Premier Danseur (prə-myā-däⁿ-sœr) Noun: A principle male dancer
My husband is dancing.
A moment ago I stood about where he is now, hovering on the edge of the action like a middle-schooler desperate to be included. The music had begun. The dancers had gathered, almost all of them from different countries and younger than us by a generation or two. Someone mentioned river-dancing, so I was ready to queue up with the crowd and learn something new. But this was not to be a lesson for beginners, rather it was a contest. Ten dancers lined up on a make-shift stage, poised to compete for a prize. This was to be a show. I realized I was out of my element, so I moved to the outer orbit of the crowd and watched, expecting Bill to do the same. He is, after all, an introvert.
Unlike me, the raging extrovert, Bill doesn’t fear exclusion. At times he actually seeks it out. If he fears anything, it is exhibitionism. Which makes the jig—yes, a jig—he is dancing at present quite alarming. It’s St. Patrick’s Day and apparently Bill’s idea of how leprechauns dance is this: twirl—yes, twirl—with one index finger pointing at the top of your head. I’m wondering if he just had a stroke. Or a lobotomy. Who is this man?
And he looks so proud of himself. No, not proud, just content that now, at this moment and in this place—this very public place—he is dancing. We are at a party in the courtyard of an apartment complex. Our son and daughter-in-law minister here for one of our favorite organizations: Apartment Life. Throwing parties like this one is what they do best. This means they are in charge of the dance contest. It also means Bill can’t win, you know, nepotism and all that. But he is dancing anyway.
How forcefully can I express the wonder of this moment? May I tell of the countless receptions we’ve been to where Bill let his shyness get the better of him and refused to dance? May I tell of the times when we did indeed dance—trying to do it correctly—and those attempts became mini-conflicts in our marriage? Our combined embarrassment produced an exponential awkwardness, not because we couldn’t dance, but because we couldn’t loosen up enough to enjoy it anyway.
I notice those couples at receptions now. The ones where the wife looks longingly at the dance floor and the husband sulks. It’s subtle, but the longing and the sulking are unmistakable. Dancing says romance to a wife, or lack thereof. To a husband it says adequacy, or lack thereof. She thinks, What’s so hard about this? He thinks, Why would I make a fool of myself in the center of a room where people might, well, see? (It’s a little like flower-giving: Bill thinks this must involve buying a dozen roses. All I want are flowers, and it doesn’t matter how much they cost. Heck, pick some dandelions in the front yard and you will melt my heart.) Dance with me, fool, even if we just embrace and sway.
Now may I tell of the night over a decade ago when we spent the evening sitting at a linen-covered table, munching on mints and Jordan almonds, and never made it to the dance floor? I didn’t notice the faint sulk on Bill’s face till it was almost time to go. I guess I thought we were officially over it. I guess I thought it didn’t matter so much anymore. We mattered, but dancing didn’t. I assured him—sincerely—that I wasn’t longing for a two-step or a waltz or even one of those slow-dances where you just stand there and move back and forth like a metronome.
Nevertheless, Bill came home angry at himself that night and determined to never sit on the sidelines again. In his mind, not dancing translated into a kind of failure. Thus dancing became a metaphor for courage.
After that dancing was fun. We still stink at it, but we enjoy it now. It’s mighty convenient for us that dancing these days is a mixed-bag genre. Compare the moves on today’s dance floor to the precision of a Jane Austen ball or the interlocking rhythm of the Virginia reel. It’s like placing a Jackson Pollack next to a Rembrandt. Today’s dancing is vague. Yesterday’s was exact. For the dance-impaired, this is blessed relief. Sure there are those dance-savants we watch a bit wistfully, jealously in fact, who make it look easy. Sure, there are the reality shows that remind us it’s not. But the glob of people who populate the parquet at most wedding receptions today just bounce around like so many puppies begging to go outside.
Puppy-dancing, that’s what we’re good at now. No one notices us (they never did when we were self conscious either) and we just do our thing. We aren’t coordinated, but we coordinate, as in fit together. It’s a rhythmic respite from the rest of life. An excuse to gaze into each other’s eyes. Add music, sway a little, and it’s magic.
But this, this is altogether different. Bill has officially bounced all the way off a cliff.
He’s made it to the final three. Our son announces the next level of the dance-off and asks the DJ to change up the music. Bill grins in anticipation. My daughter-in-law and I are hugging each other and laughing. What’s gotten into him? we both wonder.
I am lost in the grin on his face…when I can catch it as he rotates in and out of my view. Normally, I would be swaying in time with the dancers on stage. Church—teeth-rattling rock worship in church—has taught me to move with music where ever I am. (What better place to learn that? In the middle of adoration and amazing, amazing grace.)
But I am frozen in admiration. I love this man.
Bill and I have been to enough weddings to be familiar with current music. We even know the few “moves” associated with some of the staples. But we depend on other’s feet to remind us. I mean, we hardly look up during the complicated parts. Bill acknowledges The Cupid Shuffle with a look of recognition. And then it all falls apart. Shuffle is exactly what he does. To the right. To the left. Or something like that. The inevitable happens and he’s eliminated. It’s down to two dancers.
He joins me on the periphery of the crowd, smiling and sweating and ready to cheer for the two remaining dancers. Both are impressive. One, from India, does a kind of sultry windmill with her arms. The other, the ultimate winner because her friends cheer the loudest, appears double-jointed in her knees and elbows.
Now is where I might point out what I am sure is Bill’s underlying purpose for this public display of boogie-down. His motion has a mission, right? I suspect it does. I’m guessing he wants the party to succeed. He wants the guests (the party-goers) to enjoy this memorable night staged by our kids (the party-givers). He’s turning water to wine, doing his part to add flavor. He joined the contest as a kind of Pied Piper, nobly competing so that others would follow suit. Or, depending on how you look at it, he threw himself under the bus. Committed hari kari on the dance floor. Because this is certainly not within the boundaries of his comfort zone.
Comfort zone? Bill has obliterated his. The raw courage of it all is staggering. For the naturally uninhibited, this may seem a small feat. But I know him. He prizes safety in social situations. Clearly, he prizes conquering his own fears even more. I happen to love his reticence, his careful way of speaking and acting. I think it displays a God-given propensity for wisdom and sensitivity to others. But Bill says there are times when his reserve becomes an enemy, handcuffing him to a chair when he needs to be up and on his feet. His objectivity—that rare ability to stand apart—keeps him removed when he needs to engage. Who knew this enemy could be vanquished simply by dancing?
But, at the moment—at this gleeful moment—I don’t care about his motives. I’m having too much fun watching him from the sidelines.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Art
Art: Noun \ärt\ decorative or illustrative elements
Sometimes stuff gets on my nerves. It isn’t until you live with someone that your attention to the little habits of another can escalate to the obsessive; where silent irritation can swell and erupt into a shrill “I can’t take it anymore!” over the likes of a toothpaste tube that looks like it was squeezed by someone lacking opposable thumbs. Minor eruptions over minor annoyances. When we were first married, this happened a lot. To both of us.
When I talk about habits, I’m not talking about moral flaws. No, just things like chewing noises, throat clearing, lapses of consistency in checkbook entries, laundry errors. All the flotsam and jetsam of newly married life. All crowding the surface in the riptide ride of that first year. And—exhale with me now—all carried away by the gentler currents of the following years. Because, after all, none of that stuff matters.
Learning what matters and what doesn’t: the fine art of marriage.
Art. Just about every time Bill and I visit the High Museum in Atlanta, we see something that reminds us of the subjective nature of art. Corrugated tin with stick figures drawn, surely, by a rogue kindergartener with a can of spray paint. Art, really?
What is esteemed as modern art may be vilified a decade from now. Conversely, there are great masters whose work was vilified when it was modern. Entire movements, in fact, have suffered from delayed appreciation. Might a middle-aged couple from the suburbs of Paris have visited the Louvre in 1880, only to stumble upon a Seurat or Van Gogh and, on the carriage ride home, mutter to each other, “Dots of paint on a canvas? Art, really?”
Learning what matters and what doesn’t. A subjective art.
Which is why a habit forged on years of repetition and nurtured by as many years of tolerance can resurface to pound its niggling little feet on my nerves thirty years down the road. Actually, resurface isn’t the correct term. These are the habits that hide in daylight. They have been there all along. Because some habits genuinely don’t matter, they escape notice. And because they escape notice, one believes them to have fled. But they don’t. Or at least some of them don’t.
Bill has a few of those enduring habits. (I do too, but that isn’t the point here.) I can think of only two of these tendencies, trivial to be sure, that have captured my attention lately. One has to do with nasal passages and is only noticeable in certain weather and at certain proximity. I’m dealing with it.
The other, as habits go, is a wisp. If it were evidence lifted by CSI at a crime scene and sent to “trace” for analysis, it would come back “inconclusive.” I know this. And I know Bill has not changed. He has not adopted annoying breathing patterns in his middle age.
It’s like a painting on canvas. The only way the painting can change, is for the beholder to change. I have changed. I suspect this is hormonal on that grand scale at which women my age experience their cyclical existences. As if PMS is throwing a raging frat party inside of me to say goodbye forever. I’m not excusing it; I’m just saying sometimes stuff gets on my nerves…now more than ever. So when I share the source of my chagrin, judge me if you will, but only if you’ve been me.
That’s me these days: a shade (of red) easier to exasperate. I live with Bill. Every day. So I am back to the lesson of our newlywed year. I am figuring out what matters and what doesn’t.
The fact that Bill can hardly utter a sentence without hand gestures doesn’t matter. Evidently the fact that he uses both hands to gesture instead of drive might seem to matter, but we’ve never had a wreck due to this practice, so I guess it doesn’t. The fact that he has this one specific gesture he uses repeatedly without nuance or meaning of any kind doesn’t matter. And the fact that his particular crook of thumb and forefinger evokes the proffering of a credit card to a waiter doesn’t matter. (But once I saw that image I couldn’t erase it.) What does matter is that I have probably missed significant portions of Bill’s stories or sagacity simply because I honed in on that imaginary-credit-card-wielding hand. What does matter is that I am somewhat obsessed. I mean, it doesn’t matter and I make it matter. That’s sick.
About a week ago I realized I was doing this. Sinking into a mild madness of irritation. Again, it doesn’t matter. It is a problem so slight, so ancillary to real life, so just plain dumb, that I don’t give it much thought. Until the next time Bill gestures. For a brief moment it matters intensely, and then I forget it again. It doesn’t matter enough to warrant a memory.
But even the slightest of our frailties warrant redemption. I believe that. No, Bill’s hand gesturing does not warrant redemption. My irritation does. That’s because attention to something Bill does robs me, ever so slightly, of attention to who he is. If love is shared through communication—speaking with mouths and hands, listening, responding—then this particular fixation truncates love.
Of course, until now, I didn’t think any of this through. I didn’t think it mattered enough.
And then we went to look at some art. Old art. Undeniably art. An exhibit of the Chinese terracotta army had been in Atlanta for a while and we were itching to see it. Knowing that the figures we would see were over 2,000 years old and part of a mighty horde of soldiers excavated from the massive grave of the First Emperor of China imbued our visit with solemnity. I prepared to be awed.
I wish I hadn’t. Yes, the figures were stunning. Yes, we read the stories emblazoned on the black walls and wished we’d purchased the headphones. But we had seen too many photographs of Pit Numbers One and Two. We knew the army numbered upwards of 8,000. We knew they had stood at attention since 200 BC in relentless formation. Row upon row.
Here we found only eight. A representative sampling. Interesting, but no shock and awe.
Until I took a closer look. The figures stood on a low dais, spaced a few feet apart from one another. Once painted into life with color, they gleamed like old copper coated with a layer of verdigris. The effect was ghostly. The rear figure was a charioteer with his hands raised waist high to hold imaginary reins. No horses reared before him, no ropes laid across the downward hook of his fingers, but the gesture was unmistakable. The ropes had disintegrated, but the soldier remained intact and gave the clue to his purpose by his posture. The other warriors, each a different rank as signified by their clothing, stood with their hands to their sides in loose attention.
And then I noticed their hands. Their imaginary-credit-card-wielding hands. Forefinger and thumb crooked just so. The remaining fingers curled in a slack mimic of the forefinger. Their hands were empty, but the gesture was unmistakable. They were warriors. Their wooden weapons had disintegrated, the bronze spear tips strewn in the grave at their feet. The weapons had disappeared, but the soldiers remained, for centuries indicating their purpose by their posture. I’d seen that posture before. I’d watched Bill’s hands replicate those gestures over and over.
And, just like that, in a flash of art and antiquity, redemption came. Like the terra cotta warriors, my husband was built to hold a weapon. No, not oxidizable wood and heavy bronze. Not a means for murder and mayhem. His hands were made to hold the Word of God.
Paul advised every believer to use the Word offensively, like a sword. Not to give offense, but to take initiative with truth. The writer of Hebrews surpassed the metaphor, saying the Word is “more powerful” than the sword. It is “living and active” as opposed to dead and disintegrating, as a physical weapon of earthly material. It penetrates deeply. It goes for the heart. Bill heard the call to such arms years ago and answered it as vigorously as only a young man can.
Call me crazy, but the Chinese warriors bore their imaginary arms with a subtle smile on their faces, as if aware that their hands were empty. As if their warrior-ness was a settled fact unhindered by their lack of lance or spear. Just so, Bill’s “sword” is invisible, but his purpose—to wield the sword—is indicated by his posture. It is invisible, because it rarely has to be visible. He lives it more than he thrusts it. His posture implies the sword: his ready pose in life, his determined stance, his hands that remain empty of falsehood and divested of immature thinking. His posture is one of readiness and attention. Eagerness, actually.
Eagerness is hard for a man like Bill to express. He isn’t one to get excited. Much less to show it when he is. (He once told me he was jumping up and down on the inside. Elation is even more difficult for him to show, so this was huge.) So sometimes he uses his hands. His hands reveal what he’s excited about. Like a terra cotta warrior, his hands are on the ready. And that…that is what really matters.
