Out on Monk's Road

A few days ago, I drove west on the Bluegrass Parkway to visit the Abbey at Gethsemani. There was a time when I made this trip more often, and I've been overdue for a visit. The abbey is a Trappist monastery in a bucolic setting down a narrow country road in Nelson County. Thomas Merton lived there, and today it's home to quite a number of monks. They're contemplative, which to my understanding means they emphasize prayer and work and an atmosphere of silence.

The Gethsemani monks are known for their fruitcakes and cheese and bourbon candy. I sampled the candy once at Christmas time, and believe me, it will either clear your sinuses or put hair on your chest or both. They're generous with the bourbon is all I'm saying.

They picked a great spot for a contemplative abbey; by day, they're surrounded by lush fields and soft green hills with little to interrupt the quiet but birds and crickets, and by night they're tucked under a bright canopy of stars. I know, because I used to take my binoculars and go there star-gazing. It was the one place I could think of where it was dark enough to see the night sky and safe enough to be doing it. I used to gaze at the moon by the hour from their parking lot and try to identify constellations and nebulae; the only interference was a rather bright light on a nearby barn.

The first time I visited the abbey, I think I was expecting something more medieval. I was doing the Artist's Way and went there on an artist's date. A monastery might not be the first place you'd think of for an artist's date, but as I interpreted it, I was seeking out new experiences and exploring realms outside my everyday sphere. Certainly, the abbey qualified for that. It was a place I'd long been curious about and floated in my imagination as some kind of mysterious, otherworldly Avalon, resounding with chant and shadowy silences.

When I got there, late in the afternoon of a Saturday in November, I stopped at the visitor's center and spoke to the monk on duty, who had a very round face and glasses but didn't seem particularly medieval. He told me I could visit the church, so I went in and looked around. I might have taken his invitation too liberally, as I went all the way down the nave and around the little nooks at the other end, which may actually have been off limits. When I came back to the seating area behind the little gate, I was just in time to see the shocked face of another visitor, evidently a regular, who crossed herself agitatedly and knelt down to pray with the stiff manner of someone who had just witnessed the breaking of at least eight and possibly more of the Ten Commandments.

I stayed in the growing dusk of that autumn day for vespers, sitting with the other visitors who gradually filled the seats as bells tolled and white-and-black-robed monks came strolling in from various directions to fill the benches on either side of the nave in front of us. To be honest, I think I was a little disappointed with the plainness of the church, which seemed rather starkly white with its unadorned dark wood beams and spartan interior. When the monks began to chant, it was in English, not in Latin, and even the melodies seemed more modern than I was expecting. I was still a little wounded by the silent rebuke I'd received from the pious woman and wondered why I so frequently felt in the wrong when it came to Catholicism, the church I was raised in.

In between chants, there were readings, and as it happened, one of the readings was on fornication, which was mentioned several times. Each time it came up, a few more visitors, all young and mostly in pairs, got up and left in a hurry. The Abbey at Gethsemani is fairly famous, and I'm sure it draws people from all over the world, many of whom are not churchgoers at all. I surmised that these young pilgrims, probably admirers of Merton's who knew of his work with the Buddhists, stopped in to see the place associated with him and got more than they bargained for in the form of an epistle on sins of the flesh. I sat there unmoved. I might have had trespassing issues, but otherwise my conscience was in the clear.

I'm not sure why I went back after the first anticlimactic visit, unless it was because had I noticed the light. After the first time, I usually went directly up to the second-floor balcony, which allows you to look down the length of the nave from on high. You can't even see the monks unless you sit close enough to the front, but what you can see is . . . light -- the way it streams in through the parti-colored windows, like the answer to a prayer or the sound of the word "om." It's very peaceful in the balcony, with that warm light streaming in, and the simplicity of the church turns out to be the perfect backdrop  for watching the light. When I think of the abbey now, that's what I see.

