Home is Where the Rain Smells Best

I feel no regret as the plane takes off from Dulles airport, partly because it is seven-thirty in the morning and I have been up since four, partly because it is summer vacation, and I am going home. Home. I settle back in my seat with The Grapes of Wrath unopened on my lap. I have been living in Virginia for nearly a year, but whenever I think of home I think of golden California. They say I am an east coast girl at heart; I was born in Connecticut after all. But I do not remember Connecticut at all. I was two when we moved. These days the east coast and the green of Virginia have been paying me suit, but when all is said and done, California – crazy, dry old California, got to me first.

The trip is long. Five hours on the plane, with one stop and one layover, is enough to try anyone’s patience. I am tired and my eyes feel scratchy from lack of sleep. My legs are getting cramped, and as usual the plane's air conditioning is slowly freezing me. I keep looking at the time, hoping it has moved, but it crawls at a snail’s pace. I try to catch some sleep, but I have never been good at sleeping in a moving vehicle, even if I have been up since four in the morning. I focus instead on editing the manuscript I have brought along, but soon grow tired of that. It is very easy to lose interest when you are on a very long plane trip. I would so much rather be on a train. A train trip across country takes several days, but it is leisurely and you can get up and move around. It is a mode of transportation that is much more friendly to the creative process.

I pull out The Grapes of Wrath again and find where I left off. The Joads are heading to California. I am heading to California. The Promised Land? Some may say yes, others no. The Joads said yes. The land of opportunity? Not these days. We are stuck in a recession as bleak as the neglected fields of the Joads’ homestead. Well, Promised Land, land of opportunity; whatever you may choose to call it, I call it home.

ïïï

California is dry. It has not rained much in the last year. Everything is brown and gold. The golden grass of California does something to a girl who has been gone for months. To see the wind, the ever-present wind, blow the grass gently or fiercely in turn, stirs the heart. You may say we are crazy. Oh, but it is true.

ïïï

At last, here is San Diego. I still have one layover and several hours left of my trip, but home is closer. I am now on California soil, so to speak. I begin to feel excitement deep in the pit of my stomach. It is either that or the motion of the plane. I wait in my seat as new passengers board the plane, bound for Sacramento. The seats next to me are empty, and I hope they will stay that way, but soon a man and woman slide in next to me, a middle-aged Oriental couple. They smile and we exchange the usual pleasantries of fellow passengers, then fall silent. I return to The Grapes of Wrath and wait for the plane to take off.

It takes off with the usual roar of sound. The woman next to me crosses herself and prays silently, much to my surprise, as that is what I am about to do. The flight to Sacramento is not long, and when we arrive I am glad to stretch my legs for a little while as I wait for my connection.

Another hour on the plane. This time, I sit next to a woman with a raspy smoker’s voice. She saves a seat for her husband who arrives soon after. He is a grisly bearded man with tattoos who smiles kindly at me. They are both very kind. The woman and I make small talk, and she offers me a stick of gum. They are on their way to Las Vegas. But I am going home.

Home. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our final descent into Burbank…” My stomach jumps with excitement. The plane lands and I step out onto California soil. Well, asphalt, really. But no matter. This is California. This is where I belong.

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I will never forget the golden hills of my home. It is nothing like the lush green fields of the east coast, but it still does something to me every time I see it after a long absence. It is ingrained in me like my love of music and writing. I never will, never could forget. It has a song of its own, that golden grass. The wind whistles through it, bringing in the scent of wind-kissed sage grass. I have never particularly loved wind. In fact, it often drives me to distraction. But it too is ingrained in me, as is the golden grass. Sometimes the wind brings destruction, but sometimes it brings life. It blows in the spring, whisking away the deadness of the old year.

ïïï

The storm clouds gather on the horizon, and soon they loom overhead. We wait expectantly, hoping for the rain. We have not had rain in so long, not real rain. The air is charged with the expectancy of the coming rain. The wind blows the clouds around, rearranging them until they are primed for opening. The first drops fall and hit the dusty ground.

I sit at my desk by the open window. It is dark outside, and the fresh, pungent smell of California rain wafts in. There is nothing like the smell of this dry country during rain. It is fresh and delightful. It smells of wet earth and rabbitbrush. I can never grow tired of it. There is nothing else like it. I have missed the smell of the rain. In Virginia the rain just smells damp, and the air is heavy. Here the air is light and crisp. I forget how much I miss it until I come back.