I knew that. I knew that the man himself is all that matters. What are little habits? Nothing. But if, in my attention to them I make them something, it helps to connect them with the deeper man. The real man. Making that connection is an art. A feat of imagination. And I hope he’ll attempt the same for me. I’m the clumsy toothpaste tube squeezer. I’m the forgetful checkbook recorder. I’m the laundress who is fails to vanquish stains.
My habits like these don’t really matter, do they? But if they ever do, I know Bill has a weapon in his hand. A weapon that will cut through his own petty irritation to his heart, where love resides. And that is what really matters.
Sometimes stuff gets on my nerves. It isn’t until you live with someone that your attention to the little habits of another can escalate to the obsessive; where silent irritation can swell and erupt into a shrill “I can’t take it anymore!” over the likes of a toothpaste tube that looks like it was squeezed by someone lacking opposable thumbs. Minor eruptions over minor annoyances. When we were first married, this happened a lot. To both of us.
When I talk about habits, I’m not talking about moral flaws. No, just things like chewing noises, throat clearing, lapses of consistency in checkbook entries, laundry errors. All the flotsam and jetsam of newly married life. All crowding the surface in the riptide ride of that first year. And—exhale with me now—all carried away by the gentler currents of the following years. Because, after all, none of that stuff matters.
Learning what matters and what doesn’t: the fine art of marriage.
Art. Just about every time Bill and I visit the High Museum in Atlanta, we see something that reminds us of the subjective nature of art. Corrugated tin with stick figures drawn, surely, by a rogue kindergartener with a can of spray paint. Art, really?
What is esteemed as modern art may be vilified a decade from now. Conversely, there are great masters whose work was vilified when it was modern. Entire movements, in fact, have suffered from delayed appreciation. Might a middle-aged couple from the suburbs of Paris have visited the Louvre in 1880, only to stumble upon a Seurat or Van Gogh and, on the carriage ride home, mutter to each other, “Dots of paint on a canvas? Art, really?”
Learning what matters and what doesn’t. A subjective art.
Which is why a habit forged on years of repetition and nurtured by as many years of tolerance can resurface to pound its niggling little feet on my nerves thirty years down the road. Actually, resurface isn’t the correct term. These are the habits that hide in daylight. They have been there all along. Because some habits genuinely don’t matter, they escape notice. And because they escape notice, one believes them to have fled. But they don’t. Or at least some of them don’t.
Bill has a few of those enduring habits. (I do too, but that isn’t the point here.) I can think of only two of these tendencies, trivial to be sure, that have captured my attention lately. One has to do with nasal passages and is only noticeable in certain weather and at certain proximity. I’m dealing with it.
The other, as habits go, is a wisp. If it were evidence lifted by CSI at a crime scene and sent to “trace” for analysis, it would come back “inconclusive.” I know this. And I know Bill has not changed. He has not adopted annoying breathing patterns in his middle age.
It’s like a painting on canvas. The only way the painting can change, is for the beholder to change. I have changed. I suspect this is hormonal on that grand scale at which women my age experience their cyclical existences. As if PMS is throwing a raging frat party inside of me to say goodbye forever. I’m not excusing it; I’m just saying sometimes stuff gets on my nerves…now more than ever. So when I share the source of my chagrin, judge me if you will, but only if you’ve been me.
That’s me these days: a shade (of red) easier to exasperate. I live with Bill. Every day. So I am back to the lesson of our newlywed year. I am figuring out what matters and what doesn’t.
The fact that Bill can hardly utter a sentence without hand gestures doesn’t matter. Evidently the fact that he uses both hands to gesture instead of drive might seem to matter, but we’ve never had a wreck due to this practice, so I guess it doesn’t. The fact that he has this one specific gesture he uses repeatedly without nuance or meaning of any kind doesn’t matter. And the fact that his particular crook of thumb and forefinger evokes the proffering of a credit card to a waiter doesn’t matter. (But once I saw that image I couldn’t erase it.) What does matter is that I have probably missed significant portions of Bill’s stories or sagacity simply because I honed in on that imaginary-credit-card-wielding hand. What does matter is that I am somewhat obsessed. I mean, it doesn’t matter and I make it matter. That’s sick.
About a week ago I realized I was doing this. Sinking into a mild madness of irritation. Again, it doesn’t matter. It is a problem so slight, so ancillary to real life, so just plain dumb, that I don’t give it much thought. Until the next time Bill gestures. For a brief moment it matters intensely, and then I forget it again. It doesn’t matter enough to warrant a memory.
But even the slightest of our frailties warrant redemption. I believe that. No, Bill’s hand gesturing does not warrant redemption. My irritation does. That’s because attention to something Bill does robs me, ever so slightly, of attention to who he is. If love is shared through communication—speaking with mouths and hands, listening, responding—then this particular fixation truncates love.
Of course, until now, I didn’t think any of this through. I didn’t think it mattered enough.
And then we went to look at some art. Old art. Undeniably art. An exhibit of the Chinese terracotta army had been in Atlanta for a while and we were itching to see it. Knowing that the figures we would see were over 2,000 years old and part of a mighty horde of soldiers excavated from the massive grave of the First Emperor of China imbued our visit with solemnity. I prepared to be awed.
I wish I hadn’t. Yes, the figures were stunning. Yes, we read the stories emblazoned on the black walls and wished we’d purchased the headphones. But we had seen too many photographs of Pit Numbers One and Two. We knew the army numbered upwards of 8,000. We knew they had stood at attention since 200 BC in relentless formation. Row upon row.
Here we found only eight. A representative sampling. Interesting, but no shock and awe.
Until I took a closer look. The figures stood on a low dais, spaced a few feet apart from one another. Once painted into life with color, they gleamed like old copper coated with a layer of verdigris. The effect was ghostly. The rear figure was a charioteer with his hands raised waist high to hold imaginary reins. No horses reared before him, no ropes laid across the downward hook of his fingers, but the gesture was unmistakable. The ropes had disintegrated, but the soldier remained intact and gave the clue to his purpose by his posture. The other warriors, each a different rank as signified by their clothing, stood with their hands to their sides in loose attention.
And then I noticed their hands. Their imaginary-credit-card-wielding hands. Forefinger and thumb crooked just so. The remaining fingers curled in a slack mimic of the forefinger. Their hands were empty, but the gesture was unmistakable. They were warriors. Their wooden weapons had disintegrated, the bronze spear tips strewn in the grave at their feet. The weapons had disappeared, but the soldiers remained, for centuries indicating their purpose by their posture. I’d seen that posture before. I’d watched Bill’s hands replicate those gestures over and over.
And, just like that, in a flash of art and antiquity, redemption came. Like the terra cotta warriors, my husband was built to hold a weapon. No, not oxidizable wood and heavy bronze. Not a means for murder and mayhem. His hands were made to hold the Word of God.
Paul advised every believer to use the Word offensively, like a sword. Not to give offense, but to take initiative with truth. The writer of Hebrews surpassed the metaphor, saying the Word is “more powerful” than the sword. It is “living and active” as opposed to dead and disintegrating, as a physical weapon of earthly material. It penetrates deeply. It goes for the heart. Bill heard the call to such arms years ago and answered it as vigorously as only a young man can.
Call me crazy, but the Chinese warriors bore their imaginary arms with a subtle smile on their faces, as if aware that their hands were empty. As if their warrior-ness was a settled fact unhindered by their lack of lance or spear. Just so, Bill’s “sword” is invisible, but his purpose—to wield the sword—is indicated by his posture. It is invisible, because it rarely has to be visible. He lives it more than he thrusts it. His posture implies the sword: his ready pose in life, his determined stance, his hands that remain empty of falsehood and divested of immature thinking. His posture is one of readiness and attention. Eagerness, actually.
Eagerness is hard for a man like Bill to express. He isn’t one to get excited. Much less to show it when he is. (He once told me he was jumping up and down on the inside. Elation is even more difficult for him to show, so this was huge.) So sometimes he uses his hands. His hands reveal what he’s excited about. Like a terra cotta warrior, his hands are on the ready. And that…that is what really matters.
I knew that. I knew that the man himself is all that matters. What are little habits? Nothing. But if, in my attention to them I make them something, it helps to connect them with the deeper man. The real man. Making that connection is an art. A feat of imagination. And I hope he’ll attempt the same for me. I’m the clumsy toothpaste tube squeezer. I’m the forgetful checkbook recorder. I’m the laundress who is fails to vanquish stains.
My habits like these don’t really matter, do they? But if they ever do, I know Bill has a weapon in his hand. A weapon that will cut through his own petty irritation to his heart, where love resides. And that is what really matters.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Some of you have asked about this one, so here it is. No big words. Just big love.
I am watching my son dance his first dance with his wife. Foreheads touching, lips moving in a conversation no one else can hear, arms looped around the other’s neck, leaning together in a careless box step. Why do we make a spectacle of something so sacred?
I look away. And then I notice the black and white row of our other sons behind them. Their arms are draped behind each other’s backs and they are swaying to the music. Swaying. Together. Like a mother who never forgets how to move back and forth when a child needs soothing, I sway in time with them from the other side of the dance floor. I am struck by how substantial this image is. It is a symbol of how things really are. No myth, this musical moment between our sons. They are touching because their lives touch. Their hearts, too.
There was a day, not that long ago, when I could not have imagined this. Those days, as a mother, I used to ask God for a cumulative fifteen minutes of encouragement a year. I got more than that, but some years not much more. Meted out in split second windows of perspective, these visuals kept me going as a mom. A small strand of kindness might be woven into a day filled with brotherly strife. The boy who acted monstrously the day before would say or do something so sweet, so obedient, so right, I would be filled with enough hope to last a month. God was who He said He was. He was there. We were on the right track. We would make it. And then it was back to faith… until the next window opened up.
But this is not like that. It isn’t foreshadowing, it is substance. It isn’t hope for the future, it is life in the present. This is satisfying and real. I mean, it’s worthy of a party.
I watch them sway. And then I remember something so startling I almost laugh out loud. Or cry. I can’t decide which.
The day after summer camp. Our two oldest were whatever age places them on the shore of that vast sea called adolescence. One toe each in the water, testing it out. They are telling me all about camp and they are making fun of something. (It seems they are always making fun of something. I’m just happy when it isn’t each other.) Today they are telling me how annoying the girls were, of course forgetting that I am a girl. The girls drove them crazy during the singing around the camp fire. Those silly girls. They locked arms and swayed. Every night. It was so dumb.
I’m picturing what my sons must have been like around that campfire. I’m sure they did what boys that age do. Nothing. They were too busy looking out to sea—to that ocean of teenage years that beckons all boys like a pirate ship’s raised flag—too busy planning their getaway to participate in the moments adults orchestrate for them. Too busy entering the life-on-my-own-terms season to enjoy life in our universe. Perpetually distracted, that’s what they were like. And they stayed that way for what seemed like a long time.
And now. Now they look so handsome in their crisp black and white. Ties loosened and lapels punctuated with a spray of green. From here, the ocean of those final boyhood years looks like a pond. From the perspective of this far shore, it was a wading pool where we splashed and had fun. The battles fought on the open seas of adolescence have taken on legendary, but smaller, proportions. Around countless dinner tables where we have met as peers, I have let them retell it all to me. And it has become funnier and easier in the telling. Gone the fear and doubt. Gone the desperate clinging to any sign of hope that they would actually grow up. That they would learn how to love, or at least how to tolerate each other.
Now they are swaying. Because they want to, they are locked in a manly embrace. The song ends and they stay together for a moment longer. As if reluctant to let go. This, this, is the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.
I am watching my son dance his first dance with his wife. Foreheads touching, lips moving in a conversation no one else can hear, arms looped around the other’s neck, leaning together in a careless box step. Why do we make a spectacle of something so sacred?
I look away. And then I notice the black and white row of our other sons behind them. Their arms are draped behind each other’s backs and they are swaying to the music. Swaying. Together. Like a mother who never forgets how to move back and forth when a child needs soothing, I sway in time with them from the other side of the dance floor. I am struck by how substantial this image is. It is a symbol of how things really are. No myth, this musical moment between our sons. They are touching because their lives touch. Their hearts, too.
There was a day, not that long ago, when I could not have imagined this. Those days, as a mother, I used to ask God for a cumulative fifteen minutes of encouragement a year. I got more than that, but some years not much more. Meted out in split second windows of perspective, these visuals kept me going as a mom. A small strand of kindness might be woven into a day filled with brotherly strife. The boy who acted monstrously the day before would say or do something so sweet, so obedient, so right, I would be filled with enough hope to last a month. God was who He said He was. He was there. We were on the right track. We would make it. And then it was back to faith… until the next window opened up.
But this is not like that. It isn’t foreshadowing, it is substance. It isn’t hope for the future, it is life in the present. This is satisfying and real. I mean, it’s worthy of a party.
I watch them sway. And then I remember something so startling I almost laugh out loud. Or cry. I can’t decide which.
The day after summer camp. Our two oldest were whatever age places them on the shore of that vast sea called adolescence. One toe each in the water, testing it out. They are telling me all about camp and they are making fun of something. (It seems they are always making fun of something. I’m just happy when it isn’t each other.) Today they are telling me how annoying the girls were, of course forgetting that I am a girl. The girls drove them crazy during the singing around the camp fire. Those silly girls. They locked arms and swayed. Every night. It was so dumb.
I’m picturing what my sons must have been like around that campfire. I’m sure they did what boys that age do. Nothing. They were too busy looking out to sea—to that ocean of teenage years that beckons all boys like a pirate ship’s raised flag—too busy planning their getaway to participate in the moments adults orchestrate for them. Too busy entering the life-on-my-own-terms season to enjoy life in our universe. Perpetually distracted, that’s what they were like. And they stayed that way for what seemed like a long time.
