On God Avoidance and Other Activities in the Garden

So already, the other night as I was getting ready for bed, I realized I had no interest in reading other people's stories, fictional or not. That surprised me, because the week before I'd finished reading Daniel Mason's North Woods, which I loved--so much so that I'd gone to the library a couple of days later to borrow an earlier Mason book. And two weeks before that, I'd finished reading Omo Moses' The White Peril: A Family Memoir, which I also loved, so much so that I blogged about in February.

It's my habit to read a little before I go to sleep, and I wanted to take in some words, but not the kinds of words I'd been taking in during the weeks before. As I climbed into bed wondering, "What words, what words?" I realized I hadn't given God much thought or attention in the last few months. 

Why that thought at that moment? Probably for three reasons.

 

The first was that a couple of days earlier, I'd recalled how last fall, after my mother died, I'd gone to synagogue a couple of times and felt very disconnected spiritually. Despite the kindness of so many in my congregation, I knew I was not connecting with God through the services' formulaic prayer and familiar language, nor did I feel like making the effort to do so. My feelings were in no way a criticism of God, my fellow congregants, or liturgical prayer; they were simply an expression of my orbiting in this strange new mother-less galaxy.*

The second was that twice quite recently, God had entered my mind. But He'd stayed there only briefly, as if in passing.

 

The first time was while I was walking--something I hadn't done much recently because of February's stubborn ice, low temperatures, and gusty winds. As if to say "enough" to winter's persistent harshness, I headed out to my usual salt marsh on the last day of February when the potentially lethal ice had finally vanished from the trails. Being there reminded me that Donald Trump and Elon Musk don't have dominion over everything--certainly not over the salt marsh and the ducks' seasonal rhythms.

 

The second time was while I was reading Peter Beinart's Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. The book explores the assumptions and priorities of various Jewish individuals and groups as Beinart understands them politically, culturally, and historically; offers his opinions about their practical and moral costs and benefits; and asserts that a consideration of Jewish values and teachings can and must guide Israel's way forward. In particular, I appreciated his discussion of Jewish chosen-ness, which is all about relationship to God and the obligations associated with that, and its implications for the future of Israelis, Palestinians, and American Jews.

 

The other night as I sat in my room, I found myself missing having some kind of an ongoing connection to God. But I also still wondered what part of my "what words, what words" conundrum was a response to Donald Trump's degrading treatment of Volodymir Zelenskyy  in the White House on a recent Friday, and what part of it was the latest expression of my experience of the loss of my mother--which is more akin to emptiness and disorientation than to sadness. 

 

Next to my bed was a book of daily meditations called Healing After Loss, a gift of a good friend, that I hadn't been reading regularly--only because I was feeling more weird than bereft. But seeing it there did remind me that I had a couple of other books written by rabbis that offered daily meditations, or short enough "chapters" to lend themselves to bedtime reflection. So I pulled out both Floating Takes Faith: Ancient Wisdom for a Modern World by Rabbi David Wolpe and Restful Reflections: Nighttime Inspiration to Calm the Soul, Based on Jewish Wisdom, written and edited by Rabbis Kerry M. Olitzky and Lori Forman. 

 

I read the first entry in the former and the March 3 entry in the latter. Remarkably, they both spoke to me, tempering my profound sense of puzzling absence.

The March 3 meditation in Restful Reflections, entitled "The Voice of God Has Never Stopped," talks about the Shema, translated as "Hear, O Israel"--the prayer that's known by heart in both Hebrew and English by virtually every American Jewish person, regardless of how they feel about being Jewish and how observant they are. The meditation's author, Rabbi Levi Meier, explains,

The 'Hear, O Israel' is a statement of faith, love and commitment to listen to God's voice. And to live that belief means bringing oneness and wholeness into the world. It means bringing people together, bringing unity and peace into the lives we touch. (51)**

For the last months, I've been wondering why I do what I do--literally, why I fill my hours with what I fill them with. Rabbi Meier reminded me that lots of what I routinely do, whether I'm an organizer or simply a member of the group, brings people together to do something meaningful and even pleasurable together. If that "meaningful" has peaceful aspects, my glass is half full, despite my nagging sense of absence.

