MoMA

       The heavy rain clouds that hung low on the city buttoned up their bottoms sometime during the night.  The lights of Time Square flashed red, gold and blue: “Nuns Rock, The Book of Mormon, Best Musical of the Century. Samsung.  Corona Beer.  Disney.” All flashing, all calling to me. There is nothing in the world like Manhattan and there we were with only one full day to spend. 

      We woke late after a long night.  My husband, mother and I had gone to see Pricilla Queen of the Desert the night before.  It was playing in the old Palace Theater, I think, with its ornate gilded boxes and tiny flip up seats.  Pricilla is the story of three drag queens who buy a bus (Pricilla) and head to the Australian outback to play a gig at a casino run by the ex wife of one of the men and, unbeknownst to the others, to see his son.  I had expected fun…feather boas, platform shoes and Gloria Gaynor; but I had not expected the poignant moments, the sweet reality that the actors gave their characters.  I laughed and boogied, but I wiped more than one tear as well. 

      Before the show we went for dinner at The View restaurant atop the Marriot Marquis Times Square where we watched the sunset light the tall buildings as they slide softly past us, all full of stories. 

When we returned to our room after the show, I drank ginger ale from a Pricilla Queen of the Desert sippie cup and read the bios of every actor we had seen.  It was the final tags of those bios that touched me.  After the list of credits…the Broadway, the Off, the regional, the cruise ships…each actor had a word or two for someone.  Some thanked God.  Some thanked their mothers, their partners, their acting coaches.  Some sent kisses to their babies. One just said, “Oh Wow!”  My favorite. My sentiments exactly.  Just “Oh Wow!”

     Robbie and I decided that we wanted most to go to the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA.  Robbie grew up on Long Island in the 50’s and 60’s.  His father took the train into Manhattan each day to work as an auditor for the state of New York while Robbie rode the bus or thumbed a ride to St. Dominick’s High School in Oyster Bay.  When he could, Robbie would sneak into the city after school, take the subway to Chinatown and buy fireworks that he hid under his letter jacket and sold at jacked up prices to all his friends back in Bethpage.  Chinatown he knew and even a little of Harlem where he had worked summers for the Cohen brothers installing windows in the 6^th floor walk-ups and the well cared for brownstones, but he had never been to MoMA and always wanted to go.

      At first I resisted.  Not a fan of Picasso and Pollack, I wanted to go to the Met and pour for hours over the tiniest of antiquities, reliquaries and tiny ivory crosses, fading icons that still pulse with energy, Hittite household gods…bronze and nearly shapeless like the ones Rachel stole from her father and hid under her skirts as she and Jacob fled after robbing Laban blind.  But when we woke late and I realized that Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ and Monet’s ‘Water Lily” panels hung there, I was ready to go.

     We stopped for lunch at the Stage Deli.  It was recommended to us by a street vendor whose round, dark, dreadlock framed face was full of sparkle as she pointed us toward her favorite eatery.  Our waitress, maybe her name was Velma, was short and solid.  Her old SAS shoes, run over on one side, had clearly schlepped decades of matzo ball soup and pastrami sandwiches.  We gave her the opportunity again.  She talked about her love for New York, how she would never leave it. 

     When she learned we were from California, she asked us about the Michael Jackson doctor’s trial.  “I watched it for seven hours yesterday,” she said.  “Day off, you know.  I think he did something.  I just don’t know what.” 

     “Well,” I said.  “He either did something or should have, I guess.” 

     “Yeah,” she said, pointing a twisted finger at me.  “That’s it.  He should have.”

      After lunch we walked the few blocks to MoMA.  It is a sleek building with fencing covered with signs and drawings from people who visited the museum.  “I told you I’d come, Mom,” one of them read. Others had line drawings of dragons and daisies and short notes of awe and immortality.

I am always surprised, although I don’t know why, at how great works of art affect me.  They make me cry.  Every single time.  Especially Van Gogh. 

     The first time I really remember this was on sabbatical in Zurich. It was there that I saw one of his ‘Sunflowers.’ I just stood in front of that small canvass and cried.  That was when I first discovered that Van Gogh was my favorite, right then on a jet-lagged Thursday in a gray Swiss summer.  The energy nearly knocked me off my feet, like lightening bolts, like stand-your-hair-up-straight sheet lightening. I knew that there was something powerful and transcendent at the heart of the universe when I looked at that picture.  No, I always knew that.  I don’t remember a time before knowing that. When I saw “Sunflowers” I felt it, an internal goose bump of the soul. 

