And for the season it was winter . . .

I met my graduate class for the second time last night. We had a good discussion of early American narratives of exploration, contact (with tribal peoples) and settlement. One of our focal texts for the evening was our anthology's excerpt of William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, a history of the pilgrims, the Mayflower and all that. And as is always the case, I stand amazed in my imagination as I try to put myself in the moment of the pilgrims' arrival at Cape Cod in that November of 1620. Bradford describes it thus:

Being thus passed the vast ocean, . . . they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor. . . . And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilds beasts and wild men--and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects. For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all civil parts of the world.

No matter the wrongs and rights of these Puritans, Separatists, pilgrims, and all the many wrongs and rights that have followed from their actions, I'm always amazed at their faith and their commitment and their strength.

The Gym

Time that I've been previously spending exercising my fingers here in this blog space has recently been spent at ETSU's Center for Physical Activity (CPA). But I've missed this writing and hope that now I can find a balance.

I started walking for exercise almost four years ago in an attempt to lose some weight and get in shape. Over the time since, I've gotten in fairly good shape, probably the best I've been in these past 30 years since high school, but I haven't really done well at weight loss. (But that's another blog.) After doing a summer and fall exercise program in 2005, I vegetated through much of last winter, and so I'm trying not to let that happen again this year.

My attempt to keep up winter exercise is leading me more and more to the CPA. It's a wonderful facility here on campus, and as a faculty member I'm able to use it for free. And it's an interesting place. I'll write a little about what I do there and a little about what I see.

What I do: I walk a lot. The CPA has a wonderful elevated track that goes around the wall above the large exercise and the three full-sized basketball courts. Eight laps makes a mile. I have my mp3 player set up with just the right number and combination of songs for 32 laps, which takes me a little over an hour. When I don't want to walk, or when my knees are hurting, I do 30 minutes or so on the elliptical machine, the use of which makes me think of movements I've seen in cross-country skiing. (Notice that I write "seen" and not "done.") I also started working my way through the weight machines recently, which I'm trying to do every time I'm there. I'd love to take more advantage of the nice pool, but I don't swim well; so when a goal is available I shoot some basketball. I try to make this exercise by playing a game with myself. First, I shoot a free throw. If I make it, I shoot another and another until I miss. (Let it be known that I'm not a great free throw shooter.) When I miss, I grab the reboud and make myself stay in motion, shooting all kinds of shots until I hit one. Then I go back to the free throw line and repeat. I do this until I hit 48 free throws and field goals. Because I'm a poor free throw shooter, I get a fairly good cardio workout in between brief moments of rest at the free throw line.

What I see: Lots and lots of people working out. These are mostly students, but a lot of faculty and staff are there as well. Mornings are best, although I don't particularly like working out in the morning. Afternoons and evenings are okay, but they're crowded.

• When walking--Many people walk in pairs and talk as they go around, but most, like me, wear their little headphones and listen to whatever. I often catch myself wondering what this person or that might be listening to through those headphones--Justin Timberlake? Faith Hill? Slipknot? J.S. Bach? And I wonder if any of them think about what I might be listening to. Some who know me would feel certain that I'm likely to have some Bruce Springsteen and Bruce Hornsby in my ears. They would be right. My mp3 player also has The Call, U2, Pete Townshend, Roxy Music, Steely Dan, The Police, a techno piece and even one of my own songs. Would anybody have guessed last Friday while I was on the elliptical machine that I was listening to a Speaking of Faith program on "The Biology of the Spirit"?


• When on the elliptical machine--I'm behind a couple of rows of treadmills that are used both for walking and running. (I've tried these, but I wasn't too taken with them.) I find it both funny and amazing to watch people run on these, especially when they're running at a pretty good clip. To put out that much energy and stay in one place! Beyond the treadmill rows is a wall with six or seven televisions, all tuned to different channels. I haven't figured out yet if I can listen to them. And I probably won't try to figure it out, because I don't want to listen to them. I don't even like to look at them.


