One

“The other day, when you told me it was coming up on five years, for a minute I thought that couldn’t be right,” Amy said as she packed our toiletries, passports and her camera into her day pack.

Gray light of morning was coming up over the North Sea out the window beyond my desk at the foot of our bed.  I slid a fresh yellow legal pad and a couple extra pens into one of the two small suitcases we’d packed last night.

It’s February 7.  The date on the end of my mother’s life.  The date that waited on the calendar, all those years, like a pebble on a forest path, waiting for her foot, without intention, without malice, but waiting just the same. Just one sharp little pyramid of a pebble, not even an inch high, which stuck to the sole of her sneaker.  And which, because she’d lost most of the feeling in her feet to diabetes, burrowed its way in with every step she took, until it was deep into the flesh of her foot, ending her walking days forever.  And beginning the years of amputations and infections which ended only with the last of her days.  February 7.

Today.  On the fifth anniversary of my mother’s death, we were going to Paris.

“She would have loved that, Jon, you three going to Paris,” my dad had said on the phone from Michigan when I’d told him our plan.

Amy said much the same thing in the car as we drove from the Scottish cottage in which we now live through a light flurry toward the Edinburgh Airport, past snow-filled fields and hedgerows of black and dark gray trees in relief against the white.

“She’d have thought all about us there and wanted us to tell her everything we planned and wanted to hear every detail we could think of when we got back.”

It’s that thing everyone I’ve ever known personally who has lost someone does: say aloud what the one they’ve lost would have said or felt or done.  I’ve heard it said there’s a kind of tyranny in doing this, a taking of identity from the dead person, who is powerless to be anything but what the living would have them be.  Perhaps that’s so for some.  I can see how it very well could be.

But what’s true for me and others I’ve heard say their dead would have loved or hated or enjoyed or laughed at something is that we don’t stop knowing someone when they die.  The world goes on.  Unbelievably, idiotically, cruelly, indifferently, gracefully, beautifully, it goes on.  And the dead person is left behind.  However, when we sense and then say how that person would have reacted to what the new days bring, we show that we still know them.  And because we still know them, they still have a relationship to the world that has moved on from their time.

Amy and my dad were right, my mom would have loved the thought of my little family headed off to Paris, would have lived vicariously in our modest adventure while we were there and would have listened until we were exhausted from telling about it when it was over.

“Today, I’m thinking about what a good listener your Nana was,” Amy said to our daughter, Anya, as I drove the winding road through oncoming snowflakes.  “Your Nana was a very, very good listener.  She’d remember . . .”

Amy was quiet a long time.  She didn’t continue speaking until she could do so without quavering.

“She’d remember all the details of what people told her, and she’d ask about really specific things later.”

It was true.  My mother would remember the college class schedules or job prospects or illnesses or vacation plans or daydreams of the people who spoke to her.  She’d recall names of people she’d never met and would never meet, people who mattered to those around her.  And she’d ask by name about this teacher or coworker or that relative or friend or romantic interest.  She’d remember what the people who spoke to her cared about and hold on to it until the next conversation.

“She and I would just sit and talk for hours and hours,” Amy continued.  “I really want to be a listener like that for people.”

I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Anya in her booster seat, staring out the window contemplatively.

“She was the kindest person we’ll probably ever know,” Amy said.  “And we know a lot of very kind people,” she hastened to add.

Amy said that.  I had the particular feeling of comfort one gets when a key personal truth is confirmed by another human being.  The enormity of my mother’s spirit wasn’t something I’d conjured in my mind these last five years.  It was so.  At least Amy believed it was so, and I trust her more than anyone to tell me what’s real.

“What did I do when she died?” Anya asked.

Amy explained that she and Anya were at her parents’ house a half-hour away from mine when I called and said Nana had died.

“You had questions.  I remember you asked if that meant she was out of breath.”

Amy said she gave Anya a choice about coming with her to town and Anya had wanted to, had asked if she could see Nana one more time.

“Was I scared?” Anya asked.

“A little,” Amy said.  “When you saw she wasn’t breathing or moving.  But you also wanted to be there.”

I remembered.  I led Anya into the bedroom.  Amy had gone in for her turn alone and was sitting in a chair beside the bed, my mother beside her, propped up with pillows at her back.  Two friends, side-by-side one last time.

Purple blotches were forming on my mother’s ears and though I’d closed her eyes, her mouth hung slightly open.

Anya leaned over onto Amy’s lap and kept her gaze fixed on her Nana.  Amy stroked Anya’s hair.

On we drove into the present day.

“Do you know what an obituary is?” Amy asked.

“No,” Anya said.

Amy explained the term and told Anya that I’d sat down and written Nana’s that same afternoon, all about Nana’s life and the people she loved.

“Was I in it?” Anya asked.

“Of course,” I said.  “You were the arrival.  You were the new person, the next piece of our family.  The best thing about the last years of her life was you.”

Amy went on to tell how we all, she and Anya, my dad and sister, my mother’s sister and brother and I went to Vango’s on Third Street for lunch.

To myself I recalled that we’d left so as to be gone when the undertaker came to the house with his long, black car and wheeled my mother forever away from her home and snowed-over garden.  Later, when I spoke to him in his office in the funeral home, I was struck by how young he seemed in his crisp shirt and suit, his hair cut to a buzz above his ears.  He was much younger than me.  My mom would have liked that, I recalled thinking.  She was a champion of those just starting off, sympathetic to their need to prove themselves and find a place in the world.  It was the first time I thought how she would have felt about something in the world she did not know.

Amy told Anya how the sun came out the day my mother died and the rest of us all drove out to the rocky Lake Superior shore at Presque Isle Park.  A few hours of spring in the midst of winter.  We parked at the Pavilion where we’d had Anya’s first birthday, just above the paved path along which I’d pushed my mother in her wheelchair, Anya in her lap, into the summer wind off the lake and the seagulls holding the air around them.

“She loved seagulls?” Anya said.  It was as much a statement as a question.

 

We rose up into the sunshine, but it was snowing again as we made our descent.  Anya polished off her Air France hot chocolate and declared it, “One of the best hot chocolates in the world.”  As we taxied toward the terminal, the captain welcomed us to Paris in French and again in English, then Vivaldi came softly on the PA.  No lack for flare, the French.

I’d been worried that Anya would be worn out by the day, its travel and our talk of her Nana’s death.  But to my pleasant surprise, she was giddy to be in Paris.  Normally, Anya barely tolerates eating out and, finicky eater that she is, she generally rejects her food after one bite with a guilty shrug and a meek “sorry” as soon as the waiter is out of sight.  But at the first taste of her first Parisian meal, a simple poached salmon, she went wide-eyed and said, “It’s the best salmon in the world!  Every bite is a little bit of Heaven.”  And a short time later she discovered that, like Air France’s hot chocolate and Café Maître Kanter’s salmon, Café Maître Kanter’s chocolate mousse was quite to her liking.

Our lean, jovial waiter came by to check on us and smiled.  “She’s the princess, yes?”

“Ah, yes,” I confessed.  “The Princess.”

From the restaurant we rushed to Pont Neuf on the Seine to make an 8:00 boat cruise, Anya leading the way and tugging on our hands as we ran.

Amy and I were last in Paris the summer I was twenty and she was nineteen, and we’d taken a night cruise down the river then, sitting atop the tour boat with our cheese and bread and bottle of wine.  Now, twenty-one years later we had an eight-year-old with us, an eight-year-old who could not have been more pleased to be there, among the few people braving the open seats atop this tour boat in the chilly night air.

“Take a picture of me in front of it!” she told Amy when the highest twinkling lights and spinning beacon atop the Eiffel Tower came into view.  And she asked Amy to keep taking photos as it got closer.

When we were right alongside it, I pointed up to the restaurant on the first level above the four legs and said, “Your mom and I had dinner there.”

I recalled us splurging, me plunking down my first credit card because we’d burned through almost everything of the few hundred in cash we’d worked all year to save for that summer.  Our Eiffel Tower meal and the rest of our days wandering around Europe weren’t paid off for five years, and here we were at it again, spending into the red to live it up again.  Gathering stories.

 

They’re asleep now, my wife and daughter.  I’m up late at the little desk in our hotel room, writing in the soft light from the window.

Every detail we wanted to tell.  That’s what my mom would have wanted to hear.  And so I’m telling them anyway.  Telling them to Anya if she’s reading this one day.  Telling them to the cold Paris night outside.  Telling them to you.

I’m reluctant to let the day end.  To leave the fifth year without my mother and begin the sixth.  But we go on, into the life my mother did not know.  The life into which she wished us.

 

Two

We’d been up at Montmartre, amid the winding, narrow streets, taking in the views from that hilly district in the dusk, and we were heading back to the hotel after an early dinner when I saw them, a couple about twenty, ascending the stairs from the Metro, an overstuffed backpack weighing him down, a duffle slung protectively across her front.  She had a guidebook in one hand and they looked disoriented and bushed, but excited to finally be near wherever it was they were headed.  There we were, Amy and me, those two decades ago.

We’d had our young, middle-class family tourist day.  I woke early and stole a couple hours for a ten-mile run through the city.  On the Left Bank a few holdover revelers from Saturday night were still about—disheveled and their talk a little loud, a little slurry—occupying the occasional café table, drinking in the dawn with steaming coffees before finally giving in and heading to bed.  Amy, Anya and I took in the hands-on science museum Palais de la Decouverte, the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower (after Anya stopped us in front of a street vendor’s blanket-displayed wares and spent €10 of her own money for a ten-inch version and then couldn’t wait to touch the real thing).

Then we came up to Montmarte so Amy could photograph the artists selling their paintings at the outdoor market at Place du Tertre, Anya could get a chocolate crêpe and I could wander the neighborhood in which the poet Apollinaire once lived.

Anya and I ended up inside the Basilique du Sacré Coeur, warming ourselves and watching Sunday evening Mass from behind the last pew while outside Amy took photos of the Paris skyline with the lights coming on.  We had a quick, so-so dinner at a side-street restaurant and down we went to the Metro stop, ready to head back to the hotel for some cards, a little Harry Potter read-aloud, and an early bed time.

That young couple would be hitting the town or making sweet, first-night-in-Paris love because they don’t have an eight-year-old in the same room.  Or maybe they’d be zonked out early too.

Whatever they were doing, I wished them well.  As well as us.  And I hoped that when they were two decades older they, like me, wouldn’t trade places with their former selves, happy as they were back then.

 

Three

A rainy day in Paris.  Amy, Anya and I walked beside the Seine, along the section of the Quai de l’Hôtel-de-Ville that proved to be a pet-shop district.  Though later in the morning Anya would express a reasonable interest when we walked through the dark, vast air inside buy antibiotics without rx Notre Dame, she was far more amused by the kittens, puppies, hamsters and mice when Amy and I finally agreed, at the third pet-shop window we came to, that yes, alright, we could go in for a few minutes.  Notre Dame would wait a while longer.

Paris critters.  They’ll never want for anything, except maybe open countryside.  As we moved from cage to cage we saw Chihuahuas for €2800, Persian cats for €1800.  Garden variety kittens like the ones kids give away from cardboard boxes in front of American grocery stores were €850.  Hamsters were €80!

Out of the pet shop I looked down the river at the thirteenth-century Conciergerie in which Marie Antoinette awaited execution, and it occurred to me that, despite the most drastic of efforts to stamp it out, decadence is perennial.

But Anya had been too busy flitting from cage to cage, pointing out this then that cute one to notice the little price cards.  Now she was lit up, talking with hardly a pause for breath about the turtle and hamster we’d promised she could have when we move back to the States next August.  She’s a good sport about all this wandering her parents are putting her through, our own decadence, I suppose.

Later, after the darkness and candles and vaulting stone pillars of Notre Dame, she got herself up for the Louvre and our usual game of Pick the Postcards from the Gift Shop, Find the Artwork.  I was concerned about how it’d go.  With eighteen miles of exhibits, the Louvre is the largest art museum in the world.  But we’d unfolded the map, found the Ancient Egyptian halls, and set off to find the first work, a little (of course or first goal would have to be little), ceramic, blue hippopotamus.

It took a while.  Room after room of sarcophagi, pots and sphinxes passed, but Anya showed no signs of flagging.  Finally, when I was all but sure that we must have passed it somewhere in the rows and rows of display cases, Anya exclaimed, “There it is!”

She held the postcard up to the glass cabinet and, sure enough, there was the little blue hippo.  Hippopotamus figurine.  Second Intermediate Period, Seventeenth Dynasty, 1650-1550 BCE.

Over the next several hours, as rain poured on the courtyards and glass pyramids out the tall windows, she found the other five works to match her postcards, mostly animals as it happened, and then spent the euros she had left (after buying her little Eiffel Tower yesterday) at the gift shop on a four-inch, plush version of the blue, ceramic, Egyptian hippo, a new friend for Little Lamb, Anya’s never-sleep-without-her stuffed animal.

Amy and I are usually pretty good about knowing and respecting Anya’s limits, and one a day is certainly her established limit for art museums.  But the rain was still coming down outside, so we decided to head over to see the modern works in the Pompidou Centre where we’d be dry and perhaps able to have a little conversation about changes in the definition of art in the last hundred years.

