Holy Saint Francis, what a change is here!

The best part of my job teaching high school English is that I am forced to reread a handful of classic books every year. Without this incentive, I would rarely re-read the old favorites–with so many new books on the must-read list, who has the time? Fortunately, it’s part of my job to make the time for revisiting a few. Recently, my 9th graders finished Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. 

I first read this play in Mrs. Bye’s 8th grade English class. I still have my copy of the text from that unit, complete with mundane annotations in bright purple ink, but I’m afraid that the only instruction I can remember is an embarrassing conversation about how we mustn’t think that Romeo was up to no good when he wakes up in Juliet’s chamber in Act III scene v, because he did marry Juliet properly, even though that part happened off-stage. Overall, though, my first impression of this tragedy was dominated by a profound sense of doom. Those two kids had so much working against them: they didn’t stand a chance!

I encountered the play a second time just after the end of my sophomore year of high school. Taking the advice of a beloved history teacher, who swore by the mystical power of “Shakespeare Dates” to revive the magic in romantic relationships, my boyfriend and I went to a production of R&J performed in St. Louis’ Forest Park. The plan backfired, though. When faced with Juliet’s heart-rending display of devotion, I admitted to myself that I would NOT  commit suicide out of despair if my boyfriend died. Acknowledging that my feelings for him would never measure up to that tragic standard convinced me that the relationship was going nowhere. I dumped him after the show. (It would be some time before I understood that killing oneself is not, in fact, the ultimate display of affection.)

That was over ten years ago–(which means that my 10th high school reunion will be NEXT YEAR! So stressful!)–and I managed to avoid a serious rereading of the play until this recent unit. What a difference 10 years can make! My perspective on these characters has altered dramatically, as well as my understanding of Shakespeare’s overall message. Romeo and Juliet aren’t doomed:  they are agents of their own fates just as much as the rest of us. And the point isn’t that this tragedy was unavoidable and necessary for reconciliation between the Capulets and the Montagues; No, the point is that it COULD have and SHOULD have been prevented, and only a series of consciously wrong choices allowed it to happen.

Both Romeo and Juliet experience moments of foreboding and voice their concerns that “Gee, I get the feeling that if I crash this party/drink this sleeping potion, something really bad is going to happen.”  But they do it anyway! And did I mention that these star-crossed lovers spend a grand total of 20 minutes together before vowing eternal devotion and sneaking off to marry each other? An impulsive, rebellious  marriage smacking of a rebound (remember Rosaline, Romeo??) carefully orchestrated by the well-intentioned Friar who excuses multiple deceptions because he just wants everyone to get along: Can this be true love?

As an eighth grader, I found their declarations beautiful and inspiring. Ten years later, I find myself shaking my head and sighing “Oh, children…” as they cavalierly offer to strip themselves of their very names if only they can be together. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, all right, but for completely different reasons than I originally thought. I’d love to juxtapose this unit with The Crucible and assign a comparative essay on the significance of names.

How have your re-reading experiences altered your thinking about a certain novel or play?

Recent Reads

‘Tis the season for listing books, or so my friends at Ignatius and CeilingFlickers would have us believe. Books we’ve read, books we want to read, the best books ever—all excellent lists. And since I’m a bit behind on reviewing the books I’ve been reading (instead of blogging) over the past few months, here’s a list of my own. In no particular order, I present:

Some Books I’ve Read Somewhat Recently

1) Helmet for My Pillow, by Robert Leckie: This memoir, written by a surprisingly articulate and engaging reporter-turned-marine-turned reporter, recounts the story of the 1st Marines in the Pacific theater in WWII. I picked it up at the library after Zach and I watched Tom Hank’s mini-series The Pacific. Leckie’s style is thoroughly enjoyable–his sense of decency, of what is “fit to print” in the 1950s, leads him to compose more…delicate versions of the stories than HBO delivered, but he communicates the heart of the matter powerfully despite this restraint. I’m looking forward to reading With the Old Breed, by Eugene Sledge (the other primary source text for the miniseries) sometime soon. Having spent so much time with my nose in a novel lately, this brief foray into non-fiction was especially refreshing!

