Later, when the car had miraculously banked itself into a stopping point down the mountain and people were there rescuing us and taking us up to the top of the mountain and covering me in blankets and putting me in the back of my father’s truck my memories are confused and not as clear. I was never cold, never scared, never worried, it was all all right. Everyone else in the car has clear memories of the rescues but I just remember the light and that I was dying and that it was all right. Except for the moment when I regretted that my son was there.
It was the most real thing that ever happened to me in my life and I have remembered it over and over again when things would be wrong with me or I would have to have surgery. I have had no fear of death since that moment.
A few years later I was on a Delta Airlines jet going from our small airport in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Atlanta and suddenly the oxygen masks fell. We had lost an engine and the pilot announced we were making an emergency landing in Memphis, Tennessee. The plane went straight down and again I was quite certain I was going to die and again the whole airplane filled with light and it was all absolutely beautiful and perfectly all right and I had no fear. I was sorry I was sitting so far away from the other people but it was all right. It was beautiful and that was that.
In Dr. Alexander’s book everything he describes is exactly, as well as our language can express it, as I saw it both of the times I was convinced I was dying.
The tenderness and love that I felt for all the other people on the airplane was still there when we landed. We all stayed very close together after we got off the plane. It was twenty minutes or so before we could leave one another, another very strange phenomena.
An hour later, I boarded a plane for New York City. That flight was difficult. I kept listening to the engines, looking at my watch, I was back in the land of living where we have to be vigilant and aware and make up catastrophes in our brains.
It was late October when I read Dr. Alexander’s book, which I have read several more times since then. Now it is mid-December and the world is filled with Christmas cheer. Rejoice, rejoice, Emanuel, is come to thee, O, Israel. I have been in several churches and both times I have felt very close to the people around me, all my fellow human beings longing and searching for light and miracles and signs and wonders, all singing about such searches and believing there was once a time when we were nearer to such divine ideas as virgin births and wise men and stars appearing to lead the way to a better world and a miraculous birth.
I am going to start going every Sunday to either the Presbyterian or the Episcopal Church. My son has won custody of a child who has never been to church and longs to go to one. So we are going to take him but it is really myself I am taking. I want to be among people who believe in things they cannot prove.
SECTION FIVE
Blessings
Christmas Past
IN OCTOBER OF 1705, WHEN HE WAS TWENTY YEARS OLD, BACH traveled three hundred miles across Germany, much of it on foot, to hear Dietrich Buxtehude play the magnificent organ at the Marienkirche in Lübeck. There were Christmas concerts and a grand concert in memory of Emperor Leopold I. I like to think of the young man walking so many days to hear the aging composer whose work he had studied and played. Perhaps he stopped at inns along the way. Perhaps he slept on the ground, his pack for a pillow, his cloak around him against the cold. October turned into November. The fields and towns, which were covered in gold when he left his home in Arnstadt, became covered with snow. Perhaps he saw such scenes as Monet would later paint in masterpieces like The Magpie.
This year I am going to think of Bach’s journey as the days lead up to Christmas. I am going to listen to great music as the nights grow longer and colder and the dangerous holidays draw near. Every time I want to turn on the television I am going to listen to Bach and Beethoven and Mozart instead. Instead of concerning myself with riots and earthquakes and plagues I am going to listen to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, or Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, or Bach’s Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C from the Well-Tempered Clavier, or the Mass in B minor. Instead of being preoccupied with the chaos of the world, I am going to concentrate on the things that make the world worth saving.
Actually, this is just my latest strategy in a lifelong attempt to escape the celebrations our culture has created to lighten up the winter solstice. I was a loved and indulged child with parents who were married to each other. Still, my main memories of the holidays are unpleasant ones. If I think of Thanksgiving I think of disgusting amounts of fattening foods. I think of the refrigerator stuffed with leftovers and of stacks of dirty dishes. The only Thanksgiving I remember with any real pleasure was when I was in the second grade and had a role in the school pageant. I was a pilgrim and got to sing, “We are little Pilgrim maidens, in our caps of snowy white. We came over on the Mayflower, on a dark and stormy night.” Although I liked the pageant, I really wanted to rewrite it. I would have much preferred to be an Indian maiden and get to recite Hiawatha.
