The Column I Sent to Updike

The Life is the Light

I was at the beauty parlor a few months ago, and Randy was washing my hair before cutting it. As I lay back in the chair passive, inert, feeling his fingers work­ing in my scalp, a question came into my mind:

“Have you ever done a dead person’s hair?” I asked. “Sure,” he answered.

“And was it scary?”“Not really,” came his reply. “In a way it’s easy. You just do the front, of course.”

We were silent then. As he worked, I thought about my own little skull and how the day would come when it would lie all quiet beneath that Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone that Emily Dickinson refers to in one of her poems.

“Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment. This was not, I knew, standard beauty parlor gab. But Randy is not your standard person.

“I don’t know about the body,” he said. “But the Bible says the dead are a great crowd of witnesses.”

“Where are they though?” I asked, a question I have thought about every day of my adult life.

He took a breath.

“What I think,” he said, “is that it’s like theater here, and we’re on the stage and the dead are in the audience. They can see us but we can’t see them. You know how that is on a stage? We can’t see them because of a bright light in between…”

“And they’re watching us?” I interrupted, “and think­ing, ‘such a fevered dream, this living of theirs. Such tiny strivings’? Do they look at us and think, of our actions, ‘how paltry and insignificant?’”

“Oh, not at all,” said Randy emphatically. “They’re watching us because our actions are significant. We’re the ones now. It matters very much what we do.”

I’ve thought about this conversation many times since we had it back in June.

A few people are as clear as Randy is as to our place in the grand scheme of things. Many more aren’t.

A young person said to me the other day, “You’re born and then you die. And the whole time you’re here you don’t have a clue as to what it’s all about.”

I look around myself, to see what it’s about:

A little cat hops quick as an eighth-note to the kitchen window sill, arranges herself in a pool of sun that shines on the white stone slab of counter. I see the bright China blue of a fruit bowl next to her, the dazzling large-pored orbs of orange within it, her soft pelt electric with life, as she smoothes it with a wedge of pink tongue.

A cellist rises from her chair in the symphony orches­tra and sits in front, to perform an extended solo. Seated again, she takes the instrument between her legs. As she draws the bow over its strings, and the deep rich tones of the cello roll out over the audience, her throat constricts, as if with great emotion. Her nostrils flare. She keeps her eyes closed as if against the insupportable beauty of the music. When for a brief moment in the piece she opens them, she does not see the audience.

A young man, full of life and high spirits, goes on a youth retreat the first September weekend of his Senior year. Boarding the bus to return home at week’s end, he collapses and dies within minutes of what the autopsy will later show to be a cardiac infection. Another young man, unknown to him before that week away, speaks at his memorial service. He has worked with the sick at a nursing home, he says; he knows this is no fainting spell. He holds the dying boy, in the few seconds remaining. “God loves you, Jermaine,” he tells him. “I love you too.”

If the dead are all around us; if they are watching, as Randy believes, they may say, “See how they shone, at their moment in the light: the little cat; the cellist; the boy who left life early, and the one who helped him to leave it.”

Mother Theresa cradles yet another sickly infant brought in from a dumpster on the streets of Calcutta. She presents him like a bouquet of flowers to the visiting British journalist.

“See!” she says with shining eyes, “There is Life in the child!”

The life is the light. And to all those who feel the light—in them and upon them—this world is shot through with glory.

 

Notes from a Nobody

Back in 1993 when I was a serious Nobody (as opposed to now when I’m a Nobody with damaged hair) our late national treasure of a novelist and poet John Updike sent me a postcard in response to a column I sent him about an ABC boy who died young. I guess it was also about my mom dying in front of my eyes, the beauty of oranges piled in a bowl and how a woman cellist looks when she takes that instrument between her legs, which both embarrasses and moves you at the same time and makes you realize how Sex and Music and God really ARE all connected.)

I’ve been reading Updike to cheer myself up. Others would read him to feel jealous but the thing with the guy is how generous he always was to everyone; how gracious, even to us little people: Back in ’93 he wrote a short story for The New Yorker about his mother dying. Anyone could see it was his real mom, so the column I sent him accompanied a condolence note. When he answered it he said I wrote ‘like a dream’ which is nonsense but such gallant nonsense. I’m writing for 1,000 years here and still no book offers! Still no requests for my endorsements on bras for your full-figured girls! I have never been on staff at a newspaper; haven’t earned a salary since I stopped teaching high school, topping out at the handsome figure of $12,000. But I have five books which I by-God published myself. And I make a princely ten dollars a column from the papers who still bother to pay me, who haven’t themselves gone under for the third time. And every April 15^th my husband David says “T, you couldn’t be earning LESS!” – to which I say ‘So what?’

