The last leg

Again, I wasn’t sleeping. My eyes closed and opened again on restlessness. “You can relax,” I told myself, “you are at John and Tina’s house now. You are with friends.” At one point, John woke up and moved to occupy a sleeper sofa not far away in the living room. I noticed him by a pair of socked feet out of the corner of my eye. Not having brought anything myself, I slept in my clothes. “Where is this place?” I thought. “Somewhere between New England and Tennessee. Somewhere between the past and future? . . . I must be in shock.” I turned over, finding a better position on the couch. “Look!” I said, ubraiding myself, “God has given you so much. This is a fantastic opportunity for you and for your family. Stop griping. Stop moaning about like something awful has happened!” But isn’t reality more complicated than that? Can’t you grieve and rejoice at the same time – is this a mood with no words?

Daylight slipped through the front window. Realizing we were both awake, John and I considered just getting up. It was good to be here. We hadn’t seen either John or Tina in years. And now, meeting their daughter, H. for the first time was a wonderful occasion. The adults congregated in the kitchen. It had been refurbished in the last few years, and L. and I admired it. John and I talked about books, about work, about his interest in the form critical developments behind the American Constitution. My mind felt disorganized. In-transit. Finally, H. woke up – what a cutie! It took a few minutes, but she and Kara soon warmed to each other. Kara was so eager to meet her. Again, what a great attitude – Kara was handling this whole thing like a pro. Then we had to push on to Nashville (with a stop at one of our favorite restaurants: Misakes).

I don’t even remember the remainder of the drive. But when we pulled into L’s parents house – their beautiful retirement home nestled in a community with high-ceilings, cathedral windows and a rocky waterfall at the entrance – with two kids, a pack-n-play, boxes of clothes, guitars and toys and baby wipes and diapers and two vehicles a baby swing, a crib, blankets, legos, CD’s, and who knows what else – I just didn’t know if this was going to work despite everyone’s best intentions. And, frankly, neither did they.

The Journey South

Finally I have a moment to review the last few weeks. Living with Lynn-nore’s parents, living with someone else’s schedule and habits, has meant time away from the routine that would have guaranteed a little more communication before now. Nevertheless, I want to talk about the trip down and let everyone know how we are doing.

The journey south was relatively uneventful. Our stuff made it in record time, arriving at the terminal in Tennessee a mere two days after pulling away from Manchester-by-the-Sea. Our own passage took a little longer. We had hoped to visit friends on Long Island Monday evening, but that didn’t materialize. Instead, we stayed in Pennsylvania. I hadn’t been sleeping well. My mind kept turning on innumerable details – car registration, insurance questions, potential trucking fees, the heavy work of unloading the truck in Nashville. It did no better now that everything was underway. The second day, Tuesday, was hard driving. An ice storm was supposed to roll in that evening, blanketing the Appalachians. We couldn’t stop until Kingsport, until we made it to John and Tina Grubb’s house, a 12-hour trip. So we drove 80 m.p.h. most of the way. I-81 is a major East Coast artery, and I worried for Lynn-nore and the kids as trucks whizzed by. On one occasion, a car turned in between us, so I slowed down to force him to pass. 60 … 55 … 50, the driver matched every deceleration without a hint of frustration. This was a Sunday drive, apparently! At 35 m.p.h. I wondered if I wouldn’t have to stop and ask the driver to “please go on ahead.” Threading the mountains in West Virginia brought another challenge. This time, a small truck weaved first this way and then that, staying in the lane but with obvious difficulty. He was tired or he was under the influence. I sped past him and then hovered, encouraging Lynn-nore to do the same, but she didn’t move. She hung back. “Come on,” I said aloud, even though she couldn’t hear me, “pass him!” She seemed frozen. Finally, her blinker came on – take the next exit. “We’re just going to have to face this guy again,” I grumbled. We stopped at a truck stop, and I punched out of the truck. “Caleb needs to be changed,” she said. “I thought you were just nervous about that drunk driver,” I interjected. She didn’t know anything about it.

The truck stop smelled of cigarette smoke. Kara and I waited while Lynn-nore took Caleb into the ladies’ room. Hunting gear, electronic poker machines, and angel statuettes were everywhere. Kara took me on a trip through the gift shop. Kids toys, remote control tanks, t-shirts, hawaiian hula dolls, hair care products. I thought about the life of a truck driver, the life of many of the people sitting in the restaurant next door, watching the remote control tank in a video demonstration, buying a Coke at the register. I’d always placed such a life somewhere between the varieties of condoms for sale in the men’s room and the brands of cigarettes behind the cashier. Yet, I have lived in communities where being a trucker is a good life. Men save up to buy their own rig to the tune of $60,000+. These men and women are as much an image of God as I am. I have no business thinking less. They need toys for their kids, t-shirts, Cokes, shaving cream, just like anyone else. Our clothes smelled like rumpled Winstons as we returned to our vehicles. Kara had me plug the DVD player back in as I strapped the seatbelt around her. It had been all day in the car and she had a better attitude than I did.

