Help. Chasm. The Penultimate Part.

The painter says he believes Descent from the Cross is nearly finished, so I suppose I must finish the stories I set out for myself when I first thought through these ideas of Help and helping. Five stories, five chapters falling out before me in order like a fan, like stones in an arch. Nearly finished. I decided early to post them every other week to give me time to think. To wait. To avoid. Of course it was inevitable I would arrive at the one I have been carefully skirting in my thoughts all along. One, two, three, four, and here it is.When I was very tiny I began to have awful nightmares of falling. They stayed with me till in college my dream self set me the task of learning to fly. That was rough and messy and took about a school year. I got it in the end, and the dreams went away. This story has to do with falling.

Horatio. You will lose, my lord.
Hamlet. I do not think so; since he went into France I have been in continual practice. I shall win at the odds. Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart--but it is no matter.
Horatio. Nay, good my lord--
Hamlet. It is but a foolery, but it is such a kind of [gain]-giving, as would perhaps trouble a woman.
Horatio. If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forstall their repair hither, and say you are not fit.
Hamlet. Not a whit, we defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come--the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't to leave betimes, let be.
Hamlet, V ii

For my twelfth birthday my parents took my sisters and a bunch of my friends to Lehman Caves. They also took lunch and cake; candles, even. This was an unusually elaborate birthday celebration in our family. The adult I am now thinks it must have been quite an undertaking for my mom as it would have been an all-day excursion, including the healthy drives between Kanosh and the caves. I think there were about six friends plus the six of us. We had a fifteen passenger van. The important feature of our van was not the number of people it could legally carry (admittedly handy on occasion, though who cared what we drove, really, we stacked up, it's not like safety was an issue, I'm not sure the van even had seat belts) but that its four bench seats gave each sister a berth in which to lie and read while our parents drove us in the summertimes through glorious and scenic sections of this great country of ours. That they were glorious and scenic I have on hearsay. "Suzanne!" my mom would say, "Sit up! Sit up right now and look at this! Just look at this!" I would sit up, look carefully around on all sides, say, "Mmm!" and lie back down and read. In my defense, the balance of drives made in the van were between Kanosh and southern California; this instilled in me very low expectations of landscape potential. By the time we drove the coastal highway in Washington and Oregon I was a grownup myself, sitting in the front seat to claim my own slice of view, fighting a bit of carsickness, braking sympathetically and uselessly as my dad took the cliff turns at bracing speeds, his own eyes on the view, my reading times reduced to the drive from the eastern edge of the Cascade rain shadow to Kanosh. So, a goodly chunk. I still find when I read while riding in cars or buses or trains, even through England and Wales where I might be expected not to read at all but rather drink in view to the last drop, I carefully scan the windows every so often, on all sides, making sure there is nothing I should be looking at. Mostly in Britain it's just trees and more trees or in America dirt and more dirt but you can tell when the light changes on your book page it's to come up time for a look round. I discern from comparative conversation with fellow passengers who eat up views like they're starving that I don't miss much. (Close and careful readers may by this point have worked out that I mentioned four van seats, one to a sister, while all the world knows there are five of us. Well, Close-and careful, by the time the youngest came along to skew the math, the oldest was gone.)

What, you are asking, has this got to do with a birthday party on the Utah desert?
Nothing. I'm avoiding it.

The caves are amazing; if you haven't been, you should go. We all thrilled and grabbed for each other when the guard turned out the lights and thick solid blackness slammed us into our separate existences, revealing us suddenly as we always are, really are, so totally, so utterly alone in our heads that we are forced to reach instantly out to the humans on each side, squeezed by true dark into a spasm, a hiccup, of unpremeditated hand-holding if only to regain balance and a sense of things as they truly are outside our skin. Are you there? Are you? I am. I am. An unlooked for chain of twelve year old girls with the odd sister haphazardly strung among us, shuddering, astonished and giggling, gripping tightly where we joined, eyes stretched wide on black that pressed between our open lids like cotton wool, listening with horrified joy as a United Stated Forest Ranger told us there was a mile of rock between the tops of our naked eggshell heads and the fresh, free air and the wild and natural light. He paused to let that sink in and in our blindness we strained our ears for any sound that wasn't people trying to breathe normally in air gone thick and damp, cold, used-up air the earth exhales. He allowed me plenty of time to wonder if he had abandoned us below the desert rocks, finding his own way back through passages he'd come, like a mole, to know, while we felt our way alone, round and round this great room till we fell down in a heap in the middle and then he would come back like he always did saying, see, silly, I told you it was dark, now come along, and lead us out, blinking into the autumn desert evening, fading light easier on eyes grown used to the black. There are reasons I'm uncomfortable in the dark, I don't find it leads me to good narrative. Then our guide (who was of course right there all along, just imagine) brought us back one step into the known world, holding up a star in all that dark, a lighter from his pocket with the flame turned up rather high, pushing the black back a bit from our center to our edges where it turned and pushed back at us. He told us all the hundreds of people who came to the caves before the sanity of electricity only saw their wonders by the flames they themselves carried and that, worse, the first man who came here came alone, with only matches. I thought how easily a flame blows away. Embracing our day and age, the Ranger turned on the safe, fake, canned light modern men take underground with them and we breathed easy in that light without bearing all the burden and knowledge of the weight of earth or the flickering uncertainty of fire. Some hands we dropped now, flustered, some hands we held. And we walked after the Ranger in obedient single file through light that ran comfortingly ahead of us, chamber to chamber, room to room, leading us on from hidden wonder to hidden wonder while the black licked us from behind, closing down the way lest we be tempted to stray. The Ranger shepherded us meticulously, counting and shooing. "Can't go on till I know you're all here, don't want to lose anyone." He said it standing close to me and I guess my dread (I was swiftly spinning out a few pleasant little tales concerning "losing anyone") showed on my face because he said quickly,"Oh, it's not that I would lose anyone, it's that people are always trying to stay behind. Can't have that." And off he went, into the next light, us behind him, looking where he pointed, scanning all around, watchful lest a casual caress from a human hand halt the creative work of centuries, vigilant in our stepping that we mar no wonder belonging to our descendants, chastened that even our moist breathing and weak dependence on light brought to this mysterious, delicate labyrinth algae that, unchecked, might one day shroud its glories in the same slick, dull green draperies cloaking the stones in the creeks where we played on summer days. It was marvelous.

We ate lunch and cake afterward in the picnic ground, easy in the air, casual in the sun now beginning its descent, slanting through the shortening daylight of an autumn birthday. It was chilly, I remember everyone had on coats. We conscientiously picked up the bits of wrapping paper. Dad said, let's drive home through Eureka, I've always wanted to see it.

It's the way things happen. You take an extra drive on a birthday. You go up to Jerusalem for Passover. Some people see the unfolding and ready themselves against events, some people are unfolded by events they never thought to look for. If we could see our coming future simply by looking around, would we dare take any steps toward it at all?

