Free Drycleaning

Over Valentine's Day weekend, my new husband and I traveled to St. Louis, Missouri. I had never been to Missouri before, ("Who would go there? It's a place called mis-er-y!" I can still hear my little sister say from many years ago), but it wasn't too bad: a broad, friendly place with snow on the ground.

We went for a wedding, our first as a married couple. At the reception, the bride and groom were toasted by the best man and the maid of honor. We've all been to weddings. We've all heard the usual offerings of meager prose and poorer poetry put forth when an honest "Best wishes" would have sufficed. But at this wedding, the maid of honor gave a startling and beautiful confession. To the best of my memory, here it is:

"I couldn't confess this to you earlier, my friend, but now that you are safely married, I can tell you this. In my capacity as maid of honor, it was my job to bring your dress with me from New York, where you had the fittings done, and where I live, down here to Missouri. On Thursday night, just before my flight, I had some pins in the dress for some last minute fixes. I pricked my finger. I didn't notice I was bleeding. But later, when I went to pack up the dress, I saw it: down the front, drops of red, like Jackson Pollock's later work. Horrified, I went online to try to find the best cleaners in New York. And on yelp.com I found the aptly named New York Cleaners. With three hours before my flight, I grabbed the dress, ran across town on the Subway, and with trembling hands turned it over to the Korean man behind the counter. He pressed the fabric down, examining the stains, and his brow furrowed. This worried me. 'Wait here,' he said, 'Let me see what I can do.' A while later, while I contemplated whether you would ever forgive me, the dry cleaner retured and held out the dress. It was perfect: without stain, wrinkle or blemish. 'How much do you think you owe me for this?' he asked, eyes merry and triumphant. 'I would gladly empty my bank accout,' I responded - though I'm a young professional in New York, and my offer would still not have been a large one. 'But,' I said, 'Tell me what you think is fair.' He cocked his head at me and looked me over in assessment. 'It's free,' he said at last, and he handed me your perfect, white wedding dress."

And that, dear readers, is gospel.

From the Archives: Seeing Bobak in Berkeley

Written maybe early 2009? Not sure.

Bobak. Like always you were willow-thin, with skin the color of almonds, and hair black and curly as a dark lamb's. You, the most polite of boys. You used to say, "Thank you, sir," to the referees when my father, your coach, subbed you into the back row at volleyball matches, but you laughed at your opponents through the net and from the bench, taunting them in the tongue of the shah. They could not understand you. That day, though, you were walking down College Avenue. Your shadow was long in the orange light, and it crossed mine, coming up the hill towards you. The air was warm. I had not seen you since we left high school, and after we said hello I took it upon myself to spoil your afternoon by telling you that my father died, believing, as I still do, that you loved him a little. When I told you, you were very polite in your condolence, as I knew you would be, and I still wonder why I told you. You would never have known otherwise, and your afternoon would have gone on warm and beautiful in the orange light in Berkeley.

Notes from the Frozen East

Snowmageddon has entered day five? Day six? Who can count? It's all a great white drift. Trees kneel prostate under their crowns of snow, like princes called too early into kingship. Roofs threaten to collapse under the burdens, and workers walk the frozen rooflines gingerly to shovel it off. And still the snow falls.

Within, days bleed together, busy, cozy, restless. And always the beeping of Snow Cats, the scrape of shovels, the tromp and slide of galoshes through snow deep as the thigh, driven into sculptures by the wind.

Snow Day

The week before Christmas, I shoveled the driveway. That's no act of breaking news, but for me it was a first - and what a first! The sky had opened and blasted the earth with twenty inches of chilled whiteness. My roommate's car was blotted out, a vaguely vehicular hump. The stairs had ceased to be.

So in the first clear morning after the storm, when the sky was penitently blue, I began to shovel the driveway. It's sixty or seventy feet from the front door to the road. Three or four hours later, with swollen pink blisters on my hands and the sense that my bones had dried to powder with the effort, I retired inside, believing I should, mercifully, never see such a snowfall again. Not here in D.C, the capital of sloppy winters and torpid summers.

But six weeks later, and behold: the snow comes on, cold and silent and perfect, a great hand falling to hush the mouth of the world. Twenty to twenty-eight inches of it.

In. Out. Often.

Some changes come without foresight, like a car pulling out from a blind driveway. While the double-shot of adrenaline pumps through your heart, you put on the brakes and invoke your sacred loves. Only afterwards do you have a chance to assess the change wrought in you by what you never saw coming.

And some changes you see coming from a long way off, like a little town on a long stretch of open highway. Miles away, you see it, but for a while it seems no closer, just a dark pinprick that might be a bit bigger than a moment ago.

But events along awaited do come at last. My big event is here.

Today is our wedding day. Many things shall end today, and many begin. I woke long before dawn and could not sleep again. I feel calm, but charged, and alert to the end of my fingertips: alive to divine presence and all that's good to see, smell, and touch.

