The Third Man

It cheered me somewhat surprisingly last night to learn that the Phillies had signed a third baseman. Puzzled me that I had not heard of the guy, though. He’s a National Leaguer, after all; has played for the Giants for something like seven years. His name is Pedro Feliz (“Happy Peter,” one of the message-board fans was already calling him).

The opinions on Peter are mixed. Some of the Bay area fans have terrible things to say about him; how frustrating he is to watch, flailing at bad pitches in clutch situations. His batting average is only .250, and his on-base percentage is lousy, they point out. But he hits 20 home runs a year; in Philly’s small park they say he’ll hit more. He drives in 80 runs. And by most accounts he plays a terrific third base.

The paper said Rollins was juiced when he heard Feliz was coming. I wonder how that makes Dobbs and Helms, the incumbent third basemen, feel. Both were already sounding a little miffed at the strenuous efforts of management this off-season to replace them. Good riddance to Helms, I say. He was a real drag last year, the turd at third. But Dobbs is a scrapper, and a good clutch hitter. He may not be an everyday player, but I’d hate to see him go.

Examination

What are my motivations for running?

On a good day, it makes me feel good, both while I’m doing it and after. I enjoy the feeling of using my body and being in shape. Feeling good physically makes me feel younger, and gives me hope that I can stave off aging. Being in shape makes me feel more attractive. This raises my spirits.

I enjoy running. I would not do it if I took no pleasure in it. However, that pleasure can be elusive. There are some days when I have to force myself to get out and run; I just don’t feel like it. And there are some days, not always the same ones, when running feels plain lousy, no matter how much I take it easy. If there were more days and times when it felt lousy than there were days and times when it felt good I would stop running. It is harder to get back out there after a lousy day, easier after a good day.

Running requires effort. There is no guaranteed immediate reward. But there is the possibility of immediate reward. And there is a sort of guarantee that if you stick with it, you will get better at it. You may not become a good runner, but you’ll become a better one: the harder you work, the better you’ll become.

Are the same things true of prayer? Not exactly. Ultimately, improvement at prayer is a matter of grace, not of effort. Yet effort is required. Prayer, making yourself open to grace, is a discipline, in that it’s easier not to do it. One must be dedicated. And there is no promise of reward.

If I’m honest, I’ll admit that I pray mostly because it makes me feel good. But again, feeling good is not guaranteed. Grace will come when it comes; I can’t control it. I have only to put myself in the way of it, be patient and humble waiting for it, and be thankful when it comes and accepting when it doesn’t.

Money in the bank

Okay, so the honeymoon’s over. For the entirety of my lunchtime run today, I struggled as though I was carrying a cannonball. I huffed and I puffed and I felt like quitting, even though I was wearing a brand-new pair of shoes. Why the change from the time before? The day was cold, but no colder than it’s been. Had the glass of rye whiskey I sipped before dinner last night suddenly made me turn old? Serious runners talk about the “running gods,” who giveth and taketh away, without explanation. Some days you just feel lousy.

Before I’d finished a mile, a pretty good definition of “discipline” popped into my head. A discipline is something you do whether you feel like it or not. Doesn’t that about cover it? A discipline is something you practice. You do it over and over, regularly, with dedication. It’s something you set aside time for, something you plan for and commit to. Something you do “for your own good,” that is, your long-term good, as opposed to your short-term inclination, what you “feel like” doing.

Sometimes near lunchtime I will for one reason or another not feel like running: Maybe I’m hungry, or my blood sugar is low, or I’m tired or under stress. I’ll be tempted by excuses. My calf hurts, and I might get injured. I’m coming down with something. I have too much to do. It really would be better just to rest. Sometimes I’ll actually talk myself out of running, or spend so long at trading pros and cons that the opportunity is lost.

On the days when I manage to override the temptations and get myself out the door, I am "exercising" discipline. Giving it a work-out. Making it a little stronger. And that feels good. Not like scratching an itch feels good. More like putting money in a bank feels good.

It helps to remember this.

Back on the trail

It was snowing today at lunchtime. When I went out for my run, my co-worker said to me: “Wow, that’s dedication.”

If it is, I thought, it’s dedication to pleasure. Heading out for a leisurely run around the deserted golf course, by myself, when there’s snow falling and the black tree branches jut across the gun-metal sky, is the highlight of my day. It’s solitude. It’s peace. It’s honest work. It’s cleansing.

