Which is a song by Morrisey or The Smiths, a Brit Indie punk song from the 1980s, one of those lines that comes into your head first thing in the morning and it blows around in there all day long.
The dogs are fine, the garden is recovering, It is hot and windy and I can run around the house barefoot singing Indie punk with my wet hair falling on my shoulders and nobody to tell me to act my age.
Take me out tonight
Because I want to see people and I
Want to see life
Driving in your car
Oh, please don’t drop me home
Because it’s not my home, it’s their
Home, and I’m welcome no more
The light shining through everything, every day sacraments celebrated, the small good things we remember as human communion and mystery:
Plain rolls and coffee, warm chicken soup, and oatmeal on the stove top: these are the sorts of recipes for communion that astound me. It is the sort of recipe found in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. A lifetime of wafers and wine at the altar, but what does the dying Reverend John Ames recall for his young son as the holiest of meals? Remembering the day he went with his father to assist with the demolition of a church struck by lightening, Ames says that “my father brought me a piece of biscuit for my lunch, and I crawled out and knelt with him there, in the rain. I remember it as if he broke the bread and put a bit of it in my mouth.”.
And as I play with my dogs like a barefoot dishevelled Artemis, I say prayers for a much-loved friend in hospital and not getting better. Her family all around, her little spirit fighting so bravely. All the old grievances and petty grudges forgotten, as is always the case. Her son and daughter no longer squabbling but holding hands as they sit with her, wanting to her to get better, to stay here a while longer.
“The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother. It has been the greatest salve to my sorrow. The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. I’d give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn’t have otherwise seen. It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.” — Cheryl Strayed from Dear Sugar in the Rumpus,
I’m a huge Smiths fan.
Act your age? What, like 15-billion-plus years?
I guess I could do that.
Love,
T in J
You’re right Terri, that ancient self grinning away down the aeons –
I’m appalled (saddened? confused?) by the people I meet who carry such bad feelings and hatred towards their mother. I believe when we reach approx age 50, we should have lived enough to let go of those feelings. Or at least resolve ourselves to our childhood. I don’t know–it’s a shame to carry those feelings, sometimes to our mother’s death. At some point in life we must realize that much of happens to us is no ones “fault”.
Yes, Lou, I’m a great believer in the ‘no fault’ understandings but also in letting go, forgiving, moving on. That frozen stuckness is so damaging for the one who lives with it.
It’s funny, I never really thought about my mother being proud of me. I suppose she would be. I lost her such a long time ago.
She would be so proud of you — and it is sad that she was not able to stay with you for longer.
I know that my mother and father were proud of me. They were glad to see me be grown and accomplishing something with my career and life. They loved my wife and didn’t know that she was alcoholic. I’m grateful for that. I made amends to my parents after they died by writing them a letter. And in the smoke that rose from the letter in that graveyard, it felt as if my resentments were carried away.
Syd, that kind of ritual is so healing and so much of a closure – writing letters even to the dead we have lost can be cathartic.
Yes, the burning of the letters was cathartic. And as the smoke wrapped around and covered me, it was a stunning thing to feel that I understood my parents and loved them even more than before. I still miss them every day.
ML, thank you for this lovely post, and especially for Cep’s article in the Paris Review. I loved the ending:
“Grace may be the gift of the sacraments, but mindfulness is the gift produced by the writer’s rituals. Christians believe that baptism and communion were created and are sustained by God, rituals set apart in order to illuminate every bath and every meal. The parallel for writers like Woolf, Proust, Robinson, Salinger, and Carver is that their rendering of particular and perfect meals illuminates the potential for communion: readers are brought to the belief that one character or one story can show forth the splendor of all characters and all stories.”
The universe in a drop of water.
Thanks Susan, I hope some readers do click on the links I give because there was so much more in that article and I was tempted to quote that final paragraph as well.