The Anchoress

Yes, I know, I am still not posting much. That’s not exactly heart-breaking news for some.

I find that having taken a week or so off from blogging and more or less from any news monitoring, I am not at all anxious to dive back into the teeming cesspool that has become American political discourse. Once I started reading the news, the op-eds, the headlines, La Constant Carnivale of Hillary, the global warming push to aggressive hysteria - (let’s think a minute, who exactly is recommending that scientists who don’t fall in line with the warming hoo-ha should be silenced or ignored, that meteorolgists who don’t toe the line should be fired? Oh yeah…not the right) - the increasingly overt moves by the left to suppress free speech and scientific study, the childish, adolescent yelling and neurotic (or possibly simply dishonest) projection…honestly…I just wanted to puke, go bathe and puke some more. My heart and head are not yet ready to look at it all. There are stronger bloggers out there who may relish all this, but right now…it’s making me sick.

I also have I can’t even begin to count how many emails that I’m trying to get around…but they may be defeating me this time. I simply may not be able to respond to them. I may just delete all the hate mail, and even delete all the political and intrablog mail, answer the interesting email and start afresh from there…because from where I am sitting, it’s all pretty daunting and I feel a bit overwhelmed.

Oh, and someone wrote asking me why Buster’s Bookshelf recommendations are gone. Sorry about that. I took it down - and his photo - when I got email cursing him, wishing him ill and otherwise directing all sorts of negative energy in his direction.

Yes, it’s really sad that this is the world some people want to live in - a world where a teenager with interesting books and music to put out there is considered “the enemy” because they disagree with his mother’s politics. Stupid, but there it is. Perpetual adolescents, nasty to boot.

The rest of this week’s hate mail is pretty ordinary. A lot of “you’re stupid, you’re a Christianist, sex-hating creep, you should just shut up, or die” stuff.

All of which says a great deal more about these folks’ creeds and maturity than it says about mine.

I find it interesting that - in my world - these people are entitled to their thoughts and opinions, and even to full respect for them, while in their worlds I am entitled to no thought or opinion that dissents from theirs, and I should not be allowed to speak - hell, I’m barely human to them. And they think they’re the liberals, eh? Not by any definition I ever learned.

There is a name for people who hold such views, but liberal is not it.

Newsflash, people, when you are making bigoted sweeping generalizations about Christians, when you’re incapable of moving beyond sneering snark and name-calling and you’re writing lines like “you…[conservatives and Christians] are not human to me,” well…you’re not a liberal. You’re very, very far away from liberal thinking. And you should be afraid of where you’re permitting yourself to go, because it’s a bad, restricting, joyless and stagnant sort of place that has absolutely no connection to liberty or individuality. I wish better for you.

Sigh. And yet, God loves every one of you just as much as he loves me. Every one of you is the apple of His eye, as am I. Sheesh…that makes us brothers and sisters. Gawd, how you must hate that.

Kind of sucks, doesn’t it? But there it is. Whoever said you get to choose your family, anyway? God loves you, so I can’t hate you. I can’t return ugly for ugly. In truth…I don’t want to. There is enough of that crap out there, and adding to it is just too easy. It’s easier to hate than to love, easier to be cynical than to believe, easier to shout down than to listen, easier to resent than to let go, easier to sneer and hunch up than to raise an interested eyebrow and just relax. And I just don’t want to be the person who hates because it’s easier.

This week…I think I’m going to stick to art and religion. Art and religion have the capacity to expand narrow hearts and minds - art particularly can manage to transcend differences of opinion and bring people together - to take them out of themselves. Bono once said that meaningful lovemaking and music are the two means by which we can transcend ourselves and touch God. I would add contemplative prayer to that. All three - lovemaking, music and prayer, involve giving oneself over to the “other,” whether that “other” be your lover, your muse or your God. And the very act of giving oneself over should help to make one more expansive and less selfish, less self-interested. If you’re giving yourself over to hate, however…well…I don’t see how that broadens one’s views. It would seem, instead, to narrow them.

Maybe that’s all I want to contemplate this week - sex, art and the Creator.

Maybe if more people were making love, making music or praying, things wouldn’t be so damned ugly, everywhere.

And for those of you who are undoubtedly misreading this as some sort of surrender, it’s not. It’s just a break. Everyone should take them, now and then.

I really like Dave Hartline’s blog, the Catholic Report which is a terrific resource for all sorts of Catholic news stories and coverage of church-related issues. It’s a very smart site.

Before my schedule got too much for me to keep up with, Dave was nice enough to send me a copy of his new book, The Tide is Turning Toward Catholicism, which was released on December 12. He even courted me a little by mentioning your humble Anchoress in his text. Heh.

Now comes word that The Tide Is Turning Is scheduled To Be On EWTN’s Bookmark Show, 5:30 PM EST, 4:30 PM CST, 3:30 PM MST, 2:30 PM PST. Dave helpfully links to the streaming video. Good going, Dave!

I recommend the book, btw. I have not had a chance to finish it, but what Dave has put together is some extensive research and some anecdotes that give cause for people to be optimistic about the future of the Catholic Church, the growing instinct within to return to Orthodoxy (much of that instinct being fostered and led by the laity), and the prescience of John Paul II’s “springtime of evangelization.”

The book is very readable and very encouraging. It might be just the ticket for a cold winter’s eve, when it feels like precious little in the world is making sense, and the negative forces are encroaching all around. And if you have a chance, check out the EWTN bookshow, which is always worth a look.

I know I have some lawyerly-folk readers out there and I wanted to bleg a quick question and see if anyone has the answer. It’s a hypothetical question based on a conversation I had with a pal over the weekend.

The film ET, The Extra-terrestrial is Steven Spielberg’s baby - his intellectual property, his copyrights, etc. Obviously, if I wanted to write a play or a book or whatever using that story and those characters, I’d run into all sorts of copyright issues, and perhaps Spielberg would be exceedingly protective of it and not even allow a purchase of the rights. Is there a way around such a circumstance?

For instance, suppose rather than write a variation of the story of ET, I decided to write a fictionalized account - a play or book - about the life of Stephen Spielberg, and within that media I tried to weave ET throughout as a subconscious parallel - a means of digging into Spielberg’s psyche. Since ET is a historical part of Spielberg’s life and I’m writing a historical fiction of that life, wouldn’the ET story then be fair game, used within the context of the newer work? You can’t copyright life details, can you? Wouldn’t I be able to write a story that said, essentially: Spielberg lived, he created art, this was the art he created, this was why.

