Unboxed Memories

As I’ve written before, I am a woman meant to travel.  In spiritual terms, it’s called being a pilgrim.  We’re all pilgrims to one degree or another.  And this week, my pilgrimage was to that elusive place called home.  Home to West Virginia.  Home to old friends.  Home to the me I used to be.  Home to family.  Home.

I don’t know about you, but most times I bring back more than I took.  This time was no exception.  I left behind wonderful garden tomatoes – I am the greengrocer of good tomatoes, carrying what I did not grow from place to place like the abundance they are.  Tomatoes left, I bring back a storehouse of thoughts and new memories – treasures that require no box for safe-keeping.

My new unboxed memory treasures include the sublimely ridiculous as well as the merely sublime –

. . . listening to Jason Isbell on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air sing his heart and rediscover music in a way I haven’t heard in a very long time.  I’m definitely adding his new album Southeastern to my playlist

. . . family will always try to make the best of your worst failed recipe experiment and even offer to eat what’s left tomorrow – that’s love

. . . learning anew that a little boy’s heart is a tender thing and a little boy’s tears will break your heart

. . . friends of long ago and far away are treasures to rediscover

. . . my presence makes a difference and so does my absence

. . . Cuban pork sandwiches are pretty tasty

. . . family really is glad to see you even when you come empty handed (but you wouldn’t want to make a habit of it – the empty-handed thing)

. . . sometimes the things your kids didn’t tell you were really important

. . . it takes our children a really long time to figure out that our choices, our mistakes, are not their fault or their burden

. . . Seamus Heaney died and I remember hearing his voice, learning his words, at a poetry reading at Princeton years ago – the one I tell where I went to a poetry reading with Toni Morrison – I never really did – she was there as was I and that was it’s own warm feeling, this rubbing air with the good-famous – and now, in the obligatory lauding, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing is read and the words, I live here too . . . scream out of the radio landing into my soul and the words reverberate around and through and in me . . . I live here too . . . this place that is war – this always-has-been-always-will-be place where so many I’s live here too . . .

. . . and so it is that Seamus and a 6-year-old-boy-of-my-blood teach me anew that some people have perspective, whether age 6 or 60, and some never do – and I know which I am and I am humbled

. . . sometimes we’re just too busy enjoying life to go to the bathroom – and that’s okay

. . . Mumford & Sons are really cool even if I have no idea who the sons are (well, there aren’t any ‘sons’, are there?  And yes, Ian Brennan, they’re privileged – I think it’s a hoot that you think that’s worth remarking – just sayin’)

. . . little boys will always follow bigger boys – and that’s mostly how it should be

. . . family is a fluid thing and always has room for just one more

. . . sadness is contagious

. . . visiting is good

. . . things change

. . . and they don’t

. . . when you’re small you always know where you are in the picture

. . . and the bombing/invasion/attack/punishment – take your pick – of Syria is the rough backdrop to it all – invading my memories, my home, and I secretly resent it, this intrusion – can’t you just recess your warring ways for just a few days, just this once?  Can’t we have a break from caring so much just this once?  – heavy in import, with the river of Jason Isobell’s voice running through it, and it is not good.

But it is – because a better tomorrow is better than a wish . . . and family and friends matter . . . and little boys still show us the way.

Less-Than-Great Expectations*

In a wonderful turn of the phrase borrowed from Dickens, Maureen Corrigan deftly puts her finger to the pulse not only of the landscape of the book she’s reviewing, but also, I think, of the western ‘disease’ of our time:  malaise.

From Wikimedia Commons

Malaise, “an indefinite feeling of debility or lack of health . . . a vague sense of mental or moral ill- being . . .”  Merriam-Webster online dictionary  The malaise trap (interestingly named for the last name of the man who invented it rather than the condition) illustrates the state quite well if a degree of anthropomorphism is allowed: insects are drawn into a trap that funnels them into the direction of their certain death.  Wikipedia That’s how it is with malaise: it tricks us into the deceptively attractive idea of inevitability – a fatalism of mood – which in its cruel irony, creates the very inevitability which would otherwise have not existed.  Because we believe we are done for, we march resolutely in the direction of surrender – surrender to boredom, to unease, to being less than we were created to be, to expecting less of ourselves because life has disappointed, let us down, somehow.

As my own life and work are dedicated to God and focused on the church, I tend to hone in on those opining on the life or lack thereof in communities of faith.  But the overall sense of something missing, that vague sense of ill-being, applies, I think, to our society as a whole in these United States in particular.

Frankly, it puzzles me – this sense of something not-quite-right.  Perhaps more accurately, I am puzzled by the various cause claims bandied about.

One bromide has it that in the past, each generation could look forward to having it (however ‘it’ may be defined) better than the preceding ages, but there is a sea change in the land and continued eternal prosperity is no longer on the horizon.  It is the descriptor of unmet expectations.

I feel as if I didn’t get the memo.

Of course I know that my parents hoped that my life would be easier than theirs, shaped as they were by the Great Depression, World War II, Korea, Viet Nam, and the riots on the streets of the 1960's that so transfixed me and alarmed them.

And truthfully, my life has been easier than theirs.  But I never felt as if it should be.  That my circumstances thus far have been less challenging than my parents’ is a matter for gratitude, but not entitlement.   It was never a promise that they or anyone else made to me that it should be so.

Maybe it’s a product of geographic culture: being a West Virginian means, among other things, that you’re seldom surprised by the cruel vagaries of life.  And perhaps that simple recognition forms my faith as well: the prosperity Gospel never held any appeal for me.  It just rings false – false to experience as well as to scriptural witness.

And maybe it’s about the focus as well as the source of our expectations: if God, rather than a great job or an easy life is my focus, everything else shifts into a very different perspective.

With God, my expectations are very great.  But that has little, if anything, to do with my life circumstances.  Job is the rule rather than the exception.

That being said, I am truly a woman of great expectations: the expectation that my life matters . . . that wonder and beauty are gifts to be treasured and also enjoyed . . . that no one takes anything from me as it was never mine nor theirs in the first place . . . that work is often its own reward . . . that the fact that my footprints will someday disappear from this world is a triumph of life, not a tragedy . . . that maybe, just maybe, my greatest gift to the generations is not to insist on being remembered in perpetuity, but to make room for them by getting out of the way . . . thus I can enjoy what is before me now – right now – because I know it will not last . . . and maybe that is as it should be.


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*Title ‘Less-than-great expectations’ is a phrase from Maureen Corrigan’s review of Peter Cameron’s book Coral Glynn yesterday on Fresh Air with Terry Gross