Breaking Point

Waking up is a wearied acquiesence to the onslaught of daylight.

Minneapolis. 467 guests. May 15.

Orlando. 450 guests. May 17.

The last hurdle is so near, but I find myself gauging my remaining strength, and despairing that it will not be enough to get me there. That shortfall would usually mean a bout of tears or a case of the flu (A convenient, temporary sickness can be embraced like a brother if you're tired enough.), neither of which would presently be very helpful or permissible.

How can I speak of the difficulty of so good a thing? I cannot contend with the point of what I do; I cannot resist the sight of the blurred eyes from a brothel photo, their compelling prods to expend myself like so much water until my head bobs in front of my computer screen, hour after hour in a dayless week without the prospect of a weekend. But I am human and I am tired, and it grows hourly harder not to whine. I suppose I'm already whining.

Connie likes to lecture me on time management and setting personal boundaries, like in the car last night before she dropped me off at the Dorch. She must feel like she's talking to a boulder. I can feel myself glazing over, uncomprehending. Who does she want me to say no to? Her? Which off the impending urgencies shall I slough off? And onto whom? We are all rats that will not leave the ship.

As soon as I ask the question, I am haunted by the line, "Cast your cares upon him, because he cares for you." And my soul answers back, "Even these?"

Perhaps I shall have to start trying it, as little as I understand it. Soon enough, I shall hit the breaking point. It will not be pretty.

The Good Mundane

It's been amost a year since I moved here, so inflated with the expectancy of new things that I could hardly sleep. I remember that someone once told me I was brave for picking up and relocating so suddenly. I never found much valor in the act, because there was never much fear to deter me.

And now, one day is very much like another. I have worn myself into a comfortable groove. Few new people. There are, I will admit, new places, but I visit them like a sailor stepping off the familar bulk of a ship, superficially, before turning back to the sameness of the sea. The tasks that I took so much trouble to learn I now do on auto-pilot. Restlessness set it at 9 months of work. In my own self-analysis, I think I must still be timing my life to the school year, when I was never expected to stick to anything for more than nine months at a time.

These days, I find it takes the most courage not to climb new mountains, but to stay doggedly at the good, mundane thing already in progress. To not lose the grandeur of this sight because I have seen it before. To do the thing again and again, and to not grow tired of doing it well. Perhaps the most heroic achievements in this world are not one-time acts of bravery, the defining moment when you hoist the flag on some Iwo Jima, but the persistent, drawn-out good deeds that hardly seem good in their middle. Raising a child. Caring for a sick person. Rising, like sun and moon, to light the same old orb. Gary likes to say that half the battle in life is just showing up, day after day. Jesus likes to say that those that put a hand to the plow oughn't to look back.

For My Sister's Son

To my sister's son,

In one month we expect your arrival. You will go from a warm, comfortable, quiet pocket, where you ruminated on the sound of your mother's heartbeat, and you will have a terrifying exodus into another reality, a loud place with assaulting smells and piercing lights and cold gusts of air. You will have to cry to get your food, your warmth, your oxygen, that things that used to come you intravenously, in capillary caravans. But you will get used to it. You will have a good mother, and a good father, and they will wrap you in felt blankets and cradle you, because your mother knows all about oxytocin and bonding and ventral contact. Your mother went to Cornell (and so did your father - that's where he fell in love with her), you know, even if that doesn't mean much to you now. They will keep you at just the distance that your wary eyes, getting used to all this glimmer and contrast and shape, can focus on the beautiful symmetry of their faces. And right away, you will know how to grasp their fingers.

Judging from your parents, you'll be a very good-looking boy, but don't ever worry about that. From the very moment that you're born, we will declare you to be the most beautiful thing in the universe, even though you maybe a little wrinkled and pink and egg-shaped. That comes of being new to the neighborhood. And if we think you're beautiful from the start, imagine how much more handsome you'll get!

And you'll grow! How fast you'll grow! You will crawl and walk and scrape your knees and play with the cardboard packaging instead of your presents the day after Christmas. You will learn how to spell words like Mississippi, and you will learn how to mock the Harvard hockey team, and you will be Joseph in the Sunday school nativity, and you will learn to drive a tractor.

And you'll have cousins. How soon I cannot promise, but I'll do my best.

And oh, my sister's son, you will have love. You will have the love of your grandmother Shannon, with its strength like granite and its tenderness like rain. You will have the love of your parents, whick you will never know the bottom of. You will have the love of your aunts and uncles from every side. (Even before you're born, I am your partisan, your cheerleader, your storyteller, and you have an entire valley of relatives whole introduce you to El Sarape.) You will have the love of God and all his angels, and you will spend eternity trying to bend your mind around it.

