Sculpting a Subaru

I’m sure we’ve all heard the proverbial advice about how to carve a statue. Start with a block of stone, then chisel away everything that isn’t what you’re trying to carve. That makes stone-carving sound easy enough, and it pretty much applies to digging out a car covered in two feet of snow. Just start chiseling, and stop when you hit anything “car.”

In the past when I’ve had to dig out my car from a massive snowstorm, a broom has done the trick: just sweep away the bulk of accumulation, then use a snow-scraper to remove the rest. (That’s what I did in this post from eons ago, when I lived on my own in New Hampshire and Reggie was still alive and young.) When you’re removing two feet of snow, however, a broom just doesn’t cut it.

Yesterday I tried a regular broom then a push-broom to remove a few inches of snow from my car before settling on a compact plastic shovel, one I’d bought years ago to keep in my car for emergencies. Luckily, that shovel now lives in the garage, so I was able to use it on the snow-pile where my car had previously been.

When you’re shoveling out a buried car, you aren’t trying to create something pretty. Instead, you’re aiming to uncover the rough contours of the vehicle: here a tail-light, there a door.

Once you’ve uncovered enough of the hood, grille, and tailpipe to make it safe to start your engine, you can concentrate on digging out the driver’s side door. Why? Once you’ve turned the car on, you can run the heater at full blast through the vents, melting the windshield from within.

Once you’ve cleared most of the snow from the roof, hood, and windows, you can move your mostly-clean car into a spot where you know it will eventually be sunny. If you carve out the rough outlines, the sun will do the rest.

 

Stone angels

It’s becoming something of a tradition that J and I take a walk at Mount Auburn Cemetery on Christmas Day. Last year, we saw a very tame wild turkey hunkered on a decorated grave, and this year, in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shootings, I couldn’t help but notice the sad stones marking the graves of lost children.

Many of the stones at Mount Auburn Cemetery are old; consecrated in 1831, the cemetery is America’s first garden cemetery, with its graves situated in a lushly landscaped park-like setting. But among the old stones are newer ones that loved ones faithfully adorn with flowers, wreaths, candles, and other decorations to brighten an otherwise lonely resting spot.

Perhaps because of memorials like these, I don’t find cemeteries to be depressing, just bittersweet: a reminder of mortality that makes me more (not less) grateful to be alive. The one thing we all share, after all, is mortality, and taking a quiet walk on an otherwise festive day is a great way to keep things in perspective.

Some folks are lucky to reach an advanced age before they die, and others exit this world far too soon. Is the richness of your life measured by length or by depth, by the number of your days or by the way you spend those days?

Click here for more pictures from this year’s Christmas Day walk at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

 

A whole lot of shaking

Last night just past 7:00, we had a 4.0 magnitude earthquake here in New England, with its epicenter in Maine and tremors felt as far south as Connecticut. When the quake hit, I was in the bedroom preparing today’s classes and J was in the next room, likewise working; he felt shaking and I heard rumbling, as if snow were falling from the roof. Downstairs, the dogs were unfazed, including our normally nervous beagle; the cats that were sleeping in the room with me were similarly oblivious. In the other bedroom, however, our cats Groucho and Scooby were unsettled by the quake: clearly they felt something the other pets didn’t.

This seems to be how earthquakes are, at least judging from the four quakes I’ve experienced in my lifetime: some folks feel them, and others don’t. I suppose it depends on where you were and what you were doing at the time of the tremors: were you inside or outside, or in one part of a building versus another? When there was an earthquake in New Hampshire several years ago, for instance, Reggie and I felt it on the first floor—Reggie leapt to his feet and ran around barking as if trying to scare away an intruder—but my then-husband, who was working upstairs, didn’t feel a thing. When I was an adolescent and experienced an earthquake in Ohio, one of my sisters and I felt it from inside the house, where I thought the furnace had blown up in the basement, but my parents didn’t feel anything outside, where they were in the yard chatting with out-of-town visitors.