I didn't check this, I'm going to tell it as I remember it. I've never been back so you're getting a foreshortened view, barely twelve years off the ground. My youngest is twelve, just barely. I put her in my place in this story as I shape it here, she keeps me honest, helps me fathom what must have happened. How it unfolded. My dad parked the car. We got out. Is there a ghost town at Eureka? Or near there, maybe? That's what I remember. We all jumped out of the car, itching to run around, to explore. I was full of myself; my mom had made me a great birthday, everyone liked me and I had lots of presents. I took off the instant my feet hit the ground, racing myself to the top of a little hill nearby with a funny beam standing upright on it, a railroad tie, I thought, running, racing myself to the top.

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place?
Psalm 24:3

No one came after me. I was a pretty fast runner, not the fastest in seventh grade (late birthday) but maybe still in the top ten or so. I was going to run, I don't know why, to the top of that little hill, past the upright beam, and jump up and down in the middle up there. Yelling, I think. These were my unformed thoughts as I ran. Not a story, just intent. About halfway up the hill my goal shifted. Now I was running to that railroad tie standing up there alone, I was running to grab it and swing around. My plans changed again, of course, about ten feet away. I had had sufficient experience with railroad ties to want to avoid the mass of infected slivers that would have followed any serious swinging. My whole goal was to just run my heart out to the tie and grab it. And I did. It was standing at one corner of a square mine shaft which bloomed under my feet, opening like a mouth, a wound, and into which the gravel and dirt I kicked up as I stopped were now falling soundlessly, without a whimper or a scream, down and down into velvety blackness without a bottom. There was no sound as they vanished. No sound. No sound. The tie stood at the corner of the pit as solidly as if it stood in stone, bearing my weight and the speed of my headlong ascent easily, casually, as it would a song bird come to rest on its crown. I clung to it, frozen, emptied, revealed to my very young self for what I always have been, an eggshell human, alone, perching with my back to the cliffs, and to darkness. The railroad tie was the only friend I had in the world. I clung. I was a limpet. Not one part of me worked. My tongue was solid in my mouth, my eyes were split wide apart and staring unblinking at blackness, the grain of the wood was printed into my cheek and I'd still be there, eternally narrowly not falling, had little sisters not come running up the hill to me. I had to save them because there was only room on the tie for one supplicant at a time.

My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and the bonds of iniquity.
I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God.
My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more.
Mosiah 27:29

Way down the shaft I showed to my father after I had a terrible fight with my sisters to keep them away, hit one of them when she wouldn't obey me, said yes! yes! go get Dad! when she screamed at me that she was telling, way down and lodged across it at an angle was what at first I thought was a two-by-four but what my dad told me in tones of sickened, agonized assessment, still thorough and methodical in explanation, was another railroad tie. There were four, you see? At the corners? They've been coming loose and falling in over the years. I looked at mine, anxiously, and it looked back at me, unconcerned. You'd have hit that, he said, grim and calm, if you fell. Below us, my mom was loading everybody into the van. This is a bad place. We're going home. That jammed tie, too far away in the fast-fading light for me even to judge its dimensions, was for the twelve year old kneeling carefully by her dad and is now for the mother of a twelve year old, a fast runner, the most upsetting part. I can see it clearly, clearly in my memory and I can give to the horror some words I didn't have then. Everybody dies. I don't want to bounce and spin off a railroad tie on the way. Oh, my soul, almost as it were, fleeth at the thought. My standing railroad tie looks back at me, solemn. Everybody dies. Try to take precautions.

Safety is an illusion, Costis. A Thief might fall at any time, and eventually the day must come when the god will let him. Whether I am on a rafter three stories up or on a staircase three steps up, I am in my god's hands. He will keep me safe, or he will not, here or on the stairs.
The King of Attolia

I sit with friends in the fading light of a summer Sunday afternoon, talking about this story which now they have read, and one asks me what the terror was I tried so hard to avoid in this writing. Did I miss it, she asks. I stumble, unsure of my writing but still solidly horrified by the memory. No, I tell her, it was just that. Just the hole. She looks across the twilight at me, her face open and unconvinced, and then slowly her countenance changes, bleaches into bleak remembering, and slowly she tells a story of an afternoon in a park with a baby and hole hidden by tall grass. An opening into a culvert with fast running water, a long way down, and a mother who suddenly looked up, not for any reason but in the nick of time. More stories come, of holes and water and missteps, of children and of big people, too, saved by a casual glance, a slight shift in direction, a straight-up prompting. None of the stories are tragic. They are just about holes.

We camp with our children in a canyon that was once a goldmine, thousands of people living stacked on top of each other where now are only woods and stones, "improved" roads and Forest Service bathrooms. We hike to a waterfall past a sign warning us to be careful of open mine shafts. Exercise with caution. It is a momentary freezing thought on a hot day; I tell my children a fast, bare bones version of this story to frighten them into wariness, one of the only times I'll ever tell it. I'm pretty sure my sisters have heard it, maybe not though, maybe only the ones who know it were there and old enough to remember, and maybe they no longer do, or only remember that I yelled and hit one of them. I didn't fall down the shaft because for no reason a slight, unbidden thought came that I might change direction.
I try to ready us for the way things happen. Don't do anything stupid, I tell my children whenever they leave; we walk carefully the edges of our abyss as once a lost and wandering prince walked a cliff's edge, all unknowing, at night and in a fog, accompanied only by a Voice which suggested direction and took the edge-side for its own. The young prince loathed and feared the Voice speaking out of fog and dark and never till morning light showed him the narrow slash of dirt under his feet and the straight drop beyond it learned there are worse things than help with direction.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.
The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.
Psalm 121

Hole, Brian Kershisnik

Noah's photo

Meditations. Lonely. Thinking about it.