One time, I was sitting up there, lost in thought, when I heard a door opening behind me. I looked around and saw one of the monks crossing the balcony from the monastic area on his way down to the church. He was a middle-aged man with a balding head and a spring in his step, and he smiled at me without saying anything, though his expression spoke volumes. That's another thing that has stayed with me, the joy in his smile.

On my recent visit, as I sat light-gazing, I thought to myself that I should keep my mind open and see what inspiration or epiphany might come to me on one of those sunbeams. I'd been sitting there for a while, thinking about little else but how funny life is, when suddenly I realized that I needed to change a password on one of my accounts at home. Not exactly the kind of thing I was expecting, but when I'm sitting in an attitude of meditation in a house of prayer, and an unexpected thought comes to me, I pay attention.

On the way out, I stopped to look at the walled garden, a simple but inviting place drowsing in the early summer evening. I peeked into the visitor's chapel, where someone had posted a note about praying the rosary. I waved at a pleasant-looking couple I saw in the parking lot. On the way back to town, I passed a young man walking on the side of the road who looked at me with a sort of light in his eyes, a la "Woodstock." I don't know what any of that means, but when I got home, I did change my password.

A Walk in Chicago

I was in Chicago for a few days last week. As often happens in an unfamiliar place, I was tired and a bit overwhelmed the first day. Downtown Chicago is an extremely energetic environment, and it took me a day to get in synch with it.

A lunchtime walk to the Newberry Library on the second day allowed me to get my feet under me. My natural love of walking kicked in, I enjoyed finding my way to the Library (and seeing the inside of it), and the skyscrapers and busy streets that had seemed daunting the night before started to seem exciting and intriguing instead. There was a lot to see.

My last night in town we had a conference dinner, which ended early. I started walking back toward my hotel, but it seemed too early to just go to my room and brush my teeth. I decided instead to walk toward Navy Pier. I was enjoying the views of the skyscrapers lit up against the dusk and the Friday night exuberance in the air. I knew if I kept walking I would come to the waterfront, so I tried to maintain a straight course while staying on well-populated streets.

I eventually came to Lakeshore Drive and was faced with an underpass I hesitated to use. While hesitating, I saw groups of people crossing it from the other side, so I made my way down to it from the street level and ventured forth. Navy Pier, on the other side, was awash with people as I strolled past. I wondered if I should try to get to Millennium Park or if I was going to get caught in the rain.

I asked two women emerging from the park near Navy Pier how close I was to Millennium Park. I walked along with them for a while as we discussed the best way to get there. As it turned out, it was a little late for Millennium Park by then, and I had conveniently but unintentionally (because of the lake shore) walked in a sort of circle so that I was not far from my hotel. By that time my feet were tired, and I had satisfied my impulse for a walk, so I called it a night.

Every place has its own presiding genius, its local gods. I don't know Chicago well enough to say what its gods are. I was downtown, and that's different from other parts of the city I've seen before. I saw glittering towers, groups of revelers out on the town, and beautiful window displays of artfully arranged housewares and home decor. I saw a man playing a saxophone in front of the AT&T store. I saw a homeless family huddled in a doorway. I saw many tourists in a crowded Navy Pier arcade, a glimpse of the lake at nightfall, a young man taking a break in the cavelike service area of a large hotel, a doctor leaning against the reception desk inside Northwestern Hospital, and a pair of young men posing proudly for a picture in front of an underpass mural.

I navigated by prior knowledge of the map, attention to the presence of others, the advice of guides, and my own intentions. I'm glad I followed my hunch that it was too early to go to bed. During the day, Chicago is busy, directed, and purposeful. It gave me a fuller sense of things to experience a more festive but still multi-faceted city as it wound down into evening.

Keeping It Real

To Kill a Mockingbird is downtown this week as part of the Summer Movie Classics series, and I thought of going this afternoon but didn't make it in time. It made me think about how I should have included Atticus Finch in my "Handsome Is as Handsome Does" post a few weeks ago. He's another of my literary heroes.