I am used to thinking of running as a discipline, like writing, like prayer. It requires effort. You have to keep it up. There is at least some temptation, every day, to let it go. But damn I love it. Damn I miss it when I don’t do it. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to give it up.

I’m just coming back to it, after a month off because of recurrent colds and a stubborn sinus infection, so in part at least this is honeymoon talk. But I welcome the stiffness I’ve been feeling in the morning. I cherish the controlled effort of setting out from Rec Hall. I enjoy facing the cold, and coming in from it all flushed and invigorated and feeling like I’ve done something.

I think of Jim, our local astronaut. When I went down to see him at Johnson Space Center, where he was working his ass off to get ready for his Shuttle mission, he told me that his tightly scheduled four-mile run, alone through the scrub pine, with the good possibility of seeing a deer, was the highlight of his day. For Jim, running was an escape from discipline. It was his daily chance to chuck everything and break free.

Back to Cali

East Coast born and bred, I am always surprised by the friendliness of southern Californians. I react suspiciously, and then, ashamed of myself, I let my guard down probably too far.

The ringlet-headed Adonis who brings my bags to my motel room, the suntanned senior citizen who delivers my rental car: why are they smiling? Why are they happy? Why do they seem to be genuinely interested in what brings me to San Diego or La Jolla or Riverside?

Are they hustling for tips? I’d tip them anyway, just out of my overriding Eastern fear of doing something wrong—and I believe that they can smell this. Nor is there anything particular about me that would attract attention or stimulate sudden affection: I’m not a pretty girl, or a recognizable face. Why are they being so nice?

It seems to be just the norm out here, and probably I should know this—It’s no doubt a mark of my lack of sophistication that I don’t have a good handle on this thing called Western manners or California openness or whatever people call it—but still I wonder, where does it come from? What is the cause of it? When did it begin? Is it entirely a function of climate? Of geography? (Are people in Fresno and Indio as friendly as their counterparts in Laguna and Newport Beach?) Did it arrive with the gold rush? Is there some other cultural component at work?

Sometimes I think that these are the most American of Americans, suffused with optimism and tolerance, sun-kissed and feeling fortunate, living in paradise, suspended, not wanting the dream to ever end. Who can blame them? Open the motel-room door to go get breakfast and you’re blinded; you stand there blinking like an owl. As your eyes adjust, your spirit soars: Can the sky really be that blue? Can the breeze be that caressing? Is that sparkling swimming pool for me to use? How could this day not be sensational?

The stories were told of easterners (writers especially) being ruined out here, losing their bearings and their intensity among the Lotus Eaters. It’s easy to imagine. It’s easy to feel when you’re out here on assignment or vacation, and the sun warms your forearms, and you catch a whiff of eucalyptus as you cross the fresh-paved parking lot to an open-air cappucino bar where a blond-haired barista, suntanned and immaculate in her fifties, beams you a dazzling smile.

But at night in your room with the TV blaring, or sitting cramped on the plane ride back home, as you reflect on the traffic and the smog and the astronomical cost of living, don’t you wonder how people can relax out here at all?

How can they afford to be so mellow? Is the culture of the Sun so overwhelming?

Counterfeit

We were both heading to Spokane for a conference. This fellow Ron, who by chance had the seat next to me on the plane, hails from Boston, works in media relations. He’s a self-assured, opinionated presence, youngish, a bit of a hipster. He had a David Foster Wallace poking out of his knapsack, like a ship’s prow, and was passing the time by going over with a pencil a short-story draft from a fiction workshop he was taking. He paused now and then to chortle at the inadequacies of his absent classmate.

“Read this,” he said giggling, pointing at one particular howler. After I nodded and smiled appreciatively, we conversed for a while. It was October, playoff time, and he—amiably slumming—professed to be part of Red Sox nation, a diehard fan. He told of cruising through Cambridge after the last out in ’04, the year the Curse was lifted. What it was like to be in the streets, how he high-fived an overexuberant drunk leaning out of a taxi and almost had his arm taken off. What a scene!

Pretty soon, though, his story started to unravel. He couldn’t remember the name of Josh Beckett, Boston’s towering, soul-patched ace—“the big guy, the pitcher” was the best he could muster. And the awkward way he spoke about Fenway—“It’s one of the oldest ballparks in the country”—suggested he’d been there once, recently, and had known nothing of the hallowed grounds before that. I threw him a look, but we moved on to another topic.

