The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947 film) - a meditation on life, death, and love

Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney) tries to recall a never-consummated love for daughter Anna.

I would never have thought that a romantic fantasy featuring a ghost would become my favorite film, perhaps even surpassing life-long-loved classics like "La Strada," but "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" has recently ascended in my film pantheon to a spot bordering on obsession.

This film is so much more than the sum of its parts, gorgeous though those parts may be. The script is restrained, judicious, beautifully balanced between humor, pathos, mystery, and romance. The black-and-white chiaroscuro lends "Gull Cottage," and the faces of its occupants, their own spiritual, nay spectral presence.  The cast is wonderful, particularly Rex Harrison as a pitch-perfect Captain Gregg, with an unexpected bon-bon saved for the end: the radiant, criminally under-appreciated Vanessa Brown as Lucy Muir's grown daughter Anna.

undiscovered treasure: Vanessa Brown

I could wax rhapsodic about Bernard Hermann's incomparable score, which captures life's beauty and sadness with such heart-tearing harmonies. But it's the way the music embarks even before the film starts--its melancholy arpeggios vaulting over the Fox logo, instead of the studio's standard chest-thumping fanfare--that lets you know you are entering another world. Dare I call it spiritual? What else is that light from the sea at the window of Lucy Muir's bedroom at Gull Cottage? What else the misty outlines of cliff and ocean as she paces her solitary way through the years?

This film, so haunting in the non-ghostly sense, sticks its fingers into the heart and touches on the very nature of love, life, and death, in a manner unlike any other, save perhaps "La Strada".  It is not the scenes between Lucy and the captain that seem central to its being, but rather the distillation of feeling long after his spectral presence has vanished.  It's in the next-to-last scene, which I transcribe below (I did say I was obsessed).  Something about a love that is never consummated...

If you're not moved by this scene, you need to go get your stone carapace struck off. See this film (it's on Netflix).

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) Joseph Mankiewicz – Scene 21

Fifteen or so years have passed. Lucy Muir has taken many afternoon naps in the big armchair; many ship’s bells have rung on the nautical wall clock—but there have been no further visitations from the ghost of Captain Gregg; Lucy appears to have forgotten him. She takes daily solitary walks along the cliffs by the sea, whose waves have slowly undermined her daughter Anna’s driftwood post—the one on which a seaman carved her name years ago,  promising the child it would stand there “forever.” But the waves and the music tell a different story.

As Lucy strides along the cliffs, an elegant roadster hoves into view below; a young woman stands up in it and waves. It’s Anna – now grown and studying at university, bringing Bill, her aristocratic fiancé, home to meet her mother. Bill--a bland cypher next to the vibrant Anna—is  consigned to the parlor, while mother and daughter sit in the kitchen for a comfortable chat.

…

Anna: He’s a sub-lieutenant in the navy. You know my weakness for sailor men.

Mrs. Muir: It’s the first I’ve heard of it.

Anna: Oh, it’s a lifelong vice! (speaking to Martha, their loyal housekeeper) Don’t you go making eyes at him, now!

Martha (sniffing): And him a sub-lieutenant? Captains is more in my line. (She exits and shuts the door, leaving Mrs. Muir and Anna at the table in happy intimacy.)

Anna: Oh, I’ve never been so happy in all my life!

Mrs. Muir: Then I’m happy too. And I shan’t waste time with questions.

Anna: I knew you wouldn’t. And wait till you hear--I’ve discussed it with Bill--you’re to come and live with us, you and Martha.

Mrs. Muir: Oh, no, darling.

Anna: Oh, but you must! (Pitying) You’ve been alone so much of your life.

Mrs. Muir (Rising and gazing out the window): You’re very kind, but…It’s hard to explain. You can be much more alone with other people than you are by yourself – even if it’s people you love. (Turning to Anna) That sounds all mixed up, doesn’t it?

Anna: No, not a bit. But if you ever change your mind--

Mrs. Muir: Get a plate, darling… and some extra cups. (Standing and slicing the cake, she speaks contentedly.) No, I won’t change my mind. I love this house and I’ve been very happy here. And I shall live here till I die.

Anna: (busy with the cups) With Captain Gregg?

Mrs. Muir (stunned): What did you say?

Anna (coming near with tray of cups): With the ghost of Captain Gregg?

Mrs. Muir: Anna, what are you talking about?

Anna (placing tray on table): Oh, I knew the captain very well…when I was a little girl, the first year we lived here. We used to have the most wonderful talks.

Mrs. Muir (stricken, hardly breathing): You didn’t.