There's a story I'm trying not to write so I'll write about today instead.
Today I spent mostly alone.
This is the way I spend most days.
The painter is gone a-painting, my girls are round and about, sometimes someone shows up in the day, like yesterday when my sister came for a long talk, but for the most part I spend my time alone.
I know not everyone is alone. Women, especially, talk about doing things together, driving and attending and lunching and phoning and buying. I can't get it, can't wrap my mind around how that's done. Feels like algebra.
I think about this a lot, about being alone and being slightly uncomfortable and sad and about trying (with no one to see, no one to check up on me) to make sure I'm whiling away my life in a useful and justified way so I will have plenty of good stuff to talk about with God in our inevitable face-to-face. I wonder about trying to live so that I'll be missed when I die; I want a well-attended funeral. I think about a friend from college, her life stacked, racked, jeweled and enameled with family, acquaintances, intimates, who goes out of her way to try to get me to spend time with human people, phones, drives from her city to mine, tries her best to show me another way. I think in the morning that today I will call a dear friend who is leaving for Oregon, who asked me on Sunday to call her any time before Wednesday (so, that was today) for lunch or dinner or a walk or anything at all. My pick.
Today I spent mostly alone.
I went to a meeting, my version of a social life. I messed with my girls, I wrote my son in Hong Kong, I typed brief notes, some of them to people I have met in the flesh. I answered the phone. I missed a visit from the niece I love like a daughter and her own baby daughter because I was in the shower when she came and then I had to run off to that meeting. People to see. I left my visitors for my girls to enjoy. Now I sit at dusk in my empty house writing a story of emptiness, a song of my alone self, to people who may or may not exist, may or may never read it, will almost surely never tell me if they did or did not, nor will care if I never write here again and I know, this is how I do.
I did not call my friend before she left for Oregon.
Because of what happened instead.
The Provo temple closes at the end of this week, closes for a month. I go there once a week, more often when I can, to be alone and be with God. So I am going every day this week before it closes, one day for each week of the next month since I can't count Monday which does not belong to me it belongs to the family and to yard work when we "descend like locusts and get it all done" (the painter's words and the only way he can stomach yard work) and not counting Saturday which will be a Painter family reunion. So that was the early morning.
Then I had to shop, had to, we had no butter or vegetables. Made breakfast, changed clothes. That was the midmorning.
I have to do some yard work and some house work every day, nothing like all of it but enough not to lose my mind when I see all the thousands of things that need, that must, be done pressing their greasy little faces against the outsides of my windows and the insides of my mirrors. So yard work took till after lunch.
Meeting.
Housework. Not a lot. Some.
Dinner.
This writing.
If it had been a day with no meeting in it I'd have read. You can't read and visit with people, sometimes even libraries are too cozy, too social, too chatty.
I will work on this till bedtime, I will tidy the kitchen, fold the last of the clean clothes, type more, pick up my youngest at the birthday party, read to her, scriptures with the girls, good night phone call to the painter, pray, sleep.
This is very like what will happen tomorrow.
I will spend it mostly alone, a bit sad. In my sadness and my work, a knock will come at the door and my temper will flare. Who? What?
I will catch myself in that irritation, reminded that there is a price tag, a bar code, on all of it, all of my life. We pay for everything and I personally pay rent on an internal studio apartment. I choose this, choose to live alone.
Even though it hurts me.
I really did actually live completely alone once, alone in a house as a student at BYU. The house was for six girls, I was the first and, by some strange intervention of my personal gods and angels, only girl who applied that semester. I didn't know at the time I wasn't allowed to live alone as an single girl at BYU, or at least, I don't think I was. The owner didn't mention this, but I could see he was in a quandary. This had never before happened and he couldn't figure it. He kept stopping by in the first few weeks as if his physical presence might bring rent-payers to the scene. He stomped around, inside and out, talking to himself and occasionally to me, wondering whether he should even rent to me alone or just kick me out, or, alternately, whether I shouldn't be paying a good deal more rent for having a house all to myself if I were really going to be alone in the whole thing. I maintained a stoic silence before both these proposals and after a while he stopped coming by and I was alone. Truly alone for the first time in my life. I had just moved to Provo and knew only one soul, my cousin Laura, in the whole place. I never even found my ward. I didn't have a phone. I. didn't. have. a. phone. I have never been so frightened. I came home from class in the evening and turned on the TV and lamp. I turned them off when I went to class the next morning. Have I mentioned I am terrified of being alone in the night? Sleeping, letting go of listening to every sound, every snick and rustle, of watching every shift of shadow and sweep of light, giving up awareness and control sufficient to slide into unconsciousness took more will power than I had had before I moved into that house. I had to build muscle, grow callouses, just to keep breathing. One evening I hopped outside, barefoot, to throw away my trash and heard the door click shut behind me. Locked. Locked out and no one in the world had a key because there wasn't anyone else. Well, the owner had one, I suppose, but how was I going to summon him? He only came by for rent. So, three weeks. I wandered (carefully) around the house a few times, remembered I had been taught to pray and did, not in a focused and faithful way but in a glazed and scattershot way, ricocheting from fear to fear in the fading light and then just started walking mindlessly down the street, heading south. Apparently God understands glazed and scattershot because I ran, literally, into a boy from one of my classes. He wondered, rightly, what the heck I was doing, shoeless and brainless, and I told him all of it while he walked me back up the street (because north is up) to my house where with cruel and silent efficiency he broke in. He went around the back for a little minute while I waited out front; I thought he would come around the other side as I had a few times, looking the situation over but instead he suddenly just strolled out the front door carrying part of a back window. There you go, he said. It took a second for him to realize what that had done to me. I guess I must have looked as shocked and sick on the outside as I felt on the inside because he started stumbling around trying to be comforting. Oh, I don't think most people could have done that, he said, not as quick or as quiet, anyway, you'd probably have heard them if you'd been inside. Really? Great. He twisted and gripped his hardware bits a little then somberly put the window back together, kindly and awkwardly, hung around sort of miserable for a moment before walking off to the south, calling happy stupid empty little things back over his shoulder, leaving me standing on the front walk in the dark now, looking down the black hole of the front hall through the still locked front door he had just opened from the inside. Really, he had been very nice. I still feel sorry for him. Sometimes at night after that I barricaded my bedroom door from the inside. Here's the great gift from that house. My horrible boyfriend who had misused me for eighteen solid months of my life that I can never get back came to visit me there. First, in a theatrically perfect (always perfect, always theatrical) but graceless and idiotic backhand gesture while making a point about nothing he knocked to the floor and broke a very small and lovely old box of treasures, wooden, with tiny dovetailed joints and handmade hinges. Second, he dumped me for the nth time. For a wonder I didn't cry and beg and cajole and bargain. I found myself seething in rage over my tumbled and plundered box, crying in a terrible relief at the unbidden emptiness I could feel washing and lapping like healing water, a vast blessed ocean, up to and all around me for the first time in a year and a half, and cried more in a sickness and agony of sudden clarity; my life, my time, my days irretrievably squandered and stinking now of ashes and smut. I threw him out of my house, like throwing up poisoned food. His whole face turned into a round pink clown mask of surprise. He was so shocked, so hurt, so disappointed that I was lashed, flayed, by fury and self betrayal all over again. Oh, I hated the pair of us. This was all it had been about all along, the drama, and I had just been too grindingly frightened of being alone to see it. He actually came back into the house after I slammed the door (for effect (and where was my self-locking front door now?)) to try for another scene. He held my arms gently (sick! I'm barfing writing this. hang on, it's almost over) and tried to talk soothingly. I grabbed the phone (oh, hey, I had one by now. things were looking up) and dialed the police. Didn't threaten. Dialed. This was the baddest moment of my life. It was like a movie. I had this amazing soundtrack in my head. I can't remember the song, think eighties stadium-rock. Anything anthemic will do. He left, amazed and bewildered but beaten. I instantly hung up on the cops. No police came. No boyfriends came back, either. I had my house to myself. I barricaded myself in my little bedroom and reveled in my solitary splendor, my lonely dignity, new-found. There are way worse things than being alone.
It only hurts, really, in the evening.
How do I explain that I don't keep in touch because I never was? It's terrifically hard for me to connect, usually I'm standing around inside myself, smiling on the outside, offering to help out so I'll disappear, trying to be funny, waiting for signs that people are tired of me. Real human connection is like a rare and terrible drug; I hold those people very tightly, very close, probably too tightly.
Here's what I can buy with solitude.
Reading.
Reading and eating.
Making bread.
Folding clothes. A meditation.
Worship. In some of its forms.
Gardening. Not yard work.
Dancing.
Reveling.
Costumes, jewelry and clothing. The making, altering.
Scripts and play-building. The homework.
Crying over ancient Korean bowls and Revolutionary War American portraits.
Learning a tree with the palm of my hand, feeling the bark and the living spirit with my inner palm, the part most rarely touched.
Practicing. Stories or poems, lines from Shakespeare, working the sounds and the images, learning the meanings of speaking.
Walking. In woods, by houses, near water. Finding the God I've known longest.
Here's when I've got to have people.
Eating and talking.
Talking.
Sleeping. I don't like being alone. No, I don't sleep being alone.
Worship. In some of its forms.
Dancing with people.
Plays. Movies. Concerts. Performance and its audiences.
Books after I've read them.
Writing and having people help me with that by talking.
Celebrating.
Traditions. If I do it alone it's not a tradition, it's a habit. Or a compulsion.
Shopping. No one shops alone. There are no empty shops. Those shops are closed.
Music. The hugest, wrenching, transforming conversation. How can you be alone listening to music? What have you done with the musicians? Music is my sure-fire way to God as I best understand Him. And love. And hate. Anger, jealousy, silly joy, longing, cleansing, grief, crushes, new cars, tap shoes, first dances, babies and old men, swimming, winter sleep and autumn leaves.
Art. When I'm not crying about it.
My solitary father, who hunts alone and walks alone and works alone told me once the world is full of people with nothing to say talking and talking just to be sure they are still alive. Frightened of their own thoughts, the worst thing in the world, your own thoughts. I think of my dusk-time college television and lamp, warming my darkness, filling it with voices.
Together is dialogue.
Alone is for narrative.
Alone I cut the demonic plum trees from the wild-wood-growth of this Provo house. They leap on me as they go down, twist around me, slashing with their two inch thorns. I labor in an effortless storystream as they fall, slice my scalp and the back of my neck, a gramarye of the plum kingdom's methods and motivations, their histories, triumphs and losses, magiks and lore, their fear of me and my saw, their eventual downfall and certain end. You shall not triumph, plum demons. Ooh, gotta be careful of your eyes, turn your head when the tree comes down, that's how they get you. This storifying is always flowing, has been my constant condition as long as I can remember. Unless another person is there. If someone works with me there's none of that. Together we get the job done more quickly, the other person takes a turn, lifts the end, holds the tree, minimizes blood loss. We tell memories and make plans. We argue our point and concede and score and some of us make terrible puns and keep you up all night. Talking.
All day long I talk to myself. In the evening I'd like to talk to you. Call me, if you're not too busy. Otherwise, I'll listen to music. Read. Sightly uncomfortable. Sightly sad. Thinking about it.