It was not until an evening reception a couple days later that my suspicions were irrevocably confirmed. It was the day of Game 6, the pivotal win against Cleveland. Ron, craving attention, piped up about having watched the first few innings in the hotel bar. Boston had jumped out early when J.D. Drew, the underachieving right fielder, uncoiled on a 3-1 fastball with the bases loaded. “It was incredible!” Ron gushed. “The Red Sox made a grand slam!”

Made a grand slam? They made one? There was a moment’s pause. The guys within earshot eyed each other uncomfortably. No one challenged Ron directly on his faux pas: This was a meeting of science writers, after all, some of whom were on firmer ground talking about neutrinos. But from that moment on, everyone knew—I knew, at any rate—that this fellow Ron was not to be trusted.

New specs

Two months ago I finally went to the eye doctor and got new glasses. It had been seven or eight years, or longer, since I’d had a new pair. My prescription hadn’t changed dramatically in all that time, but I had long noticed blurriness at the edges of my vision, near and far, and lately it had started to bother me.

When I got checked out, I found that I was in an in-between place as far as my vision was concerned. As I had noticed before the machines confirmed it, I needed some help at both ends of the spectrum: reading and stargazing. To really sharpen both ends, however, would require bifocals, and getting bifocals would entail a significant sacrifice at the mid-range, where I actually do most of my seeing: from computer work to driving.

I could opt for trifocals, the optometrist told me, but even he didn’t seem too keen on that idea. The amount of lens area you have for each range is very narrow, he admitted, and that can be hard to get used to.

After some futzing around, I let him talk me into a compromise. I would get basically the same prescription—“We’ll sharpen it up a little,” he said helpfully—in a different frame. I guess the frame was what I wanted all along.

It’s surprising how quickly a pair of frames can look out-of-date after eight or ten years of seeming fine. I was wearing a gold-rimmed frame with full-size rounded lenses, and had been perfectly content with that, but as soon as I had given myself the go-ahead to start pulling new frames off the shelf and trying them on, the old glasses became anathema. How old and fusty they made me look! How had I stood them so long?

I tried on at least 20 pairs, and quickly narrowed down to five, all similar in style, and very different, updated, from what I’d had. Finally, with Lori’s help, I cut it down to two variants of the exact same style: smallish rectangular lenses with top-only frames. One frame was black, the other gun-metal gray.

The black were stylish. I actually thought they made me look kind of cool. Lori seconded the notion. The gray were, well, gray. They were perfectly serviceable, neat, up-to-date, but they didn’t flatter me as much. They didn’t make me look dashing. They did come, however, with a pair of magnetic clip-on sunglasses that were exceedingly handy. The cool pair offered no such option.

I’m ashamed of how much I agonized over the final decision. It was a clear-cut choice between practicality and cool. I tried as hard as I could to manuever myself into opting for cool, and then I wrestled myself out of it. I made and remade the decision a dozen times, wasting an awful lot of energy. In the end, with my family waiting and he store closing, I went for the safe choice—and as soon as the ink was dry on my signature I was kicking myself. How typical of me! I sneered. What a dull gray little man I am, never having the courage to follow my heart’s desire! It was only the saleswoman’s repeated assurances that I had a full 60 days to change my mind that enabled me to leave the store at all. I was miserable for a week.

Now, with the 60-day deadline just passed, I am reasonably content that I made the right choice after all. The gun-metal frames seem to suit me just fine, and I find myself snapping on the sunglasses all the time. Every time I do I’m glad I didn’t opt for the Maserati. (But then I usually think, these sunglasses don’t really help that much.)

Here’s the kicker: Frames aside, I’m still frustrated with my vision. From about two feet to six feet I’m all right. Closer, I just take my glasses off. But farther than six or seven feet I’m squinting as miserably as before.

So what the hell does all this mean? What have I learned?

That I am still a slave to vanity, for one thing. Despite wanting, or professing to want, the opposite, I am as much as ever prone to get caught up and make a foolish decision based on appearances. My prayers for release from this damnable condition are conducted with fingers crossed behind my back.

This half-heartedness is the other thorn that tears me. Even now, when the tide of second-guessing has gone out, I find myself unable to let go, to be completely sure that I made the right choice. What a continuing torment it is to me, what a wasteful drain, to never to be able to be whole-hearted! And to waste such energy on something so trivial! To always worry, in matters great and maddeningly small, about whether I’ve done the right thing!

