Stitches Read online

  One hundred percent of the time, they would rather make art.

  We always begin by lighting a candle, although we have switched to an electric light in a votive holder instead of actual wax, because once someone in the class managed to singe the ends of her hair on a real candle.

  Then we pray to try to be good and kind to one another. We read a short passage of Scripture, talk about it and try to learn something together about our lives and God’s love. And then, as in all great religious traditions, we overeat.

  That Sunday after Newtown, I decided we would make angels out of coffee filters. Years ago I located a great website on crafts you can make from coffee filters. We’ve made a garland of coffee-filter doves for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and for Easter we make bright coffee-filter butterflies, and chrysalises of paper-towel rolls into which we tuck the butterflies until Easter morning. Nothing looks more dead than a cocoon: hard, immobile, ugly, particularly when it’s made out of a cardboard tube from an empty roll of Bounty. And yet, just wait.

  I’d intended to bring my stapler from home to make it easier to put the angels together, but I conveniently left it on the kitchen table. At least we had coffee filters and markers at church.

  There were only two students that day, both young teenagers with developmental disabilities. The boy has been living for years with brain cancer, which led to a bleed that has left him with a brain injury. So he talks sort of funny. The other student is a gorgeous girl, who was the person who singed her hair on the candle flame. (You thought it was me, didn’t you?) She also talks in an unusual way.

  I read them a subversive verse from Luke: “And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom.” I told them that angels are always around, messengers of God’s love, to revive us when we are weary or in an ugly place and to help us cross over when we die. Then I opened a nice fresh package of round white coffee filters.

  “Oh, no,” the girl said, bending over in her chair so that she smashed her forehead on the table. I asked if she was hurt. No motion or sound. Then, bleating, “Not the coffee filters again.”

  Mason, on the other hand, beamed.

  I sighed and somehow, with my charm and legendary patience, got the girl up and running.

  We colored our coffee filters with markers. While we worked, I talked in a general way about what good people can do in the face of great sorrow. We help some time pass for those suffering. We sit with them in their hopeless pain and feel terrible with them, without trying to fix them with platitudes; doing this with them is just about the most gracious gift we have to offer. We give up what we think we should be doing, or think we need to get done, to keep them company.

  We help them to bear being in time and space during unbearable times and spaces.

  I would add that, in general, time and space have not been my strong suits.

  I would like to be able to explain the world to these loved, lovely and challenged children that would help them understand the meaning of life and make sense of their differentness. This understanding might have made a big difference in my life fifty years ago. But there can be meaning without having things making sense. Humanity is meaning. It is a synonym for the best of being human—thoughtful, sensitive, caring and compassionate.

  I asked them if they knew what “humane” meant.

  The girl raised her hand. “It means, Why are all of our projects about coffee filters?”

  She always makes me laugh. I gave her a big kiss on the head. I told the kids that humanity meant decency and heart, and that along with love, it was the solution to all problems. The girl sighed and said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” What a paradox: that we connect with God, with divinity, in our flesh and blood and time and space. We connect with God in our humanity. A great truth, attributed to Emily Dickinson, is that “hope inspires the good to reveal itself.” This is almost all I ever need to remember. Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.

  After we colored our coffee-filter wings, we spritzed them with water, so that the dyes ran slightly. While the filters dried, we had our snacks: string cheese, pears and Capri Sun, the living water of most Sunday schools. We made our angels’ heads with a second filter each, scrunched up around balled-up Kleenex, secured with embroidery thread. This gave the angels an unfortunate garroted look, but the heads held, which is all that ever matters. The remaining paper that spread out beneath was the bodies.

  At this point, it would have been fabulous if a certain special someone had remembered to bring the stapler from home, because we had to attach the angels to their fabulous tie-dyed and now fairly dry wings. Instead, I got out my tiny travel sewing kit and stitched the wings to the bodies, like the love children of Betsy Ross and Wavy Gravy, and then fluffed out the brightly colored filters for maximum angelic wingspan.

  The children loved them, and I knew the parents would, too. The angels were just completely fabulous. Then Mason made an astonishing comment. He said to the girl, adamantly, in his slightly garbled and mumbly way, “You know, I used to have brain cancer. I was in a coma, and then I was here again.”

  I had to close my eyes at the beauty of his understanding—that he was here again. He had woken up, as we are all called to do. I said, “You are a miracle.”

  The girl asked me, in her own slightly garbled way, “Why does he talk so funny?”

  Mason didn’t seem to notice. He said, “Yes, I am a miracle.”

  Then he raised his arms and fists like Muscleman.

  Two

  THE OVERLY SENSITIVE CHILD

  Augustine’s insight that to search for God is to have found God is deeply profound, because the belief we hold in the existence of another world opens space within us, and around us, which creates a more radiant reality. A radiance is inside us, just as it is visible outside us, and to seek it is maybe to catch a glimpse from time to time of a light within, of a candle at the window of our heart, of a home somewhere inside.