Anna: It was all a game I’d made up, of course—sort of a dream game. But it was very real while it lasted. (Haunting music on high violins begins as the camera closes in on Mrs. Muir – she is transported-- her eyes shine – while Anna arranges the cake slices on the plate and chatters happily behind her, unaware of her mother’s turmoil.)

Anna: Then he stopped coming, suddenly—I suppose I was growing too old and sophisticated for him. But I grieved and grieved. I was hopelessly in love with him. (Turning, she glimpses her mother’s face, and her smile morphs to astonishment.) Heavens –you look as if you’d seen a – don’t tell me you saw him too?!

Mrs. Muir: No. (Turning her back, she goes off into her own world.) No, not for years…

Anna (understanding the truth): Then you did. Oh, Mummy, you don’t suppose he really haunted us?!

Mrs. Muir (Gazing far off): No, darling. Things like that can’t happen. It was only a dream. (Yet her face clearly reveals the opposite; she’s protecting her secret world from trespass.)

Anna (circling round her mother, puzzled and disbelieving): The same dream for both of us?

Mrs. Muir (using maternal condescension to shut Anna out): Perhaps I set you off by telling you about my dreams. Little girls are very impressionable.

Anna: I don’t remember you telling me. Oh, tell me now. I’d love to hear about them! (She pulls her mother to sit back down at the table. She is radiant, irresistible.)

Mrs. Muir:  But I can’t remember them very well—just bits and pieces—a phrase here and there—a look. And I think I dreamed most of my book, “Blood and Swash”—I must have! I never could have thought of it. All these years, I’ve tried to remember—but I can’t.

Anna (close-up, her face luminous): Do you know what I think? I think you fell in love with him, too.

Mrs. Muir (indignant): I did nothing of the sort.

Anna (filled with understanding): Oh, I wouldn’t blame you if you had. When did you stop seeing him?

Mrs. Muir (dropping her stiffness): After about a year…I dreamed we quarreled. It was about a man.

Anna (knowingly): Uncle Neddy.

Mrs. Muir (indignant again): Anna, did you know that Miles and I—

Anna: I used to pray you wouldn’t marry him.

Mrs. Muir (confidingly): And you were so right. I saw him about five years ago, at a dinner party. He was bald and fat and he drank too much, and then he cried. It seems his wife finally had enough and took the children away. (She drifts back into her own inner world.) You never can tell, can you...once I thought I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

(Music swells to its most romantic and melancholy—this is the very heart of the scene, indeed of the entire film)

Anna (face aglow at the thought): Perhaps he did exist—the captain—perhaps he did come back and talk to us. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he had? Then you’d have something –you know what I mean—to look back on, with happiness.

Mrs. Muir: No, darling. He never existed. We made him up, you and I. (Her smile of secret inner joy belies her words.) I just wasn’t intended to have that kind of happiness, and I haven’t missed it, really I haven’t.... I’ve been lonely at times, but there’ve been compensations—you, and now Bill—and dear Martha—we sit and chatter like a pair of parrots. (Rising, her hand on Anna’s shoulder, she gazes off) And this house…and the sea…and the gulls… (she goes to the door) …and memories. (At the door now, she turns back to look at Anna) I have those, you know—even if it was – a dream.

(She opens the door; the moment of transport is past, her voice is once more businesslike) Now come along and we’ll join your young man for some tea.

(Anna joins her and they exit, shutting the door.)

A Maw of Need

Don't we all feel this way sometimes?

A family of robins has set up housekeeping in the holly tree by our window - giving us a (pardon!) bird's eye-view of their four babies, from the day they cracked their gorgeous robin's-egg-blue shells and struggled out into the world, yellow beaks already wide open to receive as much of the earth's goodness as their hard-working and self-sacrificing parents could supply.

The babies are born blind. The nest is a very cosy space for four chicks. When the rain fell in powerful torrents, Mother came and sat on top of them, spreading her wings wide to cover the entire nest and shield her young from the storm. Father exploited the opportunity to collect numerous worms. (Mother is a lighter gray; Father is nearly black-backed.)

The nest has been built directly over the heat pump for our air conditioning unit. I doubt the robins were aware of this when they painstakingly added twig upon twig earlier in the spring. Now, on hot days, the babies get a heated nest and a bit of a bumpy air ride as the pump disperses the hot air into the atmosphere. But they seem to be okay despite it.

Towards a New Definition of Patriotism

I often find myself wishing I were a member of my parents' generation. Tom Brokaw's "greatest generation" did not, perhaps, seek to be great; rather, as so often happens, greatness was thrust upon them by larger circumstances - Depression and World War. Suffering the necessary crucible to refine greatness.

