Patty and I are independent!

Aren't you glad to know that? We were certainly glad to learn it.

Here's what happened. One of our days in NYC, Patty and I decided to go into Brooklyn. We got on the PATH train in Jersey City and changed to an E subway train in Manhattan that took us to the top of Greenwich Avenue, within a couple of blocks of "A Salt and Battery" for lunch at a great fish and chips restaurant with real English beer and the guys cooking and serving who were speaking with real English accents. Instead of going back underground right away, we then walked through some of the Village to the next stop on the subway line, at Washington Square. At the Fulton Street station we changed to a 4 train and got off at the Brooklyn Bridge, and walked across the bridge. Our destination was the NYC transit museum. Well worth the visit! THEN -- since I had always wanted to visit the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, we got on a 2 train at the Borough Hall stop and rode to the Grand Army Plaza station, which, according to my subway map, is right on the edge of Prospect Park. (The neighborhod of Park Slope slopes downhill from the park! I didn't understand the reason for the name before walking the geography.)

Anyway, when we climbed to the street from the Grand Army Station, I couldn't orient myself. Prospect Park wasn't immediately visible. So I asked a 20-something-year-old woman walking past, "Where is Prospect Park?" She said, "I've just moved here from Belize, and I'm getting oriented myself too. But I've lived here before. Walk with me and we'll figure it out." Sure enough, the park was only three blocks away. On the way, we talked. It turns out that she had just moved back to the city to begin a program in music education at Columbia (which is exactly what our daughter, Emily will be beginning in the fall. Good Lord, small world, huh?) We explained that we were in town to visit our daughter and son-in-law, and that we were playing in the city during the days while they were at work, and here's what she said: "Wow! Independent parents! You don't have to be babysat! My parents sure wouldn't be exploring like you guys are doing!"

Patty and I got a kick out of that. Independent! I told Sheldon about the conversation later that evening, and he said that it was a real problem for their friends: that their parents are often afraid of the city when they come to visit, and need to be led around. What a shame! All you need to do is to get a subway map and use it!

Sheldon and I were talking abour this, by the way, at Shea Stadium (the F train to the G train to the 7 train to the Stadium station), where the Phillies were moribund for eight innings, but erupted to score six in the top of the ninth and then Brad Lidge nailed down the save in the bottom of the inning for a big victory, putting the Phils a game into first place. We won't talk about the fact that the Mets have beaten the Phillies twice since then. Sigh ... There is such suffering involved in being a Phillies fan.

And now, for several items completely random ...

From outward appearances (homemade signs in store windows, sidewalk vendors selling Barack Obama T-shirts and caps and such), John McCain won't get a single vote in New York City...

We enjoyed the Monty Python musical, "Spamalot" one night. One of their gags is the line, "I'm not dead yet!" (If you've seen the "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" movie, you know the joke.) I pointed out to Patty that they were selling a T-shirt in the lobby that read, "I'm not dead yet." Patty said, "I don't think people would appreciate it if you wore that."

What a joy it is to get the New York Times metro edition, which includes a full sports section (including the previous night's baseball scores) and a full metro section -- and to have time to read it during leisurely mornings!

Did you know that it is nearly impossible to find a copy of the New York Times before 8:00 AM in Jersey City, NJ? (That is, if you don't live here and subscribe to the paper.)

Patty and I are spending a few days with Emily and Sheldon in Jersey City, staying in a guest suite in the apartment building Sheldon manages. (Two towers of 37 stories each; about 1,000 residents! It's a big place, called Liberty Towers because it overlooks the Statue of Liberty.)

Anyway. The first morning we were here I woke up at about 5:30, which isn't unusual, and set out to find a newspaper box. I walked for 45 minutes! I saw some very nice residential blocks of Jersey City, which is experiencing a dramatic revival. I found the post office. I walked past an elementary school. During my walk I came across several batches of newspaper boxes, including USA Today and the Daily News, but not the Times! I finally settled on waiting until 8:00 AM, and bought a copy when the convenience store opened around the corner from the apartment building.

So it seems that the Times-reading demographic doesn't buy papers at corner boxes. Or, that the Times management has decided that it's not cost effective to make the paper available that way. Probably that's the case. After all, a newspaper is a 19th century technology of delivering news. A newspaper box is a 20th century technology of delivering the news. Any self-respecting resident of the 21st century wouldn't even be looking for the printed news page! S/he would be firing up his or her laptop, to go to nytimes.com, to read that morning's news. Unfortunately, I am a dinosaur. I don't own a laptop.

Remember to tithe 10% of the tax rebate check to an agency that works with the poor. (FISH, the Angels of Mercy Clinic, etc., etc.) After all, you've received the tax rebate from our generous national government in order to stimulate our local economies -- and any money spent on care for the poor is money spent right here at home.