• When working with weights--I see folks doing a lot of different stuff. I sometimes come to a machine that I usually do reps of 50 pounds with, and somebody there before me will have it set on 175 pounds. On most of the machines I could probably do more than 50 pounds. But 175? Is somebody doing reps with that much more weight I use?


• I see the students, mostly guys, watching their own muscles as they lift weights, via either the machine or free weights. They like to watch themselves in the mirror while they work out. Many have developed great physiques, certainly, but I can't help but wonder if they're as committed to their studies as they are to their bodies. Do they have a mirror on their desks, in which they can watch themselves read or work out equations?


• Gym clothes vary quite a bit. Some folks wear just the plain t-shirt and shorts; others are, for the gym and the business at hand there, dressed to the nines.


• The weight machines surround a large floor space covered with mats. On certain nights a judo class is going on. That's fun to watch. Having watched my son's tae kwon do sessions for several years now, I've learned to appreciate the workout that these guys get from practicing their moves and such. One really interesting thing that I've never seen before the last week or so, is that guys are coming into the gym and getting on the mats and wrestling. I thought that, in our age of stupid pro wrestling entertainmnet on TV and stupid homophobia, wrestling took place only on high school or college teams. I've always been interested in wrestling, but I never participated in any organized way. And I wouldn't know how to go about finding somebody my own age and size to help me learn to wrestle. But here are these kids coming in--groups of two or more--and they're getting out on the mats and wrestling. They get a lot of looks from the standoffish solo exercisers working their elliptical machines or treadmills, but they seem not to mind. Another interesting point about these wrestlers is that many of them seem to be what might be called "hippies" or "granolas." I watched one such group recently and wondered if wrestling had become the new "natural" exercise to participate in.

So, that's the gym experience. I'm writing this morning, because I'll be back there this afternoon, walking and working the weights, trying to keep active in both body and mind.

Sense of Wonder

Busy busy days getting the semester kicked off . . .

I just ran across these words from St. Augustine, and I thought I'd float them out there:

Men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the courses of the stars: and they pass by themselves without wondering.

The Sunset Limited

Here in the last few days of "vacation" before returning to begin the new semester, I've been reading a lot, trying to get in as much of what I want to read before I come up against what I have to read. Not to say that I won't enjoy what I read this coming semester--I will; but I still have to read it.

Only a few minutes ago, I read a recent work by one of my favorite authors--Cormac McCarthy. The work is The Sunset Limited, a Novel in Dramatic Form. The picture here is the cover. The two yellow images are the headlights of a train--which is what the Sunset Limited actually is--coming through a tunnel. The story is these two guys talking, with some moving around a little kitchen--making coffee, reading the paper and so on. One guy is black and uneducated, an ex-con who has a good mind and a strong faith in God. The other guy is white, a well-to-do professor of something. How do these two end up together in the black guy's kitchen? Apparently the suicidal professor was about to commit suicide by throwing himself in front of the Sunset Limited when the black guy stopped him. Somehow the black guy gets the professor back to his (the black guy's) apartment, where he tries to convince the professor that God is real and life is worth living.

The descriptive phrase "Novel in Dramatic Form" means what it says. The work is not in narrative form. It's more like a play. It's just dialogue, with some small descriptions of action (stage directions) plugged in here and there. Here's a random example:

White: Tell me something.

Black: Sure.

White: Why are you here? What do you get out of this? You seem like a smart man.

Black: Me? I'm just a dumb country nigger from Lousiana. I done told you. I aint never had the first thought in my head. If it aint in here then I dont know it.

He holds the bible up off the table and lays it down again.

White: Half the time I think you're having fun with me. . . .

In 2006, the work was performed as a two-man play in Chicago and New York.

