Heather King's Blog, page 59

RISKING REALITY

Okay, folks, here we go!

HEATHER KING is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: HEATHER KING’s HOLY WEEK Zoom Meeting
Time: Apr 6, 2020 01:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/573428264
Meeting ID: 573 428 264

Just download zoom onto your laptop or phone, follow the prompts, then next Monday at 1 PST, click the above link and it’ll take you to the meeting. I can help once you’re there for those who are unfamiliar with zoom.

On another front, here’s the link to a great read: a post by my New Orleans (currently Baton Rouge) friend Austin Ashcraft, whose blog is called “Risking Reality.”

Austin is 30, a tall, handsome, wild-haired adventurer/mountain man, who is also smart, funny, and adored by his Catholic-boy high school students. Unmarried Catholic women of childbearing age, when they discover he and I are friends, tend to approach, slip me their phone number, and whisper–“Could you possibly get this to him?”

Which I mention because the post is about the scandal of the Cross, and how we can never quite believe that we’re called to be just as unremarkable and undistinguished, in a worldly sense, as Christ was in his day.

This may become slightly easier as we age, I’m finding. But to be similarly called in the prime of bursting-forth life, especially in this era of social media and relentless self-promotion, often does seem a bitter, if not impossible pill to swallow.

An excerpt: “This man [Jesus] spent 30 years as a carpenter in a po dunk town down on the bayou (the Middle Eastern bayou that is). 30 years. After 30 years, there was seemingly nothing to show for his life. He had not done anything “great” or “”significant” in the eyes of the world. He had not climbed the corporate ladder of his day, started his own non-profit, gained a massive following on youtube or instagram, traveled around the world preaching and healing, served with the peace corps, become a religious “celebrity” making thousands of dollars to give a 45 minute talk, dug wells for clean water in Zambia, fed starving and dying children in Bangladesh, written a book to critical acclaim, established a well-diversified investment portfolio, given a TED talk, won a Nobel Peace Prize, had a Netflix documentary made about him, or become a famous ideologue for whichever end of the political spectrum, with an echo chamber full of faithful devotees, shoring up his sentiments of self-righteousness and self-importance.

No, he spent over 90% of his life under a self-imposed 30-year-stay-at-home order.”

READ THE REST OF THE POST HERE.

AUSTIN ALSO MAKES A MEAN JAMBALAYA!

LET’S ZOOM

Speaking of echoing that yes, here’s a thought: would anyone be interested in a zoom gathering? Just a kind of get-together and check-in during these challenging quarantine times.

I myself have historically been VEHEMENTLY opposed to all forms of online video communication and until two weeks ago had never once in my life Skyped or Face-Timed.

But because of the self-quarantine, all the meetings I usually attend several times a week have switched to zoom.

Which in case you don’t know, is a program/platform that’s super easy to install on your laptop or phone, is also easy to use, and because it works through wifi, is free. People from all over the world can participate.

The writing workshop I’m hosting at the moment has switched over to zoom, and though a small group, is working fine.

If you like, I can provide the basics of how to navigate.

I could maybe kick it off with a homely reflection of some kind and then whoever felt moved to could share for a few minutes: how and where you are; insights, reflections, a story.

To share our experience, strength and hope is Eucharistic.

I’m game if you are. Let me know what you think!

From a piece today in Angelus News entitled “Pope Prays for Media Helping People Endure Isolation:”

“Christian identity is not a card that says, ‘I am a Christian,’ an identity card. No! It is discipleship. If you remain in the Lord, in the word of the Lord, in the life of the Lord, you will be a disciple.”

Being a disciple, Pope Francis said, means being a free person who is “guided by the spirit” and “never subject to ideologies, to doctrines within Christian life, doctrines that can be debated.”

“May the Lord make us understand this which is not easy because the doctors of the law did not understand it; one does not understand it only with the head,” he said. “One understands with the head and the heart, this wisdom of the anointing of the Holy Spirit that makes us disciples.”

“POOR CLARE”: A PLAY BY CHIARA ATIK

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

I was scheduled to attend the performance of the play described below on Sunday, March 13. But like just about everything else in these uncertain times the opening has been postponed and the show was cancelled.

Nonetheless, the theater says the set is up and everything’s ready to go as soon as the coast is clear. So here you go.