  I rarely felt at home as a child, nor did I feel that the earth was my real home. I was a girl who found it scary and confusing to be on this particular planet at all. Like most girls, I always tried to be a good sport about this sense of alienation and basic unworthiness, but it wasn’t easy.

  My brothers and I were not encouraged to search for God, the obvious source of solace, but we three kids were led to the world of books, which to us was just as good. We found in books the divine plop, the joy of settling down deeply into something, worlds and realities greater than our own troubled minds. All of life, for me, begins with books and art. I was entirely engaged and content when I read Mr. Popper’s Penguins and Henry and Beezus or listened to my father read us Just So Stories and Treasure Island, or when a teacher helped the class make spooky crayon scratchboards, or puppets with rags and Popsicle sticks.

  When you love something like reading—or drawing or music or nature—it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great. If you are lucky enough to know this, then your search for meaning involves whatever that Something is. It’s an alchemical blend of affinity and focus that takes us to a place within that feels as close as we ever get to “home.” It’s like pulling into our own train station after a long trip—joy, relief, a pleasant exhaustion.

  Barry Lopez wrote, “All that is holding us together [is] stories and compassion.” If a writer or artist creates from a place of truth and spirit and generosity, then I may be able to enter and ride this person’s train back to my own station. It’s the same with beautiful music and art.

  Beauty is meaning.

  Rarely did anyone encourage my brothers and me to spend our time searching for reality beneath the obvious pleasures of the composition. Our lives buzzed by. The grown-ups we trusted did not share the news that life was going to include deep
isolation, or that the culture’s fixation on achievement would be spiritually crippling to those of more gentle character. No one mentioned the peace that was possible in surrender to a power greater than oneself, unless it was to an older sibling, when resistance was futile anyway. Teachers forgot to mention that we could be filled only by the truth that suffuses our heart, presence, humanity. So a lot of us raced around the rat exercise wheel, to get good grades and positions, to get into the best colleges and companies, and to keep our weight down.

  Most of us have done fairly well in our lives. We learned how to run on that one wheel, but now we want a refund.

  Most people in most families aren’t going to feel, “Oh, great, Jack has embarked on a search for meaning. And he’s writing a family memoir! How great.” To the world, Jack has figured out the correct meaning: He’s got a mate, a house, a job, children. He’s got real stuff that he should fully attend to. At best, seeking his own truth is very nice, but it’s beside the point. At worst, one would worry that he was beginning to resemble a native Californian.

  It is not now and never was in anybody’s best interest for you to be a seeker. It’s actually in everybody’s worst interest. It’s not convenient for the family. It may make them feel superficial and expendable. You may end up looking nutty and unfocused, which does not reflect well on them. And you may also reveal awkward family secrets, like that your parents were insane, or that they probably should have raised Yorkies instead of human children. Your little search for meaning may keep you from going as far at your school or your company as you might otherwise have gone, if you had had a single-minded devotion to getting ahead. Success shows the world what you’re made of, and that your parents were right to all but destroy you to foster this excellence.

  Robert Heinlein shook up a lot of us in our teens and twenties. Even the title of his most famous book messed with you: Stranger in a Strange Land. That phrase from the Old Testament was everything we’d secretly believed about ourselves all along—that because this place was not our home, it was no wonder we felt so different and estranged, as we were all just trying to pass as human. Heinlein’s main character could “grok” another person, which meant to deeply, intuitively, in a cellular way, get past the surface, the armor and the biographies, to the soul, to pure awareness.

  When we read this, our mouths dropped open—this was revolutionary material. I was so relieved, because I’d known that with one or two special friends and a rare adult, something subterranean and trippy was going on. We were grokking each other, without even trying. And if there was something to be grokked—a vibrational core in us, a consciousness, an essential self, that was not our charm and successes—then didn’t it mean there was some kind of capital-T Truth to seek? Obviously, it was not convenient to pursue this, because you had a big test tomorrow on spores, or an interview with the head of marketing. Maybe then just wasn’t the right time.

  Maybe now is.

  For somebody to be on a search means he or she is involved with these subversive topics, reading and comparing notes with allies, asking questions, daydreaming, brooding.

  Even though you have homework to do.

  So you—I—stuck to the family plan for a long time, because your success made everyone else so happy, even if you made yourself frantic and half dead trying to achieve it. You couldn’t win at this game, and you couldn’t stop trying. At least it was a home to return to, no matter how erratic, which is better than no home.

  If you were raised in the 1950s or 1960s, and grasped how scary the world could be, in Birmingham, Vietnam and the house on the corner where the daddy drank, you were diagnosed as being the overly sensitive child. There were entire books written on the subject of the overly sensitive child. What the term meant was that you noticed how unhappy or crazy your parents were. Also, you worried about global starvation, animals at the pound who didn’t get adopted, and smog. What a nut. You looked into things too deeply, and you noticed things that not many others could see, and this exasperated your parents and teachers. They said, “You need to have thicker skin!” That would have been excellent, but you couldn’t go buy thicker skin at the five-and-dime.

  Any healthy half-awake person is occasionally going to be pierced with a sense of the unfairness and the catastrophe of life for ninety-five percent of the people on this earth. However, if you reacted, or cried, or raised the subject at all, you were being a worrywart.

