Dear January

I don’t suppose I ought to be surprised to find you at once so brief and so long, but, all questions of “ought” aside, I am surprised.  Does anyone get used to time, I wonder, or are we always to be baffled by it, creatures designed for Timeless, caught in today and today and today?

There is reason, though, to be surprised at your balminess: tricking the daffodils to blossom before their time, teasing open windows which we thought to have kept demurely shut, mocking us for the affectation of winter coats and scarves, you overturn any notions of your solemnity. Perhaps in this, like Mr. Frank Churchill, you have “used every body ill,” but your mischievous face is so charming that I, for one, am “delighted to forgive” you.

Besides, you bring gifts to soothe my unsettled expectations:

*The satisfaction of matching nearly all their names to their faces in the classroom before they raised their hands.

*Personalities emerging from behind typed paragraphs.

*An owl on a fence-post, meeting our delighted gaze with perfect equanimity before flying away into the night.

*People who remember me — grace.

*The aforementioned daffodils; also pink camelias.

*The threat of tornadoes never materializing, so that though I woke and heard wind in the night, in the morning nothing was broken or lost.

*New piano music to draw me from the one keyboard to the other.

And so you hasten, January, to the place of your setting, and I hasten from today to today to today, with tomorrow always shining with some new thought, and Timeless promised, an end of bafflement.  But while you’re still here, and while I’m with you, and while the clouds blush in the blue sky and the naked trees and brown field look softer than I’ve seen them in other Januaries, I thought I’d like to tell you that I consider you to be passing in what might be called — though I mightn’t exactly recommend it if you were writing an academic essay – “a very well manner.”

being reminded

It may seem strange, but sometimes I forget it: the white badge of scandalous love I wear on my face. I walk out into the world supposing my face is as much like any other as any face is like other faces.  And so, sometimes, I am confused.  Today’s new student’s gaze was so persistent, so full of questions, disconcerting to the teacher who tried so hard to make everything clear, who kept looking up to find him still staring. (Most people have been taught, by his age, that staring is impolite.)  Finally, though, I realized it as he finally began with the familiar preamble, “It might be rude to ask, but …” and raised his hand in the familiar gesture to his own left brow. Such a relief it was to know the meaning of his looking, I think I beamed at him as I gave the familiar, simple explanation: how it changed when I was eight, how it doesn’t hurt, how I was glad he’d asked.

And I was glad. Those questions don’t always gladden me.  There are the days when I wax angry at the impertinence of people who deem the pigmentation of my lashes to be their concern as well as mine, days when I want nothing more than anonymity, days when I wish I did not inspire the cashier to call her niece in Louisiana to tell said niece about me. But today I was glad.

I rarely tell people the whole story; I didn’t today: how I look upon it as a mark of love, how it reverberates with echoes of other stories for me now, stories of wounds being made beautiful, how to smile when I am asked is somehow, for me, to answer for the hope that is in me. How sometimes I forget that hope, the scandal of that love, how their questions remind me. How He tells me:

You are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you.*

Oh, yes; today I am glad you asked.

*Isaiah 43:4

down to the sea in ships

I have spent a long, quiet day travelling from the first page of Silas Crockett to the three-hundred and thirty-seventh — only about sixty left to the end.  I’ve sailed round the world from Maine in the Southern Seas and the Solace Winthrop, and puffed up and down the New England coast in the steamer Searsport. I have seen generations of sea-faring men born and die, waited and watched with their waiting, watching women. Seen styles change and travel transform, and yet been rooted to one family name, one graciously aging house in an imagined village on the Maine coast.

Now, with those many days packed into my one — and yet they fit without crowding, like Narnian days — I am swathed in quietness, remembering a girl in her early teens who spent days and days wrapped in other worlds, so that days like today were not novelties then.  And I wonder if that is why she said so little, and if the habit of watching other lives in books trained her to watch people outside of books.