They say home is where the heart is. While I am not fond of platitudes and clichés, I do believe this one to be true. Though I have been living on the east coast for nearly a year, it is not really home. Perhaps someday I will make my home permanently on the east coast, and perhaps I will come back to California. Perhaps I may even, as my father suggests, go to live in Switzerland, though the possibilities of that are rather slim. But as of now, my heart is not in the lush greenwoods of Virginia, but in the golden hills of California, and the majestic mountains. But most of all it is in the smell of a warm summer rain and the rustle of the wind in the leaves. Home is where the rain smells best.

For Grandpa

Today, eight years ago, Richard Leo Ellis, my grandfather, went to be with God. 

I still remember the day my grandfather died as if it were yesterday. I was face-to-face with death. I had never understood death before, not really. I don’t understand it much now, though I have seen a good deal of it.

This time it was my grandfather.

I had seen him just a few days before, in the hospital. He was there because he’d had a stroke. I was sixteen, so I and my cousin Anastasia were allowed to go and see him. Children under sixteen weren’t allowed to come into the hospital, at least not the part Grandpa was in. The hospital room was small and white and bare except for the cards that all the grandchildren had made, stuck up on the wall. Grandpa was sitting up in a narrow hospital bed. He was wearing a light blue gown, and he looked tired. The room smelled funny. Grandpa hugged us, and he smelled like the room. We talked a bit, I don’t remember what about, and he squeezed my hand and smiled up at me, that smile that I remember and love so well. I felt happy, because he looked so well. He was going to get better.

We went back to my cousin’s house. That night we slept on the floor in the living room, me and my two closest cousins, in a row on the floor. In the middle of the night I was awoken by lights, and muted voices. Mama came over to me and whispered, “We’re going to the hospital. Grandpa’s doing worse.” She left, and I lay down and went back to sleep, but before I slept I felt a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Things were all wrong.

The next morning I got up and went the room where Mama was sleeping with my baby brother. She asked me to lie with the baby for a few minutes. I lay down next to him, and thought how sweet he looked as he slept. Then mama came back and said, “Did Aunt Marilyn tell you about grandpa?”

I shook my head.

“He died last night,” she said.

For a moment the world stopped turning. I couldn’t believe it. Then I started to cry, and I buried my face in the pillow. Mama stroked my hair, and when I looked up she was crying too. It hurt so much, but yet I couldn’t take it in. It was so unreal, yet so real.

There was a rosary for Grandpa three days later, and a viewing. All of us were there – Grandpa’s seven children and their spouses and forty-odd grandchildren. I could hardly keep from crying as we prayed each decade of the rosary. After it was over, I went up to the coffin and looked in. Grandpa lay there, and it my grandfather, but it was not. He looked so cold, and stiff, and waxy. I timidly reached out a hand and touched one of the hands folded on his chest. It was so cold and hard, and it felt so unreal. I started to cry very hard, and I could not stop. I could not let go of that hand, the hand that had once been my grandfather’s. I held it, and cried. Finally my aunt came to tell me that we were leaving, and I bent over and kissed the cold hard forehead, and said goodbye.

***

I was very fortunate to know my grandfather very well until he passed away. When I was just two years old, my family moved back to California from Connecticut, and we lived with my grandparents for several years until we bought a house in Tehachapi, not more than forty minutes away. After we moved to Tehachapi, we saw my grandparents quite often, and I developed a very strong bond with them.

My grandfather was a strong influence in my life. In order to tell you how, I should give you a little background on my grandfather’s life. These stories have been passed down to me by my grandmother and my own mother. I cannot vouch that I have them all down exactly to fact, but the meaning still remains despite that.

Grandpa came from a broken and unstable home, and was raised with no religion. When he was seventeen he ran away from home and joined the army during the second world war. After the war he became a nurse, and while he was working in a hospital in California he met William Maliglig, a young paraplegic. The two men became fast friends, and it was by William’s influence that my grandfather became Catholic. Grandpa has often said that their friendship was that of David and Jonathon. Grandpa promised to always look after William, no matter what happened, and he kept his promise until William died in the 1960’s.

