she cannot marry the man she comes to love until he becomes Muslim.

Ria is a young Hindu woman hoping to study in America to advance her writing career. She is part of a large, well-to-do Delhi family that would love nothing more than to see her marry. However, Ria seems unable to form intimate relationships with men, and only after confronting and exposing her childhood abuser is she freed from her fears. Ria feels pressured by her family to conform: they believe she will be a successful writer, but the cultural expectations of marriage predominate. She also feels this pressure more acutely as her cousin's wedding approaches, engulfing the family in money worries, adulterous liasons, and chaos of all sorts.

The Translator and Monsoon Wedding work together as amazing portraits of women and family -- the former of a woman isolated and adrift until she can reunite with her far-off family and culture, the latter of a woman who learns to fight for her independence and selfhood within an almost suffocatingly close family and culture.

Office Supply Store or Den of Iniquity

I have come to depend on friends to recommend new fiction, as I seem unable to spend any energy to find my own these days.

Helen's post about Carrie Pilby was so intriguing, I had to order it through interlibrary loan.

Helen appreciated Carrie's love of dictionaries, but I found an echo of my own soul in this passage about office supplies:

The nice thing about living in the Village is that it means you're close to New York University, and NYU has the best stationery shops in the world, I suppose because of the writers and film students. You can find forty-two colors of paper clips; twenty-three sizes of envelopes; seventy-six kinds of pens; markers with gold ink, silver ink, chartreuse ink, invisible ink, disappearing ink, peppermint ink, glittering ink, pink ink, scented ink and glue ink. It's been too long since I've been stationery shopping. The problem is, I suddenly need everything I see. Take those long pink erasers. All of my pencils have their own erasers, so there's no need for me to buy a pink eraser, but they just look so clean and nubile that I have to caress them. Forget what Nabokov said: the real pleasure in life is fondling office supplies. I could bite those pink erasers.

***

Yes, I know--there is something laughable about a person who thinks she's getting wild because she's going to buy office supplies. Well, you have your fun. You can watch your pornos and smoke your grass and climb onto your rooftop with a bottle of hooch and howl at the moon, but I will RUN MY FINGERS OVER MY NUBILE PINK ERASER AND GASP IN ECSTASY. And I won't wake up with a hangover or unsightly teeth marks on my neck.

Maybe I've been holed up too long in this little room making tiny red and blue marks on large stacks of paper, but I must admit to my (slightly) obsessive love of office supplies.

And it's gotten so bad that, like a drunk sucking down Nyquil, I even get a thrill over $1 notebooks and gel pens from Target when I can't afford rice paper and mechanical pencils from Kinokuniya.

The Book Quiz

I found this quiz via Helen. Not what I expected.

You're Cry, the Beloved Country!

by Alan Paton

Life is exceedingly difficult right now, especially when you put more miles (2800!) between yourself and your hometown. But with all sorts of personal and profound convictions (I will spend my alone time working, I will not blog, I will not...doh!), you are able to keep a level head and still try to help folks, (Mama, I can't turn my shirt right side out! Mama, I'm poopy! Mama, I fell and my knee is bleeding!) no matter how much they harm you (my kids do excel at bonking my nose with their hard little heads). You walk through a land of natural beauty (Northeastern US mixed hardwood forest) and daily horror (must be referring to the state of the bathroom right now). In the end, far too much is a matter of black and white (or perhaps a matter of dirt and clean, or work and sleep).


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