Noah's photos

Help. Succor. The Middle Part.

Slivers, Brian Kershisnik

succor, v.t. [L. subcurrere, succurrere, to run up to, aid]
Webster's

I don't like to work at a desk. If it's a big project I spread out on the floor or for word-work I sit on a squishy surface like a sofa or a bed with books and paper and pens (laptop, too, now) surrounding me in nesting half-circles. For this reason when I was a freshman in the dorms I made my bed every day, made it like it mattered, like I was in the army; otherwise there was no place good to sit. One day as I was pulling up the quilt my grandmother made for my far-from home-college-bed I stepped all my weight down onto a cute cup full of perky colored pencils my (former) cheerleader roommate had left at the edge of the empty space between our beds where she had been working on an art project, sitting with her back against her bed, paper and pencils spread on the floor, me at the library. The cup, which co-ordinated with the push-pins in her bulletin board, the throw pillows on her bed and brought out the secondary colors in her spread, was supposed to reside on her desk like a fat little vase with a bunch of skinny spring flowers, brightly painted shafts, wooden cones topped by pretty color cores tapering to fine, fine points kept very sharp because she liked to work small, but she had abandoned it on the floor and it had migrated to the very edge of my bed where it secreted itself and lurked in quilt folds till I outed it with my foot. The roommate stored her pencils point up lest they be inadvertently dulled by too long standing.

The people in Descent from the Cross are hurrying. The cross is coming down, coming apart, the whole weight of a man swinging from the nails fastening his hands and arms to the heavy upper crosspiece. The horror at the tearing and twisting in his flesh must be immediate to them and awful in their hearts and stomachs. He's dead of course, he doesn't feel it and though they know that, they feel it for him, as we do for the dead, the sleeping, the comatose. They hurry not to be hurting for him longer than they must. The sun is slipping away, pulling them into the Sabbath and enforced rest. They can work now, set and headlong, fill their minds and eyes but tomorrow will be empty and relentless. No distractions. Now they have him still, now they know what to do; now, in this little moment, they can help him, still. They love him, they believed him, this is not what they expected. There's irony here, rich and dear. Him dead, in his death and with his suffering hammering out for them their greatest help, driving home their most exquisite relief. Them crying, dying inside, hurting from force of his help. I don't know how they could be big enough, old enough, to see this moment as anything other than a disaster, the worst possible outcome. At least he's dead, he didn't suffer as long as he might have and it's over. They no longer must stand back, frozen, breathless observers of suffering. They can work and they rush to him, helping their helper. And he needs them, needs their hands; he can't get off the cross by himself.

Give us help from trouble:
for vain is the help of man.
Psalms 60:11

I couldn't see why my foot should hurt so, so badly and I didn't know what to do. There was no blood and only a strange, hard white bump along the edge of the sole of my right foot, just outside the circle of the heel. If I'd been home I'd have limped out my dad who would have turned off the table saw, taken my foot in his hands and turned it toward the light while I hopped madly around in the sawdust trying not to fall over. Then he would have sighed and taken me into the bathroom where the light was good and worked me over with tweezers and fingernail clippers till I was out of danger and then as final benediction doused me with alcohol for good measure. All on my own, far away from the family table saw and tweezers, I washed the funny bump with soap, returned the scattered pencils to their darling cup, put them on the tidy desk opposite mine, climbed on my bed with my books and studied while my foot sang a hot and throbbing song of pulses and heartbeats.

