Note: for younger family members of mine who may read this, some of this history might be a surprise, but, for all of us, the good can outweigh the bad!

“Hello,” I said into the receiver. It was not time for a scheduled call from home, so I wasn’t quite sure who was calling me or why.

My sister answered, “Hello, Becky. You need to come home. Grandpa died today and the funeral will be this coming Thursday. Mother and Daddy think that you can get a bus to Muncie and we can pick you up from there. Visitation will be Wednesday, so you really need to be home by then. Let us know when you have your details worked out, okay?”

 Early November, 1968. I was a senior in college, about four hours from home. I had been planning to go home anyhow, in order to vote in the presidential election, but this would change plans considerably. For one thing, one of my best friends was up for homecoming queen; homecoming started the day of the funeral. I would miss all of it, since my parents would take me back to school the following Sunday. I was disappointed. At the time, to miss my senior year’s homecoming seemed such a big loss. Now, it’s just another of those changes that come during one’s lifetime, just as death does.

I would miss my Grandpa Andy, because he had lived in our home since I was 12. What a man he was! He seemed so old when we took him in, but he was only 71. I say “took him in” because he got kicked out of his boarding house in town, either because he didn’t pay his rent or because he was drunk too often or both. He had a very long beard and a very brown, weathered face with the clearest, bluest eyes I had ever seen.

Because he lived with us, I never had school friends over. I’m not quite sure why. He was drunk, yes, but only on weekends. He was a scheduled alcoholic. He would ride the bus into town or walk the 1 ½ miles if he missed the bus and make a day of it on Saturdays. By late afternoon, Dad would go into town to look for Grandpa, usually with me accompanying him.  We would go from one “beer joint” to another till we found him. Dad would put him in the car, and immediately the alcoholic fumes would envelop us. What I remember most is that Grandpa’s eyes were bleary and teary, not at all like the sparkly eyes he had when he would talk to us kids.

For the next day or two, our whole family, especially my mother, who was his daughter, would revolve around getting Andy back to normal. Sometimes it was pretty awful: vomit, urine, or both spewed from his body as he came off his binge. Surprisingly, both Mother and Daddy patiently put up with his illness week after week, Mother, scolding, all the while cleaning up the messes and putting Grandpa to bed. And Grandpa, always kind, apologized each time and thanked her for all she did for him.

I think what we kids, grandkids and the first of the great-grandkids, remember most about Grandpa was how much we enjoyed being with him. He genuinely liked us and talked to us like human beings. He let us tag around behind him whatever he happened to be doing. And he did so much!  He was a great carpenter—When I was six, he had helped my dad put an addition on our house, the addition that brought us running water and the room that he would later occupy. He was a great gardener—When he came to live with us our garden expanded because he was able to do a share of the work. And he was a hunter—I’m not going to add the adjective “great” to that noun, not because he was or wasn’t great at hunting, but because I hated the fact that he hunted squirrels and rabbits in the woods behind our house and expected us to be happy to eat the meat with him. He even let us watch when he skinned the animals and hung the skins on the fence line.

He was a voracious reader. When he ran out of books, he started through the encyclopedias, finishing all of them and going back to re-read all the books in the house. Because of his reading, he always had interesting facts to tell. He also had great stories of his early life when he had gone out West to mine for a couple of years. When I was older, I realized that the move wasn’t such a good one—he had left a wife with two small daughters at home!

Eating with Grandpa, other than eating squirrel or rabbit, was something I always looked forward to. Each morning Grandpa and I shared the breakfast table. And we had the same food: hot chocolate, buttered toast, and oatmeal. Of course, he taught me to dunk the toast. Nothing tastes better than toast that has been soaked just enough to flavor it without it becoming soggy and falling in the hot chocolate, thus ruining both parts of the dunking. So, there we sat, eating our oatmeal and dunking our toast. I don’t think we talked much, if at all. Mother, who always prepared our food never joined us. She had eaten an hour earlier with my dad before she sent him off to his factory job with his lunch bucket full of a meat sandwich, an orange, and a hot thermos of coffee.

But now, with the phone call, the time had come that I would need to say goodbye to all that Grandpa had been in our home. I felt oddly detached. Having been away at college for more than three years and having spent the last summer on a mission trip, I had grown used to my life apart from my family. And Grandpa, they said, had been failing. In fact, he had been diagnosed with TB and had been put in a sanitorium in Fort Wayne, about 70 miles north of where we lived. All were hoping that he would recover sufficiently to come home. Instead, one day the family received the call that my grandfather had managed to slip from the home and wander to the edge of the property, where he was later found, a victim of hypothermia. Instead of recovering from TB, he had died of pneumonia. Why had he “escaped”? He wanted to walk home.

And so I missed a homecoming event, which would become just a “blip” on the large screen of my life. Instead, I had to say goodbye to the only grandpa I had ever known. A man, though with some faults and some failings like all other human beings, was a kind and gentle man that the family had loved. I went home and went to a funeral that I don’t even remember. But I do remember the cruelty of the day. The cold was biting as we walked to the burial plot and the snow, a cutting, icy mix, made all of us even more miserable than we had been. Grandpa, the lover of the great outdoors, should have had a sunny day to be laid to rest. Instead, we laid his cold body in the cold ground that would be covered by cold snow. Only our good memories warm us. I still love oatmeal—but not so much soaked buttered toast.

Note: I wrote this a few weeks ago for fun when I assigned this topic to my memoir writers.

I wonder if we would have bought that house if we had known we would leave it less than a year later. And what was our motivation? It wasn’t that we had had a child. Our townhouse was big enough for the three of us and our fairly large dog. It wasn’t that we both had full-time jobs and were flush with cash. Just the opposite was true. We had budgeted for the monthly payments and knew we could make the changeover from rent to mortgage because the difference was minimal, but we did not have the money for down payment, a down payment that had to be our own money, not a loan.

