Morning Musings Beneath a Struggling Sun

So already, on the last morning of February, I set out to walk between weekend rainstorms. The air was damp and clean; the sun kept seeming like it might break through the thin, blue-gray cloud cover, though I knew from the weather forecast that the clouds would prevail. But I was upbeat, cheered by both the persistence of the veiled sun and the birdsong emanating from every winter-bare tree and bush--a great Sunday morning soundtrack.

I'm not usually out this early on a Sunday morning, but my husband Scott was determined to draw with the Edinburgh crowd--that is, the international online group of figurative artists that's based in Scotland. That meant that the two of us were up and done with breakfast by 7:00, so that by 8:00, he could be in his studio ready to start drawing today's model, who was Zooming in from Copenhagen.

As I set out toward the salt marshes, I was thinking about my walk around Squantum two days ago. In particular, I was thinking about what I'd learned about Squaw Rock upon my return home. Mostly, what I'd learned raised more questions than it answered. 

• I'd looked up "Squaw Rock," and learned that there was also such a thing as "Chapel Rock" and "the Chapel Rocks."
• I'd learned something that the various sources agreed on--and that was about the presence of "a 200 million year old ancient glacial deposit known around the world as the Squantum Tillite"--whatever that is.*
• I'd learned two stories about why the "big rock" is called Squaw Rock.
  

As I thought about these things, I was also noticing winter's retreat. The Old Sailors' Pond ice was melting, and the hope of ice hockey was disappearing with it.

So as the sun and I kept walking along, I thought  about how the sounds of scraping hockey sticks and yelling boys had been completely replaced by the trills, chirps, and whistles of so many birds. Or had they? Had I even heard those winter sports sounds this year? The more I thought about the course of this COVID-shaped, temperate winter, the more I was sure the ice on the pond had never become thick and sure enough for ice hockey to be played even by masked young athletes.

But then my mind was back to Squaw Rock. When I'd told Scott that there was such a thing as Squantum Tillite, he'd told me that when we'd visited Squaw Rock on New Year's Eve day, he'd thought it was made up of lots of rocks all set in some kind of clay--and therefore wondered if Squantum Tillite was the name of the conglomerate rock he'd noticed. He was right**: I'd been too busy looking at the graffiti to look at the rock on which it had been painted.***

"More geese than swans now live . . ."

But what was most on my mind as I got closer to the marsh was the lore about how Squaw Rock got its name. The same source that sent me researching Squantum Tillite also explained that "The legend states that an Indian Squaw threw herself to death at this site, but that has never been confirmed." What bothered me was where this story came from, if it wasn't true.

In fact, that naming story was the only one I knew until I came upon the following explanation last Friday afternoon in a Quincy Historical Society pdf***** about the naming of many Quincy landmarks: 

"A very early Algonquian-speaking Native American people who lived on Squantum told stories of a most awesome male/female spirit named Musquantum. It was said that the male named Musquot dropped the rocks that formed the dwelling place (the chapel) for his wife Squanit, as well as one rock which is said to be in her likeness. Tales of these two scary personages continue to be told to Indian children living in Southern New England."

Silence at the Starting Line

Still at the marsh, I thought back to what I'd learned when I checked out the etymology of "chapel" last Friday afternoon: in 17th century English, the word was used to refer to places where religious worship of any kind took place. So Squanit wouldn't have needed to be Christian to have the word associated with her dwelling place.  But what actually happened at her chapel? Since she was a spirit, did she inhabit the chapel to which others came to worship her--or was it she herself who worshiped other spirits in her dwelling place, perhaps joined by fellow worshipers?

So why the story of the suicide that I'd originally heard? Through my internet exploring, I discovered that there was at least one other Squaw Rock in the United States to which the story of the suicide of a despondent "Indian maiden" was attached. That reminded me of a similar story I'd heard many times about Lake Penneseewassee in Norway, Maine: allegedly another Native American maiden had thrown herself into its waters because of her broken heart. 