It’s interesting how some people are more sensitive to tremors, sounds, or other physical sensations than others are. During this past weekend’s Dharma teacher retreat at the Providence Zen Center, we did an icebreaker where we closed our eyes then tried to identify a person who was holding a hand over (but not touching) our leg. Others could identify whose hand was near their leg by differences in body temperature, but I couldn’t: if a person didn’t actually touch me, I couldn’t feel their presence, much less identify them. In one of the academic buildings at Framingham State, signs mark a designated restroom and copy-room for employees who suffer multiple chemical sensitivities, and anyone who uses scented soap, detergent, or other chemical fragrances is not allowed to enter. I can barely smell the scented soap and detergent on my own person, but there are others who are so sensitive to smells, they can’t physically tolerate the chemical wake left in the absence of an artificially scented person.

When I felt an earthquake while on retreat in Rhode Island years ago, I heard the tremors before I felt them, the quake sounding like a low, rumbling hum that surged from far away like a slow approaching train. That was my most intense earthquake experience even though others in the same room didn’t feel it: because I was meditating and alert when the earthquake hit, my senses and attention were honed to their sharpest acuity. It was a sensation I was fully present for, something I couldn’t have ignored if I’d tried.

I suppose we all occasionally need to be shaken from our complacency, an intense physical sensation reminding us of the sensory world outside our own skulls. Whenever we grow too settled or sluggish, the earth herself can wake us up by shifting her old, weary bones right under our feet.

I’ve written about that Rhode Island earthquake before, back in 2004. Today’s pictures have nothing to do with earthquakes; instead, they are random images I took now that I’m able to go for walks on days when I’m teaching in Framingham.

 

Long live boredom

Today I read an article on CNN about smartphones and the so-called death of boredom. The idea behind the article is simple enough: in an age when we can carry the entire Internet in our pocket, quickly sending texts, checking email, and surfing the web whenever we have a spare moment, have we lost our capacity to be quietly unoccupied?

I remember asking a similar question several years ago as I walked through Boston’s Public Garden, alone. It was a beautiful day, and everyone around me was either walking in pairs, talking, or walking alone, talking on a cell phone or listening to an iPod. Everyone but me, in other words, was somehow filling the silence of a sunny day with some sort of sound: if you weren’t talking with someone, you were listening to something. Even a homeless man pushing a shopping cart full of tattered belongings had a battery-powered boom-box perched atop of his possessions, blasting music. What I realized that sunny day in the Public Garden is that very few of us have the time or inclination to listen to our own thoughts anymore. Why bother with the boring monotony of silence and solitude when you can give someone a call or crank up some tunes?

That was in the old days when people actually talked on their cell phones. I’ve written before about J’s and my conscious decision not to buy smartphones: when I step away from my computer, I want to be able to “unplug” entirely. J and I are, however, in the distinct minority; as that CNN article noted, “More people now own a smartphone in the United States — 45% of adults — than own a traditional cellphone.” This means a huge number of people have games, music, and the allure of the Internet close at hand whenever they find themselves unoccupied. Stuck in a long line? Play “Angry Birds.” Waiting for the bus? Check your email. Awkward conversation lull? Send a text.

I don’t want to vilify smartphones: if data plans were cheaper, there would be countless ways I’d use a smartphone in my daily life. It would be convenient to have an up-to-date weather report, the latest news, accurate directions, or the answer to a nagging trivia question easily available at the tap of a touch-screen, and it would be helpful to be able to check my online classes even when I was away from my laptop and wifi. But just because smartphones, tablets, and other gadgets make it possible for people to fill their spare time with email, music, and the Whole Wide Web doesn’t mean that filling every spare moment with such things is a good or desirable thing.

When I was a graduate student working on my dissertation, I had a PDA (remember those?) with a program that allowed me to read and edit word-processing files. I kept a folder with all my dissertation files on this device, and whenever I found myself with a spare moment at the doctor’s office, in traffic, or waiting in line at the store, I would take out my PDA and start tap, tap, tapping on my dissertation.