Crunch Time

This is the week, Phillies fans. This is what it all boils down to. Will they do what we expect, leave us brokenhearted yet again, repeating the well-worn pattern? Or will they shock our very innards and rise to the occasion, like the Merry Kruksters of ’93?

This morning’s paper verified the unbelievable: Despite an endless string of crippling injuries, despite the early immolation of their entire starting pitching staff, despite a relief corps that was sadly threadbare when the season started, the Phillies, our Phillies, are tied for first place in the wild card race with the San Diego Padres. Clean slate! Reset to zero! Gentlemen start your engines: It’s anybody’s ballgame.

Six games left, and no room to screw up. It’s almost too much to bear!

My instinct as a Phillies fan is to protect myself, button down my hopes, get ready to fail. But there’s a part of me, a tender winking spark, that says this team is different.

And it is. With the adversity it has faced, there is no way this team should even be in the running. I can’t count the number of times I have left them for dead. Each time, they have clawed their way back. Each time, worming their way a little deeper into my heart.

Can the rim-running pitching hold up? Will the booming bats go silent? Will the role-players, stop-gappers—every damn one of them finding a way to contribute—cease to step up? Or will this gutty bunch somehow prevail?

It’s crazy to hope. But I’m hoping.

Whatever happens, it has been one hell of a ride. And pain is definitely a part of it.

The return of Fall (food)

In unconscious synchrony with the autumnal equinox yesterday, I made a Sunday pot of pasta e ceci, the original fall soul food.

Eccola: A healthy dose of garlic, sauteed to pale golden in plenty of olive oil. Add two cans garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed. Sautee for five minutes, stirring occasionally, then add three large handfuls of uncooked ditalini, 2-3 bay leaves, and enough water or chicken broth to cover. Stir as necessary, adding water or broth as it is absorbed and adjusting flame accordingly to keep the pot simmering until the pasta is tender. Let enough of the liquid be absorbed al fine so that the result is moist and creamy, but not soupy. Serve in chunky bowls. At table, sprinkle liberally with freshly grated cheese and red pepper flakes. (Even better, drizzle with hot oil.) Mangia!

It’s a hearty meal in itself, of course, but we paired it with a store-bought rotisserie chicken and a nice green salad. A strong unfussy red wine is mandatory.

Musings on Identity

This to me is real: When people look at him, they will see Asian. This is part of who he is. So rather than ignoring or denying this, help him to embrace it. Don’t put him in the schizophrenic position of feeling like a white person trapped in an Asian body.

So: Nurture his Korean-ness. Learn about Korea. Make connections with the local K-A community. Make connections with other K-adoptive families. For mutual support, shared experience. Having adopted him, we must also to some extent adopt his birth country, which in fact I am eager to do.

Yet this is also true: that he is and will be culturally American. What about his desire and need to fit in here? Is it better to emphasize difference or similarity? Can you do both? How? For starters, you actively acknowledge difference as a positive thing to prevent its being considered a negative or shameful thing. At the same time you continue to nourish a sense of essential similarity that is more than skin deep. He is not either/or; he is both/and.

My own father, as a boy, was ashamed of his Italian-ness to the point that he denied it, a fact that later made him doubly ashamed. The pressure to conform was too great, and he had no resources against it—not in his community and not in his family, who could not understand how he felt. He was alone. Would it not have been healthier for him to have grown up proud of his Italian-ness?

What of this: when D feels uncomfortable being singled out? He didn’t fit in the Korean school with Korean kids who spoke no English: this was his sense, not ours. He is not Korean, he is Korean-American. He is an American of Korean descent. Sometimes (often, especially while growing up) he may just want to be an American.

I don’t want him to grow up feeling alone, isolated, confused. There are steps we can take to prevent that. Difference can be a source of strength as well as weakness.

Last night I read the report from The Gathering, a first conference of adoptees, held in DC in 1999. I was encouraged by the tone, which was mostly positive. These adoptees certainly had issues, had pain. But the overall tone was not one of anger. This was a contrast to some of what I’ve seen on the Internet, and in reviews of books like Outside Looking In. (I haven’t read this book yet; I need to work up to it.)

Is it possible that some of these more strident voices have embraced victimhood as their identity? And that they have been encouraged to do so by well-meaning activists? Yes. Is it also possible that I want to deny or minimize their pain because it hurts me too much to think of that pain being D’s, of that pain becoming the central fact of his life?