I got a paperback copy of the novel when I was 12 through one of those book clubs you join at school. Reading it wasn't so much like reading a novel as inhabiting a world, and it was a world that looked a lot like the one I was in. Rarely, if ever, have I read anything that seemed so true to life. I never lived in a small Alabama town, but Maycomb was enough like the small Kentucky town I was in to seem as if it all could have been taking place just down the street.

The noble and the ignoble side by side . . . character after character seemed to jump off the page with a three-dimensional reality. I kept thinking, "I know these people." Miss Stephanie Crawford, for one, was a ringer for one of my relatives. Scout, Jem, and Dill could have been my brother and me running around with a neighborhood friend. The prejudice, the small-mindedness, the nobility, the courage, the terrors of growing up . . . there wasn't a false note in it anywhere. By the end of it, I almost felt that I had once dressed up as a ham for a pageant and been rescued by Boo Radley.

When I first saw the movie on TV years ago, I was a bit thrown off by several things, including the actress who portrayed Scout. Actually, she did a good job but didn't look quite the way I had pictured the character. In my mind, Scout had pigtails and a sturdier, more tomboyish appearance than the gamine-faced actress in the film. And even though the movie, as I remember it, was faithful to the book in both spirit and many of its details, it must have been difficult to bring such a fully-realized world to the screen without missing something in the translation.

One thing that couldn't have gone any better was the casting of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. If ever anyone was born to play that character, it was Mr. Peck. Calm, compassionate, intelligent and well-reasoned, full of integrity . . . who wouldn't want Atticus for a father? When I think of the story, I don't think first of all the ugliness of human nature it exposes. I think of Atticus, facing down the mad dog, sitting outside the jail overnight to protect Tom Robinson, or ruffling Scout's hair after quietly explaining some important fact of life to her. I came away from the book with a belief that despite everything, decency, goodness, and wisdom create a structure that can withstand some mighty powerful storms.

Mythically, Atticus resembles Zeus at his most benign. He stands for justice and fairness and the importance of respecting principles and laws. Not the loudest or most flamboyant attorney you'd ever meet, but forceful in a different way. The kind of absent-minded father that kids might find faintly ridiculous until they were old enough to understand what was really ticking underneath the mild manner and modest exterior.

I'm not aware that Harper Lee wrote any other novels besides To Kill a Mockingbird, but I guess if you were only going to write one, this would be it. The story and the characters are timeless, and the writing is flawless. Although it has some of the tragedy of a Greek drama, it does not have quite the same fatalism. In spite of everything, Atticus will be there in the morning when Jem wakes up, and that seems to make all the difference.

Scenting the Past

Yesterday I read an article about the perfume industry in Provence. It was a very poetic account of the art and science of creating fragrance and included a description of an expert who could tell what type of perfume would suit a person just by talking to someone who knew her well. The author of the article wrote of the sense of smell and its role in setting memories, and that got me thinking about Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, and how the senses interact with experience to form lasting impressions.

Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is famous for its description of the taste of the cookie that awakened childhood memories for the narrator. There are tastes that would do the same for me, though I rarely come across things I remember eating and drinking when I was young. I was once in an old-fashioned store in Northern California that stocked the type of candy-coated chocolate balls in cellophane sleeves that I hadn't eaten in almost 40 years. I can still taste them. Finding them that day was, in a small way, like recovering a bit of the past. Other tastes that I vividly remember, like my mother's pancakes and meatloaf, both of which were hers alone, are lost to me now for good.

As for smells, my memory is full of them. One scent I recall from early childhood is the smell of Spic 'n Span, which my mother used to clean the floors. It's tied to images of my mother doing housework, with the TV on in the background. I also remember the combined scents of starch, a hot iron, and cotton enveloping me as I played on the floor, ironing board towering above me. I can still picture the living room in our duplex, with the sun coming in though a kitchen window and Search for Tomorrow's high-pitched organ music filling the air, images all tied up with those particular scents.

I continue to enjoy the smell of freshly-mown grass, which I associate with my father. I used to like following along behind him as he created paths in the yard with the lawn mower. The wetter the grass and the more humid the day, the more closely the scent matches my memory, because we lived in Florida then, and the smell of the grass there was heady and thick.