2) Cautionary Tales for Children by Hillaire Belloc, illustrated by Edward Gorey: Sam and I spend a lot of time “reading” Sandra Boyton’s books and enjoying the tactile sensations in each of Marley’s adventures, but this little gem is destined to become a favorite in the Good Children’s Library. A gift from Sam’s lovely godmother, Amy, these tales seek to frighten children into obedience (in the most amusing manner, of course). Instead of a description, a single chapter title will suffice: “Matilda, Who Told Lies and Was Burned To Death”.  Oh, okay, ONE more: there’s also the tale of “Algernon, Who Played With a Loaded Gun, and, On Missing His Sister, Was Reprimanded By His Father.”

3) Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott: I first encountered this instruction manual for writers when I was in high school. I read the first few chapters, realized it was primarily for fiction writers, and never looked at it again. Until this Christmas, that is, when my dear friend Allison (over at RhetoricalExpressions) placed it back into my hands. Lamott’s advice is so encouraging. Beyond any bit of technical wisdom she offers (and there are many such bits), she frees her students to write by admitting that EVERYone writes crappy first drafts, and most people who write for fun or a living are mildly insane, and should embrace that fact. You can thank (or blame) her and Allison for my attempt to revive this blog.

4) Beowulf, by Anon, translated by Seamus Heany: This was my second year teaching Beowulf, and it is proving to be one of my favorite units. The story is so simple, so raw, and yet provokes such nuanced questions about justice and heroes and the monsters inside of us all. Nineth graders respond well to the combination of mythical creatures, family feuds, and gory battles. I hope Sam is a fan of this one someday. It’s a quick read: return to it through Heany’s masterful translation.

5) Almost All of The Books That Michael O’Brien Has Written: I’m presently about 50 pages from the end of A Cry of Stone, which is the last in his “Children of the Last Days” series. I’ve also read Theophilos and The Father’s Tale is beckoning me from under the Christmas tree. If you haven’t read any of his books yet, you simply MUST. I cannot recommend them highly enough. However, I will attempt to do so in greater detail in a future post.

But enough about me. What have YOU been reading? And what should I add to my list?

A Penitent Post

The next time I post anything akin to yesterday’s despairing drivel, you have full permission to deliver my well-deserved slap. As penance for my pettiness, I’ve collected a variety of inspirational/illuminating quotations about the vice of whining.
These are for me, not you.

 
“He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won’t make us happier.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“When any fit of gloominess, or perversion of mind, lays hold upon you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaints.” 

— Samuel Johnson

“Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity, and consume your own smoke with an extra draft of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints.”

—William Osler

 

“The tendency to whining and complaining may be taken as the surest sign symptom of little souls and inferior intellects.” 

—Lord Jeffrey“Don’t find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain.”

– Henry Ford

 

“You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”

 – Shirley Hufstedler

“When a person finds themselves predisposed to complaining about how little they are regarded by others, let them reflect how little they have contributed to the happiness of others.”

– Samuel Johnson

“The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.”

– Samuel Johnson

 

Ouch.  Dr. Johnson has such an honest, scathing way with words.

 

Please accept my apologies. Let us go, and whine no more.

Bibliophile Break Up

I can see it out of the corner of my eye–cumbersome, yet stately–resting silently on the coffee table. The flimsy front cover curls up at the corner, evidence of my ungentle treatment. The spine, not yet broken, shows a worrisome crease around the fifty-page mark. Its gargantuan mass dwarfs all other volumes in the vicinity. And so it sits, inanimate and imposing, mocking me.

Oh, Boswell’s Life of  Samuel Johnson, why won’t you let me be??

I never should have started it: this whole thing is my fault. Why didn’t I just leave you to spend your days in obscurity on the dusty shelf of eighteenth century British Literature. Sure, Whalen considered excerpts of you important for Victorian Literature, but why wasn’t I content with those tidbits? Why did I think I could tackle you? Your rambling, endless pages?

Samuel Johnson Reading My Dear John Letter

Now I can never escape you. Every other book I read will make sly allusions to your content, bits of wit hidden within your thousand pages of tiny print. Dickens will never shut up about your wisdom. Chesterton will never get over your jokes. All of my favorite British authors love you: why can’t I love you, too? Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, why can’t we ever be together THAT way?

Now you must join the ranks of other prestigious volumes and authors that I have failed  in my career as a reader, teacher, and lover of great literature. Fortunately for you, the very names that make me cringe ought to provide you with good company. You’ll have the entire works of D.H. Lawrence by your side, I’m afraid. And while you may find Rudyard Kipling quite enjoyable companionship, Joyce’s Ulysses might prove a little too radical for your tastes. Virginia Wolfe will not leave one of your traditional sentiments unchallenged, but you might find a kindred spirit in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne (except the Scarlet Letter, which alone is exempt from this list of rejected geniuses).

