Vacations

For as long as I can remember I’ve spent a week in the summer vacationing with my family. When I was a child, I camped with my parents and brothers in Vermont or Maine. When I grew up and married, my husband and I continued the tradition by vacationing with our four children, sometimes camping and sometimes renting a cabin. Now that our children are grown, our vacation week has become a sort of family reunion, Every year we pick a different location in northern New England. Whether oceanside, lakeside or in the woods, these places are always enchanting. No matter the weather, we spend what seems to me an idyllic week, reading, hiking, talking, laughing, playing board games and soaking up the details of our surroundings.

This year we rented a cabin on the coast of Maine, a stunning location right on the water, overlooking rocks, a short walk away from a small sand beach. All day and all night we were bathed in the sounds of the tides; we watched terns and cormorants and canvasback ducks fishing. (I was stunned at the speed of the terns as they dived headfirst into the water. I wondered why they didn’t break their necks.) We watched lobster boats circling off the rocks, and sailboats weaving among the islands. We saw huge tankers gliding north along the horizon. One day we watched a tall ship to the south navigate out to sea and back again. We saw the full moon rise on the water, and I even got up before dawn one morning to watch the sky turn from purple to pink to palest lavender to gold.

As always, the week proved too short, and towards the end of it, I found myself wishing I could stay longer. I imagined taking up permanent residence there. I thought I’d like to see what it’s like in fall and winter, to witness the emergence of spring, to spend summer after summer in the same beautiful spot.

This year, when I got home, I began to think about what this sort of vacation does to me. I thought about how I experience a bit of a jolt as I reenter my ordinary life. Enjoyable as the vacation was – perhaps because it was so enjoyable – it makes the “real world” feel a little bumpier, a little more uncomfortable, than it did before.

We live in a world and a time when vacations are considered not only fun but necessary. They’re so thoroughly integrated into our lifestyles that some of us live from year to year for our vacations. And, of course, many people make their living on other people’s vacations. In some places, including the state I grew up in, tourism is the biggest sector of the economy.

Yet, for most people in the world, and certainly most people in human history, taking a vacation is an alien concept. That doesn’t mean that all these people experienced their lives as unbearably grim. Perhaps they knew something that I don’t.

For years I’ve searched for a way to take the essence of vacation and marry it to everyday life. What I’m really doing, I think, is yearning to make the unfamiliar familiar.

I would like to think I can learn to enjoy my familiar surroundings in much the same way that I enjoy the unfamiliar ones of a vacation. It will certainly take mindfulness, a conscious attending to the details of my environment. It will require a new sort of receptivity, a trust that beauty is all around, even – perhaps especially – in the most ordinary details of life.

Familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt. It can breed a new sense of wonder, a renewed immersion in joy. Sometimes it can even breed love.

Love Story

I grew up in a small Vermont town. In the early 1960s it boasted few retail establishments, but there was a drug store with a soda fountain and a handful of tiny neighborhood stores that sold bread and other “sundries.” (In those days milk was delivered to the doorstep in glass quart bottles.) I regularly visited the store in our neighborhood by going cross lots through the back yards of four neighbors, along a path of my own devising that brought me to a set of creaking wooden steps and a screen door. The store was actually just a room on the back of the proprietor’s house, a room crammed with shelves of canned goods and racks of candy.

Because the town didn’t have a grocery, hardware or department store, we made weekly family trips to the nearest city, eleven miles away. With a population of about 18,000 at that time, Rutland had a bustling shopping district, featuring several turn-of-the-century four and five story buildings. There we bought groceries, clothes, hardware and other things we might need for the coming week. We also stopped in to see my aunt and uncle and cousins who lived there. It was an all-day visit and it was pretty much mandatory. Though there came a time when I resisted, and claimed I preferred to stay home, my memory is that it was a largely pleasant excursion and an enjoyable break in the weekly routine. It widened my horizons the tiniest big and imprinted images in my psyche that still crop up in my dreams.

