Christianity – Landing

Very Small Things

October 2, 2016

As the lesson said, “mustard seed,” I thought there must be smaller things than that, things so small that is the size of the faith that I have, like, perhaps a speck of dust. Last night I was taking the train home and suddenly realized that I had no money, and would never have any money again.

Then I played this game I like, which is, I need something/what do you need? Feeling poor (as opposed to actually being poor, which I am not) is about thinking there is something that would make you happy, you just can’t afford it.

This game worked well, as the 4 train stopped and went and stopped and went along back to Brooklyn. I couldn’t figure out what I wanted that I couldn’t have it seemed like I actually had what I wanted.

I had spent the evening watching a documentary about the New York pavilion from the 1964 World’s Fair. Many people have tried to protect and preserve the flying saucers on sticks that sit in Queens, patiently rotting.

The documentary was shown at City Reliquary, a place that was on my list of spots to visit in the city. When I walked in, a woman with nicely curled hair said, “Welcome, admission is free,” and I walked through a turnstile for no apparent reason but the love of turnstiles.

Among the incredibly adorable things they have are:

a dancing mannequin in tribute to Little Egypt, the famous burlesque dancer, and a (formerly) nearby theater founded by Fanny Brice
samples of soil from each of the five boroughs
a pretend wedding cake from a beloved Mexican bakery now out of business
rocks collected at Rockaway Beach
a listening station to hear “The Bridge” by Sonny Rollins, surrounded by information about the Williamsburg Bridge, which inspired the piece
pieces of stone from famous building of New York: the Waldorf Astoria, the Guggenheim
a hammer labeled “very old hammer”

The hammer was my favorite.

Earlier in the week, I had been to the Met’s exhibit about Jerusalem. (For the bargain price of $1.) They had stained glass windows, marble carvings, gold trays, Bibles and prayer books and Korans, it was all beautifully done. It didn’t move me nearly as much as the grubby City Reliquary, though.

They did have two manuscripts written in Maimonedes’s own hand, as the label said, and that blew my mind. In one of them, he is raising money to ransom people who have been kidnapped. In his own hand.

Six years ago, I went into a junk shop in Iowa City and found this little bronze Arab-looking guy sitting cross-legged, and I loved him, and bought him, and took him home, and then I figured out he was Maimonides. Maimonides is a strange person for me to love, since he is most known for his interest in the law and science, two areas which aren’t exactly my greatest passions.

After church I took the train to coffee, and on the way, I, and many of my fellow New Yorkers, had to walk a million miles under the Fulton Street station because not only is the 3 train not running today, the A and the C and the 1 are not running, either.

When I finally got on a train, there was this foursome standing next to me, four adults and a baby I was making eyes at, they were trying to figure out how to get to 96th Street, they had taken the train downtown to get uptown, which is the worst thing in the world except taking it from Brooklyn to Manhattan to get to Brooklyn again. “The weekend train is so awful, especially today,” I said, and then I chatted with one of the ladies. “You just gotta have patience, what else can you do?”

We chatted a while until the guy with her tried to interrupt, and she said, “Excuse me, I’m talking to this nice lady.”

Then I told her to have a nice afternoon, and I got off at 14th Street, and I felt like I had what I needed.

Wind

June 12, 2016

Maybe you did not go to church because God lets crazy people shoot fifty strangers. I have not been going because God has ruined my life in other ways.

I walked into a church, a church where no one knew me, so maybe I would feel different, and an usher told me not to sit down because they were in the middle of reading the lesson. Wouldn’t it be much less disruptive to let me sit down than to tell me not to? What kind of person tells people not to sit in church? It wasn’t even the gospel. I was going to leave.

I wasn’t going to leave.

The lesson was about Ahab and Jezebel and a garden, a long lesson no one would want to talk about. I had to confirm it was really about Ahab, and I didn’t just have Ahab on my mind, the way I always do when I am downtown, in Melville’s neighborhood.

I sat. On one side of me, a woman who also was doing the whole thing, on the other, a woman who didn’t seem to know the drill. In front of us, three people who were Asian and just sat. It’s a funny phenomena, here where churches are tourist attractions, so that church, and the big cathedrals, are both holy places and places people come to see holiness played out. Through the whole service, there was a group of people in back taking photos. The woman next to me was texting someone.

This is all fine, it’s just weird.

Why were they there? We were animals in the zoo? In Asia, we would go to temples and take photos and not pray. Why was I there? To feel better for a minute, to feel not trapped in being angry the church I had joined, that no one might notice I was gone, so petty. Or I was there because I had several times hit this church after a bad day, it was on my way home from my Manhattan job, and the side chapel is small and sweet and quiet, and the subway is right there, and it was bigger and more fancy town than my church.