Just a question. Ever since the scenario popped into my head I’ve been wondering about it. If anyone knows the answer, I’d love to hear it! I mean, something similiar was done with Amadeus, but Mozart had no copyrights to deal with!

UPDATE: Snarky Bastards responded to this post and in doing so cited Edith Efron’s really excellent analysis of Clarence Thomas and the psychology of his SCOTUS hearing. It’s so good I had to share it with you. It was the Thomas hearings which first turned me rightward, away from my Democrat roots and feminist loyalties, and this remarkable piece brings it all back - it’s a must read.

Humanity brought forth in a perfect blending of old and new…

I’m back from a trip that was in some ways thrilling and in other ways both enlightening and troubling, mostly because even when we “know” who we are, we sometimes do not, if we are honest. And that makes sense. A living thing is not static - there is always growth, change, forward movement, and with all of that must come introspection, adjustment, a re-introduction to that most familiar and yet most distant star which is one’s own soul and nature. We “know” ourselves, but never for long, or fully. We know each other even less.

Sometimes we are simply and utterly fools who - even if we have determined regret to be a tiresome and useless weight - find we must accept it, still. Lift it up and bear it and carry it forward until the road has turned and lessons have been well-learned, and mistakes do not get repeated. Then we put down the burden of regret just in time to make new mistakes to carry along the next path.

And for all that we presume to know of God…well, he knows us, and loves us anyway, and bless Him, for that.

No, I have no intention of telling you what that’s all about. It’s mostly good - nothing is wrong - but yeah, regret is a cruel bastard of a teacher, and I have been an unmindful student.

I’m back, but there are errands to run, mountains of snail mail to read and process, even more email…and lots to think and pray on. I apologize in advance for the fact that I may never get to all of these emails. But I’ll try.

Meanwhile…Leonard Cohen’s unforgettable “Hallelujah,” rendered more brilliant by yet another admirably musical Welshman (what is it about Wales?) John Cale:

I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Your faith was strong, but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Listen…
Originally posted July 8, 2005

LISTEN…

LISTEN…

It is the first word of the Rule of St. Benedict.

Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.

It is such an important word - such good advice - advice I have often been to slow to take, too noisy to comprehend. Chattering on and on to God about what I thought about things, it took a long time to learn to listen. I am learning, still.

Over the past few months, I have been listening to many doctors as they have been giving me one dollop of bad news at a time. But I think only yesterday did I hear.

What I heard was the sound of a limit being met. The sound of a camel’s back breaking in two.

There have been some horror stories in my life, but I have never blamed God for them.

I have not always been a good Christian, or even a good person - I have done terrible, dark things in my day, things for which I have humbly begged forgiveness. I have never believed that I was owed some slack for my behavior simply because of the nearly Dickensian situations of my earliest years. I certainly know what I have done and, as the psalmist says, “[my sin] is ever before me.”

I also know that often our sin has a wider effect than we realize - broadening and stretching out to touch other lives, lives of which we may not even be aware - just as a pebble thrown into a pond can sometimes stir the water to its very edge. We live, none of us, to ourselves.

I know that what goes around comes around. I know there is Karma. I also know what the prophet Isaiah has said - that God has “rescued me from the pit of destruction, when you cast my sins behind your back.”

And because I know these things, and because I am inordinately aware of how many blessings I have received, I have never spent time railing at God like a fishwife, demanding to know why, so often, the short straw has seemed to fall my way.

We all draw them, from time to time, of course, the short straws. But yesterday morning, it seemed like I had drawn one straw too many.

I had been alright with the “severe anemia” straw. Not the worst thing in the world, after all.

The recent “skin cancer” straw was a little scary, but I appreciated how much worse it could have been, and I am certainly very aware, now and attentive.

Yesterday morning, though, came a straw I have dreaded my whole life, and I finally drew it: the “you are losing your hearing” straw.

I knew I’d been missing some conversation in noisy restaurants…

The loss was discovered, of course, due to that dismal ear infection of the past two weeks, but the hearing in that afflicted ear is only slightly worse than the other. Upon reading my test results the doctor asked if I had worked around airplanes for the past 20 years, or if I had fronted a rock band. “severe degeneration…hearing aids…”

My grandparents were deaf. My birth-father was cupping his ears in his fifties.

But, of course, the degeneration may not be congenital, at all.

“The autoimmune problems you have from the Lyme Disease could be the reason for it…”

Short was the straw. Crrrraaaack! Went the camel’s back.

Lyme Disease. I had it for a long while before it was diagnosed, long enough for it to affect me neurologically and otherwise. It has changed my life in every possible way. Now, perhaps, it is stealing my hearing.

I drove home pounding the steering wheel and telling God I thought He was pretty damned unfair, after all. I demanded that He listen to me and make me a sensible answer about why things were going as they were, why at only 46 years of age I was increasingly debilitated, increasingly arthritic, increasingly feeling like a 65 year old.

“It’s not enough that I must sometimes use a cane, or that I wear glasses, not enough that I am constantly bruised, often fatigued into stupidity and inarticulate, stammering aphasia, not enough that my body is scarred all over and that my skin is under seige simply because I am Irish…now I am going to need hearing aids? Now I am going to be deaf? What has my husband ever done to you, that you need to inflict this sort of wife upon him?”

Oh, I howled. I ranted.

And it was so out of character for me to do so - this has not been my way, to shake an angry fist at God and make demands. I didn’t like doing it - it felt so wrong. So wrong, not to simply be thankful for my blessings…for all the good things, and all the “not too bad” things.

But I was so angry.

And then, I remembered that my sons are both musicians. And I wept.

It’s cruel, too cruel. I’ve appreciated irony all my life. But my sons are both musicians. And I am going deaf.

Maybe I will never hear my elder son’s compositions. Maybe Buster’s jazzy riffs will only come through as an occasional toot and wail.

Maybe I will only hear my grandchildren laugh in my imagination. Assuming I live long enough to see grandchildren.

Yes…I became that downtrodden, that blue; I started wondering about mortality.

We can do such numbers on ourselves, sometimes. We can willfully shatter our own spirits, plunge ourselves into a bleak, lugubrious brood of misery, and we can do it so quickly…particularly if we are unwilling to listen.

