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In the Flesh
Tuesday August 17, 2010
The baby—Alexander Day—is three months old. Life is groaning forward again after a summer lived in 20-minute intervals at the breast pump, the awkwardness of a new baby in the house a little like coming home with a third arm. What do I do with this? I’m looking now at a little black box that contains souvenirs of the end of my pregnancy and his first days in our home. I’m not much of a scrapbooker, but I’m sentimental, so I save everything and throw it in shoeboxes marked with our names. Little time capsules, like Andy Warhol used to make in the Factory....
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Julian and Me
Monday August 16, 2010
My life keeps cycling though the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. Or perhaps she keeps cycling through my life. I don’t remember what first called her to my attention in the 1980s. But my copy of the Paulist Press version of Julian’s writings, published in 1978 as Showings (in The Classics of Western Spirituality series) is heavily annotated with my penciled marginalia. Newly baptized at the time, I needed Julian’s vision of God’s overwhelming love for us, a love so powerful that it utterly redeems our human sinfulness....
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Artist, Heal Thyself
Friday August 13, 2010
Last week, my mother told me that when I was a little kid she believed I would one day be President. We were alone in her hospital room at the Cleveland Clinic when she said this to me. She was minutes away from having surgery to remove a tumor from her brain. I didn’t know what to do other than to deflect and make light. I said I didn’t think it was such a desirable job these days. When I was in pre-school I played Abraham Lincoln in a history pageant. There are pictures of me wearing a top hat and a bluish-gray suit with wide 70s lapels and a brown bow tie. I am on the verge of tears, barely able to spit out my lines....
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Skin and Bones
Thursday August 12, 2010
This entry is not for the squeamish, but the following lines are not gratuitous. It’s just that a recent encounter made me wonder what it is that makes people recoil in disgust, and whether you can be inoculated against such things. The catalyst for my reflection occurred while I was cleaning out of a garage and suddenly came across a foot, and soon thereafter, a hip—a model of a foot, that is, and a model of a hip. My father was a surgeon, and drug reps used to come by his office and give him small plastic displays that could be taken apart, layer by layer, to reveal the inner workings of a particular body part. The purpose was to show patients, pre-op, what would be happening to them....
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In Memory of Azin Naimi
Wednesday August 11, 2010
In what seems to be the way of most tragic circumstances these days, I first heard the news electronically. It was an ordinary Wednesday when I saw the e-mail from the church’s listserv: It is with regret that I inform you of the falling asleep in the Lord of our parishioner Azin Naimi. As you can read from the information I received and from the Washington Post article below, Azin passed away in a terrible tragedy....
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Current Issue
Issue 71
Fiction by Larry Woiwode, interview with Joe Henry, art by Fabian Debora, essay by Barry Moser.
Good Letters: The Image Blog