But whatever the proximate cause, theirs was a generation that did not suffer from an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement, such as characterises the present generation. I am in a state of perpetual amazement at the accumulation of things that so many Americans have come to believe they need. Whatever happened to Formica? Now one has to have granite. How can I live without portable DVD players in the SUV, or limitless cellphone and Internet service? How can I deny my child a Wii or Guitar Hero?

(For the record... my countertop is Formica. Scratched. Long car trips can be spent reading or drawing or counting license plates. And we don't have any video games or game players in this house. Our only major sin is cable TV. Talk to my husband about that!)

I wonder what it will take for Americans to return to understanding that paying into a common fund (i.e., paying taxes) so that all might have health care, say, or so that our crumbling national infrastructure might be brought up to date and up to code, is in fact the investment most worth making -- an investment whose ultimate value will far surpass the return, however you measure it, on owning a Lincoln Navigator or a state-of-the-art home theater.

When did paying taxes into a common fund for the common good cease to be a civic virtue? I marvel at the success of the Republican Party in persuading many of us that taxes and government are inherently evil and cannot possibly ever do anyone any good, that the supreme American value is to be free to earn as much as possible, regardless of how you do it and regardless of whom you hurt, and to keep it all for your own private personal enjoyment. How they successfully appeal to our lowest and most selfish impulses and then successfully brand them as ideological virtues.

It is this mindset that has led us to the lip of the abyss, if not down into its depths. It is the lack of real civic virtue, of willingness to contribute to and for the common good, that has left us with a society of self-seeking, alienated inhabitants; a crumbling national infrastructure; a school system universally acknowledged to be failing in its mission to train the next generation to compete in the global marketplace; and the largest debt of any nation on earth.

Instead of taking the high road - postponing self-gratification to invest in our future, creating items of real value for our society and the world - we have, with the encouragement of our elected leaders, spent an entire generation rolling in the delicious mud of self-indulgent materialism.

Now don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against someone enjoying the good things life has to offer -- on two conditions: one, that the fortunate soul recognize his good fortune and happily share a reasonable percentage with the society that nurtured and educated and made his success possible; and two, that that success be genuinely and fairly earned, by creating some good or service of tangible value. It doesn't have to be a factory widget; intellectual product (e.g. software) also counts, as do items that make life easier or more entertaining ( I think of Steve Jobs, or Steven Spielberg). But the good life has not been earned when it is obtained through paper-shifting, luftgescheften, and defrauding feckless consumers, nor is it earned by artificially extending the magic of consumer credit to those who could never qualify for credit under any real test of worth.

Surely, someone, somewhere, knew that this was all smoke and mirrors, but nobody cared. Why would they? Some of the biggest pirates were, after all, the largest contributors to the Bush permanent campaign.

But the truth is, "greed is good" has been the American byword roughly since Ronald Reagan. Since FDR, NO ONE has preached sacrifice for the common good and lived to tell the tale. (Remember Jimmy Carter asking you to turn down your thermostat? How prescient he was, and how we scorned and reviled him for it.)

Now we're in the soup, and it's a soup we've cooked for ourselves over these decades of high living. And I have no idea whether there yet survives, beneath the accumulated fatty rolls of our late-Empire self-indulgence, any hard nub of the civic virtue that characterizes a healthy republic. Can we decide, as a nation, to postpone getting a granite countertop or buying the latest gizmos so that together we can invest in building our national grid, which would enable us to make effective use of wind and solar, thereby weaning ourselves off foreign oil? Can we, as a nation, take away our kids' video games and make them spend more time studying math and science? Do we have the NATIONAL WILL to do these things? Is there a leader who can inspire us to rise to this most serious challenge to America's ascendancy? Or are we just too slack, too morally out of shape to get off the national couch, roll up our sleeves and get back to the work of building this nation, as a nation - not just a random collection of disparate individuals each in it only for what s/he can get?

Joe Sixpack, Again??

I wonder what has happened
To this country that I love;
Where once we chose our leaders
From those who rose above
The ordinary middle --
Those talented and wise --
Now we elect Joe Sixpack
‘Cause he’s ‘one of the guys’.

And when Joe Sixpack leads us toward
Disaster and abyss,
We gasp and say, My goodness,
How has it come to this?

Our economy in tatters,
A war that has no end;
Our reputation shattered,
Who can this ruin mend?

Surely we need someone who’s wise
And gifted beyond measure,
But many look to ‘hockey moms’
To restore our lost luster.

We like the bottom of the class,
‘Cause brilliance makes us fear;
We choose to choose someone who
Doesn’t know to say ‘nuCLEAR.”