Driving Buster to work last night, I told him what was going on and gave him a taste of my “it’s not fair,” rant. He was, as ever, thoughtful and sympathetic. And fast with a response, too, one I needed to hear.

“Ma, listen,” Buster said, “don’t you remember about Job? Remember how heavy his afflictions were, and how he was tested…”

“Screw Job, I’m not Job,” was my heated response. “I’m not some great model for mankind, here, and there is no greater purpose being served…”

But Buster’s arrow had hit the mark, and by the time I pulled into the parking lot my head was bowed in shame, because I knew better. “I know that everything works to God’s purposes, I know it.” I admited to my son. “But this sucks. Why is all of this happening to me? Why is all this crap being piled on? Not that I want it all to happen to someone else, God forbid! But why does it have to be me? I feel like my body is falling to pieces and I’m…I’m just so angry!”

“Ma…what have you told me, all my life? God always uses the imperfect - the weak and humble and broken things to strengthen and build up and heal the world.”

“I’ve never said that!” I sobbed.

“You say it all the time!” Buster laughed. “You point it out all the time! About King David, St. Peter, St. Bernadette, John Paul II, Terri Schiavo, President Bush, heck, even the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God was first made weak, humbled and broken…”

“Well, I’m not any of them!”

“No, you’re not,” he agreed, smiling as he got out of the car and walked around. Leaning in to give me a kiss, he said, “you’re not any of them, and you don’t have their greatness, you’re just an insignificant woman in a small suburban town…but in your little world, your broken little self can be used for something good, if you let Him use it. Maybe you should stop complaining and listen. Maybe all that silence in your future is so that you can hear something else.”

The little bastard! Stopped me right in my tracks, like a wise and elderly monk who has no time for circuitous council and goes right to the heart of the matter.

When did he get so smart?

Like Job, I understand that what is occuring is not punishment for sin.

But I have been much blessed. And I have sinned much. Grace abounds, of course. But maybe there is some cosmic balance here that I will only understand in a different, altered state. Or maybe what I look at as affliction is another sort of blessing - if all of this is useful, in some strange way, to God, then what greater blessing can there be than to be allowed to be of use to Him, even in ways we do not understand?

In one of those weird co-incidences that seem so providential, sometimes, a reader with whom I have never corresponded before wrote to me out of the blue, about the same themes that were going ’round in my head. The last thing he wrote was this:

Fr Nouwen reminds us of how the Eucharist defines our life.
First Christ takes us as we are.
He blesses us.
Then He breaks us.
And gives us to the world to bless.

He and Buster were on the same wavelength, it seems.

In Rumer Godden’s novel, In This House of Brede, a nun notices a notepad upon which her abbess, severely tried by the actions of others and wishing she could be uncharitable, has scrawled, “there can be no limits.”

In another part of the book, a nun who has entered after a life of heavy secular responsibilities scorns an admonishment to be more willing, more open, to what is required of her. “I have done my stint,” she says.

“Your stint,” an older nun replies, “that sounds like a measure.”

“It is a measure,” the first nun says, “my full share.”

“I think you will find,” the older nun councils, “that God does not work in measures.”

Perhaps that is the message that Buster was delivering yesterday. I had declared the camel’s back broken, the strawbaskets full. I had had my share of bad news, had “done my stint.”

But there can be no limits.

St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila have both written of the “Dark Night of the Soul.” Mother Theresa of Calcutta and St. Therese of Lisieux wrote a little on it, as well. It seems to be a particularly scathing sort of dryness and loss that occurs at the unbreechable chasm between human and divine love. The suffering is very great. The blessing seems to be in that one only gets to that point - to that dark night - when one has advanced so far in love and in faith as to have perhaps exceeded human understanding…when perhaps all there is left is the ability not to praise or to do, but to simply be, and to be willing - humbly willing - to simply listen and be led, even to where - like Peter - you would rather not go.

It is the Pauline paradox. When I am weak, then I am strong. When I have nothing left to offer, then I will finally simply allow You to take what You need. When I have finally gotten out of my own way, I will have gotten out of Yours, as well, so that you might strew me where you will, broken and scattered and meant for something beyond my imagining.

This, I suppose, is another mystery of suffering. When I was a child I once heard a woman talk about her son’s severe and unusual illness and how a nun, upon learning the details, said to her, “my dear, how God must love you to allow you to suffer so…”

At the time I thought the nun rather perverse. This idea of God demonstrating his love by allowing the loved one to suffer seemed dubious and theologically unsound. But as I get older, and look around a bit, I wonder if the old nun was not on to something. Often great blessings and great sufferings abide within the same single life, and it was ever thus.

My sufferings are not great. “Placed in the balance, they rise…” Placed in perspective, everything can be dealt with. Whenever I have encountered a task that seemed terribly difficult, I have usually discovered that the hardest part of the job was in simply doing the work, applying myself to it with my whole heart and attention…which is another form of being, when you come right down to it. The biggest limitations have been the ones I have placed before myself.

I am losing my hearing. We will know more next month. Perhaps the degeneration will be slow. Perhaps not.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

And, as Will Shakespeare once wrote…the rest is silence.

There can be no limits. There is only one measure, and it spans a lifetime and it touches the Divine.

I know that I am not done listening. Not by a long shot.

America is Wide Awake, and Dreaming Glorious Dreams
Originally posted August 29, 2004

A Mother-Hung Nation? Meyer, Again
Originally posted June 29, 2006

AMERICA IS WIDE AWAKE AND DREAMING GLORIOUS DREAMS

“You are such a shy person,” my husband said as we drove home from a long, pretty good concert this evening. “You stammer and get red whenever you meet a stranger. How is it you manage, time after time, to get into these loud, public brawls?”

Well, alright, there is all that Irish in me, and that might explain some of it, but my husband has a point and it makes me wonder about the vast difference between shyness and timidity. It is true that I hate meeting new people. I don’t hate the people, I simply hate meeting them. I hate not having a fluid grasp of all the social cues and niceties (there was quite a raucus, barbarian quality to my immediate family and early formation and so the social graces simply do not flow, at it were…)

However, for all of my shyness, I am not a timid woman. Rather, I tend to speak my mind too quickly when an interior censor would be advisable. It happened again tonight, at a YES concert at Jones Beach Theatre.