 

A paragraph later, Rabbi Meier reassures that if one opens one's ear and heart sufficiently, "then the voice of God will enter your mind and your heart, and your actions will testify to the fact that God dwells here, now, in your room." Those words spoke directly to the possibility of lessening the distance between God and me, put there by me: what could be more distance-diminishing than having God come into my own room? It was as if I'd pressed "pause" on my personal spiritual CD player in late October, but the music had kept playing in the cosmos, ready always for me to press the button that would make the divine music "resume."

Next, I turned my attention to Floating Takes Faith. Actually I'd met Rabbi Wolpe once when he'd attended Shabbat services at my synagogue several weeks after October 7, 2023; he was the rabbi who had resigned from Harvard's antisemitism task force because he felt the group lacked a sense of urgency about the work it was doing. His column entitled "The First Question"--for some time, he'd published a column regularly in The Jewish Week--dealt with the first question God asks in the Hebrew Bible--to Adam, in the Garden of Eden, in Genesis 3.

"'Where are you?'" God asks, no doubt knowing that Adam is in the Garden of Eden--where else could he be? That was the part of the story I remembered. What I didn't remember was Adam's answer. As Wolpe explains, "Instead, it is a question of spiritual geography. Adam, understanding the import of God's question, answers that he was frightened, so he has been hiding."***

"Spiritual geography" immediately spoke to me since I've long been fascinated with inner landscapes. But Wolpe's reminder that Adam was hiding out of fear practically took my breath away. Just the week before, during my voice lesson, during a part of a Fauré song **** when I should have been singing out a beautiful ascending line, my voice teacher had said to me, "You sound like you're hiding."

I told her I probably was. My sisters had always hated my singing, so I had always felt I needed to conceal it around the house--and right now, I was singing in the house, my house. So my habit pulling back when I ought to be letting it rip was a well-established one. It won't surprise you to know that part of what I'm learning to do in my voice lessons is to let it rip--at least within the bounds of good vocal practice.

 

Letting it rip musically depends on a number of vocal factors, and one of them is having enough air, enough breath--and I often count on the experience of breathing deeply--whether I do so intentionally or suddenly realize I am doing it--to tell me that God is with me, or that there's the chance that God is with me.  

 

Wolpe's column comments, after talking specifically about Adam, that "Where are you"

. . . is not only the first question: it is also the eternal question. At each moment in our lives, this question is addressed to us: Where are you? Where are you spiritually? Where are you morally? What have you done with life, and what are you doing with it now? Are you proud of your conduct in the garden?"

Frankly, I don't want to deal with the question of what I'm proud of or not. I think there are any number of things I could be proud of, but an emphasis on being proud of how morally or ethically good I'm being (or striving to be) would too easily foreground judgment, put and keep myself at the center, and apply constant pressure.

 

But I like the other questions well enough, and I'd like to think more deliberately about what I'd like to do with my life going forward, should I be lucky enough to remain of sound mind and body. For sure I'd like to listen and hear. And I'd also like to get really comfortable with letting it rip, vocally and otherwise: the idea of not hiding out of fear appeals on every level.

So here I am, standing in the Garden. Except right now, for me, it looks a whole lot like my dining room, where I've been sitting for the length of this Sunday afternoon alternating between writing this blog and listening--to Ned Rorem songs (The Prince Consort's On an Echoing Road CD is beyond beautiful), to Paul Moravec songs (specifically to Jennifer Cano singing "A New America"--magnificent), to Gabriel Fauré songs. I am sure God is in these songs, and therefore He is in my dining room. Maybe it's the beginning of something--like less avoidance, or the renewal of something, or something altogether new. Time will tell.

* Screen Shot of Oort Cloud Formation Metal Print by Science Photo Library: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/oort-cloud-formation-claus-lunau.html?product=metal-print

** Olitzky, K.M. & Forman, L. (2001). Restful reflections: Nighttime inspirartion to calm the soul, based on Jewish wisdom. JEWISH LIGHTS Publishing.

*** Wolpe, D. (2004). Floating takes faith: Ancient wisdom for a modern world. Behrmann House, Inc.

**** Screen shot of "The Effect of Moonlight "(also known as "St. Valery Canal"), a painting by Eugène-Louis Boudin (1891), in the following blog: JDB. (2017, March 20). Clair de Lune redux. Wordpress. https://augenblickblog.com/2017/03/20/clair-de-lune-redux/

A Read for Our Times: Omo Moses' The White Peril

So already, late last Saturday afternoon when I turned on my television and began channel-surfing, I happened upon the Freedom Summer episode of Eyes on the Prize. I'd seen it before, but I kept watching because I had recently finished reading Omo Moses' The White Peril: A Family Memoir. The book quotes Bob Moses, Omo's father, at length, and I was definitely feeling immersed in Bob Moses' philosophy of change, his metaphors for empowered and empowering activists, and his ideas about leading and organizing.

