Gossamer

In my early 30s I had pneumonia. For the better part of a week I thought I just had a bad case of the flu. Essentially I was prostrate with fever and low oxygen and dehydration. I lay in our darkened bedroom on sweaty, twisted sheets. I didn't eat for days and drank but little sips of water. I drifted in and out of sleep. Basically, I was too sick to realize how sick I was.

One feverish day I dreamed that I was sitting in a hospital bed on white sheets in a white room filled with brilliant, ultra-white light that streamed in through gauzy white curtains. Seemingly from nowhere, my former colleague John appeared and sat in a white wooden chair at the foot of my bed. That would be the same John who had died a half-year earlier of malignant melanoma.

He gazed benignly at me.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"I heard you needed company."

Hmmm.

When I awoke, I asked Michael to drive me to the doctor across town. Dr. MacDonald said I had a bad case of pneumonia. He put me on antibiotics, and within a few days I was restored.

The dream stayed with me and does to this day. It was vivid, real, eerily tranquil. It was not a nightmare … more like a vision in which I was free from fear and any other strong emotion.

Perhaps the veil – the wispy cosmic membrane between temporal life and vast eternity – had torn a bit as my condition declined. While he'd been a great guy in life, apparently I was not ready then to join my friend on the other side.

BAWWWK! Or, Life as a nursery tale

"Sally Henny Penny gets rather flustered when she tries to count out change, and she insists on being paid cash; but she is quite harmless."

Recently an online customer-service agent answered my email query and commented about my e-address, which has the word hennypenny in it: "I see you're a Beatrix Potter fan."

Now, I love me some Beatrix Potter, especially that bad boy Squirrel Nutkin, but I had never known a Hennypenny connection to Potter's work. So I Googled. And there, in a Potter story called "The Tale of Ginger and Pickles," was a feathered character named Sally Henny Penny who owns a shop.

The Henny Penny I was familiar with was the one in the very old English tale of an fearful fowl who, upon being bonked on the head by an acorn, leapt to the conclusion that the sky was falling. In later print versions, she tells her friend Chicken Little, and they are joined by all manner of panicked barnyard denizens in apocalyptic feather-flapping and hysterics.

My email address derives from a high school nickname bestowed by my best friend Reese. She affectionately morphed my maiden name, Hinman, into "Hinny" and thence to "Henny," from where it was but one small chicken-scratch to "Hennypenny." So Hennypenny I was for a year or so in my late teens. Decades later, when I got my first home email account, I brought the moniker back to life to rep me on the Internet.

Last night on the Web I found some illustrations and book covers for the acorn-bedeviled Henny Penny, and I had to laugh: My nickname might be apter than I'd realized.

There runs the squawking lady chicken, freaking out that the sky is preparing to fall and bring life as she knows it to an end. And here I am, assailed by periodic anxiety attacks and jumping to catastrophic conclusions at every rupture of a kitchen sink pipe, every unwelcome phone call from a high school dean. If I can laugh at that silly Henny Penny, I'd better be able to laugh at myself.

The sky is falling, indeed!

Reverie

I was on a gilded boat floating on a copper river toward purple hills and an apricot sun.

No. I was on an ebony steed bounding noiseless on a blazing trail past emerald meadows and illuminated trees.

I was airborne, gliding, senseless with the shining. Ahead the fabled mountain exhaled gold – unearthly incense.

I drove home last evening from Edgewood, headed west into a sunset that suffused the air around me. The little homes I passed were like a fairy town, like shrines. Everything was magic, or do I mean holy.

Oh, let it be like this when my day comes. Bear my soul in clouds of knowing; bathe my eager heart in love.

Lights. Camera. ... Tree

When I was around 25 years old, in the midst of my mind's awakening (the one that was supposed to happen in college, but oh well, I was always a late bloomer), I became something of a freestyle autodidact. I tore through books about spirituality, mysticism, nature, philosophy, more nature, physics, religion, nature. And then I read the book that changed everything: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard.

Aside from being gutted with envy that Dillard had written such a masterpiece when she was not much older than I at the time, and won a Pulitzer for it no less, I was captivated by the book. It seemed that with every turn of a page, my socks got knocked off by a description, an observation, a tying-together of seemingly disparate anecdotes or qualities that yielded some stunning insight. The thing about chlorophyll and human blood? Whoa. The giant water beetle sucking the frog dry before her eyes? Damn. The long riff on fecundity and the lavish redundancy built into reproduction of most species: yikes.

Seriously, if you haven't read Pilgrim yet, please do so now. If you like it, move on to Dillard's slim volume Holy the Firm and then her essay collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk.

Late this afternoon I saw something that made me think of Pilgrim for the first time in a while. Dillard had written about the sudden blazing sight of a tree in the sunlight, and used this anecdote about a blind girl who regained her sight as a guidepost for seeing the world afresh:

Many newly sighted people speak well of the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision. To one patient, a human hand, unrecognized, is "something bright and then holes." Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy calls out "It is dark, blue and shiny.... It isn’t smooth, it has bumps and hollows."

A little girl visits a garden. She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer. (She) stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names by taking hold of it, and then as "the tree with the lights in it.”

No lanterns hung in that little girl's tree, nor in the one Dillard saw in West Virginia back in the 1970s. Nor was electricity involved in lighting this towering golden tree that stood out from among dark pines in the setting sun this evening.