My memories of Christmas always begin with the trauma of having to keep secrets and the worse trauma of having secrets kept from me. Because of this terrible secret-keeping, there is always a letdown after the presents are opened. “That’s all there is?” any child worth his salt will ask. “We’ve opened everything?” “That’s all I got?” Cause and effect, tension and release, simple physics.
The best defense against the holidays is to remember what it is we are really doing: we are trying to lighten up the darkness of winter. That is why I am going to spend the next two months listening to music—to remind myself that the idea is to cheer people up. I no longer need to cheer myself up during the holidays; I have already tried every conceivable way to keep from being depressed, so I have those strategies to fall back on, plus this new one of music.
The main thing I have learned is to stay flexible. I don’t have to cook a turkey and make cornbread dressing. I can take everyone out to dinner or go to someone else’s house. I can have a simple, elegant meal of vichyssoise and a soufflé. I can fast all day or go for a twenty-mile walk or buy everyone watches that are little automobiles that can be taken off and raced across the table.
By the time my sons were teenagers I had begun to experiment with ways to make Christmas more bearable. My first efforts were feeble and fragmented. I fixated on the tree. I decided it was ridiculous to cut down millions of trees and haul them around the United States and install them in living rooms at a cost of twenty-five dollars to one hundred dollars per household. Millions of dead trees festooned with cheap lights and decorations, sitting forlornly in their plastic holders full of stagnant water.
The first Christmas I rebelled I got a ladder out of the garage and painted it silver and hung it with lights and laid presents on the steps. My youngest son still hasn’t forgiven me for that Christmas. On Christmas Eve, he and my husband went out and bought a regular tree and set it up in the dining room and moved their presents in there.
The next year I tried having a live tree. Four men struggled valiantly to carry a huge pot of dirt with a pear-shaped cedar into the house. They got it as far as the front hall and there it sat, looking like a giant cedar Buddha. After Christmas, the men returned and moved it to the side yard, where it promptly died. This cost quite a bit of money and cured me of my tree fixation.
It is not the tree, I decided. It is all the parties and everyone getting drunk. The following Christmas we took the children to the British Virgin Islands to spend the holiday on a sailboat. The downside of this adventure is that my two older sons now live in the islands and I have to travel nine hours to see them. Not to mention worry about them getting skin cancer. There are pitfalls everywhere in the Christmas game.
Another year my brothers and I took all our children to Wyoming to learn to ski. My parents came along, too. Everyone did learn to ski. But the children kept locking themselves in bathrooms to smoke marijuana, my one-eyed brother drove a Mercedes off the road in a snowstorm (causing me to have my first near
-death—and only out-of-body—experience), and when I got home from the trip, I learned that I had pneumonia.
In recent years, three Christmases stand out in my mind. When my oldest grandson, Marshall, was five, I was at his house in New Orleans on Christmas morning. As soon as the presents were opened, I kissed my sons and their wives goodbye and, with my grandchild, began driving to my home in Arkansas. By sundown we were in the delta in the middle of a flood. We checked into a hotel in Dumas and spent the evening at the local discount store. Marshall bought a detective set with a secret code concealed in the handle of the gun. He still remembers finding the hidden spring and pulling out the rolled-up piece of paper. He says it was at that moment that he began to want to learn to read.
The next morning we continued on our way. In Alma it began to snow, and we locked the keys in the car at a fast-food restaurant. Three members of the Alma football team came to our rescue and opened the door with a coat hanger.
That night, in my house on the mountain, I began to teach my grandchild to read and write the English language. I still have the scrap of paper on which he wrote, “Today we drove to Grandmother’s house.”
