Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’ve been here just about three years now. I guess it’s taken me a while to get settled in my old house, bought “as is” (more like “as isn’t” – at the moment, with all my renovations, I have neither a kitchen sink nor a shower. I just remember what my grandmother went through when she moved out to land on McKiernan Creek in the Depression … at least I’ve got working toilets.)

So many ideas to implement. So little energy, at my age, to implement them. But I do things bit by bit. I build my gardens – all sorts of magical herbs and flowers and even a few tomatoes. I raise my doggies – Great Pyrenees. Eleven puppies currently scamper around my back puppy room. My angora rabbits survive the summers. And I do in fact intend to spin their coats. As well as all the Pyr fur that accumulates around the place.

I love it heret. I am so settled and happy, and completely embrace hermit. My “best friends” tend to be the nice ladies at WalMart and the Foodland. After so much crazy life, living here near the river, with long walks in the woods, is exactly how I want to be.

I get back to this silly blog in any case. I am almost ready to launch a second site – greensmithcottage.com – that will showcase my pups and herbs and fiber things for sale. Even got a paypal button! (Like I am ever going to figure out how that works.)

Again, so many ideas. My Colbert County book – after trips out to the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma, and down to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery – well, it takes some interesting turns. As devoted as folks are here to history, there’s a lot of history they don’t know. Or at least don’t think about much. Stay tuned. And my other books start kicking me in the middle of the night as well.

At the moment, the eleven Great Pyrenees puppies take up most of my time. Mopping floors. Whipping up mush. Giving baths. Submerging myself in puppy hugs. If you’re local and want a pup, let me know! (Pyrs are the best. Mine take care of me. Lots better than the guns everyone advised me to get when I first moved into this house alone. Can’t kill yourself with a dog.)(Unless you starve them for days and then smear yourself with tuna fish, I guess.)

Back soon, my friends.

The arc that has been 2015 astonishes me with its significance. And one experience has saturated the entire year, has stayed with me through two hip replacements, a mother’s death, a 60th birthday, and the end of my 13-year Catholic odyssey.

I still haven’t made sense of the why or how of the experience. But I have come to know it intimately, almost like a physical object, and with a great deal of specificity.  Colpo di fulmine. Are you familiar with this expression? For some reason, I remembered it from one of the Godfather movies I saw over 40 years ago. Not the words themselves, but the expression’s substance.

J.M. Darhower describes it perfectly: “Colpo di fulmine. The thunderbolt, as Italians call it. When love strikes someone like lightning, so powerful and intense it can’t be denied. It’s beautiful and messy, cracking a chest open and spilling [out a soul] for the world to see. It turns a person inside out, and there’s no going back from it. Once the thunderbolt hits, your life is irrevocably changed.”

The only thing I would take issue with in his quote is his use of the word love. That’s not what it is. It’s a sense of inevitability that doesn’t have to be manifested to be real.

Colpo literally means a physical blow. That is precisely how it feels. Like you’ve been slugged in the solar plexus when you encounter the person for the first time. Fulmine is lightning, but it’s experienced more as sound than light. A thunder blow: a percussive effect like an increased atmospheric pressure, like the rumble that takes hold of your body when thunder happens directly overhead.  The English “love at first sight” doesn’t even remotely capture the experience. Colpo di fulmine is a deeply physical, particularized, even violent event.

What is strangest about the experience in my case: it can not be acknowledged. Indeed, at the moment it happened to me, I was invisible to him. It was a very specific moment. I remember the physical details with a weird lucidity.  And though there have been subsequent interactions, barring some synchronicity, there won’t be any more. For reasons I won’t go into here, there is an impossibility in the circumstance and context.  Even if it were acknowledged, it’s highly improbable that anything would come of it. Even were the colpo to be reciprocated. I use the subjunctive mood deliberately: a verb form employed to express uncertain possibility.

Another strangeness lies in the fact that, after all my adventures in the world among men for many many many years, this has never happened to me before.  I turned 60 last summer, for God’s sake. Of course I’ve been attracted to men. Lots of them. But this is different. I know because I’ve been around the block more than a few times. Nevertheless, it did happen. Darhower was right. It changed me forever.

The experience has somehow resolved in me the desperate search for other. Somehow the bar has been raised to an impossible height that no one else could engage. There’s nothing else to look for anymore. I found it, even if I cannot have it. Indeed, it doesn’t matter if I can have it or not. This only happens once in a lifetime. And I can no longer imagine an intimate interest in any one with whom it has not occurred.