Next morning I couldn't walk well. The bump was still there. I went to class sans books, I couldn't manage them. I didn't go home for lunch, it was too far to cross the street; by the end of class I was just focused on living long enough to get back to my dorm room and die. I wanted to die lying down. It was for this my parents had send me out into the world, to make me strong or, failing in strength, dead. Limping on my toes was not the ticket at all, better to take a long step onto the heel of my right foot, a shorter, quicker, more painful step onto my left, rest, repeat. I didn't ask for help as I inched and halted across campus, in fact I told a couple of nice people who stopped to inquire that I was fine. They believed me. Sadly, I need to be forced to accept help. No one forceful came along. Must have been a student government meeting somewhere and all the team practices. I had never noticed till I measured it out in handspans that my dorm room was the furthest but one a person could live in and still be on campus. The atmosphere thickened as I edged along, taking up arms against me; accomplishing the Castellia Hall main doors seemed like half way instead of home free, I was rapidly going downhill and the hall all felt uphill. When I finally, finally got my key in the door and opened it I found our living room/kitchen full of people. Male people, and one roommate.

I had one roommate (not in my actual bedroom, that was the (former) cheerleader) who was nearly always to be found in the company of many brainy and attractive men. This was for two reasons. First, she was the most caring, generous, mature and, well, noble person on campus. She lacked physical loveliness of any sort whatever and I hope dearly when she grew up she married the best man on the planet. Second, she was maybe the smartest student on campus. People, boy people, wanted to study with her as often as she would allow them; she was a born teacher and made learning difficult maths and sciences joyful. I think. The learners all looked joyful; I couldn't understand any of their conversations but things seemed to be going well for everyone. Consequently our living room/kitchen regularly overflowed with crowds of the best and brightest male students. It was a splendid situation for everyone and I heartily recommend you always arrange your dorm rooms after this pattern. Blessedly, one of them this time was an especial friend of mine who, like all my true friends, had some considerable force to his nature. He saw my trouble (I was listing and leaning and green), told me I was stupid, got me to a chair and required of me the history of my injury while another friend, a caring, truly good and very tall person (what a lot of lovely people in this story!) put aside his trigonometry or nuclear physics or whatever to go examine the dear little desk cup and its denizens. He brought it into the kitchen, a trifle grim about the face, holding out one pencil, a white one. Where the other pencils all had great long tapers of colored core rising proudly, piercingly yet perkily in softly complementary shades from the wooden shafts, the white pencil's sharp core was broken off cleanly at the base, at the wood, showing no color whatever.

Which explained the funny, white bump in my foot.

My especial friend, who I'm going to call Rick which wasn't his name but is close, took off my shoe and sock, assuring me he would take the broken lead out and wash it and I would be fine. He examined my foot for about three fourths of a second and assured me that his friend and mine, the good man holding the sweet cup and offending pencil, would remove the lead from my foot, wash the wound and I would be fine. You can trust him, Rick said. And that is what happened, Rick holding my hands and talking to me and risking maybe half a glance about twice during the process (there's a scene in Master and Commander which reminds me forcibly of this moment, you know the one, the calm surgical removal via mirror, by the doctor and a crewman, of a bullet from the doctor himself which is accompanied by a lot of deep breathing and not a lot of watching on the part of the master and commander). Our mutual friend went to work, calmly and steadily opening up my foot using the single edged razor blade people who study advanced maths apparently keep about them, (my dad always had one) while my beloved roommate acted as scrub nurse and swabbed frequently with horrible but helpful alcohol. The alcohol swabbing made me press my head down hard on the sofa arm and hate all of them heartily (Rick in particular) while Rick stroked my hair and said all the things a dental hygenist once told me she had to learn not to say, ever. "Oooh boy." "Whoa!" "That's not good."

It wasn't good and it wasn't over because I think we had all assumed the broken and embedded point, once exposed, could be lifted out whole, but the demon-spawned white pencil had a chalk core and the chalk had fed on my fluids, had crumbled and softened to an indistinct and formless mass. There was no lifting it out at all, more like spooning. The good, good man worked steadily away while my angel roommate held my foot and made quiet, useful suggestions and Rick had his head down now, too, next to mine, holding on to me like he was the one dying and told me I could bite his hand, if it would help. I said I didn't want to, thanks, which was a lie but I didn't do it and I thought, this is what happens at college, your friends take care of you, and felt very alone and unsafe and wished for my dad who had been to a bit of medical school and was better than a surgeon.

The next morning I had a bright red line running across the bottom of my foot and about two inches up the inside of my leg, toward my ankle.

What a waste of alcohol.

You need never have heard the words blood poisoning to know how scary it is when you see it. Like seeing a blackwidow spider, certain streetbikes, or a woman all dressed in plether, an ancient instinct tells you, this is bad; run, baby, get help. The first person, miraculously, I met that morning was the boy who was at the time sort of functioning as a boyfriend and who had me into his car and into the emergency room long before I had finished telling him why I couldn't walk so well. I was scolded roundly by the receptionist, the nurse, the doctor (for---???), given antibiotics and taught how to treat blood poisoning. Which I have done since, too many times. Seems I am a bit prone. It was good for me to learn this on a week day when doctors were readily available.

Therefore, let your hearts be comforted;
for all things shall work together for good for them that walk uprightly...
D&C 100:15

That is the end of the story, or very nearly. All these people helped me, rushed in as soon as I admitted my need, tipped my hand (my foot?), as it were. Maybe they saved me from serious difficulties. I don't know what happened to any of them after we all left Snow College, not a single one, though I do know one thing that happened before we left. My good, calm friend had an epiphany that night. At about the moment he set down the razor to wipe the sweat off his hands because nothing was going as planned and the pencil point was chalk and the chalk had become a porridge, he noticed he had started to feel good. Confident. And interested. Realized he was going to change his major, realized he would become a doctor. I wonder now, all these years later, which of us in this story was helper to whom and by what working we all found our places. Helping people can hurt quite a lot. As it can hurt to let them help you.

And he ordained twelve, that they might be with him...
And to have power to heal sicknesses...
Mark 3:14-15

I have a little movie in my mind of my friend; a very tall doctor with red hair fading now to grey, taking a child's foot in his hands to be stitched, to be treated, turning it to the light, working with care and precision, growing interested and confident as he sees things are not what he expected here. I see the mother, holding the child's hand, maybe watching a little, maybe not, trusting this good, good man who is helping them.

And the King shall answer and say unto them,
Verily I say unto you,
Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren,
ye have done it unto me.
Matthew 25:40

Thorn and Sparrows, Brian Kershisnik

Meditations. Books for My Children

Burning Book, Brian Kershisnik

I never feel more alone than when I finish a book I loved. I prowl, I chew on my fingers, I pick things up and toss them about. Sometimes I cry a little. Or a lot. I don't want to even see people who haven't read that book. I feel like I'll never want to eat ever again but sometimes I just do, anyway, to distract myself and to dull a longing that is sort of like, and not at all like, hunger.
So alone because I want to have shared it, worked through the book with another human, though that's not possible or practical considering how much and at what speeds I read. I want to talk, argue and remember, prognosticate and review and sigh and I'm nearly lonely enough to bleed from it for a while. Till I get myself into another book. That deadens the disconnect and I forget.