On another great Christmas, I stayed alone all day and wrote the last chapter of a novel. It snowed that year and I saw a white fox in the yard, although I have never been able to get anyone to believe it wasn’t just a snow-covered dog.
Last year was an interesting Christmas. My youngest son, the one who can’t forgive me for the ladder, was visiting with a friend just home from Russia. At two o’clock on Christmas Eve we learned that the person who had invited us to Christmas dinner was ill and had to cancel the party. We rushed to the grocery store; we bought a frozen turkey. We threw it into a bathtub and ran cold water on it. We made dressing. We mashed sweet potatoes. We ironed a tablecloth. We stayed up until three in the morning basting that turkey.
By noon the next day we had prepared a feast. Cooking a turkey is not so bad as long as there’s some drama to it. Not that it tasted very good or that we ate much of it. Luckily, to make up for that, there were plenty of presents under the artificial, predecorated tree I had ordered from the florist. And best of all, the next day would be December 26 and it would all be over.
Morality, Part I
OLD WOMEN ARE SUPPOSED TO BE GUARDIANS OF THE FLAME. They are supposed to snatch baseball caps from the heads of recalcitrant teenagers and hand glasses of water to weary travelers and know when to use adjectives like disgusting and tacky and revolting and loathsome.
I would have to invent a new world to describe what I just witnessed on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. I would have to create a word that contained the loss of all responsibility for one’s fellow human beings. It would have to imply that the persons to whom the word applied had decided there were no standards of behavior. That thievery and bad karma were their meat and drink, the very air they wished to breathe.
Last Sunday afternoon in Biloxi, Mississippi, across the bay from the beautiful little town of Ocean Springs, where she lives, I took an eight-year-old girl by the hand and went to visit the children’s arcade of the Boomtown Casino, one of forty casinos that have opened there in the last few years. Here, at the children’s annex of Boomtown, within cigarette smoke of the big casino, is a large hall filled with machines designed to teach children how to gamble. The children put their money into a machine and gambling chips come out. One chip for a quarter. Four for a dollar. Something for nothing. This is also an excellent metaphor for the act of faith that is money.
Once the child has their chips in hand, or in the plastic cups provided for that purpose, they can wander around the floor and choose from a variety of games which cheerfully and matter-of-factly cheat them of their chips. None of the children seem to expect they will actually win the basketball toss, alligator pound, strength test, or roulette wheels. Accustomed to being cheated, they wander from machine to machine putting in their chips and accepting their losses with a sad-eyed resignation. The children are sad. It is Sunday afternoon on the Gulf of Mexico and I am in a room full of sad children carrying plastic cups filled with gambling chips. Occasionally one of the machines pays off, ejects a row of paper coupons which the child can exchange for worthless plastic toys at a counter manned by two overweight young women wearing maid uniforms.
At the back of the hall is a cage where croupiers sell tickets to the VIRTUAL REALITY THEATRE. The tickets cost two and a half dollars. For this amount the ticket-holder is strapped into a chair and rocked from side to side and up and down while watching a screen that distorts his or her sense of balance and orientation. For a flat fee of ten dollars a child can be left all day in the Boomtown Children’s Arcade and can ride the VIRTUAL REALITY chairs as many times as they like.
I had a really degrading and dehumanizing experience at Boom-town. Illuminating. I saw white children so fat they had to buy two seats in the VIRTUAL REALITY THEATRE. I saw Afro-American children only five years old being helped to stick their chips in the machines. I saw Asian children sitting strapped into chairs by the roulette wheels. Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in the Southern Mafia’s sight.
I guided my eight-year-old companion, whose name is Aurora, from one machine to the next until she had spent five dollars’ worth of chips. I told her the things that five dollars could buy in the real world but she was not interested in my lecture. She knew I wasn’t going to give her any more money to stick in the machines and she was mad about that. “This is disgusting,” I told her. “This is revolting, loathsome, common, and tacky.”