My attitude was somewhere between grief and masculine single-mindedness. I wanted to get there (wherever) in good time. Yet I missed New England in general, and our friends SWR&QE in particular. Missing them was a dull ache in my heart. Yes, I was afraid of losing “me” to my Southern roots. “In some ways it is like New England never happened,” Lynn-nore had said one evening a few weeks ago, talking about the move and the future. Thom grows up in Kingsport and moves to the big city, with that loop somewhere up North. Nothing changed, nothing put behind, nothing new added. New England had been my going away to college, every choice there had been my own. Lynn-nore and I had made what we are there, and had put 11 years into it. The result had been running into people you knew on a regular basis, a church family with shared history, the historical-yet-frenetic nature of Boston, the omnipresent beauty of the Atlantic coast, the rich resources of the BTI, decent snowfall, church bells in Harvard Square, the song-sand of Singing Beach and many, many friends, like shiny coins jangling in a pocket, and then there was SWR&QE.

SWR&QE are missionaries, and missionaries live their lives under the question mark of God. We, too, were aware of that question mark: things would change. One day God would open a door and that would be it. Hadn’t that been my prayer for nearly a decade: “What next, Lord?” New England had been a stepping stone in the beginning, a cliff not a plain. We knew going into our relationship with them that every moment had the word “temporary” written on it. But it didn’t matter. Words weren’t required. How many times did QE go up and read to Kara in her room after a long day of managing 1st graders? How often did SWR just take Caleb from us, not as if holding him was a chore but a welcome pastime. They are “our bummy friends.” We had opened the doors of our heart to them, and with it all other doors as well. How could we go with the baby due? How could we go with stories yet to be snapped off in a weekend? And it was we, not they, who were leaving. Leaving for a place far away and not coming back. Who is the missionary now? Who has sent whom? I nursed my ache with each passing mile, and my mood was as torn and overcast as the clouds against the black Virginia hillsides.

BBC4's Advent Offerings -- Thanks Be Unto God

Thank God for BBC4’s advent offerings. If you have never visited their website, I suggest you check it out. From an audio-rich advent calendar, to daily services recorded in various cathedrals throughout Britain, you can easily fill your ears with carols, choirs, readings from the lectionary, and advent homilies. Over time, the BBC has become a staple of my advent experience, if simply for the music. I can’t get enough performance during the season, and certainly can’t afford in cost or time what is available. The BBC serves it up for free.

Music, and especially choral music, really makes the advent season for me. My Mom, both a teacher of voice and an experienced and accomplished alto herself, was always dragging me to performances in my youth, and, well, it must have rubbed off. Now I’d drag myself to one every day if possible. There is nothing quite like experiencing music as a living thing. In our day of artificial lungs and mechanical hearts, we know how to keep a performance going on decades afterward, and we have mistakenly equated these corpses with living bodies. At the same time, performance groups in every area of the liberal arts have out-priced tickets to all but the wealthy, and, as each year more die from lack of funds and public interest, they reap the results. So-called culture isn’t dying because people aren’t interested any longer, rather, people are dying because ‘culture’ has turned its back on them. Music – good music -- needs its reformation.

A large part of it, too, is education. Even as I sit down in a theatre or music hall and begin to enjoy a performance, I am always painfully aware that I don’t know how to listen. I have no real framework for making meaning from what is happening. The aesthetic enjoyment is there, but experienced as a child at play, not as an adult who enters into the real depth of the thing. The only performances for which our culture educates us are political and athletic ones. My soul feels poorer for it. Just last year I drug L. and Kara to a local Episcopal church for an advent’s evening of English carols. They came more for me than for them. I wanted Kara to hear live music, to see the performers, to hear the sharp intake of their breaths, the rustle of flipping pages and the shifting and coughing of the audience. But, I had not way of really explaining to her how to take it all in. All I could do was drag she and L. there and hope for the best. There is something wrong there. If I was to go with a friend to a wrestling match, by the time we arrived at the stadium he would have filled my ears with the back-story and suitable anecdotes attached to each of the competing wrestlers. He certainly wouldn’t just induct me to our seats, sit down mutely beside me and say nothing with every body-blow of the match.

Advent suggests an answer to this malady. During Advent, the songs, readings, sermons and even the movements of time participate together lending their voices to each other. The coming of God to his people and as his people informs everything, creating what the academy calls a meta-narrative. Inducted, then, by every voice, we are led through this great story until we ourselves form a part.

So, I weep for you music and theatre. I weep for you members of the Handel & Haydn Society who, each year, sing the complete oratorio of Handel’s Messiah. I compose a lament for you well-wishers singing Christmas songs in shopping malls. You are like sheep without a shepherd. You listen but hear not. You sing, and dance, and speak your lines without knowledge. You wander in exile without a narrative-home, clutching your arias, symphonies, concertos, and chamber pieces to your breast. You have forgotten your informing logos, become unseated from the dynamic and creating Word, and need, as much as any of us, advent to give you life again.

Adventus

How should we greet the future?  With gladness or with grief?  It comes to us like a pale dawn, like New England, but it isn’t New England.  We know it for our benefit, but, at least today, parting is grief.  You, future, must wipe our eyes.