Our motivation? Was it because we didn’t want to raise our child in an apartment? Was it that we thought we were settled in Decatur, GA for a while longer while Paul finished his dissertation at Emory? Did we want a yard for our dog? Did we just get the so-called “bee in the bonnet”? Oh, our decision to buy probably had a bit of all of those ideas in the mix.

Nevertheless, by the time Jonathan, our child, was about 14 months old, we were moving into our brand-new ranch style house. Built in a new hilly subdivision, with about four to six designs, we were some of the first owners on our street, a street which was just being built-up on one side, not the other. Our house was green vertical wood siding with a panel of field stone next to the front door, which opened into a small hall with an immediate opening on the left into the tunnel-style kitchen and spilling into the great room straight beyond. In between, on the right-hand side was the hall that led to three bedrooms, two smaller ones on the right, the bath and master bedroom with half-bath on the left.  

Within no time, we had turned that house into our home—with nothing new in it—we just moved our townhouse furniture into the house. I scoured the fabric outlet stores to find fabric that I could make into drapes for the large deck door that opened to the back of the great room—no vertical blinds were included with the low-budget house. Then I found fabric to outline quilt a bedspread and drapes for the master bedroom. I have no idea what I did with the nursery and the study. Perhaps we just used what we had.

What I hadn’t planned for was Christmas. We had no money for anything for Christmas. Everything was budgeted somewhere else. I was so sad. I thought that Jonathan might be old enough to remember something of this Christmas, when he would be 16 months old. How could we have Christmas without a tree? At some point I became obsessed with having some kind of Christmas tree.

Most days of the week, I would bundle Jonathan into his umbrella stroller and the two of us would go out our front door, turn right and run up the hilly, curvy street till it dead ended into the trash heap of the construction site. Then we would turn around and race down the other side. Nothing had been cleared on that side of the road, so I could see all kinds of pine trees lining the hills.

My mind began to race with the stroller: I could cut down a pine tree for our Christmas tree. Now, obviously, I could not cut down a large tree; I wouldn’t have the strength to do that. But a small tree, perhaps I could manage that. Now, mind you, my obsession somehow blocked my mind from thinking about the fact that the tree would be on private property, especially since the owner was the construction company that would just clear most of the large trees and all the small trees when they began to divide up the land into house lots.

The next day, when Jonathan I went out for our run, I was armed with a saw. I cut short our right-hand side run and moved directly to the left side of the road, scouring the landscape for the perfect small tree. Where were all these dream trees? Perhaps I had dreamed them because all I could find were trees too large or too small, rather like Goldilocks trying the bears’ belongings. I looked and looked, finally finding a two-foot sapling that I knew I could easily cut down. But when I got close to it, I realized that one side of it was almost totally bare of branches—that just would not do. Finally, I spotted another two-footer, and cut down both of them.

Back home, after Jonathan had been fed and put down for a nap, I tackled the idea of two trees. By the end of two hours, I had lashed the two together to make a quite respectable mini-tree. I found a sturdy box, covered it with red Christmas wrapping paper, and set the tree made of two saplings on top of it. In no time at all, a string or two of lights and the best of our Christmas ornaments were hanging on the tree. At any other time, I would probably have been embarrassed to showcase such a sorry tree, but the determination of a new mother to have a tree for her only child overcame any embarrassment: that was the best tree ever.

Oh, there are other memories of that first house of ours, including hiding all of Jonathan’s pacifiers in a cookie jar on a second shelf in the kitchen cabinet and telling him he could have any pacifier he could find, knowing he couldn’t ever find them. And the Saturday night babysitter’s arrivals after Jonathan was already in bed so that we could go out on our Sunday paper route while he slept.  And the Chinese food take-out dinners shared with our near neighbors who also had a one-year-old son.

But none of those memories can top my memory of our first—and only—Christmas tree in that house. And it’s only a memory—I have no pictures to prove it ever existed. And Jonathan can’t remember it; he was still too young!

Basketball started early for me. My dad took me to my first game when I was five years old. More than likely, my mother wanted me out of the house, either because she was sick or because she was making a Christmas surprise. For whatever reason, I walked into the biggest room I had ever seen and looked across at the high bleacher seats on the other side. And that’s where we would go to watch the game—and my sister, who was a senior in high school and one of the three cheerleaders for Wayne High School, the country school that didn’t even have a gym. Wayne was playing in the big town of Union City, Ohio, right across the state line from Union City, Indiana, and both only about four miles from Wayne’s location. Everything was small—it was just that the country schools were smaller, and poorer, than the “city” schools.

I don’t remember anything about the game, but I doubt not that that night basketball got in my blood, where it would remain forever.  How could it not when I lived in the grand land of Hoosiers where basketball was legend. That first game I attended would have been in late 1952, the same year that the Milan High School team almost won the state tournament, a feat that they would accomplish the next year in the 1954 tournament. They were also an extremely small farm town school that ended up beating several large city schools to take the state tournament victory with a score of 32-30 over Muncie Central. An unheard-of outcome, it became the base story for the best-selling 1986 movie Hoosiers.

After my sister graduated from high school the next spring, my dad and I wouldn’t go to any more games together until my next older sister was in high school in the town school, which was then named Union City-Wayne, a consolidation. She joined the “cheer block,” a loosely formed club that wore costumes and that sat in a rectangular block of bleachers right behind the place where the cheerleaders, now up to five in number, stood between on-court cheers.

I don’t remember what the cheer block of my sister’s day wore for their costumes, but five years later, when I was old enough to join, we had red cotton straight shifts that had white fringe at the low waistline and a headband with one white feather in it. We looked like 20s flappers, but our team was named the “Indians.”