And now. Now they look so handsome in their crisp black and white. Ties loosened and lapels punctuated with a spray of green. From here, the ocean of those final boyhood years looks like a pond. From the perspective of this far shore, it was a wading pool where we splashed and had fun. The battles fought on the open seas of adolescence have taken on legendary, but smaller, proportions. Around countless dinner tables where we have met as peers, I have let them retell it all to me. And it has become funnier and easier in the telling. Gone the fear and doubt. Gone the desperate clinging to any sign of hope that they would actually grow up. That they would learn how to love, or at least how to tolerate each other.
Now they are swaying. Because they want to, they are locked in a manly embrace. The song ends and they stay together for a moment longer. As if reluctant to let go. This, this, is the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Sequela
Sequela: Noun (si-ˈkwe-lə) 1 : an aftereffect of disease, condition, or injury 2 : a secondary result
“I don’t want to be that girl,” my friend Fiona says, “who waits by the phone.”
And suddenly it all becomes clear. “But Fiona,” I almost say, “you are that girl. I am that girl. My mother is that girl and her mother before her. We’re all waiting by the phone.”
For some reason I want to tell her the unvarnished truth, like those killjoys who scare you to death when you announce that you’re pregnant with your first baby. They find some sort of evil satisfaction in announcing to you that your life will never, ever be the same. I want to say to Fiona: “You think there is a cure for waiting by the phone, but there’s not. The phone call doesn’t cure it. Dating the guy who calls doesn’t cure it. Marriage doesn’t fix that ache to be remembered and singled out and loved. Lovesick is just how we are. It’s an illness.”
But that makes it sound like marriage is nothing when marriage is a big, beautiful something. It’s just that, even when you are married, you have times when you wait by the phone.
And I feel for Fiona. I forget the colossal risk a single girl takes when she goes so far as to be slightly interested in a guy. I know being interested is a gamble. What if he’s not remotely interested back? Which makes love like playing a crooked slot machine in a corrupt casino. What if I’m not loved back? Or what if he loves me, then changes his mind and leaves. Or (and this is plausible to the point of actual) he loves me but he doesn’t say it the way I need to hear it. Or when I need to hear it. What if I’m trapped in a marriage where waiting by the phone is a more accurate euphemism for marriage than for dating? What if he waits till I’ve invested everything and then he makes the ultimate exit of dying? What will my heart do with that insult of all insults? That first spark of interest is a painful risk—an omen of the deeper risk of involvement—and I forgot about that.
Sequela
Houston. 1977. Second leg of a three-phase road trip from Atlanta to Texas. Bill and I were engaged. In between visiting seminaries, we stopped by one of my college friend’s homes. The stately manse of a large Presbyterian church where I felt, for the first and only time, that ministry just might be lucrative in a rental sort of way. The house evoked Driving Miss Daisy and, in it’s largeness and location, Dallas (the TV show not the city). We were there a scant 48 hours in all. So much to do, so much luxurious space to do it in, and so little time. And this is what Bill did… he slept. As deeply as Rip Van Winkle or Sleeping Beauty, he snoozed away in a twin bed with an antique pine headboard in a boy’s bedroom the size of an Olympic pool. ZZZZ. All the time.
In Bill’s defense, this was during the aftermath of a cold he couldn’t shake. Plus, we had just driven miles and miles. He was road-trip weary. But every time I trolled my heart to look for compassion I fished out something else—irritation and embarrassment. Sleep was the late night duty of the weary and solitary, not the right of the young house guest in the middle of the day.
When I say I searched my heart, I am speaking with the clarity of hindsight. At the time I just felt a low grade discomfort with the fact that my otherwise-engaging fiancé was pretty much AWOL for our entire visit. As an off-the-charts extrovert who had to be the last one asleep at every slumber party I attended (What? I might have missed something!), I just didn’t get it.
The time-lapse quality of memory is never predictable. The flower of recall unfurls in slow motion toward the present, and the final outcome can be either a rose or a poisonous weed. Such was this memory. Bill’s tiredness continued all fall. I don’t remember any other specific sleeping sessions in inappropriate locales. I don’t even remember that all that autumn he had more colds than most 22-year-old guys typically have.
I just remember when the roots and stem and bud grew into recognition. Bill’s weariness existed parallel to another anomaly and none of us connected the two. It turns out there was a reason Bill was so tired. While shaving one morning he discovered a curiosity, a hard lump in his neck. I noticed him rubbing it one day. So did his mom. The double-barreled nagging began in November and by December 24th we were all praying the blood work the doctor ordered would come back with a diagnosis of mono. That’s because the alternative was Hodgkin’s Disease. Cancer.
The day after Christmas: Bill did not have mono, which meant he had cancer.
So now, in the context of his cancer, when I write that Bill’s incessant napping at my friend’s house was irritating, it is like saying I was irritated because someone’s funeral made me miss my tennis game. Or a fatality on I-85 made me late for work. He napped because he had a disease. Sleeping was a symptom. It seemed innocuous at the time, but it had a deeper meaning. It was a sequela.
Let me say now that sequela is a medical term and I will most likely misuse it. But its Latin root is the more common word sequel which makes playing with it up for grabs as far as I’m concerned. In Bill’s case, the sequel to the original disease showed up before we knew about the main attraction. The aftermath was the clue to the actual event. Book One had been written, published, and distributed, but it wasn’t until the sequel hit the shelves that we knew the first book existed. Everyone will agree with me: cancer is an insidious disease and this is one of the reasons why. It sneaks up on you. There are hardly ever previews. Only sequelae.
I’ve told Bill if he almost dies one more time I’ll kill him. Clearly, Bill almost dying produces a host of sequelae in me too. Aside from the reminder that there are no guarantees in this relationship, there is that chronic tendency I have to gravitate to my weaknesses in a crisis. When all is well, I’m relational. When under pressure, I am clingy. When Bill is symptom-free, I am caring. When his mortality is up close and personal, I become a mom instead of a wife. (As in scolding him for carrying the grocery bag that had marshmallows in it. Yes, I did that.) In health, I’m serene. In sickness, I lose sleep. It’s like the drama of disease infects me with extra sin. A huge hypodermic full of sin.
A friend once asked me if I considered leaving Bill during his bout with cancer. A friend I love asked me that. And I almost slugged her. The way I almost slugged the Dean of Students my senior year of college who called me into her office for a chat when she found out my fiancé was ill. She suggested that I opt out of marriage because of the stress of it all. It would be okay because, (my translation) “It’s all about you.” Apparently, making decisions based on this premise is considered noble in some circles. No, I did not consider leaving.
As I mulled over my friend’s question on the way home from her house, I forgave her easily when I figured out why she asked the question. Her daughter, who was at the time a pre-teen, was battling a disease that, by many standards, would make her a marriage risk someday. She was wondering if anyone would be willing to take that risk. Maybe I should have hit her. Then she would know; she’d feel a lot better about the passion of all those risk-takers-for-love out there.
The thing you never think about when someone you love is sick, really sick, is how much time you’re going to spend in waiting rooms. Without him—the person whose wellbeing you care the most about. You wait and wait and wait. Somewhere between the sequelae and cure lies a room with uncomfortable chairs and bad coffee where you wait while the professionals do their thing. It’s a helpless feeling kind of place.
It’s really a funny joke that someone decided to name a room after waiting. That’s like naming a city “World” or a country “Cosmos.” Waiting isn’t something we do in one tiny room on the fourth floor of an institution. It’s universal.
Because, remember, we’re lovesick. Every one of us is waiting for someone who will be there, who will pay attention to our words, the petty ones and the precious ones, some one who won’t leave or opt out or lose focus. And our lovesickness has sequelae. We’re just about always symptomatic in one way or another. Disappointment, discouragement, sorrow, fear, impatience, churlishness (Now that’s a word: you have to curl your lip to say it, so it’s kind of a visual onomatopoeia.), irritability, anger, bitterness. The darker side of lovesickness is our inability to fully do for others what we crave for ourselves. We try, we really do, but we’re not always good at it. Someone is waiting on us to deliver and we fail…a lot.
I think most of the conflict Bill and I have centers on this dynamic: We don’t love on time. We do—eventually—love. But there’s often some significant lag time. And while we’re waiting, we say or do or think or feel something that precipitates conflict.
Waiting in Antiquity
If love travels through communication, then our ancestors had to wait even longer than we do. You know those phone calls you make to edit a conversation you just had? Like waiting for a doctor to walk up to your uncomfortable chair and say, “He did fine,” you want to make sure everything between the two of you is fine again. Sometimes you make those calls while you’re still in your neighborhood because the minute you pulled out of your driveway you regretted certain words or attitudes. People in the Bible didn’t get to do that. And, believe me, they were just as lovesick as we are. Waiting rooms back then must have been the size of Grand Central Station.
But they weren’t that different from us, really. When they loved, they took the same basic risks. Somewhere around 1000 B.C., Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi met and married men who turned out to be colossal risks. In the book named after her daughter-in-law (I wonder if they asked Naomi and she said, “No let Ruth have that honor.” Reminds me of a time my daughter-in-law and I had an argument over something we both wanted but each wanted the other to have more.), Naomi says to her friends, “I left full and I have returned empty.” She and Ruth arrived in Israel not just heartsick, but as heartbroken widows.
Which makes what happens next pretty darn amazing. Naomi orchestrates another courtship for Ruth. And Ruth cooperates. The older woman effectively says, “Ruth, dear, take your broken heart and offer it to a stranger. Wait by the phone. You may end up looking like a fool, but, who knows, you might get a husband in the end.”
And Ruth does it. At least these days if you wait by the phone you can do it in the privacy of your own home. He doesn’t have to know you’re waiting. But Ruth had to do something I’m not sure many of us would do. Naomi instructs (easy for her to say):
"Take a bath. Put on some perfume. Get all dressed up and go to the threshing floor. But don't let him know you're there until the party is well under way and he's had plenty of food and drink. When you see him slipping off to sleep, watch where he lies down and then go there. Lie at his feet to let him know that you are available to him for marriage. Then wait and see what he says. He'll tell you what to do."(Ruth 3:3-4)
Here’s where I might shriek at my mother-in-law, “Wait and see what he says? Are you crazy?”
But it worked. You know why I think it worked? Aside from the culture at the time and the fact that Ruth may have been prime “marriage material”, whatever that means. I’m guessing here, but one small observation says something significant to me. Boaz—the potential husband—wakes to find Ruth under his blanket…asleep. Asleep! Ruth took a monumental risk and waited for the outcome. While she was waiting she slept. I don’t know about you, but when I am impatient or anxious, I do just about anything but sleep. Ruth slept without the benefit of an Ambien or a white-noise machine.
A woman who sleeps in these circumstances is a woman at peace. The DNA of peace is trust. Ruth had lived through enough to know she could never fully trust husbands, or any other mortal for that matter. They might up and die on you. Ruth was waiting on Someone else, the God of Israel Naomi called “The Strong One.” How do I know that? When Ruth begs to go with Naomi to Israel, she says, “Your God will be my god.” Naomi was her only connection to the God she had already embraced. Sure, she loved Naomi, but it looks like she loved her God even more.
Ruth could wait on Boaz because she knew how to wait on The Strong One. That’s how her life became layered. Waiting on others makes for one-dimensional living. Waiting on God makes for a life that lives and breaths and grows beyond us.
Even so, we’re mortal and lovesick and infected with sin, so we exhibit sequelae all the time. One time my sister said, “I don’t have road rage, I cause it.” Well, we cause disappointment and we have it. That’s why waiting on others is such a gamble. It doesn’t mean we don’t do it—just think what we would miss—but it does mean we don’t expect an immediate return on our risk.
But God, He doesn’t have our disease. He can be waited on with utter confidence. Look for the word “wait” in the Psalms and Proverbs and you’ll see proof. The writers typically used the word one of two ways. First, as a direct object: God who is a Rescuer and a Friend on whom the writer waits. Second, as a subject: the enemy waiting in the bushes to pounce. Make two lists of both usages of “wait” and you’ll find the ratio is about two to one. For what it’s worth, those ancient lovers of “The Strong One” cried out in devotion to God twice as much as they cried out in fear about their enemies.
Boaz turned out to be, like my husband, a real stud. A husband who doesn’t disappoint. At least hardly ever.
(Which reminds me to insert this practical advice: I have learned that when I am disappointed in Bill for not “being there” right when, where, and how I need, I should probably wait 24 hours before I say something. Maybe 48. When I am extra needy for a dose of uninterrupted Bill-ness, if I can hold off on making that neediness known verbally for just a leetle bit longer, one of three things is bound to happen. Either I realize I am having a momentary outbreak of self-absorption and I get over myself. Or I am tired, hungry, or both. Or Bill becomes, in those 24 hours, aware of his own growing need for Kitti-ness and he arrives on the white steed of well-timed love. We’re one after all. We get to be on the same page when it counts.)
When Bill and I time our love just so, there is an echo of God Himself in the song of our marriage. The notes deepen when we both wait on God before we wait on each other. We love to hear that sound. It is a faraway hint of God walking in Eden with the first married couple. I’ll bet Ruth and Boaz heard it too. Ruth was able to wait by the phone (or under the blanket) for Boaz because she waited for his God first. She could take the risk, not because she knew Boaz would be all she hoped he would be, but because her true Kinsman Redeemer was her all and all. She became David’s great-grandmother and, one day a thousand years later, one of only three women in Jesus’ ancestry. Waiting made her life longer and wider in scope than it could have been otherwise.
So here’s what I want to say to my friend Fiona:
“Fiona, be that girl. Just wait on someone else. Be that girl with all your heart.”
“I don’t want to be that girl,” my friend Fiona says, “who waits by the phone.”
And suddenly it all becomes clear. “But Fiona,” I almost say, “you are that girl. I am that girl. My mother is that girl and her mother before her. We’re all waiting by the phone.”
