I’d like to examine how three essays from The Best American Essays 2001 satisfy me as a reader and inspire me as a writer.  I offer my thoughts and some writing ideas based on the essays in the hope that when you read them and the 23 others in the collection, you will not only feel how deeply and intimately the authors speak, but also trust yourself to speak deeply and intimately.  In other words, the proper praise in the presence of beauty is beauty, the beauty of your writing.

Chosen by poet and memoirist Kathleen Norris, the essays in The Best American Essays 2001, the newest in Robert Atwan’s annual The Best American Series from Houghton Mifflin, originally appeared in literary and national publications such as The Georgia Review, Esquire, and The New Yorker. They are long, the kind of essays you curl up to read expecting transport. And you are lifted away– often to the psychological event of an author’s coming to terms with life’s difficult processes.  These tales of emotional and spiritual growth are spun around the idiosyncratic interests and obsessions of the authors.  Rebecca McClanahan reads marginalia in borrowed books and examines the gaining of confidence and the spirit to live.  Ben Birnbaum looks into prayer by questioning the way to pray and tells his readers how fully awake one can become.  Francine Du Plessix Gray writes about the work of grieving and the cost of failing to do so.  I admire much in each of the three essays (which are among an additional 23 in the book by other outstanding authors).

“Book Marks” by Rebecca McClanahan, from The Southern Review

McClanahan begins her essay citing she is worried about the woman who has written comments in the margins of the book she is now reading.  It’s Denise Levertov’s Evening Train borrowed from the New York library.  Our author relates that she thinks the reader is a woman; she knows the color of her lipstick from a mark on the book.  She feels from the phrases underlined that this woman is in the process of having her heart worn down and our author wants to talk to her, as impossible as that is.  And so she writes the essay, I believe, to make real the mending of her own heart.

 She has no way to know which of the dates stamped in the book was the one on which the woman she imagines actually borrowed the book.  This kind of knowledge doesn’t matter; our author has been building stories from marginalia for a long time.  By telling us about her early college days when she could afford only used books that were written in, she begins to relate the story of an unhappy first marriage, a loss of confidence, a deep depression and ultimately the lifting of that sadness.  She spins her story by talking about years of remembered marginalia and about people in her life who truly loved books. Her mother’s friend Carolyn, a librarian, was one.  When Carolyn is dying, she calls the author to help her sort through her books: “‘You can have whatever you want,’ she said, ‘The only thing I ask is that you don’t cry.  Just pretend it’s a book sale. Come early, stay late. And go home with your arms full.'”

I feel tears as I read because of Carolyn’s strength and humor and the way love of books binds people and saves many.  When the author has filled her car and is going to say goodbye, Carolyn hands her an envelope labeled “Woodrow Wilson Public Library, Things Found in Books.”  She says, “‘You’d be surprised at what people use as bookmarks.'” And I am again teary because McClanahan has captured on the page the way the smallest of shared appreciations between people is large, because of the beauty of seeing that what is most idiosyncratically our own can be meaningfully passed on, and from the hope that when it is my time, I will have a way to so skillfully say goodbye.  When the author arrives home, she spills out the “bits and pieces of stranger’s lives” and wonders what books they checked out and whether they finished them, and she talks about how when she is in pain, she devours books. We think of the woman she imagined at the essay’s start.

When I have lingered over the lovely words of the essay’s ending in which the author wishes to run after the woman who has been reading Levertov’s poetry on a seemingly suicidal trajectory, my mind wanders back to Carolyn.  Our author has mended her heart and wants to tell those who are lonely how it is possible, how it happens.  And Carolyn, the woman our author names her mentor, lives in the essay as one who knows how.

And so I begin to write.  I think of myself in the position of Carolyn. I imagine that it is the end of my life.  I have something unusual that I have kept or grown or chronicled and I call someone I want to receive it.  What is it? Who is the someone? Where are we when I pass what I have to another?  I want to think about this.  I want to write about this.  It is the start of my essay in which I hope to speak as deeply as McClanahan has spoken to me.

“How to Pray:  Reverence, Stories and The Rebbe’s Dream” by Ben Birnbaum from Image

Birnbaum was raised in a world “suffused with prayer” and centered around the devoutly orthodox congregation of The Young Israel of New Lots and East New York synagogue in Brooklyn, New York.  As he listened to the prayers and said them, at home and in the synagogue, on the Sabbath and holidays, over food and drink and before and after traveling, he was aware of how hurried people sounded when they said them. And because he knew the importance famous rabbis placed on praying, he began to worry:

…knowing what God expected of us, how could I make sense of the mumbled words, the tossed-off readings, the careless petitions, the hurried mumblings that so often passed for prayer and worship in the Young Israel of New Lots and East New York and on the streets and in the houses nearby?  How could I reconcile God’s demands and the demands of Brooklyn?