Both my grandfather and his friend had a great desire to enter the religious life. But no monastery would take William with his condition, so my grandfather received permission to found a Benedictine monastery for handicapped men in the Antelope Valley in California. This experimental monastery did not last very long, however, and the bishop disbanded it after only a few years, and all of its monks were layacised, though Grandpa retained the status of an oblate for the rest of his life. During that time, Grandpa met William’s sister, Paula, and fell in love with her. He wanted to propose to her, but was unable to, as the process of being layicised was not yet complete. My grandmother told me that William told her that he had a friend who loved her and wanted to marry her, and in that way they were engaged. They settled on the property that had been bought for the monastery and raised seven children as well as their rather troubled nephew. The Ellises started a print shop and Catholic bookstore called St. Raphael Press. Whenever I think of Grandpa, I still see him standing over his presses. He loved his work, and he often said that he wanted to die working. I used to help my grandfather in the shop when I was little. Sometimes the help was appreciated, and sometimes it was not. There was the time I set the envelope machine on fire by stuffing too many envelopes in it, but we won’t go into that.

My grandfather had a great love for the liturgy, not just liturgy, but beautiful liturgy. My grandfather was not what is often called a “rabid trad”; he had just as much reverence for the New Rite as the Old Rite. He spoke his mind often, and he often spoke his mind about the deterioration and unfittingness of modern liturgical practices and music. His favorite of all the liturgies was the Liturgy of the Hours. Following the customs of the Benedictines, he prayed all the hours, at all hours of the day. One of my favorite memories of him is of him sitting in his armchair, praying from his breviary. He had a special chair in his bedroom, and he would always sit there to pray. It was comforting to see him there every day, and it is one of the things I miss most about him.

My grandfather would be the first to tell you he was not perfect, and perhaps that is true. Whenever the income tax people came around, he turned off the swamp coolers in the house and the shop, and since the Antelope Valley is dessert, they didn’t stay very long. But my grandfather was one of the most humble, dedicated, honest, deeply religious men I have ever known. He was always ready to help someone in need. He was well-respected by his fellow business-owners and employees. He was a faithful and good husband to his wife Paula, a good father to his seven children, and a good grandfather to his 40-something grandchildren. Grandpa could be rather stubborn, but most often to a good cause. He really believed what he believed, and made a point to practicing what he believed. He was a great defender of human life, as is witnessed by his seven children and numerous grandchildren. And he was wise. He always had something useful and helpful to say about any situation. My favorite of his many sayings will always be “If you can’t be modest, at least be vain.” 

***

And so I miss my grandfather. I wish he were here now to see what I have accomplished so far in my life. I wish he were there to see me graduate from college, the first of his grandchildren to do so. I wish he were here to say goodbye to me when I made the long trek across country to Virginia. I wish I could hear him say he is proud of me. Yet he is with me every day. He is part of my family, and so part of my heart. Our families, for better or for worse, make us who we are. I only wish I could feel his arms around me once again.

Someday.

Love and Cement

It seems like it was just Christmas and I was just marveling over the love of Christ who was born a helpless, human baby. Then, suddenly, it was Ash Wednesday, and I was receiving ashes on my forehead as a reminder of my humanity. Now it is Good Friday once again, and I am sitting in my little living room, listening to the rain fall outside of my window and reflecting on the Passion and Death of Christ and his supreme love.

Last night at the Holy Thursday Mass, I was watching Fr. Bergida performing the washing of feet and  I was brought back to my childhood. When I was growing up my father washed our feet at home after the Holy Thursday service. We would all sit in the living room after night prayers, and he would go to each of us and wash our feet in a kitchen bowl. I remember his gentle touch, and especially how he kissed the tops of our feet when he was finished. That small gesture has always stayed with me. My family is not overly demonstrative, but we know we love each other.

"There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends."

This has been one of my favorite passages from the Bible for a long time. It is such a beautiful idea. Today it takes on a new meaning. Every year I come to a deeper understanding of Good Friday. Every year it takes on a new meaning for me.

Christ died for us. I cannot stop thinking about that. This year especially it has been haunting me. He loved us so much that he laid down his life for us. And we did not even act as friends towards him. How much greater must that love be that he would give up his life in such a horrible way when we had abandoned him. When I think about this love, I am overcome. I want to love God more; I want to love him as much as he loves me.