After years of making good use of every spare moment—after years of carrying my damned dissertation with me EVERYWHERE, as if it were an unavoidable albatross slung around my neck—one of the most delightful aspects of finishing my degree was finally having the luxury of doing nothing. When traffic snarled to a stop, I could admire the surrounding countryside rather than reaching for my PDA. Waiting in line at the grocery store, I could make faces at the cute toddler in the cart ahead of me rather than burying my nose in dissertation edits. Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, I could read whatever trashy magazine a previous patient had left behind rather than milking every last second of productivity out of the occasion. Sometimes, being productive is helpful, but other times, being productive is tiring. Is it any wonder that many teenagers are chronically sleep-deprived given how many of them sleep with their cell phones under their pillow, just in case anyone calls or texts them during the night?

As I write these words, I’m sitting in my office at Framingham State: a quintessentially blank, boring space with a large, airy window overlooking the main road bisecting campus. After having spent my office hour answering student emails, I switched off my email notifier when I opened this file, hoping to pound out a post without distraction. It’s taken me longer than you’d think to write these lines, mainly because I’ve stopped occasionally to think, staring out my window at the students slowly ambling past, clad in the hoodies, jeans, and sweatpants that are a college student’s official autumn uniform. Some of these students walk in pairs, chatting; others walk singly while checking their phones or fiddling with their iPods. Are any of them bored? I can’t possibly know by looking at them, but I do wonder: when is the last time any of them sat quietly in a blank room looking out a large, airy window, doing nothing more productive than thinking about the slow crawl of their own silent words?

 

Toward autumn

It’s already late September, and a few eager leaves are starting to turn. The trees with their old, mostly green leaves look ratty: the oak tree outside my office at Framingham State, for instance, is so shabby, it’s difficult to find a leaf on it that isn’t insect-eaten and worn. It feels like nature is slyly shutting down, like when you linger late at a restaurant and the waiters start dimming the lights and putting chairs on the tables. Please, feel free to finish your meal at your leisure, they insist, but it’s clear they’re closing up shop.

There’s something about the light in late September, when it acquires a particular angle and color. The light this afternoon looked antique, like something leaning from gold toward bronze, a tarnished time. Already the days are noticeably shorter, and I wonder well ahead of time how we’ll weather another winter, starved for light. On brisk, brilliant, and deep-blue skied days like today, I resolve to absorb as much light as possible, while I still can.

Is this the reason why autumn leaves are so precious, their brilliance and color filling in for sunlight lost? Right when sunlight starts to lean deep toward the twilight of the year, the turning trees switch on like emergency beacons, vanishing chlorophyll unveiling long-hidden fires. In summer, the sun illuminates our lives; in the fall, we rely on leaves. In winter, fresh snow will reflect what little light there is, then we’ll round the corner into spring, when chlorophyll itself will ignite every green fuze: the old year renewed.

 

How to read a true war story

Some stories grab you by the throat, give you a shake, and knock the breath right out of you. I recently re-read Tim O’Brien’s “How to tell a true war story,” an oft-anthologized chapter from O’Brien’s emotionally eviscerating novel, The Things They Carried. People call The Things They Carried a novel because it’s book-length and loosely fictionalized, an account of the Vietnam War that seems to overlap with O’Brien’s own experience but which he never outright claims as autobiography. Sometimes the truest stories, O’Brien suggests, didn’t actually happen: sometimes you have to change the names, places, and other details–the facts of mere biography–to express a larger truth.

In my first-year writing classes at Framingham State, we’re discussing David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, this year’s common reading. Finkel’s book is “true” in a way that O’Brien’s book never claims to be. Finkel is a journalist who spent eight months embedded in an Army unit stationed in Iraq during the 2007 Surge: the exact point of American occupation when everyone had pretty much given up on the war. Finkel’s account of the 2-16 and their leader, Ralph Kauzlarich, is based on fact, as journalism is supposed to be. The names of the men in the 2-16 are real, as are the appendix photos of the 14 soldiers who were killed during their deployment. Finkel traveled with the 2-16 to Iraq–he lived with them at FOB Rustamiyah, a part of Iraq most Americans never see–and he made additional fact-finding trips to places like Fort Riley and the Brooke Army Medical Center to follow-up with the men he wrote about. Finkel, in other words, takes great pains to get his facts straight, as journalists are expected to do.

These facts matter, but they aren’t the part of the book that sticks with you. This is what O’Brien, for one, understood. Finkel gets his fact straight because history is built on facts, and it’s important to honor the legacy of those who fought and those who died. But when you walk away from a book like Finkel’s, those detailed facts are the first thing you forget.

