Lent [Day 22]: Excerpts from the Notebook

Originally written Spring 2010. Perhaps just as relevant this Spring.

So, looking back in my collections of ephemeral notes today, I found this on a folded scrap of yellow legal paper:

"When do you realize that someone is going to change your life forever?"

Which is simultaneously deep and introspective and pithy Hallmark schlock.  Let's focus on the former.  It's sort of like the question of when life begins. (After all, relationship is very much a living being.  It also raises more questions than answers.)  Is it at conception?  Once the fetus is viable?  Upon its first breath of air?  When can you realize whether someone is going to make a profound impact on you?  When do you realize you have borne life into a relationship you've created?  At hello?  Later on, once you are clearly invested in relationship?  Is it even you who creates the relationship?  And when can you realize whether you are going to make a profound impact on someone else?  For me, that comes far earlier than the answer to the initial question.

In some Schrodinger fashion, we change each others' lives just by being in them.  Our presence changes the experiment.

I realized this morning, that I am embarking on some new relationships, and that these people will always be mine.  At some future date, they will move out of my immediate presence (or I theirs).  But even so, they will always be present in my life, in some form.  To quote an inappropriate Third Eye Blind song, "I guess I'll always be knowing you."  I don't think of relationships as necessarily having expiration dates.  They don't die, they just sort of go dormant in some form, like seeds in the Atacama that wait years for rain to coax them out to life.  So my recognition today that these relationships are, actually, going to be mine forever is more an acknowledgment than a revelation.  I think this acknowledgment has come earlier than it has in the past.  Or maybe I always somehow knew it, I'm just conscious of it earlier.  It's one of those things that is easy to pinpoint in hindsight than in the present.  It's easy to see evidence when you look back for it, even if the significance of a moment escapes you at that moment.  

Motherhood of a Different Kind

I was sifting through one of my commonplace books this morning, and I came across this pearl from C.S. Lewis:

'She seems to be... well, a person of particular importance?'

'Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things...' 

'And who are all these young men and women on each side?' 

'They are her sons and daughters.' 

'She must have had a very large family, Sir.' 

'Every young man or boy that met her became her son - even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.' 

'Isn't that a bit hard on their own parents?' 

'No. There are those that steal other peoples' children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives. ... It is like when you throw a stone into a pool and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? ... But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.'

I am often asked about (not) having children of my own - it's usually one of the trifecta of small-talk topics when meeting people:  Where are you from?  What do you do?  Do you have any kids?  Especially after someone learns we've been married for more than a dozen years.  As a woman who runs in some evangelical Christian circles, it's assumed that I would have had them by now.  And that it's something I'm supposed to do, despite my body.  Frankly, I've never had a huge drive towards motherhood - I've looked at it more as merely the next logical milestone.  I'm not hostile toward the idea, either; I'm not militantly anti-children.  It just hasn't happened for us.  I choose to be satisfied either way - with or without.  We essentially gave the decision over to God; I never wanted to be so desperate that I would steamroll forth with my plan and overlook the one He has designed for us (and designed us for). A constant struggle that is hardly exclusive to child-bearing. 

One way I usually respond to the question - mostly to fill the conversation space that would have otherwise held a description of my family - is that as a high-school teacher and mentor, I've been busy shepherding others' children.  Which raises a question: Must I justify our lack of children with some substitution or place-holder?  Sometimes, yes, because I've been made to feel I am somehow less of a woman for it.  Comments from a doctor and also from some well-meaning friends in a position of spiritual authority.  Defense does spring back from that kind of thing.  Surely God demonstrates His love for us through parenting.  There are things about God's relationship with us you begin to understand once you have children of your own.  I get that.  But He also doesn't call everyone to live out the same story.  Creation and community do not support homogeneity as the rule.  He calls some to remain single all their lives.  He calls others to marriage late in life.  He calls others to be parents of one.  He calls others to be parents of many.  He calls others to be parents of none.  But He also demonstrates His love in ways too numerous to count.  

Flipping through the same book, I re-read Donald Miller's words: 

After all, the metaphors - love between a father and a son, between a man and a woman - didn't have to be exact.  They were only supposed to make a motion, to grunt toward the inexplicable.  And we don't all get to experience all the metaphors.  A person who never leaves China doesn't get to appreciate God's handiwork in Yosemite National Park, but he will have his own versions there in China.  This was important to me, because it meant that even though I didn't have a dad, I still knew about love, and from plenty of places.  So while all the metaphors weren't firing, some of them were.  I could still understand God was loving and kind, because I knew about love and kindness.

I don't need all the metaphors.  I have some.  And, in this lifetime, I'll barely scratch the surfaces of the ones I do have.  "Some" is still an embarrassing surplus of riches.

Required Reading

It's Spring Break (finally!), and I have an overly ambitious reading list. To which I will permit myself to attend once my term grades are finished. At this rate - and now that I've trimmed it a little - I've got to read about a book per day - ambitious indeed! But I think I will plan to spend a couple days at the beach, which will make for good reading time.

Tea With Hezbollah, Ted Dekker

The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran

Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton

The Four Loves, CS Lewis

Miracles, CS Lewis

Up in the Air, Walter Kirn

Atonement, Ian McEwan

To Own a Dragon, Donald Miller

The Curve of Binding Energy, John McPhee

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

I know I've poo-poohed CS Lewis and his fiction for so long, but now I want to read some of his apologetics. Some of these books have lingered on my to-read list for so long, others are first-in-first-outs. Such is the nature of my bookcase. And with the gigantor Alachua-County book sale coming up this month, I'd be doing well to get some of these read before I inevitably buy more.