That Bob Moses* was the first person I saw when I came upon that episode had clinched my decision to watch it: I wanted to hear the voice of the man who wasn't yet Omo's father, whose ideas about supporting groups to self-determine as Americans, to organize, to insist, and to persist are alive and well.

I first met Omo when he was a teenager in an English language arts class I taught at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. In January, as the release date for his book drew near, I marveled at its timeliness--one day after Donald Trump's inauguration. Since then, Trump has been confirming that we stand at another moment in our country's history requiring "we the people" to act for the sake of freedom and justice for all. Members of Omo's family have long known how to do this.

And at the same time, despite its place in American history, the nuclear family of Omo's formative years was also "just a family"--in his case, composed of four children and their two parents who were intent on raising them to thrive and realize their dreams in a world too often structured and inclined to obstruct their paths. 

The White Peril  captures Omo's experience of navigating the relationship between the public-political and private-familial aspects of his formative years. Presenting his journey from childhood to young adulthood, it offers the beginning chapters of the story of how Omo came to carve out his place in and in relationship to his family's public legacy as it continues in the present moment.**

The extended Moses family in front of a mural featuring Bob and Janet; Omo and his kids are on far left.

 

Consequently, The White Peril can be accurately described as a personal and political coming-of-age story. But it's not a conventional linear one representing just one life journey. It's multi-generic, multi-generational, multi-voiced, and multi-faceted, weaving together others' stories with Omo's own--as its subtitle, A Family Memoir implies. Essentially, it offers a mosaic of defining events, life-shaping ideas, and influential people that float in the non-chronological narrative of Omo's first decades.

 

It can be described accurately in other ways, too. It's a migration story: Omo and his family move from Tanzania to New York City to Cambridge. It's an exploration of masculinity and being male, especially as relates to black males growing from boyhood to manhood in the city. It's a portrait of a "progressive" city and its broken and kept promises over time. It's the story of the birth and first steps of a new youth-lifting educational initiative. 

 

It's also a tribute to rock-solid familial love in all its complexity. It's an exploration of what it's like to live not only with one's own vivid memories of stories lived and heard, but with other people's vivid memories of them--and the hopes and expectations that often accompany them. It's a tribute to ancestors whose voices and wisdom are not only presented in this book, but meditated upon, internalized for present and future reference (not to be confused with swallowed whole), and, above all, appreciated for their contributions to the spiritual, communal, and deeply considered intellectual place in which Omo's life is firmly rooted--and from which it draws so much strength and inspiration.***

So how does this book hold together, given its many facets? I believe the answer lies in Omo's own writing, so often poetic and dramatic, even when its aim is simply to lay out the contexts that surround particular events and situations that Omo recalls and recounts so vividly. Omo's capacity to create mood, character, and place through the physical details he chooses to share, the diction and imagery he uses to render them, and the metaphors he creates and sometimes repeats makes the world of his youth physically and emotionally immediate.

Take for example, his description of his family's trip from Tanzania to America: the almost staccato presentation of the political/historical context in which it occurred--certainly what Omo learned much later--is followed by his account of the nearly endless trip itself, as experienced by his four-year-old self.

    We were torn from the road. From the red dirt**** that stretched to the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, transplanted onto America's glacial concrete.

    We would learn that our home in Same, like most of the homes of African American expatriates in Tanzania, had been searched by soldiers and police. That it had been reported that blacks from America had arrived by boat with guns and were headed to President Nyerere's village in the build-up to the Pan-African Conference to be held in Dar es Salaam in 1974.

    We would learn that in 1975 President Jimmy Carter was offering amnesty to the citizens who had refused to fight in the Vietnam War.

    We would learn that we'd been denied Tanzanian citizenship, that the political climate had shifted, that we couldn't become Tanzania's children.

    'We're going to visit Bibi,' Mama said.