For some reason I want to tell her the unvarnished truth, like those killjoys who scare you to death when you announce that you’re pregnant with your first baby. They find some sort of evil satisfaction in announcing to you that your life will never, ever be the same. I want to say to Fiona: “You think there is a cure for waiting by the phone, but there’s not. The phone call doesn’t cure it. Dating the guy who calls doesn’t cure it. Marriage doesn’t fix that ache to be remembered and singled out and loved. Lovesick is just how we are. It’s an illness.”
But that makes it sound like marriage is nothing when marriage is a big, beautiful something. It’s just that, even when you are married, you have times when you wait by the phone.
And I feel for Fiona. I forget the colossal risk a single girl takes when she goes so far as to be slightly interested in a guy. I know being interested is a gamble. What if he’s not remotely interested back? Which makes love like playing a crooked slot machine in a corrupt casino. What if I’m not loved back? Or what if he loves me, then changes his mind and leaves. Or (and this is plausible to the point of actual) he loves me but he doesn’t say it the way I need to hear it. Or when I need to hear it. What if I’m trapped in a marriage where waiting by the phone is a more accurate euphemism for marriage than for dating? What if he waits till I’ve invested everything and then he makes the ultimate exit of dying? What will my heart do with that insult of all insults? That first spark of interest is a painful risk—an omen of the deeper risk of involvement—and I forgot about that.
Sequela
Houston. 1977. Second leg of a three-phase road trip from Atlanta to Texas. Bill and I were engaged. In between visiting seminaries, we stopped by one of my college friend’s homes. The stately manse of a large Presbyterian church where I felt, for the first and only time, that ministry just might be lucrative in a rental sort of way. The house evoked Driving Miss Daisy and, in it’s largeness and location, Dallas (the TV show not the city). We were there a scant 48 hours in all. So much to do, so much luxurious space to do it in, and so little time. And this is what Bill did… he slept. As deeply as Rip Van Winkle or Sleeping Beauty, he snoozed away in a twin bed with an antique pine headboard in a boy’s bedroom the size of an Olympic pool. ZZZZ. All the time.
In Bill’s defense, this was during the aftermath of a cold he couldn’t shake. Plus, we had just driven miles and miles. He was road-trip weary. But every time I trolled my heart to look for compassion I fished out something else—irritation and embarrassment. Sleep was the late night duty of the weary and solitary, not the right of the young house guest in the middle of the day.
When I say I searched my heart, I am speaking with the clarity of hindsight. At the time I just felt a low grade discomfort with the fact that my otherwise-engaging fiancé was pretty much AWOL for our entire visit. As an off-the-charts extrovert who had to be the last one asleep at every slumber party I attended (What? I might have missed something!), I just didn’t get it.
The time-lapse quality of memory is never predictable. The flower of recall unfurls in slow motion toward the present, and the final outcome can be either a rose or a poisonous weed. Such was this memory. Bill’s tiredness continued all fall. I don’t remember any other specific sleeping sessions in inappropriate locales. I don’t even remember that all that autumn he had more colds than most 22-year-old guys typically have.
I just remember when the roots and stem and bud grew into recognition. Bill’s weariness existed parallel to another anomaly and none of us connected the two. It turns out there was a reason Bill was so tired. While shaving one morning he discovered a curiosity, a hard lump in his neck. I noticed him rubbing it one day. So did his mom. The double-barreled nagging began in November and by December 24th we were all praying the blood work the doctor ordered would come back with a diagnosis of mono. That’s because the alternative was Hodgkin’s Disease. Cancer.
The day after Christmas: Bill did not have mono, which meant he had cancer.
So now, in the context of his cancer, when I write that Bill’s incessant napping at my friend’s house was irritating, it is like saying I was irritated because someone’s funeral made me miss my tennis game. Or a fatality on I-85 made me late for work. He napped because he had a disease. Sleeping was a symptom. It seemed innocuous at the time, but it had a deeper meaning. It was a sequela.
Let me say now that sequela is a medical term and I will most likely misuse it. But its Latin root is the more common word sequel which makes playing with it up for grabs as far as I’m concerned. In Bill’s case, the sequel to the original disease showed up before we knew about the main attraction. The aftermath was the clue to the actual event. Book One had been written, published, and distributed, but it wasn’t until the sequel hit the shelves that we knew the first book existed. Everyone will agree with me: cancer is an insidious disease and this is one of the reasons why. It sneaks up on you. There are hardly ever previews. Only sequelae.
I’ve told Bill if he almost dies one more time I’ll kill him. Clearly, Bill almost dying produces a host of sequelae in me too. Aside from the reminder that there are no guarantees in this relationship, there is that chronic tendency I have to gravitate to my weaknesses in a crisis. When all is well, I’m relational. When under pressure, I am clingy. When Bill is symptom-free, I am caring. When his mortality is up close and personal, I become a mom instead of a wife. (As in scolding him for carrying the grocery bag that had marshmallows in it. Yes, I did that.) In health, I’m serene. In sickness, I lose sleep. It’s like the drama of disease infects me with extra sin. A huge hypodermic full of sin.
A friend once asked me if I considered leaving Bill during his bout with cancer. A friend I love asked me that. And I almost slugged her. The way I almost slugged the Dean of Students my senior year of college who called me into her office for a chat when she found out my fiancé was ill. She suggested that I opt out of marriage because of the stress of it all. It would be okay because, (my translation) “It’s all about you.” Apparently, making decisions based on this premise is considered noble in some circles. No, I did not consider leaving.
As I mulled over my friend’s question on the way home from her house, I forgave her easily when I figured out why she asked the question. Her daughter, who was at the time a pre-teen, was battling a disease that, by many standards, would make her a marriage risk someday. She was wondering if anyone would be willing to take that risk. Maybe I should have hit her. Then she would know; she’d feel a lot better about the passion of all those risk-takers-for-love out there.
The thing you never think about when someone you love is sick, really sick, is how much time you’re going to spend in waiting rooms. Without him—the person whose wellbeing you care the most about. You wait and wait and wait. Somewhere between the sequelae and cure lies a room with uncomfortable chairs and bad coffee where you wait while the professionals do their thing. It’s a helpless feeling kind of place.
It’s really a funny joke that someone decided to name a room after waiting. That’s like naming a city “World” or a country “Cosmos.” Waiting isn’t something we do in one tiny room on the fourth floor of an institution. It’s universal.
Because, remember, we’re lovesick. Every one of us is waiting for someone who will be there, who will pay attention to our words, the petty ones and the precious ones, some one who won’t leave or opt out or lose focus. And our lovesickness has sequelae. We’re just about always symptomatic in one way or another. Disappointment, discouragement, sorrow, fear, impatience, churlishness (Now that’s a word: you have to curl your lip to say it, so it’s kind of a visual onomatopoeia.), irritability, anger, bitterness. The darker side of lovesickness is our inability to fully do for others what we crave for ourselves. We try, we really do, but we’re not always good at it. Someone is waiting on us to deliver and we fail…a lot.
I think most of the conflict Bill and I have centers on this dynamic: We don’t love on time. We do—eventually—love. But there’s often some significant lag time. And while we’re waiting, we say or do or think or feel something that precipitates conflict.
Waiting in Antiquity
If love travels through communication, then our ancestors had to wait even longer than we do. You know those phone calls you make to edit a conversation you just had? Like waiting for a doctor to walk up to your uncomfortable chair and say, “He did fine,” you want to make sure everything between the two of you is fine again. Sometimes you make those calls while you’re still in your neighborhood because the minute you pulled out of your driveway you regretted certain words or attitudes. People in the Bible didn’t get to do that. And, believe me, they were just as lovesick as we are. Waiting rooms back then must have been the size of Grand Central Station.
But they weren’t that different from us, really. When they loved, they took the same basic risks. Somewhere around 1000 B.C., Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi met and married men who turned out to be colossal risks. In the book named after her daughter-in-law (I wonder if they asked Naomi and she said, “No let Ruth have that honor.” Reminds me of a time my daughter-in-law and I had an argument over something we both wanted but each wanted the other to have more.), Naomi says to her friends, “I left full and I have returned empty.” She and Ruth arrived in Israel not just heartsick, but as heartbroken widows.
Which makes what happens next pretty darn amazing. Naomi orchestrates another courtship for Ruth. And Ruth cooperates. The older woman effectively says, “Ruth, dear, take your broken heart and offer it to a stranger. Wait by the phone. You may end up looking like a fool, but, who knows, you might get a husband in the end.”
And Ruth does it. At least these days if you wait by the phone you can do it in the privacy of your own home. He doesn’t have to know you’re waiting. But Ruth had to do something I’m not sure many of us would do. Naomi instructs (easy for her to say):
"Take a bath. Put on some perfume. Get all dressed up and go to the threshing floor. But don't let him know you're there until the party is well under way and he's had plenty of food and drink. When you see him slipping off to sleep, watch where he lies down and then go there. Lie at his feet to let him know that you are available to him for marriage. Then wait and see what he says. He'll tell you what to do."(Ruth 3:3-4)
Here’s where I might shriek at my mother-in-law, “Wait and see what he says? Are you crazy?”
But it worked. You know why I think it worked? Aside from the culture at the time and the fact that Ruth may have been prime “marriage material”, whatever that means. I’m guessing here, but one small observation says something significant to me. Boaz—the potential husband—wakes to find Ruth under his blanket…asleep. Asleep! Ruth took a monumental risk and waited for the outcome. While she was waiting she slept. I don’t know about you, but when I am impatient or anxious, I do just about anything but sleep. Ruth slept without the benefit of an Ambien or a white-noise machine.
A woman who sleeps in these circumstances is a woman at peace. The DNA of peace is trust. Ruth had lived through enough to know she could never fully trust husbands, or any other mortal for that matter. They might up and die on you. Ruth was waiting on Someone else, the God of Israel Naomi called “The Strong One.” How do I know that? When Ruth begs to go with Naomi to Israel, she says, “Your God will be my god.” Naomi was her only connection to the God she had already embraced. Sure, she loved Naomi, but it looks like she loved her God even more.
Ruth could wait on Boaz because she knew how to wait on The Strong One. That’s how her life became layered. Waiting on others makes for one-dimensional living. Waiting on God makes for a life that lives and breaths and grows beyond us.
Even so, we’re mortal and lovesick and infected with sin, so we exhibit sequelae all the time. One time my sister said, “I don’t have road rage, I cause it.” Well, we cause disappointment and we have it. That’s why waiting on others is such a gamble. It doesn’t mean we don’t do it—just think what we would miss—but it does mean we don’t expect an immediate return on our risk.
But God, He doesn’t have our disease. He can be waited on with utter confidence. Look for the word “wait” in the Psalms and Proverbs and you’ll see proof. The writers typically used the word one of two ways. First, as a direct object: God who is a Rescuer and a Friend on whom the writer waits. Second, as a subject: the enemy waiting in the bushes to pounce. Make two lists of both usages of “wait” and you’ll find the ratio is about two to one. For what it’s worth, those ancient lovers of “The Strong One” cried out in devotion to God twice as much as they cried out in fear about their enemies.
Boaz turned out to be, like my husband, a real stud. A husband who doesn’t disappoint. At least hardly ever.
(Which reminds me to insert this practical advice: I have learned that when I am disappointed in Bill for not “being there” right when, where, and how I need, I should probably wait 24 hours before I say something. Maybe 48. When I am extra needy for a dose of uninterrupted Bill-ness, if I can hold off on making that neediness known verbally for just a leetle bit longer, one of three things is bound to happen. Either I realize I am having a momentary outbreak of self-absorption and I get over myself. Or I am tired, hungry, or both. Or Bill becomes, in those 24 hours, aware of his own growing need for Kitti-ness and he arrives on the white steed of well-timed love. We’re one after all. We get to be on the same page when it counts.)
When Bill and I time our love just so, there is an echo of God Himself in the song of our marriage. The notes deepen when we both wait on God before we wait on each other. We love to hear that sound. It is a faraway hint of God walking in Eden with the first married couple. I’ll bet Ruth and Boaz heard it too. Ruth was able to wait by the phone (or under the blanket) for Boaz because she waited for his God first. She could take the risk, not because she knew Boaz would be all she hoped he would be, but because her true Kinsman Redeemer was her all and all. She became David’s great-grandmother and, one day a thousand years later, one of only three women in Jesus’ ancestry. Waiting made her life longer and wider in scope than it could have been otherwise.
So here’s what I want to say to my friend Fiona:
“Fiona, be that girl. Just wait on someone else. Be that girl with all your heart.”
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Tesseract
Tesseract (ˈte-sə-ˌrakt) noun : the four-dimensional analogue of a cube
When they were almost too little to do so, our sons played T-ball and soccer, both sports which afforded them plenty of time to daydream in wide open spaces. Occasionally they picked dandelions. Mostly they managed to focus enough to keep from getting bonked in the head with a ball. One fine spring Saturday afternoon we noticed our youngest having an animated conversation in centerfield with, it sure looked like, himself. We glanced right and left and saw two future All Stars laser-focused on home plate and chattering away he’s no batter, he’s no batter like seasoned Little Leaguers. After the game we asked Andrew as casually as we could who he was talking to in the outfield during the third, fourth and fifth innings. He looked up at us with those gorgeous baseball-sized eyes of his and said: “The air people.”
I have to admit I derived some satisfaction from this answer. All four of our boys inherited Bill’s athletic genes. They are just so male. But here was a boy with leanings like mine. A boy who was content to vacate the playing field for a while to converse with illusory beings. An all-boy boy with an imagination.
Give me a choice between reality and fiction and I will have to think long and hard before I’ll give up a trip to storybook land. Of course this is not always a good thing. But sometimes it serves me quite well. Like with big words. Tesseract is a geometry word. If you didn’t grasp the definition above, give this one a whirl: a regular convex 4-polytope whose boundary consists of eight cubical cells. Good grief. Fiction people are usually not even passable math people, and I’m no exception. So, when faced with a word like tesseract, I prefer the fictional meaning.
