Catering to the Coward

I ask you: what is a dental spa? I don't pretend to know. I've never been to one. But it seems like an infamous case of euphemism to associate dentistry (which was and in many places still is a medically-sanctioned form of torture) with the relaxing atmosphere of a spa. Maybe it's not an exaggeration. Maybe they really do slather your face in a lavendar-infused pore-refining mask before they let loose on the root canal, but I have my doubts.

Anyway, I first saw this interesting word pairing on a billboard while waiting for my train at the Ballston metro station. (I had eleven minutes to kill, and you can only play so many rounds of Yahtzee against your cell phone). Even more absurd than the description of the dental spa was its chirpy little slogan: "We cater to cowards." How on earth, I wondered to myself, did that one slip by the focus groups? What business in its right mind invites you to call yourself a coward (even if it's true when it comes to your oral pain threshold)? What human failing is more censured than the white feather, the instinct for self-preservation run amuk?

It's true enough the courage is not as prized as it once was. Maybe that's for the best, as lots of nasty things have been done in the name of valor. This generation, at least, cannot be accused of inordinate bravado. We are a very pragmatic, self-compassionate group of people. We are willing to blink at the shortcuts that minimize our pain. But still, a remnant would agree with Winston Churchill that courage is the chief moral virtue, because by attaining it we secure all of her sister: honesty, charity, faith, perseverance, patience and generosity. All of these require us to thumb our noses as some very provocative, petulant fears. Personally, I have never had much patience with cowardice, except where it occurs in myself and goes by the alias of prudence.

The longer I stood there, waiting for the blinking footlights to herald the oncoming train, the more I was haunted by the inevitable conclusion that catering to the coward is all in a day's work for me. I fear financial insecurity, so I am only as generous as sociability requires. I fear disapproval, so my work ethic is based on avoiding censure. I fear exposure, so I deflect conversations that might uncover my human brokenness.

Cowardice is an alluring thing, because while you are at it, you feel pragmatic and reasonable. It is only afterward, when life becomes crippled and samll, that you see how your fears have backed you into some remote corner of your expansive, God-given inheritance. The subtlety of fear is that it claims to have cornered the market on reality. The debestating potential of what you fear looms so large and rational that nothing else seems safe, or even possible, but to heed its mandate.

But fear has a secret weakness. Its apparent inalienable truths are only phantoms. Every argument of cowardice begins with a "what if" clause. We do indeed have a choice, to live lives that are big and grand and bold, to win back our inheritance, to put our weight on tested promises instead of idle threats.

What does it mean? I hardly know. And frankly, catering to the coward is so comfortable (he's a pleasant houseguest, practically family, when undisturbed), that I hesitate to unseat him. But harder, stranger things have happened. And there is Help in time of need.

Periodic Desolation

The rose dies on the windowsill. For all the water that I give to it, for all that I tenderly push it into the anemic winter sun, its sallow leaves freckle and yellow, the hands of an old woman. Even its buds do not open, but shrivel into papery, rustling wads, like failed attempts at origami. I try not to take this as a personal affront -- sleep deprivation makes me overly sensitive.

2:34 am. Sleep evades me (I cannot even catch sight of it). After church, I made myself a plate of Bethany's dolmades for dinner- brown rice swaddled in grape leaves and bathed in crushed tomatoes. Take them cold from the refrigerator. Eat them standing up. Do yoga in my church clothes in the living room, while Honeydew watches, wondering why I cannot appreciate stillness.

Sometimes I cannot sleep in an empty house. Every room shines bright and cold with the wattage of Edison's inventions. The tinny voices on the radio share witty repartee, or Judy Garland sings on the television, a Technicolor ballad of unrequited love. Their noise is the worst kind of silence.

But out of doors I trust the night, the star-strewn cavern of sky, rich with cricket song. Alone under some bower of limbs tipped in silver by a timid moon (she shows but half her face), I cannot imagine feeling fear or loneliness. I never sleep so well or so soundly as I do in a forest glade. It is on the inside, where electricity makes an enemy of shadow, where the refrigerator is full of food to eat alone and the latch is on the door --yes, on the inside, that solitude is a periodic desolation.