Remember that great thing labor leader Eugene Debs said 100 years ago? “While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”? Well where there’s a way to lose money I have found it, all unwilling, or else it has found me. At the same time I do know this, that the best fun  I ever had was on the day I took the train to New York on my own dime, went to The Ethel Walker School in Brooklyn, taught the whole day and gave away five cartons of my funniest book, the one from my children’s childhood with all the pee-pee and bum-bum jokes in it.

It’s what God wants of me I think. And to have written all your adult life is such a privilege.

These last seven days I have been writing my way out of sorrow over the death of my cat Charlotte and now here I am on the zillionth rainy day of this rainy cold summer and I feel swell. We’re on vacation with our mildewed clothes and Old Dave is doin’ the crossword ten feet away. Our remaining cat Abe is calculating the minutes ’til his next pig-out on fresh shrimp, eight strangers are coming over for drinks at 6 and God bless you guys I’m writing to you.

To read what I said about the dead boy, the oranges and the cellist give me a minute. Takin’ a quick walk for the sake of the old bones, then I’ll put her up.

Signed,

The Cheeseball as she looked last month.

(Took one look  at this pic and went straight to the beauty parlor. “I have black curly hair, dammit; Throw out the peroxide and the straighteners and let me be what I am.” Today it’s the color of charcoal ready for the steaks. And by God if the curl isn’t comin’ back at the edges too! (that’s what’s known as FAKE HAIR stuck to the back of my head in the photo. Marie Antoinette called. Cue the guillotine guys.)

 

Not in My Book

On her blog yesterday my friend Bobbie wrote about the Bored Drawer she kept as a kid. “I’d write things to do on little pieces of paper and fill the drawer with them. Then, whenever I felt that frightening bored feeling coming on, I’d pull one out, make myself do that thing, and get un-bored. “

She also mentions Russian-born writer Joseph Brodsky in this connection who got kicked out of the Soviet Union for parasitism, which I know, sounds like he was eating people’s good wool sweaters, then came to the States and mastered English so well he won a MacArthur award and was named our Poet Laureate. But in one speech Bobbie quotes him as having told hsi audience never to run from boredom “because boredom teaches you the most valuable lesson of your life: the lesson of your utter insignificance.”

Well with all respect for a guy now dead I say: To Hell with That. Was Mozart insignificant? A show-off at times and maybe a bit childish but look at his work! And what about Beethoven, whose music was considered so erotic by his contemporaries some said it must be kept from the ladies whose passions would be stirred and then what?  Was my sister’s cat insignificant who figured out how to use her paws as hands to grasp the pulls on Nan’s bureau drawers so she could hop in whenever she liked and scrabble among her dainty washables?

Ah and here I am at cats again.

Eighteen months ago when our cat Abraham almost died of a raging infection her now-missing-and-presumed-dead sister Charlotte did an unusual thing. Generally Charlotte thought Abe was a big dummy and ignored him completely but on that rainy night when we found him after three days’ hiding, holed up, waiting to die, hot with fever, and papery with dehydration, she came over to him and began licking his head and face, whether for comfort or in farewell we never knew.

Was she insignificant, and also her whole little life, now ended as it seems? What about her brother’s life of single-minded devotion to us? What about your life? What about mine?

I think of the line from Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town where the character known as the Stage Manager, posing as the minister at a wedding, freezes the action for a moment and, addressing the audience as he does throughout the play, recalls all the young ones he has married, naming the cottage, the Sunday drives, the children, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will -  then pauses and says, “Once in a thousand times it’s interesting,” but in such a tender and affectionate way you think  he must mean the opposite.

So are we significant at all then? To ourselves and to the ones who love us surely but how about to the One who created us if such a One there be?  Which brings me to what is said of the life Jesus, namely that even if he was no son of God and never rose from the grave at all, still what he said about Giving What You Need to Get and Placing Love First seems so bright and true and real you feel you could just hang your Jiminy Cricket umbrella on it and fly clear up to Death, and past and above it until Death is revealed at last as what it well may be: a tiny dark point on an endless shining line.

 

For Charlotte

It’s all I can think of today: that time I came upon the black cat dead in the road who I just knew was my own cat Charlotte, black like her and wearing the same collar, her small spine facing outward toward the cars speeding past; toward the speeding cars like the car that had struck her and kept on going.

I tore home and blurted the awful news to David, who folded his newspaper and stood slowly and walked me to the window. “T, no,” he said putting his arm around me. “Charlotte is right here napping on the patio, see?”

