Sanctuaries Lost

I want to avoid the philosophical and economic components that orbit around the word  “progress.” It’s easier for me to talk about how things I once loved have simply changed –changed by either destruction or such dramatic renovation that the “old” has disappeared.

Only memory is left; that deep reservoir of endless capacity, ever filling, continuously nurturing our eternal past, as if Lake Austin’s water level continued to rise but magically never flooded. Endless in depth, it feeds memory/fish and the fish simply grow bigger as others are added. But I am no fisher of fish but love my calling as fisher of memories.

After visiting my doctor the other day, we ate lunch and then wandered around Georgetown, intrigued by several wonderful old buildings, especially the courthouse, which had apparently been restored to its pristine beginnings. As I passed some of the empty stores or noticed the decay of the decorative exteriors, I wished in my heart that every store were as it once was, always new, as on its birth day, full of light and the sound of happy people engaging each other, buying and selling the world’s goods and services.

Here I’m in trouble already. My grandson could open the door and yell “entropy!” or add the battle cry of our struggle against inevitable decay: progress, change, and constant repair.

And memory.

My solicitous doctor, however, does not see “progress.” He taps my stomach and listens to my aging heart. There’s time yet for renovation, perhaps. In my own case, however, when it comes to my body, I do not reach for either renovation or renewal. Not here, not now.

That takes place in The Other World. Different landscape; different furnishings. Better air, more trees, and lions that rarely roar. He looks intently into my eyes. Can he also see the cataracts my optometrist warns me about?  "No, other stuff--your heart, as we've discussed before," he says quietly. "Would you consider an EKG?"  I eye him off once again, repeating our earlier conversations. “Your choice,” he says, kindly, as usual.

Let the shadow of entropy fall, for that shadow will fall.

I think of my new Swedish friend, Tomas Transtroemer: “Everything is now, now, now. Gravity/Pulling us toward work in the dark.” No, Tomas, Work in the Light.

While riding home, Lora eyes the GPS, her modern compass/Liahona. Into my mind creeps the whirrrrrring sound of ceiling fans in the old and now invisible Bishop Drug. I am 6, my mother sits next to me, tall on the stool; we dominate the special sounds and smells in old drug stores. We hear pills being poured into bottles and the quiet talk between the old man, apparently ill, and the kind, gruff voice of our local pharmacist, Lee.

The Mojave Winds blow. Playing Man is Working Man [ET, my Dad] tonight, remaining over the weekend in the High Sierras, in the Mammoth area, feeding hungry propane tanks with liquid fuel that warms the lodge and scattered cabins. Ice covers the narrow, two-lane road down the steep grade.

Mom and I inhale salt compounds, faint fumes of perfume. We hear the clanking sound of stainless steel, scooping up mounds of ice cream, a mound of delight, buried in the elixir of chocolate and butterscotch. Faye, our neighbor, smiling, adds bananas. “How are you two tonight, Dollie?”

“We are enjoying our Friday night reward food,” she tells Faye.

That was the Friday night ritual when Dad either worked late or played. Winters, he took to his skates on his brother’s pond or if in the mountains, strapped on his skis. If he played, we played, walking the crisp little journey to Bishop Drug.

Sometimes, however, we walked across the street and paid Maud Dalling [a dollar for Mom, 25 cents for me] and watched a movie. My Foolish Heart, with the husky-throated Susan Hayward or Red River, starring The Duke and a new guy Mom loved immediately: Monty Cliff. She looked for the romance and saved most of the westerns for me, on Saturday, where at 2:00 I could pull baby teeth with JuJuBees and watch Allen Ladd or Roy Rogers, or Randolph Scott. I think Scott made a movie every ten days. Yes, I saw every single one.

A cartoon and Movie Tone News. I knew each Saturday by 2:15 that we were winning the war. It wasn’t long before the deep, dramatic voice assured us, backed with grainy black and white footage that we were also winning the next war, the one in Korea, that was never even declared a war.  A cartoon with a mouse or a rabbit followed. And then the main feature, the curtains parting, the boxed up cooler air, rushing out over our spellbound faces, spreading like an invisible cloud.