The Echo Theater Company will soon be presenting “Poor Clare,” the world premiere of a play by Chiara Atik that offers a “funny, powerful, modern spin on the Middle Ages.”

The production will be staged at the Atwater Village Theater. Alana Dietze (“Dry Land,” “The Wolves”) directs. Chris Fields is the artistic director.

Here’s the setup: “Clare is just a regular noblewoman living in medieval Italy, trying out hairstyles and waiting to get married… until a man named Francis starts ranting in the courtyard. “Poor Clare” is about what happens when your eyes are opened to the injustice of the world around you — and you can’t look away.”

The play, set in 13th-century Italy and based on the story of St. Clare of Assisi, is nonetheless totally relatable in today’s culture. Clare and her sister Beatrice (Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson and Donna Zadeh), like teens down through the ages, are obsessed with fashion, boys and local gossip. Being rich, the girls also discuss these topics with their live-in help (Kari Lee Cartwright and Martica De Cardenas).

Like today’s young people, they’re also aware of the suffering of the world and along with their mother, Ortolana (Ann Noble),try to “give back” by organizing clothing drives and food distribution.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

EVEN THE DARK: POEMS BY LESLIE WILLIAMS

Award-winning poet Leslie Williams grew up in North Carolina, lived and worked in Washington D.C., Seattle, and Charlottesville (where she earned a grad degree in English), got married, moved to Chicago, had a son, moved back to DC, had another son, and moved to Boston area where she and her family have been for fifteen years.

She’s been writing and doing community and church work ever since, including teaching poetry and Sunday school.

Her first book, Success of the Seed Plants, came out in 2010 and garnered the Bellday Prize. Her latest collection, Even the Dark (2019) was co-winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition.

She has received several artist fellowships. Her poems appear widely in such magazines as “Poetry,” “Kenyon Review,” “Image,” “America,” and “The Southern Review.”

Most notably, as her website states: “She is always wondering about the Divine.”

She also hosts a blog, accessible from her site, that focuses on Scripture and is called “Finding the River.”

Of Even the Dark, her newest collection, Williams says: “I worked on many of the poems for probably fifteen years and they slowly came together into this book. Poems are a way of thinking through my role in the world and in others’ lives and are for me a kind of prayer and conversation with God. I also really like words and sounds and the music a poem can make.”

Williams’ poems soar, collide with reality, wonder, observe, ache. They are about the seeming paltriness and inefficacy of our love, and the way we offer it anyway, because the alternative—to withhold our love or to yield to despair—would be the one thing blacker than life, with all its suffering.

From “When Walking by Lilacs, a Burning Smell”:

“I’m overwhelmed: the sublime
perfumed featherings of lilac, never knowing what
to do for others but letting swallows make a home
here because I can spare the eaves.”

Moments that might bypass a less keen observer crystallize
as quicksilver shafts of light: shorthand messages from the world beyond.
“Forgetful Green” enshrines a stab of transcendence while gathering tomatoes
toward dusk from the garden: each dinner with family, in its way, a “last
supper.”  “In Which the Bread Crumbs Were
Eaten by Birds” reflects on the memory of a childhood friend lost to suicide.

“Even the Gladioli,” “Prayer that Starts in the Eye of a
Bird,” “Exile from the Kingdom of Ordinary Sight”: these are poems that grope
for transcendence in the missed chance, the offer to help rebuffed, our
inability to reconcile the human condition.  

“Create in Me A Clean Heart, O God” includes the lines:

“When my mother was sick
I didn’t go
I rolled over in my own bed
I thought she wanted

to be alone,
alone how I like to be
to keep my misery.”

The title is borrowed from Psalm 51, which runs in part, “O see, in guilt I was born, a sinner was I conceived.” The compact lines of Williams’ own “psalm” evoke our cognizance of original sin; our knowledge that original sin alone doesn’t absolve us; and the way our mothers both shape and wound us, sometimes forming us to be unable to show up for them just as they may have been unable to show up for us. Our absolution, the poem nonetheless manages to suggest, consists in our longing to be better, to love more deeply, to be less afraid.

These are poems, one senses, whose seeds were sown while sitting in the bleachers at a soccer game, or standing in line at the grocery store, or nursing a child.

