Mar
27
By Peg
Categories: Re-Vision Your Life, The Spiritual Life
Tags: Child of the 60s, Coming of age, Kennedy brothers, TV
Mar
27
I’m watching one of those rarest of birds: an intelligently written and convincingly acted TV series, via Netflix.
With all that working against it in TVland, the series apparently lasted one season. Go figure.
Jack and Bobby came to my attention after I watched the movie Bobby, a fictionalized account of the night Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. But Jack and Bobby isn’t about the Kennedy brothers; it’s about two teenaged brothers in the first decade of the 21st Century, one of whom grows up to become the president in 2041.
I love coming-of-age tales, which usually center around precocious and sensitive children and their often larger-than-life (think Atticus Finch) parents. The larger-than-life parent in Jack and Bobby is played by Christine Lahti, who is no Atticus Finch. Although she’s a brilliant tenured professor with a Ph.D., her character tends to judge others quickly and harshly, and she smokes pot to deal with the intensity of her life and her personality. Her name is Grace.
For me, Grace is the most compelling character in the series. (Watch a clip of one of her scenes below.) For a few episodes, I spent at least a few minutes during every episode yelling at her to get over herself and stop acting like a megalomaniac. A child of my own era, the Grace character has great confidence in her intellectual and moral (social justice-wise) superiority. Her fuse is short and she erupts into self-righteous rants at the slightest provocation. She intimidates people and she is made of iron.
Seven episodes in, I realize why I find Grace so compelling: I fight being like her so fiercely that sometimes I believe I’m winning that fight.
Anger. Intellectual superiority. Controlling behaviors. Self-defensive, out-of-the-mainstream beliefs and actions designed to say, “I don’t belong with you” before you can say, “You don’t belong with us.” All are elements of the wall I built around myself and carefully guarded for about 40 years. I spent much of my life being that character and, like Grace, making people around me miserable.
No wonder Grace ticked me off.
As the series develops, however, here’s what’s surfacing: Grace’s vulnerabilities. The fears that fuel her need to control and her compulsion to be right. The flawed spirit behind her inability to fully embrace the intimacy necessary for real relationships. I don’t yet know exactly where the 20th episode of Jack and Bobby will leave viewers and these characters, including Grace, but I begin to suspect that the series is as much about Grace coming of age as it is about her young sons coming of age.
That, I think, is the best I can hope for: that I can continue to come of age; that I can accept the way every age brings new growth from the seeds of the previous age; and that I will have the grace to love myself in that becoming.
Mar
23
A friend was driving home from the hospice house in the middle of the night shortly after our friend, Beverly, died in 2000. Having been with Beverly until the end, she was suddenly aware of Beverly sitting in the car with her. Beverly looked at her and said, “How’d I do?”
Always the most exuberantly alive woman I ever knew, Beverly had died a good death and her friend told her so.
When I told the story to another friend, she said, “When you go, you’ll want to know, ‘How’d I look?’”
We laughed. Why deny it?
I remembered this story as I contemplated the question posed by Pastor John Cleghorn at a Lenten service last week: What is your idol?
My idols – the false gods I worship – are the things that I allow to control my life. The things I chase after. The things I think give me happiness or power or relief. My idols are things I don’t want to let go of that do not have my best interests at heart. My idols are many, I’m afraid, and shift from day to day or week to week, just to keep me off-guard.
Vanity is an idol of long-standing. No matter how faithfully I worship at the altar of vanity, I continue to get older, heavier, less gravity-resistant. As I edge toward my sixtieth year, the idol of vanity has less and less power to deliver on its promise that looking good makes life good. Yet the less power it has, the more desperately I cling to it. A sure sign, I would imagine, of any false god worth its salt: No matter how powerless it is to make my life better, it still has power over me.
Until I decide to smash it.