“I want to do the roller coaster ride,” she said, referring to the most frightening of the VIRTUAL REALITY programs. “You said you’d let me do it.”
“I changed my mind,” I told her. “We’re going to the park.”
An hour later we were in the children’s park in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. The park is three acres of land left to the city’s children by a gentle patroness who used to be a teacher. There are trees and swings and covered picnic tables. There are trash cans hand-painted with underwater designs by a local artist. There is a gymnasium with a swinging bridge for daredevils. Adjacent to the park is the backyard of Mr. Penny Cates, age sixty-four, who has built along the separating fence a pen in which he keeps a gorgeous fighting cock and two hens. On this Sunday afternoon there were three newly hatched chicks, pecking in the dirt which their mother kept scratching up with her talons.
Aurora stared long and hard into the pen. She was transfixed, as the cock strode and preened and the unchicked hen brooded in the background and the mother hen scratched and the chicks fed. Sunlight fell down between the boards which Mr. Cates has laid across the top to keep children from throwing sticks into the pen. He came walking towards us now, a handsome man with bright red hair, wearing khaki pants and cowboy boots, his body as lithe and straight as a young man’s, his wide, freckled hands spread out beside his hips.
“Why did you put these chickens here?” Aurora asked.
“For children to look at,” he answered. “People used to fight these cocks. Put razors on their claws and let them fight to the death.”
“That’s disgusting,” Aurora said. “They ought to go to jail.”
“He’s in molt right now,” Mr. Cates added. “You come back in December when his tail is grown back in. He’ll be a beautiful sight by Christmas.”
“He’s beautiful now,” I put in. “The ruff around his neck is the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s very nice of you to keep these chickens for the children. What a nice thing to do.”
“They’re costing me money every day.” Mr. Cates spread his freckled hands and laughed out loud. “But there they are. Come back in two months, when his tail feathers are grown back in.”
Aurora stared deep into the cage, coveting the chicks. The mother hen scratched fiercely. Dirt flew out through the chicken wire and landed on our feet. Three little boys came running up. One of them was carrying a package of Cheetos. He stuffed one through t
he wire. He popped one in his mouth. I wanted to kiss Mr. Penny Cates. I wanted to polish his boots or send him a ten-pound sack of chicken feed or call him things like noble and inspiring and gorgeous and Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Proving Once Again I Will Do Anything for My Granddaughters
I NEVER SET FOOT ON A CRUISE SHIP NOR HAD THE SLIGHTEST desire to do so until my granddaughters called one cold January day and asked if I would chaperon their dance team on a five-day cruise to Nassau in the Bahamas. They had been invited to be the entertainment for the last night of the cruise. Their dance lessons are projects I paid for, and have been involved with for many years. I have sat for many hours watching them rehearse and have been the backstage mother for countless Christmas shows and recitals. My granddaughters are fifteen and seventeen years old. Their glorious dancing years are almost over. How could I say no?
So I am going on a cruise. I don’t like crowds. I don’t like to sleep in strange beds. I’m bored with the Caribbean, but, after all, it is only for four nights and five days. I love my granddaughters and the girls on their team, and I know and admire their dance instructors. I knew I would be in good company. Another thing I have never done is go anywhere with a group of women, but these young women are dancers and athletes. I decided to open my mind and broaden my horizons.
Another thing I don’t like to do is live on a boat. When I was younger, my husband and I kept a fifty-foot sailboat in the British Virgin Islands. We would sail it around for weeks on end, usually in the company of our two best friends. I think of that experience as a dreary round of rationed water, canned food and begging to get off and spend a night at Little Dix Bay. The idea of being on a ship with a bed and showers is new to me. “You’ll have to get a new bathing suit, Grandmother,” the younger girl said to me. “And, of course, a base tan.”
Things like the Truth Page 20
