My husband George and I are going to the beach on Friday for the week, and during that time we’ll be celebrating our first wedding anniversary.  How can that be?  It still feels strange to call George “my husband.”  Sometimes I look at him in a kind of wondering, dazed way, and think, “I’m married to this man?”  And already a year gone.

This coming anniversary brings to mind the unfair, unwarranted, unbelievable passage of time.  Like most of us, I believe that I have forever–forever to travel, forever to write, forever to forgive, forever to love.  But then the markers come: another New Year, another birthday, another anniversary.  One day it’s fairly easy to do that 6-mile hike, and the next . . . well, not so easy.  My body is saying “slow down,” and yet I’m so hungry to soak up every moment of experience from every day.  Rest?  How unfair, to have to rest!

I realize that I’m trapped in the finite–with the infinite, there is no boundary called “time.”  But I’m flesh and blood, and so I hear the clock ticking.  I will not have a lifetime with my new husband, for instance.  I told him when we married that he had to give me at least 30 years.  But can he?  Can I give him thirty years?  I only know that every moment we share is precious.  I don’t want to waste any of the life we have left with wondering or arguing or posturing.  And yet because I’m human, I toss off moments like I have an infinite number.  This anniversary reminds me that I don’t.

Likewise, there are the children to consider: George’s children and my children, and our grandchildren.  We don’t tell our children while they’re growing up, “Life is not easy.  It’s hard to live well–to live with integrity, I mean.  It’s hard to love well.  Dangers abound.”  What do they need from us, in the years we have left?  Can we be there for them in the ways they need us?

And what about our work, our gifts to the larger world?  What remains to be given?  What is significant and what is not?   Our days our numbered.  Time pushes us to make choices.  Not that any one of us is irreplaceable, or is going to save the world from its headlong rush into darkness, but we have to answer to ourselves.  Have we exploited our gifts to the fullest, have we done what we have been given to do by whatever powers that be?

And so I approach this anniversary with some degree of melancholy, yes, but also with awe and thanksgiving.  I know the moment is everything.  I’m living with the full understanding that I will not be living one day, and that understanding makes each day sweet and full of possibility.  Of course, I’m heir to all the human stuff that plagues us all: I want to lose 10 pounds–well, maybe 15; I wish the construction noise would stop; I don’t understand why my husband take the longer route home, when I’ve told him better.  Let it go, I say, just let it go.  Pay attention to what really matters.   

Last night I saw Eugene O’Neill’s play “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” starring William Hurt and Robyn Nevin, in Artists Repertory Theatre here in Portland.  It is an amazing play–3 1/2 hours of family angst–and the production was outstanding, with Hurt and actors from the Sydney Theatre Company, the premier theatre company in Australia.  The play’s characters come right out of O’Neill’s family.

It was an excruciating play to witness.  I watched the family disintegrate–in spite of their wanting to do better, wanting to be better persons, they seemed caught in their family history, unable to escape their fate, unable to make a way for the next generation.

I believe Hurt was quoted somewhere as saying that he wanted to do this play because it was about “transformation.”  But I saw little transformation in the play itself.  O’Neill’s character was the younger son, who is stricken with tuberculosis.  He is the poet, the young seer, the “truth teller” in the family–but nobody can really listen.  The mother has been so wounded by being dragged from one dirty hotel room to another her whole married life, never having a home and never feeling loved by her husband, that she has succumbed to mental illness and drug addiction.  The father grew up desperately poor; as an adult, he became a well-to-do actor, but remained a miser with his wife and children.  He turned to drink after selling out, by doing one lucrative but unchallenging role for most of his career.  The older son is a n’er do well and an alcoholic. 

All the characters have a love/hate relationship with all the other characters.  They say hurtful things, followed by “I love you!”  They push away in anger, only seconds later to hug warmly.  Over and over again the mother voices what I must believe is the deterministic philosophy of O’Neill: “We can’t help being the way we are; what has happened to us has made us this way.” 