Yes, Boswell’s Johnson, (may I call you that?) my failures are impressive and varied, especially considering the four years of undergraduate work wherein I paid thousands of dollars to be told what to read. A fortunate few have escaped the legions of important, yet neglected classics. Moby Dick used to lead the line-up, but he has broken rank: my husband persuaded me of Melville’s merits, over time, and last year I found the will to get through it. (The experience was not unlike Jonah’s three days of symbolic death, but I was a fool in love! Now I’m just in love.) Anna Karenina broke free during my first trimester reading binge lat fall (though, honestly, War and Peace could have easily taken her place). I also avoided Steinbeck’s East of Eden for years, only to discover its brilliance in my mid-twenties.

What I’m trying to tell you, Boswell’s Johnson, is that you should never give up hope. Just because I’m not ready to be with you right now, doesn’t mean that this is forever. Yes, the sight of your poorly designed Oxford World Classic edition makes me shudder today, but I won’t always feel that way. Someday, I’ll read you. But, today is not that day, Boswell’s Johnson.

Today is not….that….day.

He Only Asked Him Not to Leave His Cell

A practical experience of acedia is described by the desert hermit Heraclides, who received a brother troubled by restlessness in his new cell. Heraclides advised him not to follow an extreme regimen of self-discipline but to eat, drink, and sleep as needed. He only asked that the brother not leave his cell…

Simply stay where you are: A small thing to ask, right? But the young brother couldn’t do it. His cabin fever got so bad that he saw demons lurking in ever corner, even under the covers of his bed. Terrified by the vision, he disobeyed the sagely advice of his elder and ran to Heraclides’ door. Though the hermit was displeased and made him sit outside all night, he finally had pity on the weaker brother and showed him the path to spiritual maturity.

In January, I resolved to fight against acedia. Knowing my tendency towards slothfulness, especially when alone for many hours of the day, I’ve been intentional about using my time well in work and leisure.  For the most part, this experiment has gone fairly well. My daily task lists diminished as my belly grew, and now that Sam is here, I am grateful to do two or three things a day in addition to feeding, changing, and holding him.

Yet acedia may loom over the most orderly of days. Restlessness persists, despite the most intentional use of time and resources. Answering a vocation to stay put when you’re itching to move on is just as hard as following a call to some far off mission.  Lately, I’ve felt a certain solidarity with that poor acedia-ridden monk: even though he wasn’t requiring a hard life of himself in his cell, remaining in one place was just too much for him.

I’m accustomed to four-year stints: four years in high school, four years in college, and now I’m wrapping up my fourth year in Colorado Springs. I struggled through my freshman initiation to the working world, got more comfortable during my sophomore year, enjoyed the settled satisfaction of a junior and now….well…I’m ready to graduate, to move on to the next thing.  Is this an acedian habit of mind?

Springtime in Colorado hardly inspires hope for new life: a few bold crocuses peek out of the gravel here and there; early daffodils droop after a cold snap; some tint of color returns to the patches of brown grass. There’s no burst of color, no refreshing rains, no encouraging warmth. A robin might have the temerity to whistle a tune once or twice, but the dry air soon leaves him parched.  (April is the cruelest month, indeed.)

But lilacs blossom eventually, even in these dead lands. We just have to wait until late May or early June for spring to settle in around here. Maybe I need to settle in a little, too.

How Green Was My Valley

Last night I cried myself to sleep after finishing Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley. As the title suggests, the story is an elegy, a bittersweet hymn to a time that has ended and people who have passed. It’s the sort of story that resonates with all who have seen loved ones go and childhood end.

Llewellyn writes in English, but imitating the style of the Welsh language with unfamiliar colloquial constructions of the rural coal miners. Though it takes a bit of getting used to, the flow of their speech grows on you because of its simplicity and sincerity. For example, the narrator Huw Morgan once says, “O, there is lovely to feel a book, a good book, firm in the hand, for its fatness holds rich promise, and you are hot inside to think of good hours to come.”  Always “There is” and never “it is”, and usually another verbal in the same sentence that may or may not keep with the same tense. The meaning is clear enough, though.