From my school days, I recall the smell of the supply room at the end of the hall where we got our paper, ink cartridges, erasers, and notebooks. It was the sweet, woody smell of pencils and paper -- the soft, pulpy kind with blue lines, on which we learned to write -- that dominated the little room, accented by the more delicate odor of ink and the rubbery essence of erasers. There's never been another room like it.

The coconut aroma of Coppertone is one of the fragments of my memories of family trips to the beach. I've become used to more medicinal sunscreens with lighter, cleaner scents, but a whiff of old-fashioned coconut lotion takes me right back to Fort Myers Beach. In addition, there was a place at the beach where you could get hot dogs, slightly leathery and sweet with ketchup, that didn't taste like the hot dogs anywhere else. The salty scent of those hot dogs filled the air near the shaded shack where you bought them and remains for me the essence of a perfect day at the beach.

There's also the inimitable smell of the downtown movie theaters during a matinee, composed of popcorn, spilled soft drinks, and a salty-sweet darkness. Connected with this is the taste of Milk Duds, our go-to movie-time candy, and a memory of dark red curtains.

What else? Well, there's the straightforward detergent smell of Prell shampoo, which reigned supreme in our bathroom, the mild smell of Vel soap (which I've rarely encountered elsewhere), my father's Old Spice, and the scent of the clothes hamper, musky, woody, and plastic, with top notes of Pinesol. I recall the smell of batter, both the batters my mother mixed from Duncan Hines or Betty Crocker in a white plastic basin, and the ones that baked under the light bulb in my Easy-Bake Oven and were entirely different.

I've been surprised to find that some of the products I remember are still around, like Prell shampoo and Spic 'n Span. I'm not sure if they're made the way they used to be, though. I think I found a box of Spic 'n Span some years ago, tried it, and didn't think it smelled the same. Of course, on a different floor, in a different home, at a different time, it's not surprising it didn't match my memories. It was working with the chemistry of a completely different environment.

The things we remember are not just discrete items but are woven into the fabric of a place and time. They interact with the items and the people around them to create something distinctive. In some cases, they're memorable enough that you'd recognize them anywhere, like a virtuoso solo performance. In other cases, they're like the individual instruments in an orchestra, bits and pieces of something bigger that seem diminished when separated. Sense memories are like a perfume: they're made of many essences, not just one.

We the People

It's the Fourth of July and raining like the dickens. I don't know how all the city-sponsored festivities fared today, but most of them must have been rained out. The weather, to me at least, seems to match the mood of the country. Our spirits are a bit dampened by all the news about spying, IRS scandals, budget woes, etc.

It's disheartening to hear a constant litany of accusations, counter-accusations, and denials. The government tells us it has done us a world of good by invading our privacy but hasn't told us exactly how. People are continuing to lose their jobs. Things have become rather Orwellian, and you wonder which of our elected leaders are truly there to serve the country. That's what government's for, right? To serve the people?

The United States has certain guiding myths that we hold dear, although we've often failed to live up to them. I say "myths" in the sense of the foundational stories we tell about ourselves, the ones that tell us who we are. The portraits of the Founding Fathers reflect the seriousness with which the young country viewed its odyssey from wilderness to emerging nation, a land of freedom and opportunity based on principles of equality. There's a mythic grandeur in those faces and in the scenes of courage and struggle they participated in.

Despite the many ways in which these men failed to extend their ideals -- to women, slaves, and Native Americans -- the principles themselves were sound. The fact that they were applied so imperfectly is disappointing but not surprising. Over 235 years later, we still haven't got it right.

America is growing more diverse and is projected to attain a "majority-minority" status by 2043, meaning no single group will represent a majority of the population. It's uncertain whether this will also mean a re-distribution of opportunities and resources or whether those with advantages will try to hang on to them. The future isn't clear.