It’s not as depressing as it sounds. Indeed, the experience brought me back to life in remarkable ways. It’s just a simple reality of my life now. I don’t talk about it much. It sounds nuts when I try to explain it to people. So I just let it live its quiet heart inside me. I seriously don’t think it will ever go away. Perhaps this is the way Dante felt about Beatrice? Or what troubadours wrote about?

I’m writing a villanelle about him. So maybe that’s exactly what it is.

There is a wonderful sign in the Milwaukee airport when you’re flying out of town, just after you’ve gone through security. You juggle your shoes and belt and ticket and ID in one hand, try to zip up your bags after their x-ray examinations with the other, and scour the immediate horizon for some place in which you might pull yourself together with a modicum of dignity. Dignity is in fact a hopeless dream as you limp barefoot without a belt or jacket or jewelry, dragging half-open luggage behind you, through any large industrial space.

But in Milwaukee, just when you are about to succumb to reality and sit down on the floor, you see a sign over a group of benches just ahead: The Recombobulation Zone. At this point in my story, you need to understand that discombobulation is one of my favorite words in the universe. Right up there with shenanigans. And discombobulation has been a fairly accurate description of the state of my daily life for most of my life.

But the notion of re-combobulation. How wonderful is that? In desperate moments like those post-security-frisk ones, and other even more existential contexts, recombobulation well describes a wrenching need in our lives. A hunger and hope for wholeness that hovers just beyond the horizon. (That fades forever and forever when we move.) Leave it to those wonderfully practical Midwestern people of Milwaukee to articulate that longing for us and wrestle it to the ground.

Recombobulation of course assumes that some sort of combobulation has taken place at some point in the past. It’s a sketchy assumption. As we get older, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that as combobulated as we may have imagined ourselves to be in any given era, it was probably an illusion. And yet. Assuming that at some point we did in fact have it all figured out and pulled together, assuming that the frayed nature of our more recent past has simply been a blip on the steady screen of our progress … there is in fact something very comforting about the notion of a Recombobulation Zone.

That’s where I’d like to imagine myself now. For me, the assumption of any previous combobulation is even more of stretch than it might be for most. Nevertheless. I feel that maybe, just possibly, things might begin to coalesce. Memory. Music. Words. Songs. The easy connection I’ve always had with music, in particular. To return to that. How it would be so wonderful to have music as the ground of the last chapter of my life.

Last week, my sister and I visited what we call Grandmommy’s house. In fact, the property belonged to and was nurtured for over fifty years by both our grandparents – Paul and Roxie Scates.  The “house” no longer exists. It burned down in 1996. Even when it was still around, “house” wasn’t just a house. Grandmommy’s house was also grass and trees and water, more than 5 acres of heavily wooded land  with almost 100 yards fronting Donegan’s Slough. The slough, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the area, is in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It was formed when TVA backed up the Tennessee River with the Wilson and Wheeler Dams. All sorts of low lying water ways, in this case McKiernan’s Creek, were flooded to create larger, peaceable backwaters off the river. My mother says that when she swam across the slough as a girl, she could feel the cold creek water still moving through its old course  as she moved across it.

When I was little, we visited my grandparents every weekend.  The only houses around belonged to the families that had lived in Colbert County for generations.  No one lived across “the lake.” We just saw trees on the other side when we sat down to summer dinner on the front porch. These days, there isn’t a porch any more. And all manner of horrifying things abound on the other side: condos and jet skis, multi-storied piers with savage looking speedboats, nasty McMansions and off-water trailer parks.

But even among all this ridiculousness, and even without the house, the land remains magical. (I will find a post-able picture of the log house soon … it was a large hand-built log structure put up by a group of hunter/drinkers for their clubhouse in the early 1920’s.) My sister and I visited at a perfect time. Late May, when all the green was still exploding, lush and full, but the mosquitos hadn’t yet arrived in force, and it wasn’t nasty hot. We didn’t have much time to explore. And we were more than a little wary of critters and snakes, seeing as how no one pokes around the property all that much on a regular basis any more. (Caveat Trespasser: a wonderful man and his wife across the road keep things under control as well as a sharp lookout, if you’re getting  any ideas. And he’s got a gun. More than one, actually.)

There’s something about a special piece of land that has the ability to lodge itself in your heart. The ultimate Recombobulation Zone. The ultimate center of gravity. Grounded earth memory.  An obstinate affection that refuses to die.