My mind went back to Louise Erdich's Love Medicine, as it often does when the topic is attitudes toward indigenous peoples--and how we like to imagine "other people" generally. In particular, I thought out the chapter called "The Plunge of the Brave," in which Nector Kashpaw finally accepts $200 to pose nude for an ambitious woman painter. He's shocked by the resulting painting, which bears the same name as the chapter and is later hung in the Bismarck, North Dakota capitol: she painted him leaping from a cliff to "Certain death" (125). That's when he understands that " the greater world was only interested in my doom" (125).

Do people like this kind of subject matter generally? Which people? And who are their choices for who should be plunging, jumping, or leaping to their deaths? I mean, do we think about Virginia Woolf walking into the river with her pockets full of rocks the same way we think of these nameless dead Indians whom we've been told, or shown, couldn't take it anymore?

I know: it was kind of a strange topic to be turning over in my head while walking the streets of Quincy on a temperate pre-spring morning. But it's interesting to think about a place like Quincy, with its various place names and their derivations, and its perpetual interest in writing and sharing its own history. The questions of what's "old" and what's "original" are perpetually raised by the very idea of Merrymount Park, where so much encounter between native and recently arrived people took place--and now where a whole other group of relative newcomers, many of Asian origin, are making themselves at home, but not always with the blessings of those who were here before them.

* Quincy, Mass. Historical and Architectural Survey. ARCHAEOLOGICAL OR HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE. Dorchester Street. http://thomascranelibrary.org/htm/439.htm.  

** I include this paragraph about Squantum Tillite, in part because it includes so many words I've never seen before in one paragraph. (Carto, S. L., & Eyles, N. (2012, March 16). Sedimentology of the Neoproterozoic (c. 580 Ma) Squantum 'Tillite', Boston Basin, USA: Mass flow deposition in a deep-water arc basin lacking direct glacial influence. Sedimentary Geology. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0037073812000796.) 

             The Squantum ‘Tillite’ (c. 593–570 Ma) consists of thick (up to 215 m) massive and crudely-stratified diamictites conformably interbedded with subaqueously-deposited conglomerates and sandstones within a thick (~ 7 km) Boston Basin fill which is dominated by argillite turbidites. The Squantum Tillite was first interpreted as being glacigenic in origin in 1914 because of the presence of diamictites; argillites were interpreted as glaciolacustrine ‘varves’ with rare ice-rafted debris, and conglomerates as glaciofluvial outwash. More recently these have been shown to be the product of deep marine mass flow processes with no glacial influence, yet because of its age equivalence with the deep marine, glacially-influenced Gaskiers Formation, the Squantum Tillite is still seen by some as supporting evidence for a widespread ‘Snowball Earth’ event at c. 580 Ma. New sedimentological work confirms that conglomerate and sandstone facies are deep marine sediment gravity flows genetically related to massive (homogeneous) and crudely-stratified (heterogeneous) diamictites produced subaqueously by downslope mixing of gravel and cobbles with muddy facies. Rare horizons of ‘ice rafted debris’ in thin-bedded and laminated turbidite facies interbedded with thick debrites show a weak but positive correlation of lamina thickness with grain size, suggesting these facies are non-glacial co-genetic ‘debrite–turbidite’ couplets. A significant volcanic influence on sedimentation is identified from reworked lapilli tuff beds and reworked ash in turbidites. The depositional setting of the Squantum ‘Tillite’ appears to be that of a submarine slope/fan setting in an open marine volcanic arc basin receiving large volumes of poorly-sorted sediment on the mid-latitude active margin of Gondwana. No direct glacial influence is apparent. 

*** Ophis. (2019, June 21). Chapel Rocks. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ophis/48102285483/.  

**** Douglas Harper. chapel: Search . Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=chapel.  

***** Quincy History pdf from the Thomas Crane Public Library: http://thomascranelibrary.org/sites/default/files/1989.3.pdf  

*(6) Erdrich, L. (2001). The Plunge of the Brave. In Love medicine: new and expanded version (pp. 122–145). short story, Perennial.