    It was 1976. We were six, four, and two, and Malaika was getting ripe in Mama's belly, when the plane left the surface of the earth, its wheels folding into its guts. The engines roared like a pride of lions. We took off down the runway like a tortoise at first, and then a cheetah and then an albatross, wings abruptly rejecting gravity. Taking off felt like the car trips we'd made to the Indian Ocean, five, six, or seven of us in a vehicle yo-yoing on dirt and rocks until we reached the paved road, black and smooth. And then the plane was floating. On our way to forty thousand feet like on our way to the beach, . . .. We treated the plane like the road. Inspected the arms of each chair as if a bush or an anthill, ran up and down the aisle unaware that an umbilical cord had been severed, that we were being delivered to the other side of the planet.

    We landed in Nairobi and took off again.

    We landed in Paris and took off again. Remained between the surface of the earth and the sun and the moon for twenty hours. 

    We landed in the South Bronx, unaware that we had reached the shores of hip-hop. (35-36)*****

The very first sentence telegraphs that this move to America will be traumatic, even though the next sentences convey the excitement of the multiple plane rides, the pleasure with which the first plane ride recalls the movement of various animals, and the ease with which the children transfer their exploratory skills from the road in Tanzania to the airplane's aisles. In the last sentence, the language of landing shifts to mean "finally ended up." Africa is destined for memory, and the safety of the "we" whose experience is reported in this series of paragraphs that begin with "we," many only one sentence long, cannot erase or protect against the pain of the loss soon to be comprehended by Omo and his older sister. 

I particularly like Omo's evocation much later in the book of time spent with an influential friend after days spent working with students at the Brinkley Middle School in Mississippi.

     I spend evenings on Mr. Figgers's porch, just talking about things. I enjoy listening to how his words run a marathon around a point, stuff time with his hopes and provocations. I enjoy time passing, with no apparent destination, along the tenor of his voice. If there are fireflies, I enjoy witnessing the call and response. (201)

Again, the reader encounters the sensuous, imaginative quality of Omo's writing, a direct reflection of his strong response to the actual places and moments in which he finds himself. In this case, it's the slow moment--always suitable for deep listening and deep thinking. In Omo's imagination, words can run marathons, and time is a hollowed sacred space capable of being filled not only with hopes, but with unanswered questions and speculations deserving further consideration during future evenings on the porch. The fireflies******, if present, contribute to the warm night's natural rhythms, recapitulated by the repetitions of "I enjoy."

 

It was in a similar spirit of unrushed listening that I read The White Peril's many excerpts from interviews, sermons, and books that are also an important part of the book. For those who want to read only the action parts of Omo's own journey from childhood to manhood, these excerpts might seem like an intrusion, but to know Omo is to know that he is and always has been a quiet observer, absorber, listener, and thinker. By providing these other voices, he shares those viewpoints and personalities that were critical to his development "back then" and "since then." The White Peril is a family memoir, and Omo does family--nuclear, extended, and writ beyond DNA--the courtesy of letting them speak for themselves.

 

There's a lot of water in The White Peril--next to the beach in Tanzania where Omo and his siblings play, in the Harvard swimming pool where they swim and compete, beneath the frozen surface******* of the Charles River that Omo 's mother cautions him and his brother not to trust, in the ocean and waves to which his father compares the civil rights movement and those active in it. 

 

At a moment when many of us feel like we might drown in our country's deliberately churned-up rough seas, this book reminds us we can swim if we swim together. Simultaneously, it tells the moving story of a young man growing up with dreams that he adjusts over time in response to new realities and understandings. Fortunately, those dreams are good for other people, too, especially young people. I highly recommend The White Peril.

* Images screen-shot from PBS website. https://www.pbs.org/video/eyes-on-the-prize-mississippi-is-this-america-freedom-summer/

** Screenshot of photo by Nick Surette/Central Square BID accompanying Levy, M. (2021, July 25). Bob Moses, educator and icon of civil rights, 86; he inspired generations to both learn and lead. https://www.cambridgeday.com/2021/07/25/bob-moses-educator-and-icon-of-civil-rights-86-he-inspired-generations-to-both-learn-and-lead/

*** The title of Omo's book is proof of the Omo's strong connection to the ancestors: Omo's great-grandfather's book has the same title.