Wouldn't it be ironic if Americans spent their tax rebate check on electronics? That would mean sending even MORE money to China!

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplications!

Those verses begin Psalm 130. Life includes great depths of sorrow. Some of you will remember that, only days after I had been released from the hospital in late 2006, my cousin, Michael Hill, suffered as deep a sorrow as can be imagined. His 54-year old wife, Nancy, became sick and died, within a 48 hour period, from an untreatable sepsis. (The attending physician said, "We're helpless. It's like we're in the middle ages.")

Some of you remember Michael's long piece for the Baltimore Sun, mentioning a number of books and some music that was helpful to him in his grief. One book was The Goldfish Went on Vacation, by Patty Dann. Let Patty describe what happened next, in a piece she wrote for the New York Times on March 30 of this year:

How We Got From Grief to Pancakes

By PATTY DANN
Published: March 30, 2008

I was nervous about meeting my future husband’s parents, even though I am old enough to be a grandmother. When I told a friend I was marrying again, he said, “What? And lose your widow status?”

My first husband, Willem, died eight years ago of brain cancer. He was 50, Dutch, a marathon runner, as graceful as a heron. Then one day, while a spring breeze rustled the curtains, he gazed at me and said meekly, “Who are you?”

I am now older than he was when he died, as is my future husband, Michael. A wedding photograph of Michael and his late wife, a beautiful reddish blonde, sits on my bureau. Some people find it strange that I would have such a photo on my bureau. I do not. These people are our stories, our past, and the parents of our children.

“I would like you to meet my parents,” Michael said several months ago. I had seen pictures of them. His father, at 84, is a federal judge, still active on the bench. His mother, who had been a ballet dancer, is still married to him.

They fell in love and left their small towns in South Carolina to go to the big city of Atlanta. They were a mythical couple whose friends soaped “Just Married” all over their 1940 Plymouth. They washed it off, or so they thought. But the “Just Married” message on the roof remained, faded but defiant, baked into the paint and reappearing whenever it rained. And their marriage, too, survives, 60 years later, although the ballet dancer’s mind is fading.

I brought her pink ribbons for toeshoes as a gift, to see if she remembers, the color perhaps, a sensual memory from long ago, twirling and smiling in the sunlight.

The first time my son met Michael’s two boys they all nodded, “Hey,” and went off into the summer night to play basketball on a driveway down the street. When they came back sweaty, two hours later, I longed to ask the crickets what the boys had talked about. I scanned their tired faces, desperate for a sign. Did they like one another? Would it be O.K.?

The next morning I asked my son, “What do you think of the big boys?”

“Good,” he said.

“Their mother died,” I said.

“I know, but they got to know her until they were teenagers. At least they remember their mother.”

What would my future mother-in-law think of me, a New York girl?

“She might be very cordial when you meet and then five minutes later ask who you are,” Michael said.

“Oh,” I said quietly. I understood. Willem’s brain had unraveled before my eyes, and before the eyes of my son, who was 4 years old.

I have two fears:

1. Of learning to be a family again.

2. Of becoming a widow again.

I admit in the cold winters of the recent years, many nights I let my son sit on the radiator eating macaroni and cheese as we watched “Supernanny.” We were both entranced to see how she solved the problems of all these families, always a husband and wife with unruly children, screaming and carrying on. We were junkies.

Even though the children on the show were holy terrors, they always had two parents. We longed for unruly. In the days after my husband died, my son would march off to preschool and call out, “Get me a new Daddy while I’m at school.”

Then I wrote a book about my husband dying. Michael, who is a journalist in Baltimore, felt compelled in the wake of his wife’s death to read books on grief, which hadn’t been my response. It was all I could do in those days to make a cow costume for my son’s school play. But my publisher forwarded me a link to an essay Michael published about grieving, which included a review of my book.

I read it online at 2 a.m., sitting alone in my nightgown, barefoot and shivering, on a winter night last year. Reading it, I felt a complete love for his late wife, Nancy, who was an art historian, just as Willem had been.

In the essay, which included reviews of works by better-known widowed writers, Michael quoted a passage of mine about a widower I had met as a teenager who still had his dead wife’s clothes in his closet. I had been spooked at the time, never imagining that at age 46 I would have a closetful of my dead husband’s clothes, and that it would seem right.

I wrote to him: “Dear Mr. Hill, It’s an honor to be included with such wonderful writers. I am sorry for your loss.”

He wrote back, commenting on the passage in my book where I describe how I kept buying basil at the grocery store the summer Willem was dying, and how the smell of basil got me through those months. Since his wife died, he wrote, he didn’t think he could plant a garden again.