At intermission, as the roadies set up for the band, my husband left me to get a soft drink and I stood and looked appreciatively around the venue. Two men were also enjoying the play of full moonlight on water and we chatted amiably. One of them pointed out the VIP area, which looked comfortable and seemed to provide a wide variety of refreshment. The other fellow said, “it’s not worth the money, unless of course, you’re writing it off at Halliburton!”

Out of nowhere, perfect strangers talking, and this utterly stupid remark goes forth, and I cannot help myself, because I’m so sick of the mindless hate-zone so many people have fallen into without even realizing it. Calling on my limited gifts for diplomacy I say…I believe I said this and did not sneer it…”Yes, that eeeeeeevil corporation, Halliburton! Yes, they would just write off VIP tickets, wouldn’t they? Not like the rest of those companies throughout the nation and the world! Heck, not even like the corporate owner of this venue! Only Halliburton would write off entertainment. Halliburton, hiss, hiss!”

Things went downhill from there. I had to listen to how stupid America is, how materialistic, how shallow, how superficial. I heard that the Europeans were so much more sophisticated, so much more laid back, so much more soulful than Americans. “They are simply of a higher caliber, altogether,” one man sniffed at me, “than Americans. Although they are, perhaps a tiny bit too class conscious!”

“The beauty of America,” I said quietly as I tried not to explode, “is that anyone of any so-called class may ascend or descend to another simply by virtue of how much drive, energy and imagination they have, and how hard they are willing to work!”

“There you go,” the other man said, “it always comes back down to this idea of hard work - it’s so pathetic!” His voice began to rise. “It’s always about the time-card with Americans, it’s always about the job, about getting ahead, about the elite, it’s never about leisure, or family or art!”

I almost choked. America not about art? I looked about the amphitheater, old and graceful, surrounded by water, part of a Robert Moses-designed public beach. It is a little gem of community ownership. There is nothing at all elitist in the brickwork and copper architecture, but there is art. We were attending a rock concert - an artform descended from Jazz, the quintessential American music. The place itself is a testimony to imagination and hard work. I thought of all of the families who - when the beach was being designed and built in the early part of the 20th century - had a breadwinner employed by the venture. I thought of the houses and cars that were able to be acquired because of the jobs the design had created, and the tax revenues from those jobs which went toward building Long Island’s excellent public schools and public works.

The very beach on which we stood had been for many the motor which drove acquisition of wealth, education, lessons in dance, music, tennis, all of which fostered additional, continuing excellence. I saw all of this and thought about the everyday people who had punched their time clocks day after day to build such a treasure, and I felt such a sense of pride and admiration well up inside me that I couldn’t speak for a moment. When I could, I turned to the fellow and said. “Look around you. Are you blind? Look at America! This venue seats 14,000 people, on a waterfront, surrounded by something natural and wild that we worked to integrate! And it’s not here to serve elites who take themselves and their money seriously! This is a crowd of suburban people who worked hard all week and don’t particularly feel the need to go into Manhattan to affirm themselves or their lives when this excellent and beautiful theater is right here! You think Europe is so much better? More soulful, did you say?” I shook my head. “Both spiritually and philosophically, Europe is asleep, because it wants to be. But it’s a terrible sleep, because it is a sleep without dreams, and everyone knows that sleep without dreams leads only to madness and a terrible decay. America is not asleep. In fact, America is wide awake and bustling and busy and creating and building. Yes, I know, the hard work idea again, I know you don’t like it, but a body at rest stays at rest. America is wide awake and moving…and even still, somehow, she dares to dream. America is dreaming, even now.”

My husband returned and lead me away, back to our breezy seats and the music. But the conversation with those two men stayed with me. And so has that sense of pride.

I expect those two gentlemen who so loved Europe over their own country are the sort to laugh and applaud the demonstrations and hate-filled displays which will be all over the news this week as the Republicans convene in New York City and the more extreme (or addled) members of the opposition do their best to insult, shock or harrass the visitors. They won’t get it. They won’t see that the people being subjected to this classless treatment are the people who dream of public beaches with landmark towers and who build them while they sweat in blue workshirts. They see materialists groveling for a paycheck so they can buy something for their lover or their kids, and they sneer at it. I see a country that understands that what is not moving forward it is growing stagnant, a people who instinctively understand that a bridge and some beaches, and a pleasant environment and appropriate infrastructure, and music under the stars are good things and blessings - things which feed our souls, that these things do not add up to an environmental travesty that has made them impure.

I may hate meeting new people, but I love Americans. I love them with all of their faults and follies, because I know Americans; I know this one thing: there is greatness of spirit within them, and one needn’t stammer to meet them and know it as well. God bless ‘em all, I say, even the ones who don’t understand what a gift they have been given.

***

A MOTHER-HUNG NATION? MEYER, AGAIN

Yesterday, in this piece on Hamlet and Harry Potter, I wrote this:

Here is the interesting question…when a life has been lived with a sense of deep mission - as in either Hamlet’s or Harry’s case - and that mission has been fulfilled, what is the purpose of the life, thereafter? […] Perhaps this is why monarchs, old generals, popes, entrepreneurs, mother-hung rock stars and CBS newsmen can never willingly retire and live out their days. Without their sense of mission, life has no thrust and parry, no vivacity, no purpose.

Because I have a bit of a nudge-streak in me, I decided to send that last bit to a few acquaintances at CBS, including Dick Meyer, whose columns I frequently find so interesting, I must comment - even though my commentary sometimes lead to sticky debate.

Meyer wanted to know what “Mother-Hung” meant and then he pointed me toward his latest piece, The Lonely State of America, which comments on this recent study on social isolation in America.

Now, you know I take every “study” with a grain of salt for two reasons, firstly because everything is always in flux, nothing is static, and life is unpredictable, and so today’s “study” can be tomorrow’s hoo-ha, and secondly because whenever a “study” is given full-trumpet fanfare in the press, soon all the big and little laws based on the study are upon us, for better or worse. Sometimes I think studies - interesting as they are - are done for no other purpose than to excite legislation, but I digress.

Meyers writes that this study’s findings “should scare you.” These days “scared” is how every “study” wants you to feel, so fear is useless. I would say this study should make us more thoughtful, than scared.

I urge you to read his whole piece - I don’t agree with all of it, of course - but it is well worth your reading and passing along.

Meanwhile, in answer to his question:

Mother-hung. People who spend their whole lives either trying to please the mother or to replace her missing love. I’ve noticed that a large number of rock stars (and other celebs, to be honest) either lost their moms early in life (Madonna, Bono, John Lennon, Rosie O’ Donnell) or had bad or complicated relationships with their mothers (Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Mick Jagger, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland…Bill Clinton!) I’ve always thought that for these folks public adoration was the “mother replacement,” and one reason why these people can never stop or retire.