      It was the same with ‘Starry Night’ and ‘Olive Trees’ and Monet’s ‘Agapanthus.’ And so I cried.

     After we made our way through the exhibit, Robbie and I went to the café for tea and a cookie.  In line an older woman turned back to speak to us.  “Did you see the de Kooning exhibit?” she asked as if she could not believe what she had just seen. 

     “No,” I said.  “We’ve been up on the fourth floor.  I wanted to see Monet and van Gogh.”

     “Good,” she said with unexpected force.  “The one I just saw was awful.  I don’t get it.  What was the point?  I liked him in the beginning but boy, later, sheesh!  Don’t go. It was just awful.”

     By this time we were approaching the counter to order.  “Listen,” she said. “I’m a member here.  Stay with me and you’ll get a discount.”  So we sat with her for a bit. 

     “I’m 87 years old,” she said “and I still walk with no cane.”  She winked.  “And I’m spending all my money.  Who cares?  My kids don’t need anything and I’m having the time of my life.” For years she worked as a school psychologist on Long Island. One day she came home and told her husband she had just bought an apartment in Chelsea for $42,000. 

     “Get rid of it,” he said.  But she wouldn’t.  Now she lives there alone.  “It is a wonderful building,” she said.  “It is my family.  I can walk anywhere or take the bus.  I go to concerts at Julliard every week.  I come here and learn things every time. I just love my life.”

     Every part of her was alive, inquisitive, open, and ready.  When I looked at her it was like lightening, stand-your-hair-up sheet lightening. Like Sunflowers, like Starry Night, like tiny reliquaries and simple bronze gods; the woman at MoMA was a force.

     As we walked back to our hotel, I tried to memorize her face.  She was wiry and gray like a city pigeon.  Her skin was mapped and soft.  Her eyes were startling and full of fire.  Maybe they had once been the color of an iris in full bloom.

     “That is what I want,” I thought to myself.  “A well mapped face, full of life, waking each day thirsty for more.  That is what I want, to walk without a cane, to say de Kooning stinks, to eat a mushroom tart and tell strangers my stories.  That is what I want: to be just such a work of art.”

Broken Eggs

The year was 1979, deep summer in Alabama.  It was lightening bug weather and the rolling lawns of the homes along Highland Avenue looked photo-shopped green. Ratchety sprinklers filled the air with their rat-a-tat-tat sounds. Mimosa trees opened their pink skirts and closed them again.  Magnolias left their lemon scent on your nose long after you moved in for a deep sniff.  I was wearing a nice pink suit with a striped silk blouse, dolman sleeves and tiny cuffs.  The skirt swept nearly to my ankles and the jacket was cut asymmetrically.

            The women of St. Mary’s on the Highland Episcopal Church had invited me to tea.  They wanted to take a look at me.  I was, after all, getting ready to enter the seminary and they were not at all sure about it.  So I was summoned.  I don’t mean to imply that it was a particularly hostile audience.  It wasn’t.  It was a curious one. 

            In the reception room large vases of flowers sat on the mantle and the serving table.  The silver service was polished and the cut glass punch bowl had an ice ring with raspberries and mint frozen in it.  Lemon squares and pecan tassies filled silver trays.  Cucumber, cream cheese and olive and pimiento cheese finger sandwiches lay under a damp towel that was whisked off only when the trays were passed.  The women all wore their Sunday dresses.  No hats or gloves that I recall, but you could tell that some of the women pondered that decision hard before they came….phone calls back and forth…”What about gloves?” “I don’t think so.  She’s so young she probably doesn’t even own a decent pair of gloves.” (I, by the way, did too own a decent pair of gloves back then.)

            The bishop was there and everyone deferred to him sweetly.  He greeted each woman with a warm two-handed clasp.  I paddled in his wake as he introduced me to first this one and then the next.  He prayed over our refreshments and for the next hour I mingled.  Mingling is one of the things at which I am totally inept; an occupational deficit to be sure.  But I girded up my loins and proceeded to be as charming and respectful as I could possibly be. I was both wildly uncomfortable and deliriously joyful.

            After the mingling time, the bishop asked me to say a few words about my sense of call and why I was pursuing the priesthood.  So I did.  It all started, I told them, with my very first memory.