  I couldn’t go to the dog pound to help pick out our family pets, because of the dogs we left behind. I couldn’t go to Disney movies, because at the end, the mother of the species was usually taken out to the back and shot. I’d cry. What a stick-in-the-mud. This was the technical term, delivered in a sharp, scolding voice, which further calmed and reassured the child.

  As far as I can recall, none of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, “Some people have a thick skin and you don’t. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams. However, you’re not going to feel that a lot in seventh grade. Just hang on.”

  I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feelings of rage or even unabashed joy—a little bashed joy, here or there, or being mildly disgruntled. We children were little Marcel Marceaus, tiptoeing about in our invisible boxes. No one ever yelled in a bad marriage that lasted twenty-seven years. My parents went cold and remote. They spoke in clipped phrases of erudite contempt for each other.

  If you grew up around alcoholism, one of the first things you learned to do was agree not to see what was really going on. If you screwed up and said out loud that you thought something scary was happening, grown-ups would say, “Oh, for Pete’s sake—what an imagination.” This is the best way to gaslight children. It keeps them under control, because if the parent is a mess, the children are doomed. It’s best for the child to think he or she is the problem. Then there is toxic hope, which is better than no hope at all, that if the child can do better or need less, the parents will be fine.

  People used to come to our house and drink, so our home became a kind of Advent calendar, where you’d open a door and there’d be people passed out or the wrong people kissing each other. If we said anything to my parents, they’d say, “Oh, honey, for Christ’s sake, we’d all just been drinking”—as if it were an acceptable explanation, like “Oh, honey, we’d all just been putting thorns in our noses.”

  I grew up thinking that what I witnessed was probably not true, and not all that big a deal—people had just been drinking, for Pete’s sake. If it made me feel worried, well—such was the nature of the overly sensitive child.

  But then a miracle occurred. The women’s movement burst forth when I was fifteen. That was when I began to believe that life might semi-work out after all. The cavalry had arrived. Women were starting to say that you got to tell the truth now, that you had to tell the truth if you were going to heal and have an authentic life. They told us that people like me—i.e., girls—had all been made to feel crazy, neurotic and hypersensitive; they were mad, too, and finally getting mad was going to help save us, because it allowed our truth to escape from jail.

  That was great, but I had to learn new skills. One was to no longer pretend not to see what was going on. If a man in my life was behaving badly on some moral level, I made a commitment to myself that I was going to see that, instead of helping him feel better about his horrible behavior. I was going to learn to trust that what I saw was really happening. I was smart and sensitive, and like all children who grew up around alcoholism, I learned to pay too much attention. I saw a button pin once that said: “I’m not tense. I’m just very, very alert.” It was how I sidestepped the abyss. I had to learn to be present without paying quite so much attention to my poor old overamped mind, because this was the source of most of my unhappiness. And it
still is.

  The second radical choice I made was to notice and then express the fact that I was filled with rage and grief. Who knew? This was very disloyal to my family, for me to no longer play along with the family plan, but all the ways of pretending that I’d been taught were crippling, life-threatening. They had turned me from a delicious dough of flour, yeast, sugar and salt into a desperately self-conscious pretzel. I’ve never forgotten when my mother and I attended a rare church service on Easter, when I was eleven or so. The Sunday school teacher gave us Bavarian pretzels as a teaching aid and explained that pretzels began as Easter biscuits, representing children with their arms crossed to their shoulders in an old-fashioned way of prayer. But ever since, whenever I’ve seen them, I’ve imagined children in straitjackets, like Wednesday Addams with a Rorschach pretzel.

  Until I began to deal with my anger and sadness, there had been an invisible Gardol shield between me and life, wild true beautiful hard crazy life. I started to tear the shield down.

  I was good at being good at things. I was good at forward thrust, at moving up ladders. You’ve never heard of forward thrust? It is the most central principle of American life, the necessity to improve your lot and status at any cost, and to stay one step ahead of the abyss that may open suddenly at your heels. Unfortunately, forward thrust turns out not to be helpful in the search for your true place on earth.

  But crashing and burning can help a lot. So, too, can just plain running out of gas.

  I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.

  That was when I began to learn how to do all the things I had been taught not to do. I learned over the years to accept more and more of myself. The doctor and theologian Gerald May said self-acceptance is freedom. I learned to waste a lot more time, which is the opposite of the fourth thing you’re told after you’re born: Don’t waste time. (It comes right after Go clean your room.) The fifth rule is Don’t waste paper, but in order to become who I was meant to be, I learned I had to waste more paper, to practice messes, false starts and blunders: these are necessary stops on the route of creativity and emotional growth. To make up for all my papery mistakes, I sent money to the Sierra Club. I had to accept that contrary to my parents’ terror of looking bad, almost everybody worth his or her salt was a mess and had been an overly sensitive child. Almost everyone had at one time or another been exposed to the world as being flawed, and human. And that it was good, for the development of character and empathy, for the growth of the spirit. Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water.