My mother is very sick. When she is gone, my sisters and I will have to decide what to do. The property would fetch quite a lot of money on today’s market. Waterfront condos! Raze the trees and squeeze a thousand in! A developers dream! But I will fight savagely against a sale. I have this dream:

I want to make it a music place. Muscle Shoals, after all. Rebuild the big beautiful house. Create a performance space in what was the huge great room of Grandmommy’s house. Put studios in the basement underneath. And bedrooms for family upstairs.

Both my grandparents would love the idea, I think. Both were musicians. It’s how they met, in a Methodist church choir in Knoxville that my Granddaddy directed (and played cornet in), and where my Grandmommy sang alto. She played organ and piano, too. After many years of music together, when I – their first grandchild – was about 12, Granddaddy bought Grandmommy a brand new reel-to-reel tape recorder to set down the songs she had written. She had a dream of making a demo tape – at the age of sixty something – to send to Nashville. She wrote a lot.  Maybe I should cover some of her songs.

In any case – a dream. Dreams are by definition recombobulations, yes? Music once again takes hold of my life. Muscle Shoals. Donegan Slough. A Recombobulation Zone. More to come.

I resist the blog thing. As you can see. Nothing here for a couple of years. I’ve been busy doing things. None of which are particularly interesting. Same old stuff. A failed relationship. Drudgery for money.

Like many other people my age, without the pressure of a manager or publicist, it is hard to keep up with these media responsibilities. Above and beyond the fact that I really wonder who might even remotely be interested in it all. And yet. there is a newness in all this that I instinctively feel I should tend to. I may not embrace it, at least in any passionate sort of way. But perhaps it is worth a sort of glancing peck on the cheek. Or a lovely kiss. Or a quick butt grab.
(I do still love looking at men who look wonderful in blue jeans from behind.)

So much of what I want to say, I am not able to say, given my current work, and the possibility that someone might look me up on line. There are responsibilities attendant to what I do. To children. To an institution of which I am not all that fond, one that has recently, in Ohio, required workers to sign six page contracts stating that they are, in essence, repressed fascists. It hasn’t filtered down yet to our diocese. Granted our fearless leader is a little slow on the uptake given his girth, but it is bound to arrive sooner or later. And I do in fact need this job.

At what point does one go underground with what one really thinks? Open an anonymous site. Tweet pseudenonymous tweets. I used to be pretty outspoken about things, and in my own voice. And in my own body. Racing around Manhattan, sneaking into Studio 54 with gay guys (cute girls could always get in with two gay guys … who weren’t particularly interested in paying the then outrageous $20 gate, and I was poor, so that used to be a problem). Sliding down Park Avenue blocks on ice with a bottle of scotch in hand and screaming with a best friend. Sweden. France. Falling in love over and over and over and over again. Adventures. A mountain of journals. A vast landscape of beautiful men. Three astonishing children. Art. Books. The world. Much have I seen and known – cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments. Although probably not in the way Tennyson thought Ulysses did. (I never liked Penelope. Circe is my model.)

Looking back, it hasn’t exactly been a remunerative way to go. I live paycheck to paycheck these days, and the checks aren’t all that big. I do love some of the things I do. The children with their open hearts full of wonder and awe. The dear parents who support me in my work. The people I find hurting that I can help sometimes.

But.

I need to do real work again. Ideas that rock boats. Music that informs life. So many passions toward which I feel a commitment, but from which I feel so removed.

Then there all the dreams. The literal night-time ones. I wake up in the morning feeling like I’ve been to the movies. Wild. But also the daytime ones, of which even at my age I can not quite let go.

There comes a point of necessary synthesis, an excruciating point at which one must pull things together into a final whole, or fail. Outlines and notes, no matter how brilliant, no matter if there are rooms full of them, they just don’t cut it any more. An articulated work must be wrestled to the ground. I wonder if I have the energy to do that anymore. Jacob and the angel. Do I have that energy? Do I have it in me anymore?

The energy to be beautiful. The energy to dance. The energy to teach music to the grandchildren of the people on the bus I ride in the morning. The energy to eat well and exercise and stretch and summon the patience to grow old. I used to have so much energy. Maybe one is given only so much of it in a life. And then you just run through it. Like a tank of gas.

For the most part, I just want to go to bed at night and read books. And, actually, there’s nothing wrong with that as long as the books are very good, and the bed is comfy. But that means an acceptance of an anonymity beyond which the world seems to have moved.