When I was perhaps four or five, our house in Alamo was under construction. One morning, I came downstairs in a set of pink fleece footsie pajamas. There was a sheriff in the living room. It cannot be that I remember him well, but my imagination is happy to embellish the shards of memory. I see him as an armchair officer of the peace. His hair was thin and combed pitifully over the shiny pink dome of his head; his gut strained against the light brown of his neatly-creased shirt (it was just after the holidays, now that I think of it). He must have cruised the tree-lined boulevards of our white-collar, white-skinned suburbia, stopping too often for a donut hole and a cup of thin, scalding coffee, if only to have something to do. But that morning he was there to write a report.

During the night, some men had come into the house, prowled around, and stolen a video camera. Fortunately for us, the thieves were idiots. Because the property looked like a construction site, they assumed that no one lived there (though three little blonde girls were asleep just above their heads) and came looking for some power tools to steal. Later, they were caught with the video camera and cassette of Thoner family home movies. The bumbling crooks had actually taped themselves in the act and then kept the evidence within easy reach of the police, courteously supplying the key evidence necessary to convict them. The greatest loss of the evening, when all was said and done, was a piece of cinematic gold starring my oldest cousin in the bathtub. It was taped over (to the relief of at least one person).

Since then, I have not liked the night indoors, even in the ultra-safe neighborhood where I grew up. I compulsively closed blinds, drew bolts, and tried to make the dog sleep on my bed (The woman on "60 Minutes" said that a fierce dog is the best deterrent to a predator.) And still I would like awake, wishing that there was a lock on my bedrom door, wondering if anyone could sneak through my window by climbing up the geranium planter. I siezed upon reasons to fear. My sister once told me about two little girls playing in their front room at night (just as we were then), who looked up to see a peeping Tom crouched at the window. To this day I am chilled by the mental image I have conjured of those mad eyes, open to impossible widths past the iris, protruding like hard-boiled eggs, watching me with foul intent in a clouded mind. Then Polly Klaas, who lived perhaps thirty miles away, was abducted from a sleepover in her parents' home, and never again seen by the living. Tense as the mattress springs on which I lay, I prayed for legions of ten-foot warrior angels, with swords of steel and wings of bronze, to encamp around our property. I fought to talk my fear down to size and at last fell asleep.

Waiting in Line

Fourteen degrees and I missed the bus. That did it. I flagged the first cab to come chugging and puffing up Columbia Pike. It's worth a few dollars to me to keep my toes. The driver wasn't sure if my spare change would get me as far as I wanted to go, but he let me into the oasis of heat and pulled into traffic. With pride, he looked into the rearview mirror and told me that I was his first passenger on his first day as a taxi cab driver. I offered him congratulations.

Yonas came from Ethiopia three years ago. After his father died, he came to the United States where he worked as a valet parker while learning English as a second language at Northern Virginia Community College. His words are carefully unaccented.

We whiz past the Euro-Latino Market, where, like every day, two dozen men are waiting for someone to come by and offer them work. Their heads are invisible beneath the outsized hoods of grey cotton sweatshirts, ubiquitous as uniform. Their breaths come like the puffing of miniature locomotives. Fourteen degrees does not change their reality, or, more to the point, their illegality. They will do anything for whatever anyone will pay them. The debates on immigration, raging just a few miles away, have everything to do with them and little to do with the senators waxing grandiloquent about border sanctity and "waiting in line." Waiting in line is all that they do.

A Georgetown Wedding

The bride is not dressed and no one has heard from the caterer. All at once, the front door opens, brimming the yellow foyer of the Reid Alumni House with the doused glow of a late winter sun. The delivery man in the doorframe is all impudence and zippered black leather, topped with a sprinkling of post-pubescent acne. He sulks beneath the white colonial columns with their grace of evergreen garlands.

You got a delivery from Teaism?” Part demand. Part question. All Brooklyn.

Aimee and Becky usher him in, relief etched into their faces; the rest of this exchange is hardly to be missed, but, hurrying up the curving staircase, I hear no more of the tea-delivering hoodlum.

Catherine stands in her customary pose, neck arched over her Blackberry screen while her fingers fly like a switchboard operator. It’s time for the dress, a tricky business. For a while we only study the tonnage of silk, judging the best point of entry. In the back, there is a complicated series of color-coded strings for forming the bussle. They look like parachute cords. For all I can tell, you could get married in this dress or jump into occupied territory with the 101st Airborne Division. Four college-educated women stare on, bemused, until Bethany intervenes. She has two married sisters; bussling is something of an expertise. Finally, wish a flustered fastening of dozens of groom-frustrating buttons, the deed is done.

