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Popsicle Castles

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The first time I remember hearing the story was on a long car trip with my dad and some family friends. We were driving to Gettysburg, and he was waxing eloquent about his grad school days in Chicago. I was only half-listening, and then, all in a moment, I was fully listening because the story he was telling was not one I’d heard before. The characters and the setting were all new. In my memory the first telling of that story went on for forty-five minutes and felt like a whole tv miniseries, fantastic and weird and wonderful.

I’ve heard it a few times since and it doesn’t seem to last quite as long anymore or be quite the fully immersive experience. Over time it has become less funny and more moving to me, and with each new time I hear my dad tell it I find myself with more questions about its heroes. But here—to the best of my ability—is the tale, likely embellished over time in small hazy ways by both my father’s memory and my own:

My dad moved from California to Chicago for grad school around the summer of 1981, but California was not the only place his people were from. His grandmother was from Louisiana out in Goldonna, which I’ve always pictured as sepia-toned, railroad-track-laden swampland. He wasn’t really in touch with any family from back that way, but his grandma of course still was, and when he left for Chicago, she reminded him that he had kin there. One of her Louisiana cousins, Aubyn Hoyle, and her common law husband, Joe Sebold, had lived in Chicago for several years. Like a good boy, he would, of course, need to look them up. 

Perhaps he did or perhaps his Grandma Veonia, called up Aubyn herself to pass along my dad’s number, but the fact remains that they invited him to spend Thanksgiving with him that first autumn. Aubyn and Joe were going to show him a day on the town.

They pulled up to his apartment at the University of Chicago in a pick-up which didn’t seem to have enough working parts to power a lawnmower. They were probably in their forties, but because of hard-living and a scant amount of teeth, looked much older. They were, however, thrilled to have a chance to be hospitable, and to a polite young relation on top of that.

The first place they insisted on taking their PhD-bound cousin was to see their doctor. Doctors, they felt warmly, should associate with doctors, and theirs was especially good, they assured my dad. So soon they were climbing up long flights of stairs to see Dr. Aspirin, their veterinarian. Despite the fact that it was Thanksgiving Day, his waiting room was full of folks who did not look entirely well themselves speaking a variety of languages with decrepit animals languishing across their laps and at their feet. Canine skin diseases seemed to be prominent. Aubyn and Joe marched my dad to the front of the line and asked the wildly overworked receptionist if they could see Dr. Aspirin. “This here’s our kin, and he’s studying to be a doctor, so we want him to meet our doctor.” The receptionist said she would see what she could do, so Aubyn and Joe and my dad settled in with the rest of the hoi polloi to wait. They waited and waited, which of course was to be expected at a doctor’s office, particularly when you were just there to make a social call, but eventually, the honest-to-goodness Dr. Aspirin appeared. He was a tiny Filipino man in a white coat marked by all manner of fluids. Aubyn and Joe explained who my dad was and what they had in common, and the doctor shook his hand very cordially. Aubyn and Joe were well-pleased.

The next stop was Navy Pier which, in the early eighties was no great attraction, but a crowded gray hulk reaching an arm out into Lake Michigan. And then onto what my dad’s hosts assured him was their favorite piece of sculpture in the whole city. And it was, in its own way, a marvel. Forty feet tall, on a rotating platform at the edge of a junkyard were washers welded to lawnmowers fused to the bumpers of old trucks all sticking out at various angles, forming a looming silhouette of machine life and art. It looked as if the thing had grown there, though in retrospect, it couldn’t possibly have. As they wended from stop to stop Aubyn and Joe kept up a regular chatter in the front seat, often turning around to my dad to address him about various aspects of their lives or their city. At one point Aubyn, craned back and announced, with a clear belief that my dad needed to be informed, “You know, dog is God spelled backwards.”