It went okay for a while.  We stood in front of some Baques and Légers and I gave Anya my two cents on Cubism—the artist able to present multiple views at once in the single moment of one canvas and thereby escape the constraints of time.

“More about ideas than feelings, really,” I admitted.  “But I like it anyway.”

“Me too,” she said, though I was unsure if earnestly or dutifully.

Her earnestness was unmistakable, though, when she asked hopefully, “Can we go now?”

“Soon,” I told her.  I was shot myself, tired to the point of tremulous and bleary.  Amy and I just wanted her to see the Warhols and Magrittes before we left.  “Soon,” we promised.

And then, after we’d seen the rest of the Pompidou’s permanent collection, it was the famed view from the top floor we had to take in before going.

“Look at that!” I said, momentarily buoyed by the sight of the Eiffel Tower’s beacon spinning around along the bottom of the cloud cover.

“And see, Notre Dame, where we were this morning.”

Amy clicked photos through the rain-splattered glass.

Then, when Anya turned from the view to me, I saw the tear rolling down her cheek.

“Oh, baby,” I said.

“Anya?”  Amy lowered her camera.  “Oh, sweetie,” she put her arm around Anya.  “We wore you out, didn’t we?”

“I just want to get back to the hotel,” she said quietly.

“Of course we can,” I told her.

“Of course, baby,” Amy said.

The rain let up as we walked.  We bought pizzas and fruit and bread from shops in the neighborhood of our hotel, went back to the room, crawled under the covers and watched Nim’s Island on Amy’s laptop, the Eiffel Tower on the nightstand beside Anya, her Egyptian hippo, Bluey as she’d named her, tucked under her arm with Little Lamb.

 

Four

We bought breakfast of croissants, another newly-discovered favorite of Anya’s, from a tiny bakery and ate them from the paper sacks as we strolled vaguely toward the river.  We stopped in at a couple more pet shops, then crossed over to the Left Bank, headed in the general direction of Shakespeare and Company bookstore, the center of the English-speaking, expatriate literary community in Paris for eighty-nine years.  In its two previous incarnations in other locations on the Left Bank, Shakespeare and Company was frequented by expat writers like Hemingway, Pound, Fitzgerald and Stein.  Sylvia Beach, the store’s founder, published the first edition of Joyce’s Ulysses.  The store’s current incarnation, across the Seine from Notre Dame Square, was the Paris haunt of Ginsberg and Burrows and now hosts another generation of young expat writers who sleep in bunks tucked among the upstairs stacks in exchange for work around the store.

“Home, I knew it entering,” the poet Richard Hugo says of an old highway bar he came to love in Montana.  Stepping into Shakespeare and Company, I heard his words in my head.  Like the best musty American taverns, the bookstore was crowed in every crooked corner to the beamed ceiling with its own history.  A piano keyboard emerged from between a stack of books on the floor and those on the piano’s lid.  Wood chairs and stools—no two alike but all with layers of old, cracked paint—stood on the thread-worn carpets and bare, stone floor in the narrow corridors and nooks.  Even the stones around the ring of what had once been a well in the floor were stacked with books.  A few coins dotted the cement three feet down where the well had been filled in.  HOWL if you love City Lights read the bumper sticker on the wood and glass cabinet housing what looked to be leather-bound first editions.  Handbills for writers’ groups and forthcoming or recently-past readings competed for space on the door, windows and several bulletin boards.  The scent of incense and clatter of a typewriter drifted down the steps.  A black dog was tugging on a young woman’s glove, refusing to let go.

“Sorry, she does that a lot,” the girl behind the counter said in an Australian accent.

It was impossible to take it all in at once.

For me anyway.  Amy and Anya weren’t so overwhelmed by this setting out of the American writer’s fantasy of an expat bookstore in Paris.  They squeezed right past me, Anya heading up the stairs, stepping between stacks of books on every tread, following the signs to the children’s section, and Amy looking here and there and lifting her camera to her eye subtly.

I took a few minutes at the shelves beneath the hand-written “Poet’s Corner” sign, scanned the spines for poets with Paris roots, and soon had a stack that included Apollinaire, Célan, Rimbaud, Valéry, and Villon, all in translations new to me.  Deciding to walk away with only this handful (I could get books by British and American poets elsewhere, but my time to experience this place was limited), I followed Anya upstairs, toward the sources of the typewriter clatter and incense.

I found her engaged in conversation with an elderly lady, who thanked her in a French accent for her help and then explained to me that Anya had been assisting her in selecting a book for her granddaughter.

“You’re welcome,” Anya said cheerfully.

The woman paid Anya an “au revoir” and made her way carefully down between the books on the stairs.

“I’ve got a stack too, Daddy!” Anya said and showed me her pile.

“Can you help me choose?”

“Let’s find a place to sit,” I suggested and she scooped the books up in her arms.

The nearby side room was occupied by the typist, a long-haired, bearded young man working away at the machine between a smoldering incense stick and steaming cup of coffee, so we made our way forward, down a narrow hall walled in bookshelves, past a couple of the curtained-off bunks in which I’d read young writers are welcome to sleep in exchange for a few hours work the next day, through a doorway above which the words Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise were painted, and into a sitting room lined with cushioned benches and more bookshelves.  In a chair at the window overlooking rue de la Bûcherie and the Seine and Notre Dame Square beyond, cozied up next to a portable radiator, sat another long-haired, bearded young man, but as he was reading and the other fellow was writing, I figured we were less of an intrusion here.

Amy joined us and I asked if she was taking some good photos.

“I think so.  And I found a book.”  She handed me the novel Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda, a story of Parisian misfits, the cover explained.  Amy has a huge soft spot for misfits, wherever they may be.

Anya got down to business and made one stack for maybes, one for yeses, and one for no’s.  Before long she’d settled on three volumes of The Wishing Chair adventures, Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur, and Heroes, Gods and Emperors from Roman Mythology.

A friend came and asked the reader in the chair if he’d be joining Jenny and him.

“After this paragraph.”  The young man held up one finger and sat in his chair without moving.

“Alright,” he snapped the book shut finally.  “Let’s go.”

Generations of young people have come here to feel literary, and this was their time.  But it was our time, too.  I took a turn in the chair by the window, scribbled some notes on the day in my little Moleskin notebook, glanced out at the streets, wet with rain again.

Amy took my picture.  It’s good to have a partner who at least occasionally sees you as the figure you enjoy imagining yourself.

I’m not a renowned writer.  My book of poems wasn’t downstairs on one of the shelves in Poet’s Corner.  But that was alright.  My daughter was sitting across the room, paging through her illustrated Roman mythology, my wife was documenting our afternoon in this snug, timeless hideout with her camera and I was doing so with my pen.  The three of us were composing our own story and we were our own audience.

When we finally stepped out into the day the rain had quit.  We wandered down past the Sorbonne, found ourselves in a teachers’ strike demonstration, our way blocked by police in helmets and wielding shields, and by scarf-clad, black-rimmed-glasses-wearing protestors carrying signs that were mostly unreadable to us.  We ducked down a side street and into a shop where Amy bought a purple felt shoulder bag adorned with red and blue fabric shapes.  Something else by which to remember the day.

Back at the hotel for the last night of our visit, we read some more of the sixth Harry Potter book, which Anya had abandoned as “too dark” a year or so ago but which she’d asked to try again recently and is now devouring with delight every bedtime.  Once the lights were out, I lay there awhile listening to the traffic until I heard the steady, even breaths of my loves asleep, then rose and went to the little desk again, where the light from the window is just enough to see my pad of paper.

Now as I finish writing down another of our days, I look over at Anya sleeping, clutching Little Lamb and her new hippo Bluey, the Eiffel Tower still on her nightstand on one side of her, Amy sleeping on the other side. On the far nightstand, the lens cap on Amy’s camera is a sleeping eye.

 

Recapitulation

In the morning on the train to Charles de Gaulle Airport, an accordion player strolled into our car.  He was playing “Those Were the Days.”  Decades before it was popularized in America in the Sixties—my mother’s golden youth—it was a Russian song, and as the accordionist weaved and staggered toward us through the rocking train, the song seemed to come from generations of people who were once young.  Notice, the accordion was telling us.  Notice your life, the days passing each into the next like these notes.

When he was done I put a couple gold and silver euros in the Styrofoam cup he held as he passed, moving on to the next car.

I stared out the window as the scrap yards and gray housing projects of the Paris suburbs passed.

My eyes were wet.

In her youth my mother had for a while daydreamed of directing films.  I let myself imagine the accordionist’s song still playing in my head as her choice for this moment, as the Romantic, already nostalgic accompaniment to the end of our four days in Paris.

I cannot tell her about our little adventure, cannot give it to her for her to make of it a pleasant vision in her mind.  But she would have loved it.  And because I know she would have loved it, she can still remind me to notice, to be inside these days and, as the song says, to live the life we choose.

 

“Sport is a religion,” wrote the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, as if barking an order, arms akimbo, “with church, dogma, ritual.”

I hear him like a Joycean priest invoking heaven and hell, index finger poking the air on each of those last three words, “church, dogma, ritual,” which I found in his book, Memoires Olympique, published in 1931. Coubertin, a Jesuit educated historian and founder of the modern Olympic games, ends the sentence on that triple beat, like ready, set, go! And like the Olympic motto, “Faster, Higher, Stronger,” which he borrowed from a friend, a Dominican priest, who spoke the words in Latin, Citius, Altius, Fortius, to inspire his students in sport.

Sport, among other things, is worrying me the day after the Super Bowl, February 8, three days before the opening of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, BC, and minutes after my brother Bert arrives in Spokane, Washington on a flight from Denver. Bert is a Catholic priest, pastor of a parish in the inner city, and, at 58, nine years my elder. The age difference adds tension between us, not to mention that he is master of tennis and golf and veteran of the rough and tumble. He had little to do with the religious life of my childhood. Instead, in my memory, Bert is teeth chipped on a hockey rink and a shoulder separated in a rugby scrum. Even now, brown hair graying, he has surrendered little to age—six-feet-two inches tall, well muscled and fast, like when I was a teenager and saw him drive a tennis ball across the net and through a chain link fence.

Sport, Bert says, is “an addiction” for him, “my mental illness,” harsh words in that way Catholics are known for opening the wound of guilt to make it bleed. “I’m competitive,” he says, “God help me, that’s what I am.”

At the airport arrivals terminal I see the image of a speed skater on a sign for Alaska Airlines, tuft of dark hair staining his chin. This is trouble because Bert will likely chastise me for not knowing who the skater is, not to mention my ignorance of sport in general. This is why I’ve been reading up on Coubertin and the Olympic Games, which Bert has experienced twice: the winter games in Salt Lake City, and the summer games in Barcelona. Now he’s talked me into driving with friends to Vancouver to see a few events in the city and ski at nearby Whistler Mountain, where the alpine races will be held. Not the kind of road trip I’d have come up with on my own.

And Coubertin is not the kind of author I’d normally read, though in fits and starts I’ve found him compelling. As a boy in Paris he thrived in a Jesuit lycee, spending eight and a half hours a day in class, standard Jesuit rigor, an intellectual and social culture the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called “perpetual hand to hand combat.” Bert, too, attended Jesuit high school. Durkheim’s description, he says, “is right in the heart” of his own experience. Athletics were not primary at Coubertin’s lycee (as they were at Bert’s), but I believe the survival-of-the-fittest life of his Paris school days marked modern sport and in some way, me, which helps explain my nervousness about the next few days with my brother and the memories that will surface. Like Bert’s exasperation, eyebrows raised and mouth open, with my tennis game, all elbows and knees, slamming shot after shot into the net. And that speed skater on the poster, stretched out in racing form, strong and perfect, like my three older brothers and two younger sisters—stars on skis and road bikes, in baseball and tennis, basketball and volleyball. I love them but I am a distant brother, a sportophobe among athletes. I never made the team.

Hell, I never tried to join.

My family comes from Detroit, where Bert lettered in two sports at University of Detroit Jesuit High school, class of 1970, and where my father played basketball, class of 1943. Another brother is a retired professional ski racer. My youngest sister is a black belt kick boxer who attended college on a volleyball scholarship. A third brother finished college on two athletic scholarships, and a second sister is a tennis freak who met her husband on the court. Clearly, I dropped the gene.

I ask a baggage handler, “Who’s the skater on the sign?” He shouts, “Apolo Ohno!”—a name I’ve never heard—in time to spare me my brother’s needling until I realize I forgot to check the sports news before leaving the house near the university where I teach literature and writing.

“So, who won the Super Bowl?” I ask Bert, tossing his baggage in the car.

He laughs. “As if you care. Do you even know what teams played?”