Our schools are failing, yet we still
Believe ourselves superior;
Blinded by patriotic pride,
We can’t see our face in the mirror.

Are we like Rome - where people let
Old Nero play his fiddle?
Why do we vote for those who fit
The ordinary middle?

I see the American Century
Declining like the sun;
Where is the will to halt this slide
And raise us up again?

The face of hope may not look like
Your face, or even mine -
But he’s the best hope that we’ve got
To reverse our decline!

You know that what I say is true,
Your heart must tell you so;
Your ‘gut’ misled you in ‘04,
Why would you trust it now?

I wonder what will happen
To this country I hold dear
If we don’t take our blinders off
And see what’s all too clear.

We’ve let ourselves be led right to
The edge of the abyss,
Do you believe this can be stopped
By the bottom of the class?

Is his judgment good and sound?
Or does he improvise
Based on his ‘gut’, without the facts,
So very far from wise?

Did he know much about his choice
To be his running-mate?
Had he vetted carefully?
Or did he just tempt fate?

Will he use careful judgment in
A crisis with Iran?
Or will he rush into a war
Without a thorough plan?

We’re already in one such war,
Do we really need another
To leave us bankrupt and bereft,
A line of weeping mothers?

A hundred years he said we’d spend,
A century of treasure,
Just ask yourself which candidate
Is wisest, by this measure.

This material is copyrighted by its author. You may distribute it for free with the proper attribution to my blog, but you may not derive any profit whatsoever from distributing it in any form, whether print, audio, or video.

In Media della Nostra Vita

Among the many 'pleasures' of middle age that await me is that of saying farewell to my parents. (Yes, I KNOW I'm lucky to still have them.)

At present I'm watching my beloved 88-year-old dad slowly diminish. His is a gentle slide towards the abyss, the heart weakening and the breath shortening, but mental and other faculties all intact; and I know I am supposed to be grateful, that he is not suffering too much, that he is not having to undergo any painful therapies, and that trips to the hospital, with all their attendant degradations (really, you can't even take a s---t alone), remain just occasional, at least for now.

But I'm not grateful, I'm still too busy being incredulous and upset that this is happening. Wasn't he going to be on the Today Show, Willard Scott saying "Happy Birthday, 103 years old today?" I am stuck at the part where I simply cannot imagine this world without him in it. Even if all he is doing at this point is crosswords and sudoku and reading books... the sweetness and wit remain -- a spark that even survives profound hearing loss and throws out a sudden riposte when you thought he wasn't listening.

It has been - instructive? - not sure how to characterize this - to see how the spirit truly shines through the thinning frame, how, as daily life concerns dwindle, core feelings get more exposed. I have witnessed his terrible remorse for having been among those who bombed the ball bearings plants of the Nazi war machine, an action which he knows cost many civilian lives. He sits at the kitchen table and the tears stream down his sunken cheeks. No reassurance that the Nazis had to be stopped from annihilating the Jewish people and the rest of Europe can allay his guilt and sadness for having bombed and killed people who were, most likely, forced labor rather than willing volunteers. All bombast about the larger goal of the Allied victory no longer speaks to him; he just sees the imagined faces of his victims.

Exoskeletal Surgery?

Prompted by the Jewish New Year, I have embarked not only my self but my family on a journey towards greater engagement with the outside world, i.e. our community.

They say change starts on the inside. I disagree. I think it starts on the outside and slowly burrows into your insides.

So we no longer spend our weekends hermiting, reading and lazing about. We are trying on for size things like:

1. Joining a shul and going to Shabbat services, at least every other Shabbat. NOT at a regular brick-and-mortar synagogue (comes complete with expensive rabbi and staff and mortgage bonds) -- but at the Fabrangen havura (fellowship) in D.C. My husband dug out his tallit bag and kipa, and off we went.

Luckily one doesn't even have to "dude up the duds" to go to these services; shlumpy is kosher. They take their Torah portion seriously - even discuss it. But no one pries into your personal level of observance. Plus they have a great smorgasbord after services. And above all, they open their High Holiday services to all comers. I cannot and will not join any synagogue that sells (expensive!!) tickets to worship. To me this is anti-Jewish and just plain offensive.

Fabrangen seem like a marvelous bunch of people. Warm, welcoming, unpretentious, smart, well-informed, and terrific singers to boot. Services are member-led, and the music runs the gamut from Hasidic to Sephardic to mainstream,depending on who's leading.

Highly recommend them if you are DC area Jewish and like your Judaism straight up, without any dollops of social/economic pretension. (If you're joining a synagogue to make business connections, this probably isn't the right place.)

