The places that scare you

I fell to envy the other day.

It happened so innocently.

I’d gotten a Kindle from Donny for Christmas and since then the only thing I’d done with it was turn it on. I get in a slump at this time of year, which I know intellectually to expect, but had begun to make up reasons for. Not doing anything more with the Kindle was part of the general malaise, but then a friend gave me a gift certificate to put something on it, and she’s such an enthusiastic type that I figured it would be a real disappointment to her if I didn’t do it sooner rather than later. Besides that, I was bored for being totally uninspired and unmotivated, so I suppose it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I went from that lowly state to the unlovely envy.

I was going to buy my own books on Kindle, but thought I might have enough for one more, so had pulled up books listed under Spirituality. I was rather weirded out not to have heard of most, maybe not any, that were on the first page. I kept clicking next page and next. Then, at number 30 something on the list of top spiritual sellers was A Course in Miracles.

I know A Course in Miracles is right up there, so this wasn’t exactly a shock to me, it was more as if I suddenly felt the discrepancy between being number 30 and number 300,000. It didn’t seem right! It didn’t seem fair! What the hell was going on? What was it going to take for people to start reading A Course of Love? I shook my head. It didn’t seem to make any sense.

I got out of the “top sellers list” area fast and tried to order the Treatises and Dialogues only to be told I had “one click shopping.” There was no offer to let me use my gift certificate. I shut the Kindle down and went to bed (where I’m still trying to read the 50 pound book Jonathan Franzen wrote and his publishers brought out in a very hard hardcover).

When my arms got tired of holding it up I had time to consider all those envious feelings that wavered between not caring and caring. All those feelings that turn, slowly but surely, into wondering, “What’s wrong with me? What am I doing wrong?” I was a fret with it.

The lucky thing was that today, I picked up a Pema Chodran book. I only did it because I was cleaning my room (what else do you do when you’re uninspired). I was trying not to feel lazy besides. The book was, “The Places That Scare You,” which could have described my room about then.

I’d never read more than a chapter from it and was going to move it out of the “must have by the side of bed” pile. I didn’t even know what it was doing there or how long it had been there, buried and dusty. But I flipped it open and it happened to fall to this chapter on Laziness, which I thought I’d better sit down and read immediately.

Later on (I quit cleaning and kept reading) she said she’d been envious of a friend when her book sold more copies.

I wanted to shout “Alleluia,” and “Hooray, we’re all human!”

I felt like I walked into one of those places that scare me and found a friend.

Sugarcoating and Sanitizing

A new edition of Mark Twain’s classic, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” will be out next month from NewSouth Books. It will not use the N-word. All 219 times it was used by the author, it is being replaced by “runaway slave.” Political correctness, just like with this past week’s reading of the Constitution, is being extended into the past.

How distressing. As if we can’t admit that we were what we once were.

Is it because we can’t admit what we now are?

There are all kinds of reasons, to me, for finding this distressing, some of them literary. But my main response to this is a feeling of shock and disbelief. Where will this sort of trend take us? What happens when you sugarcoat and sanitize? What are you trying to hide? Is it an avoidance of taking the time needed to place situations in their correct context? An avoidance of understanding? Is it a disavowal that we’re smart enough to read Mark Twain for what he said rather than the words he used?

I don’t know. It just gets to me.

In the literary sense, I can tell you that from the small amount of publishing I’ve done, I have desired at times to reach back and make changes that would grant me to seem less obtuse or more kindly than I was feeling at the time.

When The Given Self came out, one of my friends wrote me that he took the first chapters like the “ding ding ding” at the start of a boxing match. He thought I was picking a fight. Well, hell, sometimes you can’t point things out that are concerning you without placing them in context.

Are there some things you wish you might feel free to change as an author? Sure. Would you want anyone else sanitizing your words? Certainly not. It smacks of sinister stuff to me, no matter how well intentioned, and of the generally dumbing-down of the American public.

And again it strikes me as leaving out those things that we see, perhaps, as mistakes of the past, our fear of the imperfection of human beings. Of wanting to take the good without the bad. Of believing that we can protect the children rather than educate them. Of believing that we can whitewash the American way, or maybe even our souls.