__________

     Friday night in Vancouver we’re in a brewpub with friends, watching the opening ceremonies on a giant flat screen television. I’ve forgotten about Apolo Ohno—the United States’ most decorated Winter Olympic athlete—and Bert has not mentioned him. I take a notebook from my jacket and scribble something. The TV blinks frantically in a thousand colors, images too fast to comprehend. Bert, across the table, throws me a glance. “Weird extravaganza,” I write, “way over-the-top,” and that’s the point, a show for everyone, sports fans or not, or to borrow from Coubertin’s Olympic musings, the ceremonies are “the quadrennial celebration of the springtime of humanity.” The Canadians read his book. Suspended from cables, ski racers, snow boarders, and skaters in red suits like flying demons orbit a set piece of jagged mountains in a mix of high tech digital magic and theater to tell stories of Canada and the Olympics at once. The thing exhausts itself at the lighting of the Olympic flame when a rising “ice” column malfunctions as torchbearers, including hockey great Wayne Gretzky, wait with frozen smiles. As in nature, where ice melts too early and birds collide and perish in mid-air, the glitch makes sense.

     In the brewpub the walls are heavy with photographs of people engaged in feats of skiing and hockey. I feel uneasy, like I don’t belong. I grew up in places where I didn’t belong—ski hills, ball courts, and ball fields, dropping things and tripping over my feet while pretending to be interested. Once, when I was seven, playing outfield on a public school baseball diamond in Detroit, this kid cracked one my way. I ran around looking for the ball while parents and players shouted until another player found it. The batter, meanwhile, crossed home plate. I can’t blame my eyesight, but that year my parents took me to the doctor who said I was nearsighted. I got square-framed brown plastic eyeglasses with thick lenses, which I liked because they gave me excuses. Books replaced baseball. Sweltering summer nights on the back porch of our house in Detroit, the city where I spent my first eight years, I “watched” Tiger baseball on a black and white TV with my father and brothers, a setting like a prayer meeting where every spoken word focused on the game while mosquitoes whined and sweat dribbled down my neck. We had no lights on the porch, just the black and white glow. While they watched, I read by flashlight. One summer it was Mutiny on the Bounty and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, stories that took me far away, though I still hear the man who called the Tigers’ games. When a player came to bat, he’d make a long loop of the guy’s name: “And it’s Allllll Kaliiiiiiine.” So, that was Detroit—home to Lions, Tigers, Red Wings, and Pistons—and a big network of Catholic schools like Holy Name Parish, where I started elementary school. Later, we moved to the sport paradise of Aspen, Colorado, with one small Catholic Church. There, I became a teenager outside formal Catholic education, but under the gaze of Catholic parents.

To me, religion and sport were ritual means of control. I hated both. I served six years as an altar boy, which was like playing the infield in baseball, first base or short stop, I could never hide, never let my mind drift like when playing the outfield or sitting in back pews of the church. I did my time in sports: four years of junior high school basketball, a season of football, a couple summers of baseball, and a half-decent high school career in cross-country running. I learned that in church as in baseball fixed rules govern the day. Playing the infield, I panicked at every hit and was likely to drop the ball, or in the case of assisting at mass, the holy water, which I did one day at the age of 12 during the symbolic washing of the priest’s hands before blessing the communion host, splashed it all over my white surplice robe. My nerves were raw in church, under the eyes of God, my parents, and the priest. Did they know I masturbated and was failing geometry? Did they know I doubted the piety of the priest, who was terribly overweight, and the people who knelt before him, like my mother, who drank too much, and my father, who kept silent. I wondered as well about the priest who vanished—one day I showed up to serve Sunday mass and there was this new guy standing in the sacristy, the room where priests keep their vestments and prepare services. We learned later that the old one left to get married. Anyway, it was on that first day with the new priest that I spilled the holy water. I moved too quickly with the small beaker, tipping it so the stopper fell out the top and rolled off the priest’s hands. I pulled back, fumbling so the water spilled on me, though I had enough left to finish the ritual. Another time I got sick during Christmas mass when the church was overcrowded and hot. Nauseous, I ran to the sacristy to vomit. The priests were not harsh men and never scolded me, but the rule of law in our house was participation in church. When I complained, my mother would say, in her north Midwestern twang, “Offer it up to Gaaad.”

I gave up on God long ago. Left Colorado, too. Our parents are gone. And I’ve avoided chances to reunite with my siblings, to ski together, share a holiday, the birth of a child. But Bert has forced the issue. If I wasn’t going to see the family, he’d come to see me, like it or not. So, I’m in Vancouver with my brother on the chance this might be fun.

____________

     Saturday afternoon, day one of the games, Bert and I are watching women’s hockey at the University of British Columbia’s Thunderbird Arena, near the apartment of a friend who is putting up six of us for this trip. We sit eight rows from the ice, behind our friends and side-by-side, a little awkward, like an atheist and true believer attending mass together. We’re at one end of the rink, side view of the goal, watching Switzerland, in red and white, vs. Sweden, in yellow and blue. I pull on a white, black, and maroon ski cap from the souvenir store, the same hat Canadian athletes wore at the opening ceremonies the night before. I feel giddy, distracted by novelty, like the boxy machine that bursts onto the rink during breaks in play. A man steers from a seat off the rear, as if tilling the earth on a tractor but really he’s leaving the ice shiny and smooth, like polished plastic. I’m thinking how much fun it would be to drive that thing.

“Did you see that play?” Bert asks.

I blink.

Bert shakes his head. “It’s called a Zamboni.”

“What?”

He raises his eyebrows, then his arm, fingers extended, as if to say, What’s the matter with you? He half shouts, “On the ice, that machine, it’s a Zaaam-BONI!”

I want to tell him to back off but the action starts and Bert’s head is moving with the puck, absorbed in the back and forth. On the surface, Bert is easy going. He has pale blue eyes and, like me, fair northern European skin. He greets everyone he talks to—waiters, gas station attendants, baristas, store clerks, and probably corporate CEOs—by asking their names. “Thank you Sasha,” he says after paying for coffee, as if he’s known her all his life. Bert does not wear his Roman collar, except around church and sometimes not even there. “Street clothes put people at ease,” he says. I’ve watched him say mass a few times He is sincere, full of humor and patience and makes time for everyone, which translates to a 70-hour workweek. On call, always. He spent four years in seminary in Detroit in the early 1970s as the city seethed over race and the Vietnam War, and finished his studies in Denver, where he was ordained. In Colorado, in summer breaks from their studies, Bert and my oldest brother, Chip (they are a year apart), worked construction together, ran a gas station in Silverton, CO, and worked in a hard rock mine. Later Bert served five years as a missionary in Colombia. He speaks Spanish and in Denver presides over a parish where Spanish comes in handy in a neighborhood marked by poverty.

During the hockey game Bert taps his fingers on his knees and runs a hand through his thick hair. I understand the moral and ethical passion of a priest working mean streets or risking body and mind in Colombia’s drug wars, administering last rights to a man shot dead on a roadway, but I don’t see how hockey, the most gratuitously brutal of sports, fits into his heart or why he curses like a sailor on the golf course or when his favorite football team, the Denver Broncos, fumbles a play, or why he gets impatient when I am not paying attention at games, like right now as I pull a notebook from my jacket pocket and feel his eyes under those raised brows.

Sweden scores the first goal after three minutes of play. Minutes later a Swedish player smacks the puck right between the skates of the Swiss Goalie. In front of us a whole row of people wearing red Canadian team jerseys jumps up and cheers wildly.

Bert nudges me with his elbow.  “What are you writing?

“Impressions.”

In fact, I’m making my confession. The summer of 1975 when I turned 14 and Bert was 23, I begged him to let me caddy on a solo golf outing. I lied to get the job by telling him I wanted to learn the game. But all I cared about was a chance to drive a golf cart, to race across that open grass in a toy car. So, around the third hole, pedal to the floor on the fairway, I jerked the wheel back and forth on a slalom course like in those old 1970s Audi commercials boasting of “German engineering.” We hit a bumpy patch at full speed, 15 miles an hour, and Bert gripped my shoulder, shouting, “Pete, Pete, slow down!” His eyes opened wide and when he looked behind us his voice got really loud. “Stop, stop!” I did. His golf bag had fallen over, still partly hooked to the cart, but Bert’s clubs trailed behind, lying every which way across the grass and glinting in the sunshine.

“Oh, man,” I said, fighting the urge to laugh. “Sorry.”

Sweden beats Switzerland 3-0. And 3,000 people—speakers of German, Russian, Dutch, Japanese, English, French, Hindi, and Spanish stream out of the arena. I hear it all in a tangle of excited voices.

Bert and I are not talking.

___________

     “Sport,” Coubertin said, “must be the heritage of all men and of all social classes.”  He has an ally in Nelson Mandela, a boxer before political activism landed him in Robben Island prison. Later, as President of South Africa, Mandela used the Springboks, his country’s much maligned rugby team, to unite a racially divided nation. “Sport,” he said, “is a viable and legitimate way of building friendship.”

I wonder, though, what sport does for siblings. I am thinking of something one of my other brothers, an all around athlete six years my elder, told me just before my freshman year: “You have a big reputation to live up to.” What got to me was not the impossibility of meeting that expectation, but the assumption that this “reputation” was my destiny, the model for my life, as if I was coming up through some royal line.

Sport has always been for me the business of the talented, the faster and stronger, like Apolo Ohno, and my family, Bert in particular. When it came to attending mass or knowing my catechism, he never pressured me, for which I am grateful. But in sport I worried he wanted to convert me to the same fanaticism that would cause me to jump from my seat and scream “What the fuck!” at a bad play, thrusting my hands in the air. Something I’ve seen him do. Such emotion at sporting events leaves me cold. Whatever is at stake, I’m not buying it, which brings me back to Coubertin and my discovery that we are kindred spirits. We used sport to rebel.

Coubertin, born of a noble family—servants of France in a long line judges, scholars, and military officers—embraced the “wrong” sports. “He rode horses and fraternized with peasants,” writes historian Richard D. Mandell. He took up boxing, “which reeked of lower-class brawling” and strained his relationship with his mother. I love this last detail because it marks something else we have in common—sports came between us and our mothers.

My freshman year in high school, 1976, I told my parents I was quitting basketball. I’d had enough. The only reputation I had to live up to, I decided, was the one I wanted for myself. But my mother put her hand to her heart, tears moistening her eyes. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Are you sure? We have a reputation.” There was a pause while I looked at the floor, thinking how much I hated that word, “reputation.” She added, “No, you can’t do this,” as if my participation on the team worked like the military draft, not something you can refuse. My mother, daughter of a poor Irishman who made a fortune in Ohio stone quarries, was raised in Catholic tradition, reinforced by the ideal of a large number of male heirs who could prove themselves by being stronger, by going farther, and moving higher at every level of life. She was an athlete in her own way. She bore six children and survived four miscarriages, the psychological impact of which I cannot imagine. She drank hard and chain-smoked. She died eight years ago, outliving my father by 22 years. And for weeks she refused to drop the matter of basketball and me.

My mother never knew what to make of the hyper youth culture of a high alpine resort. Neither did I. In 1971, Bert’s second year at seminary, we moved from Detroit in the wake of the 1967 riots, to Aspen, the kind of town where a man running for mayor publishes a campaign ad photo of himself charging shirtless up a mountainside. There was no escape from sports, from World Cup ski races and bicycle classics, or from mountain climbers, endurance runners, and Olympic icons like the French ski racer Jean Claude Killy, the biggest name in winter sports back then. But I was talking about basketball. “Basketball is good discipline,” my mother said. “You need to know how to get out there and fight.” And there was the reputation thing. “Your brothers all played.”

I’d tired of fighting, flailing about on the court, all arms and legs and no passion for the game. When I entered high school, I was six-feet-two-inches tall (I am 6’3” now) and rail thin, with stringy, floppy red-brown hair, and those thick-lens brown square plastic eyeglasses. In practice one day, I jumped for a rebound and landed elbow first on the head of a guard on my own team, a short, powerfully built player who could have broken me in pieces. He raged, fingers massaging his skull. “Chilson, you fucking klutz!”

On the other hand my father grinned when I told him I was quitting. He knew I hated the game. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Do what you want,” he said. “Just make sure you do what you love.”

I loved him for that, for letting me off the hook, not that I could escape the consequences. Weeks later, in town with my father, we saw the mayor on the street. The men exchanged small talk. Then the mayor looked at me. “Young man,” he said, “I don’t want to see you again unless you have a basketball in your hands.”

My father said nothing, leaving me to my anger at being pressured so baldly by a man who was more or less a stranger. I worried that my lack of athletic ability embarrassed my father, though he never showed it. And I wondered Why does this man [the mayor] care whether I play or not? But at that age I didn’t understand this was not about me. As my mother said, there was the family to think about. The mayor’s son, years ahead of me in high school, had been a basketball and football player, so there was a school team to think about and there was no one at the school taller than me. Four hundred-some kids, and I was the pinnacle of height. The point, I realize now, wasn’t so much that I had a reputation to uphold, but that if I didn’t play, I wasn’t carrying my weight.

Maybe that was too much responsibility to bear because I didn’t return to basketball, to the humiliation of the court, surrounded by screaming spectators, and where I never meshed with the tangle of team play. I compromised by taking up individual sports like long-distance running. I joined the school drama club, where I got my fill of teamwork putting on plays. This appeased my mother and I had what I wanted—a little control over my life. Coubertin never quite patched things up with his mother, but that’s not my problem. At the end of every school day I looked forward to a long run, alone.