Thanksgiving dinner was special, Joe told my dad, and turned out to take place at a cafeteria in which the turkey consisted of a variety of meat substances stuffed into a fowl-shaped mold, like a sausage casing, and then revealed in glory to the beholder. It was simultaneously a feast for both the eyes and the stomach, as well as appropriate for Aubyn and Joe’s great dearth of teeth. After dinner they took my dad back to their apartment, which was up many flights of stairs, just as Dr. Aspirin’s office had been, and, once inside, was piled high with all manner of things. But as one does with kin, they extracted the family album from one of the many piles and laid it across my dad’s lap for him to appreciate. He opened it, and three cockroaches ran out, skittering across the room and away to cover. Aubyn was not concerned by this intrusion, but began the pleasant due diligence of pointing out all the photos of his grandma as a little girl, as well as legions of relations he had never met.

At last, as my dad was hoping to make his exit, Joe announced that they needed to show him “what they made.” So they led him to the second bedroom, and he opened the door and peered in. But instead of disordered hills of junk, he found tables covered in careful architectural miniatures: the White House, the Empire State Building, the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, all built entirely of popsicle sticks. They were intricate and ordered and clearly represented many hours of work. Aubyn and Joe glowed with pride behind him. These people had dedicated themselves to building a world. My dad couldn’t think of what to say, and so he asked, “Where do you get all the popsicle sticks?” It turned out to be a foolish question, because they then led him to the kitchen and opened the freezer, which was full, of course, of popsicles. Joe smiled his toothless smile.

My dad never saw them again after that one Thanksgiving with all its revelations, but there is a coda to the story. Years later, he was contacted by a lawyer who told him that Joe Sebold had passed away and left my father a few acres of land down in Natchitoches Parish in Louisiana. There were no buildings to speak of on it, and it was hot and sodden and isolated. My dad was in the midst of finishing his doctorate and getting married, so he did the practical thing—he had the lawyer sell the land sight unseen. But Joe had, at the last, done that thing he and Aubyn knew best—reach out to kin, and hold nothing back, offer the very best of what you’ve got.

Tell Stories

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I’m sitting on the couch in the living room, watching out the window as cars make wide soaring turns onto our street. It’s gray out, but the sky seems to be done with both raining and snowing for the time being. 

I came home from my morning shift at lunchtime with the question looming: What would I do with the hours until 5:30 when I had to head back to work? (What should I do? What could I do?) I could’ve looked at my to-do list. I like lists. I create them, then they tell me where I am and what to do next. They’re a method of making sense, a method of self-control. Even my writing itself is frequently full of long, haphazard inventories. They help me feel like I’m managing, like I’ve got some sense of the scope of whatever’s in front of me.

But my productivity in many areas, including writing, has been low in the last few weeks. I’ve been half-a-stumbling-step ahead, rather than ten, as I’d prefer. That’s how it is sometimes.

So it’s not really lists—the nice, the neat, the orderly, the tidy—that I’ve been thinking about recently anyway. It’s stories—the messy, the splashy, the glowing, the inexplicable. Stories transcend our management.

My better moments in the past weeks have been moments of story-telling, when I’m talking to a friend and I think of something that happened two years ago, or eight, and get a couple sentences in, then stop myself, realizing what I’m about to do, and say, “Can I tell you this story?” And then, with my listener’s blessing, I go on.

And I’ll tell you something—when there’s no friend in the room, I just tell the stories to myself. I think of something a student or a cousin or a parent did some good while back and I launch into the tale in my head. When we tell stories—stories we care about—we do it actively, enthusiastically. So even just silently recounting some small narrative to myself, I can feel my eyes light up and my shoulders lean forward as if there’s an actual audience, my gray old winter heart rising.

I knew this, but I’d forgotten: stories are structures to hang our hope on. And I think this is because, unlike lists, stories are not entirely knowable. They’re positively littered with pockets of mystery and odd unsolvable detail, bits that call out our deepest human longings. To habitually tell stories—to others, to ourselves, to the wall, to the cat—renews somewhere in our souls the sense that we are perpetually on the edge of a very large story indeed, a story that we do not and cannot quite understand. It reminds us that there are plans much larger than our little lists, plans that will carry us in their arms, plans for glory and for justice and for grace. As Auden wrote, “Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.”