Which is actually kind of an interesting correlation to Meyer’s piece. These people, lacking mothers, look ever outward and require enormous adulation, but it’s all long-distance adulation - the length of a playing field or arena, via video, CD, radio - it’s not personal or warm. Just think of the gazillion stories of stars who had the love of the distant world but lived in private hells because they had no one to talk to, no intimacy in their lives. Look at Marilyn Monroe - she was “the most wanted woman in the world,” yet the night she died, she couldn’t get anyone to talk to her on the phone! John Lennon was able to put it down, and be a family guy baking bread, when he finally had familial intimacy.

I will have to read this study to see if it considers the disintegration of the family into single-parent or “blended” units, or the “both parents working, here is your “quality” half-hour of “together time” before you go to sleep, sweetie” phenomenon of the past 20-30 years. Because that could well be a factor.

We have now had several generations growing up with either missing parents or well-meaning but “barely-there” parents. A lot of what we learn regarding intimacy we learn from Mom and Dad and Grandma. If they’re barely in the picture, from whom will we learn it? The Nursery school teacher? If we have a society with intimacy issues (and I would define it thusly, rather than as loneliness issues), I’d wager it is because we have a society wherein intimacy has been pushed aside for the progressive lifestyle ideas which preclude learning the skill. The folks who are demanding free, government-provided child care are not helping society learn intimacy and interdependancy (even though - to be fair - in their minds, they really ARE, they believe they’re preaching “it takes a village” interdependancy - but that is not intimacy, that’s social duty, and social duty always ends up being humorless, perfuctory and expedient).

Another problem is that intimacy has been defined downward, especially for our young girls, to mean little more than a “hook-up.” This is something Buster talks to me about. Children, but especially girls, are being sexualized at ever-earlier ages. The sexual messages begin very young in television commercials and on the clothes-store racks, and most of Buster’s generation grew up watching Friends and Sex in the City and thinking that this was what life was: a series of sexual encounters with no emotional attachments, no repercussions, no pain, no loss of oneself.

Sexualized early, many girls are either overly jaded or mistrustful and remote. Buster says a troubling number of girls his age are sexually hyper-active, but unhappy and lonely - they cannot make good, healthy connections with respectable young men, because they don’t “get” the guys who open car doors for them and who look for a relationship to be about more than a “hook-up” or perfunctory oral sex. (A romance recently busted up because Buster wanted a real relationship, and the girl, a nice-enough kid, simply did not know what that meant!)

While the girls are untethered and confused balls of sexuality, too many boys are learning to see the girls not as young women to be respected, admired and (in a chivalrous sense) looked after, but as disposable spitoons for their disregarded and misunderstood sperm. I’ve heard my sons and his friends complain about it - that their generation is very screwed up about how to relate to each other, that too many of both gender have no idea what self-respect is, that they treat themselves, and each other, badly. They crave intimacy but have no idea how to achieve it when they’ve been raised to throw everything - their virginity, their standards, their drive to succeed (it’s not cool to get good grades) - their potential, their very selves away. You cannot learn or achieve intimacy if you’re busy conforming to the Culture of Now - what Flip Wilson used to call The Church of What’s Happening Now - you’re too busy just trying to keep up.

This is not an overnight problem, it’s yet another fruit of the sexual revolution and the world-tilting sixties - the overcorrection to the 1950’s.

Meyer makes the excellent point that “In primitive and survival-dependent societies, social isolation was basically impossible.” True. When my husband and I were growing up, Grandma lived upstairs and auntie down the street, cousins all over the place and that mattered, but I don’t think that’s really the issue. I think this study is quite right that much of it is a matter of time and the incessant demands of the beeper, the cell phone, the freaking unending email (my husband literally has nightmares about the non-stop email at work that keeps him from full productivity, and sometimes keeps him stuck answering it all night instead of interacting with us). The demands of the workplace, and the fact that the work day no longer begins at 9 AM but as soon as the first cell-call rings through as you step out of the shower, may well be unhinging and destructively distracting us, as perhaps illustrated in this horrific story. It could well be that the work-demands are so out-of-control that when people finally end their work day they say, “just leave me alone, and give me a little space, fer cryin’ out loud!”

But I think there may be other trends which answer this worrisome report and can provide some reassurance and reason for optimism. Last year we read, to the horror of many feminists, about the growing number of women - ivy leaguers and others - who were actively planning to leave their careers and the work force for set periods of time to have and raise children. They were including parenting in the career plans, being smart enough to recognise that if they wanted kids, they’d want to raise them, themselves. It goes without saying, they were also hoping to marry men who could help them achieve that goal. Sometimes both parents must work, but more and more we’re seeing younger parents decide that one parent will stay home while the kids are young or - as with my nephew and neice - working in shifts so that the kids are always in the charge of one parent, rather than assorted sitters and caretakers. And now - just like back in the day - Grandma is moving in with them. The pendulum swings.

If there is going to be a correction to all of this mad fruit of the “do your own thing” era, it will take TIME and undoubtedly it will anger some who insist that any correction is a dramatic over-correction. But I don’t doubt there will be a correction of some sort. Humans need each other, we will find a way back. Intimacy can be re-learned and re-captured, and it will happen on a parent’s knee, or through a Grandfather’s gentle wisdom.

Related:
The Unstoppable Allure in an Ironic Age.
Maureen Dowd Asks a Question

Buster Gets Mystical
Originally posted Feb 9, 2006

Elder Brother Gets Into the Mystical Act
Originally posted Feb 13, 2006

BUSTER GETS MYSTICAL

Buster has, of course, been home sick all week, and it’s given him a lot of time to think. Noting that he only fell under the strep bug after all of his many commitments had been met between September and January, he has been pondering the mind and the body. And the funeral of our friend Jane, last week, has clearly also been weighing on him.

“The doctors said Jane must have had cancer for 8 or 9 years,” he mused the other day, “and yet she had no pain, no discomfort, no idea she was sick until she was told about it. And then - once she was diagnosed - she died within weeks.”

“Maybe that was the gift,” I suggested. “Maybe Jane’s time was her time to go to God, but instead of suffering and enduring the chemo and the rest of it when her children were small and needed her to be fully available to them, she was graced with no pain, no illness - she was spared all of that.”