“If American women earned minimum wage for the unpaid work
they do around the house and caring for relatives, they would have made $1.5 trillion last year,” ran a recent NYT headline.

Maybe, but how do you assign a price to poems of such rare beauty,
that germinated in snatched moments of silence and solitude when the poet’s husband was perhaps away at work and the kids at school? How do you cost-benefit analyze such precious works of art that might not have come to be but for the paradox of motherhood in which the insistent desire to bring life into the world requires us in some sense to die?

From her window one morning, Williams sees a young girl in
pajamas—“The parents, their only child, the apple, the amen”—pad down the driveway.

This might be the start of an idyll—except that the child is en route to another chemo treatment:

“Thinking of God’s Goodness While the Ten-Year-Old Neighbor is Suffering” reminds us that religion has no answers. Religion—our religion—patiently endures. It plods. It drags its heavy cross, broken and bleeding. It praises when there seems nothing left to praise, when we seem to be howling into the abyss.

Against the existential uncertainty that at times seems more than human beings can bear, the world has assault weapons, nuclear bombs, closed borders, surveillance.

We have St. Michael the Archangel.

The poem ends like this:

                                                                                                  “I do
believe a sickness can be rebuked, vanish with all the darkest
days; that they could return to singing. That one day this
devastation could be shadow only, a conquering. Where even
the dark is not dark to see. My God can do this but my God
might not.”

ECHO THAT YES

“Our Lady said yes.

She said yes for us all.

It was as if the human race were a little dark house, without light or air, locked and latched.

The wind of the Spirit had beaten on the door, rattled the windows, tapped on the dark glass with the tiny hands of flowers, flung golden seed against it, even, in hours of storm, lashed it with the boughs of a great tree—the prophecy of the Cross—and yet the Spirit was outside. But one day, a girl opened the door, and the little house was swept pure and sweet by the wind. Seas of light swept through it, and the light remained in it; and in that little house a child was born and the Child was God.

Our Lady said yes for the human race. Each one of us must echo that yes for our own lives.”

–Caryll Houselander

I’m always telling myself, Wow, you should really figure out how to describe whatever the hell it is that you do, or have to offer. A platform, a frame, a brand. Partly to be fair, in order to “get my work out there,” and partly, to be honest, in order to increase my income.

Try as I might, I have never quite been able to do this.

Try as I might, every time I try to fashion a “mission statement” or “elevator pitch” or some corny thing like that (or even to sit down and write for more than ten minutes), I receive an email asking me to pray for a wayward daughter, sick husband, errant priest, drunk employee, or vocation; thanking me because my work, it turns out, has for many years accompanied and helped shore this person up; or asking me to donate some service that will require time, sweat, and heart that I absolutely feel I don’t have but to the best of my ability generally try to give anyway.

Never have I been more aware that this way of life has been given to me as a mystery and a stupendous gift.

The other day, to that end, I was contemplating the difference between charity and sharing. Charity is bestowing from your excess, or doing for free what you would otherwise have been paid for; a comic doing a benefit, for instance. God knows there’s nothing wrong with that!

But sharing is giving from your substance, like the widow who gave her last two mites. Christ’s entire life is an example.

There’s no barrier, no artificial “You stand on that side of the line and I’ll stand on this side and afterward we’ll all go home to isolate. ” We of course maintain an appropriate zone of privacy, as Mary did, beyond question.

But women or men, we’re called both to give ourselves fully and to open ourselves to receive the world into our “wombs.” In order to protect, shelter, embrace. In order to mother and father forth new life into the world.

To be “pro-life,” that is for all of life, calls us to examine our consciences, acknowledge the many areas in which we are holding back, and to venture forth, in fear, trembling, uncertainty, vulnerability and awkwardness, to offer ourselves up in ways that, for me at least, are often wildly uncomfortable.

“Let it be done unto me according to Thy word.”

Both yes! And Ouch!

Blessed Solemnity of the Annunciation. I attended live streaming morning Mass.

“All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we knew how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.”

― Gerard Manley Hopkins

AWAKE O YE SLEEPERS

In shaky economic times I must say, I feel right at home.

Right away I descend into bunker mentality mode.

In fact, having grown up one of eight in a blue-collar home–our father was a bricklayer–I’m more or less always ready for a disaster.

