The Glass Coffin

May 17, 2013 By 4 Comments

For Hella Winston

“To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.”
–Meister Eckhart

It seems rather ghastly now, given that he is serving a sentence of nineteen-years-to-life for murdering a cocktail waitress, but when I was in high school, I became obsessed with music producer Phil Spector—the eccentric and reclusive originator of the “Wall of Sound” that echoed from a dozen girl groups in the early 1960s.

I was a scholarship student at a fancy boarding school in Massachusetts where the workload was notoriously heavy and for me, particularly difficult. I failed a year of mathematics and made mediocre grades in everything else. Instead of studying, though, I sat around reading Tom Wolfe’s essay on Spector from The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, which I kept checking out from the school library. [Read more...]

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Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

April 24, 2013 By 16 Comments

Well, somebody at Good Letters had to do it: Somebody had to go buy the incessantly-hyped volume Lean In by the stratospherically successful Facebook COO (and mother of two) Sheryl Sandberg, and figure out what’s behind the seemingly endless radio talk shows and online profiles—they have been following me, they have, filling up my car like clouds of incense and dinging on my phone with the book’s mantra-like subtitle, Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.

I bought this part-memoir, part self-help book on a gorgeous spring weekday when, because I work part-time, I was supposed to be home anyway. Because the pollen was getting to me and I had woken up groggy, my husband generously offered to take the children to school on his way in to work, something that Sandberg would applaud: husbands who will assume major leadership at home are a major key in enabling mothers to succeed.

I stumbled around the house in my nightgown for a while, then finally got dressed and picked up Lean In at the Target in suburban Largo, Maryland, which at ten on a weekday morning, was as silent as a tomb. [Read more...]

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The Seed in the Grave

April 3, 2013 By 6 Comments

When the creamy, letter-press-printed wedding invitation arrived on a wintry February day, it seemed an opportunity too good to pass up: The groom was a childhood friend who had been longing for a bride ever since our college days. A quarter-century later, he finally found her.

The wedding was in Mississippi, and I could visit my beloved, Jackson-based older brother without husband and children in tow, for two days afloat and unmoored, a single girl again. I pulled the credit card out of my purse and began searching for flights.

But frivolity was not what I was thinking about on the wedding day; instead the very opposite, the tangle of inchoate obligations that tether us.

We decided to drive up to Yazoo City to visit our parents’ graves. Despite the previous late night, with a long wine- and conversation-filled dinner after my flight, and even though it was already late morning and the wedding was back in Jackson at three that afternoon, we poured coffee and set off on the forty-two mile drive up Highway 49 in my brother’s Toyota Camry. [Read more...]

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Little Houses

March 13, 2013 By 5 Comments

For Peter and Jackie Cooley, who live in one.

“So what do you know about East Pines?” I directed the question about a nearby neighborhood to an acquaintance whom I know solely as a friend on Facebook, a local historian who has written widely on the postwar country music scene in Prince George’s County and the “haunted boy of Cottage City,” who was the inspiration for The Exorcist.

“Not much,” he typed back. “You could check the Prince George’s archives.”

It was a response that was both a surprise and not. A surprise that even an expert on these old inside-the-Beltway neighborhoods knew nothing about this particular one, and at the same time, a confirmation of the neighborhood’s generally unassuming quality—it is a place that appears as though it is used to being forgotten.

East Pines has not, however, been forgotten by me, and my thinking about the place has recently begun to border on mild obsession, the subject of lunchtime Google searches trying to track real estate values and whether or not there’s still an active homeowner’s association. Sometimes after dropping the children off at school, I will make an unexpected turn onto East Pine Drive, and for a few quite moments, wander its eerily quiet, meandering lanes. [Read more...]

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We Are All Immigrants

February 26, 2013 By 4 Comments

Several years ago I had the humbling honor of sharing my journey as a convert to the Orthodox Church with former my parish, a large cathedral in Washington DC. Here are some of my remarks:

Being a part of this family, and having the Orthodox Church as my spiritual home, comes at the end of a long road of hope and longing for me. For so many of you, the depth of your faith and your commitment to the Church—indeed, your experience of the grace of Jesus Christ—are closely tied to the stories of your immigrant ancestors and how they came to this country: the yia yia who was once a scared little girl crossing the Atlantic, the uncle who swept diner floors from dawn until dark and managed to squirrel away millions.

As a child growing up in a little Southern town, I was always fascinated with the stories of immigrants who came to the United States in big ships and then lived in close-knit neighborhoods where houses, churches and synagogues, and stores all were in one block, and everything, I imagined, smelled like hot sweet bread from the bakery down the street.

I realize a lot of what I just mentioned about Greeks and immigrants is cliché, and that your own family stories are entirely distinctive. But there are some elements common to all immigrant stories, that explain why they have such a powerful hold on us: the experience of losing a homeland, the need to go to a new place and to find a new way to live, the experience of pain, uncertainty, and fear about the future, and the reliance upon faith and tradition to navigate difficult times.

[Read more...]

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Amateur Mentors

February 4, 2013 By 5 Comments


For Katherine Diop

Plod on, you Angels say, do better aspire higher
And one day you may be like us, or those next below us,
Or nearer the lowest,
Or lowest,
Doing their best

—Stevie Smith, from “No Categories,” 1950

“The way up and the way down are one and the same.”

—Heraclitus, Fragment 69

The last kid had barely walked out our front door when my husband popped the top off a Dogfish Head ale, the bottle cap pinging onto the kitchen countertop, the cold beer sighing, as he lifted the bottle to his lips.

“Frankly,” my husband said, more or less, “I think we suck at this.” [Read more...]

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The Anniversary of My Father’s Death

January 6, 2013 By 11 Comments

“After the first exile, there is no other.”
—Rosellen Brown, The Autobiography of My Mother, 1976

The great wheel of the year has turned once more, and I find myself back at the beginning again. Not at the start of a brand new year, but rather, at the anniversary of my father’s death.

I was eight years old when he died, on January 8, 1977, after six long months of decline from lung cancer. In the family’s last-minute midnight scramble to the King’s Daughters Hospital to offer a final farewell, I was adjudged too young and too asleep to wake up for the ride.

I found out that he had died when I crawled from bed at dawn the next morning, yawning and jonesing for cartoons, only to find a bathrobed neighbor stoking the fireplace, and my father disappeared into ether. [Read more...]

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The Eclipse of the Airport Chapel

December 7, 2012 By 13 Comments

The San Francisco International Airport has a yoga room, but no chapel. At least that’s what it looked like, when I was there a couple of weeks ago at six o’clock in the morning: The Yoga Room was obviously a point of pride, with extensive signage along the concourse, but there was no indication that there might be other kinds of religious—excuse me, spiritual—spaces.

It turns out that SFO does, in fact, have a chapel, though it is tucked away in the International Terminal, and is known as “The Berman Reflection Room,” which, as an entry on IFly.com cites, “provides a center for quite self-reflection and meditation.”

Assorted photographs from Flickr, if they can be trusted, depict the space as not much different than an airport gate, with carpet, lines of chairs and window-walls of glass, plus what appears to be a vestigial Chuppah-type structure, and some potted plants. (The website for a group called the Interfaith Center at the Presidio, incidentally, laments that it was asked to raise funds for the Berman Reflection Room, but not allowed to conduct any “programming” there.)

If the cliché that all trends move eastward from California stands, then the idea of airport chapels and other incidental religious spaces would appear to be in eclipse.

Which would be too bad, for I’ve always loved sighting the airport-chapel logo out of the corner of my eye, skidding my beat-up suitcase across the concourse, and entering a hushed space of—well, exactly what? [Read more...]

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