Going back to a retreat from my senior year at college, the speaker, Fr. McAlpin said, "We did not only kill a God; we killed God. But he died for us. We killed him and he suffered it for us." I cannot stop thinking about that. Even though we spit on him and killed him, he did not send down fire and brimstone to destroy us. No, he spread out his arms on the cross, embracing and gathering us into his great love. Even though we continue to spit on him and despise him, he still continues to hold out his arms to us.

When I think about my faith, I think about it as one of great joy. I am not emotionally religious. It is more internal for me. Joy for me is not a shallow, sappy feeling. Those people who depict Christ in such sappy ways give me such a cloying feeling. They have it all wrong. Joy is strength. Joy is Christ dying on the Cross. There is nothing sappy or sentimental about dying on a cross. Joy is the love that is not little red hearts. Joy is the beauty of the Deep Heavens, the way C.S. Lewis talks about what lies beyond our world. The way the Eastern Church depicts Christ is how I see him: not as a bearded lady stuck on everything that we feel like, from necklaces and t-shirts to holy cards and bumper stickers. Not that, but a strong, almost heroic God who loves us in a way that is not shallow or sappy. It is the kind of joy that you get from the end of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, after you have struggled through the depths and finally emerged, triumphant, into the light.

That is the Passion and Death of Christ. That is love. It is still with us, even amidst the concrete and plastic of our world.

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A drop of blood upon each rose;

Its snowy heart turned crimson red.

A thorn pierced deep into its side,

A worm upon its bended back.

I lost my way upon the streets,

That endless concrete sea of houses.

Endless plastic, falsely lit

In light without a source.

And what is love? the ancients cried

And sought the turning stars in vain

While kings for glory strove to die

And queens wept for the day.

The asphalt meadows, fields of rock,

Showed not a footprint, not a sound.

His light was dimmed and thrown away

To rest within a garbage heap.

Oh, where is love? the moderns scoff.

In bottled essence, plastic hearts.

A dropperful applied each day,

Administered by those who know.

The rose is growing higher still;

Its crimson petals brush the sky.

Its thorns pierce out a piece of night

And let the starlight in.

A drop of red, a prick of blood,

Fallen in the whitewashed street.

There he is standing; there he stays

Amid the concrete trees. 

A Really Kindred Spirit

This year I decided to boycott Valentine's Day, mostly because I am sick of the emphasis our culture puts on love equaling money. If you do not buy an overpriced card and box of chocolates for the one you love, you are a horrible person. My roommate can tell you about the rant I went on about the capitalization and commercialism of Valentine's Day and how it makes being single even harder. Now that the overly commercialized Valentine's Day is over, though, I would like to say something about one particular form of love: friendship.

The rather obscure American author Elbert Hubbard said about friendship that "a friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you." How true I have found that to be over the last four or five years. Growing up in tiny Tehachapi, California, I did not have any real friends. I made friends with several girls, and I thought we would be bosom friends, but they moved away. Like Anne of Green Gables I always wanted a bosom friend, "an intimate friend...a really kindred spirit to whom I could confide my inmost soul." I was very close to my cousins Anna and Anastasia, but as they lived two hours away we did not see each other very often. I still am very close to them, though we live in different parts of the country and hardly ever see each other any more. I was honored to be a bridesmaid in each of their weddings this past summer, and I remember with fondness and a smile all of the happy and crazy times we had together.

I would not say that I was unhappy or lonely growing up. I have always been a bit of a loner; I love to sit by myself and read or write. I do enjoy the company of a good friend, however, something that was lacking in my life until I went to college, aside from my dear friend Hannah. Hannah and I met more than ten years ago when she and her family lived in Tehachapi. We became very close friends, and when they moved away not long after we became pen pals. I still have the very long letters (more than ten full pages) that we wrote. When we started college, we did not write as often, and our letters are not as long, but our friendship has not diminished. This past summer we had the good fortune of being able to spend a few days together, three of the best days of that year.

