“We were all aware that there was a disaster brewing, or already afoot, but I hoped it would ask no more of the restaurant than any disaster does: simply that we stay open, tough it out, feed people, and let them feel normal for at least the duration of a meal.”
The fence at the back of our yard in Virginia had been pulled at for years by honeysuckle, and a gap had opened at one corner, so when we got bored with keeping track of the ghost runners in our backyard baseball game we would slip through the fence into the woods behind, which seemed, at the time, limitless, dangerous, and entirely ours.
Clear night, thumb-top of moon, a back-lit sky.
Moon-fingers lay down their same routine
On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.
Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.
I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and picked clean.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
And the wind says “What?” to me.
And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me.
And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.
And the gears notch and the engines wheel.
Lent arrives with a familiar feeling of obligation, a feeling that tugs at me though I have no reason to acknowledge or honor it. If I have ever believed, it hasn’t been for a long time.
The word “Lent” is so simple, and I associate it so entirely with deprivation, abstinence, spiritual cleansing, that it hadn’t occurred to me until today to wonder where it came from. It’s a word that has come to seem almost onomatopoeic—an illusion generated perhaps by its rhyme with “repent,” or because it is such a gentle, fluttering, plaintive word, a tongue to the teeth, a wet leaf flicked by the wind. It seems a word designed for the use we give it now.
But “Lent” comes from an old English word for spring. It’s simply a designation of a season. Associating Lent with fasting, with Christ’s season in the wilderness, must grow out of an historical necessity. After the long winter, the storehouses are nearly empty but the ground is still too cold to replenish them. Spring—Lent—is a season of starvation, ironically butting up against the season of abundance and rebirth. Making a spiritual discipline of it is making a virtue of necessity.
New York is the first place I learned to understand how spring could be cruel. In the south, spring comes on fast and easy. Here it approaches and recedes, torturing the weather, tempting you to plant seeds, then crippling your sprouts with late frost. It’s also the first place I’ve lived where I saw regular people walking around on Ash Wednesday with ashy crosses on their foreheads. It came as a surprise to me, who’d grown up in the Christian south thinking of New York City as a wildlife preserve for pagans and atheists, to see this public demonstration of piety on the subway platforms. Perhaps the austerity of Lent is easier to embrace in a place like this, where spring isn’t a riot of flowers and sweet peas.
I’ve made symbolic (and secular) sacrifices for Lent in the past–I’ve given up meat, sugar, alcohol, sleep. This year I plan not to give something up but to meditate on something I lost long ago, think about a hunger I already feel.
I dreamed I was reading a new book by a widely-admired writer, and the passage I read was truly beautiful, and it made me understand why everyone loved him. But I was also a little discouraged, a little envious knowing that something as beautiful as that could never spring from my head.
I recently felt I may never make another book. When I tell my friends that, they say: “You’re crazy. You’ve got many more books in you.” But I’m not talking about my ability to make or edit a picture or create a sequence. I’m talking about the way grace works in the world. Things are given to you, and I don’t know if I’m going to be given something like that again.
My children saw something gleaming in the ditch and stopped to investigate. “Marbles!” The younger one bent down to look closer. “There are lots of them!” They were many colors but when they started picking them up it turned out they were not marbles but flat-backed fake “gems,” the kind you’d buy at a craft store or an aquarium supply.
And sure enough, among the gems were pebbles of safety glass, silicone caulk, black plastic stripping. Knowing our neighbors it was not hard to imagine the scene that had led to this: a child crossing an adult, an ultimatum that seemed, to the child, too wild to be real. A moment of testing, an eruption of rage, the fish tank’s bubbling filter dropping to the floor and wheezing like it was itself a beached fish as the adult carried the sloshing tank in his bare arms through the living room, through the door he kicked open in one blow, green scummy water splashing his shirt, reeking, fueling his anger, not stopping even to look for traffic, not that there ever was any, then the whole thing dropped to the road with a sodden crash, the man cursing and leaping back as the water splashed over his feet. The door slamming again, just audible over the bellowing of the man whose anger was inflamed and not assuaged by the punishment he’d devised and carried out, the weeping of the children and the pleading of the mother all swirling together to a crest of misery.
My children didn’t see any of the tank parts, they were so focused on the gems. They picked them out of mud and from under clots of leaves like it was Easter morning. “We can make decorations for your party” said the older one. “We can wash them off and glue them to boards. They’ll be so shiny.”