2. Participating in and even leading school community activities. I agreed to co-chair a parent committee to do good works in the larger DC community. At the time I attributed that to a momentary bout of lunacy, but so far it's working out better than I'd imagined. My co-chair and eye see eye to eye. Last month I ran an event to raise money for a local homeless/indigent service provider and got 150 people to sign up, which was a huge success at this small school. We raised several thousand dollars and garnered lots of kudos. I also got approached about a new job. Note to self: casting one's bread upon the waters really does work! (Slow learner but not hopeless)

3. Getting exercise as a family. We've done hikes and walks in the beautiful fall weather, and bowled on less nice days. My husband's love affair with the Sunday paper continues unabated but he has been more or less willing to put it down and get outside for part of the day. Even he can see that it's much better for a growing child than sitting inside all day in one's jammies, writing and drawing till the cows come home. He's even using the gym at work a couple of times a week (gasp!!!!). We'll never stop preferring a good book to a good run, but we can try to balance it a bit better.

I feel quite proud of me and of my family for making these changes. Keeping it up will be a challenge - New Year's resolutions are notoriously short of lifespan. It would be so terribly easy to go back to eremitic sloth as a total lifestyle choice. This past weekend we had to grit our teeth to get ourselves out to services and then to a community event on Sunday. Once bad weather kicks in, I imagine it will get even harder. I don't know at what point external changes begin to burrow past the derma and into the viscera. But I promise to report periodically and honestly on our progress, hoping always to manage two steps forward for every one step back.

Memorial Day - Just Another Monday Off?

It's kind of strange to experience Memorial Day here in the USA after living in Israel for many years.

Memorial Day in Israel is serious stuff. Places of entertainment are closed. Torches are lit by relatives of the fallen. At 11 a.m. a siren sounds. All traffic halts. Drivers get out of their cars in the middle of the highway and stand silent for 2 full minutes. If you're in a meeting, the same instantaneous suspension of activity, the same silent homage to the fallen. At sundown of that day, Independence Day begins. Fireworks, barbequeues (mangal ), performances. But the organic connection is made manifest - between the precious gift of independence and the price paid by tens of thousands to achieve and maintain that gift.

Here in the USA, by contrast, there is an emotional remove -- for all but the families and friends of the recently fallen. The average American goes to the beach or to a picnic or backyard barbequeue. Maybe they attend a parade of aging veterans. But there is no national involvement, no sense of the greater collective. To take Memorial Day seriously in the USA, you have to be military family or rabid right-winger.

I see this partly as a result of our basic sense of security - something Israel still yearns to achieve - and partly as the unfortunate consequence of the wars we have fought in our lifetime, wars which lacked a national consensus. That absence of consensus has shorn military service of much of its sacred character. It is not the soldiers' fault - they cling to the sacred task of defending their nation. It is the fault of our elected leaders who are entirely too ready to send other people's children into harm's way, while their own sons and daughters would never dream of signing up to serve.

Really interesting book

Defining the World, by Henry Hitchings. The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary.

I've always had only vague notions of this person and his work. A really enjoyable and enlightening read, about the very first effort to systematize and codify the English language.

I notice that Dr. Johnson was a late arrival - his father was past 50 and his mother past 40 when he, their firstborn, came into the world. And this was no modern birth in a hospital: it was 1709. The year the pianoforte was invented.

I've also been reading about that. Apparently the real attraction of the pianoforte was that it put a period forever to the perennial complaint concerning the harpsichord, virginal, and all other keyboard instruments of that era -- namely, their aural monotony, caused by those instruments' inability to produce variations in volume and tone. Since the pianoforte employed, for the first time, hammers to strike the strings (rather than pluck them), those hammers could strike in accord with the precise degree of force the player applied to the keyboard that controlled the hammer action.

We took the wonderchild to see Over the Hedge at the local multiplex today. It was better than I'd expected, though entirely predictable in most part. But it introduces to impressionable young minds the radical notion that we humans aren't the only ones with a right to inhabit this planet. It also poked fun at overweight Americans, junk food, suburban landscapes, SUVs, exterminators, and neighborhood organizer types. Methinks the screenwriter might be a (gasp!) liberal!?!?

Death, Resurrection, and Gardening

Poet Stanley Kunitz died two weeks ago at the great age of 100. A long and happy life, despite his father's suicide shortly before Stanley was born.

Here's a memorable quote from "The Wild Braid:"

"Death and life (are) inextricably bound to each other. One of my feelings about working the land is that I am celebrating a ritual of death and resurrection. Every spring I feel that. I am never closer to the miraculous than when I am grubbing in the soil."

Yay, someone else noticed...