On continue, n’est-ce pas? Il faut cultiver nos jardins. Mine has some lovely herbs and flowers in it.

So much for my foray into on-line respectability.  My little “thank you for visiting” place-holder here, a gesture in the direction of what has served as an on-line resume, it also served its purpose, I suppose. At least it gave me something for resumes and applications, hundreds of which I sent out, none of which were successful, few of which were even acknowledged. Which leads me to believe, after these last non-gestational nine months, that I should fly my true colors again. Me, back. Me, writing. Me subverting the dominant paradigm, or at least pretending I do.

I admitted once to a friend, a pretty well-known professional writer friend, that I am probably much more interesting as a character than as a writer. “Oh, that’s not true,” he cooed in response, presuming (somewhat patronizingly) my comment to be some sort of self-denigration.  We were dating at the time, and he no doubt hoped to get lucky that evening. But I have in fact had a wonderfully “interesting life.” It embarrasses me to say so, but I have. Seared somewhere deep in my brain after all lies the T.S. Eliot condescension regarding  “people with interesting lives,” and particularly  people who seemed proud of that fact. Philistines! The work’s the thing, yes? Discipline. Sacrifice. Accomplishment.

Well, I try. Ideas swarm, but do little to ground me at keyboards. I worry too much: money, love, word order. It’s so hard to find just the right balance between inspiration and distraction.

But I’m back, a desperate stamina asserting itself against all odds. To hell with the pretense that I am a normal job candidate. My resume outs me on that one. As good as I am, I am not anyone’s sure bet in these economic times. On to projects which may or may not realize themselves. Riding Buses. Reflections on magic. Sheep and the Faery of Inwood Hill. Interlacings of fantasy and our dour real world. Class. Art. Beauty. Transcendence. Engagement. Justice. Hope. I draw maps. I make notes. I dream.

A month into a changed life, and I begin to settle into the gift I’ve been given.  The simplicity and hard work of a pared down dedication.  Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, I work on myself as much as my words.  A story almost done (I wrestle with the last paragraph like Jacob with the angel), an article pitched.  In the process, I see more. My own physical presentation included. I look at myself the way I look at everything else. (“Don’t worry. I’m a writer. I see everything.”  I really need to get that Graham Greene quote right.)  

Various distinctions emerge.  Style versus sensibility, for instance. The removed artfulness of self-presentation versus the immediacy of hungry engagement.  An awareness of the dance of social interaction even as one participates. So, on the one hand, I pull projects together,  sit long hours absorbed in my brain, chiseling words out of thin air. On the other, I defiantly reclaim my physical self. I read The Sartorialist in that eery postmodern way, in which text consists of image as much as word. (Is there really a difference?)  Acutely aware of its limitations, I work to hone style in the world as well as on a page. This is not easy to do with no money, but it is not impossible either. Indeed, money often gets in the way. Makes a person think style can be purchased instead of created.

There is a discipline involved, certainly.  But it is not a matter of control.  It is a matter of creation. One does not control chaos.  One engenders order within it.  The insides and outsides of cosmos.

 Botticelli’s masterpiece La Primavera  is known in English translation as The Rites of Spring (why do English translations always fall so short?). One set piece detail encompasses three women, laced in a dance, archetypally arranged.  They are meant to portray a deeply metaphysical symbol.  The Three Graces.  Indeed, the whole painting is meant to resonate at a deeply neoplatonic level. Hermes at one side, the beneficently fecund Aphrodite in Renaissance robes holding forth at the other.  But my experience focuses on the three dancing figures.

They are particularly special to me.  A huge reproduction of them, cropped in a lovely gilt frame (huge, like four by six feet at least), has been a part of my living spaces for 27 years now.  I know the time period exactly. My first husband had it delivered just before my second child was born, along with a rocking chair and a Picasso (reproduction) of a nursing mother and child, something sentimental from his blue period.

So. I reflect on the Graces and their depth. Their history. On my shifting walls over time, they have always been lovely, beautiful, and (yes) graceful, even in their reproduced, matte board, crazily overblown form.  The word Grace derives from the Latin. Gratia. But the true substantive source of these women finds its home in the Greek: they were the Charities (Χάριτες), together embodying that aspect of love that informs our word charity, a love that is generous, graceful, beautiful, other-focused, hopeful.  They were considered to be the daughters of Zeus and Eurynome, the goddess of broad pastures. In Botticelli, they dance, holding each others’ hands, glancing off beyond themselves, projecting a startling, unselfconscious beauty.  Their names, from youngest to oldest, are Aglae (“Splendor”), Euphrosyne (“Mirth”), and Thalia (“Good Cheer”).  

