Confessions of an Accidental Saint – January 21, 2020

January 21, 2020

Lord, but it is cold here this morning, seven degrees.  I can barely move the pen.  At least there is only a little wind and no snow.  This is nothing like winter back in Maryland, where I entered the world. 

I was big at birth – eight pounds – which is what happens when you dawdle in the womb.  Infant pictures record a head with spiky hair.  Mother noted on the cute little card that came home from the hospital that I had one brown and one blue eye.  Heterochromia, doctors called it. 

January is a lousy month to be born when you’re a kid.  Everyone’s exhausted by Christmas and New Year’s, the weather is either snowy or cold or both. In that pathetic competition between children in the schoolyard, being born in the winter is somehow a personal insult, just as being born in summer was somehow a sign of divine favor.  ‘Monday’s Child’ – you know that poem, right? – is upgraded to a cosmic portent and we who were born in winter were all Wednesday’s Child. 

I remember at least one birthday party snowed out.  Craig, a schoolmate who was good at everything that mattered like running and throwing, sniggered on Monday.  ‘How was the party, Winnie?’ knowing it was cancelled.  Thank you, Eunice, for that nickname!  She is my sister, and I will get to her. 

Sure, it was rescheduled a few weeks later, but by then it was more pity than celebration.  “Poor Winnie!  Can’t even have a birthday on his birthday!”  Cruelty hurled from the swing set and see-saw on a daily basis.  It’s a good thing that children are small and weak because they are capable of pure white hatred. You have read William Golding, right?

Augustine did. Not literally of course, but he knew back then that babies were not innocent. “I cast about limbs and voice, making the few and feeble signs I could, like, though indeed not much like, unto what I wished; and when I was not satisfied — either not being understood, or because it would have been injurious to me — I grew indignant that my elders were not subject unto me, and that those on whom I had no claim did not wait on me, and avenged myself on them by tears.” Infants are little tyrants, relinquishing their throne only with great reluctance. Who would even want to remember those times?  What is infancy, after all, but ‘mewling and puking?’  No wonder almost no one does. 

I digress, which will happen a lot.  But like I said, you asked for it.  I have no memory of my birth, obviously.  That part is all second hand.  Nor do I recall the apartment where we lived.  But there comes a moment when you pass the first milepost, your first memory.  That day for me came when Eunice came home. I was three, sitting in the Ford Anglia that mom and dad owned, heading toward the same hospital where I was born and just a few blocks away.  Being a safe sort of dad, I was in the back seat (there were no seat belts then).  I have a coat on, being a cold March day, but also remember being in toddler shorts and that my legs were cold.  Dad is wearing his coat and a Homberg.  Why do I remember that?  Maybe because that’s all I can see over the back of the seat, and the bare branches of late winter trees through the clerestory of the car windows above my head. My chubby legs are spread akimbo on the seat, too short to hang over the edge, dimples at the knee. 

The brick wall of the hospital fills the right-side windows of the car.  Dad tells me to be good before he gets out.  Soon the passenger door opens.  Mother gets in, wearing a short coat, a scarf over her dark permed hair, and holding a newborn in a blanket.  They talk softly as he gingerly closes the door, gets in the driver’s seat, pauses to lean over and look at the face in the blanket. Then he kisses the mother with evident gratitude and care. They pull away, enthralled.

My earliest memory is feeling alone.  Writing that hurts. Seven decades of life cannot erase childhood.  More and more it seems to me that we age like a tree, adding layers. Whatever shape we had early on remains there, covered and buffered, cushioned perhaps or even amplified, but never outgrown. Wordsworth said, “The Child is father of the Man,” which is true but does not convey what I am trying to express.  Nothing really can.  O, that I knew the words that should be written here! Even trying to do so is a struggle.  I try to do it because this truth, of infant heartbreak, is bound to be painful for you the reader as well as me the writer.  How can I do this to you as well as me?

Writing hurts in another way as well.  I think, “Is this really what happened?  I was barely three.  How do I know whether I am making it up, or that I am hiding some truth behind another?  Am I, in some noble effort to save myself and others from embarrassment, using slightly adjusted facts, or leaving out messy facts, committing the weaselly sin of omission?  Even when I tell the truth, I am lying somewhere, if only to myself. 