Whispers in the Loggia: St Paul Meets St Jaroslav

Misplaced Schadenfreude

The secret illiberal in me, the one that occasionally sucks on a juicy morsel of schadenfreude like a delicious sweet, has looked on with a certain grim satisfaction as, in recent weeks, Hamas and Fatah trained their gunsights, not on Israeli schoolchildren and ordinary felafel eaters, but on one another.

Hah, let them decimate each other's ranks - then maybe at last the way might be cleared for rational Palestinian leadership. Maybe if the cowboys all kill each other, then reasonable people such as Sari Nusseibeh will be able to step forward and make a genuine peace deal with Israel and start focusing on nation-building alongside and in concert with Israel, which has, whether you like it or no, clearly demonstrated its own abilities in the nation-building sphere.

But that, of course, presumes that the Palestinian people would follow a Sari Nusseibeh. And the fact is, when given the choice, and understanding all the ramifications of that choice, they elected - Hamas.

I saw the movie Gandhi again the other night on HBO, and recalled my thoughts upon seeing it the first time, back in the 1980s, at a cinema in Jerusalem. I thought then, as an Israeli citizen, that it was a dangerous film, that the Palestinians would go see it and realize how they could win. Organize a mass peaceful march on the Knesset. Lie down in the streets of Jerusalem. No guns, no rock throwing. Men, women and children. They'd have their state so fast it would make your head spin.

That was 20 or more years ago, and not a heck of a lot has improved since then. Whatever you think of Israel and its actions (and I'm not defending much of what has been done), you still must grapple with the basic fact that Israel hasn't had lots of good choices here, that the Palestinians have never once demonstrated any real willingness to coexist or abandon violence.

And don't tell me their violent campaign against Israel started as a reaction to the Israeli occupation, because a cursory glance at history pre-1967 will expose that as utter nonsense.

But, anent my schadenfreude, here's Danny Rubinstein of Haaretz:

"The situation in which Israel is not obliged to take responsibility, and the assumption that anarchy in Gaza creates a convenient political reality for Israel, are in fact short-term illusions. Nothing good for us can come out of what is now happening in the Gaza Strip, and it could easily spill over into the West Bank. Anarchy among our neighbors, turmoil in the security situation, economic crisis, fear of civil war and perhaps famine, anger and bitterness - all of these will eventually affect not only the Palestinians but us also, directly or in a roundabout way. No walls or separation fences will stop missiles and attacks that will cause us security and economic damage. The truth, therefore, remains as always: what is good for, and needed by, Israel in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from all points of view are quiet and stability, a flourishing economy and a regime with which we can reach an agreement - and not the opposite of these."

From his mouth to the Palestinians' ears. Or God's. For clearly the Palestinians seem incapable of making this leap unaided.

Death of My Teacher, Jaroslav Pelikan

My mentor and teacher from my undergrad days, Jaroslav Pelikan, died of lung cancer over the weekend. Obituaries will be legion, if a tad slow in coming. Here's one appreciation: http://www.svots.edu/Events/Summer-Institute/
2003/readings/Pelikan-Legend.html

In more than 30 years, I never forgot the experience of studying with him. The single most extraordinary teacher I ever knew.

If you're not a fan of church history, never mind; he'll make you one. I had intended to be a Russian Studies major but he 'converted' me to medieval intellectual history. I dropped Gogol and Tolstoy to grapple (in Latin) with the likes of Aquinas and Anselm, But somehow, Mr. Pelikan made this an intellectual adventure whose attraction lay in its very otherness, its distance from modern thought.

If you don't feel like reading his books (there are at least 40 of them), Google him and with a bit of patience you can find some recorded lectures and interviews. Here's a link to a few quick hors d'oeuvres:
http://www.counterbalance.net/transcript/jp-frame.html

Or, if creeds are your interest:
http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/speakingoffaith/20060518_pelikan.mp3

Listen and watch. The unfeigned joy, the humor that bubbles through his awe-inspiring erudition, are what set him apart from so many deeply learned scholars. His pleasure in sharing his knowledge was infectious.

I still love the quote from Augustine that he always used to cite, in a somewhat vain stab at humility: "What we have written we have written not in order to say something, but in order not to remain altogether silent."

Even though he was a name dropper who loved to brag about his accomplishments and tell anecdotes about how he learned to type before he was 3, and spoke 5 languages before he was 10, these foibles merely served to render him human where he might otherwise have appeared too godlike.