____________

     Loners rule the Olympic games. Marathoners and sprinters and cyclists, speed and figure skaters, skiers, kayakers, and many more. I’m not forgetting team sports, but it’s people like Jesse Owens, Lindsey Vonn, Mart Spitz, Nadia Comaneci, and Peggy Fleming we remember best. We remember two African American runners, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, because they raised their fists in a lone civil rights protest from the medal stand at the 1968 Mexico City games. Apolo Ohno sells his image to Alaska Airlines and Bruce Jenner to Good Morning America. But can anyone, except the most devoted fan, remember a single person on the celebrated U.S. men’s hockey team that defeated the Soviets at Lake Placid in 1980? The so-called “Miracle on Ice.”

The victory is history, the players forgotten.

I realize this after the women’s hockey game, back at our friend’s Vancouver apartment where the seven of us are watching the Olympic news on television, consumed by the individual snowboarding and freestyle ski events in the rain on Cypress Mountain, outside the city. A favored female Canadian skier is shedding tears over her lost chance at a gold medal. Our women’s hockey match, the opening event of the games, gets barely a mention. Another team on the other hand clamors for attention. “Anarchists,” as the newscaster calls them, “wearing their trade mark black clothing” staged violent protests against homelessness and the cost of the Olympics ($6 billion). Smiling into the camera she reports, “A handful of anarchists smashed the windows of the Hudson Bay Company store in downtown Vancouver.”

We’re gathered on the sofa and the floor in front of the TV. When the newscast moves to the next Olympic highlight, no one says a thing, as if the protests suggest we’re enjoying ourselves in Vancouver at the expense of the poor. I’m not the only one in the room aware of this moment of existential crisis but I am not about to bring down the party by asking aloud if we should all feel guilty about being here.

Someone says, “Six billion dollars. Wwowww!”

Yes, for an orgy of sports over a dozen days in a Canadian city known for its beauty, ethnic diversity, and painfully visible homeless population. And what’s wrong with that? Coubertin would argue that the point of the Games is to get people off their butts, out of self-pity, moving any which way, engaging each other as spectators and athletes. In fact, from an Olympic purist point of view, what the anarchists are doing is not unwelcome. They are engaged, making their pitch, and competing for attention. It’s the Olympic way and that’s what excites Bert about sport, which, as he puts it, is about “the love of competition and working as a team.”

Bert works with the homeless. He counsels drug addicts and comforts the poor. I’m not going to put him on the spot about the anger at the center of these protests, not now anyway, in front of friends. He relaxes on the sofa in jeans and long-sleeve white polypropylene T-Shirt, glancing up at the TV, as he reads the Globe and Mail Olympics coverage. “Jezzzzus,” he says, “D’you guys hear about this guy killed on the luge track?’ Bert does not have to prove himself to me, or anyone.

Still, I want to know what he’s thinking about this anarchist stuff. I’m nervous about asking, worried that after this morning’s hockey game he’s more annoyed than ever with my lack of sports passion, and because to ask him about the protests might make things worse. So, in the afternoon we’re all walking the streets of downtown Vancouver, sightseeing in a city aglow with Olympic flags, street theater, and TV news reporters doing stand-up broadcasts in the street as I step up beside my brother.

“What up bro?” he says, putting his hand on my shoulder.

I tell him I’m looking forward to going skiing the next day at Whistler Mountain. We talk about the city, how beautiful it is, and joke that the anarchists have fled. I relax enough to ask him: “Do you think the anarchists have a point?”

Bert’s face lights up at the chance to talk. And we’re off, discussing athletes and anarchists as we stroll the streets of an Olympic city. But he doesn’t get close to my question about the anarchists until later that evening, after dinner downtown, when the lot of us gather at the Vancouver waterfront to watch the Olympic flame burn atop a tripod of support columns like giant ice blocks. The whole set-up stands behind a security fence watched by cameras and police.

A steady drizzle falls as Bert stands beside me, hands shoved in his jacket pocket. He says, “I love to ski and I don’t apologize for that.” He nods his head, thinking for a moment. “But you look at the time and money you spend on certain things in your life, and you have to find a balance, and I have never had the balance when it comes to sports, and the amount of time I spend watching sports and playing sports. It’s a struggle.”

Later, as we stare up at the flame, Bert says, “God this must cost a shit load.”

___________

     The truth is, as Bert likes to remind me, I have taken money in the name of the Olympics, “blood money,” he teases me. He’s right. In the fall of 1975, months before the Winter Olympic games in Innsbruck, Austria, I was 14 and by stroke of stupid luck landed a spot in a McDonald’s television commercial, along with ten other kids, including a free style ski jumper who was a senior at the high school. The rest of us were 8^th graders.

A Los Angeles production company put out a casting call in Aspen schools for a commercial in a high alpine setting. The theme was winter fun, to be aired a year later during the Innsbruck games. In other words, this was a sports commercial. I, and nearly every student in the school system, answered the call. They interviewed hundreds of us over a week. I sat on a stool in front of a video camera behind which a pretty young blonde woman tried to make me laugh. Are you married? What is the square root of 55? Do you know the capital of Lichtenstein? Do you ski? Do you like to eat rutabaga? Then she said, “You’re awfully tall. Do you play basketball?”

I hesitated. “Um yeah, sort of.”

I like to think Coubertin would approve of my answering the casting call. He was, after all, a showman “big in energy and lucid in speech,” with a healthy streak of vanity, according to the historian Richard Mandell. “His mustache was splendid,” Mandell writes, “with sumptuous tendrils that swooped out to wisps at the end.” Coubertin’s self promotion project included hundreds of articles and 20 books on politics and history, many of which he published on his own dime, all part of an effort to paint himself, in Mandell’s words, “as a universal genius and organizational wizard.”

A week later they called me for a second interview at a Holiday Inn. My mother waited in the lobby. They didn’t like parents interfering with interviews. This time I sat in a folding director’s chair in front of a video camera while the director, a tall man with shoulder-length black hair and a deep tan, asked more questions. He said he liked the way I laughed on camera and that I had the right “Nordic” look, whatever that meant. He asked me about living in Aspen. I told him I liked to ski. Then he said, “Wanna be in my commercial?” like he was asking me join his team. I liked that. The blonde woman told my mother they would pay Screen Actors Guild wages and royalties, for a commercial that would show for years. A real pile of money.

The director asked another question, “Hey, Pete, I hear you play basketball.”

I’m pretty sure I rolled my eyes, thinking something like, Okay, here we go or Hey, Basketball is not a winter sport.

I said, “Well, yeah, sort of.”

He frowned and cocked his head. “Ahh, yer bein’ modest, Pete. I know you play on the school team. Can you balance the ball on your finger like this?” He tried and failed to spin the ball on his index finger. “You know, like Meadowlark Lemon?”

I’d never heard of Meadowlark Lemon.

“Come on, the Harlem Globetrotters?” He squinted. I could not believe my movie career was hanging on basketball. Then he said, “That’s ok. We can work with this.”

We filmed a scene on a street in Aspen one sunny cold November morning just after dawn. The director tried over several takes to get me to spin the ball on my index finger while walking with my books under my arm, wearing sneakers, jeans, a flannel shirt, jean jacket, and ski cap. No gloves. “Smile,” the director shouted, “pleeeaaaassse smile.” He watched, gloved hands stuffed in the pockets of a puffy red down jacket while his crew of lighting, camera, and sound people waved their arms to keep warm. When I scooped up the basketball I’d dropped during another failed take, he folded his arms and studied me for what seemed like minutes, like I was a piece of clay. Finally, he shook his head and told me to “go somewhere and practice.” I put on a heavier jacket and took the ball behind an equipment truck where no one would see me. I heard him say, “JeSUS Christ! Tall kid like that should be able to play basketball.” I felt I’d been unmasked, like some kind of cinematic plagiarist and the director was shouting, “Impostor, impostor!” I wanted to throw the ball at him. Standing on the sidewalk and glancing around to be sure I was alone, I tried for all I was worth to spin that damned thing on my index finger.

When he called me back I’d made no progress. We shot the scene anyway. “Okay, Pete,” he said, clapping his hands, “just toss that ball in one hand and strut on down the street like you’re Meadow Lark Lemon and you’re going to school.”

The commercial came out in February 1976 in time for the Olympics. I’m there with a bunch of kids, skiing, sledding, throwing snowballs, eating Big Macs and fries. I have my solo scene, walking that street, tossing a basketball in one hand. The ad ran four years and paid half my college education.

___________

     The funny thing about that commercial is that I can go to You Tube and bring it all back. I can superimpose that version of myself onto memories real or imagined. Like a story Bert told me of something he witnessed one afternoon in the fall of 1968, when he was a junior on the high school football team. The starting and second-string squads were on the practice field, drilling plays in one corner and agility exercises in another. The coaching staff spread out among the players while the head coach, using a bullhorn, directed operations from a perch high in the bleachers. “Short, wiry guy,” Bert said, “Little Napoleon.” He took a deep breath and explained what happened next.

“There was this kid a year behind me, a sophomore, tall kid, skinny, uncoordinated. He couldn’t perform the drills very well. All of a sudden, we heard the head coach shouting through his bullhorn, ‘Stop, everybody stop!’ And he comes running down out of the bleachers and across the field, everybody’s watching, the players, the coaching staff, and he runs up to this kid and screams at him, ‘Get down in the stance,’ meaning, you know, a three point football stance, bent over, one hand and two feet on the ground, a hand on your knee, and he kicks him right in the butt, yelling the whole time.”

For me, it’s not hard to imagine the shape and depth of that football player’s humiliation and fear. I think of young Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, absorbing his Jesuit education in a manner most unlike Coubertin, his mind in turmoil after a priest’s lecture to him and his mates at Clongowes Wood College in Ireland, reminding them of “the four last things” in life: “Death, judgment, heaven, and hell.” Stephen cringed “as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul.” I wonder as well, would Coubertin have approved of a coach kicking a player? I picture this short wiry Frenchman with a broad and thick mustache, bringing the coach to his senses. “My dear man, Coubertin says, citing his own book, “for each individual sport is a possible source for inner improvement.”

The kid on the football field must have been about 15 years old. I picture him tall and skinny, just like Bert said, swimming in too-large shoulder pads and helmet, fumbling drills and forgetting plays, knocked to the ground at every turn. I think of that kid because I know him like myself. Me, who played one semester of public school football in 5^th grade and quit after being knocked senseless one day by a boy much broader and stronger than I. Yet that coach from back in 1968, well, I’ve never met him, but I know him, too. I imagine a stout, muscular man with thinning dark hair, graying a little, his face too red from sun or alcohol. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt, khaki pants, and sneakers as he bounds down the bleachers, whistle bouncing off his chest, clipboard in hand. He runs up to this kid shouting all kinds of things, like “What’s the matter with you” or “What the hell do you think you’re doing”, or likely worse, calling him a “pussy” maybe, before ordering him to “get down in the stance” before launching that kick—think about this—before this grown man stopped, screamed who-knows-what, ordered the kid into position, and arranged himself behind the boy to kick him. Did he do a kind of rabbit kick or did he wind up like a field goal kicker and give it every thing he had? Either way, that kick must have taken the better part of half a minute to set up. It was pre-meditated. My imagination shifts to wishful when another coach with real balls, rushes up to grab the head coach by the shoulder, shouting, “That’s enough!”

But that’s fantasy. Nothing like what really happened. No one, no student or coach, according to Bert, uttered a peep of protest.

___________

     I never witnessed nor have I been the subject of such abuse in sport. Maybe it’s age or reading a frustrated French sportsman that has helped me see that sport is not about me, or about Bert, or even Apolo Ohno. Sport is about the rest of us who happily muddle along, aware that we do not measure up as we stumble through tennis, hockey, and curling. We fall on the ski slope. We try to be better, more faithful. We polish our game. We flock to great temples of sport to watch and curse, flipping through rulebooks. Call it Church. We memorize game statistics, wave team pennants, and stand for the national anthem. Call it Dogma. We cheer for our favorite teams and sing fight songs or refrains from Rock classics. “We will, we will, ROCK YOU!” Call it Ritual. We hope it all means something and to somehow enjoy ourselves.

This is what I’m telling myself the day after the hockey game, at Whistler Mountain, where Bert and I are skiing with our friends and hoping to see some Olympic alpine events. I’m riding the lift with Bert, who’s arguing with a young French Canadian about what regions have the best snow. “I’ve skied Colorado,” the Canadian says, “I have been to Aspen and Vail and they don’t impress me. The snow is so dry and light,” he complains.“It has no substance.” He speaks French accented English, drawing out his soft consonants, which oddly gives his argument weight—“The snewww ees seww dry and light. Northwest snow is better, there is more moisture. You can dig your edges into it.”

