I was baptized Mary Anne, named for two impossibly virtuous women, the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of God, and Saint Anne, her mother. They were the epitome of Catholic womanhood in my parents’ world. A baby name book told me that the names mean bitter and grace.
When I was small, my mother and I had a game where we pretended, just between us, that I was called Cynthia. I don’t remember how it started or which of us chose the name. I think she might have really named me Cynthia if she hadn’t been limited to Catholic names.
The day I started my first full-time job, at 16, someone asked me if I went by Mary or Mary Anne. On an impulse, I said “Mary.” I still don’t know why I did that. Maybe I was taking a step away from my parents’ image of me. (Maybe I was just anxious and flustered.) I’ve been Mary ever since to most of the world, although I remained Mary Anne to my family for years. Under both names, I’ve tried to be who I thought I should be. I’m still not sure who Mary is.
Sometimes I dislike the sound of my name on my inner ear. I’m not sure if it’s the actual sound of the word that bothers me. It might be the echo of bitter holiness, or the fact that it reminds me of all my inadequate past selves.
For now I will call myself beloved. Honey girl. Maria, the wind; Cynthia, the moon. Cuore del mare, heart of the sea.
The world sent me a message this morning. It said: “Hello there, square peg. You haven’t been making much effort to fit in lately. Here’s a nice round hole you might be able to squash yourself into. What do you say?”
And in the evening, life said to me: “Here are trees and sunset, twilight, moon, planets. Here are books, poems, pens and paper. Unfold into whatever shape you are tonight. Here is room for all your odd angles.”
Sent very few Christmas cards, all of them late.
Wrapped gifts at the last minute.
Didn’t bake the cookies.
Christmas Eve, midnight,
under the influence of moscato
and the Robert Shaw Chorale
(voices from my childhood
singing carols a cappella),
I look at old photos.
Me and my sister, eight and five,
standing in front of the tree
Christmas morning.
I have uneven bangs, an unformed look,
cat-eye glasses.
Her face is all smile
and happy eyes.
She had 51 Christmases ahead of her.
We couldn’t have imagined that many;
I can’t believe they’re all behind us.
In early July, I saw a weather forecast for the holiday weekend, and I was confused. Didn’t we just have the holiday weekend?
I was thinking of Memorial Day. The day after Memorial Day, my sister entered the hospital in severe pain, and on June 17, she died. Her last illness was confusing. In retrospect, her death approached in slow stages, but at the same time, everything was over before I understood what was happening. All through June I worked and met deadlines; I knew when the calendar turned over to July. But the knowledge was only word-deep. Time buckles under the gravity of grief.
My mother once told me that when her grandmother died, her family followed the old custom of stopping all the clocks in the house. I immediately grasped the potent symbolism of a stopped clock as a metaphor for the shattering impact of the death of someone close to you. It wasn’t until my mother herself died that I understood the need to carve from ordinary time a space for attending to the dead, a chamber to hold the immediate response to overwhelming loss and to contain the reverberations of the life that just ended.
My mother also told me that she was surprised to look outside after her grandmother’s death and see people going about their lives; even the buses were running. She was a child, and the death was so momentous to her that it seemed that the world itself must stop, as well as the clocks.
The world hasn’t stopped for me, but current events have become a play performed on a stage in another realm entirely. An important part of me is still in the chaotic landscape of June, of my sister’s last illness—the place where I lost her.
In this timeless space, the loss is still fresh and impossible to fathom. My thoughts approach her absence, and the permanence of her absence, and then recoil. It doesn’t seem possible. I spoke with her not long ago. She was just here. She’s always been here. How can she be gone?
It’s as if I imagine that I could leave the river of time for a while and linger on the bank with her in the place where she last was. Although I know she’s gone, I feel reluctant to leave her behind. But all the while, the river is carrying me away from her. I can see that she’s receding from me, silent and still now except in memories. I can see that I must carry my grief in the place where the clocks are still running.