“Maybe,” Buster agreed. “Or maybe your mind plays a part in all of that. Tell someone they have cancer, and suddenly, they die. Tell me I can’t afford to get sick, and I don’t.”

I gave him my copy of Larry Dossey’s book, Healing Words : The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine, and directed him to some stories within the book that explored the whole concept of illness not being able to claim you if it remains unacknowledged.

Being sick, he didn’t bother reading it. But he continued to ponder.

Today, while cleaning up the mess he has made by essentially camping out on the sofa for three days, I found scrap paper with some of his thoughts scrawled on them, and I reprint a few of them here, with his permission:

So many secrets lie dormant in the human mind - so much untapped potential, perhaps because humanity is unwilling to believe that there is so much more than we can imagine.

In the Garden of Eden, supposedly there was no sickness, no death. Maybe there was water-walking, until whatever the event occured that became our Original Sin. Maybe the Tree of “Knowledge” was just a bad metaphor, or a distortion of the serpent. Instead of gaining knowledge, Adam and Eve lost the understanding they had that allowed them to conquer illness. And Christ is about restoring that knowledge.

We talked about this over supper tonight. I like seeing the boy trying to work it all out, and wondering, and looking beyond books and everything he’s been taught - I don’t mind him treading the deep waters, as long as he keeps sight of the horizon. I know the Lifeguard can see him!

I quoted a Vespers antiphon that touched on the theme: “God planned in the fullness of time to restore all things in Christ.” Restoration is what we’re promised - and who knows if the restoration of what Buster calls “secret knowledge” is part of that.

“Jesus was all about teaching us how to advance in our humanity and our spirituality. And he was both God and Man. Flesh and Divinity,” Buster said. “And maybe he was teaching us, through his physical actions, he was also showing us what humans could do - the extent of it - like walking on water…”

Yes. Jesus said, “if you would have eternal life, you must eat my flesh and drink my blood…” maybe the Holy Eucharist is about much more than just what we think of as Communion. Maybe it’s about restoration of everything we had but lost in that break-up that occured in the Garden of Eden.

“It must have been a terrible break,” I mused. “If, as you are suggesting, humanity lost that much intimacy (walking-on-water intimacy) with the Divine, we have had 2000 years of the Eucharist and we’re still pretty broken, still far from being restored. Hardly nearer, at all. We are still broken and flawed, selfish and blind. And sick.”

Buster shrugged. “What’s 2000 years to the Eternal God? ‘A thousand ages in your sight are as an evening past…’ isn’t it great to know that God has kept the faith with us and that Christ is with us, in the Eucharist, till the end - that his own blood flows within our veins, for a time, touching our mortality with his immortality? What would the world be like without the Holy Eucharist? And how much more can we learn from Christ in that form, with that closeness?”

Peter, we remembered, holding on to Christ - that intimate - was also able to walk on water, until he allowed his fear and humanity to overwhelm him. Even that close to God, he was overwhelmed. Fear overtook him. Yes, that is a tremendous brokenness.

We’re not breaking new theological ground here, of course, and I am sure some are reading this and thinking “egad, what are they doing, here, exploring New Age goofiness and heresies?”

Nah. We’re just talking. I’m just enjoying watching a 16 year old think on it all. He and his brother both have a habit of occasionally peering into the clouds and wondering at all that is great. They knock me out.

But they’re both pretty eccentric, too. I mean, we have this heavy conversation and five minutes later, Buster is plunking on a banjo (his wind is still not there for the sax) and flipping the mp3 (or whatever) from Bela Fleck, to Tom Waites, to double-entendre (and gross) songs by “Chef” from South Park, and he’s leering in his best Jack Nicholson voice, “deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall…”

Parenthood is such a gas.

See also: Buster and the “gift freely given.”

A few days ago, I wrote that Buster, while recovering from the flu was waxing mystical. Amusingly, I got some unhappy emails from some Christians who suggested that I was an unfit mother for encouraging my son in his musings by letting his thoughts and reasonings go where they would, rather than snapping the whip and making him recite the old Baltimore Catechism while I bopped him repeatedly on the head with a bible.

I wish I were a better Catholic, and a better Christian, of course, but I think Buster has more than ably demonstrated his rather precocious and generous understandings of God’s mercies and mysterious ways in the past, and I have no worries that he will drift into “heresies.” The fact is, with few saintly exceptions (and Buster is no saint) most Catholics will step a foot outside the lot markings of our inheritance (Psalm 16) now and again and many will even wonder if they believe at all. As I had written in the previous piece, I have no trouble with my kids treading the deeper waters, as long as they have their eyes on the shoreline; I know the Lifeguard is watching. And of course, I’m watching, too. That’s my job. It’s also my job - having warned them that a hot stove can burn and a hot date can, too - to let them discover some things for themselves, even if the process of discovery brings them to exotic or tempting or even dangerous places. Once they stop holding my hand to cross the street, trust and prayer become my two infinitely powerful weapons.

Catholicism is a religion that is best suited to young children and mostly-mature adults. Young children “get” the possibilities of the supernatural. They “get” mysticism and. They “get” that “God is everywhere,” and that bread and wine may be changed, materially, into Flesh and Blood. While a little one may occasionally be heard in chuch singing “happy birthday to you,” when she sees an altar server light the candles, children understand the hush and wonder of the mass, particularly if they are in an older church - one that still has stained glass windows and statues for them to contemplate while the gist of the mass goes over their heads. (People forget how instructive and useful those windows are, but that’s another post) Young and more seasoned adults “get” Catholicism when they have reached the understanding that everything is not about them - that there are things greater than themselves.

This is why Catholicism is worst suited to adolescents and teenagers - whether the temporary ones or the perpetual ones. When the world is all about your pleasure, your nails, your car, your finances, your boyfriend, your cellphone and your angst, it’s tough to focus on something intangible which involves allowing oneself to be vulnerable and wrong, and which also involves some pursuit. When you are not accustomed to hearing the word “no,” Catholicism can seem like The Church of No. When taking responsibility for your bad choices and mistakes is foreign to you, well the idea of “sin” and “confession” all seems so quaintly unnecessary. And we cannot forget that the church herself - and some of her reps - is often too slow to deal with her own faults and mistakes.