Dessert then dessert. Could anything be better? Even though I sensed Mom’s occasional pain, masking the reward food, I enjoyed myself. And I never forgot. Were her movies, like Lost Boundaries, my first real look at black-white  relationships and the no-man/woman’s land blacks lived in after the Civil War. But they taught us in elementary school that negroes were free.  Did she plan my film-watching on impulse, or did she hope to instruct in these things?  And why did she read With His Eye on the Sparrow: A Negro Woman's Story?  Was it more than just a "read-aloud" book before bed?


Was it just the wind again? Cold afternoons, we escaped to our little library on main street. Out of the cold and into the warmth and the special quiet of libraries.  A quiet, frankly, that BYU-I could never capture.  It was a dating center; the books mere furnishings—only the ambience of a real university—the chatter centered in what Michael, my brother, calls “conversation about relationships and fabric.” What happened to our conversation about conversation?

I do know the childhood trips to the library were instructive and precious, as precious as her animated voice, reading Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytales to me at bedtime.  Books weighed more than Roy Rogers.  She helped me learn that.

Family specialists tell us we never forget the smell of burning autumn leaves and the sound of a parent reading. Mothers, do you sit next to your daughter and read to her? She may turn away, lost in the “real” world she loves, where Little Bieber resides. Years later, she will remember your voice, the soothing flow of words, your hand quietly resting on her leg.

Darkness is not the same once you’ve been read to. Ever.

“Oh, Brave New World.” 

Mom never deliberately guided me in the library. I think she trusted my heart her whole life, even when saw me wandering off the narrow path. Generally, however, she followed her bliss, leaving me to follow mine. My Uncle Roy and wife, Shirley, the sleepy-eyed one, her lips full, bovine movements, sliding through the days of her feckless life, saw daylight one Christmas and bought me Swiss Family Robinson.

I was never quite the same. Sometimes, even now, in my Late Winter Years, I go to the tree house, to what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the “tackle and trim” of that ingeniously created refuge. And the soothing sound and safety of the rolling sea, alone on that island. It's important to have a place to go to late at night. And I'm not talking about electronic screens, what Huxley called the "feelies" in 1936 in his novel. This "New World" Steve Jobs and the boys created had better be "Brave."

What are the vanishing landscapes in your memory lake? Can you remember Christmas shopping at, oh, you know, Sears or JC Penney’s? Can you smell autumn, the autumn you knew as a child?  Can you smell the smells of your second grade classroom?  The smell of wax?  The smell of chalk and paper?

I know, I’m drifting into the Land my grandchildren will never know.  I’m sorry. Chalk?  Blackboard? Quill and inkwell, anyone? Let us, as Thoreau invites us, “Go a-fishing in the River of Time”--and wish that time didn't flow like a river.  But flow it will, and it is not the same river a second after we put our toes into it. Ask, Heraclitus, the Greek. We live in a world of constant change, change that is constant-flowing like a river.  Mortality; entropy.

I leave you with Linda Gregg’s sweet review of our memory-lake. In “Fishing in the Keep of Silence,” she believes in a “God who thinks about poetry all the time, . . . repeat [ing]  “Happily to Himself./There are fish in the net,/Lots of fish this time in the net of the heart.” [italics added]

Sanctuary or Prison?

Last Saturday I took Cam, my grandson, and a fellow booklover, to Barnes and Noble.  I know, I know. You’ll tell me about Amazon and Half.com and the money I would save.  I know this, but I felt the need to look and heft and page through books. Books!  Paper, ink, brightly illustrated covers!

We came home with a very large sack, something like $150 worth of booty.  And so this week I have sat in the Texas sun, poolside, trying to forget the price we Texans are paying for the mellow yellow autumn sunshine.  Drought. Yes, I apologize to my Idaho friends who have begun to pay the price:  Ice and snow. Remember, however, my wise words:  "Weather is a state of mind."  I only wish I could live what I preach. . . every day, every winter.