Is this true?  To what extent are we forced by life’s exigencies into patterns that we cannot change?  I think we are far more determined by environmental influences and by genetic disposition than most of us believe we are.  We come out of the womb with certain personality traits hard-wired in, and a certain amount of brain power.  And then how this vulnerable child is raised either opens the way to growth or closes off possibilities–generally some of both.  In O’Neill’s play, you see negative family influences ravaging human beings.  Because O’Neill’s play is a supremely American one, you also get some sense of how an undue focus on money (an American passion) can lead people off course–and the father’s story of poverty tells poignantly of class issues.

But there is more to the human story than what we are given in this life–there is also what we choose.  How much choice is possible, I would not venture to say, but I believe that all of us have some measure of choice, and that makes all the difference.  We can choose to say “no.”  We can leave.  We can bring nurturing people into our lives.  We can speak our grievances out loud, and break the silence, as the stand-in for O’Neill does, in the play.  The most tragic figure, to my way of thinking, is the mother.  In the early 20th century, women’s roles were so circumscribed that only the very strongest could break through into another way–O’Neill’s mother was not strong; she loved a man who could not love and care for her; and the culture of the period gave her little option but to hunker down and make the best of it.

The one character who is redemptive in the play is the son who takes the part of O’Neill.  The redemption is the play itself.  He becomes a poet and a playwright and shines a light on what has been hidden.  When art is done with great integrity, it is redemptive.  The truth, as always, will set us free.  What we know, what we can name, we can choose or reject.  And therein lies the redemption.

For those of you who have not had a chance to see the documentary “Raw Faith,” the film will screen at the Columbia Gorge Film Festival tonight (Friday, August 20) at 7:00, at the Vancouver Convention Center at the Hilton Hotel, 301 W. 6th St., in Vancouver, WA.  The film will be preceded by 3 short films.  The screening is free and open to the public.
 

Marilyn, Jimmy, and I were snatched from our home in Cincinnati and taken to the South after our mother beccame ill and couldn’t care for us. We grew up there with our father and our paternal grandparents, Big Papa and Granny. The following excerpt is written in my voice at age seven or eight:

     “The backyard down the steep steps is my favorite place to play when I’m home alone. The back is for gathering eggs, feeding the rabbits, picking green apples, gathering figs for preserves before the birds peck them apart or playing a game of ‘horse’ on the dusty basketball court. A couple times a year Big Papa shows up with one of Mr. Blanton’s horses to plow the garden to plant tomatoes, musk melons, beans, peas, and squash.

     Unless it’s killing day.  On that day my kind grandmother turns executioner to fill the freezer with hens and fryers.

     Some of the chickens are my pets, dyed bitties colored blue, green and pink I get for Easter.  They have names, but I don’t know which ones are mine after the colors wear off.

     When the water gets to boiling real fast under the wood fire, Granny goes out to the hen house to catch a squawking chicken.  After she runs one down with her apron blowing up to her waist, she sits by the fig tree and throws its neck ’round and ’round while that chicken flaps and claws and yells, blood flying everywhere.  When it gets good and still, she hangs the dead chicken on the clothes line, then one at a time sticks them in boiling water so the feathers are soft and easy to pull out.  “Donna, get your old clothes on and come help me pluck these chickens.”

     “Are you through with the killing?”

     “Yes, Baby.  I’ll put the step stool here so you can reach the clothes line.  Now grab me one of those fryers.”  Scalding chicken feathers is a smell you never forget.

     I view my granny different after that first killing in the backyard.

Several people have asked for the quotation which appears on the paper taped to the top of my desk in the scene of “Raw Faith,” where I am packing up to leave the church.  I saved that piece of paper when I moved to our new home, and so will take the opportunity now to quote those words, which sustained me each day in my work and in my life:

“Markings in dry clay disappear

Only when the clay is soft again.

Scars upon the self disappear

Only when one becomes soft within.”

                                   –Deng Ming-Dao

I find that I must guard against hardness, which comes of course from not acknowledging the more tender feelings of sadness, grief, and fear.  I think we feel vulnerable when we permit this inner softening, but in this world we need to bend, to be pliable, and we begin to see that rigidity of person is not helpful, either in affairs of the world or in affairs of the heart.