Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Labors of Love

"Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it." -Albus Dumbledore

In crediting this quote, I am conflicted as to whether I should cite the fictional character who spoke the words or the author who wrote them. For many children (and adults) Harry Potter and his world are as real as this one in which we live. My daughter waited and waited for her own invitation to Hogwarts to arrive on her 11th birthday. As I approach the end, I am already mourning its absence from daily life.

I had read the first three books to my older daughter, until she became an independent reader and I turned to reading picture books to her younger sister. Last year, at the invitation of my college-age son who had not read the series, I picked the story back up last year. My goal was to get through the remaining books in 2014. I cruised through The Goblet of Fire, eeked through The Order of the Phoenix and stalled at The Half-Blood Prince, about the time I began copying Anna Karenina. When my son came home for winter break, he told me he had finished all the books. He encouraged (read: endlessly pestered) me to get back on track. I knew I couldn't complete the last two books, each as long as a Tolstoy novel, by the end of the year, but I didn't care anymore about a deadline. I requested both books on CD from the library and let Jim Dale read to me while I carpooled and ran errands.

As of today, I have fifty pages remaining in The Deathly Hallows. My reading has ramped. I go back and forth between reading on the page and listening in the car, having borrowed my daughter's hardback copy after she texted me to say, "Why are you sitting in the driveway? You could bring the CD inside, you know?"

The reason I continued to listen fifteen minutes or more after arriving home? I was crying. Harry was digging a grave for Dobby, by hand. He didn't need to; he could have used magic. He certainly had more important tasks to complete in order to defeat Voldemort. But Harry knew that some things had to be done this way.

" 'I want to do it properly,' were the first words of which Harry Potter as fully conscious of speaking.

'Not by magic. Have you got a spade?"

I was not surprised when Mrs. Weasley magically folded laundry, enchanted knives chopped vegetables, and food floated to the table. I am sure that if I had magical powers, I would use them much the same way as this fictional mother of seven. But Harry's decision was something else entirely. Dobby, a free elf, willingly gave his life helping Harry and his friends escape Malfoy Mansion. He loved Harry, and Harry needed a way to show his love in return. A Labor of Love. Blood, Sweat, and Tears. These are what we give when we love someone and need a way to show it.

So Harry dug a grave. Sophie copied, and recopied, Leo's manuscripts. Where is the magic in that?

In the Words, Dumbledore told us. One word in particular. Love.

 

Monday, January 12, 2015

Sophie's Choice

The two little girls in this photograph are Eva Kor and her twin sister Miriam. The picture was taken by Russian journalists after the liberation of Auschwitz, where Eva and Miriam were subjected to inhumane conditions, as well as Dr. Joseph Mengele's horrific experiments on identical twins.

Eva survived the camps. She moved to Israel with her sister, where they served in the military and went to trade school. Her sister Miriam became a nurse. They both married, had children and later immigrated to the United States. In 1995, Eva opened the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center, dedicated to those who survived, and those who didn't. In her mid-seventies, Eva still tells her story twice a week at the museum.

On January 3, I drove my four daughters and one of my nieces to the museum, about an hour from our home in Indianapolis. Having visited the museum several times, I found myself wondering if I would get bored or if I might yet learn some new detail of Eva's story. On previous visits, Eva told of the injections and examinations they underwent daily. She talked of beging torn from her mother and having almost no food, of the bitter cold and the rats that crawled on the floor. I had heard Eva tell how the Nazis fled the camp leaving Eva and Miriam and the other survivors to fend for themselves. Hungry and cold, groups of survivors raided the kitchens for potatoes and bread to eat, which is why the girls look plump and healthy in this photograph, a picture that the journalists staged for effect. I had heard all this before. What I learned this time was that Eva cut pieces of barbed wire from the fence, fashioning them into needles. Another survivor taught her to knit, and Eva used an old sweater she found to make the caps that she and Miriam are wearing in the photograph.

Clearly there are huge gaps between my worries and those of women whose lives are truly in peril.

I knit too, usually by the fire in my living room. I might be working on a soft blue scarf for my father, a thirteen year survivor of stomach cancer. I might be using varigated alpaca yarn that I bought at the local knitting store, where women sit at the big center table, working and talking, often laughing those big throaty laughs that some women have, myself included. My daughter might be sitting beside me, her own beautiful yarn unspooling from withing the expensive knitting bag I bought for her at a boutique in London, with its separate case to protect needles of varying sizes.

When Eva talks about her survival, she tells us that on her first night, she went to use the latrine and had to step over the bodies of dead children. This is what she tells herself:

My own complaints, as an artist, as a mother, as a woman, cannot compete with her struggle. Who am I to want more than I already have? Eva, dressed in high-heeled black boots and a silky blouse, may not look that different from me, but she can pull up her sleeve and show you the number tattooed into her arm.

At least she survived. Her sister Miriam died of cancer in the 1980s. When the doctors performed surgery, they found her kidneys to be the size of a ten-year-old child's. And what about those who did not survive the camps? What about the women and children massacred by Boko Haram in Nigeria a week ago? What about the 243 Nigerian girls who were kidnapped so many months ago and are presumably now married off to rebels? How lucky I am to live where I do.

