The Sunday Salon: Old Friends

“Old friends, old friends, sat on the park bench like bookends..."

Paul Simon’s poignant tune has been running through my mind all week as I’ve been re-reading a book I first read over 40 years ago. In This House of Brede, a novel by Rumer Godden, is the story of Phillippa Talbot, 40 year old woman who leaves behind a successful career in business and enters a Benedictine monastery to become a contemplative nun. 

“Is it easier to be than to do?” she inquires of a friend, who questions her decision to eschew a life of productive activity. And though the book was written almost 50 years ago, this question is one we ask of ourselves more and more in the 21st century. For this group of nuns, the work of their lives is of spiritual being - the majority of their days are spent in prayer and worship for people in the outside world who seek supplication and intercessory prayer. As a community they perform the Divine Office. They write books and create artwork designed to uplift and sustain spiritual life. They humble themselves before God and each other.

The novel, besides being a fascinating look inside the life of monastic nuns during the early 1960’s, is also one of those ensemble novels I always enjoy reading. The story is as much about the other nuns and postulants as it is about Phillippa (who becomes Dame Phillippa when she takes her solemn vows). Dame Catherine Ismay, who becomes the reluctant, yet clear-headed Abbess; Sister Cecily, the extraordinarily beautiful and musically gifted  young postulant a whose mother nearly disowned her because of  her vocation; Dame Agnes, old and wise, who is wary of Phillippa because sees something worldly her that is impossible to leave behind. 

When I read this book the first time I was maybe 15 or 16 and had just started attending Catholic high school. My only religious experiences to date had been sporadic attendance at a small Baptist church. The liturgy and ritual of the Catholic church quickly captured my imagination, I was eager to learn more about it. Many of my teachers were nuns (not Benedictine, of course, but Felicians), and I wasn’t quite sure how to relate to them. Becoming acquainted with Godden’s characters helped me understand them and feel more comfortable with them.

As I read this battered old library edition with it’s hard cover and rigid heavy-duty binding, it’s pages yellowed and stained after sitting on the shelf for 40 years, I wonder how long its been since someone read this book.  There are so many new books calling for our attention these days, books with beautifully designed covers, whose authors pop up in our Facebook and Twitter feeds. I picked it up at the library one day when I was wandering through the stacks and heard it beckon me from the shelf, whispering “pssst, over here” in a tremulous voice.

Just like an old, old friend.

It’s good to get reacquainted.

In Which I Adjust My Expectations...Again

Most of my Facebook friends will know I’ve been having some struggles and concerns with one of my little dogs. Magic, the older of the two at age 12, has been “inappetant” (in veterinary jargon) for the past year. He refuses his food, goes long periods without eating, and last summer developed a severe case of gastroenteritis (inflammation of the intestinal tract) as a result. He was actually hospitalized for three days in a specialty veterinary hospital about 40 minutes away from our home. He was discharged looking thin and haggard, and acting his age for the first time.

When he came home from that hospitalization, I made it my mission to feed him three meals a day. I followed him around the house with dishes of roast beef, grilled chicken, baby food, buttered noodles - anything I thought might possibly tempt him. “Just try it,” I would coax, scratching him behind the ear with one hand and offering tiny bites with the other. All this babying worked for a while, but right around Christmas time he started resisting food with a vengeance. He was either sick of his menu, sick of me constantly haranguing him, or maybe just plain sick. The less he ate, the more worried I got. How long could a dog go without eating? He began to look droopy and listless, walking around with his beautiful plume tail dragging on the ground. He shivered convulsively every time we went out in the cold, and cried to be carried around in my arms.

Per my usual, I went into full blown crisis mode. We made numerous visits to our vet, and then back to the specialist we’d seen in the summer. We tested blood, we tested urine (what can you do to dog pee that would cost $356? I wonder.)

All the results were normal. Which was good, but...

Meanwhile, Magic still wouldn’t eat. Even the “cookies” and “spicy treats” he had always eaten before were being refused with his characteristic turn of the head and slinking away. I was at my wit’s end.

I texted a friend who has much experience with animals. “Try something completely different,” she suggested. “Like a vegetable or fruit.” I remembered how much Magic liked canned green beans (ick), but I found a can lurking in the back of the pantry. I heated them up, rinsed off the salty broth, and offered him one with bated breath.

He grabbed it so fast he nearly ate my finger with it. After a few beans, I started sneaking bites of dog food into the mix. Before long, he had eaten an entire dishful. Since that day - as long as I offer a green vegetable as an “appetizer” - he’s been eating almost normally.