I have enough semolina, bulgur, wheat berries, polenta, brown rice, pearl barley, farro and pasta on hand at all times, for example, that I could easily live, in a pinch, for probably a couple of months.

The other day I said to my little sister, “Remember when we had Saltines in milk for a snack?”

“Saltines!” she replied. “Try a torn-up piece of Bonnie Maid!”

Bonnie Maid was notorious among us King kids. Generally we fell upon food of any kind or quality like wolves. But even we drew the line at Bonnie Maid, a product that purported to be bread, but was made of air and fake sponge and bleached an unnatural, chemical white. An entire loaf could be squished into about a two-inch square cube, and we often made pellets out of the stuff and threw them at each other.

The point is we were the farthest thing from fussy. We ate home-made popsicles fashioned from watered-down powdered Kool-Aid, sometimes brought spaghetti sandwiches (on Bonnie Maid of course) to school for lunch, and cut slices of Velveeta cheese from a giant rectangular block that came in a cardboard box.

We also dug clams, caught lobsters, haddock, cod and bluefish, and had a vegetable garden. Everything we ate–pancakes and muffins for breakfast; shepherd’s pie, meatloaf, fish chowder for dinner—was made from scratch. We ate what was put in front of us and we were grateful, or grateful enough. Not one of us, all these decades later, is overweight. We all love food and most of us like to cook.

So Mom and Dad did us right, in any number of ways.

The other thing that formed me in this regard is my years in Boston during the 80s as a hopeless alcoholic. I pretty much lived during that time on Buzzy’s Roast Beef, Stouffer’s chicken pot pies, food filched from customers’ plates or the bus bucket of whatever divey restaurant I happened to be waitressing in, and Winstons.

I don’t eat like that any more. I haven’t made a Trader Joe’s run since the madness began but I probably will soon. Dried apricots, almonds, endive; yogurt, olive oil, cheese. My friends Bud and Craig work at TJ’s and are thus at this point in the nature of first responders or health care workers. Daily they’re exposed to possible disease, daily inundated with people, daily called upon to be cheerful and personable.

I like good food as much as the next person, in other words, but I’m also still not especially fussy. So when everyone in LA was running around moaning, “The shelves are empty! The shelves are empty!” I drove right down to my local 99-cents Only store and came back with three overflowing bags.

I saw my downstairs neighbors on the way in. “Did you go food shopping?” they asked excitedly. “Hell yeah!” I replied. “And I don’t know what everyone’s panicking about. Why, I just nipped down to the 99 and there’s all kinds of produce and cleaning stuff, trash bags, toothpaste, candy…and then if you’re worried about running out, like I bought a few cans of sardines and a big jar of crunchy peanut butter!”

They froze. I realized from their stricken faces that I might just as well have announced, “Hey there’s a special on botulism flakes down the street” or “I know a place where you can stock up on salmonella juice!”

I love this couple. They’re funny, generous, thoughtful, supportive and kind. They’re raising a two-year-old who brings the whole apartment compound joy. But neither they, nor 95% of my other friends, would in a million years think of shopping at the 99, for anything, much less food.

As I hauled my cans of Parrot coconut juice upstairs, I could hear them discussing the Instacart app.

Later that day I reflected that the way I was formed by my childhood and drinking years, though, doesn’t really have to do with food. It has to do with gratitude, with wonder, with a deep desire to live every moment to the fullest. A capacity to get excited about simple things, to mine the riches in the smallest, most unpromising situations. To be a person upon whom nothing is lost, to stay awake.

It has to do with having been the recipient of unmerited mercy, and of therefore knowing in my better moments not to take or to use more than my share. It has to do with being fully aware of how far I am capable of falling, and how fast. No one who has lived for 10 years in a welfare hotel with the bathroom for the whole floor at the end of the hall emerges without the mark of the poor in spirit branded deep in his or her soul. My neighbors in that welfare hotel in some sense sustained me during “the dark years,” and in some sense my heart is therefore always with them.

So last Friday, for the first time in a week, I went down to the 99. I could have driven and bought more, but the sun was shining after days of cold and rain so I brought a backpack and walked the mile or so instead. I passed a few others: mothers with strollers, kids playing in the yard, older people like me out for a constitutional, or trying to get away from their spouses, or just wanting to feel the warmth on their faces and see the spring flowers: golden California poppies, purple lavender, Western redbuds.