At our first class session, I asked my students a seemingly simple question. Thinking back on The Good Soldiers, regardless of how far you got into the book, what do you remember? I didn’t quiz my students on names, dates, or other details (as they had feared) since I’m notoriously forgetful about those things, too. Walking away from a book like Finkel’s, I don’t remember the names or the dates: that’s why the names are listed in the appendix and why the date is listed at the start of every chapter. These details are important, but they aren’t what you remember.

What you remember after reading a book like Finkel’s is the same as what you remember after reading a book like O’Brien’s. You remember the stories and the scenes that moved you, viscerally. In Finkel’s book, my students remembered the same scenes I did: the part where a soldier shoots a man in the head, only to realize a terrified Iraqi girl witnessed the killing. The part where the soldiers’ Iraqi translator brings his daughter to the U.S. military base for medical treatment. The part where Finkel visits a young soldier who is hospitalized after losing multiple limbs and sustaining severe brain damage. The part where the soldiers try to figure out how to retrieve an Iraqi corpse floating in a sewage tank. My students and I remember these scenes not because we remember all the specifics: we forget the names of the people to whom these things happened, and we forget other factual details. What we remember, though, is an emotional response: a vivid, imagined sense of how we might feel if we were in a similar situation.

My students have been painstakingly schooled in a particular way of reading. According to this training, their job when they read is to find and memorize minute textual details, for these are the things teachers ask on tests and quizzes. What was the first name of the leader of the 2-16? What was the name of the first soldier to die? On what date did General David Petraeus visit FOB Rustamiyah, and on what date did the battalion finally go home? These are important details, and I’m glad David Finkel took great pains to get them right, because they’re in the book whenever I need to look them up. But when I walk away from The Good Soldiers, those details aren’t what stay in my head, because those details aren’t what matter to my heart.

What matters in my heart is that both Finkel and O’Brien, in their own, different ways, give me a viscerally vivid sense of something I have never witnessed myself. Reading either book, I learn that I don’t want to experience the things these men experience, and I don’t want anyone else to have to experience these things, either. Both Finkel and O’Brien describe events that are literally unimaginable: what does the rest of your life look like if you’re a young veteran who has lost multiple limbs and sustained severe brain damage, or what is it like to come home from war with your head full of nightmares? What remains after I’ve finished both Finkel’s nonfiction narrative and O’Brien’s novel is a clear, unassailable sense that war is entirely unlike all the pious platitudes we use to describe it. If you haven’t experienced war, you can’t really “get” it, but at the same time, it’s of vital, utmost importance that these stories be told, not so the tellers can “move on,” but so the stories themselves be remembered, emblazoned in our collective memory. It’s imperative that you know this is what happened, even if you can’t fully understand it.

So, how do you read a true war story? You let go of your desire to remember all the dates and names. This isn’t a history class; these things will not be on the quiz. Instead, you read with an open heart and an inquisitive mind, allowing thorny, troubling questions to take full root in your consciousness. Why exactly did we fight this war? Why exactly do we fight any war? How are soldiers, civilians, and people who literally get caught in the crossfire changed by the experience? How can you tell the “good guys” from the “bad guys” in a scenario where everything seems hopelessly complicated and confused? How can we honor the sacrifice of soldiers who serve, and how can we provide them with the support they need when they come home, forever changed by experiences we can’t possibly imagine?

One of the scenes I remember from The Good Soldiers, for instance, involves a soldier who finally opens up to his wife about what he has seen, prefacing his remarks with “How much do you want to know?” In another scene, a soldier tries to describe to his family the kind of place Rustamiyah is–a place where people literally live in shit, the ground being covered with trash and raw sewage–and his grandmother walks away, unable to stomach his descriptions. Neither The Good Soldiers nor The Things They Carried is an easy, enjoyable book: given the choice to turn away and ignore the stories they tell, you might decide you don’t want to know any of this. But one of the morals behind both books, I think, is that these are stories that need to be told. How can you claim to be informed about the world we live in–how can you claim to be an informed American citizen–if you have no idea what has been done in our name across the world, both to our presumed enemies and to our own troops?