Reading Manuel Munoz's "Anyone Can Do It" Twice

So already, a couple of weeks ago, I read Manuel Muñoz's short story "Anyone Can Do It,"* which appears in The Best American Short Stories 2019,** and about which Manuel was recently interviewed as part of an online series called 1 Week Critique.*** Over the next couple of weeks, the story so haunted me that I knew I had to read it again. And so I did, taking notes on its plot events and literary aspects and my feelings about them.

So let me begin by saying that the story made me feel both sad and hopeful--a combination I've been getting used to in my own life. I'd like to attribute my personal feelings to the simultaneity of national political events, pandemic fatigue, and the recent death of my father, but I'm actually suspicious that they may be feelings that often co-exist for many people.

Let's face it: despite the Irish prayer, the road doesn't rise up to meet all of us, and many markers along it reveal who and what is buried beside it rather than point travelers in the sunlit direction forward. Even the most fortunate don't get a pass on experiencing loss and unwelcome change, though they may have more resources for responding to it, coping with it, even running from it. As the story ended, I found myself haunted by the question of what life beyond the story would be for Delfina, the story's main character: she felt strong to me, but also very alone as she sat with her son on the front steps of her house at the end of the empty road.

A Facebook Photo of Manuel, in Shadows and Light

So now that you have some understanding of how the story haunts me emotionally, let me tell you a little about why it haunts me intellectually. I'm a retired English teacher, someone who spent many years helping students to recognize and respond to literary craft, to detect literary clues suggesting the "inevitable"***** directions in which works of literature might be heading.******

And yet, despite my training and my perceptions of disturbances beneath the story's surface even in the opening paragraphs, I was completely surprised by what happened later in the story--twice.******* As a result, the intellectual-literary question that has been haunting me--and it's accompanied by so much admiration--is this one: how had Manuel's writing so subtly both prepared me for and distracted me from what was practically bound to happen? I mean, how had he done that? His writing had pulled me so gently toward and away from the inevitable. And it felt so important that it had done that--so authentic in the sense of its being true to life.

Let me tell you a bit more about the story so that what I said in my last paragraph, especially in its last sentence, has the chance to make some sense.

The story begins like this: one Friday afternoon, the neighborhood men do not return from their day of work, having been deported to Mexico--a disheartening but not unknown experience that unsettles their women/wives, who have been depending on their wages to help pay their soon-due monthly rents.********

Delfina, relatively new to the neighborhood and experiencing her husband's deportation for the first time, isn't certain about whom she should trust. Lis, one of Delfina's neighbors, sees a financial opportunity in the fact that Delfina has a car (actually, it's her husband's Ford Galaxie): the car could transport the two of them to the fields usually worked by the men where they could earn the rent money they need by picking fruit. At first, Delfina says she needs more time to think. But after a trying morning the next day, she surprises herself by agreeing to Lis's plan. And so the story unfolds from there.

I have to say that when I encounter cars in literature, my former English teacher self prepares for disaster. There's the red convertible in Love Medicine that goes into the river at the same time that Henry Lamartine does, and the prized motor cars in Howard's End and The Great Gatsby that are driven by entitled men who do terrible harm. There are cars in literature that manage to set people free--one liberates two characters at the end of Love Medicine, actually--but more often than not, cars mean trouble for someone. In Lauren Groff's "The Wind," which I blogged about earlier this month, a harrowing car ride almost liberates a family, but doesn't. The problem with cars is that other people notice them.

So I had instinctive car-related reservations when it came to "Anyone Can Do It." But I let go of them when I joined Delfina on the edge of an orchard row where, after Lis's and her productive morning of harvesting, she sat feeling peaceful and satisfied while she awaited Lis's return from the car with their lunches:

Delfina sat in the higher bank of the orchard row, catching her breath, massaging her upper legs and resting. It was Sunday, she remembered, and Lis had been right after all. People did work on this day, even if it felt as tranquil and lonely as Sundays always did, here among the trees with the leaves growing more and more still, the orchard quiet and then quieter. Sundays were always so peaceful, Delfina thought, no matter where you were, so serene she imagined the birds themselves had gone dumb. El día de Dios, she thought, and remembered Sundays when  her white-haired father had not yet slept out the drunkenness of the previous night. Her own husband had sometimes broken the sacredness of a Sunday silence and she was oddly thankful fro the calm of this orchard moment that had been brought on only by his absence. Delfina looked down the row to soak in that blessed quiet and the longer she looked, the emptier and emptier it became. . . .