As I approached the store, a group of raucous guys loitered to the side of the parking lot: blaring a boombox, making vulgar comments, smoking weed, and passing around quarts of malt liquor. They were standing about two inches away from each other, and in general totally disregarding the recent strictures.

Inside, the shelves were stocked, people were orderly and subdued, and one woman wore a mask. There were cheap bouquets for sale inside the door, and signs saying “Cashiers wanted”–because who wants to work at a grocery store during a pandemic?

My own cashier was a young woman with chipped purple nails, a bad tattoo of a rose-entwined Cross and I’m pretty sure a wig who’d been spraying down the conveyor belt with cleanser and stopped as I approached to glance up and say, “I’m open.”

“How are you guys doing?” I asked. “Okay,” she said vaguely. Not wanting to chat, distracted maybe or just tired, and I suddenly wanted to hug her.

Instead, I bagged my own groceries, said “Thank you so much, take care,” wrapped my hand in a scarf before opening the door, and walked back past the knot of carousing guys–jeering and coarse, clowning a little too loudly, like boys whistling in the dark.

“I love the mountains, Lord,” I told Him on the way home, “and the trees that are in bloom. I love the sidewalk, the recycling bins. I even love the guys who are refusing to observe the rules and because of their carelessness someone may die: maybe that cashier, who probably has to ring up their booze; maybe me.”

“Or anyway help me to try to love them, because they are not one bit different than me: arrogant, selfish, out for myself. I don’t like to think of myself as a hoarder, but how many times have I barricaded my heart against The Other, my womb to new life, my precious time against ‘intruders’? Since when did I become such a lily-white, upstanding ‘citizen’?”

“And what about that (now hemorrhaging) ‘retirement’ fund that the world says is so smart, but aren’t we supposed to be people who are in the world but not of it, and have we ever seen more clearly how quickly and completely the world will fail us? Didn’t Christ himself say, ‘You fools, storing up your money in barns, when this very night your life will be demanded of you!’ ”

“So help me to love those heedless guys because the poor you will always have with you, and who can sort it all out, and Lord have mercy: on my pride, my failures of charity, my carelessness, my greed. ‘O wash me more and more from my guilt and cleanse me from my sin…O purify me, than I shall be clean; O wash me, I shall be whiter than snow’ “…

It was a beautiful walk, with the clouds edged in gold and the fresh green leaves unfurling, and made me feel sorry for all the people in the world with Instacart.

I returned with Benadryl, aloe vera skin lotion, fat-free half and half.

They were out of TP but I bought a single roll of paper towels, which will hold me for a while.

So “The shelves are empty”? No. Not by my lights. Not by a long shot.

CLOISTERED

Last night we Californians got word that the whole state is in “lockdown”– allowed to leave our homes only for “essential” activities: food, supplies, medicine, doctor, work. All “non-essential” businesses ordered closed.

I must say I am peculiarly well-formed for the cloister and in fact have lived like this for months at a time over the years, at various writers’ residencies, monasteries, cabins, hermitages and retreat houses.

Though sans pandemic, which does put a slightly different complexion on things.

My upstairs neighbor just returned home from grocery shopping at Sprouts and Target and said food except for milk and eggs is plentiful. Tons of produce.

Also, thank the Lord, we are still allowed to take walks in our neighborhood, either alone or with our families if we have a family.

Nonetheless I might purchase a jump rope. Important to attend to physical well-being, as well as spiritual, mental and emotional, during these uncertain times.

Never have I been so grateful for my plant-filled balcony and garden.

A downstairs neighbor just reported that this is supposed to last at least six months. Then he announced he’s going to build a chicken coop in the back yard.

The good news is I’m not alone or isolated here.

I attended Mass last Monday (the last time it appears for a while–or possibly, who knows, ever!). Funny, four days seems like a lifetime ago.

Kneeling in my pew after taking the Eucharist, I reflected that no matter how sick, contagious, diseased, bleeding, festering, mutilated or broken we may be–Christ never distances himself from us.

He enters into the closest possible solidarity with us. As Flannery O’Connor said, “You can’t be any poorer than dead.”

That’s a message of hope–and of love.

Here’s the link to a piece of mine on the connection between the 40 days of a quarantine and the 40 days of Lent that appeared on the website of the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Shrine.