When I went to college I began to make more friends. My closest friend was, and still is, my roommate, Jennifer. After her comes my "inner circle" of classmates: Sarah, Jessica, Christine, and Clare. Clare and I did not become very close until our senior year, but when we did I was glad, because though we are total opposites, Clare always brought a ray of extroverted sunshine into my very introverted life. Sarah is the sweetest person I have ever met; Jessica is a wonderful, delightful, perfectly awesome-in-all-ways sort of person; Christine is a generous, empathetic, and delightfully sarcastic person; and Jennifer - well, Jen is my best friend. She knows me almost as well as my own sisters. I let her hear my stories in progress.


I love all of these girls for different reasons, and for the same reason. I love them because they love me, and they accept me for who I am. None of them judge me on my looks or how I dress or how I talk. They have always put up with my quietness and my orneriness and my very wide sarcastic streak. They have laughed with me, and cried with me. They have seen me at my best and at my worst. And they still love me, and are always there for me. We have had some very good times together and done some very crazy things together.

The same thing goes for your family. Your family is like a permanent best friend. They may annoy you until you want to pull your hair out and disown all of them, but they are always there for you, just like your best friends. And your sisters (once you all grow up and move out of the very extremely long sibling rivalry stage) are great friends as well.

I still marvel that I have such good friends. I cannot imagine life without any of them. My only regret is that I have not known most of these wonderful girls my whole life. To all my friends, old and new, I love you with all my heart and I thank you for your friendship. As Winnie the Pooh says, "If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you."

The World Undone

When I was about thirteen or fourteen I wrote a short story about a young shepherd boy who was one of the first people to see the newborn Jesus. It is titled "The King of Kings." I was very proud of it at the time. Now, years later when I read it, I smiled to myself. My descriptions of the angels and of the Holy Family are very simple and rather amusing: the angel that appears to the shepherds is "very beautiful and shiny," and I described Jesus as a baby with "a heavenly light about him and a sweet smile on his face." Perhaps this is not bad for a thirteen-year-old, but I would never write like that now. As I read the story, I realized some parts of it had promise, so I thought perhaps I would rewrite it.

I often get inspiration from the oddest things. Sometimes it is not too odd: a look someone gives someone else, a passage in a book, a scene in a movie, a dream I have. But sometimes it really is odd. For example, a few weeks ago I had inspiration for this revision of "The King of Kings." The boys I nanny were watching an animated cartoon called "The First Noel." It's rather goofy, but as soon as it came to the scene where the three kings visit Jesus I was struck with the wonder of it. Perhaps it was because I was seeing from the eyes of a child in a way. I really do not know, but I did know I had to work this wonder into a story.

These past few weeks as Christmas approached, I thought a lot, and still do, on the wonder of Christmas. Now that I am older, Christmas has more meaning to me than presents and pretty decorations. Most of all I have been dwelling on the fact that Christmas is about love. I ponder the love of Christ made man for love of us. The our God should become a helpless baby to free us from the shadow and darkness of death is a truly wonderful thing. I ponder the love of the Virgin Mary that she said yes to becoming God's mother. I ponder the love of Joseph, who accepted Jesus as his foster son and accepted the strangeness of his conception. That to me is sheer love. Saint Joseph is a man truly to be emulated. I can only hope that if I marry it will be to a man who has that much love, and that he will be a father to my children as Joseph was a father to Jesus. That is the most beautiful aspect of him in my opinion: that he was an unconditionally loving father to Jesus and an unconditionally loving husband to Mary. 

The love of Christmas is beautiful. It is joyful. It is humbling. I wanted to put all of these things into a story, and so I have done my best. I cannot say if I have truly done my thoughts and the beauty and joy of Christ's birth justice, but I hope I have come near. I hope you enjoy this story, and that you have a blessed Christmas filled with love and peace and joy.

The World Undone

By Clotilde Zehnder

It was one of those wonderfully yet savagely clear nights in midwinter, back when I was a boy of ten years. It was a night when the air hangs thick and cold and the sky is pitch black, broken only by the tiny pin-pricks of stars dotting its surface. It was my turn to guard the sheep for two hours. I was the youngest, so I got the shortest shift, but it was still long to me. I huddled in my sheepskin cloak, wrapping it as tightly as I could around me. It was the coldest night in my memory. I stamped my feet and sang softly to myself. I liked to make up songs just like my great namesake, King David. I only sang my songs quietly, when no one was listening. I was afraid my brothers would laugh at me should they hear my songs.