The day with the book somehow puts a distance between me and all worlds, so that the events of the past week in my piece of Mississippi seem as distant and dream-like as the luminous Maine coast one hundred and fifty years ago. And yet tomorrow a new week opens, with all the bits of this past week crowding back, important and necessary.

The forty-nine students, whose faces and names I keep taking up in my mind, working to stick them together with the bits of their stories which I’ve learned and the other bits which I’ve imagined: hometowns and pieces of educational history and the way they chose to format their first essays combining with ideas derived from style of dress and style of speech and willingness or unwillingness to answer my smile with one of their own. Certain vague ideas in my music-teacher world, too, to be definitely settled with decisions and music copied and inserted into fifteen black folders. Appointments made, appointments kept, and my green Honda needing gasoline next time I go to town.

Sailing vessels which carried ice from Boston to the West Indies in 1850 really have no place in all of it, have they? Yet I am not sorry to have spent my day with them. Not sorry to wonder, having read of “the long dependence of the present upon the past,”* what presents may come, leaning on the arm of today. And, though often those wonderings worry me, tonight, swathed in my quiet, I don’t mind.

*Mary Ellen Chase, Silas Crockett

*A rainbow in my yard this afternoon, spanning from driveway to field: a covenant of which I am beneficiary, but which will be kept, even in spite of me.

*Rain on my roof tonight.

*Books for months-on-end, courtesy of kind librarians.

*A visit from a rather wonderful cousin.

*A letter written on the back of a red-checked paper napkin.

*Forty-five new students next week to prevent my pining for last fall’s nineteen (though I will miss them).

*The way I always arrive at the next thing in spite of my dug-in-heels and declarations of unreadiness.  The way that, in spite of those, there is always grace enough, though it is not my grace.  The way I can rest in that, if I will, when a list is the only thing I seem able to write.

frivolity

In honor of the New Year, and because I’ve recently rediscovered this project and found it much more engrossing than my Master’s thesis, I am pleased to present to you the fourth chapter of the unfinished Tales from an Impetuous Landscape:

The Grief of Spoons

It is here appropriate to narrate to you the reason why the grief of Spoons is in the air of the Impetuous Landscape.  It is no longer an active grief, for it stems from events far, far back in the Landscape’s history.  Still, the Spoons remember and sigh, sometimes, to think of how it came about.

Two of the oldest families among the servants and subjects of the royalty in the Landscape are the Dishes and the Spoons.  The Dishes have always tended to be of flat disposition, not inclined to adventures of any sort.  They are steadfastly useful, and can be depended upon to be where they are expected when they are expected.  The Spoons are a family more inclined to get into scrapes.  It is rather common for one or another of their numerous family to be missing for weeks at a time, but they mean no harm.  They are more nimble than the Dishes, and, with their broad, round, shining faces, are very well liked.

In the early days of the Landscape, there was a young man in the Spoon clan named Runcible, who was missing more often than all of the other Spoons put together.  He developed quite a reputation for it, and his fame was increased by the fact that, while most of the Spoons combed their hair smoothly down on their foreheads, he wore his in three spikes at the top of his head.  People tended to mistrust him, but, because of his good family, they could not, in good conscience, shun him.

Now it happened that he struck up a friendship with a young lad of the Dish family.  Albert was not a large Dish, nor was he very bright, but he found the glamour and adventure of Runcible’s life to be quite attractive and he wished very much that his limp hair could be persuaded into spikes.  It became quite common to see Albert and Runcible going out for an evening walk or stopping for a drink at a wayside inn.  Their friendship did not keep them from accomplishing their work, and, as Albert showed no signs of going missing, his parents allowed him to walk about with Runcible.  But then it happened.

It was during the Festival of the Talents, when trained animals competed in various skills.  There were high-jumping cows and musical cats; mop-swallowing dogs performed on street corners, and everyone turned out for a week-long holiday.  (The animals have lost much of their skill since those days; more’s the pity.)  That was the year that a cow named Bossie broke all previous records by jumping absolutely over the moon.  Her antagonists accused her of fraud, and there was a drawn-out investigation of the matter with many accusations and denials and everyone in the Landscape loudly expressing his or her own opinion of the case.  In the end, Bossie was cleared of all charges, and her record stands to this day, a memorial to the fact that cows, at least, have not developed according to Darwin’s theories.