One of the points that O’Brien makes in “How to Tell a True War Story” is that a war story is seldom what it seems. The chapter tells a pair of horrific stories: in one, a soldier named Lemon steps on a booby trap that shreds his body and leaves pieces of his flesh hanging in a nearby tree, and in the other, a soldier named Rat–Lemon’s best friend–repeatedly shoots a baby water buffalo just to watch it suffer. O’Brien describes how audiences of well-intentioned readers invariably misinterpret these stories, fixating on the pain inflicted on the baby water buffalo–an innocent creature–and in the process missing the story’s real point. This isn’t a war story, O’Brien explains; it’s a love story. The moral isn’t that war causes people to do horrifying things, but that love does. If Rat didn’t love Lemon, there would be no need to shoot the water buffalo. The tragedy of war isn’t simply that it is violent and deadly, but that it is also the setting for profoundly life-changing relationships. War, O’Brien suggests, is both hell and heaven, filled with an inexplicable mix of pain and poignancy.

One of the challenges in reading The Good Soldiers is advertised in the title itself: what exactly is a “good” soldier? If you’re fixated on memorizing the names and dates, you’ll miss that question: you’ll miss, in fact, the whole point of Finkel’s narrative. On the first day of class, I raised a question my students and I will continue to grapple with in coming weeks: why did Finkel write this book, and what does he want readers to get from it? This isn’t an easy question; the answer isn’t something you can locate in the text and then memorize. The people Finkel describes are a mix of good and bad, so it’s difficult to tell exactly who the “good guys” are. Opening each chapter with a quote from President George W. Bush that gives the politically-correct version of what happened during a given week in Iraq, Finkel then juxtaposes that scrubbed and sanitary account with what actually happened to the 2-16 at that same time. Given multiple versions of the truth, which one is “truly true”? Is Bush a bad president for giving the American people an optimistic and upbeat version of a deeply troubling war, or is Bush a good leader for trying to bolster military moral however he can, even if that means claiming victory when all the facts seem to suggest otherwise?

Ralph Kauzlarich deeply cares for the men of the 2-16 but seems over-optimistic, naïve, or even offensively insensitive when he intones his favorite saying, “It’s all good,” even in the face of tragedy. Seeking to strengthen ties with his Iraqi allies, Kauzlarich befriends the leader of an Iraqi police battalion who fears retaliation from neighbors who resent his involvement with Americans. Whenever one of Kauzlarich’s men is killed by a roadside bomb, his loyalty toward his Iraqi allies is tested. Kauzlarich wants to help the Iraqi people, but he also finds himself occasionally hating the very people he is trying to help. If you desperately want to believe your involvement in the war is “all good” because you are making a difference in the Iraqi people’s lives, you’re going to struggle with existential doubt and despair every time you realize how intractable the problems you face truly are. Winning over the Iraqi people isn’t as easy as handing out soccer balls to local children; when you can’t accurately assess who is your friend and who is your foe, you’re going to respond to even the most innocuous encounters with suspicion, dread, and fear.

I suspect my students think they were assigned to read The Good Soldiers so they could be better informed about the war in Iraq, and presumably that is part of the common reading’s purpose. But a good book, like a true war story, does so much more than merely inform. Given the pictures that both Finkel and O’Brien paint of war, what does either writer want us to “do” with that information? Once you get a vivid taste of what war was like for a particular group of soldiers at a particular time, how does that awareness change you as a reader and a citizen?

A good book, like a true war story, can help you become better informed, but it also can (and perhaps should) make you a more earnest asker of questions. Forget about what happened in Vietnam or Iraq; instead, raise the question of why it happened. If there is a lesson to be learned in any war (or in any war story), what are those lessons, and have we learned them? Getting the facts straight is difficult enough; grappling with the trickier question of why is infinitely more difficult. The Good Soldiers is sure about its facts but not nearly as sure about its conclusions. Given a true war story, how to you make sense of it, and what do you do with that information once you’ve received it?

Click here for more photos from Newton Cemetery, shot this past Memorial Day.