Sadly, because the church is idiotic, sometimes, in how it goes about dealing with teenagers - and because many parishes don’t have effective youth programs, and because too many parents think, “okay, we got the kid confirmed and had the party, now he’s on his own,” we lose a lot of teenagers who never find their way back, or only do so after being brought to their knees by the vagaries of life and the world. It shouldn’t be that way, but there it is.

My elder son is very bright - exceedingly cerebral - and also very spiritual, but he sometimes puts more trust in the things of the synapses than the things of the spirit, and he is wandering a little. While he is home from school he probably makes mass half the time - and he does so willingly - but at school there is no chance that he’s going to make mass. His campus has no chapel, and his warm bed and a late Sunday snooze-fest take precedence over worship, and I pretty much expected that would happen. I’m not happy about it, but I am not shocked, either. I was 20, once, too. Remember what I said about trust and prayer? All I can do is deploy those weapons in the hope that he remembers everything we talked about and taught, and the times when he himself tasted -as I know he did - the milk and honey.

The other night, in the middle of a blizzard, the Elder one stumbled into the house at 4:00 AM with his sweet girlfriend, announcing that they’d decided not to drive back to school in the storm. Good choice. While Sweet Girlfriend dozed on the sofa, he decided to talk religion and intellect - reason and faith. He began with a quick look at the miracle of Fatima - why, if the church has accepted Fatima as being “worthy of belief” have they done such a bad job of doing the things Mary asked to have done? Why, if hell is less a physical place than a state of being into which we cast ourselves - i.e. apart from God - did Mary show the children a vision of hell that seemed right out of Dante?

Good questions - ones that many Catholics have asked. When Mary said the whole world needed to be consecrated or the “sins of Russia” (circa 1917) would “spread” (as they have) throughout Europe and the world, why didn’t the proper consecration happen? Are we reaping the fruits of that disobedience even now? When Mary said, “read this letter to the public in 1960″ why was that put aside? Did the popes not do so to prevent a self-fulfilling prophecy, or because to do so would have deterred them from making reforms they deemed necessary? These are questions that nag many (and I wonder about them, myself, now and then), and they seem unanswerable.

My answers to Elder were two-fold:

1) no one ever said the church wasn’t a faulty institution full of people who fail. It has only survived for the last 2000 years because of the grace of the Holy Spirit. Were the Church of Rome simply a man-made cult being propped up by mere mortals, it would have dissolved long ago. God is merciful, indeed.

2) Perhaps Mary showed hell to the children in the way they could best understand it. God comes to us as He may be understood. Hence, Jesus was a Jew, to Jews. Had he landed in Jerusalem a chubby, smiling Buddha, well…I don’t think he would have had the same impact. And had Buddha been a Jew in China, same thing. These illiterate and ignorant Portugese children might have had some difficulty with an existential “hell” but they understood “consigned to flames of woe.”

“But then what about the creatures Mary showed them, the mutant creatures who seemed half animal, half man?” My son asked, “those are rather sophisticated images - it doesn’t work with your theory.”

“Maybe not, but the very “sophisticated” images probably reinforced for them the horrors of evil,” I answered. “And maybe it was a prophecy of genetic engineering, of those malleable, uncontrollable embryonic stem cells, which caused so much trouble for Parkinson’s patients in research.”

Catholicism has a tradition of faith supported by intellectual rigor. But I’m not the brightest knife in the drawer to begin with, and at that hour, well…

I know my answers did not satisfy him - but it was by then 5 AM, and little out of my mouth would have satisfied anyone. We talked more - about the theory some have that both Tony Blair and President Bush will convert to Catholicism when they leave office, about the possibilities some entertain that the current climate in the Middle East seems strangely similar to some interpretations of the Book of Revelation, which state that China and Russia will help mount a war against Israel. We talked about the controversial prophecies of St. Malachi and whether Benedict XVI could rightly be considered, “the glory of the olive,” and whether that might be because of his Benedictine name and mien (Olivetan Benedictines) or because his family has Jewish roots, or whether he might not be considered the “glory of the olive” at all, in which case Malachi’s whole debated prophecy falls apart. We wondered whether Pope John Paul’s hastily planned visit to Mexico City, in 1999, and his naming Our Lady of Guadalupe the “Patroness of the Americas” had anything to do with fixing the things left undone from Fatima, if naming December 12 as her feast day had any connection to the 2000 election, which finally “ended” on that day.

“That’s interesting,” my son said, “the image of the Guadalupe is the image from Revelation - the woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, guarded by angels. The crescent moon is the symbol of Islam. Now she is the patron saint of the Americas. Fatima was the daughter of Mohammed, who married a Christian and made her stand there, in Portugal. Is it possible that all of this is, after all, connected?”

He moved on from there. We talked until 7:00 AM, and about much deeper things - about the Angels in the Kabbalah, about Augustine and Aquinas and Chesterton and the Holy Eucharist, and about the human mind and the soul and whether the body/mind/soul complex is as interactive/intergrated as we believe. “Can you have mind without spirit - can you have spirit without mind?” he wondered. “Why do we need authority, when we have our own reason…”

We meandered through talking points about Terri Schiavo and Humanae Vitae, and the debates about using “heroic measures” to save a life. We talked about what John Paul the Great taught about the value of human life beign allowed to live to its natural end, no matter how tough it is to live or look at.

My son brought a formidable and far-reaching mind to the debate, which impressed me and made me glad. But I finally went back to sleep at 7:30 hoping that, beyond all of that rigorous thinking, Elder Son would remember the times when - the mind quieted - he could hear the enticing whisper, the one that leads you into the desert and ravishes your spirit. In the end, they pack a deeper punch, and perhaps a more permanent one - than what Oscar Wilde (the deathbed convert) called “brute reason.”

“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.” Wilde wrote. ” There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.”

My Elder son is a kind and good person, and he wasn’t hitting below the intellect - but perhaps he is at a stage where spirit and mind are less commingled than they are when one is younger or older. He would be the theology and philosophy professors most exciting find or their biggest nightmare. He was dwelling on infinity - on infinite possibilities - on the mathematics of mysticism. Music and religion and math, he mused, are at once language and means - avenues to God with unlimited possibilities.

No, he was not high. This is not a conversation entered into under the influence of a bag of Fritos. He’s always thought this way and engaged us in these sorts of talks. Our kids more than keep us on our toes! But not all things can be intellectualized.