Mar
20
Four days at the cabin. Countless wheelbarrows full of gravel spread. In the ground: one maple tree, three azaleas, two rose bushes, two rosemary plants, four juniper shrubs, four asparagus plants, one crepe myrtle, one coreopsis and three speedwell plants. One pair of brand new medium-duty garden gloves from K-Mart, already coming apart at the seams.
I was fully present with my arms as I raked gravel, my right hip as I leaned into the shovel, my back as I dragged plants and soil amendments into and out of the back of a vehicle. I sweat. I felt the sun on my arms and the breeze on my face and clay clinging to my hands.
I sat on the front steps with a tiny lizard. I played live and let live with the dirt daubers who are building a mud hut somewhere around the porch. I stood for five full minutes trying to determine if the snake across the driveway was alive and dangerous or dead and somewhat less threatening before I took another step. I listened to the cows who live a half mile down the road. I napped with my cat.
Most of the time, I live in my head. I am, therefore I think. I think more than I feel. What a glorious thing to get out of my head for four days and into my body, into the earth, into the moment.
I’m not even going to probe that for some deeper meaning. I am content to feel it and be grateful.
Mar
17
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody posts it on Facebook, did it really happen?
I’m one week into my Facebook fast. I expected it to be harder. I expected to find out that I was itching to sneak a peek or lean in to eavesdrop in the dead of night when no one would catch me at it. I thought surely I would feel lost and a little lonely, although I rarely felt lost or lonely pre-Facebook. Still, I’d grown accustomed to just hearing what my friends were doing and what they felt passionate about and what made them laugh and what they looked like when they were 23.
But I haven’t felt lost and I haven’t felt lonely.
I’ve enjoyed the silence and the solitude of my evenings. I’ve enjoyed moving in the direction of just being quiet.
In the movie “Shall We Dance,” the Susan Sarandon character sat in a bar one night facing the fear that her husband, played by Richard Gere, was having an affair. She found herself in a conversation about why people marry and stay married. She said, “It’s because we want a witness to our lives.”
Divorced at the time I saw the movie, that resonated with me. We all need to know that someone cares what we say, what we do, think and feel. We all need a witness. Having lived alone for almost eight years now, I recognize that is what Facebook has become: my witness. The friends on Facebook who respond to my status updates, who “like” the things I say, who laugh with me and commiserate with me, are my witnesses. They are all the voice of God whispering, “We see you. We care. You matter.”
Mar
8
The first Ash Wednesday I remember was in 1977. I spent the month leading up to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, living a half block off the St. Charles streetcar line in a 1920s efficiency apartment with a Murphy bed.
I partied a lot, walked the city, made a mask out of a plastic half-gallon milk jug, glue and glitter. I went to neighborhood parades where little kids sat on their dads’ shoulders and shouted, “Throw me something, mister!” Most of the beads were still glass in those days, so if you failed to catch them, they shattered when they hit the ground, a ruined trophy. By the time Fat Tuesday rolled around, I couldn’t wait for the tourists to go back where they belonged. At midnight, when it all ended, the streets and the medians and the sidewalks were strewn with broken beads and beer cans and plastic cups reeking of Hurricanes.
On Wednesday morning, I rode the streetcar into town. Cleaning crews had come through while the rest of us were sleeping it off and left the city as unblemished as if it had been to confession, said its Hail Marys and been rendered holy, or at least forgiven. The people who lived and worked in the Crescent City rode the streetcars in subdued silence, foreheads smudged with ash. I thought it was weird.
By Thursday, the hush that had ushered in the Lenten season was over. Party, repent, life as usual.
When I thought of giving up something for Lent this year, I first thought of sugar, which proved too difficult to pull off last year. One day into Lent, I ate three mediocre boxed cookies and never got back on the wagon.
So the idea was born: I would give up Facebook for Lent. The time I typically spend posting my status and liking somebody else’s status, I will invest in my spiritual practice and hope that something worthwhile is born during my time of fasting from friends-on-demand.