For me, the high point of these trips was the family visit to the Rutland Free Library. The brick and stone building was situated on a hill that was sometimes treacherous to navigate in winter, but once inside, I felt as if I’d entered a sanctuary.

Though our town was justly proud of its small library and I spent many of my high-school-age hours volunteering there, the Rutland Library was a three-story wonderland. The high Victorian interior – dimly lit and appointed with heavy, dark furniture, reading tables and massive lamps – contained shelves and shelves of books - more books than I could ever read. I loved nothing better than to browse the stacks in search of treasures, opening any book that caught my eye and sampling a page or two. I stayed as long as I could, as long as my family had patience, and I checked out the maximum number of books allowed. To this day I vividly recall coming out of the library and walking down the front steps carrying a stack of books that reached from my waist to my neck. I felt contented and happy, anticipating the hours of reading that lay ahead. In my arms I held unexplored worlds, pages and pages of experiences, a magic doorway to other places and times of my choosing.

I sometimes sampled no more than a few chapters before putting a book aside and trying another. When I found a book that drew me in, that insistently called me to turn page after page, I devoured it. The next week I was back in the library, looking for more.

I no longer live in small-town Vermont but my library habit lives on. Though my home is filled with books, I still regularly check books out of local and area libraries. I still browse the stacks, sampling a few pages, looking for treasures. I still take home more books than I can possibly read. But the truth is I’m hopelessly addicted. My habit is long-standing and compulsive. I fell in love with books early and the romance has lasted a lifetime.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Creative Procrastination

Yesterday morning, instead of working on my novel, I pruned the shrubs in front of the house. It was satisfying in a divide-and-conquer sort of way. My husband commented on my unusual industriousness and he apparently meant it as a compliment. Maybe he didn’t realize that I can accomplish a great deal in the service of not-writing.

Ordinarily procrastination is not one of my vices. When I have papers to grade, I read them promptly. When spring comes and taxes loom, I get them done well before April 15th. I like to get tasks taken care of, out of the way. I like the freedom of feeling unburdened time lying ahead of me.

Except when it comes to writing.

When I’ve cleared an entire day to work on my novel, I become the queen of procrastination. I read the newspaper, even the sports pages; I scrub the kitchen sink and sweep the floor; I check my email and my facebook page. I make appointments and return phone calls. Sometimes I do a little more research, just to “get in the mood.” There are days when I don’t start actually writing until mid-afternoon.

Professional writers are supposed to be disciplined. It doesn’t matter whether they feel inspired; they write every day. At the same time every day. That’s supposed to make the writing easier, and keep the writer from getting rusty.

I am disciplined. I make time to write every day, except Sundays. But the unfortunate truth is that it doesn’t get easier. If anything, it gets harder. Each day I feel as if I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, trying to screw up the courage to jump into the ocean. And though I’ve done it thousands of times, I’m afraid that, this time, I might drown.

I’ve thought about this a lot. Why is writing so difficult? Is it the critical demon that sits on my shoulder and tells me my work will never be “good enough?” Is it because I’m basically lazy? Is it because there’s something fundamentally terrifying about putting words on a page? (Many of my students seem to think so.) Is it because I can’t evaluate the value of what I’ve written until long after the fact?

I suspect the creative task is more demanding than others partly because it makes me feel vulnerable. It requires me to expose myself in ways that make me uncomfortable. It’s just one step away from exhibitionism.

I think writing also forces me to see – in black and white – my own limitations. The dream of the novel – the novel I want to write – is never matched by the novel that comes into being as I pile up actual words and paragraphs and pages. The realization of how far it falls short is often discouraging. Sometimes so discouraging that it cripples the impulse to write.

I’ve sometimes suspected that this is very much the way God feels about humanity – that creation has fallen far short of what might have been. But God apparently hasn’t given up on us yet. So maybe God’s patience could be a model for my own.

Each morning is the beginning of a new day. Another chance to write, to try to move my novel on paper closer to the novel in my imagination. And so this morning I’m sitting at my desk instead of taking my clippers out into the overgrown back yard or scrubbing the bathtub tiles.