No one ever talks about this part of writing, of course.  Writers and readers both dodge the sin by admiring the craft.  Read a review and see how much of it is about the writer’s craft – technique, language, style.  That’s what critics love, but they’re in on the game of course. And there is some lipsmackingly good writing out there.  Nabokov did it better than anyone with his brilliant oleaginous pervert Humbert Humbert.  Out there in literaryland, though, readers do this, too, especially sophisticated readers who have taste and discernment.  They regard great writers the way music lovers regard virtuosi, delighting in knowing how well they played that trill or double stop; or how the turn their literary double axles, or stick their rhetorical landings after an ambitious linguistic vault, to change metaphors abruptly and obviously. 

But I am no Nabokov, which is good for you, as you will be somewhat more likely to see through the amateurish paint job that covers my falsehoods. Though I intend to tell nothing but truth, what I genuinely know amounts to faded and torn pages, shreds and shards, rusted parts which I have assembled here like a car built from the salvage of a scrap yard. I need you to see that and look with gimlet eyes on whatever you read. 

This self-flagellating part of him was something Jacob was used to seeing in person and often entertaining so long as it did not go on for long.  Albrecht was hardest on himself, and at peak aggravation could be hysterically funny while doing it.  Seeing it written down, though, was irritating, as if it were a kind of neurotic tic the way other people say ‘you know’ every second sentence, or fiddle with their hair.

And “written,” literally means just that, written by hand, in a style that careened along between American Painter, Japanese Sosho, and Carolingian Miniscule.  Page upon page, disjointed facts alongside erudite quotes.  There were not that many books in the bungalow.  He was citing from memory, which was also something he knew about Albrecht.  But given what he said, how accurately? Was Jacob being conscripted as his fact checker?

Then Jacob remembered: he wants this to be frustrating, and he was succeeding marvelously.  What he was writing about – the events of his life – are stultifyingly ordinary, and he wanted Jacob to realize that.  He also foresaw that Albrecht would continue to do so by dragging him almost diaper by diaper through his infancy.  With a deep breath Jacob resumed,

Sometime later – at least I think it was later – that rejection came back. It was summer, Maryland summer, which is reliably hot and sticky.  On the worst days you felt like a large dog was panting on the back of your head, making you almost nauseous.  I was at day camp, because the previous summer I went to sleep away camp and came home unhappy with that experience. 

Come to think, as I write, that earlier experience was the set up for the one I am thinking about.  Forgive me for complicating things and leaping back and forth in time, but the mind – my mind at least – does not care when something happens.  Whether it was last year or fifty years ago, memories are equal; they are in cahoots. Listening to my thoughts is like reading the Talmud, where voices talk across time, with no thought to cause and effect.  Therefore, you will have to hear both stories, and as I think about that one, there is even a third and fourth! 

“Just start, Albrecht!” I hear you thinking.

Jacob was thinking exactly that, which amused him.

In those days, middle class parents sent their children to summer camp.  First came day camp, when they would deliver a child to a group that would then rumble out into the woods not too far away, for swimming, and to do crafts, and sing songs and have lunch.  No doubt it was to give kids fresh air and healthy exercise but just as much to relieve parents of childcare during summer vacation.  I was eight that summer when we spent a night at the overnight camp where older kids were, preparing us for sleep away camp the next summer.  Onto the bus we went, handing our lunch sacks to the adult in charge to be stored for the next day.

I do not remember what we did that day but cannot forget what happened the next day as we sat down for lunch and the counselor asked me what I brought and said, “a cheese sandwich.”  She took the lunch from me and saw that it also had mayonnaise and said, “Oh, the mayonnaise has gone bad.  You can’t eat this.  You should have told me so we could have stored it in the ice box.”  Eyes turned toward me, and I felt my face get hot. 

This was not entirely new.  All my kid comrades including cruel Craig from school who saw my odd eyes right away and said “your eyes are weird” seized on anything to mock or ridicule.  The word they used would vary when it came to my eyes and hair – ‘weird,’ ‘creepy,’ ‘strange’ – and their faces would kind of screw up as though they had seen a dead squirrel or smelt a fart.  Even adults, though they said nothing, could not keep their faces from looking unsettled.  Thus, when the well-meaning counselor threw my lunch away, my little mind went to that place which did not have words then.  Even now to assign “shame” or “guilt” would be too small for it.  I felt as if I had some modern form of leprosy from which people drew back in disgust.