Being in the cheer block meant being at every home game, most away games, and every sectional tournament game. My dad and I traveled to every game together. By then, I knew the game well, and we could converse the whole way home about how the teams had played. The only times we didn’t talk about the games were the nights when we drove home in blinding blizzards, both of us leaning forward to try to see through the white knives of snow that were darting at us right through the windshield.

I don’t think I ever thought of how my knowledge of basketball as a game developed. I’m sure a little of it came from PE classes when we had our unit of half-court girls’ basketball play. Mostly, though, I obtained my knowledge through osmosis—it was in my blood, from the first step into the hallway where the aroma of hot buttered popcorn wafted into my lungs  to the last clap of my hands that were so red they matched my dress and matched the soreness of my throat that ached from screaming so loudly. And, of course, if we lost a big game to a team such as our main rival Winchester, the tears would flow freely—from cheerleaders, from the cheer block, and even from the players, behind the cover of their neck towels.

And then life happened, and basketball no longer made my blood boil—but it was simmering away in there somewhere.  I married a sports fan who participated in many sports—tennis, basketball, soft ball, bowling—and who watched everything on tv. Basketball became part of my life again.

My third son Geoffrey was born March 18, right at the beginning of NCAA tournament play. He was born on a Thursday, and we came home from the hospital on a Sunday. We watched games all day long.

The very next year, I stayed up late to watch the final game of the NCAA tournament. Because it was played in New Mexico, watching it on Eastern Time meant that it was a late night. All three of my little boys were in bed, as was my husband. When North Carolina State pulled off the upset and Coach Jim Valvano jumped on to the floor with arms spread as wide as an eagle’s wing-span, I jumped out of my chair, screamed in delight, and woke the whole household. Jonathan, who was just six, was frightened—it was the year of Atlanta’s disappearing children, when everyone was trying to keep their children safe. I had to show him that I was screaming for joy because of what was happening way across the country. Was that the night that basketball entered his blood?

When the boys and I moved to Nashville, I made sure that they all played sports—soccer, little league baseball, and basketball. But Geoffrey never played basketball—was that a recoil from having to be birthed during the NCAA tournament? When the boys were in high school, our church youth group helped with concessions at Vanderbilt’s basketball games. Moms and dads got to help. I loved it—we could sit and watch the games for free except for our work times at all the breaks.

And that was probably the beginning of Jonathan’s love affair with all Vandy sports. Even when I moved away from Nashville and he was still living there, I would go down at least once a season to watch a game with him. And just a few years ago, I drove from Illinois to Kentucky to join him to drive to Tennessee to see another Vandy basketball game. It’s in our blood!

And here I am, a 73-year-old woman with pancreatic cancer who still loves basketball when tournament time rolls around. This is the first day of the NCAA tournament, the first tournament for two years because of COVID-19. What am I doing? Watching a game, of course—it’s in my blood.

Works Consulted

“1983 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_NCAA_Division_I_Men%27s_Basketball_Tournament#Bracket

Goodpaster, Mike.  “Why the Movie Hoosiers was Nowhere Near as Good as the True Story of Milan 1954: It really wasn’t.” January 19, 2021.  https://thegruelingtruth.com/basketball/movie-hoosiers-nowhere-near-good-true-story-milan-1954/

“Thick Darkness.” Wait—have those words been in Exodus 20:21 all along and I’ve never heard them? Impossible. Yet, I didn’t remember them being there, so I looked up the reference in my NEB. Sure enough, the words are “dark cloud,” words that fit right in with vs. 18, which talks about thunder and lightning and smoke. Dark clouds accompany storms.

But “thick darkness where God was” (NIV and KJV and at least 13 other translations) connotes something well beyond a storm: it speaks to the mysterious, to the supernatural, to the other-ness of this God. He wasn’t in a storm that humans could comprehend; he was in a darkness, a thick darkness, a “total darkness” (CSV). The words make me think of having to go into an unfamiliar shuttered room in the middle of the night with no light to guide me. What do I do? I plant my feet slowly, holding my arms out straight in front of me with my hands ready to touch whatever may be to the front or side of me. I feel for objects that may give me a clue as to where I am and where I need to go. My sight is useless, usually my hearing is useless, so I must depend on touch.

Touch? Can we use the same sense to approach the “thick darkness where God was”? Is there something within the darkness that will give us clues as to the mystery that is God? We might look at Michelangelo’s painting “The Creation of Adam” as one interpretation. Painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it depicts God reaching out his finger to impart life to a fully-created Adam who is reaching out his finger to receive the life-giving touch. Of course, in the painting, there is no mystery about God: he is swathed in white robes and illumined with light, as is Adam.

Some have said that the figure of Adam, the creature, mirrors that of God, the creator. To some extent this is true. Both figures have reached out their index fingers for the coming touch of life. Their heads incline toward one another at the same angle, with eyes appearing to peer into the other’s eyes. Adam’s legs are in the same proximate positions as those of God. There, I think, is where the comparison ends. In the most important way, the figures foretell the constant nature of God toward humans and their inconstant response. God is straining with all his being toward Adam. His desire to give life is so strong that we can almost imagine an electrical impulse could jump the gap between his finger and Adam’s.

Contrary to the figure of God’s active energy reaching out, pulsing with life, is Adam’s reclining figure which lethargically lounges away from God. I’m sure that either an art critic or a theologian could take me to task on this, explaining more precisely the kind of mirroring that Michelangelo produced or the idea of Adam being an inert, thus lounging, being until the touch of God reaches him. Still, the overall effect of the direction of the body away from God speaks to the waywardness of humans who, from time immemorial, have been turning from God just as fast as He turns—and strains—toward them.