**** Screen shot of photo on Flickr by Anna & Jorge--C@jig@ https://www.flickr.com/photos/spartan_puma/781637442/in/photostream/lightbox/

***** Moses, O. (2025). The white peril: A family memoir. Beacon Press.

*(6) Screenshot of photo posted on the following: Mississippi Firefly Tours. (2023, May 20). Photo credit: Louisa Simmons. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=212214484891558&set=pb.100083090241019.-2207520000

*(7) Screenshot of photo on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1i64pld/people_walking_on_frozen_charles_river_again/#lightbox

Reading Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These at Christmastime

So already, one mid-December afternoon when I was driving home just before dusk, I happened to tune my car radio to a public radio interview with Claire Keegan, the author of Small Things Like These. 

 

I had just passed the convent that had long been the Jamaica Plain home of the Poor Clare Nuns, and I was now headed onto the Arborway.* Ahead of me lay a sea of brake lights that far outnumbered the just-coming-on Christmas lights of the houses to my left that, perched high on the hill opposite the Arnold Arboretum, easily peered into it, especially when most of the trees were bare.

 

The interview was fascinating for two reasons. The first was how determined the interviewer was to treat Keegan's novella first and foremost as an exposé of the dehumanizing horrors associated with Ireland's notorious Catholic-Church-run Magdalen Laundries. 

 

The second was how deftly, kindly, but firmly Keegan kept asserting her personal greater interest in the inner life and related actions of the novel's main character, Bill Furlong.*** As Keegan patiently explained, "But for me, it isn't a book about the laundries. For me, it's a book about a coal man who doesn't know who his father is because his mother [gave birth to him] out of wedlock. And I think it's more to do with hope and courage … I didn't want to write a story of cruelty and incarceration."** 

 

I felt like I was listening to a tug of war that the interviewer wasn't even aware was raging, so accustomed was she to assigning significance to works of literature on the basis of the degree to which social justice was their mission.

But having heard Keegan articulate what mattered to her about the novel, I knew immediately I wanted to read it. So I bought it for my husband Scott as a Christmas present, and even warned him I might read it before I wrapped it up to surprise him with it.

 

Finally, the Saturday after Christmas, I spent a perfect afternoon reading Keegan's book--perfect because of how beautiful and engrossing it was, just as its various reviewers have claimed. In fact, so drawn into it was I that the minute I finished it, I promised myself to read it again the next day. And I did.

 

Almost as soon as I'd finished relishing that second reading, my thoughts turned to that other great Irish novella set in the Christmas season--James Joyce's "The Dead." Henceforth in my mind, I knew, the twelve days of Christmas would be book-ended by these two beautiful works, each centered on a male character who is well-regarded, ill at ease, and especially ill at ease on a Christmas season evening when certain customary feelings and behaviors are expected of him.

 

Keegan's story takes place on a Christmas Eve that becomes atypical when the events of the day lead Bill Furlong to do something out of the ordinary and potentially momentous. Joyce's tale takes place at and after the annual Epiphany dinner party at which Gabriel Conroy always plays an important ceremonial role. Something important has changed at the end of both stories for both of these characters, though what will happen next is unknown.

 

As a Jewish person, I don't celebrate Christmas, but, having taught "The Dead" and T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" to high school juniors and seniors so many times, I still think of it as a twelve-day holiday that culminates on January 6 with the Feast of Epiphany. More than the ox and ass that bowed at the manger and the angels whose praising and proclaiming voices filled the heavens, the magi--you may refer to them as the wise men or the three kings--have always fascinated me.

 

These wealthy men of position who traveled so long and far bearing gifts**** and who experienced, according to the gospels, the divinity of the newborn child--how did their manger-side experiences change not just their inner lives, but their public lives among those who didn't have their direct experience with the miraculous baby? What was it like for them to return to their respective kingdoms alone? What happened next for them--or, maybe even more importantly, what did they do next? Eliot hazards more of a guess about all of this than the gospels do. 

Both The Dead  and Small Things LIke These raise similar questions about what next. The particular Christmases presented yield realizations--or epiphanies--not just about the underpinnings of and expectations of the worlds in which the main characters occupy particular places, but the characters' capacities to grow, to change, and to make changes. So what effects will their insights and new understandings have on their psyches, their spirits, their lives going forward? Will they welcome and work to integrate them into their lives, or will they consciously or unconsciously let them go?