The Canadian wears wraparound shades and generous dark stubble on his face. There is no arguing with this man about snow or anything else, but he doesn’t know there is no arguing with Bert either. I want to say, Give it up guys, or it’s pistols at dawn. But Bert isn’t going to get the upper hand here because he actually listens. The Canadian is righteous and annoying, though I love his critique of Colorado snow because it’s getting under Bert’s skin. I see Bert’s blood beginning to heat: the arched eyebrows and open mouth. His eyes wide as if he hasn’t heard anything so outrageous in his life. He keeps drawing his breath to speak, but the Canadian cuts him off, raising his voice. He waves his hand dismissively and says, “Colorado is overrated.” I bite my lip and look away.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Bert says. “Colorado has the best snow in the world.”

The Canadian doesn’t miss a beat. “That’s a matter of opinion, don’t you think?”

On the last point, I agree with the Canadian, as much as I’d love to flick those expensive shades off his face. The snow at Whistler feels as fine beneath my skis as any snow I’ve been on. Two feet of snow fell the night before, forcing Olympic officials to cancel the day’s alpine events while volunteers on skis and in snow machines groom the racecourses. They’ve been working through the night under powerful lights strapped to trees and lift pylons or mounted on steel frames thrust in the snow. Bert gives up on the Canadian and nudges me, pointing at a team of snow packers on skis. We smile at each other and I recall one of the few spectator sports events I’ve ever enjoyed, watching Jean- Claude Killy win the giant slalom at Aspen Highlands ski area in 1973, the last race of his career. I was there because Bert insisted on it. We got up at 5 that morning to help the ski patrol pack parts of the course too steep for snow cats. The ski patrolman led ten of us down the run, pumping our skis up and down as if running in place, packing fresh powder. Around 9 a.m. he handed us passes for the day. Bert and I skied free, homemade sandwiches in our backpacks, checking on reports of who would make the giant slalom finals so we could be there to watch. Killy, at 29, suave and calm, was a hero even to me. When he talked to TV reporters, he always seemed amused, as if he had other things on his mind and I liked to imagine he was thinking, Hey guys it’s only a sport. He’d already declared this would be his last race whether he made the finals or not, which, of course, he did.

When the time came, Bert and I stowed our skis near some trees and stood in a thin line of spectators beside the orange mesh fencing about two thirds the way down the course. When the racers whooshed by—Killy making his turns with a stiff upper body, working only his legs and ski poles—Bert lifted the mesh and I ducked onto the course to nab a blue nylon gate flag, which hangs in my house today, the only sports trophy I own.

When we get off the lift, the Canadian skis off, ignoring Bert’s, “Have a great day!” and I follow Bert and our friends down a catwalk. But when I round the corner, they’re gone, as if off a cliff. I stop at the end of the catwalk, fresh snow around my knees as I lean on my ski poles, staring over the edge of a cornice and down into a double black diamond run that I suspect has just swallowed my ski partners. I’m worried about breaking my neck on the underside of this snowy lip and about losing face if I take an easier route, which strikes me as the best alternative. So I ski on, not over the lip but along a ridge and down a side run I thought would take me to a ski lift where we’d all agreed to meet. But Whistler Mountain boasts some 200 runs, and after a couple of miles of skiing, I realize the lift is someplace else and I have no idea where I am. It’s not being lost that worries me, but that Bert’s going to be disappointed I didn’t take the plunge.

My cell phone rings and I slide to a stop, fishing the phone from my jacket pocket and dropping it in the snow. I remove my glove and pick it up still ringing to see Bert’s number flashing on the screen. “Bert,” I shout into the phone, but there’s no reply. I call him back but the connection is gone. I keep on going with the phone inside my glove resting in the palm of my hand, down this run and that, zigzagging the mountain, mile after mile. My phone rings again and this time I hear Bert shouting, “Pete, Pete, are you there?” I stand in the middle of the run, shouting back, “Bert?” but we’re not hearing each other. I push off, skiing in and out of dense fog and sudden snow squalls, wondering what Bert is going to say. Finally the dark frame of a ski lift loading area appears out of the weather like a wrecked ship. The line is empty except for a ski patrolman in a sky blue jacket with the Olympic rings across the back above a white patrol cross. He carries racecourse flagging strung on nylon cord around his shoulders. We board the lift together. My phone rings as I settle in. I answer and hear nothing.

“Bert!”

No reply.

The patrolman slips his ski poles under a thigh and removes his helmet and goggles, rubbing a gloved hand over sweaty, thinning hair, graying at the sides. I want to ask him for a flag but think better of it. His face is blotchy and puffy, his eyes bloodshot. He hooks the helmet to his poles and rests his head back. “I’ve been on this mountain sixteen hours,” he says. “If it snows tonight I don’t know what we’ll do.”

I tell him there’s nothing in the forecast, trying to be helpful, but the patrolman sighs and shakes his head. “The weather in these mountains has its own schedule,” he says. “We could have a major blizzard here in the next hour.” He pauses and hangs his head, chin over his chest. After a minute, he appears to sleep but then he says, “I don’t know what I’m complaining about. I ski these mountains for a living.”

The lift carries us through the trees and emerges over open snowy meadows with the top lift shack in sight a quarter mile above. My phone rings again and when I open it Bert is shouting my name, “Pete, Pete, are you there, are you okay?” His voice is high pitched and I brace myself. He shouts, “Where are you?”

“I’m fine Bert,” I say, quietly. “Just got a bit lost. I took a wrong turn. I’m on a lift.”

This time Bert replies. The tension is gone. He’s not shouting. “I’m glad to hear your voice, bro. I was worried. That’s one of the hardest runs I’ve ever skied. We thought you were buried in the powder up there.”

“I didn’t have it in me to ski that run, Bert.”

“No sweat, Bro. We’ll see you in a bit,” he says. “You and I still have a few runs to ski together.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll see you at the top.” I shut the phone off and stare at it, feeling ashamed. All the way down the mountain, I’ve been preparing for an argument, cell phone in my glove. But Bert has revised the script.

The patrolman says, “Must be a brother.”

I smile. “Yeah, my brother.”

I’m still holding the phone in my hand. The relief in Bert’s voice has startled me and I realize what I heard in those mangled calls coming down the mountain wasn’t anger, but fear.  I still hear Bert even after the call is over. The tightness is gone and the tone loose, as if Bert’s fingers are easing up on the phone.

A friend of mine has a burn scar, like a violet, asymmetrical puddle on the left side of her face.  When we were in college, she bought a cheap seat on a train that snaked across Europe from Paris to Hungary.  Awaking from a snooze in the late afternoon, she thought she saw red flames. The passengers around her were reading, playing cards, sleeping.

She had a little discussion with herself.  Because really, what do you do?  Clear your throat and make an announcement?  Yank the emergency cord?  And what if you’re wrong?  Usually when you think you’ve seen a fire, you haven’t.  It’s the sun setting like a smear in the window several seats ahead of you.

As she was considering, she smelled smoke.  Feeling a wall of heat move up the aisle, she yelled, “Stop the train!”  Someone else called out in German.  There was a pandemonium of voices in different languages.  People lunged toward the front of the car.  A stocky man and woman quarreled in the aisle, pushing and shoving, screaming words she didn’t understand.  Behind them everyone jammed the passage, thrusting, heaving, desperate to get to the doors, unable to move forward.  Panic stricken, the clot of people who couldn’t move pushed someone down.  Several people fell.

My friend wrenched herself up and wedged herself into the stream of people in the aisle.  A woman, whose big straw hat tilted at a jaunty angle stabbed her with a red umbrella.  But eventually she reached the door. The train was rocking crazily, the fields, racing by, green and blurry.  People behind her shouted and pressed against her.  In the car ahead, some were hurling themselves through the open door.  She couldn’t see where they landed or what happened to them.

My friend leapt from the open door.  She balled herself up and rolled into a silent ditch filled with flowers, which she tells me she recalls with manic clarity.  Opening her eyes, she saw delicate, slender purple iris, pink lilies with tiger faces.  At the bottom of the gully stood a group of tall, prickly looking scarlet cone flowers.  In the field on the other side of the ditch she could see squat green plants set in rows across the ashy soil.  Far above her, the sky traveled on, absurd blue, and in the vast silence she heard the iterated chirp of a single bird.  She lay listening for a long time.  Eventually two firemen picked her up tenderly and moved her to a stretcher.  There were a lot of fatalities—people who didn’t jump from the train.   It took over six months for her to recover enough to come back to classes.

What I know about her, what little anyone can know about a friend, the one tenth of the ocean liner you see sailing above the surface, is funny and garrulous.  She tells about the fire as if it happened to another woman, a long time ago.  When I saw her recently at a conference, I reminded her of the train story.  Eventually we drifted into a discussion of politics.  She mentioned that Jim Lehrer, at the end of his News Hour, is still screening the faces of American service men killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.   I told her I always felt stunned by the spooky silence that accompanied their photos.  We talked about the rising cost of health care, bad jobs numbers, and vented our rage against Wall Street.  We narrated stories about unemployed friends and bemoaned the growing gap in this country between the very wealthy and the poor.  We mentioned the shocking changes in weather all over the globe.

The two of us spoke quickly, in code, speeding up feverishly as we became more certain that we still agreed with one another.  We circled in an angry groove of conversation.  We held the Other Side responsible.  We referred to George Bush, his lies about WMD’s, his incompetence after Hurricane Katrina, weakening of environmental protection, tax cuts to the super rich.  We ticked down our lists.   And then we had to leave for other appointments.

Later that day, I felt haunted by a peculiar emptiness as I realized that the two of us had simply rehearsed a script.  What of her marriage, her children, her career as a lawyer, her personal discoveries and changes?  I felt hollow, bereft, like a peach growing without a seed inside.  We had substituted political speech for our own experience. The truth is, I was beginning to feel the bankruptcy of name calling, circling and re-circling the same angry political accusations in the company of friends who agree with me.

Fast forward.  It’s months later, late August, 2009, the blistering dog days of summer.  Our basil, which has grown waist high, needs to be cut for pesto.  The hedges should be trimmed again.  Afternoons are so hot that when I step through the door of my study onto the patio, I feel like a candle, melting.  I don’t sweat, but my shirt is damp in ten minutes.  Most of our neighborhood has cleared out to go on vacation.  We have a different President now and a different set of policies.  A different set of citizens opposes his policies than the citizens who opposed George Bush’s.  They have been showing up around the country to disrupt and drown out town hall discussions.  Some of them appeared at a meeting in Colorado yesterday carrying guns. “They” are the political right.

You might say the engine of civil conversation, which should be moving America into the future, is on fire.  Meanwhile, those of us on the train are screaming and pushing one another down.  Much about this country needs to be fixed—the economy, health care, our roads and bridges, our terror at terrorism, racial inequality, education, melting glaciers.   Our future looks dim.  But more and more we are withdrawing into partisan groups which do not talk to one another.  So are our representatives in Washington.  Democracy depends upon discussion and compromise.  Our deep division is a scandal that threatens democracy.

Several weeks before George W. Bush ordered the attack on Iraq to bring about regime change, as he called it, my husband and I marched against the war.  Sort of.  We were in Paris.  It was February 14th.  The early evening was bitter cold and because the Metro was undergoing repairs, it was cluttered with scaffolding.  We were going to celebrate Valentine’s day with a special dinner.  Emerging from the underground around five p.m. we glimpsed a river of French men and women, young and old, pouring down Boulevard Mutualite.  People walked, rode bicycles, waved flags from the backs of trucks.  They wore scarves and berets and layers of sweaters.  Slender, beautiful young people left their shirts open, defying the stinging wind.   Ragtag dudes hoisted bed sheets with slogans.  Pregnant women sang.  Professor-like figures trudged along in full length coats reading books.  A child wearing mittens led a puppy on a red leash.

The first time I protested a war, I was twenty.  Mike Burton, the editor of our campus newspaper at Wheaton, joined me in the lunch line.  He had come from a class in modern philosophy, and as I ordered a hamburger, he quietly effervesced about Heidegger.  Then he slipped me a copy of Time magazine, opened to a picture of an American soldier’s astonished face as he took a bullet to the stomach.  The caption reported that the soldier was twenty.  I was stunned.  My age.

I glanced at the photo, stepped out of line, and, feeling I might throw up,  wandered off to the ladies room.   When I returned to the lunch room, Mike, who was by nature courtly and generous, apologized, but went on to make a case against the war.  The authorities–President Johnson, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara–and our administration at Wheaton– argued that if we pulled out of Vietnam, that country would turn Communist.  If Vietnam turned Communist, a string of other countries in the region would follow suit.  This was known as The Domino Theory, which Michael had been arguing against for a year.  I paid for my cheeseburger, then scraped it into the trash, listening while he turned the fire hose of his powerful logic on me.  Shaken as I was, I hung on for dear life to my skepticism.  How could any of us know?   We weren’t there in Vietnam.   We didn’t possess the statistics.

I was the dutiful child of a father who died early and a mother who had heroically taken on both parenting roles.  I needed to believe the parent is right.  The child who rocks the boat sinks the ship.  If a parent makes a mistake, at least she might have an idea about how to fix it.  How could McNamara, who was reputed to be a genius, who had been head of Ford, who had access to so much information, be mistaken?  How could any of us who had not run the world, guess at its complications?