Come right on time, but make it soon, my sister's son.

Frenzy

My first thought to zip though my mind this morning was, "Dear God, no!" Judging by the fact that it was past dawn, I knew that I had slept too late. Last week, I focused all my energies on Seattle, which was just as I should have done, but next week I have Minneapolis and Orlando, large banquets both, and challenging because one in a new city and the other one is overflowing with uber-rich corporate sponsors that can't afford to be slighted. All of which means I will eking every day for each possible moment of work, and makes me frenzied and a little disgruntled, and all the more prone to error and misjudgment. But listen to me. Have I forgotten who is my God? Dear God, no.

The Someday House

Someday I will have a house, a rambling, Victorian house, with back staircases and tall windows and a decrepit dumbwaiter, like one of those that has a flag flying over it on embassy row. It will be in the middle of the city, so there might not be a garden, but there will be little balconies overflowing with green things, and a sun room with potted palms and rocking chairs. And I will fill the house with strangers, every room. They will be foreign students, professors on sabbatical, missionaries waiting to deploy, an old woman whose basement has flooded. They will be people "in between," people who need a place to be loved and cared for a while. We will put in an industrial-sized clotheswasher and a kitchen that would make Julia Childs weep for joy. We will eat together in a big dining room, and afterwards we will tell stories and sing songs and read books. It won't cost hardly anything to live there, because it will be the ministry of a church, a church's way of extending hospitality (either that, or I will have become a famous author, and we will all live off the royalties ;)

That is what I dream.

Framed

When mentioning David Conrad Thoner to a stranger, I speak with succint, clinical precision about "my father" and "his long illness", I suppose to spare them the embarrassment of expressing appropriate sympathy, or to spare myself the vulnerability of grief. It's just as well. Some pains are too intimate for everyday wear.

But in the ocassional moderated reference to "my father," God forbid that I should forget when I called him Dad, or Daddy. There is a tremor in the last. Father is a word that establishes hierarchy, a word or lineage and distance, a parlor word. Dad is a word at once careful and casual, neither too intimate nor too removed, a word that I could say over my shoulder walking out the door. But daddy. Daddy is a word for a dependent child, a word of dangerous vulnerability, and trust, that if it were not so joyful, would be terrifying indeed.

This is a daddy story.

No one could ever accuse me of patience, especially when it comes to giving gifts, and more so when I made the gift, and still more when the gift is for someone I love. When I was ten years old, I took a piece of thick, fibrous paper from the art shelf at the bottom of the linen closet, the kind of paper that traps a water bead. Hunched at the dining room table, I painted with water colors for a full day until I had a group of ducks swimming in a marsh. I decided to give it to Mommy for her birthday and Mother's day, which usually fall within a few days of each other. (I had done dioramas for the last several holidays, and it seemed like it was time to make a change.)

All it needed was a frame. I went into the garage where I knew I could find some wood scraps, odds and ends left over from my daddy's construction projects.That and a fingerful of Elmer's woodglue were all I needed. The pieces I found were the wrong size. They wouldn't fit together properly without additional cutting. Undaunted, I grabbed a pencil and a handsaw, made a few marks, and set to work. I moved the saw back and forth, listening to it whine like an asthma attack while I struggled to reposition my grip on the sweaty handle. I barely made a fleck of sawdust. The concrete floor of the garage bore into my shins and the tops of my bare feet.

Daddy's silhouette, battered thumbs, longs arms balanced on the meat on his shoulders, blokced the side door of the garage.

The whining stopped.

"What are you doing?"

Silent, I consider the fold of his sinewy arms, choosing the details to win his sympathy.

"Making a frame. For Mommy's birthday presence."

The whining starts again. I look down at the crooked pink pencil mark and clamp my fingers over the wood, holding it down as if it were an enemy to be strangled.

"I can help you. There's a better way to do this."

I bristled. I liked my solitude, my resourcefulness, my struggle. I liked him at an appropriate distance. But on this occasion he persisted. He took the saw from me. He laid aside the wood glue. He admired the ducks. I remember to this day the tone of his voice while he praised them and studied them, as though it were a map of some new star. He put me in the car and drove me the arts and crafts store. He led me to the back where a woman in a dark blue smock presided over lustrous right angles of picture frame samples. I would have wanted one of the ornate frames, dripping with gold spray paint and fake antique finishing, but they looked expensive, and I had an old woman's abhorrence of spending money. Besides, the ducks, biological innovations all, would have been overwhelmed by so much gilded melodrama. In the end, Daddy helped me pick an off-white matting and a dark mahogany-colored frame, as thick as my Daddy's thumb, flattened out by errant hammer blows. Behind the glass, behind the matting, my ducks looked calmer, more sure of their pedigree. I was so immensely pleased that, although it was the 7th of March, and not thr 13th of May, I only held out for three days before begging Mommy to open the present and let us both enjoy my warmth and pleasure in giving the gift.