            The memory goes back to my grandmother’s funeral.  In those days in south Alabama, people were often buried from the home.  Such was the case with my grandmother.  She and my grandfather bought the home on College Street when they were first married in 1903.  Built in 1855 it is a wonderful old home with high ceilings and heart pine floors.  It is the home in which my father was born and in which he died 88 years later.  But I get ahead of myself.

            Somehow the decision was made that I was too young to stay home for the funeral so I was taken across the street to my cousins’ house to play with their new electric train set. 

            Here is where my memory comes in.  Just after crossing the street, I turned to look back at the house.  I remember the mourners coming up the sidewalk and across the porch to the open front door.  Both the men and women wore black suits and hats.  A few had plates of tomatoes or deviled eggs.  I watched them for a moment as they entered the house.  Then suddenly I saw an indescribable bright golden aura around the house.   I knew instantly that it was God and my journey toward ministry began right then. 

            I went on to tell them other moments that had led me to be there in a pink suit sipping punch on a Tuesday afternoon.  They regarded me quizzically.  Asked only a few of the questions so obvious on their faces and then began to collect their handbags and cake plates to go on with their summer lives.

            As I stood at the door and thanked each woman for attending, one grabbed my hand and would not let it go.  She was small and wiry.  Her nubby suit smelled faintly of closet and her salt and pepper hair was wound in tight curls all over her head.  Her eyes were a nearly invisible blue.  They looked like fire in ice, like an opal in the right light.  “Eugenia,” she said.  “Don’t blow it.  All our eggs are in your basket.”  It took my breath away. I gasped, audibly I think, and took a frantic breath like the way it is when the door closes one of those machines for lung testing.  “I’ll do my best,” I said, thinly, afraid.

            For years I dreamed of her, felt the weight of those words, the weight of ‘firsts’.  I tried so hard to be the best at everything.  I wondered what it would take to ‘not blow it.’  I wondered what the ‘it’ was that I had been so prophetically ordered not to blow.  I got an ulcer.  I changed my hair. I hid.

            As it turned out, no matter how hard I tried to live up to a those hope-filled expectations of me, no matter how hard I tried to juggle that basket, I rather spectacularly broke all the eggs in it eventually.  A broken marriage, a feminist bent.  There were lots of reasons, but suffice it to say the Episcopal Church and I disappointed each other and moved on.   I found my happy tribe among the Presbyterians…a stalwart sticky fingered lot who for thirty years have sweetly picked out the broken eggshells of my life’s messes and made a yummy omelet of it all. 

            Theologians talk about the upward fall.  In short that seems to mean that it was a great and wonderful thing that Adam and Eve screwed up so badly because that meant we got Jesus.  I cling to that.  My life has been one wonderful and ragged upward fall, each crashing moment leading to an unexpected grace that could have arrived no other way.  Broken egg by broken egg.

The Rhino Sisters

On Wednesday, Robbie and I visited the Safari Park of the San Diego Zoo.  I had been looking forward to this for weeks, so much so that I was eager to get up early (for me) so that we could head out into the hills to be first in line at the park before the August sun drove us and the animals indoors. I managed to get up, dressed and into the car with only the merest pinch of whining...and that all for show.

The park is about an hours drive from San Diego, up in the camouflage colors hills near Encinada.  When I first moved to California the summer hills, all camel and worn out green looking, made me think of a dog with the mange.  They looked like their hair had fallen out in tufts and that they had a distinctive and unpleasant itch.  I see them differently now, at least a little.  The tans and camels are not all the same.  The greeny black splotches are little oasis of shade for the creatures that scratch out a life there.  I can even see in the grasses a gracefulness, the capacity to move freely, that the lush undergrowth of my home state does not allow.

Anyway, we made the drive easily, traffic parting like the seas, and turned off onto the country road that lead to the park without so much as another car in sight.  We passed well watered vineyards, dilapidated sheds with hand painted signs for ostrich eggs and local honey.  The road almost seemed sticky with it. I was in a foreign land.

The park was everything I wanted it to be.  The early crowd was thin.  Misting stations sat next to ice cream stands.  Impossibly crowned birds peeked from behind bushes and one, an elegant crowned tinamou, even allowed us a peek at her jade green egg.  Robbie and I were caught trying to poach a feather by a wonderful keeper named Tom who showed us the egg.  (At the end of the day, when we came back for one more peek at the tinamou, Tom, surreptitiously tucked a small ibis feather in my pack. It was an offering.)