Runcible Spoon never had enjoyed the Festival of Talents; he’d never had the patience to train any creature to perform, unless indeed he could be credited with having trained Albert to listen to him.  In any case, he grew impatient with the conflict over the cow, and finally decided to leave the Landscape once and for all.  He told Albert he was going to go live the life of a vagabond in the mountains, and Albert, full of the glamour of the idea and unable to bear the thought of being parted from his hero determined to go with him.  Runcible hemmed and hawed and said it would not be fitting to take Albert from his home, however much he would like to have Albert’s company and aid in the mountains, etc, etc., and the end of it was that Albert absolutely would not let Runcible go without him, which was exactly what Runcible had wanted.

When Bossie had finally been cleared of charges, it was discovered that Runcible Spoon and Albert Dish had run away together.  An expedition was sent in pursuit of them – Albert, being not really skilled in secrets, had left a letter detailing their intended route – and the pair were brought back without any difficulty.

Albert was cleared of all blame in the matter.  He had been very young and very impressionable.  He grew up to be a useful and pleasant citizen of the Landscape, though he and his descendents after him have ever been known in common parlance as “Dessert Plates.”

However, Runcible, apart from whose insidious influence Albert would never have run away, was banished from the Impetuous Landscape and sent to live in the Land Where the Bong Tree Grows.  There he quickly gained a position of prestige – you will recall that he was present at the wedding-supper of the Owl and the Pussycat – and there he became the patriarch of a large and industrious family.

While Runcible was enjoying himself in the Land Where the Bong Tree Grows, his relatives in the Landscape were deeply wounded by his desertion and banishment.  They felt that their once-spotless reputation had been tarnished by such an association.  Ah, yes, though they have prospered and been trusted throughout all of their generations, it is still customary for their mouths to droop a bit at the corners, and still the Landscape has their old grief in its air.

©2012 Stacy Nott

to end

It would seem appropriate to send the year out with something brilliant: a good resolution made, a wise lesson learned.  I’ve been two pages from the end of my journal for a week now, not writing because I like to end journals well, though no one may ever read them.  Like Beckett’s Hamm, “I hesitate to … end.”  But the year goes out, whether I have the words for it or not, and wisdom does not arrive in neat yearly doses which one may measure and display at the year’s end.  Today has not been a day of knowing. Today, with Eliot,
“The only wisdom [I] can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

Endless, and endlessly reiterating, to the girl who carefully follows rules in order to do all things perfectly, that she does not, that she cannot, that this is, somehow, as it ought to be:

“In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.”

So that I’ve held the words so many dozen times and known them to be true and said that I will arrive there, at what I am not yet. But the way is a hard way, and the going is slow going, and there is self always creeping back to possess the relinquished things, insisting that it is my right to know and to enjoy and to be in whatever way I like best.  So that the year does not end neatly: these lessons learned and set aside; new books purchased with new lessons for the new year.  No.  The year goes out with the old battle still whirling, and the girl weary and not sufficient for these things, clinging to the One who is.

And, after all, she could be in no better place.

between

Thou who wast rich beyond all splendor
All for love’s sake becamest poor;
Thrones for a manger didst surrender,
Sapphire-paved courts for stable floor.
Thou who wast rich beyond all splendor
All for love’s sake becamest poor.

Thou who art God beyond all praising
All for love’s sake becamest man;
Stooping so low, but sinners raising
Heavenwards by Thy eternal plan.
Thou who are God beyond all praising
All for love’s sake becamest man.