The Vision of our Founders?

And the Constitution was read…at least most of it.

I’m in my hibernating mood, so I haven’t been watching TV. Maybe this story was on all day yesterday and people are sick of it. I just got my taste of it from the morning newspaper. I love this about the newspaper – that you can get a taste. You can scan the headlines. You can read, or not read, the articles below them.

You can do it at the kitchen table. Your partner’s got the local section or the sports, and you’re having your coffee and the kids or the grandkid (in our case) is eating his shredded wheat, and you can look up and make a comment, which I didn’t this morning, but did yesterday over Bert Blyleven. He’s in the paper again today but I haven’t read that section yet. I got paused by the reading of the Constitution.

I’m not getting terribly well informed by reading the St. Paul Pioneer Press, but I guess I must be getting as informed as I want to be. It’s enough to spark my thoughts or my indignation or at times a tear. I can always search for more when I can’t get enough, but usually it’s enough, or too much.

Anyway, you might say today’s story on the reading of the Constitution points out a philosophy of mine. Actually Rep. Elijah Cummings said it as good as I ever could. He said: “Imperfection is not to be feared.”

He was referring to the sections on slavery that were omitted from the reading. The part where it said slaves were to be counted as three-fifths of a person. He was making a case that being able to improve upon what the Founders started with was a “blessing.” I might say that if you’re going to haul out the Constitution as a document to live by in this century, then you haul it out – the whole thing – so you have to recognize that we can’t claim to stick by the Constitution (or anything else) unilaterally when some of it is wrong-headed.

My philosophy of imperfection isn’t about correcting mistakes of the past or condoning them. It’s more about how flawed human beings can still be leaders and poets and parents. How people without the personal constitution to succeed in the world as it is are still people. How the poor might not be so poor if they weren’t counted as overly flawed and in need of fixing, or due to enjoy three-fifths or less of the benefits of Constitutional freedom. The poor, of whatever race, religion, or sexual persuasion are in my view the new minority, those oppressed and denied what the wealthy can claim as their rights.

My point is that if you’re going to see slackers and the vulnerable and even the working class as so imperfect – imminently flawed for needing help once in a while – then lets start seeing the greedy that way too for causing the need. If you want to repeal health care reform…fine…start taking away the million dollar salaries of the CEO’s and the “right” of the medical supply companies and the pharmaceutical companies to make a fortune. Let’s call our leaders to lead, even while they hang on to their money and let’s point out the flagrant imperfection of 1 percent of the population controlling 40 percent of the wealth.

I hardly think that was the vision of our Founders.

St. Paul Pioneer Press, Reading of the Constitution triggers tussle. Jim Abrams, Associated Press. 1-7-2011, 4A.

Getting the picture

In 1973, on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, I married for the first time. I was a month shy of 18.

I wasn’t interested in the Feast of the Epiphany when I chose it for my wedding date in 1973. Charlie, my husband-to-be had joined the Air Force and was about to go off to basic training. He’d cut his long, musician’s hair already. He didn’t want it to be too big of a shock when the Air Force did it for him. I suppose the date was chosen around that timing and perhaps the first open Saturday of 1973.

My sister made my dress. My sister-in-law was helping with my hair. We were standing in my mom’s bedroom and I was looking at myself in the mirror over her dresser. I was crying. It’s the moment I remember of my wedding day, as if suddenly, I looked at myself, maybe in somewhat the way Charlie might have looked at himself with his short hair, and wondered what I was doing. I don’t know if I doubted my love. I was thinking of making a commitment for life.

Today, I’m reading about Bert Blyleven finally getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame. I’ve got tears in my eyes again. I feel like a sap for having tears in my eyes. I tend to get this way with success stories, especially someone recognized after a long time of waiting for it. Or the story of anybody coming from behind and breaking through. Or the girl who gets the guy in the end.

I got a trial membership to Netflix a month or so ago. I picked movies for my que. Then Netflix suggested some. One was the old Hayley Mills movie, “The Parent Trap”, another was “Singing in the Rain.” I don’t know that either would be considered coming from behind, triumphing in the end stories, but they were both old favorites of mine. It spooked me a little bit. What could be seen about me from the movies I chose?