The reason I write tonight, however, is to tell you about the Rhino sisters.  We took a special cart safari that allowed us a close up look at some of the animals out in the wide spaces habitats.  There, bunched up together under a sturdy shade tree, sat about six female rhinoceroses.  Our guide, Casey told us that they were a part of conservation project to help to save the rhinos.

For years rhinos steadfastly refused to breed in captivity.  Every possible enticement was used to encourage it, but none of the healthy breeding pairs produced.  Finally, by happenstance, they learned that female rhinos, when deprived of the company of other females will suppress their hormones so as not to conceive.  They do this because in the wild they need to have several adult females to protect a calf from predators.  I mean why go through an 18 month gestation just to have the little guy gotten by a lion while a baby?  Without a 'sisterhood' they would have none of it.  When several females bonded into a group, called a crash (don't you love it), then they felt save to conceive, brought their hormones up to speed and had at it.  More than 50 of the endangered calfs have been born this way.

And there they were, a crash of rhino sisters under a tree in the summer sun, each taking a turn looking after the one young calf.  Huge, funny looking, 800 pound headed things, under a shade tree taking turns baby sitting.  It takes a crash.

As we lumbered around the park on our little cart with the impossibly bright, young, blond and beautiful Casey calling all of these amazing animals by name, I felt the truth of life well up in me.  The truth of this amazing life: it takes a crash.  In the very heart of creation lies the truth we all know, that without community, without others to share the load, without a tribe to call our own, ones who know all, see all and accept all, the tender young shoots of our own lives would be too vulnerable to bring forth either.
Without a crash, everything we are created to bring forth is stopped in its very tracks.  This is why I continue with church.  This is why I will go back tomorrow, after a long and luscious vacation, and take one more crack at it all.  Because it takes a crash.

Joanne and Johanna

I've started this blog to begin a conversation about the people, moments and stories that shape our lives, form our faith and give us courage and renewed energy and hope.  Especially the people.  Especially the women, those ones whose names go unremembered in the world, whose stories start small but ripple wide, who battered down walls when faced with them, who found a voice with which to face the world.  I'll be sharing about these folks here and hope that you will add stories and comments from your life as well.

Today I want you to meet Joanne and Johanna.  I grew up in the South, Alabama to be specific, in a Mayberry of a town with magnolia trees in the front yard, pine pollen coating the broad front porch and times full of changing winds.  More of those changes another day.

At any rate, I grew up an only child in the home my father was born in and died in.  Luckier than almost everyone I know, I grew up with a deep stability that my father by temperament and tenure imbued into me.  Except for the fact that I was sick all the time.  Very sick much of the time.  A preemie, my lungs have been my weak link all my life.  Much of my early life was spent in bed, creating kingdoms out of counterpane, struggling to breathe and spending holidays in hospitals with black and orange construction paper bats taped to windows and the hazy disorientation of oxygen tents.

When I was in first grade, I had to drop out of school and be tutored at home.  One memory that sticks out for me was of my mother's friend, Joanne, coming to the house to help me learn to read.  I don't remember my tutor, poor darling, the one who slogged it out with me day by day.  But I do remember 'Miss Joanne'.  There was something clean, no nonsense, calm and durable about her.  Dutiful, too, maybe.  "See Spot run" will forever be associated with her in bermuda shorts and a pressed blouse sitting next to me on my bed while my mother got a rest.  She helped to unlock a door in me: there were things on the earth that could run and words could make it so.  I thank God for Joanne.

Years later, battered not by illness but by church, I found my way to Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and to The Rev. Dr. Johanna Bos.  When I left the deep south bound for seminary, disappearing around the tree lined streets and heading north, first to Sewanee and then to Lousiville, I had never seen a woman minister.  I thought that I and I alone would make up for the singular lack of leadership estrogen in the church.  I quickly learned how small I was and how utterly dispensable.  Until I got to Louisville and met Johanna.  How I got on her good side, I do not know. From the moment I met her she decided that I had a voice to unleash in the world and she pushed and tugged on me until I began to squeak it out for myself.  I don't think she ever used the words, but Johanna somehow told me that I was enough for my life, enough even for the church, just enough.  She believed in me, still does.  I thank God for Johanna.

'Miss Joanne' unlocked the world of others voices for me.  Dr. Johanna unlocked the world of my own.

Who taught you to read? Who gave you your first taste of 'voice'?