Last night I dreamed we had this same kind of happy ending but I wake today and it isn’t so. Our poor old Charlotte with her bad hip has been missing since last Monday and she never wanders off this way. At age 14 she knows all too will what she can and cannot do. If she were a person she’d be hitting the Early Bird Special and going right home to get in her PJs.

I’ve been telling funny stories all week but maybe I can give in to my real feelings now. Maybe telling the rest of the story about that other poor cat here will help me find the release I need. Anyway, what follows is the rest of what I wrote in the summer of ‘03 when I came upon that other poor creature:

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All I could think was “I’ll go to Mary’s! She’s an RN. She’ll know what to do about this poor abandoned creature!’

Mary answered the door with her two kids besise her and though quick tears sprang to her eyes too, she was calm.

‘I’ll get something we can put it in,’  she said and went to do that, while her boy Ben, eleven, and her girl Rachel, nine, followed me to where the animal lay.

First, Ben turned the collar of the little thing in a vain search for identification. Then Rachel crouched and stroked the fur. Then we all three crouched, a mournful silent trio.

On seeing us from across this busy street, a woman walking her dog called over.

‘Was it yours?’

When we said no, she told us that she had recently moved to this neighborhood but she thought it might be her neighbor’s cat and why didn’t she just go see. Then Mary came with a big blue towel. She spread it out and gently lifted the motionless creature, perfect but for a spot of blood at the mouth.

And then we were four, keeping silent vigil.

And when, from the dog walker’s side of the street, came two young women striding purposefully with an empty carton, I felt more tears rise.

‘Are you the family?’ I asked in a barely-controlled voice, dreading the witness of a sharper woe.

I can’t describe to you the voice of the one who answered. The kindness that was in it. The comfort.

‘No,’ she said gently, ‘But I am a veterinarian.’ And straightaway she knelt by the little cat and placed her fingers soft upon its breast.

‘Is it dead?!’ the children blurted.  ‘Mmmm,’ she murmured. But it was not us that she spoke.

‘What are you then?’ she whispered to the animal, gently lifting the legs. ‘Ah you’re a little girl!’ she crooned. Then, with both hands, raised the delicate head in a gesture like a caress.

“She’s gone,’ she told us, and in one easy motion lifted the cat in her blue shroud of towel, settled her in the box, and closed the lid.

‘What will you DO with her?’ the children cried.

‘I’ll bring her to where I work and keep her for a while, and then… we will cremate her,’ she said gently.

And so it happened.

nd in a day or two a sign went up about a lost black cat and we had the privilege of meeting the family whose pet this was, and of telling them things which to me stand as proof of all that lives and does not die. Because to them we were able to say, Not the shovel and the city truck, not the passing hours and the coating dust, but instead quick witness, and an honor guard, and escort, in the form of a young veterinarian. Escort, like an angel’s escort, out of this place, bright as it is, and lovely, and dangerous.

 

Did You Say Intercourse?

So in my column this week I told this nice story about jail and the bees and the Bill of Rights and quoted the famous scientist/ priest Pierre  Teilhard de Chardin, right? Only one of the papers that uses me got mixed up with its spell-check and called the guy DIEHARD de Chardin. DIEHARD, like the battery! Like the movie !

I guess it’s funny. And I’m hardly one to get on my high horse,  being such a lousy typist myself. My poor spell-checker is as courteous as the kindest of English butlers, offering me alternative words when it has trouble making sense of what I’ve typed. For example when I try to put ‘ actually’ it politely says “Sexually?” Did I mean sexually? When I try to write ‘of course’ and I garble the spelling it asks ‘Intercourse’?  Are we going for intercourse here?

Well I’d say most people are goin’ for intercourse most of the time to judge by the baby population but jeez. My immigrant ancestors would say it’s a good comeuppance for me for gittin’ above myself with the fancy French talk!

 

Mission Impossible?

I TRY to be mad at them but the truth is I like the mice who live  in my kitchen, because they accept me as I am. In spite of the spilled flour, the boxes of bran bought back in the early ‘90s, the  potato chip crumbs lining the shelves of my cabinets. Still they choose and befriend me. They appreciate my pantry.

And I feel just awful having to kill them. But just yesterday a person newly arrived on our shores told me it’s the mice or my health. “Their pee-pee,” he said. “It brings death.”

My pals at the hardware store sell me the classic wooden mousetrap, which you can buy for a buck, bait with peanut-butter-coated string and boom! But of course it is then that you really see them in the perfection of their small forms: The tiny feet. The little tails. The guillotined necks you can hardly bear to look upon.