The priest had to talk about the shooting. I had heard something bad in a minute of NPR. I am in full self-protection/healing mode, which means No politics, but still I had heard that. I hadn’t heard it was a gay club.

I’ve spent some small happy times in gay bars for the dancing or the singing. The reason a gay bar feels so safe is that I figure everyone there is at peace with him/herself, they had to work harder to become so, and they value tolerance more than other people, so I feel safe.

Like people should feel safe at church, but then, it’s been a year since another lunatic shot up a Bible study.

I got communion. I got to sing. I didn’t feel particularly better about God, in a narrative sense, but I did feel that things that hurt me were like pieces of armor or extra bones that I could shake off, rather than a part of my structure.

I was not feeling brave enough to go to doughnut time afterward.

I went down to the water. I am preparing this costume for the Mermaid Parade next week. I am going as The Sea. So it was research. What is water? It has four or five inch ruffles of white foam from the wind and the passings of the jet skis and the ferry and the Statue cruise boats, which could be rendered with white acrylic paint and dabbing with a bristly brush. I was watching the happy painter earlier in the week. His technique could help me.

Monday I went to the East River and looked out at it for a while. My anxiety brain cloud has been reactivating ferociously, so I was looking at the East River and waiting for my good drugs to take effect. It was windy that day, walking out on a pier to be surrounded by water.

It was so windy today, I lay back on a bench, with the Statue of Liberty to my left, and even though I was holding it down, the wind was so strong, my skirt a sail, it blew up and I was glad I wore clean and uninteresting underwear.

I don’t think a single soul noticed.

The priest said we can’t let people who use freedom another way take it away from us. What freedom really means. FDR’s four freedoms: of speech, of worship, from want, from fear. Why does God let people do that, frighten us for their freedom. Why do we let them?

I am used to wind. I don’t know why now I need water, water does scare me, big quantities of it seem like too much, for this midwesterner. It never scares me as much as buildings too big or too much sky, though. I was always a good swimmer, in my dreams, I can always breathe underwater.

Image: “Evening Wind,” Edward Hopper, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Get and Take

June 9, 2016

The woman was pleased that I was buying an umbrella. I had just splashed through Rockefeller Center, in three inches of rain, this made me laugh. Nothing was making me laugh at all, only actually wading in my sandals, running between the buildings there.

“Once we sold almost every umbrella we had, to this whole bus of people from China,” she said. She was so pleased, and so pleasant, I wondered if she had stock in the store, or the umbrella company.

That afternoon I was going to meet all these agents who could either tell me my life was worth living or not. So I thought I would try to calm down.

Under the red umbrella, I crossed the street to the cathedral. They were starting a service. I didn’t have time to stay for the service. I stopped at the St. John altar.

I did not believe in anything, except maybe I did believe in St. John, I felt nothing was his fault, not that I was again without a job, my career a mess, or that my ovaries had given up, or that, the previous evening, after I got home, I flossed and a crown popped right out of the row of my teeth. I don’t belong here! the crown said, just as I had crowned a whole afternoon of def con anxiety and thirty read-throughs, editing every other time and making marks for pauses and longer beats, then careful ingestion of exactly one and a half glasses of wine while I waited to go on so that I could stand in front of people and look and sound spontaneous and fresh and people could say to me, “You’re a natural performer.”

They were being kind, I know, but I was ungrateful and wanted to hear, “You worked really hard and persevered through the train you wanted to take not running and having to walk extra blocks, as usual, going the wrong way first, in the rain, in heels, on the brick and uneven streets of downtown, and you showed up late even though you thought people who are late for their own readings ought to be shot, what disrespect, what disrespect, why can’t you get it together?”

The sign at the St. John altar said candles $2, I realized I didn’t care what the sign said, I took out all my change and plunked it through the slot and took the candle and lit it, and God, the church universal, or St. John himself could take it up with me later that it wasn’t $2.

I got a pew and started the service with everyone, sang the parts.

I lost my St. John medal about six months after I moved here.

On my way out of the cathedral, I turned into the gift shop and in a revolving case there was a St. John medal, a heavy one on a heavy chain, right there.

I went to the counter and asked for it. The woman brought back a Joan of Arc medal, which was more than a little weird because the novel I was trying to get an agent to want to sell, thus telling me my life was worth living, the novel is about Joan of Arc (obliquely).

“No,” I said, “John.” Then I wondered if I should have bought the Joan one.

She brought back the John, I gave her a credit card because I am so out of my mind with exhaustion my checking account has too much money in it, I don’t know why, but I’m expecting that means any moment I will be overdrawn because of something I forgot.

I went back to the agent meetings. They went well. I enjoy talking about my work.