Apparently, a tesseract is to a cube what a cube is to a square. Whatever. I like Mrs. Whatsit’s definition so much better. It’s safe to say Mrs. Whatsit is one of the air people. In A Wrinkle in Time (which, by the way, I made sure Andrew read by third grade), Mrs. Whatsit explains a tesseract to Meg Murry. Meg’s father is missing and, according to Mrs. Whatsit, he journeyed into outer space on a wrinkle in time. A tesseract refers to this “wrinkle”—a compressed fifth dimension that facilitates time and space travel. She describes an ant moving from one point to another point at the end of a line. She then shows how, if the line between the two points is relaxed – wrinkled – the ant can get from here to there in almost no time at all. She says, “[A] straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.” There are two drawings in the book of an ant attempting to travel from one end of a line to another. In the first, the ant has a long way to go across the taut line. In the second, the line is relaxed, like yarn or string, and the end points meet each other. The ant barely has to move to reach his destination. As science fiction goes, this is like claiming that if you cover a cardboard box with aluminum foil, shiny side facing in of course, you can fly past the sun on your way to Jupiter. Madeline L’Engle took a concept that doesn’t exist (I think) and simplified it using a word that means something most of us can’t comprehend. Fiction, gotta love it.
But the desire to close the distance between two points is a universal theme everyone understands. The distance between two points: Marriage. Good ones shorten the distance and bad ones lengthen it. Simple, right? Not really. I don’t know what that distance looks like for you, but I am well aware of the distances between Bill and me. At least now I’m aware.
When we were first dating we read a book about marriage that claimed opposites were the best matches, and that if you and your mate were not different one of you might as well each be Narcissus himself. We had many discussions in which we hotly debated the author on this point. No, we didn’t argue with each other. We were both grievously offended by the book and loved to agree that we were the exception to the rule. Come to think of it, during those first few months of falling in love, we agreed about everything. Once we both mentioned that we liked to walk in the rain. And then one day it was pouring rain and we stood on the veranda of my dorm mutually entertaining the suggestion that we step out sans umbrella into the deep puddles of the cobblestone pathways of my campus. And we mutually declined, thereby sensibly reversing our positions on walking in the rain. We were made for each other! We were just alike.
There may be only one fundamental way Bill and I are alike. And that’s in how wrong we were about being alike. The truth is, we are polar opposites. I don’t remember when this became the accepted fact. Or when the ignorant notion that we were alike became our favorite joke. We really get a kick out of it now.
Dramatic Effect
One year I took a landscape painting class with my talented mother. She pulled some strings to get me in the class, which I’m pretty sure means she lied. It turned out to be a class for people who actually make money painting. And I don’t mean with a roller. Professional artists like my mom. I’m not even an amateur. We painted every day en plein air, and every day I exhibited a dependence on my mother I haven’t had since kindergarten. I survived the class by parking my easel right up next to hers and using her palette (mine quickly became a muddy mess) and begging her to just paint my picture for me while no one was looking. Still, I managed to learn a thing or two. Like how hard a rock is to paint. Or how many colors there are in the branches of one solitary barren tree in winter. But one concept escaped me altogether, just like calculus did in college. Except with calculus I could speak the language enough to use it on tests, even though I didn’t understand it. That’s all calculus was: memorizable gibberish. My nemesis was the term color value. I had actual nightmares about color value. Our teacher was a portly little man with Albert Einstein hair and a mad scientist’s demeanor. I was scared to death of him. Thankfully, he ignored me, my not being a professional and all, and I never had to answer a single question about color value. But I was terrified that I might. Don’t laugh if I’m wrong, but I think color value may have something to do with the way the same color can be more than one entity. Its value is what makes it different and enables an artist to place equal but opposite colors next to each other for dramatic effect.
That’s what our differences do: they give our marriage dramatic effect. And we have learned to applaud them—the differences—for playing their assigned roles so well. The trick is learning to leverage our differences. (This is entirely different from your children leveraging them… that’s not good.) There are just so many ways being dissimilar is helpful. Tactically, by using both strengths to achieve all sorts of tasks from parenting to traveling to keeping house. Enrichingly, by expanding your bank account of interests and abilities to double its original size. Influentially, by weaving an impact on the world with the multi-colored assets of two people.
There are times when Bill and I operate like two well-oiled gears with precisely interlocking teeth in a purring machine. Our trip to London was a mechanical miracle of marriage. Every couple should take the trip of their lives after they have lived together for a while. By then you know who does what best. I did the research. Knew which castle was worth seeing, which tour was worth feeling like cattle for an afternoon to do, which galleries were worth that tedious neck-strain galleries give you. I took the pieces of the tourist puzzle—hotels, trains, places, food—and put it together in a plan. And then we went and Bill took over. Totally. He read maps and figured out the Tube. (In one day. Now I know he’s a genius) Before the trip I fretted just because I wanted to and my kind of fretting was fun. For me. While we were there he fretted because he wanted to and his kind of fretting was fun. For him. In this way, we took care of each other. We enjoyed each other. As a marriage, we purred.
This may seem like a small victory, but if you think about it, it is as worthy of a parade as one of Caesar’s triumphant returns to Rome from Gaul or Germania. That’s because it’s the little differences, really, that can be the most irksome. When we figure those out, we are the victors. At first glance, our differences are broad, but they dwell in the narrow alleyways of day to day life. Bill thinks in a straight line. I think it a dotted, darting line. Some days it looks like this: He makes sense and I don’t. But on others it’s: He is rigid and I’m flexible. And the next week: He is predictable and I’m dangerous. Many, many times we have stood – stubborn, unyielding, perhaps even martyrish – planted on our fixed points along whatever continuum it is that separates us, gazing at each other across the great divide, daring the other to move from his or her fixed point and come to ours. Every marriage has its own share of these fixed points.
Two Fixed Points
Take shopping. Which we have learned to do together as rarely as possible. Aside from the fact that Bill’s eyes are covered with more glaze than a Krispy Kreme doughnut after less than ten minutes in a mall, we don’t do well with this activity. Here’s how it goes:
Bill announces, “I’m going to buy these pants and this shirt.”
I, suspecting that he might be color blind after all, suggest, “Maybe you should get a warmer color for the shirt.” Or, if I am not feeling diplomatic, “That shirt doesn’t go with those pants.”
To which Bill says, “But they’re both blue.”
“That doesn’t make them go together. Besides, the shirt is kind of ugly.” Kind of, hah.
“What makes it ugly?” Bill asks. Innocently.
I have learned that he fully expects me to respond to this question with a linear, logical answer, one that could easily be converted to a flow chart two pages long. I used to try to do this, and failed miserably every time. That’s because I don’t speak his language. I can’t even memorize the gibberish for the test. Plus, in this environment I am not possessed by the get-me-out-of-here demon Bill has dancing behind the ever-thickening glaze on his eyeballs. My explanation of something so fundamentally obvious to me—that the shirt is ugly—used to lead to a spat of epic proportions. Me angry that he so stubbornly refuses to just let me be the expert on something he doesn’t even care about. And Bill angry that I can’t be objective when clearly objectivity is the only reasonable way to make any decision. Oh yes, we are different.
So different that it takes a tesseract to close the distance between us. Because we are both alike in this: we despise the distance. Sometimes the separation that lies between us is so vast or so unbending it can only be traveled by a using a fifth dimension. A tesseract. A wrinkle. Wrinkling the distance isn’t a science, nor is it a fictional impossibility. It is an act of grace. Or, rather, the art of grace. When we wrinkle the line, the distance is still there, we haven’t erased it, but it is relaxed, rendered inconsequential as it were. We’re exchanging one message for another. Instead of You don’t matter, we’re saying It doesn’t matter because you do. It’s a new morality. Instead of I’m right and You’re wrong, it’s We’re right. I don’t even know how to explain this. It’s not gibberish, but it is mysterious. I only know that when Bill and I have held the cord of our differences as lightly as we can and allowed the line between us to grow slack, we’ve met in the mystery of grace. Mrs. Whatsit was right. The shortest distance between two points isn’t a straight line. It’s grace.
When they were almost too little to do so, our sons played T-ball and soccer, both sports which afforded them plenty of time to daydream in wide open spaces. Occasionally they picked dandelions. Mostly they managed to focus enough to keep from getting bonked in the head with a ball. One fine spring Saturday afternoon we noticed our youngest having an animated conversation in centerfield with, it sure looked like, himself. We glanced right and left and saw two future All Stars laser-focused on home plate and chattering away he’s no batter, he’s no batter like seasoned Little Leaguers. After the game we asked Andrew as casually as we could who he was talking to in the outfield during the third, fourth and fifth innings. He looked up at us with those gorgeous baseball-sized eyes of his and said: “The air people.”
I have to admit I derived some satisfaction from this answer. All four of our boys inherited Bill’s athletic genes. They are just so male. But here was a boy with leanings like mine. A boy who was content to vacate the playing field for a while to converse with illusory beings. An all-boy boy with an imagination.
Give me a choice between reality and fiction and I will have to think long and hard before I’ll give up a trip to storybook land. Of course this is not always a good thing. But sometimes it serves me quite well. Like with big words. Tesseract is a geometry word. If you didn’t grasp the definition above, give this one a whirl: a regular convex 4-polytope whose boundary consists of eight cubical cells. Good grief. Fiction people are usually not even passable math people, and I’m no exception. So, when faced with a word like tesseract, I prefer the fictional meaning.
Apparently, a tesseract is to a cube what a cube is to a square. Whatever. I like Mrs. Whatsit’s definition so much better. It’s safe to say Mrs. Whatsit is one of the air people. In A Wrinkle in Time (which, by the way, I made sure Andrew read by third grade), Mrs. Whatsit explains a tesseract to Meg Murry. Meg’s father is missing and, according to Mrs. Whatsit, he journeyed into outer space on a wrinkle in time. A tesseract refers to this “wrinkle”—a compressed fifth dimension that facilitates time and space travel. She describes an ant moving from one point to another point at the end of a line. She then shows how, if the line between the two points is relaxed – wrinkled – the ant can get from here to there in almost no time at all. She says, “[A] straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.” There are two drawings in the book of an ant attempting to travel from one end of a line to another. In the first, the ant has a long way to go across the taut line. In the second, the line is relaxed, like yarn or string, and the end points meet each other. The ant barely has to move to reach his destination. As science fiction goes, this is like claiming that if you cover a cardboard box with aluminum foil, shiny side facing in of course, you can fly past the sun on your way to Jupiter. Madeline L’Engle took a concept that doesn’t exist (I think) and simplified it using a word that means something most of us can’t comprehend. Fiction, gotta love it.
But the desire to close the distance between two points is a universal theme everyone understands. The distance between two points: Marriage. Good ones shorten the distance and bad ones lengthen it. Simple, right? Not really. I don’t know what that distance looks like for you, but I am well aware of the distances between Bill and me. At least now I’m aware.
When we were first dating we read a book about marriage that claimed opposites were the best matches, and that if you and your mate were not different one of you might as well each be Narcissus himself. We had many discussions in which we hotly debated the author on this point. No, we didn’t argue with each other. We were both grievously offended by the book and loved to agree that we were the exception to the rule. Come to think of it, during those first few months of falling in love, we agreed about everything. Once we both mentioned that we liked to walk in the rain. And then one day it was pouring rain and we stood on the veranda of my dorm mutually entertaining the suggestion that we step out sans umbrella into the deep puddles of the cobblestone pathways of my campus. And we mutually declined, thereby sensibly reversing our positions on walking in the rain. We were made for each other! We were just alike.
There may be only one fundamental way Bill and I are alike. And that’s in how wrong we were about being alike. The truth is, we are polar opposites. I don’t remember when this became the accepted fact. Or when the ignorant notion that we were alike became our favorite joke. We really get a kick out of it now.
Dramatic Effect
One year I took a landscape painting class with my talented mother. She pulled some strings to get me in the class, which I’m pretty sure means she lied. It turned out to be a class for people who actually make money painting. And I don’t mean with a roller. Professional artists like my mom. I’m not even an amateur. We painted every day en plein air, and every day I exhibited a dependence on my mother I haven’t had since kindergarten. I survived the class by parking my easel right up next to hers and using her palette (mine quickly became a muddy mess) and begging her to just paint my picture for me while no one was looking. Still, I managed to learn a thing or two. Like how hard a rock is to paint. Or how many colors there are in the branches of one solitary barren tree in winter. But one concept escaped me altogether, just like calculus did in college. Except with calculus I could speak the language enough to use it on tests, even though I didn’t understand it. That’s all calculus was: memorizable gibberish. My nemesis was the term color value. I had actual nightmares about color value. Our teacher was a portly little man with Albert Einstein hair and a mad scientist’s demeanor. I was scared to death of him. Thankfully, he ignored me, my not being a professional and all, and I never had to answer a single question about color value. But I was terrified that I might. Don’t laugh if I’m wrong, but I think color value may have something to do with the way the same color can be more than one entity. Its value is what makes it different and enables an artist to place equal but opposite colors next to each other for dramatic effect.
That’s what our differences do: they give our marriage dramatic effect. And we have learned to applaud them—the differences—for playing their assigned roles so well. The trick is learning to leverage our differences. (This is entirely different from your children leveraging them… that’s not good.) There are just so many ways being dissimilar is helpful. Tactically, by using both strengths to achieve all sorts of tasks from parenting to traveling to keeping house. Enrichingly, by expanding your bank account of interests and abilities to double its original size. Influentially, by weaving an impact on the world with the multi-colored assets of two people.
There are times when Bill and I operate like two well-oiled gears with precisely interlocking teeth in a purring machine. Our trip to London was a mechanical miracle of marriage. Every couple should take the trip of their lives after they have lived together for a while. By then you know who does what best. I did the research. Knew which castle was worth seeing, which tour was worth feeling like cattle for an afternoon to do, which galleries were worth that tedious neck-strain galleries give you. I took the pieces of the tourist puzzle—hotels, trains, places, food—and put it together in a plan. And then we went and Bill took over. Totally. He read maps and figured out the Tube. (In one day. Now I know he’s a genius) Before the trip I fretted just because I wanted to and my kind of fretting was fun. For me. While we were there he fretted because he wanted to and his kind of fretting was fun. For him. In this way, we took care of each other. We enjoyed each other. As a marriage, we purred.