Like many students at the time, however, I was reading philosophy, taking what I understood of it to heart, struggling to comprehend the stunning, recent deaths of my own father and my brother.  Reading Sartre and Kirkegaard and Camus, talking about them until late at night, some of us began trying to act, not as a person “should,” but authentically.  I wanted to take my freedom as an individual seriously, to feel each moment honestly as it passed.  I forced myself to imagine what had happened.  For months I saw the boy’s picture, heard the crack of that gun, felt fire as the bullet tore open his gut, and watched his entrails spill onto the soil.

The year before that, as president of my freshman class, I was expected to appear in a routine ROTC ceremony to review the cadets.  The truth is, as I considered this, I was mainly absorbed by what to wear.  The morning dawned, cool and crisp and full of blue sky, as only the Midwest can be.  I had bought a white suit with gold buttons.  I could ill afford to buy new clothes, but I justified the price by thinking of the occasion as a responsibility.  The suit with its gold braid looked vaguely military to me.  For two weeks I kept it hanging on the handle of my closet door, so I could admire it.  That morning after taking a shower, I tore off the sheltering plastic and put it on for the first time.  I pulled on white gloves.  I stood in front of the mirror looking like a million dollars.

Then reluctantly, I began to pay attention to the war inside me.  I knew some of my friends believed our support of the Saigon government was immoral.  I gnawed on carrots for a while and paced my room, wracking my brain about whether I should go through with the ceremony.  I phoned a friend and told her I felt torn between opposing duties.  I had been summoned by the college administration and I wanted to fulfill my responsibilities as class president.  On the other hand, I had been horrified several weeks before, when one of my close friends had shipped out to fight in Viet Nam.  On the other, other hand, I knew my distress at his leaving wasn’t proof the war was wrong.

What I did not confess to my friend, or even to myself, was that I loved the idea of standing at attention on a reviewing stand, looking spiffy in my white suit as the wind blew gently through my hair.  I wanted to be seen.  And also, I probably did not quite understand that the ceremony involved role playing.  If I had declined to review the troops, the school would quickly have substituted the freshman class vice president. But I proudly hung onto the notion that they had summoned me, personally.  After a long, tortured, semi-honest debate with my friend, I said goodbye, put the phone down, and dashed off to review the troops.

Would it have made a real difference if I hadn’t?

To me, it would have.

To the school?  I doubt it.

Now we know what to think about the Vietnam War.  Even Robert McNamara, toward the end of his life, said he knew.  The War was ugly, unjust, unnecessary, foolish.  It squandered our young men, and ravaged Vietnam and its people with napalm.  At the time, it felt—and it was— morally complicated.  In the late sixties and early seventies most of us Baby Boomers brashly dictated morality to our parents, those people who had lived through a depression and fought honorably in World War II.   We had ethical objections.  Okay.  True.  And they have been shown to be more justified, than even we realized at the time.

But the fact is, even after I turned against the war, my protesting was not as altruistic and righteous as I sometimes claimed.   Even at the time, I knew I was profoundly self interested.  I didn’t want the men I loved to go to war.  We marched, we yelled, we stabbed our fists in the air, we drank scotch to numb ourselves as we watched our chances in the TV lottery for the draft, we celebrated, or we mourned, and some of us linked hundreds of safety pins together into chains so we could remove a pin every day until our men came home.  The signs said, Make Love Not War.  For Love read Sex.  Part of the reason we argued so aggressively that the war was wrong was that we wanted what people our age always want—the chance to get on with marriage, children–the business of living.

The Vietnam War drove a wedge between the generations in my family, because both sides were absolutely sure we were right.  Several times a year I visited my mother, who after ten years of surviving as a widow, had married my stepfather and gone to live with him in Dallas.   During the day my mother and I gallivanted around to museums and stores, never mentioning politics, but one night at dinner, my step father, who was usually mild-mannered and openhanded, began ranting against the spoiled, presumptuous, out-of-control youth who were taking over buildings on campuses.

I got up from their dining room table, pretending to clear the plates, and walked around their kitchen, fuming.  I stuffed a red plaid dish towel into my mouth.  In truth, at the time, I wasn’t sure about the war.  But their staunch, unflinching refusal to think or to investigate, to consider alternatives, drove me nuts.

After while, I came back, sat down, and explained to them that Josh and Mike and Larry—young men from Wheaton my mother had frequently fed, quick-witted and decent young men, kids like me, looking forward with pleasure and hope to their lives—should not have to die because selfish old menlike Lyndon Johnson had power to order them to war.  The implication was that my mother and stepfather were equally as selfish and twisted.

“I’m sorry,” my mother said sweetly, “that your generation isn’t willing to sacrifice.”  She meant as her own generation had sacrificed in World War II, for the sake of the country.

“That was a moral war!”  I shouted.

“Daddy Jim served in the army,” my mother said, beaming at her new husband.

“Not at the Front, Sweets,” he rumbled modestly.

“We’re not exactly fighting Hitler!” I snapped.

“We’re fighting Communism,” Daddy Jim announced in the voice of reason.

“ This war has nothing to do with America’s self interest.”

“Do you want this country to go Commie?” he asked me pleasantly.

My mother, alarmed by the possibility of all-out conflict, turned to me.  “Paula called.  She wants to take us to lunch.”  This made me feel like a trophy that my mother wanted to show off to her new friends in Dallas.

“I have to grade freshman themes,” I said coldly.

“Lunch at Neiman Marcus!” she coaxed.

“Maybe some other day.”

A cold, wall of ice grew up between us.

For years we stood on opposite sides and glowered at one another.   We spoke to each other about the War in pre-fabricated, ready-made slabs of language that we had probably picked up from political rallies or television, or our separate churches, hers conservative, mine liberal.  After that, the subject of the War flared up only occasionally, but it always lay beneath the surface of our visits, the implacable war that defied civil discussion.

Why?  What was at stake?

I can only answer for myself.  If I’d had a real conversation with my parents, they might have won, because, in my heart of hearts, I wasn’t as sure of my own position as I pretended to be.  And my identity as a member of my generation—rather than theirs– rested, in part on my stance on the Vietnam war.  What was at stake for me in holding my position against my parents was dignity, called dignidad that brilliant Spanish concept, self-respect, a sense of my own nobility as a human being. Like most children, I needed to define myself as separate from my parents, which I did in some ways I knew were arbitrary.  But this, I felt, was not arbitrary.  It was a matter of morality.

Even though it turned out I was right about the War, in my demonization of my parents, I was, perhaps, more at fault than my mother.  I disdained her for her opinion, and I am sure she never felt contempt toward me for mine.  The scorn I felt for the other side helped me to barricade myself against real discussion.  What I’d have risked by having a real conversation with my parents was this:  if they had convinced me, I would have needed to change.  To change would have meant to stop being the self I recognized.  I did not want to stop being myself.   I wonder whether that deep fear of changing is what prevents us from talking to one another?

My parents were driven by anxiety about change.  Although I did not understand it at the age of twenty-three, my mother had her own history, which pre-disposed her to see the Vietnamese War as she did.   She was a teenager during the depression, when her parents lost a good bit of their farmland.  In 1933, for $60 a month she taught twenty-two kids in a one-room school house in rural Minnesota.  My father dropped out of university.  After they married, they wanted something they could count on at any cost, something that would not change. No wonder they joined the Christian fundamentalist movement.

Any form of gambling or card-playing became for my parents a symbol of the kind of financial and moral risk they abhored.  Shortly after they were married they spent a blowout weekend at the cabin of some friends on Lake Miltona, a resort close to Parkers Prairie, where my father served as Postmaster before he took over the general store from his father.  Apparently during that weekend a number of couples, including my parents, had celebrated the mild June weather by drinking and dancing and playing cards on the grassy slope above the Lake.  My father had grown up with these folks and when he brought his farm wife home to the town, she had, apparently, passed the test.  They’d been swimming, the women in their bright-colored, flowered post-World War II bathing suits with pleated skirts, the men loudly daring one another to pull off their shorts and skinny dip.  For Saturday night dinner they splurged on butter and eggs and meat and told ribald jokes and bet 25 cents a game on bridge.  The next day they skipped church, lingering at the beach until afternoon.

That evening, as my parents drove back to town, they regretted the money they had lost, not much, but needed to pay their $10 a month rent.  They were slightly hung over and ashamed of so much drinking.  Later that night, in a solemn ritual that my mother could still describe when she was 80, they climbed downstairs together to the furnace, opened the door to the red-hot coals, tossed their playing cards into the jaws, and watched the flame eagerly leap up to devour the pack.  After that, my parents never allowed cards in the house.  They renounced parties at the beach and alcohol of all kinds.  They dedicated themselves in public in the Baptist church to a life of fundamental Christianity.

My parents’ love of stability and permanence may have been what made my father design and build two houses for us with his own hands.  He knew the plumbing and electrical systems were reliable.  He had put them in himself.  The first house he built was in Minnesota.  The second was in Lincoln, Nebraska where my parents moved the family so my mother could find a job and so after my father–who was terminally ill–died, we kids could attend the University of Nebraska.  None of us went to school at the University.  But we could have.  What my parents wanted was insurance.  If we needed it, it was close by.

I watched my father build our second house.  On a spring day when the fledgling leaves were budding on the dogwoods, I stood beside him at the edge of our new lot line on the outskirts of Lincoln and watched an earth-moving machine slowly roll onto our land.  The din of the machine made us plug our ears.  I could feel vibrations in my feet.  As its jaws bit cleanly through the grass, I felt as if something inside me were flying together.  The way to start building a house, I understood, is simply to subtract earth.

For months afterward, whenever I wasn’t in school or doing my homework, I was helping to raise the walls of our house. My father let me practice pounding nails until every time I whammed the head three times, the shaft would fly straight in.  Every time the hammer hit home, I felt closure.  There.  That’s done.  That will never come out.  I still hear the clang of my handsome father’s pounding, and I can feel the rhythmic swing of his freckled right arm as he nailed the raw studs in place.  He was going to die, going to die, going to die.  For himself, he wasn’t afraid.  He wanted to finish this house before he left us.  I suspect he wanted to anchor the studs of that house to the foundation of the universe.

My father was not afraid to die, because he felt convinced of the one most essential and final thing.  With absolute certainty he believed that to be absent from us was to be present with the Lord.  We would all eventually be reunited.  Both my parents repeated that often.  As a result they faced his death with bravery that—especially since I’ve been a parent—seems inconceivable to me.  My father never became an invalid.  He was looking for adventure until the week before he died.

The kind of certainty that buoyed my father was esteemed among my fundamentalist people and it was strengthened by hymns and the fundamentalist culture.  We sang about blessed assurance.  We lustily harmonized, I’m a child of the King, and When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.  These convictions, of course, obligated us to be happy.  We kids sang, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam and I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart!  Our private dialect and pot lucks and prayer chains and Christian school reinforced the certainty my fundamentalist parents so prized. We lived in a feedback loop.

Above all, our language defined us, bolstered our certainty, and set us apart from the mainstream culture.  We were washed in the blood of the Lamb.  We bore witness to the faith, and let our lights shine before men.  We wanted to fully surrender to the Lord.  Jesus knocked patiently at the door of our heart.  We repeated the same words and images until we knew, we knew the world through those images.  My parents tended to live the way they talked.  We said grace before meals.  Before long car trips we prayed for safety.  My parents quite clearly loved one another, and they got along famously.  I had no inkling then, of course, that their fervent beliefs and language could be called an ideology.  I thought it was just obviously and simply the truth.

Years after my father died, when I was in my twenties and visiting my mother in Dallas, she had the dial tuned to a radio preacher, as she often did all day.  She loved to feel awash in the music and language of fundamentalism, which by then had started driving me bonkers.  We were making turkey sandwiches for lunch.  The preacher was praying. Oh Lord, shower your blessings right now on our radio audience.  And we just thank you that you have adopted us as your sons!  I was reflecting on why the Lord never seemed to adopt us as daughters, when out of the blue, my mother remarked, “That preacher is a godly man.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

She looked at me strangely.  “His language.” 

I had never before heard my mother comment on language.  I had never realized that she understood so clearly her own language choices.  There’s a code, she was warning me.  Follow the code.  I was sailing in dangerous waters.  By then I was reading Moby Dick and Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the difficult, radiant poems of Emily Dickinson.  I had already apprenticed myself to these masters.  I was, indeed, sailing in fresh waters—beyond clichés, out into the deep, ferocious ocean of the English language.  To me the waters felt, not dangerous, but heady and freeing.

My mother was right.  There is a code.  The idiom my parents spoke was a language of fundamentalist protest against modernism and consumerism.  Back then, it was the dialect of people who had almost no power.  The fundamentalists I knew felt they had little control over politics and they tended to be lower middle class.  Their echo-chamber language tended to be limited to religious ideas.  But with the political mobilization of the fundamentalist right in the mid-seventies, the dialect of fundamentalism became a language of power and it took on a new, political dimension.