I was in the parking lot at Stop & Shop. I had a long shopping list, and it was growing dark. But there was time – there had to be time – to stop and see. To see the tree. The tree with the lights in it.

If you click on this photograph, you won't be sorry.

What did you see today?

I needed that

It was 8:30 pm by the time I headed down Oakland Beach Avenue toward home last night. I'd been at work since 8:15 in the morning and had stayed in the city late to attend a pastoral council meeting at our church. The darkness alongside the highway seemed to menace the swath of illumination from my car lights, and I felt vaguely apprehensive. We had had a long a discussion at our meeting about dwindling attendance at weekend Masses, shrinking contributions in the offering baskets, the abrupt resignation of the organist that has left us temporarily without music, the fact that our stewardship weekend two weeks ago had yielded just one new volunteer. We were all thinking: What's to become of our dear parish?

On my way home, I saw storefronts with large "FOR RENT" signs in their windows. The Blockbuster across from our Stop & Shop is closing; posters advertise half-price DVDs.

Then, I came to Oakland Beach itself. When we bought our house here in 2006, and moved down in 2007, the economy hadn't yet taken its worst nosedive. Real estate was plateauing, for sure, but at neighborhood association meetings we discussed block grants and a new master plan, improvements to the area, traffic calming and street trees. A real estate investor was buying up properties with exciting plans to rehab houses and build new ones, and eventually to improve the main commercial strip. Growth! Improvement! Aesthetic touches! Everyone was on board the progress train.

Now, the same ambitious investor is selling off some of his properties, including a cottage on our dead-end road. His dream of upgrading the area is another victim of the floundering economy. One of the rehab projects sits half-finished, its upper story finished and sided, the first floor desolate, unsided, with gaping holes for windows. I had been reading earlier about the desperate plights of Detroit and Flint, Michigan, which are turning into abandoned wastelands. What happens, I wondered, when towns and cities go under? When it all collapses, when people leave or become homeless, when investors run away? What happens when more people lose their jobs and, eventually, their homes? How will people survive?

We baby boomers are entering older age in a far different reality and frame of mind from those we enjoyed for more than a half-century. Our postwar childhoods and our prime working years were prosperous and forward-looking. Incomes went up steadily, city and federal services were plentiful, public education in the suburbs was excellent and well rounded. We dreamed, and we spent.

It all seems decadent now, even for those of us who lived solidly middle-class lives. To think that I used to shop for recreation! Go to flea markets! Plan vacations! Today, in contrast, life seems circumscribed and grim. I know we are still fortunate compared to most of the world's souls, but in the dark evenings of autumn, scary and oppressive thoughts of decay, ruin, and potential poverty are powerful bogeymen.

Such were my dreary thoughts as I drove, bone-tired, down the avenue toward home. Out of the darkness, a puddle of light shone around the entrance to the Congregational Church. I drew closer and noticed a sign hanging outside the church's front door. It was one of those simple white grooved boards that you stick black letters into.

The sign said: HAVE FAITH.

Have faith. Have faith. The words seemed spoken into my ears, not just silent black symbols on a sign. I was so struck by their message, I actually went back this morning to photograph the sign at the church. But ... it was already gone.

Signs mean what we want them to, and I try to keep a lid on my tendency toward magical thinking. But every once in a while, in times of confusion, fatigue, or despair, we may round a corner and see a message that is eerily apt for our situation.

Have faith. What can I do but try?

Blessings 10-25-09

1. The irresistible mystery of a long-stemmed rose on the sand.

2. Shopping for clothes with Kevin. He's developed his own funky style and likes bright colors. Check the Nikes we got him at Bob's today. He bought purple laces to replace the white ones.

3. Bill Harley's fun, sassy songs for kids. I downloaded a bunch from iTunes tonight to make a CD for Caroline. Bill lives about three miles from Providence and was a member of our pool club, where he'd give an outdoor concert for the kids every summer. Kevin's favorite song was You're in Trouble. We all loved Freddie the Fly-Eating Frog.

4. Figuring out which things in life constitute the "small stuff" that we shouldn't sweat. (My list keeps growing longer.)

5. Autumn colors, autumn light.

Blessings 10-24-09

This little blessing will be four next month.

1. Watching people grooving to music in their cars. The neatly-coiffed blonde soccer mom in a BMW in front of me at a traffic light bobbing her head and shimmying her shoulders ... The dreadlocked guy in a rusted-out sedan bouncing in his seat to a beat I couldn't hear but could see ... The ponytailed teen, all alone, singing out loud to her radio with a rapturous smile. … I used to think they looked silly. Now I smile – I know just how they feel – and am more certain than ever that music is a common code that connects us all to life, the universe, and everyone. No wonder we dance.

2. Caroline (with an Amanda Pig book in her lap) in reading-readiness mode: "Nana, which word is 'said'? [I point and sound it out.] Sss. Sss. SAID." Pauses to scan the page. "Nana, why does this book have so much 'said'?"

3. That big hug from Kathy on Thursday.

4. Sunrise as I drive to Brown on Smith Street, from La Salle. For a little state, we sure have an impressive state house.

5. Sunset from my west-facing office window. I sure have a great view, if you can ignore the screen.

6. Bonus blessing: Getting into bed at midnight, cold; snuggling up to Michael's warm back. His feet twining with mine. Breathing his unmistakable Michael-ness. Snuggling as close as I can and being surprised by the joy it brings after all these years. Falling sound asleep within minutes: safe, warm, loving, loved.