When you hear that they’ve taken their own lives, your first instinct is a selfish one, to remember or exaggerate what relationship you had with them. What did they think of me? What’s an anecdote I’llhave at the ready?
You’ll say that you’re centering your grief, and you’ll wonder if you’re centering yourself. You’ll seek some artifact, some detail that will reanimate them (or at least their past self), awkwardly fumbling through the overstuffed kitchen drawer of your mind–no, they didn’t play [xxx], they played [xxx]; no, they weren’t in [xxx], they were in [xxx]. Their [xxx] was [xxx] years older–or was it [xxx] years older? So you pull the yearbook from the shelf.
You’ll read into every image. This was the senior photo that they scheduled & dressed for, that they drove to & performed in, a parent just off-camera nudging them into a smile they hadn’t shared with family in years, hoping that this will be the year it’s all better, that a year from now, they’ll depart for the future of their dreams (or of someone’s dreams), a landscape far from the shadowed horizons of their now. Their smile lasted as long as the shutter click, as false on the page as it was that day. You can almost … actually, you can easily see it.
Or maybe they’re smiling, really smiling. It’s (their last) summer at home. They’re not writing essays yet. They’re not whittling down schools yet. Every adult in their life is waiting for them to take the next steps they’ll share with their entire class, some of them life-long friends, friends to the end, truly.
They’re months away from the long absences from school, months away from the long stay at [xxx], the best possible place for them. Months away from our sighing, relieved that they were saved before they could hurt themselves. They haven’t yet written the goodbye. They haven’t yet [xxx] late that [xxx] night.
They’re months away from telling counselors, “When I get out of here, [xxx]. I understand that I have a lot to live for, and I need you to know [xxx].” They’ll be deadly serious.
They’ll be released, a plan & a prescription in hand. They … they look good, to be honest. They know they’re being scrutinized in their face & watched carefully behind their back. They might even graduate. It’ll feel like it should–like it never happened, like they’re fixed. After months, we sigh, relieved, and think of the next semester, the next class, the next batch to grade & graduate. When all (well, when most) is said & done, you forget to ask after them.
And then.
You’ll find yourself numb & cautious. Some colleagues are wrecked; new colleagues (who never met them) know how to read the room, poker faces & polite questions, euphemisms & careful terms (“completed” not “committed”). You’ll wonder quietly how to walk the emotional tightrope.
You’ll all walk into a big room where someone delivers the big news. You’ll walk your kids to a smaller room where you ask how they feel about it, about them, about this. You’ll avoid saying that there’s no why in moments like this. You’ll wonder–G-d forgive me–who might be next.
Image by Clement Hurd from Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon
There's a ritual in our house, a nightly laying on of hands. Kids come, teeth brushed, laptops stowed, to our bed. They're bigger these days, stretching the length of our own bodies. Showering love owed
on the dog, a pure-breed full-grown runt: Buddy. Underdeveloped tear ducts stain his fur deep brown, damp symmetrical tracks from eyes to snout. He accepts the love, from kids sleep-
ily giddy. They push aside his squeaky toy & the gnawed rawhide, its meaty marrow drained hours or days ago. They lie down nose to nose with him, holding his head in their hands, fully calmly ours.
When younger, they lay down hoping to stay the night, spooning against his back, draping an arm over his neck, their shared breaths a warm gentle metronome marking the slow rhythm of a dying day, far
from the solitary beds where they belong. They lingered; we let them, way back then, for a time. A family at rest, warming the same bed. Pushing tomorrow further away, drawing closer as one, sleepily,
to the symbol, the mascot, the blessed embodiment of who we are, of how we love.
The summer of long books (The Name of the Rose, The Illuminaries, etc.) gave way to the fall of reading coolstuff and things that finally came up in my Libby queue. I’m glad that I’m getting back into the habit of tracking my reading, though.
Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach had been on half-price shelves frequently enough that I worried it was one of those novels that people purchased but didn’t finish. I finished it, quickly.
Within the opening pages, I was reminded of a novel that I really enjoyed–city setting, poor Irish family, young girl, etc. Those characteristics lingered through Manhattan Beach even as the setting shifted to the sea, even as the family’s fortunes improved, even after the young girl became a young woman. Anna Kendrick pays a visit with her father to the luxurious shoreside house of a handsome charismatic man that, like her father, thrives in the liminal space between polite society and gangster society. It’s an affecting opening, one that shows the deep pull that each man has on Anna and the deep pull that the sea has on her.
Egan moves Anna’s affections & fortunes briskly back & forth between these men, between these settings, between then (near the end of the Depression) and now (near the end of WWII). The set pieces, such as a trip to a Times Square jazz club, always feel authentic; the historical research, such as the fine details of military deep-sea diving, always feel essential to the internal life of the characters.
The secrets & desires of the main three characters are at the heart of the novel, and the secondary characters (an aunt that was a silent movie bit player, a mysterious man-behind-the-men mafioso) keep you alert to the ways that a character’s fate is in the hands of so many. It was, in short, a fully human, fully historical, fully suspenseful & satisfying novel.