Wish me luck.

Ticked Off on Cape Cod

The black and white sign at the beginning of the trail was easy to overlook, except for its blood red triangle. I stopped long enough to see the word TICKS and noticed the insect graphics, but I didn’t bother to read the three or four paragraphs – the font was small and I was eager to get walking.

The trail itself was wide and well-maintained. It was easy to avoid the thick plots of poison ivy and I didn’t brush against the marsh grass, or wander off the path into the woods. The sun was shining and the cool air was invigorating. I walked beside a kettle pond and through a tidal marsh over a wooden bridge. I passed white cedars and black oaks, decaying fences and apple trees, relics of a long-abandoned orchard. I learned that the area had once been farmland where marsh grass was harvested and transported in wide wooden boats.

There were few other people on the trail – an elderly man walked an overweight Boston terrier on a leash. A young couple in shorts power-walked side by side. A tall middle-aged woman in jeans and a cranberry-colored sweatshirt approached me going the other way. As she passed, she warned me to be on the lookout for ticks. I nodded cheerfully – I had seen the sign and was being careful to stay on the path. Besides, I couldn’t fathom how I would be able to see any ticks – they’re tiny and they certainly don’t visibly leap onto your clothes.

Not that I take such warnings lightly. Deer ticks are responsible for the spread of Lyme disease, which is most prevalent in the northeastern United States. I know a young woman who has Lyme disease – she’s had several heart attacks and has spent too much of her young life being rushed to emergency rooms.

The tide was in and filled the tiny inlets and canals. Clumps of knotted wrack swayed just under the surface. The air smelled of salt. I watched a pair of Canada geese swim the length of an inlet. I turned around before the trail entered the woods and retraced my steps, noting how landmarks I had noted on the way appeared so different from the new angle.

It wasn’t until that evening, back in the hotel room, that my back began to itch. I reached to scratch it and scraped away something very small – a bit of sand perhaps? When I looked, a tick was crawling on my finger. A deer tick. I’d seen deer ticks before, some no bigger than a pencil dot. I knew I’d better check myself and my clothes thoroughly. A half-hour’s rigorous search turned up eight more ticks on the inside of my shirt and jeans. Fortunately, none had yet attached themselves to me.

The next morning I invested in some DEET and when I went hiking later that day I not only sprayed my clothes but followed the tick-avoidance precautions to the letter, even tucking my jean cuffs into my socks. I felt paranoid and freakish compared to the other, more smartly-dressed, hikers I met. But I remained tick free, and that was a blessing I was no longer going to take for granted.

City on a Hill

Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting from John Winthrop’s seventeenth century lecture, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in which Winthrop called on the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be “as a city on a hill.” and reminded his fellow Puritans that “the eyes of all people are upon us.” But the popular symbol of America as a shining beacon of freedom for the world is a long way from Winthrop’s original concept. The city he envisioned was one in which community – not freedom – was the dominant theme.

“We must delight in each other,” Winthrop said, “make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together.” The city on a hill was one in which people put the common good before their own desires and ambitions, “that every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.” They were more concerned with their dependence on each other than with independence from any authority. (Yes, even including the Church of England.)

The Puritans who came to these shores in the 1630s believed they were bound in a covenant with God. If they failed to keep their end of the bargain, they should expect to be punished – not individually but as a community. “If we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken,” said Winthrop, “we shall be made a story and byword through the world.” In other words, they would be a public humiliation, a scourge upon the earth. The city on a hill metaphor was intended as a warning as much as a promise. Keeping that covenant put the Puritans under specific obligations.

It required them to be charitable to each other. “There is a time when a Christian must sell all and give to the poor,” Winthrop insisted. “There is a time also when Christians (though they give not all yet) must give beyond their ability.” They were to let no one go hungry or without shelter. They had a duty to visit the sick, and to comfort those whose loved ones had died. They were supposed to watch out for each other. “Mutual watch,” they called it, and they took it very seriously.