And for this reason my first choice for Sunday afternoon was Neil White’s first book, a memoir, entitled In the Sanctuary of Outcasts.  How does a prison become a sanctuary?

White, a small-time publisher of magazines, finding himself strapped for money, desperately tried to keep his finger in a business that was oozing money like the Louisiana dike system. But it was like trying to hold back the Mississippi every rainy season.   White becomes a white-collar criminal.

Switching funds from one account to another, often where there was nothing but fabricated money to begin with, he was caught, tried and sent to Carville, a once ante-bellum South plantation, rescued by Woodrow Wilson as a refuge for a growing and unmanageable number of lepers—the Biblical outcasts—who until 1917 had no place to go.  Not a single state or city would accept them.

Facing a year in "prison," he learns about leprosy.  Interestingly enough, Carville becomes a “sanctuary” for him, as well as for the lepers and the broken-down, often immobilized, obese convicts. Both convicts and lepers could not be housed any place else in the prison system.  The criminals and the lepers—something out of the New Testament.

White introduces us to a cross-section of sick, physically disabled “convicts,” housed in one large wing and a host of courageous Lepers living in the second wing.

I am moved by such men as White, who can transform their surroundings into something “else,” like a cloudy, marrow-freezing day in Rexburg, or an ailment into something meaningful.

We are all in that business of "making the best of a bad situation." Certainly a job lost, [once a sanctuary--even if we didn’t realize it at the time] casts us into a kind of prison of fear, and I am sure a unique form of loneliness.  I assume here.

For students, my grandchildren, perhaps, a class or even a particular building, can become a “prison” of sorts.  I never liked the Eyring Science Center at BYU, because I don’t like the smell of chemicals. That usually means chemistry, a discipline I could not get my head around.  Sulfur, whew!  I wouldn’t make a good soldier either, even though I still try and convince my grandchildren that I was a Navy Seal in the 80s.

Let me leave you with the very epitome of courage at Carville—Ella Bounds, whom her father dropped off when she was 12, sick with Leprosy in her legs.  Now, at 80, she is up early, anxious for her paper and a cup of hickory coffee. Without legs, wheelchair-bound, she pushes her way through the long halls, singing out, “Ain’t no place like home.”  Do the math.  One building; true, rolling mounds of grass and flowers.  But one building.  Alone.

Those who like their reading in film form [streaming Netflix] might consider, “Bless You Prison,” the true story of Romanian Nicoleta Grossu, who spent 7 years in a communist prison for “traitors.”

She found God, memorized the several dozen scriptures carved into the cold cement walls that surrounded her, and transformed her prison into a sanctuary.  Later she found a whole huge Bible, which she tore into sections and handed to her inmate friends. They read their hearts into peace.

What about a short laundry list of possible prisons we may find ourselves facing now or soon?  Can you with God’s help, or the help of Buddha or that Energy Field Ella Bounds found, transform that prison into a sanctuary?

• Finding a major and then sticking with it until you finish; finding it hard to decide to decide.
• Living in a space you define as a prison, i.e., your own home, inhabited by other creatures called “family.”
• Living in an apartment without hope in the distant future of a better place to be.
• Finding yourself surrounded by people whom you find suffocating, those “Idiots,” Greg House calls his medical team.  Is there a Greg House in your life?
• Discovering the shock of realizing your marriage has cracks, is oozing river water, a dike ready to collapse.
• Facing a doctor who says taboo words like “cancer,” “neurological disorder.”
• Death—inevitable.
•  Looking in the mirror and facing the prospects of yet another Good Housekeeping magic diet.
• Discovering within yourself spiritual burnout [usually in your 40s], something Thomas a Kempis called “spiritual dryness.”  [The Imitation of Christ]
• Looking sideways at a child and thinking for a split second, "I love her—but I don’t like her..." 
• Looking inside yourself and realizing you have no desire to change.  How do I “desire to desire?” Asking yourself if you have the guts to plant the seed of hope, nourish it, cultivate it, and patiently allow it to grow.