But then when he was 11 or 12, he read a cartoon story in a children’s magazine he found on a folding chair in the sanctuary of the synagogue. It was called “The Rebbe’s Dream” and it is about a Rabbi who is told in a dream that he must travel to see the wise Rav Naftali of Berzhitz. When he arrives in the village, he is told there is no sage named Naftali, but there is a peasant by that name who lives in the woods. The Rabbi goes to his cabin and spends the Sabbath with the peasant and his wife.  At every meal, the peasant’s wife brings out a banquet of food and the Rabbi has a little and the peasant has much more than a normal share.  Just before the Rabbi is leaving, the peasant tells him that should the learned Rabbi think ill of him, he wants the Rabbi to know that once he was attacked by bandits in the forest who wanted to kill him. He prayed to God saying that he was not pious or learned, that all he had was an appetite but if God would save him for the rest of his life when he ate on the holy Sabbath, he would eat for God, only for God.  Birnbaum believes that he knew then that he had read something true that could change his life.

Prayer, he comes to learn, is when we come before God in “selfless devotion” with all our might.  And he ends his long essay filled with much information about Jewish teachings on prayer with a memory of himself, a young teen, newly part of a minion, the ten men needed for prayer at synagogues.  He remembers the 20-30 minutes of hurried praying at sunrise and then the rush to “the long table below the bookshelves at the back of the sanctuary.” One man took the bottle of Seagram’s from the secret ark while another brought shot glasses from the kitchen.  Together the men took “into our bellies the first golden happiness of the day; crying out ‘L’Chayim’–To life!–in memory of some saint we did not know but whose death on this date was somewhere recorded, we believed. ” And then, Birnbaum, writes, “each man went off to business or breakfast except for old Mr. Auslander, who stayed to wash the shot glasses,” and the author, “damp-eyed, happy apprentice to the saints, who had to be in eighth grade and cold sober in an hour, hurried home in the new light…beneath muscled sycamores, in the perfume trail of girls from public high school, home to the dark-eyed mother in a frayed robe, home to the dying sun of butter in the galaxy of the oatmeal bowl.”

These words are a car driving me down the streets of my childhood, though I did not drink shots of whiskey in a minion of men in a synagogue. They are driving me down the streets of my childhood to the apartment building with the window I looked out of evenings when the weather was growing chilled and my parents had removed the newspaper they had lined the radiators with because now we needed the heat that the landlord never seemed to turn off.  I am watching the windows of the apartments across the street light up one by one, mothers in the kitchens cooking pot roast or hot dogs and potato casserole, children doing their arithmetic homework or watching Pinkie Lee on television, learning all about California and Disneyland.  Some fathers are home from the shoe stores they own nearby and some are still driving back to New Jersey from Manhattan offices in the garment district.   I am wondering if Steven Fisk will ever notice me.  I am thinking of his blond hair brushed straight up in front and the way it looks corn silk under husks.  I am watching a menorah full of candles, my stomach knotted from eating the Wonder Bread I’d rolled into balls with my palms when I came home from school.  I do not want to do my math homework. I can’t read maps.  I am writing a poem in the voice of a soldier on the battlefield away from home.  I am drinking in the dark world and I am alive.

So, when I sigh at the beauty of Birnbaum’s memory and chuckle at the thought of an eighth grader drinking a shot of whiskey in the morning, I want to write about something I treasured in my childhood that wasn’t necessarily done according to the rules but nurtured me and made me feel alive, made me feel that I could show my happiness without holding back.  I begin to let images flood my mind:  the man who invited us in each Halloween for doughnuts and cider and the neighbor boy who discovered him and told the rest of us and the way we knew the elderly man was very lonely and the way we cheered him enjoying his hospitality; the chemistry set with real chemicals that came in a blue metal box like a cabinet and the joy of working the formulas with my father and of sneaking the set out to look at the test tubes and dream about potions.  What did I do with selfless devotion and all my might like the man who ate so much on the Sabbath and the men who downed the shots in honor of the saints in the back of the sanctuary?  If I write about the window and Steven Fisk and the blue metal chemistry set and the man with the doughnuts, maybe I’ll remember the way the kids in the apartments of Stuyvesant Village came to see my father when they skinned a knee or bruised an arm.  He had studied chemistry. He’d wanted to become a doctor.  He was a pharmaceutical salesman.  He was handsome and young and the children liked to come to see him.  I am remembering how proud I was beyond all bounds that he was my father, and I am remembering the quality of my devotion.