November's interview

The interview went amazingly well. I didn't get to bed until 12:20 the night before, and was up to leave at 4 a.m. God was good, though, and that nap felt as if it took 12 hours. It was raining hard driving to New Hampshire. I kept the radio switching between talk radio stations, and breakfasted on a granola bar. With me was the Chicago Manual of Style and a change of clothes. The plan was for L's parents to pick me up at the airport and take me over to the interview. Unused to Southwest, when I boarded the plane they had not assigned me a seat. What to do? Finally I claimed a seat about 3/4 of the way back, an isle, two seats over from a guy watching an Adam Sandler movie on his Dell. I read the style manual for awhile and slept for awhile. God was good to me again: the flight took forever – more sleep for me -- and my ears didn't notice a thing. No trouble at all meeting up with L's parents in Nashville, they put me in their car and drove me out to one of those isolated, Martian office parks. Gigantic squares and rectangles of glass thrust up from the grass at odd-angles. Robotic architecture. Mechanical aesthetics.

We arrived at my appointed publisher’s offices. Well-dressed, happy people coming in and going out of a blue marble lobby decorated in a red Christmas-bells motive. Even the metal trash cans had rims made special for red potpourri. I was dressed in leather shoes, slacks, with a blue shirt, a subdued complimentary tie and a blue sport coat. I carried references and a legal pad in a leather holder with Harvard's veritas crest embossed on it -- a gift from a friend. Taking the golden elevator, I pushed 5.

A receptionist named R. and I struck up a conversation about a pair of golden, Mickey Mouse ears perched on her counter while waiting for my interviewer, Mr. Darcy, to arrive. The entrance to this portion of the company (corporate headquarters is a huge, steel-and-glass building a block further away) was all of glass, though the interior was far too busy. The people, however, seemed human and approachable. Mr. Darcy himself was tall and quite cordial with black hair, blue eyes and a good handshake. He wore a blue shirt and tie. He took me to his office and sat down with his desk between us. His workspace was cluttered with attempts at organization. A large Van Gogh print was framed behind him, and pictures of his daughters made the rest -- he is in his upper 40's with a couple of kids in Middle School. Amid the papers was a Bugs Bunny coffee cup, one of my favorite scenes in which Bugs has been taken to the mad scientist's castle and is giving the monster a pedicure and saying, "You monsters are such interesting people." I decided that I liked this Mr. Darcy.

Now on the way down, I had been stressing about different interview questions. What do I say if he asks me this or that? I started thinking, as I told you, about my Dad's advice: tell stories. I can do that. The part of my mind that blogs and thinks and chats with friends comes up and says, "I'll take care of everything." And, sure enough, it did.

As Mr. Darcy asked me a question, I gave answers, stories. I described, narrated, engaged, cited, and above all informed him about me with every story-power I had. Be three-dimensional, be blood and bones to this man and you'll do a good deal, I thought.

Mr. Darcy steered clear of the stupid, evil questions and stayed on the "who is this guy and why should I hire him" questions. His clustered around the following: (1) can you put up with working on popular, rather than academic, religious books? (2) How do you handle detail; (3) How are your political skills; (4) Why do you want to be an editor? Halfway through the discussion, he started up and grabbed his boss, a member of the Board of Directors named the Storyteller. The Storyteller, a thin, tall man with grey hair and a grey moustache, smiled and shook hands. We talked like men talk at church over coffee. We talked about Texas, about barbecue, about the publisher’s stock, its CEO, the future of the company. Then he left Mr. Darcy and I to continue. We talked for 2.5 hours! I had an opportunity to get all my questions in, too (I’d taken care to come up with some good ones.) He said he was making a decision within the next week. He would want someone to start by mid-December. Afterward, he had to go and I had to take an exam. Beforehand, he loaded me down with four or five books.

The exam was awful - all English exams are. Unlike Math, where there is a clear answer, you never know if you're getting everything with English, and your mind starts second-guessing itself. Still, I knew I had lots of prayer with me, and so I carefully marked each page, going back over them several times. Checking isolated sentences is a totally different thing from editing prose. Prose has a feel, it runs in your hands and you can feel for inconsistencies. Isolated sentences are antiseptic and dead. I let myself out, the entire department was at a meeting, and met back up with my parents-in-law.

With a few hours to spare before my flight, I had a chance to tour L's parent's house: beautiful. A nice cup of coffee in their comfortable living room. We talked about friends in Germany, how their tapestries are showcased better in this house, what they were doing in the front lawn. Auntie Kara met me at the airport, looking not a day's different than she did in college. She looked so youthful I had to keep reminding myself that it was 2005. And, though it had been two years since I have seen her, I tell you not a day had passed. The flight back was macabre. The plane flew through alien and forbiddingly thick clouds of white ectoplasm. I couldn’t get comfortable, and wound up staring out like the dead into the monochromatic sky. L. stayed up to greet me, despite a horrible cough. I pulled in at 12:20 a.m. We talked until 1 a.m. about how things had gone and about our plans. Then we went to bed.