We stop. Catherine stands there in her dress, silk flowing to the floor, and we take self-conscious pleasure in the sight of her, and ourselves with her, a woman on her wedding day among her friends. Something joyful and solemn and achingly tender steals into the narrow slice of time, and then all reverts to happy frenzy.

Catherine frets at the hem by her feet.

“It’s still too long,” she informs Lynn.

“Well,” replies Lynn pragmatically, “You’ll just have to grow, then, because there’s no time to shorten it.”

No time. That’s right. We have one hour (or is it less?), and the bride dispatches me across the campus to reroute the wandering florist. Up the narrow Georgetown street I walk, with its crumbling bricks and its postage-stamp gardens, past the primly painted pastel houses with shuttered glass, like demure antebellum ladies. The shadows lay themselves down early in the feeble afternoon, and I find the florist, heavy-laden, at the bottom of the concrete stairs along the service road. When I met Catherine, I lived seven stories straight up from here; but that was before graduation, before Baghdad, before Pearse, and before more things than can be told. There is an agreeable symmetry to things so far afield coming home again.

In Dahlgren Square, the fountain is silent beneath the bower of bare-limbed trees. The wedding guests soft-shoe up the steps into the Chapel in pairs and whispering clusters. The women clutch shawls against the chill breath of December. Beside the Chapel, a rough wooden crèche has been set up. Joseph, brooding and protective, and a blonde Madonna with skin like old piano keys kneel together on the hay. The manger lies empty for the Christ child to come. It is the eleventh hour, and they keep vigil.

Catherine waits outside the Chapel at the bottom of the steps, clutching her bouquet of blooming sunset-tinted roses. Her brother, Tommy, and her father, are there, immobile as two pillars, while Catherine hovers and flutters like a white moth. She will not let anyone see her, but she wants to supervise the delicate choreography of the processional. She sends Bethany and me up and down the stairs as reconnoiters. The groomsmen (where could they possibly be?) are not in their places, and what if the music cues prematurely and the bridal party starts down the aisle too soon?

Tommy, at least, is beside her and can be made to answer.

“Are you ready?” she asks.

His sotto voce reply holds equal parts teenage languor and brotherly affection: “I dunno.”

But the groomsmen have materialized in their proper places, and the heady strains of “Gesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” come spilling out of the doorway. Bethany smoothes Catherine’s train into a lake of sheen. We heave open the cumbrous doors, and the wedding guests rise and crane their necks to see the processional. Her bridesmaids precede her with their pungent sprays of winter blooms and sprigs of eucalyptus. Leaving her father’s arm, she comes at last to her groom, and they sit side by side for the service.

In the Chapel, Gothic arches draw the eye upwards. Advent candles flicker in an unstill air, and the bride’s pinned hair gleams like spun bronze in their light. Father Scholl opens the service. An unbleached linen stole hangs around his shoulders, and a cord cinches his white robe around his middle. His hair has fled from the dome of his head, and as if to discipline the grey remnant, he keeps it cropped close to his skull. His ears are as large as collection plates. His voice reverberates from the ceiling, a gravelly, resounding echo like waters in a cavern, enough to lift the basest word to a homily. Next, on the lips of friends and relatives, come the words of the Apocrypha, the Canticle, and Revelations, pitting their ancient sobriety against the riotous Catholic pageantry all about us: the royal purple of Advent candles, gargoyle fantasies, and star-crowned saints frozen in their rhapsody in glass of saffron and aquamarine.

Father Scholl delivers the homily. Catherine fingers her bouquet absently; she wears her half-lidded, listening smile as she sits beside Pearse, handsome in his suit and his cranberry tie. (May no one remember what went in to the acquisition of that tie.) Father Scholl’s hands flex in lithe counterpoint to his ambling words. As he warms to his point, he quotes Michelangelo: “Lord, let me see your glory in every place.” Marriage, the priest affirms, is a golden opportunity to see the Maker’s glorious mark in these bodies of clay.

He moves on to the sacrament, calling the assembly to witness. Pearse stands to the priest’s right, Catherine to his left. Her tulle veil pours down her back like water fast-frozen. Pearse says his vows first with a voice confident, unstammering. His expression is intense and altogether happy. I have seen it like that once before, when he was lost in the strings of a mandolin in a June afterglow. Catherine follows him, blinking slowly as she speaks the binding words, as though she were reading them deep inside herself and announcing their truth to the witnessing world. The crucified Christ, suffering in wrought-iron love, looks on.