And here’s a video I made this week, to remind myself that life springs eternal.

NOWHERE TO RUN, NOWHERE TO HIDE

I mean that of course in the best possible way.

Yesterday morning I went to Mass at the Church of the Assumption in Pasadena, then stayed for a Lenten mission talk by Fr. Francis Benedict of St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, CA.

That afternoon I got word that my gym had closed “till further notice” (they’re no longer even saying till March 31, which could be good news or bad news, depending on which way you choose to read it).

And last night Archbishop Gomez sent out word that all Masses in the Archdiocese of LA had been cancelled.

Nonetheless, the churches will remain open (probably at the discretion of the pastor) for Adoration, private prayer and Confession.

The church, the library, the gym and recovery meetings make up most of my external world. But I can adapt. And the interior world that has been formed over the decades by this very small, very unremarkable, version of the monastic way of ora et labora remains absolutely intact.

Thus my daily life is not very different than it’s always been. In fact, if anything, I feel busier than usual, what with people checking in, wanting to connect, hear a word of consolation, swap stories, jokes, reflections and insights.

“Apocalypse” means to uncover (same root word fyi as eucalyptus, which means “well-covered,” in reference to the cap that covers the unopened flower; note also the Island of Calypso (“she who conceals”)).

Much is being uncovered in these unprecedented times. One is the credo by which each of us has chosen, all along, to live.

One reader for example observed yesterday: “There’s something Dante-esque about the COVID-19 phenomenon. You’re not likely to die from it. But in order to deal with it, individuals need to self-isolate, voluntarily or otherwise (which amounts to… otherwise). The curious thing is that self-isolation is at the core of the whole modern project. You know, we can all be “masters of our fate” and “captains of our soul.” It’s as if we’re being told “You break, you bought it.” You wanted to be on your own? Be on your own. See how you like it. Like a circle of hell.”

Another approach was advanced by Dr. Tom Neal, who posted the following

“If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb [or in this case coronavirus], let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies but they need not dominate our minds.”

—C.S. Lewis, from “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

Finally, yesterday afternoon I talked to my friend Tensie from the Guadalupe Catholic Worker. Tensie, her husband Dennis (who is close to 70) and their fellow member Jorge serve the farm workers, poor, sick, disenfranchised, and broken of the Central Coast. Among other things, they distribute food and clothing, run interference with the health care system, provide shelter, and operate a free medical clinic.

Perhaps most importantly, they are simply present. They share birthdays, deaths, marriages. They listen. They open their hearts and share their time, labor, blood, sweat, nerves, wisdom and bread.

“Our people are asking us, ‘Are you going to shut down? Are you closing your doors?’ We are telling them, “No! In fact, we want to double down and help even more in this time of crisis.”

I was reminded of St. Camillus, the sickly priest who served during the Bubonic Plague and founded the order known as Order of Clerks Regular, Ministers of the Infirm (abbreviated as M.I.), better known as the Camillians.

The priests provide both spiritual and physical care. Besides the common three vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, the members of the Order take a fourth vow to serve the poor sick–even when they are infectious.

Even at the risk to their own lives.

ANGELA HEWITT PLAYS BACH

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins. Clearly the event took place pre-quarantine. Amazing how quickly things change!

People think Angelenos are “laid back,” but the fact is a
simple trip to a music concert requires nerves of steel, an encyclopedic memory for geographical layout, and a longing for transcendence that needs to trump all manner of danger and discomfort.

I refer in this case to a recent trip to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, which is located on “Little” Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

As you may know, this two-lane artery, lined with ritzy
restaurants, upscale boutiques, dentist’s offices, and plastic surgeons, has absolutely no shoulder or curb, is criss-crossed by one-way streets, has narrow, if at all, left-hand turn lanes, and is therefore basically suicidal upon which to slow down or stop.

It’s bad enough during the day but try driving it at night. Palm
trees were swathed in disconcertingly blinking fairy lights. Teslas, Porsches, Lamborghinis whizzed past at warp speed. The GPS went haywire and started giving directions even I knew were wrong. Gripping the wheel and frantically “navigating,” I realized I would have done just as well to close my eyes. Somehow I found my way and realized that in order to enter the parking lot, I had to stop on a dime—mid-block and with no turn lane—and make a sharp turn to the left and down.