I grew attached to Huw during this read–the first time in a long while that I’ve been truly fond of a protagonist. As a young boy, his innocence naturally makes him an endearing figure. As he matures, other aspects of his personality (an unexpectedly fierce temper, a weakness for flirtatious young women, and an unwavering loyalty to his dear mother and sister-in-law) emerge and render him imperfect enough to stay a believable character, but never so flawed that he loses the charm of his youthful sincerity.

How Green Was My Valley is Huw’s version of his family’s story: his father struggling to make a living as the local mines are given over to conglomerates; his brothers fighting to form a union and reverse the inevitable decay of working conditions; his sisters learning to listen to their hearts; and his mother, always feeding her boys, always loving well and always suffering for the pain of her children.

Llewellyn’s depiction of their home life is an enviable one. They always take supper together, even when the older boys are grown and independent. They sit around the fire reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson together, laughing out loud at the good Doctor’s wit. And whenever someone is in low spirits, another member of the family comes with a cup of tea and a listening ear. The brothers dole out black eyes to any young men who dare speak to the sisters without permission from the father. The sisters value and protect their own modesty. Even little Huw will get into a fist fight to protect his family’s good name. They just look after one another so well. And they sing! On the way to church, coming home from the mine, before a wedding, after a funeral, always singing together.

The story is thick with subplots and overflowing with universal themes, all of which you can easily enjoy if you choose to read it for yourself. But the most touching part of the story, in my experience, is Huw’s vision of himself as connected to the race of Man though the heritage of his family.

I saw behind me those who had gone, and before me, those who are to come. I looked back and saw my father, and his father, and all our fathers, and in front, to see my son, and his son, and the sons upon sons beyond. And their eyes were my eyes.

As I felt, so they had felt, and were to feel, as then, so now, as tomorrow and forever. Then I was not afraid, for I was in a long line that had no beginning, and no end, and the hand of his father grasped my father’s hand, and his hand was in mine, and my unborn son took my right hand, and all, up and down the line that stretched from Time That Was, to Time That Is, and Is Not Yet, raised their hands to show the link, and we found that we were one . . .

A beautiful image of the communion of saints. The story ends with a reminder that the dead live on in the memories and traditions of the living.

So though the last pages left me in tears, it cannot be considered a tragedy in any respect. Huw’s heart is loving to the end, and therein lies his hope, and all of ours.

Favorites from Orthodoxy

In between nesting and working and frequent trips to the bathroom, I’ve been enjoying a leisurely re-read of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. His chapter on “The Ethics of Elfland” is probably one of the most true and most beautiful essays ever written. Here are a few of my favorite passages, so you can enjoy his thoughtful prose without having to dig up your own copy.

Surly-looking old fellow, isn't he?

“In short, oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dullness of life. This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he his normal. But in the modern psychological novel, the hero is abnormal: the center is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately and the book is monotonous.”

“Progress itself cannot progress. It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He wrote–Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change. He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is.”

“It cannot be a coincidence that glass is so common a substance in folk-lore. This princess lives in a glass castle, that princess on a glass hill; this one sees all things in a mirror, they may all live in glass houses if they will not throw stones. For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of the fact that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance most easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat. And this fairy-tale sentiment also sank into me and became my sentiment toward the whole world. I felt and feel that life itself is as bright as the diamond, but as brittle as the window-pane.”

“A woman loses a child even in having a child. All creation is separation. Birth is as solemn a parting as death.”

Ah, Chesterton…do you ever tire of having just the right turn of phrase? Good reading. Just so you know, it looks the doc’s official due-date has come and gone without so much as a Braxton-Hicks.  I’ve been eating pineapple. Earlier today, the baby had the hiccups. Two more days of work. Pray for patience!

 

 

Quadragesima

Zach and I celebrated Shrove Tuesday Denny’s style last night: my reward for grading that batch of tests was a decadent platter of French toast at 8pm. It was a good end to Ordinary Time.

Today, as you know, begins the forty days of Lent. I was going to go all English-Teacher on you and write about T.S. Eliot’s lovely Ash Wednesday poem, but since Dr. Birzer has already done a beautiful job of it over here, I’ll let well enough alone. (I do encourage you, though, to take some time over the next few weeks to read through Eliot’s  piece: it’s as much prayer as it is poem.)