They exchange bands of gold for their left ring fingers. There, it was said in past years, lies the vein that runs straight to the heart. They kiss to a torrent of applause, and Catherine’s face blooms into her nose-crinkling laugh. She looks up at Pearse with bride-joy.

Father Scholl prepares to send us away. As Pearse has waited for his bride, he reminds us, and with joy received her, so pines the world for Christ and at Christmas receives Him. Then, the wedding guests pray “Our Father” with one straggling voice while the bells of Healy toll out a carol of benediction on the chilled winter air.

Catherine walks over the threshold on Pearse’s arm to the tune of a furiously happy harp song.
“

Is my veil okay?” she wants to know.

Back at the Reid Residence, a young man (I think it’s Pearse’s cousin) wanders around in a kilt. An older man in a grey suit, very pleased with his own wit, quips,

“What’s under the skirt?”

“I don’t discuss that in such formal settings,” replies the kilt-clad youth, not missing a beat.

In the corner of the music room, a thick-girthed Christmas tree twinkles with strands of alternating lights. A pianist and a violinist settle themselves with some difficulty in the corner, tuning to each other. First come the civilized chords of the piano, and then the keening cries of the violin, like a wild bird coaxed to sing to the written notes.

Ethan, Heather’s three year-old son, runs amok beneath the dour portraits of Jesuit priests. The guests cluster around the music and jam together at the food trays, nibbling on orange scones and crustless cucumber sandwiches. The women cross their legs on low settees, consigned to sit by their merciless stilettos, while their husbands and boyfriends cradle champagne flutes and practice their party jokes. We find old friends from this city of brief sojourns, friends who have wandered to graduate school or a new job or a new spouse. Or, as we sip our tea, we acquaint ourselves with strangers and test out our degrees of separation. There is a subtle competition as we rehearse aloud our relationships to the bride and groom. (Who has known them the longest, and who can tell the best stories?) Tension mounts. We are waiting for them, and the party cannot begin without their arrival. Tonight, I cherish a new vision of what heaven must be: a ravishing reception, glorious with anticipation for the Bridgeroom of Heaven to bring His Bride, radiant but hard-wooed and hard-won, over the threshold.

The kilt-wearer heralds their arrival with a flourish of bagpipe notes. In the high-ceiling entryway, the couple doles out hugs and smiles to a throng of well-wishers, who repeat one another without consciousness or qualm. Catherine’s cheeks flush with happiness and evening air, and perhaps a bit with champagne. She glows like a lit taper, and her dress flows beneath, billowing, as mellow and fluid as melted wax in the chandelier’s glow as she stoops to chat with Ethan.

The violin and the piano sing together again, like an earlier century. The whole wedding feels Victorian as the guests mill in the large, open house, an uncomplicated wedding of community, born of place, even in this city of transience.

The Baghdad gang mars this image somewhat. Their jokes all refer back to the Green Zone, and they discuss possibilities for the partition of Iraq between gulps of Darjeeling.

When it is time to cut the cake, Pearse feeds Catherine a strawberry smothered in white chocolate. A member of the Baghdad gang suggests that the cake was provided by the KBR.

“We had to have the initials taken off it first,” Pearse explains dead-pan.

No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, the joke goes, because KBR fed them all to the Green Zone staff. The cake, however, is delicious.

I rest for a while in a corner. Ethan creeps up next to me, little-boy bored, and clambers into a regally-upholstered chair. He fiddles with a wooden nativity scene. Camels go flying; wise men fall prostrate. Suddenly, he puckers his lips in a frown and makes a befuddled announcement: “I’m wet,” as he watches a puddle collect on the chair and the floor.

Together, Heather and I look in vain for something absorbent. We finally settle regretfully on some lovely gold cake napkins, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I dash to the kitchen in search of cleaning products. The violin and the piano play on in a sonorous duet, and I hope the music covers my laughter, which the mortification on Heather’s face first bade me stifle. By the time I reach the kitchen, I am howling, head thrown back.