But with the constant, slow release of adrenaline, I often catch myself holding my breath. I make myself then take long, slow, steady draughts of air, and it occurs to me that we ought to pray in the same way that we breathe: in, out, and often.

I remember because prayer must be the breath I breathe today - especially today - because today is not, in fact, about the dress and the tux, or the cake and the flowers, or even, at its most profound depths, about the bride, the groom, or our loved ones. Today is about God. For God it was who brought two strangers on the intricate paths that brought us to the right place at the right time, and God it was who over the last months made a man and of woman of no relation into kin of soul. And God it shall be who laughs the loudest with joy to give Adam back his rib again.

In all the imperfection that mars us and the world there works a perfectly good God. Today I stand on a mountaintop where for a brief transfigured hour, the goodness of God in all of life, which we celebrate in the ceremony and the reception, is easily traced.

And to give him glory, I breathe and I pray: in. out. often. May I do so still when we descend again below the clouds.

Whatever joyous or hard thing awaits you today, breathe, dear friends, and pray: in. out. often.

Advent Thoughts

This season of life, while not the busiest I have ever known, has pulled me in the greatest number of directions: everywhere a task to complete, a deadline to bear. Endeavoring to succeed in all, I fear to please in none. I have, for example, been an indifferent blogger, neglecting even to mention that in a month or so, I will marry.

Not that I regret what has felt like a  necessary silence on my part. This blog is not intended as any kind of a faithful record of life events, nor even a confessional. And I have studiously avoided a discussion of issues and events that intimately concern others besides myself. There is a time and a place for such things, and the Internet, with all its advantages, is neither. That, and my time has been otherwise and joyfully apportioned in all that led to the engagement, and all that has followed it.

All that aside, yes, I am about to most happily join the ranks of those that have and hold til death do them part. And that is the background of today's writing.

One of the fascinating things about marriage in America is that people give you stuff - lots and lots of stuff. It arrives on my doorstep nearly every day in a cardboard box from a major department store, swaddled in packing peanuts and plastic wrap: a rice cooker, silverware, a crockpot, candlesticks, bamboo sheets, wine glasses, a toaster. An avalanche of possessions without which, apparently, my intended and I will not have a hope of felicitious union. I am grateful for these things, truly I am. The Kitchenaid mixer has fulfilled a lifelong yearning, and virtually everything on our registry will have legitimate practical use in our daily lives. It's not that it's too much, but rather that, as I seem to know instinctively, it is too little . . .

A cake platter, to hold together two disparate souls? A blender, to help us put off selfishness every morning for the next fifty years? It is a ludicrous proposition.

The averge fourth-grader knows that marriage is an institution in peril, and that the reasons for its disintegration go much deeper, most often, than what "stuff" has or has not been accumulated. Why, then, do we offer material answers for what is basically a spiritual challenge?

I am having my second (of three) bridal showers today. The year's first snow falls earnestly outside the window. And the question I am asking myself is this: What present does God give for weddings?

In just that question, I find much to help me.

For the first and most obvious answer, during Advent, is that God joyfully gives Himself wherever He is welcomed by glad and eager hearts. And this instantly reverses the marriage odds in our favor. If a husband and wife have, living in them and through them, Christ the Lord, their chances pf prevailing over all smallness of heart are immeasurably improved.

Secondly, God gives marriage to married people. It is His creation, one of the things He allowed us to bring from Eden. And though I stand still outside the covenant of marriage, I cannot help but think it must improve matters to always view the marriage as a gift - not as an obligation, or as a competitor against one's own self-realization, but as gift that, like a young tree, holds the potential always to grow larger, more fruitful and more beautiful so long as we give ourselves to tending it.

Maine Diaries: Scraps from a Writer's Notebook

Main Street, Bar Harbor, Maine - July 2009

Ray's Barber Shop

Across from the Grand Hotel, Ray's Barber Shop looks even less grand than it otherwise might, but through no fault of its own - it never tried to be much, with its siding weathered to the color of bad milk and shingles put on to keep the rain out and who cares what they look like. It's hard to know whether Ray is a woman, or if the woman I see now, sixtiesh and heavyset, with pouches under her eyes and a comb in her quick-moving hands, is Ray's heir, or Ray's employee, or if she bought the modest shop from the original Ray in some past year and kept the name to please the regulars. In any case, she moves expertly in the execution of a $12 haircut for a customer. The customer, a young man, reclines in an old-fashioned barber chair before the glass front, in full view of passersby on the street, though there aren't many in the middle of a Tuesday morning. The barber's long gray ponytail swishes against her back as she runs the tines of the comb along her patron's scalp. They share a joke and she chuckles. The pouches under her eyes get to looking like drawstrings purses cinched up too tight. She brushes the cut hair from his shoulders with a soft-bristled brush and sweeps the great green bib from around his shoulders in a practiced movement. When he's gone, she plunks herself into the chair to watch a program on the small, boxy grey television in the corner by the window, picking at her gums with short fingernails and swiveling the chair a little left, a little right, when the program makes her laugh. It's a short, amused, pale little sound, obstructed by her fingers in between her teeth.