This is the first year that I’ve wondered why these forty days are called “Lent” and the only reason I wondered is because I was trying to come up with a play on words for the title of this post. Unable to make any connection between the past tense of lend and fasting, I found the following explanation on ye olde world wide web:

“Lent was originally known by the Latin term “quadragesima”, which translated means the fortieth. This relates to the fortieth day before Easter and the forty days of fasting to come.It was during the Middle Ages, when sermons were no longer given in Latin that the English term “Lent” was adopted. Lent is derived from the Germanic name for Spring “Lencten” and the Anglo-Saxon name for March “Lenct”. “Lencten” comes from the Germanic root for “long” as Spring is the time of year when the days become longer.”

There you go: as Anglo-Saxon as can be.

You Latin lovers can give up some indulgence for Quadragesima if you like.

Pregnancy and the prospect of nursing make traditional fasting rather difficult. (Besides, since I’ve been abstaining from alcohol and coffee for nine months already for the baby’s sake, adding desserts or meat to the list doesn’t wouldn’t seem to carry much spiritual significance.) In past years I’ve given up time wasters like Facebook, or vanities like make-up (remember that spring, Amy? Not a pretty time). And while each demanded some measure of sacrifice, I don’t know that those practices actually contributed to my spiritual growth.

This year will have to be a little different. But I’m not going to bother you with details, lest I become like the Pharisees on the street corners who announce their prayers and fasting with trumpets and thus receive their meager reward in full.

It was a strange experience this evening, going up to receive ashes at Mass. I’m so conscious of life within me these days: I cope with the discomforts of full term pregnancy by trying to focusing on the joyful mystery that is this miracle of life (you know, Gaia-style). Being reminded that I am dust and to dust I shall return was a little shocking. What’s more, it made me realize, for the first time, honestly, that this little baby–truly on the brink of birth, within a few weeks of his first breath–is doomed to dust, as well.

He and I both have a lot of life to live in the interim…but it’s hard to keep in mind that this IS just the interim, you know?

“And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us”

O Entrepreneurs!

(Entrepreneur: An entrepreneur is a person who has possession of a new enterprise, venture or idea and is accountable for the inherent risks and the outcome.)

When I was a kid, my dad was always creating or discovering new business opportunities for me and my brothers. If we weren’t pulling a wagon full of extra zucchini door to door (a dime a dozen, literally) or hawking baseball caps bearing the family restaurant logo, we were mowing lawns or babysitting or yanking weeds in the garden for a small fee. My older brother Andy and I even assumed ownership of a small name plate engraving business for several years. Teaming up with my best friend Hope and her sister Joy, we got some pretty decent accounts from a local community college and a sports camp. DuBois Industrial Nameplate Company, we called it, (“DINC” for short). Andy  handled most of the business arrangements for the company: I think I was more of a liability than a partner, but he still gave me a generous cut of the profits.

 

Our machine looked something like this, but more antiquated.

 

 

In retrospect, we learned a lot from those experiences. We learned about deadlines and responsibility when we almost had to stay up well past our bedtimes finishing a project that had to be delivered the next day. We learned about the rewards of hard work when we spent a Saturday canning a year’s worth of salsa–a family favorite–from the produce of our garden. We learned about the correlation between work and money by keeping track of our hours spent bent over the manual engraving machine (though, some days, my adult experience doesn’t seem to validate that connection). And, perhaps most importantly, we learned a lot about ourselves. For instance, DINC was the first real opportunity I had to grapple with two significant character traits: my tendency to procrastinate and my abhorrence of trying to sell people things.

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not really  risk-taker. I don’t see myself as a business woman. But I am LEAST OF ALL a salesperson. Even if I believe in a product or service with all my heart, I cannot bring myself to try to get someone to buy it. It’s embarrassing: I blush and stutter and stumble over my words. I could barely bring myself to look our sweet elderly neighbor lady in the eye when I was forced to try to get her to take some zucchini off my hands. Sometimes I just gave it away, still feeling like a pest. (One of the reasons I dropped out of the Girl Scouts when I was still a Brownie was the unbearable pressure to sell those cookies!)

Despite my former discomfort with the sales aspect of small business ventures, I’m thinking about starting a little venture of my own.

I’ve been toying with the idea for some time. As my maternity leave approaches (only two weeks of classes left!) I’ve been trying to figure out a way to remain intellectually active and possibly work from home. The traditional housewife business ventures make me shudder: while I am grateful for Mary Kay and Arbonne and Tupperware and all they’ve done to liberate women, I would rather eat a cockroach than try to make a living hosting house parties in order to sell things to friends and their friends. I have to turn down invitations to spa parties and trunk shows because, no matter how tempting the free wine and facials and door prizes might seem, I know I will end up spending at least fifty bucks to assuage my easily triggered sense of guilt.