As the evening wanes, Pearse gathers Catherine into the music room. While the guests watch, he leads her in an abortive attempt at a waltz. There is less dancing than laughter, and finally none at all, as the piano and the violin surge bravely on. Bride and groom seem to care little for the steps, but they are husband and wife just two hours old, and they are young and glad. Just wait a little, and the steps will surely come.

Asleep in Jesus

This morning, snowflakes weave indolently on their earthward slide - not to stick, but just to remind us here of the cloak of winter.

In Shenandoah, the only life is on the ground. Wild chives spring up around the roots of pignut hickory trees, like shocks of sylvan sea-green hair. I stop to fill my water bottles from a shallow spring and treat it with iodine. Lord knows why, but filtering my own water makes me feel much better about the state of my life. At the crossroads of Keyser Fire Road and the Pinebridge Trail, above the nameless gorge, two hikers pause to greet me.

"Thru-hiking?"

"No, just a day-hiker."

Would we even have seen each other on Connecticut Avenue, on a Metro car, in the crush of bodies and the cocktail of urban smells? People are so much friendlier in scarce society, where the bare trees loom monstrous and large, like sleeping giants that might awake. Such impossibly tall creatures, gnarled with worried plant dreams. They are waiting for the ten-thousandth coming of spring.

Down to the left on the lariat trail lies Bohen cemetery, a low-walled relic from the brief peopled days of this ancient valley, before the government sold the land at auction for a pittance, and sent the inhabitants where they willed. Lichen gnaws on the gravestones, unhurried. Time and entropy are on its side. The writing on most is a vanished loving thought. Some have only irregular pieces of shale to mark their plots. Unnamed but to God. This makes me sad and happy at once. Near the hingeless wrought-iron gate (I move it and lay it reverently against the wall), are the markers of John and Mary Bohen. Grander than most around them, but modest as tombstones go. It must have come up a rutted track on a mule-drawn cart in ages past, ordered from Winchester or Front Royal, when those were the edges of this smoky blue world. Asleep in Jesus, they both say. Waiting for another coming. Like the trees.

More to Pinocchio

There is more to Pinocchio than we like to credit his story with. The hunger to be real, to be human, to somehow achieve the legitimacy of true personhood -- we struggle for the trappings all our days. In high school we dream of entering the real world. Real people can vote; they don't need parents to call the attendance for them. In college, finding it still delayed, we sense it lies around the next corner. Real people don't feast on EasyMac and watch Grey's Anatomy until 4 am. Reality will come after we graduate. After we get a job. Buy a house. Buy a car. Have 2.2 children and a golden retriever. Are you a Christian? Then you will be real when you become "broken," or perhaps when you find a church with "authentic community." But the quickest way to render something false is to give it a label.

Then when are we real? Not when we become real ourselves, but when we discover that God is, and the nature of reality undergoes a profound metamorphosis.

Rhapsody in Orange

Dear ones, forgive the hiatus! The best-laid plans of mice and bloggers often go awry. I have been kept from my post (or rather, posts) by the flu's nasty older brother and a case of ulcerative keratitis (if you're curious, click here). One morning, as I walked down the street to the bank trying to shield my eyes from sunlight and staggering not a little bit, I had a good feverish laugh at the realization that I looked like I have a boyfriend named Thug the Killa. But enough of such unpleasantries . . .

Great love affairs draw appeal from the forbidden, where love "springs from our only hate." Think of the Capulets and the Montagues. Tristan and Iseult. Diabetics and sugar.

So it is with me and cats. My attraction may have been innate (I pretended to be a cat until an embarassing age), but I was raised to believe that cats were nasty creatures, scratching, aloof little blighters who lived to destroy your draperies and heave up unseemly hairballs. My grandfather, armed with a crossbow, once spent a night of murderous insomnolence lying in ambush for a neighborhood tom, but that is a story for another blog.

But then I met Honeydew, a cat of cats who moved into my apartment when I was otherwise quite alone. Her name is direct and to the point: she is as fat and sweet and orange as a melon, and "Cantaloupe" was too hard to say. She came declawed and never leaves the apartment. She spends 23.5 hours a day sleeping wherever the sun is pouring through the windows; and although she never seems to move, she follows the patches of sunlight wherever they go. She doesn't have a discernible muscle or bone in her body. She purrs perpetually. Petting her is like massaging a whiskered pillow with an internal combustion engine. Rhapsody in orange.

Egad - I have become a single woman in love with her cat.