I forgot about that story, the trivial chapter of domestic history, for over 10 years. But of a sudden it returned like a road unexpectedly looping back on itself. When I thought of it, I also thought about The Hiding Place. I have read the covers off of two paperback copies. In the early chapters, Corrie Ten Boom remembers anecdotes from her girlhood, little matters, unremarkable exchanges with her father, that proved themselves parable and prophecy as her life unfolded. My Daddy was no "Grand Old Man of Harlem," like Corrie's elderly watchmaker papa. But as soon as the memory was given back to me, its parable announced itself, as if to say, "Nothing is wasted, lost or forgotten!"

The meaning, if I may claim it, was this: We are works of art, you and I, innovations in the sphere, unprecedented acts of the Godhead, and we are meant as love gifts for the Creator. However smudged the imago dei, we sense its presence, and we struggle to frame it. Well, we have these scraps, we say. They are not quite at the right angle, and the grains do not match, but we set to work, industriously sawing away to frame our lives with some of the elegance and glory that our spirits insist we were born to reflect. And then Daddy comes in. We wish him distant (hardly Daddy) but not too distant (not quite father). We want Dad, benevolent, consoling, malleable. But in he comes, with a tender disregard for all we thought he was going to do for us, tossing away the scraps we have labored over to such ill effect, rubbing the dried glue from our spent fingers, and imploring us to let him help, to let him frame the life he formed, the better to offset it beauty, to underline the its dignity.

Beloved, let us be framed.

Blue Vistas from the North Tower

In the 1900 block of Fifth Avenue, two towers of the Westin Seattle rasp the sky, two beehives of concrete and winking glass. Each tower, north and south, has forty-six floors containing thirteen rooms. On the thirty-eigth floor of the north tower at 42 minutes past dawn, I admire the cool blue vista as the city melts into a May morning. Muscular clouds thwart the emptiness of the sky. A glittering boa of headlights, ever weaker, marks the trek of commuters.

When I came to Seattle, it was raining. Wind minced the Sound into frothy whitecaps. The Sheraton did not have room for us, so we got wet and chilled jumping in and out of taxis until we settled like damp birds at the Westin. In light of the weather, I decided to skip the trip to the original Starbucks and Pike's Fish Market, where I am told they juggle halibut like a nautical Cirque de Soleil. After a steaming shower, I felt restored enough to appreciate the simple fact that it was raining in Seattle (have you ever known the joy of a place being true to character?), and to enjoy the invigorating view of mountains that wreathe the city like a promise of grandeur.

I took the bus to Yarrow Point, just around the corner from where the Microsoft barons subsist in a 66,000 square foot auditorium (for surely such a dimension cannot be a house!). Wesley Jo came and found me. She took me off to her rented house onto the shore of Lake Washington. The first thing I saw was a pink dogwood tree rejoicing in the backyard. The second was Raymond, her husband, who looked, as always, like a male clothing advertisement, even in a Rosie the Riveter apron. "We can do it!" the apron proclaimed while he gave me a hug and went to make sure he had not burned the tortillas.

How can I say it? It is good to be among old friends. It is like finding a forgotten picture of yourself in which you look surprisingly young and happy.

After a dinner of ceviche ("This is only a variation of ceviche," Raymond demurred, "a Mexican sort of ceviche" as if to temper my enthusiasm) and shrimp fajitas, we retired to the living room to read the compline by candelight, pressed arm to arm beneath a quilt, and then to look at their wedding pictures. A beach of parchment sand on Florida's eastern shore. A loose and easy sunset. Shoeless vows. Seagrass, tender fingers on the guitar, and a raucous tango on the hard-bought wooden dance floor.

The showed me the sanctuary where they and Mary hold contemplative services on Sunday mornings after breakfast, a fellowship of three. Raymond laid out for me his animal skins, a zebra and a blue wildebeest (he did not bother with the ostrich), with which he plans to upholster some chairs.

Over some petite servings of chocolate ice cream, they asked me how I am handling my twenties. Hmm. I do not yet know whether I am comfortable addressing my life in decades instead of the usual increments. A season, at most a year.

The blues are now clear greens, translucent yellows, muffled greens and baked burgundies. The wind dies, and the American flag on a neighboring building hangs now like a limp hand, now like a salutation to someone it might recognize.

Starbucks baristas brew venti caramel macchiatos on a hundred street corners. Seagulls wheel far below me to pick up the crumbs of someone's dry croissant. Traffic moves. I sigh and yawn and smile. Another day, another banquet. Good morning, Seattle.