As I read this, though some details tampered with its peacefulness, I couldn't help but think of Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi, the widowed central characters in the Book of Ruth who, having committed to being each other's family and caretakers, gleaned together in the fields. Like Delfina, I initially had been wary of Lis, had wondered about her game. But maybe Lis was someone to be trusted and depended on after all; maybe she was the good sister Delfina felt she'd never had. Maybe the two of them, made temporarily husband-less by deportation, were on their way to becoming a present-day version of Ruth and Naomi.

But I was wrong about that--you'll have to read the story to find out exactly how. And given that my understanding of the situation was dependent on Delfina's perceptions of it, perhaps I was bound to err in judgment. I say this without being at all critical of Delfina: aren't all of our perceptions shaped in part by what we need, want, hope, and fear--especially when the wolf is getting perilously close to the door and we're hoping to do more than just survive? It's not just rent money that's on Delfina's mind: in making her decision to team up with Lis, she feels pleased to be "on the brink of doing something truly on her own." And when her plans go awry, she doesn't hesitate to use the phrase "if he ever made it back" (193) in talking to herself about her husband.

There's another surprise moment later in this story, another Book of Ruth moment: a Boaz figure acts with unanticipated, unsolicited kindness and generosity. I wish I could explain to you why that surprised me so: maybe I'd bought too easily into the idea of Delfina as a woman completely alone in the universe. And maybe I've gotten far too used to a world in which acts of kindness--especially kindness to strangers--are seemingly scant. When we do hear stories of  kindness, they tend to be featured in the final two minutes of network and cable newscasts. There's another possible explanation: perhaps the people who commit acts of kindness seldom speak about them, despite the proclivity of many Americans to advertise their virtue.

Those thoughts made me listen to Manuel's 1 Week Critique interview a second time. This time, I heard--really heard--Manuel talk about the importance of "the smallest things"--which made me think that if I keep reading "Anyone Can Do It," I will begin to see beyond the smaller things in the text to the smallest ones, the ones that would have prepared me for both of the book's surprise moments. But even more importantly, maybe I will understand better how it was that Delfina grew in stature before my eyes over the course of the story--so much so that I went from wondering what would happen to her after the story ended to what she would choose to do. There's a big difference between those two things.

I hope that you'll read Manuel Muñoz's "Anyone Can Do It"; anyone can! And if when you do you have any thoughts about why Delfina, in anticipating telling her husband about the day's events, contemplates leaving out a particular detail of the story--see page 196--please share them with me. That detail is one of those smallest things that matters so much--I just know it.

* I'm not sure I'd known that "Anyone Can Do It" was among the stories collected in The Best American Short Stories 2019.** But after listening to Manuel be interviewed about it in a segment of 1 Week Critique*** aired just a few weeks back, I wanted to read it as soon as possible, in part because Manuel described it as mirroring  another story of his called "The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA." I'd loved that story so much that I blogged about it in 2015. 

** “Anyone Can Do It.” The Best American Short Stories 2019, by Muñoz Manuel, Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019, pp. 182–196. 

*** Wenzler, I. C. Manuel Muñoz Interview 1 Week Critique #0020. other. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPzPitI7lGk.  

**** 

***** I put inevitable in quotation marks because Manuel discusses inevitability in his 1 Week Critique interview.

*(6) I got to know Manuel in the mid-1990's when, as a newly minted Harvard College graduate, he was hired to teach several of my classes while I was on sabbatical.

*(7) Ingrid Claire Wenzler, Manuel's 1 Week Critique interviewer, had that same experience in reaction to the story's central event: "I couldn't believe I hadn't seen all the signs of this coming."  