As I sang I watched the millions of stars in the pitch-black sky. No matter how many times I tried, I could never count them. I had a strange need to count them, to know how many there were. There was no explanation for this desire; I could not explain it even to myself. My brothers thought it strange. Even my brother Gideon, who understood such things, could not understand this desire.

My eyes moved from one star to another, then rested on one that seemed to burn a little brighter than the others. I had seen bright stars, and knew some burned brighter, but this one had a strange quality to it, a clear, golden sort of quality. As I watched, the star seemed to grow bigger. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. Perhaps I was getting sleepy. But though I rubbed my eyes hard, the star continued to grow bigger and brighter.

I began to feel frightened. I ran to shake my eldest brother awake. “Is it my turn already?” Beniah mumbled sleepily.

“Beniah, look!” I urged. My brother heard the fear in my voice and was instantly awake. “What, is the wolf pack returned?” he asked. The wolf packs sometimes roamed the hills and wreaked havoc on our flocks.

I shook my head and pointed dumbly at the star. Beniah took a look at it. “What am I supposed to see, David?” he asked.

I found my tongue enough to stammer, “That star. Is it not bigger, and brighter, than usual? And it grows bigger.”

Beniah shook his head impatiently. “You woke me to look at a star? I see nothing strange. You are imagining things again, little brother. Lie down and sleep; I will take the rest of your watch.”

There was nothing to do but obey. I lay down and pulled my sheepskin tightly around me. Perhaps my mind had been playing tricks with me. Already the star seemed smaller and less bright. I closed my eyes and soon began to feel drowsy.

I do not know how long I slept. Without warning I was jerked awake by a blinding light and my brothers’ voices crying out in wordless terror. I sat up, trembling all over. I could hardly see a thing for the light. It was a light unlike any I had ever seen before. It had an almost translucent quality and while it was pure white it was also every color that could ever exist. I thought perhaps I could touch it and let it run through my fingers like water.

As if in a dream I got up, letting my cloak fall to the ground behind me, and moved towards the light. No, I moved into the light and it wrapped around me like the cloak I had just abandoned. As if from a great distance I saw the huddled, shaking forms of my brothers on the ground. They were crying out to God to spare them. Their fear was palpable. It was the fear of the grave.

Yet though I was afraid, my fear propelled me on until I stood still, blinded and immobilized by the light. My tongue clove to the roof of my mouth and my feet became heavy as rock. The light’s source was a fiery shape that I could not quite distinguish. Every time I thought it looked like something familiar it was unfamiliar without perceptibly changing. It was frightening, awesome, and glorious.

The fiery figure spoke, but it was not so much speech as knowledge that filled my mind. My brothers stopped their cries and were silent to hear the words. The words that filled my mind were not ordinary words. It was pure beauty, light that had taken verbal form.

“Fear not,” the light said. “Fear not, for behold, I bring thee good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. To thee this day a Savior has been born in the city of David your father. It is he of whom the prophets spoke, a savior who is Christ the Lord. He it is who shalt free thee from the darkness and the shadow of death. Go and find him, and this shall be a sign to thee: thou shalt find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger.”

The voice ceased, but the light grew in brilliance, and a thousand voices filled the air in song. “Glory to God in the highest!” the voices sang. It was the sweetest music I had ever heard.

The song faded away after a while, leaving the piercing black sky and a fragrant silence. We all stayed as we were for a while, my brothers cowering on the ground, and I standing rooted to the ground. At last my brothers stirred and I was able to move my limbs again. We looked at each other in wonder. Had it been only a dream?

Yet the words of the heavenly being – for such we now knew it to be – rang in our ears: “Go and find him.”

“Shall we search for this child?” my brother Acham asked.

“We shall,” Beniah agreed. “Come, my brothers; let us make haste.”

“What is to be done with the sheep?” Gideon asked.

“Perhaps one of us should stay,” Acham suggested, though not at all in a hopeful way.

Beniah nodded. “That would be wise. We will draw lots. David must stay as well.”

I protested, and Beniah said, “You are tired, David.”

“Please let me go,” I pleaded. “I am not tired.”

Beniah gave me a long look. “That is not true, David,” he said softly.