If “mutual watch” sounds comforting, we should remember that it has a dark side. It’s the uncomfortable part of living in community. It means that if you beat your wife, you should expect to be reported to the authorities. Your absence from worship will be noticed and if you miss enough services, you will be reprimanded. If you get drunk and insult your neighbor, you’ll have to apologize for it - in public.

Anyone who’s lived in a small town has experienced this to some extent. If you grew up in a town under 2,000 people, chances are you haven’t ever quite lost that sense that everyone knows your business. And you know everyone else’s. You learn that everything you do and say will likely be recorded in someone’s memory and played back to someone else. You learn to mind what you say and what you do. You learn to take care of your reputation, because once you lose it, you can’t get it back.

The “mutual watch” was a duty, and it went way beyond sharing information. It required doing whatever was necessary to relieve the suffering of others in the community. Winthrop spoke of a “double law” that regulated all their relationships: “This law requires two things,” he said. “First, that every man afford his help to another in every want or distress. Secondly, that he perform this out of the same affection which makes him careful of his own goods.”

This understanding of each person’s responsibility for the well-being of everyone else was integral to life in the “city on the hill." Not exactly what Ronald Reagan had in mind.

In fact, the Puritans were as wary of personal freedom as we are entranced by it. Their commitment was to community. They understood its costs and its perils. They knew that community wasn’t easily accomplished; it was a difficult and often frustrating undertaking.

They also knew that freedom, unharnessed to a self-reflective humility, was a dangerous thing. It had the potential to loose the demons of greed and corruption, to elevate self-righteousness, and ultimately to destroy community itself.

America has come a long way from the Puritan dream. Few of us would want to go back to it, even if we could. But have we perhaps forgotten something life-affirming and necessary in our national journey? Does personal freedom, when taken to an extreme, have a way of isolating us? Even in crowds, we often find ourselves alone as we listen privately to music on our mp3 players or carry on cell phone conversations as we walk down the street. We often feel anonymous, just numbers on a social security or credit card. We receive phone calls from robots. We spend hours sitting alone in our cars, commuting to work and driving to shopping malls. We try to fill our need for community with characters from television shows or by joining special interest groups, or instant messaging. Yet we still feel oddly unconnected, and so we chase our dreams across the globe, but they’re never quite within our grasp.

Community makes demands on us. It is hard work – life-changing, world-changing, hard work. It intrudes on our personal space and requires us to relinquish some of our own freedom for the good of all. But it is through these sacrifices that we become part of something greater than ourselves. “Love,” claims Winthrop, “is the bond of perfection.” In this bond people “partake of each other’s strength and infirmity, joy and sorrow, weal and woe.” This is the city on a hill that Winthrop envisioned: true community, a beacon not of freedom, but of love.

Practicing Optimism

Yesterday afternoon, as I was having my blood drawn prior to seeing my oncologist, I mentioned to the technician that my husband and I had recently celebrated our fortieth wedding anniversary. In her musical Cayman Islands accent, she asked me if I thought I’d live until my fiftieth. The question rocked me, especially in that setting, since personnel at the cancer center have been uniformly optimistic. I mumbled something like “I hope so.”

I take to heart comments and questions about cancer and mortality these days, since these issues are no longer theoretical for me. Occasionally I’m blindsided by one that sends me spiraling into depression, but most of the time I try to put them behind me. As I gradually learn how to live in the present, they’ve become less painful; their sting doesn’t last as long. They’re like those little stones thrown up by truck wheels that ping off your windshield. Fortunately, most of them bounce away without causing any damage.

As insensitive as her question seemed, I suspect it was benign, for she then launched into a long description of a fiftieth anniversary celebration she’d recently attended in which the couple had renewed their vows. “They dressed up in wedding clothes and acted like they were still sixteen,” she said. She’d clearly enjoyed the event and apparently found it meaningful enough to advise me to think about it for our fiftieth.