Despite his scholarly prominence, he was incredibly kind to me and to other students and took his time with us -- although if you wrote a paper for his class, you'd probably get a "Very good. B-". Here's what one of his colleagues had to say about his relationship with his disciples:

YDS Home>News for the YDS Community>Pelikan

James Dittes, the Roger J. Squire Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Theology, said, “Jary Pelikan liked to say that the best graduate education occurs when the student can look over the shoulder of the professor at work. But I am not entirely sure he followed that maxim in practice.

“Too often it seemed to me that the education was going on because he was looking carefully over the shoulder of the student. As mentor and as advocate he exercised a profound and vigorous respect for the accomplishment and talent of others, especially perhaps of those regarded conventionally as ‘junior' scholars, even the maverick.”

****************************************************************************
He did, for a time, seriously entertain thoughts of becoming a concert pianist. I see both vocations - music and scholarship - as his way of spreading the knowledge and joy of our Creator, by whatever name we choose to call Him/Her.

Indeed, his respect for other faiths was genuine and heartfelt without in any way interfering with his own firm membership in the Christian faith. The fact of his progression from Lutheranism to Eastern Orthodoxy in no way lessens that firmness - he saw all denominations of the church as branches of a single tree.

I will miss knowing he is here on earth with us but feel sure he has gone to his rest having lived a full and fulfilling life. I hope he didn't suffer too much at the end. Ave atque vale.

Reflections in a bottle of Voss

In my Manhattan hotel room, they’ve put two bottles of water in the little fridge. Artesian water, flown in from Norway, in bottles substantial and grand, bottles that looks more valuable than their contents, distilled out of glaciers and fjords.

I don’t have the energy to google “artesian wells” plus “Norway”. I break the security seal. I drink.

Now, perhaps, you understand why I am weary. Even drinking water becomes a political act. A minute motion of complicity in the Earth's destruction.

Does anyone really believe we can go on shipping the water of fjords to Manhattan hotels? Think how many fossils were burnt to achieve this. Waters from Norway, blueberries in February, and Rome in flames.

Too much consciousness in all that we do. Too much nuance, and way too much taint.

If only I didn’t have a kid, I could go to Rome and eat mozzarella di bufala and arucola to my heart’s content. But as it is, I go on with my ambivalent existence, knowing myself obscenely fortunate and yet wishing my life had sharper edges. I'd have less leisure for existential angst and for overthinking (my mother's accusation against me. Just drink the damn water and shut up already!).

The Murder Next Door

From where I sit I watch them, three strapping young men, roping their victim as one would a bucking steer.

But the victim stands impassive, moving only in a breeze, letting his limbs be savaged.
They cut right through; a mighty length of trunk swings free; then down, down to the grass.

Where we all come to, in the end.

Tears rise in my eyes as each body part descends. I know a crime when I see it. This is murder, the heedless tearing down of a grand, generous life.

The oak was there before our redbrick houses rose on this ground. It was a young light thing when Lincoln was shot, downtown. It stood, drinking and thinking its tree thoughts, turning sunlight to sugars, throwing out new limbs and leaves. Patiently it added ring upon ring, offering its arms to the annual rite of spring. It housed cardinals, sparrows, tufted titmice; it fed squirrels, nets of gypsy moths, cicadas. It had a whole existence of its own, about which we, its neighbors, chose to know less than nothing.

And it asked us for nothing – except to be left alone.

Now the house has been sold, part of the continuing madness as homebuyers swarm like flies on a carcass over this neighborhood, the last place inside the DC Beltway where you can get a house for under half a million. (Fifty thousand over the ask! No inspection! All cash!)

Ah, but to be only three miles from the snack aisles at Trader Joe’s!
I bet the new people like snacks.
I bet they don’t like “dirt” - raking, pollen, clogged gutters.
So why the hell didn’t they buy a nice condo downtown?

In America there’s no social compact: strangers choose houses, not neighbors.
They count bathrooms, not kids for their kids to play with.
They measure commutes, not like-mindedness.

So no one asked if we minded. They probably didn’t even realize their tree was someone I loved. Not that it would have mattered.

They are taking my green canopy and giving me – what? – more sky I don’t want.
(Not knocking the sky, mind you.)

Anyhow, it’s their oak now, and I can do, as in so very much these days, nothing.

But I go next door nonetheless, just to ask, hoping there’s a reason, needing to let someone know it’s a death that is not going unnoticed. Only everyone speaks Spanish, and I don’t. “Es triste,” I say, and the old man with the three teeth nods.

When I come back inside I find my new guest, the sun, raiding my space like a glad smiling pirate. It’s too bright to see to write. Our pleasant sun room, once awash with light in the afternoons, is even now – a sauna. As, soon, our Earth.

And to think we bought a Prius, all smug -- like that might change anything.