I'm going to have to think about this one and read it again (and maybe again). I'm just not sure what I think about it. The black man is at times a little preachy, which probably is to be expected. He's living in a crack house or something like that and trying to save some people from themselves. He's got this weary suicidal white man, whom he's also trying to save, in his kitchen. I guess he's got a right to be preachy.

But it's the white professor who bothers me. He seems so much the stereotype of the hyper-educated man whose education has allowed him such a clear view of the world (supposedly) that he has no sense of faith. He claims never to have had one. He thinks the world beyond redemption. In fact, it can't be redeemed because it was never any good in the first place. Like so many, he blames God for this. Near the end of the work, as he is apparently preparing to go out and finish the suicide he was prevented from finishing earlier, he says to the black man, "Your God must have once stood in a dawn of infinite possibility and this is what he's made of it." The professor isn't one of those atheists who probably aren't really atheists at all, who argue and argue, who kick and scream, against a being they supposedly don't believe exists.

The black man seems utterly wasted by the white man's arguments, especially, it seems, the one where the white man doesn't want to go to a heaven where he'd have to see his "mama" again. And in the end, the white leaves the black on his knees and promising a silent God that he'll keep his word for him: "That's all right. That's all right. If you never speak again, you know I'll keep your word. You know I will. You know I'm good for it."

I'm still digesting all the final arguments and the final lines. My gut reaction, however, is that all the white's big arguments are in some sense an eloquent attempt to cover a spiritual weakness, a spiritual laziness. If he truly didn't believe in God, could he have been saved from suicide by the discovery of a passion or by finding a level of faith and a value in his own humanity?

While I admire Cormac McCarthy's art, I have to say after a first reading of The Sunset Limited that Flannary O'Connor handles these questions and crises better than he and that he himself handles them better in his narrative fiction.

Doldrums

That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me though seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This though perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare

The moment I opened the blog window to write, this poem came to mind. I guess it must have been that first four lines especially that brought it to me. I look out the window of my office and see the naked branches of the trees, and it isn't hard to picture these as being a jumbled "ruined" choir loft--chairs all turned over, their legs jutting in all directions--where not so long ago I saw blossoms and green leaves and singing birds.

I once wrote a story in which the opening lines identified January as "dead space." The month doesn't even have the Super Bowl any more, does it? With apologies to all with January birthdays and anniversaries, I must say that the month seems ill chosen as the beginning of the new year. Wouldn't the beginning of April be more appropriate? Then we have the greening of the world and the returning of birds. We seem surrounded by "new." Those with January birthdays were more than likely conceived in April!

Part of this mood is probably to do with the space I'm in. The long Christmas break here at the university is over too soon, but the new semester and its excitement is not yet arrived. So I'm particularly sensitive to the notion of the doldrums in life, in calendars, in schedules.

Then again, yesterday was different. The wind outside the window was white with snow! Although I often recognize a strong spiritual or emotional connection with rain, snow is my favorite precipitation. I realize this is probably because I live in a fairly temperate climate where I don't live with snow from October or November through April or May. That might get old. Given that I don't live there, I can love snow without reservation. I could have gotten much more work done yesterday if not for sitting and staring out the window, watching the big white flakes swirl in the wind and lay beautifully along the chaotic lines of "[b]are ruined choirs" outside my window.

But, Then Again . . .

New York City's mean streets (and subways) aren't all they're cracked up to be!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070105/ap_on_re_us/heroic_catch

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=65634

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6231971.stm

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=65669

Maybe there is some hope for this world!

Some Things Will Never Change

Along about 1986 or 1987, Bruce Hornsby had a hit with "The Way It Is," a song about prejudice and discrimination. The lyric includes this refrain:

That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
That's just the way it is. . . .
But don't you believe them.

We're conditioned to think that the New Year brings about change, that the world is somehow renewed. But I was made painfully aware that the opposite is at least as true by a situation right here on my street--the street I live on.


This is the house across the street from me. Until a few days ago, a good neighbor named Steve owned it. Sometime back in November or December he put this house on the market. (The sale sign is visible just over the back of my brother-in-law's truck.) I knew the house was for sale, of course, and wondered what sort of luck Steve would have in selling it.