Soon we were exchanging e-mail messages with “re: grief” in the subject line. We corresponded for two months, starting with those first cold weeks when Michael would return to his empty home with his children off at college, and now Nancy gone, and struggle to shovel the icy driveway. Eventually the subject lines changed to “re: thumb-stack of pancakes” and “re: bolts of cloth.”

One night my son appeared at my desk at midnight, when I thought he was asleep, while I was writing restless e-mail messages.

“I see how you get, all flirty-flirty with Michael,” he announced.

Michael was coming to New York in a few weeks, to see Joan Didion’s play “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Did I want to get together for coffee? I agreed to meet him at the Morgan Library.

Two days later I panicked. “I have a middle school meeting all day,” I boldly lied. “Perhaps another time.”

But then a friend advised: “Go. You’ve been scared your whole life. Go.”

Another said: “A man married that long, 27 years, will never get over his wife. Aren’t you jealous?”

“No, it’s the opposite of that,” I said. “I love her. She would have been my friend. I don’t want him to let her go. The four of us would have been friends.”

I wrote Michael and told him I could get away for an hour. “How will I recognize you?” I asked.

“I’m 5-9 and need a haircut,” he replied. “I’ll be wearing a baseball hat. And you?”

I wrote, “Years ago, when I was in Oklahoma, I met a man who said: ‘You look like Bonnie, you know, Bonnie and Clyde. She was a little woman like you, with messy hair.’ ” I added, “Not Faye Dunaway.”

I waited nervously at the door of the Morgan Library until a man of Michael’s description walked in. I leaned forward and put out my hand. “Michael?” I said.

“Yes,” he said, shaking my hand. We talked for several minutes and then he said, “I’m sorry, but how do I know you?” And we realized he was not the Michael I thought he was. I was relieved and disappointed. This was a nice man, but I felt no magic.

Five minutes later another man in a baseball hat walked through the door. This was the man I had been writing to day and night for two months, who liked the words “bolts of cloth” as much as I did.

We did not look at any exhibits at the Morgan Library. I cannot even tell you what the exhibits were. Instead we sat side-by-side at computers, clicking randomly on virtual tours, and showing each other pictures of our sons.

“Don’t you have to get back to the middle school meeting?” Michael asked over lunch, while I pushed my food around.

“No, somebody can tell me about it,” I demurred, staring at his wrists.

Our second date, I met him at Penn Station under what we’ve come to call the “flip-flip sign.” Then we walked west and he took my hand. While buying tickets for the Circle Line around Manhattan, I confessed to him that there had been no middle school meeting. (As a wise friend had said to me: “There are no all-day middle school meetings. Couldn’t you have come up with something better than that?”)

As we filed onto the boat, a photographer took our picture. We sat on deck in the sunlight, with German and Japanese tourists seated next to us. The breeze was soft; the guide made garbled announcements about Henry Hudson and the Little Red Lighthouse, and Michael touched the back of my neck. When we got off the boat all the photos of the passengers were hanging up for sale. There we were, a middle-aged widow and widower, in love.

LAST week I met his parents. I gave his mother the pink toeshoe ribbons. She thanked me, taking them lightly in her fingers. I reintroduced myself to her each time I entered the room. When it was time for me to return to New York, Michael’s father hugged me and said in his South Carolina drawl, “Welcome to the family.”

I told his mother I loved her son.

“We enjoyed having you here. We’ll miss you,” said his mother, holding the pink toeshoe ribbons, although it was not clear to me if she remembered sewing similar ones to toeshoes long ago.

It is almost time for Michael to plant his spring garden. A button broke on the cuff of his shirt recently, and as he stood with the cracked button in the palm of his hand like an offering, I could see him missing Nancy.

I hesitated, then went into the back of my closet and pulled out one of Willem’s shirts. Although I’m no Betsy Ross, I retrieved my box of sewing things, full of threads and needles from Willem’s mother’s Dutch sewing kit.

Working carefully with the tiny scissors, I snipped a button off Willem’s shirt and sewed it onto Michael’s cuff.

In the deepest depths, God is with us. In the continuing journey of life, God is with us. In the most joyous celebrations, God is with us. God was celebrating with us and our family as our daughter Emily married Sheldon this past May. Michael brought Patty to the wedding, and she met any number of weirdos in our family. But, thank God, that didn't scare her off! Here's the latest part of the story, from yesterday's New York Times:

Patty Dann, Michael Hill
Published: July 13, 2008

Patty Dann and Michael Hill were married on Friday at the Old Nassau County Courthouse in Fernandina Beach, Fla. Judge James C. Hill of Amelia Island, Fla., the groom's father and a senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, officiated.