If you’re looking for an eye-opening, nuanced account of the 2007 Iraq War surge from an embedded perspective, I’d strongly recommend David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers. If you’re looking for a novel about the Vietnam War that will break your heart time and again, I’d strongly recommend Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

 

Deep calls to deep

Late last December, in the quiet lull between Christmas and New Year’s, J and I made a pilgrimage to New York City, where we disembarked at Penn Station, walked to Ground Zero, and visited the 9/11 Memorial before having lunch, walking back to our train, and returning to Boston. It was a quintessential day trip: a journey there and back lasting little more than twelve hours.

Like any pilgrimage, it was a trip we’d planned months beforehand, as soon as we heard the 9/11 Memorial would be open to visitors on a reservation-only basis. The site was still an active construction zone, with workers raising nearby Freedom Tower; even with guest passes, we had to wend our way through a labyrinthine security line where no one complained about walking through metal detectors or passing their bags through X-ray machines.

On a pilgrimage, you expect your travel to involve more than a bit of travail; on a pilgrimage, you’re willing to cultivate the virtues of patience and long-suffering, recognizing that life is a journey with many unforeseen twists and turns.

Before we visited the 9/11 Memorial last December, J and I had seen a series of TV documentaries aired in honor of last September’s ten-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks. We’d seen interviews with construction workers building Freedom Tower, we’d learned about the design of the memorial itself with its sunken waterfalls marking the footprints of the Twin Towers, and we’d learned the logic behind the arrangement of names on the metal panels rimming those fountains.

J and I arrived with a scrap of paper upon which I’d written the locations of two names we wanted to find during our visit: Patrick J. Quigley IV, who is buried in a cemetery not far from our house, and Welles Remy Crowther, a Boston College graduate who died after saving a dozen people from the South Tower. J and I never met either man, but their stories helped us put a face on the tragedy, and it felt appropriate to seek out their names in order to pay our respects.

As J and I walked around both waterfalls and considered the long, low wall of names surrounding them, I kept thinking of a line from the Psalms, “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me” (Psalm 42:7, NIV). The Psalms contain prayers of praise and thanksgiving, but they also contain poems of anguish and despair.

The sunken waterfalls of the Memorial evoke the heavy-heartedness most of us associate with 9/11, with falling water that is eerily reminiscent of both falling buildings and falling bodies. But falling water cannot be wounded: in the form of vapor, falling water rises again. The day J and I visited the Memorial was brisk and breezy, and one of the waterfalls was veiled with mist and a flirtation of rainbows that hinted toward the irrepressible nature of both spirit and beauty.

A waterfall is the opposite of a looming tower: instead of rising up, these waters fall down. The sunken nature of the 9/11 Memorial waterfalls reminded me of a sipapu, the hole inside a Pueblo Indian dwelling that represents the opening through which ancient ancestors arrived in this world.

When so many spirits left their bodies on September 11, 2001, where did they go? Did they fall down, like water; did they rise up, like clouds; or did they remain in our midst, like mist? What exactly are the waves and breakers the poet mentions in Psalm 42? Are they the waves of loss, the breakers of despair, or the sea of loved ones who will never be forgotten, even under the shadow of a veil of tears?

Click here for more photos of the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, taken in December, 2011.

 

Bookends

Today is Labor Day, the bookend to Memorial Day, which marks the traditional start of summer. In this election year, we’ve become even more deeply divided between the right-leaning folks who commemorate the war dead on Memorial Day and the left-leaning folks who applaud common workers on Labor Day, as if one holiday were in direct opposition to the other. Labor Day celebrates the rise of unions, which have been under attack from the right this past year, and Labor Day honors the common workers who build the infrastructure upon which our day-to-day society rests. How can servicemen protect our freedoms overseas if there were not workers maintaining the structure of society here at home?

This year, the right is rallying behind the cry of “I built this,” a shorthand slogan pointing to the importance of individual initiative and industry. Labor Day is a holiday to acknowledge the workers whose collective effort make our individual accomplishments possible: I am able to build this because they worked so hard to build that. When you drive to work every day, who built that road? When you negotiate orderly, crime-free streets, who protects your safety? When you go to the grocery story to spend your hard-earned paycheck, who stocked those shelves?