Ideological language, whether it’s the language of religion or of politics, deals in prefabricated slabs of words.  A phrase can frame and define a whole issue.  The phrases are often metaphorical.  The metaphor makes an argument which isn’t surfaced, which smuggles into the conversation a hidden assumption.

Language is endlessly shifting and perishable.   But consider idioms like death panels, or the war on terror, or government takeover of health care, or socialized medicine.  These phrases imply whole ideas.  Take death panels, for example.  This term argues that the authorities under the new health care bill—those who decide which medical procedures can be reimbursed and which can’t–are definitely going to pull the plug on someone, and it might be on your loved one.  Of course, insurance companies, who are currently the “deciders,” sometimes pull the plug by refusing coverage.  But death panels banishes discussion about these questions.  It puts the rabbit in the hat.  It obscures questions with a clever phrase.

The political right is not alone in its use of ideological language. The left refers to itself as the progressives and refers to conservatives as the lunatic fringe.  It frames its own agenda as tax relief and its proponents chant. Yes we can!   Prefabricated, ideological language is nothing new, but increasingly it takes the place of discussion, not only on the streets, but in Washington.  Both the liberals and the conservatives, whatever that means anymore, both the Republicans and the Democrats hire linguists to shape language.  They scheme ways to distort language about political issues in favor of their positions.  They repeat the new cliches until they seem “natural”.  They lock us into points of view before we open our mouths.   And since by and large we listen only to news that confirms our biases, we lock ourselves ever more firmly into our prejudices.

Given that we’re together on a train, and the train is on fire, we could use some discussion about what to do.   But what language can we use?  What assumptions do we start with?  Those of Glen Beck or those of Rachel Maddow?   Talking politics with someone on the opposite side is scary.  The effort to get past all the manufactured phrases requires inventing new language.  It is exhausting.  And the risk of offending is great.  But most dangerous is the possibility that if I talk to them, I will change, the fear that drove me during my discussions with my parents about the Vietnam War.  I had a compulsive need to think of myself as correct.  I didn’t want to risk having to admit to them that they were right and I was wrong.  If I really listened to their point of view, if I gave them a chance to convince me, I would not leave their house as the same person.  I wouldn’t recognize myself.

My deepest identity depends on feeling certain of my political positions, for example that street people can be cleaned up and made productive and that it’s possible to create a health care system which doesn’t exclude fifty million Americans.  So why should I talk with anyone who disagrees, especially since I don’t even know how.  I have my own prefabricated language and they have theirs.  Hate speech is the business of some of them who write blogs and host talk shows.  But I know the people who listen to those personalities might be less doctrinaire, more capable of compassion and empathy.  I just don’t know many of them.  I don’t even know where to start.  Hi.  What a cute dachshund!  Is he yours?  Anything more complicated—like discussing the Middle East—and I’m out of my depth.

But here’s the rub.  There’s a difference between knowing I’m right and actually being right.  Feeling certain about something doesn’t guarantee that I’m right.  It just prevents any connection with the other side.  As I have said, in the argument about the Vietnam war, I was even less well behaved than my parents, because I disdained them.

Certainty is one of the fundamentalist values I don’t like any more.  I say that with sadness.  Who doesn’t long to be certain?  But unfortunately, because we’re human, there’s a limit to how certain we can be of anything.  At least that’s what I believe when I’m not climbing the wall with anxiety.  I understand how important blessed assurance was to my father and mother, who knew my father was dying, and wanted to be sure that we kids would be safe, and that we would all be reunited.   I think my parents were right.  We’ll all be reunited.  But how can I know for sure?  The only way of knowing that is through faith.

I nominate faith to take the place of certainty.  The problem is, faith is scary, at least for me.  For the last several decades I have spent a fair amount of time in London.  I worship sometimes at St. Paul’s, one of London’s magnificent cathedrals.  A few weeks ago I was sitting on a wooden chair in the nave with a six hundred other people, listening to the boys’ choir.  Their treble soared through balanced white marble columns to the dome three hundred and fifty feet above us.  At the end of the service, the ranks of robed clergy filed up the center aisle toward the rear. Our triumphant voices sang All Hail the Power of Jesus Name, rising to mingle with sunlight from the balcony windows.

After the service, I decided to change my perspective, to climb to the top of the dome and look out on the city of London.  I’ve decided that many times and I’ve always backed out.  This time I swore to myself that I would follow through.

The stairs are shabby and cramped.  As I trudged up the five hundred and thirty rickety wooden steps, circling around and around, I felt alternately nauseated and exhilarated.  My legs trembled with animal terror. Several times I decided to turn back.  But I was enclosed in a small circular passage.  There was no room to turn around and edge down.  And the steps weren’t solid, either.  When I peered through them, I could see the whole precipitous, dizzying way to the bottom.

Abandoning certainty in favor of faith feels like climbing those 530 steps.  But those steps have taken hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to the top of the dome and, so far, they have always held.

There’s a fire in the train, sweeping towards us from the car ahead. The air is looking shimmery with heat, and the hair on my arms is singed, and I would like to say bad people are pushing and shoving in the aisles.  But I’m pushing and shoving, too.   My own shouting is preventing me from hearing anyone who disagrees with me.  And when I think about it, I feel like I’m going to be sick.  Because I don’t know what to do to stop us from attacking one another—even to stop myself.  It seems to me that the impasse between factions in this country might be permanent.  The standoff has been so long in the making, it seems impossible to resolve.

Then I go to a theatre conference and a tall, skinny graduate student named James with cowlicky red hair gets up and tells us he’ll be talking about the parable of the Good Samaritan.   I feel myself nodding toward boredom.  Everybody knows that one.  It’s about doing good to your neighbor.  Except James, who, it turns out, is a smart cookie, has already counted on us knowing that way of looking at the story, so he isn’t focusing on being nice to the Samaritan.

He’s talking about the set-up for the parable.  Although there are about twenty of us in the room, he speaks as if to each of us personally.  He holds a chalk in his left hand and occasionally marks on a blackboard.  He hooks his finger in a belt loop while he tells how Jesus went to the Temple so he could talk to his political opponents.  After a Pharisee spotted him and asked him a smart aleck question to put him down, James says, Jesus must have wanted to attack, just like we do when we’ve strayed off our own turf.  Just like I feel when I have to do more than repeat my favorite positions to people who agree with me.

James’ point is that Jesus didn’t repeat his same old positions.  Instead he told a story.  The story got everyone in the Temple involved in the messy, complicated aspects of being human.  It got their minds off ideology and confronted them with their own bodies, with sickness, death, and their regular need for assistance.  Sitting there listening to James that day, I thought, Ah ha!  This is the way to talk to people I disagree with.  Everyone loves a story. 

Once I went to a nursing home to teach a poetry workshop.  The wiry, energetic director informed me that she had invited a special needs class at the local high school to join us.  This freaked me out slightly because I knew the age differences in the audience would be so huge.  I wondered how I’d ever find something that would work for both groups.  Soon the students arrived.  The young women were showing a lot of low-cut black and purple lingerie.  Many of their orifices were be-ringed with metal, and the entire bodies of several of the men were smothered in tattoos.  The white-haired nursing home residents, who were wearing carpet slippers and flowered cotton dresses with zippers up the front, watched coldly as the students trooped in.  Each group sat in its own little enclave with a no-man’s land of empty chairs between them.

I asked them all to close their eyes and picture the house where they had lived when they were ten.  Obediently they closed their eyes.  Suppose they were walking up the front sidewalk, I said.  What did they smell?  The greenness of grass as a father mowed?  A mother cooking spaghetti sauce in the kitchen?  What did they hear?  Quarreling?  Someone practicing scales?  A record playing the Beetles?  What did they see?  The assignment was to write for twenty minutes as fast as they could—everything they felt and sensed.

They didn’t want to stop, but eventually I asked for volunteers to read the images aloud.  Every single one of them read.  They didn’t weep.  Not openly.  Well, not the high school students, at least.  But a surprising number of them ended the session with smudged mascara.  And they all lingered afterwards to talk to one another.  The wiry director, who knew what she was doing, as it turned out, broke out cookies and coffee.

All the preconceived notions we had in our heads about one another got short-circuited by those stories.  I, who was being paid to run the workshop, also got out of my own group for a while.  It was our own stories—our own images and emotions—that gave us a way of talking to one another.

Poetry and music and other kinds of images circumvent ideological language, and they can forge connections too.  I am remembering what happened in Sarajevo after they closed the opera.  The opera house had been shelled until the frightened patrons stopped coming.  The singers and many orchestra members, who had braved gunfire, finally gave up and disbanded.  Some of them pawned their instruments to buy food.  They barricaded themselves in their houses.  Sporadic gun shots reminded them they had no power.  Music had been their only power, and their music had been shut down by guns.

Then one day the army shot to death twenty-two citizens of Sarajevo while they were standing in a bread line.  The next day Vedran Smailovic took his cello to the town square, anchored it in the dirt, and began playing.  Every day he walked alone out to the square in clear sight of the gunmen, and sat down, and arranged his cello, and played.  He played for twenty-two days, one day for each of the twenty-two citizens who had been murdered.

No one fired at him.

He played music.  That’s all.  Drawing horsehair across cat gut, he let loose the  unearthly music of the great cello concertos.  The long, rich notes echoed against the buildings and resonated in the central square.   To the people of Sarajevo, his music was the sound of this truth:   guns are not stronger than music.

Smailovic offered what he had, and so did the kids and the old people at the nursing home.  The language of personal stories and the various languages of art are not ideologically coded.  They short circuit politics, replacing ideology with experience.  Both of them provide ways for us to connect with people from the other side.

I aspire to poetry that is stronger than guns.  I want to plow the locked and infertile soil of our politicized, abused English language.  I want to find new and fair and striking ways to tell what I know.  What I am trying to say, in part by telling my own story, is this:  we can quarry our own lives for images, instead of buying the ready-made ones from political operatives.  And we can be aware, as we talk, that we might be wrong.  We might even keep a sense of humor and revel in the fact that we still have something to learn.  Risk is scary but along with it come possibilities that are worth celebrating.

Think of it.  We might find ways to talk to one another.

My friend said as the racket of the tracks jolted her feet and hammered her ears, she realized that she was more likely to die if she stayed on that train than if she jumped.  She thought she would never make it down the aisle.  People were shouting, and pushing, and savaging one another.  Some passengers burned to death.  But she made it to the open door.  The wind sucked her orange scarf away.  And then she leapt.

For Things Gone

The red thread that opened a Band-Aid.

Station wagon: the biggest (and tallest) car on the road.

Movie moguls. True, they were often power hungry sons-of-bitches, but they knew, loved, and had a passion for making movies. As opposed to power hungry s.o.b.’s who know, love, and have a passion for making money.

The clack of typewriter keys on platen. The thunk and ding of a carriage return. Pulling out a page of typescript with a ratchety zip. How industrious it all sounded. And felt.

Mercury in oral thermometers. The sensation of danger when the glass broke, scattering a silvery brightness across the floor — “Don’t touch it!” — beads of quicksilver so capricious and lively you could believe them possessed of deliberate mischief.

Telephones with real bells that ring and ring when no one’s home. Busy signals that tell you: they are. Having to call back if you want to talk. Getting to talk to someone.

Being unreachable if one is not in a known location, and sometimes when one is. This being not only accepted but expected.

Encyclopedia sets that take up entire shelves. In someone’s home.

Three television networks, a local channel, and PBS. Getting up and doing something else if the programming on these could not satisfy. “Remote” being an adjective meaning “far away and difficult to access” rather than a noun denoting “plastic box to change channels with.” Television stations going off the air, with or without the national anthem and Air Force jets. Snow and test patterns and an unbroken tone.

Fishing glass bottles of Coca-Cola, RC, or Nehi Grape from large metal tanks filled with heart-stoppingly cold ice water. The slushy crunching sound this made. The resistant tug as you opened your drink of the bottle opener mounted under the counter. The steel, fluted edges of bottle caps. The cottony heat that fattened the air, the hollow thonk of your shoes on a wooden floor, the swing and swat of a screen door, and the curling dampness of the hair against your neck that usually accompanied the purchase.

Cowboy-style revolvers with ivory plastic grips that fed strips of red paper caps under the hammer with each pull of the trigger. Pounding caps in the driveway with a rock just to hear them snap. The blue-black smell of gunpowder.

Payphones. Phone booths with doors that close. Intact telephone directories tethered below the shelf. Religiously checking payphone return slots for left-behind quarters. Sometimes finding them.

Slide projectors. Their clicking and humming. Girls in darkened rooms combing and braiding and stroking my long hair to that sound.

Service stations. Men with weathered skin and fingernails rimmed black asking how they can help you as they wipe their hands on a rag. Getting to say “Fill ’er up.” Sitting in your car listening to gasoline rush into the tank while the man with his name stitched on his shirt, who actually knows about cars and what they need done to them, cleans your windshield and checks the oil.