I hung my head. “Well, not very tired. Please let me go, Beniah. I know if have been called to see this king.”

Beniah looked at me again for a long while, then he said, “Very well. Now who will stay?”

Acham said he would stay. Acham was the silent one who seldom spoke and preferred his own bit of land to all else. The rest of us set off towards the east. We had not discussed it, but it seemed only right to follow the direction of the star. The star appeared again, shining more brightly than all the others. As we walked towards it, it grew larger, and somehow we knew we were going in the right direction.

We came at last to a cave a short distance from the town where we and other shepherds were wont to take shelter on stormy nights. There we were greeted by a strange sight. The star hung right above the cave in the clear night as if it had dropped out of the sky to touch it. It illuminated the cave inside and out in a soft, unearthly light.

We approached the entrance of the cave slowly, timidly. None of us knew what we would see. What we did see took our breath away. I could never have been prepared for the sight I saw in that humble, rough cave that cold midwinter night.

 There were animals sheltering in the cave: a cow, several sheep, and a donkey. All of them were standing about, watching. I had never seen dumb beasts watch in such a way before. The expressions on their faces were almost, dare I say, human. They were looking at three people to one side of the cave: a man, a woman, and a baby. My eyes took in the man first. He was an older, kindly-looking man, dressed in the garments of a town-dweller. He looked weary, and his clothes were stained with the dust of a long journey, yet in his eyes was such pride and such love. He could only be a father, one who loved his child with unconditional love. I had never known my father. He stood beside the woman and the child with a protective and loving air.

My eyes moved to the woman and stayed there for a long moment. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my short life, and somehow I knew that I would never again see such a beautiful woman as she. She was not only physically beautiful. No, she had an air about her of goodness, and kindness, and perfection. One could almost call it a scent. I was unaccustomed to such goodness and purity, and it left me breathless. There was no weariness about her as there would be with a woman who has just given birth. This woman had a radiance about her, a joy that was palpable, a love that was tangible. I had never known my mother. I had a strange feeling that this woman was my mother. She was dressed simply, but she had a queenliness about her that surpassed her clothing. I had an urge to bow down to her.

But it was the baby, the tiny baby lying in a bed of hay, that truly caught my gaze. I could not tear my eyes away from that baby. He was wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes like any other baby, and all I could see was his little face framed by a fluff of dark hair. This baby was not red and wrinkled like other new-born babies are. His skin was smooth, soft as a bird’s feather, and radiant. Not sparkling or shining radiance, but pure radiance, like the pure radiance of his mother, but more so. I was drawn towards the baby almost involuntarily.

Beniah reached out a hand to stop me, and I froze. The baby was calling me, but Beniah was both brother and father to me, and I always obeyed him. But the woman looked up and our eyes met. She smiled the most beautiful smile and beckoned to me. I felt Beniah let go of my arm, and I approached the manger.

I knelt down and looked at the baby. He looked into my eyes, and I was suddenly weak. I was undone. In the child’s eyes I saw such things as I will never be able to describe, even now I my old age, with the weight of life on my shoulders. Perhaps I saw heaven, and hell, and life, and death. And victory. My short life passed before my eyes in the eyes of that tiny child, and I felt light as bit of sheep’s wool borne aloft by the wind. This child knew my inmost and deepest thoughts. He knew every hair upon my head. He could number the stars.

Such an indescribable joy came over me that I began to sing. As the words drifted from my lips my brothers fell to their knees behind me.

“My soul cries out to thee, my Lord,

the lord of my longing and my salvation.

I have longed for thee, my Lord,

in the darkness of my soul,

in the iniquity of my heart.

Long have I waited, late I have wept

and cried to thee in my endless sorrow.

Thou hast come, oh Lord of my life;

and thou hast turned my tears to gold,

and my sighs to pearls of high degree.”

I cannot say from whence the words came, nor can I say I had those thoughts and desires before. Yet as soon as the words left my lips, I knew they were true thoughts and desires. I gazed upon the child, and he smiled at me. I recalled the words of the angel: “It is he of whom the prophets spoke. He it is who shalt free thee from the darkness and the shadow of death.” I knew that I would follow this tiny, helpless babe to the ends of the earth, to the grave and back. I knew I would die for this child.