Anyway, I’m watching cars today. That wasn’t on the list. (And also writing. That was. That always is.)

In Praise of (Good) Fiction

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I’ve been thinking. (Dangerous.) I’ve been thinking about fiction because I’ve been trying to read a little more of it lately and soon I plan to be writing quite a bit of it. And in doing so, it’s become apparent to me that I have strong opinions about what is and what isn’t really good story-telling–perhaps to an extent that catches people around me off-guard. Sometimes, in the midst of conversation, I back myself into a corner and find myself having to explain why it is that I have just announced my disdain for much of the fiction of Wendell Berry or Marilynne Robinson, but that I do love The Mennyms and Decline and Fall and Invisible Man and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and True Grit.

There are very few things that will make me drop all pretense of being an agreeable person and begin saying foolhardy things than just getting me started on literature, most particularly getting me started on whether a story is a good one. Though the particulars of things are my bread and butter and I fully believe that only through particulars are we able to touch upon the universal, etc., etc., it might do me good to take a bit of a step back and look at the whole forest of the fiction that I love and try to understand its commonalities. What makes stories commonly good?

 

Well, I know that every really transcendent piece of fiction I’ve ever read is somehow completely unselfconscious. It is open to being read, but it does not need a reader. One gets the sense at times with a particularly strong story that even the action of the writer was incidental to its existence. It is an organic thing with beating heart and restless limbs which has always been existing at its own frenetic pace in its own universe and history with its own people and noise. 

Because of this, really good fiction is focused on its own story-ness and does not secretly wish it were a sermon or a poem. It knows that we do not live our lives in the form of philosophical treatises or expositional texts, but that life, in its rawest most incomprehensible form, is story, with beginning, middle, rising actions, characters, complications, and denouements, most of which are not recognizable when we are in their midst. Life does not pander to us and offer us reassuring explanations for its eccentricities, so good fiction reflects this in the way it drags us full steam ahead into the bright and blinding wilderness of its characters and happenings. Flannery O’Connor said that good fiction writers get dusty while doing their work. Well, I think the rest of us also get dusty while reading it.

We know we have loved a book and, perhaps more to the point, been loved by it, when we walk away from the last page changed, feeling as if our organs have been rearranged, as we’ve fallen in love, moved away from home and back again, jumped off a cliff only to be caught by the wind. But though we just spent all those hours with words, and they are the tools which have communicated the torture and salvation to us, they will somehow not suffice to explain the wonder of what we’ve experienced. Perhaps such a wonder is not possible to explain at all.

In reading, we have been allowed a glimpse at something–a world, a people, a home, a pain–which may be even real-er than we are. And this is a great mystery to me: the best stories I have read feel like secrets. I know that Jane Eyre is a classic and has been read and loved and dissected and devoured and regurgitated by millions. I’ve had my share of conversations about it and even used it as a discussion example when I taught history to teenagers, and yet I am sure no one has entered it like I have, loved it like I have. The ageless, hungry little reader inside me will never actually believe that it is not her own private treasure in the same way that she will never quite believe that Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye is not her personal friend. It is that unaccountably real to me. So not only is good fiction’s realness to us inexplicable (after all, we know that it’s fiction), but its real-ness and frequent intimate proximity to our own hearts and deepest concerns make the best fiction literally inexplicable. Our favorite stories are beyond explanation: they heroically resist it, even (Lord preserve us) in high school English classes.

Good fiction matters because when we read it and then set the book down at the end and attempt to walk away from it, we find that we cannot. The story will follow. We have walked into another world and lived there, and now we stumble back into our world to live here, with the extra appendage we have gained dragging along behind us, making us weightier, older, more.