At the end of the meetings, a woman I had been talking with was suddenly a friend and we walked to an outdoor cafe and ordered drinks. She talked very fast and so did I and we had plenty to talk about. The waiter asked us to pay because he said it was about to rain. Then the heavens did open up, we leaned back under our umbrella and still we were misted. Heavy rain in New York City means nothing. When you are from tornado territory, nothing less than Shiva-level destruction impresses.

I got back to Brooklyn and in the last block before I was home, I looked over at a huge rainbow, I could see because there is a school across the street from us, an open piece of land, giving us some sky, and a huge rainbow.

Happy postscript: the crown that fell out was just a temporary one. Dentist stuck it back on in five minutes and $50.

Image: “Man With Umbrella In Times Square,” Ted Croner, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Patience

November 9, 2015

temp29552 Although I was in a neighborhood that is that supercool Brooklyn, I entered none of the charming places, instead I went into Dunkin Donuts.

Although it was a full sunny day and I had had a perfectly restful and productive morning, I hated everyone and everything, and I had decided the only thing that would make me feel better was a blueberry doughnut. I walked up to the counter and I said, “I’d like a blueberry doughnut, please.” I added, “If you have one,” and this jinxed me, as the woman said, “We don’t have any blueberry,” and I thought a beat, about not looking like the kind of person who can only eat one kind of doughnut, or eating a doughnut that was not really what I wanted, if I was going to eat a doughnut, I want to enjoy it like a little pig in mud.

I swept everything off the counter with one foul swept and I said “Yes, you do! Go get it!”

No, I just said, “Okay, thanks,” and walked out and told this lady who asked me where the subway was where it was and went down the stairs and waited for the train while someone played the banjo and I hated him for playing the banjo, what kind of hipster nonsense was that, the fucking banjo.

I couldn’t wait to get to Manhattan where everyone wasn’t trying so hard, we were just going about our business.

(Right.)

I was reading about the bombing of Berlin, and it should have cheered me either that my city was not being bombed to kingdom come, or that the Nazis were about to be defeated in my book.

I considered going on a hunger strike to prove how angry I was at life, but then I decided I should go to Chipotle like a reasonable human being, and just eat another burrito even though all I ever eat is burritos, half of them from Chipotle, $9 at a time, an outrageous price for beans, rice, and a tortilla that costs the corporation 78 cents. A guy was standing in front of Chipotle’s door. “I’m sorry, ma’am, we’re closed. We’re having trouble with some of our equipment.”

I was denied a blueberry bagel for my heart, and a burrito for my body.

I had taken a cab to my meeting this morning, and the guy drove me through Williamsburg, I was looking at all the Hasidic people who were walking around as if there was God, and I thought, I should really get out of the car and tell them there is no God.

Frequently I find seeing someone who is orthodox or Hasidic gives me a good feeling, like, well, at least someone thinks God (well, G-d) is real and tries to do something about it. It’s not the something I want to do, but, still.

When I went to church on Saturday, I was walking down the beautifully treed and brownstoned street to church thinking, I don’t want to go. Which is a rare thing for me, I pretty much always want to go, whether I’m getting off on the spiritual stuff, or hearing great literature, or seeing everybody there are so few of us, I will be missed, or sitting in the beautiful room with the blue and the gold angels and the dark wood, or just carrying out my routine, which I find so soothing.

Usually it’s enough that I want to say I’m a practicing Christian. I don’t know why I’m practicing, exactly, but I practice.

I believe in commitment, I guess, and practice, I believe in them, I just hate them, too.

I wasn’t mad at God, exactly, that would be cleaner, I was more just so sick of His shit that I was shut down. I listened, I took communion, because you only have to shut up and take it, and it might improve you. I got to hear a baby gurgle through the prayers.

I become sane and sober and mature, but it does not follow that my life is happier or easier. Life always has difficulties and sadnesses. And that pisses me off.

I miss people, it’s been a long time since I’ve been with my family , I feel exhausted from not knowing what’s going to become of me, and maybe mostly, there’s the fact that it is dark at 4:00 now. I really don’t wake up until like 3 pm, so this is bad, bad, bad, I already feel like a vampire.

I was back teaching in the afternoon. Another teacher told me about teaching “Harrison Bergeron” and talking about the Constitution and how fun that was. One of the kids came by and told me the Royals sucked, which was way delayed conversation from when I gave him shit about the Mets last week. Another kid asked me how much money I made, and then we talked about taxes and how they work, and then this:

“I’m never gonna be a teacher.”

“That’s okay, you don’t have to be.”

“I could never. I don’t got the patience. Teachers got so much patience, man, I would strangle a kid.”

“Well, you’ll probably get more patience as you get older, if you work on it,” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“You will,” I said.

Image: a portion of “Christ Presenting the Keys to Saint Peter,” made in Cologne, around 1315, Metropolitan Museum of Art.