Yes, the eyes.

The other day, L reported, she was with D in a store aisle when he asked her a question.

“Why are my eyes squinty?”

Stunned, she turned to face him.

“I don’t want my eyes to be like that,” he said.

She knelt and hugged him, kissed each of his eyes, and told him how beautiful they were. That seemed to placate him.

I was shocked when she recounted the incident, and have been grieving about it since. The loss of innocence. The first clear sign we’ve had from him of discomfort with being different. Here it begins.

His outbust came at a time when I was feeling somewhat defensive, questioning the claims of adoptive mothers and others about how much adoptees struggle with racial identity. It seemed to confirm these claims. It woke me up (again).

The temptation, of course, is to (again) go back to sleep. To brush off this incident, forget it until it comes back to the surface and we are forced to face it.

The right thing is to acknowledge D’s discomfort, and to help him face it and surmount it. But how?

First, maybe, by facing my own uncertainty and fear. Not letting this become a bogeyman that gets pushed back into the closet.

Just waking up

Since we got home from camp I’ve been worried about D. It’s nothing he’s done; it’s what I’ve been reading, hearing, of the pain that is visited on adoptees, and particularly transracial adoptees, or TRAs, as they call themselves. From what they say, it seems inevitable that this sunny, bright, wonderful kid of ours will have “issues” that may trouble him all through adulthood, issues related to abandonment and identity. It grieves me awfully to think this.

It is also hard to grasp in his case. We have not had any sign whatsoever of problems. We have not been tested at all by him to this point; on the contrary, he has been an extraordinarily loving, sensitive, good-natured child, a kid whose positive, outgoing personality is remarked on by everyone he meets. Will he be the exception? the one who gets through unscathed?

There’s a lot of rawness in the TRA writing, a lot of woundedness and anger. It can be overwhelming. L is not ready to face it, breaking in on our idyll. I have trouble facing it myself, and can do so only in small doses. I feel drawn to learn all I can, to do all I can, but also frightened by the anger. And a part of me wonders, too, whether some of them are embracing victimhood. Is this just defensiveness? Do I even have the right to think this?

I have also begun to read the writings of adoptive moms who have become activists. I have felt defensive toward some of what they say, too. I have wondered whether they are necessarily “right” about everything—given that their experience does not match my own. Their experience is longer, broader, true. But what they say is hard to accept. Is it possible to push Koreanness too much?

I am myself confused about his identity right now. I have thought: I want for him to know that he is as American as anybody else, an American of Korean descent. But these moms and these adoptees seem to stress Koreanness above all. Certainly part of him is still in Korea.

I need to learn. I need to hear from more adult adoptees, and from adoptive parents farther along the road. And not just, I think, from the most pained, radicalized voices, although from those too.

I can’t yet face the birth mothers. I can’t yet feel them, really. But I will need to do that too. For his sake, but maybe for my own sake first? For their sakes?

There is a wall in me that I need to break down.

Narnia, Schmarnia

June 26, 2007


I never read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child. Undoubtedly that’s the time to read it. I find now that I can muster no affection for fantasy—not for Tolkien’s intricately worked out world of Middle Earth (which I loved as a teenager), and certainly not for Lewis’s jumbled kingdom. The talking beavers, the lamppost in the middle of nowhere, the weird eunuch Mister Tumnus—all of it leaves me, well, cold. So does the staunch medievalism, the skewed allegory, and the unexplained appearance of Father Christmas. And the stuffy traditionalism. I’m straining to grasp some nuanced Christian message, and it’s slipping through my fingers.

But of course I’m reflecting on the movies, not the books. The movies remove the nuance, the saving grace of language. It was the language, mainly, in Tolkien, that caught me up. The story? Well, there was a dangerous quest and a loyal and heroic band—that much I could buy into. What is there here, though? A quartet of bickering siblings, parent-less, are called upon to save the world. It scans a little bit like The Incredibles.

The kids are tested. Edmund gives in to his selfish appetites and his jealousy and so causes trouble for everyone. Peter has to grow into a warrior. Lucy, the youngest, believes—with purity. Aslan the Christ-type gives himself over to the Evil One, and by his willing death redeems. There’s a climactic battle. The cause is won.

Why am I not moved by any of this? Because it is not the Gospel? Because I don’t like the glorification of war? Because the Christ-type is a talking lion?