All the competing subcultures and groups that make up the United States represent the possibility of friction but also an opportunity to benefit from multiple points of view. There's no longer a predominant religious or cultural background, and as the country continues to grow, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves will also change. One thing that doesn't have to change is the story of freedom and equality we told ourselves at the beginning, an idea that I think most of us still like.

I'm hoping the feeling I sometimes have that we're getting farther away from our story is just an illusion, that in reality we're moving closer to it all the time. Maybe it was such a big story that we just had to grow into it, and are still growing into it now.

Handsome Is As Handsome Does

I'm hard to please when it comes to literary characters. Specifically, I'm thinking now of romantic heroes. I seem to have gotten on a track of reading novels with romantic plot lines this summer, so several leading men are jostling against one another in my mind's eye. I was reading a book last week about a woman who had a summer affair with a man she met in Europe. The book was insightful about many things, but the main character, a relatively young woman, related the story as if all good things in life were behind her, all because the guy she tooled around with wouldn't leave his loveless marriage for her.

This guy actually asked her, at the end of their affair, if she expected him to ruin his life for her. Ding-ding-ding! Fire! Disaster! Help! Shouldn't that have told her what she needed to know? Would you believe that someone who'd say such a thing was the best thing that ever happened to you? She didn't seem to see it the same way I did, though, and at story's end was in deep mourning over the one who got away. I don't get it.

She did say he was good-looking, easy-going, companionable, and funny, but isn't that beside the point? To me, nothing kills the credibility of a hero like unreliability.

Well, Mary, you might say, what heroes do you find credible? Of course, you probably think I'm going to put Rochester from Jane Eyre at the top of my list because I was once an English major and he's in my dissertation. Actually, though, I have a problem with his lack of truthfulness about the madwoman in the attic. He should have told Jane the truth. That would have been a different book, but after all, a preexisting wife is not a small thing.

Some of Jane Austen's men stand up pretty well, although some are a bit milquetoast, even if you otherwise like them (Edward Ferrars, I'm talking to you). I blame some of this on the mores of the world Austen was depicting. You really don't expect a sturdy character like Aragorn son of Arathorn to wander into the genteel precints of Emma or Pride and Prejudice, even though it's fun to imagine it. I think Emma's Mr. Knightley comes off well, since he always gives Emma good advice and remains steadfast in his concern for her welfare. He's intelligent, kind, and consistent, though of course he can afford to be. He doesn't have someone breathing down his neck about making an unsuitable match.

I've already mentioned Tolkien's Aragorn, a rough-and-ready character who cleans up well, is brave and honorable, and doesn't scare easily. He turns out to be a king, but I don't know that I don't like him better as Strider, the wandering Ranger who doesn't look like anyone special, but is. One of my other favorite heroes is Mary Stewart's Simon Lester, who appears in the novel My Brother Michael. The heroine runs into some truly hard-nosed villains in this story of murky dealings in and around Delphi some years after World War II, and Simon, a Classics teacher investigating his brother's wartime death, is a true rock.

I read this book as a teenager and barely registered Simon, who is not a flashy character, but when I re-read it several years ago, he seemed to leap out of the page with his courage, resourcefulness, and good sense, like a quieter version of MacGyver. I guess you need a few decades before you can appreciate a staunch, trustworthy character over the moody, tortured types that make such an impression on a teenager, but there you have it.

It all goes back to something my grandmother used to say when I was growing up: "Handsome is as handsome does." It used to irritate me, because I thought she was saying you couldn't trust good-looking men, which seemed like a sweeping statement (and not one I wanted to hear). Now that I understand what she meant, I've been known to say it myself.

I'm reading yet another book about a divorcée who is swept off her feet by a good-looking, sophisticated man and was ready to throw the book across the room last night when he showed up in a well-tailored jacket and crisp shirt that set off his tan but seemed too insecure to weather his date's nervousness. I'm deferring judgment for the moment, though, because the heroine is just as annoying, and I haven't gotten to the end of the story yet. I'm trying to be open-minded here and not a snob. Even a wealthy, good-looking man may have redeeming qualities, and I'll be the first to admit it.