Thou who art love beyond all telling,
Savior and King, we worship Thee.
Emmanuel, within us dwelling,
Make us what Thou wouldst have us be.
Thou who art love beyond all telling,
Savior and King, we worship Thee.
–Frank Houghton

And had I time, I might write more.  Of how holidays are spent in Florida, amongst family members, me with my traditional holiday sinus troubles leaving a trail of tissues behind my raw red nose.  Of how I could not persuade myself, packing in the cold, that sweaters would be superfluous.  Of how here there are dogs and citrus fruit and fires and people I’ve known all my life, and all of us waxing nostalgic about the times we see in faded home videos.  Of how Christmas seems always to be this odd state of betweenness for me: home far away and home here, and always the coming and the going again, loving both places, eager to be home and eager to be home. And maybe that’s the way it ought to be, the vague displacement: two things at once and both of them me.

But I haven’t the time to explain it properly now, so I’ll just wish you a Merry Christmas, and go to see my family.

“I am half-sick of shadows,” said the Lady of Shalott.  And therefore she was given:

Hugs from choir-children.

A candle-lit church sanctuary, full of red flowers.

Conversations.

A sun-lit ramble with a company of companions.

A little boy carrying a box of cookies.

Laughter.

Red bows on Harry the asparagus fern and golden bells on Firdinand the Christmas tree.

Photos of far-away friends.

Cinnamon-scented pinecones.

Crazy paper hats.

The reminder that one must be before one may do, and that sometimes being is much more important than doing.

And so she felt much better, and determined to go to bed.

 

 

after shadows

These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.
-Colossians 2:17

And if, as you aver, you are after the substance, why such wistful-after-shadows eyes? You’ve led your shadow over grass-green lawns, watched it grow shorter with the shifting sun, danced with it tall and narrow on an evening road. But though it follows you when you ignore it, leads you along so many of your ways, when you gather it into your hands you gather nothing.

Seek the substance, small one.

You have the promise of the substance, an unshakeable promise, sealed in blood. Why such angry fists at sky which will not satisfy you with shadows? Would you satisfy yourself amongst shadows, when the substance is at hand? Would you play with plastic foods in a plastic kitchen when a real banquet is spread for you?

Seek the substance, small one.

Cease striving.

Be still.

 

what child?

Reposting from two years ago today, as my new-post-generator seems to be in temporary hibernation:

Playing a piano arrangement of “What Child Is This?”  For me the flow of the melody always joins with images of shining things among evergreen branches, scents of wood smoke, peppermint and cinnamon, the glow of stained-glass in a red-carpeted sanctuary.  In my mind, its words also play, mingling and overlapping with the words of “Greensleeves”:

What Child is this?  You do me wrong! … Greensleeves was my heart of gold, The Babe, the son of Mary.

In a library book of folk songs from the British Isles I years ago read that legend attributes “Greensleeves” to Henry VIII; it was written for one of his mistresses, perhaps for Anne Boleyn.  Though stating that there was slim proof for that story, the book indicated that the original lyrics were not, perhaps, the cleanest.  The Lady Greensleeves, whoever she might have been, likely wasn’t the most lady-like of ladies.

And what was Mary?  A virgin?  With child?  There were some who knew and believed that to be true, but the rest, no doubt, esteemed her to be a fallen woman, looked down upon her more than the English court would have looked down upon Lady Greensleeves.  “Why lies He in such mean estate?” certainly!  The King of kings comes bringing salvation, and He comes already bearing this smut of supposed immorality?  Really?  Would we not have imagined the salvation-bringer coming in purity and splendor?  What Child is this, born into scandal and poverty?  We would have given Him untainted followers, new songs all His own, but here He is, with a train of made-over prostitutes and tax-gatherers and demoniacs, to be hailed by a made-over song of amorous intent.

Ah, yes, but they have been made new!  All of them ran after other objects, none were pure or righteous or good, but now — now, they are His!  And, in so far as their pasts are remembered, it serves only to highlight what He has done: they who were dirty, full of unclean passions and vices, now point only to Him who has made them otherwise.  Nails, spear have pierced Him through, the cross been borne for their transgressions.  The love of the Word-made-flesh has covered their sins.

This, this is Christ the King! [For whom but my lady Greensleeves?]