It was written for kids, I should remember that, and evidently it reaches them. Inspires them to be courageous and self-denying and true. Nothing wrong with any of that, of course. Except for the whiff of William Bennett, and triumphalism, and Christian home-schooling.

A good priest

June 16

There was mention of Joe H. at mass on Sunday. Father Joe. A good man and a good priest, of compassion and courage. He ran afoul of diocesan authorities for his attempts to minister to homosexuals.

What actually happened was he caught the attention of a handful of truly rabid homophobes, who then, as guardians of orthodoxy, took as their blood mission to run him out of the priesthood. The bishop was not strong enough to stand up to them, was in fact enraged at having been put in the position of having to do so. Joe was to him a problem priest, and was soon disappeared. He has now surfaced in New Jersey, where one presumes that there are other voices in addition to the homophobic. He is still, thank God for the rest of us, a priest.

I wish I had been close enough with him that we could’ve remained friends. That would’ve been some kind of break for me, a break from reticence. Those are my second and third responses to hearing his name; pangs of regret. (My first response was to remember him fondly.)

I tend to blame myself, but in truth, I tried to start a relationship with Joe. Invited him over for dinner, more than once. Engaged him in email correspondence. Approached him on the running trail. We became friendly, but not friends. He had too many sheep to tend, and was in some ways more guarded than I was.

During those dinners here, he opened up. Literally took off his collar and lounged on the sofa, his thick gray hunting socks and huge pale calves protruding from his too-short black pant legs: the image of a New Jersey farm boy. Plied with a bit of Scotch, he dished the dirt, compared being called before the bishop to “getting into a pissing match with a skunk,” and also spoke sanely and sensitively and with conviction about important things. He especially liked Lola, in part, I think, because she is not Catholic. She liked him too, always favored him with a warm hug after mass. But when those dinners were over, the veil went back up.

We knew nothing, really, of his troubles—except what appeared in the newspaper: scathing letters to the editor written by his enemies and the tepid responses from the chancery. Knew that he was unhappy as a diocesan priest, heard that he had tried to join the Maryknolls and was rejected. In preparation for that application, he had gone to South America to study Spanish, and picked up an intestinal bug, and lost a lot of weight. (He was pleased afterward, said he’d been trying to lose.)

And then he disappeared. Eventually I discovered by googling him a couple of snippets indicating that he had gone back to New Jersey, but there was nothing definitive until this past Sunday, when our deacon mentioned that he had come for a visit. I was sorry that I had missed him.

Scene from the Gospels

May 30

“If you’re gonna be a Christian, you better look good on wood.”
--Daniel Berrigan


They are walking toward Jerusalem, a dusty road through open country. The twelve seem dazed; they’re tired and overloaded. The people behind are apprehensive. Where are we going?, they are wondering They keep a safe distance.

Jesus looks from his left to his right, at Peter, at Andrew. He shakes his head, a rueful smile breaking across his lips. Again he stops, pulls them aside.

“Do you understand what we’re doing?” he asks them patiently. They stare at him blankly. “We are going to Jerusalem,” he says again. “There, the Son of Man will be arrested. He will be accused. He will be beaten and spit on and scorned. He will be hung on a tree and left to die.” He pauses. “And he will rise again in glory.”

The Sons of Thunder perk up at that last part. Glory? “When you get to heaven, can we sit next to you?” one of them blurts.

He sighs. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

Like children, they persist. “C’mon. We asked you first. Why not?”

He turns to look at them, eyes piercing, face now grave. “Can you drink the cup that I must drink?”

They glance at each other before answering. “Y-yes. We can drink it.”

His eyes and voice grow tender. “Indeed you will drink it, brothers,” he says quietly. “Indeed you will. But a place in the kingdom is not mine to give.”

The others approach. “A place in the kingdom? What’s all this?” Peter’s voice is indignant. There’s jostling.

He grabs Peter by the shoulders, firmly, but not roughly. The jostling stops. “Know this, brothers,” he says, back to smiling. “When men gain power, they seek out the high place for themselves, the seat of authority. It cannot be so with you.” Again, his voice grows tender, and he looks from one to the next. “With you, it must be like this: The one who is first is the one who serves all the rest.”

“If you would be first,” he repeats, “you must be servant to all the rest.”

They look at him. Some of their faces remain hopelessly blank. In others, though, in Peter’s and Andrew’s, a dim light of recognition finally dawns.