This may seem like a small victory, but if you think about it, it is as worthy of a parade as one of Caesar’s triumphant returns to Rome from Gaul or Germania. That’s because it’s the little differences, really, that can be the most irksome. When we figure those out, we are the victors. At first glance, our differences are broad, but they dwell in the narrow alleyways of day to day life. Bill thinks in a straight line. I think it a dotted, darting line. Some days it looks like this: He makes sense and I don’t. But on others it’s: He is rigid and I’m flexible. And the next week: He is predictable and I’m dangerous. Many, many times we have stood – stubborn, unyielding, perhaps even martyrish – planted on our fixed points along whatever continuum it is that separates us, gazing at each other across the great divide, daring the other to move from his or her fixed point and come to ours. Every marriage has its own share of these fixed points.
Two Fixed Points
Take shopping. Which we have learned to do together as rarely as possible. Aside from the fact that Bill’s eyes are covered with more glaze than a Krispy Kreme doughnut after less than ten minutes in a mall, we don’t do well with this activity. Here’s how it goes:
Bill announces, “I’m going to buy these pants and this shirt.”
I, suspecting that he might be color blind after all, suggest, “Maybe you should get a warmer color for the shirt.” Or, if I am not feeling diplomatic, “That shirt doesn’t go with those pants.”
To which Bill says, “But they’re both blue.”
“That doesn’t make them go together. Besides, the shirt is kind of ugly.” Kind of, hah.
“What makes it ugly?” Bill asks. Innocently.
I have learned that he fully expects me to respond to this question with a linear, logical answer, one that could easily be converted to a flow chart two pages long. I used to try to do this, and failed miserably every time. That’s because I don’t speak his language. I can’t even memorize the gibberish for the test. Plus, in this environment I am not possessed by the get-me-out-of-here demon Bill has dancing behind the ever-thickening glaze on his eyeballs. My explanation of something so fundamentally obvious to me—that the shirt is ugly—used to lead to a spat of epic proportions. Me angry that he so stubbornly refuses to just let me be the expert on something he doesn’t even care about. And Bill angry that I can’t be objective when clearly objectivity is the only reasonable way to make any decision. Oh yes, we are different.
So different that it takes a tesseract to close the distance between us. Because we are both alike in this: we despise the distance. Sometimes the separation that lies between us is so vast or so unbending it can only be traveled by a using a fifth dimension. A tesseract. A wrinkle. Wrinkling the distance isn’t a science, nor is it a fictional impossibility. It is an act of grace. Or, rather, the art of grace. When we wrinkle the line, the distance is still there, we haven’t erased it, but it is relaxed, rendered inconsequential as it were. We’re exchanging one message for another. Instead of You don’t matter, we’re saying It doesn’t matter because you do. It’s a new morality. Instead of I’m right and You’re wrong, it’s We’re right. I don’t even know how to explain this. It’s not gibberish, but it is mysterious. I only know that when Bill and I have held the cord of our differences as lightly as we can and allowed the line between us to grow slack, we’ve met in the mystery of grace. Mrs. Whatsit was right. The shortest distance between two points isn’t a straight line. It’s grace.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Respite
Respite: Noun (ˈres-pət also ri-ˈspīt, British usually ˈres-ˌpīt)
1 : a period of temporary delay 2 : an interval of rest or relief
I am in machine-gun-mode and it feels good. There are things that need to be done and I am doing them and checking them off. Ahhhh. Bill named this setting on my dial a long time ago, probably during or soon after the flurry of activity that generally accompanies something I’m in charge of. For years, the only things I was ever in charge of involved not much more than cleaning our house and baking a few desserts. That’s not true, but as I look back from a time of measurable productivity (now) to that long season of home-based professional mom-ery when I did nothing quantifiable (then), that’s how it looks.
But the term machine-gun-mode surfaced then, so I must have been busy. I am a list-maker by nature; the rat-a-tat-tat of ammunition firing is a beautiful sound to me. A list in motion! Bill has made this observation: “People who write things down get things done.” This is profound. Not what he said, but that he said it. More on that later.
Here’s what I’ve learned about machine guns: If I’m not careful with mine, it can create carnage. I drastically reduce the collateral damage if I aim the gun only at myself. I do better if I put down my weapon altogether. But I am addicted to this turbo-charged form of perfectionism. I love the rush of accomplishment and activity. Until I breathe the dust I stir up. So I have finally admitted I have a problem. Workaholic, thy name is Kitti.
I just didn’t see this coming. I guess that’s because I’ve never done anything I would classify as work. Sure, I had jobs in high school and college. Babysitting the neighbors’ kids purely for the money doesn’t count. I worked after college right up until our first son was born. And then I didn’t.
But I did things. Projects. Meetings. Parties. Causes, even. I got odd part-time jobs once all the boys were in school, but that was more like a lark because I got to dress up and leave the house. It wasn’t “work” if work is a vocation. Even then I continued to do things. Thinking back, I have to say I have always approached certain tasks with a kind of fervor most would associate with drivenness. At least that’s what Bill would say. He is not. Driven, that is.
It’s not activity I crave, it’s completion. He says I am addicted to closure. I am not obsessed with busyness for busyness’ sake. The value of the list is the “done” feeling it evokes. We have two daughters-in-law. Both are, in this list-making, get-it-done way, like me. The other day Callie, wife of David, announced: “I am addicted to closure.”
I beamed, not because she shares my addiction, but because she speaks Murrayese. It means she is one of us. Now, David is like Bill. Uncannily so. Callie continued, “And I think David is addicted to loose ends.”
Here's what I have learned about loose ends: I need them. And they can be downright lovely when offered as a gift by the one who is exactly not like you and exactly what you need. The man who loves loose ends is the man who is at peace—even when you think he shouldn’t be. He can look at you while you are hyperventilating over… whatever it is you happen to hyperventilate over (I just ran through a mental list of the real life examples of my own personal reasons for rapid breathing and decided against self-exposure) and tell you it just isn’t worth the trouble. In a good marriage, there are often two messages bandied about. This isn’t worth the trouble and This is worth the trouble. You can tell which of us favors which message. Bill is there to question the trouble. Maybe not out loud, but by a lifestyle that would rather leave a few loose ends than go to all that trouble. Often, when I am going to the most trouble to tie things up, his loose ends provide a kind of respite for me.
A respite is a tiny Sabbath. It is an interval of rest. Like a gift card to my favorite store, the one I hardly ever allow myself to enter. Like a dream vacation. Like those water stations at 10k races or the Bradford Pear trees lined up on our street in spring that make me stop the car and worship. Or like spring itself.
A Forced Intermission
I remember the first time Bill formally imposed a Sabbath like this on me. Friends were coming over for dinner and I was bustling about our apartment in a lather of preparation. We lived in an old 1930’s townhouse, with wood floors in the dining room that I polished with Pledge the morning I invited all our elderly neighbors over for brunch. I served coffee that looked like iced tea and grabbed elbows as six little old ladies skated, their bangled arms flailing like windmills, across the slick floor. This is the apartment where Bill and I taught our friends’ children to slide down the stairs on their rears and smack a puddle of water on the kitchen counter with their palms and, unwittingly, got those kids in trouble. It’s where we wondered if we’d ever be parents and, then, it’s where we first were.
On this particular night, Bill says to me—has the gall to say—“I want you to stop everything fifteen minutes before seven and sit here with me on the couch.”
Seven, of course, is when our friends will arrive. If you’ve ever had guests over for dinner, you know this is the interval wherein all the drama takes place. It is the make-or-break quarter hour of the night. And he wants me (no, tells me) to sit still on the couch with him. He wants me to cease and desist from tying up loose ends. Like he can’t stand to watch me do it for a minute longer.
I have to add that Bill always does his share to help me. Don’t assume, like I am ashamed to say I have a few times in the past, that he is lazy. You know how the view from the window of a moving train is a blur? Well, when you are the blur, all other motion looks still.
So I do it. I stop and I sit. Quarter till seven. And I see Bill’s face. I see who he is a little more clearly. I tune in to something he has to say. And when our friends show up, I see their faces and tune in to them too. On this night nothing catastrophic happens in the kitchen or in the dining room or in the universe. We have a delightful evening, achieved with fifteen minutes less trouble than I thought possible.
Mostly, Bill’s life and mine connect because one of us has to modulate the pace. One of us has to make peace with the achievement quotient of the other. And when I am the one adjusting, a respite feels like a cussed “period of temporary delay.” Like when he refuses to dance with me in that I’m on a roll don’t slow me down dance. Or when I am convinced he needs to go to Procrastinators Anonymous and I might need the support group for the victimized spouses. When I moralize his lack of trouble. (How dare he be easy-going when my goings-on are so rough?) And besides, why can’t I be the mistress of my own timetable? Why can’t I rest when I want to? I just played those last two questions in my head as an Israelite whining to Moses in the desert about the fourth commandment. Alright, I take it back.
I am learning to recognize the loose ends for what they are to me, for the way a sovereign God put Bill and me together with a potential for breathtaking harmony. The loose ends are invitations to savor. To enjoy. One of the glorious reasons God made my husband so… so opposite from me. To give me respite.
Respect for the Loose Ends
Buried in the word respite is the root word respect (It does not mean, as it appears, a do-over for spite). Respect: I need to remember that. When my husband loves me enough to stand in front of the hurtling freight train that is my life and all but command me to stop, whether directly with words or obliquely just by being who he is, I need to respect him. If not for his bravery, for the fact that God is the “Blessed Controller of all things” and gave me such a husband on purpose.
(Now would be the perfect cue for a reference to Martha and Mary, wouldn’t it? But I cannot add one iota of meaning to that pristine parable. Oh wait that wasn’t a parable, it really happened didn’t it? Of course it did. So there. Read it yourself.)
Giving in to the good that drives you crazy in another is good for you. It’s healthy. And it changes your perspective. That’s how I’ve learned to appreciate loose ends like art. Consider the beauty of loose ends—a little boy’s cut off jeans (the kind you absolutely cannot wear in the swimming pool) which are especially cute worn with cowboy boots and a train hat (I have pictures). Santa’s beard. Tassels, fringe, flowing tresses on those “you’re worth it” commercials. A pony’s tail. All manner of flora at the precise moment when it explodes into maturity. All loose ends. All ruined if tamed into something braided, managed, tamed or controlled.
But what about the lists? What do I do with my desire for carpe diem in a meted-out, measurable format? Sometimes I want to ask Jesus this question: If Martha didn’t get the food ready and serve it and wash the dishes afterwards, please tell me who was going to get it done? Is there any value in my sympathy with or my similarity to dear old Martha? And if Bill contributes a loose end here and there in the textile of my day, what do I contribute to his?
It’s obvious, isn’t it? We had been married, oh, a hundred years, when Bill said, “People who write things down get things done.” And this is what I heard: By observing others—my wife included—I have learned that loose ends are only lovely in season. The other season is the one where commitments are made and honored in writing. Where stuff gets done. Where drivenness is necessary and the machine gun is a worthy instrument. Where some things are worth the trouble.
We make a good pair, don’t you think? What could have been a collision of opposites has become, over time, a woven fabric of depth and beauty. If marriage is time, we’ve put our seasons together in a complete year. Just when one weather pattern gets old, another follows. Each is a respite for the other. And over and over and so on. And this, we both agree, has been worth the trouble.
1 : a period of temporary delay 2 : an interval of rest or relief
I am in machine-gun-mode and it feels good. There are things that need to be done and I am doing them and checking them off. Ahhhh. Bill named this setting on my dial a long time ago, probably during or soon after the flurry of activity that generally accompanies something I’m in charge of. For years, the only things I was ever in charge of involved not much more than cleaning our house and baking a few desserts. That’s not true, but as I look back from a time of measurable productivity (now) to that long season of home-based professional mom-ery when I did nothing quantifiable (then), that’s how it looks.
But the term machine-gun-mode surfaced then, so I must have been busy. I am a list-maker by nature; the rat-a-tat-tat of ammunition firing is a beautiful sound to me. A list in motion! Bill has made this observation: “People who write things down get things done.” This is profound. Not what he said, but that he said it. More on that later.
Here’s what I’ve learned about machine guns: If I’m not careful with mine, it can create carnage. I drastically reduce the collateral damage if I aim the gun only at myself. I do better if I put down my weapon altogether. But I am addicted to this turbo-charged form of perfectionism. I love the rush of accomplishment and activity. Until I breathe the dust I stir up. So I have finally admitted I have a problem. Workaholic, thy name is Kitti.
I just didn’t see this coming. I guess that’s because I’ve never done anything I would classify as work. Sure, I had jobs in high school and college. Babysitting the neighbors’ kids purely for the money doesn’t count. I worked after college right up until our first son was born. And then I didn’t.
But I did things. Projects. Meetings. Parties. Causes, even. I got odd part-time jobs once all the boys were in school, but that was more like a lark because I got to dress up and leave the house. It wasn’t “work” if work is a vocation. Even then I continued to do things. Thinking back, I have to say I have always approached certain tasks with a kind of fervor most would associate with drivenness. At least that’s what Bill would say. He is not. Driven, that is.
It’s not activity I crave, it’s completion. He says I am addicted to closure. I am not obsessed with busyness for busyness’ sake. The value of the list is the “done” feeling it evokes. We have two daughters-in-law. Both are, in this list-making, get-it-done way, like me. The other day Callie, wife of David, announced: “I am addicted to closure.”
I beamed, not because she shares my addiction, but because she speaks Murrayese. It means she is one of us. Now, David is like Bill. Uncannily so. Callie continued, “And I think David is addicted to loose ends.”