Then I bowed my head and worshiped the child. His mother smiled with joy and outside the stillness of the night was broken by the sound of heavenly song.

It was the bleakest of midwinters when a baby brought the world to its knees.

The Handwriting of the Book

I have never had the best handwriting, nor have I always cared to have the best handwriting. I used to tell myself that it was the sign of a good writer to have messy handwriting. Yet Jane Austen had an impeccable hand, as did J.R.R. Tolkien. When I was in college I was so disgusted with my sloppy writing that I set about changing it. Recently I started working on my handwriting again, with good results.

I strongly believe that we need to bring back the art of handwriting. Today we don't care about nice handwriting because we have computers to do it all for us. Ah, the fallacy! Because we have computers we are losing the art of handwriting. So many people have bad handwriting now, and it is such a shame. Like the printed book, handwriting is becoming obsolete. But the printed book does something wonderful to the human brain. When we pick up a book, the brain begins to work hard. There is physicality in reading, just as in many sports and activities. Text is a tangible part of the physical world; the brain regards letters as physical in order to understand the intangible concepts of words and ideas. When we read, the brain goes through the motions of writing. 

The brain also regards written text as a landscape. Words are the mountains and valleys on a map surrounded by a border. Paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. A book has left and right pages, and corners with which we can orient ourselves. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text. A reader can see where a page is in relation everything else in the book. There is also a thickness to the paper page, a rhythm in turning the pages, and a visible record of how far you have journeyed through the book. The brain is able to make a coherent mental map of the text. Paper books have a physical feeling of paper and words, and size, shape, and weight. For instance, we know War and Peace is a long book, and Heart of Darkness is a rather short book. People expect books to look, feel, and smell a certain way. (I know I do; I love to smell books.) When books have none of these aspects, reading becomes less enjoyable.

The digital reader, on the other hand, gives the brain far less of a work-out. The digital book is just a seamless stream of words. There is no map, no compass to guide the reader. It is difficult to see a passage in context with the rest of the book. A digital reader displays one, at most two, pages at a time, and then they are gone, leaving no trace. Studies have shown that people who read from a screen read slower, less accurately, and less comprehensively. Most people who really want to dig into a book and understand it will read a paper book. The digital book drains more mental resources, and it is harder to remember what you have read.

Handwriting has a similar effect on the brain. Writing requires the brain to be at work to form the shapes of the letters. Writing by hand differs from typing on a computer because it requires using strokes to create a letter, while typing is just selecting the whole letter by touching a key. The finger movements used in writing activate large regions of the brain that are involved in thinking, memory, and language. Again, there is physicality involved in writing a letter, a word, a page. People who handwrite more are shown to have better cognitive skills.

I have recently started writing my stories out by hand before typing them on the computer. I have never written poetry on a computer; there's something about poetry that needs to be written out by hand. Poetry is such a physical thing. I have found that handwriting my manuscripts helps me. True, it takes a lot longer, but it is so much more satisfactory, and there seems to be a direct link between the ideas in my head and what I write on paper. Something seems to get lost between by brain and the computer keyboard.

Please help me to save the dying art of handwriting. I encourage you to take some time and write something in your best hand throughout the day, whether it is your magnum opus, a letter to a friend, or simply your grocery list.

* Information on books, handwriting, and the brain taken from articles written by Phil Riebel and Scientific American.

In Truth and Time

To my father as he enters the ripe old age of fifty

“Veritatem dies aperit.” ­ ~ Seneca

The young man’s prayer at the dawn of the day

Is the old man’s prayer in the night.

The crying of joy, the song of delight,

Are the sorrows and tears of a life.

What are the tears at the end of an age,

And what are the sorrows of time

Beside the light that goes on through the dark

And burns all the brighter at night.

The dawn of day is a splendid thing,

A candle’s light in the dark.

But the men of old with their silver eyes

Go bravely into the night.

The song that once was wild and free,

And flew in the face of God

Is come to earth and burns in the heart

Of wisdom and courage and life.

The brightest of lights at the end of the day

Will burn into nothing but ash.

But the silver hearts of the men of the night

Will lead the path to the fray.

The song they sing will go on through the age

And light up the passage of time

Until it rests in the song of the young

And the hope of a new, brighter day.