I could avoid most all of this by immediately placing the book in someone's hands and making them go off and read it so they could talk to me. And I used to do that.
I used to recommend books to people.

I used to read a book and, if it had been a good book or if I felt it was asking for a specific person and I thought I knew that person, I would take the book to them and admonish, nay, command them to read, my assumption being that if it was good for me, it would be good for you.
To my astonishment and dismay, this caused trouble, over time. Not everyone agrees with my choices, which really is fine by me. I don't actually care, though I may choose to mourn, a little, for their loss. On my planet if you don't like a book I like, after a minute and rousing examination of our separate opinions, we go our several ways like gentlemen and forget about it. But on this planet people sometimes get annoyed if they don't like the book they think I think they should read; they sometimes get angry and they sometimes get offended. Sometimes they tell you their estimation of you is forever altered and they never want to play with you again.
I finally, protectively, made a rule to never recommend books, ever. And except under very special, occasional and unusual circumstances I cling, limpet-like to that rule,
And yet, as now, I am finishing an exceptional book, racing the downward arc of narrative and at the same time braking, leaning back, knowing that you can only read a book for the first time one time and after this is over, it is over forever, trying simultaneously to sprint and to savor, I find I instinctively begin scanning my interior landscape for someone, a friend, a reader, a beloved human who will not, I think, yet know this book. I cannot feel a book that has cleaved (and cleaved to) my soul is finished with me till I have hastened at its behest, clasping it against my heart, to press the book against another beating heart and say, read this, stop what you are doing and read this, drop all the lesser things and read this book this book this book and then talk to me, talk to me. But I don't do that anymore. I say, "yeah. I think I read that. I'm not sure," carefully scanning the other face for hints, clues and signs before I give any more answer. Almost no other time do I feel so keenly the sharp hard pain of living a careful life. The dreadful losses suffered where Caution rules as regent in Honesty's kingdom, Honesty being held captive by Fear, Failure and Fatigue.

Webster's tells us recommend, from the Latin re-, and com-, from cum intensive, and mandare, to order, literally means to order back or commend strongly, and the example given, no kidding, is as to recommend a book. Therefore, if I recommend a book, I am not merely marking its existence, observing that, here is a book, persons may or may not enjoy this book but this is not for me to say. No. If I recommend a book I am so much more than offering it as a possible good time. (for a good read call...) I am advising, enjoining, exhorting. That mandare in recommend is to entrust to, to commend; to put in one's hands, commit to one's charge, as in Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.
Into your hands, this book...no.

However.
For reasons I determined to hammer out a list, a list I will amend and alter as I grow up and continue reading. This is not a list of books to placate the people who ask me (as if someone who reads a lot would know just what you were in the mood for next. pfft.). I drawing up this list for my children, a sort of last will and testament of my book legacy, should that inheritance ever interest them. Anyone can see it but is is for my kids. These are books to which I have returned repeatedly for study, for refreshment, for delight, for wisdom and for sorrow. It will not be exhaustive because I forget. It will be eclectic because. You will not understand all of it and will disagree but comfort yourself with the knowledge that it wasn't made for you. I wish to point out here that I cannot receive less than full marks for stating my own opinions. These are all, every single one, books I went back to and back to, to read again. Scriptures are a given.
Study
These books are tools. Tools should be both useful and beautiful. They should work well in more than one capacity.
*A Good Dictionary, and a Good Thesaurus
Vital. I recommend you invest in good ones, I have several including the OED in one volume. That's a bit excessive, but for me it is not unlike a big game trophy in the library. And it comes with the coolest mystical magical magnifying dodad! (Now, let me say here, at the very beginning, that all the resource information is available on line. Of course it is. But this is my list and I am talking about books. With pages. I like pages. Enough said.)
*A Good Atlas
For years we have used and loved The Great World Atlas from the American Map Corp. I taught my children geography and earth science from it. And I don't know where on the world anything is.
*Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible
I use it all the time.
*Timetables of History, Bernard Grun, based upon Werner Stein's Kulturfahrplan
History works best for me when I can spread it out like a map.
*Compact Atlas of World History, Random House
This is a tiny volume. Most often, it's all I need to know.
*Understanding Paul, Richard L. Anderson
This would be the Apostle Paul. What can I say? It helps me.
*Making Sense of the Doctrine & Covenants, Steven C. Harper
I actually had a sort of unusual experience with this one, something a friend once called "shopping with Jesus." I had a very specific need and went, blindly, straight to this book. It is a new best friend.
*The Language of Flowers, Kate Greenaway
I was so fascinated by this as a child, the idea of communicating desperate vows, taunts or even threats with boutonnieres and bouquets. I longed to have a lover who would send me flowers and know what they meant--even, perhaps, engage in a conversation!! I got over it. I still think about it though when I see certain floral combinations. Hmm.
*On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Harold McGee
This is a wonderful and very serious book. If you want to know how bread stales, the timeline of fruit importation in western Europe, the comparative water, protein, fat and carbohydrate content of, say, acorns, coconut and pistachios, or why on a molecular level we have ice cream in the first place, McGee's tome is for you.
*The Postage Stamp Garden, Duane Newcomb and the Sunset Western Garden Book
This is where I start.
A Dictionary of Costume and Fashion: Historic and Modern, Mary Brooks Picken
Do you know what a pelisse is? A parure? A peruke? Do you want to? I do.
*What People Wore, Douglas Gorsline
This is not an in depth text but is quick and easy to use. I always go here first.
*The Stitch Directory
is missing. This has been a terrible problem for a while. I'll update later, when I find it.
*The Betty Crocker Cookbook and The Martha Stewart Cookbook (with the blue spine)
Whenever I need a recipe I go to these first and compare everyone and everything to them. If I could only have two cookbooks (horror!) I would choose these ladies.