Moms: Get Off the Couch! I Did. Here's How:

So, up till now I was, shall we say, a tad fatigued. Here's a multiple choice question for you:

Which memories of Mom will be cherished by my preschooler?
(a) tossing a baseball
(b) building a castle out of cereal boxes
(c) lying prostrate on the couch making weird nasal noises and drowning out the soundtrack on Dragon Tales

Well, I am happy to report that, after an unconscionably long period of wanting only to lie on the couch all day, of dragging my corpse out of bed each morning and scraping through the day doing the absolute minimum or rather less than that, I finally jettisoned my internist (who had insisted my thyroid levels were "good enough" and I was just depressed) and went to see an endocrinologist.

Endocrinologist started me on a tiny dose, just half a milligram, of synthetic thyroid hormone.
She said it would take 4 - 6 weeks to kick in.
It took 2 days.

I awoke on the 2nd day, saw the sun shining in the window and heard the birds chirping, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I actually wanted to get out of bed. I was excited about the new day. This by itself is revolutionary. My husband commented on the lack of dark bags under my eyes.

I am now one whole week into taking Synthroid and am actually PEPPY. I have energy to do the things that need to be done in my life. I have recovered my former mental focus and physical stamina. It is just amazing, the transformation. People can tell the difference just talking to me on the telephone.

So the moral of the story is: if you are a woman over 40, with or without small kids at home, and you complain to the doc about fatigue and lack of energy, don't let your GP brush you off with a prescription for Prozac and the names of some good psychiatrists to treat your "depression". You may be depressed -- who wouldn't be, feeling this exhausted all the time? -- but it's also entirely possible that you have a borderline thyroid. Tons of women past a certain age have undiagnosed thyroid issues. Go see a board certified endocrinologist. Do it soon.

envy (not the penis kind)

What had been a lovely afternoon of togetherness, sitting in the sunny porch and painting watercolor rainbows on paper, turned suddenly sour when I decided to use two of my creations as end of year thank-you cards for wonderchild's teachers.

I'm not your friend any more.
I want another mother.
I hate you.
I'm not having a good afternoon.

Later he announced he would be appeased only by a milkshake. And I, craven guilty soul that I am, caved. I rushed into the kitchen to make it, thinking: well, at least I can sneak an egg into him this way.

Wonderchild, age 5, wants me to belong entirely to him, to devote my every waking moment and particle of energy to him, to revolve around him as the earth revolves round the sun.

In fairness, I believe he revolves around me. Poor little bunny, what choice does he have? We are alone together so much. Only child, stay at home mom. Not a good formula. No "village." No nearby family, no siblings. He has playmates of course but there's still lots and lots of time that's just "Mommy and me".

Of course that's about to end, though I don't think he quite realizes. First camp, and then kindergarten, will signal the end of our solo afternoons. I'm torn between regret and relief.

Not giving up the dreams

Not giving up the dreams,
But only knowing them better.

And in the midst of that process,
The following out of skew lines,
Far striking in dark blueness,

And always playing Sisyphus,
Victim of a myth,
Victim of myself,

I hold, and will hold,
to that kernel
that I have known in secret,
The seed-pearl at the center.

Mine only, and yet not mine,
And so I do not name it;
Content to have it there,
To open my eyes upon it.

My adolescence bore little resemblance to Isadora's.  

Insert Toe in Water

My first post to an adoring public and I'm as nervous as a bride who's about to marry the guy she met on the rebound. (Yep, I've done that.)

Today was lovely. I dropped the wonderchild at his preschool and toddled over to the local posh grocery, leisurely trolling for bargain berries (organic of course!), lugged the overpriced load home and stuffed same into antique (OK, late '80s) fridge that leaves puddles all over the not-so-charmingly cracked vinyl flooring. {Why are some things charming and antique and others merely ugly and old? The others were never nice to begin with.}

I guess I like not working. Unemployment seems to suit me. Or is it just Not Enough Prozac?

In the afternoon I took the wonderchild to a little park near the house. He made woodchip ice cream and then we spent a nice half hour befriending a periodical cicada who, judging by its slow motions, was nearing the end of its brief span above ground. The great mating ritual seems to be over and the passionate mass drumming in the trees has faded to a mere background thrum.

I thought how fascinating it might be to just sit and observe the behavior of this creature. Then, a flash -- entomologist manquee!? I bet I'd last at least a day or two.

Truth is, I don't seem to have abiding passion for anything. I envy those with a life's passion but sometimes wonder if they ever allow themselves to digress long enough to pal around with a dying insect.

I do see things, even if I do nothing about any of it.

A misspent life? You be the judge.