Like many folk around the pandemic, I’ve read my fair share of minimalist books, and I’ve watched a lot of YouTube reflections on the practices & payoffs of severing yourself from things. It’s not easy for me. A huge part of my identity was formed around the content I consumed & curated, shared & gave. Music, books, movies, and now podcasts, were the main elements of my intellectual self–and of my material self. What is left when I sever ties or when I throw away these things? Abraham Joshua Heschel has an answer.
In The Sabbath(1951), Heschel offers a powerful argument for re-viewing this severing not as a loss but as a chance to rejuvenate. Each chapter is both scripturally rigorous and personally considerate. It’s a book that hits you in the heart & in the head, that offers wide gateways into thinking about opening up what the sabbath provides, in Heschel’s words, “the architecture of time”. The week doesn’t end with the sabbath; it culminates in the sabbath. Everything we do during the week is informed by, is nourished by, is made sacred in this much-needed, oft-misused time.
The Sabbath is not a lengthy book, but it’s one that I needed to read quite slowly, so poetic & elegant is the prose. It’s not a stuffy orthodox book, but it’s one that shows the vitality & gift of a cultural, spiritual inheritance. Representative quotation: “[…] the sabbath is not an occasion for diversion or frivolity […], but an opportunity to mend our tattered lives, to collect rather than to dissipate time. Labor without dignity is the cause of misery; rest without spirit, the cause of depravity” (17-18). Heschel offers the reader gems / challenges like that three or four times a page. It’s a dizzying & challenging work, one that guides the reader to interrogate their own values, their own choices, and the consequences of living so busily that we don’t let menuha (tranquility, serenity, peace and repose) in.
Álvaro Enrigue has written two novels that play with history. The first, Sudden Death, dazzled & delighted me with its deft bouncing between Old World & New World, between painting & poetry, between high art & low urges. In it, the tennis court becomes a central setting at a time when tennis was a game of rogues & royalty, a blood sport more akin to Fight Club than to the crisp uniforms & silent well-born audiences of today’s tennis courts. In its brutality & humor (& in its deliberate veering from / inspiration from the personages of Caravaggio & Quevedo), Sudden Death reminds the reader that the writing of history is, at its best, a righting of history–and not always what we would call an accurate one.
You Dreamed of Empiresis equally profane & thoughtful, equally of Europe & Mexico (or more accurately, of what would become Mexico). Sudden Death‘s tennis games are replaced by …. well it depends on the word you’re most comfortable with. Diplomacy or ritual, conquest or evolution, dreams or naps, wills or visions, the ancient clean or the modern grit. Enrigue calls this novel an account of the birth of the modern world–November 9, 1519, the day that Cortes meets Moctezuma, or the day that Moctezuma hosts Coretes, or the day that Moctezuma fits Cortes into his schedule while he’s trying to manage the dissolution of a multi-tribe/nation/people alliance, or the day that Moctezuma gives Cortes hallucinogens to trip together.
Enrigue delights in anachronism (T.Rex Monolith playing in the background of a Tenochtitlan temple) and outright fantasy (Moctezuma dreaming the author himself centuries later writing the account of Moctezuma dreaming the author himself …). He delights in what Toni Morrison called Homeric fairness, where no monster is without his humanity, where no slave is without power, where Spaniards & indigenous people can’t stand the smell of one another and can’t shake the allure of one another. It’s a quietly feminist novel, one in which Cortes is referred to as El Malinche more often (I think) than Malintzin is referred to as La Malinche. And it’s got a heckuva ending.
If I’ve read Philip Roth before, I can’t remember — which is saying something, just having finished Operation Shylock: A Confession. The voice is a difficult one to forget. Utterly personal in tone, brashly direct in how it interrogates Jewishness, how it describes the / his male libido, how it invites you to laugh at serious things & take mockery seriously. The subtitle here should have been a greater key to the book than it was.
Not a novel–not something made up. Roth not only depicts himself as he is (late middle-aged, lauded but not Nobel’d, keenly aware of his weaknesses & talents, a diasporic Jew) but also constructs depicts a double Philip Roth who looks like PR, who knows PR’s entire personal & professional history, and who is busy with his own non-fiction, high-stakes world-building: soliciting help from well-known illuminaries such as Lech Walesa & the Pope as well as quietly influential figures working in & on behalf of the Mossad to get Jews out of Jerusalem, where the double-PR says they’ve never belonged, and back to Europe, which the double-PR says is much more their natural home.
The confession is not Roth’s alone. Roth recounts the confession of a former grad school acquaintance (in this case, an Egyptian professor) consumed with righteous anger over what Israel has done in Palestine, has done to Palestinians. He recounts the confession of a former anti-Semite, the former-nurse of the double-PR, who creates a kind of AA for recovering anti-Semites (the “real” Roth line edits his twelve steps). Roth observes a Jerusalem courtroom (show)trial, hoping to hear the confession of John Demjanjuk, a defendant denying that he is Ivan the Terrible.