Nonfiction
*All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot
*Tisha, as told to Robert Specht
Just read this to my youngest, 11, she loved it. I softened but did not skip the swears as I read.
*The Beak of the Finch: a Story of Evolution in Our Time, Jonathan Weiner
This book about on-going evolution in the Galapagos Islands is gorgeously written. Also, the greatest testimony I have ever read of the reality of a loving, observant Heavenly Father, constantly involved, constantly aware, constantly adjusting out of care and concern.
*The Outermost House, Henry Beston
And here it is folks, the book that, more than any other, caused me so much trouble I stopped recommending books. It is a classic, beautifully, wondrously written. It is a record of observations made in a year the author lived alone in a tiny house on Cape Cod. Here is a sample conversation between myself and someone who tried to read this book because I told them it was my favorite book ever. Ever.
Them."Do you know this is a book about nothing?"
Me. "What? What do you mean? It's not about nothing, it's about--"
Them. "It is too. It is about nothing."
Me. "No it's not!! It's about everythi--"
Them. "No. Nothing happens in this book."
Me. "Wh--!!"
Them. "Suzanne. Nothing happens. There's a chapter about SAND."
Whatever.
It is possibly my favorite chapter and I couldn't care less if you never read it. Your loss. Your eternal loss.
*Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao -tzu
Dazed and urgent, trailing this book, Noah came and found me to talk about a bowl defined not by what it holds but by its emptiness. Formative moment for a boy who Does Too Much, and his mother who is Trying To Hold Emptiness. Hmm. Time to read this book again.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Conrad
Stories. Think about stories.
*Generations: the History of America's Future, 1584-2069, William Strauss & Neil Howe
Utterly changed the way I see stuff. Really.
*The Battle for Christmas: a Social and Cultural History of Christmas, Stephen Nissenbaum
A little word of warning to the faint of Christmas spirit. I read this book, read or told most of it to the painter, read it with Noah, read it again. I think it's important. I'm one of those people who want to know where traditions come from, what they really mean. At the end of the first read, I didn't believe in Christmas anymore. I didn't believe in ANYTHING anymore. Christmas, you see, really does come from a store. By the end of the third read I decided that everyone had always just been making Christmas up as they went along and I could certainly do that, too. Remaking this holiday is our only real Christmas tradition, so I got to have any sort of holiday I wanted. And I'm much happier now in my celebrating than I've ever been. But proceed with caution because maybe you don't actually want to know. Don't say I didn't warn you.
*Wide as the Waters: the Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired, Benson Bobrick
I loved this much, much more than Wide as the Waters, but that is a good companion piece.
*A History of the American People, Paul Johnson
Everyone needs a good American history, this is the one I like.
*Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard Wrangham
This is such a, well, cool book. Very lucid and compelling. Not a quick read. You may want to skim the fossil record bits. Big bits, those. But such a worthwhile read. One of those books that makes you strike up conversations with people you don't even like just so you can inform them humans can have larger brains than monkeys can because we cook our food. Incredible, huh? (cooked food=softer food=smaller jaws)
*The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World, Paul Collins
I confess it. I cried. At the first story of two friends, old men, the only people still living who worked with Shakespeare, going about to gather up copies of their friend William's plays for publication in a single volume that would come to be known as the First Folio. Collins gives a list of plays not much regarded at the time and out of circulation which these two carefully tracked down, plays which would probably otherwise have disappeared forever. I read the names of the first two plays to myself, paused, thought how interesting and instructed the painter to listen as I read the list to him aloud. I began again and got only as far as the third play. A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Taming of the Shrew. The Tempest. My world trembled and shimmered. What if...what if..? I had found myself sobbing suddenly and unexpectedly the summer before, standing in Shakespeare's birthplace, looking at a copy of the First Folio in its little upstairs niche. My family sweetly wandered away and let me cry alone. In heaven I'm finding those two men who toiled through the bookstalls of London, lovingly seeing to the plays their friend had never seen to himself. What if...what if..?
*The Thirteenth Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire and Phosphorus, John Emsley
Not everyone is blown to bits at the elegance, the usefulness, the prophetic wholeness and utter rightness of the periodic table. I am. If you are, or if you think you ought to be, this book is not to be missed. It's not to be missed anyway, but that is, of course, up to you. Also, if you've ever wondered why you were taught never to play with matches. It may not be for the reasons you think.
*Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindberg
*Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
Just write about one brick...still changes my life. Still.
*How Reading Changed My Life, Anna Quindlen
*A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis

Stories
You may see here books you think of as being for children. I think an amazing story is for people. Some of these books are called Fantasy. I will not label those as such in case you have an unreasonable allergy and, if you knew, would avoid them solely on that ground. This list is arranged in what to me is an order: if you know and like one book, I think the chances are reasonable you will like the ones listed near it.

*Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, Susanna Clarke
Currently sitting at the top of the list, and there for a reason, but also sitting alone.
*Watership Down, Richard Adams
This one also sits alone; I've never read anything quite like it. If you've read this and liked it, The Private Life of the Rabbit, one of Adams' sources, is very well written and interesting and nearly made it on my nonfiction list on its own merit.
*The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, Patricia A. McKillip
*The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis
Especially The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
*Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
The Two Towers is my favorite.
*The Earthsea Trilogy, Ursula K. LeGuin
I love The Tombs of Atuan best and recommend (and this is a recommendation) that no one read beyond the original trilogy. Life is short.
*Dragonsong/Dragonsinger, Anne McCaffrey
Personally unmoved and finally annoyed by the rest of the series.
*Abhorsen (series), Garth Nix
*The Dark is Rising series, Susan Cooper
Though I don't love the last book and skip it when I read these to my kids. Nobody notices.
*James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl

The Glassblower's Children, Maria Gripe
Oh, I love this fairy tale and oh, it's out of print and oh, I wish you luck should you desire to find it.
*The Pink Fairy Book, ed. by Langston Hughes
These are all good, Pink is the one I owned as a child.
*Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Robert C. O'Brien
*The Tough Winter, Robert Lawson
This is the second book, after Rabbit Hill. My mom never bought the first one. Go figure. So I read the first book as an adult and like it but don't love it, though it is just as good. I like difficult tales about winter and hardship. Let's pretend like this is our winter cave and our parents are dead...
*Puck of Pook's Hill/Rewards and Fairies, Rudyard Kipling
Wonderful children's books that children may have a bit of trouble wading through. I would suggest these as read-together books. Very worth it.
*The Children of Greene Knowe/The Treasure of Greene Knowe, L. M. Boston
I don't love the rest of the series.
*Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
I have recently been informed these are not books for children. Hmm. They were when I was rereading them. If you know and love Alice already, you might like to dip into the facsimile edition or The Annotated Alice put together by Martin Gardener. I like to dip into them.
*The Penderwicks/The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, Jeanne Birdsall
*All of a Kind Family, Sydney Taylor
*Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
This is the only one of Alcott's books I like. There, I've said it. I didn't know growing up I was reading an edited version. It worked really well for me.
*Caddie Woodlawn,
*Anne of Green Gables series, L. M. Montgomery
In all honesty, I lost interest after Anne and Gilbert ironed out their misunderstandings in a matrimonial way.
*The Secret Garden/ A Little Princess, Frances Hudgson Burnett
*The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken
This is a long series. Noah got further than I did.
*Journey to the River Sea, Eva Ibbotson
*Mandy, Julie Andrews
*Adopted Jane, Helen Fern Daringer
*Up a Road Slowly, Irene Hunt
*Strawberry Girl, Lois Lenski
*To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
*The White Witch of Kynance, Mary Calhoun
*Quest for a Maid, Frances Mary Hendry
*The Island of the Blue Dolphins
*The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare
*Calico Bush, Rachel Field
*Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome
*Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
*I Capture the Castle, Dodi Smith
*A Room with a View
*North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell
*Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
*The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
*Gilead, Marilyn Robison
*The Madonnas of Leningrad
*The Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
*A Child's Garden of Verses