I say almost, because his appetite is not the same as it used to be. I always fed my dogs three small meals a day - it’s easier for little dogs to digest smaller portions more often. But now Magic doesn’t want to eat until about 1:00. He’ll have a few “cookies” for breakfast, but that’s about it. He needs things with a little bit of spice, which makes me wonder if his olfactory senses aren’t as keen as they used to be. 

He is, after all, 12 years old. In people years, that puts him around 70. With age, his needs and desires have changed. I’ve been expecting him to act and behave in the same way he did when he was young. Worse yet, I’ve been trying to force him to.

One of the most difficult of life’s lessons is learning to adjust our expectations. We often expect we will want the same things we did ten, twenty, even thirty years ago. We expect to sustain the same levels of excitement, anticipation, and interest we had when we were young. We expect to look and feel as good as we did in the “prime” of life, when in fact we have gray hairs and wrinkles around the eyes and a little too much weight around the middle. 

Sometimes it takes a long while to come to terms with those changes. We fight it every step along the way, with miracle creams and body shaping garments and frequent trips to the hair salon for highlights. We travel and join groups and do yoga and lunch with the ladies. 

But after a while, it all seems a little frantic. After a while, we get tired. 

I’ve adjusted my expectations for my own life many times in the past 10 years. It doesn’t mean I’ve “settled” for not looking or being my best. It means that I now know I don’t have to wear a size 6, don’t need to have perfectly smooth skin, don’t have to say “yes” to every request to help or work or go out for the evening. It means I pick and choose more carefully the ways I spend my time because I know it (and my energy!) are limited. 

So now I’ve adjusted my expectations for Magic as well. If he only wants to eat once a day, then  I can live with that. If he wants vegetables and cheese instead of cooked chicken or even his dog food - well, if that’s what it takes to make mealtimes pleasurable for him, then I’m fine with it. At his age, life should be as pleasant as possible, which doesn’t include a nerve-wracked woman chasing him around the house shoving bites of food in his face. 

I’m happier and healthier when my life is aligned with my expectations. 

I think his will be too.

How about you? Do you adjust your expectations on a regular basis?

Write On Wednesday: 50 Shades

No, not that "50 shades". I wouldn’t waste one second of time writing or thinking about that atrocity of modern literature and cinema (and I use those terms loosely). 

I’m talking about the shades of my own creative life, particularly my writing life, and the different types of writing I’m called to do. 

Recently I had an opportunity to return to work at the office I “retired” from about a year ago. This time, I would be helping rewrite the copy for a new website, and also helping revise their Policy and Procedure manual. This latter project at first sounded deadly boring - but surprisingly enough I’ve found it quite interesting. Their policies are old and outdated, so I’ve been researching the latest trends in policy making regarding electronic and social media. With medical information involved, it’s a touchy subject, so there is much to consider.

The website copywriting is also interesting. I wrote the copy for the current site six years ago, and I’m hoping to really streamline the copy and the site itself into a more readable, user-friendly format. 

This week I’ve been involved in creating a power point presentation about the services our company provides. Again - a learning process for me, both in terms of writing and the mechanics of power point itself.

So I’ve been pounding away at the keys, and even though it’s not the kind of writing I’ve been focused on here on the blog, it’s another shade in my writer’s rainbow. The kind of writing that involves research, clarity, organization, consistency, engaging and informing the reader...

Wait a minute - Isn’t that what all good writing should do? Aren’t those the Primary Colors for every successful writing project?

Although I’ve been spending a lot of time on these projects, which means my other writing projects are on the back burner, I haven’t felt deprived or guilty. I feel as if I’m sharpening up some old skills and honing some other new ones.

My writer’s palette is glowing with new colors that will surely find their way onto other canvas in due time.

The Sunday Salon: Reveling in Reading

This is a great winter - for reading at least. Thanks to all that time I spent recovering from the flu, I’ve discovered a new favorite reading spot on the couch and it’s where you’ll find me for more and more significant periods of time these bitterly cold days. 

This week I finished Jane Smiley’s Some Luck, which is the first of a planned trilogy about the Langdon family of farmers, begins in 1920. Each chapter represents a year in the life of the family, with this volume ending in 1953.

So, the novel encompasses a generation and half’s worth of living, loving, working, going to school, having children. And of course, dying. There’s not a lot of major excitement or action - it’s ordinary life on a fair to middling sized farm. Drought comes, the Depression happens, war intervenes. It’s 395 pages of starkly beautiful prose about the kind of life-in-general events we all experience, whether we’re farmers, carpenters, doctors, lawyers, homemakers, musicians. It’s the story of a family, of life in American during a 30 year period. 

