The Ruby Watch
I used to see it only when my mother took me to look in the safety deposit box she kept in the vault at the bank. It is a small copper watch set with rubies that her father bought for her when she graduated from high school. My mother never wore it — at least, not during the years I knew her as my mother. It wasn’t her style and it was small for her wrist. I have always loved that watch. Not long before my mother died she gave it to me, surprised that I wanted such a thing. Despite repairs, its hands move sporadically and it requires winding. Still, I sometimes clasp it on my wrist. It’s yet another watch in the family that marks the hours’ passage in its own sweet time.
The Record Album
My senior year in college the woman in the next dorm room, who was a hallway acquaintance, was giving all of her record albums away. She insisted she didn’t want them. After several rounds of “Are you sure?” I accepted Otis Redding. The next week, I heard she had tried to commit suicide and had been taken home. For the rest of the time I was there, she didn’t return and I never saw or heard from her again. For months I was haunted by the fact that I’d had no clue what was going on in her life, inside her head, on the other side of a thin wall; in fact, I had taken personally her recent aloofness (the album giveaway notwithstanding) and had wondered what I might have done to offend her. This was not my first experience with someone suicidal. In an effort to better understand, I had taken 20 hours of crisis intervention training during my freshman year, qualifying to work on a soon-to-open suicide hotline. (It never took off — we volunteers mostly sat for hours in a cold church basement waiting for the phone to ring.) But by my senior year, my own drama was playing so loudly in my head that I utterly failed to hear that of the woman next door.
I keep that album pressed between the Leo Kotke and Stevie Wonder and John Prine and Beatles and Paul Simon albums I collected in the 1970s. I never hear “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” without feeling a certain nostalgia for a place I have never been, and without thinking of that woman, whose last name I cannot recall.
Yosemite And The Range Of Light
Where the poster came from I don’t know. It’s a framed Ansel Adams print, an image you might find in any dorm room. Because we moved into our house the same week Brendan was born (our closing was delayed by a month and the baby came early), the household was haphazard. Boxes sat unopened, rooms went unpainted, and items of uncertain origin appeared on walls and shelves. The poster hung in the sitting room outside our bedroom where I used to nurse the babies in a second-hand chair in the middle of the night. I was unwilling to use the popular Ferber method, in which you let the baby cry for set increments of time until he learns to sleep through the night. Self-comfort was the concept. I couldn’t wait it out, couldn’t comfort myself while the baby was crying. And so I was up at two and four and six a.m. and off to work in the morning, bleary-eyed, hormonal, night and day. Sometimes I sat with the lights off but more often they were on, set dim, and I was looking at that picture, made impressionistic by myopia and extreme astigmatism. With every waking and would-be sleeping moment spoken for, and with my body (though no longer harboring a fetal secret sharer) not my own, that poster opened up a cold bright world of possibility. I sang in the night to my sons in that chair. I dreamed while awake, began a novel in my head. That was a world — a universe, not just a room — of my own where, as my sons took what they needed from my body — their weight in my arms, their heat on my chest — I made all the rules.
Now I sleep through the night. The novel, committed to paper, then printed and bound, stitched up, became a fact, never again to have the potency it had when it resided in my head. It is finite now, its possibilities contained. Brendan is bigger than I am, and Sean will soon be too. But I can still feel in me that great range of light — the call of the world, the child’s insistent suckle.
The Glass Angel
I became intrigued with angels when I was assigned to write an article about them in 1990. A spate of angel books was published that year, as the quick trip du jour to salvation. I ended up probing the subject more deeply than my editors required or desired, starting with the Bible, on through the Middle Ages and into the Twentieth Century, and was surprised to learn how many people, secretly or otherwise, believed. (My husband felt the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism was encapsulated by a juxtaposition of quotes in which a minister pronounced angels a beautiful metaphor and a priest proclaimed them real.) I spoke with self-styled “angelologists” who sounded as if something were fluttering in their heads, and with thinkers who could not be taken lightly. The article, when it was published, had one of the highest readerships of anything in the magazine that year.
Three years later when Brendan was born, my mother-in-law bought an angel plate to hang over his crib in what struck us all as a perfect interfaith emblem of faith.
I didn’t think much more about angels until, shortly after my father’s death in December 2000, on a day when the wind caused the windows in the office where I worked to rattle menacingly, I bought one made of glass. It broke. I still have the pieces.
The Angel From Russia
When I found out that my friend T had taught at a study-abroad writer’s workshop in St. Petersburg, Russia — a city I had wanted to visit ever since I read War and Peace for the first time at 13—I asked her for the name of the person running the program and threw myself at his feet. In the summer of 2007 I got my chance to teach short story writing to American and Canadian students in that fiercely gorgeous city, named and unnamed and renamed for a Tsar — and for the keeper of heaven.
I spoke enough Russian to think I could find my way around alone. The first time I left my hotel, though, I got utterly lost. (One man gave me directions into what turned out to be a dark, gated enclosure, causing me to wonder whether this was where I would die. It turned out to be nothing more insidious than the entrance to the wrong hotel.) As it happened, I had repeatedly walked past the correct hotel because, in my jetlagged state, I hadn’t registered that it bore no sign in any language that said “hotel,” only one that said, inexplicably (in English), “Pepsi.” Nevertheless, the only time I was in real danger was when I made the not-very-smart decision to cut through an alley (and over the bridge with the golden griffins) to the nearest fake Starbucks at seven a.m., an hour at which, during the White Nights, most people are asleep and the streets are deserted. As if out of nowhere, a group of belligerent looking young women blocked me in the alleyway, and appeared ready, I feared, to pummel me, or worse. I was just about to throw my coffee at them and run, when one of them asked, in Russian, whether I was French. Stunned, I answered in English that I was American. At that, they let me go. (I have no idea what they had against the French; I’d have thought it would be far more perilous to be American. For some reason, perhaps because I was walking around in a raincoat I had bought in Paris, the Russians repeatedly mistook me for French — something no actual French person has ever done.)