 

In both books, marriage, family, and community play central roles; the Catholic church exerts an influence; and blanketing snow galvanizes insight.*****

 

Literarily speaking, they both rely heavily on the stream of consciousness narrative technique that Joyce originated to reveal characters' states of mind. Within these chronicled inner musings are details of conversation, place, and people that both establish the main characters' personalities and sensibilities and create overall mood. As tension ebbs and flows in both works, we the readers join these characters in being ill at ease and wonder not only how their unsettled evenings will conclude, but what tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will bring.

Interestingly, there's an actual stream in addition to that literary stream of consciousness that runs through Bill Furlong's town, or rather a river. Very early on the Sunday morning before Christmas Eve, looking down towards the River Barrow****** from the grounds of the convent, where he's gone to deliver a load of coal and which he characterizes as "still" but "not ever peaceful," Furlong muses to himself:

The day had not yet dawned, and Furlong looked down at the dark, shining river whose surface reflected equal parts of the lighted town. So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close. He could not say which he rathered: the sight of town or its reflection on the water. (60)*******

There is pair of doubles in these few sentences: the town and its reflection in the river, and the things seen near and things seen far. They suggest that Furlong is already aware of decisions to be made: will he elect to see things close up and as they are, or farther away and "finer" than they are?

 

Reflections--literal and figurative--are a motif throughout the novella; more than once, they compel Furlong to encounter himself, either as he is or as a variant of himself. As he drives toward the convent on that same morning,"the reflection of Furlong's headlights crossed the window panes and it felt as though he was meeting himself there" (59). 

 

Once inside the convent, Furlong notices that "The whole place and everything in it was shining, immaculate: in some of the hanging pots, Furlong caught a glimpse of version of himself, passing" (67). But what kind of a version is it? Does Furlong see a better version of himself? a disappointing true one?********

 

 It's Furlong's acknowledgment several pages earlier that "Of late, he was inclined to imagine another life" that has sensitized the reader to language and images related to reflection, self-inquiry, and self-regard. Keegan establishes the motif subtly, almost inconspicuously, but we perceive it and sense the way it heightens Furlong's profound uneasiness that seems to be asking for release or resolution.

And that's the way this book works. Details and images are pebbles that Keegan drops into still water. Though they fall separately, almost unobtrusively, and nearly silently, the gentle circular ripples********** they create spread out and invariably overlap. The result is the sense that all of these "small things" are interconnected and important to moving the story and the lives it portrays forward.

Take for example the details related to haircuts and people who cut hair. In the first third of the novel, Furlong's wife reports that the son of the local barber has an aggressive form of cancer that will kill him within the year (37). Soon thereafter, Furlong recalls a recent visit to the convent to make a coal delivery during which he encountered several young women scrubbing the chapel floor. Though one of their number whose hair had been "roughly cut, as though someone blind had taken to it with a shears" had asked for his help, he had not given it (43). 

 

On a morning closer to Christmas, Furlong  again heads to the convent to make a delivery--and encounters either the same girl or a different girl with "roughly cut hair." This time, he does intervene on her behalf, though not in the way she asks him to (62)--which haunts him later. 

 

On Christmas Eve, after the snow has started to fall, and upon catching his reflection--another reflection!--in a mirror in a store window, Furlong decides he needs a haircut and heads to the barbershop where the barber whose son has not long to live "nodded solemnly at Furlong in the mirror" (103). There is so much silent suffering in the shadows of the holiday bustle--as if the customers in the barber shop fear the holiday magic would dissipate if they took a moment to acknowledge the barber will soon become one more parent in the story who has been forcefully separated from his child.

Photo of the Holiday Card from My Friend Elizabeth

A little later as the snow continues to accumulate, Furlong, like the magi, journeys from home toward a place where one might hope and expect to find the presence of God, especially as expressed in human compassion and kindness--namely a convent. But Furlong already does not experience the particular convent toward which he's heading as a place of peace and caring, and he has recently been recognizing that people often collude to hide harsh truths out of fear, convenience, or unexamined indifference. 

 

Once he arrives at the convent, he re-encounters the girl with the hacked hair. What happens next you will need to read the book to find out.

 

It's small things like these--these details of action, thought, and observation--that, first, establish that Bill Furlong is at a inflection point in his life, and second, propel both him and his story forward as he grapples with all that is at stake. The question of how and whether he can respond is a separate one, which reading this book will answer for you, or at least begin to answer--since what happens beyond its last page is a further question, one T.S. Eliot would have recognized.