 

So those are my justifications for my occasional outbursts about story, for the moments when I say indefensible things like, “I just don’t think that’s the way to write fiction.” I am so aware of fiction’s wondrous and frightening power to change everything about us. Some books seem to change the density of our bones and course of the blood in our veins. But ultimately, I can’t tell you or myself or anyone what makes good fiction what it is. It’s ineffable. Good fiction, like beauty, is its own answer. 

Soon (now this makes me shiver a bit to write) I will be writing fiction for my final project, hopefully good fiction, but for now I’m writing this. And I have not been happy with the last few entries I’ve written here, which has gotten under my skin. What I’ve had to say has been fine, but I know I have not hung back long enough before publishing to play with the words, to take joy. It is all kinds of writing that we need to get dusty. And even as I write these short blog entries, I must be willing not only to stop and play in the dust, but to simply wait in it, in the grubby, glinting caves of my own little life, in deflated vowels and unwieldy consonants. I must wait unselfconsciously, with no particular agenda in mind but the offering of praise.

Last Wednesday after dinner we went for a walk across a field in ankle-deep snow under a multichrome sky. I toyed with the idea of writing to tell you about it, but, like I said, beauty is its own reward. Not all poems have to be written if they have been lived.

Christmas (Promised)

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I’ve always been one of those purists who doesn’t want to see any Christmas decorations or hear any Christmas songs or eat anything that tastes like peppermint or cinnamon until after Thanksgiving, because there’s a schoolmarm living on my shoulder who says that we must keep the season unto itself so that it will remain precious and unspoilt.

But this year I’m throwing that out the window. Maybe it’s because my mom has been texting me potential dates for the Christmas party they’re throwing this year, or maybe it’s because the books sitting next to me on the couch right now are Thomas Cahill’s The Gift of the Jews, Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk, and Malcolm Guite’s Waiting on the Word, all of which sound like promises. But more likely the reason that my roommate and I took a detour the other night in Harris Teeter to prowl around for chocolate advent calendars is that in the last few months, and even especially in the last few weeks, I have been learning how little control I have over my own life and any goodness that comes from it, and how every neat little security structure I have set up will eventually fail me, sometimes in a spectacular fashion. But when I think of Christmas coming in forty-three days, I feel peaceful in a way that cannot possibly make sense to the outside world.

The advent of Christmas means the advent of a Savior, a Savior who will fulfill everything the prophecies foretold and see this thing through to the bitter, wine-on-a-pike end, all the way through to the blinding new life on the other side. So I’ve had a change of heart, like Scrooge, because it is more and more wonderfully apparently that Jesus is not only a rock, but the only solid one, and I want to try to “keep Christmas all the year” to remind myself.

Something else I’m doing this fall, besides learning hard lessons that I thought I already knew, is interviewing women about their faith. The first question I have been asking right off the bat is “Tell me your favorite Bible story.” So that’s how I’m going to keep Christmas today. I’m going to tell you the story.

It begins with a scared girl who is trusting, trusting and a good man with her who is trusting, trusting. The two of them are headed on a trip away from home to obey the law of the land, and then in a strange barn on the old hay with the smell of manure there is pain and terror and blood and then a crying baby, alongside the sleepy animals.

And an angel comes, but not to Joseph and Mary, to some tired shepherds on a nearby hillside. The angel announces joy to the shepherds, that the newborn in the feeding trough has come to save them, that this is God’s plan and they are the first the hear news of this One who bears peace and goodwill into the world. The angel brings a whole singing host with him. So the shepherds hurry to worship, and then they hurry to tell the story as far and wide as they can.

And there is a star too, a big, bright one, but not for Joseph and Mary. Instead the star is for men in the East who follow it to travel far and risk their lives to give the tiny King the worship that they somehow know they owe him.

And the scared girl who trusted gathers and treasures all these things in her heart. And so do we, because this is the promise of things to come.

Oh, joyful and triumphant, come let us adore him, Christ the Lord!