I don’t know why Thoreau went to the woods, rather than to England or to the Carthusians or to some nineteenth-century Mall of America. Neither could I say why, precisely, I went to the barn. And why did this need for deliberate life well up just then, in 1845 or 1995, for Henry David or for me? Thoreau, who elides as much as he tells, says he wished to transact “some private business with the fewest obstacles.” And what was he looking for? “I long ago lost,” he says, “a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove and am still on their trail.”
Oh, yes. I know them. They slipped me, too.
Thoreau’s brief catalog of longing and desire seems to me as unpretentious, tentative, and proportionate a description as I have ever come across of the condition of someone going on spiritual business. How unyielding, on the terrain of this delicate work, seem to me the hard-edged names of God. Years ago I resolved I would go to seminary if only I could somehow stand aside from theology’s relentless dissection and categorization of holy things—a worthy activity for people of a certain temperament, but antithetical to mine. The study of spiritual direction, by contrast, grows out of contemplative tradition, where all the names of God rapidly become moot. “Contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere,” says Thomas Aquinas: Gaze with love on God, share what has been seen with others.
TO SAY, in a work of nonfiction, “I was born in such and such a place, in such and such a year” seems pretentious. It makes one’s individual life appear very important—when what matters are not the facts of a life but the quality of the feelings and affections—what is universal, that is, instead of what is merely local and historical. My individual life could not be more insignificant, and I venture to speak about it not because anything particularly interesting has happened to me but simply because life has happened to me, and it has happened as well to everyone who reads these words. Every book that I care to read or write is a book about the texture of being alive, and only incidentally about the facts of a particular historical moment or gender or ethnicity or skin.
Yet the facts of a life are strings that hold it to the ground. The government is interested in these facts, to be sure, and so is any fair-minded reader who wants a context for evaluating an individual view of the world. Besides, as I think about the scraps of life one shares from day to day, over coffee or traveling into the dark on trains, I realize that the details of my oddly fragmented life present a conundrum to many. “Sometimes you come across like the typical college professor and then you switch on the country-and-western music,” a friend may complain. “Sometimes you seem so solitary, sometimes surrounded by a vast extended family. … Are you a Catholic? A Buddhist? A Quaker?” With apologies, then, but in the interests of clarity, I produce the following facts:
I was born in Pampa, Texas, in an Air Force base hospital, in 1944. My parents were, as parents often were in those days, very young, and they had little money. After the war, we went back to a blue-collar east side neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, and lived for several years in a fourplex on Case Street. We shared the house with grandparents, aunts and uncles, and, best of all, cousins—five or six of them so close to me in age that I had all the advantages of growing up in the middle of a huge family. My mother had come out of this neighborhood, out of this very fourplex, and her family, the McManuses, were people of note. On the east side, in those days, that was likely to mean you had a job at the telephone company; but in fact, my maternal grandfather and his brothers were even more exalted in station: they were engineers for the Great Northern Railroad.
One day, shortly after the birth of my sister, a moving truck came and made me, for a day, the center of neighborhood excitement: we were going to live in a new house. I did not understand, at five, how permanent this break would be from my fleet of cousins, the wonderful city dump we played in from morning till night, the music of my cousin’s piano, the camaraderie, the protection—and that I would awaken for the next fifteen years or so in a tract house in suburban Roseville, a place that felt as dry to the spirit as if it had been wrung out by huge, impersonal hands.
Like many people after the war, my parents were looking for safety and stability. Their children would not burrow in amusing dumps, they would not be at the beck and call of every manic aunt. Like all the best childhoods, mine was shaping up to be, on Case Street, a machine for producing terror and ecstasy: my parents hoped to put a stop to that. They sought a protected space, planted turf on it, and strung out flowers in manageable lines. It’s possible to control a life, so long as you keep it small and take no chances. The war had exhausted, at a young age, many grown-ups’ interest in taking chances.
I still spent lots of time with my paternal grandparents, who divided their lives between a one-room apartment in the city and a one-room cabin in western Wisconsin, as well as with the maiden aunts and uncle who had raised my mother: their names were Mamie, Sadie, and Boo.
My grandparents were, in retrospect, odd company. Grandpa hardly spoke at all and worked from early in the morning till late at night building beautiful, intricate things in his workshop, inlaid tables primarily: he had been a carpenter all his life. My grandmother was musical, psychic, and a gifted storyteller. And in their presence I was what every child needs to be for however long it takes to put down the roots of a strong spirit: the object of love unlimited. Similarly, Mamie, Sadie, and Boo spoiled and petted me. Boo, in particular, would take me to the dime store every visit and bring me back with my pockets full of plastic treasure and my cheeks bulging with sweets. Left in the care of my aunts, I learned to roll pies and eat them right up with ice cream. Left with Uncle Boo, the cuisine was simpler. “Cooking,” for Boo, meant buttering a slice of Wonder Bread and covering it with syrup. We’d eat it, then pick up the plates and lick them clean. When I hear words and phrases like “grace” or “the mercy of God,” my frivolous mind composes a dinner plate glazed with Log Cabin.
But it was only a few years ago, when I turned fifty, that I realized how disconnected I felt after the move to Roseville—cut off from what Carson McCullers called “the we of me”—like a pup taken out of the litter and set to train on a cold cement floor. After one summer moving day, I never again saw my warm-hearted Italian uncle, Tony, my cousin, Denny, who marauded the countryside with me, Rosie and Joanne who looked out for all the younger ones and brought Denny and me home safely when we stalled on some great dump adventure. Behind, as well, was the upright piano I had lain behind from babyhood, absorbing music through port-holes in the soul. A piano would not fit into my parents’ decorating scheme for many years and, when it did, it would be a tinkly spinet with the pinched soul of furniture.
That week I turned fifty, my children got hold of an old photo album, looking for pictures of mom as a child. They found a snapshot of me, tiny among cousins, so uncharacteristically surrounded. “Who are these people?” they asked. Without thinking about it, I almost gave the response my parents had taught me when I wailed for that lost family: “They’re nobody special to us.” The bare words seem cruel, but the underlying sentiment was, I think, merely elegiac: our blood connection was uncertain, we want to put that life behind us, something happened that doesn’t concern you …
Instead, the little black-and-white photo blazed its revelation: the “we of me.” The answer, perhaps, to a number of miscellaneous questions: why I keep trying to live in community, why I married a man who was the eldest of ten children, why my house has accommodated, over the years, such odd lots of people, why, still, I keep wandering around looking for “the rest.”
Roseville, the merciless subdivision: Levittown of the prairie. It must have unrolled as though from a traveling puppeteer’s bag of tricks, sidewalks, tarmac, chain-link fences, and the ugly houses with their false brick fronts and aluminum siding: unreal city. It did not take me long, transplanted from the delightful squalor of Case Street and fourplex living with my cousins, to start howling. My parents, I’m sure, were thrilled to be there, which illustrates the economies of cosmic intelligence. Why provide space for both heaven and hell when in two thousand square feet both can serve their respective inhabitants?
I love city life, its ruthless push of body on soul, the exacerbation, the grinding down. Sometimes. Often.