There are briefcases full of money. There are mysterious phone calls. There is an apologia to a different strand of anti-semitism probably ever chapter. There are masked would-be kidnappers prowling under cover of the night. There is pathos & stupidity. There is a kind of Hebrew school lesson / subtle Mossad interrogation / protection scene. There’s a chunk about halfway through that summarizes & clarifies just how weird these true events you’ve read are. There is a Preface, explaining the still-ongoing legal facts of “the confession”; there is a closing note to the reader asserting, “This confession is false.”
I’m not making it sound funny enough. Or serious enough. Or timeless enough. Or timely enough. It was / is all those things, true or false.
Many students will never write for fun again, will never choose to read a poem again, will never [sigh] read a book if they don’t have to. This time, this concentrated time, this shared & free thinking is all too often fleeting. They’re eager–most of them–to leave by the end of it all, they’re eager–many of them–to leave it all behind. They know what they’ll be leaving behind, and they won’t much care.
And I will not care that they won’t much care because I know that this carelessness too is fleeting. Rooted in even the most careless, when they think of it at all, is some respect for my respect for our work, for our words together. And at some future reception, they’ll tell me, unprompted, “You know, I still have that book”.
A book they’ve held over & over again, that they’ve packed up & moved, that they’ve unboxed & put on a shelf, that they’ve preserved for years, maybe that they’ll hold & carry, store & stare at (even if unopened) for their entire lives.
To them a symbol, to me a record, of their once-deep thinking, their once- and maybe still-widened mind.
Inspired by my discovery somehow of this word–se·rot·i·noussə-ˈrät-nəs : remaining closed on the tree with seed dissemination delayed or occurring gradually
You celebrate the first steps which look like what they are, a controlled fall. Eyes wide in joy, in disbelief.
The steps grow varied in pace in path in purpose. You're often alone, doing your best to keep moving somewhere somehow.
Eventually you walk without thinking, your horizons & paths narrowed-- appointments not destinations. In rare moments, your eyes open, your feet fly, knowing nothing can hurt you till you stand still.
The doors are heavy, falling shut with a slow ease & finality. The space is sacred to some, to those who work it, to those who hope to cast the spell.
Every theater has its own relic’d beauty–loose hinges on the front & center seats, faded fluorescent tape marking the limits of characters long silent, scarred lines marking the props dragged season after season.
The heights are seen only by the lucky. Sandbags & catwalks, lights & innumerable cords. Rows of scrims, depths of story, layers of place.
You get on stage with the rest of this unkempt bunch, untied Converse shoes & loose t-shirts. You shake the tension from your shoulders & join hands, centering yourself in this song & dance, this ceremony seen only by the lucky, performed only by this loving few.
Let us play.
Thanks to Ruben Quesada for the guidance during a workshop in July 2022, when I wrote a lot, including this draft, when he challenged us to capture a time of joy.
Tell yourself as it gets cold & gray
that it is going to pay off.
The planning & grading,
the commenting & designing,
the paperwork & meetings. For you
there's the chance to reset over & over.
New units, new semesters,
new years, new courses,
December punctuated loudly
with good news from seniors,
a future they hoped & worked for,
acceptance, relief.
Tonight as it gets cold,
count the days, and know
that there is never enough time and
that there is always just enough time.
It resolved, or it didn't
in ways you'll never know.
They learned & they struggled
in ways you'll never know.
And you'll start it all again
sooner than you can imagine.
And if it happens that you cannot
reconcile yourself to this necessary
end, this final weeks, then delight
in the joy of your students, for whom--
in the best possible ways--
you were just another adult
standing in the current of their lives,
guiding them, and telling them,
Good morning. Good job. Goodbye.
She had high hopes for a tree that flowered. So many in this neighborhood were planted for another place, dense canopies you might see in a movie or in some part of town richer & older.
She hired an arborist, a kind & fussy man who called each tree by its Latin genus name, who spoke surprisingly good Spanish to his crew scurrying high above, chainsaws swinging heavily from their loose belts.
They removed the old tree, its spiky circular spores tucked in the grass for years after. She watched as they lifted the new tree from the bed of the truck, a canvas bag diapering its thin roots.
They drove spikes into the earth surrounding the hole, upturned & fragrant. The roots of the old tree were left to wither in the unseen deep. She imagined the burst of color to come.
The tree grew & flowered, less bright than she had hoped. A freak cold snap historic & long chilled the tree to the core. Her husband watched it for weeks, certain something could be saved.
Different men were hired to make rough cuts, feeding the fallen branches into a machine at the curb, mulching them briskly right before their eyes, dust catching in the brittle grey grass.
It grew the next year thick with leaves near the trunk. Branches will come anew, they thought, will come later.
It flowered as before. It flowers each year, waving gently in the piercing Texas sun.
middleagedmiddlechild. 