But God, the God who dwells in the “thick darkness” that is so incomprehensible and frightening to humans, found another way to reach out. He reached out by becoming one with the creature in the form of the man Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Nothing could be further from “thick darkness” than a human being who is just “one of us.” And, yet, Jesus wasn’t just “one of us” because he didn’t have that penchant for turning away from God, either in fear or rebellion. John 8:29 records Jesus’s words, “I always do what is acceptable to [God]” (NEB), John 14:31 records Jesus’s assertion, “I love the Father, and do exactly as he commands” (NEB), and, finally, three of the four gospels record versions of Jesus’s lines, “Not my will but thine be done” (NEB, Luke 22:42).

Beyond those words of how the human man Jesus reached out to, not recoiled from, the God of “thick darkness,” we have his striking declaration recorded in John 8:12: “I am the light of the world. No follower of mine shall wander in the dark; he shall have the light of life“ (NEB). “The light of life”: could that be something very like the breath of life or the touch of life? Jesus shows us, through his life as recorded in the gospels, that he is total light—the total light of God that we need to reach out to him, to strain toward him as he strains toward us. And how do we step from the “thick darkness” into the light? By imitating Christ. By listening to or reading others’ wise counsel about how to imitate Christ. By attending to the means of grace as given in the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Baptism.

Even then, when we are doing those things that bring light and life, we sometimes struggle with the darkness around us. We grow fearful; we grow rebellious because of those fears. Then, I think, we can walk confidently into that darkness, that “thick darkness” that is the mystery of God, knowing that, paradoxically, light, the light of Jesus, will be revealed in the center of the mystery.

Every day, I read the newspaper, even on Sunday. When I was growing up, Sunday papers, because of our conservative religious denomination, were off limits. But I shed that taboo long ago. Newspapers have always brought me great joy because they have articles about everything and the publishers don’t mind spending ink, paper, and time to put in lots of details.

In celebration of newspapers, I thought I would use this blog to give my readers a sampling of what I found in my Sunday paper, which happens to be The Chicago Tribune for February 28, 2021. There’s nothing scientific about my reading—I don’t read cover to cover. I skim till I find an article that really interests me and then I read some or all the details.

Our deep aquifers are running out of water! According to an article I found on page I, despite the torrential downpours we sometimes face here in the Midwest, the water cannot saturate through our tough shale to get down to the storage level of the aquifers; hence, the water, which has been drained for years to supply water to many towns and cities, is running out. The city of Joliet, which lies about 40 miles west of where I live, has just voted to get its water supply from Lake Michigan by 2030 because the deep-water aquifers are so nearly depleted that they will not be able to supply what is needed for that city. As a side note, the water now being drawn from those aquifers is up to 100 years old! (“With ground” pp 1, 8-9).

Page 3 of the news section had two interesting articles. One has to do with a downstate representative who attended the Jan 6 rally in Washington, with his truck sporting a “Three Percenters” sticker. I found out that the named organization is a militia group that rallies against “pandemic restrictions (“Dem county” p 3). The man accused is denying all knowledge of the group, saying the sticker was given to his son by a friend. Below that article was one on the ongoing saga of Father Pfleger, the 70-year-old activist priest who has recently been accused of sexual abuse when he was in seminary. A popular figure for justice and community reform, many want Father Pfleger returned to his role at St. Sabina’s church (“DCFS closes” p. 3).

I glanced at a few lead paragraphs of several other articles, but did not read much in depth until I got to the page called “Tribune Voices.” Three of my favorite writers were featured today. The first, John Kass, had written about city and state politics, discussing an alderman whom he has dubbed “Ald. Viagra.” It’s a long story and I don’t care to share it, just as I didn’t care to read all of it (“So who” p. 14). Instead, I skipped down to Heidi Stevens, whose regular column is “The Balancing Act.” Her headline, “Thanks to ‘love and support,’ Evanston business to stay open” caught my attention because she had just written on Thursday about this small family-owned business that had helped to feed the community during this pandemic and now didn’t have the funds to keep the doors open. Someone had started a GoFundMe page, which Stevens had highlighted, and the additional attention caused more community leaders to get involved. By Saturday, the family knew they could keep the restaurant open with the support of their community (“Thanks to” p. 14). The third feature was written by Mary Schmich, who recalled for her readers what last year, right before the pandemic was like. It was a great reminder, not only that we did have a “normal” life, once upon a time, but that we will have to work some more to get a normal life back (“From the last ‘normal’” p. 14).

“News Briefs” is a conglomeration of small tidbits of news from around the world. I rarely miss reading this column because it often has the odd piece of news that otherwise no one reports. Today, the lead article was on the possibility that the police officer killed in the Jan 6 riot at the Capitol had not died of injuries suffered from someone bashing his head with a fire extinguisher, but, instead, died of some lethal spray to his mouth, nose, and throat (“Feds reportedly” p. 23). The next tidbit was on Gov. Cuomo’s troubles with sexual harassment accusations, followed by one on Saudi Arabia’s claim of intercepting a missile, followed by one on the Myanmar Ambassador to the UN being fired by his government because he gave an “impassioned speech. . . pleading for international help in restoring democracy to his homeland” (“Myanmar fires” p. 23). Ah, but the next tidbit was about our own country and some death row inmates who may be spared because of a court decision that declared that crimes committed on tribal territories cannot be tried by regular state prosecutors (“Death row” p. 23).