 

How interesting--and rare--that a work of literature should have a title that suggests both its message about the stuff and nature of human lives, and the literary means by which it conveys that message. It's as if the method and the message are perfectly matched. And there is reason for hope, despite the cold and darkness of the winter nights portrayed.

 

I  hope you'll read--and maybe even reread--Clair Keegan's Small Things Like These, if you haven't already. For one thing, I'd love to know how you interpret the many crows in the novella. Meanwhile, Happy Feast of Epiphany, if you celebrate it. 

 

* Collage created from three screen shots from the following websites: https://arboretum.harvard.edu/stories/portals-of-wonder-and-welcome/, https://www.etsy.com/listing/716230349/christmas-lights-svg-christmas-light-svg, and https://mass.streetsblog.org/2023/11/21/revised-arborway-bus-plan-would-make-room-for-hundreds-of-new-transit-oriented-homes

** Becker, D. & Tamagawa, E. (2024, December 11). Claire Keegan's 'Small things like these' is having a moment. In Here & Now. WBUR Studios. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/12/11/small-things-like-these

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*** Screen shot of Enda Bowe/Lionsgate photo of Cillian Murphy accompanying the following article: Wilkinson, A. (2024, November 7). 'Small Things Like These’ Review: The Fears of a Watchful Father. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/movies/small-things-like-these-review-cillian-murphy.html

**** James Tissot: The Magi Journeying (c. 1890), Brooklyn Museum, New York City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Magi#/media/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-_The_Magi_Journeying_(Les_rois_mages_en_voyage)_-_James_Tissot_-_overall.jpg

***** Screen shot of photo accompanying the following: McCarthy, D. (2010, March 18). “Snow was general all over Ireland…” The last paragraph of Joyce’s The dead. Medium. https://medium.com/drmstream/snow-was-general-all-over-ireland-the-last-paragraph-of-joyces-the-dead-48b08b4c3b1f

*(6) Recolored screen shot on the following website. The townn is Athy, and it is on the Barrow River. https://www.waterwaysireland.org/our-waterways/barrow-navigation/the-barrow-way/athy*

*(7) Keegan, C. (2021). Small things like these. Grove Press.

*(8) Screen shot of a photo of a hanging rack of pots and pans available from Wayfair.

*(9) Screen shot of photo on chipcoffeeblog on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/chipcoffeyblog/93595106358/dropping-pebbles-in-the-pond-the-ripple-effect-is

*(10) Screen shot of photo on the following website: Crider, A. (2019, April 10). Is crow hunting worth my time? Project Upland. https://projectupland.com/migratory-bird-species/crow-hunting/is-crow-hunting-worth-my-time/

Writing a Long Poem During the Darkest Days

So already, the poem I've been writing for the last two months isn't finished yet. But the process of writing it has been so affirming and engaging that I wanted to write about it.*

It's been taking a willing, insightful village* to move the writing of this poem forward--and what could be more affirming than the thoughtful willingness of one's fellow villagers? How fortunate I am to have a writing group and poetry-reading friends from my college days who've read and commented on "November Dark" during these last weeks. Their sensibilities as readers and firsthand knowledge of me have helped the poem hone in on both my personal emotional truths and on some related more universal ones. I am so grateful to these reader-friends.

Still, this post is going to focus on my dark-day-in, dark-day-out relationship to the poem.

 

"November Dark" is a long--really, a long ass**--poem. Returning to it again and again during this season of late sunrises and early sunsets has been both comforting and challenging. And "November Dark" has insisted that I return to it again and again.

So why "long ass"? I know I'm not someone you'd generally expect to use that word, especially in writing. It's not just that the poem I'm writing is long--not as long as Paradise Lost, or even "Ash Wednesday," but long for me. And it's not just that it's taking me a long time to write it--not as long as it probably would have taken Elizabeth Bishop to craft what she would have considered a respectable first pass at a poem, but a long time for me.

 

More importantly, "November Dark" has had me stuck in its craw*** since early November--so "long ass" has more to do with the quality of the experience of writing a first respectable draft of it over a number of weeks.

 

Frankly, the poem has been completely inhabiting me--teasing me some days, daring me others, eluding and encouraging me in alternation, playing hide and seek with me--often acting more like a skittish potential lover** than a bunch of words on a page actually trying to become and say something. 

