Saturday, December 8, 2012

Before the Party


Lord,
in this stillness,
by this hissing fire,
under the glowing
glorying of white lights and garland,
while cookies’ frosted pageants
rest awhile,
while royal burgundy mulls,
soaking in gold honeycomb,
cinnamon and allspice,
while the star perches above
an empty room
(save us),
save us—
save us
with these simple things
we love so simply.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

The Pat-Down Pen


Ever since the advent of the TSA’s 3-D body scanners—aka, the naked scan—I have been tempted to exercise my right to avoid them.  It’s not that I’m especially embarrassed by them; whether because they're just anonymous enough, or because the social context is closer to the swimming pool end of the spectrum than the fine dining end, they don't bother me per se.  And I even get the security rationale, or at least the psychological comfort the appearance of scrutiny can bring.  No, my urge to veto the scan is more like that of an eight-year-old behind a trap set, who can’t resist hitting every snare, cymbal, and tom-tom before returning to the same drum twice.  The option being there, and rights being as useless as muscles unexercised, why not use it? 

Every time I’ve dropped my bag on the conveyor belt and approached the scanner, though, I’ve chickened out.  Chalk it up to herd mentality, my Scandinavian don’t-cause-a-bother gene, or fear masquerading as prudence.  Whatever the reason, some last hitch in my step has held me back—until last weekend.

That Sunday, I had a flight out of Phoenix Sky Harbor back to my home in Washington, DC.  Maybe it was the delightful name of the place (who doesn’t want adventure in a port named Sky Harbor?) that gave me that last oomph of nerve.  All I really know is that when the blond, short-pony-tailed woman in the bright blue uniform called me down the retractable belt line toward the spinning plexi-glass chamber, I stopped short and politely enquired whether I might choose a pat-down instead.

The reaction was amazing.  A new side of the system sprung into action.  Before I even finished the question, the pony-tail had snapped to the left and shunted me down another rope line.  “We’re short staffed,” she warned me as I was sent along my way.  “That’s fine,” I said.  Of course, I had no idea if that was true.

The new path dead-ended into a kind of makeshift holding tank cordoned off from the surrounding bustle by more plexi-glass semi-walls and retractable belts.  I was not alone when I arrived.  A gangly, pock-faced young man in cargo shorts greeted me with a hey-dude grin that revealed a rainbow of rubber bands lashed onto a cargo-load of braces.  I decided I liked him.  In fact, I immediately decided I liked the whole Pat-Down Pen scene.  It reminded me of how I’ve always imagined the smokers’ corners.  Out on the loading docks behind the office buildings in downtown DC, social class and faction dissolve in the shared rebellion of burning tobacco together.  This was similar.  Our reasons for ending up here didn’t even matter.  The point was, we had said “no” together and been cast into the outer darkness.

“Not a fan of the x-ray, huh?” I asked.

“Naw,” he said in an aw-shucks way.  “I’ve been standing here in my bare feet forever it feels like.”

We chatted and I found out he was from Phoenix, but went to med school in Michigan and was on his way to Vegas for a residency interview.  “Where are you going?” he asked me.

“Washington, DC,” I said.

“So…” he let the question draw out.  “Political job or something.”

“Nope, I’m an attorney.”

That extinguished his curiosity in a hurry.  At that moment, our company was joined by a third member, an Indian man in his thirties, wearing a pressed dress shirt and nice socks.  He sidled up to us with a knowing sigh.  “They’re always running behind,” he said.  “You find that if you travel a lot.”  I found myself shaking my head sympathetically, as though I knew.

Fortunately for my new companion, but to the detriment of our fellowship, three men in blue shirts and latex gloves shortly appeared, apparently not running as far behind as promised.  My inspector was a friendly man with a blond goatee.  He asked me to point out my luggage, then hauled it over to yet another separated area where a foot-printed floor mat told me where to stand.  The goateed man explained everything that would happen, running down a list of consent questions, speaking precisely and quickly about “sensitive areas,” and rattling off the head-and-shoulders-knees-and-toes order of proceedings.  I worried I would crack up during this rehearsal, but instead I found myself zoning into the aura of professionalism he exuded, nodding with authority at just the right moments.

Then came the pat-down itself.  I’ll spare you the details.  Except to say that I got ticklish once, and it was very thorough.  Afterwards, the inspector wished me a good flight and I unbit my lip long enough to thank him for his courtesy.  Then I was alone again.