Here's what I have learned about loose ends: I need them. And they can be downright lovely when offered as a gift by the one who is exactly not like you and exactly what you need. The man who loves loose ends is the man who is at peace—even when you think he shouldn’t be. He can look at you while you are hyperventilating over… whatever it is you happen to hyperventilate over (I just ran through a mental list of the real life examples of my own personal reasons for rapid breathing and decided against self-exposure) and tell you it just isn’t worth the trouble. In a good marriage, there are often two messages bandied about. This isn’t worth the trouble and This is worth the trouble. You can tell which of us favors which message. Bill is there to question the trouble. Maybe not out loud, but by a lifestyle that would rather leave a few loose ends than go to all that trouble. Often, when I am going to the most trouble to tie things up, his loose ends provide a kind of respite for me.
A respite is a tiny Sabbath. It is an interval of rest. Like a gift card to my favorite store, the one I hardly ever allow myself to enter. Like a dream vacation. Like those water stations at 10k races or the Bradford Pear trees lined up on our street in spring that make me stop the car and worship. Or like spring itself.
A Forced Intermission
I remember the first time Bill formally imposed a Sabbath like this on me. Friends were coming over for dinner and I was bustling about our apartment in a lather of preparation. We lived in an old 1930’s townhouse, with wood floors in the dining room that I polished with Pledge the morning I invited all our elderly neighbors over for brunch. I served coffee that looked like iced tea and grabbed elbows as six little old ladies skated, their bangled arms flailing like windmills, across the slick floor. This is the apartment where Bill and I taught our friends’ children to slide down the stairs on their rears and smack a puddle of water on the kitchen counter with their palms and, unwittingly, got those kids in trouble. It’s where we wondered if we’d ever be parents and, then, it’s where we first were.
On this particular night, Bill says to me—has the gall to say—“I want you to stop everything fifteen minutes before seven and sit here with me on the couch.”
Seven, of course, is when our friends will arrive. If you’ve ever had guests over for dinner, you know this is the interval wherein all the drama takes place. It is the make-or-break quarter hour of the night. And he wants me (no, tells me) to sit still on the couch with him. He wants me to cease and desist from tying up loose ends. Like he can’t stand to watch me do it for a minute longer.
I have to add that Bill always does his share to help me. Don’t assume, like I am ashamed to say I have a few times in the past, that he is lazy. You know how the view from the window of a moving train is a blur? Well, when you are the blur, all other motion looks still.
So I do it. I stop and I sit. Quarter till seven. And I see Bill’s face. I see who he is a little more clearly. I tune in to something he has to say. And when our friends show up, I see their faces and tune in to them too. On this night nothing catastrophic happens in the kitchen or in the dining room or in the universe. We have a delightful evening, achieved with fifteen minutes less trouble than I thought possible.
Mostly, Bill’s life and mine connect because one of us has to modulate the pace. One of us has to make peace with the achievement quotient of the other. And when I am the one adjusting, a respite feels like a cussed “period of temporary delay.” Like when he refuses to dance with me in that I’m on a roll don’t slow me down dance. Or when I am convinced he needs to go to Procrastinators Anonymous and I might need the support group for the victimized spouses. When I moralize his lack of trouble. (How dare he be easy-going when my goings-on are so rough?) And besides, why can’t I be the mistress of my own timetable? Why can’t I rest when I want to? I just played those last two questions in my head as an Israelite whining to Moses in the desert about the fourth commandment. Alright, I take it back.
I am learning to recognize the loose ends for what they are to me, for the way a sovereign God put Bill and me together with a potential for breathtaking harmony. The loose ends are invitations to savor. To enjoy. One of the glorious reasons God made my husband so… so opposite from me. To give me respite.
Respect for the Loose Ends
Buried in the word respite is the root word respect (It does not mean, as it appears, a do-over for spite). Respect: I need to remember that. When my husband loves me enough to stand in front of the hurtling freight train that is my life and all but command me to stop, whether directly with words or obliquely just by being who he is, I need to respect him. If not for his bravery, for the fact that God is the “Blessed Controller of all things” and gave me such a husband on purpose.
(Now would be the perfect cue for a reference to Martha and Mary, wouldn’t it? But I cannot add one iota of meaning to that pristine parable. Oh wait that wasn’t a parable, it really happened didn’t it? Of course it did. So there. Read it yourself.)
Giving in to the good that drives you crazy in another is good for you. It’s healthy. And it changes your perspective. That’s how I’ve learned to appreciate loose ends like art. Consider the beauty of loose ends—a little boy’s cut off jeans (the kind you absolutely cannot wear in the swimming pool) which are especially cute worn with cowboy boots and a train hat (I have pictures). Santa’s beard. Tassels, fringe, flowing tresses on those “you’re worth it” commercials. A pony’s tail. All manner of flora at the precise moment when it explodes into maturity. All loose ends. All ruined if tamed into something braided, managed, tamed or controlled.
But what about the lists? What do I do with my desire for carpe diem in a meted-out, measurable format? Sometimes I want to ask Jesus this question: If Martha didn’t get the food ready and serve it and wash the dishes afterwards, please tell me who was going to get it done? Is there any value in my sympathy with or my similarity to dear old Martha? And if Bill contributes a loose end here and there in the textile of my day, what do I contribute to his?
It’s obvious, isn’t it? We had been married, oh, a hundred years, when Bill said, “People who write things down get things done.” And this is what I heard: By observing others—my wife included—I have learned that loose ends are only lovely in season. The other season is the one where commitments are made and honored in writing. Where stuff gets done. Where drivenness is necessary and the machine gun is a worthy instrument. Where some things are worth the trouble.
We make a good pair, don’t you think? What could have been a collision of opposites has become, over time, a woven fabric of depth and beauty. If marriage is time, we’ve put our seasons together in a complete year. Just when one weather pattern gets old, another follows. Each is a respite for the other. And over and over and so on. And this, we both agree, has been worth the trouble.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Palimpsest
Palimpsest: Noun(ˈpa-ləm(p)-ˌsest, pə-ˈlim(p)-sest) 1 : writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased 2 : something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface
I remember chalkboards. It’s not like chalkboards are relics of antiquity or anything, but they do possess a certain old school charm. Some friends of ours live in a 1940’s school building cum loft. Their second bedroom has the original chalkboard on the wall. I am so jealous. Who wouldn’t want a 12 by 6 foot remnant of history on their bedroom wall? I sometimes think if I stare at my friend’s chalkboard long enough, I’ll see the neatly-printed names of children who are now members of the AARP. I suppose I can just blur my eyes and focus, like you’re supposed to do to find the hidden image of a dolphin in those Jackson Pollacky prints you buy at the mall. With enough concentration, I might see homework assignments from the 50’s or maybe even a mention of one of the Apollo lift-offs.
Bill and I have a new chalkboard in our kitchen. It is far more ornamental than useful. From time to time I’ll scrawl a phone number or date on it, but usually I write things like Happy Birthday Jesus (a message that remained from Christmas until almost Easter) or Esse Quam Videri, because I love that phrase. Esse Quam Videri means “to be rather than seem to be” which makes it a ridiculous thing to broadcast on a sign. But mostly our chalkboard just looks nice on the wall.
On the functional to aesthetic continuum, I fall on the ‘how it looks’ end. (Hence my need to be reminded esse quam videri) That’s why I wouldn’t dare put a dry erase board in our kitchen. Wouldn’t dare.
Now that I’ve established that, I have an announcement to make. I have discovered a way to clean dry erase boards between uses. This is huge. Because I still use them quite often in locations other than our home and I hate the way the marker residue lingers like dark ghosts on the glossy white surface. I’m not sure I can divulge this secret in print without committing a serious trademark infringement, but seriously, the company with the Yul Brynner look-alike on the label should thank me for this. Those white sponges with the word “magic” on the box are true to their name. It’s magical the way they work on the most stubborn dry erase stains (which, by the way, is an oxymoron and in a perfect world shouldn’t exist).
Until this amazing discovery, I would have called the dry erase board a modern palimpsest. That’s because, in the absence of a truly effective eraser, most dry erase boards resemble their ancient ancestors: their reusability is flawed. The first message writers used animal skins that were cured, scratched with rebus-like messages then scraped off and written over. The scraping was about as effective as the common felt eraser. Archaeologists bless their lucky stars for this. But technically a dry erase board cannot be a palimpsest because—technically—it can be erased. That means the humble chalkboard may well be the final palimpsest in history and, therefore, the last form of writing material that is a decent metaphor for the way life is. On a chalkboard the messages from earlier times bleed through. It has layers. Depth. Just like life.
Life in Layers
In life, the sediment of conclusions reached that redeemed former mistakes lies dormant—but not dead—beneath the surface. This is commonly known as wisdom. The things you know that you preface with “Somewhere along the way I learned…” Failures that seep through when you need them and, in their use, become victories. This is why sages are generally not proud. Mistakes humble them before making them wise. If ever I am called wise it is only because I have made so many mistakes.
I do know a few things. Like teenage boys don’t talk about what matters to them when they are pushed to do so. You have to wait for it. Or you really shouldn’t polish your wooden floors with Pledge. They look lovely, but you could get sued. Or, when discussing a sticky situation, in person is better than a phone call and a phone call is better than email. Or whoever said you could potty train a toddler in one day—one day—lied. It takes patience… and more than one day. Underneath these nuggets of wisdom lie mistakes. A giant hill of them.
Marriage can be a palimpsest too, with the specters of the past stubbornly refusing to fade. But this can be a good thing. According to my husband, I have not aged. What I was bleeds through and, happily, obscures what I am. Sometimes I swear Bill is myopic to the brink of idiocy. To him I am a slate with years of messages overlaid on top of each other. It’s not that he doesn’t see the topmost message, it’s that he sees them all. I know this because I see him the same way.
Behold the optical miracle of marriage. There is a computer graphics trick that mimics this a bit. By some digital sleight of hand, one face gradually morphs into another face. But that is a ruse and a creepy one at that. I’m talking about a truth that can’t be explained until you’ve lived it. It percolates for years. When I look at Bill, I see all I have ever known of him and, at times, the years before I knew him. His face is at once graven with the results of expressing himself countless times (he smiles with his eyes and now they crinkle in perpetuity) and as fresh as when I first saw it. I was primed for his face before I went downstairs to meet him for our first date by a friend’s announcement to me that “a boy with the most beautiful eyes” was waiting for me in the lobby. She was right.
This is when a palimpsest is a wonder. A two-for-one deal of the century. It combines the richness of history with the breathtaking beauty of initial impact.
Upon further inspection, this metaphor breaks down more quickly than most. The act of seeing Bill this way isn’t consistent. It is like romance itself: as ungraspable as the wisps of fog leftover from night when the sun takes its time rising. It’s the way it’s supposed to be, but isn’t always. When I catch a glimpse of Bill in this unerased way, I feel a stab of grief because I can’t hang on to it. A sadness as when, on summer mornings, I would awaken to find the jar of golden light specks I’d captured the night before filled with dry insect carcasses. No matter how many holes I poked in the lid of the jar, the enchantment didn’t last very long. And I ache for it to.
The Dark Side
I remember a substitute teacher we had for two whole weeks in second grade. She said “Mizriz” instead of Mrs. I remember the morning when she wrote my name—all by itself—on the green chalkboard that looked a lot like the one in my friend’s bedroom. My crime: chewing on my pencil. She confiscated my fat red pencil and held it up between her thumb and forefinger like it was a dead animal’s tail. “Class, Kitti has a very bad habit,” she smirked to my classmates as she wagged my pencil before them, “and maybe if I embarrass her enough she’ll quit.”
I couldn’t have been more mortified if I’d wet my pants in the cloakroom while waiting for the “go” sign on the bathroom door. That actually happened, but by then Mizriz Substitute was off torturing another class somewhere and I was dealt with more discreetly by my regular teacher.
As painful memories go, that’s a mild one, but still I wouldn’t mind erasing it. And there are others, believe me. There are those times when my own mistakes are embarrassing or shameful and I wish they wouldn’t linger and bleed through to the surface of my life like ugly smudges. Aching to see through layers to the beauty is one thing. Hurting for want of an eraser is another. Not all mistakes turn into wisdom. Some are just bad. Between the two of us, Bill and I have had our share of markings we’d like to eradicate. I reacted. He neglected. I spouted off. He withdrew. I overwhelmed. He withheld. Sometimes the hieroglyphics are so predictable and deeply stained we can’t help but look for them. There are definitely those times when I curse the layers. They expose me. They are not safe.
This is the evil power of a palimpsest. What lingers to show through can be an unbidden curse from the past. A way of seeing someone that they don’t deserve. A smear that whispers in its insidious ghost language: “Remember when…? Don’t forget what happened. Don’t forgive.” A cowardly message that has us using terms like track record and body of evidence and personal history when we refer to people. Usually the people we love most. Early uses of the word palimpsest referred to the “scraping” of earlier layers on parchment or leather. In Sanskrit, its root is babhasti, or “he chews.” Ouch. The unavoidable implication: erasing and rewriting hurts. To live is dangerous.
Rock
So what’s a vulnerable palimpsest to do? I’ll tell you what every one of us does: we become hard and unerasable and impenetrable. We hide our true selves so thoroughly no one can see through. We become granite. Rock.
The marriage pundits say: “Never use the word never.” They’re right. Never is a hard word. We use never when we want to erect a brick wall between ourselves and our spouses. I remember one night near the end of our first year of marriage when Bill and I each came face to face with a major weakness in the other. Simultaneously. He was this way. I was that. I might not change. He wouldn’t ever, I was sure of it. We were looking at years of co-existence. It was bleak. For a few hours I rolled that poisonous word never around in the bitter taste in my mouth. I was never going to risk hurt by being myself again. Never. I was going to withhold my true self from the man I loved.
I look back on the decision I almost made and cringe. It is one of the scariest what-might-have-beens in our marriage. It would have begun the calcification process with light speed.