*(8) Photo-shopped screen shot of photo embedded in Sidler, S. (2020, June 23). Why Does My Old House Have Two Front Doors? The Craftsman Blog. https://thecraftsmanblog.com/why-does-my-old-house-have-two-front-doors/. 

*(9) Screen shot of photo embedded in Masons, F. (2020, October 25). Peach Tree Care. The Tree Center. https://www.thetreecenter.com/peach-tree-care/.

In the Eye of the Storm: Reading Lauren Groff

So already, sometimes people have no idea they're in trouble, even in actual danger. Other times, they do know, but they fear there is no way out of or through it. In this latter instance, it can be hard to tell whether there's no one who can or will help them--or whether, for whatever reason, they either fail to convey their need for help--or actively conceal it.

Saturday, I picked up the most recent New Yorker and read two pieces about people in dangerous trouble of different sorts.

One piece was  John Mathias' "Living With a Visionary," a personal history that reveals the severe toll that unceasing worry, caring, and grief can take. In this piece, the victim is the dedicated spouse-caretaker of a person with Parkinson's accompanied by hallucinations in the era of COVID-19. Reading this piece made me even more grateful for the cheerful window visit* my sister, cousins, and I had had with my mother earlier in day, courtesy of her dedicated care-givers: my mother had stood tall, recognized us all even though we'd been wearing masks, blown kisses to us, and told us, courtesy of speaker-phone, to be careful in the snow.

The other piece was Lauren Groff's very intense short story, "The Wind," which compelled me to keep reading, despite the sinking feeling I had after reading its first two columns in the print version. I have this same sinking feeling whenever I'm confronted with a tale of what I sense are diminishing odds, especially if they are at all connected to the  simultaneous terror and calm of children who are literally and figuratively along for the dangerous ride.

The short story presents, among others, three women in the same family, each of a different generation: the female narrator of the short story; her grandmother, who was the driver of the car in the story; and her mother, who was a passenger in that car, and who has shared the story of the car ride with the short story narrator and her other children.

After I finished the story, I kept rereading its last two columns on p. 54 of the print version. They do the following in this order: 

• describe the moment when the mother of the children in the car**--the short story narrator's grandmother--can't make her own body move--and the narrator's mother, the oldest child in the car, realizes "that everything depended on her"; 

• assert the existence of two stories of what happened next, the version the narrator's mother is known to tell in minute detail, and the "true story" the short story's narrator perceives beneath her mother's version; and 

• express metaphorically the legacy of such events, regardless of how accurately they're recounted.

I've watched enough Law and Order: Special Victims Unit to know all about escalation in domestic violence situations and to understand the particular plight of victims whose abusers are members of the police department. So on that score, this story does not surprise.

But "The Wind" is the story told by the child of the child who was an eyewitness to the events that I didn't want to watch unfold as I kept reading. It's not so much about the danger of rewriting the story, as the eyewitness does, according to the short story's narrator. It's about the impossibility of erasing the story's emotional legacy regardless of how it's told.

The final sentences of the story provide a metaphor for this pervasive legacy--I believe you can read them without damaging your experience of reading the story.

But always inside my mother there would blow a silent wind, a wind that died and gusted again, raging throughout her life, touching every moment she lived after this one. She tried her best, but she couldn’t help filling me with this same wind. It seeped into me through her blood, through every bite of food she made for me, through every night she waited, shaking with fear, for me to come home by curfew, through every scolding, everything she forbade me to say or think or do or be, through all the ways she taught me how to move as a woman in the world. She was far from being the first to find it blowing through her, and of course I will not be the last. I look around and can see it in so many other women, passed down from a time beyond history, this wind that is dark and ceaseless and raging within.***

I have to admit I was surprised when the experience of the wind went from being particular to the narrator and other members of her family and became something shared by people more generally, especially women--a kind of primordial legacy borne uncomfortably by one gender.**** 

The truth is that for me personally, even more memorable than the story's metaphor of the wind was the harrowing image created by the last sentence in the paragraph before the one from which I quoted above. It was so harrowing, so paralyzing, that my mind could not move beyond this particular story quickly enough for Groff's final general statements to resonate with their desired social significance. To experience that harrowing image yourself, however, you'll have to read the story.