The backstory: Robert Macfarlane tweeted about a book called Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary. I initially misread the title as Walkers’ Rhyming Dictionary, which got me thinking.
Next May the peonies and iris will blossom again. After this season’s flowers are gone, leaves will turn sunlight into energy to be stored by roots for next season. Some of the peonies I see now might go on blooming every year for decades.
These cicadas will be gone in a few weeks. But the urgent clamor and frenzied mating in the trees begin a new cycle. Young cicadas will tap tree roots for sustenance and live through multiple versions of themselves underground before they emerge in turn 17 years from now.
Will I be here to see the next adults of Brood X appear? Or, for that matter, will I be here a year from now, when iris and peonies bloom again? What new versions of myself might I grow into, given time? I contemplate futures, tracing paths through a cloud of possibilities. My body is preparing a future I can’t see.
This winter a friend told me that in my red-and-black winter jacket and my mask, I looked like a bird. I made up a common name for the kind of bird I am and then, while I was at it, wrote a guidebook entry for myself.
Spectacled Scarlet Sparrow: Red wings, back, and belly with black markings; gray legs. Typically seen in urban environments but has also been observed in wetlands and forests, particularly in karstic landscapes.
Flock size is typically small. Individual birds may be solitary or even shy in their habits, but they maintain contact with the flock. Known to fraternize with crows. Courtship behavior is highly individual.
Vocalizations include excited chirping (often when in the presence of other flock members) and, when alone, a low murmur that, according to some observers, sounds like the bird is talking to itself.
Diet varies widely and includes nuts and seeds, fruits, vegetables, and Cheetos. Notably fond of peanut butter, cheese, chocolate, and porridge.
Typically diurnal but capable of extended periods of nocturnal activity.
I got to see the moon today. The winter has been cloudy, and I was looking forward to an evening walk under a rising and nearly full moon, but when I went out, the eastern sky was full of clouds. I had some hope that the sky might clear, though, and a mile or so into my walk I did spot a very ghostly moon, just barely visible through the clouds.
Image courtesy of Pixabay
A little further on, I saw it again, slightly more substantial but tangled in the branches of a tree. From where I stood, only a small strip of sky was visible between the tree and a house, and I walked very slowly until I found just the spot at which I could see the moon unobscured by either tree or house. It was silly, perhaps; to me it felt like part of an ongoing game.
When I was very small, my mother would push me in a swing in a park near our house. As I swung, I noticed the moon bobbing up and down, sometimes disappearing briefly behind a tree. My mother would sing this song:
I see the moon,
the moon sees me,
hiding behind
the backyard tree.
Because of the way the moon disappeared and reappeared, not only when I was swinging but as we walked to and from the park, I thought as a child that it was the moon that hid behind the backyard tree. But at some point I recognized the ambiguity of the lines and realized it could be me, playing a game with the moon. Or maybe we were playing a game with each other.
I hadn’t understood clearly until tonight that those long-ago evenings are still with me in my love of the night sky. The child is mother of the woman, to paraphrase Wordsworth. I love to walk at dusk, when I can watch the stars come out and see the moon, if it’s up then. Sometimes I stop to admire it, storing countless mental snapshots of the moon in gaps between tree branches, or sitting between two power lines like a whole note on a musical staff.
Image courtesy of Pixabay
I have so many memories of the moon: very slender crescents, either really old or really new, sometimes with a bright planet close by; full moons that seemed to float gently free of the horizon and sail on into the night; serenely shining moons seen intermittently between ragged flying clouds; the daytime moon, pale and unfamiliar; a full moon rising over the Atlantic, edging each wave with liquid silver.
Seeing the moon today and recalling my mother’s song reminded me of something I read recently, a translation of part of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “For here, there is no place that does not look back.” Jane Hirshfield quotes this line in her book Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She goes on to say, “In this radical vision of vision, there is no difference between human and nonhuman, between sentient and nonsentient. All being becomes single, alive, available, and awake.”