Whenever I’m grocery shopping and see a delivery man stocking shelves, I smile because my Dad did that, driving a bread route for years. If there was bread on the shelf when you went grocery shopping this week, it was because some hard-working Teamster like my dad drove a truck to deliver it: it didn’t just appear there by accident or chance.

Given the goodies in your grocery cart, you can “build” all kinds of things, limited only by your own culinary initiative and skill. But don’t pretend that because you combined those ingredients into something tasty, you created those ingredients themselves. Somewhere, a laborer grew that produce, raised that livestock, or ground that grain into flour. If you’re able to read a cookbook, some teacher taught you how, and if your kitchen catches fire while you’re cooking, some firefighter will rush in to save you.

Focusing on one’s own accomplishments while ignoring the assistance one has received is arrogance, and thanking those who gave their lives in war while not acknowledging the living laborers who work for the common good is folly. Both kinds of service are essential, and both kinds of service demand their own kind of sacrifice. Honoring one without honoring the other is like cutting off your left hand to honor your right. The beauty of bookends is that they work together, this one supporting the other in a perfect metaphor of collective teamwork.

I snapped these shots of the Fallen Firefighters’ Memorial last summer, when J and I vacationed in Seattle.

 

Homecoming

It’s been more than a week since I’ve posted here, and in that time, J and I have driven to the Midwest and back, visiting his family in Pittsburgh and my family in Ohio. Last night while I was taking the dogs out, one of the hornets in the nest near our dog-pen stung me, as if she’d forgotten who I was. While I gently shook her from my shirt-sleeve, I heard a screech owl wailing from one of our backyard pine trees: welcome home.

Today’s photo of a late-blooming pokeweed is one I shot this time last year.

 

Araby

This weekend, J and I went to the North End to check out Saint Joseph’s Feast, the latest in a series of religious festivals that happen every summer in Boston’s Italian enclave. Of the various photos I shot of this year’s feast, my favorite is this one featuring a rather dejected-looking Saint Joseph statue draped in ribbons in an empty shrine.

The sight of this small statue standing forgotten while a larger, more colorful one was paraded through the neighborhood, stopping at every block so admirers could drape him with scapulars pinned with money, immediately reminded me of the ending of James Joyce’s “Araby,” in which an adolescent boy eagerly anticipates attending a local bazaar. Arriving late, the boy is disappointed to find half of the stalls closed or closing, the bazaar filled with a “silence like that which pervades a church after a service.” As the boy tries to find an acceptable gift for a girl he likes, he is disappointed to realize the wares are cheap and tawdry, not elegant or exotic as he had hoped.

I’m guessing we’ve all had moments like the one James Joyce describes in “Araby,” when we’ve realized something we once thought was magical is merely ordinary. The shrine in which Saint Joseph sat was a handmade thing, framed with ordinary wooden boards and adorned with tin foil and electrical lights. By night, Saint Joseph’s shrine must look heavenly to a child, lit with an otherworldly glow; viewed by adult eyes in the light of day, it’s just another facade for yet another festival.

Great care goes into the planning of any religious feast–imagine the devotion and dedication it took to design and apply every inch of tin foil–and yet at the end of the day, what lies underneath the pomp and spectacle is the stuff of ordinary life. Saint Joseph’s feast parades down the same old street that residents use every day; every year, these North End festivals happen in the same old neighborhood. We can, on special occasions, dress up the drab sites of our mundane lives, but ultimately the same old substance lies under the spiffed-up surfaces. Calling a bazaar “Araby” doesn’t make it any more exotic: bazaar-goers are still stuck in a nondescript corner of Dublin, and they still go home to their same old Monday-morning lives.

And yet, perhaps this is the wisdom of a religious festival, at least a Christian one. The very idea of incarnation insists that God himself took on ordinary flesh to dwell in the mundane world: before Joseph was a saint, he was just another dad to yet another kid. Every now and then, a bazaar comes to town and brings with it a break from the usual routine, and once upon a time, God adorned himself in flesh, was born in humble stall made of boards, and lay otherwise forgotten while the world distracted itself with its usual pomp and frivolity.