I know wedding vow renewal ceremonies have become popular in recent years, but so far I fail to see their attraction. It seems to me that the point of wedding vows is that you give them once, with the intention that you will keep them throughout your lifetime. I have the sense that renewing them oddly undermines the original vows. Certainly, forty or fifty years into a marriage, a couple can make their vows with a deeper, more mature understanding of what the words signify. But isn’t part of the mystery of marriage exactly that “not-knowing,” that blind leap into a future you can’t see? That naive tumble into adventure?

I was appallingly naïve when I made my wedding promises forty years ago. I was twenty-one, fresh out of college, a child of the idealistic sixties who was caught up that era’s romantic optimism. Like most girls, I was raised on Cinderella, happily-ever-after stories.

I remember very little of the specifics of our wedding ceremony. But I do know that the words “’till death do us part” rocked me at the time, with their gravitas and intimations of mortality. They rock me still. That my husband and I have vowed to stay together until death parts us means that our story, ultimately, will not have a happy ending.

All of which suggests that the story is not actually about the ending, but about the middle – the day to day living of it. Marriage seems to be as much a mysterious advenutre as life itself.

What I’m cultivating now is a different kind of optimism than I had forty years ago. A practiced optimism , an optimism that is not subject to the whims of fortune, but focused on waking up each day, grateful that I’m alive. Focused on being truly alive throughout the day.

Will I live to see my fiftieth wedding anniversary? I sincerely hope so. But right now I’m going to celebrate this day.

Today I’m awake. I’m alive. Praise God.

Immersion

Yesterday afternoon I attended the reading of a novel-in-progress. It was a good reading and a good novel; the voice was strong and the narrative well-paced, infused with vivid, telling details. In the question and answer period after the reading, there was some discussion of the novel’s theme, and the process the author used to discover the theme. One person wanted to know if the author had gone back and thematically revised the manuscript. Then the author was asked to name her themes and when she responded by explaining how she had woven the moon and the woods throughout the narrative, someone pointed out that those were images, not themes.

The exchange started me thinking about the difference between theme and image, which led me to consider the differences between the fiction writer’s task and the task of the literary critic. A theme, of course, is an idea – basically an abstraction, a compressed thought that expresses a particular point of view – presumably the author’s. Images, on the other hand, are the stuff of the life of the novel. Images are where you find the theme.

So how exactly does a novelist go about establishing a theme? How necessary is it that the writer intentionally shape a story around a theme? For some time I’ve suspected that the best writing is more intuitive than intellectual, and that the writer experiences the emergence of the theme exactly as the reader does – slowly, through immersing herself in the images.

We humans are story-telling creatures. For thousands of years, people shared stories in which images were the primary expression of meaning. Our ancestors were comfortable with metaphor and mystery. Then something changed, and I’m not sure exactly how or when, but it seems that now, in the western world, we’ve become so enamored of “facts” that we are no longer comfortable in the world of symbol. Maybe it’s science, or academic or the media, or a mixture of many factors. But it seems that we want to nail down – exactly – what something means. We are driven by the need to be unequivocal about ideas, from politics to science. We want to precisely explain the meaning of an event or a story. We “deconstruct” fiction, or have it deconstructed for us, so that we can understand it correctly.

But an image always contains more than a single, identifiable meaning. A metaphor is a window onto more than one landscape. A gesture is both more mysterious and more complete than an idea. We know we’re loved not because someone has told us so, but because we’ve been embraced.

Robert Frost was once asked to explain the “hidden meaning” of his poems. He said, “If I wanted you to know I’d had told you in the poem.” Finding the hidden meanings, finding the theme, isn’t the job of the writer. It’s the job of the literary critic. It’s akin to the task of a fisherman –who must drop a line or a net over the side of a boat and pull a fish into the air. But the novelist’s task is a different one, at once more visceral and more dangerous. The novelist can’t stay in the boat; she must jump all the way in, completely submerge herself in the water. She must swim with the fish.