Why I hate golf

May 29

My good friend I-man keeps trying to get me interested in playing golf. Now he’s trying to get my son, his godson, to play. I don’t have the heart to tell him how much I hate the sport.
Let me count the ways:
Because it is a Republican sport, a rich man’s sport, a wasteful sport, the sport of someone who would heedlessly impose himself on the environment. I hate it for moral reasons, as some people hate eating meat. I grew up across from a golf course, so I knew it sort of innocently. A nice course but not exclusive—not at that time. By now it has no doubt become so, a gated community. But then it was open for the neighborhood kids to crawl. Nobody chased us, or cared that we were there. Try cutting across a golf course today, to get here or there. Or sneaking there at night to have sex. They’ll sic the dogs on you.
It takes so much water, so many chemicals, so much money, to tame a place for golf. It’s an obscenity. Yet I met a man who designs courses, a nice and down-to-earth guy, a Bizup.
I hate it for the same reason I hate ice-skating. You’ve got to pay every time you do it, for God’s sake!
I can appreciate the skill required, the thrill of hitting well, the addictive nature of it. The whole being outdoors bit. But the expense!

Herman Wells of Indiana

May 23


In Bloomington for a conference last week, I saw plentiful evidence of one man’s legacy, how much good a single man with vision and energy can leave behind. The man was IU’s longtime president, Herman B. Wells.

I do not know where Wells came from, or how he got to the top. I don’t even know his academic specialty. But I walked through the magnificent concert hall that he had built, and I toured the Kinsey Institute, whose controversial mission he stoutly defended, and I walked (and ran) the beautiful campus he planned and developed, with its distinctive limestone buildings and its copious, richly imagined greenspace, and I didn’t wonder that people spoke of him always with reverence and awe.

His portraits are numerous around campus, a stout, round-faced, pleasant-looking man in a tan, 50s-era suit. So are the stories: of how he used to attend weeknight student recitals well into his 80s, of how he .

Perhaps the most impressive story was this: that through the worst of the McCarthy era, this lifelong bachelor, who lived with his mother until she died in her 90s, whose sexuality was a well-guarded secret, had the courage to resolutely defend Alfred Kinsey’s right to conduct and publish his research.

Surely MyU has never had such a leader.

Memories of graduate school

May 22


I was a shit in graduate school. On the first day, I taped a sheet of paper over the 8x10 glossy of Steve Martin with an arrow through his head that my office-mate had fixed to the painted cinder-block wall behind our shared cubicle. “I can’t stand him looking at me!” I scribbled on the paper in blue ink. My office-mate was rightly incensed; I have a memory of her tossing her hair and harrumphing indignantly at the edge of my vision. But she said nothing to me, and neither did any of the dozen other first-year grad students who shared the remaining cubicles. I was left to slowly recognize on my own what an ass I’d been. It took about a week, and I was much too shy to apologize.

This had been, and to some extent remains, the pattern of my interactions with people. Long bouts of vacuum-packed silence punctuated by eruptions of inappropriate boldness or ferocity. A kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing. My parents used to call me Vesuvio.

The result was that after that first day no one talked to me—no one except Howard, a shaggy, gangly 6-foot-6 inch Thoreauvian from south of Pittsburgh who happened to be a born-again Christian. Howard was drawn to me by his intuition that, unlike the others, I did not reflexively condemn his religion. He took a big brotherly interest in me, often talked to me about his church, but was never pushy. “Don’t you like people?” he once asked me after I expressed a distaste for crowded suburbs. It made me think. Howard would die of melanoma within a month of getting his Ph.D., leaving a wife and infant daughter.

Silent as I was, I spent a lot of time listening to conversations from behind my smoked-glass cubicle walls, quietly admiring the self-conscious repartee. Are there any souls more pretentious than graduate students in English literature?

Too elite to eat meat?

May 8

This locavore business that I’m reading about in the New York Times: Is it just the latest fad? The latest someone wanting to make me feel guilty? That’s a Neanderthal response, I know, but why is this stuff always being pushed by people who have it all? The latest thing to be into. Cause of the week. Forget vegan. Or maybe on top of vegan.

In truth I have long had an affinity for eating local, within reason, as my father would say. I detest the idea of eating apples imported from Washington or New Zealand. But to get so religious and strict about it? Devotees of the “100-mile diet” eat nothing grown further than 100 miles from their homes. That means they deny themselves coffee, tea, flour, wine, in addition to most fruits and a good number of vegetables and God knows what all. Olives, for God’s sake. Olive oil. Anchovies. Gin. Chocolate!!

