In the vast village of the world
Dear Nancy:
Your last letter, then Rita’s letter to both of us have stirred me in ways I’ve been trying to understand these last few days. I have wondered what I’d say in response to either of you from that that stirred up place inside and now here I am this morning, reading what you both wrote.
Rita. “In my novel HIDING EZRA, the antagonist (initially) who feels such an outsider to his home and family, and I’m also Ezra, who is the most comfortable person I’ve ever known in his own skin, as much a part of the land where he lives as the trees themselves.”
And you. “When I hold a book and read it, I feel the hours spent crafting, and imagining, and studying, and revising, and researching. I feel all the people whose names are not on the cover, but perhaps in the acknowledgments page, or perhaps not on the acknowledgements page, but who cooked meals and watched children and provided retreats and gave the book to their sister for her birthday. I feel a web of connections.”
Yesterday, John and I went to hear a concert and as we headed back through the streets of Baltimore, we came upon a car crash. The traffic was backed up, so we rode slow, past blocks of abandoned row houses, past deli’s and cleaners and a park with a building-size mural of jazz singers. And we suddenly came upon a stretch of sidewalk with speakers and a microphone and a man pacing and praising.
I was raised Southern Baptist. I’ve been a drifter toward Catholicism, a sometime Quaker, a practitioner of a sort of Mariolatry, a believer most in the holy power of silence, but it never fails that I feel it in my bones and blood when I hear a street preacher. And I suddenly knew what it is that moved me so much about the last two letters. As much a part of the land as the trees themselves, as Rita says. A web of connection, as you say. A village. I longed for home so badly as I rolled down the car window and listened to that street preacher for a minute it was almost real again.
The home I’m from is no longer there. I mean Hagerhill, Kentucky, a village of sorts. A stretch of Highway 114 in Eastern Kentucky that was bought up and dynamited and turned into new Highway 23, about twenty years back now. Still I dream it. Alvin Johnson’s store. Clifford Adam’s house across the road from my grandmother’s. Her house. The back bedroom with the fireplace’s open mouth, its kind red glow that warmed me. The back door that opened out to the warm house, its scent of winter potatoes and the cool spring running underneath. Neighbors whose names I recite like a prayer. Virgie Faye. Leota. Sylvia. Edith. Their faces, as a poem by Charles Wright says, like bead after bead from a broken rosary.
I am thankful, often, for the village that you and I are making with our letters here, in this brave new world of the internet. Its emails and twittering and linking in and good-reading. So many connections and so many statuses and experiences and moments. A seemingly unending chain of messages and events, likes and dislikes, events and announcements.
And then, like yesterday, I come back to it. Remembering. Holding still and tasting the past. The street preacher’s shoes scuffed the pavement. He paced and praised and I felt such longing it took me hours to name it.
Winter. Tea in a jar.
How my grandmother, those years back would, each winter, make a great big jar of Russian tea. Russia, that distant world that most likely, as Alvin would say over at the country store across the road, made it all up, that trip there and back to the moon. Russia. Rush-ee. Russian tea. It was about as far from Russia, that tea, as you could get with its mixture of Tang and lemonade and instant tea and cinnamon, that most exotic of spices in my grandmother’s kitchen. It tasted sweet and ooh, she’d say, it’s so good and warm.
I scroll down the pages of Facebook and read about illnesses and recoveries. About pets and meals. About books published, poems written, photographs taken. I love it all, but sometimes I think my own vision is drowning in a village that grows bigger and bigger, a world stretched thin with names. And I remember, like magic, steam rising from a cup of Russian tea.
I watched blue police lights break above a car crash and I rolled my window to hear that preacher man summon his god. For a little while I breathed it in, something as real and holy as the past. I held still for just a little while in this vast village of the world and remembered what is behind the words.
Much love,
Karen