The bride, 54, is keeping her name. She is a novelist and nonfiction writer in New York. Her books include “Mermaids” and “The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss (and Learning to Tell the Truth About It),” about the death of her first husband. She teaches writing workshops in New York, most often at the West Side Y.M.C.A. She graduated from the University of Oregon and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing from Columbia.

Her father, Mike Dann of Pound Ridge, N.Y., is a former head of programming for the CBS television network who now is a television consultant for the BBC in New York. Her mother, Joanne Dann of Glen Echo, Md., is a freelance newspaper writer.

The bridegroom, 57, a Johns Hopkins graduate, is a communications officer with Catholic Relief Services, the international aid organization in Baltimore. Until March, he was a reporter at The Baltimore Sun, where he had been a television critic, foreign correspondent and features writer.

His mother, Mary B. Hill, lives with Judge Hill on Amelia Island. She retired as a teacher and performer with the Ruth Mitchell Dance Company in Atlanta.

The bridegroom was a widower.

(To continue the subject from yesterday's post) -- More luxuries that we take for granted:

Hot water running from a faucet! Do you know how few people in the world enjoy that luxury?

A toilet that you can sit on! (In Tanzania, hotels/hostels and restaurants catering to American tourists have such plumbing installed. In fact, at the Mongai Parish, in a new building intended to house a vocational training school, exactly one such toilet has been installed! But, for the most part, Tanzanians "do their business" into a hole in the ground. Literally. The folks at the last parish we visited, Lositete, were very proud of their hospitality towards us -- in that they had dug a new latrine. It was in the middle of the field outside the church building. For privacy, sticks had been lashed together around it.)

Electricity that's dependable!

It's not unusual for Patty and me to turn off the air conditioner during the summer. Many summer days and evenings are lovely! (I actually feel sorry for folks who miss those days, because they refrigerate their houses 24/7.) Also, there's a theological reason for not using your air conditioner: one reason why many are blind to God's deep presence with us each moment is because they are disconnected from the natural world that God has created.

Anyway.

Last night we went to bed with the windows open. But we couldn't sleep. Even though the temperature was only in the low-70s, the humidity was just too oppressive. So I closed the windows and turned on the air conditioner. And do you know what happened?

Chilled air began flowing through the house!

What luxury! Indeed, most people in the world would think this: what unbelievable, inconceivable luxury -- that we can maintain a comfortable environment in our houses.

As I've been processing my trip to Tanzania, the greatest effect of the experience has been this: how we are surrounded by luxury that would be unimaginable for nearly everyone alive on the planet -- but that we take for granted.

Other examples. I've eaten enough food today so that I'm not hungry! What luxury, in global terms! In Tanzania, the average income is $1.00 a day. The average person (living in a mud and stick hut) eats once a day. The food is often ugali. It's much like grits that are cooked too much, so they are pasty and stuck together. It's eaten with one's fingers. The typical daily meal in Tanzania is ugali with some sort of sauce. Let Tanzania stand for most of the world's population, in terms of how well fed they are.

You and I are able to eat meat each day! In Tanzania, I ate meat each day. That's because we were fed as Americans, and that did make me uneasy after a while. The meat was usually chicken, with occasional beef. We ate fish, too, a couple of times. The fish was good, but the chicken and beef was hard to eat. It was tough and stringy. Why? Because the animals had lived "free range" (as we Americans so romantically call it), and had not been injected with all the chemicals that cause our meat to be so tender. Of course, there is great concern in our nation about the effect of those chemicals in our diet. But doing without them would take some getting used to! (For me, two weeks was not enough time.) So -- what luxury! Meat each day! Meat that is tender and juicy!

At the Shell station on Jamestown Road yesterday, a gallon of regular gasoline cost $4.04. How fortunate we are! In Tanzania, the cost of gas works out to be well over $7.00 per gallon.

Patty and I went to Brewster's one night last week. (It was neat to say "hello" to Joel Gillespie and Matt Sandridge, both of whom were working that night!) What a luxury was that visit to Brewster's! Refrigeration! (Ice cream is an extremely rare delicacy in Tanzania.) And I was struck by the luxury of being able to afford an ice cream cone that cost nearly five days' wages for a pastor in Tanzania.

Now. Is there anything wrong with air conditioning, and having enough food, and eating tender meat, and putting gasoline into our vehicles (which means that we own vehicles at all!), and getting an ice cream cone?

No, there's nothing wrong with any of those things...

... as long as we remember what unbelievable, inconceivable, unimaginable luxuries all of those things are for nearly everyone who lives on this planet.

We are surrounded by luxury. I would suggest that we respond to that with 1.) daily joyful thankfulness!; and, 2.) an openness to our opportunities to care for those who are poor.

I sit quietly
motionless
long enough so that the cardinal comes to within only a few feet of me,
grubbing,
pecking at the soil of the garden.