It’s enough to make you want to turn a firehose on these people. How about a less absolutist response? How about resolving to eat more locally instead of all locally? To eat more consciously? More reverently, even. To use less. Live more lightly.

It seems overwhelming, like it could become a full-time job. I’d rather remain in the dark. How can we live at all except by remaining in the dark? And yet Jesus tells us to do otherwise, to recognize our connectedness.

Here’s another excuse: I could never get Lori and Danny to convert. And: how could we give up the convenience? As it is we can hardly get meals on the table. And how could we afford it? This is what I mean by elitist. Slow food.

Doing something is better than doing nothing, right? What could be done? Buying more produce and meat from local farmers. Patronizing Stone Soup, the farmers’ markets. Participating in the vegetable co-op. Using re-usable grocery bags. Eating less meat. Eating less processed food. Being less wasteful. It would take more time, money, and effort. It would mean a commitment, and giving up convenience.

And why? Because it’s healthier? Yes. To eat better? Yes. But more because it uses fewer resources, and is more humane. To feel better about ourselves? Salve conscience?

Poor people “don’t have the luxury” of feeling guilty over how the chicken they’re eating was treated. This is true. But it also may be true that the reason they don’t have the luxury is that we do, and we exercise it ever-increasingly.

If I’m just doing this to feel better standing next to my eco-friendly, evolved, mature friends, it’s not going to work. (This is also a bad reason to try to write poetry.)

Gene Yang’s Thang

At a recent talk on children’s literature, the presenter spoke of the growing popularity of graphic novels, and their use in schools. My knee-jerk reaction—disdain for these “non-books,” lament for the death of reading—was overcome by one of his examples, a volume titled American Born Chinese by a young San Franciscan named Gene Yang.

The speaker held this book up, literally, as a serious work for young adults, one that had won an important award, a story about growing up Asian American. As the father of a five-year-old Asian-born son, I was intrigued. The book’s clean handsome graphics drew me in immediately, and I was touched when after the program three young Asian women, Chinese graduate students, approached the lectern and shyly professed their love for it. The next day I borrowed the book from the local library—mildly surprised that they had it—and read it in an hour and a half.

American Born Chinese is a book about immigrant identity, specifically the tensions faced by Asian American kids who feel caught between the old world and the new, distanced from their parents but not accepted by their American peers. On top of the normal trials of adolescence, they are visibly and self-consciously “other,” and so subject to an amplified version of the cross-currents of longing and shame, anger and self-loathing that roil the passage to adulthood. It’s a fresh take on an old story.

The book is composed of three distinct stories that play out in alternating chapters. The central story is that of Jin Wang, a boy whose family has just moved from Chinatown to the suburbs, and his efforts to make his way in his new, lily-white, middle school. Jin’s story is flanked on the one hand by a version of the archetypal Chinese legend of the Monkey King, a fiery proud trickster who tangles with the gods, and on the other by the antics of ChinKee, an agglomeration of comically exaggerated Asian stereotypes who torments his American “cousin” Danny with his egregious behavior. Yang weaves these strands into a compelling, humorous and finally rewarding whole, using the side stories to echo and deepen our understanding of Jin’s progress.

Yang, by day a high-school teacher, is particularly adept at rendering the tender contradictions of Jin’s adolescent psyche as he struggles between wanting desperately to fit in and being himself. The side stories illuminate and in the end gracefully reveal themselves as aspects of this psyche personified.

The graphic medium seems ideal for this combination of realism and fable, humor and poignancy. Yang’s cinematic eye, strong, unfussy drawings, and spare, well-written dialogue make a sometimes painful story wonderfully accessible, in a style reminiscent of Spiegelman’s Maus. With sensitivity and compassion, he guides young-adult readers through Jin’s confusion and rage over various trials to his final hard-won self-acceptance, offering through this sympathetic and well-drawn character a model of hope and understanding for their own lives.

The story has layers of resonance; it speaks first to Asian American kids, then to other immigrant kids, and finally to all kids, immigrant or not. American Born Chinese is a worthy, well-wrought book, and it opened my eyes. I want to learn more about Gene Yang, and about the world of graphic novels. And I’m going to buy a copy for my son.