That idea is deeply attractive to me, and I’m trying to understand what it might mean. It calls to mind the poem “Oh, Lovely Rock” by Robinson Jeffers. In this poem, he describes a camping trip on which, late at night, by the light of a campfire, he sees rock as if for the first time, sees “the real and bodily and living rock.”
Jeffers describes the rock in human terms (“the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness … It is here in the mountains like a grave smiling child”), but he also recognizes its non-humanness, its fate “going on outside our fates.” He recognizes that the rock will still be there centuries later, long after he is gone and the human world has moved through many changes: “the energies that are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above.”
I think this poem may illustrate what I’m grappling with when I think about the moon looking back at me. I don’t want to simply pull the moon into the sphere of the human (and from the context of his other work, I’m sure that’s not what Jeffers was trying to do with the mountainside he saw). I don’t want to view all of nature as single and alive and awake by seeing it as sentient or human-like. I want to share a gaze with nonhuman, nonsentient nature. The experience must lie beyond words, and I know I shouldn’t try too hard to articulate it. Being a writer, though, I make the effort to use words to point and gesture.
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The Rilke translation is that of Stephen Mitchell.
First image (moon behind clouds) by kalhh from Pixabay
I didn’t know the song “Ding Dong! Merrily on High” until about 25 years ago, when I heard it at a holiday concert at my sons’ high school. Since then I’ve been mildly obsessed by it; I have at least six different versions of it on my Christmas playlists. There are a lot of songs that appear more than once on these playlists, particularly the old traditional ones, but I think “Ding Dong!” might be the only one that appears that many times. Being suddenly relieved of a great volume of work and in a slightly goofy holiday mood, I offer a guided tour of the varieties of the “Ding Dong!” experience.
The full choir and orchestra version: Here’s the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra giving this song the full treatment. The first version that I put on my Christmas playlists, back when they were mix tapes, was probably something like this.
The dad version: You may not be familiar with Woody Phillips’s album Toolbox Christmas. I can’t remember how I ran across it, but I think of this as the dad version because I sent a copy of the CD to one of my brothers, a wonderful dad who likes Christmas music, especially novelty Christmas music. I was pleased to add something new to his collection, and I believe this was the second version of this song on my playlists/mix tapes. I’m still quite fond of it.
The brass version: I love brass versions of Christmas carols. This is not the brass version I have on a playlist, which is performed by Canadian Brass and organist Eric Robertson. The recording below is by a quintet of brass players from the Philharmonia Orchestra, and I might like their rendition just a smidge better because it’s pure brass.
The angelic version: The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, does a beautiful job with this song, singing it very crisply and clearly. I’m sure if a choir of angels ever had to sing the words “ding dong,” they would sound like this. This is the choir’s 2018 performance, but there are others on YouTube.
The a cappella version: I really like a cappella versions of traditional Christmas carols. This one is by the Armonico Consort and appears to have been recorded in some beautifully resonant space.
The jazz version: This is the George Shearing Quintet; I like the nice mid-century vibe.
The Old English version: This lovely instrumental version is from Craig Duncan and the Smoky Mountain Band. The album it’s on is called An Old English Christmas, but I think it would be right at home at a Christmas concert at Indiana University’s Wylie House, which was built by the university’s first president, Andrew Wylie, in 1835 and is now a museum.
The Irish Traditional version: I discovered this one, from Cherish the Ladies, while working on this post; it’s a medley that includes a few other traditional tunes. I’m going to add it to one of my playlists as soon as I post this.
There are other varieties of the Ding Dong! experience; I was surprised to learn that Roger Whittaker recorded it, for example. I leave further exploration as an exercise for the reader, if any readers are still with me.
How much Ding Dong! etc. does one person need? In my case, quite a lot. You maybe don’t need quite as much, but I hope you found something here to delight or at least not irritate you. Wishing you and yours health and light this holiday season.
