ODDS & ENDS IX: Feeding the Lake, Donation Blues, Writing Mistakes [Sun, 10-17-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

I use Roman numerals to number these Odds & Ends columns because they are the Super Bowl of CIW…

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE LAKE, OR MAYBE THE STORE HOUSE

In Walking On Water, Madeline L’Engle cites Jean Rhys [British novelist, 1890-1979], who compared life to a huge lake of stories. It must be fed, by tributaries, or it will go dry, from evaporation and leakage. Some tributaries are big rivers, like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Others are just streams, or trickles, like herself, Rhys said. But it’s the lake that is important. The lake must be fed, so there will always be enough water that everyone can drink.

I like that image, but we need food as well as drink. I also think of life as a big store house of love. We each get to eat from it, and we each do our own form of gardening to add to it. Some of those who add are master gardeners, like Mohandas Gandhi and Jane Addams and Oskar Schindler. Others are just folks like you and me, who grow a tomato or two. But keeping the storehouse full, so that everyone can come and eat, that’s our job. All of us.

THE DONATION BLUES

Considering the section just above, I should be writing “Adding to the Store House of Love” march, but I went to Opportunity House with donations last week, and I’m thinking about how old men need to get rid of stuff but have a hard time doing it, at least old men of my profession, because for years we wore suits and dress shirts and carried briefcases, stuff nobody uses anymore, at least those who shop in thrift shops, where the donations go. So I wrote a blues song about it. More or less to the tune of “He’s in the jail house now.” Feel free to add your own verses…

I would be glad to donate

so it don’t go to probate

but nobody wants

a gray suit anymore

I gave a neatly folded

shirt of white

Goodwill tossed it

out at night

Nobody wants

a neck tie anymore

I got those nobody

wants a brief case

anymore blues…

TODAY [AS I POST] IS SUNDAY, SO…

In Marilynne Robinson’s Jack, a story of interracial romance in 1950, the most recent novel in her Gilead saga, Jack thinks about the sabbath and decides that it is a very good thing “to close the world once a week.” That’s a delightful phrase.

I think that a lot of our problems are because nobody anymore gets to have a day when the world is closed.

DEALING WITH MISTAKES

Going through old papers and found a thank-you note from the school--where daughter Mary Beth was a teacher--for being the writer-in-residence for their writing fair. I sat in a big room and each period another class would come in and talk with me about writing. The teacher in charge said, “The children loved talking to you,” which warms my heart to remember. It reminded me of the sweetest little first grade girl who asked me, “Do you ever make mistakes when you write a book?” I assured her that did happen. “Well, it would be a good idea then,” she said, “to write them in pencil, wouldn’t it?”

John Robert McFarland

“A myth is a story about the way things never were but always are.” Marcus Borg quoting Thomas Mann