I've been doing a lot of just-in-time reading lately. I'll pick up a book, read a few pages, and then have occasion touse what I read in conversation not a day or so later. Today, another interesting synchronicity. Almost two years ago, I heard a a reading at the wedding of two friends - part of which I made note in my notebook. I always intended to ask them what it was from but never did (and I see them all the time!), and my paraphrasing didn't help me google it. After an emphatic recommendation, I requested delivery of The Prophet from the library. It arrived today. I slipped it out of the envelope and opened it to casually flip through it, when right there, on the first page I open, in the middle of the page, is the very passage I noted at the wedding:

"And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course."

On Keeping a Notebook

Yesterday, a friend mentioned a student of his who once began writing in a notebook - specifically, writing everything that needed to be said that day in the event he didn't have another.  At first, that sounds noble and smart, however, it also seems fatally overwhelming.  I try to do that while on travel - to record everything that I saw or that happened (plus my reaction) in my travel journals.  But it takes me hours every night to record the day's adventures.  Usually I reach critical mass after about five days, and I start leaving big gaps when I save the writing for the next day... and for the next...  I tried to stave this off on my last trip by at least making short notes on the days I didn't feel like writing full entries, so I wouldn't later forget what to write.  I had the intention of synthesizing my quick notes into longer writings, but here I am, four months later, with just a random collection of notes.  And this isn't limited to my travel journals.  I have loads of notebooks and envelopes and glove compartments full of scribblings and cryptic notes, filed away for later development.  But I rarely revisit them.  And when I do, it's never to write them into something more formal; it's more like visiting a museum of me, in which there are no pieces to display - all that's there are the curator's notes on the wall.

Why this drive to record all detail?  It's part of my personality, I suppose.  Like Didion, I want to remember what it was to be me at that time and place.  And I have this compulsion to record every detail - because without the context, the significance of a particular thought is sadly diminished.  I am decidedly unabridged.  I often give up telling stories because I can't adequately Cliffs-Notes it for others to easily digest.  For my audience to understand an event, I have to convey every minute detail and most of the back-story.  A six-sentence story for another person is a six-minute yarn for me.  

I leaf through these notebooks and rediscover these fragments of memory that had been lost to time.  Maybe I'm the only one who cares, in which case, why am I writing all this detail for myself to enjoy later?  Or, I'm making field notes in some experiment, and eventually, I will be able to see patterns and draw conclusions and will be glad to have a rich collection of data.  I want everyone to understand the complexity of a situation.  Apparently, this extends to my future self, with how I write in my notebook.  Presumably, my notes are only for me, but I still often feel like I write for an audience outside my head.  And here, on this blog, I have a faceless audience for whom I am writing - which perhaps provides the impetus to bring all those scrawled scraps of memory into some cohesive work.  But does someone else actually need to read it for it to have worth?  Would I have any internal motivation to collect notes into something coherent if I didn't have an audience?  Probably not.

Perhaps the volume of detail I feel compelled to record is to stave off the natural paring and preparation of information for long-term storage.  The brain distills things down into a small remnant of memory, and there's no predicting what that will be.  Zoe Heller, through a character in her novel Notes on a Scandal, says this of memory-crafting: 

I keep staring at things, willing myself to remember them: the faded blue dressing gown that Sheba is always leaving draped across the sofa; the antique Moroccan tiles in the kitchen; the velvet-clad hangers in the closets.  Of course, memory is not really as obedient a faculty as that.  You can't consciously decide what is going to adhere.  Certain things may strike you at the time as memorable, but memory only laughs at your presumption.  'Oh, I'm never going to forget this,' you say to yourself when you visit the Sacre-Coeur at sunset.  And years later, when you try to summon up an image of the Sacre-Coeur, it's as cold an abstract as if you'd only ever seen it on a postcard.  If anything unlocks the memory of this house for me, years from now, it will be something - some tiny, atmospheric fragment - of which I'm not even aware at the moment.  I know this, and yet I still persist in making my little inventory, trying to nail down my recollections.

I tend to remember overtones, not details.  My reaction to a situation, not the specifics of the situation itself.  How people say something, not the words they say.  How I feel about something, not the something.  This is also why I'm terrible at describing plots of stories or films - all I can remember is my overall impression, or what I was thinking at the time.

It's difficult enough to craft one's own memories; it has to be impossible to manufacture one's own legacy.  Sam Beam implores a longtime love to remember him in a very specific way.  I am fascinated by things that others remember.  Reminiscing about grad school with a friend last weekend, she recounted a story about the two of us to her son.  On my own, I never would have remembered the situation she described, but of course I knew it once she mentioned it.  It was neither good nor bad, but of all the possible memories of us, it's interesting that that particular incident is part of her inventory.  I am loathe to say I want to control what others think of me, but I will admit I want that impression to be accurate.  It bothers me greatly when people misinterpret me.  As in the song, can we really instruct someone to remember us in some way, or, for that matter, even maintain the same catalog of memories?  Should we even care that different curators organize the collection differently - the prized acquisitions in our own exhibits are relegated to an out-of-the-way room in someone else's.  I wonder whether others would be as surprised (as I am at theirs) at my memories of them, and what triggers them.  

I certainly want to be remembered fondly for specific events.  I certainly want to be remembered seldomly for the times when I was not the best version of myself.  I edit my own memories over and over, leaving a tight, streamlined work that pleases me.  Do others do the same?  I own several pair of rose-colored glasses - ever the idealist, I usually look back on things and see the good.  Even in a current situation, one in which I really want to see and remember the bad because I think it will make it easier to let go later, I am having a really difficult time doing so.  Almost as if the harder I try, the stronger the good shines; the rosier things crowd everything else out of view.

For someone who teaches a laboratory science, I sure have no clear need for objective accuracy.