*Fun and Nonsense

Authors
This list caused me the most grief. In order to be here I have to have enjoyed everything I have read by these people. I will say candidly that not all their works are of equal strength, but if I see one of their books in a library I check it out; if I find one in a used bookstore I buy it. For some of them I have listed an obvious favorite. Or two.
*Hans Christian Anderson
*Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter, These Happy Golden Years
*Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shining Company
*Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness, The Kite Rider, Pirate's Son
*Claire B. Dunkle, By These Ten Bones, Hollow Kingdom Trilogy
*Terry Pratchett, Winter Smith
*Diana Wynne Jones, Homeward Bounders
*Agatha Christie
*Meindert De Jong, House of Sixty Fathers, Journey from Peppermint Street, The Wheel on the School
*Jane Austen
*Robert Frost
*William Butler Yeats
*Emily Dickinson
*William Shakespeare
*Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
*Henry James
*Edith Wharton
*H.E. Bates
*P. G. Wodehouse
*M. R. James
*Gene Stratton Porter

So, there is a list of my tried and true, sturdy, trusty bookfriends. It will change.
I'd love to see your lists.

I recommend we all read.
What you choose is your own terrible responsibility.

Man With a Very Small Book, Brian Kershisnik

Help. The Second Part.

A man and a woman stand in the foreground of Descent from the Cross, waiting to help. The man's arms are stretched out, the painter has given him a cloth to hold. Very ordinary, no more than what is needed. What, at this point, can be done? The work of it; lifting the poor, broken son, cleaning, wiping, combing, wrapping, positioning in a semblance of living comfort, shift him gently. Hurrying, hurrying, as the sun strides away, turning from this day's misery, flinging itself over the horizon and dragging all the day's terrible work with it. These people, this family, are coming back after the Sabbath to unwrap, to touch and linger, to work without hurry, to settle him, sleeping, with all their love and all their care and all their time. They leave him in darkness but they are coming back, they will see him, once more, soon. And they are right. But before they see him, someone else will have freed him from their careful bindings.


Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.
John 20:6-7

I always wonder about that napkin, folded and set aside. Careful, deliberate. Tidy. I am thinking about angels.

I struggle getting to church on time. Arriving early is what separates general authorities from me. Also, being nice. But definitely arriving at church on time. Sometimes it has felt like a qualifying task from a wonder tale. Gather these feathers from the wind, carry this mountain of grains in your palm, fashion flower crowns for the Queen and all her bees. Pick up your family and carry them on your head to church and do it in less than no time.
A monstrous task.
When my youngest child was about two or three, this failing in my life loomed like a rockfall across a mountain path. The rockfall seemed too deep, too tall, I could never remove it. For years I had negotiated it, climbed up and around and over it. I could do that, just, but it was wearing, made me dirty and too tired. Worse, the stupid pile seemed to be growing each week, spreading till it felt dangerous lugging my children up and across my enormous rockfall. My spirit wore thin scaling my pile of boulders, fighting on Sunday morning with my children, fighting with the painter, fighting with myself. Fighting with Everyone.
I considered skipping church.
I considered skipping church till my kids were older.
I considered skipping the first part of church (intentionally, I mean).
I considered.
With a heavy heart, I marched myself up to my rockfall and began considering my rocks.


It might seem simple to someone on the outside, someone of, say, an engineering frame of mind. Rocks have to go, can't use the road with rocks all over it, rocks have got to go, get those rocks out of here, what you want to have rocks for here in the first place? It may seem simple from the outside. It was as hard as the hardest thing I have ever done.

Drink the ocean whole, run without stopping till you reach the castle beyond the sea, swim beneath the waves till you find the fish that swallowed the ring.

I pondered my rocks. I forced myself up close to them, close enough to name them by their names. I took a Sunday to observe my failings, free and in the wild. On Monday I began to get ready for Sunday. Rock, rock, rock, rock. It took the whole week.
It's not that rock removal is Herculean. Hercules' tasks were doable, they simply required heavy machinery. My rocks, for me, were both heavy and paradoxical. I had to admit things, confess fault, remove licence, apply discipline. Close your eyes. Now do you see? How'm I s'posed to see with the blast shield down? But I kept my eyes closed and saw a lot of things. I took care of them, grimly, day after day and one day it was Sunday morning and we were going to be on time for church. Damn it.
Spin straw into gold, make bricks without straw, lay down your life to find it.


For want of a nail...

I couldn't find the white tights I had purchased, new, to fit and to be clean so there would be two pair and I could always find them and one wouldn't be in the wash and I had put the tights in the drawer but they weren't there--they weren't!!--they weren't anywhere and the whole thing, the whole week's work, lurched, stumbled, shuddered, stopped, ground down right there and I was stuck, skewered, hanging onto the drawer that was so unbelievably empty and we were going to be. Late. I hung there and felt myself collapsing on the inside into that empty space in the drawer, held on, clenched, the sides of the drawer and really felt every good solid true thing sucking down into the dark place that was never going to be--wait!-no,why-please!--brand new white tights I truly, factually, had put there myself.
It probably sounds silly from the outside, but you have to understand, I had been running to win, running for the crown, I had run till I couldn't run anymore and I didn't have a backup plan. We weren't going to make it, at all.
It probably sounds silly, from the outside.

Take back the ill you have done, fill the time you have wasted, restore the trust you have lost.

I can't. I can't do it. I prayed. Dear God, I tried, I tried so hard but I can't. God, help me, don't let this happen to me and to the children I'm trying to teach. I can't do it. And I know this is my fault, but I don't know how it happened and I don't know what to do now. Help me because I can't fail. I'm afraid. I'm afraid I will never try again.

And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.
Luke 22:43

Different people get direction in different ways. I sometimes hear words in my head. These were very clear. Look in the back of her sister's drawer. They aren't the tights you're looking for but there is a pair there that will work. And they did. Clean. And white, a perfect fit. We were not early, but we were on time.
It was as good as the best miracle of my life. It was stunning. And cozy. I had an angel working with me who knew where the tights were.

familiar, a. [ME. famylier; OFr. familier; L. familiaris, of or pertaining to a household, domestic, from familia, household, family.]
Webster

I close my eyes to see impossible things are not accomplished according to any plan of mine. I never found those tights. In Hades there is an imp cavorting about in a small pair of white tights. I shall not dispute them with him; I can't imagine they are, by now, in very good shape. Anyway, we had sufficient. If my familiar angel can restore to me tights I never had, what impossible thing shall be beyond my believing? Feed them all with five barley loaves and two small fishes, bread from the sky and water from the rock, light to those those that walked in darkness. The people on the painter's canvas patiently waiting to undertake their grim work don't yet understand; it's not just the end of the world, it's that the world has ended.


Raise the dead.

How can I keep from singing?


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