For the moment, my three graces are in storage.  I miss them. (And consequently think of them tonight.) I wonder how they might inform all the unfolding things that take place around me these days. I am, as a wonderful Jesuit I knew used to say in the face of poverty and incomprehension, hopeful but not optimistic. Yet I  nevertheless remain entranced by possibility. The three graces dance.

I will dance with them.

It is official. I am moving. And as if by magic, my little artisanal living space implodes, with books in stacks on the floor, heaps of clothes draped on chairs, unconstructed boxes waiting for the tape gun in the corners.  The biggest challenge, as always, is my library.  I don’t have books.  I have a library.  I use it.  I need it with me.  It is the only thing I have at this point to leave my children. Unfortunately, all the wonderful little wine boxes I’d saved up for years and used and reused (they are perfect for moving books), well they have finally given up the ghost.  At least I have a whole month to beg new ones off my current wonderful wine seller.  (Blanchards in Allston, I name-drop shamelessly, on the off-chance the mention will soften them up in response to the box-begging thing.  Not that they don’t know me pretty well already.  But maybe that’s something I shouldn’t write.)

Perhaps because I am older, perhaps because I have done this so many times over the years, but I can’t seem to summon that productive frenzy that has always attended one of my moves.  The wild dreams, wilder hopes, wildest possible impulse to something more than mere continuation.  I am no longer like the hero of the Odyssey, on his boats, blasting recklessly through adventures heedless of the consequences (ostensibly to get “home,” but we know better … I would have stayed with Circe, myself).  Or, in my case, indefatigably brandishing brooms and color-coded labels, churning out lists, tossing out clothes, trashing files. 

I am more like the Ulysses of the Tennyson poem “made weak by time and fate.”  Movement is more difficult. The hunger for adventure certainly remains.  But it has become so much easier to contemplate than to implement.   Might there be more of an elegance of movement these days?  A gracefulness to replace the frenzy?

The review of a life that accompanies a packing-up is harder as well.  I am haunted. Memories of things read and ideas neglected.  Of projects finished and abandoned.  Of men adored whose names I can’t quite remember. (One indication of my age – I still have piles of letters from some of them.  Even from some of them who thought I had followed their “instructions” to burn them. Ha!  As if a writer who used to be a lawyer ever burns anything. Especially when someone tells her to.  I also keep tapes of phone messages. Ha, again! Ten cuidado, muchachos. But I digress.)

This move, in any case, has a very, very different rhythm to it.  I am hopeful that this is a good sign, but I’m not convinced.  Perhaps it is good that I do not expect too much, that no move-mania overtakes me. Move-mania invariably packs a horrible hang-over, and I am kept from any meaningful work for months.  This time, I feel a more settled hunger: to work, to play music, to dance a little.  I’m not certain this will be enough to get the truck loaded.  But it has to be. There is a short story almost done.  A book proposal ready to send out.  A novel itching to move beyond the first chapter and outline, characters squirrelly and mutinous because they’ve been standing around so long with nothing to do.  My dear friend offers me the opportunity to attend to these things. More importantly she gives me the gift of once more being among dear friends, who have known me forever, and for whatever reason still like me a little.   

But there’s always Tennyson and one of my favorite poems in the world: “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades forever and forever when I move.” Somehow, I begin to understand that I’m never going to get there.  But it is no less beautiful for that.  Perhaps it is more important that I can still push off.  And will until I die trying.

I had the most wonderful dream the other night.  Full of deep beauty.  There was no plot to speak of, beyond the fact that I was falling in love with a man whom I didn’t recognize at all, whose face I held in my hands. Whose lips I touched lightly with my thumb. I kissed him when I knew people might see. (He didn’t mind.) Somehow, I had to present a cake to people, and it kept falling apart. But he came up behind me, and miraculously pulled it together. I put two small sugar rosettes on top to make it lovely.