Why should we care about this Langdon family, then? There’s nothing special about them. Not a Pulitzer Prize winner among them, nor a researcher who cures cancer, or a philanthropist who saves the lives of refugees. 

Perhaps because they are just like us. Ordinary, imperfect, living quiet lives doing the best they can with the time and talents they’ve been given. Because Smiley elevates their simple passage through life with writing like this, in a scene near the end of the book as Rosanna, the matriarch, surveys her family over Thanksgiving dinner:

She should have sat down...but she didn’t want to sit down, or eat at all; she just wanted to stand there and look at them as they passed the two gravy boats and began to cut their food. They couldn’t have survived so many strange events. Take your pick - the birth of Henry in that room over there, with the wind howling and the dirt blowing in. Take your pick - all of them nearly dying of heat that summer of ’36. Take your pick - Joey falling out of the hayloft, Frankie driving the car to Usherton, Frankie disappearing into the Italian Campaign. Take your pick - Walter falling into the well. Take your pick - Granny Mary with her cancer, but still walking around. Take your pick - Lillian running off with a stranger who turned out to be a clown but a lovable one, and nice looking, and weren’t Timmy and Debbie just darling? Normally Rosanna took credit for everything, but now she thought, this was too much. She could not have created this moment, these lovely faces, these candles flickering, the flash of silverware, the fragrances of the food, the heads turning this way and that, the voices murmuring and laughing. She looked at Walter who was so far away at the other end of the table. As if on cue, Walter looked at Rosanna, and they agreed in that instant: something had created itself from nothing - a dumpy old house had been filled, if only for this moment, with twenty-three different worlds, each one of them rich and mysterious. Rosanna wrapped her arms around herself for a moment and sat down.

It’s what we all do. Create something - a LIFE - from nothing. And if we have some luck, we survive all the strange events of our own individual lives from generation to generation and can find a point to survey it all with wonder, amazement, and pride.

Needless to say, I’m eager to read the next volume in the trilogy.

I’ll be here on my couch, waiting.

Write On Wednesday: On Desire

“I think you should write another book,” my mother said to me the other day when I started to whine about the long winter days with nothing fun to do. In fact, I almost uttered the “B” word, that one which never passes my lips. (Bored? Me?? Hardly.)

“Well, it’s not that simple,” I replied a bit peevishly. “It takes a lot of work to write a book from scratch."

“I’m sure it does,” she replied. “But you’ve already done it once, I imagine you could do it again if you really wanted to."

I opened my mouth to answer back, then closed it again. She was right, of course. Darn mothers anyway, always knowing their stuff like that.

I could do it If I Really Wanted To.

In my very small way, I’ve been stricken with second book syndrome. Life In General turned out to be a surprising and gratifying little success. And although I’ve had ideas for another book gnawing at me for a couple of years, and had plans to commence working on it as soon as Life In General was out in the world, I haven’t made a dent in it. Truth? I’m afraid. Afraid this one won’t turn out as well. Afraid to start from the beginning. Afraid of the kinds of things I might have to confront in order to tell this story. Afraid I don’t have the talent or the self discipline it takes to tell it at all.

Perhaps a more appropriate title for this post would be On Fear. 

Fear and Desire are yoked together in my writing world these days. It reminds of times when I’m walking the dogs and they are out ahead of me at the end of their long leashes - suddenly they will pull up right against one another, their sides actually rubbing, and walk for 100 feet or so as if stuck to each other with velcro. Then one of them (usually Magic) will pull away and take the lead and leave the other behind. But for a moment it’s as if they need the security of being side-by-side on this adventure, of knowing the other one is there. 

Fear is not always unhealthy. Knowing what we’re afraid of helps have the strength to overcome it. But Desire. Well that is the fuel for every fire, be it making a book, falling in love, raising a child, painting a room, cooking a meal. 

You have to Want It. Really Want It.

Beth Kephart, whose book Handling the Truth is my study guide these days, reminds me that “we can only write toward our obsession.” In her blog post the other day, she describes thinking about a new book as a  “strange existence of wading through the formidable dark toward a fledgling, heartbreaking story.” 

It can’t be about Fear. It must be about Desire. Compulsion. Obsession. An itch to tell the story. “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to literature.” (Sarah Orne Jewett). It’s not only a willingness but a need to wander into the forest of memory and experience and truth. 

So I need to turn those fearful thoughts on their head, pull them away from my side where they’ve been rubbing me the wrong way and holding me back. Let Desire take the lead. Scratch that itch to tell a story, the one that’s been teasing me every since I was a little girl. Let myself be obsessed with it.

Really Want It. 

And then Do It.