What would the newspaper be without the weather? Tom Skillings, meteorologist at WGN, Channel 9, news and the Tribune, always fills more than half a page with all kinds of random facts about Chicago weather. Since we are close to Chicago, most of what he says applies to us as well. For example, today, Skillings reported that there has never been a month of March on record that did not have some measurement of snow. For all of us who are just waiting for spring to arrive, that bit of news is disheartening. It’s even more disheartening when he reports that March has seen more than 19 inches of snow in one March snowstorm (“Sunday bringing” p. 34).

I could go on. I read part of an article on an old Morton Salt warehouse being transformed into a music venue and glanced through the sports pages to see what the Cubs and White Sox are up to. Then on to the Travel section, where I read Rick Steves’ whole article on a round-about way to get to Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina by going through the Serbian countryside. Quite fascinating! (“Off the beaten” Sec. 6 p. 8). Next, I sampled an article in the A & E section that featured a portrait painter with spina bifida (“Reframing the story” Sec. 4 p. 1).

If you have made it this far into my blog, you are committed to reading the whole thing, no matter what, but you might be wondering what point I am trying to make. I’m not sure that I am trying to make one today. I do remember when I first start writing that I was thinking about the fact that I am still alive, and, as long as I am alive, I want to be interested in daily life, whatever that might mean. But at some point, I just began celebrating that fact that newspapers have so much interesting information that our 30-second sound bites and our screen-size articles can’t deliver.

So, perhaps a challenge? Buy a newspaper—and read it—you’ll know more about your world than you did before you read it.

Works Cited

Borrelli, Christopher. “Reframing the story.” Chicago Tribune, Sec 4, p. 1.

“Death row inmates may get reprieve.” “News Briefs,” Chicago Tribune, Sec 1 p. 23.

“Feds reportedly pinpoint suspect in officer’s death at riot.” “News Briefs,” Chicago Tribune, Sec 1 p. 23.

Gutowski, Christy. “DCFS closes investigation; Pfleger still not allowed back at St. Sabina.” Chicago Tribune, Sec 1 p. 3.

Greene, Morgan. “With groundwater low, trouble is running deep.” Chicago Tribune, Sec 1 p. 1.  

Kass, John. “So who brought the Viagra to Ald. Viagra?” Chicago Tribune, Sec 1, p. 14.

“Myanmar fires envoy.” “News Briefs,” Chicago Tribune, Sec 1 p. 23.

Pearson, Rick. “Dem county chairs seek probe of GOP rep.” Chicago Tribune, Sec 1 p. 3.

Schmich, Mary. “From the last ‘normal’ weekend: We’re not as smart as we think.” Chicago Tribune, Sec 1 p. 14.

Skillings, Tom. “Sunday bringing a sneak preview of spring.” Chicago Tribune, Sec 1 p. 34.

Stevens, Heidi. “Thanks to ‘love and support,’ Evanston business to stay open.” Chicago Tribune, Sec 1 p. 14.

Steves, Rick. “Off the beaten path in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Chicago Tribune, Sec 6 p. 8.

“I think I would like to get a real estate license. Wouldn’t it be fun to be able to see inside all these old homes?” I’ve said this more than once when Jim and I were out in our neighborhood walking the dog. The statement was made mostly in jest: I didn’t really want to sell houses; I just wanted some way see inside the 100-year-old houses that surrounded us.

If a house is empty, I’m always glad when the windows are uncovered so that I can see a little bit of the interior. Actually, I don’t care if the house is empty; I like all windows to be uncovered so I can see a little bit of those inside rooms, as long as the owners aren’t looking out at me, staring from the sidewalk.

Of course, since I don’t have a real estate license and since I am too risk-averse to make appointments to see houses that I have no interest in buying, I can’t view these houses that look so interesting from the outside. In normal times, my cravings to see interiors are alleviated by being invited to others’ homes, just as we have, on a regular basis, invited people into our home.

We’ve always enjoyed tramping up and down the steps in our house to show our guests every floor, basement through attic, with all the little quirks of the almost 100-year-old home. For example, we have a shiny silver-painted incinerator door that used to feed right into a furnace of some sort that led from the fireplace to the chimney. We’ve always joked that that’s where the dead bodies were consumed. We also have these terrible plastic tiles in the half-bath on the first floor and in the full bath on the second floor. Those were definitely NOT original tiles. In our master bedroom, we have an alcove with its own built-in chest of drawers. That alcove is almost as big as my 7 x 14 study. We still have two original light fixtures in the entry and in the foyer—both with brass fittings. The doors are all original—and “custom”-sized, with original brass or glass doorknobs. Unfortunately, we’ve not found any secret passages, moving bookshelves, or other kinds of “hide-y” holes, except for our three-floor laundry chute.

This is the second time I’ve confessed my voyeuristic tendencies—the first one was about “seeing” the interiors of all kinds of news commentators and consultants who are sitting in their homes rather than in newsrooms to give us their views on various and sundry topics. I doubt I will get over my interest in interiors, so if this pandemic ever ceases, please consider inviting me to see the quirks of your homes.

But, today, a Sunday, the first Sunday in Lent 2021, I thought of other interiors: the interiors of churches. As Jim and I sat in the safety of our home in front of our TV screen, viewing our church service being live-streamed, I thought, not for the first time, that “church,” or, more correctly, “worship” cannot be a spectator sport. It is an activity which takes our active attention, our active participation. Even if we are sitting in front of the screen, something must be happening within me if I am truly to be in “church” for this Sunday. I must be listening actively, interacting with the words of the music, with the words of the scripture, with the words of the minister.

And, then, for a moment, I thought of all the interiors of churches that I have been privileged to see—to see, as most would consider, as a spectator. I’m thinking of Salisbury Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Wesley’s Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral, all in England, and Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur, and Sainte Chapelle, all in Paris. I’ve been privileged to “see” the interiors of all of these beautiful sacred spaces more than once.