Rethreading my belt, slipping on my shoes and stuffing my quart-sized plastic baggie back into my suitcase, I felt the odd but pleasant sensation that I had achieved something.  What it was, I’m not sure.  Was it the thrill of power, exercising an option unexpectedly, forcing the gears of government to crank in a way promised but rarely used?  If so, the angels must surely have been laughing.  Getting cavity searched by an agent of the state has rarely—in any age of history—been thought of as a victory.  And yet, there it was, the unmistakable scent of winning.  I slipped back into the anonymous school of humanity flowing through concourses, hallways, food court lines, blobs at the gates, jet bridges and aisles into the sky, leaping into a hundred, a thousand different directions from the Harbor to every part of the world.  Somehow, in the midst of all this, I felt a bit more.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Drama of the Comma


There’s something delightful about commas, about placing them with precision, poise, purpose.  Commas show vigor, a clean mind, a playful spirit, like a crisply fanned bowtie in whimsical color.  Consider, for instance, this simple sentence, sans any comma:

Me too ma’am.

As it is, it reads just fine.  The point is made: Our interlocutor is affirming or informing his female counterpart, perhaps his elder, that he is of accord.  Nothing terribly the matter.  Of course not.  But now, try it a little differently:

Me too, ma’am.

Aha!  A subtle pause before footing the home stretch, and what’s more, intentionally done.  This shows refinement, and also an ear for music, for the little trip in cadence—think of glancing your boot’s toe on an unexpected crack in the pavement—brings pizzaz, pop, punch, like the syncopated lick from a saxophone fitting in just a few more notes than you thought the measure would hold.

Bravo.  But now, consider the same sentence again, just one variation further:

Me, too, ma’am.

It’s a bird; it’s a plane; it’s preposterous.  There is simply no need.  Pure show-off, pure dandy: yes, you did learn or intuit that “too” stands as its own clause and can buffer the double comma, and now you—you snot-nosed brat-of-a-grammarian—are going to flaunt that knowledge for the world.  It’s obscene.

And it’s wonderful!  No need, no need at all—you never would speak the double out loud (or, rather, out-quiet) in colloquial colloquy, but the point is, you could.  You can!  In the wonderland of language, you have these kinds of powers.

Commas should be used (one might even say must be used) in certain cases.  Lists of three or more, for instance.  Suspended clauses, particularly if you’re not fond—though who isn’t these days?—of dashes, are another example.  But pass beyond these staples, and you quickly enter a world of glorious optional-ness, in that same region where artists mix their tubes of oils and chefs pinch flakes of spices.  It’s all about what he thinks feels right, what she feels to be just so, for the service of a particular eye, palate, or ear.

Take even the most basic case, the list.  What is to be done between the ultimate and penultimate?  The Oxford comma (incidentally, not used in Oxford) or straight to the conjunction?  It depends: Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme might be just the thing; but then again, if you’re feeling ponderous and if you have a little time, perhaps it’s better to have parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.

Commas are the great reminder of the freedom which is our alphabetical birthright.  They hearken to that glorious moment in the past, meditating upon our smudgy third-grade chalkboard, when it dawned on us that the point of grammar was not to deduce what the rules required, though rules there were.  No, once the rules were in place, their beautiful insufficiency pointed beyond to new fields of creation.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Two Moments of Water/Grace

1.  Home late (very late) from work, but needing to burn some of the energy that had been festering in my office chair, I set out for a run around the Capitol Hill neighborhood where I live.  And there I made a discovery: the federal government turns on its sprinkler systems at about 12:30am.  On the wide lawn behind the U.S. Capitol building, a whole field of sprinklers sprouts in regimental rows, spraying perfect snowcone orbs, like giant dandelions with cotton seeds you could blow away, or like squat spirits popping up out of the ground to haunt the surface in eerily organized fashion.  In a word, the perfect invitation for a late-night runner to dash through, to bob, weave, twirl, cut and dive through, pretending to dodge the spray (or spirits) and joyfully failing.  A hundred yards away, on marble steps of the Capitol, two security guards could only watch--and then I was gone.

2.  We had a downpour, a cloudburst so heavy, so torrential, that it bordered on the ridiculous.  As soon as I got home, I peeled off my sopping blazer and formerly-creased trousers, pulled on my running shorts, and went out to get properly soaked.