What do You Thank your Mother for?
Originally posted May 14, 2006

That Must be Disconcerting for You
Originally posted October 25, 2006

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY: WHAT DO YOU THANK YOUR MOTHER FOR?

My birth mother and I had our rough times, and they’re not worth expounding on, now. But she was an interesting person. A child of the depression (she had me kinda late in life - I’ve always been a surprise in one way or another), and of deaf-mute parents, she grew up an only child who was given many responsibilities at an early age. She was the polar opposite of the generation of children coming up, whose parents seem intent on infantilizing them and not “burdening” them with cares. Let no day of our darlings be the slightest bit dark, seems to be the Grand Theme of Parenting for the 21st century.

Anyway, my birth mother - let’s call her Alice, because she always liked that name - was shuttled around from parents to grandparents to willing aunties, pretty much at the whim of her fun-loving, hard-partying parents. Don’t be fooled, just ’cause some folks can’t hear or speak, don’t think they can’t trash a joint and start a brawl for the sheer fun of it. My experience at one of my grandparent’s “quiet” parties remains one of the most raucous, slightly terrifying memories of my childhood. I recall a man tumbling head first into the snow and giggling, laying back and cradling a bottle of something aged and warming as he began to “sing” in a most God-awful voice, and two jolly men taking a sledgehammer to one of the walls in our small house, because my mother had once mentioned to them that she wished she had a built-in bookcase. Under the spell of the poteen, starting up such a project in the wee small hours seemed perfectly logical, and generous, to them.

We did get the bookcase, eventually, out of necessity. I mean…we didn’t have a wall, anymore…

Growing up, little Alice lived poor with her parents - in a cold-water flat in Coney Island - or slightly better-off with the grandmother, a German woman who had been disowned by her well-off family for daring to marry a hardscrabble, fast-talking, kinda-not-really-respectable shanty Irishman who always had something cooking, but never made a dime. Caught between a boozy, cheerful but silent world and the grim-but-educated alternative, Alice became one of those quintessentially Irish loudmouths who “needed her noise” and who adored multi-syllabic pronouncements so much that she seemed to spit them out in capital letters. As a kid, I would listen to her speak and imagine the words surrounding her head in a bubble, as in a cartoon, and they seemed to me to spark and burst and careen around the room. She would never use abbreviations or short-cuts. If she sent me to the store for a Nabisco product, I was told to buy the cookies from the NATIONAL BISCUIT COMPANY. She despised the INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE and had friends in the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE. She knew nothing from ABC, NBC or CBS -why call them that when the COLUMBIA BROADCASTING SYSTEM just sounded so much better!

From her mouth, words became alive - they were her playthings, and when you consider the silence and non-verbal aspects of her early childhood, that’s not really surprising.

She gave me that - the love of words - of the very sound of words - the ability to take delight in a well-turned phrase or a crafty sentence, the ability to sense something beyond vowels and consonants, something that sounds like real music and gives almost as much delight. Drunk or sober, angry or gleeful, the stuff that poured from her mouth would routinely stop me in my tracks for the sheer glory of her word usage. I revelled in her immense vocabulary, her flawless diction. If some surprising, or obscene, words occasionally found their way into her soliliquies, even those were rendered inoffensive thanks to the plucky, affectionate way she inserted them.

She was very good at picking up other languages, too, which I always found fascinating. Like a sponge, she seemed to absorb the languages of those around her. I suspect that having grown up, as it were, “bi-lingual” - her second language being sign language (or perhaps that was her first) she had a knack for translation and application. Her dream-job, she once confessed to me, would have been working as a translator at the UNITED NATIONS (not, of course, the UN). I can see where that would have seemed a glorious vocation, to her.

She didn’t give me my faith - or not wholly, anyway - that came by way of herself, plus a grandmother, some nuns, the BVM (believe me, she grabbed me by the hand and led me to Christ) and even via my husband. The best thing Alice ever did for me, faith-wise was to leave me alone when I abandoned it, to let me find my way back on my own. I’ve always been grateful to her for that, and I managed to thank her for it, before she died. I thanked her, too, for not stopping me when I deemed it in my best interest to leave home at an early age. It was the right call.

She was smart; not well-educated, but world-smart and people-smart. She loved to read but I always gathered that her books were bought less for entertainment value than for the culling of new words and phrases, for new ways in which to celebrate and employ human language and to endlessly, endlessly use her tongue.

I am not much of a speaker, myself. As a kid I had a stammer that took years to get over, and even now, if I am particularly exhausted, that will return. While I can certainly talk a blue-streak around friends, among strangers I am almost morbidly silent and unwilling to draw attention to myself. But I do love words - I love to read them, write them, hear them - speak them, if I feel safe. I love moving through a New York City street and hearing the rumble of words spewing forth from a thousand different voices. I love visiting my husband’s Italian relatives and hearing the odd pidgeon-talk they (second generation Sicilians) use amongst themselves, a weird mixture of Italian and Yiddish and New Yorkese. I love how, when they get excited, they speak to me in an English whose syntax is otherworldly. I love sitting in a restaurant and hearing Hindu or Spanish or French or Urdu at the next table; even though I don’t understand a word of it, I find I often comprehend the inflection, the humor or urgency or sadness beneath the words, and that makes me feel connected to humanity in a chummy way. It reminds me that beyond our differences of expression and culture, our life-experiences are, for the most part, pretty similar. We love, we celebrate, we mourne, we sneer, we harangue…(what’s more fun to listen to than a Asian-Indian mother giving her teenager a tongue-lashing? Almost nothing!) I may prefer, in the end, to hear it all in what Churchill called, “that noble thing, the English language,” but I believe my mother gave me an appreciation for the spoken word (and for tones and structure and diction) that transcends a narrow regard.

Before she died, I wrote Alice a note, thanking her for all the words I’d received from her, the stupid ones, the slurred ones, the brilliant ones. “Without intention, without realizing it, you have handed me my profession on a platter - amid all the coal mined in our time together, there have been these diamonds, and I will not forget.”

You don’t have to have a perfect relationship with a parent in order to find something for which to be grateful, even if you are only grateful for a bad example which kept you on a straighter path. Today, I think I will lift a foamy Guinness to my birth-mother, Alice the Tonguerunner. Alice the Downshouter, Alice the Thesaurus, Alice the Wordgleaner.

Thanks, Mom. And Happy Mother’s Day.

***

“THAT MUST BE DISCONCERTING FOR YOU“

Every once in a while, a public figure b