But the fact that they were sacred spaces made all the difference. It was not enough for me to see the beauty and the wonder of the interiors; I had also to seek a place of worship in those spots. These were not interiors to be admired; these were interiors that had long welcomed the pilgrim and the priest, the visitor and the member to seek the Lord. For me, that has always meant, at the very least, to find the candles that are waiting to be lit for the sake of the prayer I will utter. Most times it means finding the chapel or space set aside for the quiet seeker to engage in prayer, to engage in conversation with the Lord Almighty. Some of my most desperate prayers, my most wrenching prayers, have been those prayed within the walls of those quiet, sacred spaces.

Now, in this year of pandemic, most of us aren’t visiting any cathedrals in England or France. Most of us aren’t even finding our way to our own churches. But my rumination upon the sacred spaces reminds me that I don’t have to go anywhere other than where I am to engage in conversation with the Lord. The sacred comes to me and I can pour out those desperate, most wrenching prayers right where I am, knowing that the faithful, compassionate Christ, my advocate, is praying alongside me in the space made sacred by his presence.

Her name was Terri, spelled with an “i.” She was one of those rather neurasthenic young women: her fine, thin fingers moved rather quickly as they would push back her fine, thin blonde hair. She didn’t talk much, seeming to be too nervous to speak in a group in the classroom. In fact, she only seemed at ease when she was holding her boyfriend’s hand or arm; he was her security. And, usually, they were together, taking the same classes, eating together, hanging out in the hallway between classes—the typical high school seniors who think that their young love is everlasting.

I have no idea if their love was everlasting. I left the next year or so and heard no more of them. At the time, I remember thinking that Terri probably had much more going for her in many ways—but, she was held back by that timidity and nervousness. I wondered if she could find her strength and her identity without the boyfriend. He didn’t seem to need her in the same way she needed him—and that inequality in a relationship is never good, is it? I worried that at some point he would get tired of her clinging dependence and would want to be free to live as he wished. As I said, I have no idea what did happen to this young couple.

But I have a very specific reason for remembering Terri. Her long, thin fingers were not just nervous—they were creative. Terri was rather a throwback to the artistic hippies of two generations before—she was a creator of whimsical jewelry. I became the recipient of several sets of earrings and one necklace. As I said, the jewelry was rather whimsical, all small glass beads and brass and silver filigree wire. And the earrings were long. One pair was definitely of the type to be called “chandelier,” those which are long with lots of dangling beads or several loops of beads that get progressive larger as they hang farther from the ear lobe.

I finally re-gifted that pair because, at the time, I thought I would never wear such long earrings. But I did keep the other two pairs—one that is also long, but not increasingly large—they are just two loops of small black and burgundy red beads, wired in silver. It is amazing how often I wear these earrings—the colors are colors I often wear. The others are quite small—just four dark green glass beads, strung one beneath the other and held by silver beads. I also find that I wear the three-string necklace, made of red, amber, and rust beads, joined together by antique brass filigree—a necklace which makes any outfit sparkle.

So, I remember Terri, a nervous, shy young woman, who, nevertheless, could show her love and appreciation to me by the gifts she gave me. Totally unsolicited, she just showed up with these gifts every once in a while. I wonder if I wore those pieces of jewelry enough to let her know that I appreciated her effort? I don’t remember. I wish she could know how often I wear those pieces now and how often I think of this young woman, who would now be approaching middle-aged, and wish the best for her. She was a good student—and a good artist. I hope the years have been good to her. And I wish I had kept the chandelier earrings!

“I’m a modernist,” I say, “mostly American,” in one situation, and everyone knows exactly what I mean. I am a literary scholar who specializes in the historical/literary period of roughly 1912 to 1945 or a little after. If I’m in a different group of people, they might be puzzling over my moniker: “Why would she say she’s a modernist? She’s old, but not that old. Does she not fit our postmodern age within which we live?”

I would answer that second group: “I’ve always felt much more at home with the modernists, regardless of what country they come from, than with any other group of writers. I don’t know why, but I ‘get’ their angst, their sorrow, their confusion, their seeming lostness. And most of all I understand that they are always searching for a meaning. There’s a depth to their searching; they don’t seem to just pass off their angst and confusion into some kind of nothingness and meaninglessness—they really want to know what is going on, so they keep searching. As I always told my students, ‘The search for meaning becomes the meaning.’”

That concept, “the search for meaning becomes the meaning” has always resonated with me. After all, isn’t that how we navigate our lives? From one day to the next, aren’t we searching to understand, searching to find our moorings, searching for a center?

But even amongst the modernists, the way to search—and the way to find—took many divergent paths. Some, like Hemingway, found it in a kind of machismo that belied his underlying depression; some, like Fitzgerald, found it in a kind of hedonism which was fueled by alcoholism. Two who took very different paths, while using some similar words to write about their journeys were W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot.

Yeats, in one of his most anthologized poems, “The Second Coming,” published in 1919, begins with the words: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity. “

What a dismal picture! It is, of course, a picture of the world as Yeats saw it following World War I. Where was the center? Everything that had seemed solid and inviolate had fallen apart. Innocence was lost, drowned in a sea of blood. But worst of all, a sense of conviction, a sense of rightness and goodness in the world had disappeared, to be replaced by “passionate intensity”—but to what end?