So, like I said, I’m considering a different kind of venture.

The idea came to me while I was working on lesson plans last week. My principal recently approved the addition of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! to my 8th grade English curriculum and I was putting together a new unit for my maternity sub. It was such pleasant work, reading through the familiar story of Alexandra Bergson and her resilience. I wrote reading quizzes and structured daily plans of discussion questions. I wrote a little guide to major themes. I chose key passages for analysis. I got to do the all the mental work of converting ideas from Cather’s pages and my head into something that 8th graders could digest without ever having to talk to an 8th grader.

While I do adore my 8th graders, there’s something so refreshing about just working with the subject matter. Wouldn’t it be great if I could write curriculum units for home school parents or co-ops who don’t have reliable instruction available for upper school literature? I’ve got the credentials, the experience, the practical know-how, and the time: do you think there’s a market? Could it be profitable? The existence of Sparknotes and other free cheat-sheets worries me a bit, but surely there are some people who would pay for high-quality instructional materials from a conservative, even Christian, perspective, right?

What do you think: good idea/bad idea? Those of you with homeschooling backgrounds, feel free to offer straightforward opinions here.

The thing is that I know that in order to turn this idea into a reality, I’m going to have to grow into the role of salesman that I avoided so diligently as a kid. Perhaps I’ll end up more like my dad than I expected to…

“Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” – Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

 

Gilead

Every time I read Marilynne Robinson’s quiet novel Gilead, I appreciate it differently. It’s written in the form of an elderly preacher’s diary/letter to his young son. The Rev. John Ames has been diagnosed with a heart condition and expects his seven year old child to grow up without him, so he writes this letter as a way of speaking into his son’s life. But the reflective process of journaling leads the pastor to some profound insights into his own life. It’s not an exciting book: but it is beautiful, and true.

The first time I read it, I remember being struck by the way Robinson creates and maintains a fictional voice of such incredible wisdom and consistency. It’s difficult enough for a writer to create a realistic voice for a character of the opposite gender (For failures, see Hemingways’s A Farewell to Arms, for successes see Cather’s My Antonia), but to craft an entire book in the voice of a fictional character of the opposite gender? And to give that character a lifetime’s worth of literary and biblical references to draw from? Amazing.

My second time through, I grew to appreciate Ames as a person, more than a fictional voice. My husband always says that the great characters of literature are more real than most people ever are. I used to take offense at the idea, but I’ve come to agree that, yes, Odysseus exists in a greater way than I have had the opportunity to exist, and Anna Karenina’s personhood–pathetic though it may be in some respects–eclipses my own in sheer magnitude. Ames does not overwhelm one like these other literary giants; rather, he plumbs a depth of knowledge, wisdom, and compassion that most people will never achieve. His wisdom is best manifest in the way that he acknowledges his weaknesses and moral failings as he experiences them. Instead of waiting until frustration or selfishness has passed to look back on it and note “Why yes, I was thinking wrongly at that time,” he recognizes his errors in real time. Maybe some day I’ll arrive at this height of spiritual sensitivity, but not any time soon.

I just finished re-reading Gilead a third time a few days ago, and it’s been sinking in differently again. This time, I found myself grieving along with Ames at the thought of missing out on his son’s life. The concept was sad enough when I first encountered his story, but I can appreciate the magnitude of that loss so much more now. Is this one of those hidden gifts of motherhood? That bearing a child allows you to go back and re-read every story with a completely different perspective? An entirely new point of identification? I’m so accustomed to identifying with the young characters, the children, the daughters. Will I someday watch Fiddler on the Roof and feel Golde’s pain more keenly than Chava’s? It’s an astonishing thought.

And the change is coming on so quickly, too! Just last night, Zach and I were watching Toy Story 3. Near the very end, as Andy plays with his toys one last time, Zach looked over to catch me crying quietly. (He’s so used to this now, after eight months of pregnancy, that he just chuckles at the sight of my tears, as he should.)

“What’s the matter, honey?” he asked, ever so gently.

Let me just say that I know now and I knew at the time that I was being irrational, but I didn’t have time to come up with a more reasonable excuse on the spot. So, choking back sobs (heavens, I’m tearing up again!), I finally admitted the truth:

“It’s just that….I just….I DON’T WANT OUR BABY TO LEAVE FOR COLLEGE!”