Way before Simon and Garfunkel sang “I am a rock,” humans have protected themselves this way; with voluntary fossilization. It is the essence of the sin nature Adam and Eve bequeathed to us. And it never works. Yes, rocks are permanent and unerasable and secure. Yes, they are strong and impenetrable. But that doesn’t describe us, it describes God. Only God. Over one hundred times God is referred to in the Bible either directly or indirectly as a Rock. And God associated with rocks too. When he wanted to write something down, he used a rock. If something is written in stone it is most likely going to stay there. He could have etched the Ten Commandments on something less durable than stone. But he didn’t. He chose an enduring material that jealously displays one message only. Rock.
But we were never meant to be rocks. In fact, when we are described this way it isn’t good. Scripture seems to say that for a human to be rock-like is a real problem. We were meant to be soft and pliable and, yes, erasable. Part of God’s redemptive plan is: Number One, to replace our self-protective hardness and, Number Two, to be—himself—our only Rock. Long before Jesus showed up, God promised “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 11:19 NIV) No one gets to be a Rock but God.
Which leaves us weak and defenseless, doesn’t it? The Psalmist refers to us as a blade of grass, a puff of smoke, a wisp, and God is over and over called a Rock. We’re flimsy, he’s substantial. We are the sum total of breakable slate and chalk dust and he is the Rock of Ages. This is the truth. When we mess with this reality and try to turn our hearts to the safety of stone, God is after us to take that heart away and replace it with something soft. Something he can write upon: “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” (Jeremiah 31:33 NIV)
I know this: A marriage between two soft, sensitive hearts who choose to hide themselves in the safety of the Rock is far better than a marriage between two strong, stony hearts. I could tell stories. Just look at the layers that have bled through to the surface in Bill’s life and mine, and you’ll see the mistakes that have made us wise. A giant hill of them.
Those mistakes are visible. Stare at either of us long enough and you will see them. In fact, they are so noticeable, I am often tempted to harden my surface in a vain effort at self-protection. But then I remember the Rock. I can run to him. I can hide in him. I can build my unsubstantial life on the substantial foundation of his truth.
One day I was reading the last book in the Bible and I discovered that, while I can never be a rock, I can own one. God promises to give me, physically, a small piece of who he is, a rock. Revelation 2:17 says, “To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.” I don’t know a lot of Greek, but I expected the word for stone here to be the word petra. Petra is the word used to describe the firm foundation in the parable comparing sand and rock. It is used when Jesus is described as the Chief Cornerstone. In Revelation it references our propensity for going to any other rock but the Rock:
And the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains and they said to the mountains and to the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.” (Revelation 6:15-16 NIV)
But the stone God promises to give us is not a petra, it’s a psephos, which means a tiny, worn pebble. In ancient courts of justice white pebbles were given to signify acquittal. Black stones were symbols of judgment. The word psephos is so tied to this idea of judgment or acquittal, it can also mean “to vote.” This white pebble engraved with my secret name is a reminder to me of the most discerning of erasures, where the sins on the surface of my life have been completely eradicated by blood. All the ones beneath too, whether they seep through for others to see or not. Yes, I am a flimsy palimpsest, but I am holding onto the Rock.
I remember chalkboards. It’s not like chalkboards are relics of antiquity or anything, but they do possess a certain old school charm. Some friends of ours live in a 1940’s school building cum loft. Their second bedroom has the original chalkboard on the wall. I am so jealous. Who wouldn’t want a 12 by 6 foot remnant of history on their bedroom wall? I sometimes think if I stare at my friend’s chalkboard long enough, I’ll see the neatly-printed names of children who are now members of the AARP. I suppose I can just blur my eyes and focus, like you’re supposed to do to find the hidden image of a dolphin in those Jackson Pollacky prints you buy at the mall. With enough concentration, I might see homework assignments from the 50’s or maybe even a mention of one of the Apollo lift-offs.
Bill and I have a new chalkboard in our kitchen. It is far more ornamental than useful. From time to time I’ll scrawl a phone number or date on it, but usually I write things like Happy Birthday Jesus (a message that remained from Christmas until almost Easter) or Esse Quam Videri, because I love that phrase. Esse Quam Videri means “to be rather than seem to be” which makes it a ridiculous thing to broadcast on a sign. But mostly our chalkboard just looks nice on the wall.
On the functional to aesthetic continuum, I fall on the ‘how it looks’ end. (Hence my need to be reminded esse quam videri) That’s why I wouldn’t dare put a dry erase board in our kitchen. Wouldn’t dare.
Now that I’ve established that, I have an announcement to make. I have discovered a way to clean dry erase boards between uses. This is huge. Because I still use them quite often in locations other than our home and I hate the way the marker residue lingers like dark ghosts on the glossy white surface. I’m not sure I can divulge this secret in print without committing a serious trademark infringement, but seriously, the company with the Yul Brynner look-alike on the label should thank me for this. Those white sponges with the word “magic” on the box are true to their name. It’s magical the way they work on the most stubborn dry erase stains (which, by the way, is an oxymoron and in a perfect world shouldn’t exist).
Until this amazing discovery, I would have called the dry erase board a modern palimpsest. That’s because, in the absence of a truly effective eraser, most dry erase boards resemble their ancient ancestors: their reusability is flawed. The first message writers used animal skins that were cured, scratched with rebus-like messages then scraped off and written over. The scraping was about as effective as the common felt eraser. Archaeologists bless their lucky stars for this. But technically a dry erase board cannot be a palimpsest because—technically—it can be erased. That means the humble chalkboard may well be the final palimpsest in history and, therefore, the last form of writing material that is a decent metaphor for the way life is. On a chalkboard the messages from earlier times bleed through. It has layers. Depth. Just like life.
Life in Layers
In life, the sediment of conclusions reached that redeemed former mistakes lies dormant—but not dead—beneath the surface. This is commonly known as wisdom. The things you know that you preface with “Somewhere along the way I learned…” Failures that seep through when you need them and, in their use, become victories. This is why sages are generally not proud. Mistakes humble them before making them wise. If ever I am called wise it is only because I have made so many mistakes.
I do know a few things. Like teenage boys don’t talk about what matters to them when they are pushed to do so. You have to wait for it. Or you really shouldn’t polish your wooden floors with Pledge. They look lovely, but you could get sued. Or, when discussing a sticky situation, in person is better than a phone call and a phone call is better than email. Or whoever said you could potty train a toddler in one day—one day—lied. It takes patience… and more than one day. Underneath these nuggets of wisdom lie mistakes. A giant hill of them.
Marriage can be a palimpsest too, with the specters of the past stubbornly refusing to fade. But this can be a good thing. According to my husband, I have not aged. What I was bleeds through and, happily, obscures what I am. Sometimes I swear Bill is myopic to the brink of idiocy. To him I am a slate with years of messages overlaid on top of each other. It’s not that he doesn’t see the topmost message, it’s that he sees them all. I know this because I see him the same way.
Behold the optical miracle of marriage. There is a computer graphics trick that mimics this a bit. By some digital sleight of hand, one face gradually morphs into another face. But that is a ruse and a creepy one at that. I’m talking about a truth that can’t be explained until you’ve lived it. It percolates for years. When I look at Bill, I see all I have ever known of him and, at times, the years before I knew him. His face is at once graven with the results of expressing himself countless times (he smiles with his eyes and now they crinkle in perpetuity) and as fresh as when I first saw it. I was primed for his face before I went downstairs to meet him for our first date by a friend’s announcement to me that “a boy with the most beautiful eyes” was waiting for me in the lobby. She was right.
This is when a palimpsest is a wonder. A two-for-one deal of the century. It combines the richness of history with the breathtaking beauty of initial impact.
Upon further inspection, this metaphor breaks down more quickly than most. The act of seeing Bill this way isn’t consistent. It is like romance itself: as ungraspable as the wisps of fog leftover from night when the sun takes its time rising. It’s the way it’s supposed to be, but isn’t always. When I catch a glimpse of Bill in this unerased way, I feel a stab of grief because I can’t hang on to it. A sadness as when, on summer mornings, I would awaken to find the jar of golden light specks I’d captured the night before filled with dry insect carcasses. No matter how many holes I poked in the lid of the jar, the enchantment didn’t last very long. And I ache for it to.
The Dark Side
I remember a substitute teacher we had for two whole weeks in second grade. She said “Mizriz” instead of Mrs. I remember the morning when she wrote my name—all by itself—on the green chalkboard that looked a lot like the one in my friend’s bedroom. My crime: chewing on my pencil. She confiscated my fat red pencil and held it up between her thumb and forefinger like it was a dead animal’s tail. “Class, Kitti has a very bad habit,” she smirked to my classmates as she wagged my pencil before them, “and maybe if I embarrass her enough she’ll quit.”
I couldn’t have been more mortified if I’d wet my pants in the cloakroom while waiting for the “go” sign on the bathroom door. That actually happened, but by then Mizriz Substitute was off torturing another class somewhere and I was dealt with more discreetly by my regular teacher.
As painful memories go, that’s a mild one, but still I wouldn’t mind erasing it. And there are others, believe me. There are those times when my own mistakes are embarrassing or shameful and I wish they wouldn’t linger and bleed through to the surface of my life like ugly smudges. Aching to see through layers to the beauty is one thing. Hurting for want of an eraser is another. Not all mistakes turn into wisdom. Some are just bad. Between the two of us, Bill and I have had our share of markings we’d like to eradicate. I reacted. He neglected. I spouted off. He withdrew. I overwhelmed. He withheld. Sometimes the hieroglyphics are so predictable and deeply stained we can’t help but look for them. There are definitely those times when I curse the layers. They expose me. They are not safe.
This is the evil power of a palimpsest. What lingers to show through can be an unbidden curse from the past. A way of seeing someone that they don’t deserve. A smear that whispers in its insidious ghost language: “Remember when…? Don’t forget what happened. Don’t forgive.” A cowardly message that has us using terms like track record and body of evidence and personal history when we refer to people. Usually the people we love most. Early uses of the word palimpsest referred to the “scraping” of earlier layers on parchment or leather. In Sanskrit, its root is babhasti, or “he chews.” Ouch. The unavoidable implication: erasing and rewriting hurts. To live is dangerous.
Rock
So what’s a vulnerable palimpsest to do? I’ll tell you what every one of us does: we become hard and unerasable and impenetrable. We hide our true selves so thoroughly no one can see through. We become granite. Rock.
The marriage pundits say: “Never use the word never.” They’re right. Never is a hard word. We use never when we want to erect a brick wall between ourselves and our spouses. I remember one night near the end of our first year of marriage when Bill and I each came face to face with a major weakness in the other. Simultaneously. He was this way. I was that. I might not change. He wouldn’t ever, I was sure of it. We were looking at years of co-existence. It was bleak. For a few hours I rolled that poisonous word never around in the bitter taste in my mouth. I was never going to risk hurt by being myself again. Never. I was going to withhold my true self from the man I loved.
I look back on the decision I almost made and cringe. It is one of the scariest what-might-have-beens in our marriage. It would have begun the calcification process with light speed.
Way before Simon and Garfunkel sang “I am a rock,” humans have protected themselves this way; with voluntary fossilization. It is the essence of the sin nature Adam and Eve bequeathed to us. And it never works. Yes, rocks are permanent and unerasable and secure. Yes, they are strong and impenetrable. But that doesn’t describe us, it describes God. Only God. Over one hundred times God is referred to in the Bible either directly or indirectly as a Rock. And God associated with rocks too. When he wanted to write something down, he used a rock. If something is written in stone it is most likely going to stay there. He could have etched the Ten Commandments on something less durable than stone. But he didn’t. He chose an enduring material that jealously displays one message only. Rock.
But we were never meant to be rocks. In fact, when we are described this way it isn’t good. Scripture seems to say that for a human to be rock-like is a real problem. We were meant to be soft and pliable and, yes, erasable. Part of God’s redemptive plan is: Number One, to replace our self-protective hardness and, Number Two, to be—himself—our only Rock. Long before Jesus showed up, God promised “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 11:19 NIV) No one gets to be a Rock but God.
Which leaves us weak and defenseless, doesn’t it? The Psalmist refers to us as a blade of grass, a puff of smoke, a wisp, and God is over and over called a Rock. We’re flimsy, he’s substantial. We are the sum total of breakable slate and chalk dust and he is the Rock of Ages. This is the truth. When we mess with this reality and try to turn our hearts to the safety of stone, God is after us to take that heart away and replace it with something soft. Something he can write upon: “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” (Jeremiah 31:33 NIV)
I know this: A marriage between two soft, sensitive hearts who choose to hide themselves in the safety of the Rock is far better than a marriage between two strong, stony hearts. I could tell stories. Just look at the layers that have bled through to the surface in Bill’s life and mine, and you’ll see the mistakes that have made us wise. A giant hill of them.
Those mistakes are visible. Stare at either of us long enough and you will see them. In fact, they are so noticeable, I am often tempted to harden my surface in a vain effort at self-protection. But then I remember the Rock. I can run to him. I can hide in him. I can build my unsubstantial life on the substantial foundation of his truth.
One day I was reading the last book in the Bible and I discovered that, while I can never be a rock, I can own one. God promises to give me, physically, a small piece of who he is, a rock. Revelation 2:17 says, “To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.” I don’t know a lot of Greek, but I expected the word for stone here to be the word petra. Petra is the word used to describe the firm foundation in the parable comparing sand and rock. It is used when Jesus is described as the Chief Cornerstone. In Revelation it references our propensity for going to any other rock but the Rock:
And the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains and they said to the mountains and to the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.” (Revelation 6:15-16 NIV)
But the stone God promises to give us is not a petra, it’s a psephos, which means a tiny, worn pebble. In ancient courts of justice white pebbles were given to signify acquittal. Black stones were symbols of judgment. The word psephos is so tied to this idea of judgment or acquittal, it can also mean “to vote.” This white pebble engraved with my secret name is a reminder to me of the most discerning of erasures, where the sins on the surface of my life have been completely eradicated by blood. All the ones beneath too, whether they seep through for others to see or not. Yes, I am a flimsy palimpsest, but I am holding onto the Rock.
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