There’s no denying that such a bleak attitude as Yeats’ fits the time period and many of the people in it. In fact, T. S. Eliot, early in his poetic career, would probably have concurred. In his poem “The Hollow Men,” published in 1925, also as a response to World War I and the changing culture after the war, Eliot includes these images, spread throughout several lines: “This is the dead land/This is cactus land/ Here are stone images/. . . The eyes are not here/There are no eyes here/In this valley of dying stars/In this hollow valley.” Later he says that the “star. . . Of death’s twilight kingdom/ [is]the hope only/Of empty men.” The dreariness, the lack of sight, the lack of direction, is only made worse by Eliot’s final assessment: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

That makes a person want to curl up and die. His “whimper may be worse” than Yeats’ directionless “intensity.” Oh, but something happens to Eliot that doesn’t happen to Yeats—he gets religion! In 1927 he converts to Anglicanism, and suddenly this man has a center.  In more than one place, but especially in his 1935 short drama Murder in the Cathedral, about the martyrdom of Thomas a Becket, Eliot writes about the “still point” at the center of the wheel. Instead of the center flying apart like the “widening gyre,” the center is held in stillness, or, as he puts it in another phrase, In fixity, where both “action is suffering/And suffering is action.” Motion in both, but held in tandem as fixed entities—a center. And, of course, the main character Thomas finds his still point, his center, as he realizes that he will be martyred, not for his own glory and not for posterity, but for the glory of God. He confesses, “I have had a tremor of bliss, a wink of heaven, a whisper/And I would no longer be denied; all things/Proceed to a joyful consummation.”

Perhaps it’s slight, but it is a difference—and such a difference! Towards the end of “The Second Coming,” Yeats creates a most disturbing haunting image: “A shape with lion body and the head of a man,/A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” is slowly moving through a desert, desert of twenty centuries making.  Yeats hands us “the second coming” with the words, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” Obviously, Yeats is thinking beyond the typical turn-of-the century-religious thought that Jesus would come a second time to save the earth. Here the “rough beast” will come to fulfill all the nightmares of a place where “things fall apart” and the “center cannot hold.”

On the other hand, Eliot in his 1927 poem that also features Bethlehem, gives us a much different take on the first coming of Christ to the earth. The poem “Journey of the Magi” follows the journey of the traditional wise men from their comfortable homes to the east through a very rugged journey following the guiding star. They suffer coldness, recalcitrant camels, disappearing camel drivers, and “cities hostile and . . . towns indifferent.” Finally, they come to a temperate valley, a valley which is filled with religious symbols—”three trees” stretching against the sky, a “white horse” galloping away, three men “dicing for pieces of silver,” and “feet kicking the empty wine skins.”

None of that, of course, is what these wise men were looking for. This old wise man, telling the tale, says that when they arrived, “not a moment too soon/Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.” And, of course, we readers are right there with the wise man, finding the place where the babe lay to be satisfactory to us as well.

But that is not the end of the poem—the wise men return home after paying homage to the babe. As he reflects on the experience, this wise man realizes, “I had seen birth and death.” He even says that “we had evidence and no doubt. . . . this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, out Death.” And he was never again “at ease here, in the old dispensation.”

At first, to most of us, we would write this off as depressing, just another modernist example of lostness and sorrow. Oh, but it is not. It is the experience of every Christian, is it not? That new center for us, represented by the birth—and death—of our Lord Jesus Christ, gives us a still point from which to grow, from which to find our own suffering in action and action in suffering—but it is not the shifting sands of Yeats’ slouching “rough beast.” We may not be at ease, just as the wise man was no longer at ease, but our dis-ease solidifies our center, not in the “old dispensation” of rules and laws, but the new dispensation of the love and peace that Christ gives to his followers.

Works Cited

Eliot, T. S. Murder in the Cathedral. Harcourt Brace, 1963.

Eliot, T. S. “The Hollow Men.” Selected Poems. Harcourt Brace, 1964.

Eliot, T. S. “Journey of the Magi.” Selected Poems. Harcourt Brace, 1964.

“The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Men

“The Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_of_the_Magi

“Murder in the Cathedral” by T. S.  Eliot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_Cathedral

“The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)

Note: I began to think about this psalm when it was part of the scripture reading for Sunday, January 17, 2021. I am reading from, quoting, and paraphrasing the New English Bible translation, 1970.

Vs 1-6: You know me; you know all. You know my thoughts; you know my whole “journey,” “my resting places,” and “all my paths.”

What a comfort these words bring. I don’t have to be anxious or afraid or embarrassed or shamed. The Lord knows all, including all of me. He knows all my thoughts, all my actions, all my motivations—even when I myself can barely discern them.

He knows everywhere I’ve been: my various homes, my relationships, my mission trips, my recreational travels—he knows all those journeys, all those places.

He knows the failures I have had, whether those be of my own making (usually) or those that have come my way by chance. He knows the struggles of my marriage that ended in divorce; the trials of raising three young sons mostly on my own, the worries of not knowing what jobs to take or how best to pay bills.

And this knowledge that God has is not an abstract omniscience, but a personal cognizance of my life. The Psalm says that the Lord God has “kept close guard before me and behind” and has “spread” his hand over me. So it wasn’t just that God knows all these things, but he has been “guarding” me in all of my life, for as long as my life has lasted. If I believe that God is, in essence, love, then I must believe that all of the guarding has been for my good, has been done in the name of love. Why, then, would I ever have to be anxious, afraid, embarrassed, or shamed?

Vs. 7-12: “Where can I escape? . . . Where can I flee?” The psalmist was not asking these questions in order to find a place beyond God’s reach. Why would he want to do so when he has said that God is guarding him? Instead, he is painting the picture of the expanse of God’s “spread” over him: it is everywhere. In fact, the psalmist says that God’s “right hand will hold him fast” wherever he may be.

I know that’s true for me, too. His hand is holding me fast, even in the middle of a cancer crisis. My personal interpretation of vs 11 and 12 is this: If I say that cancer “will steal over me” and a dark “night will close around me,” I will also say that, to God, cancer is not cancer and night is bright as day; to him “both dark and light are one.” I may not always be able to see the light ahead, but I know that God does, and he holds me in his hand.