That’s what the “should have known” felt like, though it was factually impossible. What kid knows that mayonnaise goes bad?  But to my mind I had messed up and everyone knew.  Cadging food from the other kids so I had something to eat, they now resented losing part of their lunch as well, underscoring the fact that I had failed and now everyone else was paying for it.

That story is what you need to understand the next story.  I went to that sleep away camp the next summer and the same sort of thing happened, reinforcing the idea that I was as odd outside as I felt inside.  While checking in a man at a card table said, “How much money for the trading post?”  The question made no sense to me.  “What is a trading post?” thought I.  But unsure of what to say I just stood there.  Tears began to well up, for clearly, I should have known.  An adult asked the question, and adults know more than children.  My inability to respond was clearly my fault. 

By now I was crying, which even young boys know is a mark of failure, but I could not stop my tears – further evidence of my oddness.  See how things pile up? 

“It’s OK,” said another man in the room. “His parents sent it in with the registration.”  Did my parents tell me that, though?  I did not remember that they did.  Maybe they did and I forgot, which again makes it my fault.  Such were my thoughts, though they were hardly so articulate then; more like a hum of dread like the sound of cicadas, a physical sensation that said I was unqualified for this world.

“Are your eyes different colors?” said the first man, narrowing his eyes as he stared.

I haven’t yet told the story that first came to mind, have I?  You needed to hear those two to understand the impact the last one had.  Twice I felt mortified, which is exactly the right word because each was a little death.  Humiliated is a close cousin, coming from the word for dirt.  One who is humiliated is pressed down into the dirt, which is death, right?  With that in mind let’s get to the original story I had in mind.

I was on a horse at a new day camp, because I had no desire to go back to a sleepaway camp.  We learned to mount and walk and trot, and I was proud to have learnt this.  So much so that one morning, at my request, mother stayed to watch us exercise the horses.  Because Eunice and Sebastian were with her, mother opened the sunroof of our red and white VW bus to stand on the seat and see from the parking lot, which was next to the riding ring. 

I noticed her as we came out of the stable on our mounts, walking in single file around the ring, our legs barely spanning the broad backs of our horses.  I waved.  The instructor told us to go to a trot, and one by one we began trotting.  Perhaps I allowed too much space or hesitated.  Whatever the reason, my horse decided to close the gap by cantering, something we had not done yet, which also increased my bouncing in the saddle such that in a few seconds my right foot slipped the stirrup, and I slid off the horse and fell onto the track.  Shaken, bumped, and scared by the experience, tears came readily.  Looking toward the parking lot, mother was driving away. 

My ink is threatening to freeze.  According to Shag at the post office a new virus has landed in Washington State. 

Somewhere Jacob read that the greatest saints come from the greatest sinners, but young Albrecht was hardly a sinner at all.  He was just a kid who somehow had developed the conviction of sin without actually committing them.  People love conversion stories, the sins as much as the conversions, but Albrecht was doing it backwards.  If Luther said, “the Lord loveth a lusty sinner,” meaning one who at least enjoyed his mischiefs, then it stands to reason that the Lord loatheth pathetic sinners.

Jacob then remembered Albrecht recommended he read the autobiography of Teresa of Avila, “She is a soulmate,” he said, leaving Jacob befuddled; she, that self-flagellating over pious nun?   He was nothing like her, but there it was on Albrecht’s shelf.  Curious, and needing a break, he took it down and opened to an early page, dog-eared long ago.  Taken by a slightly older cousin, who enjoyed gossip she writes of herself as a teenager:

My own wickedness sufficed to lead me into sin, together with the servants we had, whom I found quite ready to encourage me in all kinds of wrongdoing.  Perhaps, if any of them had given me good advice, I might have profited by it; but they were as much blinded by their own interests as I was by desire. And yet I never felt the inclination to do much that was wrong, for I had a natural detestation of everything immodest and preferred passing the time in good company. But, if an occasion of sin presented itself, the danger would be at hand and I should be exposing my father and brothers to it. From all this God delivered me, in such a way that, even against my own will, He seems to have contrived that I should not be lost, though this was not to come about so secretly as to prevent me from gravely damaging my reputation and arousing suspicions in my father. I could hardly have been following these vanities for three months when I was taken to a convent in the place where I lived, in which children like myself, though less depraved in their habits than I, were being educated.

Jacob suddenly saw Albrecht’s story as a worm eating through the apple of his childhood; it made him shudder.  To dispel the thought, he fed some wood into the stove.