A Path, a Compass, a Map

I guess it isn't surprising how often I end up writing about walking, since I do a lot of walking. It's even sort of a professional interest, because of labyrinths. But I read a book this week that doesn't seem to be about either labyrinths or walking, in the everyday sense of walking. I meant to read Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail last year, when it came out, but I got sidetracked. It's probably just as well, since it means more to me now than it would have a year ago.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and the events of an actual life a thousand times more compelling than the best-crafted novel ever written. Such is Wild, a memoir of a woman's solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, undertaken in sort of a desperate, intuitive belief that something good would come out of it. As Miss Strayed tells it, she was in a Midwestern outdoor store buying a shovel when she picked up a guidebook for walkers of the PCT. She glanced at the book, then put it back, but something about the cover image of mountains and sky spoke to her mysteriously, and while driving to her home in Minneapolis, she was captured by the idea of hiking the trail herself.

It was a somewhat unexpected decision for someone who had never gone backpacking. But at the age of 26, battered by the loss of her mother to cancer, the breakup of her family, a marriage that had come unglued, an unexpected pregnancy, and a mounting sense of turmoil and emptiness, Strayed undertook the journey in a bid to find answers or least have a chance to think things through. As frequently happens, the reality was very different than what she had imagined.

As a novice hiker, Strayed had little idea of how to properly pack and ended up carrying a load that felt like "a Volkswagen Beetle" on her back. Men she met on the trail had trouble even picking up her pack, much less understanding how she managed to walk with it. Her hiking boots blistered her feet and rubbed them raw, a problem that persisted throughout the trip. She had little money, and despite the carefully chosen protein bars and dehydrated food, was always hungry. She learned to use a compass along the way, crossed rockslides and ice fields, edged around rattlesnakes, encountered bears, mastered the intricacies of a wayward water purifier, slept alone in a tent, worried about mountain lions, and occasionally sang to herself.

She had imagined walking along in soothing solitude, breathing in deeply and letting the beauty of the passing scenery heal the broken places. What actually happened was that pushing through the difficulties -- the skin lacerations, the pain, the hunger and thirst, the fears, the dangers, and the mistakes -- healed her. She discovered that she could stand on her own two feet by continuing to put one in front of the other, and the beauty of the wilderness, experienced at unexpected moments in bursts of clarity, was that much sweeter for being attained so dearly.

There are many ways to interpret the story. In one way, it's a tale about learning to mother (and father) oneself. It's also a hero's journey, one that ends with the book itself, the author's "boon" to the rest of us. While it might not be apparent, the PCT, though linear on a map, is experienced as a maze in which choices must often be made. No two hikers ever experience the trail the same way. As Miss Strayed herself seems to invoke Dante early on when she speaks of feeling lost in the woods of her life, I have to tell you that I thought of The Divine Comedy often while reading this story. Like Dante the pilgrim, Miss Strayed found that, paradoxically, the only way out of the woods was the long way, the via dolorosa, through the Inferno.

The author is candid about her struggles and shortcomings and the naivete with which she began her journey. It's borne in upon the reader that it was sheer determination (and luck) that saw her through. There was every possibility for things to end in disaster. Still, events demonstrate that her intuition to undertake a difficult task to find her measure was a good one. I'm tempted to report that, like Ginger Rogers, Miss Strayed did everything a man could do, except backwards and in heels, but that's not really true, except that it is, sort of. Unlike Dante, she didn't have a Virgil constantly beside her in the tough bits, unless you count the guidebooks she carried. She found mentors along the way, but it was up to her to separate the wheat from the chaff and decide for herself what kind of trip it would be.

I doubt that I would ever hike the PCT on my own, but I recognize the impulse that led the author to do it, and I admire it. There are some things you just have to figure out for yourself. I started the book with tears at the descriptions of Miss Strayed's early sorrows and losses and ended it with tears of a different kind, and that's never a bad way to end a story.