Vs 13-18: You fashioned “my inward parts”. . . you “knit me together in my mother’s womb. . . . my body is no mystery to” you. You saw “my limbs unformed. . . [and] not one of them was late in growing.”

My body, knitted and fashioned together by God, may be a mystery to me, but not to God. He sees and knows all. I don’t understand why my own cells have gone rogue, dividing and growing out of control, but God knows. I can’t see why a poisonous concoction of chemicals can restore health to my body, even as it kills off cells, but God can see. I don’t know what the next step in this journey will be, but God will be with me in that step.

Vs 19-22: “How I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee!” Etc., etc. Why does the psalmist do this? I never understand this need to talk about enemies, either the Lord’s or the psalmist’s in the middle of a song that definitely has a different theme. Is the psalmist declaring his loyalty to God, a loyalty that can only be considered “puny” compared to the greatness and vastness that he has just declared belongs to the Lord? Is he, perhaps, warning himself that, in light of what he has just said about the attributes of God in caring for him so personally, he must not become an enemy, a rebellious one?

For whatever reason, the psalm does, indeed, include these words that we must consider. I do not want to become an enemy of the great One who has watched over me from the womb, the One who has seen me in all the places I have been, the One who has guarded me, the One who makes everything—even cancer—light in my life.

Vs.23-24: “Examine me. . . know my thoughts. . . test me. . . understand my misgivings. Watch” me so that I don’t go down a “path that grieves” you. . . and “guide me in the ancient [everlasting] ways.”

Yes, here’s the truth: with all of the understanding that the psalmist and I have about this loving God that not only creates but sustains us in our lives, we still have “misgivings.” Fortunately, because of what we know about this God, who is so mysterious and other, we do know that he knows. He can examine and test and understand and keep us. He can guide us in the everlasting ways—the dark and the light are all one to him—and the dark and the light can be one to us, too.

You’ve seen it, haven’t you? It’s the commercial where several men sit on a blue settee and talk about their wonderful hair now that they have used a particular product. I was halfway listening to this commercial the other night when I heard these words: “I have a great relationship with my hair!”

That certainly got my attention, because I have anything but a great relationship with my hair. In fact, my hair has all but abandoned my body in the wake of the chemo invasion. I can’t say that I blame my hair. I, too, sometimes feel like abandoning ship when this alien invader decides to have its way in all the cells of my body, regardless of whether those cells have done anything wrong. I am perfectly fine with the chemo attacking the rogue cells that want to take over (rather like being glad that officers tried to keep rogue rioters from ruining our capitol last week), but I would rather draw the line at the chemo attacking my hair follicles, my white blood cells, my skin cells, etc.

But what is a person to do? Cancer doesn’t give too many options to those of us who have inadvertently “invited” it into our bodies. Surgery, if we’re lucky; otherwise, the big guns of chemo are brought out to blast just about everything in our bodies to smithereens. I cannot say that I am enjoying the acquaintance I now have with chemo, but I can say that I understand the necessity of it and that I need to tolerate it as best I can in order to continue to live in this world.

Throughout this process of the last few months, I have turned to the phrase “simple acts of living.” For some reason, it just seemed like what I must do: live in simple acts daily. It has meant giving up some of my bigger plans on some days when a very simple act is all I can accomplish. Even my bigger plans aren’t big. They are the activities I used to take for granted—staying on my feet almost all day while cooking or cleaning or sorting or tossing (as in, getting rid of) or creating (as in, writing a blog).

The simple acts are much smaller. I take great delight in looking at the wintery, watery sunlight that slants through my blinds into my bedroom in the morning. I enjoy the routine of showering, dressing, putting on makeup, smoothing my thin hair, even if the routine takes me the greater portion of an hour because I am resting between parts of it. I love being strong enough to walk with Jim through two or three neighborhood blocks. We always seem to spot something that we had missed before. Sometimes we are lucky enough to see the black and white cat who lives down the block but who likes to visit our alley way.

Making a batch of cookies or feeling well enough to put together two dishes towards a meal is a joy that I didn’t realize was a joy. Putting two or three pieces in whatever current puzzle we have going brings a satisfaction of semi-completion. Snuggling under the heated throw brings warmth and comfort when my body is weary and cold. Watching a Hallmark movie with its predictable beginning, middle, and end brings me the sense of accomplishment that I have spent two hours on something that is at least not toxic.

Other simple acts are even less definable: the streak of orange in the sky that I often spy outside my study window when I am in my book group on a Wednesday afternoon; the train whistle as it blows through our town just six blocks away; the geese that honk in large numbers on some of the warmer, sunnier winter days; the snow as it drifts down so daintily onto the grass; the glitter of the few remaining Christmas reminders we have left in our rooms; the photos of family members that adorn the bookcase, few of them new, but all of them bringing a smile just to see the dear faces again, even if they have changed drastically since the time of the photo; the cards and notes that so many people have sent to me and that bring me the encouragement I need for the day.

I have always been task-oriented. I am not a person who likes to sit and do nothing but watch TV. I can manage to sit and read books—but only if the homely tasks have already been completed. To find that now my enjoyment, my pleasure, my real joy must come in the simple acts of living day to day is a revelation and an abrupt change from the habits of many years. Yet, now I can see that these simple pleasures, these simple joys, have been begging to be noticed all along. I’m glad I finally recognized them. If you are like me, I hope that you can get beyond your tasks to the simple acts of living.

Oh, did I mention our black squirrel? He brings me pleasure every day that I see him scurrying around our yard. I do worry about him—he doesn’t seem to have any companions. But he likes hanging around in our trees and eating whatever crumbs we put out for him. Perhaps he likes the simple acts of living, too.