I signed on for the trial membership because I wanted to see a documentary film called “Food Matters.” It had been recommended to me. I was in the mood to watch it. I put “84 Charring Cross Road” in my que, and “Cannery Row.”

For Christmas I got three new books. Barack Obama’s “Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters”, Kevin Klings “The Dog Says How,” and Jonathan Franzen's novel “Freedom.” I wanted each of them for different reasons. What did that say about me? Were these thing superficial…or not?

So back to crying over Bert. Maybe it’s that he’s been the commentator of Twins ballgames for as long as I’ve been a fan. He’s been up for Hall of Fame entry for 14 years. Each year he didn’t get in, he had to face that disappointment publicly. Last year, when asked how he felt about failing to get in one more time, he said, “I feel like crap.”

I liked that. Anything else, any of those “good sportsmanship” platitudes wouldn’t have appealed to me. That’s what it was, I figure. Having him admit he felt like crap, and knowing that this year, he doesn’t.

I meant to watch the news coverage of his selection yesterday. I turned on the TV a few times to do so but it wasn’t the right time and I missed it. I could see the emotion on his picture in the paper today though. He’s quoted as saying, “I was born to throw that baseball.”

He was born in Holland. His parents spoke Dutch. His dad got a job driving truck for his uncle’s molasses company. They didn’t have a lot, but when he needed shoes or a glove, he got them. His dad came to all his games.

He doesn’t read. His favorite cartoon character growing up was Fred Flintstone, he thinks “Field of Dreams” is an “outstanding” movie and likes Kevin Costner, Denzel Washington, Harrison Ford, John Wayne and Westerns.

Are you getting a picture of Bert? Do these things matter?

I like to think they do.

St. Paul Pioneer Press, Blyleven had curve to remember, Charley Walters, 1-6-2011, 2D. Associated Press Photos: Erik Kellar

The coming of quiet

January 2, 2011, a calm descends. It’s been so long that I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like. I’m awed by the quiet that seems to bear a sustained quality. After a few minutes, I’m amazed it hasn’t gone away.

I’m taking down the tree ornaments. Henry was excited to help me begin the project. Mia was not. She went down and got the boxes I couldn’t reach though. I took the candles and centerpiece off the coffee table, laid it with a towel, and for a while Henry had at it, taking down his favorite ornaments and lying them gently on the towel. Then his mom came home and whisked him off for a couple of hours at the Mall of America and gave Mia a ride home on the way, and after a few minutes I felt the quiet of the empty house.

I kept at it for a while. I wanted to be sure the ornaments from my childhood got boxed right away. The rest were safe enough on the coffee table, but there was always the chance of one of the cats hopping up to sniff an angel or a bird, and so those cherished baubles with their memories had to be wrapped in tissue straight away. Then there was the one I had made after my dad died, the sappy Merry Christmas from Heaven that met a need for sentiment that year, and that was engraved. I had the box and it seemed as if every ornament was off the tree, but I couldn’t find that one.

I stood back, in the quiet, and looked top to bottom, side to side. I got up close. Finally I picked up lesser boxes – the ornament my mom gave me at the book-signing luncheon in 1997, the three kings from 1987. Each time I walked from coffee table to box, I searched the tree with my eyes for the engraved ornament that belonged in a thin rectangular box, maroon in color. It felt odd that it was the last one, the only one I couldn’t find. That it was still within the tree…waiting.

It kept me there, with the tree and the snowmen and the Santa faces and the doves for a few minutes while the house settled down with me, and we both breathed a sigh of relief. About then, the silver of the pewter showed itself within the boughs of the Frazier Fir, and I boxed it up, without reading the inscription, simply happy to have it back where it belonged.

Then I heated my cool coffee in the microwave, and spent that 60 seconds finding another ornament that matched another box, and when the microwave dinged, brought my coffee here as I do each day, and have done, all throughout the spastic tremors of the end of 2010, but without the quiet so long that I’d ceased to miss it, and thought I’d had it in bits and pieces, and realize again now, that I have not, and drink it in. Silence.