Flying on an airplane in a spirit of communal civility. Finding it a pleasurable experience. Being given something to eat on the flight. Stairways rolled up to the airplane door. Walking across heat-softened or frozen tarmac. Scanning a cluster of faces at the gate, searching that tide of anticipatory delight for the one searching for yours. A feeling of having embarked, traveled, of having arrived someplace different.

For Vanishing Things

The bright chrome taste of cold water drunk from the tap. The musty copper taste of water sun-warmed in a garden hose.

Children with unstructured time, left to their own devices among themselves. Especially out of doors. No adults.

Independent newspapers led by editors. Ditto publishing houses.

Paper maps. Asking locals for directions and occasionally learning something about where you are that you otherwise would never have known.

Parents capable of The Look, that wordless beam of warning that stops a child cold in the middle of whatever they are thinking or doing. Parents out in public who don’t think twice about removing, even taking home, a child who is shrieking for want of sleep, food, attention, comfort.

The respectability and dignity of amateur endeavors, performances, activities, sports. Not needing to professionalize, televise, or (especially) market them.

Watermelons with plenty of seeds. Watermelon seed spitting contests. The “thoo” sound a spit seed makes.

Personal letters and cards arriving in the mail. Thank you notes. Hand-written invitations to parties and gatherings. (Parties and gatherings.)

Friends phoning just to catch up.

Globes with the countries of the world printed on them in soft colors.

Being disappointed on the day after Labor Day that it’s still too hot to wear new wool skirts and fall sweaters. Having to wait, also, to wear the new shoes that go with them. Making sure to have new outfits for fall, every fall. Thinking in terms of outfits.

Paperboys. On bicycles.

The languorous, meandering, yet attentive hours that are the most fertile medium for beginning a friendship.

Concerning Restaurants

Deft, unobtrusive service. A gracious “will that be all for now?” followed by a quiet retreat, and no one ever promising that they will be taking care of you tonight. Never being told that the soup du jour today is…or that the beef is served “with” au jus. Never being required to answer the question “You still working on that?” or referred to as “you guys.” Having every dirty fork, knife, or spoon whisked away before the end of the meal wordlessly replaced with a clean one, obviating the need ever to hear “You wanna hang onto that?” while having the soiled plate upon which the utensil rests thrust toward one’s face. Being surprised to find your water glass refilled. Reaching the end of the evening wholly unencumbered by any knowledge of the wait person’s name.

For That Which Is No Longer Considered Quite The Thing

Girls washing their faces at night with Noxema. Pond’s cold cream and tissues to remove makeup. The sharp menthol smell of the one, the soft grandmother fragrance of the other.

Sunbathing for good health. Being kissed by the sun, given a glow, or sporting a slightly sunburned nose signifying nothing more sinister than a light-filled, breezy summer.

Running through sprinklers in other people’s lawns on a hot day.

Going to movie theaters three or four times a week. Smuggling in one’s own popcorn and drinks. (Coughing to cover the sound of a popped top.)

Stocking all home stationery needs from the supply closet at work.

Two or three times a year, ordering a drink at a bar (something smoky brown or clear and oily poured into a rocks glass), then bumming a cigarette so one can enact all the rituals: whacking the pack against one’s palm to dispense the cigarette, giving the filter end several sharp taps on the bar top, the sulphurous scritch of a match strike or the metallic whiff of lighter fluid as the wheel ratchets and sparks. The leaning into the flame and cupping your hand around the hand of the person holding it out to you, the backward tilt of your head to exhale the first stream of smoke, the occasional squint and subsequent increase of all gestures made with the cigarette-wielding hand, as if you are a magician, an illusionist, your every flourish followed by a tiny spotlight.

 

When she turned 88, my mother and I agreed that it was time for her to leave the world where she’d spent her whole life and the Chicago condo she’d lived in for forty years to settle into a small apartment in a retirement community just two miles from my house in Waterville, Maine.We worked in surprising harmony preparing for the move as we sorted stuff into giveaway piles, throwaway piles, and keepers—surprising, given the wrenching nature of the task for my mother and the backbreaking nature of it for me as I dispatched carload after carload of the giveaways and trash bin after trash bin of the throwaways. I also trashed a useless item of my own—the irritation I’d carried around for years at my mother’s refusal to part with anything, to liberate herself (and her sofa) from stifling plastics, among other things. Free of my irritation (pretty much), I considered the resonance of her driving need to accumulate clutter, to hide away for safekeeping even bags within bags and containers within containers.

Was my mother filling some emptiness I didn’t know about to create an illusion of abundance? Having grown up in the Depression, did she fear being impoverished, reduced to nothing? Was she aware at some subliminal level that Alzheimer’s disease was hovering behind her own smiling face, that it would pilfer from the brain to which she’d entrusted a long life’s worth of experiences? That all she’d stored up to nourish herself and her loved ones on a rainy day might be stolen by a lethal partnership of time and disease?

As I write about my mother, I try to hold onto what seems essential about her. This is an ongoing challenge, since my mother suffers from a disease that tenaciously chips at her core. We are all, of course, fluid and elusive beings; yet, people with Alzheimer’s dramatize just how far we may inadvertently travel from who we thought we were.

The master identity thief started creeping up on my mother without our recognizing it as Alzheimer’s. When it hits late, as it blessedly did in my mother’s case, the disease can lurk in the shadows for quite awhile, passing as ordinary short-term memory loss. Since she’d been uprooted from her familiar Chicago turf, disorientation was to be expected. As was her bafflement at the onslaught of new-fangled electronics—digital clocks, DVD players with too many buttons, TVs where you can’t simply turn a dial to change a channel, voice mail machines that mumble at you so fast you can’t tell what the heck they’re saying. “How do you play those messages?” she’d ask. Never mind that I’d already showed her the single button to press to retrieve a message—not once, but dozens of times.

When it finally sank in that my hitherto intelligent mother wouldn’t simply have turned dense for no reason, I asked her doctor to check her cognitive functioning. He asked her to draw a clock face with the minute hand and the hour hand and the numbers all in a circle. Her forehead wrinkled in perplexity, looking first at him and then at me. She put pencil to paper over and over again, absolutely stymied, pausing to look at me with eyes sometimes pleading and sometimes blank. She got no further than the circle.

“I don’t understand,” she protested.

That has become the phrase she utters more than any other. That, and “you’re an angel” when I help her navigate some turn in the maze of ordinary life. I’m hardly an angel, but to her, the ability to do anything seems heaven-sent.

Yet my mother has a resourcefulness that is, at least so far, serving her well. What she accumulates now are scraps of paper containing a word, a phrase, something she wants to try to hold onto, something reconnecting her to her identity: the name of the holiday that occurs on her birthday (Valentine’s Day); the names of my son and daughter, Mike and Alison; my husband, Peter; the names for things she has—arthritis, Alzheimer’s, televishion [sic]. She hasn’t forgotten my name yet, although I was startled once to find a note she’d left me with my name spelled “Nataly,” and just the other day, on a scrap, I saw my phone number next to “Natilie.” Her memory lapses embarrass her, but not nearly as much as they would if she were more fully herself. In many ways, though, she is still herself—especially in her robust sense of humor, her general cheerfulness, and her generosity towards us, her family.

When I was growing up, one unfortunate form her generosity took was to volunteer to do things for me that I was old enough to do for myself. “Oh, I’ll do it,” she’d say to me, whether it was sewing on a button, making a snack, or running an errand. My button, my snack, my errand. This did not do much to speed the development of my autonomy, and would no doubt earn us the ugly, ubiquitous tag of the day—“co-dependent”—since I was generally quite content to accept the services offered.  My mother’s wish to do things for herself and for others, to remain on the giving rather than receiving end, was, I’m sure, a source of pride for her. But as an adult, I was frustrated at times by her inability to ask for what she needed and deserved. And when she did receive a favor from someone, she tended to take with it a nagging sense of obligation. In having to surrender most of that ego-fortifying pride to the exigencies of old age and disease, she has gained an acceptance of the curse and blessing of needing help, lots of it. Mainly from me. I, while giving that help to my mother, have discovered in myself more of her resourcefulness and cheerfulness than I knew I had.

And so we have joined the ranks of many boomer adult children and elderly parents, living out the reversal of our original care-giving roles. The first clear sign of the shift came before Alzheimer’s, about a year and a half before the big move to Maine. My mother confessed on the phone that she was afraid she’d have to move to free herself from the burden of her misnamed “walk-in” (you couldn’t) utility closet adjacent to her kitchen. On my visits over the years I’d discreetly peek into the closet for a damage assessment, only to find a dozen cans of Progresso Lentil Soup staring me down, alongside at least as many cans of Geisha albacore solid white tuna, pink sock-eye salmon, and Ragu tomato sauce—jar after bright red jar. Covering the floor of this closet sat grocery bags stuffed with boxes of Kleenex, cans of Ajax, more cans of tuna and soup and rolls of toilet paper. For extra storage space, my mother used her oven, her dishwasher, and the trunk of her car, frequently filled with bags of bags. At one point, I mentioned to her that the situation had become unmanageable. “I know,” she said. “Shut the door.” It was like an alcoholic’s stash of booze, a secret shared only with the woman who cleaned for her and with me. Finally, though, when I asked from a safe distance, on the phone, “How about we clean out that closet when I come see you next?” the answer was, in essence, “I’d appreciate it. I can’t do it on my own.”

The whole excavation project was trying for my mother, who couldn’t discard a pencil that still had two good inches remaining. Yet the buoyancy she felt from this unburdening enabled her, after we’d completed the utility closet, to say yes when I offered to tackle her kitchen drawers and cabinets. We were on a tear! Getting rid of so many things she’d held onto tugged at her stomach, I knew. Yet when we emptied the very deep drawer full of plastic containers onto her round kitchen table and stood back to witness the spectacle, we had a good laugh. On another trip, after we’d thinned out the contents of her huge bedroom walk-in closet, her apartment was transformed into a place my mother was able to live in happily for another year, showing off her closets, smiling without embarrassed self-irony. This process of emptying that we engaged in together had an unanticipated dimension: it made more room in both of us for compassion. If I were religious, I’d say that angels had settled in those empty spaces.

I felt grateful there was something concrete, finally, I could do for my elderly mother, who lived a two and a half hour plane trip away from me, a distance that often made me feel helpless. Now, since my mother lives near me, since she needs me more than ever, and since her need is virtually guaranteed to increase, I remind myself often of what my most important jobs are: scrupulously arranging her many pills for the week into their little daily containers without making a slip-up that could send her into hours of frustrated confusion; paying her bills while she’s seated in the shower until she needs me to scrub her back or right foot (the one she can’t reach); ordering movies from Netflix that show the entertainers and world she recognizes as more hers than the one around her—George Burns and Gracie Allen, Milton Berle, Ed Sullivan; setting up the disk so all she has to do is press “play.”  These matter more than what another part of me says I should be doing: working on my story collection, reading the books piled up beside my recliner—stimulating and rewarding work that has its rightful place. But not, right now, first place. Because my mother needs help, and because I’m the one who can best give it.

As close as I am to my mother, I observe her now from a certain distance, much as I observed my children when they were still very new to me, physically and emotionally dependent on my care. Just as a baby is frequently messy, muddled, and frustrating—spitting up, smelling of sour milk or pee or worse, losing hair, and making sounds that don’t easily translate to identifiable needs—so is an elderly person with dementia. My mother’s body has all the telltale signs of old age, and yet when I pat the towel on her shoulders and sweep it all the way down her back and legs to dry her after a shower, I’m not only saddened by its sags and spots, but also amazed by its resilience, its raw persistence. My mind registers blotches of psoriasis under folds of flesh, calves swollen red with edema, a big toe that rests atop the one next to it, skin crinkly as crepe paper, while my appreciation deepens of life’s mysterious process of unfolding and then folding back up, like a leaf.

My mother is fortunate to live in a place surrounded by greenery, a golf course, lots of open space, and she is exhilarated by what she describes as her long, long walks outside. Sometimes when I ride by on my bike, I see her moving like a snail, hunched over her red walker, on the driveway in front of her building, the parameter of her walks. She takes what pleasures she can in her greatly diminished world. I turn off the main road into Park Residences, pedal up next to her, and watch a smile spread across her face. “You look like a kid,” she says to me, and laughs. “I can’t believe you’re . . . how old are you?”

Life is a process of sloughing off what we don’t need and also, for those with Alzheimer’s, much of what we do need. Try as she did to hang onto all those things bursting from her closets and drawers—that accumulated clutter attaching her to life as she had lived it in Chicago—she eventually bowed with grace to the necessity of letting go and moving on, less encumbered. It was a positive move, one she chose. Now, though, the losses aren’t of her choosing and are beyond her control. Medicines help, as do the daily walks she so enjoys. So does human contact, which she has during community dinners at her residence, and during my and my family’s visits.

Ezra Pound’s famous lines from the Pisan Cantos, “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross / What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee,” applies in the end only to those whose memories function well enough for them to recognize who and what they love. While bits of my mother have fallen and keep falling away, she is still filled with tenderness. As she follows the inevitable trajectory of Alzheimer’s sufferers toward the disappearance of what had seemed her very identity, the challenge will be mine to fill emptiness with love.