It makes me nostalgic for the era when pee-pee and related ‘matter’ were prized as fertilizer, as it still is in China where, under the name “night soil,” it proudly stands as the inspiration for a patriotic song. I say sick of “The Star Spangled Banner?” Try having to sing “The Night Soil Gatherers Are Coming Down from the Mountain” at the start of a few ballgames!

 

Pus-Colored No More!

I am sick to death of blondifying and straightening my hair. Who talked me  into a color like an infected cut anyway?  I have black hair; black and unruly with silver comin’ in and what’s wrong with that? My girl Carrie always says Let it go curly, let it go grey but do you know they say they can’t help you let your hair go grey and you just have to cut it all off and start again?

The last time I cut my hair short was on the day I turned 28. We threw a party that night and the first guest to arrive took one look at me and said “Nice hair! You look like a toilet bowl brush.” (Never forgot it, the bastard.) So why not a return to my roots?  Hair the color God made it and doing whatever it feels like day to day?  And how ‘bout I lean over like this wherever I go  like in the picture. It fits my motto, I’ll say that: talk about ‘look at it this way’!

 

Man in the Mirror

Here at the annual conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists I’ve just heard a talk by Jeff Zaslow, author of The Last Lecture on Professor Randy Pausch’s amazing final talk before his death from pancreatic cancer and the sound of gulped-back tears filled the room.

Randy left behind three small children even younger than the three left by Michael Jackson, God rest his troubled soul.These children of Randy’s won’t remember their dad and he knew that. It is the cruelest and yet the kindest thing that happens to you as the sorrowing left–behind one, the way your spider of a heart wraps the time immediately following the death in such thick numb bunting you can’t recall them.

When, at 45, my sister Nan lost her young husband Tom to death on the tennis court, she blundered blindly through the whole following year. Then one night she ’saw’ him as she lay in their bed. He stood at their bedroom door in the tennis outfit he had died in. “I want to come back,” he said plaintively. “You can’t!” she exclaimed through fresh tears.  “Your friend took your job and I gave away your clothes!”

Was it a dream or did Tom really come to her that night? And if so, did he repent the pack-a day cigarette habit, the six-hard-boiled-eggs-and–six hot-dogs suppers chased down by whole pints of ice cream?  Does Michael repent the fact that he exhausted his frail and pain-wracked body in preparing for the superhuman task of a 50- show tour? We can’t know. But if we could speak with our dead just one time more I think they would have us take a long look in the mirror and resolve from here on out to spend our own remaining days loving all those of whatever age who shelter in our care and nurture.

 

Goodbye Angel

Poor Farrah, the original California Girl… I thought I had her hair for a while there, only mine was curly so I actually looked more like an English barrister with bangs. That  TV special where she’s seen alternating between throwing up and dutifully scribbling away in her illness journal was so sad. That’ll be me, still trying to write in my diary in the funeral home. (Remember what the young lady says in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest?  How she never travelled without her diary because a person should always have something sensational to read on the train ha ha ? Those were the days when my diary was so racy with the adventures of a 13-year-old that my sister stole it and used it to blackmail me!

It’s Thursday morning and I’m in the LA airport with my own diary. Noticng that they really are all tanned  around here and some sensational-looking man-made breasts just went by. This just to say goodbye Farrah with your courage . I only wish you hadn’t been talked into that lip-altering facelift; you were gorgeous just the way God made you.

 

My Bra is Your Playground

I just took a 4-hour journey wedged into a 12-inch-wide span of space between two little ones in car-seats, and SO GREAT was the love of these two for each other that all they wanted to do was clasp hands in a show of kinship – which they accomplished by having the one reach his hand under the left straps of my bra and sundress while the other reached his hand under the right two straps until – success! – they could touch at last, cutting off my airway only a little.

Then, because I’m routinely forced by the older tyke into making Stalinist-style confessions on the theme of Naughty Things I Did as a Child with an emphasis on Acts of Peeing in Strange Locations, I was thinking hard for the full 120 minutes – during which time the littler child gently patted me on shoulder, arm and torso with hands painted in the fresh juice of the berries I had been foolish enough to pack for the journey. Then, as I struggled to free-associate, pulling forth this and that bright scrap from the costume trunk of memory, my chief listener, now riveted by my talk, dreamily pulled the UPC labels from the small toys I had also brought along, affixing them to various places on my body.

‘Who’s the old lady in the stickers?”  I told him people would say when we got to our destination and they saw my many bar codes. I was  wrong though. When we got there and I toppled from the car so  red-skinned with touching and berry-mash that I looked like I had been molested by angry seagulls what they really said was ….

“Who’s the slasher victim and why is she on sale?”

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The painter:

The collage artist: