Our Lady of the Lost and Found Page 16

  I know that if I bought my calendars after New Year’s, I could get them at half-price and save myself some money. But that is not the point.

  The point is that no matter what has or has not happened in the previous twelve months, still I enter each new year with optimism, imbued with the promise held out to me by those twelve blank pages, those 365 (or 366) empty numbered squares. To me, each new calendar is the unwritten book of the coming year, the as-yet-unread liturgy, not of the hours but of the months to come.

  And yet sometimes I suspect that my fondness for calendars has a darker side too. Sometimes I suspect it comes from believing that if only I can keep close enough track of time, then I will be able to control it. Ironically, I have to admit that more often than not, the opposite is true. As I keep turning those pages one after another, indeed my calendars haunt me.

  Each morning as I sit at the kitchen table reading and drinking my coffee, I invariably find myself looking at the calendar on the wall. Directly above it hangs the clock with its round white moon face, plain black numbers, slim elegant hands that are never still. It is framed in dark blue like my new plates. These are two of the things that I would pin to Mary’s dress: two more votive offerings, two more shiny milagros: a tiny silver calendar and a miniature golden clock.

  Many of the once-empty squares on each month’s page are already the past, filled up now with the unrelenting details of my daily life: appointments with the doctor, the dentist, the accountant, the optometrist; deadlines, interviews, meetings; lunch, dinner, and movie dates with friends. On the following months’ pages, I note the days on which I will have the furnace cleaned, the trees trimmed, and a new ceiling light installed in the living room. I note the days on which I will travel to give readings, attend a formal dinner party in honor of a visiting famous writer, celebrate a friend’s birthday.

  I know this marking of the future is more than a matter of good organizational skills. It is a hedge against despair, an act by which I imagine that not only will I still be here but I will be appreciating the applause of an audience, engaging in a lively literary conversation over coffee and a sinfully rich dessert, toasting a friend’s birthday with Perrier and lime while wearing a new red dress. My marking of the future is a way of reassuring myself that yes, indeed, time will continue to pass and I will continue to be part of it.

  —Where does the time go? I wonder as I sit at the table and look at my calendar: Kitchen Garden, summer fruits, strawberries, blackberries, melons, and plums.

  Although William Carlos Williams ate his plums more than sixty years ago, they are as real to me now as they were to him then. He died when I was only nine years old, and yet still those plums remain, the perishable made permanent with words. A physician as well as a poet, he went to his grave at the age of eighty, still full of plums, I imagine, still full of words, time having been outwitted (if not outstripped) not by medicine but by the power of words. Ten years after the plums and nineteen years before dying, he wrote “A Sort of Song”:

  Let the snake wait under

  his weed

  and the writing

  be of words, slow and quick, sharp

  to strike, quiet to wait,

  sleepless.

  Everybody knows that time, like words, is quick and slow, sharp and quiet, long and short, true and false, all of these at once. Everybody knows that time, like history, is not a fixed commodity. We hardly need science to tell us that Sir Isaac Newton was wrong: time is not mechanical, uniform, steadfast, or absolute. Time, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. There is no universal clock ticking off the seconds by which we all grow older, no giant calendar hung on a star past Pluto with its pages flapping into the vacuum of space. Everybody knows that time is relative, slippery, illogical, and moot.

  The week I spent with Mary had little to do with those numbered squares on my kitchen calendar. The word week no longer meant what it used to, was no longer seven equal blocks of time with Sunday at one end and Saturday at the other. A day was no longer the predictably proportioned sequence of morning, noon, and night. An hour was no longer the numbers from one to twelve tidily arranged at equal intervals in a circle on my wrist or the wall. Minutes and seconds were no longer the decreasing increments ticked off relentlessly by the hands of the clock.

  I finally understand that these instruments (calendar and clock), these words (week, day, hour, minute, second), are all human inventions, historical means of measurement that have themselves been often altered over the centuries, evidence of our desperate attempts to nail down time and make it behave. I am not eager to admit that these words, like all words, are not sacrosanct; that they, too, as Dr. Sloan had shown us back in Ancient History 101, are subject to change over time.

  But persistent (if not consistent) as we are in trying to take the measure of time, still it eludes us, from nanosecond to light-year and back again. Still, time itself is something else again, not a thing at all but an inexorable force like the wind: undeniable but invisible, and yet evidence of it is apparent everywhere, for better or worse, its effects incarnate all around us.

  I have written about time before and found in the process, then and now, that most of what I think I know about time comes out as metaphor or simile. The clock and the calendar, too, are metaphors that stand in for the elusive truth about time. In the vernacular, most of what we say about time is also figurative. Time passes, we say: like a football, a parade, a ship in the night. Time flies: like a bird, a plane, like Superman. Time flows: like a river, like sand, like blood. Time, we have been told, is a reef, a hand, a wheel, a gift. Time is avenger, devourer, destroyer, a disordered string. Time is the great physician, the wingèd chariot, the subtle thief of youth. Time, we hope, heals all wounds.

  We talk about spending time (like money), serving time (like dinner), doing time (like lunch). We talk about buying time (like a car, a refrigerator, a new pair of shoes), borrowing time (like a library book, a cup of sugar, an egg), stealing time (like hubcaps, third base, a kiss). At one time or another, we have all had time on our hands, time to squander, time to kill. More often we say that we are pressed for time: like a shirt, like grapes for wine, like a flower in a book, like a hand against a heart. Time, we say, has run out on us: like milk, luck, or an unfaithful spouse. So much time, we complain, is lost: like mittens, sheep, or souls.

  Time, I once wrote, has always been the monkey on our backs…Time, like gravity, is irrefutable, a clear glass ball rolling down a silver slope.

  Time, I once read on a bathroom wall, is just God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. This sentence was written with a fine red marker in a stylized calligraphic hand.

  God’s way, I wonder now, or our way?

  We teach our children to tell time: like a fortune, a lie, or a story. The truth is you cannot tell a story without it. Time is the medium of history and change. Without time, history does not exist. Nor does story of any kind. Narrative depends on it. In a story, one thing happens after another…and then and then and then. Time is the natural propellant of narrative, and one of the luxuries of story is being able to move around in time in ways you never can in real life.

  The truth is you cannot write even a single sentence without it. Language itself is predicated on the passage of time. Remember all those verb forms and tenses you were forced to learn back in high school: each one of them has something different to say about time. Each step in a verb’s conjugation is a step forward, backward, or sideways in time. Try to remember the meaning of grammatical words like: transitive, intransitive, indicative, subjunctive, anterior, conditional, perfect, imperfect, pluperfect. Think about split infinitives and dangling participles: split as in logs, personalities, the ends of your hair; dangling as in earrings, legs, a dead man from the gallows.

  Consider the fact that the most irregular verb in the English language is the verb to be. It is so irregular, in fact, that it cannot be classified and so must be treated as a special case.

&n
bsp; Consider the possibility that a sentence is akin to Heraclitus’ famous river: you can never step into the same one twice.

  Be thankful that it is not necessary to know any of these things in order to put together a coherent sentence about time or anything else. Be thankful that it is enough to be able to say: I was, I am, I will be.

  Past, present, future. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. Beginning, middle, end. Sooner or later. Then and now. In Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield says, “…time is the longest distance between two places.” One of those places is always then and the other is always now. Perhaps it is no accident that we use the word then to refer to both the past and the future, while the word now is just a metaphorical attempt to isolate the present moment. Do we have a choice as to which segment of time we may inhabit?

  Much as I may be preoccupied with the passage of time, paradoxically, I find it impossible to imagine the end of time itself. I can imagine the end of my time on earth, the end of my loved ones’ time on earth. I can even imagine, in certain moments of fear and trembling, the end of the earth itself. I, too, have averted my eyes and hurried past those dishevelled men on street corners proclaiming that the end is near. But much as I have tried to ignore them and dismissed them as cranks, still their doomsday message has worked its way into my consciousness. I realize that I have spent my whole life assuming that the end is near, believing that we are near the end of the story and that Armageddon is just around the corner, if not this corner, then the next one or the next.

  And yet, much as it is not impossible for me to imagine the end of the world, still I also believe that time itself will continue even if all else ends. I am predisposed to eternity. I find infinity easier to believe in than some future moment when time itself will stop.

  Paradoxically, the more I think about time, the less I can grasp it, the less sense I can make of it. The same can be said about dreams, words, love, and God.

  All I know for certain is that for the time Mary was with me, I was living both inside and outside of time (ordinary, extraordinary, or otherwise). I was both in time and beyond it. Just as she has always been. Just as she is, was, and ever will be.

  History (4)

  The truths of fiction and the truths of biblical religion are not unrelated. Certain aspects of reality can be captured only in narrative. Paradox and parable must in this sense be enacted or witnessed to, not analyzed away. Like liturgy, literature uses language and drama to immerse us in a re-created and revivified world.

  —Paul Baumann, “A Family Man,” in A Tremor of Bliss

  As I listened to some of Mary’s longer stories, the more meandering ones, those more liberally punctuated by tangents, digressions, and tantalizing asides about other saints, other shrines, other times, I trusted her in the way a reader trusts a good writer. I trusted that no matter how disparate or disjointed the stories might seem in the telling, still they would indeed amount to something in the end. And I, like Herodotus, appreciated the impossibility of telling one story without also telling all the others, without also telling what came before and what came after, what came first and what came later.

  This realization came to me not so much as an epiphany or a revelation but rather as a recognition of something I had known all along but had not recently contemplated, articulated, or put to any good use. As a writer, I have always known there is no such thing as a simple story.

  Much as I know better, still sometimes I find myself longing and trying to do just that: to write a simple story composed entirely of simple sentences about simple things.

  I write: A dog barked in his sleep.

  This start seems as promising as any other so I continue: A woman stood by the window.

  I have no idea where this is going but I like it. I write some more: A car passed. The rain fell.

  I think I’m really getting somewhere now. I stop and read over what I have written so far. This is my first mistake.

  Now I cannot resist my own inclination to elaborate, embroider, and explain. I cannot let that sleeping dog lie. I decide to make him an arthritic old black Lab named Jet. His bark is plaintive and directed, in this instance, at a dream cat he is chasing down a dream blind alley. He is sleeping on a braided rug under the kitchen table. On the table there are four empty containers of Chinese food.

  Before all this came up, that amorphous dog was any color, all colors. But having gone ahead and made the dog black, he is no longer yellow, brown, or white. Having made him a Labrador retriever, he is no longer a German shepherd, a Saint Bernard, or a Lhasa apso.

  My simple story quickly gets out of hand. The next thing you know, the woman is a thirty-two-year-old hairdresser named Annette, the window is in the kitchen of her third-floor bachelor apartment, the car passing in the street below is red and going too fast, the rain is falling heavily, it is April, it is Friday, it is eight o’clock. The next thing you know, Annette will be pulling her fortune out of a cookie and reading it aloud to Jet. The next thing you know, there will be a knock at the door and the lives of Annette and Jet will be changed forever.

  I already know how stories are made.

  Saint Ignatius of Loyola

  Early in the summer of 1521, a gallant Spanish nobleman named Iñigo López de Loyola is grievously wounded while trying unsuccessfully, with a mere handful of citizens, to defend the fortress at Pamplona against over three hundred French soldiers. This is the man who will eventually become Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

  In the battle at Pamplona, Ignatius’s right leg is shattered by a cannonball. His left leg is also wounded, but less severely. His injuries are so grave that on June 29, 1521, the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul, a priest is called in to administer the last rites. That night Saint Peter himself appears to Ignatius and, in the morning, his attendants find him not dead as they had expected but well on his way to recovery instead.

  Ignatius is transferred to the family castle at Loyola in northern Spain, where his extended recuperation will take place. Without benefit of anesthetic, he undergoes several brutal operations. The last of these is requested by Ignatius himself. Horrified to discover that his nearly healed right leg is now deformed and considerably shorter than the left, he insists that the bones be rebroken and chiselled down so the leg will heal properly.

  —Pure vanity, Mary said, shaking her head. He was thinking of those glorious days he intended to spend again in the royal court, showing off for the ladies, strutting around in his fancy tights and his knee-high boots. Sometimes I think he should have been made the patron saint of plastic surgeons instead of soldiers.

  Indeed, prior to his injury at Pamplona, Ignatius was something of a swashbuckling dandy. A swaggering caballero, he was known for his hot temper, his quick wit, his proficiency on the dance floor, and his elegant wardrobe. Born in 1491, the last son of thirteen children of a wealthy Basque family, Ignatius showed no early signs of sanctity. As a young man, his favorite occupations were gambling, dueling, and sex.

  While recuperating at the castle, Ignatius asks for books to help pass the time. He is hoping for some good old-fashioned romances, heroic chivalric tales of knights in shining armor, ladies-in-waiting, and damsels in distress. Instead, he is brought a four-volume biography of Jesus and a collection of the lives of the saints. Overcoming his initial lack of enthusiasm, Ignatius reads and rereads these books many times. He is increasingly impressed and inspired. A change begins to come over him.

  At the age of thirty, Ignatius vows to renounce his formerly frivolous and immoral ways and dedicate his life to God. One night, so inflamed with his newfound religious passion that he cannot sleep, he gets out of bed and kneels before a picture of Mary that hangs in his sickroom. As he prays, the castle is convulsed with a tremor that opens a large hole in the sickroom wall. Then Mary herself emerges from the gaping hole with the baby Jesus in her arms.

  —I did not stay long, Mary said. But it was long enough for Ignatius to dedicate himself forever to me. In tho
se few minutes, he enjoyed what he later called “an excess of consolation.” Such a lovely phrase, don’t you think?

  In February 1522, although still not fully recovered from his injuries, Ignatius travels two hundred miles east on a mule to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat near the city of Barcelona.

  —Forgive me if I digress, Mary said, but here is a story within a story. They say that once upon a time the whole area of Montserrat was a smooth, unbroken plain. But at the moment of the Crucifixion, the earth rose up in anguish and formed those jagged rocky peaks like the teeth of a saw. And so it was called Montserrat, the serrated mountain.

  It is Saint Peter who first brings to Barcelona a life-sized wooden statue of Mary and Jesus carved by Saint Luke himself. It is another Black Madonna, Mary seated on a heavy chair, wearing a golden gown and a crown of twelve stars. In her right hand she holds a globe from which bursts a bouquet of lilies. The baby Jesus sits on her lap, holding a pinecone in one hand, while making a gesture of blessing with the other. They are both smiling.

  For seven centuries the statue is worshipped and revered by Spanish Christians. They call her La Moreneta, the Little Dark One. Then the city of Barcelona is invaded by the Saracens. The citizens manage to hold them at bay for three years, but then the tide begins to turn. On April 22, 718, fearing that the beloved statue will be destroyed, the bishop and governor of the city hides it in one of Montserrat’s deepest and most secret caves.

  —As so often happens when you put something away in a safe place, Mary said, no one could find the statue again after the danger had passed.

  In 890 a group of shepherd boys tending their flocks near the base of the mountain see a brilliant light emanating from one of the caves. The air fills with music and the boys are afraid. In the following days, both the light and the music are observed by others, first the boys’ parents, then the parish priest, the rector, and finally the bishop, who orders that the cave be entered and examined. Inside, they discover the statue that has been lost for a hundred and seventy-two years.