And yet I do want more, or perhaps I mean less. I want, I want, I want, the mantra of American teenagers. We want for things, but do we want for life?

How do we balance gratitude for what we have with the yearning for more? Eva didn't just hope to survive. She wanted to live. She wanted a life like the one she lost. She wanted to wear beautiful dresses and eat good food and have a family. To live, we must yearn, seek, desire. This is the human spirit at its best. I am lucky. I live in a country where women are not persecuted. In order to do my creative work, I do not have to carve pencils from pieces of scrap wood or bits of charcoal. But if that were necessary, then I that is what I would have to do.

Yet, a sense of lack is often our excuse for not creating. I don't have enough time, I might say, between the kids activities and the housework and my aging parents and my job. In any given situation, we can choose to be either victim or survivor. The choices vary from life-theatening to self-actualizing, but in every case, we have a choice. And that choice can change from day to day, moment to moment. And so today, with my extra pack of paper ready to go, I must choose to write, because the other option is to give up. If I choose that, I might as well lay down on the floor and die.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Un-Resolved

In my mind, I have written at least ten blog posts these past few weeks. Unfortunately, none of them ended up on the "page." I imagined posts about: homemade gifts, like the shoes that Leo made for Sophie, which hurt her feet and which she wore anyway; about the movies I have seen, The Theory of Everything and The Imagination Game, in which unusual men succeed at impossible tasks with the help of women who love them; about a Romanian bartender, Radovan, whom I befriended in a hotel bar in London, whom I gifted with my new copy of Best American Short Stories, after he told me about his love of Pushkin; about daydreaming, from my bed after my husband has gotten up and the sky is still dark and I am awake but letting my mind wander, and where I thought up the endless ideas for this blog.

Sadly, those ideas stayed in my subconscious. I don't know if they will make it out alive. And I don't know if other artists feel this way, that they will never get to every idea that comes to them. I know that as a mother, I have a long list of things I never finished, or even started, like the flannel pajamas I had hoped to make for each of the kids when they came home for Christmas this year.

My family has trickled back to their jobs and schools, pajama-less, I sit in a quiet house, wondering what to do first. There are Christmas decorations to put away. There is cleaning to be done. (Did I mention that we had the electrical wiring in our house replaced and are now faced with repairing the road map of holes in the walls and ceilings, not to mention the layer of plaster dust inside drawers and every corner of the house?) I also need to begin revising one last story in my collection and continue submitting the completed stories to journals and magazines. And I plan to begin the draft of my new collection this month. One might wonder if there is any part of my life in which I am caught up.

I am happy to tell you that there is one. I spent the last three days of 2014 copying from Anna Karenina, hoping to reach page 200 before the end of the year. On December 28, I found myself twenty-two pages short of that goal. If I were to accomplish the task, that meant roughly seven pages per day. One a good day, I have copied five.

Sunday, I rearranged the living room.

Monday morning, I sat down at the massive wooden desk in the living room, a desk left behind by the former owners, a desk which typically only gets used to serve appetizers at the holidays, and set to work. The first day, I copied nine pages. I accomplished little else that day.

Tuesday morning, I woke at 6am with Anna Karenina on my mind. By 7am, I was seated at the desk, pen in hand. I managed another eight pages, putting me three pages short of my goal.

Wednesday morning, New Year's Eve, I woke with the knowledge that I would make my goal. I should tell you that New Year's Eve is also my birthday, a day which I have rarely enjoyed. I think this has a bit to do with sharing my birthday not just with a holiday, but with a mostly adult holiday, which means that family and friends often have other plans. The day has come to have more to do with regret of all those things I have failed to acomplish, with yet another year behind me, a bitter distillation of year end disappointments.

This birthday, my forty-eighth, I woke with a sense of optimism. I was going to make it. And, if my calculations were correct, I could complete the project within a year. And so, with no plans other than to sit at a desk and copy out the remaining five pages of Anna Karenina (if you have been counting, that actually puts me at page 202, but I had to write to the end of a chapter), my birthday unfolded in a beautiful organic way. My husband presented me with a birthday breakfast of one egg, over easy, on top of his homemade ham hash. My daughter and I snuck out for a secret cupcake and a trip to a hip downtown toystore where I bought a kit to make a pinhole camera (stay-tuned for results of that project). I was presented with brand new potholders and dishtowels, a gift which I am embarassed to say made me squeal, and if you knew me, you would understand why. I once lied to my children, telling them the dishwasher was broken, so we could wash dishes together at the sink.

As to Anna Karenina, so much happened in those twenty-four pages. Levin discovers that Kitty did not marry Vronsky. Anna tells Vronksy she is pregnant with his baby. And most disturbing, Vronsky rides in the race that kills his horse. When I wrote that last scene, I pushed the chair back from the desk and stood up. My hands flew to my mouth. My daughter, 17, who had walked in to tell me happy birthday looked at me and asked, what's wrong, mom? All I had to say was, the horse died, and she was standing in front of me, hugging me. I was crying. She was stroking my head, saying, I know, I remember that part, it was so sad.

I can only imagine what the rest of this year has in store for me.