“The Work of Mourning” by Francine Du Plessix Gray, from The American Scholar

Unlike the American penchant for doing things quickly, of expecting how-to guides to keep us moving toward an end result, the work of grieving is, Gray believes, “hard, slow, patient work, a meticulous process that must be carried out ‘bit by bit,’ as Freud wrote, ” and “over a far vaster amount of time than twentieth-century society has allotted to any ritual of grief.”  When the author was nine, she tells us, her father, an officer in the Free French Air Force was gunned down over the Mediterranean in the first summer of WWII. For almost a year, her mother kept it a secret that her father was not coming back.  Following her mother’s lead, the author denied her feelings about her father’s death for years.  Through therapy and writing, she realized her often-turbulent emotions were a result of repression and denial.  She writes:

…healthy mourning has to do with relearning reality; that we must cease to desire the loved ones’ return and must recreate a new psychic space in which we continue to love them in absence and separation. Above all, I now realize that information is our most valuable treasure, that we may have to learn those life narratives before we can begin the proper work of grief.

She couldn’t face these narratives when she was in denial.  Playing Ismene in a college production of Antigone, she idolized the docile, pragmatic character for her stance of prosperity and survival above all and hated Antigone, who honored the dead.  But when she can no longer keep turbulent emotions down and they threaten to overwhelm her, she goes to France and entreats her father’s surviving sister to:

share every crucial and trivial detail she remembered about our mutual lost love–be it his generosity, his expertise in tennis and Oriental art, or his heroism in war–I finally acquired the courage to return to the ancestral vault where he is buried.

Many years later, the author tends her mother’s grave.  “There’s nothing like a grave, particularly if your life was almost botched for lack of one.”

And doesn’t that line say everything about the cost of overlooking ritual and the length of time true mourning takes.  When we lose those we love we must make room for them in our lives and to that we must ache and let go and retrieve.

When I finish this essay with the image of the author pruning rhododendrons at her mother’s grave in the hopes that they will re-grow and thinking about the way she is in charge now of who her mother is by the way she remembers her, I want to remember through ritual, too. I want to write about the ritual I’ve made of watching the sunrise on the anniversary of my son’s death.  I want to create a ritual to honor my father, who died only months later and for whose death I haven’t had the energy yet to mourn though it will be a year and a half very soon.  I think if I set myself the task of writing, I will create that ritual out of the stuff of his life.  It may be small gestures, but the ones I remember him by:

Each night when my father returned from work, he climbed the steps of our split-level house and headed for his bedroom where he placed the coins and chewing gum from inside his suit pant pockets onto the top of his highboy dresser, his white handkerchief. too.  I heard the sound of the metal on wood between the words of their conversation, my mother and father behind the closed door of their bedroom. It was good the way they reunited.  It was good the way he came downstairs in chinos and a tee shirt, his lightly starched white shirt saved to wear one more day, his pants and suit coat neatly hung on the valet my mother had bought for this purpose.  This was a ritual.  I can still see the suntan on his left arm, the one that rested on the rolled down window of his mustard colored Chevy.  And then to the kitchen, where he spread a dish towel horizontally across the front of his pants and tucked the top of it into his belt. Then the chopping. The way he helped with dinner, the onions, the cabbage. “What else?” he always asked.

With what else in my ears, I think that to reconstruct the narrative of my father’s life, I’ll start with the coins.  The nickels and dimes and pennies that made their way into his bank shaped like a hydrant, the bank we’d crack open when it was full many years after he brought it home.  The ritual would be of saving, for each coin pulled from his pockets, a memory.  And in my life I can enact my ritual, emptying my pockets on the dresser, feeding coins into a bank and with each coin linger over a memory of my father until the hydrant is full. I can write about this ritual.

I am grateful to these authors for the human worlds they have brought me, for the way they have inspired me to examine my life as they have examined theirs. In sharing my reading of their work and the responses it generates in me, I hope I have sparked your desire to add to the conversation about how we move through our lives and how we hold on as we go.