That wind and that image stayed so much with me that I woke up on Sunday morning recalling another Groff short story that relates wind and memory. In "Eyewall," found in Groff's collection called Florida, a woman decides to ride out a major hurricane in her house despite being urged to evacuate: a neighbor even comes by to offer her ride. But we soon learn, due to the story's blending of knowledge of events past, present, and future, that that the neighbor who tried to be helpful does not survive.

The woman, however, does--not exactly with the help of red wine and visitors from her past, but certainly in their company. "Houses contain us; who can say what we contain?" she says at one point. Which winds are within, and which without? The storyteller survives them, but that's about all I can tell you. 

What I really want to know--and don't--is why she decided to stay in the house in the first place: throughout the story, she often seems more like a dazed, somewhat detached Dorothy watching the people and things of her Kansas life superimposed on the swirling tornado than like an Ebenezer Scrooge about to be transformed by the visits of the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. I can't say how, or even if,  Groff's narrator's hurricane experiences will affect her. And that bothers me.

In "The Wind," Groff provides us with two perspectives, and ultimately with two stories that together explain the presence and persistence of the wind. "Eyewall," in contrast, provides only one perspective--and frankly, leaves me hungering for a second perspective--like the one that might be offered by the eye in the top half of the illustration accompanying "The Wind" in The New Yorker (see above). I really need and want to know more. There may be some hope, or at least some wonder, at the end of the story. Pay attention to the chickens and the eggs if you read it, and please let me know what you think.

Winslow Homer's "Hurricane, Bahamas"--Not Wild Enough!

There's a difference between trouble and danger . . . sometimes . . . I think. The narrators of both  Groff stories are out of danger at the end of their respective adventures. But I'm not sure they're out of trouble. Maybe the truth is that in each of us--or at least most of us--lives some trouble that, like the ache in a joint that acts up in certain kinds of weather, can be counted on to rear its head with sufficient regularity, especially in predictable circumstances, making it impossible for us to forget that it's very much a part of us. It's like the last line of The Great Gatsby says: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." But maybe we learn, too, sometimes. Well, maybe some of us do.

* My mother's senior living facility discourages face-to--face visits during the pandemic except in cases of emergency. 

** Screenshot image of Illustration by Ping Zhu on linked story page: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/the-wind .  

*** Groff, L. (2021, January 25). "The Wind". The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/the-wind.  

**** Similarly, I felt parts of the interview with Lauren Groff on The New Yorker web site veered off in a direction of a topic I hadn't even been thinking about when I finished reading the story, namely who was to blame for the "evil" that happened to the narrator's grandmother: 

"I think that much of the evil of this world comes from people who consider themselves good people, who genuinely love their families and friends and communities, but who act just a little bit too slowly to be of much help, who give just a little less than they should, who don’t want to get involved in other people’s messes, who value their own comfort a little more than the thought of extending themselves as far as they can to insure the security and happiness of others.  . .  . we’ve made it normal to extend our collective acts of caring only far enough to protect our immediate families and friends. "***** 

I have to say I was so busy imagining the children in the car with their mother who suddenly was unable to move her body that I hadn't been wondering at all about whether the mother's friends and co-workers had done enough for her. If anything, Groff's words made me think about John Mathias's friends and family: what had and hadn't they done for him when they understood that he was in such distress? (Always, those troubling questions arise: did he hide his distress, and/or how much did they really want to know that he was in distress?) 

***** Leyshon, C. (2021, January 24). Lauren Groff on the Aftershocks of Violence. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/lauren-groff-02-01-21.   

*(6) Screen shot of the first frame of the video "The wind is blowing through my hair": https://8tracks.com/muffliato/the-wind-is-blowing-through-my-hair