 

In other words, it's been plaguing me in the best possible way. It's been my companion, a soulmate**** who keeps me up at night with constant suggestions and considerations, with ideas for other words and alternative phrases. It's been fostering the kind of sleeplessness that inspires rather than troubles me--which is ironic because the poem is rooted in the experience of troubling routine sleeplessness. Once I finish this poem, I think I'll miss its knocking on the door of my consciousness at any hour, and my immediate flinging open of that door to welcome it. Realizing this makes me a little ambivalent about finishing it.

 

So why has writing this poem been a particularly engrossing, extended experience? Why have I felt so attached to it? No doubt because its subject is loss and grief that are fresh, alive, and mine right now. As many of you know, my mother died in early October, my father died at this time of year four years ago, and Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in early November's presidential election.

On December 5, when I was struggling to know how to combine certain ideas and blocks of content that I instinctively felt belonged together in the poem's third section, I wrote the following about the effect grief was having on my relationship with the world:

There's a sense that there's a veil or scrim interposed between me and the urgent, my blunted sense of the urgent, despite my recognition of it. And I was glad of that blunted sense. That's one of the interesting things about grief, I think: it both holds you and sustains you, even though it weighs on you and causes you pain. But really what it causes you is sadness because it's real and you know that you're wounded--and you're wounded in a healthy, understandable way. It's almost like it makes nothing else matter all that much. And you just try to go about your day as best you can without magnifying anything or dismissing anything. You don't make more of it and its effects; you don't make less of it and its effects.

As soon as I wrote this, I realized that though my long ass poem explicitly says I am mourning for my mother, it does not say that I am mourning for my father:

     Yes, I'm mourning for . . .  [my father and mother] both because I finally don't have to worry about her, but also because I always felt that my father was somehow alive in me because I was taking care of my mother, and that would have meant so much to him. So I carried him with me in this very active and  . . .  [embodied] way every time I went to see her. I still carry him with me, but not in the same way.

      The truth of the matter is that I now realize--well, it's not just now--that I'm really mourning for both my mother and father--her death took him away from me again, . . .  added another layer or level of separation to what was already a major separation. And how could I not be when so many of the pictures that I have of each of them are pictures of both of them?

In the same way I invisibly carried my father with me whenever I went to visit my mother in these last four years, my long ass poem, which makes no mention of him, invisibly carries him, too. Sometimes one poem can't tell the whole story, can't make explicit all the layers. And yet they're there. I think I'm writing this blog post to assert the presence of my father in the bones of my poem.

 

This year, Hanukkah comes exceedingly late: the first candle will not be lit until the Christmas Day night, and eighth candle will not be lit until New Year's Day night. I'll be lighting both my "Womenorah," as it was called by the Vermont artist who created it years ago, and the menorah that was always at the center of my family's Hanukkah observances throughout my childhood and teenage years. Now that both my mother and father are gone, I feel especially fortunate to have inherited what was their menorah.

 

On the second night of Hanukkah, I'll be lighting an additional candle--the one that marks my father's yahrzeit--the anniversary of his death on Jewish calendar. So there will be plenty of light in my dining room. And lots of memories.

It's been a long-ass year--I think everyone who's been at all caught up in this year's election fever feels this way, too. And yes, my long ass poem is close to being done. You will get to read it sometime in 2025 if that's your wish.

 

Until then, may you fully enjoy the various holidays you'll be celebrating as the solstice passes and we head again toward the light. May you and your loved ones enjoy celebrating with one another, and may your memories of those with whom you celebrated in years gone by be more sweet than sad. 

* "Cobbled steps meandering between quaint cottages in the North Yorkshire coastal village of Robin Hoods Bay. Pen & Ink - 8"x11"on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=472623692089089&id=100080243860310&set=a.165923569425771

** The online world offers two spellings for this word, "long ass" and "longass." Autocorrect likes "long ass" better.

*** Screen shot of work of art on this website: https://dateagle.art/blog_post/clare-price/--a Clare Price blog post.

****"Like chrysalids unfold their wings and soar into the night"--a painting by Scott Ketcham that will be on view in January and February 2025 in the Horan Gallery at the Ventress Memorial Library in Marshfield, MA. https://ventresslibrary.assabetinteractive.com/calendar/scott-ketcham-reception/