Having arrived, however, I discovered that the Wallis is stunning:
 a 70,000 square-foot prime piece of real
estate between Canon and Crescent. The restored building, designed by Zoltan E. Pali of SPF:architects, has won major architectural awards. The original 1933 Beverly Hills Post Office serves as its lobby. Beyond that, it’s all airy ceilings, hushed carpet, chi-chi bathrooms, spacious courtyards, upscale “waterfalls,” and bartenders surrounded by shelves of fancy liquors: all very spacious and tasteful and classy, LA style.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

Fun times!

Have you noticed that suddenly, overnight, everyone is an epidemiologist? People you’ve known for decades suddenly have a brother-in-law, a very good friend, or a sister (always unnamed, and whom you’ve never once heard mentioned before) who just happens to be an infectious disease specialist and THEY say…

Suddenly everyone’s an oligarch: People you happen to know spend 85% of their waking hours trolling FB in their bathrobes start issuing imperious online commands: when, where and whether you’re allowed to leave your home; what household and food products you absolutely must hoard, I mean stock up on–else perish.

Suddenly everyone’s a psychic (even if we get rid of it now it will just come back even worse in the fall), a prepper (our supposed commitment to sharing, compassion for the poor, and the conviction that we rise and fall together all totally out the window), and/or a 100% apocalyptic alarmist.

At least four people told me yesterday, “I tried to go shopping and there’s NO FOOD ANYWHERE!”

I stopped in at my local 99-cents Only Store today and there was tons of food. Avocadoes, cherry tomatoes, kale mix, fresh mangoes, tuna, coconut juice and on and on. The checkout line was no longer than it would normally be on a Saturday.

It didn’t occur to me to go down the paper goods aisle, because I didn’t need anything there. As my brother Joe said when he called from Atlanta the other day: “Heath! They’re stocking up on TOILET PAPER! The stuff doesn’t even give you diarrhea!!”

I actually do know an infectious disease doctor and Brown professor, Dr. Timothy Flanigan from the Providence, RI area. I called him last week. He said social distancing for sure. No kissing, handshakes or hugging. He himself and his wife had just cancelled a trip. They were staying in more, playing board games, watching movies. He said Wash your hands. Other than try to go about your daily life. There’s cause for concern but not panic.

In other words, he corroborated the directives we all heard in the first five minutes of learning about the virus.

Tim is also a Deacon and what he said next struck me more. He said along with social distancing we need to find new ways of showing our love and support of one another. He said, “We can touch elbows in an especially warm way.” I added, “Our voices.” He chimed in–“Our eyes. Our body language.”

Then he added, “What’s really hard is that the people who are already way too isolated and lonely already are the ones who will suffer most. The elderly, the sick in hospitals, the lonely–and that includes many young persons.”

As Jacques Lusseyran, “Blind Hero of the French Resistance,” discovered during his fifteen months at Buchenwald:

“That is what you had to do to live in the camp: be engaged, not live for yourself alone. The self-centered life has no place in the world of the deported. You must go beyond it, lay hold on something outside yourself. Never mind how: by prayer if you know how to pray; through another man’s warmth which communicates with yours, or through yours which you pass on to him; or simply by no longer being greedy…Be engaged, no matter how, but be engaged. It was certainly hard, and most men don’t achieve it.”

Let’s hope we’re not all going to die. But if we are, wouldn’t Lusseyran’s be a worthy credo upon which to focus in the meantime?

For my own part, my decades of avoiding pretty much all television, radio, and social media “news” is standing me in incredibly good stead. All I need to know to keep abreast on any given day I can glean in two online minutes (and this week from the incessant emails that came through saying this, this, this, this and that have been cancelled).

I’m used to living in silence, forming my own opinions, going my own way, while also making myself available to others as fully as I reasonably can. That’s an MO that works, pandemic or not.

A friend sent this on yesterday, from Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky of Los Angeles ;

“The very last thing we need right now is a mindset of mutual distancing.”

“Every hand that we don’t shake must become a phone call that we place. Every embrace that we avoid must become a verbal expression of warmth and concern.”

“Every inch and every foot that we physically place between ourselves and another must become a thought as to how we might help that other, should the need arise.”

“Let’s stay safe. And let’s draw one another closer in a way that we’ve never done before.”