On Christmas Eve, I was leaving the house when Steve came across the road to say he'd enjoyed having me and mine as neighbors. If I understood him correctly, he said he'd lived in that house for 30 years! He didn't know if I'd heard that he'd gotten married recently and that he and his new wife were moving into a new place together.

I hadn't heard. With Thanksgiving, the flurry of the semester's end and then Christmas prep, I didn't know much of anything beyond the fact that the sale sign was in the front yard.

Anyway, he told me that he and the woman who runs this little real estate company managed some rental property together, and he'd sold the house to one of their renters, an African-American couple who were looking to buy.

Then he passed on a tidbit of information that inspired the title and beginning of this entry. The German lady who lives a couple of houses up the street, upon hearing that he was going to sell, had asked him not to sell to black people.

Unbelievable, I thought. And yet believable. Will these prejudices never pass? Apparently not for a good while.

Steve said the buyers were good folks and then wondered if somebody else might not have easily said, "Don't sell to any Germans!"

I'm looking forward to welcoming my new neighbors. They were moving in New Year's night when we returned home from North Carolina. I'm sure they've been busy. In fact, I haven't even seen them yet. If an opportunity doesn't present itself soon, I'll just go over and knock on the door.

God, help us be better at living together in this world!

New Year's Day 2007

A good day with which to begin another year. We slept in a little bit, then got ready and went over the mountain to my mother-in-law's house, where we had the traditional New Year's Day meal of collard greens, black-eyed peas, corn bread and ham.

A Southern Dinner for the New Year Centers Around Traditions

Dec 27, 2006 (Destin Log - McClatchy-Tribune Business News)

"Eat poor on New Year's, eat fat the rest of the year."

For years, this old Southern saying has dictated the eating habits of people in the South on New Year's Day.

A traditional Southern New Year's meal usually includes ham, corn bread, black-eyed peas and collard greens.

A staple in the Southern diet for more than 300 years, black-eyed peas have long been associated with good luck.

It is said that the eating of black-eyed peas on New Year's Day started during the Civil War. The Northern soldiers raided the South's food supplies one New Year's Eve and took all the food except for the dried black-eyed peas and the salted pork.

On New Year's Day, all that the Southern soldiers had to eat were the peas and pork to keep them alive, so it is considered good luck to eat black-eyed peas on New Year's.

Others say black-eyed peas, also known as cowpeas, are thought to bring wealth because they look like little coins, in addition to the fact that they swell when cooked--a sure sign of prosperity.

Still others say that each blackeyed pea eaten on New Year's Day ensures one day of good luck in the coming year, or that they must be eaten before noon to bring good luck.

Collard greens are considered lucky because they are green, like folding money.

And eating corn bread brings gold in the new year. The starch in the meal is usually rice, a symbol of abundance.

And the hog, and thus its meat, is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity.

Traditions are handed down from generation to generation, representing the hope for happiness, prosperity and health in each new year.

When I left my mother-in-law's house, I sat in the car at the first stop sign and looked up at a sky striking in its contrasts. Above the hills and mountains in front of me, the sky was dark with clouds threatening rain. But above me and behind me, the sky was clear blue. Once upon a time I would have thought of this as the way life works. We have our storms and our clear days, our bad luck and our good, our troubled and our easy times.

But I don't think like this any more. I haven't trusted blue skies since that September morning in 2001 when two passenger jets descended unsteadily from a beautiful blue sky and crashed into two buildings that stood reflecting that sky and gleaming in the sun.

I still admire blue skies (real ones and metaphorical ones), but I don't trust them. Faith, family and friends now provide the images of hope, stability and promise that I need to keep rising in the morning, putting one foot in front of the other throughout the day and then lying down again at night. And so with these three--faith, family and friends--I look forward to 2007 and whatever the year might bring.