But the beautiful center of the dream was a most extraordinary vision: a lemon tree.  Nothing like an actual lemon tree.  This one had a trunk and bark like a tulip tree.  It was only as tall as a regular plum or apple tree.  But the trunk was magnificent, straight, noble, worthy of boats.  I couldn’t have reached my arms around it, it was that wide.  The tree boughs hung thick with large green leaves and thousands of lemons, some yellow, some still not yet ripe.  The limbs swayed gently at about the level of my face, which I nestled among them, amazed at the sight and smell of it.  The man with whom I was falling in love in the dream, the man I have never met, reached out and picked one for me.  “You have to taste this,” he said.  “But it’s still cool.  You have to warm it first in your hands.”

Warm it in my hands? How could a lemon picked off a tree just out of the sun be too cool?  But I did as he said. I held it reverently in my hands for a while.  And after a moment, I pulled off a bit of the skin so I could taste the flesh. It was delicious. Sweet. Nothing like anything I had every tasted.

What was this dream?  The Garden of Eden in some sort of converse? A rooted desire and completion, instead of temptation.  A wild hopefulness that life might still hold the possibility of wonder in a profusion of magical lemons.   A tree and its heavy branches and the gift of my unknown lover.

That is how I like to imagine Eve’s gesture.  The serpent a most ancient wisdom symbol.  The lover acting not out of hubris or disobedience,  but wonder. Inspired to the extragance of God. Ruach among the leaves of The Tree.

Which gets me (albeit a little jaggedly) to apples and honey.  As we go into the new year, let us imagine the sweetness, not the dogmatism, of the apple.  The beautiful cross-cut star at her heart. Her seeds, her hope, her fragrance. And let us dip our apple bits in honey together and revel in the sweetness of her as we imagine the wonder of a new year open to us.

Shanah Tovah!

Now of course I know that today, August 24, is more correctly known as the Feast of St. Bartholomew.  I went to mass this morning. I saw the priest in his red vestments.  The liturgical color is red on apostle feast days, not to tell you anything you don’t already know, dear readers.  (Indeed, one of my wonderful liturgy teachers used to preside in red on July 22,  Mary Magdalen’s feast day.  It was an aggressively inspired act. She is not of course formally recognized as an apostle. This is despite the fact that  she was in fact the first apostle, strictly speaking, that she was “the apostle to the apostles” strictly speaking.  She did not, however, make the “twelve” cut for the Church’s purposes.  But I digress.)

Back to Nathanael! I like him. I think of him as a poet, dreamy, lost in revery.  Nathanael is  Bartholomew’s first name, his Hebrew name.  Bartholomew is Greek. It means “son of” somebody, Tholmai, or something like that.  Everybody had Greek and Hebrew names in those days if they were Jewish. It depended on what circles they moved in, which ones they’d use.   Bartholomew is only called Nathanael in one of the Gospels (John: 1:45-51).  But it’s probably what his friends called him most days.  There is a most wonderful scene of him under a fig tree there. 

But why do I bore you with these things in an ostensibly literary blog?   Because.  Nathanael looms large in one thing I write,  a novel called Sheep.  The story gravitates around  a (completely fictional) chapel in which a huge stained glass window holds pride of place.  It was created by John LaFarge, father of a well-known Jesuit, and rival of Tiffany in the 19th century American art world.  The scene it depicts in deep Victorian style:  Nathanael among green fig boughs, the rich leaves bending thickly around him, his face looking up, startled, as heavens open and the angels of God ascend and descend upon the son of man.  (Cf. aforementioned John verse.)

I completely made the window up. But that’s what we do, yes?  We are human beings. The narrative impulse defines us as a species. It is how we understand the world.  Writers know this. They say it over and over again.  A.S. Byatt and Penelope Fitzgerald spring first to my mind, but that’s because I love female British novelists.  I bet even Elizabeth Bowen said it somewhere.  And of course my beloved Marianne.  (She even translated Leben Jesu into English from the German, you know.  But I digress again.)

So to return to the title of this post, which should technically be my theme, not that there are express genre requirements for this blog stuff, but I was well-trained in literary form (Northrop Frye was the big guy when I was in school):  The Feast of St. Nathanael.  I will think of this as a more expansive sort of feast day than its more liturgically correct counterpart.  Full of stories and wonder.  Not the political nastiness of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, that horrorific Catholic-Protestant blood lust in the streets of France a few hundred years ago.  Not the Church’s rigid insistence on 12, when a more fluid 13 that incorporates a woman’s understanding might be more reflective of reality (not to mention more productive of parousia).

But my wonderful Nathanael. Whom, the story says, was seen under the fig tree.  I think of him there singing songs to himself  before Philip got ahold of him. Telling himself stories of angels.