The interesting thing about a heavy rain is how much space there is.  I quickly became entirely wet: my shirt a translucent shrinkwrap around my ribs and chest, my curly hair matted flat on my forehead, my black running shorts an oil slick around my thighs.  And yet, when I spread open my palms or tried to lean with my face into the apparent wall of water, I was left empty, grasping.  All I could feel was a series, admittedly rapid, of little pelts of cold stunning water--rap tap tip tap tap pop--that vanished before I could examine, feel, or reflect upon them.  I reached out for substance and instead found mostly empty space, pocked with tantalizing interruptions.
It wasn't until after the run, stretching out on the sidewalk, that I figured out the secret.  Cross legged, butt planted in a concrete semi-puddle, I let the rain fall upon me.  And it did.  Over and over and over again it fell upon me.  I felt the individual drops and did not try to grasp them; I just let them rest and sink into me, covering entirely, bit by bit.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Where Love Abides

One of the early machines
dug up in dusty excavations
through attics and deserts
is made of metal,
(wrought iron if from the days of blacksmithery
or bronze if more ancient)
and usually is classified and tagged
among the crates marked
“Unknown Purpose.”
That is how we know
it is so important.
And that is why we also look for it
among our own artifacts—
among iPhones, sticky notes,
frisbees, bins of old landline cords—
looking for the thing
that will prove to have an unknown purpose.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

In Excelsis Deo


We had a talk tonight at the Trinity Forum from the excellently-named Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, an astrophysicist at NASA and, of particular interest, a confessing, practicing Christian.  Dr. Wiseman is a smart cookie, and a well-credentialed one: from her Arkansas farm roots, she found her way through MIT and Harvard, sharing a grading curve with a couple of future Nobel Prizewinners along the way, and even getting a comet named after her, which, if you’re an astrophysicist, seems like just the sort of thing to do.  Her topic tonight though was only half about stars and comets and such; the other half being, how does her understanding as a scientist of the vastness of the universe in space and time, affect her Christian faith?
            
Dr. Wiseman showed us a lot of dazzling pictures from the Hubble telescope, and suggested throughout that she regarded the scope of the universe as something awesome, a fertile ground for reverence and worship.  Which is a natural response for a Christian to offer.  She also noted the range of other responses people have had, including the very opposite sort of responses from the Carl Sagan crowd, which sees our speck-o-dust status as a refutation of any human-centric religion.  To my mind the hardest question was this: How do you still believe in the personal nature of, and personal relationship with, God in the face of such vastness?  When the universe was smaller this was easier to accept.  With a sizable, but not infinite, earth plumb at the center of the cosmos, surrounded by concentric layers of dome, all packaged within a timespan of thousands, not millions—never mind billions—of years, it seems easier to envision an omnipotent God caring about each one of us.  But open up the aperture of time and space to incomprehensible proportions, move from the Grand Canyon up to galaxy clusters, and our smallness, or fleetingness, seems to curdle healthy humility into a despairing meaninglessness.
            
That was my thought as I walked toward the metro station afterward, until I was interrupted by a phone call.  It was a friend with whom I’d been playing phone tag for the past month, and who had news about a new job she’d started this week after a long search, a position as a campus minister at one of the local universities.  Initially, she’d told them she wasn’t interested, then she agreed to interview, thinking she could use an offer as leverage for the entirely different sort of job she really wanted.  Then she got two offers: the ministry job and the job she really wanted.  Easy decision, right?
            
But a funny thing happened: the underdog kept sticking in her mind.  She prayed about it, thought about it, imagined about it, and in the end decided that she felt called to take the ministry job.  So she turned down the job she thought she wanted, and instead signed up for an adventure she never expected.
            
It made perfect sense to me.  And the whiff of the lived experience of relationship with a God, a wind-blowing Spirit, was a strange but instructive counterpoint to my cosmic ennui.  It was such a small moment, in one life (now two lives), and so full of splendor, splendor enough to rival the supernovas and colliding galaxies.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

For Adulthood


I recently found out, on the very same day, that one of my friends was engaged to be married and was expecting his first child, and that another had been diagnosed with late-stage cancer.  I felt terrible. Such a tragic waste of life.  So much needless suffering.  As to the other friend, I’m hopeful that against long odds, chemo can reverse the cancer’s progress.
                                    --Excerpt from “Against Adulthood,” Washington City Paper, January 6, 2012
                 

It’s less fun than you imagine childhood was, but more fun than childhood actually was.  Magic dries up, but you’ll observe that real things have a certain sheen to them, like the scrambled light coming off the surface of one particular pearl, or like the whoosh sound of air ripping across a pond, right as a skein of geese coasts down to land.  And seeing that shimmer is astounding.

There is sadness, which if handled artfully, can leave a satisfying aftertaste of wisdom.

Most importantly, there is choosing, a land of opportunity, each day giving the chance to measure the angle, to weigh the force of the stroke, and then to strike the nail and fasten a moment of yourself to the board of history.

One thing more: If you choose this life, the life of adulthood, one day—many days—you’ll be caught, suddenly, by the spectacle of yourself playacting, doing adult things, making such important decisions under the influence of the role.  Then (and only then) can you be born again, a wiser child.